‘This shared community’: McInnis welcomes Yale’s newest students

On Monday morning, as Yale President Maurie McInnis welcomed the university’s newest undergraduate and graduate students to campus in a pair of Cross Campus ceremonies, she reflected on her own arrival at Yale as a graduate student in the fall of 1989 — and her return, this summer, as Yale’s new president.

Like her, said McInnis ’96 Ph.D. — who began service as Yale’s 24th president on July 1 — the students arriving this week are embarking on an exciting new chapter in their lives.

“As you get introduced to campus, after 30 years, I’m so thrilled to be returning to it in my new role,” she said during the annual opening assembly for incoming Yale College students, one of her first major public addresses as Yale’s president. “What a wonderful way for us to begin afresh together.”

Speaking to incoming graduate students earlier in the day, during the annual Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) matriculation ceremony, McInnis drew on her experiences as a former Yale student, and as a fourth-generation educator, to discuss the important influence of teachers. And she urged students to always remain curious.

And addressing the new undergraduates, she encouraged them to fully embrace their membership in the Yale community. McInnis, an art historian, asked those gathered to consult printed copies of “Sunlight in a Cafeteria,” a 1958 painting by artist Edward Hopper on view at the Yale University Art Gallery, that were included in the event’s printed program. The painting depicts two individuals, a woman and a man, seated alone at neighboring tables in a New York City café.

“Though separated only a short distance from one another, they seem miles apart,” she said. “The acrid color, the slashing diagonal created by sunlight, and the eerie stillness leave us with a feeling of discomfort. We feel their sense of isolation and loneliness.”

McInnis explained that the painting reminds her of experiences — entering a dining hall or attending a party — when she didn’t know anyone and felt alone. Social disconnection, and resulting isolation and loneliness, presents an alarming risk to today’s students, who have come of age in a time when the omnipresence of technology and social media offer a poor substitute for genuine human interaction, she said.

“As you are embarking on this next chapter of life, know that community is an antidote to loneliness, division, and isolation, and that Yale is your community,” she said. “You have been given a remarkable opportunity: the chance to immerse yourself in this shared community, one that is structured quite differently from most American universities.”

Yale’s unique residential college system offers countless opportunities to converse, interact, and form friendships with people from a diversity of backgrounds and with different perspectives and interests, she said. McInnis urged students to form connections beyond their residential colleges, too, by engaging with faculty and interacting with the New Haven community.

“We must — as Hopper’s painting compels us to consider — pull up a chair and sit next to that fellow student dining alone and, when doing so, listen and be curious,” she said.

The annual ceremony marks the formal beginning of the first-year students’ Yale experience. In addition to more than 1,500 first-year students, this year’s assembly was attended by more than 1,000 guests, including family members, friends, and other members of the Yale community. (Watch a video of the ceremony.)

In his own remarks, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis counseled the students to take the opportunity to speak with, and learn from, people with different backgrounds and ideas than their own. “Find those people who see the world differently from you and make friends with whom you can respectfully disagree,” he said.

Lewis reminded the students that, as members of the university community, they must embrace the importance of dialogue and evidence in discussing ideas and issues.

“You were chosen to come to Yale because of your unique talents,” he said. “But the university is even more dependent than society as a whole on its commitment to words and persuasion as the means for resolving disputes. You are here to learn skills like analysis, argument, imagination, critical judgment. These are skills that you will take with you, no matter what you study, as you go out into the world to lead and serve.”

In the separate graduate student matriculation ceremony, held earlier in the day, McInnis and Lynn Cooley, the GSAS dean, welcomed Yale’s new graduate students to campus. (Watch a video of the ceremony.)

In her address, McInnis recalled the excitement and nerves she experienced 35 years ago when she arrived on campus as a new graduate student unfamiliar with the community and unsure she would succeed.

“As an art and architectural historian, I marveled at New Haven and Yale and quickly immersed myself in getting to know my new home, working in the Yale University Art Gallery, and exploring my new state by crawling through the attics of the earliest surviving houses in Connecticut with Professor Abbott Lowell Cummings,” she said.

McInnis noted that she comes from a long line of educators — beginning with her great-grandparents, who “ran a two-room schoolhouse in Frostproof, Florida, in the early decades of the twentieth century,” and including her grandfather, a math teacher and principal. From them, she said, she’d seen “the enduring impact a teacher can have on hundreds of lives.”

She felt that impact in her own life, McInnis reflected, when the late Christopher Johns, a faculty member at the University of Virginia, where she earned her undergraduate degree, urged her to apply to Yale’s Ph.D. program. “Of course, I followed his advice to attend graduate school at Yale because of its unparalleled collections and unquestioned preeminence,” she said.

At most other universities, McInnis said, as a graduate student she might have relied on slides to teach the history of art; at Yale, she could directly introduce her students to masterpieces housed within the university’s collections.  

“I saw, as you soon will, that ours is an exceptional education,” she said. “Here, you will learn to specialize, not only in how to acquire information but also how to apply it in the service of humanity. You will add, I am sure, to the sum of knowledge in your field and enrich the education of generations that will come after you. That is the purpose of your education here; to learn, research, create, discover, and collaborate with faculty members and your fellow students.”

She encouraged the students to bring a sense of curiosity into the classroom with them. And she urged them to connect with people working in fields and disciplines other than their own, noting that “it is sometimes an outsider’s perspective that leads to the question or insight that unlocks a new discovery.”

Speaking to the incoming graduate students, Cooley encouraged them to learn how to describe their work in plain language, so that the broader public can understand their importance.

“In our age of limited attention spans and the desire for fast facts, you will need to prove to any skeptics you encounter that critical thinking and meticulous research matter and can produce legitimate answers to challenging questions,” she said. “Our purpose is to use this education to think methodologically, develop cogent and persuasive arguments, and, importantly, communicate our findings to society. Communication is the key to all of this.”