President Richard C. Levin was the featured speaker at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Service held on Jan. 14 at Congregation Mishkan Israel, the oldest continuously operating synagogue in New England. The following is the text of that address:
You might think that by counting light bulbs I wasted my opportunity for religious education. But, alas, just above the ring of lights written around the dome in the archaic and politically incorrect language of the old Union Prayer Book was this one sentence from the prophet Micah (6:8): "It hath been told thee, O Man, what is good, and what the Lord doth require of thee: only to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God."
Had my religious education taught me nothing more than this, "Dayenu: It would have been enough." These words of the prophet are at the heart of Judaism: They prescribe the ethical behavior that is the essence of a good life, a life in the service of the covenant.
Tonight we celebrate the legacy of a man who lived by these words: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His passion for justice was unquenchable, and, in pursuit of it, he made sacrifices time and again to draw attention to the great shame of our nation -- the continuing racial discrimination that was the legacy of the unspeakable indignity of slavery. Dr. King once missed an opportunity to give a sermon here at Mishkan Israel because he was in jail. And when he came to Yale to receive an honorary degree he was out on bail.
Dr. King understood the importance of study and reflection; educational opportunity for black children was among his primary goals. But he also understood that we are called upon to do more. In the face of injustice, we are called upon to act.
As Abraham Heschel observed:
The world needs more than the secret holiness of individual inwardness. It needs more than sacred sentiments and good intentions. ... It is by lives that the world will be redeemed, ... by deeds that outbeat the finite charity of the human heart. ...
[A]n action has intrinsic meaning; its value to the world is independent of what it means to the person performing it. The act of giving food to a helpless child is meaningful ... whether or not the moral intention is present. God asks for the heart, and we must spell our answers in deeds.
Nearly 12 years ago, I was given the extraordinary privilege of leading one of the world's most distinguished educational institutions. It wasn't the best of times for Yale, nor was it the best of times for the city surrounding us. On campus, our splendid buildings were in an advanced state of deterioration, and our city was suffering. There were vacant storefronts throughout the downtown, housing prices had declined 20%, and "for sale" signs lined the streets of the Westville and East Rock neighborhoods. In 1991, a Yale student was murdered in front of St. Mary's Church on Hillhouse Avenue, and a year later William Finnegan published a series in the New Yorker portraying in frighteningly vivid detail the dangerous lives of New Haven teenagers caught up in a culture of drug trafficking and gang warfare. Some months later, just as I assumed the presidency, a Harvard graduate published a piece in GQ titled "The Death of Yale," portraying us as a university doomed to fail, compromised by a declining city.
If ever a job required a steadfast commitment to tikkun olam, this was it. And, as Rabbi Heschel explains, good intentions would not be enough; the soaring rhetoric to which university presidents are given would not suffice. We would have to spell our answers in deeds.
Taking care of our own campus was challenge enough. We had to mobilize every segment of our internal community to plan for the comprehensive renovation of our deteriorated facilities. This required time, coordinated planning, and most of all -- money. Thanks to the favorable economic climate, our endowment grew rapidly and our alumni responded magnificently to a capital campaign that ended in 1997. Today, although our work is not yet complete, we have invested more than $2 billion in renovating the campus, and the results are a source of pride for the entire community.
The tougher challenge was to assist in the revival of New Haven. There were, of course, pragmatic, self-interested reasons to take on this challenge. If the media were to be believed, maintaining our position as one of America's top universities depended on it. And, as Rabbi Heschel suggests, if by our deeds we could get results for the citizens of New Haven, it mattered little whether our motives were self-interested or altruistic.
But in truth our responsibility to our neighbors transcended pragmatism. Our students and faculty have extraordinary resources at their disposal to help them develop their full human potential, while outside our walls, many of our neighbors lack the opportunity to flourish. To use our resources -- and the immense pool of human talent that our students, faculty and staff represent -- to enlarge those opportunities is to do justice, to strengthen our city and our democracy.
And so we set about developing a strategy for a dramatically increased engagement with the city. We had three major objectives: to strengthen the downtown, to create jobs by spinning off new science-based companies, and to work in partnership with neighborhood organizations to improve housing, education and health of the least advantaged citizens of our community. You've all seen the amazing progress of downtown New Haven, and you may be aware that New Haven has become one of the nation's hubs for biotechnology companies. But tonight let me focus on our efforts to do justice, to address the social and economic conditions in the neighborhoods surrounding our campus.
To signal emphatically to both the university community and the city the seriousness of our commitment, we took three important unilateral steps during the first year of my tenure. First, to provide appropriate support for the implementation of our strategies, we established an Office of New Haven and State Affairs and provided it with outstanding leadership and staffing. Second, to demonstrate institutional endorsement of the prodigious volunteer efforts of our students, we established a program of paid summer internships to support the work of students in city agencies and nonprofit service organizations. Today, the President's Public Service Fellowship attracts hundreds of applications every year for about 35 positions. Third, to stimulate immediately the process of strengthening neighborhoods, we announced what has become the most visible and successful of our urban initiatives: the Yale Homebuyer Program.
The Homebuyer Program initially offered all Yale employees an annual subsidy of $2,000 for 10 years for purchasing a home anywhere within the New Haven city limits. By the end of 1995, nearly 200 employees had participated, and in the Westville and East Rock neighborhoods prices had completely stabilized and vacancies disappeared. At this point, we removed the subsidy from the high-income neighborhoods, focused on the lower-income neighborhoods surrounding the university, and increased the subsidy to $7,000 on closing and $2,000 per year for each of the next nine years. To date, we have invested over $15 million in the program, and more than 655 employees have purchased homes. Over the last nine years, 80% of the participants were first time homebuyers and 55% were members of minority groups.
From the beginning we focused systematically on the Dwight neighborhood, just to the west of the campus, where, as many of you know, students and community residents live side by side in low-rise apartments and multifamily houses. We mobilized faculty and students from the schools of architecture, law and management to help neighborhood residents develop a comprehensive plan for neighborhood revitalization. We sought and won a sizeable federal grant to allow implementation of this resident-led plan that supported job training, housing improvements, and the neighborhood elementary school. With the assistance of the Law School's clinical program, a new community development corporation was formed. Among the results of our collaborative efforts in the Dwight neighborhood are an addition to the elementary school designed by Yale architecture students, an extensive literacy program staffed by undergraduate volunteers, community gardens planted with the assistance of forestry school students, improvisational children's theater programs mounted by drama school students, and the first new urban supermarket in the state of Connecticut in a generation -- an effort facilitated by the work of students at the School of Management.
We have also worked extensively in the Dixwell neighborhood. By rehabilitating a substantial number of residential properties on Mansfield Street, we encouraged others -- including participants in our Homebuyer Program -- to invest in the upgrading of their own homes. We are building a new headquarters for the University Police in the area, which will provide safety and security to those nearby, and we will incorporate in the new facility a community center, with a computer cluster for school children and a meeting room for community organizations.
Complementing these neighborhood efforts are some very substantial public school collaborations. At the Cooperative Arts and Humanities Magnet High School, students from our School of Music play an active role in the instructional program. At the Hill Regional Career High School, over 200 students participate each year in eight science courses taught by members of our medical and nursing school faculties, and 65 students live on campus each summer to study science and work in laboratories. It is a remarkable sign of success that every single participant in the summer program has gone on to college, and it is equally remarkable that all have stayed in college (members of the first cohort are now seniors). We also take pride in the 27-year old Yale New Haven Teachers Institute, an innovative program now being disseminated nationwide, where professors work during the summer with public school teachers as partners in curriculum development.
We have also endeavored to make our campus more accessible to local schoolchildren. In addition to opening our museums to school visits, which has been the practice for generations, we now make our extensive athletic facilities available to hundreds of children enrolled in the National Youth Sports Program during the summer, and we host a citywide science fair each year.
The efforts that I have described illustrate institutional commitment and coordination on the part of the University. It is gratifying that Yale, once entirely indifferent to the plight of its city, is now nationally recognized for its efforts as a model of institutional citizenship. But even more gratifying, and more hopeful, is the spirit of service that imbues the students of this generation. Many of the initiatives I have described depend on the efforts of student volunteers, and those I mentioned represent but a small fraction of the dozens of organizations at Yale today pursuing community service projects. Under the umbrella of Dwight Hall, thousands of students work side-by-side with teachers, health care providers, neighborhood residents and home-builders to help realize Dr. King's dream of justice.
For example, recently two undergraduates were recognized for taking the initiative to found a chapter of the America Counts program at the Fair Haven Middle School. Like its older companion, America Reads (which each year involves about 200 Yale students as reading tutors at three elementary schools), America Counts is an intensive program that in its first year involved 66 Yale students giving more than 18,000 hours of mathematics instruction to Fair Haven fifth-graders. Similarly, a student at the Law School was recognized for mobilizing 30 student volunteers to organize father-child field trips to museums, sporting events, movies and other events as a means of encouraging non-residential fathers to become actively involved in the care of their children.
Why do I cite these examples of institutional and individual citizenship? I cite them because they are and should be an inspiration to us all, because they prompt us to examine ourselves in the light of Micah's reminder. On this day of remembrance for a paragon of social justice, we should ask ourselves: are we doing enough to encourage the organizations where we work, live and worship to act in the service of justice? And we should ask ourselves, are we, as individuals, giving enough of ourselves to the service of others? "Dayenu" cannot be our answer.
The work of tikkun olam, of repairing the world, is never done. There will always be new challenges, and it is our obligation to respond. In the words of Rabbi Tarphon, "We cannot complete the work; neither are we free to desist from it."
As we follow Dr. King's footsteps in our quest to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly, we cannot make the world perfect. But we must strive to make it better.
T H I S
When I was a boy growing up in San Francisco, my family belonged to Congregation Sherith Israel, which held services in a beautiful synagogue in the Romanesque style. During services -- that seemed to me to go on for a very long time -- my brother and I did not always give the devoted attention we might have to the prayers or to the Rabbi's teachings. Instead, I am afraid, we would stare up at the dome, which was encircled by a single row containing a great many light bulbs. We used to occupy ourselves by counting the lights. I can tell you even today that there were 67. Although yesterday I checked this number with my brother and he insists that there were 66.
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