University Reconsiders Tuition Rise Following Historic Foundation Gift

University officials were generally well pleased yesterday over the Ford Foundation's $260,000,000 gift to the nation's private colleges. The gift will make philanthropic history in two ways:

1) In size, it exceeds many single private gift ever made, raising the total endowment of the nation's colleges and universities by 15 to 20 percent.

2) It is a significant retreat from alleged tendencies on the part of philanthropic foundations to control educational policy.

As in past Ford grants, the money for colleges, along with $200,000,000 for private hospitals and $90,000,000 for medical schools, was earmarked for specific purposes. But for the first time each institution will be allowed to tailor its new income to fit its individual needs.

Including $4,510,000 given to the University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the nation-wide grant will be administered by the colleges without Foundation control. Although an average nationwide salary rise of approximately 4.5 percent is predicted, each college will have complete control over the allocation of the money to its different faculty levels. In addition, after ten years the colleges can use the capital of the grants without restriction.

"We are giving to institutions of merit funds which will allow them to do what they want to do," Judge Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr. '27, Foundation trustee and President of the Board of Overseers said yesterday, "not what some bureaucrat in a foundation or some board of trustees of a foundation assigns to them as tasks.

"We are meeting the suggestion that there is a curse in bigness by showing that there may be a responsible exercise even of the largest power," Wyzanski added.

Reaction from members of the University's faculty and administration to yesterday's gifts was almost uniformly enthusiastic. "The salary rise will help a good deal," according to Seymour E. Harris '20, Chairman of the Department of Economics, "first, to attract people into the academic profession and, second, to keep the best people in the universities rather than have them take industrial and government jobs.