SEA GRANT COLLEGES 89 



in research in the marine science. Grants should be made to them as funds for 

 expansion of the program become available. 



My second comment concerns the proposal in Senator Pell's legislation 

 that the money come largely in grants for specific projects and proposals. The 

 great strength of the land- grant movement was financial support of a generally 

 unrestricted nature. Just as Dean Castle has quoted from one of my fellow land- 

 grant presidents, Eric Walker, let me quote from another one, Paul Miller, 

 president of the University of West Virginia, from a speech he made just a month 

 or so ago before the Governors' Conference in Minneapolis, in which he spoke of 

 "the drift in recent years to the agent- client method of providing financial sup- 

 port- -a method which exchanges public resources for the performance of speci- 

 fied services. The technique has vastly improved the research experience in the 

 American university and enlarged enormously the intellectual versatility of the 

 country. The national welfare is much the better for it. All in all it is a move- 

 ment which is gratefully acknowledged by academic men. However, its growth 

 and current extensiveness forewarns us about its chief defect: asking for the 

 return of services almost equal to what it gave initially in resources. Some 

 unrewarding consequences are now identifiable, including the splintering of total 

 effort in ways not always attuned to the aims of the university as a whole, the 

 engendering of a national system of faculty rewards which blunts the historic 

 idea of a community of scholars and the gradual hardening of research practice 

 in a manner that is not always at home with spirited teaching." 



So he recommended to the governors, in connection with their support, as 

 well as to the federal government, "rather than the agent- client technique of 

 developing specialized project agreements with individual staff members, a 

 partnership in law [which] has existed between the U. S. Department of Agricul- 

 ture and the universities." This arrangement, he stated, "has stressed broad 

 institutional objectives for both of them in agricultural and rural life. The re- 

 sults produced by this partnership show as well as any other example how know- 

 ledge may be generated and then shared with the common culture when govern- 

 ment and universities cooperatively perform their distinctive duties. Impor- 

 tantly, the institutional grant technique employed in the agricultural experience 

 contrasted with direct exchanges of resources for services rendered, lasting 

 pools of strength in the universities. Such is the hope of academic men for the 

 future." And I would say that this is our hope, my hope, in terms of the sea- 

 grant university concept. 



One more comment. We at the University of Rhode Island were very grati- 

 fied at the commendation of our program in the marine sciences by the speakers 

 this morning. Mr. Chapman, in particular, stressed the developing interest of 

 many departments in these areas. Both he and Dr. Spilhaus have also spoken of 

 the necessity of activities comparable to those of the 4-H program, of county 

 and demonstration agents, and so forth, that characterize the work of our co- 

 operative extension services. But on any land-grant university campus, as you 

 all know, there is often considerable opposition to such work by the faculty, 

 especially those in the traditional academic fields. Even the aggie faculty is 

 sometinnes regarded by their colleagues rather condescendingly. If the sea- 

 grant universities are established, they will be truly effective only if they are 

 willing to get their hands, or rather their feet, dirty, so to speak, and to operate 

 on the applied level characteristic of our agricultural program. This may well 

 be a serious problem in implementing this concept. 



My final comment concerns money. Ten million dollars won't begin to do 

 the job, although I concur in Senator Pell's political astuteness in trying to be 

 practical. After all, the total appropriation for the new Arts and Humanities 

 Foundation, under Senator Pell's recent legislation, is expected to be only 

 $10,000,000 for the first year. But that's a new program and a new area of 

 federal support. The Navy alone must be spending in the neighborhood of 

 $10,000,000 annually in support of oceanographic research and activity in the 



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