Volume 51 - Issue 3

medical by the director of Yale

fall term and one spri in either order, not inc term in which the wit occurred.

and pass all of the courses in which they remained enrolled. A student who fails to meet this condition is

eling department must normally

se withdrawal had been au-

edical by the director of Yale

chief of the Mental Health

ng department must normally

at least one full term before

e College, not including the the withdrawal occurred.

THE NEW JOURNAL

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 51 / ISS 3 / DEC 2018

o Yale College, not including the

Students whose withdrawal had been authorized as medical by the director of Yale

Students whose withdrawal was for eith demic reasons or personal reasons mus remain away at least one full term before a return to Yale College, not including the away for at least one fall term and one s Yale Collegeoccurred. reserves the right to require a student to withdraw for term in which the withdrawal in either order, not including the term in Health or the chief of the Mental Health and Counseling department must normally

medical reasons when, on recommendation of the director of Yale

Health or the chief of the Mental Health and Counseling department, the dean of Yale College determines that the student is a danger to self

Students whose withdrawal was for either aca-

or others because of a serious medical problem, or that the student has

demic reasons or personal reasons must remain

refused to cooperate with efforts deemed necessary by Yale Health to Yale College reserves the determine if the student is such a danger. right to require a student

away for at least one fall term and one spring

g the time that a student who s withdrawn is away from Yale ege, the Committee on Reintement expects him or her to been constructively occupied have maintained a satisfactory standard of conduct. term, in either order, not including the term in

Note that students who withdrew al reasons rather than face discip to withdraw for medical that are pending against them ar reasons on recomreinstatement; seewhen, above under mendation of the director of Personal Reasons.�

which the withdrawal occurred.

A student is eligible to be reinstated only once; Interviews are normally conducted prior to the beginning of the term to

whichonly the student is seeking reinstatement. While the expectation is that a second reinstatement may be considered

these meetings will take place in person, they may be conducted by video under unusual circumstances, ordinarily of a

owing their reinstatement, students are expected to

hey remained enrolled. A student who fails to meet

teleconference when circumstances warrant. Contact the chair of the

THE ROAD BACK

medical nature.

Committee on Reinstatement with questions.

once; a second reinstatement may be

udent is eligible to be reinstated only once; a second

udents whose withdrawal was for either acaemic reasons or personal reasons must remain way for at least one fall term and one spring term, either order, not including the term in which the rviews are normally conducted prior to the beithdrawal occurred.

ning of the term to which the student is seeking

statement. While the expectation is that these

seling department, the dean of Yale College determines

dents who have demonstrated t remain in academic good standi seeks to reinstate onl strated the ability hen standing and thus com the specific number o

considered only under unusual circumstances, ordinarily of a medical nature.

the Mental Health and Coun-

Students whose withdrawal was fo that the student is a danger demic reasons or personal reasons away for at least one fall term and term, in either order, not including Since the committee seeks to r which the withdrawal occurred.

A student is eligible to be reinstated only

after his or her record has been reviewed by the Com-

Yale Health or the chief of

A student is eligible to be reinstated only Students whose withdrawal had been authorized once; a second reinas medical by the director of Yale Health or the statement may be c chief of the Mental Health and Counseling departWhile the majority of students who apply for reinstatement do u sidered only under ment must normally remain away at least one full Students whose withdrawal was for either academic reasons or personal reasons must

remain away for at least one fall term and one spring term, in either order, not including

etings will take place in person, they may be con-

the term in which the withdrawal occurred.

return to Yale College, reinstatement is not guaranteed to any applicant. Since the committee seeks to reinstate only those stuing the term in which the withdrawal occurred. dents who have demonstrated the ability henceforth to remain in academic good standing and thus complete degree requirements within the specific number of terms of enrollment remaining to them, the committee may sometimes advise an applicant to defer As an integral part of the application for reinstatehis or her return until a time later than the one originally proposed.

ted by video teleconference when circumstances

rant. Contact the chair of the Committee on Rein-

term before a return to Yale College, not includ-

student is eligible be reinstated only nce ment, students who withdrew for medical reasons

editors-in-chief Annie Rosenthal Mark Rosenberg managing editor Arya Sundaram senior editors Antonia Ayres-Brown Chris Hays Robert Scaramuccia associate editors Laura Glesby Max Graham Rachel Koh Sohum Pal Elliot Wailoo

copy editors Kofi Ansong Yonatan Greenberg Sofia Laguarda Sara Luzuriaga Eliana Swerdlow design editors Merritt Barnwell Meher Hans Sam Oldshue Rachel Wolf photo editors Robbie Short Vivek Suri web developer Philippe Chlenski

reporting supported by the Edward Bennett III Memorial Fund members and directors Emily Bazelon, Lincoln Caplan, 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

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 51 issue 3 DEC 2018

SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

26 cover

THE ROAD BACK

Students forced to withdraw from Yale have

seventy-two hours to leave campus. To return,

they must navigate a convoluted process.

Elliot Wailoo

feature 8

THE PEOPLE AND THE POLLS

Five TNJ reporters fanned out across New Haven to

capture scenes from this year’s pivotal election.

16 feature

THE KID’S SPEECH

For decades, pediatric speech therapist Wendy Marans

has fixed stutters and lisps in her Church Street office.

Antonia Ayres-Brown standards points of departure 4

DEMOCRACY, DEMYSTIFIED — Carina Gormley

GODSPEED — Zola Canady 12

critical angle DIVERTED — Jack McCordick A new model of policing has reduced recidivism in Seattle and Albany. But a year after New Haven adopted a similar program, community leaders say the city has fallen short.

22 essay

HOPEFULLY YOU’VE LEARNED KOREAN BY NOW — Julia Hedges 25 poem

SONNET TO THE HUMMINGBIRD — Kinsale Hueston 33 endnote

I WAS A FEATURED SPEAKER AT GILMORE GIRLS FAN FEST 2018 — Lily Dodd

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

DEMOCRACY, DEMYSTIFIED Each fall, twenty-five New Haveners get an inside look at how their city operates.

Carina Gormley

O

ne evening in late September, I walked into the Aldermanic Hearing Room on the lower level of the New Haven Hall of Records.

The room’s walls were lined with maps, planners, and varnished wood trim. Michael Harris leaned against a table as he chatted with the people gathered at the front of the room. When all twenty-six students had arrived, Harris pointed to a city map and requested that we each find our ward. Then, he thanked us for coming, and class began.

Harris was leading a session of Democracy School, an initiative founded by then-New Haven mayoral assistant Kate McAdams in 2002 to provide New Haven residents an opportunity to learn about the workings of city government.

The free, eight-week, application-based course hosts just over two dozen New Haven residents

4

each fall. Each class session focuses on a specific city department, and Harris, who has run the program since 2015, invites relevant officials and city residents to discuss their work. Harris also serves as Special Assistant to Mayor Toni Harp, and was consequently well-positioned to explain the basics of governance and city funding and lead discussions on emergency services, New Haven’s education system, and city neighborhoods. A redhaired man with clear eyes and a perpetual grin, he is an enthusiastic teacher. “Did you know that New Haven has thirty alders?” he asked during an informational presentation at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking in May. “That’s crazy.

Almost no city in this country has close to that many elected officials representing the interests of their constituents.” Inspired by that presenta-

THE NEW JOUR NAL

tion, I applied for the 2018 session and in the fall, I joined Democracy School’s sixteenth class.

This fall’s course underscored the challenges, big and small, that drive the work of city officials.

During one lesson, Doug Housladen, the Director of New Haven’s Transportation, Traffic, and Parking Department, told students that only 27 percent of jobs in the Greater New Haven area are within a one-way 90-minute commute from New Haven on public transit. Much of the problem, he explained, is in the city’s excess of bus stops: 4,000 in a region with an estimated need for only 2,500. As busses make unnecessary stops, commutes drag on and on.

The classroom also provides a space for residents to discuss the tensions of life in a highly segregated, budget-strapped city. One student, a woman in her forties who works with substance abuse rehabilitation services in New Haven, asked Maurine Villani, a tax collector who presented during one class this fall, about the city’s contracted tow-truck companies. “I’ve lived in New Haven all of my life, and in many different types of neighborhoods in the city,” she said. “It seems like your vendors disregard tax-delinquent vehicles around Yale—and I know that they’re tax delinquent—yet tow lots of the vehicles, even non-tax-delinquent ones, in neighborhoods that are far from Yale. They took my car once, and it wasn’t tax delinquent,” she said. Villani didn’t quite know what to say.

Nearly every class discussion of the Board of Alders or the city budget this fall circled back to the frustrating nature of “functional home rule.”

In the context of New Haven, functional home rule means that the city has limited autonomy over its legislative processes because municipal rules are largely defined by the state. For example, the Connecticut Constitution limits cities’ tax revenue-raising power to property taxes––an issue Harris and four city officials raised during the second class. This limit on taxes presents a challenge for New Haven, where 54 percent of local property is designated tax-exempt. Yale University alone represents about 2.5 billion dollars of non-taxable property assets; the growth of its property holdings continues to reduce the city’s potential revenue. And despite the city’s obvious fiscal challenges, the state continues to allocate fewer and fewer state funds to New Haven. The city’s public education system has particularly struggled. Its schools, which serve the largest stuDECEMBER 2018

dent population of any district in the state, faced a $19 million budget deficit this spring, forcing firings and school closures. In class, Harris and New Haven Controller Daryl Jones explained that last year, the city was forced to make these cuts because state and property tax revenue had shrunk so much.

This year’s Democracy School attendees ranged from high school students to an Escape New Haven employee to a retiree who had worked at a New Haven telephone company for decades. Some had just moved to the city, while others had lived in New Haven their entire lives.

Still, the student body represented only twelve of the thirty wards; most students hailed from wards closer to downtown. To address this issue, Harris said he hopes to create an online curriculum that makes the course readily accessible.

Democracy School’s alumni include many young and active community members. Caroline Smith, who graduated from Yale in 2014, said the course taught her that “the foundation of any good project is relationship-building.”

She now coordinates New Haven Bike Month, participates on several city committees, and co-founded Collab, which helps local residents pursue entrepreneurship. Democracy School helped her form connections to local officials and students, facilitating her community-based work, she said. Johnny Shively, a 2015 Yale graduate, works for SeeClickFix, an app that allows users to report non-emergency issues, such as problems with infrastructure. He told me that learning the terminology of city governance has helped him engage with New Haven politics. John Martin, the founder of the popular Bradley Street Bicycle Co-Op, said that he tries to informally foster the program’s values—connectivity and agency—at the Co-Op. The course, he said, gave him the confidence and agency to serve as a community leader. In the face of massive economic challenges, former students are waging efforts to create economic opportunity, to help the city run, to bring people together. If New Haven is “a city that is fighting for itself,” as Caroline Smith put it, Democracy School is evidence of the city’s hopes for victory—and the stalemates its residents face.

—Carina Gormley is a junior in Morse – Zola Canady is aCollege. first-year in Trumbull College.

5

GODSPEED A group of Connecticut motorcyclists is spreading the Gospel on wheels.

Zola Canady

T

rinity sits with her manicured hands folded neatly, flanked by her fellow Christian motorcyclists on a black leather couch. Mary Magdalene, Zephaniah, and II Timothy sit to her left; Sheba and Eve to her right.

“I like to wear pumps when I ride,” Trinity says. “My husband doesn’t like it, but I like the look.” Sheba, whose name appears on a black, diamond-bedazzled headband and in a tattoo in Gothic lettering on her right arm, laughs in agreement. “I wear a dress with leggings on my bike all the time.”

Each motorcyclist wears a bright red shirt under a leather vest embroidered with a rider name (“Zephaniah”), a leadership position (“Road Captain”), and various patches ranging from crosses to quotes like “Christians aren’t perfect...just forgiven.” The back of each vest is emblazoned with a canary-yellow Bible inscribed with Matthew 28:19-20 and a crest that reads, “Rydas 4 Righteousness: Motorcycle Ministry.”

Trinity (legally, Melanie Perry) is the president of the Connecticut chapter of Rydas 4 Righteousness. To put it simply, members say, R4R is “a church on wheels,” bringing Christianity to communities by motorcycle rather than requiring individuals to come to church themselves. R4R was founded in 2002 by Trinity’s husband, Solomon (legally, Arthur Perry), who is currently the ministry’s national president. Now in its sixteenth year, R4R maintains chapters in Ohio, North Carolina, and Connecticut.

Riding makes spreading the word of God far easier for the eighteen-member chapter, and allows them to bring a new approach to traditional ministry work. “I wanted to be that

6

photos by Robbie Short

light,” Sheba says. “I just wanted to be different.” Eve, a member with black, thick-rimmed glasses, short, dyed-blonde hair, and glittering diamond hoops, echoed her sentiment. “I thought that combining ministry and motorcycles, because [each is] just something that I’ve always had a love for—it’s just the best thing since running water for me,” she says.

As a co-ed, mostly Black motorcycle club, R4R challenges what people see in movies like Hell Ride and Wild Hogs and hear in songs like “Motorcycle Man”—motorcycle culture is typically portrayed as non-religious, male, white, and felonious. The women of R4R defy stereotypes. “Just by seeing a female on a bike, [spectators] are going to stop me, and they’re gonna wanna know, ‘Wow. You’re a woman, you’re riding a bike. Why?’ Then I get into my name, then I get into my Scripture, and then it opens up the door for ministry,” says Trinity.

The ministry’s members primarily focus on prayer and community outreach. Over the past five years, R4R has held a back-to-school backpack drive, built homes for Habitat For Humanity, given away turkeys and hams on Thanksgiving, and sponsored a “Lupus Ride” to raise donations for the American Lupus Foundation. As for prayer, the ministry readily assembles when others call on them. “I wanna say we’re like first responders,” Eve says. Her fellow members murmur in agreement. Other motorcycle groups call on R4R when prayer is needed, and the group comes to people’s homes to pray for family members who have died.

R4R’s biggest event by far is its “Annual Bike Blessing”

THE NEW JOUR NAL

weekend held for the last fifteen years and attended by Motor Cycle Clubs (MCs) from all over the country. Trinity explains that other clubs typically will not come to an event held at a church, out of fear of being judged by churchgoers for a lifestyle of drinking, smoking, and swearing. So R4R holds a prayer service in New Haven’s Career High School instead.

Trinity says that even though other MCs “don’t ‘do church,’” they never fail to attend.

Other motorcycle groups differ from R4R not only in religious disposition, but also in their treatment of male and female riders. “Because we’re a motorcycle ministry, we’re kind of separated from protocol, from the [motorcycle club] world,” Trinity says. In many other clubs, men and women ride separately, she says.

Eve adds that although more women ride today, she shared the road with far fewer female riders when they first organized their motorcycle ministry. “When we started sixteen years ago, if you saw a woman on a motorcycle, you questioned their sexuality,” Eve says, prompting Sheba to exclaim, “Somebody asked me that yesterday! He said, ‘Are you gay?” I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I thought all women on bikes were gay.’ I was like, ‘What?’” Once, while surveying bikes at a Harley-Davidson dealership with her husband, a man approached Eve and asked, “‘Did your husband get the sissy bar put on the back for when he’s riding you?’ I just looked at him and laughed,” Eve remembers. “I said, ‘Riding me? I rode that bike off the showroom floor.’”

Before Trinity joined R4R, she was apprehensive about riding. She didn’t think it was possible for women who rode motorcycles to also be feminine. Yet, from the moment Trinity learned to ride, she was hooked. “Now, I’m one of those women,” she says. “It became my serenity.”

When Trinity passed her license exam, she was sure to tell

her husband that she’d beaten his score. “He said, ‘I don’t believe you can ride.’ I said ‘Pull your bike out,’” Trinity recalls. “I had hair rollers in my hair, I had bedroom slippers on. He was like, ‘You can’t ride with bedroom slippers on.’ I said, ‘Watch me.’”

Trinity began to spend all her spare time on her bike. She says that her dedication to riding has only grown since she lost her brother, also an R4R rider, to a motorcycle accident eleven years ago. The Ministry was out on the highway when, in the middle of a turn, Trinity’s brother accidentally veered onto the dirt. He flew off his bike. and died a month later in the hospital. Trinity says that her brother taught her a lot of what she knows about riding, and she has no intention of slowing down. “I thought I would do him an injustice by stopping.

Because he was passionate about riding. He was a rider rider.”

The passage from Matthew on the back of each motorcyclist’s vest reads, “Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” R4R’s motto is a corollary to the passage: “reaching the lost, one soul at a time.” As a ministry, R4R’s members fulfill their mission by helping freewheeling “souls.”

But they also do this for each other. “They have come and cleaned my house, brought my family food, visited me every day in the hospital, picked my kids up from school—it’s not just an organization we’re part of,” Eve says. “When I say family? Family.”

—Zola Canady is a first-year in Trumbull College.

– Noah Macey is a senior in Timothy Dwight College.

DECEMBER 2018

7

SNAPSHOT

THE PEOPLE T

wo years into Donald Trump’s presidency, Americans are riled up. In the 2018 midterms, on November 6, an estimated 113 million of them flocked to the polls, marking the highest turnout rate in a midterm election since 1966. That energy spread to New Haven, where turnout spiked by more than 7,500 votes from 2014 to 2018; 34,392 people, nearly 59 percent of those registered in the city, cast their ballots. Some voters showed up out of concern for the state of the nation: people like Ananya Kumar-Banerjee, who led a group of Yale Democrats across the Green to register at City Hall at 9 a.m. and said that on Election Day, she always wakes up in the morning without feeling tired. Others sought to weigh in on the tight gubernatorial race between Ned Lamont and Bob Stefanowski: people like Mark Cappabianca, a lifelong New Haven resident who is 57 and voted for the first time because he worries about cuts to services for people like him who are homeless or in recovery. The day was full of mishaps in the Elm City, from malfunctioning voting machines to understaffed polling places, and New Haven was the last of the state’s 169 municipalities to gets its votes tallied, sending in a final count three weeks after the election. But by Wednesday, November 7, the state results were clear. Connecticut Democrats had prevailed in the House and Senate, and Lamont beat Stefanowski by 40,000 votes.

On voting day, TNJ reporters fanned out across New Haven to capture scenes from the election. In this series of dispatches from around the city, we hope to capture the energy that set the city’s forty polling places abuzz.

Ward 22 Alder Jeanette Morrison, who represents the Dixwell neighborhood, stood outside the entrance of the Wexler-Grant School in a sweatshirt and yoga pants at 8 in the morning, beaming. Morrison had been there for an hour and a half, she said, “educating people about the ballot.” She began to hold forth on the importance of voting, interrupting herself to hug each individual who entered as elderly neighborhood residents and a smattering of Yale students trickled in from across the schoolyard. “Has your Jordan graduated high school yet? Still working 1,000 jobs? Well, tell him to get a move on!” Then, to me: “Sorry about that. Where was I? Oh. I vote because we need more money for neighborhood initiatives. More money for schools. When teachers are cut,

8

children suffer—emotionally, too.” She paused again and dashed across the street to investigate after a neighbor told her the school didn’t know how to deal with a recent garbage overflow.

A few minutes later, she returned. “Connecticut has a good partnership,” she resumed, “between city and state. As Betty Morrison, my mother, would say, ‘They don’t take no tea for fever.’” I asked her if she felt the same way about the president. She laughed. “Oh, no. My mother said something else, too: ‘If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it!’”

Abruptly, she turned back to business: a man in a leather jacket had somehow slipped past her hug. “Honey, do you know there are two sides to that piece of paper?” she asked, referring to the ballot. He didn’t. “Can you go back home and get everyone to come, and tell them there are two sides?”

The man left. Half an hour later, he came back with a crowd.

— Beasie Goddu

Outside the glass-paneled wooden doors of the Hearing Room in the basement of the New Haven Hall of Records, Patrick Mitchell sat sentry halfway down a maroon-carpeted hallway, his legs and torso folded into a desk that was far too small for him. Mitchell, who is broad-shouldered, with closely-trimmed hair, wore squarish, thick-framed black glasses, a blazer and striped button down, and white-soled tennis shoes.

Inside the Hearing Room, Ward 7 voters snaked their way through the line, about fifty strong, and cast their ballots. As they headed back out into the cold, misty morning, Mitchell flagged them down, proffering a white slip of paper.

Mitchell, an insurance agent who lives in Fair Haven Heights, has conducted exit polls for Edison Research in each of the past three Congressional elections.

Media outlets have relied on exit polls to bolster their election coverage since the ‘70s, and Edison has conducted polling for the National Election Pool, a group of major news outlets including ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, Fox News, and the Associated Press, since 2003.

The practice may be fading; after exit polls erroneously

THE NEW JOUR NAL

AT THE POLLS pointed towards a Hillary Clinton victory in the 2016 Presidential Election, Fox and the AP dropped out of the Pool. But Mitchell sat dutifully, offering a sheet to every third voter who passed. Once they filled it out, confirming their ballot selections and filling out basic demographic information, Mitchell deposited the sheet into a small white box on the floor to his left.

Since he became eligible to vote in 1980, Mitchell hasn’t missed an election. He describes voting as a “family tradition.” He hails from Montgomery, and his parents worked with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to register voters during the Civil Rights Movement, once encountering Klansmen in rural Alabama on a registration drive. Later, they followed the Great Migration north to Connecticut. Now in their eighties, they live in Georgia, where they voted for Stacey Abrams, who was running to be the first Black woman elected to a governorship. Mitchell has five children, four of whom are old enough to vote. On Tuesday, he’d called them all and told them to get to the polls.

— Mark Rosenberg

At midday, the lobby of Wilbur Cross High School teemed with rain-coated residents of Wards 9 and 10, which include the East Rock neighborhood, Cedar Hill, and Fair Haven. They’d come to cast their ballots, waiting in line beneath SAT prep posters and Warhol-inspired student portraits.

Outside, the basalt face of East Rock loomed over the parking lot, where supporters of Ned Lamont had set up a tent. (Bob Stefanowski’s campaign was nowhere in sight.)

Standing on the damp sidewalk after voting, East Rock resident Deniqua Brunson said she was “thinking about the younger children” this Election Day. The statement made her sound older than she looked, dressed in black Air Jordans and a gold-speckled black cap emblazoned with the word “Hustle” in red lettering. Brunson’s in her late twenties, but she’s never been apathetic towards politics.

In terms of political engagement, she said, “I’m like DECEMBER 2018

a ten.”

Outside her job as a surgical tech at Yale New Haven Hospital, she helps underprivileged kids at Connecticut Behavioral Health. Some of the kids she works with have run away from home. Others can scarcely go to school because they lash out at other students. Brunson thinks the root cause is often a home life made turbulent by unemployment. She wants more jobs for young people, and when Lamont visited the hospital to campaign earlier this year, she told him so. He seemed to listen, so he got her vote.

The current administration also worries Brunson.

She doesn’t like the tone Donald Trump has set as President. “You can’t lead the country based on emotion,” she said. “Twitter should be taken away from him.”

— Will Reid

As the workday drew to an end and the sky continued to emit a light drizzle, Fair Haven residents trickled steadily through the front entrance of John S. Martinez School, a low-slung building with undulating brown walls. Volunteers for the New Haven Democratic Town Committee handed out sky blue voting guides in Spanish and English to those parking their cars. (Fair Haven’s population is 67 percent Latinx, according to 2016 numbers.) They cheered as Ward 16 residents entered and left. Inside, pensive voters mulled over their decisions in the glow of a row of booths.

Standing under the awning just outside the front doors, Ebony McClease and Vincenzo Ferraro, two strangers donning matching “I Voted!” stickers, attempted to find middle ground on issues ranging from taxation and healthcare to gun reform and immigration policy.

“If it’s hatred, it’s hatred. I don’t care how you slice it,” McClease said. “Right now, there’s a lot of sentiment and language that is scary. Everybody needs to take a step back sometimes. What if you were in someone else’s shoes?”

9

Ferraro, a silver-haired former factory owner and registered Democrat, cast his vote for Bob Stefanowski in the gubernatorial race. An Italian immigrant who arrived to the United States thirty years ago, he feels gun control reform is unnecessary, approves of Donald Trump’s policies thus far, and expressed disdain for undocumented immigrants. McClease, a Doc Martens-clad millennial who said she has worked in public service, believes America is behind the rest of the world in terms of affordable healthcare, education, immigration and gun policy. Above all, she emphasized how uncomfortable she feels navigating the current political climate, especially as a person of color.

“There are other things that play into America besides just being fair,” she said. “There are things like racial inequality. That’s a real thing in America, it’s not made up, it exists.”

In a rare moment of agreement, Ferraro said he had biracial grandchildren, and he was worried about how they would be treated in the future. “They’re going to experience the world differently, and that’s sad,” McClease said.

As Ferraro and McClease prepared to part ways, they discovered that Ferraro’s wife had grown up with McClease’s father in New Haven. “Small world!” they both declared, laughing as they departed into the night.

— Hailey Andrews

At 7 p.m., the line to register to vote at City Hall snaked all the way around the building’s second floor.

Yale students in line had surrendered to the floor, open textbooks on their laps. Volunteers from the League of Women Voters and Yale Law School circulated with registration forms, boxes of Wall Street Pizza, and plastic cups of water. “It’s not a dinner party, it’s not rude if you take it,” said one, offering the final donut in a Dunkin’ carton to a young woman filling out her form. The food went fast: some in line had been waiting nearly four hours.

For the third year in a row, New Haven was unprepared for the legion of unregistered voters who turned up at City Hall on Election Day. Many were Yale students like Jack Frésquez, a sophomore in Hopper College, who had hoped to vote in a contentious Senate race at home in Arizona. When he realized that his absentee ballot wouldn’t arrive in time, he was grateful to find out that Connecticut is one of just fifteen states that offer same-day registration. But Frésquez had been in line since 3:30. With just an hour to go before the deadline, it seemed impossible that the city could process the hundreds of people still waiting to register.

10

Volunteers and city officials went into battle mode.

Law students directed those in line to take photos of their registration forms and email them to a student who would catalogue them. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat up for reelection, strode through the crowd in high-heeled boots and a long, striped dress, firing questions at officials from the Secretary of the State’s office over the phone. A few minutes later, speaking into a bullhorn, John Rose, Jr., chief counsel for the city, called all first-time Connecticut voters into the lobby.

Around fifty people shuffled in. A woman with four small children in tow waited quietly for directions. With just fifteen minutes left, the announcement came: the higher-ups had given New Haven officials permission to swear these voters in and send them to the ballot boxes with filled-out registration forms. There was a sigh of relief, and the masses made their way to the voting line.

When the clock struck 8, that line still stretched all the way down the hall –– but its members would get to vote. Less fortunate were hopeful registrants who weren’t new to Connecticut; in the registration room, election moderator Kevin Arnold apologized and turned them away.

At 8:15, Mayor Toni Harp stood by the registration computers in tennis shoes and a black suit. She greeted me with a tired smile. She said she was glad that the chief counsel had found a way to make sure first-time voters could cast their ballots. “We’ve learned a lot from how many people came, and perhaps how to do a better job next time,” she said.

At the tables in front of her, the half-dozen women who had spent the day registering hundreds of people were finally getting to their feet. Cynthia Woods had been there since 5 a.m. “My eyes are burning,” she said, laughing. But she hadn’t lost the gentle tone she’d been using all day. She worked Election Day last year, too, she said, and she’d do it again.

“You know, the body is physically tired, but I’m just on such a high, seeing the process come through, seeing folks get excited about wanting to vote.” She smiled. “I think it’s really exciting.”

— Annie Rosenthal

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yale institute of sacred music

Upcoming Events

free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations required ism.yale.edu

saturday december 8 4 pm

Voices from Prison

Incarcerated men re-imagine Dante’s Divine Comedy

Performed by students in Ron Jenkins’ Sacred Texts and Social Justice class Marquand Chapel, 409 Prospect St.

tuesday december 11 7:30 pm

Latin Vespers

Yale Voxtet and friends Susan Hellauer and James Taylor, directors Chant and polyphony from the European continent Dwight Chapel, 67 High St.

sunday january 13 7:30 pm

The Chenaults, organ

Music of Moore, Paulus, Shephard, Briggs, and more Great Organ Music at Yale

Woolsey Hall, 500 College St.

saturday january 19 7:30 pm

O Magnum Mysterium

Yale Schola Cantorum / David Hill, conductor

Music celebrating Christ’s birth from around the world Christ Church New Haven, 84 Broadway at Elm

sunday january 27 5 pm

The World Beloved

Yale Camerata / Marguerite L. Brooks, conductor A bluegrass mass and other works

The Congregational Church of Naugatuck, 9 Division St., Naugatuck

saturday february 16 7:30 pm SEPTEMBER 2018

Cantatas of J. S. Bach

Yale Voxtet / Masaaki Suzuki, conductor St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church, 830 Whitney Ave.

11

CRITICAL ANGLE

DIVERTED A new model of policing has reduced recidivism in Seattle and Albany. But a year after New Haven adopted a similar program, community leaders say the city has fallen short.

Jack McCordick

O

fficer Osvaldo Garcia rubbed his eyes and yawned as he slumped into the driver’s seat of his police cruiser. “It’s been a long day,” he sighed. But it was about to get much longer.

For four hours, Garcia and I would sit idling in a parking lot in The Hill, a neighborhood just west of downtown New Haven, our only company the intermittent crackle of Garcia’s radio and the whoosh of cars careening down Columbus Avenue.

Garcia is tall with close-cropped black hair, and muscular in his bulletproof vest and police uniform. Despite having joined the police force only six years ago, he affects the world-weariness and resignation of a grizzled veteran. For much of our evening together, Garcia groused about the police force’s long hours, low pay, and byzantine rules and regulations.

Early in his career as an officer, Garcia told me, he made a drug arrest almost every night, but he got tired of picking up so many people for minor infractions. Now, a new initiative from the New Haven city government is trying to reduce the number of arrests for low-level offenses. When Garcia is in the position to make a drug arrest, he has a new option: he can offer the offender a chance to partake in a new city program, called Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, or LEAD, that provides a restorative alternative to the criminal justice system.

As the evening wound to a close, we hadn’t seen a single person come through the empty lot. But even if we had, Garcia admitted there really wasn’t much of a chance that I’d get to see the program in action — he and most of his fellow officers rarely think of using it.

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In late 2017, New Haven announced the creation of a LEAD pilot. Based on a national model pioneered in cities such as Seattle and Albany, LEAD gives police officers the jurisdiction to divert low-level offenders away from the criminal justice system and into community based harm-reduction programs. The program is entirely discretionary — an officer can choose whether or not to offer LEAD to an offender, and the offender can refuse the offer and opt for arrest if they so wish.

In other cities, the model seems to be working.

A 2017 study found that Seattle’s LEAD program reduced recidivism by nearly 60 percent and that LEAD participants were significantly more likely to find housing and employment. Social justice advocates hailed the success of LEAD in Seattle as a paradigm shift in the city’s approach to law enforcement, especially at a time of strained police-community relations. LEAD in New Haven began with similar hopes, but in the past year, a combination of leadership changes, minimal transparency, and a lack of community involvement have jeopardized the program’s success.

LEAD’s roots in New Haven can be traced back to the fall of 2016, when a series of sex-work stings by the NHPD drew the ire of community activists, who called on the city to find a rehabilitative approach to addressing low-level crimes, according to Jane Mills, a leader of the local criminal justice reform group People Against Injustice.

The following spring, city officials signed a Memorandum of Understanding with various state agencies and community groups, promising to involve “community stakeholders and advocates” and “bring their important perspectives and expertise to the process.” After traveling to Seattle to learn more about the LEAD program there, city officials, in the spring of 2017, applied for — and eventually acquired — a $75,000 grant from the Department of Justice. In late November 2017, the pilot officially began in the Downtown, Hill North, and Hill South neighborhoods.

Once the program got underway, however, community leaders like Stacy Spell of Project Longevity, a Connecticut-based law enforcement initiative to reduce gun violence, found that the city was no longer receptive to their input.

“Initially, when LEAD was exploring applying for the grant, Project Longevity was brought in because we are a law enforcement program as THE NEW JOUR NAL

well,” Spell said. “But once the program started to take shape, we were never approached again.”

Evan Serio, the director of Programming and Advocacy for the Sex Workers and Allies Network, or SWAN, said, “There was definitely a feeling in SWAN and several other groups that we had maybe been tokenized and brought in for the grant writing, because the city thought having a sex workers-led and focused group on the initial proposal looked really good.”

“They took our help and didn’t give anything back or keep us in the process,” he added.

In its grant application, the city promised to hire a LEAD Coordinator to run the program.

The position’s primary responsibilities include outreach to community leaders and people who have experienced incarceration, homelessness, or drug abuse. The application promised that the city would fill the position within two months of the grant award, but by the summer of 2018 — nearly a year later — it had yet to hire anyone. Nor was there a LEAD website or even a whisper about the program on social media.

And that wasn’t the only leadership void derailing the program’s progress. In January 2018, just over a month after the program’s start date, Martha Okafor resigned as the head of the Community Services Administration, a city agency that coordinates initiatives ranging from social services to the arts, and is responsible for LEAD planning efforts.

In February, she was replaced by Dr. Dakibu Muley, for whom LEAD became just one of many new responsibilities. Spell, of Project Longevity, the gun violence reduction organization, told me he thought this vacuum in leadership caused the fledgling LEAD program to stall.

Indeed, throughout the early months of the pilot, community leaders’ efforts to glean information about the program’s development were stonewalled at every turn. “We wanted to know how many people were being diverted and for what offenses, how frequently they accept it, and how often people feel like they know what they’re getting into,” said SWAN’s Serio. “[The city’s] initial response was that they couldn’t tell us because of HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal healthcare confidentiality law] but it really felt like a smokescreen.

They could very well just say that we don’t know and we’ll get back to you, and that would be okay DECEMBER 2018

— I understand that there are only so many hours a day. But it feels like they’re not even attempting to give us information.” In contrast, Albany program managers proactively released a report that included descriptions of LEAD participants with identifying information redacted.

Serio told me that, despite the fact that SWAN does on-the-ground outreach in Fair Haven nearly every day and downtown at least once a week, they have yet to find anyone who is or was a participant in LEAD. To activists, this makes the city’s unresponsiveness even more frustrating.

Last June, a group of five community organizations, including SWAN, requested to meet with LEAD’s Operational Work Group to discuss the program’s lack of community involvement and transparency. Other than Muley, the new head of the Community Services Administration, only one member of the LEAD group came to the meeting.

At the meeting, the activists pressed Muley to give them a say in hiring a new program coordinator.

But Serio said he and the other community leaders were told they would just “bog the process down.”

Though LEAD in New Haven operates out of a city government office, that’s not the case in most other LEAD cities. In Seattle, the program is run by the nonprofit Seattle Public Defender Association, and in Albany it is managed by the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice. Representatives from these organizations expressed skepticism that a LEAD program run by a city government could be effective.

“In general, we recommend that the project is not managed out of a government office, so that community partners don’t feel like the whole enterprise is vulnerable to being folded into an elected official’s political agenda,” said Lisa Daugaard, the head of the Seattle Public Defender Association.

Keith Brown, the Albany LEAD Project Manager, echoed Daugaard’s concerns. Brown said that early LEAD programs like those in Seattle and Albany were “driven by folks who were on the ground, either civil rights groups, community groups, or harm-reduction programs.” As the model spread around the country, however, Brown said LEAD became a buzzword, “one where money was often attached, so it then became a thing that municipalities and police departments decided to do.”

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In August, the CSA finally hired Cynthia Watson as the LEAD Project Manager, despite a lack of community input. Prior to joining LEAD, she worked as the Administrative Director of Christian Community Action, a New Haven-based social service organization. I interviewed Watson in a spare conference room in the annex wing of City Hall, where her office is located. In person, she’s affable and blunt. She told me that the program failed to achieve some of its core objectives in its first year. “There was a long lag where there was no communication with the community,” Watson admitted. She added that one of her main tasks as Project Director is to facilitate the formation of a Community Leadership Team made up of representatives from community groups and formerly incarcerated or homeless people. In October, Watson hosted a meeting with community groups that she called a “critical” opportunity for community members to voice their questions and concerns about the program and one of the first steps in the formation of a Community Leadership Team.

But SWAN’s Serio is less optimistic. He criticized the city’s decision to only allow one delegate from the Community Leadership Team, once it is formed, to sit in on LEAD’s Operational Team meetings. In other cities like Albany, Serio said, the Community Leadership Teams formed in a more “organic” way, which forced the city to “cede them power and oversight and meet them halfway.”

Watson has yet to make a website with information about the program’s progress. In contrast, the Katal Center released a comprehensive report after the Albany program’s first year with detailed information including the program’s funding, stakeholders, and operational successes.

The problems plaguing LEAD in New Haven go beyond institutional and organizational errors.

LEAD is primarily a law enforcement program, so it only works if the police officers charged with implementing the model buy into it.

During our ride-along, I asked Officer Garcia if he actively tries to divert people to LEAD. “The idea of [LEAD] is really good,” he said. “It’s just difficult with the amount of workload we have to follow up on.” Garcia added that he and his fellow officers seldom discuss the program, and that Hill district manager Lieutenant Jason Minardi 14

had only brought up the program in front of him “once or twice.” Garcia admitted he’d never even considered offering someone LEAD diversion.

When asked to comment on his role in LEAD, Minardi told me that he was on vacation and no longer doing interviews about the program.

In response to a similar request, Sergeant Sean Maher, the Downtown District Manager, wrote that since he had only recently been assigned to Downtown, he wasn’t able to speak about his role in the program.

In other cities, LEAD administrators adopted proactive measures for encouraging police officers to make use of the program. In Albany, for example, LEAD administrators identified a core group of officers who supported the program’s approach to law enforcement and encouraged them to actively “spread the buy-in” across the department, Brown explained. Albany’s program also just recently started sending LEAD engagement specialists — the program’s social workers — on ride-alongs with the police. In Seattle, the city held regular focus groups with officers in LEAD neighborhoods.

From the beginning, LEAD in New Haven lacked the structure of feedback and accountability that has been integral to the model’s success in other cities. Six months from now, the original LEAD grant application money will run out. At that point, the city may attempt to extend the program to more neighborhoods or even across the entire city. But a year into the pilot, basic questions about its efficacy don’t seem to have been answered.

Toward the end of my ride-along with Officer Garcia, he asked me to reach into his glove compartment and pull out a pile of paperwork. As I pulled out the pile, I saw, smushed into the back of the compartment, a small stack of LEAD pamphlets and xeroxed articles about the program from the Register and Independent.

“Funny,” he said, and then chuckled. “I don’t even know how those got there.”

—Jack McCordick is a sophomore in Branford College.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

DECEMBER 2018

 15

F E AT U R E

THE KID’S SPEECH For decades, pediatric speech therapist Wendy Marans has fixed stutters and lisps in her Church Street office. illustrations by Julia Hedges

Antonia Ayres-Brown

W

endy Marans’ name is a diagnostic test of sorts.

Section one, “wɛndi,” isn’t too hard. It can be broken down into five distinct sounds: /w/, /ɛ/, /n/, /d/, and /i/. They’re all articulated near the front of the oral tract, so the challenge is just remembering to connect the /n/ and /d/ consonant blends. Fortunately, the two phonemes don’t occur in distant sites of the mouth, which is the hardest part about other consonant blends like “gr” or “tw.” The “nd,” sound, in comparison, is manageable. Both /n/ and /d/ are produced by placing the tip of the tongue on the alveolar ridge, the front roof of the mouth that reminds Wendy of the bumpy ridges left on a beach when the tide goes out.

Section two, “mærənz,” gets trickier. With seven distinct sounds, an /r/ wedged in the middle, and a voiced /z/ fricative tacked onto the end, “Marans” is complex enough to give any child with a speech impediment some trouble. For these kids, Wendy’s surname easily becomes “Maranth,” “Mah-ens,” “Mawans,” or even “Mamem.” Some parents get tripped up too, incorrectly placing the emphasis on the second syllable: “Mar-ANS.” She’s heard almost every possible mistake. Maybe that’s why she just goes

by Wendy. ___

Wendy’s bubblegum-pink lips curl into a taut frown as she checks the time. Her watch stopped last week and though it’s now ticking again, she has been eyeing her wrist sporadically, as if always running a moment late. Her first afternoon appointment doesn’t begin for thirty minutes, but it’s time for her to start rearranging the room.

The next client is one of her tallest, so Wendy heaves the table onto its side and goes about shifting the length of each of its four legs. Wendy’s heels slip out of her shoes as she fidgets with the squeaky pegs, but she declines my offer to assist her. She’s accustomed to performing this manual task solo. But I also get the sense that she doesn’t trust me to do it carefully enough—or simply as carefully as she will.

After double-checking the notches in each leg,

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illustrations by Sam Oldshue

Wendy screws the pegs in place—a few inches higher than they were before. Her carefully-groomed bangs are left slightly disheveled, and I can’t help but wonder if the ritual, which she repeats several times a day, is actually necessary. Yet after four decades of working as a pediatric communication disorders specialist, Wendy insists on this level of precision.

The laminate blue-and-grey table is the home base of Wendy’s lessons. It’s where they all begin, with Wendy sitting diagonally from each child, and where Wendy tries to end each hour-long session, though her youngest patients have a habit of wandering. It’s where Wendy conducts intakes to suss out articulation difficulties, where she runs repetitive speech exercises and plays purposeful games when the children grow tired of these exercises, and ultimately, where most of her breakthroughs happen. But if the table is too tall, the child’s neck will strain upwards and he may not be able to see; too short, and he’ll slouch.

Wendy even customizes the size of the plastic school chairs that circle the table so each child can firmly plant his or her feet on the floor. Teaching someone to communicate is not a one-size-fits-all project.

There are no diagrams of the oral tract or pamphlets about communication disorders displayed in Wendy’s office, a one-room private practice she opened in 1997. Toys and games are Wendy’s tools, each serving a distinct pedagogical purpose. A glittery pinwheel helps children practice the controlled breath release necessary in strident sounds; glossy plastic microphones coax mumblers into projecting. Wendy keeps the beige walls sparsely decorated to avoid distractions. On the window ledge by her desk sit a model wooden train and a miniature metal toboggan. When Wendy knows a client is particularly fond of vehicles, she usually remembers to preemptively hide them.

Incorporating a child’s interests into a lesson plan is one thing, Wendy once explained, but carelessly leaving a toy within reach is asking for a disturbance in the kid’s focus, or even a tantrum. Behind Wendy’s desk, pristine glass windows span the entire northern side of the office. Last fall, after a gust of wind once derailed her train of thought, Wendy glanced toward the windows and remarked that they were the most

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beautiful, and worst, part of her office.

On Wendy’s old website, below her educational training and professional experience, appeared a bullet-pointed list of her extracurricular passions: Cello, Flamenco, Quilting. (The page has since been taken down.) Wendy handmade the office’s only notable décor—a large multicolored quilt that hangs by her desk—but she repeatedly stresses to me that she has made better quilts. She keeps this flawed one on display only so that she can point to something when children make mistakes, something that shows she makes mistakes too.

“They’re made to be squares and top right yellow one isn’t,” Wendy says, gesturing toward one of the two hundred and ten patches as if it’s the first thing I would notice. The top right yellow one hadn’t caught my eye, but when I walk closer, I see Wendy’s right. I never would have recognized the error—the patch is only slightly rectangular.

For most people, developing one’s voice and ability to communicate is something that just sort of happens. But Wendy works with kids for whom that doesn’t naturally occur—kids whose capacity to verbally express themselves isn’t inborn, but needs to be taught to them. This thing that most people take for granted, speech, is incredibly complex, Wendy says.

So maybe this care—her insistence on adjusting the table by several inches, or hanging a near-perfect

DECEMBER 2018

quilt as an example of a mistake—is necessary.

Wendy’s natural speaking voice is crisp, potent, and unmistakably British. Having been raised and schooled in England, Wendy talks with broad vowels and delicately discards her /r/ sounds, letting them slip just before they settle on the tongue. Her specific dialect, Received Pronunciation, is untraceable to any physical region or socioeconomic class. Wendy attributes her speech to her grandmother, who, as a young woman, swore off the Derbyshire parlance—a regional giveaway of her own humble beginnings.

Besides a couple adolescent nieces who’ve acquired the “Mockney” dialect—a middle-class London trend that began during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership— everyone in Wendy’s family still speaks with Received Pronunciation.

In conversation, Wendy’s rich tone is almost melodic, bouncing between syllables like notes, performing dynamic intervals with each clause. Her cadence could dwell within the five lines of a treble clef.

When she reaches the end of a sentence, or wants to emphasize a point, she slows her pace and chews on her words, letting them resonate one by one. “I think…it’s a…trahhhgedy,” she said once, describing other foreigners’ tendency to lose their accents after years in the United States.

It’s easy to catch yourself intensely listening to Wendy—not explicitly because of what she’s saying, but because of how good she sounds saying it. And the primrose hue of her lips, a staple which somehow always looks both girlish and elegant on Wendy, is perhaps her voice’s most effective billboard. Listen to me, it says. Watch what’s happening here.

Otherwise, Wendy’s physical presence is fairly unimposing. She has a small, slender frame, and the child-sized seat in which she conducts lessons never looks as miniature as it seems like it should. She regularly joins patients on the matted blue carpet of her office—sometimes to lie horizontally and use gravity to urge a child’s tongue to fall backward; other times, simply to conduct a lesson on the floor if an uncooperative student strays from the table. At the end of eight-hour days, Wendy’s hands still flutter with sweeping gestures as she speaks, and her patient, lupine eyes blink with purpose.

With ten minutes remaining before the appointment, Wendy agrees to show me the last unseen area of her office: the closet. Behind a locked wooden door, opaque plastic bins, phonetic diagnostic tests, and niche speech and language-related games are tightly packed from the floor to the ceiling, like a game of Tetris.

“Wow,” I exhale. “There are so many…”

Wendy stares into the closet and blinks, as if she’s unsure whether my comment was a compliment or

17

a criticism. I scramble to clarify what I meant, but Wendy finds the words faster than I do.

“It’s actually very organized,” she says. And then she shuts the door. ___ When I first met Wendy roughly sixteen years ago, I was an extroverted kindergartener with a spitty interdental lisp, biting softly on my tongue with each /s/, and the inability to pronounce my own name.

Section one, æntoniə, wasn’t an issue. The hardest part of my first name is just remembering to connect the /n/ and /t/ sounds, but my parents had always called me Anna anyway, voiding the issue of the consonant blend. Section two, ɛɪrz brɑʊn, was my trouble spot, and until I began working with Wendy, I proudly introduced myself as Anna Ayrethhh-Brown to everyone I met.

I don’t remember much about our weekly lessons besides the fact that Wendy rewarded me with Cheerios and M&Ms for maneuvering my tongue against the alveolar ridge. She was similar back then—same office, same lupine eyes, same melodic tones—and she taught me to fix my speech impediment by looking, listening, and imitating her, just as my older brother, Henry, had already done with her.

Henry’s challenges were more debilitating than mine. As he entered elementary school, both his /r/ and /s/ phonemes were unintelligible, which fractured his ability to communicate with peers, teachers, and our parents. My mother still winces whenever she recalls one evening when Henry asked her to read him a story before bed. Because of Henry’s /r/ and /s/ omissions, she heard him ask for a “toy,” and scolded him for trying to play so late at night. Henry, desperate to be understood, whined in frustration, “No, Mom! A toe-ey!”

Henry began speech therapy with Wendy in kindergarten and continued until his /s/ and /r/ sounds improved. Other facets of his impediment, like substituting “ch” sounds for “sh,” persisted well into middle school. This impairment presented itself most overtly on Sundays, when Henry would gab about singing in “shursh.” At our school’s annual book swap, where used titles could be traded for tokens called “chits,” Henry’s classmates mocked him for confidently announcing how many “shits” he had collected.

My family’s history with speech impediments, however, predates both Henry and me. When my father was a child, he never mastered his “s” and “th” sounds. Speech therapy was well out of my grandparents’ financial means, so my father learned to mask these insecurities by slowing his speaking pace around certain hazardous words. As an adult, he still avoids “ths”—months, truths, myths.

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Last year, after I began reporting this profile and researching speech therapy, I sat my father down for an impromptu diagnostic test.

“Say ‘anesthesia,’” I instructed.

“Anesthesia,” he copied back. No trouble.

“Okay,” I said. “Say ‘cloths.’”

“Closs.”

“No. Cloths,” I repeated.

“Closth.”

Betrayed by his tongue, he shrugged and left the room, revealing the boy in him I’ve rarely seen—the boy who never got help with his articulation, the boy who would right that wrong by sending both of his children to speech therapy one day. Later, when I asked my mother what she knew about his ambiguous impediment, I learned that when my parents were deliberating baby names for me, my mother’s top choices included “Martha” and “Lilith.” My father vetoed both.

In a home video that often makes its rounds during family reunions, I’m five years old and still unaware of my lisp. I stride into the frame and begin to sing: “Little Jackie Paper loved that rathcal puff, and brought him thtrings and thieling wakth, and other fanthy thhhhtuff!”

Interdental /s/ sounds now feel foreign in my mouth, and I don’t think of my speech patterns as anyone’s but my own, but I sometimes wonder whether lispy tones would still feel foreign if I had never met Wendy—or whether I would have ended up an adult, vetoing baby names like my father did. Sarah. Silas.

Spencer. Susannah. Sebastian. ___ In the opening scene of The King’s Speech, the 2010 film about George VI’s journey to overcoming his stutter, an unnamed speech pathologist fills the king’s mouth with glass marbles and instructs him to enunciate several words. Later in the film, Lionel Logue, the Australian-born elocutionist who ultimately succeeds in improving the stammer, leads the king in a myriad of other unconventional speech exercises: rolling log-style across a dusty carpet, swinging his arms like a windmill, lying down and breathing deeply while the queen sits on his diaphragm. At one point, as King George practices yelling “Ahhh” for fifteen uninterrupted seconds, Logue chimes in above the din: “Anyone who can shout vowels at an open window can learn to deliver a speech!”

Since the movie’s release in 2010, speech therapists like Wendy have become used to answering questions about the film, which brought the discipline of speech pathology into the public eye. And though most say that the techniques shown in The King’s Speech are outdated by contemporary standards, the film cap-

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tures a fundamental part of the field’s history: its roots in elocution.

During the late 18th century, generations before King George VI assumed the throne, the study of elocution and oratory gained widespread popularity in England. Soon after, the movement migrated to the United States, where writers began studying elocution for individuals with communication disorders.

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, founded Boston’s “School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech” in 1872, which specialized in speech instruction for deaf pupils. By 1887, there were 1,646 self-proclaimed elocutionists working in the United States.

It was not until the early twentieth century, however, that speech correction evolved into a discipline distinct from elocution. In 1922, Sara Stinchfield Hawk became the first American to receive a doctorate in Speech Pathology. And in 1937, Robert West, who served as the first president of the American Speech Correction Association, published The Rehabilitation of Speech. The classic text is still in print today, and West is known to many as the founding father of speech pathology in the United States.

Wendy’s discipline has grown to address myriad speech and language difficulties over the past century. Some speech therapists work primarily with trans-

DECEMBER 2018

gender people, assisting in the transition process and highlighting the rhythmic and intonational differences between most men’s and women’s speech patterns.

Other pathologists specialize in post-surgical voice therapy for thyroid and laryngeal cancer patients, or work with individuals after strokes and traumatic brain injuries. Pediatric therapists, like Wendy, treat articulation-related impediments, phonological disorders, and other language and communication difficulties.

Roughly 8 percent of young children in the United States have a speech disorder. By the time kids reach first grade, the prevalence of speech impediments falls to 5 percent. Still, only half of affected kids receive intervention services from speech therapists. The U.S. Department of Labor reported in 2016 that there are roughly 145,000 speech-language pathologists in the United States. A reported 43 percent of these therapists work in schools, but they’re often overworked with heavy caseloads—and children with minor but consequential articulation impediments can fall to the wayside.

When Wendy was a young girl, she once gushed to her parents, “Wouldn’t ‘Multitudes’ be a wonderful name for a boy?’”

Now 62, Wendy is unsure where she developed her fascination with speech and language. She often cites

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the influence of her father, who read Winnie the Pooh to her at bedtime and assumed perfectly suited voices for each of the book’s characters. As Wendy matured, she began experimenting with different accents as well, and quickly noticed she had a knack for impersonating regional English dialects. In late elementary school, after meeting a Scottish girl and her family on vacation, Wendy briefly abandoned her Received Pronunciation for a Scottish brogue.

A decade later, Wendy found herself 19 years old and living with her parents after dropping out of a university program in Hotel Management. In an attempt to keep her daughter occupied, Wendy’s mother suggested she shadow the speech therapist in Bedford.

Over several days, Wendy traveled from appointment to appointment with the pathologist and listened to her deconstruct speech with mind-boggling specificity. Wendy witnessed the complexity of children’s communication difficulties and came to believe—for the first time in her life—that speech patterns could be built.

For Wendy, it was a life-changing revelation. She immediately enrolled at the National Hospital’s College of Speech Sciences. After receiving her bachelor’s, she worked as a speech pathologist in London for seven years, and then returned to The Institute of Neurology to complete a one-year intensive master’s program.

During this time, Wendy met “an American”—the most specific she gets when referring to her ex-husband—with whom she moved to the United States in 1984. The couple settled in Connecticut and raised two sons. The kids have their father’s accent.

Now, Wendy is a member of both the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association and the Connecticut Speech–Language–Hearing Association. She sometimes attends ASHA’s annual convention, which regularly attracts nearly fifteen thousand speech-language pathologists, but last year she opted out. “I’m very…picky,” she once confessed to me before correcting herself. “There are certain people I really want to hear.”

What Wendy genuinely cares about is the science of phonetics and linguistics as it pertains to communication. Spoken language can be broken down into several units—sentences, words, syllables, and, at its most deconstructed level, phonemes. There are forty-four phonemes in the English language, twenty-four of which are consonants (which challenge children more often than vowels). These two dozen consonantal phonemes make up roughly 62 percent of English speech, and can be categorized by their voice, manner, and place.

Voice refers to whether the vocal folds vibrate or not when producing a noise. Because of this distinction,

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the same physical movements in the oral tract can produce different sounds, such as /s/ and /z/, or /p/ and /b/. Manner, on the other hand, describes how air is released when making a sound. Plosive consonants, like /p/ and /t/, are characterized by full blockage of the airstream, followed by a quick release of air. Fricative consonants, including /f/ and /v/, create a hissing-like tone by releasing air through a tight opening.

Lastly, place describes where a phoneme occurs within the scope of the oral tract. Bilabial consonants, /p/, /b/, and /m/, are articulated between the lips. Labiodental consonants, /f/ and /v/, manifest when the bottom lip touches the upper incisors. Dental consonants, like the voiceless “th” sound in “thin,” are made by extending the tongue tip slightly between the upper and lower incisors. Alveolar consonants, such as /t/, /d/, and /s/, occur when the tongue blade is raised to the alveolar ridge. The glottal consonant /h/ occurs when the vocal folds do not vibrate but are close enough to produce friction as air is exhaled.

The list goes on.

A properly trained speech pathologist, Wendy says, should be able to transcribe any consonant, vowel, or diphthong by ear—and identify its voice, manner, and place. One of Wendy’s biggest complaints about her field is how underappreciated this scientific part goes, and how frequently acquaintances—the same kind that ask about The King’s Speech—confuse speech pathology with the less-scientific discipline of elocution.

“When I was starting out, people heard you were a speech therapist and they would go, ‘How now brown cow,’” Wendy once remarked, rolling her eyes. ___ Wendy points to her lips, painted her signature pink. “Are these two the same or different?” she asks, adopting a hard American /r/ for the session. “Arr… arr…arr. Arrarrarr.”

The five-year-old boy sitting at the table, Samuel, tucks his chin and continues twisting his yellow rain boots around the legs of his chair. (To protect the child’s privacy, Samuel is a pseudonym.) He starts to pick at the Wallingford Police Station temporary tattoo that’s been on his arm for ten days.

Wendy tries again. “What part of my mouth is mostly moving? Arrarrarr.”

Samuel started attending weekly lessons with Wendy in the spring of 2017. When they first began, he had a medley of severe articulation issues: he struggled with the strident system, which includes sounds like “sh” and “ch”; he displayed non-rhotacism, omitting his “r” sounds; and he substituted “th” for “f,” expressing his characteristically good manners with “please” and “fank you.” Many speech therapists wait until a child is eight years old to treat these issues, as

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PROUD TO BE there’s a chance they’ll resolve naturally, but Samuel persuaded Wendy with his eagerness and aptitude.

At their first lesson, when Wendy asked him why he thought they were meeting, Samuel was certain. “I’m here so you can teach me to say ‘shursh,’” he said, unknowingly echoing my brother.

Samuel has since improved his strident sounds and learned to articulate “r” at the end of words, but he still can’t isolate his tongue on r-initial words like “rat,” or r-remedial words like “carrot.” Wendy hopes that “Arrarrarr” will push Samuel to articulate the “r” sound before a vowel, but his lips have a habit of rounding into the “w” shape when he doesn’t pause between each “r.”

Samuel finally tilts his head back in frustration, shakes his bronze curls, and howls. “Arr! Arr! Arr!” Not quite. Wendy furrows her eyebrows and playfully corrects him: “That sounds like a hiccupping seal.”

After twenty years of running her private practice, Wendy rarely encounters articulation issues that she doesn’t know how to fix, once she has cracked what she calls the child’s “systematic error code.” For almost any common problem like a lisp or non-rhotacism, Wendy knows a set of strategies—some technical and some not-so-technical—that she uses until she identifies one that works best. When she first started working with Samuel last spring, Wendy began with her usual technique: make a long “ee” and imagine the tongue is glued to the palate but allowed to slide from front to back. As the tongue moves backward in the mouth, “ee” becomes “eer.”

This visual didn’t work with Samuel—he couldn’t move his tongue without rounding his lips—so Wendy shifted to a less mechanical approach: do a seal impression. Samuel correctly articulated an “r” on his first try.

Between their weekly sessions, Samuel frequently practices speech exercises for fun, which Wendy says is practically unheard of. His r-final word articulation has now improved to the point that he corrects Wendy when she forgets her affected American /r/. Wendy recognizes the irony in teaching children a speech pattern that she does not share, but her accent doesn’t undermine her effectiveness, she says. If anything, it makes the children’s final /r/ sounds, though systematically constructed, more their own.

“I say to them, ‘You’ll be better at this than I am,’” Wendy tells me after Samuel’s session wraps up. “And they are, by the time they finish.” ___ A week later, Samuel’s Wallingford Police Station tattoo, now seventeen days out, has peeled to only a grey penumbra of a crest. He practiced “Arrrarrrarrr” at home this week, and Wendy thinks he’s ready for

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full r-initial words. She pulls out a page scattered with terms: rope, road, read, ring, rag, rat, red, rip, rug, run.

Wendy has scrupulously sketched a picture beside each word to provide a visual cue. The hand-drawn illustrations strike me like Wendy’s micro-adjustment of the table, but this time, I trust that whatever energy and attention she put into them is necessary. That maybe, one day, they’ll be a part of why Samuel won’t have to dodge words with perilous r sounds or veto baby names of his own.

Samuel and Wendy take turns pointing to a picture and reciting the corresponding word. When Samuel’s lips begin to round, Wendy gently rests her palm against his lower lip.

In a moment between drills, Samuel spots old papers protruding from Wendy’s case binder. “That’s from when you couldn’t say ‘church,’” Wendy says.

Samuel clicks his tongue indignantly.

“I can say it!” he retorts. “Churrrrrrrrrrch.”

—Antonia Ayres-Brown is a senior in Saybrook College.

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E S S AY

HOPEFULLY YOU’VE LEARNED KOREAN BY NOW When I told people that I learned Korean over the summer of 2013, they assumed I went to Korea, not that I lived with five other teenage girls in a cabin named for a North Korean work camp on the shores of Turtle Lake in Bemidji, Minnesota.

At Korean language immersion camp, we all wore hanboks at least once. We ate bulgogi and bibimbap, omelet rice and sundubu jjigae. We did taekwondo, sang Korean children’s songs, learned traditional dances and ate with chopsticks. Our counselors planned a pretend trip to Jeju Island, a street food tour, a casino night. We watched Wolf Boy and Taegukgi.

We learned how to make patbingsu, and bought socks with embroidered images of our favorite Kpop idols at the village shop using Korean Won. At Camp Sup Sogui Hosu, Korean for Lake in the Woods, the name I was given at the beginning of the summer was Ju Ri. I’m a Jewish kid from Chicago and my actual name is Julia.

It’s humid in the North Woods in July and every day I wore jean shorts. The full face of makeup I put on dripped and smudged. I applied fuchsia eyeliner to my waterline and the little kids at the camp accused me of having pink eye. My braces had orange and blue rubber bands on them, and I had a multicolored hair wrap with a plastic bead at the end.

There’s a photo of me from camp wearing a beige polyester button down with camels on it, presenting in front of the sixty or so other campers whatever Korean I had learned that week.

I wore that shirt yesterday.

When you’re growing up you can’t choose your life, but you can choose your obsession.

When I was fifteen, I played the clarinet and piano seriously. I collected glass bottles and cardboard boxes and took painting classes. I did my trig homework and learned how to drive. I was in a mother-daughter book club, and when I went to homecoming, I was too awkward to dance. On weekends, I watched my brother’s friends play Call of Duty and Smash and for 2012 I threw an End of The World sleepover. On the one-year anniversary of my Bat Mitzvah my dad came out as gay and my parents got divorced. I wasn’t obsessed with any of these things.

Really, I spent my early teens tucked under the covers of my bed watching hours of subtitled music videos, live stages, reality shows, variety shows, hidden cameras and interviews.

I was busy consuming the shiny world of Korean production 22

Julia Hedges

companies’ perfectly manufactured celebrities, who are literally called idols. I watched members of Kpop groups ranking themselves by their looks, introducing themselves and their prescribed personas: the maknae, the visual, the leader, the rapper. I watched a reality show that gave teenaged idols a baby to raise. I listened to Kpop’s addictive EDM beat on repeat while backpacking in the Grand Canyon over winter break.

Growing up is deciding what you like and don’t like. When you decide that you really, really like something, maybe something that no one else likes, that’s now who you are.

I got into Kpop early, before Gangnam Style, before BTS. I spent hours combing kshow123, soompi and dailymotion for subtitled videos. I was literally there watching as each of EXO’s teaser videos dropped, as Gee became the first Kpop video to reach 100 million views. I was a member of fan clubs—a V.I.P, an ELF, a Shawol, an EXOL. Kpop is a global phenomenon. In 1993 Jurassic Park featured Hyundai cars and the Korean company’s sales spiked by 1.5 million. The South Korean government noticed that pop culture can make a country a lot of money. By 2012, South Korea had allocated a billion dollars to fund Korean pop culture. The “Hallyu Wave,” the increase in South Korean culture’s global popularity since the nineties, exports Kpop as a significant portion of the country’s economy. Kpop videos have comments in French, Russian, Arabic, German and Hindi. In Peru, 2NE1 music videos play on TVs in department stores. Super Junior recently has promoted songs titled “Lo Siento” and “Mamacita.” Kpop groups release albums in THE NEW JOUR NAL

Japanese and Chinese. Song titles are usually in English, and lyrics often have phrases like “move it,” “break it,” “under my skin,” “fantastic,” and “I love it love it.”

At the beginning of eighth grade a friend from orchestra sent me a link over Facebook Messenger of SHINee’s music video for “Lucifer.” I was instantly hooked. I watched the five beautiful, effeminate, men with bleached asymmetrical hair dressed in leather and mesh dancing in metallic spinning rooms over and over again. I practiced my scales resting my clarinet sheet music on my computer screen with SHINee playing in the background. I watched Kpop and pretended that my parents weren’t yelling at each other outside my door.

I tried being into One Direction or Sherlock or Justin Bieber like other kids I knew, but couldn’t find anything to grasp onto. Kpop was prettier and brighter, kitschier, more theatrical. It was all-consuming. When I finished watching Super Junior’s talk shows going all the way back to 2008, I moved onto 2NE1 and then Block B and then MBLAQ. Being a Kpop fan is having ten different biases in ten different groups.

It’s memorizing the exact second of a music video your favorite member looks at the camera and winks.

When I was a teenager, the Hallyu Wave was extremely pure. It remains an industry where idols have no-dating clauses written into their contracts and a 27-year-old singer is assumed to be a virgin. Idols claim that their fans are their girlfriends. Idols often talk about their ideal type in interviews: a puppy-like personality, someone who smiles with their teeth and has a cute aura, someone who doesn’t wear heels. That’s literally me, fans say. They are fourteen years old and sheltered and naive and imagine that they are in love.

Camp Sup Sogui Hosu was populated by Korean adoptees, Korean Americans, kids who had Korean friends, kids who really liked Taekwondo, and, of course, the majority: Midwestern kids like me who were obsessed with Kpop who were not Korean. A lot of kids at camp wished they were Korean. They

DECEMBER 2018 DECEMBER 2018

wished they dated a flower boy, that they could see SHINee perform live, that they could move to Seoul and teach English.

One girl who had blond hair and did revolutionary war reenactments at home wore makeup to make her look Korean.

No one talked about it. We said we were all just there to learn a language. But the truth was that many of us weren’t there due to genuine interest in the history or politics or fine arts or customs of Korea. We dreamed about our lives being like k-dramas, where we’d trip and somehow fall right into the arms of a rich heir, who’d hate us at first, but we’d woo them with our endearing quirks and eventually fall in love.

Sup Sogui Hosu’s website says it creates “a place that is both culturally authentic and uniquely our own.” Bemidji, Minnesota, called “The First City On The Mississippi,” is the self-proclaimed curling capital of the United States and the alleged birthplace of Paul Bunyan. It happens to also be home to the Concordia Language Villages, fifteen language immersion camps clustered around Turtle Lake, all run by Concordia College. On the villages’ website, Concordia says that they are “builders of globally minded communities and guides to world fluency.” Each camp markets reasons why American kids should learn their language. Russian camp offers the chance to “enjoy great literature!” Why learn Danish? To “Unlock the secrets of happiness!”

Sup Sogui Hosu is not an authentic Korean experience.

It’s Korea accessibly served to teenage Midwesterners as a fun summer activity. Sup Sogui Hosu is the digital world of the Hallyu Wave made physical. But it’s also an American summer camp. We canoed and played UNO and ate s’mores. All summer long, my arms were covered with mosquito bites and my face was sunburned and peeling. One weekend we all went to a laundromat in town and downloaded kakaotalk and sent little winking cats to each other. We went to a shop that sold drug rugs and incense in a nearly abandoned mall and I downloaded the Hangul keyboard on my phone and put my friends’ Korean names in my contacts. Then we ate at a Perkins, a family-friendly dining chain. I ordered meatloaf.

The camp’s representation of Korean culture was distilled down to Kpop. We wrote letters to our favorite idols, and formed our own Kpop groups amongst ourselves. The counselors organized a game of Running Man based off of the variety show. We did morning exercises just like Korean high school students in TV dramas. Before bed we played our favorite Kpop songs. The girl who slept in the bunk across from

“At 3 a.m., as I started in on my seventh hour of a k-drama, I would be filled with dread that I’d never be able to escape the world of Kpop and be happy to 23 just live my own life.”

mine taped pictures of Bi, Siwon and G-Dragon to the wall.

I first went to Korean camp because my friends and I had decided to do something together over the summer. Rachel learned languages as a hobby and Joanna was Korean, so we decided on Korean. I was devastatingly embarrassed of my obsession and would have never learned Korean otherwise.

I wanted to feel superior to the Kpop-obsessed koreaboos at camp who held up double Victory signs in all their pictures.

That is not me, I said to myself, even though at that point all my YouTube ads were in Korean. At camp, I pretended to mispronounce the names of Kpop groups. I told inappropriately timed jokes and was loud and obnoxious. I was self-conscious and was confronted with the fact that I was a type: a fourteen year old white girl Kpop fan, and that no, I wasn’t unique or especially worldly. I felt the koreaboos embarrassed themselves by calling the boys “oppa,” by wearing shirts of their favorite groups, by doing aegyo, by saying “fighting!” or “daebek!” or “omo!”

After camp was over, the counselors who were from Korea flew out of O’Hare. Rachel and I took them to H&M and Top Shop on Michigan Avenue. We ate at the Cheesecake Factory and spoke in Korean. Won Jae told me that Sup Sogui Hosu was uglier than Seoul, that the food at camp was barely Korean. I told him that I would come and visit.

“Conjuring,” Won Jae commented on my profile picture a month after camp ended. I responded in Korean. I’m not sure if I ever spoke Korean again after that. I definitely haven’t visited. ___ In eighth grade homeroom, I wrote a letter to myself to be opened on high school graduation. When I opened my letter it read “please please please don’t forget Yesung and Jonghyun and T.O.P. You probably still love Super Junior and SHINee and MBLAQ. Hopefully you’ve learned Korean by now!”

But at the same time as I wrote that, I had nightmares about being in my twenties and still tucked in bed in front of the computer watching other people’s lives, yearning for a place I wasn’t in, imagining myself as someone else surrounded by different people. Growing up is boring and sometimes lonely. You look in the mirror and you have acne and braces

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and you’re wearing animal print and you have a middle part and your parents just got divorced and you wished things were different. At 3 a.m., as I started in on my seventh hour of a k-drama, I would be filled with dread that I’d never be able to escape the world of Kpop and be happy to just live my own life.

I thought something monumental would have to happen to pull me away from Kpop, but what actually happened was underwhelming. Kpop had always been the best thing in the world, and it still was, but suddenly, I found myself drifting away from it. By the end of sophomore year, passively consuming media didn’t make me happy. When I was sixteen, my dad married my stepdad and I started biking the fourteen miles to school instead of driving. I threw up in my friend’s car after a Halloween party, I cut all my hair off, I taught Hebrew school and started a klezmer band. Life went on.

And so did Kpop. At my high school graduation rehearsal the kids I had grown up with sat bored in the pews of Rockefeller Chapel and a friend and I watched EXO’s newest music video. My senior year, three friends and I drove to buy Dean’s album at a store in Chinatown. I watched Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bong Soo and Show Me the Money 4. Last year I made three different Kpop playlists on Spotify and deleted all of them. But now, as I watch a movie with friends, I don’t wish I was watching Kpop interviews instead.

Now, other girls from Sup Sogui Hosu have their names in Korean on their Facebook pages with profile pictures of the Korean children they teach or now are students at Yongsei University. I’m at a US college studying architecture and speak no foreign languages fluently. Kpop moved on without me while I moved on without it.

Still, Kpop is one of the things that I’ve spent the most time thinking about in my life, and I haven’t been able to just let go completely. Last year Jonghyun from SHINee committed suicide and I was devastated. On the Ring Ding Dong music video, a YouTube user named “x blossom” commented, “When you grew up with SHINee and you hear that Jonghyun passed away, that feels like you lost a family member. That’s how much it hurts. Rest in peace my childhood.”

That’s what Kpop was for me. Kpop idols were the characters that populated my childhood, and Korean camp was the last time I remember being treated like a kid.

At Sup Sogui Hosu, I liked pickled garlic the most out of all the side dishes. At the end of camp Won Jae led me up to the stage at the front of the cafeteria and crowned me “Miss Garlic” and put a sash over my shoulder. He fed me sixteen cloves of garlic in front of everyone while they sang and clapped.

And no matter what I achieve in my adulthood, that will be my proudest moment.

—Julia Hedges is a junior in Silliman College.

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small heart, why do you explode against yourself each dewy morning? I yearn to stroke each feather that folds backwards in your tightened skin. does each rib expand in heat as you shudder through the air? in the garden, beyond the honeysuckles, my eyes trail your swirling flight. my skin is taut over my bones, and I dream of being small and warm in someone’s hands. oh, tiny muscle, filled with ice, how long does it take your blurred form to die? two years, and I still wake aching to pink morning, my wings’ thousand beats stilled by my cradle of nest.

—sonnet to the hummingbird

—Kinsale Hueston is a first-year in Timothy Dwight College.

illustration by Rachel Wolf

DECEMBER 2018

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THE ROAD BACK Students forced to withdraw from Yale have seventy-two hours to leave campus.

To return, they must navigate a convoluted process.

Elliot Wailoo

O

n November 14, 2017, Jesica Springer was at rehearsal for the Yale Dramatic Association’s production of Dreamgirls when a twelve-pound disco ball fell on her head. The following day, she went to Yale Health, where a doctor told her she would recover within two weeks. She continued to attend classes, and tried to ignore the headaches that worsened each time she looked at the board or her notebook.

But Springer, then in her first semester at Yale, did not get better. Once, she got lost during the three-minute walk from Saybrook College to her room in Vanderbilt Hall. In a moment she no longer remembers, she shoved a classmate to the ground. Per doctor’s orders, she could only work for ninety minutes a day, in half-hour intervals. On December 7, the second-to-last day of classes, Springer withdrew from Yale. “I was not cognitively capable of keeping up with my work, or taking my finals,” she told me. “If I kept pushing the way I was, I would have damaged my brain permanently.” To withdraw, Springer sent a nineteen-word email to her dean. At the time, she had no idea that she would have to navigate a months-long, bewildering, bureaucratic process just to become a student again. ___ In 2015, one week into First-Year Scholars at Yale, a summer program in which incoming students take English 114, an introductory writing class, Charelle Brown’s father passed away back in New Mexico. After missing class for a week to attend the funeral, she ultimately failed the summer course. “My family didn’t expect me to finish the program,” she said. “I was struggling to get writing. It took me a while to process losing my dad, and I lost him at a

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time when I had to produce a lot of writing. I was just so scared to write again.” Brown had to take a writing class to complete her first-year requirements and advance to sophomore standing. She enrolled in a writing course both semesters of her first year, but withdrew each time. “It was so severe—that fear of writing and producing things,” she said. Brown spent the summer of 2016 at home in Santo Domingo Pueblo (Kewa), New Mexico, seeing to family responsibilities and taking English 120 online. It was her last opportunity to complete the required writing credit and gain the eight credits she needed to advance to sophomore standing. When she arrived at Yale for her sophomore year that August, her grade for the online course was not yet available.

One day that September, toward the end of shopping period, Brown was called to a meeting with Ezra Stiles Head of College Steven Pitti and Dean Nilakshi Parndigamage.

Brown had failed the summer class, Parndigamage said.

She would be forced to withdraw. Brown said the administrators seemed apologetic, and that they emphasized that they were reading the official policy to her. “They told me that I had seventy-two hours to leave campus from the end of that meeting,” Brown said. “[They] made it seem like [by being here] I was going to put the university in danger, which was strange, because somehow, being withdrawn for an academic reason makes you a threat.”

Springer, Brown, and every other student who withdraws from Yale has to complete a uniform and lengthy list of tasks, regardless of the reason for their withdrawal. Often, the path to reinstatement requires spending thousands of dollars on plane tickets and classes at other colleges. In recent years, administrators’ efforts to reform the process or even enforce Yale’s existing rules have been uneven and inconsistent, leaving students frustrated and confused.

Yale does not publicize statistics about how many students withdraw or are reinstated per year. This fall, I spoke with nine students who are either currently enrolled after being reinstated, or are still withdrawn. Their stories reveal the complex and often alienating process of applying for reinstatement. ___ There are five reasons why a student may withdraw from Yale: personal, financial, academic, disciplinary, and medical. Personal withdrawals cannot be forced, while financial, academic, and disciplinary withdrawals are rarely voluntary; only health–related cases can be either. Mental health– related issues are the most common cause for withdrawal, according to Sara Samuel, a 2015 graduate who served on a committee that reviewed Yale policies around withdrawal and reinstatement. To withdraw, a student sends an email to their residential college dean, who forwards it to the

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Sodi, Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs and the chair of the Reinstatement Committee, told me in an email that “students found to be on campus may be reported to their residential college deans or the campus police. In addition, anyone on campus who feels threatened by a withdrawn student can also call campus police.” ___

Yale College Dean’s Office. The Dean’s Office notifies the University Registrar’s Office, which changes the student’s status in Yale’s online systems from ‘Full-Time Enrolled’ to ‘Withdrawn,’ creating a formal separation between school and student, said Deputy Registrar Shonna Marshall.

Withdrawals are different from Leaves of Absences, which are always voluntary. Students in good academic standing can decide to take a Leave of Absence within the first fifteen days of a term. They can leave for up to two semesters, and while away, they remain affiliated with Yale.

To return, a student on leave simply emails their college dean. Yet withdrawn students wishing to return must begin a long and complex reinstatement process, regardless of the reason for which they withdrew, and whether or not it was voluntary.

Once a student’s status is changed to ‘withdrawn,’ several changes take place, removing digital facets of their studenthood one by one. Information Technology Services sets the student’s email account to expire, and the ID Center deactivates the student’s swipe access after seventy-two hours.

From then on, withdrawn students are barred from campus in perpetuity. “They may come to campus only upon receiving prior permission from their residential college dean or the Dean of Student Affairs,” state the academic regulations of the Yale College Program of Studies. Risa

DECEMBER 2018

Yale administrators often frame reinstatement as an application gauging readiness: Is a student ready to come back to Yale? Will they be able to succeed in a stressful academic or social environment? Or—especially in the case of mental health withdrawals—will reinstatement exacerbate the challenges that forced them to withdraw in the first place?

Over the last four years, three Yale students have committed suicide after withdrawing and re-enrolling: Luchang Wang in 2015, Hale Ross in 2016, and Thomas Lawrence earlier this year. After Wang’s death at the beginning of the spring semester in 2015, public conversation on campus shifted towards examining policies around mental health services, withdrawal, and reinstatement, at least temporarily. In February 2015, the Yale Daily News published a series of editorials criticizing the process; in a heated town hall with university administrators later that month, previously withdrawn students did the same.

On November 5, a 2018 alumna, referred to as Z.P. in legal documents, filed a lawsuit against Yale. She claimed Yale–New Haven Hospital held her for involuntary mental health treatment and disclosed confidential information to administrators, who forced her to withdraw from the University in November 2016. The suit alleges that Jonathan Holloway, then Dean of Yale College and one of twelve defendants in the suit, denied her appeal to remain at Yale. Z.P. was reinstated in fall 2017 and graduated this past spring. In her suit, she claims that Yale required her to withdraw as a preventative measure “due to her health and the recent suicides of two students,” even though she had demonstrated “improved mood and coping skills.” She saw Yale as “a refuge from her stressful home environment,” the suit went on, and wanted to stay on campus. While Z.P.’s allegations have not yet been brought to trial, they bring forth important questions about forced withdrawal: What reasons does Yale have for requiring a student to spend time away from campus? Do its requirements for readmission function in students’ best interests? And how can Yale act proactively to ensure students’ wellbeing while responding to the individual needs of those who withdraw?

When students who have withdrawn hope to be reinstated, they must submit a personal statement and gather two letters of support from instructors or employers. They must spend as many as two terms away from Yale “construc-

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tively occupied,” according to the Yale College Programs of Study, the sole source of information online about withdrawal and reinstatement policies. They must travel to New Haven to interview with Sodi, the Chair of the Reinstatement Committee, unless “circumstances warrant [a] video teleconference.” Students withdrawn for medical reasons must interview with doctors at Yale Health. The three-person committee—Sodi, Dean of Academic Affairs Mark Schenker, and Director of Yale Mental Health & Counseling Dr. Lorraine Siggins—reviews the application, makes a decision, and notifies the student about whether she will be reinstated.

Two of the students interviewed said that they were grateful that they were forced to take time away or not allowed to come back after a first application for reinstatement. But several students, including those two, said that the process was anxiety-inducing and stressful, or that it even impeded their efforts to prepare for reenrollment. One student currently withdrawn for bipolar disorder who asked to remain anonymous because she has not yet been reinstated said she thought her application was denied because of two instances when she checked herself into a psychiatric ward for a night, months before she applied. “They saw it as a sign that I needed more time away,” she told me. “I was worried they would penalize me because I reached out for help.”

REINSTATEMENT: Six to eight weeks before the deadline, Chair of the Reinstatement Committee, Dean Risa Sodi, emails withdrawn students application information.

Students must have no outstanding balance owed to Yale.

Students on medical withdrawal must be cleared to return by a doctor at Yale Health.

Students must have enrolled in two courses at a four-year accredited institution and earn grades of B or higher in both.

To reapply, students submit a personal statement and two letters supporting their application, mailed to Sodi’s address. In their application, students must describe what their alternative plans are if they are not reinstated.

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On the day she died, Wang posted a status on Facebook.

In it, she described her intense worry of “having to leave for a full year, or of leaving and never being readmitted” to Yale. According to the YCPS, “A student is eligible to be reinstated only once; a second reinstatement may be considered only under unusual circumstances, ordinarily of a medical nature.” ___ Brown, the student who withdrew after struggling to complete her first-year writing requirement, comes from a low-income family; a scholarship from the Gates Millennium Foundation covers all of her attendance costs. After learning she needed to leave Yale, she knew she could not afford a plane ticket home. Her Head of College, Steven Pitti, covered the cost of the flight to Albuquerque.

“I’m pretty sure it was out of his own pocket,” she said.

“I remember telling him, ‘I’ll pay you back,’ and he said, ‘When you’re famous and you’ve graduated from Yale.’”

In the hours following the meeting, Brown moved everything she couldn’t fit into her luggage to the Native American Cultural Center’s basement. She logged nineteen hours of work there, mostly spent cooking for the center’s Welcome Back Barbecue, to have money when she returned to New Mexico.

Brown flew home just days after the barbecue. In a letter

Upon submitting appropriate materials, students must schedule an interview with Sodi. Students withdrawn for mental health reasons must schedule an interview with Director of Yale Mental Health & Counseling Lorraine Siggins.

The Reinstatement Committee—Sodi, Siggins, and Dean of Academic Affairs Mark Schenker—reviews applications and renders decisions about whether students are ready to come back.

Four to five weeks before the term begins, they notify students of their status via email.

Students may need to make housing or academic accomodations with the Resource Office on Disabilities.

Students must communicate with their Residential College Dean about their return.

The committee notifies the Yale College Dean’s Office.

The committee notifies the student’s Residential College Dean of their return.

Deans counsel and make living arrangements for reinstated students.

The committee notifies the University Registrar’s Office.

The URO updates student status from ‘Withdrawn’ to ‘Full-time Student.’ This change notifies Information THE THE NEW NEW JOUR JOUR NAL N AL which Technology Services, oversees student technology services, like emails.

sent to Holloway the next week, her college advisor and architecture professor Karla Britton criticized the administration for failing to provide Brown any option other than returning home. Instead, Britton suggested the school offer students like Brown an internship or job in New Haven. “In my 14 years of teaching at Yale College, I have not encountered another student with such a deliberate determination to give back to her community of origin,” Britton wrote. “If Charelle could have been given broader support for her goals at Yale, she could have been positioned to influence not only her pueblo, but certainly the students and faculty at the Yale School of Architecture as well.”

During her year at home in New Mexico, Brown lived with her brother, his wife, and their children. “When I got home, my family did not want to talk about why I had to leave. They were embarrassed that I came home,” Brown said. She biked everywhere to cut travel costs. And she worked to get over her fears of writing. “I spent the year writing all the time, writing every single day, writing in [my] journal,” she said. “That’s really what helped me figure things out.”

In the spring, to fulfill the two-course requirement for reinstatement, she enrolled part-time at the University of New Mexico, commuting daily by train and bus, three hours round trip. UNM offers financial aid to full-time students only; to pay for her classes, she worked at the school’s Indigenous Design + Planning Institute, which gave her a tuition grant in place of a salary. She had no income, so to pay for transportation and food, every Friday and many Wednesdays, she cooked and sold burritos to other community members in her pueblo.

When Brown began her application for reinstatement in May, she quickly encountered barriers. There was an outstanding balance of $1,551.85 on her account, which she could not afford to pay. Of this amount, $504.32 was listed as “Board” charges from the fifteen days she had spent at Yale eight months earlier, and $165.44 was “Room” charges. Her scholarship is only valid for full semesters, so it did not cover the two weeks she had lived at Yale. Yale had placed Brown’s account on financial hold, preventing her from applying for reinstatement to Yale or requesting transcripts, which Brown needed to present before receiving her scholarship. She wrote a letter to her tribal governor explaining her dilemma and requesting that her tribe cover the outstanding balance. Tribal officials quickly agreed, and the payment was processed on May 31.

Brown was reinstated on August 3, 2017. Upon her return, she hoped to live with her friends and former suitemates, but she was placed with two transfer students instead. This year, she moved out of Ezra Stiles. “I just didn’t feel connected to it,” she said. ___

SEPTEMBER APRIL 2017 2018

In fall 2014, Holloway, the former Dean, appointed a committee of six, chaired by English professor John Rogers, to review practices surrounding withdrawal and readmission. The committee was the administration’s first public effort to address policies and processes that had been criticized for more than fifteen years, according to a story published in the Yale Daily News in 2015. The semester prior, a Yale College Council task force had published a six-page report recommending changes to the process. Sitting on the administration’s committee were Mark Schenker, the Dean of Academic Affairs, former Trumbull Dean Jasmina Besirevic-Regan, and two lawyers from Yale’s Office of General Counsel: Susan Sawyer and Caroline Hendel.

Sara Samuel, then a senior, was the only student.

The administration’s committee met eleven times and interviewed the registrar, the Director of Financial Aid, the Readmission Committee, residential college deans, representatives from the YCC, and students who had withdrawn and been “readmitted,” as the process was then called. “We spent a lot of time discussing the requirements for getting back,” Samuel told me. “We wanted to present the policies in a transparent fashion.”

Wang committed suicide that January, part-way through the review process. Samuel, the only member who agreed to comment about the committee’s proceedings, said its members found the event sobering. “It really added to the

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gravity of the work we were doing,” she said.

The committee issued a 4,300-word report in April 2015, outlining suggestions for policy and implementation.

Some were simple: a change from “readmission” to “reinstatement” to dispel a sentiment that withdrawal nullified a student’s Yale acceptance, an extension of the period for taking leaves of absence from ten to fifteen days, and the elimination of a $50 reinstatement fee. According to Sodi, Holloway endorsed all of the 2015 recommendations, meaning they could be enacted as policy. Many of the changes were made immediately. However, as of November 2018, three and a half years after the report was issued, several other recommendations endorsed by Holloway, who left Yale in 2017, are outstanding or only partially implemented.

The major recommendation that remains unfulfilled is the creation of a website to guide students and their families through the withdrawal and reinstatement processes.

The report recommended that the website include downloadable application materials, information about the 72-hour rule and insight into the financial aspects of withdrawal, including an explanation of tuition insurance. As of December 3, no such website existed. A “Reinstatement

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FAQ” page created earlier in 2018 contains no information except a label that it is ‘under construction’ and a link back to the legalese of the YCPS. In a November 6 email, Sodi said the FAQs would be put into effect that month, and on November 27, she wrote that they were nearly ready for publication. Back in February 2016, Holloway told the Yale Daily News that the website would be up by spring break of that year.

The University’s implementation of other recommendations has been uneven. Several suggestions made by the committee do not appear in the YCPS; it is unclear whether they are not policy or just unavailable for students to view.

For example, the report recommends that students on personal, medical, or academic withdrawal be able to petition for online library access. It also suggests that administrators require students to meet with their residential college deans while applying for reinstatement. (Neither policy exists in the YCPS.) The report also recommends moving the fall reinstatement application deadline to June 1. (Current policy has a fall deadline on July 1.)

In some cases, the University has neglected to formalize its policies in writing or communicate them to administrators. For instance, after finding that some students’ ID cards

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and email accounts were being deactivated immediately after withdrawal, while others’ accounts were left active for months, the committee recommended that Yale suspend student email accounts fourteen days after withdrawing. However, this fall, Sodi said students now have email access for three years after withdrawal. (YCPS contains no mention of this policy.) When Springer withdrew after her concussion, her dean, Christine Muller, told her that her email would be deactivated. Quickly, Springer sent emails to alumni, with whom she was working to coordinate a conference taking place that spring, passing on other students’ contact information—even though she was banned from viewing screens because of her concussion. Her email was never suspended. ___ When Springer returned to her home in Shoreview, Minnesota, last December, she was under doctor’s orders to do as little as possible. She continued physical and occupational therapy for her eyesight, which was badly damaged and causing her headaches. She couldn’t read books for weeks. “I did a lot of sitting on my front porch,” she told me. “I couldn’t exercise or move quickly without passing out.”

By the end of February, three months after she was struck by the disco ball, her condition was improving. She traveled to California and Canada to visit friends and family. She started reading books again. At that point, she knew little about the reinstatement process. When she withdrew, she got the impression from Muller, former Dean of Saybrook College, that her reinstatement would be guaranteed. “Dean Muller just really emphasized, ‘Don’t even worry about it. You’ll have to do an application, but don’t worry about that until April,’” Springer said. “It was very much presented to me as a non-issue. Both my mom and I were under the impression that there was no question of my coming back.” But she was later told multiple times in the standardized emails she received from the Reinstatement Committee that reinstatement was not assured.

Because her withdrawal was related to physical health, Springer was required to pay for a flight to New Haven in April to be cleared to return by Yao-wen Hu, Director of Athletic Medicine at Yale Health. “He was like, ‘Do you feel good?” Springer told me. “I was like, ‘yes.’ It was a twenty-minute meeting. I was like ‘Wow, I really came out here for this?’” She returned to Minnesota after the meeting. By late May, she had mailed in a personal statement explaining why she wanted to be reinstated and two letters supporting her return from an instructor and an employer.

On May 31, Springer received an email from Sodi’s assistant, Rolaina Wright, telling her to set up interviews with both Sodi and Director of Yale Mental Health & Counsel-

DECEMBER 2018

ing Lorraine Siggins. The subject line was “reinstatement materials received.” Springer scheduled both interviews for the last two weeks of June.

Then, on June 18, she received another email from Wright. The subject was “reinstatement materials NOT received.” Sodi had never received Springer’s medical clearance letter from Yale’s doctor. “I suggest, then, that you contact Dr. Hu to request a duplicate,” Sodi wrote later that day in an email to Springer, who frantically called Yale Student Health and Yale Medical Records to reauthorize them to send her health files to Sodi.

That day, Springer had rearranged her schedule for a Skype interview with Siggins about her mental health. At the time, she was enrolled in two courses at the University of Minnesota—a calculus class and an introductory economics class—to fulfill the two-credit requirement for reinstatement. The conversation with Siggins was quick. “She was like, ‘Oh, Jesica, I just opened your file because I was going to interview you, but I see that you withdrew because of a concussion. So I guess we don’t really need to talk,’” Springer told me. They ended the Skype call. “They just assumed without ever looking at my case that I had mental health issues,” Springer said. Siggins did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

When Brown applied for reinstatement, she, too, was told by an administrative assistant, Lisa Miller, that she needed to interview with Siggins, even though she explicitly mentioned she withdrew for academic reasons when scheduling the interview. Unlike Springer, Brown completed the interview with Siggins. No Yale policy requires students on academic withdrawal to interview with a psychiatrist. ___ On October 22, Sodi met with Yale College Council Vice President Heidi Dong and Director for Student Life Grace Kang to discuss a new set of policy recommendations for withdrawal and reinstatement that the YCC had been working on since the spring. (Kang is also a formerly withdrawn student; she hurt her back during her first semester, spent a year away, and was reinstated in the fall of 2017.) Earlier in October, the council had conducted a focus group with four reinstated students, soliciting feedback about the withdrawal and reinstatement processes.

The YCC proposed eliminating a requirement for students withdrawn for academic and personal reasons to spend two full semesters away from Yale. The suggestions also included offering financial aid for students who, like Brown, cannot afford to take required classes while away from campus, creating an earlier application cycle for withdrawn international students to give those who are reinstated more time to apply for visas, and establishing a Peer Liaison program for recently reinstated students.

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Many of the suggestions YCC brought to the administration in 2014 have yet to be implemented. “The Dean’s office thinks that they’re welcoming to returning students and helpful to students looking to get reinstated, but somewhere along this chain of people, reinstated students feel neglected by the Dean’s office,” Kang wrote in an email.

But Dong and Kang both said that Sodi, who has been the chair of the Reinstatement Committee since October 2017, was receptive of the latest set of proposals. “Because she’s new, she wasn’t aware of some of the problems that students had,” Kang wrote. According to Kang, Sodi will pose YCC’s recommendations to other deans in a December meeting.

However, Kang added that it may take up to two years for the changes to be implemented.

In the YCC’s research into other schools’ policies, Brown University stood out. Its reinstatement process is fairly simple. If a student leaves for medical reasons and wants to return, they need to do three things: write a letter explaining their case to the student support dean they are paired with while away, procure and supply a letter from a treatment provider, and fill out an information release form to allow deans to access their medical information. Brown does not require students on medical leave to take classes while away, or to interview with any Brown officials.

Brown’s Office of Student Support Services website contains a wealth of information about the school’s protocols for leaving and returning. Online guidelines include a four-week timeline of the petition review process, an outline of the criteria the committee use to evaluate cases, and a list of committee members. If a student wants to appeal the committee’s choice, the guidelines also provide instructions on how to do so. Prior to the creation of the guidelines in 2017, Brown deans ran a comprehensive blog about the medical leave process, complete with student and parent testimonials.

Daisha Roberts, a YCC senator who has contributed to the group’s research, praised Brown’s policies. “Everything is just student-centered, and they really care about the student’s well-being more than our policy does,” she said. ___ On July 16, Springer learned the committee had reinstated her, even before grades from her summer courses at the University of Minnesota were released. Students need a B or higher in their required two classes to be reinstated. She was relieved to hear the news—and knew she would pass the classes—but was still confused. “Why did [the committee] make me pay for these classes if [they] are going to reinstate me without seeing proof of them?” she asked.

Springer said that returning to Yale as a first-year for the second time is different. She has different priorities; she

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worries about different pressures. Her second set of orientation meetings was useless. She’s retaking the same French class she nearly completed last year. She’s managing a 4.5 credit course load, prioritizing paper-heavy courses over detail-oriented ones. “My memory is not as good as it used to be,” she said. “My short-term memory is just not there.

I’m having a really hard time keeping track of people.” A few times, she has mistakenly reintroduced herself to someone she met last year.

Since her concussion, Springer has worn bifocals to help her eyes shift between looking at close-up and faraway objects; her eyes no longer converge and she has minimal vision between one and three feet from her face.

Her adjustment was also marred by bureaucratic challenges. She could not be guaranteed housing with her class because she was not reinstated until after dorm arrangements were set. Even though Springer was assigned a room in Vanderbilt Hall with other first-years in Saybrook at the last-minute, after a student decided not to matriculate, she was not granted the medical single she requested for her post-concussion sleep disturbances. The summer credits she took did not transfer automatically; she spent weeks convincing the Math and Economics departments to transfer them, seeking advice and support from Sodi.

Springer told me she found that Yale’s policy and process created barriers that exacerbated the challenges she faced in returning to school. “It could be so much more personalized,” she said. “The person who I had rearranged my entire schedule to have a Skype interview with thought that I withdrew for mental health reasons. It’s kind of absurd to me that I’m put through the same process as someone who’s on a disciplinary leave. I also think that requiring two classes when I was gone for a semester—and that I would just have to pay for these things—is just absurd.”

When Springer arrived for move-in this year, there was no ID or key for her, although she had been communicating with university staff including Cissy Armstrong, the Assistant to the Dean in Saybrook, for more than a month about her impending return.

After arriving to Old Campus with her luggage, Springer walked over to a woman from the registrar’s office standing nearby. “I was like ‘I’m a reinstated student, there’s no ID here under my name, I don’t have a key to my room,’” Springer said. “And this lady was like, ‘Are you sure you’re reinstated? Are you sure? Have you gotten a letter? Are you sure you’re actually reinstated, and don’t just think you are?

Are you sure you’re a student here?’ I was almost crying when Cissy walked up and was like, ‘She’s good!’”

Three days later, Springer found out the woman from the registrar’s office was her first-year advisor.

—Elliot Wailoo is a sophomore in Saybrook College.

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ENDNOTE

I WAS A FEATURED SPEAKER AT

GILMORE GIRLS FAN FEST 2018 One woman’s weekend in real-life Stars Hollow.

Lily Dodd

I

found out about Gilmore Girls Fan Fest while serving, in August, on Appalachian Trail Support Crew for FOOT, a pre-orientation backpacking program for first-years at Yale. We –– the four people charged with handling emergencies in the backcountry –– were stationed in Kent, Connecticut, and it was while perusing Yelp on a desperate quest for a bagel that I discovered that the town hosts a gathering for Gilmore Girls fans in October. I didn’t know much about the show at the time, but I’d seen enough episodes to gather that it was a heartwarming mother-daughter sitcom set in a fictional Connecticut small town. Kent, with its artisanal cheese shop and hockey-powerhouse boarding school, seemed like the perfect place for fans.

I imagined being back in Kent in autumn, surrounded by women who love Melissa McCarthy, and I realized : I needed to go. Gilmore Girls Fan Fest was going to be like the magical feminist utopia island from Wonder Woman, if Wonder Woman were written by Martha Stewart.

After snagging The New Journal’s approval, I sent an email to the coordinators of GGFF asking for a press pass. This is where things got complicated: I was granted the pass (huge–– tickets to the festival were about $250), but I was also asked if I could lead a panel on “writing for the news.”

If you aren’t familiar with Gilmore Girls, you may wonder, “Now, why would they want you, of all people, to do that?” Good question. Rory Gilmore, one of the show’s two protagonists, goes to Yale with journalistic ambitions and eventually becomes Eeditor-in-Cchief of the Yale Daily News. When I confessed to the festival’s director that I not only did not write for the News, but had never written a story for any Yale publication at all, she told me not to worry and to lead the panel anyway.

DECEMBER 2018

illustrations by Sam Oldshue

She did request that, if possible, I bring a friend from the YDN. I found the ideal man for the job in the form of Eamonn Smith, a good friend and novice reporter for the News. Eamonn knew even less about Gilmore Girls than I did, which I thought might make me seem like the more authoritative panelist. When Eamonn and I showed up at the Festival’s administrative offices early Friday morning, I realized for the first time what, exactly, I had gotten myself into. One of the first interactions we had was with a volunteer, who, upon learning we were press from Yale, exclaimed, “Look! It’s Rory and Logan!” (Logan is Rory’s Yale boyfriend to whom Eamonn bears a passing resemblance. Eamonn: “Who’s Logan?”) I was delighted at being compared to the inarguably hot Alexis Bledel, who plays Rory, but I also realized in that moment that I had agreed to spend two-and-a-half days in a small town overrun by fanatical devotees of a show I’d barely watched. A massive tent served as the festival’s epicenter, but events were held throughout Kent’s quaint downtown. In the restaurants and the public library and behind the firehouse were the attendees: just over a thousand people, who were, by one volunteer’s estimate, 90 percent women, mostly wearing shirts I did not understand: “TEAM ROBERT” and “babette ate oatmeal.”

Sometimes, you just gotta bite the bullet––or in this case, the strawberry balsamic ice cream made by the costume designer for Gilmore Girls. I kicked off Friday afternoon with a debate on Rory’s best boyfriend (someone named “Jess” won), then moved on to a trivia game in which I embarrassed myself by with my abysmal knowledge of the Supreme Court. (The question was,: “Which real-life Supreme Court justice was in the Puffs?” The Puffs = an all-female secret society at Rory’s 33

elite high school. For some reason, the only name I could think of was Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Incorrect—it was Sandra Day O’Connor. Good look for me, already the least-useful person at the table.)

My favorite event was a “photo opportunity” with actors Tanc Sade and Nick Holmes, who played Logan’s Yale friends, members of his fictional secret society, The Life and Death Brigade. Two of the biggest stars in attendance, they’d appeared in fifteen and five episodes, respectively, and I’d never heard of either of them. Still, the attendees treated them like gods. And I’m not one to judge: I once handed Glee actor Darren Criss a ninepage fanfiction I had written about him having coffee with Daniel Radcliffe and Harry Potter.

During the photo opportunity at the local antique store, I positioned myself on the steps outside with a cup of French onion soup and watched. Sade, tall and sporting a bowler hat, and Holmes, whose own Instagram bio describes him as “wildly handsome,” were observational gold.

While Sade spent a lot of time fending off female attention — to a woman wearing a shirt that read, “My ideal weight is Tanc Sade on top of me,” Sade, in his admittedly charming Australian accent, said, “Wow, that’s great! I should get one for my fianceè!” — Holmes spent a lot of time encouraging it. On Saturday night, at the cast panel, Holmes estimated he had kissed seventeen attendees on the mouth. I had witnessed one kiss that morning and literally did a double-take. Later, I learned through by scrolling through Instagram photos taken at the festival that Holmes not only kissed his fans (passionately and consensually) but also took naked pictures of (at least one of) them. When not acting, Holmes is an “empowerment photographer,” specializing in black-and-white, bare-chested shots of women.

At least one of these scantily-clad photoshoots featuring a scantily-clad fan took place at the festival itself. But a woman I interviewed — who was tagged in one of Holmes’ Instagram posts labeled #GGFF— declined to tell me where, exactly, the photo had been taken.

(The Instagram account on which Holmes shares the photos, @narcissusholmes, boasts 16.6 thousand followers; a second account, @nickholmeshair, devoted strictly to his hair, has 773. On each account, Holmes’ bio includes the words “In omnia paratus,” the Life and Death Brigade motto, which means “ready for all things.”)

There’s no denying that the Gilmore Girls fans know how to party. I was initially nervous about finding people to hang out with, since Eamonn was decidedly uninterested in staying overnight, but festival attendees were unfailingly kind to me. A chef and her fifteen-year-old daughter took me out to dinner. At Club Getaway, a

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retreat center and summer camp where many fans and I slept, I shared breakfast with seventeen-year-old Malika and, twenty-three-year-old Lexi, and their mothers.

Malika and Lexi had been inspired by a scene in which Rory and the Life and Death Brigade “boys” jump off a large platform holding umbrellas. As luck would have it, Club Getaway was also home to a ropes course that included a thirty-five-foot platform, and the affable man who ran it let Lexi and Malika jump off with their umbrellas (and, of course, bungee cords). I also jumped off, though not with an umbrella, because a) I didn’t have one and b) I was worried it would somehow get tangled in the bungee cord, resulting in my tragic death at Gilmore Girls Fan Fest.

But for me, the key moment of the festival came during our “Journalism at Yale” panel, which quickly turned into a “Yale” panel, possibly because it became clear that nobody onstage knew that much about journalism. We got quite a range of questions, from “Are secret societies real?” to “How much did the YDN investigate the allegations leveled against Brett Kavanaugh?” The more I talked about Yale, the more I wished, for the first time, that my life were more like Rory’s, if only to please the audience. When a woman approached me after the panel and asked if I had a boyfriend, I wanted to say that I did, but that his billionaire father thought my family was trash, as befalls Rory. It turned out the woman was asking on behalf of her son, whom she pointed out to me, standing across the room and apparently unaware of his mom’s audacious matchmaking attempt. When I said I didn’t really want to start something at Gilmore Girls Fan Fest, his mom said, cuttingly, “He’s too young for you anyway.”

That incident aside, I’ll be earnest: it’s a strange thing, realizing that your reality is someone else’s fantasy. The Monday after the festival, I gave a mini-tour of campus to two young women and one of their husbands.

I’d met the women at trivia (they roasted me about the Supreme Court thing), and found myself more or less bursting with pride to show them my school. “Look!”

I said, pointing at Branford. “It’s Rory’s college!” This is something I would have never said five days earlier.

I dropped them off on Hillhouse Avenue, a street I get to see every day and that Mark Twain apparently said was one of the most beautiful in the world. On my way back to my dorm, I stepped on a dead squirrel. But even that seemed like something the glamorous-but-occasionally-world-weary Rory might do, and thus—extremely desirable.

—Lily Dodd is a sophomore in Silliman College.

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YALE UNIVERSITY

JUDAIC STUDIES Spring 2019 Course Offerings INTRODUCTORY COURSES JDST 201 – Introduction to Modern Jewish History, MW 1:30pm-2:20pm, David Sorkin JDST 235 – Introduction to Judaism In the Ancient World, TTh 1pm-2:15pm, Steven Fraade JDST 293 - Intro to Modern Jewish Thought , MW 11:35am-12:50pm, Elli Stern MEDIEVAL & EARLY MODERN JDST 372 - Jewish Every Day Life in the Middle Ages, Th 3:30pm-5:20pm, Micha Perry JDST 374 - Jewish Magic, Th 9:25am-11:15am, Alessia Bellusci MODERN JDST 281 - Jewish Philosophy in 20th Century, T 1:30pm-3:20pm, Zev Harvey JDST 282 - Judeo-Spanish Culture, Language, and Literature, M 3:30pm-5:20pm, Allyson Gonzalez JDST 355 - Reflections on the Holocaust, T 3:30pm-5:20pm, Katrin Truestedt JDST 358 - Feminism and Judaism, W 1:30pm-3:20pm, Igor De Souza HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE JDST 306 - Israeli Narratives, W 1:30pm-3:20pm, Shiri Goren JDST 329 - Modern Jewish Poets, W 1:30pm-3:20pm, Peter Cole JDST 343 - Advanced Literary Translation, Th 1:30pm-3:20pm, Peter Cole JDST 401 - Academic Texts in Modern Hebrew, TTh 11:35am-12:50pm, Dina Roginsky JDST 407 - Israeli Popular Music, Th 2:30pm-3:45pm, Dina Roginsky _____________________________________________________________

Program in Judaic Studies Yale University 451 College St., Rm. 301 New Haven, CT 06511 Tel – (203)432-0843, Fax – (203)432-4889 www.judaicstudies.yale.edu

Please note that information on courses, including meeting days and times, is subject to revision. Students should check the printed YCPS and especially the on-line course information for the fullest and most accurate information

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

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