James P. DeAngelis, AICP

This is a paper that I prepared with the assistance of a number of people in 1991. While its function of this paper at the conference was to celebrate the life and work of Chris Tunnard (a man from whom I learned but never enrolled in one of his courses), I have posted it here not only as an elaboration on aspects of my formal education but also as a record of a unique educational experience that existed for a time at one of the nation's most prestigious institutions of higher learning. I think readers with an interest in the evolution of the professional education of city and regional planners as well as transportation planners and engineers will appreciate the time they spend reading this piece. It is also worthwhile to direct people with a specific interest in this program to peruse the endnotes as they read this text. There is some juice in those notes! Thanks for reading this. Comments are appreciated.

I have either made contact with or discovered something about all but one of these Joint Program graduates (1) . At least eighteen of us are alive at this writing; several of us are, or are about to be, retired. We have had very stable careers (2) . We have had some degree of job security (3) . On the surface we are not a very interesting group of men especially when one considers how we came to be graduates of Yale's Joint Program.

The remaining ten men overlapped. Robert Bartolo and John Vostrez entered the program in 1963; they graduated in 1965 and overlapped with the Class of 1966 (Techeste Ahderom, Jack Hidinger, and Dick Wolsfeld). These men overlapped with my class that included Peter Jarvis, Bob Winick, and Barry Hecht (5). Jeff May, the Joint Program's last graduate, did not overlap but had been lead to the program by Dick Wolsfeld, who had given a talk to Jeff's class at the University of Minnesota.

Joel was browsing a pile of mail on his desk while we chatted. A one-page flier announced the PPG Foundation's fellowship for the Joint Program. He passed it to me and suggested that I call Art Row. I did. Art spent several hours, on three occasions before I needed to get to Lacrosse practice; he explained what city planners did by penciling computations about a plan for Yale-New Haven Hospital on the back of an envelope as he spoke. I liked his style. When I was offered the PPG Fellowship, I went for it (6) .

Financial support was very important to the Joint Program's beginning and its success in recruiting some of its later graduates (7) . The "BPR Five" attended Yale under a Federal Employee Out Service Training Program which treated them like regular Civil Service employees. These men received their salaries and were compensated for moving and educational expenses.

Indeed, during the summer between our first and second years most of us had several employment opportunities to consider; we were in demand even before graduation (8). Some of these jobs continued on part time bases during the second year. Jacques Richter and Jeff May remember working with Wilbur Smith and Associates; Ed Daniel remembers working as a researcher with Matt Huber at the BHT; Jack Hidinger and Dick Wolsfeld remember working with a consultant they called "Crazy George" -- he was not an American Indian!

In the process of preparing this paper I have reviewed the literature that had the most significant influences on those of us in the Joint Program (9). Certainly, the technical readings at the BHT, including the classic text by Matson, Smith, and Hurd and The Highway Capacity Manual and various Eno Foundation articles, were of lasting value; but there were four authors whose classic writings of that era reflect the challenges that were being faced in city and transportation planning. The authors were Christopher Tunnard, Britton Harris, Alan Altshuler, and Paul Davidoff. Having access to this cacophony of views may be Tunnard's legacy to the Joint Program's curriculum.

As the following passage from Chris Tunnard's book, City Planning at Yale, illustrates, Tunnard took interdisciplinary approaches to planning education (10) quite seriously:

What is emphasized by Warburton (Warburton 1990) and, I hope, will be emphasized in David Reed's biography of Tunnard (Reed forthcoming) is the extraordinary breadth of this man and the respect and trust that he seems to have engendered from a wide range of people. Just this winter a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, Nancy Runkle Smithdale, read everything that Tunnard had written; she wanted to know why Tunnard was not more prominent; she was particularly interested in his demand that planners use both the left and right sides of their brains (11) and understood this as relevant to his view of planners and engineers:

Tunnard viewed highway engineers as the opposition (12) . He was definitely on the "soft" side of approaches to planning; Britton Harris challenged that widely shared point of view:

Davidoff called for advocate planners (13) . He envisioned a "planner as advocate (who) would plead for his own and his client's view of the good society. The advocate planner would be more than a provider of information, an analyst of current trends, a simulator of future conditions, and a detailer of means. In addition to carrying out these necessary parts of planning, he would be a proponent of specific substantive solutions (Davidoff 1965)."

The courses (14) that the BHT offered were not just computational experiences, although it did seem at times that the absence of easily accessible computers meant that many hours were spent with slide rules and calculators. Indeed, one computational wizard made a mechanical calculator play "Yankee Doodle Dandy"!

These courses' readings were very extensive and they were not familiar to most of the students, all of whom had backgrounds as engineers. The BHT curriculum was bringing some of the natural and social sciences to applied scientists, even if they were not Joint Program students (15) .

Herb Levinson was the only member of the faculty who had standing in both the BHT and the City Planning Department. During the Joint Program's decade Herb worked with Wilbur Smith and Associates out of their headquarters office around the corner from the BHT, of which Smith was a staunch supporter. Herb taught a future oriented course at the BHT. From his perspective the objective was to broaden BHT students' horizons (16) .

During his Yale years Row worked on a project for the Tri State Region (Row 1965). Row worked on this reconnaissance from 1963 to 1965. It contained his personal views; however, they were certainly informed by a wide range of pertinent institutions and people (17) . His framework for doing this reconnaissance was to distinguish between the "structural" and "dynamic" elements that together were the region (18).

In the project Row blended socio-economic forecasting with normative planning at a regional scale. He also recognized the critical points that Tunnard, Harris, Altshuler, Davidoff, and others were making. Row's introductory statements (19) were in harmony with all of this--he communicated these views to his students!

Harry became the co-chair of the City Planning Department in 1966 when Art Row left for India; he was at the helm when the program was closed. He eventually worked with Paul Davidoff in Suburban Action, Inc. and promoted fair housing and social justice. Harry was our social conscience during those years; he was our model for activism; he was very insightful about our work (20).

It is beyond the scope of this paper to determine how this faculty group was assembled. It is clear that Tunnard had either recruited these people or agreed to their being on the instructional team. While this team reflected many views of city planning and traffic engineering, they seemed to respect each other and believed that "everything" was related to everything else and that "everything" could NOT be measured -- although trying to do the measurements was noble work. They worked hard at teaching all of us and seemed to take special pride in the Joint Program students whom they had carefully recruited. They also believed in "hands-on" experiences and in having us learn from practitioners (21).

But the most frequently mentioned point is the cultural difference between the BHT and the City Planning program environments. I can testify, as others have, that walking daily from Strathcona Hall, in which the BHT was located, to The Art and Architecture (A&A) Building, designed by Paul Ruldolph, was a one mile walk of transition--transition between academic cultures (22).

Yale University essentially rented space to the BHT; it was considered an "institute" and had no academic status in a discipline or applied science. It was relocated to Pennsylvania State University in 1968 (23). The City Planning Department ceased to exist at Yale in the early 1970s. The program had a turbulent death.

The termination of the graduate city planning program in 1969 involved many factors : city planning was not a traditional discipline or profession; its missions and needs for liaison with the social sciences were outgrowing its home in the fine arts; there was no support for finding it some other home; there were significant funds available for law and urban design; there were administrative tactics that were unacceptable to school and university administrators; the students were becoming active (some reported, "radical") in the community and challenging Yale's position as a good neighbor; and there was a fire that caused extensive damage to the A&A Building. City planning ended as a graduate program at Yale (25). Harry Wexler's analysis of the circumstances, in which he was a player, reminds us of how closely linked the key themes of planning practice, planning education, and the administrative actions of Yale University were:

This emphasis on transportation may be related to the Joint Program's curriculum (26). We may have been encouraged to emphasize our strengths rather than to develop our weaknesses; as a consequence most of us may be more comfortable with our original "engineering" fields as reflected by members of the first official class:

As we look back on these thirty-five years and the framework of prevailing wisdom that I have associated with Tunnard, Harris, Altshuler, Reiner, Davidoff, and the Yale faculty, much of their thinking has become integrated in the system; planning is a much more procedural (bureaucratic) activity today -- and many of these procedures are based on the insights of these writers as well as practitioners and the voting public (27).

The notion of designing a curriculum to ensure that young men and women are consciously educated to carry on this wisdom has to be very carefully considered. Because of their engineering backgrounds, the state of the art, and the ad Hoc nature of the curriculum (28), Yale's Joint Program graduates graduated with very strong analytical and quantitative skills as well as sensitivities about community and social issues. It may not be surprising, therefore, that those who have responded to my inquiries about the nature of a new "joint program" have, in their own ways, said (29): update what we learned!

1. Techeste Ahderom, a joint program graduate of 1966, is listed in Yale's Alumni Directory as having a Post Office Box in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. There is no other information about him; he has not responded to my invitation to comment on his Yale experience; the letter sent to him has not been returned. We all know that Ethiopia is a country in turmoil; we hope he is well.

2. At this writing six of us, including those who are "retired", work as consultants. A dozen of us work (or recently retired) as employees of public or publicly accountable agencies such as USDOT (five), USEPA, two state DOTs, and various metropolitan or local organizations. While at least one of us continued our formal education to the PhD., only one of us -- not the PhD. recipient -- has established himself in an academic institution.

3. Three of us are located outside North America (Addis Ababa, Zurich, and Paris), five of us are concentrated in the Washington DC area; five of us live in the West (Colorado [2], Utah, California, & Oregon); three of us live in the South (Florida, North Carolina, & South Carolina); two of us live in the Northeast (Pittsburgh & Albany); and two of us work together as principals in the same consulting firm in Minneapolis.

4. Arthur Row remembers participating on the committee at this conference that drafted a statement whose purpose was to "smooth out" the most difficult differences that were being expressed by engineers, architects, and planners about each other. He also noted that prior to this national conference there was a get together in Hartford sponsored by the Connecticut Life Insurance Company at which many of these same issues were articulated. He recalls that the Sagamore conference was an outgrowth of the Hartford get together.

5. Barry received his MCP degree in 1970 and is not recorded as receiving a BHT Certificate. Yet he took courses with us.

6. Of course there is always more to the story and this one is no exception. No one had ever encouraged me to pursue a career because of my achievements; city planning struck me as an emerging, unconventional field (a bit like Lacrosse); it did not seem to compartmentalize its practitioners as I was certain structural engineering would; I liked staying at Yale and in my home town; I had worked one summer for the city of New Haven designing "vest-pocket" parking lots; I knew Mayor Dick Lee and had had a social ethics course with a scholar named William E. Miller who later became a New Haven Alderman; I had always enjoyed Vince Scully's lectures and writing Art History papers -- papers that were qualitative and unlike those engineering assignments; and I was ready to marry a young women who had another year's study in New Haven.

7. It is important to note that during The Joint Program's life the national government and the major foundations were discovering the dearth of well trained city planning and traffic personnel that existed to deal sensitively with the Interstate Highway Program and the Model Cities and Metropolitan Development Act. In those days organizations put their money where their mouth was!

8. I got a job doing research in which I analyzed data from a dozen metropolitan area transportation studies with two extraordinary men, Jerry Keefer and Dave Witheford. Both were BHT graduates; both have held important positions in transportation planning, operations, research, and administration. The work that we did [Louis Keefer and Associates, Trip Generation of Major Land Use Activities, NCHRP Project 1967] is acknowledged as one of the keys to understanding the relationships between land use activities and transportation planning.

9. As I was reviewing the 1981 edition of Tunnard and Pushkarev's Man-Made America: Chaos or Control?, Wolf Von Eckardt's summary of that era's extraordinary publications reminds us of the stature of Tunnard's work:

10. From City Planning at Yale: We are in the fortunate position of being able to draw on the resources of a top-rank Department of Architecture and of the School of Fine Arts as a whole, as well as on the University Departments of Sociology, Engineering, Political Science, Public Health, the Bureau of Highway Traffic, and many others. Through these other departments the student is able to acquire the techniques and background knowledge of subjects important to the city planner, while in our own courses he develops the skills and philosophy of city planning, per se.

11. From Smithdale: In Tunnard's early writings, and about the time the joint degree program was proposed, universities separated the sciences and the arts...curricula were known as "hard" (chemistry, physics, engineering) or "soft" (art history, linguistics, and, yes, city planning--it was, after all, design oriented). To combine the two was unusual, to say the least...universities everywhere were designed with that separation in mind. Participating in Joint Program at Yale involved the crossing of those borders delineating hard and soft...

It was a two year experience that required using of both halves of one's brain. Creative thoughts, or the design process, was occurring in the right half of the brain, while computation activities were using the left half. The Joint Program demanded that its students use both halves of the brain.

12. Smithdale's review of Tunnard's later work elaborates on his "soft" views: Three more books were written by Christopher Tunnard; they each expand on his main theme: art and science should be combined to improve the lives of people. The first, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? was published in 1963, and written with his former student and assistant, Boris Pushkarev. Pushkarev was a graduate of the City Planning Program and provided the book with the "hard" chapters. Pushkarev wrote about low-density housing and freeway esthetics, studies of regional structure, and technological elements in the landscape. Tunnard, by then Yale's Director of the Graduate Program in City Planning, wrote the parts of the book which present the theory of investigation, open space, and historic preservation...

Man-Made America was met with rave reviews and was used as a banner by the planners of America. It became their incarnation of the vision of what planning should involve. It won Tunnard and Pushkarev the coveted National Book Award.

In 1968 The Modern American City was published. It seems to be a textbook for city planners since its first part lays out the histrionics of American cities, their downfalls, and the direction Tunnard would like to see them follow. The second half, however, contains 41 short readings by Tunnard, Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Lyndon B. Johnson...

[Tunnard packaged his writings with those of some very prestigious people. About two decades after the inauguration of the Joint Program Tunnard published his last book, A World with a View, in which he may have conceded some success:]

13. Davidoff also said that planners should be educated more broadly than was the tradition and they should be concerned with physical planning, economic planning, and social planning. Indeed, to Davidoff the scope of the planner's work "will be no wider than that presently demanded of a mayor or a city councilman".

14. Probably the most important course at the BHT was Transportation 110. The first week's readings focused on driver behavior; accordingly, we read excerpts from Menninger about how the human brain functioned as well as some traffic engineers' interpretations of these phenomena. In other sessions extensive readings were provided on vehicle types and dimensions; resistance to motion and power requirements; stopping; change of direction; vision and lighting; spot speed characteristics; overall travel time; traffic volume; parking; traffic safety; finance, administration, operation, and design; and all sorts of study methods.

15. From Hidinger: The reading clubs we formed in the BHT. We got so much stuff to read, no one could do it alone. We formed "The Woodmont Reading Club" of about six people. An individual took every sixth article, read it and wrote a one page summary. I used those summaries for years.

16. Levinson did this by assigning readings by Wilfred Owen, Lyle Fitch, Victor Gruen, Larry Smith, Wilbur Smith and Associates, and himself. All of these readings addressed broader issues than those to which the traffic engineer was accustomed.

17. This project was undertaken about the same time that Hoover, Chinitz, and others were finishing their seminal work on Pittsburgh, Portrait of a Region. They saw directly the connections between the economic uses of the land and the infrastructure and tried to model those relationships at the locational unit level. Although their report was path breaking, I learned (by reviewing their survey data in the late 1960s) that it was not based on as much factual data as implied; the major steel companies had not cooperated in their input-output survey.

18. From Row's Introduction: An urban region has an identifiable physical structure, an essential framework which changes slowly over time. Related to this structure is a surface development pattern which changes rapidly over time. An example of structure is the trunk line transportation system. Its elements remain through several cycles of land use in its service area. This cycling of land use represents the dynamics of the region. Clearly structure and dynamics are related, act upon and modify each other.

Identifying, dimensioning, estimating direction and rates of changes of the dynamic elements of the region, and determining effects of these changes on the structure of the region are essential steps in the physical planning process.

These changes are responses to changes in the society and its economy, to changes in the processes of its daily business as well as to changes in its mores and its ideals.

19. Row's other introductory statements from the reconnaissance: Therefore, the planning process requires an essay into the difficult area of a region's society and economy and government (which itself is a response), to estimate pressures and forces that will evoke responses in the region's physical make-up. This examination in turn may lead to proposals for modification to those parts of the machinery of government upon which execution of the plan depends. (The process of deciding whether or not to institute such proposed changes represents one test of a plan.)

For two reasons, a plan must be continuously tested and revised. A first is that plans have a way of falling short of our expectations, of not quite achieving the objectives we set, and therefore, constant appraisal must be built into the process. A second, and partial explanation of the first, is that a plan devised to meet the needs of change, must, by definition, be subject to change itself.

Forces of change and growth in the region frequently conflict one with another. They are not all acting automatically in the direction of a "better" region. Growth in one sector of the economy may induce obsolescence and decline in another. As the region's physical pattern responds to these underlying changes, dislocations in the metropolitan "system" occur. Buildings remain, for example, which have no value yet are "assessed" at value, and increase costs in the system. The resolution of the conflicting pressures as they are expressed in the land suggest three responsibilities of government for physical development: the adjudication of conflicts; the control of certain pressures or their manifestation for the common good; and planning, or directing the flow of changes into directions chosen as being most closely aligned with the public welfare.

Such choices reflect social objectives in the sphere of physical development, and are expressions of public policy.

20. Wexler's insights and breadth of planning knowledge is indicated by his comment on a paper, "Particular Land Uses and Their Surroundings: An Evaluation of the `Zone of Influence' Concept", that I wrote:

This comment was, of course, memorable and flattering; more importantly, it reveals facets of Wexler's view of planning at that time; he was coping with tough issues of planning theory and practice even as he commented on my paper. He did this by referencing his understandings of Alonso and Alexander -- two men who posed alternative views at that time! His reference to Levinson also indicates that the faculty communicated.

21. The involvement of practitioners was especially important at the BHT and has been reaffirmed by a number of Joint Program graduates. The over-arching reason for the involvement of practitioners was the fact that most, if not all, of the important research that was being done about metropolitan land use and transportation planning was being done at areawide transportation studies in Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Tri-State (New York) and Upstate New York. By the late 1960s it was estimated that over a $1 billion had been invested in these enterprises. The technical papers that people at these places wrote were reviewed annually at the Transportation Research Board's (TRB) annual meeting in Washington D.C.

The BHT for the week during which the TRB met and arranged transportation for students and faculty to attend. Bob Winick recalls the experience of walking into a small session about trip distribution models and interacting with Fratar and Vorhees, the two men whose work BHT students were expected to know. Bob remembers how impressed he was by relating to these men--men who had just given these matters "more time" than BHT students had. He also said that these men made him feel quite comfortable; the experience was one of the high points in his Joint Program experience.

My fondest recollection of the TRB meetings was having a traditional (and very sloppy) spare-rib dinner as Keefer's and Witheford's guests with members of "The Transportation Establishment"; these were a few men that had done the Chicago Area Transportation Study and distributed themselves to the other studies. I must have been a acceptable guest since I was invited back to this restaurant during the TRB meetings that I attended for a few more years.

22. It was not just that BHT students tended to be older than planning students. Most BHT students and instructors thrived on fixing traffic signals -- they carried screwdrivers wherever they went; at the A&A Building art students created papier-mache lavatories on the stairwell landings between the floors to encourage graffiti -- some of which was inspired! At the BHT personal control, family responsibilities, and Eisenhower conservatism were stressed; at A&A we argued about politics, participatory decision making and design concepts.

23. Jack Hidinger submitted the following testimony about the relocation of the BHT: I had a chance to talk to Tom Larson (now the FHWA Administrator and my former professor at Penn State) when he came to Denver to make a speech and I asked him why the BHT moved to Penn State. He said the Dean of Engineering at Penn State, Merritt Williamson, was a graduate of Yale and still had ties to his old school.

While up at Yale for some event, he talked to some Yale officials who said they were putting the pressure on the BHT to either upgrade to a Masters Degree program or get out. Williamson contacted Larson and they got in touch with Wilbur Smith and Fred Hurd (the BHT's Director) and arranged the transfer.

24. During Academic Year 1967/68 administrators of the City Planning program began to move the program into a considerably more activist position within the New Haven community; students were doing their "hands-on" learning AND making waves with the established leadership as though they were Davidoff-like Advocate Planners. This did not get much support within the academic community. They thought it was too radical.

This dearth of support, however, can be traced to some things that a group of city planning students learned in Spring of 1966. At that time we were told that the Dean of the School of Art and Architecture would not be supporting the planning program and that the administrators of the planning program, Wexler and Tunnard, had no clout to influence him.

Terry Barnes, Bob Moss, and I were selected by the planning students to have a discussion with Kingman Brewster, Yale's President and America's future ambassador to The Court of St. James. In preparation for that discussion the three dozen or so planning students convened to discuss what we should tell Brewster made this program worth supporting.

It was fascinating that essentially equal numbers of students supported each of two rather different views of planning education. Yet all of us agreed that "their" view was well supported at Yale. The two views were highly reflective of the issues that existed between planners and engineers; although students did not choose sides based on their associations with these fields.

Put simply, the two views concerned the nature of professional education should be. Should the planning program have a definite and, essentially, rigid curriculum with proven courses and instructors that imparts marketable skills (i.e., a "bag of tools with which to earn a living")? Or should the planning program recognize its extraordinary setting at a university with top rated social science departments and professional schools and make certain that its curriculum is flexible so that every planning student has access to courses that are appropriate to his career expectation?

It must have been reassuring to Kingman Brewster to hear that a small group of city planning students had sent the three of us to him to say that we couldn't figure out what our curricular structure should be. After all, this is the issue that most professional schools have to face -- even today!

Consequently, he expanded the discussion by telling us how the situation looked from his chair. Apparently, Yale had significant money from at least two sources (one may have been the Ford Foundation) to do "things" in the Law School and in the Masters Program in Urban Design that addressed the "urban crisis" that was emerging and for which new legislation was being enacted on nearly a weekly basis. Brewster said that he had to figure out how to bridge law and urban design. City planning had no standing and no significant external resources. He told us that Yale would certainly honor her commitment to current students and that he really did not know what the final outcome of all these matters would be.

Several years later I had a brief opportunity to talk with Brewster after he delivered a talk about Yale's "new" School of Management (SOM) at the Pittsburgh Yale Club. He remembered our discussion about city planning at Yale quite well; I asked no questions and he offered no comments about the program's demise. What we discussed was the similarity between the concept of SOM and the concept that some of us had of a city planning program that used the entire university's relevant faculty as a resource. He conceded that this principle underpinned SOM and that it was his hope that SOM graduates would move into key positions where they could deal with the "urban crisis".

While SOM may have eventually filled some of the vacuum left by the closing of the City Planning program, there were elements of the closing that could never and, some might say, should never be filled. Thanks to Terry Lathrop, who has shared his file of alumni mailings of 1969, it has been possible to review the events of those months as reported by the students and faculty of the City Planning Forum. Harry Wexler has taken the time to write about what happened during those final months:

The recruitment of minority students began in the 1968-69 academic year with the tacit approval of the Dean (he was informed and had no objection). The decision to recruit minority students followed discussions among students and faculty about the importance of clinical education and field work, the increasing resistance of inner-city neighborhoods to work with or otherwise welcome those "white kids from Yale," and the burden on the few black students to represent the views of the minority community in class and to explain the needs of fellow students to the "neighborhood folk."

The Department of City Planning was ordinarily responsible for handling admissions on its own, albeit within the limits on class size set by the Dean and the Provost's Office. There were two departures from the "ordinary" that year: we invited city planning students to participate in the admissions process; we decided to recruit minority students to fill up to 12 of the 24 slots in the incoming class. Many of those recruited had graduated from 4-year architectural programs and were employed in middle-management positions in Model Cities programs. We took no risks on academic qualification.

For reasons never explained, the Provost's Office didn't focus on our initiative until late in the process, around March, after we had selected the "non-minority" portion of the class. The Provost expressed several fears -- that we had reserved too many slots in the class for minorities and that the demand for financial aid would exhaust available resources. (I never expected to fill all the minority slots. At Yale, the financial aid package was assembled after admissions on academic grounds, not before. I knew we could not meet the financial needs or goals of many of the working minority candidates. But this was a decision for each candidate to make; not for the Department or the Provost's Office in advance. If left alone, I suspect we would have had 6-9 specially-recruited minority students in the class, along with 12-15 from the normal admissions pool. No big deal!)

The response in late March from the Provost's Office was to halt the recruitment effort by cutting the size of the incoming class in half. The students viewed this as evidence of "institutional racism." The Provost refused to reconsider his decision; the Department decided to proceed with admissions. You know the result. Chris Tunnard was removed as Chair and Lou DeLuca as Assistant Dean, and the rest of the faculty was told their contracts would not be renewed.

Several months later, during the summer, there was a major fire in the Art & Architecture Building. It was determined by the New Haven Fire Department that it was an arson. An arsonist, however, was never arrested. The myth is that the fire was started by someone associated with the Yale City Planning Department; it was rumored to be a political statement about the University's insensitivity to the needs of minorities and cities. Wexler says that he doubts "strongly that any city planning students or faculty were involved. They were already `burned out' from the events of the spring."

25. One way of comprehending an old program's academic standing within a large university is to explore the attention the university's alumni office accords its graduates. At Yale this reveals that City Planning graduates are included; BHT graduates are not -- and never were.

The Yale Office of Alumni Records maintains contact with graduates of the Master of City Planning program even though the program no longer exists. Most of this contact is for fund raising and the dissemination of two alumni publications: one from the School of Art and Architecture and the other a university wide alumni magazine. There continues to be an informal network of the city planning program's graduates; these are usually convened at national conferences of the American Planning Association.

The Yale Office of Alumni Records has never maintained contact with graduates of the Bureau of Highway Traffic. There are numerous stories of BHT graduates needing copies of their transcripts and not being able to get them on a timely basis. Indeed, Yale has purged its files of the 823 BHT graduates; these records, thanks to the special efforts of Harvey Boutwell (a former member of the BHT's faculty), are now housed at Pennsylvania State University, where the BHT was moved in 1968. A BHT Alumni Association exists and meets annually at national conferences of the Institute of Transportation Engineers.

26. Most, if not all, the Joint Program students entered the program with applied and, sometimes, proven skills. In the city planning program there were always projects to be completed by groups of students. Group work often develops leaders (a benefit); it always creates a division of labor (sometimes at a cost).

As deadlines approach students in these projects often perform in accordance with their strengths; the Joint Program students tended to have more strengths than the non-architects in the groups. If a Joint Program student did not resist being frequently given the transportation assignment by his colleagues, a pattern could be established: such a student can support himself as a specialist. This specialization may have continued after graduation for a number of students who had career options and, of course, for the BPR Five, who were committed to the BPR.

Several of us feel that Joint Program students were subtly encouraged to over-specialize within the city planning group projects. The irony is, of course, that civil engineers were recruited to change thinking within an established, technical profession yet the Joint Program did not discourage the practice it was designed to change!

27. My view is that the support for national initiatives that involve cities and metropolitan areas has been reflected in the actions of each national administration. During these 35 years the Federal governments' role in these matters has changed. Johnson began a "War on Poverty", established the "3Cs" process, and enunciated principles of metropolitan development. His administration's programs demanded the best from planners. Nixon challenged cities by recognizing the "forgotten" majority who had escaped the inner city to live in the suburbs. He played on the majority's fears. His administration was suspicious of planners. Carter restored respect for planning by calling himself a planner; he attempted to establish a National Urban Policy; he also encouraged entrepreneurship in neighborhoods, cities and states. Reagan equated "middlemen" and planners; he said they were expendable. He demanded new priorities for our cities and the poor. His administration demanded all of us to be more self reliant -- and we are! We now rely more on private investments and locally controlled revenues than we did 35 years ago.

28. From the perspectives of the early graduates of the Joint Program there was no joint curriculum. The idea was that two quite independent courses of study existed; the student simply took the courses that he would have taken had he been in either of the programs. It is clear that some of the these students did not like the absence of structure; even though most of the testimonials recall the educational experience fondly:

The Transportation Programs offered by many universities today do a much better job then was done then. At Yale there was no true integration of the two disciplines. The Traffic Bureau made no adjustments in its basic curriculum. The Planning School simply caste about to fill in whatever was available. (Dake)

29. There are a number suggestions that respondents made about a currently relevant curriculum but most of them are reminiscent of the old program:

Exposures to urban sociology, municipal administration, regional planning, transportation planning, and some facility design courses, economics, planning and zoning law, public transportation, travel demand mitigation, etc...(Daniel)

Transportation systems planning; highway / transit link route location and design (McHarg is coming back, now being called GIS); City / Region shaping policies (ie., water systems, sewer systems, housing policies, transportation); Environmental requirements / opportunities (EIS, air quality, wetlands, etc..); practical federal/state/local politics; transportation financing (Federal / state policies); transportation / environmental / land use law; AND the linkages of all of the above....(Hidinger)

David Witheford, a BHT graduate, says he is neither an academician nor especially current on either planning or transportation education. But he suggests five areas with which he hopes graduates in the field will become familiar:

Dave's bottom-line is philosophical: any specialist needs to be concerned with and well informed about social issues, their impacts, and associated potential consequences.