service to their alma mater
Five Yale University alumni have been selected by the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA) to receive the Yale Medal in 2007.
This year's recipients are Victor E. Chears, Dr. Samuel D. Kushlan, John E. Pepper Jr., Jon E. Steffensen and Vera F. Wells.
The Yale Medal is the highest award presented by the AYA and recognizes outstanding individual service to the University. Since its inception in 1952, the Yale Medal has been presented to 262 individuals.
Chears has served Yale in his many volunteer leadership roles for almost 30 years, since his graduation from Yale College in 1974. After serving as an AYA delegate, he was elected to the AYA Board of Governors in 1988 and served as its secretary 1991-1992. Chears chaired the board of the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale in the early 1980s and was co-chair of its 35th anniversary celebration in 2004. He has been an Alumni Schools Committee interviewer for over 25 years and continues to serve as a board member of the Yale Club of Chicago, where he is a former president.
Kushlan, a 1932 alumnus of Yale College, has been a volunteer and alumni leader for the Yale School of Medicine, where he earned his M.D. in 1935. Kushlan has taught residents, medical students and physicians voluntarily at the School of Medicine for over 50 years. At age 95 he continues to attend "morning report" of Yale-New Haven Hospital's Department of Medicine, where one of the services bears his name. He also established Merit Awards for the Medical House Staff and Digestive Disease Fellows. In addition, Kushlan has volunteered his time and resources to create a Capital Visiting Professorship in Gastroenterology.
Pepper first began his service to the Yale community as a member of the Development Board and later as a member of the 1960 Class Council and Reunion Gift Committee. Pepper also taught a course for a semester as an adjunct professor and was a member of the advisory committee at the School of Management. He was a member of the Yale Corporation, the University's governing board, for eight years, including service as senior fellow for 18 months. He stepped down from the Yale Corporation when asked by the University to serve as vice president for finance and administration. During his two years in that post, before leaving to pursue major commitments in his home city of Cincinnati, Pepper initiated a critical transformation of the University's administrative and financial operations.
Steffensen has held many volunteer leadership roles since his graduation from Yale College in 1968. His longtime service and leadership for the Yale Club of Boston led him to become an AYA delegate in 1981. He was then elected to the AYA Board of Governors in 1984, and served as secretary in 1987. From there he went on to serve on the University's Honorary Degree Committee. Steffensen later became chair of the Scholarship Trust of the Yale Club of Boston, which has been instrumental in helping undergraduates in the Boston area meet the cost of a Yale education.
Wells has helped organize events for both women and black alumni, and has championed efforts to raise funds to support the Afro-American Cultural Center and Women Faculty Forum. A member of the Yale College Class of 1971, she is on the Campaign Committee and is an at-large member of the University Council, where she served on its Theater Review Committee. A former student of Professor Sylvia Ardyn Boone, the first African-American woman to receive tenure at Yale, Wells is executor of Boone's literary estate and director of the Boone Memorial Project. Wells used her own assets to endow an undergraduate scholarship and a graduate student prize to honor her professor at Yale.
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