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

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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

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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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comfort of many younger members of the staif, along w th older members of the staff, rather than to break their careers by d.schargmg a large nt mber of them as some comparable universities did. Let me make one point clear: the senior members of the Wisconsm staff have been reduced m salary as drastically as m other umversities of Hke rank. It would, m my judgment, be a serious disservice to the young teachers to smash the salary levels of senior teachers to radically low levels for the temporary advantage of the junior teachers, for, by so doing, we would be setting up for the future a tragic uncertainty regarding the stability of the teaching income for men and women of mature years and heavy responsibility. The rewards of the teaching career are slim enough at best. If we surrender to emotional pressures in a time ot stress and set going the notion tkit mature teachers must, whenever stress comes, see every element of security go to winds to stabilize the income of young men and women in the morning hours of their careers, then the teaching profession, as a life work, will become even less attractive than it is to young men and women of ability. The general morale of the staff of the University has never been better, in my eight y-ears of service, than at the present moment. There is, 1 think, a growing feeling that we have done the best we could to meet a difficult problem. We cannot eat our cake and ha e .t. Wc cannot maintain teacher employment as fully as we have and also make as satisfactory a salary budget as we could for a drastically reduced staff from which two hundred or more ,unior members had been eliminated. All in all, Wisconsin ndes the Depression with realism and courage. And good days are .ihead! Glenn Frank. L.ikf Mcnd ' it.i, Winter