Volume 51 - Issue 5

THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N

VOL 51 / ISS 5 / APR 2019

THE NEW JOURNAL

THE JOBS YALE PROMISED

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editors-in-chief Laura Glesby Max Graham executive editor Elliot Wailoo senior editors Lily Moore-Eissenberg associate editors Hailey Andrews Zola Canady Beasie Goddu Alejandra Larriva-Latt Helena Lyng-Olsen Jack McCordick Eli Mennerick Trish Viveros Candice Wang

copy editors Jisoo Choi Elena DeBre Matthew Kleiner Yonatan Greenberg Nicole Jefferson Sofia Laguarda creative director Merritt Barnwell design editors Meher Hans Zihao Lin Sam Oldshue Alex Rifkin Chase Westover photo editors Vivek Suri web designer Philippe Chlenski

reporting supported by the Edward Bennett III Memorial Fund members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

Dear readers, More than a week ago, over one thousand admitted students arrived on campus for the largest Bulldog Days ever. The wide-eyed prefrosh eagerly visited classes, ventured into student club events, and donned their Yale ponchos and drawstring backpacks in the rain. They also might have noticed a flurry of protests amid the festivities. Current students organized teach-ins and circulated petitions in support of bolstered resources and departmental status for the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program. Activists with Students Unite Now camped outside SSS and blocked traffic in the middle of College Street, pushing for financial aid reform. And soon after the prospective students left, Yale and Hamden police officers shot at two unarmed Black local residents, Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon. The shooting sparked mass demonstrations and raised questions about the University’s role in policing the city beyond its walls.

We hope this issue, The New Journal’s 260th, inspires you to consider Yale’s place—and property—in New Haven and its lingering legacy of racial and socioeconomic exclusion. Inside, read about Yale’s unkept promise to hire more New Haven residents; the University’s controversial 185-year-old tax exemptions; the future of Asian American Studies at Yale; the local implications of a nationwide college admissions scandal; and more.

As our community reckons with Yale’s neglect for its ER&M program, the University’s broken pledge to hire from New Haven, and the shots a campus police officer fired at innocent and unarmed civilians, we head into summer reminded that work for a more inclusive future remains.

Thanks for reading, and please don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

In friendship, Laura & Max laura.glesby@yale.edu max.m.graham@yale.edu

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 51 issue 5 APR 2019

SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

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cover THE JOBS YALE PROMISED Yale pledged to hire one thousand New Haven residents by April 1st. It still hasn’t followed through.

Henry Reichard

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feature CHANGING COURSES As questions swirl around the future of the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program at Yale, activism for an Asian American Studies major has taken a new direction.

Meghana Mysore

standards points of departure 6 THE SECRET LIFE OF PEZ — Robert Scaramuccia NEW BOOKS ON THE BLOCK — Lakshmi Amin BRIBERY AND BROKEN TRUST — Mark Rosenberg

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book review A STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE — Caroline Bennet In his 2018 memoir, Casey Gerald reflects on the toll of his undergraduate years at Yale.

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poem WALKING — Eliana Swerdlow

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visual feature WHAT YALE COULD HAVE PAID — Zola Canady A map of Yale’s taxable and tax-exempt properties.

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endnote CONNECTICUT’S NEXT TOP FARM ANIMAL — Andy Sandweiss

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P EZ ZE P PP E E ZZ E PP EZ ZE PP E

P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

THE SECRET LIFE OF PEZ A non-aficionado encounters a candy-obsessed crowd at North America’s only PEZ factory, just minutes from New Haven.

Robert Scaramuccia

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graphic by Alex Rivkin

J

ust west of Yale’s West Campus, past the condo complex and the Restaurant Depot on Edison Road, past the candy roll-shaped signs blaring “PEZ PEZ PEZ” at oncoming traffic, past the glass ticket booth where you exchange fivedollars-plus-tax for a raspberry-red lanyard and a construction-paper I.D. designating you as an “Adult $5.00,” is a pedestal. On that pedestal, which rises to a height you’d consider chest-high if you were a Child 3-12 $4.00 instead of an Adult $5.00, is a round blue button. If you press that button, nothing happens.

Then, out of nowhere, from the top of what you assumed was just a blue loadbearing pillar, a giant baseball-capped head lurches backward, revealing, where its neck should be, a massive hole, out of which emerges the largest piece of PEZ candy you’ve ever seen, a veritable bathtub that looks like it’s going to plop out of the pillar and pulverize you. The tub teeters, half-ejected, holding your life in its candied hands. Then it retreats back into its hole, shrouded by the blue-billed head that returns to its pike with a knowing smirk.

That’s how I meet PEZ Boy, who, at fourteen feet tall, is the largest PEZ dispenser in the world. He’s one of the main attractions at the PEZ Visitor Center in Orange, Connecticut, which abuts the only PEZ factory in North America. After we meet, I stuff my identification card in my pocket and try to blend into the crowd of families and expert PEZHeads who have decided to spend their Saturday afternoons at a candy museum.

In 1927, Eduard Haas III of Austria began marketing his PfeffErminZ, or peppermints, as alternatives to smoking. In the 1950s, PEZ-Haas, Inc. got out of the adult breath mint business, got into the kids’ candy business, and moved its headquarters to New York City. PEZ bricks, like Tic Tacs and Werther’s Originals, look more at home in medicine cabinets than in plastic pumpkin heads, and yet Americans now eat three billion of them a year. To satiate that demand, the company has developed cuttingedge flavors like Coffee, Chlorophyll, Menthol/ Eucalyptus, and Yogurt. Of course, the candies have always played second fiddle to their containers, the Batman-, Mickey Mouse-, and Santa Claus-headed dispensers first introduced by Oscar Uxa at the 1948 Vienna Trade Fair. Flick the kicker on the nape of Batman’s neck and out comes chalky candy stored in the stem where his body should be.

The Orange factory opened in 1974. Its Visitor Center came along in 2011, after professional PEZ historian Shawn Peterson, voted 2010’s PEZHead of the Year by previous winners, convinced PEZ’s CEO to open a four thousandsquare-foot museum in the middle of suburban Connecticut. Peterson, now the center’s business manager, filled its exhibits with dispensers from his personal collection.

I walk by gold dispensers, Groot dispensers, Garfield the Cat dispensers, Garfield the President dispensers, unrealistically light-skinned Barack Obama dispensers, unrealistically attractive Richard Nixon dispensers, no-foot dispensers, thin-foot dispensers, thick-foot dispensers, and THE NEW JOURN AL

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dispensers on functional four-inch heels. I step over dispensers embedded in glass floor displays, which remind me of similar displays in the documentary Hell House. Except in Hell House, the sinful teenagers trapped in the floor could scream and thrash against the glass, whereas these voiceless and limbless Hello Kitties can only stare up and smile at the Sketchers of their oppressors.

By oppressors, I mean a) the children who are surprisingly excited about moderately edible chalk contained in non-edible plastic, and b) their parents, who presumably fondly remember the same chalk and plastic from their childhoods. One guy, who has clearly been to the Visitor Center multiple times, gives two women the grand tour, dropping impressive amounts of PEZ knowledge and asking questions like, “Did you see the little winking Pikachu?” If I were part of the PEZHeads Email Discussion Group—the PEZ equivalent of the Electoral College—I’d vote for him to be April’s PEZHead of the Month.

It’s immediately obvious, meanwhile, that I’m bad at PEZ. I don’t know a spine from a sleeve, or a leaf spring from a plastic hinge pin. I score an eleven out of twenty on the interactive PEZ trivia game.

I reach the backcorner eleVader (named for the foot-tall Darth Vader surveilling the entrance), read its instructions (“Step 1: Raise your arms. Step 2: Say ‘Weeeee!’”), consider myself unworthy, and walk to the other side of the museum to take the stairs.

Somewhere by the second-floor sign asking, “How many grasshoppers tall are you?” it dawns on me that not only am I bad at PEZ, but I will also never, ever, be good at PEZ. I’ll never be a PEZHead. I don’t have the nostalgia, the tinkering mindset, or the self-confidence required to go around telling people you collect decapitated snowmen, Supermen, and Rutherford B. Hayeses. Like any good American Studies major, I compensate by turning insignificant details into thesis sentences like: “The generally phallic appearance of the ‘Naughty Neil’ dispenser, coupled with suggestive Visitor Center advertising slogans like ‘The candy with a playmate!,’ suggests a penile obsession at the heart of American corporate capitalism.”

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None of which helps me when I try to buy Captain Marvel dispensers from the laid-back gift shop clerk. “Are you just here to buy things today?” he asks, with all the coolness reserved for people who stand three feet from Secret Life of Pets™ memorabilia. Overwhelmed, I answer “yes,” even though my journey through the museum makes the answer a clear “no,” which in turn makes it weird when I pull out my Adult $5.00 museum I.D. to take advantage of the $2.00 credit on all same-day gift shop purchases. The guy stares straight through me to the kicker on the nape of my neck and says, “Oh, so you weren’t just here for the store,” which I parry with something like “yeah,” to which he responds with something like “O.K.” while bringing the price of five dispensers down to a trim $8.45.

I escape the center and wait for my Uber at the PEZcolored picnic tables by the parking lot. A kid of about kindergarten age waits impatiently for his mom to snap a family photo underneath the “PEZ PEZ PEZ” sign, then darts toward the front entrance. Once his dad gets off his phone and opens the door to the lobby, the kid shouts, “Whoaaaa! There’s a PEZ bench!”

“No wayyy!” his mom yells back, mock-excited, while throwing something away by the tables. As my Uber driver asks me if I’m just getting off work at the factory, and further asks me if I’d like to join his free-or-reduced-price home energy scheme, I imagine the kid reacting to PEZ Boy. I start to wish I were less like his parents, and more like him.

– Robert Scaramuccia is a senior in Trumbull College.

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

NEW BOOKS ON THE BLOCK A secondhand bookstore unveils an eclectic collection on York Street.

Lakshmi Amin

T

he pre-recorded sound of a harpsichord plucking along to a Baroque string ensemble mingles with the smell of old pages and wooden bookshelves. Lingering near the front door of Grey Matter Books, I watch as mid-afternoon light reflects off cars lining York Street and illuminates piles of secondhand books and 1930s Travel magazines that cover the surface of the broad windowsill. A middle-aged man wearing a green button-down shirt, store owner Sam Burton squints at a book through a pair of thin glasses pushed to the end of his nose.

He greets me with an amused smile but glances back at the books at his side, explaining that he’s in the middle of making a purchase. While I wait, I wander over to the arts section and pick up a collection of Swedish artist Ulrica Hydman Vallien’s paintings: humans rendered in bold strokes and bright colors, concealed within a jetblack jacket cover.

Grey Matter Books opened the doors of its New Haven store in late February of this year. You might have to squint before you notice the small sign in the front window, which features a blackand-white image of a brain growing from a stem, enclosed by a thin circle.

The bookseller asks if Burton could go any higher on his offer for the used books, then reluctantly takes one of the crates back into his arms. Burton turns to sit down across from me at a table buried in more books and faces the sunfilled front window, surveying the busy sidewalk with distracted glances.

Though Burton’s own preferences in literature ranges from philosophy to film, Burton clarifies, “I don’t think the mission, per se, is to inflict my taste on people.” The Grey Matter website’s guide for booksellers features the store’s “No-go’s” list, which states that “the world is choking on its copies of The Girl with The Pearl Earring and The Da Vinci Code,” among others. On the other hand,

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graphic by Zihao Lin

“The Always and Near-Always Want List” contains eight categories including “handsome editions of the classics,” “raising chickens; keeping bees,” and “basically anything experimental, or else just plain good.” These criteria have “been whittled down through years of buying and selling,” Burton says. He worked at The Strand in New York and at independent bookstores across three states before opening the first Grey Matter in Hadley, Massachusetts, ten years ago. “Throwing away books is a very important thing,” he tells me. “You don’t want the shelves to be stale.”

One round through the store reveals old and new, mainstream and niche occupying the same shelves. Burton’s eye for the eclectic has curated an unusual collection of books that encourages customers to jump into unfamiliar literary territory. In corporate chain bookstores, autopilot steers me straight towards the textbook section, or the “kids” section, or, more realistically, the in-store Starbucks. I often leave with exactly what I came looking for—nothing more, nothing less. Instead, Grey Matter beckons me to take some time and explore sprawling rows of shelves housing unknown genres.

A few days later and a few blocks away, Dave Duda, owner of the Book Trader Cafe, sits with me in the store’s glass atrium. Downtown New Haven was home to five other independent bookstores when he first opened his own twenty-three years ago, but now, of the five, only the Book Trader Cafe and Atticus Bookstore Cafe remain. “The internet basically happened while we’ve been here, so we’ve done a lot of evolving,” he comments.

When book sales alone could not sustain the store, Duda expanded food offerings and adjusted prices to “mesh with the times.” Nodding to the used books sprawled across the main counters, he jokes that after the debut of Marie Kondo’s Netflix show Tidying Up, his inventory is fuller than it’s been in a while. Even so, he says that “something

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is missing” when customers don’t shop at physical bookstores, and he wishes more people explored literature simply for the sake of reading.

“I would not want to try and pay the kind of rent you have to pay just selling books,” Duda says, “but I wish [Burton] well.” Burton is confident that an interesting selection of “hard-to-find” books, which can’t be found anywhere else in the area, will draw in a steady stream of curious customers, and he hopes to “get into sync with what people need or want” as the store’s collection grows. Still, I can’t help but wonder if Grey Matter’s eccentric selection will be enough to prevent the front room, currently allotted for performances and book group meetings, from becoming a cafe for the sake of survival.

Back in Grey Matter, I approach a customer dressed in a muted tweed suit. Stephen, who is a tourist from Dublin, tells me it’s “absolutely astonishing” that he found a first edition copy of Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark on his first visit here after years of searching for the book in his travels— and for a very low price, too. Yale sophomore and film aficionado Brittany Menjivar shared a similar sense of excitement when she discovered a zine called Bad Seed 1. “It’s the kind of zany, rare item that I’d never find in a Barnes and Noble, and I can’t wait to check it out,” she notes. “Grey Matter APRIL 2019

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has definitely inspired me to read more this year.”

Cameron Brown, a Connecticut native and store employee, has spent four years working in bookstores and agrees that Grey Matter’s selection is what makes it so remarkable. Eagerly reaching up to a shelf behind the cash register, Brown retrieves one of his own favorite finds: The Outsider 4 & 5, a forty-six-page homage to poet Kenneth Patchen featuring delicate pages of pressed flowers and a decorative red knot of curling vines on the cover.

Burton reflects that unlike in Hadley, where his store is surrounded mostly by fields and cows, in New Haven “there’s some quirky people walking the street. It’s been fun.” He sighs and points to the pile of boxes sitting under an archway near the religion section, a sample of the thousands of books he’s had to move over the past few weeks.

He admits that running two bookstores, while gratifying, can be labor-intensive. “It’s definitely not for the faint of spine.”

– Lakshmi Amin is a sophomore in Branford College.

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Design by Chase Westover P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

Bribery and Broken Trust

Early Nov ember 2017: An L.A-based financial adviser introduces college consultant William “Rick” Singer to a California family , whose daughter plans to apply to Yale.

November 9, 2017: Yale women ’s soccer head coach Rudy Meredith receives email from Singer, who says he plans to forge the applicant’s application materials, changing her art portfolio to a soccer one.

Early January 2018: After the applicant is admitted

November 8, 2017: The financial adviser sends Singer an email stating, according to FBI documents, that the applicant’s “ father wished to make a ‘donation’ to ‘one of those top schools’ for his daughter's

November 13, 2017: Singer sends Meredith a fake athletic profile of the applicant .

April 2018: Morrie Tobin, a financial executive and Yale

to Yale, Singer mails

father seeking leniency

Meredith a check of

from the FBI in a separate

$400,000.

case, wears a wire to a meeting with Meredith in a Boston hotel room;

Later April 2018: Meredith agrees to cooperate with FBI.

Meredith off ers to designate Tobin’s daughter as a recruit in exchange for $450,000. Meredith accepts $2,000 in cash at the meeting.

Ma y 16, 2018: Meredith announces recruiting class.

Applicant is not listed as a recruit.

No ve mber 15, 2018: Meredith resigns as head coach of the Yale women ’s soccer team, with no mention of the ongoing FBI i nvestigation.

Mar ch 12, 2019:

Justice

Department files charges against Singer , Meredith, other coaches and parents involved in the scandal.

Mar ch 26, 2019:

Yale

rescinds the applicant's

graphic by Chase Westover

‘application. ’”

Mark Rosenberg

I

n the fall of 2017, a women’s soccer recruit from California with a forged athletic profile was admitted to Yale. The following May, when Rudy Meredith, head coach of the Yale women’s soccer team, formally announced his 2022 recruiting class on the Yale Athletics website, the California recruit was missing from the list. Yale didn’t seem to notice.

But federal investigators did. This March, prosecutors indicted Meredith, along with forty-nine other people, for participating in a sprawling bribery scheme in the Justice Department’s largest-ever college admissions investigation.

Yale’s admissions process is to blame. According to Senior Associate Athletics Director Brian Tompkins, the University does not independently verify recruits’ athletic credentials—a loophole that administrators say Athletic Director Vicky Chun has been working to fix. And while Harvard interviews all admitted athletes, Yale has no comparable protocol in place.

In an interview with The New Journal, Tompkins described the interaction between coaches and admissions officers as “a trust relationship.” That relationship broke down when Meredith accepted a $400,000 bribe to recruit an applicant who didn’t play soccer at all.

The admissions scandal made two things clear. First, varsity coaches at Yale hold disproportionate clout in the admissions process—enough to command the equivalent of over five years’ worth of tuition, room, and board for a bad-faith recruiting slot. And second, these days, the ultra-rich will go to almost any lengths to secure a spot for their child at an elite college. The parents of the aforementioned recruit paid William “Rick” Singer, the owner of the fraudulent college preparatory company at the center of the scheme, a total of $1.2 million; the following April, Meredith met with Los Angeles financial executive Morrie Tobin, who was acting as an FBI informant in exchange for leniency in a securities fraud case, and offered to designate Tobin’s daughter as a recruit for $450,000.

For wealthy parents hoping to bribe their children’s way into Yale or another Ivy League school, athletic recruitment would be an obvious route.

For one, Yale’s academic admissions standards for prospective athletes are more lenient than those for other students. Admissions officers place recruits on a 240-point scale based on GPA and standardized test scores in accordance with the Ivy League’s “Academic Index” system. The score of each athletic recruiting class, across all sports, can’t be less than one standard deviation below the entire student body’s score. The athletic department assigns each team an average score to hit, according to Chris Gobrecht, who coached the Yale women’s basketball team from 2005 to

admission.

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2015. Gobrecht said sports like tennis and golf that tend to recruit students from wealthy private schools are given higher target scores than sports like basketball, which recruit more heavily from public schools.

According to The Harvard Crimson, Harvard admits 83 percent of athletes with top academic ratings on an internal scale, compared to 16 percent of non-athletes with the same ratings.

Yale’s admissions office declined to provide data for this story. “A coach’s endorsement by no means guarantees admission,” Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan said through a spokesperson. “Yale and the Ivy League closely regulate the admissions criteria for student athletes.” An admissions committee reviews each recruit’s application, just as they do for non-athlete applicants, and recruits’ academic credentials are vetted rigorously from the moment coaches contact them. Allison Guth, head coach of the Yale women’s basketball team, wrote in an email, “After identifying a student-athlete we think would fit our style of play and culture, we immediately request transcripts and test scores.”

Throughout the admissions process, coaches communicate with a liaison assigned to their team by the admissions office, who advises the coach on the recruit’s likelihood of admittance.

After each recruit’s junior year, coaches send the liaison an academic portfolio, which includes the applicant’s transcript and standardized test scores. Coaches also submit a letter in which they describe the recruit’s character, background, and athletic accomplishments, including statistics and accolades. In the fall, the admissions office reviews the recruit’s full application during the early admission period.

Verifying recruits’ athletic credentials, however, is completely left up to coaches. According to Tompkins, neither the athletic department nor the admissions office currently conducts an outside review of applicants’ athletic qualifications. An FAQ about the scandal published on Yale’s website states that going forward, the athletics department will review each coach’s recruits before their applications are sent to admissions, and “situations in which a recruited athlete fails to make a team will receive close scrutiny.”

Gobrecht, the former Yale women’s basketball coach, said it was rare that her recruits were denied admission, especially once she became familiar with the admissions office’s academic expectations. But she noted that admissions reviewed her recruits’ portfolios carefully. “This is not a rubber stamp kind of thing at all,” she said. Gobrecht estimated that “once every three or four years,” the admissions office would notify her of a red flag in a recruit’s application, such as a concern with a teacher recommendation.

Singer didn’t send Meredith the California recruit’s doctored profile until mid-November, after Yale’s early application deadline.

(He’d removed an art portfolio the recruit had compiled and falsely described her as “the co-captain of a prominent club soccer team in southern California,” according to court filings.) Even on a tight timetable, and without consulting the women’s soccer team’s liaison the prior summer, Meredith was able to secure the

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“Tompkins described the interaction between coaches and admissions officers as ‘a trust relationship.’ That relationship broke down when Meredith accepted a $400,000 bribe to recruit an applicant who didn’t play soccer at all.” fake recruit’s admission. This further suggests that Yale’s vetting process, while rigorous, is far from airtight.

Still, both Tompkins and Grant Bronsdon, who worked for two years as an assistant director in the admissions office after he graduated in 2016, said that Meredith was an outlier. “This kind of thing happened because one coach was able to be more separate from the process and act with an utter disregard for the integrity of the process,” Bronsdon said.

But Gobrecht said that Yale’s elite reputation renders the recruiting process more susceptible to manipulation. “I think just from the standpoint of the demographics of who’s attracted to [Yale], the big money and the wealth and the fame…you can see why it might be possible for something like [the scandal] to happen,” she said.

Even if Yale institutes additional oversight for athletic admissions, as administrators have promised, the bribery scandal has brought newfound attention to the role athletic recruitment plays at elite institutions like Yale. Admissions advantages for athletes—particularly those who are recruited for costly sports prevalent at Ivy League schools, like sailing and lacrosse— disproportionately aid wealthy white students. According to a survey conducted by The Harvard Crimson, 46.3 percent of recruited athletes in Harvard’s class of 2022 have a family income over $250,000, compared to 32.8 percent of the class at large.

At Yale, 279 of the 297 varsity athletes on the lacrosse, sailing, ice hockey, and crew teams—94 percent—are white. Meredith’s deception might have been an anomaly, but as debates over affirmative action intensify, Yale still has a tougher set of questions about athletic admissions left to answer.

Jack McCordick, a sophomore in Branford College and an associate editor at The New Journal, contributed reporting to this article.

– Mark Rosenberg is a junior in Pierson College.

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CONGRATULATIONS TO THE NEW JOURNAL’S CLASS OF 2019: APRIL 2019 10

Eliza Fawcett, Robert Scaramuccia, Robbie Short

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:

BOOK REVIEW

A STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE In his 2018 memoir, Casey Gerald reflects on the toll of his undergraduate years at Yale.

Caroline Bennet

C

asey Gerald’s memoir gets its title from a story Gerald found on Tumblr about a village in France blessed with miracles. In the village, the peasants stop working, hoping that the miracles will replace their labor in providing food and clothes for everyone. The aristocrats, fearing this insurgency, erect a sign that declares: “There will be no miracles here by order of the king.”

Gerald tells his own story in his 2018 memoir There Will Be No Miracles Here, in which he characterizes himself as a peasant boy from Dallas, Texas. There Will Be No Miracles Here examines the cost of prosperity and provides a scathing critique of elitist institutions like Yale, the aristocracy in Gerald’s own story.

Gerald wore ripped black skinny jeans to his Morse College Tea on April 12, hosted in a small reception room with plush red carpets and floorto-ceiling windows. He wore a black turtleneck and a faded denim jacket that was a size too big on purpose. His red and white Nike sneakers were the focal point of his look—one that fit in with the dozens of students chatting quietly and passing around copies of his memoir, which was published in 2018. With a lilting Southern accent and a wide smile that made you feel like you were in on the joke, Gerald introduced himself to anyone whose eyes met his. He explained that he began writing his book in his late twenties in order to find out why he was, as he puts it, “all cracked up”—a phrase that refers to feelings of fragmentation, unhappiness, and loneliness. “You don’t really know what you intend when you start [your memoir],” he said.

“Don’t [write one] unless your life depends on it.”

At thirty-two years old, Gerald is an alumnus

of both Yale College and Harvard Business School, an Ivy League football champion, a Rhodes Scholar Finalist, a viral TED speaker, and now, an author. Gerald grew up in South Oak Cliff (SOC), a low-income neighborhood in Dallas. In an interview with The New Journal, Tony Reno, head coach of the Yale football team, recalled walking into South Oak Cliff High School fifteen years ago through metal detectors. “At the time we recruited from all over the country. We knew that [Gerald ] was going to be different because of the environment he was coming from. It was drastically different from Yale,” Coach Reno said. Growing up, Gerald was unaware Yale even had a football team. Upon receiving a recruitment letter from

A REVIEW OF

THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE

BY CASEY GERALD 11

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“THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES EXAMINES THE COST OF PROSPERITY, AND PROVIDES A SCATHING CRITIQUE OF ELITIST INSTITUTIONS LIKE YALE, THE ARISTOCRACY IN HIS OWN STORY.” Yale, he thought to himself, “Ain’t nobody from SOC ever gone to no school in Connecticut— where is [Connecticut] anyway?” But Gerald saw Yale as his chance to leave South Oak Cliff, one he could not pass up.

He writes in his memoir that he accomplished everything he was supposed to: made a little money, played football, went to a good school, and fell in love (at least once). But the “success” he learned at Yale had its limitations. “I knew how to do an interview, give a speech, kind of write a book, but I had no idea about how to care for a human being,” he told his audience at Morse College. “The search [for success],” he writes, “has not yet killed me, though I am a bit deranged—and that may be the best that I have been in all these years.” In his memoir, Gerald recalls his struggles with racial, sexual, and political identities at Yale, even among other Black students. He remembers the compromises he felt he had to make to succeed in a community where galas, formals, and networking events are the norm. He writes, “The black students at Yale were a mighty rich discovery—not only because they had so much more or had lived so differently than I had, but also and especially because they looked at me as though they were itching to pose Du Bois’s question: ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’” Gerald spent his time at Yale trying to distract others from his race, his background, and his anger, in order to placate professors, advisors, and even classmates. During his first year, his academic advisor Penny Laurans, who was the chief aide to then President Rick Levin, admonished his hat and clothes, exclaiming, “Do you wear those things around campus? Oh, 12

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no, Casey. It’s just so stereotypical, you know?

You’re at Yale now.”

There Will Be No Miracles Here is not just a manifesto. It’s also a love story. Gerald investigates romantic love and heartbreak as a queer Black boy with little guidance, familial love, and self-love. He remembers falling in love with a boy from home during his time at Yale. “By love I do not mean the strong dramatic feelings that we see on television,” Gerald writes. “I found the prospect of needing a human being, trusting them, extending myself for them, to be more horrifying than being abandoned, or almost killed, or damned for all eternity. People seemed to be the most dangerous things in this world.” Under circumstances in which poverty, abandonment, and substance addiction are the norm, where self-respect and confidence are hard to come by, Gerald says, “the most radical thing [one] can do is be well.”

Gerald writes about founding the Yale Black Men’s Union to combat his isolation from his own Black identity and to provide a space for Black students away from prejudice on campus.

“Black love is a powerful thing,” he writes. “And on this night, love—or whatever the feeling was in the room—indeed seemed powerful, powerful enough to put genuine smiles on the boys and girls, powerful enough to satisfy another mantra we adopted in that first year of the Union: We measure success by the lives that we change.”

There Will Be No Miracles Here breaks from the conventions of most memoirs. The chronology is sometimes ambiguous, and Gerald himself inhabits conflicting roles as narrator, protagonist, and antagonist. “I didn’t write a book to prove that I existed. I’m not on the outside looking in or the inside looking out. I am in the middle of my consciousness,” he declared in the crowded speaking room at Morse College. “Did you ever find the parts you lost?” a man in his sixties asked from the audience, his hand resting comfortably in his wife’s. Gerald paused for a few moments, thinking about the question. “Well, they came to find me,” he laughed. “I’m still in the recovery process, still trying to figure out what it means to love someone else.”

– Caroline Bennet is a firstyear in Trumbull College.

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WALKING The baby lies on her back in the flat space provided by her father’s forearms stretched from his chest as if carrying firewood.

In his palms, he holds the back of her head. She breathes in his wordless song.

I’m afraid he will drop her, and this walk to athe library will be marked by a bloody spot, no bigger than the books I carry. I’m not ready to see this death. I’m not ready to imagine it. I don’t turn my head to look back at them after they pass.

I want to keep it— that feeling of both peace and worry in seeing him hold his child like an offering while mumbling to the sky.

I feel the father’s hands and the daughter’s smallness push against the inside of my skull. My walk is slow.

I feel my body wanting to settle into the silence between heartbeats.

Don’t let me, father, walk off your palms into the quiet we do not seek.

Illustration by Paige Davis

– Eliana Swerdlow is a sophomore in Pierson College.

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F E AT U R E

CHANGING COURSES As questions swirl around the future of the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program at Yale, activism for an Asian American Studies major has taken a new direction.

Meghana Mysore photos courtesy of Vivek Suri

Professor Sunny Xiang’s class, Asian American Literature, sitting in on a film screening.

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I

n early December, around sixty students sprawled out on the stairs and couches on the first floor of the Asian American Cultural Center for a Yale College Council (YCC) town hall intended to gauge student interest in an Asian American Studies program. On the wall in front of the couches hung a painting of Yung Wing, class of 1854, the first Chinese student to graduate from Yale, or any American university. Katherine Hu, a YCC senator, led the project and organized the town hall alongside American Studies professors Mary Lui and Gary Okihiro. During the gathering, students broke into small groups with these professors to express their particular interests in Asian American Studies, such as South Asian or Vietnamese literature; many were often inspired to participate by their family histories. The crowd of mostly Asian American students voiced excitement at the possibility of exploring South Asian literature or an introductory course in Asian American Studies—classes not yet offered at Yale. In mid-January, following the town hall, the YCC published an infographic, listing six new courses this spring under “Asian diaspora/migration courses” and “Asian American courses”—and three under “Ethnic Studies courses.”

Yet five months have passed since the town hall, and the conversation around Asian American Studies has radically changed. In early March, students formed a Coalition for Ethnic Studies to advocate for the University to provide the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (ER&M) program with resources comparable to those of other departments. On Friday, March 29, thirteen senior faculty members withdrew from the ER&M program in protest of the major’s lack of departmental status and hiring power, as well as the denial of tenure to ER&M and American Studies professor Albert Laguna. ER&M now has no tenured professors, and no one with official leadership status. Many students have supported the thirteen faculty members’ decision, though, denouncing the University’s devaluing of their continued labor.

In support of the ER&M professors, the Coalition for Ethnic Studies held a pop-up photo campaign, inviting students to Cross Campus to take pictures with brief statements describing their defense of ER&M. Over the next few days, students showed their solidarity with the ER&M faculty, sharing and resharing photos on social media. More than a thousand students signed a letter that circulated on social media in support of ER&M. Despite outpouring of student support for the program, President Peter Salovey has not conceded to the professors’ requests.

This advocacy for ER&M is not divorced from discussions surrounding Asian American Studies

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courses. Many Asian American Studies courses found their institutional home in ER&M, and now with the program in flux, advocating for Asian American Studies has become part of a larger movement to defend and support Ethnic Studies at Yale. In many students’ and professors’ views, Asian American Studies should not be siphoned off from the broader field of Ethnic Studies, given that the strength of ER&M lies in its intersectional and interdisciplinary approach.

In light of the ER&M program’s uncertainty, talk of a standalone Asian American Studies program has all but died out; the focus has shifted to a broader intersectional movement in support of Ethnic Studies.

As the conversation widens, new questions about the best way to institutionalize Asian American Studies have emerged: What are the costs and benefits of creating a discrete Asian American Studies department? How can Ethnic Studies give voice to Asian American Studies without subsuming the distinct identities encompassed by the term “Asian American”? *** In the spring of 1970, amid a flurry of political activism around the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Bobby Seale and Black Panthers trial, the first course in Asian American Studies was offered at Yale. It was a residential college seminar in Timothy Dwight College, taught by Professor Chitoshi Yanaga, who was the first Japanese American tenured faculty member at Yale.

The seminar, called “The Asian American Experience,” explored questions of Asian American identity formation and was the first Asian American-centered course to be offered by any Ivy League college.

The Asian American Students Association (AASA), which formed one semester earlier in the fall of 1969,

“How can Ethnic Studies give voice to Asian American Studies without subsuming the distinct identities encompassed by the term ‘Asian American’?”

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The Asian-American Task Force meets to discuss how to increase awareness, enrollment and offerings of Asian-American studies courses at

worked to develop the course. Don Nakanishi, who founded the AASA, recalled that nearly one-third of all Asian American undergraduates at Yale enrolled in the seminar. In addition to helping create the course, the AASA formed an Asian American Studies Task Force (AASTF) to advocate for greater diversity in Yale’s curriculum.

“While recognizing that Yale has made efforts to expand its course offerings related to East Asia, and specifically China and Japan, the AASTF asserts that similar attention needs to be given specifically to Asian American Studies,” the AASTF website states. Still, while the AASTF made efforts to increase course offerings in the following decades, faculty with extensive knowledge in the field were difficult to retain.

Forty-five years later, there was a second surge in the movement for greater curricular diversity. By the 201415 academic year, only one Asian American Studies course was offered at Yale, and only one Asian American Studies professor, Mary Lui, had tenure. In October of 2014, Yale’s four Asian American Studies scholars—Lui, newly hired English professor Sunny Xiang, lecturer and novelist Susan Choi, and ER&M professor Quan Tran— held a meet-and-greet that addressed the University’s failure to establish an Asian American Studies program

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or even to follow through on a promise it made in 1987 to offer two courses in Asian American Studies per year.

This was occurring alongside broader faculty diversity concerns—that year, multiple professors in African American Studies and ER&M left Yale. As students and faculty organized for the departmentalization of ER&M, the AASTF started a photo campaign to advocate for a wider array of Asian American Studies courses. The campaign featured Asian American undergraduate students standing on Cross Campus against a brick wall, holding signs displaying course names missing from Yale’s Blue Book: “Yale will not teach me contemporary narratives on the Philippines and the United States,” one read. “Yale will not teach me Asian American medical systems,” stated another. The photo campaign spurred the hiring of more Asian Americanist scholars such as Professors Daniel HoSang and Lisa Lowe and enabled a larger set of courses in Asian American Studies. That year, too, Yale announced a new initiative, providing $50 million over the next five years to support the recruitment and development of an “excellent and diverse faculty.”

Soon thereafter, Yale began to prioritize the hiring of Asian American faculty and created the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration (RITM). Located at 35 Broadway, the center supports

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the field of Ethnic Studies at Yale and became the home for the study of Asian American migration and diaspora. As the RITM and the ER&M program took over the work of hiring and retaining faculty devoted to Asian American Studies, the AASTF discontinued.

Yet despite this ostensible progress, students remained dissatisfied. Stefani Kuo, who graudated Yale in 2017, had arrived at Yale hoping to double major in English and Theater Studies. After two years as an English major, however, she had taken Yale’s only class on Asian American literature and was frustrated about “just how little” Asian American writing she had been exposed to. “There just wasn’t a range of Asian American writing or literature classes I could take, especially in the English major.” Kuo did not have a single professor who was an Asian woman.

“Even the classes that were of interest to me were not taught by people who looked like me,” she said.

Kuo eventually dropped the English major and focused solely on theater. Her first play, “Architecture of Rain,” included an all Asian American student cast. “The play was from a personal perspective. I wasn’t just making something up,” Kuo said. In the play, Kuo reflected, she could delve into her Asian American identity and experiences that felt visceral to her but that she couldn’t articulate in her classes. *** In fall 2018, Katherine Hu took Professor Mary Lui’s class on Asian American History, which inspired her to advocate, as a YCC representative, for more course offerings in Asian American Studies. “[The course] made me realize that there’s a lot of Asian American history that’s been erased, and so many Asian American students feel like they’re not part of the conversation, or they don’t have a voice in politics,” Hu said. Hu is pushing for a curriculum that emphasizes an intersectional look at issues that span across a range of minority groups. For this reason, she thinks “that creating a separate program would be antithetical to the philosophy of learning.” Hu said that classes don’t necessarily need to have “Asian American” in the title to be considered part of the Asian American Studies curriculum.

In high school, Hu didn’t often think about her Asian American identity, she told me. She grew up in Texas, in a town with a large Asian population, where being “too Asian” was seen as a negative characteristic. At Yale— where 19.3 percent of the undergraduates identify as Asian American—she at first wanted to break away from an “Asian American bubble,” so she didn’t engage with the AACC. When she saw Lui’s “Asian American History” in the Blue Book for the fall 2018 semester, she realized a piece of her education was missing. Her high school history teachers, Hu said, “never talked about Asian American history,” except as “a kind of footnote.” She felt that Lui’s class gave her an opportunity for the first time to learn about her own history and the history of Asian Americans more generally.

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Hu praised large introductory courses like Lui’s, which taught her new techniques for thinking about identity and intersectionality.

Through her YCC project, she hopes that students will find their own spaces in Asian American studies courses.

“I’m trying to create a space for people who want to know their own history that has been taken from them,” she explained. Hu plans to work alongside Professor Gary Okihiro to start a student working group that would put together and publicize classes that consider Asian American identity, Asian diaspora, and Ethnic Studies. Next year, professors Lisa Lowe and Daniel HoSang will offer larger foundational lecture courses for those who want to learn more about Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies but might not know where to begin. *** Mary Lui was the first full-time Asian Americanist scholar at Yale when she joined the faculty in 2000. Lui, who is one of the thirteen professors who withdrew from ER&M, sits with her arms crossed in her office in Timothy Dwight College. With passion in her voice, she stops me every now and then to clarify what I’ve asked. Before she arrived at Yale, only one Asian Americanist had ever worked at the University, on a part-time basis. The year 2000, Lui said, seemed like a wonderful moment for Asian American scholarship at Yale: new Asian American faculty members were being hired and more classes in Asian American studies were being offered.

In January, following the YCC town hall last December, Lui told me that Asian American studies at Yale had again grown significantly after student protests in 2015 that called for more curricular diversity. She noticed an increase in courses related to Asian American Studies, alongside a growing number of tenured Asian American professors.

These developments, Lui said, made it seem less necessary to create a formalized Asian American Studies program.

In recent months, with ER&M in flux and a growing worry that an Asian American Studies program would be insular and too narrow in scope, faculty members and students have been resistant to the idea of a distinct Asian American Studies program. “There’s this tension with the desire of institution-building,” Professor Sunny Xiang told me. “How do you build spaces that are institutionally secure while also critiquing the terms of that? While building Asian American studies, ‘more is better’ can’t be the horizon of our politics—[it has to be a greater] desire for knowledge.”

Dean Joliana Yee of the Asian American Cultural Center echoed Xiang’s sentiments, explaining that students must continue to think about the ways in which the Asian American experience is intertwined with other marginalized experiences. “What’s the point of telling history if we are not advancing all marginalized communities?”

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Dean Joliana Yee is the Director of the AACC. Others have expressed qualms with the term ‘Asian American.’

Professor Gary Okihiro, who was instrumental in creating Asian American Studies at Cornell and UCLA, among other universities, told me that “the term Asian American is in a way a misnomer; it erases the differences between many groups.” Okihiro is also one of the thirteen professors formerly affiliated with ER&M. Echoing Okihiro, some students voiced that Asian Americanspecific course offerings at Yale should expand to cover the diversity of Asian American identities. “To have a class on Asian American history is to undeniably leave people out,” Sana Aslam ’20, an Anthropology major who has taken several Hindi courses and who enjoys studying South Asian diaspora, told me. “I’d love to see more classes on Pakistan-American identity, because that’s my background,” she said, adding, “I don’t think Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladeshi-American histories are really represented at all.”

Students, she said, need to “understand how Asian American history is occurring in direct relationship to other histories, Women’s and Gender Studies, African American history—so we see that it doesn’t come out of nowhere, it comes out of histories of exclusion.” *** In response to the YCC’s efforts last fall to institutionalize Asian American Studies, students revived the AASTF and have since pushed for an intersectional approach to the program. Early this

semester, members of the task force gathered together at the Asian American Cultural Center, where eleven students, including Rita Wang and Janis Jin, leaders of the task force, sat on the carpet and shared their hopes.

First-years sat on the couches and on the floor and shared their initial experiences at Yale, their apprehensions about taking Asian American History as they hungered to learn more about their family history but did not know where to begin. “What do you want to see this group become?” Jin asked, and students responded that they wanted to be part of a reading group, where they could read Asian American literature and discuss the nuances of their identity that they did not feel comfortable sharing with their peers. The room felt open, a space where students, who ranged from firstyears to seniors, could share their thoughts and hopes. In thinking about how to publicize classes in Asian American Studies at Yale, a student suggested that CourseTable, a popular student-run website that organizes course offerings at Yale, could have a listing of those courses. There was also talk of creating a survey course in Asian American studies, and starting a weekly reading group, where students could discuss pop culture references and academic articles about Asian American experiences.

Everyone involved in the AASTF has also been involved in the Coalition for Ethnic Studies, of which Jin has also been a leader. Asian American studies, she reiterated, does not siphon from ethnic studies but exists within it. Jin values the comparative framework that Ethnic Studies affords, as opposed to an Asian American Studies program focusing

“‘There’s this tension with the desire of institution-building,’ Professor Sunny Xiang told me. ‘How do you build spaces that are institutionally secure while also critiquing the terms of that?’”

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only on Asian American history and politics.

For Jin, the importance of Ethnic Studies has been on her mind since she was in high school. “I basically came to Yale for ER&M when I was a senior in high school,” Jin remembered. Jin went to a private high school in the “most conservative county in California,” in an area that was very homogeneous, as she described it, and mostly white and Asian. She said she felt as though she had to fight constantly with people about race and politics until she discovered Lisa Lowe’s book, Immigrant Acts. Jin wrote about the book in her college application essay. Now, she is taking a course taught by Lowe, who is one of the professors at Yale who recently withdrew from ER&M. Jin said she has learned from Professors Lowe and HoSang about the need for comparative, relational Ethnic Studies that does not focus just on one group, history, or set of struggles, but on how they interact. “It blew my mind,” Jin said, describing the effect Lowe’s book had on her when she was in high school. “Ethnic Studies scholarship became a way to name things I was experiencing—it was a body of knowledge that could articulate various things about how I saw the world.” *** “I want to offer a different kind of Asian American studies,” said Professor Sunny Xiang as we spoke in her

office. “I want [my] course to be outward-facing, in that [students are] taking Asian American literature as a way of engaging with race relations, U.S.-Asia relations.”

Earlier that day, I had witnessed this philosophy in action.

During the hour and fifteen minute-long class period of “Asian American Literature” on Wednesday afternoon in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, fourteen students of mostly Asian American background sat around a small circular table and discussed Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, a novel centered around Chinese-American girlhood. “The novel starts out,” Professor Xiang said quietly but steadily, “with the quote: You must not tell anyone.” Her voice was not domineering. Her thickly-rimmed glasses rested on the bridge of her nose, and her voice and eyes exuded warmth.

She positioned herself as one of the students around the seminar table, not as someone with the most important voice in the classroom. She told her students to call her Sunny, rather than Professor Xiang.

“My goal for today is to have everyone say something,” she said to the class. “It doesn’t have to be to me, it could be to a friend.”

When the class gathered back together, Professor Xiang had a student read aloud the quote, “She will add nothing if not for necessity, the riverbend of her life.” Minh Vu,

Professor Mary Lui teaches a class on Asian American History and Historiography.

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an English major, raised his hand and offered that silence in the novel is necessary. From the silence, he expanded, we could learn more about the character’s family history and her relationship to her mother. Xiang wrote the words “necessity and extravagance” on the board in chalk.

Fragments of Greek were harshly written on the other side of the board.

Later that afternoon in her office in William L. Harkness Hall, Professor Xiang said, “We’re reading a book about silence, so we want to respect silence in the classroom.”

When students are not immediately speaking, said Xiang, that does not mean they are not involved.

I meet with Vu that Friday at Blue State on Wall Street.

At first we stand at the table by the door of Blue State, unable to find a seat. It’s a Friday morning, and the rain has not stopped. Vu is unassuming and cheerful, offering a laugh every now and then, circling with his finger the buttons on his shirt. When one of the tables clears, Vu and I sit down. Vu reflects on how different the Asian American Literature seminar is from his Directed Studies courses or other English seminars. “This class is majority people of color,” he says. “It’s a community of scholars of color.”

The experience of feeling different in a classroom where the majority of students do not share your background, Vu expresses, can be isolating and delegitimizing. Ethnic Studies seminars offer a way out of this isolation for some students, in texts that corroborate and reflect their experiences.

In the next few years, Vu wants to attend a graduate program in Asian American Studies and become a professor in Asian American Studies or Ethnicity and Migration Studies. His experience as an English major at Yale, in which he initially took courses that did not address the Asian American experience, made him more curious about Asian American literature. His first year, Vu was part of the Directed Studies humanities program. “I think the Yale English department has a tendency to focus on a formalist method, like close reading,” he said. “Sometimes close reading pushes you in.” In contrast, during his sophomore year, he took Asian American History with Professor Lui. The class, he said, was pivotal for him because it drew in aspects of his personal life with historiography, with assignments like an oral history project.

Growing up, Vu often felt as though he couldn’t identify with the protagonists in the literature he read, which centered predominantly on white characters. In Vu’s family, he said, “there was not much honesty or open dialogue about our history as refugees, and I had a lack of access to my history.” Vu attended a largely white public high school with mostly white teachers and peers, which compounded into an experience of exclusion for Vu that extended into his Directed Studies seminars in his first year. This semester, in Xiang’s class, Vu read The Gangster We Are All APRIL 2019

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“Ethnic studies scholarship became a way to name things I was experiencing — it was a body of knowledge that could articulate various things about how I saw the world.”

Looking For by Le Thi Diem Thuy, a Vietnamese-American author. Vu, whose parents are refugees from the Vietnam War, was drawn to this text because Thuy explains the refugee experience through the personal lens of a singular family, rather than in dry and abstract academic terms.

Literature taught in Ethnic Studies seminars has helped him to articulate how systems of racial hierarchy operate in everyday life, which academic language often struggles to capture. “I’m interested in the everyday practice of power, and how power is enacted upon minoritized bodies,” he said.

At Blue State, Vu finishes his coffee. Before we leave, he turns to me and tells me again that in Xiang’s class, he really feels listened to. He thinks this is a common experience among his peers in the class, due to Xiang’s warm presence and the discussions about literature that expresses Asian American experiences.

“I think it’s really important to be heard,” he says, “and that’s how I feel in that class.”

– Meghana Mysore is a junior in Davenport College.

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F E AT U R E

THE JOBS YALE PROMISED Yale pledged to hire one thousand New Haven residents by April 1st. It still hasn’t followed through.

Henry Reichard

graphics courtesy of Sam Oldshue

T

he aldermanic chambers were so packed that people had to sit on the floor, stand in the aisles, or even crane their necks from the hallway outside, where the crowd had overflowed. It was loud. It was hot. And the people inside the chambers were angry.

Activists from New Haven Rising – an organization that campaigns alongside unions for solutions to the jobs crisis – waved signs reading “HIRE US” and “Yale: Take the Lead!” Yalies fanned themselves with fliers. Concerned New Haven residents read the sheets Yale representatives had handed out, cataloguing the university’s record of local hiring in the past three years. Other New Haveners, who had tried and failed to find work at Yale, prepared to give short testimonials. It was February 21st, 2019. Yale was making a public report on its progress toward a 2015 pledge to increase the number of workers it hires from New Haven.

In that pledge — which Yale officials publicly signed in December 2015 — the University promised to hire one thousand New Haven residents into permanent full-time jobs. At least five hundred of these residents had to come from “neighborhoods of need,” a term used in the pledge to refer to communities in New Haven where the jobs crisis is particularly severe, including Dixwell, Dwight, Fair Haven, The Hill, Newhallville, West River, and West Rock. At the February hearing, Janet Lindner, Yale’s Vice President for Human Resources and Administration, initially claimed that Yale had far surpassed these figures, hiring 2,591 New Haven residents, including 627 from neighborhoods of need. But both city alders and representatives from Yale’s Local 34 and Local 35 unions immediately questioned those numbers. Lindner had counted 1,431 post-doctoral associates – temporary graduate researchers, not permanent hires, as stipulated by the original contract. Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers also questioned whether journeymen construction workers should be counted, since they were being hired for short-term contracts and already had credentials. Discounting the journeymen, Yale had hired only 876 of the promised one thousand New Haven residents. Only 273 of the promised five hundred came from neighborhoods of need.

Over the course of the four and a half hour hearing, forty-five speakers gave three-minute speeches, several of

which were recounted by the New Haven Independent.

Since graduating from Wilbur Cross High School three years ago, Carlos Hernandez said he had applied multiple times for a service job at Yale. Despite his experience in kitchens and hospitals, Yale rejected all his applications.

Jamie Schmidt tried for eight years to get a full-time job at Yale. Although she held a business degree, she was told that she wasn’t qualified. And Karen Harrison, a grandmother living in West Rock, said she had been trying for six months to get a full-time job at the dining hall she works in, ever since her hours there were cut.

“Today I am one of those that’s struggling,” Harrison said at the hearing, as the Independent reported. “I’m one of the ones that’s going to have my lights turned out. I’m one of the ones that isn’t going to have food. I’m one of the ones that might not hawve heat or a roof over my head. I just wanted to be one of those who get good-paying jobs that they promised us.”

Some of the youth activists present discussed the connection between violent crime and unemployment.

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They argued that more local jobs would save the lives of youths killed on the streets. (While violent crime in New Haven has been steadily decreasing over the past decade, there were still ten homicides in 2018.) Others noted that many of the neighborhoods of need have high Black and Hispanic populations; Yale’s failure to hire from these communities, they claimed, made it complicit in racial injustice. And Rev. Scott Marks – Director of New Haven Rising – said that “this failure has revealed that the University’s hiring process is deeply flawed, and New Haven residents are not being treated fairly. Our residents can succeed in Yale jobs, but the current hiring process erects walls that prevent them from having a fair shot.”

Since the 1970s, when factories began to close en masse, New Haven has experienced economic decline and high unemployment levels. If all New Haven jobs went to New Haven residents, then the jobs crisis might be over.

According to Free Speech Radio News (FSRN), in 2015 there were eighty-three thousand jobs in New Haven, more than half of which paid a living wage of at least twenty dollars an hour. “But only nine thousand of those living wage jobs are held by New Haven residents,” FSRN reported, “and only two thousand of them by residents in the city’s low-income neighborhoods.” Though Yale is the city’s largest employer by a significant margin, FSRN reported that in 2015, less than a third of its employees lived in New Haven.

Throughout the February hearing, several questions were reiterated, again and again. Is Yale genuinely committed to local hiring? Is it committed to hiring workers from lowincome neighborhoods – to ending the jobs crisis that has existed in these communities since the 1970s? *** When Joelle Fishman moved to New Haven in 1968, the Elm City was a factory town with Yale at the center.

She remembers that New Haven was seething with activity back then — an activist’s city, filled with Vietnam War protesters, soon to be caught up in the trials of several prominent Black Panthers, but also a worker’s city, filled with industries and good union jobs. Over the coming years, the industries left, the factories closed down, and the newly unemployed workers looked to Yale for work.

Fishman’s husband took a job at Yale. She joined the New Haven People’s Center, a local hub for immigrant rights, labor activism, and other social justice causes.

The People’s Center has been in New Haven since 1937.

It’s a weather-worn brick townhouse rising three stories over Howe Street; over the years, it’s served as a homeless daycare center, a site on the Connecticut Freedom Trail, and a meeting place for Union 1199, which represents workers in the healthcare industry. The door is usually unlocked. The first floor is filled with relics of activism: pictures of quilts from the Connecticut Freedom Trail, a photograph of some of the youth activists in Elm City

Dream, and a patchwork quilt decorated with scenes and quotes from the civil rights movement. “We are not afraid, we are not afraid / We are not afraid today,” reads one of the quotes, referencing Pete Seeger. “Oh, deep in my heart I do believe / We shall overcome some day.”

Fishman is older now: wrinkled, a little hunched, but just as active in community organizing today as she was in 1968. She’s become the coordinator of the New Haven People’s Center. When she talks about the jobs crisis in New Haven, about the longstanding pattern of discrimination in Yale’s local hiring, it’s with a clear and steady voice. “A lot of work, a lot of commitment, a lot of determination” — that’s what brought Yale to the negotiating table in 2015, Fishman believes, and that’s what will bring it back in the future. “It was basically taking anger and frustration in the community and turning it in a positive direction. Saying, ‘let’s do this together.’”

There are several reasons why Fishman believes that Yale has a duty to hire from neighborhoods of need. One is that the city’s economic decline has disproportionately affected communities with high populations of racial minorities. In 1937, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) created a “residential safety map” of New Haven, indicating which areas in the city were “safe” to invest in and which areas were supposedly too hazardous for investment. HOLC’s map also noted which neighborhoods had been “infiltrated” by racial minorities; none of the safe neighborhoods had any infiltration, while many of the hazardous neighborhoods included descriptions such as “given over largely to Negros employed as domestics.”

(Infiltration was used by HOLC as an official term.) This map – a form of redlining – prevented many residents of the hazardous neighborhoods from obtaining home loans or other basic services. It also accentuated racial

“Discounting the journeymen, Yale had hired only 876 of the promised one thousand New Haven residents. Only 273 of the promised five hundred came from ‘neighborhoods of need.’”

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segregation in the city.

When industries left, the redlined communities (those that HOLC had marked as hazardous) suffered inordinately. In 2011, the Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE) published a comprehensive report detailing the history of economic inequality in New Haven over the past few decades. Among other things, this report compared the economic evolution of Newhallville, a redlined community that relied heavily on jobs from the gun company Winchester Repeating Arms, and that of East Rock, one of New Haven’s wealthier neighborhoods.

In 2011, fewer than 6 percent of households earned less than $10,000 in East Rock; 20 percent did in Newhallville.

27 percent of households earned more than $100,000 per year in East Rock; 6 percent did in Newhallville. East Rock is over 80 percent white. Newhallville is more than 80 percent African-American.

Yale didn’t help HOLC draw its map of New Haven, and Fishman doesn’t claim that the university is directly responsible for racial segregation in the city. But she does think that the university is complicit in New Haven’s racial inequality, in part because it has historically hired few residents of redlined communities. She thinks that Yale’s commitment to hire from neighborhoods of need is a necessary redress for past discrimination: for past attempts to shut out the “hazardous” portions of New Haven. *** When Fishman came to New Haven in 1968, Yale

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President Kingman Brewster was advocating a plan that would physically separate the University from Dixwell, Newhallville, and other redlined neighborhoods by extending interstates I-91 and I-95 around the campus in a circle. “There was a lot of opposition,” Fishman recalls. “It was called a moat. It was stopped by community organizing.” She remembers a day, not long after this plan was defeated, when her husband brought home a memo from Yale warning new students about “dangerous people” they might encounter on the streets. “It was coded language,” Fishman says. “It was racist.” And she remembers yet another day, years later, when a highly qualified African-American woman was denied a job at Yale in favor of an outside candidate. A local union filed a grievance; the professor in charge of hiring — who also lived outside New Haven, near the outside candidate — explained his rationale with surprising candor during the grievance hearing. “It’s true that the two women are equally qualified,” Fishman remembers him saying. “But because I’m more comfortable with the woman from my area, that makes her more qualified than the other woman.”

Near the end of the CCNE report, the authors claim that what New Haven needs above all is a jobs pipeline: “a large-scale, comprehensive program…to educate, train, and hire local residents.” Shortly after the report was published, rallies and protests began in earnest. In December 2011, one thousand people marched in a rally against income inequality, carrying “Occupy New Haven” posters above them. In April 2012, nearly two thousand people marched from the New Haven Green to Yale

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“Fishman thinks that Yale’s commitment to hire from neighborhoods of need is a necessary redress for past discrimination: for past attempts to shut out the ‘hazardous’ portions of New Haven.”

Medical School, calling for the jobs pipeline envisioned

by CCNE. In September 2014, organizers from New Haven Rising inaugurated a campaign for more local jobs in New Haven. In June 2015, after many months of protests and community organizing, Yale pledged to hire five hundred New Haven residents over the next two years.

This proposal — which made no mention of New Haven’s low-income neighborhoods — was greeted with almost universal condemnation. Only two days later, a crowd of one thousand demonstrators gathered on the New Haven Green. “Hire the five hundred now!” Ward 23 Alder Tyisha Walker-Myer shouted before the crowd. Posters with this slogan were all over the Green. Mayor Toni Harp and Rev. Scott Marks said that Yale had a responsibility to help fix the jobs crisis. Several months later, in December, New Haven Rising planned another demonstration — this time a march on the Broadway shopping district, which could have resulted in mass arrests. Just days before the march was scheduled to take place, Yale conceded to the organizers’ demands. The university made its public pledge to hire one thousand city residents and committed to hiring five hundred from neighborhoods of need.

A month after the report was published, the Board of Alders created a research group charged with finding solutions to the jobs crisis. This group conceived New Haven Works (NHW) – a nonprofit that helps residents apply to jobs at Yale and other local other employers. The job coaches at NHW work in collaboration with staff from Yale’s New Haven Community Hiring Initiative, a program that matches NHW’s clients with available job openings at

Yale. The 2015 pledge stipulated that Yale’s one thousand local hires “would come primarily from New Haven Works.” Yet it would be hard to call NHW a “large-scale” or “comprehensive” solution to the jobs crisis. According to Filip Relic – a recently hired job coach at NHW – the nonprofit has only five job coaches, and in a typical month it has room to take in under half of the hundred or so people who pre-register for job counseling. These forty to fifty applicants are chosen by random lottery. The rest are out of luck. *** New Haven Works has its office on the first floor of a tired-looking brick building near the Peabody Museum.

Walk inside on a typical day, and you’ll find a row of empty seats and blank computers, a listless room with motivational posters plastered to every available surface.

There’s a receptionist, a job coach or two, and a handful of young men and women sitting in front of computers, revising their resumes, sending in application after application. The only sound in the room is the chatter of the receptionist and the soft clicking of the keyboards.

For many of its clients, NHW makes all the difference.

Osikhena Awudu can’t remember how many times he applied to positions at Yale before coming to NHW. Back in 2012, he was a paralegal at a Hartford law office; he wanted to work at Yale because the seventy-five-mile round-trip commute from his Newhallville home to Hartford was taking a toll on his family life. He applied to technical positions, to low-level administrative positions, to anything for which he was qualified. All his applications were denied. He never even got an interview.

“New Haven Works broke the cycle, really,” Awudu said.

“I had sent many, many applications before, but essentially hadn’t gotten anywhere.” He was an impressive candidate.

He had a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Ibadan, a master’s degree from the University of Buckingham, and a year’s professional experience working as a paralegal. A job coach at NHW helped him strengthen his resume and put him in contact with a human resources generalist at Yale. A few weeks later, the generalist invited Awudu to apply for a position as a senior administrator at the Law School, a job that normally would have been open only to internal applicants. He went through a series of interviews, was hired, and a few years later moved up to his current position as a program manager. He’s been at Yale ever since.

Melissa Mason, the Executive Director of NHW, is proud of the work her staff has done over the past seven years. “Since we’ve opened our doors, we’ve placed over 1,300 people into jobs with area employers, and 75 percent of those jobs have been what we call regular or permanent jobs,” she said. NHW services clients with a wide range of backgrounds: people with high school diplomas, with an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, and even some, like Awudu, 25

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“In a typical month, New Haven Works has room to take in under half of the people who preregister for job counseling. These forty to fifty applicants are chosen by random lottery. The rest are out of luck.” with master’s degrees or PhDs. Mason noted that over 80 percent of NHW’s clients are people of color and that over 50 percent come from low-income neighborhoods.

Relic became a job coach at NHW quite recently, but he’s already been able to help several people find work.

One of his clients works in New York City and spends five hours on the train every day, which costs her about $800 per month. She hadn’t had any success applying to jobs in New Haven for the past three years, but after just three meetings with Relic she’s been able to get an interview at a local bank. “She may be selected or not,” Relic said, “but it’s definitely bringing her closer to the goal.”

Relic noted, however, that NHW doesn’t have the staff or the funding to address the full demand of New Haven residents for job counseling. The majority of NHW’s funding comes from the state and the city of New Haven, though Yale also supports the nonprofit. “Considering the

size of this nonprofit, I think we are doing a great job,” Relic said. “Considering the size and the budget,” he repeated. *** Local hiring isn’t just an economic issue. Though violent crime has decreased markedly in New Haven in recent years, it still disproportionately affects the “neighborhoods of need” of Yale’s promisecommunities with high minority populations, and many believe that better job prospects in the area would help keep the area safer. The authors of the CCNE report include several testimonies from New Haven residents. One of the most striking comes from Shelton Tucker, who in the late 1990s turned to drug dealing because of the lack of economic opportunity in New Haven.

“When I was a kid, drug dealers were looked at as somebody who had made it — had found a way to climb up out of this mess,” Tucker said in his testimony. He also turned to drug dealing; at the age of fifteen, he was making $500 a day. “But within three years I had a list of names in a folder—it had to be thirty names—of my friends who had died,” he wrote. “In 1997, I went to five funerals in two months.”

Tucker argued against policing as a way of combating drug dealing. “We can’t arrest our way out of a drug problem,” he wrote. “If you really want to fix the problem, give those guys some jobs. Prison is not a real deterrent.

Depending on the level of poverty or desperation, they’ll weigh the unpleasantness of going to prison against this poverty and desperation, and the risk becomes worth it.

But the job — that’s a real incentive, and a real way out.”

For Tucker, a good-paying job provided an alternative to drug dealing. “I got a job in construction through the city’s construction workforce program,” he wrote. “There was an opening and I got in and never looked back.” ***

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Naomi D’Arbell Bobadilla, currently a sophomore at Yale, campaigned door-to-door for New Haven Rising last summer. Bobadilla doesn’t know what the leadership of New Haven Rising —which did not respond to repeated requests for comment — plans to do next. Members of New Haven Rising are currently gathering signatures for a community petition, and Bobadilla suspects that something larger may follow. “Everyone will have the choice to believe a multi-billion dollar corporation or a community that has gathered testimonies and stood together,” she said.

Many activists criticize the university for adopting a reactionary posture. While Yale has created several programs of its own accord dedicated to ending the jobs crisis, such as the New Haven Community Hiring Initiative, it has also failed to emphasize local hiring at moments when activists haven’t pressured it to do so. In 2017, the Yale Daily News reported that on a typical day, just 12 percent of the construction workers building the two new residential colleges were New Haven residents.

Vice President for Communications Eileen O’Connor told the News that on most construction projects, the university tries to get “at least 25 percent New Haven residents,” and that they had merely fallen short on this particular project. A city official interviewed by the News mentioned the specialized skills needed to build certain parts of the colleges – skills that few New Haven residents possessed.

Fishman saw things differently. She considered the low figure to be yet more evidence that Yale isn’t invested in hiring from New Haven.

Fishman believes there are systemic issues with Yale’s hiring practices that have historically shut out many New Haven residents. She said that a little more than a year after Yale’s 2015 pledge, members of New Haven’s Black and Hispanic Caucus met with representatives of Yale to review the university’s progress. During the meeting, Fishman said, “they discovered that the majority of applications that came from New Haven Works weren’t even opened.

If there was one small error, or if one line wasn’t filled out on the cover, then the whole thing was just put in the file bin.” She also mentioned that for certain jobs at Yale, you have to start out as a casual worker with twenty or fewer hours every week. “It’s really hard for people to do that, because they can’t live on that,” she said. “You have to have another job as well.” Since the hearing this February, Yale has avoided commenting on its 2015 pledge. Lindner, Tom Conroy, the University Spokesman, and Chris Brown, the Director of Yale’s New Haven Community Hiring Initiative, were all unwilling to provide any comment on Yale’s hiring processes. Representatives of Yale’s UNITE HERE unions also did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Alderman Hacibey Catalbasoglu, currently a senior at Yale, remembers the February hearing as if it were yesterday. He had never seen so many people in the aldermanic chambers. Hacibey has lived in New Haven all his life, but he also remembers that, before becoming a

Yalie, he never felt comfortable walking onto Cross Campus.

For him, the jobs campaign is part of the larger struggle to eliminate the divide between Yale and New Haven. “We shouldn’t be making Yale out as the enemy,” he said. “But, at the same time, we should be asking how it can do more.”

Last year, in a bid to balance New Haven’s budget, the Board of Alders approved an 11 percent increase in the city’s already high property tax. Yale owns a large proportion of the land in New Haven, but much of its property is tax-exempt.

Catalbasoglu thinks that the residential colleges, at the very least, should not be tax-exempt. He thinks that Yale should try to get an affordable diner to open on Broadway in order to turn the Broadway triangle into a place where Yalies mingle with New Haven residents rather than a gentrified extension of Yale, “a place where New Haven residents don’t go.” And even if Yale had fulfilled its 2015 pledge, he doesn’t think that five hundred hires from neighborhoods of need would be enough. “No number is enough,” he said.

In 2011, thirty-four people were killed on the streets of New Haven. When Fishman thinks back to that violent year, she wonders whether those people would have died if the jobs crisis had been less severe. She wonders if Yale could have done more for New Haven in 2011, if it will do more in the future. “There’s a lot of anger. There’s a lot of frustration,” she said. “Yale is the company in a company town right now.”

– Henry Reichard is a senior in Davenport College.

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V I S U A L F E AT U R E

WHAT YALE COULD HAVE PAID

BRO

ADW AY

A map of Yale’s taxable and tax-exempt properties.

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ELM ST

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PR

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RT A F 210 O L 49, .05 O O 2, 6 666 H , SC : $1 543 $ LE NT YA ME AX: SS TY T E S R AS OPE PR ED

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EGE L L O 0 ER C 997, 53 P P O 8, .84 CE H NT: $6 5, 513 A R 6 G SME : $2, 9 S E ASS TY TAX PER PRO

This map displays most of Yale’s properties, both academic and retail. The red shows which properties Yale currently pays taxes on, and the black shows tax-exempt properties.

New Haven’s two private colleges, Yale University and Albertus Magnus College, are exempt from paying taxes on most of their property.

More than half of all real estate in New Haven is tax-exempt.

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Reporting by Zola Canady Design by Meher Hans

Y

ale paid only $4.9 million in taxes in 2018, but New Haven claims the University should be paying twentysix times that amount. In 1834, the state of Connecticut amended the Yale charter to exempt the University from local taxes on any property that makes less than $6,000 in income each year. (As a nonprofit, Yale also does not pay any federal taxes.) Over the last two centuries, New Haven has made multiple attempts to tax Yale’s property, but all have failed. Most recently, in 2016, Mayor Toni Harp and several alders voiced support for a piece of state legislation that would revise the Yale charter and enable a new property tax on Yale.

Although the bill was not passed, it ignited the “Tax Yale” movement, a community campaign for a tax on Yale’s academic buildings. But Yale’s spokespeople have pushed back against new taxes, stating that Yale is one of the largest taxpayers in the city due to the taxes it pays on non-academic properties, like the Yale Bookstore and the Yale-New Haven Hospital. In addition, the University makes annual voluntary contributions of millions of dollars directly to City Hall. In 2018, it contributed just over $11.5 million to the city, according to the Office of New Haven and State Affairs.

In 1899, Yale sued New Haven after the city produced legislation that would have established a property tax on Yale’s room and board facilities. The University won the suit.

Fifty-one years later, in Yale v. New Haven, the city of New Haven sued Yale for neglecting to 30

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pay taxes on sixteen buildings. In 1975, in Yale University v. City of New Haven, the city sued Yale again, this time for not paying taxes on the Yale University Press building at 149 York Street. All three times, the courts found that the stipulations in the 1834 charter still stood. Yale won all three cases, retaining the right to own tax-exempt property. “[Yale] is the single largest local economic force in New Haven—larger than fellow nonprofits or any private corporation,” Yale spokesperson Tom Conroy told the New Haven Independent in March 2016. The amount that Yale pays voluntarily is proportionate to its on-campus population, and as Yale’s population has grown, so has the amount of voluntary payments.

Proponents of a new property tax on Yale point to the economic disparities between the city of New Haven and the University’s campus as evidence that New Haven’s deficiency in tax revenue hinders the city’s economic growth.

In May 2018, Mayor Harp released a monthly financial report, showing that New Haven’s deficit was about $15 million for the 2017-2018 school year. “The noticeable difference in the percentage of the general fund increase and the [property tax rate] increase is largely a function of sharply decreased anticipated revenue next year,” Mayor Harp said to the New Haven Independent in March 2018. “The city stands to come nearly $17 million short.”

Due to this deficit, in May 2018, the Board of Alders approved a citywide property tax increase of 11 percent. Many felt this tax hike was a blow to city residents, especially those who had already been struggling to make ends meet. “This big increase is going to make a THE NEW JOURN AL

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big dent in my budget,” Fair Haven resident Barbara Melotto told NBC Connecticut that May. “I’m a retired person living on a fixed income and I’m sure many people in New Haven feel the same way.”

I wanted to investigate what a new property tax on Yale would mean for both the University and the city—and whether Yale’s current economic contributions to New Haven are really enough. To show what it might look like if Yale property was taxed, I have chosen to focus on two buildings: Grace Hopper College and Yale School of Art. I chose these buildings to show what it would look like if a residential college and an academic building were to be taxed, and these properties were perfect models. Since the New Haven tax assessment database is online and publicly accessible, I was able to find the assessed value of each building.

In 2018, Yale paid $4.9 million in city taxes. By comparison, Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, paid $7.3 million in taxes in 2017, according to the town of Hanover’s annual fiscal report. Unlike Yale, Dartmouth has to pay city taxes on its dormitories and dining halls. A 1977 New Hampshire Supreme Court ruling named Concord v. St. Paul’s School required all private schools—including colleges and universities—to pay taxes on dorm rooms, dining halls, and kitchens. Before this case’s ruling, much of Dartmouth’s property was tax-exempt.

Before the Board of Alders approved the citywide tax hike, Mayor Harp had considered Yale as a potential source of tax revenue to avoid major cuts in government services. She requested that Yale and its nonprofit partners, like the Yale-New Haven Hospital, pay $3 million a year to New Haven in addition to the voluntary yearly payment Yale already makes to the city. Mayor Harp is still considering this as a viable option.

Yale voluntarily pays over $11.5 million a year to New Haven; the University would pay significantly more if the city taxed its currently tax-exempt property. In 2014, Yale avoided taxes on about $2.5 billion of property; by comparison, two years later, its taxable real estate valued at only $116 million.

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– Zola Canady is a first-year in Trumbull College. Meher Hans is a sophomore in Grace Hopper College.

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Matthew Barney: Redoubt Through June 16, 2019

Catalogue available 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT | 203.432.0600 Free and open to the public | artgallery.yale.edu @yaleartgallery Matthew Barney, Redoubt, 2018. Production still. © Matthew Barney, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Hugo Glendinning

YALE U N IVERS IT Y ART GALLERY

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’

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ENDNOTE

CONNECTICUT’S NEXT TOP FARM ANIMAL A family of Alpacas found their way to the rural Northeast—and one of them tried to spit in my face.

Andy Sandweiss

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t is said that the domesticated llamas of Peru experience difficulty having sex. Farmers in the Andean highlands “try to help the animals mount each other,” says Dr. Richard L. Burger, a Yale Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology. “They try to get them in the mood for love, so they play music and the llamas drink liquor,” Burger said, shuffling a few loose papers on his desk. “When you ask why, they say para quitar la verguenza.” To erase their embarrassment.

Before this conversation, I had liked to think I knew about the long-necked animals that grace the mountains of my mother’s homeland: Peru. But after doing some investigating, I learned a whole other world of camelids (the taxonomic family of llamas, alpacas, and camels) exists—not in Peru, but in rural Connecticut.

Pine Hill Alpaca Farm, one of many alpaca farms in eastern and central Connecticut, is home to thirty-five alpacas. I had been, over the course of a week, finding myself drawn to the curious slogans of Connecticut alpaca farms. There was Southwind Farms, which promised “Alpacas from the heart,” and there was SixPaca farm, guaranteeing they were “Brewing the Best in the Breed.” Pine Hill’s website promotes a mission of “Breeding Tomorrow’s Champions, Today.”

Champions? Of what? Determined to find out, I called Becky Hopps, co-owner of the farm, to ask if my friend Brendan and I could visit. She cheerfully agreed.

We had arrived at our destination: Pine Hill Alpaca Farm, a sign read. Below it: ALPACAS FOR SALE. To the left of the sign was a dirt road, which we followed until reaching a two-story, gabled farmhouse with pens laid out on a hill that sloped downwards into the pine forest.

Clad in sneakers and jeans, Becky Hopps is a short woman with brown hair and a warm smile. She and 34

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her husband had entered the business a few years ago, after meeting a woman at the Mystic Seaport Museum who invited them to her alpaca farm. Becky “fell in love” with the camelids and the couple bought three alpacas for their farm in Plainfield. Today they have thirty-five.

Our first stop on the farm tour was an overflowing cornucopia of alpaca-based merchandise, tucked away in a wooden shed no larger than a dorm room.

It contained everything from traditional sweaters and scarfs to soap and dryer balls. Brendan and I purchased some “alpaca felt soap,” which is both made from and coated in alpaca wool for exfoliation.

When I asked Becky if her llamas are sexually frustrated, she hesitated—not because they do not encounter any difficulty but because I had misnamed her alpacas as llamas for the fifth time.

“The female lays down,” Becky began, “and the boy mounts her. A week later, “you bring the male back in, and if the female is bred she spits at the male and wants nothing to do with him. If she’s not bred, she’ll lay down again: she wants to be bred.” This process of “cushing,” in which the female alpaca lies down in what the male perceives as a very seductive position, has been around since alpacas were domesticated over six thousand years ago.

According to Dr. Burger, camelids were first domesticated in the Andean highlands of South America and were used for wool, meat, and carrying heavy loads. In contemporary Andean society, alpacas continue to be used for the same purposes. Their presence in the US is apparently due to their low maintenance, grass-nibbling capability, and money making potential offered by wool production. Over time, alpacas were exported from Peru to the US,

including the original three at the Pine Hill Farm.

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Peru has been banned to prevent other countries’ alpaca wool production from outpacing that of Peru.

Pine Hill’s thirty-two other alpacas have been bred in-house.

Stranger products and uses come from Americanized camelids. Professor Burger recalled a trip in the late nineteen-nineties to California to a Llama and Alpaca association conference, complete with a fair and parade, where “all sorts of weird spiritual associations were made.”

“People had written books [such as] My Guru, My Llama,” Burger explained. “The claim was that if you listen closely enough to the llamas you learn the meaning of life. The llamas were zen masters in an animal’s body.”

Leaving the store, we walked down a dirt path past the Hopps’ farmhouse and towards the main alpaca pen, a large wooden structure with a slanted roof.

Becky led us inside, and there they were: a bumbling herd of fluffy alpacas, their heads turned to us in attention.

“Oh my god.” It was all I could muster. All of them—all of them—were adorable.

Becky beamed with pride. They have nicknames and full names, she told us. This one was “Sugar,” Becky proclaimed, pointing to an alpaca with thick, white wool, her head bent over, munching on hay.

“That’s a fun nickname,” I said, “but what’s her real name?”

“Creme Brulée.”

After many minutes petting the animals, I asked if there were any common misconceptions about alpacas.

“A lot of people think [alpacas will] spit at them,” she said. “They’ll [only] spit at each other if they’re fighting over food—mostly the boys.” Still, one of the alpacas nearly spit in my face. Maybe it had overheard me calling it a llama.

“There’s not a lot of liquid,” Dr. Burger recalled nostalgically in his office about his experience with camelid spit. “They make an ugly face at you. If you put too much weight on a llama or alpaca, they’ll just sit down and refuse to move. If you really push, it’ll spit.”

After only a few minutes in Becky’s alpaca pen, I understood why they are occasionally used as therapy animals. Sugar trotted over to me and began to rub her cloud of wool against my belly. I almost collapsed with joy. Brendan experienced similar euphoria while petting Cinnamon Sugar (related to Sugar). A sign hung above the pen: You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy an ALPACA, and that’s kind of the same thing.

– Andy Sandweiss is a senior in Trumbull College.

*** APRIL 2019

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Truth History Democracy Hear from some of the most outstanding journalists in the world and gain insight into the media and its role in contemporary culture. poynter.yale.edu 36

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