College and University Development

Continuing a series of unrestricted developmental grants for colleges and universities, the Foundation this year focused on helping private institutions in the South attain educational parity with leading institutions in other regions. The Foundation granted a total of $33.5 million to three universities (Duke, Emory, and Vanderbilt), and to five Southern liberal-arts institutions (Birmingham-Southern, Furman, Hendrix, Millsaps, and Randolph-Macon Woman's College).

Three liberal-arts colleges elsewhere—De Pauw, Dickinson, and the University of Redlands—received grants totaling $6 million.

Each of the Southern recipients, like six others assisted in the region in past years, enrolls students in regular degree-granting programs without restrictions as to race, color, or creed.

The South's educational lag, acknowledged by the region's leaders, has been attributed to several factors. The section's agrarian economy offered a poor financial base for colleges and universities. Top scholars were lured to other parts of the country by higher salaries and capable students left to do graduate work elsewhere. However, recent developments—an expanding and diversifying economy, urbanization, and changing social attitudes due to the Negro civil-rights movement—are creating a more favorable climate for growth and leadership in Southern higher education.

Including the year's grants, a total of fifteen universities and sixty-five colleges have received $316.5 million in a Special Program in Education the Foundation began in 1960. Together with matching funds the recipients are required to raise from other private sources, the effort is generating some $1.1 billion in new support for private higher education.

The Special Program's "challenge grants," as they are popularly known, are intended to help selected institutions with plans to improve academic programs, administrative effectiveness, and financial support. They are based on a detailed study of each institution's needs, accomplishments, potential for advancement, and fund-raising ability. Recipients are free to use the grants for salaries, buildings, fellowships, and other purposes they feel will advance their educational progress.

With the original goals of the college part of the program in large measure accomplished, the Foundation will devote future grants for undergraduate institutions mainly to improving the nation's predominantly Negro colleges. (Past Foundation support for Negro higher education includes $6 million to the United Negro College Fund, and $13 million to thirteen Negro colleges in the South.)

Journalism Education

To help practicing and future journalists keep pace with the urgent and complex problems of the nation's cities, a $1,092,000 grant was made for the establishment of an