Lamar Alexander Wants to Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

He’s clearly very smart and very engaged," said Kevin Carey, director of the education-policy program at the New America Foundation. "He’s almost surely the most influential Republican in Congress when it comes to higher education." (Mr. Carey has been a contributing writer for The Chronicle.) But the senator "has become a chief defender of liberal college groups that want a lot of government money and no accountability for how they spend it," Mr. Carey said. "That is an odd place for a conservative Republican to be."