Wanted: A Fiscal Wizard

After seven years as president of Lincoln Center, Composer William Schuman last week announced his resignation. The reasons, he said, were purely personal: "I don't want to be a full-time administrator, although unfortunately I'm very good at it. I'm 58 years old, and I hope I have decades of composing time left."

If he stayed on, Schuman admitted, he would have to devote considerably more of his energies to administration and fund raising. And with good reason: Lincoln Center is close to bankruptcy. The 1969 summer festival has been canceled, and the center has decided not to continue financing the prestigious but money-losing New York Film Festival. The center is so pinched for funds that it has even dropped its monthly news bulletin and journal.

The problem is not mismanagement but the fact that the center did not develop quite in the way its founders had in mind. The great artistic companies it houses--the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet--are independent operations that have a cooperative tenant-landlord relationship with the center itself. On its own, the center has sponsored only the repertory theater--an esthetic as well as a financial disaster during most of its history--educational programs and special events such as the summer festivals, which have never shown a profit. Because of the vast fund-raising campaigns undertaken to create Lincoln Center, it has almost reached the exhaustion point in finding new sources of gift revenue. What the center needs now is a fiscal wizard rather than a gifted artist as its next president.

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