Volume 50 - Issue 1

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

I SSS 11 / / SSEEPPTT 22001177 VVOOLL 5500 / / I S

THE NEW JOURNAL

THE EPIDEMIC How recovering opioid addicts and their families are navigating treatment options in connecticut

at home 1

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editors-in-chief Eliza Fawcett Natalie Yang managing editor Victorio Cabrera executive editor Ruby Bilger senior editors Elena Saavedra Buckley Jacob Sweet Oriana Tang Victor Wang associate editors Antonia Ayres-Brown Chris Hays Mark Rosenberg Annie Rosenthal Robert Scaramuccia Arya Sundaram copy editors Philippe Chlenski Meghana Mysore Marina Tinone Amy Xu

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

executive layout editor Julia Hedges design editors Stephanie Barker Catherine Peng photo editor Elinor Hills web developer Philippe Chlenski

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

THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 50 issue 1 sept 2017

SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

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cover THE EPIDEMIC AT HOME How recovering opioid addicts and their families are navigating treatment options in Connecticut Daisy Massey

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feature UNWRAPPING MAJOR GIFTS Chinese philanthropists are reshaping university campuses. How are these donations procured?

Yi-Ling Liu

standards 4

points of departure PRESCRIBING PRODUCE — Fiona Drenttel ART AND WORK IN AUVILLAR — Amra Saric NOIR HAVEN — Noah Macey

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essay I’M ALWAYS TRYING TO EXPLAIN THIS — Ruby Bilger Talking about techno in Berlin

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profile THE HUB OF THE WHEEL — William Reid John Martin’s East Rock co-op teaches amateur bike mechanics the tricks of the trade

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snapshot THE RIGHT TO BARGAIN — Amy Xu Where Local 33 fits into the contentious history of labor organizing Yale

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poem SUN — Sidney Saint-Hillaire

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endnote JOURNEY TO FOXON PARK — Bix Archer

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

PRESCRIBING PRODUCE

illustration Julia Hedges

A wellness program in the Hill makes healthy lifestyles more accessible Fiona Drenttel Behind the parking lot of Career High School, underneath a tree toward the back of a small plot of cultivated land, fifteen people are seated in a circle, their eyes shut. A car drives by; occasionally, voices drift over from the street. A woman, alternating between English and Spanish, leads the group in a guided meditation, drawing its attention to different aspects of the surroundings. Past the circle of chairs, there are rows of lettuces, cucumbers, carrots, trellised tomatoes, and piles of fresh soil. This is the Hill North Farm, which New Haven Farms opened this past May. New Haven Farms is a nonprofit started in 2012 to improve community health through urban agriculture. Hill North Farm is the organization’s eighth urban farm, but their first in the Hill, one of New Haven’s lower-income neighborhoods.

Currently, they’re running a free, twelve-week bilingual 4

wellness program focused on preventing diabetes and other diet-related chronic diseases. The program follows a national curriculum created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but with a farm-based focus.

Following meditation, the fifteen people present will spend a half hour working on the farm, harvesting the food that they’ll later take home. The bulk of the program, however, consists of a class led by Celin Garcia, a bilingual nutritionist.

Garcia begins by checking on each participant’s progress. Many seem hesitant to share. “I’m doing good,” a man dressed in all blue murmurs, nodding.

A woman smiles shyly. In Spanish, she reveals that in the eight weeks since the program started, she’s been exercising daily and feeling healthy. Just a few days before, she went off THE NEW JOUR NAL

ers nod. “But I’m trying to find other ways to feed my kids.”

her diabetes medication entirely. The group applauds.

“Well, I spent Saturday and Sunday in the hospital,” offers an elderly woman, gripping a cane. “But I feel better today.

And I’ve come up with a great recipe for chicken and brown rice soup.”

Participants are referred to the Hill North program by their healthcare providers.

In order to qualify, they must have one risk factor—such as obesity, high cholesterol, pre-diabetes, or elevated blood sugar—and their income must fall below twice the poverty line. Beyond that, there is also a certain amount of self-selection: it’s up to the patients to find time in their schedules and come each week.

“It would be a lot easier to just go buy a sandwich,” a man said to me after the program. “But I’m here, and as long as I’m here, I’m gonna try to put healthy food in my body.”

Comprised primarily of African-American and Latino families, the Hill is cut off from the rest of New Haven by the Oak Street Connector, a one-mile segment of Route 34 built in the nineteen-sixties era of urban renewal.

This barrier has had countless damaging effects on the neighborhood over the years including, crucially, a lack of access to healthy food.

Large grocery stores are non-existent in the Hill. There are lots of corner stores and bodegas, which sell almost exclusively processed foods: chips, candy, soda. For many, fresh and healthy food is far away; in 2015, the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement completed a survey on health in New Haven, and reported that 35 percent of residents in low-income neighborhoods and 50 percent of Hispanic and Latino residents had experienced food insecurity in the past year.

New Haven Farms seeks to increase access to food for and improve the health of the Hill’s poorer residents. Liz Marsh, Program Director at the Hill North Farm, emphasizes that education cannot stand alone. “Yes, you can tell people that they need to eat healthy,” she says. “But if you don’t give them food or provide ways for them to grow or obtain their own food, then they’re not going to be able to be healthier.”

The farm’s focus isn’t limited to providing resources. “Culture is the biggest influence on people’s eating habits, and you learn eating habits from a really young age,” says Marsh.

“And so, if you’re going to talk about food and changing your habits, you have to talk about culture.”

Participants often describe the struggle of integrating healthy food habits into their own food customs. “My whole life, I’ve gone to the grocery store and bought a twenty-pound bag of rice to make rice and beans,” one woman says, and oth5

Across the street from the Hill North Farm is the Hill North Community Garden, which is run by the New Haven Land Trust in partnership with the Connecticut Mental Health Clinic. The garden stands at the corner of Sylvan Avenue and Asylum Street; spaced throughout it are raised beds filled with ripening produce, hoses connecting one to the next. It is a picture of what the Hill North Farm could be, in time. Geanine Peck, the clinic’s Associate Director of Acute Services, started the garden four years ago with the purpose of creating a public greenspace for the clinic’s patients in addition to the greater community.

The garden is always open, and visitors can take as much food as they like. Community members specifically requested many of the crops now growing in the garden, including cabbages, pumpkins, gandules (a type of legume, often served with rice in Puerto Rican cuisine), and collard and mustard greens.

Since the garden’s creation, Peck has started several different programs for CMHC’s patients, and has run workshops for the larger community about growing and preparing food.

“When we first started, people would come here and pull entire plants out of the beds, or they’d take food long before it was ripe,” Peck says, leading me through the garden. “Food insecurity around here is so extreme. People were afraid there wouldn’t be anything left for them if they waited for the food to ripen.”

In future years, graduates of the Hill North program will have the option to grow food in their own garden plots, using the skills that they learned during the program. New Haven Farms will provide each with a 4’ by 8’ plant bed, along with compost, seeds, seedlings, and a water source. They’ll have free reign to grow whatever they like.

As we leave the community garden, a man leaves his plot to introduce himself to me. “I live across the street, and I watch over this place,” he says. “Yeah—I guess you could say it’s sort of ours now.”

—Fiona Drenttel is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College.

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

ART AND WORK IN AUVILLAR A former student reflects on the legacy of School of Art Professor Robert Reed Reed Amra Saric illustration Julia Hedges

A group of thirteen students has gathered at an airport in Toulouse, France. We are en route to a small village called Auvillar for a month-long intensive studio art summer program led by the painter and Yale School of Art Professor Robert Reed ART ‘62. At 75, Reed is smaller and frailer than I had imagined, but he’s beaming. Most of us are meeting him for the first time, yet he already knows our names. He speaks in a tender tone, as if catching up with a good friend he hasn’t seen in years, and listens attentively. It is early June of 2014, and the southern French countryside that flies by the bus from Toulouse to Auvillar fulfills every painterly cliché of itself—beautiful light, fragrant air, old stone houses dotting the river banks.

But there is little time to enjoy the scenery. Under the guidance of Reed and his four teaching fellows, we spend nearly all of the next four weeks drawing and painting our “investigations”—Reed’s term for the subjects we have chosen to concentrate on for the course of the program. We begin with life drawings from objects we find ourselves. A pile of bricks, a miniature forest of moss, twigs, and pebbles, and a whole artichoke all find their way into the studio. The commitment is total; the work is personal and at times discomforting. Laptops, cell phones, headphones, and visitors are absolutely banned. On the third night, after two days of misguided attempts and Reed’s disapproval, I panick, realizing it wouldn’t be a leisurely summer session of plein air 6

painting. To stop myself from running away, I drag my empty suitcase to the studio and start drawing it.

The works we create range from palm-sized to wallsized, from six pieces to over a hundred per student for each day’s review session, which Reed calls an “observation.” “Quantity is the direct result of the intensity of your search,” he often reminds us. The studio is in a constant flurry of pieces of paper and cardboard that we fill with charcoal and graphite in a matter of minutes. The physical motions we use to produce drawings become muscle memory.

Titled “Studio Practice in Painting and Drawing,” Reed’s course in Auvillar was the final installment in a series of programs he created throughout his life. The program exemplified his pedagogy: an isolated setting, unique vocabulary, and a dedicated group of students ready to form a tight-knit community. In 1960, as a student at the Yale School of Art, Reed participated in the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, then taught by the famed artist Philip Guston. According to Reed’s wife, Susan Whetstone, the Norfolk experience was among his most formative. “Robert produced a lot of work as a painter, but he hoped his legacy would be primarily as a teacher. The programs [he designed] came out of his experience at Norfolk, which was very interdisciplinary, with musicians, painters, and other artists all working together. It was a total experience of being enmeshed in your work, your art, twenty-four THE NEW JOUR NAL

seven.”

“It sounds like some kind of a cult,” said David Whelan ART ‘12, Reed’s teaching fellow in Auvillar in 2013 and 2014, remembering the program. “But the intensity encourages vulnerability so that participants find each other in that vulnerable moment, and depend upon each other throughout the experience.”

Late at night, tens of drawings into a demanding investigation, we push each other through fatigue, frustration, and moments of doubt. But as Reed keeps reminding us, the program is a rare opportunity to sustain singular focus so intensely. He often uses the analogy of a rubber band: the program’s mission is to help us stretch further than we ever thought we could be stretched. By the end of the program, each one of us made over four hundred pieces of work.

“I will go down in history as the person who took the most seminars with Robert,” Mary Scarvalone told me, laughing. Scarvalone, a Cap d’Antibes-based artist, participated at least once in every one of Reed’s programs after she met him in 1975. The personal and artistic growth spurts that happened in the programs kept her coming back. “Bob gave you the knowledge that you don’t have to be easy on yourself and do the bare minimum. You go through the process of continually working an idea, and working and working it, doing the fifty drawings. As you do them, you discover new things you hadn’t seen before,” she said. The last time Scarvalone worked with Reed was in 2012, in Auvillar. Recently, she and a sculptor friend locked themselves in her studio

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in Cap d’Antibes, a town on France’s Mediterranean coast, for a three-day weekend of nothing but drawing with the intensity she learned from Reed.

The summer of 2014 was the last year of Reed’s program in Auvillar. That fall, I took his “Introduction to Painting” class at Yale. It was the last time he taught that, too; he was hospitalized intermittently throughout the semester, but he came back immediately each time he was released. In December of that year, Reed passed away at the age of 76.

I had many professors after Reed, but I never, not even after graduating in May this year, stopped looking back at the experience of working with him. After knowing the energy that comes from intense focus and dedication to one’s work, anything less feels inadequate, dishonest. For the Yale Summer Session staff, finding someone confident enough to carry the torch and keep the Auvillar program running has proved impossible.

Reed’s program was fiercely his own, a product of his own lifelong investigation. The following summer, the studio in Auvillar was empty of students. But across the country and the world, the rubber bands continued to stretch.

—Amra Saric graduated from Trumbull College in 2017.

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

NOIR HAVEN In a new story anthology, New Haven is the backdrop for murder and intrigue Noah Macey For me, the word “noir” brings to mind quicktalking mid-century mobsters in black-and-white suits lingering in the back alleys of menacing, unnamed cities. But the stories from the anthology New Haven Noir (Akashic Books, 2017) fill the familiar streets of New Haven with shadows and populate its apartments and hotel rooms with sinister people. From the monstrous, anonymous guest in Michael Cunningham’s “The Man in Room Eleven” to the addled and violent widow in Karen E. Olson’s “The Boy,” New Haven Noir’s characters move among prominent New Haven landmarks—Sterling Library, Beinecke Plaza, Long Wharf, 8

illustration Julia Hedges

Wooster Square—that are so specific and immediate they jar readers who know the city, flavoring it with a bitter taste.

The book’s ability to defamiliarize was made apparent to me one afternoon this summer. “Callback” by Sarah Pemberton Strong, the second story in the anthology, takes place near the Audubon Arts District, between Lincoln and Orange Streets, in a neighborhood where “Most of the big houses […] have been converted into law offices or therapy practices.” The murder, however, occurs in “a gorgeous, three-story brownstone.”

As I reached this line in the story, I looked out from THE NEW JOUR NAL

the porch of my summer sublease on Orange Street, behind Lincoln, in the Audubon Arts District. I lifted my gaze and saw two big houses that had been converted into a therapy practice and a law office, respectively. I raced down the stairs onto the sidewalk across the street and swiveled to look up at the building that contained my apartment, which was (you guessed it) a beautiful three-story brownstone. The murder from the story happens in my very own basement. Going downstairs to do laundry would never be the same.

The brownstone in “Callback” was an especially bold noir invasion of New Haven, but most of the story locations in the anthology are less specific—though that just means their eeriness is cast more widely. Alice Mattison’s “Innovative Methods,” about a visit to Lighthouse Point by residents of a troubled youth home, is sure to lurk in the back of my brain the next time my friends and I see a group of kids playing at that beach.

The authors included in New Haven Noir, an eclectic bunch of Yale University professors, New Haven residents, and concerned non-New Haveners, picked their locations on a first-come, first-serve basis. “The early bird gets the neighborhood,” quipped Amy Bloom, a former creative writing professor at Yale and current director of the Shapiro Creative Writing Center at Wesleyan University, who edited the anthology. The system worked: the sixteen stories leave no nook of New Haven untouched. Human remains are found in Union Station; denied tenure leads to murder in East Rock; an innocent plumber is framed in the Audubon Arts District. “If noir is about corruption, absurdity, anxiety, the nightmare of bureaucracy,” writes Bloom in her introduction to the anthology, “New Haven, with multiple universities and multiple clinics and

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multiple, and sometimes clashing, neighborhoods, is a noir town.”

The premise of the book deserves discussion itself.

New Haven Noir is one in a series of anthologies of literary noir published by Akashic Books since 2004.

Ninety-two currently exist, covering cities from Tel Aviv to Dubai, with multiple dedicated to each borough of New York City, and twenty still forthcoming.

The primary appeal of each of book is its focus on the hyper-local. In New Haven Noir, things as ephemeral as food truck placement and the wait times for lattes in East Rock aren’t just ornamental details, but crucial parts of the setting. (Bloom says she had to assure her barista at East Rock Coffee that he wasn’t the basis for her story’s “glacially-slow” espresso-slinger.) We often ask fiction—and increasingly, social media—to whisk us off to places we’ve never been; for local readers, New Haven Noir does not offer this sort of escape.

Yet, having read Bloom’s anthology, I find that localism and noir are well-suited to each other. It’s one thing to read about a psychopath who imprisons people in a generic town library and another to envision someone being tied to the shelves in the stacks of Sterling (perhaps even with zip ties stolen from the CEID). While a non-New Havener could certainly enjoy the collection, its true audience is residents of the Elm City. Reading about these places we know so intimately—or even just ones we pass through every once in a while—gives us the sense of being in on a sort of secret.

—Noah Macey is a junior in Timothy Dwight College.

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E S S AY

I’M ALWAYS TRYING TO EXPLAIN THIS Talking about techno in Berlin Ruby Bilger

illustration Steph Barker

“I’m always trying to explain this. I always have trouble.

I think it’s such a lonely thing to do. People in Berlin go to techno clubs alone and take pills alone and then go home— even if you go to techno clubs with friends you don’t really talk to them or even dance with them. You walk through these bombed-out industrial parts of the city, and see these scattered people holding beer bottles all headed in the same direction, and then you wait in line, and don’t hear so much 10 10

German, and when you get in there, all it is is what you expected: boom boom boom boom.”

Bernardo paused and passed me the shisha pipe. I like the pipe. It lets one person hold the floor while the other one’s smoking. I took it and watched him, hunched over, eyes darting around the printed curtains and sleepy, chuckling men in the dusky room. He and I were at a smoking lounge on a humid Monday night in July. I felt a bit sheepish talking about this, especially in English, in a Syrian cafe, in Berlin, a city that so many foreign young people flock to for a few weeks or months or years because of its legendary techno scene. But for that same reason I felt it was a silly thing to ignore.

“I dunno, I think I get it though,” he continued. “I went last weekend again, after I’d been feeling off for days. I’d just finished my German test and had been sitting around forever in the kitchen in a bathrobe, and when I got into the club I was still feeling so uneasy. What was I doing there?

I’m from Mexico but I haven’t lived there in five years. What was I doing in Germany thinking about my life in English— not even in Spanish—in this dark basement with all these other people? But I stayed anyway and after a while…man it’s hard to explain, it’s such a non-linguistic experience…but after a while I just started to feel alright there. Once I looked around, and saw all of these pulsing silhouettes, and thought of myself among all these other rootless people with similar thoughts running through their minds, it was just okay to be there—that’s all. Just this sense that I’m here, and I’m okay.

Reverberating over and over.”

I passed Bernardo the pipe when he finished. We had both been in Berlin for months off the vague intuition that we’d like it here—me intending to go back to America in August, him to stay indefinitely. We tutored and babysat enough to get by. We hung out with Mexicans with European passports and Germans from other states and Syrian refugees and English people tired of England. We had so much time to talk. We’d had three thousand conversations in this way before, over beers or water pipes, about why people do things.

I’d been aware of techno as a sexy and sinister part of the city’s folklore: huge cold rooms, everyone dancing alone and facing front, staying inside from early Friday morning until they stumbled out on Sunday afternoon. But Bernardo and I hadn’t talked about it since my first week in Berlin, in the dead of February, when we had gone to a tiny dance club to see a DJ in a tan body suit play the keytar and toss around a slightly smaller dummy of himself and I’d turned to Bernardo and said, “This is the worst.”

“But why did we show up for it?” he’d replied. “Why was THE NAL THENEW NEWJOUR JOUR N AL

this the thing we decided to do tonight? I think it speaks to all the rootless people here…”

We’d yelled in each other’s ears for a bit longer and after a while I’d checked my phone. Somehow I’d composed an email to my dad, no text in the body, just a subject headed “Swazi”. I tried to cancel it but sent it instead. The DJ threw his dummy into the crowd for body surfing. I turned to a woman who I’d met earlier that night and asked her what she thought of this.

“I like it,” she’d said, dancing. “It’s strange.” She’d paused as the DJ snatched his dummy back, then added, “after the whole day working…”

After the whole day working! I’d really started to enjoy myself after that, just for the thought of everyone who wanted to see something strange after the whole day working. And after the DJ had finished and we’d all rushed out to the frigid cobblestone street I checked my phone again, 4 a.m. in Berlin, 10 p.m. in New York, and my dad had already replied to my email:

construction workers and kids off to school—it felt wily and wonderful to invert the day like that, but it really made me wonder if Berlin doesn’t just exist for so many people as a big flat place to wander around dazed.

Bernardo and I leaned back on the velvet couches and looked at the ceiling. A laugh erupted from the group of men sitting behind us. I saw Bernardo clock them, and look at me, and we both listened to them josh one of the guys in Arabic for a while.

SOON I STARTED TO BUILD A STRANGE SORT OF FOCUS, ALMOST LIKE SLEEPING.

?

What does this mean?

But for months after that weekend I’d forgotten about techno. I liked small concerts and classrooms and public transit; well-lit places with other personalities to latch onto.

It was only by this point in mid summer that I could start to see what Bernardo was now explaining—I’d gone to one of the thumping basement clubs a few nights before, not on pills though I’m sure it helps, and after a few confused hours standing in strobe lights, plumes of water vapor, the smell of mold and the incessant vibrating bass drum that tries to pull your muscles from their sheaths, I started to feel like I’d never make it out of there. And soon I started to build a strange sort of focus, almost like sleeping. The day’s events started to course through my mind: a long delayed train, a distracted twelve-year-old who didn’t care about intro paragraphs, my own distraction from wondering why I had to teach them, a chilling look my roommate gave me as she opened the fridge, wide streets, rain, YouTube videos; I started to run through whole conversations from that day just for the pleasure of memory, and because the smoke was getting in my eyes and no one was touching; and every few measures I’d remember again how bizarre this was—that someone would need to be in this hellish underground crypt just to have some peace and think about her day. But the music would move on and soon I would too, until a sentence would wriggle into my mind and repeat, I never learn I never learn I never learn, and keep repeating until it was pounded out of me, and at the same time pounded in.

Soon the lights had changed and I started to think about all the times in Berlin I’d been in crowds like this. Bernardo and I had spent the first of May together, the holiday to commemorate workers’ rights, when the city blocks off the streets in the center of town and releases the youth there to day-drink and walk toward a park. There’s no event in the park, just more day-drinking. I’d felt a vague uneasiness the whole time. And to climb out of that techno club finally into Wednesday morning sunshine and take the train home with 11

“The funny thing is I heard two guys talking about the exact same thing yesterday,” Ber-nardo said finally, passing me the pipe. He’d been letting it burn idly. “In English, in two vaguely foreign accents. They were saying how profoundly they experienced themselves in the techno club and everything. It annoyed the hell outta me.”

He smiled a little. I could imagine those two guys exactly— long hair, tattoos, all in black, smoking rolled cigarettes. Two European assholes in Berlin to party, probably not there to see something strange after the whole day working. For a moment I imagined all the pairs of people like that across the city having our same conversation, and I turned on everything Bernardo and I had been thinking. I wanted it out of me, that inward experience I had to share, that sad transcendent feeling of communion with all those rootless people that only happens in booming nightclubs, and disappears when we overhear each other in daylight. It was embarrassing.

The group behind us started laughing again. “Seems like a fun group of guys,” Bernardo said. “Better than the guys I saw yesterday, sucks to suck…”

I looked at Bernardo sitting there, mulling over the next thing he wanted to say. And I wanted to change the subject, but more strongly I wanted to hear what was on the tip of his tongue…so all I did was laugh and tell him to quit hassling those guys. Those assholes have seen beautiful things.

— Ruby Bilger is a junior in Branford College.

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PROFILES

THE HUB OF THE WHEEL John Martin’s East Rock co-op teaches amateur bike mechanics the tricks of the trade

WillIiam Reid

photos William Reid

Behind a warehouse door in East Rock, John Martin tightens a bolt and gives the crankshaft a turn, sending the rear wheel of the bicycle into a spin above the concrete floor. He leans in and eyes the rotation approvingly. It spins true—no horizontal shake, no friction. Behind him, Connor Dwyer Reynolds, the bike’s owner, breaks into a smile.

Before finding the Bradley Street Bicycle Cooperative, Dwyer Reynolds knew almost nothing about bike repair.

But he needed a bike and wanted to build it himself, so Martin offered to teach him. Since they were about the same height, Martin repurposed a frame that once belonged to the second bike he ever built, back in college.

It needed a complete overhaul—new brakes, wheels, and gears. Now, it works.

Surrounding them in the co-op, a diverse group of mechanics attends to bikes held aloft by aluminum bike stands. It’s a rare sight in a city segregated by race, class, and cultural capital. Graduate students work next to teenagers from Fair Haven. Older, upper-class men learn from young, working-class women. They clean chains, lube gears, replace brake pads, change tires, and adjust shifters.

Outside on the sidewalk, someone test-rides a cleaned-up junker from the seventies. The brakes squeal. Some of the 12

mechanics have a background in professional bike repair, but most start like Dwyer Reynolds—they come in knowing nothing. Given time, space, tools, and a little instruction from Martin or the other experienced mechanics, they learn to salvage defunct bicycles.

The co-op takes in old bikes culled from dusty attics and garages or picked up by the New Haven Police Department. Often, they’re dead on arrival—hardly functional, if you can ride them at all. The bikes lean together in long rows in a cavernous room at the back of the shop. One by one, these hunks of metal are resurrected by the co-op’s volunteer bike mavens. About half of the refurbished bikes will go to the beneficiaries of local charities, such as Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) and the Connecticut Mental Health Center. Last year, the co-op donated about a hundred recycled bikes.

This year, it’s on track to double that.

With thick-rimmed glasses, light scruff, and a cyclist’s slight build, John Martin doesn’t exactly stand out among the other patrons on the shop floor. But he’s the man in charge here. He’s about six feet tall, thirty years old, and in two years, he’s made the co-op one of the strongest institutions in the New Haven biking community. In addition to the bike refurbishment program, the co-op hosts ‘Chainbreakers,’ a bi-monthly night for female mechanics, and group events like Bike Month, dedicated to celebrating bike culture and empowering cyclists across the city. The shop is also open to members who pay a small fee—$30 for three months—to work on their own bikes.

Local bike activist Paul Hammer describes it as the community’s “cultural center.” And John Martin? “He’s the hub of the wheel.”

—

On some afternoons during the summer, Martin’s coop looked like a block party. Music filtered out from the open warehouse door onto the sidewalk where mechanics worked and hung out. First-time customers whizzed up and down Bradley Street under Martin’s watchful eye, trying out refurbished bikes.

All of this came about mostly by accident. In 2011, after a summer on his father’s farm in Westbrook, Connecticut, Martin took a job at an architecture firm in Boston, where he’d gone to college. After a few years, he got a call from home. His father needed help—not on the farm, but at the warehouse that had been in Martin’s family for three generations. His grandfather purchased it in 1964, THE NEW JOUR NAL

and both grandfather and father used the space as the headquarters for their New Haven–based electrical business. Since his father’s retirement, the warehouse had filled with decades of detritus.

By 2014, the warehouse was costing more than his father could pay, so Martin moved back to New Haven to do something with the space—either clean it up enough to rent it out or start a small business of his own. It felt like the right time: He’d reached a plateau at work and recently gone through a tough breakup. He needed a change.

And besides, he’d never turned down his father before.

“I spent the first six months just, like, cleaning,” Martin tells me as we stand in the warehouse. “Trips to the scrapyard, dumpster loads, a ton of recycling, selling stuff

THE CO-OP IS A RARE SIGHT IN A CITY SEGREGATED BY RACE, CLASS, AND CULTURAL CAPITAL

on eBay, reorganizing, consolidating. And we’re not done, you can see. There’s still a lot of stuff in there.” Only a few shelves have been reclaimed for the co-op’s tools; many still hold brightly colored bins filled with wires, switches, fuses, and everything else needed to keep the lights on.

While cleaning up the warehouse, Martin started fixing friends’ bikes on the side, a skill he’d picked up in Boston.

At one point, he thought: Why not let other people use the space to do the same? A proper bike shop felt outside his ken, but maybe something less profit-oriented and more community-focused would suit him. “It wasn’t a business idea,” he explains. “It was just a cool side project. But very quickly, it was, ‘Let’s take this and run with it.’”

One day before the shop first started up, Martin heard a knock at the door. He opened it to find Joel LaChance,

a New Haven resident who’d been riding and fixing bikes in the city for forty years. LaChance had heard about the co-op through his insurance agent, whom Martin had contacted about purchasing coverage. A professional mechanic and former bike-shop owner himself, LaChance sought Martin out with the hope of giving him some guidance. New Haven has had various bike repair co-ops in the past, LaChance tells me. Most were funded through Dwight Hall at Yale. But the initiatives suffered from high turnover rates—student volunteers would graduate and move on without finding replacements. The Bradley Street Co-Op promised to be a more permanent fixture of the biking community. “There’s a need for affordable bike repair in New Haven,” LaChance says.

So he found Martin, and a friendship quickly blossomed. LaChance introduced Martin to Paul Hammer.

Together, the three founded BEEEP!, or Bicycle Entrepreneurship, Education and Enrichment Programs, which launched the bicycle refurbishment initiative.

The co-op has since absorbed BEEEP!, taking over the recycling program and its broader nonprofit mission: getting more people onto bikes in New Haven.

—

“Transportation is a civil rights issue,” Mayor Toni Harp announced at a public meeting in January 2014.

“It’s an economic development issue. It’s a jobs issue.”

The data agrees. A report produced by DataHaven that same year notes that “transportation is by far the most commonly reported barrier to getting a job.” Part of the problem is what the report calls “job-sprawl”: low-wage jobs gradually leaving downtown, which is fairly well-serviced by public transportation, and moving to wealthier suburbs like Hamden, which are public transportation dead zones. Over the last three decades, the proportion of residents in New Haven’s poorer neighborhoods—Fair Haven, Newhallville, and the Hill—who work outside of the city has nearly doubled, from 29 percent to 55 percent.

What’s more, due to the racial makeup of these neighborhoods, the “spatial mismatch” between housing and jobs is particularly pronounced among workers of color.

That’s where bikes come in. The 2014 report found that in New Haven, more low-wage positions are accessible via

illustration Steph Barker

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bicycle than by public transportation. And compared to cars, bikes are much cheaper to purchase and maintain, especially if owners can do it themselves at a place like the co-op. According to the American Automobile Association, owning even a modest car costs, on average, seven thousand dollars a year. At the co-op, by contrast, you can purchase a used bike for a few hundred bucks.

Martin isn’t just selling bikes, though. He wants to teach people skills that they continue to use. “I think anyone who put the time in could become a pseudo bike-mechanic in a year. Which is pretty friggin’ awesome,” Martin tells me. He cites story after story of volunteers who, after working in the co-op, became so adept they could have gotten a job in a professional shop. Martin doesn’t claim any responsibility for their transformation. Rather, it’s about having the opportunity and resources to work on a range of different bikes.

That egalitarian vision breeds the co-op’s inclusivity.

to welcome everyone, tensions can arise. How does the atmosphere change when a ten-year old joins the co-op?

How should Martin respond when a poor teenager starts stealing tools? What should he do when an older man from the neighborhood says something racially insensitive? Martin says these questions are always on his mind.

He has no clear answers, but that doesn’t bother him.

Searching for solutions—even trying to get close—is the only way to start making things better.

Besides, sometimes tension is useful. On a bike, tension is what allows you to shift from one gear to another, what makes the brakes work. One day in the shop, Martin tells me he thinks it’s inevitable that some people will feel uncomfortable in a place like this. Maybe that’s okay.

Without tension, they could never ride.

—William Reid is a junior in Pierson College.

John Martin, 30, the founder of the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op

On one summer afternoon, the oldest mechanic was an immigrant from Mexico in his sixties. He can’t always pay the shop fee in cash, so instead, he brings new rags and WD-40 to replenish its supplies. The youngest mechanic was thirteen. I first met him after he flipped over the handlebars of his street bike onto the sidewalk in front of the co-op while trying to clear a jump made of two-by-fours.

Since then, he’s taken to less death-defying pursuits: He volunteers almost every day, and when he can’t make it in, he calls Martin to let him know. (This habit comes from his mother, who says it’s good practice for when he has a job.) On another day at the co-op, I see him help a thirty-year-old man overhaul an old commuter bike.

It’s not all rosy, Martin tells me. Whenever a space tries 14

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SNAPSHOT

THE RIGHT TO BARGAIN Where Local 33 fits into the contentious history of labor organizing Yale Amy Xu

photos Eliza Fawcett

As a light rain fell on New Haven, hundreds of teachers, students, and labor organizers walked in silence down College Street. The April 25 march, which had the gravity of a funeral procession, began outside the Methodist Church across from Battell Chapel and ended at a white tent erected in front of Yale University President Peter Salovey’s house on Hillhouse Avenue. Rising to address the crowd on a makeshift stage, Maria Elena Durazo, the Democratic National Committee Vice Chair, drew parallels between graduate student teachers’ recent efforts to unionize and social justice movements of the past. “It is always this way,” she said. “When you seek what you deserve, when you act to make your rights real, you’re ignored at first.”

For months, Local 33, the Yale graduate student teacher’s union, had been calling upon the Yale administration to begin negotiating their first contract, a legal agreement between the union and the University about working conditions and employee benefits. In February, when graduate student teachers voted to unionize on a department-by-department basis, the mood among Local 33 organizers had been jubilant. But Yale had repeatedly refused to officially recognize the union, and by April, organizers decided it was time to raise the stakes.

15

Toward the end of her remarks, Durazo turned to the eight graduate student teachers gathered around her in a semicircle. “Yale wants you to wait…and so you will wait, without eating. You will show Yale that you have power.” She pivoted back to the crowd and announced what they had all been waiting for: “Tonight, eight courageous members of Local 33 begin a fast.”

Those eight members would subsist on water alone in “The Fast Against Slow,” an attempt to draw nationwide attention to their cause. If a faster’s health faltered, an allied graduate teacher would take her place—an indefinite system of rotation. The fasters had deeply personal reasons for joining the demonstration. Julia Powers, a Comparative Literature graduate student teacher, told the crowd that she was “tired of widespread and unchecked sexual harassment at Yale.” Generations of “brilliant, talented women” — including some of her acquaintances, Powers said — had their careers derailed because “men with long and well-known track records of harassment” oversaw their work. Tif Shen, a Mathematics graduate student teacher, said that when he reported an incident of assault and harassment in the workplace, the administration ignored him. Emily Sessions, from the History of Art department, said that when she spoke up THE NEW JOUR NAL

about working conditions in her department, she was called a liar, threatened, and told to “shut up.”

“Fixing this takes will, not time, and I’m tired of being powerless while Yale blossoms,” Sessions told the crowd.

“Yale has to respect us and listen to us, not wait longer. But Yale has told us to wait, so I am waiting, without eating.”

— The sudden visibility of Local 33’s efforts this past spring took many undergraduates by surprise. Most weren’t entirely sure of what to make of “33 Wall Street,” a 25-foot bowshed that members of Local 33 erected on Beinecke Plaza the morning after the Hillhouse Avenue march. The plastic-andwood shelter stood for four weeks, staffed by round-the-clock shifts of supporters who gathered at picnic tables and under strings of lights. The encampment was impossible to miss and prompted passersby to confront the University’s relationship to labor—something many had never done before.

But despite the seeming novelty of the demonstration, Local 33’s actions fit into a narrative of union organizing that is integral to the last half-century of Yale’s history. By the mid-nineteen-eighties, Yale’s clerical and technical workers had formed Local 34, and its dining hall, custodial, and maintenance workers, who began organizing in the nineteen-thirties, had formed Local 35. Both unions currently exist under the international labor union UNITE HERE, which represents thousands of workers across North America, from hotel employees to railroad dining car workers. Motivated by rising job insecurity and the increasing cost of living in New Haven, graduate student teachers also started organizing in the late ninteen-eighties, first through a group called T.A. Solidarity, which later became the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) and, as of last year, Local 33.

As each iteration of the group emerged, the Yale administration fought back, repeatedly thwarting their attempts to unionize.

For the past three decades, the conflict between graduate student teachers and the University has centered on one central distinction: Are they employees, deserving of benefits similar to University professors? Or are they students, bestowed with University resources like undergrads, and tasked with extra responsibilities that reflect their academic training?

The graduate student teachers who began early organizing efforts in the late nineteen-eighties were fighting for not just for certain workplace conditions and benefits, but for a specific ideological framework: we are students and employees. It was an issue that had never come up for Yale’s dining hall or clerical workers, who were undoubtedly University employees.

Doctoral students at Yale receive a full tuition waiver for five years of study, as well as teaching stipends, which vary from student to student. But for many graduate student teachers, that stipend, which is $30,250 a year at minimum — more than seven thousand dollars less than New Haven’s median household income — is not an adequate living wage.

For decades, the Yale administration has cleaved to one position: graduate student teachers are students, first and foremost. In the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-ninties, Yale administrators were frequently quoted in the national media arguing that pro-union graduate student teachers had 16

misunderstood their role at the University. “Forming a union represents an incorrect understanding of what teaching assignments for graduate students really are,” Donald Kagan, then-dean of Yale College, told The New York Times in 1991.

“They were never intended to be jobs, but rather to be teaching apprenticeships.”

Michael Denning, a professor of American Studies who has been involved with unionization efforts since he was a graduate student teacher at Yale, has never thought much of

this line of argument. “If these were really students,” he said, “why would [the University] give them grants? It’s because they’re not students. The whole issue of the tuition waiver, to me, has always been an indication that they aren’t really students…That’s just a pure ideological illusion.”

After years of demonstrations and debates that resulted in minimal progress, the graduate student teachers’ labor movement gained sudden momentum in August 2016, when the National Labor Relations Board ruled in favor of Columbia University’s graduate student teachers. The decision deemed them not only students but also employees entitled to collective bargaining rights under federal law. It provided the legal precedent for the battle that Yale’s graduate student teachers had been fighting for the past 25 years.

But for Yale administrators, the ruling was not the final word. Shortly after the February elections, lawyers working THE NEW JOUR NAL

on behalf of the University filed a “request for review” with the NLRB in Washington, D.C. The University wanted a reevaluation of Local 33’s “unprecedented” micro-bargaining strategy, which had been debated before the National Labor Relations Board in October 2016. Until the request for review was resolved, Yale would refrain from negotiations with the newly-certified union.

— Over the past three decades, Yale and its unions have maintained a fragile, often acrimonious, relationship. In a March 2003 article in The New York Times, Steven Greenhouse, a labor journalist, called it “unusually rancorous.”

Until 2003, strikes and walkouts occurred almost every three years, as each contract developed through bitter negotiations.

Janet Lindner, Yale’s vice president for human resources and administration, wrote in an email this summer that since 2003, there has been “a generation of strong partnerships based on the hard work of union and management leadership.” Union leaders and University administrators have collaborated on goals and worked toward a sense of mutual trust, she said, adding, “Many employees at Yale now have never experienced a strike, and that gives me great hope for the future.”

But this past spring, Local 33’s demonstrations seemed to belie any indication that the University and its unions were on good terms. At best, the protests recalled the bitter labor conflicts that have defined the University’s past.

“What is Yale afraid of?” members of Local 33 asked at rallies, just as in September 1984, Local 34 strikers demanded, “Why should the Yale administration hide from the truth?”

The striking clerical and technical workers were in the midst of their first contract negotiations in the fall of 1984.

They called for salary increases, expanded benefits, and job security over the next three years. Dining halls closed as their workers, members of Local 35, joined the picket lines. Local 34 accused the University of discrimination on the basis of both race and gender; the union primarily consisted of the female support staff that populated the University’s reception rooms and front desks.

The strike ended after ten weeks, although protests and demonstrations continued through the winter. When the University and the union finally struck a deal in January, Local 34’s victory was apparent. But it came with a price: a semester’s worth of lost wages and job uncertainty.

During the strike, there was an abiding sense among union members that Yale didn’t treat its workers with respect, said John Wilkenson, who was the secretary of the University at the time. “You shouldn’t tighten your belt in a way that will discourage or demoralize your employees, because it comes back and bites you,” he reflected. “You lose in the long run.”

When labor disputes dominated campus, undergrads were forced to reckon with their own dilemmas, both moral and practical, in ways that are unfamiliar to the vast majority of students today. Do I cross a picket line, or do I skip my class?

Do I work my student job, or do I refuse in solidarity with the striking workers?

Despite the outpouring of public support in 1984, student opinion was split. A Yale Daily News poll taken soon after the strike began found that twenty-one percent of students 17

supported the University, thirty-five percent of students supported Local 34, and thirty-nine percent disagreed with both sides. Of those who disagreed with both sides, one third chose the option, “I care but I’m confused.”

— Still, with its 80 percent female membership, Local 34 expanded people’s understanding of what a union member could look like and what unionization could achieve.

Soon, graduate student teachers began to define themselves as workers with rights. The conceptual gap between an academic worker and an clerical worker was far narrower than the gap between an academic worker and, say, a factory worker. Additionally, many graduate student teachers were married to members of Local 34, exposing them to regular union activity, Wilkenson said.

Practical concerns accompanied conceptual ones. In the

WHEN LABOR DISPUTES DOMINATED CAMPUS, UNDERGRADS WERE FORCED TO RECKON WITH THEIR OWN DILEMMAS, BOTH MORAL AND PRACTICAL, IN WAYS THAT ARE UNFAMILIAR TO THE VAST MAJORITY OF STUDENTS TODAY.

nineteen-eighties, the teaching demands placed on graduate student teachers were growing increasingly intense. Graduate student teachers were asked to spend more time teaching undergrads than ever before. Financial strains were mounting: by the end of the decade, a graduate student teacher’s teaching salary was many thousand dollars less than the cost of living in New Haven.

In 1987, a group of graduate student teachers calling themselves “T.A. Solidarity” — the precursor to GESO and Local 33 — held its first official meeting to discuss formal recourse for improving their working conditions. The organizers grappled with how to define their new group in relation to the unions that already existed on campus. As graduate student teacher Christopher Lowe jotted down on a legal pad during an early meeting, how could they maintain their autonomy as a graduate student teachers’ “advocacy group” while avoiding becoming a “union support group”? On the other hand, how could they learn from “the experience of the unions… about how Yale might behave?” As the graduate student teachers broached the question of tactics — to strike or not to strike? to withhold grades or to give everyone an “A”? — they balanced their own interests against public opinion and their allies’ positions. Lowe believed that a close alliance with the unions would help further both causes, and it was the position that the group’s organizers ultimately adopted.

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T.A. Solidarity’s evolution into GESO in 1990 marked the graduate student teachers’ first distinctive move toward a union-style advocacy group. Like a union, GESO went on strikes, petitioned the NLRB, and organized across departments. And in March 2016, GESO rebranded itself as “Local 33,” clearly signaling its allegiance to the union model.

But the legal argument against graduate student teachers as workers held strong, as it had for years. Since 1970, cases regarding graduate teacher unionization at private universities had flooded the courts. In 1972, a ruling involving Adelphi University determined that graduate student teachers were “primarily” students, not employees. The pendulum swung back and forth over the next few decades, as decisions were reversed and reinstated, defining and redefining the nature of graduate student teacher work.

— With the Columbia University decision in 2016, the NLRB set a new precedent, arguing that graduate student teachers are legal employees. Local 33 organizers wasted little time to catch the momentum of fresh empowerment and launched into a new strategy for negotiating with the University: they would organize department by department.

This strategy would secure collective bargaining units through individual departments — English, Geology and Geophysics, History, History of Art, Math, and Sociology — rather than through an all-department vote. Each of those six departments that voted to unionize would draw up a separate contract with the University. It was a tactic that ultimately included only a small proportion of the overall graduate student teacher body. But from Local 33’s perspective, they had achieved their union; they were NLRB-certified.

“The logic of it makes sense, because people are doing very specific kinds of labors in very particular units,” said Jennifer Klein, a professor of labor history at Yale who supports and works with Local 33. “[White collar unions] are organizing through a different form of unionism than industrial unionism.” This “micro-bargaining” strategy made sense for Local 33 because of the highly-specialized nature of graduate-level work, she said, and because it was a more feasible organizing strategy for a place like Yale, where organizers expected considerable pushback.

There was also some precedent for Local 33’s micro-bargaining tactic. In a 1996 academic journal article on the history of unionization at Yale, John Wilhelm, then-president of UNITE HERE, wrote that in the 1930s and 1940s, the custodial, maintenance, and dining hall workers organized “incrementally,” group-by-group, before banding into one union, Local 35. Their unionization process took over a decade.

But the University declined Local 33’s invitation to begin collective bargaining in eight departments. “Yale respectfully notes that this request is premature because the legal questions raised by Local 33’s unprecedented ‘micro-unit’ strategy remain unanswered,” an April 11 statement read. “Yale is still engaged with Local 33 before the NLRB. The university respects the legal process for resolving labor issues while this case continues to move forward.”

Many students also questioned the validity of Local 33’s methods. Stephen Krastanov, a graduate student teacher in Physics involved with GASO, a group of graduate students 18

teachers opposed to Local 33, said that for him, the union, not the University, was bargaining in bad faith. “They are waiting for a union before they start thinking about how they will be using that union,” he said. Krastanov also believes that Local 33 also has a tendency to misrepresent facts: “They are setting up the University to look bad without honestly trying to negotiate with them.”

As 33 Wall Street stood on Beineicke Plaza, conversations

on Cross Campus and in the comment threads of the “Overheard at Yale” Facebook page revealed the ambivalence over Local 33’s tactics that pervaded the student body. Why was so much of the graduate student teacher body excluded from the vote, as the University claimed? Were the elections really democratic?

This spring wasn’t the first time Local 33 had come under fire from the University community for its organizing tactics.

On January 15, 2016, a group of “women, LGBTQ graduate students, and graduate students of color” penned an open letter to the leadership of GESO, which would become Local 33 two months later. “Tactics targeting students outside of their classrooms, in their offices, their apartments and dorm rooms are invasive regardless of how we move through the university,” wrote the undersigners, many of them union members and organizers who “write with a shared recognition of the powerful work this union has done over the last two decades to support marginalized university employees and New Haven residents.”

Over the past year, Local 33 has tried to improve upon the tactics described in that letter. “We make mistakes, but we also do the very best we can,” said Julia Powers, one of the first fasting graduate student teachers, in a phone call over the summer. Melis Laebens, another graduate student teacher, said that although Local 33 is not perfect, she’s been “mostly sympathetic” to their position in the past year. “I have had personal tensions with my organizers at some points, and got angered a couple of times, but I have currently found my organizers are willing to listen and accommodate.” Her support, however, is “not unconditional.”

The University’s own delay tactics are similarly contested.

Union detractors, including a sizeable portion of graduate student teachers, say Yale is a working within the bounds of the law; union supporters, including thirteen members of the THE NEW JOUR NAL

Yale Law School who issued an open letter to the administration, believe that the University is actively defying labor law.

In the purview of the past twenty years of labor history, the current situation could best be described as “business as usual.” Some legacies, it seems, are harder to shake than others.

— On the morning of last year’s Commencement Day, 33 Wall Street was unusually empty; the action was elsewhere.

About five blocks away, in UNITE HERE’s downtown offices, local labor activists were preparing for a protest march that had brought hundreds of union supporters from across the East Coast to New Haven. Auto workers, fast food workers, union families, and graduate student teachers from other universities congregated on streets around the New Haven Green. “Union power in the ivory tower!” they chanted, sporting orange t-shirts and mortar boards.

In the weeks leading up to commencement, graduating seniors and the University administration had voiced concerns that the protesters would disrupt the ceremonies by seizing the stage or blocking the path of the formal procession. But the action was orderly and celebratory.

The demonstration halted on the corner of Elm and College Streets, where the marchers faced the graduating class of 2017. Behind a line of police motorcycles, the final group of Local 33’s fasters sat in wheelchairs, in front of a crowd of cheering union supporters and a blue banner that proclaimed, “Just the beginning, Yale.” The protesters cheered on the graduating seniors; some students shouted back words of support.

The Local 33 marchers seemed proud and defiant, but in many ways, it wasn’t their day to celebrate. When the formal procession was over, the protesters continued their march to City Hall. There, the eight remaining hunger strikers broke their fast, drinking cups of warm butternut soup. They huddled underneath a white tent as a light drizzle fell on downtown New Haven. They were in good spirits, but weary. In a few days, campus would empty out for the summer. The fight was far from won.

Yale, for its part, had already begun its counter-attack.

On Commencement Day, volunteers distributed water bottles and palm-sized pamphlets along the procession’s path.

The pamphlet, entitled “Information on Graduate Student 19

Unionization,” was a preventative measure. It contained a two-part argument that the graduate student teachers had seen before: one, graduate student teachers at Yale were organizing undemocratically; two, graduate student teachers at Yale were among the most privileged in the country.

The material structures that had defined Local 33 during its stint of campus prominence were also quietly removed.

At dawn on May 25, a crew of non-union maintenance workers dismantled 33 Wall Street. The following weekend, when alumni descended upon campus for college reunions, no sign of union activity was in sight.

The summer’s peace didn’t last long, however. On August 25, as first-years arrived on campus, a curious structure appeared on the New Haven Green. The bowshed was smaller and entirely orange this time, but similarly handsome. As Yale’s newest class swarmed Old Campus, members of Local 33 stood in front of the cleverly-named “33 College Street,” exchanging smiles and handing out fliers to firstyears and their families.

In his 1996 article about the history of unionization at Yale, John Wilhelm, then-president of UNITE HERE, reflected on labor struggles new and old. “It’ll take a while, but I think all of us will get over the discouragement and taste a little bit of the joy and the freedom and the power of that kind of struggle,” he said. “Some of us have had the privilege to go through it before.” The legacy of past labor struggles may be hard to shake, but not for a lack of trying.

—Amy Xu is a junior in Ezra Stiles College.

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Unwrapping Major Gifts Chinese philanthropists are reshaping university campuses. How are those donations procured?

Yi-Ling Liu

Under the high, Gothic Revival ceiling of the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, Chinese real estate mogul Zhang Xin speaks to a packed audience of students, professors, and university administrators on the afternoon of November 9, 2016. She is dressed in the stylish business attire that The New Yorker once called “a kind of Shanghai-Tang chic.” Before a large projector displaying photos of shiny office buildings in Shanghai, she describes the newest projects of her multi-billion dollar prime office real estate company, SOHO China. Her career trajectory—from teenage factory worker in Hong Kong to Master’s student at the University of Cambridge to renowned entrepreneur with 10 million followers on Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter)—is emblematic of “the Chinese dream.” However, Zhang Xin is not here just to talk about her success. She is here because fourteen undergraduates in the audience—the Yale SOHO China 21

Scholars—are reaping the benefits of her wealth: scholarships for low-income Chinese students.

Two years before this presentation, these scholarships were still just ideas. In January 2014, Yale President Peter Salovey flew to Beijing for a fundraising meeting arranged by Lei Zhang SOM ‘‘02, a Chinese hedge fund manager and friend of Zhang and her husband and business partner Pan Shiyi. The Chief of Staff of the SOHO Foundation passed Salovey a message: The couple was funding a ten million dollar scholarship for low-income Chinese students to study at American universities. Would Yale like to be a part of it?

The SOHO Foundation is part of an expanding network of Chinese philanthropists interested in donating to American institutions of higher education. In the last five years, in addition to the ten million dollars from SOHO, Yale has received a gift of 8.9 million dollars from Lei (who currently serves as a board member THE NEW JOUR NAL

of the Yale Corporation) to the School of Management and a sixteen million dollar donation from Chinese entrepreneurs Neil Shen SOM ’92, Brad Huang SOM ’90, and Bob Xu to establish the Yale Center of Beijing.

Joseph Tsai, co-founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, donated thirty million dollars to rename the Yale China Law Center the Paul Tsai Center, in honor of his father, and made another large donation for the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale.

Although money appears to be dropping from the sky, the process behind these donations is complex.

What happens when ten million dollars is shuttled from a wealthy donor to an institution like Yale? How are relationships with international donors cultivated?

And most importantly, how have universities like Yale had to adapt when increasing portions of significant donations come from international donors—in particular, from wealthy Chinese philanthropists?

—

Yale’s financial enterprise operates apart from the stone-carved spires of Yale’s campus. The 180-person Office of Development is housed on floors eight and nine of the tall, gray office building on 157 Church Street, just off of the Green. Few students are privy to

HOW HAVE UNIVERSITIES LIKE YALE HAD TO ADAPT WHEN INCREASING PORTIONS OF SIGNIFICANT DONATIONS COME FROM INTERNATIONAL DONORS—IN PARTICULAR, FROM WEALTHY CHINESE PHILANTHROPISTS? the intricate fundraising initiatives that take place in those rooms.

Fundraising for universities is a multilayered process involving different types of solicitation. The first two levels are annual giving and corporate fundraising, explained C.J. Menard, an independent development consultant at CJM Consulting, who has worked in the past for Harvard University and Boston University, and who currently serves as an administrative dean for Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. Annual giving—what 22

Menard calls the “scatter-bombing of fundraising”—is typically solicited from alumni en masse through electronic communication and social media appeals. Corporate funds are obtained through more specialized interactions with companies and foundations.

Then there are the big donations from individuals — major gifts. Defined by Yale as a donation of one hundred thousand dollars over the course of no more than five years, these donations are raised through highly personalized interactions with donors. Major gifts officers must “think every day about a very small group of people, about what they can do to help their relationship with the university, and make the donor feel good about their donations,” said Menard. In recent years, as major gifts have become an increasingly important part of university fundraising efforts, development offices have “evolved into highly proactive, and highly customer-service oriented teams,” said Sarah Jackson, an independent major gift consultant based in Boston. Major gifts do not simply materialize out of thin air. They’re the product of years of donor cultivation, screening, and negotiations.

The first meeting between Salovey and the Chief of Staff of the SOHO Foundation was orchestrated through an intricate web of relationships in the form of the Yale Asia Development Council. Established in 2014, the Council consists of a group of sixty-four influential men and women, including Zhang and Pan, interested in strengthening strategic partnerships between Yale and Asia. According to a private document, the membership consists mostly of CEOs of investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms—from Bank of America to Morgan Stanley to the Lenovo Group—and founders of some of the largest start-up organizations in China, such as e-commerce giant Alibaba and internet provider Tencent. The council is a microcosm of the new economic elite of Asia: more than fifty of the sixty-four members work in the financial and real estate sectors, and fifty-seven come from Hong Kong or China, with the rest coming from India, Japan, and Korea. Most members are either alumni of Yale or have children currently attending the university.

“It’s more like the Yale Council of Potential Donors,” joked one council member who asked to remain anonymous. Currently, Lei serves as Chair of the Council, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as its Honorary Chair. “Looking around the room, I found that I mostly recognized everyone — lawyers, bankers, successful entrepreneurs,” said the same council member, describing the inaugural meeting in March 2014, held in a gilded conference space at The Conrad, a luxury hotel in Hong Kong.

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At that first meeting, Salovey and Lei, seated at the front of the room, introduced the council’s purpose: to “advance Yale’s involvement in Asia on a country-by-country basis” and “identify opportunities for new strategic and fundraising alliances.” Over lunch, each member received a blue binder with Yale’s new initiatives in Asia, and lunch was served.

“We all kind of knew that the main reason we were together was to encourage us to donate,” the anonymous council member claimed. “But there was never a point where they asked, ‘Please give to the school.’

There was never a solicitation of a donation. It was very subtly and tactfully done.” To follow up, James McDonald, the Senior Director of International Fundraising at Yale at the time, sent email updates and council meeting invitations. “This Jim McDonald guy has kept in touch with me for three years,” said the council member. “But there was never a suggestion that I should be giving, even though you know that his key job is to solicit money.”

The members of the council, like all potential donors, were carefully researched beforehand. The Yale Development Office has a team that researches all top-level donors, hires external consultants, brings in lawyers from the Yale general council office, and consults trusted friends in the Yale network, like Lei, to weigh in. In the case of the SOHO Scholarship donations, Zhang and Pan had Lei’s seal of approval.

In spite of the growing influx of donations from China, giving money to universities is still a uniquely American concept. Within the U.S., the job of soliciting donations is a “well-choreographed routine where everyone knows what to expect,” said Menard. The U.S. has a widespread culture of philanthropy. “Everyone donates,” explained Menard, “regardless if it’s a multi-million-dollar donation or five dollars to your local Audubon Society.” But, outside of the U.S., the concept of donating to an alma mater is novel. Menard remembers how an international alumnus at Boston University once compared donations to universities to buying a sweater at a store and then receiving a letter from the store five years later, saying, “‘Hey look, you bought a sweater from us once, and now we’re expanding the store, do you think you could give us hand?’

The guy thought, ‘I got a diploma at BU and I paid for it,’” recounted Menard. “‘So why are you asking me for money years later?’”

Conducting international fundraising from China is therefore not for the faint of heart or budget: travel is hard, outreach efforts are costly, and success is ultimately unpredictable. “In China,” Menard says, “all the things we know how to do go flying out of the window.”

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After three years of emails from McDonald, the council member with whom I spoke never ended up donating to Yale. “I would guess that 90 percent of the people at the meeting do not give money,” he speculated. But when the other 10 percent, donors like Pan and Zhang, do decide to donate, they give ten million dollars.

“Who knows?” the council member asked. “If Jim keeps this up for ten years, maybe I’ll start to feel like I have an obligation to donate too.”

—

Solicitation is only the first part of the game. The second, harder part comes next: negotiation. Today, according to Terry Holcombe ‘64, a development consultant who worked as the Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development at Yale from 1981 to 1998, this process has grown more challenging. “When I began,

DONORS HAVE BECOME MORE INQUISITIVE, MORE ASSERTIVE, AND MORE SPECIFIC ABOUT WHAT THEY GIVE MONEY FOR. gifts were simply given. Now they’re almost always negotiated,” Holcombe told the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2001. “Donors have become more inquisitive, more assertive, and more specific about what they give money for.”

“Gone are the days of unrestricted philanthropy in which donors give and explicitly trust the institution to use their funds widely,” echoed consultant Sarah Jackson. This paradigm shift has given rise to what development professionals have called “venture philanthropy” in American universities. An increasing number of donors see their gifts as a form of investment and expect to be involved in the way their money is used.

In the case of the SOHO scholarships, Zhang and Pan had explicitly articulated intentions: to provide American education—what they perceived as a crucial path to greater social mobility—to young, low-income Chinese students. Zhang attributes her own transformation from a factory girl to a billionaire entrepreneur to the scholarships she received from Sussex University and Cambridge. Because she wants to replicate this opportunity for students like her, the SOHO donations come with clear stipulations. The scholarship guarantees that the income from the donations will always go 24

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to students from China that have need, regardless of any external economic changes. In the event of is an economic recession, such a stipulation would act as a kind of shield against market forces that could affect Yale’s endowment and its ability to support the education of low-income Chinese students. The Yale Development Office has also had to prove to SOHO that they would make a more targeted effort to recruit students from rural Chinese provinces, regions from which the university has not admitted many students in the past.

Given cultural differences between American and Chinese philanthropy, the process of negotiation is not always comfortable. An example of such a difference is the Chinese emphasis on efficiency. “Development officers from the U.S. are used to the long, drawn-out cultivation process,” said Menard. “I get to know you and you get to know me. You know I am a fundraiser, but it is a while before we actually start a serious conversation about the big gift.” In China, the process is accelerated. “China is a place where two strangers will meet over dinner and halfway through they will have told each other how much they earn,” explained Menard, who often dealt with Chinese donors in his work. “The Chinese are not squeamish about their money.”

Speed is not unique to China: it also characterizes the major gifts negotiations of many rapidly developing nations across the globe, such as the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and India. Boston University, where Menard used to work as a development officer, once sent out a questionnaire to alumni asking them to share their net worth. “Some rich guy in Dubai checked the highest category, of fifty million dollars plus,” said Menard. “Twenty-six months later, he signed the largest gift in the history of the university, having had zero contact before and having made zero previous gifts.

This was incredible, but when we are talking about international gifts—from places like China—it is not that uncommon anymore.”

One point of contention, though, is that Chinese philanthropists may have an agenda that does not match the ethos of American universities. In China, “donors tend to be more transactional,” said Menard.

“There is an expectation of quid pro quo.” Admissions is particularly sticky territory for international donors.

“Throughout my years of doing this, I have certainly fielded calls from representatives of families that go along the lines of: this family has a son or daughter, the father would like to write a check, how big a check?”

Tom Tseng, Vice President of Development at the University of Hawaii, has had many similar experiences. “Some people might have gotten well-meaning but erroneous advice that if one gave a large sum of 25

money, that one’s child or children would be guaranteed admissions to the desired institution,” he said.

Universities strive make clear at every step of the conversation that there is no quid pro quo, particularly with regards to the admission process. Admissions decisions by Yale in theory are always made before negotiations about donations begin.

Yale, however, is rich. Not all universities have the luxury and the financial means to adhere to such principles. Donations in exchange for admissions are not unheard of among less well-endowed universities.

According to a Kaplan Test Prep survey, one hundred admissions officers from four hundred top colleges and universities said that they have “felt pressured to accept an applicant who didn’t meet the school’s admissions requirements because of who that applicant was connected to.”

—

Regardless of the messy motivations attached to these donations, major gifts from China will only continue to pour into American universities thanks to a combination of powerful, historical forces at work: a deep-rooted, century-long Confucian education tradition, the growing international appeal of the American model of the liberal arts college, and most crucially, China’s rapid economic growth.

The nation’s economic boom in the last three decades has resulted in an explosion of highly concentrated wealth holders (there are now 335 billionaires in China) similar to those in the United States in the late nineteenth century. “We once had our robber barons, Carnegies and Mellons. What did they do with all their new money? They built yachts, huge mansions and sent their kids to the finest schools,” explained Menard.

“But at some point, after spending all this money, they had to sit back and think—what next? What do I do with all this great wealth? The next, natural step was philanthropy.”

Many young Chinese investors and entrepreneurs, THE NEW JOUR NAL

having gone through a similar thought process, directed their philanthropic efforts to education. According to a study done by the China Philanthropy Project, a research effort established in 2015 at the Harvard Ash Center to identify trends in charitable giving among China’s wealthy, more than two-thirds of the hundred philanthropists surveyed cited education as one of the causes that they support. They are also increasingly choosing to direct their efforts abroad. “As their personal experience becomes more global, their children are educated abroad and they tend to acquire foreign property,” said Edward Cunningham, Director of the Ash Center China Programs, in an interview published on the Ash Center’s website. “The social network of these newly wealthy will tend to globalize.” In the last two years alone, Hong Kong investor Gerald Chan donated two hundred fifty million dollars to the Harvard School of Public Health, and Columbia University received five million dollars to establish the Tang Center for Early China. And those are just the big gifts.

“Word of mouth spreads fast. A Chinese parent will send a kid to Yale, become familiar with the American concept of donating, tell their friends, who’ll start to donate too,” explained Menard. “It’s a snowball that just keeps growing.”

As Chinese philanthropy matures and globalizes, fundraising teams across the United States are quick to adapt. “When I first started this profession in 1987, other development officers were always like, don’t waste your time outside of the United States, don’t

AS DONATIONS ROLL IN FROM CHINA, INTERNATIONAL FUNDRAISING CAN NO LONGER BE AN AFTERTHOUGHT. bother with international donors,” said Menard. “A day in New York will beat a month anywhere else outside of this country.”

Twenty years later, as donations roll in from China, international fundraising can no longer be an afterthought. Go to a fundraising conference today, and it is hard to walk into any part of the room and not overhear a conversation in Chinese. “In the last ten years, I have seen a visible shift in not only front-line fundraisers who are either Chinese or Chinese-Americans [or] who are fluent in Mandarin, but also non26

Asians who are proficient in Chinese,” said Tseng, the VP at the University of Hawaii. The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, a nonprofit association of educational institutions headquartered in Washington, D.C., opened an Asia-Pacific branch in Singapore ten years ago and started to offer training conferences in Chinese in 2011. “To me, this shows a greater recognition that more cross-pollination, training, and better understanding between the East and the West has become imperative,” Tseng said.

This growing Chinese influence is not always welcomed with open arms. Under a 1992 revision to the Higher Education Act of 1965, colleges and universities must annually report foreign gifts and contracts of two hundred fifty thousand dollars or more to the U.S. Department of Education, a move intended to monitor influence from foreign donors. However, the type of influential Chinese donor that the United States once feared even a few years ago—one hoping to buy influence for personal gain—may look very different from a Chinese donor today. According to Tseng, Chinese donors have evolved from “mere givers to philanthropists,” he said. “Many are now partnering with institutions with specific goals for the betterment of the future as opposed to simply having a leverage.”

Tseng cited the one hundred fifteen million dollar gift made last year by Chinese businesspeople Tianqiao Chen and Chrissy Luo to the California Institute of Technology to establish a new institute funding interdisciplinary brain research. Chen and Luo founded Shanda Interactive, the largest Internet entertainment developer in China. “We believe that uncovering how the brain perceives, interprets, and interacts with the world can shape groundbreaking industries, play a critical role in addressing social issues such as aging and behavioral deficiencies,” said Chen in an interview conducted by Caltech. “And even help answer ultimate questions about life.”

Another example is Chen Yidan, founder of Chinese Internet giant Tencent, who is known in China as “the First Philanthropist in the Internet Industry.”

Chen is attempting to import models of American education back home to China. One of his most significant undertakings has been to single-handedly establish and endow Wuhan College, the first private non-profit school in central China. “There are many things that Chinese universities can learn from their American counterparts,” said Chen, “from residential college structures, to fostering a culture of alumni giving, to developing a liberal arts curriculum that teaches the whole person and not just a particular skill.”

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construction and launch of the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY). The Center will be located at the southern stretch of Prospect Street and Hillhouse Avenue, adjacent to the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design. “For me, it is especially vital that young people in the world today gain comfort with taking risks—with framing the problem, thinking in an interdisciplinary way, and trying ‘out-ofthe-box’ approaches,” said Tsai, paying tribute to the role that innovative thinking has played on his own life and career trajectory as the co-founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Like the American nouveau riche of the late nineteenth century, wealthy Chinese like Tsai are preoccupied with more than just questions of power, influence, and how to get their children into Ivy League universities. They are grappling with familiar questions that accompany economic excess: How should I give back to my community? How can I create meaningful change?

ties,” said Barkley Dai ’20, one of the SOHO Scholars.

“Trump campaigned on a platform of anti-globalization and Zhang sees the scholarship as a force to counteract that.”

Fundraising for universities is messy and complex.

Any process that deals with hunting down and securing large, unpredictable quantities of money requires an intricate array of moving parts—committees and relationships and luncheons and negotiations and sweet-talking fundraising officers and whispers about tit for tat — that grease the wheels of the system. And there is still some element of self-interest in major gifts, albeit not the sort of sinister leverage feared in the past.

Menard remembers a time at an education conference in Boston when somebody heard that he was an advancement officer and joked to the people nearby: “Stand back folks, and hold onto your wallets!”

“It was a joke, but words like that can be frustrating, because they do not seem to realize that people give when they want to,” said Menard. “At the end of the day, they give to feel good.”

But the projects undertaken and funded by major gifts from Chinese donors seem to show that there are goals bigger than personal interests that are driving this financial machinery. At stake is not just large sums of money, but educational goals and the future of U.S.China relations. As the Yale Asia Development Council member put it, “It is like elephant hunting. You have to play the long game.”

— Yi-Ling Liu graduated from Silliman College in 2017.

—

After her talk at Sterling Memorial Library last November, Zhang met with the fourteen SOHO scholars to discuss their experiences at Yale. When discussion veered into the still-fresh Trump victory, Zhang was struck by the thoughtfulness of the students’ comments. Most of the scholars had been in the U.S. for less than a year, yet they had become intensely invested in the nuances of American politics and the future of democracy. “I think that our conversation made her even more committed to donate to American universi27

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POEM

SUN Back before I knew the politics of walking with your chin up When I was bright eyed and 20/20’d I’d sneak to the outer orbit of the playground nestle myself between the comets and leftover kickballs and watch the sun sing itself purple

Sidney Saint-Hillaire

Like a tuning fork wobbling into place, The sun would sway somewhere between sapphire and emerald Shedding stained glass over my sight It was a parade for the patient...and the reckless for the kids who wait till greenlights to play hopscotch the ones who save their kite string for thunderstorms For a black boy who was too scared of making people feel scared Sun-gazing was my way of feeling dangerous, Jumping from the top of the stairs screaming at the mirror Grasping the iron just long enough to feel the heat These are the ways I stay sane My last resorts for when I leave myself on mute for too long With our eyes locked skyward We can still feel the cautious glances Nervous surveillance pulled taught Draped over our skin More like a villain’s cape than a bull’s eye Lead, velvet, billowing Reminding us we are always dangerous

I’d holster my hands lock my eyelids search for ways to make myself seem less like a bomb For ways to diffuse the clutched purses and tense shoulders I tiptoed in the daylight hoping the ground would forget I am there Thinking what part of a black boy’s imagination was there left to declaw?

To make protect people from?

It’s only now that I realized I haven’t stared at the sun in a while I walk light, I keep my eyes on the cement I cross the street when I see old white ladies coming Like I’m afraid of what they’re afraid of Like my eyes on the horizon meant I am hunting Meant I am deserving of being hunted Now I keep my spine arched Always to dive into my shadow And forget how sorry I am for their fear How I hold the weight of their worry between my shoulders And tell myself they’re wings How walking without remembering my skin sets me too close too the sun Forgot how in the sunlight black boys look charred With red in their eyes and coal in their grip Forget how to stare at the sun

— Sidney Saint-Hillaire is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College.

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Collages of Brent and Randy, which their mother Karine made for the sentencing hearing of Timothy Paprocki (Photo courtesy of Karine Heard)

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THE EPIDEMIC AT HOME

How recovering opioid addicts and their families are navigating treatment options in Connecticut

Daisy Massey

The day her son Brent died, Karine Heard had a migraine. She was at a drive-through bank teller when he called, asking whether she had a piece of his mail at home. “Probably. I’ll have to look,” she whispered into her phone, trying to be discreet. She thought about asking him to lunch but decided against it because of her headache. Brent told her he needed a document that matched the name on his ID so he could check into a methadone clinic—another attempt at getting clean.

Heard, who lives in Waterford, was used to juggling her son’s addiction treatment. Brent had begun taking synthetic heroin when he was just 14, crushing it up and snorting it. Soon he started injecting it through an IV. 31

At that time, Brent’s older brother Randy, a model with the Ford Models agency, was living in New York and also using heroin. The brothers had been in the same social circles at Waterford High School but never took the drug together. “They had that respect for each other,” Heard says. Most of their old cohort is gone now; since they graduated high school, about two of their friends have fatally overdosed each year.

Drug overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50. Last year alone, there were sixty thousand fatal drug overdoses, the majority of which involved opioids. It’s an epidemic that has ravaged communities across the country, from towns nestled in the THE NEW JOUR NAL

THE CONNECTICUT MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE PREDICTS 1,078 DRUG OVERDOSE DEATHS IN THE STATE THIS YEAR, AN 18 PERCENT INCREASE FROM 2016.

Christopher Johns, Lisa Cote Johns’ son, died from an opioid overdose at age 33. (Photo courtesy of Lisa Cote Johns)

Appalachian Mountains to cities along the Connecticut coast: Waterford, Bridgeport, New Haven. Although Connecticut ranks twenty-ninth in terms of state population, it has the eleventh highest opioid-related death rate in the country. And it’s only getting worse. The Connecticut Medical Examiner’s Office predicts 1,078 drug overdose deaths in the state this year, an eighteen percent increase from 2016.

Young adults between the ages of 18 and 25, who tend to be both emotionally and financially dependent on their parents, are the hardest-hit population in the opioid epidemic. In recognition of young peoples’ vulnerability to addiction, Connecticut has begun to shift its priorities.

The state has poured $335 million into its substance abuse services, funneling state funding into in-home treatment, including “family therapy teams” that work with young people and their relatives on substance abuse issues. Doctors are now allowed to prescribe Narcan, an opioid antidote, more easily, and teens’ friends have legal immunity if they administer Narcan while themselves high or in possession of drugs.

But no amount of funding can fully alleviate the weight of suffering that the families of addicted people shoulder.

In Heard’s court statement to the man sentenced for dealing the drugs that killed her son, she prayed that he change his life and offered forgiveness. “You are someone’s son,” she told him. “You have a mother.”

For families, addiction treatment isn’t just a one-time effort, but a circuitous process of decision-making and waiting. Many find the landscape of treatment options overwhelming to navigate, especially when programs are 32

overcrowded or have prohibitively high costs. Some parents first reach out to those who have already struggled through a child’s addiction, relying on social networks like the one created by Community Speaks Out, an organization based in New London. Sometimes families can afford to send their child to a comprehensive, expensive long-term program like Turnbridge, a rehabilitation center on Orange Street in New Haven. But other families are largely absent from their children’s recovery processes, and those struggling with addiction find surrogate communities in places like Teen Challenge, a Christian recovery center located near New Haven Union Station.

—

No matter the route, addiction treatment is a complex process: doctors first recommend detox, then a thirty- or forty-five-day rehabilitation program, followed by a stay in a sober house or a safe, monitored environment. But families face difficulties at each stage. Health insurance doesn’t always cover addiction treatment and the dearth of regulated, affordable options creates a cycle of relapse for people recovering from addiction. If a person does complete a rehabilitation program—despite steep dropout rates—they are still far from recovery. Sober houses have high risks of relapse, as they are unregulated and generally have no security, bed checks, or visitor restrictions.

Three New London County mothers have recently stepped in to guide other families through the throes of addiction and substance abuse treatment. In 2015, Tammy de la Cruz, Linda Labbe, and Lisa Cote Johns founded Community Speaks Out, an organization aimed at helping families navigate treatment options. It was a struggle that the other mothers knew all too well—each of their families, too, had been touched in some way by addiction.

The group formed when de la Cruz’s son, Joey Gingerella, started speaking at local high schools about his battle with addiction. Joey died last December, not from a needle but from a bullet. He was killed outside a Gro-

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ton bar when he intervened to stop a man from beating his girlfriend. The three mothers persevered through this tragedy, continuing their mission to support affected families and increase awareness of addiction prevention programs. So far, they have reached communities all over Connecticut and have helped over two hundred people enter rehabilitation programs.

Their organization offers assistance with every part of their clients’ needs. In addition to working day jobs, the three women manage support groups, conventions, and legislative initiatives, and help clients navigate insurance coverage. Their work with recovering addicts is tireless— and uncompensated. “If someone wants to go to rehabilitation,” Cote Johns says, “we get them in.”

Community Speaks Out absorbs new (non-paying) clients into a network of sympathy and encouragement, and the women stay in constant contact with them. Cote Johns doesn’t hesitate to shoulder other families’ heartaches; it’s part of the job, she says. She has called one mother twice a week for the past year to check in on her children. “We become family,” Cote Johns sighed. It’s a bond that no one wants to have to share, but one that becomes an essential lifeline during periods of familial conflict or grief.

This past January, Community Speaks Out received major recognition for its work: a five thousand dollar grant from Lawrence + Memorial Hospital in New London, an affiliate of Yale-New Haven Hospital. Through

“WE BECOME FAMILY” ... IT’S A BOND THAT NO ONE WANTS TO HAVE TO SHARE, BUT ONE THAT BECOMES AN ESSENTIAL LIFELINE, THROUGH FAMILIAL CONFLICT OR GRIEF. the grant, Community Speaks Out will become Connecticut’s first designated certifier of sober houses. After undergoing training in March with the Massachusetts Alliance for Sober Housing, de la Cruz, Labbe, and Cote Johns called up every New London sober house, inviting each to register with the organization. So far, six have registered.

Their regulation requires consistent safeguards like curfew check-ins, visitor regulations, Narcan availability, and training. The group is starting in New London, but hopes to expand across Connecticut to cities like New Haven.

The need to regulate sober houses is a personal one for 33

Cote Johns. The year her son Christopher died, he was 33, hoping to get back on his feet after a thirteen-year battle with addiction and six months in jail for violating probation. He had become hooked on drugs after taking prescription pain medications for routine surgeries in high school. On the day Christopher was released from jail, he had been sober for almost eight months. One of Cote Johns’s friends picked him up and took him to a rehabilitation center, but all the beds were full.

For recovering addicts, finding an available spot in a rehab center after a detox program can be extremely challenging. Cote Johns estimates that nine out of the ten times she calls a center, all the beds are full. In theory, New Haven has fifteen “Substance Abuse Care Facilities,” but that number includes only a couple of dedicated rehab centers.

Since Christopher had already detoxed on his own and had to wait on rehabilitation, he and Cote Johns’ friend drove directly to a sober house in New London. There are thirty sober houses in New London; New Haven has thirty-three. None are registered and few have any regulations. Though they are supposed to be safe places for people to recover from addiction, in reality, anyone can walk in and hand drugs to the residents. Christopher had stayed at many sober houses, and at every one of them, people were taking drugs.

The first few months of sobriety, when recovering addicts transition from detox to rehabilitation, are a critical window in the recovery process. In this period, they experience the physical effects of opioid withdrawal— anxiety, nausea, and vomiting—while learning to cope with stress without drugs. Many are tempted to start using again when cravings are intense and supervision is not.

Those first few months are also when most fatal overdoses occur. People fresh out of detox may not realize their tolerance has dropped, so a once-routine dose can kill them.

Christopher knew detox programs didn’t work. He told Cote Johns, “We need to fix ourselves from the inside. I have to change this, Mom.” But Christopher wasn’t able to save himself, and Cote Johns couldn’t save him, either. He died while living in a sober house and waiting for a spot in a rehabilitation program. One of his friends had walked in and given him the drugs that would kill him. One of Cote Johns’ friends found Christopher’s body the next day, after kicking down the door of his room.

Two years ago, Karine Heard, Brent’s mother, met Cote Johns at a forum for parents of children with addiction at Montville High School in Oakdale, Connecticut.

The two women immediately bonded over their experiences with their sons. Brent was still alive at the time, but Cote Johns’s son Christopher had died in 2014 and Heard had already lost Randy. In the years since, the two THE NEW JOUR NAL

have remained close, sharing memories and moments of solace: Cote Johns will call up Heard and say, “Let’s go light lanterns.” They’ll spend the evening on the deck of Cote Johns’s house in Groton, talking about their sons.

For Cote Johns, losing a child to addiction is “a different kind of pain, because you feel like you failed as a parent, as a mom.”

Last January, sipping tea in a Panera Bread in Waterford, Heard recounts what happened to her sons in a soft voice. It’s not an easy story to tell. She shifts uncomfortably in her navy sweatshirt and rests a well-manicured hand nervously on her neck. When Brent was almost 18, 20-year-old Randy overdosed and died, she says. “Brent— he just couldn’t live with the fact that his brother was gone,” Heard says. “It was too much for him.” Brent’s drug use grew worse, he dropped out of high school, and that year he cycled through thirty-day rehabilitation programs in New Haven. Heard tried to give him the support and resources he needed, but it wasn’t enough.

—

For a client with private health insurance, Community Speaks Out could make a call to Turnbridge, a long-term rehabilitation center in New Haven, located on Orange Street near the New Haven Green. Turnbridge does not accept Connecticut’s public insurance, Husky, and it is out of network for most private insurance plans, meaning that copays are high. Turnbridge would not confirm its fees, but most thirty-day programs like it are forty thousand dollars. It’s a price tag that some, like Cote Johns, believe is far too high.

But at Turnbridge (formerly called ‘Turning Point’) clients aren’t pushed out after any set period of time. Lauren Springer, the center’s Family Liaison, believes the open timeline ensures that each participant heals completely and leaves only when he or she is ready. No one can say for sure how long a broken bone will take to heal, and some say the same is true for addiction. While the detox phase is usually six weeks, according to Springer, some clients stay for over nine months.

At Turnbridge, the clients live in a large, classically New England stone house, surrounded by well-tended bushes and a lush green lawn. The website boasts a basketball court, gym, and art room. In Springer’s office on Orange Street, where the students come during the day for meetings and treatment, Oriental rugs pattern the gray wood floors and candy is displayed on the desk.

A stay at Turnbridge has three phases, the first of which usually lasts six weeks and helps clients detox and come back to a healthy baseline. Exercise, healthy eating, and family meetings are all part of the process. In addition to his or her own family’s support, each client has a case manager, a therapist, a sponsor, a psychiatric APRN licensed to prescribe, a program director, a family liaison, and a family therapist. By the third phase, clients have much 34

more freedom: they can take the bus to jobs in downtown New Haven and have less frequent appointments at the Turnbridge offices on Orange Street.

Like Cote Johns, Springer entered the world of addiction treatment support as a mother suffering through her son’s addiction. When she first started attending Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous support groups, she was terrified. “My son’s not like those people,” she thought. But when she found that the groups helped her heal, she started a group just for parents, for which she still commutes to New Jersey to run. Later, she joined Turnbridge, where she helps families become “part of the team,” as she likes to say.

Turnbridge, which accepts clients between the ages of 18 and 26, needs the support of parents. Springer tries to help each family come to terms with its child’s illness.

Sometimes parents are the first ones to call for help, but they need Springer to give them the confidence to tell their children that coming to New Haven for treatment is the only option. Other times, parents will deny that a problem exists, insisting, for example, “When I was in college, I smoked a lot of weed, and I did fine,” Springer says. But the most common issue is parents enabling their children’s continued drug use.

“No one wants to make a change until it’s just too uncomfortable where they are,” Springer says. She knows firsthand how hard it is, as a parent, to give your child unconditional love and support while not facilitating their addictive behaviors. Her son, who was once at Turnbridge but left in the middle of the program, is still using drugs.

She admits that she doesn’t know where he is right now. “I will pay for treatment, I will visit him when he’s in treatment, I will do whatever I can while staying on my side of the fence,” she says. The current situation “breaks her heart,” but she knows she can only do so much to guide and protect him.

—

Manny Barreto decided to change his life when he woke up from life support, his face wet with his aunt’s tears. It was the first time he had ever overdosed. At the time, Barreto was a 28-year-old manufacturing marketer in Brooklyn, New York. He had started doing molly, which contains the drug MDMA, years before. But when his drug dealer ran into trouble in the neighborhood, he switched to pure MDMA, and then to Ecstasy.

The evening he overdosed, he drank alcohol, smoked weed, and took five different kinds of Ecstasy pills. The high hit all at once, and he stumbled downstairs to a friend’s apartment to ask for help before passing out.

Though he faded in and out of consciousness in the ambulance, he remembers lying on the cot, wearing a wife beater in January, thinking, “This is the totality of my existence on the planet? I’m gonna die a drug addict in THE NEW JOUR NAL

Manny Barreto (left) and Steve Stokes (right), supervisors at Teen Challenge (Photo by Daisy Massey)

the back of an ambulance?”

Now a big-boned man with a dark mess of curls, glasses, and a black beard that widens with his grin, Barreto jokes that back then, he looked shriveled up, like a “turtle without its shell.”

Barreto’s life was changed by Teen Challenge, a global Christian ministry that has a recovery house in New Haven, among other branches across the world. The New Haven outpost is located in a group of run-down wooden houses clustered on Spring Street, near New Haven-Union Station and just a mile away from Turnbridge.

Strictly speaking, it’s neither a rehabilitation center nor a homeless shelter, but there are beds, a shared kitchen, and sitting areas where the men discuss Bible passages. The organization opens its doors to anyone who wants to get closer to God, but most of the participants struggle with addiction, too. The New Haven location is only for men over the ages of 18, but Teen Challenge New England has three women’s homes, and there are branches on almost every continent of the world. “We run out of beds, we’ll get a sleeping bag for you,” Barreto says.

After Barreto’s mother became abusive, he was adopted by his aunt and uncle, both of whom are ministers. Growing up, he knew about Teen Challenge’s ministry work, and the organization visited their church from time to time. So, when his aunt pulled back the curtain in the emergency room and said, “Are you ready to go to Teen Challenge?” Barreto was too tired to refuse. Leaving everything behind in Brooklyn, he enrolled at the New Haven location in 2012 and has been there ever since, first as a client and now as a staff member.

In many ways, the fifteen-month program is similar to other long-term rehabilitation programs like Turnbridge.

It has four phases, each one emphasizing personal disci35

pline, healing from the inside, and making plans for a healthy future. There are chores, mentors, and, in the last phase, job opportunities.

But the programs differ in terms of how they approach family involvement. At Teen Challenge, men are cut off from their families and friends in order to avoid the temptation to return to their old lives. Barreto is no longer in touch with anyone he used to use drugs with; almost all of those people have already died. At Turnbridge, parents and families are integral parts of the healing process and receive training in how to support loved ones with addictions. Unlike the widespread support network at Turnbridge, Teen Challenge’s clients meet with a single mentor. Teen Challenge is unafraid to discipline men who relapse or disrespect authority, whereas Turnbridge treats relapse or behavioral issues with therapy and more time in the program. If someone smokes or talks back to a staff member at Teen Challenge, he will be set back in the program’s phases and given more chores. At Turnbridge last month, young men were vaping on the sidewalk.

The two programs also differ in the demographics of their clientele. While the opioid epidemic more broadly skews white—80 percent of drug overdose deaths in Connecticut this year have involved white people—in New Haven, where there are significant Black and Hispanic populations, the epidemic crosses racial lines. Every client I saw in the hallways or outside at Turnbridge was white.

At Teen Challenge, a car of Black men pulled out of the driveway and waved to me as they headed to their jobs in town. Turnbridge, which takes only private insurance for medical fees, also has residential fees that are around nine thousand dollars a month. At Teen Challenge, participants are asked to give what they can, but it’s unusual that they can pay the fees in full: $750 per month, plus a THE NEW JOUR NAL

The Main office building of Teen Challenge, located near New Haven Union Station (Photo by Daisy Massey)

$750 intake fee. Many men come for free. And there are no medical bills, as no doctors work in the Teen Challenge house.

Comparing the success of the two programs is difficult.

In 2017, Turnbridge published an outcome study reporting that 70 percent of all of its clients reach one year of sobriety and 80 percent of that group complete another year. These numbers are striking compared to the national average; the National Center on Addiction and Substance estimates that only 30 percent of all people who complete a rehab program are successful. But addiction is a life-long struggle, and Turnbridge clients could easily relapse after two years. The most recent numbers on Teen Challenge are from a 1999 dissertation at Northwestern, in which a political science graduate student found that 86 percent of clients were drug-free after three years, and, perhaps most strikingly, 91 percent were employed.

In the first part of the program at Teen Challenge, men detox without drugs to wean them off heroin. Barreto says that opioid-based detox clinics that use drugs like methadone, a synthetic opioid, don’t solve addiction; they just substitute one form of it for another. After all, he asks, what’s the point of getting clean? To “experience life.”

He’s seen men come to the program because, even after ten years, they couldn’t kick their methadone addiction.

The first thing Barreto tells incoming men is to accept the fact that, whatever their addiction, it will tempt them to leave. When their cravings start to push them toward the door, they have Barreto’s phone number and are told to call if he is not in his office. At private-pay rehabilitation centers, Barreto says, the staff clocks out at 5 p.m. They call it “boundaries,” he scoffs.

Barreto knows how hard it can be to resist the temptation of leaving. But he was sustained by the other men 36

in the program, like his now-colleague Steve Stokes, the program supervisor, who was six months into the program when Barreto first arrived. Unlike Barreto, when Stokes came to the program, he had already been in and out of rehabilitation for more than ten years. In a thick Boston accent, he describes how it started when he began drinking to the point of blacking out at the age of 13. He started self-medicating to deal with his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). To add to his stress, his mother was abusive and cheated on her Stokes’s father with his uncle, at which point Stokes’s father left. Stokes’s OCD resulted in powerful hallucinations that he experienced throughout his youth. When he was ten, he says, he was taking a test when a voice in his head warned him, “If you don’t get up and walk over to the chalkboard and break that piece of chalk right now, your dad’s gonna get into a car accident.”

He got up, broke the chalk, and was kicked out of the classroom.

Stokes’s OCD was treated by doctors at McClean Hospital OCD Institute in Boston, where he was prescribed Klonopin. But he began abusing the medication and using it alongside heroin. Klonopin makes a heroin overdose more likely. In addition to his drug use, Stokes’s anger problems, which he thinks developed as a result of his abusive household, led him to crime and gangs. By the time he was 22, he had overdosed ten times. When he wasn’t in the hospital or a thirty-day program, he was washing his clothes in puddles and living in his car. Stokes’s dad tried to stay in his life, but after Stokes overdosed twice, he kicked him out of the house. “I can’t have you dying here on this couch,” his dad told him.

Stokes’s hands, wrapped in tattoos, start to fidget as he goes through his story. As he recounts his last overdose, he pauses to wipe tears from his eyes. He had been on a THE NEW JOUR NAL

sleepless four-day binge on speed and heroin, he says. His friend, a woman who has since died from an overdose, lured him into her car with drugs. She took him to the hospital where he protested for three hours in the parking lot, tearing her car apart and threatening to kill her if she made him go inside. She finally convinced him and, after doctors strapped him down, he woke up to his dad pleading with him to go to Teen Challenge. “I’ll try,” he said, knowing that he had nothing to lose.

Like Springer, Barreto insists that addiction cannot be isolated to a single source. “We understand that it’s no longer just biological, just psychological, just sociological,” he says. He acknowledges that not everyone who tries drugs becomes addicted. Teen Challenge does not wish to punish people addicted to drugs for their “injury,” as Barreto calls it, but the approach does “use biblical principles to correct some of their character flaws.” A person with an addiction is a slave to his own desires, contradicting the Apostle Paul, who taught, “I will be a slave to nothing except Christ,” explains Barreto.

Hoping to one day operate out of a safer location than the current outpost on Spring Street, the Connecticut branch of Teen Challenge is raising money by renovating condominiums it was gifted. The men in the house, alongside local church groups, provide the labor, and the leases or sales of the condos will provide funds for the organization. Barreto envisions a large house in the coun-

tryside, akin to something like the Turnbridge mansion.

—

When Karine Heard talks about her younger son, Brent, she still slips into present tense: “My son tells me,” or, “Brent likes…” She struggled with him constantly throughout his adolescence—from the age of 14, she says, he seemed stuck in a revolving door of addiction treatment, homelessness, jail, even life support. His parents tried tough love, enabling, and everything inbetween. She left food for him in the outside fridge or drove him where he needed to go just to avoid giving him cash.

But there was only so much of Brent’s life that she could control. On April 12, 2016, shortly after he called his mother to ask for a piece of mail, he made another call, to his acquaintance Timothy Paprocki, to ask him for drugs.

Later that day, Brent overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin in Paprocki’s car in Groton. Paprocki didn’t call for help.

Emergency Medical Services found Brent some time later and transported him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead upon arrival.

Heard got the call from the Lawrence + Memorial emergency room at 8:30 that night. She knew the number by heart. When the nurse on the phone asked Heard to come meet the doctor, Heard started screaming, “No! No! No!” The woman replied, “Please drive safely,” and Heard threw the phone across the floor.

Heard was sure that Brent was dead. “Karine, you don’t know that,” her husband reassured her. Maybe he’d had a heart attack, he said. Maybe he was okay. As they pulled up to the hospital, they passed an ambulance leaving.

Then a police car and another ambulance and another police car. EMTs watched the parents walk in. The doctor looked at them in the hallway and said, “I’m so sorry.” She told them the story, but Heard already knew it.

— Daisy Massey is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College.

Brent with his son (Courtesy of Karine Heard)

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ENDNOTE

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JUDAIC STUDIES Fall 2017 Course Offerings ANCIENT JDST 127 Christians in Early Jewish Sources, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal M 1-2:15p JDST 232 Capital Punishment Ancient Judaism, Noah Bickart T 1:30-3:20 JDST 400 Biblical Interpretation, Christine Hayes TTh 11.35-12.50 MEDIEVAL & EARLY MODERN JDST 200 Jewish History and Thought to Early Modern Times, Ivan Marcus TTh 11:35-12:50 JDST 270 Medieval Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Conversation, Ivan Marcus T 9:25-11:15 JDST 262 Jewish Travelers in the Medieval Mediterranean, Liran Yadgar W 9:25-11:15 MODERN JDST 026 Freshman Seminar: Political Theology, Elli Stern MW 1:00-2:15 JDST 332 Zionism, Elli Stern MW 10.30-11:20 JDST 386/FREN353 Jewish Identity and French Culture, Maurice Samuels Th 1:30-3:20 LITERATURE & LANGUAGE JDST 327 World Literature, Kirk Wetters/Hannan Hever W 3.30-5.20 JDST 328 Thinking Martin Buber, Hannan Hever/Asaf Angermann T 3.30-5.20 JDST 415 Reading Yiddish, Josh Price M 1:30-3:20 HEBR 110 Elementary Modern Hebrew (L1), Orit Yeret MTWRF 9:25-10:15 HEBR 110 Elementary Modern Hebrew (L1), Dina Roginsky MTWRF 10:30-11:20 HEBR 130 Intermediate Modern Hebrew(L3), Orit Yeret MW 1:00-2:15 HEBR 130 Intermediate Modern Hebrew (L3), Shiri Goren TTh 2:30-3:45 HEBR 159 Conversational Hebrew: Israeli Media (L5), Shiri Goren TTh 11:35-12:50 HEBR 161 Israeli Popular Music (L5), Dina Roginsky TTh 1:00-2:15 GRADUATE COURSES JDST 651 Critical Theory & Frankfurt School, Asaf Angermann Th 1.30-3.20 JDST 673 Intro to Babylonian Aramaic, Elitzur Bar-Asher M 9.25-11.15 JDST 760 Rabbinics Research Seminar, Christine Hayes T 2.30-4.20 _____________________________________________________________

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