Education: Two-Time Winners

Getting a gift of several million dollars “won’t make your life any happier,” the Ford Foundation’s James W. Armsey warns panting university officials. Though the money “is comforting to contemplate, the new level of excellence the grants are designed to help you reach is disturbing and disruptive to achieve.” Since 1960, the foundation has generously disrupted ten universities and 47 private liberal arts colleges with gifts amounting to $200 million. Last week Ford raised the total by $18.5 million, awarded matching grants to Brown, Brandeis, and the University of Southern California.

Each school must match the payment within three years—by raising $2 for every $1 of philanthropy in the case of Brown and $3 for every $1 in the case of richer U.S.C. and Brandeis. The rules were familiar. The trio had played the match game before, thus joining a select circle of two-time Ford grant winners.*

> Brown, the seventh oldest college in the U.S., earmarked most of its $5,000,000 for construction. Buildings planned or under way range from a graduate-study center and humanities building to a new field house, swimming pool and dining hall for Brown’s sister school Pembroke. The gift, said Brown President Barnaby C. Keeney, “is an important event at the beginning of our third century.”

> U.S.C., which shares the record with Brandeis for matching its earlier grant about two years ahead of schedule, used that money to polish a new reputation for nurturing scholarship as well as football heroes. The administration established cash awards for outstanding teaching and research, revamped the liberal-arts and graduate curriculums. U.S.C. will invest its new Ford grant of $7,500,000 in long-term endowments, use matching funds for current operations and plant expansion.

> Fast-growing Brandeis, having put up more than 50 major buildings in 16 years, will slow down the rate of new construction. Almost all of its $6,000,000 from Ford will go toward scholarships, fellowships, and endowments for more than 30 faculty chairs (average endowment: $400,000). “Here we are —a teen-ager among the university giants,” said President Abram L. Sachar, “and we had better be good to warrant going steady with the best.” With the latest gift, he added, “we will secure virtually all our tenured professorships in one fell swoop. This will make academic history.”

* Others: Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame.