Ylvisaker, Paul Norman

(b. 28 November 1921 in Saint Paul, Minnesota; d. 17 March 1992 in Washington, D.C.), urban planner, government official, foundation executive, and educator.

Ylvisaker was one of five children of Dr. Sigurd C. Ylvisaker and Norma Norem. At the time of his birth, his father, a Lutheran minister, was a professor at Concordia College in Saint Paul. In 1930 the family moved to Mankato, Minnesota, where Sigurd Ylvisaker became the president of Bethany Lutheran College, a position he held until 1950. Ylvisaker attended Immanuel Lutheran Elementary School,

Bethany Lutheran High School, and Bethany Lutheran College, from which he received his A.A. degree in 1940. He went on to Mankaro State Teachers College, graduating with a B.S. degree in 1942. Following completion of his undergraduate studies, he taught for a short time at Bethany Lutheran College while taking graduate courses at the University of Minnesota. From 1943 to 1946 he was a staff member of the Blue Earth County Council on Intergovernmental Relations, and at the same time he pursued graduate studies at Harvard University, where he was a Littauer Fellow and where he earned his M.P.A. in 1945. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in political economy and government in 1948. While studying at Harvard, he met Barbara Ewing, a Radcliffe College student, whom he married in 1946; they had four children.

After completing his studies at Harvard, Ylvisaker joined the faculty at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he earned a reputation for being a fine teacher. He also was highly regarded as a scholar and took leave during the 1951–1952 academic year to serve as a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar in England. While not interested in a political career, Ylvisaker served as the Democratic chair for the town of Swarthmore and as the executive secretary to Philadelphia Mayor Joseph S. Clark from 1954 to 1955. He also worked on Clark’s senatorial campaign.

The demands of undertaking this political activity while maintaining his teaching job, coupled with health problems, led Ylvisaker to leave Swarthmore and the Clark organization and accept a position as the executive associate for the Public Affairs Program of the Ford Foundation in New York City. In 1958 he became the associate director of the program and the next year became its director. Before leaving the Ford Foundation in 1967, he spent time in both India and Japan on urban planning projects. In Japan he served as a technical assistant in a United Nations position from 1960 to 1962 and again in 1964. His most important work with the Ford Foundation was the development of what he called the “Gray Areas” program. Ylvisaker used that term to refer to the deteriorating areas of cities between the downtowns and the suburbs. Traditionally, the Ford Foundation had put its money into surveys and scholarship; Ylvisaker convinced them to invest in programs that targeted the physical and social problems of decay. There were two significant features to this program. The first was to combine what had been separate educational, employment, health, and social-welfare efforts into one entity. The other was to bring those who would benefit from the program–the poor and the minorities–into the management of the operation. His work in this field attracted the attention of President John F. Kennedy and Ylvisaker was asked to serve on the federal Task Force on the City, which he later chaired under President Lyndon B. Johnson. In that capacity, Ylvisaker was a major contributor to the development of the federal model cities program.

On 1 March 1967 Ylvisaker was sworn in as New Jersey’s first Commissioner of Community Affairs. In his campaign for governor of New Jersey, the Democratic candidate Richard Hughes had promised to establish such a department. Richard Leone, an administrative assistant to Governor Hughes, recruited Ylvisaker for the job. His first year in that office was an eventful one. On 12 July a riot involving African American residents and police erupted in Newark. Governor Hughes asked Ylvisaker to lead an effort to ease tensions. Although the rioting lasted for five days, Ylvisaker played a significant role in bringing it to an end. On 17 July just as the Newark riots were over, violence broke out in nearby Plainfield. Ylvisaker quelled those riots by confronting the rioters and by preventing large-scale police intervention. His tenure in New Jersey was also noted for his successful revitalization of the Hackensack Meadows, in which a former garbage dump was transformed into the Meadowlands complex of sports facilities, with nearby shops and housing. In addition, he established several social reform programs in New Jersey. Nonetheless, a Republican victory in 1969 led to a cabinet housecleaning and a request for Ylvisaker’s resignation.

Ylvisaker spent the next year teaching at Yale and from 1970 to 1972 he was a professor of public affairs and urban planning at Princeton University in New Jersey. He left Princeton in September 1972 to become the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a position he held until 1982. With a decline of federal grants and a shrinking of enrollments, he presided over the downsizing of the school. At the same time he was responsible for committing the school to a public service mission and increasing the ratio of women and minorities among faculty and students. After resigning as dean, he continued to teach at Harvard as the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education, and he served as a senior consultant to the Council on Foundations. He was also a trustee of several private and community foundations. In 1991 his wife died and his own health was deteriorating. He died of a heart attack at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., at the age of seventy.

Ylvisaker faced health problems most of his life. In addition to suffering a heart attack in 1956, he had diabetes and was legally blind for many years. Although not imposing in appearance–he was short in stature, with blond hair often worn in a brush cut–his passion, commitment, courage, and the moral force of his arguments made him a formidable champion for cities and the urban underclass.

Ylvisaker’s papers, covering the years 1939–1992, are in the Harvard University Archives. While there are no biographies of Ylvisaker, there is substantial biographical information, along with a collection of speeches and writings, in Virginia M. Esposito, ed., Conscience and Community: The Legacy of Paul Ylvisaker (1999). Obituaries are in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Newark^ Star-Ledger (all 20 Mar. 1992), as well as in the Journal of the American Planning Association 58 (summer 1992): 367. Ylvisaker was interviewed for a Ford Foundation oral history project while he was a dean at Harvard. The interviews are located at the Ford Foundation Archives in New York City.

Ivan D. Steen