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The
Birth of a New Institution
How
two Yale presidents and their admissions directors tore up the "old
blueprint" to create a modern Yale.
December 1999
by Geoffrey Kabaservice '88, '99PhD
Geoffrey
Kabaservice received a B.A. from Yale in 1988, an M.Phil from Cambridge
University in 1989, and a PhD from Yale in 1999. He is currently
a lecturer in the Yale history department and is writing a biography
of Kingman Brewster, from which this article has been adapted.
No aspect
of Kingman Brewster's presidency stirred up more anger and debate
than the change in Yale's undergraduate admissions during the 1960s.
The College's traditional constituency of wealthy WASPs—many
of them alumni-bred and preparatory school-trained—began to give
way to students from a wider range of social, economic, intellectual,
educational, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. But beneath the unfolding
drive towards meritocracy and diversity lay nothing less than a
deliberate attempt to redefine the purpose of first-rank national
institutions like Yale, and to advance a subtle struggle within
the American establishment pitting traditionalists against modernizers,
conservatives against progressives.
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National as well as parochial forces and figures played a role in the drama. |
The approach
that Brewster and his controversial dean of admissions, R. Inslee
Clark Jr. '57, took toward issues of merit and class was not an
invention of the 1960s. Rather, it accelerated and intensified a
process that was already underway. The struggle over admissions
was a small but significant part of a national debate over the structure
of opportunity and social mobility in America. Much more was at
stake than the composition of Yale College. The admissions issue
was inextricably bound up with thorny questions of race, class,
the logic of meritocracy, the composition of the "establishment,"
and the nature of higher education and American society in the late
20th century. National as well as parochial forces and figures played
a role in the drama, and its outcome was felt far beyond Yale.
During
the 1930s, while president James Conant of Harvard was envisioning
an educational structure that linked success to testable merit,
Yale's admissions policies still emphasized inherited privilege,
tending toward the creation of an elite social caste. During the
years 1946-50, the G.I. Bill supported large numbers of returning
veterans at Yale, who constituted a much different undergraduate
body and brought a questioning, untraditional spirit to the campus.
With A. Whitney Griswold's election to the Presidency in 1950, however,
Yale reverted to many of its prewar tendencies toward caste.
The conservatism
at Yale in the early 1950s represented a counter-offensive on behalf
of tradition. An apt symbol of this counter-reaction was the faculty's
decision to impose a coat-and-tie rule on undergraduates in 1952.
Such a dress code had never been required before, but was deemed
necessary to combat the "disorderliness" and "sloppiness" of the
"ill-bred," non-traditional students who had appeared on campus
during the postwar years. An equally apt symbol was the continuing
informal limitation on Jewish admissions, which hovered around the
10 percent level throughout the 1950s.
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Griswold was not opposed to ideals of meritocracy per se. |
If Griswold,
a member of the Class of 1929, did not willingly inaugurate this
new turn toward conservatism, he helped abet it by setting his standard
against the most crucial aspect of modernization: meritocratic selection
in university admissions. He had little interest in the effects
of colleges and universities on issues of class and mobility, and
disdained any notion of universities as stepping stones to the professions.
The purpose of a college education, in his view, was to strengthen
one's powers of thought and instill a knowledge and appreciation
of civilized values. He felt that the prewar Yale had been infused
with a powerful ethos of community, solidarity, and unquestioned
purpose, and that postwar modernization threatened to undermine
these characteristics.
At
his best, Griswold tried to balance tradition and change, uniformity
and diversity, teaching and research, College and University values.
Griswold was not opposed to ideals of meritocracy per se.
Over the course of his Presidency, he did help open Yale to previously
excluded groups, but essentially in response to the initiatives
of others. Griswold's conservative reformism helped cool the ferment
of the veteran years and revived the view that Yale's purpose was
to educate men who would hold property and power in a society that
deferred to upper-class leadership.
However
much Griswold admired Harvard's James Conant, there is no clearer
evidence of their difference on the question of modernization than
the fact that while Conant campaigned against private schools in
the name of democracy and equal opportunity in the early 1950s,
Griswold zestfully attacked mass education, castigating the public
schools as the "rotten pilings" of the American educational system.
He argued that the reason liberal arts colleges and preparatory
schools enrolled predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants was
that immigrants to this country and their descendants, "through
lack of previous opportunity. failed to comprehend [liberal education]
and therefore failed to support it." African Americans were equally
"beyond the pale, so to speak, of the liberal arts."
Some
idea of how Griswold's anti-modernizing stance translated to the
level of undergraduate admissions may be imagined by considering
the wall of obstacles and biases raised against an applicant from
an excellent, competitive public high school such as New York's
Bronx High School of Science in the early 1950s: The student came
from a public high school, which Griswold considered unworthy; he
scored highly on aptitude tests, which Griswold discounted; he had
a specialized education, which Griswold thought disqualified him
for the liberal arts; he focused on science or technology, which
Yale considered unsavory; he was almost certainly from a non-wealthy
family, which handicapped him in that era before need-blind admissions; and he had no Yale alumni connection or feeder-school
tradition to boost his candidacy.
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Yale accepted virtually all minimally qualified legacies and graduates of favored schools. |
Furthermore,
if the candidate from Bronx Science was not Jewish himself, he came
from a school that was predominantly Jewish (partly because admission
to it depended entirely on examinations), at a time when anti-Semitic
prejudices in Yale admissions were covert but active. Griswold did
not condone the kinds of discrimination that had been practiced
against Jews and other minorities at Yale since the 1920s, but neither
was he interested in taking the initiative to root out continuing
injustices.
Even
a seemingly innocuous aspect of the admissions process, considering
the physical characteristics" of the applicant, was part of a larger
preference for the average, "all-around" boy who fit the traditional
"Yale type" over the more intellectually able student who didn't
fit the profile. During the early 1950s, the College made little
effort to reach beyond its traditional constituencies to identify
and recruit new talent, and Yale regained a reputation for non-intellectual
conformity that had begun to recede during the years of the G.I.
Bill. It is not surprising to find that during Griswold's first
five years in office, Bronx Science sent only seven graduates to
Yale, while Phillips Andover (which was nowhere near as academically
selective) sent 275. Over the same five-year span, the Board of
Admissions admitted almost all of the alumni sons who applied. As
Brooks Kelley points out in Yale: A History,"the generosity of
the board may have helped to promote the belief among alumni that
the admission of their sons was a right." The point is not that
all Andover students and alumni sons were intellectually inferior;
rather, that it didn't matter whether they were bright or dull,
as Yale accepted virtually all minimally qualified legacies and
graduates of favored schools. Whatever places remained were distributed
among intellectually outstanding applicants from less favored backgrounds
and social, ethnic, and racial groups—a neat reversal of the
priorities to which Yale had officially committed itself.
When
Griswold announced that the College would not be enlarged to meet
the rising tide of college-bound baby boomers, he hastened
to assure the alumni that the Yale man of the future would not be
"a beetle-browed, highly specialized intellectual, but a well-rounded
man." But it was clear even at the time that the admissions policy
undercut Griswold's avowed aim of making Yale a more intellectual
enterprise. Calvin Trillin, a high school graduate and a member
of the Class of 1957, observes that while
[h]igh
school boys from the provinces may have felt ignorant of some
of the things that the Eastern boarding-school people took for
granted. most of us, I think, got the feeling that a lot of
the rich Eastern people were at Yale because of some entitlement
of family or class or money and that we were there because, in
ways perhaps not immediately apparent, we somehow deserved to
be.
Trillin
concedes that the "St. Grottlesex" students set the social tone,
but argues that "there was widespread circumstantial evidence that,
on the whole, we were smarter than they were."
Indeed,
while private school students made up more than 60 percent of the
Class of 1957, they made up less than half of the membership of
Phi Beta Kappa and one-sixth of the membership of Tau Beta Pi, the
national engineering honor society. The largest feeder schools (Andover,
Exeter, Lawrenceville, Hotchkiss, and St. Paul's), which Griswold
considered the epitome of academic excellence and which collectively
sent approximately 200 students (or 20 percent of the class), each
accounted for only one of the 64 members of Phi Beta Kappa. Other
traditional feeder schools such as Groton, Hill, Kent, St. Mark's,
St. George's, and Taft contributed no members to Phi Beta Kappa
at all.
One of
the important reasons why Yale's admissions patterns began to change
in the later 1950s was Griswold's appointment of Arthur Howe Jr.
'43 as head of undergraduate admissions. Howe became the department's
first full-time director in 1954, and professionalized what had
been a small and highly personal operation. Howe widened Yale's
reach, and the number of schools represented in each class increased
from 300 in 1940 to more than 500 by 1960. Almost all of this increase
came from public high schools. And Howe exercised increasing selectivity
in admissions, as the proportion accepted fell from nine in ten
before the war, to six in ten by the mid-1950s, to one in three
by the early 1960s.
Yale
had long perceived itself to be an institution with responsibilities
to the nation at large, but the way it envisioned those responsibilities
had changed over time. At the level of admissions, the institution's
changing self-perception was reflected in the debate over the meaning
of diversity. Howe recalls that when "[p]eople talked of the University
becoming more of a national university," they "thought initially
of geographic diversity." The proportion of students from New England
and New York decreased from 60 percent in 1940 to 35 percent in
1963; the percentage of students from west of the Mississippi more
than trebled over the same period. Howe downplayed the importance
of geographic diversity, preferring to highlight Yale's interest
in a variety of sociological and educational backgrounds. In 1956,
he went so far as to propose the admission of women to the undergraduate
college, though the idea would not become a reality until 1969.
While Howe had long been interested in issues of African American
education, racial or religious backgrounds were not categories included
in the concept of diversity, and indeed consideration of such factors
was officially avoided on the grounds that to do otherwise would
constitute discrimination.
Like
Griswold, Howe was an important figure in moving Yale out of the
shadows of tradition, but—also like Griswold—he was more a
reformer than a modernizer. Howe said that "it's always been my
style to try and change, but to change in ways that I believe are
constructive, not just disruptive."
To many
faculty and interested observers like the University Chaplain, William
Sloane Coffin Jr. '49, however, Howe's approach seemed excessively
gradualist. They argued that his efforts to diversify the student
body were small-scale and cautious. The Class of 1967, admitted
in 1963, was the first Yale class in which the number of high school
students admitted equaled the number of prep school students, a
level of parity reached by Harvard in the 1940s and by Princeton
as early as 1955. Howe, together with the admissions directors of
Harvard and Princeton, initiated the "ABC" rankings, a sort of early
action admissions program for those selected schools which sent
large groups of students to the three colleges. The rankings gave
further advantage to the already advantaged. The question of admissions
discrimination was revived in the early 1960s, and Yale was found
to admit a lower percentage of Jews than any other Ivy League college.
Alumni sons, by contrast, still enjoyed a preference that meant
that more than two-thirds of them were admitted, even though a disproportionate
number flunked out or were placed on probation. Finally, the faculty
made ever louder complaints that the process was biased against
intellectuals, artists, scientists, and scholars, and brought in
too many conformist future businessmen.
Most
of the plants that subsequently flowered in Kingman Brewster's administration grew from seeds sown in the Griswold years. The basic aims
of the two Presidents were identical in two crucial aspects: Both
sought to transform Yale into a great international university while
preserving the elements that made it cohesive and distinctive. Neither
government dictate nor grassroots pressure forced them to make this
change; their reasons for changing were more complicated.
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The report insisted that where tradition and excellence were in conflict, tradition must give way. |
For his
part, Griswold was motivated by a realization that he had failed
to make the College the intellectually mature place he desired.
By the late 1950s, he moved toward correcting this situation by
making several key appointments (including Brewster as provost),
and creating several important committees. Primary among these was
the Committee on the Freshman Year, chaired by psychologist Leonard
Doob. The committee was originally charged with re-evaluating Yale's
separate Freshman Year administration, but found this theme impossible
to separate from broader issues of admissions, the student body,
and Yale's purpose. Chairman Doob remembers that committee members
were particularly upset by "the fact that almost no students from
the Bronx High School of Science were admitted, and that these were
serious, lower-class New York boys, Jewish in many cases, who had
a real interest in science, and they weren't the well-rounded types.
The Bronx High School of Science just appeared again and again in
our discussions as epitomizing this problem." The 1962 Freshman
Year Report, though it was written by some of the more senior and
respected individuals at Yale, expressed the malaise of the newer
faculty, who brought outsiders' perspectives to the University.
It also reflected Griswold's longstanding uneasiness with the sort
of education the institution had been providing to its students,
and the kind of alumni it had produced. The report insisted that
where tradition and excellence were in conflict, tradition must
give way, and Yale must step up to the responsibilities that America
now expected of its institutions.
In order
to achieve these goals, the committee recommended that the faculty
become more deeply involved in the admissions process, that all
bursary work for financial aid students be made optional, and that
Yale should eventually "concern itself with the education of women
at the undergraduate stage." The committee also believed that better
students would be attracted to a more intellectually oriented Yale
through more academic guidance, a more flexible curriculum, and
innovations that would allow each student to have "a creative experience."
The Freshman Year Report was the next best thing to a blueprint
for the early Brewster presidency. All of its recommendations ultimately
were implemented.
A
final innovation, not approved by the Corporation until two months
after Griswold's death, committed Yale to meet the financial needs
of any admitted student. Yale appears to have been the first
university in the country to adopt such a policy, although Harvard
soon followed. While a true policy of need-blind admissions was
not fully implemented until 1966, the increased scholarship commitment
was a major advancement in making Yale accessible to all social
classes. The architects of the 1963 interim policy were Brewster,
Howe, and Graduate School dean John Perry Miller, but the decision
had Griswold's blessing and is further evidence of the continuity
between Griswold's and Brewster's aims.
|
"Clearly," the editorial concluded, "we are witnessing the birth of a new institution." |
At the
end of the 1962-63 Yale academic year, the campus newspaper noted
that "[d]uring the past year a quiet revolution led by President
Griswold has acquired enormous momentum within the University,"
extending from revised admissions standards to increased academic
requirements to a de-emphasis of extracurricular activities. "Clearly,"
the editorial concluded, "we are witnessing the birth of a new institution."
Unlike
Griswold, Brewster, a member of the Class of 1941 who became President
following Griswold's death from cancer in 1963, was an academic
expansionist, and he rapidly assembled the funds and administrative
structure to work his will. Yale's undergraduate admissions was
the area most directly affected by Brewster's broader vision.
Arthur
Howe left Yale in 1964. After an interim year under Alton Hyatt
'18, Brewster appointed 29-year-old R. Inslee "Inky" Clark Jr. to
the deanship. Given that Clark would soon become a target of conservative
wrath, it was ironic that he was initially opposed by the faculty
activists and progressives like Coffin, who had chafed at the slow
pace of change under Howe. Clark had been president of the Inter-Fraternity Council at Yale, a member of Skull and Bones, and had taught at
Lawrenceville after graduation. As English professor Richard Sewall
wrote to Brewster, Clark's appointment disappointed "those who looked
for an EXCITING CHANGE, a move toward a New Image."
The
dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale is appointed by and is
directly responsible to the President. When Brewster interviewed
Clark for the position, he asked whether Clark thought of himself
as more an architect or an engineer. An architect, Clark replied:
"I said I'd like to design a different student body than the one
we have now. And I told him what I would like to do, starting right
in with a different kind of admissions staff, a much more diverse
student body, a student body that would not have financial aid as
a factor." Clark felt that Yale's impressive faculty and facilities
imposed an obligation to serve the nation by admitting the students
who could most benefit from the institution: "the most able, the
most motivated, those with the most potential."
|
Inky Clark's new staff included more individuals without Yale connections. |
Brewster's
assistant Henry (Sam) Chauncey Jr. '57 remembers that during the
time when the President was considering candidates for the admissions
deanship, they had in mind Harvard's example of admissions diversification
under Conant. This was not only because Chauncey was the son of
Henry Chauncey Sr., who had been Conant's right-hand man in establishing
Harvard's National Scholars program, but also because several of
those scholars were then prominent on the Yale faculty, including
economists James Tobin and William Parker. Brewster, who had spent
ten years on the faculty of Harvard's law school, felt that Clark
would be the candidate most likely to improve Yale's undergraduate
body along the lines of what Conant and Chauncey's efforts had accomplished
in Cambridge. Together, Brewster and Clark accelerated Howe's efforts
to broaden Yale's national base, diversify the student body, and
raise the intellectual standard for admissions.
When
he investigated admissions policies at other selective colleges
and universities, Clark found that they ran the gamut from completely
by-the-numbers meritocracy to old-fashioned preferences. At one
extreme was the University of California at Berkeley, which "did
almost everything by the computer" in an impersonal process that
admitted students almost wholly on the basis of grades and test
scores. At the other was a traditional college like Williams, where
the admissions approach was "personal, subjective, and weighted
toward maintaining the kind of college that Williams was in the
1950s and 1960s: white, New England-y, genteel, very much the place
for the well-rounded kind of person." Neither approach would be
favored by Brewster or Clark.
Back
in New Haven, Clark initiated his restructuring of admissions by
getting rid of nearly the entire admissions staff. Clark's new staff,
doubled in size, included more public school graduates, individuals
without Yale connections, and the first African American admissions
officer, W.C. Robinson. These backgrounds, Clark felt, would provide
new perspectives on the admissions process, enable the University
to communicate with people who were suspicious of its received image,
and eliminate bias and Yale's traditional insularity.
|
In 1966 the Corporation approved Brewster's proposal for need-blind admissions. |
Building
on the work of Howe, Clark targeted more schools for recruitment.
Within a year, the number visited by Yale admissions officers
doubled to more than a thousand. Clark's recruitment policy centered
on "talent searching," actively seeking out "all those candidates
who will benefit most from studying at Yale and who will contribute
significantly to the life of the Yale community. If any of the most
promising secondary school graduates in the country do not automatically
think of Yale first," wrote Clark, "then we must look for them.
Very specifically, talent searching means penetrating deeper into
at least two particular areas: the inner-city high school and the
rural high school."
Clark
abandoned the old geographic criteria, resulting in less emphasis
on the central states with long Yale traditions (such as Ohio, Illinois,
Minnesota, and Wisconsin) and much more on Eastern urban areas,
particularly the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area. Clark dropped
the "ABC" system, which had provided a significant advantage to
applicants from favored schools (Princeton followed Yale's lead,
but Harvard did not). Yale's scholarship policy was altered to increase
the amount of outright gift aid, lessen the dependence on bursary
jobs, and loosen the conditions that had prevented many scholarship
students from playing an active role in extracurricular activities.
Most
important, in 1966 the Corporation approved Brewster's proposal
for need-blind admissions, which removed information about financial
need from a candidate's admissions file and meant that the University
would no longer reject qualified applicants who could not afford
Yale's costs. There would be no quota on the number of scholarship
students, nor would there be any limit on the amount of money available
for grants and loans. While the most selective universities had
become more meritocratic over the course of the 20th century, never
before had any of them severed the connection between admissions
and ability to pay. It was a revolutionary innovation.
The policy
received relatively little attention at the time, and the financial
implications of the move were seriously under- estimated, but need-blind
admissions became one of the most important ways in which Yale attracted
students from less affluent backgrounds. Since financial aid students
had tended to major disproportionately in science and engineering,
the new policy also gave a boost to the numbers of students studying
those subjects. Brewster observed that need-blind admissions was
important in attracting wealthy students as well, particularly during
the 1960s: Now that "the pocketbook was no longer relevant to admission,
the privileged took pride in the feeling that they had made it on
the merits rather than on the basis of something ambiguously called
'background.'"
With
these policies in place, Clark and his team of recruiters fanned
out across the country, visiting schools—particularly
inner-city, rural, Southern and religious schools—that previously
had been bypassed by Yale. In many cases, Clark and his representatives
had to apologize to administrators at these schools for having snubbed
their graduates in years past. Clark recalled his frosty reception
at academically competitive Catholic schools, and his interaction
with principal Abe Lass at Abraham Lincoln High School near Coney
Island: "He said, 'Don't expect me to give you my top Jewish student
—he's going to City College or Columbia. Don't ask me for my best
scientist—he's going to M.I.T. Where has Yale been for the last
20 years?' I said, 'If I come back next year, will you give us some
candidates?' He said, 'Maybe, but it might take a while.'"
Clark's
first class, the Class of 1970, arrived on campus in the fall of
1966. It was composed of 58 percent public school students, the
highest percentage of high school students of any class in Yale
history, and a jump from 52 percent the previous year. The class
drew on more public schools than any other class (478), but also
more private schools (196).
For the
first time, the rate of matriculation of financial aid applicants
was higher than for non-financial aid applicants. Financial aid
jumped to nearly $1 million, 30 percent above what it had been the
year before; gift aid from the University increased by almost 50
percent. The class included more minorities of every kind. Clark
recalls that "[n]obody came to my office screaming for more Jews.
It was just a matter of natural selection. When we were picking
that first class in 1965, no one counted Jews, but I knew that [Jewish
enrollment] was going up. It had to."
The Class
of 1970 entered with the highest SAT scores in Yale's history; a
student who scored its mean SAT verbal mark of 697 would have been
in the 90th percentile of the Class of 1961, and the 75th percentile
of the Class of 1966. Put in a national context, half of the incoming
freshmen scored in the top 1 percent nationally on the verbal SAT.
These SAT marks were higher than those scored by the incoming class
at Harvard, also a first for Yale. By year's end, the Class of 1970
would score an average mark of 81, another school record.
|
The reaction against the new policies began before Clark had actually admitted or rejected anyone. |
The faculty
was astonished and delighted by the leap in academic ability. Scientists
were particularly gratified. The chairman of the chemistry department
was moved to write Brewster that "[a]ll of our staff who have had
any contact with this year's freshmen agree that someone has done
a spectacular job of recruiting. We are accustomed to meeting excellent
students in introductory courses but never in such numbers." Partly
due to Brewster's preferences, the class also contained an unprecedented
number of artists, musicians, and actors. A student symphony orchestra
was founded during this period, and its first conductor recalled
that during the Brewster years, "music grew and flowered in a way
that makes campus life today almost unrecognizable to anyone who
attended the college before 1968."
Beyond
test scores, the most meritocratic aspect of Clark's policies was
the minimal consideration accorded to traditional privileges of
background, money, prep school training, and Yale relationships.
The decision to include large numbers from new constituencies meant
that corresponding numbers from the old constituencies were excluded.
The
reaction against the new policies began before Clark had actually
admitted or rejected anyone, when he visited Andover in October
1965. In the past, the school had been visited by Yale's dean of
admissions and his two top assistants. They would stay for several
days, socialize with the faculty and headmaster, and hand out large
numbers of "A" ratings, promising near-assured admission to Yale.
All of this helped add a fresh layer of cement to the "trusted relationships"
that Arthur Howe often spoke of.
Clark,
after abolishing the ratings system, reasoned that, given the greater
demands of talent searching to which he had committed his staff,
it would be more effective to pay a one-day visit to Andover with
a large group of his newly minted staff members. Clark later said
that this was "a mistake which I will take full credit for," and
remembered that the visit "didn't go well. It wasn't something that
we intended to be a disaster, but for the counselor who had dealt
comfortably before with Yale by sitting for three hours with Art
Howe and his two top assistants, this was a very unsettling event.
And I think word went out from that visit that Yale didn't care
about Andover."
|
"If you haven't performed well at Andover, what makes us think you're going to perform well at Yale?" |
On the
same visit, Clark addressed a large group meeting, at which he was
asked how Yale felt about the "bottom quarter" of the class at Andover.
Unknown to Clark, the same question had been asked of the Harvard
representative who had visited the week before. At that time, Harvard
was continuing to pull away from its commitment to thorough-going
meritocracy, which most observers agree had peaked in 1954, after
which time Harvard decided that allowing all applicants to compete
on equal terms was not in the institution's self-interest. The ire
of the Harvard faculty, particularly the science faculty, was fanned
by comments along the lines of admissions head Wilbur Bender's pronouncement
that "the top high school student is often, frankly, a pretty dull
and bloodless or peculiar fellow."
By 1965,
the Harvard Admissions Office was arguing that since somebody had
to be in the bottom academic quarter, it was better to have "a 'real'
bottom quarter made up of students who are productive yet content
to be there." Harvard proceeded to fill their "happy bottom quarter"
with athletes, mediocre prep school students, and alumni sons, and
sent glad tidings of this policy to the bottom quarter of the Andover
senior class. Clark gave a diametrically opposed answer:
I said,
in effect, "Yale can do a lot better than the bottom quarter at
Andover. We're looking for the top kids at Andover. If you haven't
performed well at Andover, what makes us think you're going to perform
well at Yale?" And maybe there was a rejoinder to that, saying,
"Well, isn't there a bottom quarter at Yale?" I guess my answer
must have been, "Yes, there's a bottom quarter at Yale. There always
is going to be. But it's not going to be made up of the bottom quarter
of people at Andover, who we can predict are going to be no better
than our bottom quarter before they even get into Yale. The bottom
quarter of Yale consists of lots of people who are absolutely brilliant,
but they're not going for marks; they're doing something else."
You can imagine what the reaction was.
The
response was not long in coming. Enraged alumni wrote letters
to the administration and each other lambasting the perceived change
in admissions policy. Overlooked was the fact that Andover continued
to send large delegations to Yale (though smaller than in the past)
and continued to be the College's largest feeder. Nor was it enough
that Clark apologized and reverted to the pattern of extended personal
visits to Andover and other important feeder schools, or that by
the next year Andover's director of college placement was writing
to Clark that "all of us were extremely pleased with the Yale visit
and are in accord with the fact that the Andover-Yale relationship
is just where it should be."
|
Private schools were more concerned with social rather than intellectual education. |
One
of the reasons that the furor over Yale's attitude toward prep schools
did not die down was that Clark's policies did, in fact, drastically
reduce admissions from the smaller New England private schools,
which had historically been more concerned with social rather than
intellectual education. The anger of these prep schools was compounded
by Clark's explanations for the shift. In 1965, Clark told the Yale
Daily News that "[t]he old notion of the 'feeder school' supplying
most of the freshman class is no longer applicable," then added
that "the selective prep schools would continue to supply many Yale
students, but that the 'ingrown' prep schools would be disappointed
in the future." The issue was so incendiary pre- cisely because
Yale, which had been among the most conservative and inbred of the
nation's elite colleges, was now leading the meritocratic charge.
In 1968, Harvard accepted 28 of 61 applicants from Choate, Princeton
17 of 30, but Yale only 5 of 28. The record was much the same at
St. Paul's and many other prestigious prep schools.
Such
actions led naturally to the charge that Clark and Brewster were
biased against the preparatory schools, and—most explosively
—against the sons of alumni, since so many of them attended private
schools. As the changes wrought under Clark's deanship became widely
known, a critical mass of alumni determined that, as one put it,
Brewster had initiated "a turn away from the Yale that all of us
loved and respected." "You will laugh," William F. Buckley Jr. wrote
in 1968, "but it is true that a Mexican-American from El Paso High
with identical scores on the achievement test, and identically ardent
recommendations from the headmaster, has a better chance of being
admitted to Yale than Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint
Paul's School." In one sentence, Buckley, a member of the Class
of 1950, linked claims that Yale preferred public over prep schools,
outsiders over Yale sons, minorities over WASPs, and the underprivileged
over the wealthy. Other critics charged that Brewster and Clark
further preferred Jews over Christians, scholars over athletes,
and intellect over leadership.
Some
of the evidence brought forward to support this view may easily
be laid to rest. It is true that athletes were expected to
meet similar intellectual standards as other applicants, but this
was a change that had occurred under Arthur Howe's deanship. Relations
between the athletics department and the admissions office actually
improved considerably during the Clark era. While the number of
Jews at Yale did increase dramatically in Clark's years, eliminating
the discriminatory barriers that had kept them out hardly amounted
to anti-Christian bias. Likewise, Clark's abolition of the "ABC"
ratings, far from constituting discrimination against the prep schools,
supported his contention that "the independent schools were now
being placed on the same plane, in terms of the admissions process,
as the public schools. Everybody was going to be dealt with the
same; therefore, no more favoritism."
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As recently as 1961, Howe had accepted 53% of legacy applications. |
The Brewster
administration's troubles with the admission of alumni sons derived
in large part from a demographic time bomb that had been planted
in the 1930s. The admissions office under Howe dealt mainly with
the offspring of graduates who had attended Yale in the 1910s and
early 1920s, at a time when alumni sons constituted about 15 percent
of each class. The admissions office under Clark dealt with the
offspring of graduates of the late 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s,
who had experienced legacy rates of 25 to 35 percent. As competition
for admission intensified in the 1960s, the demographic dilemma
would have blown up in the face of any admissions dean, no matter
how wise and sensitive.
The explosion
was worse because Howe was excessively cautious in reducing legacy
representation, and Clark perhaps excessively incautious. As recently
as 1961, Howe had accepted 53 percent of legacy applications and
ended up with a class composed of 24 percent alumni sons, a higher
percentage than Harvard or Princeton. In his first two classes,
Clark admitted 37 percent and 38 percent of alumni sons who applied
—a significant drop, though these rates were still a good deal
higher than the overall rates of admission. However, perhaps due
to Yale's changing image, the number of alumni sons who matriculated
declined in those years, leading to classes with 14.5 percent and
12 percent legacies, considerably below the levels of Harvard and
Princeton.
Clark
often contrasted the cultural advantages alumni children enjoyed with the disadvantages endured by the poor and minorities, particularly
as reflected through objective measures such as the SAT. "[W]hat's
really the difference," he asked, "between a 550 [SAT score] for
a favored Yale son who has gone to Choate and a 480 for a black
kid from the inner city, who has no books in the home, no money,
and no oppor- tunity to go to plays or theater or opera? I'm not
so sure the 480 doesn't represent more than the 550." Clark was
prepared to argue that lower SAT scores by blacks and other disadvantaged
groups might reflect cultural deprivation. (Such understandings
were not often extended to businessmen's sons, whose cultural backgrounds
could be equally negligible and who were taken by surprise by the
shift in Yale admissions policy.)
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"I do not intend to preside over a finishing school on Long Island Sound." |
The
anger of many alumni over Yale's admissions policy was not motivated
by mere prejudice. As Clark observed, the changes that he
and Brewster implemented "represented a statement, really, about
what leadership was going to be in this country and where leaders
were going to come from." The alumni were correct in their perception
that Yale admissions was a zero-sum game; like most other selective
institutions, the University had not expanded to take in the new
constituencies. Since access to income, power, and status in American
society became increasingly dependent on higher education in the
1960s, failure to get a son into Yale represented more than breaking
a nostalgic tie—it raised the specter of downward social mobility.
While such fears were exaggerated (and plenty of excellent though
less selective institutions were eager to enroll the applicants
alma mater rejected), the change in Yale admissions threatened to
change fundamentally the way American institutions selected their
leaders.
Brewster
expressed the case for Yale's self-interest in admissions reform
in a pithy, off-the-record comment shortly after taking office:
"I do not intend to preside over a finishing school on Long Island
Sound." His basic view of Yale's undergraduate mission, as expressed
in his masterful 1967 formulation of admissions policy, was quite
traditional: "We want Yale men to be leaders in their generation.
This means we want as many of them as possible to be truly outstanding
in whatever they undertake." As one of his earliest advisers on
admissions had pointed out, there had long been an ambiguity "between
the view that Yale's education is a genuine process which involves
growth and change and the view that it is a mantle cast upon superior
(by reason of selection) people." Brewster thought it was both,
but he could not agree with the view of some alumni that Yale's
contribution to leadership consisted of "taking a stupid young man
and trying to prepare him for Life."
Brewster
was convinced that American society had been permanently altered by the knowledge and information explosions and the country's growth
as a world leader. Yale, he felt, should change to accommodate society's
new need for expertise by admitting students with the intellectual
capacity and motivation to make the most of Yale's resources, and
give them the training to fit them for the new demands of leadership;
otherwise society would look to Yale's competitors for its leaders,
or look beyond the universities altogether. Brewster saw no contradiction
between meeting the faculty's demands for intellectually superior
students and Yale's traditional mission of producing leaders. He
felt that American leadership and its institutional sources had
to be modernized if the country was to fulfill its new responsibilities.
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Brewster sometimes characterized himself as an intellectual investment banker. |
Allied
to this view was Brewster's belief that inherited success could
no longer be counted on and that knowledge and ability, rather than
background, would be the keys to future achievement. As he wrote
in a memo to himself, the future promised "increasing organization
and professionalization of a society dominated by organized services
rather than competition of truly independent proprietors and backers."
In a time of "unpredictable change," Yale's "leverage" lay in
attracting and educating students who had the "capacity to break
new ground or at least adapt to it." The alumni argument that the
leaders of the future would continue to come from "fine old families
whose sons have gone to Yale for many generations and come from
prep schools. with B and C averages and fine citizenship records"
was open to question. If Yale tied itself too closely to past definitions
of success, it might find itself without its "share" of the leaders
and patrons of the future. Since Brewster sometimes characterized
himself as an intellectual investment banker, it's not too much
of a stretch to suggest that in undergraduate admissions as well
as investment policy he was looking toward growth stocks rather
than low-yield bonds.
By
the same token, it was in Yale's self-interest to keep pace in the
1960s with a society in which minorities of all kinds were
winning an increased share of power and responsibility. Clark remembered
Brewster insisting at alumni gatherings: "'Yale wants to train the
very best within the black community. We've got to turn out the
black leaders of the future. The Martin Luther Kings of this world
are going to come from Yale.' It was very selfish for Yale, in the
best sense. Yale was not for a minute changing its elitist approach
to its role in world leadership."
Diversity
was not defined only in a racial and ethnic sense. Brewster—perhaps
reflecting his own appreciation for contrasting types—believed
that future leaders would come from a broader array of fields than
in the past, and that even individuals "whose creative contribution
will not be primarily intellectual or aesthetic, scholarly or artistic"
would benefit from exposure to more scholars and artists. As Brewster
wrote in his 1967 statement of admissions policy, "[a]n excessively
homogeneous class will not learn anywhere near as much from each
other as a class whose backgrounds and interests and values have
something new to contribute to the common experience." To those
alumni who charged that "Yale took too many oddballs," Brewster
insisted that "variety is a better context for mutual education
than is homogeneity. One man's oddball is another man's square."
Brewster held that this sort of familiarity with variety and diversity
would be necessary for leaders who increasingly would be required
"to mold disparate interests and ambitions into group effort."
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The 1960s was a time of considerable uneasiness about standardized tests. |
Brewster
was sensitive to the alumni claim that Clark's policies overemphasized
intellectual ability and ignored the personal qualities that were
also components of leadership. Given the rise in SAT scores during
Clark's deanship, all the more impressive at a moment when national
average scores were heading into a prolonged decline, it is natural
to conclude that Clark reconstituted the Yale admissions process
along wholly meritocratic lines. This is partially accurate, but
the statistics disguise the fact that the range of scores was expanding
at both ends. Clark consciously avoided the extremely test-reliant,
objective form of meritocracy exemplified by Berkeley. The 1960s
was a time of considerable uneasiness about standardized tests and
the ways in which they were used. Some critics were upset by the
tendency to confuse achievement with human worth; others felt the
tests were unfair to blacks and other minority groups; still others
complained that there were many kinds of excellence, even different
kinds of intelligence, that defied standardized tests.
Brewster
recognized that standardized aptitude tests were the most accurate
measure of academic performance, at least for the first year
of college, and were a more objective way of evaluating potential
applicants than the traditional approach which had allowed bias
to creep in. Even so, he wrote in 1964, "I would far rather that
Yale continue to take the risk of inevitably subjective judgments
than to remit the whole process to an IBM machine relying solely
on the testable virtues."
In the
context of Yale politics, Brewster's observations sought to offer
some measure of reassurance to alumni that human qualities of leadership
and character would receive consideration in the admissions process
alongside a concern for testable intellectual virtues. But the same
understandings were, after 1965, applied to black applicants whose
test scores seemed at variance with their personal and academic
promise, and to students whose creativity and imagination seemed
not have been captured in their test scores. In short, Yale's admissions
policy embodied a subjective rather than objective form of meritocracy.
Clark and his colleagues attempted to evaluate for potential, took
a flexible approach towards questions of circumstance (particularly
for minority applicants), and refused to set specific goals or targets
for representation of any group, be it athletes, minorities, or
alumni children.
Fear
of the alumni had weakened Griswold's attempts to diversify Yale.
Griswold believed that Yale was deeply dependent on alumni contributions
for its financial survival, and was aware of the contingent nature
of alumni support; in the blunt phrase of one alumnus, "My 'loyalty'
to Yale in the form of gifts shall continue for only so long as
Yale remains 'loyal' to me [by admitting my sons]." If Brewster
could push admissions diversification even knowing that it could
cost millions in alumni contributions, it's precisely because he
was a modernizer where Griswold was a reformer. Griswold's reluctance
to take on the financial commitment of large-scale, laboratory-based
science, combined with his mistrust of government aid, forced him
to rely on the alumni as Yale's principal source of funding. Brewster's
enthusiastic pursuit of government funds to support research in
the natural sciences, the social sciences, and even the humanities
in effect meant that the state had replaced the alumni as the University's
most important patron. The government's share of the Yale budget
grew from 2 percent in 1950 to 10 percent in 1960 and to 28 percent
by 1968. With more money coming in from private foundations, and
greater gains from the endowment promised through better financial
management, Brewster believed that Yale had the autonomy to diversify
its admissions.
The heightened
consciousness of minorities during the 1960s, the spirit of the
Great Society, and widespread antipathy to elitism and privilege
were important forces in bringing about Yale's modernization and
reorientation. The University also had powerful reasons of self-interest
for changing its admissions policies. But there was nothing inevitable
about Yale's move towards greater meritocracy and diversity, or
the institution's leadership among selective universities on these
issues during the 1960s. These outcomes were a result of Kingman
Brewster's personal leadership, and his willingness to endure the
opposition that came as a price for his idealism. Clark remembered
that in the first year of his deanship, he was hauled before the
Corporation to report directly on his changes in admissions policy.
One of the Corporation members who had "hemmed and hawed" throughout
Clark's presentation finally said, "Let me get down to basics. You're
admitting an entirely different class than we're used to. You're
admitting them for a different purpose than training leaders." Clark
responded that in a changing America, leaders might come from nontraditional
sources, including public high school graduates, Jews, minorities,
and even women. His interlocutor shot back, "You're talking about
Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at
this table"—this was at a time when the Yale Corporation included
some of America's most powerful and influential men. "These are
America's leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school
graduates here."
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Admissions policies at most other prestige universities at least pay lip service to similar ideals. |
Clark's
opponent raised a serious claim of institutional self-interest. If Brewster's predictions were wrong, and power and influence would
in fact continue to be passed down through tight networks of WASP
males, then Yale would diminish its future importance (and future
financial contributions) by admitting Jews, blacks, intellectuals,
women, and the underprivileged. And yet institutions like Yale to
some extent determined who future leaders would be, which lent a
circular quality to the question of how best to recruit leaders.
By reducing the weight of inheritance, wealth, and social standing
in Yale admissions, Brewster was helping to shrink the power of
the WASP elite, even while he was gambling that its power would
be redistributed to other rising groups. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Brewster tried to conserve the essence of the system by steering
an evolutionary path between revolution and decay, and was damned
as a "traitor to his class."
Yale's
leaders were not compelled to admit a new elite, but did so to satisfy
their own internal constituencies, to respond to broad social forces,
to act in accordance with deeply held ideals, and to ensure that
their institution was not left behind by a modernizing society.
But Brewster also clearly intended that the establishment should
assimilate and acculturate the most able members of previously excluded
groups.
The Yale
admissions office still operates under guidelines hammered out by
Brewster and Clark more than 30 years ago, and admissions policies
at most other prestige universities at least pay lip service to
similar ideals. That legacy has made Brewster not just one of the
most influential Presidents in Yale's history; it has made him a
hero to many members of a social class that has itself been changed
as a result.
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