The Politic - Spring 2014 I

The Politic

SPRING 2014 I THE YALE UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF POLITICS VOLUME LXXI

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The Most Secret Society A BEHIND-THE-SCENES EXPLORATION OF THE YALE CORPORATION 1

Dear Reader,

To hear Yale’s tour guides tell it, this is the season of courtyard snowball fights and Old Campus snowmen, of Durfee’s finest chestnuts roasting on an open fire. But as snow continues to fall outside, and Mother Nature’s icy disposition refuses to thaw, a cursory glance down Elm or York Streets reveals the truth.

The first couple months of “spring” semester turn Yalies into cave dwellers, aspiring hermits.

Each dusting of campus — to say nothing of the ensuing puddles of slushy despair — drives shivering Yalies indoors to stock up on dining hall hot chocolate and binge-watch House of Cards.

During these last stubborn days of winter, however, you now have a chance to do something exciting, something edifying, something electrifying. We are speaking, of course, about the opportunity to thumb through this issue of The Politic. Despite the frigid weather, our writers have delved deep into a series of heated topics, from local issues to national news to international affairs.

This issue’s hottest article is the behind-the-scenes look Azeezat Adeleke ’17 and Aaron Mak ’16 present of the Yale Corporation. Not quite sure what that is? Don’t worry, you’re in good company — most undergraduates surveyed by The Politic are unsure of the body’s duties (if they know of its existence at all). As one fearful student responded, “The name ‘Yale Corporation’ is super scary to me and I have no idea what it means.” Yet as you will soon learn, the Yale Corporation — from behind the heavy wooden doors of Woodbridge Hall — impacts your bright college years more than just about anything else.

Our reporters explore a variety of other sizzling, scintillating topics as well. Charlotte Finegold ’17 lays bare the triumphs and heartaches wrought by New Haven’s robust magnet school education, while Jacob Neis ’17 probes repression lurking in the snow hills of Sochi. Jacek Oleszczuk ¸ ’17 interviews Lech Wałesa, the Nobel Prize-winning former President of Poland and one of the most influential politicians of the twentieth century. A world away, Matthew Gilman ’17 takes a lighthearted look at one of academia’s most common names. Meanwhile, Samantha Gardner ’16, reporting from a university in India, exposes the truth about that country’s corrupt educational system, and Eleanor Runde ’17 details the “September strife” that continues to shake Taiwan.

From deep within your dorm room cocoons, please consider these articles — just the shoots and leaves of critically important current events — as the first sign of an inevitable spring: days when you may once again venture outside, exploring the ideas contained in this issue. Thank you for your readership, your support, and, most of all, your feedback.

The Politic

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AN INTERVIEW WITH TREVOR POTTER

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A COMPREHENSIVE LOOK AT MAGNET SCHOOLS IN NEW HAVEN

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A POLITICAL SCANDAL'S FALLOUT IN A RISING DEMOCRACY

SENIOR EDITORS Josef Goodman Noah Remnick

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Amy Chang Rod Cuestas Anna-Sophie Harling Cindy Hwang Ezra Ritchin

LAYOUT EDITOR Yuyeon Cho

BOARD OF ADVISORS John Lewis Gaddis Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, Yale University David Gergen Editor-at-Large, U.S. News and World Report Anthony Kronman Former Dean, Yale Law School Ian Shapiro Director, Yale Center for International and Area Studies

BUSINESS MANAGER Aaron Mak

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ILLUSTRATOR Madeleine Witt BLOG EDITOR Kohler Bruno GRAPHIC DESIGNER Anthony Kayruz

ONLINE MANAGERS Derek Soled David Steiner

DISCLAIMER This magazine is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The opinions expressed by the contributors to The Politic do not necessarily reflect those of its staff or advertisers.

PICTURES Pictures from Creative Commons used under Attribution Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses

THE BIGGEST NEWS IN SOCHI NOW

After Solidarity AN INTERVIEW WITH ¸ LECH WAŁESA

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A L E X C O OL E Y

Romney Revisited A LOOK AT MITT, THE NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY ON THE FORMER GOP NOMINEE

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J I M SL E E P E R

Yale’s Great Conversation?

JIM SLEEPER REFLECTS ON THE OPENING OF YALE-NUS

J AC OB N E I S

14 Rainbows in Russia MANAGING EDITORS David Lawrence Rachel O’Connell

J AC E K OL E S Z C Z U K

E L E A NOR RU N DE

11 Turmoil in Taiwan

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Justin Schuster Eric Stern

What’s In A Name?

C H A R L O T T E F I N E G OL D

A Polarizing Educational Model

M AT T H E W GI L M A N

THAT WHICH WE CALL STEVEN SMITH...

DA N A S C H N E I DE R

More Money, More Problems

Editors-in-Chief

The Most Secret Society A BEHIND-THE-SCENES EXPLORATION OF THE YALE CORPORATION

Warmly, Eric Stern ’15 & Justin Schuster ’15

A Z E E Z AT A DE L E K E & A A RON M A K

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PROBLEMS WITH INDIA’S HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM

Wanted in Venezuela YALE WORLD FELLOW CARLOS VECCHIO IS IN HIDING

S A M A N T H A G A R DN E R

18 The True Beneficiaries of Indian Education

R AC H E L O’C ON N E L L

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T H E P OL I T IC

Income Inequality

BY THE NUMBERS

The Politic, an organization that operates off of advertising and donation revenue, thanks Interprise Partners for its donation.

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TP The most common misconception is that we have a “system” of campaign finance regulation — meaning that anyone actually intentionally created the way the current laws work. In reality, what we have are “systems” created

by Congress, with major portions struck down or altered by the Courts (or undermined by regulatory action or inaction), with no one author of the resulting hodgepodge of requirements.

More Money, More Problems AN INTERVIEW WITH TREVOR POTTER DA NA SCH N EIDER

[P]

TP Back in 1988, corporations and unions were strictly limited in what they could do in federal elections, the FEC was an active watchdog agency with a credible enforcement role, presidential candidates of both parties participated in the presidential public funding system, spending by outside groups was fully disclosed, and members of Congress spent far less time raising campaign funds (and had no personal leadership PAC accounts to double-dip for). It was a different, and vastly simpler, world.

Trevor Potter is a leading campaign lawyer, nationally recognized for his experience in compliance programs, campaign finance investigations, and questions concerning lobbying registration and disclosure of federal and state ethics rules. He is the former Commissioner (1991-1995) and Chairman (1994) of the Federal Election Commission. Potter is the founding President and General Counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit organization that monitors campaign finance activities across the country. In 2008, Potter was recognized as a “Super Lawyer”

by Washington DC Super Lawyers magazine. He served as General Counsel to the John McCain campaigns in 2000 and 2008. Potter leads Caplin & Drysdale’s Political Activity Law Practice.

[P]

Today you lead the political law practice for Caplin & Drysdale.

How did you become Stephen Colbert’s lawyer?

TP Pure good luck! His staff called me on the recommendation of a former law partner of mine when they were seeking a lawyer who knew about PACs (political action committees). We spoke, then they asked if I would be willing to speak with Stephen Colbert directly.

When I did, he asked if I would be willing to discuss PACs on the Report.

Only after I was interviewed by him on air the first time did he decide he wanted to explore this issue by creating his own PAC and asked me to help him as legal counsel.

[P]

What was your initial reaction when Mr. Colbert asked you to start a Super PAC?

TP I thought it would be a wild ride — which it was. The fact that I was working with a genius — both in terms 4

of Stephen Colbert’s ability to understand complex legal issues (right up there with top Supreme Court lawyers) and his ability to synthesize those issues into an ongoing series of four minute discussions in humorous form — made it a rare and very rewarding professional experience of educating the public while accomplishing my client’s objectives.

[P]

How did Citizens United change the election cycle, and where do you see the future of Super PACs?

TP The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was predicated on at least two assumptions that proved to be false: that the new corporate independent spending would be fully disclosed, so shareholders could hold their corporations accountable and voters would know who was funding political communications, and that the wave of new outside spending would be “completely” independent of candidates and parties. Instead, much of the

money spent on election advertising in 2012 was from secret (not disclosed to the public) sources, and Super PACs and other “outside” spending was by groups created by persons closely connected to candidates and political parties, with candidates and their aides closely aligned with major funders of these groups.

[P]

Is there hope for legislation to regulate Super PACs? What kind of political challenges will Congress face in revising this legislation?

TP The first reform we need is the “full disclosure” that the Supreme Court said in Citizens United that we would have — and which it declared in the only 8-1 portion of that decision was not only constitutional but necessary for our system of campaign finance to work. This could come from court action (overturning FEC regulations, which currently allow non-disclosure contrary to the provisions of [the] McCain-Feingold [Act]), FEC recon-

How have you seen campaign finance changed since you served as Deputy General Counsel to George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign?

[P]

Trevor Potter, left, speaks with Stephen Colbert at a meeting of the Federal Election Commission.

sideration of those regulations, other regulatory actions, or Congressional passage of disclosure legislation such as the revised DISCLOSE Act introduced

by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

Beyond that, we have to look at the way that current fundraising practices are consuming enormous amounts of legislator time — to the exclusion of the work members of Congress are sent to Washington, on taxpayer salaries, to accomplish.

This is even true of the President in a re-election year — President Obama is reported to have attended at least 222 political fundraisers in his re-election year, a number incredibly disruptive to his full-time job of being President of the United States.

[P]

You are the founder, President and General Counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, which emphasizes campaign finance laws. Why did you create this foundation and what work have you done?

TP The CLC defends existing disclosure laws and other regulations of money in politics in the courts when they are challenged, and works to educate the public and lawmakers on problems with our current campaign finance system and ways to improve it.

[P]

What are the most common misconceptions that Americans have about campaign finance?

As former commissioner and chairman of the FEC, what do you think it will take for the FEC to act more efficiently?

TP The deadlocks in Commission votes, and resulting gridlock, could be altered by a majority of Commissioners taking their jobs of enforcing the law seriously. Absent that, some sort of tie-breaking mechanism to allow the FEC to work its way through deadlocks is necessary.

[P] What advice do you have for

students interested in the legal profession?

TP Law can be a very fulfilling profession if you are doing work that interests and challenges you. Find an area of law (by trial and error if that is how it goes) that makes you want to get up in the morning.

P

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A Polarizing Educational Model A COMPREHENSIVE LOOK AT MAGNET SCHOOLS IN NEW HAVEN CH A R L O T T E F I N EG OLD

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The scene was set for Julius Caesar: white lanterns hung off the balcony; two blood-splattered columns stood sentinel before a scarlet platform and a row of crimson chairs. The audience stared expectantly at the stage.

The man who strode to the microphone at center stage, however, spoke not of the might of the Roman Empire, but of the power of arts education and free learning.

“If you want a place that will challenge the way you think and the way you produce, this is the place for you,” said Frank Costanzo, Principal of New Haven’s Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School. “If you’re ready for academic rigor at a place that will nurture and cherish you, this is the place for you.”

That night — February 11 — some fifty families sat in the main theater at at the College Street high school, clutching applications and glossy brochures featuring student dancers, writers, actors, singers, musicians, and visual artists. The Open House night was for families, most from outside of New Haven, who were about to enter their children into the New Haven inter-district magnet school lottery.

New Haven’s magnet school program is one major component of its larger public education reform efforts, which have been praised across the nation. For instance, after the city overhauled its teacher evaluation system to unite teachers’ unions and school administrators, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “New Haven is the gold standard in terms of how you do things right.”

New Haven’s reform platform, as well as the nationwide school choice movement, advocates programs that offer alternatives to so-called neighborhood schools, or the public schools to which students are assigned according to their residence. In the United States, there are a variety of methods of choice. Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Georgia, among other states, subsidize private education through vouchers; other states offer tax credits to individuals for donating to education. These donations can then be converted to scholarships for students. In New York City, students can take entrance exams to be selected for one of nine special-

ized high schools, including Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant.

Several states, including Connecticut, offer charter and magnet schools as alternatives to neighborhood schools. A charter school is publicly funded yet independently run, and is founded generally by parents, community groups, or teachers. While other cities have focused on charters, New Haven has directed a great deal of funding and attention into developing its magnet schools; these are public schools that offer specialized instruction and programs otherwise unavailable. In New Haven, the magnets have become increasingly selective, and often attract students from outside the city’s school district.

Elizabeth Carroll, the director of Yale’s Education Studies program, lauded innovation in magnet schools.

“The fact that suburban students are traveling here to New Haven, as opposed to staying in their more affluent areas, I think, speaks well to the opportunities they’re being offered here,” she told The Politic. “In other cities, you’ll see magnet schools that are just for students within that district. The curricula and facilities that these magnet schools offer are incredible, and I can totally understand why someone would choose to get on a bus to come and go to school there with people not from their town.”

Yet while the magnets have undeniably strong records in terms of academics and diversity, they tend to draw a disproportionate amount of the district’s attention and resources.

Thus, they have provoked a barrage of questions for local officials and a heated debate across the city. And as the role magnet schools play in New Haven’s reform agenda becomes more and more central, this debate will only continue to grow.

•••

Magnet schools, developed to attract a more diverse student body, arose in response to protests over racial segregation in public schools.

In 1968, Tacoma, Washington opened the McCarver Elementary School, the nation’s first magnet school. Connecticut developed its magnet program more recently, after the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in Sheff v.

O’Neill (1996) that the state government was not providing all Connecticut public school students with an equal opportunity for education; the court gave the state department of education five years to equalize its schools.

It was in the wake of this decision that Connecticut developed its magnet school program.

In the seventeen years since the Sheff decision, New Haven has developed the largest magnet program in Connecticut, and one of the most prominent in the country. Today, twenty of New Haven’s 46 public schools are magnet schools. (Of the ten non-charter high schools in New Haven, only two schools are comprehensive traditional, non-magnet neighborhood schools).

What’s more, the magnet schools do not serve New Haven students exclusively.

New Haven, along with Bridgeport and Hartford, runs an Open District school choice program. In each school, seventy percent of the spots in the school are reserved for residents of the city; the other thirty percent are open to any Connecticut resident. Of the 7,325 current students enrolled in New Haven’s inter-district magnet schools, 3,000 — 41 percent — are from other districts.

Each magnet school has its own focus or structure. Superintendent Garth Harries explained to The Politic that the district develops a school’s theme by working directly with the founders of the school and evaluating the portfolio of schools already established: “Our hope is to have a wide array of schools that are attractive to different families, including different magnet schools of different kinds. The most important thing about a magnet theme isn’t the theme itself, but that the theme is a unifying scaffold for instruction so that you have teachers working together to build professional learning communities around the theme.”

In New Haven at least, magnet schools are known for being hotspots of innovation. Costanzo, the Principal of Co-op High School, argued that Co-op, with its extensive arts program, fills an important niche in the community.

“Many kids come with previous talent in some art form, but some don’t, so we work hard to cultivating our culture right from the get-go, from the freshman year, to get students to understand that this is a different, special place, 7

and to be a part of this culture, you really have to embrace and celebrate the arts.” Co-op has worked to center its curricula on mastery-based learning, in which students are coached to learn at their own pace. In addition to spending an hour and a half per day on their respective art — music, dance, creative writing, theatre, or visual arts — students, said Costanzo, also complete a rigorous academic program. Co-op was praised by the College Board for its recently-developed AP program and high SAT scores. In 2012, it graduated 90.4 percent of its senior class, up from 82.1 percent in 2011.

And Co-op is not alone in emphasizing the arts in public education.

Sophie Dillon ’17, who graduated from Wilbur Cross Comprehensive High School, lauded New Haven’s work on the arts. Dillon attended Worthington Hooker Middle School, then split her time in high school between Wilbur Cross and the Educational for the Arts, a selective afternoon magnet program for creative writing, dance, music, theatre, and visual arts in downtown New Haven. “I can’t rave about the program enough,” Dillon said. “All of the teachers are practicing artists and the classes are really small. Kids come from all over Connecticut to the program, and it’s simply amazing.”

In a city with many de facto segregated neighborhoods, New Haven magnet high schools are also remarkably diverse. For instance, Co-op is currently about 50 percent black, 25 percent white, and 25 percent Hispanic.

“We [offer] between 70 and 75 percent free and reduced lunch. You factor in all of that, and our demographics, and it’s an extraordinary place,” Costanzo said. “Students are interacting with kids that they might not otherwise have met, whether they’re from Guilford or Madison, or from Fair Haven Heights. And those are the kinds of things that really benefit kids who come here.”

James Doss-Gollin ’15, an alumnus of Wilbur Cross and the founder of New Haven Reach, a student-run organization that coordinates college access efforts for New Haven students, praised the diversity of the magnet schools. However, he also noted the tension associated with attracting suburban kids. “Even though we charge 8

other school districts to send their kids to schools here, it’s still frustrating for parents from New Haven when they want to get their kids into magnet schools, and are told there’s no space.”

Indeed, the lottery for admission is a grueling process: last year, Co-op alone received 528 applications from New Haven residents for 103 freshman spots (19.5 percent acceptance rate), and 338 suburban applications for 70 seats (20.7 percent acceptance rate).

Many parents appealed for more transparency in the lottery process so as to select their top three schools based on their chances of getting in.

“I think that’s been a reasonable criticism of the Board of Education — that it’s hard to navigate and to find out about our resources,” Harries, the Superintendent, acknowledged. In early 2013, however, the district published the magnet lottery data for the first time. Doss-Gollin added, “They’ve also done a lot of work with eighth graders to try and get them to think about where they want to go, so I think they’re definitely moving in the right direction to try and make the magnets more accessible.” This improvement is pivotal in neighborhood schools, which suffer from a lack of parental involvement because, as Doss-Gollin explained, many parents “either can’t speak English, lack an education themselves, don’t have time, or don’t care.”

New Haven’s choice to opt for magnet schools rather than neighborhood schools likewise affects the involvement of schools in their communities. “I think you gain a lot and you lose a lot from the choice not to have a high school in every neighborhood,” Doss-Gollin said. “Although magnet schools are often less segregated than neighborhood schools, you lose some of the sense of community in magnets. You don’t have teachers who can look at a kid in class and say, ‘You better stop acting up, because I know your mother.’” On the other hand, Costanzo emphasized that Co-op is taking advantage of its downtown location and its “opportunities for partnerships that other schools don’t have access to.”

Similarly, Harries and Costanzo both raised the issue of student mobility in New Haven — when students move from one school to another for disciplinary or other reasons — and its differing effects on magnet and comprehensive schools. Costanzo admitted that magnet schools seldom deal with students who change schools during the year, noting that “student mobility and transience have some real consequences for classroom learning,” and “neighborhood schools have borne the brunt of that burden.”

Carroll, of Yale’s Education Studies program, added, “I think there

Garth Harries, the superintendent of New Haven schools, joins students giving the sign for silence.

Speakers address parents at the Co-Op Arts and Humanities Magnet High School Family Night.

are legitimate questions to ask about who ends up going to comprehensive schools. Is it the kids whose parents who couldn’t, weren’t aware of, and just didn’t take added initiative of getting kids in lotteries? Those could be potential reasons for the overall lower performance of comprehensive schools. That would be something potentially concerning, that the school choice program could exacerbate gaps in achievement and opportunity within New Haven schools.”

Indeed, magnet schools not only receive state per-pupil funding for each student they draw from other districts, but, in recent years, several New Haven magnet and charter schools have been the recipients of federal grants. For instance, the New Haven Independent reported that on September 26, 2013, the U.S. Department of Education awarded New Haven $11 million over three years to develop four schools into STEM-themed magnet schools, including the Strong School, a K-4 21st Century Communications Magnet and Lab School, and the K-8 Celentano Biotech, Health, and Medicine Magnet School.

Meanwhile, Doss-Gollin remembered that at Wilbur Cross, the paper supply would run out by early May,

and when teachers went to request more supplies, they were met with bureaucratic obstacles. He explained that Wilbur Cross and James Hillhouse Comprehensive High School have become “dumping schools,” but continued, “there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you give them the resources to cope. It’s objectively fine to send all the kids who are learning English as a second language to Wilbur Cross, but if you don’t give them the resources to deal with those students, then you have a problem.”

The bottom-line for New Haven high school education reform, said Doss-Gollin, is that the district should focus on Wilbur Cross and Hillhouse in order to “improve the educational outcomes of kids in New Haven. The magnet schools have a really important role, but Cross [at 1,284 students] is bigger than several of the magnet schools put together, and a lot of the magnet school students aren’t from New Haven.”

On the topic of funding allocation, he remarked, “The same grants going to magnet schools could be doing a lot more for a school [with] a 58 percent graduation rate, like Wilbur Cross, than one with a 85 percent grad-

uation rate. At Wilbur Cross, giving the soccer team a beautiful field could have ensured that twenty more kids stayed in school every year. When we’d do our end-of-the-season ceremony for soccer, there were always kids who said, ‘I would not have graduated if this hadn’t kept me coming back every day,’ and they meant it.” He continued, “Our goalie was working forty hours a week on top of going to high school and everything else, and soccer was what motivated him to keep working really hard and showing up to school instead of dropping out so he could put in more shifts.”

After acknowledging the tensions inherent to New Haven’s school reform programs, Harries stressed that the district was working to guarantee an equitable distribution of resources among both magnet and comprehensive schools. “We need to be mindful that it is a portfolio of schools,” he said, “and one set of schools’ success can’t come on the backs of what happens in other schools.”

•••

At the end of the day, many of the issues in New Haven public schools fall outside the typical school 9

choice debate. Doss-Gollin recalled — although he could not blame them — that many teachers at Wilbur Cross “are so worn down from trying on students who have been in and out of jail, or from losing their students to violence. It’s incredibly hard to teach like that. In my sophomore year, this kid, who was everyone’s friend and was loved by all the teachers, was murdered. When there’s stuff like that going on in your community regularly, it’s hard to learn.”

Dillon and Doss-Gollin both pointed out that Wilbur Cross often seems like multiple schools under the same roof. Dillon recalled, “There was a real dichotomy between kids who were enrolled in AP and Honors classes, and those who were not. Sometimes, if you weren’t in AP classes, you’d get left behind.”

Harries said that he is prioritizing closing this gap between high- and low-achieving students. “I really want to emphasize disengaged youth in particular,” he said. “I tend to think that those students that are becoming over-aged and under-credited show the problems in our system most acutely, and so it’s always been the case that the district has tried to help those students, but I want to ensure that the district helps them systematically by identifying students before they become disengaged and take aggressive action to make sure they have the opportunity to see their future through school, instead of through activities outside of school.”

With their innovative curricula and programs, magnet schools are often heralded by proponents as effective tools in the fight to lessen the divide Harries noted. Indeed, opponents of magnet schools are often opponents of school choice in general.

And they are just as passionate in their defense of traditional public schools as school choice advocates are for charters and magnets.

Carroll pointed out the realistic consequences of school choice: “Competition fosters incentives for people or schools to do what they need to do to improve and be chosen as a school where people want to go; if they don’t succeed, they’ll be shut down.” Yet she contended, “I don’t think that people are right in saying that school choice is the silver bullet for public education.

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Offering school choice, even on the inter-district level, as New Haven does with magnets, can be a really helpful piece of the bigger strategy to improve schools across the board. And it can be a way to [increase] family engagement with schools — when families feel they have some say in what school their child goes to, they’ll be more likely to be involved with school, which leads to host of benefits.”

She paused, before elaborating.

“By and large, the argument to expand school choice has merit… And, through efforts to improve neighborhood schools, one would hope that they would, on their own, become attractive options. I think that if people felt that they had a good option in their neighborhood school, they’d prefer to send their kid to the local school rather than busing them across town…

The more quality options that New Haven can provide, the better. We want our city to be able to serve the wide priorities that people have for their kids’ education. And that seems to be what they’re doing.”

Although magnet schools clearly impact neighborhood schools, Harries explained that research on the “impact of magnets on other schools, particularly in terms of enrollment,” has yet to be done.

“I do want us to maintain our emphasis on magnets in the district,” he added. “I think that the idea of choice and choice system is really important and valuable, but we need to make sure that we’re prevented unintended consequences on other schools.”

Turmoil in Taiwan A POLITICAL SCANDAL'S FALLOUT IN A RISING DEMOCRACY ELE A NOR RU N DE

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Speaker Wang Jin-Pyng (left) presides over the stormy opening legislative session, while Ker Chien-Ming looks on from the curtain.

In June of last year, Ker ChienMing, a high-ranking Taiwanese politician in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was charged with embezzlement. The Taiwan High Court found Ker not guilty, but the prosecutors decided to appeal the decision. Upon hearing rumors of an appeal, Ker did what many of us would do: he asked a friend for help.

What Ker did not realize, however, was that the Special Investigative Division (SID) of the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office was investigating him at the time. As part of the investigation, the SID tapped Ker’s phone. Thus, when Wang Jin-Pyng — Ker’s friend as

well as the Speaker of the Legislative Yuan (the Taiwanese equivalent of a national parliament) — received a call from Ker, the SID was listening closely.

According to SID officials, Ker asked Wang to use his substantial political influence to prevent the prosecutors from appealing the decision. Wang agreed, and no appeal was ever filed.

On September 6, the SID exposed Wang’s influence-peddling at a press conference. As soon as the scandal went public, Taiwanese President Ma YingJeou condemned Wang’s actions, declaring that the Speaker had committed a “most serious infringement of Taiwan judicial independence.” Ma’s party, the

Kuomintang (KMT), quickly stripped Wang of his power as Yuan Speaker and revoked his KMT membership.

Outraged, Wang filed a lawsuit against the KMT. On September 13, a Taipei District Court filed an injunction blocking the KMT from removing Wang from power. Although Ma filed a high-court appeal of the injunction, his attempt failed, and Wang retained his position. By the end of the month, the ordeal was known across Taiwan as the nation’s “September strife.”

On October 4, Ker filed suit against Ma and KMT officials. In an interview with the Taipei Times, Ker explained that he wished “to end the 11

evil of governing by secret agents.”

The Taiwanese government promptly denied Ker’s claims, insisting that all of the wiretapping had either been conducted by mistake or approved by a warrant. The government further emphasized that the wiretapping was not politically motivated, though this claim has faced mounting skepticism in recent months.

“The evidence at hand suggests that the SID was wiretapping for political purposes,” Jau-Yuan Hwang, a law professor at National Taiwan University, told The Politic.

The “September strife” comes after decades of strained political relations between the major Taiwanese political parties. Much of this tension can be traced to the 1986 founding of the DPP, a liberal Taiwanese political party that advocates Taiwanese independence. In contrast, the KMT staunchly opposes Taiwanese independence. The two parties have been struggling for dominance ever since.

According to Jerome Cohen ’51 LAW ’55, a law professor at NYU School of Law and scholar of Chinese legal studies, politics certainly appear to have motivated Wang’s influence-peddling back in June. As the Speaker of the Yuan, Wang is responsible for ensuring that the DPP and KMT are able to collaborate and compromise in order to pass legislation.

“That’s why [Wang, a KMT member] made that phone call,” Cohen suggested, referencing the Speaker’s actions to aid Ker. “That phone call wasn’t on behalf of a KMT person; it was on behalf of a DPP person. He might not have had to make it if [Ker] had been a KMT legislator.”

Yet for all of the turmoil currently gripping Taiwan, the international press have largely remained silent. Nevertheless, the “September strife” could have very real global consequences. The scandal threatens the legitimacy of Taiwan’s leading politicians, to be sure; but even more than that, it may threaten Taiwan’s legitimacy as a nation.

•••

The alleged wiretapping, embezzlement, and influence-peddling could irrevocably devalue the Taiwanese constitution. Patent disregard for the 12

constitution by Taiwanese politicians, experts contend, could make the international community skeptical of Taiwan’s democratic integrity. According to Frances Rosenbluth, a political science professor at Yale University, this pattern of corruption needs to end in order for Taiwan to secure its longterm development. “Ma needs to play a clean game,” she insisted.

Written in 1946, the relatively young Taiwanese constitution is both fragile and unwieldy. The most recent constitutional amendment, passed in 2005, made it significantly harder to amend the constitution in the future.

According to Hwang, the Taiwanese law professor, the amendment “makes future changes practically impossible.”

A virtual inability to revise the standing constitution is a serious handicap for Taiwan’s political system, and it may make constitutional infringement by Taiwanese politicians especially damaging to the country’s legitimacy. However, some experts in Taiwanese government believe that the so-called constitutional crisis is far less serious than the media might suggest.

The wiretapping might have been legal under the Taiwanese constitution, and the issue is far from being resolved, Alan Romberg, Director of the East Asia program at the Stimson Center and former Principal Deputy Director for the State Department’s Policy Planning staff, told The Politic.

Others have also challenged the notion that the KMT’s actions pose a threat to the Taiwanese constitution. Shelley Rigger, a professor of East Asian politics at Davidson College, maintained, “The idea that the KMT has been trying to shut down or reverse or undermine Taiwanese democracy is really an ahistorical and overly politicized judgment.”

•••

Underlying the entire debate — and dominating the political conversation in Taiwan — is the issue of the nation’s relationship with China.

The ongoing feud between President Ma and Speaker Wang may have serious consequences for alreadystrained Taiwan-China relations. Wang, a relative moderate within the KMT, favors compromise with DPP legislators and often concedes on critical issues,

much to the chagrin of other KMT officials. Ma has been working for months to pass a series of 18 trade agreements with the mainland, mostly by making unilateral decisions to sign these cross-strait agreements. Wang has been pushing for more legislative influence over the agreements, which could slow down the process dramatically.

Ma’s proposals are the “first formal comprehensive cross-strait trade agreements” between Taiwan and the mainland, noted Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and a lecturer at the School of Management. The agreements are “hugely advantageous for Taiwan,” Roach added.

Though cooperation with China is critical to Taiwan’s economic well-being, the current series of economic deals runs the risk of increasing the mainland’s influence over Taiwan.

Cohen, the NYU law professor, compared Ma’s navigation of his agreements with the mainland to steering a ship between the mythical Scylla and Charybdis: “How far can you go? What’s sensible? What’s still safe?” he asked.

Cohen observed that Ma’s reluctance to give the legislature more than marginal influence stems from his fear that increased involvement of the legislature will lead to blockages, compromises, and delays in the crossstrait agreements. “If these agreements have to be vetted article by article by the legislature, [it] may lead to failure to enact or obtain approval of all these provisions,” Cohen said.

According to Hwang, the National Taiwan University law professor, “Wang wanted to slow down the whole process and let the [Yuan] have a real discussion on the merits of the trade agreement.”

Such a proceeding could have taken more than a year, he noted.

Despite the KMT’s majority in the legislature, even Ma’s most highly prioritized agenda items have had difficulty receiving approval, said Rigger, the Davidson College professor. “It’s not the case that he’s pushing things through without legislative approval.

He’s not even getting things through with his own party in control.”

Considering the political rivalry between the KMT and the DPP, as well as the apparent importance of Taiwan-China trade relations, the dispute

over cross-strait trade agreements may have been the real reason for which Ma tried to oust Wang from his position as Speaker of the Yuan. Yet now that Ma’s attempt to remove Wang has failed, the future of these agreements — and with them, Ma’s diplomatic legacy — is far from certain.

•••

Hearings regarding the KMT’s actions against Wang began this past December and are scheduled to continue in March. The Taipei District Prosecutors Office indicted Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-Ming in October 2013 for wiretapping Ker and divulging the results of those taps to Ma and the public.

In spite of the scandal, China-Taiwan relations have grown increasingly warm since last autumn. This past February, the two countries held their first high-level talks since Taiwan’s split from the mainland in 1949.

“It seems that the crisis has ebbed but is not yet completely reined in,” observed T.J. Cheng, a professor of government studies at the College of William and Mary. The KMT appears to have realized its mistake and, in an attempt to rectify its relations with the DPP and with the public, is allowing the dust to settle.

Cohen, who spoke with Ma on his most recent visit to Taiwan, said that the President is “trying to focus on different things.”

As the 2016 presidential election approaches, Ma certainly needs the country move on from this crisis. His current approval ratings — between 9 and 13 percent — indicate that he is unlikely to win his expected race in 2016. Hwang said it would indeed be difficult for Ma to recover from this autumn’s scandal.

Although both the KMT and the DPP are dissatisfied with the current status quo — neither unification nor independence — many experts believe it seems to be the safest option for Taiwan.

Cohen said that he is “already starting to worry” about the DPP nominating a radically pro-independence candidate for the 2016 presidential election. If the DPP rallies behind a candidate pushing for independence, underlying tensions with China could flare.

“The United States does not want

to see a return to political power of someone like [former President of Taiwan] Chen Shui-Bian,” said Cohen. “A Taiwan independence leader becoming president again would create a crisis in U.S.-China relations and would present an enormous risk to American security… We don’t want to have to go to war to defend Taiwan because somebody in Taiwan declared independence.”

Nevertheless, despite potentially severe economic and political ramifications, the global media have largely

ignored these wiretapping allegations, embezzlement schemes and political feuds. This general silence, in fact, appears to discount the importance of Taiwan’s political incidents in the past year.

Ultimately, these events reveal that corruption and instability exist even in a relatively robust democracy like Taiwan’s, casting new doubt on its potency, legitimacy, and durability.

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Rainbows in Russia THE BIGGEST NEWS IN SOCHI NOW: RUSSIA’S ANTI-GAY LAWS AND OLYMPIC ATHLETE ACTIVISM JACOB N EIS

LGBTQ activists protest Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The story is familiar. A nation with a dubious human rights record wins the bid to host the Olympic Games. Activists call foul, and the host government’s shortcomings become the subject of international news coverage and debate. Committees convene to discuss the matter; some even publish strongly worded recommendations to boycott the Games.

One resolution reads: “Therefore be it resolved, that the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States declares itself against America’s participation in the Olympic Games … and solemnly calls upon American athletes to refuse to participate … and calls 14

upon the International Olympic Committee to move the Olympic Games to another country where it is possible for them to be held in accordance with the Olympic ideal of chivalry and fair play.” However, this resolution was not written in opposition to the treatment of LGBT citizens under Russia’s gay laws, nor to the oppression of Tibetans by the Chinese regime prior the 2008 Games, nor even to the questionable economic policies of Brazilian officials during the lead-up to Rio 2016. This resolution dates back to December 1935, and it protests the harsh treatment of Jews in Germany under policies such as the Nuremberg Laws.

Dialogue on human rights is as inevitable at the Olympics as Coca-Cola commercials and U.S. basketball victories. Throughout recent history, the Olympics has proven to be more than just an arena for sports. It is a forum for the protests, boycotts, and demonstrations that capitalize on the Games’ publicity to press a political agenda.

While the U.S. did not boycott the 1936 Games, President Jimmy Carter did decline U.S. participation in the 1980 Moscow Games, ostensibly in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Four years later, the Soviets responded in kind, refusing to send athletes to the 1984 Los Angeles Olym-

pics, citing vague “security reasons.”

Other notable boycotts include that of Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq in response to the Suez Crisis of 1956; that of 25 African nations in 1976 in response to New Zealand’s supposed support of apartheid in South Africa; and that of Taiwan in 1980, which refused to compete under the name Chinese Taipei.

In addition to these national boycotts, individual athletes have expressed their opposition to the host country’s policies. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the 1968 Olympic Games, when African American track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in solidarity with the Black Power movement. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) expelled them for making an overly political statement at what it had intended to be an apolitical athletic event.

The Black Power incident, while provocative in the charged climate of race relations in 1960s America, was at least nonviolent. This was not so with the clash between the Hungarian and Soviet water polo teams in the 1956 Games. At nearly the same time as the Hungarian Uprising, the two teams fought what was undoubtedly the bloodiest game of water polo ever seen at the Olympics. During the so-called “Blood in the Water” match, the two sides exchanged kicks and punches until the Hungarians emerged victorious.

Spectators, too, have used the Olympics as a platform for their political grievances. The coverage of the Black Power salute of 1968 in Mexico City overshadowed what was perhaps the more significant political story: the mass protests led by University of Mexico students against the government’s spending on the Games. (This has echoes none too faint in Rio, the site of the 2016 Olympic Games.)

Professor Robert Barney, associated with the International Center for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario, is a leading expert on the history of the Games and has attended more than a dozen Olympics.

At the 1992 Games, Barney remembers extensive demonstrations by Catalonian separatists.

“For every Olympic flag that flew from a balcony in Barcelona, I saw a Catalan flag,” he recalls. As a qualifying statement, he stresses that not all

demonstrations are related to political issues. Religion comes into play as well.

Proselytization has been rampant at every Olympiad he has attended.

When asked why the Olympics — basically a massive sporting event — has frequently served as the backdrop for unrelated protests, Barney’s response is simple. “The reason [is] that it gathers so much attention,” he says of the modern Olympics, especially and crucially “on television.” The Olympics vies for the greatest viewership of any single televised event, surpassed only by the World Cup. What better forum to vent one’s grievances than the city where, for a few weeks, the camera crews of every major news station in the world run rampant? And what better way to make the news with one’s agenda than to provide a controversial story to thousands of journalists chafing for a headline?

Yet media attention alone does not explain why the Olympics has attracted impassioned political activity. It is the very spirit of the Games, as much as the publicity, that draws in activists. The opening section of the Olympic Charter reads: “Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.” Social responsibil-

ity and ethics have been associated with the Olympic Games for so long that the transcendent “Olympic Spirit” is inextricably tied to the sporting events themselves.

For billions of fans and thousands of athletes, the Olympics is an optimistic attempt to reconcile national differences, recognize the talent of human beings from every corner of the world, and work toward a more perfect global society. For much of the world, these motivations have even taken precedent over the results of the competitions. Medals have become merely a means by which athletes prove their determination for personal excellence within the context of international cooperation. (For reference, watch any Visa Olympics commercial from the past decade.)

It is surprising, then, that the Olympic Charter — featuring idealistic visions of international fraternity and human dignity — includes the following caveat: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” If a country were to push its own agenda on the members of the IOC, it would violate the spirit of equality that is so central to the Olympics. Nonetheless, many would argue that the kind of activity that fosters Olympic ideals requires a dialogue in

Gold medallist Tommie Smith, (center) and bronze medallist John Carlos (right) show the Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

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The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia officially began Friday, February 7.

which opposing parties can express their views publicly and work through their differences.

The concern, of course, is that unchecked protests easily erupt in violence, as the 1972 Munich Massacre starkly demonstrated. During this incident, the Palestinian group Black September took hostage — and eventually killed — eleven Israeli Olympians and a German police officer. According to Barney, this horrific event “put in place the need for a much more sophisticated and better security system,” which included limits to political protests.

The general policy of host countries and Olympic Committees since that time has been to establish protest zones away from the sporting venues and require permits for protest. While irksome to activists seeking to demonstrate at the Games, such limitations are in accord with the principle concerns of the IOC: safety and security.

“The IOC is a reactionary body,” says Barney. “They really like to keep peace and quiet.” Hence, the IOC tends to err on the side of preemption. For example, Barney continues, “it’s very hard to anticipate and control an individual athlete’s tacit or overt expression.” Hence, the IOC curtails athletes’ expression as if it were a potential 16

threat to the Games’ security or the host country’s national interests.

THE RISE OF PRINCIPLE 6

IN THE SOCHI GAMES

This year’s Winter Games in Sochi, Russia have been the backdrop for the most widespread and public protest movements in recent Olympic history. Rarely in living memory has the media turned so much attention to a single human rights issue in an Olympic host country: the so-called “anti-gay propaganda” laws passed by the Russian government in June 2013.

Now, Russians who provide information on LGBT lifestyles to minors can face high fines.

Avid Olympics fans have engaged in personal, televised boycotts as a result of their opposition to Russia’s laws. The U.S. delegation to the Games included several outspoken gay athletes in what was viewed as a deliberate attack on Moscow’s policies. Even Google — which, if not a weather vane for mainstream America, certainly has access to a larger portion of it than nearly any other organization — displayed its support for equal participation in the Olympics in its February 6 homepage. The website ran a quote from the Olympic Charter: “The prac-

tice of sport is a human right.”

Moscow and the IOC have responded to the threat of protest and unrest in typical fashion. The Russian government designated protest zones, just like the Chinese government did six years ago in Beijing. Athletes are prohibited from wearing clothing that explicitly supports gay rights or opposes Russia’s laws. The IOC has defended Russia’s approach, citing precedent and sections of the Olympic Charter which seem to allow host countries to sacrifice some measure of free speech for the sake of security.

Plus, concerns about safety from terrorist attacks following the bombings in Volgograd last December and suspected “toothpaste bombs” earlier this year have justifiably prompted Russian authorities to strengthen security measures. It is highly unlikely that these attacks had any relation whatsoever to movements for gay rights. Yet the general threat of violence has led to tighter restrictions limiting opposition activities of all sorts.

For all of the obstacles, activists and athletes have found creative ways of expressing their opinions within the boundaries set forward by Russia and the IOC. For instance, representatives from All Out and Athlete Ally, two

organizations that provide support for LGBT athletes, founded the Principle 6 campaign. This movement asks athletes to wear gear displaying the slogan “Principle 6”: a phrase that is sufficiently ambiguous to avoid prosecution yet that delivers a clear message.

“Principle 6 of the Olympic Charter states that, ‘Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement,’ and the IOC has confirmed that this includes sexual orientation,” Brian Healey of Athlete Ally explained to The Politic. “But in Russia, you can now be fined or arrested for speaking publicly about gay, lesbian, bi or trans issues. The new laws have fueled a massive surge in anti-gay violence within the country. The Principle 6 campaign uses the language of the Olympic Charter to give athletes and fans a way to speak out against this violence and discrimination before and during the Sochi Olympics without breaking Russian anti-gay laws or violating the Olympic ban on political speech.”

Healey emphasized that the campaign allows athletes to be as outspoken in their support as possible within the guidelines set by the IOC. “The Principle 6 campaign uses the language of the Olympic Charter to allow athletes and fans to speak out against this discrimination during the Sochi Games without violating Russian anti-propaganda laws or violating the Olympic ban on political speech,” he said. “The IOC has officially stated that athletes are free to voice their opinions on the Russian laws in press conferences. We hope all athletes focus on their competitions and perform well, but we also hope that they use press conferences as a platform to speak out against the discriminatory Russian laws, and we believe that the Principle 6 campaign is a perfect way for them to do so.”

More than fifty athletes have signed up to support the campaign, including 13 competitors in the Sochi Games. Among these is Belle Brockhoff, a young snowboarding phenom from Australia who herself identifies as lesbian. She was one of several athletes approached by Athlete Ally as the campaign was being planned, and as she recounted, “After receiving more

information about it, I immediately said yes!”

Brockhoff’s enthusiasm for the campaign stems partly from the solution it offers to athletes wishing to oppose Russia’s laws without jeopardizing their position in the Games.

“I am confident the IOC will not prevent athletes from wearing the gear,” Brockhoff told The Politic in December. “The Campaign is not only directed towards the IOC sticking to its principles but pointing out the issues that LGBT Russians are struggling with.

There, I think the Russian government may be uneasy with.” Her predictions have proven true. While avoiding the limitations on athlete expression, she and her fellow athletes have generated the kind of media attention that the campaign was intended to garner.

Despite the apparently widespread opposition to Russia’s laws both inside and outside of the country, political gestures such as the Principle 6 campaign will always have their detractors. On the one hand, some say that they do not go far enough. By operating within the framework set by

the host government, activists implicitly accept said government’s license to constrain opposition. Such protest, they argue, will inevitably be stifled once it is seen to have “gone too far.”

On the other hand, some oppose taking advantage of the Olympics to advance an unrelated and divisive cause. They claim that demonstrations undermine the apolitical spirit of toleration undergirding the Olympics.

Yet for activists like those at Athlete Ally, the policies they are protesting are what truly undermine the Olympic spirit.

“The Olympics were created for nations to come together to celebrate their commonalities as well as their differences — hence the creation of the Olympic charter, including Principle 6,” Healey said. “We believe it is the responsibility of the IOC to ensure not only the safety and well-being of every athlete and fan in attendance, but that they also promote the Olympic values of respect and equality in host countries.”

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The True Beneficiaries of Indian Education CORRUPTION AND A LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY IS HINDERING INDIA’S HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM SA M A N T H A G A R DN ER

versities come out,” Indian President Pranab Mukherjee said in early 2013.

In a November 2013 article in The New York Times titled “Indian Universities Still Lag in World Rankings,” Gayatri Rangachari Shah discusses weaknesses of Indian Universities that account for their poor performance in international rankings. She points to Indian universities’ sparse research and infrequent citations, both of which rankings value highly. Shah blames the overwhelming number of Indian students and the government’s pressure on universities to increase the number of students they accept, depriving professors of time for research. Ultimately, however, Shah does not mention the word so often associated with India: corruption.

Employees at all levels of the Indian education system — from professors and library purchasers to Vice Chancellors and regulatory officials — are not held accountable for their actions. In 2011, Transparency International found that 94 percent of Indians believed their education system was corrupt. There are certainly many instances in which funds earmarked for education are blatantly misused. But according to observers on the ground in India, the pernicious lack of accountability makes such corruption possible.

Collectively, this damages the entire education system.

In 2011, Transparency International found that 94 percent of Indians believed their education system was corrupt.

The sun had barely risen on Tuesday, February 4, 2014, when an email appeared in the inboxes of Microsoft employees. “Many companies aspire to change the world. But very few have all the elements required: talent, resources, and perseverance,” the message read. “Microsoft has proven that it has all three in abundance. And as the new CEO, I can’t ask for a better foundation. Let’s build on this foundation together. Satya.”

The email, segments of which quickly appeared in news stories around 18

the globe, came from the account of Satya Nadella, the new CEO of Microsoft and undoubtedly one of the world’s most brilliant minds. His message introduced himself, outlined the company’s past, and summarized his vision for the future; but it never once mentioned that Nadella is from India.

A native of the bustling city of Hyderabad, Nadella is also a graduate of the Manipal Institute of Technology in Karnataka, India. Like many other influential Indians in the world’s largest and fastest-growing democracy,

Nadella is a product of the country’s institutions of higher education, which educate nearly 26 million students each year.

Nevertheless, Indian colleges and universities are not nearly as notable as some of the minds they educate. In fact, not a single one of India’s 436 universities or 27,000 colleges and polytechnics rank in the world’s top 200 universities on any major ranking.

This phenomenon has not gone unnoticed. “It is a sad reflection on us when the universal rankings of uni-

TEACHER QUALITY

The fact that faculty in public universities receive tenure upon hire largely explains why research from Indian Universities is lacking. “Once you got the job,” Dr. V. Rajagopal, a history professor at the federally-funded Hyderabad Central University (HCU) explains, “there is nothing that is going to keep you on hooks or keep you competitive. Even if I did not publish a single book or article, I can still keep my job.”

While years of work determine when instructors will be considered for a promotion, at which point their publications are taken into consideration, professors never have to worry about the consequences of their performance in the classroom. Rajagopal explained that although students have the opportunity to evaluate their professors at the end of the semester, the professor

collects these evaluations directly and is not required to submit them to the department head.

Sundararaman Mahadevan, the Dean of HCU’s School of Engineering Sciences & Technology, does collect evaluations. He says that the National Accreditation Council looks at them during visits to the University, mainly for the purposes of judging the University’s overall quality. “There is no official monitoring of how faculty teach,” he says. There is “no appraisal of performance at any stage, and really, nothing can be done [if subpar quality becomes evident.]”

As an American spending a term abroad to study political science, history, and sociology at HCU, I have found that this lack of accountability is apparent in the classroom. It is neither unusual nor unacceptable for professors in India to fail to come to class without notice. Although the semester officially began on January 2, most of the faculty did not hold their first class until the following week. Even then, professors showed up only intermittently and had a habit of cancelling classes in subsequent weeks. A month into the semester, Sean Fergusson, another American student studying at HCU, told me that his Marxism and Capitalism professor warned the class that he was finishing a book: “Just don’t come to class next week. I will have too much work.”

Rajagopal notes that if all professors were dedicated to the profession, perhaps they would be more

committed to attending classes; many Indian professors, however, are neither invested nor interested in teaching.

“This job is attractive to a poor person, not necessarily someone who is aspiring to be a historian or political scientist,” he says. “The university teaching job is still seen as providing a reasonable lifestyle.”

The starting salary for an assistant professor is around ₹60,000 — or $1,000 — per month, while full professors can earn up to ₹120,000. While this is certainly much lower than what professors earn in other countries, it is high compared to a multilingual department secretary, who earns ₹6,000. Even this is high compared to the workers who bring office staff water and chai; they earn just ₹1,500 each month.

QUALITY VERSUS PROFIT

India’s private colleges are forprofit institutions that often focus on maximizing profits for their investors rather than on the quality of their education. “If you have a good business model, a private college can make a lot of money,” says J.R. Krishna, an associate professor working in the Vice Principal’s Office at Devarakonda Vitta Rao College of Engineering and Technology (DVR) in Andhra Pradesh, India’s fourth-largest state.

Most private colleges are named for their founder and chairman — in DVR’s case, a member of the 14th Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of Parlia-

HCU's School of Engineering Science & Technology, run by Professor Sundararaman, was founded in 2008, and shares its building with the Study in India Program.

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reported that 36 percent of engineering graduates in Andhra Pradesh have “no chance” of earning an engineering job. Ultimately, the paper concluded, it comes down to a lack problem solving, technical, and communication skills.

Corruption in the Indian education system dismisses the students' welfare and holds back development and improvement.

ment. Founders are usually businessmen and politicians who can afford to bankroll construction. “Representatives from the state level to the city level — everybody has private schools of their own,” Sundararaman explains. “These are all the people who are supposed to formulate the rules for government to run! It’s a clear conflict of interest.”

Some private schools have misused the Fee Reimbursement Scheme — which pays scholarships directly to the school on behalf of disadvantaged students pursuing professional degrees — and have stolen millions of dollars from the government by submitting names of fictitious students. In 2011, authorities discovered that schools in Maharashtra submitted an estimated 135,000 fake names. That scam, alone, is believed to have cost the state ₹10 billion (a little over $16 million), and similar scams have cropped up all over the country. Since the Scheme was introduced in 2008, the cost to Andhra Pradesh has increased by 150 percent.

Even though more students are enrolling in engineering and other profes20

sional degree programs, this alone does not account for the dramatic increase.

The phenomenon is true across India, Aabha Sharma, a first year M.A. Political Science student, told The Politic. “Especially in Andhra Pradesh, every boy or girl is either in medicine or engineering.”

Engineering is viewed as a gateway to lucrative IT professions that employ many Indians, especially in cities like Hyderabad — Andhra Pradesh’s capital. “More than higher pay,” Aabha continued, “I think it’s about easy employment. Like I don’t know what I’m going to do with a M.A. Okay, I’m going to study more.” Aabha’s classmate, Rashid Modieen, added, “I’d like to do something I like, even if it means waiting a long time for me to start earning money. But it’s a very difficult choice, and not a choice the everyone has the privilege to make.”

Private engineering colleges have sprung up to accommodate the state’s new students. V. Dileep Kumar is an expert on the Indian education system whose Ph.D. focused on the role of the

All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) in engineering education.

(The AICTE is a national-level council for technical education, under the Indian Department of Higher Education.) He relays that in the early 1990s, Andhra Pradesh only had 35 engineering colleges. Since then, the number of engineering colleges in the state has grown to more than 700, all of which were approved by the AICTE.

In their haste to construct new colleges, he elaborates, opportunists have flooded the market. Only 127,000 students pursued their offers of admission for 338,000 seats this year — leaving more than 200,000 spots unfilled.

In 2012-2013, 250 colleges had fewer than 100 matriculating students; 44 had fewer than ten students. Kumar says nearly 100 engineering colleges are expected to close this year in Andhra Pradesh alone.

To understand why the AICTE approved so many colleges, one must look no further than the collection of top AICTE officials who have been suspended on charges of corruption.

Many have accepted money in exchange for recognizing private institutions.

The former chairman, R. A. Yadav, and three other senior AICTE officials faced criminal charges for corruption.

While private colleges close their doors for lack of enrollment, many AICTE-approved colleges operate with a poor quality of teaching and subpar facilities. Sundararaman says private colleges often focus on expanding sports and extracurricular programs to attract students while failing to provide an adequate education. “These colleges give a degree, but whether they impart the requisite skill [it should represent], I have my own doubts.”

Despite the assumption that engineering students can acquire IT jobs that, as one M.A. student told me, “fetch more,” many graduates are not prepared for opportunities after college. According to The National Employability Report — Engineering Graduates 2014, less than two percent of engineering students in Hyderabad are hired for IT jobs. The Hindu, a the most popular newspaper in southern India,

TRICKLING DOWN

Far from just provincial administrators or small-time decision-makers, corruption occurs at the highest levels of public academic institutions. The President of India appoints the Vice Chancellors of central universities. “To get a Vice Chancellorship, people are ready to pay one or two crores (10 to 20 million rupees),” Roja Lakshmi, a Ph.D. student working with the AICTE expert V. Dileep Kumar, told The Politic.

“They can gain money from construction bribes, for example. They will favor a contractor, who will give him some amount of money.”

If a university’s highest official is corrupt, or even just subtly biased, an entire university can suffer. To Kumar, partial and corrupt university officials are to blame for faculty underperformance. “They are appointing by favoritism, rather than by merit,” he says. When Seyed E. Hasnian was HCU’s Vice Chancellor from 2005-2011, “he appointed only Muslim candidates,” Kumar claims, rather than evaluating candidates on that basis of “excellence, work, or subject.”

“If a qualification is specified by the government of India, it is not implemented by the authorities,” Kumar adds. Krishna, the administrator from DVR College, remarks, “There are rules, but rules can be bent.”

Small-scale corruption is possible for every employee that makes decisions; just as important, these employees are not held accountable. This not only reduces the efficient use of funds for education but also diminishes the quality of university resources, like its infrastructure and library collections.

“You and I are looking for books for our courses. We look in the library and don’t find our books there,” Rajagopal, the HCU professor, points out.

The campus library receives about ₹12 million ($192,000) each year, which “can be used to buy a lot of good books.”

“But there is corruption everywhere,” he continues. “A bookseller or publisher strikes a deal with the

person who signs on the contracts for supplying books, and they get pretty pointless books. They sell them expensively and the bookseller gains. The librarian who makes the purchase gains, too, because he gets a percentage out of that expenditure.”

IT ALL ADDS UP

It is no secret that corruption is rampant across India. Still, while 23 percent of Indians reported they had paid bribes to educational institutions, this was the lowest percentage to any sector. (The percentage in much high for the judiciary, medical services, police, permits, utilities, tax revenue, land services, and customs.) Evidently, Indians are frustrated by corruption and inefficiency in their country; Delhi residents elected Aam Aadmi, an anti-corruption party, to the second most seats in the 2013 elections, just a year after the party’s formation.

What’s more, many weaknesses of the Indian education system — comparatively low salaries, shortage of faculty, the relative youth of universities — cannot be attributed to corruption. Indian universities do need more money, but attempts to improve Indian universities solely by giving them more funding have had underwhelming results. The federal government’s Eleventh Fifth Year Plan increased public funding for higher education nine-fold, but the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry reported that there was “no significant improvement in terms of quality of higher education delivery.” Simply providing money can never be effective, at least as long as slices of these funds do not reach the intended beneficiaries.

According to all of the students and professors with whom I spoke, corruption in the education system ought to receive more attention from the Indian government. Holding bureaucrats accountable could dramatically improve the Indian institutions that educate the second highest number of students in the world — and insodoing, produce more graduates like Satya Nadella. Just imagine what that could do.

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The Corporation Room is located on the top floor of Yale's Woodbridge Hall.

The Most Secret Society A BEHIND-THE-SCENES EXPLORATION OF THE YALE CORPORATION A ZEEZ AT A DELEK E & A A RON M A K

The clock struck 8:00 AM on the morning of February 22, 2014, but the 54 bells of Harkness Tower were silent — it was far too early, on a Saturday, especially a Saturday in the heart of winter, for the Guild of Carillonneurs to ring the iconic bells.

While students were fast asleep in their colleges, the members of the Yale Corporation were quietly assembling in an ornate room on the top floor of Woodbridge Hall. A security guard stationed in front of Woodbridge watched Calhoun College Dean April Ruiz carefully as she walked her dog through Beinecke Plaza.

Earlier that morning, just after 7:00 AM, the Corporation fellows and trustees had trickled down to the lobby of The Study at Yale. Each, dressed sharply in business formal attire, carried luggage. Several of them eagerly greeted the assistants waiting to whisk them off to Woodbridge, while others, evidently less thrilled by the prospect of a daybreak gathering, sat in a bleary-eyed, pre-caffeine stupor.

Four staffers made small talk in the lobby — including plans to visit Yorkside Pizza — and walked the members out to administration vans.

Drivers opened car doors at the hotel and then again at Woodbridge, where trustees waged a polite war of words with their staff to win the privilege of carrying their own luggage. The Corporation members were escorted quickly from the curb to the hall, where a security guard ushered them through Woodbridge’s tall, black doors.

“I’m surprised no one tried to land their helicopter in Beinecke Plaza,” joked one onlooker, a Calhoun junior.

Just minutes later, three police officers converged on the Politic reporter standing across the plaza.

After collecting a student ID and deliberately writing down the reporter’s name, one officer explained, “We have to be real careful these days.”

Sweat dripped down his face despite the sub-freezing temperature. “They [the Corporation] were never here.”

•••

All of this begs the question: what is the Yale Corporation?

The good news: in The Politic’s February 13 survey, to which some 400

22

undergraduates responded, 73 percent had at least heard of the Corporation.

The bad news: hardly anyone knows what the Corporation does or who its members are.

When asked to list the duties of the Corporation, most students took the name itself as indicative of some sort of high-level power over the University. “Picking successors for important positions and being generally fancy and important and prestigious,” said one student. “EVERYTHING,” another responded.

Many students simply had no clue. Responses ranged from, “This is depressing, but I legitimately do not know. I don’t even have a guess,” to, “The name ‘Yale Corporation’ is super scary to me and I have no idea what it means.”

When asked to list as many members of the Corporation as they could, Yale students again demonstrated an uncharacteristic uncertainty. Several could recall the big names — Peter Salovey, Margaret Marshall, and Charles Goodyear IV — but created Corporation slots for a range of non-members, from the Mayor of New Haven to Yale College Dean Mary Miller to Danny Avraham ’15, President of the Yale College Council.

Here are the facts: the Yale Corporation is the governing board and policy-making body for the University. Nineteen men and women have seats around the Woodbridge Hall Corporation Room’s large walnut table, including President Salovey, ten appointed successor trustees and six elected alumni fellows. The final two members are the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut, who serve ex-officio and, by all accounts, have never attended a Corporation meeting. The fellows and trustees all serve staggered, six-year terms.

According to the Corporation’s bylaws, members are tasked with making “such reasonable laws… as they think fit and proper for the instruction and education of the students.” (On second thought, perhaps it is not surprising students struggled to name specific Corporation duties.) Yet when asked to describe what they do, Corporation members give similarly hazy answers.

Seated in a small room off the 23

less-than-tangential realm of “being generally fancy,” as one respondent put it. Despite its stately Cross Campus edifice, Woodbridge Hall feels a world away from WLH and Sterling Library. The Corporation, indeed, has done little to combat this perception of distance. Neither its minutes nor its meeting times are ever released. And if students solicit this information, they are told, firmly, that the information is unavailable and will remain that way.

•••

In reality, the Corporation plays an immense role in day-to-day life at Yale. Students may have a nebulous picture of the University’s governors, but the Corporation impacts nearly every major campus decision, many of which stoke controversy. From gender-neutral housing, to Yale-NUS College, to the return of ROTC, to the search President Richard Levin’s successor, the Corporation had the final word. And with a few notable exceptions, the controversy was not so much about the ultimate decision as it was the decision-making process itself — raising perennial questions of transparency and lack of input from faculty and students.

At times, that lack of transparency has allowed the Corporation to

56%

60 88%

40

84%

80

80

60 40

77% 44%

20

100

20

40

11.75%

24

No

2016

2017

Professors

Yes

2015

Would you meet with a member of Yale Corporation?

32% 85%

81.75%

71.5%

20

33% Alumni

2014

Should YC be required to meet with students and faculty?

Lee claimed that his successful petition to get onto the ballot was met with immediate resistance from Yale’s old guard. “They lined up the… other alumni to organize against me, to the extent that when I made a call to one of the alumni members who was already on the board to just have coffee, they [sic] refused to sit down and have coffee and talk with me,” Lee said.

Maya Lin ’81 ARC ’86, who designed the Vietnam War Memorial while still at Yale, was the only other alumni candidate to join the ballot — evidence, according to Lee, of interference by the Corporation. “Usually the ballot is a slate of three to four candidates,” he said. “Because of my situation as a petition candidate, it was just me and the famed Maya Lin. That in and of itself was the biggest obstacle to overcome.” In Lee’s recollection, the possibility of his winning due to a split vote among several candidates was a risk that the Yale establishment was unwilling to take.

While the AYA, on paper, is a legally separate entity from Yale University, Lee believes that the administration had a heavy hand in influencing the Association’s nomination tactics.

“That episode clearly indicated that Yale’s administration is willing to act fairly brutally to determine

60 85.5%

0

0

involved policy decisions, but the very composition of the Corporation itself.

For an organization that prides itself on an image of seamless, effortless efficiency, the body’s make-up has attracted a significant amount of press in recent years. Perhaps most notably, the 2002 alumni election was a very public ruckus, pitting corporate Yale against a grassroots challenger.

“I faced character assassination,” recalled Rev. Dr. W. David Lee DIV ’93, that upstart candidate. Over a decade ago, Lee, then the leader of Varick AME Zion Church in New Haven, decided to vie for a seat on the Corporation. Rather than soliciting a nomination from the Association for Yale Alumni (AYA), which traditionally fields candidates, he went down a less-trodden path and acquired over 4,500 alumni signatures to put his name on the ballot. Reached in Pittsburgh, where he now resides, Lee recounted the episode with an air of having not quite moved on.

“It all started because we were trying to bring a better relationship between town and gown,” he said, adding that he wanted to “empower” the New Haven community. For Lee — the black preacher, the union favorite, the self-professed David to the Corporation’s Goliath — things would not be so simple.

16.25%

12.5%

68% 83.75%

40.5%

0 Community Members

80

23%

100

Students

16%

Who do you think should be on Yale Corporation?

Professors

12%

Who do you think is on Yale Corporation (YC)?

Community Members

100

reach beyond its traditional boundaries. While, according to its bylaws, presidential selection and gender-neutral housing fall within the Corporation’s jurisdiction, faculty members point to the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, which began in 2000, as an example of the Corporation encroaching on the customary duties of the faculty. In the past, the Corporation had consulted the Yale college faculty before establishing new undergraduate courses and institutes, which may draw students from pre-existing classes. In the case of the diplomatic policy-making Grand Strategy course, the project was well underway before the whole faculty body was consulted. Jim Sleeper, a Yale political science lecturer, told The Politic, “This is like a parallel university in the sense that it was not brought into being by a vote of the faculty, by deliberation of the faculty.

It sort of just showed up.” While he did not think that introducing the Grand Strategy program was unwise, Sleeper still found the Corporation’s decision cavalier.

“I think what we’ve been seeing,” Sleeper observed, “is this subtle, administrative and corporate co-optation of faculty independence in deciding curriculum.”

The controversies have not just

Alumni

Have you heard of the Yale Corporation?

Students

grand foyer in Woodbridge Hall, Margaret Marshall LAW ’76 looks every bit the part of the Yale Corporation Senior Fellow, the body’s presiding member when the president is absent.

Her snowy hair and fine brocade jacket give her a regal air. This is only amplified by how she speaks: not slowly, but deliberately, with an accent that hints at both her native South Africa and her adopted home, Massachusetts, where she served as the 24th Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court.

“We on the Corporation are really stewards of this great institution over very long periods of time,” said Marshall. Her portrait of Corporation duties is painted with the broadest possible brush — from superintending Yale’s finances to increasing accessibility for students of all backgrounds.

Francisco Cigarroa ’79, Chancellor of the University of Texas System and an alumni fellow elected in 2006, spoke along the same lines. “My primary duty is to help Yale leadership facilitate excellence, assure fiduciary responsibilities are fulfilled and to advance Yale’s reputation globally,” he told The Politic.

As the survey results laid bare, Yale students believe the Corporation exists far over their heads, in the

Yes

No

Yes

No

who gets to run as an alumni fellow,” agreed Michael Montesano ’83, an alumnus who has sparred with the Corporation over the years, particularly on the issue of Yale-NUS. “It looked to us on the outside as if they ran someone who was very popular, very famous, very appealing, in order to keep this preacher from being a member of the Corporation.”

Lee lost decisively to Lin and eventually moved on to a different congregation in a different city. Looking back at the events of 2002, he concluded, “When they [the Corporation] don’t want something done, they put the machine in place, unfortunately, and put their spin on it.”

Sam Chauncey ’57, former special assistant to University President Kingman Brewster and leader of Alumni for Responsible Trusteeship during the 2002 election, cautioned that Lee was an unfit candidate. Chauncey, who was not a Yale employee at the time of the election, believes Lee’s association with the Yale unions could have biased him against considering the long-term needs of the University, a concern that Chauncey extends to having students and faculty on the Corporation. In addition, Lee had no prior experience serving on any board. Yet, as Montesano suggested, while Lee might not have been

Name as many YC members as you can off the top of your head.

“Margaret Marshall, that pepsi lady, Salovey, the New Haven mayor, is Fareed Zakaria still in there?”

-Anonymous Yalie “Nah dog. You know I can’t do that.”

-Anonymous Yalie

The Politic sent a survey to a random sample of undergraduates on February 13, to which 400 students responded.

25

T H E YA L E COR P OR AT ION Peter Salovey

Jeffrey Lawrence Bewkes

‘83 M.S. ‘84 M.PHIL. ‘86 PH.D. Yale University President

Joshua Bekenstein

’74 B.A. Successor Trustee

‘80 B.A. Successor Trustee

He is a member of the band Professors of Bluegrass.

Managing Director at Bain Capital wayland, ma

’70 M.PHIL, ’72 PH.D. Successor Trustee

Charles Waterhouse Goodyear IV

’79 B.S. Alumni Fellow

’72 PH.D. Alumni Fellow

‘80 B.S. Successor Trustee

Bren Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology san marino, ca

President of Goodyear Capital Corporation new orleans, la

Donna Lee Dubinsky

Maureen Cathy Chiquet ’85 B.A. Successor Trustee

Chancellor of the University of Texas System san antonio, tx

Co-founder and Board Chair of Numenta, Inc. portola valley, ca

One of ten children, he is a third generation physician.

He is part of Fortune’s Innovators Hall of Fame.

Although Netflix is a competitor of HBO, he is a House of Cards fan.

He is in the infamous “cash photo” of Bain executives that haunted Mitt Romney’s presidential run.

Paul Lewis Joskow

Peter Brendan Dervan

’77 B.A. Successor Trustee

Chairman and CEO of Time Warner Inc old greenwich, ct

President of Yale University new haven, ct

Francisco Gonzalez Cigarroa

He is a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Catharine Bond Hill Global CEO of Chanel purchase, ny

’85 PH.D. Alumni Fellow

Unsure of a career following college, she once walked out of an LSAT law exam.

President of Vassar College poughkeepsie, ny

Douglas Alexander Warner III ‘68 B.A. Successor Trustee Former Chair of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. hobe sound, fl

Known as “Cappy,” she is an avid golfer.

He was the youngest CEO in J.P. Morgan history.

Margaret Hilary Marshall Neal Leonard Keny-Guyer

’76 J.D., ’12 LL.D. Successor Trustee

‘82 M.P.P.M. Alumni Fellow

He rowed on the Yale lightweight crew team.

Indra Nooyi ’80 M.P.P.M. Successor Trustee

Emmett John Rice, Jr. ’88 B.A. Alumni Fellow

Kevin Patrick Ryan ‘85 B.A. Alumni Fellow

President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation new york, ny He is on the Board of Overseers of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts cambridge, ma CEO of Mercy Corps portland, or He has traveled to Patagonia in Chile for fly-fishing.

26

A South Africa native, she led a student group to end apartheid.

Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo greenwich, ct

Founder and CEO of Management Leadership for Tomorrow bethesda, md

Forbes Magazine consistently ranks her among the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.

His sister is Susan Rice, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

Founder and CEO of Gilt Groupe new york, ny

Dannel Malloy

Nancy Wyman

Ex officio member

Ex officio member

Governor of Connecticut stamford, ct

Lt. Governor of Connecticut tolland, ct

Until 2010, he wrote a blog known as “The Blog That Works.”

Before her successful political career, she was an X-ray technician.

He is the co-founder and chairman of Business Insider.

Photos courtesy of Yale University 27

the perfect candidate, the alumni should have been allowed to make the decision without the Yale establishment meddling in the election.

A decade and Maya Lin’s sixyear term have come and gone. But there remains the nagging question: who should serve on the Yale Corporation and how they should be selected?

According to The Politic’s survey, 33 percent of students believe that Yale professors currently serve on the Corporation. Roughly 12.5 percent thought that the Corporation includes members of the New Haven community and more than one in ten thought that students are members.

These assumptions are wrong; representatives from none of the three groups claim even one of the highbacked seats in the Corporation Room.

But it begs the question: What does it mean when students naturally assume the Corporation represents a more diverse chorus of voices? The survey data further reveal that undergraduates overwhelmingly believe the Corporation should include more voices.

More than 80 percent of respondents indicated that professors should serve on the Corporation. That figure was 71 percent for student membership and 40.5 percent for the involvement of community members.

Administration officials argue that other avenues are open for these groups to impact their University.

“The most effective way for faculty and students to influence the direction of the institution is to actively participate in the faculty and student governance structures on campus,” noted Catharine “Cappy” Hill GRD ’85, the President of Vassar College and an alumni fellow. Nonetheless, many students still feel short-shrifted.

“During my term as president I have yet to meet with the [Corporation],” said Danny Avraham, the YCC President. “I believe that the relationship could be improved if there were more opportunities to interact in person throughout the year.” The YCC, in fact, is usually promised one meeting with the Corporation per year. The other 364 days and change, the two organizations communicate through Kimberly Goff-Crews, Secretary and Vice President for Student Life, in what can be a rather frustrating game of telephone.

•••

When asked which of three qualities — business experience, academic experience, and administrative experience — was most important for a Corporation member, students rated

academics by far the most highly. Current fellows and trustees, however, are far more likely to hail from the boardroom than the classroom.

True to its title, the Yale Corporation is a strikingly corporate entity. A quick glance at the member biographies is like a primer on who’s who in this year’s Fortune 500. Maureen C. Chiquet ’85, Global CEO of Chanel; Charles W. Goodyear IV ’80, president of the Goodyear Capital Corporation and former CEO of mining conglomerate BHP Billiton; and Indra Nooyi ’80, CEO of PepsiCo, are just a few of the industry tycoons among Yale’s governors.

While this concentration of business acumen has done wonders for Yale financially, critics lament that the highest governing body in the University may be more concerned with the bottom line than scholarship. Noted Montesano, “The Yale Corporation has drawn more people from the world of business and fewer who are from the world of public affairs. And as American business has changed, and as American business has adopted this cult of leanness and efficiency, the influence of people from the business sector on the University has been detrimental.”

Detractors point to the YaleNUS deal as an example of that financial expediency. When the

Successor Trustee Paul L. Joskow M.Phil '70, Ph.D. '72 steps into a car before the February 22 Corporation meeting.

28

decision was finalized in 2011, three current or former Corporation fellows — Goodyear, Charles Ellis ’59, and G. Leonard Baker ’64 — had direct monetary ties to Singapore or its sovereign wealth fund.

In theory, the alumni-elected members are supposed to prevent this sort of hive mentality. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Corporation was solely run by clergymen, all of whom were successor trustees. In 1871, when the Connecticut legislature passed “An Act Relating to Yale College” allowing for six elected trustees to join the Corporation, the motivation was to introduce more intellectual diversity to the board by adding lay people. Now, 143 years later, Montesano fears that the Lee incident demonstrates the creeping homogenization of the alumni fellows, once again rendering the Corporation a single-minded entity.

To be sure, Maya Lin, the candidate whom the administration propped up against David Lee, is an architect, not an entrepreneur. Yet although several of the current trustees are academics — such as Peter Dervan GRD ’72, a chemistry professor at CalTech, and Cigarroa, a surgeon and Chancellor of the University of Texas System — most still have corporate ties.

“If the position is intended to bring some sort of alternative perspective,” Montesano observed, “one has to worry when the profile of the alumni fellows begins to look like the profile of the successor trustees.” Ruth Koizim, a French professor at Yale, agreed.

“The Yale Corporation has evolved to include fewer and fewer individuals with higher-education experience (as faculty),” she told The Politic in an email. “It is therefore not surprising that their decision-making style and the decisions they make are increasingly divorced from the academic goals of this academic institution.”

Corporation members, of course, argue that the broad range of experiences each brings to the table, from the world’s largest companies as well as from classrooms and nonprofits, contributes to the overall cohesion of the body. “I believe that the criticism has merit,” Cigarroa said in response to questions about the Corporation’s perceived opacity, “and

the Yale Corporation is enhancing its efforts to meet with students, faculty and staff.”

•••

From his canvas high on the gleaming white walls, Elihu Yale stared down as fifteen students — a mixture of undergraduates and graduates — filed into the Corporation Room. One by one, they entered the room, some dressed up for the occasion, others wearing jeans and t-shirts. Each took a seat and looked around expectantly as their exclusive February 19 meeting with Margaret Marshall commenced.

So began the first of two “University Teas,” hosted by Marshall and Josh Bekenstein ’80, forums for a handful of students to meet and interact with Corporation members.

The tea, perhaps a throwback to a Kingman Brewster-era policy requiring each Corporation member to share a meal with a randomly-selected assortment of undergraduates, was an “enlightening opportunity” to peek behind the curtain of University governance, said Aaron Gertler ’15.

Gertler sat in the chair that, according to an engraved golden placard, is the official seat of Linda Koch Lorimer, Yale’s Vice President for Global and Strategic Initiatives.

Students picked at plates of deli sandwiches and kale and quinoa salad — as well as Pepsi-brand beverages, Gertler pointed out, referencing Nooyi — while Marshall spoke about her background and solicited inquiries from her young acquaintances.

“The atmosphere was really relaxed,” said Sara Miller ’16, another attendee.

“Some of her answers sort of went around the questions; she would kind of lead into anecdotes about her life, or life in general. But she was very pleasant and seemed genuinely interested in what students had to say.”

The conversation covered a range of personal and governance-related matters. At one point, in response to a question about the recent push for fossil fuel divestment on campus, Marshall alluded to her own work with the campaign to divest from South Africa in protest of apartheid. She said although she personally supports fossil fuel divestment,

according to Gertler and Miller, she does not have the power to unilaterally divest, and that the process would take time. “She was of the opinion that persistence is the best strategy for getting what you want from the Yale Corporation,” Gertler remarked.

Marshall also expressed frustration at students’ lack of interest in the Corporation. “I respond to every email I get,” she told attendees, but students practically never contact her.

In many ways, however, that is unfair.

The teas were grossly oversubscribed, points out Ben Ackerman ’16, who attended a nighttime meeting with Bekenstein after he was unable to RSVP for one of the teas. Even more importantly, students are not privy to the Corporation’s agenda — and so cannot always ask pertinent questions. “If the Corporation is interested having feedback from students, they should let students know what is really going on,” Ackerman said.

At the same time that students are seeking to contribute more to the University’s governance, faculty members are similarly making moves to have their voice heard.

After rising tensions between instructors and the Corporation culminated in the tussle over Yale-NUS, Salovey appointed a delegation of six professors to an ad-hoc Committee on Faculty Input. They sought to explore more formal avenues of communication between the Corporation and faculty than disgruntled op-eds, and produced a report recommending that Yale form a faculty senate. Among peer universities, only Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lack such a body.

Barely a month ago, Yale professors voted to approve this proposal.

Salovey then selected another delegation, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Senate Committee, to come up with a structure and rules for the new governing body. Though they are still in the preliminary stages of deliberation — “Our committee hasn’t yet met with the President and Provost to be given our formal charge,” the Committee head, Steven Wilkinson, told The Politic — several professors still worry that the Corporation has already moved to undermine the process.

“Dissenters from the party line 29

What’s In A Name?

THAT WHICH WE CALL STEVEN SMITH...

M AT T HE W GIL M A N

A member of the Yale Corporation enters Woodbridge Hall on February 22.

are not asked to be on these committees and it should not be surprising that the committee recommendations are often little more than a rubber stamp of what the Corporation has in mind,” Koizim, the French professor, claimed. Indeed, a number of professors expressed discontent with Salovey appointing committee members, rather than allowing the the faculty to form the committees themselves. Wilkinson offered the consolation that the Faculty Input Committee brought their report before professors for a discussion and vote. Additionally, the FAS Senate Committee will do the same by December.

That said, more than a few faculty members — much like the students they teach — are somewhat removed from the process, if not outright apathetic. Of the twenty professors reached by The Politic, well over half indicated that they had no strong opinions and little, if any, knowledge of the issue. One professor, Carlos Eire, Yale’s T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies, told The Politic in an email: “I haven't been following this issue. Not at all. In fact, I didn’t know that any such thing was in the works.”

For now, things are more or less in a holding pattern, although a Salovey-appointed committee will make recommendations to the fac30

ulty on the senate’s structure no later than December 2014. Most faculty reached by The Politic are cautiously optimistic, although several note that their sway will almost certainly be greatly limited.

•••

So, for the Yale Corporation, change is afoot — and not for the first time. Over the centuries, a handful of reforms, like the institution of alumni fellows, stuck fast. Others, like Brewster’s lunch assignments for Corporation members, fell away with the passage of time. No one can predict how the current crop of reforms will fare.

The lion’s share of their success will hinge on how much students are willing to engage. Chauncey was at a loss when it comes to student apathy. Compared to the Yalies of the 1960s, who would often camp out in the administration’s offices to challenge decisions, millennial students appeared to him as passive as they come. “How come you guys [modern Yale students] are incapable of outrage?” Chauncey asked with unveiled incredulity.

Transparency and student input, if Yalies truly want to make a difference, demand more than tea at high noon.

To be sure, the Corporation is under no formal obligation to change its ways. “Yale is not a republic and it’s not a democracy,” acknowledged Sleeper. “It’s a private institution, which was constituted in the first place by the Corporation.”

But if members of the Corporation wish to act as good stewards of the University, their decisions should reflect not just the institution under their care, but the professors, students, and community leaders who form the institution itself.

Back in Woodbridge Hall, a stone’s throw away from snowball-tossing students on Cross Campus, Marshall clasps her hands, looking reflective. Her legacy, and that of her colleagues on the Corporation, will be determined by their success in getting ahead of the big changes — in evolving University governance, in improving transparency, in bringing more diverse voices to the table. If the Corporation stands still, its credibility with those outside Woodbridge will diminish even more.

Marshall leans forward in her seat, as if to emphasize her point: “You don’t want to have people look back and say, ‘How could they have missed that?’”

P

Steven O. Smith, then a professor of structural biology at Yale University, slid the envelope open, and out fell a check for $32,000. He sighed. The money, he knew, didn’t belong to him.

The year was 1988, and this had become a common issue in the Yale mailroom, as the university’s faculty then contained three different professors named Stephen (or Steven) Smith — the aforementioned professor of biology (now at Stony Brook University), Stephen J. Smith of the neurobiology department (now at Stanford), and Steven B. Smith, the longtime former Master of Branford College and Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science.

The $32,000 check, however, wasn’t even meant for a Yale professor, but rather for another Steven Smith, this one in consulting.

“I used to get mail for Steven [S.] Smith, the congressional scholar at Wash. U. [Washington University in St. Louis], and it would be these arcane articles on congressional voting behavior,” Steven B. told The Politic with a chuckle. “Or sometimes I’d get a package with my name on it with some serious scientific equipment.”

From birth, it seems, the Steve Smiths of the world were destined to confusion. Anyone who has attended grade school can relate to the frustration of having three Sams or four Ashleys in the same small class. For Steven D. Smith, Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, the problem was made even harder by the addition of another student with the same last name. “Don’t know what happened to that guy in the end,” Steven D. told The Politic. “But this has been an amusement, I would say.”

Stephen M. Smith, Professor of Psychology at Texas A&M University,

has likewise had several awkward experiences. There is another Stephen Smith on the faculty (Stephen B., who works in the meat sciences department), making the mailroom confusion unfortunately common. On top of that, Stephen M. said, he often receives calls meant for Steven W. Smith, who serves as the bankruptcy judge for that district of Texas.

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that his most ridiculous mix-up also occurred in a courtroom. As an expert on memory, Steven M. is often brought to trials to testify on eyewitness memory. Alas, even in the narrow field of eyewitness memory, there is enough room for multiple Steves. A prosecuting attorney mistook him two years ago for another Steven M. Smith, of St. Mary’s University, also an expert in the field, who has run experiments exploring how factors such as race and the choice of suspects in the lineup can affect the accuracy of eyewitness memory. Compounding the confusion, St. Mary’s Steven M. focuses on the same field as Stephen M. Smith, now at the University of North Georgia. This Stephen M. (the North Georgia professor, for those of you keeping score at home) did his post-doctoral research with the same man who published a thesis with the Ph.D. supervisor of St. Mary’s Steven.

Alas, the abundance of Steve Smiths in academia — and particularly in the social sciences — seems to stem more from the commonness of the name than from any divine edict.

None of the Smiths contacted for this article seemed to think that the name had any influence in their choice of profession.

“I think it’s a generational thing: a popular name for people of my age,” Steven B., the Yale political scientist, said. “I’m not prepared to draw any correlation, much less causation, between my name and what I do for a living.”

Indeed, Steve Smiths abound outside of academia as well. Listeners of ESPN are familiar with the Stephen A. Smith’s flamboyant style, while fantasy football players perpetually fear mistakenly selecting the former USC wideout for the multiple-time Pro Bowler. And of course, there is Steve Smith, the drummer for the rock band Journey.

“I’d rather be the drummer,” quipped Steven B. to The Politic, “Instead I’m just another political science professor.”

Even in the political arena, Steve Smiths are common. There are currently three state representatives — in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Wisconsin — who all share the name. Meanwhile, Steven Wayne Smith served from 2002 to 2006 as a member of the Texas Supreme Court and Steven Francis Smith was the Australian Minister for Defence and the MP for Perth until 2013. There are so many Smiths, in fact, it seems few glass ceilings remain.

How long will it be until we have a Steven Smith as president?

P

31

After Solidarity AN INTERVIEW WITH LECH WAŁESA ¸ JACEK OLE SZ C Z U K

Lech Wałesa ¸ is the first democratically elected president of post-communist Poland and a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. A Gdansk shipyard electrician, he was an opposition leader under the communist rule in Poland and co-founder of “Solidarity,” the first free and independent trade union in the Soviet Bloc that later on transformed into a nationwide movement against the regime. This resulted initially in a martial law imposition and him being interned. However, ten years later his and Solidarity’s actions evolved into a peaceful, bloodless revolution and a political system change in Poland, the very first time in the Soviet Bloc. This opened a path to subsequent similar transformations in other countries of the East. A politically influential figure on an international level, Wałesa ¸ was named Man of the Year by Time Magazine in 1981 and one of the “Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century.” He remains a human-rights activist taking part in various worldwide programs of the Lech Wałesa ¸ Institute.

[P]

More than thirty years have passed since the creation of “Solidarity.” Not long ago we celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of your being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and your seventieth birthday. In many ways, Mr. President, you are a living legend. How do you feel in this role?

LW I do not have the time to ponder about how I feel about myself. My friends constantly provide me with enough necessary emotions, so I do not think about that at all. Rather, I think about today and tomorrow.

[P]

What do you think about the position of Poland in the international arena?

LW This is a simple question, but the answer is not that straightforward. By now, probably everyone has noticed that we are a generation living during the change from one age to another one. The age of nations, countries, the age of wars, especially in Europe, has ended. This age that I like to call the “earth age” — an age during which we fought for the earth, for the ground, 32

the age in which moved the borders around–has ended. We entered the age of intellect, information, globalization.

And this age requires slightly different programs and structures. Of course, Western capitalism and countries do not feel this. Poland, however, situated between Germany and Russia, has developed something that we are not yet fully aware of: Poles have developed a kind of a foresight. We had to be alert and be looking out constantly: “Will they enter or not? From this side or from that side?” We had to always keep our eyes open. And because we were relentlessly cautious and on guard, we learned how to smell out opportunities and dangers. And today, we are probably the only ones to say, through our arguments, that this is not what we were fighting for and that Europe should change and improve some of its elements.

But because we do not formulate it this way, we fight with each other because we do not feel Europe the way we want it to be. Europe and the world were surprised that we did away with the Soviets and communism. Therefore some people now expect that Poles will once again propose what is needed today. They do not say it openly and even tease us or make fun of us, but I feel that they are waiting for Poles to come forward with initiatives that will embed us in this new age that we have begun.

[P]

What is the significance of the fact that the Summit of the Nobel Peace Prize laureates took place here, in Warsaw?

LW My friends decided to show Poland through this summit as a gift to me. Each one of the laureates chose to walk down their own path. Each one of them has their own idea, their own conception that they present and defend.

The problem is that we do not come together to achieve something great.

[P]

Mr. President, are you an advocate of the United States of Europe?

LW When our ancestors invented the bicycle and could no longer fit into their village, they had to build something bigger and therefore they created countries. We created Poland; others

created Germany and France. Now we invented airplanes, the Internet and other things that no longer fit into our little countries, just like this bike before. We no longer fit into this organization and therefore have to enlarge structures. Of course there is the question of which structures are to be enlarged, because we do not have to enlarge them all. Some things globalize themselves just like information, satellite television, the Internet. However, some things need help to become larger and we should provide this help to avoid a great danger. Ecology, for example, has to be under the process of enlargement. So I am supporter of this because I look at this age, with its technology, both good and bad, and I see that the structure called “country” is not enough for today’s development and security. Therefore the question whether we should enlarge is not relevant according to me; what is relevant is how to do it.

[P]

In October, you said that Barack Obama is the ideal leader of the United States.

LW No, that’s not what I said. I said that I hoped he would be ideal, that he would notice what the world needs — reconstruction, reform. I called him the “reform” of the States, but also the reform of the world. Being the only superpower now, it should not get entangled in wars. It should be organizing the world and Europe to solve problems. And I thought that Obama would fulfill that role. But he did not. And from that point of view, I am disappointed.

The world is a very dangerous place, much more dangerous than its was in the communist times. Back then, there were two blocks that had to be cautious of each other, controlled each other. But now their power and the power of other countries became entangled, and spread. The nuclear weapons spread too. The world no longer has a leader. At that time, the United States was the last lifeboat for the world. It was the world’s last hope.

When something happened the States would always help. But now the world has lost that lifeboat, that last chance, and therefore we live in dangerous times because there is no one who

could be the last hope of the world.

And from that point of view, I have objections when it comes to Obama.

[P]

But Mr. President, you said in October that the political style of Barack Obama would not work in Poland.

LW No, what I said is that you could be a great president in Poland and not be able to manage the same role in the States but also, you could be a great president in the States and not manage in Poland.

[P]

In that case, what kind of leader does Poland need today?

LW Back in the days, I proposed a leader for twenty years, for this period of change, a presidential system, decrees to cope with the problems and be just. But my compatriots chose another system, refused my propositions and what we have now is what democracy chose; I fought for that democracy.

[P]

What is your opinion about the idea of a world government?

LW I proposed it twenty years ago.

Seeing globalization, I thought that regional bodies should be established where the people would submit propositions and the propositions would go to a global parliament instead of the United Nations, to a global government instead of the Security Council, to a ministry of global security, instead of NATO, and there we would come together to solve some of the most pressing problems of today. But no one thought of moving in that direction. It has been twenty years and people talk of globalization but there is no organization that would gather together people who would come up with propositions that would push for a global agreement, taking into account that tomorrow we will face growth of civilization.

Once we unite Europe, it will be necessary to further enlarge structures. And in order to succeed we have to create the United States of Europe as fast as possible, next we have to combine with the States to finally start talks with China. The cooperation with China would be the hardest. Both sides would have to give in for global33

is hard to behave differently. We will remain this way for some more time, but maybe we will be able to change directions and start the right development tomorrow.

[P]

Lech Wałesa ¸ speaks with Politic staff writer Jacek Oleszczuk in Poland.

ization to be possible. There is no real globalization without China. So these were my ideas from long ago that I left behind and forgot, and you reminded me of them.

the afflictions caused by the fighting of my generation.

[P]

LW “Every generation has its Westerplatte*” as the Holy Father* said.

I would not entirely agree with that because we have lived a few generations in misery and happiness, but we can accept that. Our generation has to start from the enlargement of structures. People of my age can do that, but we are constantly limited and held back by the past, agents, wars, revolutions; and therefore we always look back. Consequently, we will not be able to accomplish that properly. It should be done by the educated youth, which does not bear this burden of the past. We should only be advising and helping. The young generation has to instrument this age. No one will do it for them; we are limited by the past.

It is hard not to notice that you are still active in politics and you are engaged in various projects, campaigns, foundations and programs like those organized by the Lech Walesa Institute — such as Poland in the World, Solidarity with Cuba, Solidarity with Tibet, Solidarity with Iran, Solidarity with Burma or Solidarity with Maghreb. What do these programs consist of?

LW The problem is that I feel responsible for the dismantling of this world from a bipolar one to a unipolar one.

I do not want our times to be wasted.

I would like the world to develop in a smarter way and that’s why I have propositions; I do not know whether they are good or bad, maybe they are fateful, but I have them and I say: “Consider my propositions and either refuse them or put them to life.” Therefore I instigate discussions and try to move towards this direction seeing the development of this world and feeling as the perpetrator of the happiness but also 34

[P]

[P]

What advice would you give to the students of Yale University?

Do you think it would be possible to organize greater cooperation between the U.S. and Poland? And is it important for the future?

LW Until now, all we were doing came from the necessity to do so, from the danger we were facing. The world

that we opened does not accept that.

This world does what life — what the economy — requires. Is a great cooperation between Europe and America needed today? I do not think so. Of course, some kind of cooperation exists but what we have to focus on in Europe is the equalization of the standard of living and the removal of obstacles caused by divisions, borders, the concept of the nation and the country. Once we remove these obstacles, we will be able to build the United States of Europe, combine with the United States of America and readjust China to globalization.

[P]

Do you believe that European Union fulfills its role well today?

LW No, it does not. The question is: would it be possible for it to do so? We have so little trust after this concept of the country, after all this fighting.

No one trusts anyone and this is why everyday we send people to Brussels and to Strasbourg to make sure that no one is deceiving us and the bureaucracy is constantly growing. There will come a time when we will start trusting each other and when that moment comes we will notice that this system is not good and that we have to abandon it. Coming out of an age of fighting, it

In what way should this change occur?

LW Generations will have to replace each other and we will have to start trusting each other, and that will take time. We have to understand that it is impossible to build European unity with such a discrepancy in taxes and development, and therefore we have to start smartly equalizing the differences. We just have to live through it.

Even if today there were a prophet no one would listen to him; there is no trust — no faith — but there is a terrible past. We have to argue with each other, fight with each other, make some mistakes and tomorrow new politicians will rise who will understand the name of the game and will write down programs and structures. They will be elected for this new reality. Now we live in the age of the word: first there was a word and then the word became the body* just as they said in the church this Christmas. This is why first we will argue and tomorrow we will chose wisely. I count on it.

[P]

LW Poland should pass on its experiences, saying: “We surprised you by fighting with communism. Now we also surprise you by saying that this is not the Europe we need; these aren’t the programs that are needed.

There is no solidarity between us. We are not equalizing the development.”

Of course, this does not mean that Germany should be giving out money.

No, not at all. But they should start a clear realization program, which would be bringing business to them and also to us, which would lead to one homogenous state.

[P]

Should we look to the East too?

LW For the moment we have a problem with equalizing. We are not able to help Ukraine or to take care of various other problems because we are disorganized, because we don’t have programs. So let’s do the equalization as quickly as possible and then we will have the strength and the means to take care of Ukraine and other coun-

tries. We have to do so or otherwise we will be suffocating in this Europe. We will have to move to the East, to China, because development will require that.

P

The interview was conducted on November 8, 2014. * Battle of Westerplatte: The first battle of the Invasion of Poland as well as the battle that marked the beginning of World War II. Is often associated with bravery of the very few soldiers of the unprepared Polish army who tried to defend the city of Gdansk (Danzig). * Holy Father: Reference to the Pope John Paul II, the Polish pope who was supported Polish unity and whose trip to Poland in 1979 triggered off the formation of the “Solidarity” movement. * “The word became the body”: direct translation of a part of the Angelus prayer. In the English version of the prayer it corresponds to: “Be it done to me according to thy word.”

Is it hard for countries to build up this trust when we learn that governments spy on each other?

LW Yes, it is very hard. But it is what development brings and we have to do it. I always like to watch anti-globalists, who scream and shout against globalization and then walk away and use a mobile phone. They should have carrier pigeons in their pockets. The first globalization is the globalization of information; it’s the mobile phone.

Even anti-globalists adopt globalization, adopt mobile phones, open borders, but they don’t like it because we don’t trust each other. They think: “They made money on wars, on colonization and now they want to make money on globalization.” It is a result of damaging experiences of the past.

[P]

So should Poland build a closer cooperation with Europe?

35

Romney Revisited A LOOK AT MITT, THE NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY ON THE FORMER GOP NOMINEE A LE X COOLE Y

“This is why you don’t get good people running for president!”

Sitting at the foot of his bed in a cookie-cutter Radisson hotel room, Josh Romney sheds his glossy campaign persona and offers a rare glimpse into a pedal-to-the-metal presidential campaign. “[Mitt Romney’s] experience is turning things around, which we need in this country,” says Josh, offering the camera an earnest glance. “This is the guy for the moment, and we’re just getting beat up constantly.”

Josh’s emphasis on his father’s practical qualifications for the presidency, rather than ideological fervor, 36

provides a rare look at Romney’s true reasons for twice running for president. Typically, candidates enter presidential races in order to promote specific policies they believe will improve the lives of Americans.

Romney, however, paid little mind to specific policies. Instead, he saw his unique experience in business and crisis management as his ticket to the White House.

Josh’s dialogue — and the implicit takeaway — is just one small segment at the 17-minute mark of Mitt, a documentary which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 2014, and

was released a week later by Netflix.

Mitt captures six years of Romney’s life, from his 2006 decision to run for president, to his 2008 campaign against John McCain, to his 2012 general election defeat at the hands of Barack Obama. The final 92-minute film was culled from thousands of hours of raw, behind-the-scenes footage.

Romney desperately tried, and failed, to shake the flip-flopper perception during his six-year campaign marathon. Yet as Mitt plainly shows, Romney appeared to be a political chameleon for one simple reason: he really was not much concerned

with policy-making. He believed that he should be president because he was a very capable administrator.

He thought that if President Romney faced a difficult situation as head of state, his business expertise and managerial acumen would lead him to chart the best possible course of action for America. Romney’s business and administrative ability, rather than policy objectives, was his impetus for running for president.

After all, it was great success as CEO of Bain Capital, emergency manager of the 2002 Olympics, and Governor of Massachusetts that launched Romney into his first campaign for president in early 2007. Since he was challenging John McCain, the field’s moderate front-runner, Romney had to appeal to the conservative base of the Republican Party. This seemingly pragmatic tactic proved problematic for Romney, and it is the most likely origin of his flip-flopping. During his time in the Governor’s Mansion, Romney had established himself as a political moderate who had little interest in enacting a socially conservative agenda. A presidential run quickly changed that.

“Romney approached politics as a business problem,” Walter Shapiro, a Yale political scientist and journalist who has covered nine presidential elections, told The Politic. “In the corporate world, slightly changing your investment pitch or advertising strategy can be seen as good business, but if you do that in politics, that’s a flip-flop.” Realizing he needed to court more primary voters, Romney acted like an entrepreneur trying to increase demand for his product. Thus, he moved to the right on many issues, including stem cell research, birth control, and gun control. As a result of Romney’s shifts, his opponents denounced him as a political opportunist, while the Republican base never really bought his conservative turn. Under these inhospitable conditions, Romney bowed out of the race in early 2008.

Considering the toll that election had on Romney and his family, Romney’s determination to run for president again in 2012 puzzled many political talking heads. By offering a window into Romney’s conversations with his close advisers at the end of his 2008 bid, Mitt provides an answer. First, after the

Netflix released Mitt on January 17, 2014.

spirited nomination contest of 2008, Romney saw himself as the GOP’s next obvious standard-bearer — a powerful argument in Republican politics. Second, he figured that the country would be struggling in 2012, and Americans would be looking for someone with business experience to steer the economy in the right direction.

This rationale led Romney to decide, rather idiosyncratically, that he would not need a concrete political credo to run. Most previous presidents, however, have entered the White House with a well-defined set of policy goals.

For example, George W. Bush strode into office with his “compassionate conservative” doctrine, complete with concrete proposals for tax law, entitlements, and immigration. In contrast, Romney was an expert manager. He believed that his ability to weigh the many factors involved in a certain situation was more important than a clumsy and inflexible ideology. Romney hoped that by 2012, the country would realize that he was a proficient decision-maker who would powerfully lead the executive branch.

Said Yale political science professor Eitan Hersh, “The sympathetic view of Romney is that he doesn’t care much about policies and prefers administration. Romney was willing to be flexible on his political positions for different electorates because his passion was strong leadership rather than policy.”

Romney’s single-minded focus on administration does not mean that he lacked political beliefs. In fact, this focus made his convictions more evident in the slightly esoteric realm of economics rather than in more-accessible debates over social issues. Mitt

clearly shows Romney’s worries about the harsh climate for small businesses under Obama. What’s more, Romney expressed to his family his intense fears about the future of the United States: “I believe we are following the same path of every great nation, which is greater government, tax the rich people, promise more stuff to everybody, and borrow until you go over a cliff.” Romney truly wanted to lead the country away from Obama’s economic policies, which he thought were stifling the growth of American companies. He found issues unrelated to the economy of little importance.

Though he was an astute businessman running to calm the weakened American markets, Romney still failed to appeal to a majority of Americans. It was thus no shocker when the documentary revealed Romney’s 2012 electoral loss.

We will never know whether Romney would have been able to successfully shepherd the country through a slow economic recovery, nor if modern administrator-in-chiefs can serve as effective presidents. As Romney’s loss proves, candidates without exciting policies face large obstacles to becoming president. Voters want to rally behind a candidate’s specific actions upon assuming the Oval Office, yet Romney failed to excite Americans about his plans for the country. And in an electoral process that favors showmanship over résumés, it will be a long time before a technocrat like Romney assumes the mantle of the American presidency.

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37

Yale’s Great Conversation?

JIM SLEEPER REFLECTS ON THE OPENING OF YALE-NUS JI M SLEEPER

On November 22, 2013, The Politic published an article entitled, "Worlds Apart: An inside look at the first semester of Yale-NUS College."

Jim Sleeper, a Yale lecturer in political science, responds here.

Some of us who’ve known Yale well for decades believe that its joint venture with the National University of Singapore is a mistake, even though its first students and faculty seem happy, and even though we wish them well. To understand why we dissent even while Yale-NUS is up and running, please join me in a thought experiment.

Imagine that your oldest, best 38

friend — someone you’ve roomed with, run with, and remain in close touch with — introduces you to a partner he or she has found for an undertaking bigger than a business venture, one that’s meant to advance your friend’s deepest political and personal dreams.

Muting your surprise and initial skepticism, you notice that your friend’s joint-venturer is affluent, pleasant, and smart. Over dinner, you also notice something reserved, calculating, and slightly controlling in this person’s interactions with waiters and responses to well-meant questions. The grace notes of a civilized cosmopolitan are there with the insistent smile. Yet

something seems wrong, and you wonder if your old friend has noticed it too.

Apparently not. But, asking around, you find that your friend’s co-venturer has begun several other, similar partnerships that failed because the other parties rebuffed them early or terminated them, complaining of the calculating, controlling qualities you’ve noticed. You also learn that on some occasions your friend’s new partner has often behaved degradingly, even cruelly, to assistants and even to fellow-citizens. Despite the partnership’s cordial veneer and contractual language, this partner has seldom respected the rules and values

that you and your friend have honored in all your dealings.

So you confront your friend, who surprises you with a shrug, some eye-rolling, and a slightly cynical curl of the lip you hadn’t seen before.

“Grow up!” your friend says in exasperation. “Look around! Most people we know are like that. The world we thought we saw while we rambled together across three continents isn’t what we imagined.

“My partner’s not a bad sort,” your friend continues. “You’re forcing your provincial American moralism on someone who knows how the world really works but also wants to learn some things from me about how to navigate and channel it even better.

“This is no romantic engagement,” your friend concludes. “It’s a long-overdue convergence, and we’ll all be better off for it. When I’m my partner’s guest, I’ll obey my partner’s rules. But my host will learn from me and, in a way, from you, too. ”

What your “old friend” said in the last three paragraphs is what YaleNUS’ inaugural dean Charles Bailyn and other Americans at Yale-NUS have told those of us who’ve challenged Yale’s joint venture with Singapore.

And Singapore’s ruling elites, who’ve funded and licensed the new college as “an autonomous unit of the National University of Singapore” and oversee its every move with a “light touch,” are personified by my thought experiment’s new “partner.”

At a February 20 panel on Human Rights in Singapore at Yale Law School, Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch and the international human-rights lawyer Robert Amsterdam explained why Yale has given an extremely repressive regime the kind of legitimacy it craves but doesn’t deserve and that the new college’s efforts to enhance liberal education won’t offset this political damage.

Yale has led in hiring the college’s enthusiastic faculty; has guided it in drafting a high-minded “collegiate city in words,” a vision of liberal education set out in a Curriculum Report; has helped design pedagogical structures inside the bubble of the brand-new panopticon of a campus; and has culled the first 157 students — mostly Singaporeans, under some

governmental pressure. By Yale’s account, this has prompted an harmonic convergence, a honeymoon of mutual discovery across differences in background and opinion ever since the college opened late last summer.

That’s great for the terrific students who’ve been confined to strict rules and family ways. Now they can discover one another and more of the world with dedicated mentors guiding what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called humanism’s “The Great Conversation” across the ages about enduring challenges to politics and the spirit. But Singapore has tightened its coils around everything a liberal education should encourage. Amsterdam and Robertson challenged New Haven students and faculty to give more visibility to the chilling offenses that they listed and that I've described elsewhere. They asked us to protest and to open law clinics to “adopt” prisoners and defend political victims of the regime’s deft impositions of defamation and bankruptcy.

Asphyxiation of news media has increased as government has strengthened its grip on the internet as well as on print and TV. In 2013, Reporters Without Borders ranked Singapore 149 of 179 nations in press freedom, worse than its 135 ranking of 2012.

Human Rights Watch’s Robertson noted that Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis has told its students to “be mindful of your local Singaporean context” and has said that Yale-NUS “will not place restrictions beyond those of Singaporean law.” But the country’s scandalous judiciary has been tightening its Orwellian array of restraints on expression, political activity, and labor rights. It also railroads dissident writers, artists, scholars, and political leaders into disgrace, bankruptcy, and imprisonment. Ironically, the more deftly selective and arbitrary the “light touch” of regulation and surveillance in recent years, the more the pervasive self-censorship, chilling the public conversation a healthy society needs.

Amsterdam asserted that Singapore still bans from the Yale-NUS campus his client Chee Soon Juan, a Singapore opposition party leader whom I helped to bring to New Haven two years ago with another leader, Kenneth Jeyaretnam. Amsterdam chal-

lenged Yale-NUS to invite Chee as a litmus test of how much Yale kowtowed to “Singaporean law” when it agreed to the joint venture.

You might ask why we should bother to condemn Singapore when the U.S. has its own terrible wrongs.

Mightn’t liberal education, even in Yale-NUS’ bubble, pierce the smog of obfuscation and catalyze constructive change in Singapore, as we hope it can in America? Yes, insists Rajeev S. Patke, a NUS professor and early partner in the venture. Patke notes that the West once banned books, as Singapore does now, but insists the books are available on campus for “academic study.”

Human Rights Watch’s Robertson wondered what would happen if a Yale-NUS student took such a book to a discussion off campus or even just blogged about it, now that new internet restrictions are being imposed. But Singapore bristles with apologists like Patke who point fingers at America’s many ills and wrongs. The difference is that we Americans who point fingers at Singapore do it here, too, as apologists like Patke dare not do there.

Liberal educators at Yale do struggle even in New Haven to keep humanism’s Great Conversation going against the pull of market riptides and against tightening coils of government and business surveillance, fine print, and laws that increase your debts and diminish your opportunities. Singapore looks good by comparison only because it’s a tiny, tightly-run city-state.

In Singapore, libertarians, civic-republicans, and democratic socialists can barely breathe.

The saddest truth about the YaleNUS venture is that Singapore’s ways and ours are converging, and I fear that we Americans are becoming more like them than vise versa. In my thought experiment above, your friend — in this case, Yale — has changed after making compromises that should have been resisted. Since Singapore craves the legitimacy we give it, it may respond to pressure, but only if we in New Haven show the political will to push beyond the limits of a contract that should never have been signed.

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39

Wanted in Venezuela YALE WORLD FELLOW CARLOS VECCHIO IS IN HIDING AS THE VENEZUELAN GOVERNMENT ATTEMPTS TO ARREST OPPOSITION LEADERS R ACHEL O’CON N ELL

Supporters of Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López protest in Caracas.

Just over two months ago, Carlos Vecchio — a leader in Venezuela’s opposition party Voluntad Popular (VP) — was attending classes and befriending the faculty and students on Yale University’s campus. As part of the Yale World Fellows program, he and seventeen peers from around the globe developed a multidisciplinary approach to the issues they would tackle in their respective fields.

Now, Vecchio finds himself at the center of violence in his turbulent home country. Following a series of vocal protests, the government has cracked down against VP officials, forcing Vecchio into hiding. With his political party under attack, his reputation on the line, and perhaps even his 40

life in danger, the world Vecchio left in New Haven could not be more different from the one he is now in.

According to Michael Cappello, Director of the Yale World Fellows initiative, “We are deeply concerned for Carlos Vecchio’s safety: he is currently in hiding in Venezuela with limited access to communication.” On February 19, Cappello released a statement on behalf of the program decrying the Venezuelan government’s decision to issue a warrant for Vecchio’s arrest.

As of February 23, Vecchio was attempting to rally his supporters while at the same time evading government forces. By the time you read, however, his situation could be drastically different.

•••

Venezuela’s struggles under President Nicolas Maduro have roots tracing back to the administration of Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013. Since Chávez took power in 1999, over one million Venezuelans have left the country, which CIA World Factbook attributes to “a repressive political system, lack of economic opportunities, steep inflation, a high crime rate, and corruption.” Chávez nationalized firms in various sectors, decreasing private investment and lowering productive capacity. Inflation has also skyrocketed from 20.1 percent in January 2013 to a whopping 56.1 percent in January 2014, according to the online reference Trading Economics.

Since Chávez’s death, conditions

have failed to improved. Venezuelans have recently taken to the streets, voicing their dissatisfaction with the country’s poor security, shortages of goods, and lack of freedom of speech.

While some Venezuelan citizens blame the Maduro administration for the country’s socioeconomic state, the government places the blame right back on the political opposition.

In mid-February, The Politic was in Boston, speaking with university students visiting from Venezuela. Practically all of them had pinned a thin, black ribbon to their shirts: a symbol of solidarity with their friends protesting back home. They echoed the demonstrators’ concerns. Regarding security, multiple students from the capital city

Caracas stated that they would never go out alone at night; they feared falling victim to one of the fairly frequent kidnappings or murders government security forces struggle to prevent.

Organized crime, increasing drug trafficking, an abundance of firearms, and weak, state-sponsored, security have all contributed to the country’s high rates of violent crime.

Even when Venezuelans fill the streets, however, it is not always clear that their message is getting out. One university student bemoaned how some television channels played soap operas while protests raged outside. This is hardly a new media-quashing tactic.

During last September’s Taksim Square protests, CNN Turkey aired a penguin

documentary in lieu of coverage of the demonstrations that were enthralling viewers around the world. As another student pointed out, the Venezuelan government demanded that cable providers remove NTN24 — a Colombian news agency covering the demonstrations — from their programming.

In spite of the media restrictions, Juan Mejia, a spokesperson for Vecchio and his opposition political party VP, gave The Politic a look into the demonstrations. He reported that at their height, protests rage “all day long.”

Maduro has been making nationally televised speeches in the evenings, so “the police and the other groups that have been harassing students go out and take advantage of the communication blackout.” According to Mejia, the government has detained hundreds of individuals. Those it releases face restrictions on traveling, talking to the media, and protesting. Meanwhile, the Venezuelan government has vacillated over whether it will expel CNN reporters.

While some protesters face jail time, others could face much worse fates. The most highly-publicized individual to perish in the turmoil is Genesis Carmona, a 22-year old college student and former beauty queen for the Venezuelan state of Carabobo.

Carmona was shot in the head when an unidentified man fired into an anti-government protest. Like Neda Agha Soltan (whom Iranian government forces killed during the nation’s 2009 protests), and like the so-called “woman in red” (whom Turkish forces doused with pepper spray during the Taksim Square demonstrations in 2013), Carmona was instantly transformed into a symbol — a martyr — around which the opposition could rally.

Of course, young people and reporters are not the only ones suffering. Opposition leaders, Vecchio among them, are at even greater risk. Vecchio, who departed campus on December 12, serves as the National Political Coordinator of VP, which he helped found in 2009. VP promotes social action and has facilitated the recent demonstrations. The government arrested VP’s head Leopoldo López — accusing him of terrorism and murder, though later dropping those charges in favor of arson and conspiracy counts — and it has Vecchio and other opposition lead41

ers in its sights as well.

“Carlos [Vecchio] is being charged with all of the consequences that have happened after the protests began last Wednesday, when lots of people have died,” explained Mejia. He predicts that Vecchio, who became VP’s de facto leader following López’s arrest, could face decades in prison.

When The Politic spoke with Vecchio last semester, he described his motivations for joining opposition politics in such a risky environment.

His father had served as a politician, but just as importantly, Vecchio lamented that under Chávez’s administration “there was a constant threat to democratic values.” He lamented how politicians in power were “changing the constitution so that they could stay in power forever. I felt the responsibility as someone who was well-educated to get involved in a process to change things.”

“The main goal for me was to bring the change and the transformation in our country whatever way I can,” Vecchio said of his party’s founding. “The aims in my mind were to reduce poverty and increase availability of education to everyone.” Vecchio and his colleagues traveled the country, talking to citizens about their lives in order to see how VP could help them.

“The main essence of political activity is social work,” explained Vecchio.

During his years traveling and campaigning for VP, Vecchio has been no stranger to violence. “Arms [are] common in Venezuela,” he said.

42

“Mugging happens often too. We often encountered people with weapons who tried to intimidate us and inhibit our campaign activities. Some of us were put in jail because of our activities. The media manipulated that facts, saying that we were running a violent campaign which was far from true.” This precedent renders Vecchio’s current predicament less surprising.

Uma Ramiah, Director of Communications for the Yale World Fellows program, expressed to The Politic that it is vital for the international community to acknowledge Vecchio’s importance as a Venezuelan political figure.

“The media has not picked up on the fact that Carlos is second in command of VP,” she stated. The fact that “the Venezuelan government sees Carlos as someone who the rest of the world doesn’t know exists” could lead it to act with little concern about a potential global outcry.

Mejia said that awareness of Vecchio’s situation within Venezuela is also vital to keeping the opposition leader out of jail. “If people keep protesting in the streets,” he explained, “it’s more likely that Carlos will be able to walk out.”

•••

Back on Yale’s Campus, the Yale World Fellows program has been furiously spreading word of Vecchio’s predicament.

“We have an explicit goal in this program to develop a network of

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Income Inequality

By The Numbers

The 85 richest people on Earth control as much wealth, 1.7

trillion dollars, as the

bottom 50% of the world’s population.

1%

65x

has over the combined The richest assets of the poorer half of the world.

The richest 1% of the world’s Top 1%

population controls

Everyone Else in the World

46% of

the world’s wealth, or approximately 110

trillion dollars

in assets.

The average CEO now makes 380x the average worker’s pay.

The top 1% of Americans owned 9% of America’s income in 1976. In 2014, they own 24% of the nations wealth.

Wealth Inequality in America ACTUAL

Distribution of Wealth in the U.S.

Middle

Vecchio, a former Yale World Fellow, is a key opposition figure in the Venezuelan protests.

people who are bound by their shared Yale experience and are committed to making the world a better place,” Cappello, the program’s director, told The Politic. He has a commitment “to stand with our Fellows when they face difficult challenges.”

Indeed, the World Fellows program has gone beyond mere rhetoric.

The program leaders sent a note to the 241 former Yale World Fellows explaining the situation and asking for their help, Ramiah said. The former Fellows have “been regularly in touch” with both her office and Vecchio in order “to express concerns for Carlos, to ask him how they can help.”

Cappello reported that fellows in the media, nongovernmental organizations, the U.S. government, and other entities are also reaching out on Vecchio’s behalf. Mejia, while acknowledging that the international community plays an important role in Vecchio’s well-being, stressed that the solution to the crisis in Venezuela must ultimately stem from within the country itself.

Evidently, the Venezuelan government thinks that arresting Vecchio will help it to control the turmoil in Venezuela. Yet VP emphasizes the peaceful nature of its protests. The opposition party offers disgruntled citizens a nonviolent way of making themselves heard. If the Venezuelan masses find themselves without a peaceful, institutionalized channel for dissent, violence will become one of the few viable avenues of expression.

For now, Vecchio’s safety is of paramount concern for his friends and supporters. “The most important thing to get across at this point is that we love Carlos…” Ramiah said. “We want him to be safe… We’re not interested necessarily in the politics as a program.”

Nonetheless, Vecchio and other opposition leaders on the ground in Venezuela doubtless want much more than physical well-being. They are demanding a massive overhaul of the nation’s political system, to say nothing of the civil rights Americans take for granted. And until their voices are heard, understood, and fairly considered, Venezuela’s turmoil is unlikely to end.

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Click in and Learn Yale faculty in international and area studies are interviewed about their current research.

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The MacMillan Report is made possible through funding from the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

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