Here it is, our final reunion, at least in this form of our being. Even after all these decades, I’m still puzzled about when and why I resisted the influences of our Alma Mater and when I embraced them. I think of my very first visit to Yale. I was a senior from Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, very much an applicant seeing Yale as a somewhat distant and maybe foreign institution. I was staying at the Hotel Duncan waiting for an appointment with the admissions office. It happened to be Passover and, as a consequence of my then practices of religious observance my suitcase was packed with special culinary products as well as with clothes. As I crowded into the elevator the over-stuffed suitcase popped open and my kosher food for Passover spilled all over the floor, cans of chicken soup colliding with boxes of matzos. For most on the elevator, this was just a slight discombobulation. For me it was an inauspicious beginning, a possible metaphor and a reminder of the ever present danger of being a stranger in a strange land.
I was accepted to Yale, received a suitable package of financial assistance and embarked on the Project of becoming or not becoming a Yalie. Of course, it was hubris to think one knew what that meant and pathetic if one cared.
I spent much of my Yale career writing for the Yale Daily News, and I loved my experiences there. I learned that everything we did was a kind of rehearsal for the world thereafter and heeling for the news was hardly an exception. Albert Pergam and I (mostly Albert) did one of the first investigative journalism series for the News structured to show the reputational harms of a supposed leftwards drift in Yale’s Political Science Department. Only later did I figure out that we were pawns in a deep struggle that included Wilmoore Kendall, William Buckley, and an intense cast of Yale characters. For God, for country and for Yale.
In my junior and senior years, I embarked on a series of articles for the Yale Daily News. It was thrilling for me, but maybe disrupted my education. After the 1959 Cuban revolution, I wrote Juan Trippe, Yale graduate and president of National Airlines, asking him for a ticket to Cuba so I could write an article for the News. I suggested it was still a wonderful thing to travel there for spring vacation. The airline tickets arrived, and I was off to the races. I interviewed Fidel on the tarmac in Cuba and covered the show trials in soccer stadia. By the time I graduated a year or two later, I had traveled to the Soviet Union to write about the handful of Western students enrolled at Moscow State University; and traveled with George Akerlof, future Nobel prize winner, visiting important southern sites of the fledgling freedom movement. As a result of this exciting life, I was ejected from the divisional program in Political and Economic Institutions taught by Lindblom and Dahl. That Program required me to attend one seminar a week and apparently I couldn’t even meet this minimal requirement.
One additional point regarding my struggle with becoming a Yalie. Ours was the time of a coat and tie rule, governing sartorial splendor in the dining halls at Trumbull College, where I lived, I apparently dressed in a way that severely challenged the rule, questioning by my actions what constituted a coat or what constituted a tie. Sometime in my junior year, in 1959, the Master of the College, John Spangler Nicholas, wrote me a letter threatening me with eviction if I continued to flout the regulations. I was not politically rebellious, but I was conditioned to think of the minimum approach to satisfying an external rule of fashion.
I’m sad so many my Yale Daily News colleagues have died. Soon that will be the fate of us all.