APPOINTED PRESIDENT There are many Brewster friends who figure that he wants to prove he is good at other things than running Yale-most likely at politics. Brewster admits that unlike most Yale presidents, he does not want to keep the post until retirement age. "To stay ten years—give or take half of that—would be bad for the institution and bad for me," he says. He does not discuss his political aims, but few expect him to aim lower than a Senate seat. In mocking reference to both his ambitions and his stylish mode of dress-mod-striped shirts handmade in Hong Kong, J. Press suits, occasionally even a black opera cape-Yale wits have dubbed him "Kingwad Tweed," claim that he wants to be "the first man appointed President of the U.S." Brewster describes himself as "a would-be Republican—but I can't find enough good ones to vote for." He voted for Eisenhower in 1952, favored Kennedy in 1960 and Johnson in 1964. Whatever Brewster's next career choice, his advice to incoming Yale freshmen last fall will undoubtedly be his own guide as well. "The fullness or emptiness of life will be measured by the extent to which a man feels that he has an impact on the lives of others. To be a man is to matter to someone outside yourself, or to some calling or cause bigger than yourself." At the moment, that cause for Brewster is still Yale-and he has mattered much in bringing Yale into a more relevant concern with contemporary issues. FRESH TALENT, FRESH IDEAS Even fond admirers of Griswold are now willing to concede that Yale during the post-war years did not always live up to its reputation, tended to tolerate aristocratic old-timers at the expense of first-rate professional scholarship. Convinced that Yale is a school that should be at the intellectual service of the nation, Brewster has stocked the university with a host of fresh talents with fresh ideas. He appointed the youngest provost in the university's history, former Associate Graduate School Dean Charles Taylor Jr., who took over the post at 35. In 1964, Brewster named R. Inslee Clark Jr., then 29, as admissions dean. Clark has drawn such a diversified batch of bright, unconventional students that they call themselves "the New Guard." Brewster has injected considerable zest into student life by replacing gentlemanly masters, mainly "Old Blue" historians, in the residential colleges with such activists as Novelist John Hersey, Historian Elting Morison and Attorney Ronald Dworkin, whose pop-art shows cause students to dub him "the mod master of electric college." Brewster also knocked out traditional course requirements so that students can select their courses more freely, set up a five-year program in which juniors can delay their studies a year in order to plunge into active social work-a hitch the students call "junior year in the jungle." OBSOLETE LEARNING Under Brewster, Yale has maintained its traditional strength in the liberal arts and continued to upgrade its long-weak science faculties, including the creation from scratch of a costly new department of molecular biophysics. Brewster boldly dropped the undergraduate B.E. degree in engineering on the ground that conventional engineering programs force engineers to specialize so early that they "learn things that are obsolete by the time they graduate." As a result, Yale's undergraduate engineering program is unaccredited, but students get a solid grounding in liberal arts before moving up to take their technical studies at the M.A. level. At least two of Yale's special schools have become all but synonymous with creativity in their fields. Theater Critic Robert Brustein and a coterie of brilliant professionals known as "the Jewish Mafia" have brought sparkle and surprise to the musty Yale School of Drama-most notably in their recent production of Robert Lowell's Prometheus Bound (Time, June 2). Yale's Law School, under Dean Louis Pollak, stresses the social and political impact of law, while Harvard's case-study emphasis produces sharp legal tacticians. Seeking to expand Yale's horizons ever more, Brewster is deeply committed to the proposed affiliation with all-girl Vassar (Time, Dec. 30), is trying to bring the Jesuits' Woodstock Seminary from Maryland to New Haven as a partner of Yale's nondenominational Divinity School. "For the first time, Yale may be a more exciting place to be than Harvard ever was," says Biologist J. P. Trinkaus, a 17-year veteran at Yale. All this has not necessarily made Brewster universally liked on campus. "The technocrats of the educational world came into the inner circle under Kingman," complains a former dean. Philosopher Paul Weiss contends that the president of Yale ought to be defining educational philosophy for the nationa task that Pragmatist Brewster has little time for. Many students complain that Brewster spends too much time tending to off-campus fund raising; they regard him as an aloof, not-quite-with-it figure. OUT OF COMPLACENCY In the long run, Yale historians may well cite Brewster as the president who shook the university out of complacency over its declining fiscal fortunes. Yale's cash problems were easy to overlook. Its Gothic towers bespeak centuries of stability, the free-flowing lines of newer buildings by Eero Saarinen and the glossy cubes of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill convey contemporary opulence. And for years, Yale was affluent. It has been blessed with spectacular benefactors: from Standard Oil fortunes, Edward S. Harkness gave $25 million between 1924 and 1931, and John Sterling gave $39 million in the 1930s; last year Philanthropist Paul Mellon gave his alma mater an art gallery and an art collection worth $35 million. Yet in 1963, when Brewster assumed the presidency, the Yale Corporation had to approve its first seriously unbalanced budget in history. Says one Yale official: "Can you picture all those Old Blues sitting around a table to approve deficit financing for their great university? It was a shock." HAVING IT BOTH WAYS Costs are outrunning income partly because Brewster is determined that Yale (enrollment: 8,673) should be both an intimate liberal-arts college on the undergraduate level and an all-encompassing university at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels. He takes great pride in the fact that "Yale is still small enough that every student and faculty member is known intimately by someone who is known intimately to me." Yale's faculty serves 3,000 fewer students, gives its undergraduates more attention than do Harvard's research-oriented professors. At the same time, Yale spends far more money on doctoral programs than does undergrad-minded Princeton. "We are trying to have it both ways," says Brewster. Having it both ways is indeed expensive, and Yale's financial troubles lead Brewster to ruminate: "I not only live in a goldfish bowl, but I sometimes feel that someone is trying to poison the water." Since 1941, Yale's operating budget has risen from $8,000,000 a year to more than $84 million today. Brewster, after rejecting $7,000,000 worth of departmental requests this year, figures that $3,000,000 of that represents an "educational deficit" in delaying the improvement of some departments to what he considers "Yale's par." Even routine building maintenance, university supervisors say, is "five years behind"; ten residential colleges, built 30 years ago, have never had major repair work. To keep costs under control, Brewster in 1965 hired Howard T. Phelan, a hot-shot efficiency expert from Cambridge's Arthur D. Little Inc., a managementconsulting firm, as development director. Only 28 at the time, Phelan and a new treasurer, John E. Ecklund, 51, have recruited a team of young experts-a former comptroller at NBC, a director of New York's Compton Advertising Inc., an M.I.T. research director-to apply computers and systems analysis to Yale's finances. They now detail 53,000 new budget items and manage to save Yale about $1,000,000 a year. Says Phelan: "Kingman is committed to making this a showcase of how to run a university." INNOVATIVE INVESTMENTS The Yale Corporation* has been equally innovative in handling university investments. On the sound theory that the market value of Yale's $448 million endowment is growing each year at a roughly predictable rate, it has agreed that there is no great risk in applying part of the gain from about one-fourth of the endowment to current expenses instead of adding it to the principal. Result: $2,000,000 more that Yale can apply this year to operating expenses. University of Rochester President W. Allen Wallis, a business economist, con *Which includes Federal Reserve Board Chairman William McChesney Martin, New York Mayor John Lindsay, Pan American World Airways Chairman Juan Trippe, Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy. siders the Yale policy "the most significant step taken in the financing of higher education" in recent years-and dozens of colleges are asking Yale for details. Brewster is aware that bold endowment use and tough cost accounting will not solve Yale's long-run problems nor those of other private colleges. In speeches across the U.S., he has been advocating a revolutionary way out. He would have all colleges charge students almost the full cost of educating them, which for Yale currently means $5,520 per year. Students would borrow that amount, plus room and board charges, from the Federal Government and repay it throughout their lifetimes with an annual surcharge on their income taxes. The higher amount paid by those who earn more and live longer would offset those who are ill-paid or who die young. "It would not be resorted to except by those who needed it," Brewster explains, "and it would not cost more over the span of a generation than the society receives for its investment." The plan intrigues some educators as a way to shift educational costs from hard-pressed parents to the generation that benefits. President Howard Johnson of M.I.T. calls it a "refreshing" approach but considers the lifetime debt "psychologically difficult," prefers some form of earlier payback. The Ford Foundation's Marshall Robinson frets about the threat of a "reverse dowry," when a woman graduate of Vassar or Smith presents a lifetime tax bill to her husband. EFFICIENCY AND SELF-RESTRAINT Whether or not they agree with Brewster's concept of loans for learning, college administrators desperately need to find new ways to stay solvent. There are some obvious possibilities. For one, colleges could easily become more efficient by better use of existing facilities and faculties, judicious expansion of student-teacher ratios, more independent study, televised lectures and programmed instruction. Despite a proliferation of intercollege "consortiums," there are still countless opportunities for more cash-saving cooperation. Simple self-restraint is also sorely needed; the small liberal arts colleges need not try to become second-rate universities. The field of private philanthropy is still largely an untapped reservoir: only 23% of college graduates give to their alma mater; only 600 of the nation's 5,000 large companies give significantly. Most private-college presidents candidly conclude, however, that the longrange answer is massive federal help. "The only place the money can come from is the Federal Government-that's inevitable," says Harvard President Nathan Pusey. Even the small colleges, concedes Mills President C. Easton Rothwell, "have passed the point of no return in their acceptance and dependence upon support from federal agencies." The only real argument about federal aid is how to get it without violating what Cornell's Perkins calls “our academic virginity"—an infringement of autonomy. The U.S. Senate passed a plan (it died in a conference committee) for reducing the federal income tax by as much as $352 for parents with children in college-but some educators concede that tuition hikes would nullify the taxpayers' gain. Most prefer federal scholarships that a student could use at any school, public or private; some suggest additional grants to the school that the student selects. Almost everyone wants federal research support expanded in size, geographical spread and subjects covered. Perkins predicts that by 1970 an independent, education-controlled commission will even be channeling federal funds directly to institutions for general operating use. GOOD V. BAD Whatever the final prescription to cure the college cash ailments, it will be certain to drastically reshape U.S. higher education. As undergraduates gain a new mobility to go where the teaching is best, inferior schools will have to merge or die. As state universities seek ever more prevate dollars and private schools rely ever more on Government funds, the distinction between public and private education will blur. This does not bother Harvard's Pusey, who insists that "the distinction between public and private is pretty nonsensical-the important distinction is between the good schools and the bad schools." No one wants the distinction blurred completely, since private education has traditionally pioneered new paths of learning, and by its example, has helped public universities fight for their own freedom. No educator is more dedicated to the preservation of the best values of the private university than Kingman Brewster. "Yale," he says, is free to "make up its own mind about what a good education is and hope that if it's right, the profession will come around." Full of faith in both Yale and the U.S., he is optimistic about the future. "I cannot believe," he says, "that the nation will allow the great private institutions to go to the wall." |