University of Iowa - Hawkeye Yearbook (Iowa City, IA)

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This is a new venture. It is the first of what I hope will be a series of brief annual reports on the State of the University and the University of the State. The ideal period to be covered would be the current academic year, 1953-54, but that would re- quire a crystal ball because the year, 1953-54, is far from finished, as this is written, and an account of the academic year 1952-53 would be almost a year old by the time this Hawkeye appears in print. I have settled on the calendar year 1953, therefore, as the best available compromise. I wish that this report might be one of unqualified optimism and good cheer. Unfortunately that would be misleading because the most significant develop- ments in 1953 for the University and the other five institutions under the Iowa State Board of Education were political ones. The year 1953 brought into sharp focus the dominance, or at least potential dominance, of partisan political control over our state institutions in contrast to the bi-partisan, non-political exercise of authority by the State Board of Education. In january 1953 the Board and its institutions were informed that for the first time in twenty years the reversion pro- visions of the Budget and Financial Control Act would be invoked against them at the end of the biennium, then less than six months away. Similarly they were informed that no longer would the institutions get one- twelfth of their appropriations monthly, but they would receive only such funds as the pre-auditor and the Comptroller would approve as necessary. The pre-audit of expenditures, authorized in 1951, was fully opera- tive in 1953. Appropriations for the first time were earmarked so that lapsed items in the budgets could not be made available for repairs, replacements, alter- ations, books or equipment, a clear departure from the historic development of the RRSA Fund and from its operation up to 1953. And, in Section 12 of the Ap- propriations Act, budget ceilings were set beyond ,Quia of ffte Uniuerdify which the institutions could not go except on a showing of emergency or necessity. What has happened in Iowa to the University, the State College and the State Teachers College is symptomatic of what is hap- pening in other states. In my judgment it is part of a general movement which will weaken and may destroy American public education. The time has come when our country must decide once again whether it is to be the hope of the world as it was in Colonial days, in the days of the Revolu- tion, in Lincoln's days, and in Wilson's days, or whether The American Dream was merely the idealism and naivete of youth which must give way to old age's cynical and selfish love of money and ease and plutocratic power. FK 31 PF Within the University the situation was never better. During 1953 the University's academic program pro- gressed in good order. Approximately 1900 students earned degrees. Approximately 47,835 ambulatory and in-patients were examined or treated in our hos- pitals. Grants for research totaled f5791,201 and were divided among 136 different research projects. At the request of a Conference on the Problems of Aging, the University, with Board approval, has organized the Iowa Institute of Gerontology. Une hundred iive con- ferences were held in the Iowa Center for Continuat- tion Study, with over 9,000 participants in public health, business and industry, labor, education, journal- ism, public service, engineering, law and religion. In October 1953, Professor E. F. Lindquist announced a new electronic test scoring machine which seems des- tined to have profound effects upon educational testing. Two buildings, a unit of the Communications Center for journalism, and the Hospital School for Severely Handicapped Children, were completed and occupied. Among other things, the 55th General Assembly 119531 appropriated S900,000 for a medical research