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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 received my September/October Yale Alumni Magazine yesterday and read practically the entire thing, cover to cover, thinking to myself, “This is more interesting than almost anything else I subscribe to.” I think what got me started was the audacity of your cover story (“The High Cost of Winning”), but I found the whole thing compelling, well written, and nicely laid out. Congratulations, and thank you.
Thanks for the September/October issue. What a pleasure to open up the magazine and find such an interesting variety. I used to be jealous when looking through my mother-in-law’s Harvard alumni magazine years ago. No longer! Looking forward to future issues.
A Collector’s Regrets I was delighted with Tim Townsend’s article on the Romanov photo albums (“The Golden Hours of the Romanovs,” Summer), particularly because he gave credit to my late good friend and client, Robin Brewster, of whose will I was an executor. I helped Robin with the legal aspects of his deal with Anna Vyrubova for the albums and with the transfer of his Russian collection to Yale. Robin had to a certain extent what the French call a vie manque; he never engaged in any trade or profession and was something of a recluse, but he had brains and ability never fully used, and he liked to regard his Russian collection as something he had contributed to the world. Your recognition would have been gratifying to him. Later, he came to regret having given the collection away because he missed it. He commissioned me to see if he could buy it back at pretty much any price Yale asked (he was the grandson of an original Standard Oil partner), but Yale, quite rightly, wouldn’t even consider giving it up.
Postgame Analysis In his cover essay about the recent book Reclaiming the Game (“The High Cost of Winning,” September/October), Paul E. Steiger '64 wrote that the book’s authors describe athletics at modern-day Yale and other schools as “a perversion of the idealized view of college athletics.” That is well put and, I’m afraid, entirely accurate. But for me as an alumnus it is not the central issue. What most matters is the perversion of Yale: sports recruits representing one-sixth of all male undergraduates at Ivy League schools, admission standards being bent beyond recognition in order to win football and basketball games, and more. I’m a lifelong sports fan and indeed still play competitive ice hockey in my 40s, and I knew and enjoyed the company of athletic recruits as an undergraduate. So without any snobbish anti-sports bias I am nonetheless deeply disappointed in my alma mater today. The practices and results described in Reclaiming the Game were obvious and pernicious in the college of the early 1980s, and to learn that they have continued and even expanded is appalling. President Levin needs to change that situation, drastically and immediately, if Yale is to retain its place as one of the most important educational institutions in the world.
Your article on admissions standards in university sports makes for interesting reading. The football team is a particular dilemma. We are apparently devoting 6 percent of the male undergraduate intake to less than fully competitive students in order to support, with the best will in the world, a third-rate football team. We started with rugby and made it better. Maybe it’s time to go back to producing America’s best college rugby team and write off football as a long-running, sometimes glorious, but ultimately failed experiment.
In the wake of the recent tragic deaths of four Yale athletes, your article was particularly tasteless. Paul Steiger, a genuine hero of September 11 who overcame profound suffering, should, unfortunately, be ashamed of himself. Yale alumni have been starved for athletic success for almost a quarter century. Would it have been too much trouble to put the redoubtable Sarah Hughes '07 on your cover instead of promoting the specious noodlings of President Levin’s daughter? What Yale needs is what has always made it special: heroines and heroes in every walk of life, public and private, emboldened by the unique serendipity of Blue life. This especially includes athletics. What Yale, and our country, for that matter, do not need is more narrow-minded, elitist academic studies. I read the article by Paul Steiger putting down sports at Yale. I think the problem with the article is that it was based on a sociological survey that was very shallow, as are most sociological surveys. I was captain of an athletic team at Yale. I also was Phi Beta Kappa, and I have since won numerous literary prizes, including the Francis Parkman Prize and the Pulitzer Prize in history. I found the time to put in several hours a week practicing at the gymnasium, holding a bursary job, meeting with teammates for dinner, and at the same time keeping up with my studies. I now hold an endowed chair in history and American studies at the University of Texas, and I expect to see the Yale-Harvard game on November 22. I should add that I found the Yale gymnasium as well as the Yale library to be one of the most comforting places on the Yale campus.
The Strike, From Both Sides I am writing during the early moments of the strike by Locals 34 and 35 at Yale, the second such strike in less than a year that aims to leave many dining halls, administrative offices, and custodial positions unstaffed (“Light & Verity,” September/October). I would like to say “shame on you” to the strikers—not necessarily for desiring better wages, but for the tactics they choose to employ. The second strike of the year began on August 27, the day that the dormitories opened to undergraduates. This strike continued throughout the week and impeded the freshmen welcome activities of move-in day as well as other events on the weekend, most notably the Freshmen Assembly. I am deeply saddened by this, for it does nothing but spit in the eye of people who have little or nothing to do with the unions' cause. The students of Yale, especially freshmen, cannot dictate policy to the university. The students are being used as pawns in the battle between the unions and Yale. As freshmen pulled up to the curbs outside the gates to Old Campus, they and their parents were greeted by shouting protesters, some of them abusive and belligerent towards the new Yalies who desired to do nothing more than move into their new home. A relative of mine heard a protester demanding of a parent on the curb, “How could you let your child come to such a horrible place?” Because of the unions' abrasive threats and demonstrations, the university was forced to postpone the Freshmen Assembly, the traditional welcome and introduction of the sons and daughters of Eli. I am saddened that events have reached this point, and both sides are to blame for the current state of affairs in New Haven. However, taking advantage of newly arrived Yalies to pressure university officials is not only deplorable, but also offensive to me as someone who remembers what it felt like to move in on that day.
Sometimes I despair. Here is one of the wealthiest universities in the world, and it can’t even pay its workers adequately or attend to their pensions when they retire. Instead of being sucked into the neo-liberal model of worker oppression, Yale should be a model for treating its workers well. Instead of fighting the unions, Yale should welcome them, give them the respect that is their due, and offer to take their counsel through formal representation on the Corporation. The administration has evidently been co-opted, compromising the university’s claims in the sphere of intellectual honesty. Led by a troop of corporate CEOs and their hangers-on, the university administration has become a propaganda front for the ideology that says the CEOs get their stock options and everyone else gets impossible working hours or the pink slip. It is an ideology of theft for the rich, in which the “economy” is nothing but a funnel—from the pockets of poor people into the pockets of rich people. This administration can’t even get the school year properly started. My hat is off to the workers who stuck to it—despite being deserted by their employer.
The Future of Divinity Congratulations on the brilliant design of your article, “The Second Coming of the Divinity School” (September/October). While I appreciated the views of the Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Ponet, I missed hearing from a Catholic chaplain. I note that several of the 12 essays presented called for more significant engagement of the Divinity School with other professional schools in programs and projects of interest to the wider university, and also with institutions and issues of concern to the people of New Haven. I strongly concur with that view, and hope that the separate location of the school will no longer be allowed to inhibit such intercourse. As one who benefited enormously from the rich liberal education offered me at Yale College and Yale Divinity School 50-some years ago, I trust that, with the generous and beautiful renovation now completed, the Divinity School will make its “Second Coming” vibrant and valuable not only for its own students but also for the intellectual, social, and spiritual life of the university and New Haven.
Although we did not solicit the views of Yale’s Catholic chaplain, Father Robert Beloin, we did include comments from the dean of the Divinity School, Harry Attridge, who is a Catholic layman (and the school’s first Catholic dean).—Eds. I am a relatively recent graduate of Yale College (Class of 1996) and a recent graduate of Yale Divinity School (Class of 2002). As an alumnus of the Divinity School, I am excited by the completion of restoration projects on Prospect Hill and the early success, by all accounts, of Dean Attridge’s leadership of the school. Two areas where I hope broader social change will occur in part due to the continued mission and influence of Yale Divinity School in Christian circles are issues relative to interfaith dialogue as well as sexuality and gender. I agree with Rabbi Ponet, a former professor of mine, that it makes sense for the school to become more engaged with other religious traditions. Given the truthful indictments of Christianity for its role in the Holocaust and the indictments I make of my tradition for allowing anti-Islamic sentiments to become so virulent in the post-September 11 era, it’s clear that Christianity needs to continue to do a lot of self-assessing and re-evaluation. This can be done well at YDS if the school maintains its spirit of humility and self-assessment and if the school is prodded in the direction Rabbi Ponet urges. However, I also think that Professor Wolterstoff’s point that universities without seminaries can become “flat” and “technologized” is important. The Divinity School can also check impulses found at the wider, secular, and globally aspiring university. For example, the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies will not be successful unless it engages the Divinity School and unless it initiates conversations with practicing Christians, both LGBT-friendly and not. Otherwise, progress made there would be flat and technologized indeed. It would also only mean progress for the few, because more likely than not there would be high correlations between the progress made and the needs of certain socioeconomic and racial groups that already have some relative, if qualified, social privilege in the university context as a whole.
What Makes a Leader? Regarding Jack Kessler’s letter (“Letters,” September/October), including his claim, quoting Robert Dahl, that leaders should be “democratically elected, not trained”: Do I understand that he approves of today’s system of electing those who excel only at delivering speeches written for them by their (ugh) staff and honing the twin skills of getting re-elected and swapping votes with colleagues for respective pork? Politics, from the time of the Greeks, has fallen for charisma and the golden voice—they had a word for it: demagoguery. Leaders of this sort have their fingers constantly in the air, testing the winds of popularity, and never take steps that may be criticized today though they might be salutary for the long term. (Recent example: Bill Clinton.) These “leaders” seem to be on far more of an ego trip than the “pretentious” public servants cited in his letter. Leadership training is an on-the-job career, and it begins with the experience of learning how to interact with others, especially when criticism is involved; how to make decisions rather than temporize; and how to live with the wrong decisions rather than find scapegoats. One road at Yale that leads in this direction is athletics (see the list of honorees for the Blue Leadership ball on page 36 of the same issue of the magazine), despite constant disparagement by academics. If Yale can help provide its new freshmen with this kind of personal experience, along with the treasured classic and/or scientific benefits from the faculty, it will give them the groundwork to be productive leaders in any walk of life, including politics. How Mr. Kessler’s “normal” candidates become leaders he does not say.
Unpacking the Peabody During my sophomore, junior, and senior years at Yale I held a bursary appointment in the Peabody Museum, working under the direction of Professor Joseph Gregory, curator of vertebrate paleontology. One of my main tasks during those years was to unpack a large number of wooden crates in the museum basement. These had been shipped to New Haven by Professor O. C. Marsh, Yale’s famous vertebrate paleontologist, from his field camps in Wyoming during the 1860s and 1870s. Unwrapping and handling Marsh’s fossils for the first time since they were shipped from the field was my unique introduction to paleontology. I subsequently earned degrees in geology, but my research has not been on Mesozoic vertebrate fossils but rather on ice-age mountain glaciers and Pleistocene climatic change in central China. During those years at Yale I was a member of Saybrook College, and therefore I was very pleased to read in the magazine (“Light and Verity,” September/October) that Marsh’s name now adorns an entryway of my undergraduate college. My youngest daughter, Susannah ('95) was also a member of Saybrook 40 years later. She went on to obtain graduate degrees in paleontology and now teaches, much as Marsh must have in his time, about the history of life on Earth. We both applaud Saybrook’s honoring of Professor Marsh, one of Yale’s most renowned earth scientists.
Mayorzilla? Your fine coverage of Professor Douglas Rae’s book about New Haven, especially the references to Mayor Dick Lee (“In Print,” September/October), brought back memories of the late '60s, when some of us ran a coffee house on campus called the Enormous Room. On Fridays, we had a program called “Lousy Flicks with Beer.” Admission was a dollar, and we got the worst movies we could find, hoping that they would actually be bad enough to evoke hilarious remarks from the audience. We showed One Million B.C. (the original version starring Victor Mature, though folks came expecting Raquel Welch), and some Viking movie that began with the line “Sire, the boar’s hunt awaits you.” But the greatest laugh of all came the night we announced “Next week’s movie will be entitled The Giant Monster that Sucked New Haven to Death,” and a voice from the back of the room yelled: “Dick Lee!”
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