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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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During the winter, in the midst of my euphoria after I knew I’d be returning to Yale to edit this magazine, I had a recurring dream. I dreamed I was moving back into the dorm. Here I was, a middle-aged woman with a husband, two children, a career, and twenty years’ worth of hard-won experience and (I like to think) maturity in between me and college, and I was moving back into the dorm. Not even a modern, refurbished dorm with Internet hookups and private bedrooms, but an Old Campus dorm circa 1977—semi-Gothic, the paint a little smudged, not much room, zero privacy. My roommates were always nice young women who had arrived two days earlier and claimed all the good spots, and they always smiled at me and said sprightly Hellos while I dragged my trunk under my bed and tried to figure out where I was going to keep my books and my toothbrush. I had the dream about three times; it stopped as soon as my husband and I bought a house. There is nothing like real estate for making a person feel like a grownup. And after we moved in, and I started driving around the New Haven area to places I’d never seen as an student, and meeting people who once would have been giving me reading assignments but are now professional colleagues, I found that moving back to your alma mater as a journalist doesn’t mean moving back into your youthful self. Instead, it means a chance to make good on the old alumni lament that education is wasted on the young. Yale is an incredible place. Benoit Mandelbrot, inventor of fractal geometry, is here. Van Gogh’s Night Cafe is here. Leading work on dyslexia, autism, and neuroimaging; the Vinland Map; the founder of the Cambodian Genocide Project; the original skeleton of Brontosaurus (later revised to Apatosaurus); the author of the bestselling Irrational Exuberance; one of the foremost teams working to build a quantum computer: They’re all here. I’ve been on the job two months now, and I’m still constantly exclaiming, "That’s here?” Add to all this an administration trying to raise Yale’s global profile in the midst of an economic downturn, a city undergoing a productive but delicate rapprochement with said administration, the old but apparently ever-renewed frictions between university and unions, and a faculty and student body that incorporate every political viewpoint from The Nation to National Review, and you have a challenging, diverse, and altogether, undeniably fun place to run a magazine. Being an alumna gives me a head start on all this. It also gives me an advantage particular to this publication. The Yale Alumni Magazine has a long and proud history of editorial independence. It’s not part of Yale; it’s an eight-person island of journalism in the midst of Yale, funded principally by alumni, subscribers, and advertising. It is published for the alumni, not the university, and its editor can only benefit from having an authentically alum point of view on what’s interesting about this place. More than anything else, to be at the Yale Alumni Magazine is an honor. I can’t hope to match the work of such accomplished past editors as William Zinsser and Carter Wiseman. What I and the outstanding staff of this magazine will seek to do is put out a publication that brings Yale, in all its complexity, to its alumni: not just Yale, the place where we were young, but also Yale today, the university that—in its politics, its economics, its student life and institutions, and above all its endlessly exciting intellectual life—remains dynamic and engaging for us as adults. |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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