Washington Monthly - September/October 2015 - 52

students at public institutions graduate with relatively low amounts of debt and equal or better earnings, the majority of privates would be in trouble. But better information is just the first step in his crusade to save the publics and force a reckoning on the privates. The second step, as he revealed at the hearing on Capitol Hill, is for Washington to get states to stop cutting their higher education budgets as a condition for receiving federal student aid. The third step is to starve the privates. In King's mind, privates have no right to federal dollars, and the history of their actions suggests that they do not have their students' best interests at heart. King finally comes up for air to tell his staff, who surround us at the table, about his day. He just showed off LSU's brand-new NCAA Golf Championship trophy to some politicians, who wanted photographs with the players. King was doing some last-minute schmoozing with his most important funders: the Louisiana state legislature. Eager to jump into the presidential race as the most conservative candidate running, Bobby Jindal had to close a massive budget gap without raising taxes. So he proposed reducing state funding for public higher education by 80 percent. Drive north eight more minutes down I-10 and you hit the Louisiana state capital, once dominated by the largerthan-life Huey Long, and this year held hostage by Governor Bobby Jindal. After years of tax cutting by Jindal, along with the added pressure of decreasing oil prices in a state heavily reliant on the petroleum industry, the state began the legislative session in April with a $1.6 billion deficit. Eager to jump into the presidential race, and to do so as the most conservative candidate running, Jindal had to close the gap without running afoul of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge he'd made to the conservative activist Grover Norquist. So he proposed, among other budget measures, to reduce state funding for public higher education by 80 percent. This on top of the fact that the state's higher education funding had already decreased by $5,000 per student in inflation-adjusted dollars since 2008, a 43 percent drop, which is the most of any state except Arizona. Jindal's proposed cuts are an extreme example of what public higher education institutions have faced to varying de52 September/October 2015 grees in recent years. Since 1989, total state support in real dollars has actually increased by about 8 percent, but enrollment grew by 49 percent in the same period. That means that state support per student has decreased by 24 percent over the last twenty-five years. Per student funding tends to drop during recessions both because states have less tax revenue with which to fund public higher education and because enrollment spikes, meaning that when schools most need extra funding states are least able to provide it. The last year of declining per student funding was in 2012, and is now increasing again in most states (though from a very low bottom), with a few exceptions- Louisiana being one of them. Throughout the spring, King worked behind the scenes, talking to legislators to try to get them to not cut funding to LSU. But by late April, with no sight of a savior for his university, King made a desperate move. He told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that if the current budget went through, then LSU might have to declare "financial exigency," which would give King the power to shut down programs and lay off tenured professors-the Times-Picayune reporter called it "academic bankruptcy." The rare declaration made national news and rattled financial markets. LSU canceled a $114 million bond sale, and Wall Street investors cried foul that the sale had started before exigency was mentioned. "It changed everything-those two words," says Bob Mann, a political columnist who also heads up LSU's communications school. The move seemed to shake Louisianans into caring about the fate of their flagship school-King told me afterward that it gave the legislators the political cover they needed. Within a month of King's declaration, the house fully restored funding for higher education by increasing sales taxes and getting rid of some tax breaks for businesses, and in the final hours of the legislative session on June 18 the legislature sent a bill to Jindal with virtually no cuts to higher education. To avoid Jindal's veto, the legislature created a tax credit for a student fee that would never be assessed, an accounting gimmick that the Republican state treasurer called "nonsense on a stick" but that allowed Jindal to claim that he hadn't raised taxes (according to Norquist's peculiar definition, a fee is not a tax). Jindal signed the budget and got on a plane the next day for a prayer rally in the early primary state of South Carolina. Not everyone was happy with King's tactics. Scott McKay, the editor of a prominent conservative blog in Louisiana called "The Hayride," says he doesn't understand why King is so focused on being funded by the legislature. LSU is a great university, argues McKay, and it's priced below the Southeastern Conference average. McKay would rather that King increase tuition to exactly what "the market" will pay for instead of "depending on the idiots in the state legislature" to secure funding for LSU every year. King feels, however, that raising tuition to make up for Jindal's draconian proposed cuts would put the school out

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2015