Charles H. Long (Special Tribute)

Deputy Provost of the University; Lecturer in English

Chip Long, B.A. Rutgers University, Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley, when Maynard Mack called you up in California and offered you a position in the Yale English department in 1966, even he could not have imagined how important you would become to Yale. The range of your experience is one reason you have become so indispensable—you have been a faculty member, a dean, and for 27 years a member of the provost’s office. You have served 5 presidents and 8 provosts, a number of whom have gone on to be presidents themselves—and wish they could have taken you with them. In your many positions over 44 years, you have seen core academic issues from several angles, and have done a host of administrative jobs impossible to cover in this tribute. No one now living has sat on more Yale university committees; knows more about the policies or procedures of the university; or has worked with more past, current, and prospective chairs of this faculty. No one has overseen more departments or schools or recruited more faculty from all over the world. For years you edited and were the guardian and steward of the Faculty Handbook, and it is local legend that you are the only person on earth who is conversant, chapter and verse, with every policy in it. It is tempting to think that institutions are built on grand visions and strategies, but you know, as those you have helped appreciate, that institutions are only strong when people are attending to all the details that make it great.
 
All of this, in itself, would be reason enough to place you among Yale’s worthies. But none of this long line of duties can tell why—as one faculty member wrote—“for those of us who have relied on you so completely, it is very hard to imagine a post-Chip Yale.”
 
Words such as “calmness, judgment, understanding, generosity, and kindness” are used as a matter of course when people describe you. As one faculty member wrote: “Your insight, flexibility and consideration during the period I was weighing Yale versus Princeton played a major part in my decision to come here.” As another said: You are the model of a great university administrator, humane, principled, literate, and sensitive to academic needs. We would be lucky to see your like again.” And as still a third wrote: “You made management look like friendship. You turned everyday tasks into elegant adventures. You put up with me.”

Because of all of these personal qualities, you have become the university’s on-the-ground problem solver extraordinaire. When the knottiest problems are faced the cry is often “Let’s go to Chip.” That means that the most seemingly intractable problems in FAS, or in any School land on your desk, and you always approach them with intelligence, practicality and sensitivity and the knack for making people feel better about the problem, the world, and themselves. So valuable is your historical memory and insight that Rick Levin asked you, when he became president, to sit with the Officers, so that he could always be sure Yale’s leaders were well informed about the puzzle that is Yale. As yet another former dean of a Yale school wrote, “there are some people in academic administration who are knowledgeable, and some who are wise, but very few who are both.” You, Chip Long, are both.
 

It is an exception to this faculty’s procedures to honor with a retirement citation someone who has not been a professor. Today we make that exception. You have watched over this faculty with loving care, Chip Long. Now, as you retire, this faculty honors you by setting aside normal expectations to honor a person who is truly one of our own.

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans