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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 nation—a 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