President Bok personally journeyed to Washington to argue that the bill would handicap the University's attempts to bring new blood into the faculty when the majority of tenured professors turn 70 in 15 years.

Recently, critics have started to point to these two legislative setbacks when they claim that higher education has become an ordinary special interest.

"The tax bill really offended members of Congress because higher education tried to make itself unique," says Miller.

Congressional aides agree. "A lot of malicious stuff in the tax bill that was anti-colleges came out of the House because many of the members felt that higher education was taking actions, like raising tuitions, that were unaccountable to the public," says one Senate aide.

Big Versus Small

A raging furor which has split college and university leaders has also helped give Congress the impression that higher education is a special interest which can be treated the same way as the textile industry or the farm lobby.

The controversy centers around the practice in recent years of what is known on Capitol Hill as "earmarking," whereby smaller universities lobby their Congressmen to legislate funds specifically for their school.

A number of smaller universities have used private lobbyists in this way to bypass the established "peer review system," through which federal agencies distribute money to colleges and universities.

Under the peer review process, federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health call in outside experts to judge proposals for experiments or construction projects based on merit, the competence of the institutions, and the possible impacts of the proposals' results.

"Academic pork-barreling" has divided the higher education community because it breaks with the traditional solidarity between colleges and universities when they went up to present their views on Capitol Hill.

Smaller universities charge that the larger ones are using "an old-boy network," in the words of a Senate aide, to keep federal funds among them-selves, while large universities such as Harvard claim that the peer review system makes the most efficient use of the taxpayers' dollars.

But both large and small agree that the controversy has arisen because federal money for scientific research and equipment has dropped to almost nothing while the cost of an average laboratory has skyrocketed. They also agree that the dispute has hurt the image of higher education in general.

"Many Senators resent the way the large schools like Harvard hoard all the money and all the schools are lobbying up here anyway," says a Senate aide. "It's just not fair and now my Senator thinks higher education is just as greedy as the steel or auto workers."

"It's undeniable that this controversy has made higher education look like a special interest if there ever was one," says Rosenzweig, whose organization represents the nation's 54 major research schools.

In an attempt to heal this growing rift, the AAU sent out a ballot this week asking members if they would support a moratorium on all lobbying for Earmarked funds, says Rosenzweig. In these days of constricted federal budgets, he hopes that non-AAU institutions will respect the moratorium, but cynically adds that "I also hope it won't rain on a cloudy day when I'm having a picnic too."