Columbia Gets Its Man

"My God, I'm glad it's over," said Columbia University Chemistry Professor Ronald C. D. Breslow as he hoisted a laboratory beaker full of champagne last week. Breslow was toasting the fact that after a frustrating 18-month search, Columbia had finally found a permanent successor to Grayson Kirk, who resigned the presidency in 1968 following violent campus disorders. The man who has agreed to take over from Interim President Andrew Cordier next fall: William J. McGill, 47, chancellor of the University of California at San Diego.

For McGill, the trip east will be a homecoming. Born in The Bronx, he worked his way through Fordham University, graduating as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1943. After earning his doctorate from Harvard, he joined the Columbia faculty and rose to become chairman of the psychology department. Five years ago, convinced that Columbia was headed downhill and uneasy about the university's tense relations with its ghetto neighbors, McGill went to the new campus at San Diego. "I reflected on what kind of revenge society could take against an institution for ignoring its environment," he says now. "Instead of protesting, I left."

Big Jump. At San Diego, McGill earned the reputation of being a tough but tolerant referee, one whose jovial personality enabled him to walk the tightrope between conservatives on the university's board of regents and in the San Diego community on the one hand and his own liberal campus on the other. "I'm a gentle soul, but my skin is thick," he says.

His decision to reappoint Radical Philosopher Herbert Marcuse to the San Diego faculty outraged local American Legionnaires, brought insistent demands for McGill's ouster and prompted the regents to assume veto power over faculty tenure appointments throughout the nine-campus University of California system. McGill rode out the storm. "There will be no inquisition aimed at political heretics while I am chancellor," he assured his faculty.

A stocky, crew-cut Roman Catholic, McGill will be the first non-Protestant president in Columbia's 216-year history. He returns to the campus on Harlem's border with the unanimous approval of the university's board of trustees and the support of the student-faculty search committee. "He's no superstar, but I think that's in his favor," says Fred Friendly, professor of journalism and a search committee member. "It's a big jump from San Diego to Morningside Heights, but this man has his priorities right."

One of the highest of the hurdles McGill must clear if he is to succeed at Columbia is financial. This year the university is suffering from an $11 million budget deficit. Another serious problem will be Columbia's relations with the surrounding community. Rapport was badly ruptured when Columbia attempted to put up a gym on park land, the move that ignited the 1968 riot. A considerable residue of hostility must still be dealt with. Neighborhood residents have long had reason to worry that the university might evict them to make way for expansion. Now they have an additional concern. Columbia is planning to start up an on-campus nuclear reactor--despite the protests of citizens who fear the possibility of radiation and explosion.

McGill puts a good-neighbor policy high on his agenda. "The most important thing is for us to become very valuable to the community," he says. Among other things, he plans to investigate how Columbia's schools of medicine, law, architecture and social work can become competent to deal effectively with the urban environment. High-rise construction, he believes, might provide the way for Columbia to satisfy its needs for expansion without encroaching on the community.

As for student radicalism, McGill says: "Our problem is not the handful of destructive revolutionaries in our midst. It is the mass of alienated students eager to be raped if only the radicals can develop an issue to suit them." Obviously, McGill's presence will not stop Columbia's radicals from attempting further assaults. But the fact that students actively participated in the search committee's hunt for a new president at least starts him off with the proper sort of imprimatur.

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