Fighting the Axe

THE FEDERAL BUDGET cuts that will strip Harvard of some $14 million of funding can accurately be called "Draconian." The manner in which the cuts were done can also legitimately be termed irresponsible.

Harvard is losing the money needed for a broad array of programs. The necessary grants for scholarships, research and special projects in the School of Public Health, College, Medical School and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are not included in President Nixon's 1974 budget.

Reliance on the Federal government for funding is not one of the pleasanter facts of life at Harvard. Harvard's pride in its status as a private, independent institution is highly incongruous with its financial needs, but as long as Federal funding was increasing annually, the University could ignore the inconsistency.

The University cannot ignore it now. Perhaps the end of support for certain programs is less than tragic. Certainly, forcing Harvard to confront the realities of its connection with Washington is a good thing. But the sudden sharpness with which the cuts were performed is inexcusable. We take strong exception to the bureaucratic indifference with which the executive branch adopted the meat-axe approach in curtailing the areas of academic work that had previously been Federally supported.

The University's cooled relationship with the government has a number of different facets, and we cannot lament equally the demise of all them. Federal grants for special projects in engineering and in some of the applied sciences have always had a straightforward contractual aspect. Basically the government bought certain types of immediately useful research, and we can only be pleased by the end of the conditions that prompted a demand for bombing studies and airplane design. But it is worth remembering that these have so far been the least affected area within the University.

The termination of some programs--such as the $400,000 Harvard College work-study arrangement--is a simple case of bureaucratic ineptitude. The Nixon Administration has not ended the Federal government's commitment to aiding college students in financial need. But by withdrawing support for the present system before completing the arrangements for its replacement, the Administration has opened the possibility that many students will be left in the lurch.

In ending some programs, the Administration has shown its Neanderthal social instincts. As President Bok admitted, some of the training grants at the Medical School had "gotten out of hand," but such excess hardly justifies the end of aid to the Boston City Hospital, a 700-bed central Boston facility that may have to reduce its patient capacity by almost a third. These cuts and cuts for basic research in the health sciences only demonstrate Nixon's backward tendencies.

We do not recommend that Congress restore all of the cuts made in the Federal budget. We do recommend that it carefully consider the scope of the cuts and the Executive's approach to the budget and hope that while lobbying in Washington, Charles U. Daly and Robin Schmidt are successful in gnawing at the periphery of the budget as it passes through Congress.

Harvard will have to live with the consequences of the new budget. When soliciting funds to replace those that have been lost and while formulating a University budget for a tight year, the Harvard Administration will exercise an implicit but enormous power. We hope that in exercising it, the Administration will be able to resist its easy inclination to satisfy--at the expense of its powerless constituencies--the financial wants of Harvard's baronial powers.