Bob Santulli – 50th Reunion Essay

Bob Santulli

Hanover, NH 03755

rbs@dartmouth.edu

(603)-252-2565

Spouse(s): Linda D. Santulli (1978)

Child(ren): Stephen (1982), Liza (1989)

Education: Columbia U College of Physicians and Surgeons MD 1973

Career: Practicing psychiatrist in NYC area from 1978–1990. Then joined the faculty of Dartmouth, and eventually became a geriatric psychiatrist, specializing in Alzheimer’s disease. Retired from Practice 2014. Now Teach at Dartmouth College.

Avocations: Outdoors; music. Thanks to my History of Music courses at Yale.

College: Morse

Like all of us, I’m sure, I feel enormous gratitude to Yale for the wonderful education I received, and I have felt great pride (and boastfulness) about being a Yale graduate since 1969. Yet my recollections of myself during those years are of someone self-involved and unreflective, looking no further than the next paper or test, my friends, my love life, getting into medical school—and staying out of Vietnam. I wasn’t mature enough to be “properly prepared for life” by Yale or anyone else. The greatness of Yale was probably wasted on me, I’m afraid. I wonder if others feel that way, too.

As I said to Richard Tedlow a few months ago, after reading a draft of his wonderful essay about the meaning of Yale for our class, I felt a disturbing sense of illegitimacy at Yale which I needed to hide from others, and to some extent from myself, as well: I felt I didn’t really deserve to be there. But by being at Yale, I could fool others, and myself, that I was actually better than I really felt—not just academically, but as a person of distinction and legitimacy, perhaps.

Those feelings, and those needs, have stayed with me for the last half century. After Yale, I spent nearly 20 years affiliated with Columbia, as a medical student, a psychiatry resident, a psychoanalytic student, and a faculty member, with two years at Cornell in the middle of that. And for the past 27 years, I’ve been on the faculty at Dartmouth. I didn’t consciously plan to spend my post-Yale life at other Ivy League institutions. But I believe that it was my Yale experience, and the sense of comfort, security, and personal validity that Yale gave me, that I have sought to recreate ever since.

Of course, I also learned from Yale how wonderfully enriching it is to be part of such a fine institution. And over the years, I have come to feel, at least at times, that I do belong here, after all.

It would be tempting, but probably inaccurate or at least very incomplete, to say that choosing to spend my life attached to Ivy League schools was a direct result of my conviction that as long as I was at Yale, I was safe: I was protected from being sent off to Vietnam. I’ve realized over the years (with increasing feelings of guilt) just how fundamental that terrible war was to our experience during the “Bright College Years.”

But my path since leaving New Haven is only partially a result of our shared Vietnam nightmare. I learned from Yale that whatever I’m doing, if I’m doing it surrounded by these Ivy-covered walls, I must really be OK. So, in some ways, I suppose, I never left.