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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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I have never before felt compelled to write a letter to the Yale Alumni Magazine; however, Cara Worthington Fekula Hyson’s “Out of the Blue” column, “My Life as a Person” (Nov.), struck a nerve. I think Ms. Hyson may take the alumni community to task excessively for sending in one-paragraph “press releases” of their latest accomplishments. You can only say so much about your life in a one-line blurb, and we are usually more willing to share our victories than our defeats. But her column rightly goes on to chastise us for sometimes letting our striving for achievement get in the way of living worthwhile and fulfilling lives. The time we spent at Yale made each of us a fuller person who is better able to ask fundamental questions about the nature of ourselves and the world around us. While many of us put those skills to work in our careers in order to accumulate wealth, sometimes it is easy to forget to continue to use them to work on ourselves and to constantly reevaluate what makes our lives worth living. Having come home to central South Dakota, where the opportunities for financial reward and other outward signs of success are not readily available (but where I find real happiness and fulfillment), I appreciate Hyson’s reminder to us all to ask ourselves how we define “success” and why. It is obviously impossible to come up with a universal answer to that question, but having the ongoing discussion of success by Yalies of different generations, backgrounds, and approaches is what Yale is all about. Cheers to Ms. Hyson for reminding us all of that.
Please pass on to Cara Worthington Fekula Hyson '77 my applause for her “Out of the Blue” piece. As a woman with her own career, her husband’s demanding career, and three (now grown) children, I agree that the issues and questions she raises deserve attention. Especially in light of the September 11 events, it seems clear that educational institutions as well as families need to consider how they can help young people develop not only self-confidence and an optimistic sense of possibilities, but also the abilities and strengths they will need to handle the conflicts and setbacks of life. I would add that teachers, parents, and young people also need to view these issues in terms of the well-being of others as well as themselves.
In “My Life as a Person,” Cara Worthington Fekula Hyson maintains that she wants to lead a discussion. There was not a day that I, as a Yale student, did not engage in discussions on the very subjects she offered—in the dining hall, in our common rooms, and everywhere in between. We students spent most of our time exploring our personhood, dissecting our latest discoveries about ourselves, and wondering where our next step toward personal growth should take us. Grades and other performance measures were non-existent, really, and we were honestly happy for friends who won accolades. We rarely, if ever, discussed professional trades; I always had a palpable sense that commercialism was discouraged in favor of academia. (I recall one instance when a suitemate and I asked our residential college dean for advice about applying to law school. The dean responded that we shouldn’t be in so much of a hurry to pursue a career, suggesting instead that we take a year off to travel.) At Yale, I never felt defined by my gender. But if Yale is to blame at all, the more accurate critique is that it failed to prepare us for the harsh reality held at bay by Phelps Gate—that the rest of society may not be so like-minded. Perhaps I finally realized how extraordinary my Yale experience had been when a colleague of my own age asserted that a woman could not serve as an effective U.S. president, or when another denied that men could act as primary caregivers to their children. Leadership is not defined by the ranks of the Fortune 500 alone. Even if it were, Yale cannot be held accountable for creating that standard. Leadership is concerned with asking the right questions, over and over again, until better answers emerge. Asking whether we, as alumni, live up to Yale’s expectations is not exactly right. A better question may be whether we define our lives not as others would have them, but as we desire them to be. If Hyson asked that question of her daughters, of her sons, and of herself, she might feel less constricted by the ghosts of Yalies past. Either way, she'd be a leader—under the definition I learned at Yale, anyway.
The Trustee’s Role I am writing in response to the Yale Alumni Magazine’s coverage of the candidacy of the Rev. W. David Lee '93MDiv for Alumni Fellow (“Light & Verity,” Nov.). The role of trustee at Yale is significant and multifaceted. Alumni have the responsibility each year to elect one alumni trustee who will carry a significant burden of leadership. He or she must be able to understand and judge the issues and opportunities that face Yale and to make decisions without portfolio. The Rev. Lee’s stated interests appear to be focused on Yale’s relationship with New Haven and opportunities for neighborhood improvements through Yale’s financial participation. Quite frankly, Yale is already in solid partnership with New Haven and has joined many initiatives that will have long-term benefits for both the community and the University. A candidate for trustee with such a single focus cannot provide the necessary leadership and judgment. Trustees must represent Yale in all aspects. My second concern is the significant financial support given to the Rev. Lee’s campaign by Yale’s unions. Such support by necessity creates an obligation, and furthermore, it is not in keeping with the spirit of service and leadership among all trustees. I urge all alumni to consider the qualifications required of a trustee as they cast their votes.
In Praise of Divinity Kudos to Matthew Holden Lewis for his excellent article on Yale’s Divinity School (“Belief, Bricks, and Beyond,” Nov.). It is the sanest, most balanced, and most upbeat assessment of the School’s present situation that has yet appeared. Since my own Divinity School days, I have followed closely the School’s affairs and vicissitudes, including the controversial “adaptive reuse” construction of the past decade, and I know many alumni, like me, were troubled by the deterioration of the physical plant and the deliberate alteration of its Georgian Colonial architecture. When I was a student in my twenties, I could not imagine a theological seminary anywhere in the world that could provide a more luxuriously beautiful environment so conducive to the study of theology. Lewis’s article convinces me that students in the 21st century will continue to find Yale, with its superb faculty and renewed, improved facilities, the finest place in the world to study theology and prepare for religious vocations. Yale should be proud of its venerable Divinity School, particularly now with its brilliant new dean, Rebecca Chopp. Its future could not be brighter.
Fallout from September I read with dismay Professor Paul Kennedy’s admonition to his history students to “put themselves in the place” of Palestinians who rejoiced at the World Trade Center bombing (“A More Global Yale,” Nov.). I suggest that this academic descend from his protected tower and put himself, literally, in the place of the victims, by visiting Ground Zero or the site of the Pentagon bombing. The moral relativism his remark seems to endorse is unworthy of Yale and an insult to the intelligence of his students.
Living in New York City as I do, and working a few blocks east of Ground Zero, I am confronted on a daily basis with the losses suffered on September 11, via co-workers who are still coping, as well as newspaper testimonials and obituaries (not to mention that ubiquitous smell). However, I don’t think that the spectrum of losses was ever as dramatically illustrated as on page 80 in the November Yale Alumni Magazine. Right there, side by side in their respective Alumni Notes sections, were listed victims Bradley Hoorn '01 and Elizabeth Gregg '77PhD. These two graduates represented, for the most part, the upper and lower extremes of the ages of victims. I couldn’t help but think of them, their peers, and of everyone else in between.
The Reach of Slavery Your article on the Amistad Committee (“Light & Verity,” Oct.) recalls the grinding irony that slavery, once the prime focus of everyone concerned with equality, has now been debased to the point where equality is abandoned the minute the subject is raised. There is no suggestion of applying the same rules to everyone of any race, nation, or creed. Instead it is used as a weapon against the currently fashionable whipping boy and as a prize to reward the currently fashionable aristocracy anointed by the currently fashionable royalty of political despots. No wonder. If we make all people pay for their ancestors' sins, it will bear hard on many favored minority groups. Past slavers include Indians (both North and South American), pre-Christian Jews, Asians from Cathay to Japan, New Zealand Maoris and other Pacific Islanders, Mongols, Mohammed’s followers for 800 years, many African tribes (who were, and still are, slavers), Europeans, and Americans. Note that the overwhelming majority of slaves were non-black, including my starkly Anglo-Saxon forebears, marked by iron collars riveted around their necks for a hundred years after the Battle of Hastings. Throughout history, humans have treated each other with abominable cruelty, and we must recognize this sorry heritage and try to improve on it. The best we can see is some slight improvement over three thousand years in the developed countries. Our country was founded on the principle that its affairs would go better than those in the rest of the world if each person was held accountable for his or her own actions. Will we now throw people in jail for their ancestors' crimes? How insane can we get?
For more on the issue of Yale and slavery, see “The Slavery Legacy”.—Ed.
Added Language Following up on “Boning Up on Bulgarian” (Oct.), the article about Yale’s program for Directed Independent Language Study, I should add that part of the funding for DILS comes from the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, from Title 6 grants to the African Studies Council, and from the European Studies Council.
Mao’s Landlord A historical footnote to the article on Yale’s links to China (“Sticking With China,” Sum.): As Yale’s own Sterling Professor of History Jonathan Spence tells us in his book on Mao Zedong, when Mao became an entrepreneur in Changsha in 1920, his landlord was none other than the Hunan-Yale Medical School. The future Communist leader paid his rent and made a 30 percent profit his first year.
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