Editorials
FROM BACK PAIN TO HEADACHE "Getting government off our backs'' is an irreproachable idea - unless it merely transfers pain to other sectors of the national anatomy. Higher education, for instance,...
...Together, that amounts to federal student aid to the tune of $6.5 million annually...
...The Jesuit provincials had been worried that they were in the midst of a constitutional crisis...
...If the American people value education, as they seem to, let the demand pay for it...
...The 1983 Reagan budget requests a 54.2 percent cut in student aid programs for the 1983-84 academic year...
...You can't reduce tax revenues and greatly expand defense spending without taking a pound of flesh from somewhere, and that somewhere, besides social welfare, is obviously education...
...Some touchy points remain...
...On average, the federal government provides a sixth of their income, considerably higher than the proportion supplied state universities...
...The president's Council of Economic Advisors, in its recent Economic Reports of the President submitted to Congress, suggests a further, questionable philosophic rationale: that while defense is an obvious "public good," education ought to be rated a private good...
...The distinction is important - though with interest rates as high as they are and expected to remain so, such moral subtleties may well be lost on middle-class parents with college age children...
...Like others, the college is already hurting from last year's cuts which reduced student aid by $250,000...
...In recession-staggered Buffalo, turning education into a "private" good is grim news...
...Take a typical example: Canisius College in Buffalo, New York...
...Not even Representative Jack Kemp seems willing to go along with the president on this one...
...For some independents, like Stanford, the rate of federal support is far higher...
...The illness of the Jesuit's superior general, Father Pedro Arrupe, had provoked the intervention, the pope said, and he lavished praise on Arrupe, counselors of the Jesuit curial staff, and the order's membership for the spirit in which they had accepted the papal test...
...situations differ from one country to another and we must evaluate, with the consent of Rome, whether Jesuits can become directly involved in political, social, and economic activities when there are no laymen around who can fulfill these roles...
...Half its students are on Pell Grants which go to clearly low-income students, and three-fourths of the whole student body depend on Guaranteed Student Loans, which amounted to $4.5 million this year...
...The prospect of a mighty military giant, they may be saying, will be no real defense if it means a brain drain...
...At worst, the fear had been that the Vatican might indefinitely postpone the election of a new superior general for the order, and in the interim play monopoly chess in the appointment of conservative or reactionary Jesuit superiors...
...We will need," he said, "to see how far it is possible to go...
...In a similar mood, the House Education Appropriations Subcommittee recently rejected the Reagan proposal to impose sharp new restrictions on Guaranteed Student Loans - including the plan to bar graduate students from receiving them...
...Nor are corporations likely to fill the gap...
...The 1983 Reagan budget spells a further loss to Canisius of $1,398,000, and a lot of empty seats...
...the next few years unless something is done...
...The consequences for colleges and universities are as dire as they are for many students and their families...
...There is a real threat," asserts E. Alden Dunham of the Carnegie Corporation,'' that literally hundreds of small private colleges may go bankrupt over The battle of the budget is far from over, but pained parents and college officials seem to be getting their point across on the Hill...
...They guess that will force some 500,000 students to leave college or transfer to less costly institutions...
...Hence no state subsidy...
...and (2) though the pope warmly endorsed action for social justice, he reiterated his anxiety that the priest's concern remain primarily spiritual and not that of a doctor, social worker, trade unionist or politician...
...You can't keep cutting the same programs over and over again," said Rep...
...VERDICT IN It was a'' test,'' Pope John Paul II told the assembly of Jesuit provincials who had gathered in Rome at the end of February to hear why the pope took the unusual step last October of appointing a personal delegate to run the order...
...Many, who now count on it, won't be able to do so...
...and say that defense is sacrosanct...
...try 54 percent...
...Already, in mid-March, the House Education and Labor Committee recommended $3 billion for Pell Grants, double the $1.4 billion the president had asked for...
...The pope confessed he'd been "edified": the Jesuits had passed the trial with flying colors...
...Even Secrtary of Education Terrell H. Bell admits the cuts in aid are "harsh and austere...
...The pope banished these gloomy prospects by giving the green light to the election of a new superior general by year's end...
...Reagan's reversal of a thirty-year trend in public support for education is plain...
...And the transfers, says president Roscoe Brown of Bronx Community College, are bound to drive many of his less competitive black and Puerto Rican students onto the streets of the south Bronx...
...The latter issue, according to Father Guiseppe Pittau, assistant to the pope's personal delegate, emerged as the most controversial matter for discussion at the provincials' Rome meeting...
...The addendum to this news is the budget's elimination of the so-called Trio programs designed to steer disadvantaged young people toward higher education, and to provide counseling and tutoring for those who enter college...
...Testifying before Congress recently, representatives of the independent colleges and universities estimated the 1983 Reagan budget will lose them $1.25 billion...
...Silvio O. Conte (R...
...It voted to recommend $1.3 billion for 1983 loans, enough to finance the program under current eligibility standards...
...The spirit of the pope's address on February 27 was one of reconciliation...
...The logic of Mr...
...Signs are, however, that Congress may not give Mr...
...Since the greater part of student aid subsidizes the middle class, slashing such programs is admittedly not so obviously unfair as gutting the food stamp program for the really poor...
...For many independent colleges and universities, the issue of government aid is a matter of life or death...
...To cut aid to such groups makes conservative rhetoric about self-reliance and independence ring hollow...
...And Congress appears unwilling to go along with last year's "brilliant" budget strategy of a blind vote on the sheer size of federal spending.This year Congress is looking at items one by one...
...Nor is the situation up the street, at the state university, any better - with some 14.5 thousand students receiving $43 million in federal aid during the current year...
...How," complains Fred A. Nelson of the Atlantic-Richfield Foundation, "does a corporation justify continuing to make grants when it's laying people off...
...Mass...
...It's estimated these programs annually reach 242,500 minority youth and 104,000 white teenagers...
...And as the independent colleges and universities turn to private sources for support, they'll be facing stiff competiton from state universities for the same funds...
...Reagan what he wants in this area...
...Higher education, for instance, has a headache - as do parents with children headed for, or already enrolled in, college...
...Stitched into the pope's laudatory eighteen-page text were exhortations (1) to a narrower interpretation of the reforms initiated by Vatican II than perhaps many Jesuits consider either intellectually or pastorally justified...
...Demanders with no cash must presumably go without...
Vol. 109 • April 1982 • No. 7
