Christmas Bonus

In faculty rooms, hospital wards and medical schools there was cause for more than the usual seasonal jubilation. This week the Ford Foundation announced that it is making a vast grant to private institutions all over the U.S. and its territories. Its total: $500 million. The huge Christmas bonus is the largest outlay by a private foundation in the history of philanthropy. It also makes the 20-year-old Ford Foundation--already the preeminent U.S. philanthropic organization, worth $2.5 billion--several light-years ahead of the field.

Three-Way Split. The half-billion-dollar melon will be split three ways: 1) $210 million in grants to 615 privately supported universities and colleges; 2) $200 million for some 3,500 privately supported hospitals; and 3) $90 million for privately supported medical schools.

The Ford Foundation trustees approved the grant last week at their quarterly meeting in Manhattan. The money will be paid out in two massive installments during the next 18 months, beginning next July.

The colleges, with the largest share of the grant, must be four-year, liberal arts and sciences institutions, regionally accredited. The grants will be in the form of ten-year endowments, and will be used for one purpose only: to help raise the salaries of teachers. Each college will get a sum equal to this year's faculty payroll.

Each college will decide how it will invest its money, and at the end of ten years, the principal may be used in any way the colleges see fit.

Last March (TIME, March 14) the Ford Foundation made a $50 million salary grant, which was awarded to 126 private colleges and universities that had extended themselves to meet the economic problems of their faculties. This money (not yet distributed) will be added to the grand total. The lucky 126 (which will also get their full share of the added $210 million will no longer be required to spend the $50 million grant on faculty salaries, and may now spend it in any academic way they please.

At the time of the original $50 million grant, Henry Ford II, chairman of the board of trustees,* explained the foundation's munificence and its concern with the problem of America's underpaid teachers. "In the opinion of the foundation's trustees," he said, "private and corporate philanthropy can make no better investment than in helping American education at its base--the quality of its teaching.

Nowhere are the needs of the private colleges more apparent than in the matter of faculty salaries." 25-Bed Floor. The hospital grants may not be used to reduce operating deficits, must fulfill at least one of three objectives : 1) improvement of, or addition to, facilities and services; 2) additions to, or training of, personnel; 3) research. In order to qualify for a grant, each hospital must be listed by the American Hospital Association, and must submit evidence that it is taxexempt. Institutions with 25 adult beds or more may qualify, so long as they serve the general public. The amount of each individual grant will be based on degree of usefulness to the community, as measured in patient-days of service and number of births (newborn babies are not counted as hospital patients). The grants will range from $10,000 to $250,000 per institution.

The $90 million grant to medical schools will be in the form of endowments, to help strengthen the instruction of medical students. "Unless the increasing financial needs of medical education are met," says the foundation's announcement, "the present high standards of medical training in the U.S. will undoubtedly be lowered.

Funds urgently needed to improve the teaching in medical schools are generally unavailable or inadequate."

* Commenting on the much-debated activities of the Fund for the Republic, an autonomous child of the Ford Foundation (TIME, Nov. 28), Ford wrote in a letter last week: "Some of its [the Fund's] actions, I feel, have been dubious in character and inevitably have led to charges of poor judgment. What effect my comments may have remains to be seen. I am satisfied, however, that no public trust can expect to fulfill its responsibilities if it does not respond to intelligent and constructive public criticism."

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