Yale University

It's been more than five years since Charmaine Gordon gave up power suits for spandex and the sedate tedium of taxes and pensions for the heavy breathing of high-volume aerobics."

So. You're a graduate student teaching two sections of English literature to freshmen at State University Tech each term. You're responsible for discussing texts, assigning and grading essays, giving tests and issuing final grades. You're not paid much, just a thousand dollars or so per class, but it helps pays the bills.Are you a student? Or are you an employee?The question has taken center stage at campuses across the DTC nation, from New Haven to San Diego, where graduate student instructors are seeking to gain recognition as employees, with guaranteed benefits and the right to bargain collectively.

A year ago, Yale University came up with an idea. It told its full-time faculty and staff members that if they buy a home in New Haven, Conn., the university will pay them a subsidy of $2,000 a year for 10 years as long as they remain in the house and continue working for Yale.This set a trend. A small but growing number of non-profit institutions has begun similar programs. Some are in New Haven, including the Hospital of St. Raphael, the city's fourth largest employer. Others, like the University of Southern California, are on the West Coast.

Richard Lewis Robbins, 56, a lawyer and conservationist who, as executive director of the Lake Michigan Federation from 1975 to 1981, led efforts to clean the Great Lakes, died May 28 at his home in Chicago. He was trained in electrical engineering at Cornell University, law at the University of Pennsylvania and computer technology at Yale University. He worked in city planning and zoning in New York City for then-Mayor John V. Lindsay. He moved to Chica go in 1973 to work for American Society of Planning Officials.

Havre de Grace. -- The tapestry of Maryland political life is long and colorful, the more so because of the way some of its more durable human strands keep appearing and reappearing as the decades slip by.Go back to the tumultuous spring of 1969, and the green Connecticut campus of Yale University. Yale students are on strike, protesting the war in Vietnam and assorted other perceived evils. They want the faculty to join them in closing the university down.In the chapel, when a retired professor stands to challenge the idea that such an action will address the shortcomings of society, a tearful sophomore from Baltimore responds.

Four years after giving $20 million to Yale University to expand its Western civilization curriculum, Lee M. Bass, a billionaire alumnus, has requested that the money be returned because Yale never instituted the courses.The university -- which in recent weeks had been scrambling to devise a curriculum to satisfy Mr. Bass -- announced yesterday that it had agreed to give back the $20 million after concluding that it could not accept his conditions.The most troublesome of these, Yale officials said, was Mr. Bass' recent request that he be allowed to approve the faculty members for the courses.

It's a funny thing. I've been telling lots of people about Yale University in recent weeks and nearly everyone has had the same reaction: ''Imagine Johns Hopkins doing something like that!''Here's the scoop: Yale University has announced that since it pays no city taxes on its academic properties, it wants to help New Haven, Connecticut, in other ways. It has established a $5 million fund to match investments by other venture-capital funds in new technology companies locating at two New Haven sites.

Can humans be truly human and truly fulfilled in a world of glass and concrete set apart from nature, surrounded by cultural artifacts and pursuits, enclosed in electronic cocoons where much of reality comes from the television screen and the computer display?Not in a million years, according to a new hypothesis. It holds that eons of evolution, during which humans constantly and intimately interacted with nature, have imbued Homo sapiens with a deep, genetically based emotional need to affiliate with the rest of the living world.

The conclusions can be put so simply that a preschooler could grasp them: Barney, the purple TV dinosaur reviled by many adults but loved by millions of kiddies, is good. And Barney-bashing, the fad now sweeping America, is bad.Here's another one, too, for all of you parents out there: The repetitive and saccharine qualities of the PBS show "Barney & Friends" -- the very elements that some adults find so annoying -- are exactly what preschool kids need.Those are among the initial findings of a study for Connecticut Public Television by Dorothy and Jerome Singer, child-development experts at Yale University (who, incidentally, don't think "Sesame Street" is as great as lots of other people do)

Charles Albro Barker, historian, scholar and author, died of heart failure Sept. 12 at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, Calif. The former chairman of the Johns Hopkins University history department was 88.He joined the university in 1945 and chaired its history department from 1967 until his retirement in 1972.Dr. Barker's tenure at Hopkins was marked by participation in the peace movement. He was founder and first president of the Conference on Peace Research in History of the American Historical Association.