Change is happening at Yale. It has a new president. The Alumni Association has a new director. New schools and centers are establishing themselves. This totally blind, type I diabetic, multiple Yale degree holder with postdocs and a Yale/Hastings Fellowship in Bioethics senses a tremendous opportunity to reevaluate apparent, and sometimes expressed, university thought on the value of exposing our community to alums — and faculty — with practical experience of the world’s problems and how they are being addressed. 

When on campus, I mentored hundreds of Yalies. I still work with Yale students today. My experience of the campus and discussions with several undergraduate assistants say that too many students have limited access to Yalies working in practical areas outside of the big four:  healthcare, law, finance and consulting.

Even in these areas, on-or-near-campus access to academics while passively sitting in class is far easier to get than is exposure to non-academics, whom students must actively find in their limited spare time, possibly via poorly utilized resources like Yale Connect and Cross Campus which have significant learning curves for everyone. These resources also require comfort, which many people lack when making unsolicited outreach to possible contacts.

As a result, most students in the College and professional schools will make career choices before full exposure to their options for making positive change happen. Yale could, possibly via Career Services, redress this by actively bringing alumni — involved in everything from K-12 teaching to government and community service, not to mention the arts, journalism, startups and technology — to campus, or hosting a virtual series with heavy advertisement. Many alums would welcome opportunities for student interaction. 

I matriculated to Yale College in 1989. Helping good people see how they can make great things happen energizes me. In 2023, I asked Yale Medicine Magazine — which profiled me and others in 2000 — to highlight the incredible work done since 1974 by Dr. John Rugge, MED ’73, who founded and built the Hudson Headwaters Health Network in rural upstate New York.

I have deep family ties there. I have learned Hudson Headwaters — which began with Dr. Rugge and four physician assistants and now has 300 health providers in 24 community and specialty clinics, with more coming — where 162,000 individual patients were seen last year — totaling at least 500,000 encounters — has made healthcare accessible in places where it would have otherwise ended because local physicians were aging out of practice. Hudson Headwaters was an early Federally Qualified Health Center and helped launch the “Medical Home” movement. Its growing catchment covers a Connecticut-sized section of upstate New York, supports unique community-provider partnerships, succeeds in keeping health professionals in rural practice and more. I am told it may have helped keep communities from dying altogether. 

Yet, when I asked Yale Medicine to profile Dr. Rugge and his work, I was told via email: “Recently, we’ve been asked to emphasize, as much as possible, the important research that’s happening at YSM. As a result, we have had less space in the magazine for alumni coverage.” I asked contacts at the Yale Alumni Monthly about profiling Dr. Rugge. I heard nothing. 

Dr. Rugge is not the only alum doing amazing real-world things to whom Yalies should be exposed. Yale’s resistance to talking about his achievements, so relevant to many of the health access issues Americans face today, highlights for me the low priority it has on helping everyone discover the invaluable work our diverse and talented community does in many applied fields and the positive impact today’s campus residents can have wherever they go throughout their lives. 

One path Yale could follow to expose everyone to the diverse applied contributions Yalies make today would be a publication like Princeton’s “Alumni in the News” so our community can see what a Yale education, hard work, good luck and solid contacts can make possible. 

I have a Yale Ph.D., Princeton and Harvard masters’ degrees and I work to improve outcomes and access for many. I know highlighting our challenges and opportunities through research is important. Experience drives my belief that encountering problems and seeing how people are overcoming them is even more so. Celebrating those creating practical, cost-effective solutions is particularly critical given America’s struggles with outcomes — and increasing doubt good ones are possible here. 

This understandable doubt amplifies the importance of highlighting good things happening and Yalies facilitating them.

As their tenures begin, I encourage President McInnis GRD ’90 GRD ’96 and YAA Director Cole ’99, in concert with other Yale leadership, to create ways to expose Yale’s incredible students to the amazing practical work Yalies do in ways that will make accessing these people and opportunities easier than I’m told doing so is today. I — and I’m sure many other alums — stand ready to help Yale make this happen.

MATTHEW A. WEED is a consultant, speaker and advocate for improved health outcomes. He graduated from Yale College in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in political science; and earned a Ph.D. in genetics from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2004. You can contact him at matthewweedconsults@gmail.com.