Larry D. Lauer

In recent years, I have been adapting the lessons I have learned in my marketing and communication work to the bewildering world of legislative advocacy. My focus has been on helping advance higher education and nonprofits, and  it has been quite an adventure. 

I thought it reasonable to think that a certain amount of government regulation was needed to keep greedy speculators on Wall Street from ruining our main street economy, or to deter out-of-control bankers from being totally self-serving. or to prevent manipulators from using non-profits to hide questionable business practices, or to keep less than  competent educational administrators from misusing funds. But in this hopelessly polarized society, it seems all I encountered were the most extreme political ideologies and solutions.

In my immediate world of higher education I was willing to support essential regulation focused only on very specific  situations and people. Beyond that, I thought that it might be possible for an enlightened government to focus on providing financial and other positive incentives to stimulate informed and creative ideas to improve teaching and research.

From my 45 years as a teacher, it really did seem apparent that individual institutions and students have specific talents and special needs. In other words, I naively thought it should be possible to convince educated government officials that finding and supporting talent, and institution-specific solutions, is far more effective than centralized controls  that assume everyone can learn the same material  in the same way.

Instead, I found even more centralized controls and regulations than I imagined, along with a disturbing commitment to increase them.  Even new administrations that I thought would be somewhat enlightened, are not. To punish the guilty, they punish everyone.  As a result, all institutions have had to add staff and money to comply with endless pages of detailed regulations, and any goal to keep costs and tuition low has been rendered almost impossible to reach.

I will still concede that limited regulation is sometimes necessary. On top of that, however, we desperately need mutually respectful dialogue between “trench-experienced” teachers, administrators, and enlightened legislators. But to make this even feasible, we must first end this mean-spirited, polarized, and destructive argumentation that is tearing our country apart.