Letter to the Editor: On Masters and Deans

To the editor:

Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith announces that the supervisors of the Houses are henceforth to be called "Dean,” like himself.

Like everyone else he would agree, the abandoned title "Master" derives from nothing offensive (only today, its echo is offensive). On the other hand, "Dean" in a university sense derives from the Roman Catholic church by way of Oxford and Cambridge, by way of the Anglican Church. These ties were severed by the American Revolution.

Bishop Seabury presiding at the time over the King's Church in America, from which the Puritans had once sought refuge, was a Yale graduate, beginning his ecclesiastical career with ordination as dean—that is, "deacon" (both English words, like the French doyen, variant derivatives of the Latin diaconus). An ardent Tory, he fled to England to regain accreditation as head of his sect under the name "American Episcopal,” and returned in that guise to the United States.

It must obviously offend Americans who value the Puritan story and all Protestant sects, to have over them supervisors with a title that recalls such a line of descent. But then, maybe they can live with their own history, which for everyone everywhere must be in some way offensive, and instructive.

Ramsay MacMullen AB '50, AM '53, PhD '57 is an emeritus professor of history at Yale.