WHY WOULD A UNIVERSITY refuse to celebrate an offer from some of its most devoted alumni to raise $ 20 million or more for its coffers? For reasons of principle, apparently, because the same university sacrificed a $ 20 million gift for precisely the same reason just last year. The university is Yale, and in both cases the money was to be raised for the purpose of teaching western civilization to freshmen.
In March, representatives of 15 classes of Yale alumni, led by the class of 1937, sent a letter to Yale president Richard Levin after Texas billionaire Lee Bass pulled his $ 20 million grant from the school. The alumni offered to “control the heavy damage caused by the failure of the grant” by raising funds for the creation of a western civilization major, a significant enlargement of Yale’s acclaimed freshman Western Studies program, and the creation of a Center for Western Civilization.
Bass rescinded his gift in March after a politically charged curriculum fight in which liberal professors sought to prevent the school from implementing the western civilization program for which the gift was expressly earmarked. Sara Suleri, a professor of comparative literature, put it this way: “Western civilization? Why not a chair in colonialism, slavery, empire, and poverty?” Amid such criticism, Levin decided to forgo hiring professors for the program and formed a committee to explore alternative uses for the Bass grant — without informing Bass himself.
The collateral damage was astonishing; one professor familiar with the university’s fundraising efforts estimates that the school blew many millions besides the $ 20 million Bass grant in lost donations from alumni disgusted at the school’s willingness to kowtow to faculty ideologically opposed to the study of Western Civilization.
At a meeting with alumni representatives at the Yale Club of New York on Sept. 8, Levin rebuffed the alumni. He was only willing, he said, to see an expansion of the existing freshman Western Civ program — and that by a mere 34 students, or less than 1 percent of the school’s undergraduate population.
This proposed enlargement would probably harm the program it is designed to help, because the Yale administration is refusing to hire new faculty to handle even the 34 new students. Levin decided instead to hire six post- doctoral fellows to do the job. This aroused the ire even of the liberal Yale Daily News, which blasted the administration in a Sept. 12 editorial: “Levin is doing away with the most attractive part of the program: small discussion groups led by professors … Postdoctoral fellows just don’t cut it … Hiring non-professors waters down — rather than improves — Yale’s Western Civilization programs.”
Thirteen Yale professors delivered a letter to Levin on Sept. 21 asking that the hiring of the post-doctoral fellows be stopped, in part because they believe the administration is in violation of its own regulations as well as the policies of the American Association of University Professors.
But it’s Levin’s continuing disrespect for efforts on behalf of Western Civ that has evoked the most discomfort — disgust, even. “They threw a nickel to the freshman program, and the rest is nonsense,” says one professor. “It’s an incalculable loss.” Levin seems to be gambling that alumni and faculty discontent will quickly fade and that the implementation of additional Western Civ programs will prove unnecessary. Indeed, if this past year is any indication, the administration appears to view its alumni as irrelevant to policy debates at Yale. Terry Holcolmbe, Yale’s vice president for development, even told the Yale Alumni Magazine that alumni will ” eventually… return to the fold and life will go on.”
That may not happen. Alumni are maintaining unprecedented levels of involvement in the affairs of the tmiversity. Says Russell Reynolds, a 1954 graduate who heads a consulting firm specializing in corporate governance: “I don’t think the problem is simply dealing with Western Civilization or the humanities at Yale — I think it’s dealing with the governance of Yale and the way the institution is currently being run.”
by Pat Collins; Pat Collins is editor of Light and Truth, a conservative magazine at Yale; published by the Intercollegiate Studies
