Transcript of Press Conference to Announce an Award of the National
Endowment to the Humanities to the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute 18
October 1978
Gerald N. Tirozzi, Superintendent of Schools
My name is Dr. Gerald Tirozzi. I am the Superintendent of Schools in New
Haven, and I am here this afternoon to express my sincere gratitude to
Yale University and members of our staff for putting together what I think
is an outstanding program, and an excellent example of Yale-New Haven
Public School cooperation in terms of meeting the specific needs of the
New Haven Public School system. This grant will enable us to develop
curricula in English, history, and art for the school system, and take
advantage of the resources of Yale University, its professorial staff, and
other resources. Again, I am indebted to this type of involvement on the
part of Yale University and staff, and to Professor Giamatti President
Giamatti now. We are delighted, and I commend Yale for its involvement,
the City administration, Mayor Logue and his involvement, and my own
staff, and I look forward to great things from this project.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, President of Yale University
About a year ago at this time, Jim Vivian approached me and asked if I
would like to participate in the project which was called the Yale- New
Haven Teachers Institute. And because I didn't know if I would have a
summer job, (laughter) and because it seemed to me the kind of thing that
I had done before through the Yale Summer High School program and I had
taught in other forms, I was very interested and anxious in participating.
Jim worked with people like me, with Professor Henry Turner, Chairman of
the Department of History, with Professor Charles Davis, Professor of
English and Chairman of Afro- American Studies, and other faculty, and
developed this program, and I think it is a splendid thing, and I hope
that it can continue. It seems to me that this is the kind of joint effort
between the City and the University that we hope will become more frequent
and productive in coming years. Yale's educational and human resources are
the most essential contributions the University can make to the whole
community in which we live. It is precisely the kind of effort that we
wanted to make. It was the kind of involvement that I personally wanted to
be able to have and then was in some sense denied the opportunity of
having but one of the reasons that I wanted to be here today, to thank Dr.
Tirozzi and the Mayor for their cooperation and help and to look forward
to it in the future was because I do want to have some capacity to
participate in this effort. Yale is going to be developing a whole series
of programs in the summer under the leadership of Professor Charles
Porter, who is the director of Yale's Summer Programs. This seems to me to
be one of the most imaginative, innovative, interesting and I hope long
ranging that we have and I hope is simply a harbinger of things to come.
Hon. Frank Logue, Mayor of New Haven
My name is Frank Logue. I work in the bank down at the corner. I am
delighted to be here with you, Bart, with Gerry Tirozzi, and with Jim
Vivian, and I want to express my special thanks to the National Endowment
for the Humanities for making this imaginative grant. I think what this
represents, this joint effort, is a combined activity that is in the
mainstream of both our enterprises. There are people who would like Yale
to do something to help the City, the City to do something to help Yale,
which we would create out of whole cloth. The great thing about this
joint effort is that it takes resources and skills that Yale has in the
arts and the humanities and applies them to the highly direct and real
problem of what is it you can do to take the young people who are in our
public schools today and not only teach them, but maybe inspire them,
maybe get to them in a way that excites them about learning. My own sense
is that the best learning takes place when the student is not just
responding but is excited about what he or she can do. I might say that
what is true of being an elementary school student is also true of being a
Yale student. So, I commend the National Endowment, the people on our own
staff, the Board of Education and the people at Yale who have worked on
this. And while it comes out of the mainstream of what Yale does and what
the City does, my sense is that you can make a brand new kind of a
contribution to help our kids to learn significant and profound things,
and have a curriculum design that makes them eager to do that. To solve
that very simple problem we have Jim Vivian here who is going to tell us
how to do it.
James R. Vivian, Director, Yale-New Haven Teachers
Institute
Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I would first like to recall those conversations
that the President mentioned when we discussed his becoming an Institute
faculty member and say that, although it was in a sense our loss when the
Corporation elected him President of Yale, it was certainly also our gain
and the gain of all of us who share a commitment to opening the resources
of the University in ways that are beneficial to the City. Since 1970 Yale
has assisted a number of New Haven teachers to develop new curricula for
their public school courses. What distinguished the Teachers Institute
from earlier programs is its scope and ambition. Teachers and the Public
Schools administration have had a leading role in designing the Institute
to cover three disciplines in the humanities and within each subject to
serve a high percentage of middle and high school teachers. The Institute
will provide major assistance to the Public Schools' curriculum planning.
In the spirit of "mutual regard and collaboration," which President
Giamatti encouraged in his Inaugural address, Yale and the Public Schools
have made a notable commitment to the Institute, and at a time of fiscal
stringency for both. During the next three years, Yale and the Schools
will provide over half of the Institute's total budget of $660,000. With
the $210,000 grant of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and if we
can raise at least $45,000 in additional gifts which the National
Endowment will match, the Institute will accept 60 teachers as Fellows in
the coming year and 80 in each of the two following years. Through the
1978 Institute forty teachers became members of the Yale community and
wrote new curricula which 3000 New Haven middle and high school students
will study in this school year. By the end of three years all 9,100
secondary students in the Public Schools will take courses in which
Institute curricula are presented. The great strength of Yale and the
Schools is their teachers. Through the Institute Yale faculty and school
teachers join as colleagues to prepare new curricula which will improve
the teaching and learning of the humanities. There is no program like the
Institute in any other American city. I hope that the Institute s success
will show how fruitful such cooperation can be.
Logue
Question time.
Question:
Dr. Tirozzi, how do you hope this will benefit
the New Haven Public School system?
Tirozzi
I'd like to essentially echo what Jim Vivian said. In the areas of
English, social studies and art-of course we have curriculum in place-this
will allow us to develop more detailed curriculum, hopefully more
appropriate curriculum, and will allow us to call upon the resources of a
major university with specialists in respective areas in English, the
arts, and history to assist us in this endeavor. As Jim said, 9100
students have the
potential to be affected by what we do in this endeavor; so I see it as a
very positive step.
Question:
Dr. Tirozzi and Mr. Vivian, how much money is
going to be available and who is going to get it?
Vivian
The total budget of the program over three years is $660,000. The National
Endowment for the Humanities has provided a grant of $210,000 to be
applied over 3 years, $70,000 in each year. The National Endowment will
also match up to an additional $45,000 if we are able to raise gifts in
that amount.
Question:
Dr. Tirozzi, will this amount be sufficient for the school system in New
Haven?
Tirozzi
In terms of our planning with Yale personnel this amount will be
sufficient. The New Haven Department of Education has also committed funds
and supervisory and administrative resources to insure the success of the
project.
Question:
The funding of this goes for three years. I
guess no one knows what will happen then, but is there a commitment to
continue this program as long as possible?
Giamatti
What one hopes is that this program that we've been developing and have
developed, and now have funded will be a way of now demonstrating to other
granting agencies the merit and the success of such enterprises and what
we have to do is build on the success that we ve had and that I trust we
re going to have, and be constantly looking. This is the way these things
work. I think the NEH has made a splendid contribution. Mayor Logue said
it best, one can't really be grateful enough to the National Endowment for
the Humanities for the imagination and for the vision they ve had, and
Duffy's had, in locating this effort in the City and the University in a
joint way. It seems to me that one is committed now to continuing it.
What that means is that one is committed to continuing to look for more
resources, not because things have to cost more, but because things that
are done well ought to prove themselves and be supported. And I would hope
that those efforts to find more moneys will be a joint effort. They'd have
to be, it seems to me, between the City and the University, precisely
because that is the nature of the enterprise.
Question:
Dr. Tirozzi, are there enough teachers in the school system to handle this
extra "burden"?
Tirozzi
Actually yes, over the three year period in a sense there are more than
enough because with the number of teachers we have who potentially can be
involved, some teachers will be involved more than once. So we will
definitely, hopefully, be touching the largest percentage of our staff in
the areas cited. I just want to add one important comment to what it can
do for the school system. The City of New Haven has many major resources
they call upon, Yale University being one. And in some respects I'm a
selfish person. I m selfish because I think of the students in New Haven
and the teachers in New Haven. This program is available only to New Haven
students, New Haven teachers, New Haven administrators, and it s programs
such as this that hopefully can make our school system even more
attractive to be a part of and hopefully draw more people to come into
cities because of the kind of involvement we can have with a major
University like Yale University which is committed to working closely with
the school system, as is evidenced by this endeavor. So I hope that this
is step one in a variety of steps to strengthen that type of relationship.
Question:
Will Yale faculty indeed be teaching public school students and vice
versa?
Tirozzi
Well, in this particular program that is not the goal; however, we do have
a program with Yale where approximately thirty of our juniors and seniors
in high school take courses at Yale University for credit, and those
courses are taught by professors at Yale University and we're hoping to
expand on that in the future.
Giamatti
This is essentially a program where, as the Mayor implied and Mr. Vivian
implied, there is a collegial relationship among teachers, teachers in the
New Haven school system, teachers in the Yale school system. Dr. Tirozzi
and the Mayor have been very gracious, and I'm grateful for it, in saying
what the involvement of the City and the University in this way will do
for the City. Let me say that Yale University also benefits from this
precisely in the way that Gerry said. In this way the University is able
to keep in touch with the vital, major, cultural center in the east, New
Haven, and help its young people become the kind of young people they want
to be and, I hope, go to Yale, among other places. Yale has a very real
stake in primary and secondary education in the United States of America
and a very real stake particularly in this area because this is where one
wants the young people who will be coming here to come from. So that the
collegiality that one emphasizes in this is in no sense a polite
phraseology. It s a very real collegiality. All the people who will be
engaged in this program are teachers, and they ll be working together to
develop curriculum which will enable students in various stages to become
students at the other stages. That's going to be of a very great benefit
when it works and how it works for the teachers and the students at all
the levels.