ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

From Inside the DLP

This will be the final article under Dr. Stokes’ byline. She has retired after five years of service as college and university library specialist in the Division of Library Programs. I feel that

I can speak for all academic librarians in saying that her presence will be greatly missed. In her work, through personal contacts and through her column she has managed to guide many of us through the often confusing paths of the federal programs for academic libraries. Her lucid explanations in her column and in personal appearances not only gave the “how” but the “why” of what was happening at the federal level.

It has been a personal pleasure knowing her and working with her. Mike Herbison, Editor

By Dr. Katharine M. Stokes

College and University Library Specialist, Training and Resources Branch, Division of Library Programs, Bureau of Libraries and Learning Resources, U.S. Office of Education. Washington, D.C. 20202.

When I read Robert A. Mayer’s article, “Grantsmanship,” in the July 1972 Library Journal I kept experiencing the “shock of recognition” at many points of similarity with federal grants program procedures and philosophies. Since I have now retired after five years as the no longer operating college and university library specialist in the DLP, the last two as Program Officer for Title II-A of the Higher Education Act, I think the most useful way for me to bow out is to try to do a sort of College Library Resources parallel to Mr. Mayer’s article about private foundation grant application procedures.

You will not have to approach the Bureau of Libraries and Learning Resources about a Title II-A grant. If your institution is listed in the Education Directory for higher education that is issued annually by the Office of Education, either you, as librarian, or your president, will automatically receive the application materials for Title II-A grants. If your institution is not listed in the Directory you should inquire of your president’s office about its institution’s compliance with the eligibility requirements for receiving federal grants. The officers of the institution may be in correspondence with the Accreditation and Eligibility Staff, Bureau of Higher Education, Washington, DC 20202. In that case, the institution may already be eligible to receive grants, although it is not yet listed in the Directory. If the A&E Staff informs the Bureau of L&LR of your approved status, you and more than 2,500 other institutions will receive the Title II-A application materials automatically from the Bureau.

There is no established date for sending out Title II-A application materials and no regular deadline for your submission of them. Each year the bureau plans to send the materials early in the fall, but procedural delays have always resulted in the materials not being ready until about December. The date for submission has usually been set about March.

When you receive the application materials, either directly or from you president’s office, read the instructions thoroughly. Don’t assume that you can turn to the application form immediately and fill in the blank spaces as you did the year before. Each year there have been changes in the regulations or criteria. Unless you understand the motivation for these changes as evidenced in the instructions, you may be disappointed if your application does not qualify for the maximum possible grant.

When the Title II-A appropriation dropped from $25 million in 1969 to $9,816,000 in 1970, the basic grants of $5,000 going to all eligible applicants since 1966 were cut to $2,500 for the 2,201 institutions receiving them that year. There was no particular reaction from the field, probably because many of the recipients were also awarded small supplemental grants which they had learned in the three previous years might vary considerably from the amounts they expected. Due to the scoring, according to the criteria for supplemental grants as interpreted in the Bureau of L&LR sometimes the scores were different from those the hopeful applicants estimated.

In 1971, when it was decided that the $9,- 900,0 released for Title II-A should be concentrated on grants to the “neediest” institutions, basic grants were made to the institutions whose applications received twenty-one points or more on the supplemental grant criteria. The highest scores, down to twenty- one, used up the available funds, so out of the 2,165 applicants only 531 received basic and supplemental grants. The basics were mostly $5,000, only a few colleges being able to match less than that amount. The supplementals, which do not have to be matched, were computed by multiplying the supplemental score by the institution’s full time equivalent enrollment. Up to $10 per FTE student could be granted under the law by which Title II-A was authorized. Fiscal year 1971 was the first time full funding of the supplementals was possible. In 1970 only 18 percent of the amount for which the applicant qualified could be granted. In the three previous years the $25 million ap- propriation was enough only to fund the supplemental grants at 76 percent in 1967, 43 percent in 1968, and 46 percent in 1969.

Many of the 1,600-plus disappointed applicants in 1971 wrote to the ALA office in Washington or testified at the office’s request in hearings before Congressional committees on the proposed amendments to the HEA. The Act was in effect only through June 30, 1971, so the 1972 HEA programs were administered under a continuing resolution until June 1972 when the amendments were passed by Congress and signed into law by President Nixon. Only 494 combined basic and supplemental grants were made in 1972 under Title II-A, though 1,550 institutions applied in spite of the previous year’s discouragement. The amendments of 1972 to the HEA mandate basic grants again for all eligible applicants, so there should not be many disappointed institutions next year as these last two years’ programs have created. The supplemental grants may now go to $20 per FTE according to the amendments, but the size of the appropriation to be passed by Congress, and the portion of that amount released by the administration will determine how the 1973 program is administered.

The HEA of 1965 set aside 15 percent of the appropriation for Title II-A to be devoted to Special Purpose grants, Types A and B for individual institutions and Type C for consortiums or combinations of institutions.

The amendments of 1972 raise this percentage to twenty-five. If you read the instructions accompanying the application the last two years you saw that in each of them the priorities of the current OE administration were stressed in the criteria for Special Purpose grant scoring, in order to insure that the grants went to the institutions whose situations best fitted those priorities. For instance, in the 1971 application materials there was evident, for the first time, an attempt to tie in Special Purpose grants with the Model Cities program of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. If academic libraries in Model Cities areas were cooperating with the HUD programs for the underprivileged they were given “brownie points” which usually placed their applications among the highest scores in the three categories. If your institution was not in or near a Model Cities area a careful reading of the application instructions would have warned you that you were not likely to receive a grant. If, on the other hand, you were in a Model Cities area but were not making your resources available to their officials, you would have had time to make overtures to the CDA in the Mayor’s office of your city and set up some cooperative arrangements that would bring up your score on a Special Purpose application. Since needs far exceed program support capability, a score near the top of the possible scale was necessary if you hoped to receive an award. The OE Regional Library Program officers tried to alert the librarians.

Each of the Special Purpose categories has a particular emphasis. Type A is to help an institution acquire library materials to support its curricula, particularly those on the graduate level. Or to help in the establishment of a new facility—a learning center combining books and AV materials, a Black Studies collection, or a collection on non-Western civilization. Sometimes a small college will submit an application for this sort of collection which requests an amount out of all proportion to what the library budget usually comprises. Reviewers from the library field are brought in to assist the bureau staff in reading the Special Purpose applications and among them or among the staff members there is a wide acquaintance with academic libraries and librarians. So a too ambitious application is apt to be rejected on the grounds that the college couldn’t spend that much money effectively during the one year for which grants are made. Or perhaps a prestigious institution with a fine library is considered less deserving of support for its Special Purpose application than a small college that is trying to support master’s programs with a collection of less than 50,000 volumes. In such cases, a high score may not insure the receipt of a grant though the application would merit one if money were less limited.

Type B grants are meant to encourage institutions which have developed special library collections of interest beyond the campus to lend them for research purposes or to meet special needs in the community. For instance, in 1971 collections on drug abuse or environmental pollution which were being used in both campus and off campus programs were given extra points in the scoring. Also, a notable collection like that of Stanford University’s Hoover Library is used so heavily by researchers all over the world that it’s only fair to provide some outside help for its maintenance and continued growth.

Type C grants were set up especially to encourage cooperation among academic institutions in the acquisition of materials infrequently needed on a single campus. They are meant not only to provide economies in cutting down duplication of expensive materials, but also to provide a breadth of resources no one of the members of a consortium could afford to house and service.

This is the way the II-A program has been going. There is no guarantee that it will continue in the same fashion. But if you will read the instructions with your application (that have been prepared with all your criticisms in mind, but must be limited to fit into OE’s priorities) you will understand what the grants are meant to accomplish and can direct your application to conform to the current priorities which govern the selection of those to be funded.

* * *

Now I would like to talk a little about why there is no set date for sending out application materials. Before I went to work in the Office of Education I had heard people who preceded me in the office talk about grants—Frank Schick and Ted Samore—and when they spoke at MALC or ALA meetings I thought I was hearing “the word.” They seemed very knowledgable and yet things didn’t seem to work out later as they said they would—or the dates they mentioned would never be met. The first year of the Title II-A program, for instance, when Frank talked to a group of Michigan college librarians in Lansing we were all excited at the prospect of $10 per FTE student besides $5,000 for a basic grant. But when we received the application materials a couple of months later, only basic grants were available. I never learned the painful difference between Congress’s authorization of funding for a law and the appropriation that was passed by another piece of legislation until I worked in OE. The authorization for Title II-A when the HEA was passed in 1965 was $50,000,000 but the appropriation was only $10,000,000. Therefore, only basics could be made available to the 1,830 institutions which applied and were eligible to receive grants in 1966. That, apparently, is going to be the situation again in ’73.

The next year, 1967, the authorization remained the same, but the appropriation was $25,000,000, so all five types of grants could be offered that year, and the situation remained the same in 1968. The original act, with its $50,000,000 authorization was amended in 1968 and the authorization became $25,000,000 for 1969, $75,000,000 for 1970, and $90,000,000 for 1971. But what happened to the appropriations? The 1969 one remained $25,000,000, matching the authorization for the first time. But the 1970 one fell to $12,500,000 instead of climbing toward that $75,000,000 authorized. To make matters worse, the president (actually his Office of Management and Budget, OMB) withheld all but $9,816,000. That was the year we had to cut the basics to $2,500 and funded the supplementals “across the board” at only 18 percent of the amounts for which they qualified. In 1971 when $90,000,000 had been authorized, the appropriation passed by Congress was $15,325,000, but OMB released only $9,900,000. That’s when we devised criteria to find the “neediest” institutions—our program of small grants to almost every college applying was obviously not popular with OMB where the emphasis was being placed upon “disadvantaged” students. The administration was reasonably pleased with the results of our program in 1971, though a few changes had to be made to slant the criteria this time to benefit particularly institutions enrolling not only economically disadvantaged, but minority group students. This year, 1972, the HEA was up for reconsideration, since it had run out by June 30, 1971. So we operated under a continuing resolution while Congress considered what should happen to the various HEA titles. The appropriation was set at $11,000,000 for 1972 and that amount was released by OMB, which we took to be an indication that we were meeting the administration’s priorities more favorably.

For 1973 the budget of the administration included $11,000,000 again for Title II-A. But Congress had not passed the Amendments of 1972 to the HEA at the time the appropriation bill for education was made up, so Title II-A’s amount was not in the bill vetoed by President Nixon in mid-August. It was in the bill he vetoed recently, at a level of $12,500,000. The ALA’s Washington office still tried to get more than the administration’s recommendation for Title II-A into whatever appropriation bill Congress came up with next. ALA aimed at $30,- 000, 000 to $35,000,000, but no more than $12,- 500,000 is the likely amount to get by with the President. That will be just enough to fund $5,000 basics for the 2,500 or more institutions who will probably be eligible to apply.

Now do you see why we don’t get the Title II-A application materials out to you until midwinter, or even spring? Do you remember how the instructions for 1970 that came with your application contained a “Special Note” on the front page? It read like this:

While funds have not been appropriated at this time for fiscal year 1970, it is anticipated that the expected level of Title II-A funding will be approximately $12,500,000. In view of this, it has been determined that, at this anticipated level of funding, no special purpose grants will be made to eligible institutions in fiscal year 1970. Therefore, these Instructions and the accompanying application form will make no provision for describing procedures and giving information for making application for special purpose grants. It has also been determined that basic grants will be made to eligible institutions in the amounts not to exceed $2,500 in fiscal year 1970. In the event that the level of funding for fiscal year 1970 is substantially altered from the level anticipated, then further Instructions will be sent to all institutions of higher education advising them of any and all program changes for fiscal year 1970.

That set of application materials was sent out ten days before Christmas 1969. If we were to get the grants distributed before the end of the fiscal year, June 30, 1970, we could delay no longer. We were expecting only half of the $25,000,000 we had for the program in 1967, 1968, and 1969, but in the end only $9,816,000 was released out of the $12,500,000 Congress had appropriated.

I hope you all subscribe to, and read carefully, the Washington Newsletter of the ALA. When you are asked to write your congressman or senator to urge a yes vote on a piece of library related legislation, you can take a hand in providing better federal support for your libraries. The people in the Office of Education can’t do it for you—they work for the administration and must carry out its mandates if their programs are to continue to be funded. The ALA lobbyists are your best friends when it comes to influencing Congress, so write your concerns to them and send them copies of what you write to your congressmen or senators. I hope you will all get $5,000 basic grants next year, but sometime I hope you can persuade Congress to appropriate enough to reach also that supplemental grant of up to $10 a head (now $20!) in the ’72 Amendments that we Michigan librarians got so excited about when Frank Schick told us about it, back in 1966! ■ ■