Campus clips

A $25 million gift to the university from Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin ’78 will be used to establish the Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. To be housed on the West Campus, the institute will draw on the resources of Yale’s museums and libraries to study better ways to conserve art, books, and other material artifacts. The institute will also work on improving methods of digitizing collections.

The free video lectures in the Online Yale Courses program are so popular in China that a university there is marketing a book based on them. But it seems the Chinese university didn’t ask permission—violating a prohibition on commercial uses of the free material. Yale’s lawyers are talking with the publishers.

You’d never know it from the record number of applications this year, but Yale College has been pulling back on its marketing. Admissions dean Jeffrey Brenzel ’75 said in May that since 2005, his office has cut mailings to high school students by a third—to about 80,000 a year. Although high application numbers and low admission rates are widely seen as signs of quality in higher education, Brenzel says the pursuit of those numbers can go too far. “If a student has only the most remote chance in admission, I feel it’s inappropriate to try to persuade a student to send an application,” he told Business Week.

Did Yale buy the right to close High and Wall Streets on campus forever, or just for 20 years? In 1990, Yale paid New Haven $1.1 million to close two blocks of each street. The agreement was to be revisited in 20 years; Yale says that meant just that the parties would evaluate whether the change had any negative impact on traffic. But in April some aldermen in the cash-strapped city suggested that the university should pay to renew the deal. Meanwhile, in June Yale agreed to pay the city $3 million for a 99-year lease on the parking lot on Broadway opposite the Yale Bookstore.