Education: The Steady Hand

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In the book-lined study of a red brick New Haven mansion one day last week, a slim, sandy-haired man with a very bad cold sat glowering at a typewriter. Every so often, after a spate of typing, he would spring from his chair, reach for a Kleenex, pace about the room, then stop to consult one of the dozen books he had piled higgledy-piggledy upon his desk. For President A. (for Alfred) Whitney Griswold of Yale University, the task of writing a baccalaureate address was nothing short of agonizing.

It was agonizing partly because it was the first he had ever written. At 44, Whitney Griswold was just completing his freshman year as a university president. But for any president, Yale’s 1951 commencement would be something out of the ordinary. Next week, as Griswold dons his academic robe and the gold chain of office, to accompany the solemn commencement procession on its traditional path from the campus to the New Haven Green and back again, he will also be marking Yale’s 250th anniversary year.

There will be no special celebration this June to commemorate the occasion. But scholarly, debonair Whitney Griswold might well stand in awe of his responsibility. By virtue of his office as 16th president of Yale, he has become automatically one of the top educational statesmen in the U.S., the head of one of the world’s dozen ranking universities, the custodian of a great tradition. The university which grew from the little school founded 250 years ago in a farmhouse at Branford, Conn, descends in a direct line from such ancient seats of learning as the University of Paris, from Cambridge and Oxford.

The Proper Function. The whole ideal of the university is rooted deep in Western civilization—older than parliaments, older than the modern state itself—and over the centuries it has assumed many functions. It has been a refuge for scholars, a treasure house of facts, an incubator of new ideas and new ideals. At its best, it has always been the preserver; propagator and perpetuator of human wisdom. The proper function of the university, wrote Newman, is “teaching universal knowledge.”

U.S. universities have not always lived up to that maxim. Under the influence of the Germans, who carried their pursuit of facts for their own sake to the last extreme, the laboratory began to overshadow the classroom, the specialist the student, and the idea that men must become well-rounded human beings before they become specialists was almost forgotten. In a later day, U.S. education fell into the anarchy of free electives, and scattered courses piecemeal before its students to be sampled as their taste or fancy dictated.

Today the return to the teaching of universal knowledge is well under way, and nowhere is it more visible than in the Yale of Whitney Griswold. It could be seen in its most obvious way in the breadth and depth of Yale’s imposing facilities—topflight schools of law, medicine, divinity; the nation’s oldest forestry school; the world’s second largest university library (next to Harvard’s). It could be seen more clearly still in Yale’s whole interlocking curriculum, where political scientists and psychiatrists teach in the law school, physicists rub elbows with philosophers, engineers teach in the medical school. At 250 years, Yale is more than ever what it has always taken most pride in being—a teaching institution.

“For God, for Country …” Like any educational institution—especially in the U.S.—Yale is often more popularly known by its tags and badges than by its principles. To many, it is simply one of the big three Ivy Leaguers, the member that somehow has managed to produce alumni of such varied types as Nathan Hale, William Howard Taft and Rudy Vallee. In the person of William Lyon Phelps, it has gushed through hundreds of women’s clubs; and in Owen Johnson’s fictional character of Dink Stover has fired the hearts of thousands of pre-Hopalong boys. It is the land of the Whiffenpoof, the Boola-Boola, the tables down at Mory’s. Waggish non-Yalemen never seem to weary of calling “For God, for Country and for Yale” the outstanding single anticlimax in the English language.

The physical Yale is plunked incongruously down in the heart of a prosaic, overgrown town—a neo-Gothic citadel besieged by a grid of Main Streets. Neon signs blink into its leaded windows; drugstores, shoe stores and tailor shops challenge its ivy-covered walls. The worlds of Samuel and Howard Johnson are but a step apart.

Yale’s newest buildings appear to be the oldest, for their antiquity was planned in advance and custom-made. Upperclassmen eat in baronial halls, may sit under imposing chandeliers or by an imported Burgundian fireplace, use silver sugar bowls. Yale’s Divinity School looks as if it might have been moved up from Williamsburg; the university library looks like a cathedral (“Must I genuflect?” a bemused visitor once exclaimed); its main power plant is clothed in stone to look like a Gothic tower.

The Yale Spirit. Yet throughout this neo-Gothic land runs an intense esprit that seems to start with the Fellows of the mighty Corporation itself. These 19 gentlemen are the guardians of 1,005 acres, masters of $125 million in stocks and bonds, a 1,100-man faculty, an enrollment of 7,500. But such is their loyalty to Yale that rarely does any one of them miss a meeting. Even the nation’s Secretary of State and one of its busiest Senators, Robert A. Taft, will once a month gladly drop everything in Washington for two days of sitting in high harmony side by side in New Haven.*

Such esprit comes partly from the fact that Yale is a dynasty, perhaps the most inbred of all the ivy-league colleges. Since 1766 only one president, James Rowland Angell, has been an outsider, and today 55% of its faculty are Yalemen. It also springs from a carefully nurtured sense of responsibility and community service. One result is that Yalemen have sallied forth from New Haven to found or be first presidents of 40-other colleges & universities, until Yale has become the most successful Johnny Appleseed in the educational orchard.

In some respects all Yalemen are Johnny Appleseeds at heart, dedicated to the proposition that one does not earn one’s “Y in life” just for oneself alone. They might, be as different as RFC Director W. Stuart Symington and Columnist Max Lerner, both ’23, or as bustling Senator William Benton of Connecticut and his lifelong friend, Robert Maynard Hutchins, both ’21. But they are all apt to be men with a mission, whether it is holding high public office, running a local community chest or managing the Red Cross drive.

Energetic Drift. Like the British Constitution, the Yale code is unwritten; it is simply in the air. It echoes back to the 19th Century, to the days of William Howard Taft (’78) when undergraduates carried bangers (canes), hired sweeps (servants), and felt it bad form to “talk stand” (discuss marks). They were the days that soon inspired the fictional Frank Merriwell, who would give his all against Harvard (“Old Yale can’t get along without him!”), and tight-lipped Dink Stover (“I’ll play the game . . . We’ll see who’ll lead!”), who did the same.

Today, Yale undergraduates still “play the game”—on the field & off—in an atmosphere of calm but unrelenting competition. From the moment a freshman begins to “heel” for the News, the Banner or the Lit, his life becomes a purposeful drive upward—but a drive he must pretend to ignore. “Intense, aren’t you?” is the rebuke to overenthusiasm. “The thing to do,” says one undergraduate, “is to drift energetically.”

Campus anthropologists like to divide Yalemen into “White Shoes,” “Brown Shoes” and “Black Shoes.” The White Shoes come from the proper families and the proper prep schools; their weekend dress, almost like a uniform, is a button-down shirt, striped tie and Brooks Bros, suit. The Black Shoes are apt to be on scholarship (one-third of all Yale students are), working their way through college. The Brown Shoes are somewhere in between.

For any Shoe, one sign of success is to get into a fraternity—preferably such “Row Fraternities” as Zeta Psi, the Fence Club, or Delta Kappa Epsilon. Far above these stand Yale’s six senior societies—Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Berzelius, Book and Snake, Wolf’s Head, and Elihu—whose new members are picked each year when the junior class lines up on Tap Day in Branford College Court, waiting for the slap on the back from some senior member.

Spiders to Slaves. But Yale is much more than the fraternities and senior societies, the athletic teams and Mory’s, the Fence Club and the Yale Fence (part of which still is preserved in Pach Brothers’ studio as a prop for the annual pictures of Yale team captains). In the last five years, with such men as F.S.C. (The Meeting of East and West) Northrop, Metaphysicians Brand Blanshard, Paul Weiss and Theodore M. Greene, Yale has built the best philosophy department in the U.S. On the Yale faculty are men like fiery Historian Samuel Flagg Bemis, two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner (Pinckney’s Treaty; John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy); cherubic Composer Paul Hindemith; Botanist Paul Burkholder, who helped develop chloromycetin; Cleanth Brooks of the New Criticism; and Theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, brother of Reinhold, in the Divinity School.

Yale’s research ranges from Tacitus to spiders, from servomechanisms (socalled slave machines) to cancer and carbon 14 (the radioactive isotope that dates objects up to 30,000 years old). In its library (4,000,000 volumes), scholars are now in the process of editing the fabulous Boswell papers and the Wilmarth S. Lewis collection of Walpoliana. The “Boswell Factory” and the “Walpole Factory” alone make Yale the custodian of the most impressive collection of 18th Century English literature in the world.

Yale is also a custodian of another sort. It was not even a university officially until 1887—eleven years after Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins began as a model. It did not bother with a full-fledged engineering school until 1932—36 years after Columbia. It did not climb aboard the “elective” bandwagon until Harvard had tried the experiment for 20 years, or build its residential colleges until 1933, when Harvard’s houses were already three years old. Even its fraternities were never cast from the campus wholesale, as were those at Princeton under President Woodrow Wilson, though most have long since severed their national ties. Consciously or unconsciously, Yale has traditionally waited for others to lead, observed their course, then picked the middle road to follow.

Thus, if its progress has not been speedy, it has been selective and generally sound. If it has opened few new frontiers, it has at least held fast to old and solid principles. In the best and truest sense of the word, Yale has stood from its earliest beginnings for conservatism triumphant.

“I Give These Books.” The college that was to grow into Yale University was born on a table top in the parlor of a trim farmhouse in Branford, Conn. To that house, one day in 1700—when Harvard was already 64 years old and Princeton still 46 years away—came ten clergymen from all over the Colony, bearing books. One by one, each approached the table with the words: “I give these books for founding a college in Connecticut.” By the next year the new “Collegiate School” had a charter, and by the year after that, one student—a wistful sophomore called Jacob Heminway, who, “solus, was all the College the first half-year.”

For a while, the young school barely managed to stay alive. But soon celebrities from overseas began to come to its rescue. Sir Richard Steele sent complete files of the Tatler and Spectator, and Sir Isaac Newton sent a copy of his Principia. Finally, a plump, periwigged gentleman named Elihu Yale, a retired East India merchant and a former governor in Madras, sent the most substantial gift of all: £562 worth of goods.

The governor’s gift put the school on its feet, and in 1718 it gratefully changed its name in his honor. By 1720, it had 43 students and a three-story house, painted blue. “I take very great content under my present tuition,” wrote Student Jonathan Edwards that year, “as all the rest of the scholars seem to do.”

Yale survived the paroxysms of the Great Awakening, the fierce evangelical movement that swept through New England in the 1730s and ’40s. Then came the American Revolution. The gallant old Reverend Naphtali Daggett, president pro tem (“Would you have me president pro eternitate?”), took down his long fowling piece and opened fire (“You old fool,” cried the British, “what are you doing here, firing on His Majesty’s soldiers?”). Captain Nathan Hale, ’73, was captured and sent to the gallows, and Alumnus David Bushnell devised the first submarine and tried to blow up the enemy fleet in New York Harbor.

“What Is the Reason?” The nation’s first postwar generation continued to converse in Latin, to eat their breakfast of dinner leftovers (olla podrida, alias slum), to debate such questions as: “What is the reason that though all rivers run into the sea, yet the sea doth not increase?” By the turn of the century, Noah Webster, ’78, had moved into a house up the street to begin his dictionary, and Eli Whitney, ’92, was beginning his career as inventor and one of the great forces in the Industrial Revolution.

Under the presidency of Theologian Timothy Dwight, Chemist Benjamin Silliman, father of scientific teaching in the U.S , set up his pioneer laboratory, out of which grew the autonomous Sheffield Scientific School. Gradually, Yale began to accumulate some of its brightest ornaments. There were Physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, who formulated the laws that form the basis for modern thermodynamics, Elias Loomis, who helped devise the modern weather map, Geologist James Dwight Dana, Sociologist William Graham Sumner.

Though Yale continued to grow in size and merit, it sometimes seemed to do so reluctantly. The years of the late 19th Century were boom years for U.S. higher education, when the U.S. university began not only to mirror but to rival the great universities of Europe. It was in the age of the mighty autocrat, Charles Eliot of Harvard, that American scholarship finally came into its own.

As if waiting for the sound solution, Yale characteristically held aloof. The “breeze now blowing,” said President Noah Porter, might be very invigorating, but it was no time to lose sight of older duties. Thus, for the next four decades, while the rest of the U.S. was exuberantly spawning new schools, new courses, and daring teaching techniques at breathless speed, Yale remained comparatively static. Not until James Rowland Angell blew in from Michigan in 1921 did the new Yale rise, St. Petersburg-fashion, where shops, lots, and dilapidated dorms had been before.

New Geography. Yale’s transformation into a true university had started under Angell’s predecessor, Economist Arthur Twining Hadley, ’76, Yale’s Grand Old Man (of whom a colleague once said: “He thinks in Hebrew; reasons in Latin, spins you a joke in Greek”). Angell completed the transition. Suddenly, the cautious campus found itself with a brand-new engineering school, an observatory at Johannesburg, the first U.S. graduate school of nursing. With the millions that poured in, mainly from Philanthropists Edward S. Harkness and John W. Sterling, Yale got a whole new geography. Angell built 37 new buildings, nearly quadrupled endowments to $95 million, set up the famed drama department under George Baker from Harvard (HARVARD FUMBLES, YALE RECOVERS, headlined the New York World), and pulled the medical and law schools out of their lethargy. By the time he retired in 1937 and courtly Charles Seymour took over to consolidate the gains, the university had caught up again with its peers.

It was during the age of Angell that a freshman named Whitney Griswold moved into the old freshman Oval. He had come from Morristown, N.J., with generations of Yalemen behind him, the son of a New York insurance broker who would leave for work in Manhattan each morning before daylight and return home each night after dark (his paternal advice: “Don’t commute!”). By the time young Whitney got to Yale, his education consisted of eight years at a small private school, followed by four years at Hotchkiss, in Lakeville, Conn.

He was shy and skinny (“I barely cast a shadow”), but he fell in love with Yale the minute he arrived. Compared to Hotchkiss, “it was like hitting Broadway after ten years in a lumber camp,” and young Whitney was determined to make the most of it.

He was the young man with a banjo on his knee and a mind full of wisecracks. He began to “heel” for the Record,’ and eventually became its managing editor. He wrote rambling comments for the Record (“We like Yale better than we do Harvard. Otherwise we would have gone to Harvard and liked it better than Yale”), and under the names of Sancho Panza and Guy Fawkes, some light light verse for the News (“Ruddy-fased the peepul go, Up to Plasid for the sno . . .”). Griswold’s ambition in life: to be a writer.

Jefferson to Talleyrand. Yale in the )20s was the Augustan Age for such ambitions. Alumnus Sinclair Lewis had already begun to make a name for himself with Main Street and Babbitt, and under the impetus of such courses as Professor Henry Seidel Canby’s writing course and Professor “Johnny” Berdan’s daily themes, Yale turned out Thornton Wilder, Walter Millis, Philip Barry and Stephen Vincent Benet. Griswold reveled in Berdan’s Age of Pope, found Johnsonian Chauncey Tinker “the finest lecturer I’ve ever heard.” With Classmates Clare (White Collar Zoo) Barnes and Paul Mellon, he helped to found a semi-literary club called “The Mountain.” Its purpose: “No purpose.” Its motto: “Je m’en fiche” He happily enacted literary charades as one of William Lyon Phelps’s “Pundits,” and just as happily turned down Skull and Bones in favor of Wolf’s Head.

As Griswold emerged from Yale in 1929, it was into a world about to crash. When it did (“I must have helped to bring it on”), he was working as a clerk with the Wall Street firm of Harris, Winthrop Co. Griswold soon realized that the world of finance was not for him. What he really wanted to do was to go back to Yale and teach.

At that job he was a natural. From his very first days of correcting English papers for Chauncey Tinker, slipping them under the Great Man’s door before breakfast, his rise on the faculty was swift. No single department or subject could hold him: he moved from English to international relations to American history—a one-man “department of everything.”

He was a vivacious lecturer with a flair for mimicry. Pacing back & forth with theatrical grimaces and gestures, he could be Jefferson or Silas Deane or Talleyrand, and students flocked to hear him. He was both irrepressibly merry and irrepressibly concerned. He spent five years compiling his scholarly Far Eastern Policy of the United States, and three years more on his Farming and Democracy. These books were not only thorough history, but were meant to be guides for present action. Says a colleague: “You would never catch him writing anything that stopped in 1815.”

In World War II, Whitney Griswold organized a special set of courses for U.S. occupation officers. Under his direction, Yale’s Foreign Area and Language Curriculum and its Civil Affairs Training School became among the best going. For the university itself, they were also something of an eye-opener: no one had really realized before that Whitney Griswold could also be a crack executive.

“Pull Up Your Socks.” One day in February 1950, Griswold and his slender, black-haired wife Mary took off for Manhattan to see Caesar and Cleopatra. That day, their old friend President Roswell Ham of Mt. Holyoke College happened to join them at lunch. Ham was somewhat depressed, Griswold recalls, full of the worries and frustrations of being a college president; and when he finished talking, Griswold could not help heaving a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” he said to his wife when lunch was over, “we’re not in that racket.”

Though he did not know it at the time, he was already in the racket. That very morning the Corporation had met and picked Whitney Griswold to be Yale’s 16th president. “Pull up your socks, boy, and get on with it,” Dean Acheson told him. With some misgivings, Griswold did.

It was not too easy at first. At his very first formal faculty reception, his garage was set on fire by a pyromaniac. When he had to abolish Yale’s traditionally boisterous Derby Day, a mob of students marched on his house, was turned away by a few firm words from the president. And wherever he looked, Yale’s awesome operating deficit ($450,000 last year) was there to haunt him.

Griswold wrote a theme song—”Some Insolvent Evening.” He took a slogan from a mayonnaise jar—”Keep cool but do not freeze.” Gradually, his life began to settle itself into a pattern.

Refreshing Prejudices. In the presidential mansion with its nine bathrooms and 20 rooms, visitors would sometimes come upon him playing carpet bowls in the state parlor with one of his four children, or singing with a group of Whiffenpoofs about the fire (“I’m an honorary member”). And on his way to his office in Woodbridge Hall, he would still stop now & then to level his Leica, snap a camera shot of a student, a building or a professor. But once in his office, seated at his 18th Century slant-top desk, Whitney Griswold proved he knows how to govern.

He is a president with refreshing prejudices—against luncheons, conferences, pretentious convocations, surveys, group projects, and all the pressure enterprises universities are prone to indulge in. His beliefs are just ‘as refreshing. He is for the big man with the big idea—the great scholars (“To whom else do we owe our progress from savagery?”), and the great teachers (“A Socrates in every classroom”).

In accordance with these beliefs, he has set up a $1,000,000 fellowship program to give young scholars in the humanities a chance they rarely get today. For the university, he has picked his appointments well (among them: Novelist Robert Penn Warren, Chemist John G. Kirkwood, Political Scientist James W. Fesler). He has even reached down to the secondary schools, which he regards as the weakest link in the educational chain. His M.A. for teachers is an attempt to give schoolmen courses—not just in pedagogy, of which they often have too much, but also in the stuff and substance of their subjects, of which they usually have too little.

“Everything Under the Sun.” To Whitney Griswold, education is essentially “Madison and Jefferson talking to each other about everything under the sun.” Today at Yale, scholars who have not talked to each other for years are beginning to communicate at last. The talk goes on in every classroom, in every corner of the campus. It is Yale’s answer to the long, arid years of schizophrenia and specialization, to such critics as Abraham Flexner, who denounced U.S. education as “atomistic,” and Robert Hutchins, who dubbed it “disunity, discord and disorder.”

The land of the Whiffenpoof has become a land of new horizons—a land where subjects, once unrelated in teaching, are coming together like parts of a vast jigsaw puzzle. Under Dean Edmund W. Sinnott of the Division of the Sciences and Dean William C. DeVane of the Humanities, the Sheffield Scientific School and the College merged, and a whole new set of studies has been set up to give students a common, broad education—”the background,” said Dean Sinnott, “of all human knowledge.” But the artificial wall between “Sheff” and “Ac” was only the first to go. Now, the walls between the professional schools and the college are beginning to crumble, and professors once confined to law or medicine or divinity are teaching undergraduate courses.

But it is in the experimental Directed Studies program that Yale seems to be searching for the pattern of the future. Here, philosophy is the core about which history, literature and the sciences revolve like planets. Philosophy holds them together, relates them, gives them life in common. It is Yale’s boldest attempt to make education a whole.

In making it so, Yale is only reverting to its old role as conserver. As far back as 1828, it rose up against the mounting U.S. cry for a “more practical” specialized education: “The object of … this college is not to give a partial education consisting of a few branches only . . . Our duty to our country demands of us an effort to provide the means of a thorough education . . . The greater the impulse to action, the greater is the need of wise and skillful guidance. When nearly all the ship’s crew are aloft, setting the topsails, and catching the breezes, it is necessary there should be a steady hand at the helm.” In 1951, Yale sees the need the same.

*The other members: the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut, President Griswold, Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill, the Rev. Arthur H. Bradford, Irving S. Olds, Lewis H. Weed, George Van Santvoord, the Rev. Morgan P. Noyes, Charles D. Dickey, Morris Hadley, Frederick Trubee Davison, Wilmarth S. Lewis, Juan T. Trippe, Robert T. Stevens, Edwin F. Blair, Jonathan B. Bingham.