Giving Yale to Connecticut

Harper's Magazine, November 1977.

Excerpt:

The purpose of a Yale education can hardly be to turn out a race of idiots. But one would have thought that was what Yale precisely engages in. Walking out of the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena during the hottest days of the controversy, I espied the Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin walking in. I introduced myself. He greeted me stiffly, and then said, as he resumed his way into the hotel, “Why do you want to turn Yale education over to a bunch of boobs?” Since he had been chairman of the educational policies committee of the Yale Corporation, it struck me that if indeed the alumni were boobs, he bore a considerable procreative responsibility. Certainly his contempt for Yale’s demonstrated failure was far greater than my alarm at its potential failure.

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