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Lobbying for Higher Education
How Colleges and Universities Influence Federal Policy
Lobbying for Higher Education is about how the major higher education associations and the constituent American colleges and universities try to influence federal policy, especially congressional policy. In clear prose Cook explains how the higher education community organizes itself in Washington, how it lobbies, and how its major interest groups are perceived both by their own members and by public officials. The book focuses on the crucial development in 1995-1996 of a new lobbying paradigm, which included the greater use of campus-based resources and ad hoc coalitions. The most engrossing part of its story is higher education's creative response to the policy turmoil and disruption of the status quo that resulted from the shift in congressional party control.
The author, Constance Cook, uses sources unique to this project: over 1,500 survey responses from college and university presidents (a 62% return rate) and nearly 150 interviews with institutional and association leaders. Fortuitously, the 1994 electoral upheaval provided her with an opportunity to capture, analyze, and interpret the responses of her subjects in a period of unusually sweeping change.
Lobbying for Higher Education is a timely book with an interesting and important story at its core.
Constance Ewing Cook is associate professor of higher education at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan. She is a political scientist who first became familiar with the Washington higher education associations when she worked for the U.S. Department of Education. Later, as executive assistant to the president of the University of Michigan, she learned about higher education lobbying from a campus perspective.
An important antidote to the increasingly cynical view of Washington and a must-read for current and aspiring college presidents, deans, and other administrative and student leaders. Cook details the remarkable story of how the higher education community, believing in the rightness of their cause, drastically changed their modus operandi and prevailed in the most serious battle in decades over federal support of higher education.
--Nan Shelby Wells, Director of Government Affairs, Princeton University
Lobbying for Higher Education is the finest study we have of coalition formation among Washington lobbies and the best book we have on the interest group politics surrounding policymaking for colleges and universities.
--Jeffrey M. Berry, author of The Interest Group Society and Lobbying for the People
A superior book, well grounded in the relevant literature, that offers consistently balanced, informed, and perceptive judgments.
--Hugh Davis Graham, author of The Rise of American Research Universities
Everyone engaged in any way in the Washington battles of higher education will want this map of the terrain, locating as it does both the institutional combatants and the issues. Through a convincing and fascinating analysis of recent history, Professor Cook also provides clear, concise, balanced, and compelling judgments that will be of critical importance to everyone touched by federal higher education policy.
--Sheldon Hackney, former president of Tulane University and the University of Pennsylvania, and former chairman of NEH
Outstanding. Cook's use and interpretation of interview and survey data are superb. The book will command the attention of all of the major stakeholders in the relationship between higher education and the federal government.
--Harland G. Bloland, author of Associations in Action: The Washington Higher Education Community
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