Yale President to Leave, Head New Private-School Venture

NEW YORK — In an announcement sure to shock students and faculty alike, Benno C. Schmidt Jr. will announce today he is resigning as president of Yale University to head a difficult and untested venture to create a system of high tech private schools across the nation.

Schmidt, 50, who has served as Yale’s president for the past six years, will become president and chief executive officer of the project created by Christopher Whittle, the Knoxville, Tenn., entrepreneur and businessman who seeks to create 1,000 for-profit schools designed to rival public schools.

According to the business plan, the schools will charge a moderate tuition, but will have lower operating costs than public school systems and thus will make a profit. Initial plans call for Whittle and Schmidt to open 200 elementary schools, which will also feature day care by 1996 as the first stage of the project.

By the year 2010 Whittle hopes to be operating 1,000 of the educational institutions whose mandate will span day care through high school.

People who have worked with Whittle on the project, which was announced last May, confirmed that Yale’s president would be leaving his post as head of one of the nation’s most prestigious universities and would formally make public his plans today at a news conference in New Haven, Conn.

Schmidt plans to leave Yale by Jan. 1, 1993, at the latest.

“He (Whittle) always knew he would need a chief executive officer,” said a source familiar with the project.

The recruitment of Yale’s president automatically gives Whittle’s Edison Project added visibility, stature and legitimacy.

One of Schmidt’s first tasks will be to lead a team of educational experts, businessmen and curriculum planners in designing the project. Both Whittle and Schmidt, it was understood, see the project as a template, portions of which can be translated to the regular public school system.

Plans call for the schools once they begin operating to charge about $5,500 a year tuition.

Only a very few people at Yale’s campus in New Haven were aware that Schmidt was considering another offer as he grappled with a troublesome $12-million budget deficit.

Like some other universities in a time of recession, it has not been an easy year for top administrators at Yale, which also has a $500-million building program under way at the same time as administrators are weighing controversial proposals to shrink the faculty and do away wth some departments.

The announcement of Schmidt’s departure makes these challenges even greater when they are viewed in the context of the resignations of two other top Yale administrators.

Donald Kagan, the dean of Yale College, made public his resignation a month ago and Frank M. Turner, the university’s provost, will leave office at the end of the academic year.

The Edison Project is being financed initially by Whittle Communications and three major partners, Philips Electronics N.V, Associated Newspapers of Britain and Time Warner.

Whittle already operates Channel One, an in-school television news service aimed at high school students, which he estimates has an audience of about 8 million.

The task of creating a nationwide system of advanced private schools is certainly daunting, in terms of curriculum change and finances. But educational experts say if it succeeds, the venture could be extremely profitable both in terms of the bottom line and school-based reform.

The challenge is not only to provide a world-class education but to eliminate the expensive bureaucracies that have been the hallmarks of some public school systems.

Schmidt’s announcement will come one day after Yale’s 291st commencement.

He will bring to the Edison Project experience both as a lawyer with expertise in the First Amendment and as an educator. Before becoming president of Yale in 1986, Schmidt served as dean of Columbia University’s law school.

There was shock when Schmidt told members of Yale’s Corporation, its board of trustees, that he was resigning. Yale’s president made the announcement at a breakfast meeting at his home on campus Monday morning.