Library celebrates Willie Ruff ’53 and The Conservatory without Walls

Jazz musician Willie Ruff, founding director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program at Yale, returns to campus on Oct. 14 to celebrate the program’s 50th anniversary. Through the Ellington program, dubbed The Conservatory without Walls, renowned musicians mentored and performed with young people at Yale and throughout New Haven. As Yale News reported in 2002, since the program’s inception in 1972, Duke Ellington Fellows had by then worked with an estimated 180,000 New Haven public school students. See full story.