Daniel Barnes at Politico:
Some of the nation’s small liberal arts colleges are hiring Washington lobbyists for the first time — seeking to distinguish themselves from the Ivy League universities at the center of President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education.
While managing government relations has always been a main responsibility for college presidents, at least five of U.S. News & World Report’s top 20 liberal arts colleges have recently hired lobbyists for the first time in their histories, according to lobbying disclosures: Williams College, Pomona College, Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College and Washington and Lee University. All five schools declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.
“There are some institutions that have decided that because of the risk, they feel like they need to hire some outside expertise to bolster what they’ve already been doing,” said Steven Bloom, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education.
Firms hired to lobby on education-related issues for those five schools include Lewis-Burke Associates for Williams College, theGroup DC for Pomona College and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck for Davidson College. Holland & Knight has received the largest payday of the firms hired by those five schools, netting $80,000 in the first quarter from Washington and Lee University and Claremont McKenna College, according to disclosure reports. The lobbying firms declined or did not respond to requests for comment.
A key factor driving the K Street hires, according to disclosure reports and people familiar with the matter, is worry about an expanded endowment tax — the 1.4 percent tax on university investment income that was first adopted in 2017 to help offset Trump’s broader package of tax cuts.
