Did you have a Yale teacher or a class that taught you something precious. That has stayed with you and/or continues to influence you?
Vince Scully taught me to see with heart, not just mind. His descriptions of buildings leaping up and columns squatting down, and of course breast shaped mountains, added a quality of aliveness to inanimate objects and structures. That way of seeing has never left me.
Walter Cahn was the instructor for my Directed Studies History of Art course freshman year. I recently learned that as a child he was smuggled into Vichy France, staying one step ahead of the Nazis who ultimately killed his parents. He was convinced that the medieval sculpture he saw as a refugee at a Benedictine monastery set him on the path to studying art history, ultimately becoming a full professor and chairman of the Art History department. He opened up the world of art history to a boy from small town Connecticut, and art and architecture have been a central part of my life ever since.
Oh yes, Robert Ferris Thompson, Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art at Yale.
Yale “began” for me when I met with Yale’s Blue Book, which introduced me to Mr. T’s animated course on African art, my first and best elective. Me, a country boy from very rural upper New York State, parents 2nd gen immigrants, Quaker family with a small farm and living in a house repurposed from having been a stage coach “motel” for travelers across rural NYS in the 1800’s, and so on. Before I left for Yale, my mother shared with me that she was, as she put it, “1/8th black”.
What I wanted from Yale was everything. But I particularly wanted to expand my horizons. So, my pleasure at reading Yale’s Blue Book was nearly visceral. Initially, I thought that Yale would not permit me to study African art, so I went to his office and asked permission. He changed my life, no drama there.
Oh, it’s easy to start my explanation, but where to stop? How about his effect on his classroom when he played his own Ghanaian “talking drums” during some lectures? Drums? During lectures? And, knocking about on his lectern to generate even sharper percussive sounds? To a country boy from upstate New York such as me, it was a revelation to learn from him that percussion and rhythm is everywhere in Africa, in colors, in shapes, sounds – in masks, designs, clothing, the speech, yes of course in drums. But there are so many different types of drums and percussive instruments. That list is not short.
How about his response when I asked him to assign a special project to me – he said “you can almost just make it up on your own – just look around whereever you may be in America, and you may find forms of African art – it’s everywhere”. Then, a few weeks later, while visiting my family in rural New York State I unexpectedly encountered a museum with a collection of so-called pottery Toby Jugs, made by American slaves. I photographed the collection, and wrote a paper for Thompson’s class about the collection. His response, “you see, one merely has to look, and you’ll discover influences of African music and art everywhere”.
How about that 3 weeks after graduation in 1970, my folks drove me 4 hours to New York City, and put me on an old PanAm 707. On to Ghana for a few months. A visit to Ethiopia. Then to Kenya for 3 more. Finally to Lusaka, Zambia. Where I lived and worked for the next three years. I raised financing from various nonprofits (Oxfam, Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Methodist Church, and others), and formed and ran the national credit union association for Zambia. I created accounting materials that were adapted for use in Zambian country villages and towns by teachers, police, farmers – so that they could better control and manage community based financing entities, using their own community funds. It took me north, south, west and east within Zambia.
And, during my 3 yrs in Zambia, I met my Danish wife, in Lusaka. After Lusaka, we moved to her home in Denmark, and then onwards to Royan, France to study French… And, then finally back to the USA, and Boston for law school. And, became a lawyer in 1978, practicing multinational venture capital and transactional work in technology and the life sciences.
So, was Robert Ferris Thompson pivotal in my life? Simply yes. No qualification necessary.
My vote goes to Leonard Thompson, who taught my African History course 1969-1970. Born in England and settling in South Africa, he was a champion of the anti-apartheid movement and was ultimately expelled from the country after publicly exposing the fact that Afrikaaner bibles listed all the white members of the family tree on the front page and all the mixed race members on the back page. Furthermore, he insisted on holding classes during the height of the campus strikes in 1970, claiming that it was more important to discuss the issues of the moment, in particular given his personal background, than noisily waving placards at raucous rallies. I don’t know what his standard curriculum might have been absent the strikes, but I sure did learn a hell of a lot from him.
DD Hall, American Cultural History: a course in which Professor Hall asked us to look beneath/beyond the events, the stories, etc. and consider the perspective, the “stance,” of the individual relating those events and stories. Therein arose a basic question: “Where are you coming from…?” The notion of the other’s stance has stayed with me in both personal and professional (medicine)
Henri Peyre was the best professor I had at Yale. After boarding school, I took a gap year and spent 9 months of it in France, and then took a French lit class my first three years at Yale.
He was not only a great French professor, he was also a wise man. Indeed, more than any other professor I had at Yale, he changed the way I looked at the world.
Does anyone else remember visiting professor Jean Vaché? “L’accent aigu c’est d’une importance primordiale”,” he would always add in introduction. Despite the fact that his field was the poetry of English writer Thomas Hardy, he opened a world of French literature for me.
Anecdote: Hardy has a story entitled “The Withered Arm,” about superstitious belief in the healing power of a hanged corpse.
It came to pass the summer after graduation, I think, that I visited him in Dorset, UK with my Wellesley girlfriend. He had rented (maybe though the National Trust) the “Hangman’s Cottage” for a month while doing research, and N and I slept in the guest cottage… which it turned out was the very space in which the remains of those hanged were once laid out, and a bound copy of the story was in the night-table. Talk about a Liberal Education! Sadly, Jean Vaché is deceased — at least not by hanging. But I’ll pick up the tab to raise a glass of pre-tariff Bordeaux with any classmate who remembers Professor Vaché, and maybe his seminar the college FKA Calhoun.
“L’accent aigu….”
Three of my many memorable teachers come to mind right away. Sophomore year, Pierson College Master John Hersey launched a partnership between the College and Lee High School to recruit future teachers, and the tutoring he encouraged me to take on over the next three years sparked my career in education. I remember especially a conversation we had that fall about his book on the 1967 Detroit riots, The Algiers Motel Incident, that made plain the need for racial injustice in our country. I took several excellent courses from Michael Holt that led to my history major. His American History survey featured vivid lectures like a dramatization of the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1858; his seminar on 19th century America was a laboratory to learn the craft of historiography and the changing interpretations of history. Jim Axtell’s History of Education course began at Beineke Library with the Guttenberg Bible before us to illuminate the profound impact of movable typeset books on everything from the Reformation to schooling. The research papers I wrote for him on seventeenth century demography and the common school movement whetted my appetite for scholarship, and it was Jim who encouraged my application to graduate school at Stanford. These three remarkable teachers, and many others, inspired my career in education, and I am forever grateful.
Paul Greengard. As a junior psych major I became interested in the biology behind behavior. Bruce Krueger and I were enchanted by a physiological psychology class (which would now be called neurobiology) and asked the teacher if he knew of a lab where we could work for the summer. He directed us to Paul, who had recently moved to Yale and was totally on fire. Because the lab was still small, we got to know him better than we possibly could have 10 years later. He was brilliant, driven, loving, lovable, competitive, sweet and funny. He became a life-long mentor and friend until the day he died, age 95, Nobel Prize in hand, and still going strong. He was my sensei for nearly 50 years.
Eugene TeSelle. I took his introductory course on religions of the Mediterranean Basin 1000 B. C. to 400 A. D. The various religions that were the subject of the course were a wonder to me. That period of time resembled, in some fashion, the religious variety of current India. Further, it inspired my interest in the Bible, which is an interest I have maintained since then.
Michael Kahn, who taught introductory Psych 10 my first semester on campus. He was charismatic, and about to leave due to no offer of tenure. He taught the canons of current psychology, always pointing out why the content was important.
I have continued to emulate this for decades in teaching emergency medicine.
“You’re a beautiful bunch of cats”, he said as a finale when the seemingly endless applause ended.
Victor Brombert. I’m not sure why I signed up for French Literature. It was pretty far afield from anything I studied before or since. Blame it on “Liberal Arts Education”? He was a wonderful lecturer with tremendous insight and interpretive genius. Proust, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Stendhal, Celine, Camus, Sartre: quite a memorable journey!
Dr. Robert Chase, a visiting professional at the medical school changed my life.
It happened on a Saturday afternoon when I sustained a serious injury to my right hand.
In the Yale New Haven hospital ER I was told a famous hand surgeon from Harvard was on sabbatical at Yale and was on call.
A few hours later with 20+ young physicians watching, Dr. Chase did a masterful repair of my dominant hand which resulted in a near perfect functional result. Two years later I saw him again while taking the first year anatomy course at Harvard Medical School. After a lecture on upper extremity anatomy, I went up to him to show him my hand and thank him for making such an amazing impact on my life. I’ll never forget his response: “Nice repair. Did I do that?”
Being a self-confessed science nerd, Wolfgang Leonhard opened my eyes and mind to the fascinating world of political science, 20th Century history, and international intrigue, a fascination that has stayed with me to this day. When Yale College shut down in the spring of 1970, Leonhard refused to stop teaching, proclaiming he didn’t escape communist East Germany and Yugoslavia only to be muzzled in the USA. If I recall correctly, with the University officially closed, he delivered his last History of World Communism lectures under a magnolia tree in the Silliman College courtyard. At the 25th reunion, I spoke with several classmates who shared similar respect and affection for Leonhard; I am sure there are many more.
Like Jay Clasgens, I was fortunate to have Bart Giamatti as a professor. He inspired me to write the best paper I ever wrote, “Bevors, Aventails, and Umbreres: Disguise and Revelation in the Faerie Queen.” He honored me by asking if he could use it in his next book. Additionally, I was powerfully moved by Richard Sewell and his Tragedy course. He also happened be the Master of my college, Ezra Stiles. The tragedy for me was that, because of the student strike our last semester and my involvement in anti-war and civil rights efforts, I did not perform in my independent study course with him at a level he expected and deserved. Lastly, as a singer in the Battel Chapel Choir, I was privileged to hear William Sloane Coffin preach week after week. He inspired me to go to divinity school where I continued to be involved in the anti-war and civil rights movements.
I climbed the squeaky stairs of the old Stoeckle Hall music building up to the attic-like top floor for first semester freshman harmony. A room full of uncomfortable-looking upperclassmen. In walks a barrel-shaped shiny bald headed man, Bülent Arel. He looks at us and says, “Harmony is a pendulum. Swing this way, dominant, swing that way sub-dominant, let it sit in the center, tonic. I was entranced. Everyone else in the room except violinist Paul Severtsen was muttering “I can’t understand his accent.” The rest of the semester none of them showed up, and Paul and I had a tutorial with Arel, who became my most important and formative composition teacher for the next seven years.
Dick Goldsby whose optimism and generosity knew no bounds. James English who rescued me in organic chemistry. James Davis the dean of TD whose kindness was legendary. Many more superb and gracious professionals that made Yale a transformative and revelatory experience.
Jim Davie, not Davis. Autocorrect strikes again. :). Goldsby was a junior faculty in biology.
I second Neil Blumberg’s mention of Richard Goldsby, assistant professor of biology, with an anecdote. In 1966, I invited Barbara, a high school friend, to a Yale football weekend. Since she was a science major, I took her to hear Goldsby’s packed biology lecture on Saturday morning. It was clear that he impressed her more than the game and the Calhoun College party that night. Fast forward 8 years; I ran into Barbara and her husband on the National Mall as we watched Nixon fly away in his helicopter. She had married Goldsby! They are still active, internationally-renowned scientists today at Amherst and UMASS. It was Yale’s loss to lose Goldsby, one of the great teachers in my life, to the “publish-or-perish” policy that still reigns in academia.
Several great teachers come to mind:
Alan Bromley, chairman of the physics department, who stuck with me even though I was certainly the least capable student ever to cross his path. Alan actually came to my room in Silliman to help me with a particular homework assignment. He passed me only out of mercy (a required course that I needed to apply to architecture school) and we remained in contact until he died. As partial recompense for his generosity, I worked with a number of famous physicists during my career, including Nobel laureates, and designed the physics research center at Boston University, so I turned into a bit of a physics groupie.
John Palmer, dean of Silliman, who taught Daily Themes, surely one of the most influential, memorable, and difficult courses I ever took. He would gather the class together each Thursday afternoon at his apartment in Silliman for wine and cheese where we would read our work out loud and critique each other’s efforts. Despite being an English major, I was pretty embarrassed at first but under John’s tutelage progressed from passable to fair over the course of the semester. Since then I’ve published over two hundred professional articles and six books.
Peter Millard, of the A&A (as it was called then). We first met for lunch at Mory’s and the conversation lasted until closing time, during which we downed copious amounts of alcohol (his poison of preference was Jack Daniels). That was the first of many long conversations, during which Peter unfolded to me the mysteries of the design process, which, as it turns out, was remarkably similar to marriage counseling. I did not become an architect because of Peter (that was a boyhood ambition) but due to his influence I was able to become a much better one. Our friendship, and his counseling, continued until the day he died.
Scott Simpson
I had two teachers who really changed my career directions, and helped hone skills I am still using as a self-employed consultant. Jerry Pollitt introduced me to archaeology and analysis of structures via his vast knowledge and well-illustrated presentations on classical Greek and Roman architecture. Among his many talents, Mike Coe taught me how to survey and map archaeological features in the field, and helped develop my mapmaking skills by turning me loose on his then-current and voluminous finds in southern Mexico.
My most memorable and best loved prof was Bart Giamatti. His enthusiasm for his subject was infectious, making the classes on allegory and Spenser’s “Faerie Queen” ones to anticipate and then delight in. He was also gracious enough to write a recommendation for me to Stanford. At a cocktail party in my final year of law school, I happened to chat with the dean, whom I hadn’t met before. He paused after learning my name and then remarked that mine was the most unusual recommendation he had ever read. Apparently Bart framed it as an extended metaphor. What a guy!
Spenser has a character in that allegory, “the Blatant Beast,” who remains in my mind to this day. Thank you, Bart! What wonderful course.
Daily Themes … 300 words per day, senior year. No excuses. The deadline reigns supreme. Thank you Mr. Gordon and associate Steve Kezerian (from the Sports Information Office).