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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 2012 · VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 103 · yaledailynews.com
INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING
RAINY CLOUDY
40 40
CROSS CAMPUS
FOOTBALL HILL ’69, FROM YALE TO THE PROS
IMMIGRATION
YALE-NEW HAVEN
2012 ELECTIONS
ICE arrests 2 New Haveners, 43 others in four-day operation
HOSPITAL SEEKS EXPANSION AS MERGER FINALIZED
State unlikely to sign onto a pact challenging the Electoral College
PAGE 10 SPORTS
PAGE 3 CITY
PAGE 3 CITY
PAGE 5 CITY
Juniors tapped for Whiffs, Whim
In memoriam. Moira Banks-
Dobson ’11 was killed Tuesday night in a five-car crash caused by a drunk driver. She was 24.
Launched. Oprah, Lady Gaga and mama Gaga Cynthia Germanotta were all at Harvard on Wednesday to celebrate the launch of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, an organization that follows the message of acceptance and selfconfidence expressed in Gaga’s hit 2011 single, “Born This Way.”
BY CAROLINE TAN STAFF REPORTER As Yale works to improve its sexual grievance procedures for students, its efforts have also adjusted the resources available to staff and faculty members.
SEXUAL MISCONDUCT
But not without controversy.
A Facebook event asked Harvard students and affiliates to meet at 3 p.m. in front of Sanders Theater — where, inside, Gaga would be launching her Foundation — to ask the university to officially renounce a secret court it created in the 1920s to find and expel gay students and award them honorary degrees. Protestors said they would present Harvard administrators with an online petition in support of these demands which as of Wednesday night had received more than 5,600 signatures.
America’s Next Top Historian.
After winning high praise among reviewers for his biography of George F. Kennan, history professor John Lewis Gaddis has won the seventh annual American History Book Prize for his work. The prize, which has been handed out by the New York Historical Society, is awarded for a nonfiction American history book “that is distinguished by its scholarship, its literary style and its appeal to a general as well as an academic audience.”
JACOB GEIGER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
WHIFFS, WHIM TAP NEXT GENERATION New members of Yale’s two senior a cappella groups, the all-male Whiffenpoofs and the all-female Whim ’n Rhythm, were tapped Wednesday night.
FA C U LT Y H I R I N G
Yale Law aims for diversity
O
n Tuesday, Yale Law School Dean Robert Post LAW ’77 announced to students that it had offered tenured positions to several professors. Those receiving offers included one woman who — if she accepts — will become the first person of Hispanic descent to join the school’s tenured faculty. DANIEL SISGOREO reports.
Happy Fifth Birthday!
During Wednesday night’s dinner, Ezra Stiles Master Stephen Pitti delivered a cake to his college’s dining hall to celebrate the birthday of EB Saldaña ’14, whose Feb. 29 birthday makes her a “leap baby.” “The cake was delicious,” according to a source who attended the event.
Going viral? Fresh off the
heels of their “Scarves” video, The Yale Record released a new video on Wednesday called “Jelly Beans.” The video features a scene in which Bea, played by Kat Lau ’13, is frustrated as Natey Weinstein ’14 and Olivia Scicolone ’14 loudly attempt to eat jelly beans as she tries to force them to watch a video on her smartphone.
Town-gown. Architecture professor Alan Plattus ARC ’76 spoke Wednesday night at the Milford Library on ways the city could improve its downtown. “I’m a huge fan of downtown Milford,” Plattus said, according to the New Haven Register. THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY
1962 A trend piece remarks on a “revolution” in which students choose paperbacks over hardcover books. Submit tips to Cross Campus
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Admins focus on faculty, staff misconduct
At a town hall on faculty diversity held Tuesday afternoon, more than 140 Yale Law School students gathered to learn about the school’s faculty hiring process. But early in the hourlong meeting, Dean Robert Post LAW ’77 made an announcement: a Hispanic woman had been offered tenure. Six attendees of the meeting, who requested anonymity because the session was closed to the press, identified Cristina Rodriguez ’95 LAW ’00 as the potential hire. If Rodriguez — who was a visiting faculty member in fall 2009 — accepts the offer, she will become the first Hispanic professor to whom Law School has awarded tenure.
Rudolph Aragon LAW ’79, who served as a co-chair of the Latino Asian Native American law students association (LANA) during his years as a student at the Law School, said the announcement was “long coming.” His classmate and fellow LANA co-chair, Sonia Sotomayor LAW ’79, had already become the first Hispanic justice on the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009. The Law School — ranked number one by U.S. News & World Report since the publication began evaluating law schools in 1987 — has diversified its tenured faculty ranks in recent decades, but has not yet given tenure to a Hispanic professor. “How can it be that the Supreme Court has a Latina jus-
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Cristina Rodriguez ’95 LAW ’00 may become the Law School’s first tenured Latina professor.
tice, and YLS has never had a tenured Latino faculty member?” said Carel Alé LAW ’11, who served as a co-chair of the Latino Law Student Association while at the Law School. But even as Rodriguez decides whether to take an office at 127 Wall St., students, alumni and faculty interviewed said they hope the Law School’s efforts to diversify its faculty will not end with Rodriguez’s offer. SEE DIVERSITY PAGE 6
Faculty to raise Yale-NUS concerns BY GAVAN GIDEON AND ANTONIA WOODFORD STAFF REPORTERS Professors say they intend to raise objections to the liberal arts college Yale has planned with the National University of Singapore at today’s Yale College faculty meeting. Though Yale-NUS was officially announced in March 2011 and is set to open in fall 2013, professors said they still wish to debate the merits of the project. Yale-NUS is the only major item on the agenda, which temporarily caused Yale College Dean Mary Miller to cancel the meeting on Feb. 17 because she did not feel there were enough
issues to be discussed. But Miller said the meeting was reinstated after faculty stated their desire to address YaleNUS “sooner rather than later” — a conversation that will begin after University President Richard Levin reports on the developing college. “It is time for the Yale College faculty to be heard on issues affecting our own future relations with this new institution that bears our name,” French and African American studies professor Christopher Miller said in an email Wednesday. Beginning in September 2010, faculty were invited to discuss Yale-NUS at “town
hall” meetings, and over the next two years some expressed concern about whether academic freedoms and civil rights would be suppressed at YaleNUS because of Singapore’s allegedly authoritarian government. But professors said they do not recall addressing the liberal arts college at their monthly faculty meetings, which they said allow for more formal discussion than town hall gatherings. Classics professor Victor Bers said deliberation on YaleNUS should take place in faculty meetings because they follow parliamentary procedure, SEE FACULTY MEETING PAGE 4
After the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) clarified its Title IX regulations last April, administrators nationwide have taken steps to make their universities’ responses to complaints of sexual misconduct more consistent across staff, faculty members and students, according to six higher education law experts interviewed. Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler, who began overseeing Yale’s Title IX compliance in November, said in a Wednesday email that her appointment is part of a larger effort to improve coordination between the University’s various grievance processes. Still, some of the University’s procedures remain separate for different subsets of the Yale community, and some policies — such as the use of nondisclosure agreements — differ between those procedures. “This process [of reviewing Yale’s sexual grievance procedures] has not been limited to complaints involving students but rather has addressed the procedures for reviewing complaints from all members of the University community, thus providing opportunities to harmonize the University’s approaches to sexual misconduct complaints and provide enhanced coordination of related procedures,” she said. Higher education law experts said universities generally assign different administrators — such as student
life officials, academic deans and human resources officials — the responsibility of addressing sexual misconduct issues for certain segments of a college’s campus, adding that this division can create confusion among individuals seeking help. At Yale, while undergraduates and graduate students are encouraged to seek advice from the Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education Center, employees and postdoctoral students can reach out to the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, which addresses complaints related to racial and gender-based discrimination. All members of the Yale community can file complaints with the Yale Police and Title IX coordinators, and the newly-established University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct (UWC) hears all complaints except those filed by faculty or staff members against staff members. Employees with grievances against other employees can also bring complaints to human resources officials. One library staff member interviewed, who filed a sexual harassment complaint against a colleague two years ago and wished to remain anonymous because of the sensitive nature of the issue, said she thinks the University “compartmentalizes [its procedures] too much.” When she approached administrators with her complaint, she said she had been asked to talk to a variety of different administrators, who she said were each responsible for handling different parts of her case. She added that she felt this process “divided up all the different offenses until it looked like not much had happened” since no administrator was responsible for SEE COMPLAINTS PAGE 4
City sees second murder-free month BY JAMES LU STAFF REPORTER Wednesday marked the end of New Haven’s secondstraight month without a homicide, an interval not seen since summer 2009. The number of violent crimes is down citywide by more than 20 percent compared to this time last year, according to data from the New Haven Police Department. But city and police officials said it is still too early to tell what role, if any, the community policing strategies implemented in the past three months by NHPD Chief Dean Esserman have played in the drop. “We’ve implemented many strategic changes, and there are more cops walking the beat, so I think it would be unwise to specifically attribute [the drop in violent crime] to any one thing,” NHPD spokesman David Hartman said. “What we do know is that we have a new chief, a new direction, and have zero homicides to date this year.” While Hartman said the statistics so far this year are prom-
ising, he stressed that “statistics are simply statistics” and rarely provide an insightful look into the city’s crime situation. Since the statistics can change instantly, it would be “arrogant or foolish” to declare the department’s community policing efforts successful yet, he added. Hartman could not immediately supply detailed statistics of New Haven crime in February, but in January, the violent crime rate was 28.7 percent below the rate in January 2011. This figure includes a 29.9 percent drop in robberies and a 16.7 percent decrease in assaults. This figure followed a year in which violent crime dropped 11 percent citywide even as the number of homicides rose by 10 to 34 — a 20-year high. By this time last year, the Elm City had recorded four murders. “It’s a very short period to judge on, but I do think community policing is making a difference in bringing violent crime down significantly,” said Richard Epstein, the chairman SEE NHPD PAGE 4