The Affluent Miniversity

At a time when most private colleges are struggling to find the funds just to keep alive, Connecticut's Wesleyan University has a most unusual problem: it has more money than it can spend--and thus has the cash to experiment with projects that can make it a better place to teach and learn.

The relative affluence of Wesleyan, a Methodist-founded, all-male university with only 1,240 undergraduates and four Ph.D. programs, stems from the shrewd investment practices of its recent trustees. In 1953, they took an endowment of $18.2 million and have since built it up to $70 million, mainly by investing heavily in insurance stocks --no surprise, since some of the trustees were Hartford insurance executives.

They also spent $8.6 million in 1949 to acquire American Education Publications, publishers of a grade school current-events pamphlet, My Weekly Reader, which soon expanded to 13 school periodicals with a circulation of 16.5 million, netting the university $28.5 million. The press was sold in 1965 to the Xerox Corp. for 400,000 shares of stock then worth $56 million. Wesleyan has since netted $63 million by selling 300,000 of the Xerox shares. The school's endowment of $161 million breaks down to $130,000 per student.

Rebuilding a River Port. With that backing, Wesleyan can afford to try out new ideas. It is pumping $3,000,000 into a development company to help rebuild its home community of Middletown, a once busy river port with declining industries and fading neighborhoods. One project will be a model community to be built on nearby farm land, which Wesleyan hopes will make the area more attractive to recruitable professors. Wesleyan also gives about half of its students financial help in meeting the $3,350 annual cost of attending school; next fall 37 Negroes--10% of the freshman class--will be admitted on full scholarships.

Under retiring President Victor L. Butterfield, Wesleyan's "College Plan" has accented independent study for undergraduates. Similarly, Wesleyan's freewheeling Ph.D. programs (in biology, physics, math and world music) allow students to ground themselves broadly in the liberal arts, combatting complaints of the stifling specialization of most doctoral studies.

Also highly flexible is Wesleyan's Center for Advanced Studies, at which such invited fellows as Britain's Author-Scientist C. P. Snow, former White House Aide Richard Goodwin and William Manchester (The Death of a President) get ample stipends (up to $15,000, plus housing) with only one vague appeal to conscience: "They are invited to participate, to an extent consistent with their plans for their own work, in the ongoing work of the university." Snow confined himself to two lectures during his one semester at Middletown. His wife, Pamela Hansford Johnson, who was also a center fellow, used the time to write a novel (Night and Silence Who Is Here?) chiding the collegiate practice of collecting big-name scholars in centers for advanced studies.

Off the Shelf. Wesleyan gives its students plenty of say in deciding what the university's future will be. Two students serve on the school's permanent educational-policy committee, a group Butterfield calls "the key to change." Three students are helping incoming President Edwin Etherington, former head of the American Stock Exchange (TIME, July 22), on a study of education policies and programs. A student committee on university development offers advice on campus construction plans. Wesleyan undergraduates also rate their professors. And their voices are not ignored: when Senior Dave Eger objected to administration plans to build a hockey rink before erecting a needed gymnasium, he rounded up 546 students' signatures on a petition. Thanks to his protest, the plans are being reconsidered.

Where, with all its money, is Wesleyan heading? Etherington hopes that all of the planning committees and consultants will come up with a variety of options. Wesleyan might go coed, develop new graduate studies, add law or medical schools, or reach out to expand its community services. Whatever the eventual choices, Wesleyan can afford to take its time. Says Etherington, with comfortable and enviable assurance: "The worst way to spend money is to buy the first thing off the shelf."

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