Universities: New Haven, Safe Haven

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Campus wits called it "the coronation of the Kingman" and Yale's Kingman Brewster Jr. jovially agreed. With two days of pomp and ceremony designed by him to stress that "Yale is an important asset of world civilization," the 263-year-old university last week inaugurated Brewster as its 17th president.

Rather than a small gathering of New England gentry, come to honor one of their own, 200 leading educators were invited to New Haven for the celebration. In the caps and resplendent gowns of their universities, domestic and foreign, the delegates marched to

Cross Campus, and the bells in Harkness Tower pealed traditional Yale tunes (sample: Down the Field). Parading back to cavernous Woolsey Hall, Brewster received the ancient symbols of presidential office: the 1701 manuscript of the original Yale Charter, the school seal of 1722, and the brass keys to the university. Windup of the weekend was a grand ball at the turtle-shaped Ingalls hockey rink, where guests, faculty and the presidential couple sipped punch and danced the night away as two bands played music to be inaugurated by.

Homecoming. Although Brewster is a Yaleman (class of '41), he is far from a typical Old Blue. As an undergraduate he turned down membership in Yale's elite senior societies, quit a fraternity because of the "mumbo jumbo" of the national chapter. He was chairman of the local America First Com mittee, among a dozen other campus activities, but when war came, lie signed up as a Navy fighter pilot. Instead of returning to Yale, Brewster went through Harvard Law School, became a professor in it, and was talked about as a possible future dean. It was while he was vacationing on Martha's Vineyard with his wife and five children that Mother Yale beckoned. Sailing and walking the beaches with Yale President A. Whitney Griswold, he became a close friend over the years, and Griswold lured him back to New Haven in 1960 to become provost.

It was a good time to be back, for Griswold had just rescued the university from a serious case of postwar doldrums. He more than tripled the endowment to $375 million, built 26 new buildings that gave the neo-Gothic campus a modern look, established research fellowships for young scholars. But the last days of his 13-year tenure were trying ones for Brewster and Yale. Griswold had always been rather distant from all but a few faculty favorites; now he was dying of intestinal cancer, and it fell to Brewster, as provost, to run day-to-day affairs. Yet he had neither the power nor the inclination to make major decisions. Once again, Yale seemed to be drifting.

Revival. After Griswold's death a year ago, the august Yale Corporation took five months methodically screening 160 nominations for the presidency. Brewster was the odds-on choice despite two obstacles: he had no Ph.D., and he had not joined a senior society. But with rare unanimity, faculty and students were plugging for him, and when he was named last October, Yale was overjoyed. The new president, 44 years old, plunged into the job with impressive energy and charm. "We don't know exactly what will happen yet," says Paris-born Georges May, dean of students, "but we do know it's going to be a very dynamic administration."