Each summer for the past eight years, Yale for Life’s alumni-scholars have “entered the time machine” and returned to New Haven for a week to plunge into an intensely engaging, participatory, social, and scholarly adventure as Yale students once again. They live together at Yale, eat together, and have access to Yale’s treasures and resources, from the libraries to the museums to the athletic facilities.
Yale for Life courses are entirely seminar-based, with Yale’s most dynamic and fascinating professors sharing the week with the alumni-scholars – in class, at meals, and at special events that go beyond the classroom.
This summer, Yale for Life is enabling its scholars to do more than just study at Yale. They can study Yale itself.
From June 9 to June 15, Yale for Life is offering the opportunity for a small group of approximately 20 alumni-scholars to study the history and social impact of Yale in a unique, possibly one-time-only, week-long seminar course entitled, “Yale: Myth and Reality, Past and Present.”
Students in the class will explore Yale’s social history, its art and architecture, as well as maps, photos, literature, and many of Yale’s most precious collections and treasures. The course includes guided field trips across Yale’s campus and the greater New Haven area.
Volunteer Steve Tomlin ’83, who has worked with the Yale faculty to help organize the course, noted, “Years ago, as a Yale student, then as a Yale parent, and now as an alumnus-scholar in Yale for Life, I would wander through campus and wonder at the built environment around me, regretting that I had only the most limited sense of the history and meaning of the place.”
“Yale: Myth and Reality, Past and Present” is all about exploring, fascination, and fun. It’s about going to places that many alumni have likely never visited: the Art History Department's terrace on the 7th floor of the Loria Center; the Trophy Room and the rowing tanks in Payne Whitney Gym; the Buddhist Shrine in Harkness Tower; the Gates Classroom in the renovated Manuscripts and Archives section of Sterling Memorial Library; the new colleges; the Native American Cultural Center; the Yale Farm; and the far reaches of Grove Street Cemetery.
“This is a course that can only be taught at home on Yale’s campus, and we will take an eclectic, intellectual ramble through Yale itself,” said Tomlin. “And we will dive deeply into Yale’s many amazing collections: collections of people and perspectives and places, but also the most jaw-dropping artifacts and treasures.”
Faculty for the course include Edward (Ned) Cooke, Charles F. Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Director of the Center of Study in American Decorative Arts and Material Culture, and Professor of American Studies; and Jay Gitlin, Senior Lecturer History & Associate Director Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers & Borders. In addition, Cooke and Gitlin will be joined by a slate of esteemed guest faculty and leaders for field trips and special events.
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To learn more about the course, visit the Yale for Life page on “Yale: Myth and Reality, Past and Present.”
