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UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

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civilization in which youth will receive the best that the world has to
give.

The best that the world has to give depends upon the best that our
schools, colleges, and universities have to give. The best that our
schools, colleges, and universities have to give depends upon the best
that our scholars and teachers have to give. The best that the scholars
and teachers have to give depends in this State upon a restoration of
their means of decent living and their opportunities for decent work.
We should not wait in North Carolina for our teachers and public
servants to reach the breaking point. They have used up their little
savings, borrowed on their life insurance or dropped it, worn old
clothes of past years, given up those little extra things of mind and
spirit dear to a teacher's heart, and yet they stay behind in grocery
bills and the most ordinary needs of life. A fifteen per cent increase will
not even offset the rise in prices. Crowded school rooms drain out
their youth and nervous vitality. Deeply cut and damaged in work and
life they have held the line for North Carolina.

The Trustees of the University of North Carolina have always been
interested in the life and needs of the whole State. They are deeply
interested now in the values and opportunities of the public schools,
the state institutions, departments, and agencies of the people as a
basic investment in a common civilization. This civilization tends to
go up or down with the budget of the State.

All the agencies went down with the State into the valley of the
depression. Through their sacrifices and heroism the State has both
recovered its fiscal balance and strength and carried on its eight-months
school. The continuing social danger to the state in its depleted public
servants becomes deeper with the fiscal and social policies of recovery.
The state cannot wisely climb up again and leave the teachers and all
others in the public service low down in their means of decent living
and opportunities for work.

The increase asked for is not an increase, but is simply a partial
restoration. The requested increase of twenty-five per cent in the state
salary scale is not in any case more than a seventeen per cent restora-
tion. This partial increase would reach upward only to the average
level reached downward by the American states at the bottom of the
depression. Our request reaches up to the point they reached down to
then.