(Opinion) “New Haven has been Yale University’s home for over 300 years and mine for nearly 40. As a longtime Yale employee and New Haven resident, I know that the university and its city love and need each other — and that there come moments when our leaders have special reason to work closely together for the good of our community.
“… I do not believe that New Haven’s current financial problems are the result of a lack of generosity from Yale.”
Yale President Peter Salovey, 2020
“The History major is for students who understand that shaping the future requires knowing the past..”
Requirements of the Major, Department of History, Yale University
Knowing the past of New Haven and Yale’s relationship may indeed help us think through how we might seek to shape our intertwined future.
Fortunately, we have a window on the past from my old Edgewood School classmate Mark Mininberg. Mark’s grandfather, Mayor John W. Murphy, was New Haven’s mayor during the Great Depression, and Mark explored Murphy’s struggle to keep the city afloat in his 1988 book Saving New Haven: John W. Murphy Faces The Crisis of the Great Depression.
Murphy banked on Yale recognizing that “the university and its city love and need each other.” After all, back then, as now, the university was flush with cash and in the midst of a construction boom. Certainly its self-interest in helping out New Haven would be obvious.
Alas, it was not to be.
Now, in 2020, as the Board of Alders grapples with a proposal to eliminate a department, slash hiring and vacant positions, and raise property taxes, perhaps knowing this past will help us shape a better future for all.
After all, as William Faulkner noted, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Reprinted below is Mark’s chapter from Saving New Haven: John W. Murphy Faces The Crisis of the Great Depression as Murphy reaches out to the then-Yale president in 1932:
Facing A Crisis
From his second floor office in City Hall, Murphy could look out across the New Haven Green and see workmen scrambling over scaffolding lashed to the sides of the new buildings which were going up as part of Yale’s expansion program. The mayor would be momentarily pleased to see men busily at work, although they were only a small fraction of the total unemployed. Then flashes of anger would overcome him as he recalled the reason why the men were occupied.
As Yale had accumulated millions in bequests from such benefactors as Standard Oil founders John W. Sterling and Edward S. Harkness, it began just before the First World War to buy up as much choice downtown property as it could. There were miles of free land adjacent to the university to the north which could have been used for expansion, but Yale desired the hallowed downtown area. Aided by its tax-exempt status, which had been instituted in 1792 and preserved by influential alumni in the state General Assembly and Supreme Court, Yale could outbid almost any competitor for the property it desired.
By 1930, Yale property had been worth an amount equal to over ten per-cent of the city’s grand list of taxable property. The university increased its tax-exempt land by approximately 20 percent between 1930 and 1933. The decrease in the grand list which resulted cut further into the city’s already limited tax base, while Yale continued to receive free police and fire protection and use of the sewage system.
Harvard, aware of the damage excessive tax exemptions caused Cambridge, had agreed in 1928 to pay moderate taxes on its properties. The citizens of New Haven, hoping that this precedent would stir arch-rival Yale to fulfill its long overdue obligation to its hosts, were disappointed. Yale had been constructing buildings at a steady pace since the mid-twenties. But with the Depression, labor and materials were rendered dirt-cheap and the university seized the opportunity to build everything it had ever wanted: Payne Whitney gymnasium, the largest athletic facility in the world; the huge Sterling Memorial Library; Sterling Law School; Sterling Hall of Graduate Studies; a new art school, several residential colleges, a new power plant, many new classrooms. In all, thirty-five buildings would be built from 1929 to 1937 at a cost of $52 million.
Most of the new buildings were designed in Gothic style, made to look ancient in imitation of Oxford. For Yale, the new medieval fortress, provided a symbol of the university’s stature as a world institution, with roots deep in the past, and with the weight to remain far into the future. But to New Haveners, the thick stone walls and imposing towers were more than symbolic. They were a physical barrier which further separated the university from the city.
The first week of June, Murphy met with Yale President Rowland Angell and members of the Corporation at Woodbridge Hall to try to persuade them to make some small contribution to the relief of the people. Yale’s endowment had grown fourfold since 1921, from $25.7 million to $107.6 million, and the mayor naively anticipated some kind of positive response. He had, after all, welcomed Angell to New Haven.
Murphy returned from the meeting dejected, telling his friend Joseph Carr: “Joe, they’re tough people. I didn’t get any response from them at all. But Joe, I saw something in there that I may not live to see but you may. There’s a model on the table in there which shows Yale owning all the property from Grove Street Cemetery to New Haven Hospital and from College Street to Howe. They want all of downtown.”
During the next year, Murphy continued his effort to get Yale to accept some responsibility for its actions, but to no avail. Annoyed by New Haven’s impudence, President Angell later publicly portrayed Murphy’s humble request as a threat not only to liberal education and learning, but to truth itself:
“The University is dedicated to the discovery, protection, and dissemination of truth. As such it has been subject to attack since time immemorial from every agency that fears new truth and arrogates itself the exclusive possession of particular areas of truth. In one generation this attack has come from organized religion, in another from vested business interests, and in yet another from political forces that cannot, or will not, brook the light of disinterested investigation and discussion.”
Meanwhile, Murphy solemnly watched the towers rise over New Haven.
For more on this history — and on the question of taxing Yale —see this piece from the Fall 2016 Yale Historical Review.
Earth to Elicker: asking won't work. Find leverage and apply it. My recommendation? Look to commencement week.