The big news in Olympia last week was about the budget, but the real show was about tuition in the House Higher Ed committee.
 
No matter how you felt about the bill, you had to like the Senate floor debate on Senate Bill 6562.  That’s the bill that would have given some tuition-setting authority to UW, WSU, and WWU, provided certain performance targets were met and certain financial aid guarantees were made.  It was the lone survivor of four or five bills regarding tuition that were introduced this legislative session.  SB 6562 was introduced by Senate Higher Education Chair Derek Kilmer, but the version that arrived on the Senate floor had significant contributions from Republican Senator Joseph Zarelli.  The ensuing debate and vote were similarly bi-partisan.  Senators spoke thoughtfully and with very little looking over their shoulders for political consequences.  And the 29-19 vote broke along the line of genuine conviction rather than party lines.   
 
Then something happened on the way to the House. 
 
Whatever the House consideration of tuition lacked in substance, it made up for in Olympia theatre.  After passing the Senate, the bill was referred to the House Higher Education Committee, where the chair, Representative Deb Wallace, didn’t schedule a hearing until Tuesday, February 23, the last day to vote bills out of committee.  This tardiness, along with Representative Wallace’s longstanding opposition to university tuition authority, led to speculation that she would attempt to kill the bill procedurally.  This suspicion seemed appropriate when the bill turned up last on an otherwise pretty dull agenda. 
 
The hearing was barely underway when Representative Scott White, a strong proponent of university tuition-setting authority, surprised Representative Wallace by moving that the agenda be changed to make sure that there was ample time for testimony on the tuition bill.  Much hubbub ensued, with the Democrats leaving the room for a fraught caucus, much to the bemusement of their Republican colleagues.  When they returned, the agenda was changed and testimony soon began on SB6562. 
 
Representative White won the procedural battle, but he lost the war.  After more than two hours of testimony, Representative Wallace chose not to have a vote on the bill.  If she had, it wouldn’t have passed.
 
The testimony, on both sides, was generally pretty good.  Everyone, from students to faculty to university trustees and administrators to business leaders recognized that the real problem is years of declining state support for state universities.  They may have differed on how to approach the problem, but they all understood that our universities are facing a crisis.
 
But on the legislator side of the TVW cameras, there was little more than confusion and piety.  The hearing was supposed to be about SB6562, but by the time the testimony began, there were at least two substitute bills—one from Representative Wallace that simply raised the cap on tuition increases from 7% to 9% and one wonderfully imaginative piece of writing from ranking Republican Glenn Anderson that would have kept legislative and university staff busy for years to come trying to figure out what it meant.  The three different bills would have had dramatically different consequences for the operating budgets of the three universities involved, but that didn’t seem to matter to committee members, as all they really wanted to talk about were lofty principles of “accountability.” 
 
Three or four times Representative Wallace announced that “the buck stops with the legislature,” and several other committee members expressed reluctance to transfer authority for what students pay from the people’s elected representatives to unelected trustees and regents who are accountable to no one. 
 
Here at the blog, we feel pretty strongly that trustees and regents should not see their jobs as much more than hiring and firing presidents and raising money, so we’re pretty sympathetic to the idea of not giving more authority to politically appointed rich people who show up for a meeting every couple of months and may or may not know anything about universities.
 
So the accountability argument would have been interesting if . . . any of the bills under consideration had actually given tuition-setting authority to trustees and regents.  But none of them did.  The Senate bill and Representative Wallace’s bill had clearly defined limits on tuition increases and Representative Anderson’s bill didn’t really give anybody authority to do anything. 
 
All the bluster about who is elected and accountable and who isn’t was really beside the point.  And at the end of the day, as almost every other state in the nation has demonstrated, it doesn’t really matter who sets tuition.  What matters is who appropriates state funds to universities, and that will always be the legislature, and as long as those appropriations keep going down, tuition will keep going up.
 
The nadir of the hearing came when Representative Wallace pushed the whole moral high ground thing too far and gratuitously called the universities untrustworthy liars. She did this in response to University of Washington President Mark Emmert’s testimony.  The whole exchange is worth watching here: 

 

In response to all the emphasis on accountability, President Emmert points out what everyone from the universities has been trying to point out for a while: pound for pound and dollar for dollar, Washington’s universities are the best in the country.  We’ve felt compelled to point this out at every opportunity in response to all the blog commenters, op-ed writers, and legislators who, no matter how much evidence they see to the contrary, continue to feel that if the universities just cut out all the bloat, greed, and corruption, we’d be O.K.
 
In her response, Representative Wallace doesn’t go quite that far (although she has in the past), but she does continue to pick at a sore that has tormented her since the end of last year’s legislative session.  After last year’s cuts, the universities, the Council of Presidents, and this blog have regularly pointed to the fact that state appropriations to universities were cut by an average of 23%.  This has stuck in the craw of Representative Wallace and some other legislators who feel that we haven’t been appropriately grateful to them for the “hard vote” they took to let the universities double the statutory tuition increases in order to mitigate some of that cut.
 
Well, O.K., but the point of highlighting how state support for universities has been steadily declining has not been to show up Representative Wallace or anybody else.  It has been to try to show how such underfunding threatens to seriously compromise our students’ education, and to try to make 4-year higher education more of a priority for the state.  And it seems ironic at best to chastise the universities for not crowing about tuition increases in a hearing where everyone is beating on the universities for wanting the authority to raise tuition.  And to call the information about state appropriation cuts “misleading” and declare them a reason to be forever vigilant against university dishonesty and skullduggery is just beyond the pale.
 
Washington’s universities had their state appropriations cut by over $400 million last year, and we’re looking at another $45 million cut this year.  Our total funding (state appropriations and tuition) ranks 48th in the nation.  It’s time to stop talking about how to further regulate and control the best universities in the country and start talking about how to fund them.