Academic literature on the topic 'Yale University. Alumni'

Documents in the Yale University archives - the papers of the presidents, deans, provosts, secretary of the university - show that Yale was no more insulated from the hot and cold of post-World War II politics than any other university. During the decade of 1945–55, the Yale authorities felt considerable pressure to take action concerning several appointees whose political views had been questioned by alumni, and most certainly by others as well. The New Haven Office of the FBI - and through it the national headquarters in Washington, D.C. - had been in close touch with university officials for some time and, during the last years of the regime of President Charles Seymour, knew of what it described as the Yale policy of inquiring into the political activities of faculty members prior to their appointment. As the Special Agent in Charge of the New Haven Office reported to J. Edgar Hoover on June 6, 1949, “The position of Yale University is apparently swinging around to the point… that it is much better to look men over and know exactly what they are before they are appointed, and that it is much easier to get rid of them by not appointing them than after they have been once appointed.”

With the regularity of commencement, colleges and universities today conduct annual solicitations of alumni and multiyear comprehensive fundraising campaigns. These now commonplace practices constituted radical innovations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The former originated at Yale University in 1890; the latter at Harvard University between 1915 and 1925. It was through these two innovations that higher education began to assimilate the new phenomenon of “mass giving” and “people's philanthropy” which arose in American society between 1890 and 1920.

Some studies date the origins of US intercollegiate football—and, by extension, the modern game of American football—back to a soccer-style game played between Princeton and Rutgers universities in 1869. This article joins with others to argue that such a narrative is misleading and goes further to clarify the significance of two “international” fixtures in 1873 and 1874, which had a formative and lasting impact on football in the United States. These games, contested between alumni from England’s Eton College and students at Yale University, and between students at Canada’s McGill University and Harvard University, combined to revolutionize the American football code. Between 1875 and 1880, previous soccer-style versions of US intercollegiate football were replaced with an imported, if somewhat modified, version of rugby football. It was the “American rugby” that arose as a result of these transnational exchanges that is the true ancestor of the gridiron game of today.

Mark Jacobsen of University of California, San Diego and NBER reviews “The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America's Environment, Security, and Independence” by Michael J. Graetz. The EconLit abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Explores the problems, policies, and politics of energy in America, beginning with the crises of the 1970s. Discusses a “"new economic policy''; losing control over oil; the environment moving front and center; no more nuclear; the changing face of coal; natural gas and the ability to price; the quest for alternatives and to conserve; a crisis of confidence; the end of an era; climate change--a game changer; shock to trance--the power of price; regulation and the rise of cap and trade; Congress and the road to reform; and disaster in the Gulf. Graetz is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Columbia Alumni Professor of Tax Law at Columbia University and Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Yale Law School. Bibliographic essay; index.”

When Conant left the presidency in 1953, Harvard was still under the sway of its traditional soft-shoe, old boy administrative style. Pusey felt no great obligation to modernize governance. To the end of his presidential days, he relied on an almost ostentatiously small staff. When he came to work each morning, he opened his own mail. Here as elsewhere, older folkways stubbornly endured. Pusey’s closest associates in the 1950s were two very different breeds of cat. One was personal assistant William Bentinck-Smith ’37, an affable, cool-minded former journalist with a facile pen (something the president lacked). Bentinck-Smith was Pusey’s amanuensis and a close adviser on a variety of alumni and policy matters, very much as Calvert Smith had been for Conant in the 1940s. “I worked for him for eighteen extraordinary years, in a relationship of mutual trust and intimacy,” Bentinck-Smith recalled. Pusey’s (improbable) other close confidant was Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean McGeorge Bundy. If Pusey was as much a product of middle America as a Harvard president was likely to be, Bundy was as close to an aristocrat as America was likely to produce. He was a scion of the Boston Lowells, self-confident enough to have gone not to Harvard but to Yale. Rumor had it that the Corporation put pressure on Pusey to make Bundy dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Fellow Roger Lee told the president-elect in the summer of 1953: “only if a first-rate administrator is available and thoroughly briefed before the opening of college will you yourself be free to deal with the many policy questions which will naturally arise with a change in the presidency.” Pusey himself says that he was attracted by an acerbic Bundy review of William Buckley’s assault on the liberal university, God and Man at Yale. Only thirty-four when he became dean in 1953, associate professor of Government Bundy soon showed those who didn’t know it already that he had as sharp a mind as anybody in the University. A consummate meritocrat, he handled his faculty with effortless ease, and for the most part they loved it.

Harvard’s nine professional schools were on the cutting edge of its evolution from a Brahmin to a meritocratic university. Custom, tradition, and the evergreen memory of the alumni weighed less heavily on them than on the College. And the professions they served were more interested in their current quality than their past glory. True, major differences of size, standing, wealth, and academic clout separated Harvard’s Brobdingnagian professional faculties—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Medicine, Law, and Business— from the smaller, weaker Lilliputs—Public Health and Dentistry, Divinity, Education, Design, Public Administration. But these schools had a shared goal of professional training that ultimately gave them more in common with one another than with the College and made them the closest approximation of Conant’s meritocratic ideal. Harvard’s doctoral programs in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) were a major source of its claim to academic preeminence. As the Faculty of Arts and Sciences became more research and discipline minded, so grew the importance of graduate education. A 1937 ranking of graduate programs in twenty-eight fields—the lower the total score, the higher the overall standing—provided a satisfying measure of Harvard’s place in the American university pecking order: But there were problems. Money was short, and while graduate student enrollment held up during the Depression years of the early 1930s (what else was there for a young college graduate to do?), academic jobs became rare indeed. Between 1926–27 and 1935–36, Yale appointed no Harvard Ph.D. to a junior position. The Graduate School itself was little more than a degree-granting instrument, with no power to appoint faculty, no building, no endowment, and no budget beyond one for its modest administrative costs. Graduate students identified with their departments, not the Graduate School. Needless to say, the GSAS deanship did not attract the University’s ablest men. Conant in 1941 appointed a committee to look into graduate education, and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., “called for a thoroughgoing study without blinders.

At the heart of Harvard lay the College. Half of the University’s students were there, as was most of the history that fueled the Harvard mystique. Undergraduate tuition and the contributions of well-heeled College alumni provided much of the income on which the University depended. But the elitist, inbred College culture posed a substantial obstacle to Conant’s goal of a more meritocratic Harvard. Admission was the first step in the student life cycle, and admissions policy went far to set the tone of the College. Eliot did not pay much attention to the matter. But his successor Lowell wanted students who would be a social elite. Catholic students were quite acceptable to him: in comportment and values they passed his entry test for the leadership class. So, too—more doubtfully—did wealthy, assimilated German Jews, though assuredly not their Russian-Jewish brethren. Anne MacDonald, executive secretary of the admissions office since the beginning of the century, was one of those women then (and now) essential to the smooth functioning of Harvard. In a 1934 memorandum to Conant, she explained the workings of her bailiwick. She and her opposite numbers at Yale (a Miss Elliot), Princeton (a Miss Williams), and the College Entrance Examination Board (a Miss McLaughlin) met yearly “to compare notes on all matters concerning admission, and the different ways in which they are treated at the three universities.” Some of her work required special handling: “The interviews with rejected Hebrews or their relatives are particularly precarious, and one needs to be constantly on the alert. . . . For the past ten years, or since the restriction [Harvard’s unofficial Jewish quota] we have been particularly fortunate in settling these cases.” But there were snakes in this admissions Garden of Eden. A substantial portion of each entering class failed to meet the academic standards of the College: 30 to 40 percent of freshmen had unsatisfactory records in the early 1930s. And the student body was too parochial: in 1931 Harvard had the highest portion (40 percent) of students from its home state among the nation’s major colleges.