Brewster Lauds Independent Universities During Inauguration as President of Yale

As representatives of 169 colleges and universities, 32 of them founded or first headed by Yalemen, looked on, Kingman Brewster, Jr., was installed as 17th president of Yale University in New Haven, Conn., Saturday.

Brewster, who had served as Yale's provost under A. Whitney Griswold, insisted in his inaugural address that private universities must remain independent of both government and private business and suggested the formation of a "Peace Reserve Training Corps" on the model of existing ROTC programs.

A graduate of the Harvard Law School, Brewster was a professor of Law here before becoming provost. He is the first man not holding an earned doctorate to head Yale in this century.

"The explosion of knowledge," and the "uncanny development of automated machines and mechanized intelligence," are destroying the monopoly of a few universities over high-quality education, Brewster said.

Modern-technology, he predicted, will soon make the lectures and libraries of any university available to students across the country. At the same time, "with the sprouting of subspecialities from old root disciplines, no university can now contain the full growth of the tree of knowledge."

With this loss of a monopoly over knowledge, Brewster said, the most important function of a university will be to provide a climate where "20 years of unbroken competition for nothing worthier than test scores" is not allowed "to dampen all aspiration, intellectual as well as active," and "where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure."

"If the Peace Corps is the best national outlet for the larger active purposes of the oncoming generation, perhaps it should be given no less academic house room than military and naval training," he said.

Brewster also emphasized that "as other corporate and government groups mobilize intelligence to discover as well as to apply knowledge to meet topical needs. It is all the more crucial to have a few academic centers predominantly motivated by a self-directed search for truth."

"Even the pressure to serve the state," he explained, "must not lead the university to forfeit that credibility which belongs alone to those who answer only to the dictates of a conscientious intellect."

"Freedom," Brewster said, "has too often been reduced to the right to choose on whom to be dependent." He emphasized the desire of many scholars "to spend one's time and energy and mind upon what seems to him most intriguing and exciting, not to be directed by what some client or customer may request or what some bureaucrat is willing to support."

President Pusey, who along with Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, also spoke at the installation, emhasized that Harvard and Yale are no longer almost alone as leaders of American education. He said that the number of first-rate universities is now approaching two dosen, and is growing rapidly