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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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There were a few bumps in my readjustment to Yale when I started work at this magazine last April. One was the Connecticut springtime deluges, which I’d managed to forget. Another was the fact that I had Elm Street inextricably fixed in my head as running north-south (it doesn’t), and so kept having to pull out my embarrassing tourist’s map. There was also the moment when I first saw the daffodils blooming again on Old Campus and remembered how very many years it had been since I’d seen them last. But the biggest bump was an ordinary technobureaucratic delay of the kind most office workers in large institutions grind their teeth over at some point: it took one long week of floundering in telecommunications darkness before my e-mail account was finally activated. As bureaucracies go, Yale is a superplex. When I was an undergraduate, I never really noticed; like many people my age I took the smooth functioning of my surroundings for granted. Also, I was pretty much convinced that Yale revolved around me and my kind, and the idea that we would soon pass and be forgotten with the rest was disturbing partly because it suggested that somebody else might have a more lasting claim. And many, many people do. Yale’s library staff alone is more than 600 strong, almost enough to staff Williams College. Yale has its own police force, telephone company, full-service printing facility, and HMO. Yale has 3,000 faculty, 3,600 management and professional employees, and 4,300 clerical, technical, service, and maintenance employees. Its information technology staff alone numbers at least 400 (and let the record show that they’re outstanding; my e-mail glitch stemmed from the magazine’s half-in, half-out status as a nonprofit run separately from the university). Yale could be a small town. It even has its own agricultural base, or at least a fraction of one; Berkeley College and the Sustainable Food Project have started an organic garden north of the central campus. One of the responsibilities of the Yale Alumni Magazine is to periodically assess for our readers how things are going at the superplex. For instance, when Yale returned a $20 million gift from Lee Bass ’79 in 1995, writer Jennifer Kaylin and then-editor Carter Wiseman ’68 produced an analysis that laid out the whole story in clear and careful detail. In this issue, we offer a retrospective on the president’s tenth anniversary. We are privileged to publish an essay by Larned Professor Emeritus Gaddis Smith ’54, ’61PhD, one of Yale’s history greats, as well as a brief tribute by David Gergen ’63, who is an expert on presidential leadership. It’s always a pleasure to cover good news; under Rick Levin, Yale has flourished. In this issue, we are also offering articles about the work of the faculty: genocide historian Ben Kiernan’s research in East Timor, computer scientist David Gelernter ’76, ’77MA, and his rethinking of the desktop, and an effort by immune system biologist Richard Edelson ’70MD to create a cancer therapy that would function like a vaccine. I no longer believe that Yale revolves around any single group. But if it did, that group would surely be the faculty, who are primary shapers of the university’s intellectual life. Their work is one of the most important things supported by the Yale superplex, and we’ll continue to bring you stories about them. |
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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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