HEW May Get You Too

In Boston, a federal grand jury has indicted two schoolmen for theft of federal funds—a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts and a Worcester public school administrator. Other indictments may follow, and not in Massachusetts alone. The director of investigation and security for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare somewhat ominously mentions that similar “incidents” of theft and fraud, at the expense of HEW, have occurred at universities and colleges in Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles.

The Boston indictments are for the relatively petty purloining of some $29,000, expended in part upon a junket to Puerto Rico by these scholars and their boon companions. But the total sums stolen or wasted at the University of Massachusetts alone are vastly greater. Dr. Robert Wood, president of the University of Massachusetts, in the beginning appeared to be about as eager to open this can of worms as President Nixon had been to seek out the Watergate burglars. But the Daily Hampshire Gazette, at Northampton, began publishing more than a year ago a series of courageous and accurate articles about the scandalous doings in the University’s “innovating” School of Education. By February of this year, President Wood was informing the University’s Senate that perhaps $2.4 million in federal grants might have been misused at his university, through “misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance.”

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Russell Kirk

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In Boston, a federal grand jury has indicted two schoolmen for theft of federal funds—a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts and a Worcester public school administrator. Other indictments may follow, and not in Massachusetts alone. The director of investigation and security for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare somewhat ominously mentions that similar “incidents” of theft and fraud, at the expense of HEW, have occurred at universities and colleges in Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles.

The Boston indictments are for the relatively petty purloining of some $29,000, expended in part upon a junket to Puerto Rico by these scholars and their boon companions. But the total sums stolen or wasted at the University of Massachusetts alone are vastly greater. Dr. Robert Wood, president of the University of Massachusetts, in the beginning appeared to be about as eager to open this can of worms as President Nixon had been to seek out the Watergate burglars. But the Daily Hampshire Gazette, at Northampton, began publishing more than a year ago a series of courageous and accurate articles about the scandalous doings in the University’s “innovating” School of Education. By February of this year, President Wood was informing the University’s Senate that perhaps $2.4 million in federal grants might have been misused at his university, through “misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance.”