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Show Moynihans Right, But Who Listens? gait akr tribune Wednesday Morning - February New York Times Service WASHINGTON Among the many - imposing sights 19, 1986 days, you would have to include the tall figure of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moymhan of New York, striding along with an old battered Irish hat on his head and a chip on his shoulder. Page 10 Section A Fully Use University Potential, Protect Research Financing If they insist on keeping research grant money meant for the states colleges and universities, legislators will validate the adage that a poor country ignoring its university will remain poor. Utahs public universities receive millions of dollars worth of grants, usually from the federal government or private institutions, to conduct research projects each year. A portion of each grant is earmarked for such overhead costs as library usage, utilities and other administrative services needed for research. The schools which generate that money are not allowed to keep it all, however. The Legislature requires a 0 split with the state. For example, University of Utah research generated $14 million in overhead compensation last year, half of which went 50-5- Into state coffers. last years Legislature intent approved language that would allow state schools to keep a larger portion of research grant money, this year the temptation is strong to conAlthough tinue claiming the funds. Legislators were told the other day theyll have at least $34 million less to appropriate than they expected, so theyre looking for places to save money. Their Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee, which approved a $10 million larger package than legislative leaders ordered, has provided a convenient target. If that $10 million is denied, the universities again will lose half the research overhead funds they attract. Ultimately, however, the state also . wjll lose. The universities use overhead pay- rements to recruit world-clas- s searchers who, in turn, spur economic .development and produce tax revenue. Two examples: The U. of U. recruited Distin guished Professor William I. Higuichi, who has received $1.4 million in new grants the past three years, with the promise of investing $120,000 of overhead funds each of five years in the Department of Pharmaceutics. By spending $120,000 on laboratory space and research equipment, the university attracted David Washington these in W. Hoeppner as chairman of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. Within six months, he has developed new research worth $218,000 a year for five years. According to U. of U. officials, 56 new Utah companies emerged during a period, the direct result of research, creating 4,500 jobs, generating $20 million in state and local taxes. If more overhead money could be reinvested in research equipment and facilities, they say, the universities could attract even more research grants. Last year legislators approved but never implemented a resolution suggesting that 90 percent of research overhead compensation stay with the school involved. The remaining 10 percent would have gone into a higher education pool to spur more research at the states other colleges. Higher Education Commissioner W. Rolfe Kerr has proposed a compromise: Ten percent of each grants overhead money would be placed in the states general fund. Then, another 10 percent would be allocated to a higher education pool for encouraging research projects, and 80 percent instead of the formerly proposed 90 would belong to the institution which had originally attracted the grant. Most of the nations major research universities already keep most or all of the overhead payments accompanying research grants. Recent revenue shortfalls should convince Utah legislators this state cant afford to do otherwise. 15-ye- ar Over 20 years ago, this former professor of government at Harvard, assistant in the Cabinet or to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford, ambassador to India and the United Nations, reported a crisis of illegitimate and neglected children in the black families of America. As he says, he got a bloody nose in the process, but here he is again with an update of the facts in a remarkable book called "Family and Nation. It is different in two respects from his original monograph. First he notes that the tragedy of broken families is not only a black problem but now a general problem, not merely the responsibility of local, state and Federal officials, but a challenge to the conscience of all of us. "Do we care?" he asks. Do we really care? He quotes from President Reagans 1985 State of the Union address: A nation renewed, stronger, freer and more secure . . . knowing that as the family goes, so goes our civilization." Moynihan doesn't come up with any thumping conclusions, except one: that if the people and the press dont pay more attention to the facts of family life in America, there will be no effective remedies. So he asks: Do we care that, in a period of our greatest prosperity, the number of our citizens living below the governments official poverty line is higher than ever before? Do we care that one out of four of the nations preschool children are living below this poverty index, and that, as things are now going, within 10 years the major will come from broken families and that even today more than half of all births to teen-ag- e mothers are out of wedlock? Do we care that in 1984, 61 percent of poor adults were women; that more than s of all the poor were either adult women or children under 18, and that the poverty rate for children in fe- ity of three-quarter- attention to something maybe more important than President Marcos of the Philippines, and more immediate than the exploration of outer space. He knows something of human frailty, and from his experience in the of the university and the bureauof Washington; unlike the mental cracy wanderings of most ghost-writte- n speeches in the Congress, he can not only write and speak but say serious things with a glint of Irish humor. Its interesting that as he grows older, Moynihan is more concerned about the plight of the children than he is of the elderly. A commonplace of political rhetoric," he says at the end of Family and Nation, is that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it takes care of its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young. But time and again he insists that the hope of easing this problem lies not with our leaders but with ourselves. He points out that this crisis in our family life did not come about through some great cataclysmic event such as war or epidemic or oppression from abroad. The American people did it mainly on their own, and will have to begin by facing the facts. Moynihan is not the first Harvard professor who railed against public indifference. Archibald MacLeish, the poet, identified the problem even before Moynihan. We are deluged with facts, he wrote in 1958, "but we have lost, or are losing our human ability to feel them. . . . Nothing could more convincingly demonstrate that knowledge without feeling is not knowledge and can lead only to public irresponsibility and indifference and conceivably to ruin. Nothing, he concluded, could more clearly prove that when the fact is disassociated from the feel of the fact ir. the in the comminds of an entire people mon mind of a civilization that people, that civilization, is in danger. cor-ride- Senator Moynihan households was much highpercent? Do we care that the illegitimate-birtrate, like the crime rate, is higher in the United States today than in any other Western nation? Well, its true that Pat Moynihan thinks with his heart and writes with his male-heade- er James Reston fist, but he is a trained scholar careful of his facts, who for two decades has been trying to get at the leading principle or parent truth of our national life. No doubt he stuns his hearers with his fighting Irish passion, and this is no accident, for what he is trying to do is get our d 54 h pi'ut jxm, b Fund Grand Jury - - The question of who pays for the services of the two special prosecutors appointed by Utah Attorney General David Wilkinson to advise the Salt Lake County grand jury includes some far larger elements. Besides compensation for Rodney G. Snow and Larry R. Keller, the the grand jury is to a need of investigators, staff going court stenographers and other clerical help. Also there is the matter of compensation for the grand jurors, too. Then there are the mundane, but "hecessary, matters of telephones, sta- tionery, office andor courtroom space, recording and duplicating rjUipment; in short, just about every-thin- g needed to staff, supply and equip : j : a good size office. When Mr. Wilkinson raised the question about pay for Mr. Snow and Mr. Keller he only took public note of the tip of an iceberg. There is a far closed. Mr. Wilkinson indicates his office is in no position to finance the grand jurys activities. What it will cost taxpayers eventually for the grand jurys deliberations is pure guesswork now. But one tentative amount mentioned has been $250,000. Whether that is accurate, excessive or insufficient is immaterial at the moment. What is obviously relevant, however, is that without prosecutors, investigators and other staff members, along with the necessary materials and equipment for them to function efficiently, there is no point in continuing with the grand jury. It is, thus, imperative that an agency responsible for funding the grand jury, along with the funds needed to do the job, be determined immed diately, quite probably by some be If cant that done, hearing. the 3rd District Court judges could find themselves with the moral, if not legal, obligation of rescinding their grand jury call. court-oriente- larger financial consideration lurking beneath the surface of his concern. Ordinarily these matters, in the case of former grand juries, have been Orbiting Paragraphs One of the surer signs of old age is when accommodated within the county attorneys office because he was the you whistle less at girls than at prices. grand juries adviser. With the Salt Many of todays kids have Lake County Attorney Offices activi- diets. They live on pizza. ties on the agenda for investigation Mealtime in a family of finicky eaters that avenue of fiscal aid has been amounts to whining and dining. d ; Chicago Crooks Could Learn From Marcos Chicago Tribune Service d Slats Grobnik put aside his newspaper and said: I just figured out the perfect defense for all of the Chicago aider-me- n who are being investigated for pocketbeer-staine- Mike Royko stuffing. Let me guess. They plead innocent on the grounds that they were mentally impaired, the proof of which is that they were stupid enough to get caught. "Hey, thats not bad. But the perfect defense is this guy Marcos in the Phillipines. What does he have to do with it? He didnt steal any votes in Chicago. "No, but tell me this: Is there any Chicago alderman who can compare with Marcos? Compare in what way? "Well, how about as a thief?" Of course not. All the aldermen in the city's history didn't put together a stash as big as Marcos. He has extensive real estate holdings in New York and other big investments. The man is generally acknowledged to have piled up a fortune in the hundred of millions. Maybe billions. Most of our guys are happy to pocket the price of a vacation in Miami. And how is he as a liar?" Once again, Marcos is in his own class. Historians recently discovered that he concocted almost completely his heroic World War II record. He got himself a chest full of medals for leading a resistance group that didnt even exist. Hes even suspected of having collaborated with the Japanese. A few of our aldermen have police records, but thats expected of them. Another Viewpoint Ellis Island: Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, But No Shops and Hotels New York Times Service shot in all the furor over deadliest The the Statue of Liberty and Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca is "commercialization," and it's being fired by both sides. The trouble arose when Secretary of Interior Donald Hodel removed Iacocca from one of two organizations concerned with re-- . storing the Statue of Liberty and nearby Ellis Island. Iacocca angrily ascribes his firing to Interior's desire to "commercialize Ellis Island. The government plan would create a conference center and hotel, financed by what Iacocca calls "the sale of tax shelters to the rich." -' Now consider the rival Iacocca plan. "He when he should know commercialization sees it," says a Park Service official. It calls for a large glass building to include a brewethnic-fooshops. That ery, music halls, and does not sound exactly like a blueprint for dignity. d The competition between plans probably explains Secretary Hodel's sudden step. He admires Iacocca's feat of raising almost a dollars for the restorations. quarter-billioBut he calls it a conflict of interest for Iacocca to head both the fund drive and the commission that helps decide how to spend the money. That sounds unduly punctilious. The heated battle over plans seems a more plausible explanation. Which plan is better? Neither. Both sound thoroughly commercial. The golden door contemplated in both sounds more like Elizabeth Arden than Emma Lazarus, more like a luxury spa than a place to ruminate on the tired, poor and . tempest-tossedWhy limit the future of such evocative American icons to two development plans? There was reason to be uneasy about commercialization from the start. Private fund raising brought with it sordid scenes like beer companies contesting the exclusive right to use the Statue of Liberty in advertis n Franchise rights have been sold for 750 products including official swizzle sticks and air fresheners; that turns Miss Liberty into a Statue of License. Why were private funds needed in the first place? There could hardly be a more logical reason to spend public funds than the public celebration next July Fourth. ing. If money was to be sought privately, Iacocca has done an exceptional job of finding it, $230 million and counting. Whats now clear is that it's time for commercialization, of all kinds, to stop. The process of deciding on restoration has so far gone on mostly unnoticed and un- remarked. The Iacocca controversy now puts the public squarely on notice of the need to pay attention and ask questions. The first question is, Why must Ellis Island be converted into any kind of development at all, fair? There is no luxury hotel or ethnic-fooshortage in America of suburban malls in d I which one can eat souvlaki, croissants, won ton, empanadas, and pizza by the slice. Yet there is a distinct shortage of places of quiet, powerful dignity, like the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. Once, literal-minde- d patriots denounced the starkness of names engraved on marble as a "black gash of shame." The only shame now is theirs. This has become the most moving of Washingtons public places. Ellis Island can uncover its own deep feelings. The second question, now that the Iacocca affair has awakened public attention, is, how can the public's interest be informed and its concerns addressed? What can the government do by way of hearings or competitions to assure that the restoration meets the demands of history and fitness, not just the need for return on investment? In removing Iacocca from his commission job, Hodel said he needed "unfettered" advice about the restoration. Why not ask all of us immigrants? v Thats what I mean. Heres a world class bum. Murder, stealing money, stealing elections, faking his background. And how long has he been doing this stuff. Oh, for many years. He has a proven track record. "And what did we ever do about it? We treated him like he was on the legit and we even sent him money, right? Thats true. There have been billions in military aid, some of which he skimmed into his own pocket. And what are we doing now? Well, somebody has finally written a statement for President Reagan in which he says hes not happy with the way the election was conducted. But what are we going to do? Well, there really isnt much we can do. You see, with all of his flaws of character, our government has always believed that Marcos is of some value because he is against communism. Thats why we give him money, so his troops can chase the local commies. Wouldnt Mrs. Aquino be against commies if she was president? Definitely. So would just about anybody who held that office. But the reality is that Marcos is there. And our position is that while he might be a bum, hes our bum. That's what I mean the perfect defense for the aldermen. I don't understand. , Its simple. When they are asked to testify why they took money from that FBI mole, they say they needed the money to finance their battle against the spread of communism in their wards." Not bad. But what if somebody points out that there hasnt been any problem with communism in their wards. That's OK. They say it just proves that theyve been doing a terrific job of keeping the communists out. Do you think the jury will believe that? "Why not? Reagan and his people have always taken Marcos' word on it. Youre probably right. So all the aider-mehave to do is find enough people who think like Reagan to form a jury. Oh-oI think they got a problem." n |