THE FREE AND OPEN EXCHANGE of ideas and information, however unpopular they may be, is supposedly the governing principle of the university; it’s called ” academic freedom,” and it undergirds the system of lifetime tenure for professors, among other things. The Yale University Corporation, the school’s board of directors, is betraying that principle by suppressing a report on the university’s handling of a $ 20 million grant — a report it commissioned from Jose Cabranes, a U.S. circuit court judge and potential Supreme Court nominee in a second Clinton term.
The $ 20 million grant, the most notorious charitable donation in memory, came from Texas multimillionaire Lee Bass, who earmarked the money specifically for the the study of Western civilization at Yale. Bass presented his gift in 1991 after a speech by then-dean Donald Kagan blasting the academic assaults on what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.” Three years later, in an unprecedented move, Yale returned the grant. Bass had, the school said, demanded oversight privileges that violated the school’s academic freedom.
This explanation was disingenuous. The truth is that from the moment it was announced, the grant was viewed as an outrage by the very professors on campus Kagan was implicitly attacking — professors who believe that the study of Western civilization is elitist, exclusionary, racist, sexist, and intellectually genocidal. Indeed, the only administration action on the grant before its return came when university president Richard Levin formed a committee to study alternative uses for the Bass money — without informing Bass.
As one professor close to the administration puts it, “At each stage Levin had to do something willfully strange to not do the obvious” — spend the money Bass had given the school. Richard Franke, chairman of the Yale Corporation, admits that the delay on the Bass money was “a mistake.”
In a meeting with alumni in May 1995, President Levin promised that an internal review would get to the bottom of what had happened to the Bass money. Cabfanes and a fellow member of the Yale Corporation, Henry Schacht, began an investigation of the matter last fall and produced a report that must be damning, because the Corporation will not release any information from it, despite repeated requests from alumni. “It’s our report,” Franke says firmly. “We never had the responsibility or the need to release it. Things have died down and we’ve moved on. Why keep the issue alive?”
Aside from the simple fact that it would be the right thing to do, Franke should consider releasing the report for the very reason he doesn’t want to. He knows full well that “the issue” of the Bass grant and the university’s bewildering treatment of it is still alive. Nothing has been resolved. Alumni are still angry, and the administration continues to shy away from instituting a specific Western civilization program. As the Yale Class of 1937, a very active alumni group, noted in its summer news bulletin, the administration’s interest in Western civilization “is tempered by the resistance of illiberal faculty, who support multiculturalism. Such a conclusion is unfortunately enhanced by the failure of the Corporation to release publicly its Cabranes-Schacht report on the reasons for derailment of the original Lee Bass gift.”
From the Corporation’s point of view, the group of alumni who feel strongly about Western civilization is small and, indeed, has a negligible effect on the university’s bottom line. Franke says quite confidently, “I think that the gifts [from alumni] speak for themselves.”
If the administration and the Corporation wanted to prove that the Bass fiasco had not been caused by politics or ideology, the Class of ’37 offered them the perfect opportunity. After the Bass debacle, the Class of ’37 tried to work closely with Levin and other administrators to assist in restoring Yale’s reputation by promoting the university’s commitment to Western civilization. The administration assured the Class that it wanted to make a ” conspicuous gesture” to demonstrate such a commitment. But repeated efforts by the Class — including a proposed donation drive to raise money for Western civ — were shot down. In a letter to be published in the upcoming Yale Alumni Magazine, the Class writes collectively, “With the situation apparently deadlocked, ’37 asked a fundamental question, ‘If the necessary funding were made available, then would Yale establish a major Western civilization program?” The definitive answer from the corporation and the administration was ‘No.’ Yale’s approach to western civilization will proceed ‘incrementally.'”
Franke confirms the essence of the letter. “It’s not some sort of master plot or anything,” he says. “It was our ultimate conclusion that we had done what was appropriate as far as Western civilization is concerned.” The administration’s “appropriate” and “incremental” approach ended after only two small steps. First, it announced an expansion of the Directed Studies program to admit 35 more students. Directed Studies is a rigorous course of study for freshmen that covers Western history, philosophy, and literature, and it usually has many more applicants than spaces. The second, and virtually meaningless, step was to lift the 18-person cap on the humanities major. But since the major attracted only 25 qualified students, there was no increase in the number of courses offered.
Although the Class of ’37 welcomed these steps, in a letter to its members and the secretaries of other classes, it said these gestures “are not enough to allay suspicions [that multiculturalism dominates the University], to demonstrate Yale’s commitment to Western civilization studies, or to restore alumni support.”
And yet, despite such dissatisfaction, “alumni giving is up,” Franke says, and he points to another $ 20 million donation from another Bass — Lee’s brother Robert, whose money is earmarked for the renovation of Yale dormitories.
Indeed, the Yale public relations machine can boast that last year overall alumni participation increased 8 percent, and that in fiscal year 1994-95 alumni donated $ 200 million. Realizing its tenuous position, the administration even maintains its own arsenal of unofficial advisers, including the ideologically dizzying David Gergen, who was elected to the Corporation earlier this month. Western-civ proponents inside the administration say Gergen was involved not only in helping Yale spin the media when it decided to return the Bass grant but also in shutting down the Class of ’37’s fund-raising proposal. Franke says Gergen’s involvement is no big secret, and that because of his background, Gergen was “asked to look as Yale’s communications programs.” Gergen denies any involvement with the Bass grant and says Levin has called him four or five times over the past year and a half to discuss different university matters.
Gergen makes it very clear he “wants to be on the record as being pro- Western civilization.” Other Corporation members agree. “By the way,” says Franke, “I’m a great supporter of Western civilization.” Both men sound sincere. But at Yale, the question has become: What are you willing to do about it?
Not too much, since the whole controversy is not about the value of Western civilization, which most people recognize, but rather its political implications. “Western civilization is a misnomer,” says Franke, its purported supporter. “It’s gotten so politicized that it doesn’t mean anything.” Defending the only intellectual tradition self-critical enough to produce Yale’s liberal professors — and whose belief in the free exchange of ideas has granted those very same professors lifetime tenure — is somehow to be identified with a reactionary fringe.
Levin’s predecessor as Yale president, Benno Schmidt, was viciously attacked by liberal faculty, who opposed him on many issues, including the school’s embarrassing and expensive labor disputes. Today, the faculty has remained silent as the labor unions struggle with the university. This has been Levin’s bargain: The president, an economist by training, has traded Western-civilization studies for peace and quiet on campus.
Peace on campus has meant that the curriculum now includes more than 100 courses on the narrow issues of race, ethnicity, and gender. The university offers comprehensive majors in women’s studies and African-American studies. In 1993, the administration easily caved in to student pressures to maintain separate Chicano and Puerto Rican ethnic deans — all this while discouraging programs in Western civilization.
Though donations are at an all-time high, some of the most faithful alumni are indeed being pushed to the limit, no matter how confident Franke may be. Keeping alumni in the dark while paying lip service to Western civ is likely to backfire. Perry Bass, the Bass family patriarch, has minimized the impact of his son Robert’s donation by saying he is not yet convinced that Yale is serious about Western civilization. And $ 20 million from Robert is a paltry sum compared with what Yale could lose by being omitted from Perry Bass’s will. His estimated worth: $ 6 billion. If the free and open exchange of ideas is ever extended to Cabranes’s report of the Bass fiasco, the Corporation will likely learn its lesson in Western civilization the Levin way — through the economic decisions of its alumni.
by Neomi Rao
