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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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As the graduates of 2007 get used to their new identity as Yale alumni, we'd like to welcome them to the Yale Alumni Magazine— and take this opportunity to remind all our readers that this is your publication. Unlike most alumni magazines, this one is editorially independent, produced not by the university but by a separate alumni-based nonprofit, and funded principally by advertising, class dues, and alumni donations. It was founded in 1891 by the Yale Daily News, “exclusively for the benefit of the graduates.” The magazine’s statement of purpose charges it to “impartially explore the achievements, issues, and problems of the University … in order to convey a complete, fair, and accurate understanding of Yale today.” To learn more about the magazine and our nonprofit publisher, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., see About the Magazine. We welcome questions and comments from readers.—Eds.
How to succeed in business school I had the privilege of attending the Yale School of Management (“Revamping the MBA,” May/June) at a time when young people with an interest in the private, nonprofit, and public sectors applied there instead of the business schools at Harvard and Stanford. Despite the snide references in your article to SOM’s food being better than its education and at least 20 references to Harvard and Stanford, SOM is doing just fine, thank you, and will continue to do so if it follows its own path and stops comparing itself to the competition or obsessing about Zagat-like rankings of graduate schools. The fact that SOM is now ranked fourteenth by Business Week, eighth by the Financial Times, ninth by the Wall Street Journal, or fifth by Forbes only demonstrates the silliness of trying to quantify the value of an education—or the future successes of a student -- by a single number. We already do enough of that in this country. I applaud President Levin’s and Dean Podolny's efforts at SOM. Yale should always do well at whatever it does, and I’m particularly happy about the effort to bring organizational behavior back into the core of educating executive leaders. I was one of the early “Ad Sci” majors at Yale, and I went on to get the traditional MBA at Columbia. While my finance and marketing studies there taught me much about the nuts and bolts of business, it was my Yale OB classes with notables such as Victor H. Vroom and J. R. Hackman that gave me valuable insights into the heart and soul of a company, team, group, and so forth, that I still use daily. Stay the I am glad to hear Dean Podolny is making changes that will lead all B-schools towards a more appropriate curriculum for educating organizational leaders. The important thing is not to lose the SOM mission (I prefer the word “aura”), which is embodied in the statistic you mentioned of 3 of 21 Henry Crown Fellows being SOM alumni. I hope that Joel Podolny, the new SOM dean, misspoke when he posed the following questions as a shorthand for the school’s mission: “At the end of the day, how do you do good while doing well? How do you make a contribution, rather than just take?” Such a juvenile view of business belongs in Hollywood, not at Yale’s business school. Solo entrepreneurs and massive corporations contribute to society every day, by providing services and goods that people want—at constant risk to their capital in a competitive market —and by providing jobs. How else does Dean Podolny think he would receive the astounding cornucopia of products that our economy pours forth? The notion that businesses “just take” displays a remarkable ignorance of how capitalism and markets work.
Labored relations I was disappointed to read the comments of Yale–New Haven Hospital CEO Marna Borgstrom and Yale University president and hospital trustee Richard Levin (Light & Verity, May/June) in which they claimed ignorance of violations of federal labor law by the hospital’s labor relations “consulting firm.” Their claims are disingenuous; for nearly four decades, Yale administrators have pursued an aggressive anti-union policy, outsourcing its implementation through third-party contractors and then feigning surprise when their strategy is revealed. As a Yale graduate student and resident of New Haven from 1967 to 1980, I was directly involved in community activities in support of university employees. In 1968, I and a handful of Yale students marched on a picket line in support of a strike by university employees, which was crushed in less than two weeks. Every three years thereafter during the 1970s, students, community residents, and even some faculty demonstrated on Prospect Street, in support of workers passing right in front of the economics department —where Levin was a grad student and faculty member. In 1969 a small group of hospital employees began an organizing effort; in response the hospital employed a law firm nationally known for its hardball tactics. By the end of the 1970s, during the time when Borgstrom was a public health student, only a small number of workers in the dietary department had succeeded in gaining recognition for their union; the situation remains the same nearly 30 years later, despite overwhelming support for a union by the hospital’s employees. Yale, with an endowment approaching $20 billion, in part the result of tax-exempt status granted by legislative action, and Yale–New Haven Hospital, which benefits from hundreds of millions of dollars of public medical research funding, have an obligation to adhere to the requirements of federal labor law. CEO Borgstrom has served as a hospital administrator since 1979 and President Levin has been in his office, and served as a board member of the hospital, since 1993; in her role as senior executive and his role as trustee, they must recognize their responsibility to ensure that these illegal activities never recur.
Still rocking, independently I read the May/June cover story, “Yalies Who Rock,” with great interest, but why not give props to some of the more, er, senior alumni who remember the late 1960s/early ’70s when WYBC was on the cutting edge of the FM radio revolution? After all, some of us have gone on to have careers as indie musicians. For instance, Gary Lucas ’74 has distinguished himself as a guitarist (and songwriter) with Captain Beefheart, Joan Osborne, and Jeff Buckley, to name but a few. And myself, who produced Alex Chilton's debut solo album in 1975, have more recently been producing people like Frank Black, Deborah Harry, and Wilson Pickett (not indie, but certainly not lacking in indie cred). I know the pioneers get all the arrows, but a little respect to those of us who were indie before the floodgates opened.
Einstein and God I hope that, in the interest of truth, you will not allow the misrepresentation of Einstein’s views on God, as offered in the letter of Professor Joel Brind, to go unchallenged (Letters, May/June). It is true that, as Brind says, Einstein spoke of “a spirit vastly superior to that of man,” but it is also clear that by this he did not mean a god. “I do not believe in a personal god,” Einstein wrote. “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” It appears that defenders of the faith must pick their quotations selectively to make their case, as do those who point to the one place in Darwin’s work in which he expresses momentary doubt, but neglect to continue the passage to its conclusion, which explains why he has laid his uncertainty to rest. I would also take exception to Professor Brind's contention that “scientific thinking has run downhill” in the last few years; to the contrary, it has perhaps made greater and more beneficial advances than in all the centuries before. In his letter, Joel Brind says, “What we unequivocally do know about natural processes is that they spontaneously run down; not up.” Although this is true in the absence of energy inputs, the statement has no relevance to life, much less evolution. If it did, a fertilized egg could not grow into a salmon, a crocodile, a chicken, or even Dr. Brind himself. This argument against evolution fails both as common sense
Your brain on antidepressants As a longtime user of Paxil, a similar antidepressant to Prozac, I was both fascinated and disappointed to learn in a May/June Findings article that “Ron Duman, a neurobiologist at the Yale medical school, has now demonstrated one of the ways in which these drugs achieve their effects: by spurring the growth of new brain cells.” And I was naïve enough to think that my expanded wisdom was due to my advancing years!
Diversity includes conservatives In the May/June Light & Verity department is a report on the hiring of Nydia González as Yale’s chief diversity officer. This is described as a brand new position, but the article goes on to say that Yale already has a deputy provost, Kim Bottomly, “who is charged with improving faculty diversity.” Evidently, Ms. González’s responsibilities will center on staff diversity, but she is also to support Ms. Bottomly. Nowhere, however, does the article mention political diversity. Should one infer from this that the university is indifferent to the representation of a spectrum of political views within the faculty? Should not an ardent adherent of Ayn Rand be able to find a few congenial spirits on the faculty? Why should Ms. Bottomly and Ms. González not be seeking to add conservatives as well as Latinos to the faculty rolls?
Preventing future shootings I very much appreciated the comments in From the Editor (May/June) about the tragedy at Virginia Tech. I think that the approach taken by Yale is worth disseminating and publicizing; my impression is that the administrators at Virginia Tech were much more passive and/or resistant compared with the much more aware, and at times hands-on, approach of Yale faculty and staff concerning troubled students and troubling behavior. People need to know that there are very different approaches to such problems at other universities, such as at Yale. We may not yet be able to inject any sanity into our country’s completely insane laws, practices, and attitudes about guns, but at least we can take steps to make our universities safer, as Yale has been doing.
Proof and God In the May/June Letters section, David N. Miles '62 writes that he entered Yale as a devout atheist and that this was reinforced by professors like Brand Blanshard. I was in one of Professor Blanshard’s classes at about that time, and I recall him analyzing and demolishing several centuries' worth of “proofs” that God existed. As I recall, he also said that all the proofs he hadn’t lectured on were equally fallacious. But then he added, “Of course, all the proofs that God does not exist are fallacious, too.”
Football credit As a loyal alum of the Law School, I am always anxious that Yale be fully credited for its contributions. And perhaps even for others' contributions, when we can get away with it. But there is an exception to every rule. Here, it is where the relevant contributions are those of Princeton—of which I am a loyal undergraduate alum. In that spirit, I was struck by your passing suggestion that American football, like the word “Frisbee” (Old Yale, May/June), “originated” at Yale. The important innovations—in 1880 and 1882—of Yale football coach Walter Camp undoubtedly moved the rules of play far closer to the game that we know today. But given that Princeton students are credited as the earliest U.S. players of the football-like game of “ballown,” that Princeton developed the very first set of U.S. rules for the game (1867), and that a November 6, 1869, match between Princeton and Rutgers is widely credited as the first college football game in the United States, the reference is, at least, misleading. It is true that the Princeton-Rutgers game was played under relatively more soccer-oriented rules. If that is to be cited as the relevant distinction, however, the result is even worse. Credit would then have to go to Harvard, which played a rugby-rules game of football against McGill University in 1876. “Old Yale” writer Judith Schiff replies:
Baby, we erred There is a certain irony in your putting the headline “Baby, remember my name” over the May/June letter relating to the High School of Music and Art, since the name of the mayor who founded the school is misremembered: it is Fiorello H. LaGuardia, not Fiorella. That school, founded by Mayor LaGuardia in 1936, was remarkable. It was a “magnet school” before this phrase was invented. Its student body was heterogeneous, and in general extremely bright and artistically talented. It maintained the highest quality both in the arts and in the academic area. Indeed it is due in part to this quality that, after graduating HSMA in 1946, I was able to complete Yale’s four-year curriculum for the Mus. B. in three years.
Remodel the Old Campus If two new colleges are to be constituted at Yale (Light and Verity, May/June), the place for them is the Old Campus. The present residential buildings could be remodeled to form two U-shaped or L-shaped colleges on the site, thus preserving the green space. Although the architecture of Victorian cigar boxes like Farnam, Lawrence, and Durfee is not very distinguished, it is doubtless superior to anything that would be built from scratch, given present-day designs and costs. One of the new colleges might be called Old College. As a freshman I hated the Old Campus. The buildings were not even decent dormitories; they lacked any amenities, like lounges or common rooms or game rooms, not to mention dining halls. I would much rather have been in a college. Did it make sense in 1951 to put the freshmen in this primitive, isolated quad? If it did, it no longer does.
Let’s debate Re: Philip Kantor’s letter in your May/June issue, in which he asserts that “political debate” is not what “we, the alumni” want to see in the magazine: “I,” as “an alumnus” (and a classmate of Mr. Kantor’s for two years, until I took a year off and came back to graduate in '76) am not only delighted to see political debate in your pages, but expect nothing less. In fact, I find it hard to believe that someone who was lucky enough to be at Yale in those great, societally volatile years would spurn political discourse in any way, shape, or form. My greatest memories of the university and of New Haven are of argument, debate, and dialogue, every day and every night. It’s a tradition that I’ve tried to keep alive ever since. And as a lifelong journalist, I’d say this: no magazine’s credibility is diminished when it fosters discussion, debate, or outrage; letters like Mr. Kantor’s prove that this magazine is fulfilling its mandate. And doing its job.
As I finished reading “The Birth of Birth" (March/April), I was truly amazed at the egotistical exploits of man’s small intellect trying to attribute the miracles of God to the nothingness of time. Considering the vast immensity of the universe, I stand amazed at the narcissistic musings of dust creatures that live for approximately 70 years. How dumb can educated fools be? It is the pot trying to prove how it was never made by the potter. In truth, it is simply egotism and the desire for lack of accountability for one’s behavior that drives this theory of lifeless evolution. According to Exodus 20:11, God created all things: “heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is.” If sentient humankind cannot create something as small as an atom, or a blade of grass, or even a leaf out of thin air, then to ascribe all creation to lifeless time and inanimate chance is intellectually dishonest.
Y’all should know better It appears that neither your writer nor contrarian grammarian Ben Yagoda (Arts and Culture, March/April) comes from the South. In my experience, “y'all” always means you-plural. I may say “y'all” to one person, but never about one person. Thus, I say to you, the staff of the magazine, that y'all should include someone who understands this not-so-subtle distinction. The Oklahoman on our editorial staff has used “y’all” only in the plural. But we (that’s the plural and editorial “we”) found Yagoda’s statement, that he knows of different Southerners who use it different ways, interesting and worth including.—Eds.
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