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Freedom of Assembly
July/August 2004
by Adrian Brune

Adrian Brune has written for The Nation and the New York Times. As a service to readers, the Yale Alumni Magazine reports regularly on the Association of Yale Alumni.

“I ask you now to look around this room, and to join me,” assistant professor of English Elizabeth Dillon told a lunch crowd of 350 alumnae in Commons on April 30, “in performing an imaginative act: to not see women as secondary, as appended, as added on after the fact to a male Yale—but to see yourselves as the face of Yale.”

The occasion was a conference called “In the Company of Scholars: Yale Women in a Changing World”—the first full-scale rollout of a new annual project for the Association of Yale Alumni. Traditionally, AYA’s twice-yearly alumni assemblies brought in a different kind of crowd, most of them delegates appointed by local Yale clubs, classes, and graduate and professional alumni associations. Now, in an effort to reach out to Yale’s rapidly changing graduate population, the AYA has thrown its doors open to a wider spectrum of Yalies.

For more than three decades, the AYA has served as host, resource, and clearinghouse for alumni interested in reconnecting with Yale and each other. But the configuration of the assemblies (which are far from the AYA’s only project, but among the most important) limited its ability to attract those who weren’t already active in Yale groups. “I don’t think they do a very good job of connecting with people who aren’t the class treasurers and so forth,” said attorney Alice Stock '83 at the April conference. It is a perception, or reality, the AYA wants to change.

At the same time, says executive director Jeff Brenzel '75, over the past five to eight years the AYA has seen an increase in the number of alumni “interested in engaging with Yale not according to what class they happen to be in, or what geographic area they’re from, but around what they care about.” The Yale Alumni Chorus is thriving, the Yale Daily News’s 125th anniversary attracted 500 attendees last year, and the upcoming 35th anniversary of the Afro-American Cultural Center is expected to be very popular. The AYA now arranges events for groups of Asian American alumni, Native American alumni, and gay and lesbian alumni, among others.

Hence, the new plan for the assemblies. The AYA still hosts a fall assembly for leaders of the traditional alumni organizations, where they can share techniques for building their groups and meet with administrators and faculty. But now, it will also hold a large conference every spring for alumni who share a particular interest. This spring’s conference was co-organized by the Women Faculty Forum, a group that promotes women’s scholarship and gender equity at Yale. During a day and a half of lectures, small-group discussions, and informal networking, alumnae heard law professor Judith Resnik trace international women’s activism back to the anti-slavery movement; discussed why leaving the full-time workforce to care for one’s children shouldn’t be called “opting out"; met with leading women faculty; founded a new organization called Yale Women for Kerry; heard talks by the university’s provost (a woman), secretary (a woman), and general counsel (a woman); and collectively demonstrated that the face of Yale has already changed irrevocably.

Next spring, the AYA and the School of Management will put on a conference for business leaders. Smaller, specialized conferences will take place over the course of the year for various academic departments and for groups like the Spizzwinks? and the symphony orchestra.

Vera Wells '71, one of the first black women graduates of Yale college and a former member of the Yale Development Board, attended the women’s conference. The new assembly format, she says, allows for specialized events “so that everyone has a very easy connection back to the one central thing—that we are all Yale grads.”

The AYA, which today has a staff of 30, was a product of the sixties. In those years of campus upheaval and alumni concern, the existing Alumni Board remained largely inactive. After coeducation crystallized the amorphous and ill-defined alumni dissent into an urgent, specific complaint, says Brenzel, Yale created the AYA—not to abolish coeducation, but to serve as a forum for two-way communication between the graduates and the administration. This was the origin of the two semiannual assemblies.

Alumni who have criticized Yale policies have sometimes also criticized the AYA for being too close to the administration. Although its board comprises volunteer Yale graduates, its staff members are Yale employees. The AYA’s objectivity was questioned in the Corporation election of 2002, when New Haven minister David Lee '93MDiv was nominated by alumni petition to run against Maya Lin '81, '86 MArch, who was nominated through the standard process (a committee of AYA board members and Yale officials). Expressing concern that Lee’s mailings looked enough like AYA mailings to confuse the alumni, the AYA board sent a mailing of its own saying that it did not endorse either candidate over the other. But the letter also reported that Lee had received funding from Yale’s unions—a disclosure many alumni viewed as biased. (Brenzel responds that the AYA maintained the only web site that republished all available articles about both candidates, including those critical of the AYA and Yale.)

The AYA is atypical among alumni associations in that it doesn’t exist to do fund-raising. Brenzel reports not to the Vice President for Development but to the Secretary of the University, Linda Lorimer '77JD, who also oversees public relations and corporate governance. The AYA does work with Development, and many AYA volunteers are involved in fund-raising. But its real tasks lie elsewhere. Lorimer likes to speak of a network of “ambassadors for Yale”—graduates who feel close to Yale and will talk up its strengths. “Yale has recognized that it’s valuable to keep alumni involved in other ways besides asking for money,” says Natalie Yates '82, whose husband, Richard Cacciato '82, is a class treasurer. “The better people feel about an institution, the more valuable the degrees it confers.”

Yale has always had strong alumni networks, dating all the way back to 1792, when it became the first U.S. university to organize graduates of the college according to their year of graduation. The AYA’s goal is to strengthen those networks, even in an era of increasing alumni heterogeneity.

From that point of view, the results of the first spring conference were mixed. On the one hand, although the AYA invited every alumna living near New Haven and every alumna it could reach via e-mail, only 350 signed up. But on the other hand, most of the attendees had never before come to any AYA event besides reunions—proving that the new kind of assembly can bring in new blood.

And the event itself got terrific reviews. “It has been a long time since I’ve been in a room with so many people who are so multidimensional,” said Gail Lavielle '81MA. “It’s what I remembered. It’s all the good things about Yale that I remembered.”

“I hope there will be future activities,” said Myra Evans Lapeyrolerie '81, “so that more women will feel as if they have a place to come back to.”  

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