Assembly LVIII: Three Hundred Years of Creativity and Discovery
Friday, April 20 through Sunday, April 22, 2001
Executive Summary
Friday Morning Plenary
The Past and Future of Alumni Relations at Yale

On Friday morning, the AYA Assembly conducted a plenary session for AYA delegates, Yale Club Presidents, Yale College Class officers and Graduate and Professional School Alumni Association Presidents that placed alumni in the history of Yale and explained alumni roles in making Yale what it is today.

Chair of the AYA Board of Governors, Maureen O. Doran ’71 MSN, welcomed delegates to the Assembly and reflected on how fortunate they all were for being a part of the AYA at the time of this great Tercentennial celebration. She also thanked Jeff Brenzel ’75 and the rest of the AYA staff for their involvement in planning and implementation of the extraordinary weekend. Edward Dennis ’63, Secretary of the AYA Board of Governors and Chair of the Education, Assembly, and Long Range Planning Committee introduced the speakers for the opening plenary.

Gaddis Smith, ’54, ’61 PhD, Larned Professor Emeritus of History and former chair of the History Department (1978-1982), discussed the roles and influence of alumni in the transformation of the University over the years.

Yale’s first two centuries



• Yale College was the first college to identify alumni by class. In the early days, members of each class took all of the same courses together, which created a close bond among the students. This also helped to build cohesiveness among the alumni.
  
• When Connecticut discontinued financial support of the University in 1831, Yale conducted its first endowment drive. This was the first time Yale looked to its alumni for funding.
  
• Following the Civil War, alumni organized to oust the Connecticut state senators serving on the Yale Corporation and replace them with alumni representatives.

  Yale in the Twentieth Century

• Around the time of World War I, Yale encountered financial difficulties and became greatly dependent upon the generosity of alumni. This in turn increased the alumni stakes in the enterprise of the University. The alumni organized the Alumni Committee for University Development, which gathered information, and in comparing Yale to other Universities, found it lacking. They approached President Arthur Hadley with a number of difficult questions, demanding to know how he planned to make Yale a great university.
  
• Dissatisfied with the University’s response, in 1918, the alumni committee asserted itself and in a virtually unique episode in Yale’s history, erected the structure of the university as it is today, including establishing the office of the provost, centralizing finances, and dividing the faculty and studies into academic departments.
  
• President James Angell, who succeeded President Hadley, had ambivalent feelings about alumni. He wanted Yale to be a great research center and wanted to move the Medical School and the Divinity School apart from the undergraduate humanities school. He also felt that it was important to “Keep Yale Yale,” which turned out to be a code phrase for matriculating alumni sons and establishing quotas for Jewish students, among others.
  
• After World War II, William F. Buckley ’50 in his book God and Man at Yale accused the university faculty of being anti-Christian and pro-liberalism. He claimed that the alumni “owned” the University and should have the right of governance to control the university, including choosing the faculty, the students, and determining what should be taught. President Griswold conducted a full evaluation of the University to examine alumni relations more closely and reasserted academic freedom.

  Alumni and the Admission of Women 
  
  

• In 1951, President Griswold appointed a council to look into the admission of women. The Korean War threatened to take away too many men, which would greatly affect the University financially. However, there was strong opposition and as a result, nothing was done to change the admissions policy.
  
• Kingman Brewster said in a 1966 corporation meeting that “…it was time for Yale to take the responsibility of educating women.” And in 1969, women were finally admitted to the University. It was agreed that in admitting women, there should be a quota and that Yale should not reduce the number of men admitted. Initially only 250 women per 1000 men were admitted. By 1972, after much protesting by students and faculty about the quota on women, sex-blind admissions was instituted.
  
  Alumni discontent 
  
  
• During the 1960’s, many alumni became unhappy with co-education, a decrease in legacy admissions, drugs, scruffy dress, and a host of other issues that they found unacceptable. · The University responded by forming a special alumni commission, the Dwyer Commission, which helped to define the role of alumni in University affairs. The Association of Yale Alumni was formed to serve as a clearinghouse for alumni and University officials to express their concerns and exchange views.

In the question and answer period following, Professor Smith addressed the history of Yale and ROTC, and the admission of women to the Yale Medical School, which dates back to 1916.

Murray Biggs, Professor of English and Theater Studies, and three talented drama students presented dramatic readings of selected letters submitted to the University through its 300-year history. The letters included one from Cotton Mather in 1718, thanking Yale for taking his advice to name the university after Elihu Yale. Another, from Jonathan Edwards, dating back to 1719, criticized the decline in decorum since his own graduation, accusing the students of thievery and drunkenness and the administration of lax discipline. The letters that followed repeated the themes of both alumni discontent and alumni appreciation of Yale through the centuries.

Eustace D. Theodore ’63, former Executive Director of the AYA, outlined his talk on “The Fourth Estate—Alumni in the Digital Age.” He discussed the future of alumni relations and the impact alumni will have on the University in the next fifty years. The major questions he addressed were:

Who will be the students?
• In the digital age, alumni will continue to be students throughout their lives through online courses. The student body will change not only in age, but also geographically. Students from around the world will have access to education through the Internet.
  
  Who will support the University? Where will the money come from?
• Philanthropy has given way to philanthropic investments. For many institutions, large donations now come with increasingly detailed instructions on how to use the funds. Universities in general will have less control over how they can spend the money they raise, and thus donors and corporations will increasingly set priorities.

  Who Governs?

• Faculty, students, and staff each have a role in guiding the university. These roles evolve over time, and alumni as a group, have been limited inside players. They will become more significant in the life of the University when they join faculty, students and staff as ongoing participants in the life of the University community. That is why their continual participation through online courses and cyber alumni clubs and communities is so important.

  Major changes for the future

• In the digital age, connections established by the AYA will flourish. Lifelong education will link alumni to Yale in far more meaningful ways. Communities built around class, club, and graduate schools will develop continuous, on-going relationships through listservs and other online vehicles. Time and space will no longer be a barrier.
  
• The modern university has 3 missions: Preservation, creation and transmission of knowledge
  
• Faculty will embark upon entrepreneurial ventures despite the fact that universities currently claim ownership to intellectual property created by faculty. There will be more of a “for profit” orientation to education. · Private vs. State, Profit vs. non-profit—in the past, Yale, unlike state universities, was not focused on practical education and in “helping people to find jobs.” But more and more private universities like Yale are showing greater interest in the practical side of education.

  “Keeping Yale Yale” in the modern context

• In order to do this, the University needs to focus on two truly important tasks:
  
  • Define Yale’s core mission and values
  • Engage faculty, students, and alumni
    
• Theodore closed his presentation with the following quote, “Faculty come and go, students are supposed to come and go, happily, administers come and go, but alumni go on forever! They are the only permanent constituency in a successful educational institution.”

Executive Summary Contents
I.    Executive Summary Home
II.   BOG Candidate Introduction
II.  Friday Morning Plenary
III. Yale Medal Lunch
IV. Tercentennial Leadership Convocation