Yale Loses A Prominent African Historian and Compassionate “Gentle Giant”
I wanted to share a short “In Memorium” note for one of the professors who taught us while we were at Yale.
His name is Prosser Gifford. He went to Hotchkiss School and then Yale and then to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Then, after a stint at Harvard Law School, he returned to finish a PHD in history at Yale and start teaching African History as an Assistant Professor.
The reason why he was so important for our class was that he became the inaugural Director of President Kingman Brewster’s “5-Yr BA Program” — and the class of 1969 is the first to have graduated anybody in that program.
With support from the Carnegie Foundation in New York, Prosser and Kingman created a pilot program through which Yale undergraduates could go to live and work in the “third world” for a year away from Yale between their Sophomore and Junior years. In the midst of the Vietnam war — when students who were not enrolled in college classes were subject to being drafted immediately into the army to go to Vietnam – President Brewster wanted to initiate a new kind of global education.
Kingman had known Prosser from Harvard Law School days, and at Yale he entrusted him to create a new kind of educational experiment whereby college undergraduates could work in the third world “…without having to kill someone with a government loaded rifle.” There were twelve of us chosen for the program, and it represented an important and courageous initiative on Kingman Brewster’s part in the middle of the Vietnam War.
Prosser — with Brewster’s support — went to battle with our Draft Boards back in 1966 to argue for each of us to have the right (as fully enrolled Yale students) to devote a year to work in a third world country in a self-supporting job. The program was a smashing success in all respects, and it was continued for years thereafter. I think many of our class might well remember Prosser as the African historian who created this program, and they would appreciate hearing about his life and work in a “memorial note.”
Attached is a note I wrote for the Rhodes Scholarship community, as Professor Gifford was a guiding hand to generations of Rhodes applicants and matriculants.
It is with sadness and a heavy heart that we learned of the death earlier this month of Prosser Gifford (Yale, Connecticut, Merton ’51) at the age of 91. His accomplishments were many and his friends and associates world-wide formed a de facto global network of care and concern about the major issues and conflicts facing the human community.
Kind words have been composed by neighbors, fellow members of Merton College and in The New York Times, but words alone cannot reflect the sense of loss and sadness among those from all continents whose lives he touched while he and his wife, Deedee, served for decades at Yale University, Amherst College, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C.
Prosser’s long-standing advice to students rings more true than ever in an age of global pandemic lockdown:
His generous and expansive outlook will be remembered by historians and educators from all over the world as they strive to articulate new narratives for World History that can enable us to survive as a human community with a new understanding of our common circumstance on the only life-supporting planet in the known universe.
