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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. |
Richard Levin ’74PhD, President Being tapped to lead Yale is a heady experience, but at least one candidate for the job had second thoughts about the wisdom of attempting to shepherd what he called a “ruined college” whose buildings and finances were in sorry shape. The candidate was Timothy Dwight, but in 1795 he put aside his doubts about the place’s viability, assumed the presidency, and undertook a dramatic rebuilding campaign. The University’s situation in the early 1990s was not quite so dire, but with both the consequences of decades of deferred maintenance and the spectre of budget deficits coming home to roost, no one would have blamed Richard C. Levin for passing on the chance to become Yale’s 22nd president. Of course, like Dwight, Levin accepted the job, and in a book produced to honor his ten years at the helm—a time characterized by a massive rebuilding effort and the restoration of balanced budgets—Levin offers readers a look at the principles that have guided him. The Work of the University is a collection of speeches and essays. A number of these public pronouncements—the annual address to entering freshmen at the start of the fall term and the Baccalaureate for graduating seniors, along with the challenging 1996 policy statement titled “Yale’s Fourth Century”—have appeared in this magazine, while other speeches, from his eulogy for Nobel laureate economics professor James Tobin to his Tercentennial DeVane lecture on “Democracy and the Market,” will be new to many Yale Alumni Magazine readers. Placed under one cover, they reveal many of the insights and inspirations that have defined and directed Levin’s presidency. Given Levin’s stature as an economist, considerations of the interplay between democracy and the free market figure heavily in several of these addresses. One lecture—“Can America Compete in World Markets?”—which was delivered to the New Haven League of Women Voters in early 1993, is particularly intriguing because, in focusing on the role of basic research in technological innovation, Levin foreshadows his recent major initiatives in expanding the sciences at Yale and helping turn discoveries into new businesses in New Haven. In a section of the book called “The University’s Role in Society,” the president explores these themes in more depth, and in a speech delivered at Peking University in May 2001, he discusses another key initiative, expanding Yale’s role on the global stage. The majority of the book, however, is more personal: Levin’s annual words of advice for freshmen to help guide them on their Yale path, and his speech to departing seniors to put their Yale journey into perspective. In these addresses, the president invokes the experiences of such luminaries as explorer Meriwether Lewis, physicist Richard Feynman, statesman Benjamin Franklin, and mountaineer Edward Whymper. Levin charges students to consider the meaning of citizenship and service, and, of course, he spoke to them in an effort to make sense of September 11. In his Tercentennial Address on October 5, 2001, Levin delivers to the Yale community an agenda for the next 100 years and an antidote to the evil that had been loosed on this country. “Here is our task,” said the president. “To educate thinking citizens and leaders, to preserve free inquiry and free expression, to generate new knowledge that improves health and prosperity, to encourage realization of the human potential latent within our cities, and to reach out to the world to provide a foundation for mutual understanding and peace.”
Robert J. Shiller, the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics At the height of the dot-com boom three years ago, the Dow had topped 11,000, the NASDAQ had cleared 5,000, and it seemed as if the laws of financial gravity had been repealed. One popular book of that time was Dow 36,000, and there were even financial analysts who suggested that this wasn’t an optimistic enough forecast. Yale economist Robert Shiller wasn’t one of them, and in a sobering book called Irrational Exuberance—the title comes from a famous assessment in 1996 by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan of an already overheated stock market—Shiller said that investors were in for a fall. Subsequent events established the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics as a modern-day seer, so now when Shiller talks, people listen. They’ll certainly be listening to his newest effort, released several weeks ago, in which the economist proposes a way to “fundamentally resolve the economic risk predicament.” Shiller’s means for doing this derive from the world of finance, a discipline whose “primary subject matter is the management of risks,” but whose benefits “often accrue mainly to the already well-off members of our society.” In this book, the economist outlines six fundamental ideas—three aimed at the private sector and three directed toward the government—that, if implemented, could result in what he terms a “new financial order.” The first is an expansion of the notion of insurance to cover livelihood and home equity. The second is a call for a new kind of security—macro markets—that Shiller believes could help reduce financial volatility. He also proposes income-linked loans, inequality insurance, intergenerational social security, and international agreements to manage risks to national economies. These proposals would “democratize finance and bring the advantages enjoyed by the clients of Wall Street to the customers of Wal-Mart [and] extend the domain of finance beyond that of physical capital to human capital,” says Shiller. “Our fundamental risks will thus be insured against, hedged, diversified, making for a safer world … A new democratic finance will encourage all of us to be more venturesome, more inspired in our activities.”
David Frum '82, '82MA On January 30, 2001—ten days after the inauguration of George W. Bush as this country’s 43rd President—conservative journalist David Frum joined the Bush team as a speechwriter. It was an odd career switch, for not only did Frum lack political aspirations and speechwriting experience, he was also, by his own admission, no partisan. The Bush team’s catch-phrase, “compassionate conservative,” rang hollow—“less like a philosophy than a marketing slogan.” Frum, who is Jewish, was also troubled when the first phrase he heard on entering the White House was “missed you at Bible study.” Worse still, he had strong doubts about the wisdom of joining an administration whose leader had “come into office with half the country thinking him little better than some Paraguayan colonel who seized the presidential palace and the other half pretty much indifferent to everything in his program except the promise to lay off interns,” says Frum. Noting that this “was not much of a mandate to govern,” the writer admitted that “my faith in Bush was not deep.” But his curiosity was, and so he opted to become a Washington insider. Over the next 13 tumultuous months that he spent as a presidential wordsmith, Frum’s attitude towards Bush gradually began to change. In this personal and often poignant account of his time at the White House, the author profiles many of the major players on the team—Karl Rove, Michael Gerson, Karen Hughes, and Condoleeza Rice, among them—and reveals what it was like to be there during and after September 11. Frum chronicles everything from the menu on Air Force One to Bush’s commencement speech at Yale. Of special interest is Frum’s account of how the 2002 State of the Union address came together—the speech that contained the controversial phrase “axis of evil.” In some articles, Frum has been credited with coining the words that have come to define Bush’s foreign policy—and with being fired when, in a private e-mail that wound up public, Frum’s wife claimed her husband as the phrase’s author. The story he tells in the book is more subtle, and it provides clues to the character of the commander-in-chief. It also serves as one of many anecdotes showing why Frum’s opinion of his boss rose during his time in the White House. Frum’s change of heart seems to mirror that of a nation that has followed its President into two wars. “Leadership remains the greatest mystery in politics,” says Frum. “George W. Bush was hardly the obvious man for the job. But by a very strange fate, he turned out to be, of all unlikely things, the right man.”
Brief Reviews Alex Berenson '94 “On Wall Street, not all numbers are created equal,” notes the author, a New York Times business reporter. In this readable analysis of a systems failure, Berenson offers the tools investors need to separate good numbers from bad.
Steven
Brill '72, '75JD The day after September 11, this country was utterly changed. Journalist Brill assesses terrorism’s impact by following people as different as John Ashcroft and the owner of a shoe repair shop near Ground Zero.
Paula
Marantz Cohen '75 In this comedy of manners, a clever, gentle, and Borscht Belt–funny update of Pride and Prejudice, the Bennett sisters have become kvetchy Jewish widows adrift in a retirement community in Boca Raton, Florida.
Jim
’49 and Dancy Duffus If the AT beckons but backpacking the entire 2,100-plus miles is not possible, the authors offer an alternative: 74 points along Eastern U.S. highways that offer access to scenic adventures in the world’s longest linear park.
Bethany Teachman '02PhD, Marlene B. Schwartz '96PhD, Bonnie Gordic '01,
and Brenda Coyle Straight answers and advice from researchers associated with the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders
Monique
Truong '90 When Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein lived in Paris, they hired a Vietnamese cook. Debut novelist Truong brings a man she calls Binh, who is infused with “the pure, sea salt sadness of the outcast,” and these women to life.
Anne Applebaum 1986 Kate A. Baldwin 1995PhD Jonathan Barnett 1958, 1963MArch Dick Bentley 1959 Sarah A. Binder 1986 Matthew J. Bruccoli 1953, Editor Frederick Buell 1964, 1967Law Paul E. Ceruzzi 1970 David Marshall Chan 1991 Debra Rae Cohen 1976 Bruce Cutler and Lionel Rene Saporta 1973 Douglas W. Darnowski 1992BS Jacqueline Deval 1983 Cai Emmons 1973 James O. Freedman 1962LLB Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony 1985, 1996PhD Michael Gecan 1971 Tamar Szabo Gendler 1987 and John Hawthorne, Editors Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb 1988 William Glenn Gray 1999PhD David Edman Gray 1992 Benjamin Gregg 1977MFS David Garrett Izzo and Lincoln Konkle, Editors Jeff Johnson 1974 Charles J. Johnson Jr. 1953 Gary S. Katzmann 1979JD, Editor Christina Klein 1998PhD Peter Mark 1976PhD George M. Marsden Phillip C. McKee III 1994 Edward Mickolus 1981PhD General William E. Odom, Professor (Adjunct) of Political Science Britton Payne 1992, Writer and Illustrator Ellen Peel 1982PhD John Portman 1985 Richard A. Posner 1959, 1996LLDH Stephen G. Ray Jr. 1993MDiv Nina Revoyr 1991 Archie Richards Jr. 1960 Renee C. Romano 1990 Frank Satterthwaite 1968MUS, 1975PhD, and Gary D'Orsi Virginia Scharff 1974 David Schoenbrod 1963, 1968LLB, and Ross Sandler Ian Shapiro 1983 PhD, 1987JD, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science Lawrence B. Slobodkin 1951PhD Laura Spielvogel 1998PhD Hugh Spitzer 1970 and Robert Utter Peter Stansky 1953 Monique M. Taylor 1984 Rachel Zucker 1994
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