New Haven, Conn. — Friday evening found architects and art historians trying locked doors and rechecking printed directions as they attempted to locate the Yale University Art Gallery auditorium, which was to be the site of a symposium on universities as architectural patrons. “Enter on High Street,” said the symposium schedule, not particularly helpfully. The art gallery had closed more than an hour earlier.

The designated entrance turned out to be down a dim, leaf-strewn passage between the Skull and Bones Tomb and scaffolding erected for renovations at the university’s Jonathan Edwards College. Two more turns and several stairs revealed the auditorium’s side door, and behind it the irrepressible Bob Stern—Robert A.M. Stern, principal of Robert A.M. Stern Architects and dean of Yale’s architecture school—who was working the room, welcoming friends, and trading gossip. You couldn’t help thinking that the unpublicized symposium, if not actually more exclusive than a Skull and Bones meeting, was every bit as well hidden and definitely more interesting. What follow are some of the best lines.

From David Brownlee, chairman of the art-history department at the University of Pennsylvania:

“I am an art historian, but I should say too that I have been working to correct this through group therapy that I have obtained without charge by serving on a variety of committees and commissions devoted to Philadelphia historic preservation, Penn’s architectural-project oversight, and campus-design review. ... As a historian, I really don’t care what happens—whatever happens is interesting. It all makes good history. But I’ve given up objectivity and become that anthropological fall guy, the participant observer.”

And also:

“Between the world wars we created a Great Gatsby world of materialized dreams on American campuses in the luxurious houses of Harvard and the colleges of Yale. I find it impossible, frankly, to see in these the offspring of the monastic complexes of Oxford and Cambridge. These are instead cadet versions of the residential hotels and apartment buildings of Rittenhouse Square, Connecticut Avenue, Central Park—marvelously and poignantly of their time, not medieval at all.”

From Karen Van Lengen, dean of the architecture school at the University of Virginia:

“In the first two weeks that I was there, everyone I talked to—everyone—had a Jefferson quote. Everyone talked about Jefferson in politics, Jefferson in sociology, Jefferson in the arts. ... I said to my husband, ‘I don’t know if we can stay here—this is just too much.’ ... What I really realized, which I think became the foundation of what I’ve been trying to do at UVa, is that architecture really matters. At Penn, as much as I love Penn, we are not talking about Franklin every five minutes. We know he founded it, but—done. We move on. Not at UVa. It’s the ‘academical village.’ ... It’s that artifact that is the soul of the university, that is so important to the life of the school that no one … can tell you why. Larry Sabato [director of the university’s Center for Politics] has no idea—even though he lives on the lawn—how that actually operates.”

From Mack Scogin, former chairman of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and principal in Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects:

“It’s absolutely incredible to me what it takes to do architecture in today’s world. If you will, I’m just going to read you a list of consultants that we are working with on a present project. This is one project. They have a consultant for health-services design, equipment planning, specifications writing, structural engineering, facade design, miscellaneous metal engineering, masonry engineering, landscape design, landscape documentation, geotechnical engineers, civil engineers, acoustical design, fire-and-life-safety design, smoke-exhaust engineering, security systems, hardware systems, information technology and communication, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, plumbing engineering, lighting design, elevator design, LEED design, sustainability, irrigation design, environmental design, food service, parking design, traffic consultant, structural peer review, commissioning agents, at least two cost consultants, construction management, code-and-agency-approval consultant, graphic consultant, and, of course, all the lawyers that it takes to negotiate all the contracts between all those people, us, and the client. That’s almost 40 separate disciplines involved in the making of one building. What that means is, these are all people that have an expertise that we as architects cannot bring to the table at the level that is required to make a state-of-the-art building in today’s world.”

From Mr. Stern, speaking of James Gamble Rogers, who designed many of Yale’s most notable Collegiate Gothic buildings, including the Harkness Tower and the Sterling Library:

“Frank Lloyd Wright and James Gamble Rogers were the same age. They both came, basically, from Chicago. They were both sons of ministers. Rogers came to Yale as a scholarship student, went on to the Ecole des Beaux Arts. At Yale, he happened to meet a few people, and the rest is history—Harkness, Sterling, etc. Wright went for two years to the University of Wisconsin to study engineering, basically dropped out, and apprenticed for an architect in Chicago. Went to the suburbs of Chicago. Didn’t meet many people, except one who got him in a little trouble. And when Wright came to Yale—at the behest of, of all people, Philip Johnson’s nephew Andrew Dempsey—he went to the Taft Hotel, which was then the hostelry of choice in town, and he looked out the window and he saw the Harkness Tower. And he stated, ‘I’d rather be in the Harkness Tower looking at the Taft Hotel than the other way around.’ Wright hated some people deeply and longly, and the great James Gamble Rogers was definitely one. Now, to say that Wright was jealous—we won’t go on to that.”

From Mr. Stern again, speaking of Richard C. Levin, Yale’s president:

“Now the president is at Davos again. Every time he goes to Davos he says Yale is going to be greener than the last time he went to Davos, depending on who’s raised the bar. So we’re nervous of what’s he going to come back and say this time.”

Mr. Stern yet again, while showing pictures of the architect Charles Gwathmey’s renovation of, and addition to, Paul Rudolph’s famous 1963 Art and Architecture Building:

“How do we handle peer review at Yale? Well, the dean is a little wicked sometimes. So the first day of class—when the scheme had been approved, but all the visiting critics from around the world, the faculty, and students all gather for the first day—Charles Gwathmey got to present his scheme to everyone. And you could just tell trouble was a-brewing. And [Vincent] Scully and other people—Peter Eisenman—all called Charlie. By the time he got back to New York he was a nervous wreck. Telling him he ought to do this—more stone, less stone, or whatever, but Gwathmey did listen, and he did go back and restudied the facade, which had already been approved, and the bottom scheme is the one that will be built. So there is discourse all through the process.”