Federal education aid to be paid for with student privacy?

The old saying "He who pays the piper calls the tune" is never more true than when our federal government provides "aid" to some segment of society. Want to keep your federal highway dollars? Make sure your state passes laws mandating seat belt use, a lower blood alcohol limit, etc.

As notorious as such highway funding extortion has become, federal aid to education may be even worse. The "No Child Left Behind Act," for example, imposes all kinds of testing and other requirements on states and their public schools in order to maintain their federal funding. Under the guise of improving educational quality, this and other federal laws are moving us toward total federal control of our children’s education.

A recent proposal by the federal Department of Education would further escalate the educational power grab. Colleges and universities would be required to submit detailed personal and educational information on each student. The information would be stored in a federal database, keyed to a student's Social Security number. The excuse? All of these students and their schools are receiving federal aid, so it behooves the feds to keep track of them.

It should be obvious that tracking this private information about individual students violates their Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable search. It is also not a power delegated to Congress under the Constitution, thus violating the spirit of the Constitution as a whole, as well as the Tenth Amendment. But Congress often uses the funding argument to circumvent such restrictions.

Privacy advocates are already starting to rally against the proposal, as well they should. Maybe we'll even beat this one. But what concerns me is that federal funding of everything under the sun leaves Congress with the temptation and a rationale, however flawed, to monitor and control everything under the sun.

Opposing each outrageous proposal in a purely defensive manner is ultimately doomed to defeat. When we win in one case, things stay as they are. When we lose in any case, we move inexorably in the direction of the total surveillance and control society. The situation never moves back toward a society that is safer from government meddling.

How can we get onto the offensive? We can, of course, work to get our congressmen to roll back federal funding. Conservatives have been trying to accomplish that for a century with little success. We must continue to do so, but we need to attack the problem from other directions as well.

State and local governments, as well as private entities, must start to refuse federal funding whenever the temptation is offered. We need to scrap our emphasis on getting back "our fair share" of federal taxes. If we can successfully resist the federal carrot, we will be able to avoid the federal stick.

One successful example of such repudiation of federal funds is Hillsdale College, a small (about the size of South Dearborn High School) liberal arts college in southern Michigan. Some years ago, the federal government tried to force the college to knuckle under to the various race monitoring and other interference which they commonly impose on colleges under the excuse of scholarships and other federal funding.

Since Hillsdale was founded on the principle of providing a good education for men and women of all races, the college was offended at the idea that it had to be told how to handle race relations. As a conservative school, it rejected federal interference of other kinds as well.

Hillsdale's response was to decide to go it alone. Not only does the school itself not accept federal money of any kind, but its students may not accept such aid either. Without the threat of withdrawing funding, the government has pretty much left Hillsdale alone.

One might have expected them to go broke after a few years of such a policy. Instead, Hillsdale has thrived on the strength of its academic reputation and private financing. Indeed, its independence has made Hillsdale a bright spot in the depressing atmosphere of higher education today.

State and local governments, as well as public and private educational institutions, should study Hillsdale's example. Certainly there is a short term cost to rejecting the seduction of federal dollars. But the alternative is to be pulled further into the maw of all-powerful government.