The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute has always encouraged both the
partnership of institutions and the partnership of people of diverse
backgrounds. The question of diversity and community has therefore been
central to its work, as these statements by Yale faculty will indicate.
We excerpt here from Teaching in America: The Common Ground (1984)
some paragraphs by Howard R. Lamar and Richard H. Brodhead. President
Lamar has added to his selection some paragraphs from his present
perspective. And we have added to this grouping an essay by Bryan Wolf.
All three teachers have had long careers at Yale, one as a professor of
History, the other two as professors of English and American Studies.
Howard Lamar has also served as Dean of Yale College and as President of
Yale University. Richard Brodhead is currently the Dean of Yale College.
In the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, Lamar has led a seminar called
"Remarkable City: New Haven in the Nineteenth Century" and another called
"Studies in American Regions and Regionalism." Brodhead has led one on
"Autobiography," and Wolf has led a series of seminars on American writing
and painting. In different ways, they focus here on certain problems of
"community"local, state, and nationalwith which the Teachers
Institute has been centrally engaged. And they offer ample testimony from
university teachers and administrators concerning the value of such a
collaborative program. Howard Lamar, an authority on the history of the
American West, clearly learned much from his shared exploration of the
history of New Haven. Richard Brodhead learned to help reinvent the terms
on which his shared field can be communicated with others. And Bryan Wolf
found a space for his own version of an experimental classroom, through
which he learned how to address the richness of racial and ethnic cultural
traditions in the United States.