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 30, 2012 · VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 114 · yaledailynews.com
INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING
SUNNY SUNNY
39 50
CROSS CAMPUS An Ivy League welcome. In
addition to the 6.8 percent of Yale applicants who got good news on Thursday, Harvard accepted a recordlow 5.9 percent of applicants, and Princeton let in only 7.9 percent of applicants.
A CAPPELLA FOR MEMBERS, A LIFELONG BOND
WARD 1
THEATER
M. LACROSSE
As aldermen redraw wards, the ‘Yale ward’ will expand its borders
‘SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE’ DEBUTS
After 5OT loss to Princeton, Elis chase first Ivy win against Penn
PAGE B3 WEEKEND
PAGE 5 CITY
PAGE 7 CULTURE
PAGE 14 SPORTS
Yale admit rate hits low GRAPH ADMISSIONS RATES FOR TOP SCHOOLS BY FRESHMAN CLASS 25
Brown Columbia Cornell Dartmouth
20
Harvard MIT
Not jealous. The Cornell Daily
Sun reported that Flo Rida and Weezer both turned down offers to perform at Slope Day, Cornell’s equivalent of Spring Fling that will take place on May 4. The Swedish DJ Avicii was Dartmouth’s first choice.
Sesquicentennial. On
Thursday, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition held a discussion, moderated by history professor David Blight, that included Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco, University of Virginia professor Gary Gallagher, University of Pennsylvania professor Stephanie McCurry and Law School professor John Witt ’94 LAW ’99 GRD ’00. About 100 people attended.
Moving up. The following
professors were awarded tenure at a Board of Permanent Officers meeting Thursday, Yale College Dean Mary Miller said in an email: Ian Quinn, an associate professor of music, Caleb Smith, an associate professor of English, Barry McCrea, an associate professor of comparative literature and English, Beverly Gage, an associate professor of history, and Alexey Fedeorov, an associate professor of geology and geophysics.
It’s that time of year again.
This year’s Yale College Council Elections Committee emailed a packet of rules to underclassmen on Thursday. The current YCC will hold a Potential Candidates Meeting on Sunday at 7 p.m.
Next Top Website. In an email
sent to students this week, the Yale University Library requested feedback on the redesign of the home page of the Library website. The Library currently anticipates that the redesigned home page, referred to as the “front door”, will go live on Aug. 1.
Earth hour. From 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Saturday, the lights will dim on Harkness Tower in cooperation with a global Earth Hour designed to bring attention to climate change as an issue that affects everyone. In memoriam. Adrienne Rich,
a noted feminist, poet and essayist, died of rheumatoid arthritis on Tuesday at her home in California. She was 82. In 1951, Rich won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and in 2003 she won Yale’s Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.
THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY
1981 President Ronald Reagan is in stable condition after an assassination attempt. Submit tips to Cross Campus
crosscampus@yaledailynews.com
ONLINE y MORE cc.yaledailynews.com
Princeton
15
Stanford
Admins consider new rules for frats PROPOSED RULE WOULD BAN FRESHMEN FROM ATTENDING OFF-CAMPUS GREEK EVENTS
UPenn Yale
10
5
2012
2013
2014
BY ANDREW GIAMBRONE STAFF REPORTER Yale posted a 6.8 percent admissions rate for the class of 2016 — the most competitive in University history — on Thursday afternoon. After receiving a record 28,974 applicants, the University extended offers of admis-
released by its peers. “We had another extraordinary applicant pool, and another challenging selection process,” Brenzel said. “Of the students we could offer admission, we know that the ones choosing Yale will bring us astonishing talents and aspirations.” An additional 1,001 applicants have been placed on Yale’s waitlist, which Brenzel said will help the Office of Admissions enroll a
As administrators discuss details of the recent ban of Greek organizations’ fall rush period, they are considering a policy that would prohibit freshmen from attending Greek-sponsored off-campus events during the fall. The committee charged with outlining the specific regulations — which comprises administrators and leaders of Greek organizations — convened for their second meeting Thursday morning. Two presidents of Greek organizations who attended the meeting said administrators suggested ways to define what activities would qualify as freshman recruitment, and one potential policy would ban freshmen from going to off-campus events hosted by fraternities and sororities in the fall. John Meeske, associate dean for student organizations and physical resources, said no decisions have been made, and administrators are exploring multiple options for implementing the new rule.
SEE ADMISSIONS PAGE 4
SEE FRATERNITIES PAGE 6
2015
YALE ADMITS RECORD LOW OF 6.8 PERCENT, WAITLISTS 1,001; RATES AT MOST IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS DECLINE sion to 1,975 candidates, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel said in an email Thursday. Yale’s admissions rate declined for the third consecutive year, and the University was among six Ivy League schools to admit an alltime-low percentage of applicants, putting its figure in line with those
BY JANE DARBY MENTON AND MADELINE MCMAHON STAFF REPORTERS
2016
Levin, Salovey respond to faculty BY GAVAN GIDEON STAFF REPORTER In a memo released Thursday to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University President Richard Levin and Provost Peter Salovey responded to a number of concerns aired by professors this semester.
We are clearly entering a period of more robust faculty engagement with University concerns. JOHN DARNELL Chair, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations In the wake of two contentious Yale College faculty meetings held in February and March — in which professors discussed the University’s push to streamline administrative services and the creation of Yale-NUS College, respectively — Salovey and Levin are taking steps to improve communication between the administration and the faculty. The two administrators said they have met with professors in 17 academic departments and programs in recent weeks to discuss their concerns, and Thursday’s memo addresses some of the most common grievances raised by faculty. Though Levin and Salovey said many issues facing the University emerged in light of the economic recession, such as constraints on construction and faculty hiring, they pledged to work alongside faculty in continuing to address those and other challenges. “The past four years have given us one financial challenge after another,” Levin and Salovey wrote. “Even as we continue to SEE FACULTY MEMO PAGE 6
ZOE GORMAN/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
The Yale Undergraduate Ballet Company’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” will go Saturday in the Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School. Several Yale dancers say the space is more suitable than those on campus.
Dance scene outgrows capacity BY YANAN WANG STAFF REPORTER The dance scene at Yale is growing — perhaps too rapidly for the University to keep up. In recent years, a variety of student dance groups have cropped up around campus, outgrowing the resources that currently exist for undergraduate dance. According to the website for the Alliance for Dance at Yale, an umbrella organization that encompasses all of Yale College’s dance troupes, the campus is home to 22 different extracurricular groups. Of these 22, more than half were founded within the last 10 years. As a result, concerns have emerged over whether Yale’s facilities can support this increased interest, as the Univer-
sity is not traditionally known as a school with a prominent dance community, said professor Emily Coates, the University’s only fulltime faculty member teaching dance courses. “We’re brimming over,” Coates said. “The overflowing of enthusiasm, initiatives and new extracurriculars is all amounting to the additional need for space in rehearsal and performance.” On April 27, the Yale Dance Theater program led by Coates will perform an excerpt from legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham’s piece “ROARATORIO,” a breakthrough for dance at Yale, as the University was the first organization granted rights to Cunningham’s work since his company’s last performance on Dec. 31,
2011. The event has attracted the attention of noted New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay, who is scheduled to attend the performance, Yale Dance Theater members learned Wednesday. Yet there is no dance department at Yale, which lists courses in the discipline under the Theater Studies Department, and most of the University’s rehearsal spaces are not designed for dancers. Many of the studios, for instance, are not fitted with sprung floors padded to protect dancers’ feet, said Elena Light ’13, a member of Yaledancers and Yale Dance Theater. “It would be great for Yale to create a dance studio with the express purpose of it being for dance,” Light SEE DANCE PAGE 4
PAGE 2
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
OPINION
.COMMENT “There isn’t exactly a whole lot of athletic talent amongst you intellecyaledailynews.com/opinion
NEWS’
O
VIEW Remaining Yale in Singapore
W
hen Yale-NUS opens, Yale must throw its weight behind
the values it has always cultivated.
Y
ale-NUS College will open in 16 months. No amount of criticism from faculty or alumni will stop Yale’s first-ever international franchise from welcoming its inaugural class of students in fall 2013. The school’s opening will be the capstone of University President Richard Levin’s efforts to globalize Yale. It is also clearly a boon for Singapore. The city-state’s government wanted a way to train a diverse group of students to help Singapore thrive, and it wanted a brand name to anchor the new college. It received everything it could have asked for by signing a name as big as Yale. Both sides have expressed their excitement about the partnership with speeches and press events. But the truth remains that Yale will henceforth be linked with an authoritarian regime, and the University will have to find a way to balance partnership and pushback. It will not be enough just to advance the frontier of modern education or to build an excellent college. The University must use all its weight to keep the new institution true to Yale’s values and to the needs of students at Yale-NUS. Yale was founded to teach moral fortitude and leadership in civil and religious spheres. Now, lux and veritas point to acceptance of all students and points of view. Yale teaches students to question standard practices and to uncover what is right. All that is crucial to the academic environment, and it — not the U.S. News and World Report rankings — is the true Yale brand. YaleNUS may help Yale’s commercial and global prestige,
but it has to promote Yale’s commitment to equality and freedom, too. Yale is dedicated to public service and fighting injustice. Singapore’s regime allows dissent in the classroom — but only in the classroom. Ideas should not be fenced off in safe spaces. Imagine a Yale where debates could not spill out of classrooms and into dining halls, train cars and the speeches of politicians across the country. That school would not be Yale, and it would not be able to live up to Yale’s educational values. Education does not lie solely in the academic sphere. Academic freedom is worthless without social and political freedom. In the self-censoring atmosphere at NUS, where current students can neither protest freely nor register an official LGBTQ group, holding a liberal arts education to Yale’s standards is impossible. It is Yale’s duty to fight for the same freedom for the students at Yale-NUS as for those in New Haven. The students who arrive at the new college will be searching for a kind of education that doesn’t yet exist in Singapore. They will want challenging discussions, political activism and the chance to question their fundamental tenets. Once these students enroll in a school bearing Yale’s name, it will be Yale’s responsibility to ensure that they get what they’re signing up for. Should Singaporean policies interfere, Levin must lead the way in standing up for his students. If Yale cannot ensure the rights of the students at Yale-NUS, its presence in Singapore will be a disgrace.
tuals.”
‘ELI1’ ON ‘SCHOOL BEFORE SPORTS’
Iron ladies in America
ver break, I visited the National Portrait Gallery in London, which is full of paintings of England’s most famous citizens, including many women. I was struck by how many strong female leaders England has produced, not least Elizabeth I. I had also recently seen The Iron Lady, about Margaret Thatcher, the powerful if problematic prime minister of Great Britain in the 1980s. I then thought their about American counterparts and was reminded — not for the first time — of the relative scarcity of past and present powerful American women. There are some: Madeline Albright and Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Condoleezza Rice, a slew of former first ladies and members of Congress, social reformers and political revolutionaries. But America has yet to have a female leader as powerful as Elizabeth or Margaret Thatcher. And while the United States is younger than England, we have still had more than enough time to promote women into positions of power. Women currently make up 17 percent of the Senate and 18 percent of the House of Representatives, rates lower than those of Sweden, India and Rwanda. According to a 2010 United Nations report, just 14 women served as the heads of state or government in the world’s 192 countries. In only 23 countries did women comprise more than 30 percent of their national parliaments, and on average one in six cabinet ministers was a woman. This trend of underrepresentation at the highest levels of decisionmaking carries over into other spheres: Only 13 of the 500 largest corporations in the world had a female CEO. As a young woman who has yet to decide if she will run for political office, I find these statistics disturbing. England may have a his-
tory of strong female leaders, but they were few and exceptional. The British parliament is only 22 percent women at present, and there has been no female prime minister since Thatcher. Both the United Kingdom and the United ZOE — two of the most MERCER- States progressive countries in the world — have a dearth of GOLDEN women at the top who serve Meditations as advocates and role models for future generations including my own. The national conversation about women’s reproductive rights signals the fallout from this crisis of female leadership. How can a congress that is only 17 percent women adequately characterize and defend the status of women? The conservative men who feel entitled to make moral judgments for American women about abortion and contraception can enforce their opinions because there aren’t enough other perspectives in the positions that matter to stop them from talking. The example of Rush Limbaugh raises another challenging question in the discussion about female leadership, which is that of public intimidation. Defend a woman’s right to choose or her right to cheap contraception and you are liable to be labelled a slut for the world to hear. Limbaugh’s remarks reflect the comfort many commentators have with disregarding the voices and opinions of American women. Young women in America face a climate that gives them few role models, fixates on what they do with their bodies and then makes them
feel guilty for doing what men can do easily: have sex without fear of the long-term consequences. So, Mr. Limbaugh, if you and your conservative henchmen in Congress have your way, women in this country will have more babies. They will have sex — probably less of it, but they still will have it — but they will have sex less safely and under a cloud of recrimination. And because more women will have children younger (having never had access to sexual education in middle and high school, because you are against that as well), they won’t complete their education and they won’t run for Congress. Not in the numbers we need to make a difference and to change the tone of the conversation about women’s rights in America. I idolize Elizabeth I and have tremendous sympathy for Margaret Thatcher, but one died the Virgin Queen and the other spent her political career navigating criticisms of her ability to lead. Their lives are a testament to how hard it has been and still is to be a woman in power. Yet their male colleagues managed to sow their wild oats (see the too-common sex scandals of men in politics), get married and have children without apologizing for it. Without more female role models who have led balanced lives in the public arena, I hesitate to enter politics. And if I don’t — if other women don’t — we will remain stuck at 17 percent, quiet-voiced and unable to decide our own fates, political or otherwise. ZOE MERCER-GOLDEN is a junior in Davenport College. Her column runs on alternate Fridays. Contact her at zoe.mercer-golden@yale.edu .
S TA F F I L L U S T R AT O R I L A NA S T R AU S S
Race across America
G U E S T C O L U M N I S T C R I S T O L I AU TAU D
Our responsibility on gender
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L
et me share three stories with you. The first one took place in 1977. Five Yale women sued the University for a violation of Title IX due to a “failure to combat sexual harassment of female students.” Before Alexander v. Yale, “sexual harassment” did not really exist as a formal term. The students’ case, largely guided by a manuscript by famous feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, then a second-year student at the Law School, set a historic precedent for protection against sexual harassment. The second one took place over spring break. On March 8, women and men around the world celebrated female heroes on International Women’s Day. This year, the 101-year old global event focused on “Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures,” and celebrations worldwide reminded citizens the fight against gender violence has a long way to go before it is won. The third took place this week in the Silliman dining hall. A friend and I were discussing Title IX. In minutes, the entire table was in on the discussion. A few students argued they were tired of this issue: Yale’s administration
already offers so many resources for victims of sexual violence and we should benchmark ourselves to other schools. When I arrived as a freshman, I heard few conversations on gender issues. But our history and responsibility as a leading institution demand the conversation continue. It has been about a year since the start of the Title IX investigation. Regardless of our individual opinions on the investigation, we, as a campus, have grown from the experience. Today, dialogue on gender issues occurs throughout our classrooms, dining halls and suites. Though our campus discourse on gender issues, like the global fight against gender violence, has room to grow, my interactions with other students have indicated improved awareness and sensitivity among Yalies. In terms of concrete progress, the Women’s Center hosted a wellattended series of dinners at the provost’s house last spring to create a forum for discussion on combating sexual harassment and sexual violence at Yale. SHARE resources have been further publicized, the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct publishes reg-
ular reports of disciplinary outcomes and our Communication and Consent Educators (CCEs) have expanded their purview. This progress is a testament to the power of a joint mission between students and the administration, grounded in communication and cooperative implementation. Ultimately, however, the administration should only be responsible for these issues up to a certain point. This is our campus. As students, we are responsible and accountable for the climate in which we live and learn. We are the best regulators and shapers of our campus culture. We must have faith in our student body’s ability to take initiative and tackle contentious issues. The recent survey by the Yale Sexual Literacy Coalition and CCEs is an excellent example of student initiative, placing issues of real concern out in the open. The 2,342 respondents to the survey on sexual practices highlighted our increased willingness to engage with campus climate issues. The survey is a start, but let’s not be satisfied. Gender issues affect our entire community. It is crucial we get them right, for our
sake and for the example we set as a community. We are a campus of leaders, and we cannot be satisfied with student apathy or over-reliance on the administration. As we consider how these issues will play out next year, student leadership will be critical in building on this past year’s successes and developing new opportunities for student engagement. It is imperative that we not forget our responsibilities as members of a leading global institution. The example we set has implications for our society, nationally and internationally. Let’s keep in mind the students from 1977 and women around the world today who work to shift paradigms on gender discourse. In taking further charge of gender issues on campus, let’s honor their bravery and leadership. Last year, our campus’ struggles fell into the national spotlight. We should be humble before we quickly dismiss our issues, and we should conduct ourselves as Yalies with a greater responsibility. CRISTO LIAUTAUD is a sophomore in Davenport College. Contact him at cristo.liautaud@yale.edu .
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
PAGE 3
FRIDAY FORUM
WOODY ALLEN “When we played softball, I’d steal second base, feel guilty and go back.”
YALE TALKS SINGAPORE G U E S T C O L U M N I S T R YA N P O L L O C K
Crossing borders, closing minds I
wonder how much of an exaggeration it would be to say that precisely what Yale teaches us doesn’t matter, that the content of our education is a somewhat irrelevant measure of how well we are educated. Grade point averages suggest it’s not all that far-fetched an idea. Only the most partisan pro-humanities people among us — and, full disclosure, I might be one of them — would argue that a 3.7 in the English major demands the same volume of blood and tears as a 3.7 in the chemistry major. What are we left with, then, to evaluate what our liberal arts education is giving us? A line I like and have heard a lot from students, faculty and administrators, goes something like this: At Yale, we learn to think in
new ways. Yale helps us expand our minds. What a lovely thought! And what an important distinction. Thoughts are entirely different beasts from ways of thinking. Thoughts are legion; there are at least as many thoughts as blogs and search results and Facebook walls. Ways of thinking are more rarified, more dynamic. They energize the mind, unlike thoughts, which only fill it up and make it sluggish. Energized minds cover everwidening intellectual terrain with agility, passion and necessary irreverence. Energized minds cross and violate boundaries and thus require ever wider, ever-weirder avenues for expression. And these exciting ways of
thinking, which some at Yale hope to deliver like a product to Singapore, can indeed be found in discipline-driven departments — which French professor R. Howard Bloch characterized as outmoded “silos” — here at Yale already. We assume wrongly that even the tamest syllabus in the most canonfriendly literature departments doesn’t bring together texts whose friction with other texts on that same syllabus isn’t capable of starting a fire in the brain. A brief, illustrative digression: Anthropomorphic tomatoes juxtaposed with dramatized terrorists subvert nothing about our University’s culture. In fact, they only reinforce and reflect our school’s exciting, promiscuous core mission. The
improbable connections, the realized links between far-flung aspects of human life or culture or politics — in a word, discovery — these are the nexus of the liberal arts. That nexus requires us always to expand the range of ways we think about ourselves and our world. Yale’s academic mission has something profound to do with the active enlargement and broadening of free thought and expression. For that reason, Yale-NUS, in crossing one national boundary, makes Yale complicit in the rigid enforcement of others. If Yale-NUS forces Yale to cooperate with an autocratic state that actively seeks to delimit and constrain free expression, from the press to the bedroom, then Yale-NUS represents Yale
in name only. This is not to say that Yale-NUS wouldn’t maybe do some good for the openness of Singaporean political or academic culture. But we should care more about what Yale-NUS would say about the Yale in New Haven. Granted, all states, to varying degrees, constrain what people do, say and think, from France to Myanmar. Without doubt, the United States is no bastion of tolerance and cannot be said to promote free expression as fully as it could and should. But every inch of space that Yale University wrenches from society for the open discussion and consideration of radical, or radically conservative, or — why not? — radically harlequin ways of thinking is so precious
A
s the Yale-NUS project develops, much has been made of the danger Singapore’s authoritarian government poses to academic freedom at the new college. Last week, several members of the Yale community, both professors and students, wrote about the threat of what amounts to censorship in the classroom. Opponents of Yale-NUS have crafted quite a pessimistic view of the initiative. However, having studied at NUS last summer, I would like to offer a view of Singaporean education that is not nearly as bleak. I won’t pretend that a single summer studying at NUS has provided me with special insight into the Singaporean government’s intentions toward YaleNUS or education policy in general. But what I can say is that my time in Singapore erased much of my earlier skepticism regarding the proposal. I went to Singapore with the fairly common view that the Singaporean state would be strict; I would be expected to give up the Yalie’s proclivity for jaywalking, throw away all my gum and avoid questioning the amazing fortune of the People’s Action Party (PAP) to have won
every parliamentary election since 1959. However, on entering the classroom, I soon realized that the Singaporeans didn’t need a Western influence to prompt them to think outside the boundaries laid down by the government. They were more than capable of doing it on their own. Many students were entirely comfortable critiquing any aspect of Singaporean life and government policy. Similarly, prominent figures, including Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, were not considered sacrosanct. One student habitually referred to Lee with the nickname “Icky,” demeaning the man who is held up as the nation’s George Washington, yet the professor did not demand that such talk stop. Despite common perceptions, young Singaporeans are not afraid to stand up in the classroom and speak their minds, even when their position deviates from the state’s official line. During my brief time there, we discussed issues ranging from male conscription, which was derided as economically wasteful and an unfair burden on young men, to the state’s egregious policy of
pushing its citizens into preset ethnicity boxes. Several students, quite early into our course on Southeast Asia history, had no qualms about declaring the official Singaporean state narrative obviously manufactured and therefore lacking in meaning. The notion that these young men and women can only conform to state norms or are cowering under the lash of government censorship and are unable to engage in free discussion is insulting both to the students and their professors, who encourage, not suppress, such dialogue. To these young men and women, the Yale-NUS collaboration is an opportunity to expand this incipient discourse. I will be the first to say some of these anecdotes admit that, under the current regime, serious civil liberties problems exist in Singapore. However, they also reflect that a budding dialogue about such issues is already present in that nation. The YaleNUS project can be a tremendous force for bolstering this reformist instinct among young Singaporeans. Yet, in spite of this potential, some here at Yale would prefer
to reject this opportunity. They assert that Yale will abandon its commitment to academic freedom by working under government restrictions. Let liberalization come first, they say, and then Yale will engage with the Singaporeans. Such a strategy may contribute to liberalization in Singapore in the long term, but what about the short run? What about the students who are there now? Are we really proposing to shut the door on them just so we can sit back some 9,000 miles away and pat ourselves on the back for maintaining our sense of academic integrity? I could never support such a position. I’ve met and lived with these students, and they are not merely nameless people far across the globe. They are young men and women looking to Yale, to us, to help them foster the sense of academic freedom and build the liberal arts education that each of us enjoys. Let’s help them create it. They are certainly no less deserving of it than we are. WILL MORELAND is a junior in Davenport College. Contact him at benjamin.moreland@yale.edu .
G U E S T C O L U M N I S T R A J E E V PA T K E
More than banned books I
write as an academic firmly committed to a future for the liberal arts in Singapore. I am part of a team from New Haven and Singapore planning a curriculum and recruiting faculty for Yale-NUS. We share the conviction that a liberal arts education offers a vital alternative to systems of education centered on early and exclusive specialization. It has the potential to enrich educational options in rapidly modernizing countries such as Singapore. Some in the U.S. have declared that an alliance between Yale and NUS compromises the ideals of the liberal arts model. On the contrary, not to take up this challenge would be the real dereliction. The liberal arts educational model can secure a fresh lease on life in Southeast Asia and show that there is virtue in hybridity and adaptability. The notion that Singapore is a repressive society has cast a needless shadow over the venture. The matter of a list of banned books, when read out of context, can appear to support this notion. Most nations have a history of banned books. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was briefly withdrawn from publication in 1881 by
its Boston publisher because of explicit sexual content. In 1929, U.S. Customs banned Rousseau’s Confessions because it was injurious to public morality. These and many similar books are foundational to a humanities education. There seem to be three reasons why books get banned. They contain material that can offend religious beliefs, promote racial discrimination or violate sexual mores. Nabokov’s Lolita, for instance, was banned for a while in Canada in 1958. The Catholic Church abolished its Index of Prohibited Books as recently as 1966. The Merriam Webster Dictionary was banned in a California elementary school in 2010 for its definition of oral sex. Earlier this year, Arizona banned Shakespeare’s The Tempest and other books in an effort to limit resentment. I could go on and on. Such instances indicate that all societies face the problem of whether to intervene and what to do when books offend ethnic sensitivities and religious beliefs or confront parents with questions such as “Would I like my daughter to read Lolita at age 14?” The problem is not unique to the U.S. or Singapore. And if a dictionary or Shakespeare can be banned,
then how is one to separate that which is alleged to have reference value or literary merit from that which gives deep offence to some segment of society? Such cases raise the question of whether the freedom to read promiscuously is a principle in danger of losing its efficacy if promoted without reference to social consequences. An education in the liberal arts can open a dialogue between a belief in the freedom of speech and belief in a state’s responsibility to protect its citizens. Engaging in such dialogue is more constructive than turning one’s back on a society because it is alleged to be illiberal. So yes, Singapore does have a list of banned books. It exemplifies a particular view of how a nation wishes to protect its citizens. Perceptions of what that might entail keep evolving. Meanwhile, the spirit of liberalism inherent to the idea of a liberal arts education can surely be prepared to recognize and respect difference. Moreover, the NUS library does represent some banned authors: A title by Marquis de Sade, for example, and two by Salman Rushdie are available for academic study, discussion and debate within the university. If
there is a list, there is also room for discussing such books within an academic context. Times are changing. A liberal arts education is part of that process. There is room for evolving models of education to change the nation’s perceptions of its own interests. Milton wrote in Areopagitica: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” In the spirit of Milton, I might ask, what is the use of a liberal arts system that practices its virtues safely in the U.S., where it meets few challenges to its ideals? Here, in Singapore, a nation which lacks this option, the idea of the liberal arts has an opportunity to educate young minds towards the ideal of a wiser humanism. More to the point, it has a chance to test itself. Why shrink from that challenge? Why not welcome it, instead, as the logical evolution of a role for the liberal arts in the 21st century? RAJEEV PATKE is Professor of English language & literature at the National University of Singapore.
RYAN POLLOCK is a junior in Calhoun College. Contact him at ryan.pollock@yale.edu .
GUEST COLUMNIST S T E P H E N D A R WA L L
GUEST COLUMNIST WILL MORELAND
Yale can foster reform
that this space becomes a vital part of what I’ll go out on a limb and call our school’s soul. We cannot export Yale University to a state like Singapore without Yale University becoming just a brand name. We cannot attempt to transplant the liberal arts into Singapore by yoking Yale with the National University of Singapore without, to a degree, tokenizing what a liberal arts education, at its best, helps us do. Members of Yale’s administration are too comfortable treating Yale and the education it offers as, respectively, a business and a product.
A liberal arts outpost I
serve on a faculty search committee for the new Yale-NUS College, so you might be tempted to discount my strong support for the venture. I began, however, as something of a skeptic, having recently come to Yale from a university that seemed, like many, to be increasingly distracted from its intellectual core by administrative initiatives. What appealed to me about Yale was its unstinting commitment to liberal arts education, which gives real power to students and faculty — something I had experienced myself as an undergraduate here. In my opinion, no other major research university has anything like Yale’s devotion to the liberal arts, and no one does it better. From this perspective, Yale-NUS seemed a potential diversion. I now believe that the reverse is true. A commitment to the liberal arts in today’s context provides the strongest argument in favor of the kind of venture that YaleNUS College represents. We live in a world that is progressively more global but also more specialized. Technology makes possible and global markets dictate a kind of specialization, including across international boundaries, that was unimaginable even 20 years ago. Just think of the highly technical investment instruments and mechanisms in which international finance now traffics. Or the media- and cyberbalkanization that threaten the public political sphere in our own country (where people tend to get “news” from sources targeted to confirm their outlook). Even within the academy, disciplines are increasingly collections of specialized subfields. And when interdisciplinarity is championed in opposition to departmental silos, it is often to employ diverse disciplinary lenses to achieve even greater focus — for example, using psychology, neurophysiology and philosophy to understand the nature of moral thought and feeling. This increased capacity for specialization and focus has brought enormous benefits and insights, but it has also created new challenges, not least to our ability to view things more comprehensively, to think through the relations between more specialized knowledge and to ask in a critical and intelligent way: What is worth more intensive and specialized focus? This, of course, is precisely what liberal arts education is all about. What Yale-NUS College hopes to nurture, in the words of NUS President Tan Chorh Chuan, is students who can both zoom in and zoom out to respond to the challenge of contemporary fragmentation. But if the liberal arts are more relevant now than ever, they are also more embattled. Outside the
U.S., university education usually consists in relatively specialized courses of study. And within the U.S., as Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreyfus document in a comparison of college majors between 1968 and 2008, the great majority of higher education has become pre-professional and vocational. There is not much more Yale can do, other than by example, to further the liberal arts in our own country. But the opportunity to help create a really excellent liberal arts college in Asia is simply too good to pass up. Singapore’s excellent English-speaking educational institutions and student base and its history as a nexus of international trade offer the real prospect that Yale-NUS College will not only be an excellent institution in its own right but a model that can spread more broadly throughout the region that will likely see the most vigorous economic growth over next several decades.
EXPAND THE LIBERAL ARTS. REACH ACROSS DISCIPLINES This is not about extending the Yale brand. It is about fostering liberal arts education in a way that can make it more evidently vital and relevant in today’s world, at home no less than abroad. The idea is not to clone Yale in Singapore but to create something distinctive and comparative in an Asian context that can also enrich what we do in New Haven. Some have raised concerns about human rights in Singapore in opposition to Yale’s involvement with Yale-NUS College. Yale-NUS should be unshakably committed to human rights, including freedom of speech, political freedoms and nondiscrimination, both on principle and because nothing is more central to the liberal arts than free thought and speech. But just as our own failures in securing human rights are no reason not to foster liberal arts education here, so neither should we forgo being engaged in Singapore on similar grounds. To the contrary, helping the liberal arts take root in any society, our own or any other, is something we can do in support of human rights. And Singapore’s distinctive position in Asia gives Yale’s engagement there special promise. STEPHEN DARWALL is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy and a 1968 graduate of Morse College.
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
FROM THE FRONT
Dance at Harvard and Princeton A dedicated dance center opened at Harvard in 2005. Students at Princeton can earn an academic certificate — similar to a minor — in dance.
As interest in dance grows, a struggle for space
ZOE GORMAN/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
Dancers in the Yale Undergraduate Ballet Company, which is performing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School this weekend, say the space is better suited for dance than any on campus. DANCE FROM PAGE 1 said. Currently, the two main spaces used by dance groups are Studio D on the fifth floor of Payne Whitney Gymnasium and the Broadway Rehearsal Lofts on Elm Street. There are also dance studios in the residential colleges, but three students interviewed said that they are too small to be of much use. The lack of studio space has resulted in regular scheduling conflicts between groups.
“There’s not enough room,” said Orit Abrahim ’15, a member of Danceworks. “We run into each other a lot when we’re rehearsing.” The dance community got a boost three years ago, when Associate Dean of the Arts Susan Cahan approved funding to rent out the dance studio at the Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School shortly after it moved to its new location on College Street. The Co-op space is available to any Yale group that wants to use it, Cahan said.
In addition to Yaledancers, which uses Co-op’s studio for its four-hour Sunday rehearsals, the Yale Undergraduate Ballet Company has been using the high school’s space to rehearse for its debut show, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Performances of the ballet, which opens today, will also take place at Co-op. The co-founder of the Yale Undergraduate Ballet Company, Amymarie Bartholomew ’13, said the Co-op’s stage is “beautiful,” adding that it also provides more audience seating than Yale’s
venues. If they were performing at the 200-seat Off-Broadway Theater, Bartholomew said, they would have been sold out by Tuesday. Aesthetically, the Co-op’s proscenium theater works well for staging traditional ballet performances, whereas the Off-Broadway Theater is better suited for plays, Bartholomew said. She noted that under the Cahan’s leadership, Yale’s administration has been “receptive to the needs of undergraduate dance
groups.” Light said that while she is grateful for the support Cahan has shown for the dance program, she wonders why it took Yale so long to start recognizing dance as a legitimate artistic and intellectual pursuit. “Why are Yale University dance groups forced to use the local high school’s dance facilities? We’re a huge research university — why aren’t we using our own resources? The Co-op space is what our studios should look like,” Light said.
One downside to the arrangement with the Co-op is that groups who use the high school’s theater to put on performances at a cost subsidized by Yale cannot charge ticket prices for their shows, Groove Dance Company President Audrey Ballard ’13 said. The Yale Undergraduate Ballet Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” will run through Saturday at the Co-op. Contact YANAN WANG at yanan.wang@yale.edu .
Like most Ivies, Yale’s admit rate drops ADMISSIONS FROM PAGE 1 target number of 1,350 to 1,360 students — roughly the same size as last year’s freshman class. Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell also released their most selective admissions rates ever on Thursday. Harvard admitted 5.9 percent of applicants — the only Ivy League figure more competitive than Yale’s — while Columbia and Princeton closely followed, at 7.4 and 7.9 percent, respectively. Dartmouth’s admissions rate dropped to 9.4 percent,
UPenn’s to 12.3 percent and Cornell’s to 16.2 percent. Brown’s figure rose slightly, to 9.6 percent, the only Ivy other than Columbia to see an increase. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also posted a record-low admissions rate, at 8.9 percent, earlier this month. Stanford has yet to release its results. Six admissions experts and college guidance counselors interviewed said they were not surprised to see Yale’s admissions rate decline, as it has fallen each year since spring 2010. James Onwuachi, a college guidance counselor at the West-
minster Schools, a private Christian day school in Atlanta, Ga., said the nation’s elite schools have received the greatest number of applications over the past few years, which has contributed to their highly competitive admissions rates. “You couple the size of the high school age population that are seniors, along with the proliferation of online applications, and you expect that kind of selectivity,” Onwuachi said. “It’s like an arms race.” Onwuachi added that he worries decreasing admissions rates may deter top-notch students
from applying to the most selective schools, since their chances of gaining admissions are slim. Sarah Beyreis ’85 GRD ’94, director of college counseling at the private Cincinnati Country Day School, said she does not know whether declining admissions rates will be sustainable in the long term. But she said the low rates are partly beneficial because “not every kid can get in,” which encourages students to consider schools outside of the Ivy League and other traditional elite institutions such as Stanford and MIT. “It isn’t like these are the only places anymore since they’re turn-
ing down so many kids,” Beyreis said. “There are more great colleges out there.” Last year, Yale admitted a preliminary 7.35 percent — 2,006 of 27,283 applicants — to the class of 2015, and then accepted 103 students from the waitlist. The final admissions rate Yale posted that year, 7.7 percent, was then an alltime low for the University. Students admitted to Yale in both the early and regular decision rounds have until May 1 to accept or decline their admission offers. Contact ANDREW GIAMBRONE at andrew.giambrone@yale.edu .
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
PAGE 5
NEWS
“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.” TENNESSEE WILLIAMS PLAYWRIGHT
TODAY’S EVENTS
Aldermen begin redrawing wards
FRIDAY, MARCH 30 4:30 PM “Hunting for New Phenomena with the ATLAS Experiment.” Physics professor and ATLAS researcher Sarah Demers will give this Physics Club Talk. Sloane Physics Laboratory (217 Prospect St.), Room 57. 5:30 PM “Quesadillas & Questions: Lenten Dinner and Catholic Trivia Night.” Stations of the Cross at 5 p.m. A quesadilla dinner and Catholic trivia night will follow at 5:30 p.m. in the Golden Center, with team-based prizes awarded to the charity of the team’s choice. All are welcome. Saint Thomas More, the Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale (268 Park St.). 7:30 PM Yale Concert Band presents: “Harvest.” The Yale Concert Band, directed by Thomas C. Duffy, presents its spring concert. Music includes J. Mackey’s “Harvest: Trombone Concerto,” F. Ticheli’s “Blue Shades” and R. Strauss’ “Serenade for Winds,” as well as a performance by the Yale Band Percussion Ensemble. Woolsey Hall (500 College St.). 8:00 PM “Hips Against Hunger: Belly Dance Show.” Dances will include a Turkish karsilamas, a traditional Egyptian dance, a tribal fusion sword piece, and a hip-hop fusion piece. Proceeds to benefit the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen. Sterling Hall of Medicine (333 Cedar St.), Mary S. Harkness Auditorium. NICK DEFIESTA/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
LGBT Co-op launches ‘Pride @ Yale 2012’
SARAH ECKINGER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Ward 1 Alderwoman Sarah Eidelson ’12, left, and Ward 7 Alderman Doug Hausladen ’04 will have to negotiate new ward boundaries due to the city charter-mandated redistricting process now underway. BY NICK DEFIESTA STAFF REPORTER Whether Ward 1 remains the Board of Aldermen’s “Yale ward” may depend on how closely local politicians wish to follow the letter of the law. Aldermen debated the rules governing the city’s redistricting process and began to redraw ward lines at a special committee meeting Thursday evening. By city charter, the Board must produce and pass a ward map every decade that equalizes each ward’s population — based on updated Census data — before a May deadline, but it faces a number of challenges. Among them, warned Victor Bolden, the city’s corporation counsel, is the charter’s stipulation that each ward be contained within a single state legislative district “to the maximum extent feasible.” At a previous meeting, former alderwoman Nancy Ahern warned the committee that crossing state legislative district lines could cost the city an extra
$30,000 for extra polling locations required by state law. But Priti Mathur of ARCBridge Consultants, the Virginia-based group advising the Board on the redistricting process, said following that stipulation is possible but not necessary. She said she had drawn up a map that complied with it but featured radically different wards, a result she thought would not be acceptable to most aldermen. The committee also debated whether they could change the total number of wards in the city. While Board President and Ward 5 Alderman Jorge Perez said aldermen had always believed the number of wards had to be changed through charter revision, Bolden informed the committee that they had the power to do so. But neither following state legislative district lines nor changing the number of wards received much attention once the committee separated into groups by district to negotiate how to change New Haven’s politi-
cal map. Some wards, like Doug Hausladen’s ’04 Ward 7, are close to the target number of residents and do not need to be changed. Others, like Ward 30 Alderman Carlton Staggers — whose ward is more than 1,600 below the target — must negotiate with other board members to end with a population within 5 percent of 4,326, the legally allowed deviation. Some aldermen will have to give up key voters in the redistricting process. Ward 29 Alderman Brian Wingate, whose ward’s population is too high by 20 percent, was forced to cede blocks containing his supporters to neighboring Ward 28, which is 20 percent below the minimum. And despite having the district nearest the ideal number of voters, Hausladen will have to give several blocks of his ward to Sarah Eidelson’s ’12 Ward 1, since her ward, which includes Old Campus and eight residential colleges, is below the minimum population threshold by nearly 10 percent. According
to negotiations between Hausladen and Eidelson, Ward 1 will likely expand either south or east, possibly placing City Hall under Eidelson’s jurisdiction. By law, the Board must also do its best to take into account demographic factors like race and income, follow natural boundaries like large streets or parks, maintain the “core” of each ward and ensure each ward possesses a polling place. Aldermen also seek to avoid displacing any alderman’s residence from his or her ward, forcing that alderman to move in order to be eligible to continue representing the ward. That point arose when Eidelson proposed expanding Ward 1 toward the southeast, where Hausladen lives. “[Eidelson and I] live two blocks from each other,” Hausladen said. “I would offer to move, but I like my apartment.” Overall, the redistricting process will reflect a general population shift towards the east, with the eastern neighborhoods of Fair Haven, Fair Haven Heights and Quinnipiac Meadows among those seeing the greatest population growth since the 2000 Census. Wards in the western neighborhoods of Dwight, Westville and West River, meanwhile, will all need to increase in size to compensate for their population decreases. The lines set by the committee members Thursday evening will be used to create an initial proposal to be discussed at the next committee meeting. The map will be debated and possibly edited further before the entire Board votes on a final proposal. If the Board fails to approve a plan in time, warned committee chair and Ward 6 Alderwoman Dolores Colón, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. will determine the ward map. The next meeting of the special committee, when aldermen will reveal their proposal and hear testimony from New Haven residents, will take place April 4 in City Hall. Contact NICK DEFIESTA at nicholas.defiesta@yale.edu .
Pride @ Yale 2012 kicked off Thursday with the “Love Makes a Family” art exhibit in Trumbull College. BY CAROLINE TAN STAFF REPORTER Leaders of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Cooperative said they plan to emphasize the diversity among Yale’s LGBTQ students in “Pride @ Yale 2012,” an annual monthlong event series that officially launched Thursday night with the “Love Makes a Family” art exhibit. The exhibit — which seeks to challenge misconceptions about LGBTQ families and relationships — highlights Pride 2012’s goal of promoting “inclusivity” and celebrating multiculturalism, said Hilary O’Connell ’14, president of the LGBTQ Co-op and chair of the Pride Committee, a branch of the Co-op tasked with planning Pride 2012. She added that organizers made extra efforts to reach out to other student groups to co-sponsor activities since many LGBTQ students across the University participate in other cultural, religious and extracurricular organizations. “I think Pride [2012] is in a lot of ways a space where all of these communities and the marginalized members of these communities can come together and have a place to speak,” O’Connell said. “We don’t want to speak over anyone and their issues, so if we are going to have a particular talk about some identities and there’s a cultural house for those identities, we don’t want to speak over anyone’s voice who is here.” O’Connell said the message of “community” and “diversity” is especially important as LGBTQ issues gain more attention nationally. Though O’Connell said she thinks there is a “false idea of mutual exclusivity between faith and sexuality” among national LGBTQ discourse, she said she has noticed a higher level of “openness” within Yale’s community. Karmen Cheung ’13, head coordinator for the Asian American Cultural Center, said she has noticed the Co-op’s increased focus on collaboration this year, citing an “Out and Asian” panel discussion about LGBTQ issues in the Asian-American community as an example. Cheung
added that there are not many “openly out” Asian-Americans and that she hopes working with the Co-op will help AsianAmerican LGBTQ students feel comfortable with their sexuality. O’Connell, who was an associate director for Sex Week 2012, a biennial event that took place last month after administrators approved Sex Week organizers’ proposal, said students have been less critical of Pride 2012 events than they were to Sex Week efforts since she thinks “open homophobia on this campus is wildly not tolerated.” “I think in general, Yale’s community is very supportive of different kinds of sexualities,” said Joanna Zheng ’14, who attended Thursday’s art exhibit. “Discrimination is not over on campus but Pride Month is a good way to recognize that these problems still exist.”
Discrimination is not over on campus but Pride Month is a good way to recognize that these problems still exist. JOANNA ZHENG ’14 “Love Makes a Family” features photographs of LGBTQ families and will be held at the Trumbull College art gallery through April 4. The exhibit is based in Massachusetts and began touring in 1996, according to LGBTQ Co-op board member Amalia Skilton ’13. Pride 2012 received funding from the Office of LGBTQ Resources, the Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee and student group co-sponsors, O’Connell said. She added that the event has a budget of less than $5,000 to cover the 31 events Pride 2012 plans to host this year. Pride @ Yale was founded 35 years ago as “Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days.” Contact CAROLINE TAN at caroline.tan@yale.edu .
E&EB creates pre-med track BY CLINTON WANG STAFF REPORTER When the biology major splits into the ecology and evolutionary biology and molecular, cellular and developmental biology majors next fall, E&EB will decrease the number of required classes and broaden its curriculum in an effort to better prepare students for medical school. The E&EB major will now feature two tracks, which do not yet have official titles. One track will be designed for pre-med students and include new required courses on comparative anatomy and comparative physiology, and the other will retain the current “core courses” of ecology, evolutionary biology and organismal biology. Two E&EB professors who helped design the changes said they hope that the availability of two tracks, along with the reduced number of required courses for all majors, will make E&EB more attractive to students who are concerned that current requirements might prevent them from simultaneously pursuing medicine or other fields. “I think there is a growing interest in biodiversity, and we’re trying to tap into it,” said E&EB professor Thomas Near, who served on the committee that outlined the changes. “With the new track and added flexibility, the major will appeal to those who love [nature] … but want to go to med school.” MCDB Department Chair Ronald Breaker said his department is also considering whether to loosen its major requirements, though he said discussions are still in their early stages. Though the new E&EB track that focuses on medicine will simplify the challenge of meeting pre-med requirements for E&EB majors, Stephen Stearns, an E&EB professor and committee member, acknowledged that he is unsure whether the track will give students sufficient grounding in the nonmedical aspects of ecology and evolutionary biology
CHART CHANGING BIOLOGY REQUIREMENTS Current Biology reqs (E&EB track)
Future E&EB reqs Track 1
Future E&EB reqs, “Medical” Track 2
Introductory biology with lab
Introductory biology with lab
Introductory biology with lab
General chemistry with lab
General chemistry with lab
General chemistry with lab
Organic chemistry with lab
Organic chemistry with lab OR geology OR math
Organic chemistry with lab OR geology OR math
Physics
Physics
Physics
Calculus
Calculus or statistics
Calculus or statistics
General ecology
General ecology
Biochemistry
Evolutionary biology
Evolutionary biology
Comparative physiology
Organismal biology
Organismal biology with lab
Comparative anatomy with lab
2 biology labs
—
—
Genetics
—
—
Statistics
—
—
2 electives
—
— NOTE: DOES NOT INCLUDE SENIOR REQUIREMENTS
to “deserve” the E&EB degree. Stearns sits on a committee that recommended that the American Association of Medical Colleges incorporate more material on ecology and evolutionary biology into its new version of the Medical College Admissions Test to be released in 2015. For now, he said professors teaching courses catering to pre-med students will have the responsibility of incorporating the fundamental concepts of the subject into their syllabi, adding that funding will determine which professors the department can enlist to lead the classes. Aspen Reese ’12, an E&EB major who served on the committee that drafted the curricular changes, said she thinks E&EB and other science departments need to prioritize improving the quality of teaching as they
develop new courses. “New classes taught to new students, but with the same emphasis on PowerPoints, memorization and literature reviews, will not be truly changing anything,” Reese said. “While there are exceptions, generally speaking, teaching is put much below research in a faculty member’s priorities, and the undergraduate students lose out.” Though E&EB professors said they hope the changes will increase student demand for the major, they said an influx of new majors may have the negative effect of reducing the amount of attention and resources the department can give to individual students. To address this potential issue, Near said professors may need to find their own ways to meet the needs of students. Near said enrollment his course
on ichthyology rose from 14 to 65 students this year, but he has still tried to keep the class discussionbased. Anticipating a high enrollment next year, he plans to lead a smaller segment of the class on a field trip to the Carolinas over the fall break to create a more intimate learning environment, and he is considering offering a spring ichthyology seminar with limited enrollment. The E&EB Department will host an information session on the new major on April 2. Rising sophomores, juniors and seniors will have the option of majoring in either biology or the standalone E&EB or MCDB majors, but incoming freshmen will not able to pursue a biology major. Contact CLINTON WANG at clinton.wang@yale.edu .
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
FROM THE FRONT Engagement with faculty promised FACULTY MEMO FROM PAGE 1 attend to challenging financial matters, we reassert with conviction our commitment to working together with the faculty to set the course of Yale in the years ahead.” Levin and Salovey linked many points discussed in the memo either tangentially or directly to budget cuts made since the onset of the recession in 2008. After the University’s endowment dropped nearly 25 percent and ripped a $350 million hole in the budget during fiscal year 2009, administrators were forced to reduce the number of authorized faculty searches and to hold the size of ladder faculty in the FAS at roughly 700. Most construction projects — such as the new Yale Biology Building, two new residential colleges and the renovation of Hendrie Hall — were also stalled. But the two administrators pointed to several signs suggesting the University has weathered the worst of the budget crisis. The number of authorized faculty searches, which normally hovers around 75 but was roughly half that figure over the past three years, has returned to its normal level this year, they said. The faculty may grow slightly next year from its current size of 691, and “the pool for faculty raises will be three percent” in the fiscal year beginning July 1, the memo states. Though fundraising for some of the major stalled projects has yet to be completed, renovations to science laboratories and classrooms are scheduled for the next two summers.
In the future, we will work collaboratively with departments to ensure that additional staffing changes serve each department’s needs and are welcomed by the faculty. RICHARD LEVIN AND PETER SALOVEY University President and Provost In addition to explaining actions the University has taken to address budget-related problems, the memo also outlines steps to increase consultation and dialogue between departments and administrators. Though monthly Yale College faculty meetings have recently served as a venue for professors to discuss issues that affect the University as a whole, such as shared services and Yale-NUS, the memo states those meetings are designed primarily to deal with issues that affect academics and student life within Yale College. Levin and Salovey suggested holding one or two semesterly meetings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which differs slightly from the Yale College faculty, and for which faculty members will be able to put items on the agenda that they hope to discuss with administrators and their colleagues. Faculty of Arts and Sciences meetings are currently only scheduled when specific items need to be addressed — a meeting is scheduled for Monday to discuss the recently released report on the process of allocating faculty resources. But Levin and Salovey said they rec-
ognize the desire among faculty “for a regular forum for faculty discussion of significant University issues.” Roughly 20 professors at the February Yale College faculty meeting spoke against efforts to improve administrative services at the University, criticizing the shared services business model as an across-the-board system that cannot meet the needs of individual departments and protesting the University’s ongoing reorganization of departmental staff. In the memo, Levin and Salovey said they “regret that this has been a source of stress for some faculty members.” “In the future, we will work collaboratively with departments to ensure that additional staffing changes serve each department’s needs and are welcomed by the faculty,” they wrote. Levin and Salovey did not address Yale-NUS in the memo. Salovey said Thursday that he expects the liberal arts college will be discussed extensively in the coming week, especially at the Yale College faculty meeting scheduled for Thursday. As part of efforts to improve communication, Levin and Salovey also suggested holding meetings between departmental administrators — chairs, directors of undergraduate studies and directors of graduate studies — and Yale College Dean Mary Miller and Graduate School Dean Thomas Pollard on a more regular basis. Pollard has faced increased scrutiny from faculty over the past year, in part due to a report he released in August 2011 that recommended sharing “best practices” with departments across the University. Fifteen professors in the Graduate School submitted a proposal to Levin and Salovey on March 6 calling for a faculty advisory committee that would counsel Pollard on proposed policies. Thursday’s memo states that Pollard will begin meeting more regularly with directors of graduate studies and will “reconstitute” in the fall an informal advisory group of faculty that he put together two years, with membership open to nomination. Levin and Salovey also said Pollard is not trying to force a “single ‘template’” onto departments or to allocate resources in a manner related to these best practices, as some faculty have suggested. “This is not at all the case, and Dean Pollard joins us in regretting any misunderstanding,” Levin and Salovey wrote. John Darnell, chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, said he was pleased to see Levin and Salovey responding to faculty concerns. Darnell said his department and a number of smaller departments met with Levin and Salovey on Wednesday, and he said he views both this meeting and the memo as signaling constructive communication between the faculty and administration. But he added that these steps are preliminary and full results have yet to be seen. “We are clearly entering a period of more robust faculty engagement with University concerns,” Darnell said in an email Thursday. Despite the endowment’s 21.9 percent return on investments in the fiscal year that ended June 30, Salovey said in January that the University still faces a projected $67 million budget deficit for the 2013 fiscal year.
15
Percentage of Yale men in fraternities.
According to collegeprowler.com, 10 percent of Yale women are in sororities.
New rules for frats considered FRATERNITIES FROM PAGE 1 Avi Arfin ’14, president of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, said administrators were “floating around” ideas at the meeting rather than forcing them upon students. He added that he thinks the policy of banning freshmen from all Greek off-campus events would be “problematic.” “Campus-wide events are for the sake of having campus-wide events, not to target rushing,” he said. Under the proposed rule, sororities and fraternities would be allowed to hold on-campus, “supervised” events with freshmen, Arfin said. Pi Beta Phi sorority president Audrey Ballard ’13, who attended the meeting as well, said she also opposed the idea, adding that she left the meeting “confused about the goals of the policy and not knowing where [administrators are]
coming from exactly.” “I think one of the great things about Yale’s Greek life is how open it is, where people can walk into a party anywhere,” Ballard said. “Limiting freshmen from attending Greek-sponsored events fosters exclusivity and separateness.” The committee also discussed the announcement by Princeton University last Sunday restricting students from attending events held by fraternities or sororities on or off campus during their entire freshman year, Ballard and Arfin said. Kara Dreher, a former president of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority’s Princeton chapter, said Princeton administrators justified the measure by asserting that a party thrown by a Greek organization is considered a solicitation of membership, and thus falls under the category of recruitment. But Dreher said a “general consensus” among students at Princ-
eton is that the policy will be difficult to enforce because the university does not officially recognize fraternities and sororities. Most Greek organizations at Yale are not registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office. Five Yale freshmen interviewed said they understood why the administration was considering the restriction, but would not favor such a change. Nikita Tsukanov ’15. a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, said he thought the administration should have a consistent policy across all organizations and that this regulation would single out Greek organizations, since many other groups throw parties off campus. “I understand what the University’s doing, but I think [administrators] ought to take into account Yale’s particular social structure,” Tsukanov said. Ben Burke ’15 said one of his first experiences at Yale was going to the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity’s party during Bulldog Days, and though he said he does not drink alcohol, he thinks parties give freshmen an opportunity to meet people in a “vibrant social environment.” Burke added that off-campus parties gave him an opportunity to meet both upperclassmen and underclassmen. Lizzie Hylton ’15, a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, said she thinks many freshmen would attend fraternity parties even if the ban were imposed. “The idea that you can stop freshmen from going to a frat party is unrealistic,” she said. “My biggest concern is that the harsher the regulations are, the more you force it into an underground scene, which is more dangerous.” The recommendation to ban freshman rush came from a report by the Committee on Hazing and Initiations, which formed after a group of Delta Kappa Epsilon pledges shouted offensive chants on Old Campus in October 2010. Contact JANE DARBY MENTON at jane.menton@yale.edu and MADELINE MCMAHON at madeline.mcmahon@yale.edu .
TIMELINE BAN ON FRESHMAN RUSH OCTOBER 2010 Delta Kappa Epsilon pledges are taped on video chanting offensive slurs on Old Campus. DECEMBER 2010 The Committee on Hazing and Initiations forms. APRIL 2011 The Committee on Hazing and Initiations releases a report with nine recommendations, one of which is to ban Greek organizations’ fall rush period for freshmen. MARCH 2012 Administrators ban Greek organizations’ fall rush period for freshmen.
CHRISTOPHER PEAK/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER
THURSDAY The implementation committee meets and discusses a potential policy that would prohibit freshmen from attending off-campus events held by Greek organizations during the fall term.
One rule being considered by administrators would prohibit freshmen from attending offcampus events hosted by fraternities and sororities.
Contact GAVAN GIDEON at gavan.gideon@yale.edu .
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NEWS
“Sunday in the Park with George” Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin starred in the original Broadway production of the show, which opened in 1984 and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards. It won two, for design.
Arch program tackles sustainability
State passes cap on gasoline tax BY HOON PYO JEON CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
KAMARIA GREENFIELD/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
At a talk titled “New York City’s Sustainable Parks for the 21st Century,” the city’s parks commissioner spoke about the role of public space. BY NATASHA THONDAVADI STAFF REPORTER Over the past two weeks, several events at the School of Architecture have highlighted a growing focus on sustainable parks. On Thursday, a talk entitled “New York City’s Sustainable Parks for the 21st Century” brought Adrian Benepe, the New York City Parks and Recreation Department commissioner, to New Haven to discuss the intersection between public park facilities and the environmental movement. In his talk, Benepe referenced many of New York City’s recent parks projects, including the Freshkills Park on Staten Island, for which seniors in the undergraduate architecture major have been designing works of energy-producing land art as part of a design competition. Seniors in the architecture major recently started finalizing the designs for the Freshkills Park Land Art Generator Initiative that they have been working on since the beginning of the semester. Though the judges, leaders in New York’s sustainable design field, will not evaluate the designs until July, the students must finish their entries by April 18 for the school’s end-of-semester final review process. Tom Zook ARC ’95, one of the professors of the studio class that is working on
the Freshkills project, said that it has been instrumental in shaping their awareness of sustainability issues. “I think that in trying to choose a way to generate energy, [the project] has revealed to me the complexity of the issue,” said Kevin Adkisson ’12, a senior in the class. “It’s one thing to have solar panels or farms in Las Vegas, but it’s harder to do something that works on the scale and under the conditions of New England.” Daniel Whitcombe ’12, another member of the class, explained that producing an energy-generating mechanism that is also beautiful has presented the class with the challenge of truly reconciling sustainability and design. In addition to the sustainability criteria, the aesthetic element of the project requires each design to include a recreational or artistic component. The seniors have responded to this in different ways, Zook said, with some focusing on the pragmatic possibilities of the project and others on the more esoteric. One member of the class, for example, is working on a large-scale vegetable garden that achieves the aesthetic component since its sheer size renders it a civic monument. Another student is approaching the project from the opposite angle and is creating a sculpture that celebrates the many sensory aspects of wind while generating energy. The project has also motivated the
seniors to consider the impact of their designs in a public context, as opposed to the more theoretical environment of the classroom. “The public in general are not connoisseurs of architecture but like things that are beautiful,” Adkisson said, adding that his academic focus at Yale has been on architectural ornament. “Usually when we are designing in studio, it’s all very theoretical. But thinking about what everyone can appreciate has been interesting, and my project has ended up very ornamented.” His project features metal flower ornaments in accordance with Dutch architectural tradition, Adkisson said. Benepe’s talk came soon after the March 20 establishment of a lecture series that brings together faculty from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the School of Architecture, which have had a joint-degree program since 2006. The series aims to help increase the dialogue on sustainability in design, organizer Elisa Iturbe ARC ’14 said in an email. The first event of the new series focused on the future of wood, featuring School of Forestry professor Chad Oliver FES ’75 and School of Architecture critic Alan Organschi ARC ’88. Contact NATASHA THONDAVADI at natasha.thondavadi@yale.edu .
In response to skyrocketing prices at gas stations statewide, both chambers of the Connecticut legislature voted unanimously on Wednesday in favor of a bill to cap the state’s tax on gasoline. The approved bill, which will cap the gross receipts tax on gas at the cost of $3 per gallon wholesale, has been sent to Gov. Dannel Malloy for his signature. Despite some Republican attempts to extend the duration of the cap and push for a lowered tax percentage rather than a set cost per gallon, the state House of Representatives and Senate both passed the bill unanimously. The bill will also grant extra authority to the commissioner of the state’s Department of Consumer Protection and the state attorney general to fine oil corporations for suspected profiteering and price-gouging activities. “Citizens across the state are struggling to make their ends meet because the gas prices rose by 47 cents over the last 90 days,” said Adam Joseph, a spokesman for the Senate Democrats. “[The legislature] thought that it would be of best interest for all to give some relief now, as… gas is something that affects everyone, especially the moderate-income families.” The bill passed on Wednesday does not alter the percentage at which the gross receipts tax is levied. This percentage, which is currently 7.53 percent, is scheduled to rise to 8.81 percent on July 1, 2013, as prescribed by lawmakers seven years ago. The gas tax cap passed Wednesday is scheduled to end on that date. Legislators said they considered the second portion of the bill — which empowers the commissioner of the Department of Consumer Protection and the state attorney general to monitor profiteering and price-gouging more closely — to be equally essential as capping the gasoline tax. State Sen. Scott Frantz (R-Greenwich) said the new bill expands jurisdiction of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act, enabling the commissioner of the Department of Consumer
Protection and the state attorney general to levy a fine of up to $10,000 on companies found to be engaging in illegal pricing methods. The department and the attorney general will scrutinize oil price trends to detect such behavior and ensure that companies stop charging inflated prices to expand their profit margins. “We need to hold accountable those people who are not being held accountable now,” State Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney (D-New Haven) said. “The measure to protect consumers against price-gouging and profiteering is just as important as the cap itself.”
[The legislature] thought that it would be of best interest for all to give some relief now, as … gas is something that affects everyone. ADAM JOSEPH Spokesman, Connecticut state Senate Democrats The legislature moved quickly to pass this bill, which was drafted last Wednesday. Frantz said pressure from constituents to pass the gas tax prompted a sense of urgency among legislators to pass the bill before the upcoming election season. In light of this urgency, the bill was designated as an “emergency-certified” bill and was sent directly to Malloy, who has pledged to sign it. “There was a tremendous pressure from the constituents in my districts to do something soon, because high taxes eventually drive away business and discourage commerce,” Frantz said. Had the gas tax cap been in effect on Wednesday, consumers in New Haven would have saved 1.7 cents per gallon on average, according to the Hartford Courant. Contact HOON PYO JEON at hoonpyo.jeon@yale.edu .
‘Sunday in the Park with George’ makes Yale debut BY JOSEPHINE MASSEY CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Art comes to life in “Sunday in the Park with George,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical that opened Thursday at the Off-Broadway Theater. The 1983 musical was inspired by post-impressionist painter Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” When Lapine and Sondheim saw the work hanging in a museum in Chicago, Lapine was inspired to write the book for a musical that revolved around a fictionalized Seurat and incorporated the figures from the painting into the plot, said Noah Bokat-Lindell ’12, who plays Seurat. Amid affairs between the painting’s characters, Georges struggles to balance his love for his lover, Dot, and his love for his work, Bokat-Lindell said. The first act of the show follows Georges as he paints his masterpiece, despite receiving criticism from the surrounding artistic community for the pointillist style he pioneered. At the same time, Georges navigates his crumbling relationship with Dot, who is roughly based on the woman on the right side of the painting. Ultimately, Georges must decide between giving himself entirely to his career or to his romance with Dot. Director Spencer Klavan ’13 said the show’s emphasizes the connection between two human beings. “It’s hard to address that a person leaves you for himself rather than for someone else,” said Sara Hendel ’14, who plays Dot. The second act of the show depicts Seurat’s great-grand-
son George as he accounts his own life as a struggling artist 100 years later — a portion of the musical that was not always performed, Klavan said. In the musical’s original Broadway production with Mandy Patinkin as George and Bernadette Peters as Dot, the second act of the show was not in fact staged until the final three nights of its first Broadway run, Klavan said.
It’s hard to address that a person leaves you for himself rather than for someone else. SARA HENDEL ’14 Actress, Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” “The two halves are very different,” he said. “The first [half] is more narrative and relationship-focused, while the second is more idea-focused. However, both deal with harmony and [human] connection.” “Sunday in the Park with George” marks Klavan’s first foray into directing. In “Finishing the Hat,” a pivotal song by Georges after Dot leaves him, Klavan said he deviated from the original production by having Bokat-Lindell stand as he sings. In the original production, Georges remained seated on his stool for the entirety of the song, but Klavan said he wanted George “to be more confident in his choice to pursue his career over his lover.” “The stool was too a safe a place to go back to,” Klavan said. This is the first time the show has been performed by undergraduates at Yale, a rarity for a
TORI BURNSIDE CLAPP/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, “Sunday in the Park with George,” debuted at the Off-Broadway Theatre on Thursday. Sondheim show, Klavan said. This is likely because of its “incredibly challenging” technical requirements, he said, citing the necessity of lifting and pulling set pieces on and off the stage. To manage these needs, set designer Maggie Ditre ’14
created an intricate rigging and pulley system for the show. Sondheim, best known for scoring musicals like “A Little Night Music” and “Sweeney Todd,” aimed to evoke Seurat’s painting technique in the show’s music, Bokat-Lindell said. In
painting, Seurat used a pointillist technique, in which dots of color appear distinct up close but blend into a clear image from afar. By mixing staccato with longer notes, Sondheim created a similarly dotted but harmonious feel in his music,
Bokat-Lindell said. “Sunday in the Park with George” will run through Saturday. Contact JOSEPHINE MASSEY at josephine.massey@yale.edu .
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State legislature tackles toxins BY LILIANA VARMAN STAFF REPORTER The Connecticut General Assembly’s environment committee recently okayed two bills that would limit the use of two toxins found in common commercial products. One bill would ban products containing the flame retardant Tris from being marketed for children ages three and younger, said state representative Philip Miller, vice-chair of the environment committee. The other bill, he added, would require labels on food packages containing the chemical Bisphenol-A (BPA). Both bills were passed last week and are headed to the full House for consideration in the next few months. The environment committee, Miller said, was made aware of scientific studies that show over 250 chemicals — including Tris and BPA — have been found in the umbilical tissue of newborn children in the state, and that several chemicals have been found in mothers’ breast milk. “It behooves us on a state level to make these things known to our people,” Miller said. He added that the bill has received broad support from organizations including the Connecticut Depart-
ment of Public Health, which has testified in its favor. During April, he said, the committee will focus on getting these bills to the House or Senate floor. Tris, Miller said, is a chemical that is found in children’s bedding and clothing that has been shown to be carcinogenic. BBPA, he added, has been shown to disrupt pregnancies and the functions of the human endocrine systems, particularly in the youth. “There’s no reason to have BPA in our consumer products,” said John Balmes, professor of environmental health science at the University of California, Berkeley. Due to its estrogenlike nature, he added, BPA has feminizing effects in male kids and causes hormonal imbalances. Since children’s organs are smaller, a given concentration of a chemical is more potent for them, said Elizabeth Kavanah, executive board member of the Connecticut Environmental Health Association. These bills, she said, are a “step in a right direction” that will help promote better public health for Connecticut citizens. Balmes said that although these bills demonstrate an effort to protect public health, there is a need for a system that would hold manufacturers more accountable for the safety of their products. Passing single chemi-
cal bans can cause companies to make minor molecular changes to a substance, he said, and tend to result in the use of substances with similar toxicity. “What we really need is approved chemicals policy across the board so that the public is better protected,” he said. Lacking such a policy, he said, products in the United States are banned only after a public health or environmental crisis. New Haven Health Director Mario Garcia said the department approves of efforts to remove recognized toxic material from food supply systems and consumer products that could expose children to dangerous chemical substances. He added that although environmental risk assessments of some substances can be controversial, the city’s health department’s jurisdiction does not currently allow for effective regulation of products containing fire retardants or BPA. In 2009, Connecticut became the first state in the nation to ban BPA from infant formula, baby food cans and jars. The law went into effect on Oct. 1, 2011. Contact LILIANA VARMAN at liliana.varman@yale.edu .
Chilean academic probes class dynamics BY KIRSTEN ADAIR CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Patricio Navia, master teacher of New York University’s Liberal Studies Program and a renowned Chilean political commentator, discussed Thursday how Latin American countries are working to overcome historic socioeconomic inequalities. Navia spoke to roughly 20 students in William L. Harkness Hall about the challenges Latin American countries — and Chile in particular — face in redesigning their political landscape around a growing middle class. As Latin American nations work to overcome class inequalities, Navia said “pragmatism and gradualism” will be vital in helping countries implement reform. Latin America is at an interesting crossroads, Navia said, as poverty declines and the rising middle class demands more attention from political leaders. He added that while many commentators and authors today claim that Latin America is “taking off” economically, those who think “more critically” agree that shifting class dynamics present problems for the region. A Chilean native, Navia is well known throughout Latin America for his columns and other published work. He attended the University of Illinois as an undergraduate, earned a master’s in political science at the University of Chicago, and received a Ph.D. in politics from New York University in 2003. Though poverty has diminished in Chile since democracy was restored there in 1990, Navia said that change has not decreased economic inequality, but rather has made everyone “simply better off.” He said the middle class has not received enough attention from policy makers, who have focused on addressing the needs of the poor. “While all models predicted that inequality should have increased [in Chile], the level of inequality has actu-
The percentage of income earned by the richest 10 percent of Latin American society. A study by the World Bank found that the upper decile earned 48 percent of national income, as compared to 29 percent in most developed countries.
Dwight Hall revamps college service program BY JULIA ZORTHIAN STAFF REPORTER Dwight Hall leaders are hoping to capitalize on residential college spirit to encourage more students to participate in community service. Two years ago, Dwight Hall placed representatives in residential colleges to coordinate service events, but the representatives struggled to hold events consistently, current and former Dwight Hall leaders said. Alyssa Bilinski ’13, institutional service coordinator for Dwight Hall, is now leading a renewed effort to offer a similar program, called College Service Outreach Fellows, in which eight fellows will hold service events for three colleges every weekend so that each college will have one event per month. Next year, once the program is more established, the fellows plan to create a competition to name the college with the most service. “The colleges have a strong sense of community built around them,” said William Redden ’14, financial coordinator at Dwight Hall. “You can see that through IM competition and the loyalty found in members of each college. We’re hoping to tap into that to get people involved in service.” The eight fellows were appointed March 20 and met this Monday for training, and they intend to meet monthly to organize events, Bilinski said. Leaders of the new group said they hope to build off of the experiences of the previous College Service Representative Program, which Alexandra Brodsky ’12 began two years ago. Brodsky said the idea for putting representatives in each college originated from the fact that many students cannot commit to community service every week, but may want to help with one-time service opportunities. “In the same way we had [student
activities committee] chairs, we also wanted community service chairs,” she said. The College Service Representative Program included nine colleges at its largest, Brodsky said. Larger events drew between 20 and 30 students, while some offered colleges had more intimate service opportunities. For example, an Ezra Stiles College representative recruited four students every month to work with children at Yale New Haven Hospital. But Bilinski said the program “fizzled out” by the end of last spring. While the previous program allowed college representatives to choose and coordinate their service opportunities, Bilinski said in the new program the fellows only need to choose the dates of the service, and she will coordinate the site where colleges work on each weekend. She added that this new model is intended to increase the amount of support Dwight Hall offers to the fellows by helping them with plans. “We want to create more of a community between the College Service Outreach Fellows, where they can share ideas, say what works and what doesn’t,” Bilinski said. Redden said the fellows will be coordinating with organizations with which Dwight Hall has traditionally worked, such as Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven, to find service opportunities for the colleges each week. Activities could range from building houses to designing science lessons, Bilinski added. Julia Calagiovanni ’15, the service fellow for Silliman, said she plans to raise awareness of the program by attending college council meetings and by emailing students panlists. Dwight Hall will also host the Yale Day of Service on April 7. Contact JULIA ZORTHIAN at julia.zorthian@yale.edu .
SPRAGUE FEATURES FAMED COMPOSER
MARIA ZEPEDA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Patricio Navia, a professor at New York University, told an audience of approximately 20 that Latin America stands today at a crossroads in its class dynamics. ally remained the same,” he said. Inequality has persisted throughout the history of Chile and other Latin American countries, Navia said, but not necessarily with entirely negative implications. He noted that countries need some amount of inequality to foster competition and economic growth. Navia said government policies can help alleviate inequality. He added that even though Chile’s improvement has been limited, the nation is moving in the right direction. He said Chile has benefited from stable political institutions since the restoration of democracy and a market-friendly economy. “If Chile is the patient in the hospital, the patient is making some progress,” he said. As Chile pursues reform, the country has also kept some elements of its previous political infrastructure, which Navia said has aided its efforts to implement change. By contrast, Navia said many other Latin American countries have struggled in overhauling
their governments because they tend to destroy the foundations of their previous state. The talk was met with interest from several students, many of whom are involved in the Latin American Students’ Association, which sponsored the event. “Professor Navia presented a useful historical and economic context for understanding recent political trends in Chile, and a perspective on how Chile’s current situation compares to other nations in Latin America,” Rachel Brown ’15 said. Murat Dagli ’14 said he was happy to hear an optimistic discussion of Latin America, a region he said is often associated with violence, drugs, poverty and other negative phenomena. The talk was held as part of Latin American Week, which ends Friday. Contact KIRSTEN ADAIR at kirsten.adair@yale.edu .
ZOE GORMAN/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
REICH COMES TO NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN Steve Reich, considered by many the greatest living American composer, was featured at the New Music New Haven concert in Sprague Hall on Thursday evening. His piece “Vermont Counterpoint,” written for a 12-member wind ensemble, interspersed well-defined, rhythmic phrases in repetition, pulling melodic parts together and apart again in a ripple effect. Reich’s “Proverb” featured a mix of vocals, keyboards and vibraphones.
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
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BULLETIN BOARD
TODAY’S FORECAST Mostly sunny, with a high near 53. Northwest wind between 7 and 11 mph. Low of 37.
TOMORROW
SUNDAY
High of 50, low of 39.
High of 52, low of 44.
BEAR IN ANTARCTICA BY ILANA STRAUSS
ON CAMPUS SATURDAY, MARCH 31 4:00 PM “All This Singing, One Song: Myths and Paradoxes in Musical Improvisation.” Symposium will explore myths and paradoxes around practices of musical improvisation. Led by Helen Phelan, course director of the master’s program in ritual chant and song at the University of Limerick’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, the presentation will draw on current doctoral research in vocal performance at the Academy. Presentations will include sung examples from Irish traditional song, Georgian Orthodox chant, Western plainchant, contemporary Irish rituals, and songwriting with children in urban regeneration areas. Institute of Sacred Music (409 Prospect St.), Great Hall.
THAT MONKEY TUNE BY MICHAEL KANDALAFT
7:00 PM Yale Anime Society present: “WTF Japan.” In honors of April Fool’s Day, the Yale Anime Society will be showing episodes from a collection of wonderfully weird anime: “Abenobashi,” “Genesis of Aquarion” and “Tower of Druaga.” William L. Harkness (100 Wall St.), Room 119.
SUNDAY, APRIL 1 7:30 PM Schebertiade: An evening of piano music by Schubert, solo + 4 hands. Faculty members from School of Music will perform a short program consisting of pieces composed by Schubert: two movement C-major, Fantasy in F minor and more. Linsly-Chittenden Hall (63 High St.), Room 102.
MONDAY, APRIL 2 5:30 PM “Sex in the Stable: Naughty Women, Strapping Men and Well-Hung Horses.” Carolee Klimchock, a graduate student in American students, will give this women’s, gender, and sexuality studies colloquium. Erinn Staley will also give a talk titled “‘All Are Welcome’: Feminist Ecclesiology and Intellectual Disability.” William L. Harkness (100 Wall St.), Room 309.
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CROSSWORD ACROSS 1 Legendary kicker 5 Go slowly 9 Start to strip? 13 Neural transmitter 14 Old carrier 16 Count (on) 17 Actor roomies' mailbox label that sounds like racing groups? 19 Fifty-fifty 20 In the wrong way 21 On a cargo ship, say 23 Mink cousin 24 Actor/flutist roomies' mailbox label that sounds like a crook? 28 Jodie Foster title role 31 First apartment, perhaps 32 TV host/singer roomies' mailbox label that sounds like a vital sign? 37 Begins a concert tour 38 Flamenco shout 39 Cyberspace giant 41 Waikiki wreath 42 Digestion-related commercial prefix 45 Actress/comic roomies' mailbox label that sounds like an auto safety feature? 48 Youth who flew too near the sun 50 Appointment 51 Actress/cartoonist roomies' mailbox label that sounds like an airport employee? 54 Frankfurt's state 58 Winningest NFL coach 59 Resentful 60 Former eft 63 Screenwriter/acto r roomies' mailbox label that sounds like an old announcer? 65 Track 66 Net business 67 "Sesame Street" giggler 68 Heredity unit
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69 "Now!" relative 70 Road sign silhouette
DOWN 1 Half a '60s quartet 2 Get a life? 3 Game you usually lose 4 3-Down player, e.g. 5 Nimble 6 Seine filler 7 30-ton computer 8 Ristorante offering 9 Invent 10 Gun 11 Stein filler 12 MD for women 15 Desert rises 18 Work the party, in a way 22 Opposite of exo25 "A Passage to India" heroine 26 Montana, once 27 Respectful response 29 Not clerical 30 Alibi provider, sometimes 32 Pueblo people 33 Smart guy?
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34 Make good on 35 However, briefly 36 Blabbed 40 Plug end? 43 Railroad crossing 44 "That hurt my feelings!" 46 Code of conduct 47 Visibly furious 49 Cook on the range 52 Conspires 53 Poke, kitten-style
SUDOKU EXPERT
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55 Elegance 56 Note next to a red F, maybe 57 Miscue 59 Circular road 60 Frothy traditional beverage 61 "__ of Destruction": 1965 protest song 62 Pallid 64 Peeples of "Fame"
7 6 9 3 8 7 6 1 5 4 9 8 2 3 4 8 1 3 7 5 3 5 4 8 6 4 6 2 3 9 9 3 4 8 8 7 6
4 5 6 9 3 8 2 1
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
NATION
T
Dow Jones 13,117.00, +0.30%
S NASDAQ 2,765.50, +0.26% S Oil $103.40, +0.59%
High court has options on health care law
S S&P 500 1,401.30, +0.22% T 10-yr. Bond 2.16%, -0.04 T Euro $1.34, +0.38
Romney turns focus to swaying centrists BY BETH FOUHY ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHARLES DHARAPAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Supporters of health care reform rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington on the final day of arguments regarding the health care law. BY MARK SHERMAN AND RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON — The arguments are done and the case has been submitted, as Chief Justice John Roberts says at the end of every Supreme Court argument. Now the justices will wrestle with what to do with President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. They have a range of options, from upholding the law to striking it down in its entirety. The court also could avoid decid-
ing the law’s constitutionality at all, although that prospect seems remote after this week’s arguments. Here is a look at six potential outcomes, from the simpler to the more complicated possible rulings: --Q. What if the Supreme Court upholds the law and finds Congress was within its authority to require most people to have health insurance or pay a penalty? A. A decision in favor of the law would end the legal fight and allow the administration
to push forward with implementing its provisions over the next few years, including the insurance requirement, an expansion of Medicaid and a ban on private insurers’ denying coverage to people with pre-existing health problems. The political wrangling, however, probably would continue as Republican candidates for president and lesser offices are calling for repeal of the law. --Q. What if, on the other hand, the court strikes down the entire law?
A. That would kill a costly new federal entitlement before it has a chance to take root and develop a constituency of beneficiaries and supporters, namely more than 30 million people who are supposed to wind up with health insurance because of the law. In addition, some parts of the law already are in effect and would be rolled back. One popular provision allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26 has added nearly 2.5 million people to the coverage rolls, at no cost to taxpayers.
NEW YORK — Rick Santorum doesn’t care about the unemployment rate. Newt Gingrich has “more baggage than the airlines.” Both are Washington insiders who have bent their principles for money and influence. So say Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his allies. That advertising playbook has helped make Romney his party’s likely presidential nominee and could offer a preview of what awaits President Barack Obama in this summer’s general election campaign. Voters in early primary states have seen plenty of this ad strategy already: a torrent of attacks on Romney’s opponents along with a few positive spots about the GOP front-runner’s biography and business experience. The strategy, devised by Romney’s campaign and an allied independent group, has been focused and unforgiving, all but eviscerating the former Massachusetts governor’s rivals while portraying the candidate as an effective manager and devoted family man. “The ads have been very effective,” says Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for American Crossroads, a conservative-leaning super political action committee. They’ve catapulted Romney “into a very strong position in the Republican primary without going so far that he’s alienated swaths of independent voters.” The general election phase of the campaign will tell whether that’s true. One thing that’s certain is that the Romney team’s approach has successfully shepherded him through a primary season in which
voters have been far more conservative than the candidate was perceived to be. Romney’s team now faces a far greater challenge: persuading a more centrist general electorate to bounce Obama, who polling shows has much higher favorability ratings than his Romney himself.
[The people] … who are going to decide the 2012 election, haven’t tuned in yet. KEN GOLDSTEIN Kantar Media/Campaighn Media Analysis Group The Romney campaign and Restore Our Future, a super PAC supporting his candidacy, together have poured about $50 million into television ads in the primary campaign so far, according to information provided to The Associated Press by ad buyers. No other candidate or super PAC has come close to that level of spending. Restore Our Future, which is run by several former Romney advisers, has spent more than $35 million on TV ads alone, almost of which have been negative attacks against Santorum and Gingrich. ROF’s approach has been clear and unadorned: Cut straight to the heart of Romney’s rivals’ vulnerabilities, often using their own words against them. Make accusations about their records, citing news sources as support. There are signs a similar approach will be used against Obama.
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
PAGE 11
WORLD Apple workers get raise, fewer hours BY PETER SVENSSON ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK — Chinese workers who often spend more than 60 hours per week assembling iPhones and iPads will have their overtime hours curbed and their pay increased after a labor auditor hired by Apple Inc. inspected their factories. The Fair Labor Association says Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the Taiwanese company that runs the factories in China, is committing to a reduction of weekly work time to 49 hours, the legal Chinese maximum.
At this point, it’s politics. It’s not really economics. THOMAS DINGES Analyst, iSuppli That limit is routinely ignored in factories throughout China. Auret van Heerden, the CEO of the FLA, said Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn, is the first company to commit to following the legal standard. Apple’s and FLA’s own guidelines call for work weeks of 60 hours or less. Foxconn’s moves are likely to have an impact across the global technology industry. The company employs 1.2 million workers in China to assemble products not just for Apple, but for Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other pillars of U.S. technology. Foxconn’s factories are the last step in the process of manufacturing iPhones and other Apple devices, most of which have hundreds of components. Research firm IHS iSuppli estimates that Apple pays $8 for the assembly of
a 16-gigabyte iPhone 4S and $188 for its components. It sells the phone wholesale for about $600 to phone companies, which then subsidize it to be able to sell it for $200 with a two-year service contract. Ricardo Ernst, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, said companies play a risky game when they raise their manufacturing costs. U.S. consumers have shown little inclination to pay more for products that are made in the U.S. as opposed to China. But iSuppli’s figures suggest that if Apple were to absorb a Foxconn wage increase that keeps salaries level while cutting average working hours from 60 to 49 per week, it would pay less than $2 extra to have an iPhone made. Other electronics companies, particularly PC makers such as Dell and HP, earn less profit on what they sell and could see a deeper impact. Thomas Dinges, an analyst at iSuppli, said Apple’s competitors will probably have to accept the price increase too, since it’s framed as a moral issue. “At this point, it’s politics. It’s not really economics,” he said, adding that there are few alternatives to Chinese factories for most of these products. The FLA auditors visited three Foxconn complexes in February and March: Guanlan and Longhua near the coastal manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, and Chengdu in the inland province of Sichuan. They employ a total of 178,000 workers, with an average age of 23. Average monthly salaries at the factories ranged from $360 to $455. Foxconn recently raised salaries by up to 25 percent in the second major salary hike in less than two years.
22
Number of members in the Arab League
Representing Arab nations across North Africa and the Middle East, the organization serves to guard the states’ mutual interests. The number includes Syria, even though the country was suspended from the league in November 2011.
Iraq shunned at Arab summit
KARIM KADIM/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, center, attends the Arab League summit in Baghdad, Iraq on Thursday. BY LARA JAKES AND HAMZA HENDWAWI ASSOCIATED PRESS BAGHDAD — Sunni Muslim rulers largely shunned an Arab League summit hosted by Shiite-led Iraq on Thursday, illustrating how powerfully the sectarian split and the rivalry with Iran define Middle Eastern politics in the era of the Arab Spring. The crisis in Syria is the epicenter of those divisions. The one-day summit closed with a joint call on Syrian President Bashar Assad to stop his bloody crackdown on an uprising seeking his ouster. But the final statement barely papered over the differences among the Arab nations over how to deal with the longest-running regional revolt. “What disturbs the breeze of our Arab Spring and fills our hearts with sadness is the scenes of slaughter and torture committed by the Syrian regime against our brothers and sisters in Syria,” said Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, leader of Libya’s National Transitional Council. In a snub to Iraq, only 10 heads of
state from the Arab League’s 22 members attended, with the rest sending lower-level officials. Especially notable were the absences of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and most other Gulf countries, as well Morocco and Jordan - all of them headed by Sunni monarchs who deeply distrust the close ties between Baghdad’s Shiite-dominated government and their top regional rival, Iran. The Gulf countries also see Iraq as too soft on Syria. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have talked of arming Syria’s opposition, apparently eager to bring the fall of Assad and break the Sunni-majority country out of its alliance with Iran. Speaking to the gathering, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki urged restraint, saying Baghdad opposes any military intervention and citing his country’s years of turmoil as an example of what happens when outside forces get involved in national struggles. U.S. forces left Iraq just over 100 days ago after nearly nine years of war and occupation.
“Iraq is afraid of the attempts to militarize the Arab uprisings, because this will deviate them from the right course and push toward the wrong position,” al-Maliki said. “Dialogue between the government and the opposition is the right option to solve the crisis.” Iraq’s hosting of the annual summit for the first time since 1990 was touted by Baghdad officials as a victory in their efforts to show the country is moving toward stability after years of sectarian fighting that almost tipped the nation into civil war. Thousands of security forces cleared the streets and locked down the capital in one of the quietest weeks in years, although officials said two Katyusha rockets hit near the fortified Green Zone where the summit was held just as diplomats convened. No casualties were reported. The summit was the first since the wave of Arab Spring uprisings began sweeping the region more than a year ago, targeting its long-ruling strongmen. The 2011 summit was canceled because of the turmoil.
Spain engulfed by anti-austerity strike
ANDRES KUDACKI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A protester is grabbed by police agents in Madrid on Thursday during a general strike. BY DANIEL WOOLLS AND CIARAN GILES ASSOCIATED PRESS MADRID — Spanish workers enraged by austerity-driven labor reforms to prevent the nation from becoming Europe’s next bailout victim slowed down the country’s economy in a general strike Thursday, closing factories and clashing with police as the new-center right government tried to convince investors the nation isn’t headed for a financial meltdown. Tens of thousands held protest marches in Madrid and other cities, and the demonstrations turned violent in Spain’s second largest city of Barcelona, where hooded protesters smashed bank and storefront windows with hammers and rocks and set fire to streetside trash containers. Television images also showed the Barcelona demonstrators throwing rocks at riot police vans, and hitting them as they sped near the crowds. Traffic was slowed in Valencia next to the Mediterranean Sea when demonstrators lit mattresses ablaze on a highway, and a Molotov cocktail was hurled at a police car in the eastern city of Murcia. Authorities arrested 176 protesters across Spain and said 104 people were injured in clashes, including 58 police officers. There were no immediate reports of serious injuries. The protests came a day before Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s administration is expected to announce about (EURO)30 billion ($40 billion) in spending cuts and tax hikes to ease increasing fears about Spain’s budget deficit. European leaders insist drastic cuts amust be made this year even though reductions in government spending are almost sure to boost the unemployment rate of nearly 23 percent, the highest among the 17 nations that use the
euro. The labor reforms make it less costly for Spanish businesses to fire workers, and give them incentives for hiring - but protesters said they are being forced to give up rights they earned decades ago.
Why wouldn’t I protest? I’ve spent 45 years working for the same company and now they can get rid of me almost for free. JOSE JIMINEZ “Why wouldn’t I protest?” asked textile worker Jose Jimenez, 60, from the Madrid protest. “I’ve spent 45 years working for the same company and now they can get rid of me almost for free.” Others said the reforms put in place by Rajoy in February after his conservative Popular Party ousted the governing Socialists in November will only boost the profits of companies and banks. “Workers are losing all their rights, and the benefits will go only to the banks and the businesses,” 57-year-old bus driver Fidel Martin said. Labor unions said millions of Spaniards in the nation of 47 million stayed away from work to protest, and the strike caused transportation delays and prompted Spain’s government-run national health care system to significantly reduce services except for emergency cases. Workers at car factories that assemble vehicles for Renault SA, SEAT SA, Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co. largely stayed home, and services at mining and port facilities were also severely limited, union leaders said.
PAGE 12
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
AROUND THE IVIES
Frat Boy Urbandictionary.com defines a frat boy as “a college kid who thinks he’s better than everyone else because he is in a fraternity … frat boy behavior is typified by drinking shitty beer.”
T H E H A R VA R D C R I M S O N
T H E C O R N E L L D A I LY S U N
Harvard accepts record low of 5.9 percent
SAE denies fault in brother’s 2011 Death
BY ELIZABETH AURITT STAFF WRITER An all-time low 5.9 percent of applicants received offers to join Harvard College’s Class of 2016 on Thursday. This marks the seventh consecutive year that Harvard’s admission rate has fallen. At 5 p.m., 1,260 students received notifications of their acceptance by email. In total, including the 772 students admitted in December in the early action acceptance round, a total of 2,032 initial offers, more than 100 fewer than last year, were extended to applicants. The admit rate for those considered under regular decision, including the 2,838 early action candidates who were deferred to
the original round, was 3.8 percent. T h i s year’s accepted students HARVARD w e r e selected from an applicant pool of 34,302, down 1.9 percent from last year. The percentage of black, Latino, and Native American students accepted to the class decreased slightly, while Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians were accepted at slightly higher rates. Black students make up 10.2 percent of the accepted students, and 11.2 percent are Latino — down from last year’s
11.8 percent and 12.1 percent, respectively. Ten percent of the accepted students hail from foreign countries. More than 60 percent of students accepted this year will benefit from a record financial aid budget of $172 million; families receiving aid will pay an average of $12,000 of the total cost of Harvard undergraduate education, which next year will rise to nearly $55,000. Under the recently modified guidelines of the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative, students from families that earn less than $65,000 will attend Harvard at no cost. “It’s a big commitment, and it’s aimed right at the people that need the money the most,” said Dean of Admissions William R.
Fitzsimmons ’67. Last year, even with a slightly larger applicant pool, the acceptance rate was a bit higher, at 6.2 percent. Fitzsimmons said in a press release that the return of early action admissions, discontinued at Harvard in 2006 and revived for the Class of 2016, made it more difficult for the admissions office to predict the number of students who will ultimately matriculate. Thus, officers were conservative in the number of students they accepted. Furthermore, good press might spur accepted students to choose Harvard in higherthan-usual numbers. “There’s been some very, very good publicity about Harvard this year,” Fitzsimmons said.
THE DARTMOUTH
Rolling Stone article targets College culture BY SOPHIA JOHNSTON STAFF WRITER An article in Rolling Stone titled “Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy,” addressing allegations of hazing at Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity made by Andrew Lohse ’12, has been published in the April 12 edition of the magazine, released online on Wednesday. While many students interviewed by The Dartmouth expressed displeasure with Rolling Stone contributing editor Janet Reitman’s representation of Dartmouth culture, some said they recognized that
the article would provoke discussion about important issues addressed DARTMOUTH in the article, such as sexual assault and hazing. Reitman’s piece includes a timeline of the events that led to Lohse’s January opinion column in The Dartmouth, as well as Reitman’s description of Dartmouth’s Greek system and its relationship to hazing. The arti-
cle relies on Lohse as its primary source but also includes interviews with several current students, professors and alumni. Lohse said that his relationship to the Dartmouth Greek system began with his older brother, a Dartmouth alumnus who was a member of a fraternity and whom Lohse highly admired. After arriving at Dartmouth and pledging a fraternity, Lohse told Reitman he expressed concerns about several activities with which he felt uncomfortable but never received a positive response from SAE members. During a one-year suspension
from the College resulting from two criminal charges, Lohse brought his concerns to the attention of administrators and eventually described his experiences within the pages of The Dartmouth. Reitman’s article characterizes the College as the “most insular school in the Ivy League,” where “fraternities essentially control the social life” and criticism of Greek life is equivalent to “criticizing Dartmouth itself.” Reitman describes the “rampant” nature of sexual assault, closely linked to “predatory” fraternities.
BY HARRISON OKIN STAFF WRITER Sigma Alpha Epsilon argues that the death of George Desdunes ’13 was the result of his own “culpable conduct,” according to a defense brief filed by the national fraternity earlier this month. Denying all charges in the $25 million wrongful death lawsuit brought by the mother of Desdunes, the SAE brother who died after a pledging event last February, the fraternity claims that it does not have a pledge process and that it does not require anything of pledges. SAE also demands that any damages awarded to the plaintiff — Desdunes’ mother, Marie Lourdes Andres — should be paid by the 20 former SAE brothers and pledges also named as defendants in the complaint. In a separate, criminal lawsuit, three SAE pledges were indicted on charges of first-degree hazing and firstdegree unlawfully dealing with a child. The fraternity denies liability for actions taken by individual brothers or pledges at specific chapters. It argues in response to the suit that SAE did not directly exhibit “negligence, carelessness, and/or culpable conduct” and that Desdunes’ death was not the result of any direct action or negligence by the organization. In its response to the suit, SAE also argues that Desdunes was partly or wholly responsible for his own death. SAE claims that Desdunes both “assumed the risk” and “consented to the risk” of the actions that led to his alcohol poisoning, from which he died on Feb. 25, 2011, at Cayuga Medical Center shortly after he was found unre-
CORNELL
sponsive on a couch in the fraternity house. Shortly thereafter, Cornell revoked its recognition
of the SAE fraternity. According to allegations made by Desundes’ mother in the wrongful death lawsuit, several SAE pledges kidnapped Desdunes, tied a noose around his neck and kept him bound and blindfolded while pledges quizzed him on fraternity history. Each time Desdunes answered incorrectly, the pledges forced him to perform exercises or drink alcoholic substances, the suit alleges. The national SAE organization has faced scrutiny since hazing incidents have been reported at its chapters on several campuses in addition to Cornell. In March 2011, the SAE chapter at the University of Michigan was expelled from campus after allegations surfaced that brothers physically abused pledges, according to The Huffington Post. One month later, Bucknell’s SAE chapter was suspended for four years for hazing incidents involving illegal alcohol and drug use, The Bucknellian reported. This month, 27 SAE brothers at Dartmouth College were charged with hazing by the university for allegedly forcing pledges to engage in dehumanizing behavior including swimming in and swallowing vomit, The Dartmouth reported. SAE’s response follows briefs filed by the defense attorneys of three pledges — Max Haskin ’14, Ben Mann ’14 and Edward Williams ’14 — who have been charged in criminal court.
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
PAGE 13
SPORTS
Maria Sharapova beats Caroline Wozniacki on reversed line call The No. 2 and No. 6 ranked tennis players in the world went to three sets on Thursday in the semifinals of the Sony Ericsson Open. Sharapova won 4-6, 6-2, 6-4 but took the final point after the umpire overruled a call by the linesman. Instead of going to deuce, Sharapova was given two more serves which she used to set herself up for an overhead slam, and the win. Replays showed the umpire was right.
Golf tees off for season GOLF FROM PAGE 14 seniors left in the lineup. Both teams have their sights set on the Ivy League Championships, which will take place in late April. Members of the teams said they expect nothing less than a repeat of last season. “We won the Ivy title last year and intend on winning it again,” Lipa said in an email to the News. The main goal of the men’s team is also to defend its title, Hatten said. If either team wins another Ivy League title, it will continue competition in the NCAA tournament. The toughest competition in the Ivy League for the men’s team is currently Dartmouth, Davenport said. He added that Yale defeated Dartmouth in the fall season. The women’s team’s tournament against Georgetown will be its first since the fall, except for the Rio Verde tournament, which they
Ivy competition begins
competed in over spring break in Arizona. The team is eager to begin the season this weekend, Lipa said. The men’s team is also eager to begin its season. “I think I speak for everyone when I say we’re excited,” Hatten said. The men’s season opener will be hosted by Yale next weekend, April 7. A home tournament is an advantage, since the team has played on its own course many times, McNiff said. Due to this advantage and the team’s strength, if the Bulldogs play their best game, they could certainly win the tournament, Davenport said. The men’s team placed ninth at their spring break tournament, the Callaway Farms Invitational in Santa Fe, Calif. Contact MONICA DISARE at monica.disare@yale.edu .
ZOE GORMAN/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
The baseball team is coming off a weekend of mixed results against Hartford, with two wins and two losses. BY CHARLES CONDRO STAFF REPORTER The Elis have already played 20 games this season, but the road to the Ivy League championship begins this weekend.
BASEBALL
JANE LONG/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
The Elis start their spring season on April 7 with the Yale Spring Opener.
A doubleheader at Columbia (6-13, 0-0 Ivy) on Saturday followed by a twin bill at Penn (8-9, 0-0) on Sunday will give the Bulldogs their first taste of Ancient Eight play. “It’s a clean slate,” catcher Ryan Brenner ’12 said. “Wins and losses before this don’t this don’t matter. It’s all about the Ivy League.” Although Yale has struggled at the plate — hitting just .226 this season — Brenner and infielder Chris Piwinski ’14 said the team is about to break out of its slump. One Bulldog who has not been slumping is shortstop Cale Hanson ’14. He leads the team with a .385 average. Piwinski said that having one player hitting well can spark his teammates. “We’ve faced some adversity through-
out the lineup,” Piwinski said. “[But] the Saturday, 1 p.m. biggest thing is that at hitting is contagious.” When the Elis take the field in New York and Philadelphia this weekend, they will be Columbia taking on some familSunday, 12 p.m. iar faces. Unlike many at of the teams that Yale faced in the non-conference portion of its schedule, the Bulldogs have been playPenn ing against these teams year-in and year-out. Even so, the Elis are still looking to gain an advantage over their opponents by scouting. Second baseman David Toups ’15 said that the pitching staff has been looking at scouting reports on the opposing hitters, and Piwinski added that Yale’s coaching staff has been gathering information on the opposition’s tendencies. Brenner and Piwinski added that since Columbia’s starting lineup is laden with left-handed hitters, the Elis will most
Baseball
likely send southpaws to the mound in both games Saturday. Yale’s final tune-up game before Ivy play starts was cancelled due to rain at Quinnipiac University on Wednesday. The lack of a weekday game should not make the Elis rusty, however. “It’s not really going to affect us,” Toups said. “We’ve got practice [Thursday] and Friday.” Practice will prove vital in Ancient Eight play, as Brenner said that the talent level is comparable throughout the league. Toups added that teams will need to play with a sense of urgency and a high level of concentration to come out on top. Solid pitching will be key to a successful Ivy League season as well, and Piwinski said he is confident in the Elis’ hurlers. “Our pitching staff looks pretty amazing right now,” Piwinski said. “This is going to be the weekend where we really turn it on.” The Elis begin their twin bill against the Lions at 1:00 p.m. at Robertson Field in New York City. Contact CHARLES CONDRO at charles.condro@yale.edu .
Rowing season starts LTWEIGHT CREW FROM PAGE 14
LINDSEY UNIAT/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
The lightweight crew team graduated five seniors from the varsity eight last season.
Men’s lacrosse to face Penn M.LAX FROM PAGE 14 margin. The last time these two teams met, Penn came back from three goals down in the first half to beat the Elis 10–9 in triple overtime at Franklin Field. In that game as well the Bulldogs came back from a two-goal fourth quarter deficit to force overtime, but were not able to convert that momentum into a win. Yale won 16 of 23 faceoffs in that contest and will need to dominate at the X again if they are to prevail this time around. Midfielder Dylan Levings ’14, who shares Yale’s faceoffs with Cole Yeager ’13, is ranked sixth in the country with a .625 winning percentage. Levings was in top form last weekend against Princeton, winning seven of his last eight faceoffs when the Bulldogs needed him in the fourth quarter and overtime.
Men’s Lacrosse Saturday, 1 p.m.
vs.
Penn
The Elis also got a strong performance out of Meyer last week. In his third game as the starter, the s o p h o m o re made a career-high 14 saves, including three in the second overtime period
alone. Attackman Conrad Oberbeck ’15 has also made a strong impact in only his first year on the team. Oberbeck leads the team in goals with 14 and is third with 17 points. His .500 shooting percentage also makes him the Bulldogs most efficient offensive weapon this season. Tomorrow’s game at Reese Stadium is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Contact JOHN SULLIVAN at john.j.sullivan@yale.edu .
power throughout the spring. He added that the results of the Eastern Sprints and the IRA National Championship will be determined by whichever team improves the most, so he said the team views racing as a “formative experience.” Team captain David Walker ’12 said that he expects the lightweight league to be very fast and competitive this year, but the challenging competition will also present opportunities for improvement and success between now and the Eastern Sprints and the national championship in May and June. “The search for speed continues, and judgment day will
come,” Walker said. Lightweight Saturday, 3 p.m. crew differs at from heavyweight crew in that no oarsman may exceed the Navy weight of 160 lbs. on race day, with an eightperson boat average of 155 lbs. per rower. In last year’s race against Navy, Yale won by 3.3 seconds in the varsity race. Last weekend, the Midshipmen lost to Princeton by 5.3 seconds in the varsity race.
Lightweight Crew
Contact LINDSEY UNIAT at lindsey.uniat@yale.edu .
W. lacrosse heads to NY W.LAX FROM PAGE 14 far this season alone, she has already scored 21 goals and is the second lead scorer on her team. Another key Raider player is their captain Courtney Miller. With 29 goals and ten assists, she is the Raiders’ top scorer this season. She has earned first team All-Patriot League honors three years running and was named second team All-Region by IWLCA. Along with O’Sullivan, she also recorded two goals and an assist against Yale last year. Man-to-man defense is expected in Saturday’s match. “If we can keep them from scoring, I like our chances,” Phillips said. “We will have lock down defenders on them.” Yale has improved significantly in turnovers and clears lately. The number of turnovers has been consistently decreasing, and the team has been putting a heavy emphasis on clears during every practice. Although the team struggled with creating shot opportunities at the
beginning of the season, the Bulldogs now seem to Saturday, 1 p.m. have gotten over at that hitch, recording 34 shots against Marist this week. Phillips said the team now needs Colgate to improve in its shooting percentage, which means scoring on more shots. Midfielder Sabine van der Linden ’14 and midfielder Christina Doherty ’15, Yale’s two main face-off players, have been stepping up with strong draw controls. Phillips said Colgate has been very successful on the draw this year and draw control will be a very important factor in the game. Captain Caroline Crow ’12, midfielder Cathryn Avallone ’15 and attacker Devon Rhodes ’13 are Yale’s top three scorers so far this season. Crow leads with 14 goals, including a fantastic hat-trick in Wednesday’s match. Attacker Jen DeVito ’14 has made a huge impact on the team
Women’s Lacrosse
by scoring five goals in a single game, against Marist. Avallone and Rhodes have so far recorded 12 and 11, respectively. Crow and midfielder Ashley McCormick ’14 will be the two top scorers among the returning starters for the Saturday game. Phillips said the Bulldogs, who are now midway through their scheduled matches, have shown significant improvement compared to last season. Whereas the team recorded only three wins overall last year with 83 goals, it has already secured that many victories this year along with 77 goals. One downside to the upcoming game is that the Bulldogs will have to take another two-hour road trip to New York just after their trip to Marist on Wednesday. However, Phillips said since there is no midweek game next week, the team will be totally focused on its match against Princeton on April 7. Tomorrow’s game starts at 1 p.m. Contact EUGENE JUNG at eugene.jung@yale.edu .
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WOMEN’S SAILING DELLENBAUGH WOMEN’S REGATTA Marlena Fauer ’14, Eugenia Custo Greig ’14, Morgan Kiss ’15 and Isabel Elliman ’12 will represent Yale’s women’s sailing team in this weekend’s Brad Dellenbaugh Interconference Regatta at Brown. The forecast calls for winds in excess of 20 miles per hour.
COED SAILING THREE REGATTAS THIS WEEKEND The Yale coed sailing team, coming off of last weekend’s victories at the Ivy championship and Boston Dinghy Cup, will split into three groups to sail on the Thames River at Connecticut College, Mystic Lake at Tufts, and the Charles River at Boston University.
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“It’s a clean slate. Wins and losses before this don’t matter. It’s all about the Ivy League.” RYAN BRENNER ’12 CATCHER, BASEBALL
YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
Elis look for first Ivy win
Y150 launches season
MEN’S LACROSSE
BY LINDSEY UNIAT STAFF REPORTER On the heels of the heavyweight crew team’s sweeping home victory against Brown last weekend, the lightweight crew team will open its spring season this Saturday against Navy in Princeton, N.J.
LIGHTWEIGHT CREW
has been ranked in the top 15 in the country. Interestingly, however, Penn’s worst loss, an 11–4 drubbing at the hands of the Tigers, came to the lowest-rated of these teams. Both teams played their first two conference games against Cornell and Princeton and the Quakers and Elis share an opponent in Lehigh as well. Neither Yale nor Penn was able to come away with a victory in any of these contests, although the Bulldogs lost their games by an aggregate score of 29–23 while the Quakers were outscored by a 37–19
The Bulldogs will take on the Midshipmen in four races — the varsity eight, junior varsity eight, second junior varsity eight, and freshmen eight — on Lake Carnegie, fighting to take home the ninth annual Johnson Cup. Saturday’s race will present the Blue and White with two challenges, head coach Andy Card said. “[First,] Navy is always a deep and fast team, and second, it’s our first race of the spring,” Card said. “Your first race is, well, your first race, and we have many new guys on the team — new guys in the freshman eight by definition, sophomores new to varsity competition, and new guys in the varsity boat. Everyone is racing up.” Card added that many talented seniors, including five in the varsity eight, graduated last year, so the top 16 slots must be filled. But even with the new roster, the team hopes to keep one thing the same from last year. The Bulldogs are defending their No. 1 ranking in the nation after the Intercollegiate Rowing Association National Championship last June. The 2011 season was the first time since 2005 that Yale finished in first place. While Saturday will be the first official race of the season, a scrimmage against Trinity last weekend allowed Yale to test the waters of competition. Card said the event was gratifying, and that he saw a strong effort from the squad. Varsity oarsman Thomas Schwartz ’13 said that the team uses every race as an opportunity to critique its strengths and weaknesses, in order to develop speed and
SEE M. LACROSSE PAGE 13
SEE LTWEIGHT CREW PAGE 13
BLAIR SEIDEMAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Midfielder Greg Mahony ’12 scored a goal and had three shots on goal in last Saturday’s 10-9 5 OT loss to Princeton. BY JOHN SULLIVAN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER One week after playing the longest game in the history of Yale men’s lacrosse, the Bulldogs will take the field again tomorrow against Penn in search of their first Ivy League win of the season. The Elis (2–4, 0–2 Ivy) played well in each of their first two conference matchups, but were nonetheless denied wins by No. 5 Cornell and No. 17 Princeton. Two weeks ago the Bulldogs pushed the Big Red to the brink in Ithaca, N.Y., but they ultimately came
up one goal short. Last weekend Yale returned home to face Princeton and battled for five overtime periods before falling 10–9 to the Tigers. That game featured a twogoal comeback with less than a minute remaining in the fourth quarter and a Herculean defensive effort by the Bulldogs for the first 18 minutes of overtime. Ultimately, though, the Tigers came away with the win. “The loss is tough to take right now,” goalkeeper Jack Meyer ’14 said after the Princeton game. “But we just need to get at each other in practice, hustle, and continue to
play Yale lacrosse. That will be a recipe for success going forward.” Yale has now played three consecutive games against ranked opponents — the other contest was an 11–7 loss to No. 7 Lehigh — and have not won since a victory over Albany in the second game of the season. The Elis need a win this weekend to get their season back on track and give themselves a chance to qualify for the Ivy League tournament. The Quakers (1–5, 0–2 Ivy) have had an even tougher schedule than the Bulldogs. Each of their six opponents so far this season
Teams prep for spring tournaments BY MONICA DISARE STAFF REPORTER Yale’s golf teams are beginning their spring seasons with high expectations and Ivy League Championships to defend.
GOLF Both the men’s and women’s teams qualified for the NCAA tournament last year after winning their respective Ivy League Championships. The women’s team, which will compete on Monday in Georgetown, lost three seniors last season to graduation, but expects to make up the difference with a strong freshman class. The men’s team, which will kick off it’s spring season on April 7 at home, lost only one senior and gained three freshman. “Everybody is hungry to repeat an Ivy League Championship,” William Davenport ’15 said. After a winter of working inside, the men’s team is itching to hit the golf course and repeat the suc-
cess of last spring. Members of the team said they may be even stronger this year. “I think we’re just as strong if not stronger [than last year],” Jeffrey Hatten ’12, the team captain said, “We have more experience than last year,” he added. The biggest loss to the men’s team was former captain Tom McCarthy ’11, who was a significant contributor to the team last year. The three freshmen this year, Davenport, Thomas Greenhalgh ’15, and John McNiff ’15, have stepped up to take his place. Davenport, in particular emerged as part of the starting lineup in the fall season. The women’s team lost three seniors last year. The team is now composed of more underclassmen than upperclassmen, which is a big change, Alexandra Lipa ’13 said. But this change is not necessarily for the worse. The Bulldogs gained three new freshman, Shreya Ghei ’15, Marika Liu ’15 and Caroline Rouse ’15. Lipa said that the freshmen are helping to fill the hole the SEE GOLF PAGE 13
STAT OF THE DAY 14
Bulldogs seek to repeat victory BY EUGENE JUNG CONTRIBUTING REPORTER The Elis will travel to Hamilton, N.Y., tomorrow to face Colgate carrying the momentum of Wednesday’s 13-9 victory against Marist with them. The victory against Marist was the team’s first away win of the season and gave it an extra boost of confidence after a string of four losses.
W.LACROSSE “Colgate is one of the better teams in the Patriot League but seems to be having an off year this year,” head coach Anne Phillips said. “But we cannot take this team lightly or overlook them in any respect.” The Bulldogs (3-5, 0-3 Ivy) defeated the visiting Raiders 10-7 at home last year. With only two victories and eight losses this season, Colgate (2-8, 2-1 Patriot) is desperate for a win. “We don’t want to be the team that gives it to them, although they won’t go down easily,” Phillips said. Phillips said the home field advantage was a huge factor in the team’s win last season. She added that she did not think Colgate played to its full potential last year. In their last meeting, Yale outdid the Raiders in every aspect of the game, except turnovers (18-14) and fouls (19-17). The Bulldogs showed overwhelming strength
EUGENE JUNG/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Defender Adrienne Tarver ’14 (5) had six ground balls in Wednesday’s game. in shots (24-19), draw controls (12-7) and ground ball controls (21-17). Goalkeeper Whitney Quackenbush ’12 also recorded one more save than her Colgate counterpart Christina Roa. The returning key player to watch on the Raiders’ side is Amanda O’Sullivan.
She led her team’s attack last year by scoring two goals and taking a quarter of Colgate’s recorded shots during the match in New Haven. She scored 22 goals in total last season and averaged a goal per game. So SEE W. LACROSSE PAGE 13
THE NUMBER OF GOALS LACROSSE ATTACKER CONRAD OBERBECK ’15 HAS SCORED THIS SEASON, THE MOST OF ANY BULLDOG. Oberbeck was ranked in the top 50 Men’s Lacrosse players of the Frehsman class by Inside Lacrosse before attending Yale. He has a .500 shooting percentage.