The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute

Mission

The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute is an educational partnership between Yale University and the New Haven Public Schools designed to strengthen teaching and learning in local schools and, by example, in schools around the country. Each year, teachers propose Institute seminar topics after canvassing schools across the district, and then work in small groups with leading Yale faculty members in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

The Teachers Institute brings together teachers from the elementary, middle and high school levels, providing them an opportunity to work as colleagues both with one another and with their counterparts who teach at Yale. Each participating teacher becomes an Institute Fellow and prepares a curriculum unit to be taught in his or her classroom the following year. The units are used widely by other school teachers around the City and, through the Institute Web site, by teachers beyond New Haven.

Leadership of the Institute reflects the partnership between the University and the City. Teachers play a leading role in the governance of the Institute through the Steering Committee, the School Representatives and Seminar Coordinators groups, and the team of colleagues responsible for the Institute's National Initiative. A presidentially-appointed body of Yale faculty members, the University Advisory Council, provides general direction of the program and advises the Yale President on the activities of the Institute locally and nationally. A National Advisory Committee, composed of distinguished leaders in education, public policy and philanthropy from around the nation, is appointed by the Yale President and assists the Institute with the development of its programs. This Institute governance is expressed in the “Policies, Structure, and Procedures,” which were endorsed by the Yale Corporation.

Since its inception, the Institute's operations have been supported annually by Yale University and the New Haven Public Schools. During the past 25 years, numerous foundations and corporations and hundreds of individuals have provided generous gifts and grants in support of the Institute's annual program and its permanent endowment.

The Institute has been widely recognized as a pioneering and successful model of university-school collaboration. While New Haven remains the focus of the Institute's efforts, it has also launched a National Initiative to demonstrate that the approach taken in New Haven can be tailored to establish similarly fruitful university-school partnerships under different circumstances in other cities.

While he was Superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, Rod Paige, now United States Secretary of Education, oversaw the establishment of the Houston Teachers Institute in affiliation with the University of Houston. He said, “I applaud the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute for supplying models for what universities should do. Its projects are not just inspiring, they are creating an environment in which partnerships will be the norm, not the exception.”

Contributors

Bill Cosby

William H. Cosby, Jr. was born to William and Anna Cosby on July 12, Germantown Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Calling himself a “late bloomer,” he did not realize the value of a formal education until after the first four days of boot camp in the U.S. Navy. Cosby said, “Four years later in May, when I got out of the Navy, I hit the ground running from Norfolk, Virginia, and immediately enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia.”

Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Bill Cosby is well known for his commitment to education. He emphatically believes that the best assurance for a satisfying and rewarding life begins with knowledge. Cosby himself went back to college, long after he had achieved much of his success, to obtain a masters degree as well as an Ed.D. He has, in fact, applied this further education in his professional life.

He has never stopped realizing the importance of challenging himself. “People always say, ‘You don’t need money, why are you still working?’ My answer is that it isn’t about money. That’s academic. It’s about accepting the challenges of one’s own ideas, clarifying the unanswered questions and pursuing the excitement of discovery.”

Mrs. Cosby is equally passionate about the importance of education, and she too has attained an Ed.D. Together, they have strived to promote the importance of a good education. They have donated funds and their time to a wide range of universities and other educational organizations and delivered many addresses to further emphasize the importance of learning.

Cosby said of the 25^th anniversary of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, “It is time to steadfastly applaud those who care enough to try to make the world a better place.”

Calvin Trillin

Calvin Trillin, author most recently of the novel Tepper Isn’t Going Out, has been acclaimed in fields of writing that are remarkably diverse. As someone who has published solidly reported pieces in The New Yorker for 35 years, he has been called “perhaps the finest reporter in America.” His antic commentary on the American scene and his books chronicling his adventures as a “happy eater” have earned him renown as “a classic American humorist.” His best-selling Remembering Denny, about a Yale classmate, was hailed as “an elegiac, disturbing and altogether brilliant memoir.”

Trillin was born and raised in Kansas, City, Missouri, and now lives in New York City. He graduated from Yale in 1957, did a hitch in the army, and then joined Time. After a year covering the South from the Atlanta bureau, he became a writer forTime in New York.

In 1963, he became a staff writer for The New Yorker. From 1967 to 1982, he produced a highly praised series of articles for The New Yorker called “U.S. Journal”—3,000-word pieces every three weeks from somewhere in the United States, on subjects that ranged from the murder of a farmer’s wife in Iowa to the author’s effort to write the definitive history of a Louisiana restaurant called Didee’s “or to eat an awful lot of baked duck and dirty rice trying.” Some of the murder stories from that series were published in 1984 in Killings, a book that was described in The New York Times as “that rarity, reportage as art.”

From 1978 through 1985, Trillin was a columnist for The Nation, writing what USA Today called “simply the funniest regular column in journalism.” From 1986 through 1995, the column was syndicated to newspapers. His columns have been collected in Uncivil Liberties, With All Disrespect, If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Enough’s Enough, and Too Soon to Tell. From 1996 to 2001, Trillin did a column for Time.

Since 1990, Trillin has written a piece of comic verse weekly for The Nation. In 1994, he published Deadline Poet, his account of being a commentator-in-rhyme on the news of the day.

Trillin’s books have included two other comic novels, a collection of short stories, a travel book and an account of the desegregation of the University of Georgia. His three antic books on eating—American Fried, Alice, Let’s Eat and Third Helpings—were compiled in 1994 into a single volume called The Tummy Trilogy. His memoirs include Messages from My Father, a New York Times best-seller in 1996, and Family Man in 1998.

He lectures widely and has appeared often as a guest on television. He has written and presented two one-man shows at the American Place Theater in New York—both of them critically acclaimed and both sell-outs. In reviewing “Words, No Music,” in 1990, the New York Times called Trillin “the Buster Keaton of performance humorists.”

Trillin served as a Fellow of the Yale Corporation from 1988 to 1994 and is currently a Trustee of the New York Public Library. He was instrumental in the creation of the Association of Yale Alumni Community Service Summer Fellowship Program which provides selected Yale students with a stipend to support their summer volunteer activities.

Howard R. Lamar

Howard Roberts Lamar is Sterling Professor Emeritus of American History at Yale, where he taught from 1949 to 1994. During his years at Yale, he served in a number of administrative positions, most notably chair of the Department of History 1962-1963 and 1967-1970, Dean of the College 1979-1985, and President of the University 1992-1993.

Lamar was born during the Depression in the town of Tuskegee, Alabama, and attended public schools at a time when the State literally ran out of money to operate them through the full academic year. There was, he says, an “education-will-make-a-difference” theme to his upbringing, and his father fought to keep the schools open. Lamar was in certain respects born to teach. Prior to getting married, his mother was a school teacher as were two of her sisters. He recalls well his own school teachers “who took people like myself into their homes and would have us over for dinner.”

He was also bred to be a scholar. As a child, his mother bought him an encyclopedia of world history that he read “page by page.” He grew to be, he says, “in love with learning.” Long before leaving Alabama for college at Emory in Atlanta, Lamar read the autobiography of legendary Yale English Professor William Lyon Phelps and reading Phelps on Yale and New Haven made his decision a few years later to choose to come here for graduate studies an easy one for him.

He arrived in New Haven in 1944 and never left for long again. He studied and then began teaching history in an era in which the field of American historical scholarship was largely confined to everything east of the Mississippi. There was little serious investigation of the American West and few courses offered at any level. He set out to change that because he felt serious scholarly work and teaching were needed “to make the West a part of the United States.”

Over the next half-a-century, his work—including seven books and more than 30 influential articles—opened up a new frontier in American historical studies. He foreshadowed many of the important themes in what would emerge as “the new western history,” a major rethinking of the frontier experience of the American West. Many of his students went on to become leaders in the field. He continues to work as a scholar and advisor. The late historian Stephen E. Ambrose described Lamar’s most recent book, The New Encyclopedia of the American West, which he edited, “a monumental achievement in the historiography of the American West.” He has been honored at Yale with the establishment of The Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, an academic center that seeks to further historical and comparative explorations of the frontier experience in North America and throughout the world.

Lamar’s scholarship and his teaching have always been informed by his desire to reach the widest audience possible. Year after year, his undergraduate lectures on the American West attracted overflow crowds. He has lectured and taught at many non-academic centers around the nation. He has always insisted that historians “have a responsibility to render intelligent meaning to the events of our lives.”

When Lamar arrived in New Haven in 1944, the divide between Yale and its home city could be enormous. Lamar stepped beyond the campus confines and explored his new home town. The small town Southerner made a point of getting to know it as a home to multiple ethnic groups and social classes, a place where you could meet the world in all its guises. He liked New Haven and felt enough at home to run and win a seat on the Board of Aldermen, 1951-1953. He never lost his love for New Haven as a city with a rich history and a vibrant life.

In the early 1970s, he participated in “The History Education Project,” an effort to provide summer seminars at Yale for New Haven secondary school teachers of history. The university and the school teachers had much to learn from each other. He recalls, “We soon discovered that we had common problems and interests and that, indeed, history was an ideal subject for seminars devoted to catching up in one’s field with the new research, learning to use a new currency of concepts, and watching with fascination the ever-changing panorama of American history and its meaning.”

As with his commitment to integrating the West into American historical scholarship and teaching, Lamar brought a deep belief in the shared purposes of university faculty and school teachers to those seminars. The same spirit informed his efforts on behalf of the founding of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute: “to establish, once and for all, the commonality and relatedness of all problems concerning teaching and educating, no matter what subject and no matter at what level. That in turn touches a more fundamental problem in the United States: a sense of community.” The Teachers Institute was above all an effort to restore that sense to New Haven.

In 1977, Lamar and James Vivian, now director of the Institute, met with Hanna H. Gray, President of Yale at the time, about founding the Institute as a major extension of The History Education Project. Fittingly, in 1979, he offered an Institute seminar called “Remarkable City: New Haven in the Nineteenth Century.”

He led another seminar in 1991 on “Multi-disciplinary Studies in American Regions and Regionalism.” When he served as Yale President, he acted to constitute the University Advisory Council, the faculty board of the Institute, as a formal, appointed body. In 1993, President Richard C. Levin appointed Lamar as its Honorary Chair, a post he continues to hold.

He has written about the exhilarating experience of teaching that first Institute seminar on New Haven history, “We discovered that we were all a part of a whole and that by an intelligent study of the parts we would better understand the whole. Therein lies the purpose of a local effort called the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and its significance as a model for a national effort to relate town and gown, and the school to institutions of higher learning in a mutually advantageous way.”

As a result of Lamar’s scholarship, teaching, and work on behalf of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, the parts of the whole have come to better understand one another and the whole they form. All are better for that shared effort. The spirit of community he has brought to so many endeavors lives on in the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.

History

This year marks the twenty-fifth year of operation for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. The Institute traces its roots back nearly a decade prior to its founding to a period when New Haven high school teachers worked with members of the Yale Department of History to develop new teaching materials in history. The school teachers and Yale history faculty members participating in what was known as the History Education Project (HEP) discovered that they gained a great deal working with one another, and became the nucleus of the groups that planned the Institute.

In 1977, Howard R. Lamar and James R. Vivian, then director of the HEP, met with their history faculty colleague, Hanna H. Gray, who at the time was Acting Yale President. She pledged support for the planned Institute as it applied for sufficient external grants to launch a more ambitious, extensive and demanding program. The Institute was formed and, with initial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Yale and the New Haven Public Schools, the first seminars were held the following summer. Then an English professor, A. Bartlett Giamatti was to lead the first Institute seminar in student writing, but could not when he was chosen that year to become Yale’s President. At the time, he said he had received a “different though not higher calling.” In 1979, Lamar led the first of his Institute seminars, on the history of New Haven.

With the 1978 award of the first of four National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) program grants in support of the Institute, the Institute began to develop and offered an expanded range of seminars. The news conference announcing the first NEH grant brought together for a joint announcement on the same stage the President of Yale; the Mayor of New Haven, Frank Logue; and the Superintendent of Schools, Gerald Tirozzi, for the first time in anyone’s memory. Happily, it marked the first of many such occasions for the Institute.

As the Institute developed, a system of governance was established, combining bodies of Yale faculty, New Haven school teachers and nationally prominent friends of the Institute. Since the Institute’s founding, teachers have served in the leadership of the Institute not only by proposing seminar topics but by working as School Representatives and Seminar Coordinators. Created in 1984, a National Advisory Committee, appointed by the Yale President and composed of educational and public policy experts and others interested in the work of the Institute, lend their support and advice to its development. In 1990, the Institute became the first program of its type to be permanently established as a function of a university. In 1993, Acting President Howard R. Lamar more formally constituted the University Advisory Council to set direction for the Institute. When Richard L. Levin became Yale President, he appointed Lamar as its Honorary Chair, a post he continues to hold. In 1994, the Yale Corporation endorsed the “Policies, Structure and Procedures” of the Institute as its charter.

At its inception, the Institute operated out of the Department of History. With the strong support of President Giamatti, the Institute moved to expanded quarters in the newly established Whitney Humanities Center. As the Institute program broadened and became national in scope, it outgrew that space. In 2001, the Institute moved to its present home on the 11^th floor of 195 Church Street, overlooking the New Haven Green and the Yale campus.

Throughout its history, the Institute has pioneered efforts in New Haven and nationally to provide for professional development of teachers and to improve schools. In addition to disseminating the curriculum units created in its seminars, the Institute organized conferences and published both books and a periodical, On Common Ground, to share and spread ideas for improving teacher quality. The Institute received major endowment challenge grants from the NEH and the DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund (now the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds) in 1990 and 1991.

With the support of a major grant from the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds, the Institute launched a National Demonstration Project in 1998. The Project aimed to explore the feasibility of adapting the Institute approach at several other sites around the nation. All sites selected were considerably larger than New Haven and represented quite different urban challenges. Those universities and school districts participating in the Project were: Chatham College, Carnegie-Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Public Schools; the University of Houston and the Houston Independent School District; the University of New Mexico and the Albuquerque Public Schools; and the University of California-Irvine and the Santa Ana Unified School District. Each year of the grant, the five Institutes convened for conferences in New Haven and a network of Institutes was established.

In 2001, a multi-year plan, the Yale National Initiative, was drafted. Under the plan, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute envisions the establishment of as many as 45 new Institutes by 2015.

To date 534 New Haven teachers and 118 Yale faculty members have participated in the Institute and many tens of thousands of students in New Haven schools and other schools around the world have studied subjects based on 1,392 curriculum units developed at the Institute.

After a quarter century, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute reaffirms its fundamental mission of serving teachers in its home community and providing a national model for the productive relationship that universities and schools can develop. Founding Director Vivian said, “The Institute’s primary commitment has always been to New Haven and, as its influence spreads nationally, the Yale-New Haven partnership will continue to serve as the outstanding example of its approach.”

Chronology

Current and Former Members of the National Advisory Committee, 1984-2002

Fellows of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 1978-2002

* years of participation

Seminar Leaders of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 1978-2002

* years of participation

Support Awarded

The following foundations, corporations, and agencies have supported the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute during the first twenty-five years. In addition, hundreds of individuals have contributed support.