THE MAGAZINE ABOUT THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N YA L E & N E W H AV E N
VOL 49 / ISS 4 / FEB 2017
THE NEW JOURNAL
CAN YALE BE A S A N C T U A RY ?
In the age of Trump, undocumented students wonder how far the university will go to protect them
editors-in-chief elena saavedra buckley isabelle taft managing editor spencer bokat-lindell senior editors sophie haigney sarah holder yi-ling liu aaron mak david rossler associate editors ruby bilger victorio cabrera eliza fawcett natalie yang copy editors griffin brown philippe chlenski harry gray rohan naik senior designer ivy sanders schneider
members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, 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, 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, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen
with support from
illustrator bix archer photo editor elinor hills web designer mariah xu web developer philippe chlenski
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.
THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 49 issue 4 feb 2017
SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com
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cover CAN YALE BE A SANCTUARY? In the age of Trump, undocumented students wonder how far the university will go to protect them Annie Rosenthal & Amelia Nierenberg
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feature THE THING ABOUT WINTER After twenty years in prison, can you rebuild a family? Caroline Wray
standards 4
points of departure PRESTON AND THE PIPIT — Elena Saavedra Buckley GAME NIGHT IN THE NEW COUNTRY — Juliette Neil MAPPING A NEW HAVEN — Robert Scaramuccia
10 essay MILK, SCONE, WATERMELON, WORDS — Mae Mattia The invention of a woman 12 profiles YALE MEN IN THE CABINET — Rachel Calnek-Sugin, Chris Hays, Arya Sundaram Trump has chosen three Yale alumni to serve in his administration. Who were they on campus? 17 snapshot RESISTANCE ON THE CORNER — Mark Rosenberg For years, a few local women have stood by the road, calling for peace 28 poem ON A TUESDAY — Griffin Brown 37 endnote WHINE AND DINE — Jacob Sweet
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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
PRESTON AND THE PIPIT A sixteen-year-old bird watcher stumbles across something rare Elena Saavedra Buckley On a late October morning in 2016, a bird landed in the model airplane field at Sherwood Island State Park near Westport. At that time of year, this particular bird expected warm weather and the banks of the Mississippi. Here, it stood less than half a mile away from the cold Atlantic Ocean. It hid in the grassiest patch of the park among dried, golden reeds, far away from any of its kin. It had never been more lost. The same morning, sixteen-year-old Preston Lust sat at one of the park’s picnic tables with his family, having lunch on his stepdad’s birthday. He lives ten minutes away from Sherwood Island. Preston is one of Connecticut’s most skilled young bird watchers. He started birding with his grandfather at age nine, and he’s seen and recorded over five hundred species since, a number many adult birders hope 4
to reach. He’s also too young to have a driver’s license, which means that he is an expert on his hometown’s natural habitat. Nearly half of his sightings have been in Connecticut. On eBird, the most popular website for birders to record their sightings, Preston submits checklists from his backyard almost every day detailing which birds he saw and how many. He’s a master of Sherwood Island, too—quietly, as if he were retrieving something familiar from a shelf, he knows in which trees he can find a saw-whet owl and which bushes are good for spotting warblers. Some competitive birders “chase” the species they want to see, buying plane tickets to Arizona and Alaska. Preston prefers his neighborhood. Before the picnic at Sherwood that morning, he had already seen a rare red crossbill near his house. At the park, he and his brother Terry wandered over to the THE NEW JOUR NAL
model airplane field after lunch to see if they could spot anything else. Here, the locals met the visitor. After following a group of eastern meadowlarks into the reeds, Preston saw the bird. It crouched near a tall wall of grass, small and beige and shaped like an easyto-miss songbird. The brothers first thought it could be an everyday American pipit. But, as they kept watching it, the bird didn’t bob its head as much as it should, and the umber feathers on its back glowed white around the edges. Preston started taking field notes, and he recorded a blurry cellphone video. Then, he sent a message to the local birders’ email listserv. “I alerted them to the fact that we potentially had a Sprague’s pipit,” he told me. This bird, blown wildly off its migratory course by wind and confusion, had never been seen in Connecticut. “So, uh, this was a big deal.” — “Best bird I saw all year.” “Best bird I’ve seen in Connecticut.” At the January meeting of the Connecticut Young Birders Club (CYBC), club president Brendan Murtha and member Jory Teltser talked about the day Preston saw the Sprague’s pipit as they birded near the shore in Greenwich. Both boys rushed over to the park as soon as they heard, and Jory, one of Preston’s best friends at school, took photos and posted them online. “First state record found by my friend, and young birder, Preston Lust (only 15 years old)!” the caption read. The first people to see the bird were all under the age of eighteen.
“A lot of the big-name Connecticut birders who keep really serious state lists dropped everything and got there as fast as they could,” Brendan said. The next morning, about thirty people showed up to get a glimpse, but the pipit had already left. Connecticut is one of the states with the most bird watchers per capita according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, though most of them are adults. The CYBC, which welcomed its tenth member during the January meeting, tries to be as involved as it can in the larger birding scene. But compared to, say, New York’s seventy-member equivalent (whose president was recently profiled in the New York Times), it’s small. Plus, Connecticut itself isn’t exactly a birder’s paradise. “It’s boring,” Jory told me, and Brendan agreed. It’s a small, developed state with no open ocean, and there aren’t many trees far away from a road. Jory remedies the problem by keeping as busy as he can—perhaps practicing for somewhere more exciting. He is mentored by the former president of the Connecticut Ornithological Association, and he once saw three hundred species in the state over the course of a year, putting him in the ultra-exclusive “300 Club.” Brendan, who will graduate from high school this spring, said he “has to get out of Connecticut.” Preston Lust feels a little differently. He wants to live in Connecticut for the rest of his life, as does his brother. When I asked Jory about what kind of birder Preston is, he said that, despite staying outside the circle of competitive Connecticut birders and not being much of a “chaser,” he has a knack for encountering the birds that more goal-hungry watchers might overlook.
photo jory teltser illustration ivy sanders schneider
FEBRUARY 2017
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Recently, Preston put a high-powered microphone on the roof of his house that connects to his computer. Overnight, as birds fly over his house, the microphone records their nocturnal flight calls, which he listens to the next morning with sonogram software. This helps him recognize birds he can’t see. “You’ll be birding with him, and he’ll say that he heard something fly over,” Jory said. “And it’s like, not only did I not hear that, how did you identify that?” Preston, Jory, Brendan, and another CYBC club member are planning on entering a birding competition in New Jersey called the World Series, under the name “CYBC Darth Waders.” The last time Brendan competed, his car got stuck in a sinkhole, but he’s more confident about his chances this year. Preston, he said, is their “secret weapon.” — Preston and Terry walk along the paths on Sherwood Island a month after the Sprague’s pipit sighting. The
brothers are silent as they bird, both dressed in black sweaters and black pants, hugging their binoculars to their chests. Every once in a while, they softly call out each other’s names, point at a branch, and stare. When they get to the shore around dusk, Preston points at a gull standing near the water. Unlike the other birds on the beach, its back looks like smooth, grey slate. The lesser black-backed gull, as he calls it, is the only one of its kind on Sherwood Island. It has been coming back to this beach every year since he started birding. Preston walks off the path and towards the sand. “Do you see something?” Terry asks. “No. I just felt like going on the beach.” — Elena Saavedra Buckley is a junior in Silliman College. She is an editor-in-chief of The New Journal.
P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
GAME NIGHT IN THE NEW COUNTRY An historic Italian-American club adapts to a changing city Juliette Neil
It’s Thursday night, and that means Bingo at the Annex Club on the eastern side of New Haven’s harbor. The club was founded by Italian immigrants as a civic center for their community in 1938, but nowadays Bingo Night draws an ethnically diverse crowd of devotees. A woman in a blue hat with Bingomania written in rhinestone across the front and a man with a walker wait in a long line for 6
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concessions. In the large room where Bingo players wait at their tables for the game to begin, gold wallpaper and large mirrors fill the walls, and chandeliers dangle from the ceiling. A Bingo board lights up to announce lucky numbers, and the tables are covered with bottles of Dabbo Ink Dazzle, the high-tech version of Bingo chips. The Annex Club upgraded about ten years ago. THE NEW JOUR NAL
Behind the concession stand counter, Robert “Bobby” Astorino—the current treasurer and former president of the Annex Club—sells Bingo cards. He stands in front of flowers and a “Family, Laugh, Love” sign and informs me, politely but firmly, that he does not have time to talk. He directs me to a smaller table where a man sells lottery numbers, collecting the money in small tin brownie pans. Joe Tirotello, who is 88, has worked Bingo Night for thirty-five years. He has also served as a coach for the Annex Club-sponsored Little League team and volunteers on Tuesday afternoons when retirement home residents visit the club. Tonight, he knows almost everyone by name. — The Annex neighborhood—the club’s namesake— welcomed a constant stream of Italian immigrants beginning in the 1890s. The New Haven immigrants created “mutual aid societies” such as La Fratellanza (“The Brotherhood”) and La Marineria (“The Navy”), to support Italians as they built new lives in United States. At the end of the Great Depression, twenty-eight Italian-American men began a Young Men’s Association known as the Annex Club. Its goals were slightly different from those of the original Italian-American societies. A pamphlet from the club’s fiftieth anniversary states the original objectives, one of which was: “to engage in community activities which will advance the interests of this organization and its membership in the community.” Put more simply, the men of the neighborhood wanted a place where, after working or playing a game of football, they could convene, relax, and remind themselves of what Tirotello, a life-long Club member and the son of an original member, still refers to as the “Old Country.” The club is no longer exclusively Italian-American nor exclusively male, though a large portion of its participants are either original members or descendants of them. Al Balchek, another Bingo Night volunteer and former president of the club, proudly tells me, “We have Irish, we have Polish, we have Jewish, African American, Puerto Rican.” Balchek himself is Polish-Italian, and as we walk around the club, Italian names still dominate: Astorino, Castiglione, Apuzzo, Berrelli, Ginetti. They line the wall in the members-only lounge, feature heavily on the donors list, and belong to many of the Bingo players. Though their heritage is a source of pride for these people, most don’t dwell on it. The Club was a place for dances and Fourth of July fireworks, as well as for recollections of Italy. In building supportive communities to help their members succeed, the mutual aid societies and the Annex Club also promoted assimilation. Italian immigrants in the nineteenth and early twenFEBRUARY 2017
tieth centuries sometimes faced discrimination and prejudice; today their descendants include New Haven’s longest-serving mayor and current United States Representative Rosa DeLauro. As long as the Annex Club has been open, the community it serves has been transforming. But its regulars, who built railroads and coached Little League, still come to the Club. The Club’s numbers, as well as its influence, have
AS LONG AS THE ANNEX CLUB HAS BEEN OPEN, THE COMMUNITY IT SERVES HAS BEEN TRANSFORMING.
dwindled. “We donated an awful lot of our time and our expenses to the city of New Haven,” Balchek tells me. “Lots of charity work, fundraisers, offered the place up if people needed a place to host things, say. It’s very difficult for us to do that today. In today’s society, it’s not cheap to open up the doors.” Beyond the economic burden, the tight-knit community of families has also changed. “I miss the old days,” Tirotello says. “We used to have Saturday night dinners here. We don’t do that anymore. Because nobody wants to come!” To survive, the Annex Club has evolved. Instead of hosting wedding parties for its members, the Club hosts motorcycle shows and the Connecticut Gay Men’s Choir. They still offer scholarships for Club members’ children, and they still host community events, but Bingo Night, bookings, and Astorino’s careful work as treasurer keep the Club afloat. On a typical Thursday, any melancholy nostalgia is drowned out by the cheerful chaos of the Bingo crowd. Astorino teases Tirotello, once again, about his age. Balchek says happy birthday to a woman who has just won fourteen dollars. Conversations about children and spouses float throughout the hall. People still come every Thursday for Bingo, and many come more often, for meals or drinks in the lounge. Astorino tells me that they are booked “pretty much every Saturday for the next two years.” — Juliette Neil is a freshman in Timothy Dwight College.
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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
MAPPING A NEW HAVEN A Yale senior builds an app to help refugees find resources Robert Scaramuccia
illustration ivy sanders schneider
Hundreds of refugees scrambled into the United States in early February after a federal judge halted President Donald Trump’s ban. While the Trump administration decides whether to appeal to the Supreme Court or rewrite the executive order altogether, people fleeing violence and persecution will continue trickling into the United States, seeking to build new lives from scratch. But what will the more than two hundred and fifty thousand refugees already living here tell these newcomers about American life? Where can they pray, buy familiar food, or obtain the proper job certification? What is here to help recent arrivals feel welcome? According to Yale College senior Elena Hodges, not enough. And the resources that do exist are hard to find. Hodges, a Political Science major, started working with an Iraqi refugee family, the Al-Mashhadanis, in Fair Haven in late 2015 through the Yale Refugee Project. She quickly became close with the family’s seven children and saw firsthand the obstacles they faced. The children, who range in age from one-and-a-half to twenty years old, felt socially isolated. They struggled in school, finding it difficult to learn English along with algebra and American history. The family didn’t 8
have a car, meaning the nearest Islamic center was forty-five minutes away instead of fifteen. “That relationship just kind of got me thinking about why it is that people fall through the cracks in terms of accessing social services,” said Hodges. “New Haven has hundreds and hundreds of NGOs. But there are still a ton of people who aren’t getting access to those services.” Part of the problem is that Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), the nonprofit that resettled the family Hodges knows as well as hundreds of others, has only six months to integrate refugees into new communities. After that, federal funding dries up quickly. IRIS receives sixty percent of its revenue in the form of federal grants, meaning it must adhere to federal guidelines that prioritize short-term resettlement over long-term support. IRIS executive director Chris George described the government’s traditional philosophy as hasty. “Just get them off to a good start, then pivot and welcome another family that’s coming tomorrow night,” he said. Hodges considered the problems facing the Al-Mashhadani family and others like them more urgent than THE NEW JOUR NAL
anything she could address by writing a research paper. So for her Human Rights Scholars capstone project, she decided to develop something that the Al-Mashhadanis could use to find services. She came up with the Resource Access Mapping Project (RAMP), a tool that refugees and other service-seekers will eventually be able to access on their smartphones. Inspired by similar projects in Berlin, Vancouver, and New Orleans, RAMP marks the location of every service provider relevant to refugees in New Haven, from soup kitchens and Goodwill stores to domestic violence shelters and mental health clinics. It tells users whether a provider’s location is wheelchair accessible. It lists the documents users should bring with them in order to receive services. It comes in English, Spanish, and Arabic, offers a community rating system, and integrates with Google Maps so users can add a food pantry to their daily bus route. It even maintains a FAQ page on topics like community farming, as well as information about family-friendly recreational activities. At least, Hodges hopes it will do all this eventually. “As of now, this is all kind of conjecture and theory,” she said. “It’s not real yet.” RAMP is still in its spreadsheet phase, sprawling across twenty-three columns and 447 rows. Hodges and a team of volunteers, including Yale undergraduates and members of the Law and Medical schools, are working to make it a reality by the end of the semester using Kricket, an app aiming to create a crowdsourced, worldwide map of resources for refugees. Although the map’s first iteration will only come in English and will only display provider locations rather than integrating with other apps, it still reflects a semester’s worth of research. Hodges and her team combed through New Haven’s prisoner reentry guides, consulted with experts at Yale Medical School, and called provider after provider to confirm their hours, services, and accessibility. “My whole approach has been mostly to reach out to people who do the work in the community already, and to have it be made in communication with the people it’s targeted at,” she said. Hodges admits her project is limited: It can’t reverse restrictive immigration policies, for example. But she thinks RAMP has the potential to change the way people think about refugee resettlement in addition to connecting refugees to the resources they need. A guiding principle of RAMP is that, beyond having food in the pantry and clothes for the family, refugees deserve to live fulfilling lives. “‘Do I have employment that excites me? Am I leading a life that I actually care about, rather than just getting through another day?’… FEBRUARY 2017
That’s not something that there’s really support for,” Hodges said. She hopes making refugees more familiar with available resources will allow them to focus on other aspects of their lives. RAMP is welcome news to Joseph, a Congolese lawyer and refugee who arrived in Connecticut last October. (He did not want his last name to be published.) After five years of interviews and security checks, all while bouncing between Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, and Kakuma, its second-largest refugee camp, he was able to make a permanent home in the U.S. Halfway through his six months with IRIS, Joseph has the basics down. IRIS shuttled him, his wife, and his three children to their new home on their first day in New Haven. His kids are in school, and he just got a job at a packaging supply store. He feels safe—even welcomed. He’s amazed that strangers on the bus say “bless you” when he sneezes. Yet his mental map of the city has holes. He wants to find cassava, a staple food in the Democratic Republic of Congo that’s hard to come by here. His children want to visit a zoo. With his IRIS-provided smartphone, he’s ready to use RAMP whenever it becomes available. “It’s a good idea, a good idea,” he said. “Yes, yes, yes, yes. Because, you know, you have children, sometimes [it’s] not only good to bring them just to [the] library. The children like to know, to see animals, to see the mountains. It’s very, very good.” — Robert Scaramuccia is a sophomore in Branford College.
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MILK, SCONE, WATERMELON, WORDS The invention of a woman Mae Mattia
“With my eyes I blindly seek the breast: I want thick milk. No one taught me to want. But I already want. I’m lying with my eyes open looking at the ceiling. Inside is the darkness. An I that pulses already forms. There are sunflowers. There is tall wheat. I is.” - Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
“My mom loved breastfeeding,” Hayley said, cheeks aglow, on the sidewalk, beside the chapel, beside the cars in legion at the stoplight. Hayley is a friend of mine from college, rather magical, whose cheeks are ample and exquisitely rouged. Often it seems to me, in the sunset, that her face is the facsimile of an unbitten peach, lately fallen, in the grass. I want to talk to Hayley about peaches, but I stay quiet, because if I told her about her face, the fantasy would fade: it is ridiculous to tell a woman she looks like a peach. I was surprised, besides, to hear her mother loved breastfeeding, and raised my eyebrows. “Because it kept her thin,” she said. “She could eat five donuts a day and still have bruises on her collarbone, because she was so fragile.” So it wasn’t, it seems, that she loved breastfeeding Hayley in particular. Or perhaps she did, but all these years later, what occurred to her, in memoriam, was a felicitous side-effect of motherhood, that it stole the blood from your body, so to speak, and turned it into milk. Milk is the first taste we know on earth; our first taste is the taste of our mothers; before we steal the fruit from trees, before we press them into wine; before we cup our hands beside a stream; it precedes language, precedes our first word. But Hayley is
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“Only afterwards does fear come, the pacification of fear, the denial of fear––in a word, civilization. Meanwhile, atop the naked table, the screaming slice of red watermelon. I am grateful to my eyes that are still so frightened.” - Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life
now twenty-three: her mother has forgotten; it has been long since her daughter was a child. Now there is only the body, the aging body, the fear of the end of the body. Now her mother, when she speaks of food, speaks only in terms of fear. When Hayley speaks of milk, she is curious, almost enchanted, but this enchantment is a twin to fear—not of death, or age, but of the forfeiture of her femininity. “All of my friends had skim milk,” she said, “but my mom always bought whole milk, because she was obsessed with these studies that were coming out at the time.” The studies posited that skim milk induced premature breast development. “In third grade,” she went on, “I remember Jordan Tour had boobs and I didn’t and I really thought it was because her family fed her regular milk. I was so bitter about it. When my mom gave me money to buy milk at the store, I would buy skim milk and then play dumb, so I could have a gallon of it on hand.” Hayley refused to submit; she was a frightened trickster, and she desired breasts. “This is bundled into my general anxieties about fertility,” she said. She wanted then, and still wants, to be a woman, THE NEW JOUR NAL
wants to know what it means to be a woman, and fears that if one day she is bereft of milk, if she cannot be a mother— what, then, of womanhood? If she is to be barren, what are left but lipstick and aprons? Or if she is to dispense with those symbols, what then? Only perdition, perhaps—or perhaps, somewhere in that hereafter, she will grasp, at last, a fact.
Now, whether she wore lipstick on the sidewalk— whether the public world, in the matter of desire, was a hall of mirrors—the kitchen was a respite, a bare-footed bakery. She no longer made her scones as an offering of love, or at least, not to you or me. Because every scone she baked arrived on her own plate. The crumbs left on her table are evidence of an intimacy.
Milk is a fact. But even so, she said, “I don’t understand how it works, it seems really magical to me.” Nor does she want to know. What she does know is that a peach is known by its nectar. If it is not sweet, it is only a reflection in the mirror. She has performed, has attempted to perform this or that face of femininity. Hayley became a postulant before the oven: she baked cookies and cakes. This was in high school, when she first asked the question, How does a woman speak? Because cakes are silent, cookies are silent, and what they offer in place of words are sweet nothings. Hayley wanted to be a sweet nothing: eyes declined, ears occluded by chestnut ringlets. She wanted to say: I love you. But a woman was circumscribed by a trellis of icing. A woman spoke without words, without gestures; a woman reduced her body to the shape of a scone; and when it was so small that it could be eaten in two bites, she offered it with cupped hands; she begged for alms, but not to be given, not to be given: she begged that they might take. Her body was a burden, too clumsy; her nearness to delicacy only clarified the distance. So she baked; it was how a woman performed her quiet. Because a woman lacked the bones of a fish, the miniature splinters; she did not stick in the throat. Hayley wanted to vanish into her own revelation. But when she came to college, her scones said nothing—not even quiet. A scone was made only for questions of tea; it could not answer questions of death. When placed beside death, a scone was absurd. She discarded her apron; if she was to be sweet, it would have to be a matter of words. But she did not want to be sweet, unless sweetness was the means by which she beguiled you, or beguiled, perhaps, herself. It was difficult to delineate desire. “I don’t want to wear make-up just to please a guy,” she said, “but I don’t want to not wear make-up because I’m afraid of what that will signal to the world.” Either way, hers would no longer be an innocent offering. “I like skirts, I like high heels, and I don’t think there’s a problem with that.” When she walked into the kitchen, it was not because she needed sugar. Nor because she needed to escape into a diorama. Nor because she wanted the purity of a definition. Now she fell into the kitchen like a slant of light.
Last week, the heat was relentless; summer in New Haven is unforgiving, so I stopped into Hayley’s apartment to say hello and rest my feet. I wanted to lend her a book of essays, Little Labors by Rivka Galchen, and show her my new lipstick. But when I arrived at her kitchen, I did not pass beyond the doorframe: I did not want to interrupt. I had arrived at a scene, not so much of a crime, as of beauty—though there was, within this beauty, a quality of trespass. Hayley was slicing watermelon. She dropped each slice with an air of distracted elegance into an alabaster bowl, humming, meanwhile, some soft tune. Then, noticing me, she turned around. “Oh hi,” she said, “welcome.” In her other hand was a bright kitchen knife, larger than what is so-called strictly necessary. She held it with her wrist limp, as a child might hold a lollipop—but she was far more languorous than a child, and just as daring. Which is to say, she held it as if violence belonged to her no less than elegance. If a woman could wield a spatula, so she could wield a blade. But when she saw my eyes, she laughed. “You are just the sort of person who would find this romantic,” she said. “I thought about that while you were climbing the stairs.” Even carelessness is a performance. Hers was a performance for both of us, on a summer day, in the middle of New Haven. And in the middle of New Haven, she had managed, at last, to surpass her innocence—or to arrive at a more ancient innocence. She was, for the length of a glance, as old as the Stone Age. But a glance is all we’re given. In a week or two, Hayley will move to Los Angeles, to begin, as they say, a new life. But for now, in the summer, even if she does not know what a woman is, she knows what a woman can do. A woman can split apart her sweetness. And discover, inside the skin of a watermelon, a new word.
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[August 5, 2016] — Mae Mattia is a junior in Branford College.
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PROFILES
YALE MEN IN THE CABINET Trump has chosen three Yale alumni to serve his admininstration. Who were they on campus?
Rachel Calnek-Sugin, Chris Hays, and Arya Sundaram On Capitol Hill, three Yale alumni are preparing for new jobs. Steven Mnuchin ’85 will serve as Secretary of the Treasury. Pending confirmation by the Senate, Ben Carson ’73, and Wilbur Ross ’59 will join him in President Donald Trump’s cabinet. Yale alums have long inhabited the upper echelons of the U.S. government, but Trump’s Ivy League picks run counter to his populist campaign and rejection of intellectual elitism. These two Wall Street bankers and the neuro-
surgeon were neither Yale Political Union firebrands like John Kerry nor the scions of political families like George W. Bush. They inhabited different spaces at Yale—from the Yale Daily News business team to senior-level psychology seminars to the Yale Literary Magazine—but none seemed to be preparing for a life of civic engagement. How did they spend their formative years at Yale before embarking on the non-political careers that still delivered them to the West Wing?
STEVE MNUCHIN
“A Yale man,” the New York Times Magazine reported during George W. Bush’s presidency, “used to be somebody who looked the part.” Donald Trump ran for the presidency on an anti-establishment platform that attacked the intellectual elite, big banks, and the corporate-political “swamp.” But in his first weeks in office, he stocked his cabinet with members of those same groups. Steven Mnuchin 12
THE NEW JOUR NAL
’85 is Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Treasury, but he ticks all the boxes that would qualify him as an enemy of Trump supporters. He is, quite literally, a Yale man, who looks—and has always looked—the part. Mnuchin started his career at Goldman Sachs, where his father was one of its top partners. Eventually, he moved to Hollywood, where he invested in films, launched OneWest Bank, and made a name for himself as a “foreclosure king.” CNN reported that OneWest became infamous for its “widow foreclosures,” the practice of booting elderly and vulnerable residents from their homes through onerous loans and technicalities, according to CNN. In one instance, Mnuchin was said to have foreclosed on a home over an unpaid bill of twenty-seven cents. Like other Trump cabinet nominees, Mnuchin has no government experience. His main qualification for Treasury Secretary seems to be that he’s dealt with money before. He is the chief executive of the hedge fund Dune Capital, which, the New York Times reports, was named for the dunes outside his vacation house in the Hamptons. According to his classmates in Hopper College (then called Calhoun College) and other members of the Yale Daily News board, Mnuchin hasn’t changed much since his Yale days. When asked whether they were surprised that Mnuchin was one of Trump’s cabinet picks, many gave the same answer. A pause. Then, “No.” After graduating from New York City’s Riverdale Country Day School in 1981, Mnuchin followed his father to Yale, where classmates recall he drove a Porsche and lived off-campus in the luxe Taft Hotel on the corner of College and Chapel streets. Katherine Randolph ’85, a classmate in Hopper, recalls that he mostly hung out with other wealthy kids from New York private schools. His two off-campus roommates, Eddie Lampert ’84 and Benjamin Bram ’84 both went into finance and worked with Mnuchin for some time at Goldman Sachs. (Reached by email in early January, Mnuchin said that he would do an interview with The New Journal after his confirmation. In the days after he was confirmed by the Senate, Mnuchin did not return requests for comment, nor did he respond to an emailed list of questions.) Mnuchin’s main extracurricular was the Yale Daily News. He didn’t write, but instead headed the business side—an almost entirely separate part of the newspaper, according to his colleagues on the editorial board. Bennett Voyles ’85, who described himself as a “fellow Newsie,” remembers the publishing team as “a sleek crew in Lacoste shirts who would glide in and out of the News building.” FEBRUARY 2017
As publisher during his junior year, Mnuchin was embroiled in conflict with the News’ editorial board. After his nomination for Secretary of the Treasury, Dan Froomkin ’85, a former News editor tweeted: “I knew Steve Mnuchin back when his idea of fun was starving the Yale Daily News of resources to pad his resume as publisher.” Froomkin vividly recalls arguments between Mnuchin and the editorial staff, in which Mnuchin insisted on fewer pages of content to leave a financial surplus. Anndee Hochman ’84, the editor-inchief of the News in 1984, remembers a year of clashes as the editorial team pushed to maximize content and the publishing team tried to maximize profit. Voyles and Froomkin attempted a coup against Mnuchin, but Mnuchin and the News’ lawyer reportedly quashed it before it could get anywhere. Mnuchin’s colleagues on the News largely found him difficult to work with—Hochman describes him as “self-confident to the point of arrogant, a smooth talker and a lousy listener”—and many of his peers in Hopper remember him as equally unpleasant. One of his female classmates, who wanted to remain anonymous because she is afraid of being “sent to the Trump gulag,” said she “always felt like taking a cold shower when in his environs.” Mark Danziger ’85 is quoted in Businessweek as saying he “put the douche in fiduciary.” But not everybody felt negatively about Mnuchin. Hopper classmate Serena Williams ’85 says she remembers Mnuchin as “always nice and smiling.” And he was tapped for Yale’s most illustrious secret society, Skull and Bones. Mnuchin entered the society in his senior year, along with his roommate Eddie Lampert, whose hedge fund he later worked for, and James Boasberg, the federal judge who ruled this September that construction could proceed on the Dakota Access Pipeline. Mnuchin’s Senate confirmation was rocky; he failed to disclose one hundred million dollars in assets on the Senate Finance Committee documents, claiming that he had “misunderstood” the questionnaire. But by February 13—the Monday after he attended Steve Schwarzman’s seventieth birthday party in Palm Beach, where he and fellow guests Wilbur Ross, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner enjoyed acrobatic performances, two camels, and a rendition of “Happy Birthday” by Gwen Stefani, according to Bloomberg—the Senate voted 53-47 to confirm him. In December, he’d already updated his job title on the alumni database to “Secretary of the Treasury of the U.S.,” making things already Yale-official. — Rachel Calnek-Sugin is a sophomre in Silliman College. 13
BEN CARSON “Do you believe that everybody should own a home?” Senator Dean Heller of Nevada asked Ben Carson ’73 at his Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in January. “I believe that everyone should have the opportunity to own a home,” responded Carson, raising his eyebrows and pausing after “opportunity.” During the hearing, he spoke at length about encouraging individual responsibility. He recounted, as he frequently does, how he grew up in an impoverished Detroit neighborhood and rose to the top of his high school class before attending Yale. Carson has taken a circuitous route into politics. A prominent neurosurgeon, he entered the political limelight with a controversial speech criticizing President Obama’s policies at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast. Despite his lack of experience in politics or housing, he ran for president in 2016 and was recently selected by President Trump to lead HUD. But Carson, who now advocates conservative “common sense” government and denounces political correctness, was not always so outspoken. At Yale, he was a reclusive, devout pre-med student; few of his classmates would have guessed that he was on the path to become such a recognizable and divisive political figure. Carson’s peers in Davenport College remember him as intensely focused on academics and not eager to develop friendships. In an era of counter-culture and protest, he stood out for his close-cropped hair, pocket protector, and high-water pants. According to his peers, he was an outlier. “No one knew him particularly well,” explained Ronald Taylor ’73, a classmate in Davenport. Early in their freshman year, Taylor sat down to a few 14
meals with Carson, but he felt rebuffed. “After a couple early attempts to engage him, I spent the next four years smiling and saying ‘hi,’” Taylor said. Dr. Edward Wassman ’73, a Davenport classmate who studied for chemistry and physics classes with Carson, remembered that Carson would sit near the front of lectures and often have conversations with peers or professors after class. Dr. Don Marshall ’73, a psychology major in Branford, also remembers Carson readily participating in his classes. “I had a distinct impression of him saying things that he thought were really brilliant, that other people didn’t think were very good,” he said. According to Walter Miller ’73, Carson’s freshman-year roommate, Carson was disciplined and meticulously neat. He cleaved to a conservative sense of propriety; when Miller began sleeping with his girlfriend on the couch, he sensed Carson’s disapproval. By senior year, Miller recognized Carson as one of the “nicest guys I knew,” but added, “You probably wouldn’t want to hang out with him, because you probably wouldn’t have that much fun.” Though he identified as a Democrat, Carson was reticent about politics as a student at Yale, a fact made more pronounced by the swirl of political activism that defined the campus in the early nineteen-seventies. During his freshman spring, tens of thousands of protesters flocked to New Haven for the high-profile trial of Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panther Party. Tensions continued as Yale adjusted to coeducation, beginning with Carson’s class, and Vietnam War protests swept across college campuses. Several of Carson’s classmates in Davenport, including former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke ’71 and Senator Sherrod Brown ’74, Democrat of Ohio, were influential activists remembered for leading the student body through the protests. Henry Chauncey ’57, a former Secretary of the University who ran crisis management during the Bobby Seale trial, was surprised to learn that Carson was at Yale during the period. “I thought I knew every black student at Yale,” he said, referencing the heavy involvement of African American students in the protests. Carson avoided participation. He was “a bit dismayed by the disruption of academics,” according to Wassman. Carson, speaking to The New Journal, acknowledged that he “really didn’t engage in a lot of political conversation.” Unlike Chauncey, he recalls a student body in which most people were frustrated by the turmoil. “I think everybody was a little bit dismayed during the Bobby Seale trial,” he said about the academic disruptions, “so I don’t think that would be anything out of the ordinary.” THE NEW JOUR NAL
Carson expressed his beliefs more vocally in his church community, away from campus politics. Lola Nathan, who attended services with Carson at the Mt. Zion Seventh-day Adventist Church in Hamden, had him over for dinner regularly during his undergraduate years. Over their meals, she would argue with him about everything from politics to current events. Interviewed at Mt. Zion in January, she tersely remarked that she disagrees with him just as much now as she did then. On Carson’s prospects at HUD, his former friends and classmates are split along ideological lines. Some are hopeful about his foray into U.S. government. Terence Diggory ’73, a Davenport classmate who had a friendly relationship with Carson, said, “He has demonstrated that he is smart, and I’m sure right now he is doing a lot of homework.” But many others are dismayed. Walter Miller seemed disappointed about Carson’s rise to conservative stardom. “He would be the last guy that you would think would be a politician.” —Chris Hays is a freshman in Hopper College.
WILBUR ROSS Wilbur Ross ’59 has been dubbed the “king of bankruptcy” by Fortune magazine. Over the past fifteen years, he has made billions of dollars by capitalizing on failing American steel, coal, and textile companies. He made his way into President Trump’s inner circle in the nineFEBRUARY 2017
teen-nineties by rescuing him from the Trump Taj Mahal debacle, when Trump struggled to make debt payments for the Taj Mahal casino just a year after purchasing it. Today, he’s the nominee for the United States Secretary of Commerce. Sixty years ago, though, he was “Wilbo.” In the era of mandatory coat and tie, he moseyed about the Jonathan Edwards College courtyard in a baggy crewneck sweater. According to Kerry Wood ’59 who lived upstairs from him for three years, Ross gained the nickname “Stinky” because of his heavy aftershave. “If he had too much cologne, it was because he wasn’t showering adequately,” said Dan Harris ’59, another member of Ross’s JE class. “Wilbur, to be generous, at the time was a slob,” he added. “A nice guy, but a slob.” In an interview with The New Journal, Ross claimed that the nickname “Stinky” belonged not to him but rather his freshman year roommate. In the late nineteen-fifties, Yale’s culture pressured students to obey a conservative prep school style of dress. Fred Oser ’58 describes the campus in a single sentence: “I was completely overwhelmed by the atmosphere of conformity.” Oser remembers walking back from a Sunday church service in Battell Chapel dressed in his best blue suit and blue suede shoes, mortified that his clothes didn’t fit in. The very next day, he bought a tweed jacket from J. Press. Amidst a traditional, homogenous culture, Ross defied categorization. He was a legacy prep school kid on scholarship; a member of the Air Force ROTC and an English major; a frat boy who made the Dean’s List. His fraternity, Chi Phi, attracted atypical members. Chi Phi was far less exclusive than Fence Club, Delta Kappa Epsilon, or any of the other houses where “you just had to be someone,” according to Oser. It had fewer prep school boys but more high-achieving students than other fraternities. But by the time Ross graduated, Chi Phi’s numbers were dwindling, and the fraternity permanently dissolved in 1961. Ross was part of the Yale literary scene, working on two starkly different publications. He was a member of the Yale Literary Magazine, which, at the time, the Yale Daily News described as dying, debt-ridden, and full of mediocre writers. Ross also contributed to Ivy Magazine, a student-run, inter-school magazine that catered to the posh elite of the Ivy League. At a time when post-college options seemed limited to banking, insurance, and brokerage, Ross yearned to be a writer. “People who were literarily inclined weren’t looked down on, they were just thought to be a little bit odd,” said Chauncey, though he did not know Ross personally. But Ross’s literary aspirations were short-lived. He dropped out of the legendary Yale 15
English course “Daily Themes.” Ross said this decision “saved me from the life of poverty,” a point he also made in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2010. After graduation, he packed his bags for Harvard Business School and eventually ascended to the upper echelons of Wall Street, where he became famous for flipping failing businesses. He said, “the only poetry I write now is occasionally for a friend’s birthday party. I’ll do a little poem or something like that.” Ross’s transformation into a financial titan and member of Trump’s political circle, however, was not totally unexpected to some of his peers. A classmate who wished to remain anonymous said that during Ross’s time at Yale, “he was very clearly paying attention to where he could have most upward mobility.” Ross was the president of his fraternity, a platoon sergeant in the Air Force ROTC, and a member of an honors organization called the Yale Key. He sought out groups—and leadership positions in those groups—that allowed him to develop his personal standing and social network. “I believe he’s very aware of who he is and the reputational franchise he is trying to develop,” the classmate added. Ross argued there was nothing unique about his driven approach to college. “In those days, the working assumption of everybody that I knew in my hometown was that you could do better than your family had
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done, and I think by and large that people did,” he said. In 2012, Ross was widely reported to be the “Grand Swipe,” or president, of Kappa Beta Phi, the secret fraternity of Wall Street leaders whose members include former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the former heads of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Soon, he will likely enter one of the nation’s most prestigious societies: the United States Cabinet. As a legacy student on scholarship who joined the establishment worlds of Yale and Wall Street, Ross could be cast as someone who understands the divide between disparate socioeconomic groups. Like Trump himself, the billionaire claims he will represent the interests of working-class Americans. “Middle class and lower middle class America has not really benefited by the last ten to fifteen years of economic activity and they’re sick and tired of it and they want something different,” Ross said in an interview with CNBC in June. It remains to be seen whether the would-be writer turned corporate titan will be capable of providing something different. —Arya Sundaram is a freshman in Davenport College.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
RESISTANCE ON THE CORNER For years, a few local women have stood by the road, calling for peace. Mark Rosenberg
photo by the author
At 11:30 a.m. on the Sunday after President Donald Trump’s Inauguration, Susan Klein dons a floppy maroon hat with a pink “Women for Peace” button planted proudly on the front, straps on a red fanny pack stuffed with fliers, and steps out the door. It’s a half-hour walk from her home near Westville to the triangular island at the corner of Broadway and Park Street in New Haven, across from Christ Church and Maison Mathis. By noon, she’s in position, holding up a silver Styrofoam sign emblazoned with two words in bold black letters: RESIST WAR. Klein, who spent twenty years working in the Yale University library system before retiring in 2011, grew up in New Haven where her parents protested the Vietnam War on the Green. She has stationed herself on FEBRUARY 2017
this corner most weekends for the better part of two decades in a ritual called the New Haven Sunday Vigil. “We’re US citizens,” she told me when we first met. “We have to speak out against terrible, criminal injustice by our government.” The protest tradition evolved out of a vigil against the Gulf War that met on the corner of Church and Chapel Streets every Thursday, starting in 1990. In 1993, the group broadened its scope and renamed itself Peace and Justice News and Views. Shortly thereafter, it morphed again into the Connecticut Coalition for Peace and Justice, a larger group of activists from nearly a dozen local organizations. In 1999, when Klein first joined, the vigil moved to its current spot, and the ten 17
members protested the NATO bombings of Kosovo. For the past six years, she has held vigil on the corner from noon to one almost every weekend. Just after noon, Paula Panzarella and Monica McGovern arrive. Both have been protesting for over a decade. Panzarella has held several jobs over the years, including director of a soup kitchen, volunteer providing aid to the homeless, and garment factory worker. For her, activism has provided continuity. She grew up in New Haven and became engaged with local organizing in 1991, volunteering with the Progressive Action Roundtable, a forum for New Haven-area activist groups, for eight years before joining the vigil. McGovern, the group’s most right-leaning member, joined the group in 2005 and volunteered with Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. Panzarella and McGovern take over the sign, standing solemnly under the gray sky, while Klein patrols in front, tightly gripping a stack of fliers. She’s soft-spoken; sunglasses shield her kind eyes. Politely but persistently, she plies passersby with pamphlets. The women distribute eighty fliers each Sunday, typically produced and printed by Klein or a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. This week’s flier, entitled “The Biggest Meddler,” details seven egregious examples of political interference by the United States. The women oppose all military conflict, shifting their message as the government shifts its interventions. The day before, hundreds of thousands of women had descended on Washington, DC for the Women’s March, chanting and singing as they filled the National Mall. The women of the New Haven Vigil occupy their triangle quietly, holding their banner and waving back when a car honks. They don’t sing or shout or beat a drum. The last Sunday of each month, members of the New Haven branch of Jewish Voice for Peace stand with them. Otherwise, it’s just Klein, Panzarella, McGovern, and Joan Cavanagh, who is on her way back from Washington today. “It’s very meaningful to stand here and bear witness and try to catch people’s attention quietly,” Klein says. McGovern doesn’t think their method reaches as many people as a larger protest might, but says, “there’s no room for me in big demonstrations because they’re dominated by left-wingers.” Panzarella agrees with McGovern’s dislike of large protests, but disagrees with her rationale. “At a bigger demonstration, it’s hard to engage,” she says. “We give people the chance to ask the questions they have. Sometimes people approach us with animosity, but this allows us to exchange ideas.” Some people race past, heads down. Some begrudgingly take a flier and stuff it into a pocket. But others 18
walk away reading the flier curiously, and a few strike up conversation. The women have spread their message in varying styles over the decades. In 1973, to protest the government’s bombings in Cambodia, Cavanagh climbed a water tower on a freeway outside Baltimore and landed in jail for ten days. At one protest on the Broadway triangle, after sharing that story, she asks Klein the name of a tall building a couple blocks away. “That’s the Hall of Graduate Studies,” Klein replies. “Are you thinking of going up there, too?” Cavanagh grins. “No, just looking.” The others are less audacious in their methods. Panzarella speaks slowly and ponderously. McGovern uses short, clipped sentences. Klein often just listens, encouraging passersby to voice their concerns with occasional words of assent.
ALL THEY TRY TO DO IS GET PEOPLE TO LOOK UP FROM THEIR PHONES, STOP FOR A SECOND, AND THINK.
Today, a woman in a black parka walks up. “I’m Israeli and I’m absolutely terrified,” she says out of the blue. “Netanyahu and Trump are the same person.” Klein nods in agreement. They spend a few minutes decrying settlements on the West Bank. After she leaves, Klein lets out a sigh of relief. “Sometimes you get these Orthodox Jews who say, ‘You don’t want Israel to exist,’” she explains. “I’m glad there was no argument. I’m not a confrontational person.” Today’s vigil is the first since the inauguration of Donald Trump, but the women on Park and Broadway haven’t altered their message. “The election didn’t change my sense of hope,” Cavanagh told me a week earlier. “It reinforced everything we’ve been standing for the last twenty years, thirty years, forty years, fifty years.” “I’m not sure if I’ve thought of things pre-election and post-election as being different,” Klein says today. Peace advocacy is a never-ending endeavor. Since 1999, the women have handed out around sixty thousand fliers. But there are still soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under Obama, extra-judicial drone killings became commonplace, and the United States sent troops to Syria, Libya, and Somalia. Even in left-leanTHE NEW JOUR NAL
ing New Haven, reactions to criticisms of these policies are not all positive. Sometimes people wave in support. Sometimes they give them the finger. Regardless, the women’s aims remain lofty, their dedication unfailing. “My goal would be to live in a country with a government in which everyone is respected,” Klein said. “I expect to be vigiling for the rest of my life.” At around 12:45 p.m., a man drives by on a yellow motorcycle, blasting Wiz Khalifa and honking enthusiastically. The driver of a Mercedes gives them a thumbs up. Klein is bemused. “This has been among the most positive responses we’ve ever had. I wonder if the inauguration and the demonstrations have something to do with it.” She pauses. “Maybe I could allow a little optimism to filter into my consciousness.” A few minutes before the women head home, a man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a green cap shuffles up to the corner. Klein hands him a flier, and he begins speaking animatedly. “I’ve got a couple Vietnam buttons,” he said. “Lot of my friends didn’t make it back. Sometimes I get nightmares. It really scares the hell
FEBRUARY 2017
out of me. I’ve seen people killing women and children, and I still remember all of that.” His voice rises. “It makes me sick!” “And it’s still going on,” Klein says. They chat for a few more minutes. “Talking to you made me feel better,” the man says. He and Klein shake hands. McGovern and Panzarella leave at one. Klein folds up the sign. “The vigil is not only important for the people who pass by,” she says, stuffing the last few fliers into her fanny pack. “It’s important for us, too. On the weeks I can’t come, the rest of the week doesn’t feel right.” The women recognize they aren’t agents of seismic change. All they try to do is get people to look up from their phones, stop for a second, and think. Klein walks back down Broadway, heading home. The island is empty. Pedestrians stroll along. Cars speed by. War goes on. — Mark Rosenberg is a freshman in PIerson College.
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The Twenty-Sixth Annual
MAYNARD MACK LECTURE
John Douglas Thompson
Actor
In conversation Monday April 10, 2017 5:30 pm at Yale Repertory Theatre 1120 Chapel Street Open to the public without charge. This lecture is endowed through the Elizabethan Club of Yale University.
by Caroline Wray
“The thing about winter is, when you’re not in it, you have a perception of how cold it is. But then, when you actually get in the cold, and you’re freezing your butt off, you don’t even remember what that perception was. For a second, you’re like, ‘take me back.’” At 5:30 a.m. on February 24, 2014, Scott Lewis took his first step as a civilian in more than twenty years. Ejected from a bus on the side of the road next to the New Haven Correctional Center on Whalley Avenue, he had only one set of clothes, which he was wearing, and a box of legal papers. He’d spent the majority of his time in prison toiling to get out: teaching himself the law, representing himself for nineteen years, methodically plodding though appeal after rejected appeal in order to shed his inmate number (137682) and escape from the 120-year sentence he’d been handed down for a crime he never committed. When Scott took that first breath outside after the bus doors puffed open and he stepped onto the sidewalk, the air rushed hard at him. Most of his fellow citizens were asleep, including his sister Marlo, scheduled to pick him up in three hours. He had no cell phone, no access to a phone booth—or the coins needed to activate it—and no coat. The bus chugged away. The sun would rise in an hour. His arms, carrying the box of legal papers, started to tremble.
Homecoming Twenty-four years earlier, on October 11, 1990, former New Haven alderman Ricardo Turner and his lover were murdered in bed following a cocaine-related heist. At the time, neighborhood dealers Scott Lewis and Stefon Morant owed ten thousand dollars to a local kingpin whose business depended on his partnership with a dirty cop, Detective Vincent Raucci. By 1995, Raucci had gathered several witness statements implicating Scott and Stefon in the double murder, and the men were sentenced to 120 and seventy years, respectively. An FBI investigation into the corrupt cop soon revealed that he’d blackmailed the witnesses into falsely placing them at the scene of the crime. The complete FBI file is dated January 24, 1997—less than two years after the men were incarcerated—but it would take eighteen years before both men were released for the crimes they didn’t commit. Some of the events that occurred during that time: Scott and Stefon turned twenty-five, then thirty, then forty-five. Scott’s younger daughter Jesilinett learned to write her name in cursive, dropped out of high school, and became a certified medical assistant. Stefon’s twin sons, Christian and Julian, learned how to toss a baseball back and forth, then how to drive. Scott’s youngest son, Tamaje, started kindergarten and eventually served a three-year drug possession sentence after being arrested and tried as an adult at the age of fifteen. Scott and Stefon became grandparents. Stefon’s father died, then his brother. His elementary school girlfriend wrote
him a letter, and they got married. Scott taught himself to write appeals, which seven state judges rejected. In 2009, then-Yale Law School professor Brett Dignam learned about the case through a judge with whom Scott had filed for writ of habeas corpus. Aided by a small team of her law students, she began working to secure his release. Finally, in 2014, a federal judge granted Scott habeas corpus, ruling that Connecticut had with 22
held evidence of his innocence and thereby violated his constitutional rights. (According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 160 wrongfully convicted people were exonerated in both 2015 and 2016.) When Scott stepped off the bus into the February air, he was a free but not-yet-exonerated man with only the clothes on his back and the GPS device strapped to his ankle. When someone is wrongfully imprisoned, all their resources go towards one thing: getting out. But reentry into society is not the same as reintegration. What happens after getting out? Besides arduous logistics (Do you have a bed to sleep in? How do you get an ID?), navigating the emotional saga of release is a colossal task. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has published a twenty-two-page handbook for released prisoners. It concludes with a “Rebuilding Your Relationships” section, which advises prisoners to “begin by appreciating the small things,” and bear in mind that loved ones have aged in their absence. But what is that supposed to look like? Where on earth do you start? Scott’s first goal as a returning civilian was to avoid freezing to death on the sidewalk. He followed a line of people into the jail, saw a counselor he knew, and managed to borrow his phone. His call woke his sister Marlo, who rushed out of bed to pick him up. “Turn left,” her GPS said as they pulled out of the parking lot. Scott was floored. While he knew technology had changed since the nineteen-nineties, he hadn’t accounted for his sister’s talking car. Even during those first hours—his reunion with Marlo, his mother, and then his children—Scott tried to figure out how he was going to move out of Marlo’s house. Without independence, he still felt imprisoned. “Everyone was happy, everyone was celebrating, but I was isolated in my own mind, strategizing. What’s my next move? How am I going to get up in the morning? What am I going to wear?” he remembered. Those first sixty days were excruciating. Even with a loving family and a place to stay, Scott felt trapped, reliant on others for food, cash, and transportation. He had one pair of shoes (work boots), and his only clothes smelled like the cobwebbed basement where they’d been stored during his twenty-year absence. He and his two twenty-something sons, Scottie Jr. and Tamaje, spent weeks driving around in the same little car, applying for the same jobs. Eventually, Scottie Jr. was hired, rendering Scott immobile once again. “I really understood how people could come out of prison, have family support, and still break down and go back to what they were doing before,” Scott said. That’s exactly what happened to his son Tamaje, who had been released from prison a week before his father, and ended up back in jail for a few months in 2016. THE NEW JOUR NAL
Love Stefon Morant, Scott’s co-defendant, was released from prison in August 2015, a year and a half after Scott, after serving for over two decades. Since his release, he’s bounced around from seasonal work to unemployment to a brief stint as a warehouse dockworker, which he had to quit because of his knees. When his job sweeping floors for the city came to a close in October, he felt nervous about being unemployed again. Unlike Scott, who was officially exonerated in August, Stefon still has the murder felony on his record. (Rather than getting off on an early release, his sentence was cut to the shortest possible time, which he’d already served, minus a couple of years for good behavior. Also unlike Scott, Stefon had not aggressively represented himself or caught the attention of the Yale Law School clinic.) Still, he’s in good spirits. A large man who often smiles so big that his eyes disappear, Stefon says it’s tough to stay depressed for long, thanks largely to the Christian faith he discovered in prison. Remembering his homecoming, he gazes at the ceiling. “The first day was joy, of course,” he said. “It couldn’t have been any other feeling. It was an answered prayer from God.” When the judge ruled that he’d get out, the courtroom was full of Morants—his mother, siblings, and cousins—who erupted in celebratory tears. His wife Kimberly said that, aside from the births of her three children, it was the happiest day of her life. At the moment of his release, she met him on the corner outside the New Haven Correctional Center, where Scott stood the previous winter, and asked where he wanted to go. “All I wanted was to be able to put on a belt,” remembers Stefon. “Think about it: twenty-one years, not being able to wear a belt with your pants.” So straight to Marshalls they went, where they bought a belt, a pair of pants, and some slippers. Eighty minutes of freedom, and one goal already accomplished. His wife helped mitigate the struggles he faced coming home. Kimberly had a house, a steady income, and a life with space carved out for him. It was easy to slip into. While Scott was worried about how long he’d have to live at his sister’s, Stefon moved right into his wife’s house. When Kimberly and Stefon first dated, they were in elementary school. After breaking up as preteens, they remained friends. When Stefon went to prison, social circles they shared always maintained his innocence. She sometimes wondered how he was doing, as she grew up, got married and had three children. After her FEBRUARY 2017
Scott Lewis and his youngest daughter Harper-Rose, born a year after his release (photo courtesy of Scott Lewis)
Stefon Morant and his wife Kimberly, a few weeks after Stefon’s release from prison in late 2015 (photo courtesy of Kimberly Morant)
first husband’s death in 2007, she reached out to the still-incarcerated Stefon as a penpal. By 2008 they’d started a romance and by 2009 they were married. His faith in the face of a seemingly insurmountable sentence attracted her. Devotion like that, she said, was what she sought in a partner. She always hoped but 23
Stefon Morant and his children, sent as a gift to him while incarcerated (drawing by Jason Peterson)
Stefon Morant’s twin sons, Julian & Christian, at their high school graduation. Stefon, still behind bars, missed the ceremony (photo courtesy of Stefon Morant)
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never fully imagined they’d be able to live as a couple on the outside. Then, last July, they celebrated their marriage with both of their families and a traditional wedding party. Stefon was dressed in black and white. It was the happiest day of his life. A committed romantic relationship eventually blossomed in Scott’s new life, too. A few years into his incarceration, Scott’s mother told him offhandedly that a young woman had come into her hair salon. The woman knew Scott and believed that he was innocent, and the case had inspired her to go to law school to get him out. This was years before Dignam’s legal team had picked up Scott’s case. He needed all the help he could get, and he couldn’t believe his mother didn’t remember the woman’s name. Without knowing who she was, Scott thought of her often while slogging through legal work behind bars. He wondered whether she’d ever come back to the salon, whether his mother would ever remember her name, whether a young woman would ever appear with the key to his freedom. About a month after he came home, Scott reached out to an old friend, Rachel Bidon, with whom “there’d always been an unspoken attraction” during his former marriage. She was with someone at the time, but they went for lunch anyway. Scott wore parachute pants and a sparkling gold shirt, the only “going-out” outfit he still had from the nineteen-nineties. As they aired old feelings, she mentioned that she once wanted to be a lawyer, and in the midst of studying for the LSATs visited his mother’s salon to tell her that Scott had inspired her studies. Scott was dumbstruck. “When does that happen?” he said, shaking his head. “I looked at her and said, ‘You’re the one I’m looking for.’” They were married five months later. Their daughter, Harper-Rose, is now eleven months old. Scott has been out for three years. He’s practicing real estate with Pike International, and he’s just a couple of steps away from obtaining his broker’s license. He loves talking about the clients that he has made homeowners. He wears a crisp white button-down and shiny black loafers to work. His wedding ring gleams on his left hand. He gestures like a politician while he talks, as if he is building something for you in the air. “Who knows?” he says. “Maybe someday I’ll be mayor of New Haven.” Lost Letters Scott Lewis’ twenty-six-year-old daughter, Jesilinett Vasquez, can’t remember interacting with her father before he went to prison. But, save for a short break when she was seventeen, they exchanged letters nearly THE NEW JOUR NAL
twice a week throughout his entire incarceration. She knew what he looked like from photos, but she never visited and they rarely spoke on the phone. He existed primarily within the words he wrote to her. The notes ran long—usually several lined pages, front and back. This was their medium, which rendered Scott not so different from a diary that wrote back. Jesilinett says she’s always felt comfortable telling her dad almost anything: aspirations, school stresses, relationship woes. Stuff she’d never tell her mom.
She grew up fantasizing about an old-fashioned father-daughter relationship. She wished he’d helped her with math homework she struggled with, given her boyfriend a hard time, or seen her off to prom. She wished he’d been there when she dropped out of high school because she was pregnant, and when her children Lanie and Xavier were born. She wondered if he’d ever dance with her at her wedding. Then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t in prison anymore. She had plans to meet him at her grandmother’s house. But, unsure of how it would go, she almost bailed on the meet-up altogether. She couldn’t remember ever touching him before. What should she expect? Would it be better to keep their relationship encapsulated in its past state, without real-time verbal confusion to muddle it? But shortly after Scott opened the door to embrace her, Jesilinett realized she had nothing to fear. She and her father embraced and talked, and it felt natural. Their on-paper rapport carried into conversation. She left brimming with optimism and gratitude. Her father was home. Really home. A couple of weeks later, she brought her kids to a family birthday party, and they met their grandfather. Again, it felt as though things were cohering well, if a little surreally. Her boyfriend had met her father before she did, because they were in prison together. He told her Scott talked a big game about “becoming a father” after getting out. But despite the first few happy reunions, Jesilinett began to feel like he wasn’t making good on his word. She rarely heard from him, and she wanted FEBRUARY 2017
him to take greater initiative to be a part her life. She couldn’t get rid of the fear that maybe he wasn’t the father she’d been waiting for, that maybe he wasn’t much of a father at all. — The first thing one notices about Scott Lewis are his high cheekbones and soft, brown eyes. These are also the first things one notices about Jesilinett (who, although twenty-six, looks like she might be sixteen). Her four-year-old, Xavier, has them, too. Jesilinett and her kids live in West Haven in a single-family home. She said she couldn’t bring much in the move, so she got rid of the collection of letters she’d gotten from her dad while he was in prison. Sitting in her kitchen, Jesilinett described how she’s felt since her dad came home. “It hurts,” she said. Lanie, tugging at her mother’s jeans to show her a drawing, floated away, then returned with a paper towel roll. She wordlessly handed it to Jesilinett, who took a sheet to wipe her eyes. “I just wish he was more like a father. I wish he knew them,” she said, pointing towards the kids. “I know him,” said Lanie, crossing her arms. “He picked me up. We played a game.” “Yeah? What do you call him? What’s his name?” Jesilinett asked. Lanie pursed her lips. She looked at her feet. “Exactly.” — Fifteen-minute phone calls once a week or less constituted Scott’s relationship with his sons, beginning when they were in preschool. Early on, he said, he stopped allowing his kids to visit. The humiliation of getting stripped, searched, and bossed around—and watching his kids go through metal detectors, get reprimanded for moving the wrong way or attempting to do anything other than hold his hand across a table—“triggered [him] psychologically.” And, unlike Jeslinett, Scott’s sons didn’t strike up a written correspondence. Before he came home, Scott took his reunion with his children for granted. He thought it “would be a given; that it was natural, biological,” but he found that his kids had grown up without him in their lives and didn’t need him. A few months after Scott’s release, Scottie Jr. told his father as much. He didn’t feel any particular emotional connection to his father, and as a then-twenty-six-yearold man with two kids of his own, he wasn’t seeking guidance from a stranger who’d been removed from society since 1995. “We’re biologically father and son, but in terms of everyday living, you really don’t know me,” Scott recalled his son saying. “You don’t know who I am.” 25
Five months after his release, Jesilinett learned her dad was engaged to Rachel when an acquaintance mentioned it offhandedly in a Stop & Shop. She had no idea her father had been seeing someone. Incensed, she texted her sister Liz, who didn’t know either. They agreed: How did their father have the time to meet someone and get to know her, but not the time to mend and foster relationships with the family he already had? In his hurry to make up for lost time— reconnect with a lost love, assemble a life, and participate in a linear, traditional fatherhood—he had left them behind. “He wasn’t only moving on. The whole thing felt like he was rubbing it in our faces,” Jesilinett said. Jesilinett “went off on him” over text. She told her father that she worried about the marriage. It seemed naïve not to acknowledge that Scott, who’d been wrong-
fully imprisoned for twenty years, stood to gain a great deal of money as compensation from the state. Was he sure that this woman’s motives were pure? Rachel, Scott’s fiancée, saw the messages and grew angry. When Harper-Rose was born about a year ago, Jesilinett decided to go see the family, but her relationship with Rachel remained sour. Jesilinett left the hospital in tears. Her dad had a new daughter and a new life with a woman who couldn’t stand her. “He says he knew her before, that she helps him, gives him a house, that she loves him…” Jesilinett trailed off, waving her hand above her kitchen table. “Blah, blah, blah,” her daughter Lanie finished. How to Be a Father Scott and Stefon attribute most of their post-prison successes to the new relationships they’ve forged, but both have struggled to connect with their now-adult children. Like Jesilinett, Stefon’s son Julian Sobin questioned his dad’s new relationship with Kimberly, and he considered skipping last year’s wedding party. He cried at the ceremony because it was an emotional 26
day: wonderful, sure, but also difficult. He didn’t know Kimberly and, frankly, he hardly knew Stefon. He resented that his dad wasn’t trying harder to make things work with what he already had. “It’s not like my mom wanted him back or anything,” Julian said. “But he has four kids with two women. Part of me was like, why does he have to join this new family? Why couldn’t he make things work with a family he already had?” To her three kids, now all high school–aged or older, Kimberly said Stefon’s been a fantastic stepfather. Julian, however, thinks his dad doesn’t really know how to be a parent. When Julian becomes a parent, he says he hopes to emulate his mother: someone who was always there, who “would give the shirt off her back” and worked tirelessly for him and his twin brother Christian. Even though Julian knows his father didn’t commit the murders for which he went to prison, he’s always harbored resentment. “If he’d been a good parent at the time—focusing on his kids or helping my mom, and not on getting involved in sketchy stuff—he would never have ended up in prison to begin with,” he explained. For a while, Julian thought about joining his local police force. During the preliminary stages at the training academy, they asked if he was related to anyone who’d been convicted of a crime, and he knew he’d have to bring up Stefon. He did, but also mentioned that he barely knew and almost never thought about his father, having been raised by his mother and grandparents. By any emotional measure, they were his parents. Christian feels that distance even more strongly— which is ironic, Julian said, since Christian has so much in common with Stefon. They look alike, laugh alike, and exhibit the same rebellious streak. Growing up, Julian occasionally worried about Christian; he didn’t want him to end up like their dad. The twins talked on the phone with Stefon occasionally and visited every so often, but they didn’t like going to the prison. There were so many rules about how you could interact, and they were never sure how to make conversation. When they got older and had more control over their schedules, they went less regularly. Sometimes, if peers asked why his dad was never around, Julian would lie, saying he was away on business or always working. He was embarrassed. His friends’ parents weren’t in prison. But when on a road trip with friends, Julian got the call that his dad would be free and began to sob. “The tears just started coming. I didn’t even know it was happening,” he said. “I just started imagining all the things he could be there for—if I ever get married, have kids.” THE NEW JOUR NAL
Scott Lewis and Stefon Morant shortly after Morant’s release in 2015 (photo courtesy of Scott Lewis)
Julian didn’t know what to expect from their relationship after the release. The first time they met, he mostly felt shock, and that didn’t go away for a while. Now, he told me, they’re more like friends than father and son. He is reluctant to schedule time with his dad, who rarely takes the initiative. Sometimes, they go to the gym together, where they make small talk about girls or sports and work out alongside each other. In December, after Julian graduated from Southern Connecticut State University, Stefon took him out for a drink. On the drive over, Julian told his dad that he didn’t feel like they knew each other, that he was angry, and that he wished his dad felt more like a father. Stefon listened sympathetically, and Julian thought things might change. But after a few months, he said, they haven’t. “They all come back from prison having found Jesus, which is cool, fine,” Julian added. “So I get a lot of Bible verse texts. But not a lot of ‘Hey, how are you? How’s your life?’ texts.” In Search of Lost Time Unlike his half-sister Jesilinett, Tamaje—Scott’s youngest child from before prison—has a single early memory of his dad. He must have been around four, which puts Scottie Jr. around six. They were at Toys FEBRUARY 2017
“R” Us, and Scott told them they could each pick out one thing. Tamaje impulsively grabbed a piece of candy, but later wished he’d followed Scottie’s lead and picked out a Hot Wheels car. A week after his most recent prison release, he sat at the kitchen table with his fiancée. Tamaje, like his father and Stefon, credits her, who visited him in prison every day for the last year, with helping him get straight and giving him a place to come home. To an extent, he thinks having his father around might have kept him out of trouble—he went to prison for the first time for drug possession when he was fifteen—but he also doesn’t care to linger on hypotheticals. Now, Tamaje is feeling more optimistic about the future. Before, it seemed impossible to get a job and easy to go back to the street. But this time, his dad’s around and has a steady income, and he’s offered Tamaje a part-time position at Pike. He says he never felt his relationship with Scott was strained, because he never knew what he was missing. Now, he’s looking forward to building a personal and professional bond. “Maybe it’s because I’ve been in myself,” he said. “But I get it. I don’t hold anything against him. He lost a lot of his life.” — Last March, Jesilinett turned twenty-six. Scott took her to IHOP in the morning. “Just to have breakfast together, for the first time ever,” she said, her voice cracking a little, “that was so special to me.” Like Tamaje, she sometimes wonders whether things would have gone more smoothly if Scott had been around while she was growing up. He motivates her unlike anyone else, she says. After several starts and stops over seven years, she finally got her GED this summer, partially as a result of his prodding. Maybe that would have happened sooner had he been home. So, there at IHOP, they talked about her study schedule, her aspirations for a medical career, her life as a mother. They discovered that neither of them even likes breakfast food. It’s something they share, along with their high cheekbones, youthful brown eyes, and a tendency to get cold, both indoors and out. “Like, all the time,” said Jesilinett, reaching for her jacket over their unfinished pancakes. “Me too,” said Scott. “Have I told you about my first day out of prison?” — Caroline Wray is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College.
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poem
ON A TUESDAY Griffin Brown
Here, now, a half-dozen people are nearly touching one another under the rubble of the Salvation Army thrift store. By evening, I have exhausted the coverage. There’s a photo of a family standing at the edge of the cluttered lot. To their left, an excavator rests with its head down. Dust coats the daughters’ hair. They’ll be gone as soon as the light changes. Their car is just around the corner; with the walls gone, you can see it. What surrounds the car is full of holes: lens flares burn through other buildings and faded billboard advertisements. Street signs with bent stems— casualties— stick out of the broken sidewalk. World is ready to cave in.
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THE NEW JOUR NAL
yale institute of sacred music presents
Kirstin Valdez Quade Sin, Story, and Salvation
thursday, february 23 · 5:30 pm
Sterling Memorial Library Auditorium · 130 Wall St., New Haven Yale Literature & Spirituality Series Presented with support from Yale Divinity Student Book Supply
Kammerchor Stuttgart
Music of Fasch, Mendelssohn, and more
sunday, march 5 · 7:30 pm
Battell Chapel · 400 College St., New Haven
Music for Palm Sunday
Yale Camerata · Marguerite L. Brooks, conductor Premiere of a new work by Robert Kyr
sunday, april 9 · 4 pm
Woolsey Hall · 500 College St., New Haven All events are free; no tickets required. ism.yale.edu
CAN YALE BE A SANCTUARY? In the age of Trump, undocumented students wonder how far the university will go to protect them by Annie Rosenthal and Amelia Nierenberg
On the night of January 29, 2017, a crowd of nearly 1,500 people gathered in front of Sterling Memorial Library. The previous week, President Donald Trump had issued a dizzying array of executive orders targeting refugees and immigrants. The people had come to protest. The word SOLIDARITY, projected over Sterling’s façade, illuminated the old stones with a call to action. Swaddled in winter coats and holding candles, students, professors, and New Haven residents young and old stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Yale sophomore Alejandra Corona Ortega took the microphone and began to speak. She said the recent presidential election had made her question whether she belonged at Yale—that, as an undocumented immigrant, she’d begun to wonder if the promises of America were not for her. Was an America that would
elect Trump a country that could ever support her? Her voice rose as she addressed Trump’s recent threats to increase deportations and withhold funding from sanctuary cities like New Haven, which has pledged to limit its cooperation with federal immigration enforcement actions. “He, and people like him, will never stop until we are too afraid or overwhelmed to speak up,” she said. “Or worse, too indifferent to do anything. But nights like these give me the strength to not let fear seep in.” Corona Ortega, a New Haven local who graduated as valedictorian of the Sound School in 2015, continued amid applause. She’s become accustomed to speaking about her immigration status — she “came out” as undocumented last spring at a rally for Bernie Sanders on the New Haven Green.
“Lastly, Yale and Yalies, do better. Don’t think of this as only your Yale community. Think of this as your New Haven community too.” She handed the microphone off. The crowd cheered. — For liberal arts institutions, the Trump presidency — evidently hostile to dissent of any kind, fearful of multiculturalism, skeptical of experts and even the notion of truth — poses a range of confounding challenges. Few are more urgent than how to respond to Trump’s immigration policies. How far will Yale go to protect those who study and teach here? How much power does this wealthy, elite institution have to resist the tide of national policy? And how does the institution’s location in New Haven — the country’s first “sanctuary city”— affect the answers to these questions? In the uneasy first month of the Trump presidency, there are few answers. But activism has escalated significantly at Yale and in New Haven, forcing these issues to the fore. Since Trump’s inauguration on January 20, city residents and students have taken to the streets and to the Green, many protests organized primarily by New Haven organizations like Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA). Almost all have been direct responses to Trump’s immigration policies. In his first week in office, Trump issued four executive orders targeting immigrants. On January 27, he banned refugees worldwide from entering the United States. He temporarily halted immigration for ninety days for all people from the predominantly Muslim countries Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, a ban which has since been frozen by federal courts. He ordered the construction of a 2,000-milelong wall along the Mexican border. He announced 32
plans for a weekly online list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. And he re-enacted the “Secure Communities” program, started under George W. Bush and continued under Obama until 2014. The program requires the FBI, which routinely runs the fingerprints of arrested individuals against its own databases, to also run them against databases maintained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) —sometimes leading to deportation or other legal consequences. “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” the executive order most directly concerning to Corona Ortega and other undocumented Yale affiliates, expands the discretionary power of individual ICE officers. It also broadens the definition of “criminal” to target nearly every undocumented immigrant for deportation. The university does not collect official numbers, but the Yale Daily News reported in 2013 that there were at most twenty undocumented students on campus. This year, Ramon Garibaldo Valdez, an undocumented first-year graduate student who has advocated for undocumented students, estimated the number to be somewhere around thirty. The flurry of action has left undocumented Yale students bracing for the worst. Corona Ortega and others who have no legal status worry that their long-held fears of deportation could come true. Other students, like junior Rafael*, obtained a Social Security Number and a driver’s license through the Deferred Action Childhood Arrival Program (DACA), a program Obama created in 2013 via executive order. Rafael can drive and work legally in the U.S., and he feels safe to a certain extent. But “DACA-mented” students face a new threat to their sense of security, too: Throughout his campaign, Trump threatened to end DACA entirely. Some undocumented Yalies, like Corona Ortega, have turned to activism. Others, like Rafael, fear talking publicly about their immigration status. Because Yale is the wealthiest and most powerful institution with which they are affiliated, many are looking to the university for support in this moment of uncertainty. Yale has taken a strong public stance against one aspect of Trump’s immigration policy: The ban on refugees and immigrants from muslim countries. As a member of the Association of American Universities, Yale backed a January 28 AAU statement calling for a swift end to the executive order, which would have barred returning students and faculty from certain countries — a fact University President Salovey detailed in a campus-wide email on January 29. On February 13, Yale joined Harvard, Stanford, and fourteen other universities in filing an amicus curiae brief in support of a legal case against the order. Salovey has THE NEW JOUR NAL
also publicly supported the BRIDGE Act, recently proposed legislation meant to protect DACA students if the program were terminated. In a November opinion piece in the Yale Daily News, Salovey promised legal representation for undocumented Yale students and formalized the Yale Police Department’s policy of non-compliance with ICE. Tom Conroy, director of the university’s Office of Public Affairs & Communications, wrote in an email that university policy now mandates that YPD officers will neither inquire as to immigration status in non-criminal activity “nor enforce civil provisions of U.S. immigration law.” Following the election, the Office of International Students and Scholars (OISS) created a new website with resources and advice for undocumented and DACA-mented students. On November 9, OISS director Ann Kuhlman sent an email to undocumented students. She acknowledged that “some of the policies discussed during the campaign are understandably raising concerns for the undocumented and DACA-mented community, at Yale and beyond, on how the new administration will address the broader issue of undocumented individuals.” She wrote to the recipients: “you are an important and valued part of the Yale community and to let you know our office is alert to these issues and will monitor them closely. Presidents Salovey and Levin before him have long advocated for a reform of U.S. immigration and expressed support for the DREAM Act. This expression of support will continue.” At the end, she wrote: “We are all here for you.” While many immigrants and their supporters on campus say they appreciate the offers of assistance from OISS, they remain frustrated with what they view as an opaque response from the Yale administration. On December 19, Salovey quietly rejected a petition signed by nearly 1,000 members of the community asking Yale to designate itself a “sanctuary campus.” The sanctuary designation, a concept both symbolic and concrete that has drawn massive support on college campuses around the country, would publicly declare Yale’s refusal to collaborate with ICE officials attempting to detain members of the university community. While all Ivy League universities except the University of Pennsylvania publicly rejected the label, students at over one hundred schools have petitioned to adopt it. Thirteen colleges, including Wesleyan University and Connecticut College, have publically declared themselves as sanctuaries. Salovey’s rejection came at the bottom of a Yale News press release about the BRIDGE Act — without ceremony and without campus-wide recognition. Tom Conroy, director of the university’s Office of Public FEBRUARY 2017
Affairs & Communications, said in an email that the briefing was emailed out to the entire Yale community. “Yale’s Office of Public Affairs has engaged with a number of media members about Yale’s position, and I don’t believe there is any public confusion regarding that position,” he wrote. But much of the student body seems to remain unaware of the decision: a January 27th Yale Daily News article on the Yale sanctuary campus movement wrote that Salovey had “indicated neither support nor opposition to that proposal.” And on February 8th, Viviana Arroyo, co-moderator of the student organization Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), wrote in an email, “Many students are unclear about whether or not the administration has clearly come out and said that Yale will be a sanctuary campus.” The day of the vigil, Salovey sent a university-wide email to the university community expressing support for Yale’s immigrant community and highlighting the importance of diversity on campus, but no administrator spoke at the event. — Corona Ortega has a hard time falling asleep these days. Events like the vigil are bright moments in an otherwise stressful period. An aspiring lawyer, she is taking five classes as an Ethnicity, Race & Migration major, working as a public school intern through Dwight Hall, volunteering with New Haven’s JUNTA for Progressive Action, and organizing in support of immigrants like
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herself at Yale—all while constantly monitoring the news for updates on Trump’s policies. Though she says her friends at school have been supportive since the election, most are not undocumented, and the people she worries about are not on campus. Since Trump’s election, New Haven’s status as a sanctuary city—which Mayor Toni Harp has repeatedly affirmed in recent weeks even in the face of federal funding cuts—has come to feel more significant to Corona Ortega, who moved here with her family nearly ten years ago. She spent most of her childhood over two-thousand miles away from her mother: While Corona Ortega and her brother stayed home with relatives in Puebla, Mexico, her mom worked in New Haven and sent money back to support them. After nearly a decade away, her mother moved back to Puebla to be with her children. But making ends meet was nearly impossible—she opened a series of bakeries that all failed. When Corona Ortega finished sixth grade, her mother told her that they wouldn’t be able to afford to send her to seventh; in Mexico, her school charged for uniforms and other mandatory services. But Corona Ortega was smart, her mother said, and deserved a better life than the one she’d had. They sold everything they owned to pay a coyote to help them make the journey to New Haven with Corona Ortega’s older brother and stepfather.
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The Elm City’s designation as a sanctuary city kept them safe. Once, when her mother was driving Corona Ortega home from work in North Branford late one evening, a police officer stopped their car and asked to see her driver’s license. When Corona Ortega’s mother couldn’t produce one, the officer asked why she was driving without a license. “I have to work,” she responded. Corona Ortega recalls that the officer seemed to understand immediately that she was undocumented—but the officer simply fined Corona Ortega’s mother and sent them on their way. On November 14, less than a week after the election, Mayor Toni Harp readied New Haven’s top lawyers to start preparing a legal defense in case Trump attacked New Haven—despite the fact that affirming its sanctuary distinction jeopardizes $56 million of New Haven’s federal funding. “New Haven residents have never questioned if I deserve an education or if my family deserved a job,” she told the crowd gathered at the vigil in January. “They’re fighting for people like me.” According to Fatima Rojas, a volunteer with both ULA and JUNTA, fighting for the immigrant community means fighting alongside them. After the election, both immigrant advocacy groups met with representatives from City Hall to set up a working group to define what “sanctuary” will mean for New Haven. The group also includes representatives from the New Haven public school district and the police department. Rojas, who is a member of the working group, says it has defined three principle aims: to strengthen the legal language of the police general order, to extend the sanctuary status to New Haven public schools, and to create a legal document defining New Haven’s concept of a sanctuary city, with help from the Immigration Legal Services Yale Law School clinic. Since the election in November, attendance at ULA meetings has more than doubled—on the Monday after the inauguration, over fifty members of the New Haven immigrant community packed the folding chairs at the group’s Howe Street office. Children played on the floor as their parents looked to community leaders for advice. Before the election, many came to the group for support in cases of housing discrimination, wage theft, and police brutality. Now, ULA co-founder John Jairo Lugo says that deportation is as real a threat as any. In recent weeks, ULA has worked with La Casa Cultural, the Latinx cultural center at Yale, to organize phone banking sessions to call local representatives, and Lugo says they’ve been inspired by the number of Yale students turning out to show their support at rallies. He’d like to see Yale’s administration extend support to immigrants in New Haven—given the university’s clout, a public show of solidarity could provide THE NEW JOUR NAL
a powerful counter to the racism that Trump has legitimized. But, he says, he’s not holding his breath. — Rafael has not felt as anxious as Alejandra on campus or at home in rural Georgia. The path to Yale began when his parents left Aguascalientes, Mexico in 2001, determined to give their children access to education. According to the Pew Research center, the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico living in the United States rose steadily from 1995; the population peaked at 6.9 million new arrivals in 2007. Rafael and his parents came on legal visas and overstayed, joining the American undocumented population overnight. They followed his father’s friend to a small town in a Trump-voting county with cotton fields and pine groves, fast-food restaurants and a new Wal-Mart Supercenter, a single Catholic church and a handful of Hispanic families. Rafael’s four younger sisters were all born there, and they have all excelled in the town’s public schools. Rafael says going back to Mexico isn’t even a question. They live in Georgia. They’ll stay in Georgia. Most of their family is American. After easily rising to the top of his middle school, Rafael spent the summer after his junior year in high school at the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program, the most prestigious academic summer program in the state. His success planted what he called “the idea of a Harvard” in his mind, and he focused his college search on prestigious private institutions. His teachers encouraged him to apply out of state. He was that kind of student. But Rafael also had no other options — Georgia is one of three states nationwide that effectively ban undocumented students from enrolling. When Obama created DACA in 2013, Rafael gained an immigration status that conferred practical and psychological benefits. When he was admitted to Yale, his status was not much of a concern. To Rafael, being at Yale provides an imperfect sense of security. “I am not vulnerable in the sense that I have a Yale degree,” he said. “But I am vulnerable because some of the closest people to me are vulnerable, and there is nothing I can do to stop that.” Jennifer Angarita, who graduated from Yale in 2010, remembers being undocumented at Yale in a preDACA America. Now that she has a Green card, she remains engaged in immigration activism and organizing in Boston, and she spent much of her time at Yale involved with campus groups like MEChA and New Haven groups like JUNTA. Although the university administrators were supportive and she found professors she could trust, she kept her immigration status close to her chest. In particular, she remembers Ann Kuhlman of OISS as an advocate, unwilling to FEBRUARY 2017
make any public declarations but very sympathetic to what Angarita described as the “trauma of living as an undocumented student.” Now, Angarita and Dwight Hall director Peter Crumlish are discussing establishing an advisory network for undocumented students to connect with undocumented alumni. Postgraduate opportunities are few and uncertain for undocumented students, and she wants to help establish an “underground railroad” of professional and personal support. Today, it is safer and a little easier for undocumented students to move through the university, especially those protected by DACA. But there are still obstacles for completely undocumented students like Corona Ortega. For one thing, she’d like to work as a peer liaison at La Casa or as an aide in the Timothy Dwight College Office, but without DACA status, she’s not eligible for employment by the university. In accordance with Yale’s need-blind admissions policy, Corona Ortega’s tuition is covered by financial aid. But financial aid doesn’t cover the cost of textbooks, and she says her family needs the additional money she could bring in with a job. Her brother is in community college, and he and their mother both work as wait staff. To some extent, Corona Ortega does feel protected by the Yale bubble: She says she doubts that ICE agents would come to Yale’s campus to physically detain her— at least, she hopes that Yale wouldn’t allow them to. But after Trump’s executive orders, she worries about the possibility of a less dramatic encounter: returning to her suite one day to find that ICE had unceremoniously left her a deportation order. She’s not confident that the Yale administration could, or would, prevent that from happening. In an email, Conroy wrote that law enforcement can only enter campus with a search warrant, and are required to check in with the Yale Police Department. If that worst-case scenario were to occur, Corona Ortega says she wouldn’t look to Yale for support. Her family has already contacted a lawyer. Garibaldo Valdez, the undocumented graduate student in political science, says he thinks Yale’s decision 35
to discreetly publish its rejection of sanctuary campus designation was a politically savvy one. According to the 2016 Annual Budget Report, Yale receives over $500 million in federal funding that supports seventy-five percent of the research conducted on campus. Conroy dismissed the idea that any of Yale’s actions are influenced by the need to protect funding, writing: “Any speculation that Yale’s positions on undocumented students and immigration is at all influenced by concern for federal research funding is completely unfounded and unfair.” Garibaldo Valdez doesn’t see the rejection as a complete loss, though. Of the ten pillars of a sanctuary campus presented by the petition, the administration has at least partially implemented half: promising legal representation for students, appointing Ann Kuhlman to be a university liaison for undocumented students, forbidding police cooperation with ICE, and creating the OISS resource website. But Garibaldo Valdez says that these actions constitute only a small fraction of what the administration could do if it wanted to. “For a student who’s coming of age in the era of Trump, I am looking towards my institution, asking, ‘What do you think?’” he said. “And the response happening right now from the student body is, ‘We are with you, you are a part of Yale.’ And from the administration, it’s ‘We’re kind of with you, but we don’t want to lose federal funding.” — Unlike Corona Ortega, Rafael chose to attend Yale without knowing much about New Haven or Yale’s history with DACA-mented students. When he came to New Haven in 2014, he had never seen the campus, and he is the only member of his family who has. Still, it feels like home. For Rafael, Yale is about attaining his version of the American Dream. He’s staking out internships at places like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey Consulting, majoring in economics rather than psychology, his passion, to maximize his chances for economic success. At home in Georgia, switching easily between Spanish and English so his parents could understand, Rafael said he was lucky to have made it to Yale. “I’m on the successful side of the dream,” he said. “I’m fortunate for that. But at the same time, it’s a kind of an ideology that keeps you going forward.” He wants to succeed financially, but he also wants to prove himself. “There’s a stereotype that’s continuously pushed — we aren’t contributing, we aren’t doing anything,” he said of American prejudices against undocumented Hispanic immigrants. Of her son’s path, Rafael’s mother said, “Te tocó.” Rafael paused. “I don’t know how to translate that,” 36
he said. “If I translated exactly… ‘it touched you’?” He tried again. “She’s thankful for that and the fact that it worked out for me,” he said. “She doesn’t want it to sound like it’s been a gift. It’s something that you worked hard for but also, it’s lucky.” Undocumented students like Rafael and Corona Ortega say they never take their place at Yale for granted. But they also say that as students here, they see themselves as full members of the Yale community— defined not by the public statements of administrators but by the actions of their peers and professors. In that sense, they haven’t been disappointed. Garibaldo Valdez agrees. Speaking at a Sanctuary Campus walk-out on November 16, standing in the very same spot where Alejandra would address the crowd two months later, he says he was shocked by the sense of security he felt. “I have never imagined I could be in a university-regulated space where I don’t have to feel a certain degree of apprehension, not to say fear, to say my status,” he said. “And part of it is not due to the administrative benefits I’ve gotten, but it is due to the student body. And so the student body has made me feel like I am a part of Yale.” The future remains unknowable; both Alejandra and Rafael move through Yale bearing the constant weight of uncertainty. But one thing is certain: The fate of undocumented immigrants at Yale will depend not only on Trump’s actions but the actions of their neighbors on campus. If students keep attending rallies, calling their senators, showing up—then sanctuary status could be authored by action instead of administrative declaration. But Garibaldo Valdez would still welcome that administrative declaration. “It’s this feeling that I am a part of Yale, and you’re not treating me as such,” he said. “I mean, if one of your students were being threatened with this dark cloud of deportation, would you not go to the furthest extent to protect them? Would you not come up with things to do to make them feel safe? And I am seeing some of that. I wish I could see more of it.” *To protect himself and his family, Rafael is using a pseudonym in this story. — Annie Rosenthal is a freshman in Berkeley College, and Amelia Nierenberg is a junior in Timothy Dwight College.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
ENDNOTE
WHINE AND DINE Jacob Sweet
1. Making a dignified entrance You’ve made your first mistake: entering a dining hall without an eating partner. How did it end up like this? Just today, ten acquaintances inquired about grabbing a meal and catching up, but when you asked what time worked, they started sweating and fled. Weird. You don’t want to look like you’re trying too hard to find somebody, but if you don’t put in enough effort, you’ll end up sitting alone. You see Jimmy from Orgo. His notebook of chemical reactions is open next to his cup of Mountain Berry Blast Powerade. If all else fails, Jimmy is always super down to talk about stereoisomeric relationships and his overbearing parents. Before you enter the kitchen, you see two of your friends halfway through their meal. Last time you joined them, they wouldn’t leave until you finished. Not wanting to delay them, you ate so fast you choked on your beef and kimchi taco. Yikes. You avoid eye contact and head toward the line. 2. Rationing chicken tenders You’re third in line for chicken tenders, and by the time you’re up, three remain. Normally, you’d take all three, probably more. Chicken tender day is a gluttonous
FEBRUARY 2017
celebration, and one or two doesn’t cut it. But there’s someone behind you. You don’t want to leave her with nothing, but at the same time, would she be happy with just one? She’ll likely take it, and then wait for more. The lone tender you left will be the coldest on her plate. You glance back, gauging her expression, and she smiles. It seemed like a genuine smile, but was it too genuine? Your legs begin to shake and you nearly lose control of the tender tongs. You take two. Not enough for you, not enough for her. As you walk to the sauce table, the dining hall staff whip out a fresh batch. It’s too late now to go back in line; you would be admitting defeat. You drizzle sweet and sour sauce on your plate in quiet resignation. 3. Ordering a hamburger You’re craving more meat, so you walk to the grill. The grill master looks at you, expecting an order, but you’re not ready. It will take around seven minutes for the burger to cook. By that time, you’ll be seated, enveloped in a riveting conversation with your yet-to-be-determined meal partner. Going back to grab your hamburger may stunt or even terminate your conversation. And what if the person you’re talking to just watched Food Inc. and is repulsed by the steaming hunk of meat on
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your plate? And don’t you think it’s kind of rude that you’re asking an employee to make you a hamburger when there’s plenty of prepared food? And—“Excuse me,” the dining hall employee says, “Would you like a hamburger or not?” You notice that there are seventeen people behind you. “No thanks,” you say. You exit the kitchen and sit alone, fantasizing about red meat. 4. Scooping out ice cream
— Jacob Sweet is a junior in Hopper College.
illust r
ation
s bix
arch e
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You grab the ice cream scooper out of the murky water, and flip open a metal top— vanilla. You try another—raspberry. On the third try, you find an empty tub. No, wait: there’s three inches of rock-hard chocolate ice cream stuck to the bottom of the container. You should have known that the Berkeley freezer would be set to an inappropriately low temperature, but there’s no use
in having another dining hall meltdown. You don’t want Yale Security to pin you to the floor again. You get to work, reaching your entire arm into the freezer, digging into the ice cream with the world’s tiniest ice cream scooper. To get an adequate amount of ice cream, you’d need at least five or six more scoops, but you don’t have that kind of time. There is one person in line behind you, and you know that if you keep scooping, he’ll write an op-ed about how much he hates you. You get one last scoop into your to-go cup and steal a metal spoon because there are no to-go spoons. By the time you get back to your suite, the ice cream is melted. You drink it like a thin milkshake, which is a sad thing to drink alone.
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THE NEW JOUR NAL
the franz rosenzweig lectures at yale
migrants in the profane The Frankfurt School and the Dialectical Inheritance of Religion
Image Source: http://archive.computerhistory.org/projects/chess/related_materials/ still-image/bak/1-0.The_Turk.Granger_Collection_0059574_H.102645400.jpg
Peter E. Gordon
Amabel B. James Professor of History, Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy Harvard University
6:00 pm • Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, 120 High Street April 20 Benjamin: The Ambivalence of Secularization
April 24 Horkheimer: The Dialectical Inheritance of Western Monotheism
April 26 Adorno: Negative Dialectics as Negative Theology
Reception to follow. For information, please contact Renee Reed at (203) 432-0843 or renee.reed@yale.edu
sponsored by the judaic studies program at yale university
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THE NEW JOUR NAL