Ayle Ocllege Erunion Obok

YALE COLLEGE CLASS OF 1969 50th REUNION CLASSBOOK

Our Stories 50 Years Later

Published by the Yale College Class of 1969 on the occasion of its 50th Reunion

May 30 – June 2, 2019

Yale University

We dedicate this 50th Reunion ClassBook to our deceased classmates. We celebrate their lives and thank them for all they have given us: their friendship, their example, their contributions to the world. May their spirit live on in these pages.

Copyright Š 2019 by The Yale College Class of 1969

Contents Acknowledgments vii A Note from the Editors-in-Chief ix To Our Yale ’69 Classmates xi Letter from the Class Secretary xiii Letter from President Salovey xv Invited Essays xvii Our Stories 137 Geographic Listing 865 Photo Credits 875

Acknowledgments Reunion Committee (The Triune)

1969 ClassBook

REUNION PROGRAM ADVISORY BOARD

Doug Colton JP Jordan Bill Newman

Arthur Klebanoff, Publisher JP Jordan, Carney Mimms, Co-Editors Steve Dunwell, Photography Brian Skulnik, Managing Editor, RosettaBooks Jay McNair, Designer Myra Drucker, Editorial Staff

John Adams, Derry Allen, Ken Brown, Tom Emmons, Fred Heller, David Howorth, Alan Hurwitz, Carl Lazarus, Bruce Mazo, Howard H. Newman, Art Segal, Hal Valeche, Arnie Welles, Wayne Willis, Triune.

Executive Committee: John Nelson, Art Segal, Triune.

College Captains

AYA Coordinator

David Howorth, Attendance Chairman, College Captain Manager Berkeley: John Adams, JP Jordan Branford: Rick Drost, Keith Nelson, Steve Vaughan Calhoun/Hopper: Mike Schonbrun Davenport: Ned Culver, Brad Davenport, Carl Lazarus, Eliot Norman, Dick Tucker Timothy Dwight: Herb Stiles, John Weber Jonathan Edwards: John Nelson, Hal Valeche, Arnie Welles Morse: John Gottshall, Pat Madden, Sam Weisman Pierson: Alan Hurwitz, Mike Pfeifer Saybrook: Paul Field, Bruce Mazo, George McNamee, Carl Pierce Silliman: Derry Allen, Bill Beslow, Fred Heller, Andy Schnier Stiles: Paul Abrams, Claes Nilsson Trumbull: Tom Carey, Jerry Schnitt

Jennifer Julier ’77

Class Officers Art Segal, Secretary Ken Brown, Secretary Tom Emmons, Treasurer Dan Seiver, Corresponding Secretary

Class Website Wayne Willis, Harry Forsdick, Webmasters

Class Survey Tom Guterbock Michael Baum Reed Hundt Richard Tedlow

50TH REUNION GIFT CO-CHAIRS Robb High, George McNamee, Howard Newman, Steve Schwarzman, Lang Wheeler, Ken Wolfe

And the many who helped along the way...

Charles Akers ’68, Jim Amoss, Mike Baum, Alan Boles, Barney Brawer, Roger Collins, Roberta Colton, Julian Fisher, Sam Francis ’64, Joe and Carol Green, Reed Hundt, Charles McGrath ’68, Tom McNamee, Michele G. Newman, John O’Leary, George Priest, John Spitzer ’65, Richard Tedlow, Cindy Tso, Jeff Wheelwright, Lorenzo Wallace, Dick Williams, Roger Yee Bull Tales courtesy of Garry Trudeau ’70

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A Note from the Editors-in-Chief

T

‌he preparation of the Yale class of 1969 ClassBook has been a voyage of rediscovery for all of us but especially for me and my peerless co-editor JP Jordan. My journey began more than two years ago when I was approached by Doug Colton and Wayne Willis at a class event at the Yale Club in New York City. This was the first such event, apart from reunions, I had attended in decades and though I hadn’t come with anything in mind beyond an evening of fellowship with classmates, I was soon recruited to work on the nascent 50th Reunion ClassBook.

My initial reluctance was overcome by three irresistible forces: Doug Colton’s enthusiasm, Wayne Willis’s technical expertise on display at his already up-and-running class website, and perhaps above all, the decision to bring in our classmate Art Klebanoff and his publishing house RosettaBooks to produce the ClassBook. This was not going to be just the output of some generic reunion publisher!

I soon learned that the ClassBook was an enormous collaborative effort not just on the part of the editors and the Reunion Committee, our Triune of Doug Colton, Bill Newman, and JP Jordan, but from all of you, our classmates and friends. The ClassBook contains information submitted by more than 500 of you. Many of these entries contain thoughtful and heartfelt personal essays exploring the ways in which

your experience at Yale has helped shape your lives. It has been a particular pleasure, and not at all the hard slog we had expected, to read and respond to each of these essays. We believe yours to be a greater level of written participation than that of any previous 50th reunion class.

Many hands have helped shape these essays, as well as the personal information and pictures many of you have submitted. The enormous job of collecting, collating and formatting these entries could not have been accomplished without the automated production system devised

by Wayne Willis and carried forward with the help of his assistant Cindy Tso. The reaching out to classmates to write and submit, though spearheaded by those of us on the ClassBook team, received a mighty boost from the efforts of David Howorth, Attendance Chairman and College Captain Manager, and his College Captains. We might still have fallen short of our goals but for all of you who reached out to one another.

The classmate essays and personal information are the heart and soul of the ClassBook, but it contains many other elements that we hope will help you relive those Bright College Years and enrich your experience at the reunion itself. JP Jordan has dug deeply among the lives of our classmates and exercised his considerable powers of persuasion so that we can include extended essays from members of the class exploring aspects ix

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of life at Yale during the 1960s. We hope these essays will resonate with many of you, as will the photographs by Steve Dunwell and others along with entertaining tidbits including samples from Garry Trudeau’s iconic Bull Tales cartoons.

The ClassBook is further enriched by the work of our Classmate Tom Guterbock, whose class surveys and their clear analysis have helped give us a detailed and well-rounded picture of the diverse lives we have led in our fifty years since leaving Yale.

To return to where I began, JP and I hope you will find the book now in your hands to be unique among Yale ClassBooks. It is the creative fusion of the rich class website www.yale69.org produced by our

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webmaster Wayne Willis, the professional efforts our class publisher Art Klebanoff—with his publishing team led by Brian Skulnik and Jay McNair—and the analytical skills of our class survey maven Tom Guterbock.

Enjoy the results!

Carney Mimms

JP Jordan

The Meaning of Yale for the Class of 1969—One Man’s View

by Richard S. Tedlow

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hy is it that the four years from our arrival at Yale early in September 1965, to our graduation on June 9, 1969, have proven so important to so many of us? Most of us will be seventy-two years old in 2019, the year of our fiftieth reunion. Those four years we spent in college constitute a mere one-eighteenth of our lives. Why so important? Why is it that today you can initiate a conversation with a classmate with whom you may not have spoken in a half-century, and it will be as easy to talk to him as it was when we were undergraduates together?

I. One reason is the set of events that took place outside the college’s hallowed halls. These included preeminently the Vietnam War and the upheavals of 1968, especially the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Vietnam War escalated while we were in college. Unlike World War II, this was not a war about which one could feel proud. Unlike the Korean War, Vietnam seemed endless. There were no “fronts” as there were in previous wars. The definition of victory was unclear and therefore its achievement uncertain. One soldier (not a classmate) was particularly eloquent: “What am I doing here? We don’t take any land…

We just mutilate bodies. What the fuck are we doing here?”

Nevertheless, the promise of victory was constantly reiterated and just as often not achieved. In a word, the war was a bloody, pointless mistake. It was a horror. Everyone knew this except the policymakers in Washington. And even when they figured out that the war could not be won, they did not go public with this conclusion. They kept feeding young Americans into its maw. Many of us felt that Muhammad Ali was 47

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right to resist. “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong,” he said.

What did the war mean to our class?

First and most obvious, Yale—“Mother Yale”—kept us safe. We all had student deferments. Yale kept us from killing and—let’s face it, more important to most of us—from being killed as long as we were pursuing a degree in good standing. Over 58,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam, a lot more wounded, and some are still living with PTSD. We were different. We got a four-year “hall pass.” Nevertheless, some of us did fight in Vietnam after graduation.

Second, the flipside of the coin was that if you left Yale, you ran the risk of winding up waist deep in the rice paddies. “Here today…Punji stuck tomorrow,” in the words of one of our classmates. The price of leaving Yale could be your life.

Third, the drumbeat of this first “living room war” with its napalm and body counts was with us constantly during those four years. It forced us to face some uncomfortable questions. Were we patriotic? If so, what were we doing in New Haven while less fortunate Americans were in Pleiku, Da Nang, Khe Sanh, or some other dreadful place? If we opposed the war, why weren’t we as vocal about it as our remarkable chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, was? Some of our professors led teach-ins. Harry Benda comes to mind in particular. Others marched in protests or campaigned for candidates who promised to end the war.

Fourth, the war meant our class stayed together through those four years. The war was the external pressure that united us. We all had to come to terms with it. We all had the war in common.

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II. It was on April 4, 1967, that Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered one of the most courageous speeches any American ever did. The place was Riverside Church in Manhattan. The speech was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” King called the conflict what it was: a colonial war. He knew his public opposition to it would cost him support. But the war was evil, and he felt he had no choice but to oppose it publicly.

Precisely one year to the day following that speech, King was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. The most eloquent spokesman against the numberless injustices visited upon the black race in United States was dead. He was thirty-nine years old.

Riots broke out around the nation. New Haven was no exception.

It was impossible not to hear the sirens of police cars zooming past the co-op toward Dixwell Avenue. It was a nightmare come true.

If you were taking History 42B, the history of the modern Soviet Union, your instructor was Professor Firuz Kazemzadeh, a Russian-born son of a Persian diplomat in Moscow. Professor Kazemzadeh was an expert on Iranian-Russian relations, and for a time he was the master of Davenport College. He was also a leading figure in the Baha’i faith.

The day after the assassination, Professor Kazemzadeh put aside his notes for the scheduled class. He talked about King and all he meant. It was clear from his touching, heartfelt remarks that King’s murder was a tragedy for the nation and for the world. One knew, although he did not say it, that Professor Kazemzadeh experienced King’s assassination as a personal loss. A lot of education took place that day.

On April 26, 2017, Professor Kazemzadeh wrote, “In spite of my

T h e Meaning of Yale for th e Class of 1 9 69 —One Man’s View

advanced age, I clearly remember the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King…[but] I have not given up my conviction that in spite of all setbacks, humanity is progressing towards the abolition of racial and nationalistic prejudices.” Three weeks after he wrote these words, Professor Kazemzadeh died. He was ninety-two.

Do we have the courage to share Professor Kazemzadeh’s optimism?

Courage and faith are what it will take because of the state of the world today.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was irreplaceable. His murder stole from us a true leader. “Leadership” is a word often used, but the phenomenon is all too rarely encountered. King’s death cast a pall over 1968, which turned out to be a very strange year indeed.

Just a week before King’s murder, on March 31, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a televised address to the nation. Somehow, a lot of us knew that something big was up because we watched the speech on television. Johnson concluded with the altogether startling declaration that “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” Johnson was fifty-nine years old when he gave that speech. He looked like a man in his eighties. That evening, you could not place a call to Washington from New Haven.

The lines were overloaded.

The true reason behind Johnson’s decision will never be known. We do know that Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota had decided to challenge him for the Democratic Party nomination in 1968. On March 12, New Hampshire held its primary. McCarthy, aided by a cadre of college students some of whom doubtless were our classmates, received

42 percent of the popular vote. Johnson won the popular vote with 49 percent, but McCarthy’s showing was unexpectedly strong, illustrating the unpopularity of the war and of Johnson personally.

Four days after this contest, Robert Kennedy took the opportunity to enter the race. He realized that Johnson was vulnerable.

To recount all the twists and turns of politics in 1968 would take a book. It is probably true, however, that no year in living memory saw college campuses so politicized.

On June 4, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. That left the nation with two presidential candidates, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Neither man was truly anti-war. Neither had a grain of charisma.

Both were retreads.

Nixon’s nomination was secure. Humphrey was formally nominated at the convention of the Democratic Party in Chicago in late August.

That convention was literally a riot. Many college students, including members of our class, were there. It was an inauspicious prelude to our final year in college.

The election itself was an anticlimax. However, the results were more significant than most of us imagined they would be. There was more killing in Southeast Asia after we graduated than while we were at Yale.

The pity, one might say the tragedy, of the flat conclusion of Johnson’s Presidency was the blotting out of the magnificent domestic legislative achievements he engineered in 1964 and 1965. Chief among these were the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. This legislation constituted giant steps toward doing something about the institutional racism in the nation. Indeed, these two acts are still resisted today by American racists.

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III. Such was the tumultuous world outside. Inside Yale, fundamental changes were a-foot during our bright college years, changes which would forever change the college.

To be sure, there was continuity with the past as well. For example…

Yale was a four-year experience with very little transferring in or out.

It was an on-campus experience. Few people lived off- campus during those four years, and few were married prior to graduation. Indeed, there was not much transferring from one college to another. The result was that we spent a lot of time with our classmates. Some of us formed bonds that have endured for half a century.

Those four years were marked, as they must also have been for many an “old blue” who preceded us, by a search for companionship. In one way, that search was more easily satisfied than it has ever been since we left. Any time of the day or night, you could knock on any door and get into an interesting conversation.

No one had to be bored at Yale when we were there. Nor hungry. If you needed a great burger, the Yankee Doodle was a stone’s throw away.

Female companionship on the other hand—that was a different story.

We chose Yale full in the knowledge that it was not co-educational.

Now this seems ridiculous; but at the time, it did not seem strange at all. Many elite eastern colleges did not admit women. Many of our classmates had attended all-male private schools, so the idea of single-sex education was not novel.

And if, prior to selecting Yale, a prospective student asked about the 50

absence of women, the response was reassuring. Girls were easy to meet.

They’d visit Yale to get their MRS degrees, and Yale men were a valuable commodity. As the song goes: “Though we have had our chances for overnight romances with the Harvard and the Dartmouth male. And though we’ve had a bunch in tow from Princeton Junction, we’re saving ourselves for Yale.”

Suspicions should have been raised when we found on our doorsteps freshman year a questionnaire prepared by “Operation Match,” the first computer dating service in the United States. You answered the questions, submitted the form, and received a list of girls with whom to get in touch. At least that is how it was supposed to work. Your faithful author tried it. I got the names of nine women and one man in return.

The man—he literally live next door to me in Vanderbilt Hall—had checked the wrong box for his own gender.

More disturbing and revealing for anyone who saw it was a fifty-seven-minute documentary commissioned by Yale itself entitled “To Be a Man.” The film was shot our freshman year, picked up by public television, and aired on sixty stations across the nation.

It is a poor excuse for a documentary (in my view, for what that may be worth) that manages to be both boring and terrifying at the same time. Most terrifying is the complete absence of women. There is merely one brief shot, twenty seconds long, of a woman. She is shown being filmed by a man, probably for a class assignment. We do not even see her face. She is a prop. That’s it for the opposite sex.

No women are seen in class, either as students (obviously) or as teachers, and no women are seen talking to a Yale man outside of class.

Healthcare in America: One Physician’s Perspective

by Arthur I. Segal, MD

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practiced medicine for forty years before retiring in the spring of 2017. I had flourished in my work, enjoying the challenges even in the most demanding moments. I loved virtually every phase of my career, and felt privileged to have the opportunity to care for patients.

Beyond the long hours and perpetual sleeplessness, and despite the insatiable demands of the healthcare bureaucracy, I found an inner sense of purposefulness, honor, and responsibility in having patients trust me to manage their lives—to sustain their hopes along with their physical and emotional wellbeing—while caring for their health. The clinical challenges I confronted were mostly anticipated in professional training and medical research reports, so were manageable and usually had satisfying outcomes. Truly burdensome demands and enduring frustrations invariably were products of the business of medicine—such as multiple

insurers each using their own treatment standards and coverage requirements, even for common problems. Proof of current coverage, authorizations required prior to evaluation, testing, and treatment, mandatory collection of copays, and frequent patient misunderstanding of their own financial obligations all became commonplace and increasingly detrimental to office efficiency, and too often impeded the healthcare process. Yet it was only after these preliminary steps that real healthcare service began.

Successful interventions were the norm, often with the most dramatic improvements occurring following surgery. My practice of OB-GYN encompassed issues from pregnancy and reproductive health to contraception, depression, sexual assault, marital dysfunction, sexually transmitted diseases, and more—a breadth that I found engaging 109

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and fulfilling. With my patients I shared moments of profound happiness and—inevitably—of tragedy and loss, frequently foreseeable, yet at times deeply intimate.

I discovered that I often preferred to work with medically indigent, disenfranchised patients whose needs were the most profound and for whom my work seemed to have the greatest impact. It was amongst those outside of our employment-based healthcare system—and too often unable to access even our underfunded public health programs— that I found my work the most fulfilling.

Over time, the contrasts between the care and outcomes of patients who did participate in workforce-based health coverage and those who did not became increasingly stark. In the period bracketed by my career, the system for providing health services in our country changed radically, narrowing access even as the knowledge, skills, and tools at its disposal expanded exponentially.

In my earliest experience, medical care was still based on relationships. I had no doubt of that physician-patient relationship as central, sacred, and inviolable. In that model, decisions about care were based on judgment of a doctor who had an enduring relationship with the patient, informed by some access to the accumulated body of scientific medical knowledge. The beloved television image of a wise, devoted family practitioner (Marcus Welby, MD) embodied a practice ethos and level of personal attention that both doctors and patients consider “right.” This Norman Rockwell–drawn “family doctor” was the first, and often the most trusted source consulted for diagnosis and care.

Fifty years later, medical care is very much more scientifically 110

fact-based, calling upon previously unimagined technology, startling discoveries about biologic processes at the cellular level, and an almost-unmanageable rate of expansion of understanding of the causes and disease and pathologies. Where once we trusted Dr. Welby, evaluation and management of many health problems now depends on hugely sophisticated—and expensive—automated machines, and rigorous adherence to clinically validated treatment protocols, methodologies, and clinical templates. Primary care relationships remain and are still valued, but by-and-large the kinds of health service to be administered is determined through diagnostic routines commonly subcontracted to specialists designated by a hospital (or insurer), with treatments managed according to accepted science-based methods. Compared with performance when I began my practice, the efficiency and efficacy of medicine has increased, and patient outcomes are much improved. For decades, mortality declined and previously serious, even fatal, conditions were pushed back or held at bay.

Along the way, what used to be a myriad of community-based health providers centered on local hospitals coalesced into now dominant regional, or super regional, multi-hospital systems that expanded into all facets of health service, including acquisition of many formerly independent physician practices and multi-specialty clinics. Networks aggregating multiple services and their providers have been set up not just by hospitals, but also by insurers, employers, unions, universities, religious groups, governmental entities, foundations and other not-forprofit organizations, and aggressive for-profit corporations.

The healthcare landscape now is dominated by large enterprises

Health care in America : O ne Ph ysician’s Pers pective

that—whether legally organized as not-for-profit or for-profit—all compete for patients, market share, and revenues. But their economic competition focuses on lowering costs for insurers and other payers, not of holding down what patients must pay—and only indirectly by emphasizing quality and comfort (unless you are a patient with very generous coverage or are quite wealthy). Healthcare is not just “big business,” it is the biggest component of our national economy, comprising about 17 percent of our GDP. It continues to grow and, as our population ages, its share of the economy may reach 20 percent. The trillions of dollars spent annually on healthcare drive often meteoric advances in every facet of the system. But despite the huge sums invested and the near miraculous developments they generate, care continually becomes more expensive, not less, and grows less, not more, accessible to many of our citizens.

The gains and improvements in the capability of our healthcare system are of no benefit to those who cannot gain access to them. For most purposes, access (beyond emergency services) is effectively limited to those who have insurance coverage—and that coverage began with, and largely remains, a byproduct of employment. Coverage beyond the employed (and dependents) is obtained, if at all, from federal and state programs (Medicare, for those who were in the labor force; Medicaid, for the categorically indigent; The Children’s Health program; the VA; and whatever remains of the ACA, or “Obamacare”). Care for seniors and (at least in theory) for our veterans, is well-embedded politically, but care for the tens of millions who are neither remains the subject of a rancorous, unending debate over who should be covered, and who should pay for whatever coverage is provided.

In this debate, healthcare loses its intimacy and much of its humanity.

The term becomes a political abstraction devoid of its essential empathy.

Instead, it is fulcrum for ideological advantage, hopelessly entangled in in partisan arguments over whether healthcare should be considered a privilege rather than a right. A viewpoint that I find lacking in compassion and far too often mean-spirited however widely held it may be.

Under any rational analysis, healthcare services constitute a public good just as do roads, schools, or police and fire services. They comprise a major part of the public sector in all developed economies because they are essential to both individual and aggregate welfare, regardless of the differences in financing, administrative, or delivery systems.

Economics cannot ascertain satisfactory market equilibrium conditions for this product category. There are no meaningful substitutes for maintenance of life and wellbeing. Most health services are not subject to global supply. Demand grows with population and median age and with development of new or better services, and may effectively be infinite. While supply is responsive to pricing but also by the need for regulation and oversight.

The special regimes needed to maintain the quality and safety of the goods and services that together comprise healthcare inherently impose substantial indirect costs, to which are added the profits of most insurers and many providers, the costs incurred and profits sought by those who develop new (and always expensive) drugs and devices, and the amounts added to every paid bill to cover the costs of providing uncompensated care and of defending against inevitable legal claims.

The net of all these factors is a system very much different than the 111

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one I entered a lifetime ago. It is larger, less personal, and infinitely more complex. It is not amenable to simplistic reductions and is not going to return to the Marcus Welby days (if it was ever there at all). None of this complexity, however, means that we cannot create and operate a system that insures to everyone in our society the same opportunity to maintain their physical well-being through application of medical knowledge and technology. We cannot assure comparable health or longevity to everyone, but we can provide everyone the care that will give them the best opportunity for a healthy life and achieving their potential. We could, but we don’t.

Why? What happened to healthcare, something that everyone wants and needs? There are difficult issues regarding the proportion of resources that should be expended on end-of-life care—a debate on which I venture no opinion here—but for infants, children, and the pre-Medicare population no one argues against the utility or desirability of care.

Yet the potential lack of access to care increasingly haunt those who currently do have insurance coverage as well as those who do not: This concern devolves down to the question of who will pay for care when it is needed. All of the perturbations and innovations in the market for healthcare and the means of its delivery have not generated an effective means of assuring universal access, and will not so long as healthcare remains the symbolic focus of disagreement political philosophies over the role government should play in our individual welfare.

My perspective is of course colored by personal professional experiences. I remember instances too well in which the system failed those it supposedly serves—as when pregnant women delayed seeking care 112

because of burdensome, intimidating, or impossible (for them) documentation requirements. Or because they could not find available providers or transport, and consequently suffered compromised outcomes for mother, child, or both. Other factors—usually meaning other manifestations of poverty—were often at work, but taken together they are my memory of too many women accepting deficient care, or none, because they lacked the means to obtain services in their own best interests for that of their children.

We have the world’s greatest medical capacity but a compromised, and for many recipients a mediocre, delivery system. While of great potential, the system is highly fragmented but poorly coordinated, in many respects due to single-minded insistence that a competitive market model is the best way to elicit and distribute healthcare goods and services. The result is not just redundant competing system, but significant expenditures on non-price means of attracting patients—often through brand-enhancing marketing, and inducing (or purchasing) physician loyalty. Healthcare is not treated as something everyone can receive: it is a growth industry that demonstrates little if any interest in the part of the population for whom no deep pocket will pay.

Some numbers readily show the dilemma: US healthcare spending in 2016 was $3.3 trillion. or $10,348 per capita. The comparable figure in 1960 was $146. With adjustment for inflation, the cost is now nine times what it was when we were in middle school. Projections for 2023 will bring that amount to $14,944 each, a rise from 5 percent of GDP in 1960 to 17.9 percent in 2016, and 20percent in 2023.

Government programs accounted for about half (49 percent) of

Yale Daily News excerpts with commentary by Alan Boles

Although freshman year could have been justifiably regarded as an oasis of calm, our subsequent undergraduate years (along with 1970) probably constituted the most tumultuous period at Yale (and many other American college campuses) since World War II. The controversial and escalating Vietnam War, the prospect of compulsory service in it following our college careers, the fervent political activity to “dump Johnson” and end the War, the black (and to some extent) Hispanic civil rights movements, the rising counterculture, the earnest search for academic “relevance,” and increasing demands for coeducation at Yale (and other single-gender colleges) upended the carefree tranquility that tradition tended to associate with our “bright college years.” The staff of the Yale Daily News tried its best to report on the principal developments that affected the campus. What follows are stories of a few of them.

November 3, 1967 The decision by the faculty to abolish class rankings and numerical grades in favor of a much looser set of grading categories—honors, high pass, pass, and fail—was the first of a series of major changes to academic requirements. Subsequently, mandatory course loads were reduced, comprehensive exams were eliminated by many departments, and residential colleges were allowed to initiate and conduct their own seminars for academic credit—the so-called “Hall seminars.”

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November 4, 1968 Pressure to bring coeducation to Yale College had been building since at least our freshman year. Yale President Kingman Brewster had proposed to resolve the matter by formally affiliating Vassar College with Yale and moving it to New Haven. But in 1967 his plan was rejected by Vassar’s trustees. Coeducation efforts stalled until Yale undergraduates, led by our classmate Avi Soifer, organized “Coed Week,” a brilliant ploy to force the administration to implement undergraduate coeducation by simply admitting a large number of female students to Yale College and housing them in the Old Campus and the residential colleges. This tactic succeeded marvelously.

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May 12, 1969 The growing anti–Vietnam War protest movement at Yale generated efforts to strip the ROTC programs of academic credit and remove them from campus, to campaign for elected officials like Allard Lowenstein who opposed the war, to raise money for the appeal of Yale Chaplain William Sloan Coffin’s war-related criminal conviction, and to support resistance to the military draft by students about to graduate or otherwise leave college. So it was not surprising that our class decided, among other measures, to focus our commencement ceremony on opposition to the war by featuring an anti-war speaker and to establish a legal defense fund for those classmates who, if drafted, refused induction.

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