Volume 19 - Issue 6 by The New Journal at Yale

Yale Symphony Orchestra Alasdair Neale, music director 1986·1987 Season ..

. ... .

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.5

Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from 'West Side Story'

·· Rossini: 'The Italian Girl in Algiers' Overture

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Annual Benefit Concert Woolsey Hall ~,_. Friday, April24, 1987 Spm

2 The :-lew JournaVApril 17, 1987

Cover Design by john Stella Cover photo by Pearl H u

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Between the Vines

Vol. 19, No. 6 April 17, 1987

Borderline Friends Two years ago, when the writer started volunteering as a Big Sister in New Haven, she found herself placed in an unfamiliar context, in the role of ready-rruule friend. Communication relied on finding common experiences, but at times distance imposed too large a gap. By Susan Orenstein.

Features

Leaps and Bounds With works that convert credit cards and knitting needles into dance themes, three choreographers collaborate to reach increasingly receptive audiences. Here they describe the creative energies they bring to a renewed dance movement in New H aven. By Skye Wilson. 1'IUJ(/ern

f8 ,

A Passion Preserved Horace Walpole died 200 years before ~y" Lewis was even born. But at Yale~ Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, part archive and part museum, the minds of the two men have achieved a curious fusion. By Hugh Kennedy.

The Course ·o f Neglect Teaching A ssistants .from the Humanities and Social Sciences divisions of the Graduate School claim that Yale is a bad employer, saying that it provides wages that dont support them, job descnptions that mystify them, and no means to remedy complaints. Trying to tap this discontent, the TA Solidarity Group hopes to unite graduate students to form a collective voice and, if necessary., to take collective aciton. By james Bennet.

Tallying the Score After ten years at the helm of Yale athletics, Franlc Ryan will step down this July to assume new duties at Yale. Having strengthened the department~ financial and organizaJional base, Ryan defends his controversial career against sharp criticisms .from alienated coaches and athletes who agree that the time has come for a change. By Daniel Waterman.

Books

H eroic Landscapes Above the Land, the most recent winner in the Yale Younger Poets &ries, offers strong images of the places and people author julie Agoos has known: a timeworn New Hampshire field, an Italian concierge. Always, her poems evoke new responses to familiar subjects. By Blakey Vermeule.

Afterthought

Yale's Failing Grade Barry Shain (GRD '88) arrived at Yale six years ago, searching for a strong intellectual climate. What he found instead: narrowmindedness and dogmatism.

NewsJoumal

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5 The New Journal/April 17, 1987 3

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News Journal

Sterling Voices

Wednesdays, right around noon, most people eat lunch. Hardly anyone goes to the library. So hardly anyone, except perhaps a few librarians, hears the voices coming faintly from a far-off corner of Sterling. A lonely grad student playing a radio in the stacks? Confused worshippers mistaking Sterling for a church? Not quite. It's the Yale University Library Staff Singers. "We practice on Wednesdays," conductor David .Weisbrod explained. Weisbrod, who works for the Library Systems Office, has conducted the Staff Singers for several years. He did not come up with their name; none of the Singers seems to want that bit of ingenuity credited to them. But he has exercised an iron fist over the group, for whom fifteen minutes of calisthenics precede each We.d nesday rehearsal. Olga Phoenix, a veteran of the group and native Yugoslavian, remembers the turbulent days before Weisbrod's ascendancy. "Our first conductor, the one before David, was Ukrainian, so we sang a lot of Eastern European music. I , myself, loved these songs, but I think the words were too difficult for the Americans to pronounce. We didn't have many people then. Now we have more." The members, composed of staffers and graduate student workers from throughout the Yale library system, sing mostly in English now, although last year Weisbrod let his troops perform "Mon coeur se recommande a vous." The Singers rarely schedule more than two tour stops each year. While students vacation in December, the Library Staff Holiday Party features the group as its entertainment attraction. And in late May, the Singers give their annual concert. These dates make it difficult for interested undergraduates to attend

concerts, and Weisbrod admits the scheduling is deliberate. "We're not a student group, so we don't generally perform for students," he said. They do, however, make guest appearances at Tower One, a ho.u sing development for senior citizens, and at Connecticut Hospice in Branford. So why do they closet themselves away in the corner of Sterling, in the Lecture Gallery, to rehearse? Actually, the Singers do not always act so reticent. They have been known to sneak a song or two in "acoustic utopia"- the library nave. In this bastion of silence, doesn't Weisbrod think it inappropriate that he and other librarians set a noisy example? "No," he said, in a tone that brooked no argument.

its own telephone cables in 1980, Yale Communications dec.ided to buy phone lines for the entire campus. By fall 1986 it owned and operated all of its own telephone cables. It leases lines from SNET for local calls and employs the cheapest lines available for any particular long-distance route. Michael Grunder, director of the Yale Communications Department, concedes that "you can't put in a system like this perfectly." And, in fact, students have been grumbling about the phones since they arrived in

- Warren Kampf

Bad Connections If you've finally figured out how callback works, if you can recite your sixdigit access code in your sleep and have received a refund for all the numbers on your phone bill you didn't call, congratulations. You will have more changes in the phone system to contend with next year. The Yale Communications Department will change student telephone numbers to correspond with their room numbers. Although many students may find this c hange convenient, Jeff Euben, manager of Central Campus Communications, calls it a security risk, because anyone- well-meaning or not- can readily find out a room number and locate a student. Changing phone numbers marks another step in an overhaul of the system which began in 1973. That year, while SNETCO continued to handle local calls, Yale bought its own W A TTSBOX and gained access to long-distance trunks. After the Medical School successfully installed

September. Bruce Spiva, a member of the Student Life Committee of the Yale College Council, maintains that "YALENET has not communicated effectively enough with students. They haven't told people how to use the system and where to go with complaints." Human errors accounted for many of the transition problems first semester, and the department has taken care of most of them. Some students who signed up for BASICPLUS never received its new features, such as call-waiting and callback , because their orders were recorded wrong. In addition to jumbled orders, misenten!d Social Security numbers kept bills tied up for months, so that a number of students still face the prospect of back bills. The New.JournaVApril17, 1987 5

Human mistakes also kept some students off a mailing list that would have informed them of the cheaper BASIC system which became available over the summer. The computers proved no less fallible than the Yale Communications staff, cha~:ging students for calls to such popular numbers as 000-0000. And if you think someone discovered your access code and made those five unexplained calls to Oregon, then you should probably request a refund. According to Grunder, the computer, and not some creative numberpqncher, was most likely to blame. Moreover, it shouldn't happen again. To frustrate would-be code thieves, Yale Communications now requires that callers punch their access codes after the number they are calling rather than before. Furthermore , starting late this spring, the department may begin including the number from which calls originate on students' bills. But some phone problems won't go away. Yale Communications will still charge callers for staying on the line longer than 35 seconds, (for overseas, 45 seconds) whether or not someone You can dance if you want to.

6 The New Journal/April 17, 1987

has picked up on the other end. One student reported $20.00 in phone charges "just to hear the operator say, 'We're sorry. All overseas lines are busy now.' "Yale's system is simply not sophisticated enough to detect when someone has picked up. According to Euben, such feedback equipment costs too much. Âˇ Students already object to the cost of phone service. Actually, they pay less than New Haven residents. The YALENET monthly charge for BASIC is $14.00, billed as a lump fee at the beginning of the year. SNETCO charges $16.35 per month for equivalent service. Y ALENET charges five percent less than SNET for instate c'!-lls, and five percent less than MCI for long distance. Next .year Y ALENET may offer an even cheaper alternative for those willing to sacrifice long-distance calling: a special rate to get a dial tone for on-carppus calls only. Perhaps the phone company will finally install a welcome change.

-Talia Bloch

Stepping Out For those who still suffer pangs of embarrassment over last December's Holiday ball or nervously anticipate this year's prom, the Yale Ballroom Dancing Club may provide hope. Missing her ballroom dancing days at M IT, Julie Forman (GRD '90) helped Stu Weinzimer (PC '88) organize the club last semester. "When I first got here," she saif:t, "there was no ballroomÂˇ dancing club and I cried and cried all year. This year I decided to stop crying and just start one." By following Yale College Council guidelines for forming a club, Forman and Weinzimer gained a small initial budget which they spent on. preliminary advertising for the group. The organization now suppor.ts itself, relying on a nominal attendance fee to cover the cost of the instructors. Elaine Mills Solerno, a professional instructor who teaches ballroom dancing at Payne Whitney Gymnasium, conducts the class. She is assisted by Liz Napier (Law '90), who teaches one out of four sessions. Napier took lessons at a dance studio for several years before she came to Yale. "There is a real subculture of ballroom dancing. I used to go dancing four nights a week at least," she said. The Yale Ballroom Dancing Club and the classes offered at Payne Whitney differ in both cost and spirit. The fee for the club is $2.00 a person per session or $10.00 for a semesterlong membership, as opposed tO $40.00 a couple at the gym. In addition, the club is less formal. It meets Sunday afternoon in the Dwight Hall common room from 2:00 until whenever the last couple drags their feet from the floor. And unlike Payne Whitney, it does not subscribe to the

Noah's Ark theory of ballroom dancing; graduate and undergraduate students are encouraged to arrive singly. The dancers switch partners frequently and must in troduce themselves before slipping into each others' arms. The club consists of a core group of about fifteen students. A comparable number of floaters attend less regularly. Most are beginners, although a few seem instinctively to know a rhumba from a cha-cha. Whether or not a ballroom dancing "sub-culture" exists, most of the members have joined the club "just to have fun and dance." Ellen Barber (SM '87) and Peter Olszowka (SM '87) explained, "We realized the senior prom was coming up, and we didn't know a thing." Others said that they attend the formal dances sponsored by the residential colleges every Christmas and spring and are tired of floundering on the dance floor. "I've wanted to learn for a long ti.me, but I couldn't get into the class at the gym," said Tom Huang (SY '89). The club's founders hope to sponsor a dance at the end of the semester. Meanwhile, its members are looking forward- rather confid ently, in fact- to the spring dances and senior prom. But now, according to Leon Hwang (TD '87), "the problem will be finding someone else who knows how to do all this." - Ellm Bresln-

Critical Shortage A travel brochure for the Philippines might boast of warm weather and mangos. It would probably not mention nurses. But to tap this littleknown resource, Yale-New Haven Hospital recruitment officers traveled halfway around the globe last December. The hospital staff had hoped to gain more than 20 employees, but only ten candidates had passed

Yale-New Haven Hoapital ia abort of nunca and long on patients.

their nursing boards and had their visas approved. As a result, the hospital continues to face a serious problem: a conservative estimate places the size of Yale-New Haven's nursing staff at 900, 100 nurses shy of the ideal figure. According to Maureen Egan, Yale-New Haven's Personnel Manager, "There hasn't been a crisis like this in a long time." The difficulties at Yale-New Haven reflect a national problem: there are not enough nurses to meet mounting demand. As the Baby Boom generation grows up, improved technology is keeping them and their parents alive longer. As average age increases, the likelihood of sickness and injury grows. In addition, costly insurance polictes are forcing hospitals to reduce the length of in-hospital stays. Consequently, the outpatient industry has grown, requiring still more qualified nurses. Despite the demand, low enrollment plagues nursing schools across the country. High school students who are not college-bound tend to enter the work force immediately after graduat ion , without co n sidering alternatives like nursing school.

Working conditions such as bad hours and frequent weekend shifts discourage many prospective nurses. For some, nursing's frustrations outweigh its rewards. "If I could have another chance, I would never choose the profession," said Maureen Kangley, a Registered Nurse at YaleNew Haven Hospital since 1976. The current shortage makes the job more unpleasant. Kangley and other nurses find themselves compensating for missing staff. And the shortage is affecting care. Rachel Rotkovitch , vice-president of nursing for Yale-New Haven Hospital, admitted that "patients may sometimes have to wait a long time when they call for a nurse because nurses are so busy." Such difficulties have led Rotkovitch on a crusade to recruit nurses for YaleNew Haven. She has scheduled future missions like the Philippine trip to nursing recruitment fairs in England and Ireland this spring. In addition, recruitment officers are stepping up efforts at high schools across the country. -

Pamela Weber

The New Journal/April 17 , 1987 7

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8 The New Journal/April 17. 1987

Between the Vines/Susan Orenstein

Borderline Friends

Outside the window of the bus, the square, sand-colored houses of a project looked like a geometric pattern repeating itself down the street. I waited to see the sign of the Sunshine Grocery , my cue to get off. Once outside, I found the number on Evelyn's house, the porch and the front steps, the door and the staircase to the apartment. A large black woman with a blue-patterned scarf arou nd her head unlocked the door, or rather unhooked the bent nail that h e ld it in place. "You're Susan, right?" H e r voice was deep and husky. "I'm Evelyn's mother. Hello." She led me towards tl:te kitchen where something was frying. Four children moved around the table and stove, the smallest trying to climb into a ch air. "Evelyn's not ready yet," her mother said. "But I been wanting to meet you." Self-conscious, I sat at the far side of the table trying to look responsible , caring, open, not too pushy, and less scared. But Evelyn's mother bare ly glanced at my study of expressions. She was busy with the chicken on the stove, one of the children pulling the pants right off her waist. Evelyn didn't come in until her mother called her. We had permission to take a walk down the street, and for the next hour or so we started getting used to each other. At fourteen, Evelyn was a head taller than I was, muscular and long-legged , her stride even and calm. I n bold matching outfits and large hooped gold earrings, she looked older than I did walking down the street. "H i, this is Susan. She's my big sister," she said to a friend of hers o n our way home that day. She said it as if

I'd lived in her house all along, as if we had the same traces of her mother's voice in us. For the next year a nd a half, o ur visits together always started the same way. I got on the bus, rode to the Sunshine Grocery, and ended up in Evelyn's kitche n. We took long walks down Congress, catching up on school or the latest boyfriend. Our language separated u s. Evelyn did not know what college m eant, she had never heard of being Jewish. And I could only guess the meaning of her "homegirls" and jumped the first time

answered the phone. She invited me back not to her house but to her kitchen, and I sensed the distinction wasn't trivial. "Hello Susan. Yeah, this is Evelyn's mother." I said hello and waited, glad my nervousness was hidden on the phone. "I want to tell you Susan, when you was coming over, I thought, I just can't be nothing but myself, you know, and how's it gonna be letting someone into my kitche n and see me. But if you want you come back, okay?" Evelyn's second-floor apartment has four rooms: her mother's bedroom, living room, kitchen and children's room. A large TV in her mothec's bedroom stays on loud. The furniture doesn't match , and hanging beads separate the rooms instead of doors. What's most distinctive about the apartment is the smell. It smells like Evelyn's mother cooking her food, like her brand of cigarettes and her she said "niggers" to mean boys. Much particular kind of soap. The smell is of what she said had a shock something I can't describe but only element- stories, for example, of know , something intimate that makes fifteen-year olds with several children, me feel close to Evelyn. all by different fathers, or a boy who Our Âˇwalks down Congress conkilled him~e lf playing Russian tinued the next year. Occasionally, we Roulette. Evelyn doesn't seem like the went to the mall, to the Yale Art right person to describe ugly things. Gallery, to Old Campus. And a numH er mouth is always read y to smile, ber of times we went on her family and she laughs in short, happy squeals. errands. During my sophomore year , The squeals made some of the things a week before Thanksgiving, I went she said even more surprising. She told over and waited in the living room. me she would never have children and because Evelyn's mother and would never believe a man when he grandmother talked in the kitchen . told her he loved her. "No way," she Both of them large women, they said. "I'm not having no baby. Uh-uh." laughed with their hands down over their knees, stumbling around the room. At one point they were out of M y first VISlt with Evelyn was m view, a nd I realized I couldn't March of my freshman year. When I understand w h at they were saying. called the next week, he r mother Their voices had grown thick with

I smiled thinking about the faces, thinking I knew them .

The New JournaVApril 17, 1987 9

southern dialect, and only bits and pieces came through. For the most part, they spoke so quickly the ends of their sentences trailed off in low, barely audible words. I kept thinking they were talking to me, and not wanting to ignore them I jumped up three times. Finally, they came into the living room. Evelyn's grandmother stuck out her hand to meet me, then swept me up i!1 a hug. She was sending Evelyn and me on an errand to buy a lottery ticket , buttermilk, and snuff. I thought for a second, remembering snuff from a song, but unable to picture it at the market.

We started at the liquor store to buy the lottery ticket. Evelyn's grandmother had already picked a number as she did every day, so far without success. Ticket in hand, we went to the Congress Supermarket, a large store with selections of Spanish dishes in addition to the usual foods. In the refrigerated section tucked in the back was our buttermilk. Before leaving, we spent another ten minutes helping a woman find a stick of lard for frying. She looked bored and tired, but her face brightened at the sight of Evelyn. Somehow we just couldn't find the lard, and with Evelyn holding her arm to steady her, the woman laughed at

the shelves of food, in some way very funny then, every row like a h ead shaking no, the lard isn't here. We finally found it and went to buy the snuff. Going into the next store was like entering a cave. Only a faint light was on, and we weaved past the figures of several men standing around the room, their eyes trailing Evelyn. She bought the snuff, and I was glad to leave there and go home. We walked up to the side of her grandmother's house, and two wrinkled hands reached out from th e basement window. I felt like part of a secret tran saction as the hands quickly pulled in the, _good s. T hen they pulled

5\ ~~~

10 The New Journal/April 17 , 1987

in my own hands. "Susan, for Thanksgiving what're you thinking to do? I got the whole room h ere, only for myself, and you come eat with us if you want. You can see how much room I got." By the time I came back to Yale this past fall, Evelyn, her family and I openly expressed our affection. I loved calling when Evelyn answered the phone because her greeting would change at the souno of my voice. Hello, she would repeat, but with a squeal. Her mother hugged me when I came over, her arms wrapped around me as she laughed. She would ask me to watch her kids while she went to the store, or she would send me to the store instead. Now she didn't apologize for the clutter, the ripped housedress she was wearing. One afternoon as I was leaving she put her hands on my shoulders for a few seconds, and her eyes-often darting from the front door to a child crying to something cooking on the stove- momentarily became calm and looked directly at me. She tightened her g rip o n my shoulders. "You two, you been good girls," she said. This year, Evelyn talked less about school and more about boyfriends. During our first visit in September, we sat in the Chapel Square Mall for two hours drinking cokes. She told me about Bobby , the first to break her heart. "All of a sudden he didn't call, and m y homegirl, right, she said she seen him with this other girl, only I knew he didn't love her 'cause he loved me, right. And lhen that same girl I heard from someone else he was with her again , and I heard this one night he was at my homegirl's house, on her porch, right, and I went there and he said Evelyn I guess maybe you want your chains back and I said well, Bobby when did I ever say that, right, and he took them off his neck and I just couldn't even look at him then , Susan, I just couldn't look , and I went home and no one was there and the phone rang but I didn't get up, and then I

â&#x20AC;˘ took a bath, Susan, for a long time. My homegirl called a nd wanted to come over but I said no, and Susan I picked up them chains, right, in my bed, and well, he had this wavy kind of hair with oil on it, and the chains smelled like the oil being around his neck, and I just pulled them up to my face, and I smelled him Susan, oh my god I cried and cried. And now, I just don't know, I don't know, 'cause we never stopped loving each other, Susan." Despite her sadness over Bobby, Evelyn still smiled as she talked, and she giggled over the question of whether or not I had grown over the summer. I was shocked a few weeks later when her mother told me she had run away from home . The news made me feel franticalJy worried about her safety and whereabouts. In all our talks, she had given no hint that she was ever considerin~ leaving home. And I could only wonder what made her leave, what forces I knew nothing about. Âˇsince October, Evelyn h;tS <.:orne home for a short period , then gone to live with another boyfriend . I still call and leave messages that her

mother promises to relay. Last month marked two years since first met Evelyn. I keep remembering what happened when I left her that first day. It was a Sunday, and I waited at the bus stop looking at the buildings in the g rowing darkness, the shadows and the handwritten words on the church door beside .me, "Sunday service, all welcome 6:00." People started trickling in. I received a nod or two as families walked into church, some followed by a man or woman a lone, a straggler summoned at the door. Immediately, I felt more at home in the neighborhood. As voices began a hymn, I smiled thinking about the faces, thinking I knew them. But a few minutes later, it occurred to me what I must have looked like from a distance. from down the street, my body leaning against the church door. An emptiness replaced my smile, a feeling that could only have been one thing, longing for home.

Susan Orenstein, a junior in Trumbull, managing ediwr of TN]. Evelyn is a pseudonym.

The New Journal/April 17, 1987 I I

12 The NewJournal/April17, 1987

Art and artists: Mary Barnett, Sandra Kopell and Judi th Phelps reh ea r se in the Sculpture Garden for National Museum Day.

Leaps and Bounds Skye Wilson

"I don't know what the hell I'm doing when I go into rehearsal. I just have the faith that it will come to m e."

When the Chapel Square Mall reopened in 1984, choreographer Sandra Kopell performed a special dedication. "Two shopping nymphs danced around the fountain," she explains. "Thf' soundtrack was Muzak, and we threw money and were burdened by oversized credit cards. We also danced on the escalator as part of the performance. L ooking back. r wish I had done an entire piece on the escalator." Th~: dance took place at the bcginning of Kopell's career as a New Ha,·~·n artist. Two years later she met \.-1ary Ramett and .Judith P helps. also mod~·rn clancc. choreographers. and the thn·e women began to work together to create claoK~·s and en~nts at which to perform tht·m. Tht•ir first efforts have paid off. as laq(t'r crowds attend their pl"rfonnances. The n·sult. clann·rs agn·~·. is <• resurgcm·e of community intt'l"t·~t in an art that has attraned littk support for the past ten years, since New Haven's dance scene went into decline. But as yet, this renewed interest has not generated broad-based

community support or the k ind of financial backing necessary to sustain a sizeable dance movement. The idea of modern dance elicits shrugs of ignorance from many people who think of all dance as ballet, and grimaces from others who view modern as too surreal, too cerebral, o r just too weird. Through audience education and greater exposure, Barnett, Kopell, and Phelps hope to make their work more accepted and to smooth · the way for other choreographers. According to Kopell, the modern dance scene had dwindled d rastically ,.,•hen she arri\'ed in New H aven from New York four years ago. Government cutbacks had eliminated the three main companies and schools, and many choreographers had left for New York, at that time considered the center for modern dance. K opell organized several projects herself, such as a dance marathon for the New Ha,·en- Leon, Nicaragua Sister City Project. but the major turnaround did not occur until last year when Tht•

:-.lew JournaVApril

17, 1987 13

- eyes when I was three years old. I t's obviously something I don't remember, but it made me think of surgery as a metaphor for opening. On ! one hand it could be bloody, but it also j could be the most intimate thing," she :; says. The choreography for this piece ~ calls for three dancers, one ladder, one ~ poet on top of the ladder, and one man :z: in an armchair reading the fluorescent pink, yellow, and green pages of a newspaper. The dancers take on a steely pose with arms jutting up and legs balancing at right angles to one

~.~ ~~~~:::-~- ~;: ~-~- ~~~ ~

Judith Phelps: turning abstract ideas into specific iQlages.

approximately eight local dancers formed a choreographers' workshop. The showcase of resulting work became Dance Gallery, now in its second year. By the second set of performances last January, audiences had grown from family and friends to sell-out crowds totalling more than 150 people. The Dance Gallery also brought Barnett, Kopell, and Phelps together. In rehearsal for a work Kopell has choreographed for the Yale Art Gallery's National Museum Day on May 16 and 1 7, the three display individual styles that clearly distinguish modern dance from ballet. Layers of leotards, tights, parachute pants, and t-shirts cover bodies that are solid and muscular, not emaciated. The dancers' feet, not clad in toeshoes,. remain bare. Kopell explores each movement of her dance with the detachment of a painter evaluating her brush strokes. The other dancers provide a study in contrasts: Barnett moves energetically, like an enthusiastic child, while Phelps 14 The New JournaVApril 17, 1987

appears implacably self-assured. Kopell beats two sticks together to provide rhythm as the dancers run through the piece again and again. Occasionally she gives instructions, always on the beat. "And keep breathing," she prompts. "And a gallop, hop, brush. Nice!" The dancers finish by bumping into a studio wall. In the studio, the dancers work without outside commentary. Once on stage, their monologue becomes a shared conversation, in which the audience may participate with applause or with silence. "Sometimes I worry about getting too artsy," Kopell admits. Nevertheless, she feels that inexperienced viewers need not understand the message of a dance to appreciate the movement. Modern choreographers usually do not have a linear story in mind when they compose; they select images to evoke an emotional reaction. For example, a poem Barnett wrote in college entitled "Going Under," dealing with a childhood operation, sparked one of her works for Dance Gallery. "I had surgery on my

For a piece Kopell performed in Dance Gallery, sheÂˇ played the White Rock girl, while Barnett portrayed the M _o rton Salt trademark.

another. P erched upon the ladder, the poet recites "Going Under" and then descends to join the dancers. Toward the end of the piece, the man in the armchair rolls off into the wings. Obviously, Barnett does not make each movement a symbol for her ~etaphor once she begins to create a dance. "I don't set out with a plan necessarily, or an idea that I want to express. I'm not contemplating my navel. I don't know what the hell I'm doing when I go into rehearsal. I just have the faith that it will come to me," she says. Phelps relies on a somewhat more methodical procedure: she takes an abstract idea such as "how objects come together" and redirects it into a specific image. That particular idea evolved into a dance called "Merging" based on the movement of large

knitting needles; she and Barnett knot themselves up in a giant white rope. Kopell relies on more visual stimuli to inspire her choreography. Formerly a full-time graphic designer and illustrator, she often uses artistic or commercial icons to convey her message . "I really enjoy taking still images and making them move. I t's kind of like connect-the-dots," she says. For a piece K opell performed in D ance Gallery, she played the White R ock girl while Barnett portrayed the Morton Salt trademark. T hey demonstrated supermarket folk dances as a professor "lectured" on shopping rituals . More recently, K opell has moved from the shopping aisles to the art gallery halls, with pieces based on two paintings by Matisse and on the H enry M oore woman in the Sculpture Garden. The latter dance's message, she says, is more abstruse than those of her previous works, moving away from the satirical edge that character ized many of her earlie r pieces. Kopell's recent work, along with that of Barnett and Phelps, may still scare off viewers who a re more comfortable with images and stories they can readily identify. "The re's a difference between art and entertainment. If you don't have to bring part of yourself to the performance, the n you're looking at the Rockettes," she says. But to help

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audience members feel more comfortable w ith this art medium, Phelps hopes to begin a series of informal dance p resentations with Barnett and KopeU, followed by question-andanswer sessions. For now, though, the choreographers rely on wor~-of-mouth to engage people's interest. Each of the women, however, criticizes Yale for not helping to provide an educated audience. Yale, New Haven's most far-ranging cultural center and most influential corporation, does not provide any significant support, financial or otherwi~e. to dance. "Yale just doesn't respect dance or cultivate it. Dance history is a great anthropological tool ,'' Kopel! says. According to Kopell, both Wesleyan University in Middletown and Trinity College in Hartford have several dance courses within their regular curriculum. These colleges also bring in outside performers. In contrast, Yale's only dance offerings consist of a modern composition college seminar, taught every fall by instructor Barbara Feldman , and informal, non-credit

physical education classes at the gym. Feldman points out that Yale has inadequate space for dance, and therefore cannot invite outside companies to perform on-campus. New Haven also faces the typical small-city struggles in finding enough dancers and enough funds for classes and performances. Phelps often must act as businesswoman as well as dancer and choreographer. At the beginning of one class she sat by the door with a list of dancers, accosting them as they walked into the studio. She needed to collect money from at least 15 people to hire a new teacher. By the end of the class, not enough dancers had contributed to ensure that the teacher would take the job. In a world with no stable financial backing, salaries are paid up front. In additi~m, male dancers are in short supply. An average class of 20 people includes o nly two or three men; one of these may dance with a local company, which restricts him from working for other choreographers. "Dance in America is considered a

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feminine art form, and men may think . that only women can get involved. If they don't receive some exposure to dance in college, it can be ~hat much scarier to take a class," Barnett comments. Recognizing the difficulties faced by both men and women in the profession, Kopell adds, "I think everyone in the dance world is frustrated in some way. But if you want to do it badly enough, you do it where you are and work with what you have." Despite their frustrations, these women will continue to choreograph and dance. In a largely uninitiated community, exposing audiences to dance will also remain a high priority. Given the intensity with which Barnett, Kopell and Phelps work, they should succeed in revitalizing the New Haven modern dance scene. But even if they fail, if audiences reject poets on ladders and white ropes, it won't really matter. "I am obsessed with dance. I don't find anything else as satisfying," K opell says. "I just can't wait to get into the studio."

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Skye Wilson, a sophomore in Calhoun, is on the staff ofTNJ . The New j ournal/April 17, 1987 17

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18 The New JournaVApril 17, 1987

A Passion Preserved Hugh Kennedy Anyone who settles down to an afternoon of research in Sterling knows the maddening frustration of turning up six catalog cards in a row marked "Mudd Library." The thought of traveling half a mile up Prospect Street makes any books listed there seem a little less desirable. But a Yale library even further away than Mudd proves that traveling does have its rewards. Just over 40 miles outside of New Haven in Farmington, CT, the Lewis Walpole maintains a rich collection of eighteenth-century books, prints and artifacts. It suffers only from a lack of patronage; after decades of informal and eight years of formal operation, it

has not become the center for British Studies it deserves to be. Short of rolling the house and library all the way to College Street, the librarians at the Lewis Walpole have made every effort to entice senior essay writers and Ph.D. scholars from Yale and beyond. Needless to say, no one fights over appointments. In fact, staff members eagerly pick patrons up at the nearest railway station, and every researcher using the Walpole is assigned their own personal librarian. For long-term projects, there are lavish sleeping quarters available (which beats falling asleep in the stacks). And anyone who does arrive at the grounds

is sure to feel a thrill of imperialist pleasure, for the Walpole is truly a cultural find. Part library and museum of the English eighteenth century, part residence and a good part reliquary, the Lewis Walpole Library of Yale University demurely sits at 154 Main Street in Farmington, about an hour from New Haven. There are no weenie bins, circulation desks or water fountains, but there are halls doubling as portrait galleries, overstuffed leather chairs and tea with chocolate biscuits served promptly at 3:30 on weekdays. If J. Press and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum joined forces to become a The NewJournaVApril17, 1987 19

library, they would create something like the Lewis Walpole. Marie Devine, the librarian, greets dissertation writers and visitors alike at the entry to the Side Hall of the building. Something about her chatty enjoyment of an arrival reminds you of entering your own aunt's house- or perhaps Charlotte Bronte's. Flicking off a bedroom light switch in the Hall she chuckles warmly , "I swear there's a ghost in here. Someone's been turning on all the little lights." A visitor who has just stepped out of rural ~orthern Connecticut into a chilly 200-year-old Anglophile building may respond tentatively to such a welcome. But as Devine begins to outline the history of the Lewis Walpole to visitors, her enthusiasm about the place becomes infectious. Because the Lewis Walpole Library served until very recently as a serious collector's home as well as a research center, visits properly begin with a tour. A good start might be an excursion through the minds of two men, because no one named Lewis Walpole ever existed. In fact, the library's title combines the names of the owner of the house, Wilmarth Sheldon "Lefty" Lewis, (1895-1979, Yale '18), and the great English social chronicler Horace Walpole, (1717-1797), whose life and

20 The New J o urnal/April 17. 1987

letters became Lewis' passion. A look into the meticulous efforts with which Lewis followed his hero- he compiled a record of everything Walpole did every day for a 60-year period- gives the compound name Lewis Walpole new meaning. In day-to-day life Wilmarth Lewis was known to everyone as "Lefty," but in other ways he began to blur with a man born 200 years before him. Horace Walpole, whose effigy .appears on walls throughout the house, is best known as the writer who unleashed the first Gothic romance, The Castle of Otranto, on the world. As the son of Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister under George I and II, young W a! pole used his Eton and Cambridge education not to pursue parliament or the military life but to pursue an early retirement from public life, writing and establishing his own printingÂˇpress at his Twickenham villa, Strawberry Hill. He also developed friendships with contemporary socialites like Lady Louisa Stuart and the bluestocking Hannah More, and left behind over 7,000 letters from a lifetime of correspondence. His estate, now St. Mary's College at Strawberry Hill, still serves the academic world, but over two-thirds of the books and letters Walpole owned and wrote now reside in "Lefty" Lewis'Âˇ home. Lewis, like Walpole, came from a pampered background and actively pursued civic affairs throughout his life. After earning an undergraduate degree at the Thatcher School and a graduate degree from Yale, he went on to become a senior member of the Yale Corporation and a fellow of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Literature. His central passion, however, lay elsewhere. Retiring to pursue the pleasures of inherited wealth at the ripe age of 26, Lewis discovered some lively Louisa Stuart notes in a volume of John Heneage Jesse ' s George Selwyn and his Contemporaries that he purchased in London. While tracking Stuart's name, Lewis found her favorably

compared to an "inimitable gossip" named Horace Walpole. Very soon afterwards he discovered that Walpole references in.eighteenth century letters were like capillaries leading back to a heart. Apparently, this man had either seen or heard about every social, medical, or political happening of the day and had described it to someone in intimate detail. Not long after this discovery, Lewis bought his first Horace Walpole letter. Lewis' initial interest in' Walpole's letters grew to an obsession that filled his days and emptied his coffers. He used his and his wife Annie Burr Auchincloss's considerable fortune to track down and buy any Walpole work, Strawberry Hill press book or fragment of Walpoliana he could get his hands on. What he couldn't buy he bartered for with the major libraries of the country. For over 50 years Lewis headed the committee that edited and published the monstrous 48-volume Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence. His death prevented him from witnessing the publication of the last volumes in 1983, but by the late seventies he had amassed more information about Horace Walpole than one person has probably amassed about anyone. Right up to his death in 1979, Lewis encouraged scholars to visit and work with him. His house and its nine separate libraries, totalling 30,000 books and 37,000 prints, all relate to Walpole in the eighteenth century- or as Lewis and many other scholars have contended, vyalpole as

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~~~itfS the eigh teenth century. From the entrance hall lantern taken from T wickenham that hangs in the East Library to the precisely im itative a rrangement of Walpole's own manuscripts and letters in the North Library, the Lewis Walpole appears as bent on its own brand of authen tic restoration as Plymouth Plantation or a 1: 1 scale map out of Borges' Labyrinths. I n fact, "Borges would have loved th is place," Marie Devine laughs, standing below a print of Walpole's library that dictates one area of shelf order. Sometimes, Lewis attempted more than mere duplication. Near the en d of the Long Hall, for example, an imposing black door is built into the wall. A bronze 1.1 is screwed into it at chest level. "Walpole had a residence at 11 Berkeley Square," Devine explains, drawing out a weathered photograph of London and pointing to a facade with a black door. "Mr. Lewis rescued it when the house was being torn down in the 30's." . She adds that in Lewis' la~er years,

former librarian Catherine Jest in often wheedled him into dropping his own harsh notes to fellow colleagues and critics into the letter slot of the Walpole door. It seems logical that the same man who laid out Walpole's paintings, furniture and bool<s just as Walpole might have wanted would drop his own letters through Walpole's former front door. Lefty Lewis' print collection reveals that he developed some of Walpole's other tastes, too. Joan Sussler, Curator of Prints at the Lewis Walpole, works out of a large, recessed space that was until recently a squash court in Lewis' house. I n her position she oversees the largest collection of Hogarth p rints- some of Walpole's favorites - outside of England (over 700) and collections of major caricature artists of the day such as Henry Bunbury and T homas Patch. The system of indexing by date, title, artist, engraver, publisher and subject matter developed by Lewis' wife makes cross-referencing extremely smooth. "For instance," she says, indicating a print of an

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eighteenth century dinner p a rty, "I can find at least 30 prints with referen ces to corkscrews in them." Using the system, she can look up visual data on anything else from curtains to chimney sweeps in the library's prints. I n the print room she and Devine haul out a g igantic three by two foot volume of H ogarth prints. "It's an elephant folio," she laughs, "that's all I can say." Turning through the .prints she explains how the original H ogarth collector George Steevens lined them up in various states and editions to make comparison easier. She p auses at a page showing the infamous English murderess Sarah Malcolm in a dozen printed states of the same pose. After the prints she produces a true piece de resistance, an actual copper plate of Hogarth's famous satire "The Sleeping Congregation" used to press out copies. The bookseller's 1967Âˇ price still affixed to the back momentarily distracts her. "Ninety pounds," she says with pride. Apparently , Mr. Lewis had not only a collector's enthusiasm , but an eye for a good

bargain as well. While the print room and much of the Lewis Walpole exclusively reflects Walpole's character, the New Library gives both men expression. P aintings of W alpole and his relatives hang from the walls, while a framed photograph of Lewis meeting with his cousin John F. K ennedy sits on a low table. There are two eight-foot cast-iron lanterns from Strawberry Hill at the arched entryway, and shelves of eighteenthcentury literature next to twentiethcentury critical volumes. Walpole's prized objects, such as a lacquered wooden box a ccented with W edgwood and lapis lazuli that he had built to hold a friend's drawings, sta nd beside Lewis' favorite leather chairs and desks. The 1 $ense of wholeness the books, furniture , o bjects and space produce could not be more strategic or more natural. . If the Walpole visitor. tires after hours of gawking, walking o r researching, the staff prepares tea in the white, sunlit kitchen at 3 :30. More often than not , the four wom_e n take

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the NEW MUSEUM SHOP this tea alone. Tourists make up the majority of visitors, and almost all research questions are handled by phone or through the mail. The last patron using the library for long-term research left late in 1986. Though Devine has only been at Yale for a few months, she is already surprised at how few faculty members use it. "Jacqueline Kennedy, Mr. Lewis' niece by marriage, used to drop around ," she says casuaJly. The allusion brings up the subject of friendly relations with the nearby Miss Porters school, where the First Lady once prepped. A senior English class from the school reading Walpole's The Castle of Otranto has been through on a tour recently. Otherwise, the cold months tend to be the slowest. Even without regular visitors, D evine contents herself with keeping the Wa.Jpole presentable to company. Fully absorbed in her surroundings, she sighs, "The beauty is just lovely." In fact, her words make sense applied to the Lewis Walpole, whose namesakes balance and complement one another. Everywhere Lewis and his staff have recreated the pleasures of the contemplative and epistolary life H orace Walpole led. The added dimension of Lefty Lewis' effects only doubles that sense. Both library and librarian are ready for as many visitors as time will permit. Lefty Lewis' own invitation to "come and have a Walpole wallow" still echoes in the halls.

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The Course of Neglect James Bennet "It's your education, how do you want me to spend the 15 hours? Shall I grade your midterms this week, or shall we discuss the reading?"

24 The New Journal/April 17, 1987

"We n eed a name. I've been referring to us as the TA Action Group." It is 8:30 on Thursday night in Machine City, and the meeting has just started. Laughter of students sitting at distant tables mixes with the sporadic chatter of the change machine, drifting to the round table in the back where four angry teaching assistants sit waiting for their colleagues and thinking of a name. "TAs for a better Yale, we could call ourselves." "But we need a good acronym- you know, like POOR." "Let's use some Middle Eastern imagery. Let's call ourselves the Graduate Student United Front." The woman pauses, grinnmg. "Or the Arm nf God."

Now three other graduate students arrive and the selection of a name is put on hold. One woman draws a xeroxed circular from her knapsack and scatters copies around the table. After discussing the letter, the others agree to distribute it to all graduate students. "Don't WannaBe Your Beast Of Burden," the text proclaims. "TAs say 'No More Exploitation.'" It goes on to describe the two concerns which unite the members of the group: low salaries and the lack ofjob descriptions to standardize the levels of teaching assistants (TAs) throughout Yale's departments. Individually; many TAs complain about each of these issues; the members of this nameless group believe that they can unite their peers to address both .

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Two weeks later, on April 8, the same seven TAs have again gathered in Machine City. They now have a name: the TA Solidarity Group. And they also have company. Eighteen graduate students and one representative of Local 34 cluster around the table,Âˇ drawing curious glances from undergraduates . The mood has changed. Gone are the joking and the casual digressions of the first meeting. Other than the original seven, most seem not to know each other. Common experience and common anger have brought them together in Machine City. If no one addresses their concerns, common frustration may bring them to the picket lines. The group began building slowly last

fall. Rhonda Lieberman (GRD '90) and Anna Blume (GRD '90) met with Yale administrators last semester to complain about the TA system. Through the Committee on the Graduate School, an advisory committee to the graduate deans, they persuaded the Graduate School to distribute a questionnaire to all TAs at the beginning of April. The letter to the administration accompanying the survey warned, "A spectre is haunting Yale-the spectre of TA solidarity." Feeling that the administration would not go far enough in changing the system, Lieberman and Blume turned to other TAs to build a collective voice. Lieberman says that the graduate students they have contacted responded enthusiastically. "People were

so relieved to find out that others were in dire straits financially. They just thought they had been given a raw deal as individuals." The TAs found that they share other criticisms. Yale, they say, provides them with no job descriptions, no job training, no explanation for their pay, and nowhere to take their complaints. Some TAs say that feeling exploited leads them to resent their undergraduate students, who they say are the University's priority. More frequently, TAs refer affectionately to their "kids" and worry that poor pay and long hours prevent them from teaching effectively. Proud of encouraging contact between undergraduates and faculty, Yale's administrators have resisted expansion of the TA system. Before The New Journal/April 17, 1987 25

Rhonda Lieberman (GR D '90): being a graduate student at Yale is l ike "being a townie at a resort."

1972, when the University provided most graduate students full fellowshtps covering tuition and living expenses, assisting a professor in the College was considered a privilege; TAs earned an honorarium of S300 a semester. But as fellowship funds shrank in the late '60s and early '70s, Yale began encouraging graduate students to work in the College to support themselves. And the number of 1'As grew. The Humanities and Social Sciences now offer their students stipends of varying amounts to cover living expenses for the first 2 years. after which they expect them to teach. Last year, 967 graduate students worked one or two semesters as TAs, filling 1521 teaching appointments. According to Robert Bunselmeyer, associate dean of the Graduate School, "I think it's true that Yale, having started from an honorarium system, has a bit of historical drag." The TA system has not matured as the number of TAs has grown, and it has no mechanism to set matters right. The Provost's office, which finances 26 Th~ Ne"' journal/April 17. 1987

the TA program, has no standing committee to receive and evaluate complaints. The Graduate School, to which many TAs turn for help, has no power to address their problems. Though the group gathered in Sterling does not have a formal hierarchy, Yvette Huginnie (GRD '89) has taken control of the meeting, tapping her Bic pen against an open palm to emphasize her points. When her stipend dried up after two years, Hug innie became a TA to support herself. Taking a job that interrupted her studies and reduced her income by S1000, she found that her generous educator could be an exacting employer. "I feel I was in some way decei,Âˇed, because the)' told me I could support myself teaching and that's just not true.~ The Provost's office divides teaching fellows into four levels determined by the number of hours a semester they work. According to this year's scale, a Teaching Fellow 1, such as a grader for a large lecture class, works 75 hours a semester and earns S850, a TF2 works 150 hours for S1700, and so on. Now

in her third semester as a TF3- the most common T A gradationHuginnie earns $2550 from Yale per term. She scoffs at the Provost's esti~ate that a TF3 should work approximately 15 hours each week. Attending lectures, meetin g with the professor, preparing for her sections-with a combined enrollment of 31 students-leading discusssion, and providing office hours, she estimates that she spends at least 20 hours a week as a TA. Since the course requires a five-page paper, a midterm, a 15-page paper, and a final, four weeks this semester she will work considerably longer than that, grading her students' written work. "And for that, I'm paid $510 a month. Which after taxes is $460." She laughs bitterly. "I know this." This year, the Graduate School set its "budget standard"- the cost of living for a single person in New Haven for nine months- at $7785. A TF3 , working both terms, can earn only $5100. To ease this $2600 deficit, Huginnie has taken a second job, working at Beinecke Library 10 to 12 hours each week. But she still finds herself in a predicament shared by many of her peers: accumulating a large loan debt (in her case, $13,000) and looking ahead to a career in academia, where salaries can support few interest payments. Since he became dean of the Graduate School last July, Jerome Pollitt has been trying to address graduate students' complaints about the TA system. "I would say the biggest challenge of my deanship is to try to bring some order and regularity and fairness into the Teaching Fellow program." A slim man with thinning reddish blond hair and a soft, clear voice, he sits in his office in HGS, spring sunshine spilling through the large bay windows. " I tried to persuade the Provost [William Nordhaus) 10 form a heavy-weight Provostial committee to deal with this question," he says. Though denied this request, he convinced Nordhaus to allow him to establish an informal committee 10 examine the system. Th.e Provost's

Sushi, Sashimi, Tempura Lunch and Dinner 7 Days a Week office, which controls the funds for the TA program, directed the Pollitt Committee to pursu e only administrative issues and to make no recommendations on salaries. But the committee is examining pay scales at other universities and plans to report its findings. Isn't that tantamount to making recommendations on salaries? P ollitt smiles slightly. "There will be no formal recommendation. I mean, we're certainly not going to keep the results of our inquiry secret." H e suspects that Yale will have to raise its TA salaries to be fair and to remain competitive in attracting students. The TAs claim Pollitt will discover

that H arvard's TA salaries exceed Yale's by 75 percent. Though differences in the universities' job descriptions hinder com parisons, close approximations m ay be drawn. According to H arvard's teaching fellow coordinator-, Marilyn Larner, a "two-fifths" puts in 20 hours a week handling two sections and therefore would roughly correlate with Yale's TF3. At H arvard, two-fifths this year earn $8920. According to Bunselmeyer, -who is assisting P ollitt in examining the TA system, third and fourth year students at Harvard pay a 'low tuition' of $2,800, while those at Yale generally pay non e. Apparently,

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then, Harvard's two-fifths net about 20 percent more from their salaries than do Yale's TF3s. Huginnie feels that Yale will never pay TAs what they are worth, but argues that it should pay them at least enough to live on. "In that way, the undergraduates will get their education . .They won't have section leaders who are underpaid, overworked-" she leans forward, her voice dropping"resentful. And Yale will get their doctoral candidates out." Huginnie seems to regard direct action as the TAs' most effective weapon. "As it is now," she says, "every graduate student is donating a considerable amount of money to Yale by working 20 hours a week. I think there's a lot of rc:Jom in there to push some buttons." If Yale pays her for only 15 hours a week, she argues, she could ask her students, "It's your education, how do you want me to spend the 15 hours? Shall I grade your midterms this week, or shall we discuss the reading?" Not all the students sitting around the table in Machine City share Huginnie's enthusiasm for using a confrontational approach. A student

brings up the possibility, and vigorous argument breaks out. When one of the group's newer members suggests that they first try to use the official University channels, a woman seated across from him sharply replies, "They're exhausted." A .gentler voice intervenes: "We should at least wait on the Pollitt Committee." Throughout the meeting, Ray Lurie QE '80, GRD '88) has been the voice of mod~ration. Now in his fifth year in Renaissance Studies, Lurie has taught sections eight times in the College. As chairman of the Committee on the Graduate School, he has been obsessively examining theTA system for a year. On the fifth floor of the Sterling stacks, Lurie sits in the office of his second job, in the St. Thomas More Project, describing the inequities he has found in the TA system. Each spring, when the Provost's Âˇ office notifies departments of their annual allotment for TA salaries, it encloses a memo to department Âˇ chairmen distinguishing among the four different TA levels. But because this memo emphasizes distinctions based on the ambiguous index of number of hours

Associate Provost Charles Long: "There's a lot of misunderstanding out there."

28 The New Journal/ April 17 , 1987

worked, providing only three sketchy models for the types of responsibilities TAs perform at different levels, it leaves each department great freedom for interpretation. As a result, says Lurie, "Every department has become its own fiefdom." The workload ofTAs at the same level varies strikingly by department. TAs in the Art History department reported earning TF2 wages for working 20 hours a week . TF3s in Philosophy and History teach two sections; those in English, one. Additionally, English T As can earn an extra $150 a term by splitting their sections in half. Lurie leans back, waving his hands in exasperation. "I, in the English department, am getting paid more to T A half the number of students of most of the people I know in History." Associate Provost Charles Long, who wrote the present guidelines, says that "There's a lot of m isunderstanding out there, which is surprising." Though he feels that Yale could never achieve a perfectly equitable system, he insists, "The last thing we would want to do is knowingly and intentionally exploit the graduate students." As a member of the Pollitt Committee, Long will help come up with more descriptive examples of typical TA duties to encourage departments to standardize their appointments. At present, the College maintains a contingency fund to upgrade salaries of TAs who it determines should be higher on the wage scale. But because Yale does not provide its TAs with job descriptions, many graduate students seem unaware both of the pay and hours sc!J.les. According to one TA who understood the system and had her salary raised, "Once you can address them on that basis- that you're being underpaid on their terms- then they're very responsive. But there are very few people who know how to do that." According to Long, the contingency fund would not suffice were many TAs at a certain level in one department to demand raises. But, he points out, there exist other 'Yays to redress inequities. For example, professors could reduce their cours~ require-

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ments: "It would surprise me if there weren't courses out there which could fruitfully, usefully, responsibly reduce the amount of writing they require from students." In addition, he says, p rofessors could test their students with exams based on short-answer questions, which require less time to grade than essays. But this action might come dangerously close to replacing the undergraduates' academic needs with the University's economic ones. Long argues that TAs should not have to spend much time preparing for section. TAs, he says, should have read the course material at some point during their undergraduate or graduate careers; having to read it now may indicate that they are not knowledgeable in the field. But many TAs felt that if they did not reread an assigned book they would be shortchanging their students. One English TA reacted indignantly to the suggestion that he should already know the material. "I couldn't possibly teach something that I hadn't read that week. It would be irresponsible." Sometimes, however, students do not have a strong background in the courses they teach. Frequently, these are students in the so-called "special programs"- Medieval Studies , Renaissance Studies and Comparative Literature. Because these small departments do not have counterparts in the College, their students must apply to other departments for jobs. And in defiance of the Provost's regulations, many departments

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discriminate in favor of their own students. English, for example, denies appointments to only 12 percent of applicants from within the department, but to 79 percent from without. Jonathan Friedman, associate director of undergraduate studies for English, says that his department discriminates because the demand for teaching jobs exceeds its number of available appointments. He argues that English students, training to teach English literature, need relevant experience. In addition , he says, English students would not be qualified to teach outside the department. This issue sparked Lur ie's interest in theTA system. As a student in R e naissance Studies, he has had to struggle for appointments in English. Now a TA for an undergraduate course in Shakespeare, he says that the English department passed over many of his peers, instead selecting less qualified students from among its own. "So you have modernists TAing Shakespeare because they have their pick of the crop, since they're in the English department, and people who work in Late Medieval or Renaissance literature, who end up in modern had a choice:

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30 The New Journal/April 17. 1987

literature because they get the detritus." A general oversight committee, Lurie feels, would erase these problems. It might also correct problems resulting from the cumbersome bureaucracy. It seems that every TA, at some point, has had to fight at least once for a paycheck; one was not paid until two years after he completed the job. Other graduate students report even more frustrating encounters with theTA program's administration. Because of one such encoun ter, Lisa Jepson (GRD '89) joined TA Solidarity. Sitting in a Naples booth, she speaks quietly, her clipped speech revealing her anger as she recalls losing her TA position. Jepson began teaching a section of Italian 115 last semester. Beginning her second year in the I tali an department, Jepson was still collecting her stipend. That stipend, combined with her salary as a TF4, raised her income over the Graduate School's budget standard. Students receiving support may not earn more than the budget standard without having their stipends cut, to e nsure that the Graduate School fairly distributes financial aid. In this case, however, the rule ensured only that the Italian department lost a needed teacher. When she returned this semester, Jepson learned that she could not collect both her salary and her stipend. Rather than teach for free , she quit, leaving her students to hunt for another section. Yet graduate students frequently exceed the income limit without being penalized. Jepson maintains, "The rules change according to whatever is convenient. for the administration." H owever, what appears so perplexing about Jepson's case is that it would have been more convenient for the administration - in fact , for everyone- to allow her to teach. But the Graduate School administration , happening to find her in violation of a rule, rigidly enforced it. This particular rule may not be around much longer. In his office in HGS, Pollitt tentatively gropes for the words: "rm giving serious consideration to the

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possibility of exempting teaching income from the student budget limit." If Pollitt succeeds in eradicating the income limit, his action will have farreaching effect~. Horror stories abound about departments and professors manipulating Yale's rules or exploiting the vulnerability of graduate students to exact assistance at low or no wages. The income limit lends itself to such abuses. In one small department, two third-year students without jobs or stipends applied to teach a popular course. But the dep;utment passed them over in favor of a secondyear student who was already teaching a language class in addition to collecting a stipend. Anxious to TA the prestigious class, the student accepted the appointment, t.10ugh it would pay her nothing. Instead of ensuring broad distribution of financial aid, the income limit enabled the department to avoid paying a TA. Though he has fond memories of Yale's professors and students, Houchang Chehabi (GRD '86) sees its administrators in another light: "The whole Graduate School bureaucracy is pervaded by a culture of pettiness, narrowness, and lack of imagination." Having worked as a TA for several classes and taught four courses and two college seminars, Chehabi, a Prize Teaching Fellow, applied to teach another college seminar in the spring of '86. Though he had the backing of two colleges and of his department, which was short of junior seminars, the Graduate School administration declared that he had taught too many

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cour ses to be eligible to teach again. But as a fore igner on a student visa, Chehabi could not work outside the UniversitY or qualify for federal loans. I n the end, Yale came through with a loan-at 12 p ercent interest. Now an ass istant professor at Harvard, Cheh abi reports that TAs there earn more and work less. But his biggest complaint about Yale's system does not center on salaries. "It's the treatment," he says. ~One gets no respect." Whether or not Yale's TAs gain that respect will depend largely upon their ability to pull together. The Pollitt Committee may go a long way toward meeting demands for detailed, published job descriptions to standardize the TA system in all d~partments, perhaps by next year. But the Provost's efforts to prevent the committee from examining ·salaries suggest that no major increase in the $2.6 million Teaching Fellow budget is forthcoming. Graduate students may have to force action on that front. The group in Machine City thinks that the T As can do it. "A major fact of life is that we're poor," Lieberman says. This common problem, the group feels, will lead graduate students to act collectively. According to one TA, "People know so little about the system that they just accept things." Once their colleagues awaken to their exploitation, argue members of the group, they will unite and, if necessary, take action. But Pollitt disagrees: "Those people who came to me and said, 'If you don't do something instantly we're going to strike!' I felt were extraordinarily naive." Though the Natural Sciences supplied 374 of the 967 TAs in Yale College last year, the group of wouldbe organizers boasts no representatives from that division of the Graduate School. Job descriptions in terms o f number of hours worked satisfy students in the Natural Sciences. Also, students there receive far more outside funding than students in the Social Sciences and H umanities, and consequently rarely complain about wages.

The organizers face other obstacles. Graduate students communicate very little with one another within departments, and even less within the Graduate School as a whole. Living far apart, these students concentrate on their own work and problems. How many paychecks would they willingly forego? Furthermore, individual financial situations, r~flecting family, University or outside funding, vary widely, weakening any sense of common experience. And graduate students are an extremely vulnerable group; the professors they might estrange by striking are the same people upon whom they depend to further their careers. "The graduate body is ctiv ided," Jepson says. "I t's silent, it's silenced, and it isn't easy to get together and be heard." But TAs have struck before. When Philosophy TAs withheld grades in January, 1972, Yale capitulated almost immediately, doubling their pay. This action sparked wildcat strikes throughout the Gradu11te. School, causing Yale to initiate the_studies that led to today's system. Perhaps the radicalized TAs organizing in Machine City can convince their peers that their individual concerns fit a larger Houcbang Chehabi (GRD '86) says T As at Yale get "no respect."

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scheme. In general, graduate students have heard about the group. And when asked about striking, they react almost u niformly: at first, students chuckle or roll their eyes, perhaps scoff at the idea. T hen they reconsider, and appear startled by their conclusion. One woman paused and then said, as though speaking to herself, "When you think about it, we could really stop things completely." "Is this the meeting of the T A Solidarity Group?" Huginnie looks up and smiles. "Sure is. Take a seat." H uginnie sits at the crowd's center, taking notes as she gathers suggestions on actions the group should take and dividing responsibility for following through. The advisor from Local 34 cuts in frequently, "In January," she says, "there's a possibility of 4000 Yale workers going out on strike. You have to figure out what your relationship to them is going to be." She provides tips on dealing with the Yale Corporation, pressin g the group to take specific actions. "You don't organize by paper," she says. Huginnie runs through the list: posters announcing the &raduate student forum to be held April 21; graduate students at the Corporation breakfasts on Saturday; a deluge of calls to the Graduate School deans and P resident Benno Schmidt with requests for appointments; calls to other graduate students and to sympathetic faculty. There may be p ickets on Class Day. And there may be a strike next year. And there will be another meeting in a week, to prepare for the forum. "Bring a date," calls Huginnie, as the students rise to leave. "Bring someone else who wants to work, or just to listen." Singly and in small groups, the TAs disperse, leaving behind a couple of Coke cups, a few scattered papers, and four lone undergraduates studying intently to the jarring accompaniment of the change machine.

•

} ames Bennet, a junior in Timothy Dwight, is editor-in-chief of TN]. Associate Editor Tom Augst, a senior in Silliman, contributed to this article.

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The Ne w J o urnaVApril 17, 1987 33

On a sunny Monday afternoon in March, only two days after Yale students dt•parted for their spring vacations, Frank Ryan quietly announced his resignation. There was no press conference, just a Simple news release stating that Ryan, director of Y a le Athletics, would step down from the post he has held for the last ten years to a!1,ume new responsibilities at Yale in l' niversity planning and de,·clopment. Two weeks later. with Yale's campus in full s"·•mg again, the ,,,.-ord of Ryan's resignation began to spread. leaving many students and athletes perplexed and curious , questioning the Circumstances of his resignation and ir' bearing on the Athletic Depanmcnr. For almost everyone v' ho ha ~ had a stake in the Athletic D e partment during his tenure

-athletes, coaches,- alumni and stu· dents- Ryan's resignation meant something. For some a disap· pointment, for others a bl~ssing, the end of Ryan's career came as .a surprise to all who have follo~"'ed his administration. Stacked on a chair in Ryan's office are the framed pictures of his past. In one foune sits an aged cover of Sports Illustrated, with a vibrant, youthful portrait of Rxan during his days as quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. His appearance has not changed much since then. Now, at age 50, the grey· haired Rvan still boasts a robust figure. H~ has as strong and staid a presence as his exterior might suggest, speaking carefully, deliberately, with a slight Texas drawl. Ryan'~ years before coming to Yale tell the story of a man

with great capabilities and diverse strengths. As one member of the Faculty Commitee on Athletics pointed out, Ryan embodied the ideal example of the student athlete -capable on the field, accomplished in his academics. Ryan is perhaps best known for his career in professional football, having played quarterback four years for the Los Angeles Rams, seven years for the Cleveland Browns, and two years for the Washington Redski ns. The press lauded R yan when he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Rice University in 1965, six months after he carried the Browns to the 1964 national championship. After his retirement from football in 1970, he became the director of information systems for the U.S. House of

Representatives where he designed their electronic voting system. And then, in 1977, Ryan became Athletic Director at Yale. He will leave that position this July to take up a !lew University post, as Associate Vice President of Institutional Planning, working under Provost William Nordhaus to develop Yale's resources and facilities. Since his resignation as Athletic Director many faculty members and students have questioned the circumstances surrounding his promotion. Because Ryan's second five-year contract would expire in May, a routine review committee headed by former Dean H oward Lamar was appointed to evaluate Ryan and recommend whether or not Yale should renew his contract. R yan accepted the new post

before the committee could make a recommendation. And because studen ts, coaches, and other athletic administrators have leveled criticism against R yan in recent years, some members of the Yale community speculate that his appointment might have been a way to shelter him from a strongly negative evaluation, maintaining both his credibility and that of the Athletic Department. R yan openly concedes that the review influenced his deciscn to move on, but he stresses the importance of other factors, including a desire to become more directly involved in education. "The fact that I was going through a review caused me to think very seriously about a n ew direction," Ryan said. Âˇ "Before the review was completed I had reached the decision The New JournaVApril 17, 1987 35

Department was considered excessive by expanding the number of associate by the administration. And women's athletic directors from three to six, he sports was just beginning to evolve and slowed decision-making and inhibited they were groping for a direction," communication between his adminRyan said. Aside from these problems, istration and athletes. But he he also felt that the morale of the eliminated t400,000 in excess department was extremely low. "There spending fro.u the department's was a lot of resignation that you can't budget and directed over $9 million in win at Yale," he recalled. "Some facility improvements, including the coaches actually told me to my face renovation of Coxe Cage. Ryan also that they thought they just couldn't win made many personnel changes, in both and that their job at Yale was just to the coaching staff and the adminimaintain the program and give the stration, "to eradicate the impression kids good experience. I'm all for that that Yale can't win." The result: in too, but I think they should win their 1982 Yale athletic teams reached a . 500 fair share. winning percentage for the first time in "There was a sense of not really over 25 years. knowing how to control their own "I think those problems have been destiny. It was a terrible state of corrected," Ryan said. "Women's sports affairs," Ryan said. He was hired to have gotten their direction. Men's whip the department into shape- to teams are 'back on the winning ways, improve its otherwise disastrous overall. And I think that this financial state; and to make the teams department, as much as it might object win games. To accomplish these goals, to the rather strong direction I've given Ryan brought his skills of modern it, knows more about its place, where organizational management to the it's goingÂˇand what they needed to do department, enacting a series of to get there." "massive Âˇ budget reductions," !'lnd Few would question that Ryan has generally bringing Yale athletics under strengthened the organizational and firmer financial control. Some criticize financial state of his department. In Ryan for increasing the Athletic that sense, he has been a success. But Department's bureaucracy, saying that the "rather strong direction" he refers to has been a bone of contention for years. In the process of restructuring Yale athletics, Ryan generated mixed feelings, both in and out of the Glory days: Ryan featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated department, ranging from praise to ~ anger to sheer frustration. His critics ~ claim that Ryan has made as many ~ problems as he has improvements in ~ â&#x20AC;˘ the department. ~ At worst, Ryan has been called a :z: cold and insensitive administrator who of sought to maintain a well-oiled machine rather than to meet the human needs and concerns of coaches and athletes. Ryan has also appeared unsympathetic to women's athletics in recent years, most notably through several incidents involving women's gymnastics and volleyball. Those controversial incidents, coupled with numerous complaints of mismanagement from athletes, have become gospel for - critics seeking to

that I didn't want another tenure as Athletic Director." Ryan said that he began thinking about a career change when former President A. Bartlett Giamatti stepped down last year. "I began contemplating the future, without anything specific in mind. I was coming to the end of another term at Yale, and there was the factor of a new administration who often like their own staff." He said he reached his decision to resign in December, after speaking with President Schmidt. "Benno also thought it was a good idea. He agreed that ten years is a long time as Athletic Director, but he also acknowledged that I had a lot of capabilities and was in favor of some other arrangement. I was delighted," Ryan said. Although his new position is far from the realm of athletics, in many ways his responsibilities will not differ from those that he held in the Athletic Department- he will still be dealing with finances. But his new job will not entail the kind of tasks he faced when arriving at Yale ten years ago. At the time of Ryan's appointment, three major problems plagued the Athletic Department. "The men's teams were terribly unsuccessful as a whole. The cost of running the Athletic

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point c.ut Ryan's insensitive and unmoveable stance. Members of the women's gymnastics and volleyball teams perhaps have more to complain about than most athletic teams at Yale. Some members of the women's volleyball team, a successful club sport last year, recounted the difficulties they encountered in trying to gain varsity status for their team, a goal they finally achieved this year. They told tales of bureaucratic mix-ups and of an Athletic Director deaf to their: n eeds and concerns. Some team me.mbers believe Ryan did not accurately represent them to the faculty committee on athletics, which grants varsity status. One member of the team claimed Ryan once told her that volleyball, the second most popular women's sport in the country, was not a "real" sport, but one to be played at picnics. The team finally gained varsity status over the summer because of a growing emphasis on volleyball t~roughout the Ivy League. Women's gymnastics became a focus of controversy last season when its final meet of the '84-'85 year was cancelled due to a bureaucratic mix-up. The athletic adminstration felt that the space allotted for the meet on the gym's eighth floor should be reserved for varsity basketball practices. During the course of negotiations with the rival team's athletic department to relocate or reschedule the competition, the meet fell through entirely. The ad ministration handled the decision to move the meet and all suosequen t

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negotiations without the k nowledge of the Yale gymnastics team or coach. The basketball coaches had not planned a practice for that day, and the incident called into question the .d epartment's priorities, which gave precedence to a men's team's practice over a women's team's competition. ·Members of the women's gymnastics team again. questioned their treatment by the depar:tment when they returned to Yale this fall. After thirteen seasons as a varsity team with a winning percentage of .908, six · Ivy League titles and a 99-10 record, the team dropped from varsity level to Varsity II level, a status entailing less funding and attention from the department. That decision upset many athletes and coaches on both men's and women's teams and caused many athletes to question Ryan's priorities. For some, the gymnastics incidents serve as an example of his alleged insensitivity. Ryan said the team's demotion was based on a policy which dictates that the status of a Yale team reflects the common standards set among all Ivy League teams. If other Ivy League universities treat a given sport as a high priority, Yale will follow suit. Yale looks to Harvard and Princeton in particular for setting standards. Because Princeton dropped their gymnastics team over the summer, leaving only four teams in the Ivy League , the Faculty Committee on Athletics , with Ryan's support , decided that Yale's team did not merit full varsity status. Princeton reinstituted its team this

fall after overwhelmmg student and alumni protest, but Yale's team remains Varsity II and its members fear that such a status will hamper recruitment and prevent the team from competing on a higher level. Yale gymnasts and their supporters argue that because of the team's success over the last ten years, they should not be restricted or measu red by Ivy League standards which they believe they far surpass. ~The Ivy League is Mickey Mouse. Why should we _be confined to inferior teams? Yale should be running its own show and not just lqok at the Ivy League," said one gyinnast. R yan said the demotion should not affect the team. But members feel unsupported by the Athletic Department, and their morale has dragged . "It makes you wonder why you're doing athletics in the first place. You wish you could have an honest relationship but you don't," said one team member about the Athletic Department. The issue of the gymnastics team in many ways exemplifies the problems that arise with many of the criticisms leveled at Ryan. On the one hand, Ryan supports almost all his decisions, whether favorable err unfavorable, with department policies- policies, such as the creation of Varsity II status, which he has a large hand in shaping. And he cnuctzes many of his OFponents for their vague, subjective and often unsubstantiated accusations. "I've sort o f taken that approach right down the line," said R yan. "That is to say , I've wanted to establish an identification for thi~ d epartment, and

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I wanted it to know its boundanes, to stay within those boundaries and yet be terribly successful. The way to give those boundaries shape was to make policies and say 'this is the way we are going to be."' Because of his consistent adherence to policy in making decisions, Ryan often appears out-of-touch with athletics on the student level and indifferent to individual concerns or needs, focusing instead on financial matters. "He has a complete lack of respect for the people he's in charge of. He lost sight that the department was here to serve the students and team athletes, and it got turned around to where you're here to serve the administration ," said one varsity

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40 The NewJoumaVApril17, 1987

R yan criticizes m an y of his opponents for their va gue, subjective and often unsubstantiated accu sations. magazine last year highly critical of Ryan's policies and treatment of women' athletics. Editors of the magazine say they were chastised by some of Ryan's administrators for be!ng too negative. "Most people are afraid tO. speak out, or are made ~o feel disloyal if they do," said one athlete in regard to criticizing Ryan's administration. The door to Frank Ryan's office is almost always open, and he is fond of saying : hat he "maintains an open door policy," willing to communicate with athletes and coaches at all times. But few, if any, of the coaches, studems or ~ven his own associates have been known to take advantage of the offer. In efforts to improve communications with the athletes themselves, Ryan began holding Team Captain Meetings three times each season for athletes to voice their complaints to him directly. "Frank had his ideas and would give you a chance once a year to break his walls down, but it was useless. Meetings were a formality. We weren't working together to come to solutions. We were fighting against him, and that is not the way a relationship between students and [the athletic] administration should be," one varsity team member said. Ryan, on the other hand, said "there is a curious lack of specificity [in those meetings) , a lot of vagueness and a lot of groping." He asserted that people leave those meetings remembering only the negatives. "You just don't hear about the other stuff," Ryan said. "The controversies and the rough edges tend

to get a little higher p r ofile. The n ice things don't. And because I'm at the top of the pyramid the blame tends to r ise up to me. But I think that I bend over backwards to be nice and fair to people." Ryan argued that most of his criticism comes from "a lot of misrepresentation and inflation. You tell me exactly what I need to do to improve the program or improve th e attitude of people in the program and I'll work to that end." R yan believes that he's been sensitive to many pro b lems, both personal and admin istrative, th roughout his ,year s in the department. "Unfortun ately the world doesn't see much of that a~d so they complain and are dismayed at some of the things that h appened," he said. He also believes h e deserves .few if any of the criticisms he has received, criticisms which he feels have been exaggerated. "I was h ired to straigh ten it out, to get. it under control. That b ecame the stamp of my administration. It's hard to do that and at the same time rem ain the n ice fu zzy wuzzy warm uncle," Ryan said. Ryan acknowledges some of th e strain his strict policy decisions have placed on his relations with athletes. "I don't know if I could h ave escaped the problems of having to make massive budget reductions early, o f having to make the personn el changes to eradicate the impression that Yale can't win. I don't know how diplomatic I was. I probably could have done some of those things w ith a little bit more finesse. I've always been sort of an upfront person and I think my approach was rather shocking to a place that had always been rather soft. I don't know if I would have done anything differently. I'm still an upfront person," Ryan said. "My conscience is quite clear." Difficulties arise in assessing Ryan's ten year s at the Athletic Department. In concrete matters, matters of financial stability and w inn ing averages, Ryan can be call.ed a su ccess.

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Ryan said he has maintained "an open door policy" as Athletic Director.

But in the face of discontent and trepidation both in and out of the department, one must ask 'if those developments cost too much. Ryan will assume his new role at Yale come July, a role to which he was perhaps better suited all along. And while Professor Donald Kagan of the Classics department serves as Interim Athletic Director, the search for a replacement .-, ill continue. No one can predict who it will be. But many feel strongly about the kind of person it should be. Ryan hopes Yale will find someone "who can blend fiscal decisions with policy decisions." But for the many athletes and coaches, that quality does not seem to be a concern. They feel the time ha.s come to bring in someone who can take the department in a new direction. With Yale athletics on firmer financial ground than ever before, athletes and coaches hope for a director with new standards, one who, as an athlete put it, "is a little more understanding."

•

Daniel Waterman, a j unior in Ezra Stiles, is associate editor tif TN].

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Books/Biakey Vermeule

Heroic Landscapes Adrienne Rich, Robert Haas, and John : • Juhc Ago<» Hollander have won it. W. H. Auden, l. Above the Land Stephen Vincent Benet, and Archibald l:' MacLeish have judged it. And between 400 ~ and 900 men and women now compete for it § every year. The Yale Series of Younger Poets, ~ the country's oldest "first book" competition, ~ offers a weighty heritage to its winner. ~ Begun by Clarence Day, the brother of 8 Yale University Press Director George Parmlee Day, the contest is now in its eightyecondyear. Anyone under the age of 40 who never had a poetry collection published !Y subTTJit a manuscript; and according to 'harles Grench, acquisitions editor at the ress in charge of the competition, this rocedure generates «a real mixed bag" of tries. "A lot of them are terrible," he oncedes. But the winner's poetry, as onstrated by the impressive list of past ictors, is often superb. In addition to But Julie Agoos' immediate project, as ublishing the winner's collection, .;· the Yale James Merrill says in his introduction niversity Press arranges readings and press to her book, is to challenge her own '!!leases heralding the arrival of the new talent pronouncement that "So much 'n the poetry world. Winning the Younger sensation is unknown." Unknown, or Poets Series can mean the difference between pei'haps undiscovered; and her poems ccess and anonymity in literary circles. dare those insensate hometown places James Merrill, the current judge of the to yield up their secrets. She writes of mpetition, selected Julie Agoos' collection painting over an old chipped railing: bove the Land as this year's winner, and "My arm is a plow, or a circling 'n March the Yale University Press published a irplane./! am giving a grain to goos' book. According to our reviewer, her something soft and fraying." And yet ork could stand alone on its merits. Due to there is nothing mechanical about this good graces of Merrill and the Yale Series gesture, repeated again and again if Younger Poets, it will no longer have to. throughout her poems, that shapes old observed forms to her own rhythms, ingraining them with her own voice. Both figures, the plow and the airplane, describe the kinds of truth ulie Agoos won the Yale Younger she lends to her observations: in one oet's Award last year, and in her sense she is the truthseeker, churning ms she presents a heart so feeling up the fertile ground, and in the other, d so full that I am tempted to she p atiently keeps her distance, onder at its reverence. One cannot circling wide and free above larger ssibly, I have thought, find the patterns. dscapes of Cambridge and New J .D. McClatchy has recently written ampshire, unalterably familiar to of his misgivings about an emergent ose of us who have lived there, so style among younger poets: "Their triguing and ripe with possibility.

poems are very intelligent, but not conceptually challenging; they tend to be impersonal, anecdotal, morally neutral, elegantly turned but without passion." J ulie Agoos avoids these particular faults, carefully negotiating the o ften brutally unforgiving dialectic between her own voice and the weight of tradition. Whatever homage Agoos has paid to the Academy's standards of poetic work (her love for her teachers and respect for the authority implicit in structures of learning are everywhere apparent), she slips through those tightly drawn boundaries with a slightly irreverent wink, a sly gesture of recognition. Her poems draw on myths as ancient as the Iliad, refreshing them in a particularly feminine way, while at the same time creating new myths equally heroic in their own terms: myths of broken language, chipped paint, and worn lives. In one poem, a professor unintentionally insults a Chinese doctoral candidate by placing her essay on the floor beside him after he's read it; and we are suddenly made aware of how communication has been failing and finally failed: "her soft-footed fury at the unmeant dishonor, the insult/limited and circumscibed by language/yet all with the still precision o£ a watchspring:/the incompleteness of it and the timing." In another poem she asks her sister, who has tried to teach her the Latin names for trees: "Whom were you reassuring with Latin names?/What love made you believe the earth was stirred/to take you in? . . . I cannot blame them, nor the blushing Acer/who fades unmoved by your particular step./That bark is not your skin, and roots long sunk/in moss do not drink rain for you, or carry/your memory to be dug at like a scent." The New J oumaYApril 17, 1987 43

Julie Agoos Yet while language breaks down, as it does again and again in th ese poems, Agoos sets herself the task o f communicating without it; the medium she chooses is the geometric shapes and patterns which b ind objeCts and people together. Her poems written in Italy in which she constantly shifts between English and Italian show us a woman learning from the crossed, geometric and fl uid patterns embodied both in the artisticÂˇ conven tions of Italian Renaissance painters and in the forms of relationships with other people. While some of us may need a d ictionary to read these poems, we can trust her to make sense of unknown words for us, as they fit metr ically into th e sentence or as she glosses them elsewhere. The effor t i~ well wor th it since t h e pressing sense of fluidity between shapes, old forms and new, tran scends the language she uses. Standing on the banks of the A r no, she sees the figure of a young "Geometrist" she knows and remembers how he once pronounced a simple theory to a crowd of us in the Blue Grotto at Fresole: non si puo mai frenare Ia volonta- one can never cpntain the will, or the shape, of a thing. Suddenly the separations, the images which have refu sed to cohere in this p oem begin to make distinct patterns of their own, in which the poet is not the container but the contained: But for the one surviving, North exists only in a hard vertical, South: where the father fell .. They my eyes steady on mountains in both directions; I cannot VALl think in any language what these sights mean for now,

44 The New journaVApril I 7. 1987

though I hear the river speaking to itself. These figures of Geometry u nderlying her images constitute the landscape of her poems, a landscape wh ich d raws on very particular sources, Italian and American, but which, as the title of her book suggests, ultimately transcend s th em. The men and women of her poems are her heroes, but like lan guage, heroism does not adhere to the figures of its traditional types. The heroic spirit she admires lives not in you ng b o isterous warriors, but in the Âˇ older men and women who teach her: a New England farmer, an Italian widow, a silent concierge who speaks to he r in the soft movements of his b room. These figures, which sh e treats. with tenderness or irony, become part of her search to inscribe a new Geom e try, which borrows on old rules with out becoming bonded by them. The process of unbinding h erself from received forms of art, (that of Masaccio and Ucello) and of creating new shapes is a complex challenge against wh ich each of her poems struggles in different ways. In one of her central poems, "The Four Seasons," Agoos evokes an old "Weatherman" to embody the elemental transcience of the weather itself. He is actually a field laborer, as o ld and honest, in her view, as the field he works in; with his aching back and his time-worn countenance, he is like the old portinaio, and the host of other old men who appear as the heroes of her poems, a solitary unspeaking Other. This old "weatherman" is in a sense radically diminished by the poet's sense that he is "like this idea/of a crossroads in a field," and yet in the ter ms of her poem, his transcience, his ability to pass like the weather above the ground, lends him the dignity of an

a rtist's subjectiv ity: "have I sim ply im agined/th at life is like th is process/of the weather, or the patien t/trud ge of the p a in ter . . . ?" S h e seems am b ivalent about the status of external objects, inclu d ing th e people wh o represent objects: like the g r oun d itself, will its eternal presence prevail over th e weather (or weatherman) which shapes it? She works out t his complex question, a question which draws together all the various m otifs in h er poems, th rough a p oetry which in its lar gest sense imitates the discipline of geometry itself with its infin ite ways of descr ibing th e relations b e tween objects. In her poem "The Good Neighbor ," the speaker addresses he rself to an ivory figurine of a C h inese' Iaborer, in which she sees the resemblance to an old professor of hers. She r eflects that "H e, with h is b ad heart,! gave ou rs a sort of principle of h eart,/found humor in the a wful softening/th at came with each a ttack

this old portinaioÂˇ_ (far more capable of movement than we are) comes setting the floor astir with something closer to grandeur than impatience: pulling the broom, bending backward like an angler, a square bit of tapestry drags into the room beneath it, just like a hooked fish half rising out of flystruck water: how at home he is, moving through the room back first, his flexed thighs and puffed out ribs, blue-covered, mirroring the sky .

TheNewJournal o n it, in each/it made (loving some p articu lar/of learning) on oversized h eroes bearing arms." The re presentation of this professor (interchangeable with these oversized h eroes h e loves so well) as a small figurine cuts h is heroism down to a m o re manageable size; he emerges fully heroic: For you are a good neighbor to them, a monk full of retiring passions, yet not too full to take the world beyond and move it inward, filling your basket with a lexicon of deeds and nature. T he journey you must be on seems full of sorrow. Agoos makes us Âˇwary of lexicons, but this on e seems differ ent, since it is a lexicon both of d eeds and of nature, settlin g in the dialectic between the world beyond and the inward world, and p rivileging neither. As a tourist in Florence, she writes: "Here is a view,lh ere is a postcard/a pen, a brigh t new/stam p, a glance toward the window, a glance inward:-" A full relation between the two char acterizes th e heroic spirit in her poetry. W eaving these relations b etween herself an d others, and among the others themselves, Agoos begins to make p atterns out of the sensate world with her p ervasive sense of the immed iacy of feeling. H overing above the lan d, the patterns she draws are as minute and internal, and as broad and fa r- ra n ging as she wishes; and what b inds her poetry together is her sen se o f a profound connection between the two: I think of that unclaimed sound of voices that circles above the land: one cannot enter the perspective without losing sight of it. One loves what one is reminded of loving.

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BUlky Vermeuk is a junior in Ezra Stiles. The New JoumaVApril 17, 1987 45

Afterthought/Barry Shain

Yale's Failing Grade YA LE

(@1 Reflecting on my experiences at Yale, I immediately recall the sense of expectation th at consumed me six years ago when I fi rst was notified that I had been accepted as a graduate student in Political Science. I was lookin g forward to final ly attending a u n iversity where rigorous in tellectualism was positively countenanced and did not need to be apologized for nor hidden. Although I had attended over ten universities and colleges in California, I nevertheless still felt like a provincial coming for the fi rst time to the capital. Maybe it was because I had initially graduated with a degree in industrial arts education (teachin g shop) and had spent the last ten years, on and off, working as an auto mechanic; I'm just not sure. I ronically, that I had worked with my hands, I would learn, was in part responsible for my having been accepted. I was to be the department's working class hero. H owever, the:.ir expectations concerning my political sympathies would prove as wrong as my hopes of finding a dynamic intellectual life at Yale. What is most prominent in my memories and in my continuing sense of Yale are these expectations of intellectualism that I had brought with me. Pan of this package of expectations was that the graduate students would be truly exceptional intellectuals and that th e undergraduates would be rather mediocre. After all, weren't the graduates secular clerics willing to sacrifice everything in their pursuit of wisdom and knowledge while the undergraduates were rich spoiled brats looking to "network"? Additionally. "knowing" as I did that the life of the mind would be treated with great respect and devotion at Yale. I expected that undergraduate teaching would be given the highest of 46 The New journal/ April 17. 1987

priorities. Even before classes had begun, I became aware that maybe my expectations for a rich intellectual life at Yale were painfully skewed from the reality that would confront me du r ing the next five years. I had just returned from a summer of travel, the last of my many 1960s-style peregrinations over the globe, a summer of, in fact, intense intellectual excitement in Paris and .Berlin, where being an admitted conservative among Marxist intellectu~ls had actually aided me in str iking

I began to suspect that here among the graduate students m y being intellectually challenging would not be met with enthusiasm but, instead, with "moral" outrage . up conversations and friendships. Then, after having passed a week of evenings at the graduate student bar, the GPSCY, I began to suspect that there among the graduate students my being intellectually challenging would not be met with enrhusiasm but, instead, with "moral" outrage. It seemed that graduate students, contra my expectations, were not committed to the life of the mind. Nevertheless. I hoped that the GPSCY crowd would prove to be anomalous. Unfortunately, they would prove very much to be part of the public orthodoxy that would make graduate student life at Yale intellectually suffocating.

But once classes started, I had doubts abo u t m y initial impressions and discounted my experience at the GPSCY as being th e product of posttravel fatigue. What fostered these doubts was the h appy discovery that the Political Sciencefaculty, contrary to my expectations, were mtellectuaUy open and seemingly willing to take risks (a p rescient observation, as allowing me to teach would subsequently bear witness). What I experienc~d. which may in p art explain th e inaccuracy o f my expectations, was that the faculty's overall confidence in t h e liberal pluralisr descriptive and normative model was in the process of collapsing. They (as is possibly the disciplin e as a who le) were once again becoming increasingly insecure about their paradigmatic nakedness, and were beginning to search for alternatives- hence, the openness. Obviously, Yale was not intellectually moribund, or so I hoped anew. But the sense of relative openness that I found amon g the P olitical Science faculty did n ot apply, unfortunately, to the graduate students. My initial reactions for med in the summer were, if anything, too flattering. The graduate students, the life-giving center of intellectual experimentation on every campus I had known, seemed to be for the most part brain-dead and neutered, epigones of 1960s radicalism, religiously dogmatic souls that were, nevertheless, bereft of a vital religion. To say that they were closedminded and weren't engaged actively in the life of the mind would prove to be a gross understatement. I would learn during the course of the next five years that their normal response to intellectual challenges would be verbal castigation or physical abuse. Although my initial impressions of

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be solidly con,firm_e d" durihg two yery fong_ yearsa~ liyjng a~ HGS--ana taking clas.ses, it would.'not be until I began' to teach in my second year that I would learn that I had !Jeen,_ as wrong about the undergraduates in_my negative expectation as I had been "about the graduates in my p'ositive one.. _As I became_ interested in the undergraduates and audited classes . with · them, _I also began to· question Yale's commitment to ·- quality education. After· years· and years of undergraduate . classes, r was able to judge the quality of. teaching far more effectively "than <:ould the ·average undergraquate . .And. _what disturbed me was, the reaii4:ation.that the College, in spite of the enormous aniou.nt of money undergraduates spend to attend Yale and the pre.stige that accrues, does not foster intellectualism, in that taking teaching · serious!y _ is not encouraged by Y.ale College. Although lip service is of course given to the importance of teaching, l was struck by how empty this promise is when I learned that teach\Qg assistants were sometimes (frequently?) assigned to a particular class not ~caus.eofexpertise, or even interest in a subject matter, but instea~ because of the administrative needs of departments who have made pledges of financial assistance to these students. Slowly, I was beginning to doubt the truism that Yale Up.iversity was structured to serve the needs of its undergraduates or, in the larger sense, the full life of the mind. Not only were the teaching assistants frequently not passionate seekers of knowledge, but seemingly, the assistant professors also were not lightning rods around which hungry young souls could congregate in their quest for understanding. How could they afford to be while working in a research university where promotion is based almost solely on the quantity of one's publications (and the possession of certain social graces)? Given that most of the junior people

know they will be cut loose in a few years, rationality demands that they waste as little time as possible on teaching. Here at Yale, as at other research universities, there are few professional returns for investing energy and love into teaching. I often wondered how many students and their parents really understood on what basis Yale's reputation rests (the scholarly output of its faculty) and that, in general, excellence in teaching is not encouraged nor to be expected. What I found even more remarkable, given my experience in the '60s when the quattty 01 teacnmg was 01 paramount importance to students, was how quiescent Yale's students were in the face of their exploitation. In spite of my general disappointment with the inteUectual life to be found at one of the great Ivy League universities, at least one of my expectations, nevertheless, would happily prove to be errant. Without denying the possibility that many, if · not most, of the undergraduates may actually be the rich brats I had expected, I can only report that in four years of teaching and leading sections here, I have never been aware of having had any in my classes. And even more striking to me was that it was among the undergraduates that I finally discovered a small but significant minority committed to the Jife of the mind. And even if being a minority is something that may frustrate these students themselves, they seemingly are treated respectfully by their peers, a condition that certainly doesn't obtain in most of the many universities that I have attended. Almost in spite of Yale College's lack of support, there is ro be found among some of its undergraduates a flourishing intellectualism. I have been impressed with the way undergraduates have responded to roy courses ("Political Culture of the 1960s,., "Colonial American Rel1gious and Political Thought," and "Conservative Critiques of Modernity") where they are exposed, probably for the first time , to one truly radical form

of thought, in this case, philosophical conservatism. What has struck me. as so unusual is their inteJlectual maturity in the unsettling and alien intellectual environment my classes create. On the whole, they have reacted neither asdocile conservative sycophants nor as blind liberal dogmatists but, rather, as careful and judicious explorers traveling in an unknown land. _ It has been in my classes that, finally, I (and I hope my students) found myself engaged in the intellec- . tually challenging milieu that I initially had hoped would describe all my experiences at Yale. My students h_ave continuously challenged me and forced me to defend, clarify, and even expunge parts of the argument l have put before them. For the experience they have afforded me, I owe my students a great debt of gratitude that I can never repay. In addition to having been graced with the finest of students, I have been very fortunate in my years at Yale in enjoying truly warm and erudite advisors. Therefore, in spite of the philistinism of many of the graduate students that I have encountered, I must think of leaving Yale only with the greatest of trepidation. Where else will I be able to teach and learn from such splendid students and to argue with such noble adversaries as my advisors? Nevertheless, my overall judgment of Yale must rest finally on the shocking absence of an active intellectual life on campus and Yale College's concomitant lack of commitment to undergraduate education. Possibly, in the quest for bourgeois civility and scholarly professionalism, intellectualism at Yale has been discouraged. Regardless of who or what is responsible (and I don't claim to know), it ultimately is incumbent on the students and their parents to insist on their purchased right to an education, not simply an experience in trivial pursuits.

•

Barry Shain (GRD '89) is a Prize Teaching Fellow in the Political Scima departmmL The New JournaiJApril 17, 1987 47

.The class participation of 68o/o is ttie highest since the Class of 1964 S19,274 contributed to the 1~7 Quarter CeRtury Fund. $22,992 io pledges to the 1987 OCF. (an 8°/o increase over the previous record)

Berl(eley Branford CalhOun Davenport Ezra Stiles Jonathan Edwards Morse Pierson Silliman Saybrook Trumbull Timothy Dwight Total

QCF Pte~es $ 1715 2398

1965 1600 1735 1693 2180 2138 '1943 :1075 1760 2790 $22,992

Participation 70°/o 69%

'l2°/o 4

59°/o

51o/o 70°/o 83% 70°/o

78o/o 41°/o 66°/o

90°/o 68°/o

Our goal ls 70o/o parttctpatton. We still need 25 seniors to pledge. Thanks to stu~ support, the Yale Alumni Fund is continuing to raise money to insure that the Urilvers1ty thrives. The quality of Yale's future depends on you.

JYALE ALUMNI FUND P 0. BOX 1890, 1.55 WHITNEY AVENUE, NEW HAVEN , CT 06508 203-432-6076 FOUNDED1890