Bob Hungerford, Yale Class of '60, sat in front of the fire at the Yale Club reminiscing with the few of his classmates still alive and well about the good old days, the old Yale, the Yale of patrician heritage, noblesse oblige, culture, legacy and honor.
It was a privilege to be an alumnus of such a storied, revered institution, one whose founding fathers were among New England's best and brightest and who set an example of patriotism, faith, honor, and disciplined ambition.
Bob was a graduate of Exeter Academy one of the exclusive preparatory schools of the Northeast, breeding ground for the Ivy League. St. Grottlesex, as St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, and Exeter were collectively called, prepared young gentlemen not only for higher education but for a higher calling. Men graduating from the Ivy League were to be the country's future leaders of government, finance, and industry, and few disappointed. They had legacy behind them. After a sojourn in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they as members of the Davenport expedition, were founders of New Haven and Puritan settlements in New Jersey. Later generations were were founders of the great investment banks of New York, captains of industry, and civic and community leaders.
The Hungerfords inherited wealth, created more of it, and spent it wisely but well. Bob's family still owned a 'cottage' in Newport, most of Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard, waterfront properties on Nantucket and homes on Park Avenue and Beacon Hill.
In all their storied history, there was never once even a hint of scandal. The family was a model of patrician propriety and good will, generous, respectful, and considerate. They were the models of a Jeffersonian democracy where the individual was meant to thrive, but never at the expense of the community in which he lived; and they were advocates of a Hamiltonian aristocratic ruling class - educated in the spirit of the Enlightenment to educate others in the way of faith, service, and patriotism.
It was therefore with immense disgust and revulsion that Bob and his classmates viewed the Yale of today - a university no better than second and third rate public schools of the Midwest and sent on its downward spiral by Dean Inslee Clark who thought it reasonable and politically advantageous to open the doors. With the new diversity and the cleansing of any and all remnants of legacy, tradition, and history, Yale was no longer Yale.
Bob had nothing against the smart Brooklyn Jews who finally got their chance at the Ivy League - they added a Harvard note of intellectual genius and individual artistry - but they were the first to erode the aristocratic foundations on which the university was built. Yale was not just a locus for high-level academic achievement, but the Westminster Abbey of American culture. Any school can turn out mathematicians and accounting wizards, but Yale was training a generation of leaders, men for whom America was not just a residence, but a place their families had built and they had preserved.
Cato the Elder was an ancient Roman philosopher and educator whose Triptychs were the foundation for teaching the future leaders of the Empire. Not only were these young men educated in administration, management, military strategy, history, and politics; but imbued with the moral principles of honor, justice, duty, courage, compassion, and respect. It was a complete education, well-rounded and comprehensive, and it served Rome well.
It was in this tradition that Elihu Yale and John Davenport established Yale, an institution built on faith, reason, and service; and it was the demise of this tradition that Bob and his classmates lamented.
They cringed when a classic education turned 'approachable' and 'relevant', when race, gender, and ethnicity replaced academic excellence and moral probity as acceptance criteria, and when there was no longer an ethos, a cultural, moral center around which all student life revolved.
Yale was a hodge-podge, tamales and soul food, gay boys and femmes, social traffic every which way, a jamboree of political good feeling without a trace of Aristotle, Churchill, or Augustine to provide some grounding, some intellectual legitimacy.
Pope John Paul II had argued long and hard against Protestant cultism, the easy road to spiritual salvation and redemption. He hated what he called Hallelujah religion, and the facile, hysterical transformations that happened every Sunday. The Catholic Church was founded on the basis of faith and reason, the teachings of Athanasius and Aquinas, and the mystical complexity of the Trinity. The Church had never wavered from its core ethos, unchanged since the Council of Nicaea.
And so it was with Yale, no different from the Church, always having maintained its core moral ethos, its doctrines, principles, and intentions; but now it was shedding all traces of such elaborate historical precedent and becoming a nothing place - a place without a center, without a fulcrum, a cavalcade of anything goes.
How could slave journals replace Shakespeare? Western civilization was being given a pass in favor of multi-culturalism. The persistent Paleolithic cultures of Africa were limned and lionized for being 'essential', primally enlightened places of environmental wisdom whereas every student on campus was the living legacy of Versailles, Persepolis, Athens, and Rome. One issue judgment prevailed - European history was dismissed because it was colonialist, exploitive of the black and brown races of the world, takers and never givers, brutal overlords and masters.
Yale was but a few academic millimeters away from Shop and Home Ec, a vocational school at best; but given the inchoate, centerless courses that passed for a curriculum, students were sure to get less than engine reassembly and sourdough baking.
Bob took another sip of his brandy, toasted his classmates and Yale, settled into the old leather armchairs the Club had generously agreed to keep and center around the fire, leant back and daydreamed of beautiful Priscilla Logan, his first love, his only real love who somehow drifted off and away after graduation from Wellesley.
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