Federal and State Aid

Abstract

I WOULD say, in the first place, that as far as my own professional and personal philosophy is concerned, I would endorse without any reservation everything that Dr. Eldon Johnson says in his paper. Beyond that, in terms of the position of the University of Massachusetts and the recent rise in tuition, part of the policy is localized by the peculiar Massachusetts statutory and legislative position of the University vis-a-vis the position of other land-grant and state universities. I regard the increase in tuition which the board of trustees voted early in I959, and in which I acquiesced reluctantly after four years of fighting any increase whatsoever, as basically a compromise with expediency, political and otherwise, and not a fundamental expression of what those of us who are still defending low tuition really believe. In the long run, the members of my board who were reluctant about the move -which doubled the tuition at the University of Massachusetts from the $ioo rate established in I933 -believe, as I do, in a long-range philosophy of no tuition. It might be of some interest to point out that the most ardent supporter of this thesis is a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard on the Board, a Boston lawyer who, according to his background, would be assumed to be on the other side that is, a defender of high tuition and of private education. However, he fundamentally believes in the philosophy of public education, as I do. Public higher education, as Mr. Johnson has pointed out, is not often very well defended in the northeastern section of this country. The University of Massachusetts is trying to expand its annual budget to meet mushrooming demands for public education in the next few years. Massachusetts is the largest of the New England states in terms of population and fiscal resources, but it stands at the bottom of the national totem pole in public education. It is impossible to contradict the fact that Massachusetts ranks fiftieth in per-capita expenditure on public higher education and in the percentage of its state budget spent on operating funds for public higher education each year. In that atmosphere, we face greater than average difficulty in translating fiscal attitudes at the legislative level into financial support for the expansion which the University has undertaken in the past five years and, indeed, since World War II, particularly with the Commonwealth's own fiscal situation in a critical position. This entire situation creates an atmosphere of financial expediency rather than one based on public need. The University in an expansion program, however, is faced with a need which is not merely financially expedient, for raising faculty salaries or increasing operating funds. I imagine that everyone else in the country is striking for increased faculty salaries. In Massachusetts, however, legislative restrictions have (even after the winning of our freedombill legislation in I956) ' kept us in a strait jacket of minimum and maximum classified pay schedules (established by legislation) that leave us with maxima, particularly for our professional administrative staff, and, most important, for our associate and full professors, low to compete. By too low, I mean they are below all of our sister land-grant institutions in New England and far below the midwestern and western institutions. When the University of Rhode Island has higher maxima by $2 ,OOO for a post than the University of Massachusetts, then in terms of comparable economic resources or any other fiscal policy, the University is in bad shape. This means that we inevitably lose able faculty members, especially when we have distinguished professors whom we are trying to retain against raiding, which is now reaching dangerous proportions. Some people try to cover this up with a kind of maudlin altruism, saying that the private colleges and the public colleges all love each other, and somehow we are all going to share our faculties and resources. This is nonsense. In my opinion, we