Search for balance: town partners or ivory towers?

Yale isn't the only one; from Harvard to UCLA, colleges rest uneasily in their cities

EWAN MACDOUGAL/YH Yale's gates require IDs to keep New Haven's residents out...

From major events like aldermanic election scandals to the daily routine of using IDs to enter colleges, reminders of Yale's relationship with New Haven are everywhere. Yale realizes engagement with the city is essential, and seeks to reach out to town residents. Yet perceptions that students live in an ivory tower linger, and there is still a long way to go.

"We work closely with the city to ensure that the interaction and interconnectedness work to everyone's best advantage," said Michael Morand, assistant vice president of education and government at the Office of New Haven and State Affairs. "One would hope that people are wise enough to see that the architecture of the campus is somewhat misleading, and that it's simply not the truth that Yale is an inaccessible campus."

Approximately 500,000 visitors come to campus each year, many of them local residents. This number includes people who participate in Dwight Hall's community service groups, attend performances given by the School of Music, tour the campus, or visit University museums. Since both the Yale University Art Gallery and the British Art Center are free and open to the public, each attracts over 100,000 sightseers every year. Annual admission to the Peabody Museum numbers around 170,000.

Additionally, the Yale University Visitors' Center, located on Elm Street across from the New Haven Green, runs tours everyday year-round. The tours attracted 18,872 people during the 1998-99 school year. The Visitors' Center also lends its space out to national and local non-profit organizations free of charge.

To celebrate Yale's tercentennial, the University will host an open house for the city the weekend of Sat., Oct. 21, 2000. Its goal will be to allow New Haven residents "to get to know us and to feel comfortable with Yale," Janet Lindner, director of the tercentennial, said. "I think this is a great opportunity to open the campus to the community and let us both share in each other's riches." Lindner also hopes the open house will encourage local residents to return to the campus throughout the year in order to take part in Yale's programs, performances and special events.

But not everyone in the Yale community shares this view. Stephanie Schmid, TC '02, a member of the Yale College Council, said that, in her experience, Yale's attempts at community outreach are "superficial and usually fiscal in nature." Concerning Yale's plan to open the campus to the community for a day during the tercentennial, Schmid said, "This seems completely pathetic to me. By showing [New Haven residents] my dorm room, I will supposedly be letting them into my life and sharing Yale with them?"

American universities: angels or devils?

EWAN MACDOUGAL/YH ...but at Sterling Memorial Library, all are welcome.

Yale is not alone in its ambiguous relationship with the city around it. Many American universities have been alternately praised and criticized for the role they play in shaping their surrounding communities. Steve Sann, a UCLA alumnus and community activist, described what he calls "the angel and the devil syndrome" of the modern university. "Initially, everybody is thrilled by the amenities of a university," he said. "But over time, I think it's inevitable that tensions [with] the surrounding community will arise."

Sann said that UCLA's administrators are acutely aware of the school's relation to its surroundings. UCLA is situated next to Bel Air, Calif. in Westwood Hills, Calif., an area in which, Sann said, "there isn't a home for less than a million dollars." He said that UCLA has "redoubled its outreach" initiatives in the city of Los Angeles. "[We] don't want to be seen as an ivory tower that's separate from the heart of downtown L.A.," he said. In the spirit of its roots as a public educational institution, the university developed UCLA Extension, a continuing adult education program with over 4,500 course offerings. In addition, UCLA's School of Education works closely with principals and teachers in the Los Angeles public school system to improve standard K-12 education so that city kids are better prepared for college.

According to Andrew Gurman, BK '98, a Harvard law student, Harvard and Cambridge remain two very distinct communities in spite of efforts at integration. "When I walk by Harvard Square, I rarely ever see Harvard students—many of whom live across the street from the Square in Harvard Yard—go up to [local residents] or see [locals] approach the students," he said. "The reluctance of the two groups to interact symbolizes to me a real break between the university and the town. There is no denying that there is a separation between the two."

This separation is further exacerbated by the inaccessibility of Harvard's libraries. Widener Library, the main library, lets locals only into its display room, where a copy of the Guttenberg Bible is displayed, and then only if they show proof of Cambridge residency. Lamont and Houghton Libraries require a Harvard ID. By contrast, Yale's Sterling Memorial, Cross Campus, Beinecke, and Isaac S. Gilmore Music Libraries are all open to the public, although access to the stacks in Sterling requires a University ID.

Students at comparable universities expressed similar doubts about whether it is possible to succeed at bridging the town-gown division. "All speakers are open [to the public], but the outsiders who come are generally not from the surrounding community," Brown University sophomore Alex-andra Sullivan said. "They usually have some connections to Brown, either as alumni or friends of professors."

Brown does have an active community service program, however. "The best service happens over time, where real relationships can develop and reciprocity can occur," Peter Hocking, director of the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown, said. Hocking cited the center's deaf literacy program, which provides treatment and education to hearing-impaired adults, as an example of a program that builds enduring relationships between students and local residents.

At Princeton University, the Program in Continuing Education allows staff and community residents to enroll in courses for a fee. However, the cost of the program limits its accessibility. The university does offer a Community Auditing Program, through which local residents can attend lectures by registering with Princeton's Office of Community and State Affairs. Yet Princeton sophomore Rishi Sanyal said, "In my experience, it's Princeton the university and then Princeton the town. I don't think Princeton especially encourages mixing."

Lecture courses: bridging the gap

Opening lectures to the public is a popular way for universities to reach out to their surrounding communities. With the goal of making university education more accessible to the public, Yale's DeVane Lecture Series is open to all members of the Yale and New Haven communities with no enrollment required. The lecture series from the fall of 1998, "Yale and the External World: the Shaping of the University in the 20th Century," taught by History Professor Gaddis Smith, PC '54, GRD '61, brought scores of New Haven residents and Yale alumni to Battell Chapel each week. Sylvia Wu, MC '01, said having non-Yale students in the class enhanced the experience. "I definitely think that lectures should be open to the public. The non-Yalies seemed much more appreciative of the lectures, and they added a lot to the class by relating their personal experiences."

Yale's Special Students Program also offers courses to around 100 students from a range of backgrounds. However, these students are drawn from an applicant pool similar to that from which the bulk of the undergraduate body is admitted, and there is no stipulation that a certain number of spots must be reserved for New Haven residents. One educational initiative that does target New Haven is Yale's New Haven and Area High School Program, which allows 30 to 40 distinguished local high school students to take college courses.

At Harvard, world leaders give addresses at the ARCO Forum of Public Affairs, sponsored by the Kennedy School of Government. All speeches are free and open to the public. "We want people to experience the benefit of having an institution like Harvard in their community," Mary Power, senior director of community relations at Harvard, said. Harvard has no continuing lectures like the DeVane series, however.

University of Chicago junior Ben Schreiber cited open lectures as a source of positive interactions between faculty and students and residents of Hyde Park. "Toni Morrison came to lecture here, and there were more people from the community than there were from the school," he said. He said, however, that Chicago's overall relationship with the Hyde Park community was "contentious, at best" and noted that the university's police force is the third largest institutional police force in the world, behind that of the Vatican and Columbia University.

Big footprints: universities and development

The decision of a university to undertake development at the expense of local businesses is one of the most heated issues in town-gown relations. Construction of a new medical facility at UCLA destroyed 1,000 university parking spaces. In response, students and faculty took over commercial parking lots. "People were apoplectic," Sann said.

In the 1950s, University of Chicago developers forced many bars and shops to close in an attempt to isolate students from the minority populations moving into Hyde Park. Their strategy backfired, however, as the economic development around the university has been stifled. "In a sense, the community problems are partly the result of the university," Schreiber said.

Yale's Broadway expansion has also come at the expense of certain local merchants. Store 24 was forced to move, and recent casualties have included Ashley's Ice Cream Parlor, Broadway Pizza, The Daily Caffé and Quality Wine. Jim Albrikes, a 15-year New Haven resident, said, "Yale is like a microcosm of socialism at work. It has arbitrarily decided to close down businesses without asking the community residents what they really want or need."

However, New Haven administrators have been supportive so far of Yale's development. Citing the University's status as the city's largest employer and third-largest property-tax payer, Mayor John DeStefano wrote a Hartford Courant article in August saying that the city wants to see the University expand. "Under the leadership of Yale President Rick Levin [GRD '74]," he wrote, " we have moved beyond the old fears and ignorance about the University. This is not a zero-sum game where one of us has to lose for the other to win."

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