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Quarrels with Providence
In
anticipation of the University's 300th birthday, one of America's
leading essayists embarked on an intensely personal journey in search
of the beliefs on which Yale stands. What he discovered was a foundation
for dissent -- regardless of affiliation -- that apparently
remains as solid today as it was in Jonathan Edwards's day. In other
words, when Yale isn't perfect, it is going to the dogs -- often
simultaneously.
by Lewis Lapham '56
March 2001 -- Special Tercentennial Edition
Lewis
Lapham '56 won the National Magazine Award in 1995 for essays and
criticism. The author of nine books, among them Money and Class
in America, he has been the editor of Harper's Magazine since 1983.
During
the winter of 1992 Yale University was passing through one of its
periodic seasons of discontent,
and the general run of newspaper headlines seeping out of New Haven
supported the impression of a once-high citadel of ancient learning
reduced to a hollow ruin. The dean of the College departed in February,
apparently in protest over the disrespect being shown to the relics
of Western civilization, and in March the provost was forced to
resign by a resentful faculty whose salaries he had attempted to eliminate or decrease; the Gay and Lesbian Alliance was posting
manifestos on the classroom doors.
As a
graduate of Yale I read the reports with more attention than I might
have brought to similar dispatches from Harvard or Brown, and it
wasn't as if I'd expected the news to be good. For at least ten
years, I had been listening to various members of the New York literary
crowd tell travelers' tales about going to Yale to speak to the
undergraduates and finding a lost world overgrown with the weeds
of multicultural ignorance
and cant, the groves of academe strangled with the vines of political
correctness. Most of the correspondents added to the burden of the
University's sorrows the sum of the crime and poverty in the city
of New Haven. If it wasn't prudent to utter the name of Aristotle
within 1,000 yards of Harkness Tower, neither was it altogether
safe to walk after dark beyond the perimeter of the walled courtyards
without the protection of the campus
police.
Even
so, and contrary to the prevailing opinion, I assumed that matters
probably were not as grim as they could be made to seem in eight-point
type. I knew enough about the troubles in progress at most
of the country's institutions of higher learning to know that money
was always short, the faculty often restive, and the students usually
glad of the chance to parade their virtue. But in the second week
of April I received a letter from Benno Schmidt, then the President
of Yale, prompting me to think that the confusion around the tables
down at Mory's was a good deal
worse than maybe I had inferred. The letter surprised me because
Schmidt apparently had gone to the trouble of typing it himself,
on a plain sheet of paper unadorned with the University's seal.
Never before had I received any communication from a Yale President
other than the annual requests, handsomely printed on heavy stationery,
for sums of money so far beyond my means that I seldom read the
second sentence. And yet here was Schmidt, addressing me as a "valued
alumnus and particular friend of Yale," inviting me to New Haven
in a month's time to attend a fund-raising event that he billed
as a "fanfare" for $1.5 billion, promising band music, a multimedia
slide show, and viewings of the Gutenberg Bible.
Although
pleased to have been summoned to so grand an occasion, I figured
that a secretary in Woodbridge Hall had made a mistake with one
of the alumni lists. My connection to the College was as tenuous
as my acquaintance with Schmidt. It was true that I was a member
of the Class of
1956; true also that I once had taught a seminar in Calhoun
College on the art of reading newspapers. But I didn't go to the
Harvard games and knew as little about the disputes within the English
department as I knew about the triumphs of the University's bond
portfolio or the sorrows of its fencing team. From my graduation
I had carried away none of the memorabilia likely to certify my standing as an Old Blue, and if by no reach
of anybody's imagination could I be classified as a valued alumnus
or particular friend of Yale, I assumed that my induction into the
company of the elect meant that an alarmingly large number of the
University's more reliable patrons had either moved to Switzerland
or died intestate.
On reaching
New Haven late on the afternoon of May 2, I half expected to find
the students pushing wheel barrows filled with the plaster remnants
of Greco-Roman portrait busts, but the once-familiar buildings were
much as I'd left them in the spring of 1956 -- somehow smaller than
I'd remembered but otherwise unharmed, and among the several hundred
alumni gathered for the fanfare in Woolsey Hall the mood was upbeat
and exuberant. Schmidt bounded out onto the stage in a burst of
strobe light, boyish and grinning and eager to please, and when
he said that Yale had received -- "this very afternoon" -- $50 million
given by Paul Mellon '29 for
the Center for British Art, the audience responded with loud applause.
Five outsized television screens behind the stage then began to
blink on and off like neon signs, and for the next 50 minutes the
multimedia slide show ran through a fast-paced series of images
-- teachers teaching, students studying, coaches coaching -- while
five soundtracks supplied a medley of College songs. At syncopated
intervals the screens went dark, and in the shadows on stage right
or stage left a single spotlight came to rest on the solitary figure
of a venerable professor or worthy alumnus -- the designated proofs
of Lux et Veritas revealed as living sculpture. Jaroslav
Pelikan, one of Yale's most eminent historians and a former dean
of the Graduate School, appeared in the light clutching a battered
leather briefcase (symbol of the higher learning); Calvin Trillin
'57, noted humorist and member of the Corporation, performed a comic
monologue; a young English professor read a poem by Archibald MacLeish
'15; the Whiffenpoofs sang the "Whiffenpoof
Song." Lights flashed, music sounded, other luminaries came
and went, and at the end of the hour Schmidt assembled everybody
on the stage in an impromptu chorus line. Swaying from side to side,
their arms linked around one another's shoulders, they led the audience
in the singing of "Bright College Years," and in keeping with long-established custom the alumni
waved white handkerchiefs to the slowing tempo of the closing lines,
"For God, for country, and for Yale."
Heartened by the
sentiment and glad to have remembered all the words, the crowd moved
through the rotunda to the cocktail reception in Commons, where
five gigantic figures in papier mache, each of them at least 20
feet high, stood in triumphant procession among the buffet tables
and smoking pillars of dry ice. A dance band was playing the songs
of Cole Porter '13, and for about 20 seconds I thought I had walked
into a fraternity party at the
old DKE house that somehow had managed to remain in progress for
the past 37 years. From a bartender I learned that the papier mache
figures were meant to represent five of the nine Muses, but they
looked like portly 19th-century railroad magnates rather than the
dancers on a Greek vase, and he thought that they had been salvaged
from the set of a Hollywood epic about the collapse of either (the
bartender didn't know which) the Roman or the British Empire.
I
didn't see anybody whom I knew by name, but the faces conformed
to a familiar type -- well cared for and successful -- and
the genial din of small talk -- about the stock market (up 30
points), golf courses in Scotland (less crowded in the spring than
in the fall), the weather in Paris (unseasonably cold) -- filled
the immense room with a buoyant and expansive sound. Despite the
rumors of academic calamity, the University was famously in the
news in May of 1992, the sons and daughters of Eli advancing on every front, winning political office and academic prizes, adding
to America's stores of wealth and knowledge. George Bush '48 was
president of the United States, and Fay Vincent '64 was commissioner
of baseball. Three candidates for the summer Democratic presidential
nomination (Edmund G. Brown Jr. '64LLB, a former governor of California,
Senator Paul Tsongas '67LLB of Massachusetts, and Governor Bill
Clinton '73JD of Arkansas) had attended the Yale Law School; so
had Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, the newly-appointed Supreme
Court justice and the woman who had accused him of sexual misconduct.
Jodie Foster '84 was renowned in Hollywood both as an actress and
a director, Garry Trudeau '70, '73MFA had promoted "Doonesbury"
to the ranks of national celebrity, and David McCullough '55 recently
had published what soon was to become a best-selling biography of
Harry Truman.
As the evening wore on, the vodka giving out and the musicians playing
a third and fourth reprise of "You're the Top," the tenor of the
conversation proved a good deal less complacent than it had seemed
on first hearing. A senior historian observed that faculty opinion
of President Schmidt fluctuated between ridicule and scorn; a tenured professor of political science confided the information that the
University had lowered its intellectual standards to "impermissible
levels of mediocrity"; a young teaching
assistant, scowling and deconstructionist, introduced himself
as "an agent behind enemy lines in the French department," implacably
opposed to the "factory-like conditions" under which he was forced
to correct undergraduate essays on Pascal.
The
alumni cherished a good many grievances of their own, and
although by and large pleased with Schmidt's defense of the University's
cash positions, they worried about the stories in the newspapers
and the damage being done to Yale's reputation. A once-upon-a-time
chairman of the Yale Daily News wanted to know whether I'd
walked around the College lately, and, if so, whether I'd noticed
the kids with rings in their noses. He attributed the outrage to
the fact that the University was being run by the Bob Dylan people,
aging student activists grown up to become professors of ideological
nonsense. A former captain of the hockey team said that his son
had refused to consider applying to Yale because he was "a conservative
kid, still heavily into male chauvinism," which was maybe a little
immature of him but something that couldn't be helped, at least
not in Indianapolis, and he just wasn't about to go to college with
a lot of New York City balletomanes making fun of him because he
had worked as a campaign volunteer for Dan Quayle and didn't know
the difference between dead flowers and potpourri.
As I
listened to the charges being brought against dwindling verbal aptitudes
and declining moral standards, I wondered what it was that the plaintiffs expected of Yale. Here were people accustomed to having their way
with the world and who owned much of what was worth owning in the
United States on May 2, 1992, and yet something had spoiled their
hope of the College's future. Why the sense of loss -- past, present
and impending? Why were so many people talking about the canon of
the great books, or, for that matter, about the uses of the liberal
arts?
Sterling Memorial
Library was still reassuringly intact, the Whiffenpoofs commendably
in tune, and if most American college students didn't know how to
diagram a compound sentence or tell
the difference between an adverb and an adjective, the same
could be said of most American tax lawyers and television anchorpersons.
As at most other seats of higher American learning, the students
studied the arts of getting ahead in the world, acquiring the keys
to the commercial kingdom that bestows its rewards on the talent
for figuring a market, not on a knowledge of Thucydides. Why then
the preoccupation with the humanities, and why expect deliverance
at the hands of medieval historians and professors of Latin verse?
By the time I'd left
the reception, the carillon in Harkness Tower was striking the hour of 11, and
glancing upward at the sudden sound, I remembered that on the level of the bells,
170 feet above the Branford lawn, the stonemasons in 1921 had carved four allegorical
figures representing the four careers recommended to the sons of Mother Yale -- the church, business, medicine, and the law. The lesson in Protestant stone
rested on the premise that it was Yale's duty to set the examples of American
virtue and recruit the membership of an American ruling class, and I understood
that between the lines of the evening's anxious talk about falling SAT scores
and Cicero's absence from Linsly-Chittenden, the subject under review was the
validity of the University's license to issue the warrants of moral character
and spiritual worth. No matter what was being taught in the classroom, Yale
was still in the business of shaping what its deans and development office construed
as "the nation's leaders," still issuing the tickets of admission to the ranks
of social and executive privilege. But what kind of leadership class? Made out
of what kind of material, to what specifications and to whose design? In the
image of George Bush? Or more along the lines of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill?
Or maybe on the model of Garry Trudeau and Jodie Foster? The questions clearly
troubled quite a few of the alumni milling around the pillars of dry ice, and
their disappointment had less to do with the sweet remembrance of carefree youth
than with the passing of a world that somehow was more orderly and well-behaved,
more neatly bound by the rules of decorum, less cynical and more willing to
salute the flags of schoolboy romance.
Three weeks later
Benno Schmidt abruptly resigned the Presidency, failing to inform the Yale Corporation
of his departure until the morning of the graduation ceremonies for the Class
of 1992. Institutions as venerable as Yale ordinarily arrange the comings and
goings of senior management with considerable care, the press releases staged
in a sequence indicative of sound judgment, good feeling, and the dawn of a
bright new day. The manner of Schmidt's exit produced the antithesis of that
impression, and the national news media stayed with the story throughout the
months of June and July, adding further proofs to their winter theorem of Yale's
imminent collapse. The journals of conservative political opinion enlarged upon
their beloved themes of cultural decline and fall, and at New York cocktail
parties on the literary left the consensus of every evening's wisdom held that
Yale had never been a match for Harvard, never anything other than a Peter Arno
cartoon and an empty raccoon coat. The summer's small talk on Connecticut lawns
and Long Island beaches offered further annotations of the same text -- all
standards lost, nothing sacred, Lux et Veritas a bitter joke -- and by
the first week in September I'd taken the case for Yale's defense.
So
much of what was being said seemed to me so plainly wrong, or at least so sharply at odds with what I remembered of my years
as an undergraduate, that if in April I hadn't counted myself a
particular friend of Yale, five months later I knew that I held
it in a far more affectionate regard than I previously had guessed.
I associated it with the play of ideas and the love of language,
with lessons on the harpsichord and a senior thesis submitted in
the form of a canto by Ezra Pound, with an afternoon spent listening
to Thornton Wilder '20 address a set of observations on the fate
of the modern novel to a very large and amiable balloon that he
had brought back from the Danbury Fair. Not once in four years did
I meet a Harvard student who could sit in on a conversation improvised
at Yale. Harvard students knew the words, never the music. Then
as now, the Harvard turn of mind tended to produce sophisticated
apologetics for the party of things-as-they-are; the dissenting
spirit at Yale usually voted with the party of things-as-they-might-become,
and it occurred to me, 36 years after the fact, that the trajectory
of my own life had followed from my four-year sojourn in New Haven,
that if I'd gone to Harvard probably I would have become a lawyer,
if to Princeton, an ornithologist or an investment banker. The recognition encouraged me to talk to a New York publisher about possibly writing
a history of the College, if for no other reason than to refute
the remark about the raccoon coat.
For the next six
months I pursued a course of unsystematic study, reading around in the memoirs
of alumni both famous and obscure, thumbing through the standard histories and
back issues of the Yale Daily News, also through old yearbooks, faculty
memoranda, novels, and short stories in which Yale provided the setting for
the young hero's awakening to the world's ambiguity and grief, toasts raised
to the glory of a boat race won in record time, essays composed by Yale presidents
defining the College's mission to an always darkening world. By the end of the
year I understood that in broad outline the history of Yale divided, like the
academic year and Caesar's Gaul, into three parts.
Founded by ministers
at Saybrook in 1701 as a vessel of the true Puritan faith, the College undertook
"to supply the churches of this colony with a learned and pious and orthodox
ministry." The need was felt to be urgent because the graduates of Harvard,
the only other college in New England at the time, were going forth into the
American wilderness without the proper mandate of Heaven. Transferred to New
Haven in 1716, Yale for the next 140 years retained the character of the small
church school that Bishop George Berkeley in 1731 had seen as an "academy for
dissenters.breeding the best clergymen and most learned" of any in America.
Toward the end of the 19th century the direction of the College's affairs and
the appointment of its President passed out of the hands of Congregationalist
ministers and into those of the newly-minted captains of industry and finance,
and between the years 1885 and 1960 the faculty replaced the lessons in Christian
doctrine with studies in the liberal arts meant to introduce the sons and heirs
of great fortune to the attitudes appropriate to the members of the country's
commercial aristocracy. The curriculum and the assumptions of privilege remained
comfortably in place through the first half of what Henry Luce '20 titled "The
American Century," but soon after the Second World War the rearrangement of
the seating plan everywhere else in American society induced Yale College to
transform itself into what was known in the jargon of the day as a "multi-versity."
The term escaped precise definition by even its most fervent advocates, but
by 1970 it was clear that what most people had in mind was an academy for careerists,
open to women as well as men and geared to the production of a ministerial elite,
still pious and orthodox, but secular in spirit and corporate by inclination.
If I
could have forced myself to read through the texts in an orderly
way, in chronological sequence or somehow alphabetically by author
and/or subject, I might have found it easier to discover the clear
line of the Yale narrative. But I never could avoid the traps of
digression, and I kept taking note of stray facts for no reason
other than my liking for them -- Cotton Mather advising the Rector
of Yale College to forbid public commencements because they entailed
the consumption of plum cake, which was "very expensive and an occasion
for much sin"; New Haven noted for the invention of the Blue Laws
and the hamburger; the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher handing out Sharps
rifles to student abolitionists in the 1850s in order that they
might add to the body count of pro-slavery enthusiasts in Kansas;
the first football game against Harvard played in the autumn prior
to Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn; the Beinecke Library in possession
of the bullet that killed Admiral Lord Nelson at Trafalgar.
During the same months
that I was rummaging through the card catalogs in the Sterling Library, Yale
was seeking a successor to Benno Schmidt, and I often ran across members of
the faculty who wanted to talk about the characteristics desirable in a President
of Yale. Almost always they based their hopes for the future on their recollection
of a near or distant past, and the enormous canvas of their collective memory
again reminded me of the difficulties placed in the way of accurately portraying
a college that welcomed so much contradiction and encouraged among its graduates
so many definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
On
the topic of the Yale President nobody was without a strong opinion -- among the 30-odd alumni with whom I raised the question, at least
five had put forward their own names for the position -- but with
regard to the distinctive temperament and genius of the College
none could match the authority of George W. Pierson '26. Then in
his 88th year, nearly deaf and all but blind, Pierson had been chairman
of the history department when I was an undergraduate, but before
going to see him in early March of 1993 I knew him only by reputation
-- Emeritus professor, author
of a two-volume history of Yale and two studies of Tocqueville,
collateral descendant of the Reverend Abraham Pierson, who in 1701
had served as the first Rector of the College that its founders
in their more transcendent moments construed as "a school for prophets."
Expecting a reminiscence both learned and benign, the record of
Yale's achievement recalled with a nostalgic tranquillity as mild
as the tea at the Elizabethan Club, I was surprised to meet instead
with a fiercely passionate defense of what Pierson regarded as the
integrity of the university (any university, but most especially
Yale) in a society all too willing to abandon its faith in the strength
and freedom of the human mind.
It was a cold day
with snow in the forecast, and Pierson's 18th-century wooden farmhouse 15 miles
north of New Haven didn't make many concessions to comfort or the weather. Furnished
in the plain New England manner (small rooms, a planked floor, nothing in the
way of frivolous ornament) the house over the span of 250 years had acquired
a modern kitchen and a large collection of books, but in no other particular
would it have displeased the 17th-century Puritan wife whose portrait, severe
and very faintly smiling, presided over the conversation from the wall above
the fireplace.
Pierson had anticipated
the questions that I was bound to ask, and he had prepared a brief lecture on
the history of Yale, its place in the American scheme of things, the continuity
of its long-abiding purpose, its recent loss of confidence, and the odds (heavy
and unfavorable) against its intellectual rescue. We sat in wing-backed chairs
placed opposite one another in an attitude of formal address, Pierson wearing
a rumpled tweed suit and a woolen sweater. He spoke for about an hour, often
pausing to peer at his notes through spectacles as thick as magnifying glasses,
occasionally interrupting himself to ask if I was following the line of argument.
What
concerned him was the loss of the University's soul, or,
as his God-fearing ancestor might have put it, the trespass of the
World, the Flesh, and the Devil on what was once the holy ground
of academic sovereignty. Observing that universities had been self-governing
institutions long before the invention of any of the political systems
presently at large among the nations of the earth, he reminded me
that the idea of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge was old enough to have survived monarchy, despotism, oligarchy, socialism,
democracy, and the church. He wasn't so sure that it could withstand
the power of the corporate state backed by the doctrines of egalitarianism.
The premises of the
university, Pierson said, didn't match the trend and temper of the times. Universities
were about the past; America was about next week. Literary studies were by definition elitist and impractical; America was about technical innovation and examinations
graded on a curve. It was in the nature of democratic societies to resent exhibitions
of superior intelligence and to mistrust any play of mind that didn't attach
itself to a fortune-bearing result.
Not
that as Americans we ever had been overly fond of history or the
uses of the past. During the 18th and 19th centuries the
country was as grasping of the jackpot future as it was in the 20th
century, but the ruling elites at least had the wit to know that
their commercial voyages required some sort of moral and intellectual
ballast in the hold, and for nearly 300 years they had sustained
Yale as an institution independent of the state wherein to teach
"faith in God, belief in man, the value of learning, the importance
of character -- without wealth, without luxury, without arrogance."
More recently, however, Yale, like every other college in the country,
had pawned its freedoms for the grace and favor of public money.
The transaction obliged the College to teach what other people wished
it to teach, imposing on it "the kind of servitude that one expects
of Latin American universities, where everything is politics and
nothing means anything except what the politicians say it means."
Which was a serious loss because Yale was "a damn fine place .
among the best in America," and one to which "the nation owes a
hell of a lot more than it knows."
The sudden edge of
anger in his voice caused Pierson to look up from his notes and ask again whether
I was taking his points. Did I have any idea of how large was the debt the country
owed to Yale?
No, I said, it hadn't
occurred to me to do the math.
"You should do so,"
he said, "you would find it worth your trouble."
He had worked out
the numbers in another of his books, The Education of American Leaders, in which he had compiled lists of Yale College graduates who had founded colleges,
been elected to Congress, served on the Supreme Court, made important discoveries
in the sciences, contributed to the well-being of the nation. His figures suggested
that among the people pre-eminent in the country's major occupations over the
course of the 20th century, roughly 9 percent had acquired some part of their educations at Harvard, 7 percent at Yale, 4 percent at Princeton, and not as
much as 2 percent from any other university.
Pierson glared at
me over his spectacles until he was satisfied that I appreciated the scale of
the achievement, especially for so small a school, and then he proceeded to
tell me why the same percentages weren't likely to carry forward into the 21st
century. The society didn't count on its statesmen or its movie stars to have
read Milton or Shakespeare, and the corporations inclined to hire Yale graduates
didn't make important distinctions between students who had read Montaigne and
those who had studied the complete works of Gloria Steinem. If the kids knew
how to run the computers, work up the punchlines for Disney or Goldman Sachs,
figure the exchange rates between German deutschmarks and the Japanese yen,
what did it matter what they knew or didn't know of or about the liberal arts?
The social orders
founded first on the Protestant church and then on the pillars of commerce had
given way to a managerial elite loyal to nothing other than its own ambition.
In place of what was once a library and a community of scholars, Pierson said,
we have "the self-help university," the "short-order university," the "social-prestige
university" pandering to every minority interest and political subtext capable
of lobbying the development office -- the students free to set their own curricula,
courses designed to the specifications of a marketing study, Homer taught in
English instead of Greek. If the country's possessing classes no longer assigned
a high value to the search for possibly unwelcome truth, then on what principle
did a university -- Yale or Harvard or any other -- think it could stand its
ground?
"The
totalitarians and the egalitarians," Pierson said, "are very much
alike .
Define the public interest as your own, and you can usurp anything
you choose to usurp."
Within the allotted
hour he'd brought his lecture around to its point of origin; turning over the
last page of his notes, he looked at his watch and asked if I had questions.
We talked for maybe another 20 minutes, Pierson suggesting several books that
I might find useful, and then he accompanied me to the door that was fastened
with an iron latch as old as everything else in the house. For a moment we stood
together on the front step, considering the first, tentative flakes of what
looked like the preamble to a heavy snowfall. Pierson smiled and reminded me
that he was a historian with a conservative turn of mind, so conservative that
in 1967 he had been one of the few members of the Yale faculty to speak against
the admission of women students. Historians, he said, were never much good at
foretelling the future, but from what he could judge of the tide of events,
American colleges were like ships caught in the same current, some more obviously
helpless than others, some steering across or against the wind, but all drifting
toward certain destruction on a lee shore.
Eight months earlier,
and I might have mistaken Pierson's testimony as another despairing communique
from what were then being billed as "The Culture Wars." For 15 years the chorus
of public scolds on the conservative and neo-conservative right had been worrying
about America's torn moral fabric, deploring the high incidence of illiteracy,
the practice of abortion, Hollywood pornography. The voices were nearly always
shrill, the demerits handed down in the manner of indignant complaints about
the traffic or the towel service.
Pierson
was talking about something else, in a voice that was neither indignant
nor shrill, and by March of 1993 I'd read enough of the Yale
text to have become acquainted with both its character and tone
in the writings of Jonathan Edwards and Jeremiah Day; also in Owen
Johnson's Stover at Yale, the autobiographies of David Dellinger,
Wilmarth Lewis, and William Sloane Coffin Jr.; in William F. Buckley
Jr.'s God and Man at Yale and the essays of A. Whitney Griswold
and A. Bartlett Giamatti. The school for prophets rejoiced in the
preaching of sermons, and apparently it had been doing so for 300
years.
The book that my publisher
had in mind, comprehensive and abundantly footnoted, proved to exceed my capacities
as a scholar. But I was slow to give up the proposition, and during the interval
between Benno Schmidt's resignation in May 1992 and my own 40th reunion in June
1996, I continued to read through the college histories, to talk to various
well-informed alumni, and in the spring of 1994 to travel to New Haven once
a week to teach an undergraduate English class. Although too easily tempted
into aimless digression, and usually lost in what I learned to regard as the
maze of the library's Manuscripts and Archives room, I did at least come to
understand that Pierson had been improvising on a traditional theme; so had
the alumni wandering through the iced smoke in Commons.
During the first
150 years of America's colonial expedition, the sermon -- especially the jeremiad -- served as the principal means of literary expression among the faithful settled
in the New Jerusalem. To write was to preach, and the booksellers in Boston
and Philadelphia stocked in devout quantity the travelers' guides to perdition.
Preachers ascending the pulpit affected the gesture of rubbing hideous sights
from their eyes, as if they couldn't believe the extent of the folly and wickedness
to which, reluctantly, they bore witness. To the Puritan divines who established
Yale College in what was then the poorest of the Northern colonies, the world
was not the world unless it was coming rapidly to an end. In like manner among
their academic heirs and spiritual assigns, Yale was not Yale unless it was
going rapidly to the dogs. The College from its beginning had been engaged in
a quarrel with Providence, the faculty and students given to taking up the questions
of conscience with a degree of intensity that met its early 18th-century standards
of "declamation, oratory, and disputation." They understood the jeremiad as
a means of converting weakness into strength, the preacher seeking to instill
in the congregants a sense of doom sufficient to make of their fear the engine
of their salvation.
It
was Cotton Mather's dispute with Harvard that provoked him to assist
with the founding of a College in Connecticut
more strictly conformed to the teachings of John Calvin. The Massachusetts
Bay Colony had lapsed into the heresy of tolerating some of the
weak-minded doctrines of the Anglican church, and seeking to prevent
the spread of the infection into southern New England, Mather instructed
his agents in London to find money for a College built on rock instead
of sand. His agents discovered Elihu Yale, a rich merchant long
in years and short of heirs. Yale had been born in Boston and had
lived briefly in America before amassing a fortune as the East India
Company's Viceroy in Madras, and in January 1718 Mather wrote to
him with the offer of a naming opportunity. The deal closed in August -- the endowment arriving in the form of nine bales of East India goods,
a collection of 417 books (among them Seneca's tragedies and Jeremy
Taylor's Doctrine of Repentance), and a portrait of George
I. A week prior to the September commencement (the one at which
Mather had advised against the reckless serving of plum cake), the
assembled clergymen bestowed the name of Yale College on what was
then the only building on what is now the Old Campus. The faculty
consisted of the Rector and two tutors; the students, between the
ages of 14 and 17, were taught "to know God and Jesus Christ and
answerably to lead a Godly and sober life." Their daily regimen
didn't allow for much straying from the path of righteousness -- up
at 5:30 a.m. for prayers in chapel, bread and beer for breakfast
in Commons, more prayers, a long day's study of the Bible (the students
required to speak to one another in Latin), again to chapel for evening prayers, and so to bed by the light of a tallow candle.
No going into other student's rooms; no associating with dissolute
persons apt to lead "an unquiet life." No "needless perseverations,
foolish garrulings, chidings, strifes, railings, uncomely noise,
spreading ill rumors, divulging secrets.."
But
it was never easy to preserve the faith, and no matter how clear
the guidelines they didn't always prevent the students from wandering
into taverns, or the resident clergy from blundering into
heresy. Rector Timothy Cutler was peremptorily dismissed in 1722
when he concluded the September commencement exercises with a prayer
to which he added the Anglican form of an ending, "And let all the
people say, Amen." The words signified the Rector's too close acquaintance
with Arminianism, which embraced the heretical notion that a human
soul could bring about its own salvation. Puritan dogma held that
only God's predestined decree had any say in the matter of amens,
and Rector Cutler was gone before the first leaves fell from the elm trees. Soon afterwards, so was Jonathan Edwards. A graduate
of the Class of 1720, Edwards served as a tutor at the College from
1724 until 1726, at which time he pronounced the air in New Haven
so fouled with the stench of Arminianism that he departed for a
pulpit in Northhampton, Massachusetts, and the parishioners on whose
heads he soon brought down his famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God."
Yale offered a predominantly
theological course of study throughout the whole of the 18th century, but the
finer points of doctrine were nearly always in dispute. The Great Awakening
of the 1740s divided both the College and the town into rival states of grace
known as Old Lights and New Lights, the two congregations worshipping in adjacent
churches on the Green. During the Second Great Awakening in 1802, the outbreak
of fervent religious feeling among the students and younger faculty -- so sudden
and wonderful to behold that many were "awestruck and amazed" -- once again
remanded the Calvinist company of the elect to the passions of urgent oratory
and declamation. Those among them who could not endure the hideous sight of
blasphemy followed Jonathan Edwards westward out of Sodom, departing for the
settlements on the still innocent American frontier, there to preach the uninfected
truth.
Transposed into the
forms of political argument, the tendency to question the motives of Providence
allied Yale College with the cause of American independence. The Class of 1769
objected to the British Parliament's passing of the Townshend Acts that imposed
a tax on imported English cloth, and by way of protest it posted a notice in
the newspaper announcing its appearance at that year's commencement "wholly
dressed in the Manufactures of our own country." Fourteen of the College's graduates
were elected to the Continental Congress, four signed the Declaration of Independence,
and 12 served as generals in the Revolutionary War. When British troops invaded
New Haven in the summer of 1779, 70 students (roughly half the enrollment in
a College dedicated to the training of ministers) rushed into pitched battle
with assorted dueling pistols and fowling pieces. They lost the fight, but their
tenacity impressed the admiral of the British fleet. Inclined to punish their
impertinence by burning to the ground "the largest University in America," which
might "with propriety be styled the parent and nurse of rebellion," the admiral
was dissuaded from doing so, at least partly on the rumor of heavy American
cannon in the vicinity of Hamden, and the British contented themselves, in the
words of the Yale President, Ezra Stiles, with "Plunder, Rape, Murder, Bayoneting,
Indelicacies toward the Sex, Incidents of Abuse and Insults toward the Inhabitants
in general."
When
not otherwise employed in the service of church or state, the Yale
talent for disputation found its most vivid expression among the
questions addressed to the curriculum. What was it proper
to teach, in what languages living or dead, and what weight was
to be assigned to the word of God in a world increasingly persuaded
by the laws of reason and the proofs of science? Conservative both
by temperament and doctrine, Yale inclined to look with suspicion
on the advancements of learning. As late as 1714, ignorant of Newton's
physics and not yet fully convinced by the observations of Galileo,
the College was still firm in its opinion that the sun revolved
around the earth; the faculty didn't consent to the teaching of
history and belles lettres until 1776, and in 1802 President
Timothy Dwight (the grandson of Jonathan Edwards) vilified the writings
of Voltaire and Rousseau in a sermon (well attended and gratefully
received) to which he gave the title, "The Nature and Danger of
Infidel Philosophy." Various dissatisfactions with the College lesson
plan resulted in periodic flights into the wilderness -- there
to begin again with fresh ink and a revised syllabus -- and between
the years 1747 and 1793 Yale graduates either founded, or served
as the first president, of Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Williams,
and the University of Georgia.
Over the course of
the 19th century Yale cautiously revised its curriculum to satisfy the requirements
of a society learning to build steel mills, munitions factories, and railroads.
President Jeremiah Day issued a directive in 1828 that established the premises
for what became known as a liberal education -- less insistence on rote memorization
and more emphasis on learning how to think, "not to teach what is peculiar to each one of the professions, but to lay the foundation for what is common to
them all." Gradually the College relinquished the practice of conversing in
Latin and Greek, adopted European standards of scholarly research, acquired
schools of medicine, divinity and law, approved the intellectual adventurism
of Benjamin Silliman and Willard Gibbs, awarded (in 1861) America's first doctoral
degree, added laboratories and studies in the natural sciences, developed the
discipline of paleontology. But no matter how numerous the reforms, they tended
to lag a generation behind the times, and the impatient friends of a new and
abridged revelation seldom lacked for reasons to complain. Across the span of
the century their voices echo with a sound comparable to the one behind the
screen of the small talk in Commons on the evening of Benno Schmidt's fanfare
to the not-so-common man:
Chancellor
Kent, who graduated in 1781 and subsequently wrote important
commentaries on American law -- "I stood as well as any of my
class, but the test of scholarship at that day was contemptible."
Andrew
White, Class of 1853, and thereafter president of Cornell,
regretting the weakness of the Yale faculty -- "Fettered by a
system which made everything of gerund-grinding and nothing of
literature."
Harlow
Gale, Class of 1885, on Yale's teaching of physics and astronomy
-- "In none of these sciences was any apparent effort made to
reveal the real stuffs, forces and laws of nature . to arouse
a wonder and admiration of nature which should enlarge our petty
intellectual Ptolemaic horizon to the modern gigantic Copernican
scale."
During
the last three decades of the 19th century the country's new industrial wealth
began to erect universities on the cornerstones of its own names, and the monuments
bought and paid for by Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Duke attested to the reformation
of the American ruling class. Ministers and lawyers ceded pride of place to
businessmen and bankers, and at Yale the old Puritan ways and means were fitted
to more worldly ends. The sons of great fortune could afford to regard their
four years at the College as a social rather than an intellectual enterprise,
and what was wanted was a stage on which to learn the lessons of conduct and
deportment that Pierson in his book of Yale achievement had described as "the
training in good habits.habits of industry and exact study; good moral and
physical habits; habits in square and manly dealing." The academy for dissenters evolved into a gentleman's College, the enrollment substantially enlarged (500
students in 1850, 1,000 students in 1900), the academic curriculum augmented
with a merry-go-round of extracurricular orchestras and literary clubs, the
country's first daily student newspaper, fraternities, marching bands, senior
honor societies, and lively sporting scenes.
The
football field offered the most dramatic setting for the show of
strength and the proofs of character, and the Yale team exulted
in its nine-year run of undefeated seasons. Invented at the College
by Walter Camp, captain of the team in 1878, 1879, and 1881, and
afterwards its coach, football so quickly captured the public imagination
that by the turn of the 20th century the Yale-Harvard game had become
the most glamorous event on the nation's athletic calendar. The
big New York money traveled to New Haven in private railroad cars
(T. H. Gillespie aboard "Caligula," J. P. Morgan aboard "Connecticut,"
sometimes as many as 50 less splendid equipages bearing magnificences
of smaller fortune); newspapermen in checkered trousers arrived
from cities as distant as Denver and Los Angeles; lovely delegations
of the fairer sex, resplendent in bright silk and heavy fur, looked
as if they stepped briefly out, or charmingly down, from one of
Charles Dana Gibson's illustrations in Leslie's Weekly. The
young gentlemen on the field of honor played for Yale and God and
country, and although God was never seen to stand and cheer, the
country sometimes waved its hat. President Teddy Roosevelt, himself
a Harvard man, struck the preferred tone in the autumn of 1901.
Accepting an honorary degree on the occasion of Yale's 200th anniversary,
the hero of San Juan Hill bestowed on the College the blessing of
the Gilded Age:
I have
never worked at a task worth doing that I didn't find myself working
shoulder to shoulder with some son of Yale. I have never yet been
in any struggle for righteousness or decency but there were not
men of Yale to aid me and give me strength and courage.
For the underclassmen
in 1901 the surest path to righteousness led from struggle on the football field
to the glory of selection by one of the senior honor societies, preferably Skull
and Bones. Every spring on what was known as Tap Day, the 15 departing seniors
in each of the societies chose their successors from among the members of the
junior class. The ceremony was very solemn, a Calvinist proof of grace performed
in a College courtyard in full view of the entire student body. The firm tap
on the right shoulder, accompanied by the command, "Go to your room," signified
acceptance in the company of the elect, one's College works and days judged
worthy of redemption. Owen Johnson (Class of 1900) memorialized the emotion
of the moment in Stover at Yale:
He heard
them cheering, then he saw hundreds of faces, wild-eyed, rushing
past him; he stumbled and suddenly his eyes were blurred with
tears, and he knew how much he cared, after the long months of
rebellion, to be no longer an outsider, but back among his own
with the stamp of approval on his record.
Together with nearly every other man in his class, Johnson's heroic Dink Stover comes to Yale from
an eastern boarding school where he has been taught the lesson that from those
to whom much has been given, much will be asked. During his freshman year he
serves his apprenticeship to the football team and acquires the properly languid
attitude toward "the necessary evil" of his studies -- "the price to be paid
for passing four years in pleasant places with congenial companions."
But
he also finds himself moved by a sympathetic feeling for the poorer
inhabitants of the town, working-class people absorbed in
the "earnest romance of the submerged nine-tenths," and he forms
a friendship with Brockhurst, a fellow student who mocks the College's
veneer of learning and rails against "the savage fanaticism" of
its "race for success." Brockhurst defines the College as "a beef
trust with every by-product organized," and speaking for the author
in a voice not unlike George Pierson's, he champions the freedom
of mind against the tyranny of the business ethic:
The great
fault of the American nation, which is the fault of the Republic's,
is the reduction of everything to the average. Our university
is simply the expression of the forces that are operating outside.
We are business colleges purely and simply, because we as a nation
have only one ideal -- the business ideal.everything has conformed
to business, everything has been made to pay.
Stover
believes what he sees and listens to what he's told, and during
his sophomore year he defies the social authority of the "in crowd" -- drops
out of his sophomore society, keeps company with "idlers" who live
unquiet lives. The mood passes, and Stover, much improved by his
wandering in the morass of doubt, goes safely into the Harvard game
and through the gate at Bones. The ending argued for the proposition
that Yale was about having it both ways -- spiritual transcendence
and worldly success, the practice of democracy and the privilege
of oligarchy, talent reconciled to virtue, God at one with Mammon,
John Calvin in a letter sweater.
First published in
serial form in McClure's Magazine 11 years after Johnson's graduation,
the book proved immensely popular among readers everywhere in the country as
well as among those within the College, and for the next 40-odd years the term
"Stoverism" summed up the general impression of Yale that still remained current
in New York literary circles in the summer of 1992.
The
impression was intentional, aided and abetted during the first half
of the 20th century by the three Yale presidents (Arthur
Twining Hadley, James Rowland Angell, and Charles Seymour) who in
their own persons embodied the ideal of the civilized gentleman
as much at ease on a pheasant shoot as in the company of Tacitus.
Hadley took office in 1899, the first layman to do so, and not long
afterwards he revised the schedule of payments on the debt owed
both to Caesar and to God. Asked by a visiting clergyman how long
he was expected to preach to the undergraduates assembled in Battell
Chapel, Hadley replied, "Of course, we put no limit upon you, but
we have a feeling here at Yale that no souls are saved after the
first 20 minutes."
The faculty understood
teaching as a dramatic art. They enjoyed presenting themselves in the characters
of Robert Browning or Sir John Falstaff, which startled the philosopher George
Santayana in the autumn of 1917 when he gave a season of lectures at New Haven
and seconded the motion of Teddy Roosevelt:
Nothing
could be more American than Yale College,. Here is sound, healthy
principle, but no over-scrupulousness; love of life, trust in
success, a ready jocoseness, a democratic amiability, and a radiant
conviction that there is nothing better than oneself. It is a
boyish type of character, earnest and quick in things practical,
hasty and frivolous in things intellectual.
The judgment
was incomplete. It was true that the College paid more attention
to "good moral and physical habits" than it did to the subtleties
of the French Enlightenment or the Spanish Inquisition; it was also
true that at Harvard the ranking professors (Santayana among them,
together with William James, and Josiah Royce) brought to their
lectures degrees of scholarship thought excessive by their peers
at Yale. What Santayana missed was the congregation of Yale's chronically
dissatisfied minority, the students and younger faculty more likely
to torment themselves with metaphysics than their compatriots elsewhere
in what was to become the Ivy League. Like Brockhurst, they didn't
dine at Mory's, didn't know the lyrics to "Boola
Boola" or the "Whiffenpoof
Song;" their energies tended to gather around the questions
of divinity and law. The resident clergy operating under the imprimatur
of Dwight Hall, many of them as fierce in their beliefs as Jonathan
Edwards, recruited missionaries to bring the light of Christian
learning to China, to Manhattan's Lower East Side, to the Indian
reservations on the Dakota plains. The law school, smaller than
the one at Harvard and always angrier about the misallocations of
social justice, attracted students more apt to become assistant
district attorneys than corporate counsel to a steel company.
The voices of conscience
were hard to hear through the music of the Jazz Age, and Yale between the two
World Wars unashamedly embraced the joys of Stoverism. When F. Scott Fitzgerald
wrote The Great Gatsby in 1925, it was not by accident that he cast as
Yale men both Nick Carraway and Tom Buchanan. The neo-Gothic residential colleges
appeared during the years of the Great Depression, the dining halls furnished
with linen table cloths and silver serving bowls, the beds made and the rooms
cleaned by Irish maids. President Angell had endorsed the architecture after
spending a summer in England studying the buildings on exhibit at Oxford and
Cambridge. He returned to Connecticut with a set of sketches and drawings, and
after due consultation with Edward Harkness (Class of 1897), the alumnus who
paid the bill, the workmen were instructed to affix the stamps of antiquity
by smudging the facades with soot, dripping acid on the sandstone.
Most
of the memoirs of the period speak to the pleasures of four years
in pleasant places with congenial companions. The diarists
remember being happily introduced to John Donne's poetry and Lester
Lanin's dance music, their first looking into Coleridge or the milk
punch at the Taft Hotel. My father '31 never forgot Chauncey Tinker's
lectures on Lawrence Sterne or the bathtub gin and three-day bridge
games in Vanderbilt Hall. The New York newspapers in the 1920s published
on their front pages the names of the young gentlemen tapped for
Bones, and well into the 1930s the Harvard-Yale game preserved its
place as the country's foremost sports event, attracting to the
stands personages as grand as Georges Clemenceau, Texas Guinan,
and Babe Ruth.
Although the College
awarded scholarships to students distinguished by little else except
their "habits of industry and exact study," the gifts brought with
them a schedule of hidden costs. Thomas Bergin '25 (subsequently
Sterling Professor of Romance
Languages), had been born and raised in New Haven; therefore associated
with what Stover regretfully had seen as "the stench of the town,"
the young Bergin couldn't afford to join a fraternity or buy a hip
flask. Lacking prestige and a patrician manner, he escaped the notice
of the wealthier students ("quite simply unaware of the existence
of the lower social orders") who walked past him in the street as
carelessly as they walked past the stone gargoyles and the exemplary
moss. Max Lerner '23, later an important social critic, saved enough
of the little money he earned as a dining room waiter to acquire
a second-hand raccoon coat. To no avail. Nobody ever asked for his
opinion of the football team or stood him to a drink at DKE.
In none of the Yale
texts from the late 1930s do I find anybody drawing the analogy between the
stench of Arminianism and the stench of the submerged nine-tenths, but the crisis
of the Second World War fostered a patriotic reawakening of the belief in democracy
and raised the problem of social class to the power of theological dispute.
If Yale wished to continue setting the example of American virtue and composing
the group photograph of the American elite, somebody had to think of something
to tell the admissions office. William C. DeVane, Dean of the College in 1948,
framed the amended purpose as an imperative:
Our graduates
must be critics and leaders or else we are not justified as a
university. What I want for Yale College is an intellectual eminence
as great as her athletic and her social eminence, or her eminence
in activities of all sorts . for the man of action we unquestionably
provide a superb training -- none better. For the man of intellectual
achievement, I'm afraid that we are surpassed by Harvard, Columbia,
and Chicago, in that order.
Arguments about the
correct definition of the phrase "an intellectual eminence" soon involved the
company of the elect in another of its periodic seasons of discontent. The faculty
divided into the academic equivalents of Old Lights and New Lights, and in 1950
William F. Buckley Jr., the chairman of the Yale Daily News, published
what amounted to an 18th-century sermon, God and Man at Yale, in which
he denounced the proposed revision of the curriculum as monstrous relativism
and wicked folly. Never mind that he was Catholic, and thus likely to have been
seen as an abomination by the Congregationalist ministers who once directed
the College's plan of worship; an inheritor of Yale's polemical turn of mind,
Buckley had searched through every one of the College's academic departments,
but nowhere had he found anything "uncontaminated with the absolute that there
are no absolutes."
Discussion of Buckley's
book was still a work in progress when I entered Yale in the autumn of 1952,
and by the end of my first term I'd come across four or five factions of undergraduate
dissent, none of them aligned with Buckley's strict construction of the Christian
faith, but all of them, had they but known it, partaking of Brockhurst's dissatisfaction
with "Yale as a magnificent factory on democratic business lines," and dreaming,
as did Brockhurst:
of something
visionary, a great institution not of boys, clean, lovable and
honest, but of men of brains, of courage, of leadership, a great
center of thought to stir the country and bring it back to the
understanding of what man creates with his imagination, and dares
with his will.
No
idealistic undergraduate had very far to look for objects of derision on which to chalk up the proofs of loyalty to a higher truth and
a nobler purpose. Yale in the 1950s had begun to transform itself
along the lines marked out by Dean DeVane, but it was still the
gentleman's College to which the clean and lovable sons of privilege
were sent in station wagons to improve their acquaintance with the
civilization (here is London, there is Paris) in which they would
have occasion to be spending a great deal of money. The opening
paragraph of the freshman handbook carried the instruction "to treat
Yale as you would a good woman," and the students gathered in protest
around the statue of Nathan Hale in the autumn of 1953 were carrying
signs in praise of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
To take seriously
the precepts of so complacently conservative an institution was to trade one's
soul for the standard mess of Wall Street pottage, and the expression of underground
resistance revealed itself in grand and small remonstrances against the philistinism
outfitted by the York Street tailors at J. Press (where pre-scuffed white buckskin
shoes sold for $10 more than the same shoes still in the box); also against
Harris tweed and the football team, the editorials in the Yale Daily News (steadfast in its support of Lester Lanin and the McCarthy hearings), the
Fence Club, weekends at Vassar or Smith, the CIA (which maintained recruiting
offices in both the history and the English departments), button-down shirts,
captain's chairs, anything and everything that could be identified with Dink
Stover or Henry Luce.
To
the best of my knowledge and recollection, the faculty didn't distribute
Sharps rifles for an assault on Fraternity Row, but in sophomore
year I remember Alexander Witherspoon, a Milton scholar and of the
same generation as George Pierson, remarking on the subversive nature
of the Yale dialectic. He had put a question to the class about
one of the lesser angels in Paradise Lost, and when it met
with a still and perfect silence, he pointed an admonishing finger
at the young gentlemen in what suddenly seemed a very small room.
"An education," he said, "is a self-inflicted wound." He then went
on to say that Yale was not to be admired merely for its superb
collection of striped and polka-dot ties. Perhaps we would take
the trouble to notice that elsewhere under the elm trees the College
had assembled a large assortment of sharp and blunt instruments,
all or any one of which was capable of inflicting irreparable harm.
During my junior
year I heard Richard Sewall, another of the inspired professors then in residence,
make a similar point in the course of a lecture on Hamlet. His commentary
on the play had brought him to the subject of medieval architecture, which in
turn reminded him of the neo-Gothic bastion at Yale, its likeness to a cloister
or a fortress, its monasticism and "inward-moatedness" distinguishing it from
the more companionable atmosphere of Princeton and the urbanity of Harvard.
Which possibly was why the students, or at least some of the students, delighted
in soliloquies and disputations. In a castle or a monastery, what else was there
to do?
It was a question
to which I never found an extracurricular answer, and most of what I learned
at Yale I learned in what I now remember as one long, wayward conversation in
the only all-night restaurant on Chapel Street. The topics under discussion -- God, man, existence, Alfred Prufrock's peach -- were borrowed from the same
anthology of large abstraction that supplied the texts for English 10 or Philosophy
116, but at 3 a. m. in the brightly lit booths of the United restaurant the
review of the material seemed somehow closer in spirit to what was being said
in Greenwich Village than to the mimeographed course outlines placed on the
desks of Harkness Hall. The dramatis personae changed from week to week, but
the company invariably added to the sum of its quixotic hopes and miscellaneous
discontents -- apprentice poets and would-be novelists, a trumpet player in
one of Yale's jazz bands badly unnerved by his sexual encounter (two days in
the Hotel Duncan) with Sarah Vaughn, authors of plays in one scene, aggrieved
Jews resentful of their status as designated proofs of Christian grace, a student
of Russian literature suspected of Communism and arrested by the FBI for possession
of a Thompson sub-machine gun, admirers of Albert Camus and Berthold Brecht,
angry young English professors chafing under the rules of academic tenure, an
actress from the Drama School who had been to bed with Brando.
Recalled 50 years
later in the bourgeois comfort of an editorial office in Manhattan,
my principled objections to Harris tweed take on shadings of the
absurd. Like Stover I had arrived at Yale by way of a eastern boarding
school, admitted not for habits of industry or study (at Hotchkiss
I stood 57th in a class of 72), but because my father had been mustered
into the troop at Bones and because on ground adjacent to the Yale
Bowl my great-grandfather had commissioned the construction of the
Lapham Field House in
order to insure the graduation, in 1924, of my backsliding great-uncle
Ray.
But
what was not absurd was the passionate intensity of the late-night
talk on Chapel Street, the sense that something more important
was at stake than the grade (almost certainly failing) on the next
day's geology quiz. Having noticed the contradiction between what
was said in the baccalaureate addresses at Woolsey Hall and what
was meant by the diploma -- the Yale education as the means of
acquiring cash value as opposed to the grandiloquent statement about
the College preparing its students "for the whole of life, as free
men in a free society, etc." -- we thought we had discovered something
new and brave. We didn't know that we had fallen into the old Yale
habit of quarreling with Providence, that it wasn't the terms of
the argument that were important but the energy with which it was engaged.
Neither did we know
that another version of the quarrel was going forward in Woodbridge Hall, the
participants as vividly engaged but with opinions more well-informed and in
language less verbose. A. Whitney Griswold had succeeded Charles Seymour as
President of Yale in 1950, and although a graduate of the gentleman's College
(Class of 1929, a member of Wolf's Head), he concurred in the judgment of Dean
DeVane. Yale was too much a rich man's school. The time was at hand to do for
the many what had been done for the few, to search out students less fortunately
born, enlarge and extend the mandate of Heaven, attract professors of national
rank, apply a meritocratic means to an egalitarian end, or, having it both ways
and maybe just as well, an egalitarian means to a meritocratic end.
The
rearrangement of the social and intellectual furniture occupied
the College for the next 20 years. Griswold drafted the syllabus
of change, and until his death in 1963, he oversaw the first stages
of reformation; his successor, Kingman Brewster, completed the program
in the years 1964 to 1973. Like Griswold, Brewster was a graduate
of the gentleman's Yale (Class of 1941, member of the Pundits);
also like Griswold, he proceeded from the premise that privilege
owed a debt both to virtue and to talent, and when asked what it
was that he had in mind for the College he liked to say, "I do not
intend to preside over a finishing school on Long Island Sound."
None of their motions carried without objection, and their joint
venture was accompanied from the beginning by loud lamentation in
the correspondence columns of the Yale Alumni Magazine.
Of the two presidents,
Griswold was the more contemplative, a history professor fond of quoting Thomas
Jefferson's thoughts on liberal education as the means whereby "the best geniuses"
might be "raked from the rubbish." He construed the University as the proverbial
ivory tower, mercifully removed from the "money rackets." Mistrusting both the
practical and the practitioner, Griswold opposed federal funding for a medical
school, disapproved of policy institutes and committee reports, didn't like
to go to meetings. His secretaries scheduled one meeting in the morning, another
in the afternoon, each limited to the duration of an hour. He seldom inquired
about the purpose of a meeting -- whether it was meant to reassure the faculty
or comfort a deputation of disquieted alumni; what was important was that there
were only two. He preferred to sit at his desk with a fountain pen and a yellow
legal pad, composing essays remarkable for their eloquence. Like Pierson, he
associated learning with freedom:
For what earth, air, fire, and water are to animate nature, freedom is
to learning. A mind unfree, a mind possessed, dragooned or indoctrinated,
has not learned. It copies. Learning implies discovery. The unfree
mind looks at maps but does not travel. It dares not. For at the edge of the maps is the jumping-off place, full of dragons and
sea serpents. The unfree mind stays home, locks the doors, bars
the shutters. It is a hero in a crowd, a coward in solitude; it
is a slave and a sloth.
Among the few prominent
people in the country who spoke forcibly and publicly against Joe McCarthy in
the early 1950s, Griswold was also an accomplished mimic and a puckish wit,
once seen on a College balcony delivering a speech in imitation of Mussolini,
on another occasion dancing -- with straw hat and cane -- off the stage of a
lecture hall in which he had just conducted a class in American history. He
also delighted in architecture, and the university during his term as President
commissioned buildings from Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, Marcel
Breuer, and Paul Rudolph.
If Griswold was closer
in spirit to Owen Johnson's Brockhurst, Brewster more nearly resembled Stover,
serving as the University's provost when Griswold died and thus prepared to
carry forward into practice what his predecessor had posited in theory. Restless
and impulsive, always glad of the chance for a meeting or a speech, Brewster
vaulted into office on an ascending curve of optimism and great expectation.
The country's sense of its supremacy in the world had survived the assassination
of President Kennedy in November 1963; in Washington President Lyndon Johnson
was talking about a Great Society rich enough to afford an amplitude of guns
and butter, and in New Haven Brewster was talking about more and better faculty,
higher salaries, a business school, larger stores of relevance and marble. In
his manner and appearance he reminded people of a Kennedy, and at his swearing
in as Yale's 17th president in Woolsey Hall in April 1964, the impressive show
of pomp and ceremony (trumpets, drums, shouts of "Long Live the King") suggested
to all present the hope of Camelot regained.
Over
the span of the next six years Brewster and Yale made good on most
of the promises and projections. The University adopted a
policy of need-blind admissions
and offered more acceptances to public school students than to those
from private schools; class attendance was no longer compulsory;
senior essays replaced comprehensive examinations; black students
appeared in larger numbers; the faculty nearly doubled in size and
so did faculty salaries; the Corporation in 1969 approved the admission
of 500 women undergraduates.
An admired figure
on the Yale campus, often seen strolling with his dog and happy to believe that everyone at the University "knows someone who is known, intimately, to me,"
Brewster understood the University as an active agent of social change. An ancestor
had made the voyage on the Mayflower, and he regarded himself as an aristocrat
who could afford to pay premium prices for the gestures of noblesse oblige.
His patrician manner and open-handed munificence endeared him to the faculty
and students in New Haven, but the alumni were not as readily amused. Most of
them as conservative in attitude as Jeremiah Day or Timothy Dwight (the undergraduates
of 1960 had preferred Richard Nixon over John Kennedy by a margin of two to
one), they didn't approve of love beads and blue guitars, took unkindly to the
news that their old fraternities were being condemned as "elitist," too clearly
marked with the labels of prep school "prestige." By 1965 the alumni were refusing
the annual requests for funds, responding instead with letters in which they
deplored the University's failure to uphold the social and intellectual traditions
with which (in the days of the correspondent's youth) it had been so nobly blessed.
In New York, Henry Luce was heard to say, "What the hell is wrong with prestige?"
The events of the late 1960s reformulated the decade's early and optimistic enthusiasms as street demonstrations associated with the
civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, and within the University
the aesthetic objections to the Fence Club and captains' chairs
found political expression in marches on the Pentagon and the defiant
burnings of a draft card or a bra. Nobody at Yale more fully embodied
the rebellious temper of the times than the Reverend William Sloane
Coffin Jr., the University chaplain whose quarrels with Providence -- his
own and those of anybody else who cared to sign a petition or raise
a fist -- seldom failed to make the six o'clock news. A man for every season of discontent, Coffin's life had run through all the
chapters of both the Old and New Testaments of the Yale scripture -- born
in 1924 to wealth and privilege in New York, cast briefly into poverty
as a boy in Carmel, California, a year spent studying the piano
in Paris, a diploma from Andover, four years in the Army during
and shortly after World War II, a degree from Yale ('49), two years
of service at the CIA, a graduate of the Yale Divinity School, brief encounters with Williams College and the Peace Corps, and appointed,
in March of 1958, to the job that Griswold described when offering
it as "Yale's conscience." Coffin accepted the appointment with
a simple, "Yes." He could as easily have said, "Of course." From
his father (William Sloane Coffin '00) and grandfather (Edmund,
Class of 1866) he had inherited a proprietary interest in the College,
and he knew that it was his mission to preach, as did the 17th-century
Puritans, "the uncomfortable Gospel." His first prayer as Chaplain
to the Freshman Assembly in September 1959 informed the class that
the "Lord forbids our using our education merely to buy our way
into middle-class security."
Coffin wanted to
believe that the nation's universities constituted the "faithful remnant" meant
to stand against the drift of "materialism, conformism, and complacency," and
during the 17 years of his tenure in the pulpit at Battell Chapel, he practiced
as he preached -- bringing Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at Yale in 1959;
boarding a Freedom Ride in Alabama in the spring of 1960, jailed in Mississippi
for having gone the last imprudent mile; organizing the earliest opposition
to the Vietnam War in October 1965, two years later advising students to surrender
their draft cards; being indicted by the federal government in 1968 for conspiracy
and civil disobedience, the indictment also naming Benjamin Spock '25; opening
Battell Chapel in 1969 to a Black Panther protest, introducing Kingman Brewster
to Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsburg on May Day, 1970 at the demonstration in
New Haven joined by 13,000 people who had come to "Free Bobby Seale"; traveling
with David Dellinger '36 to Hanoi in September 1972 to accept the release of
three American prisoners of war.
The
parable of the Yale chaplain speaking truth to power sustained the
several factions of undergraduate dissent, some of them grounded
in the causes of civil liberties and civil rights, others on the
road to Selma, Woodstock, or Chicago. As was to be expected, the
alumni were appalled. Presidents Griswold and Brewster fended off
the demands for Coffin's dismissal by referring the complainants
to the First Amendment, but Griswold's riposte was the more pointed.
Remarking to Coffin that "the brethren are a little hot under the
collar," he showed him his formal letter of reply, in which he made
the point that learning was synonymous with the freedom of mind,
"as those without a Yale education are sometimes a little slow in
grasping."
The rebellious spirit
of the Age of Aquarius, its optimistic enthusiasms as well as its angry protests, expired during the early years of the 1970s. The Watergate scandal forced the
resignation of President Richard Nixon, the war in Vietnam ended in a whimper
of retreat (an overburdened helicopter lifting off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon), and the once urgent questions of civil rights gave way to
the even more pressing concerns about a once-prosperous economy faltering into
recession. The price of Arab oil reached $40 a barrel, the price of gold $512
an ounce, and the important people at the country's important conference tables
talked about the ways in which small was beautiful, and why, in an age of scarcity,
it was wise to hedge the bets of idealism with prudent balances of self-interest.
In
the atmosphere of diminished expectation at Yale, the fervent
rhetoric of the 1960s dwindled down the drains of esoteric literary
theory, and the administrators in Woodbridge Hall approached the
University's budget as a text sorely in need of deconstruction.
Brewster never had been a man to count the cost of a grand gesture
or a noble experiment, and by 1974 the Yale endowment was hard-pressed
to pay for the maintenance of its buildings and grounds, much less
to advance the sums required for bold initiatives. The faculty brooded
over plans of retrenchment as if contemplating maps of lost artillery
positions, and the students returned (without much protest or unruly
noise) to the careful study of corporate career moves. When in 1977
the Reverend Coffin published his memoir, Once to Every Man, the tone of it suggested that he was writing about a place and time
the likes of which he never hoped to see again.
That same year A.
Bartlett Giamatti took office as President of the University, and I begin to
lose the thread of the Yale narrative. Not because I neglected to read the books
or question witnesses both credible and well informed, but because I talked
to so many of the interested bystanders that I can't place all the available
opinions in an intelligible context or a coherent sequence. Giamatti I knew
as a friend. Prior to his accession to the Yale purple, I had engaged him to
write four articles a year for Harper's Magazine about the American sporting
scene, and it so happened that in the fall of 1977 I was teaching an undergraduate
seminar at Calhoun College over the span of the same two months in which the
Corporation was weighing Giamatti on the scale of judgment. Every Wednesday
for ten weeks I met him at a coffee shop somewhere in New Haven to bring a report
of the rumors circulating among the well-placed alumni in New York, and I came
to understand something of his ambivalence about the prospect of being named
the University's President. His father had attended Yale as a day student, and
although Giamatti had been born in Boston and schooled at Andover, he never
overcame the suspicion that he might be wearing the same cloak of invisibility
that had hidden Thomas Bergin. If and when he stood revealed to the clean and
lovable sons of privilege, he didn't know whether he would be found deserving
of their recognition and trust. Openly emotional and easily excited to dramatic expression, Giamatti never was much good at disguising whatever thought happened
to cross his mind, and over the course of the autumn semester I learned that
although as a professor of Renaissance literature he taught the texts of Machiavelli,
he didn't take to heart the instruction in cynicism. He chose to think that
it was better for a prince to be loved than feared, and on his first morning
in Woodbridge Hall in July 1978, he issued his first memo to the University
as a flourish of self-effacing wit:
In order
to repair what Milton called the ruin of our grand parents, I
wish to announce that henceforth, as a matter of university policy,
Evil is abolished and Paradise is restored. I trust all of us
will do whatever possible to achieve this policy objective.
The office of a university
president Giamatti defined as a "mid-19th-century ecclesiastical position on
top of a late 20th-century corporation," and he gave up writing for Harper's
Magazine (about sports or any other subject) on the grounds that he no longer
could speak or write in any language other than what he called "the higher institutional."
The President of Yale depended on the good will of too many constituencies at
odds with one another (faculty, students, administrative staff, parents, alumni,
the federal government), and he no longer could afford to commit the crime of
candor. On the topic of a liberal education ("a cauldron of competing ideas
and not a neatly-arranged platter of received opinions") he wrote as eloquently
as Griswold, but he didn't enjoy the advantage of an equally receptive audience.
The boom of prosperity synonymous with the first term of the Reagan administration
brought with it a miracle of loaves and fishes in the financial markets, and
by 1983 Giamatti might as well have been shouting his faith in higher education
into a Shakespearean tempest or a wind tunnel. Occasionally I ran across him
at a fund-raising event in New York, and always he seemed two or three years
older than when I'd seen him last. It galled him to bend the courtier's knee
to the ruling prejudices in the money rackets, and I remember him once saying
that he had thought a university president was supposed to cut a more dignified
figure in the world than that of a "song-and-dance man, stepping brightly through
the paces of the beggar's pantomime."
As
with Giamatti, so also with a fair percentage of the faculty and
alumni whom I encountered while making notes for the book
I didn't write. I probably talked to as many as 200 people about events at the College in the last quarter of Henry Luce's century,
and if the conversation went the distance of a second drink, I invariably
could count on the prophet seated across the table at Mory's or
standing at the bar of the Yale Club to open a vein of idealism.
During their days as undergraduates they had handled too carelessly
one or more of the sharp instruments left lying around under the elm trees, and having come away with a lifelong wound, they expected
more of themselves than a fortune in vulcanized rubber or a row
of condominiums on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The object of a Yale education they remembered as a joining of the proofs of success
to those of conscience, the perfect synthesis of the College dialectic
never more perfectly expressed than by James C. Thompson, a member
of the Class of 1953 who subsequently became both a Chinese scholar
and an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency -- "Do good,
walk humbly with thy God; but become powerful, famous, and, if possible,
affluent." The maneuver was never as easy as it looked in a New
Yorker cartoon, and the better failure was the one on the side
of Puritan discontent, not with the sophisticated inertia allied
with the party of things-as-they-are, but with the troubled and
romantic energy implicit in the hope of things-as-they-might-become.
Not that there was anything wrong either with prestige or the standard
mess of Wall Street pottage, which was a good deal more nourishing
than it could be made to seem in blank verse or on the stage of
an off-Broadway play, but there was also the injunction to improve
and reform, if not the universe or the always too-easily-corrupted
colony of Connecticut, then at least the management of a salmon
fishery or the affairs of a suburban hospital.
Speaking
for the record and with almost no exceptions, the interested bystanders expected of the University what they expected of themselves.
I met with venerable members of the faculty who thought Brewster
a great man and Giamatti a dreaming fool, also with those, equally
venerable, who thought Giamatti a great man and Brewster a glad-handing
shill; I spoke to watchful alumni who said that all of Yale College
had become a business school, the old idea of the gentleman songster
off on a spree replaced with that of the professional careerist
gathering the acorns of credit and approval. For as many people
who thought that the experiment in egalitarian theory had proved
a miserable failure, an equal number pronounced it an astonishing
success.
I was again reminded
of the disputes with Providence on the warm October day in 1993 when Richard
Levin was invested with the office and emblems of the Yale Presidency. The University
staged the ceremony with its customary delight in theatrical effect -- trumpet
voluntaries and muffled drums, a slow and splendid procession of dignitaries
in academic velvet and scarlet silk, college flags dressed up in the devices
of medieval heraldry, fanciful tents, gaily decorated with pennants broad and
flying, sunlight glittering through the arched windows of Woolsey Hall, and
from the choir loft high up under the ceiling of painted clouds, a descant of
soprano voices falling from a 17th-century sky. Baroque organ music accompanied
the carrying of the Yale mace onto the rococo stage; the orchestra played an
anthem set to words from Antigone, and Levin delivered a speech shining
with noble truths.
All in all, a fine
performance, and afterwards on the Cross Campus lawns as many as 2,000 friends
and guests of the University assembled under a drift of blue and white balloons,
the prophets at ease in Zion, and on every hand the nods and becs of great good
feeling -- faculty smiling on students, students happy with the show of pomp,
the gratifying presence of prominent alumni (grave statesmen, noted wits), President
Levin and his wife standing on the steps of Sterling Library, shaking hands,
accepting the gifts of benediction.
Not yet having given
up the notion of a book about Yale, and therefore collecting notes for what
was still a work in progress, I had asked several of the faculty and alumni
for their impression of Levin's speech. Not surprisingly, they blessed it with
superlatives, their opinions all within the range of brilliant and magnificent.
But the first student to whom I put the question -- a student approached at
random and one whom I had never seen before -- dismissed it with contempt, as
if I'd intended an insult or a joke.
"You're not serious,"
he said. "You weren't there, right?"
I assured him that
I'd heard the whole of the speech, even taken notes.
"You know," he said,
"if I thought that I was going to grow up to become Rick Levin, I'd kill myself
before eight o'clock tonight."
Impressed by the
ferocity of the remark, I asked for further explication of what he clearly regarded
as a wicked text, obnoxious in the eye of Heaven. It wasn't that he didn't think
the speech appropriate to the occasion, but somehow he had hoped for something
he could recognize as revelation -- uncontaminated absolutes, a burning bush -- and for the next 20 minutes he denounced the dream of reason that had brought
forth so many of the century's monstrous births. He phrased his objection in
an impetuous rush of words, juggling names and dates like Indian clubs, rounding
up Levin in a net of infamy with the Vietnam War, hydrogen bombs, Henry Kissinger,
blatant credentialism, the mindless and uncaring greed of the New York banks,
the debasement of America's moral coinage and the loss of its spiritual inheritance,
the successor trustees of the Yale Corporation.
It was hard to know
whether the student's politics tended left or right; what was unmistakable was
the passion with which he engaged his play of ideas and amazed himself with
the act of intellectual discovery. I admired his lack of caution. For all he
knew, I could have been one of the successor trustees, an old guy in a gray
suit who might mention his impertinence to a dean, make trouble with his resume,
spoil his chance of an introduction to somebody important at Morgan Stanley
or the New York Times. I couldn't be certain of the fact, but I didn't
think that seditious spitting in the face of authority was much in vogue at
Princeton, and I assumed that if a Harvard student had harbored a similar set
of objections, he could have been relied upon to keep them judiciously hidden
under a napkin of nervous irony.
Here
again was the old quarrel. Not the one that had driven Rector
Timothy Cutler out of the small seaport town that he would as soon
have seen turned into a pillar of salt, nor again the one that had
provoked the passions of Messrs. Buckley and Coffin, but an improvisation
on the familiar Yale theme, "learned and pious and orthodox," for
which George Pierson had searched through his notes on a snowy day
in the same vicinity of Hamden where a British admiral in 1779 had
suspected the presence of heavy American cannon.
A sudden excitement
of bells in Harkness Tower interrupted the young pilgrim in mid-sentence. The
master of music at the keyboard in the carillon was making a joyful noise unto
the Lord, outdoing himself with a gaudy rendition of a Bach chorale that obliged everybody on the lawn to observe a prolonged moment of appreciative silence.
The bells brought to mind the four allegorical figures representing the cardinal
points of a Yale success, also the eight Yale Worthies whose lifelike statues
the masons had placed 20 feet below them, on the level of the clock. While reading
through one of the College histories I dutifully had made note of all their
names, but until that October afternoon it never had occurred to me that three
of the eight embodied the antithetical spirit of remonstrance and dissent -- Nathan Hale, hanged for treason against the British crown; John C. Calhoun,
apostle of secession; Jonathan Edwards, Puritan tutor refusing to worship at
the altar of the world in time. The lesson was in the stone.  |
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