Universities: Anxiety Behind the Facade

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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 problem-solver 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 faculty 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