Yale Bulletin and Calendar

May 2, 2008|Volume 36, Number 28|Two-Week Issue

The McDougal Graduate Student Center is a quiet place where students can go to read, study and conduct research.

Center celebrates decade of
shaping graduate student life

In the decade since it was established, the McDougal Graduate Student Center has both reflected and influenced the changing nature of graduate education at Yale.

For many years, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was a loose confederation of academic departments and programs with offices in the Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS) that handled the nuts and bolts of admissions, financial aid, registration and dossier services — all under the oversight of a dean and associate deans.

“Graduate education was very department-driven, and students were often isolated in their departments with no sense of being part of a larger community,” notes Peter Salovey, former dean of the Graduate School and now dean of Yale College and the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology.

Then, a little over 10 years ago, the Graduate School began to expand its mission and broaden the range of services it provided to students. One of the most significant steps in this process was the creation of the McDougal Graduate Student Center, which was dedicated in October of 1997. Alfred McDougal (Yale College Class of 1953) and his wife, Nancy Lauter, funded renovations to create the center and established an endowment to support programming.

McDougal says he made his gift to allow graduate students, most of whom live off-campus, to have some of the same opportunities afforded to undergraduates through the residential college system.

“I have been greatly enriched by my undergraduate experience at Yale,” he says. “But as I talked to graduate students at a number of campuses, I realized how isolated — and even lonely — the world of graduate students can be. The graduate years are a time when students pursue a more narrow specialization, but a student of French literature, for example, doesn’t cease to be someone who loves to play the cello or soccer or have career concerns. I sensed a real need at the University for a center that could support graduate students in the variety of endeavors that encourage them to be the well-rounded people they are.”

Salovey chaired the committee that turned the idea for a student center into a reality. “Our challenge was to transcend those [departmental] barriers and provide a place where graduate students could come together for social and academic reasons,” he says.

Today the McDougal Center offers an array of special events, programs and services designed to enrich graduate student life at Yale socially, intellectually, culturally and professionally.

The Common Room is the heart of the center. For generations, it was a private lounge available only to residents of the HGS dormitory tower. Now open seven days a week, often until 11 p.m., the Common Room combines traditional furnishings with contemporary convenience: carved wooden paneling, emblematically decorated windows, carpets, a stone fireplace and deep leather chairs, plus wi-fi, e-mail kiosks and a coffee shop. When the soot from decades of cigarettes and wood fires was removed from the ceiling during renovation, intricately painted, colorful scenes depicting the history of Western civilization were uncovered for the first time in many years.

The center’s Program Room features audio-visual equipment for computer-based presentations as well as space for workshops, meetings and lectures. Downstairs, the McDougal Center houses the Graduate Writing Program, a computer cluster, the Graduate Student Assembly Office and additional work areas for the center’s graduate student fellows.

The McDougal Center is also a place where individuals from different departments, whose paths might not otherwise have crossed, can gather to socialize and exchange ideas.

The Student Services corridor includes offices for Student Life, directed by Lisa Brandes; Graduate Career Services, directed by Victoria Blodgett; the Graduate Teaching Center, directed by Bill Rando; and the Office for Diversity and Equal Opportunity, temporarily headed by John Mangan. The new writing coordinator, Elena Kallestinova, will take up residence in the center this summer, and will be offering programs and tutoring sessions. The professional staff and student fellows in all of these offices collaborate closely to ensure that the McDougal Center meets the needs of the students of the Graduate School.

“We are always innovating and enhancing our offerings to make the graduate student experience as good as it can be,” says Brandes, the original director of the McDougal Center.

The McDougal Center “is the hub of the graduate-student community, and it was through the McDougal Center that I met most of my closest friends at Yale,” says history graduate student James O’Leary.

“But the value of the McDougal Center is not only in encouraging an extracurricular social life for lonely graduate students,” adds O’Leary. “I believe that the center also benefits the academic culture of the Graduate School. During my first year, I was exposed mainly to the intellectual life of my department, and like all departments we tended to focus on specific, and perhaps even arcane (to somebody who is not steeped in the field) problems. It was great to take these fascinating problems and bounce them off a larger academic community and to hear how people in other departments approach similar problems.”

Amy Savage, a student in the School of Public Health who is also a fellow with the Student Life Office, recently represented the center at the 2007 Ivy Grad Summit, where she met graduate student leaders from the other Ivy League universities. “As I spoke with delegates from these universities, it became very apparent that the McDougal Center at Yale is not only one of a kind, but it truly is the gold standard that these other institutions aspire to emulate,” says Savage. “Each conversation highlighted for me just how generous of a gift Mr. McDougal and Ms. Lauter gave the graduate community at Yale. What the McDougal Center allows the administration, staff and fellows to achieve is unparalleled.”

The McDougal Graduate Student Center will host an anniversary reception on Friday, May 9. The gathering will take place 4:30-6 p.m. in the Common Room of the center, located in the Hall of Graduate Studies, 320 York St. The Citations, the Graduate School’s a capella singers, will perform at the reception, which is open to the Yale community.

For more information, visit the website www.yale.edu/graduateschool/mcdougal.

— By Gila Reinstein

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