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University Daily Kansan
Monday, Jan. 11, 1965
Tuition-free Schools?
The belief that each youngster should pay for his own education through tuition appeals to those jaundiced by a half-truth. They seem to have been misled by Madison Avenue propaganda to "sell" education, that a college degree is worth thousands of dollars extra to the man fortunate enough to have one.
This is a half truth because it ignores the probability that the successful man would have made money without a degree. Because it is based on statistics derived from a period when college opportunities were few. And because it overlooks the fact that many of college's nobler products, philosophers, poets, preachers, teachers and scholars often make far less than an over-the-road truck driver.
Moreover, even if the dollar value of a degree were the exact truth, it has no market place application to tuition. Few students of college age themselves have the price of a college education. The jobs open to them are too few and too poorly paid to be the answer. And to limit college to the offspring of rich parents is a restrictive and monopolistic practice contrary to the market principles of free enterprise and risk opportunity.
The whole truth is that a college education has many values of many kinds, some of them unrelated to the dollar sign. For example, the success of a democratic republic such as ours depends
upon informed citizens and wise leaders; only education can produce them.
Even in terms of dollars, the greatest value of college education is not the increase in the earning power of specific individuals but the rise in the cultural, economic and social level of our whole society. We all live better and more wisely, we have more diversified needs and more ways to meet them, we have more markets and more factories, more income and more investments and savings because more and more of us have a better education.
Government support of free public education at all grades has been an American principle. It has been an achievement of which we have boasted. And of all the states, Kansas has been one of the leaders, near the top in terms of per capita support.
Has been!
For now comes to Kansas the notion that tuition-free education is wrong. Now comes the notion that college is only for the children of parents rich enough to pay the bills. And when our consciences tell us this notion is wrong, that it would turn the clock back for Kansas by 150 years, we try to salve that confidence by offering to waive tuition for a mere five per cent of those seeking to enter college.
Poor Kansas! What a New Year's resolution!
Salina Journal
"All Aboard As Soon As We're Ready For Departure!"
David Lilienthal: Pioneer on TVA. AEC Boards
Last fall a campus speaker urged KU students to plan for careers in public service or international business.
He was the American best qualified to make such a plea: David Eli Lilienthal, once a public commissioner of electrical and atomic power, now a forward-looking international businessman.
LILIENTHAL, stopping in Lawrence on a nation-wide lecture tour, professed a great interest in college students and their problems in planning for careers.
Admitted to the Illinois bar, Lilienthal started practice in Chicago, where he distinguished himself in cases involving public utilities and labor disputes.
His own college years were spent at DePauw University, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa and for two years president of the student body. At 23, he had a law degree from Harvard.
IN THE EARLY 30s, Lilienthal helped Gov. Philip La Follette of Wisconsin reorganize the state railroad commission into a public utilities commission, and became one of the three commissioners. By the end of the commissioner's second year, it had ordered utilities rate reductions to save some 420,000 consumers an annual total of $2,350,000.
Then in 1933 plans made by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Sen. George Norris materialized for a project in the Tennessee Valley. Chairman of the new TVA board was Dr. Arthur Morgan, president of Antioch College and a dam engineer. The second director appointed was Dr. H. A. Morgan, president of the University of Tennessee and a famous agronomist. The second Morgan, people supposed, would make Tennessee put up with the dams the chairman would build.
DAVID LILIENTHAL was the third man named to the board. Thirty-four years old when he arrived in Knoxville, Lilienthal was a slight, serious-looking young man who told reporters that day, "The purpose of this
project, as far as I am concerned,
is to make the people happier."
He set about in a hard-headed,
businesslike way to do his third
of the job: to justify the expense
of the building program by
selling the product — power —
that would pay for it.
Opposition to TVA competition quickly arose from the private utilities corporations and from national legislators from the Valley. The TVA's need for friends in the struggle led to its "good neighbor" multi-purpose program of flood control, reforestation and farm improvement that made power production incidental to dam construction.
AS THE TVA MADE peace with the Southern countryside and its utilities companies, it prepared for the world war, using its resources to increase power production to an annual 12 billion kilowatt-hours. National defense used all of TVA's multiple activities; ordnance plants, river traffic, shipbuilding,
CRITICISM CONTINUED. In 1938 Sen. Styles Bridges said, "In the heart of America a new star has arisen in the constellation of authoritarian states — the state of Tennessee. And David Lilienthal is its Fuehrer." Worse yet, Chairman Morgan charged his fellow directors with conspiracy against him and Lilienthal with dictatorship and dishonesty. These charges and Morgan's dismissal by Roosevelt brought about a joint inquiry by a House and Senate committee. After 15-,470 pages of testimony, the committee concluded that Morgan's charges were unfounded and that Lilienthal and Dr. H. A. Morgan had acted with "proper administrative discretion."
The Yankee lawyer was becoming more and more attached to the Tennessee River. He learned the Southern farm language, talked of "our" problems and "our" benefit, consciously tried to tie TVA in with Southern history. In 1946, the Progressive Farmer named David Lilienthal the "man of the year in Southern agriculture."
defense housing, dehydrated foods.
TVA's contribution to the war effort and Lilienthal's popular book, "TVA: Democracy on the March," reversed criticism of the project. For example, Dorothy Thompson, once a staunch opponent, called TVA "the greatest constructive achievement of the New Deal."
AFTER HIROSHIMA and the decision to put the control of atomic power into civilian hands, David Lilienthal was appointed head of the Atomic Energy Commission. His confirmation came only after a Congressional smear attempt to brand Lilienthal a left-winger. Under attack in the Senate hearings by Tennessee's Sen. Kenneth McKellar, who had wanted to annex TVA to his patronage empire, Lilienthal made this impromptu statement:
ONE OF THE TENETS of democracy that grow out of this central core of a belief that the individual comes first, that all men are the children of God and their personalities are therefore sacred, is a great belief in civil liberties and their protection, and a repugnance to anyone who would steal from a human being that which is most precious to him, his good name; by impugning things to him, by innuendo or by insinuations.
As head of the AEC, Lilienthal worked to devote nuclear fission to peaceful purposes. After several years, the strain of the atomic responsibility led Lilienthal to think of resigning. He wanted the freedom to speak more than a government official could. He also had "a feeling that my life wouldn't be complete, living in a business period—that is, a time dominated by the business of business — unless I had been active in that area."
IN THE SPRING of 1950, when he "wasn't under fire" at the AEC, Lilienthal resigned and became a consultant to several companies. He made his fortune as an executive of a small, troubled company which, through
mergers and acquisitions, became the Mineral and Chemical Corporation of America. Lilienthal raised the company's annual receipts from $750,000 in 1952 to $274 million in 1960.
Since 1950, Lilienthal has been associated with the Development and Research Corporation, of which he is now chairman of the board. Wall Street-based, this company provides managerial, technical, business and planning services in the development of resources abroad.
LILIENTHAL IS PUTTING to good use the years of experience at TVA advising other countries. The corporation has worked on such projects as reclamation of Khuzistan, a region of western Iran, development of Italy's southern provinces, establishment of a TVA-like authority in Columbia's Cauca
Valley, advice to Ghana on water supply, to Puerto Rico on electric power, to the Ivory Coast on mineral development.
Lilienthal wrote another book, "Big Business," in which he argues that America's productive and distributive superiority and national security depend upon industrial bigness, adequately regulated by government. Bigness, he says, can express "the heroic size of man himself as he comes to a newfound greatness."
IN DAVID LILIENTHAL'S career may be seen a unique and genuine unification of interests in business, science and government. His imagination and integrity have served his country well in the development of our power resources and the extension of American knowledge to other nations.
— Margaret Hughes
BOOK REVIEWS
THE VIEW FROM A DISTANT STAR: MAN'S FUTURE IN THE UNIVERSE, by Harlow Shapley (Delta, $1.75).
Dr. Harlow Shapley is one of the eminent astronomers of his time, and readers of popular works will find that they can manage this eloquent recent book in which the great question is considered: "What is man's future in the universe?"
In language witty and clear, the scientist discusses the evolution of the galaxies, life on earth and the other planets, and of mankind itself. He recalls what were for him two moments of discovery: that the center of the universe might be tens of thousands of light-years distant, that ants he was examining were a throwback to the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic Era, when he found himself suddenly back in the age of the great reptiles.
Such illuminations mark this book, with a style consistently enjoyable: "The other special moment of discovery came to me one day while kneeling before the great god Biological Evolution."
Dailij'Ifänsan
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Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912. Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays, and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Jim Langford and Rick Mabbutt ... Co-Editorial Editors