Michigan List

Administrators of each of the 43 State universities in the U. S. realize that fat legislative appropriations depend directly on public appreciation of the university's services. Last week the University of Michigan jogged the memories of Michigan editors with a list of 52 ways in which it serves Michiganders.

The University of Michigan sends lecturers traveling up & down the State, enrolls 2,500 persons in extension courses. It estimates that 300,000 use its reading lists, pamphlets, clippings. It analyzes drinking water, gives treatments for rabies, fills the schools with health speakers. To its hospital every year come 30,000 patients, to its dental clinic 15,000. Its broadcasting service prides itself on music classes by radio. There are public concerts by the Music School faculty and every spring a May Festival at Ann Arbor. The University holds institutes for parent-teacher clubs, for women's clubs, for owners of timberland. It gives courses for industrial foremen, for meter-readers. It is a big brother to the public school system, arranging examinations, promoting orchestras and debating clubs. The State relies on it for research on highways, conservation, fisheries.

Well-timed was the University's reminder of its 52 functions. Currently, President Alexander Grant Ruthven is trying to get the State Legislature to up the University's annual appropriation from $3,200,000 to about $4,060,000.

Not only at Michigan but in many another state this month universities have been wrangling with legislatures to re-store prosperity budgets. Encouraging to pedagogs was the experience of one of the hardest hit institutions, the University of North Carolina. Governor Ehringhaus had recommended that that University be held to a budget some 40% below that of 1928. Last fortnight the University's small, able President Frank Porter Graham, who calls more North Carolinians by their first names than anyone else in the State, made a personal appeal for a 25% increase, told legislators that his University was "reaching the breaking point." Last week the appropriations committee voted to give him what he asked.

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