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The Yale of My Day
March 1997
by the Editors

No matter how recently someone has graduated from Yale, conversations about the experience tend to begin, “In my day,” usually with the emphasis on the second word.

More often than not, the  message being sent is that Yale was better—or at least different—then, whenever then might have been. And perhaps it was, at least for the speaker. What becomes clear from the vantage point of this magazine, however, is how similar perceptions about Yale life extend over so many generations, despite the apparent differences. If Yale was special in the 1940s to those who were at the College then, it seems it was not less special in the 1960s and 1980s for those in residence in those days.

In hopes of conveying a sense of both the varied forms of those perceptions, and the similarities among them over the years, YAM recently scanned the alumni body from the 1930s to the 1990s for a selection of representative “recollectors.” We limited the candidates to people who were inclined to writing as undergraduates, and who went on to become professional writers—whether of fact, fiction, or drama. (We were prepared for some sour commentators, but either we missed them, or they chose not to respond to our invitation.)

The selection was limited to graduates of Yale College in part because YAM will be reporting on the Graduate School’s 150th anniversary later this year, and in part because the undergraduate and graduate experiences are so fundamentally different for most people.

While our original list of writers was intended to be as comprehensive as possible, it could not, of course, cover the entirety of the Yale experience; as the following pieces demonstrate, the experience takes too many forms.

Young Lords and Lower Classes
by Oliver Jensen ’36

Distant Thunder
by Roger Starr ’39

New Haven On Stage
by Max Wilk ’41

From White Shoe to Combat Boot
by John Finney ’45W

Defying Dink
by Lewis Lapham ’56

Harold Bloom and the “Orc Cycles”
by C. D. B. Bryan ’58

Vietnam On Our Mind
by Jacques Leslie ’68

Of Reading, and a Wink
by Stuart Kellogg ’70

A Confusion of Lures
by Steven Brill ’72

Chronicling a Cauldron
by David W. Dunlap ’75

Surviving “Grim Professionalism”
by Melinda Beck ’77

Diary Daze
by Hugh Kennedy ’87

A Not Unwelcome Senselessness
by Jane Mendelsohn ’87

When the World Barged In
by Peter Beinart ’93

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