For U.S. Colleges, Fiscal Ed 1A

Finding brave new ways to cope with inflation and pay the bills

Caught in a perilous financial crunch, private colleges are devising ingenious plans for raising revenues and cutting costs.

A Coin for a Library

Construction had started on Yale University's new Seeley G. Mudd Library. But inflation was exceeding expectations, and Yale needed to find another $1.5 million as the projected construction cost grew to $6.7 million. Meanwhile, resting virtually unseen in a library vault was the Yale coin collection's most famous gold piece, a 26-gram doubloon struck in 1787 by New York Goldsmith Ephraim Brasher.

Last week Yale offered the doubloon for sale, and within four days it was snapped up for $650,000. The name of the buyer was withheld because possessors of such costly coins rarely risk publicity and a possible ripoff.

With reason. The most celebrated theft of a Brasher doubloon occurred as fiction in Raymond Chandler's 1942 mystery The High Window, later made into a movie. But in 1965 real thieves snatched the Yale doubloon from Sterling Memorial Library. The university got it back only because a private detective, tipped off that a Chicago mobster had the coin, was able to apply a

little virtuous blackmail. Everything considered, a library may be a safer investment, even if its name is Mudd.

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