Yale School

Long criticized for its lax admission standards and financial woes, Yale Divinity School has agreed to decrease the size of its faculty and become more selective in admitting students. But the graduate school will not veer from its traditional mission of training students for ordination to the ministry, even though other universities have channeled their divinity schools toward a more academic pursuit of religious studies.

They remember him as a wild-haired, garrulous guy who bragged about his home state's watermelons and glided through school seemingly without trying--or, sometimes, showing up for class. Bill Clinton always "had a tremendous learning curve," remembered Mark I. Soler. "It was a good thing, because he wasn't the most diligent student."

A year ago, Raymond J. Barry submitted his play "Once in Doubt" to the Los Angeles Theatre Center--and it was rejected. "They thought the non-sequitur scenes like me jumping on the light-bulb glass saying, 'I wish something exciting would happen,' wouldn't work," says the Obie-winning actor. "The literary critic wrote a scathing review." Undeterred, Barry bowed the play last January at the Cast Theatre, followed by a summer run at the People's Light in Pennsylvania. Suddenly, the show was hot.

Soon after Lloyd Richards settled into his new jobs as Dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1979, he got a call from his old acting buddy, James Earl Jones. "He congratulated me on my appointment," recalls Richards, "but I said, 'It doesn't end there. If I go to Yale, you go, too. As do a few other people.' " Richards wasn't joking. Jones played in Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens," put Richards in touch with Athol Fugard, then appeared in Yale's American premiere of Fugard's "A Lesson From Aloes."

J. Hillis Miller, a literary critic whose work has been praised as brilliant but denounced by some as deliberately obscure, will leave Yale University to join UC Irvine on July 1, University of California President David Gardner announced Friday. The appointment is considered an academic coup for UCI, said Murray Krieger, who began UCI's critical theory program. "It is a terrible loss for Yale but an absolute breakthrough for Irvine," said Krieger, who was instrumental in recruiting Miller.

The Yale School of Medicine on Monday reported receiving its largest gift ever, an $8-million donation to be used in constructing an addition to its library. The donation came from Betsey Cushing Whitney of Manhasset, N.Y., Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti said.

Guido Calabresi, 52, one of the nation's leading law educators, has been appointed dean of Yale University Law School effective July 1, it was announced Wednesday.