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Tercentennial Talent
Summer 2001
by Bruce Fellman

During a weekend this April on a campus filled with singing group performances and pro-union demonstrations, Anita Hill '80JD, who gained national notoriety ten years ago when she accused then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas '74JD of sexual harrassment, pondered the role of law in creating social change for women. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau '70, ’73MFA, made a rare public appearance to talk about the origins of his internationally syndicated comic strip “Doonsebury.” And the nation’s 41st president, George Bush '48, told tales about “Gorby,” the Babe, and “43”: former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, baseball legend Babe Ruth, and his son George W. Bush '68, the 43rd U.S. president.

The occasion was the Alumni Leadership Convocation that took place April 19-22 and brought some 1,500 Yale graduates and their guests to New Haven to celebrate what organizers called “300 years of creativity and discovery.” The gathering of so many alumni, each of whom plays a leadership role in alumni affairs, also attracted the attention of well-organized groups of protesters who gathered on the New Haven Green, on the streets, and in various places around campus to urge support for the unionization efforts of graduate students and hospital workers, and various other causes.

While the demonstrations were spirited, at least one middle-aged Blue was not impressed. “Compared with our day, this was pretty mild stuff,” said Jim Babst '71, of New Orleans. Still, the protesters got their points across, noted Mehmet Kahya '73, who came to the weekend from his home in Turkey where he is president of the local Yale club. “If the students want something, I think one has to listen to them,” said Kahya.

Inside classrooms and dining halls, attendees listened to some of the University’s best teachers and most noted alumni talk about their work. “We featured what Yale holds to be its heart—teaching and learning in the liberal tradition,” says Linda Koch Lorimer, University Secretary and head of planning for the year-long 300th birthday celebration.

The convocation was the second in a trio of major events held in honor of the University’s Tercentennial. The kickoff last October 21 paid tribute to Yale’s ties to the Elm City (see Dec. 2000), while the finale on October 5-7 will be more of a party for the campus community.

For the April event, the planners put together a weekend that examined virtually every field of Yale endeavor. Implementing such a program required a coordinated, Yale-wide effort worthy of a military campaign, said Lorimer. “This was an achievement that showed the capacity of the University staff, from custodians and dining hall workers to professors and administrators, to work together,” said the secretary.

The Convocation featured both entertainment and education. Naturally enough, the evening portion of the program revolved around music and offered everything from Charles Ives, Class of 1898, and Cole Porter '13 to football cheers and a cappella singing groups. The daytime portion explored Yale’s intellectual landscape through 57 different presentations, five on Friday, April 20, and 51, divided between three time periods, on Saturday. The entire group then convened in Woolsey in the late afternoon to hear George H.W. Bush talk about world events, his presidency, his Yale experiences, and public service. The following morning, the Convocation reconvened in Battell Chapel for an ecumenical service.

Any program that included musician Willie Ruff singing spirituals and exploring the history of the three-string bass fiddle and Sterling Professor Emeritus of English Marie Boroff leading attendees in a chorus of “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” was certainly wide-ranging. But, of necessity, “it was not all-encompassing,” said Penelope Laurans, a dean and assistant to the President who helped develop and coordinate the presentations. “We had to make terrible choices.”

Just as the AYA had to whittle down its guest list from the estimated 35,000 alums who have taken part in some aspect of volunteerism to the 1,500 or so current leaders who could be housed in a limited supply of local hotel rooms and accommodated in Yale’s classrooms and dining halls, so too did Laurans and her team have to limit the talent and ideas they wanted to put on display.

But even this highly selective version of the Blue Book and the alumni directory had convocation attendees scratching their heads and wondering how to choose between sessions on the invention of football or the handheld computer, or between considerations of the new urbanism with Vincent Scully or literary criticism with Harold Bloom. In the first set of Saturday morning sessions, for example, there were opportunities to practice the art of conducting under the direction of Lawrence Smith, conductor in residence at the School of Music; to learn how the work of Phillips Professor of Mathematics Ronald Coifman is enabling technicians to restore old Caruso recordings and scientists to develop an artificial eye; or to discuss investment strategies with Yale’s chief investment officer David Swensen '80PhD. Maddeningly, all these presentations met at the same time.

In the next set, paleontologist Jacques Gauthier offered a behind-the-scenes tour of the Peabody Museum’s fossil collection, Leffingwell Professor of Painting Richard Lytle led a hands-on consideration of color theory in which participants were given paper, paint, and glue to work through exercises developed by Josef Albers when he taught at Yale from 1950 to 1958, and two-time Olympic rower Chris Ernst '76 led a panel discussion about the evolution of her sport at Yale. But as before, each attendee could only pick one from the 19 presentations offered during the 10:45 a.m.-to-noon time slot.

Some of the sessions filled to capacity, but any available seats were made available to students, more than 800 of whom secured tickets. “We didn’t want the convocation to be seen as exclusionary,” said Jeffrey Brenzel '75, executive director of the AYA, which played a lead role in organizing the convocation. “Besides, the alums love to rub elbows with undergraduates.”

After a buffet lunch at the residential colleges during which students and alumni compared notes, convocation attendees returned to a program that offered fewer, but no less easy, choices. There was the possibility of watching playwrights Christopher Durang '74MFA and Wendy Wasserstein '76MFA critique student productions of their plays or of listening to the Tokyo String Quartet rehearse its repertoire. For readers curious about why the best-selling novel, A Man in Full, ended so abruptly, author Tom Wolfe '57PhD, in a program on “The Making of a Writer,” had a surprising revelation. “I ran out of time,” said the man in trademark white. “I crashed the book into a wall and walked away.”

While Wolfe was making his mea culpa, Alan Shestack, who directed the Yale Art Gallery from 1971 to 1984, described one of its odder “defining moments.” The gallery had been in the middle of meeting a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Shestack had asked each member of the governing board for a donation. One member was Paul Mellon '29, but because the philanthropist had just endowed what would become the Center for British Art, Shestack asked for only a token gift.

“I won’t give you a nickel,” was Mellon’s response, Shestack recalled. However, “he then wondered if I’d be interested in a few paintings. I had only wanted a hundred bucks, but we wound up with 16 paintings by French impressionists that were worth millions.”

While Shestack reminisced, “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau, who almost never speaks in public, told a packed Sprague Hall that the inspiration to try to go commercial with his comic strip, which was then called “Bull Tales” and was running in the Yale Daily News, came from the success his tutor Erich Segal had with Love Story. “I took a look at my own work, which was about equally shallow, self-involved preppies, and said, hey, I’ve got a business model,” Trudeau explained. The cartoonist also defended his treatment of the current U.S. president, who appears in the comic strip as an asterisk in a ten-gallon hat. “Is this the kind of thing a member of the Class of 1970 should be saying about a member of the Class of 1968? Well yes, it is,” said Trudeau.

In a sense, George W. has actually fared better than his father, whom the cartoonist depicted as nothing at all. But the 41st president was solidly in evidence onstage in Woolsey Hall where he fielded questions from President Levin, history professor Paul Kennedy, international relations graduate student Maria Ivanova, and graduating senior Peter Massa, outgoing captain of the football team. The senior Bush was by turns humorous and caustic in discussing the end of the Cold War, the defeat of Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, the role of the United Nations, and his own political fortunes.

The 77-year-old president often began his answers with a personal anecdote, such as “I’ll never forget an evening in Madrid,” or, “the day the Berlin Wall came down, I remember sitting at my desk.” Bush, in a relaxed manner evocative of a fireside chat, then went on to describe behind-the-scenes meetings with world leaders that changed the world’s political landscape.

The entire discussion, along with most of the other sessions, is available on the Web at www.yale.edu/yale300/aprilweekendvideos/index.htm, but several moments stand out. One was Bush’s advocacy of humility on the world stage. “We can’t treat everyone with arrogance just because we’re now the only superpower,” he said, adding that this was especially true in dealing with Russia. “I didn’t want to put my fingers in Gorby’s eyes—we have to treat them with respect.”

Bush appeared genuinely moved when panelist Ivanova, who grew up in Soviet-dominated Bulgaria, thanked him for his role in “the events that transformed my life … This was the time in history when we got a new dream,” Ivanova said.

Perhaps the most poignant moment was Bush’s response to a question by Peter Massa '01, who is embarking on a career in public service. Massa asked about the lessons Bush had learned from sports. The president answered with a story in which he told his mother that he'd scored three goals an Andover soccer game. Instead of praising the boy for his achievement, his mother asked, “But George, how did the team do?”

Assembling a good team and bringing out its best effort was the essence of leadership, and Yale had made a “huge contribution” to providing leaders, said Bush. “Public service is a noble calling. There’s no definition of a successful life without service to others.”  

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