"Citizen Lobbyists: In Tight Budget Times, Colleges Recruit and Train Alumni, Parents and Even Students as Advocates," The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2003, 24.
By WILL POTTER
The evening session at the University of Maryland at College Park starts off like an introductory course. The 15 students take turns stating their names, hometowns, and why they enrolled. The instructor wastes no time, though, and dives into a lecture on the legislative process, a PowerPoint presentation on higher-education appropriations, and how-to videos on talking with state legislators.
The session wraps up with a discussion about civics and a hefty homework assignment: Persuade Maryland lawmakers, who face a $1.2-billion deficit, not to cut spending on higher education.
This is Lobbying 101 for alumni, parents, and students who have volunteered to fight budget cuts at the state Capitol.
For years, colleges have urged alumni to speak up for their alma maters through letters and phone calls. Now, as colleges face their biggest budget cuts in a decade, these lobbying campaigns are becoming more prevalent and more aggressive.
At the College Park campus this is new terrain, on which the university was hesitant to tread.
But Maryland officials saw other interest groups mobilizing to protect their pieces of the pie and felt the institution had to step up its efforts or suffer substantial cuts.
They soaked up advice from political campaigns, business lobbyists, and grass-roots efforts, like those trying to protect aid to the arts.
Armed with that knowledge, they mounted Maintain the Momentum, one of the most aggressive higher-education lobbying campaigns in the country. The rallying cry, made repeatedly by William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland System, is that "higher education has lots of friends but too few advocates."
"In the past, there have been grass-top and grass-roots efforts," Mr. Kirwan says. "Until now universities have mainly used the grass tops, having influential members of the board and university officials walking the halls of the Capitol."
Now Maryland looks to its roots. Using $20,000 raised through private donations, the system has put more than 100 people through crash-course training sessions in the last few months, and started Web sites with talking points, instructional videos, and one-click access to legislators.
"The emphasis is really on the personal," says Larry Johnson, a College Park graduate who attended one of the evening sessions. This means personal visits, phone calls, and e-mail messages — and a lot of them. Mr. Johnson either calls or writes his legislator weekly, and has gone to Annapolis a handful of times in the past few months, he says.
The strategy looks like grass-roots organizing: Personalizing higher education to make legislators cut elsewhere, or else chop lightly. It has been tried before, say higher-education experts. But new economic pressures have led to renewed interest in the tactic.
The practice has led to some concerns. The lines between these programs and official lobbying efforts by universities are sometimes hazy. Laws governing university lobbying vary from state to state, but nearly all colleges are prohibited from using state money to lobby the state. So some colleges say they are merely informing concerned citizens, not lobbying. Many colleges operate these programs through alumni associations, using private money so that they can lobby legally.
"I call it AstroTurf lobbying," says James Browning, executive director of Common Cause Maryland. "It's fake grass roots. This stuff did not pop up out of ground. It was planted."
Learning From Others
To learn to navigate legal roadblocks and teach volunteers grass-roots-style lobbying, college officials often turn to Kirk R. White, director of Hoosiers for Higher Education at Indiana University at Bloomington.
Formed in the late 1980s, it boasts 10,000 members, compared with hundreds in similar organizations at other institutions. Mr. White says the numbers come in handy if he needs to "call out the troops." Other colleges aspire to have a lobbying army of their own. "I probably get a couple of calls a month, sometimes a week," Mr. White says. "They want to know how we pay for it, how we recruit, and what it takes to make it successful."
These programs don't work unless they have close ties with the alumni association, strong commitment from the university's president, and guidance from the government-affairs staff, Mr. White says. They also require private funds and should be kept separate from the university's official lobbying efforts. Mr. White, for example, is paid by the alumni association, although his office is located next to other government-affairs staff members.
Mr. White says he constantly looks to other advocacy groups — mostly outside of higher education — for new tactics. Indiana University has 500 "community captains," who mobilize volunteers around the state, similar to election campaigns.
Organizers also use public-information laws to obtain lists of campaign contributors, which are then matched against alumni databases. Legislators pay more attention to constituents who donated heavily to their campaigns, Mr. White says, and many contributors are alumni. So Hoosiers for Higher Education will ask those people to put in calls to their legislators and use their clout to help stop budget cuts.
"Higher education, if it plays its cards right, can really be above the down-in-the-dirt, money-giving rat race that occurs in politics," Mr. White says. "We're not just another special-interest group."
New Program at Penn State
One of the fledgling programs that has looked to Indiana is the Penn State Grassroots Network. The program started last fall and is run through the alumni association at Pennsylvania State University.
Organizers of the network have been holding town-hall meetings across the state. Like Maryland's training sessions, they are part introduction to politics and part pep rally. Penn State focuses specifically on motivating young alumni, says Bernie Ryan, director of the network. "They can't give thousands of dollars, but they want to give back."
More than 300 members have signed up for the group in the last three months, he says. The university has four paid lobbyists, but 240,000 alumni in the state. So the potential to multiply the institution's influence in the legislature is significant, he adds.
Mr. Ryan and some organizers at other institutions hesitate to call these grass-roots efforts "lobbying" or "training." They simply keep alumni informed, they say, and offer them an outlet to volunteer, if they choose. The University of Wisconsin System has further distanced grass-roots lobbying from official university business by creating Citizens for Higher Education last October. The nonprofit group is separate from the university and headed by a former member of the Board of Regents.
The group uses grass-roots lobbying tactics, though, and aims to be "the Sierra Club for higher education," says Linda Weimer, a university spokeswoman, adding that the organization works closely with the university.
"We're just doing everything we can think of," she says.
"These cuts around the country are so stressful that we all have got to think outside the box. Business as usual is not going to carry the day."
For Wisconsin organizers this means branching out to students by creating "student ambassadors" in the lobbying effort. In the rush to recruit alumni and parents, getting students involved is something organizers sometimes overlook, Ms. Weimer says.
Students have generally responded to the impending budgets cuts with mass protests. In California, in what experts say was the largest rally ever for community colleges, 8,000 students marched to the State Capitol. College students in New York walked 500 miles in a "relay march" to Albany to protest proposed tuition increases. In Minnesota and in Maryland, students have carried coffins to the Capitol in mock funerals for higher education.
Different Priorities
Increasingly, though, students are moving from street protests to more-direct contact with legislators. Students around the country say they stick to the lobbying mainstays — phone calls, e-mail messages, and lobbying days — and try to collaborate with administrators and alumni. They all lobby for higher education, students say, but sometimes with different motivations.
"On some items we will join with the alumni," says Jonathan L. Ducote, president of the University of North Carolina system's student government.
"The alumni, though, are primarily concerned with key economic stimulators, like research projects," he says. "Freshmen couldn't care less about research. They care about tuition."
Some students fear that differences in priorities will hurt any coalition built among students, the university, and the grass-roots lobbyists. If states slash higher-education budgets, institutions will turn somewhere to make up the money, and students say it will come at their expense. Then they will have to lobby their own administration.
"There's already some friction between the student body and the administration as a result of these proposed cuts," says Kyle W. Arganbright, student-body president at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. "No tuition increases are proposed right now, but tuition has increased by 10 percent in each of the last two years."
How Effective?
The question is whether the grass-roots efforts of alumni and parents will prevent those cuts. Volunteer lobbyists have unique advantages over paid lobbyists, says Mike DiRaimo, the director of state relations at Penn State, who has advised grass-roots lobbyists at town-hall meetings.
"If an alum has an opportunity at a social gathering or Little League game to approach a legislator, they can do it," he says. "I can't. Lobbying is a process that what you actually do, what tactics you use, depends on where you are and who you are."
Mr. Kirwan, chancellor of the Maryland system, says the institution's aggressive campaign may be working. After a preliminary budget hearing, the university put out an e-mail "action alert" to volunteers, who sent legislators 400 e-mail messages in a half-hour. He notes that the Senate has proposed only a $2-million cut in higher-education funds, compared with the $37-million cut proposed by the House.
"Now when I see members of the General Assembly they put their hands up before I say anything, and they say, I know, I know.'"
Other college officials say they will consider an aggressive campaign like Maryland's if it proves successful. Many had mixed feelings about, for example, creating a political action committee to pay politicians.
Indiana's Mr. White said that colleges have a mandate from the state and should not sink to the level of special-interest groups.
Nebraska State Sen. Roger R. Wehrbein, chairman of the appropriations committee, says he has felt the grass-roots efforts there. His office has received scores of letters and e-mail messages from parents and alumni, asking him to be gentle with higher education. That's had a "different impact" from institutions' own lobbyists, he says.
"They do have an interest in what goes on, but it's not as vested as the professionals,'" he said. "These are the people who will have to be paying the bills."
Mr. Wehrbein says he empathizes with these concerns and constituents' tenacity, but he can not make any promises. After all, the money has to come from somewhere.
