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Investment O ce’s 2020 report, it allocates 6 percent of the portfolio, or just over $2 billion, to emerging markets, which includes China. The New York Times further
FROM THE FRONT
or a god." ARISTOTLE GREEK PHILOSOPHY
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Applications break 50,000 for the first time
APPS FROM PAGE 1
outreach and communications at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, credited virtual outreach methods with the record applicant pool.
“The consistent increases in applications are a positive sign that our pivot to a virtual outreach strategy has been successful,” Dunn told the News. “Although there is no substitute for visiting campus — and we hope that we can continue welcoming campus visitors as soon as possible — it is clear that new virtual events have allowed us to connect with more prospective students and to feature amazing Yale students in a new way.”
The admissions office has employed virtual tours, online information sessions and video and poster campaigns to showcase the University. But Dunn also credited current students as the o ce's “most valuable asset” in outreach.
Dunn noted that the increase in international student applicants outpaced domestic application growth this year, though both have risen in the past two application cycles. Last year, international applicants also accounted for the majority of the historic rise in applications.
“We are impressed by the variety of students throughout the world who are seeking the opportunity to study at Yale next year,” said Keith Light, associate director of admissions and director of international admissions. “We are truly seeing the very best prospects from more than 150 countries and territories from all four hemispheres.”
Regular decision applications were due on Jan. 2.
Contact JORDAN FITZGERALD at jordan.fitzgerald@yale.edu . Yale received 50,022 applications to join the University’s class of 2026, the most in the school’s history.
LUKAS FLIPPO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER
Amid human rights violations, U. investigates Chinese holdings
CHINA FROM PAGE 1
tions in China. Since 2017, the Chinese government has been engaged in a process of systemic oppression of the Uyghur Muslim population in western China, drawing widespread condemnation.
“We’re in the process of [probing possible Chinese investments],” law professor Jonathan Macey LAW ’82 said. “We’re going to be starting to do that early in the semester.”
The University’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility, or ACIR, is responsible for ensuring that Yale allocates its investments in accordance with social and political standards, and works in tandem with the Yale Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility, or CCIR, which makes final decisions on investment practices. Both committees were heavily involved in implementing the University’s new fossil fuel investment principles in April.
Macey, who chairs the ACIR, explained that the committee had not undertaken this investigation until recently because it had been predominantly focused on the question of divestment from fossil fuels. Though the committee has not yet started its review, Macey said he suspects that some companies will not meet Yale’s principles for investment.
“My intuition is that there’ll be a range of activities among companies and that some might be eligible for divestment,” Macey said.
When asked in an interview, Salovey would not guarantee that any company that Yale is invested in is not involved in any of the ongoing human rights abuses in China. However, he said that when the University uses a hedge fund manager in China, the Investments O ce “makes our principles clear to that fund manager” and requires transparency in the investments.
He added that there is a mechanism by which students can raise concerns over Yale’s investment practices.
“In any geography, we partner only with investment managers who meet our sterling ethical standards, and our relationships in China are no exception,” Mendelsohn wrote in an email to the News.
Some members of the Yale community have previously called for Yale to sever all of its financial ties with China, including with private businesses, due to ongoing human rights violations.
According to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Security, “the [Chinese Communist] Party’s overall aim appears to be to ensure that a wide range of businesses are under the influence of the CCP and willing to work with it to achieve national strategic objectives.”
Rayhan Asat, a human rights lawyer focused on the Uyghur crisis in China and former Yale World Fellow, wrote in an email to the News that while private companies have been instrumental in Chinese economic growth, the government has begun to crackdown on them, especially when they “get in the way of the Chinese government’s specific goal.”
Macey, however, disagreed that Yale should divest from all Chinese companies.
“I don’t think that doing business in China or having a relationship with the Chinese government is something that is automatically grounds for divestment,” Macey said. “They have to be associated with a particular human rights abuse or some grave social harm.”
Salovey agreed with Macey’s view of the relationship between private and public investment, saying that there is a strong delineation between stateowned enterprises and private businesses. He further agreed that a company must be actively engaged in causing social injury to warrant divestment.
Salovey also noted that Yale is not unique in investing in Chinese companies, pointing to both other university endowments and mutual funds that are invested in emerging markets. The investment, like any other foreign investment, comes with risk which the University is monitoring, he said.
“We are watching social and political developments in China,” Salovey added. “We are certainly cognizant of relations between the U.S. and China. And particularly with any kind of foreign investment activity there’s geopolitical risk. And we have to assess that as part of whether it makes sense to be investing in other parts of the world.”
Still, Asat argued that Yale should hold itself to a higher standard.
“Regardless of the financial imperative to invest in Chinese market funds, Yale should abide by a basic moral standard,” Asat told the News. “That moral standard demands that even, and especially, when circumstances encourage and reward harmful investments, we must seek other solutions. There is always a choice, and Yale must make the right one based on its principles, even if it is not easy.”
The University has grappled with similar issues in the past. In apartheid South Africa, the University divested from a company that was involved in producing identity cards that were used to segregate society, according to Salovey. The University also divested from an oil company operating in Sudan, where the government was determined to be comitting genocide in Darfur.
In January 2021, the U.S. State Department labeled China’s repression of the Uyghur muslim population a ‘genocide.’
The worsening of relations between the U.S. and China have placed U.S. universities in a precarious position, as they aim to continue collaborative work with Chinese academics while remaining within the law. In December, nearly 100 Yale professors protested the U.S. government’s response to the worsening relations, denouncing the Department of Justice’s China Initiative as a threat to academic freedom and as discriminatory towards academics of Asian descent.
In August 2020, the State Department urged university endowments to divest from Chinese holdings, pointing to the human rights abuses occurring in China and suggesting that certain firms may be delisted from stock exchanges.
“The boards of your institution’s endowment funds have a moral obligation, and perhaps even a fiduciary duty, to ensure that your institution has clean investments and clean endowment funds,” Keith Krach, the former undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment, wrote in the August 2020 letter.
Krach continued, saying that “consequently, the boards of U.S. university endowments would be prudent to divest from PRC [People’s Republic of China] firms’ stocks in the likely outcome that enhanced listing standards lead to a wholesale delisting of PRC firms from U.S. exchanges by the end of next year.”
While Yale did not follow the State Department’s recommendations, Mendelsohn made clear that the University is continuously watching this issue.
“We are monitoring social and political developments in China, including and especially U.S.China relations,” Mendelsohn wrote in an email to the News. “Geopolitical risk is necessarily a consideration in all foreign investment activity, and China is a top focus at the moment.”
The ACIR determines grounds for divestment based on the principles outlined in the 1972 book “The Ethical Investor” written by Yale professor John Simon and former Yale professors Charles T. Powers and Jon P. Gunnemann.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
BY ABE BAKER-BUTLER AND ELIZABETH DEJANIKUS STAFF REPORTERS
Three Yalies, who are working on revolutionizing kidney care, repairing the polluted atmosphere and enabling new depths of data science, have been awarded Churchill Scholarships for the 2022-23 academic year. Sarah Zhao ’22 is one of 16 recipients of the Churchill Scholarship in science, mathematics and engineering, while Megan He ’22 and James Diao ’18 are the only two national recipients of the Kanders Churchill Scholarship in Science Policy. Yale has become the first institution ever to have three Churchill Scholars in a single cohort.
“This was the first year we were able to award two Kanders Churchill Scholarships in science policy,” Winston Churchill Foundation Executive Director Mike Morse said. “This year’s cohort has an interesting balance of disciplines and of institutions of origin from across the country.”
The Churchill Scholarship, awarded to 16 American students annually, provides funding for one year of master’s study overseas at Churchill College in the University of Cambridge. The award was founded in 1959 at the request of Winston Churchill, after whom both the college and award are named, to further research and collaboration between American and British scientists. A committee of Yale STEM faculty selects two nominees, who polish their applications and submit them to the Churchill Scholarship national competition in November. The Churchill Foundation then selects 16 Churchill Scholars from among the nominees of over 120 participating institutions.
The Kanders Churchill Scholarship for science policy, launched in 2017, does not have a university-level nomination process. Instead, students express interest when applying for the Cambridge Master’s in Public Policy program. The scholarship is awarded annually to one or two recipients who join the cohort of 16 Churchill Scholars at Cambridge.
Zhao, who was selected from a pool of 110 nominees, is completing a joint bachelor’s and master’s in statistics and data science at Yale, while also majoring in mathematics. At Yale, she has worked on research in quantum computing and information theory with professor Liang Jiang, theoretical statistics and optimization with professor Zhou Fan and geometrical and topological data science methods in the Summer Undergraduate Math Research at Yale program with multiple mentors, including Professors Smita Krishnaswamy, Jeffrey Brock and Ian Adelstein.
“I’m excited to explore both the theory and applications of machine learning,” Zhao said of her upcoming year at Cambridge. “I’m looking forward to learning more about the computer science view of the field.”
When not working on research, Zhao volunteers with the Yale Education Tutoring Initiative (YETI) and dances with Yale Movement.
Megan He, one of two winners of the Kanders Churchill Scholarship in Science Policy, is double majoring in environmental engineering and global affairs. Her research at Yale has focused on the emissions of organic compounds into the atmosphere.
Outside of research, she is the chair of the environmental engineering departmental club, a peer tutor in the physics department and an Engineering tour guide. While at Cambridge, she will pursue a master’s degree in science policy, focusing on how it relates to climate and air pollution.
Diao, the second Kanders Churchill Scholar, graduated from Yale in 2018 with degrees in statistics & data science and molecular biophysics and biochemistry. He is now a third-year medical student at Harvard Medical School, while also dual-enrolled at MIT in the Health Sciences & Technology program.
While at Yale, Diao worked extensively in the lab of Yale School of Medicine professor Mark Gernstein, focusing on developing extracellular RNA analysis tools. Diao also volunteered as
COURTESY OF MEGAN HE, SARAH ZHAO AND JAMES DIAO
a peer-counselor for Walden Peer Counseling and danced on Yale’s Ballroom Dance team.
Diao’s work focuses on using technological tools to improve health for diverse populations. He was named a 2022 Forbes “30 Under 30” in the healthcare category for his work eliminating the use of race in kidney function tests. “My goal is to better understand the bits and gears through which data and innovations have to flow in order to reach the bedside,” Diao said. “Whether that means understanding clinical guidelines, what kind of things clinical guidelines should think about when considering population health or how best to bring new technologies to patients in a way that does that.”
Rebekah Westphal, assistant dean of Yale College and director of the O ce of Fellowship Programs, views the students’ distinction as “a reflection of the strength of Yale’s STEM education and research possibilities, but also of the incredible support Yale students receive from their faculty and other academic advisers.”
Morse urges the Yale faculty to “keep it up!” and to continue giving students the chance to be creative and to push the boundaries of knowledge. “Let them continue to surprise us,” he said.
“It’s incredibly rewarding to see Yale students who are absolute top scholars in STEM fields recognized for their work and potential through this fellowship,” Westphal said. “The difficult part is always that we have more stellar applicants than we can nominate each year.”
Morse told the News that each year, the Churchill Foundation’s national selection committee, which is composed of former Churchill Scholars, is blown away by the research accomplishments that the nominees have amassed at such a young age. He says many committee members wonder if “they themselves would…have won against this kind of competition.”
Westphal encourages potential applicants to start thinking about the Churchill Scholarships early, in the spring of their junior year, and to meet with her as part of that process.
Morse emphasized the unique nature of the scholarship as an enabler of scientific exploration, characterizing the year at Cambridge as an “opportunity to do something risky” without the typical pressure to design a conservative, working experiment that will land a postdoctoral position. Morse encourages Scholars to “embrace that opportunity.”
Applications for the 2023-24 Churchill Scholarship will open on Yale’s Student Grants Database during summer 2022.
Contact ABE BAKER-BUTLER at
abe.baker-butler@yale.edu and ELIZABETH DEJANIKUS at elizabeth.dejanikus@yale.edu .
Med students rally for abortion rights on Roe v. Wade anniversary
NICOLE RODRIGUEZ/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
BY VERONICA LEE STAFF REPORTER
The Yale chapter of the Medical Students for Choice organization rallied Saturday in support of the protection of reproductive care, as the Supreme Court seems poised to dismantle Roe v. Wade nearly a half-century after it was first decided.
On Jan. 22, the 49th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, first-year medical students and co-leaders of Medical Students for Choice Siddhi Nadkarni MED ’25 and Kate Callahan MED ’25 gathered fellow organizers, students and faculty members on the green outside of Cafe Med to call for the provision of reproductive care. Medical Students for Choice, a national organization, has chapters at medical schools across the country and seeks to raise awareness about abortion and reproductive healthcare.
“Although it was originally founded to raise awareness during a time when abortion wasn’t taught in the medical curriculum, Medical Students for Choice has expanded its reach in recent years,” Nadkarni said. “Something [Callahan] and I are passionate about for our chapter is thinking holistically about how reproductive justice intersects with racism, public health and gender issues.”
At the center of the event were three speakers, including physicians at Yale New Haven Health and local community activists.
Nancy Stanwood, section chief of family planning and associate professor at the medical school, said that her ability to provide “compassionate” reproductive care was integral to her role as a physician.
“I live out my values every day as a doctor by providing abortion care to my patients when they need it, how they need it, centered on their reproductive lives and their hopes and dreams,” Stanwood said. “Abortion care is healthcare. It is critically important for people to be able to direct their lives and dream and live and thrive.”
Stanwood also addressed the physicians and future physicians in the crowd, highlighting the new challenges they will face if Roe v. Wade is overturned, which she believes will happen soon. According to Stanwood, as medical students go out into the world and serve patients across the country — some of them in states where abortion may soon be illegal — they may come face to face with laws that punish providers and anyone else involved in providing abortions to patients. Stanwood encouraged the assembled crowd of medical students to “be brave” and keep fighting for reproductive rights.
The Supreme Court is set to decide by this summer on Mississippi’s abortion law in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health by this summer. Given the current conservative majority in the Court, Stanwood and many others believe that this decision will overturn Roe v. Wade, essentially knocking down the foundation of legalized abortion in the U.S.
Liz Gustafson, state director of Pro-Choice Connecticut, also spoke on the day about her personal experience with abortion and how both legislation and societal perceptions of abortion should change.
“My decision to have an abortion was not a difficult one; Being pregnant when I did not want to be was,” Gustafson said. “Abortion is not merely a concept or debate topic. It is healthcare. It is freedom. It is normal. And our stories deserve to be respected and heard.”
Gustafson continued, saying that even the protection of Roe v. Wade is not enough. She highlighted the fact that systemic racism, economic injustice, documentation status and the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes over the past 49 years have kept abortion access out of reach for people of color and other marginalized groups. In response, she argued, states like Connecticut must continue to fight for public policy changes and work to destigmatize abortion.
Last to speak at the rally was Complex Family Planning Fellow Blythe Bynum, who was raised in Mississippi, a state with some of the most aggressive anti-abortion laws in the country. During her speech, Bynum described the difficulty of growing up and receiving her medical training in a state that openly challenges Roe v. Wade. However, it was these experiences that pushed her to become a provider who advocates for her patients and their bodily autonomy.
“To be a clinician these days honestly is to be an activist. It’s unavoidable,” Bynum said. “If my patient comes to me and tells me they don’t want to be pregnant, I’m there to make them unpregnant. And that’s because I trust my patients. This is the same trust that legislators should have in their constituents.”
The rally also raised money for the Lilith Fund, the oldest abortion fund in Texas, and Pro-Choice Connecticut, a grassroots organization dedicated to pro-choice advocacy. By supporting organizations like these, Nadkarni and Callahan hope to help change the future of reproductive rights in the US.
In 2019, over 600,000 legally induced abortions in the United States were reported to the CDC.
