Yale Admits Blacks - 1969

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

The other important change in the composition of the Yale College was the enrollment of Black undergraduates. In 1969, Yale enrolled a total of twenty-six Black undergraduates. Yale was as white as elephant ivory. Racist drawings adorned the inner walls of Payne Whitney Gym. The college named after the radical slave master John C. Calhoun had Confederate flags and bull whips outside its dining room.

By 1975, eighty-six undergraduate Blacks entered ale. The average between 1975 and 1997 was ninety-one per year or 7 percent of each undergraduate class. By 2000, Black faculty representation had inched up to being 3 percent at Yale. Blacks, however, continue to be overrepresented in maintenance positions. In 2002, Blacks were nearly 44 percent of Yale’s blue-collar workers.

Even though Yale is now, without doubt, more diverse in gender, race, and religion than ever before, the preponderance of wealthy, White families has not changed from 1952 to the present.

Yale Goes Coed - 1969

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

Yale College was an all-male institution from its founding to 1969 when the first undergraduate females breeched its defenses. Women had been allowed into Yale’s graduate art school for a bit of cultural polish since the late nineteenth century, but in the undergraduate domain, the only women in New Haven were visiting relatives, girl friends, prostitutes, or strippers. It was an adolescent boy’s world with more than its share of ugly episodes. One the worst was “the gang rape of a prostitute in 1940 that was a running public joke during the Brewster’s undergraduate years.” [Kabaservice, “Kingman Brewster and the Rise and Fall,” 436]. Going coeducational ended the most blatant manifestations of Yale’s masculine culture, both in college and at alumni events.

In the first academic year of coeducation, 1969-19780, there were 1,025 men, and 588 women. The “freshmen” class had 230 women, but 358 transferring women moved into the sophomore, junior, and senior classes to spread women around, helping to set a new tone on campus. The Seven Sisters colleges, close to Yale in social composition and geography, provided more than their share. Of the transferring families, fully 124 were from just three of them: Wellesley, Smith, and Vassar.

In 1994, George W. Bush told an interviewer that Yale “went downhill since they admitted women.”

Yale Corporation – Ivy Group

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

The Yale Corporation, which holds power of final say on anything it cares to rule on, always kept tight control over financial aid. The Corporation legally owns and controls Yale. Yale coordinated its aid program with the rest of the Ivy League, and from 1958, Yale also worked with MIT, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University. Financial officers from all those institutions would meet as the “Ivy Group,” to “compare and negotiate awards to joint scholarship candidates and ensure progress towards the standardization of awards.”

Yale and the Underprivileged Upwardly Mobile

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

As Yale admissions dean during the 1960s, Howe repeatedly explained to alumni that Yale was an upper-class liberal-arts college for the education of future leaders. Admission decisions at Yale had to take its social composition and special mission into account. Yale was looked to by families in the upper-class for social reproduction. In an alumni convocation speech Howe explained:

“To those who have enjoyed the privileges of cultural opportunities, wealth, and social standing, there is no stronger desire than to preserve the same for their children, and admission to Yale is one of the best ways to do it. To those less privileged, identification with a prestige-laden institution is probably the most effective vehicle for upward mobility. But those who are experiencing such mobility should, we are constantly reminded, have unusual reserves of intelligence and stamina to overcome the frequently painful, disturbing aspects of the process. Most of us have a natural, genuine sympathy for the underdog, and yet it is when sympathy rules reason that we make our worst admission errors. There is a very thin line indeed, between creating opportunity and causing injury.”

The upwardly mobile were suitable for vocational subjects at state universities, after which they could be technicians or accountants, but America’s future leaders should be culturally prepped in privileged families if they were to properly benefit from the stock of wisdom available in a liberal-arts residential college.

Howe feared that the upwardly mobile, at a place like Yale, would fall in with a fast, hard-drinking set, to the detriment of their studies and meager bank account.  Ivy colleges as a tool of upward mobility were like a sharp hook that harms as it hoists the underprivileged; youths from lower social classes would not be well matched to the college culture.

Artist: Eric Drooker

Yale and the Select Colleges

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

In 1968, research conducted by Harvard estimated there were approximately sixty-nine select colleges in the land. Yale’s Office of Institutional Research [OIR] circulated a confidential report on each of the sixty-nine colleges ranked by entering SAT scores. Institutions were rated “A” to “F” with fifty points separating each letter on the scale. Neither Harvard nor Yale was in the “A” group.

A: Cal Tech, Carnegie-Melon, MIT, Stanford, Swarthmore, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD. Most of the “A” list were in California, not New England.

B: Amherst, Harvard, and Yale. 

C: Brandeis, Bryan Maw, Harvey Mudd, New College, Pomona, Reed, and Wesleyan.

D: Barnard, Brown, Cornell, Haverford, Middlebury, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, St. John’s in Maryland, Trinity in Connecticut, and Williams.

E & F: The rest of the sixty-nine, including the two remaining Ivy League members, Colombia University and Dartmouth.

These four state universities - UC Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison – have the most “super students” in the entire United States because unlike the Ivies they do admissions at the top end of the ability pool based on academic, not personal, qualities.

Elite public institutions tend to draw from a broader social stratum than private ones do. Being dependent on the public purse, rather than on affluent families’ personal savings, public elite universities can truly admit students without any regard to ability to pay. They tend to be more middle class, and have a larger representation from the working class that America’s private elite colleges. Public elite universities also have a different sense of mission than private ones do. Being upper class, and more dependent on the taxpayer’s favor, public elite universities tend to focus less on old traditional humanities subjects, and more on modern natural science and technology.

Yale and the Posture Photographs

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

Yale willingly participated in eugenic schemes to measure personal character, in particular the infamous practice that lasted until 1968 of taking nude “posture” photographs to study the relation of body type to personal abilities. Cohort after cohort of Yale men would walk from their freshman dorms on old campus over to Payne-Whitney Gymnasium, stand in line on the fourth floor, and enter one at a time into a room without windows. Inside, two technicians would instruct youth to disrobe before they would place metal pins against his spine that would both measure and hold each youth in position while three photographs were taken. One need not imagine the experience generated more, or less, anxiety than an army induction physical, and the unpleasant registration procedure may have played some ritualistic role for the youth demarcating, like a military haircut, the transition from secondary school to Ivy League status. The practice, begun at a few elite colleges in the 1930s, was required at all of the Ivy League colleges [Brown, Colombia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale] and the Seven Sisters [Barnard, Bryn, Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley] from the 1940s to the 1960s. 

At Harvard, the posture photographs were part of a formal medical discourse on “character.” Every new Harvard undergraduate would be photographed naked and then, on a separate occasion, subjected to a medical exam by a member of the department of hygiene. The doctor would observe and engage the freshman in a conversation about feelings, attitudes, and activities. The doctor was supposed to use a diagnostic tool that presumed to evaluate individuals against a normative standard of what constituted a healthy masculine male. Harvard’s medical exam, regardless of intent, was a technology that validated particular masculine cultural stereotypes, while stigmatizing others as deviant.

Student’s had to arrive for the doctor’s examination with a five-page questionnaire filled in, which included thinly disguised ethnic inquiries, requesting that one list one’s religious denomination, as well as one’s father’s and mother’s birthplace. Just as at Yale, answers to those questions helped Harvard track its Jews. And there were a number of questions on social class. One had to list the occupation of every family member, and report incomes.

New York Times Article 15 Jan 1995

It was Naomi Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth," who opened the Pandora's box of posture-photo controversy. In that book and in a 1992 Op-Ed piece in The Times, Wolf (Yale '84) bitterly attacked Dick Cavett (Yale '55) for a joke he'd made at Wolf's graduation ceremonies. According to Wolf, who'd never had a posture photo taken (the practice was discontinued at Yale in 1968), Cavett took the microphone and told the following anecdote:

“When I was an undergraduate, there were no women at Yale. The women went to Vassar. At Vassar they had nude photographs taken of women in gym class to check their posture. One year the photos were stolen and turned up for sale in New Haven's red-light district." His punchline: "The photos found no buyers."

Yale and Eugenics

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

In the 1880s, Sumner was one of Yale’s most popular professors. His survival-of-the-fittest social doctrines, called eugenics, was to be a science of genetic selection to ensure the upward evolution of the race. The socially unfit, congregated in “inferior” ethnic groups, were to be restricted and discouraged from reproduction, by sterilization if necessary, and the superior race, frequently referred to in America as the “Nordic race,” were to be given the laws and schools that would allow them to flourish.

In the United States, the eugenic message the well received by many members of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant [WASP] establishment. It harmonized with their sense of social and cultural superiority and fit so perfectly with anti-Black and anti-immigrant prejudice that prominent American scientists and politicians took up the cause with religious-like fervor.

Eugenicists scored some important victories in the 1920s. The 1924 immigration bill that excluded Jews and Japanese, and cut to a trickle the flow Mediterranean and Eastern European families, passed in the House by a vote of 326-71 and in the Senate by 62-6: it was signed into law by President Coolidge with the words, ‘America must be kept American.” In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of compulsory sterilization for the unfit.