For everyone miffed about what's happening to their university: for the last 20 years tenured professors have been accepting large federal research ; grants. This new priority has led them to gradually abdicate their teaching duties creating a need for more low-level teaching assistants, while their government money has created new positions for research assistants. Its resources thus redistributed, the university is dependent on the new federal funds to maintain it all. Traditional sources of income are drying up. Our universities will either have to fold or become federally controlled. Harvard will be the last one to go because it's the most independent one now.

The whole student rebellion at Harvard has grown out of the side effects of this uncontrolled evolution. This story explains what is happening. It is important.

Nearly two weeks ago, William L. Marbury, the senior member of the Harvard Corporation, was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun. The result was a news story with a three-column headline that read "Harvard Trouble Laid to Maoists." Marbury blamed what was going on at Harvard on certain members of the Progressive Labor Party, who are followers of the famous Mao Tse-tung of China, and so on. Mr. Marbury, who is a Baltimore lawyer, a director of not a few corporations, and a Fellow of Harvard College of 22 years' standing, also said some things that were a little less predictable about the Harvard Trouble. For one thing, he said that SDS and is supporters want Harvard to take a political stand against the Vietnam War by kicking ROTC off campus. But, he said, Harvard as an institution cannot take a stand on the war, because taking a stand on the war "could produce a governmental backlash that might imperil the school's independence."

Then, he went on: "Slapping ROTC in the face is like slapping a lion in the face. It is a crazy thing to do especially at a time when every university is dependent on federal funds. . . Harvard is less dependent than other schools," but the university does not want to be put in the position of "denouncing the military service and the government." He added that he was in "complete agreement" with the Harvard faculty's decision to downgrade ROTC from an academic department to an extra-curricular activity. "I am perfectly satisfied with having the faculty say ROTC courses shouldn't be accredited."

There are two conclusions that can be drawn from this. The first is that the Corporation has very little intention of removing ROTC from Harvard, or putting ROTC in a position at Harvard that will cause the Pentagon to remove it. This means that there is more Harvard Trouble ahead. Those Maoists and their two are tree thousand friends in the Stadium who voted to get rid of ROTC are not going to like this. But the second conclusion is more important. Marbury's reason for keeping ROTC is far different from reasons that Pusey has stated previously (" to provide an opportunity for a young man to satisfy his military obligations and remain in college" and "it's terribly important for the United States of America that college people go into the military.") The reason that Marbury gave in the interview is undoubtedly what is behind all the other talk we have been hearing: if Harvard removes ROTC, it will face a "Governmental backlash." It will be like "slapping a lion in the face." (The Sun reporter, one Alvin P. Sanoff, failed to ask Marbury what a lion was doing roaming around the Harvard campus.) Harvard receives three-eighths of its total income (37.8 per cent according to the financial report of the treasurer for 1967-68) from the federal government; this money is necessary to Harvard if Harvard is to survive, or, as Marbury puts it, if Harvard is to retain its "independence"; getting rid of ROTC would be an action that would clearly harm Harvard's relations with the federal government.

The story of what has happened at Harvard over the past month is essentially a story of Harvard's relations with the federal government--how Harvard has become deeply dependent on federal funds for its survival; how that dependence causes university administrators to act often with the interests of the federal government, not the university, in their minds; and, finally, how federal funding has torn the university apart, produces strains and tensions in Harvard's internal structure, and renders the university helpless to defend itself.

Harvard is a mild case. It receives less federal money as a proportion of total income than many other private universities its size, because of its huge endowment. (Princeton and M.I.T. receive more than half their funds from the government.) Still, federal funds are by far the largest single source of income at Harvard, more than room and board, student fees and tuition (21.9 per cent), more than private gifts and annual endowment earnings (33.6 percent). The trend is very recent. Federal funds have been pouring into Harvard steadily since the end of World War II, but the greatest surge has been since Pusey became president in 1953-54. In that year, income from student sources was 36.2 per cent of the total, income from private sources 46.3 per cent, and from the federal government, 7.8 per cent. The Federal money amounted to $3 million. Last year, 14 years later, it was $64 million.

The term "private university" at Harvard and at other large universities like it had become an anomaly. The advantage of a private university over a public one is that it is free to pursue knowledge without being responsible to a large public. It has a constituency, mostly its alumni, but they normally understand that it should be able to create new knowledge and pass it on without too many mundane restrictions. The private university, since World War II, has developed what Clark Kerr has called a "common law marriage" with the federal government. There is nothing very sinister about this, or very conspiratorial. The university became involved with the federal government because it needed money, the federal government became involved with the university because it needed research.

Since World War II, the traditional sources of support for universities have been gradually drying up, while at the same time, costs have been rising enormously. There are many reasons for this. First, there is more competition for the philanthropic dollar. Private foundations used 46 per cent of their grants for education in 1961-62 and only 37 per cent in 1964-65 (latest figures, Foundation Library Center). The foundations have said they are looking for more actionoriented programs, and the largest, Ford, has announced that it will try to stay away from areas where the federal government is very active (e.g., private higher education). Private citizens are finding other uses for their money too. Gifts represented 11.5 per cent of educational and general income at American universities in the peak year, 1957-58. Within six years, the figure had dropped to 7.2 per cent (latest figures, U.S. Office of Education). Student income is falling too, as university assume the social obligation to educate students who are qualified but who cannot pay (one way to do this is through scholarships, clearly; the other, by extremely low tuitions). Meanwhile, overall costs at universities are rising, first because enrollment is rising, first because universities cannot increase their productivity to absorb normal rice rises the way industry can. Tenure, nine-month sessions, and small classes are expensive habits, but universities claim they need the "psychic income" they provide to operate successfully. Technology -- film, tape, television, computers, programmed instruction--has improved learning, but it has increased its cost (see Anthony Oettinger's new book, Run, Computer, Run). In industry, technological progress has led to more output per man hour. The irony is that education has been largely responsible for the increase in knowledge that leads to the increase in productivity, but education gets few financial benefits.

So more and more, universities have been turning to the federal government for aid--not direct institutional support, but, in most cases, support for scientific research. Research funds are very versatile; they can be used to build new laboratories and hire new faculty members and janitors. Also, they enable universities to free their unrestricted gifts for use in areas other than science. This may seem a strange way for the federal government to support universities, but there is no other way that is justified by America's ideology. The Constitution does not mention the word "education" (even though there was early support by Washington, Jefferson, and others for a "national university"). From the founding of the nation, the government's involvement with the universities has had little to do with education per se, rather with other political goals that peripherally involved education. The Morrill Act of 1862, which established the land-grant college system, was motivated in large degree by a desire to dispose of excess public lands profitably. The National Defense Education Act of 1968, which provided graduate fellowships to thousands of students, would not have passed Congress without the sputnik scare, without the word "defense" in its title, and without the preface, "The security of the Nation requires the fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women." The Higher Education Act of 1965 (extended in 1968) provided another justification for aiding universities, again tied to other political goals, but closer to education for its own sake. That act calls for federal support to give everyone in America an equal opportunity to make it, to get their social and economic advancement. This justification is greatly expanded in the Carnegie Commission report of last December: "Equality of opportunity through education, including higher education, is beginning to appear as a realistic goal for the less privileged members of our society."

Today, the federal government supports universities mainly because it needs to purchase a product--scientific research (that is where two-thirds of all federal aid to higher education goes, and even a higher proportion at Harvard and other large universities--the $64 million, 37 per cent figure at Harvard include only government money for research; government money for scholarship aid, the other major proportion, is included in tuition figures).

In certain cases, the university is better equipped to turn out the research product then private firms and the government itself. Actually, the term "federal government" is misleading. Every federal Department except the Post Office and the Treasury and at least 15 independent federal agencies, from the Smithsonian Institution to the Tennessee Valley Authority, buys university research. Buying research is like buying guns; it is something the federal government does regularly, so it did not require any major change in philosophy or even in policy for the federal government suddenly to become higher education's major benefactor.

The universities were eager to sell their product. New areas of scientific research were opening up, excellent European scientist (and social scientists were flowing to America to escape Hitler and the devastation of Europe, and the universities were hard-pressed to find private funds to finance research. The demands from the government were not so strict as to interfere with free intellectual inquiry, the universities concluded. Whatever the weapons implications of their research, most scientists were doing what they wanted to be doing anyway. Some universities, like Harvard, prohibited secret research on the campus just to be safe, but the federal government did not mind.

Still, the universities, especially the private ones, had to severely change their self-images and their purposes to accept so much federal money. In 1952, the Association of American Universities, an organization of 42 of the top public and private universities, studied the financial condition of universities and the federal role in funding them. The report concluded with this warning about federal aid:

Perhaps higher education has responded too much to trends in American society. Where the need is for wisdom, the colleges tend to teach skills. When citizenship demands broad knowledge and critical thinking, the colleges frequently offer narrow professional training. Although America's new position in the world calls for the highest level of social, philosophical, and political leadership, the universities build larger laboratories, federal programs encouraged the universities to do these things. Thus have federal programs encouraged higher education to turn away from its first function of criticizing, prodding, and even leading out national thinking.