Little Givers

It was all very well to say that Mark Hopkins could teach on the end of a log: his subject was moral philosophy. His brother Albert, who was a scientist, needed a laboratory. In the century since the Hopkins brothers, education has rolled off the log and become one of the nation's biggest industries; though it has spent millions on its factories it needs two billion dollars more. Where will the money come from?

The University of Rochester's Alan Valentine thinks that what the country needs is a few good multimillionaires. Rising income taxes and falling interest rates have just about wiped out the big giver. Last week most big universities were busy devising ways & means of hitting "a lot of little givers."

Put Up or Go Down. Yale's President Charles Seymour picked a big businessman (American Brake Shoe's President Bill Given) to head a "committee on university development." It cost $7,500,000 to run Yale in 1941; more than $12 million in 1947. President Seymour wanted alumni to shell out ("The only alternative is deterioration in a Yale education"). Yale has already increased its tuition charges for undergraduates to $600, and doesn't feel it can raise them any more.*

Like Yale, other colleges relied on rich or big-name alumni to put the bite on lesser grads.-In most cases, behind the alumni amateurs were professional fund-raising agencies. Northwestern University alone wanted $167 million; Columbia needed $100 million. Harvard thought it could make do with $90 million. To refurbish the Mark Hopkins log at Williams (at a cost of $2,500,000), President James Phinney Baxter III spent 24 days in one recent month chasing dollars outside Williamstown. (He felt, he said, like an "itinerant mendicant.")

Pillars Postponed. Where was the money going to? Everything was up: even the frogs used in biology laboratories had jumped from 72-c- to $2.25 a dozen. The biggest expenses: more buildings and higher faculty salaries. The University of Washington has started a $20 million building program--to complete the upper campus in "collegiate Gothic," the lower campus in modernistic glass-&-brick. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is building a functional $15 million Illinois Institute of Technology in a tumbledown neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. CalTech needs $5,000,000 just to maintain the new telescope on Palomar Mountain.

A few schools were holding back. They nervously noted that it was costing the University of Michigan $12 million to finish structures estimated at $8,000,000 when they were started. Observed the cautious treasurer of Florida's little Rollins College: "Private or endowed institutions which resist the temptation to expand [may look] unprogressive now, but in a few years they may be pointed to as 'Pillars of wisdom.' "

* Prewar Yale tuition: $450 a year. Last fortnight Columbia raised its tuition 33 1/3%, its dormitory rent, 17%. This week Colgate raised its tuition 20%.

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