Lagging appropriations are endangering many state universities
The University of California at Berkeley is one of the nation's proudest institutions of higher learning. Nonetheless, its Life Sciences Building, constructed in 1930, is a crumbling monument to deferred maintenance. When the air-conditioning system broke down last winter, the heat killed dozens of rats being used by visiting Fulbright Professor Veronica Tamasy in a research project; it was the second time in three months that a batch of her rats had succumbed to equipment failure. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, cash is so short, complains Historian James Leutze, that...