The 2008 Republican Party Platform

Inside Higher Ed
September 2, 2008

To date, John McCain’s higher education policy has been short on specifics. That’s not to say his rival, Barack Obama, delved heavily into the finer points of student aid or research funding before his party held its convention last week in Denver. Nevertheless, the Democratic nominee’s public statements on college affordability and other topics, combined with somewhat more detailed policy prescriptions already available on his Web site, made for few surprises last week when delegates ultimately adopted the party platform committee’s official report.
On Monday, during a subdued schedule altered at the last minute to accommodate Republican Party leaders’ concerns about the impact of Hurricane Gustav in the Gulf Coast, delegates convened to complete the Republican National Convention’s “specific official business” — including, as a matter of procedure, approving the party platform.
That document, which outlines the Republican Party’s official stances on policies ranging from immigration to the environment, also contains the most detailed look so far at how the presumptive nominee John McCain would approach higher education as president.
The candidate’s existing positions call for more innovation, more transparency and fewer regulatory barriers in higher education, casting colleges and universities as necessary to maintain America’s competitive advantage in the world. Many of McCain’s proposals are about simplification, although they don’t go into much detail: simplifying (and consolidating) financial aid programs, simplifying college tax benefits, simplifying student lending, reducing earmarks that could take away from peer-reviewed federal research funding.
The platform, like all party documents, doesn’t necessarily commit McCain to support individual policies, and its intended audience is more likely to be constituencies within the Republican Party than undecided voters or policy makers. It is essentially identical to a draft circulated late last month, which the chairmen of the platform committee, referring to a process that invited citizens to upload videos with suggestions for revising the document, called “the most grassroots-driven platform development effort in the history of American politics.”
It provides a glimpse into potential future Republican approaches to issues largely overlooked so far in the presidential campaign: the role of community colleges; whether institutions should use more of their endowments to boost financial aid; an acknowledgment that low graduation rates threaten American dominance in higher education; a call to revamp the financial aid system; opposition to how Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is applied in college athletics; and a nod to supporters of distance education (details below).
On other issues — like affirmative action and quotas (against) and the Solomon Amendment and ROTC (for) — the platform maintains longstanding positions supported by both the party and McCain. [To read the entire story, go to: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/02/repubs ]