Pitt's Juggler Fumbles

Two years ago, a University of Pittsburgh trustee asked Pitt's Chancellor Edward Harold Litchfield: "Edward, don't you have enough balls up in the air now?" Replied Litchfield, who was running a $100 million drive to upgrade Pitt, promoting a $250 million redevelopment of the school's Oakland neighborhood, serving as chairman of S.C.M. Corp. (formerly Smith Corona Mar-chant), and heading Studebaker Corp.'s Executive Committee: "Maybe I do--but don't call me down on it till I drop one." By last week it was clear that Litchfield had finally fumbled a big one: Pitt.

This July, Pitt faces its fifth successive operating deficit, for a cumulative total of $19.5 million. Last week a bill began moving through the Pennsylvania legislature to provide an emergency appropriation of $1,250,000 just so the private university can meet its July payroll. The school is seeking $4,000,000 more in extra state help to get through the next 14 months. Governor Wil liam Scranton has ordered the State Council of Higher Education to investigate Pitt's finances. The Ford Foundation has appointed Indiana University Chancellor Herman B. Wells to head a study of the school's future.

Big Talk. The brisk and blunt Litchfield, 51, came to Pitt ten years ago, after serving as an aide to General Lucius Clay in postwar Germany and as dean of the graduate school of business and public administration at Cornell. His selection was engineered by the late Alan Magee Scaife, millionaire industrialist, president of the Pitt Board of Trustees and brother-in-law of Financier Richard King Mellon. Scaife died in 1958.

Pitt had long been a Mellon family beneficiary--$74 million in the last 20 years. Last month Mellon and his wife quite pointedly gave $5,000,000 to Carnegie Tech, where students refer to Pitt's 42-story Cathedral of Learning as "The Height of Ignorance," and $2,000,000 to Duquesne. The Mellons are said to have soured on Litchfield's autocratic manner and his penchant for big-talk promotion. Litchfield announced in 1963, for example, a plan to roof over the 75-acre Panther Hollow as part of his Oakland redevelopment, and build an upside-down seven-level research and cultural center. Plans were later scaled down, and now are stalled.

A More Respected School. Litchfield's defenders argue that he is being made a scapegoat for lax fiscal supervision by Pitt trustees. A dynamic chancellor is too busy churning out ideas, they say, to audit the cash flow. They also argue that in upgrading Pitt, Litchfield chose a costly course: increased emphasis on graduate teaching and research, which require expensive facilities and slight the revenue-producing undergraduate enrollment.

By any judgment, Litchfield made Pitt a more respected school--to the point that many Pittsburgh-area residents criticize it as too choosy about whom it will admit, and too costly: tuition has nearly tripled, from $537 in 1954 to $1,400 now. When Litchfield arrived, Pitt had 561 full-time faculty members, 56% with Ph.D.s, for its 16,141 students. Today its faculty numbers 1,091, and 84% have Ph.D.s, for a student body that is only about a thousand bigger. Faculty salaries have nearly doubled, averaging $12,126, and the percentage of out-of-state students has grown from about 4% to 34%.

Pitt's financial problems have increased sentiment in the state legislature to take over the school as a state university; the state already pays $4.8 million a year in support. As for Litchfield, his future in the lucrative chancellorship--it carries a $45,000 salary, a $25,000 expense account, use of the former H. J. Heinz mansion, which cost the university $250,000 to buy and remodel--is in doubt. He suffered what Pitt doctors term "a mild heart attack" in May, plans to recuperate this summer in his cottage in the Virgin Islands and at his 1,750-acre Pennsylvania farm. Pitt trustees are discussing whether to keep him on.

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