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.

Comment on this article

Light & Verity
March 1999

Paul Mellon: An Unparalled Legacy

In his lifetime, Paul Mellon '29 was one of Yale’s most remarkable benefactors, standing, in President Levin’s words, “alongside Harkness and Sterling in terms of generosity to the school.” Mellon, who died on February 1 at his home in Virginia at the age of 91, was no less generous in death. His will includes the largest single donation to Yale by any individual: $90 million, along with 155 works of art of unspecified value.

Mellon left $75 million and 144 art works to the Center for British Art (with the condition that the Center never charge admission), $5 million and 11 European paintings to the Art Gallery, $5 million to endow an exchange program with Clare College at Cambridge University (which Mellon attended after Yale), and $5 million toward the renovation of the Art & Architecture Building.

Mellon is best known at Yale for founding the Center for British Art and filling it with his own outstanding collection of British art, the largest outside Britain. (Characteristically, he asked that the Center not bear his name.) But Mellon’s judicious giving made a staggering impact on nearly every facet of Yale life. He paid for the construction of Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges and endowed the 12 residential college deanships, the DeVane Lectures, the theater studies and humanities majors, the Directed Studies program, and more than a dozen professorships.

Born to great wealth, Mellon turned away from a career in his father’s bank, choosing instead a life of art collecting, horse breeding, and above all, philanthropy. Besides his support for Yale, Mellon was known for his patronage of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which was built in 1937 with money and paintings from his father, Andrew Mellon. In 1978, he funded the construction of the Gallery’s East Building. In his will, Mellon left $75 million and more than 100 paintings to the Gallery.

Mellon is remembered fondly by those at Yale who knew him. “Paul Mellon was wise, generous, and strikingly modest, a man of exquisite taste and deeply humane values,” said Levin.

An appreciation of Mellon will appear in an upcoming issue.

Under Pressure, the Co-op Links Up

Facing competition from the bookselling giant Barnes & Noble, the Yale Co-op is fighting fire with fire. In December, the Co-op’s board of directors signed a ten-year management contract with Wallace’s Bookstores, Inc., a Kentucky-based chain that operates 78 college bookstores across the country.

The 114-year-old Co-op will retain its name and current membership structure, but Wallace’s is expected to make major changes to the store’s physical layout and marketing strategy. “Wallace’s has interesting retail ideas,” says Co-op board president Bill March '71. “They’re a high-energy company, and they’re very competitive, which is extremely important to us in our situation.”

Wallace’s spokesman Doug Alexander says the company has developed a new design and marketing concept that allows its stores to adjust their merchandising strategies more quickly to meet seasonal customer needs. The Co-op will be the first store to employ the concept. “We’re going to redesign the entire interior of the store,” says Alexander. “By mid-August, we expect to have all the major changes done.”

The Co-op is owned by its members, to whom it offers discounts and other benefits. The store enjoyed quasi-official status at Yale until 1997, when the University decided not to renew the lease on its Broadway store, opting instead to lease to Barnes & Noble College Bookstores, which now operates at that location as the Yale Bookstore. The Co-op moved to the New Haven Green, where it anchors the Chapel Square Mall, in the summer of 1997.

Despite the loyalty some professors feel toward the nonprofit cooperative, the Co-op has been losing the battle for course book orders to the Bookstore. This term, the Bookstore offered texts for 200 undergraduate courses, compared to 40 at the Co-op. But March says the trend is reversible. “With Wallace’s on board, the textbook situation will improve dramatically,” he says.

Clinic Examines “Cinderella” Kids

When Americans go abroad to adopt children from Asia, Eastern Europe, or Latin America, it’s a “wonderful Cinderella story” for the children, as Dr. Margaret Hostetter puts it. But when they bring the children home, the new parents may find themselves facing any number of diseases or development problems unfamiliar to doctors here. That’s why Hostetter, a pediatrician who directs the Yale Child Health Research Center, opened the Yale International Adoption Clinic shortly after coming to the University last year.

Hostetter began her work with newly adopted international children at the University of Minnesota, where she started a similar clinic. Hostetter and her team test the children for a number of infectious diseases that are common in the their country of origin, and evaluate their growth and development.

The clinic also examines video tapes of children available for adoption that are sent to potential parents by agencies or orphanages, looking for clues about their physical and developmental well-being. “If we can see a child on tape for longer than two minutes,” says Hostetter, “we can observe things about gross and fine motor skills, socialization, and language.”

Hostetter says that new problems have emerged as international adoption has expanded. Until 1990, 70 percent of such adoptions were from Korea, which has a system of well-run foster homes. But more recently, adoptions from understaffed Eastern European and Russian orphanages have increased. Many of these children suffer from a lack of close contact with caregivers. “A child will lose one month of linear growth and development for every three months in one of these orphanages,” says Hostetter. “If they’re adopted before the age of 2, that loss can be reversed.”

Probing GM’s Links to the Nazis

As Ford and General Motors face new allegations that they profited from collaboration with Nazi Germany and the use of slave labor, GM has hired Yale professor Henry Turner to investigate its wartime activities. Turner, the Charles J. Stille Professor of History, will take a one-year sabbatical to pursue the research project, which involves locating, copying, and cataloguing relevant records of GM’s Opel subsidiary in at least 14 cities in the U.S. and Europe.

General Motors first opened a factory in Germany in 1935 to make trucks that were later used by the German army. The company has insisted that it had no control over its German subsidiary after the war began, but a new history of GM by Bradford Snell '67 cites corporate documents in making the case that the company was “an integral part of the German war effort.”

“After 1941 it gets very complicated,” says Turner. “What I want to know is: When did GM’s influence [over Opel] cease entirely?”

Turner says he will have unrestricted access to GM’s files, and will place copies of the relevant materials he uncovers in the Yale archives. “The management wants to know what the facts are,” says Turner.

Turner, who has taught at Yale since 1958, is considered an authority on Nazi Germany. He is the author of German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler and Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power.

New Building for Medical Research

Before accepting Yale’s offer to become dean of the School of Medicine in 1997, David Kessler told the University that it needed new facilities in order to recruit top researchers. The University agreed: This fall, pending city approval, it will begin work on a new $160 million research complex on the medical campus. The 420,000-square-foot building, scheduled for completion in 2002, will occupy the block bounded by Cedar Street and Congress, Howard, and Gilbert avenues.

To dramatize the importance of Yale’s biomedical research to the New Haven economy, Kessler unveiled the design for the new building at New Haven’s Career High School, where local students learn anatomy and other subjects in partnership with medical students. “This isn’t just about Yale,” said Kessler. “It’s about all of us, and most of all, it’s about the young people in this room.”

The new building was designed by the architectural team of Payette Associates and Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates. In addition to laboratory space, it will include facilities for teaching and for magnetic resonance imaging.

Lyme Vaccine Tackles Ticks

In many parts of the U.S., spring marks the beginning of Lyme disease season. But thanks to the approval last winter by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of a Yale-designed vaccine, people across the country now have a weapon against deer ticks, the pinhead-sized arachnids whose bite is responsible for transmitting the ailment. Lymerix, developed in part by Yale researchers Erol Fikrig, Fred S. Kantor, and Richard Flavell and manufactured by Smith-Kline Beecham Biologicals, is the first vaccine to protect against infection by a spiral-shaped bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi, a spirochete that can cause a wide variety of symptoms ranging from fatigue to severe arthritis and heart abnormalities.

Flavell, chairman of the immunobiology department and a professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, explains that the vaccine appears to work in an entirely novel fashion—in effect, Lymerix vaccinates the ticks.

Lyme disease is transmitted, says Flavell, when a tick infected with spirochetes draws blood from a mammal and then regurgitates some of the now-tainted meal back into its unwitting host. But people vaccinated with Lymerix make antibodies to the disease-causing bacteria, so when the tick feeds, “these antibodies are taken up and kill the spirochetes,” says Flavell.

Lymerix, which requires three separate shots and possibly a periodic booster, has proven nearly 80 percent effective in clinical trials involving almost 11,000 volunteers. Because the vaccine doesn’t confer complete immunity on everyone, though, people in deer tick country will still have to check for the presence of these creatures.

Levin at Bat for Baseball Panel

Shortly after leaving the Presidency of Yale in 1986, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti became president of the National League, and then commissioner of Major League Baseball. Now, President Richard Levin is making his own mark on the nation’s pastime. In January, commissioner Bud Selig appointed Levin to a “Blue Ribbon Task Force on Baseball Economics.”

Levin, along with former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, and political commentator George Will, are charged with examining the player compensation system, which many owners hope to reform in the wake of the record $105 million contract recently signed by Kevin Brown of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The National Basketball Association recently negotiated a salary cap with its players' association.

Expanding the Slavery Saga

As scholarly interest in the history of slavery reaches new heights in the academic community, Yale is developing a center devoted to the subject. Last fall, the University dedicated the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, a locus for conferences, lectures, and research support on slavery in the New World.

Founding director David Brion Davis, a Sterling Professor of History, explains that the Center will promote scholarly attention to the “big picture” in New World slavery. “There’s been a tendency to think of slavery as blacks picking cotton in Mississippi,” says Davis. “But that’s a rather parochial view. One also needs to look at the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas.”

The Institute’s activities will include an annual interdisciplinary conference; the administration of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, a $25,000 annual award for the most outstanding book on slavery; outreach to New Haven high schools and historical groups; and the awarding of research grants to Yale graduate students and fellowships for visiting scholars. The first conference, in October, will focus on the domestic slave trade in the U.S., Brazil, and the West Indies.

The Center, whose offices are located at 80 Sachem Street, is funded by a gift from two Yale alumni, Richard Gilder '54, '57JD, and Lewis E. Lehrman '60. Gilder and Lehrman, noted collectors of documents of American history, own the Gilder Lehrman Collection that is on deposit at the Morgan Library in New York. They are also the founders of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York, which promotes the teaching of history in secondary schools through seminars for teachers and other activities.

Wesleyan Uproots “Ivy” Slogan

Wesleyan University raised some hackles recently when it began calling itself “the Independent Ivy” on recruiting materials sent to prospective students. The objections didn’t come from New Haven or Cambridge, though, but from the college’s own Middletown, Connecticut, campus.

An ad hoc student group called Poison Ivy rose to protest what Wesleyan senior Scott Cavanaugh called “a wannabe slogan.” The students felt that trying to associate itself with the Ivies was inappropriate for the small liberal arts college, which is regularly listed among the best in the country. Cavanaugh said the word 'ivy' brings with it a reputation for being “elitist, upper crust, and old-boy network. We don’t want that reputation.”

Wesleyan officials said the slogan was created to emphasize the college’s academic excellence and independent spirit, and that it had tested well in focus groups of high school seniors. But late in the fall the administration, apparently swayed by the students, decided to retire the slogan.  

©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