Chris and Benno's Excellent Adventure

Now that Yale's Benno Schmidt has signed on to Chris Whittle's Edison Project to build a $2.5 billion nationwide chain of two hundred private schools, can they really offer a better teaching system? Or is this the dawn of education as big business? JESSE KORNBLUTH reports

JESSE KORNBLUTH

" play on the cusp, which isn't to say on the edge," says Whittle.

Chris Whittle can't help himself. He has an idea, he inflicts it on the people he meets. Most times, that works for him; he pitches, they react, he goes away wiser and, soon enough, a bit richer. Along the way to a selfmade fortune that's somewhere north of $40 million, he's experienced very few conversational disasters.

On that short list, Ed Victor, the international literary agent, and his wife, Carol, might—until recently—have noted a small dinner they gave in Bridgehampton in the summer of 1990. There, Whittle felt an overwhelming need to talk about education. And there, he definitely seemed to crash and bum.

A year earlier, he had launched Channel One, a television news service that gave public and private schools not only a free twelve-minute current-events program each day but also free satellite dishes, free cable wiring, free videotape units, and free television sets for every classroom. In return, Whittle exacted just One promise: students were all but required to watch both the news show and the two minutes of commercials embedded in it. "Academic acid rain,'' his critics cried. Educational "junk food.''

Critics meant nothing. Channel One became a huge financial success, making Whittle the Ted Turner of the Beverly Hills, 90210 set and encouraging him to contemplate an even more audacious business—a national chain of private schools. Now, over dinner at the Victors', he tossed that idea onto the table. And the guests pounced. "I was.. .skeptical,'' recalls Peter Jennings, who cares enough about schools to make education a regular feature on his nightly news show.

The one professional educator at this dinner—Benno Schmidt Jr., who had just completed his fourth year as president of Yale University—was just as skeptical. "For me, the evening's big event was when a guest, after taking a bite of the magnificent fresh tuna steak Ed Victor had practically tagged in mid-ocean and marinated to perfection, said, 'Oh, summer on Long Island—you just go down to the market, buy any fish, and throw it on the grill.' As for Chris, I mostly remember that we banged on him pretty hard. The unspoken predicate was: What do yew know about education?' '

Chris Whittle can't help himself; controversy energizes him. The following spring, as he was making the first of many announcements of what he now called the Edison Project, he went to New Haven to talk with Schmidt about his plan to bring what one critic would deride as the "Kentucky Fried Children" approach to American education. Schmidt, unsurprisingly, was all for better schools. But his enthusiasm was definitely not personal. Whittle didn't mind at all.

"You're going to think I'm crazy," Whittle said, "but I'm going to ask you to leave Yale and head this."

"I do think you're crazy," Schmidt replied.

"Don't say no too quickly."

"I can't possibly leave Yale—even if I wanted to do this," Schmidt said.

For Chris Whittle, no is merely foreplay for yes. He wrote Schmidt a heartfelt seven-page letter that jump-started a series of more serious conversations. A hundred hours of private talks later, Schmidt sent lawyers and accountants to scour Whittle's books. And then, last winter, almost as if Whittle had willed it, Schmidt presented Yale with a restructuring plan that his faculty resoundingly rejected. Suddenly, it seemed as if Whittle had it right—by leaving Yale, Schmidt could get back into education.

"I think that's great," Whittle said when Schmidt called him this spring with the good news. "And I don't care what anybody says—you did the right thing."

The day after Yale's commencement exercises in May, Whittle announced that Schmidt would be leaving the campus at some point before the end of the year to lead the Edison Project. The reaction at Yale was mixed: shock that its president was giving the equivalent of two weeks' notice and going to work for a man whose idea of an educational experience was Channel One, regret that Yale's greatest fund-raiser was taking his talents elsewhere, relief that an administrator who seemed to have better relations with the alumni and the mayor of New Haven than with his faculty and students was calling it quits. In educational circles, the reaction to Whittle's plan to open two hundred private schools in 1996 was also divided: almost everyone assumed his venture would be successful, and a great many professionals seemed to think that it would be yet another blow to our archaic, ineffective, practically unmanageable publicschool system.

"Benign neglect is at the core of this idea," charges Herbert Kohl, the veteran school reformer. "This is pure Reagan-Bush: neglect the issues, build a bypass around the problem, create something that may be wonderful for white kids. And, of course, make a fortune."

For Schmidt, whose father invested for Jock Whitney and invented the phrase "venture capital," the prospects of a salary which may be as high as $800,000 to $1 million and a healthy chunk of equity are not compelling reasons to leave Yale. Idealism is. So is the changing nature of university presidencies; six years as the leader of an archaic, ineffective, practically unmanageable enterprise like Yale may be all anyone can take. Two weeks after Schmidt's bombshell, Michael Sovern, president of Columbia University, announced his resignation. "One might ask the question not why am I leaving now," he mused, "but why did I stay so long?"

And then there's the Whittle-Perot factor.

Whittle, like Perot, stands for high principles that you can't really argue with. Public education is a mess, and it keeps getting worse. Schools are perceived by students and educators alike as both dangerous and boring—a deadly combination. Forty-four percent of Boston's high-school students drop out before graduation; in New York, one of every five high-school students skips classes on any given day. In one Houston elementary school, half the students had to repeat a grade; in New Orleans, where a high-school principal demanded that parents pick up their children's report cards, 70 percent of those cards went unclaimed. Worse, as test scores plummet, so do school budgets.

Who will turn the mess around? Not "the education president." So far, George Bush's biggest educational initiative has been to present a "voucher" plan that would allow parents to choose their children's schools. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was booed when he championed this notion at a meeting of the American Federation of Teachers last year—his audience saw this as one more way white parents would move their kids out of multiracial schools. The only people who seem to be doing anything constructive about reforming public education are individual teachers and administrators who make up an underfinanced grass-roots movement.

When government pulls back, business sees opportunity. Already, a Minneapolis company called Education Alternatives Inc.—headed by a former publicschool superintendent—has won contracts to run selected public schools in three cities. Elsewhere, the boundary be. , tween civic good and the bot-

tom line is less distinct than ever; two weeks before Schmidt publicly cast his lot with Whittle, Penn State University said "Uh-Huh!" to Pepsi-Cola, signing a $14 million contract that makes Pepsi the official soft drink on its twenty-one campuses until 2002. The trend is clear: services long thought to be the responsibility of the government are, increasingly, for sale.

The Schmidt hiring has, for the moment, obscured that unsettling reality; the initial questions spawned by the Edison Project have been about policy and educational issues. It costs about $5,500 for a public school to educate a child for a year, exactly what Whittle intends to charge. At a time when even high-income parents are straining to pay tuition at elite private schools, does he really believe there are large numbers of parents willing to pony up for what they can get for free? Or is he counting on the enactment of the Bush administration's voucher plan—does his enterprise depend on the transfer of public money? If so, his promise to give scholarships to 20 percent of his students is of less import than the wholesale flight from public education that his schools might inspire.

The educational questions are just as thorny. The cure for bad teachers is good teachers—and good teachers cost money. In order to raise the $2.5 billion he needs to build his first two hundred schools, Whittle is looking for capital from some of America's biggest computer and software companies; they might back his latest scheme in order to be named his sole suppliers of interactive technology and educational software. Inevitably, that leads to some form of electronic classroom. But even with vouchers, how will Whittle provide each student with an expensive "learning partner"—a computer, a video-playback unit, maybe even a fax machine—without cutting back heavily on salaries? Will a Whittle classroom be fifty kids plugged into hardware, with sporadic teacher visits? And who will determine the electronic curriculum: the Whittle experts, the corporate creators of the software, or the local teachers and administrators?

It is Chris Whittle's good fortune that the debate about public-private issues and technology-driven schools has, so far, drowned out the realization that success here might make him the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. But it's too simple to say that money is all that lures him; there's also unprecedented power for Whittle if this enterprise takes off. For if the Edison Project achieves his dream of creating one thousand schools by the millennium, he and his corporate partners will control not just the technology that runs these schools but the lessons and values that are taught to legions of students.

If Channel One is any precedent, this isn't reassuring. In addition to commercials that are, on occasion, overtly antieducation ("Students in many foreign countries go to school on Saturday and Sunday—suckers"), its "news features" are at least as concerned with soft stories about teen gettingand-spending and life-styles as they are about current events. In a recent study commissioned by Whittle, students who watched Channel One regularly were able to answer only one more question correctly on a thirty-item test than students who were not exposed to this educational "advantage." On the other hand, Whittle says his advertising rates are going from $150,000 for a thirty-second spot to $200,000. So critics and parents alike are right to worry that the Edison schools may well represent the realization of an Orwellian fear: a handful of corporations turning our children not into more educated citizens but better-informed consumers.

Very little of this, of course, comes to the surface in interviews with Whittle and Schmidt. "I had absolutely planned to run for office in Tennessee in 1994," says Whittle, who's forty-four. "I'd been trying to decide between a race for governor and senator. When Edison came along, I made a conscious decision between education and politics. In terms of serving, I thought this was a better thing to do—and I thought I'd be better at it."

"We have a system of higher education that's rightly regarded as the best in the world, but the foundations are genuinely crumbling, with potentially catastrophic results for our ability to function as a democracy," the fifty-year-old Schmidt told me. "Education in this country needs radical revolution, not reform in the usual way. You don't know how uncharacteristic that is for me to say. Five years ago, I never would have been persuaded to do this. But then I look at Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the changes in social and political thought that are sweeping the world. And I think about the fact that never in my lifetime have Americans been so ready to question the wisdom of inherited processes and institutions. And I have to conclude that those changes have, in some deep sense, informed this choice."

If they're as sincere as they sound, how can anyone not applaud their effort? But is Whittle—described by one and all as "the world's greatest salesman"—really a believer in the dream of a better school system or just enamored of its potential to catapult him to the kind of national prominence that might make him the next Perot? Is Schmidt— who was, for better or worse, Yale's first president who seemed more like a C.E.O. than an educator—a convert to an attainable dream or a sucker for a brilliant sales pitch? Is this a story of great ideas appearing at just the right time, or is it just another tale of careerism and unregulated opportunism: eighties greed overlaid with sixties spirit and nineties buzzwords?

Kingman Brewster Jr., an eleventh-generation Mayflower descendant, was the last sleek Old Blue president. He'd graduated cum laude from the college, where his class voted him the man "who had done the most for Yale." In his fourteen years as its president, he earned that description again; he was solicitous of student and faculty opinion, knew your name if you happened along as he walked his dog, and never pretended to be a scholar. In 1970, when Black Panthers were being tried in New Haven, he prevented street-fighting when he said, in his official capacity, "I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States." Three thousand students signed a petition praising him; alumni support ran four-to-one. Eight years later, the judge who had issued the arrest warrant for Bobby Seale delivered the ultimate verdict: "Brewster saved Yale and New Haven from a holocaust that would have made Kent State look like a Sunday picnic."

After Hanna Holbom Gray's interim year came A. Bartlett Giamatti. He too had graduated from Yale, and he'd never left; he had earned his Ph.D. there, become a professor at thirty-three, and was, at forty, the youngest Yale president in almost two hundred years. Giamatti was a magnificent orator, writer, and editor; not only could he turn bons mots with ease, he also found time during his eight-year presidency to produce two books. And yet he had the common touch. In conversation, he was always "Bart." He liked to mingle with the kids on Halloween, and at football games he sometimes led the band. No doubt about it, Giamatti was loved. When he left Yale, all that made it tolerable for his many friends was that he was going to be commissioner of baseball, his dream job; when he died, at fifty-one, the mourning at Yale was wrenching.

As is customary in academia, Giamatti gave Yale a year's notice. A search committee was organized, with Cyrus Vance as its head. The committee quickly fixed upon Schmidt. He had gone to Yale College—"with greater joy than wisdom," he later admitted. That's a euphemism. "Benno wasn't destined for greatness," a college friend reports. "He was a guy with crinkly eyes, a nice smile, and a hockey stick. " But at Yale Law, Schmidt caught fire; when he graduated, he clerked for Earl Warren, chief justice of the Supreme Court, and then began to make a name for himself as a constitutional scholar. In 1984 he was appointed dean of the Columbia University law school, where he promptly raised a record-breaking $9 million. Two years later, the energetic, boyish, tough, and very well-connected Schmidt was, at fortythree, tapped to lead his alma mater.

Yale embraced Schmidt warmly, but he didn't seem to return the embrace. His third wife, Helen Whitney, had a career as a filmmaker and a child to mother in New York; she had no intention of living in New Haven. The search committee, many of whom lived in New York, understood the strains of two-career marriages. Yale didn't. Mary Brewster had been an extraordinary hostess and partner—Kingman's "unsecret weapon," a Yale administrator once noted. At Yale receptions, Toni Giamatti stood by her man. But Helen Whitney, it turned out, saw herself more as an intellectual collaborator than as an arm piece. This became clear when inaugural invitations went out for a reception honoring "President and Mrs. Benno C. Schmidt Jr. ' ' These had to be hastily amended. "They realized that they had originally listed someone who does not exist," Schmidt told The New York Times.

Over the years, he says, "many students told me Helen was a good role model and that they admired her independence." Still, right from his inaugural address, Schmidt was at odds with some of his faculty. For one thing, he spoke of literature in moral terms. "He threw the gauntlet down on deconstruction, a way of looking at literature that's somewhere between pernicious and ludicrous," his wife says. "Literature is not a linguistic predicament, and Benno had the courage to say that. It needed to be done—and at Yale, where deconstruction is king, he paid the price. "

His later speeches, though just as pointed, were less effective. When he'd moderated a PBS series about the Constitution, The Washington Post's Tom Shales had praised his "ability to be succinct." Somehow, he lost that gift in New Haven. "Benno's a god-awful speaker who takes an hour to communicate what could be said in five minutes," a senior professor says. "He lost the faculty partly because of his style—he reported to people who make their living by talking, and treated them like kindergartners."

Worse, students and faculty alike found Schmidt curiously remote. "Where's Benno?" they asked, in reference as much to his frequent trips to make fund-raising pitches as to his dual address. They didn't grasp that his job wasn't the same as Brewster's or Giamatti's, that his central concerns were a balanced budget, the long-delayed reconstruction of the crumbling Yale campus, and better town-gown relations. Along the way to successes in each of those areas, he was faced with the kinds of problems his predecessors never had to confront—like a 1987 Wall Street Journal piece that labeled Yale a "gay school" and the splintering of the campus into narrow interest groups.

In 1990, as the school year ended, Schmidt looked over his budget and decided he needed to make major cutbacks. As he made them, he knew he was in for more hostility. It was at this point that he and his wife went off for their annual weekend with the Victors in the Hamptons.

Chris Whittle first flirted with a career in media as a sophomore at the University of Tennessee. Prophetically, his enterprise involved education—he and a friend hired graduate students to condense textbooks and sell them, as Time Savers, to their less scholarly classmates. This was his first success, and it encouraged him to target media to narrow age ranges and interest groups.

Knoxville in a Nutshell, funded by loans from family and friends, led a Japanese car company to Whittle and Phillip Moffitt, one of his partners. Could they create a magazine for young adults that would allow the Japanese product to stand out? Whittle could do something even better—he created a magazine sponsored by a single advertiser. Over the years, he and Moffitt made a modest fortune with specialty media of this kind. And then, in 1979, they bought Esquire.

"Education in this country needs radical revolution, not reform in the usual way," says Schmidt.

Whittle, as publisher, is generally given equal credit with Moffitt, the editor, for saving Esquire. That's not the full story. "Chris came to New York ready to do it all," a close friend says. "But it wasn't happening for him socially. Chriscouldn't stand that—his obsession is Getting It Right."

So, once he had Esquire under control, Whittle returned to Knoxville to build the core business. There, he was magic. "The building was filled with kids publishing obscure magazines , but you could feel the energy, " a longtime employee recalls. "It all came from Chris. 'Do they still have billboards?' he asked one day. It turned out he hated billboards. 'I'd love to start an interstate radio station to take their place—it would tell you what's happening in each area as you pass through,' he suggested. When he has an idea like that, he'll look at you, and there are sparks in his hair and laser beams coming from his eyes, and you feel his adrenaline in your body. And you go back and tell people that's what you're going to do, and everybody goes, 'God, yes!' "

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Whittle's real genius, though, was in sales. "I remember a three-day conference we had in 1982," says a former Whittle sales manager. "I had always thought of him as an eccentric, but he taught us how to sell. There was nothing eccentric about his method—it was all based on homework. I saw that Chris does an incredible amount of research before he approaches a prospect. He knows what underwear you've got on, and why; he knows what makes you tick. And it's worth it. This is a business in which most people are in for the quick hit. Not Chris. He wants the relationship, even if it takes him four to six months to get it."

By 1986, Whittle and Moffitt had undergone a bitter, very private divorce. Moffitt sold off Esquire and moved to California; Whittle began to prepare for his political and social debut. In 1988 he sold half of Whittle Communications to what would become Time Warner. With $40 million in hand and a limitless future ahead, he married Priscilla Rattazzi, a niece of Gianni Agnelli and the mother of a young child.

"Chris is so ambitious, so determined to do it all and, at the same time, be correct about it—he cares about everything, ' ' says a friend who has often visited Whittle's New York apartment, with its antimacassars on the chairs, gold on the ceiling, and string quartets after dinner. "Priscilla was comfortable about herself —she didn't give a shit. One look and he knew that was where he wanted to be."

The Whittles soon had a child. One could say that school returned to Whittle's consciousness naturally, with the introduction of children into his life. But his interest in education also dovetailed with his stunningly accurate prediction that the downturn in the magazine business was not a momentary blip. "Home-based media has dramatically declined as an environment for sending advertising messages," he began saying. "Place-based media has other interesting advantages." His basic theory was to bring advertisers directly to readers; now he would bring them directly to students. "There aren't going to be two [television] sets hanging from the ceiling in a classroom," he said. "In place-based media, it's a first-in-wins game."

Channel One, inaugurated in 1989, saw 40 percent of U.S. high schools taking Whittle up on his offer of free technology in just the first twenty-four months. By the time Whittle met Schmidt, he had bought 325,000 television sets and installed five thousand miles of wire in almost eight thousand schools. The New York Times estimated potential revenues at $100 million a year, more than double the worth of anything else in Whittle's stable.

The print media, Whittle was inclined to conclude, were going the way of calligraphy.

Soon after he met Whittle, Benno Schmidt was in the throes of the 199091 academic year's first economic crisis. Along with dumping water polo and wrestling, he had decided to ax some print media. But killing The Yale Review was not shrewd. In protest, novelist John Hersey resigned from a Yale committee, and fifty-six distinguished writers signed a letter denouncing the president's decision. "Schmidt says he canceled the magazine because he found it wasn't contributing to Yale's academic mission," a columnist wrote in the Yale Daily News. "What he means is it isn't bringing in money."

Money: to students and faculty alike, cash and not education seemed to be their president's overriding concern. Schmidt was focusing increasingly on Yale's deteriorating campus, which had been built mostly in a single decade and had never been renovated. The Yale community found that an unappealing issue. "There had been almost a Calvinistic pride in Yale's decrepitude, a sense that the glory of the place lay in its intellectual core," an administrator said. The College Council president complained that Schmidt "doesn't have much of a presence on campus."

The president kept his cool, working to revive the Review and firing back only after the 1991 school term ended and he found himself in the relative safety of the National Press Club. "I believe universities in the United States are in disarray and difficulty," Schmidt said there. "At most universities these days, including Yale, by and large it is quiet. But the quiet, I think, is the quiet of the storm center."

In the fall of 1991, the storm struck. Schmidt was desperate to reduce Yale's almost $800 million budget and determined to embark on a restoration campaign slated to cost as much as $100 million a year; his opening salvo was to close the freshman cafeteria at dinner—at a protest rally, students ate cake—and cut hours at the third-largest library system in America. Last January, his committee on restructuring called for a 10.7 percent reduction in the faculty, slicing and dicing departments and closing one institute. "During the next five to ten years, Yale University must become a smaller operation," Schmidt's provost told the faculty.

This proposal came at a time when Yale's endowment had, in six years, jumped from $1.4 billion to $2.6 billion—and when Schmidt was well on his way to raising the first $300 million for a historic $1.5 billion capital campaign. Those numbers seemed vast compared with an anticipated deficit of $8.8 million a year. Surely, Schmidt and his administrators were going too far.

"Instead of sending forth a vision of how we could be better, he talked about cutting back," one professor said in disgust. Another approached some trustees he considered sympathetic. "What job can we get Benno?" he asked. The parking-lot talk had faculty wishing Schmidt were closer to the Bush administration— although his ultimate goal was said to be a seat on the Supreme Court, it was thought he might be offered a federal judgeship. "The general feeling was that Benno would conclude the capital campaign in two years, declare victory, and announce his resignation, effective in a year," a disgruntled professor told me.

By that schedule, Schmidt was out of Yale in 1995.

While Schmidt was under siege, Whittle was having a terrific time. He had commissioned ultra-chic designer Peter Marino to do up a new apartment in the Dakota. He was completing a vast office complex in Knoxville and an equally impressive summer home in East Hampton. His critics were keeping him in the news. And he was, at every opportunity, winnowing through the candidates for ' 'founding partners' ' of the Edison Project.

"Why me?" former Esquire editor Lee Eisenberg asked in the summer of 1991.

"Think of this as eight to ten hours of programming to a young audience," Whittle replied. "Think of generating ideas that inform and entertain in several media."

The forty-four-year-old Eisenberg, who has recently fathered two children, suddenly found that education was of immense concern to him. So did Dominique Browning, another Esquire veteran, who'd gone on to bring serious reporting to socalled women's subjects at Newsweek. John Chubb, the co-author of a book advocating "choice" in public-school selection, was a natural addition, as was Chester Finn Jr., a former assistant U.S. secretary of education, who's an advocate of school vouchers. Nancy Hechinger, who'd worked in Apple's Multimedia Lab, had founded a company that was one of the pioneers in interactive media. Whittle met Sylvia Peters, the African-American principal of a highly regarded Chicago public school, on a television show. Daniel Biederman, president of the Grand Central and 34th Street Partnerships in New York, had spent more than a decade trying to improve public spaces with private money.

The team was set. All Whittle lacked was its leader. But Schmidt was still on the fence. So was his wife. "My initial response to Whittle's offer was that he had a bold, fascinating idea, but this wasn't a good time for Benno to consider it," Helen Whitney says. "I don't mean because of faculty nit-picking or fundraising or budgets. I just felt that parts of the Yale community hadn't gotten to know Benno. They didn't see his humor, his irreverence, his fierce intellect. They talked about him as 'standoffish'—that's absurd. This is a man who plays bluegrass with students." What Schmidt needed, she felt, was to work through Yale's institutional problems and establish himself as an educator.

But the executive aspects of Schmidt's job predominated. Last March, his provost announced his resignation—given his leadership of the hated restructuring committee, that seemed somewhat less than voluntary. Three weeks later, the dean of Yale College followed suit. The only key administrator slated to stay on with Schmidt for the 1992-93 school year was Judith Rodin, who'd been dean of the graduate school for just a year. Meanwhile, the 1991 murder of Christian Prince —a Yale undergraduate who had been killed just over a block from Schmidt's home—continued to affect the campus. Freshman applications dropped by 1,128; accepted applicants who chose Yale declined from 59 percent to 55.5 percent. And the Yale Daily News was hammering away: "The process [Schmidt] initiated to spur fiscal stability seems to be going in circles, and undermining confidence more the longer it goes on."

At the height of the crisis, it is rumored, Schmidt spoke with Vernon Loucks Jr., head of Yale's trustees, and mentioned the Whittle offer. "Take it," Loucks reportedly said.

" A totally, completely false story," says Schmidt. "That rumor is an example of how people create stories for their own delectation." Still, his resignation was such a well-kept secret in New Haven that only Loucks knew about it in advance. For that reason, the Yale community was miffed to discover that, four days before the announcement of Schmidt's departure, a New York Times reporter and photographer had been summoned to New Haven to interview Schmidt and Whittle and photograph them in the president's garden. The Edison Project's founding partners also had scant notice. "We found out three hours before Benno showed up for lunch," one says. "All I knew was that the head of the project was a man."

The media sweep that Whittle coordinated next seemed to take Schmidt very much by surprise. He sounded ill-prepared on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. In more extensive forums, he talked passionately about the educational crisis, but said nothing his listeners didn't already know. To some of the Edison team, it seemed curious that Whittle and Schmidt were being so available to the press so early in the development process. But none of the controversy seemed to hurt Whittle. "He loves the heat," a friend says. "He'll tell you himself: 'I'm just stirring the pot.' "

Schmidt seemed more vulnerable when I met with him in New York on a weekend afternoon in June. His town house is on one of the less fashionable streets in Carnegie Hill, and there are few frills inside—the water of choice is tap, the stairway carpet is so frayed it threatens to unravel, and the main event in the living room is the piano, on which his eleven-year-old daughter was practicing the "Pathetique." Clearly, the people who live here are animated by ideas, not objects.

In his garden, wearing an old polo shirt and khakis rolled at the ankles, Schmidt said he saw his Yale years not as a series of crises and defeats but as a record of difficult problems and hard-won achievements. He was able to leave, he said, because the capital campaign was ahead of schedule. Labor contracts in New Haven had been signed. The campus renovation had begun. The faculty had agreed to a more modest reduction in size. "I felt a sense of having accomplished a lot and created momentum and a window of calm," he told me. "I could say to a successor, 'I'm not handing you a university in difficulty.' And Chris Whittle is a very persuasive fellow."

On the issues ahead, he is, he said, still in the learning mode. Whittle's critics say the Edison schools can't open without government vouchers. Schmidt disagrees: "The case for this project is much easier to make if you're not diverting funds from the public-school system." Will Channel One be in the Edison Project schools? He doesn't know. Will there really be lots of technology and only an occasional visit from teachers? He can't say. All that's clear to him is that he's taking the biggest chance of his life.

In his office at the Seagram Building a few days later, Chris Whittle had all the certainty that Schmidt lacked. His office environment is organized and burnished: a rolltop desk hides his computer; a silver letter holder designed by Richard Meier is the only visible design element. Unless you count Whittle himself—in his blue suit pants, button-down shirt, signature bow tie, cashmere cardigan, and long hair, he comes across as a figure from a Frank Capra movie, Jimmy Stewart as C.E.O.

If this user-friendly image is a construct, it's brilliantly executed. Once, Whittle was considered enigmatic, even inscrutable. "After eight months," a former girlfriend says, "I still didn't feel I knew him." That description—and lingering charges that he's a snake-oil salesman—stung. Now, as long as you don't press him on forbidden topics like profits and salaries, he welcomes even the most aggressive questioning.

Announcing a chain of schools without a plan, for example, has struck many as somewhat rash—even arrogant. Not at all, says Whittle. "I have a lot of ambivalence," he told me. "I'm not paralyzed by it. I work every week with the same therapist I've been seeing since 1980. I see recurring themes. One is that I play on the cusp, which isn't to say on the edge."

If he's eager to proselytize for the Edison Project, perhaps it's because he alone sees no risk. "I wouldn't do this if it were very risky," he said. "Despite what's often said about me, I'm a very conservative financial player." Nor is he much concerned that, for more than a year, he put all his chips on a prospective team leader who kept turning him down. "It was clear to me that this was the most exciting position in American enterprise. We could have our pick. And I mean that literally— we could have gone anywhere in America and said, 'Come do this,' and people would have stood in line. Where else do you get a chance to provide an important social service, go on an enormous adventure, and simultaneously lead the largest business start-up in history?

"Now, if you'd asked me when I started if a college president—much less an Ivy League president—would head this, I'd have said no. Most presidents are very conservative. I couldn't imagine them as change agents. And this was going to be controversial—I learned that from Channel One. Whoever led this would have to be tough as nails and not be afraid to take a position. At Yale, when Benno spoke out against 'political correctness,' he demonstrated that. The fact that he ran a complex institution four times bigger than mine was another plus. But mostly Benno just seemed right."

What else seems right? Critics have suggested that Whittle hopes to make a quantum leap in his net worth by turning the Knoxville area into the next Silicon Valley. "There is going to be a Silicon Valley of education, and Knoxville could well be where it's based," he cheerfully admitted. "With Channel One, we've effectively built a national satellite system that will soon have 11,900 dishes in place. In effect, we've built an eight-million-seat system—and we may well double its size. That pipeline becomes a freeway to providers of educational software. I see a link between that pipeline and those providers. And Edison might be one of the big software providers."

Will Channel One be in his schools? "If I have anything to do with it, yes." Does he see further incursions of commercialism? Here, I touched a nerve. "Whittle Communications is no stranger to education. We have provided magazines and posters to schools since 1970, and they included advertising—that was how we funded them—and for twenty years there hasn't been a peep. The idea that I introduced advertising to schools with Channel One, I couldn't believe that. Any walk through schools will tell you that wasn't new." And he jumped up to show me his copy of a First Reader published by New Century Catholic Press in 1903 that had ads for Postum and Calumet baking powder in the back.

The charge that he's commercialized schools misses the point, Whittle says; so does the accusation that his schools will make students slaves of technology. The real revolution of the Edison Project, he insists, will be its improved "human dynamics." "Let's not be locked into the standard student-teacher ratios," he told me. "That rigidity—twenty-to-one, thirty-to-one, with the teacher in front—is part of the problem. With technology in place, the idea of 'teacher' will be expanded. Yes, we may have fewer paid teachers. Parents and students may do the great bulk of running the cafeteria—that's a big cost. Kids run McDonald's—why can't they run the cafeteria?" Whittle sees no reason why students shouldn't perform janitorial tasks also. "Critics say, You want kids to work for the school? Well, they clean schools in Japan. I say that by having students work and by getting each parent to give just two hours a week to the school you're giving teachers much more time to meet with kids one-on-one. That's a radical improvement right there."

Shaving costs and demanding parent participation are crucial for Whittle; building schools, stocking them with equipment, and developing a curriculum will drain all the capital he can raise. He's not, he insists, counting on the government for anything. "We absolutely must be able to run this business without vouchers,'' he told me. "You can't raise capital on the basis that the Wisconsin legislature might do something."

This point will confound some of Whittle's critics, who see his long-standing friendship with Lamar Alexander, the secretary of education, who was formerly governor of Tennessee, as the linchpin of the Edison venture. "Lamar Alexander's job is to produce vouchers," Herbert Kohl told me. Jonathan Kozol, the author and educational reformer, who has debated Whittle and finds him "an insufferably arrogant snot," goes a step further. Alexander's helping Whittle to get his hands on public money would be, he says, "the pedagogic version of insider trading."

To avoid what Whittle calls "hoopla that would hurt Lamar and us," he hasn't bid—even though "we might be the leading bidder' '—for funds the Bush administration is providing for its New American Schools initiative. In 1987, Whittle sold Alexander some much-sought-after stock in Whittle Communications for $10,000; a year later, just before Whittle sold half his interest in the company to what would become Time Warner, he bought the stock back for $330,000. Alexander also made $125,000 as a consultant for Tennessee Illustrated, the one magazine Whittle ever edited. After his confirmation as secretary of education, Alexander sold his Knoxville home—purchased about a year before for $570,000—to a Whittle executive for $977,500.

"Lamar received exactly what all the stockholders did," Whittle says. "The Senate committee went over this—and they had every desire to find something— and didn't come up with anything. Anyway, the sequence is all wrong. If I had a master plan, Lamar would make this money after the fact."

But the critical finger pointing at the Alexander-Whittle connection may, like so much of the debate about Whittle's projects, be misdirected. Education isn't funded at the national level; it's a state matter. And at the state level Whittle is a master strategist. His ability to make powerful connections has been one of the singular achievements of Channel One. And that suggests his field team and his wellfinanced lobbyists might not have much trouble getting state legislators to approve vouchers for the Edison schools.

As it happens, state educational codes prohibit charging public-school students for their education. In some states, parents and prosecutors have argued that forcing children to watch "free" news shows really makes them pay for this equipment. By that logic, local school districts violate state law when they sign up with Whittle. In states with centralized bureaucracies—like New York, which has banned Channel One in public schools, and California, where public schools can sign up for Channel One but get less state funding if they do so—this is a potent argument. (In California, Whittle has so far spent about $600,000 in vain on lawyers and lobbyists. He may need to spend more: the Fort Worth, Texas, school system recently voted to shut out Channel One, and others are poised to do the same.) In states that aren't so rich, Whittle's field operatives have a remarkable record of success.

In North Carolina, for example, Whittle's sales force persuaded a small-town school system to sign up for Channel One. The state sued Whittle and the school board—and lost. "Before we got to court, Whittle staged an intense lobbying effort," North Carolina senior deputy attorney general Edwin Speas told me. "He hired one of the largest law firms in the Southeast. They were very successful in changing this from a legislative debate about the use of students for profit to a debate about local control of public schools—and in today's environment, local control is a hot issue. In my opinion, the state supreme court was substantially influenced by Whittle's success in the legislature."

Ross Perot, on the other hand, was not so impressed by Channel One. Early on, he had joined Whittle's board of advisers, but began to reconsider, late last year, when critics of Channel One bombarded him with some of its programs and study guides. Perhaps the straitlaced Perot was unhappy to discover that Channel One not only discussed R-rated movies but showed clips from them. He may also have been displeased to find himself on the back of a teaching guide that had Pee-wee Herman on the cover. In January, although Whittle asked him to hold off, Perot resigned. Whittle finessed his departure by eliminating the entire board of advisers. This is not to say that Perot and Whittle don't value the same executive style. Hamilton Jordan, president of Whittle Books since 1991, has taken a leave to co-manage Perot's campaign.

Perhaps the straitlaced Perot was unhappy to discover that Channel One not only discussed R-rated movies but showed clips from them.

"T f I had five or ten favorite students, X Chris would be among them," says Richard Marius, director of Harvard's expository-writing program, as he looks back over his thirty years as a teacher. "I met him in 1965, when he was a freshman at Tennessee and I was teaching there. I never would have called him an intellectual; it was Phil Moffitt who had the triphammer intelligence. But what a lovely kid—immensely popular, with a smile that lit up the room. In 1968, I remember, the university refused to let Dick Gregory speak on campus. Eleven of us sued. It was a wild time—I slept with a revolver under my pillow. Chris doesn't like to talk about it now, but as president of the student body, he was very helpful to us."

Whittle's character changed in the intervening years, Marius believes. Success had something to do with it, and isolation from common experience, and, he suspects, a desire to take a proven ability to make money and transform it into Great Works. "Look at his pictures now," he says. "He's somber, serious. It makes me sad; he looks like a stuffy guy pretending to solve the problems of America. And this Edison Project! The president of Yale signing on is like the president of the United States quitting to join the Mafia—such a disappointment, such a loss of civic virtue."

Marius has missed something about Chris Whittle: the last time he had to sell himself directly to his customers was when he ran for student office at Tennessee. Since then, he's built his empire by changing the rules of the game—getting most other magazines out of doctors' offices so his could reign supreme, keeping most other ad-driven shows off Channel One equipment, delivering his single-advertiser books directly to targeted consumers.

Education's a different proposition. Whittle wants parents to pay him to admit their children to his schools—and then "volunteer' ' their time as teacher's aides— so he can make a profit; that's not quite the same thing as John F. Kennedy asking Americans to join the Peace Corps. Meanwhile, educators may well become more organized in their resistance to the Edison Project. "He'll see opposition he never imagined," a school reformer says. "Administrators who have taken all his technology will fight any attempt to give public money to private enterprise."

All this suggests that the man who will have to make the Edison Project appealing to the public isn't Schmidt but Whittle. Schmidt we can understand: he's an honorable careerist who responded to mid-life twinges of idealism. Whittle remains mysterious, opaque. If he doesn't become a clearer, less controversial figure before he asks 150,000 parents to commit their children to schools they will have a hard time envisioning, it's completely possible that Benno Schmidt will, once again, have to change jobs to get back into education.