Patron-Client Relations

"The change in Catholic attitudes toward federal aid to higher education decisively influenced the postwar growth of Catholic colleges and universities, enabling schools to obtain new funds for construction and research...

"Moreover, federal emergency assistance to students ($93,000,000 between 1935 and 1943) boosted enrollment and provided urgently needed revenue for numerous Catholic colleges and universities... By the early 1940s, various Catholic leaders favored federal aid to education, provided it did not entail federal control...

"After 1945, a growing number of Catholic leaders aggressively sought financial aid from the government, fully aware that the Catholic community alone could not finance the increasing social, educational, and religious expectations placed on Catholic schools...

"The availability of federal aid and the willingness of Catholic schools to accept it permitted Catholic higher education to expand dramatically and to move toward its goals of serving Catholics and increasing Catholic influence in American society... During 1967 alone, Catholic higher education received $125,000,000 in federal grants and contracts, not counting repayable loans."

-- William Patrick Leahy, Jesuits, Catholics, and Higher Education in Twentieth-Century America (PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, 1986), pp. 233-37.