Education: $46 Million from Ford

The spreading alms of the Ford Foundation last week embraced five U.S. universities in a $46 million hug. The aim: to give each region of the nation more great private institutions. The winners: California’s Stanford ($25 million), Indiana’s Notre Dame ($6,000,000), Maryland’s Johns Hopkins ($6,000,000), Colorado’s Denver ($5,000,000) and Tennessee’s Vanderbilt ($4,000,000). It was the biggest single Ford gift since the 1955 windfall that boosted faculty salaries across the land by $500 million.

The new money has only one string—the winners must match each Ford dollar with two from other private sources. Exception: wealthy Stanford (endowment: $90 million), which must match Ford three for one. Total potential kitty: $163 million. Ford’s gift alone tops Denver’s entire $4,600,000 endowment.

Ford spent a year choosing among universities that have strong presidents capable of raising cash as well as dreaming of academic distinction. The lineup:

¶ Denver’s Chancellor Chester M. Alter, 54, a Harvard-trained chemist, recently warned his Methodist-related school (5,700 students) that its job is “guarding and nurturing the life of the intellect,” not wasting money on “extravaganza” football. His first use for Ford’s money: more land, more teachers, more pay.

¶ Johns Hopkins’ President Milton Eisenhower, 61, veteran of previous successful reigns at Kansas State College and Penn State University, has given direction to a famed but floundering campus (2,400 full-time students) whose undergraduates had seemed forgotten amid the brilliance of its graduate students. Eisenhower has restored balance, raised faculty salaries, will use Ford’s money first for new science facilities.

¶ Notre Dame’s President Theodore M. Hesburgh, a Holy Cross priest, has at 43 become one of U.S. Catholicism’s most distinguished educators. Along with numerous public jobs, notably the Civil Rights Commission, he has done much to prove that Notre Dame (5,500 men) is far from a football foundry. In 1958 he launched a $66 million drive to boost “academic excellence” in the next decade; much of his first Ford money will go toward a new library and research in humanities and social science.

¶ Vanderbilt’s Chancellor Harvie Branscomb, 66, a Methodist theologian, has ably integrated the Nashville campus (3,700 students) despite such problems as the recent crisis over the expulsion of a Negro divinity student. Most of Vanderbilt’s initial Ford money will go into its prestigious law school.

¶ Stanford’s President J. E. Wallace Sterling, 54, a highly businesslike historian, has for ten years run the West’s outstanding private university. Stanford’s enrollment has doubled to 8,600; the faculty has won three Nobel Prizes. The 9,000-acre campus includes everything from a moneymaking industrial park to the site of a planned $100 million accelerator, and the Ford money will help pay for chemistry and physics buildings.

Why should rich Stanford deserve Ford help? In a state full of booming public campuses and the highest number of collegians (234,000 fulltime) in the country even the “Princeton of the West” insists it needs more cash to keep rolling. So do most private U.S. campuses.