Board of Trustees visits Yale for its spring meeting

Trustees traveled to New Haven to learn more about Yale's efforts to create new connections between the university and the rest of the world, and about its undergraduate programs in the arts and in residential education. Every three years Stanford's Board of Trustees goes to the university's Sierra Camp overlooking Fallen Leaf Lake in the Sierra Nevada for its spring retreat - a time to focus their collective attention on a topic of particular interest. This year, they held their spring meeting at Yale University , so they could find out more about its undergraduate residential education program, about the ways Yale integrates arts education into everyday life and about its efforts to internationalize. "Those were three areas that we felt Yale did particularly well, which were of great interest to Stanford," said Leslie Hume, chair of the Board of Trustees, speaking at a campus press briefing last Friday in the Main Quad. The decision to hold the spring retreat at another university came out of a 2008 conversation between Hume, who had just been elected chair, and President John Hennessy. "We tossed around the idea of doing something different - of going to another university to learn from the best practices of the institution," she said. "The Yale Corporation [the governing board and policy-making body of the university] came to Stanford in 1999 when Gerhard Casper was president to look at the reforms we had made in undergraduate education," she said.