Education: The Straitjacket

When Colorado-born Jean Paul Mather became president of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst two years ago at 39, he knew that he had a problem campus on his hands. Founded in 1863 as the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the university did not achieve university status until 1947. It had grown from an uninspiring prewar institution with four small divisions, 1,260 students and 45 buildings to one with 75 buildings, an enrollment of 4,300, schools of agriculture, engineering, nursing, home economics and business administration. But academically, says President Mather, today the University of Massachusetts is doomed to "increasing mediocrity." Reason: it has almost completely lost the power to control the caliber and size of its own faculty.

More Zombies. Since 1954 the university has been struggling inside a strange sort of straitjacket. In an effort to streamline the administration of various commonwealth agencies, the legislature placed them all—including the university—under the thumb of the Division of Personnel and Standardization. The division classifies jobs, sets salaries, abolishes or creates positions as it sees fit. It applies the same procedures to the university as it does to mental hospitals, prisons and road-building projects. The result is that Massachusetts cannot begin to compete with other campuses for top teachers. "What can I get?" asks President Mather. "Intellectual zombies."

In hiring a full professor, Mather can offer him no more than $6,180. At the end of twelve years, the professor automatically reaches a final salary of $7,680, but the Division of Personnel and Standardization bars merit raises. When the professor dies, the division is apt to downgrade his post to an associate professorship, thus making proper replacement even more difficult than it would be normally. "If the librarian requires top-level professional assistants," says Mather, "he will be told by the division that he cannot have them because the mental hospitals do not have assistants in their libraries. When a professorship becomes vacant in the history department, and we want to use the money for that professorship to improve the geology department, we cannot do so if the division does not approve. And usually it doesn't."

Rotted Crop. In 1950 the division made a six-week survey of the university, promptly "nagged" (i.e., marked for elimination or downgrading) one out of ten university posts. In spite of the campus' growth, the division still stands by that 1950 report. Once, when Mather appealed for extra hands to help with the school of agriculture's bumper crop, the division said no. The crop rotted, and at considerable expense the university had to buy its food on the open market. All in all, the setup has been so suffocating that the Phi Beta Kappa senate has refused to charter a university chapter.