Press release from the Office of the Governor: NASHVILLE – Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam today announced Burns Phillips as the new commissioner of the Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
Phillips had been serving as acting commissioner of the department, after coming over from the Department of Finance and Administration (F&A) where he was managing director of customer-focused government initiatives administration-wide.
UT alumnus Larry Martin has been named by Governor Bill Haslam as interim Finance and Administration Commissioner. He will take the helm of the state’s Department of F&A on Monday, June 1. Current Commissioner Mark Emkes retires May 31.
“Under Gov. Haslam, Tennessee has taken incredible steps toward making state government more responsive to its customers, the taxpayers, and I want to thank him for this new opportunity to serve the state,” Martin said.
Martin, 65, has served as an adviser to Haslam throughout his tenure as Mayor of Knoxville and as Governor. He will serve in the interim role until a replacement has been selected.
Prior to pursuing public service, Martin was an executive of First Horizon/First Tennessee Bank. He joined the company in 1969 and served in various capacities. He moved to Knoxville in 1987 when he was named president of First Tennessee Bank Knoxville. When he retired, he was serving as chief operating officer for First Tennessee Financial Services with responsibility for all Tennessee Regional Bank Markets; Merchant Services Processing; Hickory Venture Capital; and the Commercial, Corporate, and Middle Market Divisions of the bank.
A native of Jackson, Tenn., Martin received his bachelor of science from the University of Tennessee’s College of Business. Throughout the years, he has been involved in many community activities, including the University of Tennessee Foundation.
“I am grateful that Larry has agreed to step into this position and serve Tennessee taxpayers in this capacity,” Haslam said. “He has been critically important in helping us establish the systems and organizational structure to begin recruiting, attracting and retaining the best and brightest to serve in state government, and I look forward to continuing to work with him as interim commissioner of F&A.”
The search for a permanent replacement is ongoing.
A special Senate Higher Education Oversight Subcommittee hearing occurred last Thursday regarding student fees, tuition, and accreditation. The archived webcast of the hearing is available here. UT and TBR leaders answered questions about student activity fee allocation before the hearing moved on to questions involving tuition and accreditation.
The Associated Press covered the discussion of student fee allocations and produced the following news story:
By ERIK SCHELZIG, Associated Press
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Members of special Senate panel on Thursday raised questions about University of Tennessee fees being used to pay for speakers at a student-initiated program about sex.
Republican Sen. Stacey Campfield of Knoxville suggested at hearing of the higher education subcommittee that students should be able to opt out of their fees being used to pay for events they find objectionable.
But Joe DiPietro, the president of the state’s flagship public university, responded that free speech protections require officials to remain neutral about the subjects that speakers want to address.
“While I may have personal views about some of those topics, I have a professional obligation to keep our university in a position that complies with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
Campfield cited one speech titled “Bow Chicka Bow WOAH!” and an event that he called a transgender “cross dressing show” as examples of having little redeeming quality.
“Now I that doesn’t mean I don’t support the First Amendment,” he said. “If someone wants to go dress up like a duck, God bless them. But I shouldn’t have to pay for that, should I?”
Campfield, who has sponsored failed legislative efforts to ban elementary and middle school teachers from addressing gay issues, said he also worried that underage children attending the university would have access to adult material.
DiPietro said the school analyzed enrollment figures at the time of Sex Week to find out how many students were under age 18.
“We determined there were six of them, out of 27,000 students,” he said. “I think we need to treat them as if they’re other students as well. Everyone is treated the same in that regard.”
In March, the university withdrew more than $11,000 in direct funding for Sex Week after some state lawmakers took issue with the program. But it said it was powerless to halt $6,700 in student fees being used to support the event. Students raised much of the lost direct funding back from private sources before the event was held in April.
DiPietro defended the overall objective of the event.
“It’s very important and very appropriate on a university campus to have some sex education going on,” he said. “If we prevent one unwanted pregnancy, if we prevent one sexual assault and prevent the transmission of a sexual disease among our students, it’s a benefit.”
Campfield said his concerns reach beyond the Sex Week event. He argued that few of the speakers paid for through student activities fees in recent years have addressed conservative issues.
DiPietro noted that the school’s college Republican group hasn’t applied for money to pay for outside speakers in the last three years.
“Organizations need to apply in order to gain or secure the funding,” he said.
Campfield appeared to want to press on about the issue before being cut off by fellow Republican Sen. Joey Hensley of Hohenwald, the panel’s chairman.
“We’ve talked about it enough,” he said.
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The longest-serving member in the history of the Tennessee General Assembly has officially announced that he will not be running for reelection in 2014.
State Senator Douglas Henry (D-Nashville), age 86, will continue to serve the remainder of his current term. He represents the State’s 21st Senatorial District.
Beginning his legislative career in 1955, Henry served in the State House for one term. He was later elected to the State Senate in 1971, where he served as the longtime Chairman of the Senate Finance, Ways, and Means Committee. Senate Finance is widely recognized as one of the legislature’s most powerful committees. He now serves as the Committee’s Chairman Emeritus, alongside Senate Finance Committee Chairman Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge).
Senator Henry has been a tremendous advocate for public higher education over the course of his legislative career. “He always had a keen interest in higher education and was always willing to sit and explore these issues. Senator Henry was very interested in how he and his colleagues could help UT improve. He wanted your advice and thoughts,” says UT President Emeritus Joe Johnson, commenting on Senator Henry’s service. “He gave priority to the enhancement of higher education–public and private–in Tennessee. The things I appreciate most about him are his availability and his thoughtfulness.”
In recent years, Senator Henry played leading roles in a number of education reforms, including the First to the Top Act and the Complete College Tennessee Act. UT President Joe DiPietro reflects on Henry’s career, saying, “He was a great champion of higher education, and we appreciate his support.”
Please join us in thanking Senator Henry for his commendable service to the people and the State of Tennessee.
The Higher Education Act, last rewritten in 2008, expires at the end of this calendar year. No one knows when Congress will actually finish renewing it or how the deep partisan divide that pervades Capitol Hill will complicate what is already a lengthy process. Last time around, it took five years to renew the act after it expired. When the Education Department announced plans for a sweeping regulatory agenda on Monday, some saw it as a signal that its officials didn’t expect Congress to finish its work anytime soon.
But a Senate committee and House of Representatives subcommittee kicked off the process regardless, holding the first broad hearings on higher education since the new Congress took office in January. Despite the scope of the hearings, and the divisions between the two parties that control each house of Congress, both ended up discussing how to simplify the complex federal financial aid system. And the most urgent item on Congress’s higher education — dealing with the interest rate on federally subsidized student loans, which is scheduled to double in July — made only a brief cameo at both hearings as panelists and lawmakers focused on broader issues.
The House hearing was billed in part as a chance for members to get up to speed on higher education issues as they prepare to rewrite the Higher Education Act, with written testimony that included an overview of the 40-year history of federal financial aid. The Senate hearing was narrower, focusing on students’ views of the financial aid system. Both quickly made their way to calls to make the financial aid application process easier to understand.
At the House hearing, Rep. John Kline, the Minnesota Republican and chairman of his chamber’s Committee on Education and the Workforce, asked for specific suggestions on how to simplify the federal financial aid system, saying simplification had long been a “major goal” of his.
The suggestions, from Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, and Dan Madzelan, a longtime senior Education Department official who retired at the end of 2011: start with the application process, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, long criticized for its complexity and impenetrability.
At the Senate hearing, the need for standardization and simplification was also a major theme. Ranking member Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, suggested that the costs of complying with federal regulation, as well as states shifting money from higher education to pay for rising Medicaid costs, were the reason for the tuition burden on students.
“We have so many regulations precisely because we have created such a complicated system,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who testified at the Senate hearing. “There’s an incredible need to simplify this … and to simplify this means to go back, to revisit where we were when these programs started out.”
Simplification is a “terrific goal,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, as he began his testimony at the House panel — in fact, he said, simplification has been the “holy grail of each reauthorization for the past 25 years.” Still, each reauthorization has arguably made the financial aid system more complicated, not less. There are now seven options for repaying federal student loans, for example.
Maintenance of Effort?
Tuition prices, college costs and whether students get good value for their money have been a focus for the Obama administration for more than a year. Questions from members of Congress from both parties suggested that those questions will preoccupy lawmakers as well as they prepare to rewrite the Higher Education Act.
Panelists at the House hearing repeatedly pointed to state disinvestment in higher education as a major driver of college costs, an argument made early in the day in the Senate. Those offering testimony called on Congress to hold states accountable for maintaining or increasing their spending on public higher education.
“Public higher education, which educates 70 percent of students in the United States, is about to cross a historic threshold,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. “For the first time ever, students will pay a higher percentage of the operating costs… than state governments.”
But the system of federal financial aid is constructed in such a way that putting together strict “maintenance of effort” requirements — requiring states to keep funding public higher education in order to receive federal dollars — is difficult because states receive relatively little money for higher education from the federal government. As a result, previous maintenance of effort requirements have been “nibbling at the edges,” Madzelan said.
Rep. John Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked if there were any proposals for maintenance of effort “with teeth.” As part of the Gates Foundation’s Reimagining Aid Design and Delivery project, some outside groups recently called for turning some federal higher education programs into block grants to give the federal government more leverage over the states. But those suggestions — which if enacted would be a significant change to federal policy, particularly if Pell Grant funding was involved — didn’t come up at Tuesday’s hearing.
Income-Based Repayment
Another idea discussed at both hearings: improving the system by which students repay loans based on their income. At the Senate hearing, Ethan Senack, federal higher education associate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, called for making sure more information is available to students and “streamlining” income-based repayment.
The House hearing went further, discussing enrolling all borrowers automatically in income-based repayment. Rep. Tom Petri, a Wisconsin Republican and longtime advocate of such a system, recently introduced a bill to enroll all borrowers in the income-based program and collect loan payments through paycheck withholding — the same system used for paying income taxes.
Petri’s proposal is the “most complete and thorough proposal we will ever have,” Hartle said, and he argued that a system of automatic income-based repayment would deal with two of the three challenges facing student loan borrowers. It would eliminate, or at least alleviate, the burden that high loan payments can put on a graduate’s earnings. And it would do away with defaults in the federal student loan system.
But automatic income-based repayment could also worsen the other problem confronting student loans: students might borrow more than they should, Hartle said.
Little on Interest Rates
While the Higher Education Act expires at the end of 2013, that date isn’t a hard deadline — the law will remain in effect, and no one would be surprised by a delayed reauthorization. But July 1, when the interest rate on subsidized federal student loans (loans that don’t accrue interest while students are enrolled in college) will double to 6.8 percent without Congressional action, is a much more immediate issue.
In his budget request for the 2014 fiscal year, put forward last week, President Obama proposed a change to interest rates for all loans that would allow them to rise and fall along with interest rates in the overall economy. The proposal drew mixed reviews: Congressional Republicans praised it Tuesday, but student advocates — and some of their allies among Democrats — said the lack of a cap on the market-based interest rate could endanger students if interest rates spike.
At the Senate hearing, Harkin indicated that he wasn’t pleased with the lack of an interest rate cap in Obama’s plan. And Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, joined with Senack of U.S. PIRG in asking Congress to act before interest rates double in July.
“The reality is that most students graduating from college these days, they’re not making enough money to pay the bills, let alone pay back these loans,” Franken said.
Philosophical Questions
For the most part, the House hearing focused on the technical side of broader questions — how to simplify the financial aid system to ensure access, helping students succeed while holding down costs (using strategies both large and small — McGuire, the Trinity president, told lawmakers that she does not serve cookies at faculty meetings because “our students go into debt to pay for college; we cannot be eating their tuition”), and collecting student data that accurately measures college completion rates.
But there were a couple of detours into the larger philosophical questions that underlie the federal government’s involvement in higher education. When his turn to question witnesses arrived at the House hearing, Rep. Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican, opened by asking if too many students are going to college. Walberg said he was concerned about the growing number of students who need remedial classes. “Let’s make sure students are pushed, but it takes academic qualifications, and it takes excellence,” Walberg said. “Let’s not manufacture students.”
And near the end of the hearing, Rep. Luke Messer, an Indiana Republican, asked witnesses about the role of federal financial aid in driving up college costs. “Does federal student aid influence tuition? No,” Hartle said.
“You really believe that?” Messer said in response.
By the end of the hearing, the shape of any future Higher Education Act proposals — or even what members of Congress would like to see included in the legislation — remained unclear, as it probably will be for some time. The witnesses, though, set forward a few guidelines, emphasizing simplification and urging Congress not to regulate colleges too much.
“First,” said McGuire, as she began to lay out the principles she’d like to see underlying the next iteration of the Higher Education Act, “do no harm.”
Zack Budryk contributed to this article.