We wrote, week before last, that the corporation has emerged as the most nubile of all the ladies to whom the strategists of higher education have given the eye in their search for financial serenity. Accordingly, the courtship is passionate. There is a long way to go before it can be said that corporations have settled down, prepared to pay for higher education in the same spirit in which they pay for, say, electricity; but the idea has gotten across. The Council on Financial Aid to Education reported last week that corporate gifts have increased from forty to one hundred million dollars a year since 1950. Not bad, for a mere six years of missionary work. Only a tiny percentage of American corporations have been conned. Think what will happen once the idea is generally accepted! It makes the eyes stream for joy.
To say that the corporations that have been talked into giving have been conned is not to say that the colleges that have benefited from those gifts are, in the abstract sense, unworthy of support (that argument can be made too, but is not here being made). It is merely that the reasons being advanced why corporations should contribute to education are phoney, and questionbegging. The principal arguments being used to lead the corporations on are as follows:
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