Yale's Non-Expansion Policy: 'Normalcy' First

Not so long ago Yale students are their food like Harvard men, from divided trays; now they use gleaming blue and white china emblazoned with college shields. Until this summer, one of the old freshman dorms was popularly known as "Dirty Durfec"; now a thorough remodeling has made it one of the most popular freshman halls.

These traces of the "gracious living" of the late thirties are two of the most obvious indications that Yale is well on the path to what the New Haven university's administrators like to call "post-war normalcy."

Yet, Yale's policy is not as simple as the innocent sounding 'normalcy" implies. President A. Whitney Griswold's alternative to expansion seems rather an attempt to make Yale approximate a large scale modern Athens: a place where a select group of gifted and highly motivated students will learn from the best teachers. An essential part of this will be a pleasant and comfortable environment, superficially known as "gracious living."

No one has a very exact definition of this "normalcy," but almost everyone at Yale agrees that it has to be attained if the University is to save itself from the dilution of educational standards they forsee at universities that try to absorb huge future increases in college students.

At this early stage in the process, only the beginnings of the proposed pleasant, though functional, environment are clearly visible. Yale wants its students to have privacy for study and this means a maximum of one desk to a room. "Any other system fails to consider the garrulous nature of American undergraduates," says Thomas C. Mendenhall, Master of Berkely College. Study also requires adequate library facilities.

The most ambitious steps toward these goals, still in the planning stage, are a new resident college and an undergraduate library somewhat like Harvard's Lamont Library. The most probable location for the new college has already been purchased while a plan for a new library will soon be submitted to the administration by University librarians.

Yale Buys Town School

This fall, Yale bought property which three New Haven high schools now occupy adjacent to the Eli campus. Under its contract with the city, the university must wait until New Haven builds new high schools before it can take over the buildings and land. This will not be before the summer of 1957 and Yale has made no definite statements concerning the use of this land. However, about the only other large and empty areas adjacent to the campus and suitable for a new college are the Grove Street Cemetery and the New Haven Green; both seem unlikely choices.

The contract with the city was briefily threatened when the Republican candidate for mayor, Phillip E. Mancini, accused incumbent mayor Richard C. Lee, former director of the Yale news office, of making a secret deal with the university at the expense of the city. Lee, however, defeated Mancini by the largst vote majority in New Haven political history in this month's elections.

The report to the University Council on a new undergraduate library will recommend its construction at High and Wall streets, just across from Sterling Memorial Library. "Present library facilities are over-crowded and it's no secret that we badly need new space," University Librarian Dabb says. A committee has been studying Lamont Library for about a year as a model for parts of the Yale library's operation.

Much has already come and will come before the proposed new college and library, however. The first step toward the goal of one desk per room was the reduction of incoming freshman classes from 1,150 to 1,000 despite greatly increased applications for admissions. This was much less than the veteran swelled post-war peak of some 7,500 college students, but resident fraternity houses had disappeared during the war to leave the colleges and freshman dorms still over-crowded when the veterans left.

"We can't contract further under such great pressure to expand, so we have to build and remodel," says Norman S. Buck, Master of Branford College and Associate Provost of the University. Although a new college is still in the future, the freshman problem has already largely been taken care of.

Renovations were badly needed in the old freshman dorms anyway, so administrators combined "deferred maintenance" with the partitioning of large rooms into small ones to reach the ideal of one desk per room.

This is also the first year freshman do not have to worry about finding special electrical appliances as the switch from DC to AC current came this summer. The three year remodeling project is expected to draw to an end in another year.

New Medical School Dormitory

Classroom and office space is a somewhat less serious problem, but expansion would be necessary if the University grew even a little. "If someone asked me today for an office, I'd be at ends to help him," reports Buck, who also heads a faculty committee concerned with space allocation. One of the recently acquired New Haven school buildings may very probably be used to solve some of these needs, acording to C. H. Sanford, University Business Manager.

While a new resident college and an undergraduate library are just barely in the planning stage, the New Medical School dormitory is a fact. The university is also expected to bid for a part in a government supported New Haven slum clearance plan that would make possible a low cost housing project for faculty members and married graduate students. At present the project is threatened by the diversion of state funds from the project to the repair of flooded-damaged highways.

Another existing fact is the $2,350,000 Gibbs Science Building dedicated on October 28; the laboratory building represents Yale's hope to bid directly for a larger share of national intellectual leadership, this time in nuclear physics, as dedication speaker Ernest O. Lawrence, Yale '25, Director of Radiation Laboratories of the University of California, pointed out.

This hope for wider intellectual leadership permeates all of Yale's projects under Griswold and is what gives them more than just a defensive tone. But for all their vigor, Yale's building projects in the college would ultimately mean little without plans to make good use of the buildings.

This is the next phase and it has begun, though less conspicuously than the first. It takes the form of attempts to improve the curriculum and the faculty.

Last spring, President Griswold presented a plan which would increase the intellectual demands made on the students while giving them much greater freedom. The plan emphasized long-range learning with syllabi readings to prepare the student for general exams at the end of the year, much like the famous Hutchins plan at the University of Chicago. Only weekly discussion classes would be compulsory and students would hear what lectures they selected, with the aid of an adviser, as most valuable.

Most of the proposals were rejected by the Course of Study Committee as too radical for the present character of student motivation, the makeup of the faculty, and the University's financial state. Nonetheless, the committee submitted a report, approved later by the faculty, which called for many of Griswold's specific recommendations: a two-year reading list, auditing lectures suggested by advisers, and a senior essay project climaxed by oral and written examination as well as a now Divisional Honors program for outstanding scholars.

"We are now putting into practice what we voted in principle last spring," says William C. DeVane, Dean of the College. An increase in seminar discussion courses will probably lead to the addition of three or four new faculty members in honors divisions, he said.

An increase in faculty salaries last year just covered by a $200 tuition hike indicates Yale's interest in increasing the quality in its faculty as well as its faculty-student ratio. In these moves, University policy makes a start at the removal of the second objection to Griswold's original plan, i.e., the make-up of the faculty.

Behind and necessary to all of Yale's projects, of course, is money. During the past two years, Yale has put almost $6,000,000 in construction and remodeling, the highest amount spent for this purpose since the early 30's. Of this, $4,991,000 was from gifts of alumni, friends, and two foundations. These figures do not include the $2,500,000 gift of alumnus John Hay Whitney, New York investor, toward the purchase of the New Haven school property.

Yale might not believe that it can afford indefinite expansion, but it seems to have faith in its ability to raise enough money to create Griswold's Athens. Speaking in October at the banquet which launched the Yale Alumni Fund drive for 1955-56, alumnus Irving S. Olds, former chairman of the board of the U.S. Steel Corporation, gave statistics which indicated, he said, that great potential sources of funds have barely been tapped.

"The country's unprecedented prosperity and favorable tax laws make philanthropic gifts easier," for private or cooporate donors, Olds said. With a systematic exploration of these new sources Yale may well be able to find money to invalidate the third objection to Griswold's plan of last spring, insufficient finances.

This leaves but one objection, the character of student motivation. Criticism of Griswold's plan stressed that most Yale freshmen and sophomores were not equipped to handle the freedom and flexibility which he wanted to give to them. But, in his annual report to the alumni last Monday, Griswold reemphasized his thesis of "quality over quantity." With a limited enrollment in the face of ever increasing numbers of qualified applicants, Yale will of necessity become more selective. If the admissions department can successfully use it's selectivity to choose the best motivated students, the last of the present objections to Griswold's plan will vanish.

Last spring, Mendenhall, said that the Course of Study Committee's report "represents an honest effort at taking the free wheeling plans of President Griswold and trying to equate them with the present situation." President Griswold has now set about equating Yale's present situation with his free-wheeling plans