Volume 17 - Issue 6

Publisher Tony Reese Ediwr-in-Chiej Joyce Banerjee Business Manager Lauren Rabin Executive Ediwr Rich Blow Managing Ediwr Anne Applebaum Designer Patrick Santana Production Manager Margie Smith Phowgraphy Ediwr J im Ayer

Associate Business Managers Rob Lindeman Barrie Seidenberg Art EdiiiJr Beth Callaghan Circulation Manager Mike Sonnenblick*

SuifJ Alison Gardy Adina Levin Tamar Leb.r-ich Hank Mans bach •

Tom McNulty Pam Thompson Melissa Turner• Dan Waterman

• eiL<ktl April 17, 1985

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Members and Directors: Edward B. Bennett • Henry C. Chauncey, Jr. • Peter B. Cooper • Andy Court • Brooks Kelley • Peter Neill • Michelle Press • Thomas Strong ik<lrd of Aduis~s: Gerald Bruck • John Hersey • Roger Kirwood • Elizabeth Tate • Peter Yeager Frimds: Anson M. Beard,Jr.t • Edward B. Ben· nett, Jr. • Blaire Bennett • Jonathan M. Clark • Louise F. Coopert • James W. Coopert • Peter B . Coopert • Jerry and Rae Court • David Freeman • Geoffry Fried • Sherwin Goldman • Brooks Kelley • Andrew J. Kuzneski , Jr. • Lewis E. Lehrman • E. Nobles Lowe • Peter Neill • Fairfax C . Randallt • Nicholas X. Rizopoulos • Arleen and Arthur Sager • Dick and Debbie Searst • Richard Shields • Thomas Strong • Alex and Betsy Torello • Allen and Sarah Wardwell • Daniel Yergin thas given a second time (Volume: 17, Number 6) 1M N,..,J-...Ju pubhshed six mncs durins the ochool year by !he New Journal at Yale, I""·· P - Ofo roce Box 3432 Yale StatM>n, New Haven. CT 06520. Copynp l985 by the New Journal at Yale, Inc. All rights .....-rved R~production eittk.r in whok or i.n part without written p:nnir •ion of the publisher and cditor-in-chtef iJ prohibited nus m-i~ u published by Yale Collese ><udent•. and Yak Univen:icy is not responsible for its contents.

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2 The Ne" Journal/April 19. 1985

Cover design by Pairiclc Sanlilna Cover photos by Carter Broolcs Katie Hazelwood David Hoffman

Between the VInes

8

Of Glass Slippers and Tall Tales Even wilh. their Ph.Ds, published wor/cs and tmure, Yale professors still remember the influences of their childhood: the fairy laks thaJ haunted their dreams and shaped their desires. By Aliron Cardy.

Features

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High School Stories Studmt-teocher relations at Wilbur Cross High School are not as tense as tJv:y used ltJ be, but problems wilh. poverty and discipline remain. Dtspite the adverse surroundings, however, there are still students drterrninÂŤllo learn and teoclzers dedicokd ltJ helping them. By Tma Kelley.

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Solidarity and Support

Wzih money, medicine and poliJicoi protest, the CommiJJÂŤ in Solidari!Y wilh. the People of F1 Salwdor rtodus out ltJ help the cWilians of Cm/Tal .Ammaz.

By Melissa T umer.

Admissions and Financial Aid: Getting into Yale, Paying to Stay Two articles examine how students are odmiJkd to Yale and how they struggle to pay the cost of a Yale educalion ona tJv:y arrivt.

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Choosing the New Blue By jim Halpert.

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Paying Yale's Price

By Anne Applebaum.

Profile

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Keeper of the Past An unusual Yale proftSS()r wilh. some rodia:JJ theoriLs smds shock waves througlt the staid world of pa/eonlo/Q~. By Dan Watmnan .

Books

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One Man's War

Jade Fuller,

groduak of Yale and Vldnam, wn1a about coming homL and pic/ring up the pieces in his novel Fragments. By Jay Gantry.

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History of Shame In Slavery and Hwnan Progress, Yalt Proftssor Dtwid Brion Davis wrile:s a nn.v history about an agr-old problem. By Rich Blow

Afterthought

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LeHers

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NewsJoumal

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Learning in the Real World

The New Journal/April 19, 198$ 3

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Naming Names To the Editor: I read your Special Issue, March 1, with great interest. I began at Yale the fall of 1977, in the new Special Student Program and therefore constituted both a female and older student participating in a "neW' and "nearly neW' situation at the University.

I will graduate this May with the Class of '85 at the age of 50, part of another "frrst" for Yale-the B.L.S. degree (Bachelor of Liberal Arts). I have witnessed many positive changes for the undergraduate woman at Yale, both young and old during this eventful time.

I recognized many friends among the names of female graduates on your cover. However the names of the four women receiving B.L.S. degree on May 24th were not included in the Class of'85.

This relieves me of any anxiety I may have had, that as a female, and older I was somehow conspicuous at Yale.

Yours truly, Beverly Criley Graham, '85 Edilor's Note:

The New Journal apologizes for any oversights and errors on our cover.

Unfortunately, a more accurate list of senior women was not aJXZiJable to us.

Announcements

Italian Clothing 4 The New Journai/Apnl 19, 198S

998 Chapel Street

Last September, former Editor-in-Chief Tina Kelley submitted issues of The New journal, dating from September, 1983 to April, 1984, for review by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association . In February, 7ne New journal received CoJ· urnbia's Silver Crown Award, having earned 987 points from a possible 1000.

We thank Columbia for their recogni· tion.

The New Journal would also like to thank the Gannett Foundation and the Gannett Outdoor Company of Connecticut for their generous grant in support of the special issue on fifteen years of coeducation at Yale.

,

Selections from George Eliot's Letters Clarification In the March 1 issue of The NewJouT'TUll, the photo of Lisa Melfi and the women's crew team on page 56 was mistakenly credited to Pearl Hu. The photographer was Carter Brooks. The New Journal apologizes for this error.

In "A Different Ballgame ," the river on which the crew teams practice was mistakenly identified as the Derby. The river is the H~usatonic; Derby is the name of the town. Also, Nancy Harthun is TC '87.

In "The Compleat Cartoonist," Pamela Boynton's middle child was mistakenly identified. His name is Keith.

In "The Tenure Gap," Professor of Philosophy Ruth Marcus stated that the comparative literature department had not tenured women faculty members.

Margaret Ferguson and Barbara Johnson were given tenure by the department in 1984.

Th~ N~w Journal

edited In . Gordo11 S. Haiqbt ~

"A book to cher ish ." -Leon Edcl

"A g reat edition of a great lcttcrwritcr. (iordon ll.1i~hr j, th~ dd'n:'t ofl·ditor' .1n~l kilO\\., mor~ .1bour (it·or~~ Eliot tlun .\11\"0ill" d'l". Sh~ (O~tld not b~ lx:m:r 'crn:d ." - R.ichat·d E ll m ann

"Tiw krtcr'> l"(\~.11 ,\ dcpth ofin-,ighr imo Eliot\ dur.lat-r whi(h rhc 'dcc.:ti\·c dt·t.lil-, ofbiogr.1ph~· c.:.mnot t]ttirc nurd1." -Leslie A. Marcha nd $2\.00 Publi,hnllw Yale University Press

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encourages letters to the editor

and comme nt on Yale and New Haven issues.

Write to J oyce Banerjee, Editorials, 3432 Yale Station, New Haven , CT 06520. AU letters for publication must include address and signature.

Tht N~u-JourruJ! r eserves the right to edit all letters for publication.

In Appreciation As graduation approaches, the magazine will be losing a group of hardworking and dedicated members of the Class of 1985. Many of this year's seniors were the first freshmen to v.'Ork for The New Journal when it was refounded four years ago. We extend our thanks to Jim Ayer, Chris Berti, Hilary Callahan, Eduardo Cruz, Andrea Fribush, Larry Goon, Lisa Hintz, Dave Hanson, Jane Kamensky. Tina Kelley, Art Ling, Jim Lowe, Carol Martin, Tim Misner.

Roben Moore, Peter Phleger, C hristine Ryan, Marilynn Sager, C~rinne Tobin, Sloan Walker, Christianna Williams and Lisa Yun for the talent and enthusiasm they brought to the magazine. In varying degrees, their contributions have shaped The 1\m Journal.

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The New JournaVApril 19, 1985 5

NewsJournal

Africa on Orange Street A black grate covers the front of a shop on Orange Street, almost concealing white letters which read: Botanicas Chango #5. Within, shelves are lined with hundreds of miniature bottles containing infinitely-hued perfumes, bath. oils and incense. Atop glass-fronted cabinets sit large, plastic statues: a silver cobra, a Roman piUar, a laughing Buddha. OccassionaJ mirrored bar signs flash brightly between a myriad of religious plaques and cruciftxes. There appears a vague division between religious goods, for which Botanicas Chango #5 advertizes itself, and seem-

ingly trivial, five-and-dime-store paraphernalia. This semester the store became an optional term paper assignment for Timothy Dwight Master Robert Thompson's class, From West Africa to the Black Americas: tht Black Atlantic Visual Tradition, solely because of its religious content.

"My interest in the store," Thompson said, "is that it reflects the religious icons of the Yoruba of Nigeria." Botanicas Chango #5 demonstrates the blending of Yoruban images with Roman Catholicism, and Thompson, who discovered the store while walking down Orange Street, "was very interested to see this Nro-American process taking place literally a few blocks from Yale."

"I was very interested to see this AfroAmerican process taking place literally a few blocks from Yale." ,, Botanicas Chango #5 is greatly influenced by Spanish culture. The locked cabinets which surround the rectangular room are neatly filled with silver charms, jewelry, books on dreams, hair-care items and games. Cassettes and record albums, along with wedding invitations, Hallmark cards· and weU-thumbed novelettes, are all in Spani~h. juan juan, the owner from Mallorca, Spain, took the shop over from his cousin two years ago.

Juan owes much of his patronage to Anne Kordorsky, a religious woman who is at the store every weekday around four p.m. Kordorsky belongs to a New York religious group that combines West African religions with Catholicism. She has a regular group of "clients" who visit · her at the store or at her home for advice and for the special bath oils or incense, among other materials she prescribes. "A lot of times they go to the doctor and he can't fmd anything," she said with a heavy Puerto Rican accent, "so they come and I give them something." She stresses, though, that a person's religion does not matter to her. "Everyone, they come privately."

The uniqueness of Botanicas Chango 15 prompted Melissa Park, MC '88, a member of Thompson's class, to visit it.

"When you walk in cold," Park said, "you probably just see plastic ligures, vials and beads ... But there's so much more, there's history and culture that goes back centuries. It's exciting because• you're touching something that links past to present through various cultures and religions."

-Paul Kihn Items in Botanicas Chango 6 Tht" Nc:-"' journdi/Apnl 19. 1985

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American Pop in Print The story of Nadine is one of obsession.

In the Chuck Berry song, the obsession is with a woman the narrator sees while riding a bus. But Julian Dibbell, DC '86, and Joe Levy, BK '86, share a different obsession- with music as a whole, and, specifically, with Nadine, their newly-created Yale music • magazme.

Despite the interest in music here, particularly in popular music, Dibbell and Levy feel students can seldmn express their interest or learn more about music. "It struck us that there just aren't enough outlets for writing about music at Yale," Dibbell said. "So last -semester, at a Chopin concert in an opera house in Ouro-Preto, Brazil, I decided to start the publication."

Levy and Dibbell define popular music as "music made with recording and selling in mind- music geared to the mass market, which unfortunately excludes almost all jazz and classical music." Nadine focuses on popular music, yet Dibbell and Levy also want to write about other musical styles including jazz. .

According to Levy, their publication has a much more serious approach to popular music than generally found at

Yale. It will include articles about records and bands and analyses of different aspects of music. Although it is a serious publication, Dibbell admits, "I get scared about being so pretentious as to say it must be intelligent. I also want it to be humorous."

In fact, after considering several names for their publication, Dibbell and Levy chose the title of a 1964 Chuck Berry song. "It's got elegance and Americana," Dibbell explained, "although the song is politically incorrect, because there's so much sexism."

"Rock and roll itself is politically incorrect," Levy said. The political aspect of nwsic could develop into an article, and Dibbell and Levy may broaden the magazine's scope to include not just popular music but popular culture as well.

The Davenport College Coucil has allotted Dibbell and Levy $250 to $300 for the first issue, due out April 26.

They are now searching for advertisers, because they still need $300 to 500.

Dibbell and Levy expect to continue Nadine during the 1985-86 school year publishing three times a semester. Said Levy, "It's going to have a lot of rough edges, but it's also going to have a lot of heart and soul."

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- nee upon a time Yale professors were children living in far off lands all over the world. Then they grew up and journeyed to the heart of New Haven to live (perhaps ever after, perhaps even happily) in an Ivory Tower. They came with books, Ph.Ds and gray blazers and soon fell into the way of life there: teaching, re earching, avoiding red tape. In no time their mind were filled with worrie and wishes, but many of them still carried in the misty chambers of distant memory one of their earliest educational experience : fairy tales. ..A a child I read fairy tales all the time." aid Harriet Chessman, who teaches "Women's Perspectives on Literature" and a eminar on Gertrude tein and Virginia Woolf. "I remember especially Cinderella was very important to me, and all those fairv tales ' about a younge t daughter who had to uffer and then would gain through her uffering a prince. I under toad o strongly, even when I was really little, the romantic element in a lot of the e torie ."' he shook her brovvn curly locks.

And I was a pure ucker for all of it."

Toda Che sman believe she has found the secret key to the magic of fairy tale . "Fairy tale are like puzzles.

A child keep going back to them to figure out the trangene . The conflict i re olved at the end but you're left with an odd feeling. You keep di gui ing the conflict from your elf a a child. and certainly the torie keep di guising it from vou."' Che sman tilted her head to ' the jde. '"Maybe that' why rm a literary critic. I never thought of that."

Knowing well the power of fairy tale , Che man read her dau hter torie in \·vhich women pia · more active role . I change the tori I read to 8 TheN

Journ !/April 19, 1985

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her. I don't have Papa Bear always speaking first or yelling or being the strongest, and his bowl isn't always the biggest," she said referring to Goldilocks.

But even as a child, Chessman had the urge to deconstruct one tale that scared her. "Bluebeard went over the bounds of disguise to real violence," she said, recalling when Bluebeard's wife unlocked the one room he forbade her to enter. "She goes in there and sees blood everywhere from all his other wives, and also- though I might be making this up- the corpses of all his dead wives. And in the heart of the room is this pool of water, or maybe a crystal ball, and she looks into it and sees him looking back at her."

Chessman paused and then whispered, "That's how he knows to come and kill her."

"I liked Bluebeard because the wife escapes in the end," said Rory Browne, dean of Branford College, who read a different ver ion of the story while ' growing up in England. "You've got all these grisly corpses hanging in the wardrobe, but her brothers come and kill Blue beard." Browne was sent to English Catholic boarding school at the tender age of seven. "We heard an awful lot of stories about saints and martyrs," he said paling a bit. "Martyrdom was held out a a role model to u all." In school Browne pined away for his home in London next to the Regent' Park Zoo where he spent "night lying in bed listening to ea lions croaking."

He remembered liking Saint Francis of A i i, because he talked with the animals.

Bro\\.ne, who now teaches a graduate history seminar "Power and Privilege " remembered a "dreadful tory"' his aunt forced him to hear a a child. " he was a dentist and worried about mv habit of ' ucking my thumb " he aid. clutching both thumb with hi forefinger ... She took particular intere t in reading me the ·tory of The Long-Legged Tailor from thi German book '-vith gha tl , illu tra•

tions. There was a little boy who sucked his thumbs all the time, and then suddenly his parents warned him that if he didn't stop, the Long-Legged Tailor would get him. One day his parents go out, the door of the room swings open and this terrible figure," Browne drew a monstrous form in the air, "like some lalloping kangaroo, strode into the room, took out these enormous iron shears," he 1 reached into his blazer pocket, "a11d cut off the boy's thumbs.

The las~ illustration shows the boy holding up his hands with two bleeding stumps d_ripping blood down onto the floor into some sort of sticky red pool."

Browne caught his breath. "I hated that story."

Far away from Browne's wicked aunt, in southwest Mexico, lived Hector Calderon, now a profe sor of Chicano literature. Calderon also suffered a fairy tale torture similar to Browne's. As a boy, Calderon could not fall asleep until his grandmother told him a story. He remembered vaguely stories about little horses and little people living in little worlds, but one story he could not banish from his memory was La Llorona, or The Wailing Woman.

"My grandmother told us the story of La Llorona, a woman who kills her children and has to go throughout the world wailing. My grandmother and others wore they had heard La Llorona. We knew thi woman was out there somewhere behind the garage, in the dark night, in the alley." Sudden}~ the child disappeared and the academic returned. "The function of this, as I ee it now, was to keep the kids in line. If you were doing something your parent didn't want you to do, they would evoke La Llorona."

Kai Erikson, editor of The Yale Review and ociology profe or, confe sed he could not find the trail of breadcrumb to hi memory of childhood torie . He remembered likin Pinocchio but couldn't remember the character or plot. "A lot of the e torie are just plain

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They could have been songs or games or even nonsense syllables," he said, vehemently brushing aside an imaginary pile of stories. Then, clasping his hands back together, the sociology professor explained, "The most important part · was the ritual of sitting together in a family group- it's a kind of embrace- reading the story, hearing the sound of the voice and the affection expressed by it."

"The only things I remember are the scary things," said Faye Crosby, professor of psychology, who gave her Oedipal analysis of one of her favorite childhood stories, Babar. "At one point in the story Babar's mother gets shot. I think children love that part even though they also hate it. I also loved the movie Bambi, where Bambi's mother is also shot and killed," said Crosby, who teaches psychology courses on justice theory and women. "Kids are both repelled and fascinated with the idea of losing their mothers. That makes them very vulnerable and very liberated at the same time. Didn't you ever feel that way?"

Arthur Galston, plant biology professor, spoke about his favorite part of Rapunzel. "I remember her hair being let down and the prince climbing up the tower," he said, sitting near the window of his ninth floor office in Kline Biology Tower. "And I remember a whole host of stories about a dragon that has to be

long·le~d

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which was so entirely . self-containing and a relief from the moral dilemmas of adolescence." He spoke more quickly, "It clearly idealized asexual fantasy, and in some ways is imperialist and quasiracist." He returned to his earlier nostalgic tone, "But it's still gripping.

It's so academic. Anyone who wants any power has to know at least three or four languages. And various forms of_ self-denial are integrally related with power." · Next time you're sitting among hundreds of other bobbing heads in lecture or around the close confines of a seminar table take a careful look at your professor. For once upon a time Yale professors read stories with monosyllabic words, simple plots and happy endings. They might not think much of them today, but those stories opened up worlds of fantasy, introduced them to the quirks of adult life and possibly had a greater impact than they might realize. Today some of the enchantment still remains in these grown up children.

In the words of Robert Thompson, master of Timothy Dwight, "Anything that enriches our fantasy life is wonderful. Our fantasy life is one of our dearest preserves. It gives children something to dream for and dream through."

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conquered by a knight who has to rescue a damsel in the tower." Galston, known for his invention of TIBA which was later used by the Department of Defense to create Agent Orange, said Little Red Riding Hood scared him as a child. "I remember a drawing of a wolf in grandma's bed with a night cap on, sharp teeth, slathering a bit at the mouth. It made me suspicious of people who should be benign but have another side to them."

Lars Engle, who teaches English 114, English 125, a Shakespeare seminar and Daily Themes, found the path to academic princehood as a young lad.

"My mother read me The Iliad when I was six. She said I kept track of the minor characters better than she did," he said, grinning to himself. Engle, nevertheless, did not lose compassion for those less precocious than he. "I liked stories where the last shall come first.

For example, the third simple brother who is thumped upon by his brothers goes out into the world and wonderful things happen to him usually because of his kindness to animals, not his aggression."

Six years after The Iliad, Engle read The Lord of the Rings. "I was terribly, passion~tely involved with that world

• Alison Cardy, a sophomore in Ezra the staff of TN].

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10 T he New J ournaVApril 19, 1985

High School Stories Tina Kelley "It seem s poverty and learning are going hand in hand, and N ew H aven is a poor city."

At the foot of East Rock, near the Victorian houses and yellow buses, parents drop their children off at a school where one student in seven has a child. At Wilbur Cross, one of New Haven's three high schools, half of the ninth grade reads at or below the sixth grade level, some at the third or fourth grade.

Seventeen-year-olds recently released from prison share instructors with professors' children headed for top colleges.

Teachers struggle to be heard, then listened to. And behind the scenes, administrators try to find a balance between strictness and fairness.

Cross's present problems are symptomatic of those facing inner city schools throughout the country. They demand solutions, or will handicap students in their search for employment and financial independence. Yet Cross is a better, safer school than it was 15 years ago, when racial tensions threatened to disrupt classes, or in 1978, when a teacher was murdered in the school store. The ethnic diversity which once split the school, with its 65 percent black, 16 percent white and 19 percent Latino population, is now one of its greatest strengths. Through the efforts of dedicated people, not complex methods, not money, the school aims for order, then growth.

Of Cross's 1613 students, 200 are enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) courses, which they can take for only three years before joining regular classes. Next to a script alphabet, a poster on the wall of Maria Pennachio's ESL first period class read, "Live up to your potential." She raised her voice over the Spanish words of her five students. "Be on time to lectures," she said. "You have to be overly push y with you guys. Take out your notebooks and worksheets, together with a pen and pencil , which should be on your desk at this moment. Now we will cover the present continuous tense. How do we form that? Ay ay ay, come on

everyone." The chatter quieted down a bit. "First you get the infinitive." She worked on the assigned exercises, then continued the lesson with a discussion of table manners in various Spanishspeaking countr ies.

"Louis," she said, "why are you not participating?"

"Cause I had a fight last night. I don't feel right."

Marie Fadus teaches an advanced class, called "the Yale kids" or "the back-pack generation." One of her students sat in the back of the room reading Time magazine, putting it down to take a spelling test- words from Moby Dick like magniloquent, argosy, unctuous and turbid. A student asked how ambergris was discovered, and Fadus suggested he look it up in an encyclopaedia and report to the class later.

"I'm readin g this aloud, because it's so exciting," she said, holding a copy of Melville in one hand, shaking her other fist for emphasis and pausing to point out examples of onomatopoeia. She discussed Plato, Kant and Locke, and their relation to Transcendentalism.

She talked about victimization and foreshadowing. F ive of the 28 students were professors' children, Fadus explained, and the rest were from the nearby area.

In her next class Fadus teaches four parents. Sixteen students filed in, smelling of cigarettes, pushing the desks to the back of the room, giving random hugs and high-fives. "Who's the darling who's got my marking book?" Fadus asked. After ten minutes of searching for the book and taking attendance, she told the class to write an imaginary letter to Ann Landers. She explained Ann Landers and her job to several of the students, then collected their letters and read them aloud, encouraging the class to answer them.

"Dear Ann Landers," she read. "Why do rich people have a lot of cars, and The New Journal/April 19, 1985 II

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"Dear Ann Landers, I am 14 years old and I have a 23-year-old boyfriend .

He doesn't like making love and I do. I sometimes feel there's someone else in his life that he loves, but he says he loves me. What do I do?" The class laughed relentlessly, guessing who had written it. · "Dear Ann Landers, ·I have a boyfriend who's fooling around, but I ' have a baby by him. I want to tell his new girlfriend. What should I do?"

"Send her a diaper," suggested a boy in the back row.

Fadus looked a bit drained by the beginning of third period. "It's physical· ly exhausting to be in this building," she said. "Some children are unwilling to learn , and there's almost noth.i ng you can do about that. It seems poverty and learning are going hand in hand, and New Haven is a poor city. But the stu· dent body has improved in ten years -there's a willingness to follow the rules. The greatest pleasure in teaching is to watch the mind grope and grow and be unbiased. And the greatest ad· •• • vantage Cross offers these youngsters 15 to be mixed up all together."

"You can make it!!" "Please do not Socialize in the Classroom!" "Learn tO LISTEN!" "Show Respect!" In the verY quiet classroom, English teacher Michael Lucibello sat at his desk undef

The n1en of Wilbur Ctoss

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Students in a Wilbur Cross classroom these construction paper signs. H e lowered his voice so his seniors could concentrate on reading their second novel, a sixth-grade level book about reverse discrimination.

"I don't teach it like a remedial level class," he said. "They've done what many people thought they couldn't do. I take the gossipy approach with a book 'Hey, what happened to Sam Saturday night?' They're curious, they like people. I love the age group because they want attention, and a lot of times in the homes they don't get it." Lucibello, who described his work as a ministry, -pointed to success stories in his grade book-D+'s going to B's, Fs going to C + 's. Next to the book were advertisements from the book club he enC<;>uraged his class to join. He spoke of hts plans to teach them creative writing.

-.:here are students with good ideas," he satd, "just sometimes I think they've never been asked to put them on paper.

A lot of times they've given up, and I don't see why they should."

Teachers in other departments also have to cope with students working op lower grade levels. Forty percent of the students work on remedial math skills, and some ninth and tenth graders use a firth grade science book. According to h iStory teacher Andrew Bram in an interview with the NeUf Haven Register, "Years ago there were levels in these subjects, but education has passed through a phase when nobody wanted anyone to feel they were labeled. It's self-defeating. How do you meet

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everybody's needs? Sometimes what happens is, you just try to reach as many kids as you can."

Dr. Gerald Cuddy teaches an accounting class fifth period. Like many of the teachers at Cross, he has been teaching here for almost 20 years. "You can come in with your standards up here and the kids down here," he said, indicating a gap of about three feet, "but ~hat doesn't prove anything. You have to adjust your standards. I like working with inner city youngsters because it's much more rewarding. To motivate them, success is a key. I know teachers who brag about failing 22 out of 24 students. There are some people who say you should keep them back, and then they drop out at 16, and they can't even get a job in the post office or police department without a high school degree." H e was interrupted by a girl who wanted to go to the bathroom, but he didn't give her a pass. Bathrooms are locked during first , third and fifth periods, and students can be severely reprimanded for walking in the halls without a pass.

"Seventy percent of the public school students in New Haven are on public assistance," he said. "They have the problem of not having guidance at home. They don't have anyone at home telling them to go to school or to get their pencils."

As Cuddy spoke in the back of the room, several of his students argued near his desk. One girl raised her voice, saying, "If you want to have a baby ,

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Mane Fadus you have a baby. If I want to kill my baby, I'll kill my baby.~ "Out in Guilford they can yell at the students and get results, but here, you really can't," Cuddy said.

Richard Pucklin, head of the history department, also complained about not getting results. He has taught in the New Haven school system for 30 years.

"There are kids who won't take books home, you give them the information and they just don't study. There's a lack of basic skills which frustrates a lot of kids. When you can't read and can't write, what are you going to do? You can't take a kid who's been like that for ten years and expect to do something with him overnight. Teaching reading has to begin in the primary grades, and has to be carried over to the home.

Home problems often interfere with the learning process. In many of these kids' houses, there are no magazines, no books, no stimulation. No one's there providing the incentive to read.

Teaching has to begin early. It's not even a question of money- you could build a beautiful building and put everything in it, but not have the factors to motivate the kids.

"Still," he added, "there are kids who could go the way of all flesh, who could be on the street, and something we've given them has turned them around."

Van Spruill, one of Cross's four security guards, has helped in this process, acting as an unofficial counsellor and parent. He thumbed through his notebook of arrests and said proudly, "There were 50 last year at this time, and it's down this year. We've got a good bunch of kids, it's just that one percent that's a pain. We have quite a few happy endings. The coaches have a lot to do with it too." He explained that Cross has won the state basketball championships for nine out of the past 14 years, and this year brought home the state football title too. "There are kids who've been in trouble. two years

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or so coming back from Longlane or Cheshire [correctional facilities] and you should see them now. They've been involved with just about everything you . can imagine in the school now. They impress their peers. There are groups for those who want to achieve something. Any group they choose, it's there for them. I treat them like I treat my own kids."

At 12:40 the school day ends for 40 percent of Cross's pupils, who leave for jobs or for the Educational Center for the Arts, where students can take classes in the creative arts. Others remain for lab science classes or sports. On the second floor, Tom Ragozzino's office was quiet for the first time all day. The ~ssistant principal sat beneath a sign that read, "Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they will never be disappointed." Next to it is a bulletin board filled with school portraits. Of the freshmen pictured there, he explained, only 60 percent will graduate from Cross. "Some move, some go home to Puerto Rico, some drop out. It's a very mobile student body, and they come frol'D: ..just about all over- Fair Haven, the Hill, Dixwell, Prospect Street and Elm Haven."

A student looking for an excuse to get out of detention interrupted him. Permission denied. "I'd be less than honest if I didn't say a tremendous amount of my job is maintaining discipline," he said. There are no free periods at Cross, and graduation requirements are up to 21 classes, five more thap. several years ago. "In the late '60s and early '70s there was a lot of violence here, a lot of riots.

The sense of belonging was down. It will take abou·t a generation to get back to normal. We need a long period of peace, instead of jumping from crisis to crisis."

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Solidarity and Support Melissa Turner "We defmitely believe mass struggles should be supported ."

16 The: Nc:w JournaUApril 19, 1985

Taped to the door on the second floor landing of Dwight Hall is an orange piece of construction paper with the handprinted words, "New Haven CISPES: Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador." Inside, old chairs and couches are arranged in a circle.

Although empty, the room still speaks to the visitor. Arrayed on every wall are posters and bumper stickers. Some protest U.S. involvement in Central America: "El Salvador, the People will Win," "Stop the Bombing in El Salvador" and "U.S. out of Central America."

Others are reminders of past events: "Coffee with Milk," "Dance Party" and "Holly Near and Ronnie Gilbert."

Underneath large maps of El Salvador and Nicaragua are photographs of Nicaraguan children.

Born in 1981 as an informal undergraduate study group, CISPES is one of many New Haven organizations critical of U.S. involvement in Latin America. Registered with Dwiglu Hall, CISPES has 35 members, including city residents, alumni, faculty, graduate students and undergraduates. Originally concerned with the struggle in E1 Salvador, the group has focused most recently on Nicaragua as well. CISPES calls for popular rule in Central America, and it implements this belief in democracy within itself: CISPES has no president, no heirarchy. With letters to Congressmen and rallies, the group constantly asks the U.S. government to reexamine its role in the region. Moreover, CISPES works within El Salvador and Nicaragua, funding both medical relief and community projects, attempting to restore order in war-torn areas.

"We share a common belief that U.S. intervention is not useful for the U.S. or for the region," said Alicia Fernandes, '83, a founder of the study group."We definitely believe mass struggles should

be supported." From its earliest stages, CISPES has been a political supporter of the Salvadoran FDR-FMLN, an alliance of the political party, the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) and the guerilla faction, Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberacion (FMLN). Viewing FDRFMLN as the legitimate voice of the Salvadoran people, CISPES shows its support for the coalition by trying to educate the Yale and New Haven communities. The group shows films and presents speakers, revealing FDRFMLN's struggles against the repressive Salvadoran government and military.

Although CISPES does not support the alliance fmancially, it does raise money for a medical relief fund in FDRFMLN-held regions of El Salvador.

CISPES contends it can only provide aid to civilians through such a fund, because relief sent to government-controlled areas would probably never reach the injured.

More likely, the funds would be confiscated by the government, or the doctors who received them would be arrested for engaging in subversive activity.

Most recently, funds raised have been channeled into the Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund run by a U.S. medic, Dr. Charles Clements. He went to El Salvador after seeing the effects of the bombs he had dropped as a pilot in Vietnam. Wishing to treat the most severely injured, Clements chose to work in FDRFMLN areas, prime bombing targets for the Salvadoran Army. "The Salvadoran army is using a 'scorch earth policy.' It is destroying villages that it thinks support guerillas," said English Professor Richard Halpern, who was the frrst graduate student to join CISPES. "The war effort is not against the guerillas because the army can't pin them down. The only war that they can wage is against the civilian infrastructure. And the civilian casualties have been high. It's been documented

CISPES members meet in Dwight Hall .

The Newjournai!April19, 1985 17

that both napalm and white phosphorous bombs are being used by the Salvadoran army." To date, CISPES has contributed to the Fund over $13,000 from the HoUy Near/ Ronnie Gilbert concert last year and over S800 from the Sabia concert this March.

Through the Fund, membt'rs feel they repair, if only in some small way, the damage inflicted by U.S. backed forces.

"If the U.S. gives aid that hurts the people," Donna Minkowitz, CC '85, said, "we want to counteract it and give aid that helps them. So, if the U.S. provides the bombs, we want tO provide medical aid."

While CISPES provides relief through a third party in El Salvador, it has become much more directly involved in Nicaragua. CISPES recognizes the Sandinista government, although the U.S. supports rebel groups, known as contras, who wish to overthrow it. In Nicaragua the organization performs solidarity work: building community facilities and funding agricultural projects.

In a small Nicaraguan town called San Ignacio, hidden in the hills on the Pacific coast, a small winding dirt road leads past the three or four ramshackle homes that comprise the center of town, past the small school and health post built by the

Sandinistas, to another dirt path. The trail leads to a building in an open field with cows grazing nearby, the rural work-study school built by the Sandinistas. Here, 135 grade schoolers learn to cultivate crops and to dairy farm.

When CISPES member John Adler, '84, visited San Ignacio two summers ago, the Sandinistas had completed the construction of the school but had no funds to buy cows. Consequently, the schoolchildren had no milk to drink. Through several fundraising events, coffeehouses and dances, CISPES raised $1000, enough money to buy five cows for the school.

CISPES is currently involved in a pro-

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18 The :Se"' JournaVApnl t<J. IQR5

ject in Ocotal, one of the largest northernmost Nicaraguan cities, located ten kilometers from the Honduran border.

The city has a long history of struggle against U.S.-backed forces, dating back to 1927 when Agusto Sandino's army attacked U.S. Marines stationed there.

Because the region has remained a Sandinista stronghold, it is oft!!n assaulted by the contras. Last year, Ocotal was attacked three times, the most recent of these raids destroying the regional grainary, sawmill, coffee mill and radio station.

Working in a mental health clinic out· side !'vtanagua, CISPES member David Geltman, CC '85, visited Ocotal las{ summer. "I met with someone on a bus who invited me to the city. On my return, I spent a week in the house of a woman coordinator of a Sandinista Defense Committee (a mass organization with chapters in every neighborhood)," Gettman said. During the course of his conversations with the coordinator,

"'CIA Out" Rally on Cross Campus Geh man heard about the redevelopment project in which CISP ES is now involved .

The Sandinista Committee wanted to b uild a community center on the outskirts of town which would lodge a nursery, meeting hall and health clinic.

Although the community could supply the labor, the building supplies and the space, it lacked funds because the government itself did not initiate the project . "When I told the coordinator how we (CISPES) might raise the money they needed by giving parties, she told me a very telling thing. She said that they used to hold fundraising parties, but now they can't because they are in constant fear of attack from the contras. They have to be on alert at all times," Gettman said. So far, CISP ES has raised $700 of the SlOOO ~~ pledged and hopes to complete the proJect by early summer.

Along with such solidarity work , CISPES also engages in anti-intervention activities, attempting to influence the gove rnment's Central America policy d~ions. The group has organized bus tnps to rallies in Washington to protest

U.S. involvement in Nicaragua. The last March on Washington on November 12, 1983 saw a New H aven contingent that filled six buses. "It was a huge organizing effort and it was very successful," Fernandes said. "To have 300 people commit $27 and one day and a night is a big statement."

Last month , C ISPES completed its Contra Contra Campaign. The group collected signatures and held letter-writing campaigns to C onnecticut Congressmen, urging them to vote against the release of $14 million in suspended C IA funds for the contras. "Whether you believe the contras commit atrocmes, whether you disagree with U.S. intervention or whether you support the Nicaraguan government , it doesn't really matter. You can still support our position against funding them (the contras)," said Eric Arnesen, a ftfth year graduate student of Afro-American and labor history. "We want the Congressmen to know that they aren't going out on a limb when they vote against the aid. We want to give them the confidence to vote and to let them know

they h ave support in their constituency."

Arnesen joined C ISP ES two years ago during the h e ightening of U.S. involvement in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Since then, he has devoted a great deal of time working for the group - his C ISPES responsib ilities share priority with his dissertation and his teaching. Arnesen's commitment to C ISP ES and its principles permeates his speech, his emphatic gestures and his clothing. The words "Solidaridad con El Salvador" and the image of two Indian women, one with a raised clenched fist , is visible on the purple t-shirt he wears.

Arnesen and other members apply their political p rinciples not only to their work in Central Amer ica, but to the organization itself. As part of its commitment to democracy, CISP ES actively supports fe m inism . Women always represent th e group at public events.

Said Fernandes, "Women representatives are good for C ISP ES internally.

Women who come to the events see that not all politicos are male. We show that women are assertive and politically active The New J oumal fAp ril 19. 1985 19

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about issues other than 'women's issues.'"

Often fundraisers attempt to inform the audience about both Central America and feminism. The Holly Near/ Ronnie Gilbert concert proved successful because of the large feminist turnout from the surrounding area, since both singers are well-known feminists. The Sabia concert featured a group which sang leftist and feminist songs in Spanish. "It was really exciting speaking to a feminist audience about C ISPES' projects at the Holly Near concert," Minkowitz said.

"Feminists around here are the ones who happen to be the most activist because they have been organized for a long time already. It's good to talk to a group about Central America that is already politicized."

As part of their belief in equality, CISPES has neither officers nor bureaucracy. "In terms of ranks, there aren't any distinctions made. Students are considered adults. If there is a heirarchy at all-and I don't think there IS-it's with vears of membership to CISPES," said Renaissance Studies DUS Susanne Wofford. Formerly a member of the Yale Faculty Committee on Central America, Wofford joined CISPES because she wanted to "''ork with a more diverse and active group of people.

Because there is no presic!c:nt, members volunteer to chair the weekly Monday

evening meetings, while others take notes or time discussions. The "rotating chair" guarantees continuity through graduations and the constant addition of ne"' members. Newcomers can observe the more experienced members as they run meetings before they volunteer to chair one themselves.

Although devoted to action, CISPES strongly believes in self-education through observation, reading and discus· sion. "We operate on the assumption that what has brought a person to us is a concern, not a lot of previous knowledge," Wofford said. To learn more about current political and social events in Latin America, CISPES members meet regularly as a study group. The member who volunteers to lead the self-education session assigns articles for reading and discussion. In these sessions, members examine everything from the situation of women in Nicaragua to the policies of the FDR-FMLN, from land reform to homosexual rights.

The Monday evening meetings procede from a ney.-s summary and lll'lalysis of Latin American concerns to reports from each of the four committees and concludes with a period of "critlself-crit."

Conducted without time constraints, this period allows members to discuss what went well during the meeting, what went poorly, how individuals conducted

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themselves, whether anyone made statements that were chauvinistic on either a national or personal level. "Many of us feel that we're in this conflict for the long haul," Arnesen said, referring to their conflict with U.S. government policies. "So we have to be able to work together and to talk to each other honestly."

People sit on the chairs and couches, on the table tops and floor, listening to an ru:• count of the week's news in Nicaragua. A friendly dog who answers to the name Sandinista makes his rounds to be petted. Professor Halpern looks at the watch in his hands and reminds Geltman that there are five minutes left. Geltman suggellts that the group move on to news from FJ Salvador. "A Congressional caucus accused the administration of supplying 'insufficient, misleading and, in some cases, false information' on FJ Salvador. The caucus stated that twice the supposedly 55 U.S. officials are present in FJ Salvador and that U.S. person~1 go on patrols under frre, target bomb sttes and maintain equipment. State and Defense department officials had no comment "

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In one sna.p shot, ·call it "Class of'55," the students are all male, mostly white,- mostly East Coast, _mostly from prep schools. In another, call it "Class of '85," the faces ~re. altnost half female, one fifth minority, and only one fifth .a lutnni legacies. What happened? . _ In the titne elapsed between the two photographs, Yale began actively searching for qualified .minority applicants, recruiting from inner-city and. rural high schools and limiting the formerly near-automatic admission of legacies .

Most importantly, Yale promised full financial aid according to need, thus insuring that all those admitted could actually attend. But in a new era characterized by federal reluctance to support student loan programs and record nutnbers of applicants to Yale, a less positive side to the '60s ambitions has emerged. Both minority advocates and alumni parents accuse the Admissions Office of unfair practices, the Asian con1munity charges Yale with discrimination, and controversy surrounds athletic recruiting. Moreover, some students arrive at Yale only to find their expectations of carefree college life dissolve into constant financial worries.

In the following two articles, The New Journal reexamines the present status of the adn1issions standards Yale instituted in the 1960s, and the promise of full financial aid which accom~ panied· thetn. In "Choosing the New Blue," Jim Halpert explores the controversial admissions policies for three student groups minorities, legacies and athletes and in "Paying Yale's Price" Anne Applebaum discusses the fmancial dif- · ficulties students encounter in · staying at Yale .

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22 The New Journal/ April 19, 1985

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The New journal/April 19. 1985 23

Choosing the New Blue Jim Halpert "The stereotype of Yale in the 1950s as a There's an academic mtmmum that a bunch of prep school kids whose fathers student be able to do Yale work, and in went to Yale had a lot of truth to it," most cases a minimum standard of social remembered Worth David, dean of or extra-curricular ability," David exundergraduate admissions. "There were plained. "Academic promise alone is not a lot of guys here who were looking to in most cases enough to get a student into coast through coUege playing sports and Yale. We want to be able to find the kid a having a good time before landing a job roommate." with a New York brokerage ftrm."

But once these students are admitted, Change came in the 1960s. With the there are still thousands more applicasupport of then-President Kingman tions for the Admissions Committee to Brewster, Dean of Admissions Insley consider and about another 1000 Clark trimmed the percentage of private students to be accepted. At this stage of school students, opened Yale to women, the process, it begins to matter whether a accepted more minority applicants and student's father or mother went to Yale, rejuvenated emphasis on academic abili- whether an applicant is a member of a ty. According to Clark, the rationale for minority group and whether an applicant these changes was quite simple. "The stu- shows the ability and the desire to play a dent body was not diversified enough nor varsity sport. intellectually strong enough to make Yale Legacies are the group most privileged the national and international resource it by the Admissions Office, with a stable acceptance rate of about 40 percent. ought to be."

Today's Admissions Office tries to "Around the Ivies the standard admit follow Clark's guidelines. "The admis- rate for legacies is twice the rate of other sions process consists of taking the kids applicants," David noted. "Of the groups with the strongest academic records," which receive special consideration, David said, "then consciously trying to legacies have the strongest conventional put a diverse class together. We don't qualifications, probably because of inwant a class with 1300 history majors." come, family values and the like."

But 'diversity' is a nebulous and pro- Although David termed legacies "about vocative term that must somehow as qualified" as their classmates here, he translate into specific policies. Now, it did admit that they sometimes are not on often boils down to the special considera- par with other Yalies. tion given to three groups who comprise Despite this fact, legacies are accepted only one-third of the total applicant pool: to Yale at such a¡ hish rate because legacies, under-represented minority they- or more accurately their parentsare essential to the University's financial groups and athletes.

Of course, extraordinary musical and welfare. Director of Development Terry artistic ability are part of the admissions H olcombe, '64, spends much of his ttrne equation, and David considers geograph- "keeping alumni happy." Holcombe ical diversity a particularly important pointed out, "Since the late 1960s Yale asset as well. "There are some has had to depend heavily on gifts to susgeographical differences which 1V and tain itself. Inky Clark's changes bred a other factors haven't wiped out. New whole generation o f disappointed England and Southern kids still look at parents." things quite difTerently."

While most of the alumni are used to Roughly the first 1000 strongest ap- seeing roughly a fifth of each class replicants breeze through the admissions served for the sons and daughters of process with "little or no discussion. Yale, Holcombe still gets. phone calls 24 The New Journal/April 19, 1985

Adm.iasions Committee at work

The "'ew JoumaVApril 19, 1985 25

about 'individual disappointments.' "It's tough to respond to the parents. If I say, 'Look, we bent over backwards and your kid still didn't get in,' it only makes them feel worse," he said. "My most difficult cases are the ones who got into Harvard and not into Yale. And then there's the guy who gets really mad and writes us a few years later to inform us of his son's election to Phi Beta Kappa. There's just not that much I can do."

Every year, Holcombe informs the Admissions Committee about parents' involvement in development projects, in terms of donations and alumni work. He realizes, however success is never assured. "Each year we wait anxiously for the print-out to come over from Admissions. There have been some things that have delighted us and there have been some major disappointments."

Although in a sense every legacy applicant is Holcombe's concern, he targets the most important cases. David explained, "Like Carm Cozza, Terry tells me what he wants- and the people at the top of his list are important to us."

Like minorities and legacies, athletes' applications also receive an additional reading in the admissions process. The big spectator sports, particularly football, receive top priority in athletics admissions. "Each year our coaches are in contact with and receive applications from between 1500 and 2000 students interested in playing varsity sports," Director of Athletics Frank Ryan estimated.

Football players who fall into this category receive 'top,' 'middle' or 'bottom' ratings according to their ability and their interest in Yale. Describing candidates in the top category, David said, "If we think they are representative of the rest of their class academically, then they will probably be admitted. A comparable candidate who does not play sports has only a one in four chance. Football players are not necessarily stellar students, and it's probably fair to say that they don't crowd the ranks of Phi Beta Kappa. But if they get caught up only in sports, we've wasted a spot. I know we make some 26 The New JournaVApr•l 19, 1985

Worth David mistakes, because other people tell us recruiting. "But like everybody else, Ad· about them. Those people don't realize missions gets caught up in the glamor that we're generally taking kids from spots. There's been a shortage oflinemen blue-collar backgrounds for whom the over the past few years, and linemen are benefit of a Yale education is great." crucial." Laspina explained that football Each year the football coaches give the players from prep schools have little Admissions Office's two athletic chance of being accepted. "A kid from the coordinators the names of some 250 deep South or far West '"'-ill have a higher players. About 95 of these candidates will rank and that will make Admissions look be accepted, which works out to an ad- better. Yale is , ·ery conscious of what mission rate of between 30 and 40 per· other schools think of its admissions stan· cent, greater than the rate for minorities dards."

Although they do not offer athletic but less than that oflegacies. Yale counts on a good deal of attrition. As:;istant scholarships. Ivy League colleges do ag· Coach Sebastian Laspina said , "We want gressively recruit athletes, particularly to see 50 kids out for the freshman team football players. According to David ...All and 30 from each of the upper classes." schools spend a disproportionate amount "Admissions defmitely looks out for of time on athletic recruiting."

Somewhat uneasy over the treatment us," said Laspina, who supervises football

"Academic promise alone is not in most cases enough to get a student into Yale. We want to be able to find the kid a roommate ." he has received from the p ress, R yan described athletic recruiting in very lowkey terms, stressing that all the sports programs look for athletes who can profit from several different aspects of the Yale experience. "We don't sell the kids Yale athletics," Ryan said. "We sell them Yale ." Coach Laspina agreed. "We want a kid who's going to feel at home and isn't going to stick out academically or socially.

The attrition rate is pretty high, and we don't want some goon running around here who's wrecked his knee and decides he doesn't want to play any more." But for Laspina, football recruiting is clearly a business . "Coaching isn't different from any job in the real world. We have to produce. If we don't get good kids, we'll start losing consistently. The administration will think we're dumb, and then we'll be out of a job."

Thus motivated, football coaches spend much time and money recruiting.

Every spring they mail a letter to coaches at almost every high school in the country, expressing interest in players in the top 10 percent of their class with SAT SCOres over 1200- the 20th percentile of each Yale class. High school coaches, under pressure to get their players into a good college, will often overlook these academic requirements and give Yale the names of less qualified players.

Under NCAA regulations, Coach Cozza and his staff must wait until December 1 to visit players at the high schools, where they pick up filins of each

candidate's performance during one game. If a player passes his ftlm test, he is invited to Yale for an all-expense-paid weekend. He is housed with a member of the team and shown the campus, sports facilities and football highlight ftlms. L aspina added however, "I make sure they take him to the libraries, show him the academic stuff. I like it when a player gets to a Friday class."

Mike Curtin, OC '86, favorably recalled his recruiting experience. "I had signed a letter of intent to go to the University of Utah back in my home state. I never thought I'd get into Yale , but when I did I remember thinking, 'Gee, I really want to go visit, just to see the place.' On my visit, the thing that made me decide to come here was Coach Cozza. H e didn't even talk football. He talked about my decision in terms of the total experience. He said the experiences you'll have here will be like no p lace else.

On the plane ride home, I decided to try to get out of my letter of intent."

John Zanieski, SM '85, added, "When 1 came to Yale, I saw that the football players commanded a lot of respect, both among themselves and among the students generally. It looked like a classy organization."

R yan would not disclose the budget for athletic recruiting, saying that the figures are "difficult to ir.terpret correctly." He did say the budget is â&#x20AC;˘comparable to that of other Ivy League schools." David noted that funding comes not only from the University, but also from separate alumni funds for the individual sports.

Comparing athletic recruiting to other admissions recruiting, David said, "We fly on super-saver flights. You can't get that bringing in an athlete for the \O."Cekend. I wouJd imagine that thâ&#x20AC;˘ athletic recruitment budget is much larger than ours and far larger than the $29,000 we devote to our student minority recruitment budget."

Even with that relatively small amount of money, minority admissions and recruitment at Yale have come a long way, according to Muhammed Abdullah,

'70, the director of minority recruitment.

"In the 1960s when I attended Yale," Abdullah said, "there were only about a hundred other black students on campus.

I'd see someone on the street who looked like me and I'd stop because it was so unusual."

During the same period, Black Students at Yale (BSAY) persuaded Clark to accept an informal quota for black applicants. After a corresponding initial rise, the number of minority applicants and matriculants has fluctuated widely since the 1960s. Since Abdullah began work in 1981, numbers in both groups have risen substantially. But campus minority groups protest the declining rate of admission for minority students, which hit an all-time low of 24 percent last year.

This phenomenon is most pronounced among Asians, whose applications have quadrupled over the past four years and who will reportedly face an admission rate below that of whites this year. Tom Saenz and William Oh, both ES '87 and co-chairmen of the minority recruitment program, are alarmed. "This couJd happen eventually to any minority group," Oh said. "Asians are competing with other Asians for the same slots and are practicaJy being penalized for having large numbers of qualified applicants.

The legacy admit rate remains steady, while ours drops each year. The policy ignores the fact that Asians still face discrimination."

David defended his policy firmly. "The Admissions Office has examined the tremendous increase in Asian applicants, and we've found that the increase has been in suburban, professional Asians.

Standards are tougher for them. It's not the lower-income, urban Asian who is gening squeezed out." But because the Admissions Committee meetings are closed, it is difficult for David to clarify this process. This controversy over the limits of affirmative action will probably not be settled until the Executive ComrnitteeonAdmissions Policy holds its next meeting, most likelr next year, according Th~ :-..;~

JournaVApnl 19,

198~

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28 The Ne" Journal/April 19. 1985

to Yale College Dean Howard Lamar.

Campus minority groups also char~ that those minorities who d o get accepted are not economically representative of their minority group. but more affluent than the norm . Abdullah responded, "More students are coming from schools that suggest affiuency. We're gelling a spectrum; there is diversity within the minority population. We'd be d oing a disservice admitting any student who doesn't have the qualifications necessary to benefit from a Yale educatio n. That could ruin people's lives. Plus if w e create even a small pattern of failure, people will extrapolate and think of othe r mino rity students as unqualified .~ Da...;d added , "It's not po ible to turn years of disadvantages aro und in a short time . Yale's a tough place. Still, I'd ay that only in the Asian group do .... e ha'e a problem of di...-ersity. Eightv percent of black students here are on financial aid -they're certainly not rich." But Don Hancock, '84. ,,•ho now works in Admissions, said recruiters rarely venture into inner-citv schools which have not already sent students to Yale. Instead thev tick to an informal list of "magnet~ schools in an area, usually private schoools, competitive public high schools and chools in wealthier neighborhoods.

The Admissions O ffice minority recruttmg program is reinforced by the work of 4{) undergraduate volunteer recruiters. These students are flown home over Thanksgiving vacation to recruit other minorities in their area.

Reaching some 10 to 12 schools over the break, the recruiters distribute literature and give a presentation about Yale, ex· plaining application essays and the value o f a liberal arts education in the Nor· theast. "I'm really there to turn kids on to aHending a four-year college," said Gilbert Garcia, BR '85, a Latino from fJ Paso, Texas. "If they say they don't want to go to Yale, that's fme; I'll help them go to Harvard."

Garcia considers his role more that of a friend than a recruiter. "I'm not the Admissions Office guy with the slide show who looks real preppy," he said. "I'm supposed to be the confldant." Garcia will phone his prospectives over Christmas ,·acation to see how their essays are progressing and also keeps track of where his tudents apply, making sure that they have a ,-table back-up school. M uch of his recruiting effort is targeted at college counselors, who often discourage their students from ap plying to an Ivy League school, and parents, who wor ry their children m ight lose their ethnic identity

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during four years at Yale. "I have to convince the parents that they won't lose their child. Sometimes I even get my parents to meet them," Garcia said.

In-April undergraduate recruiters call all their applicants, inviting the admittees to a minority recruiting weekend at Yale and offering to .talk over the admittee's decision. Many minority students can not alford the cost of coming to Yale for a weekend, and Garcia would like Yale to fly in students just as the football team docs. David has considered the strategy, "but only as a substitute for the under~aduate recruiting program." Garcia responded, "The two shouldn't be mutually exclusive. If the football team can fly a hundred applicants to New Haven each year, we can certainly make room for this."

Although he is very aware of all the interests competing for the places in each Yale class, David still has the last word on who gets in and who does not. "I don't get calls from people who have leverage over me saying 'you better take so-and-so;' I'm reasonably well protected. But I do get calls from people who think they have leverage over me."

David remains certain that his office will further the reforms made by Clark in the 1960s. "I like the fact that Yale is playing a more important social role through minority recruiting," he stated. "When you exclude the legacy cases, the difference in class composition at Yale, Harvard and Princeton is really very small. It shows how much the admissions process has changed and come to appreciate diversity since the 1950s." But the controversy surrounding the admissions process has not disappeared. Readjustments and continual reexamination of the requirements must continue if Yale wishes to be the "national and international resource" Inslee Clark and Kingman Bre"o;ter envisioned .

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The New Jouma.l/Apnl 19, 1985 29

Paying Yale's Price Anne Applebaum "Complain ing about financial a id is like looking a gift horse in the mouth. But almost everyone has some problem w ith it."

30 The

~ew

Journal/April 19. 1985

Imagine two identical families living in identical homes in identical neighborhoods. Each family sends one child to Yale. Now imagine that one family has saved $50,000 over the last 20 years and the other family has vacationed in Europe every summer and h as no savings at all. Which will qualify for fmancial aid and which will not?

Answer: the family with no savings.

The other family will have to use its $50,000. It can cry "unfair" as long as it wants, but according to the "Uniform Methodology" employed by Yale and nearly every other college in the country, this is the way things have to be. Calling the system a "snapshot approach," Donald Routh, Director of Yale's Financial Aid Office, explained, "The Uniform Methodology doesn't make value judgments about why the family is in the situation we fmd it. It doesn't say, 'H ow come you're a teacher instead of a lawyer?' or 'How come you're an alcoholic and one-third of your income goes down the drain every year?' It just asks, 'What is your situation now, and on the basis of that situation, what can you pay?' We just don't know a better way to do it."

In an era of rocketing tuition costs and the threatened loss of government support for student loans, any criticism of the Uniform Methodology seems almost ungrateful. But the fmancial aid process is very much everyday reality for the majority of Yale undergraduates, and can even be the determining factor in their decisions to apply, to attend, and then to remain at Yale. The problem of identical families With identical incomes and different assets is not the only snag created by such a system. The Financial Aid Office runs into difficulties determining different costs of living and real estate values in different parts of the country. It runs into difficulties determining what to do when parents change jobs, purchase homes, save for retirement or even at-

tempt to cheat on their fmancial aid forms. Most of all, , the Uniform Methodology runs into difficulties because no two students are alike. Some receive specfal scholarship awards, others have difficulties making the amount of money Yale expects of them. In short, everything that makes families (and students) not uniform creates problems for the Uniform Methodology.

Despite efforts to equalize the treatment of every student, solutions to these difficulties often boil down to quite unmethodical guesses about how much a Yale education should be worth to a family, what that family should have to give up in order to send its child to Yale and how much the student should sacrifice to work his or her way through college. Not surprisingly, the University's estimate of the worth of a Yale education, the family's estimate and the student's estimate do not always concur.

In recent years Yale and other universities with similar need analysis systems have come up with statistical solutions to combat some of the inequalities the Uniform Methodology creates. Yale now uses tables prepared by the National Board of Realtors to equalize the inflationary leaps in real estate values which have occurred in some parts of the country. Routh explained, "If you bought a $75,000 house fifteen years ago, and now it's worth $350,000 because you live in Washington D.C. or in certain suburbs of Los Angeles, we can adjust that. We reverse this too- if you tell us your Beverly Hills townhouse is only worth S80,000, and you bought it for $75,000, we might readjust that to conform to the national average."

Other real estate problems do not solve themselves so easily with tables and average figures. The father of one Yale student is a professor without a large income who owns two homes and is saving one for his retirement. Yale told him to

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sell his second home. The student recalled, "Their· attitude was, 'Yale is a hardsh ip. Act like it's a hardship."' But Routh shook his head and explained, "The Uniform Methodology has to make some assumptions about what standard . of living is appropriate for families asking for ·rmancial aid. That system assumes one house. We don't make a personal judgment that they shouldn't have a second home, but we do make ajudgment that they shouldn't expect more fmancial aid because of it."

Stephen Knight, SY '87, has an even more complex problem. His father, an Episcopal minister, recently moved from California to H awaii and p urchased a very expensive new home. Upon seeing the p rice of his home on Knight's fman· cial aid application, Yale revoked his financial aid award. The Knight family claims that the new home does not represent any change in income, but rather insists that most of the new home was paid for by the church and the sale of the old home, while the rest required a large mortgage, which the family must now repay. Routh asked, "Did the family need a home of that magnitude? If the problem was that they were suddenly obliged to use all of their resources to support a parent in a nursing home, we would have been more sympathetic.

However, since they knew that it was a time in their lives when they should be providing education for their children, I'm trying to understand a little better how they come to buy that kind of home.

Families must make certain decisions about standards of living when their children go to Yale." Knight is threatening to withdraw from Yale and the fmancial aid department is continuing its investigation of the situation.

In these cases the issues are not clear· cut. Yale is a hardship for many families who have to make sacrifices. But when that means not buying the house that they want, having to sell a retirement home or forcing one parent to look for a higher paying job, the high tuition may cause parents to regret sending their

Donald Routh, director of Yale's Financial Aid Office I I

Everything tha t makes families and students not uniform creates problems for the Uniform M ethodology. children to Yale in the f~rst place. One junior recalled, "When I go home, it's just one constant hassle about how much Yale costs. My folks want me to accelerate a semester just to save the money."

Even without parental pressure students often run into monetary difficulties at Yale, especially with the requirement th at they work both during the school year and over the summer.

John Morrell, BK '86 noted, "You struggle to earn $1400 during the year, and when you get out, that's peanuts. I'd rather have all that time to do more things while I have the opportunity to do them at Yale, but I'm already going to be $10,000 in debt."

Other students disagreed. Darius Helm, a junior in Morse who works parttime for a solar-p aneling f1rm, said, "Some people aren't as rich as other people are, and there's no reason why they should be. There are good jobs available and you can work on your own time. The dining halls pay twice as much for washing dish es as the same job would in a New H aven restaurant."

P aradoxically, the Uniform Methodology can create special problems for students wh o lik to work or who earn

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Have your graduation party with us at China Inn! merit scholarships. Money earned or received in excess of a predetermined limit does not actually change the amount of m oney the family must pay or reduce the amount the student must earn, but is used instead to reduce the amount of gift scholarship Yale gives the student. Morrell actually turned down a $10,000 General Motors scholarship for this reason. He recalled, "If I'd been on no aid at the time it would have saved my family a whole lot of money. But since it would have required that I work for General Motors for two summers, I decided it wasn't worth accepting. Yale would pocket it immediately, and it made no difference in the amount of money that my family and I had to pay."

According to Routh , a government regulation is responsible for this seemingly contradictory system by which students who are not on aid can make more money than students who are and scholarships only help those who do not get m oney from Yale. He explained, "Every student who gets aid from us probably has some sort of federal aid as well, even if it's only the guarantee on their loan. And the government regulations insist that no student gets more aid than necessary. Aside from that, our own policy is that we are committed to meeting every student's needs, but not to providing any aid in excess of need." This year for the flrst time, Yale did allow scholarship recipients to reduce self-help by the frrst $500 of the award, plus half of the remaining award, meaning that the student can work or borrow less. This adjustment is made only for earned scholarships and not for state or local grants, wh ich are still used to reduce the U niversity d onation. "This is the best we could do," explained Routh. "Otherwise the government makes us give back the excess money.

But when the particclar situations of foreign students extend beyond the jurisdiction of the federal government, according to David Hyder, TO '86, they sometimes reach beyond the range of the Yale fmancial aid department. Hyder, a

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President Giamatti

Canadian citizen, was unabte to get aid from the Quebecois government partly because the "separatist government wasn't particularly interested in subsidizing an English-speaking student at an American university." When he told Yale that he would not be receiving this aid, Yale recommended he "ask again politely," although Hyder knew that the political situation made the effort almost completely futile. Due to politics, bureaucracy, and postal systems, it took almost a full year for Hyder to receive financial aid. He explained, "The delay was both completely unnecessary, and completely predictable to anyone who knew anything at all about Canadian politics."

H yder's earlier difficulties receiving enough fmancial aid led in part to his decision to take two years off from Yale.

H e attributed his problems to the department's limited knowledge of the particular problems of foreign students, and noted, "They don't keep abreast of the Canadian dollar, and the different taxation policies, or they don't appear to.

M ost Canadian students at Yale are quite wealth y, because average Canadian students can't even think about coming here. Yale just doesn't offer them en ough money. rm back because my fathe r has a new job."

But the use of averages to analyze the _ situations of individ uals, the bureaucratic confusions and the paradoxes they create are not unique to Yale. Some form of the Uniform Methodology is used to determine need at most universities, and

many policies are common among all the members of the Ivy League, a group formed expressly to insure that no students, and no athletes in particular, would choose one school over another on the basis of fmancial aid policies. Until recently all Ivy League schools held to an "aid-blind" admissions policy and offered to meet the full financial needs of all who were accepted. Brown and Dartmouth no longer .make these claims.

R ecognizing the difficulty of providing the one million dollars worth of fmancial aid that Yale must come up with every year, Morrel confessed, "Complaining about fmancial aid is like looking a gift horse in the mouth. But almost everyone has some problem with it_" Others remain mystified by what seems from the outside to be a completely arbitrary process. One student noted, "Every year they come up with some figure that we're supposed to pay, and it never seems to have any relationship to how much money we really have. So every year we have to figure out a new way to pay it."

Som e students are so wary of the fmancial aid department's authority that they were reluctant or unwilling to discuss their difficulties.

But behind this desire not to rock th e boat lie some very serious anxieties about the future of fmancial aid at Yale. This winter, the R eagan administration indicated that student loan programs may no longer be immune from budget cuts, leading to speculation that Yale will have to reconsider its full fmancial aid policy.

The proposed budget cuts could seriously

~ alter the status of any student receiving a federal loan. Denying rumors of future policy changes, Routh stated, "No suggestion has been made that this is even a remote possibility. We are concerned but are not panicking and do not plan to change our policy." The Yale Corporation itself has assured R outh that the policy of providing full fmancial aid is in no danger of being abolished and will continue to be a University priority. Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti recently spoke against cuts in the student loan programs before a Congressional subcommittee, and stated at last week's rally against the aid cuts that the government policy reversal "would turn back a fundamental tie that has run throu gh American history ... the principle that access to America in the fullest and best sense of the word is through education on one's

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But Yale's fmancial aid department remains caught in a double bind. On the one hand, it will always be subject to the will of budget writers both within and outside of the University. On the other hand, its own bureaucracy and even its unavoidable demands upon students create difficulties for them and their families. Any student whose individual situation deviates from pre-established norms may fmd him or herself in conflict with a fmancial aid officer who must make decisions about the student's fmances according to what may be purely subjective criteria, or at least criteria which differ from the student's own values. With 80 percent of Yale undergraduates working, borrowing and receiving gift aid from Yale, the fmancial aid department cannot afford to become any less concerned with the particular problems of individual students, especially if the level of government commitment to students begins to change. Otherwise, Yale's price tag will again dictate who can attend Yale and who cannot even consider applying.

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Profile/Dan Waterman Keeper of the Past

W hen I first called John Ostrom to ask him for an interview he laughed at me.

Then he asked, "Wiry do you want to do this?" I sighed and explained to him that h is work as a professor of paleontology, -his relations with the Peabody Museum, and his role in establishing Yale's geology field camp in Wyoming were all interesting aspects of Yale that very few people knew of. He laughed again, paused and finally agreed to meet with me.

Although Ostrom seemed reluctant to speak to me, I had already heard that he was an amiable man who enjoyed talking about his work. If you just sit d ow n with him and mention D e inonychus, his most famous d inosaur discovery, then "he just kinda gri ns and will go ofT telling you about it," one o f h is students had said. I decided it was worth a shot.

At h is office in Kline Geology Lab, Ostrom, a short, stolid man with a full head of wavy grey hair, greeted me with a fmn handshake- probably from picking u p large bones, I thought to myself.

H e peered at me over the top of his glasses, and led me through his office d oor, which was plastered with drawings and comics. Inside, I stopped momentarily to take in the room, filled with stacks of papers. Masses of bones and skeletons were scattered everywhe re, as though a small zoo had exploded within. He moved some papers from a chair for me and I said, •Let's talk about Deinonychus."

Ostrom recalled a 1964 expedition to M on tana, when his research party discovered a set of very unusual claws "just

resting on the earth's bare surface." H is team excavated the site and unearthed what was not only the most extraordinary dinosaur discovered in recent years, but vital evidence that some dinosaurs were warm-blooded.

"We brought the remains back to the lab here at Yale and reconstructed the anatomy," Ostrom said. The animal he pieced together, bone by bone, was an intimidating beast: a 150-pound, eightfoot long, two-legged carnivore which ran in packs of up to ten and was capable of killing animals over five times its own weight. "Its most unusual aspect, as well as the reason for its ferocious ability, was its foot structure.

Each foot consisted of two toes with a third, h u ge, scythe-like claw. The Dein onychus used those two feet for walking and for killing. It destroyed its prey by hopping on one leg and killing with the other, or it used both legs for hunting, much like a kick-boxer," Ostrom said.

Deinonychus' strange foot structure suggested to Ostrom that the creature might have been warm-blooded, a theory many of his colleagues doubted.

•Dinosaurs of all kinds have been traditionally classified as reptiles because of certain anatomical, skeletal, and structural features that are typical o f reptiles and not of warm-blooded birds or mammals," he explained. • R eptiles are cold-blooded ektotherms, meaning they need external sources of heat, which is why they bask in the sun and are inactive until they get their body temperature up to full level. Mammals and birds, however, are capable of

"It destroyed its prey by hopping on one leg and killing with the other, or it used both legs for hunting, much like a kickboxer."

Artist's rendering of Ostrom'• discovery, Deinonychua The New Journal/April 19, 1985 37

The Yale geology camp in Wyoming generating their own internal heat and can therefore be in continual motion."

The difference in their metabolism is that endotherms function at "fullthrottle," maintaming that constant action due to consumption of food . "It's important for the animal to run at racing speed instead of at an idle," Ostrom said.

"When we found Oeinonychus and reconstructed its anatomy it proved to be a very fast and very agil<' animal, quite different from any dinosaur I had seen before," he said. All of these factors suggested to him that it was a highmetabolic predator, possibly a mammal. Also, he pointed out that Oeinonychus could only walk on two feet. Leaning forward in his chair, he asked me what animal did I kno~ that could ong walk on two feeL Without waiting for my reply, 0 trom smiled and ans~ered- hi rds Because Oeinonychus could only walk on two legs it was more like a bird than a reptile, and therefore mo t likely warmblooded.

There are only five existing specimens of Demonychus in the world; Ostrom keeps Yale's very valuable remains in a file cabinet in his office. H e led me over to that cabinet and showed me the actual vertebrae of Oeinonychus' tail, used as a dynamic stabilizer for 38 The New JournaVApnl 19, 198!i

running at high speeds, much like the parasol of a tightrope walker. A contemporary form of the Oeinonychus, the roadrunner, has a very similar taif.

Ostrom became less formal as he carefully removed from the cabinet one of the only specimens of Oe inonychus' wrist. He pointed out how that wrist enabled Oeinonychus to make powerful sweeps with its deadly claw and disembowel its unlucky victim. Smiling, he took great pride in showing me the wrist and then allowing m e to hold it.

Shortly after his discovery, Ostrom heard of some colleagues who were planning to use the name "Oeinonvchus" for a dinosaur of their own finding. "Most dinosaurs are named something-'saurus' and I wanted something distinct. I had to have that name," he said. So he published a short paper describing his find and gave it his official name: dino for ~terrible," O'!)X for "claw:"' T~bl~ Ckzu.. However in 1969, when he finally published his ground-breaking theorv on Deinonychus, the paleontology community ,,¡as skeptical. His colleagues disputed Ostrom's reconstruction of the foot, the key to his theory that Deinonychus was warm-blooded .

Ostrom's confirmation came a few years later when a joint M ongolianPolish expedition in M ongolia made a n

extraordinary discovery: the completely intact skeletons of a Veloceraptor , a cousin of Deinonychus, and a large Protoceratops, which had died in combat together. Not only was the di~osaur found clinging to the head of the Protoceratops, but one of its massive claws was buried in the plant-eater's chest.

"You don't know how hard I've tried to get in to see that specimen," said Ostrom, sitting up in his chair. "But it's in Ulan Bator in the People's Republic of Mongolia, a part of the USSR which is not recognized by the U.S.- no diplomatic relations at all except through Moscow." He has met with his M ongolian coun'terpart, but that scientist cannot get the remains out of M ongolia for Ostrom to see. Nevertheless, the rvtongolian disco,â&#x20AC;˘ery verified Ostrom's theory once and for all M ore recently. Ostrom has been studying a different dinosaur called Archaeopteryx, believed to be the key to the evolution of birds from reptiles.

This controversial theory was first proposed in 1876 by Thomas H enry Huxley. the loyal defender of Charles Darwin, and has undergone many twists and variations since then. At one point, a colleague of Ostrom's named Alick .

Walker proposed that birds evolved from crocodiles. Ostrom responded to

!Lift.

cosrnetus

He pointed out how that wrist enabled Deinonychus to make powerful sweeps with its deadly claw and disembowel its unlucky victim.

Walker immediately, having studied all of the five ·existing specimens of Archaeopteryx. Although Archaeopteryx had feathers and other bird-like characteristics, Ostrom showed that if you took away the feathers, then the skeleton looked exactly like a small dinosaur. Ostrom had shown conclusively that Archaeopteryx and birds in general must have evolved from small carnivorous reptiles. Walker, a professor at Newcastle-on-the-Tyne in England, has since rejected his own theory and accepted Ostrom's.

Ostrom's theory on Archaeopteryx has become generally accepted by the paleontology community, and last September O strom organized an international conference on Archaeopteryx in order to come to an agreement on how flight evolved. He called the conference a "smashing success" because of the large

number of scientists present. However, no unanimous decision was reached and most scientists left with the same opinions on Archaeopteryx that they had held before the carne. "The human animal is frail in the sense that we develop opinions or conclusions and unless someone presents overwhelming evidence that you are wrong, you tend to cling to your belief," Ostrom said. "When I first presented my theories on Archaeopteryx people said 'Wow, it's so obvious. Why didn't I think of that?' but were still reluctant to accept it."

When he is not busy with conferences, teaching or doing research, Ostrom serves as the curator vertebrate paleontology at the Peabody Museum. H e is currently raising over $12,000 for a fleshed-out and life-size model of the Deinonychus for display at the Peabody.

Ostrom enjoys his role because he

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Excavation in Mongolia of Velo~~raptor takes great pride in the Peabody. "As a museum, it is excellent. But as a private university museum, the Peabody is really extraordinary," he said, adding that, unfortunately, few members of the Yale community take advantage of it. "I like to embarass my classes by asking who has been to the P eabody. There are actually students who don't know that the place exists."

His pride in the museum is the rightful pride of a father, for many of the P eabody's acquisitions are the results of Ostrom's work. Throughout the 1960s Ostrom carried out a series of expeditions in the West, particularly Montana and Wyoming, bringing back many of the specimens that now rest in the Peabody's Hall of Dinosaurs. This April, Ostrom "pulled a great coup for Yale," possibly his greatest. When P rinceton University announced it was leaving the field of vertebrate paleontology, Ostrom immediately proposed that Yale could best make use of their very valuable collection of fossils. The Princeton administration agreed. "It's sad," Ostrom said, "because they have been a stronghold in the area for so long. But this does demonstrate how we put priority into scholarship and overcome our football rivalries. It's the way all academic institutions should treat one another." The fact that Yale was competing for Princeton's collection with the Smithsonian, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the Carnegie Museum and the U niversity of Michigan, gives Ostrom great

satisfaction. The collection of over 24,000 fossils will come to Yale this month, joining the Peabody's already valuable collection, which includes the original Brontosaurus found and named by Yale's Professor O.C. Marsh in the late 1800s.

In the regions out west where Ostrom spent his early career, Yale now has a permanent geology field camp. When Thomas Stroock, '48, donated a ranch to Yale, it was considered an ideal location for a base camp for Yale's geology field course. To help shoulder the costs of maintaining a ranch year-round, Yale asked Harvard and Cornell to join the project and a three-way foundation was created. L ocated 17 miles from Saratoga, Wyoming in the Sierra Madre mountains, the camp was established in 1981 and has been operating for three seasons.

Ostrom is the only active member from Yale on the foundation board, and according to some of the students who have spent summers there, he is the backbone of the camp. Although much of Yale's geology department has become more theoretical, Ostrom is a firm believer that "you cannot learn geology unless you look at the rocks.

You can sit in a class and read the textbooks, but until you really get out there and get your h ands dirty in the field, the concepts are not reinforced adequately," Ostrom said. Debbie Colodner, a senior geoiogy major, spent last summer at the camp and readily agrees with Ostrom. "I learned more from that

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Ostrom clearly loves the region, speaking of it as "a beautiful forested area. It has nice flowing brooks with good fishing-reaJiy nice trout," he said. However, Ostrom has only been able to visit for brief periods recently, due to his responsibilities and projects here at YaJe. "You can tell that he reaJly loves the land and wishes he could be back out there," Colodner said.

Ostrom's devotion to both his students and his work is obvious in the way he speaks of his profession. "After having done this for a few years, I become more and more stimulated by the fact that life is constantly changing, that evolution is such a wonderful process," Ostrom said. He feels that his class, "The History of Life," designed for students who do not plan to pursue geology or paleontology, is one of the most important aspects of his job here.

"I'm still getting letters from students I had four or five years ago who say 'I'm so glad I took your course. I see the whole world differently,' and that's a pretty good feeling to have," he said. "I reaJiy believe that the only way to get a perspective on your own life is to look at life of the past. We are only here for a fleeting moment , as part of an enormous panorama. We live only in one smaJI miiJenium, on a speck of dust , in all of the universe," said Ostrom, removing his glasses and reclining against a cabinet. "When you start to think about that, you ~gin to reaJize that life is a marvelous phenomenon."

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JournalfApril 19. 1985 41

Books One Man's War Jay Carney "How could I make someone understand the difference between morality and what happens to a man's soul when he leaps out of a helicopter on a combat assault?" wrote Jack Fuller in an article entitled "Getting Back to the Garden" in the April 1971 issue of The New journal.

In the article, Fuller described his postVietnam impressions of Yale and the "War at Home."

"How could I relate ethics to the smell of carnage and cordite?" the article continued. "That would take a novel to do ..." That summer Fuller began writing his novel about Vietnam. In 1984, after 13 years of writing and revising, Fragments was published.

Although Fuller took over a decade to complete it, Fragments does not seem overworked. It is neither long, nor detailed with factual historical references; nor does it have a complex plot. But what it does have is an immediacy that draws the reader into one experience of being in Vietnam and Cambodia during wartime.

The prose is simple; even descriptive sentences are short and to the point. The author uses this compressed style to maintain tight control over the novel's fmely tuned characters and their interrelationships. Fuller leaves little ambiguity about the kind of person each character should represent to the reader.

Although this aspect of Fuller's style can make some of the novefs sequences a bit predictable, the author ultimately manipulates this predictability to make the most significant events more surprising and effective.

Fuller draws the material for Fragments from his own experience in Vietnam. After one semester at Yale Law School in 1968, he was drafted into the U.S Army for two years, the second of which he spent as a combat correspondent for Stars and Stripts. Fuller spent his year in the field with the "grunts," the ground infantrymen. H e 42 The New JoumalJApril 19 , 1985

got to know these m en well because, like their civilian counterparts, correspondents for Stars and Stnpes never carried weapons: they depended on grunts for protection.

Fragments is about the grunts and th e experiences Fuller had with them. The novel reads like a fresh account of nonfiction. The two central characters are Bill Morgan, a careful thinker who looks to the facts to find the reason, and Jim Neumann, M organ's new friend and hero. Told by Morgan, a college graduate of the class of '68, the novel opens at the end of the story. M organ and others report to an official inquiry into Neumann's actions during a ski rmish with the ene m y near the village of Xuan The. Civilians had been killed, but Neumann is absolved because no one but he can say exactly what happened there. Then Morgan takes us to the beginning, to when he received his draft notice, began basic training, and first met Neumann. From here, Fuller carefull y de ve lops the reader's understanding of the characters, their friendship and their circumstances before they reach Xuan The. This is the site of the novel's central event, the place where Fuller demonstrates the "difference between morality and w h at happens to a man's soul when he leaps out of a helicopter on a combat assault."

The bitterness Fuller had felt w hen he returned to Yale in 1971 had driven him to write his article. What he could not communicate there, he chose to explain in a novel. But isn't it too early to turn into fiction an era whose facts are still a matter of heated debate? And isn't the inevitable result a romanticizing of even the most horrible of events? Clearly, Fuller does not think so. The attitudes he encountered when he returned from Vietnam could not be enlightened by m ore factual information. As he did then, Fuller still belie~es

A~OVEL BY l-\CK FllLER

Fragments by J ack Fuller.

1984 William Morrow (cloth) 1985 Dell Publishing (paper) that fiction is best suited to convey his message about Vietnam. "Everyone had their own glib moral assertions to make about a soldier's responsibilty for his actions in Vietnam." he explained recently. "One thing that had struck me was how difficult it was to make any simple historical judgement on the event, both when I was there and after I h ad come back. And that's why it was so irritating that others' assumption s were so simple ... " Fuller remembered particular events a t Yale that revealed to him disturbing misperceptions about the war. One n ight some law school students watching the news were cheerin g "as though it had been a H arvard-Yale game" w hen the North Vietnamese Army crossed a demilitarized zone during a large-scale

j ack Fuller invasion in 1972. Other times h e found it hard to watch students waving a :-.;orth Vietnamese banner. Said Fuller, "People seemed to think this was a match in which U.S. failure would somehow lead to humane results." H e makes no intentional political statement in Fragmnzts on the propriety of U .S . involvement in Vietnam. But he does make a personal statement, one addressed to anyone who would selfrighteously reduce the question of behavior in Vietnam to a simple right or wrong. In combat. morality becomes equivocal. "Soldiers were thrown into tragic situations where decisions made in a split-second might come back to h aunt them endlessly," Fuller said.

"And then there is the idea of responsiblity and freedom linked to thi central

ambiguity . . . because it's hard to excuse one's own self when the facts alone don't explain what you did.~ Fra(!mmts is Fuller's absolution for every American soldier who ever found that a rational account o f the facts fell short of supplying an explanation for what had happened to him . But it also means to <:how those soldiers that ultimate!} the responsibility for their actions dors lie with them selves. Although this responsibility is fraught with moral ambiguity.

Fuller believes that accepting it is an assertion of one's freedom.

In Fragmnrts, ~forgan is like the many soldiers who continuallv try to find concrete explanations for \"hat has happened. H e looks to the circumstances that man cannot control to find the<:e . explanations, hoping they will

serve to absolve people of their responsiblity. For Morgan the controlling forces in Vietnam are "chance and necessity. That was all there was to it.

As much as you hated the odds, hated the brute, amoral powers of the jungle, you had to clin g to them. They left no room for blame ." Once he comes home, Morgan fights with the all the unanswered quc'ltions in his memory of Xuan The. The facts he has, the fragments, do not fit together into a w holt·. do not make the connections that would free Neumann of rc ponsibility. Although in the final s ene of the novel Morgan has all the information from Neumann that he had not previously known, his desire to <,um up the event, to put it on the shdf under the heading "Chance and 1'\ecessity," is ultimately frustrated. Neumann cannot be absolved; the responsibilty is his.

Acknowledging this, the reader will have to make his own estimation of the moralitv invoh ed. if anv at all.

One ·might easily su'spect there is a strong autobiographical relation between the author and Morgan. But Fuller explained that he wanted to separate his characters from himself as much as possible in order to maintain a more objective critical eye. Perhaps Fuller created Morgan as a link between himself and those who did not go to Vtetnam, those for whom he wrote hts I q71 article. The last line of the nO\el belongs to ~forgan : ..And if I wept at all. it \.,as not for the dead ." His education is the reader's education. If w<' gain a better understanding of what happt·ned to Amencans in Vietnam from Fra(mmls. thl'n our compassion. thic; time. goes to those who 'urvived.

•

jay Cam~ is a sophomor~ m Timoth; Du lf!hl Colug~.

'I h~ :-.:~.,. Journ<ai!Aprtl HI, 1985 43

History of Shame

Rich Blow Slavery and Human Progress

by David Brion Davis 1984 Oxford University Press

For most Americans the word "slavery" conjures up images of the antebellum deep South, of overseers with whips and blacks in cotton fields. Yet the institution of slavery dates back to the start of recorded history in Mesopotamia, and it was not even until the late 18th century that slavery was considered a sin against morality. Instead, slavery was generally thought to be a system of labor which benefitted both captor and captive, condoned by governments and churches in all parts of the world.

Sterling Professor of History David Brion Davis has spent most of his academic career studying the problem of slavery, and his new book, Slavery and Human Progress, continues his writing on the subject. The book is an ambitious mixture of historical research and Davis's own "moral philosophy," a combination which gives the book an emoDavid Brion Davis lecturing in WLH tional impact very rare and very welcome in historical writing.

Davis's thesis is simple but to perpetual slavery the infidels, fascinating: slavery has always been in- pagans, unbelievers, and enemies of extricably linked with changing con- Christ . . . " The enemies of Christ were cepts of "progress," and in mockrn not necessarily blacks, however; such history there has been a "momentous physical distinctions were attributed to shift from 'progressive' enslavement to factors like climate and environment. 'progressive' emancipation." He writes, But inspired by Biblical language, non"From Plato onward even the visions of blacks began to associate the color with a utopian society toward which humans things dangerous and unholy, and such might evolve assumed the continuing feelings were easy to transfer to black existence of slaves.

Progress, Africans. however conceived in the ancient Nonetheless, slavery did not become world, was fully compatible with widely entrenched in modern Europe human bondage." For Christians, until after the Black Death of the 14th Muslims and Jews alike, religion sanc- century, when Europeans desperate for tified the enslavement of"outsiders" who a labor force increasingly turned to would receive, in theory, the benefits of African slavery. Over the course of cena superior civilization and religion. In turies the European slave trade one instance, "Papal briefs of the 1450s developed into a hugely profitable inauthorized the Portuguese King or dustry which helped ensure nations' Order of Christ to conquer and reduce economic growth. As Davis argues, "the 44 The New JoumaVApril 19. 1985

vast majority of eighteenth-century policymakers and commentators equated slaves with wealth and national greatness." Tragically, it was indeed true that slaves played a vital part in the expansion and progress of Western civilization.

But the nineteenth century brought momentous changes for enslaved blacks. Britain would outlaw slavery in the West Indies in 1833; the United States fought a civil war, in part because of agitation over chattel slavery; France, Brazil and numerous other countries would abolish slavery in their domains before the century ended.

According to Davis, "The Western world was beginning to view slavery as an intolerable obstacle to human progress-as an economic <f{lachronism as well as an offense to Christian morality

you can read

TheNewJournal almost anywhere* and human rights." For Davis, the next question is what caused this immense shift in ideals of progress and attitudes toward slavery.

T o find an answer, Davis looks closely at the history of the abolitionist m ovement in Great Britain, the first "civilized" country to abolish slavery.

British abolitionism began with a Quaker revival in the 1770s, a movement which confronted the paradox of slavery in a country that prided itself on setting a moral example for the rest of the world. The Quakers' rejection of slavery spread to other religious groups, and in time the denunciation of slavery became a religious rite of purification akin to renouncing drinking, gambling an d other sinful forms of "worldliness" As D avis writes, "Testimony against slavery became a crucial symbol of 'serious religion.'"

Evange lical British abolitionists argued that slavery had become an impassible obstacle to the country's progress. It was an institution that had no moral, religious or economic justification for being. Yet the abolitionists as well as their opponents feared the eradication of slavery would mean the collapse of the British plantation economy in the West Indies, and theorized that emancipated slaves would (and should) still be bound to their former masters. Predicted abolitionist James Stephen, "The dread of starving" will be "substituted for the dread of being flogged." Similarly, both groups feared that freeing the slaves would create a permanent underclass of indolent and possibly rebellious blacks.

In his explanation of how the British government gradually took up the cause of emancipation, Davis reveals his esteem for any government that would act against its economic and diplomatic interests for the sake of human rights.

Though cognizant of the pragmatic arguments against emancipation, the British Parliament clearly favored the cause of humanity, both in their own territories and in foreign lands. As

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Davis thoughtfully concludes, "This abstracted concern for human rights ran counter to the normal assumptions and procedures of law and has hardly been a prominent theme in human history."

Moving beyond Great Britain, Davis explores the years after English eman· cipation, which he terms "a century of progress." Britain's example forced much of the rest of the world to recon· sider its moral stance on slavery; no country which wished to be progressive could permit slavery within its borders.

No longer would governments and churches worldwide speak of the "progressive" nature of slavery and expect to hear praise for their morality.

But Davis ends on a disturbing note, asking whether slavery has really disappeared from the world or simply taken new forms. He points to labor camps in the USSR, Jews forced to work in factories in World War II Germany and the oppression of indigenous peasants in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Clearly Davis feels that the 20th century has not rid itself of the forced use of human labor.

Slavery and Human Progress is an impressive book, though not without its flaws. In many instances the awesome

scope of Davis's study -literally, the history of recorded civilization- makes it impossible for him to examine his subject as thoroughly as it merits. There are instances where his treatment of issues is glaringly superficial, most noticeably in his examination of emancipation in France and Brazil.

But to •his credit, Davis makes no claims of being able to do justice to all this information, and therefore much of the book has an informal, almost talkative tone. Davis seems more con· cerned with raising qu.estions of morality and progress than with answering them, an approach which has left some academic critics dissatisfied, but works for the reader who prefers a candid approach toward issues of morality rather · than a dry and apparently omniscient historical treatise. In Slavery and Human Progress, David Brion Davis proves that he has the breadth of knowledge to at· tempt a study as immense as this. Even more impressively, he demonstrates the intellectual honesty to admit that no in· dividual can answer the disturbing question of how men could enslave other men, all in the name of progress.

•

Rich Blow is Executive Editor ciffNJ.

As both white and black abolitionists discovered, emancipation could be even mOI'e effectively blocked by men who believed in progress than by those who fatalisticaDy resigned themselves to the sins of this world . . . . To speak of the idea of progress as an oiJstDcll to emancipation may be troubling for people who would like to translate aD historical problems into binary choices . . . U nfor· tunattely, the problems we are exploring are much too complicated for yes-or-no answers. This is not to say that muddy thinking can be justifw:d by references to 6fe's oonc:lusions. For thoee of us who still think of history as a kind of moral phibophy teaching tiy examples. it is precisely the moral character of truth-the varied 8IJ8Ies of vision that are also the subject of imaginative literature- that cne must seek to capture. If such inquiry has any 'therapeutic' value, it arises from the diac:overy that the most comforting and reassuring facets ol meaning ... are not the only dimensions of historical experience.

-from Slavery and Human Progress

Afterthought

- ~------~~--------------------------------------------------~----~~

This issue's Aflnthought cvmes from an interview with Molly Armstrong, CC '84 who was an American Studies mqjor. 7he interview was ediud by

joyce

&n")tt,

ediwr-in-chiej of The New Journal.

Like many Yale alumni, I work in New York City. Every morning, I lea\e my room and "''alk past 42nd Street, past peep shows and bookstores, to a large, h orseshoe-shaped building just off Times ~uare. As one of the volunteers here at Covenant House, a short-term crisis center for homeless youth , my work day begins at eight a.m., when I get all the girls over 18 out on a jobsearch. Then, I review the new cases, the kids who walked into the c;hdtcr just last night. Usually, we have 200 children staying at the House, although there are only 110 beds. Mats on the floor and couches in TV rooms substitute temporarily for the street or sub\\ay trains. We give them towels and sheets, feed and sometimes clothe them.

CO\enant House is a sanctuary. The kids here, all under 21, are running, either from a pimp or a family or a group home.

Their experiences match nothing we think of as typical of childhood. I contact a child's parents on[y with her permission, and the House reunites a good portion of the children with their families, prO\ided no abuse is involved. The average stay is six days, too little time to change their lives. Because I must constantly choose between imperfect solutions, my idea of success has changed. Success here only occurs on a small scale.

Along v.ith handing out toilet paper and serving meals, I "crisis counser- talking down the suicidal, breaking up fights ~1o:.tlv I deal with children who have always thought no one cared ·\\hethcr thev lived or died. I get hugs and curses, but all I do throughout is listen. always listen.

I alway' enjoyed listening. I loved being fresJu:t~ counselor, and because I \\as such a good listener. I almost dtdn t graduate.

As graduation approached, however, I realized that "good listener" could not be listed on m y resume. In fact , I could list fe"' concrete achievements, and yet I believed I had to fmd a career immediately. at 21. .The more I looked for a job, the more confused I became. Finally, I turned to examine the resourct•s I had, namely, myself. Young and without obligations, I knew I could take chances; I was free to d o anything. I decided then not to foUow the standard Yale senior route of resumes and CAPS. Stank\ Kaplan and graduate .;chool.

Fe\" people felt as I did. Like m)"'Clf, they had debts to pay off, and o:o they needed to earn sizable salaries. But I felt more

than the need to succeed fmancially, I felt the need to grow. Instead of reading theory and discussing hypothetical situations, I itched to go out and act. I wanted to test myself and felt I could through volunteer work.

M y parents and my close friends understood and supported my decision. However, others who were only acquaintances began to feel uneasy around me. I knew my decision was my own, not a judgement on the actions of other people. But at a time when seniors have to think about their responsibilities to family or debt or tradition, some people made choices they were uncomfortable with. Perhaps they were like a fr iend of m ine who graduated two years before me. H is freshman year he picketed Morgan Stanley for some of their activities in the Third World. Senior year he applied for a job with them when he saw the fmancial responsibilities awaiting him.

In the city, I occasionally run into other Yalies on the street. I have nothing in common anymore with most of them. We made such choices that our lifestyles simply do not overlap.

For my work at Covenant House, I receive 12 dollars a week, room and board. The House is a Catholic institution, and I live in the lay religious community attached to it. The volunteers, ranging from 22 to 71 years of age, sign up for a 13 month stint, the frrst month devoted entirely to training.

My work as a tutor of the behaviorally disturbed at Troup Junior High in New H aven exposed me, if only on a small scale, to the kind of children I deal with at Covenant House. We have a policy of open intake, meaning we accept any child who walks through our doors: those with a criminal or psychiatric h istory, chronic runaways, abuse cases and the resourceless.

After seven months, I do not feel burned out. Rather, I am forced to examine assumptions about the world I never knew I had. For example, my views concerning male-female relationships are constantly challenged here. The only affection many of these children have known has been within sexual relationships.

In fact , Covenant H ouse has a whole floor of mothers and b.d>ies. A girl would not get an abortion because her child is all she has.

What I'm doing now I know I can't do forever : the stress factor is too high and the intensity will wear thin. But I know I have made the right decision . M y schooling did not end when I left the University. I will continue to learn from children who are alone. from those who have nowhere to go. AD I must do is listen.

•

The New JournaVApril 19, 1985 47

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