University of Wisconsin Madison - Badger Yearbook (Madison, WI)

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Report. This Report, voted by the faculty jnd conhrnied by the regents, will go down .is one of the gre.at documents in the history of Americ.in education. It had a realism about it that, in niv judgment, sets it above cither the New Plan of Chicago or the Lowell Plan of Harvard. This Fish Plan was, perhaps, the most widely publicized of the educational moves matured towards the end of the prosperity period, but, throughout the University, notablv in the Medical School and in the College of Agriculture, there were many less heralded, but none the less significant adjustments in policy and organization that had ripened to the point of agreement and stood ready for execution when the university year ended in June 193 0. Directly thereafter the economic blizzard began to chill the campus. The earh ' months of the depression saw our income drop faster than our load of work dropped. No one could then tell with assurance how fast or how far the Depression would drive the curves of income and registration downward. No one could tell with assurance what the changing relation between income and load of work might be in the months and years immediately ahead. Ordinary in- telligence dictated a policy of caution regarding any changes in policy and organization that would set up, for the years just ahead, prior obligations for increased staff and added expendi- tures. New moves in policy and organization that could not clearly be financed through read- justments in a progressively shrinking budget were automatically outlawed. The result was that many, if not most, of the fruits of the preceding four years of study and planning had, for the time being, to be put in cold storage. This was true particularly of all phases of the Fish Plan that involved added budgetary outlays. The relationship between the income curve and the registration curve seems, at the moment, to justify the hope that the academic year 1934-3 5 will see the resumption of the educational advances legislated in 193 and postponed under financial pressure in the intervening period. But no one can predict with certainty the financial dilemmas that may confront the 193 5 Legis- lature and what this may mean to the state support of the University. This biennium-to- biennium uncertainty is the major factor that makes long time planning in a publicly supported university extraordinarily difficult, particularly in a phase of depression. The binding thread of all the new moves in educational policy that were ready for execution when the Depression hit the University was greater integration and more direct social focus of student programs of study. The experience of the last five years has underscored the necessity for such moves. There is, I think, a greater and more general readiness to reconsider the process of education in terms of the present phase of political, social, and economic transition to new bases than at any time during the last eight years. I confidently expect the next two years to see at Wisconsin more fundamental educational progress than has been realized at any American university during the last decade. The groundwork has been done. The mind of the University is reaciy. It remains only to see whether this progress can be financed. The sweeping reorganization of the Short Course in Agriculture along the lines of the Danish Folk High Schools, which remade Denmark, is one of the bright spots of Wisconsin ' s depression period. It deserves special consideration in any survey of the depression period in the University. One of the finest fruits of the new mood the Depression has induced in the University is the sustained reconsideration of Wisconsin ' s research program that has been under way during 10

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w isc-onsin Kick ' s lu ' I )chrcss ion President Glenn Frank I ■ ■H I dcli,i;litccl by the intelligence and rc.ilism L fi-it ' e J the makers of the 1934 BADGER to HW I ' ' ' ° ' ■cscue it from exclusive dependence upon snapshot-and-satire routine which marks so many student yearbooks. Its editors ask me to introduce their attempt to record the impact of the Depression upon the University by stating, with such simplicity and brevity as I can muster, the internal policies with which the University has sought to meet and to mitigate the external pressure that has converged upon it since the economic order backfired on us in 1929. A nation cannot suffer an economic disloca- tion so profound without its institutions having to adjust themselves to its impact. It is no easy matter to pilot a great social institution through rough economic seas. There are, of course, some bright colors as well as black in the picture. ,,.,.,.. , , , ' ' ■ ' of ress produce balance sheets of both ..ssets .ind liabilities for church and state and school. The church, for instance, has not always en.oyed its greatest powder in its moments of greatest prosperity. The next generation may look back upon this phase ot stringency as having purged as well as plagued our universities. We are, perhaps, too close to its difficulties to ,udge justly the beneficient results that mav come rom this time of stress when every expenditure must be freshly cross-examined. For the moment I shall do no more than express my belief that the Depression has brought to the University of Wisconsin alike among its students and its teachers, a seriousness of mind and a solidantv of spirit ,t did not have in the days of the pathological prosperity of the Coolidge Era. On the liability side of the balance sheet, it must be recorded that the Depression has affected he tenipo of development in the University as it has aft ' ected development in all social institutions throughout the nation. As the aaidemic year 1929-30 ended, many reconsiderations of educational policy and organization which had been maturing during the preceding four vears had reached the stage of administrative recommendation, faculty legislation, and regent confirmation. The Experimental College had been a storm center of discussion of the aims and processes of liberal education. It had not produced a total scheme wholly applicable to a large college intimately mterlocked with he duties of pre-professional preparations. It had, how ever, demonstrated the fact that a superior ducational result-m terms of intellectual aliveness, sustained interest in ideas, the hab ' t of reading good books from desire rather than dictation, and a living interest in contemporary social sues-could be produced by a procedure that breaks through the specialized pattern of depart- mentalized courses. One of the first fruits of the Experimental College was the Fish Committee [9]

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the second semester ot 1934. There li.is been .i se.irchiiij; re-examln.ition ot all research in the physical sciences in the light of the social implications of its results. The research of the social scientists has been re-examined in the light of its relation to the strains and maladjustments ph sical science research has put upon the social order. The future promises a new collaborative relation between the physical and social scientists at Wisconsin. This is one of the great stories that will emerge from Wisconsin ' s depression period. Its details are still in the making. The drastic drop in inct)me has been met, in the tirst mstance, b ' the ordinary economy measures that would be employed in any organization. Vacancies have been left unfilled wherever it has been possible either to drop the work or to redistribute and absorb the duties of the positions vacated. N ' acant positions that have had to be refilled have been refilled with younger men at lower salary levels. The staff has been decreased through readjustments and reorganizations. This staff decrease has not been made by discharging teachers but by taking advantage of turn- over and not tilling vacant positions. This decrease has been, in the main, among assistants and instructors who resigned or left for other positions. Services and courses have been eliminated or consolidated. Heavier schedules of work have been required. Expenditures for business items have been drastically reduced. Miscellaneous capital expenditures for books and apparatus have been reduced at every point where it seemed poss;ble without serious effect upon educational service. Less vital physical maintenance of buildings and grounds has been deferred. Minor im- provements of plant and equipment have been postponed. No new buildings have been erected. All available balances have been returned to the General Fund of the state to help absorb the drop in income. All such measures were employed first in order to protect as long as possible the none too ample compensation of the teaching staff. But the drop in income could not be absorbed without resort to salary waivers. The first schedule of salary waivers ran from three to thirteen per cent with certain exemptions in the lower ranks for married persons. The second schedule of salary waivers put into effect last year was more drastic because the drop in income was more drastic and all other means of absorbing the drop had been exhausted. The net effect of the last schedule of salary waivers was from twelve per cent at the lowest to twenty per cent at the highest, with only the salary of the chief executive officer assessed as much as twenty per cent. Other unnersitics employed saiarv waiver schedules that looked more humane than ours. That is, they assessed the lower salaries, say, up to 51,500 more lightly than we assessed them. But these other universities, before they reached the making of their salary schedules, fired younger members of the staff right and left. One university summarily dismissed 23 5 of its younger staff members. Obviously it could then make a salary schedule for the remaining assistants and instructors that was more liberal than ours. We chos: to maintain employment by spreading the work even though it meant a more drastic impact upon the younger members of the staff. As far as the upper levels of the staff were concerned, their salary waivers were quite as drastic as in any comparable universities. Our salary waivers were, never- theless, attacked as illiberal by one member of the Board of Regents and by certain political forces outside. No depression budget in a large and complicated institution will be free from mistakes in judgment and some elements of injustice to individuals. It is mv conviction, however, that the Wisconsin salary budget, when examined ten years from now, will be seen to have been socially sounder than many better appearing budgets of the period. We frankly chose to sacrifice the n