Jane Levin

Senior Lecturer in the Humanities

Jane Levin, B.A. Stanford University, Ph.D. Yale University, faculty member at Yale since 1990: You started at Yale with a Ph.D. on Jane Austen, supervised by the great eighteenth-century scholar Martin Price. But soon enough, after starting to raise four children, and several years teaching writing, you found your home, your calling, and your vocation in Yale’s Directed Studies Program, an integrated introduction to some of the seminal texts of Western culture. 

You taught in D.S. for over thirty years. What were you like as an instructor? To quote a student evaluation: “inspirational.” “At the beginning of D.S.,” another student wrote, “everyone will fight for her section.” Your first lecture of the year, always on the Iliad, has been described as “incredible.” One hundred percent of your students said they would want to take your section again. 

But beyond your stellar teaching, you helped galvanize the program in many ways. For fourteen years, from 1999 to 2013, you were DUS of the program, undertaking all the work required of a DUS. During that time you profoundly enriched the program: you added annual sessions for students at the Yale University Art Gallery, a discussion at the Yale Center for British Art, and a visit to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library into the D.S. curriculum. You also coordinated fourteen years’ worth of colloquia, setting up three speakers each semester to lecture D.S. students about an issue in Western civilization. For all of this you were awarded the 2003 Yale College teaching prize for excellence by a lector or lecturer. 

And you did all of this while the spouse of the president of Yale, entertaining legions of people, representing Yale around the country and the world, attending performances, alumni meetings, development occasions, corporation retreats – grading papers on planes and in between family and first lady obligations. No presidential spouse before you had ever been an instructor at Yale. You were the first. And what an instructor! 

It is no surprise that you were able to do all this. What else would one expect of a student who, at the end of her freshman year at Stanford, was #1 in her class? Coming in at #2 happened to be a young man who was also quite bright - he later became your husband. And who else, we might ask, decides she must learn Greek after the age of fifty? Teaching Homer, you declared it only right that you know him in the original. And so, at an age where few decide to learn any new language, never mind a notoriously challenging one, you undertook learning ancient Greek, during term time - while you were teaching, involved with your family, and doing the work of a presidential spouse. 

You retire now to split your time between New Haven and the west coast, where all your children live, to give more time to your grandchildren, and play more piano. When people ask whether you and Rick are loyal to Stanford, from which you both graduated, and where your son will soon be the president, you counter with your love for Yale. “Yale will always be the grass under our feet,” you have said. As you retire to a bicoastal life, but from the place that will always be your spiritual home, the faculty salute your many contributions—and to one who has given Yale teaching and service so much devotion, they offer their own devoted thanks in equal measure.