Stanford’s Board of Trustees reported Friday on their retreat to Yale University, which Board Chair Leslie Hume said provided a look at a “very different” institution.

Board members traveled to Yale’s campus in New Haven, Conn. to meet with administrators and tour University facilities and residences April 26-28.

According to Hume, the visit focused on three aspects of Yale: its residential college system, its support for the arts and its efforts in global engagement.

Residential ‘Safety Nets’

Yale represents a sharp contrast to Stanford’s model for undergraduate housing and residential education. Yale is organized along a system of 12 residential colleges, and students are assigned to a college for the duration of their time as an undergraduate. Each college has a master and a dean–both senior faculty members–and provides advising resources, academic programming and a dining hall to its members, along with other unique facilities.

While students take courses along with all other students on campus, they retain their affiliation with their specific college.

“They use those colleges to create community cohesion and coherence in the larger Yale community,” Hume said. “They’re a way of building connections among a small group of people. They serve in some ways as a safety net.”

The board visited one residential college that Hume described as typical, containing a dance studio, pottery studio, exercise room, 80-seat movie theater, photography darkroom and several community art spaces.

Stanford, by contrast, has a more decentralized model with a more diverse range of housing options–and a corresponding reliance on shared University facilities. While Hume said she and the board “like the variety of housing stock” at Stanford, this diversity constrains Stanford’s ability to provide dedicated facilities or focused community building at the level of a residential college.

“There’s no way Stanford could do anything like this,” Hume said.

Hume also said that, in her view, the residential college system provided a different sense to the two campuses.

“If you look at these colleges, they are walled-off, if you will, self-contained units,” Hume said of Yale’s offerings. “We are sort of open institutions–people go outside, and they go places across the campus.”

A ‘Proliferation’ of the Arts

Hume also noted that Yale paid particular attention to the integration of the arts into residences and facilities, pointing to one example of the installation of stage lights in dining halls to allow them to be used as performance spaces.

This attention to the arts, Hume said, resulted in what one Yale student called a feeling of being “bombarded” by the arts. She compared this favorably to the goal of Stanford’s arts initiative to make the arts “inescapable” on campus.

Hume said that this “proliferation” of artistic space on campus also drew support from Yale’s museums, which are world-renowned, even for a top university. As one example of the integration of museums into student life and education, Hume noted that there is an employee at Yale dedicated to examining Yale’s course offerings and looking for potential opportunities to make use of museum exhibits, holdings and collections in classes.

“There’s a multi-pronged effort at Yale in the arts to do with space, to do with faculty, to do with student engagement and to do with grant support for students,” Hume said.

Yale also has professional schools of music, drama, art and architecture, providing a level of administrative support and dedication for these arts that goes far beyond a single department.

To Hume, Yale’s highly developed and comprehensive commitment to the arts was an indicator of a difference in the highest priorities of the two institutions, citing a similarly strong level of commitment at Stanford to athletics that Yale did not share.

Support for International Programs

On the subject of internationalization, Hume pointed to Yale’s focus on internships and grants for students, rather than dedicated overseas programs, as a strong contrast to Stanford’s system.

Yale “is putting structures in place that support and in some ways integrate what is going on on the campus to do with international programs,” Hume said. “And Yale has been very intentional about doing that.”

Hume pointed to some of Yale’s focuses as possible areas in which Stanford could find itself expanding in future years–potentially in lieu of adding additional overseas campuses.

Divestment

Last, responding to a question about whether or not the board would take up a divestment discussion in the wake of recent student campaigns on investment and divestment in the Middle East, Hume said the issue, if brought to the board by the student body, would fall under the purview of an investment responsibility committee chaired by board member Goodwin Liu ’91.

The committee is “a forum for dealing with issues exactly like this,” Hume said.

Hume said the question was the first time she had heard of the recent campaigns.

Liu has been nominated by President Barack Obama to a position in the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Taking Stock

The board retreat at Yale was originally scheduled for last year, but was postponed as Stanford attempted to manage the budget crisis brought on by the economic recession. In the interim, one of the original reasons behind the trip–assessing options for the expansion of the size of Stanford’s undergraduate population–faded as a central concern.

Hume said the idea of a visit, however, still held appeal, as did the connections with top Yale administrators. Yale President Richard Levin ’68 and Yale Provost Peter Salovey ’80 M.A.’80 are both Stanford alumni. In addition, The Yale Corporation visited Stanford in 1999, and Hume said the visit had focused on Stanford’s undergraduate reforms as part of the Campaign for Undergraduate Education, of which she had served as a vice chair.

“Yale, for a number of reasons, seemed the logical place to go,” Hume said.

Hume added that following its visit, the board would not be providing any overt direction to Stanford’s current Study for Undergraduate Education (SUES), but that the group would share its impressions with the study’s co-chairs, history Prof. James Campbell ’83 Ph.D. ’89 and drama Prof. Harry Elam, when they meet with them in June.

Hume said the trip was instructive on the whole, and indicated that Stanford’s board may pursue similar retreats in the future.

“Any time you go to a different environment, you become much more conscious of your own culture and your own university environment,” Hume said. “You learn from their best practices, but I think you also learn what is particularly important and valuable about what you have here.”

“It’s a very good thing to do once in a while,” Hume added.