Volume 41 - Issue 3

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Managing Editors Amy Fish, Mitch Reich

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Designers Alice Buttrick, Aimee Marquez

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Editor-in-Chief Nicole Allan

Senior Editors Nick Handler, Jordan Jacks

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THE NEW JOURNAL

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Volume 41, Number 3 November 2008

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·poWER HUNGRY .

Reducing emissions, increasing consumption: Can Yale have it all?

by Amy Fish

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FORTUNE TELLERS In today's economy, should Yale spend its endowment? byLauraZax

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SNAPSHOTS 11

RADIO ACTIVE Yale's AM station tunes in to past glory.

by Sarah Nutman

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BURNING BRIDGES Yale-run community center trims its grassroots.

by Marissa Grunes ·

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STANDARDS

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LOOSE FOOTING Outdoor enthusiasts struggle for Yale's support.

by Sophie Quinton •

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POINTS OF DEPARTURE

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PROFILE Small Town Values by Kate Lund

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THE CRITICAL ANGLE Tome Raiders by justin Stone

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ENDNOTE Classifieds, Nov. 5, 2008 by Liz Deutsch

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The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc.., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copy· right 2008 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor in chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Seventy-five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven community.

Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $18. Two years, $32. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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November 2008

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CHIMES OF PASSION

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One day in the middle of the 1950s, after a career performing small roles on Broadway and Swedish dialect parts in radio shows, Robyna Neilson Ketchum stopped smoking and announced that she . would collect bells in order to fill the void.

The decision was not entirely out of the blue, her husband wrote after her death in 1975. As a child growing up in Min. nesota, Ms. Ketchum had loved "antiques and echoes." It was not surprising, then, that she would one day come to be known as the "Bell Lady" and that her collection would "be Enshrined at Yale among the ·World's Greatest Instruments.''

When people visit Yale's Collection of Musical Instruments in an ornate stone house on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, they generally flock upstairs to see the pianos, harpsichords, and clavichords, or meander downstairs amidst Stradivarii and early American piccolos. Few visitors enter a small room to the right of the entrance that displays about half of Ketchum's collection of over four hundred bells from around the world. Once a harpsichord studio, the room was redesigned to house the bells after Ketchum died. Its black walls disappear into the ceiling and creep quietly into the corners, making way for well-lit display cases and, in the center, an austere square platform strewn with bulbous sound-makers.

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every shape and ring. in every tone. Susan E. Thompson, a curator at the museum, is not herself a campanologist, but she knows her bells (or, to be technical about it, her idiophones). "Most people come in thinking that bells have to · have clappers," Thompson tells me, referring to the . dangling, clanging part inside many bdls . .

"Well, they don't!" She picks up ambonga from Central Africa to reveal its empty in~ terior. All you have to do is strike it and it reverberates. Maybe that's what drew Ketchum to these instruments their accessibility. Bells don't require extensive musical training to play; just a flick of the wrist or a tap of a stick will do. Ping! Ririg!

Donngg. What satisfying little things. And they can be scintillating beyond sound.

Thompson pulls a Japanese rattle off the wall and notes, "I have to be careful to display this one on the right side.'~ The "right" ·side has Chinese characters engraved on large, round, coin-like surfaces. The wrong side seems to be just squiggles squiggles which, at second glance, are clearly depictions of four different sexual positions.

Thompson takes the handle and shakes the rattle in the air "Fertility!"

In this room full -of handles, I begin to imagine hands. Here, a hand emerging from the orange robes of a Buddhist monk on pilgrimage. There, the calloused hand of a Swiss farmer. The hand of an African witch doctor next to that of an Italian priest. All ringing, striking, shaking bells.

A French businessman taps his gaudy desk bell, which is topped with a scantily clad Native American warrior. Nurses walk around hospital corridors Clanging heavy, nurse-shaped bells in 19th-century England. ·Who, I wonder, shook the bell shaped like an Iron Maiden, the vicious 18th-century German torture device? Examining the labels, I realize that the cast of missing music-makers is actually an interspecies bunch. There are bells, now dormant, that once hung on the necks of Scandinavian cows and the legs ofThai elephants.

More evocative than the bells themselves are the sounds they produce. While most of the bells remain behind glass cases, their collective capabilities can be heard in a soundscape that plays from speakers mounted on a fireplace in the back of the room. More than one thousand years of sacred and profane sounds ring, arhyth-

mically, atonally. Some summon, others warn. Waves of slow, almost aquatic bass notes vibrate beneath the quick tingling of metallic chimes. There is s?mething calm . and contemplative in these invisibly ris• ing a~d subsiding .tones, but tfi'ere is also something~grand and urgent and complicated. At ~imes I feel as., if I'~ in engaged . in some chaotic, multicu1tural ·ceremony with a million different rituMs and a mil• • • lion different paths to transcendence, I am ' suddenly struck by the phrase "the ring of truth.''

Scholars come to the Bell Room to decipher all kinds of mysteries to examine symbols on various Buddhist bells and Japanese gongs or to of!er theories ~m the possible connection between ancient Peruvian bells and similar vers. i ons from South. . . e~t Asia, sketching out unusual lines of human migration. The Bell Room, it turn~ out, offers a crash course in, among other disciplines, wodd religion, metallurgy, and global history. There is .some doubt, though, as to the legitimacy of all the labels. "She says they're from Japan," Thompson says, looking skeptically at a set of handbells. The . "she" in question is, of course, Ms. Ketchum, on whose original labels the understaffed Collection of Musical Instruments has had to rely.

I wonder again about Robyna Ketchum.

Why bells? Was this her way of traveling the world? Of vicariously experiencing ceremonies and systems from across time?

Venturing into the sonic unknown? The very last bell in the room's longest display case is, perhaps, the only one of truly indisputable origin. It belongs to an identifiable time and place. It is a bell for the US Bicentenntial, designed by Ketchum herself just before her death. It is small and golden, decorated with an eagle, stars, and patriotic phrases a hand bell reminiscent of the Liberty Bell, and one of the few artifacts in the room that I think I understand. I give it a ring. I never did hear Robyna Ketchum the Broadway singer or Robyna Ketchum the radio character, but as a bell, Robyna Ketchum sounds crisp and bright. .

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THE NEW JOURNAL •

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CROSS ROADS .

I first encountered Holy Land USA, a now-defunct Christian amusement park in Waterbury, Connecticut, when I was nine years old and on vacation with my evangelist neighbors as part of their ongoing and ill-fated project to enfold me into the flock. The family was nice enough, but something about their dynamic left me unnerved: The father was upstanding, but with an officious and verbally abusive streak. The children seemed to believe that bees were satanic slaves. And the mother, congenial, pious, vaguely medicated, might have possessed as much faith in the miracle workings of Cymbalta as she did in anything prescribed by the New Testament. As we drove across the state to a steady stream of Worship FM, the illuminated crucifix standing atop the decrepit remains of Holy Land was visible &om the highway for miles in each direction and appeared to represent some kind of spiritual harbinger for the weekend to come. Would I embrace Christ? Would the magic finally take effect?

"There's the cross!" exclaimed the seven-year-old daughter from her car-seat.

All eyes turned to the road as we passed beneath the embankment. It was a singular vision of roadside rapture.

The cars • around us fell away from view, the sound of the radio receded. But this transcendent moment could not tast. "Pay · attention to the road, dear," came the concerned wife's voice. Before long, we had passed Holy Land by and found ourselves at some cloistered resort, possibly also called Holy I .and, playing tennis and muttering November 2008

prayers over macaroni and cheese. I never ..· got around to embracing the Savior, but the image of that cross stayed with me. I . vowed to return to Waterbury one day, but . in different company.

In April 2008, the crucifix had been torn down by the city and replaced ~ith a new, polished-metal replica. It was an unexpected decision, given the morbid disrepair into which the rest of Holy Land had been allowed to fall following its 1984 closure. The simultaneously charming and psychotic brainchild of a loc~ lawyer, the park was originally imagined as a divine alternative to places like Disney World or Universal Studios, and in the midst of its 1950s heyday drew tens of thousands of visitors a year. A half-century later, its . miniature recreation of Bethlehem has crumbled and pine trees shield the bits of scripture carved into stone. Guarding the hallowed ground is a convent of nuns who reside in a complex by the chain-linked gate and make it their business to chase away marauding hoboes or sexually adventurous teenagers. In an alarming and poignant transformation, Holy Land USA has mutated into something more akin to Holy Shit USA, hallowed ground whose present-day allure seems less ecclesiastical than sublimely ironic.

It was a rainy and miserable night this November when I finally embarked on my long-awaited return to holy ground.

In place of Christ-crazy chaperones, I was accompanied by my alcoholic roommates.

Instead .of DC Talk, we listened to NWA. As we cruised through toilet-bowl weather to a Death Row soundtrack, I knew that a new era had arrived. I have difficulty~ believing in a higher power, but at the time, something about driving a Japanese vehicle through collapsing New England strip-malls as "Straight out of Compton" destroyed the speakers felt like an undeniably spiritual, if not necessarily liturgical, phenomenon. After 45 minutes~ the glowing cross dawned over the damp cesspool of Waterbury like an ostentatious streetlamp. I was overjoyed. "I hope we don't get murdered," my roommate muttered.

Holy Land, while technically private property, is not difficult to infiltrate. After parking our car down the hill from the convent so as to avert whatever kind of police attention exists near large populations of nuns, we walked around the border fence and entered the complex through an open gate. In the darkness, we pulled aside branches to reveal decimated altars

and busted porcelain figurines. Micro: Bethlehem, up close, shrouded in fog, had devolved into a violent parody of religious tourism. This was not faded glory but total annihilation. The flocks of families the site once hosted had left no trace of their presence; the sole indication of human contact was lazy and unimaginative vandalism, an anarchy sign spray-painted over a shattered Virgin. We moved uphill, pushing past trees, until the forest opened up and the crucifix stood before us. Standing on the cinder base beneath its soaring, electrified scaffolding, the three of us looked do~n ,on Waterbury, the windows of its innumerable department stores and gas stations and hospitals glowing in the fog like fireflies in a swamp. It was all very moving and beautiful, as if the lights of the amusement park had somehow migrated down the hill from Holy Land to set up a more permanent and depressing camp in the valley, some sort of strange and fallen Palestine.

When Walt Disney gave evangelist preacher Billy Graham a tour of Disneyland, his guest is known to have remarked that the park was pure make-believe. Disney responded, "You know, the fantasy isn't here. This is very real ... the park is reality.

The people are natural here; they're having a good time; they're communicating.

That's what people really are. The fantasy is out there outside the gates of Disneyland, where people have hatreds and people have jealousy. It's not really real."

But Holy Land hints at a new prognosis. The hatreds of people are directed at rides and icons a trash-filled manger, a concrete Jesus anointed in graffiti while the real world, imperfect and hazy but imbued with a prescient and artificial magic, sits in a valley filled with cars' and nuns.

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visitors. By 2007-2008, this number had more than doubled, with 1,920 scholars visiting from just under a hundred coun-. tries. More than half of these scholars are affiliated with the School of Medicine or various scientific research facilities, however, and rarely encounter undergraduates in a classroom . .

What differentiates the MacMillan Center's international visitors is their ability to provide their students with a direct link to the global issues that they-research and teach. Jarie Edwards, dean ofinternational affairs for Yale College, emphasizes the immediacy that international scholars bring when they teach about their home regions. "There's nothing like studying 'Yith someone who has just gotten off a plane from, say, Bolivia, to learn about the situation there right now," she says.

International professors are especially prevalent in two relatively new majors:South Asian Studies and Modern Middle East Studies. Until more permanent faculty members are hired, these visitors can fill positions and draw · attention to the • new maJors. .

Larisa Satara, who joined the MacMillan Center staff six years ago as the first director of the Visiting Scholars Exchange, organized academic orientations to life at Yale. Satara explains _that visitors come to Yale for a variety of durations and in different capacities: Some teach classes, some come to do their own research, some stay the whole year, others for only six weeks.

These scholars are distributed throughout Yale's departments and the various councils at the MacMillan Center and receive grants and fellowships from Yale as well as from their home countries.

The Office of International Students and Scholars works to prepare visitors for life at Yale, in New Haven, in America. It supplements faculty-led dinner conversations on "Understanding America''discussions about American political and social issues with a more informal forum called "Crossing Cultures," which focuses on more mundane aspects of American life: email etiquette, "how to make small talk," and U.S. holiday traditions. A popular topic is "U.S. food," the discussion of which includes instructions on how to eat a baked potato.

But cultural instruction cannot always ease the strain on international families.

Marvan Khawaja, a visiting professor from the American University of Beirut, has found the transition to be "very •

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TEACH FOR AMERICA

On the second floor of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies one November afternoon, a group of four visiting scholars is squeezed around an oval table for lunch. A woman with dark, billowing hair takes out a Ziploc container of rice mixed with traditional Indian dhal and yogurt. The man beside her mangles through Chinesenoodles with chopsticks; his neighbors munch on falafel wraps. Interspersing bites of food with chatter in diverse accents, they share stories of their home countries, bringing global interaction to Hillhouse Avenue.

In 1996, when Professor Gustav Ranis took over as director of the then-named Yale Council on International and Area Studies, the council brought only three to four visiting scholars to campus annually.

The year before, the Council had consolidated and moved into Luce Hall, and President Levin who had already made a priority of internationalization of the University's research and curriculum charged Ranis with the mission of, metaphorically and literally, "filling up the building." The MacMillan Center now invites approximately one hundred such visiting scholars to Yale in both teaching and researching capacities, with about half typically coming from abroad.

The numbers of international visitors across the University are far more staggering, and Yale consistently ranks among the top ten U.S. institutions sponsoring scholars from abroad. During the 1997-1998 school year, Yale hosted 889 international •

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challenging." His wife, who worked as a painter in Lebanon, is trying to pursue her art in New Haven but has begun working at a day care to keep · busy. .The situation has also been difficult for Khawaja's 13-year-old son, for whom it took the family three months to find a school. "[My son] was very nervous about coming to a new school, about how he would get along with the other students, about our name ... " Khawaja trails off. It probably would have been easier if his son had not come, he later confides.

Yet for Charu Gupta, the most difficult aspect of the transition has been leaving her 13-year-old son behind in India, where she teaches at the University of Delhi. Gupta's son will have to take centralized board exams next year and they both thought he would fall behind in his work if he joined his mother in America for the year. · The challenges faced by Khawaja and Gupta are shared by many scholars with families, whether or not their spouses and children move to New Haven. The transition forces children to adjust to new envi, ronments or learn to be independent from their parents; spouses have to make sacrifices and often take on unfamiliar family roles. Gupta says that her husband is taking care of their son and home, "in tnany ways. defYing and challenging the stereotypes that we have of South Asian men."

Despite the challenges, Gupta emphasizes the many merits of teaching abroad.

With no domestic obligations, she has the freedom to participate fully in academic and social life at Yale. She has relished the chance to listen to such "stars" as Jiirgen Habermas, who visited Yale last month, and has been taking advantage of the extensive library resources here. She has learned about different pedagogical options: In India, most of her classes are taught as "a monologue," but after witnessing the interactive nature of Yale seminars, she hopes to better integrate her students into class discussion when she returns home. In addition, meeting colleagues at the MacMillan Center and throughout the Yale faculty, she has formed a cross-cultural and cross-regional network of friends that she hopes to maintain.

And when she misses aspects of Indian culture that are absent in New Haventhe street food, the "buzz" of the October festival month she turns to Yale's active South Asian community.

Christer Thornqvist, a professor from Sweden whose visit to Yale was his first

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THE NEW JOURNAL

to the country, says he has only to make a trip to IKEA, which he describes as a "small Sweden," to find a bit of home in New Haven.

-Naina Saligram

frequented intercollegiate athletic events, the Yale Cheerleading Squad officially formed in 1912. Since the school didn't go co-ed untill969, these early cheerlead. ers were, like most Yalies at the time, male . students from elite secondary schools.

The Bush men Prescott Sheldon Bush '16, George H. W. Bush '48,. and George W. Bush '68 were all avid members of the Yale Cheerleading Squad; a picture of Sheldon Bush mid-cheer is tucked in away in Sterling Library's Manuscripts and Archives. In those early years, cheerleaders embodied not only school spirit but also masculinity and leadership, and they received wide respect and admiration from the student body Anyone who has ever seen Bring It On,

Bring It On Again, Bring It On: All Or Nothing, or Bring It On: In It To Win It

CHEER AND LOATHING As a high school senior attending Bulldog Days, Michelle Wolfe DC '11 knew that she wanted to join the cheer squad.

But when she asked her Bulldog Days host about Yale cheerleading, Wolfe, who was a varsity cheerleader at her high school, was disappointed to hear that the University apparently didn't have a squad. At the next day's extracurricular bazaar, however, she came across an enthusiastic group of Yale undergraduates brandishing a "Yale Cheerleading" sign.

"My host didn't think there was one," Wolfe says. ''And I still get the same reactions from people when I tell them I am on the cheerleading team. It seems 'to be a confusing and surprising concept because some hadn't realized that Yale even had cheerleaders!"

Yalies may be oblivious to their school's small but active cheer culture because they don't attend games, or because they cave to popular stereotypes of cheerleaders and assume that such a culture cannot ·exist within Yale's Gothic towers and legendary libraries. Many would be surprised, however, to find that Yale's cheer squad is entrenched in a near-century of history.

Originally a band of "yell-leaders" who November 2008

is familiar with the archetypal American cheerleader: blonde, peppy, and subject to vicious social laws. Many members of Yale's cheer squad complain that people who don't know them personally make assumptions about their intelligence and sincerity based on their pastime.

Even for Kimberlee Sheldon BK '1 0, who grew up in England, such American media portrayals are a cultural landmark.

"I saw in all these American films that cheerleaders in high school were kind of bimbo-y and often were the popular girls with mean personalities," Sheldon says.

"But I thought that might be different on a college level."

Such films in fact encouraged Sheldon to try cheerleading what better way to immerse oneself in apple-pie Americana than by cheering at football games? · Bu~ she was disappointed to discover that the activity was not quite as popular at Yale as she'd imagined. "Yale girls tend to have hostile reactions toward cheerleading," Sheldon explains. "When we are trying to recruit and approach random girls to ask if they are interested in joining, some would go, 'Eww; no, why would I want to do that?' I could see this happening in high school, but this is really redundant here: I mean, we are all at Yale."

Co-captain Lindsay Barbee TC '09 believes that Yale cheerleaders defy the stereotypes. "Since a young age, cheerleaders are sort of the Gossip Girls of high school.

They are hot, slutty, stupid, and popular," she says. "Perhaps some cheerleaders act that way, but not all, and definitely not Yale Cheer. While many of my teammates are quite stunning," Barbee continues,

'·' we don't ever attempt to exude a sexy image. We are bouncy, we are sharp, we are cute. " Male cheerleaders battle stereotypes as well, but of an entirely different nature.

Grant Goodlin PC '10, although aware of the popular assumption that stuntmen are gay, has not experienced more than mild surprise from anyone who has found out that .he joined the squad this year. "But' I've gotten some great reactions," he says. ''And I hear stuff like, 'Way to go, Grant!

I thought that cheerleading was only for girls!' and 'Introduce me to some of your new friends."'

Last year, former stuntman Phil Clopton MC '08 won the honored title of Mr. Yale, which the cheer squad now uses as a recruiting point for future stuntmen: "Mr. Yale was a cheerleader!" they tell recruits.

And the Yale name, of course, goes a long way to dissolve various other side effects of the Bring It On franchise. "We are cheerleaders," Barbee says, "but we are Yale cheerleaders. Clearly the Yale comes first."

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SUNDAY NIGHT LIGHTS Christ Church draws its largest crowd of the week to sit in the dark and stare at an empty altar. Every Sunday at 9 p.m., there are multicolored candles, sweet incense, and entrancing music. But there is no minister, no Bible, and no choir in sight. The crowd at the Compline service is decidedly non-churchy, though a few genuflect and make the sign of the cross before sitting. Most are young twentysomethings in couples and small groups,

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wearing sweatshirts and high heeled boots.

This crowd seems less interested in God than in music, light, and calm . .

In such an empty, cavernous church, footsteps and whispers sound vaguely meh>dic. For a few minutes, the only sounds are the taking-off of coats, the unzipping of zippers, the placing of backpacks into chairs. When the real music begins, it is cryptic, merely a low, vibrating note. The singers are unseen in · a balcony above the pews, and, slowly, words begin ·to form. Voices chant, "Arne nnn." Plainsong, the style of liturgical chant sung at Compline, involves a single melody and no instrumental accompaniment. It's a non-Whiffenpoof sort of a capella, with l9w tones that rise to the high ribs of the church ceiling "Lord, have mercy upon us" female notes blending like chimes into the deep swell of male voices. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost ...."

The lyrics change by season, according to the customs of the centuries-old monastic orders of St. Benedict. For over a thousand years, Compline services have been part of a cycle of prayer and music to mark the end of the day, the last of eight canonical Hours performed by the Christian church. Christ Church, according to its website, se~s Compline as "the sole point of calm in a hectic week," meant for "a new kind of worshipper." It posts podcasts of sermons online and welcomes seekers into the "loving, growing family'' of the church.

Reverend Kathryn Reinhard hopes that the service targets those who can't find the time to worship or who find church intimidating. "We get a big mix, a huge range of people ... .it's non-threatening, you don't have to sit, stand, and kneel, and there's no intermediary," she explains.

"You can go to it as a Christian service if you want to, and see it as a place to pray," one Compline attendee suggests, "or just let it be a time to relax, or meditate, or just listen to the music. It really doesn't matter if you're atheist, Jewish, Muslim, nothing ... nobody will question you about why you're there." Still, Reinhard says, "I hope they start coming [to Christ Church] because of Compline." After the service, she teams with Divinity School volunteers to serve hot cider to visitors, hoping to create a sense of community among the group and thus draw them into the Christ Church fold.

The eight Compline singers form their •

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own community and call themselves "Team Compline." The service is reputed as a good singing gig, not least because each chorister receives $50 per session.

Compline chorus alum Lucy Fitz Gibbon TD '1 0 calls the service "magical." But unlike the listeners, her mind cannot wander.

A "half-hour of intense concentration," Fitz Gibbon explains, is required to maintain the chant's precision. And with only eight singers, one member's slip-up will echo loudly through the silent church .

The chorus is no more religious than its audience. Though he sings explicitly Christian lyrics, Neil Vasan MED '12, an agnostic, enjoys the music. "There are mentions of God and stuff like that, but it's pretty inviting," he explains. "You don't feel like you're being bombarded with other people's beliefs." · .

So, unbombarded, the devout and the agnostic share the pews quietly, listening.

And when Compline ends, it is still Sun"': • day night. The week is about to start, or it has finally ended. There is work to be done.

Eyes are woozy with darkness, minds lulled to sleepiness by the chanting. The singers remain immobile in their perch above the congregation until they hear the squeak of a floorboard or the grind of a chair. At the first sign of shifting, Team Compline begins to leave. Arid slowly, Fitz Gibbon says, "like little bugs out of the woodwork, people start trickling out," from the dark indoors to the darkness outside.

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New Haven native shrinks his city down to size.

By Kate Lund

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Well into the new century, Fair Hope, Connecticut appears to be suffering from chronic nostalgia for the 1950s. Kids play baseball in a vacant lot, their home runs dropping into a field of weeds and lilacs. The pool hall does good business.

The church hosts crowd-pleaser marriage ceremonies, the couples posing for photographs on steps of well-worn brick.

Everyone is white; everyone looks happy.

Except for when the train ruris through, the streets are pleasantly quiet.

Like the other three towns it borders, Fair Hope is made up of thirty sections each less than thirty inches long. Its ·residents fit on my thumbnail; few buildings are taller than my forefinger. Fair Hope is an entirely realized world, growing up building by building in the basement of New Haven's most unlikely miniaturist.

"This postcard right here is a postea rd of a piano factory in Ivoryton, Connecticut," Steve Rodgers says, pointing to a yellowed print of Fair Hope's real-world inspiration, taped beneath its three-dimensional replica. "I built this in five days during a snowstorm week, just sat on the couch while my wife watched Project Runway. Tim Gunn's dope, you know what I mean?" Steve, this miniature world's divine creator, is giving me a·guided tour of the four fictional towns connected by a working railway. He's eager to show, though he apologizes for taking my time. Not a miniaturist by trade, Steve has spent the working half of his 34 years in the music industry ten years touring with his brother, some stints with record labels, and a current gig as manager ofThe November 2008

Space, an underage performance venue in ffamden. · But on his off-days, his fictional world comes first. "I get really excited, I'll put in a fourteen hour day," Steve admits, pointing to a grocery store without any right angles.

"I probably worked three weeks here just building that building from scratch."

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pointing to a grocery store without any right angles.

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Steve is a scavenger. ''I'm a tag sale junkie, like beyond junkie," he confesses. On average, he hits 15 sales a week garage sales, rummage sales, estate sales. After an initial learning phase, he stopped using kits, so he's constantly stockpiling his own materials. "Everything that I see, I'm always like, how can I use that in the context of a miniature world?" Steve says, taking me through his diorama. The baseballs in the field are cupcake sprinkles; the port windows in the shipyard are eyelets from childrens' shoes; some of the buildings' interior bracing is done with chopsticks.

Steve's always snatching up cast-offs and putting them to use. Out on a walk with his five-year-old daughter, he uncovered a huge, old railroad sign beneath a rotting caboose. The sign now graces the basement entry to what Steve calls "Trainworld." · "My wife thinks I'm crazy," he laughs.

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"We'll be out in the yard and I'll start killing our bushes for the sake of making new forests in my miniature world."

On the streets of Fair Hope as on the streets of New Haven fresh paint mingles with decay, but in Trainworld, Steve's diligence, not nature's entropy, drives disorder. "This is alcohol and India ink. Us real model-makers use this for weathering," Steve explains as he pours dark liquid onto a strip of bass wood. Some buildings are peeling, and birds nest on rooftops and leave behind their droppings. Red brick is scuffed with sidewalk chalk. Days' worth of Steve's labor is not even visible. He removes the roof of the church to show me a rehearsal for the Christmas pageant taking place inside; he stoops down to eye-level to peek in through the window of the billiard hall, where at a tiny pool table a man is poised to hit the eight ball. ·Had Steve not pointed it out, I would never have noticed that the siding of every four-inch building is lined with pinpoint nail holes.

Steve's attention to detail has paid off, earning him something akin to celebrity status in the world of miniatures: His creation was recently photographed for Model Railroader Magazine. But beyond the borders of Fair Hope, Pine Ridge, Tribute, and Graylock Falls, Steve couldn't care less about exactitude. ''I'm not a meticulous person," he insists. "If you look upstairs in my dresser, you'll be like 'Woahhh .. .' " Nothing about him suggests precision.

He punctuates his profoundest insights with colloquialisms, the backseat of his car could host a tag sale, and his hair is get-

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ting long. But downstairs, in Trainworld, Steve taps into a well of superhuman fastidiousness. "I was a Marine cadet for four years and I think it taught me some weird discipline thing," he says. This value lives on as he sits at his basement desk at three in the morning, with a beer and an earful ofNPR, counting receding windows on a black and white postcard with a magnifying glass and a toothpick.

A couple of times per year, collectors and miniaturists put down their magnifying glasses to mingle at their grandest gathering: .the model railroad convention.

Steve shows up to a handful of these events, mostly to buy material or to sell his surplus supplies. He describes the scene as an unlikely arena for middle-aged machismo·balding men in thick glasses dropping train jargon, pushing to the front of the display room with big expensive cameras while their wives wait on benches ringing the perimeter. "Every model builder is my dad's age. The future does not look hopeful," Steve says. The average train guy is a retired engineer, a current rail conductor, or a quarry worker. They tend to be a little overweight and a little overpatriotic.

"I mean, I love the USA, but I'm not going to wear an American wolf T-shirt and be like, 'Heyyy,' you know what I mean?"

Almost every miniature-builder picked up the hobby as an extension of a mechanical vocation. "For a lot of the guys, it's all about, 'Hey man, look at my DL109 New Haven. It's only made from 1949 to 1950,"' Steve says, referring to a type of train. "That's all garbage, I don't like any of that stuff."

Steve isn't in it for the machinery or the affirmation of masculinity. For him, the heart of this solitary activity is a connection to people, and he likes nothing better than to sit down and talk trains with some of the great old-timers. He's in touch with a wide network of Midwestern modelbuilders and corresponds with an old hermit living off the grid in Washington State, where he grows a special plant Steve uses in his miniature forests. But while Steve named his third town Tribute as a nod to those who came before him, Trainworld honors more than model-railroaders. As Steve leads me from building to building, he shows me that the real foundation of each structure is made not of bass wood or chopsticks but of bits and pieces of his biography. His uncle spent years inventing a lightweight bike n10del before uprooting his family to a cabin in the Blue •

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Ridge Mountains; Fair Hope's bike repair shop is housed in a wooden A-frame. Steve spent his brief stint at a North · Carolina boarding school smoking cigarettes in· the shadow of a rusting water tower. "I always wanted to climb one," he says. In Tribute, a line of miniature boys lean over the railing of a water tower, egging on classmates scaling the ladder below.

But perhaps the story best chronicled in the tracks and beams of Trainworld is the narrative of a region's past. "I really love the history of New Haven," says · Steve, who has lived in the Elm City all his life.

Pasted on the ceiling is an aging, arm's.:. length map of New Haven rail-lines. "See that train yard, where the lines all connect?

1hat's Target," he says. Hunting down inspiration and materials brings him out of the basement and onto his city's streets.

Working from a 1908 postcard, he once spent an afternoon searching the waterfront at City Point for the exact site of 19th-century oyster beds. The door of Fair Hope's brewery is decorated with an old bottle cap he found when.visiting the site of the New Haven original. But despite his interest in earlier eras, all of Steve's towns are frozen sometime between the dawn of the railroad revolution and the rise of today's Target. · Steve does not appe~ to harbor a 1950s fetish, however, and upon closer inspection, his layouts reveal a sense of humor in · his approach to picket-fence America. Pine Ridge sports a red light district; Greylock Falls hosts a chain gang. Boy scouts march through a thick forest that obscures a circle · of drunks and a lady with a shotgun. But these details are playful, not cynical; there's a beauty to each of these towns, a blessed simplicity. This is Steve's parents' era, and for him, there's something romantic about it. "I kind of wish I was around in, like, post-World-War-II America," he says. "I feel like there was a lot of hope."

Only toward the end of my tour of Trainworld does Steve remember the train.

He unwraps a heavy locomotive and attaches a string of cars, each one unique. "I could have been a hobo, ridden the rails, done that whole thing,'' he says, dusting the caboose with a whisk brush. And while Steve's no vagrant, his earlier life mirrored the mobility of one. Out of high school, he and his brother took their band, Mighty Purple, on the road or, more appropriately, the rails. "I traveled ten years of my life solid. Out of the state of Connecticut two hundred plus days a year," he

remembers. His band forwent asphalt for crossties, and Steve speaks with nostalgia of his train days, of travels up and down the coast, from Charlottesville to Boston, of being thrown together with strangers on fourth-class, 14-hour journeys. Trainlife the constant, blurred exposure to new landscape, days and nights spent swapping stories and smoking out bar car windows, always engaged and always taking in suits Steve. But as he neared thirty, he felt the pull from train to town. He married, had a kid, and, for the first time, became serious about miniatures.

But when Steve left the bar car for his basement, he did not stop watching the world and gathering its stories he merely replaced the blurry view from the window of a moving train with the precise inspection of a magnifying glass: In the steps of Fair Hope and the beams of Graylock Falls, the narratives ofNew England merge with his own story.

"Let's show · you nighttime," Steve says. He hits the lights, cues the locomotive, and sets his timers. At first, nothing pierces the darkness save the glow of a lone fire in the backwoods of Pine Ridge. But, slowly, sounds begin to emerge and overlap--cows moo, crickets chirp, twangy bluegrass floats from the bandstand. Then, . one by one, living rooms illuminate, ·light floods the pool hall and the rug shop, and streedamps flicker and blink to life. Now comes the rumble, near-silence cut by a crescendoing thunder. The whistle sounds, the railroad crossing sign blinks red_, the safety gate lowers across the main street. In rushes the train its lights pass over Fair Hope, and in an instant, it is gone. Steve rolls up the sleeves of his blue and green flannel shirt and leans against the border of his miniature world. Five years ag9, he would have been on that train, but since then, he's realized that a moving life is not for him. He doesn't want to hurtle past the world's exquisite details.

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Kate Lund is a freshman in Silliman College.

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RADIO ACTIVE .

Yale's AM station tunes in to past glory.

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"You're listening to Poptimism." It's just after 7 on a Monday night and Catie Gliwa TC '11 is on the air. "Next up, MIA with 'Bamboo Banga' and, at risk of losing one of my three listeners, Miley Cyrus." As the last song fades "and I, I can't wait to see you again" Gliwa returns to the mic.

"This is WYBC 1349 AM. You just heard Miley Cyrus with 'See You Again.' Hor-- ace, I hope you're still listening."

Horace is her boyfriend.

Gliwa underestimated her listenership (after all, her mom always tunes in from Denver, and her co-editors at the Yale Daily News decided to play her show that night), but probably not by much.

Although the Yale Broadcasting Company's commercial, professionally-run FM station ranks among the top three in New Haven, its AM student counterpart is struggling to find a listener base even within Yale's walls.

But it hasn't always been this way.

Du.ring World War II, Yale's closedcircuit station was the university's primary news source. With the war came a· paper shortage, then paper rationing, which made printing a daily newspaper difficult, if not unpatriotic. The "Oldest College Daily" suspended its production as part of the war effort, so Yale Radio stepped in; the station upped its programming until,

under order from the Yale College dean, it was broadcasting continuously.

C was one offew media outlets to broadcast live from the New Haven Green on May Day 1970> when thousands of city residents converged to protest the trial of Bobby Seale and other members of the Black Panther movement.

The wartime broadcasts coincided with the age of President Roosevelt's fireside chats, an era when "people would just sit down with their radios," Sean Owczarek SM '11, incoming general manager of YBC, explains. Owczarek, whose shaggy curls often fall across his right eye, may be just the man to recapture WYBC's oncesexy reputation. He speaks of radio.-especially Brown Student Radio, the station of his childhood with a reverence most reserve for deities. He explains that Brown's legendary station, though broadcast two hundred miles from his home on Long Island, convinced him that radio was his destined medium.

And since arriving on campus, he has worked to spread his faith in airwaves.

"The guy came in super-enthusiastic," says current general manager Jordan Malter PC '09. "Now everyone is feeding off that enthusiasm." This zeal radiates from Owczarek as he describes the medium's heyday "the heart of radio" with something like nostalgia, though neither he, nor even his parents, were alive at the • urne.

Ken Devoe SY '69 contends that radio's prime both at Yale and beyond lasted well beyond the war, despite the resumption of the YDN and the proliferation of household TVs during the 1950s. Now serving on the station's Board of Governors, Devoe was a member ofWYBC from 1967 until 1969 and worked in the radio industry for twenty years after his time at Yale. In the history he tells, Yale radio gained popularity within the larger New Haven community circa 1968, around the same time as the Summer ofLove and the legendary Woodstock Music Festival. Music made up the bulk of programming by this time. "The music started to change," explains Devoe. "The stuff you now know as classic rock the stuff we liked was cutting edge then. We started playing it on the FM and were essentially the only station playing it. The listenership outside •

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Yale exploded."

Until recently, training took an entire .semester. A newly-t:evised jive-week program is m'or,e in line with other schools' requirements, but it is still a considerably more tedious and less hands-on experience.

protest the trial of Bobby Seale and other members of the Black Panther movement.

Through its live coverage of events like these demonstrations · and the ensuing student protests, WYBC became a forum for countercultural expression, for dissent against both Yale University and the nation at large.

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The popularity of Yale Radio's music programming in the New Haven community and on campus brought money and fame to the station. As a result, other WYBC programming, especially the news department, flourished. "We did have a bit of a presence, staying on top of news and controversial issues," remembers Devoe . .

1he department covered news not only on c;ampus but also across the country, interviewing guests at Master's Teas as well as broadcasting live from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. WYBC was ore of few media outlets to broadcast live from the New Haven Green on May Day 1970, when thousands of city residents:students and .citizens alike converged to . .

THE ZEITGEIST OF the '60s remade radio· . and helped to keep it alive during the early '70s . .But as the Baby Boomers grew up and the national youth culture they had created began to dissipate, so the glory . days of radio began to wane. Now, in a world of iTunes and podcasts, listening to 'music on the radio can feel obsolete.

So obsolete, in fact, that radios are slowly being phased out. Malter himself admits that the overwhelming majority ofYalies most likely do not own radios.

Yet while WYBC flounders, many other college radio stations have remained incredibly successful. Owczarek's beloved Brown Student Radio boa.Sts a listenership of at least 4,000 per month, and even this figure, impressive by Yale Radio standards, could be an underestimate due to iTunes downloads that the station cannot track.

Listenership is alluring. Campuses with thriving stations like ~rown's boast more

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DJs and more producers; some even have talk shows. "I have a lot of friends who ' do college radio who got stcuted bec!).use the station was so popular at their school," ' Gliwa explains. · She cites competitive application processes, like the one at the University of Chicago, where, according to its. website, . prospective jockeys must submit a tWohour playlist showcasing "unique and interesting music that wouldn't otherwise be heard on commercial radio outlets."

Once applicants make the cut, they fight for airtime. "One of my friends' first shifts was 2 to 4 a.m. because they give the freshmen the ones no one else wants," says Gliwa. That friend DJs at the University of Oregon, where radio programming is live 24 hours a day, seven days ·a week. Even in_ the wee hours of Saturday morning, peo-· ple call or instant message with requests, a phenomenon that rarely occurs at WYBC even during primetime.

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The station's chaotic schedules "makes it impossible to casuC, " says ally listen to Catie Gliwa TC '11.

Currently, the Yale station struggles not just for listeners but for members. Malter considers the low level of student interest one of the major problems plaguing the station. Many attribute declining membership to WYBC's move from Hendrie · Hall to an off-campus building at Temple and Crown Street in 2000. "It's a couple of blocks' walk, and I bet we lose a few for every block we are from campus," Malter says, only half-kidding. The facility's atmosphere may also deter students. The office, shared by both the FM and AM teams, feels decidedly corporate. Its big leather chairs and conference rooms are emphatically unlike a romanticized picture of a grungy college radio station, and WYBC is no longer "the place to hang out" that it was in Devoe's days. Most members come in just before their shows and leave directly after. While Devoe's closest friends are his colleagues from his WYBC days, today's station ~acks such a community; Gliwa notes that she only knows a couple of other DJs, both from connections outside ofWYBC. Broadcast restrictions may also intimidate prospective DJs. The Federal Com. munications Commission charges $5,000

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for an expletive on the air, and a missed station ID at the top of the hour comes with a similarly hefty pricetag. The FCC generally doesn't waste limited resources moni- _ toring non-commercial college stations, but WYBC, thanks to its commercial FM branch, cannot slip through the cracks.

Since the commercial station is YBC's sole source of revenue, its members are wary of doing anything that might cost them their broadcasting license and participate in a grueling training process geared to adhering to FCC regulations. Until recently, training took an entire semester. A newlyrevised five-week program is more in line with other schools' requirements, but it is still a considerably more tedious and less hands-on experience. Both in form and in content, WYBC has drifted from the scrappy reputation of college radio and also from the spirit that sustains it.

And without a strong membership base, it's hard to generate a listener base. While the station currently has about 75 members and will probably add a few more after this training season, the numbers can be deceptive; many of these members don't work regularly, making it difficult for WYBC to

will contain downloadable podcasts of archived shows.

a fill its schedule with original programming. Although the station broadcasts 24 hours a day, it is only live from 6-11 p.m. during the school week, with a couple of other shows scattered at other times. An autocaster takes over unmanned shifts, but the machine's pop-heavy playlist is "not the kind of music the campus would be interested in," says Gliwa.

In an effort to woo and retain members, WYBC has sacrificed programming structure. "We might have a rock show next to a sports talk show, back to back with an electronic music show," Malter explains.

Gliwa also decries the chaotic schedule.

"It makes it impossible to casually listen to WYBC," she says.

A hockey match isnt the only event best appreciated live. A Yale broadcaster could have captured Grant Park the night of November -i or the 700 Yalies singing wlhe StarSpangled Banner~~ early the next mornin~ in a way that no newspaper reporter could.

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BuT A YALE RADIO revival may be drifting on the not-so-distant horizon. The answer, like all answers these days, will be Google-able. WYBC-X, an internet stream, is set to launch in January. The X-stream, which Devoe calls "the future of radio," will take on the AM station's role as an outlet for student broadcasting.

Although the station currently simulcasts over the internet, the new stream

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"People will be able to listen on their iPhones," says Malter. Or on their computers, iPods, or any other mp3 player.

The makeover might also render WYBC more appealing to would-be members.

Unlike its AM or FM counterparts, the internet stream requires neither broadcastquality radio equipment nor strict compliance with FCC mandates. "We can bend some of the rules," says Owczarek with a

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sly grin.

These changes will make it possible to. broadcast from places far from Temple and Crown. "It may allow us to set up on campus. Someone might even be able to broadcast from a dorm room," says Malter. Such flexibility of location . has proven valuable on other college campuses. The University of Oregon's station, for instance, often streams live D J sets from an amphitheater at the heart of campus, a popular place for students to hang out between classes. Just as broadcasting outside on a warm fall day gives Oregon's sta~ion a sense of place, the X-stream would give WYBC the flexibility to inject its stations with the character they once had.

Even as Malter and Owczarek are encouraging a more casual college atmosphere at WYBC, they . are using the Xstream launch to add elements that will make the station a bit more professional.

They plan to streamline the schedule and institute more block programming. And although Yale Radio is already better equipped than most college stations, the shift to the internet will be coupled with an infrastructural overhaul. The WYBC board plans to purchase special effects machines and equipment that; will allow entire bands to broadcast from the station .

The contours of the culture of radio that Malter and Owczarek hope to create at Yale are not yet clear. College radio, after all, has historically served as a platform for students to voice dissent. During Devoe's time, radio was the voice of demonstrators on the Green, and even today, the University of Oregon's station features more than a handful of shows with titles such as ''Anarchy Hour" and "Left Out." But these days, Yale is not exactly a hub of civil disobedience. As Owczarek puts it, "there are no Black Panther trials going on." And when controversy does arise, most students don't turn to radio as their outlet. "They seem to feel that the YDN op-ed page works pretty well," he says.

One way WYBC hopes to re-integrate itself into student culture is by rejuvenating its news department; the executive board is about to appoint a news director. In Owczarek's opinion, radio news is unique among news sources. "We cover events live," he says. He pinpoints this quality as one of the reasons WYBC's sports coverage is still thriving. Although such success stems in part from individual broadcasters' yen for sports radio, it also comes from what Owczarek calls the "im•

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mediacy" of something like a sports game.

But a hockey match isn't the only event best appreciated live. A Yale broadcaster could have captured Grant Park the night of November 4, or the 700 Yalies singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" early the next morning, in a way that no newspaper reporter could. And although television, too, provides a medium to cover such events, it requires far more expensive equipment.

Radio, especially internet radio, is simple.

Have tape recorder, will travel.

The enchanting quality ofWYBC's potential revival part nostalgia for radio's heyday, part anticipation of its futuredraws people in. "With the internet, you are no longer limited to the power of the broadcaster," Owczarek says. "Your listenership is the world": the-student studying abroad, the parent tuning in from Denver, and the young Owczarek picking up BSR from Long Island. Like many members of WYBC, Owczarek has an unwavering belief in radio, a belief that has survived even the post-internet age. He wants to enrapture, to cast a spell. As the station's new slogan promises, he wants to "put the magic back in radio."

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BURNING BRIDGES Yale-run community center .

trims its grassroots.

By Marissa Grunes At the end of this past May, with no warning, Makana Ellis TD '05 was fired.

When her supervisor at Yale's Office . of New Haven and State Affairs (ONHSA) called her in to tell her that her contract would not be renewed, she had been working for over two and a half years as coordinator of the Dixwell-Yale Community Learning Center (DYCLC), an initiative that works to bridge the gap between Yale and the Elm City. "They told me they wanted to take the Center to another level," recalls Ellis, "but they never told me prior that what we were doing currendy wasn't what they were looking for." Ellis describes her reaction as one of frustration. "I was extremely disappointed, and ... saddened by the event. I had definitely planned to continue to stay there and work with the . . youth and members of the community."

Since opening its doors in Janyary 2006, the DYCLC has welcomed hundreds of regular members for basketball tournaments, after-school programs, and classes that range from tax preparation to the well-loved line dancing. But iliis semester, ONHSA, fearing that the Center's organization had grown too lax, suddenly November 2008

opted to replace many members of its student and volunteer staff with certified teachers and educational professionals.

The resulting controversy has sparked a debate about the optimal method of organizing and running mentoring programs in New Haven. Did the free-form, essentially student-run framework employed inthe Center's original incarnation provide enough oversight and structure to improve the lives of the city's most under-served children? And, on the other hand, does the Center's new commitment to professionalism marginalize the role ofYale students, so integral to the Center's goal of bridging the gap between the University and the city?

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c1ts not just a job for us. » -Nora jacobsen SY :110 TEN YEARS AGO, the Ashmun Street property that now houses the DYCLC and the Yale Police Department was a "vacant, blighted industrial structure," says Michael Morand '87 DN '93, associate vice president for New Haven and State Af-

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fairs. After Yale learned that a hazardous waste removal company wanted to buy the property "to park industrial equipment," the University decided to nab it in the hopes of adding "security to the neighborhood." The YPD moved in, followed, in January 2006, by the Dixwell-Yale Community Learning Center.

As the Center's first coordinator, Ellis, a New Haven native newly graduated from Yale, was at first "the only full-time person there," she remembers. "It was a huge responsibility, especially for someone coming straight out of college, but I was enthusiastic about it." Even before the Center opened, Ellis energetically set about creating policies and infrastructure _by conducting "a lot of door-to-door work, handing out surveys, trying to see what sorts of programs the Dixwell neighborhood would be interested in."

The community wanted youth programs, so the Center opened with. after-school and student programs Tuesdays through Saturdays, special programs on Sundays and Mondays, and a plan for continued expansion. Ellis continued to canvas the neighborhood and by the end of June had

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signed on over a thousand youth and adult members.

Recognizing the Center's ~nique po-· tential to forge relationships between Yale students and their younger charges, Ellis hired freshman and sophomore interns "because I knew they would be there for three or four years and have that consis- · tency with the students and · establish a great relationship with the members." .

The strategy seems to have worked. "It was really meaningful," says former intern Nora Jacobsen SY '10. "It was not just tutoring where you're with the kid for an hour and you don't know them.:. this ·was such a connection. It was probably the only place on the Yale campus where you could get something like that, and it was . '' amazmg.

Jeremy Harp TC '10, who played basketball with the Center's high school students, agrees. "I learned so much," he says, '~and my views of how to reach older kids have changed." Interested in b~coming a civil rights attorney or community activist, Harp discovered the importance of sports as an arena "where men and youth bond" and where Yale students can teach local students ''the importance of education." He was shocked by the social and psychological division · between his world and that of his charges. "I found it amazing that they live so close physically b1._1t they might as well be miles away," he says.

"The bringing of the two worlds together is at the Dixwell Center."

THROUGH THE DILIGENCE of its staff and interns, the DYCLC successfully bridged that invisible gulf between Yale and New Haven. Adedana Ashebir MC '09 remembers · the mutuality of her experience interning at the Center. "We did our best to share what we learned and they returned the favor, maybe even two-fold," she says.

"It's the Dixwell-Yale Center." Each intern brought individual skills and interests.

Ashebir took students to the Yale University Art Gallery and screened Saturday movies, and Harp played basketball with ~e older boys and talked about how gang viOlence was affecting their lives.

One semester, Jacobsen organized a tolerance discussion group to which she invited members ofYale's Arab Students Association and Women's Center. While she knows that "you can't completely change kids all at once," she did see a tangible impact that she attributed to the steady presence of the interns. ''A lot of the interns

worked a lot of hours, and the kids really did get to know us, and when you say to them that Arabs aren't terrorists, that you have to respect homosexuals for that to come from someone they know is really important."

'1 found it amazing that they live so close physically but _they might as well be miles away . .. The bringing o the two worlds together is at the Dixwell Center. " Jeremy Harp TC >10 But despite strong student presence at the Center and the emerging coope;ation with various Yale organizations, the ONHSA was not satisfied that the Center was fulfilling its potential. One problem, administrators worried, was discipline.

Claudia Merson, the Public School Partnerships coordinator at the ONHSA, was concerned that the interns didn't "know what is natt_1ral entropy of children and what is disorganized." She cites occasional phone calls from parents about bullying at the Center, which she said "shouldn't even be a possibility." Control was so lax that the administration hired a retired police officer, Charles Barbour, to help keep things orderly.

Ellis had a different take on Barbour's presence, remarking that "he was sort of a grandfather figure, helped to maintain discipline and order, helped a lot of students with their homework."

Jacobsen agrees that he was "an excellent role model for the kids" who "related to them in a positive way." To her, discipline wasn't a problem. "Things were never out of control," she says.

WHEN THE INTERNS returned to school this fall, they waited for the usual scheduling email from Ellis. It never arrived. After a month of radio silence, the ONHSA informed them that they needed to reapply for their positions. Merson admits that the failure of communication was "1 00 percent my fault, I can own up. 'A piece of it was that I don't think any of us understood the arrangement the director had with the interns; it's the antithesis of everything I've encountered in this Office." Merson says she had expected interns to reapply on a

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regular basis rather than having their contracts automatically rolled over from year to year.

The change in procedure left many of ' the interns confused and hurt. "We all got the vibe that we weren't wanted.

Wheth.. er or not t h at's true, I'm not sure," says Ashebir. Unsure of their positions at the Center, former interns began frantically searching for other jobs to pay for books and to cover fall tuition.

This frantic · search, Jacobsen explains, should have been avoidable. "Part of the responsibility ofYale to its students is that when they provide this kind of a job, they make sure that they deal with the students responsibly and riot just as disposable workers who go through here in four years," she says. "It's not just a job for us."

Apart from their sudden unemployment, the former interns were most troubled by their broken relationships with students at the Center.

"It doesn't make sense for us to break ties with the youth so abruptly," Harp says. "I haven't talked with any of the kids since I left the Center last semester. I can find them on Myspace now but that's ·a bout it, and I've lost touch with some of the older kids who I was talking with about gangs."

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Claudia Merson, the Public School Partnerships coordinator at the ONHSA, was con·cerned·that the interns didn't "know what is natural entropy of children and what is disorganized. " •

When Jacobsen visited the Center earlier this semester, she worried that the students she had mentored felt abandoned.

"There was one kid who was a foster kid and it just felt like another person who'd gone, that's the impression I got from him," she remembers. "I was pretty close to him by the end of last year ... It was hard, I was coming back from the summer really looking forward to that." She decided to cut contact after this last visit.

"Some of them have been hurt a lot by people who have come in and out of their lives," Jacobsen explains. "I don't want to · be one of those people."

Morand defends the employee turnover by emphasizing that Ellis was hired on a year-to-year contract "which is not unusual in the world," he adds. He believes

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that the OHNSA honored both Ellis' contract arid those of the interns, and at least one intern was re-accepted to work at the Center.

That leaves at least two former interns who were not even granted interviews when they reapplied, though one had worked at the Center for four semesters as well as the summer, and the other had averaged fifteen hours a week the previous · year. The ONHSA readily admits that it mishandled the transition on a personal level, and Merson expresses her willingness to help past interns find other posi:.. tions in education and service.

The final decision-making, however, rested on Morand, who is quick to emphasize that "it is important to focus on L in [DY] CLC, to structure the place with a focus on training and education. You might call it the education professionalization of the Center." Keeping in mind Moran~s goal of making the DYCLC "not a dropin center but a true learning center," the ONHSA decided to seek leadership based on professional education experience.

"We were moving away from a r1 student-run place, moving towards professional educators," Merson says, expressing a wish to educate l'\Ot just the Center's kids but its student interns. ''As models of an I

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as "teachers, principals, police officers, librarians, parents of youth members, and even a couple of youth members."

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excited learner," she continues, students interested in a career in education "can learn a lot from professional educators."

The ONHSA is still searching for a permanent coordinator to direct the Center, but the background of }effie Frazier, the current interim director, offers a glimpse of the type of leader it · hopes to pursue.

Morand describes Frazier as a "well-recognized educator" who served as a principal in the New Haven School District for 23 years before retiring from her post at Wexler Grant High School. Frazier "knows the neighborhood, knows education," he says, and is beginning to create a "networked and plugged-in place" that is "part of a fabric, an ongoing conversation we have with the neighborhood with a focus on learning."

Like its former interns, Frazier recognizes the Center's potential to bring two worlds together and has tried to use the organization as a vehicle to bring Yale resources to New Haven youth and to allow them to discover the neighborhood in which many of them have lived their whole lives.

Frazier lowers her already-soft voice to

an ardent whisper as she relates a trip she planned with a group of children from the Center. "We were going to the Grove Street Cemetery" across the street from the Center "and the kids were complaining that it was too far away. I took them outside, and said 'Look! It's right there!'

They had no idea it was so dose."

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Much of the infrastructure that Ellis constructed, however, lives on, and Frazier counts thirty students enrolled in the after-school program, 17 of whom attend regularly.

The current interns have started initiatives of their own. Some practice music with children who are learning to play instruments, and Francesca Slade PC '1 0, who worked with One Laptop Per Child at MIT this summer, has begun teaching basic computer programming to stude!ltS at the Center.

All of this comes as good news to the interns whose contracts were not renewed and whose semesters have been fraught with concerns for the Center's well-being.

"The community needs to move on, these kids need to move on, and they need the Center," Jacobsen says. Along with Ellis and the other former interns, she's not protesting. She knows that's the last thing the Center needs.

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FoR NOW, THE Center is operating with slightly scaled-back hours the afterschool program ends an hour earlier and the calendar shows no regular youth programs on Saturdays and no longer caters to students over 13. Ellis, still on the Center's mailing list, expressed concern that she had not received any publicity materials this semester. But she is trying not to look back. While she would like the former interns to be able to resume their positions at the Center, she herself is thinking of law school. An important step she thinks the ONHSA could take to avoid misunderstandings like that which put the interns out of work is the formation of a board to monitor programming and hiring decisions. The board might include Yale students and faculty, she recommends, as well

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TN Marissa Grunes is a junior in Saybrook College.

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he Yale University President's Public Service Fellowship seeks outstanding Yale undergraduate, graduate and professional students to work with organizations that promote economic growth, human development, and neighborhood vitality in New Haven.

Fellowship awards range from $3,600 to $6,000 based on experience, degree pending and weeks worked. Fellowship placements range from 8-11 weeks from the end of May through August. All students may apply for placements proposed by local non-profit and public sector organizations posted on the PPSF website.

Fo-r more information and application materials, log on to the Fellowship website, or contact Reggie Solomon at reginald.solomon@yate.edu

Application Deadline: January 16,2009

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On a golden day in October in New Haven, Connecticut, in a tall, old red-brick building on Yale's immaculate campus, natural. gas combusts at 1 ,200 degrees.

"Maybe hotter," says Tom Starr, the manager of Yale's Central Power Plant.

Starr leads me up a few metal steps and opens a hand-sized hatch on the side of a huge, green, insulated-steel box to reveal a little window. Inside, the space explodes with outlandish purple and yellow flames.

We're looking at the burner that provides fuel to the big green box, called a boiler. Natural gas burns .to make heat in the burner. The heat turns water into steam in the boiler. And steam is everything.

Steam runs all over campus to meet space heating and hot water needs. It powers the turbines that run steam-driven chillers to make chilled water for air conditioning. It drives the pumps that push chilled water in huge blue pipes from the power plant to every corner of campus. It keeps us warm, it keeps us cool, it keeps our showers hot and our dishes clean and our dining halls open, and it protects priceless research by maintaining the precise climate conditions required in labs on Science Hill.

Starr explains all of this as we· walk through the plant. He speaks with the conversational manner of a practiced tour

guide, casually slipping in technical terms just a beat too fast for me, but with the . volume of a bullhorn, competing with the noise of the plant. It· is a hissing, buzzing, roaring, put-on-your-hard-hat kind of noise, slightly different in each part of this maze of metal and concrete. My own hard hat keeps slipping down my forehead and clanking against my safety goggles.

It's pitiful enough that Starr interrupts his ' well-honed speech to help me adjust the hard hat. My eyes and ears must be at their . best to take in what so much of the Yale community remains blind to.

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"In the commercial side it's entirely about production_ costs. And for the Yale community it's reliability rst and production costs second. , .

-Tom Starr

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for Environmental Partnership (STEP) I have come in search of the commitment on the ground. What is it, exactly, that we pollution-haters are trying to replace?

Images of the University's bright future hide what could be the strongest potential motivation for Yalies to conserve. As Yale President Richard Levin hands out glossy brochures of greenhouse gas goals to all of his official visitors, and as engineeringignorant environmentalists like me push Yale and its students to achieve these goals, the reality stands here: in the 1200° fossilfuel flames that continue to power our lifestyle. .

IN 200 5, LEVIN announced his muchtouted Greenhouse Gas Reduction Commitment, vowing to reduce Yale's greenhouse gas emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels (or 43 percent below 2005 levels) by 2020. Since Levin's announcement, the University has showered antiemissions efforts with publicity and funds.

But the goal has come head-to-head with an even more pressing ambition: Yale is exAfter a few years of working on the advocacy side of Yale's commitment to . panding at an unprecedented pace, adding more and more energy-intensive square sustainability by trying, mostly in vain, footage to its campus. The commitment to pound conservation into student beto greenhouse gas reduction is swimming havior most recently as the head of the upstream, and the current is only growing energy team in the Yale Student Taskforce •

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stronger.

Yet emissions reduction is hidden where we might least expect it. Despite the demonization of conventional energy production, Starr and company quietly wage their own battle to cut our carbon. Next to the big green box ·stands an even bigger gray box: another boiler, but this one is different. This cogeneration system, also known as combined heat and power, produces both electricity and steam from the same input of fuel and, in doing so, cuts greenhouse gas emissions drastically. One of Central Power Plant's three "cogen" units is shut down today for maintenance, Starr tells me excitedly, so I will be one of the few tourists to see inside a process that usually remains invisible. He opens a door to reveal the cool interior of the dormant cogen and points out a turbine, roughly the diameter of a bike wheel. Instead of directly powering a boiler, the burning of natural gas runs this gas turbine, which spins a generator to produce electricity.

Meanwhile, the gas that powered the turbine still holds energy in the form of heat; the gas exhaust is about one thousand degrees. Here, the cogen kicks in: The hot exhaust is channeled into a boiler to make steam.

At the end of the day, run• nzng a blue plastic brush down 15, 000 twenty-footlong tubes is, in terms ofemis- _ sions reduction, one ofthe best things we can do.

The cogen boiler is no different from the conventional boiler in the green box:except that it's getting its heat from another source. "So the fuel that we burn here, we kinda get to use it twice," Star_r says. By the time the twice-used gas exits the boiler and heads up and out of the tall smokestacks, it has lost about 700°, leaving it at a modest 300. "We're taking a huge amount of thermal energy out of that exhaust gas and making something useful out of it," Starr boasts.

Cogen cuts down on both cos_ts and emissions. Aside from its double use of fuel, the system allows Yale to produce much of its own electricity rather than rely entirely on the regional electric grid. Each of Central Power Plant's three cogeneration units produces about six megawatts

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of electricity. Combined, that's enough to power 300,000 standard light bulbs or to cover about half of the electricity demand in Central's coverage area, which indudes all of Central Campus and Science Hill. The remaining half still comes from the utility company. By burning relatively dean natural gas {with ultra-low-sulfur diesel oil for backup), Yale significantly improves the environmental profile of its grid, which relies in part on highly polluting coal-burning plants. And although building a cogeneration facility requires a huge investment $100 million for the Central cogen project the system pays for itself in less than a decade.

Cogeneration is one of the cleanest ways to burn fossil fuel for power, but in the end, it is still burning fossil fuel. Yale these does not allow Starr and his colleagues to prioritize efficiency and emissions reduction; trying more experimental dean energy options takes place outside the plants, in settings that hold no risk of upsetting Yale's power supply. Yale demands reliability, to a much higher standard than that of a typical utility.

Coming from the commercial utility business, Starr found Yale "very, very different. In the commercial side it's entirely about production costs," he says. "And for the Yale community it's reliability first and production costs second." The Yale plants not only provide comfort but also run kitchens, medical facilities, and science labs that must maintain standards of temperature, humidity, .and ventilation . ·both to meet safety regulations and to sustain careers' worth of experiments. Starr and his colleagues cringe at the mention of "That Day Last January," when a construction accident caused parts of campus to lose power. "For an operation like this, the total integrated cost isn't just the cost of operating and, you know, did you burn m ·o re or less fuel than you could have," Starr says. "The total cost is what happens if this facility stops operating? What's the value of the research work that's lost?

What's the value of incurring damage to buildings? We provide the ·only source of heat to the Central Campus. So what happens to the buildings if we're not able to provide heat in the dead of winter? There

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is an economic cost to that and it's enormous. It's huge!"

The big-picture measure of reliability is what is called firm capacity; that is, what would a plant be able to produce if its biggest unit shut down? For steam firm capacity, for instance, if Central's biggest boiler broke, how much steam would we able to produce? And for electricity, how much could we produce using cogeneration alone if the grid went out, or, in reverse, how much could we take from the grid if our cogen shut down? A dependable power plant has built-in redundancy, with many machines running only to back up others. Redundancy not only insures against machine failure; it also allows workers to regularly shut down one set of machines for maintenance while another set fills in.

Yale's cogeneration is not only an environmental measure but part of what Starr calls the University's "very, very deep investments in assuring reliability." Yale's cogen electricity is cleaner and cheaper than the grid, but it is also more reliable. Foi

As we talk in Starr's office, which sits above the operations at Central Power Plant, two men in soot-smeared overalls saunter in; they have just cleaned a boiler.

Starr looks them over. "It's not as clean as it should have been based on the looks of you,"he says.

One answers, chest thrust out, "It's a lot cleaner now, chie£" They launch into a discussion about baffie plates and crack stoppers. Once Starr is finished interrogating the men, he lapses into a thoughtful pause, .then slips in one last question.

"Drums looked all right?" "Yeah," one man answers, adding slyly, "Other than being too small." The other jumps in: "Can't imagine those holes just keep getting smaller." They all laugh.

The drums, Starr explains, are the round hatches that lead into a boiler. "For licensing for the boilers," Starr explains, "we're required to do an inspection every year. That inspection is very, very invasive.

Those two guys have just crawled through the boiler from one end to the other on what's called a fireside, which is where the

Yale's medical community, with its high concentration of research labs and medical facilities, the stability of cogenerated electricity has ' proved a crucial selling point.

After witnessing a decade of successful cogen operation at Central Power Plant, its medical campus counterpart, Sterling Power Plant, is preparing to install its own, IS-megawatt cogen facility.

Muir learned a valuable lesson: When the Yale community demands energ)'> you make it happen but it better not . get zn anyones way. ~

Aside from the occasional $1 00-million-dollar addition, the day-to-day work of assuring reliability consists of checking, cleaning, and replacing countless nuts, bolts, lights, pipes, and blades. Most of the work of running a power plant, Starr says, .1s constant routine . maintenance. . '' ((

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hot gas is, and then through the headers where the steam is actually collected .... So anything that could potentially be wrong with the boiler is caught with an inspection like this before it actually manifests · itself in a failure of the equipment."

Down in the plant, Starr displays . evidence of the massive scale of plant maintenance. He points out a chiller that is opened up for cleaning, a large cylinder that contains 15,000 25-foot-long metal tubes. The tubes hold water, which is chilled by a refrigerant and then shipped campus-wide to buildings for air conditioning. But the inside walls of the tubes collect deposits, which impede the transfer of heat from the water to the refrigerant and make the chiller less efficient. Starr reaches into a nearby box and picks up a stiff, blue, giant-pipe-cleaner of a brush.

Once a year, workers must run such a brush down the entire length of each of the 15,000 tubes twice. And this is just one of five chillers in Central Power Plant.

As the planning begins for the two new residential colleges and the new School of Management campus, Downing, along with Olmstead and others, is pushing for designs that will be amenable to installations like wind turbines.

Knowing my biases, Starr has shown me the chiller cleaning process to teach me a lesson. While I'm busy worrying that reliability trumps efficiency at Central, its engineers see efficiency in every detail of the plant, on scales both minute and grand. And such an eye to efficiency doesn't always clash with the plant's more urgent priority of reliability: Sometimes, efficiency and reliability work together. At the end of the day, running a blue plastic brush down 15,000 25-foot-long tubes is, in terms of emissions reduction, one of the best things we can do.

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YALE demands of its· power plants, it doesn't exactly roll out the red carpet for them. At Sterling Power Plant, an easy-to-miss complex on Congress Avenue, Assistant Manager Jess Muir points out a second-story window to a concrete lot below. "See that? Underneath there is MUCH AS

a 3.5-million-gallon tank." The underground tank, once used to store chilled water, has stood empty for years and now sits beneath a parking lot and a tennis court. Soon, the tank will hold two huge cogeneration units. Each will produce 7.5 megawatts of electricity and save 20,000 metric tons of carbon equivalent a yearcomparable to the emissions of over 3,500 cars ..

"Imagine a regular truck container," says Muir in his sharp, energetic Scottish accent. Each cogen unit is "slightly bigger than that. It's basically a jet engine in a box." Two jet engines, each in a box, all inside a bigger box, underground: It sounds potentially disastrous. Extracting some of the equipment for repairs, Muir admits, could get tricky, but there aren't many other potential cogen sites on Yale's crowded and ambitiously expanding campus. Witnessing the efforts needed to get permission to raze the tennis court, Muir learned a valuable lesson: When the Yale community demands energy, you make it happen but it better not get in anyone's way.

Take, for instance, the new chiller plant, now slated for a site in Science Park, which will allow the University to more than double Central Power Plant's peak air conditioning production. Even after the project's benefit had been acknowledged, it wasn't easy to secure the property. "That facility had to compete with a lot of other building plans for the site," says Sam Olmstead, Yale's head of Utilities Engineering.

"It's not like we're going to bump a classroom for a chiller plant. So finding a home for it was challenging." Classrooms truinp chiller plants, but classrooms also need chiller plants. The problem stems partly from the limited local space available for Yale's Manifest Destiny, and also from an attitude that urban planners call, "Not In My Back Yard."

"NIMBYs," scoffs Tom Downing, Yale's senior energy engineer. Downing's office, cluttered with diagrams of fuel cells, brochures for evacuated solar tubes, and a thin-film photovoltaic solar panel leaning against one wall, reveals an obsession with alternative energy that exceeds his job description. He directs his NIMBY comment toward Yale's reluctance to place wind turbines anywhere visible on its architecw rally finicky campus. The same term applies to anything from sewage treatment plants to power plants. Everybody needs them, but nobody wants to see them.

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But wind turbines and solar panels, both visually iconic clean energy sources, should hold the most potential for overcoming NIMBYism. They are something to show off especially considering the publicity attached to Levin's greenhouse gas commitment, the strategy for which emphasizes on-campus renewable energy ' installations. Downing wants to create space, both aesthetic and geographic, for the projects that Yale theoretically supports. As the planning begins for the two new residential colleges and the new School of Management campus, Downing, along with Olmstead and others, is pushing for designs that will be amenable to installations like wind turbines.

Currendy, Downing is in the process of installing a series of ten -micro-wind turbines the plan for which, after being bounced around Science Hill in a game of blueprint hot potato, has finally found a future home on top of Becton. Not as visible as Downing would have liked, but it's better than nothing.

But micro-wind turbines won't get Yale to its emissions goal any faster than will brushing out 15,000 chiller tubes. At one kilowatt (that's one-thousandth of a megawatt) each, Downing's turbines might cover at most 5 percent of Becton's energy consumption. As everyone agrees, there is no silver bullet, but instead a mix of many small solutions that, together, start to add up.

Still, "small" is a relative term. Yale could have installed a hundred micro-turbines by now, instead of a barely-approved plan for ten. The "no silver bullet" mantra serves as a convenient excuse, hiding the nagging suspicion that Yale isn't willing to make big sacrifices to reduce energy use or to rethink the way it consumes and expands. Is Yale making the changes necessary to reach its celebrated goal?

"I don't know," Muir responds. "I don't see it. All I see is these numbers here." He gestures to his computer screen, where an endless spreadsheet records Yale's energy production data: 6.5 million cubic feet of natural gas burned in a single day this summer, producing 17 megawatts of electricity, 17,000 tons of chilled water, and 5.5 million pounds of steam and that's just for Sterling Power Plant. Starr is more political than Muir, but no more optimistic. "I don't see any ability to meet needs in a non-conventional fashion," he says.

Starr is overseeing the installation of two new conventional boilers at Central Power

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Plant. As tempted as I am to condemn them, there is nothing wrong with the boilers themselves. They will be the most efficient models around, and, like the new Science Park chiller plant, they're wanted partly to increase firm capacity. The boilers themselves aren't causing Yale's skyrocketing steam consumption; they are only answering it.

c'My ultimate goal Muir continues with a frustrated yet hopeful smile~ c'would be... to walk out of here~ lock the door and say, cYou don& need me anymore. ~ I would love nothing better than to shut down all this polluting equipment. :1:1

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All new Yale buildings must now meet the widely used LEED standard for sustainable design, but even LEED-certified November 2008

buildings use a substantial amount of energy: More development means more power plant demand. Planners like Downing and Olmstead must do what they can, given the no-arguments-allowed expansion plans that land on their desks. ''All of our reductions have to take place agaiQst that backdrop," says Olmstead.

"We're very keenly aware of the energy we're producing," Muir laments, "but it's our job to produce whatever is needed."

And Yale needs a lot. "My ultimate goal," Muir continues with a frustrated yet hopeful smile, "would be ... to walk out of here, lock the door and say, 'You don't need me anymore.' I would love nothing better than to shut down all this polluting equip, ment.

Yale's Utilities and Facilities Departments claims some of the University's truest believers in reducing emissions. Energy professionals, more than anyone, see the dirty underbelly of consumption and the darker side ofYale's obliviousness.

MurR AND STARR don't just want the Yale administration to pay more attention.

They want individuals to reduce their per-

sonal consumption and also to speak up, to call out the University when it lapses and to push for change. "You see windows open during winter, you see windows open during summer when you know the air conditioning's on and it just kills you," says Starr.

The "open windows" refrain, which echoes through the ranks of Yale's energy engineers, is a criticism more profound than it might seem. Open windows are both a symptom and a cause of energyinefficient buildings. Buildings with antiquated temperature controls or drafty windows and doors run heating systems unevenly and thus inefficiently; when people in the hot parts of a building open windows, the building senses colder air and responds by pumping in more heat.

The guilt lies both in the decision to open a window and in the failure to demand better heating systems in Yale's buildings, resulting in what Muir calls "energy pissed away."

"Open windows" is code not for laziness but for blindness. Because Yalies don't see the systems that serve them, they don't think of an overheated building as some-

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thing to question. But they do see it as a bother. .

Yalies become aware of the energy system only when it doesn't work for them and then they utalk back" to the system by opening a window.

Yale's energy makers and energy consumers . are largely · alien to each other.

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Meanwhile, John Higgins is watching from the systems side that Yalies do not see. Higgins, Yale's Systems Engineer, . oversees the programming of the University's increasingly sophisticated HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) climate-control systems, which determine the flow of steam arid chilled water from the power plants to buildings across campus. The HVAC systems of separate buildings are linked through a web-based central computer program called Backnet.

Higgins opens Backnet and pulls up my college, Jonathan Edwards. It's a fairly simple diagram showing the flow between

valves, pumps, and heat exchangers in the college. "Delta T is twelve degrees," Hig- . gins announces with satisfaction, referring to the temperature change of the building's hot water. Then he turns to me to make sure: "Is it comfortable?"

Higgins describes himself as "not a rock-the-boat person," which makes him well-suited to his job. Like production in the power plants, climate control is supposed to be invisible. "HVAC is one · of those things · no one ever calls .you up and says you're doing a good job. So if you don't hear from a building you figure it's running pretty well."

Higgins' assumption is understandable, but is it valid? As long as Yale's energy engineers keep doing their job, the enormoq,s costs and emissions associated with energy consumption will remain invisible to those whose behavior determines demand and thus dictates the mechanics of building control. But how can the mechanics side talk back and change this behavior?

The question points · to a truth that echoes in the words of Muir and others: while Yale's chiller nibes may be running smoothly, the channels of communication remain plugged. Most of the time, communication is a one-way st.reet. While inside the power plants, Yale's demands ring •

loud and clear, Muir's and Starr's message to the Yale community barely makes it past the power plant gates. On the other side, Yalies become aware of the energy system only when it doesn't work for them and then they ((talk back" to the system by opening a window. Yale's energy makers and energy consumers are largely alien to each other. Someone must bridge the gap between them and that someone may be those who, for now, largely represent the problem: Yale's students. the help of Bob Ferretti, the Education and Outreach Manager at the Yale Office of Sustainability and my former supervisor, ·STEP pushed for mod~ est improvements that would bring potentially big energy savings.- Capping the few chimneys left open around campus and insulating drafty windows and doors are the easy measures, the "low-hanging fruit" that Yale has yet to pick clean. STEP took its case all the way to John Bollier, the powerful associate vice president of Facilities. The work paid off. '"We are tightening the envelope," Ferretti assures me, and "it wouldn't have happened without STEP." As part of the team that approached Bollier, I was surprised to find that he took us seriously. He didn't just humor us. He

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listened intensely to our ideas and, when he approved, made things happen. Having grown accustomed to a campus where, over centuries, tradition has deposited resistance to change in every nook and cranny of Yale's operations, I thought his response something of a miracle. · ) Strangely, STEP has been most effective not in changing student behavior·the original goal of group but instead in changing Yale's mechanical systems. But these mechanical changes are themselves a form ofbehavioral change one that, unusually, brings administrators, engineers, and students all to the same table. And in building these new channels of communications, ·students are proving the keystone. Ferretti helped me understand: Bollier listened to STEP not because we were experts but because we were students, talking with him face-to-face.

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By justin Stone

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The largest collection of cuneiform day tablets in the Western Hemisphere is crannied away in a corner of the third floor of Sterling Memorial Library, and even though Yale is among the best places in the world to study Assyriology, there simply are not that many Assyriologists, and it shows. When, in early September, I first tried to find my way to the Babylonian Collection, neither the attendants at Sterling's front desk nor the guard outside the Stacks knew where it was, nor is its location listed on all of the reference . maps in Sterling's nave, and, despite the library's otherwise resplendent aesthetics, the empty hallway that led me to The Epic of Gilgamesh flaunted only burntout light bulbs and a puddle of pungent water courtesy of a corroded bathroom pipe whose appearance suggested that it, too, was a Mesopotamian relic. Of course I startled the curator, Ulla Kasten, when I opened the door to the exhibition room (''I'm sorry," she said, jumping from her desk, "I just wasn't expecting anyone"), and of course I surprised her by being an English major ("Students of literature never remember that literature begins with the Sumerians"), and of course I elated her when I began to examine a Babylonian figurine ("Feel free to read all my labels; nobody ever does anyhow"). Of course a forgotten civilization would have a forgotten collection.

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The oldest writing in the world is, as far as I can tell, exactly like the newest writing except that it looks sloppier. That's partly due to the medium; writing on wet clay was an inhere~tly journalistic enterprise because, under the Fertile Crescent's scorching sun, it wasn't too long before that clay began to dry just try chiseling a story on a slab of hardened earth with a water reed and you'll forgive the Sumerians for not crossing every t. (That said, if a scribe made a mistake, he could moisten the clay and revise, but this resulted in a curious side effect. The most rewritten parts of the tablet are also the thinnesttheir clay whittled down from repeated washing and writing and so we can suss out just how persistently an author strove to find his mot juste.) In any case, the writers of old engaged in the confrontation of challenging ideas, using rhetoric, irony, humor, and metaphor in the same way we do. Their inventions became our • conventions.

Most of the displayable collection sits behind glass cases in a rather uninspiring room. If not for a pair of elegant windowpanes, one depicting a Babylonian sphinx, the other a royal retinue, you might forget that the objects on show are very valuable and very old. The newest date _from circa 1 CE, the oldest from 3,000 years earlier.

Some 40,000 other tablets are hidden offstage, in an archive so weighty that its

floor has been reinforced in concrete.

One of the larger tablets clamored for my attention; it had a yellower tint than its compatriots, lustrous and inviting and exuding self-confidence. It was an unmistakable commodity: the world's first recipe. "In some sense, writing developed for that recipe," Kasten told me. As villages grew into towns, and there were too many people to know everyone's business, the Sumerians developed a basic inethod of recording food production: the original bookkeeping. Soon, writing expanded beyond a mere instrument of tabulation for Abednago's sheep and Balthazar's onions.

No longer content with discussing how much food was produced and who had it, some savvy scribe decided to explain what to do with it. The recipe tablet is flanked by other ancient objects: a water basin, a rattle, a gameboard, an adoption contract, the story of a jealous marriage, each and every artifact or panel the result of handiwork, each and every handiworker sustained by food, the very food whose dissemination was aided by the creation of writing and whose preparation was abetted by these instructions for making pigeon stew." Pigeon stew! "The haute cuisine of Mesopotamia," according to the curatorial description. Can you imagine Sumerian epicureans eking out their livelihoods in pursuit of this ambrosial nectar?

We can make it, too. Thanks to Kasten's

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unread labels, the age of enlightenment is upon us all (but forgive the terseness, perhaps another byproduct of rapidly drying clay tablets): "Take a pigeon. Split it in half. Also prepare some red meat. Boil water, throw in fat, and add herbs and spices ... " So our recipes have improved. But the idea of a recipe has not changed.

I see Hammurabi, lying atop a bed of virgins and saying something like, c1 don't make the rules, I just enforce them, " before reaching for another bowl ofpigeon stew.

Other wonders abound. I was par. ticularly moved by a tablet describing extispicy, the science of interpreting the future through the entrails of sacrificed animals (a practice which has since become illegal, unless you use road kill). Another tablet calculates the ratio of the sides of an isosceles right triangle, a mathematical the creeds and rituals that buoyed them discovery falsely attributed to the Greeks. through pogroms and wars and depresThe formidable stele of the code of King sions and genocides, the all-sustaining beHammurabi, slightly removed from the liefs shared by their grandparents and by rest of the collection and situated next to a their grandparents' grandparents in an apstack of tomes that describe the economic parently unbroken chain for thousands of and social history of the Orient, has a basyears.

I see that the convictions for which relief of Hammurabi's encounter with the my faithful ancestors of generations past sun god. (Unlike the rest of the collection, _ would have sacrificed their lives (in defthis stele is just a copy; blame the French.) erence to the magnificent innovation of King Hammurabi claimed that his law those wayward Israelites and the infinite code was divine, which is a magnificent wisdom of their fetterless God) were actuself-defense, because even if the laws are ally convictions that my ancient relatives~ intensely disagreeable, one cannot shoot probably borrowed from the Babylonians.

God's messenger. I see Hammurabi, lying The timeworn foundations ofWestern juatop a bed of virgins and saying something risprudence were wrested from unknown like, "I don't make the rules, I just enforce and unknowable stone slabs that sit idly them," before reaching for another bowl in a nondescript room separated from evof pigeon stew. ery synagogue and church and courthouse That God's law is untouchable is not proudly displaying the Ten Commandthe only thing the Babylonians figured ments, separated indeed from the world at out first. One tablet is has a selection from large, by a pool of toilet water.

1he Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest Not everyone has forgotten.

I have poems to feature a god using a flood to gravitated to the collection a few times make a tabula rasa. In this room we have in the two months since I discovered it. divine law, a deluge, a legal precursor to The water has long since been mopped up the Torah and the Ten Commandments, and most of the light bulbs replaced, but a water laver for ablutions like those deI still find myself the only one there, so I scribed in the Hebrew Bible, and, for that wonder: How many of Yale's world-class matter, a description of Mesopotamian resources go unnoticed?

This can't be the temples conspicuously similar to the alonly one.

When I go, I always stand before leged form of the one in Ancient Israel. a small and fractured stone slab.

It is a sort I see the religion of my grandparents, November 2008

of prayer, the label explains, that would have been set befo_re the statue of a god: "I am a scholar, but whatever I have been taught has turned into drivel for me.

My hand for writing is gone, my mouth is not up to discourse. I am not old, but my hearing is thick, my look cross-eyed ... " It may come as no encouragement that educational discontent is as old as education. But, I assure you, I have never felt so perfectly connected to the course of human history as when I commiserated with that ancient Babylonian.

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â&#x20AC;˘

TN . justin Stone is a senior in Davenport College.

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LOOSE FOOTING

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Outdoor enthusiasts struggle for Yale support.

By Sophie Quinton • •

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Ragged Mountain stands in a dramatic ridgeline that arcs across Connecticut.

It offers a long, challenging hiking trail, some of the most extensive rock climbing in the state, and a view of the vibrant foliage, shimmering lakes, and church steeples of rural New England. It seems a world away from New ·Haven, yet Yalies can reach the ridgeline in forty minutesif they have a car. This fall, after a failed scramble for transportation, the undergraduate group Yale Outdoors was forced to cancel plans for a day hike to Ragged Mountain, disappointing the thirteen students who had signed up for the trip. Of all the forest, trail, and river systems in the New Haven area, only East and West Rock are accessible by foot, bike, or public bus.

For undergraduate outdoor organizations, most notably Yale Outdoors and the Yale Climbing Club, no car means no hike.

Tired of such let-downs, Eli Bildner DC '10, Spencer Gray TC '09, and Bo White FES '09 are mobilizing outdoor groups and pushing for change. Since outdoor activities require more funds than the average undergrad group, keeping them "separate from the central workings of the college is •

not particularly well suited to producing good outdoor life," Bildner explains. He, Gray, and White representing, respectively, Yale Outdoors, the Climbing Club, and the Forestry School's . 1OOo/o Clubhope to persuade the University to support the centralization of outdoor life at Yale. "Our vision is to have outdoor life as a separate program, run out of the Yale College Dean's office, with an endowment and funding," Bildner explains, outlining the ambitious plan with his characteristic calm. An umbrella group incorporating his, Gray's, and White's clubs as well as the popular Freshman Outdoor Orientation Trips (FOOT), would facilitate communication between organizations, increase their scope, and allow for a greater emphasis on teaching wilderness skills. Ideally, the umbrella group would have its own space perhaps even its own building in which groups could meet and store their gear. This new organization, the three believe, would reduce trip costs, solve transportation issues, and unify the outdoors community on a university-wide level.

LAcK OF TRANSPORTATION may seem like a minor issue, but it presents a formidable

challenge to Yale's struggling outdoor scene. Transportation costs drain the fiscal resources of every outdoor-oriented organization at Yale. As the University"-with the exception of community-serviceoriented Dwight Hall lacks a fleet of vans for student groups to borrow, Yalies are often confronted with a dilemma: shoulder the costs of renting a van or cancel a trip.

Yalies are often confronted with a dilemma: shoulder the costs of renting a van -or cancel a trip.

And transportation is only part of the problem. Administrators have failed to provide storage space, so FOOT is forced to stash its gear in the For~stry School's basement and Yale Outdoors in the Berkeley College music room. Unlike many other comparable schools, Yale has no umbrella organization devoted to supporting outdoor activities. To outdoors-minded students like White, "it's so obvious that

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THE NEW JOURNAL

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Yale lacks a strong outdoor program." In cold, blustery Hanover, Dartmouth boasts a centralized, university-supported outdoor education program that has achieved national prominence. In urban Boston, MIT facilitates outdoor. life through an independent non-profit organization that offers organized expeditions, educational programs, rental vans, and equipment.

Even universities with less of an outdoor focus, like Princeton and Penn, manage outdoor life through dedicated offices and provide students with space to meet and store gear, . while at Yale, transportation difficulties are symptomatic of a broad lack of institutional support. Like other student organizations, outdoors groups receive just several hundred dollars of Undergraduate Organizing Funding Commitee funding per year, far too little to fund far-away camping trips.

Many students find this situation particularly frustrating given the rich natural environment just beyond New Haven.

Yale owns 11,000 acres of New England forest which it uses primarily for research purposes, as well as a 1 ,500-acre recreational property called the Outdoor Education Center, less than an hour away and replete with cabins, kayaks, and a lifeguard-staffed swimming area. Most undergraduates know little about these resources since they are not made readily available for student use. Yet Yale College students have demonstrated their interest in outdoor life: Almost one in three Yalies chooses to participate in FOOT, one in six applies to be a FOOT leader, and there are seven hundred names on the Yale Outdoors Club's panlist.

"Outdoor activities certainly, without question, attract a considerable number of our undergraduates," says Edgar Letriz, acting dean of Yale College and assistant dean of student affairs. But given the outdoor-friendly reputation of schools like Dartmouth and MIT, he suspects that prospective students who are serious about outdoor life might eschew New Haven.

"The students who want those kind of experiences enroll in [other] institutions," he says. But luring this demographic to Yale is not at the top of his priority list, and he imagines bureaucratic difficulties with BUdner's plan. "They are organizations involved in physical activities, so it would be a proposal best suited to the Athletics department," he begins, then rethinks his statement. "Although at Yale, athletics is really more about teams. It's an odd situ'

November 2008

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Yale Outing Club, he warns, the proposed ation. They are not the typical social or political organizations, they're not teams, . organization would have to be backed by so where do they fit into the scheme of a majority of the student body. Outdoors things?" groups, he said, must ask ¡themselves: "If you build it, will they come?''

Further complicating the situation, Letriz explains, since outdoors activities span IF THE HISTORy of Yale's Mountaineering both undergraduate and graduate organizations, "a University effort would have to Group is any guide, says White, then the answer is yes. White and Gray have embe addressed through every dean of those schools." This could take years. barked on a mission to revive the nowdefunct Mountaineering Club, which they hope to endow with an almost academic Dean Letriz suspects that pro- philosophy. ''At one point," White says, spective students who are seri- the club "was the premier mountaineering organization in the US." Though the club's ous about outdoor life might reputation faded during the 1960s and eschew New Haven. ''The stu- '70s, he explains, the Yale library retains its unusually large collection of moundents who want those kind of taineering literature. In the YMC's glory experiences enroll in [other] days, mountaineering was an upper-crust sport, dominated by men with a surplus institutions, "he says. of money and time; these days, the sport is propelled by commercial and star powFOOT REMAINS an outrageously popular er, its high-profile participants aiming to program, yet its institutional base is surconquer the highest terrain in the shortest prisingly flimsy. Unlike Cultural Connecperiod of time. tions and the FreshPerson Conference, it The reincarnated Yale Mountaineerisn't fully integrated with the Yale College ing Club, White hopes, would embody dean's office. Other than covering trip both the physical and intellectual sides of insurance and helping with budget acmountaineering. '~The school might think counting, the office does little to smooth it's not academic, but it's not just a sport'-FOOT's path. The program supports lifestyle and intellect are involved," he exmost of its costs by charging participatplains. "Precision, risk assessment, cultural ing freshmen and manages its lqgistics sensitivity, conservation, thinking about through a corps of student organizers. our relationship to the environment, wilIt also relies heavily upon its part-time derness philosophy .. .it can be very inteldirector, Priscilla "Cilia'' Kellert '74 FES lectual." On expeditions, White insists, - '81. "we should look at social issues, cultural "Cilia is the god of FOOT!" exclaims components, and bring back to Yale what Avani Dholakia TC '09, a former FO¡O T we've learned." coordinator. "She holds the glue ofFOO! This experiential learning is startlingly together between leadership, and she's the deficient at a university so focused on encollective memory of the organization." vironmental sustainability. Armed with Involved since the program's inception, its high-profile Sustainable Food Project Kellert acts as FOOT's alumni database, and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reducgeneral manager, and collective mother. tion Commitment, the University has FOOT even owes its storage space at the hosted state-wide conferences on sustainForestry School to Kellert's husband, a ability and recently sent President Levin Forestry School professor. to Washington to testify before the Senate While the umbrella organization that Environment and Public Works CommitBildner and White envision would ease tee. Yet somehow, amidst all this green, it FOOT's dependence upon one individual can't seem to muster the resources to send and make It less expensive for its freshmen a dozen students out on a day hike. participants, FOOT may prefer to maintain its independence. And, according to Letriz, the support of a broad-based group like FOOT might be just what Bildner and White need to get their umbrella organization off the ground. In order for Sophie Quinton is a junior in the University to establish a campus-wide '

TN

Trumbull College.

33

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FORTUNE TELLERS In today's economic climate, should Yale spend its endowment?

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ByLauraZax

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•

THE NEW JOURNAL

34 •

On September 26, 2007, a headshot of Yale's chief investment officer and ·global investment god David Swensen graced the New York Times business section, accompanying an article about the Yale endowment's 28 percent jump to an unprecedented $22 billion. On that same day, Washington legislators were also thinking about Yale's endowment. In a morning hearing championed by the Senate Finance Committee's Ranking Member, Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a debate about college endowments was circling around one question: Colleges are earning a lot, but are they spending too little of it on financial aid for their students?

The coincidence was not lost on Lynn Munson, a critic of college and university spending and the hearing's star witness.

"Despite the fact that that very week the Senate Finance Committee, which sets the tax policy for the nation, had signaled · a strong interest in college university endowments," Munson says, "Yale went ahead and came out with particularly prideful announcements of its returns. They called attention to themselves even as the Finance Committee was calling these issues . . '' mto question.

There is certainly evidence that Yale is proud to be well-endowed. Snoop around the Investments Office and you might find a plush, stuffed bulldog wearing an already outdated Yale blue sweater that reads "YALE ENDOWMENT $13 BILLION" in stitched white lettering. More recent · investment office paraphernalia includes a tote bag lined with fabric that states "The Yale Endowment $23 Billion October 2007'' written over and over again in the Yale font.

The bag's lining is loud; the office that custom-ordered it isn't. For all of its boastful openness about the market value of Yale's endowment, the Investments Office is remarkably dose-lipped when it comes to disclosing information about its financial practices. "The Investments Office has no comment to offer concerning this subject," the financial analyst contacted for this article emailed. During the full year that Jhomas Kaplan, the current editorin-chief of the Yale Daily News, covered the Investments Office for the paper, Swensen did not once respond to Kaplan's requests for an interview. Swensen recently visited an undergraduate class to speak about the endowment in a downward-turning economy, but he began by asking that the students not talk to their peers about the November 2008

discussion.

The reticence of the YIO-and of similar offices at other colleges and 'u niversities is particularly problematic given . their primary argument in the endowment spending debate: Endowments are complex and critics are uninformed. Armored in expertise, the offices retreat.into a tightlipped justification for their tight-pursed practices: "Trust us." '

c1 would tuck that information away in my head and read about the GDP ofsmall nations in the morning paper and realize that's about the size of some school/ endowments.

-Lynn Munson :1)

other hand, is so loquacious that the endowment critic's critics accuse her of being a talking head. She first became interested in what she calls the "endowment hoarding" of some colleges and universities while she was serving as chief of staff at the National Endowment MuNSON, ON THE

for the Humanities, a federal grant-making agency. Reviewing applications for fun4ing from . colleges and universities across America, Munson was stunned by the s_ize of many endowments. "I would tuck that · information away in ~y head and read about the GDP of small nations in the morning paper and realize that's about the size of some schools' endowments,, she says. .

When Munson left her post at NEH to start a family, she began to more seriously research the endowments at US colleges and universities schools to which, she realized, she might soon be paying tuition.

Since then she has become something of an unofficial expert on the subject and is currently an adjunct fellow at the Center for College Affordability and Productiv• • lty.

Bt,J.t Munson is by no means alone in her critique. Though she was one of the first voices to question the size of college and univershy endowments, others from college alumni to current students, from college students' parents to the parents of fut;ure college students have joined her in a debate that has been gaining momentum over the past two years. This year, Senator Grassley teamed up with Congressman Peter Wekh (D-Vermont) to draft a proposal

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A Science Investment For Yale University

David Swensen calls his running of the Yale endowment a labor of love. During his tenure, it has achieved an annual compound growth rate of 16.3 percent.

Yale University is investing $500 miJJion in neN science and engineering fadlities, induding five neN buildings and renovations a old ones.

Yale's more

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to try to bew111e a Sdeoce and tee t lllOiogy the growing

importance that universities are pladng

and for its schools.

Universities have been spending heavily on fadlities to fi JSter ruttingedge scientific but Yale's

35

director of research and policy analysis for the National Association of College and University Business Officers, which

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conducts an annual and highly respected study of higher-education endowments in which Yale takes part. Redd's tone provides no hint of value judgment, either positive or negative, on whether such a bias is desirable. "That's a subjective question," he says blandly.

A stable endowment ensures that scholars in the year 3008 will have no fewer opportunities than do their 2008 counterparts.

Critics, however, do not avoid the subjective, and their opinions are pretty transparent. "Where is the line between saving up for students of the future and asking today's students to make sacrifices that are too great and actually kind of deprive them?" asks Munson, who believes that many institutions of higher education in the U.S. have already crossed this line.

"The policy seems to be more for the sake of more," she says, describing a keepingup-with-the-Joneses mentality.

But in addition to the need to stabilize spending between the present and the future, administrators claim that, even if a university wanted to spend much higher percentages of its endowment, there are a number of factors that limit how much the university could spend. Though the YIO tote bags boast "$23 billion" in a repeating pattern, this number is not the whole story. "That's the market value, but it's not actually the amount of cash they have," explains Redd. On average, about a quarter of college and university endowments are invested in illiquid assets such as hedge funds, private equities, and natural resources, which cannot be sold in the open market. Illiquid assets not only diversify a university's investment portfolio, they also "prevent raiding the endowment," says Redd.

Much of the endowment is inaccessible for another reason: earmarks. When donors give money to colleges and universities, they have the option of mandating it for a specific purpose. Restrictions range from well-known professorships such as the Sterling to the endowment for tulips at Jonathan Edwards, Yale's wealthiest col-

•

for legislation mandating that colleges and universities spend a minimum of 5 percent of their endowments annually, a figure already legally required of all non-academic non-profits.

Administrators and Swensephiles for the most part dismiss these criticisms as ill-informed or simplistic. They emphasize that institutions of higher education already have their own complex, self-imposed spending rules mathematical formulas that designate what percentage ofits endowment a college or university spends during a given year. While these models differ slightly from school to school, all are designed to smooth consumption over time so that the university doesn't have a drastically irregular budget say, a budget that osciliates as much as the rate of return does from year to year. Yale's long-term average for endowment spending is 5.25 percent. But that does not mean that each and every year Yale meets the 5 percent minimum that members of Congress have proposed. Though in years with low returns Yale is likely to spend as much as 5.5 percent of its endowment, when blessed with high returns, it may spend as little as 4.5 percent. (While half of a percentage

point may sound negligible, when talking about an endowment in the tens of billions of dollars, even fractions of fractions are values worth debating.) Many considerations go into the equation, but one of the most important factors is the spending rule's ability to self-adjust based on the endowment's past performance in the market. "The spending rule is based on sound economic analysis. It's mathematical and it makes sense," says a current Yale student and former YIO intern who wished tore• rna m anonymous.

The spending rule requires such delicate engineering because it is designed to sustain a college's purchasing power to perpetuity. Since Yale expects to be around indefinitely, the equation must manage the present not only with an informed sense of the past but also with a keen eye to the future .. The phrase that financial officers at universities use to describe this parity between present and future is "intergenerational equity." A stable endowment ensures that scholars in the year 3008 will have no fewer opportunities than do their 2008 counterparts.

"In general, endowments are biased toward future students," says Ken Redd, • •

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lege. However, statistics from the 2007 NABUCO endowment study show that only a little .over half of a school's endowment, on average, is restricted and that of those restricted funds, 30 percent are set aside for financial aid. "Unless Yale could prove to you that they have a higher proportion of the endowment that is restricted than most institutions of their type, I simply wouldn't let them get away with that argument," says Munson.

Yale, she insists, could be more generous with its funds even under existing restrictions. But Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, the Holy Trinity of endowments whose piles of treasure stretch closer and closer to the heavens, are not the only schools that have, in Munson's estimation, reached the other side of that intangible line. Naming names, she points out that not only private but also many public schoolsthe University of Texas, the University of Minnesota are guilty of big endowments and little spending. Colleges and universities are nonprofits, but their endowments dwarf those of their not-for-profit peers.

In fact, at least 26 American academic institutions have endowments larger than that of the nation's wealthiest museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose endowment sits at $2 billion.

Professor Douglas Rae, who served in New Haven's mayoral office in the early '90s and who now teaches courses on capitalism and the city, believes that Yale has done its duty to its students, its scholars, and its city. In his estimation, the Univer- sity has already paid the societal dues that Munson and friends demand the nonprofit begin to pay. Rae points to the tax revenues that Yale, as the largest owner of commercial property in New Haven, pays to the city, to the financial aid reforms of last year, to the institution as an engine of employment. "Yale is hands down the most beneficial institution in the city," he says.

Restrictions range from wellknown professorships such as the Sterling to the endowment for tulips at jonathan Edwards, Yale's wealthiest college. ..

Munson claims that she won't be able to assess whether Yale's financial aid re-

forms and contributions to New· Haven make up for its tight-fisted endowment · policies until there is more transparency in the financial decisions of institutions of higher learning. Currently, schools are not obligated to disclose how they spend their budgets. "I believe it has really contributed to hoarding," says Munson. · Money management is made further opaque by the fact that, at Yale, the Investments Office is not obligated to make their investments public unless Yale accounts for more than 50 percent of a company's stockholding.

Approaching the push for transparency from a different side, an undergraduate organization called the Yale Responsible Endowment Project has created a petition to encourage the University to reconsider its investments in a hotel management company whose labor policies are less than praiseworthy. The group is not officially recognized by the University.

Of course, there are other reasons for keeping Yale's books under wrap. Because the University is a role model in the field of investments, other institutions clamor for the details of its portfolio so that they might mirror it. "If Yale were to disclose its investments, we could potentially be driven out of our own investments because people look up to us," said the former YIO • Intern.

This kind of he-said, she-said debate seems to have come to a draw. In the past year, many colleges and universities Yale included have drastically revamped and greatly improved financial aid packages for middle-income families. In concession, the other side of the debate has shifted its proposed legislation to the backburner.

After a congressional hearing with university administrators on October 8, Senator Grassley concluded that he would most likely not pursue the 5 percent spending rule.

Grassley's decision was no doubt also influenced by the results of September's economic downturn. The uncertain future against which university administrators insist that enormous endowments protect may have arrived. Fellow Ivies Brown and Cornell have instituted hiring freezes because of budget concerns. But with a minimum 5 percent payout like the one Congress proposed, Yale's own endowment which garnered only 4.5 percent in returns in the declining market would have shrunk.

While college administrators point to decreased returns as evidence that these

institutions need to protect themselves against an unpredictable future, endowment critics insist that these are precisely the conditions that call for universities to be generous. "Harvard uses the phrase 'a rainy day fund,' but it would have to be a rainy day of Biblical proportions," says Munson. "There is simply no excuse whatsoever to be sitting on those funds in a time like this."

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c'Jfa university could dip into its endowment and reward all the needy students that needed to be rewarded, eventually the endowment would cease . ,, to exzst.

-KenRedd With both sides claiming the recession as proof of their victory, the endowment debate has sharpened rather than settled.

Financial aid, which was always a large part of the discussion, is now its core.

"Students and their families need help,'' says Munson.

Still, though some have suggested that schools such as Yale could offer a free ride to every member of each incoming class merely by spending its endowment returns, very few people actually argue that schools should pursue such a policy. "If a university could dip into its endowment andreward all the needy students that needed to be rewarded, eventually the endowment would cease to exist," says Redd.

Translating Lehman's terms to layman's terms is not a priority at least not for the YIO. Perhaps critics of endowment spending believe that the machinery of college and university finances have something to hide because financial and administrative officials often behave as though there is.

With this in mind, the use of the word "treasure" to describe massive university endowments is less hyperbolic than it might seem. The money's whereabouts;its uses and its potential abuses are disconcertingly buried.

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TN Laura Zax, a junior in Silliman College~ is an associate editor ofTNJ

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CLASSIFIEDS, NOV. 5, 2008

By Liz Deutsch · Conserva-T's Apparel seeks designer for retro "There are Republicans in New England" fall line. For consideration, please submit CV, samples of previous work, and proof of NRA membership. , .

Republican party see~ trained professionals for constructing machine to unnominate Sarah Palin for Vice President.

Desired skills include particle physics, knowledge of time travel, denial.

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Experienced event planner needed immediately (before ballot-initiative season) _ in Massachusetts for stoned gay wedding at defunct greyhound track.

Immediate opening: General Store, Liberty, TX. We are a small, primarily white (not racist!), blue-collar community seeking stock manager to handle increased demand for the following items: cookie dough, Advil, razor blades.

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CNN hologram open casting call. Photogentic, personable. Punditry/Hip-hop/ Star Wars background a plus. Telephone Obi-Wan for audition. information.

Wolf Blitzer seeks agent to manage new career goals including hosting Rockin' New Years Eve with taxidermied Dick Clark and killing time in front of giant 2012 election countdown clock on cable news .

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Lighting professionals wanted for new live-action Skeletor 1V series featuring James Carville in tide role. Experience in soft anddim lighting desired to mask insect-like on-camera appearance.

Counselor positions available at New Horizons Drug Rehabilitation Center due to spike in addictions to powerful, mystery drug "Obama-dust." Applicants must have experience dealing with bouts of euphoria, uncontrollable tears/chanting, reported feelings of "hope" and belief in "change."

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Tina Fey seeks therapist to overcome multiple personality disorder.

TN Liz Deutsch is a sophomore in Morse College.

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