Class News
Gus Speth '64, co-founder of NRDC, remembers
Gus Speth, our classmate and dean of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, was a co-founder of the National Resources Defense Council. The following article, from the November/December 2005 Yale Alumni Magazine, pertains.
From the editor
Some of Yale's best-known institutions are impermanent. Great
professors who have taught at Yale 30, 40, or 50 years endow the place
with their personalities, and to the generations of students they
influence, they come to seem immutable. But they are painfully unlike
courtyards and bell towers, because they don't last.
One of those institutions died this September: Boris I. Bittker '41LLB,
Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law. He was a preeminent tax lawyer ― so
respected in his field that every tax law and accounting firm in the
country has his books on its shelves. He was a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and, as a Sterling Professor, one of the
small number who have earned Yale's most exalted academic honor. Bittker
could have become the dean of the Law School; but he preferred, said
former dean Guido Calabresi '53, '58LLB, to be the informal in-house
adviser "to dean after dean after dean."
People with the depth of mind for this level of scholarship tend to
surprise. They don't follow standard paths or patterns. As a scholar of
tax law, Bittker worked in a field that doesn't lend itself to
amazement, at least for laypeople. It was his extracurriculars that were
unusual.
In 1968, a handful of graduating Yale law students decided to found a
legal nonprofit that would do for the environment what the NAACP legal
defense arm was doing for civil rights. One of the students, Gus Speth
'64, '69LLB, sent a memo to the Yale law faculty describing the plan and
asking for help. Only a few professors responded. To the students'
astonishment, Bittker was among them. In the late 1960s, established
middle-aged tax lawyers generally stayed aloof from unusual political
ventures by students ― "brash and presumptuous" students, Speth says.
He remembers: "Here was a man of impeccably good judgment, tremendously
respected by the bar, the leading tax scholar in the country ― exactly
what we needed to launch a public interest law firm with credibility. He
put himself on the line for us. A pinnacle of the legal profession came
out of the tax books and said, 'I'll help you."
Gus Speth is now the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and
Environmental Studies and the former head of the UN Development Program.
The venture he co-founded after law school became the Natural Resources
Defense Council, today the leading environmental public policy
organization. (I worked there for several years as editor of its
quarterly magazine.) All of this was, in some part, made possible
because a Yale professor lent his expertise to NRDC's effort for
nonprofit tax status; lent his counsel to its director, John Adams; and
lent his name as a trustee to the letterhead, where it opened doors that
might otherwise have stayed closed.
Bittker worked at Yale for almost 60 years. He had become an assistant
professor in 1946, and after he retired in 1983, he went to the office
every weekday. Speth remembers visiting him there in the past academic
year. Bittker was 88 years old and ill; he would live only a few more
months. But in the midst of their conversation about Speth's work, he
asked: "How can I help you?"
Kathrin Day Lassila '81