Why A Class Survey?

Hardly a man remembers that famous day and year when I delivered your class history, with the refrain fol-de-rol-de-rol-rol-rol. But the flashback will gobsmack you when you hear my recapitulation of the succeeding half-century in much less than a half-hour on the occasion of our 50th Reunion.

Come reunion time, still other classmates relishing an audience will tell us about “The Meaning of it All” (Richard Tedlow) and “Our Spiritual Paths” (Mike Baum).

All of us who volunteered for these roles felt the need for some light grounding in reality. Therefore, we decided on asking all of you how it has been, what it is, and where we are going. Our presumptuousness committee comprised anyone who expressed an interest, and each member offered questions until the inquisitiveness knew no bounds.

We turned to an expert from the class’s ranks, Tom Guterbock, director of the Center for Survey Research at the University of Virginia, in a search for order and form. He gently weeded out the worst of our questions and appropriately rephrased everything. You will each be receiving this truly professional undertaking in due course.

Now, an earnest discussion was had concerning privacy. Individual answers will not be revealed to anyone — not the reunion organizer, not me, not Tom,  … NO ONE.  Specifically, no one at Yale will see the responses or use them to target fund-raising requests.

We also took quite seriously the possibility that historic, demographic information should not be gathered at all on two grounds. First, if anyone wants to reveal to anyone else at the reunion or otherwise how many or how much of this, that, or the other he (yes, I am the last class historian who can only type “he” as the pronoun) has or had, then he should do that orally, face to face. Second, we would all benefit from looking forward into the future rather into the past.

As your once and future class historian I felt the second point was largely valid, but not completely. There needs to be enough room for retrospective contemplation to permit my presentation at the reunion itself. The second point seemed to all of us to be completely right. However, two further thoughts enabled us to conclude that the survey should be sent: only a computer (only?) will know your answers, and you don’t have to answer questions you do not want to answer. This is not TSA, FBI, NSA or any other three-letter acronym at work here; it is only with TLC that we approach the topic of gathering and talking with each other in 2019.

Well that’s the story of the survey, old pals. See you soon.