Massachusetts Morass

When college presidents parade their woes, it is time to mention Jean Paul Mather*of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The maximum salary he can offer a full professor is $8,684; the minimum offered the same man at the neighboring University of Connecticut is $8,100. This summer Massachusetts doubled tuition to $200, planned to use the money to attract sorely needed new teachers. But things do not work that way in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Last week the state senate voted down Mather's house-approved pay-raise plan. And after five years of thoughtless state control, able President Mather resigned. "We cannot be sure our present faculty will remain," he snapped. "What is worse, we cannot possibly go out and recruit this fall because we have absolutely nothing to offer."

Suffocation. Colorado-born Economist Mather was 39 when he took over in 1954 --the nation's youngest land-grant college president. What he got for the honor was a stepchild institution, utterly straitjacketed by the state's frugal division of personnel and standardization, which controlled teachers and salaries by the same procedures applied to road building. The setup was so suffocating that Phi Beta Kappa refused to charter a Massachusetts University chapter.

Mather traveled 2,000 miles a month to get public support for a "freedom bill." When it passed three years ago, the trustees finally had the right to hire teachers.

Mather brought in dynamic new deans and professors, reorganized the school, nearly doubled the operating budget, launched an $11 million bond issue for new dormitories, got $26 million in appropriations for new classrooms and equipment--three times the school's total capital spending in the 91 years before Mather took office. Enrollment rose from 4,091 to some 6,000 this fall, with 10,000 expected by 1965.

Monkey Business. The man who ended Mather's success story last week was Democrat John E. Powers, president of the state senate and front runner in Boston's mayoralty campaign. Powers was not impressed by Mather's plea that the university is already losing able teachers; he was more concerned with holding down Boston's tax rate and sabotaging his political rival, Democratic Governor Foster Furcolo, who backed President Mather.

To discredit Mather, Powers' supporters muttered darkly about "the educator with the maids and chauffeurs." (Mather has one maid; a non-uniformed university mechanic occasionally drives his car.) Mather is also the nation's lowest-paid public university president ($15,000 a year). But the propaganda cut deep; Mather resigned largely to "stop this personal monkey business" (he will stay through next June). To Educator Mather, it seems unlikely that culture-conscious Massachusetts will lose one of its oddest distinctions--spending less (2.32%) of the tax dollar for higher education than any other state in the Union.

*His minister father admired Germany's 18th

century novelist, Jean Paul Richter. He also

claims direct descent from New England's fiery Preacher Cotton Mather (1663-1728.)

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