Yale Daily News — Week of March 5

T H E O L D E ST C O L L E G E DA I LY · FO U N D E D 1 8 7 8

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · VOL. CXLIII, NO. 18 · yaledailynews.com

Elicker unveils two budgets simultaneously Elicker’s optimistic vision comes in the form of the “Forward Together Budget,” which would keep services and taxes as they currently are but would only be possible if Yale and the state provide a hefty increase in funding for the Elm City.

“The city’s budget crisis is one we need to get under control,” Elicker said. “We need to make very, very difficult decisions. Without a doubt, [the “Crisis Budget”] will significantly impact our ability to provide services to our residents as well as the cost to taxpayers. We do not want to pass this budget.”

City law mandates that the mayor must submit a budget to the Board of Alders by March 1 every year, and Elicker’s press conference officially began the city’s three-month budget season.

The proposed “Crisis Budget” follows several months of warnings from Elicker about the

BY THOMAS BIRMINGHAM AND OWEN TUCKER-SMITH STAFF REPORTERS New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker introduced not one, but two budget proposals for fiscal year 2021-22 on Monday morning for the Board of Alders to review, emphasizing the dire economic decisions that lie ahead for the city.

The unprecedented move to submit two budgets to the board served as Elicker’s latest plea for financial support from the state of Connecticut and Yale University. One budget, proposed in case New Haven does not receive additional support from either and labeled the "Crisis Budget," would raise taxes by 7.75 percent and include millions of dollars worth of layoffs. Three city buildings would also be effectively shut down: the Mitchell Library in Westville, the East Shore Senior Center, and the fire station on Whitney Avenue.

SEE BUDGET PAGE 4

NAT KERMAN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Under the Crisis Budget, three New Haven buildings would also be effectively shut down.

Yale admin prep for student body growth Curtis Hall signs with Bruins

BY TRISHA NGUYEN AND ÁNGELA PÉREZ STAFF REPORTERS On Monday morning, the Boston Bruins announced that they had signed Yale men’s ice hockey center Curtis Hall ’22 to a threeyear entry-level contract beginning in the 2021-2022 season.

In the two years that he spent with the Bulldogs, Hall quickly established himself as a notable figure on the ice. The 20 year old, who was selected 119th overall in the fourth round of the 2018 NHL Draft, tallied 38 total points SEE HALL PAGE 5

YALE DAILY NEWS

The class of 2024 now contains 1,759 students, according to Yale registrar data current as of Feb. 1, 2021.

BY AMELIA DAVIDSON AND MADISON HAHAMY STAFF REPORTERS With Yale set to welcome larger-than-usual classes of

sophomores and first years the next academic year, professors and the Yale administration are taking steps to ensure that class sizes remain similar to pre-pandemic levels.

In preparation for the growth in first years and sophomores on campus, Yale faculty is planning to shift resources to accommodate SEE FACULTY RATIO PAGE 4

COURTESY OF DON CLARK

Fewer than two months after forfeiting his last two years of NCAA eligibility and signing with the Providence Bruins, Hall secures his first NHL contract.

Medically vulnerable Yalies slam new CT plan PILOT proposal passes in state Senate

BY JULIA BIALEK AND EMILY TIAN STAFF REPORTERS

BY THOMAS BIRMINGHAM STAFF REPORTER After months of advocacy from New Haven politicians, the Con-

necticut state Senate voted in favor of Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney’s proposal to increase fundSEE PILOT PAGE 5

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

The Senate approved the PILOT proposal, which would cost the state an estimated $129 million, by a margin of 28-7.

On Feb. 22, Gov. Ned Lamont announced that Connecticut will now follow a largely agedbased eligibility order instead of following the state’s previous plan of prioritizing vaccinating essential workers and those with preexisting health conditions of any age.

The new plan, described by the governor to be simple and efficient, is a notable break from national CDC recommendations. In the new plan, Lamont announced that Connecticut will use an age-based approach to determine who is eligible for the vaccine, and he laid out a schedule for age group eligibility over the next several months. In addition to age-based eligibility, preK-12 school staff and teachers, as SEE VACCINE PAGE 5

CROSS CAMPUS

INSIDE THE NEWS

The Yale faculty votes to change the Credit/ Fail option to Credit/D/Fail effective 1994.

Students will have to get a 'C-' or above to get credit for the class. Approximately 75 percent of the professors at the meeting voted in favor of this change.

WANDERING

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY, 1993.

Yale alumni are working on a multimedia project called “The Wandering” — inspired by the Schubert art song and focused on "queering the past." Page 6 ARTS

HEART

REGINA SUNG/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Students with underlying health conditions were set to be vaccinated through Yale Health during the first two weeks of March under the previous guidelines.

To improve patient outcomes, Yale physicians have built an algorithmicallybased system to guide clinical decision making in heart failure cases.

Page 8 SCITECH

DESK

After years of operating out of church basements, the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen bought its own building as a centralized location for homeless services in the Elm City.

Page 11 CITY

IVY LEAGUE

The Ivy League SAAC presidents banded together to push for graduate eligibility exception for all class years.

The exception was ultimately granted for senior studentathletes. Page 14 SPORTS

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION G U E S T C O L U M N I S T PA T R I C K B U C K L E Y AND KRISTEN RAMSEY

GUEST COLUMNIST VICTOR ASHE

Why I’m running The future of American science for corporation E

ach year Yale alumni choose a person to serve on the Yale Corporation — the governing body of the University. There are usually two to three candidates who run for the position; They are chosen by the Yale Alumni Association Nominating Committee. I am the first petition candidate to qualify for the ballot for Yale Corporation in 18 years.

The current process does not represent Yale at its best. I had to announce my candidacy 14 months before the 2021 election. Then I had to secure at least 4,397 signatures but actually had over 7,200 signatures to place my name on the ballot in the upcoming election starting in April. In this process of collecting signatures, I learned a lot about Yale alumni from all classes of Yale College and graduate schools which would give me a head start as a new Corporation member if elected.

The work of the Corporation is often shrouded in secrecy as the minutes are embargoed for 50 — yes, 50 — years. Even meeting agendas are not disclosed. The election process is deeply flawed and unfair — YAA candidates are asked to stay silent and not give interviews to the News. Typically, the ballot includes only a photo and brief biography.

This year, likely in response to strong support for my campaign, a short video will appear but this still avoids discussion of current issues.

Even today as you read this piece, we still do not know the names of the candidates or candidates chosen by the Yale Alumni Association 14 member nominating committee. Their names, however, will not be released until the week of April 12 — only 48 hours before voting begins. While the nominees often appear to be qualified persons, their refusal to outline their platform or contact information does not earn my vote. Given that 87 percent of the 146,000 eligible alumni skipped the most recent election, many alumni share my view.

This is a disdainful and dysfunctional system which is unworthy of a great educational institution that is committed to free speech, open inquiry and public service. As a petition candidate, I am not bound by these gag rules.

I am running because I want to bring some sunlight, fresh air and new ideas to the Corporation. Enough of the status quo. The Corporation needs to listen to alumni. On March 2 President Salovey, along with Cappy Bond Hill and Chip Goodyear, will speak to Florida alumni — good idea — but would only take written questions while live follow up questions were not permitted — bad idea. Not having live follow up to questions inhibits serious dialogue.

What changes are needed? First, lower the number of signatures to get on the ballot. In 1965 it was 250 signatures when William Horowitz was elected as a petition candidate, now it has jumped to 4,397 signatures.

Second, the timeline needs to be shortened for candidates to announce their candidacy. Petition candidates announce in a few days by March 15 for the May 2022 election, while YAA candidates are determined two months before the 2022 election and kept secret until voting starts.

Third, let’s repeal the gag rule or practice — as Yale calls it. It is counter to an open and free election concept where issues are debated in a civil way.

Fourth, the Corporation should tell all of us what issues it considers at its meetings and, in broad terms, what happens at each meeting. Keeping minutes secret for 50 years is just plain wrong. Sensitive personnel and legal matters can always be redacted.

Fifth, Yale should bring basic transparency to the Alumni Fellow election process. In 2020 Yale announced Carlos Moreno as the winner of the election, but not the number of votes he and Nancy McInnis received. Only at my urging did Yale announce the total number of votes cast but not the winning margin. What we do know is that the current system is broken given the anemic 12 percent alumni participation rate.

This is not an exhaustive list.

Other policies are antiquated, such as the disenfranchisement of Yale college alumni for five years after graduation. They should be able to vote the day after they graduate. Moreover, The sharp growth of administrative staff should be reviewed to determine how many staffers are needed.

As a Tennessee lawmaker, I won bipartisan support for major bills to protect the environment, increase voter participation and require transparency in government. When I was the nonpartisan Mayor of Knoxville for 16 years, I broke down barriers to hiring women and minorities and created a police civilian review to ensure public accountability. As Mayor, I dealt regularly with town gown relations between the University of Tennessee flagship campus and Knoxville. I balanced the city budget for 16 years, and became president of the US Conference of Mayors from 1995 to 1996. I’ve served in various federal posts appointed by five different Presidents of both parties, including ambassador to Poland under both Presidents Bush and President Obama.

I want to make the Yale Corporation the best it can be and inclusive of all alumni. My candidacy is the only way to assure a discussion on this topic starts. My election would bring a new and refreshing voice to the Corporation deliberations.

VICTOR ASHE graduated from Yale College in 1967, and was the political editor of the Yale Daily News from ‘66’67. He is a petition candidate for the Yale Corporation Board. Contact him at vhashe@aol.com or 865-712-5933 .

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any young scientists see the scientific enterprise in America as deeply flawed, one that has never lived up to their expectations. Previously, times of national crisis have sparked huge changes to the scientific community, most notably during WWII. The current COVID-19 pandemic heralds a new age of American science once again.

The immediate and global-scale threat of the COVID19 pandemic has captured the attention of American scientists on a scale that has never been seen before. Scientists from industry, government and academia all came together in Operation Warp Speed to develop safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in a record time. The fruits of this massive collaborative effort so far — three safe and effective mRNA vaccines — are truly remarkable, while taking less than a year from start to finish. This moment is reminiscent of the dramatic shifts in American science that occurred during WWII, and similarly brings the possibility for dramatic and long-overdue change.

While many possible directions for American science lie ahead, it is clear that there will be no return to the status quo. The pandemic has exposed both the benefits science can provide and the current problems it faces from within. Not a single laboratory studied SARSCoV-2 in fall 2019. Now, in mere months, COVID-19 has become one of the most well-studied diseases in human history and successful vaccines are entering arms across the world.

Despite this incredible shift, growing inequalities that threaten the future of American science have worsened due to COVID-19.

With schools closed, female scientists were more likely to sacrifice their research efforts to care for their children. Underrepresented, minority scientists were

more likely to have lost loved ones and are more at risk from existing healthcare disparities. Leadership at all levels, from university department heads to newly elected officials including President Biden, will need to work together to carry forward the good and root out the bad that the pandemic has unmasked in American science. Bold action will be needed to make lasting change, but President Biden has signaled that he is up for the challenge.

Calling back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s letter to his science advisor during WWII, President Biden wrote to his science advisor in January, just one year after the first coronavirus case was detected in the United States. In his letter, Biden poses five questions relating to public health, climate change, national security, equity and the state of American science to his science advisor, Eric Lander of MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute. The letter marks another inflection point in the history of American science. How will the federal government and scientists across academia, industry and government respond to the pandemic and what will be the result for science in the coming decades?

The list of desperately needed changes to American science is long. Warped incentives in science, specifically the drive to quickly publish no matter the cost, has caused unprecedented damage during the pandemic.

Here at Yale, a distinguished cancer epidemiologist left his scholarly lane to support the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, while discounting evidence that refuted his claims about its effectiveness.

The “leaky pipeline” problem still exists, leading to disproportionately low numbers of women entering academia. This problem persists despite the fact the number of women entering science at

the bachelor degree level actually surpasses men. The scientific community does not currently reflect the diversity in the United States and demographic trends will only worsen this gap if left unaddressed. Not only will the problem of recruitment need to be addressed — STEM has a diversity retention problem that will need to be fixed at the same time.

Even though Congress largely ignored former President Trump’s budget proposals that called for massive cuts to federal research funding, research spending has still stagnated. On top of all this, Congress has no formal way to debate science and technology holistically. Neither the House nor Senate has a single committee that can oversee the entirety of federal research activities. Any one of these issues would be cause for concern, yet we must face them all at once.

Despite its current bleak state, American science has met the challenges posed by the COVID19 pandemic with remarkable success. The disruptive nature of the pandemic has thrust a new era of American science into view by highlighting both its strengths and weaknesses. Biden and Lander now have the opportunity to champion necessary structural changes to the American scientific enterprise. This devastating pandemic demands equally disruptive and dramatic efforts to reignite the furnace of American science, expediting advancements that will benefit Americans and the world in the decades to come.

PATRICK BUCKLEY and KRISTEN RAMSEY are second-year Ph.D. students in the Microbial Pathogenesis department and members of Yale Student Science Diplomats, a student organization centered on science policy. Contact them at patrick.buckley@yale.edu and kristen.ramsey@yale.edu .

GUEST COLUMNIST KIRAN MASROOR

The stuff of daydreams “A

ction is character,” our English teacher says.

I think it means that if we never did anything, we wouldn’t be anybody.

So much of life is spent in quiet thoughts, in daydreams.

Looking out classroom windows or car windows and unspooling a thread of an idea. Zoning out during a lecture and thinking about what I should have said differently that one night.

Walking through the hallways of my old high school, wondering about the lives of the kids I didn’t talk to. And so many daydreams are not even our own; they come from inhabiting the lives of people around us. All the time spent with my face craned up to the TV. Time spent paled by the glow of someone’s Snapchat story on my phone.

It’s gotten to the point that these daydreams have defined the landscape of my memory. Memories of old daydreams are kept so close to memories of reallife events that I think they are no longer separate in my mind.

I find the phrase ‘high school’ in my mind and see footage of parties I did not attend, after-images of thoughts I chased in history class. I hear someone’s name and think about moments we never got to have together.

I can’t tell you yet what these daydreams and ideas have added up to and if they have left me as quickly as they came. But throughout my life, I’ve tried to keep a record of the most important ones, in a series of diaries. This catalog of my truest thoughts, my most honest daydreams, can be found ducttaped shut, covered in dust, under my bed. Even like this, the diaries seem too accessible.

I have this recurring fear that when I die, someone I love will find them in my belongings and read them.

I DON’T WANT MY WRITING TO BE MORE ALIVE AND MORE HONEST THAN THE PERSON I AM AROUND OTHERS. I DON’T WANT TO LIVE MOST PRECISELY IN THE SUBTLETIES AND HESITANCIES OF MY WRITING. HOW BEAUTIFUL IT COULD BE, HOW IMPOSSIBLE IT SEEMS, TO EXPRESS YOURSELF ACCURATELY WITHOUT ART. I don’t even think I fear that people would read my diaries and judge me. I think I fear that they would not recognize me.

That they would say, “Wow. I never knew she had this in her.”

That they would feel lied to.

Maybe some people would wish they knew how much I thought about them. How highly they lived in my mind, how important their actions were to me. I don’t want my writing to be more alive and more honest than the per-

son I am around others. I don’t want to live most precisely in the subtleties and hesitancies of my writing. How beautiful it could be, how impossible it seems, to express yourself accurately without art.

Listen, I don’t know what stuff life is made up of and if our daydreams are made of that same stuff. But if we never did anything, we would never be anybody. And I want to be someone. And I want to live. Like, real-life live. Like, wake up and say things I actually mean to people and act with so much conviction that no one can deny I am real. Like, fight through splintered sentences when I’m struggling to tell someone how I feel. Like, be so grounded in the physical world around me that I look at everyday objects as though they’re constellations I’m tracing in the night sky, and not just the bright blue underbelly of a skateboard flying by on Chapel Street.

Our lives should blaze more than anything we write or dream about. I want to cherish my ice skating bruises, the songs I blare, my butchered piano recitals, my wide grins, my moments of selfishness, the shaky pitch when I cry, my homeroom crushes, my failed seductions, all the time wasted on standardized tests, the twitches of my body in my sleep. Note to reader, I imagine that we twitch in our sleep because our limbs are remembering old ways they used to bend. An echo of a past gesture.

Maybe I should stop being so harsh on writing. This is what always draws me back to it: I can pour so much of myself into the words I write and the page never overflows.

KIRAN MASROOR is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College. Contact her at kiran.masroor@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 3

“Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.” BILL GATES AMERICAN BUSINESS MAGNATE

House passes Equality Act, Sabin introduces resolution in support

BY OWEN TUCKER-SMITH STAFF REPORTER On Feb. 25, Downtown Alder Eli Sabin ’22 introduced a resolution to the Board of Alders Health and Human Services Committee that would declare the Elm City’s support for the federal Equality Act, a sweeping piece of legislation seeking to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

That same day, the House of Representatives voted 224-206 to pass the Equality Act, mostly along party lines. The legislation last passed the House during a previous session in 2019, but it never reached the Senate floor. The act would amend existing civil rights legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to acknowledge LGBTQ individuals and ensure protections in areas of housing, employment and federally funded programs, among others.

In Connecticut, 13 municipalities have already passed local resolutions in support of the Equality Act. If approved by the Board of Alders and signed by Mayor Justin Elicker, New Haven could become the next municipality in the Nutmeg State to do so. The board will vote on the resolution on March 15.

“In Connecticut, we’ve moved in the right direction more recently, but we should always be aware that the rights that we’ve won for the folks in our community are not guaranteed forever,” Sabin told the News. “We need to be vigilant.”

John Board, chairperson for New Britain Pride, has spearheaded the grassroots support for numerous local resolutions across Connecticut. He said he is hoping all 169 state municipalities will pass similar resolutions, but that the current support is encouraging.

In Washington, D.C., three Republican representatives voted in favor of the bill. On a statewide level, the towns and cities signing on in Connecticut have included both large cities like Hartford and rural, conservative-leaning towns like Roxbury.

“To have such bipartisan and broad support for this at a local level sends a message to not only Congress but to the president and vice president — that here in Connecticut, we support the Equality Act,” Board said. “A lot of change happens on a municipal level.”

After passing through the House, the Equality Act will now be brought to the Senate floor.

Both Board and Sabin noted that local support can be used in debates

by members of Congress who represent Connecticut — “They can say, ‘Look, there is genuine, local support for this,’” Board said. Sabin said passing the resolution also sends a strong message to New Haven residents.

“New Haven is quite a progressive community — generally we do a pretty good job on this issue, but we always are aware of how we can do better,” Sabin told the News. “This is an important opportunity for us to make a statement. It’s important for our residents to understand that their local government is on their side and making sure that they have the human rights they deserve.”

The New Haven resolution references various moments in history, including the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the 2015 legalization of samesex marriage as earlier victories in the LGBTQ civil rights movement.

It resolves that the Board of Alders “recognizes that LGBTQ rights are human rights and are constitutionally protected; recognizes that all residents should be treated fairly and equally regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity; agrees that New Haven must strive to ensure that the promise of equality is realized for all.”

Each of Connecticut’s five representatives, including New Haven

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, voted in favor of the act on Thursday. In a statement to the press, Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-Waterbury, expressed support for the bill’s passage.

“I voted for this bill to further the central purpose of my work here in Congress — that everyone should have equitable access to opportunity — including in housing, education, employment and all aspects of public life,” Hayes said. “The passage of this bill represents our continued commitment to ensuring all Americans

are treated with dignity, respect and the full protections of the law.”

The Equality Act will need 10 Republican votes in the Senate to pass. It has already received enthusiastic support from President Joe Biden, who listed it in his legislative priorities for his first 100 days.

The first version of the Equality Act was drafted in 1974.

Contact OWEN TUCKER-SMITH at owen.tucker.smith@yale.edu .

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Thirteen municipalities in Connecticut have already passed local resolutions supporting the Equality Act.

Students reflect on time in temporary housing

YALE DAILY NEWS

At the beginning of the semester, students who arrived outside of COVID-19 testing hours lived temporarily on Old Campus.

BY MARISSA BLUM STAFF REPORTER The grasp of the COVID-19 pandemic on Yale and the New Haven community at large remains strong, and as such, the University and its students had to adapt move-in procedures to keep the community safe.

In a Jan. 14 email to Yale students registered to live on campus, Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd explained plans for spring semester move-in. In an attempt to prevent the potential spread of the virus from newly arriving students, the Yale administration made the deci-

sion to offer temporary housing to students unable to move in within the COVID-19 testing hours offered during move-in, which is 4:30 p.m. from Monday to Friday. Instead, these students would be placed in Bingham Hall and Welch Hall on Old Campus until they would be able to get tested. The News spoke to three students about their experience in temporary housing.

Garrett Frye-Mason ’23, a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College, was relieved to learn that Yale would be offering temporary housing to students. However, he found the process for signing up somewhat difficult.

“The administration, the University, did not provide us with much information on how the process would work at all. Even in the beginning they didn’t really tell us how to sign up for the temporary sign-in slot and then after, they didn’t tell us how we would actually move in,” Frye-Mason said.

Frye-Mason was eventually able to learn more about the move-in process when, a few days before his scheduled move-in date, Yale Conferences and Events sent him an email containing his assigned room number and a phone number he could call when he arrived.

He was not the only one to suffer from this confusion. Like Frye-Mason, Emily Brown ’24 signed up for temporary housing hoping to have a safe and coronavirus free place to stay the night before she moved back in. When Brown arrived at the gates of Old Campus, she was not sure where to go. While Frye-Mason was able to check in with staff on Old Campus, staff were not available to Brown since she arrived in New Haven at almost 1 a.m., having to use the provided phone number instead. According to both Frye-Mason and Brown, the University had provided them with a bed, sheets, towels, a refrigerator

and access to a bathroom. However, both of their rooms lacked overhead lighting, and Brown additionally lacked a heating source and pillow.

“It was a bit of a surprise getting there at 1 a.m. and there was no light in the room and only one electrical outlet … I had a cellphone, so I just used my flashlight”, Brown told the News. “It was a bit uncomfortable because it was very cold in the room and then the bed had some really awful sheets on it, which is you know whatever, and then had one blanket and no pillow so I had a sweatshirt under my head and it was freezing … so it was just a rather uncomfortable night.”

For Elise Williamson ’24, who did have lighting and heat, the most frustrating aspect of staying in temporary housing was the lack of food.

All three students had been told to expect that food would be provided; however, this was not the case.

While Frye-Mason was told that the food ran out before he arrived, both Brown and Williamson were told that they could order food, which put Williamson in a less than ideal situation.

“I was under the impression that food would be provided like even if it was just like freezer meals, but I got there and they said I could order food,

which was fine, it was just kind of — as a low-income student I try to budget everything so that was kind of a surprise because ordering two meals for one day is a full amount of money.”

Other than leaving their rooms to go to the bathroom and pick up delivery from outside, they were expected to stay the night to avoid contact with others before getting tested.

While the living situation was less than comfortable, they all expressed that it was reasonable for the night.

Frye-Mason was particularly thankful for the positive and helpful staff.

“The staff who signed me in were working really really hard and overworked so I felt bad for them, that they were doing so much,” Frye-Mason said. “They were both manning the phone lines and answering questions for everyone in temporary housing. They were also telling everyone where to go, signing people in, handing out key cards. Like I said, there were 10 people when I was checking in, so there was a pretty considerable line for that time of the night.”

Asymptomatic testing is available for students, faculty and staff twice a week.

Contact MARISSA BLUM at marissa.blum@yale.edu .

Jackson Institute capstone projects adapt to pandemic

BY PHILIP MOUSAVIZADEH STAFF REPORTER Even as the COVID-19 pandemic has crippled in-person instruction, the global affairs major’s capstone project has adapted to the public health situation, according to students and faculty.

Four students in the global affairs major, along with Director of Undergraduate Studies Sigrídur Benediktsdottir, spoke with the News about how the Capstone Course — which each global affairs major is required to complete in their senior fall — operated remotely. Overall, five students and faculty told the News that the project was well-managed and productive despite the pandemic. They added that the experiences lost to remote learning were insignificant, especially compared to the successes in replicating many of the aspects of the project.

“Everybody in my group found afterwards that it was potentially our most memorable class and experience at Yale [despite the pandemic],” Jonathan Altman ’21. “We made the best of the situation and because the potential for this course is that it could be everybody’s best course that they take at Yale, even if it comes up at 80 percent of what it could have been, that’s still pretty good.”

Altman said that one of the advantages of being online was that by the start of the fall semester, many experts and profession-

als were comfortable attending and organizing online meetings — which meant that the students had a broader array of experts than usual to call on for help with their research.

In the capstone project, students working in teams are tasked with helping to solve a public policy issue for a non-profit organization, government body or private sector firm. Past projects include working with UNICEF’s supply division and the United States Special Operations Command.

Despite being remote, some teams were able to replicate the collaborative element of the project, according to Altman.

“One thing our group did really well is that we had really strong collaboration and had a fun and friendly vibe,” Altman said.

Including social elements within classes meant that students and their faculty advisors “formed a really good rapport and it made that team experience aspect of it really good,” Nico Moscoso ’21 said.

While some groups may have been able to replicate many facets of the capstone experience, both Altman and Beneditskdottir recognized that the biggest loss of the year was the seniors’ ability to travel to conduct research.

“Almost every capstone group gets to do some sort of travel, and a lot of people signed up for specific ones because they were under the impres-

sion that they would be able to travel to these places,” Altman said.

Typically, Global Affairs students get to visit their client for three to seven days in the summer before their senior year, or during senior fall break.

“I am certain that some of them are disappointed to not be able to travel in the way that usually is done in the capstone, but at the same time I know many of the [student] project leaders did superb things to try make them feel like they were really in the spots,” Benediktsdottir said.

This included virtual tours of the locations that the students ordinarily would have visited — including Kenya and multiple countries in Latin America.

But Benediktsdottir noted that the travel that seniors usually get to do is only one small part of the experience of being a Jackson student.

“I think the main issue is the cooperation between students to figure out how to solve an issue,” Benediktsdottir said.

Moscoso and Brenda Cachay ’21 agreed that despite all of the challenges that the pandemic has presented, the senior project was a positive experience. Moscoso described it as “as good as you could hope a virtual experience to be.” Cachay said that, despite her worries that the Institute would be unable to attract a diverse group of clients during the pandemic, the projects that students

were able to work on were engaging and compelling.

But both students noted the lack of social interaction was an undeniable loss this year. Ordinarily, they said, students on the same team would spend hours working together in person during the week — which would enable both a social and academic relationship to develop.

They also echoed the sentiments of Benediktsdottir and Altman, suggesting that the element of travel was not as important as it is often made out to be and that, above all, the most important element of the capstone project is dealing with the issue at hand in a collaborative way.

“I certainly don’t feel cheated,” said Moscoso.

Moscoso and Altman also both noted the impact of faculty input on

the capstone project. Altman told the News that Jackson faculty were responsive to emails and provided teams with “tremendous help.”

Andrew Song ’22 expressed disappointment primarily in the impact the pandemic has had on the ability to travel. However, Benediktsdottir suggested that, given the rollout of vaccines in the United States and the possibility of most Yale students being vaccinated relatively soon, travel may be possible next year — although it depends on the state of the pandemic globally.

The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs is in the process of transitioning to a school, which is expected to be completed in 2022.

Contact PHILIP MOUSAVIZADEH at philip.mousavizadeh@yale.edu .

KAI NIP/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Global affairs majors expressed optimism about their capstone projects despite their virtual format.

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“Let's cut energy waste, make our economy the world's most efficient, and give our workers a leg up in the global marketplace.” FRANCES BEINECKE ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST

Mayor announces alternate budget proposals BUDGET FROM PAGE 1 financial dangers that lie ahead for the city. At the center of the $589.1 million proposal is a tax hike of 7.75 percent, which would increase the city’s mill rate — which represents the rate of every $1 taxed for every $1,000 in property value — from 43.88 to 47.28. Elicker has continuously emphasized in the weeks leading up to the announcement that such tax increases would be unavoidable. The city’s expected deficit currently stands at $66 million for fiscal year 2021-22, assuming no further help from the state or Yale.

Beyond taxation, the budget also includes $2.6 million in “unspecified layoffs” for city government employees, as well as the net elimination of 16 currently vacant government positions.

Board of Education funding would remain constant with the “Crisis Budget,” as Connecticut state law prohibits New Haven from cutting education funding any further. According to Elicker, this would still hurt the city’s schools, as fixed costs are expected to rise even if allocated funds do not.

“The financial challenge[s] we face are a result of a structure in the State where municipalities, such as New Haven, cannot adequately collect enough revenue to fund the very services our residents need and many residents in the region rely on,” Elicker wrote in the proposed budget.

Elicker’s “Forward Together Budget,” on the other hand, would not impose a tax increase and would allow the city to continue operating its services as is.

The $606.2 million proposal is reliant on a $53 million combined increase in funding from the state and Yale. The budget represents the sum required to maintain status quo city services.

City officials have aggressively pursued a proposal for increased state funds from the Payment in Lieu of Taxes, or PILOT, program spearheaded by Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Loo-

ney of New Haven. Over 50 percent of property in New Haven is non-taxable, in great part due to the University and Yale New Haven Hospital’s mass holdings. Under the PILOT program, the state is obligated to reimburse municipalities 77 percent of lost tax revenue from non-taxable properties. Due to a lack of funding for the program, however, New Haven is currently only reimbursed for 26 percent of the lost property taxes. Looney’s proposal looks to increase this to 50 percent of the intended 77, which could funnel an additional $49 million into New Haven’s pocket.

The Senate approved the proposal on Monday, but Elicker said there is still the possibility that the state could later decide not to fully fund the proposal. Due to this ongoing uncertainty, Elicker’s administration has continuously sought to pressure the University for an increased voluntary contribution. Elicker said he is on the phone with University President Peter Salovey “weekly, if not more” to try to work out a deal.

Such conversations formed a pillar of Elicker’s mayoral campaign and first term platforms.

Elicker told those at the Monday press conference that the “Forward Together Budget” would rely on Yale making up whatever portion of the $53 million is not met by PILOT. He added that ideally the University’s contribution would be much greater, though he has refrained from saying how much he could request.

“We want to be able to invest in many more programs that will help our city thrive,” Elicker said. “We are cautiously optimistic that both [Yale and the state] will realize that we all need to be a part of a solution that sets us on the right course.”

The city’s current fiscal year budget is $567.9 million, meaning that the “Forward Together Budget” proposal would represent a 6.7 percent increase.

Acting Budget Director Michael Gormany explained that this was due primarily to the city being

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

The simultaneous reveal of two budgets underscores the dire economic decisions ahead for the Elm City. required to meet increased pension payments, paying debt service and meeting obligations regarding employee salaries. He also noted that in both proposed budgets, the pension fund drops its annual rate of return from 7.75 to 7.25 percent.

“What is really driving that increase are fixed costs, and pensions are a very big driver of that,” Gormany said. “We made many cuts in order to minimize that increase.”

Elicker’s announcement has already sparked concern from those who would face the direct consequences of the “Crisis Budget.”

John Jessen, city librarian of the New Haven Free Public Library, told the News that the proposed closure of Mitchell Library would reduce the

library system’s ability to serve the entire city.

“It would be a devastating cut for the community of users,” Jessen told the News. “The libraries in the city of New Haven are perfectly situated geographically to reach the most amount of people.

Cutting off the Mitchell branch would mean the whole west side of the city would not have the services that people in any other part of the city would have.”

Jessen said library staff remain unsure what the closure would mean for employment and distribution of library materials, but he expects layoffs to be “minimal,” and that the majority of them would be the elimination of vacant positions. For now, the library is practicing what he called “parallel planning” — fig-

uring out what it will have to do in the case of either budgets.

He also said he is remaining optimistic that the city will obtain the necessary funds and pass the “Forward Together Budget.”

“I’m hopeful from conversations I’ve had departmentally with the mayor,” he said. “It’s out right now, and everyone’s like ‘We have this amazing budget, and this horrible budget,’ and you just have to stay optimistic and wait until you actually have facts. We hope like hell that [the closure] is not gonna happen, but we’re ready if it does.”

The city must approve a new budget by July 1.

Contact THOMAS.BIRMINGHAM at thomas.birmingham@yale.edu and OWEN TUCKER-SMITH at owen.tucker-smith@yale.edu .

Student body to grow, forcing staffing changes

YALE NEWS

Yale plans to hire a small number of recent graduates from its Ph.D programs to teach specialized upper-level seminars.

FACULTY RATIO FROM PAGE 1 for larger demand for first year and sophomore classes. Tamar Gendler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, told the News that the University is planning to add resources and staff to typically sought after first-year courses such as English 114 and 120, introductory math and introductory language courses.

The University will also hire a small number of carefully selected recent graduates from its Ph.D programs to teach specialized upper-level seminars typically taken by juniors and seniors, freeing up more full-time professors to teach sophomore classes.

“The main thing for students to know and understand is we are putting additional resources in place and we are profoundly committed to making sure the undergraduate experience next year, even in the face of additional students, feels exactly as lively and engaged as it has in years where we

have our standard enrollment levels,” Gendler said.

Gendler also noted that, for the coming year, Yale is hiring additional instructors and adding additional sections “in anticipation of additional student arrivals.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has left the class of 2024 larger than expected as some members of the class of 2023 — who were barred from returning to campus for the fall semester — took leaves of absence for one semester or the whole year.

The class of 2024 now contains 1,759 students, according to Yale registrar data current as of Feb. 1 — a significant increase from the approximately 1,550 students who typically matriculate in a given class.

In September, the News reported that 341 students admitted to the class of 2024 had chosen to take gap years, therefore becoming members of the class of 2025. Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan told the News that the admissions office is committed to admitting a typical num-

ber of students to the class of 2025, which tends to yield 1,550 matriculants. When the students who took leaves of absence are added, the class of 2025 is expected to contain around 1,900 students.

According to Gendler, the University therefore expects that the Yale student body in fall 2021 will be seven to eight percent larger than in a typical year.

“As always, the admissions office is eager to respond to as many impressive students from the widest collection of backgrounds as possible,” Quinlan wrote in an email to the News. “I am delighted and relieved that the admissions office will not need to reduce the number of admissions offers we extend to graduating high school seniors as a result of the pandemic.”

Yale’s student population will remain at this increased size for the next few years. Matthew Jacobson, professor of American studies and history and chair of the FAS Senate, told the News that this enrollment bulge is “a matter of tre-

mendous concern” for faculty. But Gendler said that the University is keeping close track of typical class enrollment patterns to ensure that resources are adequately allocated to account for the increase in students.

This is not the first time that Yale has had to adjust class sizes due to the pandemic. The News reported in December that Yale used most of the funding for professional school TFs on coronavirus-related needs this year. As a result, fewer TFs could be sourced from the University’s professional schools, forcing some classes to reduce enrollment due to limited staffing.

Shiri Goren, director of the Modern Hebrew Program in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, told the News that, to her, the Yale administration seems to be able to accurately predict enrollment patterns and should therefore be able to plan ahead for any problems that might arise from the larger student body.

Goren added that new pre-registration systems in place should allow departments to resolve any last-minute issues with class sizes.

“The pandemic and other serious problems the country is currently facing make any long-term planning quite challenging and even with that my sense is that both Yale College and the FAS Dean’s Office are doing a good job in planning and preparing under such complicated circumstances,” Goren wrote in an email to the News.

Stefanie Markovits, the Director of Undergraduate Studies for English, described in an email to the News the measures that the English Department is taking to accommodate the influx of students. Namely, there will be “more intro level courses than ever before” and a return to pre-pandemic caps on seminars, which are higher than the current caps in place, so that more students can enroll in each class, Markovits said.

And in Political Science, David Simon, the DUS of the Department, noted that the major has

a seminar requirement, so additional faculty to accommodate for the expected increase in demand, is necessary.

“We know that there will likely be a bump in enrollment, but mostly at the first-year level for now,” Simon wrote in an email to the News. “In the coming years, the[re] will be a high demand for faculty advising, especially for senior essays. In addition, we'll need to be able to make sure we can offer enough sections to accommodate demand in our larger lecture classes.”

In order to accommodate all of these needs, Gendler described “terrific longitudinal data” that allows Yale to accurately model enrollment patterns for each class, particularly emphasizing the firstand second-year classes, which will be the largest.

To allow members of those classes to interact with senior faculty, she said that recent Ph.D students, instead of teaching first- and second-year courses, will in many cases be teaching upper-level seminars, allowing ladder faculty who would normally teach those courses to instead teach at the more introductory level.

The University is also hiring instructors in areas that Yale expects to see increased enrollment.

“We’ve given additional resources to each of those [popular first-year classes] … to hire expert instructors now, so that we have a chance to get the people who are most qualified to do that teaching, and we will add proportionate to what typical enrollments have been with a little bit of buffer, additional teachers for each of those introductory-level courses,” Gendler said.

This semester the most popular course at Yale was S&DS 230, “Data Exploration and Analysis.”

Contact AMELIA DAVIDSON at amelia.davidson@yale.edu and MADISON HAHAMY at madison.hahamy@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

FROM THE FRONT

“If you don't have a leg to stand on, you can't put your foot down.” ROBERT ALTMAN AMERICAN FILM DIRECTOR

Yale star Curtis Hall ’22 inks entry-level deal with Boston Bruins HALL FROM PAGE 1 with 22 goals and 16 assists during his time at Yale. In his sophomore campaign, Hall was the NCAA Division I statistical champion for game-winning goals and ranked ninth in the division with a .61 goals per game average. Additionally, the sixfoot-four, 212-pound, Chagrin Falls, Ohio native led the Blue and White in goals and points, and received Second-Team AllECAC and Second-Team All-Ivy League selections.

“I’m versatile. I played center my whole life, and occasionally right-wing in USA tournaments,” Hall told the News in a phone interview. “Me being able to play both positions gives me a good chance to get some games and show what I can do.

The main goal is to be a consistent player in the Bruins’ lineup somewhere down the road.”

While this deal marks a great step forward in his hockey career, it is not Hall’s first professional commitment. The announcement comes fewer than two months after Hall had previously signed a one-year deal with the Providence Bruins, Boston’s American Hockey League affiliate and development team,

earlier this year. Furthermore, the Bruins released the news on March 1, the first day in the NHL that entry-level contracts for next season are eligible for filing.

Hall described himself as a physical player with good offensive and defensive skills.

In a press release published by the Providence Bruins on Jan. 26, Boston Bruins General Manager Don Sweeney commented on the anticipated success of Hall as one of their top prospects.

“Our organization believes Curtis has a bright future with the Bruins and he has our full support as he takes the next steps with his hockey career.”

Sweeney said.

The news of Hall’s signing brought excitement to many of his former teammates, including current Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguin Luke Stevens ’20.

The Yale graduate, who had secured his own professional contract with the Pittsburgh Penguins’ AHL affiliate last August, praised Hall for his talents and expressed enthusiasm for the junior’s future.

“Hallsy was a great player at Yale and really took off his second year at school,” Stevens wrote to the News. “Most importantly, he is a great guy and a great team-

mate. I couldn’t be happier for him and I’m sure he’ll have success at the next level.”

Yale senior winger Dante Palecco ’21 shared similar sentiments, speaking “for the whole team” with regards to the excitement they felt upon learning that Hall had signed with the Bruins.

The New Jersey native not only acknowledged Hall’s skills, but he also commended him for his character off the ice and presence in the locker room.

“He does things with the puck on a daily basis that make you wonder just how he did that and it was a treat to watch him work,” Palecco said. “Definitely going to miss playing with him and having him around the locker room [and] campus, but I know he is going to have a very long, successful career and it is going to be fun to follow.”

Hall’s contract with Providence will end after the 30 games scheduled for this season.

In his first game, he injured his knee and has been doing rehab since then to get back on the ice. Despite this, Hall emphasized that his time with the team was a “great learning experience.” He is currently enrolled in classes as he trains with Providence and reaffirmed that get-

ting his degree is still a “top priority.” He also noted that his time with Providence has been “great in every aspect” and that he is looking forward to contributing “anything [he] can” to the Boston Bruins.

The three-year deal is annually worth $925,000 against the cap.

Contact TRISHA NGUYEN at trisha.nguyen@yale.edu and ÁNGELA PÉREZ at angela.perez@yale.edu .

MUSCOSPORTSPHOTOS.COM

The Yale junior plans on continuing his studies this semester and said that getting a degree is a “top priority.”

State senate approves PILOT proposal PILOT FROM PAGE 1

YALE DAILY NEWS

Over 50 percent of New Haven property is non-taxable, which includes land owned by Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital.

ing for the Payment in Lieu of Taxes Program, PILOT, moving New Haven one step closer to receiving a large influx of money from state coffers.

The Senate approved the bill by a margin of 28-7. If the bill becomes law, it will restructure the existing PILOT program to spread funding more equitably across Connecticut municipalities under a threetiered approach. Under the current program, New Haven receives a 26 percent reimbursement on all of its non-taxable property, like land owned by Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital. In total, over 50 percent of New Haven property is non-taxable, and Looney’s proposal would bring the city’s reimbursement up to 50 percent from the current 26 percent. The proposal would cost the state an estimated $129 mil-

lion, Looney said in an earlier state hearing on the proposal, and would bring an additional $49 million to New Haven annually.

Earlier this month, Looney, along with Mayor Justin Elicker, members of the Board of Alders and other New Haven residents, testified at a hearing in front of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee in favor of the program. Looney called it a necessity for “struggling communities.”

“The existing state policies seem to punish those that successfully work their way out of poverty by clawing back the progress they have made,” Looney said at the hearing. “The purpose of our public assistance programs is to lift people up and help them carve a path for their financial future.”

Though the PILOT proposal is currently advancing through the state legislative process, Elicker said

in a Monday press conference that the route to funding will not be as simple as passing the bill. The mayor said that it is still possible that the state legislature could move against fully funding the proposal during budget discussions in the coming months.

“We hope [the state legislatures] do not, but it is very possible they could reduce the amount of funding that is needed,” Elicker said. “The question for us is: Will the legislature follow through?”

However, Elicker said he was optimistic that the state will do what it needs to do to support New Haven.

Elicker, Looney and other elected officials held an additional press conference on Tuesday to discuss the bill’s passage through the Connecticut state Senate.

Contact THOMAS BIRMINGHAM at thomas.birmingham@yale.edu .

Medically vulnerable students left out of CT’s age-based vaccination plan VACCINE FROM PAGE 1 well as professional child care providers regardless of age, will be eligible to receive the vaccine.

Under this new system, individuals between the ages of 16 and 34 are not expected to be eligible until May 3. That means that medically vulnerable Yalies — students with underlying health conditions that would have qualified them for the vaccine far earlier under Connecticut’s previous vaccine eligibility system — have now largely been pushed to the back of the queue.

Prior to the new statewide vaccination plan, medically vulnerable students were to be vaccinated through Yale Health during the first two weeks of March.

“Only time will tell what will be the most efficient roll out policy,” Maryanne Cosgrove ’21 said. “But every informed body is recommending that [medically vulnerable] people be given priority, and it’s appalling to me that the governor would have the audacity to pretend they don’t exist or that they don’t matter.”

Cosgrove, who is at greater risk for COVID-19 due to health conditions, explained that she would have already been eligible for vaccinations in New Jersey and the greater Philadelphia area, which she usually calls home.

She spent her last semester studying remotely, but she decided to come to New Haven to gain access to library resources for her senior thesis. While making that decision, she was under the impression that Connecticut would roll out a vaccination schedule that would accommodate medically vulnerable individuals like herself.

Currently, she could make the trip back to her home state to be vaccinated, but appointment scheduling is haphazard and she does not want to put family members at risk. In addition to those considerations, the trip would involve a multi-day before- and after-travel quarantine — precious time taken away from a busy semester.

Joaquín Lara Midkiff ’24, vice president of the student advocacy organization Disability Empowerment for Yale and the accessibility and disability policy chair for the Yale College Council, explained that individuals with certain health conditions are not only physically “high-risk” but may face financial insecurity at a higher rate than other populations.

“The governor’s age-based rollout policy is inconsistent to what I believe to be equitable,” Lara Midkiff said.

On Feb. 18 — just days before the governor’s announcement — DEFY was able to secure an agreement with Yale Health to ensure that high-risk individuals would be prioritized in the vaccination queue.

“The governor, in changing directions on vaccine eligibility, expressed the expectation that using age-based categories would simplify and speed distribution of vaccines,” COVID-19 Coordinator Stephanie Spangler told the News.

“I certainly understand the disappointment of those who thought their turn for vaccination would come in the next phase. I am hoping that the governor’s commitment to speed and efficiency, coupled with the Biden administration’s strong focus on increasing vaccine production, will make

vaccination a possibility for our entire community soon.”

Under Connecticut’s previous vaccination plan, Ryan Felner ’24 also would have been eligible for the vaccine, since he is immunocompromised.

For many months, Felner viewed early March as “the finish line,” and he was deeply upset to have been placed at the back of the vaccine line despite his medical vulnerabilities.

“I was angry, for myself, but also for the countless people who suffer from even more severe con-

ditions,” Felner said. “This policy completely leaves them behind, putting them in harm’s way for months longer in many cases. It’s just completely misguided to deny vaccine access to the most medically vulnerable people.”

Both Lara Midkiff and Cosgrove pointed out that the rev i s e d va c c i n a t i o n p l a n neglects not only medically vulnerable individuals under the age of 60, but also frontline workers of non-medical industries who have continued to work in person throughout the pandemic.

“The world would not run without those people working these incredibly important jobs, who are often women, people of color and working class people,” Cosgrove said.

On March 2, President Biden announced that the country was on track to have enough COVID19 vaccines for every adult in the United States by the end of May. Contact JULIA BIALEK at julia.bialek@yale.edu and EMILY TIAN at emily.tian@yale.edu .

REGINA SUNG/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Now, all Yalies will not be eligible to receive vaccines until at least May 3 under Lamont’s new guidelines.

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

ARTS Yale alumni present ‘The WAndering’

BY MARISOL CARTY STAFF REPORTER Yale alumni Calista Small ’14, Jeremy Weiss ’15 and Max Sauberman ’18 are working on a multimedia project called “The Wandering” — inspired by the music of German Romantic composer Franz Schubert.

Small, Weiss and Sauberman designed and produced “The Wandering” as neither an in-person experience nor a live-streamed performance. Rather, it includes a visual album comprising a film and soundtrack, an augmented reality exploration, physical art and other interactive elements. The three received a grant for their project from the Schwarzman Center last November, and the show will open in mid-April. Lara Panah Izadi ‘14, Christine Shaw ‘14, Charlotte McCurdy ‘13, Zach Bell ‘14, Sahil Gupta ‘17, TanTan Wang ‘20 and Daniel Rigberg ‘15 are a part of the project as well. “‘The Wandering’ is a new immersive art piece designed to be consumed at home,” Sauberman said. “We’ve sought to aestheticize Schubert’s art song visually but also thematically, guiding audience members through experiences both tangible and conceptual that align with our mission of creating emotional ties across distance.”

Weiss, who credits Schubert as his inspiration to pursue classical music, is the album’s featured vocalist. In fact, the idea for “The Wandering” initially emerged from Weiss’ plans to perform Schubert’s music on Zoom post-pandemic.

But when he started rehearsing, he realized that audiences were tired of watching music performed on Zoom.

“This is going to be so boring for everyone involved,” Weiss recalled thinking.

“No one, not even my family is going to want to watch me sing Schubert for an

hour over Zoom. So I started thinking about ways that we could innovate.”

Weiss then got together with Small and Sauberman. The producers decided to supplement Schubert’s music with a series of 10-minute-long filmed episodes. Replicat-

ing the format of live performance, the films cannot be paused and must be watched from beginning to end. Viewers can choose when to watch each film, as the show is made to be experienced over four days.

The show opens on April 15, but in the weeks before then, it will undergo

deadline for students to sign up is Friday, March 5.

Small said the film’s storyline is inspired by a letter Schubert wrote to his close friend and possible lover Franz Schober in 1822 titled “My Dream.” In this letter, Schubert says, “When I would sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I would sing of pain, it turned to love. Thus love and pain divided me.”

The story combines realistic and dream-like elements. Small said the main premise follows a character who wanders into a “World of Prism,” where white light is refracted into color and rainbow and “all characters are their most colorful selves.”

The films also thematically reflect Schubert’s lyrics. The visual album features Schubert’s art song — a type of music written for one singer with piano accompaniment.

Weiss said that a German word that appears frequently in his art song is “wunderlich,” which directly translates to “strange” but more accurately means “wondrous strange.”

“We started thinking about why we often label things that are ‘wondrous strange’ as just strange or different, and how we can learn to see wonder in what’s different from us in the world around us,” Weiss said.

In addition to the visual album, “The Wandering” includes aspects of augmented reality. Audiences are encouraged to engage with the films’ themes on a webpage they can access with a password.

“You get to return back to it and think about it and listen to the music again and do these activities,” Small COURTESY OF JEREMY WEISS said. “That’s very, very unique and I’ve never seen that happen in theater before.” participate in workshopping the show.

Undergraduates who sign up for a ticket These students will experience “The to “The Wandering” through their resiWandering” before its release and meet dential colleges will be able to experience with the producers to discuss the show the full show at no cost. and provide feedback. In return, the show’s producers will give the students Contact MARISOL CARTY at suggestions on their own work. The marisol.carty@yale.edu . “workshopping” — a process in which students will experience the show and then give feedback — through the Schwarzman Center.

Earlier this year, the Schwarzman Center sent out a call for 20 students to

Julián Fueyo receives national recognition for composition ‘The Eleventh Heaven’

BY MAIA DECKER STAFF REPORTER Composer Julián Fueyo MUS ’23 is intent on understanding modernity through ancient concepts. Following the premiere of Fueyo’s piece “El Onceavo Cielo,” or “The Eleventh Heaven,” he received national recognition for it as a first-year student at the School of Music.

“The Eleventh Heaven” won two prestigious awards this past year for composition students in the United States: the 68th Annual BMI Student Composer Award and the ASCAP 2020 Morton Gould Young Composer Award.

Fueyo said his piece was inspired by the 11th level of heaven in the Indigenous Nahua culture’s cosmology and the visuals that were preserved from this prehispanic culture. The Nahua people are the largest Indigenous group in Mexico.

“My work is inspired by the motivations behind the decisions that artists took in ancient times,” Fueyo said. “My music tries to explore ancient aesthetics, ideas and understanding in our rapidly changing contemporary culture.”

Fueyo added that it is important to question how human development can affect local and global anthropology.

Fueyo grew up in Tampico, Mexico. He studied piano and violin when he was young and eventually began conducting in high school. During that time, Fueyo often conducted his local orchestra when violence in Tampico from the drug wars at the time prevented its director from attending.

In 2013, Fueyo continued his musical education at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan.

“It was a miraculous thing that I went — it was an adventure, in many ways, a musical and personal adventure,” Fueyo said.

After attending Interlochen, Fueyo studied composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He received several notable awards in Cleveland, including the first prize at the Robert Avalon International Competition for Composers, Abundant Silence Composition Contest and Cleveland Composers Guild Collegiate Composition Contest.

Arseniy Gusev, his composition studio mate at the Cleveland Institute of Music, said that Fueyo’s music and personality “immediately caught [his] attention.” Gusev, who won the Singapore International Piano Competition in February, recently commissioned Fueyo to compose a piece for him to perform.

Gusev said that Fueyo’s art has “a unique sense of beauty,” which Fueyo shows in his music through themes of mythology and visual art. He also said that Fueyo’s “devotion to his creativity and tireless curiosity” leads him to new explorations and discoveries.

During his first year at the School of Music, Fueyo studied under Hannah Lash, associate professor of composition. Lash said Fueyo was “musical, intelligent, curious and ambitious,” and described his music as “lush, harmonic and

often lyrical.”

Fueyo is currently on a gap year. The pandemic is uniquely challenging for composers like Fueyo, who traditionally compose for orchestras and other large groups.

“We’ve had to reinvent ourselves a bit,” Fueyo said.

For example, since certain compositions — especially those including wind instruments or singers — are difficult to perform while adhering to mask-wearing regulations, Fueyo has begun exploring small ensemble and solo pieces.

He is also using the break to think about his future career.

Fueyo mentioned he was excited to collaborate with the “extraordinary community of [passionate] people” at Yale.

In particular, Fueyo is looking to collaborate with a creative writer to produce a song cycle or operetta exploring the role of female leadership in operatic narratives, and he hopes to evaluate current anthropological and cultural phenomena through this piece.

Contact MAIA DECKER at maia.decker@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF DIANA TERRAZAS

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

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ARTS Yale Dance Lab launches ‘Transpositions: dance poems for an online world’

BY TANIA TSUNIK STAFF REPORTER On Feb. 15, Yale Dance Lab released the first two episodes of its 16-part series called “Transpositions: dance poems for an online world” in collaboration with the Yale Schwarzman Center.

The series features weekly digital dance poems in a variety of styles, involving 16 choreographers and 66 dancers from across Yale’s dance community. Created by Emily Coates, director of the dance concentration in the theater and performance studies major, Transpositions presents an innovative response to the challenge of performance arts in a pandemic.

“We wanted to create a project that would keep people dancing, creating and, most importantly, connected to each other,” Coates said. “Transpositions let us research the remote world together and experiment with forms, movements and angles, rather than attempt to recreate dance in its usual studio form in our small home spaces.”

To strive for representation across different genres and disciplines of dance, Coates reached out to dancers from 12 Yale dance groups as well as the New Haven community. Additionally, Coates reached out to choreographers across the world — including New York, Massachusetts, South Africa and Burkina Faso. These performers collaborated over two online sessions. Coates said the choreographers had complete freedom to explore an array of artistic ideas, “from using language and poetic word while dancing to experimenting with partnering via Zoom.”

This collaboration was then extended to a team of nine sound designers from the Yale School of Drama and video artist Kyla Arsadjaja ART ’20, who created original musical parts and edited video footage.

“One of the highlights of Transpositions was the sheer number of artists touched and impacted by this collaboration,” said Jennifer Newman, associate artistic director at YSC. “Because we’re living and creating art mostly in an online world now, it is easier to connect with people worldwide despite social distancing. We were very fortunate to gather talents from across the disciplines and geographic locations.”

Dancer and producer Gabrielle Niederhoffer ’23 also said that she felt “incredibly fortunate” to learn from experienced choreographers from around the world and feel a “sense of the community.”

As a multidisciplinary project, Transpositions integrates dance with music, language and video art.

For example, the second episode — choreographed by Brian Seibert ’97, a lecturer in the Theater and Performance Studies Department — combines historical writings and footage with a contemporary reexamination of dance styles, performed by Yale dancers.

Choreographers aimed to inspire novel ideas about dance and transform the audience’s perception of movement.

“Because of the pandemic, we can’t travel or even walk around as much as we are used to, so instead, we tried to re-explore how we can travel in the little spaces we do have now,” said choreographer Lacina Coulibaly.

After the release of the last episode in May, all 16 dance poems will be united in the form of an anthology and streamed live for the public. Newman said this anthology will “capture a moment in time” and serve as a time capsule of the artistic response to unprecedented times.

Besides celebrating collaborative creation, Transpositions also showcase the beauty and range of choreography.

“Dance can seem very enigmatic for some people at first,” Coates said. “It’s about working through those preconceived ideas which helps guide the audience into the complexities and riches of the dance. And I think that our project

YALE NEWS

Niederhoffer, who participated in five different sessions, noted that each choreographer’s approach was different. She said that while some sessions reflected a regular choreography format, others were more experimental.

“For one of the poems, we had to interpret poetic quotes through the language of our body, to embody the tone, and to improvise based on our own writing.

Our bodies basically became a form of poetry,” Niederhoffer said.

puts a huge array of the dance’s beautiful complexities on display.”

The Yale Dance Lab also launched Dancers’ Debrief series in collaboration with YSC, featuring interviews of dancers from the dance poems.

The Theater and Performance Studies department is located at 220 York St. Contact TANIA TSUNIK at tania.tsunik@yale.edu .

School of Art exhibition opens, encourages reflection

BY ANNIE RADILLO STAFF REPORTER Reflecting on the passage of time and periods of contemplation from last year, School of Art students crafted an exhibition that praises looking backwards called “In Praise of Shadows.”

The exhibition, located in Green Hall, went on view on Feb. 16 and features work by seven master’s degree candidates in painting and printmaking. The exhibition’s pieces revolve around the passage of time and reflection — in response to both life-changing events and moments of stillness.

“This exhibition brings together artists of today, not tomorrow, a collective of painters and printmakers who have found a way to hang on to a shadow,” the exhibition’s curator and guest lecturer Ebony Haynes said.

“Grouped together, this exhibition creates a space where seriality and revision are embraced and where contemplation is long and encouraged.”

Even though the Green Hall exhibition is open to the public, interested viewers must make appointments on the School of Art’s website to see the show.

Time slots for the show are 20 minutes each and are available until Feb. 21. A comprehensive virtual exhibition will launch in early March.

Danielle De Jesus’ ART ’21 art in the exhibition discusses moments from Puerto Rican history. Her

work on display — taking the form of paintings that are 7 feet wide — spans different styles including oil on linen, oil on panel and installations.

“Many of us in the diaspora have had our history hidden from us and are only taught a very small portion of our story in school both in Puerto Rico and the diaspora,” De Jesus said. “So I can only hope that

De Jesus added that she was particularly excited about the work of Alina Perez ART ’21 and Leyla Faye ART ’21 in the exhibition, and she said their use of color and light inspire her.

Another student, Dala Nasser ’21, chose not to showcase her work — despite original plans to do so — following the killing of Lokman Slim, a Lebanese critic of the militant extremist group Hezbollah.

“As a friend of Lokman’s and a Lebanese citizen, I find it paramount to exercise my right as an artist with a voice to choose silence in moments where words fail, where solidarity is needed, and abstain from exhibiting in mourning of this truly horrendous crime,” Nasser said. “I hope this gesture carries some of the weight that this incredibly courageous individual lived by.”

Rather than showing her own art, Nasser put up a framed photo of Slim and his dog with a handwritten caption saying, “In Loving Memory of Lokman COURTESY OF JUN JUNG, NICK MASSARELLI AND MIANWEI WANG Slim 1962-2021.”

De Jesus said she thinks all featured artmy work will inspire Puerto Ricans to question the ists are “telling their personal stories” through their relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S. as its work. For Haynes, these stories are glimpses into the colonial subject.” past that are full of potential.

De Jesus’ paintings include scenes from the Ponce “Shadows, paradoxically, cast light on things Massacre in Puerto Rico, a protest against a former almost forgotten,” Haynes said. “And how rich in the Puerto Rican governor, the Puerto Rican parade in shadows is the place of time and memory.”

Bushwick, Hurricane Maria and “perreo” — a sensual dance performed to reggaeton music — held in Contact ANNIE RADILLO at this instance as a political demonstration. annie.radillo@yale.edu .

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Anticoagulant use soon after hospitalization can reduce death risk in COVID-19 patients

BY MAI CHEN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER A recent study involving researchers at the School of Medicine found that prescribing anticoagulants could be effective in preventing COVID-19 deaths.

The paper was published this month in the British Medical Journal and shows that patients given preventative doses of anticoagulants — drugs that prevent blood clotting — within the first 24 hours of being hospitalized with COVID-19 have a mortality rate that is 30 percent lower than that of patients who are not given this medication. The research was done in collaboration with experts at the School of Medicine, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

“We noticed that early on in the coronavirus pandemic, deaths from COVID-19 were partially attributed to the formation of blood clots that have led to more serious thromoblic events like lung failure, heart attack and stroke,” Chris Rentsch, lead author of the study and assistant professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said. “These cases were quite common in patients with severe cases of COVID-19. We thought to ask the question … anticoagulants prevent the formation of blood clots in COVID-19 patients, which might confer benefit in terms of protecting COVID-19 patients from mortality.”

In order to conduct this study, the researchers drew upon real-world observational data from electronic medical records from healthcare groups within the VA, the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, from March 1 to July 31 of 2020.

Of the 4,297 patients included in the study who were hospitalized for COVID-19 during that time period, 84 percent received prophylactic anticoagulation medication of either heparin or enoxaparin within 24 hours of being hospitalized.

These individuals who were able to receive anticoagulation medicine were closely observed, to keep track of who died or experienced serious bleeding within 30 days of hospital admission. The observations were then compared to

data from patients who did not receive anticoagulants in the first 24 hours of hospital admission.

“One of the most challenging things about using observational data is having to account for confounding information,” Amy Justice, one of the authors of the study and a professor at the School of Medicine, said.

“If you don’t account for that, the analysis may appear to show that either benefit or harm is associated with a medication, when in reality it has more to do with the way that medication is prescribed to specific individuals with preexisting conditions.”

In order to overcome the issues associated with confounding results, where extra variables could complicate explanations for an observed relationship between two variables, the data were randomized prior to analysis in order to reduce bias.

According to Rentsch, there was an overwhelmingly large number of people from which they could have possibly extracted data. The excess of potential data and the need to quickly find evidence amid the increasing impact of the pandemic also contributed to the difficulty of data collection, processing and interpretation.

The study found that 14.3 percent of patients who received prophylactic, or preventative, anticoagulation and 18.7 percent of patients who did not receive the medication died within thirty days of hospital admission.

From these numbers, the researchers concluded that there was an absolute relative risk decrease of 27 percent.

Rentsch explained that the researchers were “mostly surprised by how robust the results were

with regards to the number of sensitivity analyses they performed.”

“We conducted around 10 sensitivity analyses to see if our estimates from the primary analyses changed under different sets of assumptions,” he said. “Our primary conclusions did not change in any of the additional analyses undertaken.”

The unchanging nature of the primary conclusions therefore suggests that the results can withstand scrutiny.

Matthew Freiberg, professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Vanderbilt University and one of the study authors, said that the results were not surprising due to previously known information about blood clotting complications in COVID-19.

“Our hypotheses were that treating patients with prophylactic anticoagulation would lead to a lower risk of mortality — likely due to reducing some of the risk associated with a hypercoagulable state,” Freiberg wrote in an email to the News. “This is conducive with what we know from clinical observations, including autopsy data, that suggests that people who have severe covid often have an incredible amount of clotting, both in venous and arterial systems, so there was already a fair amount of concern that covid might affect people with severe diseases.”

To further develop this study, the researchers are also interested in determining whether providing anticoagulation at higher doses provides any further benefit than the prophylactic doses used upon initial hospitalization.

Rentsch said the researchers are also considering repeating their study with individuals who have been on full dose blood thinning medications prior to getting COVID-19, to determine if outcomes would differ in that case.

“We eagerly await the results of ongoing clinical trials, particularly those investigating whether this therapy should be given to non-hospitalized people newly diagnosed with COVID-19,” Rentsch said.

As of Thursday evening, there have been 28.4 million COVID-19 cases in the United States.

Contact MAI CHEN at mai.chen@yale.edu .

YALE NEWS

Yale team develops heart failure algorithm to inform clinical decision making

BY MARIA FERNANDA PACHECO STAFF REPORTER

ZIHAO LIN/CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATOR

Up to 50 percent of heart failure patients who are discharged in the United States are readmitted within six months of leaving the hospital. To lower this figure and improve patient outcomes, Yale physicians have built an algorithmically-based system to guide clinical decision making.

Due to the complicated nature of heart failure, whether someone goes on a transplant list or is prescribed a specific treatment course, for example, is determined based on individual risk assessments. But studies have shown that most clinical predictors physicians rely on for these assessments perform “about as well as a coin toss,” according to Tariq Ahmad, medical director of Yale’s Advanced Heart Failure program.

Unsatisfied with these indicators, Ahmad collaborated with colleagues F. Perry Wilson, director of Yale’s Clinical and Translational Research Accelerator, and Nihar Desai, associate chief of the Section of Cardiovascular Medicine and associate professor of medicine, to build a new system that helps clinicians make better decisions when it comes to treatment for heart failure patients.

“Every patient should be treated with the best possible treatment option,” Ahmad said. “And if there’s no other option, that should also be made clear to the patient. If they have a 90 percent risk of death, you should tell the patient that.”

Ahmad and the other researchers worked together to harness the power of data-driven medical decision-making aids to deliver “Best Practice Alerts,” which are based on key information from patients’ electronic health records and compute calculated risks of one-year mortality — or a patient’s odds of dying within one year.

The hope is that these alerts, which are currently being tested within the Yale New Haven Health System as part of the Risk EValuation and its Impact on ClinicAL Decision Making and Outcomes in Heart Failure, or REVeAL-HF, clinical trial, will provide personalized treatment recommendations to physicians and ultimately yield improved patient outcomes.

“It can be hard for doctors and other providers to know what to expect when they’re seeing a patient at a single point in time, because patients can decline quite quickly, and it can be unexpected,” Wilson said. “When we set out to do REVeAL-HF, we had two main motivations. One was to see if we could design a predictive tool that would really accurately predict mortality in patients with heart failure, but I think even more importantly, we wanted to determine if the sharing of that information with the doctor makes a difference.”

Ahmad said that, currently, the imprecision of other clinical descriptors often leaves too much open to subjectivity. While physicians are highly skilled, there are limits to the level of objectivity that the human mind can retain in life-or-death situations.

Nathan Novemsky, professor of marketing and psychology and an expert in the psychology of judgment and decision making, told the News that even though the human brain is able to pick up on several important pieces of information, it is not exactly wired to extract the precise correlation between each different indicator and specific outcome in the same way that computational methods can.

Cardiac diagnoses often involve a complex mix of factors, and doctors need to look at many biomarkers to understand what is going on, Novemsky said. Though he acknowledged that there are a host of ways in which human doctors are far superior to artificial intelligence,

when it comes to computing figures like risk factors, algorithms can often outperform most experts in ascertaining a patient’s diagnosis.

“There are just certain combinations of information that, when done intuitively, are just not as accurate as when done mechanically,” Novemsky said. “Excel, it turns out, can do it a lot better than the human mind [in those calculations].”

Because REVeAL-HF is a randomized trial, clinicians within YNHHS are being selected at random to receive these Best Practice Alerts. This will allow for the team to evaluate how patients who were treated based on these prognosis risk factors performed compared to those who did not.

In terms of patient recruitment, the REVeAL-HF system has been designed to automatically recruit those over the age of 18 who are admitted into the health system with blood tests that point to heart failure. The trial will end within the next couple of weeks, at which point the team will look at several endpoints to gauge the effectiveness of the alerts — including mortality rates, readmission incidence and length of hospital stay. “[Through these alerts,] we’re hoping that heart failure patients are going to be discharged on better medication, that they’ll be referred to specialists more often and that this can lead to an increase in appropriate uses of therapies,” Ahmad said.

He noted the team has completed the enrollment of over 2,200 patients in one year — a rate he said is “unheard of.” The first patient was randomly selected for the trial in November 2019.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the country for men and women.

Contact MARIA FERNANDA PACHECO at maria.pacheco@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 9

“I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.” ARTHUR YOUNGMAN AMERICAN COMEDIAN

Spring semester break days off to shaky start

LOGAN HOWARD/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

The YCC collected comments from students who had issues on the first break day.

BY MADISON HAHAMY AND LUCY HODGMAN STAFF REPORTERS While a Jan. 29 email from Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun advertised break days as “a chance for rest and renewal,” class schedules and, in some cases, unaccommodating professors made the first break of the semester less relaxing than some students anticipated.

The first of five break days interspersed throughout the semester took place on Monday, Feb. 22, meaning that faculty were expected to cancel both classes and assignments on that day, as well as assignments and assessments on the day that followed. But students told the News

that some professors continued to schedule classes and work — and even for those with no classes, the day was spent studying.

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t meaningfully restful and it reminded me of the stress we will have to endure during the spring semester due to the lack of a cohesive break,” said Christion Zappley ’24, who is also staff producer for the Podcast Desk of the News. “It’s important for professors to respect the no-work policies because it’s inevitable for students to burn out when doing work nonstop like this, especially in the middle of a pandemic.”

On the break day, Yale College Council Vice President Reilly Johnson ’22 asked undergrad-

uates via social media to notify her of any break day violations from professors. Within 24 hours, she received 18 submissions that detailed how professors allegedly rescheduled or held Monday classes or had large assignments due Monday or Tuesday.

Chun, however, told the News that, while he was aware of “some deviations from our recommendations,” he had also heard in those cases that every professor asked by students to accommodate the break day ultimately did so.

Chun also noted a week-long break was not an option for administrators and the break days were only added for “some improvement over the fall term.”

“The one-week spring break is not feasible because then we would have to do a reset quarantine because there is no way to prevent a small number of students from traveling,” he told the News. “This decision was not arbitrary either. It was recommended by the public health folks, and many of our peer schools are doing similar things.”

YCC Academics Director Saket Malhotra ’23 said that YCC anticipated reports of faculty violations and prioritized student self advocacy accordingly. The YCC posted a self-advocacy guide on their social media platforms, which Malhotra described as a “concentrated effort by students to use their own power in numbers, and to use the influence of other Yale

faculty, like DUSes and academic deans to get their professors to abide by Dean Chun’s guidelines.”

Malhotra acknowledged that many professors “have set schedules they’d like to follow, made pre COVID,” and that it “may be beneficial for professors who know their content to have control over their class schedule.” However, he emphasized that sticking to a pre-pandemic class plan prevents adaptation to the current public health environment.

In the future, Johnson said, Yale should use stronger language in its break day policies and give administrators the ability to enforce these policies.

“I hope that professors and staff will treat future break days, and the students that need them, with more respect,” she added.

Looking ahead to the remaining four break days of the semester, Malhotra said he hopes that Chun will take stronger measures to ensure that break days are used for their intended purpose.

Katherine Du ’22, the outreach and communications director of the Yale Student Mental Health Association and the former mental health chair of the YCC, described the fall semester, which had no days off between the start of term and November break, as feeling “a bit like a marathon the whole way through.”

The break days, Du said, are “a great way for Yale to show that they care about their students,” in par-

ticular because the spring semester is during the latter half of the academic year. Du urged professors to “show some empathy to students” by not assigning work due on or after the break days.

According to Zappley, however, “there was no difference in what my day looked like on the break day compared to an average Monday in regards to coursework.” Zappley focused on “catching up on reading and doing work that I had due for the next day” during his time away from classes.

For Ryan Thoreson, clinical lecturer in law, the break day was much needed for students and professors alike.

The day off allowed him to check in with teaching fellows in his lecture course — Theories, Practices and Politics of Human Rights — and also to take a breather in a “full speed ahead” semester.

While he acknowledged that the break days might make some sections of his lecture have assignments due that the other students will not have to submit on a given week, he considered that to be “a small price to pay.”

“If we can’t have a spring break, I feel like carving out days is important,” Thoreson added.

The next official break day will be on Tuesday, March 9.

Contact MADISON HAHAMY at madison.hahamy@yale.edu and LUCY HODGMAN at lucy.hodgman@yale.edu .

Valley Street to receive $2 million in traffic safety improvements

BY ISAAC YU STAFF REPORTER According to officials, drivers will not be racing down Valley Street for much longer.

On Tuesday evening, public officials invited residents to a Zoom meeting to suggest traffic safety changes including raised intersections along Valley Street, which runs through the residential neighborhood of Westville.

This was the third major corridor development meeting presented by the Engineering and Transportation, Traffic and Parking Departments in the last month.

“We’re trying to focus on the areas where, throughout the city, we see the most frequent issues around dangerous driving and significant traffic,” Mayor Justin Elicker said at the meeting.

Giovanni Zinn, who leads the Engineering Department, called Valley a “high priority” corridor, noting that his department’s focus on Valley Street comes after strong advocacy from the Westville Community Management Team. The city has acquired $2 million for improvements from the Connecticut Local Transpor-

tation Capital Improvement Program, which will fund the entirety of the Valley project.

With the funding, Zinn’s department plans to install several raised intersections in Westville, which are intended to reduce traffic speeds in a similar fashion to the Whalley Avenue speed tables Zinn presented last week. Speed tables, which are longer versions of speed bumps, are also a possibility for Valley’s final design. Overall, Zinn emphasized that the traffic-calming infrastructure will help make Westville a safer residential area.

“It really messages to people that if you want to come down Valley Street, respect the fact that it is a neighborhood, as opposed to a speedway,” Zinn said during Tuesday’s meeting.

As with the Quinnipiac Avenue and Whalley Avenue projects, residents will be able to use a newly-introduced online comment tool to pinpoint areas of safety concern near Valley Street on a map. This will allow residents to notify officials of changes they would like to see in their neighborhoods.

Residents of Valley Street also commented on other suggested

traffic safety changes that were implemented in recent years. Carolyn Lusch worked with her CMT to request a “No Turn on Red” sign at the stoplight at Blake Street and Valley Street, though additional requests to reduce that intersection’s curb radius are still pending. At Tuesday’s event, resident Paul Chambers said that he worked as chair of the Westville CMT to request a crosswalk near 120 Valley St., an elderly housing unit.

Although Chambers said it took six years for the request to be completed, he said that speeds have “come down considerably.”

Then, Westville Ward 30 Alder Honda Smith expressed optimism about the Valley Street project’s potential impacts, saying that residents have been waiting for these changes for “such a long time.”

She also suggested that additional bumpouts be added along the curb to prevent parked cars from blocking drivers’ sight lines.

“I do personally believe that the raised intersections will slow traffic tremendously,” Smith said. “This is not going to be a speed haven for people to drive fast — I have confidence that this will be one of the most beautiful streets ever.”

JESSIE CHEUNG/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Residents along Valley Street say that rampant speeding in their neighbourhood has gone on for too long.

After his department uses residents’ feedback to produce a final design, Zinn said, the city will hold an additional meeting in April to present the design.

Resident Iva Johnson expressed excitement about the proposed ideas. She said she also hopes to see the implementation of interim solutions to improve traffic safety before the changes in Valley Street are completed.

“I just want to jump up and down and act like a three year old, because I’m so happy that we’re going to have a neighborhood … where there’s not going to be racing cars,” Johnson said.

“Families and children will feel safer.”

Valley Street’s safety improvements are scheduled to be installed by the spring of 2022.

Contact ISAAC YU at isaac.yu@yale.edu .

Seventeen juniors, 47 seniors inducted into Phi Beta Kappa honor society

BY EMILY TIAN STAFF REPORTER Phi Beta Kappa, an academic honor society with chapters at college campuses nationwide, announced a new class of 17 juniors and 47 seniors last Friday.

Elections to choose the next class are held three times for each graduating class, at the beginning of junior year, the beginning of senior year and Commencement.

The sole criterion for election to membership is a student’s academic record while at Yale: elections are based upon the percentage of straight As in a student’s Yale grades. The juniors were elected as a part of their first round of inductions, and the seniors were elected for their class year’s second round.

Mary Orsak ’22, a Russian major who began studying the language as a first year at Yale, said that she knew very little about the honor society prior to receiving a congratulatory notice from Dean of Academic Programs and Associate Dean of Yale College George Levesque last week.

“I texted my suitemates, and one asked if it was a sorority,” Orsak

said. “This is probably the closest I’ll get to being in Greek life.”

Students become eligible for election to Phi Beta Kappa when they have finished four terms of enrollment, which includes terms spent abroad but excludes Yale Summer Session.

Qualifications for membership are slightly more rigid than Yale’s own grading scale.

Courses taken on a Credit/D/ Fail basis are included in the calculations as non-A grades, while passing marks on courses graded solely on a pass/fail basis are not included. Courses taken abroad — even if they earn Yale College credit — do not count toward Phi Beta Kappa calculations.

During the first election, in accordance with “local tradition,” around 15 students are elected, and around 50 to 60 students are elected in the second election, according to Levesque. No more than a total of 10 percent of each class is ultimately inducted into the society after the third election. The overall number of students elected into the society last year and this year resembles that of previous years.

Because of the pandemic and the universal pass/fail grading policy that was adopted during the previous spring term, however, PBK undergraduate officers made a few adjustments for elections.

Last year, the third election for the class of 2020 was based on seven terms of enrollment, instead of the usual eight, due to COVID19. The same will hold true of the third election for the class of 2021. The two elections that were announced Friday would have typically taken place in fall 2020.

“Doing so allows the chapter to base those elections on four and six terms of enrollment, respectively, which follows past precedent,” Levesque wrote in an email to the News.

Brian Sun ’22, a mathematics major, indicated that he had “pretty adequate mathematical preparation” prior to coming to Yale and felt supported by the Mathematics Department throughout his time at Yale to merit the honor.

PBK inductee Steven Ma ’22 wrote to the News that studying remotely during the pandemic, though challenging, did not seriously affect his academic plans.

“While it’s certainly been tougher to study at home without in person classes and interactions, my academic plans haven’t been too impacted by the pandemic, as I haven’t taken a gap semester, and I am lucky that my home situation allows me to primarily focus on my classes and research,” Ma wrote to the News.

Alden Tan ’22, a computer science and economics major who was inducted during the first junior election last week, said that he has been studying remotely from Singapore since last March — noting the challenges of attending office hours, enrolling in synchronous classes and staying connected to his friends in college while on a 13-hour time difference.

“As an international student, the concept of liberal arts was unfamiliar to me before I came to the US, but I have come to greatly appreciate and value the broadbased education that Yale offers, where I can explore a diversity of fields, in addition to pursuing my major in depth,” Tan wrote in an email to the News.

Contingent on COVID-19 restrictions, a reception and

ceremony is currently being planned for the fall semester.

Rohit Giridharan ’22 wrote to the News that he was glad to be “recognized in an official capacity” and have the opportunity to meet other students in PBK. Although primarily seen as an additional academic distinction, affiliation with PBK will also include invitations to receptions and an annual banquet for active and alumni members. In addition to the induction ceremonies, the chapter hosts a number of events during which it presents the William Clyde DeVane Award to Yale faculty for distinguished teaching and scholarship and the Joseph W. Gordon Award to a Yale graduate to honor their contributions to the arts and sciences.

The Alpha of Connecticut chapter of Phi Beta Kappa — Yale’s chapter — was founded in April 1780, and is the second oldest chapter in the organization following the founding chapter at the College of William and Mary.

Contact EMILY TIAN at emily.tian@yale.edu .

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS

“Success is not an accident.”

Brady’s 1999 donation set up squash center

COURTESY OF YALE ATHLETICS

The Brady Squash Center now serves as a home for Yale’s varsity players, New Haven youth and competitors from around the world.

SQUASH FROM PAGE 10 create the new center. Though Brady thrived on playing American squash, Chauncey mentioned that Brady was “interested in modern squash,” a reference to international-style play, because of the global nature of the sport. Brady was a very international figure in U.S. politics, most known for “Brady Bonds,” his debt-reduction strategy in Latin America during his time as secretary of treasury.

Chauncey mentioned Brady’s identity as an international figure — setting his sights on the international aspects of squash followed naturally.

Chauncey convinced Brady to give a major gift of $3 million.

“When I was first approached about the possibility of creating the number-one squash facility in the world at Yale, it had immediate appeal,” Brady told the Yale Bulletin at the opening of the center in 2000.

According to Chauncey, in order to create a first-class squash facility, having at least 15 courts is essential. Squash teams carry 18 players, with two players to a court, so for both the men’s and women’s teams to practice simultaneously, a facility would need approximately 15 courts. Former Yale squash head coach Dave Talbott, who recently

retired after 38 years with the Blue and White, also mentioned how revolutionary the center was when it opened.

“We were the first to really build a big international squash center with more than six or eight courts — 15 courts, three exhibition courts with all of them having stands,” Talbott said. “It’s just an awesome center.”

Harrison Gill ’22, current captain of Yale’s men’s squash team, also credits Brady for making New Haven a major center of U.S. squash.

Yale and New Haven regularly host events like the U.S. Junior Open Squash Tournament that draw thousands of squash players from around the world to the Elm City. Chauncey said that visitors traveling to New Haven for Yale-hosted squash tournaments account for more hotel nights than anytime other than commencement.

“Because of how big the facility is, it allows for both national and international squash tournaments to happen multiple times a year, which definitely is a stimulus to the local economy,” Gill said.

Is sports betting in CT imminent?

BETTING FROM PAGE 10 the University of Connecticut, expressed his strong opposition to intercollegiate sports betting at the hearing Tuesday morning.

Currently, laws in several nearby states that include many of Yale’s Ivy League opponents, including New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, permit sports betting but prohibit bettors from putting wagers on in-state intercollegiate teams. A bettor in Rhode Island, for example, cannot bet on Providence College or Brown University but would be allowed to bet on games that feature teams from the other 49 states.

“If collegiate sports betting is legalized,” Eskin stated in his testimony, “UConn and the other collegiate sports programs in Connecticut will have to greatly expand education, training and monitoring efforts as we endeavor to protect student-athletes and the integrity of intercollegiate sporting events played in Connecticut.”

Yale Athletics did not send any representatives to the hearing.

However, Nick Wojcik, a writer for odds.com, told the News that policymakers in states with laws against in-state collegiate sports betting “have changed tune” as they realize the potential for significant increases in revenue from big bettors who want to place wagers on hometown teams.

For more, see yaledailynews. com/blog/category/sports.

Contact DEAN CENTA at dean.centa@yale.edu .

Stu Comen, sporting a Yale jersey with signatures from the 2012-13 men's national champion squad, is a chef in Silliman and an avid Yale hockey fan.

FANS FROM PAGE 10 The Ivy League ultimately canceled all athletic competition for the entirety of the 2020-21 academic year, causing the Hamden native to have some free time on his hands.

Cohen was “especially bummed out” because he planned to bring his grandkids to Youth Day at the Yale Bowl.

“They have been to hockey games but with their Saturday activities, getting them to the Bowl has been impossible,” Cohen said.

Cohen said that he misses

the friends that he sees at these events in addition to missing the actual games. With Facebook groups, however, where Cohen and his friends mostly complain about no sports and reminisce about old games and good times, they are able to stay in touch.

Although his wife, Elaine, does not join Cohen at the Yale Bowl, she still roots for the boys in blue from home.

“I look forward to Stu’s calls from the games and his Facebook updates,” she told the News.

Cohen is not the only Bulldog fan with a career-tie to the Uni-

“At first, the whole logic was ‘Well, you know, you could easily get a college kid to shave points off or whatever for his personal gain,’” Wojcik said. “But now I think that's kind of ridiculous to think.”

Under the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, or PASPA, sports betting was illegal for the most part outside of Nevada. However, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned PASPA in 2018, allowing sports betting to be legislated by individual states.

Sports betting is not yet legalized in Massachusetts or Connecticut and is only offered in limited in-person capacities in New York.

Rhode Island and New Hampshire are currently the only states in the New England area with fully operational legal online sports betting.

Wojcik explained how, in his opinion, Connecticut’s entry into this market would not only boost revenue but increase tourism as well.

“If it's marketed correctly, tourism will definitely be a thing,” Wojcik said. “People will be traveling to Connecticut just to place bets … You will see more traffic on an NFL Sunday if New York and Massachusetts don’t have it.”

Some members who sit on the committee, like Rep. Michael DiMassa of New Haven and West Haven, are skeptical of sports wagering being allowed in Connecticut this legislative session. “[There is a] 25 percent [chance sports betting passes] to be hon-

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

While the Mohegan Tribe has come to an agreement with Gov. Lamont on sports betting, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation is not yet in agreement.

Superfans missing the Bulldogs

COURTESY OF STU COHEN

STEPHEN CURRY AMERICAN PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL PLAYER

versity. He is not even the only Yale superfan named Stu. Stu Comen is a chef in Silliman and an avid Yale Hockey fan.

Comen told the News that growing up in Hamden fostered his relationship with Yale from an early age.

“I was always a Yale fan, but I only started following Yale hockey after becoming part of the faculty,” Comen said. “Silliman used to be the closest college to Ingalls, so many of the hockey players came to eat dinner here.”

Comen has been working for Yale since 1979 and in Silliman since 1983.

Comen explained how he developed a good rapport with Yale hockey players because he made their dinners before watching them play. He still stays in touch with some of the Bulldogs.

“I still exchange holiday cards with Brad Dunlap [’98],” Comen said.

Dunlap was a forward on the Yale men’s hockey team.

The 2012-13 Yale hockey team gifted Comen a Yale jersey with all their signatures before they went on to win the NCAA championships. No jersey is complete without the name on the back: This one has his nickname, “Chef Stu,” along with the number 59 because of his birth year.

Comen told the News that he recently watched an ECAC game on TV, and said that “with no fans there, it wasn’t the same.”

“If there was a game, I would be there,” Comen said. “I understand that the Ivy League is education first, athletics second.”

The Eastern College Athletic Conference only includes four teams this season because some institutions opted out of competition due to COVID-19.

Contact MELANIE HELLER at melanie.heller@yale.edu .

est because there are a lot of outliers that have to be worked out,” DiMassa told the News.

One of the main outliers DiMassa described to the News includes negotiations with tribal entities, who own the casinos in Connecticut.

While the Mohegan Tribe has come to an agreement with Lamont on sports betting, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation is not yet in agreement. Chairman of the Mashantucket Pequot Gaming Commission Rodney Butler spoke at the public hearing Tuesday expressing support for SB 146 and said that the governor’s office and tribal entities are “close” to reaching a deal.

Butler also noted that this deal is about “fairness and equity” for the Mashantucket Pequot tribe.

He said the deal can help provide “funding [for] our healthcare for our tribal elders, funding education for our tribal youth. For providing public safety. We don’t have a tax base. We can’t increase taxes.”

Rob Gallagher, a pit manager at Mohegan Sun who spoke on behalf of the Mohegan Tribe at Tuesday’s hearing, also stressed the economic importance of sports betting to the Mohegan Tribe.

“By passing online gaming and online sports wagering, you'll make it easier for our team to withstand a downturn in the future and also do more for the state of Connecticut in the years ahead,” Gallagher said in testimony. Gallagher spoke about the importance of revenue for the tribe given losses this past year because of COVID-19.

Once the negotiations between the governor’s office, Mashantucket Pequot Tribe and the Mohegan Tribe are complete, the compact will be sent to the legislature for approval.

State residents who think they might have a gambling problem can contact the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling by calling (888) 789-7777 or can text “CTGAMB” to 53342.

Contact DEAN CENTA at dean.centa@yale.edu, JAMES RICHARDSON at james.richardson@yale.edu and ALVARO PERPULY at alvaro.perpuly@yale.edu .

SAAC writes letter to presidents LETTER FROM PAGE 10 The SAAC Presidents were able to circumvent this process by banding together and getting Harris to present their proposal that all students affected by COVID-19 get the chance to play as graduate students directly to the Council of Presidents.

After the presidents saw the proposal, they sent it to the policy committee for a final review before making a ruling. The SAAC Presidents were advised by a member of the policy committee to compile a survey of what all student-athletes thought about the graduate exception for all affected students — to further build their case for a final meeting before the decision was made. Over 1,500 student-athletes responded to the survey, 82 percent of whom said they would utilize the exception, and 97 percent of whom expressed support for a fifth-year graduate competition exception, Bhargava said.

Bhargava said that the Council of Presidents had scheduled a final meeting for Feb. 22 to discuss this change but that they were surprised with an email from Harris on Feb. 11 announcing that the Presidents had

granted the exception to senior student-athletes. The Feb. 22 meeting did not take place.

Harris sent the email to SAAC Presidents around 30 minutes before other senior athletes were informed of the change by their respective athletic departments according to Cassavant.

“I think it was hinted at that [the Ivy League was] going to find some type of compromise,” Pryce said.

Still, Casavant and Pryce agreed that the decision — however quickly the league might have moved — still felt late because the only group that was granted an exception would not be able to take full advantage of the opportunity due to the timing of the announcement.

The Ivy League referred the News to the statement that was sent to student-athletes regarding the Council’s decision.

Without the exception, all athletes competing in the Ivy League must be undergraduates who use their eligibility over eight semesters of actual enrollment.

Contact EUGENIO GARZA GARCÍA at eugenio.garzagarcia@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF IVY LEAGUE

Ivy League presidents ultimately agreed on a compromise: a more restrictive waiver limited to graduating seniors.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 11

NEWS

“I’m in love with what a high heel does to a leg: how it makes a woman or a man feel. It’s empowering.” BILLY PORTER AMERICAN ACTOR

YUAG gets new Kline and Rothko pieces

COURTESY OF YUAG

The pieces come from the Lang collection of 20th-century art, a private collection developed by the Lang family.

BY ANNIE RADILLO STAFF REPORTER On Feb. 25, the Friday Foundation — a foundation dedicated to supporting arts organizations — donated a collection of works by abstract impressionist artists Mark Rothko and Franz Kline to the Yale University Art Gallery.

The gift honors the legacy of late philanthropists Jane Lang Davis and Richard E. Lang. The Lang family has deep ties to Yale, with multiple alumni in their

extended family. Contained in the gift are four works by Kline — including a painting and three works on paper — and two paintings by Rothko. These pieces hail from the Lang collection, a renowned private collection of 20th-century art. They offer great insights into both painters’ artistic process and the evolution of their respective styles.

“I think what’s really delightful about [the pieces] is that they show these artists’ progression from an early point in their

career,” said Cynthia Schwartz, a conservator at the YUAG. The two Rothko pieces mark a new phase in Rothko’s artistic career. The first piece, an untitled painting from 1941-42, is now the oldest Rothko piece in the YUAG’s collection. Schwartz said this painting is an early example of what she described as Rothko’s “mythological biomorphic period,” a period during which he fixated on mythological elements in his art.

The second painting, Rothko’s “No. 11 (Yellow, Green, and Black)” from 1950, is now the earliest example in the YUAG’s collection of Rothko’s color field paintings, which embody his signature style of abstract blocks of color.

Rothko would continue to employ this style throughout the rest of his career, Schwartz added.

Even though the two paintings are separated by a decade and vary in artistic style, they are both divided loosely into three registers, or vertical sections, and use similar shades of greens and blues to split up the sections.

Keely Orgeman, YUAG’s curator of modern and contemporary art, said it was interesting how Rothko’s compositional format from earlier periods carried over to his later work.

One of the Kline paintings included in the collection, called “Portrait of Nijinski,” is also from an early period in the artist’s career. Like the Rothko pieces, it contains elements that Kline would continue to explore in his career. The painting’s subject — ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinski of the Ballet Russes — is a recurring figure in Kline’s later works.

“He was fascinated,” said Elizabeth Hodermarsky, the Sutphin family curator of prints and drawings at the YUAG. “[Kline] went back again and again and again to paint this figure, on both canvas and paper.”

Theresa Fairbanks Harris, the YUAG’s chief paper conservator, said that one of Kline’s paper works in the gift is a 11-by-8.5-

inch oil and ink piece speculated to be a painting of Nijinski.

This piece is nearly identical in design to a larger enamel on canvas housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The sketch is drawn on common paper and contains graphite grid marks on top of the paper.

Harris said these markings indicate Kline’s plans to transfer the design on a larger canvas.

“He’s not like Pollock, throwing paint down. It’s very, very planned, and controlled, and very subtle and very beautiful,” Harris said. “That’s the wonderful thing about works on paper and drawings, is they give you an idea of the artist’s first ideas.

It’s a way to understand their thought process and how they develop a design.”

Schwartz said Rothko’s 1941 untitled painting offers a similar glimpse into the artist’s careful process. Using infrared, she and

her colleagues discerned Rothko’s “underdrawings,” or the charcoal sketches he used to guide his painting strokes.

“I always think it’s interesting to think about abstract impressionists struggling with composition just like any artist did,” Schwartz said. “We often think they just have this thought that they put down on the canvas and it’s fully formed.”

Orgeman and Hodermarsky mentioned plans to showcase these pieces in an exhibition this spring if the museum reopens to the public. Additionally, the curators hope to contextualize these works in terms of 20th-century art in a larger exhibition in the winter of 2022.

If it occurs, the winter 2022 exhibition will take place in the Jane and Richard Levin Gallery.

Contact ANNIE RADILLO at annie.radillo@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS

The gift honors the legacy of late philanthropists Jane Lang Davis and Richard E. Lang.

DESK plans move to State Street building

BY SYLVAN LEBRUN STAFF REPORTER After years of operating out of church basements, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen is moving into a building of their own on State Street, aiming to create a centralized location for homeless services in New Haven.

Despite logistical difficulties of fundraising during the pandemic, DESK purchased their new space in early December 2020. This was the culmination of a strategic planning process that began two years earlier. While they currently offer nightly meals in the basement of the Parish House of the Central Church on the Green, DESK plans to incrementally expand their hours and offerings at their independent State Street location.

Deepening their current partnerships with other local organizations, DESK plans to create a comprehensive drop-in space and resource center for unhoused individuals. Until DESK has fully transitioned to its new location, which does not yet have a kitchen, the

organization will continue using its current Temple Street location for dining operations.

“It had become clear that there were a lot of holes in the network of services for people experiencing homelessness,” said Steve Werlin, executive director of DESK. “So we began having some discussions with our partners, with our clients … and we realized that what our folks really needed was a place where they could access our services more readily, on their own time, on their own terms.”

Since 2017, DESK has worked to broaden access to resources for homeless individuals by collaborating with other local human services providers. The current DESK dining room, in a borrowed church facility on 311 Temple St., is open one hour a day for dinner. Health care workers, street psychiatrists and case managers gather in the dining room to provide aid on site.

DESK’s current list of partner organizations includes Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center, Connecticut Mental Health Center, United Way of Greater New Haven,

Liberty Community Services and Columbus House.

“We have great homelessness service providers in New Haven and we’re not looking to reinvent the wheel, we’re not looking to duplicate services,” Werlin told the News.

Columbus House, a local nonprofit dedicated to services for people experiencing homelessness, sends its outreach and engagement workers to the DESK dining room. According to Columbus House CEO Margaret Middleton, its case managers meet with clients at DESK’s evening meals and connect them with resources for long-term planning.

Middleton told the News that she believes DESK’s new location will better facilitate these important conversations, using designated meeting spaces that allow for greater privacy.

“The current location doesn’t have any of that additional space … devoted specifically to outside providers or for doing different types of meetings,” said Middleton.

One of DESK’s major goals in designing its new location is to con-

SYLVAN LEBRUN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

DESK purchased its own building on State Street and aims to create a hub for homeless services in New Haven.

nect unhoused individuals with as many needed services as possible under one roof, Werlin said.

The first floor will be a dining room with a drop-in center providing basic needs such as food, clothing, toiletries and harm reduction supplies. The second floor will be a resource center with what Werlin calls “next-level services.” Plans for that floor include a clinic for Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center’s street medicine team and office spaces for mental health specialists, outreach workers and case managers from other partner organizations.

“One of the biggest problems facing people in need in New Haven is you have to go to five or six different places to try to get support,” Scott McLean, president of DESK’s board of directors, said.

“Go to a soup kitchen and you go to a social worker, then you have to go to a health clinic, then you have to go to the state. That’s like a fulltime job, you know. The full-time job of being poor is part of why poverty is so unjust.”

According to McLean, DESK’s board of directors saw the move to State Street as a “launch point” for collaborating with partners to provide comprehensive homeless services and combat this injustice.

The construction on the 266 State St. building, which had a past life as a dog grooming salon, began soon after DESK’s purchase of the building in December. The space was chosen for its physical accessibility, as a street-level building close to downtown New Haven.

However, to make this space truly accessible, a series of longer-term construction projects will be necessary, according to Werlin. DESK is currently fundraising for “extensive renovations” on the building, including installing an elevator and a medical-grade heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. He expects that these will be carried out over the next fiscal year.

Within the next month, DESK plans to open with limited capacity as a drop-in space from 1 to 4 p.m., six days a week. The organization plans to provide activities

and a space to get out of the harsh weather, before directing clients to their Temple Street location for dinner.

“We’re going to steadily increase those hours,” Werlin said. “And then the hope is that when we get into the hottest months when we’re really needing some cooling spaces, we’ll be operating at full capacity … during the hottest hours of the day.”

The strategic planning process that led to DESK’s decision to move lasted from 2018 to early 2019. Their initial plan was simply to rent a space and sign a long-term lease — property ownership was not on the table at the time.

This all changed when the pandemic caused real estate prices in downtown New Haven to fall dramatically.

“Suddenly we just found ourselves in a position … with property prices the way they were, to actually purchase a building for the first time in our history,” Werlin told the News. “Within two blocks of the [New Haven] Green, right downtown, we’re right where people need us.”

Although COVID-19 guidelines made usual fundraising strategies — like ribbon cuttings and kickoff events — impossible, DESK experienced what McLean called an “extraordinary” increase in donations after the outset of the pandemic.

This support, and lower real estate prices, allowed DESK to make their big move.

“When crisis hit New Haven, we didn’t close up shop and turn away, and we pivoted and we adapted and we moved forward,” Werlin said. “We said to ourselves, now we are in a position to actually make an even bigger splash than we had intended before. Let’s do it. Let’s do something bold.”

In 1987, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen first began offering meals three nights a week at churches on the New Haven Green.

Contact SYLVAN LEBRUN at sylvan.lebrun@yale.edu .

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

THROUGH THE LENS

A

s a first year, I was supposed to be remotely learning at home in order for Yale to maintain a low campus density. But to keep the “college lifestyle” and preserve the connection to my studies, I am off campus, which comes with its own changes.

Rather than the mandatory COVID testing at my residential college, I make the optional journey to 150 York.

Rather than walking across the courtyard to ready-made meal, I make the weekly bus ride to grocery stores and intentionally plan out recipes.

Rather than grabbing boba with friends and celebrating birthdays with my family, I wait behind gates and FaceTime in.

This is the life of the partial student — one who is only allowed to a certain point of connection.

JESSIE CHEUNG reports.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 13

BULLETIN BOARD ILLUSTRATIONS

SOPHIE HENRY is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College.

Contact her at sophie.henry@yale.edu .

DORA GUO is a sophomore in Pierson College.

Contact her at dora.guo@yale.edu .

GIOVANNA TRUONG is a sophomore in Pauli Murray College.

Contact her at giovanna.truong@yale.edu .

ANASTHASIA SHILOV is a sophomore in Siliman College.

Contact her at anasthasia.shilov@yale.edu .

CROSSWORD

GIOVANNA TRUONG is a sophomore in Pauli Murray College.

Contact her at giovanna.truong@yale.edu .

CORRECTIONS FRIDAY, FEB. 26

A previous version of the story titled “Looking at the past, present and future of renaming” that ran in print on Feb. 26 stated that Calhoun was the University’s highestranking official, which was not necessarily true. The article has updated on the News’ website to reflect that he was one of its highest-ranking officials.

NCAAW No. 20 West Virginia 72 Kansas State 64

NCAAW No. 10 Indiana 89 Iowa 80

SPORTS

NCAAM No. 10 Villanova 72 No. 14 Creighton 60

NBA Brooklyn 132 Houston 114 FOR MORE SPORTS CONTENT, VISIT OUR WEB SITE goydn.com/YDNsports Twitter: @YDNSports

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

VOLLEYBALL ELLIS DEJARDIN ’22 NAMED CAPTAIN On Wednesday, the Yale women’s volleyball team announced Ellis DeJardin ’22 as its 2021 team captain. The Bulldogs will be looking to extend their streak to four consecutive league championships under her leadership.

WOMEN’S CREW KRISTINA WAGNER ’15 AT TRIALS Last Friday, Kristina Wagner ’15 finished third in the women’s single at the 2020 Olympic rowing trials in Sarasota, Fl. behind two former Olympians. Wagner now sets her sights on doubles trials in April. For more, see goydn.com/YDNsports.

“Being a grad transfer has been a cool experience … it’s given me the opportunity to get a Masters while still playing baseball [and] the chance to see another college team and another Division.”

DAI DAI OTAKA ’20

A history of the Brady Squash Center

Lamont pushes legalized sports betting

BY DEAN CENTA, JAMES RICHARDSON AND ALVARO PERPULY CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS AND STAFF REPORTER The Connecticut General Assembly Public Safety and Security Committee is considering multiple bills with the goal of legalizing sports betting in the state of Connecticut.

BETTING ANASTHASIA SHILOV AND ZULLY ARIAS/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR AND PRODUCTION & DESIGN EDITOR

In 1999, Nicholas F. Brady’s ’52 donation of $3 million helped Yale transform into an American squash destination.

BY DEAN CENTA CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Located on the fourth floor of Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium, the Brady Squash Center has welcomed thousands of squash players from around the world since it was built in the fall of 1999, fulfilling the vision of former Yale squash captain Nicholas Brady ’52.

In 1994, United States Squash significantly altered the U.S. squash game. Gone were the days of the American variation of hardball squash, and in came the international game with its softer ball and smaller court. This left Yale’s old squash facility, with its 28 American-style courts, obsolete. Yale would have to step up and renovate the courts and needed to raise around $7 million in order to complete this daunting task.

Theodore Shen ’66 presented a gift in 1995 to begin the construction of six new courts, now known as the The-

odore Shen Wing in the Brady Center.

Henry “Sam” Chauncey ’57, a former Yale administrator, was tabbed to find funding for the rest of the facility.

“The Brady” now consists of 15 international singles courts, most notably the unique four-glass-wall Brady Court.

“The squash game was changing, and the institutions had to change their facilities,” Chauncey said. “There was a kind of pressure on it, sort of like the pressure that developed for artificial turf in soccer. The movement got going and you had to change.”

Chauncey said that at first, the University wanted a new squash center out in West Haven, similar to the Cullman-Heyman Tennis Center. However, because squash is a winter sport, they decided to keep the squash courts in Payne Whitney so that fans in New Haven would not have to make the trek.

In came Nicholas Brady, the namesake of “the Brady.”

Brady is known as the former United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He graduated from Yale, where he was a member of the Chi Psi fraternity, in 1952. Under his leadership in his final year at Yale, Brady’s Bulldogs were crowned intercollegiate team champions in early March 1952.

Through his donations and advocacy, Brady played a significant role in transforming the center from an outdated collection American-style squash courts to the world-class venue it is today.

Behind the donation: An international squash center In the late '90s, Chauncey traveled to Washington, D.C., to convince Brady to donate money to help

Stu-perfans missing a year without Yale sports

SEE SQUASH PAGE 12

COURTESY OF STU COHEN

Stu Cohen estimates he has attended about 400 events at the Yale Bowl. The Hamden native has only missed one Yale home game since 1964.

For most casual fans of the Bulldogs, the annual Yale-Harvard football game is their only exposure to Yale Athletics. But for superfans like Stu Cohen and Stu Comen, Yale’s athletic facilities, like the Yale Bowl and Ingalls Rink, are their second homes.

FANS Cohen, who has a lifetime pass for Yale football, went to his first game when he was just 14 years old.

Starting in 1973, he ushered at the

Bowl for 25 years and said that he still knows most of the ushers from across Yale’s athletic facilities. In 2018, he attended his 300th Yale football game at the Bowl.

But it is not only football that attracts Cohen to the stadium.

“Between regular season Yale football, concerts in the ’70s, soccer, the New York Giants and many Yale scrimmages and spring practices, I’m sure I’ve attended some 400 events,” Cohen said. “I had only missed one game since 1964 … because I was at Dover Speedway. …

It was a tough choice.”

STAT OF THE WEEK

SEE FANS PAGE 10

6

On Feb. 10, Gov. Ned Lamont announced his fiscal budget proposal for fiscal years 2021-2022 and 2022-2023. In his pre-recorded announcement speech, he expressed his support for sports betting and internet gaming. Multiple bills being proposed in the Public Safety and Security Committee address sports and online

betting, and a public hearing was held on Tuesday to discuss them.

“I am working with our neighboring states and look forward to working with our tribal partners on a path forward to modernize gaming in our state, as well as the legislature on legalization of marijuana,” Lamont said in his budget announcement speech last month. “Sports betting, internet gaming and legalized marijuana are happening all around us. Let’s not surrender these opportunities to out-of-state markets or even worse, underground markets.”

One of the main sports gambling bills under consideration, SB 146, would allow betting on in-state intercollegiate competitions. Neal Eskin, the executive associate director of athletics at SEE BETTING PAGE 10

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The CGA Public Safety and Security Committee hosted a public hearing on Tuesday regarding sports betting.

Ivy SAACs pushed for grad exception

BY EUGENIO GARZA GARCÍA STAFF REPORTER In an unprecedented fashion, on-field rivals became off-thefield allies, as the eight Ivy League Student-Athlete Advisory Committees worked together to fasttrack their proposed graduate student exception policy to the Council of Presidents. The effort included a survey that canvassed conference student-athletes, collecting 1,500 responses, 97 percent of whom expressed support for allowing an exception for graduate eligibility due to the pandemic.

LETTER

BY MELANIE HELLER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

NHL St. Louis 3 Anaheim 2

Earlier this month, Yale s e n i o r s t u d e n t - a t h l e te s received an email announcing that the Ivy League granted an exception to seniors across the Ancient Eight to compete as graduate students at their respective institutions, granted that they have been accepted

into a degree-granting graduate program.

The decision evoked confusion and hope among Bulldog athletes who were mainly concerned about the timing of the announcement, which came after most graduate application deadlines at Yale had passed. But the announcement did not contain an explanation of how the change came to be. All eight Ivy SAACs came together to petition the Ivy League for a graduate student exception for all students — not just seniors — whose seasons were affected by COVID-19. Following the SAACs’ efforts, the Council of Presidents approved part of their petition, allowing the exception for senior student-athletes.

“We really were hoping that it would be … a blanket waiver for all student-athletes specifically because regardless of class year, we’ve all gone through this pandemic together,” Brown’s Ivy League SAAC representative Peri Sheinin said. “Although we were disappointed that it did not

WILLIAM MCCORMACK/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Rivals became teammates during a year with no competition, as all eight Ivy SAACs collaborated on a proposal for the Council of Presidents.

extend to all class years we took it … we were appreciative of the Ivy League’s willingness to reconsider their policy.”

In early December, shortly after hearing that the Ivy League had canceled the winter sports season, Cornell SAAC co-presidents Paul Casavant and Khary Pryce decided that they wanted to petition the Ivy League to allow all student-athletes who had lost seasons due to COVID-19 to compete as graduate students at their institutions.

Casavant and Pryce decided that their best plan of attack was to present a united front with the other SAACs to improve their chances of success.

By the end of December, the SAAC presidents drafted a statement which they took to their respective athletic departments, student-athletes and fellow SAAC members, according to Penn’s SAAC president Yash Bhargava.

After getting some input from their respective schools, the SAAC presidents finalized a draft and scheduled a meeting with Ivy League Executive Director Robin Harris on Jan. 14.

Harris helped the SAAC presidents revise some of the language in their letter and put it on the agenda for the next Council of Presidents meeting on Jan. 21, according to Casavant.

The normal process for instituting a policy change within the Ivy League is to petition the Ivy League’s Policy Committee, which reviews the proposed changes and sends their analysis to the Council of Presidents.

SEE LETTER PAGE 10

NUMBER OF TIMES CURTIS HALL ’22 SCORED TWICE IN ONE GAME DURING THE 2019-20 HOCKEY SEASON.

FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021

WEEKEND // KALINA MLADENOVA

The Work of Grief // BY EMILY TIAN When Simone Koch Costa’s grandmother passed away in Brazil from COVID19 just before the beginning of the second semester, she dealt with the loss mostly on her own.

“I was really close to my grandma, but I couldn’t be there with her,” Koch Costa ’22 said. “I couldn’t go to that COVID-19 hotspot and come back; even if I went [to Brazil] I wouldn’t be able to go to the hospital with her.”

Koch Costa, who transferred to Yale in the fall of 2019 and is currently enrolled off campus, said that she has thought a lot about reaching out to support systems at Yale — but did not know where to begin.

She’s wary about letting strangers into her mourning process. But the relationships that she has built in college are young and still maturing, and she’s unsure if she wants to freight these friendships with her own grief. While her work supervisor and professors were understanding when she asked for extensions, she still felt she shouldn’t have.

“I have a lot of awesome, very caring professors, but I don’t want to use up their office hours by bringing [the loss] up,” she said, “even though it may have helped, since I have an established relationship with them.”

Every Saturday, Koch Costa logs onto a Zoom session with some of her friends from her residential college. She plays online Pictionary with them and sometimes just talks — eluding the subject that has occupied much of her mind over the past month.

“I didn’t want to talk about it with them, either — I knew I would fall apart,” she said.

“This is our fun. This is our one meeting a week. I don’t want to make it about me.”

The grief of one COVID-19 death is cast onto approximately nine surviving family members, according to a Penn State study on kinship networks. Such a multiplier would suggest that a country that recently surpassed 500,000 coronavirus deaths is also a country of at least 4.5 million mourners — and likely many million more, given that the estimator does not even attempt to account for the messily entwined circles of friends, mentors and colleagues that a single individual reaches. Since public, ritual mourning practices have largely tapered off this year because of the pandemic, experiencing the deaths of loved ones — due to COVID or other causes — can also be especially isolating.

A recent Washington Post column observed that, once, an individuals’ pass-

ing was borne out by extravagant social rituals. But due to the number of deaths during the First World War and the 1918 pandemic, the author wrote, prolonged, communal mourning processes could simply not be maintained. In the century that has followed, mourning became abbreviated and grief private.

At Yale, coming to terms with the recent loss of a loved one may also require setting aside other academic and social obligations.

“A toxic productivity goes along with Yale time, which can be energizing but not always healthy,” Yale University Chaplain Sharon Kugler said. “We chaplains, even in normal times, would be more countercultural to encourage people to take time for themselves.

Not everything is urgent and earth shattering.”

But it can be hard to step back, she acknowledged, in a “competitive atmosphere that’s also very smiley.”

And as much as it has been written about and ritten over, grief is relentlessly individual. Regressive, stubborn, fuzzily defined, mourning a death cannot be compressed and sectioned off by a deadline.

Although the Chaplain’s Office is the University’s spiritual heart, Kugler said that her meetings with students are frequently not religious in nature. Students can sign up for a remote appointment with a chaplain through their website or contact individual chaplains directly.

There are other resources at hand for members of the Yale community experiencing grief — residential college deans and heads are often the first in line to contact a student who has been experiencing a challenging loss; students may also choose to engage with peer-to-peer resources through various informal and formal mentorship programs and the Walden Peer Counseling hotline.

“When it comes to a community of care, silos go away. But we think about who we are failing to reach: some students, graduate students or those who live off campus may be less visible,” Kugler said.

Grief counselors through Yale Mental Health and Counseling can also be reached by phone, to set up Zoom appointments.

“I find that Yale students often worry that allowing themselves to feel emotions will lead to them becoming overwhelmed and then not being able to be functional and falling behind,” wrote Paul Hoffman, director of Mental Health and Counseling at Yale Health, in an email to the News.

“Grief counseling is a way of encouraging

people to talk about and explore their feelings to not sweep them under a rug.”

It has been a particularly difficult month for many Yale students and staff because of the passing of Andrew Dowe ’08 GRD ’20 — a lecturer, director of undergraduate studies of women’s, gender and sexuality studies and associate director of the Office of LGBTQ Resources — and the high-profile shooting of Kevin Jiang ENV ’22, currently under investigation as a murder, within a short window of time.

Michelle Morgan GRD ’17, Yale’s digital accessibility specialist, was a classmate of Dowe’s in the American Studies graduate program and a friend. She described her reaction to Dowe’s passing as one not only of grief but also of anger and uncertainty.

“Andrew’s presence made my own continuation as a staff member here possible — he made being here possible for many different kinds of people,” Morgan said.

“Andrew was so self- sacrificing to everyone, to all students, but who he was beyond his generosity. How do you grieve for someone personally, past a professional front?

What are we extracting from people like Andrew? How do we provide as mentors of students when there just isn’t enough to go around?”

Morgan has been leading a weekly virtual sewing circle with the Office of LGBTQ Resources to create a wall hanging in tribute to Dowe. But three weeks ago, Zoom-bombers hijacked what was intended to be a healing space suddenly by displaying a disturbing graphic video and using Nazi hate speech.

“We can reclaim that, but it feels contaminated,” she said. “There’s no way to have closure — there’s no ritual.”

The absence of a ritual for the community to come together after the passing of a loved one is its own kind of loss, particularly as students are also experiencing losses of routine and of in-person connections, noted Eunice Yuen, an emotional wellness consultant who works with the Asian American Cultural Center.

“There’s a lot of spaces to have these conversations, but not everyone has the same relationships with [Dowe],” Morgan said. “It’s hard to forge the same kind of intimacy around a person with strangers, especially when it is mediated digitally.”

While Zoom vigils and funerals are an ersatz substitute to physical togetherness, Kugler said that they have shown her that individuals are so willing to connect with one another that they commit to an event, even on the imperfect venue of a Zoom screen. Grieving is about peers showing

up for peers, she noted, and being slightly more open to admitting what you are going through — even when no magical set of words can be strung together to bring the experience to an early end.

“The work of grief is three steps forward, four steps back, but we get to know each other more tenderly and differently in the process,” she said.

Three years ago, just after the end of her first semester at Yale, Jaccaranda Woldemariam ’21 came home to the sudden news of her father’s passing. Catapulted into her second semester at Yale, she plunged herself into academics, seeking in her classes an anesthetic for grief.

Though she spoke regularly to a supportive priest at St. Thomas More, Woldemariam did not tell her friends about her father’s passing until the last month of the year. Looking back, she says that she spent the semester and summer following her father’s passing finding “ways to escape,” finally taking time to rethink her academic priorities and sort through her grief during her sophomore year.

Spending this past year taking classes from home because of the pandemic has been especially hard, she said. In her hometown, places and activities frequently become tripwires, jogging, without a moment’s forewarning, dormant memories of her father.

“Memories will be weird, popping up and triggering us in unexpected ways. You can be in Shake Shack and find yourself in tears,” Kugler said. “This is not a new conversation. Helping people through grief is giving them permission to be gentle with themselves. Sometimes life doesn’t go on — we have to stop and let what has happened in.”

When she transferred to Yale, Koch Costa had been hoping that her grandmother would be able to visit campus.

Medical complications delayed initial plans; then, her grandmother passed in January.

Instead of the anticipated reunion at Yale, Koch Costa is getting a tattoo in tribute of her grandmother, and sometimes wears her jewelry to class. She stores these pieces — some Christmas bracelet charms, a ring, an angel necklace — in a wooden music box from Vienna, which chimes to “Edelweiss” from “The Sound of Music.”

It’s one of her grandmother’s favorite songs.

Contact EMILY TIAN at emily.tian@yale.edu .

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND STUDENTS

Screenshot of a Moment in the Student Organization World In a non-pandemic year, first years would be introduced to the wide range of extracurricular clubs and activities offered at Yale through the fall Student Organizations Bazaar, a totally overwhelming experience of hundreds of tables and hundreds of people, all of whom are urging you to join their group. Do you sing in the shower? Join acapella! In the fall of 2020, the bazaar was held virtually, with all the increased structure and awkwardness of Zoom and GCal appointments. It’s hard to imagine a sharper sense of contrast. And yet, clubs did their best to adapt online.

The Yale Society for the Exploration of Campus Secrets, who in the past recruited members at the extracurricular fair by handing out cryptic business cards and then vanishing back into the crowd in time to avoid follow-up questions, pivoted their recruiting strategy to sending cryptic emails linking to an equally curiosity-provoking website. Responding to interview questions through this mysterious ~email~ format, YSECS acknowledged the effects of the pandemic on its activities, but with optimism for the future, stating: “Though physical exploration is curtailed for safety, the traditions of Society have continued and plans for the next year are unfolding without a hitch. While our activities are not visible to the untrained eye, be assured they will continue.”

YSECS also sees an opportunity in online or remote activities: “The many secrets that Yale has meticulously attempted to conceal cannot be fully understood solely through physical or digital means. Even so, many elements can be explored via the worldwide web. Furthermore, we encourage those who can to explore via astral projection; for those who can’t, store bought out-of-body experiences are fine as well.”

In some sense, “store bought out-of-body experience” is not a bad way to describe participating in an activity via Zoom: there, but not physically present. When Selin Goren ’24 joined the Yale Dramat Association back in the fall, she was a remote student due to COVID19. It felt warm to be involved in an extracurricular activity, as she didn’t know much about Yale. She had never been on campus before. Thankfully, the team rehearsed during a “convenient time” in her schedule. Yet, that wasn’t the case for the actual performances.

An evening performance from Nov. 13 to 15, 2020, meant waking up for a show at 4 a.m. for her, as she was joining the team miles away, back home in Istanbul, Turkey.

“I think in general, just the performances themselves were tough in terms of waking up. Yet, it was a really nice experience,

especially being involved in something even though I was remote,” Goren said.

The director, Catherine Alam-Nist ’24, wisely adjusted the play “Dominion” according to a pandemic production. Zoom was actually a part of the play where the characters called each other. It made perfect sense for both the actors and the audience.

The audience also became a part of the production. At the beginning of the play, the actors requested the audience to switch to participants. The audience hid the non-video participants, so they saw only the actors.

The actors themselves closed their camera too when they exited the stage, so that they would disappear from the screen instead of going blank. Goren thought it made it more engaging and felt more like a show rather than another Zoom meeting of an ordinary day.

In general, costumes were do-it-yourself.

Though some actors bought a few pieces of clothing, most of them wore what they had at home. The play itself didn’t involve that many costumes; rather, the actors paid the most attention to the colors that would represent the moods of their characters. For instance, Goren wore gray and black clothes for her troubled character Briseis.

Despite all the witty adjustments, performing on Zoom still felt like a different experience for everyone. “Performances, theater, dance, music, these are really hard to convey through Zoom, I think.

But still, considering the circumstances, it was a good experience,” Goren said.

It’s true that some activities simply cannot be replicated online. When describing the activities of the Yale Drama Coalition, President Eliza MacGilvray ’23 said with a laugh, “We used to go places and be in front of people!” Co-Vice President and former co-firstyear liaison Jay Mehta ’24, added, “We would sell baked goods and stuff, but alas, we have nothing but virtual baked goods to offer now.”

In every way aside from baking, though, the YDC has been working to make sure that theater is something that can succeed over Zoom for as many people as possible. The YDC is an umbrella organization, whose mission statement Mehta describes as seeking “to promote accessibility, fairness and community building in Yale theater,” a mission the coalition adopted in addition to providing administrative functions for Yale theater, such as organizing season previews and managing casting cycles for shows.

“We just want to make sure that people who want to do theater at Yale can do so in a healthy way,” Mehta said. “I think all of us individually found a home in theater, // DORA GUO

WKND RECOMMENDS Olmo Bagelry’s black tea.

and among people who do theater, and we want to make sure that everybody has that chance, and that it’s open to everybody.”

The YDC has been able to take advantage of the upheaval of the pandemic to pause and evaluate the typical undergraduate theater-making process at Yale. Their recent activities include hosting town halls to collect feedback on how to make audition processes more accessible, compiling a Yale theater wiki document, and starting the Collaborative Arts Matching Program, which pairs students interested in creating shows and those interested in collaborating on shows in various roles. The program doesn’t hold auditions or require experience, and intentionally keeps commitment stakes low, bringing down the various barriers that students interested in theater may face to actually getting involved with a production.

This focus on creativity and accessibility extends to the coalition’s view of the best practices for the day-to-day creation of Zoom theater as well. MacGilvray acknowledges that “theater in general is just such a live experience,” and that element of Zoom theater is not the same, but also notes that the YDC has “been trying to focus on the new opportunities that Zoom theater is providing, and trying to take advantage of it while this is the situation.” Samantha White ’22, a theater-making liaison on the YDC board, affirmed, “Discovering ways of taking what we would use in a live piece and making it interesting on Zoom has been very fulfilling.” She noted that Zoom fatigue is one of the major issues of virtual theater, and went on to describe the list of best practices the organization created to help mitigate its effects, such as shortening rehearsals, and asking for the actors’ access needs each time before starting.

“2020 was the first year we had this new mission statement and it’s been really, really fulfilling as an organization to get to work on that,” said MacGilvray. “Even though so much has been taken away by COVID, it’s been a really vibrant space.”

The YDC’s mission of striving towards accessibility addresses an element of Yale extracurriculars that extends far beyond the world of theater. While the extracurricular activities offered at Yale are numerous and diverse, many students encounter a not-so-widely advertised layer of exclusivity when they try to join a club for one of their interests — an audition or selection process, required previous experience or simply an unwelcoming atmosphere.

Due to the pandemic, a kind of reversal has occurred, with many clubs now struggling to meet as normal, recruit new members, or work on projects together. Yale’s community is defined by its passionate, interested student body, but this student body is also exhausted by the wide variety of challenges brought on or exacerbated by the pandemic.

Kara Liu ’23 has faced these issues as the editor-in-chief of the Yale Literary Review, a semesterly magazine that publishes reviews of art. It is the only publication at Yale that accepts pieces on art about anything and anytime, from book reviews to critical analysis of theater to dance.

Liu has been a member of the organization since February 2020. Back then, the Review didn’t have frequent meetings. Yet, as everyone was on campus, the members would meet up or talk directly to the editorin-chief or other managing editors if they had any questions or things to discuss.

For this year, everyone is in different time zones, so it’s much more difficult to reach out to writers and people who submit different types of works. Each member is experiencing difficulties of their own, whether it be electricity outages or Wi-Fi problems.

“It definitely affected the activities. For any type of literary magazine, we all literally need to be there to discuss each publication because it’s not a one person thing,” Liu said.

Even before the pandemic, the club was fairly small. Now that everyone is in different places, it’s just impossible for people to get involved or the club members to coordinate enough people to sustain the magazine.

Therefore, the Review is focusing mainly on promoting the club, recruiting new members and developing their website, as there are simply not enough submissions for the magazine.

The Guild of Bookmakers, another literary undergraduate organization that runs bookmaking workshops for the Yale community, has also faced difficulties trying to operate as normal over Zoom. In a typical year, the guild would run around two workshops a month. This year, the guild has so far run three softcover book binding workshops, two last semester and one this semester, with a hard-

cover workshop coming up later in the spring.

Matt King ’22, president of the guild, noted that it has been difficult not to have access to the physical binderies in the Silliman and Davenport college basements, where more specialized and expensive materials and tools are kept, and where workshops would typically take place. When assembling kits to distribute to interested students for workshops, “We really have to start from scratch,” he said. It has also been frustratingly difficult to reserve other Yale event spaces to hold workshops or prepare kits.

The in-person and communal aspects of bookbinding were a central part of the appeal of the guild for King. He had been introduced to the guild as a first year at the extracurricular fair, and discovered he loved working on bookbinding projects after attending some of the workshops. “It was a way for me to dedicate, especially making a hardcover book, several hours to a single activity — it was almost a sort of meditation, and it was also a way for me to connect with friends. … Plus there was the bonus that books make really good gifts, so I can feel accomplished having made this really nice thing, and then I can give it to someone else.”

The transition to an online format has missed some of these qualities: “It’s had less of a community feeling, just by virtue of being on Zoom — it’s one thing being in a room at a table with people and music, and another thing having a wall of screen faces in front of you, so I’m really looking forward to getting that community back.”

However, this same lack of access to physical spaces or connections is also something he has seen drawing people to participate in the guild’s activities. “One thing I’ve really liked about the virtual workshops is that we’ve been able to reach more people, and I think part of that has to do with a new interest in a tactile activity, especially since no one really has those [opportunities] any more. A lot of the people coming to our workshops are people who have lost a lot of their other creative outlets.”

King has also been proud of the guild members’ ability to improvise and come together to pull off successful workshops: “It was nice seeing the ways we were able to not just make do, but even flourish with very limited supplies and spaces.” He’s looking forward to doing a hardcover workshop in the future, though this presents its own challenges. “Who wants to sit on Zoom for four hours? Not many people,” he says, smiling.

King is also looking forward to expanding the leadership roles present in the guild.

Leadership turnover has been a concern, as the typical member progression to guild leadership involves binding five books of significance — an advanced project that has been nearly impossible to complete over the past year. Instead, this year the leaders sent out a wide call for interest in helping lead the guild. They were pleased with the response they received from first years and sophomores who had maybe never had the chance to bind a book before, but were excited about learning and helping run the organization.

While there are currently three named leadership positions, King has had interest from five or six people and foresees finding roles for all in leading the guild. “It’s been really heartwarming seeing so much interest and participation, even more than pre-pandemic, from people who don’t know us as well as they could,” he said. “It gives me a lot of hope for the future of the guild, and I see the guild’s future in this group of people.”

The members of the YDC board, too, were thrilled to talk about the process of recruiting new people and their incoming board members. “It gave us the opportunity to step back and appreciate each other, and the space, and the organization, and what we like to do, and think critically about the way we wanted to present ourselves to the people who were entering the organization,” said Mehta. “I feel like they’ve already brought a lot of really good ideas and energy to the board, and they’re all just amazing people, so that’s a big plus.”

So perhaps YSECS gives the best summary of any organization’s activities, in their own snarky way: “As the name suggests, a society is principally a collection of people.” At its best, it seems that adjusting to the challenges of the pandemic can offer something of a renewal of Yale’s clubs at their essential level: finding a community of people interested in the same thing, and working together to do it.

Contact GAMZE KAZAKOGLU at gamze.kazakoglu@yale.edu and GEMMA YOO at gemma.yoo@yale.edu .

ONLINE THIS WEEK: PODCASTS TO PULL YOU THROUGH MIDTERMS: Jacob Cramer ‘22 and Kelly Farley ‘22 tell us all about their favorite podcasts.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND DADS

Does Anyone Even Know What Yale Dads Do?

// D O R

A GUO

// BY ÁNGELA PÉREZ AND ANNIE SIDRANSKY Dads can be quite the enigmas. Sure, they may go to work, but what do they really do all day? Many kids find themselves mystified by their fathers. But, despite all the playful joking, real questions still remain about who these men truly are.

The News talked to four Yale Dads in an attempt to unravel a bit of this mystery, and in the process got a closer look into the lives of some of the fathers behind Yalies.

Jim Sailer Jim Sailer is a man of above average height, one who can be loud in group settings and is known to make the occasional dad joke. This information comes from his son, though; over the phone all that can be known is that his voice holds a tone of kindness and sincerity. Sailer works at a nonprofit in New York City called the Population Council. He is the executive director of the Center for Biomedical Research within this nonprofit, and his work contributes to the development of new contraceptives, as well as HIV and STI prevention products for men and women.

“The work is about the whole planet, the globe, and not just the United States or Europe or something like that. We’re trying to give people options — all around the world — to manage their fertility, which is a fundamental part of anyone’s life and health,” Sailer said.

From day to day, Sailer has strategy sessions with various staff members, which can take the form of face-to-face meetings, or, more recently, Zooms. These meetings help them determine which products are needed and which ones they should invest in and develop. Before the pandemic, Sailer often traveled to visit companies or academic institutions that the nonprofit wanted to partner with, and occasionally he met with government officials, both domestic and international, to talk about the Population Council’s work.

While Sailer describes himself as “very lucky” to have his current position, his life didn’t begin at the Population Council. He attended Swarthmore College, where he received a bachelor’s in political science, and later went on to receive a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.

From there he had a variety of jobs, ranging from management consulting to work in New York City government, before ending up at the Population Council.

Though he was offered a wide array of professional opportunities over the course of his career, Sailer explained that he didn’t always possess every single qualification for those jobs. Instead, he had certain skills that held potential. This has made his work all the more enriching, and has given Sailer the opportunity to be a “lifelong learner.”

In his free time, Sailer engages in election

work. He has interests in social justice and related issues, and he tries to engage with these passions by working to get “better, smarter, more empathetic elected officials.”

In fact, Sailer was significantly involved at the grassroots level in the politics of the 2020 election.

Regarding his title as a Yale Dad, Sailer explained that he does not wish to take the accomplishments of his son, Henry Sailer ’24, and make them his own. He specified, however, that while being the father of a Yale student isn’t specifically a part of his identity, being Henry’s dad is, and he has great pride in and excitement for his son.

Mike Soto-Class Mike Soto-Class ’91 has a braided friendship bracelet on his wrist, courtesy of his youngest daughter. As he gesticulates throughout our conversation, the colors on it stand out against the neutral tones of the office from which he is calling. Soto-Class runs the Center for a New Economy, a nonprofit think tank in Puerto Rico. As the first of its kind on the island, the think tank prioritizes effective, nonpartisan policy development.

Soto-Class’s calm demeanor is contagious, as he narrates some of the policies that the CNE has helped shape in the past. CNE currently has three offices: one in Washington, D.C., one in Madrid and the original Puerto Rico bureau. He described the process of the think tank as a cycle of doing research, influencing policy development in a nonpartisan way (based on the research the group complied) and witnessing the impact of the policies they helped shape.

“People that know Puerto Rico, know that it’s a very politically charged place. It was very unbelievable to people that you could have an organization that was really nonpartisan, and that was our objective,” SotoClass said. “At the beginning, people were very doubtful, very skeptical, and it took a while before we were able to build up the credibility we have now. And that has been really helpful for us in influencing public policy both here and in D.C.” While the group has 16 members now, it initially started as a much smaller group, composed of more than a few Yale alums.

While working as a chief of staff for a senator on the island, Soto Class-found that most of the policies developed had no evidence to support them being beneficial. Remembering some of the think tanks he had seen around Yale, he decided to start his own. Through the CNE, he set out to rectify this issue in a politically charged Puerto Rico. Because of the fraught political situation on the island, Soto-Class sought to prove in every way he could that the CNE was not affiliated with any political party — it does not accept donations, nor is it available for hire.

Soto-Class was in Saybrook College during his years at Yale. He still has a fondness for his bright college days, and said that, despite having a rough first semester, he “love[s] it more now than before” and still marvels at what he describes as “the incredible richness [of the University].” When he thinks of his best memories at Yale, he pictures himself in his dorm room: His most valuable moments were the times spent with friends outside the classroom.

“Relax and have a good time, but also realize you’re never gonna have this kind of richness again,” he said, as fatherly advice to readers. “And I think even if you’re in a university setting later on, it’ll still be different because you won’t have as much time or as much freedom to explore. … This is the greatest moment for exploration and taking advantage of things that you have. … You need to find a balance, but err on the side of exploration.”

Muzaffer Kazakoglu Muzaffer Kazakoglu can be quiet, but reveals a witty, more quirky side of himself once you get to know him. He owns a company that deals with heating, ventilation, air conditioning and automation, and acts partly as a manager and partly as a consultant for this company, which does so much more than just sell thermostats.

Kazakoglu doesn’t have a typical 9-to-5 schedule. He often works in the company’s R&D center, where new ideas and projects are cultivated. In this endeavor, they look three or five years into the future to determine the trajectory of the business. This includes seeking new connections and maintaining existing ones as they expand the business outside of Turkey, where Kazakoglu resides.

Before Kazakoglu was in this line of work, he hadn’t anticipated going into it. Things didn’t go as originally planned with his education, but even so, Kazakoglu was ultimately able to graduate from university.

After that, he worked at several companies within the air conditioning industry before deciding to establish his own. This wasn’t part of any long-term plan, but by taking business opportunities as they came up, “fate” led him to where he is today.

“I’m in a position that’s better than I expected,” Kazakoglu said.

Outside of work, Kazakoglu has recently been dedicating time to self-discovery, which he does in part through yoga classes.

He said that this has been new and exciting for him, and something he believes to be relatively common among middle aged adults.

Kazakoglu’s tie to Yale is through his daughter, international student Gamze Kazakoglu ’24. He’s tremendously proud of her, but feels that being a Yale Dad isn’t part of his identity.

“It’s 100 percent her success, her identity,” he explained. Kazakoglu then elaborated that sometimes parents have a sort of competition among themselves in respect to their children — one which he does not participate in. Still, he’s incredibly happy for his daughter, and said that hearing about all she does in her studies has even given him a chance to learn.

Mengkui Chen Doctor Mengkui Chen’s eyes crinkle at the corner when he speaks and smiles — the lines proof of a face that smiles often. He wears a lab coat with his name stitched on the left side of his chest as he calls from his office in the pathology department of the cancer hospital where he works. Daily, he assists surgeons in the operating room to help give correct diagnoses.

Chen happened upon the medical field somewhat unexpectedly. After graduating high school in Wuhan, China, Chen was not sure what he wanted to do as a profession.

His family had no doctors, and since he was not particularly inclined towards anything yet, they suggested he go to medical school — and the rest is history.

“I love it. I love this field. I love my profession,” he said. “I’m always behind the scenes.

I don’t see patients directly, I don’t operate on patients directly, but I can make a decision that can change the patient’s clinical course.”

Eventually he decided to move to the United States and pursue a doctorate at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, where he then worked as a faculty member. He is excited to return to the university environment he loves — soon, he will start work at the Yale Medical School.

“What’s the purpose of your knowledge?

You don’t keep the knowledge for yourself,” Chen said, about his love for teaching young doctors. “You need to train those young brains, those residents, those fellows… I want to just convey all my knowledge to them. … This is the best part.”

Chen is a father to two Yalies, one alum and one current student. He believes that Yale gives students a “boost,” but that it is more important to know “how you want to shape yourself.” Who you are and what you do are up to you, regardless of where you go to school.

After years upon years working to be a doctor in both China and the U.S., after moving here to further his learning and after sending both daughters off to Yale, he has one piece of advice: “Before you turn 40, don’t be afraid of anything… Just try everything.”

Contact ÁNGELA PÉREZ at angela.perez@yale.edu .

Contact ANNIE SIDRANSKY at annie.sidransky@yale.edu .

ONLINE THIS WEEK: WKND RECOMMENDS Sitting in the back of Koffee? with your two best friends :)).

GOODBYE OR BADBYE? Roaa Shaheen ‘24 meditates on loss.

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND STARS

Sex on the WKND: Dealbreakers Is it ethical to have sex with a Republican?

// DORA GUO

That depends on whether Republicans are a dealbreaker for you. Dealbreakers — we’ve all got them, whether we’re aware of them or not. Some people are instantly turned off when they find out their prospective partner voted for Trump, or they have blue hair, or they’re in the YPU. Is it a dealbreaker if your partner’s a Republican? I can’t answer that for you.

What I can say, though, is that I once dated a guy whose family owned seven MAGA mugs — one for each member of the family plus me. I was alarmed, but it was also 2016 then. Trump was dangerous, for sure, but his election still seemed out of the realm of possibility. I deemed the MAGA merch a yellow flag, not a dealbreaker, and picked out a different mug for myself.

Now, if I found a MAGA mug at a guy’s place, I’d probably call an Uber home right away. That might make me a closed-minded snowflake, but it also means I’m aware of my own desires and boundaries. There’s no amount of charm, wit, intelligence or skill in bed that would make me feel comfortable dating someone who supports a literal demagogue who wants to oppress people who look like me.

Anyway, enough about the T-word. There are certainly many valid dealbreakers that you shouldn’t compromise. If you’re looking for someone who shares your religious faith, that makes sense. If you only want to sleep with people who believe in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, then hey, you do you. (But also wtf?) If you’re opposed to dating anyone under 6 foot, good luck.

But wait. What if your guy’s Hinge profile says he’s 6’0”, but since everyone knows straight men add two inches to their height on dating apps, he’s really only 5’10” and that’s a dealbreaker? What if he volunteers at an animal shelter and cooks pasta from scratch and always makes sure you orgasm?

Is that still a no-no?

That’s the thing with dealbreakers. Usually,

they’re not actually dealbreakers. They’re just warning signs, yellow flags, a cause for pause.

Some of my so-called dealbreakers that are really just yellow flags: • Did DS freshman year • Lightweight crew • Active on Reddit Some of my yellow flags that should be dealbreakers: • Has a bad relationship with their mother • Going into finance • On the Yale Daily News One of my best friends says she’d never date someone with a goatee. Another has sworn off moderates and conservatives. Another says they’d never date someone who shares a name with one of their parents. (Been there, done that. It’s not so bad. Just don’t say their name during sex.)

Most of us aren’t consciously thinking about our dealbreakers when we’re dating. When I’m lying in bed drunk on Saturday night swiping on Tinder, my fingers move instinctively. Within milliseconds of glancing at someone’s profile, they know whether to swipe left or right. My Tinder dealbreakers are even narrower than my normal ones. If they’re holding a fish? Left. Salt wall at Jack’s? Left. White guy with Chinese letters in his bio? Left. “I’m 6 feet if that matters”? Left.

Instead of agonizing over all the traits we hate in a partner, I think we’d all be better off if we focused on the green flags. The qualities that signal someone is a great match for you. A rock climber?

Someone who makes you laugh without trying? A good cook? Especially now, in a pandemic, when we’re stuck with dating apps to find new matches, it’s more important than ever to adopt an open mindset. Who knows, maybe the next time I see a guy holding a fish on Tinder, I’ll swipe right. He might just have all my green flags, too. sexonthewknd@gmail.com

Stars and the Lack Thereof // BY SEAN PERGOLA

Nostalgia be damned, I did not plan to miss anything from home. I doubt anyone plans to miss the past, so I can’t say my failure was unexpected, but I didn’t have any grand “Ladybird”-esque revelations of secret love for my hometown. When I got to New Haven, it was the absence of the stars, the stars I had hardly ever consciously noticed, that brought the strongest pangs of homesickness.

I came to this revelation last semester on a lonesome rooftop in New Haven. The sky, it occurred to me, was so empty. I don’t mean this in a completely physical sense — if anything, it was teeming with the radiance of artificial lighting. I could even call it beautiful. But that radiance seemed sacrilegiously hollow. It superseded the cosmos, drowning the stars in false idols. All that was left were bleak, cold glimmers suspended in a cloud of black ether and yellowish effervescence. They were pathetic, these few surviving stars, mere dead pixels or punctuation marks.

Dramatic as my description may be, I am under no illusion that the stars are my

companions. They have always been distant, even cold, despite the typical effects of nuclear fusion. Yet there was something profoundly comforting about their presence — stern figures, unwillfully elegant, constantly staring down with the same blank expression you might expect from a teacher whose approval you seek in vain.

After returning home for winter break, I noticed the stars for a week, more or less.

In this time, I marveled at their profound beauty, tracing those constellations that had reblossomed from a single star that had overcome the aura of the city. Then I forgot about them again. It was not until returning to campus in January that I recognized my shocking display of arrogance. The empty sky mocks me for it.

It would be disingenuous to frame myself as the champion of rural life at Yale. Truthfully, my hometown of Blairstown, New Jersey, may abound with cornfields and clear skies, but it is still New Jersey, and it is still only a two-hour drive from New York City.

I can’t even say I miss rural life in the slightest. I love New Haven, love it more than I

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could ever claim to love Blairstown. What a concept to walk to a convenience store whenever I’m hungry, or to be able to order an Uber without a two-hour wait, or to be called “Jewish” without it sounding like slur!

I can’t help but wonder if I have any right to miss the stars, given my situation. There are so many here at Yale who have been ripped from environments so much more naturalistic than mine, who are actually fond of their bucolic homes, yet I am the one to whine. And I can’t even tell you exactly why I miss these stars, why I see the sky as empty and the emptiness as devastation, when I don’t miss where I could see these stars.

Perhaps it’s melodrama. Perhaps it’s a learned practice of capitalizing on whatever tragedy I can grasp at for the purpose of getting sympathy from whatever audience I may have. I don’t think it can be reduced to this, though. Melodrama does not, or ought not to, feel so real.

Maybe it’s this: I look out to the stars, and I see their absence, and I miss what I wanted the stars to be. I miss what I should have had, but never did. I miss the nights in the fields

with the friends I was never all that close with, gazing up at the cosmos, having conversations that never actually happened about our dreams and hopes and plans for the future in that kind of honest way that only a late night under the stars can bring out (or so I’m told). I miss the camping trips I never took with my family, those trips that might have become an annual tradition if we had liked each other a bit more, the ones that I never had the chance to pretend to hate but secretly look forward to. I miss pointing out the constellations to the girl I loved with my whole heart who wasn’t actually there, feeling my pulse quicken as she pulled me in for the kiss I never tasted that put the wonders of the Milky Way to shame. I miss the illusions.

Light pollution is sobering. It leaves only a bleak sky and only those stars that emanate X-rays instead of fantasies. And I stare at them, pining for a reality I never even knew, a reality that has never seemed so distant.

Contact SEAN PERGOLA at sean.pergola@yale.edu .