Hufstedler Meets Washington

Long before the House of Representatives passed legislation authorizing the creation of the Department of Education, the rumors flew hot and heavy in Washington. President Carter, education insiders believed, would name someone with experience in state education programs to head the department--someone like former New Mexico Gov. Jerry Apodaca, a Chicano, or Mary F. Berry, under secretary in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), a Black woman.

Others, including Congressional liaisons in Washington's community of education lobbies, were certain that Carter would call on a managerial figure to oversee the new bureaucracy, the second cabinet agency he had created during his tenure. When Carter finally announced his choice--Shirley M. Hufstedler--an appelate court judge from California who was well known in legal circles but unfamiliar to educators--everybody was surprised, some were shocked and all were quick to offer an opinion.

Most surprised of all those involved was Hufstedler herself. When the White House was checking into Hufstedler's background, the 54-year old judge was on vacation in the hinterlands of Nepal, conquering yet another stretch of the Himalayas. When administration officials contacted Hufstedler upon her return to the United States, she assumed they wanted to talk legal shop. But when the officials suggested that Hufstedler take the 13th chair in the Carter cabinet, she was taken aback. But now, almost four months since her December 6 inauguration as the nation's first Secretary of Education, Shirley Hufstedler is too busy to even think about hiking in Nepal.

Buried in her fourth floor office in the far reaches of Federal Office Building No. 6, hidden from view by the endless expanse of her desk, Hufstedler is not what one would expect but already she looks at home. Many predict that she would not get comfortable so quickly. Coming from neither the education nor bureaucratic worlds, Hufstedler was an outsider in professions where people like to take orders from insiders. Because Hufstedler was not clearly associated with the interests of primary or higher education, people on both ends of the spectrum were angry about Carter's choice.

The Department of Education, after all, had only squeeked by the House by 14 votes and in the opinion of many, as one Congressman bluntly put it, Carter's support for it represented "a political payoff in every sense of the word." Then candidate Carter had picked up the first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate from the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's most influential lobby for primary education, in return for his promise to build the department. Those who represented post-secondary education interests feared that, given the NEA's vital role in establishing the department and a Secretary who came from the primary sector, higher education's pleas might be ignored. Carter had to avoid alienating the NEA, however, which saw the Department as a down-payment for a 1980 endorsement. In the end, he picked the wisest and most politically expedient course--nominating an effective, respected public figure whose background was solid enough to arouse interest but vague enough to seem fair to all concerned.

For Hufstedler, as lobbyists in Washington point out, the first few months of her job demanded an acute awareness of the implications of even minor decisions coupled with a firm resolve to get the department off on the right foot. As the newest kid on the block, Hufstedler would have to hold her ground, ready to fight for her portion of the federal turf--money and manpower that other agencies would not relinquish without a struggle. Meanwhile, she had to avoid getting tangled up in the nuances of bureaucratic affairs that threatened to ground her well-laid plans.

With the first of many legislative chores--preparing and presenting the department's 1981 budget for the Congress--behind her,' Hufstedler seems to have settled well into her new role. "The difficulty," the 5 ft. 2-in. charcoal-haired Hufstedler says as she sits on a couch in her office, "is that all of these things have to be done at the same time." But, she insists, "we're not having any trouble putting it together beyond the routine things. It takes time to move people from one building to another," she explains.

Hufstedler has labored under less-than-ideal circumstances, trying to coordinate 152 separate programs, many of which (131) come from the old Office of Education in HEW but some drawn from departments as diverse as Labor, Agriculture, Defense and Justice. With employees under no less than 14 different roofs and headquarters shared by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Hufstedler's task would have confounded even the most experienced of Washington hands. Her critics say she had been slow to reform the bureaucracy, but Hufstedler faced with the unpleasant task of unraveling a third of HEW, perhaps the largest bureaucracy in the world, has done admirably. "Nobody can say she isn't trying," says one higher-up from HEW.

In what friends say is typical behavior, Hufstedler downplays any personal success she's had, saying that some "extraordinary and gifted people from inside the bureaucracy and out have aided her efforts." She smiles and puffs on a cigarette. "It isn't as if I'm trying to be a do-it-yourselfer," she explains. "On the contrary, I've had plenty of help." Hufstedler deals firmly yet succinctly with critics' worries. Of the department's 17,000 employees, 11,000 work in American schools overseas, she says. Most of the department's new employees are drawn from old bureaucracies, she adds, noting that, when it's all said and done, the department will employ fewer people than were employed in the programs it inherits. "It's not a huge sprawling bureaucracy at all," she insists.

When Carter formally signed the Department into law, many critics warned that the department, like its cousin the Department of Energy (DOE--the new department will simply be ED)--would have terrible growing pains. "The department will spend about two years thrashing around trying to figure out which end is up," a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers, the group which lobbied hardest against the department's creation, predicted. Hufstedler dismisses such warnings and points to the difference between the DOE experience and her own. The issues surrounding energy, she says, are "set before a bewildering array of Congressional Committees within whom the Department of Energy had to deal. That's not the situation at all," says Hufstedler, who calls her department's set of issues "much more discrete."

In first exposure to a new environment, like any good judge, Hufstedler has made effective use of precedent. As a former lawyer--Hufstedler spent ten years with her husband's Los Angeles, Ca. firm of Beardsley, Hufstedler and Kemble before she began her rise in the California judiciary--Hufstedler says she is used to such interrogation. "I've been taking appeals for many, many years," says Hufstedler, whose record as a judge caused President Ford to consider her carefully when he looked for someone to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in 1975. "To be sure," Hufstedler adds, quickly, "the setting is somewhat different, but the process is in reality very similar."

Many questioned the need for a separate department of education when Carter first proposed it, saying that it was an unnecessary addition to the bureaucracy the president had already promised to trim. But Hufstedler, speaking in measured tones, makes a good case for a unique, important role for her agency. "Undiluted by competing interest," education is brought promptly in front of the President and his Cabinet, she says. "In the various scattered programs in the huge agency of HEW," Hufstedler argues, the Secretary and his/her staff, distracted by different kinds of priorities, didn't have the necessary time to coordinate education programs. The new Department, Hufstedler believes, presents "an opportunity to make coherent programs that rather lived a life of their own in earlier incarnations of the Office of Education."

Hufstedler promises there will be no single spokesman for the interest of higher education--her own experience in the field, aside from passing work on law school curriculum, was limited to serving as a trustee for Occidental College and the California Institute of Technology--but says her efforts will be supported by those below. Hufstedler will be joined by the retiring Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, Albert H. Bowker, who will be assistant secretary for post-secondary education. Bowker, whose long experience in higher education, particularly with larger institutions, bodes well for university interests.

But, the Secretary warns, education cannot be seen as isolated processes on different levels. "It's foolish to talk about institutions of post-secondary education" without thinking about the sources of those institution's students", Hufstedler says with conviction. "One addresses the issues, therefore, not simply in isolation but as a part of the full set of issues and problems that affect American education at all levels."

Hufstedler believes that good education policies can only be fashioned if there is constant communication and input from all concerned groups. "Students, of course, should and do have a very lively voice in the affairs of post-secondary education and their views should be heard," she says, adding tactfully, "They're not always right but they're by no means always wrong either."

Hufstedler has not abandoned her strongly liberal recored on the bench as a champion of the rights of women and minorities. "Educational equity for women in all phases is about 150 years overdue," she says, voice rising in support of the principles embodied in Title IX, which guarantees proportionally equal expenditures for men's and women's athletic programs.

Moving from Title IX, Hufstedler discusses her views about the federal government's relations with private educational institutions; "Where federal involvement is necessary," she has said, "our goals should be maximum efficiency and cooperation, minimum disruption and domination." Sitting atop the bureaucratic tentacles, she reiterates that view, promising that the federal role in control of education, despite warnings from President Bok and others, will not increase because decision-making has been centralized in the new department.

The pressure on the public treasuries is such, she warns, that an increase in federal funds to private institutions is unlikely in the near future. Correspondingly, Hufstedler takes a pragmatic tack, revealing the common sense judgement her associates commend. "People want the federal role to increase all over the place when it comes to the matter of having federal funds that can be directed by the universities and colleges," she says. "In short, what a lot of people want is perfectly human--'please send me a check but no strings." Well, you can't have it both ways."

On the other gnawing issues of concern in higher education, Hufstedler, heretofore vaguer in conversations with the press, chooses words and plans that belie the fact that, prior to December, she had little if any exposure to such issues. For the next decade, the "biggest single problem facing post-secondary education is demographics," she says, noting that the age cohort that would ordinarily be headed to college "has diminished drastically;" some estimate it will decline nationally by 20 per cent in the next decade. Small liberal arts colleges will only survive if they redefine their missions or join in consortia with others faced with similar woes. If Hufstedler's refreshing idealism is foreign to Washington, she is also realistic. "There are a number of different ways in which institutions can survive--but not all of them are going to," she admits.

Coupled with demographics, inflation has had severe effect on private institutions of higher education and is reaching down into federal student aid programs. Like any good school teacher, she warns that people must be disciplined but are nonetheless entitled to the rights of an education. "The effort of any overall financial aid package should be to provide enough financial aid so that young people are not foreclosed by reasons of financial need from going to college," she says. Hufstedler feels that the national direct student loan program, which has allowed families boasting large annual incomes to seek help must be remodelled, because it is "utterly senseless to provide a financial bonanza to people who can afford to send their young people to college." She reiterates her position that default rates on student loans must be cut dramatically, and supports the administration's proposal to cut back about $250 million in student aid in fiscal 1981. The cut, slated for the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant program, she asserts, means only a "very modest" per student loss but, because the program applies to so many students, will yield a large overall savings to be budget-conscious government. Already, Hufstedler explains, the department is hard at work on a simplified application form for financial aid which will tie together existing programs that have heretofore required different paperwork.

In discussing the problems facing post-graduate education, Hufstedler again mixes pragmatism with an ear for innovation. "The Secretary of Education cannot have significant impact on the job market," she says, but she can try to create opportunities for younger faculty. By getting senior faculty to take leaves in the government and the private sector, Hufstedler reasons, "you will create opportunities for young faculty" and students who are interested in academic careers, may not hesitate to continue working for Ph. D's. But, Hufstedler warns, a person who is simply in search of the monetary rewards will always suffer from disappointment. "The priorities and needs of the government, technological change, and economic conditions can always render obsolete the value of whatever kind of education you have," she cautions, "But the fact that you have that education may provide you with the intellectual flexibility to adapt yourself as the needs of the country change."

Shirley Hufstedler is learning to adapt to the changing requirements of her environment. With the initial building stages of the Department of Education well under way and seemingly in control, Hufstedler has already come a long way from the babe-in-the-wooods stage that many predicted she might languish in for the balance of her career. The bureaucractic teeth Hufstedler has pulled thus far, as she readily admits, are just the beginnings of the business of being a Cabinet secretary. With any luck and agood deal of support from below, Hufstedler may defy the experts and the critics and be the outsider that makes the insiders listen and the federal bureaucracy work.CrimsonRobert O. BoorstinSHIRLEY M. HUFSTEDLER