Free college for all. (Class Notes).

In times when the right holds power and has political momentum, progressives tend, understandably, to hunker down--to think and act entirely in defensive modes.

Post-September 11 has been such a time. Liberal Democrats and insider-activists have insisted we scale back our political expectations to reflect the realities of the evaporated federal surplus and the recession and the inexorability of reallocating public spending to the military and "homeland defense." Under these conditions, the line goes, it's folly to propose increases in social spending; we can hope only to minimize cuts that will inevitably be imposed.

Hogwash! Even a practical opportunism should call for fighting for what we want and settling for what we can get, not accepting in advance the limits of expectation that the ruling class and its steno pool set for us.

We still have all the problems and concerns we had on September 10, even more so; there's no reason to back away from them. Has our travesty of a profit-driven health care system become more just since September 11? Has economic recession improved the plight of those assaulted by welfare "reform"? Has the national crisis in affordable housing abated? All of these problems and others have only intensified. Rather than retreat or acquiesce, it's all the more important to fight for an affirmative vision of what public policy would be if the country were governed by, and in the interests of, the vast majority of people who live in it.

As threatening as the new political environment is, it also presents us with some opportunities. The ease and rapidity with which the Bush Administration and Congress appropriated scores of billions of dollars for relief to New York City and increased the budgets for defense and national security demonstrate amply that availability of public resources is much more a matter of will and commitment than of objective scarcity.

We need to pursue strategies for shifting the terms of public debate. This task does not obviate the need to preserve gains that are under concerted attack, such as commitments to racial and gender justice, Social Security, and governmental provision of quality public services. Indeed, it is a necessary complement to them. The only way to preserve those gains is to counter the arguments used in attacking them. And by countering those arguments, by insisting that unrestrained market forces do not lead to justice, we open up the possibility for the change we need.

Take higher education.

Paying for higher education is a major concern and great financial burden for most Americans. Yet post-secondary education is increasingly a prerequisite for effective labor force participation, for any hope of a relatively secure, decent job. Since that is the case, shouldn't society have an obligation to provide universal access to such an essential social good? Why should we accept a putative consensus that preempts consideration of an issue so important to so many Americans? Why shouldn't access to higher education be available without tuition charges to everyone meeting admissions criteria, as a right, at any public institution in the United States?

The effects of the recession, particularly on public college and university systems, have been severe. Already several state systems have taken the unusual step of imposing mid-year tuition increases. And a recent study by the Lumina Foundation for Education found that the costs of attending public four-year colleges were financially manageable in only five states--Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Kentucky and Wyoming--before the current budget crunches. In a third of all states, many students needed loans to attend even two-year community colleges. And the situation is destined to get worse. Class sizes will increase; new faculty will not be hired, and departed professors will not be replaced. Student services will atrophy, and rising costs will make it still harder for people to attend.

The Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute, a nonprofit educational organization associated with the Labor Party, has initiated a grassroots campaign to call for the federal government to make higher education accessible to all academically qualifying students by paying all tuition and fees for all students at all public, post-secondary institutions in the United States. (The government should also provide support for borderline students and enable easy movement from the community college to the university on the basis of interest and demonstrated ability.)

Federal guarantee of universal access to higher education is not entirely unprecedented in American history. The most dramatic approximation to it was the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the G.I. Bill, under which a generation of World War II veterans received what was usually full tuition support and stipends (up to nearly $12,000 per year in 1994 dollars) to attend post-secondary educational institutions. By 1952, the federal government had spent $7 billion (nearly $39 billion in 1994 dollars) on sending veterans to college. This amounted to 1.3 percent of total federal expenditures during that period. A 1988 report by a Congressional subcommittee on education and health estimated that 40 percent of those who attended college under the G.I. Bill would not otherwise have done so. The report also found that each dollar spent educating that 40 percent alone produced a $6.90 return in national output.

The G.I. Bill had broad, positive ramifications for the country as a whole. Not only did the direct beneficiaries realize increased income and employment opportunities, as well as personal growth and enrichment. The benefits also extended intergenerationally, making for greater opportunities for their children and families, which contributed to a general expansion in college enrollments through the 1970s, far outstripping population growth. Enrollments increased by nearly 21 percent in the years 1950-1960 and nearly 167 percent in the 1960-1970 period. In 1950, 1.7 percent of the total U.S. population was enrolled in colleges and universities; by 1975 the figure had risen steadily to 5.2 percent. This growth also fueled a dramatic expansion of colleges and universities.

Bulging enrollments led to enlargement of physical plants and capacities at already existing institutions. Increased demand for higher education also prompted creation of new institutions, many of them public campuses in urban and underserved rural areas that brought higher education physically within reach of new segments of the society. All this expansion, in turn, stimulated construction and other employment opportunities. And it dramatically democratized college and university life and broadened and deepened the intellectual culture of campuses and academic disciplines.

The history of the City University of New York (CUNY) provides an instructive illustration of the general social benefits that result when you remove financial constraint from access to higher education. The free tuition policy in effect in the CUNY system until the 1970s brought higher education within reach for tens of thousands of people for whom it would otherwise have been no more than an unrealizable dream. In addition to the impressively lengthy roster of prominent public officials, academics, and others who took advantage of that access, exponentially more people were able to translate it into more secure and rewarding jobs and lives than would otherwise have been attainable.

Similarly, many states responded to increased demand by expanding and rationalizing public systems of higher education to facilitate access. They integrated community college with regional and state university tiers in ways that enabled students to move fluidly from one level to another as their accomplishment and interests warranted.

For decades, the California system was a model of this kind of egalitarian access and fluidity. The aftermath of Proposition 13 (the 1978 California ballot initiative that radically cut property tax revenues and imposed draconian restrictions on subsequent increases) and the constrained revenue base resulting from tax revolt politics reduced this mobility within the California system since the early 1980s.

Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating during the 1980s, costs of attending colleges and universities rose nationally, and sources of available federal grant-in-aid support decreased relative to need. College attendance for all except the wealthy has become contingent on qualification for interest-carrying student loans. This filters out many potential students who either cannot afford the encumbrance of loan-indebtedness or cannot qualify for loans. More students are prevented from completing degree programs because they exhaust the sums for which they qualify before satisfying their class requirements. Still more take much longer to complete their courses of study than they would otherwise because they have to take off time to work to save for tuition and other expenses not covered by loans or to contain indebtedness. Still more are pressured by their debt burdens to pursue courses of study, or even subsequent lines of employment, outside their interests in hopes of earning enough to pay off loans.

A recent study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found that two out of three students have to borrow money to go to college, and 40 percent are saddled with massive debts when they graduate. From 1992 to 2000, college debt doubled, and the average debt now averages $17,000, with a third of the students owing more than $20,000.

This state of affairs is inimical to a decent and just society. It imposes unacceptable, though typically unacknowledged, human costs in terms of social waste and unfulfilled human potential and satisfaction, and it perverts the values of higher education.

Moreover, it is unnecessary. A 1999 report from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics indicates that in 1996 tuition and fee revenues at all two-year and four-year degree awarding public educational institutions totaled just over $23 billion. This is a relatively small sum, less than 2 percent of the current federal budget. Even if increased access were to double the number of students attending colleges and universities and double the annual tuition demand to $46 billion, that would still be a sum easily absorbable within current federal budgets. Potential increases in other forms of federal aid to students, such as Pell Grants for non-tuition expenses, would not prohibitively increase the total cost.

The expenditure commitments could be absorbed easily by restoring minimal tax justice: for instance, simply closing corporate-tax shelter loopholes introduced between 1990 and 2001 would generate an estimated $60 billion annually to the federal treasury, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

Only by taking up the challenge of building a coherent movement, creating and cultivating popular support for a long-term struggle focused on everyday needs--what are sometimes described as "practical utopias"--will it be possible to redefine the terms of national policy debate. Removal of financial constraint on access to higher education could be such an initiative. It appeals immediately to students, parents, university faculty and staff, and the organizations that represent them. It also has a natural and historic base in the labor movement, and not only among unions that represent workers in the education sector. Free public education was one of the two main demands of the earliest American unions, the shorter workweek being the other.

Despite the right's attempts to characterize public support for higher education as an upper middle class giveaway, this is an issue that has resonance throughout the population. The "Joe Sixpack" imagery that drives phony rightwing populism is simply bogus.

Interest in educating oneself and one's children--for employment and intellectual curiosity and self-fulfillment--is not, by any means, the exclusive property of the upper middle class. To say that working people do not have similar aspirations is to make a condescending caricature of them. The issue of access to free higher education cuts across the familiar lines of division by race, gender, age, inner-city, and suburb that the right's agenda has successfully exploited over the past two decades.

This could be the beginning of a significant popular movement--on the order of earlier agitation for black Americans' civil rights, for the eight-hour day, or for old-age assistance--that helps to redefine the terms of national political debate. As those earlier movements did, it could also achieve its own objectives and, in the process, expand the foundation of American democracy.

Adolph L. Reed Jr. is Professor of Political Science on the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science at the New School a member of the Interim National Council of the Labor Party. For information about this campaign, contact the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute's website at http://www.djdinstitute.org.