New Haven's Presidential Search

Needed: Someone to lead the Old Blue out of the red

It could almost be the College of Cardinals, sitting in secrecy to elect a new Pope. There are closed-door sessions around a huge octagonal table, beneath the gaze of portraits of past presidents. The participants--members of the Yale Corporation, Yale University's august board of directors--breathe not a word about their deliberations. There is even an executive secretary who vigilantly collects every scrap of paper after each meeting, carries them home and carefully burns them in his fireplace.

And rather like the white smoke above the Vatican that marks the election of a new Pope, the wisps coming out of Yale Professor Emeritus Edgar Boell's chimney lately have been signaling the imminent end of Yale's seven-month search for a successor to Kingman Brewster, who resigned last April to accept the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James's. Last week William Bundy, chairman of the corporation's eight-member presidential search committee, announced that the list of candidates to be Yale's 18th president--once as high as 400--had been narrowed to ten finalists. Early next week the 18-member corporation will meet in Washington, quite probably to make the final choice.

Strict secrecy shrouds the identity of the ten. But a dozen or so names keep turning up. Among them: outsiders Harvard Dean Henry Rosovsky; Stanford President Richard Lyman; and Thomas Ehrlich, former dean of Stanford Law School, now president of the Legal Services Corporation. The list may also include two former Yale undergraduates: William Muir ('54), a professor of political science at Berkeley, and Prosser Gifford ('51), a Rhodes scholar and dean of Amherst since 1967. Among Yale faculty members and administrators thought to be on the list are A. Bartlett Giamatti, director of humanities division, and Hanna Holborn Gray, Yale's provost and, after Brewster's resignation, acting president.

Gray, daughter of Yale historian Hajo Holborn, is an expert in European intellectual history who was educated at Bryn Mawr and Harvard. As acting head of Yale, she has slashed fearlessly at Yale's budget and also is weathering a bitter two-month strike by the university's 1,400 blue-collar workers. "She's head and shoulders over the other internal candidates," says one respected faculty member. Yet, he adds, "many of the Old Blues, on whom the university is dependent for much of its future funding, would never accept a woman as president."

Brewster's successor will inherit a salary of about $85,000, a stately mansion --and Yale's grave financial problems. Over a decade, the university's cumulative deficit has climbed to $16.6 million. Last year, Yale spent $209 million and ran $6.6 million in the red, the largest annual deficit in its history.

Part of the problem, according to a blunt analysis of Yale's finances due to be released next week, has been the high cost of innovations introduced by Brewster during his 14-year term. The study was done by Anthony Knerr, a former vice chancellor of the City University of New York, who was brought in to diagnose Yale's financial malaise. Under Brewster, Yale not only went coeducational but also increased its percentage of minority students (now 12%) and admitted many more students in need of financial aid. Brewster added 100 new professors to the faculty, which now numbers 2,400, and opened a graduate School of Organization and Management. Says Knerr: "I'm sure that Brewster's term will go through a re-evaluation when this study appears."

Worst of all has been the devaluation of Yale's endowment. Now estimated at $560 million (second only to Harvard's $1.46 billion), its purchasing power has shriveled to about 60% of what it was ten years ago. Falling stock prices account for much of the decline. But another cause has been the incorrect figuring of the formula that determines the amount of income that can be drawn each year from the endowment. Oddly, the corporation --which is generally conservative and includes such financial heavyweights as J. Richardson Dilworth, manager of the Rockefeller billions, and Green Stamp Heir William S. Beinecke--failed to adjust the formula to reflect depressed stock values. Result: Yale has been eating into its endowment, not just spending income from it.

Gray announced a $350 increase in tuition and a $175 increase in room-and-board charges this year for Yale's 5,100 undergraduates (they already pay close to $8,000 a year). A freeze in hiring has so far resulted only in larger discussion groups and fewer graduate student-teaching assistants. Yet faculty and administrators are uneasy. Declares Assistant Professor Michael Ferber: "We'll end up like a big state university. People will come because it's Yale, but it won't be the same."

Added to Yale's other problems is the strike. At issue are wages and job security, with the union claiming that the university is replacing full-time workers with part-timers to avoid paying fringe benefits. Many students have swung behind the workers, mainly because the university refuses to submit the dispute to arbitration. Equally angry is New Haven Mayor Frank Logue (Yale '48), who complains: "The welfare rolls are growing. Stores and markets are hurting." Additionally, the city asked Yale as a "good citizen" to pay between $800,000 and $1.5 million for services it receives on its nontaxable property, but the university refused.

Hanna Gray, obviously interested in a permanent lease on the Yale president's paneled office in Woodbridge Hall, contends that the present troubles may prove beneficial. "A university that is basically healthy can be strengthened by a re-evaluation," she argues. "Yale has had a very good standard of living that must be scaled down. But the life of the university can be preserved."

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