Volume 20 - Issue 6

Publisher Mary Chen Editor-in-Chief Martha Brant Business Manager Jodi Lox• Managing Editors Skye Wilson Peter Zusi Designer Jon Wertheimer Production Manager David King Photography Editor Heidi Schulman

Associate Business Manager Pamela Weber Associate Designer Pamela Geismar Associate Photography Editor Ann Light National Sales Manager Laura Smith Circulation Manager Malaika Amon

Stoff Joanna Bober Cameron Brooks Cynthia Cameros Andrew Cohen Jenny Colleton Ashley Dunning• Lynn Festa• Jennifer Fleissner John Gill Mitchell Hammond

Regina Hillman•

Jonathan Hoyt Erin Kelly John Kim• Kirk Semple Barry Shimelfarb Jaeyong So• John Stella Jamie Workman Doug Wright

•tltcud April, 1988

These days it's more important than ever to plan your financial future the best way you know how. We're a family of financial companies that can help you make the most of your money.

If you'd like to know more about how MONY can work for you, or how you can work for MONY, contact: Terrance Clune, CLU 300 Collingswood Avenue Fairfield, Connecticut 06432

Members and Directors: Edward B. Bennett Ill • Constance Clement • Peter B. Cooper • Andy Court • Brooks Kelley • Michelle Press • Fred Strebeigh • Thomas Strong

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(Volume 20, Numb<r 6) 77v N<W J0tmt41 i• publiohed six oimes durin~t the school yur by The New Joumal ao Yale, Inc., Poat OfTo« Box 3432 Yale S.aoion, New Haven, CT 06520.

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2 The New JournaVApril 22, 1988

Cover design by.fon Wertheimer Cover photo courtesy Yale University Archives/

The First Yale U nit, A Story of Naval Aviation

Letters Between the Vines

6

C ool Receptio n In their aifjustmmt to college l!fe at an u'!familiar scliOOI, transfer rtudmts face the problnns posed by an aloof administration.

By Vance Hamplemo.n

Features

10

20

A Flying Start Since the .first aero club of 191 Q, Yak studmts have triitkd in their hooks for .fl~t:ht manuals. The history qfjlyin~ aJ Yalt has mrompassed two world wars and led many to mqjor careers in aviaJion.

ByJohn Gill

Exploding the C a no n Controversy r~es over how to tf4ine the Wtrtem literary tradition, a question thaJ dictate.r w hich hooks students read and how they rtt themselve.r. Rut while criticism is easy, answers are hard to .find.

By Erin Kelly

26

Moments of Contact For an autistic person, makin.~ a htd can bt a rtruf!.~le But Bmhat¡m's 1forts haue prepared some qf its residents .for 70h1 in thl' community

By Jennifer Fleissner

Books

34

Afterthought

38

On Pride in Prej udice Can possian exist without hia.rl'r? Allan Bloom'1 bt.rt-rtllin~ hook undert.5tima.tes the sla)fi~ power qf prejudict and condudl'r that today'r rtudmts art passionkn.

By J amie Workmmt

T o Thailand and Back Thert art mort DÂŤJtic places than l\m Hmm. But onl' Yalt /!raduall'.found that workin(! in the city, alJJw~h not [!lnmorou.1 Nlpr tfdint hzr exptcialions.

By T om AUKst

The New J o u maUApril 22, 1988 3

Letters

The Senior Class Council of the Class of 1988 is pleased to announce

PROFESSOR STEVEN .t. GOUL:D, Harvard University CLASS DAY CEREMONY, MAY 29, 1988 2:30p.m. Old Campus

(2 MINUTES FROM YALE)

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On The Road Again

To the editor: We'd like to thank John Kim for his concern with the situation affecting the Dwight Hall organization Groupwork, a group-oriented big sibling program that has undergone some recent difficulties. John Kim's article, "End of the Road," gave an apt description of the situation of Groupwork as it stood a few weeks ago. As he stated, the program was se•e rely handicapped by a lack of transportation. However, both the student volunteers and Dwight Hall remained committed to finding a solution to Groupwork's dilemma. Recently Jack Hasegawa and Pam Anderson of Dwight Hall, along with students involved in Groupwork, met with Carl Rodenheiser and Jean Sheeley, executive and associate directors of the YMCA on H owe Street. Together, we worked out a program that will allow Groupwork to continue intact.

Beginning after Spring Break, the children involved in Groupwork will be picked up by YMCA busses and brought to the YMCA for the afternoon with their Groupwork leaders.

The YMCA, in a pilot program begun last year, provides transportation to the YMCA and swimming facilities for city children; Groupwork volunteers will also provide alternative activities for the children now involved in this program. Those of us involved with Groupwork are very excited about the prospect of working with the YMCA, and we look forward to the successful continuation of such a valuable program .

•

Shannon Carey (PC '90) Eve Rittenberg (BR '90) jill Schoolman (BR '90)

!GOLDE

THREAD BOOKSELLERS

The Ntw journal encourages letters to the editor and comment on Yale and New Haven issues . Write to Martha Brant, Editorials, 686 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. Tht Ntwjoumal reserves the r ight to edit all letters for publication.

In Appreciation As Commencement approaches, The Ntw journal wishes to acknowledge the important contributions made to the magazine by members of the Class of 1988. We extend our thanks to James Bennet, Carter Brooks, Norman Dong, Pearl Hu, Susan Orenstein, Jennifer Sachs, John Stella, Daniel Waterman, Stu Weinzimer and Grace White for all their hard work, talent and enthusiasm. Their dedication has shaped The Ntwjoi.ITTUll. We are grateful for the time and energy that they devoted to the magazine, and we wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors.

915 State Street New Haven, CT 06511 (203) 777-7807

Congratulations Tht Ntw.fouma/ is pleased to announce the election of .Jodi Lox as Business Manager and Pamela Geismar as Designer . .Jodi joined the magazine in 1987 and has served as Associate Business Manager this term. Pamda also joined the magazine in 1987 and has served as Associate Designer this year . .Jodi and P amela will continue the leadership of graduating Business Manager Norman Dong and Designer .Jon Wertheimer . .Jodi will assume full responsibility as Business Manager in May and Pamela will take over as Designer for our September issue. 'vVe congratulate them and wish them the best of luck.

Corrections Tht Ntw Journal would like to g ive credit to .Jacyong So for the drawings accompanying "The Primary Ambition of Irwin Zucker" in our March 4 issue. T he credits for his graphics were inadvertently omitted.

• • • • • • • • •

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The New Journal thanks Andrea Assarat Ethan Cohen Silva Darbinian Norman Don~ Anthony E'' in~ Vance Hampleman julie Hantman Stephen Hooper Anna Kreiner Motoko Rich David Rosenbaum Stron({-Cohen Craphi< Desi~n Tom Strong Wolfgang

'•

918 Whalky Al'e.

The New joumaVA pril 22, 1988 5

Between the VinesNance Hampleman

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Cool Reception My first day at Yale found me standing in front of my residential college gates, baggage in hand, trapped outside without a key. I noticed a number scrawled on a piece of white paper near the top of the gate. "Need room keys?" the sign asked. It was the first instruction for moving in that I had seen. I called the number. No one was there.

I turned to my first acquaintance at Yale, the student who had given me a ride from the train station. He shook my hand and smiled sympathetically.

"One thing you'll learn really quick is 6 The New JournaVApril 22, 1988

that you transfers are not a top priority with the administration," he said.

"Once you're here, you're pretty much on your own."

Three hours later, a reticent ambassador of Yale handed me my keys.

My troubled arrival was hardly the triumphant entrance into Yale I had envisioned. There was no welcome, no throng of other incoming students, no counselor to answer questions or to help me settle in. If I had been a freshman, I would have jumped back on the train and headed home. But by

Transfers come to Yale with a focus that only comes from trying something and failing- or having it fail you.

last January, I had already completed three terms of college. Entering Yale as a second-semester sophomore, I could not turn back. I stood in front of those closed gates having already shut the door on my previous school.

I left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge at the end of last year in order to escape the stress and a frighteningly narrow education. MIT's presentation in my hometown of Wichita, Kansas had assured me that the school offered the best of both worlds- the most skilled scientific minds and first-rate facilitie: coupled with a strong humanities department and a well-rounded student body. This balanced approach appealed to me. Although I wanted to study physics and engineer.i ng, I also sought an environment that fostered creativity and an ample exchange of ideas. But it took less than a)nonth for MIT to shatter this carefully crafted illusion, the naive notion that a technical school can provide a complete education.

MIT trains its students to be talented physicists, computer scientists, or engineers. It doesn't teach them how to think, feel, or interact with people.

At MIT it is fashionable to wear t-shirts emblazoned with "IHTFP" (I Hate This Fucking Place). It has one of the highest suicide rates in the country-six people killed themselves my year. Most students stay up all night twice a week, every week, to get problem sets done. Of the 13 men in my fraternity pledge class, three have left MIT. Of the ten that remain, two have developed drinking problems, and at least one sees a psychiatrist regularly.

When I decided to transfer out, many of my fraternity brothers told me they wished they had done the same. For them, being only a year or two away from the coveted "brass rat" (the MIT class ring with the beaver mascot), they had already endured too much to turn back. But with only one year invested, and three more ahead, I had

to leave. Yale offered the education and challenge that I wanted. Since my arrival, I have enjoyed just how relaxed it is here.

That year, however, did not go to waste. Unlike the freshmen arriving at Phelps Gate in the fall, transfers come to Yale with a focus that only comes from trying something and failing-or having it fail you. Because transfers have already attended college somewhere else, they know what to embrace and what to avoid, both in academics and extra-curriculars. A lot of them

are older, having taken time off from school to work, travel, or serve in the military. Their experience in making transitions facilitates their adjustment.

When I arrived at Yale, I had already lived through that nervous first week away from home, the excitement of meeting classmates, the flurry of activity before classes begin. No longer was college a strange new environment where I suddenly had an accent, pop was soda, and beer was sold at package stores.

At my new school, I would share the

., The New Jou.rnaVApril 22, 1988 7

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Peter Cheng's Restaurant 177 Park St., New Haven, CT

status accorded four-year students.

Associate Dean of Yale College Patricia . Pierce, the director of the Reviewed by: transfer program, assured me, "The After Hours minute you transfer in, you're a Yale Yale Daily News student like other Yale students."

New England Magazine Perhaps from the administration's Connecticut Monthly Magazine point of view this statement is true. But New Haven Register from my experience, it idealizes the actual situation.

New Haven Advocate The process of changing schools New York Times creates obstacles to the transfer's Hartford Courant validation as a Yale student. Transfers Frequent Flyer spend a shorter amount of time at (Official Airline Guides) Yale-at least four but no more than Reopen Monday to Sunday six terms. Always conscious of the semesters they are "behind," they strive 5:00 to 10:00 p.m. to compensate for that missing time.

For reservations call But their rush to get involved in the (203) 624-5913 plethora of campus activities cannot replace the sense of belonging that All Major Cred;t Cards Accepted comes with four years of campus life.

Transfers neither feel certain about who is in their class nor are listed in the lfr;::::;::::;::::~~~;:t;~;::::;::::;::::;::::;::::;::::;::::ffi Old Campus. Attempting to enter a new school emphasizes the transfer's differences from other students; the second time around, making a successful adjustment doubles in importance.

Nothing can make transfers exactly like the rest of the student population. But the Yale administration can facilitate their transition into the college better than it does.

Yale's present system manages to admit transfers and find them housing, but only through a bumpy process.

The University accepts these students when "regular" students take a leave of absence or graduate at mid-year.

Transfers then face about three months of empty time. I returned home to attend the University of Kansas for my unclaimed semester.

Pierce recognizes the problem posed by mid-year admission, but she says that it is necessary to keep student enrollment relatively constant, despite the wait it causes.

The numbers say that transfers are nothing more than space-fillers. The administration reinforces that impression through its lack of communication with its new students. Once admitted, transfers sense that they 8 The New JournaVApril 22, 1988

have slipped in through Yale's back door. After accepting the transfers, Yale keeps silent for almost six months before letting them know about housing. There is absolutely no Yaleinitiated contact during this time.

Along with their acceptance in June, transfers receive a letter stating that they will be notified about housing by mid-November. It was Christmas Eve before I found out that I had a room.

Looking at my classmates, I will always wonder what went on their freshman year, what initiation into Yale escaped me.

The situation was worse for m) roommate, another transfer. He turned down Williams and Swarthmore to come to Yale, but the administration's aloof stance jeopardized his college plans. Worried about wasting other opportunities, he had to spend hours on the phone digging through Yale bureaucracy and decentralization to confirm that he had not been forgotten.

Presently, the responsibility for assisting transfer students falls to the residential colleges and the contact people (former transfers), who attempt to fill the many gaps. No one office supplies all the information for the few transfers that come in each year. My contact person sent an advisory letter that would have answered many of my questions ¡ during those first few days.

The letter reached my Kansas home six days after I had left. I arrived at Yale equipped only with the knowledge that I had a room and that classes began in two days. Meanwhile, I was on my own to discover how to get a

Our cooks ~ork, so you don't have to! post office box, an I.D., and a meal card.

The Yale administration does have incentive to improve the transfer process. Dean Pierce calls the transfers' arrival "an infusion of real intellectual interest and strength," citing the wide variety of experiences that transfers bring with them , along with their high levels of motivation and enthusiasm.

With the administration's compliance, coordinating the program should prove a small task and would yield substantial benefits for transfer students. The Yale College Council's Student Life Committee recently sent a letter to Pierce. This letter describes the problems· that transfers have experienced this year due to the lack of communication, especially regarding the logistics of arrival. It also proposes the steps that the administration can take to consolidate all the information transfers need at one particular office.

In addition, Pierce has solicited advice from former transfers to help improve the program for incoming students.

For transfer students, it is a relief to be at Yale, if for no other reason than to bring their academic travels to a halt. In my case, I have attended three schools in three different states, all in the space of two years. Some aspects of the Yale experience , however, will never be mine. I'll never spend freshman year on Old Campus, never hear a Freshman Address, never eat in Commons with the students in my year (except for class dinners when I am supposed to "relive" freshman dining).

Looking at my classmates, I will always wonder what went on their freshman year, what initiation into Yale escaped me. Although I have a Yale Station box , have secured my room and gate keys, and have discovered the merits of Naples pizzeria, in some ways I am still standing outside the locked gates of Yale, carrying the baggage of three terms of college spent elsewhere.

•

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The New JoumaVApril 22, 1988 9

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Yafe >.'Avia!!g_~tJ:u'e ears ago, be recent contnbutton_;o~trapitaon of Club, model aarplanes were-eenous --1 becam~ the tpir4 Jngalls ~is flying at Yal~ business. Materi~ --fgr tlie con,_.. century t<fO~ .with a Y aeronautl~ Si~e inception of Yale's farst struction of --mo<lel '"tDOJIOpjanes and club. "Every landing, every takeoff, as --flymgilub in 1910, the University bas b~ were avail~ to club exhilarating," be says._,::t!s- .~JCe 'had no,r-i'ewer than seven aeronau~--- members at U<" U~rsity Repair drivm~~CS'in_te}l'se tond!'n- organizations. While some.-cl'"'these -shop, apd s ents worked for weeks tration:-lfut"you're pretty much in your clubs !:&aye had a negligible impac~ to -J)erieet.,.tbeir model gliders in the own world up there, so it's also on evel{ tbe Yale community, o~cs hopes of winning the college comperelaxing. There's that coqstant, calm qa.ve-lnfluenced aviatio~ - ~~w tition. At the first "Exhibit of Air engine noise." Last yea\ ~ Haven ~d across tfl,e ~ouil'try, Contrivances," the winning model members of Yale Av~(YA), 12 making -national headlines. All told, monoplane traveled a distance of 85 undergraduateramong them, spent a Yale ~ad some form of flying feet, 4 inches, before settling to the total of 2,000 hours in the air;l.terun~ Qr_gatr!zation, either sanctioned or op- floor of the Yale Gymnasium. to that.tl'elaxing engine~oise . Y~ P!."¡ ~sed by the University, in 57 of the The club led an active existence for vides a five-plane )feet f~~Yile- last 78 years. three years before its operations affillated pilots AUld alse ispo~rs Even before they were able to get dwindled to dilettantism. "'The time is .L. ~onthly lectures by major-fisun:s \n their- hands on- an aircraft, Yale cdming when a knowledge of Oying the field of aviation. While the club's students devoted themselves to the will be as much a pan of an American own bisto,ry .paos almost 25 years, emerging science of aeronautics. In gentleman's accomplishments as golf

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or automobiling," the club's president told a Yale Daily News reporter in 1913.

By the following year, Yale's first aero club was defunct.

While it lasted, the Yale Aero Club allowed its members to fly its newly acquired glider and also arranged the first aviation exhibition sponsored solely by a college aeronautical organization. In a two-day program in May 1911 , hundreds of spectators paid a dollar a head to watch two expert aviators perform stunts over the old Yale Field. Among other tricks, one pilot tossed baseballs from his Curtiss biplane to the catcher of the Yale baseball team. The plane's speed of over 50 miles per hour and altitude of 500 feet made catching the projectiles a difficult task, even for the otherwise capable athlete.

The program for the second day included an event that the Yale Daily News depicted as a dramatization of science fiction, "a representation of how two aeroplanes would fight in the air, as described in H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds." The newspaper's description of the mockdogfight reflected the nation's general disregard for the crucial role air combat would play in a modern war.

Even for most of the country's admirals and generals, aerial warfare belonged primarily to the imagination, not to the military, although World War One lay just over three years away. Only seven years would elapse before the first American airman would die in combat, a 24--year-old Yale Aero Club alumnus who was shot down over the North Sea. With the advent of war in Europe, interest in aeronautics at Yale flourished and ultimately became the backbone of naval aviation in the 12 The New Journal/April 22, 1988

most rudimentary Naval Reserve .......... - Flying Corps. Any aviation training on the part of Davison and his friends would have to be privately financed.

Both Trubee Davison and his father felt certain that the United States would be in desperate need of pilots if United States. In the summer of 1916, war were declared, and they pushed on almost a full year before the United with their plans for the private training States' entry into the Great War, a of the Yale unit. Trubee's father leased group of ambitious Yale under- an air station in Port Washington, graduates banded together to learn Long Island, while Trubee sent off how to fly a hydroplane. The students, telegrams to the men he had selected as who came to be known as the First Yale his fellow aviators. "Yale was a small Unit, hoped to contribute to the place in those days," says Trubee's son, United States' inevitable involvement Daniel Davison (DC '4-9). "Dad knew in the European conflict. When everybody in his class. These were all President Woodrow Wilson finally people he had played around with- a ended his policy of isolation and lot of them were football players, and declared war on Germany in April there were a lot of senior society types.

1917 , the Navy could claim a meager It was really a clubby little outfit they 22 seaplanes and 38 qualified pilots as had there." Within a couple of weeks, its aviation force. Four months later, the 12 original members of the First when the First Yale Unit completed its Yale Unit had set up camp in the training, its six planes and 26 aviators rooms of the Davison estate, a short bolstered the Navy's air power consi- drive from the air station. Flight derably. At the end of the war, the training began immediately. remarkable achievements of the unit At the beginning of their training, inspired Historian Ralph D. Paine to the student aviators had only one compile a defmitive history of the flying-boat at their disposal, an unit's exploits, The First Yale Unit, A aeronautical jalopy called Mary Ann, Swry of Naval Aviation. which Trubee's father and uncle soon As Paine describes, the First Yale supplemented with two additional Unit began as the brain child of F. planes. John Farwell III ('18), the only Trubee Davison, a Yale sophomore member of the unit still living, who joined the American Ambulance remembers the flying-boats as highly Field Service for the summer of 1915. unstable machines. Although Farwell's \ÂĽbile driving an ambulance in speech is often garbled, his memories France, Davison met aviators who had are still lucid, down to the most minute seen battle. Their descriptions of the deta.iJ. "They were very crude boats, excitement and potential of air power not planes," he recalls. "They had a appealed immediately to his sense of great heavy weight on the bottom, and adventure. The following July, Davi- we guessed it would take a thousand son secured the financial support of his feet to get out of a tailspin, but at that father, a partner in the wealthy Wall time nobody knew much about the airStreet firm, J. P. Morgan & Co. craft at all." Most modern airplanes are Armed with a letter of introduction well-balanced and rarely go into what from an influential family friend, the aviators call a "graveyard spin." "The younger Davison set off for Wash- F-boat took off at 4-8 miles an hour, ington to ask the Secretary of the Navy :md she had a top speed of about 55," whether he might enlist a group of Yale Farwell adds. "So you couldn't afstudents as a reserve unit. The ford to make many mistakes, could Secretary was impressed with you?" Today, YA's slowest plane

"Flying will be as much a part of an American gentleman's accomplishments as golf or automobiling." cruises at 110 miles per hour.

Along with the air station came the services of its experienced instructor and mechanic, Dave McCulloch, who had flown earlier in the war with the Royal Air Force of Italy. "McCulloch was a very fine man, but he sure liked to sleep as long as he could," Farwell says, giggling. "One time I got up early to go flying, drove out to the air station, and he was still eating his breakfast, so he took his meal with him into the plane. He had his coffee in a seltzer bottle or something. I was flying the plane, and as I took off, his coffee and milk just sprayed all over his face and shoulders. He was a very bright man, and I'll tell you, he surely never made that same mistake twice."

In addition to teaching his students how to pilot the flying-boats, McCulloch took care to acquaint the unit with the technical intricacies of the aircraft.

Since there were only two-mechanics at Port Washington, the students had to learn how to overhaul engines and do repair work if they wanted to fly . The

mechanical skills they acquired would later prove invaluable to the Navy.

During the fall term of 1916, the Navy invited the Yale unit to move its flying-boats to the submarine base at New London. The students continued to practice flying as much as their studies would allow, and one Sunday, Davison and Farwell caused quite a stir on campus when they dropped in by hydroplane in time for chapel.

When the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany in February, the First Yale Unit more than doubled its roster to a total of 29 men. Congress had finally passed the Naval Appropriations Bill, and in March, the unit became the first detachment of the United States Naval Reserve Flying Corps. Davison and seven others became commissioned officers. With resources for aviation still scarce, the Navy could provide the unit with no more than a commanding officer, a few mechanics, and some machine guns. The rest of the operation, air station included,

continued to be financed privately.

J . P. Morgan & Co. contributed $100,000 to the cause, and in a matter of days the unit had raised an additional $146,000 through private donations. According to Paine, the funds amassed were "enough to startle the Navy Department which, until 1916, had been unable to obtain from Congress any separate appropriations for aviation whatever, and then only to the amount of $1,000,000." Although the unit used most of its enormous budget to purchase more aircraft and equipment, military life had its little luxuries. During its training period, the unit paid $1,549 for "laundry & valet expenses."

The unit left Yale mid-semester in 1917, training in West Palm Beach for the winter months, and then relocating in Huntington, Long Island. By the end of July, all of the unit had had sufficient flying time to take the naval qualifying test for aviators. The first portion of the test required each pilot to land his aircraft within 300 feet of a

This Curtiss R-6 biplane looks sleek compared with the earlv flvinl!"-boats of the First Yale Unit.

.,

The New JournaVApril 22, 1988 13

buoy. "First we had to fly up to about 5,000 feet ," Farwell explains. "Now that's not very high , is it? But back then it took an hour and a half." Farwell was one of the unit's 26 aviators who qualific:d to receive a Navy pilot's license. "When I took off," he continues, "the first thing I noticed was that there was gasoline on my seat, and I can tell you, that stuff sure bums.

When I came in to land, I pointed right at the boat where all the Navy men were standing. I guess from their point of view it looked like I was going to land right on top of them, and they were all yelling and getting ready to jump in the water. I was probably a good 75 feet off, but the F-boat's wing was about 50 feet long, so I guess that's close enough."

During this same landing test, Trubee Davison, suffering from fainting spells, made a slight error while maneuvering and plunged his machine headlong into the water. His flyingboat split in two under the impact.

As Farwell explains, "The engine in the F-boat was behind you. When Trubee

crashed, the engine came over him. It didn't kill him, but it crippled him."

Davison broke his back in the accident, becoming a paraplegic for life.

Beginning in August, the Navy split up the First Yale Unit, sending its men to a variety of posts both overseas and in the United States. In the introduction to Paine's book, Navy Rear Admiral William Sims notes that with qualified aviators at a premium , the Navy used the comprehensively trained men of the unit as "a nucleus for the training of an air force at home." Having left Yale only six months before, the members of the unit took up positions as instructors and commanders of air stations.

F.arwell was sent to Buffalo, where he was responsible for training an additional 12 Yale students, the Second Yale Unit. In November, the Navy reassigned Farwell to Pensacola as an instructor, along with six members of the Second Yale Unit who had qualified as aviators under his guidance. "The man in charge at Pensacola could get the plane off the

In 1936, Bill Slaymaker (SY '38) considered his Fairchild aircraft a "nifty job."

14 The New Journal/ April 22. 1988

ground and land it, but in general, naval officers just didn't know anything about the machines themselves," Farwell says. "We did all the legwork. When we got there, they had 96 planes, but only 16 could fly. When we left, they still had 96 planes, but only 16 couldn't fly." The situation was similar at other air stations all over the United States. "Wherever the boys from the First Yale Unit went," Farwell adds, "they might have had a naval officer over them, but they knew more than the naval officer knew-there was no comparison."

The First Yale Unit performed prodigiously in the war. All but six of its men saw active duty in Europe; three were killed in action. Five won the Navy Cross for conspicuous gallantry, and three received the Distinguished Service Medal . Two were awarded the British Flying Cross, ten the French Croix de Guerre, four the Belgian Croix de Guerre. One, David Ingalls, who had left Yale after his freshman year, became the Navy's only "air ace," shooting down at least five enemy aircraft.

Some of the unit used their war experience as a springboard to positions of greater responsibility in government service. Ingalls and one other member of the unit later became Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air. Two more of the unit, one of them Davison, held the post of Assistant Secretary of War for Air. And perhaps the most successful member of the unit, Robert Lovett, became George C . Marshall's Undersecretary of State during the implementation of the Marshall Plan and succeeded Marshall as Secretary of Defense.

In the fall of 1919, a year after the signing of the armistice, war veterans flooded the Yale campus. Of these, about 50 had flown in the Army, Navy, or Marine Corps branches of aviation. In January, these veteran pilots formed the Yale Aeronautical Society and elected to its executive board two former members of the First Yale Unit, Ingalls and Harry Davison Jr. , Trubee's younger brother. The society wasted no time in entering the

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Before a crowd of more than fifteen hundred, Yale won t~e 25-mile air race, the main event of the contest, edging out the University of Pennsylvania by a mere ten s~onds. One of the pilots in the victorious airplane was Juan T. Trippe ('20), Secretary of both the Yale Aeronautical Society and the Intercollegiate Flying Association.

After leaving Yale, Trippe combined his administrative and aeronautical expertise to found Pan American Airways.

When the representatives of the Yale flying club returned to campus with their first-place trophy, the University refused to place their cup among those collected by the other athletic teams.

Popular wisdom at the time suggested that recreational flying was aristocratic suicide. Without university support, the club soon died out.

In 1927 , the year that Charles Lindbergh made his famous Atlantic crossing, interest in aviation grew markedly on the Yale campus, inspiring students to organize the Yale Aeronautical Society. Remembering the previous dub's conflict with the administration, the new society chose to focus on the innocuous pastimes of research and education. This flying club, strictly speaking, was not a flying club.

The Yale Aeronautical Society's emphasis on research made an impact on aviation outside of the University.

When the municipal body responsible for investigating possible New Haven airport sites postponed action for two years, the society took the mttlative and recommended an appropriate location.

The group conducted an extensive survey of land around New Haven and meticulously compared the conditions and costs of the 17 most important landing fields in the United States.

Although the New Haven Air Board rejected the particular site that the society recommended, the aviation club stimulated interest in the construction of an airport in New Haven.

The most recognized effort of the Yale Aeronautical Society came in October 1928, when delegates from all over the country flocked to New Haven for the first Intercollegiate Aviation Conference. The convention, which lasted three days, included presentations from a U.S. Senator, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Aeronautics, and world-famous aviatrix Amelia Earhart. F. Trubee Davison, Assistant Secretary of War, sent a telegram of congratulations.

The conference helped legitimize college clubs throughout the country.

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One of the last society presidents, C h arles Morris ('32), left Yale after his soph omore year to get married, but he took his dedication to aeronautics with him. Only two years out of Yale, in 1931, he became Connecticut State Aviation Commissioner, a post he ftlled for ten years before joining the Sikorsky company as chief test pilot for early versions of the helicopter. "It was while I was flying for Mr. Sikorsky that we really broke through the barrier and discovered we had a flying machine," Morris recalls. "So you can see that the Yale Aeronautical Asso· ciation really opened up some doors for me." Morris later wrote a book on the genesis of the helicopter.

Enthusiasm for aviation reemerged in 1936, when sophomore Bill Slaymaker (SY '38) and a group of seven or e ight friends decided one evening to try to organize an air meet.

Slaymaker has kept an aviation scrapbook ever since those early days at Yale. H is office, which takes up the portion of a bright red barn not occupied by h is wife's race horse and t wo barn cats, overflows with m e morabilia of a sportsman's life- a wild boar head, photographs of

gargantuan ftsh, model biplanes. Red and yellow aircraft fly in all directions across the wallpaper in his bathroom.

As one might expect, Slaymaker's aviation club emphasized the sporting aspect of aeronautics. Beginning in 1937, the group flew in three annual intercollegiate meets, losing ignominiously to Harvard in the first two, but finally winning the trophy in 1939.

Five colleges participated in the first contest, including Smith, whose sole representative gained the title "lone girl flyer" in a Yale Daily News headline.

One event, called "paper straftng," required the pilots to throw a roll of toilet paper out of their cockpits and to cut it three times with their aircraft as the roll unfurled. "If you had a plane with an open cockpit, like my Fairchild, the best thing to do was throw it out at the top of a loop, so you could cut it for the ftrst time on your way back," Slaymaker says, pronouncing his words with an unmistakable twang.

"You could cut the darned thing with either your wing or your prop, but if you got it with the prop, it would really shred the toilet paper and not leave you much to cut the second time around."

Although no one was ever seriously

injured during Slaymaker's tenure, he and three friends did have a close call.

"The day after the Hindenburg exploded, we flew out to see the wreck in Lakehurst, but we never got there," Slaymaker says. "We were flying over Long Island when the doggone prop fell off. AI Oiss, who was a darned good pilot, made an emergency landing in the infield of the Belmont Raceway."

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, a handful of aviators from Slaymaker's club, most of them now graduates, enlisted individually in the Air Service. The club's best pilot, Fred Borsodi (TO '39), joined the Army Air Corps. "At first they made him a second lieutenant because he could fly , but when they found out what he could really do with an airplane, they made him a major," Slaymaker says. Borsodi completed 130 missions as a fighter pilot, primarily in the African and Italian theaters. In the last year of the war, Borsodi was killed flying an experimental plane in England.

In addition to the individual wanime contributions of the Yale Aviation Club's pilots, the University itself allowed the Army Air Force Training Command School (AAFTC) to set up shop right on the Yale campus, prompting at least one Old Blue to complain that Yale had sold its soul to the military. Beginning in 1943, the 3,000 cadets of AAFTC, the largest school for the training of technical officers in the Air Corps, took over one-half of the University's residential facilities and one-third of its classrooms. Living alongside Yale's 2, 700 undergraduates, a typical Army cadet roomed in an Old Campus dormitory, did calisthenics in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, ate his meals in the Freshman Commons, and attended courses in aerial photography in the Hall of Graduate Studies.

After World \Var Two, about 40 undergraduates, both Air Corps war veterans and aviation novices, established Yale's sixth aeronautical dub, Yale Aviation, Inc. The dub took pan in annual intercollegiate "fly-ins,"

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compeuuons similar to those of the previous decade, but otherwise its commitments were quite informal.

"After the war, people began to accept aviation as a reasonable way to get around," says Richard Mann (TD '49), co-fo under of the club. "It was a lot of fun . You'd call up som e babe from S m ith and say: 'H op in your plane, I'll m eet you for lunch."' The club continued to function until the late fifties , prim arily as a spo rt ing proposition .

"You'd call up some babe from Smith and say: '~op in your plane, rn m eet you for lunch.'"

The current campus flying club, Yale Aviation, appeared in 1964. I ts fou nders have all had unusually eventful lives or deaths in aviation , re flecting the range of fortunes that have followed membership in Yale's aeronautical clubs. After leaving Yale, YA president Fred S m ith OE '66) went o n to found Federal Express, an idea he had fi rst proposed in an economics pa per as an undergradu ate. H oward W eaver OE '45W), Yale President Kingman Brewster's assistan t for external affairs and a World War Two bomber pilot, o nce walked away u nharmed from the wreckage of an airplane whose fuel lin e had frozen over Massachussetts. Norwood Russell H anson , a philosophy of science professor known for his ebullient personality, his passion for flying, and his unbridled arrogance , died in his aircraft in 1967, crashing into a mountain on his way to give a lecture at Cornell entitled "Flight Theory Within the H istorv of Ideas."

Throughout YA's early years , H anson brought the club a good deal of free publicity, not all of it positive.

During the 1965 football season , H anson buzzed the Yale Bowl on fou r different occasions in his thunderous, five-to n Grumman Bearcat; clearing the heads of terrified football fans b y

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only 50 to 100 feet. "There were a couple of angry letters to the editor," laughs Hank Galpin (DC '67), YA's second president and a self-avowed fan of Hanson's. "His response was that Yale ought to see a great fighter plane flown by a great World War Two fighter pilot- and that was him."

H anson had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for completing 54 carrierbased missions near Japan. He also conducted a one-plane, one-professor aerobatics show in his spare time in order to finan ce his monstrous aircraft.

Due to, or perhaps despite the attention which Hanson drew to the club, YA grew from one aircraft to three, and from 22 active members to 60 in the course of three years. Since one of YA's charter members was an insider at Woodbridge Hall, support from the University was not long in coming. "President Brewster was a World War Two pilot himself," Galpin remembers. "So I'm sure he smiled favorably on the whole d~al." Today's incarnation of that same dub, which enjoys the full recognition of the administration, combines the eclectic pursuits of its predecessors with the more extensive resources now available.

In addition to sponsoring speakers and offering discount flight rates, the organization promotes inexpensive overseas tours.

In the 54 years separating the founding of the earliest and most recent Yale aviation clubs, the science of aeronautics made extraordinary advances, but the basic allure of flying remained the same. Hanson's powerful Grumman Bearcat could climb to an altitude of 10,000 feet in just 81 seconds, while Farwell's rickety Curtiss flying-boat would have taken three hours to cover the same distance. But for both men, as for David Ingalls, participation in a Yale flying club has always meant the opportunity for pilots to meet with others who can understand the relaxing exhilaration of that constant, calm engine noise .

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The New J ournaVApril 22, 1988 19

Exploding the Canon Erin Kelly Samuel Coleridge had been dumped and wanted sympathy. "Oh, Lady." the poet moaned, "what can these avaiV to lift the smothering weight from my breast?" the class stared blankly at "Dejection: An Ode" on the Kinko's xerox. To his cries of"Lady" Coleridge received no answer. Frustrated by the silence, the professor leaned forward .

"Don't you see, the poet takes a personal tragedy, and by putting it into traditional ode form, gives it universality."

Coleridge's universality was aimed at a select few. For the women in this seminar, Coleridge's words did not inspire sympathy: Despite his cries of "Lady," the poem was obviously addressing men. The realization that accepted conceptions of the universal are in fact ¡ exclusive has forced the academic community to reexamine the collection of Western writings known as the canon. The canon has traditionaUy been held to embody the deepest and most universal expres.s ions of the human spirit. Today, incre.a sing numbers of critics are exploring ways

to redefme the canon, pointing out its biases. Though the canon has always been under revision, the current explosion of different voices may be the greatest conflict it has ever seen.

The complex political and social questions that make up the debate affect students on an immediate level.

These questions boil down to how we relate to what we read. What do we expect books to do for us, and how do we as students and professors institutionalize these expectations in the canon or, more concretely, a study of the humanities at Yale?

Current focal points of the debate at Yale are the Directed Studies Program (OS) and the Humanities major. Both programs claim to provide grounding in the Western literary and philosophical tradition. This year the 42-year-old OS program faced a proposal for revision, while the experimental Humanities major received the stamp of tenure from the faculty in December. Within the Humanities major, dissent broke out last year in a seminar on Modernity. One work by a woman appeared on the syllabus- an eight-line poem by Emily Dickinson .

"It was a kind of brewing hostility among us, especially on the part of the women," said Susan Epstein (SM '88).

"We were frustrated with the limits ot the canon and its assumptions."

After hearing students' concerns, the faculty of the Humanities major organized a symposium addressing the question of the outsider and the tradition. Walter Cahn, professor of History of Art, spoke about teaching a course on cathedrals and being Jewish.

Ralph Hexter, associate professor of Classics, talked about being gay and teaching the Medieval period, with its love poetry and church doctrine. And Patricia Joplin, assistant professor of English, spoke of the tensions of studying a masculine literary tradition.

Joplin says it was "like a thundercloud" when she read Virginia Woolfs A Room of One's Own in a class at Hampshire College caUed "Looking Back Through Our Mothers" in 1972.

"It became so obvious that in my own education I'd been asked to forget I was female . I read in a way that was male, and went along registering these shocks and insults that had not been addressed," she said. Joplin decided to make up for her patriarchical education. She went out and found books by women. "I just bought them all, and began feeding myself, reading my way through them."

Similar frustrations prompted a committee to study the problem of gender in the OS curriculum last year.

Led by Assistant Professor of English Nancy Wright, the committee obtained a $2,500 grant from the Ford Foundation. The resulting report found that, although OS has undergone structural changes since its establishment in 1946. "the cour-.es' syllabuses had remained fuced in their

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assumption of a patriarchal perspective of Western culture." Outsiders such as women are usually saved for the last week of class, and inserted in such a haphazard way that, as Wright said, "no wonder no one believes they really belong to the tradition." The committee wanted to avoid tokenism by building in questions of gender and race from the beginning of the program.

One proposal was to read the sonnets of Petrarch alongside those of his contemporary Louise Lai>e, who challenged the way Petrarch represented women in his poetry. Timothy Hampton, an assistant professor of French who teaches DS Literature, implemented this suggestion, and said thC' dialogue among thtâ&#x20AC;˘ stu<ients and

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the two poets was exciting. "Most of my students ended up liking Lai>e better than Petrarch," he addect.

Although DS incorporated a few of the committee's suggestions, the proposal as a whole met rejection. The committee had wanted to read a slave narrative by Frederick Douglass alongside writings of Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson. "We thought it was important for American students to read a slave narrative, and we thought it could help establish a background against which to read Toni Morrison's Son.e qf Solomon, an Afro-American work," said Wright. The other literature instructors rejected this as untraditional, and generally thought the proposal too revisionary. Hampton said that while he applauded many aspects of the proposal, the report went too far in attempting to "make OS a course about gender issues." Overall, Wright was disappointed by the prevailing opinion that "tradition is not something to be innovated upon."

"The report was full of practical suggestions," said Cyrus Hamlin, professor of Comparative Literature, who has taught in and coordinated both DS and the Humanities major.

Hamlin does not mind revising OS as long as the program retains its concentration on texts, not social history. "The whole pOint is to maintain a sense of center, with an

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ÂŁv c{ancv occasional touch on the periphery," he said. But the definition of that center is exactly the problem. The question demands a c riti cal exam ination of the political , social. and artistic biases that determine what is central and what is pnipheral.

Hamlin said that while it is necessary for peripheral voices to hear themselves reflected in what they read, part of the value of the humanities comes from "a confrontation with otherness and strangeness." Hamlin explained that DS starts with texts like the Bible and Homer because they are the hardest to relate to, because the perspective is so different. Yet the most influential books we read are those that balance between our own perspective and one that challenges us. Grabbing on to what we recognize in a text, we use that hold to grapple with questions that confound our vision.

Hexter warns against the desire to see our reflection in what we read.

"Affirmation can be very heady, but very dangerous," he said. "It's a very American democratic idea that every-

one should find representation in the canon: People want the works they read to tell them something about themselves. This notion comes out of the romantic tradition- that literature must reflect who you are." Hexter says being gay doesn't keep him from appreciating the tradition. "I don't read to hear my own voice," he said. "I learn more from hearing different voices."

Hexter is correct in pointing out the danger of self-affirmation. But most peripheral groups do not want to read their own literature simply in order to shake their fists and proclaim their own strength. Certainly, there is an element of pride involved, but more important is the desire to hear a new voice speak and have it be recognized.

The DS History and Politics class, for example, studies 2,500 years of political thought without considering that women lived outside the economic and political power structures for most of this time. Testimony from a single voice creates monotonous history.

Tension between outside and inside continually reshapes the canon. Hexter

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points out that a cns1s in the canon occurred in the Roman Empire after Christianity became the state religion.

People wondered how to read the classics, written from a heathen perspective. They solved the problem by reinterpreting them. Scholars devoted their efforts to explaining how Aristotle was consistent with Christianity. â&#x20AC;˘ They pulled the canon back into the center by seeing it in the light of their own ideology.

Outsiders' attempts to widen the canon underlie its development.

Dante, now a canonical figure, wrote his Divine Comedy in Italian to give expression to his native language within the Latin tradition. Although previous standards disdained the vernacular, Dante stretched their boundaries. His writing challenged the assumptions of the canon and induced change. Nancy Seybold (ES '88), a Humanities major, explained, "It's easy to say, 'yeah, I'm a woman, and none of these old farts were women.'

But they had their own ways of being on the outside." The definitions of "outside" are not static. Although the outsiders have changed, feeling excluded is nothing new.

But this does not invalidate the concerns of those on the fringe. They must wonder how they fit into the tradition that "forms the basis of Western culture," as the Yale College Programs of Study describes the Humanities major.

Studying the Western tradition, women and minorities explore how the canon has categorized them, and how they might escape these imposed definitions. But such a way of reading becomes tiresome. It is difficult to find oneself always attacked or objectified.

"It does something to you to spend four years reading things like John Donne discussing women as continents," said Carla Power QE '88), an English rna¡

Best Mexican Restaurant In New Haven County and State-wide Runner-Up! Connecticut Magazine Readers' Poll 1988 jor. Reading a book requires aligning yourself with a point of view; when this point of view always places your own group in a submissive position, reading becomes masochistic. Looking on while your gender or ethnic group is continually maligned makes sociologtcal analysis, just as much as stoic silence, painful.

Many suggest that marginal groups look into special programs like Women's Studies, Afro-American Studies, or Gay Studies, a program Hexter has helped set up. Such programs have great value because they focus on peripheral voices, but their existence should not obscure the issues that the canon needs to examine. An Afro-American Studies department does not relieve the English department from considering questions of race. Further, the notion that certain parts of humankind need to enroll in their own specialized programs denies the possibility of a tradition which embodies a common human heritage-once a fundamental assumption of the humanities . Perhaps this possibility died long ago, but a means for dialogue between these groups remains essential. As Hexter observes, "Our only safety is in the play between the different perspectives. Whatever truth there is will be found slipping between the planes."

Study of the humanities should include such dialogue. Critical reading of the canon is not a reverent celebration of the books that make humanity great- it is a dynamic and often personal confrontation. Seybold believes this challenge motivates many Humanities majors. She noted that only a small percentage of the major is mad<· up nf ''hilt·. Chri,tian malt•, -the group toward which the canon has traditionally aimed. "I think maybe if the question of the canon doesn't bother you, you study something else.

I feel like Pve got to deal with it. We're not all canon-lovers, but you've got to study something to know how to change it."

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A boy sits in a park under the watchful eye of a middle-aged man. Gradually, the child becomes agitated. He moans, waving his arms in the air frantically.

The man leaps up, grabs the boy, and forces his arms down, but the child continues to thrash about. A passing stranger looks on, horrified. hurries over to them.

"What are you doing to that child "He's autistic," the man keeping a firm hold on the boy. stranger is not pacified.

"I don't care if he's artistic!" retorts. "It's not right!" Tell story, Kara Weeks smiles and her head. "So many people just rln~â&#x20AC;˘"'"" know what autistic means."

It means everything to Weeks, supervisor at Benhaven, which is institution for autistic children adulu. But the teachers and visors at Benhaven's residences schools a.re accustomed to 26 The New Journal/April 22. 1988

ignorance of autism. The syndrome was only recognized in 1943, by Harvard psychiatrist Leo Kanner. He named the condition "autism" because, as he observed at the time, "There is from the start an extreme autistic aloneness that, whenever possible, disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside." This social impenetrability is still widely considered to be autism's distinguishing feature.

Most autistic children also display ritualistic, self-stimulating motions.

These include prolonged rocking back and forth, frantic hand gestures, or simply shouting and running about wildly. In its most extreme form, this self-stimulation can turn into selfabuse. When "tantruming," autistic children may hit themselves or bang their heads against a wall.

Experts in the fifti~s and sixties saw autism as a psychological problem, brought on by deficient parenting.

Psychologist Brunb Bettelheim's influential book, The Empty Fortress, espoused such treatments as increased hugging, or even separation of the child from the parent held responsible- most frequently the mother Proponents of these therapies felt that they could cure an autistic child.

Researchers today generally eschew the blame-the-parent approach and are exploring possible biological and chemical causes. Presently, these doctors feel that the condition cannot be cured.

Autism is rare, affiicting only four or five out of every 10,000 children. Most are boys. All autistic children are either born with the syndrome or contract it during their first year of life.

Parents frequently have great difficulty caring for an autistic child at home, and the experience of one parent led to the creation of Benhaven . Amy Lettick, who founded the institution in 1968, named it for her autistic son, Ben. In seeking help for him, she had found that few organizations existed for autistic people. This changed with the passage o f the Education for Handicapped Children Act in 1975.

Househol d tasks like preparing dinner are part of behavior therapy.

The legislation requires that every school district in the United States provide free and appropriate education for all children, regardless of handicap, in order to receive vital federal funds.

Programs for autisti~ children are more common today. Still, Benhaven remains unique in its size and scope; it is the only organization of its kind. in Connecticut, as well as one of the most respected in the nation. The residents and students range from young children to adults in their thirties, and they function at many different levels, both socially and intellectually. Most are not simply autistic, but also retarded.

Others, who do not display the standard autistic behavior, may show a few symptoms such as ritualistic motion.

Benhaven has four branches: a main group of residences in an isolated area of North Haven; the Charles H. Orazen adult workshop near New Haven's industrial Forbes Avenue; a school in Wallingford; and a small residence, Medalie House, for high-functioning, autistic people. These sites are all staffed by trained teachers as well as volunteers. Medical treatments, such as the administration of drugs, are provided by doctors from the Child Study Center, a branch of the Yale psychology department, which has been linked to Benhaven since it opened.

The center also runs a class, offered through Yale, in which students volunteer at one of the residences or schools. Psychology major Kat y Schneebaum (PC '89), who went on to work at Benhaven for a summer after taking the class, admits that a full-time

job there can be draining. "Even though Benhaven gets amazing results, it's still on a relative scale," she says.

"My conception of what success meant really changed while working there.

Success for these kids could mean making a bed." The constant frustrations and repetitiOUS behavior therapy tax all Benhaven employees, and not surprisingly, there is a high turnover rate. Still, those who have stayed point to one overriding reason: They love the kids.

The pastoral setting of "the farm," Benhaven's principle branch in North Haven, consists of several ranch-type dwellings surrounded by woods. Each residence houses a different age group: Baker House is primarily for young children, Nakash House for adolescents, and Rosenberg House for adults. Another house, johnson, is kept locked, because it contains "runners" who will take any opportunity to run away.

Both N akash and Baker, the children's homes, are notably spare inside; bedrooms contain few furnishings except chairs covered with plastic and pictures screwed into the wall. In one child's room, the closet door is tied shut. Linda Simonson, the program and staff coordinator , explains that the children sometimes urinate onto their clothing. Another room has an extra layer of wood along the lower wall, but even this has been partially stripped away. While such destructive behavior is not an everyday occurrence, the employees must prepare for it. The adolescents at Nakash are particularly The New JournaVApril 22, 1988 27

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difficult. The hormonal changes of puberty do not bypass these teenagers.

The residents all have specific, longterm goals, based on their abilities, which are laid out each year at a meeting among the teachers, social workers, and parents. The child is helped along by positive reinforcement- a piece of candy or a smile- which rewards appropriate behavior. Notebooks contain each person's daily activities, broken down Each resid ent has specific goals, into minute steps and indicating b ased on t h eir abilities. whether a step requires a teacher's escalate into real violence, which is prompting. The notebook for one boy difficult to control when dealing with a contains "taking a shower" and grown ps:rson. All too frequently, this "making my bed," as well as activities violence is self-directed. In one parcalled "chocolate chip cookies" and ticularly severe case, a boy would "hobo's dinner." These two consist of a throw himself face down on the series of photographs that the children ground, without even the reflex to put follow like recipes. The first shows an his hands up for protection. Benhaven apron; the second hands being washed; needs to employ restraints, such as the third a bowl, and then the nec- tying a tantruming individual to a essary ingredients and utensils one by chair or to a staff member. The State Board of Mental Retardation offers one.

Since most of the farm's residents specific guidelines about w h ich are nonverbal, they often commu- restraints are allowed. New methods nicate through pictures. One child, must be approved, and all procedures doing a puzzle with his visiting father, recorded each time they are used. makes use of a "conversation board," Representatives from the board pay which has pasted to it his photo, words frequent visits to Benhaven to check on like "want" and "more," and a number how individuals are being treated.

The issue of restraint is delicate, as of different foods and activities to which he can point. Sign language is Benhaven recently learned all too well. also used, even with the few residents Last fall , one mother sued the instiwho do speak. One behavior associated tution, charging that they were with autism is echolalia, where the abusing her child. This woman had in autistic child will repeat what is said to fact bought for Benhaven t1le very him or her. A few others, especially the straitjacket being used on her child. higher-functioning residents, can But it is not uncommon for parents to respond to questions quite normally. have difficulty accepting the use of But an autistic person rarely takes the restraints, though they are for the initiative and actually speaks without child's own protection. being prompted. Simonson explains, Those concerned about the however, that this seemingly apathetic possibility of abuses raise the question behavior may be misleading. "They do whether it proves unwise for autistic form relationships, but in a different children to be hidden away at isolated way," she says. "They attempt social locations like the farm . Robert Burt, interaction. Their inappropriate be- chairman of Benhaven's board of dihaviors may be ways to initiate this." rectors since 1985, has serious misThese work in getting people's givings about this kind of separation, attention. Many of the children which makes it harder to monitor periodically make a loud n01se or treatment. "These children can call . forth a very primitive kind of fear in gesture wildly.

These behaviors can, unfortunately, their caretakers," he says. "It's very

• CATERING • SANDWICHES • TAKE-OUT

easy to get locked into a very vicious cycle in which the kids are regarded by the adults as subhuman, and so inhuman things are done to them."

Burt also feels that abuses are hard to monitor in large institutions. He points out that Mansfield, one of Connecticut's state homes for the mentally retarded, grew to house 5,000 people until a lawsuit ordered it to decrease in size. "Mansfield is a terrible place," Burt says, "but it started as a family-run school in about 1890 for ten kids who lived with a superintendent, in a beautiful bucolic setting. So that's my constant refrain when we talk about enlarging. I always

The notebook for one boy contains "taking a shower" and ~making my bed," as well as activities called "chocolate chip cookies" and "hobo's dinner."

tioning only that it should not be considered a national model.

Inger Connery, a supervisor at Benhaven, points out that the Wallingford school may in fact be typical. "Sometimes states say 'yes, everybody's integrated in our state,'" she says, "and then you go and look and they're actually in separate classrooms." Admittedly, teachers unfamiliar with autism often have trouble dealing with the special needs of autistic students. Most of the Benhaven staff think that integration is appropriate only for the highestfunctioning children. "Their behavior will be less disruptive, upsetting, and confusing to the normal kids," explains Dr. Joel Bregman of the Child Study Center.

Despite its continued emphasis on separate schooling, Benhaven is turning toward a policy of integrating with the community. "Everything is being examined right now," says Benhaven Teacher Tom Sobocinski.

"We're talking in groups and committees about what is our mission, what is our philosophy, and that breaks down into our techniques and directions." Benhaven's new direction has led to the integrative programs at Medalie House and the Charles H .

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say, remember Mansfield." Unfor- Six of Benhaven's highest functioning tunately, Benhaven is under pressure residents, ages 17-20, live at Medalie from the state to expand. In Burt's House in New Haven. The ornate view, Benhaven's small size and building, which once housed a girls' contact with the outside world have fmishing school, was first used by helped keep it from becoming "a Benhaven as a school, but later was transformed into a residence. This warehouse operation."

Like the farm, the Benhaven school decision provoked some hostility. in Wallingford is set apart; its students "There was a movement within the are not integrated within the normal neighborhood to raise money to buy school system. "People rationalize it by the building from us," Burt recalls. saying they're happier amongst their "Before we met with the community, it own kind, and it's cruel to subject them was possible for some people to say, to the stress of comparing themselves 'Well, rm not opposed to retarded to normal kids," Burt says. "But I think people in principle, but there are practhat stress and comparison is a normal tical problems.' They'd cite things part of development and growth. The like parking, and noise. But then when impulse to protect these kids because we were so flexible on the practical they're 'different' can mask a lot of problems, all that was left was . . . " He negative feelings." Still, he speaks smiles wryly and does not continue.

Considering the initial opposition, highly of Benhaven's program, cau-

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. The typical Benhaven bedroom is spare, with a few amenities for the higher-functioning residents.

Medalie's residents have succeeded rently clean rooms at the Ramada Inn. In many ways, the residents at Meremarkably in winning over their neighbors. Teacher Peter Davis helped dalie House are different from the to supervise a paper route and other average autistic person. Except for one projects such as street cleaning around who is deaf, they are all verbal and the area, all of which have received answer questions readily. Weeks exmuch praise. Appreciative personal plains that the staff has a rule not to letters were even sent by neighbors to talk about the residents in front of the residents who did the work. Kara them. "You have to try to treat them as Weeks, the supervisor at Medalie, equals, not kids," she says. "That's the notes that once the kids learned how to hardest, but also the most important deliver the papers themselves, they thing." Because of their higher-funcwere far more conscientious than most tioning ability, the Medalie residents deliverers about getting the job done are taught through psycho-educational efficiently. The task capitalizes on their techniques. "Here we can use actual strengths: It's repetitive, which autistic discussion, not just things like planned children don't mind. But it does re- ignoring," Weeks explains. "A person quire learning basic skills. can help create a program for The Medalie residents also crossed themselves, and that kind of control is an important boundary when they at- effective. There's also a lot of group tended a concert at Yale's Woolsey discussion about things like rules."

Hall. "People at Benhaven were very Another Medalie technique is the use nervous," Weeks says, "but we took of non-contingent positive rethem and they were perfect. They see warding-that is, rewarding people things like going out, which we see as with privileges simply as a treat, rather rights, as privileges . So they didn't than making them earn it. want to blow it. The success with the The more relaxed atmosphere and concert erased a lot of misconceptions close-knit group help Medalie House and got us started." Since then, the function like a family. The residents group has made further outings to have known each other now for over a other concerts and sports events, and year. But their relationships have a their weekly activities include bowling time limit. Two of the Medalie stuand shopping. Several also volunteered dents are about to tum 21 , which is the at the Red Cross, performing simple cutoff point for funding through the clerical tasks, and two of them cur- school system . Afterwards, money

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must come from Medicaid, mainly available through the recipient's home state. About half of the residents at Medalie come from other states, and may have to return home or enter another institution . Benhaven's adult residence is small although other group h omes d o exist in Connecticut. As Burt says, "Our theory is not that we have a lifetime commitment to these people,

"Just staying at the table for an h our is a taught beh avior." but that we take very behaviorally distu rbed kids and try to teach them to live in a group setting."

The Charles H . Drazen adult workshop hopes to integrate autistic people into society by placing them in regular paying jobs. Located in a neighborhood of factories , Drazen is a small structure squeezed in between a banana company and a sausage company. When workers are unemployed, they spend their time performing tasks in the workshop itself. "Usually it's copies of jobs that we know we'll be getting or that we have had in the past," explains Supervisor Inger Connery. "They use real materials.

Sometimes we ask a customer if he'll leave us a few extra boxes of things."

As is typical at Benhaven , the worksh op is understaffed. At the worktables, if a staff member turns away, the people gradually stop working, and begin to stare or to engage in ritualized motions. Still, as Connery points out, "Just staying at a table for an hour is a tau ght behavior. All these things have

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been worked on since they were very young, because part of autism is being very distractable, being always in tune to what you need and your own internal sensations." A t an unattended table, one woman with glasses and a blond ponytail rocks back and forth, while the man beside her erupts in a sudden flurry of hand gestures that looks like a drum solo. They are making surgical bags; this involves folding a white plastic sheet into a rectangle, with the aid of a wooden board or ruler, and secur ing it with a tie. The staff, mostly college graduates, moves back and forth, starting people up again by saying their name or simply pointing to the p ile of plastic sheets. "A lot of people here can do the job," Connery says. "The problem is motivation. T h ey're very dependent on prompting."

When an autistic adult does take a job outside, he or she is always accompanied by a teacher. This program is called "supported employment." Supervisor Tom Sobocinski explains that ideally, jobs are suited to a worker's strengths. Some, for example, have an unusually high tolerance for loud noise. They will also have no desire to socialize at work , and this creates a picture of efficiency. "I preach mutual dependability," Sobocinski says. "We are unique in the state, and I think in a lot of other parts of the country as well, in that we put our people on the payroll. They become employees of the company and so there are nice things like at T hanksgiving, they brought turkeys home."

Walking around the main room of the workshop, Sobocinski points to a bulletin board covered with all the different buttons the workers have made, from "Friend of the New Haven L ibrary" to "I love Midori melonballs."

The workshop owns six button-making machines. Other jobs have included delivering phone books and assembly line work.

But the training at Drazen goes beyond work skills. Many of the group homes incorporate the teaching of skills and responsibility in to daily life, through household tasks like folding

laundry or preparing meals. Drazen provides other opportunities for community interaction through eating out. going shopping, or taking small trips during free time. One worker goes out for breakfast regularly with a supervisor. "That starts the day off witb a real positive interaction," Sobocinski says.

Following Drazen's example, the residences are also emphasizing work skills. "The trend now is to start in nursery school and kindergarten," Connery says. "Things like taking responsibility, independence, having a job. It's not such a new idea for regular kids, because in kindergarten, you have things like you are in charge of watering the plants, you are feeding the rabbit. But for a disabled population this wasn't always necessarily the case."

The adolescents at the farm also learn how to function in the outside world. As Connery explains, seemingly simple things like eating out can be broken down into a "large number of separate steps. "Each thing might have to be taught in a very systematic way.

So you do need to start early ," she says.

Meanwhile, the Wallingford school emphasizes academic skills like math in useful contexts such as counting money or telling time. These are taught alongside less school-oriented activities like toothbrushing.

Benhaven hopes that through such instruction , its graduates will have experienced life within the community from an early age, and will be stronger candidates for programs like Drazen.

The staff does acknowledge, though, that some cases are beyond such h!!lp.

When school funding ends at the age of 21, the residents with the least potential may be placed in ~tate institutions, considered by many a last resort. Benhaven is expensive, and its programs can only do so much. But for some, it can mean the difference between an overcrowded institution and a job in the community.

•

.fcnnif~r Fl~issrur, a junior in Calhoun Coll~g~. is on th~ staff of TN]·

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On Pride in Prejudice When Allan Bloom, in his book. The become taboo: We are no longer Closing of the American Mind, writes, WASPs, blacks, men, or women-we "These kids just do not have prejudices are merely individuals. We are against anyone," he is not praising uninspired by music, our studies, or students for their tolerance and under- members of the opposite sex. In its standing. On the contrary, Bloom effort to make everyone equal, demomaintains that prejudice is healthy cracy has made everyone more or less because it serves as a testing ground the same, without prejudice or pasfor philosophical and spiritual ideas. If SIOn. The structure of higher education students have no prejudices, all thinking is done in a vacuum; students are has changed through democratic prodrained of the passion to believe in grams such as affirmative action and anything strongly. Drawing dis- coeducation, pitting our prejudices tinctions, according to Bloom, has against our experience. Bloom labor34 The New Journal/April 22, 1988

iously documents this change, and draws conclusions based on what he sees . The institution s in which he has taught ove r the course of several decades have given him an excellent testing ground for his theories. But after all the social upheavals of counterculture, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the sexual revolution, the fundamental human nature of the student has not changed -as much as Bloom fears. Prejudice, with all its advantages and disadvantages, still

exists. Human nature does not alter over a matter of decades, no matter how monumental the collapse of the existing structure. The passion for people and learning is still there.

The breakdown, as Bloom sees it, is epitomized by the rise of rock music and the fall of classical music. He does not equate rock with the pelvis thrusting of Elvis Presley or with the seductive wardrobe of Madonna-that would be too simplistic. Instead he states, "This strong stimulant, which Nietzsche called Nihiline, was for a very long time, almost fifteen years, epitomized in a single figure, Mick .Jagger." H e¡ informs us that "rock music has one appeal, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire." No one will try to refute his claim by comparing the Stones to Stravinsky, but one can draw a parallel between the passionate effects of the composers on the listener.

Looking more realistically at this music which "closes our minds to the higher pursuits of life," ¡¡we must do what Bloom neglects to do: look at the various roots and branches of the huge tree of which Mick Jagger and his barbaric appeal are only a part. Rock stems from centuries of blues and jazz.

Far from being a purely homogenous tradition, rock music contains diverse strains. Take any four roommates, and even if every one is a rock fan, each will have distinct tastes within that genre. While Bloom may consider rock nihilistic, I have prejudices against my roomates' music while remaining passionately inspired by my own.

Not only does Bloom overlook these various branches of rock, and their accompanying prejudices, he prodaim<; that "rock music provides premature ecstasy artificially induces exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors." Bloom paints an exaggerated picture of students as sexuallyfrenzied rats following the Pied Piper Mick Jagger. He is reduced to the character of the evangelists, condemning "on-campus forrniiication!" For our salvation, the evangelists offer the Good Book;

Bloom offers the Great Books.

While Bloom sees rock music as a dangerous disruption of a valuable system of prejudices, he feels that the civil rights movement, ironically, has done the opposite. Through affirmative action, the movement has simply replaced one bad system with another.

Bloom writes, "The programmatic brotherhood of the sixties did not culminate in integration but veered off toward black separation." He points to the segregated tables in the dining halls as evidence of this phenomenon.

But the tables in dining halls "where no white student would comfortably sit down" are only part of the story. Some people would not comfortably sit down at an all Dramat table or Yalesbians table anymore than others would sit down at an all crew-jock table. These are more subtle prejudices that Bloom . ignores. It was not any different in Bloom's college days.

Bloom states, "Whatever their politics, they [students] believe that all men- and women- are created equal and have equal rights. Whenever they

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meet anyone, considerations of sex, color, religion, money, nationality, play no role in their reactions." Would Bloom rejoice if told that this statement is patently false? I may be equally glad to see a female, black, Mormon, or gay friend, but this does not mean that I ignore her or his beliefs, background, or upbringing. I avoid religious conversation with devout Catholics, and would no more arm wrestle a woman I was trying to impress than I would send roses to my friend on his birthday. Healthy as well as malicious prejudice is still alive and well and living on campus.

Bloom also bemoans that " roman ce is dead." Coed living conditions, coed bathrooms, and coed beds have essentially taken the spice out of encountering the opposite sex. We are like our parents after 25 years of marriage, yet we lack even the initial excitement of crossing the threshold on

wedding night. If this is true, then why is there a proliferation of flower stands on every street corner? Who is buying the flowers?

Since the establishment of coeducation, Bloom claims that truly erotic sex has diminished substantially, and lovers no longer say "I love you." At this point, I wonder where he is getting his information. Asking his students questions in or after class is one thing; expecting them to reveal their most personal and intimate feelings is quite another. Unless Bloom bas been practtcmg serious voyeurism, his statements on the loss of love and passion don't hold water.

The forces that Bloom sees as so destructive have not destroyed our prejudices. The conflicting goals of counterculture, instead of replacing a once grand moral structure with empty relativism, may even create new prejudices. He observes, "The sexual

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revolution marched under the banner of freedom, feminism under that of equality." Their problem arose when the two clashed over issues such as pornography, he states accurately. In a later paragraph, he points to another contradiction: "The sexual revolution, however, wanted men and women to get together bodily, while feminism wanted them to be able easily to get along separately." These contrad ictions are still unfolding, and we have yet to see where they will leave us. Such movements can be summed up as the antitheses to what h ad been the theses of previous decades. Yet Bloom wants to deny that there is or will be a synthesis of these two stages.

Bloom gives an exhaustive presentatio n o f the cha nges in America n as well as in European thought. Every paragraph of his book is fascinating and p rovocative. But because he fails to understand us on ·more than a superficial level, he fails to see our passions and our prejudices, our heroes and our villains . H e does not eat breakfast, brush his teeth, or wait to use the shower with us. H e has a limited knowledge of what we feel, and therefore, of what we lack.

Bloom presents the reader with a well-defined figure of a student- nice, as he puts it, but basically uninspired.

By all detached reasoning, Bloom should be believed, but he is no longer a student. In his impatience to prescribe a remedy for our ills, Bloom invents the disease. His overall claim is that higher education must get back to basics before we can become healthy again. It is ironic that he has forgotten the most basic lesson of education-you can't judge a book by its cover.

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New Haven , on Yale Campus The New JournaVApril 22, 1987 37

Afterthought!Tom Augst

To Thailand. and Back "What are you doing here?"

I had taken my chances, I admit.

Walking through the Yale campus by the Boola Boola Shop with the suspect credential of Recent Graduate, the question was bound to occur from the curious, the well-meaning, and the Oh-Hi-How-R-U (Keep walking, I don't really want to know) types alike.

The question itself was perfectly innocent. But the tone implied something further: embarrassed surprise, as if I had stumbled into a black tie affair ready for a costume party; exasperated pity, as if I had stayed at this party well into its bitter end; condescending indifference, as ifl were a street person asking for handouts of nostalgia.

Disbelief: Why didn't I grab my chance to escape, finally, from this prison?

I mumbled some answer with suitably Yale self-assurance. I looked at the trees, at the sidewalk, at my watch, all the while smiling, nodding, and hearing myself respond with such phrases as "learning experience," "challenging," "satisfying"- and the clincher, "I should be out of here by May or August." I had gnawed these words to the bone long ago; now they .. . were stuck in my throat. After six .::. ¡ ~¡p1onths of repetition, how could I post~~ 6ibly draw any more sustenance from

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38 The New Journal/April 22, 1988

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test, along with thousands of others in what was a record year for the LSAT ~ administration? Wasn't I still con~ sidering applying tp law school? I - broke out in a sweat of delirious self~ examination: W hat should I , a typiu ~ cally ambitious Yalie, be doing? Once .:; again, I felt uneasy about working in New Haven.

My ego told me that I had defied the destiny that had brought me to Yale- I had left the path of the Wunderkinder. ~

dry words like "challenging" and "satisfying"?

I felt slightly dizzy. "And, uh, what are you up to?" I asked, breathing in deeply. My acquaintance's mouth opened into a dark chasm and disgorged references to a familiar, faraway life, one that I, too, had lived.

"I'm in a play . . . spring break . . . senior essay . . . . " And then what?

"Maybe law school . . . ." Blah blah blah. Hadn't I considered law school myself? A few months ago, desperate and aimless, hadn't I even taken that

In sixth grade, the school nurse called me into her office, made me draw pictures of myself, and then informed me that I was gifted. I left her office wondering where I'd caught this disease. That is when I entered the cloistered company of boys and girls who went to Math and Science Club and did arts and crafts after school (I had to miss two episodes of "Speed Racer" per week). Then there was tracking in public schools where, no matter how many new kids you saw in the halls, you saw the same 30 faces in all of your classes. SAT scores danced before my eyes, as did teacher recommendations, and then college reply letters telling me that l was diverse, talented, and accepted. Proud parents, diplomas, awards, blah blah blah.

I had made a speech to my high

school class at graduation where I proselytized: Don't succumb to what others expect of you; destiny is not something to be comfortably accepted but must continually be remade. And after my speech, I saw the uncompromising face of my physics professor, Mr. P, telling me, "I hope you don't forget what you said." At the time, I was grinning too much, filled with the promise of the future, unable to think about what he meant.

"So, uh, is it uh . . . strange ... living in New Haven?"

I blinked. Mr. P was not watching me; I was in front of the Boola Boola Shop. "Strange?" I repeated. My acquaintance looked around nervously. She clearly thought I was strange. "Well, yeah, being so close to Yale and all," I said.

I knew this sense of strangeness could come upon me anywhere, disguised as nostalgia or melancholy. But being in New Haven increased my awareness of the prQtection the Blue Mother affords its young. Standing in front of the Boola Boola shop, I looked into the window and remembered that for a moment, sometime in my junior year,the paraphernalia appealed to me.

I would have blissfully wrapped myself up in Yale sweats, scarves, and even Boola Boola underwear. Between the shyness of freshman year and the camaraderie of graduation, we immerse ourselves in a stimulating and structured environment. Such a selfcontained and formative experience can give us the illusion that we are finished creatures, done with learning, and ready to accept our destiny, comfortably. A year later, rm having doubts.

"What's strange is that the Boola Boola underwear was so gosh darn snug," I mumbled. Confused, my acquaintance stared at me for several seconds, looked at her watch, and suddenly remembered she was late for something, but it had been nice talking to me. "Take care-" I called after her.

I continued to stare at my reflection in the window.

What was I doing here? Living, cer-

Why didn't I grab my chance to escape, finally, from this prison? tainly. "Dude, you call that living?" my reflection answered. Wearing reflector glasses, cut ofT shorts, tye-dye shirt, and a big grin, he said, "Oughta be in Thailand. Kickin' back on the steps of a temple-some radical Frisbee turf out here." That's just an escape, I thought.

I looked more closely, and decided I would look good in a suit and tie. "Wall Street's for me, buddy," he said, pulling at the wristband of his Rolex.

"They started me at 35 grand, but I could be pulling in 60 with my bonus."

And look like everybody else? Perhaps

the academic robe was for me, dressing me for a life of the mind in some British university. "If you must walk off the path to cross the green, for heaven's sake don't let the Dons catch you."

Engrossed by my reflected image, I was tempted by these roles, so easily adopted. But Mr. P's face appeared once again before my eyes. He reminded me that no matter where I am or what I do, it is the fate of adulthood to reevaluate one's standards and goals, to rediscover what is satisfying.

After four years of weaning, of learning how to fit in and create an identity for oneself in a community, the Yale graduate -like any other graduatemust learn all over again. In the end, one must wear one's own underwear.

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Tom A ugst is a graduate of Silliman College.

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The New JoumaVApril 22, 1988 39

The class participat since the $2~04 contributed to $26,0 In ptedges to (a 15% increase