THE HEALTH SCIENCES. Less than two months after his presidency officially began, Mayer presented to the trustee Executive Committee a long list of items on which he had already initiated studies, many of which dealt with the health sciences in general and "strengthening the biological and preclinical abilities of the University" in particular. Before Mayer assumed the presidency, Senior Vice-President and Provost Kathryn McCarthy had called attention in her annual report for 1975-76 to the "strong and broad base in the biological sciences" which existed on both the Medford and Boston campuses. She had called for even greater attention to those sciences and had gone so far as to suggest "that the undergraduate curriculum mandate some study in this area." Mayer went a step farther and called for greatly expanded attention to the biological sciences, in a broad programmatic format.

Among his proposals were establishing a university-wide nutrition institute, seeking support for a center for human nutrition research from the United States Department of Agriculture, and exploring the feasibility of establishing a school of veterinary medicine. He outlined substantially the same program at the very first faculty meeting over which he presided, in September 1976. All had been mentioned in some way in his recently delivered inaugural address. If Tufts were to enter a period of expansion of its programs, and at the same time heighten its visibility as a world-class educational institution which Mayer foresaw, he realized the necessity of seeking substantial outside funding from public as well as private sources. At his very first official appearance before the Executive Committee of the trustees in the summer of 1976, he called for contracting with a public relations or consulting firm in the nation's capital to keep the university in close touch with developments and key individuals in the federal government who might serve Tufts' interests. The services of the firm of Schlossberg-Cassidy and Associates, operated by Gerald Cassidy and Kenneth Schlossberg, were obtained, and became known as the "Washington Connection." They were to be on the lookout for federal funds in the form of both outright grants (matching or otherwise) and loans. In 1977 alone, the institution received special Congressional appropriations or authorizations totalling $39 million,