The Y of It All

To most of the students and faculty at Yale, husky, engaging Kingman Brewster Jr., 44, has long been the odds-on favorite to succeed President A. Whitney Griswold who died of cancer last April. As university provost and thus Yale's No. 2 faculty officer since 1961, Brewster had proved to be a. hardworking combination of scholar and administrator, and succeeded in charming New Haven in the bargain. But there were dark rumors of dissent among the 16 members of the arcane council that had the power of final decision, the Yale Corporation. For one thing, academic purists pointed out solemnly, Brewster had neither M.A. nor Ph.D. And though he was indeed a Yaleman (A.B. '41), his law degree came from, of all places, Harvard.

Five months passed as the Corporation struggled with its doubts and pondered other names, leading the Yale News & Review last week to explode with exasperation: "Is it too much to ask that the members of the Yale Corporation resolve to stay in session this weekend until they have chosen a president?" Whether or not stung by this rebuke, the Corporation gathered around a highly polished table in Woodbridge Hall and finally agreed on a name: Kingman Brewster.

Point of View. Yale's 17th president fits no educator's conventional mold. In college, he rose to become chairman of the Daily News, but on Tap Day, when Yale juniors are selected for secret societies, a delegation from Skull & Bones searched for Brewster in vain, finally found him firmly seated on a basement toilet, from which perspective he declined membership. At the start of World War II, when Yale's President

Charles Seymour was a vigorous internationalist in support of all-out aid to Britain, Brewster argued for the America Firsters in college debates. But when the U.S. went to war, Brewster promptly joined the Navy and became a fighter pilot.

After the war, at Harvard Law he caught the eye of Professor Milton Katz who took him to Paris as a special assistant at the burgeoning Marshall Plan headquarters, later helped him get his first teaching job--an assistant law professorship at Harvard.

Old Grad Sailor. The path back to Yale started at Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where the Brewsters and their five children spend their summer sailing. A neighbor and fellow sailor at Vineyard Haven was Whitney Griswold. Becoming good friends, the Old Grad and the President ribbed each other unmercifully. "What are you doing to my alma mater?" Brewster would roar, joshing Griswold about student riots at New Haven, losing football teams or his presidential speeches. When the rumor spread that Brewster was under consideration as next dean of the Harvard Law School, Griswold in 1960 offered Brewster Yale's provost job. "The idea came to me as a surprise," says Brewster, but he promptly accepted.

"Although it was completely unrelated to anything I had done in the past, it seemed a good time to find out if I would be any good at it." He lost no time proving he was a natural. And as acting president for the past five months, he has been operating boss of a $45 million budget and overseer of some 8,400 students and 2,000 faculty. Brewster has made few mistakes. No one doubts that the official transition from No. 2 to No. 1 will be equally smooth and painless.

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