Board of Trustees visits Yale for its spring meeting

Trustees traveled to New Haven to learn more about Yale’s efforts to create new connections between the university and the rest of the world, and about its undergraduate programs in the arts and in residential education.

Every three years Stanford’s Board of Trustees goes to the university’s Sierra Camp overlooking Fallen Leaf Lake in the Sierra Nevada for its spring retreat – a time to focus their collective attention on a topic of particular interest.

This year, they held their spring meeting at Yale University , so they could find out more about its undergraduate residential education program, about the ways Yale integrates arts education into everyday life and about its efforts to internationalize.

"Those were three areas that we felt Yale did particularly well, which were of great interest to Stanford," said Leslie Hume, chair of the Board of Trustees, speaking at a campus press briefing last Friday in the Main Quad.

The decision to hold the spring retreat at another university came out of a 2008 conversation between Hume, who had just been elected chair, and President John Hennessy.

"We tossed around the idea of doing something different – of going to another university to learn from the best practices of the institution," she said.

"The Yale Corporation [the governing board and policy-making body of the university] came to Stanford in 1999 when Gerhard Casper was president to look at the reforms we had made in undergraduate education," she said.

"They liked what they saw and found the visit instructive. We also thought of visiting Yale because of the strength of our connections with the university’s administration."

The April 26-28 meeting began with an informal Monday evening dinner hosted by two Stanford alumni: Yale President Richard C. Levin and his wife, Jane Levin, BA ’68.

President Levin, an economist who earned a bachelor’s degree from Stanford in 1968, earned a doctorate from Yale in 1974 and joined its faculty that same year. Before becoming president in 1993, Levin served as the chair of the Economics Department, and as the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Peter Salovey, Yale’s provost, is also a Stanford graduate (BA, MA ’80).

On April 27 and 28, trustees attended panel discussions on Yale’s residential colleges and on arts education. They listened to a presentation, "Internationalization: Architecture & Strategy," delivered by Levin and Linda K. Lorimer, vice president and secretary of the university.

During Levin’s tenure, the university has launched the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, created the Yale World Fellows Program, and introduced a financial aid policy for international students that provides the same generous financial aid as that awarded to U.S. students.

Stanford’s trustees toured two of Yale’s residential colleges – undergraduates live in one residential college for four years – to get a firsthand look inside the residences, each of which houses about 400 students. Every residential college has its own master and dean, both of whom are Yale faculty members. The master and dean live in the college with their families and eat their meals with students in the dining hall.

Hume said she was impressed by how many "arts spaces" she saw in one of the those colleges, including a dance studio with a sprung floor to absorb shocks, a pottery studio, a small black box theater and a darkroom. Yale had also installed stage lighting in the dining hall, so that it could double as a performance space.

While Stanford’s residence halls don’t have the space for studios, theaters and darkrooms, the university could consider following Yale’s example and create additional performance spaces by installing stage lighting in some of its dining halls, Hume said.

During one panel discussion, a Yale social sciences student said he felt "bombarded by the arts" on campus. Hume, who was delighted by the comment, said it reminded her of Casper’s goal of making the arts "inescapable" at Stanford.

"If you’re bombarding students with the arts, you’re making the arts inescapable," Hume said, adding that Yale has a staff person who studies the university’s course catalog and contacts faculty members with ideas for integrating the arts – such as visits to one of the university’s museums – into their classes.

Hume said one of the things Yale appreciates about Stanford’s educational program is that the university makes it easy for science and engineering students – and other non-arts majors – to earn course credits for taking arts courses that are performance or practice based.

"Anytime you visit another university you become much more conscious of your own culture and your own environment, and you learn from their ’best practice,’" she said. "You also focus on what is particularly important and valuable about Stanford. It’s a very good thing to do once in a while."

"We like our location on the Pacific Rim, “ she said. "We feel fortunate to have great professional schools tied to a fabulous undergraduate liberal arts education. We like the culture of risk-taking and creativity, of being practical, of being entrepreneurial, and of the possibilities that exist because we’ve broken down the ’silos’ that once divided the schools. We like the fact that our schools are so closely connected on campus and that interdisciplinarity and collaboration is encouraged, not only by the Stanford ethos, but also by the Stanford geography."