What is at Yale.

Where the records live

The collection — catalogued as Adoption study records of the Child Development Center, MS 1585 — sits within the Manuscripts and Archives department at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. Sterling is the principal library of the university and the home of the bulk of Yale’s special collections. Manuscripts and Archives accepts deposits of papers from researchers, institutions, and other entities that wish to preserve their records under Yale’s curatorial care. The Neubauer collection is one such deposit. It is not, in any meaningful sense, a Yale-originated body of research; the university’s role is custodial.

That custodial framing matters for the question of how the seal can be lifted. Yale honors the access terms that the donor of a collection sets at deposit. The formal donor of MS 1585, in 1990, was the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services — the parent organization of the Child Development Center, where Peter Neubauer had directed the program. The terms could be modified. They have not been.

What the collection contains

The collection has not been described in detail in any public Yale finding aid available to non-credentialed researchers, and what is described below is a synthesis from the public record — subject statements, documentary interviews, journalism, and statements by representatives of the holding institutions. The collection is understood to include:

• Home-visit reports and field notes from the program’s researchers, organized by subject across the years of observation;
• Standardized assessment data — cognitive, developmental, and personality measures administered to subjects throughout childhood;
• Films and audio recordings of subjects at structured tasks and during interviews;
• Transcripts of interviews with adoptive parents about each subject’s development and the family’s home life;
• Working notes, correspondence, and administrative records of the program itself, including communications with Louise Wise Services about subject placement.

What the collection contains, in other words, is the comparative dataset the program was built to produce — each child’s record alongside the records of the siblings the child did not know existed.

The deed-of-gift terms

Deeds of gift are the standard mechanism by which manuscript collections enter university archives. They specify what is being given, on what terms, and with what restrictions on access. A donor can stipulate, for example, that materials remain closed for a period of years, that only credentialed researchers may use them, that the donor or the donor’s designee must be consulted before access, or that certain categories of material are open while others are closed.

The Neubauer deed appears to have used several of these provisions. The most consequential is the time-based seal: the unredacted collection is set to open on October 25, 2065 — seventy-five years after the 1990 gift. The seal is institutional and mutable: it was set by the parties to the deed, and the parties to the deed (or their successors) can change it.

How access decisions are made today

Access decisions in practice involve three parties: Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives staff, the institutional successor to the original depositor (broadly, the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services), and where applicable the requesting subject themselves. Since the late 2010s, identified subjects who can establish their identity and request material about themselves have, in some cases, received redacted portions of their files through this process. Outside parties — researchers, journalists, members of the public — have not.

The redacted releases that have happened are not, in any meaningful sense, an opening of the archive. They are case-by-case disclosures made under continuing institutional control. They are valuable to the subjects who receive them. They do not address the larger question.

What this archive recommends

The recommendations on the advocacy page address the institutions that hold the standing to act here. In short: the deed of gift can be amended; the redactions can be reduced; the access criteria can be widened; and the calendar release date can be brought forward. None of those moves require legislation or litigation. They require institutional will.

Direct contact for interested parties

For correspondence with Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives department about the collection’s status, access, or the deed-of-gift terms — and for members of the public who wish to write the department in support of opening the collection — the channels below are public.

Contact details are taken from Yale’s public-facing library pages. If they have changed since this page was written, the department’s current site at web.library.yale.edu/mssa is authoritative.