[From Time magazine, June 23, 1967]

UNIVERSITIES-ANXIETY BEHIND THE FAÇADE

Nothing is quite so perennially promising in its greenery, so seemingly carefree in its end-of-the-year exuberance, so timelessly secure in its traditional commencement ceremonies as a college campus in June. Last week, as alumni gathered on campuses across the nation for reunions and beaming parents strolled shaded walks with newly graduated sons, proud leaders of academe pointed to glistening new science buildings and plushly modern dormitories, talked glowingly of new plans, programs, projects. But this appearance of comfortable affluence is largely deceptive. Behind the impressive façades of most private universities and colleges there is a deep concern. They are in grave financial trouble, and many are searching frantically to close a dollar gap that threatens their very existence.

The cost crisis is not confined to the nation's marginal institutions of higher learning the small, church-related liberal arts college, the genteel finishing school for girls. Even the giants of American education feel threatened. Despite Harvard's imposing $900 million endowment, Assistant Dean Arthur Trottenberg says that "we're worried to the point of reaching for the panic button." Columbia's president, Grayson Kirk, contends that "all our institutions face a financial problem of staggering magnitude and complexity." "Self-pity is a congenital disease of my profession," adds Yale's Kingman Brewster Jr., president of the nation's third oldest and second richest private university, "but it's almost impossible to exaggerate this problem." Yale, he says bluntly, "has never had a more difficult financial prospect-and a serious strain on resources for Yale is a crisis for other places."

SPLASHES OF RED INK

The warning splashes of red ink on university ledgers these days amply bear him out. This year, for the first time in 15 years, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences faces an operating deficit-of about $1,000,000. Rice, the best and richest private university in the Southwest, will have a deficit of more than $950,000 this year. Princeton President Robert Goheen worries about running into the red within three years; Stanford foresees a possible $2,000,000 shortage by 1969. Unless new sources of revenue are found, Yale will be faced with an annual opening deficit of more than $15 million by 1977.

Many private colleges have balanced their books only by curtailing necessary expenditures and their presidents are beginning to worry about whether quality is being sacrificed as well. Vice President Franklin Kreml of Northwestern admits that his university's books balance, but then adds: "By God, we have problems-we're fighting for our lives. Our faculty is too thin. We have insufficient housing for students, insufficient student aid, too small a graduate program." California's prestigious Mills College cut back its administrative staff this year. Cornell's president, James Perkins, held his 1967 deficit to about $500,000, mainly by denying $2,500,000 requested by his deans for projects they considered crucial.

BACKS TO THE WALL

For such schools as Yale and Harvard, the financial crisis is relative: what is involved is not survival but the maintenance of traditional excellence. For plenty of other colleges, however, the quest for funds is a matter of life and death. “The less well-endowed university," says Brewster, "is literally finding its back to the wall as it tries to be competitive in faculty, facilities and programs." Occidental President Richard C. Gilman, while confident that his own school will survive, predicts that 250 private colleges will either merge with other institutions or collapse within the next five years. Already Temple and the Universities of Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Kansas City, and Houston have quietly surrendered their status as entirely independent private schools, have become affiliated with state systems.

From Amherst to Yankton, U.S. college presidents have a simple but thoroughly convincing explanation of the financial crisis: the cost of higher education is rising infinitely faster than academic revenue.

The rapidly expanding professorial paycheck is a major source of school deficits. Staff salaries account for about 50% of total expenses at a large university like Yale, and across the nation, professors are getting raises of 7% a year. In 1950, the national average for all college-level teachers was $5,310; today it is $11,265. Harvard, which paid its top professors no more than $12,000

in 1947, will offer $28,000 next year; its 548 full professors average $20,000. And teachers take it for granted that the average will go even higher. "The senior faculty members expect a review of their salaries every year," complains Harvard's Arts and Sciences Dean Franklin Ford. "No one seems to remember back in the '30s, when it was every four or five years." Also on the rise are college payrolls for nonteaching services. At Kalamazoo College, for example, janitorial salaries have climbed 40% in the past five years and no one, ruefully notes Columbia's Kirk, “ever wants to endow janitorial services."

FACING COMPETITION

One reason why professorial salaries have skyrocketed is the increasing competition that private schools face from public universities. As higher education has become a politically popular field for legislators to support, the best of the state universities have found ample funds to lure professors from private universities with promises of sky-high salaries and unlimited research facilities. Some educators are worried about the growth of the public multiversities. Although two-thirds of the nation's 2,173 colleges and universities are private, their share of student enrollment has slipped from 50% in 1950 to 35% today.

New breakthrough in knowledge have led to a proliferation of specialized studies that constitute another severe strain on the resources of the private college and university. M.I.T. now offers its students an array of 2,966 courseshalf of which did not exist a decade ago. Before World War II, a single professor could teach everything that Columbia expected a student to know about China; now he would pick up fragments of Sinology from 20 specialized scholars. Many of these new sciences, moreover, are primarily graduate specialties-and the universities run heavy deficits operating top M.A. and doctoral programs University of Chicago officials estimate that they spend $13,000 a year to train a grad student in medicine or biology who pays only $1,980 in tuition.

BOTTOMLESS PITS

Keeping up with new knowledge also means maintaining costly research and library facilities, which may build a university's prestige but also serve as bottomless pits for funds. It now costs Harvard $6,000,000 a year to support its huge library; a decade hence, annual maintenance will climb to at least $14.5 million. An adequate computer installation for instruction at a large university costs at least $2 million a year to rent and operate.

To be sure, state universities are not immune to the rising costs of education-but a skillful president can almost always get his regents and legislature to ante up for a new cyclotron or an added Ph.D. program in zoology. Administrators of private colleges claim that their available sources of revenue, while rising in dollar volume, no longer keep pace with expenses.

As a rule, private institutions pick up nearly 60% of their instructional costs from tuition, which has been rising dramatically in recent years. The national average has jumped from $700 to more than $1,200 in the past ten years; N.Y.U.'s soared from $940 to $2,000, Reed's from $800 to $2,200, Sarah Lawrence's from $1,551 to $2,350. At the present rate of increase, Harvard's tuition, now $2,000, will reach $5,000 by 1978. "But this is impossible," says Harvard's vice president, Lewis Gard Wiggins. "We'll have to look elsewhere for the money." Many small-college presidents are afraid that they will price themselves out of the market. The question that fathers ask, says Byron Trippett of the Colorado Association of Independent Colleges and Universities is: "What can Colorado College offer my boy for a tuition of $1,700 that the University of Colorado can't do just as well for $300?"

GOOD WILL AND GOOD WILLS

Endowment is another traditional source of income, and some private colleges are courting aging millionaires with a fervor that verges on frenzy. "We are trying to build good will-and good wills," quips University of Miami President Henry King Stanford. "Unfortunately, naming Miami in a will seems to be a guarantee of longevity." Actually, as the 100 schools that hold 92% of the nation's $12 billion in university endowments have long since discovered, inherited wealth is not the answer. Columbia, for example, has quadrupled its endowment to more than $390 million in the past 30 years, but income from this source covers only 22% of the school's expenses today, compared with 42%

in 1937. Roughly two-thirds of all endowment funds are committeed to specific uses by their donors and cannot be used for general operations.

Virtually every college in the U.S. is now embarked on a massive fund drive— and most of them are succeeding beyond their wildest hopes in getting friends, alumni and business corporations to give, and give generously. The trouble is, most drives are aimed at expanding facilities and adding new faculty, which adds to operating costs. And as the fund drive becomes a permanent rather than a periodic process, the necessary go-and-get-it zeal will become ever harder to sustain. "We are going to have to raise $1,000,000 a week for as long as the university exists," says Chicago Provost Edward Levi-and he is not sure how it can be done.

The recent injection of federal money into higher education has turned out to be both a lifesaver and an irritant. The Government now spends $4 billion a year on college campuses-half of it in support of Government-desired research, about $750 million in construction of facilities, the rest in loans, scholarships and jobs that help more than a million students to stay in school. But officials of such schools as M.I.T. and Caltech-which get about half their operating budgets from federal funds-argue that the research is only a service to Government, and that the grants do not pay the full costs of maintaining the added facilities. The American Council on Education's John F Morse contends that "most federal programs involve a drain on, rather than a strengthening of institutional resources."

TO CONVINCE THE DONOR

The campus quest for money is so pressing that academic administrators today spend most of their time in hot pursuit of potential donors. As Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy notes, "The private university that does not choose an entrepreneur for its president is bound to be sorry." Yale has had little reason to be sorry that it chose Kingman Brewster, whom U.S. Education Commissioner Harold Howe calls "one of the most lively voices in higher education today." Although not an educational philosopher in the style of Clark Kerr or James Bryant Conant, Brewster is an outgoing activist and analytical problemsolver who is convinced that innovation and change are the way to save the traditions of Yale. "We have to convince the donor we have something to offer," he says. "I'm sure support will depend on the ability of the institution to excite."

It is no great liability that trim, urbane, greyingly handsome Kingman Brewster, at 48, looks rather as if he had been type-cast by Otto Preminger for the job of chief salesman and spokesman for Yale. An eleventh-generation descendant of a Mayflower immigrant, he is every inch the patrician who enjoys academic ceremony. At the same time, says one friend, Brewster "holds a fundamental irreverence for anything stuffy, too old or established"-and delights close friends at dinner parties with his self-depreciating humor and talent for mimicry. Actually a loner who carefully guards his deepest feelings, Brewster is also gregarious enough to pre-empt center stage at bourbon-and-bull sessions with Yale's faculity and students. An ear-wearying public speaker whose official utterances are frequently pedantic and dull, Brewster shines wittily in small groups, admits that conversation rather than ivory-tower concentration provides most of his ideas. "I get more stimulation by talking to people," he says, "than by retreating to the library-it's out of the hurly-burly that I get my ideas."

CRUSTACEAN FATHER

Brewster has always been enveloped by bright conversation. His mother held an A.B. from Wellesley and an M.A. from Radcliffe, his father an A.B. from Amherst and a law degree from Harvard. Both were Phi Beta Kappa freethinkers and poles apart in their thinking, especially in politics. Father was what an acquaintance calls "a crustacean McKinley Republican," Mother "a Cambridge liberal Democrat." They were divorced when Kingman was six and his mother married a Harvard music professor, Pianist-Composer Edward Ballantine. Their Cambridge home, with its two grand pianos, was a setting for brilliant table talk on politics and culture from such guests as Law Professor Felix Frankfurter and Pianist Rudolf Serkin.

At Belmont Hill, a prep school founded by Harvard professors mainly for their children, Kingman settled for Bs on his report cards. "He had a tremendous brain, but there was so much else he wanted to do," recalls his Latin teacher. He edited the school newspaper, played the First Lord of the Ad

miralty in H.M.S. Pinafore. A star at debate, he helped beat a loquacious Groton team consisting of Franklin Roosevelt Jr. and William and McGeorge Gundy, taking the affirmative side on "whether capitalism is more conducive to war than socialism."

DEADLY VASSAR GIRLS

Kingman spent his summers sailing off Martha's Vineyard, became so skilled that in 1935 and 1937 he scored clean sweeps to win the Prince of Wales Cup in "Acadia"-class international competition in Nova Scotia. He is still an enthusiastic boatman who, notes a friend, "minimize his tacks by coming closer to the white water than other sailors will" and is coowner of a 30-ft. ketch, Auriga, with Williams President John Sawyer. Brewster sees a link between sailing and running a university, contends wryly that "there is always the infinite capacity for anticipation at the start and rationalization at the finish." Before the start of his freshman year at Yale, Brewster asked advice on courses and teachers from a Martha's Vineyard neighbor, Yale History Professor A. Whitney Griswold. It was the start of a long friendship that grew closer when Brewster became chairman of the Yale Daily News, found Griswold a stimulating source of information about the university and a spirited conversationalist on politics. "We had a common sense of the ridiculous and the absurd," Brewster says.

Among the things that Brewster found absurd were Yale's secret societies and fraternities. Rebelliously anti-Establishment, he turned down a tap from Skull and Bones, declined the presidency of Zeta Psi fraternity, and attacked those institutions of privilege in Daily News editorials. He also wrote that Vassar girls are "the world's most deadly bicycle riders" and that girls should not wear slacks: "The women of Wellesley, Smith and Vassar must be deprived of their pants." Foreshadowing his present concerns, he noted that Yale had operated in the red by $133,588 in 1940 and warned: "No institution can long afford to carry a deficit or cut into capital resources."

Brewster also became deeply interested in politics. He opposed U.S. entry into World War II, joined the isolationist America First movement, even testified before a congressional committee against U.S. aid to Britain. He also arguedas some of his New Left students do today-that students should be permitted to attend peace rallies. Looking back, Brewster sees his position as defensible at the time, since, he thought, F.D.R. was pushing the U.S. toward war without a "fair hearing and popular debate."

Pearl Harbor and the passage of the Lend-Lease Act turned Brewster into a dedicated internationalist. After graduating cum laude in 1941 (selected by his class as the member who "had done most for Yale"), he joined the State Department as an aide in Nelson Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs. He earned a commission as a naval aviator, served four years on antisubmarine patrol but never sighted a sub. While in service he married Mary Louise Phillips, a Vassar art major he had met at a post-football party at Yale. She quit in her senior year to marry him; they now have five children.* Eager for a career in public affairs, he entered Harvard Law School in 1945, because "law schools seem to attract an extraordinary number of the people who have the highest potential of each generation." He made the Harvard Law Review, graduated magna cum laude.

Brewster spent a year working with the Marshall Plan in Paris, returned to start a twelve-year teaching career, first at M.I.T., then at Harvard Law School. As a teacher, he "worked harder than I ever have before or since," he recalls. "Because of the caliber of the students, you find yourself spending most of your time on the ropes."

Brewster had been promoted to full professor at Harvard and was serving on top faculty committees when his longtime friend, Whit Griswold, by then presiIdent of Yale, asked him to become his provost. Although he had no Ph.D. and no administrative experience, he quickly accepted. His acceptance was dictated partly by his admiration for Griswold and his affection for Yale. It was also, he recalls, "a decision you make at 40 to find out what you're good at." Brewster turned out to be so good at the job that the Yale Corporation promoted him to the presidency when Griswold died in 1963.