Power of the Purse

MASTERS HAVE a difficult task--coordinating the social and academic lives of up to 450 students at the College. They are a hard-working and earnest group, generally dedicated to their House and its students. But in allocating House funds, masters have broad discretion, and most work in too much isolation from students.

Each master now receives approximately $24,000 to run his House, basically divided into a $3500 Ford Foundation endowment for educationally related projects, $14,000 for general House administration and $7,5000 for entertainment. In addition, each master--with one exception--is required to live on campus, usually in fairly luxurious accommodations. Because of faculty reluctance to accept masterships, the administration two years ago added an "administrative stipend" of $5000 to each master's salary.

When surveyed, administrators and masters used conflicting terminology to describe the various House funds, and some overemphasized the extent to which the funds were intended for students. Subsequently obtained University guidelines for the entertainment allowance show that the $7500 fund is vaguely intended to meet expenses incurred "for the benefit of the University." The guidelines suggest masters may use the fund for household staffs and functions to "entertain students, faculty and guests of the University."

But the fund is intended only for expenses "beyond normal family social needs" of a master, and Master Robert J. Kiely's use of a large part of the fund to hire a full-time, live-in maid at Adams House seems inappropriate. Since at least a part of the maid's services is for Kiely's purely personal benefit, a commensurate part of her salary--as Dean Whitlock said--would "more appropriately" come from the administrative stipend. There may be acceptable reasons for retaining the maid, who has been paid personally by previous Adams House masters and is two years away from retirement, but the present system appears to leave too much discretion in the hands of the master, whose expenditures are reviewed by no one.

A check with other masters turned up no similar situation, but it did show that masters use different accounting procedures for these funds. Some masters kept all the funds scrupulously apart, while at least one master was unable to say how much of the entertainment allowance went for student-oriented functions because he lumped all these monies in a single account.

The funds provided for the Houses are fairly limited, and some masters quite admirably add money from their own pockets to keep the House afloat financially and expand its activities. But the master's role in forming the House environment should not be a purely paternalistic one. In the murky area of house funds, students should be given an increasing say in--or at least a review of--the funds that the University sets aside for their House life.