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Yet in 1963, when Brewster assumed the presidency, the Yale Corporation had to approve its first seriously unbalanced budget in history. Says one Yale official: "Can you picture all those Old Blues sitting around a table to approve deficit financing for their great university? It was a shock."
Having It Both Ways. Costs are outrunning income partly because Brewster is determined that Yale (enrollment: 8,673) should be both an intimate liberal-arts college on the undergraduate level and an all-encompassing university at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels. He takes great pride in the fact that "Yale is still small enough that every student and faculty member is known intimately by someone who is known intimately to me." Yale's faculty serves 3,000 fewer students, gives its undergraduates more attention than do Harvard's research-oriented professors. At the same time, Yale spends far more money on doctoral programs than does undergrad-minded Princeton. "We are trying to have it both ways," says Brewster.
Having it both ways is indeed expensive, and Yale's financial troubles lead Brewster to ruminate: "I not only live in a goldfish bowl, but I sometimes feel that someone is trying to poison the water." Since 1941, Yale's operating budget has risen from $8,000,000 a year to more than $84 million today. Brewster, after rejecting $7,000,000 worth of departmental requests this year, figures that $3,000,000 of that represents an "educational deficit" in delaying the improvement of some departments to what he considers "Yale's par." Even routine building maintenance, university supervisors say, is "five years behind"; ten residential colleges, built 30 years ago, have never had major repair work.
To keep costs under control, Brewster in 1965 hired Howard T. Phelan, a hot-shot efficiency expert from Cambridge's Arthur D. Little Inc., a management-consulting firm, as development director. Only 28 at the time, Phelan and a new treasurer, John E. Ecklund, 51, have recruited a team of young experts —a former comptroller at NBC, a director of New York's Compton Advertising Inc., an M.I.T. research director—to apply computers and systems analysis to Yale's finances. They now detail 53,000 new budget items and manage to save Yale about $1,000,000 a year. Says Phelan: "Kingman is committed to making this a showcase of how to run a university."
Innovative Investments. The Yale Corporation* has been equally innovative in handling university investments. On the sound theory that the market value of Yale's $448 million endowment is growing each year at a