A WHITER SHADE OF YALE?

The president of Yale University had known for two weeks what the Journal's editorial page announced in acid tones one morning in March: Yale had agreed to return a $20 million donation to Lee Bass, Texas billionaire and alumnus. Bass had given the money five years earlier to establish a new program at Yale to study Western civilization.

Now, the money was gone. And as Levin waited for his ship to return to Quito, Ecuador, he was losing the public relations battle too.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a conservative educational watchdog in Bryn Mawr, Pa., was casting the story as the most absurd battle to date in the ongoing culture wars, a clash between professors of multiculturalism running amok and scholars vainly struggling to preserve the remnants of Western civilization. Yale was overwhelmed by liberal professors ready to throw out Plato, Shakespeare and $20 million for Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ISI claimed.

The press loved it. "Lost at Yale: The Finale," the Journal editorial page read. "How the West Was Lost at Yale," U.S. News & World Report said. "The Fall of Western Civ," Newsweek reported. The Boston Globe's editorial page roared: "In the annals of the-one-that-got-away stories, it is going to be hard to top Yale's failure to land Lee Bass and his $20 million gift."

In fact, according to those at the center of the controversy, it was anything but.

The story of Yale's folly actually reveals little about multiculturalism on campus -- though perhaps much about its opponents. On one level, the matter was no more than a dry budgetary squabble between a pragmatic president and a principled history professor that was carried on through Yale's bureaucracy at a librarian's pace. Nothing at a university, though, is ever so simple.

History professor Donald Kagan, for all his imposing manners, is, at heart, a romantic. Most of all, he is large -- both in appearance and intellect. His specialty is classical Greece; Kagan's history of the Peloponnesian War has been called "the foremost work of history produced in North America in this century." Kagan dazzles students with the force of his ideas. In his classes, he sits at attention, his arms jutting out and his booming voice in love with the drama of his subjects.

As a college student in Brooklyn in the '50s, Kagan had become engrossed with the world of Homer, Pericles and Odysseus. Brooklyn College offered free tuition then and it filled with kids from families that, like Kagan's, had come from Europe only to find factory work in America.

The young Kagan was also taken in by baseball. He be came enchanted watching Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees. Baseball became the first example of Kagan's charming but impractical habit of seeing the world as a grandiose adventure.

"If, in a future age, Western civilization should come to an end," Kagan once wrote, "some perceptive scholar will point with certainty to the era that marked the beginning of its decline. The first clear sign came in 1953, when the Boston Braves moved to Milwau kee; the next year the St. Louis Browns became the Baltimore Orioles. . . . The Dark Ages had begun."

He was serious.

When, 35 years later, Kagan looked out on Yale as dean, he saw a college much less disciplined than the school he had thrived at. Yale's student body was now half female and -- in part due to affirmative action, which Kagan opposed -- courted a substantial number of minority students. It had a women's studies program and a black studies department too.

In a series of speeches, Kagan took on the liberalism he thought had taken the rigor out of a Yale education and made it a "mutual massage" between indulgent professors and soft-minded students. In June 1990, he told the conservative National Association of Scholars that the humanities at Yale pursued opinion, not truth. "People in the humanities don't experiment, don't have controls. {They} disagree about what's good and bad, and overall seem a very funny bunch of guys," he said.

When professors found out about the speech, they were livid. "The faculty couldn't stomach it," said Prof. Peter Brooks, chairman of the comparative literature department.

In September, Kagan continued his campaign. He told the incoming freshman class that the study of the West should rest at the heart of an education because, he said, Western civilization played a more central role in the development of democracy than had any other culture had.

"We fail to {study} Western civilization at the peril of our students, our country, and of the hopes for a democratic, liberal society emerging throughout the world today," Kagan said.

Another firestorm broke out. Kagan "was so confrontational and wasn't interested in consensus-building," Brooks said. "Don should remain a Tory back-bencher. He's best as a gadfly, not a dean."

Eventually the debate died. Professors focused on a budget crunch that threatened their departments. Those fights did far more damage to Kagan that the political issues, eventually causing him to step down, along with the president who appointed him, Benno C. Schmidt Jr.

But a rich alumnus in Texas was watching. Paying Their Respects

Lee Marshall Bass, 40, was born into a Texas family soaked in oil money and steeped in a kinship with Yale, the college that family patriarch Perry Bass, Class of '37, had attended and loved.

As a sophomore at Yale, Perry began accumulating a family fortune that by 1994 Forbes magazine estimated to be $6 billion.

Bass told his sons, "You either go to Yale or you don't go anywhere else," said Richard Franke, a member of the university's board of trustees and a friend of the Basses.

Classmates who lived with Lee Bass in Silliman College, one of Yale's 12 residential houses, said he did not flaunt his money. He wore jeans and grew his blond hair to his shoulders. He was a good student but not exceptional. Bass was better known for practical jokes such as throwing buckets of water out of his third-floor suite. He and his friends even earned the nickname "The Criminals" for their pranks, a classmate said.

Lee Bass was, even then, intensely private. He did not submit a photo of himself for his senior yearbook and did not list himself in any of the college's 84 groups. Today, he is notoriously media-shy and does not grant interviews.

In April 1991, eight months after Kagan's speech, Bass pledged $20 million to pursue the study of Western civilization. Lee's brother Edward had given $20 million for a biospheric institute. Brother Sid had given $20 million for buildings and a humanities program. And father Perry threw in another $20 million for a science building.

Lee's gift was the only one with a distinct political message: Western civ was not dead. It was inspired by Kagan's speech. At a news conference in New Haven, Schmidt and Kagan said only that Yale would create a year-long elective course on Western civilization. Lee Bass, characteristically, did not attend.

That summer, Kagan, who by then had stepped down as dean, became one of the "Bass Professors" and was charged with designing a sophisticated Western Civ curriculum. After meeting for 15 months, he and the other professors came up with an intensive course that would meet five days a week for morning lectures and twice weekly for afternoon discussions. Professors would both lecture and run discussion sections -- unusual for Yale, where graduate students usually lead sections. Students would cover literature, history, art, science, religion, economics and politics from the beginning of time to World War II. One week, according to a copy of the syllabus, they would study Dante and the Black Death; another week, Marx and 19th-century technology.

It was a grand scheme, but from the beginning it had its critics, including then-Provost Judith Rodin, now president of the University of Pennsylvania. They felt that the course's ambition was matched only by its impracticality. Enter Levin

The man who replaced Schmidt as president was Richard Levin, who had been dean of the graduate school. His job was to be a healer after the acrimonious money fights with the faculty.

An easygoing man for such a pressure-filled job, he too is something of a baseball fanatic. He can still put on the aw-shucks grin that must have made him a natural leader of his neighborhood Mickey Mantle fan club. And like Kagan, he is a scholar with a broad and classical education. At Stanford, he studied history, pursued pre-Renaissance Italian art in Florence and, as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, tackled economics and political philosophy. At Yale, he was a popular professor and a conciliator as economics department chairman and dean.

That spring, Yale's new president had money, not politics, on his mind when he turned to Bass's $20 million gift. Yale faced a $12 million budget gap. The Bass program as proposed would be adding faculty at a time when Yale was cutting the faculty by 6 percent.

Levin did not object to the Bass course's content, which had already been approved by Yale's curriculum committee. Multiculturalism was not the issue.

But he wondered if putting 11 professors into such a small, elite course would actually limit the number of students exposed to Western civ. And how could he hire four new junior professors when Bass's money -- like most gifts since the 1970s -- could be used to pay for four junior faculty already at Yale? He decided the junior professors would come from within Yale.

"We would have to go hat in hand and ask departments for their faculty," said Henry Turner, Bass professor of history. "We were asked to design a Rolls-Royce of a course and after two years of work on it, we were told to put in a Chrysler engine and Plymouth upholstery."

Was this what Bass wanted? His instructions had been terse. "Full-time faculty {should} take direct responsibility for the teaching at the heart of the program," his indenture said. Kagan and others argued that this meant new hires. Anything else would violate Bass's wishes, they said.

Others disagreed. Said Steven Smith, a political science professor who helped design the first Bass course: "The president argued -- for, I think, good reasons -- that the program as originally conceived was going to be administratively difficult to implement."

Levin asked the new college dean to design a more practical alternative, but one that still centered on Western civ. One idea included a year-long, team-taught course studying democracy from ancient Greece to modern times.

But what everyone involved with the Bass program agrees is that the debate was never about moving the course away from an inquiry into Western civilization. The course was still for the most part going to be about famous dead white men.

"People are creating a straw man that does not exist, so they can tear it down," history professor Frank Turner said of the subsequent reports.

All the Bass professors who would talk for the record concur. Kagan would not comment.

Martin Klein, Bass professor of science, called multiculturalism "a stalking horse." "It was a question of money," agreed Roberto Gonzalez-Echevarria, Bass professor of Hispanic and comparative literature. "There was no {ideological} criticism advanced in a significant fashion." The issue, he said, "has been simplified to make it dramatic."

Levin, too, backed the Western orientation. He had, after all, spent his academic career engaged in a study of the West. His wife, Jane, taught in Yale's Western civilization program for first-year students. The couple, she recalled, spent a year in college reading Tolstoy's "War and Peace" aloud to each other at night.

Levin had even begun his presidency in a spat defending the traditions of the West, however dated others saw them. Levin wanted Yale's Glee Club to sing a hymn at his inauguration that contained words some considered sexist. Some singers preferred a hymn with gender-neutral words. Levin insisted on the traditional version. The ISI Mission

As Levin and professors argued the details of the program, a Yale junior named Pat Collins wondered what was happening to it. Collins seems the most unlikely of students to cost his college $20 million. The 20-year-old looks like the young Republican from Orange County, Calif., that he is: a broad-shouldered ex-swimmer with blond hair and blue eyes. But his curiosity was more than academic. He writes for a magazine tied to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which has a very particular interest in the state of Western civ courses.

In his college common room, Collins met Chris Long, vice president for programs of ISI, a nonprofit organization that says it promotes traditional education. Others see it promoting political conservatism. Indeed, ISI's office in Bryn Mawr, Pa., has the trappings of a campaign. Its 25 employees scurry from phone to fax to copier with primary-eve intensity.

ISI does not quibble about its mission. William F. Buckley Jr., the Yale graduate whose works include "God & Man at Yale," a conservative critique of the school, founded ISI in 1958. The group wants universities to teach traditional values: values that do not include the "trendy" study of feminism or gay or Afro-American issues.

"The problem is students are not getting an education," Long said. "Students are not learning anything about the fall of the Roman empire. All they know is the West is terrible and the history of the West is violence."

Universities, Long said, have become captives of liberal interest groups. "I think you have some faculty who really see their role not as a mentor," he said. "They see the university as a place to carry out social experiments and political agendas."

Last year, according to tax records, ISI spent $2.4 million, raised from individuals and conservative groups such as the Olin Foundation, to pay for lectures and fellowships. For instance, it paid Dinesh D'Souza, author of "Illiberal Education," $173,975 to speak at various functions. The group, Long said, has representatives on 1,090 campuses in the United States and sponsors 340 education programs. It has a $200,000 budget to target six schools it thinks deserve special attention: Yale, Washington & Lee, Duke, Stanford, Vassar and Converse College.

ISI targets older alumni, who often dislike changes that swept campuses in the '60s and '70s. It funds conservative student magazines that it sends to alumni. Alumni are urged to write administrators or, better still, direct their contributions to conservative causes.

In New Haven, ISI bankrolls the Conservative Forum, a debating group, and publishes Light and Truth, a magazine which prints investigative journalism, including such recent articles as "Gay Extremists Find Friends at Yale" and "Problems with Coed Bathrooms." Those organizations share an office in a downtown building -- rent paid by ISI, according to the building's owner.

Rich Cowan, coordinator of the University Conversion Project, a Cambridge, Mass.-based organization that monitors right-wing campus groups, says ISI is engaged in a campaign to sow fear among wealthy alumni.

"It is a way of mobilizing people who have resources to give to the university against the changes that have taken place in the last 20 or 30 years," Cowan said.

Collins, who writes for Light and Truth, says he sees himself as a journalist, not an activist. During the summer, he studied at the Washington, D.C.-based National Journalism Center, which trains campus conservatives in journalism, and worked as an intern at the Washington Times. The center's director is M. Stanton Evans, an ISI trustee and former editor of the Indianapolis News, a paper owned by the family of former vice president Dan Quayle.

"I don't know why people would blame me for reporting what is going on," Collins said. It Hits the Fan

Collins's article saying the Bass grant was mired in multicultural infighting caused a stir across the nation well before it hit campus, which had emptied for Thanksgiving. ISI sent out a press release and gave Collins a list of reporters to call.

Citing Collin's piece, the Wall Street Journal editorialized, "There can be little doubt that the faculty quarters ideologically opposed to the Western Civililization program...played a crucial role in derailing the initiative." The New York Times followed with a lengthy news story which said, "The dispute says much about the perils of trying to expand a Western history curriculum in an era when debates about multiculturalism divide campuses."

"Would we have got a front-page metro story in the New York Times on a story about administrative delays to a grant?" asked Yale spokesman Gary Fryer. "I would bet my life the answer would be no."

Collins took a complicated story and cast it in black and white, liberal vs. conservative. And he made various assertions that didn't hold up.

Collins wrote that Yale's president planned to divert a $20 million gift for Western civilization studies to such programs as one taught by a scholar of gay and lesbian studies. In fact, the funds for Yale's one visiting professor of gay and lesbian studies came from another donor.

Collins tagged the new Bass group as liberals. He cited Prof. David Marshall, director of Yale's Whitney Humanities Center, as suspect because he once spoke at a rally for Yale's labor unions in 1984.

"I don't know Mr. Marshall," Collins said in an interview. "I haven't taken his course. I haven't read his books and I don't know much about comparative literature. But I know Don Kagan would never lead a sit-in."

Marshall said in an interview that he was fully supportive of the Western studies emphasis and noted that he spent his career studying the so-called Great Books of Western literature. All Is Lost

Lee Bass read about the status of his gift in the Wall Street Journal. He also heard from Long and ISI President T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., who, according to Newsweek, flew to Fort Worth to brief him. He would not hear from Richard Levin. The Yale president had tried to talk with Bass, but couldn't find time. "Communication should have been better and I take responsibility for that," Levin said. "That was a mistake." Bass, meanwhile, was embarrassed by the editorials in the Journal, say people who know his reaction. Levin finally flew to Texas for damage control. He promised to implement the Bass course as Kagan had originally planned.

Bass asked for another guarantee: He demanded to approve the professors who taught in the course. Levin knew it was an impossible condition that would compromise the university's academic freedom. Bass wouldn't budge.

Finally, Yale's trustees voted in February that Levin should return the $20 million if Bass insisted on approving professors. Yale brought in Lloyd Cutler, a former White House lawyer and old friend of family patriarch Perry Bass, to work out the details and -- if possible -- turn Bass's mind. The chances of that, Levin said, were "low." Cutler never even got the chance to try.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, after calling its own sources, who included Kagan, reported as fact that Yale was returning Bass's money. The objections of "multiculturalists...and the inability of Yale's administration to move off the dime on the Bass gift, has now produced bitter fruit."

The media frenzy began anew. Multiculturalism and Yale's deceit killed $20 million, Collins told newspapers, magazines and radio shows across the country. "I am disappointed," he said, "that the university wasn't able to conduct itself in a trustworthy way." Yale is still feeling the sting. At graduation last month, Levin was on the defensive. "Contrary to what you may read in the newspapers," he told graduating seniors and their parents, "few on the faculty at Yale and its sister institutions doubt that the great works of Western civilization warrant a central place in the curriculum."

Earlier, Collins was posed outside Yale Law School, dressed in a gray pin-stripe suit, as a television crew from the Christian Broadcasting Network rolled tape. "The alumni are in revolt," he said, smiling.

As for the course, it's now just a 26-page proposed syllabus in a file cabinet. "I would have tried to take it," said senior Mark Chenoweth, a conservative student activist at Yale. "Now I obviously won't have the opportunity to." CAPTION: The campus of Yale University. Like ivy, the battle over the Bass millions ranged far and wide, but wasn't very deep. CAPTION: In a series of speeches, history professor Donald Kagan, above, attacked the liberalism he thought made a Yale education a "mutual massage" between indulgent professors and soft-minded students. Texas millionaire and Yale alumnus Lee Bass, left, agreed, pledging $20 million to develop an ambitious course concentrating on Western civilization. Yale President Richard Levin, right, didn't object to the Bass course's content. But the original plan caused more budget problems than it solved.