Federal Aid: Going It Alone

FEDERAL AID Going it Alone Most college leaders, public and private, plead for more federal funds as the only way out of a cash crisis that grows increasingly serious each year.

Yet a hardy band of holdout colleges is stubbornly bucking the irreversible trend toward greater reliance on Washington. These schools even shun the federal help already available, prefer to try to make it on their own.

The resisters range from Mormon-run Brigham Young University, largest U.S. private school (enrollment:

20,670), to tiny Wabash College (840).

They include such high-quality liberal arts schools as Claremont Men's Col lege in California and Hanover College in Indiana. Also among them are New Mexico's Artesia College, which is still too new to be accredited, and a dozen little-known institutions operated by fundamentalist churches.

The church opposition, especially among Baptists, is based on the constitutional principle of separation of church and state in its strictest form. This is often combined with a conservative political philosophy that distrusts strong central Government and big federal spending. Brigham Young President Ernest L. Wilkinson, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1964, argues, for example, that the federal debt already is too high and that B.Y.U. does not intend "to be a party to the insolvency of our country." Federal gifts, he holds, lead inevitably to federal control, since "it would be an irresponsible Government if it put up the money and didn't know how it was being spent."

Muscle Y. Fat. The most articulate aid opponent is John A. Howard, president of Rockford College, a middle-quality liberal arts school northwest of Chicago. He is concerned less about outright federal control than a possible loss of academic diversity if Government funds become overly important. "If you're dependent on federal money, you've got to figure out what you think those bright young men in Washington think you need," he argues. "You can't be yourself."

Leaders of the holdout colleges also cite the time-consuming red tape involved in securing federal grants, the Government's emphasis on science and defense-related studies, and the discouraging impact of public grants on private giving. Yet some of the opposition has more of a rhetorical than a pragmatic ring. Declares President J. Donald Phillips of Michigan's Hillsdale College: "I don't like to see the vibrant muscle of independence and incentive turned into the flabby fat of dependence."