Volume 57 - Issue 3

Cover Story

The Long Ride Home

Since 2019, forty-four pedestrians and cyclists have been killed on New Haven streets. Six years later, activists say nothing has changed.

Dear readers,

This issue of The New Journal finds you in the aftermath. In the wake of tragedy, people are confronted with a choice: to pick up the pieces, or to build anew.

In our cover story, Tina Li ’27 follows a group of cyclists, galvanized by the deaths of their friends to fight for safer streets. Meanwhile, Christina Lee ’26 visits the last alternative school in New Haven as it mourns the loss of two students. Paola Santos ’25 checks in on the Anti-Corruption Foundation, operating leaderless and in exile, a year after the death of its founder, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Elsewhere, our writers wrestle with whether a city can learn from its past. A victim of police violence looks at the jagged road to police reform. Successive failed developments in Westville haunt the city’s efforts toward affordable housing. And while Yale claims to uphold free expression, its new policies sever protest from campus space.

We write to you from a new year already wracked by devastation: last month wildfires swept through cherished neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and a slew of executive orders have destabilized long-standing fixtures of American democracy.

We hope these stories can help us to hold what has survived, and find the resilience to go forward.

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Behind the eccentric Audrey Hepburn signs around New Haven is an even more enigmatic artist. By

Harry Lowitz

Sonia Rosa

When two police officers shot at Stephanie Washington in 2019, protesters across the city mobilized for Yale Police reforms. Five years out, Washington says she still hasn’t received the justice she craves.

By Sophia Liu

Breaking Old Ground

One plot of land in Westville has seen two failed affordable housing projects in the past fifty years, revealing the pitfalls of public housing development in the city.

By

Elias Theodore

Silence on the Plaza

Following a wave of pro-divestment protests, new rules governing how, when, and where students can gather in outdoor spaces appear to intentionally restrict student protest.

By Hannah Mark

After Navalny

A year after Alexei Navalny’s death in Russian prison, his opposition organization continues in exile–building a global network with ties to Yale.

Paola Santos

A Last Alternative

Riverside Education Academy, New Haven’s last alternative school, grapples with the death of two students. By

Christina Lee

The Long Ride Home

Since 2019, forty-four pedestrians and cyclists have been killed on New Haven streets. Six years later, activists say nothing has changed.

By Tina Li

In the wake of the 2024 election, international students at Yale confront their relationship to America. By Moe

Shimizu

A writer confronts her great-grandparents’ testimony of Holocaust survival in a Yale archive. By Tali Kantor Lieber

Schwartz

Andrew Storino

By Lily Shukla

Audrey Hepburn Says SLOW DOWN

Behind the eccentric Audrey Hepburn signs around New Haven is an even more enigmatic artist.

New Haveners have noticed, enjoyed, and sometimes stolen signs put up by artist Matthew Feiner. His most recent design is especially eye-catching: “SLOW DOWN,” it reads, over a stencil of Audrey Hepburn. The colors and stencils vary, but each sign features Hepburn in the center with her beehive haircut, staring straight at the viewer.

There are around 240 Audrey Hepburn signs made by Feiner in Connecticut. Audrey glares from street signs near Feiner’s studio in West Haven, near his girlfriend’s place in Hamden, around bike routes, and across downtown New Haven.

“They’re a bright spot on the urban landscape,” Feiner proudly remarked. “They’re a calling card from an artist that says ‘cars slow down, everybody slow down, take an assessment of your life.’”

When asked how long ago he started making the signs, Feiner’s scruffy face smirked, and he responded in his slightly raspy voice. “I guess the question really is, how long ago did I start admitting that they were mine?”

This coyness is characteristic of Feiner. Bill Kurtz, a local teacher and longtime friend of Feiner’s, points to the square black tattoos on each of Feiner’s knuckles that cover up what was once a tattooed phrase across his hands. Kurtz has heard Feiner give different people different answers when asked what word was covered up. More often, he just won’t tell people. “He kind of resists the easy answer,” Kurtz said.

Behind the signs is the eccentric persona of an artist motivated to connect New Haven and its people.

Standing in his cluttered studio with shades on and hands in pockets, Feiner gazed up at the four large stenciled signs adorning the wall. Feiner’s distinct repertoire has had dozens of designs over the years. He collages six or seven images “that work well together” on crosswalk signs, erects “weird little sculptures,” and spray-paints the phrase “say hello” on sidewalks. His work is often taken down or stolen, which frustrates, amuses, and flatters Feiner. “I’m honored if someone takes that and brings it back to their world––that’s getting the message out,” he said.

But Feiner’s “SLOW DOWN” signs are distinct from his others because they are directed at a specific problem: people driving like “assholes.” The signs have more implicit meaning, too. Feiner worries about the growing need for instant gratification. “You have an entire generation of people coming into driving that have just spent their entire lives playing Grand Theft Auto.”

But why Audrey Hepburn? “Divine intervention,” he said, matter-of-fact. One day, in 2020, while working on the original “SLOW DOWN” signs alongside a project requiring an Audrey Hepburn stencil, he threw the stencil behind himself out of frustration—something just wasn’t working. When he went to retrieve the stencil, a mark remained.

Feiner was taken by Hepburn’s intimidating, expectant stare enlivening the direct messaging of his signs. “She’s looking at you saying, ‘Hey, I know your mom,’” he said. An added bonus to the new design was that signs with only the words “SLOW DOWN” looked too official, and were likely to face removal by the city government.

Audrey Hepburn is one of Feiner’s idols. He speaks about her on a firstname basis. As a kid, he often watched Hepburn’s movies with his mom, and he was moved by her World War II survival story. Her body’s development was inhibited after starving in Hungary at the hands of Nazis, as was Feiner’s due to frequent ailments growing up.

Feiner has deep-seated visions for the way things should be arranged. Near the door of his studio, there are three hanging strings with corners of potato chip bags next to a wind chime. Over the course of a year, he filled the strings with the corners. He does not usually plan his pieces at all, but he says he can see the end product and can tell when things look right. He builds his art—slowly.

“The child gets beaten out of most people,” he said about his artistic mindset. “Mine’s right in the fucking back of my head all the time.”

For example, he has placed roughly forty pieces of rusted metal silk-screenprinted with the word “pervert” in bus stops and other random places around town. While the word carries loud inappropriate sexual connotations, Feiner believes it maintains a widely applicable meaning. “I’m a pervert,” he declares. “I pervert bike riding to its extreme.” In fact, the word applies to many things in his life, he says: the way he watches films, the way he makes art. “It’s healthy,” he resolves.

It seems his free-ranged creative vision doesn’t only take place in public. “He never used to present gifts directly,” said Elaine Lewinnek, Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, and Feiner’s longtime friend. “He’d just casually leave artwork in my bathroom or atop my coat rack after he and a group had been over.”

After graduating high school in Madison, CT, Feiner moved to New Haven, where he has been ever since, except for some years teaching art at the University of Texas in Austin.

“New Haven’s my city,” Feiner said. His family was in New Haven before Yale was founded, he pointed out. His friends christened him “The Mayor,” a nod to his network in town and the care he offers the community.

Before his more abstract artistic advocacy with the “SLOW DOWN” signage, Feiner advocated for biker safety in New Haven for many years. He started Devil’s Gear Bike Shop in 2001, stepping down as owner in 2021, and joining a community of bikers and bike advocates called Elm City Cycling.

Feiner brings an element of creativity and kindness to both his art and his advocacy. With this strategy, he has a way of getting people to work together and get things done. When Lewinnek, during her time as leader of Elm City Cycling, mentioned that she hoped to gather a “critical mass” of New Haven bikers, Feiner suggested that their advocacy would go further if they “make it a kinder, less critical mass.”

When a city planner was fired in the early 2000s, Feiner decided Elm City Cycling ought to go on a bike ride to the city planner’s house and have one hundred bikers serenade him with kazoos. Lewinnek said this was a turning point.

“After that, City Hall got stuff done for us,” Lewinnek recalled. “The rest of the city planners, the ones who were left, were like, ‘Wait, we like you biker people.’”

incident in Hamden, CT, have left Feiner with injuries to the wrist, elbow, brain, and other parts of his body.

Though his signs have been occasionally construed as aggressive or confusing, Feiner believes “more people take it the right way.”

While putting up a “SLOW DOWN” sign one time, Feiner recalled a car racing past him, then hitting its brakes and reversing back toward him. Feiner expected an angry driver. Instead, the driver rolled down his window and said, “You know, you’re absolutely right.”

When that driver slowed down, it was a perfect example of what Feiner wanted people to learn from his signs. For that minute, Feiner explained, the driver’s “whole life” slowed down. He noticed where he was and acknowledged the other people around him. Then he drove off with more care. ∎

Harry Lowitz is a first-year in Ezra Stiles College.

Feiner has been unable to continuekeep putting up any signs since last year, but plans to leave out more in the future, including “SLOW DOWN” signs, for which he still sees a need. In September 2017, Feiner and his colleague Johnny Brehon entered a burning building to save neighbors. This event, several biking accidents, and a mishandled police

Acre by Acre

Connecticut farmers struggle to stay afloat amidst hostile insurance policies and climate catastrophe.

By Sonia Rosa

On Cercacelli’s Harrison Hill Farm in Northford, CT, an abandoned asylum, a church, and a graveyard sit alongside empty tomato fields. As we drive through the farm in his truck, William Dellacamera, the owner, points out the shed—decorated as a haunted dollhouse—where his eight-year-old daughter, Callie, spooked local farm-goers this past fall.

“I wish I didn’t have to do this,” Dellacamera gestures towards carefully painted haunted houses, an extra source of income for the farm. Eventually, we reach the farm’s perimeter, where damaged wooden posts hold together a dented metal gate.

In August 2024, a hail storm wiped out an entire season’s worth of produce on Dellacamera’s farm in just thirteen minutes. Now, he owes 510,000 dollars in insurance bills and weather damage repairs.

Climate change has increasingly disrupted the lives of Connecticut farmers, resulting in an influx of droughts, flooding, and untimely warm temperatures. In 2023, Connecticut farmers faced over twenty one million dollars in losses due to frosts and flooding.

The absence of government aid for farmers like Dellacamera in response to such climate disasters, on the other hand, is not unprecedented.

At 19 years old, back in 1999, Dellacamera experienced a drought while working on the Cecarelli farm in Northford. There, he watched Senators

Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman use the farm as a stage to proclaim their mission to support small farms, specifically through low-interest loans—a solution small farmers oppose as they struggle to pay them off.

Twenty-six years later, Dellacamera stands in a similar place; this time he

has the opportunity to directly voice the needs of small farms like his to Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, who visited Cecarelli farm after the storm.

Not all farmers could keep fighting, though. Unlike the United States’ largest farming states, in which large single-crop farms dominate, Connecticut farms skew small. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 460 out of 5,058 Connecticut farms closed between 2017 and 2022. These small farmers are trapped within a system that does not adjust to their size. Many face mountains of debt, have trouble navigating the insurance system, and remain overlooked on the policy floor. This, amidst the natural disasters exacerbated by climate change—such as the hail storm at Cecarelli’s—buries farmers deeper in economic strife.

Before the green Revolution in the 1960s, when scientific advancements aimed to increased crop production, farms thrived off variety, supporting themselves and people’s diets with a regional variety of crops. “Pretty much everyone was a diversified farmer,” describes Ella Kennen of the New Connecticut Farmer Alliance. “And then these policies came into place that subsidized a handful of crops, and that

William Dellacamera, at his farm in Northford, CT.

has really drastically changed our diet.”

Post-Green Revolution, desires for high crop yield led to an expansion of monoculture and the usage of chemical fertilizers and GMOs. Such practices have resulted in a lack of biodiversity, agrochemical pollution of soil, air, and water, and increased carbon emissions from industrial technology use.

The most profitable farms are those that participate in monoculture. This is also thanks to the current crop insurance system, which allows farmers to insure their crops if they are diseased or destroyed due to a climate emergency. Large farms in the Midwest grow “cash crops”: corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice. If one of these few crops fails, those farms have the resources to insure them; government subsidies for crop insurance are virtually unlimited. For larger farms, high-cost premiums allow insurance companies to gain government subsidies for their services, thus incentivizing them to service monoculture farms. According to the Government Accountability Office, this practice can result in more generous subsidies for high-income farms.

For those who farm a diverse range of crops outside the cash crop realm, however, crop insurance is too expensive and lacks accessible options. Aaron Taylor is one of the four owners at Four Root Farm, in East Haddam, CT, dedicated to growing diversified, unique crops like shishito peppers and fairy tale eggplants. To save money, none of his crops are insured. Instead, he hopes that if one species dies, he can continue growing and selling the others. Similarly, Dellacamera only insured 65 percent of each type of crop he grows— leaving him without the cash to revive his barren farm post-hail storm.

Even the name “cash crop” sets a precedent for smaller farmers hoping to grow a range of produce, labeled “specialty crops.” “They call us specialty crops, but we don’t have specialty rules. We still got to fall under the rules of the green guy,” Dellacamera tells me. By the “green guy,” Dellacamera refers to larger farms that can afford insurance.

Specialty crops, however, aren’t merely a necessary evil for smaller farmers—they are imperative to environmental strength and consumer health. Specialty crops provide biodiversity, better soil health, and a crop rotation that can resist climate emergencies and diseases. On the consumer

side, a more diverse diet ensures food security through better nutrition. Still, smaller farms are placed in an arena too large, forced to combat a system that prioritizes monoculture.

To further assist farmers, the USDA’s Farm Service Agency moves to ensure an “equitable delivery” of Farm Loan Programs. However, trouble paying off loans and accumulating interest only land farmers in more debt.

“No farmer needs another loan,” says Chris Bassette, co-head farmer at Killam & Bassette Farmstead in South Glastonbury, CT. “That was the one thing we kept hearing from town officials, state officials, federal officials.”

The incomes of Connecticut farmers have nearly doubled from 14,941 dollars to 28,428 dollars between 2017 and 2022, according to the Department of Agriculture. But in the face of decreasing food profits and high supply-chain costs, farms—especially dairy farms—struggle to support themselves.

Greenbacker’s Brookfield Farm, in Durham, CT, auctioned most of their cattle in 2018, ending a legacy of dairy farming dating back to 1732. In a 2009 testimony before Connecticut’s Environment Committee, farmer Joe Greenbacker expressed that due to suppressed milk prices, the farm was down one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in milk income.

Fluctuating food prices have shrunk farmers’ profits. In July 2024, the national crop production index was 6.7 percent lower than in June of the same year, meaning farmers received less money for their crops. Still, distributor prices and labor costs remained high. Farmers, then, are thrust into a volatile

market. “It is really easy to go underwater,” Taylor says.

“It’s tough because labor is so expensive, and then [there’s] all of your insurance, your feed bills, your fuel,” Megan Hastings says. She owns Hastings Farm, one of only eighty-seven surviving dairy farms in Connecticut, a sharp decline from 210 in 2009. In 2009, the Hastings faced a similar struggle to the Greenbackers, almost selling their cows and the farm entirely.

“You worked all day and knew, at the end of the day, [that] you would be in more debt than when you started,” Hastings tells me.

CHRIS BASSETTE and her husband

Kevin Bassette, along with their 94-year-old business partner, Kenry Killam, have found innovative ways to secure extra income to support the farm. Similar to Dellacamera, they host haunted events at their farm known as “spooky strolls.” The farm also sells crops in fifteen different markets a week, rents out an Airbnb, and offers catering. “It’s great to have the consumer come and get to meet us and talk to us, but it’s a lot of work, and I would love to not have to do it,” Chris Bassette says.

Killam and the Bassettes aren’t the only farmers juggling new hats. At Four Root Farms, in East Haddam, CT, Taylor cycles between roles: musician, father,

and co-owner of CT Greenhouse. “It wasn’t working for me to make [the amount of money] I was making, which is sad, and I wish that hadn’t been the case,” Taylor says.

Managing a business and accruing side hustles have become integral to a farmer’s daily routine, and the demanding schedule can cause mental health battles and burnout. More young farmers are quitting. The national average farming age is around sixty. And among the younger farmers who want to begin farming, many lack land access and struggle with land affordability.

Some, however, have surpassed the hurdles and choose to stay.

“We are not growing the next giant business that can do it differently, but to be one of many small farms who are doing differently,” Taylor says. Four Root is comprised of four best friends, all farmers between the ages of 39 and 40. Taylor and his friends chose to enter the industry because they wanted to be among those changing the face of farming. “I could just be another person with a college degree working for a nonprofit trying to support farmers, or I could learn to be a farmer in my generation and learn to do it well and feed my community,” Taylor says.

Though she tried to distance herself from her family’s dynasty in her youth, Megan Hastings found herself drawn to dairy farming. Now, Megan and her sister, Lauren Hastings, are committed to continuing their family’s legacy amidst the uncertainty of the dairy market. “When we were talking as a family about selling the cows, we were all gonna get real jobs. It didn’t feel right,” she remembers. “I can’t really imagine doing anything else.” The future of younger farmers, then, lies in their resilience and dedication to creating a new legacy of farming.

Some farmers are also organizing. The New Connecticut Farmers Alliance aims to support the future of farming by connecting beginner farmers with one another, especially BIPOC farmers, a demographic often underrepresented in farming.

For Dellacamera, advocacy starts in his tractor. With the support of other local Connecticut farmers, Dellacamera has driven across Connecticut, sporting signs with signatures from local farmers across the state––an effort he calls his “Will Goes to Washington” movement. His last stop was Washington, D.C., inside Connecticut Congresswoman

Rosa DeLauro’s office, where senators and USDA officials crowded the room.

In December, 2024 shortly after Dellacamera’s trip to the Capitol, DeLauro secured a Disaster Assistance Bill, allotting a 220 million dollar grant for farmers who underwent climate disasters during the 2023 and 2024 seasons in New England states, Hawai’i, and Alaska. The bill provides financial support to small and medium-sized farmers without the requirement for crop insurance—a large step for specialty farmers.

The Disaster Assistance Bill is just the start. In Dellacamera’s words to Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal after the bill was passed, “This isn’t over. And there’s a lot that needs to be done.”

One major contender in this fight for the small farmer is the Farm Bill, a multiyear bill tracing back to post-Depression America. The bill allocated 428 billion dollars from 2018 to 2023 in government funding to support farmers, food-insecure citizens, and environmental protection efforts. Despite being renewed every five years, the bill failed to pass in both 2023 and 2024 and has now been extended to 2025. Democrats and Republicans still have not agreed on how to fund the bill, and whether nutrition and climate programs should be limited. The longer the renewal of the bill is postponed, the longer smaller farmers endure crop insurance untailored to them, insurance and loan programs that do not help them, and new climate issues not addressed by the outdated bill.

This season, Dellacamera’s farm is barren. Sitting in his truck, he is quiet as he thinks about the future of Cecarelli’s Farms. He instead describes how local farm-goers marveled at the abundance of peppers displayed on his field just four days before the hail storm.

For many, all it can take is a few minutes for a livelihood of work to disappear. But Dellacamera is prepping for his next harvest—and trip back to the Capitol. And while the dirt road he drives on is a long one, it is not one untaken. In 1979, farmers participated in the Tractorcade, driving hundreds of miles to Washington D.C. in their tractors to protest the foreclosure of American farms. Today, Dellacamera has four tractors ready to be driven by neighboring farmers, all working acre by acre to fill what looks like an uncertain future. ∎

Sonia Rosa is a first-year in Pierson College.

Dellacamera lost a season’s worth of produce in a hail storm last summer.

The Pasture

Spring with its promise of holidays was come on the open farm behind the house behind your father’s house.

You knew this: you caught on our way your father’s asparagus sprouted out of earth.

Inside my fool brother sought your sister. You knew this too: I had allergies and sneezed and you wiped my nose and yours from the laughter.

In the tall grass after I asked: if you too stooped to marry, where was the field you, you would sow and what would you grow there?

You parted the dirt. Me? Oh, no. Here, see? At the harvest he will reap his plenty.

–Netanel Schwartz

Where skincare meets self-care.

Artwork by Artpce.

After Navalny

A year after Alexei Navalny’s death in Russian prison, his opposition organization continues in exile–building a global network with ties to Yale.

By Paola Santos

layout design BY ALICIA GAN

PHOTOS Sourced by Colin Kim

“Since Soviet times, the safest place in Russia is the kitchen,” says Anna Biryukova, Head of Public Opinion Research and political polling at Russia’s largest democratic opposition group, the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Biryukova addressed an audience at Henry R. Luce Hall in October 2024. “In modern Russia, you cannot have a casual political conversation with a stranger at a bus stop. You cannot say you don’t like Putin. It’s simply not possible. 100 percent not possible.”

The chilling effect of repression in Russia has turned even ordinary conversations into a risk, as Russian media projects a fantastic majority supporting those in power. “They want you to feel if you are not with them, you are nothing, you are all alone. And, if you object, there will be consequences,” Biryukova continued.

Following its dissolution by Putin’s government in 2021, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which is usually referred to by its Russian acronym FBK, now operates from Vilnius, Lithuania. With 135 employees, the FBK uses social media, investigative journalism, and grassroots organizing to expose corruption, counter state narratives, and build toward a democratic future for Russia. Engaging a predominantly young audience, their YouTube news channels—boasting 6.37 million subscribers and over 1.58 billion views—rival live viewership of Russian state TV, making them one of the most influential independent voices against Putin’s Russia. From the fbk’s new headquarters in Lithuania, Biryukova continues to gauge public sentiment inside Russia, disguising calls with a local Russian number to elude state surveillance.

Associating with or donating to the FBK, which exists off of private donations and crowd-funding, can lead to charges of extremism, treason, or aiding an “antistate” entity.

The FBK has operated leaderless since February 16, 2024, when its founder, Alexei Navalny, died in a Russian penal colony in the Arctic Circle where he was serving a 19-year prison sentence.

As the war broke out, Navalny urged his team from prison to think long-term, and prepare for a democratic Russian future, albeit one kicked down the line. “He had an ongoing idea that education was the greatest value,” Biryukova recalled. “Not only for his kids, for everyone in his working and friend circle.”

For Navalny, the Yale World Fellows program, Yale’s global leadership ini-

chief of staff—and Biryukova both became World Fellows, in 2018 and 2024, respectively, following in Navalny’s footsteps. When they applied to the fellowship, Navalny provided them with letters of recommendation. Their acceptance and participation in the program reflected a growing recognition of Navalny’s opposition movement by the University. Now, without their leader, the FBK pushes on–mobilizing a global network Navalny began to build at Yale.

II.

ASince Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the FBK has faced a grim reality: the opposition’s momentum had plateaued while the crackdown on dissent intensified. Journalists and lawyers affiliated with the movement live under constant threat.

tiative which he attended in the fall of 2010—a year before he founded the FBK—embodied this vision. The Yale World Fellows program is a semester-long residency for mid-career professionals. The program was established in the early 2000s, at the urging of former University President Richard Levin, who wanted to bring Yale to the forefront of post-Cold War global democracy efforts. Yale provided Navalny access to U.S. and global political networks and a platform to refine his anti-corruption strategy, elevating his profile internationally. Yet, the experience came at some cost. Back home, Kremlin propaganda smeared Navalny’s association with Yale as evidence of Western collusion.

Leonid Volkov—Biryukova’s husband, Navalny’s close ally, and former

lexei Navalny was born in 1976 in the small town of Butyn outside of Moscow to a modest family—his father, a former Soviet Army officer, and his mother, an economist. Raised in a series of garrison towns, Navalny spent summers with his paternal grandmother near Chernobyl, Ukraine. The 1986 disaster, coupled with the Soviet government’s deliberate attempt to downplay the scale of the catastrophe, would later shape his staunch anti-corruption stance. Navalny’s education in economics and law in Moscow laid the foundation for his future political activism. In 2000, he aligned himself with the liberal Yabloko party, which championed a free market economy and a strong civil society. In 2008, he launched a stakeholder activism campaign that targeted five state-owned Russian oil and gas companies. By purchasing small shares in these companies, he gained access to corporate meetings and internal documents detailing their financial assets. With this, he exposed widespread corruption within the companies. His findings, published on his widely-read LiveJournal blog beginning in 2008, quickly drew the attention of then-President Dmitry Medvedev, who, three years later, caved to public and governmental pressure to acknowledge the staggering embezzlement happening within state-controlled industries.

Navalny, top row fourth from the right, with the 2010 cohort of Yale World Fellows. Photo courtesy of the Jackson School of Global Affairs.

After Navalny

Navalny’s fearless use of the internet as a platform to reveal the Kremlin’s corruption earned him the moniker “Russia’s Julian Assange” from The New Yorker

Navalny applied to the Yale World Fellows program in 2009, backed by recommendations from prominent Russian dissenters. He realized that to effectively target Russian oligarchs funneling state funds abroad, he needed to understand U.S. and U.K. money laundering laws. He also hoped to study American party politics, checks and balances, and the mechanics of successful elections—insights he aimed to apply back home in Russia.

Leslie Powell, a former Yale World Fellows admissions officer, remembers Navalny “stumbling” through the admissions interview, emailing afterward to apologize for his English. “But even then it was clear he was onto something big,” Powell said.

The Yale World Fellows program has supported four hundred fellows across ninety-six countries in its global leadership programming, boasting a more competitive entry rate than Yale College. Political dissidents stood out in a program that typically prioritized government leaders, entrepreneurs, journalists, artists, scientists, and humanitarians—“people who are moving the needle in some way via different pathways,” as current director Emma Sky said. Only three fellows—Navalny, Turkish intellectual Hakan Altinay, and Nicaraguan activist Félix Maradiaga—have faced political exile or imprisonment.

In August of 2010, 34-year-old Alexei Navalny settled into a condo on New Haven’s Prospect Street with his wife, Yulia, and their young children, Dasha and Zakhar. Navalny immediately found a primary school for sixyear-old Dasha, enrolled his family in the Yale healthcare system, and rented a car so the Navalnys could get around the city from their lodging up the hill.

He lent his car to his neighbors, other World Fellows who had also brought their families along—Nicaraguan fellow Ricardo Terán, South Sudanese fellow Lumumba Di-Aping, and United Kingdom fellow Marvin Rees. These four would gather in the warmer months on each other’s stoops, drinking wine and talking politics, trading recipes from their respective countries, and setting up for their children’s first Halloweens.

A lanky figure with piercing blue eyes, Navalny carried himself with a

measured intensity that drew attention without demanding it. He approached the experience with the mindset of someone intent on absorbing as much as possible. “I firmly believe that all the best things on Earth have been created by brave nerds,” he would later say.

Navalny’s four months at Yale, in the fall of that year, marked his first extended stay outside of Russia. Even before arriving to the program, Navalny had cast a wide net, determined to leverage his experiences at Yale to create change back home. According to former World Fellow admissions officer Valerie Belanger’s email records, he made a list of experts at Yale Law School he wished to consult on U.S. and U.K. anti-corruption measures. Once arriving at Yale, he finally reached them—legal and political corruption scholars like Susan Rose Ackerman and Bruce Ackerman, Cold War historians like John Gaddis, and political economists like Aleh Tsyvinsky.

In class, Navalny voiced his convictions with brevity. Before he finished his sentence, peers like Ted Wittenstein and Marvin Rees could comfortably bet the phrase “corrupt Russian government” would leave his mouth.

For all his clarity of purpose, Navalny’s political past was not without controversy.

Even as classmates admired his resolve, others debated his past rhetoric. Navalny’s neighbors remember debating his annual participation in the “Russian March,” a rally that brought together Russian ultranationalist groups, like neo-Nazis. YouTube videos from 2007 show him likening Moscow migrants to tooth cavities, an issue that he proposed could be “carefully but decisively removed through deportation.”

February 2021, Amnesty International initially revoked the opposition leader’s “prisoner of conscience” status, citing this clip as justification. However, in Oct. 2021, after observing his ongoing commitment to a government free of corruption, it reversed this decision, acknowledging in a statement that “an individual’s opinions and behavior may evolve over time.”

Navalny confronted this criticism in his posthumous memoir, Patriot, stating, “I decided that if I, with my democratic values, supported the right of free assembly, I needed to be consistent and support other people’s right to do the same.”

“Look, he’s a product of Russia and Russian politics,” Rees said. “Even though he shared the stage with people we would find problematic, when I got to Yale, I didn’t find a guy who was acting towards me or any of the other fellows with any sort of individual hostility. I didn’t hear tunes of global white supremacy. I met a man who had a north star of corruption in his country, but also someone who was not fixed in his worldview.”

His peers at Yale remember him as disciplined. He jogged each morning. He set off to read, a lot: political strategy, Protestant theology, and The Hunger Games. He admired The Wire television series, and would later model its grassroots organizing in his Moscow mayoral campaigns, insisting his team watch and take notes of the street gatherings in Baltimore.

“You know that tacky thing of going somewhere new, being a student, and wanting to be a better version of yourself?” Biryukova asked. “Well, in his case, it actually worked.”

Navalny died in a Russian penal colony in the Arctic Circle where he was serving a 19-year prison sentence. Photo courtesy of Peter Rigaud—Laif/Redux.

Belanger, the former admissions officer, remembers Navalny confiding in her that he was inspired by how many Yale students believed they would be world leaders. Some were convinced they would be president of the United States. “Just to be around that level of confidence and belief in that kind of power of an individual to affect change… It’s really influencing me,” Belanger recounts Navalany saying.

At Yale, Navalny kept his anti-corruption blog—Navalny.ru—alive while also expanding his efforts through RosPil, a crowdsourced project aimed at exposing fraudulent state contracts. In November 2010, he released a 300-page dossier exposing alleged massive corruption in the construction of Transneft’s East Siberia–Pacific Ocean pipeline. “But before you start reading, look in your wallet,” he wrote in one post. “You may not have noticed, but about 1,100 rubles [approximately 37 dollars] have disappeared from it. Not much for each of us,

but this amount was stolen from every adult resident of Russia. In total, at least $4 billion were stolen in the course of this story.”

Within six months, the site received one million visits monthly. Navalny encouraged visitors to anonymously share information about dubious government agreements and discuss the allegations online. Meanwhile, the Kremlin sought to discredit him, placing Navalny under investigation by the Russian Minister of the Interior.

Near the end of the program, the fifteen fellows of the Class of 2010traveled to Washington, D.C., for the program’s annual visit to the State Department There, Harold Koh, a Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, who was serving as Legal Adviser to the State Department, made a point of pulling aside former program director Michael Cappello and Navalny. Cappello remembers Koh saying, “Secretary Clinton knows Alexei’s name.” People

at the highest levels of U.S. foreign policy were aware of Navalny’s work and his ties to the University. Cappello pointed out that Secretary Clinton is a graduate of Yale Law herself, and “that that connection with this Russian dissident mattered.” It was clear that some of Yale’s most powerful levers were being engaged on his behalf. III.

Less than a year after the program ended, Navalny seized international attention by leading mass protests against suspected fraud in the December 2011 parliamentary elections. Expanding his investigations, he branded the ruling United Russia party as the “Party of Crooks and Thieves,” a label that stuck and contributed to its declining vote share. The fallout sparked Russia’s largest anti-Kremlin protests since Putin took power, with nearly sixty thousand demonstrators nationwide.

His online campaign urging Russians to vote against United Russia had helped push the party’s official support below 50 percent, but Putin’s party still claimed victory. Opposition figures and outside observers, including the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, called the results a sham, citing widespread fraud and “serious indications of ballot box stuffing.”

Navalny was arrested the night of the protest and sentenced to fifteen days in jail for defying a government official—the first of more than ten arrests over the next decade during which he spent hundreds of days in custody.

Upon word of Navalny’s arrest, the Class of 2010 World Fellows’ Whatsapp group quickly mobilized, as fellows coordinated efforts to support his release. Filipino World Fellow of the Class of 2005, Vicente Santiago Pérez, suggested each fellow hand-deliver a letter to the Russian embassy in their country demanding Navalny’s release. Nearly 150 fellows followed suit. To avoid fueling accusations of Western imperialist interference, they appealed directly to their own governments, leveraging the World Fellows’ global network rather than invoking the Yale University name. Three weeks later, Navalny was released, further solidifying his status as the face of the opposition.rather than invoking the Yale University name.

Navalny with his son, Zakhar, in 2012. Photo courtesy of Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters.

Police detain Navalny in Moscow in 2018. Photo courtesy of the Associated Press.

Navalny’s political influence grew when he campaigned for the position of Moscow mayor in 2013. His grassroots approach garnered 27 percent of the vote, an unprecedented feat for an opposition candidate during Putin’s tenure.

Russian state media frequently highlighted his Yale education, labeling him “the Yale World Fellow” and “Yale Mayor” during his mayoral campaign. Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Russian Communist Party, demanded Navalny’s imprisonment due to his ties to the “Imperial West” and labeled him as a “direct offspring of their union.” Kremlin-aligned critics went as far as accusing him of being a Central Intelligence Agency operative, reflecting the broader distrust towards intellectuals who engage with global networks.

During Navalny’s mayoral campaign, Cappello, despite helping advocate for Navalny’s release within the World Fellows network after his 2011 arrests, refuted claims that Yale had bolstered Navalny’s political ambitions. Cappello told the German newspaper Deutsche Welle, “Our intention is not to support transitions of government.”

Navalny was eager to dispel accusations that he was a tool of foreign interests, whether that of Yale or the United States government. Belanger remembers him pleading she close his and his wife’s Bank of America accounts during his run for Moscow mayor in 2013. A foreign bank account would do him no good in securing national trust in Russian elections, he realized.

In his email to Belanger, he went on to cite his growing criminal accolades, courtesy of the Kremlin. “I guess I can be

named as the most criminal Yale World Fellow ever. I’ll be extremely grateful if you can help me,” he wrote in 2013.

He’d lose his mayoral election, but go on to draw up support for a Yalie on another ballot three years later. Rees, now-Mayor of Bristol, England, commented on Navalny’s support during his 2016 mayoral election as another gesture of his former neighbor’s generosity.

“I’m still not allowed to leave Russia, but when I can, I’m gonna visit Bristol like a boss with a mayor friend of mine,” he emailed Rees.

IV.

Upon his return to Russia, Navalny established the FBK. Relying on small donations from thousands of ordinary citizens rather than a few large donors, Navalny built a movement resilient to state interference.

“The most important thing we do is, then, to spread the story so millions hear about it,” he wrote in Patriot , about the strategy behind FBK ’s early media campaign. Investigative documentaries turned opaque graft into compelling narratives that resonated with ordinary Russians. Notable examples include Putin’s Palace: History of the World’s Largest Bribe (2021), which exposed a $1.4 billion palace allegedly built for Putin and amassed over one hundred million views. Another FBK documentary detailed then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s network of bribes, sparking nationwide protests.

From prison, Navalny reflected, “The year 2012 set a pattern in my life, an

endless vicious circle for many years to come: protest rally, arrest, protest rally, arrest. It was unpleasant, of course, but that was not going to stop me.” Even with his candidacy banned, Navalny ran again for mayor of Moscow in 2016 and for president under Russia of the Future Party in 2018. He established FBK offices in over eighty cities across Russia. His ambition was clear: to create a “permanent working structure” for the opposition that could bring people to the streets, participate in elections, and—eventually—win them.

In August 2020, Russian operatives poisoned Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok. The assassination attempt, which is widely believed to be ordered by Putin, left the then 44-year-old hospitalized in Germany for over two weeks while he remained in a coma. Just five months later, he decided to return to Russia. He refused to ask his countrymen to risk their lives to take down the Putin regime while he mused on political theory from abroad.

Upon his return, he was immediately arrested on faulty extremism charges upon landing, sparking nationwide protests in his support.

Cappello reflected that those close to the leader saw that, “the fundamental problem in protecting Alexei, was Alexei.” They could not imagine a scenario in which he would have been comfortable not returning to Russia.

“I remember thinking, would I be more likely to attend his inauguration, or his funeral?” Capello said. “Turns out, I’d go to neither.”

With Navalny’ death came the collapse of a fragile hope. An alternative

Layout design by Jessica Sánchez

Alexei Navalny and his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, in 2020, marching for Boris Nemtsov, a murdered critic of Putin. Photo courtesy of Krill Kudryavtsev/Getty Images.

Russian history of liberatory democracy, a near end to the Putin years that seemed far-fetched but not impossible, for the moment, was gone.

Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya says, when the Putin era ends, which she sees as inevitable, she will run as an opposition candidate. She intends to participate in free and fair elections and become President of Russia, Navalnaya told the BBC. Until Putin leaves power, she cannot return to Russia, as she was charged in absentia to two months in prison for participation in an extremist organization: the FBK

Navalny’s Passing hasn’t stopped the FBK. Biryokova likened their work in exile to running with weights tied to your legs, growing heavier with every step. “Right now, in Russia, you have to run and run. And it gets worse, and worse. You can’t just go to the streets. You can’t just protest Putin.”

She recalled how Navalny’s unflinching belief in the promise of a democratic future for Russia kept the team going, even under immense pressure. “After speaking with him in his office, you’d walk away with three new projects to take on,” Biryokova said. “He’d convince you to keep pushing, that the movement needed you, that you must serve like he was.”

Now, in the absence of that guiding force, the task ahead feels even more pressing. “We don’t have a silver bullet that will end it tomorrow,” Volkov, former Chairman of the FBk and director of political operations for the Future

Party, said. The opposition’s focus, he explained, is to force Putin to expose the contradictions and inefficiencies of the political system. “We don’t know when it will collapse, how it will collapse, or how much time it will take, but shedding light on its flaws makes it more likely to collapse sooner.”

Since Navalny’s death, the danger has only escalated. As of Feb. 2025, Volkov faces eleven politically motivated criminal cases initiated by Putin’s regime. Biryukova herself was forced to flee Russia in 2019 due to mounting threats from the government.

“What bothers me deeply is that Alexei always talked about the beautiful future he envisioned, but he never got to see it,” Biryukova said. But, as Birykova reflected, they could only expose the Kremlin’s lies if they kept telling the truth. “Give me a little time. And then I go to work,” Biryukova posted in her tribute to her boss and friend, on February 17, 2024, the day after his passing.

For the FBK—and the future of the Russian opposition—there is no alternative.

Volkov says the opposition is prepared to run campaigns and win elections. They’ve done it before—cutting United Russia’s hold on the Moscow city parliament in 2019—and they’ll do it again.

“The only predictable thing about how change happens in Russia,” Volkov reflected during a panel at a screening of Navalny (2022) last November in Yale’s Luce Hall, “is that it always happens unpredictably.”

This unpredictability shaped Navalny’s approach to leadership, including his preparations for the possibility of his own death.

“After his poisoning attempt, journalists

kept asking, ‘What would your team do if you were killed?’” Biryukova recounted. Navalny’s answer — steady, pragmatic: “They would just work. They know how.” Exiled but unyielding, the FBK continues its fight online. As of February 2025, the homepage of its website, stark in white and Russian-red, greets visitors with a roster of “bribetakers and warmongers”—a biting yet cheeky rebuke of the Kremlin’s corruption. It’s right out of Navalny’s playbook.

Anna Biryukova remembered the day she gave birth to her second child while Alexei Navalny was in prison, just one month after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “It was an overwhelming day, as I was dealing with the birth of our child while Alexei’s future remained uncertain,” she recalls. Despite the chaos, Navalny sent a note through his lawyer and addressed Biryukova by one of many endearing nicknames he was known to coin for his team (Biryukova, for her part, always called him Alexei). “Annette, I congratulate you,” he wrote. “You can have many days like those in court, waiting for another sentence, but giving birth is something unique, and this is what makes today important.” Even from behind bars, Navalny’s message was clear—life, new life, and specifically the new Russian generation, was something worth celebrating. ∎

Counting Bodies in the Angeles National Forests

One, I state to myself.

There are no rules.

A pigeon is a kite if she wishes.

In an orange sky, a yawn turns daybreak into night — if the eyes get teary enough. I am blind in the night. I am blind in the day. I could stare, unseeing, for millennia and nothing should ever fade away.

Two. It rests better in the mouth.

To fatten the skyline with canopied crowns.

Until, in mid-afternoon, the shades of a dying sun withdraw.

Two, I ponder, is also the number, if squared, becomes death.

I stare at my morning oats.

They are filled with dried fruits and seeds and stuff. I stir and I stir, thinking of the sky. Little clouds. Smoke signals.

They’re spinning days and into little bugs and little beans.

I want life back. I want it all.

Greed is not a number— it grows and festers and calms and swells. I tend to mine like my moldy bread.

A rotten log. Abandoned, forgotten, yet it spreads.

Two hundred acres. I pause.

Before the wind, there was silence.

Outside, I hear voices crying.

Even after the char, there were chimes of glass shards striking against grain.

The heat is unbearable today.

Someone, please save the children, but dear God, please don’t make it be me.

Now, thirteen thousand six-hundred ninety acres.

I try to think of any number greater. All around is an immense crackling. The fascia of our land is aflame.

The smoldering smell of laurel sumac whipped away. The word “survival” comes to mind. When does need become want? What do I want more than I need?

I need the clean smell of sage in the land with dreamy lichen curtains. The soft kuk-kuk-kuk of the dove blends with the ashen melt. The raspy aye-aye of scrub-jays aflight in chorus.

Farewell, my beautiful world.

If someone else can see my life, it makes her pain a little less like make-believe. I think I may have lived after all.

Dear sky, please let me survive. Just one more night.

–Michelle So

A Last Alternative

Riverside Education Academy, New Haven’s last alternative school, grapples with the deaths of two students.

By Christina Lee

Layout design by Vivian wang photos courtesy of Google Maps

When uzziah shell, 16, and Daily Jackson, 17, were shot and killed in late 2024, the students and faculty of Riverside Educational Academy took a step back from their typical class schedules. Mel Campbell, a math teacher at Riverside, described a “dark cloud” looming over the school. “Everybody was grieving,” he explained. “Going through different stages of grief at the same time.”

Male students whom he never would have expected to show vulnerability cried. Some students were angry. Some broke down. Others reminisced about the good times they shared with the late students, created posters, and wore memorial hoodies. Everyone needed support.

The deaths occurred only eleven days apart. On the Friday afternoon of November 22nd, Uzziah Shell was shot and killed near Goffe Street and Hudson Street. On December 3rd, just four days before Uzziah’s funeral, Daily was shot and killed on Shelton Avenue. Both Uzziah and Daily were friends and students at Riverside Academy. The deaths, according to New Haven Chief of Police Karl Jacobson, were linked in association to feuds between youth groups.

“It was like the wound was starting to heal, scab over, and started going back to the little bit of normal as we could. And then it was ripped off,” Campbell said.

Located along Long Wharf, Riverside Academy is the last standing alternative high school in New Haven, with a student body of less than two hundred. It is commonly known as New Haven’s school for at-risk students. Since its founding around twenty-five years ago, the school has aimed to provide an alternative path to completing high school for students who struggle in

a traditional classroom setting. Its goal is to support students during their final developmental years, especially when they’re facing familial challenges and housing and food insecurity.

Ronald Huggins, Deputy Director of Youth Services, New Haven’s’ Youth and Recreation Department, explained that matriculating to Riverside is a matter of students having “courageous conversations” to confront their risk of not graduating or getting their high school diploma.

New Haven public schools refer students to Riverside when students struggle to maintain their attendance or meet credit requirements. In most cases, school referrals are made by assistant principals, who identify students in need of more focused attention and personalized instruction that cannot be provided in densely populated schools. Riverside Principal Derek Stephenson, Sr. performs thorough evaluations of whether or not a student’s needs can be met through matriculation. Schools sending students to Riverside provide a profile of a potential student, which details their academic, attendance, and disciplinary histories. When a referral reaches Stephenson’s desk, he reviews the application packets and meets with prospective students and their families. A smaller portion of students come through as self-referrals.

The school itself is a plain, starkwhite brick, single-story building. Standing just off the road, it is not fenced in. There is little identification other than “Riverside Academy,” written in blue —once above the entrance doors, and a second time on the side of the building.

A security officer stands posted by the entrance to the lobby, where light spills in from an octagonal skylight. Past the metal detector, common to all of New Haven’s public schools, sitsis a small water fountain. An illustration of the Riverside Raptors, the school mascot, is printed on the wall above the fountain.

Riverside wasn’t always the only alternative high school in New Haven. In 2018, the New Haven Board of Education voted to shut down the alternative high schools New Light High School and New Horizons High School due to budget cuts. Following the closures, the two schools consolidated with Riverside, the largest alternative school at the time. Seeking more affordable rent, the Board of Education

moved Riverside from its original location at 560 Ella T. Grasso Blvd. to 103 Hallock Avenue.

Narrowly spared from budget cuts and now rocked by tragedy, Riverside has faced criticism and calls for it to shut down. Though some argue that the very system of alternative schooling harms students, Riverside continues to defend its model, arguing that it fills a critical niche in the school system for students who need more specialized attention. Now the smallest in the city’s school system, Riverside promises unmatched care and attention to student engagement.

There is no instruction manual for a grieving school. The students, staff, and teachers at Riverside have turned to each other for guidance. Amidst debates over whether alternative education can properly serve its students, Riverside promises to try. II.

For faith Ortiz, 18, a senior at Riverside, loss seems perpetual. When I met her at Riverside, she wore a plain white t-shirt with black joggers. She had braces, and her hair was swept back into a low bun. Faith’s laidback demeanor disguised the volume of grief mounted on her shoulders. She counted the deaths of loved ones on her fingers: “Then my aunt, and then my

uncles, my cousins, and then my grandma.” But losing her friends to gun violence was a different kind of loss.

Faith knew Uzziah since he began attending Riverside as a freshman three years ago. She looked back fondly on the times the three of them—Uzziah, Daily, and Faith—would goof around together in the art room or the gym. “They could tell when something’s wrong with you, even if they were not okay themselves. They would still check up on you or goof around to bring up your day.”

Outside of the classroom, Uzziah worked for the city through the Youth@ Work program and participated in LEAP, a youth development program. He enjoyed playing football and basketball and volunteering at his church. While he kept himself busy, Uzziah was always gracious with his selflessness.

“He was a great friend, even if you didn’t know him personally,” said Aniqua Booker, Uzziah’s older sister. “If he had to give his last, he would.”

At school, Uzziah always smiled and was never disrespectful, Campbell remembered. He was reserved and restrained—the kind of person who would simply walk away when upset. In Principal Stephenson’s last memory of him, Uzziah was skipping away from his office, smiling from cheek to cheek.

Daily shared a similar playful spirit. “Daily was just starting to open up,” Campbell said. “He was one of the ones that was kind of hard to get to open up and trust us.” Eventually, though, he began to crack jokes back and forth with Campbell.

On November 27th, just a day before Thanksgiving, Riverside students gathered in the school gymnasium for a ceremony honoring Uzziah. Daily was one of the main speakers at the school’s memorial service. The two were close, described by Faith as brother-like. At the service, Daily wept, but tried to hold his emotions together for the sake of Uzziah’s mother and sister, Faith remembered.

Uzziah was to be laid to rest on December 7th. Faith recalled discussing with Daily what to wear to the funeral. But Faith would attend his funeral alone.

On the evening of December 3rd, Dalonna Jackson was walking into her house after work when

the emergency lights of an ambulance flew past her. Six minutes after stepping into her home, Dalonna’s aunt yelled out, “Buster got shot!” When Dalonna arrived at the scene, Daily—known affectionately as “Buster” by friends and family—was being transported to the hospital. By the time Dalonna arrived, it was too late.

Daily was walking home along Shelton Avenue when he was killed in a drive-by just a few blocks away from home.

Over a month after the killing, at a press conference at the New Haven Police Department that Wednesday afternoon, Assistant Chief of Police David Zannelli announced that Daily’s alleged killer, a 17-year-old juvenile defendant, was taken into custody and arrested. Family members and friends in attendance sobbed as Zannelli recalled the details of the crime scene.

Dalonna was the penultimate speaker at the press conference. She spoke with a calm and languid countenance, her hands clasped by her chest and shoulders swinging from side to side. She wore a sweatshirt, gifted by her godparents, printed with pictures of Daily and accessorized by pins reading, “Forever in our hearts. We will always remember you.” For Dalonna, the familiarity of the podium was especially painful. Sixteen years ago, her father was shot and killed when she was only 8 years old and Daily was 1 year old. Now, 24 four years old, she carried the weight of two losses. Standing before city officials, news reporters, and family members,

Dalonna’s pictures of memories with her brother, Daily.

Dalonna prayed for the boy who killed her brother.

“I pray,” she said, pausing to take a breath, “that God shows you that there’s another way in life but this.”

Just a few hours after the press conference, I met Dalonna in the basement office of the Pitts Chapel Unified Free Will Baptist Church on Brewster Street. The Dalonna I sat down with was much different than the public-facing Dalonna from earlier that day. She spoke softly with her hands folded into her lap, head hung low.

“My brother really was my best friend, my confidant, my everything. We did everything together,” Dalonna said. “When I’m down, I can’t go to nobody else because my person is in the ground.”

Growing up in the absence of her father, it was her brother, Daily, through whom Dalonna often found strength. She recalled the sleepless nights when Daily would come into her room and sit beside her. His presence was enough to reassure Dalonna. Daily could light up a room simply by standing in it.

“He was, if I could be totally honest, the only reason why I’m still alive,” she said.

As she mourned the loss of her brother, Riverside faculty called and checked in on her, sent flowers to the house, and sent social workers to sit and talk with the family in the first couple of weeks after the death. Stephenson reached out personally to tell Dalonna about his affection for Daily and his strengths as a student.

“They were very there emotionally for us,” she said. Dalonna is a Riverside alum herself.

IV.

For some community members,

Riverside is part of the problem.

Three days after Daily’s death, family and friends celebrated his life by gathering outside at the basketball courts on the corner of Ivy Street and Shelton Avenue as the sun set, to celebrate Daily’s life. The memorial service honored the late teen with prayers, candle lighting, and a balloon release. Among the many gathered to mourn the loss was Sean Reeves, a community gun violence advocate and local business owner. In his speech at the gathering, Reeves implored youth to stay out of trouble. Thirteen years ago, Reeves made the same plea before a similar crowd—only that time, the memorial was for his son, whom he had just lost to gun violence.

Reeves argues that alternative schools like Riverside are fundamentally flawed because they put kids and their self-esteem—particularly their belief in their intellectual capabilities—at risk. “Putting a label on the kid,” as Reeves says, teaches children that they are “bad seeds” and promotes a cycle of disengagement. “Riverside should be shut down.”

Reeves’ concerns over Riverside’s merits allude to a broader mistrust in the system of alternative schooling. ProPublica has reported that school districts often involuntarily reassign students to alternative schools for contestable disciplinary reasons like “common decency” and “disrespect,” sentencing them to less rigorous curriculums and deteriorating facilities.

In 2019, similar doubts emerged among the New Haven community

when then Superintendent Carol Birks proposed to close Riverside amid a 30.7 million dollar budget deficit. The motion came less than a year after NHPS had merged two other alternative schools with Riverside, which at the time had one hundred and thirty-five students. According to The New Haven Independent, Birks expressed doubt about the success of the alternative learning model, citing high chronic absence rates.

To push back against Birks’ doubts, Riverside students and teachers testified in defense of the school. Students tearfully shared that they felt cared for by Riverside faculty, thanking teachers for providing emotional and professional support, as reported by The New Haven Independent. Teachers highlighted the trust they built with their students over the years. Riverside survived its second closure threat.

Six years later, Stephenson is confident the school is not at risk for closure. “Riverside is not going anywhere,” he said. Since its inception, Riverside has continued to accommodate students with a variety of needs, despite being viewed monolithically as a last-resort destination for struggling students.

According to staff and faculty, Riverside takes on students who struggle to show up to school or meet attendance requirements due to housing problems. Students who are being evicted. Students whose parents are incarcerated. Students who are reading at very low levels. Students who cannot read at all. Some students are 21 years old, overaged and under-credited. Others are described by teachers as “academically brilliant,” but unable to handle stimuli.

No matter the need, Riverside vows to meet students where they are.

V.

In the wake of UZZIAH and Daily’s deaths, Riverside mobilized its longstanding systems of support. The school, working with the New Haven Police Department to bolster student safety, employed a full-time school resource officer and scheduled more frequent patrol visits. The intention, says Chief Jacobson, is not to over-police, but to “focus our attention there in a positive way.” The Connecticut Violence Intervention Program has a staff member at the school lead small group discussions. The school has brought in therapy dogs and mental health professionals from Clifford Beers Community Care Center. The school’s social worker, Lisa Agosto, sat down with students to offer one-on-one supportive counseling. Students were given a pause from schoolwork.

“The school really supported all of us,” Faith explained. To Faith, the school’s response mirrored patterns of support she’s experienced as a student at Riverside. Faith appreciated being able to take a break from normal coursework in the weeks after the loss of her friends. On more routine days, too, when she feels overwhelmed or unable to engage in her school work, she goes to the music classroom to listen to or make music, or just talk to the music teacher for advice.

Michael Pavano, an art teacher at Riverside, expressed that matriculating at Riverside was about support, not punishment.

“It’s about transitioning them, getting them to understand that when you come to school, we are going to support you. You’re not going to be thrown out of class, you’re not going to be suspended all the time because you’re not doing this, you’re not doing that—that traditional environment,” Pavano said.

D’Shawn Coleman, 17, a senior at Riverside, can often be found playing the piano in Pavano’s art room. D’Shawn shared that when he came to Riverside as a freshman, he doubted whether he would be cared for by the school community. He entered with a preconceived notion about Riverside being a “bad school,” and friends and family sometimes belittled him for attending an alternative school. Over time, D’Shawn grew an appreciation for his peers and teachers for the support they provided him academically and personally.

He has built meaningful relationships with trusted teachers, which he

says is rooted in mutual respect and seeing that they are “genuinely trying to help.” The level of support he has received at Riverside, he said, can only be found in an alternative setting, which he has found easier to adjust to.

For Silvia Sanchez, 17, Riverside’s smaller class size of five to eight students was the reason why she transferred to the school as a sophomore. At Hill Regional Career High School, where the school population is about seven hundred, Silvia felt “claustrophobic” and anxious, which took a toll on her mental health and school performance. She often skipped class because “it was just too much.” Since switching to Riverside’s more intimate setting, Silvia’s attendance has improved and she has been able to keep up with all her assignments.

“I’m doing better here,” she explained, “At Career, [the teachers] are busy. There are a lot of kids. They can’t even focus

“We like to come, not just as classmates, but as a family,” Faith explained. “We come as a community and make sure that we’re here to help each other out.”

on one student at a time. But here, you know they care for you.”

Riverside holds regular town halls, assemblies in the gymnasium, to discuss matters of significance with the entire student body and teachers.

On a Thursday morning in January, thirty students and teachers gathered in a semi-circle around a small wooden podium for a town hall. Stephenson opened the assembly with general reminders about school credit requirements, attendance rules, and basic student responsibilities. Following Stephenson were U.S. Navy recruiters, an anti-gun violence advocate, and Aniqua Booker, Uzziah’s sister.

Aniqua gave a short speech about the power of decision making and resistance to peer pressure. After her brother’s passing, she began speaking at Riverside town halls. “It just brings me joy and a lot of gratitude to try to come out and speak…so they know there’s more to your life,” Aniqua said. “Right now is not the finish line, there’s so much more.”

“We like to come, not just as classmates, but as a family,” Faith explained.

“We come as a community and make sure that we’re here to help each other out.”

In addition to offering typical courses—English, history, and algebra—Riverside gives students the room and freedom to pursue their hobbies and interests in a way that is low-pressure but still structured and guided. Pavano, the art teacher, has had students interested in carpentry build kitchen cabinets and countertops, students interested in automobile mechanics draw schematics, and students hoping to become hairdressers develop new hairstyles. Faith, who wants to become a Certified Nursing Assistant, prepares for the exam during Pavano’s class. “My classroom is, ‘Listen, whatever you love, bring it in here. I’ll find a way to make it happen for you. I’ll find a way to support it,’” he said.

Pavano says that most of his students have gone on to lead “great, productive” lives.

Peter Chase has taught history at Riverside for five years. On his wall hangs military badges, patches, and a portrait of him in uniform, where he served as a Petty Officer Third Class, with a brooding blue-eyed gaze and a chiseled face. Faith remarked that back then he was a heartbreaker and now he’s a chair breaker. It’s an inside joke the two share.

But more importantly, Chase is a product of alternative education himself. He described himself as “a rough kid,” joking that he had “so much fun senior year” that he did it twice. After five years, Chase graduated from a basic studies program, similar to Riverside’s alternative schooling model, in Branford, CT His personal experience with alternative education was the reason why he wanted to teach at a school like Riverside.

Coming from a place of understanding, Chase connects with his students outside of the classroom, too. He does cookouts with his students and takes them fishing.

For some outside of the school, Riverside is one piece of a larger fight to protect young people in New Haven.

Reverend Dr. John E. Cotten, Jr. is the senior pastor at New Hope Baptist Church, founded in 1958. Dalonna has a close relationship with Cotten, referring to him as “dad.” On December 19th, Daily’s celebration of life ceremony took place at Cotten’s church.

Passionate about helping the city’s youth, Cotten founded Queen Esther, a faith-based initiative that recruits foster care and adoption parents. He expressed his frustrations with the lack of support

systems for young people, even as they share a city with an institution like Yale.

“I don’t understand why our children are not protected,” he said. “We are here in a major city, New England, the top school in the world, and yet we can’t figure out how to do this, how to protect our young people, or how to educate our young people.”

But for Cotten, while Riverside might not be the perfect solution to protecting the most vulnerable students in New Haven’s public school system, shutting it down isn’t either.

“If you shut it down, where are they going to go? What’s going to happen to the kids?” he asks. “To shut down something without providing a better alternative that meets the needs of the reason why you are shutting down the first institution—that’s confusing to me.”

VI.

December 3rd will always have a question mark next to it,” said Dalonna. “I’ll never understand why my brother was taken from me. I’ll never be able to just move on from this, because he was such a big part of my life, and knowing that my brother died the same way my father did, it’ll never be real or seem real.”

Like Dalonna, Riverside continues to mourn. But its systems of care persist too. There are teachers at Riverside who never want to leave. There are students who leave and come back to thank their teachers with a hug. There is Stephenson, who continues to welcome new students with open arms.

“We’re planting seeds,” Stephenson said.

Faith is graduating this year. She plans to move to Georgia to live with her older brother and pursue her nursing degree, as well as her own clothing line. Some day, she hopes to build a homeless shelter. For now, Faith is focused on moving forward. “It ain’t the same, but I can’t keep letting these deaths hold me back.”

Faith is excited for a new start. She’ll miss her friends and family in New Haven—especially the ones she can’t take with her. “Most of all, I’ll miss going to the grave sites,” she said.

When asked about Riverside, without hesitation, she says, “I’ll be back to visit for sure.” ∎

Christina Lee is a junior in Davenport College.

Mas’s Shoulder

By Miye Sugino

“In “Mas’s Shoulder,” I asked my family members to cut out the silhouette of Mas Okamoto, my great-grandfather. In the original photo, Mas is wearing a white shirt against a white background: the outline of his shoulder vanishes. Thus, this exercise of visual memory is an imaginative one, interpreted by family members of different generations.”

Those Who Speak

A writer confronts her great-grandparents’ testimony of Holocaust survival in a Yale archive.

By Tali Kantor Lieber

It was in class at Yale that I first watched my great-grandparents’ testimony of Holocaust survival. I expected some kind of great emotional release, but it never came. My great-grandfather felt somewhat masked, still withdrawn, just out of my grasp— his demeanor remained stoic while he attempted to describe the indescribable. Watching my great-grandmother felt like a homecoming.

Thirty six years ago, the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies project made its way to the survivor hotspot of Queens, New York where Hana and Anschel Kantor recorded their memories. These files were then deposited in Sterling Memorial Library, permanently absorbed into Fortunoff’s collection of stories.

When I arrived at Yale last fall, I was nervous in the normal ways, eager to find friends and extracurriculars. I also knew that I would have to confront my great-grandparents’ testimonies. I was too physically proximate to the archive—hidden behind a nondescript, brown door on the third floor of Sterling Memorial Library—to ignore them. It didn’t help that an exhibit by the Fortunoff, titled “In the First Person” had just gone up in the Beinecke. Each time I passed the gargantuan white cube, I thought of my great-grandmother and her strange connection to the place where I now study.

The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies was the first of its kind. It pioneered audiovisual testimony as a medium to record not just

the stories of the Holocaust, but the lives of survivors before and after the war. The archive is not static, a room tucked away full of tapes. The Fortunoff has developed curricula for a variety of courses at multiple levels of education, with a Teacher Advisory Council of educators across the country. The archive consults for Holocaust museums and has advised archival work surrounding other global genocides.

Today, there are over four thousand four hundred recordings, recorded in twelve countries and in over twenty languages. The very first testimonies were recorded by survivors in New Haven, by a burgeoning organization titled the Holocaust Survivors Film Project.

“There is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself,” Dori Laub, a child Holocaust survivor and Yale professor of psychiatry and a founding member of HSFP, wrote in his book “Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.” “One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life.” If we take Laub’s words to be true, Fortunoff has granted thousands of survivors a kind of second life.

The total digitalization of the testimonies allows deeper engagement with the recordings, which can now be accessed from any corner of the world, with permission from the archive. “The archive has transitioned from the active collecting, processing, and digital preservation stage to a new stage in which

we build on the foundation built by our predecessor to enhance access to the collection and encourage use of the collection in teaching and research worldwide,” Stephen Naron, the director of the archive, explained. The extraordinary act of faith the survivors initiated by entrusting Fortunoff with their stories has higher stakes now, as the testimonies can reach more people, more rapidly. And as the number of living Holocaust survivors dwindles, the preservation of memory becomes even more urgent. As the Fortunoff Archive steps into the moment for which it was created, who is there to meet it?

Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock began videotaping four Holocaust survivors in an office in New Haven on a May evening in 1979. They began at 6:30 p.m., and remained long after midnight. Vlock, a television reporter, and Laub turned their interviews into an archive. The Holocaust Survivors Film Project officially launched in June of 1979, in the home of William Rosenberg, who led a local labor zionist organization that HSFP had used to contact survivors. A month later, survivors poured into his home for what would be the second recording session of their stories. HSFP board members and volunteers turned kitchens and living rooms into makeshift meeting rooms, discussing their plan to tape more testimonials and map the future of their newfound organization.

HSFP grew quickly. Geoffrey Hartman, a Kindertransport survivor and English professor at Yale, joined the ranks and requested a grant from the New Haven Foundation to support the burgeoning organization; the grant was approved in 1980. They published newsletters, amassed volunteers, and held lengthy recording sessions, sometimes recording up to six testimonies in a day. At the time, Hartman was building Yale’s Judaic Studies program from scratch and beginning to see the university as a home for these testimonies.

HSFP had recorded a grand total of 183 testimonies when they officially deposited them in the Manuscripts and Archives division of Sterling Memorial Library in 1981, establishing what would become the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

In 1987, the status of the testimonies changed from a deposit to a permanent donation. The Fortunoff family, a prominent Jewish jewelry retailer, endowed the project, giving it the financial freedom to live in perpetuity. Esther Fortunoff-Greene, who now sits on the advisory board of the Archive, remembers that her parents’ donation was driven by their own interactions with survivors in the New York City jewelry market.

HSFP, and then Fortunoff, demanded extreme sensitivity from its interviewers and required an extensive training process. The interviewer training packet from 1984-1997 contains a syllabus for volunteers and lists training sessions, required readings, and a fifteen minute in-depth interview with an individual of the volunteer’s choice, to practice before encountering the survivors. They developed a specific methodology, designed to give narrative agency to the survivor. The packet included something called the “bad questions list,” compiled by JR, presumably Joanne Rudof, Fortunoff’s original archivist. Off the table were questions with simple, factual answers (were the prisoners old or young?), and questions that implied judgement or assumptions.

unanswerable: What was the worst part? I found it nonsensical. How does one dare to ask a survivor of multiple camps what “the worst” part of their experience was? How could she ask him to measure the weight of the many massacres he witnessed? But his answer was simple: “Anyone could kill you.”

Relatives know that Holocaust survivors can be separated into two groups: those who speak about the war, and those who remain silent.

My great-grandfather Anschel died in 1994, eleven years before I was born, but my most treasured memories are of my dear Gigi Hana, tumbling around a then-crumbling home purchased with German reparations checks.

Hana had dramatic red nails, made

the need for accessible Holocaust testimony. Stephen Naron, the director of the archive, explained that “once the survivors are gone, archives like this will be the only bridge between the living and the dead. Listening to testimony is the closest we can get to being in a room with a survivor and learning from them firsthand.”

Yet, testimony is not a textbook; factual inaccuracies or conflicting narratives are inevitable. An understanding of this nuance informs who can and cannot access the archive—currently, any researcher can gain access to the collection at an access site, and relatives of survivors are provided with remote access. Gil Rubin, the Director of Academic Programs for the Fortunoff, explained that inconsistencies can, in the worst of scenarios, lead to Holocaust denial. “People will pick and choose certain segments and make them appear as something they are not,” he remarked. These deviations expose the human process of storytelling—deeply individual and rooted in our emotional memory.

shining golden chicken soup, and answered every single question I asked her. Anschel, I’m told, was much more reserved. But this was the beauty of the Fortunoff: survivors who rarely spoke of the horrors they witnessed were granted a vessel.

My beloved great grandmother passed away in 2023. I said goodbye to her as she cried out for her mother in Polish, a language I had never heard her speak.

Thirty six years ago, my great-grandfather’s interviewer broke the rules. When discussing his experience in concentration camps, she asked the

The Beinecke exhibit on the Fortunoff Archive is timely. We are losing survivors by the day, intensifying

I am all too familiar with these discrepancies. In her stories—at home and in the archive—my great-grandmother spoke with an air of tenacity, attributing her survival to her own cleverness. Stories seemed to bend and warp around her, twisting according to whatever quick-witted choice she had made. When she passed away, my mother eulogized her. “She was unsparing about the devastation, but nearly every Holocaust story she told had a common theme, which is that she, Chanka Kantor, was the heroine,” she wrote. “She highlighted her daring, her cunning. Her intuition. The time she pulled her sisters out of a line bound for execution. How she warned Grandpa Anshel from returning to his hometown of Kielce where the infamous massacre was taking place.” Neither my mother nor I accept the premise that our shared matriarch was actually more intelligent, or more deserving of life, than those who perished in the camps. This method of narration, as we understand it, was my great-grandmother’s

Making orange juice.

way of making sense of the incomprehensible luck of Holocaust survival.

These fine gradations of my great-grandmother’s testimony are something only I, or another member of my family, can understand. The thought of an academic coming across her story in the archive troubles me. It isn’t that I am worried they won’t understand her or the complexities of her narrative, although they will never grasp my, or my mother’s knowledge of her.

It is that I am not willing to share my great grandmother.

Now that she is no longer alive, this testimony feels like the most valuable piece of her that I have left. The crumbling house in Queens has been demolished, and the chicken soup doesn’t shine gold the same way. Her story will always belong to me, but since 1989, it has also, in effect, belonged to Yale.

to sign free of restrictions. After all, they gave testimony because they want it to be used and shared,” he explained. “A small minority are more protective, and that’s their right, and we abide by their restrictions in perpetuity.”

I also understand that these stories do no good sitting in a dark corner of Sterling Memorial Library. Testimony, when treated with the care it merits, is

Each survivor that records for Fortunoff signs a legal document. The current version, shared by Naron, says that survivors grant Yale and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies unrestricted rights to use their image and likeness, as well as distribute it on other platforms. However, I understand that my great grandparents did not fully sign their stories away—they remain our own. Every logical part of me trusts Fortunoff’s leaders: “We feel an enormous obligation to the survivors who shared their testimonies with us,” Naron said. “From the start, we created a number of policies to protect survivors from potential harm.” He noted that survivors can add or remove components to the standard release if they desire an embargo on the testimony, or want to restrict its use in a certain way. “Most survivors are happy

before, during, and after the war. “In that series, there’s a little bit more of a sense of trying to reconstruct events that played out,” she told me, “in that series I actually really was looking for different and sometimes conflicting perspectives on the same event.”

the gold standard of Holocaust representation, and can be an extraordinary method for education.

Nahanni Rous worked with Fortunoff to co-produce the podcast “Those Who Were There: Voices From the Holocaust,” which uses the archive’s testimonies. In the third season, Rous reconstructs the city of Vilna

The class I took in my first semester, “Representing the Holocaust,” is taught by Millicent Marcus and Maurice Samuels. They assigned the final for the class carefully—students were asked to choose a testimony to engage with in essay form. “We don’t want people to criticize the testimony, but to come at it as a scholar of testimony and to look at it as a form of representation,” Samuels said. Both professors expressed their satisfaction with how students grappled with the testimonies. The goal of the final was to not only listen with care, but to negotiate the dynamics of testimony as a format; to interrogate how and why certain questions were asked, and how survivors responded in speech, body language, and mannerism. “I would love to see everyone at Yale engage in the archive in some way,” Samuels added.

Fortunoff’s ways of working with testimony are getting more creative, Rous’s podcast being one example. The reach of these stories may go much farther in an untraditional format—most people do not have the interest, let alone the patience, to sit down and watch a multi-hour recording. But as these testimonies are adapted, we may lose some of their original magic, of whatever powerful, hours-long release figures like Laub were able to initiate.

Hana and Anschel Kantor, with their family throughout the years. Layout design by Jessica Sánchez

When I stumble upon the room marked “Fortunoff Archive” in Sterling Memorial Library, my heart still spikes. I half expect to open the door and see my great grandmother inside, wrinkled and beautiful, blond hair piled on top of her head.

I am only beginning to understand what it means to have my familial experience absorbed into my university’s archive. I remain uncomfortable with the dual ownership of the testimonies, with our prized stories in the hands of someone else. After watching the testimonies multiple times, my own memory starts to slip: which are the stories I was raised with, and which did I learn in her testimony? Now that my great grandmother is gone, the responsibility of telling her story rests heavy on my shoulders. I am the eldest in my generation, blessed with the most time with my great grandmother and burdened by the task of attempting to communicate her magic to those younger than me. Her testimony, preserved thanks to Fortunoff, will always be a narrative safety valve. I will return to it again and again. And when I tell my children of Hana Kantor, I will tell them her story exactly as she would have wanted them to hear— in her own words. ∎

The Bees

Having so long watched others set to work before me, I enter now the suit of heavy cotton and slip my hands into goatskin gloves, those sly parodies of nature. The galea lowers its darkness over me dimming the world, coaxing me to safety.

I check myself: the quality of my disguise the state of things in their right place, and at last lean down among them. Their sound comes up, thousand-fold and loud, like the cars that passed close by when I walked along the highways as a child. And immediately

sickly, small, and orange, I overwinter with them there until the great smoke pours down like air through bared teeth.

–Andrew Storino

Tali Kantor Lieber is a first-year in Benjamin Franklin College.

The writer and her great-grandmother, in Hallandale, FL and Queens, NY.

Justice by Design

When two police officers shot at Stephanie Washington in 2019, protesters across the city mobilized for Yale and New Haven Police reforms. Five years out, Washington says she still hasn’t received the justice she craves.

By Sophia Liu

Stephanie Washington shimmers in gold earrings, gold nose piercings, gold necklaces, and a gold belt. As she sits in her friend’s fashion boutique in West Haven, a leg tattoo reading “perfectly imperfect” peeks through her skirt.

It’s been over five years since Washington was thrust into the center of New Haven’s movement for police reform.

Two days after her 22nd birthday, on April 16, 2019, Washington’s then-boyfriend, Paul Witherspoon, was driving the both of them home. When the car approached a traffic stop, Hamden police officer Devin Eaton and Yale police officer Terrance Pollock opened fire on the couple. Pollock had matched Washington’s car to a description in a false report of an armed robbery. Witherspoon was physically unharmed from the driver’s seat. Pollock was grazed by Eaton’s bullet and minorly injured. Washington needed twenty-two staples in her stomach.

A sixteen-year veteran of the Yale Police Department (YPD), Pollock was suspended for thirty days without pay and reassigned to an administrative, non-patrol position after an independent review. The investigative report of the shooting said that Pollock, who fired three of the sixteen shots, was justified in his use of force because he believed Eaton and Witherspoon were exchanging gunfire. Eaton, who fired the four bullets that struck Washington, was charged with assault and reckless endangerment. In May 2022, New Haven Superior Court Judge Brian Fischer sentenced Eaton to three years of probation and 450 hours of community service.

In 2020, Washington filed a lawsuit seeking over fifteen thousand dollars in damages against Eaton, Pollock, and multiple municipal entities. The lawsuit declared negligence and unreasonable seizure, as well as a violation of Washington’s Fourth Amendment rights and the policing agreement among New Haven, Hamden, and Yale. In 2023, a year after Eaton resigned, Washington settled her lawsuit for 1.1 million dollars.

Now 27 years old, Washington has accepted that the long scar across her stomach may never fade.

“I had to work super hard on not letting what happened to me devour me,” Washington said. “But I lost myself completely. I didn’t know who I was.” She became afraid of therapy and mistrustful of everyone except for Witherspoon, her lawyers, and her biological and adopted mothers. In 2020, Washington cut off all her hair as a symbolic restart.

Washington’s attack, coupled with the international vitality of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, galvanized efforts toward police abolition across Connecticut. But five years out, these efforts have not materialized into lasting or effectual reforms.

Founded in 1894, the YPD is the oldest college police force in the United States. In the mid-tolate 20th century, driven by rising student enrollments and civil rights and antiwar protests, college police forces emerged to maintain security and enforce

laws on university campuses. In 1992, the City of New Haven codified YPD’s ability to arrest anyone in New Haven, and gave YPD felony arrest powers extending to the borders of Connecticut—encompassing three million people unaffiliated with Yale.

Yet, the YPD is still Yale’s police force. Unlike officers of the New Haven Police Department (NHPD), who are paid with public funds, YPD officers receive their salaries from the University’s private funds. Today, the University maintains a privately owned, privately funded police force of ninety-three officers. A 2008 lawsuit revealed that YPD’s operating budget at the time was over ten million dollars.

Officers from the YPD who are certified by the Connecticut Police Officer Standards and Training Council can be deployed by the NHPD. The certification includes 818 hours of training in patrol skills. Meanwhile, specialized training, such as in implicit bias and de-escalation, is available but not mandatory. Activists have framed this system as a “triple occupation” of New Haven, which is policed by Yale, NHPD, and Hamden police officers.

Similar acts of violence have rippled throughout U.S. universities, more than a third of which fund private and armed police forces. In 2013, a Morgan State University police officer was involved in the killing of 44-year-old Tyrone West. In 2015, a University of Cincinnati police officer fatally shot unarmed 43-year-old Sam DuBose. In 2018, a University of Chicago police officer shot fourth-year student Charles Thomas.

After Washington was shot, Yale students were immediately called to action. Around midnight, three days after the police attack on Washington and Witherspoon, a group of Yale students coalesced at the Afro-American Cultural Center. They formed the Black Students for Disarmament at Yale (BSDY) to demand the defunding and dismantling of the Yale Police Department; a differential, or “fit-forpurpose,” call response system devoid of armed police officers by the end of the 2020–21 academic school year; and the reinvestment of these funds to support New Haven organizations that serve Black and Brown communities. BSDY led two weeks of protest for their demands.

BSDY, along with four other undergraduate and graduate student groups, united as the Abolition Alliance at Yale (AAY) to demand that the YPD be dissolved. They argued that because policing in the United States was birthed from the need for Southern slave owners to capture and punish runaway slaves, it is foundationally violent and racist, and cannot be simply “reformed away.”

“By dedicating millions of dollars to so-called campus policing, Yale is in reality investing in the policing of residents throughout the Greater New Haven area,” AAY members said.

Central to AAY ’s argument is the claim that the majority of cases that YPD responds to do not require an armed response and could be handled by Yale Security. According to a 2018 report by AAY, 85 percent of crimes that the YPD responded to were property crimes, which do not involve force, or the

threat of force, against victims. In their August 2020 op-ed, AAY members wrote, “We realize that Yale cares more about the security of its property than the security of the different people the institution comes into contact with.”

The report also argued that YPD exaggerates its necessity in Yale and New Haven. In 2020, former YPD Assistant Chief Anthony Campbell ’95 DIV ’09 told the Yale Daily News that the YPD receives twenty thousand to thirty thousand calls annually, but AAY found that only 10,604 calls to the YPD were logged for that year. Those calls were mostly of a medical nature—once again raising the question of why the YPD arms its officers to address medical situations.

Amid outcries over Washington’s shooting, the administration took its own action. In June 2019, Yale commissioned a consulting firm called TwentyFirst Century Policing Solutions (21CP), an outgrowth of an Obama initiative that was comprised of academic and civic experts on policing.

As Black Lives Matter protests reached their height after the murder of George Floyd in spring of 2020, Washington’s story gained increased resonance in New Haven. “I never, at least in the conversations I had, felt that we had to convince people that we were doing something worthwhile,” Jaelen King ’22, president of BSDY, remembered. “It was more of a conversation of how we implement this.”

In June 2020, after months of analyzing police procedures and interviewing New Haven residents and Yale students and staff, 21CP published its assessment of the Yale Police Department, which had two primary recommendations: first, to establish a “differential response” model where non-police resources like mental health providers and residential college advisors serve as the first response in situations that do not require armed enforcement, and secondly, to enhance collaboration with the community to strengthen trust.

After 21CP released their report––amid a national outrage over police violence after the murder of George Floyd––Yale promised to meet several demands, including policing without military equipment, implementing new scenario-based training in de-escalation techniques, and requiring all officers to intervene in and report any incidents of excessive use of force by a fellow police officer.

BSDY responded to 21CP’s report, underlining that its proposed reforms overlooked the racial disparities in policing. Furthermore, BSDY argued that reforms have not stopped ceaseless incidents of police brutality. Banning chokeholds in New York did not stop the murder of Eric Garner; de-escalation training in Seattle did not stop the murder of Charleena Lyles.

BSDY noted that while they proposed absolute abolition, 21CP’s “differential response” model maintained the need for armed police along with alternative response methods. 21CP also recommended strengthening the relationship between YPD and NHPD by sharing information through updated technologies and systems. Further cooperation

between the two departments, BSDY argued, would only “[disregard] community members’ demands and [entrench] a system of over-militarized, overreaching policing and surveillance.” BSDY advocates secured meetings with Campbell and former Director of Public Safety Ronnell Higgins, but King said that the meetings didn’t result in any meaningful change.

In November 2020, the YPD announced that it was piloting a differential response to improve “YPD’s productivity by more efficiently using the department’s total resources.” YPD has since updated its dispatch center to greet callers first with “Yale Dispatch, is this a medical, police, or fire emergency?” For mental health issue-related calls, two plain-clothes officers now respond in an unmarked patrol vehicle.

Washington appreciates the time and effort Yale students put towards advocating for her. “A lot of the Yale students [supported] me,” said Washington. “Thank you. Thank you for that.”

Five years after 21CP Solutions’ report and the tide of BSDY and community activism, the YPD has not been defunded or demilitarized. In spring 2024, the YPD employed at least 3 Skydio drones—military-grade drones used extensively by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Israel Defense Forces—to surveil peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters. Assistant Chief of Police Von Narcisse, in an April 30 email to Campbell, which has since been released to the public through a public records request by student journalist Theia Chatelle ’25, celebrated that “we have a legit police force, ready to go, 24-7. We don’t need to, and won’t, wait for law enforcement capabilities to mobilize. We can and will do it ourselves, swiftly.”

In 2024, the YPD’s Police Advisory Board—a decades-old group of students, faculty, and community members who gave recommendations to department leadership—dismantled after its two student representatives graduated and were not replaced. All mentions of the board have been wiped from the YPD’s website. But even during the Board’s existence, student representative Craig BirckheadMorton told the Yale Daily News that the group never met, even though Campbell said it received civilian complaints.

In a January 20 email responding to questions on YPD reforms, Head of Public Safety Duane Lovello wrote that implementing 21CP Solutions’ recommendations “remains ongoing” and the differential response model “continues to evolve.” Lovello added that multi-million-dollar financial investments have been made to improve the radio communications system and a centralized operations center.

In a January 13 email, University President Maurie McInnis expressed her support for the differential response model, but made no comment on any specific or new initiatives she would like to see.

NHPD reforms have similarly fallen flat. As of October 2023, the NHPD budget of 43 million dollars was four times greater than the city’s funds towards human services, such as disability services, elderly

services, public health, and youth and recreational services—which have remained stagnant since 2019. In 2019, the Board of Alders unanimously passed a resolution in favor of the New Haven Civilian Review Board (CRB), which is tasked to investigate complaints against Yale and New Haven police officers. As of April 2024, the CRB is only two-thirds full because of its stalled nomination process.

Moreover, YPD and NHPD continue to use ShotSpotter, an audio-based gunfire detection technology first implemented in 2009, which notifies officers of suspected shootings. Since then, ShotSpotter apparatuses have been expanded three times—most recently in 2022 through the addition of sensors. The 191 ShotSpotter sensor locations in New Haven are concentrated in predominantly Black and Latine areas. Of the 108,131 New Haveners that live in a neighborhood with at least one ShotSpotter sensor, 24.8 percent are white, 36.2 percent are Black, 30.3 percent are Latine and 4.5 percent are Asian.

BSDY kept a list of YPD incidents, some self-reported. In 2020, this included a YPD officer stopping a Black student biking near Pauli Murrary college officer explaining to a Black student the necessity to keep “undesired people” off campus during COVID-19 move out.

On September 19, 2024, Jebrell Conley, a 36-year-old Black man and alleged member of New Haven’s Grape Street Crips gang, was killed by gunfire in a confrontation with one New Haven police officer, one New Haven police sergeant, and one state police sergeant. While protesters acknowledge Conley’s criminal history, they urged that the aftermath would have been different if Conley was white, and called for the discharge and decertification of the officers who shot Conley. But none of the officers were discharged—two were placed on paid administrative leave. New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and Police Chief Karl Jacobson both said that they believed the officers used “appropriate force.”

ullet fragments still dot ashington’s spine because they are too close to a nerve to be extracted. She still feels occasional back and leg pains but notes that the pain is manageable. Every April, around her birthday, the same anxiety returns.

Washington says that the lawsuit settlement hasn’t dramatically changed her day-to-day life. She works a 9-to-5 at a bank; she still has to pay the bills. She recently completed an online Fashion Merchandising course at Cornell.

She says she hasn’t seen the type of police reform she hoped for—the reform that activists were organizing around in 2019. The settlement, she says, doesn’t amount to the justice she craves.

“People scream justice for this person, justice for that person. But what does it mean to the person you’re screaming justice for?” Washington asks. She says no amount of money could amount to just compensation. “Justice, to me, is people taking accountability for what happened, not just like: ‘Oh, I’m throwing a sorry in your face.’”

But Washington remains optimistic about the possibility of reform. She understands the expectations that police officers grapple with. “I know police officers that are very sweet and kind,” Washington said. “I don’t hate police officers. I don’t have any hate in my body.”

Washington believes that sensitivity training could better prepare police officers to handle complex situations. Her experience in customer service as a waitress influences her to imagine how the compassion expected from customer service employees could be applied to police officers. For Washington, effective police reforms require a complete mindset shift—not just training—in which police carefully and compassionately assess their ongoing situation. She’s prepared to fight for it.

“A lot of people are not here to talk about it anymore,” Washington says. Most people, she notes, do not survive police brutality. “For me to walk, and talk like before––I should be a voice for police brutality.”

In 2021, Washington began designing clothes as a way to heal and rediscover herself. She describes clothing design as the one thing that kept her “sane” and “leveled” after being shot. Inspired by her adopted mother, who would sew and alter Washington’s clothes, Washington loved the way she could tell a story through customizing outfits.

She’s developing her clothing brand HD, which she hopes will become an in-person store. HD stands for Honeysuckle Dozier: her zodiac flower and her biological last name. HD also stands for high definition, which is a reminder for Washington to weave her dreams to life. She wants to spread love through her brand. “I don’t want to only be known as the girl who was shot,” she says.

Washington’s smile spreads across her face. “I gave my own self justice.” ∎

Liu is a sophomore in Berkeley College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

Sophia

@zahiretylon on Instagram, as styled by Stephanie Washington (@_hdmademe)

The Long Ride Home

Since 2019, forty-four pedestrians and cyclists have been killed on New Haven streets. Six years later, activists say nothing has changed.

By Tina Li

layout design BY ALICIA GAN

PHOTOS Courtesy of COlin Kim

They say the streets have become the “Wild West.” That their chests seize with dread as they step on the asphalt. That cycling feels like a “full contact sport,” but it’s their fault if they get hit. That the two of them just wanted to get an ice cream cone, and now their friend will never eat one again; that it’s traffic violence, not mere accidents; that everyone is afraid and too many have died and reassurances aren’t enough anymore. That they were promised change.

Since 2019, forty-four pedestrians and cyclists have been killed on New Haven streets. The city consistently has the highest rate of pedestrian crashes in all of Connecticut. There’s an unspoken rule among cyclists and pedestrians: wait at least three seconds before you cross the road. Red light runners won’t wait for you to look both ways. In 2021, 305 Connecticut residents submitted written testimonies in support of a state-wide omnibus traffic safety bill; over half were from New Haven. One of them, Carmen Viudes, was almost run over the morning she planned to write her letter. In her testimony, she described the incident succinctly: “He was protected by a one-ton metal cage, while I am a soft bag of flesh and bone.”

Of the dozen cyclists, pedestrians, and activists I spoke to, nearly everyone knew someone killed in a car crash, and all had their own close calls. The first reaction to a traffic-related death is usually to blame the people involved: brake-averse drivers, reckless cyclists, distracted pedestrians. But in the wake of several high-profile deaths in 2008, a growing number of New Haveners began noticing that crashes were concentrated in hotspots across the city, such as Ella T Grasso Boulevard, Whalley Avenue, and the lower-income neighborhoods of Fair Haven, Dixwell, and The Hill. There must be systemic reasons.

Since its emergence in 2008, the Safe Streets Coalition has refocused conversations surrounding traffic safety toward New Haven’s enduring infrastructural issues: faded or wholly absent crosswalks, ill-timed pedestrian signals, wide lanes that encourage speeding, and inconsistent bike lanes.

Bringing together residents and experts, the coalition has applied pressure to key projects and collaborated with the city to develop actionable roadmaps for change.

But the fatalities are unceasing. New Haven must radically rethink its street designs, activists say, and stop treating traffic violence as inevitable. In its way, however, stands a city bureaucracy riddled with inefficiencies.

II. Co-Op and Coalition

Doug Hausladen’s life of public service was foreshadowed. When he was four, in the bluegrass rolling hills of Kentucky, Hausladen went door-knocking with his mother to gather signatures for a sidewalk installation. After a brief stint as the Ward 7 Alder of New Haven, he would direct the city transportation department from 2014 to 2021. Affectionately dubbed by fellow public servants as “Downtown Doug,” his commitment to progressive transportation infrastructure landed him a spot in Connecticut’s 40 under 40 in 2022.

Two deaths galvanized his advocacy. In 2008, Mila Rainof, a student at the Yale School of Medicine, was struck by a car while crossing South Frontage Road and York Street, a busy intersection in front of the hospital where she worked. Her death left the Yale community in disbelief. Hausladen couldn’t shake the similarities between himself and Rainof. Both were 25, with aspirations to help others; she was headed to an emergency medicine residency in California, he wanted to one day be an alder; she was hit on her two-block commute home, he walked two blocks to work every day. It could have easily been him, he realized, killed randomly on the streets, his life cut short.

Then, just a month after Rainof’s death, Gabrielle Lee, an 11-year-old girl, was killed in a hitand-run while crossing Whalley Street on her way to the laundromat. The two deaths jolted the entire city: traffic safety was no longer an afterthought but the subject of heated discourse. Having first joined

Elm City Cycling, one of the advocacy groups out of which Safe Streets grew, Hausladen became a key member of the nascent Safe Streets Coalition. The coalition’s first project was momentous. In the spring and summer of 2008, citizens and experts worked together to pass the Complete Streets Manual, a sweeping mandate to prioritize active transportation across city streets. After the Coalition delivered a three thousand-person petition to the Board of Alders, the legislation was passed in 2008.

Cycling in New Haven requires you to keep your “head on a swivel,” Kyle Anthony, general manager of the Bradley Street Bike Co-Op, told me. A lapse in vigilance could make you eat concrete or metal. Bike lanes end abruptly, forcing cyclists to veer into the car lane. Many beginner cyclists end up taking the sidewalk—illegally. Even the experienced likened their commutes to constantly merging on and off an interstate. Kai Addae, a Safe Streets organizer and adventurous cycling enthusiast, described how she used to have to cross four lanes of traffic to reach a bike lane on the other side: “There’s no predictability for me there, there’s not even an expectation that bikes would be there.”

In the face of sluggish progress and nearmonthly fatalities, a sense of community is indispensable for activists. There are three types of cyclists, Anthony tells me: commuters, athletes, and those who want to heal their inner child. “I’m in the camp of never wanting to grow up,” Anthony said. The coalition brings together all three. After all, as Hausladen told me, “everyone owns the streets.”

III. Roadblocks

Since Rainof’s death, there have been several lectures in her honor by the Yale School of Medicine, hundreds of Facebook posts dedicated to her memory, and innumerable pink and white carnations laid down gently where she died. But, seventeen years later, the intersection of South Frontage and York has seen two more fatalities and few changes. Ownership of South Frontage Road was passed from the state to the city in 2020, yet promised safety improvements—1.5 million dollars in raised crosswalks and bike lanes—have yet to begin.

Comprehensive traffic safety improvements are, unsurprisingly, expensive. A block of sidewalk demands a couple thousand dollars, and a single intersection project depletes the city’s funds by at least a million dollars. Ambitious projects looking at an entire stretch of road require consultants to hold design meetings and draft and redraft plans—the upcoming Chapel Street two-way conversion was only made possible with an eleven million dollar state grant. The transportation department cinches most funding for large projects from competitive state grant processes. The rest is then scraped up from what’s leftover of property taxes.

“What ends up happening in Connecticut is everybody gets a little bit. Nobody gets enough,”

Hausladen said. “So everyone just sort of pisses and moans and complains.”

The city is also still healing from history. In 1957, Mayor Richard Lee ordered the Oak Street Connector project, displacing communities he deemed “slums” to make way for a highway that connected the suburbs and tore through the city. New Haven was the nation’s urban renewal testing ground, having received more money per capita than any other city. Not only was the connector never fully realized and ultimately an economic embarrassment, but it also left behind a web of one-way streets—a fatal precedent for a car-centric city. Today, New Haven’s gridded streets shuttle cars through downtown as if they were on race tracks.

South Frontage Road, half of the Oak Street Connector, after it was demolished and rerouted by

Ella T Grasso is a behemoth to cross as a pedestrian. A four, at times five, lane “stroad”— combining the deadly speeds of an arterial road with the multi-purpose usage of a street—the boulevard is an example of how state ownership of a street can hinder its progress.

the Downtown Crossing Project, still bears the scars of a hasty and rude birth. In 2020, Yale Law student Keon Ho Lim was killed in a “right-hook accident” while cycling through South Frontage and York. In a right-turn-only lane, he attempted to continue straight, only to collide with a truck turning right from the lane to his left. Neither was at fault; bikers are taught to stay right in the absence of a dedicated bike lane, and the driver could not have seen him. A commenter under an article about Lim’s death called the street design “criminal.”

From I-95, North and South Frontage run antiparallel to each other, one starting and one ending at Ella T Grasso Boulevard. The road has been dubbed “Death Boulevard” by the New Haven Independent, as nine people have been killed there alone since 2019.

Ella T Grasso is a behemoth to cross as a pedestrian. A four, at times five, lane “stroad”—combining the deadly speeds of an arterial road with the multi-purpose usage of a street—the boulevard is an example of how state ownership of a street can hinder its progress. Hausladen worked for years to add nearly a mile of sidewalk, and even then, one side still lacks a sidewalk.

Aaron Goode, longtime traffic safety and environmental activist, invited me to the West River Peace Garden, which lies right by the boulevard. Carrying a plastic bag to collect trash, Goode wore a bright orange Connecticut Trails Census vest over a windbreaker and argyle sweater. He works at the garden often, and today he brought a friend. They both wear newsboy caps and slip into Yiddish as we chat.

Six years ago, Goode was cycling along the

Farmington Canal when he was hit by a truck. The road was double-laned, and while the nearest car had yielded, the car in the other lane, obstructed by the first, could not brake in time. “I was completely immobilized for weeks, months. But after that, you have to get up and get back to work.”

Back at Ella T Grasso, the city has made the boulevard safer after hard-fought negotiations with the state with a new crosswalk where four pedestrians died in a single year and a lane removal to reduce the possibility of a crash like Goode’s. Behind the garden, construction crews are building a new suite of townhouses, championed by the city to stitch the neighborhoods together again.

Goode and other activists don’t blame any individual in the city government. The slow progress, rooted in a risk-averse and incremental culture, surpasses a single person; after all, as Goode said, Connecticut is the “land of steady habits.” In the meantime, though, pedestrians and cyclists must navigate the deadly streets left in place by the city’s historically car-centric mindset. Last April, Goode’s friend and peace activist Yusef Gürsey was walking home from a protest when he was struck by a car on Whalley Avenue in a hit and run—on the same street where Gabrielle Lee died in 2008.

IV. Black Box

Somewhere in the depths of City Hall, perhaps in the aldermanic chamber or perhaps in a smaller, shadowy meeting room, five people oversee the annual milling and paving list. Traffic safety improvements are contingent on this list, as the transportation department must wait for a road to be repaved by the Department of Public Works before restriping to narrow lanes or adding bike paths.

The Resource Allocation Committee was formed in 2012 and consists of two city officials, two alders, and a civilian chosen by the board of alders. It was created out of alders’ concerns that Mayor John DeStefano held a dictatorial grip on the transportation infrastructure budget. Hausladen and Mayor Justin Elicker, then alders themselves, were the sole two nay votes among the thirty-member board. They were concerned the change would merely shift power to another political body, failing to “depoliticize” the oversight of transportation infrastructure.

Over a decade later, the committee’s standing members are not listed on the city’s website. Residents have no way of attending its meetings, and many likely do not even know it exists. What could have been a committee that liaised with activists and civilians, that allowed fervent discourse in public meetings, that fielded concerns about project statuses, ended up being yet another cryptic committee in City Hall. My attempts to contact its members were unsuccessful.

The Resource Allocation Committee’s decision-making process is not made public. While Mayor Elicker emphasized to me the committee’s role in ensuring internal collaboration and fairness

in project distribution, activists questioned the committee’s fundamental role. If the milling and paving list is to be one of the city’s methods of traffic infrastructure improvement, spreading it across neighborhoods without a long-term plan leads to piecemeal development. The streets they focus on also don’t all correspond with high crash zones, Safe Streets activist Maximilian Chaoulideer pointed out. As their concerns continue to grow—SeeClickFix, the city’s online forum for noting necessary repairs, has over five thousand unresolved requests—activists and residents feel unable to see past the city’s opaque processes.

“The bureaucrats at City Hall are playing God,” Hausladen said, “By having projects in a black box, they can switch stuff around from one season to the next. Nobody’s the wiser.”

V. Jaded

Every weekday, safe streets activist Rob Rocke bikes from East Rock to his job as an IT support technician for Yale. He takes the Grove Street bike lane all the way down to the heart of campus, before the path ends in front of the Schwarzman Center. His work might call him to Chapel Street, where he must still weave through speeding cars. Or to Whitney Avenue, where traffic calming measures were slated to begin in 2022 but have been delayed to this year.

During his decades as an activist, Rocke has seen several bills and ordinances pass—touted as establishing more transparency or expediting progress toward active transportation—that ended up being ineffective. Like the 2010 Complete Streets manual. Or the 2008 “3 foot” biker law, which forbids drivers from getting closer than three feet to cyclists— and is hardly enforced. Or the 2020 city-led and mayor-backed Safe Routes for All plan with highly researched proposals for top-priority roads. In this roadmap, a protected bike lane runs through Chapel Street. In the most recent conversion plan—even with the eleven million dollar grant—the street is to be renovated without a bike lane entirely. Despite hopes, the Resource Allocation Committee joins this list of fruitless efforts. Passing the legislation, as it turns out, is the easy part.

“I’m realizing how naive it is to say it now, that suddenly it would just happen,” Rocke said, “If you read [Safe Routes for All], it was meant to be: if a road is touched you have to add a bike lane, you have to add a sidewalk, you have to consider all users of that road whenever the road is touched. And I realized, without activists policing that and hounding people for it, it doesn’t happen.”

Activists have felt not only let down but betrayed. Safe Streets activist Lior Trestman pointed out that, in the original 189-page grant proposal for Chapel Street, the phrase “bike lanes” was mentioned 157 times, and the city included a letter of support from him when he thought the plan would have bike lanes. After securing the grant funding, the city is now

walking back on its words. “We are totally jaded to the idea that there’s anything to advocacy that is productive,” Trestman told me, “We have not worked to build the [coalition] because it feels like it’s all in vain.” When I brought up activists’ concerns that the city was diverging from the Safe Routes for All plan, Mayor Elicker pointed out the reality of how Chapel Street has limited room to accommodate bikers, yet many small businesses there need parking spaces to thrive. Elicker admires street safety activists for their dedication and for expressing their concerns, especially as someone who walks and bikes himself. Trying to balance the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers, however, “takes a lot of hard decisions.” In the meantime, he said, New Haven is at least more proactive than neighboring cities, and in recent years, fatalities have gone down—from twenty-one in 2020

For the activists, though, change isn’t happening fast enough. Trestman loves New Haven. But he thinks that in the future, when he’s thinking about having children, he would not in good conscience let them bike, walk, or play on New Haven streets. If the time comes and drastic changes have yet to be made, he’ll move away. “Call a spade a spade,” he said. At a certain point, you

VI. Blueprint

Rocke had imagined the Safe Routes for All roadmap as a binder on an important shelf in City Hall, and each time a road is slated to be repaved, officials would simply flip to the right page and see what’s already been researched and signed off on by the alders. It should be that easy, activists tell me; it should be “cookie-cutter.”

Even when he was Director of Transportation, Hausladen felt his progressive vision frustratingly curbed. He needed alders to approve his proposals, and his attempts at collaboration were often petty and futile: “‘Hey, can we talk about this bike lane?’ They’re like, ‘Sure, but I got a parking ticket last week and I’m pissed at you, so I’m going to not call you back for two months.’”

To begin with, the city needs to dedicate more effort to outreach, Hausladen said. This could look like a database with project statuses—which the city promised activists in the past but did not come to fruition. For the Resource Allocation Committee, this would mean releasing a milling and paving list years in advance. Activists would then have time to properly engage with the community and compile fleshed-out, supported plans for change.

Secondly, in New Haven, the public works and transportation departments reside in two different cabinets and operate separately. The engineers and designers on the transportation team must plan lane striping changes depending on the public works team’s progress. Uniting them, as Mayor Michelle Wu did in Boston when she took office in 2021, would synchronize the departments and reduce communication hiccups.

Most of all, though, New Haven needs a visionary. Activists believe that the current transportation director is too embroiled in day-today minutiae to have time for big-picture ideas. Chaoulideer wants to see a dedicated transportation coordinator. Someone with gumption, who will stake political capital to advocate within the government for cohesive, radically safe streets. This idea isn’t unpopular in New Haven—Elicker himself proposed such a role last year—but, due to a limited budget, the alders cut it.

Change isn’t impossible. Recently, Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith of East Rock and Fair Haven, with several other alders, secured a two million dollar federal grant to redesign streets and neighborhoods rendered treacherous and half-constructed by the Oak Street Connector.

As they wait, activists and residents grow tired. Often, as we spoke, Rocke would put on a faux-hurt air and joke, “I’m not saying anyone has an obligation to tell Rob Rocke what’s going on.” But that’s the reality. As they track down changes and push the city to fulfill their promises, they’re often left in the dark. Activists have shifted their energy toward a more tangible effort: erecting memorials for those killed on New Haven streets.

VII. Phantom

On a windy december evening, Safe Streets leaders met to discuss the implementation of red light cameras. But Chaoulideer is bitterly hesitant to even call it a coalition anymore. In the past, they were a band of activist groups across the city, spurred by a shared vision and memories of loved ones lost on the streets, with their meetings attracting up to fifty attendees. Now, only the core group remains: Rocke, Addae, Chaoulideer, Trestman, and less than a dozen others.

Optimists and idealists at heart, they’re still driven by the urban planning studies and reports

they originally circulated among each other. Addae dreams of a day when basic traffic safety is ensured and she can push for radical and experimental street plans. Trestman sees the flourishing state of some cities across the world and remains hopeful that the tenets of active transportation are indeed simple and attainable.

New Haven has good bones to work with, Hausladen believes. It has a gridded and geometrically straightforward system of short, narrow streets and over three hundred miles of sidewalk. The city is, in many ways, ideal for comprehensive street change. Now serving as director of the Parking Authority, Hausladen advocates and testifies for proposed traffic safety improvements—recently, red light cameras, which were finally allowed last year after the “Vision Zero” bill was passed.

In the meantime, the Complete Streets and Safe Routes for All manuals, political victories of decades

past, collect dust. The black box remains impenetrable.

In November 2020, the Safe Streets Coalition memorialized Lim’s death on South Frontage and York with a ghost bike. The activists had picked up a junk bike from the bike co-op, carefully coated it with durable bone-white paint, and chained it to a street pole—then repeated that for the other dozen deaths just in that year. Small and somber, it stood firm in its reminder; drivers couldn’t miss its stark whiteness even if they sped through the intersection.

The bike was stolen or taken down sometime a few months later. Before that, though, it stood upright, as if Lim could jump back on at any moment and ride home.∎

Tina Li is a sophomore in Pierson College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

End of the World (Indiana)

one year i rose & there was snow smothering the leaves i watched a flake drift over the flowers bloomed a robin swallowed & recoiled & the earth seemed as if everything had lost its name may may forgetful snow fall here my memories repackaged & served in dust & gradually the hills filled with the tremors of earth undug & the groundhogs took cover

it became a land of corn & snow the rows ornamented in perpetual christmastime (that was the only holiday we celebrated here) in the end jesus would die again (& where would we crucify him? in the chicken coops his arms splayed against crushed beaks & broken wings brown his arms like mine & yet) he dies he dies again because who is willing to die for their sins of plastic bags & pedals pressed

oh lord this earth was never ours to begin with let the rivers overflow so it can feel what it is to be human let us drown in its salted tears dance ourselves off the face of Earth until we have undone the ground & its toiled soil & then we shall return to

–Lily Shukla

American Studies

In the wake of the 2024 election, international students at Yale confront their relationship

to America.

By Moe Shimizu

On the nigHT of the 2024 presidential election, Ruoyu Zhou ’27 sat at a watch party in her friend’s suite as the United States map reddened.

“It felt kind of like a joke at first, and I remember people were treating it as if it were some sort of TV show. The line between politics and entertainment felt blurry,” Zhou said. “As the night went on, it just began to feel more real, both in terms of what it meant for me, and what it meant for my American friends.”

Zhou, an international student who grew up in Guizhou, China, who attended high school in Singapore, wasn’t sure how the election results would affect her directly as an international student. “I knew that the election was definitely related to our lives, especially for me given the worsening of U.S.–China relations, but we aren’t involved in the voting or how the election turns out. Ultimately it’s not our country.”

Zhou echoes a sense of emotional distance shared across the ten international students I spoke to about the 2024 U.S. presidential election. While Donald Trump’s reelection signifies global changes, many students expressed mixed feelings about their investment in the results.

Like many international students, I applied to Yale from Japan hoping to pursue educational and financial opportunities unavailable in my home country.

Most of the students I spoke to felt similarly, and seven shared that they hope to secure employment in the U.S. for at least a few years after graduation. And yet many students, myself included,

But then you see that America is becoming more and more unstable, and Trump inarguably being a big aggregator of many problems, which makes me concerned for the future.

don’t wish to stay in the U.S. long-term for cultural and political reasons.

The election of Donald Trump has called the stability of international students—and their futures in the U.S.— into question. In the wake of the results, many international students are questioning their relationships to the U.S. as a whole. Their reactions manifest in an

emotional distancing from the U.S. and disillusionment with its image as a land of endless opportunity and democratic freedom.

FORMANY INTERNATIONAL students, the election feels personal in its threat to their places in America and to their prospects of staying post-graduation.

International students pursuing a full-time degree arrive in the country on an F-1 visa, or a “nonimmigrant visa for a temporary stay” specifically for students pursuing full-time academic studies at a U.S. institution. They are temporary guests—when their visas are at risk, so are their legal grounds for remaining in the country.

Since his inauguration, Trump has already made moves to threaten their security.

On January 26, Donald Trump threatened a 25 percent tariff on Colombia alongside visa sanctions which would deem Luis Tomás Orozco Vaca ’26 from Colombia’s visa nonrenewable.

While a deal was reached hours later, the move showed the unpredictability of Trump’s actions on immigration. “I think Trump has shifted U.S. foreign policy in a way where he is willing to strike down any deviance and target countries with insane responses,” Orozco said.“That’s definitely a new dimension of insecurity.”

On January 29th, Trump issued an executive order pledging to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestine protests.

Meanwhile, Project 2025, in which many of Trump’s closest advisors and administration members are heavily involved, includes a section on prioritizing national security in student programs, suggesting that the government “eliminate or significantly reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students from enemy nations.”

International students pursuing a career in the U.S. are also left wondering how the presidency will play into their futures. If students wish to stay post-graduation, they must apply for extended time allowed for professional experience through Optional Practical Training or Curricular Practical Training. The other, more long-term option to secure a place in U.S. is through visa sponsorship from a U.S. company, most often the H-1B visa for occupations that require “theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge.” Pursuing an H-1B visa usually means securing a job with large employers with enough funding to sponsor visas.

Lorenss Martinsons ’26, from Latvia, studies Cognitive Science and plans to stay in the U.S. to pursue fields related to machine learning and Artificial

Intelligence. He says the industry is “more forward-thinking” in the U.S. than in his home country. Yet the volatility of the Trump administration’s policies concerns him. “I think it just feels very unpredictable on what he is going to do,” said Martinsons.

Donald Trump’s first presidency included an executive order which led to denials of H-1B petitions increasing fourfold from 6 percent in 2015 to 24 percent in 2018. The order also resulted in longer delays and requests for evidence, slowing down the application process as a whole. In 2017, Trump issued Executive Order 13769 to “protect the nation from foreign terrorist entry” into the U.S., targeting travel from primarily Muslim countries. The order sparked concerns about the safety of international students and scholars studying abroad in America, though the department of Homeland Security later clarified that the ban excluded student visas.

During the 2024 election, Trump showed mixed stances toward legal immigrants: In June of 2024, he stated that he would provide green cards to all foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges. Over the last few months, he has been engaged in heated debate about the H-1B visa program, at points even claiming,“I’ve always liked the visas...I have used it many times. It’s a great program.” However, many experts

expect increased scrutiny in the H-1B visa process.

“He’s sending a lot of mixed messages, and the main problem is the complete uncertainty on what his position will be. I’ve definitely shifted my priorities to be more attentive about how the rules might be changing, and how that might impact my future,” Martinsons said. His worry seems to hold true even for those who aren’t committed to staying in America. Two students I spoke to mentioned that they’d begun searching for potential internships and careers in Europe.

Ozan Say, the director of the Office of International Students & Scholars, points out that despite the general anxiety about immigration laws and travel bans amongst the international community, there are nuances to the changes a Trump presidency might impose. He assures students that Yale will continue to support international students through any changes, and, as it always has, “advocate for reasonable immigration improvements that benefit our students,” particularly in situations that might impact their safety in the country.

III.

Elite

U.S. universities like Yale became hubs for international students during the Cold War. The colleges played a role in American soft power diplomacy, marketing the nation as a global leader in democracy and higher education. Since then, U.S. universities have often been deemed a path to success.

Orozco was aware of the socioeconomic privileges that Yale would provide him when he decided to enroll from Colombia. “There is a sense of status that comes from being here. Being international studying in America, going to an Ivy League school—that reads in a certain way to people, both to Latin Americans back home and to Americans,” he said. What he points out is true: being an international student studying in the States is perceived by many as a mark of status and privilege. Being a student at

his first speech as the 23rd president of Yale University, Peter Salovey quoted James Truslow Adams, writer and historian, who coined the phrase “American Dream,” when describing what Yale offers students: “A land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

This narrative of America as a land of freedom and opportunity seems to still ring true for some international students coming to the U.S.

When pro-democracy protests swept Hong Kong in 2019 during Trump’s first presidency, Sam, who has been

strong-man kind of character that could help people who don’t have the fortune to live in a democracy,” Sam said. “But then you see that America is becoming more and more unstable, and Trump inarguably being a big aggregator of many problems, which makes me concerned for the future.”

Zhou also senses that what was once a system representing “the epitome of democracy” is shifting ideologically. Post-World War II, the U.S. advertised itself as a land of freedom and democracy—a “policing of the world” of sorts, as Sam notes. To study in the U.S. as a student from Hong Kong means access to

America would give me great opportunities, and I believe in the system,” Sam said. “I like the democracy and the freedoms that it gives me, even as a non-citizen—theoretically, at least. I think America as a country, and the idea of America itself, can live on.”

Others aren’t so optimistic. Orozco admits that he holds a very cynical perspective on the U.S. as a whole. “I don’t feel as if I belong to this country at all,” he said.

Underlying Orozco’s contempt is Colombia’s long history under aggressive U.S influence and intervention, a notable example being Plan Colombia, a U.S.-led

in half. They’re probably not true, but there was a general air of anxiety about immigration status being canceled out of nowhere or put on pause.”

He notes that this time around, the second Trump presidency only furthered the distrust he had already felt toward the U.S. “I think the general sense towards America’s political landscape when I go back home is, ‘Get a grip.’ This kind of thing happens everyday in Iraq,” he said. “American problems are problems, but we’ve dealt with so much more. I think the only reason for anxiety is because many Americans still believe in America as a clean

with powerful legal and institutional protection. The Office of International Students & Scholars offers logistical support and community for international students, implementing programming such as first-year orientations and bonding events. Simply being part of the institution of Yale offers a further layer of protection—students told me stories of immigration officers glancing at “Yale” on their visa and immediately letting them through, while their parents tagging along were questioned thoroughly.

And despite the uncertainty, international students continue to come to Yale for the tangible opportunities it

provides educationally, professionally, and socioeconomically.

Yale also offers its students some sense of belonging.

The cynicism that I heard in many international students, and recognized within myself, seems tied to a refusal to associate oneself too deeply with the U.S. And yet, our lives are so intertwined with Yale—a place embodying an epitome of American wealth and status. I was curious whether students thought themselves to be at home at Yale, a much smaller world within the country.

The general sentiment seemed to be yes. “Yale feels utopian sometimes,” Zhou said. “I have such a welcoming community here, people are very open and genuine.”

“Of course there’s a sense of home,” Orozco said. “I think it’s difficult to define what being ‘at home’ even means—can Americans even ever feel as if they fully belong to this country? But when it comes to Yale, I have my social circle here, I call my dorm ‘home.’ There’s always going to be a sense of affinity.”

I, like many of my international peers, remain highly skeptical of the U.S. on many levels. The sense of distance rooted in the U.S.’ history, how it wields its political and economic power, and more fundamentally the experience of living in a foreign culture will always exist. In the same way that one might feel most like a Yale student back home, I find myself most Japanese when I am here, surrounded by those who are not.

The Trump presidency further complicates this relationship international students have with the U.S., what the country means to us, and where our places might be here. And yet, to position ourselves between America and our home countries, to exist inside the gates of Yale, also means we have tied our lives inextricably to this country.

College.

Moe Shimizu is a sophomore in Davenport

Snapshot

“IBreaking Old Ground

One plot of land in Westville has seen two failed affordable housing projects in the past fifty years, revealing the pitfalls of public housing development in the city.

By Elias Theodore

t was once a beautiful place to live,” Elizabeth Yarbrough told me when I asked about Westville Manor, her old home. She moved to the affordable housing complex in 1993 to raise her sons, who thrived in the nearby woods and “family-oriented” community. “My house was always open to the kids,” she told me, smiling.

Today, toppled grills and boarded windows line the dead-end streets of the Manor. The concrete units in a remote northwest fringe of New Haven seem more like barracks than the cute townhouses Yarbrough recalled.

Six years ago, the city approved a plan for redevelopment. In preparation for the first phase of demolition in spring of 2020, the housing authority forced residents on the north side of

the Manor to relocate. Now, the promise of renewal seems empty—units which were cleared out have new tenants, and the Manor remains untouched, isolated, and in physical decay.

Politicians and developers frequently pledge to build affordable housing. But the path to completed and thriving homes is slow, and subject to greed, bad planning, and discrimination. Westville Manor, and the fifteen acres on which it stands, knows these struggles too well. The land has hosted two failed affordable housing complexes over the course of fifty five years: first, a public housing project by a celebrity architect that promised radical change; next, its disconnected and poorly maintained replacement, Westville Manor. The story of this land illustrates how stigma, mismanagement, and corruption have plagued affordable housing

developments in New Haven, upending the lives of residents.

Paul Rudolph moved to New Haven in 1958, appointed by Yale to chair the Department of Architecture. During his time at the university, Rudolph developed a keen interest in designing buildings using prefabricated mobile home units. With their low cost and efficient construction, Rudolph believed prefab would be the solution to America’s housing crisis.

When Rudolph arrived in New Haven, Mayor Richard Lee’s urban renewal mega-project was just underway. The two men collaborated on a number of structures during Lee’s tenure, including Temple Street Parking Garage in 1961 and Crawford Manor in 1966, a housing complex for the elderly.

In 1968, they began their final project together: Oriental Masonic Gardens, a federally funded housing complex for low-income families constructed of prefabricated units and located on the site of present day Westville Manor. The proposal came on the heels of the race riots in the summer of 1967. For Lee, the development was a chance to improve his relationship with New Haven’s Black community. When it opened, approximately 75 percent of the families living in the Gardens were Black, an attempt to racially integrate racially integrating West Rock, a predominantly white neighborhood. Additionally, the experimental use of prefab was a chance for New Haven to again receive national recognition, attention Lee had basked in during urban renewal in the 1950s. The mayor unveiled Rudolph’s sketches in the presence of George Romney, Nixon’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, in 1969; much to Lee’s delight, the press closely followed along.

The vast majority of affordable housing complexes at the time were highrises in dense urban areas. The Gardens were much the opposite, consisting of 148 homes spread across wooded terrain. Each home consisted of two or three modular units made of plywood stacked on top of each other. Unlike most public housing projects, Oriental Masonic Gardens was managed as a non-profit cooperative. Residents could own their units, as opposed to renting them. Rita Reif of The New York Times wrote an overwhelmingly optimistic article, “Thanks to Prefabs, Out of the Slums and Into Their Own Co-Ops,” in February of 1972, six months after the Gardens opened. Reif portrayed happy families and described the complex as “meticulously maintained,” suggesting that the “pride of ownership and sense of community involvement was evident.” Seven years later, the development was slated for demolition.

Oriental Masonic Gardens faced nearly every challenge imaginable. The development was originally budgeted for 3.4 million dollars, but the prefab units were more expensive than anticipated; there was little precedent from which to estimate cost. All told, the Gardens went 450,000 dollars over budget, even as developers cut corners to save money: units sat on concrete posts instead of full foundations; unprotected pipes froze in the winter;

one resident described having to hold an umbrella while cooking—roofs didn’t fit units and often leaked. The co-op defaulted on payments in 1978, leaving the project in the hands of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the New Haven Housing Authority.

Despite the negligence in construction, much of the blame for the decay at the Gardens was directed towards the co-op owners, architectural historian Sean Khorsandi explained to me. Articles from the time cast residents derisively as “people who couldn’t take care of things, who were used to living in apartments and weren’t used to maintaining a yard,” Khorsandi said.

Affordable housing was stigmatized even when it was owned and managed by a government agency. In the early 1950s, to appease white Hamden

residents, the New Haven Housing Authority helped fund the construction of a fence separating Hamden from West Rock’s housing projects. The oppressive barrier stood in the near vicinity of the Gardens and Manor, a symbol of racial and class animosity that stood until 2014. When Yarbrough lived in the Manor, she described two-minute drives to Hamden taking thirty, thanks to the fence. As New Haven Mayor Toni Harp worked to take the wall down, Hamdenites pushed back; one told The New York Times, “We don’t want the thugs on the corner, the cars racing through here.”

By the time demolition of the Gardens was announced in November of 1979, half of the decomposing units had been abandoned; everyone who was able to leave had done so. The remaining sixty families were relocated by the state.

Archival renderings and photographs of the Oriental Masonic Gardens.

Oriental Masonic Gardens was “all but forgotten by the men who produced it,” wrote Collins. But it loomed large in the minds of those who designed its successor.

In December of 1980, the New Haven Housing Authority invited proposals from developers for what would become Westville Manor. They were planning a complex structure nearly identical to the Gardens: 158 units, ranging from two to five bedrooms, spread across the hilly site. The final design called for units built on-site out of concrete blocks, a reaction to Rudolph’s factory-made, plywood failure. Things would be different this time, the developers promised. Ownership of the project was transferred to the New Haven Turnkey Construction Co in November 1984, which hired Kantrow Construction, owned by brothers Michael and Richard Kantrow, to serve as the property’s general contractor.

One month into the project, the Kantrow brothers requested an additional one million dollars from HUD to cover “costs incurred as a result of unknown subsurface soil conditions.”

HUD’s Hartford and Boston offices denied the request. The Kantrows, working under a tight budget, kept pushing, and HUD’s national office provided them an extra eight hundred thousand dollars. Westville Manor opened to residents in 1986, but became ensnared in controversy regarding the Kantrows’ request for additional funds. After years of investigation, the brothers were indicted for conspiracy to defraud the federal government. Michael pleaded guilty in 1994. In the words of one HUD employee, the Kantrow case was just the “latest chapter” in Westville Manor’s “long and tortured history.”

Despite the corruption, the Kantrow-constructed units were in good condition when Yarbrough arrived in 1993. Fortunes began to change in the Manor in 2006, when the housing authority started redeveloping Brookside Estates and Rockview Apartments, temporarily relocating a number of residents into the Manor and fracturing the tenant community. Four years later, the state shut down

West Rock Nursing Home across the street, leading to incessant break-ins, graffiti, and overgrowth on the property. Without the nursing home’s patients and ninety employees coming to work each day, the Manor felt more remote than before, Yarbrough remembers. The Manor homes also started to physically deteriorate. Two children were hospitalized after part of a unit’s ceiling collapsed in 2013, a structural issue that afflicted many of the homes. With physical decay and the presence of temporary residents, “things just went downhill,” Yarbrough explained. In May of 2014, there were four shootings in the Manor in the span of a single week.

By 2018, the project was in a state of “obsolescence,” Shenae Draughn, president of the New Haven Housing Authority, told me. In collaboration with residents and the housing authority, Kenneth Boroson Architects completed a master plan for the redevelopment of Westville Manor in 2019. It is the same local firm who designed Brookside and Rockview, complexes which are considered successful. The proposal features two large recreational

layout design by Jessica Sánchez

green spaces, ample but less visible parking, and the creation of three new streets, one of which curves through the entire complex. The design seems promising, cognizant of the site’s former challenges and thoughtful in how it addresses them. While it doesn’t include the screen doors and walled-off gardens that she and her fellow residents lobbied for, Yarbrough agreed it was an improvement.

When Yarbrough and I spoke, we sat in the living room of her new home in Rockview where photos of her sons and grandsons line the walls and her favorite color, bright red, fills the space. Yarbrough immediately made me feel welcome, ushering me inside from the cold even though my shoes were covered with snow. She was one of the residents on the north side of the Manor who the housing authority relocated in preparation for phase one of demolition and construction in 2019. Six years later, there is still no progress on the development.

The pandemic arrived before phase one broke ground, beginning a period of inaction that continues today. Getting federal subsidies for

constructing and renovating affordable housing is extremely competitive, and the housing authority’s bids have thus far been unsuccessful. Draughn seems optimistic that they will secure the money soon, but it only covers phase one of the project. Relief for residents is many years away. ***

Iapproached a woman, who requested to use the pseudonym Maria to protect her identity, one frigid January afternoon as she scrubbed the exterior of her white SUV. Maria said she had been relocated by the housing authority to the Manor only a couple of months ago. The public housing project which she had long called home, West Hills, is currently undergoing its delayed redevelopment. She had no sense of when demolition at the Manor would begin, when she would again be forced to pack up and move. I asked how she liked living in Westville Manor, and she told me “it’s no different from any other neighborhood, it has its problems, it has its shootings, it needs work done.”

In our conversation, Draughn talked extensively about the stigma surrounding public housing. The fact that the Hamden fence came down only about ten years ago “speaks to this shared bias

that continues around what we think about the families who live in affordable housing.” At the same time, a two bedroom unit in New Haven costs close to two thousand and four hundred dollars per month, 35 percent higher than the national average. “Entry level teachers, entry level police officers, they can’t afford to pay that,” Draughn explained. When a project undergoes redevelopment, the housing authority gives the displaced residents the choice between a unit in another one of their properties or a voucher to buy a home. Each resident also has the option to move back once construction is complete. While she has some fond memories of Westville Manor, Yarbrough is settled and content in Rockview. “I wouldn’t go back,” she told me. ∎

Elias Theodore is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College.

photographs of Westville Manor.

Silence on the Plaza

Following a wave of pro-divestment protests in April, Yale’s new rules governing how, when, and where students can gather in outdoor spaces appear to intentionally restrict student protest on campus.

By Hannah Mark

At 4 p.m. on any of yale’s outdoor spaces, no one can sing. No one can chant or play instruments, except from 12 to 1 p.m. and 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. on a weekday, with prior permission. No one can hang a flag from a college window, lean a painting against a wall, or place a sculpture on Cross Campus or Beinecke Plaza. Any works of art, left unattended, are banned.

Before last April, Yale’s rules on using outdoor spaces, postering, chalking, and light projection had remained largely untouched since 2016. Yet as student-led protests and encampments pressuring Yale to divest from arms manufacturers swept across campus last spring, the administration revised its policies on how, when, and where students could gather on campus

spaces. In August 2024, Yale introduced dozens of updated or entirely new policies on outdoor spaces, its first major change to these policies in nearly a decade. Many of the policies specifically limit protest activities on Beinecke Plaza and Cross Campus— which not only served as key locations of the April demonstrations but also as sites with a decades-long history of student activism.

If you walk through Yale’s campus today, you might not notice that the university’s policies on the use of outdoor spaces have changed. Student organizations continue to host singing sessions, clothing pop-ups, and recruitment events, some without the required permission from the Office of the Secretary and Vice President for

University Life. At least two student leaders I spoke with were unaware of the policy changes. Others I spoke to continue to use outdoor spaces as they did before: without administrator permission or pushback. Meanwhile, a few activist groups, especially those advocating for Palestinian causes, report heightened administrator scrutiny, social media surveillance, and restrictions on their activities.

Yale’s official policy on free expression has not changed. But in practice, Yale’s new rules restrict students’ ability to protest on campus. Furthermore, Yale’s inconsistent enforcement of its new policies suggests that the university designed the policies to limit student protest while appearing to uphold free speech.

A Swift Response

WHEN ASKED WHETHER the new policies were created or updated in response to pro-divestment protests, Pilar Montalvo, Assistant Vice President for University Life, and Kimberly GoffCrews, Secretary and Vice President for University Life, responded in an email that the policies had been “reviewed in the summer of 2024 and some changes were made to clarify and provide additional details intended to be helpful to members of the university community.” But the timeline of the policy changes suggests that they were not just “clarified” or “updated” as claimed, but specifically enacted to curb activist actions and prevent further pro-Palestine protests such as those in April.

Yale made its first policy change after student organizers built a six-foot-tall wooden bookshelf on Beinecke Plaza and filled it with hundreds of works of anti-colonialist literature on April 16, 2024. The structure, part of a protest called “Books, Not Bombs,” urged Yale to divest from weapons-manufacturing companies that fuel global conflict, with a focus on Israel’s war on Gaza. Minutes after the makeshift library’s completion around noon, Montalvo ordered students to remove it, citing a university policy that states that “pathways and entryways to buildings must be kept clear and accessible.” When students did not comply, Montalvo directed Yale facilities workers to dismantle the structure. The Yale Daily News reported that for the hour the shelves stood, students and pedestrians were still able to pass through Beinecke Plaza to Schwarzman Center on either side of the bookshelf. In photos from the event, the bookshelf structure spanned about a third of the width of Schwarzman Plaza, with space on either side.

On April 22, a week after the bookshelves were removed, Goff-Crews emailed the student body to “clarify” Yale’s position on structures. Prior to that email, the university policy on structures did not exist on the Office of the Provost website. The new policy prohibits the placement of any structure, broadly defined as “structure, wall, barrier, tent, sculpture, artwork, or other object,” on any Yale outdoor space without written permission from the space’s administrator. After the administration removed the library, protests escalated to a multi-day encampment on Beinecke Plaza which culminated in the arrests of forty-seven protesters, at least forty-four of whom were students.

On August 19, 2024, the Office of the Secretary and Vice President for University Life published at least thirty new or updated policies on their website for the use of outdoor space, postering, chalking, light projection, and publicity. Prior to the April protests, these policies were generally permissive, as long as student activities showed “respect for university property and the rights of others.” Now, restrictions are much more specific, regulating everything from student art installations to where flags and banners can be hung, and defining sixty-minute slots for “singing, chanting, shouting, playing instruments, or using other noisemakers” in public spaces on weekdays. The use of Cross Campus by

“Unlike their peer groups who continue to use outdoor spaces freely, several explicitly pro-Palestine student groups have reported increased surveillance

by administrators.”

any groups in the month of May is now banned—without exception—to “prepare for commencement.” Yale has run 323 commencements without such a policy.

Selective Enforcement

YET IF YOU TAKE A LOOK AROUND

Yale’s bulletin boards—by the Women’s Table, the York Street entrance to Old Campus, or in front of William L. Harkness Hall—you’ll find they’re often overflowing with posters that don’t follow university guidelines. Under Yale’s new regulations, only one unique poster can exist on each board, and every poster must include the sponsoring organization. Beginning in September 2024, I spent six weeks observing bulletin boards on campus and documented forty-seven violations of the postering policy during

that time. Violators included posters from the Whitney Humanities Center and the Yale University Art Gallery—official departments of Yale University.

The postering policy also states that posters that don’t adhere to the rules may be removed by “authorized staff” weekly. I emailed Montalvo and Goff-Crews asking them to clarify who the “authorized staff” in charge of poster removal are—Goff-Crews replied, “Various staff at the university are authorized to remove posters that do not comply with the guidelines.” I continued to return to the same bulletin boards over the course of the six weeks and did not witness any of the posters in violation of guidelines removed. However, on December 1, 2023, when pro-divestment protestors posted a sixty-foot banner listing the names of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 2023 on the front door of Woodbridge Hall, Montalvo permitted a Yale student—one who did not meet the definition of “authorized staff” as outlined in Yale’s policy—to remove the banner.

Between August 19, when the updated outdoor space use policies took effect, and November 5, the Office of the Secretary and Vice President for University Life approved eighty-seven group applications for use of Cross Campus and Beinecke Plaza, according to Goff-Crews. But student groups have continued to hold events in outdoor spaces without administrator permission.

On September 17, Yale Club Jump Rope held an outreach event for first-year students on Beinecke Plaza where they amplified music at 4:30 p.m., outside of the allowed time frame. A leader of the club confirmed that the group had not requested permission and was not questioned or confronted by any administrators. On September 14, the Yale LGBTQ Center—a university-funded department—held a pop-up giveaway of clothes and shoes on Cross Campus which included a clothes rack that could be classified as a “structure” according to Yale’s policy. A student who staffed the pop-up confirmed that the group didn’t email anyone to request use of the space, and added that nobody questioned whether the group was allowed to be there. On the night of September 16, Yale Nigun Circle, a group that typically meets on Monday nights in the Slifka Center for Jewish Life to sing wordless melodies and rounds, held a spontaneous singing circle on Cross Campus at 10 p.m. According to a group leader, the gathering was informal and

unplanned, and no request for permission to sing on Cross Campus was made to the University administration. Other student groups have also sold merchandise and tickets on Cross Campus (where the sale of goods is prohibited), sung late at night on Old Campus, and staked art installations into Cross Campus—all without administrator pushback.

Though none of these events disrupted campus life or raised complaints, they all violated Yale’s new policy, which states that its rules are “meant to preserve these [outdoor campus] spaces for use by everyone.” But no action was taken against any of these groups, and many student groups continue to use campus spaces and post posters on bulletin boards without consequences. Yale’s inconsistent enforcement of its new policies raises a larger question: if amplified music, impromptu structures, and spontaneous singing aren’t truly disruptive to campus life, why are they restricted in the first place? By creating and then inconsistently enforcing new policies, Yale isn’t preserving campus spaces for “everyone”—it’s picking and choosing who gets to use them, and for what.

Monitoring Dissent

UNLIKE THEIR PEER GROUPS who continue to use outdoor spaces freely, several explicitly pro-Palestine student groups have reported increased surveillance by administrators, including personal phone calls from Montalvo, and social media monitoring by the Office of the Secretary and Vice President for University Life.

Nadine Cubeisy ’25, a student organizer, says that her group is often contacted by Montalvo after they post to their Instagram. Following a post about Yalies4Palestine’s weekly meeting and dinner in October, Montalvo emailed Cubeisy directly to ask about the gatherings. “Our office has been notified that your group, Yalies4Palestine, has announced weekly gatherings of some sort on Tuesday evenings,” Montalvo wrote in the email. “However, there was no location provided. Do you plan to hold these on Cross Campus or Beinecke Plaza? Or do you have a different plan in mind?”

In November, Yalies4Palestine posted to Instagram about a study-in on Cross Campus, for which they submitted a form to Yale administration. The following morning, Cubeisy received an email from Nina Fattore, the Associate

Director of University Life, saying that the “office had been notified that this event is already being advertised as a variation of the event from last year with the bookshelves,” and asking whether bookshelves or structures would be present. Fattore also directed Cubeisy to call Montalvo on her personal cell phone. Cubiesy said that Montalvo regularly calls her to check in on her group’s activities. Montalvo also regularly shows up in person at events that Cubiesy’s group hosts.

Last September, the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project (YUPP) planned a vigil at the Women’s Table to mourn the execution of Marcellus Khalifa Williams. Though unrelated to pro-Palestinian protest, YUPP had previously co-hosted events with Yalies4Palestine and endorsed Occupy Yale. Two days before the

vigil, YUPP posted the details on Instagram. The next day, all board members received an email from Montalvo requesting they submit a form for approval. After complying, they were granted permission.

Former YUPP co-president Bahar Bouzarjomehri ’25 found the timing strange. “We hadn’t reached out to any Yale admin about this before,” she said. “I really don’t know how they found out about the vigil, if not by social media monitoring.” To Bouzarjomehri, the administration’s email and the fact that YUPP is openly supportive of Palestine seem connected. “It’s clear to us that we’re on some sort of radar,” she said.

It’s not just administrators: the Yale Police Department (YPD) has also been deeply involved in surveilling student activists through monitoring social media, student’s ID swipe history, campus

Last August, Yale introduced dozens of updated or entirely new policies on outdoor spaces.

camera footage, aerial drone photography, and through collaboration with the FBI, according to reporting by journalist Theia Chatelle ’25. On December 20, 2024, Chatelle reported that the YPD not only monitored ongoing protests but tried to prevent future protests by tracking student social media. Emails exchanged between YPD compliance and crime analyst Vanessa Schencking, and YPD leadership contained screenshots of Instagram posts from pro-Palestine student groups. Another series of internal YPD emails cross-referenced Yalies4Palestine’s Instagram followers with students who were registered to attend Spring Fling, following a suggestion by YPD Director of Compliance and Strategic Initiatives Lisa Skelly-Byrnes that pro-Palestinian students might try to organize a protest at Spring Fling.

This invasive surveillance of pro-Palestinian students by Yale police and administrators raises serious concerns about student privacy. More troublingly,

Yale’s systematic tracking and monitoring of student activists points to a concerted effort to silence dissent, particularly from pro-Palestine groups on campus. For Arjun Warrior ’26, who is an organizer with the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition, the situation is clear: “The fact that new rules have only been created now, in response to pro-divestment and pro-Palestine protests, suggests that admin’s goal isn’t actually to enforce time, place, and manner restrictions. It’s to shut down speech that the board of trustees doesn’t want to hear,” he said.

Space as Speech

FoR DECADES, Yale’s outdoor spaces—Beinecke Plaza in particular— have been used as sites of student protest, including anti-war art installations in the 1960s, anti-apartheid encampments in the 1980s, and fossil fuel divestment protests in 2020. It was this long history of student activism that inspired organizers last spring to make Beinecke the site of pro-divestment and pro-Palestine campus protests.

To many faculty and students, Yale’s decision to restrict student access to public spaces immediately after a major student protest feels like a direct attack on protest activity. At Yale, and everywhere, space and free expression are inherently linked, says Roderick Ferguson, a professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale whose work examines the relationship between universities and student protest. “One of the tools that’s in the activist toolkit is space and the use of space, because you’ve got to have your protest somewhere,” Ferguson explained. “That involves plazas, that means quad areas like Cross Campus, that involves buildings.” Yale itself acknowledges the connection between space and free expression: its new policies about outdoor space use are consolidated in a section titled “Free Expression at Yale” on the website for the Office of the Secretary and Vice President for University Life.

In its official communications and on its Free Expression at Yale website, Yale emphasizes its commitment to free expression, writing that “the free exchange of ideas…is essential to our goal of excellence…across the university.”

“To say that those spaces are no longer available for political uses is a way to remove that tool from the activist toolkit,” said Ferguson. “You have an effort to

narrow the possibilities for activism, and in that way, the university is abdicating a very clear mission about what a university is.”

Student organizers are finding ways to continue their activism, even with the growing sense that public spaces at Yale are becoming less accessible. For Cubeisy, the process has become a strange sort of routine: filling out forms for approval, back-and-forth emails with Montalvo’s office. She sends me screenshots of their exchanges—negotiating the details of the Cross Campus study-in on November 4

“You’d never guess the logistics behind it all—the forms, the emails, the calls, the fact that, at Yale, protesting means first having a personal phone conversation with a university administrator.”

and the Books Not Bombs referendum announcement on Beinecke Plaza on November 6. When Montalvo calls again on November 5, it’s to tell her that organizers are not allowed to block counter-protesters from filming them.

On the day of the study-in, students wrapped in blankets and keffiyehs sat in groups on Cross Campus, writing letters to University Provost Scott Strobel. Cubiesy moved among them, pausing to greet friends, smiling. You’d never guess the logistics behind it all—the forms, the emails, the calls, the fact that, at Yale, protesting means first having a personal phone conversation with a university administrator.

On December 8, Books Not Bombs passed. “Almost half of the Yale student body voted, and students overwhelmingly voted YES for disclosure, divestment, & reinvestment in Palestinian scholars & studies,” @sumudyale posted on Instagram. “Yale Board of Trustees, the students have spoken. It’s your turn now.”

Despite the new policies, the paperwork, the calls, the quiet absurdity of negotiating activism over the phone, and the growing sense that public spaces are no longer fully theirs to use, student organizing continues. ∎

Hannah Mark is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

It’s Alive!

By Mahitha Ramachandran

i Like to imagine a campus bulletin board as one monstrous organism, every pinned flyer a new flailing limb. As I walk by, it thrashes and wails at me to stop and look, that big-headed beast. Sometimes I do. There’s always something new. Apply to be a Law School summer fellow. Free stand-up comedy show last week. Public global technology lecture, art gallery video series screening, local punk rock band

edges beside fresh ink. Bold and italic attempts to entice. There is a tacit life in their accumulation, the whispered narrative of it all. Someone must make them, pin them there. Someone, then, must also take them down. I wonder if they go one by one, examining each one, or if they rip them off in apathetic grabs, a crumpled slaughter. Here, everything is finite and urgent.∎

Mahitha Ramachandran is a sophomore in Morse College.

Fly the Coop

37 Pörkölt and bigos, for two

39 “The Golden Girls” actress Arthur

40 Demand

42 Language written in syllabics

43 Ring exchange

44 British brute

Genre of

Question from Rumpelstiltskin 20 “Super cool”

22 Don’t eat this

23 Peter, Paul, and Mary, for one

25 Go down

26 Like eyes during a tedious lecture

29 Diamond count

33 “Code” used by train-hoppers

34 Primordial substance called Chaos in Greek myth

35 Sub alternative

36 Communication system often written in Stokoe notation

45 Agent of the King?

47 Polite address

49 [Crickets]

50 Noodle whose name means “buckwheat”

51 “You !”

54 Many a parent with college-aged kids... or a literal description of several features of this puzzle

59 Words to spell?

60 Early sign of spring

61 Sloughs off

62 Face-to-face, in text

63 Melon leftovers

64 Let up

65 Cedar Rapids school

19 Tarnish

1 Fail to grasp

2 Fashion designer Marc

3 VIP dining locations

4 Doll created by cartoonist Rose O’Neill

5 They may require whetting

6 Establishment whose name comes from a Belgian town

7 Birthday party topping?

8 “ a plan!”

9 Texting signoff 10 Became depleted 11 Geologic vision 12 Division 13 Salon product

21 Pasta whose name means “barley”

24 Metonym for a major 200s “boom”

25 Word that may cause less confusion?

26 Country that achieved sovereignty under Kwame Nkrumah

27 Also–ran

28 Hit or miss, often

30 Hip city fashion

31 Exercise fad based in martial arts

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A Last Alternative

Riverside Education Academy, New Haven’s last alternative school, grapples with the deaths of two students.

After Navalny

A year after Alexey Navalny’s death in Russian prison, his opposition organization continues in exile–building a global network with ties to Yale.