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Quart for a Gallon. S.U.N.Y., of course, is not alone in having unsolved troubles. All across the U.S., the massive expansion of state systems has created massive problems. The situation, says U.C.L.A. Chancellor Franklin Murphy, is "like a man trying to fill a gallon jug with not much more than a quart of water." Armies of undergraduates are demanding more teaching attention; at the same time, governments are pleading for more research, which requires new emphasis on graduate studies, and the cities are begging for ideas to help check their spiraling decay.
As public systems try to do everything at once, they face the danger of diluting their quality. A college does not automatically become better by renaming it a university, and a doctoral program without an adequate faculty is worse than none. Yet countless ill-equipped colleges are clamoring for the prestige of university status, and Harvard's Riesman rightly sneers at the spectacle of "150 Avises trying to become a Hertz."
Political pressures in North Carolina last year catapulted four onetime teachers colleges into "regional universities." But they are still essentially teachers colleges, and they merely pose a threat to the financial support that has made the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill the best public institution in the South. Spreading resources equally throughout a state is no real solution. "Our great institutions are a great national asset," warns Clark Kerr, who is heading a Carnegie-financed study of higher education in the U.S. "You've got to concentrate talent to make it effective, since talents energize each other."
As a public trust, public universities are inevitably drawn into state politics. Legislators frequently badger university presidents to get rid of hippies, protesters and Communists. Former University of Missouri President Elmer Ellis recalls that for years he had to fight harder to get money because lawmakers complained about "all those Reds" on his faculty. All he had, argued Ellis, was one lone socialist—but the funds come easier now that the teacher has left to take a $4,500 raise at Wayne State University. Political considerations also kept the University of Massachusetts from putting its new medical school on either its Amherst campus, where it would have complemented other departments, or in Boston, where it could have tied in with other strong med schools. In a pointless compromise, it will be located halfway between the two, at Worcester.
Standards from Yale. Even some public educators are worried that state schools may be getting so powerful that they will squeeze out the many struggling private colleges or deplete the strength of the better ones—all of which face an economic crisis (TIME cover, June 23). Educators agree that the two sectors need each other. The University of California may have set high standards for all state schools, notes Clark Kerr, "but we got those standards from private institutions like Harvard and Yale."
Public higher education also faces a financial squeeze, despite the vast sums of money poured into it by state legislatures. Enrollment, salaries and other costs are rising even faster than income. Most state schools have sharply raised tuition—S.U.N.Y., an