Ford's Urban Grant

The Ford Foundation's $3 million grant to endow five chairs in urban studies at Harvard will boost a long-neglected field. At the least the new professorships will enable the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and several of Harvard's schools to provide more courses in a field that has recently attracted considerable undergraduate and graduate interest. The mere presence of more permanent professors, more courses, more Ph.D. candidates, and more research in urban affairs will agitate public concern for city afflictions.

Most of Harvard's schools have already had a number of social scientists and doctors involved in teaching urbanrelated courses, guiding research projects, and organizing action programs in Cambridge and the Boston community. But the Ford grant last week, by creating professorships, will add a new degree of continuity and coherence to urban studies. And the foundation has indicated that this grant--of almost $11 million to Harvard, M.I.T., Chicago, and Columbia--is just the first step. Ford began the same kind of massive assistance seven years ago to increase studies in international affairs. The result at Harvard has been a prolific interdisciplinary increase in courses, first-rate professors, publications, and research in international affairs, especially in underdeveloped countries.

The new chairs will have long-ranged influence on urban studies and solutions, but there still remain the immediate ills in cities. Ford has not neglected to attack the present problems: in addition to the $11 million for endowment, Ford has pumped more than $13 million into urban research and action programs during the past year. But at a time when the United States Congress has relegated urban programs to a low priority when handing out funds, large foundations like Ford must assume even more responsibility in financing short-term efforts. City and state governments, even if they do have available funds, will not support politically unpopular programs such as the Ford-backed project on racial integration at the School of Education. Often fruitful research can go hand in hand with temporary programs, however short-lived those solutions may be.