THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N
VOL 52 / ISS 3 / DEC 2019
THE NEW JOURNAL
Unclear Cutting
editors-in-chief Laura Glesby Max Graham executive editor Elliot Wailoo senior editor Lily Moore-Eissenberg associate editors Hailey Andrews Elena DeBre Beasie Goddu Alejandra Larriva-Latt Helena Lyng-Olsen Jack McCordick Eli Mennerick Trish Viveros Candice Wang copy editors Jisoo Choi Matthew Kleiner Yonatan Greenberg Nicole Jefferson Sofia Laguarda
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, Linda Colman 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
creative director Chase Westover design editors Rebecca Goldberg Meher Hans Zihao Lin Sam Oldshue web manager Andrew Sheinberg
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.
 2
THE NEW JOUR NAL
THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 52 issue 3 DEC 2019
SINCE 1967 27 cover www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com UNCLEAR CUTTING The Yale Investments Office owns vast timberlands in northern New England. Some question whether the land has been managed sustainably. Max Graham 22
critical angle THE LEFTOVERS What happens to the food Yale doesn’t eat? Ellie Garland
standards point of departure 4 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF CHOCOLATE—Sohum Pal 6
snapshot WELCOMING WORDS—Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits In Fair Haven School’s new STEAM lab, students learn in a groundbreaking bilingual education program.
11 snapshot THE COP’S CONTRACT—Candice Wang A Hamden police officer faces rare criminal proceedings for shooting two unarmed civilians. His case reveals just how hard it is to hold the police accountable. 15 snapshot THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED—Kapp Singer Yale is slowly pedestrianizing streets that run through campus. What does this mean for the city? 20
essay FORGETTING EVERYTHING—Eileen Huang A Chinese-American reflection on Yale’s Light Fellowship.
34 endnote STERLING’S HOLD ON ME—Irene Vázquez
NOVEMBER 2019
3
P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF CHOCOLATE A new drone delivery app drops snacks from the sky. SOHUM PAL
O
n a Friday in October, I wandered into a parking lot on Crown Street, the roofs of the High Street fraternities peeking over the trees. I hoped I had found the drop point for Kiki Air. The day was sunny and cool. Overhead, I heard a buzzing noise. Cat and Josh pointed up. On the phone, a pilot asked me if I was “in a position to receive the drop.” I said I was, and a blue cylinder fell from about sixtyfive feet in the air, bouncing against a curb about twenty-five feet away from me. I tore open the padded cerulean envelope. My Toblerone bar had arrived; the drone flew away, arching over a line of buildings until it vanished from view. Yale undergraduates Jason Lu, Josh Ip, and Cat Orman hope this might be the future—lightweight snacks and sundries delivered by drone. That vision is driving Kiki Air, a drone delivery app for Yale students, developed by Lu and Ip. As Ip sees it, the coming years will almost inevitably include drones at our beck-and-call. Food delivery services like UberEats already exist in New Haven, and as Ip mentioned, the market for drone delivery is quickly becoming crowded. In 2016, Amazon announced “Prime Air,” a drone delivery service whose rollout has been continually delayed; Google, UPS and Walmart all have similar
4
services in the works. But Ip clarified that Kiki Air is not competing in the meal-delivery or the package-delivery market, which are Amazon and Google’s terrain. Kiki Air’s small drone can only carry loads up to six-hundred grams. Rather, Kiki Air competes with delivery services like GoPuff, a self-described “convenience store delivery app and digital convenience retailer” available in dozens of U.S. cities, including New Haven, as of May. While Kiki Air’s prices are similar to GoPuff’s, its delivery time averages about five to six minutes, versus GoPuff’s half hour. Kiki Air currently has no minimum price for an order, and no delivery fee. As Ip explained to me, each morning from Wednesday to Sunday, a student pilot picks up the drone from “where it lives,” in an apartment near Whitney Avenue. The pilot fills two suitcases with the day’s inventory—mostly snacks like candy or protein bars, but also other convenience store items like condoms, menstrual products, phone chargers, and toothpaste. The pilot sets up on the roof of a parking garage near the Grove Street Indian restaurant Sitar and prepares for any calls that come in, starting at 12 p.m. Nearby, another certified pilot goes to a ninth-floor office space that Kiki Air has rented, which the company calls air traffic control.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
The controller can see the drone from the ninth-floor window, complying with the “visual line of sight” required by FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) regulations. That controller also reports on weather conditions and generally monitors the airspace to watch out for airplanes and other flying objects. At dusk, generally around 6 p.m., the controller and the pilot pack up, having concluded operations for the day. FAA regulations generally do not allow drones to fly within five miles of an airport, but Kiki Air applied for and received a waiver from the FAA to conduct its operations near Tweed New Haven Airport. In transit, the drone flies a few hundred feet above the ground. When it reaches the drop site, it descends to about six stories off the ground, then releases the order on the pilot’s command. Orman and Ip assured me that the mechanism for dropping packages is safe: packages are swathed in bubble wrap and cannot fall while the drone is moving. If the drone takes a sudden dip in altitude, a parachute releases to slow the machine’s fall. Ip developed the Kiki Air app this past summer, and in the fall, he recruited Orman to work on marketing and publicity. Lu secured initial funding from an angel investor he met while interning at a venture capital firm. That investment covers the cost of the drone, training, certification, inventory, and wages for three to four FAA-certified drone pilots. Emerging drone technology is governed by just eleven pages of FAA regulations. The pilots at Kiki Air, mostly first-years in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Yale, have to train and take licensure exams at Tweed New Haven airport, per the FAA’s guidelines for remote-controlled drones. Ip remarked that certifying to be a drone pilot is “like going to the DMV.”
NOVEMBER 2019
Quinten Hoagland and Bryan Regan, two Kiki Air pilots who are first-year students at Yale, wrote over email that they took the job because of their interest in aviation. Hoagland remarked that the material covered by the FAA exam is largely tangential to the actual job of a Kiki Air pilot. Hoagland noted, “Aside from the ‘flying a drone’ part, the job’s very much like bagging groceries, except the bags are thick bubble wrap tightly secured around the items.” Orders typically begin coming in around 3 p.m. and continue until dusk. Kiki Air receives about twentyfive orders each day. I was caught off guard by how Ip and the pilots brought the language of daily chores—going to the DMV, bagging groceries—to the hyper-futuristic experience of drone snack delivery. I wondered, briefly, if they had calibrated this language to ease the alarm in my mind, my suspicion of the unfamiliar. But their language was too casual, too off-the-cuff. Rather, it seems that the founders and employees of Kiki Air are entirely at ease with the robotic future that faces us. Still, Hoagland remarks that he took the job with Kiki Air in part because piloting drones sounded “slightly bizarre.” As Kiki Air’s early success demonstrates, drone delivery may be commercially viable, but it retains a certain novelty. There is a chance that drones will fill the sky someday, and airdropped packages of chips and candy will be de rigeur for all-nighters. Indeed, Ip, Lu, and Orman are betting on it. – Sohum Pal is a senior in Branford College.
Illustrations by Sam Oldshue Design by Rebecca Goldberg
5
SNAPSHOT
Photography by Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits Design by Rebecca Goldberg
WELCOMING WORDS In Fair Haven School’s new STEAM lab, students learn in a groundbreaking bilingual education program. NICHOLAS RUIZ-HUIDOBRO MAGDITS
N
ecesitamos ayuda!” pleaded one of the students as he tugged the collar of his white uniform polo shirt, exasperated because the digital Sasquatch on his screen wouldn’t move. “You just need to press here,” replied the young girl at his side, “See?” Although their teacher had been leading the coding lesson in Spanish, the two kindergarteners comfortably switched from one language to the other. These students, along with eight of their peers, huddled around a table inside their school’s new language development STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) lab, the latest addition to a budding bilingual literacy project at Fair Haven School. With fifty-three million people of Latin American descent, the United States boasts the second-largest population of Spanish speakers next to Mexico and is expected to be the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world by 2050. In places like New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood, whose population is over 60 percent Hispanic, bilingualism is already the norm. As of last year, 46 percent of students in New Haven Public Schools have Latin American heritage, and eighteen percent are English Language Learners (ELL). Of those ELL students, 85 percent speak Spanish as their native language. Fair Haven School
“¡
has the largest share of ELL students out of all schools in the city of New Haven. Although the United States has no official language, English has been the traditional language of instruction in most classrooms across the country. Hispanic students, according to a 1997 report by the National Research Council, were once expected to “sink or swim” in a school environment that didn’t take their linguistic background into account. In February, the National Center for Education Statistics reported consistent underperformance in reading and math by Hispanic students when compared to their white counterparts in the past three decades. But dual-language programs, which are specifically designed to make education for ELL students more equitable, have been shown to increase academic achievement in these populations. For the last four years, Fair Haven School—a district magnet school that largely serves residents of
6
THE NEW JOUR NAL
the Fair Haven neighborhood—has been adapting to community needs by shifting its curriculum towards a dual-language immersion program. Under this model, students are taught all subjects in both English and Spanish, encouraging native speakers of both languages to become bicultural and biliterate. The program has grown to include one more grade each year since its inception and is currently offered for grades K-3. Along with its new STEAM lab, the dual-language program represents a break from traditional education for non-anglophone students. • Following a giddy group of children walking into school after a field trip, I sat down to talk with Heriberto Cordero, the enthusiastic and down-toearth principal of Fair Haven School, the largest elementary school in the district. Every once in a while, our conversation paused when students came into his office—where his doors were always open—or when he stepped out to greet someone’s grandmother. Cordero views his close relationship with students and their families as a point of pride. Born and raised in New Haven, Cordero learned Spanish from his Puerto Rican family at home and only learned English once he started going to school. Cordero credits New Haven for much of his own education—the city’s New Haven Promise scholarship program gave him the opportunity to obtain a bachelor’s and master’s degree at Quinnipiac University on a full ride. In return, he wants to build up the community that so profoundly informed his own life. Cordero noticed that New Haven’s language programs needed dramatic improvement. “It’s something so simple, showing the students that we appreciate their language,” he said. “Growing up here, it wasn’t like that. The only valued language was English—you could forget the rest. Spanish, Arabic… nonsense!” When Cordero began working at Fair Haven School five years ago, the ultimate goal of the ELL programs at the school had been to transition students to a monolingual, English classroom as quickly as possible. However, this emphasis on English acquisition risks the students’ losing their native language, which Cordero sees as a problem. “Here at Fair Haven, we value all languages,” Cordero said. “Your language is not something NOVEMBER 2019
I want to take away. It’s something we should nurture and support as a school.” Cordero’s dream is eventually to have an entirely bilingual school.
“YOUR LANGUAGE IS NOT SOMETHING I WANT TO TAKE AWAY. IT’S SOMETHING WE SHOULD NURTURE AND SUPPORT AS A SCHOOL.” Such a dream was hardly imaginable to me when my parents, both immigrants from Peru, took me to my first day of school in a small Virginian town. Like Cordero, I was born in the United States but grew up only speaking Spanish at home. When I walked into the classroom, it was like stepping into an entirely different country. I didn’t learn to speak in a way my classmates could understand until about halfway through kindergarten, and, even then, I had difficulty managing the foreign sounds of English. My kindergarten teacher tried to teach herself some Spanish so that I could feel included in her classroom, but there was nothing remotely comparable to Fair Haven School’s dual-language immersion program, let alone a bilingual STEAM lab. • The language development STEAM lab is the first of its kind in the district, and its implementation has set Cordero’s dual-language program apart from the others in New Haven. As we spoke in his office, Cordero spotted Francisco Cajaraville Bonilla, the bilingual teacher from Spain in charge of the new STEAM lab, and invited him to join us. Our ensuing conversation flowed between English and Spanish, with tinges of Spanish, Puerto Rican, and Peruvian accents coloring our words. Regardless of what language the students speak, Cajaraville argued, the lab—which functions as a weekly “specials” class alongside music, art, and 7
physical education—allows them to use the abstract concepts they learn in math and language courses and apply them to something practical that they can visualize. Depending on the class’s dominant language, Cajaraville pushes students to learn the vocabulary for the technology they use in the less dominant tongue. If students are more comfortable with Spanish, for example, Cajaraville teaches them the terminology in English but provides definitions in Spanish.
“IN A STEAM LAB LIKE HIS, WHERE THE TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE IS NO LONGER UNILATERAL, THE TRADITIONAL CONCEPT OF A TEACHER DISSOLVES.” Cajaraville decided it would be easier to show me how his classroom functions rather than to explain it, so he invited Principal Cordero and me to observe his Spanish-language kindergarten computer science class. Students were learning the fundamentals of coding through a tactile iPad game called Coding Awbie. In the game, players put together command blocks with buttons that guide a Sasquatch-like figure through a maze. As Cajaraville stepped over robot mazes and picked up 3D-printed action figures that former students had made, he pointed out how the children were working together, emphasizing his efforts to teach the students what he calls “transversal values” like collaboration, cooperation, and nonviolence to achieve their goals. As Cajaraville showed showed me the lab’s equipment, a little girl with a ponytail trailed curiously behind her teacher, hoping he would make the small blue robot move again. Technology, like the bilingual nature of the classroom, allows for individualization, Cajaraville said. “It allows each student to go at their own pace, and the teacher can make sure no one gets 8
left behind without holding the more advanced students back.” If students want to keep going, they can keep going. Two of the girls from his secondgrade class—who, according to Cajaraville, once started crying because the Internet was down and they couldn’t code—ended up writing over a thousand lines of code that year, more than doubling the other students’ averages. One seventh-grader who learned about music editing from Cajaraville two years ago now makes music mashups and posts them onto his YouTube channel, which currently has over one hundred thousand subscribers. Although the class is officially bilingual, coding is another language taught at the school, and it’s one the teachers are still learning as well. Cajaraville uses the MIT-developed visual coding language Scratch with his students, but one of them, a boy named Juan, came in one day with questions about Python, a more advanced language. “I had no idea how to use Python,” said Cajaraville, “but I told him not to worry. We’re going to learn together.” In a STEAM lab like his, where the transmission of knowledge is no longer unilateral, the traditional concept of a teacher dissolves. Cajaraville argued that the “banking” model of education—in which the teacher has the knowledge and deposits it into the child—is no longer considered the most effective. “There are too many things the teacher doesn’t know, but if the students want to learn, we’ll either learn together, or they’ll teach me. Knowledge needs to be transmitted in every direction.” Cajaraville now spends a lot of time in the local public library studying more advanced coding so he can help his students push their own intellectual boundaries. Cajaraville’s students are eager to learn—one even expressed wanting to program his own version of the video game Fortnite—and he’s willing to help them get there. For Cordero, this language development STEAM lab proves something very important about the necessity of Fair Haven School’s dual-language immersion program; namely, that language is often one of the only barriers that prevent these kids from excelling in STEAM fields. “Five years ago, the kids here never had the opportunity” to learn computer science, especially in their own language, Cordero said. “Now I have a school of nine hundred students who are way more advanced than I am. I am so THE NEW JOUR NAL
proud! It doesn’t matter if you don’t speak English, that doesn’t hold you back anymore.” In Cordero’s and my own experience, starting school only knowing Spanish led many teachers to assume that the non-anglophone children were less intelligent or capable because they didn’t understand the material. In Fair Haven, however, students are working on advanced coding projects from a young age. The issue clearly wasn’t the material. It was the language. “In order to gain bilingual proficiency in a language, it takes about seven years of consistent work,” said Cordero. “Are you going to wait seven years to start teaching these children? Absolutely not. The learning has to continue, and that’s what we try to do here.” • While the burgeoning dual-language immersion program has brought positive change to the school, it is still in its formative stage. As more and more refugees and immigrants resettle in Fair Haven, the demand for educational resources in languages other than English and Spanish is also rising. During a parent-teacher conference, an Afghan family mentioned to Cordero that their children were coming home having forgotten some of their native Pashto—now the second-most spoken non-English language in Fair Haven, followed by Arabic—since they couldn’t practice it at school. When they asked
NOVEMBER 2019
Coredero what could be done, he immediately talked to New Haven’s ELL Programs Director Pedro Mendía-Landa. “We’re now seeing about incorporating Pashto lessons for these students for about twenty minutes per day,” Cordero said. Even with the dedication that administrators and teachers like Cordero and Cajaraville demonstrate to their students, maintaining a program like this is not an easy job. Finding teachers with the linguistic capabilities and the necessary certifications to teach in multilingual environments is difficult, but retaining them is even harder. “It’s a grueling job,” Cordero said. Bilingual teachers need to relay the same material twice, adapting it to two groups of students with different first languages. The New Haven Independent reported in November of last year that New Haven’s public school system has approximately fifty certified bilingual teachers for the more than 3,500 ELL students in the district. Hiring more and retaining the few they have is of the utmost importance. Although there are similar dual-language immersion programs across the country, Cordero is confident that none has a language development STEAM lab as good as his. Once he realizes his plan to expand the program to every grade in the school, Cordero said, “Va a ser nítido”—it will be amazing— “because it will be a program like no other.” With diligent and motivated educators like the ones at Fair Haven School, students may soon no longer have to dream—as I did—about attending an entirely bilingual school.
– Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits is a junior in Trumbull College.
9
All events free; no tickets required except where noted.
Friede auF erden Yale Schola Cantorum Danish National Vocal Ensemble David Hill, conductor Works by Nielsen, Strauss, Schoenberg, and others Friday, November 15 · 7:30 PM Battell Chapel
Advent ConCert Yale Camerata Marguerite L. Brooks, conductor Works by Persichetti, Susa, Finzi, Herzogenberg, Olson, Goss, and Bach Saturday, December 7 · 7:30 PM Battell Chapel
ism.yale.edu
Art SongS
in Miller Hall 406 Prospect St.
deFiant SpiritS: Fernando Brito’S Sinaloa Award-winning Mexican photographer captures the resilience of Sinaloa culture in the midst of the criminalized state September–December 13 Weekdays 9–4 (except holidays) 10
Great Organ Music at Yale
Exhibition
Yale Voxtet Bernarda Fink, artistic director Tomoko Nakayama, piano Friday, December 13 · 7:30 PM Marquand Chapel (409 Prospect St.)
Guest Artists and Special Events
Choral and Vocal Music
YAle inStitute of SACred muSiC eventS
voiCeS from PriSon Incarcerated men re-imagine The Divine Comedy Sunday, December 7 · 4 PM Marquand Chapel (409 Prospect St.)
Journey to the heart oF the iraqi MaqaM Iraqi vocalist Hamid Al-Saadi with Safaafir Sunday, January 18 · 4:30 PM Luce Hall Auditorium
roomful of teeth the dublin guitAr QuArtet Nico Muhly: How Little You Are Saturday, February 1 · 7:30 PM Battell Chapel Guest artists perform on the Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall
rAChel lAurin Works by Buxtehude, Franck, Brahms, and Laurin Sunday, November 24 · 7:30 PM
THE NEW JOUR NAL
SNAPSHOT
THE COP’S CONTRACT A Hamden police officer faces rare criminal proceedings for shooting two unarmed civilians. His case reveals just how hard it is to hold the police accountable. CANDICE WANG
J
udge Patrick J. Clifford tapped the microphone in front of him. It was 10:53 a.m. on Tuesday, November 5, the windiest day of the week, but within the windowless courtroom on the sixth floor of the New Haven County Courthouse, the air was musty and warm. Clifford announced, “This is State v. Devin Eaton.” Officer Eaton, dressed in a gray suit, his sideburns neatly trimmed, strode into the small courtroom with Win Smith III, his attorney. Smith declared Eaton’s not guilty plea. Within ten minutes, Judge Clifford recorded Hamden police officer Devin Eaton’s not guilty plea on the docket and announced his next court date, December 10. Just as quickly as he had entered, Eaton disappeared from the room. He didn’t say a word. Last April, while on duty as a Hamden police officer, Eaton shot an unarmed woman, Stephanie Washington, 22, in the face. Despite increasing pressure from activists and the instatement of Eaton’s
felony charges on October 21, he still retains his police badge and walks free, having paid $100,000 in bail on the day of his arrest. Eaton was the first Connecticut officer to be charged for an on-duty shooting in fourteen years, according to the Yale Daily News. His felonies include one count of first-degree assault and two accounts of reckless endangerment. But Eaton’s movement through the judicial process, state investigation, and internal police investigation has been hindered by a collective bargaining agreement, or CBA, between Hamden’s Police Labor Union and the town’s police department. In the state of Connecticut, around a hundred municipalities have signed police CBAs, since the nineteen-sixties. These contracts originally guaranteed reasonable work hours, healthcare, and protected child labor, but they have also made it harder to hold police officers accountable for violations of the law. The Hamden Police Department is one of several departments across the nation that
⁃April 16, 2019: The shooting October 17: State’s Attorney releases report ⁃October 21: Eaton is charged with a felony
November 13: Protestors disrupt police commission meeting
⁃April 18: Hundreds of activists march for police accountability NOVEMBER 2019
November 5: Eaton pleads not guilty ⁃
11 Timeline illustrations by Sam Oldshue
has struggled to fire an officer for misconduct due to the terms of a CBA. * The incident that has tested the limits of local police accountability systems occurred six months ago in a matter of minutes. At 4:20 a.m. on April 16, a clerk working the night shift at Go On gas station in Hamden called 911. The clerk told the operator that an African American male with dreadlocks, who was driving a red car with a female passenger, pulled a gun on a newspaper delivery employee to ask him for money. Earlier in the night, the clerk said, that same man had been “harassing” a different customer. Hamden Police immediately sent officers Devin Eaton and Keron Bryce to Dixwell Avenue, where the two suspects had fled, according to the clerk. A dispatch went out to both New Haven Police and Yale Police, stating, “Just had a street robbery happen in our town, was heading in your direction on Dixwell Avenue, with a gun used in a street robbery,” according to the State’s Attorney Report. Eaton and Yale officer Terrance Pollock drove separately onto Argyle Street, lined by four beigegray houses interspersed by vacant yards. Moments later, Paul Witherspoon arrived at the street in a red vehicle with Washington in the passenger seat. Just when Witherspoon emerged from the car with his hands rising into the air, Officer Eaton unholstered his handgun and fired in the direction of the car. Witherspoon ducked back into the car. Eaton says that in this moment, he feared for his life. “As he began to turn towards me, I saw the operator begin to raise his right arm up and it appeared that he was holding an object in his right hand, which appeared to be a gun,” he said in testimony included in the State’s Attorney Report. As Witherspoon reentered the car, Eaton moved to the rear, still firing. He advanced to the other side of the car, where he shot Stephanie Washington in the face. In total, Eaton fired thirteen bullets before he fled down Argyle Street. Pollock, who fired three bullets, was grazed in the leg by one of Eaton’s. Later in his testimony, Eaton claimed that he thought he was acting in self-defense. “I was afraid that the operator was going to shoot me and cause me serious bodily harm or death.” However, the Report’s account of Witherspoon’s testimony states that Witherspoon “never did anything to provoke the police to shoot at him. He 12
was following the orders from the police officer.” When exiting his car, he pushed open the door with his left hand and stuck both arms out the door first to indicate that he had no weapon. Later investigations revealed that both Witherspoon and Washington were unarmed. “[Eaton is] responding to what he believes is an attempted gun robbery,” Win Smith III, Officer Eaton’s attorney, told me on the phone, two days after the trial. “The man gets out of the car quickly. He can’t see his hands. He believes there’s a gun involved. He can’t see the person’s hand, and he fires.” Washington later recounted in the report that she was leaning back between the driver’s and passenger’s seat to duck for cover. “It was like being in a nightmare,” she said. “I thought I was going to die.” Both parties—Eaton and the two victims—claimed to have feared for their lives. Yet in the months that followed the shooting, members of the public have debated whether Eaton’s fears were justified. Eaton says he thought he was facing armed suspects in a robbery. But he, too, was armed—and as a police officer, he had the ability to call back-up. The week after the shooting, New Haven’s streets flooded with protesters and signs; Wall Street was awash with a sea of passionate students and community members throughout the week, demanding the disarmament of Yale police officers and the discharge of Officer Eaton. One of the New Haven activists, Kerry Ellington, believes that Eaton is a criminal, and should be treated as one. “What we witnessed was two officers jumping out of a car and playing video games that night,” Ellington said, speaking metaphorically. “There were children who were terrified that night. They heard the gunshots and ducked down.” Ellington wants Eaton to be viewed by the court first as a citizen, then a police officer. “There needs to be immediate consequences,” Ellington said. “The fact that they’re being held to a different standard and the process for police officers is different than what any other human being would go through. It’s egregious. It shows that our system is compliant with police violence.” * But any immediate consequences for Eaton have been stalled by labor contracts that Hamden THE NEW JOUR NAL
Design by Meher Hans
can’t legally circumvent. These types of contracts, called collective bargaining agreements, or CBAs, first originated in 1806, when skilled shoemakers in Philadelphia gathered together to demand higher wages, forming the first collective bargaining agreement, or CBA. Since then, labor unions in hundreds of other industries have joined their ranks to protect basic rights such as limited work hours, child labor laws, and healthcare. CBAs are essential for protecting workers, but they also have some drawbacks. Police labor unions, which originally formed in the nineteenth century to push for limited working hours, began negotiating strict CBAs with local municipal governments. These contracts must be signed by both parties, and voted upon by legislative councils for approval every eight years. According to ACLU activist Melvin Medina, Hamden’s police commission, which acts as a governing body for the police department, should have the power to investigate and discipline, and discharge officers. Yet the police commission lost these powers when it signed the CBA with Hamden’s police labor union. “The town willingly negotiated its rights away,” said Medina. “It’s actually the mayor and the legislative council that’s agreeing to this.” Medina suggested that the town signed the CBA because it has set a precedent for decades of signing these agreements. Many legislative council members also may not be reading through the entire contract, Medina said—at least, that was the case in Hartford. If the legislative council members had actually received a full copy of the agreement, he believes they would push back on it. Various articles of Hamden’s agreement override the police commission’s power to discipline police. The contract requires that a written complaint be signed by the complainant and submitted within sixty days of an incident; otherwise, no disciplinary action can be taken. “This creates a system in which you time yourself out,” Medina said. The agreement also allows for gaps in police officers’ files—making it possible for recorded histories of a police officer’s actions to be incomplete. “How many complaints has [Eaton] gotten in the past?” Medina questioned. “We actually don’t know, since it’s not in his file.” In reality, according to two members of Hamden’s legislative council, the entire collective bargaining agreement has been shown to all members. When asked whether she’d read through the CBA, member NOVEMBER 2019
Judy Clouse said, “Yes, I did. However, it was more of a, I need to sit with this understand it more, and not, I need to have it changed immediately. Now that I’ve been in for two years, I think there are changes that can be made.” Clouse hesitated when asked about the plausibility of future negotiations to alter the CBA. “I hope there will be negotiations,” she said. Legislative council president Michael McGarry, on the other hand, was more explicit about the reality of CBAs undergoing any future change. “Negotiations are hard,” McGarry said. “It’s hard to get changes into the union contract. Not to say that it’s impossible.” * In order to discipline Eaton, the Hamden police department must hold a hearing by December 21, sixty days after his felony charges were brought forth by the state on October 21. Activists worry that the city will take no action, and that Eaton’s pay will be reinstated in the new year, sustaining his employment and status as a police officer. However, Michael McGarry, president of the Hamden Legislative Council, claims that there is a reason for the CBA’s massive power: “to protect labor folks, so that towns can’t make some resolution that takes away workers’ rights,” McGarry said in an interview on WNHH Radio. According to McGarry the drawnout investigations into Eaton’s conduct are slow for a reason. “Everything seems to be working,” McGarry said. “It just takes a little longer. Part of the reason for that is that we need to make sure that everything is done as close to perfect as humanly possible. We want to make sure that there’s no automatic appeal to his termination.” Medina called McGarry’s argument “a red herring.” He said that the CBA does not actually prevent the city of Hamden from organizing an independent investigation into Eaton before the state’s investigation concluded. Frustrated with the city’s lack of action, the ACLU filed a public records request, inquiring about a policy that keeps the city from conducting an independent investigation. Medina said the city “did not produce any documents backing this up.” In Medina’s ideal world, the city of Hamden would instate an independent investigative body to deal with cases like Eaton’s. Completely unaffiliated with the police department and police commission, the 13
agency would have the power to objectively analyze police misconduct cases. “We need more democratic control over policing,” Medina said. “In Hamden, you see a [police commission] that has the power to hold police accountable, but for legal reasons, are not able to.” When asked whether two simultaneous investigations into Eaton are allowed under Hamden policy, both Clouse and McGarry did not comment. However, McGarry offered, “I don’t blame the state attorney or anyone for trying to take all the time they can to make sure that it is done really well.” Clouse, on the other hand, warned that “If there are two different investigations going on [at the same time], that can throw the whole thing off,” giving Eaton a chance to appeal. She wants to follow protocol as closely and slowly as possible. In the eyes of these council members, slow means careful. And careful is a means to construct a foolproof case against Eaton that won’t be appealed. Activists, however, still push to break down this bureaucratic system that essentially has its hands tied. * At the Hamden Memorial Town Hall, the microphone shut off at around 5:50 p.m. on November 13, but Roxana Walker-Canton, activist and Hamden resident, soldiered on. “My name is Roxie,” she said. Her voice was muffled, her back turned to the crowd as she stood at the podium at Hamden’s monthly police commission meeting on November 13. Walker-Canton and her pastel sweater struck a soft contrast to the gray-and-white garbed members of the Hamden Police Commission, seven of whom sat in a semi-circle before her. One of the commissioners shook his head before leaning into his microphone. “I don’t think the microphone’s working,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. A woman, seated in the crowd behind the podium where Walker-Canton stood, whispered to her peers, “They don’t care if they can’t hear us anyway.” After a few tweaks, the microphone revived. WalkerCanton’s voice echoed against the olive-colored walls of the town hall. The meeting resumed—the sixth since the shooting. And still, Washington’s shooting wasn’t written on the meeting agenda. The activists’ demands—to hold Eaton accountable through the justice system and to discharge him—seemed to 14
have gone unheard. Six months after Eaton pulled the trigger, tensions between activists and police are rising. A series of steps toward consequences—the State’s decision to charge Eaton as a felon, Eaton’s recent not guilty plea, and the ticking of the clock as the December 21 deadline for Hamden Police’s hearing—have given activists hope that perhaps this time, justice within the courtroom will be served. “My name is Roxie,” Walker-Canton repeated in a low, steady voice. “I am appalled at the lack of attention placed on this case. I am appalled that [Stephanie] hasn’t been put on the agenda until now. Their bodies were put in a situation where they could’ve been killed. The commission needs to see that this is important. It’s a public health issue when you talk about police brutality.” The crowd exploded into snaps. Ellington, dressed in muted baby blue, stood amongst a crowd of around one hundred protesters holding “JUSTICE FOR STEPHANIE AND PAUL” posters. “Talk about it,” Ellington yelled. As Walker-Canton continued speaking into the microphone, her voice passionate, rising in volume, the seven commissioners stared straight ahead past her, expressions blank. —Candice Wang is a junior in Berkeley College and an associate editor for The New Journal.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
SNAPSHOT
THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED Yale is slowly pedestrianizing streets that run through campus. What does this mean for the city?
Kapp Singer
W
all Street seems like just another minor thread in New Haven’s urban fabric. Physically, it boasts nothing remarkable except maybe the size of its potholes, although it is a little wonky, running one-way eastbound three blocks from College to Orange and one-way westbound on its final block between State and Orange. But the street’s history, and that of similar streets running through Yale’s campus, unveil a deeper story about the fraught relationship between Yale and New Haven. The street is only six blocks long. Walking west along Wall on a crisp sunny day, I pass several parking lots, a daycare center, and two churches. On the corner of Wall and Church, sun reflecting off the green glass Chase Bank tower casts surreal reflections on the pavement beneath my beat-up white Nikes. Moving further, the first signs of Yale gradually appear. Gothic spires slowly fill my vision, and by the time I reach the intersection of Wall and College, I’m encircled by the campus: meticulously planted flower beds, sturdy wooden benches, and students bustling to and from class. This past summer, Yale turned a section of Wall into a pedestrian walkway. But the story of Yale’s takeover really began in 1990, when the University secured the rights to restrict vehicle traffic on Wall Street and High Street for twenty years. The deal cost Yale $1.1 million up front, with an investment of more than $50 million in New Haven over the following ten years.
NOVEMBER 2019
In 2011, the University and the city revisited the original agreement. After intense debate about what the future of the streets should look like, lawmakers failed to reach a decision. In the meantime, Yale crafted a new proposal—one that would allow the University to purchase the streets outright for $3 million with no future payments. When this plan was brought to a vote on June 3, 2013, the aldermanic chamber erupted. Protestors stood in the back of the hall chanting “Whose streets? Our streets. Whose streets? Our streets” and “New Haven is not for sale!” Cops eventually escorted the protestors out of city hall as they belted the 1931 United Mine Workers union song “Which Side Are You On.” After a short recess, the protestors were let back in, and the vote was conducted: the sale passed twenty one to eight. The city needed to fill a hole in its annual budget, and an immediate infusion of $3 million proved too tempting for a majority of alders to turn down. Two pairs of waist-height black plastic signs bookend Wall between College and High. The signs read “CLOSED TO TRAFFIC” in white serif font on a blue background, an unmistakable graphic identity. This blue-and-white signature, a low-profile marker of an urban crusade, defines Yale’s territory within New Haven.
15
These four signs, in conjunction with new paving, bike racks, and benches, represent the first stage of Yale’s latest project to pedestrianize Wall Street. The Yale Daily News reported in September that by 2020, Yale plans to have cordoned off an additional block of Wall as well as an adjacent block of High Street so as to surround the forthcoming Schwarzman Center, renovated student life complex, with verdant walkable plazas. Justin Elicker, New Haven’s mayor-elect who was an alder during the controversy in 2013, told me about his opposition to the sale: selling the street eliminates the city’s “ability to choose how to use that street in the future” and “the amount that was being offered was very, very low.” Doug Hausladen, another alder at the time, also voted against the deal. He now serves as the director for Transportation, Parking, & Traffic for New Haven. On my bike ride down to the Clerk’s Office to retrieve Board of Alders meeting minutes, I spotted him. I had been trying to reach him, but my emails kept getting sucked into the bureaucratic vortex. As he was getting out of a silver Buick, I recognized his bearded face and shouted, “Doug!” Briefcase in hand, he halted his beeline towards the municipal building at 200 Orange Street and turned to face me.
16
I introduced myself, but he seemed to be in a rush, so we exchanged phone numbers and agreed on a time to speak the next day. What upset Hausladen most about the street sale was its indefinite nature. Even though Yale assured the Board of Alders that it would keep the street open to the walking public after the purchase, Hausladen argued, “You and I both can see a world where there is no way to legally hold them to that.” Current plans indicate the new plaza will remain accessible to everyone, but Yale’s ownership effectively stretches to infinity. “Forever is a long time. Put it that way,” Hausladen said. “Even I have a really hard time understanding what forever is.” Hausladen sees the university’s tendency to buy and close off vehicular space as a mission to isolate the campus from the city. In fact, fifty years ago, Elm Street almost went the way Wall has gone today. But instead of peaceful protests, there were aggressive altercations, revealing that New Haven’s streets are an arena of town-gown tensions. * Before Morse and Stiles were built in the early 1960s, the northwest border of campus was defined by two high schools: Commercial and Hillhouse. Every afternoon at 2:30, students would make their way home after school down Elm Street, and Yalies would heckle and pelt them with snowballs. The high school students would jeer back, “if you can’t get a date, get a Yalie.” “There was a long period in which Elm Street was a place of high tension,” veteran Yale administrator Sam Chauncey explained to me. When I met Chauncey in Atticus cafe, he was sitting alone at a large round table casually sipping an iced tea. Without getting up, he extended his hand for a shake, warmly inviting me to sit down. Chauncey began working for the Yale administration immediately after graduating in 1957, and by 1963 he was appointed special assistant to University President Kingman Brewster. After working for Yale for almost 30 years, Chauncey is now retired and
THE NEW JOUR NAL
Design by Meher Hans
lives in New Haven, volunteering as a student advisor for Yale College and giving alumni talks. Last spring I wrote an op-ed in the Yale Daily News about jaywalking on Elm Street, in which I had jokingly proposed routing cars through an underground tunnel to keep street-crossers safe from oncoming traffic. Right after the article ran, Chauncey emailed me to say that Yale had actually explored that very idea in the 1960s. I sat down with him to see what he remembered about the initiative. Chauncey explained that town-gown tension reached its zenith on March 17, 1959, during the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade down Elm Street. “There had been a very early snowstorm. Wet snow. Perfect snowball snow,” Chauncey said. As the parade progressed down Elm, hundreds of Yale students began to bombard the paraders with their hard-packed, snowy projectiles. Some aggressors posted up on the upper floors of what was then Calhoun College, turning dorm rooms into makeshift turrets. New Haven Police chased students into college courtyards, swinging nightsticks. An all-out brawl ensued, students beating officers, officers beating students. The following morning, the Yale Daily News reported that “for an hour yesterday afternoon New Haven had the appearance of being a city at war.” A photograph taken during the riot shows a Nazi flag displayed in the window of a room in Hopper College, a sign that bigotry had been swirling around parts of the student body. A 2001 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine reported that the riot was thought to be motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment towards the St. Patrick’s Day paraders. “All hell broke loose,” Chauncey said. “I mean it was a nightmare. I was a young assistant dean then, and it was awful.” So awful, actually, “that the mayor of New Haven and the president of Yale, who were very good friends, wouldn’t speak to each other for three or four months.” But the two administrators eventually collaborated: on March 31st, New Haven mayor Richard C. Lee and Yale president A. Whitney Griswold announced the formation of the Commission to Study Yale-New Haven Community Relations, made up of a retired Connecticut chief justice, a former Yale athletic director, and a New Haven police commissioner.
NOVEMBER 2019
In September 1959, the commission published a report on town-gown relations. The document devoted an entire section to “Traffic,” recommending “routing vehicular traffic underground” on Elm for two blocks from York to College (from what is today the Patagonia store to Hopper College). This newly freed space would possibly “be integrated in the campus” so that “New Haven and her citizens as well as Yale would benefit.” Desperate to resolve the Elm Street question, Lee offered to help fund studies for the project: “Dear Whit, I am sure we can find the $2,100 to do our share of the engineering job on the Elm Street tunnel,” Lee wrote in a letter to Yale president A. Whitney Griswold on October 30, 1959. Lee was an urban renewal poster child, famous for razing ‘blighted’ areas across New Haven to make way for new highways. So it comes as no surprise that he was keen to help Griswold with a monolithic auto infrastructure project along Elm, one that would conveniently result in new space for Yale’s elite. Despite the collaborative effort, the tunneling project was never completed. The Elm Street Underpass report, conducted by a New York-based engineering firm, estimated that the tunneling would cost over $3 million: too high for the University. The infrastructure under Elm, such as electrical connections and water lines, also prohibited a full excavation of the street. Yale administrators continued to explore the idea throughout the 1960s. Even though Morse and Stiles took the place of the high schools, Yale liked the concept of a unified campus. Correspondence as late as 1966 suggests the university continued to entertain the idea of a tunnel beneath Elm Street. But nothing ever materialized. “Elm Street today is kind of a sad street in my way of thinking,” Chauncey said. Taking his napkin from his lap, he began wistfully drawing what he dreamed Elm could look like now, thinking out loud along the way.
17
Chauncey illustrated how he would remove a lane of traffic and add dozens of pin oak trees flanking the street. (He was very intent on the pin oaks, insisting, “If you prune them high, fifteen feet, they create a canopy.”) Much of Chauncey’s explanation was admittedly very difficult to follow—the details of his vision were hard to decipher from his napkin drawing— but his sentiment was crystal clear. City streets create fractures in what could be a more complete campus, which could serve as an amenity not only to Yalies but to New Haven residents, too. Chauncey recounted a story of a New Haven resident he knew who worked on Park Street and would walk home through the colleges, before the gates were locked to the public, because she felt safer that way. “Nothing broke my heart more than when we decided we had to lock all the college gates,” Chauncey said. “We don’t do anything, in an urban sense, to welcome the citizens of New Havens onto the Yale campus.” For years, Chauncey has worked to repair towngown relations. In 1972, he started Yale’s Community Relations Office, a group that has worked on charitable projects like New Haven Promise, New Haven Reads, and Squash Haven. If I knew about all the generous contributions Yale makes to New Haven, I’d be “astounded,” he told me. “It isn’t just the $11 million, it’s a whole lot of other stuff.” But in Chauncey’s eyes, Yale’s commitment to New Haven has deteriorated significantly. I asked him if the current administration was making any effort, but he cut me off before I could finish my question: “Absolutely not. I am appalled. And I’ve told him, so I don’t mind saying it, but I am appalled at how little Peter Salovey is interested in the relationship other than nice words.” Chauncey’s rhetoric about pedestrianization conveys a belief that walkable areas will benefit everyone. But his work on the 1960s Elm Street
tunneling project also shows an intention to isolate the campus. “After that snowball riot we all talked about tunneling underneath and closing that street off,” he said. These seemingly opposite impulses left me confused, wondering whether Chauncey’s ideas about walkable spaces would only end up solidifying the town-gown divide. * My interviews with Chauncey and Hausladen, roughly a week apart, felt like a staged debate on Yale’s relationship with New Haven. If they were in the same room, the discourse would be, let’s say, passionate. Chauncey thinks a more pedestrianized campus would help make Yale more “appealing and welcoming… Even for the citizens of New Haven, just walking home. It becomes a more pleasant trip.” Hausladen passionately refuted this notion, explaining that foot traffic and auto traffic are inherently at odds. “Yalies want pedestrianism and the region of New Haven is a vehicular-based region,” he argued. The prioritization of pedestrians would constrict New Haven’s auto thoroughfares and prevent commuters from efficiently getting to work, in order to “take all the space back just for Yalies’ use.” After such intense controversy over outlandish tunneling projects, closing arterial streets, and the relative values of pedestrians and drivers in the context of the university and the city, the four small signs bookending a block of Wall Street may seem inconsequential. Closing Wall St. to cars won’t significantly impact traffic patterns, and it doesn’t formally exclude New Haveners from walking in that space. But a pedestrian space is not necessarily a neutral space. The Elm Street plan of old and today’s Wall Street project both reflect an effort to isolate Yale from New Haven, a city that is so often portrayed by Yalies as rundown, depressed, or dreary. There’s a future in which I return to Yale to find wrought-iron gates guarding the entrance to Wall Street that beep upon the swipe of an ID. It’s really not too hard to imagine—just think of Old Campus, which had its gates locked in 1976. But isolation does not always come in the form of physical barriers. Even if Wall is never formally closed off, its purchase and pedestrianization serve as a reminder of Yale’s tendency to co-opt public urban space in the name of campus continuity. Maybe on Wall we are already witnessing a barrier under construction. —Kapp Singer is a sophomore in Hopper College.
18
THE NEW JOUR NAL
YA L E CENTER FOR BRITISH ART NOVEMBER 2019
The Yale Center for British Art, through the generosity of Nancy Horton Bartels and her late husband, Henry E. Bartels, is pleased to offer paid academic-year and summer internships to Yale undergraduates. Awarded annually, these internships introduce students to museum operations and best practices in the curatorial, conservation, and administrative departments. For more information and to submit an online application,  19 please visit britishart.yale.edu/education/yale/internships or contact Research (ycba.research@yale.edu | +1 203 432 2824).
Design by Rebecca Goldberg
E S S AY
FORGETTING EVERYTHING A Chinese American Reflection on the Light Fellowship EILEEN HUANG
O
n the first day of my language program, our teachers warn us not to be surprised if anyone Chinese tells us, “You’ve gotten fatter.” This is not considered rude in China, she explains, merely a habitual way of greeting a friend or acquaintance. No culture shock here. At family banquets in China, which my sister and I attended every few years, I grew used to the aunties, whose faces I often can’t recall, telling me how big, how fat I’ve become. They would make these remarks amiably, often smiling, counterintuitively filling my plate with more needle-boned fish, pinching the parts of my stomach that have changed. Any foreigner should know Chinese people are not like Americans; they are eager to point out anything different. * In Harbin, a classmate and I visit a local wholesale market to hunt for cheap clothing. We’re both Asian American. At a small shop selling sundresses, the vendor manning the stand notices our accents, the way we can’t seem to curl our tongues to pronounce r words. She says, “You are not from here.” We think only of bargaining. We explain that we’re foreigners, Americans actually. We traveled so far to look for affordable clothing. Can you give us some better prices? A little cheaper, maybe? The vendor is not interested in business. “Americans? Why do you look like that?” She steps closer, studying our non-American faces. Another vendor joins her. They pinch our clothing, look down our shirts, move their faces closer to our skin, still giggling at each other, Why do they look like that? “We’re Americans,” we repeat as they flock us, though I’m unsure whom we are addressing.
20
We reach to part the bead curtain hanging over the store’s exit. When we duck out, they point after us: Are you sure they’re not Chinese? Other vendowrs come out to look at us, looking after our running silhouettes. * Mandarin was my mother tongue. I grew up speaking it until I didn’t. It feels odd to relearn a language that I once knew so seamlessly, to say a word and realize I can no longer pronounce it. In my language program, a portion of the class is devoted to reviewing and pronouncing new vocabulary words. Our teacher holds up words on a flashcard, we read them back as accurately as possible. I sense there are different standards for different students. The teachers are more forgiving toward mistakes made by non-Asian students. In a class with mostly white students, I pronounce a word slightly incorrectly. The teacher singles me out. “Wrong,” she says, “say it again.” I say it. “Repeat it,” she says, “again.” I’ve been asked by multiple strangers if I plan on returning to guonei, or “the Mainland,” after college. I explain to them that I was born in the United States. I’m an American. They question me further. How, then, do I look Chinese? Some strangers in China don’t bother me with more questions. Instead, they get upset, hurl insults, and insist that I am not American, just delusional, arrogant, and Chinese. In Mandarin, there’s a phrase , (wangben), that means “forgetting everything.” It’s used to signify the worst kind of forgetting, a kind similar to amnesia, a kind hard to forgive—one that makes it hard to recall what you’ve lost.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
I hear this for the first time on a taxi ride to the Beijing airport. A particularly curious driver keeps asking me which Chinese CEOs I admire, so I tell him I don’t know many, I’m an American. Laughing, he says, “Then you have really wangben,” and I feel guilty. I feel this guilt when I’m overheard speaking English on the bus; when not remembering the faces of my relatives; when traveling to another country to relearn my mother tongue; when looking at my language teacher as I repeat a word I used to know, as she reiterates, Again, remember, again. * We Americans, Asian-Americans, and other hyphenated Americans are said to have the advantage of having one foot in each nation. The downside to this is that we flounder, struggle to find our balance. We are never rooted to one cohesive identity. I don’t find comfort in a purely American identity. America is the white parent asking if I eat dog at home. America is chink, is love me long time. America is the elementary school teacher telling me to speak normal. Not in Chinese. America is my parents calling my white friends “American,” my Chinese American friends “Chinese.” America is the child staring at me from the front of the bus, pulling his eyes into slits, grinning. In China, I can’t deny that I feel less foreign and interesting and more alien, the result of a ghastly intercultural experiment. Even so, I don’t find much comfort in the other country that claims my nationality, that implicitly taught me through years of racism—internalized, systemic, and overt—that speaking Chinese is useless, so I should just forget it. * Most Chinese Americans who have been to China believe that ABCs—Chinese slang for “Americanborn Chinese” receive different treatment than foreigners who look visibly foreign. I am grateful for the ability to slip through crowds unnoticed, to ride the subway without strangers snapping furtive photos of me. Nonetheless, when Chinese people breach the topic of nationality and identity, that’s when ABCs are paid the most attention. “If you’re American, then how do you look Chinese?” During this program, the origin of this NOVEMBER 2019 DECEMBER 2019
question becomes clear. For Chinese nationals, who have the idea that a nation must be “ethnically harmonious” for decades, nationality is inextricably tied to race. Thus, for them and for many others, American identity is inextricably tied to whiteness. Sometimes this makes me sad—this idea that I have no nationality to claim without constantly defending it. I think about how I’ll never feel fully comfortable standing for the Pledge of Allegiance; how I am simultaneously geographically, culturally, and politically removed from the country my parents left twenty years ago. I don’t find comfort in this idea that I’m thrashing between nations, merely treading seawater. At the same time, I reflect on how when governments attempt to tie race to nationality, it’s usually done to systematically oppress and terrorize those who fall in the margins—Muslims who are not Han Chinese, bodies that are not white. Do I need to participate in this? Do I need to identify with one nationality over the other, or can I exist and thrive in the margins? * White or white-passing Americans in China have the privilege of performing foreignness, or what can be perceived as a genuine American identity. We ABCs can only mimic it. Chinese people are fascinated by white Americans speaking Chinese, even with an accent it’s exotic. When I speak Chinese with an American accent—cultural treason. One day during my program, a few American students and I are treated to lunch by a Chinese study abroad company. To the white students, the company’s employees are magnanimous. They pile dumplings on the students’ plates—Which kinds do you like? Eat more!—and are amused by their ability to say haochi—“it tastes good.” They listen to their experiences, ask engaging questions: How did you start learning Chinese? It’s very good! I keep waiting for them to ask me questions, for the dumplings to be placed on my plate, for the compliments regarding my Chinese ability. Soon, the lazy Susan spins, staggeringly, toward me, but no one’s chopsticks rush to transfer chive dumplings to my plate. I wait until I realize I have to help myself. – Eileen Huang is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College.
21
CRITICAL ANGLE
THE LEFTOVERS
Illustration by Zihao Lin
What happens to the food Yale doesn’t eat? ELLIE GARLAND
E
ating at Yale was once an unsavory affair. Young men subsisted on salt beef, dry cod, and the occasional apple ‘pye’: a doughy dessert prepared with sugar, hog’s lard, and a peck of apples. Wars brought shortages, and at times, the students found the food so unbearable that they threw the boiled beef on the floor and the rancid butter out the windows. In the “Bread and Butter Rebellion” of 1828, a group of them went on strike, unsuccessfully, against the central dining hall, Commons, for its unsatisfactory offerings. In the fifty-four years since anthropologist Loomis Havemeyer published Eating at Yale: 1701–1965, almost everything about the dining experience has changed. Ceramic plateware, spa water, and self-service replaced the Yale china, hard cider, and butlers. Menus evolved to serve more global food. And yet, the philosophy behind eating at Yale has remained constant: it’s not really about the food. Eating at Yale is about sitting, thinking, and talking. But as students engage in conversation over Char Sui Ramen and Brownie Walnut Pudding, most do not realize that we live in a country where food waste is the largest and least recycled portion of the waste stream and in a city where 22 percent of residents lack steady access to healthy and affordable food. Yale University oversees twenty-three residential and retail dining operations and serves an average of fourteen thousand meals each day. The scale of this operation means that the way the University considers larger issues of food waste and food insecurity can have a significant impact. What happens before we eat is a familiar story. Yale Dining strives to source food locally and limit food waste during production. Dining staff turn unattractive tomato “seconds” into salsa and misshapen pumpkins into ravioli. They employ a “nose-to-tail” philosophy; if broccoli florets are the vegetable du jour, the stems are used in soups, and the leaves are featured in salad 22
bars. To improve campus “food literacy,” Yale sponsors local farm tours to teach students about its sustainable procurement practices. Come autumn, ninety mostly flannel-clad undergraduates flock to nearby farms to ride tractors through pumpkin patches and pick apples from trees in a vision of pastoral bliss. But the largely untold story of where our food goes after we eat can help elucidate Yale’s role in the New Haven food ecosystem. Where are the Yale-sponsored tours of the places Yale sends its food once students are done eating? *
THE NEW JOUR NAL
It’s lunchtime in your favorite residential college dining hall, and you’re clearing your dishes and waving goodbye to your friends. You scrape what remains of your red lentil pasta and garbanzo bean salad into the food waste bin. You speed to your seminar, pull up your readings, and spend the next hour trying to come up with a vaguely intelligent thought to share in class. You have long since forgotten your lunch. As you carry on with your day, your red lentil pasta and garbanzo bean salad sit in a bin with the other halfeaten and uneaten foods. Once or twice daily, a Yale truck collects the food scraps from your meal and the other 13,999 served that day. Your lunch travels thirtythree miles on I-91 North to Southington, Connecticut. The truck turns onto Depaolo Drive and pulls up to a large white structure on an expanse of black tar, nestled between an evergreen forest and rust-colored piles of mulch and topsoil. Men in bright yellow hoodies wander the grounds to monitor the cylindrical tanks and the magic happening inside them. Atop the largest of six tanks, an American flag waves in the wind. Quantum Biopower is Connecticut’s first food wasteto-energy facility and the only anaerobic digester on the East Coast. In 2011, Connecticut issued a food diversion mandate that requires large commercial businesses that produce 104 tons or more of food waste per year to send their food scraps to a state-licensed recycling operation, so long as there is such an operation within twenty miles. Though colleges and universities are exempt from the 2011 mandate, Yale, striving to be a leader on the sustainability front, opted to comply. In late 2016, the University became one of Quantum Biopower’s first customers. The Yale truck parks in Quantum’s reception bay and empties the day’s load into a murky brown pool that the company’s vice president Brian Paganini calls a “really gross milkshake.” The stench of rotting food pervades the air as Yale’s food scraps mix with waste from nearby supermarkets, hotels, hospitals, and seven other colleges and universities. A violent churning separates inorganic materials from the organic ones before the milkshake is fed to the digester: a titanic oxygendeprived steel tank that holds one million gallons of liquefied waste at a low-pH, high-temperature setting. Microscopic bacteria in the digester consume the food waste with constant oversight from the Quantum team. “You can’t give the bacteria the whole Thanksgiving meal one day, or it won’t eat the next,” said Director of Operations John Ferguson. He described the anaerobic digester as an infant in its early days—the bacteria’s first NOVEMBER 2019
‘meal’ was milk from a nearby dairy supplier—that has since blossomed into a hungry teenager that will eat basically anything. As the bacteria consume the liquefied waste, they expel methane. “It’s a biological process,” said Paganini. “No different than a cow’s stomach or the human body.” Quantum’s state-of-the-art tanks harness the methane to create electricity. Southington buys back some of the electricity at a discounted rate to power its wastewater plants, municipal buildings, police station, and fire station. So far in 2019, Yale trucks have delivered over 850 tons of food waste to the Quantum facility. The Quantum operation recycles forty-thousand tons of food waste each year, generating 420 thousand cubic feet of contained methane and enough electricity to theoretically power 775 homes with clean energy each. One of the main advantages of anaerobic digestion is that it keeps the methane contained, harnessing the emissions as fuel for energy creation. Traditional composting, which turns organic waste into soil and fertilizer, allows some methane to escape into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. While Yale’s partnership with Quantum Biopower diverts waste from landfills and incinerators, the University’s food disposal system isn’t perfect. For one, food waste bins are only available to students in dining halls, during dining hall hours. This system fails to capture food waste generated from Yale’s robust snacking and buttery culture. Secondly, diners often put into waste bins things that cannot be processed at the facility. According to Ferguson, Quantum recently contacted Yale about silverware, trays, tools, and even brooms mixed in with the food scraps. The machinery can scrape out this contamination, but only at a volume of 5 to 10 percent of incoming material. On college campuses, every eater plays a role in optimizing sustainable operations. To estimate how
“BUT THE LARGELY UNTOLD STORY OF WHERE OUR FOOD GOES AFTER WE EAT CAN HELP ELUCIDATE YALE’S ROLE IN THE NEW HAVEN FOOD 23
“IT’S A FRAGILE SYSTEM: MEETING THE URGENT NEEDS OF ONE GROUP CURRENTLY DEPENDS ON ANOTHER GROUP HAVING TOO MUCH.” much food to purchase, Yale Dining uses data-driven meal forecasting based on two years of historical data. If all students adhered to Yale Dining’s “take what you eat, and eat what you take” philosophy, a message printed rather inconspicuously on dining hall fliers, the data would reflect small behavioral changes and eventually lead to purchasing reductions. Natalie Warren, who graduated from Yale in 2017, tackled the issue of university food waste in her cognitive science thesis. She sees food waste as a cooperative dilemma since students must expend some costly effort (taking the appropriate amount of food) to promote a public good (reducing food waste). For her thesis, she implemented a cooperation-inspired marketing campaign in half of the college dining halls, fastening endearing posters to napkin dispensers and bulletin boards with slogans like “Second Time’s A Charm: Take only what you eat and go back for seconds if you’re still hungry. #cleanplateclub.” The six dining halls with the marketing intervention saw a statistically significant reduction in dinnertime food waste at an average of .01 pounds per person per day, or about sixteen pounds per day. Later iterations of Warren’s signs still adorn dining halls today, reminding students to consume with intention. Edmund Chute, a senior at Yale, and Chris Chute, who graduated two years ago, are taking a technological approach to campus food waste generated outside of the dining hall. This fall, the brothers launched Vulture, an app designed to provide students with fast, accurate information about every source of free food on campus. Students post a picture, description, and the location of any surplus food. Other users receive a notification with directions and updates should the Insomnia cookies or Popeyes biscuits run out before they arrive. “We think the best way to reduce food waste is to create a platform for notifying people, telling them when food is available, and making it fun to go get it,” said Chris 24
Chute. The app has launched at Yale and Harvard, and the Chute brothers hope to expand to other campuses across the country. Still, the scale of the problem is enormous. In the United States today, more than thirty-six million tons of food are sent to methane-releasing landfills and ash- and soot-producing incinerators. It would take an additional 910 facilities like Quantum Biopower to divert all this waste and turn it into energy. Quantum is already running at 95 percent capacity, so the team sees tremendous opportunity for growth in the state of Connecticut and across America. “Anaerobic digestion is at the nexus between recycling and energy. In the United States, this whole industry is very much in its infancy,” said Paganini. “Recovering food waste is the last portion of the waste stream that really needs attention. It’s the final frontier of recycling.” But there are still many barriers. Not all states have mandates like Connecticut’s, and even Connecticut’s mandate is poorly enforced. Developing, permitting, and financing anaerobic digestion facilities is an expensive endeavor that requires community support, and many people have a not-in-my-backyard attitude toward waste, Ferguson said. Without these facilities, the onus falls entirely on institutions and individuals to reduce waste. * Not all food Yale Dining cooks is digested by its student body and Quantum bacteria. As Yale’s food scraps make the daily trek to the anaerobic digester, Yale’s untouched leftovers travel a shorter distance: to the soup kitchens, daycare centers, elderly housing apartments, and faith communities in New Haven that feed some of the University’s food-insecure neighbors. If the algorithms for predicting food volume were perfect, Yale Dining wouldn’t have any leftovers to donate, but a sprawling, buffet-style food service operation makes excess inevitable. On Fridays and Saturdays, Yale student volunteers pick up some of these leftovers from the residential college dining halls. They drive around twenty pans of food to the United Parish House at the corner of Temple and Wall Street, home to the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, or DESK. Since 1987, DESK has provided weekday meals to New Haven residents experiencing homelessness or poverty. In 2005, students working with the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project extended DESK service to weekends by launching the Yale THE NEW JOUR NAL
Design by Chase Westover
Community Kitchen, or YCK: a food-rescue program where student volunteers serve and staff dinner service with food donated by Yale Dining. On weekend nights, YCK volunteers in hairnets and chalky white gloves serve chicken thighs, grilled carrots, and Bolognese pasta on plastic trays. At round tables in folding chairs, about fifty men, women, and children eat dinners that closely resemble what the Yale student volunteers ate in the dining halls that week. YCK Project Heads Willemijn van Deursen and Maurice Ware are grateful for the friendships they’ve built at the United Parish House over the years, though they hope for a day when they no longer see the same people meal after meal. “Our goal as an organization is not to exist because then there wouldn’t be a need,” said van Deursen. Today, some emergency food services in New Haven are made possible by Yale Dining’s inefficiencies. It’s a fragile system: meeting the urgent needs of one group currently depends on another group having too much. Yale Dining is also a steady donor to Haven’s Harvest, a one-year-old food recovery nonprofit that redistributes food through a deep and broad community network. “Runners” drive trays from restaurants, supermarkets, and universities to churches, housing complexes, and community agencies. These hyper-local exchanges typically take no longer than fifteen minutes. “The perimeter of Yale’s campus is food insecure,” said Lori Martin, the founder and executive director of Haven’s Harvest. “We don’t need to move food far to make a difference, and nobody within an arm’s length of this campus should go without food.” On one run in November, Caleb MartinMooney, Haven’s Harvest’s operations director and Martin’s son, parked his gray station wagon on York Street. He descended the stone steps to Branford College’s basement kitchen and grabbed three pans of food from a walk-in refrigerator. He loaded orzo, herbed chicken, and eggplant parmesan into his Bernie-stickerspeckled trunk. With NPR on low in the background, MartinMooney drove 2.1 miles to the Fair Haven Elderly Apartments where he dropped off the food in a common area with large windows and potted plants. He retrieved a dozen pans from last week’s delivery and drove home. This run is one of about twenty of Haven’s Harvest food transfers that happen each day, totaling nearly a million pounds of redistributed food annually. It was initially difficult for Martin to find a home for her carloads of organic and commercially grown food. Four of the pillars of emergency food service in New NOVEMBER 2019
Haven—DESK, Columbus House, Loaves and Fishes, and the Community Soup Kitchen—rely mostly on food banks and had little interest in the variety and unpredictability of Haven’s Harvest’s supply. But Martin knew that more residents than those who regularly attend soup kitchens experience food insecurity. “Excess food is not just for those in need, an ‘us’ and ‘them,” said Martin. She described one encounter with a woman from Connecticut’s shoreline who called with six pans of food leftover from a town hall. Martin called several faith communities near the donor site and found a place that could use the food. When she told the donor where the food was going, the donor was surprised it wasn’t headed for New Haven. “There are people who are hungry everywhere,” Martin reflected. “What has been surprising is food insecurity is so silent. Sometimes we don’t hear about it until that burden has been lifted.” Martin has since developed a community-centered approach to food recovery. Through word of mouth, people know to call her when spare food arises unexpectedly, whether that’s dozens of pizza boxes from a conference or six-hundred burritos from a hackathon. Sometimes businesses are shocked by the amount of excess food coming from their own kitchens. This
“EXCESS FOOD IS NOT A SHAMEFUL THING. BUT THE ‘SHAMEFULNESS’ MAKES IT SO WE CAN’T TALK TRUTHFULLY ABOUT LEFTOVER FOOD.” realization may prompt institutional efforts to reduce food waste, resulting in fewer food donations. Martin urges food providers to embrace, rather than resent, the leftovers they do produce. “Excess food is not a shameful thing,” she said. “But the ‘shamefulness’ makes it so we can’t talk truthfully about leftover food. If employees can’t tell the truth, then the food will get thrown away when we could have done something better with it.” Despite the potential for more food aid to come from newly-embraced leftovers, Martin understands 25
that food redistribution will only ever be a temporary solution to a deeper problem. Austin Bryniarski, a School of Forestry & Environmental Studies graduate, focuses on the politics of food waste. He commends Martin’s willingness to talk about power, race, class and gender when it comes to food redistribution, but he wishes that the emergency food service industry as a whole would “flex its political muscles” more. In Bryniarski’s eyes, food recovery programs, banks, and kitchens address an immediate lack of food while often forgetting that hunger is just one way that poverty manifests. “The most sustainable, structural way to address food insecurity is to address the poverty that makes food so hard to come by,” said Bryniarski. “Otherwise, you miss the forest for the trees.” Bryniarski also worries some of these programs treat food-insecure populations as mere mouths to consume unwanted excess. “The people on the receiving end of this food basically become a safety valve for a system in which people produce too much,” said Bryniarski. Critiquing a system of emergency food providers has complex implications, especially when so many residents currently depend on them for their meals. But Bryniarski is right that alleviating food insecurity in New Haven would require more of Yale than surplus food donations. If the University supported upstream political change, like affordable housing, job creation, and fair wage initiatives, fewer people would depend on emergency food providers. Mayor-Elect Justin Elicker, for instance, urges the University to rethink its tax contribution to the city. In his Blue New Deal, he pressures Yale to give $50 million annually, quadruple its current voluntary contribution. Elicker believes this money would dramatically increase New Haven’s ability to function as a city. Moving from a temporary solution to a permanent one takes time, and there are limits to what any institution, even one as powerful as Yale, can do to effect change. To start, Yale Dining could supplement its farm tours with initiatives to advance a campus-wide understanding of food insecurity and food waste as pieces of a larger structural puzzle. While college students today are often told to attend to the present moment, it is worth thinking about the future: the immediate future in which our garbanzo bean vestiges power the Southington fire station and leftover orzo from college kitchens finds a second home at DESK, but also the future that people like Bryniarski are working towards, in which food insecurity doesn’t exist and food waste is not wasted. The next time you’re 26
eating Quinoa-Stuffed Peppers in your residential college, engage in the hallowed tradition of dining hall discourse, and ask your neighbor: how can we get there?
– Ellie Garland is a senior in Pierson College.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
Unclear Cutting
NOVEMBER 2019 Design by Chase Westover
The Yale Investments Office owns vast timberlands in  27 northern New England. Some question whether the land has been managed sustainably. MAX GRAHAM
COVER
T
he autumn leaves of New Hampshire’s Coos County, the Great North Woods, beyond the White Mountains, obscure my view. I am searching for what Rick Samson, seated next to me in a camouflage button-down, is trying to show me, but I can’t see past the burnt yellows, oranges, and caramel browns. Samson and I are in his black pickup, bumping along a gravel road a few miles into a dense woodland. The vast majority—81 percent—of New Hampshire land is forest. Every so often Samson slows his truck to say, “See how small this stuff is? There was nothing here when they cut it,” or, “If you look down through there, there is nothing; there is nothing left here at all.” But everywhere I look, except for a few unremarkable tracts where the forest has been cleared, I see trees—poplars, beeches, maples—and lots of them. I am not qualified to assess whether a logging operation is sustainable or not. But neither, really, is Samson. Even though he has spent more than seventy years hunting and snowmobiling in the New Hampshire woods, he is a county commissioner with no technical background in forestry. Still, Samson isn’t shy about sharing his opinion. The tree trunks are skinnier than they should be, he says, and they have been hacked down in recent years where they should have been thriving. Samson feels so strongly about the mismanagement of the land here, in Millsfield, New Hampshire, that he has agreed to take me on a tour of the property without its owner’s permission. As a public official, Samson is not too worried about getting in trouble. He is confident that he could proffer a convincing excuse were someone to catch us. I am not worried, either, because I feel that I have a stake in the land. I am a Yale student, and Yale, though reluctant to admit it, owns this forest. To be precise, the Yale Investments Office owns it. Unlike Yale’s research forests, which the School of Forestry own and operate, this timberland is part of the university’s $30.3 billion endowment. Its purpose, plain and simple, is profit. Nothing about the physical property suggests that the trees are Yale’s. A sign at the entrance declares that the land belongs to “Bayroot LLC.” A Google search of “Bayroot LLC” reveals that the company has no website. Indeed, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what Bayroot is. According to a handful of news articles, Bayroot is not an ordinary LLC, but a “subsidiary” or a “shell company.” More informative is a line in Yale’s federal tax documents, which says the university owns 98.8 percent of Bayroot, 28
a share valued at $58.6 million, as of 2018. Essentially, Bayroot is a name on paper—a name that conveniently conceals the Yale Investments Office’s efforts to gobble up land in rural New Hampshire and Maine. To make matters more complicated, Yale (or Bayroot) doesn’t actually manage the land it owns; a company called Wagner Forest Management does. Wagner oversees logging operations and land management plans on 2.7-million acres of forest across New England and eastern Canada. The primary goal of timber investment management organizations like Wagner is to maximize return for their investors. Between 1993 and 2017, investments in U.S. timber returned an average of a little over 8 percent, meaning that timber is a stable long-term investment. In his book Pioneering Portfolio Management, David Swensen, Yale’s chief investment officer, explains that timberland “offers strong return potential, steady cash flow, inflation protection, and portfolio diversification.” In short, it is a safe and steady institutional investment—one that won’t necessarily make a fortune in the short term, but will generate good returns over the course of generations. (Swensen declined to comment for this story.) Most of the trees in Coos County used to be owned by paper companies, but within the last three decades, timber supply has shifted to a global market as cheap imports have outmatched domestic products. The local forest-products industry has been hit hard. Coos’ mills have shuttered, and outside private investors like Yale have bought up holdings, hoping to capitalize on timber’s low risk and steady returns. Northern New Hampshire has always relied heavily— economically and culturally—on forests. Timber “is our economy. It’s our sense of place and our sense of community. Our heritage really is built into the landscape,” said Liz Wyman, a Yale School of Forestry graduate who now lives in Lancaster, the county seat. Lifelong Coos County resident and local journalist John Harrigan, who used to manage 160 acres of timberland around his home, echoed Wyman. “I’ve been involved in wood, one way or another, all my life. It’s just part of me,” said Harrigan, whose dining hall ceiling is supported by gargantuan red maple logs, cut in the mid-19th century. As I ride along with Samson through the woods, he recalls that, in 2017, Harrigan and another one of his friends, Wayne Montgomery, a former logger, were fined $124 for escorting a few Yale School of Forestry students along the same private road that we are now driving down. They were checking on the forest, much as Samson and I are. (Neither Samson nor the students were charged because they were passengers, and the fine was for THE NEW JOUR NAL
operating motorized vehicles without permission.) Later, when I visited Harrigan at his home, he laughed about the fine. Harrigan, whose family has owned two Coos County newspapers for decades, has been dubbed “The King of the North Country” because he is quite possibly more devoted to the woods of northern New Hampshire than anyone else. While Harrigan has not spent much time analyzing Wagner’s forestry practices, he called the company’s management of the Millsfield forest “a cut-and-get-out,” a logging job “with little regard for what could come.” He said that a lot of people can’t tell the difference between a “quick cut for profit” and a genuinely sustainable harvest. “When they look at a forest, they just see trees.” * Dottie Kurtz sees Wagner’s trees just about everyday. Kurtz is a town administrator in Errol, another one-mainintersection Coos County hamlet, which borders Yale’s land. I met her at the Errol town hall, a three-story white wood home. As Kurtz and I walked around the town hall’s main foyer, lined with photos of lumberjacks and felled logs, I asked her about allegations against Wagner’s timber practices. To my surprise, she gave me a perplexed look and said, “I have never heard anyone say anything negative—ever.” Wagner manages the land adjacent to Kurtz’s backyard. She often rides her snowmobile along the network of trails that crisscrosses Wagner-managed forest. “They take good care of the land,” Kurtz said. “They manage it well. They’re good neighbors.” Kurtz knew about the Yale-Bayroot connection, although she wasn’t bothered by it and said most people in Errol probably were not aware of it. When I pressed her again about the possibility that Wagner has not managed Yale’s land to a high ethical standard, she was nearly lost for words. “I can’t—I’m dumbfounded.” I, too, was dumbfounded. After all the suspicious things I had heard about Wagner, here was one of Wagner’s neighbors telling me the company was taking good care of the land. Then again, I knew that most people, including me, could not tell the difference between good and bad timber management. In Yale Forestry Professor Chad Oliver’s lingo: “A lot of amateurs don’t know a good forest practice when they see it.” Besides, even the few people with enough expertise to assess a timber harvest might have different understandings of what “good” and “bad” mean in the world of forestry. After speaking with Kurtz, I doubted more than ever NOVEMBER 2019
that Wagner was an evil corporation laying waste to the county’s forests. But I also figured that, as friendly and forthright as Kurtz was, she might not be seeing the whole picture. And I feared that I wasn’t either. * The environmental consequences of unsustainable logging are fairly straightforward: habitat loss (for animals like lynx, in New England), decline in biodiversity, soil and watershed damage. But maybe the most urgent danger is climate change: forests store a tremendous amount of carbon. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, forests offset 13 percent of the United States’ carbon emissions. NEFF, a forest conservation nonprofit, has published guidelines for timber practices that would sequester 1.9 gigatons of carbon in New England forests in the next twenty years—the equivalent of taking every vehicle in New England off the road, according to NEFF’s executive director Bob Perschel. “Yale could be a part of that challenge,” Perschel said. Since neither Perschel nor the rest of us know exactly how Wagner manages Yale’s land, it is impossible to say specifically what the company could do differently. But NEFF’s recommended logging practices would generate 2 to 4 percent in annual returns, falling well short of the Yale endowment’s 5.7 percent average annual return on natural resources over the last ten years. In 2009, Yale said that its timber interests comprised roughly three-million acres. The University has held vast holdings in New England forestland at least since the early 2000s. In December 2003, Bayroot bought 129 thousand acres of land in New Hampshire and more than five hundred thousand acres in Maine. At the time, no one was aware that Bayroot was connected to Yale. “All we knew about was Bayroot, Bayroot, Bayroot,” Samson reflected. “We thought it was just another company.” (Yale also owns 91.3 percent of Typhoon LLC, which, according to a 2011 Bangor Daily News article, holds 471,000 thousand of acres of land in Maine. Typhoon LLC’s land, like Bayroot’s, is managed by Wagner.) Much about Yale’s endowment is mysterious. Swensen has not revealed any specifics about Yale’s holdings—such as value, location, amount of returns, or partnerships with other companies. Swensen has railed against student activists and the Yale Daily News, which, he wrote in a March 2018 op-ed in the News, “frequently fails to meet fundamental journalistic standards” in reporting on the endowment. But when student activists and reporters, 29
and even members of directly affected communities, like Samson, a say-it-like-it-is Navy vet and registered Republican, have pressed the University to defend its investment practices, administrators have responded with condescension at worst and cryptic answers at best. The Investments Office has a policy not to speak with reporters on the record. Yale cannot dispute that Wagner has not been perfect. The company was fined $35,000 in 2009 by the Maine Forest Service for clearcutting in an area of Bayroot land where such activity was not allowed. Clearcutting is the practice of removing every last merchandisable tree from an area of five or more acres. Glenn Booma, a biologist by training who has spent time in Bayroot’s woods since the nineteen-seventies, said he can immediately tell the difference when he crosses onto Bayroot land. Booma doesn’t have a formal background in forestry, but he doesn’t hold back from criticizing Wagner. “What I see when I walk on their property is embarrassing for them,” Booma says, and it “could likely be corrected with modest improvements in timber management.” He describes trees cut too close to wetlands and severe erosion near roads and waterways. Sediment from erosion after a harvest can harm trout populations; alongside a New Hampshire state fish biologist, Booma found that the area’s brook trout “literally decreased by hundreds of fish in a hundred meter stretch” following a heavy cut on Bayroot land. Booma observes that these practices, though inexcusable, might be expected of a for-profit timber company. But of an institution that claims to care so deeply about environmental stewardship and ethical leadership? In a 2017 open letter to the Yale Investments Office, Wyman, the Yale Forestry graduate, implored the University “to stop destroying our landscape, communities, environment, and economy with poor management decisions on its thousands of acres of timberland in New Hampshire.” Wyman also is not an expert in forest management, but she did learn about sustainable forestry at the Yale School of Forestry. She said she has enough background to feel confident that Wagner is “not practicing real, genuine sustainable forestry.” And Yale, she says, is complicit. * “How would you sum up what Yale has done wrong, what Wagner has done wrong, what Bayroot has done wrong?” I ask Wayne Montgomery, Samson’s former logger friend, who leans all the way back in his recliner, 30
his feet nearly level with his head. Montgomery, Samson, and I are at Montgomery’s house, a one-story, light blue home, typical of rural New England, with an American flag hanging out front and a pickup parked in the driveway. Montgomery lives in Groveton, New Hampshire, a small town that used to buzz with the hum of a paper mill, but now is unhurried and quiet, other than the occasional whizz of a timber lorry passing through town. Wagner manages its forests, Montgomery answers, “with a policy of just trying to produce the highest-valued products as quickly and as much as they can, and it’s a short term management plan. There’s no sustainability.” Montgomery admits that he cannot say with certainty at what rate Wagner harvests timber, but he said he would bet it is “three or four times” that of truly sustainable logging companies. To put it simply, Montgomery argues that Wagner harvests far too fast to maintain an ecologically healthy forest. Montgomery ushers me over to his dining room table, where four printed-out satellite images lay side by side. Two of the photos show Bayroot’s land in Millsfield, one captured in 2003, when Bayroot bought the land, the other from 2015, after the land had been logged. The 2003 photo reveals an emerald green earth, fractured only by a few skinny brown lines representing roads. Referring to the 2015 photo, Samson joked, “If a squirrel wanted to go across that land it would need a knapsack and lunch.” As I view the images, Montgomery opens his laptop and pulls up the satellite software administered by the University of New Hampshire. He says that Dartmouth College owns and manages a timber operation on land adjacent to Bayroot’s land, in Cambridge, New Hampshire. Both Samson and Montgomery insist that Dartmouth practices exemplary forestry. Montgomery zooms in on the border of Bayroot’s land and Dartmouth’s land. “This is the Dartmouth property here,” he says, pointing to the right side of the screen. “And it is treated totally and completely different. Now there are places where they’ve harvested timber here, and you can actually see that.” Then he points a little to the left of the border. “But there’s nothing left here; this strip of land—there’s nothing left. It’s gone,” he says. Even to my untrained eye, the evidence of clearcutting on Bayroot’s land seemed stark. But I still was not quite sure what to do with that knowledge. In the moment, I assumed clearcutting was not good practice, but upon further research, I discovered that it actually can be advisable in certain situations. In its guide to ecologically sound forest management, the New England Forestry Foundation THE NEW JOUR NAL
states, “Despite the public concern, clearcutting may be called upon where mature trees are in poor health or condition due to ice damage, insect infestation or other disturbances, or to create habitat for birds and mammals requiring larger patches of early-successional forest.” Could anyone really analyze Wagner’s practices from just a few satellite images, without knowing why and to what extent they actually engaged in those practices? Samson and Montgomery refer to the satellite images as indisputable evidence of Wagner’s ill management. But my doubt lingered. After meeting with Samson and Montgomery, I reached out to Kevin Evans, the manager of Dartmouth’s timberland—called the Second College Grant. Evans thinks that sustainable forestry is pretty straightforward. “My goal is that I don’t cut anymore than I grow,” he said. The Second College Grant does not belong to Dartmouth’s endowment, but it is managed for profit and, according to its website, “provides revenue for student scholarship.” Evans calls the forest “an investment property,” but unlike the Yale Investments Office, Dartmouth uses its woodland for research and outdoor recreation, not only timber harvesting. Evans declined to comment on Wagner’s management. The most he would say about Yale is, “They don’t want to tell people what’s there.” * I decided to go see what the people at Wagner would or would not tell me. When I arrived unannounced at Wagner’s field office in Errol, a white-bearded man in dark jeans and a red-and-black flannel button-down ushered me into the small office. I was shocked to be welcomed so amicably and even more surprised that, after a few minutes of rather awkward conversation, the man, Raymond Berthiaume, harvest planning and operations manager, agreed to speak with me. Berthiaume oversees more than 500,000 acres of land in New Hampshire and western Maine, mostly owned by Bayroot. Berthiaume’s initial response to my concerns about Wagner’s logging practices was that the company is certified as “sustainable” by third-party auditors. In fact, Berthiaume told me, one of those companies—Sustainable Forestry Initiative, or SFI—was out on Wagner’s land auditing the company as we spoke. He said one or both of the auditors, the other called Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, checks up on Wagner every year. The company’s website confirms that the certifications are “a critical part of Wagner’s business model” and guarantee “an objective evaluation of Wagner’s sustainability efforts.” The Yale NOVEMBER 2019
Investments Office made a similar argument in a 2017 press release, calling Wagner “a world-class manager of timberland.” Montgomery and Samson had told me that the green certifications do not mean much, that it is not that hard to become certified and that Wagner and other timber companies actually pay for the certifications—a potential conflict of interest. But Berthiaume insisted that the auditors are entirely independent and have high standards. (Other foresters I have interviewed similarly dispelled claims that the auditors lack independence.) Compared to Yale’s secretive ownership, Berthiaume’s candor was refreshing. “I’d say Bayroot is probably the number one or two largest private landowners in the state,” he said. “If you’re driving through northern New Hampshire, there’s better than a 75 percent chance you’re looking at Bayroot-owned land.” Besides, many of Berthiaume’s points made perfect sense: “Wagner is in the business of managing timberland, so it’s in our interest to keep the timberland timberland. And, why would we change that? That’s cutting ourselves out of a job, and that’s not a good business plan.” Berthiaume also denied Samson and Montgomery’s claims that Wagner engages in unsustainable practices like clearcutting. He fell back on the fact that Wagner has been certified as “sustainable” by two independent auditors. But as Coos County resident and environmental journalist Jamie Sayen would later tell me, “If you had a hundred people in a room and you asked them to write down the definition of ‘sustainable,’ you would have a hundred different definitions.” It occurred to me that maybe—likely, in fact—neither Montgomery nor Berthiaume was lying. They were just operating under different understandings of “sustainable.” * Local opposition to Wagner’s forest management and to Yale’s furtive presence in Coos County extends beyond the logging question. In November 2012, Wagner leased a 24-mile stretch of Bayroot land in Coos County to Eversource Energy, an energy conglomerate planning to build a hydro-electric transmission line, called Northern Pass, from Quebec to Massachusetts. (The financial details of the lease were not publicly disclosed.) Eversource had been buying up land from local residents, trying to carve out a contiguous route for the $1.6 billion power cable through northern New Hampshire. Private landowners and environmental groups banded together to oppose the 31
Bayroot’s land in Coos County, New Hampshire. project, which they argued would harm the landscape and hurt property value. Bayroot’s land was key. “Without Bayroot I don’t know if [Eversource] could have done it,” said Chris Jensen, a former reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio who covered the controversy in its early stages. News of Yale’s involvement with Bayroot only added to the opposition movement’s narrative of an out-of-touch corporation taking advantage of a small rural community. In a January 2018 Yale Daily News op-ed, Samson wrote that the transmission line would, among other harmful things, “mar forests that we have depended on and enjoyed for centuries.” Yale, Samson argued, “is extracting significant wealth from Coos County.” Charlie Jordan, who owns and edits the Colebrook Chronicle—a local weekly paper— said Northern Pass is the only issue his paper has ever taken a stand on. “This was the fundamental crux of why people live here” In May 2017, Samson, Montgomery, and a few fellow Coos County residents traveled five hours to Yale to participate in a teach-in alongside student activists. Samson and the students also visited the School of Forestry hoping to meet with dean Indy Burke, but Samson said she was not there. He said upon returning home he received a call from the Yale police, who told him he might be arrested if he went back to Yale’s campus. (Samson does not have a record of the call.) Unfazed, Samson returned to campus in October 2017 to deliver a petition to the Investments Office, but he was barred entry. “I was not a dissident until 32
Courtesy of Glenn Booma
I visited Yale,” Samson later reflected, grinning. Throughout the Northern Pass controversy, Yale public affairs officers asserted that Wagner’s contract with Eversource had already been signed and that Wagner could not legally back out. Although the University refuses to speak in detail about its contract with Wagner, Yale’s argument appears something like: when the Investments Office enters into a contract with an investment manager, it sets general expectations and ethical guidelines for the manager but yields authority to interfere with day-today operations. Yale did not have the power to terminate the Northern Pass lease nor would it have the power to change Wagner’s logging practices. Still, the Yale Investments Office’s website declares, “Yale will work with fund managers to implement its ethical investment policies” and can attempt “moral suasion.” When push comes to shove, Yale can sell its interest in a company to a secondary buyer. But that would cost money, not make it. Ultimately, in July 2019, the Supreme Court of New Hampshire unanimously upheld a ruling that Eversource failed to demonstrate that the power line would not interfere with local land uses. The court’s ruling ended the Northern Pass project, but the fight has moved to Maine, where another power company, Central Maine Power, or CMP, hopes to route a similar transmission line from Quebec to Massachusetts. In late August, Wagner agreed to a deal with CMP to run the line across seventeen acres of Bayroot-owned land in Maine. The Bangor Daily News reported that Yale’s president Peter Salovey wrote in an THE NEW JOUR NAL
email to a concerned state representative that Yale has “no direct ownership of land in Maine,” but only “indirect property interests.” Salovey’s statement aligns with Yale’s curt defenses during the Northern Pass debate, but the fact remains that even an investor with “indirect property interests” has leverage. The issue is not that Yale lacks power; it is that the University doesn’t think that what is happening on its timberland constitutes a serious enough breach of ethics—or at least the University is not ready to reconsider how, or with whom, it invests in timber. * The Yale School of Forestry’s nearly 11,000 acres of New England timberland is entirely separate from the endowment’s. Frank Cervo, who manages the School’s woods, emphasized this fact several times to me, as did Professor Chad Oliver, who said there is a “firewall” between the Investments Office and the School of Forestry. Forestry professors and staff simply do not get involved in the management of the endowment. Curious about the “firewall,” I wrote to School of Forestry Dean Indy Burke. She replied, “It’s not really a firewall, it’s just that we have our own forests” and to manage those “is about all we can possibly do.” She said that the School of Forestry won’t criticize the endowment: “It’s rather like caring a great deal about your family but not getting involved or taking sides in your siblings’ marital issues just because you love and understand them.” Burke was nothing but gracious in her willingness to engage with me, and she even offered to meet with me in person, although not before my deadline for this piece. In her email, Burke rightfully pointed out that the implications of Wagner’s forestry management are complex. But Burke, as any Yale student or professor, has a stake in the endowment, and she, as the leader of one of the nation’s most prestigious forestry schools, has a unique position of power from which to weigh in on the ethics of timber management. Cervo graduated from the School of Forestry last year and has minimal knowledge about Wagner’s logging practices, but he cautions me about criticizing the company. He warns that some of the coverage he has seen about Wagner has lacked “basis” in forest ecology. In October 2018, Cervo took several Yale students on a tour of New Hampshire forestry, including Wagner-managed land. He called the company “gracious” hosts and said that nothing he observed seemed problematic. But, he admitted, “You’d need two to three weeks [on Wagner’s land] if you really wanted to diagnose what they’re doing.” NOVEMBER 2019
I can’t conclude that Wagner is doing something categorically wrong. I don’t have the expertise to assert my own judgments about a company’s forestry practices, and I am not sure anyone who has the expertise as well as the means and time to assess Wagner’s operation comprehensively would speak to me on the record. I strongly suspect Wagner could be doing better. And I believe firmly that the Yale Investments Office should invest only with a company that practices exemplary forestry, even if doing so would generate less profit. But until we know exactly what Wagner is doing on Yale’s land and until the right people start looking into what Wagner is doing on Yale’s land, forming an accurate conclusion about whether or not Wagner practices “sustainable” forestry may be impossible. Yale’s endowment covers more than a quarter of the University’s operating budget, including professorships and financial aid. And the Investments Office engages in secrecy no doubt to prevent competitors from discovering their investment strategies. Secrecy gives Yale a leg up. It helps Yale fund critical programs. It benefits all of us, students and faculty alike. At the same time, secrecy prevents us, stakeholders, from holding the University to the high standards that it preaches. At an institution which prides itself in the pursuit of Lux et Veritas, which teaches its students to be curious, to ask questions, and to challenge boilerplate narratives, secrecy about the ethics of its investments is a violation of Yale’s own stated values. “If the heat gets too hot in the kitchen,” Glenn Booma said, Yale will change how it invests in timber. “The heat’s just not hot enough yet because you’ve got to drive hundreds of miles from New Haven and twenty-five miles up a dirt road in order to look at this stuff.” I drove that distance, and I would encourage others to do the same. Only then will what happens beneath the forest canopy become clearer. And only then will we know if the kitchen will get too hot. – Max Graham is a senior in Davenport College.
33
ENDNOTE
STERLING’S HOLD ON ME An unlikely love letter. IRENE VÁZQUEZ
T
he first boy I loved at Yale won my heart in the core of Sterling Memorial Library. After dinner at Berkeley one September night, he told me that he’d happened upon a book he thought I would enjoy, so he’d put it on hold for me, and would I like to go with him and pick it up? We put away our dishes, and we made our way to the Sterling Hold Shelf, where he had requested Philip Gross’s Mappa Mundi. It was my first visit to the Hold Shelf, and walking past the rows of alphabetized volumes to the shelf labeled “Q” (the first letter of his last name), I could think of nothing more romantic than having a dangerously pretty boy make a book of poetry materialize out of the stacks for my reading pleasure. I affectionately clutched the slim green volume to my chest. The boy and I are no longer speaking; in fact, when the book was due months later, I’ll admit, I considered holding onto it so he’d be beset with late fees. In the two years that have passed since that night, I’ve been a frequent guest at the Hold Shelf, and I’ve never gotten over the rush of swiping in to retrieve a book set aside especially for me. I guess in a place with millions of volumes, an entire room qualifies as a “shelf.” The Hold Shelf’s entrance, a trio of forest-green leather doors studded with brass nails, stands below “Alma Mater,” a mural by Yale alum Eugene Savage depicting a celestial Mother Knowledge flanked by her devotees. The Hold Shelf is the library’s middle child. It lacks the majesty of the nave, whose name gestures at Sterling’s cathedral-like nature. (Yale Tour Guide Legend™ has it that in the
34
late 1920s, architect James Gamble Rogers wanted to design a chapel for Yale but received the commission to design a library instead, so he concocted the most cathedral-like library he could muster.) Sterling opened in 1931; the Hold Shelf opened in 2013 as part of a $20 million modernization of the nave. But entering the Hold Shelf from the grandeur of the nave—stone arches, coffered ceiling, stained glass windows—reveals a startlingly utilitarian space. White chain-link fencing quite literally cordons it off from the endless stacks. Each shelf, where holds are grouped by last name of the requester, are also chained off. Compared to the abundance of the stacks, the shelves never look quite full enough. The lights are at once aggressively fluorescent and too dim. It’s a fundamentally transactional space; most customers at the hold shelf go in because they require a book and leave once they’ve retrieved it. This efficiency is what the 2013 renovations were all about: combining the previously disparate desks of Circulation, Information, and Library Privileges into one desk and using the space freed up at the end of the nave for self-service check-out, workstations, and of course, the Hold Shelf. This automated expediency is magical to me. At the Hold Shelf, I can request book after book, and print copies of Yale’s nearly 15 million volumes appear just like an Amazon Prime Delivery (but without the ethical compromises). “Get it @ Yale,” the web page that outlines the university’s various methods of book delivery, speaks to its Internet Age immediacy. Access needs aside, it’s this same acquisitive rush that fuels
THE NEW JOUR NAL
Design by Meher Hans
online shopping addictions and the willingness to pay exorbitant delivery fees on UberEats. Much like Amazon Prime, the near-instantaneous acquisition and online request system can obscure the work that goes into maintaining “the beast” that is Sterling Memorial Library, as my friend Mia AriasTsang put it. Mia worked in the Stacks department of Sterling through her first two years. “There’s a lot more work that goes into it than one might think,” she noted. “And it’s almost completely run by students.” In my frequent visits, it’s rare that I actually see someone on shift at the Hold Shelf. But on one midmorning trip, I pause at the dry erase board at the back of the room, which cheerily announces that it’s a “Magnificent Monday.” The tasks spelled out on the board reveal the hidden hands that keep the shelf in order: 8-9: Removed unwanted holds, pulled expired books—WS; 9-10: Shelved, Accuracy Check A-M—DB; 10-11: Sh. books, Acc. Check C.A./S.R. Some of Mia’s work in the Stacks Department involved prepping books for their journey down to the shelf. Discharge, the process of scanning books returned to Sterling and re-sorting them for their prospective readers, was her favorite part of the job (not only because it was the one part where she was allowed to sit down). As she printed the tickets, she’d look out for names she recognized to see what her friends were reading, and over time she came to know a few of the Hold Shelf regulars. “I’d never have met them in my life, but I’d see they’d have a whole bunch of books on something super
NOVEMBER 2019
obscure like Catholic Art History or the Crusades,” Mia said. “There’d be like 20 books on the crusades for one person, and I’d be like ‘Damn, hope Christopher Martinez is having a good time researching this.’” In the years that Mia worked at Sterling, I’d look forward to the photos she’d send when she came across my name during her shelving shifts. There, at the shelf marked “V” for Vázquez, I picked up books that would become fundamental to my life and research like Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk or books I requested but never opened like The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities. I still remember the blustery January day my sophomore year when I took refuge in the warmth of the Hold Shelf to pick up Yarimar Bonilla’s Non-Sovereign Futures. It’s a foundational book for my research in French Caribbean poetics, and after discovering the introduction in PDF form freshman year, it was finally in my hands. It felt like something was beginning. I may not have ever finished Mappi Mundi, but it was the Hold Shelf that won my heart that September night. Alma Mater was more visible to me inside those forest-green doors than at the mural outside; light and truth were always waiting for me there. – Irene Vázquez is a junior in Berkeley College.
35
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
THE NEW JOUR NAL
