The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
By Ed Stannard
NEW HAVEN — Judith Schiff is a living encyclopedia of Yale University history.
As the chief research archivist at Sterling Memorial Library, Schiff can offer dates and facts as if she had just looked them up that day.
But Schiff ’s relationship with Yale goes back to her days as a student at New Haven’s Sheridan Junior High School and Hillhouse High School.
“Growing up in New Haven, I went to the public schools,” Schiff said. “At the time, Yale had a big role in them. … It evolved because of the Music School and the Art School at Yale. … It seemed like every teacher that we knew about either had a B.F.A. [Bachelor INSEPARABLE FROM THE CITY 300-year relationship molded New Haven and Yale
of Fine Arts] or at least had taken some art or music courses there.”
Schiff and her classmates also would take regular trips to the Yale Art Gallery, where a particular docent gave them a tour tailored to their interests, and to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Schiff ’s professional involvement with Yale began in 1960, when a friend working in the library said someone was needed to catalog manuscripts of New Haven families. Graduate students usually were hired for such positions and Schiff had graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1959, but she got the job and has been at the library ever since and in her current role since 1972.
“The library is the heart of Yale,” Schiff believes. “Everything else could close” and the university would still exist as long as the library, with its massive collection of 15 million books, papers and other materials, was open. In fact, during both world wars, “Yale essentially shuts down” and even faced bankruptcy. But “the library doesn’t change. It goes on through feast or famine, wars — it’s always there.”
For 300 years, since New Haven outbid other Connecticut cities, Yale has been inseparable from the city. Today, with city streets crisscrossing much of the campus, it is one of the most urban universities in the country.
Yale students, faculty, speakers and guests eat at the same restaurants, shop at the same stores and walk the same streets as New Haven residents, so that it has never been unusual to pass by a Nobel laureate — such as last week’s newest winner, economist William Nordhaus — or a student at the School of Drama named Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti, Angela Bassett, Jodie Foster or Claire Danes. Or a future president named Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.
New Haveners might also run into a Yale student whose parent they know of — Theo Spielberg, son of Steven, or Barbara Bush, daughter of George W. (and granddaughter of President George H.W. Bush, class of 1948).
Besides the Bushes and Clinton, Yale claims a fourth president, William Howard Taft, class of 1878. Taft also served as chief justice on the Supreme Court, although he did not attend Yale Law School. Eleven Supreme Court justices are Yale law alumni (nine received law degrees there), including four now serving: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor and, as of last week, Brett Kavanaugh.
Mixed relationships
Relations between the city and the university have not always been smooth. Yale Presidents Kingman Brewster Jr. asked university Secretary Henry “Sam” Chauncey Jr. to form a community relations office in 1972 because the relationship had sunk so low that the Board of Aldermen denied Yale permission to build new residential colleges.
The Feb. 17, 1991, slaying of Christian Prince, a sophomore who was shot in the chest in front of St. Mary Church on tony Hillhouse Avenue, created a crisis. The 16-year-old charged with his homicide was acquitted twice.
But in the 19-year span, 19942013, in which Yale President Richard Levin and Mayor John DeStefano Jr. held office together, so-called town-gown relations improved to a point that has enabled both Yale and the city to flourish.
This year, Yale undergraduates number 5,453, along with 6,859 graduate and professional students and 4,410 faculty members. There are 118 countries sending 4,462 students to Yale, according to Yale’s “By the Numbers” website.
Since 1990, Yale has made more than $120 million in voluntary
payments to New Haven on its tax-exempt property and last year paid $4.5 million in property taxes on its nonacademic real estate.
A school for church leaders
The Collegiate School was founded Oct. 9, 1701, by the General Assembly, which gave it a charter “wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts and Sciences [and] through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State,” according to Yale’s history web page.
In Schiff’s own “Brief History of Yale,” she recounts how the town of Saybrook, situated at the mouth of the Connecticut River, was chosen for its convenient location. The Rev. Abraham Pierson was named the first president and students met in his home in Killingworth (later separated as the town of Clinton) until his death in 1707.
Schiff wrote that 10 ministers met in Branford in 1700, each donating books for the founding of a college. Today, Saybrook and Branford are the only two residential colleges named for places rather than people.
Welsh businessman Elihu Yale, step-grandson of New Haven Colony founder Theophilus Eaton, made his first gift of 32 books in 1713, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica , but the prominent preacher Cotton Mather suggested that the school might be named in Yale’s honor if he made another sizable gift, because Yale needed a new building.
In 1718, according to Schiff, Elihu Yale donated more than 400 more books, bales of goods that sold for 562 pounds and a portrait of King George I. The building — and thus the school — was named Yale College.
Becoming a world-class school
Yale wasn’t always the world-renowned university it is today. But by the time of the Civil War, it was the largest college in the United States,
according to Schiff.
Douglas Rae, a professor of management and political science at Yale who served as New Haven’s chief administrative officer in the early 1990s, said Yale’s evolution into the major institution it has become began “around the time of the Civil War, and I would focus on the shift away from the classic curriculum built around Greek and Latin toward the vernacular subjects that included science and natural history.”
Benjamin Silliman, named professor of chemistry and natural history in 1802, collected many of the rocks and minerals that make up the Peabody’s collection today. But it was his son, Benjamin Silliman Jr., who founded what would become the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and who helped in the development of the first oil wells in Pennsylvania, according to Rae.
“There was a New Haven company that financed it and Silliman told them where to look and what to expect in terms of challenges to drilling through the rock,” Rae said. But “Yale was slow off the dime in terms of science and engineering . ... All of his scientific
education occurred in Germany,” Rae said.
But Yale caught up, appointing O.C. Marsh the first professor of paleontology in the United States in 1866, according to the Peabody’s website. George Peabody, who financed Marsh’s education and trips to collect fossils, was his uncle and founded the museum with a $150,000 gift.
Always international
Levin lists among his accomplishments the increased international atmosphere of Yale, both in increased enrollment from other countries and by Yale students studying abroad, with the most significant being the establishment of Yale-NUS College in Singapore, founded in 2011 by Yale and the National University of Singapore. The number of foreign students has risen from 2 percent to 12 percent. “That makes a big difference [when] oneeighth of your students come from abroad rather than one in 50,” Levin said. Meanwhile, three-quarters of students spend time studying overseas, including in a program Levin started in China.
The international connections started much earlier, however. Schiff’s column in the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2004 focused on the missionaries sent to the kingdom of Hawaii, led by Yale President Timothy Dwight IV, who, moved by a Hawaiian man found weeping on the steps of one of Yale’s buildings, tutored the man, Opukahaia (later known as Henry Obookiah) and helped establish the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810.
The China connection began with Yale missionaries in the 1830s, resulting in Yung Wing, Yale class of 1854, becoming the first Chinese student to graduate from an American college, Schiff writes.
Women raise the standards
While Yale was known for admitting the upper echelons of society, the 1950s were “the tipping point around meritocratic recruitment of students and faculty,” according to Rae.
“Yale, like other American universities, was clubby … and clubbiness had some elements of bigotry against Jews, against Catholics, against southern European nationalities and, most of all, against unwhite people,” Rae said. “Something like bigotry continued in the faculty in the 1980s.”
.
Rae credits R. Inslee “Inky” Clark Jr., undergraduate admissions director, with changing that policy. “There was a flood of talented Jewish kids and the place got better,” Rae said. Levin became Yale’s first Jewish president in 1993.
Clark then paved the way for Yale to become coeducational, after all-female Vassar College’s rejection of a proposed merger in 1967 because of “our desire to be mistress in our own house,” as the Harvard Crimson quoted a Vassar trustee.
The Crimson said in that 1967 story that Brewster planned to launch a “women’s coordinate college” that would have its own curriculum, faculty and identity. Two years later, women were admitted as undergraduates, 100 years after they were admitted to the first class of the School of Fine Arts.
The first class, which graduated in 1973, was composed of 230 female freshmen — now called first-years — along with 1,029 men, plus 358 female transfers.
Rae said, “The striking thing was when women were admitted the standard of performance in the place went up measurably and that was partly because the critical gaze of female students made it embarrassing to be an ignoramus in a Yale classroom.”
Now, Rae said, “the percentage of Yale undergraduates that are just ridiculously talented is very high. … [Yale] has no superior in American education. It has some close rivals but no superiors.”
Rae, who has taught at Yale for 51 years, said, “I never get through a year without being amazed by somebody in a good way.”
New Haven and Yale
The histories of Yale and its home city are so entwined; one wouldn’t exist anywhere close to its present form without the other. “Yale is inextricably and happily linked to New Haven, and so it’s not as if they’re two different things that happened to meet,” said Michael Morand, class of 1987, who later served on the Board of Aldermen when he was a student at Yale Divinity School and is now the communications director at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
“Both President [Peter] Salovey and President Levin proudly celebrate the fact that each had lived in New Haven for decades prior to becoming president,” Morand said. Mayor Toni Harp, a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture, is another example of someone who came to Yale and decided to stay and make her mark in New Haven, he said.
“At the Yale commencement, students march around Center Church on the New Haven Green” to acknowledge the university’s roots in New Haven, Morand said. “A few weeks later, Woolsey Hall is filled with commencement of Gateway Community College.”
Relationships weren’t always so positive. “Historically, Yale was like the manor on the hill. Doing anything with New Haven was not even thought of,” Chauncey said. “In 1950 a man named Whitney Griswold was named president of Yale and Dick Lee was elected mayor of New Haven and they were extremely close. … Everything had to go through them.”
In 1963, Brewster took over from Griswold and New Haven “was going through real troubles,” Chauncey said. “Faculty didn’t want to live here. … We didn’t have great relations between the two entities. It was just an unhappy time, and of course it was an unhappy time
“The fact is, Yale certainly in 2018 is a different institution than in 1994. To me, the secret sauce … is the professional schools, such as the schools of Law, Medicine, Public Health and Management. It’s the research university that has emerged and really what that has driven is jobs.”
— Former New Haven Mayor John
DeStefano Jr.
in urban America.”
May Day 1970
Yale and New Haven have cooperated in a variety of ways over time — and endured periods of mutual suspicion — but one effort may have prevented loss of life, if not injury and major property damage. It was May Day 1970, when protesters planned to pour into New Haven to rally against the trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale, who was charged with ordering the murder of Panther Alex Rackley. The Vietnam War was on the minds of many, who had protested across the country and had targeted universities as representing the status quo.
The universities would lock their gates against protesters and, “in every case, the university turned out the Army or the police and buildings got burned down,” said Chauncey, who was in charge of security at the time. Yale took the opposite approach.
Along with New Haven Police Chief James Ahearn, Brewster and Chauncey decided to open Yale up to protesters. “Jim Ahearn and I, as a result of what we learned … we decided to do the reverse” of what other schools had done, “which was to invite all these people into the Yale campus.”
“Essentially what we did was to announce publicly that the protesters were welcome at Yale.” They could sleep in courtyards and were given food and medical care.
Ahearn, whom Chauncey said was “way ahead of his time,” decided there would be no police presence on the Green. “The crowd on the Green could not see anybody in uniform or with a gun,” Chauncey said. Ahearn was afraid of a tragedy, which, three days later, occurred at Kent State, where four students were killed and nine injured by Ohio National Guardsmen.
Still, the campus was in turmoil. Black Panther leaders urged students to “kill a pig” or burn buildings, students went on strike and faculty held classes in their homes or in the old York Square Theatre on Broadway.
Liberal and conservative
Yale, like many American universities, has a liberal reputation, with students unafraid to speak out when they believe the rights of women, LGBTQ people and people of color are infringed. A residential college head, Nicholas Christakis, was berated by a student demanding “a place of comfort and home” after he defended his wife Erika Christakis’ reaction to a cautionary email about offensive Halloween costumes.
Demonstrations by both students and New Haven residents forced the renaming of Calhoun College, which honored slave owner John Calhoun, to Grace Hopper College.
“The rhetoric around here is more liberal than the country of which we are a part,” Rae said. “I think when you get a little below the surface, a lot of people here are not as dogmatically liberal as their press clippings would make you think.”
Yale has produced liberal Justice Sotomayor but also conservative Justices Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh and of the four presidents it has produced, only Bill Clinton could be called left of center, if not centrist.
Lifting New Haven up
When Brewster asked Chauncey to establish a community relations program in 1972, it was Chauncey’s “fundamental belief ” that “If Yale fails, New Haven fails; if New Haven fails, Yale fails. Therefore we had an obligation at Yale to make New Haven a successful place.”
He and Brewster had to work to overcome negative attitudes. “Many people benefit from Yale,” Chauncey said, through programs such as Squash Haven (which helps students from the city’s worst-performing middle schools to get into good high schools) and LEAP (Leadership, Education and Athletics in Partnership). “There are also people who are left out and who feel that Yalies are snooty, which they can be,” he said.
“You have the difficulty of interaction of people who are doing very different things in their lives,” Chauncey said. “There are homeless kids who are struggling to survive and Yale kids who are struggling to get into law school or medical school.”
“The first thing we did was to make a decision [that] we would try to get people to live in downtown New Haven,” Chauncey said. Out of that effort grew the Whitney-Grove and Audubon arts complexes, which included retail and housing. The goal was to have 40,000 downtown residents and “we’re pretty damn close to that now,” Chauncey said.
Schiff said further efforts to reach out to New Haven came under President A. Bartlett Giamatti, but a 10week union strike hindered his efforts. “Giamatti as president would have been very different if it were not for the union troubles,” Schiff said. “His father was a day student from the Italian section and he was very interested in reaching out to the community.”
Among Giamatti’s initiatives was Communiversity Day, when Yale opened up to city residents with activities such as a human chess game. But Yale was not rich at that time, and the campus was starting to show its age.
When an arm fell off a statue on Harkness Tower, Giamatti said it would not be repaired, Schiff said. “God did this and this is how it will remain,” Schiff quoted Giamatti as saying. Yale was falling apart.
Tough times on campus
When Benno C. Schmidt Jr. became Yale’s 20th president in 1986, money was tight. Schmidt increased the endowment but, in order to pay for needed repairs and other improvements, proposed a 15 percent cut to the faculty, according to a 1999 New York magazine profile.
“Benno was basically the CEO who lived in Manhattan, come in on Monday morning and go home on Thursday night,” DeStefano said. Students wore “Where’s Benno?” T-shirts and protested outside Woodbridge Hall, home of the president’s office. In 1992, Schmidt left to cofound the Edison Project, a plan “to reexamine the very nature of ‘school,’ according to a 1994 article Schmidt wrote.
A 1994 GQ article, “The Last Boola-Boola,” stated that Yale was “riddled with debt, doubt and denial.”
Levin and DeStefano
Richard Levin was inaugurated president of Yale in 1993, the year John DeStefano Jr. was elected mayor of New Haven. In their almost 20-year tenures the two men forged a relationship that strengthened both the university and the city.
“I think we ought to be given credit for not being stupid,” said DeStefano, now executive vice president at Start Community Bank. “The city and Yale found itself in a lifeboat in 1993 and ’94 and decided to row in the same direction.”
Downtown had begun to revive back in the 1980s, with developer Joel Schiavone rehabilitating blocks of Chapel and College streets. The old Taft Hotel was turned into apartments and the Shubert Theater, shuttered since 1978, reopened in 1983.
But DeStefano said that in the early ’90s, “the city was troubled; Yale was troubled; and I think there was uncertainty in where the economy was going.”
Yale was seen as having “lost momentum” and “they were falling to a second-tier institution,” he said. Meanwhile, “there was a shift in the economy, where traditionally these low-skilled but high-wage production jobs were being replaced by a service economy.”
When DeStefano took
office, Macy’s and the Edw. Malley Co. had just closed, the Park Plaza Hotel and Chapel Square Mall were foundering, and there were “2,000 vacant housing units in the city,” with multiple structures empty on some blocks, he said. The GQ article called it “a war zone of poverty, crime and drugs as frightening and oppressive as those of some of the worst cities in America,” with a 30 percent unemployment rate.
New Haven needed help. “I think Rick Levin was selected as president of the university because the [Yale] Corporation realized that Yale could no longer be a great university if it didn’t have a different relationship with and different outcomes coming from its host community,” DeStefano said. “I don’t think it was an accident that they picked Rick.”
Levin hired Bruce Alexander, who had retired from the Rouse Co., which developed Harborplace in Baltimore and Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, to create a new Office of New Haven and State Affairs.
Among the new office’s initiatives was to start Yale Properties, which, encouraged by DeStefano, bought Schiavone’s properties, since he had gone into bankruptcy, and most of the stores on Broadway, all of which are on the tax rolls. The city, which had resisted Yale’s attempts to build new academic and residential buildings, “embraced a very accommodating view of the expansion of the campus,” DeStefano said. That was done “in a thoughtful and reasonable way into Newhallville” with new police headquarters and Yale Health Plan buildings, he said.
When DeStefano became mayor, Winchester Avenue “was literally closed with Page fence. You couldn’t have had a more stark division. Literally a fenced-in street with a guard post,” he said. Now, he said, where the campus meets Newhallville is “a soft edge instead of a hard edge” but said similar measures need to be taken behind the School of Medicine in the Hill section.
“I’m very proud of what we accomplished over that 20 years,” said Levin, who moved back to New Haven in 2017 after serving as CEO of Coursera, an online education company based in California. “I of course was a longtime resident of New Haven when I became president,” having entered graduate school in 1970.
“In a couple of years prior to my taking the presidency, there had been a growing concern within the Yale community that the condition of New Haven could become a liability for Yale.” The 1991 slaying of Christian Prince had added further to the stain on New Haven’s reputation.
In a survey, “We found to our astonishment that well over half of the residents of Woodbridge and Orange had not been in New Haven in over a year,” Levin said.
He brought back Linda Lorimer, who had worked for Giamatti, as secretary to “build good will, build trust. There was a sense that we didn’t have any interest in the city’s well-being.”
In 1994, Yale launched its Homebuyer Program, in which Yale employees can receive $30,000 over 10 years toward the purchase of a house in the city, and an additional $5,000 if they live in designated vulnerable neighborhoods. As of fall 2017, 1,221 faculty and staff had taken advantage of the benefit.
The program “was an immediate success, which led to kind of a remarkable resurgence in the neighborhoods where faculty tended to live,” Levin said. At first, the East Rock section, which had suffered from urban flight, benefited the most. Later, the focus was put on the poorer neighborhoods in the city.
“It was the first big program we launched and in many respects the most significant,” Levin said. More than half of those who have taken advantage of the program are people of color and 80 percent are first-time homebuyers, he said.
Yale Properties, operating out of the Office of New Haven and State Affairs and Campus Development, has brought in a number of retailers, some replacing longtime local retailers and restaurants with higherpriced stores.
In an email, Yale spokeswoman Karen Peart said, “We do indeed have some national tenants in our portfolio, including Apple, Barbour, J. Crew, L.L.Bean, L’Occitane, and Urban Outfitters. However, approximately 70 percent of all of our tenants are either regional or local owners such as Raggs, Derek Simpson, and Wave to name a few.”
Meanwhile, Yale’s buildings, many built in the 1930s, “had never been renovated and they were totally dilapidated.” Levin launched the major renovation program.
In his 20 years, Levin rehabilitated all 12 residential colleges and planned Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin colleges, negotiated long-term contracts with Local 34, the clerical and technical workers, and Local 35, the service and maintenance workers, and bought the former Bayer campus in West Haven and Orange to create Yale’s West Campus. The last labor battle is with the graduate teachers, Local 33, with whom Yale refuses to negotiate .
In its 2013 report, the Yale Investments Office reported that the university endowment had increased by 600 percent over 2003, to $20.8 billion. It now stands at a record $29.4 billion.
“The fact is, Yale certainly in 2018 is a different institution than in 1994,” DeStefano said. “To me, the secret sauce … is the professional schools, such as the schools of Law, Medicine, Public Health and Management. It’s the research university that has emerged and really what that has driven is jobs.”
The two largest office buildings in the city, 100 College St., which Alexion Pharmaceuticals built, and 300 George St., formerly the Southern New England Telephone Co., are home to companies that would not exist if not for Yale, DeStefano said. “Those are virtually all private-sector jobs but they are all related to Yale research,” he said.
The increased cooperation between Yale and New Haven brought other benefits. The late Dr. Donald Cohen, a psychiatrist who was director of the Yale Child Study Center, and survivors and witnesses of gun violence were referred for treatment. Dean Robert Blocker at the School of Music and Jock Reynolds, former director of the Yale Art Gallery, stepped up to bring more arts into the schools.
More Yale students volunteer at New Haven Reads, started by the late Christine Alexander, Bruce’s wife, and participate in 90 programs at Dwight Hall , the independent undergraduate social service and