Eugene V. Rostow

Abstract

On retiring, Gene Rostow terminates the active installment of an association with Yale that commenced when he entered Yale College as a freshman more than fifty years ago. Gene has been a cyclone of energy throughout the forty-five years of our acquaintance, and unless the law of entropy has operated in reverse in his case, I assume that he generated at least as much excitement as an undergraduate. Evidence of his views in those days can be gleaned from the Harkness Hoot, an irreverent Yale College publication with which he was associated and which, unlike most of yesteryear's undergraduate effusions, is entertaining even today. One of its targets, which it repeatedly attacked with vigor and zest, was "all that is smug, ornate, and ridiculous in Yale life," especially Yale's "architectural chaos." The chaos, as the publication's name implies, consisted of Yale's residential colleges and the other "girder Gothic" buildings that Vincent Scully (and perhaps Gene as well) would today protect against the bulldozer with his own body. Is it possible that Mother Yale knew best, and that yesterday's rear guard has become today's avant-garde? Whether the answer is yes or no, Yale has clearly had the last word: The Harkness Hoot is not preserved in the functional simplicity of Seeley Mudd Library, but in Sterling's architecturally chaotic Yale Manuscript and Archives Room, on shelves that are protected by sliding doors made up of glass that was cut carefully into panes, only to be reassembled and held together with mock-medieval leading.