The Yale Corporation, the school's governing board, met with about 70 undergraduates in a breakfast meeting and discussed what qualification the school's new leader should possess.

Among the issues raised were whether the future president should be a current affiliate of Yale, or whether he could come from a background in business or politics.

No short list has yet surfaced for a successor to former Yale President Benno C. Schmidt, though the New York Daily News recently reported that Gov. Mario M. Cuomo was a possibility.

A Yale spokesperson termed it an interesting rumor, but an official in the governor's office judged it unlikely.

Stanford Business School Dean A. Michael Spence, formerly the faculty dean at Harvard, has also been mentioned as a possible candidate.

Schmidt announced he was resigning last spring to lead an effort to design private elementary schools. His six-year tenure at the New Haven school was often punctuated by rocky relations with students.

"Where's Benno?" became a popular refrain of students and faculty who criticized his frequent absences from campus. Schmidt lived in New York City and commuted to Yale.

Students at the meeting last week debated how much time the new president should be forced to spend in New Haven.

Committee to Examine Science Courses

In other news at the financially strapped college, the new dean of the college has named a committee to investigate the quality of science classes for non-science majors.

Dean Donald Engelman created the committee to examine whether the courses are too easy and whether they're taking at all.

Yale undergraduates generally think they're pretty easy.