Warning from Yale

Last week Yale's President James Rowland Angell took as the main theme of his annual report a problem which has lately brought many a sleepless night to many a U. S. university executive. Wrote he:

"Current social and political trends, accentuated, if not directly provoked, by the economic depression, contain a menace for the great endowed institutions. . . .

Counting among their number the most venerable and many of the most important of our universities, they have owed their power to assemble great bodies of scholars, to create great libraries and laboratories and museums, very largely to the gifts of generous benefactors, often in the form of legacies. If the present tendency to excessive taxation of personal income persists, or increases, as it may, and if this be coupled with further assault by inheritance taxes upon testamentary estates, the two largest sources of income for these institutions will almost inevitably dry up or, in any case, be gravely impaired. If on top of these procedures exemption from taxation of gifts to philanthropic and religious organizations should be repealed, as has already been energetically proposed, the consequences would again be extremely destructive to endowed educational foundations. . .

"Tuition charges, apart from endowment the only source of income, could not possibly alone support these institutions of learning, unless, on the one hand, educational standards were ruthlessly sacrificed and the methods of teaching were radically and disastrously modified (e .g. by discharging many of the teachers and employing a few lecturers to address huge classes; or, on the other hand the fees were greatly increased, which at present would, as a financial device defeat itself by greatly reducing attendance. Adequate scholarships would help solve the problem, but these rest almost invariably upon endowments or private gifts and wouId be subject to the same malign influences already pointed out. Whether the social order in America can afford seriously to cripple these endowed institutions and possibly to destroy some of them should be conscientiously considered by the advocates of taxation methods the results of which are reasonably certain ultimately to undermine the vitality of the universities.

"A complete reorganization of education in the United States, with a shift in its objectives and a complete change of its center of gravity, may, as some persons believe, be highly desirable; but to bring this about by indirection and more or less unintentionally as a result of panic-stricken effort to mitigate through injudicious taxation the effects of a transient economic crisis, or as the result of a merely emotional assault upon the results of thrift and industry, would be a sorry product of our democratic society and one ruinous to some of the highest values which have been built up in our century and a half of national life "

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