Royal Blues

With dignity, earnestness and immense discretion, four men last week strove for election to a place on one of the nation's most select, secretive and somber ruling bodies: the board of university trustees that is styled by ancient usage as the Yale Corporation. Following tradition, an alumni committee put up an official slate for Yale's 85,000 graduates to choose from: Flour Heir Philip W. Pillsbury, 60; Republican Congressman John V. Lindsay, 42, of New York; and George B. Young, 51, executive vice president of Chicago's Field Enterprises Inc. Competing with them was William Horowitz, 57, a New Haven banker and chairman of the Connecticut state board of education.

Petition candidates rarely have much of a chance, but there was a special flurry in the case of Horowitz, whose son and son-in-law were also Yale men. Five hundred alumni, including Democratic Senator Thomas G. Dodd and leading Republican John Alsop, signed the nominating petition to get him on the ballot on the general theory that "it would be a good sign" to have a Jew on the board for the first time in the corporation's history. However, in the balloting, the alumni's choice was New York Congressman Lindsay, '44.

Congregational Ministers. By his election, Lindsay became one of six corporation members chosen by the alumni, one every year, for six-year terms.* But the elected "fellows" are not the whole board: ten co-ruling "successor trustees" jointly pick their own replacements and serve until they are 68. For most of Yale's history, the ten successors ran the corporation, reluctantly agreed to give graduates representation in 1871. In earlier times, the ten were invariably Congregational ministers from Connecticut, like Yale's founding fathers. This pattern was smashed in 1905: the corporation admitted a Congregational minister from New York. The only Congregationalist left is Amos N. Wilder, a Harvard divinity professor, who must retire this year.

The essential power of the corporation is ownership of the university--buildings, endowment, everything fixed and movable that is Yale. L'universite, c'est nous," joked former Corporation Member Dean Acheson. The corporation manages all finance and investment, must give recorded approval to each course of study, faculty appointment and degree. In practice, said Acheson, "we don't interfere with the running of the college. This would be the quickest way to louse things up." Instead, the corporation applies itself seriously to its key job, which is to pick the president of the university, and usually ratifies his decisions.

"We are all busy men," says Herbert F. Sturdy, a Los Angeles lawyer who five years ago was elected as the first member from the Far West. "But for me, the corporation comes ahead of everything--all business, social or family." He flies in ten times a year for two-day meetings in New Haven and, like most members, rarely misses a session.

"Clams or Oysters?" The sessions are conducted according to tradition as tenacious as the Yale bulldog. Members arrive on a Friday morning, meet in committees (educational policy, finance, budgets, endowments and gifts, buildings and grounds, honorary degrees), and in the evening go to Mory's, where the waiter laconically asks each of them: "Clams or oysters? Steak or lobster?" Informal talks are leavened by tact, wit and persuasive intellectual argument. "There is a tremendous sodality," says Walpole Scholar Wilmarth Lewis, who holds the record for continuous membership, 26 years.

At 9:15 the next morning, the corporation assembles in its paneled Woodbridge Hall meeting room, sitting around a mahogany table in high-backed leather chairs, each bearing an engraved plate with the name of the occupant. No one smokes until university officers and corporation committees present their reports. Then a faint cloud of blue begins to fill the air, while the group politely strives to reach their decisions.

Only after they agree do Yale and the rest of the world hear about it--maybe. And, as Acheson put it, "we never give reasons for our decisions, merely the blunt fact of them. How vulnerable are those who explain--courts, statesmen, editors. We can say of our views, as Mr. Churchill did of his when challenged with inconsistency, 'My views are a harmonious process which keeps them in relation to the current movement of events.' "

* Harvard's seven-member corporation, which advises the university on financial and policy matters, is composed of the president, treasurer and five fellows--currently four lawyers and a banker. It divides power with the 30 alumni on the Harvard Board of Overseers, who approve faculty appointments for longer than a year and supervise the school's program and facilities through 43 "visiting committees" made up of alumni and outsiders.

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