Inseparable from the city
300-year relationship molded New Haven and Yale
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 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 were usually 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.
For 300 years, since New Haven outbid other Connecticut cities, Yale has been inseparable from the city.
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.
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.
But in the 19-year span, 1994- 2013, 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.
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 worldrenowned 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 institu- tion 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.
The international connections started early, too. 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 Euro- pean nationalities and, most of all, against unwhite people,” Rae said.
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.
Liberal and conservative
Yale today, 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.
Demonstrations by both students and New Haven residents forced the renaming of Calhoun College, which honored slave owner John Calhoun, to Grace Hopper College.
Yale has produced liberal Justice Sotomayor, but also conservative Justices Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh. Of the four presidents it has produced, only Bill Clinton could be called left of center, if not centrist.
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.
In 1992, Schmidt left to co-found the Edison Project, a plan “to reexamine the very nature of ‘school,’ according to a 1994 article Schmidt wrote.
A1994 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.
“The city and Yale found itself in a lifeboat in 1993 and ’94 and decided to row in the same direction,” said. DeStefano, now executive vice president at Start Community Bank.
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.
“I’m very proud of what we accomplished over that 20 years,” said Levin.
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, buying the former Bayer campus in West Haven and Orange to create Yale’s West Campus.
Labor contracts were renegotiated and the last labor battle is with the graduate teachers, Local 33 -- whom Yale refuses to negotiate with.
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.