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Editor's Note: In 1963 Kingman Brewster was named president of Yale University. Over the next several years, he transformed what he said had been a finishing school for the children of the rich and the well-born into a great academic institution where merit and equality of educational opportunity held sway.
IN THE SPRING of 1966, admissions director R. Inslee ("Inky") Clark was summoned before the Yale Corporation to report directly on the changes in policy he had implemented since his appointment by Yale president Kingman Brewster the year before. The 30-year-old Clark walked over to Woodbridge Hall and climbed the marble stairs to the second floor. He entered the imposing room where Brewster and the Corporation were gathered in their high-backed leather chairs around a long, immaculately polished table beneath twin chandeliers and portraits of Elihu Yale and bygone presidents. Clark briefly described the process leading up to the admission of his first class, the Class of 1970, and the new emphasis he had placed on talent spotting, merit, and diversity.
One of the Corporation members who had "hemmed and hawed" through dark's presentation finally said, "Let me get down to basics. You're admitting an entirely different class than we're used to. You're admitting them for a different purpose than training leaders." Unspoken but understood by all was that the dean of admissions' new emphasis had rejected unprecedented numbers of wealthy, WASP applicants from preparatory schools, many of them alumni sons, who had been Yale's longtime constituency. Clark responded that in a changing America, leaders might come from nontraditional sources, including public high school graduates, Jews, minorities, and even women. His interlocutor shot back, "You're talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table" - he waved a hand at the other distinguished men assembled there. "These are America's leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here."
No aspect of Kingman Brewster's presidency stirred more anger and debate than the overhaul of Yale's undergraduate admissions during the 1960s. Admissions became a battleground over the university's purpose. The outcome of the battle, which was felt far beyond Yale, was part of a larger struggle in American society, the thorny debate over race, class, gender, and...