Memo to a Trustee
WRITTEN by Trustee Beardsley Ruml 15 and the late Provost Donald H. Morrison, and therefore having a distinct Dartmouth parentage, Memo to a CollegeTrustee was published by McGraw-Hill last month and was immediately a provocative treatise for college teachers and administrators to talk about. The booklet is a report on financial and structural problems of the liberal college, prepared for The Fund for the Advancement of Education.
Asserting that there is great waste in curriculum, methods of instruction, administration, and use of college plant, Memo to a Trustee makes its most dramatic point in claiming that it is possible to nearly double faculty salaries without raising tuition. This could be done, Mr. Ruml says, by adopting a 20-to-1 student-faculty ratio, by overhauling the curriculum into more sensible and economical form, and by devoting all tuition income to faculty salaries and leaving all other college operating costs to be met from endowment, gifts and other income.
The faculties themselves are the biggest obstruction to achieving such a plan, the report says, and authority for the design and administration of the curriculum must be taken from the faculty as a body and vested in one of several possible mechanisms for change, such as the president alone, a smaller faculty group, or an educational policy council made up of the president, faculty representatives and trustees. When the faculty as a whole has the authority, Mr. Ruml writes, the quality of the curriculum is lowered by departmental pressure groups and the proliferation of courses.
Along with advocating a 20-to-1 student-faculty ratio, the report proposes more efficient use of a smaller faculty through flexible class sizes, ranging from large lectures for several hundred to seminars for very small groups. It would severely prune the number of courses offered; would reduce the student's weekly class schedule to twelve hours and eliminate all recitation sections, leaving time for more independent study; and would cut the faculty teaching load to about nine class hours a week.
One of the most interesting sections of Memo to a Trustee works out the salary possibilities, under Mr. Ruml's plan, for colleges with enrollments of 800, 1200, 1800 and 3000 students, and with tuition of $800. For the 1200 college, after 25% of tuition income is put aside for retirement, insurance and leave reserves, there would be ten salaries of $7500, fifteen of $10,000, fifteen of $12,000, ten of $15,000, and ten of $16,500. For the larger colleges salaries would go as high as $26,000.
Mr. Ruml, who invented the pay-as-you-go tax plan back in the 1940's, may not have done it again; but he sure has given the liberal arts colleges something to think about.
