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September 29, 2006|Volume 35, Number 4


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University launches 'Yale Tomorrow' campaign

Yale is launching a development campaign the weekend of Sept. 30 that is expected to seek $3 billion in five years to fund a wide range of University priorities in the 21st century.

"Above all, we need to complete the transformation of Yale from a local to a regional to a national to an international university," President Richard C. Levin said of the impetus of the campaign, named "Yale Tomorrow."

Campaign officials said that approximately three-fourths of Yale's endowment funds are dedicated to specific current purposes, making new financial sources necessary if Yale is to expand beyond its current scope. Officials described the campaign as a comprehensive, University-wide initiative designed to benefit each of Yale's schools and programs.

The following is excerpted from Levin's message outlining the objectives Yale seeks to pursue with the support of the campaign:


President's Message about the "Yale Tomorrow" campaign

This campaign will seek to enhance those Yale programs that are already among the nation's best. We will reinvigorate the Yale College curriculum, support graduate education, strengthen our libraries and museums, invest in the humanities and social sciences, deepen the Law School's involvement with international affairs and the legal profession, and augment the teaching and financial aid resources of our distinguished Schools of Art, Architecture, Drama, Music, Divinity, Nursing and Forestry & Environmental Studies.

We will also seek to strengthen those programs that are vital to maintaining the University's overall standing in the 21st century. To remain among the world's great universities, we must invest in science and technology on an unprecedented scale. To keep our School of Medicine at the forefront, we need to translate advances in the biomedical sciences into improved clinical care. And to participate fully in the education of 21st-century leaders, we need the School of Management to take its place among the nation's top business schools.

Above all, we need to complete the transformation of Yale from a local to a regional to a national to an international university. To prepare our students for leadership in an interdependent world, we need to augment the faculty resources devoted to international studies, and we need to make it possible for every undergraduate to have an overseas experience during his or her four years at Yale.

In the statement that follows, I highlight some of the most important objectives of the campaign under four headings:

* The College

* The Arts

* The Sciences

* The World

In this format it is possible to mention only a fraction of the many opportunities available to prospective donors. This is a comprehensive, University-wide campaign, embracing all of the University's schools and programs. A complete listing of gift opportunities is available online at www.givingcatalog.yale.edu.


The College

Yale College is thriving, perhaps as never before. Our faculty, distinguished for its scholarship, remains deeply committed to undergraduate education. Our students enjoy incomparable residential facilities, and they receive from their deans and masters the kind of personal attention normally found only in small colleges. The result is a student body that is intensely serious about the academic enterprise, even as it is engaged with equal intensity in an almost unimaginable array of student activities -- from athletics to debate to building and racing a solar-powered car, from tutoring schoolchildren to assisting in soup kitchens, from protest to electoral politics to the Yale Entrepreneurial Society, from a cappella singing to the exceptional Yale Symphony Orchestra, from filmmaking to musical comedy and opera. With more than 250 student organizations, Yale College is a virtual laboratory for leadership.

Recognizing that excellence is no excuse for complacency, we undertook a comprehensive review of the Yale College curriculum at the time of our tercentennial. The Committee on Yale College Education, chaired by the former dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead, recommended, among other things, substantial improvements in the teaching of science and quantitative reasoning, greater involvement of Yale's professional schools in undergraduate teaching, especially in the arts, and a major commitment to increasing the opportunities for students to study and work abroad. A principal objective of the Yale Tomorrow campaign is to provide permanent funding to support these initiatives.

To serve as responsible citizens and leaders for the 21st century, our students need to become sufficiently familiar with the basic scientific principles and methods that will enable them to form judgments about the quality of argument and evidence in the many scientific disputes that affect public life. We intend to provide enhanced support for pedagogy in science and quantitative reasoning and to develop a variety of courses that meet this need more satisfactorily than comprehensive introductory courses, which are tailored to serve those who intend to continue in science.

The arts play a central role in the life of Yale College, but the opportunities for formal study are limited. To satisfy student demand for courses in studio art, photography, filmmaking, theatrical and musical performance, and related fields, we need to create new faculty positions in the Schools of Art, Drama and Music, as well as in theater studies and film studies.

As nations become more interdependent and careers become more global in character, we need to ensure that every Yale College student has an opportunity to study or work abroad during his or her four years of enrollment. To this end, we are expanding the number of approved junior-year-abroad programs, and creating one of our own in Beijing. Recognizing that many Yale students would prefer to spend summers abroad, we have created new summer school courses abroad taught by Yale faculty, as well as hundreds of new work internships around the globe. We have also committed to providing stipends and waiving the summer earnings requirement for those students on financial aid who study or take unpaid internships abroad.

Our commitment to providing full need-based financial aid for all admitted students -- extended initially to U.S. citizens and permanent residents 40 years ago and subsequently to international students five years ago -- resonates with the best traditions of this land of opportunity. Yet we have found that many talented young women and men from lower-income families remain unaware that a Yale education is affordable. To make it completely clear that we welcome students of great potential regardless of background, we announced in 2005 that parents with annual incomes below $45,000 would not have to contribute to the cost of their child's education. We seek additional financial aid endowment to support this new commitment.

In the end, maintaining the unique quality of a Yale College education requires us to attract and retain a faculty of extraordinary talent and accomplishment. Endowed professorships and funds to support research will further our efforts to preserve our historic excellence in the humanities and social sciences and to add to the distinction of our faculty in science and engineering.


The Arts

Yale's unique strength in the arts is well known around the globe. No other private university has a full suite of professional schools in art, architecture, music and drama of comparable distinction. From Maya Lin to Chuck Close, from Norman Foster to Willie Ruff, from Meryl Streep to David Henry Hwang, Yale's contribution to the arts is unsurpassed. And in the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, we hold art collections of extraordinary quality and breadth.

To maintain the excellence of our professional schools and the related departments in Yale College and the Graduate School, we need to ensure that the quality of our facilities is commensurate with the quality of our teaching programs. In recent years, we have created the new Gilmore Music Library, renovated Sprague Hall and Leigh Hall to serve the School of Music, and converted an abandoned facility on Chapel Street into Green Hall, the new home of the School of Art. But much remains to be done. We are seeking support for the renovation of Hendrie Hall (for both undergraduate and graduate students in music), Stoeckel Hall (for the Department of Music), and Paul Rudolph's modern classic "A+A" building to house the School of Architecture. We will also build a new home for the School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theatre, a new building to house the School of Art's sculpture program, and a new home for the Department of the History of Art. We will also relocate and expand the new, highly successful Digital Media Center for the Arts, which serves all of the arts schools, as well as undergraduate programs in film studies and theater studies.

We are in the midst of expanding the Yale University Art Gallery to house its growing collections and to serve the pedagogical needs of the School of Art, Yale College and the Graduate School. Soon after the ongoing restoration of the magnificent Louis Kahn building is completed, we will initiate work to expand the gallery across the High Street Bridge into Street Hall.

Our hope is to raise funds sufficient to complete this entire $500 million building program by the end of the campaign. It is a source of great pride that Yale has the capacity to contribute to the quality of life and creativity of our nation by making such a monumental investment in the arts. We are also seeking to raise at least $100 million in endowed scholarship funds to encourage talented students to take on the risk of careers in the arts without incurring excessive debt.


The Sciences

During the past 60 years, America's prosperity and the health of its citizens have increasingly come to depend on its leadership in generating new advances in scientific knowledge and translating them into new products, new services, and entire new industries. And during this same period, America's universities have been the principal worldwide source of new scientific discoveries. Because of the social and economic importance of science and technology, the global reputation of leading universities has come to depend heavily on the quality of their scientific research.

To ensure that Yale will continue to rank among the world's greatest universities, we committed at the turn of the millennium to a $1 billion investment in new and renovated science facilities. We have since built the Class of 1954 Environmental Science Center, the Class of 1954 Chemistry Research Building, the Daniel L. Malone Engineering Center, and the Anlyan Center for Biomedical Research, and we have used these splendid new facilities to attract superb new scientists and engineers to our faculty. But we have much still to accomplish to guarantee the success of this initiative. We will soon begin construction of a new biological science facility on Science Hill, and soon thereafter Sterling Chemistry will be converted from a research lab to a center for undergraduate science teaching and learning. And the Peabody Museum will be renovated. The School of Medicine will build at least two, possibly three, new research buildings, and to translate the fruits of scientific research into longer and more productive lives, we are building, jointly with Yale­New Haven Hospital, a new cancer hospital that will draw upon best practices developed at Yale and elsewhere to become one of the nation's premier sites for the care of cancer patients.

One of the strategies we are employing to ratchet up the quality of science and engineering at Yale is to build critical mass in emerging areas of research. Hence, we are seeking support for major initiatives in genomics and proteomics, human genetics, computational biology, biomedical engineering, nanotechnology and quantum computing. In each of these areas, we have outstanding faculty who rank among the world's leaders. We are also seeking support for crucial areas of biomedical research, such as cancer, neurological disorders and cardiovascular disease.


The World

In the 18th century, three-quarters of Yale students came from Connecticut. In the 19th century, three-quarters came from New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In the 20th century, we became a truly national university. To maintain our preeminence in the 21st century, we must complete the transition from a local to regional to national to international university. Today's graduates will have global careers, and their contribution to society will transcend national boundaries. The growing interdependence of nations requires us to prepare students for global leadership and service. This has implications for the shape of curriculum, the composition of the student body, and the extent to which students and faculty are directly engaged in activities abroad.

Yale's faculty has exceptional distinction in the study of many areas of the world. Chinese and British history, African art, and the literatures of France, Italy, Spain and Latin America are just a few examples. But there are important areas of international studies -- such as the politics and economics of China and India, and the politics and culture of the contemporary Middle East -- that we must develop if we are to offer our students sufficient exposure to nations and cultures that will have an important influence on 21st-century affairs. Establishing endowed professorships in international studies and in the Law School as well as the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, is an institutional priority.

We have recently discovered great value in selectively drawing upon the expertise of our faculty to mount short-term educational programs for established or emerging leaders from around the globe. Most of these programs differ from the executive programs offered elsewhere by schools of business or public policy in that they draw upon the whole range of expertise in our faculty -- from history and the social sciences to law, business, environmental studies and public health. All these programs -- the Yale World Fellows Program, the Global Constitutional Seminar (for supreme court justices in emerging and established democracies), the Middle Eastern Legal Studies seminar, the teaching programs of the China Law Center, and customized programs for Chinese university presidents and environmental officials -- have been supported with short-term funding from individuals or foundations. It would be desirable to secure more stable support for such efforts to educate global leaders, as well as support for the construction of suitable conference facilities.

Nearly 10% of our undergraduates and one-quarter of our graduate and professional students are neither citizens nor permanent residents of the United States. The provision of need-based financial aid for international students in Yale College, introduced to mark our tercentennial in 2001, has had a dramatic effect on the quality and diversity of our matriculants, but the aid packages needed by many of these students requires us to seek new endowment for scholarships.

As we augment the opportunities for Yale College students to study and work abroad, we need to attend to the needs of our graduate and professional students to deepen their work through international experiences. The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale provides partial funding for overseas research undertaken by graduate students. Architecture students travel annually to work with local students on projects in Shanghai and Hong Kong, students at the School of Music perform abroad, and the School of Management takes students to study the emerging businesses of China and India each spring. All these worthy endeavors warrant expansion.


Afterword

I hope that you will be inspired by our plans to make education in Yale College even better, to give our arts schools and galleries facilities commensurate with the quality of their programs, to catapult Yale to the highest level of excellence in the sciences, and to establish ourselves as a truly global university. To pursue these objectives, we need your support.

On many occasions, I have invoked the Talmudic epigraph of Rabbi Tarphon: "We cannot complete the work, but neither can we desist from it." To strengthen our nation and to improve as best we can the human condition around the globe, I ask your help in carrying forward the work of the University.


T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

University launches 'Yale Tomorrow' campaign

Gift of $50 million to create Greenberg Yale-China Initiative

Greenberg: 'Flexibility' will be key Yale asset in China

Program will educate corporate leaders about . . . climate change

V.P. and union president co-chairing Yale-United Way Campaign

This year's 'Science Saturdays' for children celebrates women scientists

Alumnus Robert Burger is named an assistant provost

MEDICAL CENTER NEWS

More Yale-related MacArthur Fellows

Yale's Endowment earns 22.9% in the past fiscal year

Erin Lavik and Tarek Fahmy win biomedical engineering awards

Are we alone? 'Alien Earths' explores scientists' quest to find out

Exhibit explores connections between art and music in different period

Yale novelists, poets and playwrights will read from their works

Works by photojournalists in Iraq on view at ISM

Study finds affirmation exercise boosts minority . . .

Conference to explore ways to increase diversity in higher education

Traveling Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival comes to campus

Ancient coins will be showcased in 'The Romans in Asia' symposium

Two noted scientists serving as visiting scholars . . .

Five alumni to be honored with Wilbur Lucius Cross Medals

Five junior faculty members are honored by The MacMillan Center . . .

Memorial service for Jaroslav Pelikan

University of Michigan professor wins Yale's Douglass Prize

Campus Notes


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