Washington -- For most colleges and universities, May is the month for bestowing "rights and privileges" to deserving scholars.

For the University of the District of Columbia, May was also a time for handing out furloughs to workers and a tuition hike to students. By the time the month had ended, the school's board of trustees had adopted higher tuition, slashed pay for its 375 full-time faculty members, gouged the administrative staff's salaries and shortened the academic calendar by beginning the coming school year Oct. 1 instead of Aug. 16. -- all to accommodate a $6.7 million budget deficit.

The deficit is just part of the myriad problems confronting the 10,000-student school as UDC struggles through the same kind of fiscal mire faced by its parent governmental body; Washington, DC. At the same time, its current budget crisis highlights a question that has nagged UDC throughout its existence: Can public higher education survive in the nation's capital?

The school was created in 1976 by merging the DC Teachers College, Federal City College and Washington Technical Institute in what remains one of the nation's only urban land grant universities.

Virtually every problem faced throughout the academy these days is present -- and writ large -- on the small but modem looking urban campus located in an upscale pat of town here. Fiscal woes? In the last six years, UDC's budget, most of which comes from a congressional appropriation that is passed through the District of Columbia government, has done nothing but shrink.

Even before the current round of fiscal woes, the city's contribution to the school's budget fell from $76 million in fiscal 1992 to $43 million now. And that was before the city's financial woes worsened into a nightmare status. Now, with the city's budget approved by a hostile Congress and overseen by a skeptical DC Financial Control Board, the school now faces the threat of a DC budget appropriation of $41 million in the coming fiscal year. At the same time, its enrollment has plummeted from the 15,000 students present when the school opened in 1976 to today's 10,000-student level. Even before the current round of budget cuts, the school's budget had been cut by $32 million since fiscal 1991.