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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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In ordinary times, editorials in this magazine seem out of place. The Yale Alumni Magazine’s mission is to report on Yale for the benefit of the alumni and their University, and to provide a platform for comment. It remains what it was at its founding in 1891, a neutral conduit between Yale and those who have passed through it. But these are not ordinary times. At the moment on September 11 when Jenny Holley, our editorial assistant, rushed in with the awful news she had heard on her radio, this magazine, like every other institution and individual in America, changed. We were about to send the October issue to the printer when the hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The cover story was to have been about the strides Yale is making in addressing issues of international scope. The cover image was a cheerful graphic of a globe spinning on a stand in the shape of a silver “Y.” That was not a message the Yale Alumni Magazine could send on September 11. In rage and in sorrow, we are trying to answer a question so many Americans are asking: What can we do to help? In this issue, we have three responses. One takes the form of the Class and School Alumni Notes, in which our correspondents have begun to list the names of those classmates killed, injured, and otherwise affected by the attacks. The second is a brief piece in the “College Comment” section by an undergraduate about the impact of the recent events on one member of the student body. The third is our cover story, “Worldly Wisdom.” In the aftermath of the attacks, the article’s author, Mark Branch, returned to the people he had interviewed for the piece that had been scheduled for the October issue and asked them what we should know about the reasons for what had happened and what may lie ahead. This is where universities differ from government agencies, corporations, and military organizations. Universities bring to bear on society’s most vexing problems the forces of history, inquiry, and analysis in search of understanding—even, perhaps, solutions. Whatever action Yale alumni may take in response to September 11—whether in the White House or in humbler homes—the outcomes will depend on understanding. That is what education is for. This is what we can do to help.
Missing on China Melinda Tuhus’s article, “Sticking With China” (Sum.), beautifully illustrated the ways in which, from the beginning, Yale-in-China has reflected what Reuben Holden, the long-time Secretary of the University, cited in his book, Yale-in-China, as “the Yale spirit.” However, conspicuously missing among the Yale schools and entities mentioned in the article was any mention of the prominent roles of Divinity School professors and Dwight Hall staff and students in the founding and development of Yale-in-China. It is important to remember, as Holden has reminded us, that “Yale-in-China was in fact a culmination of the long historic tradition within Yale [of undergraduate religious societies at Yale and other colleges] and the climax of missionary activity in the whole intercollegiate Christian movement in America.”
Sports Irony I’m sure I’m not the only one who giggled at the irony of the April edition of the Yale Alumni Magazine. The issue featured a short essay by James Shulman and William Bowen (“A Gladiator Class?”), which offers a quick precis of their hugely important book, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Their findings about the relationship between college athletes and the admissions process are chilling to anyone who cares about higher education. In short: Even at America’s most academically selective institutions (including Yale), the academic mission is being distorted and perverted in order to field teams of competitive athletes, no matter whether they meet the academic grade. The cover story, however, was about Yale’s new rowing facility! The article touted the architecture of the building (the pictures do look nice) and discreetly didn’t mention the total cost, only noting that a $4 million gift was involved. Purely a coincidence?
The Slavery Legacy My response to the Amistad group [See “Light & Verity,” Oct.], as a Yale graduate of many years ago, as an historian of sorts, as a teacher, and as someone interested in truth, is to applaud its members for drawing attention to the extent to which slavery and slave money once permeated American economy and culture. Each year, my students are astounded to learn that slavery existed here in “liberal” New England well into the 1800s; the Yale information provides further factual underpinnings for this assertion. As to the question of what the present owes the past, I make this a topic of serious discussion in my courses. We have done some good talking and some thoughtful writing on matters ranging from memorialization to reparations. Ultimately, we are speaking of a legacy of racism and classism and the ways in which institutions (including schools, universities, and governments) have perpetuated the evils. I say, let the conversations and arguments roll—there is nothing but thoughtful good to come of it. I consider the Amistad group’s work both substantive and tactical. Along with unearthing good factual history, it has also elected to associate the bad stuff with a highly respectable and very affluent institution that is generally thought to occupy some very high moral ground, and whose scholarly commitment to addressing issues of race and slavery has been as firm as anyone’s and better than most. If this sort of thing went on at Yale (I read the meta-message as saying), then we cannot deny that it was everywhere, and that willfully unexamined connections to slavery are part of the fabric of all the cultural and economic history of our society. The lever here, as I see it, is not so much lifting the seal from Yale’s hidden past, but rather using Yale’s “moral authority” as a fulcrum by means of which we can lift the curtain and let some light and truth into the historical crypts from which we have tacitly agreed to remove the gravemarkers.
Speaking up for Unions I was disturbed to read Law School dean Anthony Kronman’s piece, “Are Graduate Students Workers?”, in the May 19, 2001 edition of the New York Times. ["States of a Union,” Oct.] In opposing unionization of teaching assistants, I fear Dean Kronman reacted with the voice of management, rather than with that of the academy. Perhaps this is because, while he has contributed to scholarship in many fields, as far as I know he has never taught labor law or studied collective bargaining. Indeed, he errs from the start by asserting that the NLRB’s recent holding that TAs are employees was a “dramatic reversal.” I can inform you, having written the AFL-CIO’s brief in the recent New York University case concerning teaching assistants, that the NLRB had never before squarely resolved the question. Dean Kronman acknowledges problems existing in universities, including the growing reliance on untrained graduate students to teach classes, and the admission of graduate students in numbers sufficient to perform this task, but out of proportion to the number of tenure-track positions available when they graduate. But he does not identify what factors will reverse the current trends. In effect, he echoes the refrain of many employers who, faced with organizing drives, simply ask for “another chance.” In addition, Dean Kronman portrays unions as only for blue-collar workers, as institutions that will “define graduate students even more rigidly as the piece-work teachers of undergraduates.” He thereby fails to take account of the fact that unions represent a broad spectrum of workers, ranging from teachers and doctors to the engineers at Boeing, not to mention TAs at many leading universities (such as the Universities of California, Michigan, and Wisconsin). Finally, Dean Kronman simply applies to the academy the formulaic argument that collective bargaining is inconsistent with individual achievement and the goal of producing scholars with “distinctive views and voices.” But individual achievement has proven consistent with union membership in multiple spheres. Didn’t Michael Jordan excel in the unionized NBA; doesn’t Julia Roberts have a distinctive voice, even as a member of the Screen Actors Guild? TAs who join unions have no less respect for intellectual freedom and individual merit than their professors, and collective bargaining is a supple institution able both to address their concerns as workers and to advance their ideals as students. Collective bargaining is nothing more than a system of representation governed by the principle of majority rule. Would Dean Kronman suggest that democratic government is incompatible with individual achievement? Does he really believe that denying graduate students a meaningful voice in what is undeniably (at least in part) their workplace, will teach them to speak with a distinctive voice in the future?
Coach to the Rescue This letter concerns your March issue’s mention of the 1919 “low period” at Yale, when returning local servicemen assaulted many Yale students (“Highs & Lows of Town & Gown”). My father, “Mac” Baldrige '18, was involved heroically in this event. At that time, my father (a returned army veteran from France) was at Yale Law School. He lived in Vanderbilt Hall as a proctor for the undergraduates there. He was well known to the local police and to many of the rampaging young “townie” servicemen because he was the football coach of the New Haven semi-pro football team, and he had been successful in getting Yale to allow the team to play their games in the Yale Bowl on Sundays. In 1919, after learning that a large group of Yale men were trapped by fire in the movie house across from the Taft Hotel, he was able to lead them back safely across Chapel Street to the Vanderbilt gates, which the campus police briefly unlocked for their entrance. Seeing “Mac” Baldrige helped calm down the rioters.
Classy Coverage Of all the cheerful and grumpy letters you print, none that I can recall has acknowledged the authors of the best-read feature in the Yale Alumni Magazine -- the “Class and School Alumni Notes.” I naturally turn first to the three secretaries my class has enjoyed: Larry Lawrence, Julie Singer Chernoff, and Nancy Marx Better. But it is also a pleasure to read notes from other classes. In recent months, I have been most impressed by Erik Kulleseid '85, whose calm and gentle tone follows the standard set by the exquisitely stylish Michael Montesano '83 (now retired). Great thanks to all these faithful correspondents.
Drinking Woes It was interesting (but not really surprising) to read about Yale’s de facto policy of looking the other way with regard to unlawful underage drinking (“A Closer Look at Alcohol,” May). Nice to know we even put on workshops on how to break the law (to drink in a controlled manner), even though alcohol overdose cost a student life. Since there are no documented cases in the world of medical literature of overdose deaths from cannabis use, perhaps a workshop on how to smoke cannabis in a controlled manner would make more sense—as long as we are ignoring the laws anyway.
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