Volume 31 - Issue 4

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features

8

The Chosen People jews have reached the promised land ofacademia: tenure at Yak. Now they're debating their responsibility to help other groups reach the top.

BY DANI EL BROOK

14 Alma Water You can't argue taste, but ifyou're a University. at least you can bottle it.

BY IAN BLECHER

16 Tempest in a Teacup How did a troubled man ofletters break the Elizabethan Club's unwritten rules?

BY BEN SMITH

22

Interior Design Photography ofdomestic spaces explores the isolation ofliving alone.

BY jENNIFER LUDWIG

26

The Silent Treatment To create a close-knit brotherhood, one Latino fraternity cuts offties to the larger Yale Community.

BY Eu KINTISCH

31

Spies Like Us The CIA's current recruiting efforts indicate that its privileged relationship with Yak may be a thing ofthe past.

BY MI CHAEL GERBER

34 The Ball Game Debutante balls are being refashioned to fit a culture that tbJesn't wear kid gloves.

BY DA N KELLUM

38

Raw Talent In japan, sushi chefi face a long and arduous apprenticeship, but in New Haven, they can get rolling fast.

BY ]ADA Yu AN

standards

5 41

Points of D eparture

44

T h e Critical Angle: Definition of a Madman BY jOHN SWANSBURG

46

E ndnote: Girls, Girls, Girls BY RONEN GIVONY

Between the Vmes: LocaJ Flavor BY jESSICA WINTER

TIQ N., joUtJW. is published !iff times during tbc aadcmic 'fC'lr by The New journ.J at Ya_k, Inc.• P 0. Box }4}1 Y.Jc Starion. New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 1p Pu k Street. Phone: (10J) ..J1-19S7· AD contuu copyright 1999 by The New Journal at Y.Jc, Inc. AD Jlicha Raervecl. Rq>roducoon cubcr m wbok or in pan watb..ut wr111cn pcnnmion of the publiahcr and editor in cluef u probibit<d. While dUs ...,..U.. is publisbcd by Yale College swdua. Y.Jc Univcnity u DOt r<Sp<>nsibk for its contenD. Seven tbouAnd !iff hundml copao of ada ISSUC uc distnbutcd frtt to members of tbc Y.Jc and New Ha~ coauaunity. Subtcriptions uc anibbk to tho« outsi<k tbc .,..._ Ra.rcs: One yar, stS. Tv.o )eatS. SJO. The l'cw Journal;:. pnntcd by lmpnnt Printmg. :-:onh Hum, CT: bookkttpmg and balling scMc:c:s uc pro.idcd by Col111m Bool<keq>ingof Ncw H..m. T H£ NIEW jOIIa>IA.L cncounp lmm to the cdite>r .nd comments on Y.Jc and !'cw H~ issues. Wnte 10 EdatorUis. }4)1 Y.Jc Sation, New Ha-a~, CT o6!10. Alllmm for publication mua include address .nd signature. We racrvc the right to edit all kners for publication.

The New Journal thanks Bill Bascus Eva Bonime Scott Benton Fayrt Davis Nora Ericson David Foley Sarah Hammond Nicholas ]itkoff Rita Jules Emily Lebovitz Carl Lowendorf fenny" Ludwig Edith MacMullen Webster McBride ]tan-Claude Michel Margaret Miller Peter "Georgia Pete" Norman Karen Paik Philip Pentz Brad Renfro Bill Robinson David Slade Aimee Shu Tamara Sussman Karl Tupper Marryr the Younger Gwin Schroder Whitt Barbara & Big Jerry De Winter

Groucho Marx once said he would never join a club that would have someone like him for a member. While we scoff at those exclusive groups which confront us in our everyday (and not so everyday) lives, we cannot help but question ourselves and those groups of which we are so clearly not a part. And, once in this exclusive circle, we often try to-downplay the inherent exclusion in which we participate. How many times have you responded ''Connecticut" when asked which school you attend? That vaunted goal of Yale-dom, one which we have all sought at one time or another, transforms from innocent over-achievement into its own brand of exclusivity. We become more conscious of it every day when we speak with friends from home or read the papers detailing how Mother Yale is not without her biases. But exclysivity is far from limited to groups. It permeates every tier of culture, from both above and below.

Would you have picked up "The Inclusive Issue?" Most would have passed the cover off as one of any number of resident activist publications indicting the University for one of its many exclusive _ policies. What's alluring about inclusion? Certainly not much when it comes in the form of a magazine being distributed to thousands of students, all knowing that whatever exclusive exposes were formerly uncovered are now available to anyone willing to read about them. Upon seeing "Exclusive," we immediately imagine celebrity scandal sheets entertaining for their overt trashiness.

Exclusivity is more exciting to read about. This issue of The New journal explores this sticky situation. We can say we hate exclusivity, but we say it with the certainty that we are still consciously and sometimes helplessly contributing to the very forces that propagate it.

\"' 4

THE NEW JouRNAL

To Die For J?eath be not proud, but it certainly can be h1p. And for the past two centuries, the hippest place in town co party in the afterlife has been the Grove Street Cemetery.

The attraction, of course, is the exclusive crowd. Where else can you carouse six feet under with hipsters like Benjamin Silliman, Eli Whitney, Tunothy Dwight, Ezra Stiles, and the likes of Timothy Mix. What, you haven't heard of Timothy Mix? He's only the hottest OJ this side of the Housatonic.

And let's not forget about the service.

Anyone who's paid $4 for bottled water is sure to be impressed by the hand-excavated graves, a process chat takes about five hours of manual labor. As far as accommodations, you can rest assured that the ground six feet above you will be covered in quaint shrubbery and flanked by chirping birds year round, leaving no hint of the party below.

With sucfi credentials, the Grove Street <?emetery is one of the most exclusive postlife party grounds ever. The cover charge is $3,500 for a plot (more than four times any other local cemetery). And although the cemetery is still accepting members, only a few hundred out of about 15,000 spots are left. Be sure to book in advance: life-long customers say it's the only way to go.

The hosts of this club to end all clubs are a husband and wife team, cemetery superintendent William Cameron, Jr. and assistant superintendent Joan Cameron.

Gracefully aged, grayed at the edges and softspoken, such a pair of guardians have an air of permanence and finality. They are like the dignified, benevolent chaperones who hang around to make sure nobody dances too close or spikes the punch.

"We feel like we're caretakers of an o.utdoor museum," William says. "Isn't that nght, Joanie?" he asks. "That's right," she responds.

"We never fight on the job," William continues. "We work as a team. We are like one person." Such romantic caretakers bespeak quite a pick-up scene below.

Surprisingly, Grove Street wasn't always

FÂŁBRUARY 12.,

1999

regarded as the swingingest place to be. It was initially created on the outskirts of town to accommodate the overflow crowds from the more popular burying site at the New Haven Green, in the center of town.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Green was where all the cool kids went to die and it filled up with astonishing speed. In less than two centuries, the number of bodies had increased so much that the graveyard crept across the Green. It had to be obscured from view with willows and other foliage much like the nondescript warehouse facades that mask many an NYC hotspot.

Epidemics of yeUow fever in the 1790s li~e so many r~mors of beer-recycling: tamted the Greens popularity, though. When the death toll climbed above a hundred, citizens understandably got tired of looking at headstones and death all the time. Led by James Hillhouse, they banished the rest of the future dead to Grove Street, a new joint at the edge of town. Thus, Grove Street

Cemetery started as the second-most exclusive burial place in New Haven. Grove Street was just the place you settled for when the Green was all sold out.

But from these bumble beginnings, our familiar cemetery rose to its current position as the dopest graveyard in town. Both its location next to the prestigious Yale campus and its list of f.unous members contribute to its snobbish and exclusive feel. If, upon death, one is able to gain admittance, the high stone walls of Grove Street Cemetery provide a hip place to bump and grind after the grind of life is over.

-Andrtw Youn

Public Domain I did not expect to be admitted to Yale. !he. ide.a of enrolling at an Ivy League Institution was unreal to me, a senior attending high school in the Netherlands.

Yale's name carried the connotation of elitism and isolation; only once I became a Yalie myself did I become aware of its diversity.

"There has been an increasing diversity in the type of high schools applicants who attend," Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Richard Shaw says. "Yale now accepts students who have been home schooled." For the class of 2002, 53.3 percent went to public schools, 11.9 percent to boarding schools, 18.6 percent to private day schools, and 8.7 percent to parochial schools. In the last decade, there bas been an increase in students attending religious schools, coupled with a seven percent decline in public school students. "This trend is not a result of Yale's admission policy," Shaw says. "With the economic prosperity, more parents are sending their children to private schools, and there bas been an erosion of the yidd rate for students at public schools." In response, the University has increased recruiting at public schools and boosted financial aid, hoping to ~ prevent a further drop in the number of .!T middle-class students. ~ Justin Davids (ES '0 I) would never have l applied to Yale had he not received the "1 01 f reasons to go to Yale" pamphlet in the winter ~ of his junior year of high school. Attending Smithton R-6 High School, a rural public school in central Missouri, Davids never thought about going to college out of state, let alone a place like Yale. He became the first student to attend an Ivy League institution in his high school's 130-year history and the only one to go out of state in his graduating class. "Receiving Yale's information brochure was the first time I thQught about the idea of going to the Nonheast," he says.

The first student in 16 years to come to Yale from the north Oregon coast, Becca Shaffer (ES '?I), _:ilio credits Yale's recruiting effort. Cons1dermg her high school's one Advanced Placement offering and less-than5

rigorous curriculum, Shaffer viewed Yale as a dream school. Shaffer was extremely impressed that the Yale interviewer visited her house; for all her other college interviews she had to travel to Portland, an hour and a half away from her home. She was also moved by the phone call from the alumni coordinator on the day she received Yale's acceptance letter. "I was torn among Yale, Duke, and the University of Southern California, and Yale's efforts definitely affected my decision."

"Many of the public schools that send students to Yale are magnet schools or schools with selective admissions," Shaw says. "Since the freshman class must have the common denominator of intelligence, we only accept people who are prepared to be academically challenged at Yale. " This preparation is usually harder to achieve in schools with fewer resources, according to Shaw. This has not, however, discouraged Yale from admitting students who have o.utstanding records at high schools with poor resources: In 1967, Yale President Kingman Brewster wrote a letter to the Director of Admissions ending the favoritism towards private schools. The letter stated that there should not be "prejudgment by any generalized favor for particular family or school background." Three decades later, Dean Shaw keeps a copy of this letter on his desk.

-Makiko Harunari

junior Year Abroad Three years ago, the class of 1999 became the first class required to live on campus as sophomores. The administration created this new regulation to bolster the strength and cohesiveness of the residential colleges, and perhaps it has. It also has had a paradoxical effect, however: as all of the sophomores packed into the already crowded rooms of their colleges, they forced more of their fellow college members into the exile of annex housing. When Yalies enter the room lottery in the spring of each year, those with the lowest picks inevitably face exclusion from housing in their college.

Walking across Old Campus to a suite in McClellan Hall, I expected to interview a lone a nnexee. Upon entering the room, however, I was confronted with several sofas full ofJErs. "In JE annex housing, it's not like

6

you're exiled from JE," said Julia Rusinek OE '00), a resident of McClellan. When Rusinek moved into annex housing she moved with a sizable contingent. This year, like most years, over half of the junior class of JE is annexed, filling all of entryway A of McClellan; the juniors staying behind in JE are more likely to feel left out than those physically excluded from JE. "The people of JE are more important to me than the physical structure of JE," said Andrew Krause OE '00). In the McClellan annex he certainly has these people, a veritable community~ of JE expatriates deep in the freshman territory of Old Campus. The annexees all agreed that McClellan Hall itself is a benefit of being annexed; in addition to spacious rooms in good repair, it affords JE juniors a good view of the antics of the feisty freshman class.

The environment Luis Quan (DC '00) finds in his annex housing could hardly be further from that found in McClellan. His apartment at 210 Park Street is the only Yale housing in the building; in fact, Yale does not even own the apartment he lives in, but rents it for him from a private landlord. For some, giving up the closeness of living in their residential college might be difficult, but Quan said that living at a slight remove provides "a really good balance." He is able to participate in the social life across the street, but can leave Davenport for the quiet of his own apartment whenever he chooses. "I've done berter academically, actually," he said.

Although Quan likes his annex apartment, he is less glowing in his assessment of this Yale phenomenon than the JErs I spoke with. Earlier in the year, several other residents complained that he was making too much noise. Quan, who values his apartment precisely for the quiet it affords him, insisted that he was not the source of the disturbance. The other tenants complained to Davenport Master Gerald Thomas; Master Thomas subsequently gave two warnings to the confused and frustrated Quan and even threatened removal if the noise did not stop. Finally, Quan slipped notes under all the apartment doors in the building, protesting the unfair accusations against him and asking the source of the mysterious clamor to stop. The situation seems to be resolved now, although Quan's regard for the administration of his college has been tarnished by the experience.

Shelby Batchelor (TO '01) resides in the

TO annex at 370 Temple Street, across from the language lab. "When I told my friends where I was going to be living, they said, 'Oh no ... the Rock! '"-a reference to 370's similarity to Alcatraz in its isolation from civilization and its somewhat forboding facade. But I doubt that any inmates' cells in the infamous San Francisco Bay prison resembled the rooms in 370; several floors up, Batchelor lives in two connecting rooms that once served as a double. Life in the TO annex, despite the warnings of her friends, has not been an onerous exile for Batchelor, but an opportunity for more privacy. "I've got that only child thing," she said, "I need my own space." Three seventy does have its own oddities; the aged radiator makes loud spitting and gurgling noises and plaster sometimes peels away from the wall. Shelby sometimes wishes she lived closer to the exciting Yale melee, but acknowledges that TO, although heralded for its tight-knit community, isn't that close either. Like the residential colleges, the annexes have their -quirks and peculiarities; whether or not Yalies find life in them enjoyable depends on whether their own quirks match.

-julia Kardon

Business Letters Wharton-watch out. Yale School of Management's (SOM) recent change in degree name from MPPM (Masters of Public and Private Management) to MBA (Masters of Business Administration) will give the school a new competitive edge. The new name back-tracks on what the SOM recruitment brochure has long emphasized: that the MPPM is not just an ordinary MBA, but an MBA Plus.

Despite a change in label, the school intends to keep the rather exclusive contents of its package, according to SOM Dean Jeffrey Garten. "The mission of SOM will stay constant: to educate global leaders for business and society," Garten recendy wrote in a letter to the faculty. The school has long focused on the integration of the private, public and non-profit sectors of the economy and how they function together. This progress\ve approach has consistendy earned the school the number one spot in the non- ¡ profit management category in US Naus anti

World &port's Best GradU4U Schools.

Tm NEW JoURNAL

As a result, the program attracts an eclectic student body, not just young businessmen on their way to Wall Street or Corporate ~erica. Raised and educated in Italy, Annachiara Marcandalli (SOM '00) aspires to "go back to Italy and make a difference." With the recent introduction of the Euro, she explains, the Italian government will contract public spending, translating into splendid growth opportunities for Italian non-profits. She plans to return to Italy as a consultant to help establish corporate community partnerships.

Other students with non-traditional goals include Allison Weaver (SOM '99), who will head into museum management, and Matt Larsen (SOM '99), who is honing his skills for the Edison Project, a private company which manages public schools around the country.

But diversity does not stop at students' future goals. Not only are 30 percent of SOM students from abroad, but the school boasts a wide variety of vocational backgrounds-a whopping 33 percent of the students have worked at non-profit organizations-much more than at most business schools. "A real asset of Yale SOMis the diverse student body with different backgrounds, different world views and relatively broad definitions of what success is," Weaver says.

School officials give a variety of reasons for the switch to an MBA this year: it will attract more students, help with job recruitment and address the requests of many Students and alumni. For the next three years, both degrees will be offered, but after three years, SOM will only offer an MBA Alumni will be able to swap their MPPMs for MBAs. In the business world, names matter.

Nearly all the members of the class of 1999 are opting for an MBA. "It is hard enough trying to explain in Italy what an MBA is," Marcandalli says. "I can't imagine what it would be like trying to explain to people what an MPPM is." Recruiters sometimes view the MPPM as a second-class business degree, not for what it truly is: "an MBA plus."

Although applications for SOM won't all be in until March, Director of Admissions Richard Silverman says his office has hit the jackpot. "We are, so far, receiving more applications than last year, and we might even hit a record high for the school, but this was not unexpected," he says. "Our predictions of

FEBRUARY 12, 1999

an increase have proved to be just about on target."

The change to an MBA will open up new doors for its students, at heart the school will still remain one step ahead in its unique focus. And a new degree name and an admissions explosion are just the beginning of what could be an SOM renaissance.

-Navin Manglani

D rop Out, Perk Up Borsodi's is a secret. The shotgun cottage in uptown New Orleans, across from a cemetery and an elementary school, bears no identifying sign, only a string of Christmas lights. Yet anyone who finds the coffeehouse is welcomed as an old friend.

A man and woman in plaid flannel and paint-spattered jeans, with long, shaggy gray hair emerge from behind the creaking door and envelop my friend Colin with hugs and exclamations. Robert Borsodi kindly asks, "What do you do? Are you in school?" when Colin introduces me to him. "Oh no," I thought, "time to reveal myself as a member of the establishment."

"Urn, I'm at Yale University? In Connecticut?"

"Oh, yeah. I was there, too. What would you kids like to drink? Marie, I think we're out of whipped cream."

This cavelike room was the last place I had expected to run into a son of Eli. Every surface is plastered with posters, flyers dating back to Borsodi's founding in 1978, crayon drawings, postcards sent from all over the world, handwritten quotes from Nietzsche, Nabokov, Paul Klee and the Grateful Dead, and tapestries made of old Mardi Gras

costumes. A 50 year-old Milanese cappuccino maker chugs and steams like a locomotive behind the bar. A white dove sits in a cage. A fireplace faces the bar, its mantlepiece heaped with stones, shells, botclecaps, and feathers.

The reader may be moved to sneer at the hippie trappings I've described. There were lots of beads and braids in the room, and people were trading stories about pilgrimages to a Rainbow Gathering. Colin and I order rwo Cafes Herbabuena, which is Spanish for mint. Borsodi begins to make them with astonishing deliberation. I ask him if he liked Yale.

"It was all right. I used to hitchhike into New York City every Friday afternoon, and back on Sunday." He adds extract of mint to our cups of coffee with a chemist's eyedropper.

"Oh. Well, there's a really cheap train now, only 12 dollars one way," I counter.

He looks at me, amused. "Believe it or not, I didn't always have 12 dollars.

Sometimes I didn't even have a couple of quarters for the subway, and I would walk hundreds of blocks."

"What did you do in the city?"

"Went to shows, got around, talked to people. I didn't care for Yale particularly," he says. "My senior year, I started a coffee house on Whalley Avenue. That continued on for about three weeks, and I realized I couldn't do both. So I left school." He unscrews the top of an old peanut butter jar painted in purple glitter and starts to spoon green sprinkles on top of the fresh whipped cream.

"But I learned the most at Yale from talking with the people there. The professors and students both. I learned far more in the :t dining halls than I ever did in class." "i I find Borsodi's words true-the highest ยง: privilege of a place in a club like Yale is the [ quality of its members. Coming from a man who aetually chose the creation of meeting places over the material benefits of a Yale diploma, this sentiment sounds less cliched.

Borsodi's business cards state his address (he has no phone) along with his mission: "There should be some common ground somewhere, after all~ where free spirits can gather and not seem peculiar or out-of-theway. Where any-and-everyone can share for the moment, at least, their common human experience among this welter of things here below." I wonder ifhe learned this at Yale.

J

-krya Kammnz 7

THE

CHOSEN

PEOPLE

jews have reached the promised the land ofacademia: tenure at Yale. Now they're debating their responsibility to help other groups reach the top.

DANIEL BROOK

8

THE NEW JouRNAL

n 1920, newly-minted Yale man Morris Sweetkind, enticed by the academic progress." Over the past year, the issue has come to the fore life of the mind, resolved to stay in New Haven while his in large part due to the Tenure Action Coalition (TAC), an alliance of classmates left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Rather than cash activist organizations, cultural houses, sexual orientation groups and in on his prestigious degree, Sweetkind applied to pursue graduate the Women's Center. TAC's goal is to reform tenure procedures by work in Yale's English department. While other applicants waited expanding affirmative action policies and non-traditional departments.

In November, Sarah Anne Minkin (MC '99) and Julie Weise (SY '00), nervously for their letters of acceptance or rejection, a professor by the name of Tucker Brooke met personally with Sweetkind to discuss the two Jewish members of TAC, attempted to convince the official status of his application. "Look, Sweetkind. You're a good student, but representatives of Yale's Jewish community to join the Coalition. we've never had a Jew. Don't apply. It's just a waste of time."

The idea did not seem far-fetched. While Yale Hillel had The chilling nonchalance of the remark conjures up another Yale. traditionally shied away from taking stands on campus political issues, A Yale so clubby that being accepted as a grad student in the English it had become more activist of late-perhaps a sign of the level of department was tantamount to receiving a professorship; virtually the comfort Yale's Jewish students finally feel. Last year, students proposed entire department was Old Blue. In those days, the university was only that Hillel publicly support activists' efforts to cleanse Yale's financial portfolio of the ethical stains left by nominally open to Jews, their academic status limited to !Jndergraduate, their numbers ~r-=--~=---==----==-=-===.....'""ii tobacco investments. While there was limited to under ten percent. Graduate general agreement that Yale's position was school, and the world of Ivy League academia unethical, students could not decide on an that lay beyond, was still strictly off-limits. A appropriate course of action. Was it Jew would not receive tenure on the Yale Hillel's role to take a stand on such an College faculty for another generation. issue? If it were to do so, in whose name In 1946, the Philosophy department should it sign? Faced with this dilemma, the leadership divided the governing tenured the College's first Jew, Paul Weiss, whose path to the ivory tower was typical of council into two bodies. One, the his generation's. Born in Manhattan's Jewish Programming Board, would deal with

I

In the 1920s, the University was only nominally open to Jews, th d eir aca ernie StatUS d d d limite tO Un ergra Uate, the!¡r numbers II.ml¡ted to

ghetto, the Lower East Side, he studied at its Jewish Oxford, City College, and traveled onward through the newly unlocked gates of Yale's Old Campus.

After him, the deluge. By 1970, one out of every six Yale College professors was Jewish. When the shock waves of the 1960s finally shook Harkness Tower, anti-Jewish hiring discrimination was a thing of the past.

While the 1972 Dahl Commission Report on Yale College called for administration action to fill "gaps in the faculty," these gaps were defined as a lack of "women and disadvantaged minorities" [emphasis mine]. Despite Yale's virulently anti-Semitic past, by the '70s, discrimination against Jews was a thing of the past.

Despite the recommendations of the Dahl Commission and more than a dozen similar reports published in its wake, the number of women and racial minorities on Yale's faculty continues to lag behind those at comparable institutions. As the most recent study of the subject., the 1991 Jaynes Report, put it, "Yale's position and its national image in this area remains precariously close to the backwaters of

logistics and day-to-day affairs. The other, the Hillel Student Board, would deal with "the bigger issues," as then-Hillel Student Co-coordinator Justin Florence (TO '00) put it. For example, this year, in response to the Matthew Shepard murder and the picketing of his funeral by religious fundamentalists, the Board drafted an open letter condemning the acts which was published in the Yale Daily News.

With a forum in place to address their concerns, Minkin and Weise presented their proposal to a Student Board meeting at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life, a $6 million testament to Jewish integration at Yale. Before the meeting even began, the pair realized they had an uphill battle before them. If only because of TAC's less than tactful methods-such as its megaphone-enhanced protest held outside President Levin's office during its representatives' meeting with him-it became clear that Hillel would not join the Coalition.

Acclimated to this fact, Minkin and Weise hoped Hillel would at least sign and send a letter in support of tenure reform to President Richard

ten percent.

FEBRUARY 12, 1999

9

Levin (GRD 74) and the YDN. According to Florence, their argument ran something like this: "Jews had been historically discriminated against, especially in faculty hiring at Yale.

Because of that, we had a heightened sensitivity or awareness to discrimination in faculty hiring." Indeed, the letter drew heavily from the history of anti-Jewish discrimination in hiring at Yale and was filled with parenthetical citations to Dan Oren's (MC '79) definitive history of the subject,

joining th~ Club: A History of]ws and Yak. While the activists' presentation drew hostile criticism from a few of Hillel's more conservative members like Isaac Meyers (BR '0 1), who characterized their letter as "long and angry," it also failed to win over the vital center of liberal-minded but cautious students. Yale's closed tenure deliberations forced Minkin and Weise to rely solely on statistical and anecdotal evidence of institutionalized discrimination. While the evidence did have a certain power, most students wanted to hear administrators present a defense. "No one said, 'perhaps these statistics could be explained by a, b, and c.,"' Florence recalled, explaining students' reluctance to take decisive action as gauged by comments made at the meeting and a series of votes taken on potential responses.

Rather than sending the original letter, the Student Board drafred a new letter, inviting President Levin to present the administrative position at a Hillel tea. {Levin accepted the invitation on the condition that he would not exclusively discuss tenure, but would comment on a range of issues.)

But the core of the problem went deeper.

Why was a committee of students specifically created to take a left-of-center stance on tobacco investments balking at supporting tenure reform? In their original letter and presentation, Minkin and Weise hoped to use Jewish history at Yale to impel their community to take action. In doing so, they took a page from Friedrich Niet7.sche's philosophy of history-only when certain historical facts are selected and strung together to tell a particular story can they spur people to take a stand. But while the activists' letter highlighted historical similarities, their audience could not help but think of differences. Newly-elected Student Co-coordinator Sophie Oberfield (SY '01) summed this objection up well. "The parallel is a little problematic. It just isn't the same

THE NEW JoURNAL

thing. Jews were once kept out [officially)."

As the story of Morris Sweetkind illustrates, But with respect to women and minorities, matters rarely came to that. The Ivies Oberfield said, "It's not a policy. The [antigenerally nipped their potential Jewish Jewish] poli<:1was broken and now it's not an problem in the bud. Denying qualified Jews issue anymore, but this isn't a case where you spaces in their graduate schools ensured that can look at a policy and say, 'Hey, that's universities would rarely have to deny a discriminatory, it's written.' It's a case of clearly qualified Jew a place on their faculties. alleged discrimination that isn't in the rules In an age when an Ivy League PhD was a de but in the process. And that's a big facto requirement for an Ivy League faculty difference." The activists realized their post, there were simply very few "qualified" audience demanded a stronger parallel than Jews. While top graduate schools today have they could provide. "They wanted evidence affirmative action programs in place, they still of overt discrimination, and I don't think have low numbers of minority students, there is overt discrimination. And I think we especially in certain areas. For example, in were in a position of having to argue that 1995 blacks received only 1.5 percent of all there was," Minkin said.

PhDs conferred in the physical sciences.

Dan Oren, who now teaches psychiatry Surely there are no overt messages telling at the Yale Medical School, echoes Oberfield's blacks not to do graduate work in these fields, remarks. "There is a world of difference but there may be tacit messages sent out by a between the 1990s and the 1920s, '30s, and still-prejudiced society. That unspoken cues '40s. In the first rr====-- ==============iJ influence girls to half of this century abandon math the university and science during administration, the early adolescence deans and the is well-established. faculty of all the It is also possible schools were that the historical virtually all .white, oppression that Anglo-Saxon, male kept America's minorities poor Protestants. Now that's a stereotype, and uneducated but that accounts encouraged this generation's for maybe 90 or 95 percent of the "talented tenth" to bunch. Today you pursue more lucrative fields like can look at the medicine, law, and business rather than the faculty and there is far more diversity. Is it a underpaid and over-intellectual world of perfect diversity? Certainly not. But today, academia. the community is very different. Much of the While it was the exception rather than discrimination against Jews back in the '30s the rule, even before World War II, Jews was a discrimination against people who were occasionally came up for tenure. Instead of not part of the community and was born out appealing to overt anti-Semitic policies, of a disdain for Jews. I don't think that today opponents used code words to indirectly one could make a credible case that there is draw attention to the candidate's ethnic significant disdain for women or minorities origins. According to Oren's book, Paul among the faculty because indeed there are Weiss's faculry nemeses derided him as "a many women and minorities who are among caricature of the all-knowing and pushy Jew," the faculty at this point. So it's not the same a man unfit for entrance into Yale's polite level of outsider versus insider situation that society. Oren writes, "As long as a Jew could is was 70 years ago." not have been a 'gentleman,' he could not Still, a case can be made that there are have been part of a society of gentleman some legitimate parallels. Many of those who scholars." Critics of the tenure process cite were skeptical of the analogy seemed to be similar anecdotes in which they claim male under the false impression that, in the '20s members of tenure committees have opposed and '30s, Jews kept coming up for tenure but female candidates' tenure bids, claiming their were being kept out by anti-Semitic policies.

Why was a committee of students specifically created to take a left-ofcenter stance on tobacco investments balking . at supporting tenure reform?

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"pushiness" makes them difficult to work with. "It's a code word for 'assertive woman,' what is considered unacceptable in a woman," according to Minkin.

But anti-Semitic code words were not always personal; some were ostensibly academic, as TAC maintains may be the case today. Before the 1950s Yale's English department excluded Jews because the department felt Jews' lack of faith in the New Testament undermined their ability to understand the English literary tradition for which it is a canonical text. While today this appears an obvious rationalization of antiSemitism, might modern day hostility towards new forms of scholarship also mask prejudice? Members of the TAC think so.

They cite an anecdote from a reform-friendly professor who recently served on a tenure committee reviewing a female candidate.

According to TAC members, the professor told them she decided not to bring up the candidate's feminist ·scholarship for fear of provoking a "gender backlash." But Paula Hyman, a tenured professor of American Jewish history since 1982 (fact check), adds a caveat, explaining that there is "a fallacy connected with the idea that people through their ethnicity or gender offer representation" of their particular group. Not everyone charting new academic territory is a woman or minority. Hyman gives the example of "a Jewish male in Religious Studies who was doing some pretty radical stuff. Before he [was up for] tenure, he wrote a book called God's Phallus-probably not the kind of book you should write btfort you get tenure-and a lot of people didn't think it was good or defensible scholarship." The candidate did not get tenure.

Minkin recognizes that there are problems with drawing these parallels but insisted that the Jewish community ought to support tenure reform regardless. In fact, she presented a strong argument that btcaust the situations are different, different solutionslike affirmative action-are needed. "The Jewish situation is different from other groups,'" she said. "Sometimes Uews assume] the comfortable political pose of 'Well, we're Jewish, we're different, so we didn't benefit from wpite privilege.' Not true, not fair.

We've been 'white' in this country since at · least 1950 in terms of being allowed to move our to the suburbs while black people have had to stay in the urban centers." That the

THE NEW JouRNAL

harsher American experiences of blacks, and presumably other groups, warrant stronger remedies than were needed for Jews may be a stronger defense of affirmative action than trying to dc'iw a Jewish-minority parallel.

Still, it was not an argument well-suited to Hillel. Jewish students raised on grandparents' stories of anti-Semitism may chafe at the notion that they were the beneficiaries of "white privilege," even if the claim has some truth to it.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Oren. Despite his understanding of the differences between the two situations, he agreed with the general goal of increasing diversity and even spoke favorably of the activists' original letter, the one the Student Board rejected. Rather than draw a parallel between Jews' history at Yale in this century and that of women and minorities, Oren invoked ancient biblical history. "A Jew is instructed to remember that he was once a slave in Egypt and that he was delivered from slavery," he said. "So the idea of siding with the underdog and fighting for truth and justice is a very strong tradition within Judaism."

Explaining the Jewish commitment to social justice, former Hillel Student Cocoordinator Claire Sufrin (CC '00), like Oren, referred to biblical imperatives. She recalled Exodus 23:9, a passage that for her "says it all": "You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt." Perhaps the tenure activists' hopes of winning Hillel's support lay in emphasizing the analogous fttlings of being an outsider at Yale, and not in trying to construct a somewhat dubious historical paralld. For no two situations in history are truly analogous; there will always be facts that do not match. In taking a stand, it is often necessary not to dwell on such facts. As Nietzsche wrote, "Forgetting is essential for action of any kind"-Tenure Action included.

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FEBRUARY 12, 1999

13

ALMA WATER lan Blecher

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THE NEW JouRNAL

Total

Men

Y = Yak University Natural Spring mzter

Women

fEBRUARY 12, 1999

Non-Drinkers

P = Princeton Stadium Natural Spring mzter

go to Yale. We iron "Y"s like gang-signs on the woolly sweaters we tie around our necks. We shop at the "Yale" Bookstore. We eat, no, we dine at Mory's. And what do we drink? Well, sure, we drink beer. But what do we drink when we're dehydrated from drinking beer? You got it: Yale™ Spring Water, the exclusive beverage of Yale University. But is Yale™ Water Yale's water? Are we so true to our alma mater's blue wishbone that we can taste it?

I decided to find out.

So one windy February afternoon, I donned my 0. Press) bow-tie and my (Barrie Boaters, Ltd.) shoes and made my way to the Yale™ Post Office. And there, next to Snow Job's eager promotional team, I called school spirit from its postal beyond. In one set of cups, marked "X," I poured New Haven tap water. In a second, marked "Z," I poured Yale™ Spring Water, and a third, marked "0," I filled with Princeton™ Stadium Water (smuggled out of Jersey by a New journal operative). Harvard doesn't have bottled water, so, for the purposes of my survey, Princeton does matter. Aside from their hydro-preference, students reported their gender, year, and whether they regularly consume Yale™ Water.

Pretty soon we got our first scientific result! Most Yale students surveyed said they would not submit to a blind taste test of lukewarm Ivy water.

Eventually, though, the Snow Jobbers bored of their Whiffenpoof~ry and took the challenge.

The incredible conclusion? Yale students prefer to drink water from cups marked "0." UnfortUnately for our experiment, this means that Princeton wins. On average, Yale students prefer it about ten percent more than the home Bow. The good news is that the women

W

Drinkers

T =New Haven tap water

of Yale have remained true to their school just like they would to their... Anyway, they're relatively indifferent to Princeton, ranking it about equally with Yale. Men, however, prefer Stadium Water by about 20 percent. A glimmer of hope: apparendy, our water is an acquired taste. Respondents who claimed to drink Yale™ Water regularly actually preferred it to Princeton's, where the uninitiated chose Princeton™ Water about 29 percent of the time.

I don't know about you, but something seems fishy about these results, and it's not the water; no fish could live in New Jersey's poisonous sludge. We're talking about the state that has violated the Clean Drinking Water Act more than any other. There's no way in hell their sludge beats our sludge. Where is this Princeton Spring anyway?

The snow-capped peaks of Newark? The natural spas of Elizabeth?

The hidden valleys of Fort Lee? The answer may shock you. Princeton™ Water is not from New Jersey. It's from the Catskills, in upstate New York. Worse, there's nothing Princeton about it (except that it's a fraud). The whole operation is outsourced to a mysterious conglomerate called "Leisure Time Spring Water," which owns the spring and slaps "Princeton" labels on a few of the hordes. How fabulously exclusive. Yale™ Water, as we all know, comes from Willington in our good old Constitution State. No shady subcontracts. Just smooth, fresh spring water that happens to taste vaguely sebaceous.

So Princeton won. But they had to cheat to bring it off. How sadly typical. I think maybe I'll have a beer.

IBIJ

Ian Blecher, a junior in Davenport College, i.s on the staffof TNJ.

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THE NEW JouRNAL

TEMPEST IN A TEACUP How did a troubled man of letters break the Elizabethan Club's unwritten rules?

BEN SMITH

Elizabahan Club Constitution, Artick Xl/L Section 7 ~y mn{lbn- may b~ cmsured, suspmded, or ncp~lkd, for caus~. by a vote ofthree-fourths ofthe Board ofGovernors... "

first time in the Lizzie's history, formally suspending a member for a period of at least six months.

The member (we'll call him Allan North), an English major, poet and intellectual, received the club's traditional letter of welcome in the tudents walk past the large white house beside the School of beginning of the 1970s, during his junior year. In late August of 1998, another letter on Elizabethan Club stationery summoned him to the Music on College Street every day without ever thinking of the Elizabethan Club. Unlike the dramatic crypt across the street Orange Street law offices of Jacobs, Grudberg, Belt & Dow. There, in belonging to the secret society Scroll & Key, every element of early September, the club's Governors explained to the alumnus that the private dub affectionately known as "the Lizzie" withdraws from his unusual behavior had forced them to hold the constirutionally passersby. Members open the green door with their own small keys, required formal hearing and to begin the process which might lead to and enter a comfortably furnished set of rooms perfectly suited to censure, suspension, or expulsion. The club's vice president, librarian reading, quiet conversation, and daily tea.

A Patricia Willis, then read a series of charges, a wimess to the event says.

Life membership in the Elizabethan dub of .. ...

North's sole breach of club rules appeared to be Yale University costs $10, plus a $2 deposit for ~ a single occasion on which he smoked a the club key. The benefits of membership have In the fall, the Board of cigarette in the club. The essence of the charges, changed remarkably little since 1911, when Governors invoked Article however, was his transgression of the oldcarpet manufacturer and anglophile Alexander fashioned decorum so important to the Lizzie's Smith Cochran, class of 1896, created the XIII of the club's constitution character: his conversational intrusiveness, his ~ privare dub for the intellectual and social benefit violation of members' personal space, and his ~ of undergraduates. For 88 years, the discreet for the first time in the Lizzie's imposition on the dub's live-in steward, Leslie club has been open from eight am to ten pm, in {c [[ d Landgraf. North spoke in his own defense, all seasons, to anyone with a key. Last summer, history, orma Y suspen ing a denying some charges and promising not to "' club members still in New Haven were member for a period of at [east repeat others. Though he had been visibly battling mental illness, over the course of the dismayed to find that the Lizzie had shut its six months. semester, he appeared impressively composed to doors for the season. Most members still do not know, however, that the club's Board of \ at least one Governor, George Raine UE '96 Governors took that action in order to keep out T I.AW '00). one of their own. When tea and sandwich service resumed in the &1.1, Over a week later, on September 15, the full Board of Governors met on the club's second floor, seated on comfortable armchairs the Governors invoked Article XIII of the club's constirution for the

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beneath a portrait of Wtlliam Shakespeare in a dark, book-lined room. The Board, whose members are elected to serve one- and twoyear terms, administers the club's day-to-day affairs. Its current president, Emeritus Professor of English George Hunter, opened the meeting in his Glaswegian accent, and then gave way to the heads of the Social, Admissions, and other committees for their reports. As the Board's six undergraduate members, none of whom had been privy to the previous week's hearing, sat in silence, the older members of the board discussed what was to be done with North. He had been using the Lizzie for its intended purposesonly too often, artd too much.

"The Lizzie's practice is to rule by consensus," says Raine, an active Governor whose devotion to the club and careful manners make him an ideal member. But that day the Board moved toward consensus through an atmosphere marked by controlled tension. Beinecke curator Stephen Parks (SY '61), the club librarian and a dominant figure at the Lizzie, spoke vehemently against allowing North to return, and was seconded by a graduate student Governor who appeared to feel personally threatened by him, according to two undergraduate Board members. By the same account, two other Governors, who had met privately with North on several occasions, spoke in his defense: Raine and surgeon-turned-author Richard Selzer, the chairman of the Board of Incorporators, the body that holds the dub's ultimate power.

The meeting's outcome was a blunt letter, composed joindy but signed by vice president Willis. "Three-fourths of the Board of Governors voted to suspend you from the club for six months, that is until March 15, 1999," a late draft of the letter informed him.

"During the period of your suspension," it continued, "you are to make no use of the Club House. An envelope, stamped and addressed to the Club, accompanies this letter for the purpose of your returning your key for the duration."

Phrased in the Lizzie's courteous, conservative style, the letter gave no reason for the suspension, and offered no consolation. But North now says that he needed no explanation: his behavior had challenged one of those unwritten rules that keep the Flizabethan Club the last bastion of an earlier, more decorous Yale.

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Unwrittm Rule: Don't gtt pmonal

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ate in February of 1998, North returned to his dub. He says that he had stopped by occasionally during his more than 20-year absence from Yale, but now he was moving back to New Haven. He requested a new key from Leslie, the quiet, well-liked steward, and put down a $2 deposit. North's tweedy dress, politely aristocratic manner, and conservative aspect matched the dub's atmosphere. However, the new face and unusual manner also stood out among the club's regulars.

Quun Elizalmh I, c.1579

Upon receiving the key, he entered a building that had changed litde since he had last been there-one Governor recalls the impassioned responses to a suggestion that a single picture be moved. The narrow entry hall opens on its right to a well-lit social room, where a side table displays copies of Country Lift, British Htritagt, and Tht Sptctator. Portia, the voice of conservative feminism at Yale, lies casually on a coffee table. At the end of the entry hall is the tea room, where members come from four to six to eat off of silver service and white table cloths. The weekday buffet, prepared by the steward, includes cookies, tea, and a rigid succession of sandwiches: Monday, tomato; Tuesday, cucumber; Wednesday, turkey salad; Thursday, cinnamon toast; Friday, tuna salad;

Saturday, a choice between peanut butter & jelly and cheese; Sunday, date-nut bread with cream cheese.

Nearly empty for most of the day, the building fills up around tea time with members who include faculty, students, staff and alumni. On a recent Friday, tea began with an opening of the club's vault to display some of its treasures, including about a dozen Shakespeare quartos and a Milton first edition. Members sat and stood in groups, sipping tea and downing tiny tuna salad sandwiches. Two casually dressed women talked at the top of the stairs while a group of men in ties and white sweaters and women in dark-colored skirts and dresses gathered around a table in the tea room for serious discussion. In a room toward the back of the house, a professorly man spoke in an Italian accent to two younger women. They drank tea and looked out on the well-trimmed garden, where, in the summer, members play croquet under a huge bust of William Shakespeare.

Perhaps cliques are inevitable in a dub like the Lizzie, whose application process has changed little in recent decades: current members drop letters in support of candidates into the dark wooden Admissions Committee box on a table at the left side of the entry hall. Candidates who receive the minimum of two letters are evaluated by the Admissions Committee for their commitment to the goals of the club. Some members perceive a quiet split in the dub between the well-dressed, often politically conservative students who maintain the club's stated purpose of literary and intellectual discussion, and the more liberal undergraduates who are sensitive to accusations of elitism and come primarily for the pleasant setting and free food. A junior woman in t-shirt and jeans is typical of those who are less concerned with the club's decorum, saying, "It's like going out to coffee with someone but you don't have to pay. It's a nice place to have, and it's no stupider than the secret societies." Crystal McKellar (TC '99), a member of the Admissions Committee, represents the club's conservative leanings: "If someone maintained their membership for a reason as petty as free sandwithes, I would be shocked and dismayed."

North is among the Elizabethan Club faithful. "I am a great believer in decorum,"

THE NEW JouRNAL

he says, explaining his acceptance of the suspension. He is attached to the club not for its sandwiches or couches, but for its members. "~'s a place of interesting and talented people with similar interests to mine," he says. In fact, North's behavior was a little too well~suited to the stated mission of the club: he handed out copies of his poems, and interrupted members' solitary reading to share details of his intellectual and personal life. "I was very self-absorbed at the time," North says of this psychologically difficult period. Another member observed, "The Lizzie is for polite conversation, simple conversation, to hear more than that got on people's nerves in numerous ways."

By the time the Board of Governors met on April 14, 1998, some Governors had heard complaints that North was making the club an uncomfortable place. It was difficult to pin down concrete offenses-rather, members complained of unsolicited poems, inescapable monologues, and forays into uninvited, personal topics. They also complained that North had begun buttonholing them outside the club. One member recalls being put off when North called her at home to invite her to tea, leaving the number of the club on her answering machine. The club steward also remembered that North's conversation had begun to put a dent in her full schedule, though she speaks highly of him and says that in spite of his apparent mental illness, "I didn't find him threatening."

Most of the complaints that seem to have troubled the Board members came from women who fdt threatened by the eccentric, gregarious older man. No one appears to have alleged sexual harassment, but many female members felt that North put them in uncomfortable situations-in a club dominated by decorum, they had to break off conversations and deny requests for telephone numbers. As one undergraduate woman put it, "He was a mentally unstable man. No young woman's going to feel comfortable in that situation." Other women say they felt no threat from North, but several did complain to the Board of Governors, according to members of the Board During his first month back at the club, North appears to have broken only the subtlest of the unwritten rules which control behavior in the Lizzie. Some members still find it hard to say what exactly their problem

FI!.BRUARY 12, 1999

with him was. Raine recalled that although North was apparently fulfilling the mission of the club by vigorously pursuing intellectual discussion, "Many people just viscerally felt this was inappropriate." Yet, as Raine recalls, "It was so hard to distinguish what he was doing from what anyone else was doing."

Unwritten Ruk: Don't slup on tht couches

S

pring break came and went, the uncomfortable episodes became more frequent; the month of April saw what North now recalls as a few very difficult weeks. Kirk Swinehart (GRD '01), a member and graduate student in American Studies, remembers him as "a dazzling raconteur and poet of peculiar sensibility." He continues, "Now the Lizzie is nothing if not a place for raconteurs and poets, but he spoke a little too quickly and animatedly for comfort. It was clear from the first that something was not right, and no more so than when he forced his poems on you. Invariably, they were printed 10 an eerie, unsteady hand."

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rrThe Lizzie is for polite conversation, simple conversation, to hear more than that got on people's nerves., I \ ÂĽ Swinehart says he accepted a copy of one poem, and some months later the author asked him to pay for it.

By the time the Board met on May 5, North's awkward conversation and unwanted poems had given way to requests for money and what most saw as more open abuse of membership privileges. Several members noted that his dress had deteriorated, and that he was spending almost every possible moment in the club. They also noticed that he had begun to violate one of the club's many tacit rules, and was seen napping on the couches. "There are certain things in the Lizzie that you just don't do," Lilly Tuttle (PC '00) says. "It's different from crashing on a couch in Sterling Library-I would never feel comfortable sleeping on the couches at

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the Lizzie."

The Lizzie is open to guests of members on Thursday through Sunday, and North would sometimes invite student Duff Monon (TC '00), a Religious Studies major whom he had met after his return to Yale. They made a conspicuous pair-the wiry, often disheveled student and the increasingly worn memberoften sitting together at the table in the center of the tea room, discussing personal and intellectual issues under the club's dominant decoration, a large portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. "Mr. North is one of the most articulate, talented people I have ever met in New Haven," Duff recalls; he also remembers that his friend once brought him on a members-only day, leading to an uncomfortable reprimand.

"I would stress the minomess of the incident and the appropriateness with which it was handled. I have good things to say about the club and the Board of Governors. I am certainly not disgrunded, and gossip seems to have blown things our of proportion."

"In a way, he was the ultimate Lizzie person," Duff Morton says. And North appears to remain so, commenting appreciatively even on his suspension, "The committee was quite tactful." Like many members who refused interviews, he places a high value on discretion and propriety. Before politely showing me to the door of his longterm residence to conclude our first brief meeting, he used the same words as Stephen Parks, who strongly objected to this story: '1t's entirely private club business."

During his months of growing Unwrittm Ruk: Don't rely on th~ Lizzie disorientation1 and his weeks of intense illness, North had come to rely on his club to e would normally have met at the an extent that was, quite simply, indecorous.

Lizzie, but as North has more He expressed his growing disorientation in than a month until his suspension . the Elizabethan Club that he imagined can be lifted, we spent half an hour on a existed for him, a place that could meet his recent Thursday night at a small white table obsession with the conversation and company in Ashley's Ice Cream Cafe on York Street. I of fellow intellectuals. Lacking psychological sipped a milk shake A stability and still while he spooned his looking for a vanilla ice cream with permanent residence, strawberry sauce and ''[ North had begun to fingered a heavily use the Lizzie as a annotated copy of A home.

Th~ory of Lita-atu" by "In a place that Rene Wellek and Austin prides irself on a sense Warren. The wilder decorOUS~ of decorum, it's elements of the difficult to accuse Elizabethan Club someone of being rumor mill had indecorous," Raines suggested that this man ~' says. In a club selected might be actively from the elite of the threatening, a deliberate -Board of Governors elite, no one imagined harasser who was that such a problem detached from reality. member George Raine could arise-at first, no When I nervously one knew if the dropped my notebook constitution even under the table, he \ contained provisions returned it to me with a for handling the smile. situation, a Board member recalls. But North cringed to recall the weeks in April following the club's January 21 meeting, when his personal demons, of whatever Hunter, the president, said he anticipates that variety, got the better of him. "It was a blip, a North will be conditionally reinstated in lacuna in my life," he now says, a native March. "Before we come to a decision, we· speaker of the club's literary idiom. Putting have to talk to him and see the conditions to aside his distress at the very existence of this which he would agree," he said. "We haven't article, he began to advise me on its contents: decided what those conditions are yet."

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other walls are papered, also in black and white, with a jarringly campy set of quotes on the theme of time.

With the passage of history neatly confined to the bathroom, the Elizabethan Club attempts to maintain its unchanging attachment to the serene Yale of a vaguely remembered past. If the suspended North keeps his use of the dub within its limits, and restrains his appetite for its refined society, he will probably get his key back. Yet as blue jeans appear more and more frequently, and as so many members admit that their primary interest is the free sandwiches, the club is gradually moving away from the old Yale that its conservative members so admire. The dose-knit social and literary society which Yonkers carpet maker Alexander Smith Cochran imagined in 1911, and which Allan North envisioned again in the spring of 1998, no longer really exists, if indeed it ever did. If he is reinstated in March, North can stand with the rest of the Lizzie faithful in the losing battle to maintain a perfect, impossible history of Yale.

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21

INTERIOR DESIGN

by Jenny Ludwig

When I was five the black dreams came; Nothing after was quite the same... When my silent terror cried; Nobody, nobody replied... .! got up; the chilly sun/ Saw me walk away alone."

Autobiography, Louis MacNeice "Exclusive photographs" evokes stacks of yellowing National Enquirm. But these domestic landscapes capture exclusion itSelf. I took these photos during the year my parents' house stopped feeling like home. I was living alone for the first time, and a picture I took of my own apartment led to this series.

THE SILENT TREATMENT Eli Kintisch

THE NEW JouRNAL

To create a close-knit brotherhood, one Latino fraternity cuts off ties to the larger Yale community. t was about 2 am four years ago when Angel Falcon (ES '99) threw open his door and stormed into his freshman suite. He hurled his keys angrily against the wall and cried out. This was a surprising reaction from the even-tempered Falcon, a cry of anguish tearing into the cold serenity of yet another dreary February night. Angel's roommate found him lying face down on the bed. The letters on the back of Falcon's yellow hooded sweatshirt read "Caballero." Caballero Falcon was crying.

The process of pledging Lambda Upsilon Lambda (LUL), Yale's Latino fraternity, had taken its toll on Falcon. He was the kind of freshman who, at parties, spent half the time introducing people and telling jokes, and the other half flaunting his salsa moves with his newest Latina. He rapidly earned a reputation as a merciless seducer, vowing at one point to "cure sexual frustration at Yale, one case at a time." Hew~ a headstrong and articulate player. Now, after a month in uniform, under LUI:s vow of public silence, his roommate found him disconsolate and broken.

"That's the toughest night to talk about, it was psychological," he says, avoiding specifics. "Sometimes you think that you are really close to finishing this goal, but you are surprised that you are not even remotely close ...They cut us down bad." The physical and mental toll of pledging, or being "on line" as they call it, had similarly affected Falcon's two line brothers, and one Caballero had already dropped out.

Several weeks later, Falcon would finally "cross" and become a brother, an Hermano.

For each Caballero, in one way or another, pledging the nationallyaffiliated LUL is the most arduous ordeal he's ever faced. During the process that can last upwards of eight weeks, the line of Caballeros wears only white shirts, army pants, brown neckties, beige jackets and gold and brown armbands. At night they add hooded sweatshirts.

While they may participate in class discussions, outside of the classroom and their own rooms, they are not permitted to speak with anyone but each other. Alcohol and drugs are strictly prohibited. Meals should be short. Mandatory study hours--long. Instructed to walk head down from class to class, Caballeros cut right angles when they turn. On official pledge evenings, the line studies Latino culture, exchanges personal histories, or endures challenging jogging and calisthenics workouts. Pledging Lambda becomes a Caballero's life.

Cast among its fellow fraternities on campus, LUL bears little resemblance to the larger, less structured, more public G reek organizations. When seen marching on a path in tight formation, a Caballero line seems more like a centipede on a rainforest twig than a pack of white-hatted frat boys taking their leave from Lake Place. The

I

FEBRUARY 12,

1999

decision not to host late nights and four-keggers has been well thought-out. LUL is a fraternity that demands not only psychological discipline, but nearly an entire semester of rigorous commitment.

It's a lot to ask of a wide-eyed freshman, bombarded daily with Yale's possibilities. "As a frosh, faced with all these new opportunities, all these decisions on what to join, I know it seems contradictory," Hermano Manuel Berrelez (DC '00) , LUL's president, ad mits.

"Wouldn't the last thing you'd want to do as a frosh be to alienate yourself from the rest of your class?"

Perhaps that is why, from an undergraduate population of approximately 160 Latino men, LUL culls only a handful for each pledge class. Lambda stakes an extremist position on a constant dilemma facing minority organizations: whether to publicize themselves and reach out to Yale, or to encourage self-reliance and risk estrangement from the rest of the university. And even within the Latino community, LUI:s stance is one of careful selectivity. By making it so arduous to join, LUL aims to attract only those fully dedicated to ?:" the process of becoming an Hermano.

For Camar Graves (BK '01) the opportunity to focus on his roots was instrumental in his decision to pledge last year. To him, going ~ through the process was a test of ethnic loyalty. "It's like, how badly do ~ you really want to help your people?" ~ As president, Berrelez knows that if he wanted, he could create the standard shmooze and booze atmosphere of the fraternity meatmarket. "I'm convinced that if we were to rent out Naples, get pizza and beer, we'd have at least 25 Latinos show up," he says

f

atino students bring with them a variety of ethnic experiences through Phelps Gate as freshmen. Some grew up in Hispanic neighborhoods, raised on a diet of tortillas, merengue and the Catholic Church, and found themselves as one of few Latinos in their Advanced Placement classes. Afrer playing the daily role of token Minority Success Story in their high schools, they would come home to Latino neighborhoods and do their homework amidst a Burry of Spanish. Now, after earning a place in the Yale freshman class, they're once again living in the ethnic climate of that AP class, only now on a much grander scale. "I never felt like a rnino,rity before," Hermano Frederico Blanco (BK '00) said. "It's something to come to grips with."

Wendy Montoya (BR '0 1), shares the experience. "I was used to being in a mdting pot of people," she says of her adolescence in H ouston.

"Now I get all these emails just because I'm a minority."

O n the other end of the scale are Latinos who have long known the wodd of the demographic margin, arriving at Yale from affiuent,

L

moscly white neighborhoods or prep schools.

Hermano Graves, for example, came from Greenwich, CT, and Hermano Wellington Veras (TO '99) from Choate. For them, claiming positions as minority standouts has become second nature.

Here at Yale, Latinos from every background are brought together, from the suburbanites searching for an ethnic identity, to the kids straight from the barrio grappling with their new status. LUL hopes to imbue both with a renewed cultural pride-which may explain why LUL, whose letters also stand for La Unidad Latina, has so much solidarity to start with. Lambda prides itself on its cultural diversity, boasting firstgeneration Dominicans from the Bronx, halfPuerto Ricans from Queens, and MexicanAmericans who know they're often considered too white to be Mexican and too Mexican to be white-a tenuous spot on the unspoken Chicanometer.

Uniting its diverse constituency has long been a challenge for Yale's Latino community.

"There's somewhat of an invisible line between Puerto Ricans and Mexicans," Montoya says. Seniors recall racial tensions from a few years ago between some of the Lambda brothers and individual Chicanos.

"The dynamics were tense, hot," said Salvador Gallardo (DC '00), president of MeCHA, Yale's largest Chicano organization.

"But right now, they get along."

How strongly an ethnic organization can unify its members--and conversely how well that group can define itself in the context of its cultural surroundings-are important measures of its strength. For many, Greek letter organizations offer the right combination of internal camaraderie and campus presence.

Since the 1906 founding of Alpha Phi Alpha at Cornell, a black fraternity whose alumni include Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, the rise of ethnic Greek life has gone hand in hand with the progress of minorities in higher education. Although ethnic fraternities flourish at most schools with large frat populations, such as SUNY Albany or UCLA, it's on the grounds of historically black colleges such as Atlanta University or Norfolk State that the ethnic Greek system is an intrinsic part of campus culture. In these minority-turned-majority environments, when the pledges appear, or come "above ground," the campus crawls

with black-clad Alphas, red-hooded Kappas, and arm-branded "Q-dogs," brothers from the legendarily brutal and secretive Omega Psi Phi. Thousands flock to the ethnic Greek step-shows, in which the rhythmic intensity of the dancing is matched only by the crowd's explosive reception.

At Yale, while recruiting weekends, ethnic houses, and PROP (the minority freshman orientation program), have become mainstays of the official minority support system, a handful of black and Latino fraternities have come and gone with the enrollment tide.

LUL first appeared at Yale in 1992.

Historically, most ethnic frats have remained small-Lambda generally enjoys a line of under five Caballeros-and outside of the minority community, its events go almost entirely unnoticed. Lambda's fall Noche

creates . a promtnent public persona for itself-its process cries for attention through its very silence.

LUL

Dorada, a publicized, elegant banquet featuring academic speakers and over 250 guests from all around the country, drew no coverage from either campus newspaper. It's not that people don't notice the fraternity, it's that people just don't ask. t's 9:15 pm, and at the back of Cross Campus Library study hours drag on.

Decked out in their shirt sleeves, ties and armbands, the Caballeros have the institutional sobriety of penitentiary bookworms. Oo one side of the table sit Caballeros Carlos Garcia (TO ' 0 l) and David Botero (BK '02). Facing them are their line brothers Matthew Ramon (DC '01) and Carlos Jimenez (MC '02). The group is Banked by Hermano Marcos Tuero (PC '01) and a few other Hermanos at a nearby desk.

Tune passes. Two girls come by to chat about

I

Orgo. The Caballeros study. The girls giggle and the Hermanos explain. The girls leave.

The Caballeros study. Problem sets give way to reading and then to labs. Study hours are five hours a night, five nights a week.

Most Yalies don't know much about the Latino community. Many have never heard of DB (it's the nickname for Despierta Boricua-the Puerto Rican organization on campus) or of the Latino cultural house (actually there are two: La Casa Cultural Julia de Borgos and the Chicano Cultural Center).

Yet the figure of the hooded pledge walking head down is easily recognizable. ~bda could very well hide its pledges away for eight weeks, but chooses not to. Instead, it creates a highly noticable public persona for itself-its process cries for attention through its very silence. Nowhere is that silent broadcast louder than here, in CCL In this forum the pledges assert themselves as efficient, studious Caballeros-gentlemen.

Silent gentlemen, that is, The verbal isolation, called "social probation," serves several purposes. "One has to do with symbolic historical connotations to us as Latinos, as a conquered, oppressed people," Hermano Berrelez explains. Along with this metaphorical quiet, social probation is a method of elirninatirig distractions, allowing the Caballeros to focus on nothing but academics and fraternity.

With the line as their only support for several months, Caballeros turn their focus inward. "If you isolate yourself from everyone else, all you have is each other," Hermano Graves says. "You're trying to build a brotherhood and you're trying to share your lives, and your experiences and your hopes and your energy." The months of mutual solitude seal powerful bonds of friendship.

Perhaps the best manifestation of the Hermanos' emphasis on brotherhood (Lambdas call one another Bro) are the Caballero armbands-each line designs its own insignias and wears them constantly. But the loyalty that develops is more permanent than ink on cloth. As they say on line, Hmnanos para Simzp". Brothers forever.

The Hermano alumni community supports itself in a variety of ways. As in any network of connections, Hermanos report that unique opportunities seem to flutter through the window when the time is right Hermano Falcon, for example, received an early morning phone call in November, got a

THE NEW JoURNJJ.

tie and resume, and found himself at an Michael Jimenez (DC '99), agrees. interview for a lucrative job at Proctor & "Marching down like soldiers, in cadence, I Gamble, although he had not even applied. definitely don't think it's healthy at all," he For Hermano Graves, the Hermanos says. "But if those people want to do it, I came as a godsend when academic trouble respect it." forced him co cake a year off from school.

While he commends the group for "Guys were calling me from California," he cooperating with the administration, Dean says, shaking his head. "Everyone wanted to Edgar Letriz Nufiez, Yale's Puerto Rican see that Camar got back to Yale." This brand Cultural Center Director, does not approve of of brotherhood, essential to leadership, is the fraternity's pledging approach. A specialist what the pledging process tries to foster. "We in fraternity relations, Letriz Nufiez helped are teaching these men to lead," Hermano Tuero says.

And lead they do. Jeffrey Vargas, chairman of the fraternity's national council, points to alumni fundraising efforts to raise money for victims of Hurricane Mitch which recently battered Central America and the Caribbean. In New Haven, Lambda brothers started AMIGO$, a mentoring program in New Haven classrooms. But in the minds of the .__ Hermanos, these are mere gestures in comparison to the real community service that the fraternity offers-the creation of responsible Latino men. Several Hermanos have never met their own fathers-they know what's at stake in communities which suffer a lack of male role models. It seems the best gifts that Latinos at Yale can give to their communities are themselves. ambda's strategy of open isolation takes the notion of self-empowerment to an n-your-face extreme. For a Caballero, Yale becomes nothing but an academic resource for months on end. Breaking away from the greater community, the line develops as a unit, without any interaction with Yale's larger social environment and all too often, without its suppon.

The Yale community has, in the past, raken issue with the excesses of LULs social probation, denouncing their method as standoffish and militant. Communities at a variety of schools with LUL chapters have criticized their use of evocative armbands. Yet it's their segregationist practices that bring the most ire. "Not even considering the uniform, the act of isolating yourself for so long is taken negatively by the community, both ethnic or not, " MeCHA's Gallardo says.

I

L

FEBRUARY 12, 1999

when police arrested Lambda president Antonio Magana (DC '98) and detained 15 fraternity members for criminal trespass.

Hermano Miguel Correa (ES '00) insists he and his brothers were "simply where we shouldn't have been." Yet the NNU Havm Register called the incident an initiation, raising the specter of hazing.

In retrospect, though, the only lesson learned is that frat boys will, in the end, be frat boys. Like their fellow Greeks on Lake Place and High Street, Hermanos play a lot of Nintendo, hang out together, and try to avoid college stress.

Investigation yields little evidence to suggest abuse.

Simply put, becoming a Lambda man is difficult, but not painful or dangerous. And when viewed alongside the practices of other campus Greek organizations, their process seems refreshingly wholesome. LUL pushes its pledges not with excessive drinking but with running, marches and pushups.

Caballeros are not forced to shame themselves in public but are dressed instead to command respect from all. For pledges, studying with their brothers means doing their homework or discussing Latino heritage, not poring over old test questions supplied by willing alumni.

bar Lambda-style pledging during a previous stint at Union College, following similar precedents at dozens of Greek-heavy schools.

"A pledge process that requires and imposes a period of silence I don't agree with," he says.

"I consider that complete and outright hazing-along with alcohol infractions, violations of university regulations and physical abuse." Take any given group of fraternities, he maintains, and one will likely push the limits.

Perhaps this was the case last spring,

f library hours are the fraternity's statement to the university, then panies during the process are its way of sending a message to the Latino community. When Caballeros make an appearance at a fraternity party, heads turn. Music pulsing, the crowd parts as the line enters the room with their distinctive march, their "scroll." The Caballeros then stand in a close line before the crowd, and shout a fraternity chant. As the party resumes, and the crowd spreads into the spaces around them, the men stand on line, arms locked on each other, heads forward, faces as blank as a sheet of paper.

The women ogle and taunt, the Hermanos keep watch proudly, and the temperature rises as the party goes into the night.

Sweating through their shirts, ties, armbands, and jackets, their silence is their pride. "You're so amped!" Hermano Tuero says, recalling last year's parties. "You can't

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n a windy afternoon last semester, I ran into Angel Falcon by the post office, not far from the freshman room where he had once tumbled into bed after so many turbulent pledge nights. Here was the storybook Latino Yalie, at the top of the world at age 21. He had gone from the barrios of the Bronx to prep school and to Yale, and from PROP to La Casa Cultural and to LUL. His journey had continued with the ascent from Caballero, merely a gentleman on a line of three, to Hermano, a member of the Brotherhood, a keeper of a greater Line, one that stretched from his Ivy League dorm room far back to his ancestors' roots in the Congo,' in the Caribbean, in the Honduran pampas.

Framed in the quiet austerity of Old Campus, Angel cut a handsome figure with a dark coat and a cap. His face seemed uncomfortable, quizzicaL It turned out he had just seen a sign for Yale's minority recruitment weekend~ne of the weekends that he had attended four years before.

"It's weird. For the first time, I'm just wondering ifwe need it," he said. Later, when I asked him about that moment in the fall, he explained that he was beginning to question the need for race-specific programs like special weekends.

Coming from Falcon, the consummate Hermano, such an opinion came as a shock.

In challenging the legitimacy of race-specific organizations, he questioned his involvement with a brotherhood that had given him so much. Having endured the rigors of the pledging process, earning his position as a Lambda man, Falcon knew the isolation of silence. Now he joins a larger debate, with a new, more skeptical voice.

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lose face. If you lose face, you've let it all go down the tubes." The crowd responds to the line's resolve in a euphoric frenzy. The party flares around them and they stand as one, Caballero eyes locked like dead-bolts on an Hermano future.

"

•

ua.!2.!!

Eli J(jntisdJ, a senior in Ezm Stiles (;q/kgt, is associau ttlitor of 1NJ.

30

Tm NEW joURNAL

Spie& Like U&?

The CIA's current recruiting efforts indicate that its privileged relationship with Yale may be a thing of the past.

MICHAEL GERBER f you've got a clean background, want to serve your country, and don't mind an occasional polygraph, there just might be a spot for you in the world of intelligence. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), and other members of the United States Intelligence Community are trying to rebuild for the next century. And part of that process is recruiting college students.

But enticing the next generation of spies is not as easy as it once was. While in the past the mere letters CIA attracted students who were intrigued by its mystery, the Agency is losing its glamorous reputation. As more of the CIA's secrets are revealed-from the failed assassination of Fidel Castro to the treachery of Aldrich Ames-the CIA's ability to bring in new blood has suffered. "The CIA definitely doesn't have the respect it used to have," David Bookstaber (SY '99) says. "More and more I'm unconvinced that they even do anything valuable."

Such sentiment, especially among students like Bookstaber, a seemingly ideal future intelligence officer, may explain the Intelligence Community's recent recruiting troubles. A vocal conservative, Bookstaber studies computer science and mathematics on an Air Force

I

FEBRUARY 12, 1999

ROTC scholarship. He is a patriotic American with technical skills, a liberal arts education, and military experience. The walls of his room are covered with pictures of the fighter jets he hopes to fly next year as an officer in the Air Force. But after applying for an internship with the NSA, Bookstaber does not see intelligence work in his future.

"More than anything, the impression I got when I was applying was tedious," he says. "I'd rather be flying planes-not looking at maps, satellite images, or trying to pump the businessman down the street about what he's selling to the guy next door."

Without the allure of espionage, intelligence organizations find themselves competing alongside investment banks and consulting firms for the nation's top students. "In the past, the srudents were much more likely to come to us," Ken Acosta, a staffing officer at the NSA, says. Now, srudents can simply log on to the NSA website to find job descriptions, starting salaries, and application information.

CIA advertisements in Th~ Economist, the N~w York Tim~s. and campus newspapers sit alongside those of Morgan Stanley and Andersen Consulting. Srudents now know that being an intelligence officer is not like a James Bond movie, so they have to be drawn in by

31

C)

}.

1 f

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more traditional means. "We've had to be creative," Acosta says. "It's a more difficult

sell."

In response to the challenge, the agencies are overhauling their image. These are the new and improved, friendlier spies. "We've become a lot more open in the way we do business," says Marie Vanderhoof, the Chief of College Relations in the CIA's new Recruitment Office. A visit to www.cia.gov gives a sense of the Agency's new approach.

How could any college student tum down an Agency that offers the following benefits at its national headquarters in Langley, VA:.

Employees can shop for an extensive array of quality personal and gift merchandise; arrange for personal travel (air, train, ship}, vacation packages, and cruises; purchase discount entertainment tickets: theaters, movies, sporting events, and theme parks; and utilize a handy one-day film processing service, a dry cleaners and shoe repair service, and a unisex hair salon.

"They try to talk up how nice the life is, how you only have to work 40 hours a week;" Bookstaber recalls from his NSA interviews.

The NSA and CIA can advertise all the benefits they want, but the bottom line is salary. And that is exactly where they cannot compete. The best salary the NSA can offer a recruit just out of college is $41,000, which pales in comparison to most investment banking offers.

Not that there has been a lack of applications; just last year, the CIA received over 25,000. But there has been a dearth of qualified applicants. Despite the increased information available about the Agency, the public is still generally unaware of the CIA's role. "A lot of people think that we're a law enforcement agency," Vanderhoof says. But until the CIA defines its role in the post-Cold War world, the Agency will be misunderstood.

Although Bookstaber seems suited for covert operations-having recently turned 21, he is working on his permit to carry a concealed weapon-he chose not to work at the NSA, opting instead for "a much better deal," a job at Microsoft. His internship at a large corporate fum sounds f.uniliar in today's Yale environment, where work in the public sector is not respected the way it was 50 years ago, when Yale and the CIA had a much closer relationship.

32

he ties between Yale and the Intelligence Community trace back to a time more than 150 years before the CIA existed. Nathan Hale, American Revolutionary hero and the nation's first spy, spent his college days on Old Campus. His story now appears on the CIA Website for Kids:

T

Armed with my Yale degree and under cover as a Dutch schoolmaster, I went behind British lines and proceeded to collect information. Other man my cover, I wasn't weU trained in me art of spying. I was captured by the British and hanged on SCptember22, 1776.

One wonders why Hale, who was 21 at the time, went to war with a diploma instead of a concealed weapon; but his patriotic demise signals the beginning of a strong, connection between Yale and the Intelligence Community.

Yale's relationship with the CIA was unique even among the rest of the Ivy League, according to Yale History Professor Robin Winks' book Cloak and Gown. At Yale, the CIA could find students with travel experience, knowledge of foreign languages, and liberal arts educations. The strong history department also drew recruiters; analysis at the CIA focused more on human intelligence than on technology, so students with strong analytical research skills were most valued.

But such qualities were found in students at other elite colleges. "Yale was not any better than Harvard," Wmks says. The key to Yale's influence was tradition. Once Yale alums took prominent roles in the development of the CIA, they guaranteed that Yale would have a significant role-Yalies tend to suppon their own. So more students were recruited from Yale, who in turn recruited more. At one point, even the Yale crew coach was on the CIA payroll to recruit potential operatives.

In the 1960s, all this changed. Yale became a center of anti-Vietnam sentiment, and support for government organizations, especially mysterious ones like the CIA, plummeted. Other universities across the nation experienced the same phenomenon.

In fact, according to Winks, Nixon wrote a memo instructing the CIA to stop recruiting at Ivy League schools and Stanford and stick to "patriotic" schools like Brigham Young and Notre Dame.

According to political science professor H. Bradford Westerfidd, today's Yale faculty has a much different relationship with the CIA than when he first began teaching here in the 1950s. Then, it was common practice for professors to do consulting work for the Agency, and also to recommend students.

"There were very few inhibitions among the faculty towards recommending students until the 1960s," he says. Now, he knows of no professors who actively recruit; a student would have to initiate the process.

And what about faculty members being consultants for the CIA? "It declined," Westerfield says, "but never ceased." olitics does not fully account for Yale's diminished role in the CIA. In the 1980s, there was talk of a New Conservatism at Yale, but the university never regained its special affiliation with the Agency. As human intelligence became less important than technology, the Intelligence Community began to focus on schools with stronger engineering and computer science programs. Yale is better known for its history and English departments-no longer high priorities at the CIA. When the CIA visited campuses last fall, Yale did not make the list; Princeton did.

Competition from non-Ivy schools also keeps recruiters away from New Haven. "We look at campuses that are wdcoming and we look for diversity," Vanderhoof says. When

P

THE NEW JoURNAL

the CIA was content with being the white male institution that it is, Yale served as the perfect breeding ground for intelligence officers. But th~word of the day is diversity, and the CIA muSt listen to it.

As the nation's intelligence coffers have been significantly depleted, the recruiting budget has been among the hardest hit. At one time the CIA could afford to visit as many schools as its recruiters could manage.

"I currently do not even have a recruiter in the northeast," Vanderhoof explains. She has plans for hiring one by next fall, and maybe then Yale will re-enter the recruiting circuit.

In the spring, the Recruiting Office will evaluate the past year's efforts. But even if they decide Yale is a school they want to target, money may still keep them away. After all, the Agency was in such financial straits that at the onset of the Gulf War no agent was stationed in Baghdad; they certainly cannot afford to recruit at every school.

Budget problems affect recruiting indirectly as well. As politicians struggle to balance the federal budget, the CIA struggles to keep up with the private sector. The NSA now has to compete with the likes of IBM for the chance to offer appli~ts cutting-edge facilities. The Intelligence Community no longer holds the definitive lead in technology.

Bookstaber's experience indicates another reason why the recruiters are having trouble.

During the interview process, he was interrogated twice with a polygraph. In addition to suggesting an involvement with foreign nationals during his religious mission, his examiners accused him of drug abuse.

"People who know me laugh at the thought of someone being so convinced that I have ever used drugs," he says with a laugh.

But on the same day, according to Bookstaber, one applicant cried as the examiner pressed her for incriminating answers. "They were yelling at her, trying to get her to confess to something. So finally she confessed to copying software when she was 15," he says, " and they laughed at her."

Microsoft not only pays better, but they probably don't care if you stole a street sign in high school. It's no surprise that most students do not feel it's worth it just to be able to say, "I could tell you what I do, but then I'd have to kill you."

Ia)

Michael Gerber, a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College, is a ~earch direÂŽr of 1NJ. FEBRUARY 12, 1999

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ou can buy debutantes for 95¢ a piece at the willfully cluttered Group W Bench on Chapel Street. Rubber nuns in penguin suits and their vulcanized white rabbit companions, meant to invoke the anonymous drug-laden memoir Go Ask Alice and the Jefferson Airplane supersingle "White Rabbit," stand on the shelves. Among these, interspersed throughout, stand figures of archaic femininity: unironic brides, bathing suit beauties, cowled runway models, and pink-gowned prom queens. Thumb-sized, mass-produced dust collectors, the figurines have nothing to do with

34

cotillions or debutantes, not to mention parental coercion.

In one corner, someone has dumped a slew of these, head first, into a big milk carton auspiciously labeled the "Bin of Debs." As it is with most things sold at Group W Bench, an untested antiestablishment air settles over each transaction.

I grab a handful of the old ladies the store calls debs and carry them to the register. I lay them topsy-curvy on a jewelry display case and take out three dollars. Apparently at Group W Bench tax is included or never paid because the black-clad cashier hands me back

THE NEw JouRNAL

three nickels back with a postage stamp-sized receipt.

"Debs," she says, slamming the drawer of the cash register shut to the beat of a Bob Marley song. "An interesting choice."

as Gilman put it, "get around the meaninglessness of the whole thing."

Sara Perkowski (TO '99) chose not to come out in the more serious New York debutante circuit. She admitted that, after boarding school, the notion just seemed like an ostentatious display of the ot that many people belong ro the rarified world of debutante Upper East Side materialism she had long since ceased to admire. balls anymore. A more than passing interest in courtliness Although she had attended dancing school and some of the sixth grade seems counterintuitive to generations versed in Betty Friedan dances requisite for obtaining an invitation to come out, the prospect and Gloria Steinem. So just as stores like Group W Bench depend on of being a debutance didn't really mean much to her. Perkowski consumer appreciation of their sarcastic camp, debutante societies occasionally laments her decision, reflecting that one of the deb parties she artended as a guest was a lot of fun. "Coming out doesn't mean depend on a reverence for the past. In many cities the societies persist even as their tried and true purpose-to introduce women to societyanything, but who gives a shit," she said, draining a can of Diet Coke. has long fallen away. Young ladies with old money, new money, or In the kitchen of her apartment on High Street she smokes a Camel enough money to pay the two to three thousand do!Jars it takes to Light and shakes out her showered blonde hair. "It was a good time," come out, dig up white dresses held aloft with petticoats. The dresses she said. "What have you got to lose?" evoke the gowns of the Gilded Age, the historical moment when the Everyone I talked to said pretty much the same thing. "I'm not industrial-financed spectacle of debutante balls first appeared in the your typical debutante," Serena Cherry (ES '99) apologized. "I try to United States. keep it under wraps," she said of her coming out in Chicago, "but it Modem debs wear kid gloves and have their names called out over doesn't really work." Most of her friends weren't debs and such an loud speakers. Esconed by a father or an uncle, the ladies walk, smile elitest distinction sets her apart among her economically diverse group and cunsy. They dance with the dates they brought from college or of friends at Yale. "It doesn't reflect who I am. People get the wrong high school, and no one really thinks about I .( impression." Gilman says something similar. ''I'm marriage or how this process once separated the n many Cl tes not what you think of when you think of a good girls from the bad. young ladies with old debutante, but neither are my friends and they all For some it's a terrific honor. "I knew some came out too." These debutantes mock the money, new money, or girls who thought it was the best day of their lives," seriousness of the ceremonies they participated in, Liza Grote (SM '00) said of family friends she enough money to pay the not sure how to rationalize the ritual of wealth and knew. For others the many deb balls they attend several thousand dollars it privilege of which they are a part. d At least that seems to be the case among during the Christmas break of freshman year are just good parties. " I mean, it was fun," Ellen takes to come out, ig up debutantes at Yale. "I think it's different for girls Gilman (BR '00) said, although she questions how white dresses held aloft who spend more time in St. Louis," Grote said. meaningful the process of coming out was. In fact, with petticoats.

"They feel much closer to it." For women everyone I talked to admitted that their parents geographically cut off from the societies to which { were more enthusiastic about the process than they ever were. Gilman they have been introduced, the designation of "debutante" carries little talked about how excited her mother was at the prospect of her weight, especia!Jy in a community so bent on rewarding merit, not .!l" coming out at the Las Madrinas Ball in Los Angeles. She admits, pedigree. Sally Peacock (TO '99) talks about how the debutante ball ~ however, that the ball itself didn't make any pretense of societal benefit. was not so much an introduction to society as a farewell to St. Louis- J "They [the organizers] sat us down. 'We're just going to throw you a she hasn't been back since. Grote admits seeing herself in the paper was :r big party,' they said. 'This is going to be so much fun, girls.'" The pretty embarrassing: "You're getting recognition for something you j speech was meant to assuage the fears of girls who might find the didn't work for. â&#x20AC;˘ notion of coming out dreadfully old-fashioned. In fact, for Gilman the Sitting at her job at the front desk of the Sllika Center, Peacock recounts the cabalistic elements of the ball she and Grote attended, the community service aspects of the balls-in one for the LA. Children's Hospital prospective debutantes were asked to perform weekly Veiled Prophet Ball in St. Louis. Organized by some of the most service-were their biggest selling points. Many of their deb balls do powerful men in the city, the ball is a serious occasion, ridden with function as charity fundraisers, giving most of the proceeds to local comic and secret details. The most prominent man in the organization hospitals or women's organizations. Although very few of them force dresses up in an elaborate costume and presides ovu the presentation their participants to become actively involved in the organizations they of the debutantes. They bow to him and be reveals the debutante be are funding, many of them promote this kind of charitable element to, has chosen as the Queen of the Coun of Love and Beauty.

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When asked, neither Grote nor Peacock knew what the symbols meant, saying only that they had some meaning and that other people closer to the organization would understand their origins and significance.

"We're empty signifiers," Peacock giggles, submitting her participation to Barthian reading. "My friend just says it's a big pagan ritual that you have to put up with, you know, for the moms." ntil a few years ago, young ladies from the right families ip the Elm City came out at the New Haven Assembly. "It was a terrible boring affair," confides longtime resident Cally Rollins.

"The girls walked down the plank in front of their patronesses. Oh, it was terrible." Those balls are defunct, as are the cotillions Rollins sponsored at the Taft Hotel beginning during World War II. "We live in such a colorless time now," she laments, no doubt dismayed by the pomplessness of '90s living. "There were so many ·witty people then." What wit and engraved invitations had to do with one another she didn't say, but she smiled a lot recalling that less ironic time and peppered her descriptions with "wonderful" and "divine" the way we might convey the ineffability of a situation with "like" and "you know."

The phenomenon of introducing young ladies to New Haven society would have gone the way of the corset and the Corvair were it not for Reverend and Mrs. Cofield at the predominantly black Immanuel Baptist Church. There is nothing particularly traditional looking about the church over which Reverend Curtis Cofield presides. A brown stone and cement structure at the corner of Chapel and Day Streets, the church's industrial architecture attests to its congregation's modernity. There is no ornate scrollwork, no overt reference t o the plainsong style of older New England churches, and the main sanctuary offers chairs instead of standard pews.

Nonetheless as the New Haven Assembly gradually abandoned the practice of introducing its ladies to society, the small church on Chapel Street reinvoked the debutante moniker with that same traditional goal in mind. According to Reverend Cofield, the Debutantes for Christ group was founded in 1973 in an effon to establish a social outlet for young people affiliated with the church.

U

Like its stuffier cousin once removed down at the New Haven Assembly, the Debutantes for Christ organization presents young ladies to society, but does so at a much earlier age-while they are still in high school-and without the hefty price tag commanded by traditional debutante societies to keep the riff-raff out.

While the traditional purpose of debutante balls has been a means for the introduction of women to society, the committee at Immanuel Baptist Church has put its own unique spin on the increasingly archaic institution of coming out. Patricia Turner, a former chairperson of the Debutantes for Christ committee, explained her 20-year involvement and stressed th e program's tripanite structure: debutantes and their male counterparts, Beaux, must fulfill a service project of their own design, participate in a number of college and career seminars and showcase a talent at the closing pageant. , According to Turner, debutantes are selected by their merit, regardless of their ability to pay, and the church, wh ich recognizes the good effects of such programs on the community, funds most of the annual ball and the preparatory programs associated with it. When Turner ta1ks about it, the mission of the organization seems much more comprehensive than anything a cotillion ever pretended to be. "We teach them that drugs, getting pregnant are not the alternatives," she says. "We teach them theater etiquette and dinner behavior."

At the same time the organization makes up for some of t he family problems encountered more frequently here than in wealthier neighborhoods. The relationship between father and daughter, long a traditional feature of debutante balls, has special significance in the Debutantes for Christ pageant. Identifying the ball as a "family-oriented event," Susan Jackson, the current chairperson, stresses that t he organization of the family makes no difference to the hosts of the pageant. "It's a family-oriented event, no matter who the parents are." By this she means t h at a participant's parents might be divorced, never married, or deceased. She recounts that for some of the fathers involved in the pagean~. this is the first time they have spent a reasonable amount of time with their daugh ters. One father, she remembers,

THE NEW JouRNAL

exclaimed that the father-daughter dance was the "first time I held my baby in my arms."

Needless to say, such reunions are far less common at tr.rdicional debutante balls.

Turner congratulates herself when she speaks about the grandeur of the final ball.

"It's a pretty hotsy-totsy affair," she says, describing the dresses and the decorations.

She boasts that this year it will take place at the Omni Hotel, so that, according to Turner, the participants who don't have a car will be able to take the bus. As with all elements of the program, the committee stipulates that the event must take place in an area accessible by foot or public tranSportation.

The grandeur of the ball is not the end of the line for the Debutantes of Christ.

Emboldened by career counseling, etiquette lessons, and a recognition of their self-worth, they crusade toward job security and suburban comfort. "It's not just because of our program," Turner continues, "but our girls go on to become doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, you name it." She rattles off names and accompanying occupations as proof of the success of the program: lawyers who live in. Westport, elementary school teachers who live in West Havenemphasizing, of course, the importance of friendships made along the way.

Operating as an educational, community uplift organization, the Debutantes for Christ Committee seeks to eliminate the socioeconomic barriers its young participants face. The final ball, to be held on February 26, is a universe away from what debutante balls symbolized in the past. It is not a showcase of wealth and bloodlines, but rather a presentation of merit and ambition, even if its terminology remains rooted in the nineteenth century.

Through the receiver, I can hear Tumer's dinner sizzle in front of her. In the basement office of the church, a volunteer uses Windows 98 to update a pledge drive database. It is strange to imagine someone in this environment wanting to harken back to a day when debutantes meant something. It is stranger to think that someone would see in that word a vehicle to promote not just selfesteem, but self-actualization.

Ill]

Danul &Uum, a smior in SiUim4n Co/kg~. is a m4Mging editor of TNJ. FEBRUARY 12, 1999

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jada Yuan

THE NEW JouRNAL

In Sapporo, japan, and Nnu Haven, Connecticut, all must begin with the rice. For aspiring sushi chefi in both towns, rice represents more than a staple, more than a simple grain. It is the basis ofall sushi-from Temaki hand rolls and cylindrical Maki rolls to raw fish Nigiri slices. He who cannot prepare rice will never make sushi. eikichi Moto, a 12-year sushi veteran and co-owner of Hama Japanese Restaurant in Hamden, Cf, makes his rice in a deep wooden basin about three feet in diameter. Balanced on a garbage can in the middle of the kitchen, the huge basin steams eerily under bright fluorescent lights. With a large wooden paddle in one hand and a bottle of mysterious golden liquid in the other, Moto leans through the steam and tosses the white grains into the air with sharp, furious flicks of his arm. In less than five minutes the basin is clean, the rice flavored ana ready for use.

Moto's mysterious golden brew represents the last in a series of careful steps to achieve the perfect sushi rice. Any hopeful chef must first develop an eye for judging the quality of his crop. Sushi chefS in both Japan and America prefer Japanese rice because it remains sticky even when cool, and only rice that has dried for over a year will do.

"New crop is no good for sushi," says Tadahiro Hayasaka (Haya for short), another immigrant from Sapporo and owner of Haya's Japanese Restaurant in New Haven. "Cook time is very difficult because already has so much moisture, but.... " He shakes his head. "No choice sometimes."

In a craft that strives for perfection in both taste and display, improperly cooked rice poses a serious problem. Rice too wet will tear straight through a piece of seaweed or will pack so tightly it renders a piece of Nigiri sushi inedible. Rice too dry (including American rice, which loses moisture as it cools) will fall right out of a Malci or Temalci roll or will fail to pack properly into the bed necessary for Nigiri raw fish. Learning how to determine proper moisture for each batch of rice may take months, and even once a hopeful chef masters moisture, he must still master flavoring. As a requirement of the trade, Japanese sushi chefs hide their flavoring secrets under a cloud of intrigue, keeping their recipes even from their apprentices. "In Japan, men in general have put a large value on their professional success as a measure of who they are, so they hold on to what they know," says Bun Lai, a 29 year ola Japanese-American who grew up working in his mother's Miya's Japanese Restaurant in New Haven. "They don't want a peon coming in and being better than them." Eventually, a young ~d ambitious sushi chef must use clandestine thievery and crypuc

S

FEBRUARY 12, 1999

deciphering methods to divine the proper ingredients for sushi rice.

The wait before making sushi can take up to five years. n the first five years, a young sushi chef hopeful may spend more time washing dishes than making rice. "You do a lot of little things," Lai says. "Basically, imagine being someone's personal slave." Mter a couple of years, when rice-making becomes more familiar and other "peons" have entered under the sushi chef, the apprentice can move on to cleaning and cutting fish, the second step on the road to sushi mastery. Duties under cleaning and cutting range from removing the skin of the fish and slicing it for use in Nigiri to making marinades for the chef and scrubbing fish guts off the bar at the end of the day. According to Lai, sushi chefS deliberately withhold fish cleaning, cutting, and flavoring secrets from their apprentices just as they withhold rice-cooking secrets. With their progress so calculatedly slow, it may take several additional years before the chefsin-training identify fish preparation skills, let alone master them.

Japanese patrons, though, accept nothing less than mastery-one wrong slip of the knife can render a rare and expensive piece of fish unfit for use, and improper cleaning and curing of raw fish always hazards the danger of food poisoning. Only after mastering fish cutting can a hopeful chef begin to think of working solo.

While learning the rudiments of preparing Nigiri sushi proves difficult for beginners, making the move from apprentice to chef is nearly impossible. With veterans hoarding their positions at the head of the bar, few rising chefs get a chance to enter the spotlight. "You may never be a starting man," Lai says, because "the starting man may be there his entire career." For the majority of Japanese sushi chefS still under the tutelage of another chef, the dream of one day escaping from the oppressive apprentice system provides the only spark of enthusiasm in a sea of tedium. "Japan, people work in restaurant not only for money," Haya says. "People like to work and learn the skill. If they learn something, maybe one day [they can] open up own restaurant."

But according to Haya, even the most skillful chefs cannot open restaurants if they lack the capital. Over the past two decades, Japan's sushi market has become flooded with men of poor or little training who own restaurants only because their parents have the money to buy them one. "In Japan, sushi every place, just like McDonald's," Moto sighs. Not only has market saturation increased competition and lowered profits, it has removed the honor that once attracted sushi chef hopefuls to the business. Young chefS looking for distinction then have two choices: suffer through the ten or more years of training

I

39

necessary to work solo, or leave Japan. ager to leave for America and economic opportunity, none of New Haven's Japanese sushi chefs completed the rigorous ten year training. Seikichi Moto was already 30 years old before he decided to become a sushi che£ Before that he worked as a manager for a wholesale company selling calculators and survey equipment. Moto had never tried the food service industry, but as he and his friend Kenichiro Hamagishi (Hama for short) discussed 'moving to America and buying their own restaurant, he realized that sushi would provide his ticket out of Japan. Three years before leaving for America, Moto quit his job in wholesale and took one in the fish market. There he worked for an entire year, cutting and cleaning fish and learning to determine fish quality at a glance. Once he had learned about fish, he moved on to a sushi restaurant. Fifteen years ago, when the starting wage for a sushi chef was around 150,000 yen (approximately $556) per month, Moto worked only for food and living expenses. In return, his hosts taught him as quickly as possible, and by the time he and Hama left for New York two years later, Moto had learned and perfected his skills from rice to Nigiri.

A young kid straight out of rural Sapporo, Tadahiro Hayasaka had begun his training at the Prince Hotel in Karuda, Japan, where he worked as a French che£ "Japan was too much for me," he says. "You work in a company, you are part of machine." Haya dreamed of moving to America, where he could leave the strict hierarchies and traditionalism of Japanese culture: "I come here to adventure," he says. "I try to find new lifestyle." Americans, however, had had their fill of French chefs. The country wanted sushl chefs and even offered an automatic green card for those willing to immigrate to its sushi-hungry cities. To get to America, Haya had to embrace the very aspect of Japanese culture he hoped to escape. He began traditional training and stuck to it for over two years, working hard and moving quickly through the dish-washing and rice-making ranks to the second level of fish cleaning and cutting. After two years, though, he was ready to leave Japan and set off to meet a friend who owned a restaurant in New York. He had yet to make his first sushi roll.

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Japanese satellite television flashing silently behind him, Haya now smiles with all the confidence of a man secure in his independence from a restraining hierarchy.

Two years ago--13 years after he first arrived in New Haven-Haya finally opened up his own sushi restaurant. The move had been preceded by two years of Maki and Temaki rolling and Nigiri slicing at a restaurant in New York, then a move to the quieter and more manageable Connecticut city. In New Haven, Haya hopped from restaurant to restaurant, working first at Hatsune (now defunct), then Miya's, and finally at his own jointly-owned Haya's Japanese Noodle House.

Rumors of Haya's pride and quick temper swirl around his restaurant moves and his ultimate break with the Japanese Noodle House. According to Lai, who worked with Haya at Miya's, chefs who have gone through any form of traditional training often bring with them problems that make work in America difficult. Although the chefs may have left Japan to escape the secretive and arduous training rituals, they bring elements of that tradition into the training of their own workers in America. Lai claims that after two years of training under Haya, the chef still remained tight-lipped about his cooking secrets.

Chefs coming to America carrying little but their sushi knowledge and their dreams also tend to rely dangerously on sushi as a lifeline, as the full content, rather than a mere facet of their identity. "With Haya," says Lai, whose break with the man still causes resentment, "his entire social life revolves around the restaurant." Lai says that when the chefs form all their friendships through their work and look at their sushi as a validation of their success, the distinction between personal and business affairs becomes blurred. A decision made for business purposes can often become construed as a personal affront. When speaking of other restaurants in the area, Haya grows upset and loudly denounces all but Haena's as sushi "I don't trust."

Clad in his dark blue Japanese wrap shirt and white food service hat, the tiny Seikichi Moto at Hama feels none of Haya's malevolence towards other sushi restaurants· Moto's arrival in New Haven was preceded by only six months of further training in upsrate New York, after which he and Hama located

THE NEW JouJUW-

a failing Italian restaurant cheap enough for them to buy in New Haven. Since Hama's opening 14 years ago, the restaurant has doubled in s~e and has quadrupled its number of sushi chefs (for seven years it operated with only Moto at the bar). The restaurant prides itself on "tasty and beautiful sushi made quickly," and most of its creative sushi options, such as the red, yellow, pink, and green Rainbow roll are Moto's own invention.

New Haven, with its large university population of what Moto calls "sushi people," has opened up opportunities for many other chefs besides Haya and Hama. Mei Yao and Miao Yu, two part-owners of the Asian House Restaurant, have capitalized on the student population's willingness for experimentation and taste for ethnic foods.

Their restaurant features Chinese, Thai, and Japanese selections, but all three of their chefs are Chinese. After immigrating to New York from Shanxi, China, Miao Yu trained for only two months before stepping behind the bar at Asian House. "We just know the simple way, not deep," Mei says, but the glut of experimental and ignorant restaurant-goers doesn't seem to notice. "American person comes in and knows just a few words of Japanese, but they talk to her," Mei laughs.

"Chinese and Japanese person is just a face.

They look the same." eorge Oakley, one ofMiya's star sushi chefs, looks nothing like any other chef in the New Haven area. The California-born surfer and wrestler is not only muscular and young, he's also black.

Oakley, who spent most of his life working in his parents' two 7-11 stores, never guessed that he would end up working as a sushi chef in New Haven. Two years ago, when he decided to come to Southern Connecticut State University to complete his degree in sociology and communications, his only consideration had been the school's wrestling program. When his wrestling career ended a year and a half ago, Oakley started hanging out at Miya's in downtown New Haven. He knew Bun Lai, a former wrestler, through other wrestling buddies, and liked to go to the restaurant several times a week for Sapporo beer and sake. One day, a couple of months later, Lai offered Oakley a job. "He was like, 'Throw this on,' and he handed me an apron," Oakley says. "fm very inquisitive.

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FEBRUARY 12, 1999

He saw that I kept asking about sushi and it just sort of blew up. So here I am, chopping away."

The training regiment at Miya's took about five months of learning the basics known to sushi chefs everywhere: how to cook rice, how to cut fish and how to make rolls. Lai supervised Oakley and taught him all he knew. "It's a progression," Oakley says.

"As you progress you get to be on your own more and more until they want to see how you react under pressure and they throw you to the wolves." After a year and a half of work at Miya's, Oakley now joins Lai in creating new options for the menu and making other decisions for the restaurant. Oakley grins rnischieviously, "I put the soul in the roll."

New Haven and its population of "sushi people" has room for all creative sushi artists within its boundaries. "If interested in sushi, anyone can be sushi chef," says Moto, who employs one Japanese-American and two Mexicans at his bar. Sam Oh, a Korean immigrant whose Seoul Restaurant in downtown New Haven features both Korean and Japanese specialties, asserts that race has much less to do with making great sushi than determination and sensitivity. "It's like a heart," he motions towards his chest. "If mind goes too fast, rice grows too hard. You have to take care of the rice, the knife, the fish. You have to touch fish very softly."

Patrons at any of New Haven's sushi restaurants have to get used to the lack of Japanese sushi chefs in the area. "I get second-guessed all the time," Oakley says.

"It's up to me to show my talents, show what I can do." But Oakley isn't worried. He knows his rice, fish, and seaweed as well as any other chef in the area and has throngs of repeat customers who find his rolls the most soulful in the city. Oakley won't stay at Miya's forever, though. He'll finish school in a year and still has to thi.nk about graduate school.

For him, sushi is less of a career than another notch in his cooking belt. "Now," Oakley says as he presses a bed of rice into a thin piece of seaweed, "I have something to add to my appetizer list."

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Is there an American city (other than Detroit, perhaps) so synonymous with urban decay as Buffalo? There it sits in the left armpit formed by Canada's border with New Yt>rk. It gets the meanest moufalls east of the Rockies. It's home to the losing-est Super Bowl contmdm in history. And as anyone who's driven through it en route to happier places will attest, it looks bad.

-john Boonstra, "Down & Out in America's Armpit" The New Haven Advocate, july 4, 1998 s there an American city (other than Detroit, perhaps) so easy to rag on as Buffalo? Is there any town that inspires as much disdain, even revulsion? Vincent Gallo's film Buffalo '66-which provided the springboard for Boonstra's terse meditation on geography, misery, and football-made disgust its central theme: disgust for oneself, for one's surroundings, for one's parents and origins, and foremost for Scott Norwood. Norwood, as Western New Yorkers know all too well, was the Buffalo Bills player whose botched field-goal attempt at the close of the 1991 Super Bowl has become a crystallizing moment of defeat in the city's collective memory, an undying symbol of Buffalo's fundamental haplessness. Historically, the Queen Citywhere I spent my first 18 years--has suffered a long decline: it slowly sank from a focal point of westward expansion in the nineteenth century as the hub of the Erie Canal, to a bustling but financially troubled metropolis in the 1960s, to the dilapidated, rather desolate town it is today. The closing of the steel mills and "white Bight" in the 1970s delivered sound blows to Buffalo's self-image (and population density), but somehow Norwood's folly was a point of no return. The moment that ball careened just right of the goalpost was the moment that proved what Buffalonians had feared all along: that we were destined, in all things, to fail.

The kicker, so to speak, was that this premonition was confirmed in front of the entire country; we were anointed as the official whipping boy of the U.SA., much like Newfoundland is for our neighbors to the north. We wear our dunce-cap crown with cheerful defensiveness, trying to turn our national shame into a position of strength. And-1 suppose because we're true to ourselves--we fail. Jay Leno establishes a nightly monologue motif by which he compares the height of Buffilo's snowdrifts with that of diminutive Bills quarterback and Flutie Flakes purveyor Doug Flutie (family lore has it that my cousin Mary Beth flirted with him in a bar once), and we'll reply with chirpy pluck that winter in Buffilo is the best seven months of the

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year. Make geography-as-destiny jokes like "America's Armpit" or "The Mistake on the Lake" (a tide which Erie, PA and Cleveland also proudly claim), and we'll remind you of our mercifully close proximity to Toronto, where we buy up Roots sweatshirts in bulk and where any disaffected teenager with access to a car spends as much time as possiblt.

Say you're Don lmus. You go to Buffilo for a speaking engagement (in the hilly Southtowns, no less, which is as close to pastoral as the Buff comes). Your subsequent report to millions of listeners about the trip carries a whiff of the tragic, conflating pity, terror, and a certain reverent abhorrence in just five words: "God, what a dreadful place."

We might be a little flummoxed, but we've got plenty of comebacks in our town-pride holster: Mark Twain lived here for a little while. Hey. at least we 71lfllk it to four consecutive Super Bowls. We've got, urn, the Goo Goo Dolls. We've got a Frank Lloyd Wright house. And goddamrnit, we've got wing.r.

Maybe Buffalo should turn that preeminent claim to famerecently celebrated here in the Elm City, at the Seventh Annual Wwg Ding in the New Haven Coli5eum-into a hokey-inspirational motto, like how Clinton's people are always saying be's the Man from Hopc"We believe we can fly," or something. The problem, obviously, is that the same disingenuity is inherent in both catchphrases. The

THE

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disappointment one feels upon the realization that Big Bill actually said "Mom and Pop's Floor Maintenance" and "Daddy-O's Auto grew up in a debauched, corruption-laden casino town would be no Parts." The women sported bad, crinkly perms and too-tight jeans and match for the expectations dashed by the disclosure that the wings in too much makeup. Everyone was overweight. Everyone talked through question for Buffalo are torn off slaughtered chickens (from Arkansas), their noses. Everyone was enjoying their Rolling Rock and buffalo wings. Outside it was cold and dreary. The Coliseum looked like my plunged into boiling fat, cooked until they float, and served up to hungry beer-swilling patrons, many of whom in their lumbering girth parents' bowling league. It looked, in short, like home. and hirsute aspect resemble the beast for which our proud city is If New Haven can look and sound like Buffalo, then I would guess named. that a lot of America can. Maybe the perverse nationwide fixation Yet somehow I don't think most Buffalonians would recognize the upon Buffalo as an embodiment of pure abject humiliation is a reflection of what we all fear we have in common with the town, and a irony as such, or mind it if they did. Take food critic Janice Okun, writing about buffalo-wing originator the Anchor Bar in the February projection of it. A substantial number of us come from places, like 3 edition of the Buffalo News: "The verb 'to Buffalo' something is now Buffalo or New Haven, where there isn't much to do and the weather firmly ensconced in the culinary dictionary; it means to fry isn't so good and the people aren't so nice-looking. For a host of something (anything) and serve it with celery sticks and blue ~==:::::::::,..,_ reasons, Buffalo has become the national microcosm--or cheese sauce. So the responsibility of being chief chicken scapegoat--of all these local frustrations and insecurities. wing cook at the Anchor Bar is, well, awesome." In this And it's decided to be a gracious scapegoat. That's why Janice Okun can write without the crutch of irony passage, I'm struck by the refusal-informed by breathless civic pride-to admit that something about "intricate variations of chicken wing art," or unsavory tinges this exciting new entry into the why the Anchor Bar website boasts that past visitors to the pub have included "Spyro Gyra and Glenn Miller gastronomic lexicon. I'm fascinated by the swift elision of any logical connection between a sentence about Band member Dick Gerhart." frying something (anything) and a sentence asserting the On my way back from the Wing Ding, I stopped majestic perch of those fearsome deities who do the frying. into the other Anchor Bar, on College Street here in New Haven, to ask if they ever get confused with the buffalo-wing These are the linguistic stamps of a dyed-in-the-wool-worn-sevenmonths-of-the-year Buffalonian, for whom selective cultural myopia mecca. "Nah, that's never happened," barkeep Elaine replied, but my question did spark some secondhand memories of Buffalo. "I had a and a decidedly sanguine spirit of embellishment are one's best ways of friend from Buffalo," Elaine told me. "His mother was basically rationalizing why, in God's name, you live in Buffalo. A native ability to fling animal parts into bubbling pots of lard is just one of your illiterate and talked funny; it was really embarrassing. But he would go to the Anchor Bar there and the guys would just look at him like he options.

After I attended the Wmg Ding on February 4, however, I realized was a god, because he'd gone to college and everything." This image of that maybe there isn't that much to rationalize; there are plenty of fine Buffalo's Anchor, in which the Cro-Mag patrons toss their bones¡ on upstanding folks who don't have anything against animal parts, lard, or the floor before approaching the ethereal M.A candidate in their midst the Goo Goo Dolls for that matter. (The lineup of local bands with speechless apelike wonder, doesn't quite jive with my impression of the tavern as a stop for financial-district types and undergrads who providing the soundtrack for this gluttonous event included a plurality of sensitive emo-meets-Allmans types, all markedly Goo-Goolish.) like jaxz.. It does correspond, however, with a conveniently constructed Seven local bars and restaurants had set up shop around the perimeter narrative, one to which Leno and lmus and plenty of others have made of the Coliseum to hawk their varieties of buffalo wings, and as many notable contributions. Buffalo looks bad so that everybody else can tables serving soda, beer, and "wine" (I didn't ask) slaked our thirsts. look better. The Wing Ding was a reminder rrat a lot of us basically look the same. laJ The very first words I overheard once my friends and I pushed our way through the-1,000-strong crowd were those of a woman saying "Oh, wow, oh my God"--or, more precisely, "Oh, waaw, oh my gaaad." I knew that sound, that timbre--dusty and flat as the prairie where jessica Wintn; a smwr in Trumbull Co/kg~. is a managing ~dimr of TNJ. Buffalo roam. The men wore rattails and football jerseys and shirts that

FEBRUARY 12,

1999

43

DEF I NIT I ON OF A MADMAN Shut within an asylum, William Minor unlocked the English language.

by John R. Swansburg II The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester (Hapercollins, 1998), pp. 242.

P

erhaps only a man with so formidable a name as Richard Chenevix Trench, dean of Winchester, could have proposed the concept of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). On November 5, 1857, Guy Fawkes Day, Trench set forth the explosive idea that it was not the role nor the prerogative of a lexicographer to determine which words should be included in a dictionary. A dictionary should be a record of all words that enjoy a recognized life span in the language.

But what is so revolutionary about an English dictionary that includes all English words? The English dictionary is a surprisingly young entity. Four hundred years ago there was no such volume. Consider the implications: William Shakespeare had no English dictionary at his disposal. Neither did Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, or Donne. The first English dictionary appeared in 1604, written by a schoolmaster named Robert Cawdry and contained a scant 2,500 entries over 120 pages. Cawdry produced the work "for the benefit & help of Ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskillful persons, Whereby they may more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes." This work set the tone for the many dictionaries churned out during the remainder of the 17th century: a dictionary was a reference work that defined difficult words-words like abequita~, bulbulcitate, and commotrix. More general dictionaries began to appear in the 18th century, culminating in the famous achievement of one of the greatest minds in the history of English literature: Dr. Johnson's

A Dictionary ofthe English Language.

Johnson's dictionary was a response to a demand, made most notably by Jonathan Swift, that the English¡ language be delineated, fiXed. Swift complained of the appearance in print of such unfitting English words as "bamboozle" and such linguistic tramgressions as "couldn't." Thus while Johnson's work was far more comprehensive than any of its ancestors, it was also haughtily prescriptivist in tone. Johnson edited the English language, including in his volume only those words he deemed appropriate.

This haughtiness is charmingly apparent in the timbre of his definitions. Take, for example, his definition of oats as "a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." Or his entry for lexicographer: "a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words." An entry in Johnson's dictionary was still a membership in an exclusive club.

Thus Trench's idea was utterly new: to write a dictionary that not only included every word in the English language, but also traced the history of each word's use in order to identify changes in meaning and sense.

This was a tremendous undertaking. To put the work into perspective, consider that it took Johnson and his staff six years to write A Dictionary of the English Language while it took a succession of editors and a far greater staff over 70 years to produce the OED. For every word in the English language, a history had to be found, an etymological map created. This meant scouring every dark

corner of English literature, from Beowulf to Dickens, for occurrences and variations of words. The most famous and influential editor of the OED, James Murray, enlisted the help of the English public in order to complete this chart of the language. Through one of his repeated appeals to English readers for help, Murray unwittingly found the assistance of Dr. William Chester Minor, former New Haven resident and graduate of Yale Medical School.

But it was not in his family's New Haven home or in their crockery shop at 261 Chapel Street that Minor sifted through every book he could get his hands on, meticulously noting down citations for the OED. Rather, it was in Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where he was incarcerated for life.

Ironically, the Oxford English Dictionary could not have become a reality nor the end of lexical exclusivity achieved without the help of a man excluded from society, a man condemned for life to a lunatic asylum.

Simon Winchester's The Profissor and tht Madman, recently nominated for a Critic's Circle Award, unravels the story of the man whose untiring work made possible the production of a project as audacious as the

OED. Wmchester paints for his reader the life of a brilliant man trapped by unrelenting psychosis. After graduating from Yale, Minor began his medical career as a surgeon in the Union Army during the Civil War. Bur eventually Minor's psychological problems

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became too acute for him to perform his duties properly, and he was discharged from the Army. Believing a change of scenery might do him 9ood, Minor soon made his way to London. -: But his mental state did not improve with his change of nation. Indeed it worsened, and one night, in a characteristic fit of paranoia, Minor murdered a man in the streets of the Lambeth section of London. On his way to work, George Merrit was shot through the neck by Dr. Minor, who believed Merrit was trying to harm him. Merrie had unknowingly become a character in the world of Minor's delusions. A judge found Minor not guilty by reason of insanity, and Minor was subsequently committed. It was from his asylum that he penned what became nearly 10,000 entries in the Oxford English

Dictionary.

Winchester has an intriguing story to tell, without a doubt, but his story is by no means impeccably told. Despite the remarkable nature of the making of the OED and William Chester Minor's integral role in it, Winchester at times betrays some insecurity about the quality of his story. He seems to want the story to be something it is not. In his preface, Winchester promises that "what follows is [a] strange, tragic, yet spiritually uplifting story." Strange and tragic yes, but Winchester forces "spiritually uplifting" where it does not belong.

Winchester also does something very dangerous-he deceives his reader. He offers a romanticized version of the first meeting between Murray and Minor, in which the former is said not to have known of the latter's mental deficiencies until mistaking the asylum's warden for Minor: "And you sir, must be Dr. William Minor. At long last. I am most deeply honoured to meet you."

There was a pause. Then the other man replied: "I regret not, sir. I cannot lay claim to that distinction. I am the Superintendent of the Broadrnoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

Dr. Minor is an American, and he is one of our longest"staying inmateS. He committed a murder. He is quite insane."

This dialogue is pure fiction, the creation of an English magazine writer in 1915 when the story first broke and nothing was known about the first meeting of editor Murray and concriburor Minor. Winchester, however, FEBRUARY 12,

1999

knows that Murray knew of the New Haven doctor's condition long before ever visiting Broadmoor. Yet he offers the myth first, in no way indicating co his reader that the story is wholly spurious. The author goes on to admit that this story is not true, and to deliver the details of the actual first meeting, but the reader inevitably feels let down. This feeling of deflation would not be so acute if the fictional account of the first meeting of the Professor and the Madman were not the one that the reader is made to anticipate throughout the narrative. The reader is left feeling like Winchester wishes that his story did end with the rather Gothic scene above.

For example, he writes, "The patina applied by decades of good use has made the legend pleasingly credible." What kind of alchemy is Winchester asking his reader to accept?

Not only does Wmchester ask his reader to believe a myth, but he also dwells on certain unfortunate facts. Regretting the sexuality that had plagued his actions and thoughts throughout his life, Dr. Minor performs a final act of surgery: the removal of his own penis, the source of his unsavory desires. While perhaps this detail deserves mention, since it demonstrates the development of Minor's condition, it is questionable that it deserves an entire chapter in the book (a chapter wincingly entitled "The Unkindest Cut"). Wmchester provides himself with an opportunity for some simply unfortunate passages in an otherwise wellwritten work. The most egregious:

book Winchester attempts to demonstrate to the reader how Minor may have acquired the perverse sexuality of his later years during his childhood in Ceylon. Winchester's prose at this point becomes almost salacious: And there are the girls-young, chocolate-skinned, ever giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies, rosebud nipples, long hair, coltish legs, and scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears-who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who run, quite without shame, along me cool wet sands on their way back home.

The surgical removal of the penis is ar the best of times a dangerous practice, rardy performed even by doctors: An attack by the renowned Brazilian fishier known as candiru, which likes ro swim up a man's urine stream and lodge in the urethra with a ring of retrorse spines preventing irs removal, is one of the very rare circumstances in which doctor [sic] will perform the operation, known as a peotomy. It is a brave, foolhardy, and desperate man who will perform an autopeotomy, in which one removes one's own organ-the more so when me operation is done in an unsterile environment and with a pen knife.

There are other problems as well, problems of form rather than content.

Although the work is written in a very readable style, Winchester seems to have added to his personal lexicon while researching The Professor and the Madman.

Abstruse words dot his prose, often sending Winchester's readers from the pages of the book to the pages of a dictionary, presumably for most readers something more abridged than the OED. Some of Winchester's gems: fusillade (to shoot down by volley or successive shot), tocsin (an alarm bell or warning signal), and purlieu (a resort).

A thorough reporter, always quoting from primary sources, medical records and newspapers, Winchester often relates intriguing details in the history of Dr. Minor.

William Chester Minor's contribution to the making of the OED cannot be overestimated.

Although there were others like him during the 70 years of production to contribute prodigiously to the dictionary, no one ever matched Minor's precision and ability to always be one step ahead of the Oxford editors. Oddly enough, the individual who made all this possible, having brought the doctor the greater part of his library from which he culled his citations, was none other than Eliza Merrie. The wife of the man Minor gunned down, the cause of his exclusion from society, forgave the sick murderer of her husband and gave Minor the opportunity to put an end to lexical exclusivity.

1111

A brave, foolhardy, and desperate man indeed.

Another unnecessary element to Winchester's work is his often aimless and unscientific speculation about the causes of Minor's psychological ailments. Early in the

john Swansburg. a junior in Saybrook Colkge, i.s on the stajfofTNJ. 45

~iris, ~iris, ~iris A YALE MAN GOES IN SEARCH OF THE YALE WOMAN.

Ron en G ivony " G

entlemen: I wish to make a strong protest," an angry pen wrote the Yak Alumni Magazint in 1966 to answer student calls for coeducation at Yale. "Let's face it-charming as women are-they get to be a drag if you are forced to associate with them each and every day.

Think of the poor student who has .a steady date-he wants to concentrate on the principles of thermodynamics, but she keeps trying to gossip about all the idiotic trivia all women try to impose on men ... " Two years later, another tradition-happy alum wrote the YAM to argue that, "Many men are able to devote greater emphasis to their academic endeavors in an atmosphere ... [without che] potencial distractions ... inherent in a coeducational setting... " "Idiotic trivia." "Potential distractions." In this seemingly new era of the Women's Center, the Women's Table, Aurora, Portia, t;he Women's and Gender Studies department, the Viva La Vulva theater troupe, along with the University Provost and Graduate School Dean both being women, these snippets of old-school opposition to women invading the ranks of Mother Yale sound like hopelessly ancient remnants of a bygone age. And yet we still hear the lingering remains, slightly modified and updated, of such sentiments: Diane Kunz's tenure struggle, Yale's position~ead last-among Ivy League universities in its percentage of tenured women, and the gender discrimination trial of Ann Diamond.

The statue of Nathan Hale and Woolsey Hall's proud dedication to "The Men of Yale" who died in war offer reminders of where we've come from and also how complete (or incomplete) the degree of coeducation at Yale really is. As we approach the thirtieth year of coeducation on campus, perhaps a brief tour through the events of Yale's busy night life is in order.

Tuesday night, the Women's Center. Even with rain pouring outside, eight women have gathered for a writers meeting of Aurora, "a feminist magazine" (never capitalized). Hellos are exchanged, seats taken, articles handed out. The inside of the latest issue boldly declares, "Everything is a FEMINIST issue." Yale's refusal to establish a department of Gay and Lesbian Studies is discussed before the reading of "Pasty Blue Nausea," a poem describing a woman's fears while awaiting a pregnancy test's results.

"Say what you will about this poem, it's definitely Aurora material," one of the editors says. "We had a bunch of poetry submissions for this issue from someone else, but I don't really think they deal with the subjects Aurora usually discusses."

"Like what?" someone asks.

"Oh, I don't know," she says. "You know, poems about, like.. .love.

Sunny days. Stuff like that. Not really Aurora content. Oh, yeah, were you still doing that article about a visit to the DUH gynecologist?"

Wednesday night, the Yale Bookstore. Flanking portraits of Bill Clinton, George Bush and other Yale greats is a display for St:orm- at Yak, Owen Johnson's paean to Old Yale's Glory and the Yale Man (always capitalized). A brief look inside: "They had begun at last. Four glorious

years, good times, good fellows, and a free and open fight to be among the leaders and leave a name on the honor roll of fame." That same night, the New, Blue's initiation begins with singing atop the Women's Tablethe same monument that, two weeks before, served as a urinal for a heartily masculine frat initiation rite-and ends later with the women side by side, swaying and clapping during a performance inside Sterling Library.

Saturday night, Toad's: Saturday Night Dance Party is carrying on nicely. The bass pulses down York Street, drawing eager males and females in, past the surly, frowning bouncers. Once inside, sweaty and excited people bump into each other, spilling beer, chanting loudly, Give it to me baby! (uhh-huh, uhh-huh), Give it to me baby! (uhh-huh, uhh-huh).

A trio of dancing females, recent scars on the Booty Cam, dressed in black spandex and revealing halter-tops, mouth the words in unison between puffs of Newports. I walk up to them, dancing with each one in turn, posing the obvious question.

"So, uh, what do you think of coeducation at Yale?" I ask.

"WHAT?" she yells, confused and unimpressed. "Are you aware that next year will be the 30th year of coeducation here?'' I yell back.

"Is that your idea of a pick-up line?" she asks, rolling her eyes, shimmying away and still singing, loud and lascivious.

"So," I say, shifting strategy with her friend. "Do you feel like women are integrated fully into Yale life here?"

She eyes me suspiciously. "My boyfriend's over there. Why don't you ask him?" She points to a beer-guzzling ogre twice my size and waves affectionately. ¡ "I'm just trying to do an article," I sigh. "Do you have any thoughts on coeducation here?" I ask the last of the trio.

She shakes her head no, I'm sorry, and heads back into pandemonium. Where is this much-feared "distraction" to be found?

Before leaving the Aurora meeting, I was asked to distribute a dozen or so flyers requesting submissions for the next issue. I go to the Trumbull dining hall the morning afrer Toad's, slightly hung-over and grumbling about feminism. The lunch hour crowd is bristling. I move from table to table, nodding hello to the Trumbull master as I place a blue flyer in the center of her table, and survey the room to see if any tables are not done.

Paintings of college masters, their service to Mother Yale long since past, form a solemn perimeter to the dining hall. The task is finished, somewhat. The sight of Yale's first and only female college master, surrounded and gazed upon by portraits of old white men on the walls in faded hues on dusty canvas, provides an obvious contrast-perhaps a fitting image for this messy business of coeducation. You've come a long way... baby. li1J

Ron_e_ n-::: G:-:ivo-ny -.-a-so-p' ho_m_o,-re-,in-8-:ra :__n-,rfo,_rd..,..C=o"lle-ge,~is'""ci,;:.. rw 't"": cm~. on a-n~ dsu-;bsai ---:-.p~.,tlons man-agu -. ofT;;NI.

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