Uncle Sid

Sidney Lovett, 68, chaplain of Yale University, is many things to many men. For some, he is the fun-loving chief figure in the Great Hoax of 1948, who appeared as the mustachioed guest speaker at a Yale charity banquet and had everyone convinced that he was Count Alexandri Cristea, "the oldest living member of the royal family of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen." For others he is the tolerant chaperon who turns up at student parties equipped with a London bobby's helmet and a whistle to blow should things get out of hand. He is also the coach of the Pierson College baseball team whose head is filled with major-league statistics, and trainer of the Pierson football team whose bag is crammed with adhesive tape, aspirin, oranges and a Bible. But to all Yalemen, Chaplain Lovett is the ever-genial "Uncle Sid," who has probably done more than anyone else to bring God and man together at Yale.

Cokes & Smokes. When Lovett ('13) returned to Yale as chaplain in 1932 after serving as minister in two Congregational churches in Boston, religion was not exactly in vogue on the U.S. campus. That year Yale offered only one religion course to its undergraduates, and only three students bothered to enroll. Lovett no sooner took over the course than its fame began to spread. He allowed his students to smoke and sip Cokes in class, insisted on only one rule: "If you must sleep, do it in a dignified position." But in spite of such informality, "Cokes and Smokes" proved to hundreds of students that the study of religion could be a rigorous and fascinating intellectual discipline.

When Lovett finally gave up the course in 1954, enrollment stood at 300. In 1944 Lovett headed a faculty study that had a profound effect on Yale. "If the nemesis of the strictly sectarian college is its dogmatism," the study declared, "that of the broadly liberal university is its aimlessness." Lovett and his committee recommended that Yale set up a full-fledged graduate and undergraduate department of religion, manned not only by theologians but by psychologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers. The time had come, said they, to end the "idolatry of every discipline for itself," and to try to reconcile science and religion, and relate all knowledge to "the whole context of human life . . . It is only the universities, not the churches or seminaries, which can hope to discover how we may, without destructive schizophrenia, at once pray and question, and so be fully men."

Friendly Ambassador. While shaping his "Utopian Department" of religion, Uncle Sid was still always available to students in trouble. He considered himself, says one colleague, not so much a teacher and preacher as a "Christian pastor." He arranged loans, gave counsel, often acted as a sort of friendly ambassador between a boy and his parents. He could cheer a room with his gift for mimicry or by sporting one of his large assortment of strange hats. But his burdens were often heavy. Once a graduate student came to him and tearfully blurted that he had incurable cancer. It was Uncle Sid who taught the boy to live out the less than two years left to him fully and without fear.

Last week Uncle Sid announced that he would retire from Yale in June, and after a vacation at his home in New Hampshire ("There I might get acquainted again with my three children and nine grandchildren") he and his wife will leave for Hong Kong, where he will serve as Yale-in-China representative at New Asia College. But in talking over his plans, he was not wholly his jovial self. "I shall miss the boys," said he, "the sinners as well as the saints." Yale's saints and sinners could say the same of him.

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