Sam Chauncey

Who is Sam Chauncey?

Henry "Sam" Chauncey, Jr. was a longtime administrator at Yale University. He has been credited in part with management of the volatile atmosphere on campus and in New Haven, Connecticut associated with the New Haven Black Panther trials.

Chauncey was appointed in 1963 as a special assistant to then Yale President Kingman Brewster, 1963–1977. He had been a student at Groton School before Yale. Senior year he had worked in the University Secretary's office. He graduated with the Yale Class of 1957 and was a member of Wolf's Head Society.

Chauncey is a descendant of Yale College's first graduate, and his father, Henry Chauncey, was founder and head of the Educational Testing Service, and an important aide to James Bryant Conant, Harvard's president, 1933–1953, when that school expanded its admissions net. Chauncey did likewise for Brewster, with R. Inslee Clark, Jr., much as his father did for Conant in recruiting and admitting incoming classes more diverse and academically able than their predecessors.

Rather than the apocalyptic student riot that consumed Kent State University on May 4, 1970, Yale, under the leadership of Kingman Brewster on behalf of the faculty and Kurt Schmoke on behalf of the undergraduates, embraced and then managed the spirit of the protest. The protest lasted two days, May 1 and 2. Brewster and Chauncey met with Archibald Cox of Harvard to discuss what went awry April 15, 1970 in Cambridge, Massachusetts at a protest organized by an offshoot of the white radical group Students for a Democratic Society. The consensus was locking the gates to the university incited the violence, and it had done likewise at Columbia University. Abbie Hoffman vowed that Yale would burn May 1 after the experience at Harvard.