Asha Prihar, Contributing Photographer

Richard Rosenfeld ’63, who endowed Rosenfeld Hall, visited his namesake dormitory on Monday to give a talk organized by Timothy Dwight College on the history of Yale entitled “When Yale Buildings Speak: The Eponymic Voices of Timothy Dwight College.” 

Rosenfeld Hall, which now serves as a residential building in TD, previously served as a language laboratory and a secret society.  

After graduating from Yale, Rosenfeld attended Columbia Law School and earned a Master of Laws degree at Boston University.

As an entrepreneur, he developed a travel business valued at over $90 million. His business, International Weekends, pioneered charter travel by making flights more affordable to the general public. During her introduction to the talk, Head of Timothy Dwight College Mary Lui explained that Rosenfeld donated $500,000 in 1985 for a complete renovation of the then-language laboratory.

“Part of the reason for this talk is to awaken Yale to embrace the values of the Enlightenment,” Rosenfeld told the News. “In this country, there are threats to the institutions of Enlightenment, such as fair elections. But I don’t hear today’s students creating a movement to defend the Enlightenment from threats that exist in society.”

He added that Enlightenment ideals include scientific reasoning, democracy and toleration. 

Rosenfeld emphasized that these Enlightenment values are nonpartisan.

“It’s not Republican,” he told the News. “It’s not Democrat. It’s the value system of educated people and I think that value system can be weaponized by students, by the administration, to say what is wrong.”

In his speech, Rosenfeld also talked about several social movements in the United States, including the Civil Rights movement, and how they reflected the ideals of the Enlightenment.

He discussed the United States’ progress toward increased tolerance and open-mindedness, and explained that while the country has become more diverse over time, Yale lagged behind for much of its history.

“Yale, however, remained steadfastly distant from equality and toleration,” he said.

He said that the University imposed harsh restrictions on the number of minority students admitted — initially a 10 percent quota for Jewish students — starting in the 1920s and continuing through his time at Yale.

He added that student protests promoted inclusivity and pushed Yale to become what it is today.

“He spoke so eloquently and passionately of Yale’s history of racial and religious intolerance and elitism and the work of his peers and brave administrators such as Civil Rights and peace activist William Sloane Coffin to push the university to change in the 1960s,” Lui wrote in an email to the News. “I hope our students left with a better understanding of this history and their own power to stand up and push for justice and democracy whether on or beyond this campus.”

At the talk, Rosenfeld also spoke about his views on the U.S. Senate. 

In 2004, Rosenfeld wrote a well-known essay in Harper’s Magazine arguing that the United States Senate should be abolished.

“In America today, U.S. senators from the twenty-six smallest states, representing a mere 18 percent of the nation’s population, hold a majority in the United States Senate,” Rosenfeld wrote in his essay. “And therefore, under the Constitution, regardless of what the President, the House of Representatives, or even an overwhelming majority of the American people wants, nothing becomes law if those senators object.”

At his talk on Monday, Rosenfeld explained this argument in more depth, asking if the current system really reflects a “democracy or an aristocracy.”

He also delivered a keynote address to the annual dinner of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1997, in which he argued that the Founding Fathers feared democracy more than wanting it.

During his speech, Rosenfeld said that for the country to maintain a well-functioning democratic system, there needs to be a strong culture of democratic republicanism.

“What happened in the last years is that politics has gone away from arguing about policy to arguing and degrading the culture, which is a precondition to having a democratic system,” he said.

Jill LaGattuta, Rosenfeld’s daughter, also attended the event and explained that she found it “very interesting” to hear her father’s stories during “such a tumultuous time” at Yale.

Rosenfeld Hall is located at 109 Grove St.