If higher education had a back, it would be up against the wall.
From devastating funding cuts and climbing tuition costs that threaten educational quality and access for low-income students to the specter of business models to measure student success, higher ed is under siege.
There hasn’t been a unified, nationwide voice to speak up for issues like student access and affordability and speak out against so-called educational reforms being pushed by well-funded, private philanthropic foundations (read: The Gates Foundation and The Lumina Foundation, among others) with their own agendas.
That changed in May with the launch of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE). Backed by the California Federation of Teachers (CFA), UUP and education organizations across America and Canada, CFHE’s mission is straightforward: to ensure that affordable, quality higher education is accessible to all sectors of society in the coming decades.
More than 35 unions, student groups, and black and Hispanic associations from 26 states and Canada—including the AFT, the NEA, Professional Staff Congress, the Canadian Association of University Teachers and the Institute for Higher Education Policy—have pledged their support for the campaign.
The CFHE’s May 17 kickoff, at a Washington, D.C., press conference, was webcast live to faculty on more than 40 campuses in states including New York, Wisconsin, California, Florida and Massachusetts.
 “This is a question of access and affordability,” said UUP statewide Secretary Eileen Landy, the union’s CFHE representative who helped form the campaign. “People are being shut out of public higher education, which has always been the step up to economic and social mobility. And the doors are closing.”
“This campaign is about tearing down the walls of isolation among faculty but, more importantly, bringing together faculty and other groups who are passionate about higher education and deeply distressed about its current direction,” said CFA President Lillian Taiz. “We need to talk and work together and too often that has not been happening.”
To help accomplish that, a virtual think tank—which includes higher ed luminaries like Gary Rhoades, former general secretary for the American Association of University Professors—has been formed to produce policy-oriented research that CFHE organizers hope will lead to new federal and state laws and campus policies to promote the campaign’s seven principles.
Supporters believe those tenets will recast the current debate over educational reforms into one that focuses on higher ed as an essential right for students. The principles include: a broad and diverse curriculum; investing in faculty that have academic freedom and support to do their jobs; more public funding; and far less emphasis on measuring quality with standardized, simplistic metrics.
“As those principles detail, this campaign is about change,” said Steve Hicks, president of the Association of Pennsylvania State Colleges and University Faculties. “But we need change that is good for our students and for the quality of higher education that they deserve.”
UUP was one of the first unions to sign on to CFHE after Taiz approached President Phil Smith about the initiative. Smith embraced the plan and sent Landy as UUP’s representative to a January meeting in Los Angeles to help set up the campaign. More than 70 unionists, students and representatives from black and Hispanic groups from across the country worked together on the campaign and how to proceed.
“Well-funded foundations with no real higher ed experience are driving initiatives that haven’t been researched carefully nor fully thought out, and they’re using an entire generation of students as test subjects to see what works and what doesn’t,” Smith said. “We need to respond and that’s what CFHE is all about.”
The campaign swings into gear this fall; organizers will be urging locals to become involved with Campus Equity Week (Oct. 24-28) events at their colleges and universities. A national day of action—tentatively slated for April 2012—to promote the importance of access to quality education is being talked about, as is formulating the campaign’s legislative approach.
Those and other issues will be discussed at a CFHE national conference, scheduled for Nov. 1-2 in Boston.
“We have to push back against these attacks on public higher education, which are very well organized and very well funded,” Landy said. “No one has spoken with a coherent voice on behalf of public higher education until now.”
For more information about the CFHE, click on the campaign’s website at http://futureofhighered.org.
— Michael Lisi