Yale Week

Twenty years ago the name Yale stood for a famed Fence and a sentimental tradition, for a stubborn football team and a good undergraduate college, for Billy Phelps and a group of elms. It stood only by courtesy for a university. Its graduate and professional schools were second-rate. But in 20 years Old Eli has become The New Yale. Today its professional schools are mentioned with respect, its claims to universityship are beginning to be taken seriously.

Last week three Yale men made university news.

Law. Elected Dean of Yale's Law School was Ashbel ("Pail"--from ashpail) Green Gulliver. Of Dean Gulliver's three immediate predecessors, two (Thomas Walter Swan and Charles Edward Clark) are now judges of the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the third (Robert Maynard Hutchins) is president of University of Chicago. Under them, Yale's Law School rose to top rank, today vies with Harvard's for the distinction of being the most illustrious law school in the U. S.

Harvard's former Law Dean Roscoe Pound used to greet his entering class: "Gentlemen, take a good look at the persons seated on either side of you--for one of you will not be with us next year." Last week Yale's Dean Gulliver was able to say to his first-year class: "Gentlemen, take a good look at the men seated on either side of you--for both of them are Phi Beta Kappas." Yale's School, annually besieged by four times as many applicants as it can admit, can pick & choose.

The School has 24 full-time teachers for its total of 380 students (Harvard has 31 for 1,400 students). Yale law students get individual instruction in small classes, have as teachers such topnotchers as Arthur Linton Corbin, Edwin Borchard, James Grafton Rogers (until recently they also had William Orville Douglas, now a Supreme Court Justice, and Thurman Arnold, now Assistant U. S. Attorney General). Average age of Yale's faculty is 43, of Harvard's, 50.

Proof of the Law School's eminence is that 80% of its graduates get jobs immediately, most of them in Wall Street, at $2,000 to $2,400 a year. Ashbel Gulliver has been in charge of placing graduates since 1934, when he became assistant dean. A graduate of Groton School and of Yale (where he was top man in his law class in 1922), Dean Gulliver is rated a solid, enterprising administrator.

Medicine. When Dr. Milton Charles Winternitz resigned as dean of Yale's School of Medicine in 1935, he had quadrupled its $2,000,000 endowment, made it a first-class school. He was succeeded by Dr. Stanhope Bayne-Jones (Yale '10), who further added to the school's reputation. Dr. Bayne-Jones's most noteworthy achievement: establishing Yale as one of the nation's foremost cancer research centres, by means of the $10,000,000 Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research.

Last week pink-cheeked, likable Dr. Bayne-Jones unexpectedly resigned as dean, declining a five-year reappointment. Reasons: to have more time for bacteriological research and to head a campaign to double the School of Medicine's endowment, now $8,500,000. It was rumored that Dr. Winternitz, 55, might be brought back as dean.

Human Relations. Eleven years ago Robert Hutchins and Milton Winternitz, then deans of Yale's Law and Medical Schools, respectively, put their heads together and started Yale's Institute of Human Relations. Purpose: to find ways & means whereby mankind could learn to live together more harmoniously. The Institute has not yet found the formula. Its director is placid, pipe-smoking Dr. Mark Arthur May. Last year Dr. May and his colleagues reported that they had formed some theories at least about why men do not live harmoniously, published their theories in a book called Frustration and Aggression (TIME, March 6). Last week Dr. May brought his report up to date, announced that the outbreak of World War II had confirmed his scientists' theories.

Crux of their theories: that aggression is caused by frustration. The German people, said Dr. May, are deeply frustrated. At first they attacked the Jews, have now turned their attacks upon their real frustrators. He explained: "Because they could not place their hands on the English, whom they really hated, they turned to the Jews, innocent bystanders. Since the beginning of the present war we have heard relatively little about the Jewish persecution, for hatred has now been canalized."

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