60th Reunion Videos – with Links to the Full Package
Here, we provide the videos webmaster Jean was able to record during our 60th Reunion, held at Timothy Dwight June 9-12, 2022. We enjoyed perfect weather and glad camaraderie as we attended faculty lectures, an Art Gallery reception, classmate panels, our Memorial Service and a presentation by President Salovey in Woolsey Hall. Photos will be posted very soon, but in the meantime, please enjoy the videos below. Our written Reunion Report is here. Our Reunion Photos are here. Our ‘Litany of Thanksgiving and Remembrance,’ from our Memorial Service, is here.
David Scharff on China Today
Memorial Service
Finkle & Weeden
Saturday, June 11, 2022
Prof. David Blight speaks on Frederick Douglass
Classmate Panel. Working Into Our Eighties: Failing Retirement
Saturday Evening Remarks: Yale Varsity Hockey Coach Keith Allain
The Y62 Whiffenpoofs
Joe Holmes Swing Band
We welcome your comments below.
How wonderful to have this rich set of videos! Really looking forward to savoring each one! Thanks, Jean, so much for these gifts to our class!
It’s my distinct honor and great pleasure to work with you, Tim. Thanks for the kind words!
I would like to submit this as background information to supplement David Scharff’s excellent discussion at the reunion of recent cultural developments in modern China. [Top video on this page.] Yale has a long history of involvement with China, and our class has participated extensively in it. Skimming Bob Oliver’s obituaries, I came across a classmate who was a Director of the Yale in China program, which dates back to 1901. For many years Yale was a leading source of Chinese language teaching for Christian missionaries heading out to China. After the 1949 Communist takeover of China, missionaries were no longer welcome in China, but the US Air Force took over Yale’s Chinese program to teach Air Force intelligence officers how to translate communications of Chinese pilots and their air traffic controllers, and Yale students who wanted to study Chinese were able to piggyback on that excellent program; eventually many instructors in the program were hired away by other colleges to establish Chinese language courses based on the materials Yale had developed.
Around our time at Yale, Yale hired two highly regarded Chinese historians who had been teaching at Stanford, Arthur and Mary Wright. Arthur refused to come unless Mary was also given tenure, so she became one of the first two women to receive tenure in the undergraduate college. Arthur specialized in ancient Chinese philosophy and Mary specialized in modern China; they had lived in China during WWII. I believe I was the first undergraduate to major in Chinese Studies. There were in my beginning Chinese classes two Clare fellows who were graduates of Cambridge in England and were deemed to be members of our class. Sir John Boyd served in her Majesty’s foreign service, while Jonathan Spence (see Bob Oliver’s obit) eventually spent many years as a prominent Chinese historian on the Yale faculty, writing numerous highly regarded books on various aspects of Chinese history. And I return to our classmate Dr. David Scharff who, with his wife Jill, made numerous trips to China over the past 15 years, studying and writing about the recent evolution of Chinese cultural attitudes. I highly recommend his recent book, Marriage and Family in Modern China, which expands on the topics he discussed at the reunion.
As for myself, I moved on to Harvard Law School, where I took newly arrived Prof. Jerome Cohen’s course on Chinese law, and eventually traveled to China several times as a tourist. Although I did not use my Yale Chinese education professionally, I highly valued it as a means of comparison to the evolution of cultural values in our own society.