As American politicians and educators continue to slice and dice away at higher education resources and programs using the hollow, yet sharp knives of austerity, the future of a diverse academy increasingly looks bleak and dreary.
The widely used justification — the need to cut costs and reduce the national deficit — seems so difficult to conceptualize each time I look at military expenditures, each time I hear about another country the United States has bombed.
From the standpoint of diversity, the reformers of exclusion have peeled away at the surface of many of the programs, funding lines and initiatives in higher education that the reformers of inclusion instituted over the course of the 20th century, climaxing in the 1960s and 1970s.
Some of the inclusive core is still intact, aside from the popular refashioning of affirmative action as fundamentally a reverse discriminator as opposed to a corrective for historic discrimination. But that core has continuously been attacked, and it appears the latest assault is directed towards Pell Grants, the nation’s largest financial aid program.
The cost of the program, which provides low-income students with grants to help pay for college, is primed to exceed $40 billion for the 2012 fiscal year, according to Higher Ed Watch. That is too much in the current fiscal environment, according to U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., who heads the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies. He voted for the House GOP budget resolution, which would decrease the maximum Pell Grant from $5,500 to $4,705.
“Pell Grants open a lot of doors, but they rely on a solvent government,” Rehberg said on his Web site. “Getting our deficit under control and making sure Pell Grants can be sustainably funded is the only way we can guarantee that they will still be around the for next generation.”
If the federal government can spend $2 billion per day in Libya (according to Forbes magazine), then I think if politicians like Rehberg wanted to, they could find the money to sustain and even increase Pell Grants. But it appears that, like welfare in the 1990s, the Pell Grant program could be scaled back significantly, as the GOP resolution also calls for the narrowing of eligibility requirements. In fact, in a recent interview with Blog Talk Radio, Rehberg classified Pell Grants as the “welfare of the 21st century.”
