Puzzler for Pedagogues

Almost unnoticed amid the local mayoralty scandal and a series of felonies juicy enough to please the most avid tabloid devotee, a group of national leaders in higher education last week chose Boston for their annual meeting. For three days, the Association of American Colleges met at the Statler, and in the course of its deliberations neatly side stopped the most ubiquitous and difficult of all pedagogical problems--money. The nettlesome issue of Federal subsidies for higher education stood high on the agenda, and one of the keynote speeches featured Dr. Carmichael of Tufts in a fervent plea for Federal aid. Then, quietly, the convention sent the resolution back to committee with a recommendation that the membership be polled a second time on a question to which it had already responded "Aye" by a preponderant majority.

One possible explanation for the hesitancy arises from some poorly times and ill-advised remarks by the Association's Director, Dr. Guy Snavely. The day before the meeting opened, Dr. Snavely relieved himself of the dictum that "if we have Federal aid we must have Federal domination." To that deathless relic of States' rights, he added a classic of Algeriana: "Anyone with ambition enough can go to college." With its chief executive indelibly on record, the Association faced the unhappy dilemma either of repudiating its spokesman or failing to express its own majority opinion on a vital issue. The educators choose the easy way out.

A more realistic but less palatable course would have been a collective admission that Dr. Snavely was orating through his mortarboard. Federal subsidies at the college level need no more imply Federal domination that the forty million dollars which the Office of Education annually devotes to underwriting the States' efforts in elementary education. The whole history of Federal aid to higher education, from land grants to the NYA, and more recently the annual two and a half billions expended under the GI Bill, has so far not revealed a single incident of dictation from the Potomac. Political interference with academic freedom has invariably been a curse of the very States whose autonomy Dr. Snavely so vigorously defends. The most outrageous scandals of the past decade have occurred in the State Universities of Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas, under the aegis of such luminaries as Huey Long and Eugene Talmadge.

Dr. Snavely's second remark simply does not square with the facts. According to the available figures, about one hundred thousand qualified secondary-school graduates are barred from attending college every tear solely because they are poor. This group, almost half as large as the total college enrollment of the nation, cannot be absorbed within present scholarship funds without reducing the average grant to an inadequate pittance, and the part-time job market in the typically small college community is already oversupplied. The presence or absence of 'ambition" does not account for wastage of almost a third of the potential undergraduate body of the nation.

The Association by ducking the most pressing contemporary problem in higher education, has done its members a rave disservice. Its refusal to state flatly that only Federal aid can enable the colleges to fulfill their task--education for all who can benefit by it--merely postpones the issue and delays its solution.