Symphony on His Shoulders : Ex-UCSD Chancellor Carries Batons as Fund-Raiser, Mediator and Savior, but Time May Run Out Today

At a small, private dinner on a cool January night, local developer George Gildred turned to his friend, William McGill, and asked for help: Can you get involved? Can you help the San Diego Symphony? McGill remembers that seated nearby was Mayor Maureen O’Connor, who echoed Gildred’s sentiments.

The dinner, held at the private Tambo de Oro club overlooking downtown San Diego, was in honor of New York Mayor Ed Koch, who failed to show. Koch’s last-minute cancellation may have been a source of embarrassment to city officials, who had advertised his arrival. But it may yet benefit an unexpected recipient: the symphony.

As O’Connor press secretary Paul Downey later explained: “With Koch there, the focus would have been on him. As it was, Gildred and O’Connor could turn their attention elsewhere--specifically, to the symphony, and what the man seated between them could do to help.”

The man seated between them was William J. McGill, 65, the former chancellor of UC San Diego and a past president of Columbia University. He has had a seat on or directed the boards of AT&T;, Occidental Petroleum and McGraw-Hill publishing company. He headed President Carter’s Commission for a National Agenda for the ‘80s. He’s also a devotee of classical music.

Mayor Requests His Help

O’Connor, who had long admired McGill for his skill in handling student unrest at UCSD in the 1960s, asked him to mediate the labor dispute between symphony musicians and the San Diego Symphony Assn. The two sides had barely spoken since management locked out the musicians in November and canceled the winter season. Within weeks, McGill led them to a verbal agreement, albeit one without signatures.

It was not the first time that McGill had become involved in a labor dispute involving musicians. His father was a jazz musician, a leader in the New York musicians’ union. The elder McGill was so embittered over the poor pay doled out to musicians that he forbade his son to play a musical instrument--a fact the son remembers not just sadly, but resentfully.

Now his role is changing, and today could be momentous in the history of an orchestra that first performed in 1910. The symphony association has set today as the deadline for funding the fall season. If the money isn’t raised--and so far it hasn’t been--chances are that yet another season will have to be canceled. That would be three straight, including the 1987 Summer Pops.

Can the symphony board survive three strikes and not be out? Will the orchestra play again--under its name, San Diego Symphony, under the banner of Symphony Hall? McGill finds himself grappling with these questions. Since he has handled the labor dispute, what role remains?

Why is he still involved?

‘Unrewarding Service’

“Good question,” he said with a laugh, chewing on a toothpick during a recent interview in his office in the Psychology and Linguistics Building, which overlooks the Muir College campus at UCSD. “It’s certainly not by choice. I wouldn’t do it unless (O’Connor) were insisting on it. This is very unrewarding volunteer service.”

Having untied the labor knot, McGill has since devoted himself to raising funds. He’s still trying, as is O’Connor, and he readily confesses that neither has had much luck. Recently, he has been asked to assume a larger task--plot a course for the city’s oldest cultural institution. He does so at a time when symphonies all over the country are failing, and locally, amid doubts over a controversial board.

The credentials he brings are impressive. From his native New York, he came to La Jolla in 1965 to teach psychology at UCSD. He’s a research psychologist, with expertise in the field of mathematical psychology. In 1968, he became chancellor, at a time of unparalleled student unrest. His foes during a stormy and brief tenure ranged from Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver to then-Gov. Ronald Reagan.

Two years later, he returned to New York as president of his alma mater, which was ravaged by student unrest, not to mention a $16-million debt. During his tenure at Columbia, McGill endeared himself to some, alienated himself from others, and apparently affected no one indifferently.

Some examples:

- Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s magazine, who covered McGill while a student journalist at Columbia: “He’s very tough, hardheaded on labor and very political. But I like him.”

- Moe Foner, a noted labor organizer in New York City who opposed McGill during two bitter strikes involving university clerical help: “He doesn’t come in with his hands clean at all. In the course of a labor dispute, he always sides with management.”

- Arthur Krim, chairman of Orion Pictures Corp., who was chairman of Columbia’s Board of Trustees during McGill’s tenure: “He was an absolutely terrific president for the university. He did such a magnificent job of preparation and elimination of all of our problems.”

Krim said that McGill almost single-handedly wiped out Columbia’s debt and saved the venerable Ivy League institution from financial ruin.

He said no better man than McGill could have fallen into the dreams of the San Diego Symphony.

“If I were on either side, I would choose him instantly,” Krim said.

McGill appreciates the praise but remains uneasy about being called a “savior”--especially in the latest task.

Nervous About Dependence

“I’m a little nervous about both sides (the symphony association and unionized musicians) depending on me so heavily,” he said. “My approach is to help them help themselves. In other words, I reject the role of savior.”

But many are counting on McGill for just that--saving the symphony, which hasn’t operated in six months.

As much as they hate to admit it, both sides in the symphony dispute need each other desperately--and say so privately. But neither side needs the other as much as they both need McGill.

A source among the musicians, who asked not to be quoted by name, said, “He’s our last hope--he’s it, the last straw. We don’t care whether he had a lousy record with labor in New York. At this point, he’s all we’ve got. To play or not to play--that’s the only question left.”

McGill was angry when musicians “refused to accept binding arbitration (an O’Connor proposal, quickly rejected) and fired a few salvos about my labor record at Columbia.”

“That,” he said, his bushy white eyebrows arching as he leaned back in his office chair, “was unwise. I don’t have a problem with labor.”

Good Relationships

McGill said he has established an “excellent working relationship” with musicians’ attorney Liza DuBrul, who is based in New York. He said he has an equally good relationship with symphony board President Herbert J. Solomon and Executive Director Wesley O. Brustad.

Solomon said McGill had been fair with him, and added, “I think I feel comfortable in saying he’s a man of outstanding reputation and the highest credentials, and I am hopeful that his efforts will be productive on behalf of the symphony for the benefit of the entire community.”

Both critics and admirers say McGill’s stand on issues is hard to pin down. One moment he can be deflating Eldridge Cleaver and the next welcoming to Herbert Marcuse. He has jawboned with President Reagan, of whom he said, “He’s one of the toughest, most forceful, meanest, nastiest politicians you could ever hope to meet.”

But McGill is no stranger to Corporate America or major boards of directors--many of whom support Reagan unequivocally. It is precisely these ties that may yield the symphony a philanthropic umbrella in the future.

In one breath, he will say the musicians were wrong to get uppity with him; in the next, he calls them indispensable to a city’s culture.

Concern for Jobs

“I’m very concerned about the musicians’ jobs,” he said with passion. “It seems to me mistakes have been made (on the part of symphony management), and the net result is, these talented people aren’t working.

“If allowed to go on even for a short time, say, a year, it creates a situation where we export some very capable people elsewhere, because we haven’t the means of employing them.”

McGill says he sympathizes with the financial plight of the musicians.

“For those who aren’t in a position to go where they wish, to sit in a lead chair with another group, these are people simply without income,” he said. “And that’s wrong .”

McGill is guarded in comments about symphony management, except for one major beef--today’s deadline.

“What do you do if you miss it?” he said angrily. “Give up? All this stuff about a deadline is puzzling to me. The last thing I want to do is get into the framework the symphony was in two years ago.” Then, the symphony raised $2.4 million in a crisis campaign and soon found itself nearly $1 million in debt.

Symphony’s Deadlines

“Those deadlines are coming out of the symphony--not out of me,” he said. “I’m governed by the need to get them on sound footing. It may take a week; it may take six months. The first and most important thing is money; the second, a good, sound business plan. At the moment, we haven’t got either.”

Can a fall season be expected?

“Ask me in July,” he said.

O’Connor has asked McGill to form a committee to investigate symphony dealings over a five-year period and air them in public. She has also asked him to devise a fiscal blueprint to deal not only with a $1.5-million operating debt, but with the vagaries of the future. What’s needed, McGill said, is a reputation for excellence, a philanthropic pipeline and a bridge to the business elite. At the moment, he said, none of those is in evidence.

He calls it deplorable that, for years, the symphony played before empty seats, both at Civic Theatre and Symphony Hall. He advocates a plan taken up in Kansas City, Mo., where schoolchildren and visiting firefighters are given seats as gestures of good will--in the hope of cultivating ticket buyers .

McGill refuses to believe that symphony board President Solomon and all his predecessors are evil men, as symphony musicians insist in fits of pique. He concedes that the board has made mistakes--some serious, others drastic--but denies that any constitute “chicanery.” Still, he believes the symphony board lacks the acumen of professional business minds. Otherwise, he asks, why would their finances look so grim?

Hedges on Resignation Issue

Will he ask the board to resign--as they offered to do last month?

He hedges on his answer but does say that a powerful elite of San Diego’s best business minds must have a say in future decisions. Such people will be added to the board--or, they will simply replace it.

“If the board resigns soon, I would see it as a personal step that they feel compelled to take,” he said. “If the board can take any steps at all to rehabilitate the symphony, solve its financial problems, then they ought to continue. If it were me, I would see if I could play a role in the new scheme. If I couldn’t, I’d get the hell out.”

McGill said he doesn’t have the power to fire the board, as symphony reorganizers have in Dallas and other cities.

“Dealing in the realm of personalities and egos, you have to proceed with great sensitivity,” he said. “I don’t think it’s wise to talk of sweeping out the board in the absence of any misfeasance.”

McGill still is puzzled about exactly how he signed on for all of this.

“I’m supposed to be in genteel retirement,” he said. “I started out thinking I’d arbitrate a dispute for 30 days. Then I changed my sights and decided I’d raise money. Now, as I’m unpeeling the onion, it goes much deeper. What’s required is a broad-scale, fundamental, systematic effort. A lot of work.”

Put simply, McGill said the symphony no longer reflects the city it embraces. San Diego has changed radically, he said, from the sleepy little Navy town he came to in 1965 looking for refuge from Manhattan. He never found it.

“In those days,” he said, “San Diego was very old-fashioned. It wasn’t the gung-ho, high-tech yuppie community you find today. The professionals we have here, their tastes are different from the folks of 25 years ago. The symphony doesn’t seem to realize that.

“Wouldn’t the new breed want to help in the building of the arts--in a symphony renaissance? How long do I think this will take? One year, two? I’d say five, minimum. We’re talking a major overhaul.

“But somehow, we’ve got to do it. Don’t we deserve more than the Padres, the Chargers and the America’s Cup? When are we gonna get started?”