Do-lt-Yourself Endowment

From Harvard to Holyoke, Massachusetts cherishes rich colleges with independent incomes--and barely gives an allowance to its own virtually unendowed University of Massachusetts in Amherst. No one feels this more keenly than Massachusetts' able President Jean Paul Mather, who will quit this spring in protest against low faculty pay (TIME, Aug. 31). Last week Mather's 5,200 students offered another kind of protest to the penny-pinching state legislature. To import sorely needed "cosmopolitan contacts," Senior Winthrop F. Sheerin, 25, of West Stockbridge, Mass., proposed that a "distinguished visitors' " chair be endowed by the students themselves. Instantly approved, an annual $3 head tax will raise an estimated $17,500, hopefully attract all sorts of illustrious lecturers, from Poet T. S. Eliot to Physicist Edward Teller. Said embattled President Mather proudly of his students: "They are honestly interested in sustaining excellence."

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