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What's Love Got To Do With It?
February
2001
by Ted Gray '72
When
I was young, I fell passionately in
love with a beautiful, older enchantress.
Initially she was extremely demanding and challenged me to the limits
of my capabilities. This tough-love experience consumed me to the
point of dominating my entire life for four years. She sparked an
unquenchable love of learning and encouraged excellence in all endeavors
from the athletic fields to the chemistry lab. Under her influence
I grew steadily as I experienced the failures and victories of daily
life. Her values and high standards became mine, and I paid for
them with the proverbial blood, sweat, and tears.
In return, I was
comforted by her enduring embrace and rewarded with opportunities new to a boy
from the sparsely settled Southwest. She gave me my first opera and introduced
me to the classics and Dante and DNA. Along the way, her family became my family,
and I met many wonderful and diverse people. The acquired knowledge was both academic
and pragmatic. We took a walk on the wild side, and I suffered my first hangover.
Born in a time before ethnic food became universally available, I encountered
pizza for the first time at the age of 18. I soon learned that one does not carry
a large Naples pizza under one's arm -- vertically. After gravity had worked its
deleterious voodoo on the warm cheese, I also discovered that the cruelty of roommates
could be boundless and undying.
I parted from her
company for a time, but as a token of our association she gave me a one-page document,
in Latin, assuring me that in spite of my scarecrow concerns, I really did have
a brain. At critical points in later life, this scrap of parchment sustained my
self-confidence and maintained my moral compass. Because you are bright and also
because you share in some way my experience, you know that the 300-year- old lady's
name is Yale. She changed my life forever.
Last June, I completed
seven years as a delegate to the Association of Yale Alumni -- four on the Board
of Directors, the final one as Treasurer. A friend at AYA recently asked me why
I had volunteered. My first inclination was to mumble a superficial and unsophisticated
response explaining that it had been "enormous fun." This impulse reminded me
that a respected professor had once observed about my written work: "Keen grasp
of the obvious!"
On reflecting a moment
further, I realized that the real reason I became active with the alumni organization
was to reestablish ties with Yale. From my first trip back to New Haven as one
of 300 AYA delegates, the experience was exciting and invigorating. I found great
satisfaction interacting with other Yalies who ranged in age from 18 to over 80.
The AYA staff was suffused with energetic people perpetually eager to explain
and assist. Getting reacquainted with current students, the professoriate, and
the administration was refreshing, thought-provoking, and reassuring. Yale has
130,000 living graduates, and the work of helping them maintain a lifetime interactive
connection to the University was a delightful and rewarding challenge.
As a middle-aged
alumnus from a distant location who spent a great deal of time on campus in recent
years, how do I evaluate Yale's current situation? By nature, I would rather render
constructive criticism than parrot platitudes. However, when I consider the significant
improvements I have witnessed at Yale, the University's strengths far outweigh
the remaining weaknesses. The trends are good. In the last decade the University
has significantly increased its endowment, assembled a highly competent administration, enhanced the already prestigious faculty, rebuilt the physical plant and undertaken
the addition of needed facilities, honed the admissions process to select an exemplary
student body, strengthened the graduate schools, and even fielded a winning football
team.
Why did
I get involved? Yale is an invaluable multinational resource. She
produces leaders, artists, scholars, doers, and thinkers. Our alumni
have an impact on the world. No less important, we make a difference
in our local communities, service organizations, religious institutions,
and any other place that people of good character and willing hearts
should be found. I believe Yale, its people, and its ideas matter
and deserve our continuing support. And that is why I did what I
did. I did it for love! |
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