Tongue-in-cheek arrogance or the real thing?

Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, in New Haven.

“The Yale president must be a Yale man. Not too far to the right, or too far to the left or a middle-of-the-roader. Ready to give the ultimate word on every subject under the sun from how to handle the Russians to why undergraduates riot in the spring. Profound with a wit that bubbles up and brims over in a cascade of  brilliance. You may have guessed who the leading candidate is, but there is a question about him: Is God a Yale man?”

-- Wilmarth S. Lewis (1895-1979), Yale trustee, writer and near-monomaniac collector of the works of Horace Walpole (1717-1787), the British writer. He graduated from Yale in 1918. (He made the remarks above in 1950.)

In 1928 he married Anne Burr Auchincloss, a granddaughter of Oliver B. Jennings, one of the founders of the Standard Oil Company. Mrs. Lewis was also caught up in the Walpole pursuit and devoted her fortune and much time to it until her death, in 1959. Most of their collection was left to Yale.