Volume 49 - Issue 2

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

VOL 49 / ISS 2 / OCT 2016

THE NEW JOURNAL

TRUMP et

VERITAS the GOP’s existential crisis comes to campus

editors-in-chief elena saavedra buckley isabelle taft managing editor spencer bokat-lindell senior editors sophie haigney sarah holder yi-ling liu aaron mak david rossler associate editors ruby bilger victorio cabrera eliza fawcett amelia nierenberg aaron orbey natalie yang copy editors griffin brown philippe chlenski harry gray rohan naik

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

with support from

design editors ivy sanders schneider allison primak assistant designer elaine wang photo editors elinor hills web designer mariah xu web developer philippe chlenski

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

THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 49 issue 2 oct 2016

SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

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cover TRUMP AND MAN AT YALE The GOP’s existential crisis comes to campus Isabelle Taft

31

feature THE COUNTDOWN New Haven is refocusing its efforts to tackle homelessness. Is that enough?

Eliza Fawcett

standards 4

points of departure SEIZE THE POLE — Mikayla Harris CAMERA LUCIDA — Catherine Peng

9 profile

MONTANA, RUNNING BACK — Mark Rosenberg

In the middle of the night, a rising Yale football star left the team 13 snapshot

ETHICALLY ENROLLED? — Sarah Holder

Students navigate accusations of sexual harassment

against famous professors 16 essay

PAPERS, PLEASE — Victorio Cabrera

I fought the bureaucracy, and it was a draw 30 poem

KOOKABURRA SITS IN THE OLD GUM TREE — Rachel Yalowitz

37 endnote

I AM THE MAN YOU KILLED IN THE WAR... — Micah Osler

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

SEIZE THE POLE At PoleFly, sexiness and sport go together Mikayla Harris

Wooster Square’s hottest fitness space is an empty dance studio with ten-foot metal poles bolted to the ground and ceiling. On a recent Sunday, a friend and I visited the studio, which sits in a small brick building across the street from Sally’s Apizza. It was a hot and humid day, and the last thing I wanted to do was exercise— especially when that exercise was pole dancing.

A tall, lanky woman with pinkstreaked, strawberry-blonde hair greeted us at the door. She wore a tight blue crop top and low-rise sweatpants with slits up the sides showing off toned, muscular legs. She introduced herself as Jessica Lynn, our instructor and the owner of the studio, PoleFly. We walked into a room with wall-towall mirrors, lined with stability balls, light hand weights, and yoga mats. It was a cozy space, private and serene.

But the eight poles interspersed throughout the room made it obvious that this was not your traditional dance class.

Lynn gave us a rundown of the studio rules. Number one: no jewelry. It can scratch the poles. Number two: no lotion. While poling, your palms, among other things, can get sweaty, and lotion weakens your grip. As my friend said, “This pole is more stable than any relationship I’ve ever been in.” Nobody wants to complicate that with lotion.

PoleFly opened in 2013 and, in addition to pole dancing, offers aerial hoop, barre, and chair dancing classes.

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Lynn was surprised that my friend and I had never heard of the studio before; Yale students are some of her best customers. Visitors range from members of Yale Dancers to students at the Divinity School to players on the football team. But her most frequent patrons? Women at bachelorette parties.

Pole dancing has been popular since the nineteen-eighties, but its reputation and purpose are contested and evolving. In recent years, many pole aficionados have championed it as a non-sexual form of exercise. “Up until a few years ago,” Lynn said, “to say you did pole dancing was a taboo.” Before she opened PoleFly, Lynn worked as a bartender in downtown New Haven. She took pole-dancing classes in order to stay in shape, but when she mentioned her pole work, customers at the bar responded by asking her which club she danced for.

At the same time, there are amateur and professional competitions for pole enthusiasts, branded as purely athletic. Like at nightclubs, woman are usually the ones competing, and the uniform is often a glorified bra and underwear—but that’s more utilitarian than aesthetic.

Skin contact with the pole is required for inversions because it creates the friction needed for flips and tricks (another reason for the “no lotion” rule). And for these athletes, little about pole dancing is glamorous.

They have callused hands, they get bruises, and their skin peels off. Still, the US Pole Dance Federation—an organization founded in 2008 to organize national pole dancing competitions—boasts the tagline “The Sleek, The Strong, The Sexy.” Lynn said that the purely athletic focus ignores the fact that many women learn how to pole dance as a form of entertainment, not exercise.

Now, most competitions have a separate section for “exotic dance.” And studios like PoleFly, popping up across the country, walk a delicate line between drawing customers through the activity’s sexy reputation and insisting on its serious athleticism.

We began the class with a light warm up to “Uptown Funk.” After we finished our squats and dynamic THE NEW JOUR NAL

stretches, we started to learn a couple of basic tricks.

Our first move was called “walking around the pole,” which consisted of walking around the pole. Then we moved on to some more complicated moves, the most intense being the fireman spin. Imagine a fireman sliding down the pole in the station to get to the truck.

That’s the basic configuration of the spin, but instead of sliding down, you use the momentum from initially swinging your outside leg (the one farthest from the pole) to leap up and spin around the pole several times.

I did it, but I can’t say it was graceful. Lynn made it all look easy. She has been “poling” for about five and a half years, ever since a friend took her to a class and got her hooked. She loved the challenge of it, and she found it much more fun than working out at the gym.

She supplemented her classwork by training at home on a pole she had installed in her living room.

“I have a ton of toenail polish scrapings on my ceiling from inversion kicks I would practice on the pole,” she said with a laugh. “It’s only about eight feet tall.”

Next we learned some “sassy floorwork” to combine with the pole tricks for a final dance combination. First up: the body roll.

“Imagine you’re squatting over a nasty toilet at a club and then you’re using the pole to help roll your body up,” Lynn explained. “Now slide all the way down the pole to the floor with your legs in a wide squat position like you don’t even care how dirty the bathroom floor is.”

Described as such, the moves did not sound sexy.

Lynn went on to describe the first part of a turn as “sniffing your armpit.” She tries to make her language as desexualized as possible.

“Once you say the word ‘sexy,’ people get uncomfortable,” she explained. “Most people come here for a workout, and even the people that do come here to learn how to dance ‘sexy’ get anxious when they actually hear that word.”

PoleFly offers about twenty-five group classes a week, but instructors also lead private parties. And those, according to Lynn, get a bit crazier; at bachelorette parties, Lynn will often lead chair or lap dancing classes. In such cases, it’s clear that the participants are not there for a workout, so Lynn often uses more sexual language than she would use in a traditional class.

Although the crowds are rowdier, she enjoys teaching them: it’s usually everyone’s first time poling, and the vibe is less morning-at-the-gym and more night-at-theclub. But the number one rule she gives to groups is that they are not allowed to attend the class under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

“It’s a workout, so they can’t be drunk and trying to do it,” Lynn explained.

OCTOBER 2016

“ONCE YOU SAY THE WORD ‘SEXY,’ PEOPLE GET UNCOMFORTABLE.”

Not everybody follows the rules. “One girl was so drunk that I had her just sit in the corner and play with one of the stability balls,” Lynn said. “She still threw up.”

We performed our final routine to Beyoncé’s “Me, Myself, and I.” It was about a minute and a half long, and it combined the moves we had learned: walks around the poll, fireman spins, and body rolls among others. I can’t really say how I looked while doing it.

I was watching Lynn the whole time, trying to mimic her movements. By the end, I was dizzy from all of our spinning and had broken a sweat. The next morning I woke up with sore arms despite the fact I had barely left the ground. I watched some videos of professional pole events, and I was struck by the athleticism of the women competing. Pole dancing is no joke: it’s a serious workout. Yet when I was on the phone with my mom later that week and she asked what I did Sunday afternoon, I didn’t tell her about my time at PoleFly. Lynn said pole dancing “doesn’t have to be a shameful thing,” but it still wasn’t something I wanted to talk about.

During the class, Lynn and the other women, including myself, wore their hair down. Being able to flip your hair while performing the dance makes it more fun.

But I have never been in another fitness class where everyone kept their hair down. We were doing challenging moves, but at the same time we were being, well, sexy. PoleFly instructors don’t use sexual language because they don’t need to: people taking their classes know what they’re signing up for. While for women, it’s hard to be simultaneously sexual and athletic, for men there’s no such clear divide. What PoleFly and professional pole dancers are attempting to do is clear a space for women to be both. It’s no small feat.

— Mikayla Harris is a senior in Silliman College.

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

CAMERA LUCIDA John Chirikjian takes a photo every day Catherine Peng

On his 784th day at Yale, John Chirikjian takes a picture of me in the bustling Branford dining hall.

His camera is pressed close to his chest, and his dark eyes narrow. Then comes the click. Chirikjian pauses to compare this photo to the ten he has already taken today and to the thousands he has taken during threeplus years at Yale. He won’t show me the shot before he leaves, tucking his camera to his side, but hours later I will find my own photo online, where anyone can see it.

Chirikjian always knows precisely how many days he has been at Yale, because since the beginning of his freshman year he has taken a photograph every day and posted it in a public Facebook album (titled “‘Take it Slow’ ~ Dean Loge,” referring to the former Dean of Timothy Dwight college). The most recent photo when we spoke was the sixteenth photo of Chirikjian’s senior fall and the 783rd in the collection. A computer science major in Timothy Dwight—the site of his very first photo entry— Chirikjian began the project to share his college experience with his parents. Posting photos online, where friends and family expect to see them, keeps him accountable.

Chirikjian’s photos are meant to resemble a shared diary account of everyday life on campus. From his first breathless still taken on August 24, 2013 to a shot of a colorful summer night under the lights of Ashley’s Ice Cream Shop shop on September 16, 2016—the day before we spoke—Chirkijian’s photos are touching not only because of the moments they capture, but also because of their consistency. The album displays his meticulous devotion to Yale, shot by shot.

“Every once in a while when I’m feeling sentimental, I’ll go through all the photos,” says Jordan Plotner, his close friend and freshman-year roommate. It’ll always bring me to this place of timeless nostalgia.”

There are moments in the album that could belong to any Yale student—photos such as Harkness (#166), Questionably Necessary Bag Checks At Bass Library 6

(#432), HalloWoads (#569)—but there are also photos so personal that they might be best understood by close friends, or Chirikjian alone. There are his New Haircuts (#466), his Mustache Parties (#269), his Suite Teethbrushing (#194). His closest friends sparkle in these photos, pulling viewers into scenes that they have not experienced. It feels strange and intrusive to study these photos as an outsider to Chirikjian’s private life— to feel a false nostalgia for another’s memory as you click through the collection.

I need to ask for an explanation from Plotner on the Attempts to Bleach Hair w/ Teeth-Whitening Toothpaste (#467), for instance, which captures the reflection of Chirikjian’s suitemates gathered in a bathroom mirror, blow-drying their hair. “That pretty much sums up sophomore year,” he tells me. “Mev and Lukas dyed their hair blonde, Mev shaved his head, and Lukas tried to change his hair color with toothpaste. I was a somewhat passive bystander and Chirikjian was taking the photo. It’s an odd scene in which every single one of us is doing something that doesn’t make sense.”

Chirkijian insists that he doesn’t mind whether the pictures are popular in a social space or whether they rack up likes from peers. “I’m a social media whore… but I like to think that I’d choose a more intimate scene if it better represents the day,” Chirikjian says. He refuses to plan his successive shots, and takes several each day in search of the perfect candid.

Though he speaks of capturing intimacy, it often escapes him. Even the grainier iPhone photos that dot the album are tweaked for color balance, straining for faithfulness to reality. “Ideally, every one of this series would be a candid scene,” he says. “But more often than not, if you pull a camera out, even if it’s just a phone, people become instantly aware of it.”

— When Chirikjian takes my photo, I think about this authenticity. I know he is looking for a natural pose, but I can’t stop myself from smoothing the hair near my THE NEW JOUR NAL

all photos courtesy of John Chirikjian

OCTOBER 2016

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face. I know the photo will land on Facebook, where I am currently faceless.

Last April, I deleted my account because I had never been interested in following the lives of people I had never been close to. However, scrolling through Chirikjian’s album on the temporary account I made just for this purpose, I feel a sense of closeness with him that is unreasonable after only one interview. I know how his friend Gabe Eats Fries (#641), with the ketchup at the center of the paper plate, and I fall a little in love with the way Martha looks in the golden light of afternoon in Post-Run Last-Minute Shopping (#121). If I don’t feel like I really know Chirikjian, I know at least that I am not alone at Yale—that others, too, have Late Walks Back from the Library (#298), write Late Papers (#602), and sometimes feel as if the world is Cold and Desolate (Photo #646).

In Timothy Dwight, where Chirikjian will hold a spring gallery show displaying his project, the community has embraced the shots as a shared album. It has become a point of pride, he says, for students in the college to appear in the photos.

Chirikjian himself, however, has a hard time remembering a lot of his photos save for his most recent additions to the album. He calls each photo a reminder of the day’s events, stimulating his memory, but he seems more concerned with the sense of measured time the photos lend him.

“Everyone here is doing so much,” Chirikjian says, and sometimes it overwhelms him. “You talk to any

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one person, and they’ll tell you some of what they’re doing, but often they’ll just forget because of the magnitude.” The photos, he tells me, help him understand his own progress.

So many of these pictures are gorgeously composed, capturing foggy nights in a dreamscape of soft lavender.

Chirikjian is a serious artist, and I wondered, as I spoke with him, whether the album just amounts to a celebration of his numerous joys on campus. But if I wasn’t convinced that Chirikjian’s album is relatable, or completely naturalistic, I stop questioning once I finally find my own photo in the album, #784. I’m convinced I fit into what Chirikjian, in a low voice at the end of our conversation, tells me in his most pressing sense of purpose with the album title.

“I want to get intimate moments,” he says. “I want to get something real. Realer.”

In the photo, I’m smiling wider than usual with a forced slouch. I want to seem comfortable, as if we’re talking casually. Looking at the photo, it’s easy to forget that Chirikjian, once the shutter snapped, left quickly; that he will take another photo, and another, and another, until he graduates; that we talked only once.

But still, in between frames, there is a quiet moment to remember with him.

— Catherine Peng is a sophomore in Branford College.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

PROFILE

MONTANA, RUNNING BACK In the middle of the night, a rising Yale football star left the team.

Mark Rosenberg

Photograph by Matthew Leifheit

Just past midnight on August 19, as the rest of the Yale football team slept before the first day of fall camp, Andrew Grinde made his getaway. The fivefoot-eleven freshman running back slipped out of his room in Lanman-Wright Hall, taking care not to rouse his roommates, and walked out to High Street, where an Uber awaited him at the curb. He rode to Union Station, then boarded a night train to Philadelphia.

By the time Grinde’s teammates woke up, he was long gone. He’d left behind a gift—a big yellow and grey suitcase filled with most of his clothes, which the other freshman recruits proceeded to rifle through—and a lot of questions.

OCTOBER 2016

“The coaches were really impressed with him,” freshman wide receiver Caden Herring said, “and he just up and leaves.” Offensive lineman Lucas Tribble, who is also a freshman, put things more explicitly: “We were all kind of like, ‘What the fuck?’”

— Grinde grew up playing sports with his older brother Jimmy and working on his family’s farm in Great Falls, Montana, a tight-knit community of 60,000 nestled between mountains and farmland. Though his parents divorced when he was young, they “supported him through everything,” he wrote in an email from Bozeman, Montana last month. Throughout high school he 9

Grinde (center) with his high school football team, The Bobcats. Photo provided by Grinde.

went for bike rides and lifted weights with his mother Cyndy, a personal trainer, and ate dinner with her five nights a week.

To Grinde, Montana is the greatest place in the world. “You feel a sense of freedom,” he wrote. “People in Montana are able to live their lives doing what they want to do.” In Great Falls and the surrounding suburbs, football is king, and Grinde was at the center of it all. He started playing flag football in third grade, tackle in fifth. This will be the first season he’s sat out.

“Football played a huge role in my life,” he wrote.

“All the life lessons it taught me, the pathways it opened up for me, the relationships I gained from it.”

As a junior, Grinde was named Montana’s Gatorade Player of the Year. That year, he rushed a class record of 2,180 yards and twenty touchdowns, leading the C.M. Russell High School Rustlers to the Class AA state championship game. His name shows up five times in the state record books. “Watch his film,” Yale Assistant Coach Derrick Lett told me. “He’s the best player in Montana.”

The eleven-minute high school highlight reel, which has been viewed over two thousand times online, is utterly silent. No 2 Chainz, no trap beats, not even a roar from the crowd. There’s nothing to distract from the football. At 210 pounds, Grinde has the stocky build of a power running back. But he’s got speed, too; the video opens with Grinde catching a screen in the backfield and sprinting seventy yards down the left 10

sideline with the entire defense in hot pursuit. In the next clip, he jukes a hapless defender to the ground.

He blocks a massive lineman onto his back, makes a leaping sideline catch, and spins out of a defender’s arms in a split second.

The Gatorade press release mentions academic credentials in step with Grinde’s athletic prowess: 4.0 GPA, vice president of his class, elementary school tutor, Special Olympics and United Way volunteer, youth soccer coach. He played basketball on the side—and led the state in three-point shooting percentage. Paul Rice, Yale’s Montana recruitment coordinator, tracked Grinde down after that junior season. “He had Ivy League aspirations and grades,” Lett said. He was the kind of recruit coaches covet. Harvard and Columbia were after him, too, but ultimately Grinde chose Yale.

He liked Yale’s coaching staff, he had gotten along well with his teammates during his recruitment visit, and he was excited to live in New Haven.

Grinde’s success brought him statewide renown.

“He’s a small-town hero,” wrote Patrick Brennan, a high school friend of Grinde’s. “Everyone wanted to be associated with him.” That reputation awaited Grinde at Yale: Division I football, a potential starring role, the chance to play in front of tens of thousands of fans at the Harvard-Yale Game.

Grinde arrived in New Haven as part of a twenty-nine man recruiting class deemed the best in the Football Championship Subdivision in 247Sports’s THE NEW JOUR NAL

Composite Team Rankings. Preseason training began on July 2; though the team can’t hold official practice until late August, the summer months provide a chance for incoming freshmen to lift, condition, and bond. Grinde seemed to be thriving. “He was doing well with the players,” Lett said. “All signs were that he was happy.”

“We all loved Andy,” Herring agreed. “Andy was the man.”

But for a college student, playing football means sacrifice. Players can’t schedule classes between two and eight. The afternoons are packed with treatment sessions, film sessions, and practice. Sometimes, the commitment pushes players to the brink. “When we have early morning lifting, we always joke about quitting,” Herring said. “But we’re never going to do it.”

“If you don’t love the game,” Tribble said, “you’d rather die than play college football.”

— In Grinde’s junior year of high school, as the accolades came pouring in, the demands of the sport started to wear on him, and he began to consider taking a year off before college. “I knew a break off for one year would rejuvenate me,” he wrote. “The only reason I did not act on my dream was because of football.” Grinde’s array of academic and athletic demands was a heavy burden. “Privately, he’s under tremendous expectations and stress,” wrote Brennan. “In the public eye, he’s calm and true.”

After a season of awards and broken records, Grinde’s future was secure. He committed to Yale on August 6, 2015, before his senior year at C.M. Russell. But his love for football started to erode. As the season began, he had doubts about whether he wanted to play for four more years. Football was making him feel sick of school, and impeding his “will to be a happy and innovative student,” he wrote. Then, in a mid-October game against Billings Senior, he fell on his left shoulder and his AC joint separated, sidelining him for several games.

Football is a dangerous game, and Grinde knows it.

“My brother studies neuroscience in college and has been warning me about head trauma for a while now,” he wrote. “Any life changing injuries like that worry me quite a bit, especially since I was blessed with a mind that got me into Yale.” Still, Grinde insisted, he never would have stopped playing for fear of injury. But in the midst of a season in which he was already reconsidering his commitment to the sport, this was another setback.

As his senior spring turned to summer, Grinde felt increasingly set on taking a year off. He knew he could rejoin Yale’s team after a year away, though a longer OCTOBER 2016

deferral would be harder for the coaches to accept. But he balked at the last moment and decided to give the team a shot. Back home, he was lifting for ten hours a week; he showed up to camp at 225 pounds and felt stronger than he ever had before.

But at Yale, summer training was nothing like Grinde’s usual routine. The team spent only two hours a week lifting; the majority of training was spent out on the fields, running and doing conditioning drills.

Grinde lost ten pounds and performed worse and worse on the team’s weekly speed and vertical tests. Though his teammates and coaches believed otherwise, the summer was a struggle for him. He wasn’t enjoying football anymore. “I was weaker and slower at the end of [the summer] than I should have been,” he wrote.

“The summer training sucked a lot of my confidence for the sport right out of me.”

As August approached, the thought of leaving lingered in Grinde’s mind. He came to a realization: if he were to be happy at school, football couldn’t be a part of his life. He made the decision. “I never in a million years thought I would work up the courage to actually take off like I did,” he wrote. “But one night I just did it.”

At first, the team heard nothing. Then, a text. The only reason he was playing football, Grinde explained, was because his dad wanted him to. He didn’t love the

IN GREAT FALLS AND THE SURROUNDING SUBURBS, FOOTBALL IS KING, AND GRINDE WAS AT THE CENTER OF IT ALL.

game anymore. A couple of days after his departure, there was another update, this time from Chicago. Two weeks later, that was the last the other Yale football players heard from him.

The team was blindsided. Incoming freshmen football players leave their schools fairly often, Lett said; they get homesick, or lose their sense of commitment to the sport. But this rarely happens at Yale. In fact, as far as Lett knows, this is the first time it’s happened in Tony Reno’s five seasons as Head Coach.

Grinde knew he was ultimately headed back home to Montana, but he had no plan, no timetable. From 11

Philadelphia, he took a train to Harrisburg. Then a bus to Pittsburgh. A midnight train to Chicago. He explored each city by day and slept on trains and buses by night. He was free, careening across the country on his own—but not for long.

Steve Schreck of the Great Falls Tribune reported Grinde’s departure from Yale on August 24, writing that Grinde, “one of the most heralded recruits in recent Rustler history, will not be a part of the Yale football program this season.” John Amsden, a personal injury attorney from Bozeman, Montana, saw the news. He reached out to Grinde and offered to help him find work in Bozeman. In the midst of his travels, Grinde accepted a position as a legal assistant at Amsden’s law firm, Beck, Amsden & Stalpes, PLLC. Though Grinde had planned to travel for a few more weeks, he put his wanderlust aside and took a twenty-eight-hour train ride from Chicago, through Minneapolis, and back to Montana. Now, Grinde is keeping himself busy, working at the firm forty hours a week. He has been doing research for testimonies, gathering information for cases, and assisting Great Falls District Judge Dirk Sandefur in his campaign for a seat on Montana’s Supreme Court. In his free time, Grinde takes online courses on real estate. And he still works out for a couple of hours every day.

— Throughout his childhood, Grinde longed to play in the NFL. But gradually, that ambition faded. Back in Montana, he is pursuing a new dream: a year away

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from football. But even now, the game follows him. He owes his internship in part to his stardom—after his career at C.M. Russell, the entire state had his back.

Now, he talks of other dreams, of traveling from city to city on his own. “I decided to quit living my life for other people,” he wrote. He wants to make enough money to travel the world. Where does he want to go?

He tells me it’s “quite a long list.” One day, he hopes to buy a lake house. He mentions this out of the blue.

Why a lake house? “There’s nothing but good vibes while staying at a lake house,” he wrote. “And I am all about good vibes.” As Grinde dreams of his future, football doesn’t appear to cross his mind.

Lett is adamant that Grinde will be back on the team next year. “He just needed a bit more time,” Lett said.

“It’s like riding a bike. When you’re a running back, it’s all natural.”

Grinde, however, is uncertain if he’ll return. “I do not see myself rejoining the football team,” he wrote me. But then, a few days later, he sent me another email: “There’s still a chance I’ll play.”

As Yale’s football season unfolds, 107 of his former teammates will be lifting, practicing, and playing together in New Haven. At Beck, Amsden & Stalpes, over two thousand miles away, Grinde will be sitting at a desk, living for himself.

— Mark Rosenberg is a freshman in Pierson College.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

SNAPSHOT

ETHICALLY ENROLLED? Students navigate accusations of sexual harassment against famous professors Sarah Holder Thomas Pogge stands in the doorway of a classroom in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, surrounded by a gaggle of students. He’s just finished teaching “Global Financial Integrity,” a Yale college seminar that meets Mondays at 3:30 p.m., in style: ten minute late, to rousing applause.

On a Monday afternoon like this, well into Yale’s fall semester, it’s easy to forget that just a few months earlier, Pogge was publicly accused of sexual misconduct.

Last spring, in a Buzzfeed News article entitled “Ethics and the Eye of the Beholder,” Yale graduate student Fernanda Lopez Aguilar alleged that Pogge used his position to manipulate her into a sexual relationship, punishing her professionally after she resisted his advances. The article reported that this incident was just one example of Pogge’s misconduct, an “increasingly open secret in the international philosophy community.” After Lopez Aguilar filed a federal Title IX complaint in October 2015, Yale reviewed the case, finding evidence of “unprofessional conduct” but not enough to support claims of “sexual harassment.”

On June 20, 2016, more than 150 professors and colleagues in the field signed an open letter condemning Pogge’s behavior. “Based on the information that has been made public, we strongly condemn [Pogge’s] harmful actions toward women, most notably women of color, and the entire academic community,” it reads.

As of its last update on 9:40 PM EST on July 13, 2016, the letter has 1,013 signatures.

Esteemed English professor Harold Bloom has faced similar accusations to those mounted against Pogge, most publicly in Naomi Wolf’s explosive 2004 New York Magazine cover story, “The Silent Treatment.”

“I was the object of an unwanted sexual advance from a professor at Yale,” she wrote, naming Bloom. She recounted a strange candle-lit dinner he’d insisted upon, during which he had placed his hand firmly on her inner thigh. Wolf insisted that Bloom’s advances also seemed to be part of an open secret, and wrote that she and other former female students had come forward with allegations of their own, and condemned Yale for not taking the complaints seriously. But because the public accusations were made twenty years after the private transgressions, Yale again did not take action. Critics argued Wolf’s claims were based purely OCTOBER 2016

on hearsay; Meghan O’Rourke wrote a column in Slate vilifying the testimony, called “Crying Wolf.”

The University has not removed Bloom or Pogge, because however much media attention their lapses received, neither professor has been found guilty by Yale—and in Bloom’s case, Yale never investigated.

This semester, students are again offered the opportunity to study under these professors, both of whom are widely regarded in their fields. Pogge and Bloom’s upper-level seminars are both application-based, and Pogge’s intro level course is just one of three options to fulfill the Political Philosophy requirement in the Ethics, Politics, and Economics major. All three classes are small, but every student sitting there made a conscious decision to do so.

The complicated nature of the professors’ public personas introduces a graver consideration to the course-selection process: Should students consider allegations like these as they decide to take certain classes? Is there a moral calculation involved, and are students making it?

— “The idea that it might be morally wrong to refrain from taking a class for the reason that its instructor has been accused of sexual misconduct—this idea is pretty bizarre,” Pogge wrote to me in an email. An article like the one I am writing, he argued, participates in the propagation of sexual misconduct charges that may be false. “To be sure, any undeserved harm your story inflicts could be outweighed by e.g. a compelling public interest. In the present case, however, the public interest served by your story seems miniscule: the ethical question you pose is barely worth discussing and could be discussed equally well in generic terms, without alerting readers to the accusations against me.”

It’s not surprising Pogge would be willing to look at this philosophical question more abstractly—he is a philosophy professor. But given the allegations against him, some find his ethical focus troubling. This semester, his seminar is focused on “Global Financial Integrity”; in the spring, they are titled “Ethics & International Affairs” and “Recent Work on Justice.”

“I feel like humans hate hypocrisy instinctively,” said Grace Paine, a senior majoring in Political Science who considered taking Pogge’s class before realizing 13

SHOULD STUDENTS CONSIDER ALLEGATIONS LIKE THESE AS THEY DECIDE TO TAKE CERTAIN CLASSES? IS THERE A MORAL CALCULATION INVOLVED , AND ARE STUDENTS MAKING IT? who would be teaching it. “And so the idea of tacitly showing my respect for this person of authority—who speaks from his position of authority on morality and has a documented history of behaving immorally toward young women and abusing his position of power—when he talks about global abuses of power didn’t sit right with me.”

However, Pogge’s area of philosophical expertise actually has little to do with the kinds of personal and professional morality that have been called into question, argued Shelly Kagan, a colleague of Pogge in the Philosophy department. Pogge studies global poverty alleviation, and argues that wealthy countries like the United States should help developing countries not in the name of “charity,” but out of obligation.

“Despite the fact that [Pogge] might have behaved in ways that seem distasteful and unprofessional and even immoral,” Kagan said, “the forms of misconduct are not forms of conduct that have anything to do with his area of teaching.”

Lopez Aguilar, who grew up in Honduras, argued the opposite. In addition to accusing Yale of violating Title IX, which concerns sex-based discrimination, she also filed a Title VI complaint, which concerns race.

“He has a taste for women, most ironically, who hail directly or recently through their lineage from developing and non-Western countries,” she wrote. “Most disturbingly, his choice of victim precisely parallel the very countries’ consent he purports, in his well-known academic theory, to defend as invalid in light of human rights abuses.”

The race dimension exacerbated the already uneven power dynamics between Pogge and his student, Lopez Aguilar wrote. Linda Alcoff, a Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College who signed the open letter, said that while one might think Pogge’s specialty would require him to be sensitive to intersectional identities, an awareness of structural injustices does not always translate into an understanding of identity-based injustices.

Professors like Pogge, she said, “take the structural stuff as a macro framing. It doesn’t always cause them to feel that they need to understand racism, sexism, heterosexism.”

Even if you were able to separate the question of 14

Pogge’s philosophical pursuits and his behavior, she added, it wouldn’t make a difference. “Anybody who is a professor in higher education has taken on a morally bound obligation to assist his students and to do his scholarship with integrity and with responsibility to others,” she said. “That’s true whether you’re doing higher energy physics or ethics.”

— At 86 years old, after having taught at Yale for sixty-one years, Harold Bloom’s complex reputation precedes him. If you believe the rumors, he’s sexist and inappropriate. A womanizer. But he’s also a world-renowned literary critic; preeminent in his field. Bloom’s alleged offenses have settled behind a historical haze in a way that Pogge’s aren’t. Every year, students still jockey for spots in Bloom’s class. “[The class] was attractive to me because one of the things this school professes to be is a collection of experts like that,” said a male junior taking Bloom’s course, “Poetic Influence: Shakespeare to Keats.” He spoke under the condition of anonymity. He had read Wolf’s piece before coming to Yale and, after signing the open letter condemning Pogge, also carefully considered the moral implications of studying under Bloom, who did not respond to requests for comment.

“I was wondering, thinking about the article, not knowing how to let that enter in my decision matrix,” he recalled. How is it possible to reconcile Bloom’s prestige with the specter of what he might have done?

Ultimately, he said, he outsourced the calculus to Yale. “There’s this tendency to politicize choice here,” he explained. “But if you buy into this institution—and you do…—to me, these questions are always a slippery slope.” By attending the university, he argued, students are already complicit in funding a faculty project which is inherently based in a “totally gendered power structure.”

— For men, it’s often easier to speak in abstract terms about the philosophical and moral implications of a choice like this. But for women, it’s more complicated—it becomes a choice about whether you are willing to risk harassment yourself.

“I’m hesitant to take any rumor as truth, but I’d THE NEW JOUR NAL

rather be safe than sorry,” said Kas Tebbetts, a freshman enrolled in the Political Science equivalent of Pogge’s lecture, also called “Intro to Political Philosophy,” but taught by Bryan Garsten.

Paine, the senior who chose not to take Pogge’s class, was more critical. “The idea in general of having a professor who is alleged to have preyed upon undergraduates who he’s teaching makes me kind of sick,” she said. “Just sitting in lecture and thinking about all the allegations…”

Taking a class with someone who allegedly fits the trope of a “male cultish academic figure who feels like their brilliance gives them impunity, using power to get young women into bed,” as Alcoff described Bloom and Pogge, may be a risk.

Nicole Bokat, the mother of the managing editor of this publication, studied at New York University in the 1980s, when Bloom taught in the English department.

There were rumors even then, Bokat said. “For example, he made a comment that he was so happy to be at NYU because the students were so much more attractive than at Yale,” she recalled.

Bokat did not take a course with Bloom because their literary interests didn’t seem to align—she wanted to study female authors, and knew “he wouldn’t be interested in that”—but, she said, “in the old days, if you couldn’t take class with any sexist professors, you wouldn’t get your degree.”

Women that do take Pogge’s classes also have grounds to hesitate for professional reasons. Kagan mentioned a rumor that Pogge has written letters of recommendation for women with whom he’s had romantic but not academic relationships. Regardless of whether the rumor is true, female graduate students who may have turned to Pogge for mentorship might now worry about how that association will damage their reputation in the long term.

“Yale should take a hard look at its own history in regard to professors like Bloom and Pogge and rethink the criteria of excellence,” Alcoff said. Hiring scholars who have major influence or who have published esteemed books means little when their students cannot work at their optimal level for fear of harassment.

“Institutions often separate the quality question from the moral question, but you can’t!”

But it is no more the responsibility of women than of men to make a political statement in their course selection. The opportunity to study under literary or philosophical genius is attractive to many—so of course, some female students have considered these professors’ reputations and chosen to take their classes anyway.

I counted five female students in Pogge’s “Global Financial Integrity,” and at least three in “Intro to PolitOCTOBER 2016

ical Philosophy.” The five I asked declined to speak with me. Only men would comment.

“Although there may be questions about morality, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them, especially if they have shown themselves to be very good at teaching,” said Miles Betterson, a sophomore taking Pogge’s lecture. “I did debate over taking it or not, but the be all end all was: I’m going to learn a lot.” Besides, he needs the humanities credit, and another section didn’t work.

Jacob Malinowski, a freshman, agreed. “I don’t endorse anything he’s done in his personal life, and I don’t condone the allegations. I just think the class is interesting.”

When I ask Gaurav Pathak why he chose to take Pogge’s “Global Financial Integrity,” he was quick to defend his decision. Pogge’s an incredible speaker, an esteemed scholar—and he is only one of three co-lecturers who team-teach the course (the other two are professionals from Price Waterhouse Cooper and McKinsey). “He’s practically a section participant,” Pathak said.

Of the nine female students who have taken or are taking Bloom’s class I contacted, none agreed to speak on the record.

— Should a vegetarian boycott a professor for eating meat? Should monogamists avoid learning from an adulterer? These hypothetical comparisons are pithy and easy to swallow. And they miss the point.

The idea of boycotting a class based on a professor’s beliefs might seem counter to the project of a liberal arts institution, a place that’s supposed to challenge assumptions and shape informed, reflective opinions through exposure to dissenting discourse. Taking classes from professors whose politics differ from one’s own expands these boundaries—as does, one could argue, taking a class from a professor whose lifestyle or personal choices seem distasteful.

But here, the stakes are different; higher. The question of whether to take a class from one of these professors is not always an abstract moral choice. It’s also a very concrete question of a teacher’s power over his students, and whether or not you can learn from someone who might abuse that power in the classroom.

Either way, it’s impossible to remove the burden of individual responsibility. If no one showed up to “Intro to Political Philosophy” on the first day of shopping period, Pogge wouldn’t be teaching a class.

— Sarah Holder is a senior in Saybrook College.

15

CRITICAL ANGLE

PAPERS, PLEASE.

I fought the bureaucracy, and it was a draw

 16

THE NEW JOUR NAL A copy of the initial appointment notice, printed at the Hartford USCIS office and modified at the East Hartford biometrics office.

I’m what you call DACA-mented. This means that starting in 2002, when my family came over from Uruguay and we overstayed our tourist visas, I was totally screwed (no papers), and ever since June 2012, when Obama decided that he did in fact have the Constitutional authority to re-order our enforcement priorities through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, I have been slightly less screwed.

Since then, I have had a renewable work permit, which allows me to do luxurious things like “work,” “get a driver’s license,” and “pay taxes whose benefits I will not receive.” All of these privileges are courtesy of the Employment Authorization Document, my DACA-ment.

But let’s take a step back. I know, it’s crazy that my family has lived in South Carolina for thirteen years and doesn’t even have green cards. We overstayed our visas because we had an uncle who thought that he could get us green cards, but he was wrong. Oops. Yes, I am pretty American. No, there’s no pathway to citizenship for people like me (all 665,000 Childhood Arrivals). I could do a green card marriage, but I’m not too keen on the idea of committing a felony. Yes, it’s a felony. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has officers whose job it is to sniff out true love (what underwear does your spouse wear?

When did you last have sex?). Yes, my parents would totally get deported by President Trump; they’re keeping a set of Very American cheeseburgers constantly on the grill just in case Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) comes knocking.

With that out of the way, here we are: me, after more than a decade in this country, with a work permit that can get renewed every two years and serves as my only claim to any sort of lawful status in this country.

I’m currently on my second such work permit, which means that I’m only in my fourth year of pseudo-legality. Four years was apparently long enough for me to forget how precarious my position is. This is a story about what reminded me.

The drama is bureaucratic. Accordingly, it is logistical and boring. I needed to renew my work permit, which was going to expire on October 2, 2016. This procedure involves some very simple paperwork, which I filed in May, and an eventual biometrics appointOCTOBER 2016

ment, where USCIS would take my fingerprints and picture. Dealing with USCIS is an exercise in waiting patiently, so I wasn’t too concerned when July passed with no biometrics appointment. But by the end of August, I was worried—I now had a month until the expiration of my permit, and USCIS takes a month to blink. I started inquiring about my case.

Now, I’ll give credit where credit is due. USCIS has a pretty spiffy-looking website, and sometimes it even works. It was on this spiffy website, on September 8, 2016, that I was told—by cursive lettering in a very aesthetically pleasing scrollwork graphic—that “on August 5, 2016, we scheduled you for a biometrics appointment and mailed you an appointment notice for Receipt Number [redacted].” This message presented a significant problem. USCIS had not processed an address change in time, it turns out, and had sent my biometrics appointment to the place I lived during my summer job in Fort Lauderdale, whose owner decided I didn’t need to be informed about the envelope from USCIS that arrived a few days after I left. Now we arrive at the emotional high point of the drama: me, in the Trumbull College Library, staring at a computer screen, silent. (In my mental landscape, screaming and breaking things.)

An expired work permit would mean being fully undocumented for a pretty long time as an entirely new application was processed. A quick recap of Things It is Difficult to Do While Undocumented: work, get on an airplane, present ID for literally anything. In short, prove to anyone at all that you are a person who exists.

It would also mean that I would begin accruing unlawful presence, which would make several pathways to legal status more difficult, and, after 180 days, trigger a three-year bar on coming back into the country if I ever were to leave. I had grown so accustomed to my legal status that all of this came as something of a shock and an affront. Me? I’ve figured this out! You can’t do this to me (again). As my dear friend Donald might say: Wrong!

There’s no way to write about what happened next in an interesting way, because it was intensely uninteresting. I talked to an immigration lawyer, who advised me that there was a biometrics office in East Hartford, and that the Hartford USCIS office could print my appoint 17

WHAT IS LEFT TO SAY? MY LIFE ALMOST GOT RUINED BECAUSE OF A BUREAUCRATIC HICCUP (AND STILL COULD). ment notice. I duly made an appointment in Hartford.

There, I did indeed receive my appointment notice.

Then, I went to East Hartford, where I explained to the immigration officer that I was really trying not to get deported and would he please consider letting me do the biometrics there with my old appointment notice?

He smirked a little—I think he was on to my game— and then said yes, proceeding to edit the appointment notice with the most beautiful orange pen I had ever seen.

And with that, the ball went out of my court and into that of USCIS, which now has to decide whether or not my crisis-intervention was timely enough. I wait. Omitted from this boring narrative is a phone call to parents (screaming, but who wouldn’t scream) and a strained week of being able to accomplish nothing aside from making people uncomfortable with my near-hysterical jokes about getting deported (“This won’t be funny when I’m getting deported!” followed by nervous laughter). And, of course, approximately half of the World’s Greatest Democracy wishing I would skip all this trouble and just get the hell out.

Maybe USCIS will play nice and renew my work permit despite the delay. This is good. It will not change the fact that my legal status depends every two years on the caprices of a clanking federal bureaucracy. It will not change the fact that the only thing between my parents and ICE is the generous, memo-writing hand

18

of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. It does not change the fact that immigration reform with a path to citizenship, which would eliminate this country’s institutionalized socio-legal underclass, is a proposal easily defeated because “amnesty” is a bad word in the national morality play. Millions of people are at the mercy of How the Base is Feeling.

How The Base Is Feeling becomes law, becomes bureaucratic protocol, becomes ontological reality. In the nineties, the Base Felt that there were too many damn foreigners streaming in from Cuba, and, accordingly, the State of California took the entirely logical step of proposing to ban undocumented children from public schools. I want to go visit my relatives in Uruguay, some of whom I haven’t seen in thirteen years?

Thunk! I bounce off the invisible walls erected by the law. My dad has to drive to work? Thunk! Maybe he gets arrested, because the State of South Carolina would rather have unlicensed drivers on the road than cede to the Illegals by doing anything so weak as giving them driver’s licenses. (The People of South Carolina seem pretty comfortable with their cheap vegetables, and with my dad painting their houses.)

What is left to say? My life almost got ruined because of a bureaucratic hiccup (and still could). Donald Trump might become President. As I have been whining to you in the pages of a Yale magazine, millions of undocumented workers have been subsidizing the very pleasant lives of people who, at worst, want to ethnically cleanse them, and, at best, would probably rather the invisible labor stay invisible. Maybe, while you read, ICE knocked on some doors to Enforce Our Nation’s Immigration Laws. A few weeks ago, I saw someone in Ray Bans and chinos wearing a Make America Great Again T-shirt. What a fun intellectual exercise that must be for him. Fuck this.

— Victorio Cabrera is a junior in Trumbull College.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

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TRUMP and MANat YALE  20

THE NEW JOUR NAL photograph & cover

by Elinor Hills

P

E

A dozen or so Yale students, all men, stared at a television tuned to CBS. They had packed into the common room of sophomore Michael Fitzgerald’s Silliman suite to watch the first debate of the first presidential election in which they are old enough to vote.

The men lean right, politically, but they had officially disavowed the Republican candidate on stage: Donald J. Trump. Trump was the reason they were all in Fitzgerald’s suite, instead of at the Yale College Republicans’ watch party in Linsly-Chittenden Hall across campus. In August, after the Yale College Republicans endorsed Trump, four of the board members, including Fitzgerald, quit and started their own organization, the New Republicans. They pledged in an inaugural Facebook post to be “a more active Republican organization on campus that will always put national interests above partisan ones.”

On the one hand, this position ensured they could experience some satisfying schadenfreude no matter who prevailed in the debate, because neither candi-

Alex Thomas, a junior astrophysics major, set down his plate and waved his arm. “Meeeeeeee!” he shouted at Luntz. “Everyone in America raises their hand,” he joked. Thomas, who is the first person in his family to go to college, grew up in a largely agricultural, Republican-leaning community in southern Ohio. He and his mother plan to vote for Clinton, even though they dislike her, because “she’s not Trump.”

Like Thomas, most of the focus group voters raised their hands in answer to Luntz’s question. They chose words like “incompetent,” “obnoxious,” “fake,” “liar,” and “scary” to describe the candidates, exuding outrage and bewilderment. “They’re both honest and dishonest,” one woman said. “It depends what you want your honesty on.”

“This entire debate is going to be a slugfest,” one on-screen voter predicted. “Back and forth, all personal attacks.”

Some of the New Republicans giggled. Grant Gabriel, a senior from Nevada who had been involved

the GOP’s existential crisis comes to campus date could embarrass them. On the other hand, whatever Trump said over the course of the next 90 minutes, given his track record, would probably add to an unseemly chapter for the Republican Party they still mostly supported, and a less-than-shining moment for a democracy they still fervently believed in.

Fitzgerald, a sophomore who favors tidy slacks and plaid button-downs, provided Pepe’s Pizza and bottles of Pepsi. As the New Republicans grabbed slices and settled in on couches and chairs, Republican pollster Frank Luntz held a conversation on CBS with a focus group of 27 undecided Pennsylvania voters wearing blue and white “Hello My Name Is…” stickers. A woman with pink hair said she was leaning towards Hillary (“There’s a surprise,” a New Republican noted drily), while a middle-aged white man declared himself the “most Trump person in this room.” A freshman who had met the New Republicans at the extracurricular bazaar alternated between glances at the screen and his Bible, which he was reading for Directed Studies.

Frank Luntz asked the focus group, “Who here is mad at the choices we have for President?”

OCTOBER 2016

with the College Republicans for three years and has worked for Newt Gingrich, shook his head at the television. “I’m not going to find this funny,” he said.

Gabriel describes himself as a “pragmatic conservative,” being moderate on social issues and farther right on fiscal policy—approximately the outlook of the majority of the self-described conservatives I interviewed for this story. He says he watched with shock as Donald Trump “took the political world by storm.”

As a Classics major, however, he believes history has shown that populist movements like Trump’s fizzle out quickly. That’s what he hopes will happen, leaving the Republican Party he loves intact. He wants the longterm lesson of Trump and his furious supporters to be that the Republican Party must do a better job addressing the needs of working-class voters. At the same time, he thinks the party must reject Trumpism (and “Trumpian rhetoric,” to use another favorite New Republican phrase) to move forward.

by Isabelle Taft 21

IN FRONT OF HOUSE AFTER HOUSE, FOR MILES OF HIGHWAY, YOU SEE THE SIGNS: TRUMP. TRUMP.TRUMP. It’s an argument made by many prominent conservatives across the country. Politicians like Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse and former presidential candidate Jeb Bush are refusing to vote for Trump while claiming that they represent the true values of the Republican Party. It’s an argument that could play well here on campus, too, where a Yale Daily News survey of the Class of 2020 showed that just 5 percent said they supported Trump; in 2012, a survey by the News showed 15 percent said they supported Mitt Romney. Yale’s William F. Buckley Program, which was founded in 2010 to promote intellectual diversity on campus and is known for inviting right-leaning speakers to campus, conducted a national poll that found only 19 percent of four-year college students support Trump, compared to 42 percent who say they’ll vote for Clinton. But the New Republicans are looking beyond campus to insist that they can play a role in redefining the GOP. Even in an insular environment like Yale, they believe their fight is a fight for the soul of the party and the country.

“If, say, in four or eight years we continue nominating people like Donald Trump and continue down this very dark path, I’ll have to leave the Republican Party,” said Benjamin Rasmussen, a junior and New Republicans co-chair. “But there is hope. There is hope. We’re not out of time yet. We’ll stay with the party, if we’re bringing it back to the party of Reagan. But I don’t know. The future is very uncertain.”

The problem is that it’s not clear what, if anything, the New Republicans and their conservative compatriots can do to influence the voters that this election has revealed and emboldened. The increasingly vocal altright has claimed Pepe the Frog as its unofficial mascot, subjected journalists to anti-Semitic trolling on Twitter, and turned a hypothetical wall into a proud symbol of nativism. Even beyond the alt-right, many Trump voters rage against the elitism and arrogance of 22

Washington, and it seems unlikely that anyone with the New Republicans’ approach and Ivy League pedigree will be able to squash them—or convince them of the wisdom of small government principles and overt outreach to non-white voters—after November 8.

In Fitzgerald’s common room, Luntz ceded the screen to Lester Holt, Clinton and Trump. Soon, Trump was proclaiming that the housing crash was good business and not paying taxes made him smart while Clinton whipped out a too-cute line about “Trumped Up Trickle Down” economics. The New Republicans uncorked a bottle of Woodbridge white wine. They laughed at some moments, but they also spent a lot of time with their heads in their hands. Funny this was not. They are still Republicans, and Trump is too.

— Less than a year ago, to many Americans, Republicans, and students on this campus, Trump was funny.

Rasmussen, a Global Affairs major from the Bay Area who says he’s used to being one of the few conservatives in the classroom, was studying abroad in Russia when Trump rode a golden escalator down to his presidential announcement speech in June 2015. Rasmussen says he “laughed out loud.” But then Trump’s poll numbers spiked and stayed high, and Rasmussen started to get nervous. Something was happening in the Republican Party that he didn’t understand.

When he got back to campus, the Yale College Republicans weren’t doing much. The primaries started, and Trump won New Hampshire, and then South Carolina, and then a slew of states on Super Tuesday. The College Republicans held a debate watch party during the primaries, but only board members came.

“We had all this Popeyes chicken and only like five people were there,” Rasmussen recalls.

No one in the organization supported Trump in the primary, according to Rasmussen and Fitzgerald, but THE NEW JOUR NAL

as the months wore on and one candidate after the other fell by the wayside, the group began to discuss what they would do in the event of Trump’s nomination. Early on, there was a division between those who disliked Trump but thought he would be better than any Democrat, and those who would not support Trump under any circumstances. Fitzgerald was especially disturbed by what he saw at Trump’s rallies; as a black man, he says, he would be wary of attending one even if he loved Trump. When the semester ended and summer began, some Republicans on campus and across the country were still hoping for a successful eleventh-hour challenge to Trump at the Republican National Convention. It didn’t happen.

After the Harvard Republican Club announced in early August that it would not be endorsing Trump, the Yale College Republican board members—including Rasmussen; Fitzgerald; Gabriel; sophomore Jay Mondal; and co-presidents Emmy Reinwald, a senior, and Michaela Cloutier, a junior—convened for a discussion via GroupMe about what to do next. They decided that while it was inappropriate to release an official repudiation of Trump, they didn’t need to endorse him, and Gabriel made the point that doing so could turn off potential new members and compromise other work, like campaigning for down-ballot candidates such as Senator Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire. “We reached a compromise between those who hated him and those who felt they had an obligation to the party,” Gabriel recalls.

This strategy of staying quiet and hoping no one asked directly seemed viable, Fitzgerald said, because the College Republicans are such a small group, with three board members at the start of this year and about six people who attend events. As Reinwald and Cloutier would later point out in an article they published on The Tab about their endorsement of Trump, before August 8 the Facebook page had just forty-eight likes.

(The Yale College Democrats have over 1,700.)

But a week later, the College Republicans GroupMe blew up again: Someone had created a fake Twitter account and posted the message, “The Yale College Republicans will not be supporting Donald Trump in the fall. More information to come.”

Gabriel, checking Overheard at Yale from Boston, watched news about the Twitter account attract comments asking if the tweet was true. “Things sort of snowballed,” Gabriel says, but he still thought the situation could be resolved with a neutral statement that said nothing about Trump while criticizing the impersonation and theft of the College Republicans’ logo.

But the co-presidents saw it differently. They felt the situation demanded a show of vocal support for Trump, OCTOBER 2016

and by the time they told the other board members what they were doing, their statement was already up on Facebook. It was shared over two hundred times.

“While not every member of our organization supported Trump in the primary, as an organization and branch of the GOP we support Republicans up and down the ballot,” it read in part. “And yes, that includes supporting Donald Trump for president.”

Rasmussen was on the subway in New York as the events unfolded, and when he got off, the endorsement was up. He and the other future New Republicans tried to persuade Reinwald and Cloutier to revise the statement, but they refused. Individual board members could post their own comments on Facebook, the co-presidents said, but the official stance of the Yale College Republicans was that Trump should be the next president of the United States.

Rasmussen, who founded an organization called the American Patriots Club at his high school, says he had joined the College Republicans because he wanted to advance the cause of conservative politics on campus. He felt the Trump endorsement would make that impossible. “We’d be forever branded, not as conservatives or Republicans, which already has negative connotation on this campus,” he said, “but as Trump supporters.”

Fitzgerald, Rasmussen, Gabriel, and Mondal told Reinwald and Cloutier they were resigning. (They reached out to the last board member, sophomore Ben Zollinger, but he said he supported the endorsement and would keep his position.) They considered trying to impeach the two co-presidents, but the organization’s constitution provided no process for that. Reinwald and Cloutier declined to comment for this story; one College Republican I approached in person said he saw “no necessity to give interviews to the mainstream media.” (I asked to talk with them again after it became clear that Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” video was reshaping the race and the national chairman of the College Republicans announced she would not vote for Trump. Reinwald replied, “We’re not commenting.”)

Among the ex–board members, the idea of starting an anti-Trump Republican organization took shape.

Within days, Fitzgerald had built a website and the group had drafted a statement. They emailed Cloutier and Reinwald to explain what they were doing, and then they went live with a Facebook post. The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Breitbart picked up the story. Rasmussen appeared on Fox News to argue with Ryan Fournier, the National Chairman of Students for Trump, a big-haired, smooth-faced North Carolinian who said the New Republicans were throwing the 23

election to Clinton. Rasmussen countered that he was helping to “save the Republican Party from its eventual collapse.”

Various right-wing sites also wrote about the New Republicans. USA Politics Today called them “appalling,” while the Gateway Pundit (“Where Hope Finally Made A Comeback”) declared them “sick.” As of early October, the Yale New Republicans’ sole Facebook post—their introductory message—had attracted fifty-six likes, as well as comments from people with no apparent Yale affiliation. “You are a disgrace to our country and party,” wrote a man named Phillip Hefner.

Rasmussen dismissed the backlash as a sign that the New Republicans were on the right track. But the online hate also seemed to reflect a disturbing revelation of this election cycle: There is little respect left between the GOP voters who anointed Trump their nominee and the party elite. A group of earnest Yale kids who think they know what’s best for America made a satisfying stand-in punching bag for The Establishment.

The reaction on campus, however, has been largely positive. The New Republicans share articles written about them on their Facebook page and say they received emails from incoming freshmen even before the semester started. But Rasmussen, a first-generation college student whose mother is a mail carrier and whose father is a house painter, hasn’t told his dad about his new extracurricular. His father has been a Trump supporter from the very beginning of the campaign. Rasmussen does, though, talk about the New Republicans with his grandfather, who’s a somewhat less dedicated Trump supporter. The conversations aren’t exactly cheerful.

“He thinks I’m dividing the party. He thinks I’m giving in to Hillary,” Rasmussen says. “He thinks that if we don’t elect Trump, then the Republican Party’s doomed. But if we do elect Trump, the Republican Party’s more doomed.” While Rasmussen was busy trying to build a space for right-leaning Yalies who hate Trump, he had to communicate across a growing fracture between himself and the people back home.

— Yale is a liberal campus, but the undergraduate community is dotted with conservative organizations: the Yale Political Union’s Party of the Right, the Federalist Party, the Tory Party, and the Conservative Party; the Yale Free Press; the Objectivist Study Group; and, since 2010, the well-funded, non-profit and non-partisan William F. Buckley Program. Last year, the Buckley Program boasted 174 student fellows (including Reinwald, Cloutier, Rasmussen, and Gabriel; Fitzgerald is applying this year) who attend events and dinners with 24

speakers. Unlike the College Republicans and now the New Republicans, these organizations are devoted primarily to discussing ideas, not to electoral activism.

At a recent reception held by the Buckley Program at The Study, this preference for high-minded principles was on full display. Buckley was celebrating its reprinting of the 1975 Woodward Report, which laid out a strong institutional commitment to free speech.

The remarks of federal appellate judge José Cabranes, who got his law degree from Yale in 1965, didn’t sound totally un-Trumpian—he criticized political correctness and the implementation of a shadowy universe of federally-mandated sexual assault bureaucracy on college campuses—but chants of “Build the wall!” would have elicited gasps and stares. Before Cabranes spoke, guests mingled beside an open bar while waiters passed cosmopolitan trays of potstickers and falafel balls.

The election has been a topic of consternation across Yale’s conservative intellectual circles. (The Federalist Party recently held a debate on the topic “Conservatives have no party.”) Abhay Rangray, a sophomore and prospective Buckley Fellow in a suit and red tie whom I had met at the New Republicans’ debate watch party, said the whole spectacle was a sign that America’s democracy was devolving into European politics, with the Democratic Party edging towards Communism and the Republican Party towards nationalism.

“I hope this is a temporary shift, and after the era of Trump we can return to conservatism,” Rangray said.

“But it’s frightening because Trump’s success shows that old-school values are not shared by many Republican voters.”

Conservatives in the Buckley Program, like the New Republicans, tend to wax poetic about those old-school values. They’re the values of the Program’s namesake: the founder of the National Review, the twentieth century’s leading American conservative intellectual, and a member of Yale’s class of 1950. Just before graduating from Yale, Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale, a critique of secularism and liberalism at the university. Lauren Noble, who founded the program as a Yale senior in 2010 and is now the executive director, describes Buckley Conservatism as a principled opposition to the expansion of the state’s role in public life.

She and senior Josh Altman, president of the Buckley Program, say that true conservatism also rejects racism. William F. Buckley, they note, helped to purge anti-Semitism from the party. (He also criticized the Civil Rights Movement and wrote in a National Review editorial that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically.” Noble says that the THE NEW JOUR NAL

Civil Rights Movement was not Buckley’s finest moment.)

Ultimately, many self-described Buckley Conservatives recognize that arguing amongst themselves about Trump’s rejection of conservatism is futile.

“Everyone kept shouting, ‘Trump is not a conservative, Trump is not a conservative!’” Noble recalls of the primary season discourse among the conservative intelligentsia. “And half of America does not care that Trump is not a conservative.”

While standing near the cheese table before Cabranes’s remarks, I ran into Karl Notturno, a Buckley Fellow and Yale’s most famous Trump supporter. For over a year, he’s been posting Facebook statuses that support nearly every statement Trump makes and proudly wearing a TRUMP t-shirt around campus. He’s not involved with the Yale College Republicans, and he hasn’t officially worked for the Trump campaign, though he did a bit of phone-banking once, but if you ask almost anyone at Yale whether they know any Trump supporters in the student body, Notturno’s name is often the first—and sometimes the only one—to come up.

Notturno sipped a Pepsi with grenadine as he explained why he preferred Trumpism to pure conservatism. He wore a coat and tie, his blond hair rising in its trademark shock. A registered independent, Notturno says he’s gone through a political transformation since high school from liberal to libertarian to non-ideological.

“Trump is far more practical than ideological,” Notturno said. Many conservatives at Yale, he thinks, get caught up in ideology and principle and fail to explain how those would translate to actual policy solutions.

To cite a favorite phrase of his supporters, Trump tells it like it is. He doesn’t care what Bill Buckley would think.

The New Republicans are betting that, moving forward, they can restore conservative principles, and hopefully decorum, to what they believe is their rightful place at the forefront of the party. It’s a bet that could help them make electoral politics more appealing to conservatives at Yale, who don’t canvass and campaign with the gusto of liberals in the Yale College Demo-

The Yale New Republicans from left to right: Grant Gabriel, Ben Rasmussen, & Michael Fitzgerald

OCTOBER 2016

crats. But it’s a bet that seems less tenable beyond the Ivory Tower.

— Three weeks into the semester, the Yale New Republicans held their first event of the year, an introductory dinner at the Branford Dining Hall. Fitzgerald and Rasmussen set their bags down at a long table by the door, retrieved plates of pasta and hamburgers, and sat down to wait.

Soon a freshman in a baseball cap and red backpack appeared beside the table.

“Is this the Yale New Republicans?” he asked. Fitzgerald and Rasmussen nodded. “What does this group entail? Are there meetings? Is this a meeting?”

“This is more like a social, get-to-know-you dinner,” Rasmussen replied.

The freshman, Perry Falk of La Jolla, dropped his bags and went to get food. Soon two other freshmen, Canaan Harris of northeastern Mississippi and Snigdha Nandipati of San Diego, arrived.

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After some small talk, Rasmussen began his pitch: “Basically, what we plan on doing is campaigning for candidates who truly represent the best of the party, not just anyone who slaps an R next to their name.” It can be difficult to nail down what “the best of the party” really means for either major American party, but I got the sense from the New Republicans that they’re looking for fiscal conservatism, more moderation on social issues, and, especially, serious efforts towards racial inclusivity. Few major Republican candidates hit all of these targets, but the New Republicans tend to like people like John Kasich and Marco Rubio.

The freshmen nodded.

“There’s also a tradition of Partisan Pong,” Rasmussen continued, referring to the annual battle between the Yale College Republicans and the Yale College Democrats that takes place in the spring. “We’re going to try to join as a third party and win it.”

At this dining hall gathering of conservatives, the conversation turned not to the wisdom of the Austrian School of Economics or the social value of patriotism, but instead to the real reason everyone was there: Donald Trump. They shook their heads over the infamous Cinco de Mayo taco bowl tweet, decried Trump’s refusal to firmly reject David Duke’s endorsement, and speculated whether this moment marks the end of the Republican Party or just rock bottom before it can make a resurgence. Fitzgerald also brought up his pessimism about the GOP’s ability to draw minority voters.

“It’s not because the Republican Party is racist,” Harris responded. “It’s because almost all the racists are in the Republican Party. I wish the Party did more to say, ‘That’s not us.’ If it isn’t us. I hope it’s not us.”

If the New Republicans’ rhetoric on Trump tends towards the apocalyptic, the College Republicans don’t seem much happier about him. Though the College Republican board members refused to comment for this story, they did invite me to their first meeting of the year, in a classroom in WLH one Monday evening in September. About ten people showed up, most of whom were freshmen. Reinwald and Cloutier taped up a flag, which kept falling off and needing to be re-taped, that said “College Republicans: The Best Party on Campus.” They passed out College Republican glasses and posters, which they encouraged attendees to hang up in their rooms to irritate their roommates.

They broached the topic of Trump without saying his name, using a tone of grim resignation, and then moved on quickly. Calling the year “rough” for Republicans, they emphasized the need to support local candidates.

Reinwald also mentioned that their panlist has over one hundred people—a sign, she said, that Yale is 26

home to more Republicans than the attendees might think based on the size of the meeting. Notturno told me the same thing about Trump voters while at the Buckley event: He says complete strangers sometimes stop him on the street to say they’ll be voting for Trump in November. And once you start looking beyond the circles of people who are actively involved in political groups on campus, it becomes easier to find students who aren’t merely grudgingly supporting Trump.

Snigdha Nandipati, a freshman who came to the New Republicans dinner but said she doesn’t consider herself especially politically minded, supports Trump’s stances on immigration. Most of the outrage regarding some of his comments is a result of media spin, she thinks, to which Trump falls victim because of his inexperience. The Washington Post’s release of the tape showing Trump talking about how he “grabbed [women] by the pussy” gave her some pause, but she was heartened by his apology during the debate two days later. “As a woman, I am not threatened by a couple of words that were said in a harmless casual setting over ten years ago,” she wrote in an email. She plans to vote for Trump in California.

For several Trump supporters on campus, however, the release of the tape on October 7 was a game changer. Earlier that week I had interviewed a junior and a senior, both political science majors, who were happy to go on the record as Trump supporters. One of them, the junior, had supported Trump from the beginning of the Republican primary. He thought the candidate had good ideas about fiscal policy, was moving the party beyond “attempting to regulate morality” by opposing gay marriage and would support small business owners. Trump’s rhetoric “has really been uncalled for at times,” but he thought the media was taking Trump’s words out of context. A few days after the tape came out the junior emailed first to say that he no longer planned to vote for Trump, and then to insist that his name be removed “due to our political climate on campus.” The senior had conisdered Trump “the lesser of two evils”—until the tape came out and he decided that he would not vote for Trump and did not want his name associated with the candidate.

“I am hoping the Republican Party will try and do something with this,” he wrote in an email. “I really don’t know if there is a fix for this type of problem.”

— With thirty-six days before the election, a group of Yale Democrats boarded a bus paid for by U.S. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro and rode to Keene, New Hampshire to canvass for Hillary Clinton. (The New Republicans are hoping to visit later this month to canvass for Kelly Ayotte with the Harvard Republican THE NEW JOUR NAL

Club.) Polls show Trump and Clinton neck and neck in this state of Rockwellian small towns and some of America’s highest opioid overdose death rates.

The stretch of Route 101 heading into Keene from the Massachusetts border is dotted with TRUMP signs, their bright blue jumping out against a backdrop of autumnal leaves. The Clinton campaign occupies a storefront in Keene’s busy downtown. There was none of the handwringing or anxiety I heard among Yale’s conservatives, nor the ambivalence many liberals hold towards Clinton. Inside the campaign office, by design, you forgot the narrative of presidential election as national existential crisis.

When the Dems knocked on voters’ doors, you remembered. Maxwell Ulin, a senior from Santa Monica, California and president of the Dems, canvassed voters on three streets in a suburban neighborhood of tidy two-story homes.

His list included undecided voters and those who leaned Republican. At each house, Ulin, lanky in light blue jeans and a darker blue button down, knocked and then stood at attention, carefully holding his Hillary for America campaign materials below his waist so the voter wouldn’t see them and get irritated before even opening the door. At the first house, a man cracked

open the door.

“Hi—” Ulin began.

“Politics?” the man asked. “…yes,” Ulin replied.

“Have a good day,” the man said.

At a house with a Trump sign, Ulin followed his orders and still knocked on the front door. The middle-aged, sweatshirt-clad man who answered said everyone in the house would be voting for Trump. Ulin moved on, and I stayed to ask the man what he thought of the Yale New Republicans. He hadn’t heard of them before, and he wasn’t terribly interested.

“That’s their choice,” he said, before shutting the door and returning to the football game.

When he finished his list, Ulin had encountered an approximately representative cross-section of the American electorate: There was a Trump supporter, a Clinton supporter, and a lot of people who were mostly just mad about the whole thing. Good enough. After three hours in New Hampshire, the Dems headed back to New Haven, ultimately spending twice as much time on the bus as they did on the ground.

That same weekend, I met a man named Paul Neugebauer in the parking lot of a church in West Haven. A retired firefighter with grey hair and a thick mustache,

EVERYONE KEPT SHOUTING, “TRUMP IS NOT A CONSERVATIVE TRUMP IS NOT A CONSERVATIVE!” AND HALF OF AMERICA DOES NOT CARE THAT TRUMP IS NOT A CONSERVATIVE. OCTOBER 2016

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he was dropping off donations. We started talking about politics when I mentioned a class I was taking called Modern US Liberalism and Conservatism.

“I’m a right-wing guy,” he said. “I think the country’s being stolen.”

For decades, he was a member of the firefighter’s union in Bridgeport, and just before the 2000 election he attended a union conference where Hillary Clinton gave a speech he found dishonest. He doesn’t like Trump’s arrogance, but he thinks Trump is a patriot.

What bothers him most about Clinton isn’t her politics so much as what he sees as her elitism—people like her, he is sure, think people like him are stupid.

Neugebauer’s anger is a problem not only for the Democratic Party, but also for the New Republicans, who in rejecting his nominee are implying that they, too, think he is stupid. This might be the major problem revealed by this election: a large subset of American voters believe that the political elites—a category into which Yale students are lumped even when they technically hold no power—are laughing at them.

When I asked the New Republicans how they think the Republican Party can reject Trumpism without alienating his millions of supporters, Rasmussen mentioned the danger of listening to the masses. Gabriel said he hopes Trump-style populism will lose favor after this election. They didn’t have a solution for bringing voters like Neugebauer into a reimagined Republican Party.

I asked Neugebauer what he thought of the New Republicans. He paused for a long moment.

“I think your generation succumbs to a lot of social pressure,” he said. “I think these kids’ decisions were based more on how they appear to the public than what they actually believe.”

It was clear that talk of principles would not persuade Neugebauer to reconsider his support for Trump, because he didn’t even buy that those principles were authentically held. And none of this matters, really, because Neugebauer thinks that if Trump wins, President Obama will somehow create an excuse to remain in office. In other words, Neugebeauer no longer believes that American democracy actually exists.

The New Republicans have to believe that it does.

They have to believe that Americans on the right, given the choice, will reject Trumpism and accept the wisdom of rebuilding a big-tent party staked firmly to conservative principles. But when you leave Yale, drive to Keene or across the West River to West Haven, in front of house after house, for miles of highway, you see the signs: TRUMP. TRUMP. TRUMP. And you wonder if the New Republicans, who think their whole party is at a crossroads, might be standing there alone.

— Isabelle Taft is a senior in Silliman College. She is an editor-in-chief for The New Journal.

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poem

Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree Rachel Yalowitz

I was the shadow of the Kookaburra hanging on my windowpane.

The glass superimposed my toothless smile onto the blue crescent of his wing.

When his eyes overlapped mine, I revealed my teeth in laughter, and he echoed me in a round.

I laughed louder; he cackled and called me insane, But I was the shadow of the Kookaburra slain.

Kookaburra sits on a rusty nail but where is the hammer, where is the axe that turned the old gum tree into the window frame.

Oh how life can be.

photograph by Elaine Wang

the countdown

At Trinity Church on the Green, homeless people line up to receive a free lunch after a Sunday afternoon service. Photographs by Joey Ye.

NEW HAVEN IS REFOCUSING ITS EFFORTS TO TACKLE HOMELESSNESS. IS THAT ENOUGH? by eliza fawcett There’s a ritual every Sunday afternoon on the New Haven Green. For the past nine years, rain or shine, volunteers have set up a small altar behind Trinity Church on the Green, complete with an altar cloth, communion chalice, and Bible. They unfold a dozen wooden chairs. A self-appointed drummer sits down, flips over a plastic container, begins playing a beat, and a congregation of homeless people arrives for the Chapel on the Green.

On a cold afternoon at the end of September, the oldest participants fill the rows of chairs, while the rest stand in a semicircle around the altar, bags of their possessions at their feet. One man lies down on the grass, hand on his stomach, looking up at the trees. The rector welcomes the crowd and begins reading a Bible passage, raising her voice over the sound of city buses rumbling down Chapel Street. The crowd listens quietly.

When the service ends, the crowd lines up for the

most vital part of the event: a free Sunday lunch. Each week, a different local church sponsors the Chapel on the Green, providing their rector for the service and over 150 bagged lunches containing sandwiches and snacks. The line, nearly one hundred people long, consists almost entirely of young or middle-aged black men. Some leave immediately after receiving food, while others congregate in small groups across the Green to eat.

One of the attendees is Harold Fox, who has lived on the New Haven Green since the beginning of July.

He sleeps on a bench, sitting upright, his backpack at his feet and worn suitcase by his side. When it rains, he sleeps under the awning of a bus stand on Chapel Street. But he never really sleeps. Even in the dead of night, the Green is alive with activity, and he dozes for an hour or two at most.

Nine weeks ago, Fox, an affable 47-year-old New Haven native with short hair and a thin beard, had an apartment and a steady job. Monday through Friday, he worked 16-hour shifts at the Yale-New Haven Hospital sterilizing surgical instruments, a job he had held for nine years. But when he got into an argument with his supervisor, he was fired. At first, he held onto his apartment, though making rent soon became difficult.

Then, he became convinced that someone was snooping around his home at night. Fearing for his safety, he gathered his remaining possessions and left.

Fox is now one of the roughly one hundred unsheltered homeless people who spend their nights in New 32

Haven’s streets, parks, and abandoned buildings. That population seems to have surged in the city recently, casting a shadow over the progress that state and federal governments say they have made in the past two years. Since Fox only just lost his home, he is considered “transitionally homeless,” and thus is not the priority of federal and statewide efforts, which focus on housing the “chronically homeless,” people with disabilities who have been homeless for over a year.

Jason Martinez manages the Coordinated Access Network (CAN), a federally-mandated shared database of homeless people, for United Way of Greater New Haven, a social service provider. He said the New Haven area has been housing the chronically homeless with unprecedented efficiency. “Last year, it took two and a half years to house the chronically homeless,” he said. “Now, it takes 100 days.”

Before the CAN, homeless people had to inquire at each shelter for an available bed. Now, they can call 2-1-1 and be entered into the system, which allows local service providers to connect them with available resources, case managers, and a place to sleep. The CAN helps reduce favoritism at shelters, and prioritizes support for the chronically homeless, whom the federal government deems the most vulnerable.

The state of Connecticut has been a national leader of homeless reduction initiatives. In January 2015, Connecticut joined Zero: 2016, a national campaign that is trying to meet the goals of the Obama Administration to end veteran’s homelessness by the end of 2015 and chronic homelessness by the end of 2016.

Zero: 2016 includes over 400 member organizations responsible for coordinating homeless services in city, county, metropolitan, or statewide areas. And to track its own progress, Zero: 2016 requires that each branch conduct an annual “Point-In-Time Count” (PIT), a laborious data-gathering method that requires sending volunteers into streets and shelters to count the number of homeless people they find on a single night.

In May, when the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness (CCEH) released its PIT data, the statewide results were encouraging. Across Connecticut, homelessness had dropped thirteen percent since 2007.

Chronic homelessness had dropped twenty percent in only a year, on track with the targets of Zero: 2016.

And last year, to much fanfare, the state declared the elimination of veteran’s homelessness; there is now a system in place to ensure that homeless veterans, once identified by service providers, secure housing within ninety days.

In New Haven, however, even as service providers pool their resources to fight homelessness, there is little agreement about the most basic fact: whether homeTHE NEW JOUR NAL

lessness is rising or falling in the city. The New Haven PIT reported 625 homeless people, including 138 children. That number was lower than it has been in the past, but it was a ten percent increase since 2015.

The rate of chronic homeless showed no significant decrease within the past year. And most worrisome of all, there was a fifty-two percent increase in the city’s unsheltered homeless population from last year alone.

Yet despite the concerning data, service providers in New Haven are optimistic that they can eliminate chronic homelessness in the city by the end of this year — and eventually, homelessness altogether.

“I definitely think it’s possible to end homelessness,” said John Bradley, the Executive Director of Liberty Community Services, a New Haven-based homeless service provider. “We’re not talking about ending poverty, we’re not talking about getting everyone educated.

We’re just talking about 500 people sleeping on the street. It can be done.” As Bradley explained, eliminating chronic homelessness will make more resources available to the transitionally homeless, which would enable New Haven to eliminate homelessness entirely.

But the current emphasis on ending chronic homelessness means that transitionally homeless people like Harold are at risk of falling through the cracks. Since Fox has only been homeless for nine weeks, he is not even represented by the PIT. And because he has not yet entered a shelter or worked with a case manager, he is not part of the CAN. He lives on the Green in a limbo between the home he had not long ago and the shelter that, due to fears of bedbugs and a sense of principled independence, he hopes to avoid for as long as possible. He remains optimistic that soon he will find a job and an apartment. But the strain of the past few months shows in his weary, drooping eyes and the ragged edge of his voice.

Fox spends his days walking to soup kitchens across New Haven for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and attends the Chapel on the Green on Sundays. He has a slow, lurching gait, a combination of the weight of his luggage and a limp he acquired after being hit by a car years ago. In the morning, he goes to the Powerhouse Gym in North Haven so that he can exercise and shower. (He has enough money to keep his membership until the end of the year.) And each night, he returns to a bench on the Green to sleep under the glow of a streetlamp.

“Eventually I’ll get myself out of here,” he says.

— For federal and local governments, ending homelessness is as much a financial concern as it is a humanitarian one. The longer someone is homeless, the more they cycle through expensive public systems like hosOCTOBER 2016

pitals, jails, and emergency services. According to the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness (CCEH), eliminating homelessness could save up to seventy percent of the cost of those public resources.

But in their fight to end homelessness, service providers in New Haven and across the country face formidable challenges. Limited employment opportunities, stagnant wages, the opioid crisis, and the rising cost of living continue to push people into homelessness or prevent them from returning to permanent housing.

Since the causes of homelessness are complex and pervasive, victories are ephemeral.

The homeless are a transient population. People move from place to place, arrive and leave shelters, and try to hold onto permanent housing. As a result, tracking rates of homelessness over time can be almost impossible, even with systems like the PIT. Community leaders who volunteer in the PIT are quick to note its flaws. But the confusion sits deeper. Many city officials and homeless service providers say there is no clear consensus about whether homelessness is on the rise in New Haven, or if the disturbing data is caused by random variation.

Martha Okafor, the Community Services Administrator for New Haven — a branch of City Hall that oversees city community service providers — emphasized that the PIT count is inherently unreliable.

“It’s not a total count, because at that point in time, you count all the people you can reach. We don’t get to every place, and we only get the people we can see. We may not reach every person,” she said. Fox, for example, had a job and an apartment when this year’s PIT was conducted.

Lisa Tepper Bates, the Executive Director of the CCEH, said the weather of the count night could significantly influence the data. On bitterly cold nights, people may go to greater lengths to find shelter, resulting in a lower unsheltered population; last year’s PIT was conducted during a blizzard, she said. Warmer temperatures tend to correlate with higher unsheltered counts, as was the case this January.

Bradley said that the opening of a warming shelter at Bethel AME Church on Goffe Street this past winter might also have increased this year’s high unsheltered count, since people there, who might not have been even counted before, were recorded as unsheltered.

Some, like Tepper Bates, argue that this year’s uptick may not be representative of a larger trend. Another provider said that even with the PIT and her organization’s own data, “we just don’t know.”

But Bradley said that the potential increase does concern him, and that his organization has seen higher demand recently. Sunrise Café, a free breakfast pro 33

gram Liberty Community Services runs out of a church in Wooster Square, has seen more participants between this summer and last winter. And for the first time ever, there are waitlists for its housing programs, though that is partly because calling 2-1-1 makes it easier for people to request access, Bradley explained.

Okafor, who manages the $1.1 million that the city allocates to homeless service providers in New Haven, was even more adamant. She explained that the data from the Homeless Management Information System, a federal system that centralizes data from local providers, indicates a homeless population in the city that far exceeds the PIT count.

“Oh yes, homelessness is on the rise,” she said.

Though faced with uncertainty and disagreement about the state of homelessness in the city, most service providers are cautiously optimistic that they can eliminate New Haven’s chronic homelessness by the end of this year. And there is a strong impetus to do so: as Tepper Bates argued, the chronically homeless are the people most likely to die if they are not housed.

But Okafor pointed out that the intense focus on housing the chronically homeless diverts attention away from the largest population, the transitionally homeless, who may have only recently lost their homes and now are struggling to get by.

“The conversation has centered on this very small population, and you lose sight of the larger population of people who are homeless, which is growing,” she said. “We’re not paying attention to them.”

— Although Fox has both a mental and physical disability – schizoaffective disorder and a permanently damaged leg – he is not considered chronically homeless because he has not yet been homeless for a year. He is not a priority for the federal or the city government. As Fox grapples with the reality of his new life, he is striving to inform himself about the landscape of resources available to him.

Like most homeless people in New Haven, Fox has the schedule of free meals around the city memorized; they determine the course of his day. Depending on the day of the week, he gets breakfast at Sunrise Café, Amistad in the Hill neighborhood, St. Paul’s Chapel, or the Community Soup Kitchen on Broadway. He gets lunch there too, or at the Saint Ann Soup Kitchen.

For dinner, he heads to the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen on Temple Street.

Fox lives on $190 per month from food stamps, bumming cigarettes off other people on the Green and accepting the occasional dollar from passersby. He is petitioning for unemployment benefits, but if that does not work out, he plans to get a job at Hummel Brothers 34

Inc., a meatpacking company in Long Wharf, which he has heard is always hiring.

But Fox is qualified for a much higher-skill job. In his thirties, living in a housing authority apartment in New Haven, he went back to school at Gateway Community College. He received two Associate in Science degrees in hotel and food service management, and a certificate in culinary arts. Now, though, his daily routine has become so much about survival that he has few long-term plans, beyond vague hopes that he will find a good job and a place to live soon.

“I don’t hang out with people,” he says. “That’s how I got started with all this mess in the first place, trusting people,” he says. He says that he likes the Chapel on the Green for its sense of community, but he is largely on his own.

— The rector looks up from the passage to address the crowd on the Green. “Jesus is saying to us, you may be lost sometimes, you may be the one that was taken from the fold, and it may not make any sense to you, but I see you, I will seek you out.” She opens her arms wide.

“Those times when we don’t feel like we’re with the others, when others have left us behind, let us rejoice, for God is seeking us out.”

After the rector’s prayers, people move through the crowd, shaking each other’s hands and exchanging peace. An old man tapping a large stick: “Peace be with you.” A skinny young man wearing a backwards baseball cap, leaning against his bike: “Peace be with you.”

A middle-aged woman with shivering hands: “Peace be with you.” Fox, wearing a white undershirt and cargo shorts, toting his suitcase: “Peace be with you.” Then, the rector performs the communion rites and circulates through the crowd, dipping a communion wafer in grape juice and placing it on each person’s tongue.

The drummer begins playing a slow beat as the crowd sings a mumbled version of “Amazing Grace” and, with increasing rhythm, slides into “We Shall Overcome.”

Rowena Kemp, the Assistant Rector of Trinity On the Green, which organizes the program, has worked at the service since 2014. She says that the size of the group is smallest at the beginning of the month — when people receive SNAP benefits — and swells significantly by the end. Recently, she has noticed that the crowd has been younger and bigger.

Fox is sharing a bench with a young man who introduces himself as “Lieutenant Kendrick the Third.” He has glasses, cropped blonde hair and jittery knees. In one breath, he says that he grew up in Florida, is active in the U.S. army, and suffers from PTSD. He then points to a gaunt, shirtless man with tattoos across his chest sitting on the asphalt next to the bench, THE NEW JOUR NAL

whom he claims is his brother. “His name is Ghost.”

As they eat their lunch, the three men talk about the dangers of the Green. “People are getting shot, selling all kinds of drugs,” says Kendrick. “And the gangs mark their territory—” “Yeah, that’s the loose cig guys,” says Fox, nodding.

“You gotta stay safe.”

“I’ve seen more homeless out here than anywhere in Connecticut,” says Kendrick.

But in New Haven, he says, you can get three meals a day, which is why he came here.

Ghost agrees, rocking back and forth. “Trenton [New Jersey] is a war zone,” he says. His wife is still there, he says, and he wants to bring her to New Haven as an escape.

— Ghost is not alone. Many nearby towns do not have emergency shelters, which forces homeless people to take buses or trains to get to a city like New Haven, where they have a better chance of finding a bed. For Bradley, the influx of outsiders is an indication of New Haven’s success at supporting the homeless. He noted that New Haven is the only city in Connecticut that dedicates general revenue funds (business and property taxes) to homeless services. But increased demand from newcomers also strains New Haven’s ability to serve its own homeless population.

At least on the ground, it seems that demand for homeless services has risen recently in New Haven.

The Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen now serves 30 more people on average than it used to. The Chapel on the Green has also seen its numbers rise. Each Sunday, new faces emerge in the crowd. One volunteer, who has been serving the program for the past three years, said that when he scans the crowd, there are only ten or fifteen people who consistently appear; everyone else is different. One of the church sextons attributed that fluidity to the fact that other towns actively send their homeless people to New Haven because the city has more available resources.

Even as many homeless people arrive in New Haven seeking immediate support, the city government is trying to reallocate its resources so that fewer people become homeless in the first place. Martha Okafor said that before, all of the city’s money was going into emergency shelters. But last year, the Community Services Administration, which she leads, redistributed city funds for homeless services based on a review conducted by an independent panel. Two shelters, New Reach and Emergency Shelter Management Services, lost over $100,000 in city funds. That money was given to other agencies for preventative measures such as financial help with utility bills, childcare support, and OCTOBER 2016

Harold Fox. Photograph by Eliza Fawcett. food stamp assistance. The city’s funds were also used to open Bethel AME Church’s new warming center.

“We’re moving away from just sheltering people and hoping for the best,” said Tepper Bates. “We’re trying to focus at the front door on preventing homelessness and helping people leave shelters as quickly as possible.”

Homeless service providers like Liberty Community Services and Columbus House have programs that can intervene at critical moments to pay a client’s rent, prevent eviction, or help them stabilize their lives before they lose their homes. And rapid re-housing programs can quickly place people in permanent housing by providing initial financial assistance to cover a security deposit, the first month’s rent, or utility bills.

As important as preventative measures are, in the short term, many homeless people across New Haven continue to rely on emergency shelters to get off the streets at night. Columbus House maintains a shelter in the Hill with about 100 beds that, depending on the type of program someone is a part of, can be slept in for one night or up to six months. In the men’s and women’s wings of the shelter, there are clean, well-lit rooms with a dozen beds reserved for emergency stays of up to ninety days.

But at Emergency Shelter Management Services, a 75-bed men’s emergency shelter on Grand Avenue in Wooster Square, the homeless must line up each day to secure a bed. One Friday afternoon, roughly thirty men were waiting outside the shelter’s entrance at 3:30 pm, 35

half an hour before the shelter opened its doors, with more arriving every few minutes. Many of the men in line were quick to condemn the shelter for poor conditions and a bedbug infestation.

Joshua Hoenig, a 29-year-old from a neighboring town, pulled up his shirt to show bed bug bites that ringed his stomach and covered his arms and legs. He said that he had just been to the hospital because of the bites. Doctors warned him that if he were bitten again, he would risk getting a blood infection. But he had nowhere else to go, so he was back in line.

Other men displayed bedbug bites across their bodies and described bedbugs in mattresses and pillows, a ceiling fan that only blows dust, moldy showers, bathroom tiles caked with grime, blankets that are never cleaned, unsecured storage bins, favoritism, complaints to the Health Department that went ignored. (Okafor said that there was a “moment” when the shelter had bed bugs, but health inspectors visited and certified it.) Even as the city attempts to fund preventative measures, some emergency shelters, like the one on Grand Avenue, seem unable to provide adequate support.

And, as Bradley pointed out, even preventative programs receive little federal funding; housing the chronically homeless remains at the top of the nation’s priorities.

“It’s one of the things where we have to say, come back when you’re desperate,” he said.

— “I can’t take being hungry and homeless anymore.

I just can’t take it,” Fox says, sitting on a bench in the New Haven Green as dusk falls over the city.

He has just spent a whole day petitioning for unemployment benefits. He never heard back from a temporary staffing company he applied to. And he is losing hope that he could have a good future in New Haven.

If you can’t get a job at Yale University or at the YaleNew Haven Hospital, he says, you have to leave the city to find high-paying work.

“I’m just tired of asking people for shit,” he says. “It makes you humble but elusive, because people don’t want to see you anymore.”

Fox pulls on his navy sweatshirt as the cool evening air sweeps over the Green.

“I’m tired of this, I really am, because this is not me,” he says, as the lampposts flicker on for another night.

— Eliza Fawcett is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College.

Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA)

On view through December 11, 2016

Free and open to the public | 1 877 BRIT ART | britishart.yale.edu Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA), Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (maquette), 2007, plastic, Dutch wax-printed cotton textile, cork, acrylic and glass bottle, © Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA), courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

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ENDNOTE

micah.osler@yale.edu I AM THE MAN YOU KILLED IN THE WAR, BACK TO HAUNT YOU FOREVER IN PANLIST FORM

It begins with an email. It’s from mailman.yale. edu, so it misses the spam filter and goes straight to your inbox. You get the notification during seminar, and you’re sitting right next to the professor, so for the next hour it sits there, unopened, unanswered.

You hope that it might be your Lit professor getting back to you about her office hours, or maybe word on that internship you applied to last month.

Out of class, you pull out your phone and open it. “Welcome Newbies!!” reads the subject. That’s funny, you think. You don’t think you signed up for anything. You open it. Your eyes glaze over—it’s just a generic welcome email from some unnamed organization, full of quasi-ironic green Comic Sans and GIFs of Ron Swanson throwing up or whatever.

You delete the email and go on with your day.

I don’t send anything for the next two weeks.

That’d be too easy. You’d catch on to the game. But soon enough, in that same seminar, at that same time, you get an email from the same address. You give it a glance. It’s worse than the last one: you don’t really read the content, but you can see that the Comic Sans is orange now and much larger, and all the GIFs are from that one episode of Pokémon that gave all those kids seizures. That’s in rather poor taste, you think. Maybe I’ll unsubscribe.

So you do. You get two confirmation emails.

Cool. You feel a rush of power. You feel as if you’ve won.

Nope. You’re wrong. Next week, same time, another email. Okay. You’re gonna read the goddamn thing for once.

Hi all!

WHAT UP from the CROW’S NEST, all you smarmy scriveners! Hope everyone is having a stellar week!

OCTOBER 2016

Just a quick reminder: SlorpF.E.S.T. is COMING UP THIS WEDNESDAY AT 2 A.M.!!!!1!!!1! Remember to get your tickets and background checks NOW, because they’re going fast!

It goes on like this for a few weeks.

You unsubscribe again, but you’re starting to get more than a little weirded out. You email the IT department. Hey, you ask. Is there any way to remove me from this panlist? They won’t take me off.

Sunday night. You’re asleep. You’ve got class in a few hours. You hear a buzz. In the matchstick moonlight filtering through the blinds, you groggily reach for your phone.

“Newbies: OMG GET YOUR DRESS SLACKS NOW!” reads the subject line.

Without even thinking, you throw the phone across the room, and it shatters.

The next morning, you’re picking up the shards of glass, trying to figure out what the hell about this is making you so angry. Fuck, you think, it’s everything. Those rainbow fonts. The unrelenting onslaught of pointless cutesiness. Those fucking GIFs from TV shows you’re pretty sure never existed and also from Friends. Truly, God need not create Hell, you think; man has made it for himself.

On the way to the bathroom, you step on a piece of glass from your phone’s screen. It goes right through your foot.

You come back from the emergency room.

You’ve already missed two classes today, and you’ve got three papers due in the next two weeks, so you know you’d better get to work.

In your inbox are six new emails. Five from the panlist; one from IT. Dear sir, the last reads, Thank you for contacting Yale Information Technology services with your con 37

cern. However, removing a student from a mailing list is up to the discretion of the student organization sending the emails.

So you open one of the goddamn things. You scan for an email address to send a message to, someone to yell at. Zilch. It’s just you and mailman.yale.edu.

Did you try unsubscribing from the panlist? the IT email asks. You nearly break your laptop, too.

The emails come every hour now. Not at regular intervals. Sometimes there’s a gap long enough to make you think that maybe the deluge has stopped.

Then you relax—big fucking mistake.

Now the messages include your name. Some of the emails start with it. They’re just vague enough that they could conceivably be form emails. But just.

Your friends are getting tired of you asking them about who’s behind this panlist. I don’t know, says Esmé. Maybe it’s a religious thing? Fucking Carl asks why you don’t just unsubscribe, so you punch him right in his pudgy face in the middle of your Politics of Knowledge in Latin America seminar.

Another month. Maybe two. You can barely tell any more. You can barely sleep these nights. The GIFs begin to follow you into your dreams. I’m creative and fun and quirky! they say. I epitomize millennial vapidity! Don’t you just think I’m the fucking greatest?!

Then came the first email you missed, but Jesus, was it a doozy. From your ER&M prof. We need to discuss your paper, it said, you found out later.

You never made the connection, because you stopped checking your inbox. This happens a few times. You’d know your grades were dropping if you checked your emails.

You’re isolated. You don’t look at your texts any more after someone added you to this inscrutable group message called “THE SCROD SQUAD ;););)”. Oh God, you think. It escaped the email server.

You miss class. You aren’t eating enough. One night, you claw the modem out of the wall in a fit of madness.

Sometimes, you try to sleep and all you can hear is the MIDI version of “Trap Queen” that they attached to one of the emails. More than once, you watch the sun rise on another weary day, your trembling hands clutching the blanket, and all you can think is, Shit, did I miss SlorpF.E.S.T.?

When ExComm finally comes calling about your failing grades, they know well enough to visit in person.

— Next September. You’re back home, living at your parents’ house. You’re stable. You’re doing fine. You work part-time as a barista. The medication is working. Everything is just A-okay. There are at least some days when you don’t vomit the second you see WordArt. You’ve applied to a couple of new schools.

Explained that you had a nervous breakdown but you’re doing much better. You should be hearing back about now, you think. So, you check your email.

The subject reads: “OMFFFFFFFFFG NEWBEEZZZZ WELCOME!!”

And as you lie there on the floor, convulsing in fits of agony, you will think, finally, of the mist along the hedges that day near the coast. You will think of the blood, the face you barely glanced at.

The name you never cared about.

You will know now what you should have known long ago: that sometimes, the dead don’t die.

That sometimes they merely transmigrate into a semi-nonsensical string of cat memes and garish slang and ceaseless invitations to stop by a pitch meeting. That the unsubscribe button is just a cruel trick, like a knife to the back or shopping period.

That this is your life now. That you are condemned to my world of ceaseless badgering and sub-Upworthy attempts at hip twentysomething humor for all eternity. That you will forever suffer my revenge.

— Micah Osler is a junior in Pierson College

Opening Halloween Weekend at 290 York Street

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