Arresting
One’s Own
Campus arrests last spring fractured longstanding protections Yale has historically extended to student protestors.
Letter from the editors
Dear readers,
Where do individuals go when they’re left unprotected by institutions? In Volume 57, Issue II of The New Journal, they turn to each other.
Seven months ago, we witnessed the mass arrest of pro-Palestine student protesters on Beinecke Plaza. In our cover story, Megan Vaz traces the protracted legal battle for arrested students and the unusual ways the administration cracked down on protests last spring, probing the question of what protections a university ought to provide its students—and what happens when that trust fractures.
In his feature on the fight to secure Temporary Protected Status for Ecuadorians in the United States, Matías Guevara Ruales follows one woman’s escape from organized violence in Ecuador and the nationwide grassroots campaign to protect migrants from deportation.
Elsewhere in the city, people create their own communities when established spaces fail. Kelly Kong talks to parents defending their right to homeschool their children independent of governmental restrictions. Andrew Storino asks what it means to build a community around disability, an identity often private and invisible. A communist reading group unites around the promise of revolution, a therapeutic support center models holistic care, and a group of activists brings their own experiences with food insecurity to their organizing.
In this issue about people uniting around the causes they believe in, the words of Ecuadorian-American activist Angélica Idrovo come to bear. “Hope,” she reminds us, “at the end of the day, is a discipline.”
With gratitude,
Managing Board
Maggie, Chloe, Aanika, Sam
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Members & Directors: Haley Cohen Gilliland • Peter Cooper • Andy Court • Jonathan Dach • Susan Dominus • Kathrin Lassila • Elizabeth Sledge • Fred Strebeigh • Aliyya Swaby
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The residents of a psychiatric care village create art and fellowship. By Keertan Venkatesh
Grocery Gap
Follow an activist on her grocery run in a food desert. By Chloe Edwards Out of the Frame
At the YUAG, the Department of Prints and Drawings sketches out an alternative mode of museum-going. By Ellie Park
No Safe Return
As violence surges at home, Ecuadorian organizers in Connecticut mobilize immigrant communities across the U.S. to secure their right to stay.
By Matías Guevara Ruales
Arresting One’s Own
Campus arrests last spring fractured long-standing protections Yale has historically extended to student protestors.
By Megan Vaz
As the number of students receiving accommodations rises, what would it look like to form a community centered on disabled identity? By Andrew Storino
Don’t Ever, Ever Go Here
A makeshift balcony offered space for small rebellions. By Abbey Kim
Double Tanka (Storm) By Lucy Ton That
Payday: A Sestina By Yash Wadwekar
Above Ground
New Haven has always been a jazz city. By Zoya Haq
page 47.
Connecticut’s lack of homeschooling regulations has sparked concerns about abuse and neglect–but some parents say state oversight would violate their freedom to educate their children. By Kelly Kong
Are You a Communist?
FRevolution is coming, and it’s coming to New Haven.
or a member of the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA), Hassan Foster is a mild-mannered man. Sporting a beanie and oversized blazer, he opened his notebook to a page titled “Left-wing Activism.” The 42-year-old was soft-spoken when we met for coffee, almost passing as just another armchair revolutionary. Nothing could be further from the truth.
After ten years in custody, Foster was released from the Connecticut prison system last spring. Charged with a violent crime, he claims he was pressured by self-interested public defenders into taking a plea, arbitrarily placed in solitary confinement for weeks, and beaten by guards who “looked at him as
started to “wake up.”
Foster realized that the racism he’d experienced as a Black man growing up in New Haven “had something to do with capitalism”—the way he was treated in prison felt like “modern-day slavery.” He became fascinated by the Black Panthers; he’d seen the Spike Lee film Malcolm X as a child and pictured himself in the disillusioned and imprisoned young Malcolm.
Upon his discharge, Foster felt that a lot of people in his position would simply “sit down, blend in, and live a quiet life.” But he had to do something. He began volunteering at neighborhood projects, including the Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery, where he met Eric Goodman, a 28-yearold from Vermont and founder of the RCA’s Connecticut branch.
If you’ve come across the “Are You A Communist?” posters plastered around Yale’s campus, you’ve already had your first dalliance with the RCA. The group’s origins are far from New Haven: it was founded by Ted Grant, a Trotskyist who had spent the 1970s working with the insurgent group Militant to infiltrate the British Labour Party. After being kicked out in 1983, Grant started giving up on the idea that you could make change through the party system. The Revolutionary Communist International, the organization he established a decade later, had a more radical vision.
The RCA believes that under capitalism, the average person’s quality of life slowly gets worse and worse until, at some point, the floodgates break and general strikes and mass class struggle ensue. Their job is to set up a structure for the impending revolution: Goodman explained they aim to “recruit people, build up leaders, and send them back to the neighborhoods that they’re in.”
munism as a sophomore at McGill University. At a performance art show, he was instructed to stare into a strang er’s eyes for five minutes; when their time was up, the pair began a casual conversation which soon grew political. The woman asked whether he’d want to go to a communist party meeting— Goodman tentatively said yes.
Sitting in his first found himself enthralled by how “these people were saying funny words like bourgeoise and prose…but they had a robust framework for why things were so fucked up.” His chemical engineering degree simply wasn’t part of the solution. Soon, transferring out of McGill, mov ing to Denver, and ditching engineering for history, he started a local branch and began organizing.
By 2020 Goodman found himself settling down with his partner in New Haven, ready to be “done with it all.” Then, the national party came calling. When a budding local communist asked the party how he could get involved with communism in New Haven, the RCA put him in touch with Goodman, impressed by the branch he’d built in Denver. Organizing, Goodman believes, “starts with two people,” and the party had found him a second.
Now, every Monday, members of the RCA get together and discuss texts— Lenin’s “State and Revolution” was on last week’s agenda. During the week, they put theory into practice: attending protests, holding rallies, or making the case for communism to their friends and coworkers. For now, the driving goal of the RCA is to connect like-minded people and build a network—Foster has taken college-aged “comrades” to meet his friends who are still in prison, and the group is meeting members of the New York branch this month. The RCA declined to tell me the number of members they have––either out of secrecy for their grand revolutionary plans, or the fact that they might be smaller than Goodman lets on.
Part of their strategy is to work within existing protests. During the pro-divestment protest on Beinecke Plaza last April, two RCA members camped out day and night among Yale students in an effort to translate inter-
to home, like workers’ rights. The RCA holds their own rallies as well, their posters emblazoned with “Fight Tuition Hikes!” or “No War With Iran!”
As Goodman put it, “Foreign policy is just an offshoot of domestic policy.”
Foster, who still isn’t quite a hardcore revolutionary, hopes the party will empower him to make changes here at home. “I’m not exactly sure what it looks like but we can do better. The country can do better,” Foster told me. He’s trying to “see a better city,” to reform the justice system, and to shine a light on the “Black magic” of the courtroom. After all, while he got a second chance, not everyone does. J’Allen Jones, a friend of his, was killed in Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown, Connecticut in 2018. Foster’s tone sombered each time he mentioned his own two years spent in Garner: “It was hell in there, there was more violence than I’ve ever seen.”
Foster has found a second home in the RCA: “I’m a brother that’s been
judge me for doing ten years in prison, they just invited me in. People want to hear what I have to say.” At the core, it’s a group where like-minded people from a panoply of backgrounds can gather and carve out a space for themselves. Yes, the RCA reads Lenin on Mondays, but they play Monopoly on Wednesdays and barbecue on the weekend.
However, Goodman was quick to dispel any notions that the all fun and games. “This is a hardcore organization,” he said. People have to be “up to their responsibilities”—each comrade has a defined title in the party, from ‘Secretaries’ to ‘Press Officers.’
Chantal Gibson, a 21-year-old party member from New Haven, emphatically agreed.
The RCA itself probably isn’t going to overthrow capitalism, but every Monday night, a ragtag group of activists bands together, reads Marx, and keeps a small but fierce revolutionary flame alive in New Haven. Gibson accepts that their work “may seem small in New Haven,” but for revolutions around the country and the world to succeed, “we need to do our job.”
As Goodman remarked, “A better world has to be possible—because if not, what’s the point?”∎
Maximillian Peel is a sophomore in Trumbull College.
“Being a comrade is a different type of bond,” said Gibson. “We’re not just casual friends, and we don’t play personality politics.” The ties between comrades are based off a fundamental understanding that “when the time comes, you’re dedicated and committed to the cause.”
RCA posters are papered across New Haven.
Drawn Together
The residents of a psychiatric care village create art and fellowship.
Sandwiched between houses just past Brick Oven Pizza, Fellowship Place resembles a drive-through window: a canopy shades the front desk, and glass walls allow its bustling energy to seep out onto the street. Behind its front gate sit scattered maple-colored buildings, separated by benches and grass patches.
“Four years ago, my mental illness reached a critical level,” Joseph Higgins said. We sat in a paint-splattered arts studio in one of Fellowship’s buildings. “I was barely fit to be in public.”
A silence followed, but not an awkward one––the room held no hesitancy toward emotional depth. His palms, tucked under his thighs, squeezed and shifted in his chair.
Higgins, 60, was born in Branford, Connecticut. In 1989, he was diagnosed with bipolar I with psychotic features, soon followed by diagnoses of generalized anxiety disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. He describes his mental illnesses as a series of “cascading traumas”—each condition, left untreated, spiraled into the next.
In 1990, Higgins began psychiatric treatment for his illnesses at a behavioral healthcare agency in Branford, where he received treatment for over thirty years. He recalls the experience with little fondness––his clinicians, “hostile and unhelpful,” would respond to his specific requests by thumbing sticky notes to their computers, claiming they’d eventually “get to it.”
Three years ago, Higgins hit a wall in his psychiatric progress. Without
emotional and social support, his mental health destabilized. Looking for community, he thought of Fellowship Place, an organization referred to him by a friend years prior.
“I knew it was where I needed to be to get the kind of support I needed in order to recover,” Higgins explained. “And that’s what happened.”
In 1960, Phyllis McDowell––educated in psychology at Sarah Lawrence College and involved in many of New Haven’s mental health organizations––founded Fellowship Place amid the deinstitutionalization movement, when long-stay psychiatric hospitals were being shut down and replaced with community-oriented mental health services. During this awkward transition stage, Fellowship functioned as a weekly drop-in social program for people with mental illnesses, offering weekly dance classes paired with refreshments, music, and socialization.
It’s since kept with tradition. Mary Guerrera, Fellowship’s executive director, describes Fellowship today as a “one-stop shop” for mental health––an all-in-one supplement to psychiatric care, focused on community-building. Fellowship is staffed by forty-five employees and supported by volunteers, many of whom are licensed clinical social workers or are otherwise experienced in supportive services.
Fellowship’s mission of social support is anchored by its physical community. Fellowship owns four affordable-housing apartment buildings––three on Fellowship’s main campus and one in West Hills––with rent offered at a rate of 30 percent of residents’ incomes. Residents with no income receive free housing.
“Lack of daily structure and social connection is a big challenge for people with mental illnesses,” Guerrera said. Current psychological research indicates that mental illness and social connectedness are cyclically related: social support is a central component of recovery from serious mental illnesses, but many mental illnesses cause people to disconnect and isolate from their communities, inhibiting them from effective recovery.
To address this cycle, Fellowship Place offers the Psychosocial Rehabilitation Service, affectionately known as the Clubhouse.
The Clubhouse offers community service events, recreational outings,
layout design by jessica Sánchez
Scenes from Fellowship Place, which anchors mental illness treatment in physical community.
Leo Trang holds up his artwork.
fitness classes, counseling services, and cultural events to over three hundred clients. Most unique of the Clubhouse’s offerings, perhaps, is the Expressive Arts Program. It offers therapeutic services fueled by artistic expression: dance classes, music groups, and visual arts classes.
“It’s a beautiful blend between art and psychology,” explained Marisabel Sanchez, a New Haven artist and Fellowship’s Expressive Arts Coordinator. “Typical cognitive-based therapy is about thinking about your issues in a different way; it’s about changing your perspective on the issue you’re facing. Art is similar, but more expressive.”
Leo Trang, the first Fellowship client to join Sanchez and me in the Clubhouse, agreed. Hefty black headphones sat around his neck, the wire looped repeatedly around the front strap of the brown satchel slung over his shoulder.
He spoke with his hands. “I have a range of emotions from, like, here to here.” He created a spectrum with his palms parallel to the ground, one above his head and the other at his chest. “Before coming to Fellowship, my mood was always low, and the medicine could kind of push me up to a normal level.” He moved his bottom hand up to his chin. “But the medicine locks you into that point.”
Trang was the first person at his psychiatrist’s office to ever successfully stop taking medication, which he attributed entirely to Fellowship. Before Fellowship, he tried traditional
therapy, group therapy, intensive outpatient programs, and a different art program––all to no avail.
Trang attributed Fellowship’s unique effectiveness to the autonomy it affords its clients. “We’re not just people lumped in here––there’s no bell telling us to move from class to class,” he said. “We’re all actually hanging out together. We’re socializing of our own free will.” This autonomy, he continued, allowed him to build a genuine community that motivated him to visit Fellowship consistently.
Charlotte Sabovic, a licensed clinical social worker and the director of the Clubhouse, explained that this autonomy is foundational to Fellowship’s healthcare strategy. “Too much of their lives is so prescribed,” Sabovic said. “They’ve been told what to do for whatever amount of time by too many different people. In here, it’s not that at all.”
Trang burst out in agreement: “We can actually breathe.”
Sabovic stifled a smile before continuing. “It’s a person-centered approach,” she said. “We’re here to encourage them. It’s led by what they want to do, independently.”
To Higgins, for example, Fellowship largely serves as a middle-man between him and the resources he needs.
Higgins has been heavily involved in the New Haven arts scene since moving here in 1997, and Fellowship brought him a community with which his art could grow. In his experimental
pieces, he explores the relationship between photography, paper, and light––he creates automatistic pieces, which are intended to be interpreted distinctly by each viewer.
Through his art, Higgins retroactively observes his mental health. “I can look back at my work and think, ‘Oh, jeez––that’s what I was feeling.’”
This self-awareness provided him the mental stability to pursue the psychiatric care he needed. After working with Fellowship for months, he transferred his psychiatric services to a new provider, where he received medication that further stabilized his mental health.
When asked about the future of Fellowship Place, Guerrera emphasized the importance of strengthening Fellowship’s physical community. “All I want is the dollars to build more housing,” she said. “Some of these people don’t have incomes. The solution to this problem isn’t just affordable housing. We need deeply affordable housing, and we need support services.”
With its rent accommodating for residents’ incomes, its community-based support system, and its case management resources, Fellowship seeks to fill this need. ∎
Keertan Venkatesh is a first-year in Saybrook College.
Fellowship Place stands tucked between residential buildings on Elm Street.
Grocery Gap
Follow an activist on her grocery run in a food desert.
Forty-seven dollars. That’s all the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has given Cheryl Rabe to spend on a month’s worth of groceries.
At Stop & Shop, Rabe must decide: strawberries are too expensive on their own, so she opts for the value container of mixed fruit; organic greens aren’t affordable and bagged salad will go bad too quickly, so she chooses a head of lettuce; alfredo sauce—which Rabe prefers—is too expensive, so she settles for tomato sauce; soda isn’t ideal, but it’s only one dollar, so it goes in the cart.
“I’ve been learning to eat like that— to not be picky,” Rabe says, looking downward at the cart. Today she wears an Obama T-shirt that reads “Have you missed me yet?”
Rabe is a member of the New Haven chapter of Witnesses to Hunger, a group whose mission is to “identify, address, and create positive solutions to food insecurity.”
What distinguishes Witnesses to Hunger from similar food-focused advocacy groups in New Haven is their members—many of them, like Rabe, have personally lived with food insecurity.
As we pass through Stop & Shop’s aisles, Rabe maps out New Haven’s food insecurity for me. The city has a tremendous lack of grocery options. This means that, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, parts of New Haven are classified as a food desert: an urban area where it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality fresh food.
As a result, 22 percent of New Haven residents are food insecure— double the national average, as the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project (YHHAP) states.
Stop & Shop, located on Whalley Avenue, is the only full-service supermarket within walking distance from downtown New Haven, so price gouging is common.
“Milk you can get for $2.50 at Walmart, they’ll charge you $4.50 at Stop & Shop,” Rabe says.
Food insecurity, and price gouging, have only grown since the pandemic. Before the pandemic, Rabe said she received 260 dollars from SNAP. After the pandemic, that number dropped to sixty-seven dollars, and then to forty-seven
dollars because of her part-time job.
Qualifying for SNAP depends on how much money an individual and their household makes monthly. In Connecticut, someone living in a household of one making no more than 2,510 dollars could receive up to 292 dollars in SNAP benefits. The sum is followed by an asterisk; track it to the bottom of the chart and it’s emphasized that this 292 dollars is “the most SNAP benefits someone could get.”
In other words, people like Rabe will probably get less.
Produce on the shelves of New Haven’s Stop & Shop.
“So now I’m finding myself at food pantries, food banks, soup kitchens,” Rabe says, “It’s been very hard.”
SNAP benefits are restrictive. Shoppers cannot use an Electronic Benefit Transfer card, the card that allows SNAP users to access their benefits, to purchase hot or prepared food, like rotisserie chicken.
However, SNAP gives more autonomy to its users than its alternatives: food pantries, food banks, and soup kitchens. Rabe explains that food pantries and the like tend to give primarily canned goods and other “pieces of meals.” They are also difficult if you have dietary restrictions or preferences, such as a gluten-free or Kosher diet.
Witnesses to Hunger sees the issue of food insecurity magnified among families with school-aged children. Their current mission is to raise money for children at risk of going hungry when meals are not available through New Haven Public Schools, which is usually during school breaks.
School breaks typically occur at the end of the month when money is short for many families and SNAP benefits have been exhausted. To combat this, Witnesses to Hunger has organized an initiative to provide groceries to families in need. In April, before spring break, families could pick up groceries at four different public schools for easy accessibility. Any leftover bags were given to local churches by United Way and required pre-registration to be picked up by families.
Some families, however, were either unable to register or unaware that the bags required registration. Anticipating this, volunteers were told to enforce the registration rule and only give out bags to those who had registered beforehand.
One of these volunteers was Mark Griffin, a Witnesses to Hunger member. He decided to give the groceries to families, even if they hadn’t pre-registered. “Our hearts don’t work that way,” Griffin said.
Griffin has been with Witnesses to Hunger since 2018, four years after the New Haven chapter started. When the organization began, Griffin would go door-to-door with Billy Bromage, a member of Witnesses to Hunger and the co-chair of the Food Access Working Group of the New Haven Food Policy Council, to let families know about the mobile vans Witnesses to Hunger was using to provide kids with meals over the summer.
With donations from a New Haven Public School Food Service donor, Witnesses to Hunger gave out one thousand two hundred bags of food during the April 2024 vacation. Their focus now is summer break, or the “August gap,” the longest of all school breaks.
“One thousand two hundred bags may sound like a lot,” said Susan Harris, another Witnesses to Hunger volunteer. “However, there are over nineteen thousand students in NHPS and all are eligible for free or reduced meals at school.”
In January 2024, Bromage began a
petition with Witnesses to Hunger asking Yale to “commit one hundred thousand dollars per year to support existing free grocery programs at New Haven Public School locations that reach families when New Haven public schools are not in session.”
Witnesses to Hunger has received half of their one hundred thousand dollar request. Twelve thousand dollars comes from the Yale’s Office of New Haven Affairs; the rest is from private donors.
Sitting together at Panera Bread, a couple of months after our grocery shopping trip, Rabe and Griffin—decked out in white and blue, since the Yankees played this weekend—enthusiastically update me on Witnesses to Hunger’s advocacy efforts. They tell me that Witnesses to Hunger is going strong and that they aren’t stopping at fifty thousand dollars. Furthermore, they want the one hundred thousand dollars to be an annual donation.
Griffin says the fight is worth it, and that it “won’t go away overnight.”
On the third Saturday of each month, Witnesses to Hunger will meet in Wilson Library to discuss new ways to get the word out, educate the community, acquire petition signatures, and plan future rallies. ∎
Chloe Edwards is a junior in Branford College.
layout design by Lauren Yee | photos courtesy of Chloe edwards and ellie park
Members of Witnesses to Hunger pass out flyers and collect petition signatures on Yale campus.
At the YUAG, the Department of Prints and Drawings sketches out an alternative mode of museum-going.
Alarge wooden door on the fourth floor of the Yale University Art Gallery guards a room that looks off-limits. But small white print on the wood reads, “OPEN BY APPOINTMENT.” Behind lies a collection of more than fifty thousand prints, drawings, and photographs—the hidden treasures of the Department of Prints and Drawings.
Most YUAG curators work outside of the three-building museum, but Prints and Drawings is one of three curatorial departments housed within the Gallery. It operates out of a study room adjacent to its exhibition space on the fourth floor.
Most of the YUAG’s works on paper collection are prints. They are created by etching or carving an image onto a matrix—a template often made of wood or metal. The matrix is inked, and the inked image is transferred onto another surface, often paper or fabric, which becomes the artwork. Because the process is defined by transfer from a template, printmaking facilitates reproducibility. For this reason, prints and drawings curator Freyda Spira told me, works on paper are seen as “democratic media.”
“Because they’re multiple, many copies can be distributed around the world and disseminate knowledge,” curator Lisa Hodermarsky explained.
What happens when works on paper, valued for their accessibility, become tucked away in a museum?
Prints and Drawings, met me in the lobby of the Yale University Art Gallery. Together, we took the West Elevator to the fourth floor.
The department was founded in 1927, ninety-five years after the YUAG. Previously, the museum had been mostly a paintings collection, and according to Hodermarsky, there were only a “small smattering of drawings.” In 1925, the Gallery was gifted 150 prints by Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn, a collection significant enough to start the department and study room.
With Spira, I entered the James E. Duffy Study Room, where a large wooden table stood at the center. Natural light flooded in through the floor-toceiling windows, illuminating the prints lined neatly along the table’s perimeter. Towards the back of the room, offices with big glass windows provided a glimpse of the curators behind the scenes. I saw Lisa Hodermarsky, the Sutphin Family Curator of Prints and Drawings, focused at her desk, but as soon as I came into the room, she greeted me brightly. “I like your sweater,” she said. “Very collegiate!”
As the two curators showed me through the different spaces, they seamlessly bounced sentences back and forth between each other.
Spira started: “This is where we do….” “The magic here!” Hodermarsky finished.
The curators opened several cabinets and drawers, sharing fun facts about each piece. Works on paper can stand alone as complete works, but the collection also includes many preparatory works of paintings displayed in the Gallery. For Hodermarsky, seeing the artist’s process is the exciting part. In the late 19th century, she explained, the artist of a mural would often do the preparatory sketch, but the painting was usually done by assistants. “The preparatory works are what have the artist’s hand,” Hodermarsky said.
Classes often visit the study room, where students can experience an alternative mode of museum-going. Yale English lecturer Margaret Spillane, who teaches “Writing about Contemporary Figurative Art,” brings her students here twice a semester. Students, Spillane said, are often surprised by the intimacy of experiencing the art at such proximity.
“There’s no glass, there’s no frame,” she said. “It’s a completely different experience when there’s nothing mediating the space between you and the work.”
Through the study room, works on paper are accessible to students in a way that off-site paintings and sculptures are not. Yet Joseph Henry, a fellow in the Prints and Drawings department who facilitates class visits, noted that the radical reproducibility and traversability of prints is perhaps oversold. “They’re not
On an october afternoon, Freyda Spira, the Robert L. Solley Curator of
Joseph Henry considers works pulled for a future rotation about light and darkness.
virtual documents that travel,” he told me, as he handled the prints. “They have a real materiality to them.” To be viewed by a visitor, each work must be individually unearthed from storage and monitored by the staff.
The department has long serviced visitors through their study room, but it was only in 2022 that the department received a dedicated gallery space. YUAG Chief Curator Laurence Kanter said that the Gallery had always wanted one for the Prints and Drawings department, and the COVID-19 pandemic provided the opportunity to convert part of the temporary exhibition spaces for prints, drawings, and photography rotations.
Yet the department still cannot display a permanent installation. Because light exposure may cause fading and color shift in paper, the prints and drawings gallery is changed out every six months. Compared to curators at other departments, who host mostly permanent installations or special exhibitions planned several years in advance, curators in the Prints and Drawings department put together rotations at a tempo Henry described as “a little aggressive.” Curating rotations, along with servicing visitors in their study room, keeps the small department busy.
With a diversity of visitors and interests to accommodate, different works
cycle in and out of storage. Sometimes, the selections provide unexpected inspiration for rotations: earlier this fall, two Dante portfolios were pulled for an Italian literature course. The curators are now considering the portfolios for a future rotation about light and darkness.
Spira said that class selections are just one example of the many “rabbit holes” through which Spira and Hodermarsky find inspiration. Spira said the collection is like a library, to which Hodermarsky immediately added: “The book you think you want is not the one you want. It’s the next thing.”
Spira and Hodermarsky might start the curation process by browsing
Studies for Untitled (2009) by Kerry James Marshall sit on the table.
Left: Studies for Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958), by Edward Hopper. Right: Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958) on display on the third floor of the Art Gallery.
through an online database. But having the collection at their fingertips enables another level of interactivity—the curators can actually pull works out, see how they look in real life, and examine how objects look next to each other on the big table.
“I think we’re like kids in a candy store, and we have a really rich collection, and so it’s hard not to get excited,” Spira said.
When I first visited the small department, I was struck by its quiet hyperactivity. Now I can see that this hyperactivity ensures these works on paper have visibility. And visibility is crucial for works on paper—they were always meant to be seen.
Though these works of art may now be tucked away in a museum, it is the Prints and Drawings staff who keep the spirit of accessibility alive. They facilitate the movement of the thousands of prints and drawings that lie in storage—preventing them from collecting dust, and bringing them to the public. With each rotation, a new set of works takes on renewed life.
What’s on display in the prints and drawings gallery is only a glimpse. Just one wall away, tens of thousands of hidden prints brim with possibility. ∎
Ellie Park is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College and a Design Editor of The New Journal.
Within the study, a back storage room contains shelves packed with boxes of prints and drawings. Freyda Spira pulls out Erasmus of Rotterdam, an engraving by Albrecht Dürer that dates back to 1526.
Light Rain Within the Hour
By Cal Barton
Well, the flood was was coming. Politicians took up the word “Armageddon.” Television preachers did things with their arms. Lifeguard apparel was in fashion, and hipsters wore T-shirts that said “Current Mood: Hieronymous Bosch.” Everyone named Noah had to smile through variations of the same joke. Fortune tellers brought bag-chairs to the gas stations. Farmers forgot the names of their horses. Antique dealers lined up all their rocking chairs and pushed them, one by one. The baker’s wife went to the men under the bridge; they laughed and tossed
chunks of bread to the ducks. The duration of the average hug tripled. Those who once fled from the word “lover” wondered why they had been so uneasy. At the seafood restaurant, one man wiped his chin, stood, walked to the lobster tank, and turned it over, screaming: “Be free! Be free!” The lobsters clicked their claws, unimpressed. Teenagers brought boomboxes to the cemetery. They were dancing when the first raindrops fell: they held out their palms, tilted their heads to the sky, and cheered. The rocking chairs stopped rocking. The men under the bridge tossed their shoes
into the water. Nursing home residents sat by the window and listened to the rain-music. The oldest began a list of everyone he could remember meeting. He wept. There were puddles now. One boy in the cemetery yelled—“Guys, make room for the ghosts!”—and they made room. And they applauded invisible breakdancers. And they were terrified.∎
Cal Barton is a senior in Morse College.
No Safe Return
As violence surges at home, Ecuadorian organizers in Connecticut mobilize immigrant communities across the U.S. to secure their right to stay.
By Matías Guevara Ruales
layout design by jessica sánchez
Photos courtesy of Matías Guevara Ruales
Colorful floats descended toward the New Haven Green on the morning of August 18th. Ecuadorian and American flags waved from motorcycles, jeeps, pickup trucks, even a Hummer limousine. Dancers in traditional dress swept into the park as vendors sold cevichocho and cotton candy out of the trunks of their cars. Children carried their own miniature flags. Balloons rose, and wild honks filled the air.
As Yale’s newest undergraduates were moving into Old Campus, hundreds of Ecuadorians gathered on the Green across the street to commemorate the 1809 uprising that kicked off Ecuador’s long struggle for independence from colonial rule. Each year, the local Ecuadorian community—the sixth largest among the foreign-born population of New Haven County—celebrates this holiday by holding a parade.
The festivities began just outside 1 Church Street, where the Consulate of Ecuador in Connecticut shares a building with a Yale School of Public Health research center. (The consulate is one of only three foreign missions in the state of Connecticut, and the only one outside of Hartford.)
This year, leading the parade were Angélica Idrovo and Carlos Córdova, among other representatives of local community organizations. They marched shoulder-to-shoulder, in step with the music. They looked determined. Together, they carried a sign that read:
PODER COMUNITARIO
TPS FOR ECUADOR.
The banner was a call to action. Connecticut immigration activists like Angélica and Carlos have been trying to get the United States’ government to designate Ecuador as a country eligible for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for over a year. The TPS designation—enshrined in federal law as a safeguard for people whose home countries are dangerous to return to—would protect undocumented Ecuadorians from deportation and allow them to legally seek work for a defined period. With an ongoing wave of gang violence and an energy crisis currently facing the South American nation, activists say such a measure is more than justified; sending undocumented Ecuadorians back home under the current conditions can put their lives in danger.
Connecticut has long been an epicenter for Ecuadorian life and activism in the U.S. Possessing the fifth-largest Ecuadorian population in the entire country, the state is home to numerous associations of Ecuadorians that regularly lead advocacy efforts to address their communities’ needs. In 2008, this activism played an important role in helping to establish the Ecuadorian Consulate in New Haven, which now services migrant communities in Maine, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, in addition to Connecticut.
In August of 2023, escalating violence in Ecuador prompted a group of local Connecticut activists to start lobbying for TPS. The campaign has since spun into a grassroots coalition with advocacy hubs across the U.S., engaging over thirty-five federal legislators and executive officials, as well as senior members of the Ecuadorian government. Their efforts have forged new ways for largely undocumented Ecuadorian populations across the country to exercise political influence at the national level.
II.
From his office at 1 Church Street, Consul General of Ecuador Julio Prado Espinosa tells me that violence, especially extortion by criminal gangs, has come to surpass family reunification and poor employment conditions as the number one cause for resettling reported among the 70,000 patrons in the Consulate’s jurisdiction.
At a national level, the number of Ecuadorians attempting to enter the U.S. has surged dramatically in recent years. As of September 2024, 122,072 encounters with Ecuadorian nationals were reported by Customs and Border Protection this year along the Southwest border, a 5.03 percent increase over 2023 and a 407.4 percent increase over 2022.
For most Ecuadorian migrants coming to the U.S., the only possible route runs through the dense rainforests of Central America before reaching the U.S.–Mexico border. Prior to 2021, when Mexico started requiring tourist visas for Ecuadorians, people could fly to Mexico before continuing their journey north. Today, even if migrants manage to cross the perilous Darién Gap and reach Mexico by land, life-threatening challenges await once they arrive: kidnappings by drug cartels, unreliable coyotes, the absence of an Ecuadorian embassy to fall back on if things go wrong, and, at the end of the road, a heavily patrolled border where both Mexican and American agents stand ready to detain those attempting to cross.
Still, thousands of Ecuadorians arrive on U.S. soil every month, their incentives to reach a safe haven stronger than the military-grade equipment used to keep them out.
III.
Priscila Rivadeneira arrived in Connecticut in 2022. She is 36 years old, a mother of two girls, ages 8 and 11, and lives in Old Saybrook, CT—just thirty minutes from the Consulate in downtown New Haven. Between twelve-hour shifts at work, afternoon classes at Three Rivers Community College, and the morning rush to get her daughters ready for school, she can barely spare the time to grant me an interview. When we finally manage to align our schedules, it’s Friday night, her one day off. “You know how it is on days off,” she says, “there’s just more work to do… helping out my sister, the girls—it never stops.”
Priscila calls her current line—or lines—of work “extemporáneos.” For now, she has a relatively stable job, taking care of an “elderly American lady,” una ancianita americana. She likes it. It keeps her busy Saturday through Thursday. Over the past two years she has also had to take on work doing nails and cutting hair, learning through YouTube videos and similar self-taught methods. “I’m bad with my hands, really,” she tells me. “I never thought I’d be doing things like these for work.”
Back home, in Ecuador, Priscila was a lawyer and a business owner. She lived in the Andean city of Cuenca where she and her husband started a car dealership back in 2011. She used to manage the legal department. She tells me a story of hard-earned social mobility: resettling from her rural hometown to a large city, getting married, starting a family, opening a business. Eventually, the couple’s efforts afforded them “stability, both economic and social.” They had children. They traveled, both in Ecuador and abroad. They settled comfortably into the ranks of an entrepreneurial middle class. “We were doing well,” she reminisces with a distant stare. “It was the fruit of our labor.”
That was all until their lives were threatened at gunpoint one day. Then, like many others, they were forced to leave. IV.
Historically, Ecuador has been a peaceful nation. Even though the country is tucked between Colombia and Peru—two cocaine-producing powerhouses that have long contended with violent guerilla forces and militant groups tied to the drug trade—for most of this century, Ecuador ranked among its more developed neighbors like Chile or Argentina in violence indicators.
During the late 2000s and early 2010s, the nation experienced the largest oil boom in its history. Under the administration of then-President Rafael Correa—who has since been convicted of bribery in the context of a multimillion-dollar corruption scheme—hundreds of public schools, clinics, roads, and houses were built all over the country. The poorest 40 percent of Ecuadorians saw their incomes grow
Angélica Idrovo (right) and Carlos Córdova (middle) lead the Ecuadorian parade on the New Haven Green.
eight times more than the national average. There was the promise of a welfare state on the horizon, the promise of a repatriation program for the tens of thousands of migrants who had left in the 1980s, the promise of a bright future, and an everlasting source of export revenue buried under everyone’s feet to fuel it all.
That changed in 2016, when the FARC—a Colombian guerilla group that controlled 60 percent of the world’s most productive coca crops at the time—signed a peace deal with the Colombian government, effectively demobilizing a fifty-year insurgency and creating an enormous power vacuum in the cocaine trade. Foreign organized crime groups began flooding into Ecuador. Each sought a slice of the country’s newly competitive—and highly lucrative—drug transportation routes.
Collusion networks between organized crime groups and government officials which had formed under Correa and a fall in oil prices toward the end of the 2010s allowed criminal organizations like Los Choneros, Los Lobos, and Los Tiguerones to take hold for years to come.
In 2023, eleven days before citizens voted for a new president, candidate Fernando Villavicencio—a former journalist who repeatedly called for stronger measures against drug gangs— was shot and killed by a group of Colombian hitmen as he left a political rally in Quito. The Attorney General’s Office found evidence linking Villavicencio’s murder to the Lobos gang.
Years before they made national headlines, however, criminal organizations like Los Lobos were already spreading fear through the streets of the major cities.
V.
Priscila says it started in 2019, when a series of mysterious men began showing up at the car dealership asking to talk to her and her husband. Random cars started looking eerily familiar. Motorcycles constantly flashed in and out of her rearview mirror, trailing her like shadows on the road. She began to recognize the same young man in a helmet around town. “At the beginning, you’re in your own world. You drive your car and you feel fine. But you start realizing at some point that it’s the same bike, it’s the same guy everywhere and it’s no coincidence,” she said.
The men who showed up at the office wanted money. Five thousand dollars every month. They identified themselves as members of Los Choneros, a drug syndicate based in the coastal city of Guayaquil. In exchange for the monthly installments, they promised to invest in firearms, explosives, patrol cars—“defense equipment” to protect the neighborhood from rival gangs.
“I had neighbors who paid,” recalls Priscila. “They paid because they were afraid.” Priscila held out at first; five thousand dollars every month was not a sum her family could spare.
One day, she received a call about a car sale opportunity in a town in Guayas, not far from the border of her home province. Transactions like this were common; she often took trips around the country to buy and sell cars. On this occasion, Priscila and her husband decided to take their daughters with them for a family trip.
“If they ask for your papers, and you don’t have them—you’re committing a crime. And you don’t want to commit a crime because you’re not a bad person, but you’re forced to do it out of necessity.”
When the family arrived at the meeting location, they found no one there. After a tense twenty-minute wait, two armed men pulled over abruptly on a motorcycle. They began to harass Priscila’s husband with threats, insults, and their firearms. “When I saw that, I swear, I thought it was all going to end there, that our lives were going to end,” Priscila remembers. “I thought those people were going to shoot us on the spot.” She crouched inside the car and covered her daughters’ eyes.
The men told Priscila’s husband that if he didn’t pay them five thousand dollars every month, they were going to hurt his family. They said they were going to kill his daughters.
The Rivadeneiras tried every possible legal avenue to protect themselves. They filed a police report. They appealed to local prosecutors and other authorities for protection. But Ecuador’s weakened law enforcement system failed to stop the threats. Eventually, the family decided to leave the country. They had relatives in Connecticut. They came to the U.S. on tourist visas. They brought as many of their belongings as they managed. They left everything else behind.
Just an hour and twenty minutes away from Old Saybrook, where Priscila’s family would eventually settle, and mere days after the murder of Fernando Villavicencio in 2023, Angélica Idrovo got a call at her home in Danbury. It was Carlos Córdova, an immigration organizer she knew through the Danbury Ecuadorian Civic Center.
Ángelica left Ecuador when she was twelve, and became involved with immigration advocacy groups in high school. Carlos had a background in unions and worker’s rights associations in Ecuador, which expanded to include immigration work once he resettled.
“Anghy,” she remembers Carlos saying over the phone, “we want to hold a meeting to talk about what Ecuador is going through. We want to talk about the killing…We’re going to pitch the idea of fighting for TPS.”
Angélica replied in an instant. “Perfect, count me in.”
TPS confers three main benefits on qualifying individuals during its period of designation: 1) they are not removable from the United States; 2) they can obtain an employment authorization document (EAD); and 3) they may be granted travel authorization. For some 162,000 Ecuadorians who are undocumented in the U.S., these protections would be nothing short of life-changing.
When Priscila speaks to me about her family’s first few months in America, during which they had no official papers beyond their tourist visas, she is full of remembered anxiety. “I’m telling you, it’s like being on edge constantly, with the constant worry of when they might arrest you,” she says. “If they ask for your papers, and you don’t have them— you’re committing a crime. And you don’t want to commit a crime because you’re not a bad person, but you’re forced to do it out of necessity.”
Indeed, the lack of legal documents complicates every aspect of life in this country for people like Priscila. For one, it prevents them from seeking legal employment, forcing migrants to turn to informal and poorly regulated labor markets. Antonio Arízaga, a New York-based activist who presides over the United Front for Ecuadorian Immigrants, tells me that some undocumented Ecuadorians in this country work twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours a day in restaurants, produce markets, and similar places, earning less-than-minimum wages. “Simply put, they are exploited,” he says.
A formal U.S. source of income also makes it easier to build a credit score and sign a lease. Lacking both when she first arrived, Priscila tells me no one would rent to her in Connecticut. The family had to relocate to Minnesota for several months to access a lease that accommodated their needs, and they weren’t able to return to Connecticut until after they had filed asylum claims.
Arízaga emphasizes the third benefit of TPS. It allows Ecuadorians to apply for a travel permit to
return to Ecuador for urgent matters such as the illness or death of a family member, without fearing that they will not be able to re-enter the U.S. Perhaps even more important than being let back into the country, however, is being safe from deportation in the first place. TPS protects beneficiaries against forced removal, a crucial provision for people with a high risk of being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), such as immigrant day laborers, who must venture into busy public spaces each day to seek work.
Without TPS, Ecuadorian day workers in Connecticut have to withstand repeated crackdowns from ICE. One famous example is the 2006 case of the “Danbury 11,” a group of Ecuadorian men who were peacefully assembled at Kennedy Park in Danbury one morning before a van of undercover city police officers showed up and offered them work. The van took the men who accepted to a parking lot, where, as soon as they stepped off, ICE agents jumped out and arrested them. All of the men were subsequently placed into deportation proceedings based on statements they gave after being seized.
Yale Law School Professor Michael J. Wishnie ’87, LAW ’93 led a team of student volunteers in efforts to get the men released on bond. “Many immigrants with meritorious defenses forgo those defenses because it is too costly to pursue them,” he tells me. Wishnie and his students argued that the arrests had violated their clients’ rights under the Fourth Amendment.
After five years and countless legal maneuvers, the YLS team eventually won six hundred thousand dollars from the City of Danbury and the Federal Government for eight of the men. It was the largest settlement in the history of civil-rights actions brought by day laborers. ICE agreed to grant the men deferred action status. And yet, two of the original eleven men were still deported.
Today, TPS could change legal outcomes for the tens of thousands of Ecuadorian immigrants at risk of deportation who don’t have access to the resources and goodwill of America’s top law schools.
VII.
Angélica and Carlos held their first meeting in Danbury in August, 2023, eight days after Villavicencio’s murder. About a dozen people, mainly leaders from local advocacy groups and cultural centers, convened to discuss the implications of the violence in Ecuador for immigrants in the U.S. It was clear to them that under those conditions, it wasn’t safe for people like Priscila to go back.
A few weeks later, a second meeting was called. Then a third, this time in Stamford. About sixty people showed up. A fourth meeting in Danbury. Then Meriden. Then New Haven. Leaders from these and other cities like Bridgeport, Stamford, and Norwalk decided to form a steering committee, with Ángelica and Carlos at the head. Engagement was increasing slowly but steadily.
Then, in January of this year, the movement suddenly gained explosive traction—there had been new developments back home.
In the first weeks of 2024, a terrifying wave of riots broke out in Ecuador, first inside most major prisons and then across the country. Gangs kidnapped police officers, detonated explosives in the streets, and set cars on fire as devices of intimidation. In Guayaquil, a group of hooded men stormed a news studio during a national broadcast and pointed firearms at the heads of journalists. Eleven people died in just a few days. More than 850 were arrested.
In an exceptional exercise of executive power, President Daniel Noboa declared a state of “internal armed conflict” and unleashed the military upon the country’s gangs in an attempt to calm the ongoing riots. Back in the U.S., this created a surge of interest in the TPS movement that had been taking shape in Connecticut. “It was in that instant that Ecuador met the conditions for designation,” Arízaga told me.
Under the Immigration Act of 1990, the Secretary of Homeland Security has the discretion to grant TPS to countries under three scenarios: an ongoing armed conflict (such as civil war); an environmental disaster (such as an earthquake, hurricane, or epidemic); and what is simply described as “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”
Prior to the January riots, Angélica’s team had devised a policy strategy to prove that the violence in Ecuador amounted to “extraordinary conditions,” a hard claim to prove due to the vagueness of the legal language. But Noboa’s declaration of an internal conflict prompted them to realign their plan.
“The hope now,” Angélica tells me, “is that Ecuador will qualify for TPS under the condition of ‘ongoing armed conflict,’ which is far more concrete.”
VIII.
In 2024, Angélica and Carlos’ Connecticutborn movement began to gather national momentum, converging with more recent, independent campaigns nationwide. Angélica says she connected with activists from New York, Minnesota, Utah, and California, all assembling their local communities to talk about the same goal: securing TPS for Ecuadorians.
In January, advocacy groups in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut delivered letters to Ecuadorian officials across East Coast consulates, asking their government to endorse the petition for TPS with Washington. On January 23, Ecuador officially requested TPS for its migrants through a formal petition to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). However, every activist I talked to stressed that the Ecuadorian government’s support has been far from vigorous. President Daniel Noboa has come to the U.S. on several official visits since he took office in January, and not once did he speak about TPS
On February 22, 2024, New York organizers secured a meeting with three members of Congress,
including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to request their support in advocating for TPS with officials in the DHS. Exactly a month later, OcasioCortez led twenty-four members of Congress in sending a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasizing the urgency of TPS as a measure for keeping Ecuadorian immigrants in the U.S. safe from the violence facing their home country. The same week, leaders from major East Coast cities formed a National Coalition of Ecuadorians for TPS, inviting every state with a TPS advocacy movement to join forces. In June, the coalition organized a march to D.C., with people coming from as far as Florida and Utah to voice their support for the cause.
Less than a week after the march, the coalition’s leaders were called to a meeting with officials from the White House and Departments of State and Homeland Security. At the meeting, Angélica said Homeland Security representatives told her and the other leaders that a joint committee was working on a report to assess whether Ecuador qualified for TPS . As of early November, the coalition hasn’t heard back from the department.
Many will face deportation to a country overwhelmed by violence before Trump’s inauguration in January, and, if Mayorkas doesn’t heed the community’s calls, many more after that.
Despite the delayed response, activists still hold out hope for a favorable policy outcome— even in the face of Trump’s victory in the presidential election earlier this month. They expect the Biden administration will act swiftly in the coming months to safeguard protections for vulnerable communities before Republicans regain control of the executive branch in January.
With Trump promising mass deportations for his second term, approving TPS before he takes office would provide a buffer for Ecuadorians at risk of being sent back to a country ravaged by organized gang violence. For people like Priscila, this protection could mean the difference between life and death. What’s more, it could endure well beyond Trump’s inauguration, even if he tries to repeal it.
Trump has tried and failed to rescind TPS designations for several countries in the past: first for Nicaragua in 2017 and then for El Salvador in 2018. His attempts were challenged in federal court, leading to a 2018 injunction that temporarily blocked the terminations—and bought Nicaraguans and Salvadorians years of TPS protection, even as the administration sought to phase it out.
Activists hope for that sort of protection against Trump’s mass deportation policies for Ecuadorians, too. The coalition’s plan is to continue pressuring Mayorkas throughout the year.
Carlos and Angélica talk to me about how proud they are of the concrete victories their campaign has already achieved: lawmakers they met with, letters to high-ranking officials, protesters in high numbers assembled outside of Congress. They have had to fight for every inch of ground they’ve gained in public life. They’ve known what it’s like to be undocumented.
To be undocumented is to be denied the same political representation as everyone else in the country where one lives and works, while still being subjected to the same laws. To be undocumented is to be denied the right to vote. To be undocumented is to be dispossessed of the most essential tools for political agency. And yet, undocumented people still find ways to call upon those in power.
“Someone has to speak out for us—not in the name of a political party, not in the name of any candidate, but in the name of the community, that community that’s out there on the ground, that wakes up early to work in the fields, in the restaurants,” Carlos says. “It should be us who put forward this proposal.”
Angélica knows how much time it takes for independent activism to take shape. “I’ve been at this for a while,” she says. “It doesn’t happen in a day.” For now, she reflects on the work ahead. “Something that helps me a lot,” she tells me as our conversation draws to a close, “is
reminding myself that hope, at the end of the day, is a discipline.”
It may yet take more hope, and discipline, before Ecuadorians are granted the protections of TPS . Many will face deportation to a country overwhelmed by violence before Trump’s inauguration in January, and, if Mayorkas doesn’t heed the community’s calls, many more after that.
Still, though the policy outcome remains uncertain, the significance of the underlying activism should not be overlooked. Through the TPS campaign, this community has built an advocacy network that stretches across the country. It has shown that even though hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians in this country may lack legal papers, they are not without political agency. In that respect, the consequences of this movement for Ecuadorian organizing will far outlive a second Trump term. ∎
Matías Guevara Ruales is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.
A family waves Ecuadorian flags at this year’s Ecuadorian Civic Parade.
Don’t Ever, Ever Go Here
A makeshift balcony offered space for small rebellions.
By Abbey Kim
It started with an X-Acto knife and a hairdryer. About six years ago, outside the window on the third floor of the spiral staircase in Branford Entryway E, Kara noticed a small stone balcony. The perch was only about eight Converse wide, bracketed by shin-high stone walls. Two of its sides hugged the entryway’s curved body—slanting up to stone tiled roof and kissing the narrow window. Kara tried to open the window to step onto the ledge, but the window was sealed shut. So she melted the plastic with the hairdryer, X-Acto’d through the goo, and officially liberated the Branford Balcony.
Or, at least, I think that’s what happened. I’ve never met Kara. Two of my suitemates did, when we were firstyears and she was a senior. One of my suitemates remembers talking to her at a suite party. The other swears it was in a dining hall. Like the history of Yale itself, the story of this balcony has been constructed by many, often conflicting, testimonies.
The balcony became my I-knowa-spot spot. My let-me-show-you-somewhere somewhere. Everybody wanted to show it to their friends, but nobody wanted it to be known. It was a corner; an overlook; a place to watch the moon; a safety hazard; a gossip hideout; a locus of conversation, cigarettes, alcohol, weed, and make-outs.
My first-year suite joined in the unofficial lineage of the Branford balcony, conveyed mostly by passed-down stories and light littering. It certainly wasn’t as
glamorous as other parts of Yale’s campus. Though we lived just a floor below, getting onto the perch was pointedly inconvenient. My suitemate Jamie described it as “super whimsical.” Kate had a different take: “that shit used to scare me a lot.” Simply put, you must:
1) Step up onto the metal handrail of the spiral staircase.
2) Wedge your fingers in the narrow window frame. Try not to worry that they’ll get smushed; they probably won’t.
3) Hoist yourself and pray.
“It’s kind of a collective effort to get on,” my suitemate Gianna explained. “It’s like: please hold my phone while I clamber up and jump up the stairs to try to get up there.”
During our time in Entryway E, my suite and I frequently journeyed up the stairs to perch on that ledge. We sat with the rustling of leaves, the thud of hurried steps below, the constant opening and closing of doors in the entryway. It became our place—a shared spot apart from the supervision and pressures of other Yale spaces.
“It wasn’t hidden; it wasn’t private; it wasn’t secret,” my suitemate Kate said. “Yet somehow it also was.”
For as long as I knew it, the balcony bore remnants of this secret life. It’s been home to a souring bottle of red wine, mysterious crumpled papers, discarded blue face masks. Last September, it hosted seventeen cigarette butts, a crumpled Starbucks pastry bag, and a half-full Purell dispenser with liquid that was slightly green.
“If you’re wearing white pants, you probably shouldn’t sit there,” my roommate Lauren reminded me. “And it’s not comfortable at all. And you don’t really want to lean against anything.”
In the midst of the rebellion, an air of fear pervaded the balcony. There were the rational worries—falling, getting locked out, staining your pants. But there was also a quieter hum to the space. Being so high up and out of sight created the all-consuming feeling of invisibility.
“For the most part, if you’re up there, no one knows you’re there,” my suitemate Beth said. “Everyone walking below you, no one knows.”
This sense of removal, when braved together, turned into comfort. My suite and I felt free of the sterilized world of Yale. Our conversations moved from tentative high school gossip to divulging fears and five-year plans.
This September, Yale Facilities installed two shiny metal screws to either side of
the window’s handle. A small laminated sign, haphazardly taped to the glass windowpane reads:
Do Not Open Window and Use Balcony
This is a University Violation Violators will be subject to ExComm No Questions Asked
I did, however, have some questions. When I asked Branford Facilities Superintendent Ian Hobbs about the closure, he had a simple answer: “It’s a safety thing…It’s just dangerous.” If people walked or sat on the balcony, he explained, they could crack the non-load bearing roof and create leaks.
The balcony isn’t a balcony at all. It’s ornamentation, never meant for human feet. When Branford was built in the early 1920s, I doubt they planned on the newly minted Collegiate Gothic lending itself to such illicit activities.
But students have a way of finding themselves in places they don’t belong. Hobbs remembered having the window screwed shut years ago. He didn’t think much of it again, until he saw a black folding chair peeking over the turrets this August. Apparently, the screws got loose.
The balcony is impossible to detach from the splendor of Yale. For one, it stares Harkness Tower in the face. Everything about that 216-foot-tall Goliath has been carefully planned: each foot commemorates a year from Yale’s founding to the tower’s construction. Climbing its 284 steps requires an appointment—and supervision. Harkness and the balcony peer over Linonia Court, which is named, of course, after the Linonia Literary Society. Entryway E is dedicated to James Fenimore Cooper, one of the first American novelists. These spaces demand sanctioned activity and assert tidy meanings. The balcony resists this order.
I thought about unscrewing the new set of hardware sealing off the Branford balcony. But I don’t want to get ExCommed. Besides, I’d be missing the point. It’s not for us anymore—not now that I’ve talked to administrators about it, not now that there’s a sign there stamped with an official Branford seal. Still, I’ll remember the way the moon looked from up there. We stared at it together: full and bright and confessional enough that we could believe, even if just momentarily, that we were the only ones really seeing it. ∎
Abbey Kim is a senior in Branford College and former Editor-inChief of The New Journal.
Double Tanka (Storm)
And in the morning, The trash will be a heap of Exoskeletons & I will trace the language of Our desire between
The knife lines you left In the cutting block as I Peeled raw shrimp and you Smashed garlic until it bled Like the storm outside of us.
–Lucy Ton That
Opening Access
As the number of students receiving accomodations rises, what would it mean for Yale to form a community with disabled identity at its center?
By Andrew Storino
The student secretary, lacking a real desk, sits behind a folding table erected to one side of the foyer. 35 Broadway, tucked behind the Shops at Yale, is spacious and quiet. Cleaning product hangs in the air. Save for the small plaques identifying these rooms as the home of Student Accessibility Services (SAS), the office could belong to anyone.
Before I entered Yale as a transfer student this fall, I had never even seen a public conversation on disability. “Disability” was appointments after
school, weekend trips to big medical centers in San Francisco that didn’t make sense to my friends, and the immediate, unspoken isolation that comes when I am given 50 percent more time to complete the exam that everyone studied hard for.
Now, at Yale, a vast network of accessibility services is just an email away. In 2015, SAS provided accommodations for 720 students. Nine years later, that number has more than quadrupled. With just seven employees on staff, SAS now services some three thousand students across
the entire University. Extra time on tests, single dorm rooms, dietary accommodations, and assistive technology, among many other accommodations, fall to SAS to administer, regulate, and support.
Yet even at Yale, where I have access to previously unimaginable resources, where students have actively organized around disability, and where nearly one in four students receive accommodations, I hesitate to say I have found a community. As national debates over the increase in accommodations continue, they focus almost entirely on
accommodations themselves: Are they effective? Are they fraudulent?
These debates overlook another question. Even as more students seek support from Yale, these students remain decentralized and often invisible to one another by virtue of their shared hidden identity. With these challenges, what would it mean to form a community with disabled identity at its center?
yale’s Resource Office on Disabilities was founded in 1982 and renamed Student Accessibility Services in 2019. The office assisted its first cohort of twenty-four students in 1983-84. Early history of its operations is scarce, but the office describes itself as established “in response to the growing population of students with disabilities enrolled” at Yale.
This “growing population” has roots in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 504 of the act mandated that “no qualified individual with a disability in the United States shall be excluded from, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination” under any program receiving federal financial assistance. The law’s passage would have outsized effects on colleges throughout the country, but only with time. The federal government’s initial failure to implement Section 504, spurred by lobbying from employers reluctant to change hiring practices, led to protests and sit-ins around the country in the summer of 1977. It was only after these efforts, that Section 504 became widely known and enforced in schools and workplaces nationwide.
Similar spikes at institutions across the country have provoked responses ranging from concern to praise. In “The Chronicle of Higher Education”, James Madison University professor Alan Levinovitz called for a scaling-back of accommodations and pushed “studyskill programs, peer-support groups, and temporary interventions” as alternatives. These measures, he argued, would “help students make it through stressful periods without giving them a permanent biogenetic explanation for their challenges.” For Levinovitz, the over-medicalization of students’ struggles diverts attention away from other sources of the difficulties they encounter, such as academic underpreparedness and mental health, while also diminishing the weight of more serious medical diagnoses. On the other hand, advocates at the U.S. Government Accountability Office
and elsewhere have argued that the rise in accommodations can be attributed to a historical lack of resource-awareness amongst students, and a growing number of students with long-term disabilities enrolling in college.
Kimberly McKeown, who has directed SAS since 2021, doesn’t attribute the growing number of accommodations to any single factor but notes that the office saw a higher number of requests, specifically for mental health conditions, following the pandemic. SAS does not keep disaggregated data for instances of each particular disability. Mckeown noted, anecdotally, a dramatic increase in students seeking accommodations for dyslexia.
in some cases, the experience of receiving accommodations changes not only a student’s practical relationship to living and studying at Yale but also their identity.
“I didn’t have much experience with accommodations before I came here,” Nida Khan ’24, a mentor in Yale’s Disability Peer Mentors Program, remembers. “I came to college not really knowing what my disability was. I was just sick and I had nerve pain in my hands.”
Khan’s recognition of her disability, and her evaluation and diagnosis, came only after she had struggled with challenges she could not name.
“I progressively kept getting worse and worse each semester,” Khan recalls. “It got to the point where I realized, okay, this isn’t just that college is hard; this is something specific.”
Khan was diagnosed outside of Yale, but began receiving accommodations via SAS. Some were common, like extra time on exams and extensions for assignments, but one of the most helpful accommodations was highly specific: an automatic door opener activated by simply swiping her I.D. at any door on campus.
“People didn’t even know that was a thing until they saw me do it with my I.D.,” Khan remembers. The technology was “a game changer” for her, “an unexpected accommodation that really helped my life.”
that a technology so obscure has such a profound impact on Khan’s life speaks to difficulties of finding connections across such a varied identity. Rose Bender, a current Yale medical student who graduated from the College in 2020, came to Yale and immediately faced this problem, struggling to find others who shared her experience. The first connection she made was by coincidence.
“Through one of my extracurriculars, totally unrelated to disability, I met somebody who happened to have the same chronic illness as I did,” Bender said. “We became very good friends, and decided we wanted to start a group for students with disabilities.”
That group, Disability Empowerment for Yale (DEFY), was founded in 2017 as Yale’s first student-run advocacy organization dedicated to disability. DEFY marked the first organized effort by disabled students to create their own support system, independent of University structures. Their goal was not to usurp or replace SAS but rather to provide something that SAS could not: a group that focused on disabled students’ experiences themselves rather than on providing purely institutional solutions to their challenges.
Having a single banner for students to organize under proved effective. DEFY was instrumental in creating the American Sign Language program at Yale and in crafting Yale’s new policy on accessible course materials and websites. Their most well-known achievement, however, has been the institutionalization of two academic mentorship programs: the Disability Peer Liaisons and the Disability Peer Mentors.
“When I got to Yale, other groups had Peer Liaisons that are run through the colleges and set up as soon as you
A branch of the Good Life Center at the SAS.
get here,” Bender recalled. “I thought, why is there nothing like that for students with disabilities?”
Bender’s friendship with someone who shared her experience showed the advantages of the comprehensive, holistic mentorship offered by Peer Liaisons at Yale’s established cultural houses. She wanted to ensure that this kind of support wasn’t left to chance. Bender started an informal Peer Liaisons group within DEFY, creating an email list and handing out flyers around campus. The first year they had “maybe four or five mentees,” Bender says. The program grew to fifteen the next year, and DEFY petitioned for its institutionalization while continuing to work as an independent advocacy organization.
They took the informal program to the two offices most likely to accept it: SAS and the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. To DEFY ’s surprise, both offices agreed to host the program, and it was split in two: the Disability Peer Liaisons, which would fall under the auspices of SAS, and the Disability Peer Mentors Program, overseen by the Poorvu Center.
Last year, the Disability Peer Mentors came under the direction of the Office of Educational Opportunity (OEO). Now, while the Disability Peer Liaisons continue to resemble other holistic Peer Liaison programs on campus (activities include taking mentees out for food, check-ins, and advising on life at Yale in general), the Disability Peer Mentors are now trained only in academic mentoring, a move made by the Poorvu administration which, according to Bender, altered the goals of the program fundamentally: “It’s not being true to the spirit of the program,” Bender says of the Disability Peer Mentors’ new role under the OEO. “Putting it under that umbrella and that group, and taking away our unique training and community aspects, there’s a lot lost.”
While the Disability Peer Liaisons still exist in their originally intended form, they are only available to undergraduate students who are registered through SAS—unlike the Peer Mentors. For those unregistered, the path to holistic mentorship is not clear, if it exists at all.
With increased visibility, resources, and organization, institutionalization brings the risk of moving studentcentered programs like Disability Peer Mentors toward another service-based model.
when I arrived on campus this fall, I was overwhelmed not only by the sheer number of resources sent to me as soon as I had scheduled a meeting with SAS, but also that these resources came from Yale’s administrative offices, and framed what was provided in terms of “support” rather than “community.” In the same string of emails from SAS, I learned how to schedule a meeting with an assistive technology expert and be paired with a Peer Liaison.
As it stands, the physical, communal space for disability at Yale is The Good Life Center at SAS, a room within the SAS office and an offshoot of the larger series of campus relaxation spaces under the
“Good Life” banner. Improvised from the skeleton of administrative suites surrounding it, the Good Life Center is an island of color and comfort between SAS’s white walls. Sunlight streams down through skylights. Accessible seating of varying heights and styles surrounds a central table, where lichens creep over the sides of a planter. A shelf holds coffee and tea.
But according to Sovy Pham, a junior who works as a Peer Liaison at SAS, events hosted there usually have low attendance—a challenge the Peer Liaison program itself shares.
“The number of students who receive accommodations versus the number of students who request a Peer Liaison, it’s
drastically different,” Pham tells me.
Pham’s initial experience with formal accommodations, like Khan’s, began at Yale. With a diagnosis, Pham says she can explain her situation more easily to professors: “My ability or inability to complete certain assignments. There’s a reason for it, for the way that my brain functions differently than other people’s.”
“There’s this split stream at Yale,” Khan observes. “A lot of these accommodations are actually super common. It’s not just people who identify as disabled. People get accommodations who don’t spend as much time thinking about disability and what it means to be disabled and have a disabled body.”
Translating such a subjective and personal experience into a shared identity and, beyond that, into a community, is a difficult task. The close relationship between disability and the medical and legal mandates of student support, specifically student confidentiality and evidence-based approval for accommodations, can make connecting with others who share the experience more difficult.
“With SAS, students don’t have to tell anyone that they have a disability, and that’s everyone’s choice. This is not to say that SAS is opaque on purpose, but students are empowered to make that choice,” Pham notes. Disability, because it is often defined in terms of an individual’s capacity rather than their outward appearance, can
also be literally invisible, regardless of the rules in place to ensure privacy.
This invisibility bleeds over into support and advocacy spaces as well. As a Peer Liaison, Pham says she doesn’t know anyone who is a Peer Mentor, despite the fact that those programs were once one and the same. She also advocates for causes related to disability as a member of the Yale College Council, including an effort to create a disability cultural house at Yale, but does so mostly independently of DEFY
“I think disability is unique as an identity because it necessitates institutions, because it is the institution that determines your ability to some extent,” Pham muses. “Institutions create the parameters for how disabilities manifest.”
Pham offers an example: “I’m Asian, right? If I go to the AACC, or if I don’t go to the AACC, I’m still gonna be Asian at the end of the day. My relationship to my identity does not have to be necessarily tethered to an institution.”
writing this article has been the only time, at Yale or anywhere else, when I’ve talked to others about the experience of disability in a sustained, non-trivial way. These conversations have helped me see how others engage with disability: not as a barrier to be triumphed over, but as a way of living. At the most basic level, forming a community around disability would require defining “disability” outside of a particular institutional transaction.
For those who want to have these conversations and bridge the divide between statistical debates over accommodations and how students actually experience them, there is no single path forward. DEFY and other advocates on campus have called for the creation of a Persons with Disabilities Cultural Center since 2019, but with low attendance at existing events on campus, it’s unclear if a designated physical space is the largest barrier to creating a community. To move forward, we need to acknowledge that the difficulties in creating a community around disabilities may stem from the very institutional measures intended to support them. ∎
Andrew Storino is a sophomore in Trumbull College.
Community members leave messages on a chalkboard at the Good Life Center at SAS.
Arresting One’s Own
Campus arrests last spring fractured longstanding protections Yale has historically extended to student protestors.
By Megan Vaz
layout design BY ALICIA GAN
PHOTOS Courtesy of Tashroom ahsan
Tacey Hutten ‘26 was asleep inside a tent on Beinecke Plaza at 6 a.m. on April 22, when her friend shook her awake to inform her that police officers were outside the encampment. Hutten and other protesters had anticipated that they would be arrested, but not that the police would show up this early in the morning. For three days, Hutten, among hundreds of other students, had been occupying the plaza, protesting the university’s investments in weapons manufacturing amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza, which has killed over forty thousand people. They had contended with threats of arrest from the Yale Police Department for three nights, refusing administrators’ orders to disperse their encampment of over two dozen tents, where they had hosted teach-ins, artwork displays, student group performances, and mutual aid support. On the previous day, the university offered the protesters a final deal: in exchange for dispersing, organizers would be granted a meeting with two trustees of the Yale Corporation, which makes final determinations regarding university investments. The protesters turned it down.
Hundreds of students gathered around the encampment the night of April 21, linking arms to form a protective ring. A hundred voices chorused into one. Just like a tree that’s planted by the water, they sang, we shall not be moved.
Police waited until dawn the next day to announce their final dispersal warning.
As the YPD officers closed in, over fifty demonstrators awoke and assumed the same protective stance, again linking arms as they circled the Beinecke flagpole. As the demonstrators sang the protest spiritual “We Shall not be Moved,” officers arrested students in rounds, picking out a few protesters at a time as others waited to be taken. Protester Kai Padilla-Smith ’25 described how
students were made to wait shivering for over an hour as the tents were ripped down behind them.
“ It was very clearly part of the university’s continued psychological pressure on student activists. Why are you showing up at six in the morning when we were all up until three rallying to keep you away?” Hutten said. “That is where this univer sity’s resources go into—the policing and criminal ization of its own students—as well as the funding of bombs and missiles and tanks that are just deci mating Gaza.”
Hutten didn’t resist when police officers ziptied her wrists, shouldering her and forty-seven other arrestees, at least forty-four of whom were students, through the Schwarzman Center. Spectators and supporters heckled the officers and cheered for the protesters as they were loaded into Yale buses. The buses shook from the arrestees stomping, singing, and cheering pro-Palestine slo gans inside. All of the arrestees were charged with criminal misdemeanors for trespassing.
When justifying the arrests, the University pointed to protesters’ refusal to disperse and claimed that the demonstrations blocked paths to the Schwarzman Center.
“Prior to their removal from the plaza, the university spent several hours in discussions with student protestors, offering them opportunities to meet with trustees, and to avoid arrest if they left the plaza by the end of that weekend,” a university spokesperson wrote to me.
Following the arrests, the Sumud Coalition— formerly known as Occupy Beinecke, the coalition of student groups that organized the protests— has campaigned for Yale to drop the charges via social media and online petitions that have garnered thousands of signatures. While Yale cannot directly revoke the charges pressed by the state of Connecticut, it does have the power to ask the
Pro-Palestine protestors gather at an outside Beinecke Plaza.
state to do so—a move that could weigh heavily in the state’s decision.
University president Maurie McInnis has asserted that Yale has no agency in the legal system. Weeks before the hearing, she told the Yale Daily News that the hearing outcome “really isn’t in our hands.”
“I know people imagine it might be, but it’s not,” McInnis said. “Yale is not getting involved.”
The argument that Yale cannot get involved by pressuring prosecutors in the cases against its students is perplexing, given that the University ordered the protestors arrested in the first place. Beinecke Plaza is the university’s private property, so only Yale can make final calls about what legally constitutes trespassing. Yale administrators—not the Yale or New Haven police departments, the city of New Haven, nor the state of Connecticut—called on police to descend upon the students that morning.
Six months after the mass arrest, on the morning of Halloween, Hutten and forty other keffiyeh-clad students clustered inside the lobby of the New Haven Superior Court for their hearing. It was either the third or fourth hearing for most of the students, depending on whether they appeared at a virtual hearing in June. Demonstrators said that they and their lawyers pushed for continuances from previous hearings to pressure Yale into asking the state to drop the charges, a move symbolizing their arguments that the University should not have involved police and that the students should not have been charged in the first place. Yale never budged.
“The arrests were an arbitrary and abusive exercise of power that Yale knows that it has,” Hutten said. “And dropping the charges is one of the first bare minimum things that you can do in order to
start to remedy that situation.”
At the Halloween hearing, about two-thirds of the protesters agreed to a deal in which their misdemeanor criminal trespassing charges would be lowered to a lesser charge of trespass infraction for a ninety-dollar fee.
Hutten and Padilla-Smith were among the two-thirds of protesters to agree to the deal, wearied by months of litigation, anxious about their upcoming appearances in front of the university’s executive committee, and eager to focus on campus activism in support of the people of Gaza. The remaining thirteen students declined to take the deal, continuing the fight to get their charges dropped at yet another hearing in December.
I spoke to twelve alumni involved in five different civil disobedience movements at Yale over four decades. All of them expressed a belief that the administration cracked down unusually hard on the pro-divestment protesters last spring—a break from the protections the university has historically provided student protesters. It is unprecedented that students arrested en masse spend over six months in legal limbo, even more so that thirteen are still fighting charges. And over a week after the arrests on Beinecke, YPD violently arrested protesters without direct orders from administration—setting a precedent that could compromise the safety of student protesters and free expression on campus.
“It did feel strange walking around campus, feeling like I have been criminalized by my own institution,” Padilla-Smith said. “Yale likes to tout its student body as this politically active group of people that wants to make a difference in the world, but then when you try to actually align yourself with those values, they punish you.”
encampment
A second encampment was erected on Cross Campus.
Student activists have carried a unique status throughout history precisely because they are students. Those attending elite institutions like Yale benefit from their association with powerful institutions that have long protected them from harsh recourse in the criminal justice system, allowing them to wield their privilege as a tool for change.
“It’s important, the level of privilege these students collectively—not individually—are able to summon in terms of attention from the media and historically better treatment by police,” said Beth Coleman ’91, a former anti-apartheid protester who is now a professor at the University of Toronto. In the hours after the pro-Palestine Yale students were arrested, the story made headlines in The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, CNN, and dozens of other news outlets.
“These are the people who are credible and can risk getting bad grades, but they don’t have to risk losing their jobs,” Coleman continued. “They’re able to stand up in a principled way for things that need to change in the world.”
What distinguishes civil disobedience from other forms of peaceful protest is the act of breaking rules and welcoming consequences—legal, academic, or professional—to emphasize the gravity of a cause on a public stage. Even so, supporters of Yale’s arrestees have stressed that the University has a duty to protect its students from the potential violence of policing and to uphold their freedom of expression—even when administrators, trustees, and Yale Corporation members disagree with their actions and words.
Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Greta LaFleur, who serves as an attorney for dozens of the students arrested last spring, said she believes that the university’s choice to involve the police to quell the protests later empowered officers to crack down on students, even without direct orders from Yale administrators.
“I don’t think there’s any coincidence whatsoever that the arrests were broadly non-violent on the part of police behavior on April 22, but the arrests on May 1 were brutal,” LaFleur said. “That’s what happens when you bring cops on campus to do the enforcement of disciplinary procedures or of behavioral policies.”
After April’s mass arrests on Beinecke Plaza, police confrontations with protesters had momentarily calmed, despite continuing demonstrations and the construction of a second encampment on Cross Campus, which police dismantled and dispersed after three days without further arrests.
On May 1, however, a group of demonstrators marched around campus, delivering speeches and chanting outside of then-President Peter Salovey’s home and the YPD station. After a YPD lieutenant warned protesters to disperse from the station over the speaker of his police car, protest marshal Craig Birckhead-Morton ’24 and the other marshals directed the protesters to leave, ushering them
back to central campus.
“Obviously, we took this warning seriously,” Birckhead-Morton said. “The police were caught off-guard. I think they really thought that they had really defeated us, so they were surprised.”
But as the group approached the walkway between Yale Law School and Sterling Memorial Library, Birckhead-Morton, who was arrested as part of the encampment a week prior, was confused to see YPD cars waiting by Beinecke Plaza. A police car suddenly drove directly into the crossway to block their path.
Unlike the April 22 arrestees, no one had joined this demonstration thinking they were risking arrest. Unlike those who had been arrested en masse, they hadn’t received training on handling police interactions during nonviolent protests. It was BirckheadMorton’s job as a marshal to ensure protesters’ safety. But when Birckhead-Morton approached Lieutenant Chris Halstead—the same officer who ordered demonstrators to leave the YPD station—to ask how the protesters were supposed to disperse, Halstead grabbed him by the arm, pulling him towards the police car. It was Birckhead-Morton’s twenty-second birthday, and he had been holding his birthday cake.
“I think it pissed them off that we had been able to sustain ourselves after everything that had happened,” Birckhead-Morton said. “The crowd [was] outraged, because why are you arresting people who are keeping the students safe?”
Protesters crowded around the car as another student marshal repeatedly asked Halstead why Birckhead-Morton was being arrested. An officer placed her under arrest. One person grabbed Birckhead-Morton’s other arm to tug him away from Halstead, who was eventually able to handcuff him. From the window of the police car, BirckheadMorton watched as another officer held a protester from the New Haven community against a squad car. A second officer broke through protesters and
The shanties of the anti-apartheid protest on Beinecke, late 1980s. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Juliver ‘90 for the Yale Alumni Magazine.
tackled another New Havener. Chief of Police Anthony Campbell ’95 DIV ’09, aided by three other officers, kneeled on the protester’s back for over ninety seconds. The protester emerged with a bleeding nose and cut face.
“It seemed like the cops were kind of on a bit of a power trip,” said Rebecca Wessel ’24, a student organizer who was present for the May 1 arrests. “And maybe wanting to assert power after they had seen how many people were rallying against them at the YPD office.”
Duane Lovello, Head of Public Safety, released a statement on the May 1 arrests on August 26. An external review of the incident, it disclosed, found that probable cause supported each arrest, but “the arrests taken in total did not follow best practices,” including on crowd control and the disproportionate force used in one of the arrests.
In an email exchange dated May 4 obtained by student journalist Theia Chatelle ’25, YPD Assistant Chief of Police Von Narcisse wrote to Campbell that the pro-Palestine demonstrators “are pathetic and sad,” going on to criticize the protests as a “sad attempt to attack Yale” that is unrelated to the events in Israel and Gaza.
“I agree 100 percent. There [sic] actions are like a small group of vandals and criminals rather than protesters,” Campbell replied.
In response to a request for comment, Campbell did not answer inquiries regarding the email exchange or the events of April 22 and May 1. He confirmed that the YPD advisory committee, a civilian review board created to ensure police accountability, is no longer active and said that the university is “considering refinements to its scope of advisory responsibilities.” When Birckhead-Morton was a student, he was part of the committee.
the occupy beinecke encampment drew in part from one of the most famous instances of student civil disobedience in Yale history: the anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s, in which students fought for Yale to divest from companies with holdings in South Africa. On Instagram, posts that included side-byside photos from the pro-Palestine demonstrations and the anti-apartheid protests garnered thousands of likes. Yet alumni told me that the details of the arrests and administrative responses at the two protests differed, revealing an increasing hostility toward student protesters last spring.”
For ten days in April 1986, Matthew Countryman ’86 and about twenty other Yale students slept atop soggy newspapers, packed together inside rickety wood and aluminum forts on Beinecke Plaza.
After a year of rising dissent on campus, the anti-apartheid protesters set up a cluster of structures, aiming to resemble the poor and crowded urban shanties where Black South Africans were forced to live by the country’s white minority. Like the pro-Palestine protesters who erected the Beinecke
encampment, the Coalition Against Apartheid activists never asked the university for permission to pitch up the shanties.
“University investment was the rationale for our violation of the university policy. In other words, the university was pursuing immoral policies in South Africa, and that gave us the right,” Countryman told me this September.
The organizers of Beinecke Plaza’s newly erected “Winnie Mandela City” deliberately chose April 4th, 1986, for the shanties’ debut. It was the 18-year anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. It was also the weekend that the Yale Corporation would meet in person. Each day that week, hundreds gathered for rallies protesting Yale’s investments in companies doing business in South Africa.
The Winnie Mandela City first came down ten days after it went up. The Yale Police Department had given a final warning for student protesters to vacate the plaza by midnight. Similar to the events of April 22, 2024, arrests happened early the next morning. About three dozen Yale Police officers descended on the plaza at dawn to arrest seventy-two students and four New Haven community members. Countryman chose to go limp as officers dragged him away, pleading with them to not take him from his home.
Police loaded students into buses and took them to the city jail, where they were then booked and quickly released.
The first round of arrests in April 1986 drew massive backlash from public figures in local and state politics. Within the Yale community, distaste was even stronger.
Democrats from the Connecticut House of Representatives even proposed a bill to revoke Yale’s charter in the state constitution over the arrests; House minority leader Irving Stolberg declared that “Yale has clamped down in an arbitrary and arrogant manner… rather than encouraging dialogue.”
One hundred and fifty-six faculty members signed a statement expressing disapproval of Yale’s arrests of its students. It asserted that the university was guilty of “breaking an important tradition of trust among all members of the University community with regard to the free expression of divergent viewpoints.”
The outrage produced quick results. A faculty committee, convened by administrators, announced that the university had to allow student activists to reconstruct the Winnie Mandela City and let it remain until the start of June. The permission was contingent on the shanties not preventing others’ use of the plaza as a thoroughfare or a space for other gatherings.
In the following three days, two more rounds of arrests occurred at other apartheid-related, pro-divestment demonstrations.
Protesters were charged with misdemeanors, but about a week after the arrests, prosecutors exchanged those charges for infractions on their own accord. This time, prosecutors offered arrestees a deal: plead not-guilty or donate twenty-five dollars to a charity organization and drop the infractions immediately. Otherwise, the state would automatically enter
a no-contest plea in which infractions would be dropped in no sooner than thirteen months given no further legal troubles.
“With one stroke of a pen, [prosecutors] got rid of all those cases,” former anti-apartheid protester Doug Carver ’88 said. In contrast, he pointed to the unusually protracted legal process for the pro-divestment protesters arrested last spring. “Seven months, that takes you from one school year to the next, one academic year to the next. There was definitely nothing like that.”
Pro-Palestine protesters not only contended with a longer legal process than anti-apartheid protesters, but also tighter restrictions from administrators. While former university president Bart Giamatti told students they could build shanties elsewhere on campus, negotiations over the potential reinstatement of last spring’s encampments have never occurred. Instead, Yale adopted guidelines that outright banned unregistered student groups like the Sumud Coalition from hosting outdoor gatherings, though daytime demonstrations and teach-ins have continued this semester. The anti-apartheid shanties stayed for another two years with sanction after their inception, only coming down in the summer of 1988 when a disgruntled alum set them ablaze.
Coleman, who had protested apartheid, said she felt that despite administrators’ “shockingly brittle” initial response of multiple rounds of arrest, they respected the practice and history of nonviolent protest. Countryman agreed that he did not feel personal hostility toward students from University Secretary John Wilkinson ’60, the administrator in charge of addressing student protests.
“I thought we had a very positive relationship, and it didn’t change when we did get arrested. In that sense, [Wilkinson] didn’t get angry with us. His commitment to maintaining dialogue and negotiation very much remained in place,” Countryman said. Their relationship later grew into a friendship with Wilkinson that persists in the present; the former administrator attended Countryman’s wedding years after his graduation.
Meanwhile, current Yale protesters have felt that administrators openly express animosity toward them. Hutten pointed to a faculty-wide email that Yale College Dean of Students Pericles Lewis sent shortly after the arrests, in which he characterized protests as increasingly dangerous due to “non-Yale protesters with a known history of violent confrontation with the police.” He urged faculty to ask that students stop associating with them. In a statement to the Yale Daily News, Lewis later apologized for insinuating that the protests would become violent without evidence and said he erred in repeating mere speculation.
“It has been made very clear to us that this campus isn’t for us,” Hutten said, “and that we are believed to be the people who are making this campus unsafe.”
The breakdown of trust and communication between protesters last semester stands out in the history of student protests at Yale.
Arrests during peaceful demonstrations were rare under the tenure of former university president Kingman Brewster, who sometimes spoke out on high-profile political issues and even participated in some protests against the Vietnam War during his presidency. In 1970, when several prominent mem bers of the Black Panther Party were charged with murder in New Haven and student activists gathered in hundreds to protest, Brewster criticized police for inflaming racial tensions. For a “May Day” demon stration on the New Haven Green against the trial, Brewster coordinated with student activists, residen tial college staff, and faculty to open up the residen tial colleges and dining halls for thousands of outside protesters.
Richard Levin, who served as university presi dent from 1993 to 2013, told me he had a personal distaste for responding to student protests with arrests. Police involvement only occurred under uni versity orders in cases where students occupied the inside of buildings overnight. Other protest-related arrests, often related to pro-labor activism, occurred primarily at the hands of New Haven police for demonstrations that blocked city streets.
“Remembering that demonstrators are our stu dents is one important facet. And drawing clear lines about what is permissible expression and what isn’t is another,” Levin said. “It’s only when their right to express their opinions is disruptive and prevents oth ers from using university facilities or from going to class, or expressing their views, that it’s a problem.”
In the early 2000s, the undergraduate organization Students Against Sweatshops protested in support of Yale joining the Workers’ Rights Consortium, a monitoring organization for overseas factories. Levin disagreed with their demands, but he discussed students’ concerns during their demonstrations on Beinecke Plaza, even hosting a teach-in on labor conditions and international markets. When Students Against Sweatshops set up their own overnight encampments on Beinecke Plaza, Levin said he never felt the need to involve police, as the encampment didn’t block the flow of traffic or disrupt daily life on campus. Police officers were present, but from a distance and inside their cars. According to Abigail Balbale ’04, a former Students Against Sweatshops protester, they only approached periodically to warn protesters about the rain or to recommend they eat and stay warm.
“In retrospect, he was treating us like adults who he can have a conversation with, and that was treating us with a certain level of respect that I feel is less common in the world today,” said Balbale, who is now a professor at New York University. “So many universities, including Yale and NYU, have doubled down on their representation of the protests as violent and dangerous in a way that further undermines that trust.”
today, countryman is a bespectacled faculty member at the University of Michigan, where he is the chair of the African American and African Studies department. As a former student protester and now-educator, he believes that arrests only worsen campus environments, universities’ reputations, and students’ overall well-being.
“I could see that there were lessons learned from the experience in the anti-apartheid movement, and the university seemed to be applying those to grapple with students around issues, whether it’s pro-labor protests, or the climate protests, or whatever else,” Countryman said. “So it’s striking that they have abandoned that—they’ve gone back to arrests.”
The act of deploying police to respond to nonviolent student activities sets a dangerous precedent, Greta LaFleur argued.
“I don’t think it is in any way ever safe to bring law enforcement onto college campuses as a means of enforcing college policy ever,” LaFleur said. “And there’s a really clear example of why you shouldn’t do that, and that example is Kent State.”
According to meeting minutes from a faculty senate meeting held three days after the April 22 arrests on Beinecke Plaza, Dean Lewis told faculty he had lost his control and authority over the situation on Saturday evening, when two counter-protesters entered heated confrontations with protesters after attempting to film them. Police were a necessary response to escalating tension, Lewis said. But some faculty members pointed out that the arrival of police officers themselves to a nonviolent protest caused the escalation and a feeling of inevitable conflict.
“In fifty years, [Yale] will celebrate us for being activists and standing up for what we believe in… the same ways they celebrate the anti-apartheid movement,” Padilla-Smith told me. “But in the moment, we’re criminalized, excluded from meetings, basically rushed out of the university as fast as we can be.”
On May 4, 1970, four students attending a largely peaceful protest against the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio were shot to death by members of the state’s National Guard. The university had called in the National Guard after a series of rowdy demonstrations around campus earlier in the week. Nine other students were injured, including one person who became paralyzed for life.
The Kent State example represents an extreme, but the potential for any degree of violence when calling in law enforcement cannot be dismissed. At multiple other universities, the police presence at recent pro-Palestine protests has endangered current students, with police beating and pepper spraying protesters and student journalists. At Columbia University, an officer’s gun fired unintentionally during an interaction with student protesters.
Yale has taken steps to address the arrests of the spring, allowing students to meet with one trustee. The university has also changed its guidelines around free expression to restrict outdoor and overnight gatherings, chalk use, and postering. Yale has hired “free expression facilitators,” who a university spokesperson said are responsible for “supporting speaker events, rallies, vigils, gatherings, protests, and counterprotests.” This semester, the free expression facilitators have stood to the side and observed demonstrations and teach-ins on Cross Campus and Beinecke Plaza, some of which Yale agreed to sanction.
Yet many of the students arrested last fall continue to feel cast aside. When the Sumud Coalition was granted a meeting with one trustee in September, the Yale Corporation denied all of the group’s initial terms for meeting—including allowing students who were arrested or facing disciplinary charges to attend—in an email to organizers.
Hutten and Padilla-Smith are still students at Yale, where they continue to be involved with teach-ins, campaigns, and rallies held by the Sumud Coalition. They said that their relationship with the school has changed for the worse.
“For student activists, how are you supposed to attend classes and build relationships with professors, and invest in this university when you also have cops on every corner?” Hutten asked. “And then walking to class, you see the cop who arrested you.”
Outside of activist work and academics, Hutten avoids spending more time on campus than she needs to. Her trust in the university to engage in productive conversation has eroded. ∎
Megan Vaz is a senior in Pierson College.
Protestors hang a Palestinian flag on Cross Campus.
Payday: A Sestina
For Balbir Singh Sodhi
Mornings spent always the same: your lips forming a line Like the horizon squeezing itself against the naked land until drops Of blue & violet bleed out. Roadrunners’ twiggy limbs casting Zigzagging shadows. Headlights blinking awake on rolling hills. Your face Ripe with the morning cold. Bombay Sapphire––one shot Snaking down your throat. Then prepare to run
the gift of a green card. Mama’s tears run Through glitchy WhatsApp calls some days, the line Cutting any hope of assurance. Some days, she takes a shot At asking a question. “Coming home?” Her eyes drop & then you swallow. The selfie screen a blank face Of arrogance. Mama shaking her head. She cast
Away your dreams for her comfort. In Jalandhar, you cast Pennies into ponds before your flight. Some run Of luck that Mama didn’t kill you at the gate. Still face Her reappearing questions each morning. A line Of big burly motorbikers sliding you pennies for drops Of espresso, which you call justification. You took one shot
& payoff’s late. But Mama doesn’t see the flu shots & Hondas. The interstate wind combing your scalp. Casts & crutches for you & you & you. Mama doesn’t see the desert drop
Uneven sands. Slithering canals. Little runs
Of water spilling into the front door. Doesn’t see the mop become a fishing line
Like in Jalandhar with Papa. Carp & catfish. The clock face
Fading away. The engine sputters. Mama doesn’t see you face
The pickup truck. The window rolled down, the man ready to take a shot
Five times mumbling & rumbling various lines
That the Gods in his head cast
Him to say. Mama doesn’t stop your blood from running
Down the front door. She doesn’t hear your body drop
Onto the hard tile floors. Mama doesn’t see you die. She’ll hear CNN drop
Your mispronounced name. Your face
Burnt like a ghost onto her TV & his & theirs, run
For the first time from America back to India. They will show one shot
Of your Chevron. Mama will see its neat shelves & clean tiles. Customers will cast
You into a shrine & Mama will visit it when she lands, lips a quivering line.
Mama will face God & you will respond instead. Tear drops & blood lines
Traded for something Mama will not see: that to run to America was to cast a line & wait
For your shot––stronger than the one that Mama will blame.
–Yash Wadwekar
Off the Books
Connecticut’s lack of homeschooling regulations has sparked concerns about abuse and neglect–but some parents say state oversight would violate their freedom to educate their children.
By Kelly Kong
OnE SPRING AFTERNOON, Amber
L eblanc’s fifth-grade daughter, Bella, came home in tears. Bella, who has dyslexia, had just met with her first special-ed teacher at her Chesire public elementary school. The teacher told her that whenever she sees her older sister Elisabeth, an avid bookworm, reading, she should be reading, too. “To give that task to Bella is so overwhelming and so inconsiderate,” LeBlanc remarked.
It took three years of arguing with administrators for LeBlanc to get a formal ADHD and dyslexia diagnosis for Bella. When LeBlanc brought up the problem to Bella’s teacher, she remembers the teacher saying that Bella simply needed to “try harder.”
After LeBlanc resorted to hiring an external tutor, the school claimed credit for Bella’s progress. It wasn’t until LeBlanc discontinued the tutoring service that the administration finally recognized Bella’s decline and need for individualized support. But by then, it was too late.
Bella’s struggles in school began to disrupt her social life and self-esteem. The tears eventually devolved into tantrums. “She would come home and have insane anger outbursts,” said LeBlanc. “This was happening several times a week.”
The second LeBlanc pulled Bella out of school and started homeschooling, the outbursts went away.
LeBlanc is not alone in her choice to homeschool. According to a 2023 Washington Post analysis, homeschooling
has become America’s fastest-increasing form of education. Connecticut’s neighboring state, New York, saw a 103 percent increase in homeschooling in 2023 since the 2017-18 school year. Though the Connecticut government does not keep official records, The Education Association of Christian Homeschoolers estimated that the state’s homeschooling numbers doubled from twenty-two thousand in 2019 to between forty and forty-five thousand by 2021.
“The steady increase in homeschoolers has been happening for a very long time, with a clear surge around early COVID,” said Diane Connors, founder and president of the Connecticut Homeschool Network (CHN).
This independence from a larger institution is part of what has allowed Tony’s classes to continue for so long; activities hosted by the New Haven Pride Center, for example, have been hampered since the nonprofit lost its 501(c)(3) status for a few months this year after failing to file tax returns. Tony’s group, on the other hand, does not rely directly on institutional support; he offers the Saturday morning meetings pro bono, paying for the craft supplies out-of-pocket. Locations in and around New Haven allow him to use their spaces at no expense for him or the families who attend.
This surge in homeschooling in the state comes at a time of declining public school enrollment. The New Haven school district has seen a 12.65
percent decrease in enrollment in the last decade and projects an additional 1,740 student decrease over the next one (out of the current 18,877).
Yet Connecticut’s unusual homeschooling policy makes it impossible to measure exactly how many parents have turned to homeschooling for their children. Connecticut is a “no regulation” state, offering zero requirements or oversight on its homeschooling families. Families are not required to notify the school district or state government when they pull their children from school.
Connecticut General Statute §10184 requires all parents in the state to “instruct [their children] or cause them to be instructed” in a list of subjects, including basic literacy, geography, arithmetic, and United States history and citizenship. “But how, when, where, and with what materials is strictly left up to the parents,” says Attorney Deborah Stevenson, founder of the National Home Education Legal Defense (NHELD).
Certain school districts in many of Connecticut’s neighboring states, such as Rhode Island and Massachusetts, ask for curriculum plan portfolios to demonstrate homeschoolers’ academic progress. Many also require time-totime in-person evaluations, standardized testing scores, and proof of qualification from parents. But Connecticut does not require any such proof of instruction, let alone proficiency.
This lack of oversight has concerned lawmakers and child advocates, who argue
that it allows cases of abuse or neglect to slip through the cracks under the guise of homeschooling. Yet parents like LeBlanc believe homeschooling properly educates children whose learning style marginalizes them in public school systems. As the debate continues, Connecticut’s lack of records and regulations means information on families’ actual homeschooling practices remains murky.
II.
To MANY HOMESCHOOLING PARENTS, quality educational experiences go beyond academics. “I’m sure my daughter could learn to read and write, totally fine,” New Haven homeschooling parent Julia Werth says. On a typical day, Werth spends at most thirty to forty minutes of structured learning time with her pre-Kindergarten daughter. I asked if she
chose homeschooling because she was concerned about the New Haven Public Schools’ recent funding deficit. She shakes her head.
“I would be fine sending her to Nathan Hale [School],” she responds, referencing the nearest NHPS elementary institution. But the reason Werth keeps her daughter at home isn’t centered on dissatisfaction with public schools. She likes that homeschooling allows her individualization, more family time, more sleep, more play, less stress regarding testing—the list goes on.
For Katie Self, who homeschools her second grader and pre-kindergartener, family is a priority. “I want to raise my children and be an active part of their lives,” she says. Homeschooling allows Self to cultivate Christian religious and moral values, uninterrupted by routine external schooling. “We love God, so that is
consistent throughout our whole life. We love learning, so that is consistent through everything we do.”
LeBlanc’s older daughter, 12-yearold Elisabeth, left traditional schooling in seventh grade. She was previously homeschooled from kindergarten to first grade. Elisabeth is looking to study neuroscience at Yale to better understand her grandmothers’ Alzheimer’s diagnoses.
Elisabeth participated in AGP Academically Gifted Program—throughout elementary school. In her experience, however, AGP mostly involved sitting in the back of the classroom on a computer, learning material she couldn’t share with her classmates. “I think that it then taught her really to zone out. She dissociates a lot,” said LeBlanc. Her school denied LeBlanc’s proposal to let her skip a grade.
Elisabeth is enthusiastic about her transition back to homeschooling. “It’s
the feeling that you have this tiny bunk bed you share with someone: that’s how school feels like. And then homeschool is this giant queen bed,” said Elisabeth, widening her arms to gesture at the immense freedom.
Today, LeBlanc feels very strongly about schooling: “The public school system only works for a very small percentage of children.” Whether in special-ed or gifted programs, schools leave behind the kids stuck on the periphery of their arbitrary “normal.”
Jenn Massameno of Wallingford, who homeschools her two teenage sons, Sam and Max, credits this failure partially to the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which began in 2010 to increase consistency in K-12 ELA and math education throughout the United States. The initiative began with a simple idea: to create one set of academic expectations for all students, ensuring identical and consistent levels of achievement for all. Common Core provides outlines and descriptions of skills students should have at each grade level. Its top-down, standardized approach, however, limits a teacher’s ability to adapt to student needs and leaves many at a loss.
“[Common Core] was saying that we’re just going to teach in the middle. The kids who are lower? They’re going to get the extra help. The kids that are higher? Too bad for them,” explained Massameno.
Massameno, a former public school special-ed teacher, suspected from a young age that Sam had dyslexia and her younger son, Max, had ADHD. Public schools offer free support for such special needs. Yet, after observing the under-resourced and overstrained special-ed services in Wallingford Public Schools, Massameno opted for homeschooling. “There was no way that I would ever send my kid to that school.”
According to a 2023 U.S. State Department of Education report, Connecticut sends 6.3 percent of its students out of district schools into specialized programs for children with disabilities, the most of any state. While specialized schools certainly can help students with accommodations succeed, the high outplacement rate may also demonstrate school districts’ inability to adequately support special-ed students in integrated school settings.
“It was just really disheartening,” said Massameno.
III.
For Many FamilIES, homeschooling goes beyond its lexicon—“home” and “school.” From building original curriculums to seeking outside activities, parents often find themselves doing far more than moving a public school structure into a private household.
Massameno explains that one of the most challenging aspects of homeschooling is finances. “There’s no way that we would be able to do this if we could not live on the one income that my husband makes,” Massameno explains.
When Massameno and her husband were married, Massameno chose to stay home with the kids, resulting in a series of financial decisions that enabled her family to homeschool: they purchased a smaller house, which they could afford on one salary; they drove used cars until the cars died.
Chione Giacomarro, who homeschools her two children, Kamy and Caden, recognizes the inherent privilege of being able to homeschool. Most families can only choose it, she says, “because they have the resources to be able to accommodate that.”
Homeschooling gets expensive. Many aspects of the vibrant practice— extracurricular sports, art activities, frequent museum trips—come with a price. Membership for homeschooling co-op groups, where families come together once or twice weekly to offer enrichment activities and community, can also be costly. Durbin’s friend who homeschools in Oklahoma receives a state tax write-off for homeschooling her kids. Connecticut, however, does not and cannot provide this benefit, as it does not keep track of its homeschoolers.
In many homeschooling families, at least one parent will have to fully take on the role of a teacher, dropping a full income, or, in Werth’s case, working part-time outside of regular homeschool schedules. More often than not, the majority of homeschooling work falls to mothers, who make up 82 percent of stay-at-home parents in the U.S.
IV.
CoNNECTICUT ATTEMPTED to pass a bill increasing homeschooling oversight in 2019. It failed after eliciting protests from homeschooling advocates like Connors and Stevenson. The
proposed legislature first arose after Matthew Tirado, a non-verbal autistic teen, died in early 2017 after suffering abuse and neglect at the hands of his mother. Tirado and his sister had been out of school for months before his death. Hartford Public Schools, Tirado’s district, had filed reports to the Department of Children and Families alleging potential abuse in the household, but no response took hold. Ostensibly, Tirado was just homeschooled, and lawfully so.
Later that year, Sarah Eagan, Connecticut’s acting Child Advocate, argued for improved protection for Connecticut’s homeschooled children in a report. “There must be a safety net to protect children who are victims of abuse and neglect from being withdrawn from the safe harbor and visibility of school and removed to a less or even potentially non-visible environment,” Eagan wrote. She proposed that parents “apply” to homeschool their children, reviewing a student’s truancy and absence records and reporting any concerns of abuse or neglect to the DCF ahead of time.
“In a public school, if children are absent, they will send truancy officers to the home, and there is a point where they will get the Department of Children and Families involved if a child is truant,” said Mary Gunsalus, Lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center and head of Child Study Center School. “But how is that regulated in a homeschooling environment?” she asks.
It isn’t. Connecticut General Statute §10-184 explicitly requires children under the age of eighteen to regularly attend a public school, unless “the person having control of such child is able to show that the child is elsewhere receiving equivalent instruction in the studies taught in the public schools.” Without governmental supervision, however, no one can be one hundred percent certain of the “equivalency” of instruction in a home.
NHPS explicitly states that the district does not provide “any support in educating the child” once they give up their seat in school. This means no access to free coursework, technology, special-ed programs, nor mental health and counseling services that all public schools mandate. For low-income families, it also means losing access to subsidized meals and after-school care.
But for many homeschooling families, the purpose of homeschooling is to
provide an educational experience not equivalent to that of public schools.
Many homeschooling parents make the case that truants are not homeschooled, as they are not being educated. They argue that abuse and neglect, too, are problems separate from at-home education that need to be addressed without infringing upon the constitutional rights of homeschooling parents. According to Connors, many homeschoolers left traditional schools to escape purported bullying, physical abuse, and threats of violence against students. In her daughter Sophia Connors’ opposition to Connecticut’s 2019 bill, she asked lawmakers to “leave homeschoolers alone and to take care of the real problems that they have yet to fix.”
For Attorney Stevenson, who founded NHELD, the battle against increased homeschooling oversight hinges on preserving parental rights to direct their child’s education from state interference. “Did we, the people … grant to the government the right or the power to grant or take away our inalienable rights in the manner they propose to do so? Then the conversation, as a matter of law, must end there,” said Stevenson.
Some homeschooling families in Connecticut say they find the state’s lack of oversight crucial to their practice. LeBlanc finds the minimal requirements to be “nice,” as it enables her full freedom in her children’s education. Werth and her husband chose homeschooling partly because they wanted to detach learning from the rigid standardization of testing.
Homeschooling is not an “anti-public school” agenda, said Connors. “It is the idea of facing the truth of where the public schools are at, and not being willing to give the schools the time to fix their issues. Your child gets one childhood and it isn’t to be used as [the school’s] experiment, because it’s clearly failing.”
V.
AMELIA DILWORTH ’23 was homeschooled from preschool through ninth grade. Dilworth grew up in a homeschooling group, where parents brought their kids of similar age together twice a week, taking turns teaching different subjects. Through it, Dilworth experienced not only what it feels like to belong in a community, but also how to construct one from the ground up. “You’re in an environment
everyone kind of comes together to build, right? So, it’s much more than just going to that empty shell of a school building, and saying bye at the end of the day.”
Dilworth reflected that as a young child, watching her homeschooling community grow also meant witnessing a group of women—her and her fellow homeschoolers’ moms—take agency and create a community filled with learning and flourishing. “I think that was really good and healthy for my idea of what women can do,” she explained. “Together, we decide what we’re doing, not some unknown group telling us what we’re doing. We, as a collective, make choices.”
But the freedom that homeschooled families receive also presents its uncertainties.
When asked about what she envisions for Sam and Max’s futures, Massameno smiled and responded: “You’ve hit my weak spot.” She knows, however, that her number one priority is for her sons to be happy. “That is the goal. How they get there? I just—I want to help them get there, and I don’t know the best way,” she explained, adding, “and I’m not good with uncertainty.”
LeBlanc hopes to seek out new STEM resources for Elisabeth. After her previous homeschooling group disintegrated, she wants to find a new group for Elisabeth. She may even consider founding one herself. ∎
Kelly Kong is a first-year in Morse College.
Jazz, Above Ground
New Haven has always been a jazz city.
By Zoya Haq
I’m right in the swing of things. Literally—in the swing of it all. The ups and downs of the melodies, the croon of the trumpet, the thrum of the bass, and the echoes of the drums. It’s a Tuesday night, but New Haven’s Cafe Nine is alive. Flanked by posters advertising Coca-Cola products and maps of the city’s historic downtown, local guitarist Ed Cherry is soulfully strumming on the stage, playing a slow rendition of “Peace” by Horace Silver. He’s flanked by his ensemble: together, they form a trio of the bass, the drums, and Cherry on the strings. His eyes are closed. The crowd in front of him is enraptured. The room is silent, save for the music.
Tonight is one of Cafe Nine’s signature jazz shows, held in partnership with the New Haven Jazz Underground. Located on State Street, Cafe Nine hosts live music shows seven days a week with the goal of supporting emerging artists in the greater New Haven area. Twice per month, on Tuesday nights, local jazz musicians take the stage at the 34-yearold venue.
Here—alongside other local bars like The Cannon and Three Sheets—the spirit and collaborative energy that have defined New Haven’s jazz music scene since the turn of the 20th century remain alive.
11.
New Haven has always been a jazz city. Born out of the New Orleans swing and blues scene, jazz was originally a mechanism of expression for New Orleans’
Black community. With the advent of sound recording, it spread rapidly across the South in the 1920s and 1930s.
During World War I, industry and job market growth along the Eastern seaboard sparked a large wave of Black immigration from the American South to the Dixwell and Oak Street neighborhoods of New Haven. With the Great Migration, the jazz music tradition moved North, settling along the Eastern coastline in industrial hubs like New Haven.
Many new city dwellers found work at the local New Haven arms manufacturer, Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Amidst this revitalized industrial landscape, jazz clubs began popping up across New Haven, serving as an outlet for finding community and letting loose after a long day’s work.
New Haven’s first club, The Monterey, opened its doors in 1936. Many others soon followed: Dinkie’s, Golden Gate, The Playback, The Recorder, The Foundry Cafe, The Democratic Club, and the Musicians’ Club. Most were located along Dixwell Avenue in historic downtown New Haven. From the beginning, jazz in the city was collaborative, fueled by an appreciation for the shared physical space of Dixwell Avenue and the community-orientation inherent to the genre.
Eventually, both local and national names would come to consider Elm City their stage. Alongside artists like John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Duke Ellington—who would often stop to perform in New Haven between Boston and
New York while on tour—local artists, like the Buster Brothers, Reginald Jackson, and Allen “Rubbs” Wilson, fueled and fed the jazz scene in New Haven.
Yet by the 1990s, this scene was growing smaller. Throughout the 1980s, the majority of the clubs along Dixwell had shut their doors due to bankruptcy, as well as a series of drug-related busts at clubs like the Foundry Cafe. Many New Haven musicians began moving to New York in search of greater opportunities.
Today, Dixwell Avenue looks different. Former clubs are boarded up; “For Sale” signs populate the street. The building that used to house the heart and soul of New Haven jazz, the
Cafe Nine’s New Haven Jazz Underground.
Monterey, is now a distant memory— peeling crimson paint, graffiti tags, and wooden beams cover up what was once a national jazz hub.
Conscious of this history and desperate to keep New Haven jazz alive, organizations like Jazz Haven, founded in 1996, and the New Haven Jazz Underground, founded in 2006, began working to preserve the spirit and legacy of the genre in the city.
Jazz Haven is a not-for-profit organization that organizes jazz festivals and listening events around New Haven, such as weekly jazz listening nights at the Institute Library on Chapel Street.
Meanwhile, according to its founder, Nick Di Maria, the New Haven Jazz Underground’s goal is to “preserve and flourish jazz culture” by hosting weekly jazz shows around the city. 111.
Di Maria, a musician himself, started playing the trumpet in 1994.
To put it simply, he said, he instantly “fell in love” with the instrument—and with jazz.
While he grew up just outside of New Haven, he visited often to see his uncle and fell in love with the city.
After college, Di Maria decided to settle in New Haven to pursue a career as a music educator. While he didn’t expect to plant roots in Connecticut, he ended up investing in the vibrant music scene and became a local teacher. “The rest was history,” he reflected.
Di Maria sees jazz as a lifeline for himself and for the city. To him, jazz in a smaller town like New Haven fosters a strong sense of community. “Philly, Wilmington, Tampa, Pittsburgh, they’re all similar cases to New Haven. You don’t have to be from New York to grow up with this music, to grow up in a jazz city,” Di Maria said. “The Underground is trying to preserve that spirit, trying to keep that idea going that jazz doesn’t have to just thrive in a major metropolitan area. It could be somewhere like your own town, you know.”
The Underground defines itself as a “grassroots, community-based organization” that hosts clinics, shows, and jam sessions with locally and nationally renowned musicians at venues like Cafe Nine, The Cannon, and Three Sheets multiple times a month. Traditional event series like Tuesday Night Jazz at Cafe Nine fuel a symbiotic relationship between local musicians and the Underground, who count on the
Underground to find gigs within the New Haven area, as well as between musicians and the greater New Haven community.
Back at Cafe Nine, Di Maria introduces Ed Cherry’s performance.
“New Haven is a jazz city, through and through,” Di Maria says. “We’ve got to keep that alive. Thank you to Ed for coming out and performing here tonight. A true jazz legend.” 1v.
Ed Cherry was born in New Haven.
He moved to New York in 1978 to play guitar for jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie for 14 years. After Gillespie’s death in 1993, he began his solo career. On stage, Cherry is suave, cool, and collected. His guitar is like an extension of self, a phantom limb. When he’s performing, he and his instrument are one.
The crowd at Cafe Nine this October evening feels familiar. It’s clear that many audience members know one another; they catch up over a beer at the bar as Cherry and his band play on stage. Warm lights flicker as the crowd murmurs.
After the show, a line of people queue up to share a word with him. Some are old friends; some are fans; some are fellow musicians inspired by his craft.
The Cannon’s New Haven Jazz Underground.
“I’m a guitar player, too,” a middle-aged, bespectacled man tells Cherry. “I just got back from picking up my daughter from school, man, but I knew I had to make it here before the show ended.”
Other audience members chime in, nudging their way toward Cherry, who, at 6-foot-5, towers over the crowd. “Great show, Ed!” “What a talent.” “Nice to see you, man.”
Cherry’s mastery of the strings, to be frank, intimidates me. Watching him play, I’m catapulted back to mornings spent on my childhood bedroom floor, plucking away at my Yamaha acoustic in my desperate yearning to translate my 15-yearold thoughts into music form. I plucked and strummed and tapped my finger against the body of its bronzed wood on the daily. I never got very good. Cherry’s playing—the dynamics of it, the soul— contains deep emotion and reflection. The music he plays is alive.
I muster up the courage to get a word in. “Awesome show,” I say. “I’ve been learning guitar for a few years now. You’re a master.” Cherry smiles warmly, nods. “That’s great.” He coughs, turns. “Keep it up.” Then he walks to the bar, sits down alongside the audience members—friends, family, and community members—waiting for him, and orders himself a drink. ∎
Zoya Haq is a sophomore in Saybrook College.
Top: Cafe Nine’s New Haven Jazz Underground.
Bottom: The Cannon’s New Haven Jazz Underground.
Gee Willikers!
ACROSS
21 Egg carton?
22 Video game with a trans protagonist
24 Depression-era org.
25 Personal pronoun 27 Shop tool
28 Abandon the old you, in a sense
29 What the CROWN Act protects
33 Breaks free from the rat race
34 “Gee willikers!”
35 Corporate complex
36 Prevent friction, maybe
Altar words
Web structure
Knavish sort
Designer Michael
Low-lying landform 51 “You’re telling me!” 53 Amulets used in Hoodoo
54 Pickup line?
55 Small projection
56 Built an extension, say DOWN
1 First in line, often
2 Persona non grata 3 Indicate
4 Glowing, in a way
5 Killed it
6 Do some guesstimation
7 Bubbling
Chance to strike 41 Offering in some gardens 42 “I’ve got nothing to add!”
8 “Adding that to my list of phobias.”
9 Personal fig.
10 Slot line 11 “Let me take over.” 12 Empathic denial
13 Strong scrubber 15 “I call dibs!”
20 “Seems fine.”
22 Wildly improbably
23 Protagonist of “In Search of Lost Time”
26 On the whole
28 “Don’t censor yourself!”
30 Big kahuna
31 Bolt found on the tracks
32 “Papa Bear” of Chicago Cubs fame
33 Response to a funny text, maybe 34 Ice cream brand known for its use of sugar substitutes
35 Addresses that may be contracted
38 Scientific name for Vitamin B7
39 Lacking in direction 40 Pitch at
42 Sjoberg, pseudonym used by Taylor Swift
43 Ready to play, in a sense 44 Destabilize 47 Oodles and oodles
49 Metric unit
51 Garten of the Food Network
52 Gumball?
The New Journal was founded in 1967, under the following mission statement: “This university has once again reached that stage in history when people are talking about the New Yale, presumably to be distinguished from the Old Yale, which in its own day was presumably considered new. Wishing to share in this modernity, we have chosen The New Journal as the name for our publication. Besides, things seemed slow around here.”
No Safe Return
As violence surges at home, Ecuadorian organizers in Connecticut mobilize immigrant communities across the U.S. to secure their right to stay.
Off the Books
Connecticut’s lack of homeschooling regulations has sparked concerns about abuse and neglect–but some parents say state oversight would violate their freedom to educate their children.
Opening Access
As the number of students receiving accommodations from Student Accessibility Services rises, what would it look like to form a community centered on disabled identity?