Seventy Years Of Yale-Backed Do-Gooderism In New Haven, Connecticut
/If you have followed the news coming out of Yale — and why would you, really? — you would know that it’s one ever more embarrassing thing after another for the seemingly “smart” people at this elite university. Wokeism run amok; overt racism in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”; an uproar over a professor who offered a gentle defense of “culturally appropriative” Halloween costumes; and on and on. Most recently, a couple of weeks ago it was 100 loud law student protesters shouting down a free speech debate while the Dean of the Law School (Heather Gerken) stood by and did nothing.
But if I had to pick the very worst thing about Yale, a good candidate would be how Yale has inflicted its progressive/socialist ideology on its home city of New Haven, Connecticut, to the great harm of New Haven. Unlike many of the events listed above which are frequently in the news, the consequences of these progressive ideas on a city take the form of a gradual decline that can pass unnoticed until one day you stop to take stock. But I was reminded of New Haven’s ongoing Yale-induced tragedy today when I received an email from one of my Yale classmates on the subject of our upcoming 50th reunion. My classmate informs us that Yale has created a “New Haven Fund,” and urges us to make contributions to Yale that will then be designated to go to this Fund. From the email:
We can make a difference by contributing to the New Haven Fund through the Yale Alumni Fund. I hope when you consider your special gift to Yale in honor of our 50th Reunion that you will designate a gift toward New Haven Support.
The email goes on to list numerous New Haven-based projects receiving grants from this Fund, from a day care center to homeless outreach to public schools. What’s not to like? It all sounds very virtuous, or at least it does to those unfamiliar with the seventy-year history of counterproductive Yale-backed do-gooderism in New Haven.
Here’s my summary of New Haven’s history basically since right after the Second World War: Very much under the influence of Yale and its faculty, New Haven early on adopted the progressive model for improving the lives of low income and poor people. “We” the elite must fulfill our moral obligation to “them” through government programs and taxpayer-financed spending, thereby to improve “their” lives. Therefore, adopt and fund every “program” that can be named. Max out on federal social spending and grants of every sort. New Haven for decades aggressively sought to be the number one city in the country for social programs and “urban renewal.” From a March 1979 paper by Joseph Montagna for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute:
The urban renewal program in New Haven was undertaken on a massive scale. No other city in the United States could equal the ambitious commitment to such a large scale redevelopment of its business and residential districts. On a per capita basis, New Haven outranked all American cities in securing funds which produced an impressive experiment in the physical and human rejuvenation of a city.
In an October 2015 post, I previously wrote a fairly comprehensive review of the disastrous failure of New Haven’s desperate efforts to raise up its poor residents by the method of massive government spending and programs. From that post:
If these [programs] worked even a little, one would think that New Haven would have a poverty rate somewhat below, if not significantly below, national norms. If these things worked even a little, one would think that New Haven would have per capita income levels above, if not significantly above, national norms. But instead New Haven has poverty double the national norm and per capita income at or below the level of dead-last Mississippi. In other words, it's not that these programs are just not working. They are actively destructive of work effort and of striving and of upward mobility, trapping wildly disproportionate numbers of New Haven's citizens into generations of unbreakable poverty.
Today, inspired by my classmate’s email, I will update some of the statistics to see if another seven years of Yale do-gooderism have improved things in New Haven even a little:
Poverty rate. National rate (most recent figure from Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, reported September 2021 for the 2020 calendar year): 11.4%. For New Haven (same source) 25.2%. Thus New Haven’s poverty rate is well more than double the national norm. This is true despite the fact that Connecticut ranks second among the states in per capita income.
Per capita income. For the U.S. as a whole (Census estimate July 1, 2021): $35,384. For New Haven: $27,607 (same source).
Median household income. For the U.S. as a whole (Census estimate July 1, 2021): $64,994. For New Haven (same source): $44,507. For comparison, median household income for 2020 in last-in-the-nation Mississippi was $44,966. No other state had median household income below $50,000. Connecticut’s 2020 median household income was $79,043.
Murder rate. In 2021 New Haven had 25 murders and a population of about 134,000, for a rate of about 19 per 100,000. The national rate for 2021 was about 7 per 100,000.
You would think that after 70+ years of this people would start to catch on that something is not working. Instead, each year a fresh crop of young and naive kids come in with the idea that this time they will get it right because they are so much more earnest and more caring than the fogeys who preceded them. Nobody ever tells them about the 70 years of spending and programs that have only driven New Haven further and further into the ditch.
As to my classmate’s email about the Yale-sponsored New Haven Fund, at least this is private money, and maybe comes with a little incentive to seek real results (as opposed to the bureaucrat’s main incentive, which is to grow the bureaucracy and be sure that the underlying problem never gets solved). But given Yale’s track record in New Haven so far, I would not have any real hope for positive results.