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The Yale Alumni Magazine welcomes readers' letters, which should be sent to: Letters Editor, Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905; via fax to (203) 432-0683; or via e-mail to: YAM@yale.edu. Due to the volume of correspondence, we are unable to respond to or publish all mail received. Letters accepted for publication are subject to editing. Unless correspondents request otherwise, e-mail addresses will be published for letters received electronically. |
Letters The Birth Goes On Although
reformers like Inky Clark and Kingman Brewster no doubt changed
the face of Yale ("The Birth
of a New Institution," Dec.), Geoffrey Kabaservice's suggestion
that their efforts verily threw open the doors of the University
(and of other similarly "elite" institutions) to students
of underprivileged backgrounds is fantastically misleading. That
Yale still enrolls a disproportionate number of private secondary
school graduates (more than 40 percent of each class) suggests that
the old adage about the University's idea of diversity -- namely,
boarding a rich kid from California with one from New York -- still
obtains. This is hardly surprising when one notes that Clark, the
"radical" progressive of Kabaservice's article and the
"father" of modern Yale, left New Haven to become the
headmaster of the Horace Mann School, perhaps Manhattan's most exclusive
preparatory academy.
I date back to 1934, as far as Yale is concerned, when I entered the freshman class and stayed on until 1941 getting a law degree in addition to my BA. During that time and up to now, I have been a regular reader of the Yale Alumni Magazine; but never, I repeat, never, in those 58 years have I read an article equal to, or even close to "The Birth of a New Institution." Since I was editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News in 1937-38, I am especially grateful to you for straightening out my memories. I am also appreciative that you gave such a positive report and published such an appropriate article on my friend, Kingman Brewster. I knew him and Whitney Griswold extremely well. I also had some contact with Arthur Howe, but very little with Inslee Clark. You have even straightened me out with respect to all of them! Anyhow,
I had never read a more thoughtful and important article in
the Yale Alumni Magazine.
I look forward to Geoffrey Kabaservice's biography of Kingman Brewster,
a man who, in my opinion, deserves a definitive and accurate recording
of his contributions to Yale University. Without him, I fear, it
is almost accurate to say that Yale would never have even begun
its efforts to become one of our country's most prestigious institutions
in higher education.
Thank
you for the article on Inky Clark and Kingman Brewster's efforts
to reshape the student body at Yale. The programs and policies these
men established changed three lives. My cousins JoseGiron '66, Arturo
Giron '74, and I had absolutely nothing, and now we are respectively
a doctor, a Peace Corps country director, and a college professor.
All this we owe to a very brave decision to change Yale into a place
that made things possible for its students instead of one that merely
confirmed their place in the world. Thank you, Yale, and don't ever
look back.
After reading Geoffrey Kabaservice's disparagement of A. Whitney Griswold and beatification of Kingman Brewster, I knew the reason why extracurricular life at Yale was so much more attractive in the 1950s than in my son's undergraduate era in the 1980s. Like Lenin, Brewster was a social engineer who indeed changed the environment under his jurisdiction. And like Russia after its revolution, Yale after Brewster took on a drab, austere lifestyle. Brewster denigrated fraternities with meaningless pejoratives like "elitist," and put them temporarily out of existence. But compare nursing a fine brandy over billiards after a delicious steak at the DKE house to, in later times, dyspeptically wolfing deli lunch meat in a bleak activity room at a residential college. Or contrast the upbeat appearance created by the coat-and-tie dress code of the 1950s to the post-Brewster years, when campus fashions resemble casual day in a county jail. The preppy majority of the 1950s (so evidently displeasing to Brewster) generated the pride in contemporary Yale students of having at one time the best college swimming team in the nation, and at another of competing in the same league with the country's best college football team, Princeton (also largely comprised of preppies). Now the Yale team sweats a game with Valparaiso. Thanks
for the memories, President Griswold, and for providing happy, golden,
bygone, non-ideological days, when individuals were just individuals
and were not judged or classified in WASP or minority categories
or by their socioeconomic status. The general atmosphere was, comparatively
speaking, quite pleasant.
I recall Inslee Clark well from my application process. I presume that he was on the admissions staff before he became director in 1965, because I was a senior at Poly Prep in Brooklyn, New York, when Clark paid a visit in the fall of 1963 and pitched Yale to a group of prospective applicants. I don't believe we even had a visit from Harvard or Princeton, though it's possible Clark was charismatic enough to make the memory of any others fade. Four of us ended up at Yale. That was a lot from Poly to be interested in Yale, and certainly a lot to be accepted (and three of the four of us were Jewish). Later, as a Yale student, I was walking on campus when Clark crossed the street to greet me. With warmth, he asked, "John, how are you enjoying Yale?" I was so flattered that he remembered my face and name from a group interview over a year earlier. I was
a solid student, but by no means famous (we had Olympic athletes
in the class), so I've always assumed Clark remembered, and greeted,
all (or at least most) of the applicants whom he'd met and then
accepted. He wasn't just an innovative administrator sitting in
an office, focusing on policy -- he was a great guy.
For the record, I wish to point out that Yale has traditionally accepted and nurtured prospective scholars from any quarter. Do not lay this credit at the feet of Kingman Brewster; it was already at Yale when Brewster was a freshman in the fall of 1937. When Brewster had been at Yale barely two months, I applied to Yale, asking for a regional scholarship. It was a period of deep Depression -- my family had no money to send me to college, or for much of anything else! Yale did not ask me my race, my religion, my finances -- Yale asked only for my high (not prep) school grades and activities. My high school had graduated 20,000 students -- none had gone to Yale (few to any college). I had never been within 80 miles of New Haven; I had no Yale connections; I never knew a Yale graduate. I knew only that Yale was a great place to learn. Yale did not know if I was black or white (no pictures, no interview); nor if I was Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or agnostic (no questions were asked). Yale figured (they must have) only that I could learn. I was offered a regional tuition scholarship and a 21-hours-per-week job in Commons for my board. I came; I studied; I worked. I earned (Yale gave me the opportunity) 100 percent of my college expenses, and after junior year I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Yale has forever offered opportunity to anyone who would work hard to achieve. Yale asked nothing about me except, "Could I perform? Could I make it?" I am convinced that has been Yale's attitude forever -- even before Kingman Brewster, as I was. I am
sure there are men going back to 1701 who would say the same thing.
In regard to Geoffrey Kabaservice's piece on the Brewster years, herewith a personal recollection that may be a useful addition. I was requested by President Brewster to return to Yale in the summer of 1972 to help in establishing a new office of public information, of which I would be the first director. In July and August, most of the Yale faculty and the administration were gone on vacations, and all but a few students had already departed. It was good time for me to rummage through files and do some research. Shortly after I moved into temporary quarters above a garage on Hillhouse Avenue, Mr. Brewster called me one morning from Martha's Vineyard and reported that he was coming down to New Haven for a few days. He suggested that we have dinner that evening. We went to a steak house not far from New Haven, ordered drinks, and started to talk. The conversation lasted several hours. It was, in fact, almost midnight when I came back to my apartment. Before I turned in, I made notes on our discussion. It seemed at first that he was briefing me on some of the undercurrents of the administrative task, but after a while the subjects became free-ranging. Somewhere along the way, he asked me if I had any questions about my responsibilities. In that context, I inquired about the reaction of the alumni to his policies over the preceding nine years. He gave me what soon became a very familiar rueful smile, and then replied quite specifically. On the so-called "troubles" of 1969 and his letter to the faculty (which was almost instantly leaked to the press) regarding the Black Panther trial in New Haven, he said, "I probably placed too great a burden on the word 'skeptical.'" On coeducation, which had caused some stormy debates, he reaffirmed his conviction that admitting women to Yale College was essential to a healthy undergraduate life and to the learning process, even if some alumni who opposed coeducation apparently had no mothers, sisters, wives, or daughters to reckon with. On diversity, which began to grow swiftly just after World War II when the GI Bill permitted qualified students to enter Yale who otherwise could not have afforded to come, Brewster told me that greater diversity and a "need-blind" admissions policy were logical and direct consequences of the "pursuit of excellence." Students, he had often said, informally learn as much or more from each other as they do in the classroom. When I asked about personal hostility towards him as "a traitor to his class," he paused. Then, that smile again. He said, "I might wake up tomorrow morning, or next week, or next month, and decide that it is time for me to leave because I am no longer able to do my job well. But I believe alumni loyalty to the great Blue Mother will triumph -- because excellence will triumph." (I had not heard the affectionate sobriquet, Blue Mother, before that evening.) About five years later, Kingman Brewster accepted an appointment as U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. During those years, I occasionally wondered whether his faith in a democracy of opportunity, and an aristocracy of excellence, was misplaced. I no
longer do.
I was fascinated by the behind-the-scenes drama about admission policies, which played out in the 1960s. As an undergraduate, I apparently slipped in under the radar screen of the old policy, being a public school student of modest Midwestern circumstances. As a graduate student, I witnessed the admissions watershed from the vantage point of serving as a freshman counselor. The Inky Clark classes were distinctly different: more diverse, less affluent, more focused, and definitely less preppy. Many freshmen also arrived already possessed of an established gift, whether in music, science, the arts, or athletics. The only downside I saw was that some students focused on their specialty to the exclusion of other opportunities at the University. My modest contribution as a counselor was to implore each student to take at least one "cross-training" course in an unrelated subject. I recall pushing in particular Professor Vincent Scully's art history, Professor John Blum's in 20th-century history course, and a number of American Studies courses. Most
counselees took my advice, often acknowledging afterwards that such
courses provided stimulating insights for their primary courses
of study. Apparently, that elusive quality of "well- roundedness"
can be learned, not just inherited.
This so-so Yale undergraduate, throughout his four years, often thought about his advantages not shared by countless others much worthier than himself. That is not commendable. It is only the truth. After Yale, this same graduate purposely infiltrated unfamiliar circles to meet, get to know, and make friends with other human beings not blessed, as was he. Mr. Brewster and Mr. Clark did not have to propel this graduate in any direction. It is not so much what Mr. Brewster or Mr. Clark did, as it was the way they did it. They polarized the issue of change. Now (and for some time to come) at Yale there are the haves and have nots. As is
the benign destiny of America, time or some other natural force
will make of the haves a whole. Sadly, the two good men who were
responsible for the change might well have accomplished their objectives
sooner had they not tried to do so with such heavy hands.
Tunes With a Past Judith Ann Schiff's flashback on "Die Wacht am Rhein" and "Bright College Years" reminded me of a scene in the classic Bogart film Casablanca: A bunch of Nazi officers sing the German version in Rick's, and are then outbellowed by a bunch of French (Vichy) officers, still patriots at heart, with their "Marseillaise." It also reminded me how poor traditional American institutional music would be without its borrowings from the German, of which "Bright College Years" is only one example. I had a rather eerie sensation recently when, at a mixed Jewish/Gentile wedding reception for a relative, the concert musicians hired for the occasion struck up the lovely Haydn hymn, "Austria," still occasionally heard in church. This piece was notorious during the Kaiser and Hitler years as "Deutschland uber Alles." (It had been the Austrian national anthem, but the Germans swiped it.) Shorn of its more chauvinistic lines, it remains the German national anthem as "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit." It was sung when the Berlin Wall came down some years ago, and some American television commentators mistakenly referred to it as the old "Deutschland uber Alles." Not all the traffic has been one-way. "Heil Kaiser Dir" is a direct steal from "God Save the King/Queen," as, of course, is "My Country 'Tis of Thee." In the early 1900s, a German-American student at Harvard wrote a number of football songs for that institution. The student, Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl (whose mother was a Sedgwick from the old Connecticut and Massachusetts family), later became a prominent Hitler supporter and fund- raiser, and directed foreign press relations for the Nazi Party in the early years of its rule. In the Nazi victory parade on Unter den Linden after Hitler took power, SA brownshirts marched to one of Herr Hanfstaengl's Harvard band pieces. (Hanfstaengl fled Germany before the Second World War and wound up in the United States with the help of a New York Harvard Club pal from the old days, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.) I once
suggested to the Harvard alumni magazine that it take a look at
Hanfstaengl's/Harvard football's musical contributions to Nazi Germany.
So far as I know, however, this bit of scholarship remains untackled.
The Buckley Touch Your recent article, "Who's Teaching Whom?" (Sum.), reminded me of how fortunate I was the first semester of my freshman year at Yale to have had William F. Buckley Jr. (who was then in his junior year) as my undergraduate instructor for an intensive introductory five-times-a-week conversational Spanish course. Bill Buckley was an outstanding classroom teacher -- though it was always unnerving when he came through the cafeteria line at Davenport College (where he lived, and where I was then working as a freshman bursary boy) and caught me by surprise with a greeting delivered in a rapid-fire burst of Spanish (accompanied by his inimitable pterodactyl smile). Many years later, on the only post-Yale occasion when I was in his presence (at a reception in Los Angeles preceding a dinner at which he was to be a guest speaker), I thought it would be a nice surprise for him when I tapped his shoulder and, as he turned around, said to him (in my best Spanish, of course) something to the effect of "Mr. Buckley, one of your old students still remembers your Yale Spanish class with pleasure and with gratitude." When
I did so, he turned around and looked at me for only the briefest
moment before responding (in impeccable Spanish, of course), "Senor
Stamm -- how nice to see you again!"
Re-Directed Studies Simon
Rodberg '00, in his well-documented suggestion for expanding Directed
Studies ("College Comment,"
Nov.), exhibits a more mature mentality than one would expect
from an undergraduate. He praises the course greatly but convincingly
urges broadening it to include more non-European examples. May I
suggest that he be considered for a professorship to help direct
that additional approach. Yale need not worry about its reputation
as long as it produces Simon Rodbergs.
I applaud Simon Rodberg for his grasp of the history of worldwide intellectual traditions. It is certainly a prescient college student who can understand life in the context of everything. Most of us struggle to find truth and meaning simply in the context of our own Western intellectual tradition. Mr. Rodberg's commentary is nothing less than an attack on the very foundations of American liberal arts education. Mr. Rodberg also repeats the oft-heard lament that liberal arts universities such as Yale spend so much time talking only about white males. His implication is that somehow it is the fault of today's educators that this is so. In reality, this is so simply because -- for whatever reason, good or bad -- the vast majority of influential thinkers in our Western tradition have been white males. If Martin Luther just happened to have been a black woman, we most certainly would be studying her today. With this in mind, it would be curious if we didn't spend most of our time studying white males. To do otherwise would be to invent history. Perhaps
Mr. Rodberg is right, and Yale needs a new, broader directed program.
It could be a wonderful marketing tool for the University. "In
four short years, study and analyze the totality of human intellectual
endeavor!" We might call it Undirected Studies. |
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Yale
Alumni Magazine, PO Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905. USA.
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