Trustees Under 30

College trustees were once viewed as old curmudgeons interested primarily in saving money and having winning football teams. Though the average age of trustees still hovers well beyond the half-century mark, a few schools have begun to foster a youthful image.

The nation's first under-30 university trustees, most of them recent graduates, have been appointed this year at Maine, Lehigh, Princeton and Vanderbilt. The eight state universities in Kentucky have begun to admit student leaders as ex officio trustees. In Vermont, Wyoming and Washington, legislatures are weighing proposals to name youthful members to state university governing boards.

Last week New York's Mayor John Lindsay appointed two young trustees to the city's board of higher education, which governs New York's 19-campus City University. Maria Josefa Canino, 25, the daughter of a Puerto Rican grocer, is a seasoned Harlem social worker and the youngest person ever named to the board. Jean-Louis d'Heilly, 28, is a doctoral candidate in political science at City University. Last winter he organized a huge demonstration to protest cuts in the university's funds, a move that deeply impressed Lindsay. The new appointments, says the mayor, will make C.U. "more responsive and relevant to the needs of youth."

Many schools that have recently added young trustees to their boards regard it as a way to yield to student demands for self-determination without suffering any traumas. Indeed, the new trustees could hardly be called firebrands. Perhaps the most militant of them, Brent L. Henry, a 21-year-old Princeton senior, helped to seize a campus building last March to protest his school's investment ties with South Africa. Henry's plans as a trustee, however, are reassuringly moderate. "I will listen," he said, "to the students and the deans and their views before making decisions. But I do not anticipate any overnight changes." Maine's Steven Hughes, a 26-year-old political-science major, sees his role in much the same way as his 14 older colleagues, whose average age is 57. "My interests won't be much different," he says.

Though youthful trustees tend to be moderates, they still have definite ideas about how their campuses must change. Henry intends to push for greater student influence in shaping Princeton's curriculum. Like most young trustees, he also wants to see the university become more involved in the community. New York's Maria Canino will use her influence as trustee to modify CUNY's entrance requirements. The university, she says, must "bring in larger minority representation."

Whether young trustees will actually influence their elders remains to be seen. Vanderbilt has made room for four students on its 36-member board, but they are still a compact minority. J. L. Zwingle, director of the Association of College Governing Boards, scoffs at the youth-leaning trend as "cosmetic, not substantive." The real decisions, he says, "are made in the committees of administrators and faculty." Still, many students see the appointment of young people to a school's highest policy-making body as at least a welcome step in the right direction.

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