Seed Money

Arland F. Christ-Janer, president of eastern Iowa's small (870 students) Cornell College,*proclaims "one of education's least spectacular messages." Says Christ-Janer: "We are mightily impressed by dramatic advances in such areas as missilery and medicine, but as a liberal arts college our business is to bring these new facts of life into meaningful focus. Nothing more."

The Ford Foundation usually gives money for lightly defined goals, but it has a soft spot for humanistic ambitions like Cornell's. Last year the foundation promised Cornell $1,400,000 if the school could raise double that much in three years. Christ-Janer was off and running. He logged 100,000 miles in ten months, collected $3,400,000 in cash and pledges from loyal alumni and Iowa farmers, who turned the pockets of their bib overalls inside out to match the foundation's challenge. Then he set about to advance the "business of the liberal arts college." He raised faculty salaries 10% (enough to satisfy several would-be defectors), gave more students more scholarships, and started, far ahead of schedule, a long-range construction program, including a fine arts building and dorms. With the Ford grant as a catalyst, Cornell became a better school, faster.

Giving good colleges seed money is the aim of the Ford Foundation's Special Program in Education. Since the program began, four years ago, 42 rigorously selected small, private liberal arts colleges and nine major private universities have received grants totaling $164,200,000, and have raised additional matching funds of $401,400,000. Last week the foundation added 20 more schools to its list of beneficiaries.

>Five liberal arts colleges--Colgate, Middlebury, Mills, St. Olaf and Vassar --got Cornell-style matching grants totaling $10,800,000. Of the $100 million originally set aside for small colleges, $91 million have now been given out, none to segregated schools; the foundation this year slowed the pace of giving in hopes that before all the money is granted, some can be handed out to racially integrated Southern colleges. > Eight Negro colleges and the Atlanta University Center (consisting of six independent schools, including top-rated Morehouse and Spelman colleges, that share academic resources) received $13 million. The Ford Foundation waived the usual matching requirement, considering the meager fund-raising capability of Negro colleges. The foundation also insisted that the money be spent on academic improvements, such as fellowships and visiting professorships, rather than on physical facilities. > The biggest grant of all, $25 million, went to New York University, largest private university in the U.S., to help solve some of the painful problems of a big-city school. N.Y.U.'s 41,700 students are scattered in 15 graduate and undergraduate divisions on two campuses. Most students commute from the metropolitan area and study at home because of inadequate library facilities; among 14 new buildings, N.Y.U. plans a library and study center accommodating 3,000 students at a sitting. Two 30-story residence towers will provide 358 badly needed faculty apartments, at rentals lower than commercial rates.

The Ford gift, which requires N.Y.U. to raise $75 million in the next five years, was a leg up for the school's ambitious new president, James Hester, 40, who came to Washington Square less than three years ago. Pinning his hopes on a 408-page blueprint for development, he submitted it to the Ford Foundation and held his breath. Since Foundation President Henry Heald himself had been a president of N.Y.U., Hester's plans got a stiff going-over to fend off charges of favoritism. Now Hester can go ahead with the massive task of "creating a university environment on the city pavement."

-Which, like New York's Cornell University, was founded by a descendant of 17th century Bostonian Thomas Cornell; otherwise they are not linked.

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