Yale Daily News — Week of April 15, 2022

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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · VOL. CXLIV, NO. 20 · yaledailynews.com

IS THE COUNCIL IN CRISIS?

19 Yale College Council members speak out on year of Senate inefficiency

BY LUCY HODGMAN STAFF REPORTER After a year punctuated by Senate apathy, 23 out of the 28 current senators in the Yale College Council will not seek re-election.

On April 21, polls open for YCC elections, which will usher in a new slate of senators and executives. The 2022 candidates roster, which will launch officially on Friday and was obtained by the News in advance, comes as some members of the body question whether the organization’s current structure is conducive to the achievement of tangible policy goals. Facing issues with Senate engagement, the YCC has often failed to meet quorum requirements — the minimum

number of senators who must be present for a vote to be legitimate — at their weekly meetings. The body passed only three Senate-wide resolutions or amendments during the academic year, and some of those took multiple attempts at reaching quorum before a vote could be held.

In interviews with the News, 19 current members of the YCC reflected on the effectiveness of the Council’s operational structure, recalling challenges with maintaining Senate engagement, meeting policy goals and pushing initiatives through the bureaucratic processes of the University administration.

“Even though I would say we have done meaningful work, I’m having a hard time thinking of greatest successes, to be honest, because I feel

like this entire spring semester has been a push for things that haven’t come to fruition,” said Iris Li ’24, co-academic life director.

The YCC, Yale College’s centralized student government, is led by an elected student president and divided into three branches — policy, operations and events.

The events director supervises programming carried out by the respective class councils for the first year, sophomore and junior classes, while the vice president supervises the YCC Senate and its constituent policy teams. In the senate, two elected senators represent each of Yale’s 14 residential colleges. The retention rate for senators running for reelection is often low, pointing to a broad-

ly-felt sense of apathy with the YCC’s ability to make change.

Currently, Bayan Galal ’23 serves as YCC president, working with Zoe Hsu ’24 as vice president and Diba Ghaed ’24 as events director.

According to the YCC Constitution, representatives can raise issues at the council’s weekly senate meetings, where the rest of the body votes on issues ranging from associate senator confirmations and the establishment of event subcommittees to impeachment and constitutional amendments.

Depending on their gravity, votes require either a simple, two-thirds or three-fourths majority. Due to inconsistent attendance records, YCC members were unable to provide exact numbers of times the

Senate met quorum during their weekly meetings, but nine anecdotally noted that it was not often.

Policy proposals extending beyond the internal structure of the YCC are not voted on in the Senate, Galal told the News. Instead, any senator can draft a proposal for a policy change which members of the executive board can present to University administrators. Galal classified the process of drafting and proposing policies as the bulk of the YCC’s operations.

Last spring, Galal and Hsu’s campaign hinged on the promise that they would build a “healthier Yale,” developing the physical, mental, community, finanSEE YCC PAGE 4

Yale Ventures to Feds seize stolen artifacts lead innovation

BY SARAH COOK STAFF REPORTER On Tuesday morning, the University announced the creation of Yale Ventures, a new initiative to help faculty and students launch their ideas into medical, technology, science and engineering startups and support innovation and entrepreneurship throughout New Haven.

Yale Ventures will be led by recently appointed Senior Associate Provost for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Josh Geballe. The initiative aims to provide more structured support for innovations designed at the University, transform ideas into startups, facilitate corporate sponsorships and grow the entrepreneurial community in the area. It will be organized into four primary units: Intellectual Property and Licensing Services, Innovation Training and Startups, Corporate Partnerships and Innovation Community. Each of these units will be funded with new University investments.

“The launch of Yale Ventures is an important step in expanding the impact Yale will have on addressing many of the world’s biggest challenges,” Geballe said. “New

Haven is booming with exciting startups, imagined and led by talented people on the cutting edge of medicine, science and engineering, who are eager to see their work result in new products and services that make a large-scale impact.

Yale Ventures intends to play a key role in making New Haven a globally recognized hub of innovation, and this is the ideal time to undergo this exciting transformation.”

Geballe said the seeds for Yale Ventures were planted over a year ago by Vice Provost for Research Michael Crair. Crair conducted research on how to expand Yale’s support of entrepreneurship and innovation, and spoke to stakeholders across and outside the University along with other universities. His research ultimately culminated in the creation of the Senior Associate Provost for Entrepreneurship and Innovation position, which the University began to recruit for last summer.

Geballe said the program is designed specifically for Yale.

“We have a unique equation and unique strengths here at Yale and in SEE VENTURES PAGE 4

ZOE BERG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Thirteen artifacts of South Asian origin were confiscated after an investigation into art dealer Subhash Kapoor.

BY WILLIAM PORAYOUW STAFF REPORTER The Department of Homeland Security recently seized 13 artifacts from the Yale University Art Gallery, or YUAG, on suspicion they were smuggled by a disgraced art dealer.

The pieces, which were of Indian and South Asian origin, were allegedly stolen by art dealer Subhash Kapoor.

Kapoor, who was convicted in

2012 for taking antiques from temples in South India as part of a $100 million international smuggling scheme, then sold these stolen artifacts to major art museums across the world, including the National Gallery of Australia and the Toledo Museum of Art. Thirteen of these smuggled artifacts ended up in the YUAG, which is recognized as the oldest university art gallery in the Western Hemisphere.

“Yale University, having been presented with information indicating that works of art in its collections were stolen from their countries of origin, delivered the works on March 30, 2022 to the New York District Attorney’s Office, which will coordinate the objects’ repatriation later this year,” a statement released by YUAG read. “Yale was glad to work cooperatively with the DA’s Office in this important matter.”

SEE YUAG PAGE 5

Cruz criticizes Yale political discourse Yalies unhappy with early registration

BY LUCY HODGMAN AND OLIVIA LOMBARDO STAFF REPORTERS

Students and other community members filled the ballroom of the Omni Hotel on Monday evening to watch Texas Sen. Ted Cruz record an episode of Verdict, the podcast he hosts with political commentator Michael Knowles ’12. Cruz and Knowles spoke for almost two hours, covering controversies at the Yale Law School, the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and the question of intellectual diversity on Yale’s campus.

The event included a conversation between Cruz and Knowles, and then a question-and-answer session moderated by conservative political commentator Liz Wheeler. It was hosted by The William F. Buckley, Jr. Program, a group intended to “promote intelSEE CRUZ PAGE 5

CROSS CAMPUS

BY EVAN GORELICK AND ISAAC YU STAFF REPORTERS

LUKAS FLIPPO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

The Buckley Program’s efforts toward political diversity have in large part been focused on the inclusion of conservative voices in campus dialogue.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY, 1951.

Yale's inexperienced crew team faces off against seasoned teams from Harvard and England in the the first ever international intercollegiate crew race rowed in American waters. A crowd of 25,000 people is expected to attend the event.

INSIDE THE NEWS

Yesterday, students across campus woke up at 8 a.m. to register for fall-term courses.

The new system, which requires students to register for courses a semester in advance, was implemented for the first time during the pandemic after years of planning, alongside the scrapping of the archaic Online Course Selection system in favor of a streamlined Yale Course Search website. But in the semesters since, students have been almost uniformly frustrated with the process. In an informal survey of 30 undergraduates on Wednesday afternoon, more than two-thirds reported being dissatisfied about the course registration process.

“My main issue with the course selection process is broadly that it forces students to make plans based on information they don't have and without the time to fully consider options,” Tai Michaels ’23 wrote to the News.

The traditional shopping period, which allowed students to try out an unlimited number of courses during the first two weeks of each semester, was scrapped in spring 2021. Now, students register for courses in the middle of the previous semester. Certain courses, including creative writing workshops, language classes and certain upper-level seminars, have always required preregistration, but this now occurs the semester prior, in the days before early registration.

SEE REGISTRATION PAGE 5

PAN

WASTEWATER

ALAMAN

THE STUDENTS DRIVING SONNENFELD'S LIST

14 months after he allegedly killed Yale grad student Kevin Jiang, Qinxuan Pan got another two months to review the evidence pointing to him as the murderer.

PAGE 3 UNIVERSITY

PAGE 11 CITY

PAGE 6 SCITECH

PAGE 7 ARTS

A Yale team has conducted weekly analyses of New Haven’s wastewater as an early-warning measure of COVID19’s trajectory.

Upcoming Spring Fling performer Alaman Diadhiou ’23 performed in the Benjamin Franklin college common room.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

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OPINION Love Letter to Myself N

ormally, people write letters to their future selves so that, after an indiscriminate amount of time, they can read them and reflect on who they were and what they wanted when they first wrote the letter. But this one isn’t a letter for me to read a few months or a year from now; it’s a letter for you, myself, the me writing this right now.

I’ve been wanting to say this for a while now. I’ve only been watching as you slowly circled the drain — calling it getting to know yourself — but I need to tell you something.

You’ve changed. I noticed you’ve been tired lately. You go to bed at four in the morning, promising yourself that you’ll wake up at eight in time to go to your nine a.m. lecture. You wake up past ten and as you stare from your pillow at the digital clock on your dresser, your first foggy thought of the day is that you should cease to exist. A dramatic response to waking up two hours later than you wanted to, but when it feels like you’ve lost control over the rhythm of your life, sometimes you want to remove yourself from the equation altogether.

LOVE IS WANTING THE BEST FOR YOURSELF, THINKING OF YOUR LONG-TERM HEALTH AND HAPPINESS INSTEAD OF IMMEDIATE BUT ULTIMATELY MEANINGLESS DEADLINES. It feels like you’re always forgetting something in one of your classes. You think about the upcoming midterms and those final papers that you already know the prompt for, and could theoretically finish now, but the deadline seems both much too close and very far away.

You make a Microsoft Word document for the paper, add page numbers and close the window. As you go through your day, you complete assignments and check them off your weekly to-do list. However much you finish, though, it feels like you’ve done nothing, even as you’re exhausted. It’s already past midnight but there’s so much left to do. Therefore, you get an overpriced sandwich and gummy bears from Good Nature to keep yourself awake and work until four. Rinse and repeat.

I miss you. I miss how you used to wake up at eight and get ready for the bright day stretching ahead of you. I

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T R AY H A N A S AT

miss how you used to excitedly greet people in the dining hall or the street, how you used to love meeting new people and setting up HYERIM boba dates. Now BIANCA you sleep in and wake up tired, NAM you look blankly straight ahead Moment’s as you walk past Notice people you know because you can’t muster the energy to socialize, you eat silently as your friend talks to someone you guys bumped into at the dining hall, you ghost people and avoid responsibilities. You look in the mirror and look at your grades and get caught up in self-doubt and disappointment. You overthink your interactions with your closest friends, you get into weird moods and lock yourself in your room to study with classical music playing on your speaker (the first time you did this, your suitemates laughed at you). You say it’s an introverted phase, that you’re learning to love spending time with yourself, but I disagree. Yes, maybe you’re more of an introvert than you thought, but introversion is not inherently self-destructive behavior. Because let’s face it, that’s what this is.

You’re not being efficient or taking care of yourself when you force yourself to stay up late, just to wake up late the next day feeling drained. You’re not learning to love yourself when you exhaust your body and torment your mind with the demand to do more, do better. Let’s be honest. That’s not love. Love is wanting the best for yourself, thinking of your longterm health and happiness instead of immediate but ultimately meaningless deadlines. Love is encouraging yourself to improve and mature with the same gentle words and praise you would give your friends, instead of tearing yourself down with scathing criticism. Love is understanding that you won’t always satisfy your own high expectations, and that’s okay, because you’re doing what you can and that means you’re doing great.

You see, I’ve realized I’m in love with me. Really, truly, heart-achingly in love. I want me to be happy.

But that also means I have to let you go. We can’t both have me at the same time. It doesn’t mean I’m erasing you completely from my life. You’ll always be a part of me, but I can’t let you eat away at my happiness and hope for the future.

I can’t let you treat me like this anymore. So this is goodbye. I love and respect myself, and I want to be happy.

HYERIM BIANCA NAM is a sophomore in Saybrook College. Her column ‘Moment’s Notice’ runs on alternate Wednesdays. Contact her at hyerim.nam@yale.edu .

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Human Rights Lawyer’s Message to the Yale Community S

pring has finally arrived in New Haven. Yalies are starting to enjoy the beautiful weather and come out of their cozy dormitories. Sunny weather is not the only thing that makes us smile. With graduation looming, soon-to-be Yale alumni are excited about the prospect of celebrating their hard work with loved ones. Upon graduating, Yalies will embark on new journeys driven by their ambition and individual choice. Some may choose careers with a mission and purpose. Among us, we could be looking at future presidents, ambassadors, prominent entrepreneurs, policymakers and more.

My heart fills with joy when I envision a bright future for Yalies.

At the same time, I’m also consumed with sadness and excruciating pain, for I can’t help but look back at my own graduation when I look ahead to yours.

Six years ago, I was beyond excited to be the first Uyghur to graduate from Harvard Law School. I was planning to move to the District of Columbia to work as an anti-corruption lawyer. I never thought a nightmare was about to ensue, and that I would spend the next six years of my life in search of my brother. My brother Ekpar Asat, an award-winning tech-entrepreneur, philanthropist, alumnus of the U.S. State Department program, has fallen victim to the Chinese government’s concentration camps for Uyghur people. On my graduation day, I was the only graduate sitting next to empty chairs reserved for my family. My brother had been forcibly disappeared, and my parents were unable to leave China.

As I sit to write this oped from the Sterling library, I keep thinking: how has six years gone by with his absence? I looked around the room and was reminded of how drastically different my life is from other members of the Yale community. My graduation was a lonely day filled with sorrow, agony and fear. I wish each Yalie can enjoy their graduation with loved ones by their side.

With the excitement and confidence I have in the wonderful Yale community, I can

also impart a crucial message which reflects years of struggle, learning and fighting in defense of human rights, the rule of law and democracy.

Ekpar’s ordeal has shaped my life and informed my values. The injustice against Ekpar became a driving force in my mission as a human rights lawyer.

Since I came to Yale as a World Fellow and now Tom and Andi Bernstein Fellow at the Law School, I have engaged in tireless advocacy about the plight of my community, the Uyghur people of China. I have taught seminars, including Yale’s famous Grand Strategy Course with the indomitable professor Beverly Gage, joined college dinners and teas and chatted with Yalies about their career goals, lives and purpose. We organized a protest for Uyghur freedom. I also spoke at the Summit for Democracy at the invitation of President Biden and joined the Amanpour show, with Yale Law Library serving as my perfect backdrop. But my community continues to suffer. The world has only become messier and darker with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Despite the grim reality, I was thrilled when University President Peter Salovey issued a strong statement condemning Russia’s invasion and potential crime of aggression in Ukraine.

We are six years into the Uyghur crisis and I wish Yale has similarly condemned China. Nevertheless, the President’s message — along with the hundreds of students and community members who gathered on Cross Campus in protest — gives me optimism that perhaps we might take a stand against the Chinese government’s repressions. Institutions like Yale must be stewards in ending atrocities wherever they occur.

Although the situation is very bleak, hope has emerged. Yale has finally begun to investigate whether Chinese companies it might invest in are connected with Uyghur forced labor. The Yale community often asks me, “what’s Yale’s unique responsibility to end the atrocities against bright individuals like my brother in today’s

China? How can this be done without jeopardizing Yale’s historical relationship with China?”

Seeing many Chinese students on the Yale campus, including children of Chinese communist party elites, I wonder if Yale can demand that the Chinese government send Uyghurs to Yale instead of concentration camps. Uyghurs are intelligent, kind and generous people.

They belong to Yale. They deserve our solidarity. In every lecture and workshop seminar, I’ve sought to do justice to the suffering of my people by highlighting the monumental dignity and resilience that my people has exemplified throughout this dark period. The Chinese government has deprived my brother of agency and voice, but they cannot take away his dignity. My brother remains an epitome of excellence, truth and grace.

In a few minutes of a monitored video call to the camp where Ekpar is held, my father virtually and proudly embraced his long-missing son. While struggling to contain his agony, pain and emotion, my dad wished that the roles were reversed.

However, my brother comforted my father despite looking like a gaunt shadow of his former self, bearing the scars of years-long solitary confinement and reassuring my parents that “these days shall pass.” Unconsciously, he reached out in the hope of wiping off my dad’s tears, only to expose the handcuffs that broke my mom’s heart to pieces. He urged my parents to wipe off their tears, stand tall and always choose kindness in the face of injustice. He taught — and continues to teach — a message of “kindness and peace” that we all should learn from and champion.

So Yalies, as you are designing your career goals and ambitions, I invite you to become an ambassador of peace. In times like this we need people like you more than ever. Both Yale as an institution and its members must choose to be the light to shine in the darkness for the oppressed, to speak truth to power no matter how powerful they may be.

RAYHAN ASAT is a Yale Law Tom and Andi Bernstein Human Rights Fellow, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Contact her at rayhan.asat@yale.edu .

A savior died A

midst the preponderance of social media posts today that spam our brains with information, it seems cruelly ironic that the information is so easy to forget. Just weeks ago, almost every single news site was flooded with images of Ukraine.

Just months ago, they were flooded with images of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Just a year or two ago, we all posted on Instagram in solidarity with the protesters of the Black Lives Matter movement. And where have all of these discussions gone? In the wake of these tragic events, only the people most intimately affected by them continue to feel the pain of grief and loss. The world, on the other hand, seems more than content to move along its merry way, as if nothing has quite changed at all.

Social media has dramatically desensitized us to longrun change. In the short run, it is excellent at turning eyeballs to whatever cause it deems fit, flooding our screens with soundbites, podcasts, videos and all the information that could possibly exist.

Then, in the span of a few weeks, all of it is magicked away by an algorithm, cast into the depths of TikTok purgatory.

Think about it — in a few days, our social media feeds will once again be flooded with bunny ears and images of easter egg hunts all around town. The next day, all of Easter will be forgotten, and our feeds will be stacked instead with advertisements for mother’s day paraphernalia.

The ephemerality of social media has important effects on

our capability to effect widespread change.

If we truly believed in our social media pledges, then we should care about changSHI WEN ing the long YEO run systemic problems that God, pervade society as well.

Country, For instance, and Yale we should more consistently care about gun violence and not wait for the next shooting to happen in order to slowly inch towards change. On campus, if we truly believe in saving lives tragically taken from us by mental health issues, why should we wait for terrible things to happen in order to take action?

You might wonder — what on earth does this have to do with the title of this editorial? I would argue that it has everything to do with it. As a Christian, I often get asked — and have often asked, as a child: “What is so good about Good Friday?”.

As Christians, we believe that God, fully incarnate as man, was flogged, made to carry a huge cross, wore a crown of thorns, was pierced through the side, made to drink vinegar and had nails driven into his hands and feet. These are scenes that are enough to make anyone gag. Yet, we haul this story out every single year to remind ourselves of it, even though it doesn’t quite seem “good.” To what end?

Good Friday is an invitation to remember. In fact, in an age of social media numbness, as I argued earlier, Good Friday is a day of feeling, and sitting in feelings that might seem bad or unpleasant. To protest against modern-day amnesia and remember how many bad things there are going on, unbeknownst to us. On another level, Good Friday is an invitation to reflect on how royally the world has screwed itself over. To the extent that it, quite literally, could not save it from itself.

So if until now, your Good Fridays have been the day of buying little Walgreens chocolates in preparation for easter egg hunts on Sunday, let the significance of the day not be lost upon you. Even if you are not a Christian, I think there is value in dwelling upon past injustices, and sparing a little bit of your heart for groups of people who continue to suffer at this very moment, as we go about our own lives. This Good Friday, I am thinking about how broken the world is. I am thinking about the countless lives we’ve lost to the pandemic, to civil wars, to mental health crises and the lives we continue to lose.

I’m also thinking about the fact that Good Friday is a celebration of hope, of the impermanence of death and the triumph of peace over violence. That’s what makes Good Friday good.

SHI WEN YEO is a junior in Morse College. Her column, “God, Country, and Yale”, runs every other Wednesday. Contact her at shiwen.yeo@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

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“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” FREDRICK DOUGLASS AFRICAN-AMERICAN ABOLITIONIST

Two Yale professors selected as Guggenheim Fellows

BY GAVIN GUERRETTE STAFF REPORTER Yale professors Daphne Brooks and Milan Svolik have been selected from a pool of 2,500 applicants as recipients of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

On April 7, in the 97th annual Guggenheim Fellowship competition, Brooks, a professor of African American studies, women’s, gender and sexuality studies and music, and Svolik, a professor of political science, were among 180 individuals awarded the fellowship from a wide range of artistic fields and scholarly disciplines. Brooks was named as the sole recipient of the fellowship in the theater arts and performance studies category. Svolik was one of two recipients in the political science category.

According to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation website, the fellowships are given to “mid-career individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts and exhibit great promise for their future endeavors.” Brooks and Svolik will continue to produce research in their respective fields through a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation.

“It’s wonderful to be included in a community populated by so many of my peers in academia and the arts whom I deeply admire,” Brooks wrote to the News, going on to discuss her intended work through the fellowship, the first fulllength study of the 1935 “folk opera” Porgy and Bess. “I’m very pleased to have the support of the Guggenheim to not only dissect and illuminate the multiple dimensions of this classic and yet deeply troubling and problematic text but to also tell a different story in which generations of Black women creatives have subverted and reinvented composer George Gershwin and librettist/lyricist DuBose Heyward’s material.”

Both professors have received recognition for recent books — Brooks recieved the 2021 Museum

COURTESY OF YALE FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Brooks and Svolik have been selected by the Guggenheim Foundation as fellows in the fields of theater arts and performance studies and political science. of African American History Stone Book Award for “Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound,” and Svolik took home the best book award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association for “The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.”

In addition to the experience that can be gained by the fellowships themselves, the professors’ departments and students also stand to benefit from their work through the fellowship.

Brooks has already indicated interest in leading an undergraduate seminar on Porgy and Bess in the African American Studies Department upon her return from sabbatical, noting the timeliness of the decision as Black feminist filmmaker Dee Rees is working on a new version of the opera.

“Professor Brooks’ Guggenheim fellowship is exciting news and a much-deserved honor for her,” Jacqueline Goldsby, chair of the African American Studies Department, wrote to the News. “Professor Brooks’ writing on African American music and literature, sound studies and Black feminist theory is breaking open so many new questions and archives; she deserves the Guggenheim year to dig into her next project on George Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess. All of us in African American Studies — faculty and students — are thrilled that she’s won this prize fellowship.”

Svolik, whose work focuses on comparative politics, political economy and formal political theory, will use his fellowship in political science to undertake a number of paper-length projects as well as to synthesize years of research on democratic backsliding into a book

manuscript, “Downsizing Democracy: Why Ordinary People Acquiesce to Authoritarianism.”

Svolik is seeking to address a lack of empirical evidence and rigorous theoretical framework in extant research to approach the question: “When can we realistically expect democratic publics to serve as a check on the authoritarian temptations of elected politicians?”

“My ambition for the book is to offer a rigorous explanation and the most comprehensive evidence to date for when and why democratically elected politicians succeed in subverting democracy,” Svolik wrote in his statement of plans for the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Svolik said he sees this work as addressing one of the most important intellectual challenges facing social science today.

Chair of the Political Science Department Gregory Huber said that the department is “thrilled” about Svolik’s fellowship, and that his success continues Yale’s “excellent history” with the award.

“Professor Svolik’s early research on how autocrats retain power has now turned to the equally important question of how democracies can backslide to autocracy, in part, with popular support,” Huber wrote to the News. “Understanding the fragility of democracy is at the forefront of efforts to understand patterns observed worldwide in which the move to democratize is far from a one-way street.”

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925.

Contact GAVIN GUERRETTE at gavin.guerrette@yale.edu .

Gee receives Early-Career in Affective Science Award

COURTESY OF THE FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Gee was the recipient of a SAS 2022 Early-Career in Affective Science Award for her work studying childhood adversity.

BY ELIZABETH WATSON STAFF REPORTER Dylan Gee, an assistant professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale, was honored by the Society for Affective Science, or SAS, for her research on how early adversity in childhood contrib-

utes to the development of mental health disorders.

The SAS Early-Career in Affective Science Awards recognize the outstanding scientific contributions by SAS members who have completed their doctoral degrees within the last ten years. Gee, who completed her doctoral degree at UCLA in 2015,

was one of two recipients designated with this honor in 2022. Specifically, Gee was chosen for her work exploring the manner in which the developing brain responds to its environment and how these experiences can affect one’s mental health.

“I really enjoy the combination of the excitement of scientific dis-

covery, the opportunity to connect with youth and families and the potential for broader impact that our research brings,” Gee said. “Stress is a universal experience, and exposure to trauma during childhood is unfortunately common. Our work in childhood adversity has been applied to inform decisions about public policy related to children’s well-being, and that opportunity to contribute to the translation of science into societal impact is really important to me.”

Part of Gee’s interest in this area of study stemmed from her time as an undergraduate student at Dartmouth working with DREAM –– Directing through Recreation, Education, Adventure and Mentoring –– a mentoring program led by students for children living in low-income housing in Vermont and New Hampshire neighborhoods. Gee observed the wide range of ways in which children responded to stressors in their environments and became curious about how to foster positive growth through a deeper understanding of children’s relationship to these factors.

Gee explores this aspect of psychology in her role as the director of the Clinical Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab, called CANDLab, on campus. The CANDLab investigates the role of caregiving and trauma in areas such as emotional regulation, anxiety disorders and PTSD. Notably, Gee has studied the impact of childhood stressors and the risk for psychopathology with the hope of developing clinical strategies for intervention. The lab also evaluates emotional learning and behavior through the lens of neuroplasticity and changes in corticolimbic circuitry, which are responsible for a myriad of cognitive functions.

“As a postdoctoral fellow in the CANDLab, I have benefit-

ted immeasurably from Dr. Gee’s mentorship,” Alexis Brieant, a postdoctoral fellow in the CANDLab, said. “Her innovative research in clinical and affective science continuously moves the field forward, and I’m so thrilled that this work is being recognized by the field through this award.”

Going forward, Gee aims to bridge the gap between neuroscience and clinical practice by using her lab’s findings to formulate new treatment methodologies for children. The lab has two primary goals for the future: devise methods to observe the wide range of experiences in early childhood to identify the impact of key factors on the developing brain and explore how children regulate emotions such as fear and anxiety through their understanding of safety in their particular environments. Gee hopes that finding the answers to these questions could provide crucial insights into developing new treatments.

“Her work is not only really amazing basic science work that helps to understand brain development, but also important applied work,” Jutta Joormann, the department chair of psychology, said. “She takes the insights that she gains from her research to then try to improve interventions that we have. We know from research that very often, anxiety disorders in childhood are sort of the precursors of more serious psychopathology as children get older, so it’s actually really important to develop effective interventions for anxiety disorders in childhood.”

Gee also recently received the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association for research in psychopathology.

Contact ELIZABETH WATSON at elizabeth.watson@yale.edu .

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“By providing every student with a quality education, and the materials they need for class and to do their homework, we can help students from all backgrounds learn and thrive.” LONDON BREED MAYOR OF SAN FRANCISCO

YCC members reflect on year of inefficiency YCC FROM PAGE 1 cial and institutional health of the University.

“I think one common misunderstanding about the YCC is the consistency with which we present policy proposals to the Yale administration and the extent of advocacy that is poured into each proposal and policy win,” Galal told the News. “We regularly meet with administrators to advocate for policy changes for the student body, and though there are many that are not passed through, the extent of our policy wins this year points to the consistency with which such advocacy has happened.”

In the past year, Hsu told the News, she and Galal have successfully advocated for several changes of which she is particularly proud.

In particular, Hsu pointed to the YCC’s efforts to waive the housing relinquishment fee for the spring semester, distribute over 400 COVID-19 testing kits to students during winter break and institute a host of package center reforms like hiring student workers, extending hours and changing the email delivery notification system.

Yet, as with past presidents and vice presidents, there remain significant elements of Galal and Hsu’s platforms that have gone unrealized, such as establishing a student advisory committee within the Yale Mental Health and Counseling department or appointing a student representative to the Yale Corporation. At least six members of the Council have told the News that generally, bureaucratic challenges have made YCC members’ goals difficult to bring to fruition.

“There's never a lack of policy ideas or things we know students want, but it is a matter of negotiating with administration and working things out in a feasible way,” said Leleda Beraki ’24, Co-Academic Life Director. “It's always hard to put a lot of work or research into a proposal and have it get shot down, but it is definitely the reality.”

This year, one challenge senators proposing resolutions or changes within the Council have faced has been the requirement of meeting quorum.

Quorum requires at least threefourths of the representative body to be present and participating in the vote, according to the YCC Constitution. Members that abstain from any vote can still count toward the quorum as long as they are present for the vote.

Neither Galal or Chief of Staff Julia Sulkowski ’24 could confirm the number of times the senate met quorum during the academic year.

Sulkowski confirmed, however, that the YCC has only been able to vote on three significant proposals this year. The council passed two resolutions in the fall — one calling for an end to legacy preference in admissions, and one condemning the racist and antisemitic grafitti discovered in Kline Biology Tower.

This spring, the Council passed an amendment to the YCC constitution that will add a “Speaker of the Senate” position beginning in the 2022-23 academic year.

Both the legacy resolution and the speaker of the senate amendment were brought to the Council twice because quorum was not met in the Senate the first time. The vote condemning the Kline Biology Tower incident occurred virtually.

Pierson College Senator Viktor Kagan ’24, who proposed the Speaker of the Senate amendment with Timothy Dwight Senator Ryan Smith ’24, said that when it came time to vote on the amendment, they reached quorum by “frantically texting” everyone they knew to come to the meeting.

According to Kagan, a central intention of the Speaker of the Senate amendment was repairing the engagement issues which have so often kept the body from meeting quorum.

According to the YCC Constitution, the Speaker of the Senate — who will be decided by internal election during the 2022-23 academic year — will primarily be tasked with acting as a “representative and leader of the entire senate.” Among the Speaker’s responsibilities are designing the Senate agenda, attending meetings of the Executive Board and removing senators deemed disengaged by the standards of the Constitution.

The amendment stipulates that senators can be removed either if they have three unexcused senate meeting absences or for “lack of engagement” — if they fail to conduct half of the required monthly senator office hours, attend less than half of a semester’s senate meetings or if they are deemed unengaged by the speaker and vice president in “individual cases.” “[The amendment] creates a designated person where a big part of their job is engaging individually with every single senator, making sure that their ideas and opinions are heard, and also holding them accountable, to make sure they show up to meetings and do what they’re elected to do,” Smith said.

As the amendment will not take effect until next academic year, the YCC Constitution currently says that an executive board member or senator will be considered for removal from office upon their

third unexcused absence from a Senate meeting or required event or their fifth excused or unexcused absence from either.

Although the YCC Constitution tasks the chief of staff with “facilitating attendance,” Sulkowski told the News that when it came to enforcing attendance, she was “left out of the decision process on next steps to take.” Sulkowski said that this spring, she was asked to review an email that Hsu wrote checking in with chronically absent senators about their commitment to the position, but that she was given no update about whether or not the emails were sent.

“Given that we are still in the midst of a pandemic and YCC members are full-time students who have volunteered their time to serve the student body, we have ensured flexibility in attendance this year, as it is insensitive to force YCC members to attend meetings when they are facing familial, health, academic and other personal issues,” Hsu told the News.

Hsu added that Senate attendance information — along with meeting information and voting records — is available upon request.

When the News asked for access to the meeting records, including attendance information, Sulkowski provided records for meetings conducted during the spring semester and told the News that she did not have access to attendance records from the fall, when attendance was not enforced.

Smith accounted for YCC’s lackluster attendance this semester as “Yale students being Yale students,” emphasizing that so much of the student body was busy so it became hard to coordinate all of the members at a single meeting.

But Kagan suggested that the sense that voices of the executive board took priority over those of senators could contribute to a sense of low morale within the body.

During Senate meetings, Kagan explained, members of the executive board often spoke more than senators, which he said “frustrated a lot of people.” As a member of the executive board, Beraki told the News that she sometimes felt “far removed from the senate,” adding that it sometimes felt like policy directors were assigning senators proposals to work on rather than meaningfully working with them.

Berkeley College Senator Alex Sundberg ’24 suggested that the lack of engagement could be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which senators are less inclined to participate in the democratic processes of the YCC because they anticipate how difficult it will be to achieve their policy goals.

YALE DAILY NEWS

This year, one challenge senators proposing new policies have faced has been the requirement that YCC meet quorum.

“It's much harder to get motivated to come to meetings or participate when you don't feel like you can really get anything done,” Sundberg said. “Or, if you get something done, it's keep dining halls open past 8 p.m. so that students can study in them. That's great … but that's not changing my life as a student here.”

Li agreed that the infrequency with which policies are enacted could be disheartening.

“People are spurred on in moments of passion,” Li said. “You just need one person to really care about something to write a policy proposal and submit it. However, sometimes people are at their maximum bandwidth and no matter how much they care, it might be that they simply don't have the space to prioritize writing proposals, and then that thing gets dragged on for a little while and then it loses steam.”

Although the new Speaker of the Senate position is meant to mitigate lack of attendance, senators have questioned whether it can effectively solve some of the deeper issues that may be leading to senators’ disillusionment.

Branford College Senator Ray Jin ’25 noted that the addition of the Speaker of the Senate will add an additional layer of bureaucracy to the already-convoluted workings of the YCC. And Beraki pointed out that some of the Speaker of the Senate’s responsibilities may overlap with those of the vice president.

“In terms of the Senate Speaker amendment, I think the intentions of it are good because the senate should definitely have a more unified voice in the direction YCC takes, but I do worry that this position will not fulfill its role,” Beraki added.

“The Speaker would essentially be the connective tissue between [the]

senate and [the executive board], but that also falls under the role of the VP so it can get a bit tangled.”

Financial Accessibility Director Logan Roberts ’23 suggested that the inactivity of the Council might also be a product of the Yale administration’s bureaucracy. He noted that it can be discouraging to watch policies proposed by the YCC falter when they reach the upper workings of University administration.

“Any time you want to make a slight adjustment, it takes a monumental amount of force and effort,” Roberts said. “One issue that I’ve found is that students will come forward with really wise ideas and then we'll bring them into the Yale bureaucracy. The person we reached out to will say, ‘Oh, this isn't in my purview, talk to this person.’ We'll talk to that person, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, this isn't in my purview, talk to this person.’ A lot of the challenge is even finding the correct administrator about these issues.”

Current YCC senators and executive board members will conclude their roles on April 22, leaving it up to the newly-elected YCC members to grapple with the current structural inadequacies. The new YCC members will also soon need to partner with a new dean, as current Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun, who has been a main administrative collaborator with the YCC, will conclude his term on June 30.

Reflection on consistent YCC inaction comes in wake of Harvard students’ April 1 decision to dissolve the Harvard Undergraduate Council in favor of a new student government.

Olivia Tucker contributed reporting.

Contact LUCY HODGMAN at lucy.hodgman@yale.edu .

New initiative to drive entrepreneurship VENTURES FROM PAGE 1 Connecticut,” he said. “We're looking to tailor this new program to play to those strengths and to build on them over time in ways that are uniquely Yale.”

With the “For Humanity” capital campaign underway, Geballe said this initiative is consistent with the University’s overall vision, and said there is “growing recognition” from the University and from University President Peter Salovey that Yale has an “important responsibility” to translate research into products, services and solutions to address the world’s problems.

In 2021, 11 startups spun out of Yale with $53.3 million raised in new venture financing. A record-breaking five IPOs occurred in the past five years for Yale spinouts Arvinas, BioHaven, Inozyme, NextCure and IsoPlexis.

“At Yale, we are nurturing connections across campus to drive innovation that benefits individuals and communities,” Salovey said in the announcement. “Our investment in Yale Ventures will ensure that our faculty and student entrepreneurs have the support they need to tackle the most critical challenges facing humankind. We are wholly committed to the integrative approach and ambitious vision of Yale Ventures, and I’m excited to see it realized.”

Geballe said Yale Ventures will involve new investments in faculty and programmatic support, although he would not disclose the budgetary details since the

budget process for the University is still underway.

According to Geballe, over the past 10 years, the expansion of the University in terms of faculty and research investments has grown but the investments in the Office of Operative Research focused on translating research into innovation and startups have remained relatively stagnant.

“Creativity and collaboration are hallmarks of our research enterprise at Yale,” University Provost Scott Strobel said in the announcement. “Yale Ventures marks an opportunity for us to fully harness their potential. Under Josh Geballe’s leadership, alongside our partners in New Haven, and with new strategic investments, we are poised to drive significant impact in the coming years.”

The Intellectual Property and Licensing Services unit will work with faculty, staff and students to support technology transfer efforts such as disclosure, patenting and licensing of new inventions designed at Yale. The unit will be managed by the existing business development and operations teams that were previously part of the Office of Cooperative Research, which will have its name retired. However, the group will be expanded, and this expansion is aimed to increase proactive outreach across the University.

The Innovation Training and Startups unit will continue supporting students and faculty through existing programs including the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation, the Center for Biomedical Innovation

and Technology and the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking. This unit’s main goal is to help transform ideas and inventions into startups or initiatives to have positive global impacts, and new programs will be added to further support these efforts. Geballe said this unit will focus on mentorship, access, connections to potential investors and research strategy to help faculty understand business models for translation of research.

The Corporate Partnerships unit will focus on strengthening relationships with corporations in support of Yale research, as well as increasing access to resources from private partners. This work will continue to expand under joint direction from the Yale Office of Development and Crair’s office.

Geballe said the Corporate Partnerships team will be focused on “collaborations with large organizations where we have overlapping areas of interest in terms of research and innovation,” in which the corporation will sponsor certain research being done at Yale. He gave the example of the gift given to Yale from FedEx in the past to fund the Carbon Capture Research Center, and he said the University already has “extensive partnerships” with Alexion and AstraZeneca.

The fourth unit, the Innovation Community team, will work to build the overall entrepreneurial ecosystem across the University and Greater New Haven, and aims to implement an expanded mentor network and equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives, investor ser-

vices, community partnerships and career connections.

Geballe said the expansion of roles in Yale Ventures will mostly focus on expanding mentorship and fellowship programs. He told the News there are currently “pockets” of mentor networks, but there is no way to plug in alumni or people in the Connecticut ecosystem who want to support new ventures.

Bringing together these mentor networks, Geballe said, will help faculty and students get a “complete view” of the people who are willing to help them in their efforts.

Yale Ventures plans to work with student organizations including the Yale Biotech club and collaborate with organizations in New Haven including BioCT and Connecticut Innovations to help expose students to internship programs and jobs after graduation. Geballe said the startup ecosystem in Connecticut is “robust” and “dynamic,” so he sees many opportunities for Yale students to have opportunities to stay in New Haven after graduation.

Geballe added there are currently new initiatives being planned related to job training programs.

Geballe said professor of chemistry and biology Craig Crews has led a new job training program that aims to connect New Haven residents to opportunities to become laboratory assistants to help support companies in New Haven. Yale Ventures will also collaborate with the Center for Inclusive Growth.

The announcement explained that Yale Ventures will support existing innovation efforts in New

Haven. The University announced in 2021 that it will run an innovation hub at 101 College St., and the biotech incubator BioLabs will be housed at this location. Arvinas, which came out of Yale, will also be located at the 101 College St. location, and AstraZeneca previously announced plans to expand to New Haven after acquiring Alexion.

“We have a robust network of Yale researchers, alumni, and partners working in the innovation space,” Crair said in the announcement. “And we have a well-established history of translating research into real-world solutions. What’s so exciting about Josh Geballe’s arrival and the Yale Ventures initiative is the chance to leverage these in new ways and to an even greater degree.”

Geballe told the News that due the nature of startup culture to give back, there are many opportunities for alumni involved in startups to act as mentors. He said there are often alums who want to help support current innovation efforts, and the structure of Yale Ventures will connect alumni to opportunities to give back.

New positions have already been added to work on this initiative, and more will be announced in coming weeks. Geballe will share additional details about the implementation and future of Yale Ventures during the 2022 Yale Innovation Summit, which will be held May 17 and 18.

Josh Geballe took on his new role at Yale on Feb. 2.

Contact SARAH COOK at sarah.cook@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

FROM THE FRONT

“It was a privilege and an honor to work alongside Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. Working with people at the top of their game was like a master class.” SHANGELA AMERICAN DRAG QUEEN

YUAG artifacts taken by Homeland Security YUAG FROM PAGE 1 Antiques confiscated by the Department of Homeland Security included a 10th-century sandstone statue of Kubera, the Hindu god of wealth, as well as a marble arch known as Parikara – valued by investigators at $550,000 and $85,000, respectively.

According to the University, the New York District Attorney provided evidence that the confiscated artifacts constituted stolen property in February 2022; the evidence was collected through information not available in the public domain. By the time University officials were notified about the concerns regarding the

artifacts, Yale had already conducted research into their origins.

According to Homeland Security, the artifacts were identified as being “connected to either Subhash Kapoor or his overseas suppliers.” The 13 total artifacts have been valued at $1.29 million, with nine of these objects having been donated to the University by the Rubin-Ladd Foundation, which has been linked to Subhash Kapoor’s $143 million art smuggling ring.

This is not the first time that Kapoor’s artifacts have been investigated for connections to looting. Back in 2008, Kapoor sold an 11th-century bronze Dancing Shiva statue worth $5.6 million to the National Gallery of Australia. The

statue was later discovered to have allegedly been stolen from an Indian temple located in Tamil Nadu.

On March 30, the University voluntarily surrendered the artifacts when the New York District Attorney’s office served the objects with a search and seizure warrant.

“Yale is committed to provenance research and welcomes information regarding the ownership history of objects in its collection,” a statement by the University administration said, forwarded by YUAG communications coordinator Janet Sullivan.

The Yale University Art Gallery was established in 1832.

Contact WILLIAM PORAYOUW at william.porayouw@yale.edu .

TIM TAI/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The 13 total artifacts have been valued at $1.29 million, with nine of these objects having been donated to the University by the Rubin-Ladd Foundation.

Yalies decry missing syllabi, times as registration opens

YALE DAILY NEWS

Six Yale College Council senators called for changes to the course registration process in a public letter that was subsequently forwarded to administrators.

REGISTRATION FROM PAGE 1 Students’ qualms with the new system included the lack of posted syllabi for many courses, a lack of professor assignments for some courses, as well as missing course times for lectures or discussion sections. At least one course that was available for registration in the morning was subsequently announced as canceled. Oth-

ers were dissatisfied that the number of courses that a student can request spots for is capped at 10, and the number of confirmed credits on one’s worksheet is capped at 5.5.

“Honestly I’m just kind of disappointed,” Iris Tsouris ’25, who is a WKND staffer for the News, wrote. “There are classes that don’t have syllabi or meeting times listed on YCS that I

would’ve applied for, had they not been lacking in this information.

There was a course … that seemed very in line with my interests, but I felt compelled to drop it from my course list because it didn’t have meeting times.”

This past week, six Yale College Council senators called for changes to the course registration process in a public letter that was subsequently forwarded to Yale College administrators. The letter called for administrators to postpone the start of preregistration, improve the registration website, include students in the redesign process and standardize registration across academic programs and departments.

“We thought it opened up way too early, and the process was made worse by the fact that courses weren’t posted yet,” said Matthew Elmore Merritt ’24, one of the senators who signed the YCC’s letter. “Several of my professors have told me personally that they don’t have syllabi ready yet. It’s my understanding that the reason for pushing up the timeline was to make it easier for faculty to figure out how many students would register for their classes.

But it seems this process just brings up new issues and doesn’t help either faculty or students.”

Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun responded to the YCC Senators, saying that he recognized the

issues brought forth and was working to fix them. In an interview with the News, Chun said that his office would work with the registrar’s office to remind faculty about posting course information and syllabi earlier. But Chun stressed that syllabi are not required to be detailed at this point, but rather are meant to give students a basic understanding of the course.

Chun also noted that the shift to the new system was originally prompted by faculty concerns about accommodating student interest and dealing with chaotic class size fluctuations during the old shopping period.

“I have my ears close to the ground about feedback from both students and faculty, and I wish registration would have been smoother than it has been,” Chun said. “We’ll continue to remind faculty to post information, and remind faculty that we’re doing early registration for them, at their request. This is how most schools do it. So I know that it has to work better; it can work better.”

Faculty indeed have reported generally positive feedback, saying that the new system is an improvement from the old shopping period, though several noted that some streamlining is still needed.

Given this is Chun’s final semester as dean of Yale College, how the system evolves from this point onward may rely heavily on the

prerogative of Chun’s replacement, who is expected to be announced by the end of the semester.

Some students, including several upperclassmen, wished for a return to the old shopping period. “[Early registration] remains the single most negative change to my Yale curriculum during my four years here,” Franklin Bertellotti ’22 wrote.

Having to register for courses in the spring, and then finalize schedules in the fall, Ben Cohen ’23 added, felt like doing twice the amount of work.

Other students, however, noted that the specific changes made to online infrastructure have been positive. Yale Course Search centralizes instructor permission processes and serves as a hub for course information and syllabi, once they are posted by faculty.

“It’s a lot better than it was [in fall 2020],” Noah Riley ’24. “Last year the system was outdated and almost impossible to work with.

Yale Course Search is a lot better.”

Approximately 1,459 courses will be offered in the upcoming fall semester.

Lucy Hodgman contributed reporting.

Contact EVAN GORELICK at evan.gorelick@yale.edu and ISAAC YU at isaac.yu@@yale.edu .

Sen. Cruz makes contentious trip to Yale CRUZ FROM PAGE 1 lectual diversity on Yale’s campus,” according to the mission statement on its website. While representatives of the Buckley Program have heralded the need for political diversity on Yale’s campus, others have raised concerns regarding the Program’s decision to platform the outspoken conservatives. While the event was not widely protested, some student groups organized a day of political activism to support progressive Texas organizations.

Cruz has long faced criticism for his role in the lead-up to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Shortly before more than 2,000 rioters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Cruz questioned the legitimacy of then-President-elect Joseph Biden’s election on the Senate floor. In January, he described the capital insurrection as a “terrorist attack,” before reneging on that sentiment less than 24 hours later, describing his own statement as “frankly dumb.”

The Buckley Program’s efforts toward political diversity have in large part been focused on the inclusion of conservative voices in campus dialogue. Cruz joins Henry Kissinger, Peter Thiel and Charles Murray as guests the program has hosted since its inception in 2010.

“Yale certainly lacks intellectual diversity,” Knowles told the News. “Nearly every dollar that faculty members donate to political candidates or causes goes to Democrats. But ‘diversity’ is not a good in and of itself. Intellectual diversity may be a fine means to an end, but that end must be truth.”

Knowles — who has argued that the conservative movement should “wield political power to fire bad professors and academics

who are brainwashing children” — instead told the News that his focus was on shifting the “perspective presently being taught” in American schools.

As part of this effort, Knowles said that conservative students should increase their willingness to openly confront social issues, which he said they avoided for fear of social consequences, like “losing a coveted society tap or lucrative job at Goldman.”

“If you take an unpopular position, you risk being denigrated, you risk being ostracized,” Cruz said during Monday’s event. “And so people often just shut up about it, just say, ‘You know, I’m going to keep my views quiet.’ How you come through that, I think, is one of the real testing aspects of education.”

The question of education was central throughout the conversation. Cruz spoke in support of the “Parental Rights in Education” bill — dubbed by opponents as “Don’t Say Gay” — which passed in Florida on March 9 and bans public school teachers in Florida from holding classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity. Cruz also denounced the teaching of critical race theory as “revisionist history” that he said was dividing students along racial lines. Critical race theory is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw which acknowledges the persistence of racial disparities in the U.S. and questions the structural hierarchies that enforce them, but it has become a lightning rod for debates over school curricula.

Another topic of conversation was the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court last week. Cruz made national headlines for his questioning of Jackson during her confirmation hearings, during which he scru-

tinized her stances on critical race theory, accused her of issuing problematically short sentences to those in possession of child pornography and appeared to dismiss the ability of transgender people to experience gender discrimination.

Knowles argued at the event that Cruz’s treatment of Jackson was less harsh than the questioning of Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90, and dismissed the accusations of sexual assault levied against Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.

During the question and answer portion of the event, Maia Cook ’25 pushed Cruz on his questioning of Jackson, asking him to make two nice comments about the justice.

Although Cruz described Jackson as “powerful” and “talented,” he took issue with Cook’s description of his questioning of Jackson, which Cook said was “flagrantly racist.”

“Racism is a really big evil in this context,” Cruz told Cook. “It is also an insult the left tosses around casually.

Every single question I asked her concerned her record … And so respectfully, I could not disagree more deeply when you say it is racist to examine a judge based on their record.”

Resonant throughout the evening was the ongoing controversy surrounding a March 10 incident at the Yale Law School, when about 120 students gathered to protest a bipartisan panel featuring Kristen Waggoner, the general counsel of the Alliance Defending Freedom — a conservative legal advocacy organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group.

On March 7, Cruz joined hundreds of prominent conservatives in signing a letter drafted by the authors of the Philadelphia Document, calling on Yale to condemn and discipline the student protesters.

Cruz and Knowles also made reference to Yale College students, specifically citing a Yale Daily News opinion piece by Ely Altman titled “Cruz and Knowles are speaking — don’t go” as an example of an attempt to suppress free speech on college campuses.

Michelle Foley ’25, who attended Monday’s event, took issue with Knowles’ and Cruz’s assertion that Yale students are “too emotional or too headstrong” to hear out opinions that differ from their own.

“Of course, there’s some dominating opinions and there’s some more socially acceptable opinions, but in general I feel like Yale does a pretty good job of letting people speak and have their feelings be heard,” Foley said. “I am a little bit frustrated with this trend I see in conservative cultures of people acting like free speech is under attack when usually their legal right to say their opinion is never actually at risk.”

Tom Attard-Manché ’24 told the News that, as an international student, he attended in order to hear from a broader range of perspectives than he is usually exposed to.

Alan Gao ’24 said that though he came into the event wanting to give Cruz a chance to change his mind on some of his policies, the Senator was not successful. Gao added that he did not think he would ever listen to Cruz speak again.

Although some students had predicted protest surrounding the event, only one incident, during the question and answer portion of the event, deviated from normal — a student asked Cruz if he would “fellate another man” to end global hunger.

Cruz responded by asking if the student would vote for Donald Trump to end global hunger, but the student had already walked out of the room.

Otherwise, Cruz and Knowles received a peaceful reception.

Instead of direct protest, some student groups — including Yale College Democrats, The Yale Politic, the Yale Undergraduate Legal Aid Association and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán organized a day of action in response to the visit.

“In thinking about our response to Senator Cruz's visit, Yale Dems was given the difficult task of taking the temperature of the student body,” Yale College Democrats vice president Emma Wallner ’24 said.

“We wanted to strike a careful balance between respecting freedom of speech and acknowledging the danger of Senator Cruz's platform.”

The day of action began with a Cross Campus fundraiser from 12 to 6 p.m. on Monday afternoon, where organizers raised over $1,600 for the Texas ACLU, the Texas Organizing Project, Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas and the Central Texas Transgender Health Coalition.

Afterward, Yale College Democrats and the Politic hosted a panel, titled “When the Insurrectionists Come to Town,” which convened virtually to discuss the siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The panel was followed by a phone-banking session to Texas voters for competitive state senate candidates, which featured a speech by Texas state Senate candidate Gwenn Burud.

“Our programming is inspired by our faith in direct action and commitment to supporting grassroots organizations that serve communities left behind by Sen. Cruz and his political allies,” Dems President Kyle Mayer ’23 told the News.

Cruz has served as the junior senator from Texas since 2013.

Contact LUCY HODGMAN at lucy.hodgman@yale.edu and OLIVIA LOMBARDO at olivia.lombardo@yale.edu .

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY It’s in our sewage: tracking “low rumble” of COVID-19 cases

BY KAYLA YUP STAFF REPORTER In the race to track COVID-19 infection rates, wastewater testing takes the lead in speed, accuracy and cost. The Yale team in charge of wastewater tracking reflected on a week of low COVID-19 levels in New Haven sewage, and the team’s overarching role in the pandemic.

After a toilet is flushed, the waste traverses sewers underground, eventually flowing into a sewage treatment plant to be processed. Cities around the globe have invested in these centralized plants, where a community’s waste is concentrated and mixed together. At New Haven’s wastewater treatment plant, the “sewage sludge” filtered out of water has proven valuable for tracking COVID-19’s trajectory. The Yale team responsible for this effort is led by professor of chemical and environmental engineering Jordan Peccia and PhD student Alessandro Zulli GRD ’26.

“The reason why [wastewater testing] tends to be more representative is the fact that you’re not subject to any biases in testing,” Zulli said. “When you do traditional testing, people have to come in, people have to be sick enough for it to prompt them to get a test and the testing site has to not be overwhelmed — which has happened both recently and in the past. While with wastewater, you’re getting a sample from every individual that is in your wastewater county, without any of those biases.”

“Sewage sludge” refers to the solid waste component separated from the liquid waste in wastewater. The team of researchers first investigated this sludge in March 2020, around the time of the first quarantine restrictions in Connecticut. Zulli had been studying viruses in the environment — one of which was coincidentally a related coronavirus — priming him for this chance to test for COVID19 in environmental samples.

The team is currently trying to see if there is an outbreak of BA.2 — the novel sub-variant of the Omicron variant — in New Haven. According to Peccia, their wastewater analyses will likely provide the earliest stream of data for predictions about the virus’ trajectory. Weekly updates can be found on Peccia’s twitter feed. His most recent tweet described the past week’s BA.2

levels as “a low rumble” in New Haven wastewater.

While levels as of April 4 are higher than they were in mid-February — which was the lowest point for COVID-19 detection — this increase is relatively small and gradual. Meanwhile, BA.1 caused almost an “exponential growth” in levels, Peccia said. The slight rise in COVID-19 over the last couple of weeks is likely representative of a few local outbreaks “which then died down,” Zulli said.

“The BA.2 keeps going at a low rumble,” Peccia said. “There’s not a huge outbreak, but it’s not zero.

There are little pockets of infections here and there, but it’s at least 20 times less than it was at the peak for BA.1.”

Given the current vaccination rates, an increasing number of people with COVID-19 may be asymptomatic. Even if these people do not seek testing, wastewater analyses would still detect their infection. This has allowed the wastewater testing system to track community levels of COVID19 two to three days ahead of traditional testing data.

During the Omicron outbreak, the team was the first to indicate a peak in New Haven. Wastewater testing allowed detection before testing results did, and well before it could be seen in hospitalization rates. According to Zulli, the Connecticut Department of Health regularly uses this data to monitor outbreaks.

“We’ve worked over the last couple of years to make [the wastewater testing] really quick, efficient and low cost to transform it into something that can be used for public health,” Peccia said. “It is hundreds or thousands of times less expensive than testing programs. And so it’s important for us to make sure that our protocols are easy and accessible.”

Peccia’s lab group had been concerned with viruses in wastewater for years. However, Peccia focused on the afterlife of wastewater. Once processed at the treatment plant, wastewater may be applied as a fertilizer product or flow into rivers and other bodies of water. There has been public health concern about people being exposed to pathogens from drinking or swimming in such water.

Fortunately, the team did not find risk of transmission for COVID-19 through wastewater.

Wastewater monitoring itself is nothing new. According to Zulli,

CECILIA LEE/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

this method had been used to detect polio virus in the United States decades earlier, but was less precise. Researchers would first test the polio virus levels in wastewater before a vaccination campaign. Afterwards, when polio virus in wastewater reached undetectable levels, the vaccination campaign could be considered successful.

“We definitely saw [COVID19] vaccinations have an effect on the wastewater levels, particularly early on,” Zulli said. “As some of the new variants increased in vaccine evasion, we saw a resurgence.

With BA.1 we saw much higher levels in wastewater, higher than we’d seen previously.”

Biotechnology advances have allowed researchers to track the number of RNA copies of COVID19 per milliliter of wastewater.

Building on their research, the Peccia group has expanded to endemic viruses — viruses which exist at a constant, predictable level in a community — which generally do not have good community coverage through traditional testing.

“There are a lot of endemic viruses that don’t have good coverage through traditional testing, but that still cause a lot of socioeconomic damage, and sadly, deaths,” Zulli said. “Influenza being a big one. [Testing] is still pretty much only limited to people who go to the hospital for influenza. Wastewater testing could easily give you a heads up on when things are happening and when [levels] are increasing.”

Peccia said that the project has never been that well-funded.

While the state had previously funded the project for an entire year, enabling daily monitoring and expansion to seven Connecticut townships, that program ended. Max Weiss, a spokesperson for Gov. Ned Lamont, told the Hartford Courant that the state chose not to renew the contract as they already have data from individual COVID-19 tests.

A donation from Jonathan Rothberg GRD ’91 enabled the project to continue on a weekly basis. However, this funding will be finished by June, which will

conclude the wastewater analysis project. According to Peccia, there does not seem to be any funding on the horizon, though he sees advantages of continuing wastewater testing in the fall, when a possible resurgence of COVID-19 may occur.

However, the Connecticut Department of Health continues to use Peccia’s team’s data as a secondary source for tracking the virus’ trajectory.

“The Connecticut Department of Health, I believe, pretty regularly uses our data,” Zulli said.

“Before the BA.1 wave we would have weekly meetings with them to update on all seven of the townships [we covered] … so I do think they look at this data, particularly when they first start seeing a few more cases pop up, to see if the levels match up.”

Peccia earned his PhD from the University of Colorado in 2000 while studying the UV inactivation of bioaerosols.

Contact KAYLA YUP at kayla.yup@yale.edu

Yale lab sequences COVID-19 cases across YNHH system

BY YASH ROY STAFF REPORTER Due to the disruptive nature of the pandemic, Yale’s Center for Genomic Analysis has taken on the responsibility of sequencing samples from positive COVID-19 cases in the Yale and southern Connecticut community.

The YCGA is at the forefront of genomic testing within the state and the nation, providing doctors on the Yale New Haven Hospital system targeted information regarding plans for the treatment of patients with cancer and autoimmune disease. The Center houses Nate Grubaugh’s lab, which currently specializes in a Yale SARS-CoV-2 surveillance initiative. The initiative is responsible for the sequencing of approximately 10 percent of the COVID19 tests, currently translating to about 190 tests, within the Yale New Haven Hospital system every week.

“We didn’t create the weekly sequencing routine until January 2021,” Grubaugh said. “Then we really started to ramp up our efforts …we were able to capture sort of the heyday of variants, which was the spring of 2021 when there were alpha, beta, gamma, theta, iota, epsilon, and then we captured Delta taking over in the summer, and then obviously Omicron this past winter.”

Grubaugh said he first worked with Yale epidemiology researcher Anne Wyllie on the SalivaDirect project. During that process, his lab split off and began to work on genomic testing as it became apparent that sequencing positive samples would be necessary to effectively combat COVID-19.

Grubaugh’s lab also worked with the NBA and NFL to sequence the SARSCoV-2 virus to aid both leagues in gaining a deeper understanding of transmission within their facilities.

YASH ROY/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

“Before the emergence of variants it was more about looking at patterns of spread and an outbreak investigation,” said Grubaugh. “That changed when alpha emerged in the UK in late 2020. And it was pretty clear that this was going to hit the U.S. and we did not have a systematic program to monitor for emerging SARSCoV-2 variants.”

According to Grubaugh, during the beginning stages of sequencing in Connecticut, his lab and Yale were the primary sequencers of the virus. In recent months, however, the CDC has overtaken his lab in sequencing within the state.

Grubaugh told the News that to sequence, his lab analyzes about 30,000 nucleotides of information and turns them into strings of letters and numbers

with the Pangolin computer program.

The data is then uploaded to both his lab’s website as well as a weekly Thursday twitter thread where he provides updates on which strains of the virus are dominant in southern Connecticut.

“Every Friday we receive samples from Nate’s lab,” said Bony De Kumar, director of operations of the Yale Center for Genome Analysis. “We then sequence them and give results back to Nate’s lab by Wednesday. And they analyze and report those sequences. And so all the variant detections, like is it Omicron or is it Delta.”

The YCGA has three different sequencers, two that provide 8.8 billion readings when run for a 48-hour cycle, and another sequencer that sequences larger chunks of genomic code.

De Kumar told the News that YCGA can produce up to 27 terabytes of information per week, including the COVID-19 sequencing data.

“The Yale Center for Genome Analysis is a full service facility dedicated to providing RNA expression profiling,” said the YCGA website. “DNA genotyping, and high-throughput sequencing uses state of the art technologies, and the resource is open to both Yale and other non-profit organizations.”

Currently, 69.2 percent of last week’s roughly 200 samples have been identified as the newer strain of the Omicron variant, B.A. 2.

Contact YASH ROY at yash.roy@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

ARTS Alaman Diadhiou ’23 and New Legaxy turn Thursday night into Friday

REGINA SUNG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

BY OLIVIA CHARIS CONTRIBUTING REPORTER After being chosen as one of this year’s Spring Fling student performers in the recent Battle of the Bands, singer Alaman Diadhiou ’23 was eager to continue performing live.

Diadhiou performed some of his original songs alongside Boston-based band New Legaxy in the Benjamin Franklin Common Room on Thursday at 10 p.m. The evening began with a few songs from New Legaxy before Diadhiou took the stage. The band, featuring Cisco Swank on the keyboard, Evenson Vincent on the bass and Arlo Sims on

guitar, played several songs, including one paying homage to New Orleans, a Beatles cover and some original music. Brian Richburg, New Legaxy’s drummer and Diadhiou’s high school friend, collaborated with Diadhiou to organize the concert. Apart from working individually with Richburg, this was Diadhiou’s first time performing with New Legaxy.

Having spent two years during the pandemic without the chance to perform for an audience, Diadhiou is more attuned to the importance of the first few performances that are in person once again. In particular, he wants his Spring Fling set to be carefully thought out and planned.

“I want to do it right,” Diadhiou said.

The absence of live performance on campus has also been felt by other students. Diadhiou’s concert has been one of many recent chances for students to experience in-person music on campus after the pandemic largely halted live performances. “[Diadhiou’s concert] made me appreciate live music more,” Lidya Demilew ’25 said.

The return to in-person performances hasn’t been the only new development in Diadhiou’s music journey. This past month, he began performing his original compositions live for the first time. Apart from his one cover of the song “Adorn” by Miguel, the entirety of his performance on Thursday consisted of his original songs.

When songwriting, Diadhiou says he tries to consider how listeners will process the music in a “performance context” as well as in a “personal listening context.” As a comparative literature major, he hopes his courses will allow him to find “some kind of synthesis between sonic qualities and narrative qualities” and improve who he is as a songwriter and an artist.

Not only has Diadhiou considered his identity as an individual artist, he has also thought about his identity as a Yale artist. Being a student and an artist at Yale for Diadhiou means “making your own space.”

“It’s not like Yale is begging you to [make art], you have to create that space for yourself [and make] more

noise than the representation you have,” Diadhiou said.

By perfecting his live performances and sharing his original music, Diadhiou hopes that he will be able to create such a space for himself this semester. Even still, his creative work on campus is not just about who he is as an artist at Yale.

“Yes, I want to be a great artist at Yale, but I also want to be a great artist, period,” Diadhiou said.

Diadhou also noted the lack of representation in terms of Black artists on a campus that is predominantly white, as well as the scarcity of artists focused on R&B as a genre.

He said that there are so many Black artists he hopes will “take up more space” at Yale and he is excited to continue making his own music while collaborating with other Black artists on campus.

Ultimately, Diadhou wants his work to be something that people remember. He believes it is up to him as an artist to create and present in a way that people feel they cannot be anywhere else when he is performing.

After Thursday night, fans are eager to watch Diadhou perform again soon.

“Alaman was awesome and I’m really excited to watch him at Spring Fling!” Grace Aitken ’25 said.

Diadhiou is a student in Benjamin Franklin College.

Contact OLIVIA CHARIS at olivia.miller@yale.edu .

Karen Brooks Hopkins to educate on the world of arts administration

BY ILANA ZAKS CONTRIBUTING REPORTER On Wednesday afternoon, former Executive Director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music Karen Brooks Hopkins will deliver a talk at the Yale School of Management.

The talk, titled “The Role of Arts Organizations in Anchoring Community Economic Development,” will educate students about the arts administration field, challenges and opportunities, how the arts can be a positive influence for community and community building and the importance of an organization’s artistic vision. Students will also learn about careers in arts administration and why they can be satisfying, meaningful and exciting, “even if it doesn’t look like fundraising is the most exciting career path on earth,” according to Brooks Hopkins.

“It’s a necessary skill. All of these things have a deep creative edge and require skill and technique to pull them off,” Brooks Hopkins said. “I’m hopeful more students and people in the next generations will be interested in managing these institutions and doing a great job.”

The Brooklyn Academy of Music, or BAM, which Brooks Hopkins previously headed, aims to provide innovative theatrical and music productions.

One of BAM’s biggest achievements is the Next Wave Festival, which began in 1983 and gives artists whose more ambitious works were primarily presented in Europe a stable space in America for their large scale productions. The festival provides up and coming artists with a developmental platform and has featured artists such as Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Brooks Hopkins spearheaded the innovative programming envisioned

by BAM’s longtime Executive Director Harvey Lichtenstein and Joe Melillo. Her book, “ BAM... and Then It Hit Me,” was published in 2021 and explores several strands of Brooks Hopkins’ experiences with artists and celebrities including Pina Bausch, Phillip Glass, Fiona Shaw and Mikhail Baryshnikov; experiences in fundraising, marketing and leadership and building successful neighborhoods arounds the arts. Brooks credits the “secret sauce” to BAM’s success to the unity of one voice serving the program and vision of the institution.

“Everything spoke in one voice; from advertising, to brochures, and fundraising and marketing felt like programs,” Brooks Hopkins said of BAM’s unique marketing strategy.

“It was all in alignment with the ultimate vision and had a consistent message, clear brand, and a sense of how much is too much. The best fundraiser thinks about creativity and finds ways to create all the material around the main message.”

Theater Management student Natalie King ’24 is excited to learn about the trends in marketing and fundraising that Brooks Hopkins learned over the years at BAM. “I’m particularly interested in hearing [Brooks Hopkins’] perspectives on institutions like BAM and other performing arts centers and what they should be doing in their next steps in regards to business and programming,” King said. “What is the institution doing in response to Black Lives Matter? Is there still a space in the cultural landscape for these kinds of behemoths? What should the business sector be thinking more from the performing arts and where is the intersectionality between the two fields?”

Faculty members are also looking forward to the talk. According to Anthony Sheldon, executive director of the program on social enterprise and lecturer at Yale’s School of Management, Brooks Hopkins is an industry professional who is able to bring the School of Management and Drama School together in addition to a variety of students interested in finance, arts and culture and economic development.

“I hope students take away that arts institutions and audiences recognize the cultural level and deep understanding of tourism, and how bringing diverse groups together into the same physical space in terms of cultural artifacts and offering those to the broader community is a catalyst for economic and community development.” Sheldon said. “Realizing the symbiotic nature of a cultural institution rather than a fortress can actually be intentionally planned out and implemented to engage more broadly with the community.”

Initially, BAM was headquartered in one old building in a neighborhood struggling economically. In addition to the clearance of buildings during urban renewal in the 60s, there were

AMAY TEWARI/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

extreme issues of crime, blight and poverty. By the time Brooks and Joe Melillo came to take over, they tried to integrate and understand the needs of the neighborhood. Through attending town meetings, they found out that the institution was negatively thought of among residents.

Through the realization of a new building called the BAM Fisher building— “a game changer,” according to Brooks Hopkins — the 250 seat Fishman venue was available, accessible and affordable in every way. Additionally, the diversification of the board, staff and audiences required a complete reexamination of the spaces in which productions welcomed audiences, as well as the programming that was curated, which ultimately opened doors for different audiences and artists, furthering BAM’s innovative contribution to the community.

Florie Seery, a fan of Brooks Hopkins’ work at BAM and associate dean of the David Geffen School of Drama, encourages students who want to be involved with arts administration like Brooks Hopkins to be keen observers of audiences’ reactions to the arts.

“For the work you can’t get to, read everything you can about it,” Seery said. “Given the recent challenges of COVID-19 to the field, and the eco-

nomic and social justice hurdles that have faced us, it is also important to look at success in other aspects of our society and think how you might apply that practice to our artform.”

So what lies in the future for the arts?

“I would like to see meaningful, respectful, partnerships that will result in positive benefits for both,” Brooks Hopkins said. “Large institutions are important to the entire ecosystem because they can do big things, attract large audiences with their big venues, resources and fire power. Small institutions have more originality and flexibility in their programming. Giving large institutions more depth and credibility adds community building. More sharing, connectedness and collaborations will ultimately create more innovative, inclusive work and partnerships with potential for longevity, as well as generate more money to incentivize partnerships on a programmatic and administrative level.”

The talk is sponsored by the Yale School of Management, SOM Arts Culture, SOM Women in Management, the SOM Economic Development Club and the David Geffen School of Drama.

Contact ILANA ZAKS at ilana.zaks@yale.edu .

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

THROUGH THE LENS

S

ince the founding of the New Haven Colony in 1638, what is now known as the New Haven Green has been an integral component in defining the social life of New Haven. Though the public sphere of New Haven has and will continue to inflate beyond this 16 acre plot of land, there are few locations in New Haven like the New Haven Green that have been a part of various climacterics in Connecticut’s history. On the surface, the nature of the New Haven Green may lack distinction relative to other parks, however, a brief history of the Green shows that it is the unique sum of the ambition and culture that have passed through New Haven over the centuries.

In 1701, Yale University was founded as the third institution of higher education in all of the United States. The finished construction of Old Campus in 1718 marked the beginning of a new era for the New Haven Green. As the formal government in New Haven had become increasingly rigid in structure, the New Haven Green was surrounded by and encompassed legislative, religious, and educational institutions. The number of visitors to the New Haven Green would continue to increase over the years as the foundations for various levels of activity had been set. The Green would also hold several state houses until New Haven ended its period as co-capital of Connecticut with Hartford in 1875.

During the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the New Haven Green and its surrounding buildings were lucky enough to survive the common practice of British troops to burn and loot cities after the Green was deemed “too beautiful.” 1 After the War, George Washington visited the Green and the Trinity Episcopal Church in 1790 (a plaque acting as evidence of this event was stolen for almost eighty years and only returned in 2011).

By the mid-19th century, most of the buildings on the Green had been torn down as the social and political activities of New Haven shifted to the areas surrounding the Green. While few changes were made to the Green after this point, some notable additions to the Green include the Bennett Fountain (1907) and a marble World War I Memorial with a flagpole at its center (1928). 1 Efforts to modernize the Green have fortunately been rejected by the Proprietors of the New Haven Green, a committee that holds private ownership of the Green and has protected the Green from being overrun by industrialization.

There’s plenty more history and insight that comes with the New Haven Green, and it can be explored in a multitude of ways. Today, it is still known to the population of New Haven for the many concerts and events hosted on the Green, but hopefully this short introduction depicts the depth of its history and justifies its position as one of the most esteemed town greens in the United States.

JOSHUA BAEHRING reports.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 9

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

KURT VONNEGUT AMERICAN WRITER

Who’s behind the SOM’s viral corporations in Russia list?

BY YASH ROY STAFF REPORTER As Jeffrey Sonnenfeld’s viral list of companies ending their ties with Russia continues to gain traction, a small army of students are driving the operation behind the scenes.

The face of the operation is Sonnenfeld himself, who has garnered headlines in major media outlets across the country — coverage of the now-1,000 company long list trended as the most read article on the New York Times for 36 hours last week. But, behind the scenes is a team of over 20 Yale College and SOM students who research and run the database. The News spoke with three Yale College students and five SOM students on the responsibilities and work they have been doing to curate Sonnenfeld’s list, which now encapsulates roughly 25 percent of Russia’s GDP. “Our goal is to disrupt and shake the Russian civil society out of its complacency,”Wiktor BabinskiGRD ’22 said. “This list is supposed to make the Russian public feel the consequences of what its government, that they have elected in the last 20 years, is doing to them.”

According to Steven Zaslavsky SOM ’22, he and many of the other SOM students who are involved in the project are currently taking Sonnenfeld’s strategic leadership class. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Sonnenfeld shifted to discussing the war in his class, bringing in CEOs of oil and banking companies as well as Eastern European history professor Timothy Snyder, Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former Obama Secretary of Defense Ash Carter ’76 and former Obama Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson.

When Snyder visited the class for a panel about the Russian invasion, Sonnenfeld asked Zaslasvky, who is fluent in Russian and Ukrainian since his father is Russian and mother Ukrainian, to ask Snyder a question in Russian about whether the Russian people were falling for the ruse that their government had put up around the circumstances it used to justify the war.

“We really connected during that exchange,” Zaslasvky told the News.

“And then right before spring break …

Sonnenfeld reached out to [the class] asking if anyone had time to help because, you know, just just a handful of folks on the team doing it … So I started digging deeper on that, and studying. Alright, [what are the valuations] of the companies on the list?”

Originally working as a researcher for Sonnenfeld’s project, Zaslvsky has since shifted his focus and is now working with Yash

Bhansali ’23 to understand the revenue stream impacts of companies leaving Russia as well as how the publication of the list has influenced the stock prices and market values of the companies that have pulled out and those that kept their doors open for business in Russia.

Bhansali told the News that he and Zaslsvky have been analyzing what percentage of Russia’s GDP has been cataloged by this list. He added that he joined the team after reading about work Sonnenfeld had done surrounding social responsibility in the corporate world.

“We are looking to quantify the impact on the Russian Economy,” Bhansali said. “We are also looking at the way markets are rewarding those corporations that have led the withdrawal effort. … We have leveraged various financial databases such as Bloomberg, FactSet, CapitalIQ, MSCI, Thomson Reuters in addition to data from original source documents pulled by our team across 10 languages and 166 countries.”

Zaslvsky and Bhansali were not the only students to answer the call.

Georgia Hirsty SOM ’22, another student in strategic leadership, has a history of activism and has spent much of her adult life working for Greenpeace and other service-based organizations. When she received Sonnenfeld’s email, she too leapt to join the project.

The repository of companies originally had a binary metric of pass or fail. If a company was pulling out of Russia — and the group could verify it through public statements, press coverage and public filings — it would be listed as “passing,” while companies that were still doing business were listed as “failing.”

However, the group eventually created a grade-based system, ranging from A through F. Companies that dig in and refuse to exit Russian operations, or who are simply adhering to sanctions, receive an F letter grade. Companies that have committed to suspending future planned investments are classified as “buying time” and given a D grade on the list.

Companies that scale back or curtail operations, but who are hedging their bets, receive a C grade.

Companies that suspend all or almost all of their operations — including not paying their Russian employees — receive a B grade.

A company only receives the top grade, an A grade, when it commits to wholly divesting from Russia and ending all operations in the country.

The group comes together and works through the metrics they have set up to come to a consensus on what each company’s grade should be.

Hirsty said that she is responsible for looking at the companies that

are currently classified as failing and evaluating whether or not they can move up on the curve.

“Every day I was updating all the Fs,” Hirsty said. “So if a researcher sends me a company, and they say, I think this company has a D, because they’ve said that they’re suspending new investments. But then I go … and I’ll basically look up the article that they linked to verify that that’s what it in fact says, then I’ll check the company itself and see if they’ve had the statement that was maybe hard to find, maybe they have put out a new statement or said something in their SEC filings and so it’s just kind of another layer.”

Hirsty added that much of her job has been dealing with companies that accuse Sonnenfeld of being “defamatory” or “libelous.” She explained that many companies that are listed with F or D grades have reached out to the initiative demanding that they be moved up.

Moreover, according to Babinski, some companies have even reached out and told the initiative that they had not consented for their publicly-available information and statements to be used in the database.

Sonnenfeld told the News that the group regularly sends the threatening legalistic notices to media outlets or posts them publicly.

As the initiative has expanded to include more companies, the team has also expanded to include individuals with specialized industry or linguistic skills.

Cate Littlefield SOM ’22 worked in the fashion and jewelry industry and has focused on following cosmetic and fashion companies and their stance on business in Russia.

“I’m basically just looking at essentially like the biggest companies by revenue so far in the fashion sector and the consumer goods sector,” Littlefield said. “From a name brand like Chanel that we all recognize to something that’s slightly more obscure. …

I’ve been starting with basically a list of these large companies in both sectors and then just kind of systematically going through them one by one looking at their press statements or social media feeds … to see what statements they’ve made on the war in Ukraine and how their operations have been impacted by it, whether they’ve chosen to totally shut down operations or scale them back.”

Littlefield also told the News that she has been receiving videos and pictures from people in Russia showing her companies that still have shops open in Russian malls, and she has been using this evidence to piece together who is still selling consumer goods in Russia.

Camillo Padulli ’25 has focused on Italian companies and their

COURTESY OF JEFFREY SONNENFELD

Despite a flurry of global media attention, often overlooked is the fact it is a team of Yale undergraduate, graduate, MBA and EMBA students maintaining the list. operations in Russia during his work for the initiative.

According to Adriana Coleska SOM ’22, who is also an Assistant Medical Director at the Department of Emergency Medicine at the School of Medicine, it can be difficult to determine whether or not a pharmaceutical company exit is ethical, especially since many of the medications that pharmaceutical companies claim are for necessary humanitarian missions are in fact just over the counter medications that can be produced by Russian pharmaceutical companies without foreign involvement.

“Medications and biotechnology are used for the health and well being of humans,” Coleska told the News. “Is it ethical to remove medications that may cause suffering of one population to attempt to stop the suffering of another? This is the curtain behind which many of the pharmaceutical companies are hiding when they declare that they will continue to manufacture in or import to Russia. However, our research has shown that a large portion of medications sold are over the counter medications, which are not life saving, and furthermore are also manufactured by Russian pharmaceutical companies, meaning there is a Russian alternative the country can rely on.”

According to Sonnenfeld, many pharmaceutical companies have been defending their business operations in Russia on a humanitarian basis even though the drugs they are selling are not being used in any humanitarian capacity.

Franek Sokolowski’25 told the News that a large part of the work they have been doing as a group is sifting through all of the information they are receiving to determine what is true and what is public relations posturing by companies.

“These companies are very deceptive,” Sokolowski said. “We are trying to outsmart them as much as we can. … So we are in this unfortunate posi-

tion where because we rely on facts, we sometimes cannot publish something even if it’s true.”

As the project moves forward, Marina Negroponte SOM ’22 told the News that the initiative will shift towards studying different regions of the world, including the continued involvement of Latin American companies in Russia and Russian investment in Latin America.

“There’s a data point and it says one in five companies are likely not to do anything in Russia,” Negroponte said. “And so when I dig into Mexico and other Latin American countries, it’d be interesting to see how many companies within a sector are showing positions but also like, Can there be a larger threshold within an industry to actually put pressure on companies?”

According to Chief Executive Leadership Institute’s Head of Research Steven Tian ’20, the group plans to expand the list as long as Russian forces remain in Ukraine.

The students involved in the initiative said the experience has been work intensive — each of them has reported spending more than 40 hours a week on the project, and the team faces an almost constant onslaught of emails to respond to and work to complete.

“A lot of the time, you really do feel a moral impetus to see what you’re doing,” Sokolowski said.

“And you really can see the positive impact that you’re having.

And this makes it a lot easier to actually just put down whatever you’re doing and, you know, pursue the project because you really know that you’re doing the right thing. And you really know that you are having a tangible impact on the lives of the people. And I think that that knowledge is really helpful for us in accommodating this with our own lives.”

Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Contact YASH ROY at yash.roy@yale.edu .

Yale quizbowl team wins back to back national championships

BY NATHANIEL ROSENBERG STAFF REPORTER Yale’s quizbowl team clinched its second national championship in two weeks this past weekend, winning the Academic Competition Federation’s national championship in the undergraduate division over a marathon 19 games.

Yale had previously claimed the Division II National Championship at the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament, run by National Academic Quiz Tournaments, on April 2. At this weekend’s ACF Nationals, Yale was eligible for the undergraduate championship as no graduate students played on their team, a common practice in high level quizbowl.

Yale brought as much of their A-team as possible to the tournament, fielding a team made up of Daniel Sheinberg ’23, Arthur DelotVilain ’25, Michal Gerasimiuk ’23 and Matt Pecoraro ’22. Besides firstyear Delot-Vilain, the entire team had placed third in the undergraduate division at ACF Nationals 2021.

While Yale was missing arguably their best player in Daniel Ma ’23, they still went into the tournament hoping to contend for a title.

“I thought we had a very good shot at winning the undergrad title,” Gerasimiuk said. “Our main contender was Brown [University], against which we have had a very good record.”

Delot-Vilain opted to fly to Minneapolis on Saturday morning, staying behind in New Haven Friday night to attend a R.A.P Ferreira concert with his suitemate. It was a decision he would regret. Delot-Vilain’s flight

got delayed from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M., eliminating any chance of him playing on Saturday, when the majority of the tournament occurred.

“I was like uh-oh,” DelotVilain said.

“I was always a little bit more doubtful that we would be able to do as well as we ended up doing. So I was just sort of laughing and saying, ‘this is hilarious,’” Sheinberg reflected.

Without their second leading scorer, Yale entered the tournament with much lower expectations. The team still managed to perform well, winning each of their first four games, including a tense upset of the University of Chicago.

The game, which ended up being decided by one question, hinged on Gerasimiuk’s answer to a question on the Chinese history text “Records of the Grand Historian.” Gerasimiuk answered “Record of the Grand Historian,” which was marked incorrect.

But Yale won the tossup on appeal after it was decided that Gerasimiuk’s answer — even without the plural “Records” — counted as a direct translation of the works title.

Yale subsequently lost to a stronger team from the University of Texas, but bounced back to finish the preliminary rounds with a 6-1 record. The impressive performance by a team missing two of its top players spoke to the excellence of both Sheinberg and Gerasimiuk.

“It’s just that Michal and Daniel Sheinberg are ridiculously good at this game,” Pecoraro explained.

“I’m always amazed at their breadth of knowledge.”

However, both the University of Chicago and Texas also finished 6-1,

necessitating a series of playoffs to figure out which out of the three would advance to the top bracket for the playoffs. Yale lost their tiebreaker game to Texas handily, ensuring they could finish no better than 13th in the overall field.

“Obviously, it’s a little bit frustrating not to make it into the top bracket, but at the same time, the strength of the field in the top bracket was tremendous,” Sheinberg said. “Maybe it was worth it.”

Despite the setback, only one other team eligible for the undergraduate championship advanced to the top bracket for the playoffs — Brown University. If Yale finished within six places of Brown, they would be guaranteed a final to determine the undergraduate national champion.

Yale ended the day strong, winning their final three games to finish Saturday with a record of 9-1, as the tiebreaker was not counted in official standings. The team was greeted with even more good news when DelotVilain arrived that night.

“I think the whole dynamic kind of changed a little bit when Arthur got there,” Sheinberg told the News.

“Like obviously he’s really good at quizbowl, but also he’s just a funny guy. There’s a little bit less pressure on the three of us.”

With the resumption of play on Sunday, it was clear that a Yale team featuring Delot-Vilain was much stronger than the one from the day before. The team won their first six games, and their points per bonus question, often a good measure of the true skill level of a team, increased from a Saturday average of 13.9 to 15.6 over their Sunday winning streak.

The Sunday morning run featured a dramatic moment, when Sheinberg won a game against Northwestern University by correctly answering a tossup about the Henrik Ibsen play “Rosmersholmon.”

Eventually, Yale did lose to Oxford — in a round they maintained had too much British content — but by that point they had earned the chance to play for the undergraduate title. Despite making the top bracket, Brown had struggled to a 2-8 record in the playoffs, guaranteeing a final matchup.

Since Brown had made the top bracket, Yale faced a disadvantaged final, where they would need to win two games to win the tournament, while Brown would only need to win one.

“We felt like we had a good chance to win at least one of the two games,” Delot-Vilain explained. “With the four of us there, we were favorites.”

Yale won the first game handily, defeating Brown 300-120.

“It was a good round for us, and it was a tough round for Brown,” Sheinberg said. “I mean, they had six negs, and seven gets.” A neg is the quizbowl term for an incorrect answer, as you receive negative points.

The win set up a final game between the Ivy League rivals to determine the undergraduate national championship. Brown jumped out to a massive lead early, winning by 90 after seven questions and by a still massive 70 point margin at halftime.

“That was really depressing to face in the first half,” Gerasimiuk lamented.

Yale did not quit, however, and stormed back to get the next three tossups and tie the game at 135 apiece. The teams alternated getting the next several questions, until Yale pulled into a narrow five point lead with one question to go.

Pecoraro heard the question and knew instantly who would answer.​​ ”I thought, okay, this is Daniel Sheinberg’s moment,” Pecaro said.

“He’s the literature player.”

Sheinberg remembers an intense experience.

“We were all listening really closely,” Sheinberg recounted. “The question got pretty late. They start to say a ‘factless autobiography’.

And as soon as I hear the first syllable, I say, alright, it’s him.”

Sheinberg buzzed in, answered with Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the correct answer, and won the national championship for Yale.

Although this championship was Yale’s second in two weeks, DelotVilain said that did not dampen the team’s excitement at their win.

“It was much more satisfying [than the other championship win], honestly, because we were not supposed to win,” DelotVilain said. “We had a harder road to get there. … I left feeling a lot happier, it was a lot more fun.”

This is the first time since 2014 that Yale has won two quizbowl national championships in the same year.

Contact NATHANIEL ROSENBERG at nathaniel.rosenberg@yale.edu .

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS

“[Bobby Brink] seems to have like a sticky stick… He’s a guy that’s going to hang onto [the puck], not throw it away.” MIKE YEO PHILADELPHIA FLYERS HEAD COACH

Search for next head coach begins

MUSCOSPORTSPHOTOS

Director of Athletics Vicky Chun and Deputy Athletic Director Ann-Marie Guglieri will oversee the search for the new head coach.

W BASKETBALL FROM PAGE 14 slightly more competitive than Ivy League hoops; according to conference rankings based on the NCAA’s NET rankings compiled by college ratings site WarrenNolan.com, the A10 was the ninthbest league this past season. The MVC, which Loyola Chicago is leaving, ranked 10th, while the Ivy League ranked 15th of 32 Division I conferences.

When Guth took over at Yale in 2015, her move to Connecticut also represented a return.

She served as a Yale assistant coach and recruiting coordinator from 2010 to 2012 under former coach Chris Gobrecht. Guth told the News that Yale became her dream job after working with the program as an assistant.

“I think very few places could woo me away from what we’ve built at Yale and what I believe in to the core,” Guth said. “I think Loyola’s one of those places that does align with the academic integrity, the social responsibility and the competitive excellence values that I value. It’s the place I fell in love with coaching.”

In between her first job with the Ramblers and her seven-year run at Yale, Guth’s coaching career has included assistant-coaching gigs at Missouri, DePaul and Northwestern, where she worked from 2012 to 2015.

The Bulldogs earned three berths to Ivy Madness, the Ivy

League’s conference basketball tournament, during Guth’s tenure, though the 2020 installment of the tournament was canceled and never played due to the onset of the pandemic. Yale did not advance to the NCAA Tournament — the Bulldogs’ last and only Ancient Eight women’s basketball title came in 1979 — but has crept up the Ivy League standings in recent years. After finishing sixth during Guth’s first two seasons, Yale ended its two most recent campaigns — 2019-20 and this past winter — in third.

Last month, the Elis traveled to Boston for Ivy Madness but fell to Columbia in the semifinal.

Yale signed Guth to a contract extension through 2023–24 following the team’s 2018 run to 19 wins and the WBI postseason championship.

“I think we win in life with people, and in our profession, we’re kind of judged on wins and losses,” Guth said. “I think the success that I feel that we’ve had at Yale is really best depicted if you take time to sit down with any one of our players, any one of our staff, and you get to know them as a human and how they approach life, how they’re committed to their community, how they’re committed to being servant leaders.”

Guth, who earned a master’s degree in educational leadership from DePaul in 2010, was also known to audit courses at Yale.

When Silliman Head of College Laurie Santos’ lecture “Psychol-

Bulldogs narrowly defeat rival Harvard LACROSSE FROM PAGE 14 just going to continue working hard and carry this momentum into our next game,” Boone said.

Burt scored an underhanded backhand goal to make the score 13–11 and put the nail in the coffin with 2:46 left in regulation.

After that, Harvard won the draw, but Yale’s defense stayed strong, forcing Hem to take a low-percentage shot that was saved by Boone. With 1:28 left in regulation, Harvard attacker Riley Campbell scored to chop the Bulldogs’ lead in half. Off the draw, Vaughn made a huge play to give Yale possession, which allowed Markert to hold the rock and run out the clock.

Yale is now the only team to have four wins and zero losses within the Ivy League, which has

earned it the No. 19 spot in the NCAA Women’s Lacrosse RPI rankings. Princeton is 2–0 after winning against Brown on Saturday, and Cornell won against Penn to improve to 3–1.

Cornell beat out Penn 13–9 last Saturday to snap the Quakers’ two-win streak. Cornell will face a tough test against No. 4 Syracuse on Tuesday, April 12. The Big Red has had a solid season thus far, going 7–4 overall. After Syracuse, Cornell will close out the regular season by playing Yale, Brown and Dartmouth, aiming to secure their spot in the Ivy League tournament.

The Bulldogs aim to keep their undefeated conference record alive, as they take on Cornell next Saturday, April 16 at noon in Ithaca, New York.

Contact RYAN VAKIL at ryan.vakil@yale.edu.

MUSCOSPORTSPHOTOS.COM

This is the first time since 1995 that the Yale women’s lacrosse team started 4–0 in conference play.

ogy and the Good Life” became the most popular course in Yale history in spring 2018, Guth was among the approximately 1,200 students in attendance on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She was motivated to audit the class by a player who thought she would enjoy the content, Guth told the News at the time. She also audited Marc Brackett’s “Theory and Practice of Emotional Intelligence” during the 2016-17 school year.

T h e sea rc h fo r G u t h ’s replacement is underway, according to Associate Athletic Director for Strategic Communications Mike Gambardella. Director of Athletics Vicky Chun and Deputy Athletic Director Ann-Marie Guglieri are overseeing the search.

Guard Christen McCann ’25, who started 24 games this past season as a rookie, called Guth’s care and passion “unmatched” and said she feels the team can only express gratitude for Guth’s leadership and continue to wish her luck. McCann added that the best way the program can approach the offseason is with optimism.

“We are aware that the hiring process isn’t automatic, yet recognize that the athletic department is actively searching for a coach with our best interests in mind,” McCann said. “I have faith that our next head coach will fulfill those requirements, and I look forward to the growth we will experience as a team over the next year.”

Yale and its main rival will both enter next season with new leaders. Following the retirement of 40-year coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, Harvard last week formally introduced Carrie Moore — a former assistant at Princeton, Creighton University, the University of North Carolina and the University of Michigan — as the Crimson’s next head coach with a ceremony on the floor of Lavietes Pavilion.

A 2004 graduate of Illinois, Guth initially walked on to the women’s basketball team before earning a scholarship. She also played one year of collegiate golf.

Contact ANDREW CRAMER at andrew.cramer@yale.edu and WILLIAM MCCORMACK at william.mccormack@yale.edu.

All three Eli rowing teams secure trophies CREW FROM PAGE 14 lier in the season, the women’s crew team is ranked second in the nation, but the team remains focused on medaling races.

“As far as the rankings are concerned, it is nice for parents and friends to see that we are ranked second,” Margaret Hedeman ’23, a former sports editor for the News who rowed in the first varsity eight, said. “But the only ranking that actually produces gold medals is the final one at the NCAA as well as our [Ivy] Conference Championships. Until then, the ranking doesn’t mean anything to us, it is just noise. We are not too focused on that at all.”

At Gilder, the men’s heavyweight team won four of its five races to keep the Olympic Axe in Derby, Conn. The still water on the Housatonic River made for perfect racing conditions on Saturday. The home team was able to capitalize with commanding victories over Dartmouth.

In the morning, the varsity eight won with a five-second victory, coming in at 5:12.0, and Dartmouth finishing at 5:17.4.

The second, third and fifth varsity eights placed first with two-, seven- and nine-second victories, respectively. The fourth varsity eighth came second, five seconds after their opponent.

Several students and community members took the half-hour drive from the center of campus to cheer for their No. 1-ranked Elis.

“It is really nice to see the amount of supporters who made the effort to come out to Gilder,” Patrick Craig ’23, who rowed in the third varsity eight,

said. “I have never seen it that busy even when we were rowing undisrupted by COVID-19 … It was a huge buzz and it meant a lot to have all the friends out there and all the family.”

In May, the crew will compete at the Eastern Sprints, the annual rowing championship for the men’s Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges. Craig mentioned that for the past couple of races, the volume of practice has been tapering, but it will pick up in the coming weeks in preparation for the Sprints.

In its only home race of the season, the men’s lightweight team defeated Georgetown. The Bulldogs swept the Hoyas, coming ahead in all races.

The first varsity crew squad defeated Georgetown with a nearly two-second victory, finishing at 5:27.8. The second varsity crew team won, coming in five-seconds before its opponent. For the third varsity fours, two Yale teams competed, placing in first and second place and finishing at 6:07.0 and 6:12.0.

“It was a great weekend and very fun to be racing at home,” Geoff Skelly ’22 wrote in an email to the News. “Georgetown was very strong this year, but we were able to win all the races. We’re excited to keep moving forward and get ready for the Dodge Cup this weekend.”

This weekend, the women will take to Gilder to host Princeton on Saturday. Both men’s teams will head south to Philadelphia where the heavyweights will take on Columbia and Penn in the Blackwell Cup while the lightweights will race Penn in the Dodge Cup. Contact NICOLE RODRIGUEZ at nicole.rodriguez.nr444@yale.edu.

CIURTESY OF SAM RUBIN

The men's teams will head south to race in Philadelphia this weekend.

Formerly interim, now head coach FENCING FROM PAGE 14 itself reached out. The epee squad knew who I was, knew I was working around the area. They reached out personally because they needed help specifically in that competition, but generally, they needed help with the epee squad.”

Israelian would return in 2019 as an assistant coach and help the team in a season where Yale placed ninth at the 2019 national championships and Emme Zhou ’23 was named All-American by earning eighth in women’s foil. After the surprise termination of Henry Harutunian in April of 2019 and the sudden 2021 dismissal of Wang, Israelian was named interim head coach.

In the Blue and White’s return to the NCAA Championships in 2022, they placed ninth again and Zhou earned her second all-American distinction. This result is on par with the team’s 2019 finish, tied for the second-best result the Elis have achieved in the last 15 national championships they competed in.

Zhou, who was strip coached by assistant coach Sean McClain, described how Israelian "really helped [her] through the toughest matches" at this year’s national championships. The All-American also noted Israelian’s passion and investment in the team’s well-being since her first interactions with him five years ago.

“It was truly so difficult for our team to continue to perform at a consistent high level that we have been these past couple of years due to all of the coach switches,” Zhou said. “I am excited that Coach Israelian is no longer in the interim position because we can now finally set long-term goals and [start] preparing earlier and more efficiently.”

YALE ATHLETICS

Before the promotion, Israelian led both varsity fencing squads for seven months.

Israelian describes Zhou’s All-American title as a career highlight while also noting the consistency of the women’s foil squad.

Other top moments included the qualification of seven Bulldogs for nationals and 10 Yalies — seven women and three men — for the All-Regionals distinction.

Despite the historic team finish, Israelian noted several difficulties during his first season at the helm, with the team having to tackle travel logistics, the pandemic and Israelian himself wrangling with the unfamiliarity with the responsibilities of the position. However, he cited the support of many within Yale Athletics as meaningful, noting that Deputy Athletic Director Ann-Marie Guglieri and Yale Athletics Fencing Supervisor Megan Lupini consistently helped with his transition into the role. The University admissions office, accounting office and other members outside of the coaching department were also sources of understanding and patience.

"I am thrilled that Marat will be leading our fencing programs as our next head coach,” Athletics Director Vicky Chun wrote in a state-

ment to the News. “His proven leadership and commitment to the student-athlete experience has and will continue to take Yale fencing to the highest level of excellence."

Ahead of recruitment season, Israelian traveled to numerous youth competitions to represent the Yale fencing program and anticipates further developing the recruitment process during his tenure. Despite uncertainties on whether he would continue in the role prior to his promotion, he advocated for the Blue and White’s program to ensure it would continue recruiting strong fencers.

Moving forward, Israelian aims for improved results.

“We should strive for much more,” Israelian said. “We’re trying to be the best so even if we’re better than we’ve been before, if we were 20th and now we’re 10th, we’re still not there.”

The fencing season finished the weekend of March 20 at the 2022 NCAA Championships in South Bend, Indiana.

Contact HAMERA SHABBIR at hamera.shabbir@yale.edu.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 11

“Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.” KIMBERLE WILLIAMS CRENSHAW AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS ADVOCATE

Comp Sci faculty call for facilities change

BY ANIKA SETH STAFF REPORTER As Yale strives to strengthen its scientific offerings, computer science — the most popular undergraduate major under the engineering and applied science umbrella — is a key priority. But with the department on track to continue expanding both in student and faculty size, some faculty expressed serious concerns about the existing physical infrastructure.

Arthur K. Watson Hall is located opposite Grove Street Cemetery and is home to the bulk of departmental operations.

Affectionately known as “the Zoo,” per the department website, the third floor of AKW features 38 computers that run both the Linux and Windows operating systems at all times and that are available to students both on-site and through remote login. Still, given the expanding size of the department, faculty hold generally negative views of the AKW facility, with some expressing a need for new computer science facilities in the near future.

“In the upcoming few years, as we’re likely to see more faculty and graduate students join, AKW is soon likely to run out of space — I believe this is the most pressing concern for facilities in AKW,” computer science professor Anurag Khandelwal wrote in an email to the News. “This is also true for space required to house computing infrastructure — we’re quickly running out of space for hosting servers. While solutions like shared offices for graduate students and spreading out CS faculty across multiple buildings might help, these are short-term solutions. We will likely need a newer building to house all of our growing CS faculty, postdoctoral and graduate students, to preserve the same collaborative environment we’ve enjoyed so far. Fortunately, there has already been promising signs of progress on this front from the administration, and I’m hopeful we will be able to achieve this goal soon.”

According to its website, Yale’s computer science department launched in the 1970s. In 1987, the University allotted a specific building for the discipline: AKW. Originally built in the 1890s, the building’s interior experienced a full overhaul to accommodate the “high-tech requirements” of what was, at the time, “one of the nation’s leading computer science research departments.”

Now, however, some faculty members say there is room for improvement in the computer science department’s physical infrastructure.

“The [Arthur K. Watson] building at Yale is one of the most embarrassing buildings in the whole country,” computer science professor Dragomir Radev wrote in an email to the News.

“I hope that some rich alumni can give enough money to Yale to move the CS department to new facilities and labs for CS faculty and students.”

Radev noted that the building is outdated and not well-suited to collaboration among faculty and students. For research, in particular, he wrote that there is “no adequate classroom space or any lab space,” as well as a lack of space for social gatherings.

He also compared Yale’s computer science facilities with those of other elite universities, saying that “all top 20 or so” of the country’s computer science departments have moved to state-of-theart buildings “over the past few years.” Radev specifically pointed to Harvard, which completed its Science and Engineering Complex in the fall of 2020, and the University of Washington’s 2019 construction of its computer science building. He also mentioned similar investments at the University of Michigan and the University of Texas.

ate interest and enrollment have grown over the last few years, the number of faculty has risen to accommodate such growth, leading to increased demand for finite space.

“The space is already running short for faculty and student needs,” Khandelwal said. “Three to four graduate students sharing a single office and an atrium space overflowing with undergraduate students during course office hours is not an uncommon sight. Similar issues are likely to happen when undergraduate students want to

ficial intelligence and machine learning, trustworthy computing, big data and heterogeneous systems — with a particular interest in experts who work in interdisciplinary areas and can thus “leverage Yale’s existing strengths in social science, law, medicine” and other sectors of interest on campus.

“I am looking forward to getting 4-5 new faculty within the next year or so, and several more over the following 1-2 years,” Radev wrote.

Jeffrey Brock ’92, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied

YALE DAILY NEWS

Some faculty members say there is room for improvement in the computer science department’s physical infrastructure.

Department chair Zhong Shao also discussed the need for new and expanded facilities to accommodate both the increasing department size and to maintain pace with the rapidly changing computer science landscape more broadly. “ T h e co m p u te r sc i e n ce department desperately needs a new building. The facilities in AKW are too old and no longer suitable for 21st century CS research and teaching,” Shao wrote to the News. “During the last four years, we have doubled the number of Ph.D. students and added more than 13 tenure track faculty members and 6 instructional faculty members. We now have more than 500 declared CS, CS+X, and CPAR majors. We have completely used up all the office and lab space in AKW.” This coming fall, Shao added, there will be more than 110 computer science doctoral candidates, all of whom will need office space and seminar rooms to hold research discussions.

As such, Shao noted that the department “definitely need[s] more physical space.”

Per Khandelwal, AKW was “a great home” for the department until recent years. Historically, he said, the department included about 20 faculty members, but as undergradu-

work as research interns over the summer — we are unlikely to have enough lab space to seat them as well as graduate students.”

Khandelwal noted that 10 to 15 new faculty members, himself included, joined the department in the last three years, which has also prompted “a marked increase” in the graduate and postdoctoral groups.

In February, the University announced a major wave of science and engineering investments, which includes the addition of 30 new faculty positions within the School of Engineering & Applied Science and a “comprehensive renovation plan to be implemented over the next decade” — which will include STEM buildings.

Within SEAS, the investment announcement notes that the faculty expansion is geared in large part toward expanding the size of the computer science faculty.

In his email to the News, Radev said this year the department is focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning, with active recruitment efforts centered around computer vision, natural language processing, robotics and other areas of artificial intelligence.

Shao concurred, adding that the department is seeking faculty who are experienced in arti-

Science, and University spokesperson Karen Peart did not immediately respond to an interview request about the computer science department.

For some faculty members, observations about AKW’s deficiencies are not new, and have a direct impact on the search for new hires. In November 2020, computer science professors Brian Scassellati and Lin Zhong told the News that the inadequate facilities are in and of themselves a barrier to bringing new faculty members on board — particularly the lack of lab space and unfavorable collaborative setup.

“Almost all the candidates I talk to afterwards, they mention that the building is one of the disappointments,” Zhong said. “It’s so dark and gloomy.”

Scassellati also expressed that it is challenging to recruit and hire world-class faculty without adequate infrastructure, as a candidate who needs lab space may not accept an offer from Yale without those facilities already in place.

In a February interview about the investment announcement, Brock noted the needs of the computer science department in particular.

“I’ve been hearing from the computer science faculty over the last few years a deep need for better space to support computer science but also better

space really to support the student-facing mission, which is increasing — I would say it’s one of the biggest drivers of interest in engineering and student enrollments,” Brock said at the time. “So we have a lot of work to do to expand both the faculty but also the availability of high-quality student-facing space for what is a central part of the teaching mission.”

Khandelwal echoed Brock’s statement of priorities, noting that the top two areas in which the computer science department stands to benefit from the University’s ongoing investments are, first, hiring more faculty “to meet the growing teaching and research demands” of greater undergraduate interest, and, second, “building new infrastructure.”

He expressed optimism that the pursuit of these two goals will lead to Yale offering more computer science courses — not just in pure computer science, but also at the “intersection” of computer science and other departments, such as law, arts and management.

For undergraduates, the computer science department presently offers a bachelor’s degree in both science and arts, a certificate in programming, and four combined majors in cooperation with other departments: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Computer Science and Economics, Computer Science and Mathematics, and Computer Science and Psychology.

In graduate studies, the department hosts both a doctoral and a graduate program.

Shao expressed appreciation for the University’s support of computer science in recent years in particular, with excitement for the department’s future offerings.

“CS has already benefited greatly from the strong support from the University in the last few years,” Shao wrote. “With the addition of many new tenure track and instructional faculty members, starting from this coming academic year, our department will be able to offer many new courses on machine learning, quantum computing, blockchains, full-stack web programming, and python programming for social science and humanities majors. With the addition of more Ph.D. students, we can also improve the TF support for many of our large-enrollment 400-level courses.”

Khandelwal also described a need for an increase in the department’s administrative size.

“As the number of faculty and students grow, the department also needs a growth in our administrative staff; our current staff works tirelessly to keep various pieces of the department running — ranging from undergraduate and graduate curriculum, to managing research seminars and talks and even helping faculty and students deal with often esoteric issues,” Khandelwal wrote. “Our department simply cannot grow without a parallel growth in the administrative staff!”

Arthur K. Watson Hall is located at 51 Prospect St. Contact ANIKA SETH at anika.seth@yale.edu .

Pan case delayed again

BY SOPHIE SONNENFELD STAFF REPORTER In the latest court hearing on the matter, Qinxuan Pan received more time to review evidence implicating him in the murder of Yale grad student Kevin Jiang.

That hearing took place in the state courthouse Wednesday morning in downtown, exactly 14 months after the murder. State Superior Court Judge Gerald Harmon decided to allow the case to be pushed back by two months to June 2. This was the fifth hearing granting Pan and his attorney Kevin Smith extensions to review state evidence pointing to Pan as the murderer.

After the last hearing requesting an extension for Pan in March, Pan’s lawyer noted that

Pan must read through thousands of pages of evidence at the correctional facility where he is being held. Smith explained that Pan has had difficulty reading through these documents because of limited access to the prison library. That limited access, he said, was due to staffing shortages in the Connecticut Department of Corrections.

The New Haven Independent reported that two friends of Jiang’s mother were present at the hearing Wednesday.

One of those friends told the Independent that the case has “really shocked” the local Chinese community.

“We can see that [Jiang] was a good kid, actually a role model for a younger generation,” the man told the Independent.

Jiang, who was attending the Yale School of the Environment, was shot and killed Feb. 6 last year in the East Rock neighborhood just over a week after he proposed to his fiance Zion Perry GRD ’26. The New Haven Police Department named Pan as a person of interest in the case Feb. 10, which led to a months long manhunt as Pan eluded police.

Pan was arrested by U.S. Marshals in Montgomery, Ala. with seven cellphones, $19,000 in cash and his father’s passport.

According to prosecutors, he was also renting an apartment under a fake name.

Pan is currently being held on a $20 million bond.

Contact SOPHIE SONNENFELD at sophie.sonnenfeld@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

This was the fifth hearing granting Pan and his attorney extensions to review evidence pointing to Pan as the murderer.

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

BULLETIN BOARD

SOPHIA DESCHIFFART is a senior in Trumbull College.

Contact her at sophia.deschiffart@yale.edu .

VICTORIA LU is a sophomore in Silliman College.

Contact her at victoria.lu@yale.edu .

JESSAI FLORES is a junior in Davenport College.

Contact him at jessai.flores@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 13

“Show class, have pride, and display character. If you do, winning takes care of itself.” BEAR BRYANT FOOTBALL PLAYER

Nobel laureate Sidney Altman dies at 82

BY EVAN GORELICK STAFF REPORTER Sidney Altman, former dean of Yale College and Nobel Prize winner, died in his New Jersey home on April 5. He was 82.

Altman, Sterling professor emeritus of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 for discovering the catalytic properties of RNA. Altman became a professor at the University in 1971, and he served as dean of Yale College from 1985 to 1989.

During his time as dean, Altman helped pioneer the University’s approach to undergraduate science education.

“Sid Altman was a great scientist, and a great University leader,” Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Tamar Gendler told the News. “In the late 1980s, when I was an undergraduate, he served as dean of Yale College when the role involved oversight not only of the students but also of the faculty. He was insightful and dedicated. A few years later, the excellence of his scientific contributions was recognized with a Nobel Prize. This extraordinary combination — a truly great scientist, a truly dedicated university citizen, distinguishes Sid and his legacy.”

Altman was born in Canada in 1939 and grew up in Montreal, where his mother worked in a textile mill and his father in a grocery store.

Both his parents were first-generation immigrants, and Altman’s upbringing focused heavily on the importance of education.

“For our immediate family and relatives, Canada was a land of opportunity,” Altman wrote in a short autobiography for the Nobel Foundation. “However, it was made clear to the first generation of Canadian-born children that the path to opportunity was through education. No sacrifice was too great to forward our education and, fortunately, books and the tradition of study were not unknown in our family.”

Outside of his studies, Altman was an avid ice hockey fan and an excellent hockey player. He

went to MIT as an undergraduate, where he studied physics and played on the club hockey team.

Altman began his academic career as a physicist. Only during his final semester at MIT did he take a short introductory course in molecular biology to “find out what all the excitement was about,” according to the autobiography.

After graduating in 1960, Altman began his PhD in physics at Columbia University. But he soon questioned his decision to become a physicist and ultimately decided to leave Columbia and enroll as a graduate student at the University of Colorado Medical School. There, he studied biophysics under the mentorship of Leonard Lerman, who was doing cutting edge research on DNA. After completing his PhD, Altman went first to Harvard, where he worked with Matthew Messelson, and then to the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, or MRC, in Cambridge, U.K. In Cambridge, he began his postdoctoral work with Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick and Nobel Prize winner-to-be Sidney Brenner.

“I was privileged to become a member of the group . . . at the [MRC] in Cambridge, England,” Altman wrote. “As an ex-physicist, I felt as if I was joining the equivalent of [Niels] Bohr’s group in Copenhagen in the 1920s. It turned out to be scientific heaven.”

At the MRC, Altman conducted research that would help lead to the discovery of the ribozyme RNase P, which consists of a structural RNA molecule and one or more proteins, and for which he would ultimately win a Nobel Prize.

Professor emeritus of molecular, cellular and developmental biology Joel Rosenbaum, Altman’s long-time colleague, recalled how Clement Markert — Yale’s chair of biology at the time — went to Cambridge to meet Altman and hired him on the spot. “The two became fast friends,” Rosenbaum said.

At Yale, Altman rose through the ranks while continuing his

SURBHI BHARADWAJ/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Altman served as Dean from 1985-1989, and won a Nobel Prize in 1989 for his work on the catalytic properties of RNA. work on the enzymatic properties of RNA. With the foundation he built at the MRC, Altman’s work culminated in 1978 with the analysis of RNase P and the conclusion that RNA-based ribozymes could have catalytic properties.

“When he sent his first publications out on ribozymes [in the late 1970s], the community of molecular biologists, including several at Yale working on RNA, did not want to believe the work,” said Rosenbaum. “He had a hard time obtaining invitations to speak at scientific meetings, like those at Cold Spring Harbor, and, indeed, getting his work published.”

But the scientific community could not neglect Altman’s work for long. It soon became clear that ribozymes were the future of molecular biology. The work Altman completed at Yale earned him a Nobel Prize in 1989, over a decade after his 1978 discovery. He

received the prize with Thomas R. Cech, who did similar work at the University of Colorado.

“It did not take long . . . for the ribozyme field to take off, and today it is a major field in molecular biology,” Rosenbaum wrote to the News. “I regard [Altman’s] finding as almost equal in importance in Molecular Biology to the discovery of the DNA double helix by Watson, Crick (and Franklin).”

Altman became chair of Yale’s biology department in 1983.

In 1985, he began a four-year stint as the dean of Yale College, during which he maintained an active lab in Kline Tower and continued to publish in major scientific journals.

As dean, Altman spearheaded the expansion of the science and language requirements of the Yale College curriculum, which remain today. In 1989, Altman

returned to his position as a fulltime professor.

“As the dean of Yale College, Sid was extraordinarily devoted to having students conversant in all disciplinary areas,” Yale President Peter Salovey said in a Yale News press release on Wednesday. “And as someone who was himself a great reader and a beautiful writer, and widely knowledgeable, he believed non-scientists should have an understanding of science, and that scientists would benefit by having a richer understanding of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The distributional requirements he helped initiate at the time promoted these goals.”

Altman is survived by his two children, Leah and Daniel, and four grandchildren.

Altman’s funeral services will be private.

Contact EVAN GORELICK at evan.gorelick@yale.edu .

Art History expands course offerings after year-long professor deficit

COURTESY OF YALE UNIVERSITY

More than half of the Art History department’s core faculty are currently on leave, but the department plans to increase its course offerings next semester.

BY EVAN GORELICK STAFF REPORTER After facing significant pandemic restrictions and a professor deficit, the Art History department is planning to return with expanded in-person course offerings next year.

Wi t h re d u ce d pa n d e m i c restrictions this year, the Art History department has moved classes back into the University Art Gallery and Center for

British Art, along with other Yale collections. But over half of the department’s tenure-track professors have been on leave during the 2021-22 academic year, keeping the department from offering its usual range of courses and taking full advantage of museum access. For the next academic year, as faculty numbers return to their normal levels, the department hopes to meet and exceed its past breadth of course offerings.

“We’re building on our strengths, and expanding our course offerings, which I am sure will have a great appeal for majors and non-majors alike,” said Milette Gaifman, chair of the department. “We’re particularly excited about the return to in-person classes at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, as well as the sessions and seminar at the Institute for the Preservation of Culture on West Campus.”

The 2021-22 academic year saw a significant reduction in campus COVID-19 restrictions. For the Art History department, this meant drastic changes to class structure and logistics. When restrictions were at their height the prior year, the department, which has historically made use of the University’s art and archive collections, had to alter the focus of its classes from physical art objects to digital ones.

Jacqueline Jung, a history of art professor and the department’s director of undergraduate studies, said that it was “really difficult” to teach fully virtual art history classes. Jung, who teaches the large survey course “Introduction to the History of Art: Sacred Art and Architecture,” had to redesign her spring 2021 course for a pre-recorded, asynchronous format. Importantly, discussion sections had to change, too.

“Discussion sections are really essential to this and other 100level classes because [they] are really grounded in our on-campus collections,” Jung said. “Not being able to walk through the gallery space was really, really difficult.

I was meeting with the teaching fellows every week to design programs where [students] could use . . . photos and images of objects in the collection that students could go back on their own and look at.”

Some students, like Marianna Sierra ’23, took leaves of absence because of these changes to class

structure during the 2020-21 academic year. Sierra said that she took a leave in order “to make sure my class time was spent with the physical objects and in the gallery spaces.”

This fall, Jung taught the same course in a hybrid format.

Though lectures were pre-recorded, the course integrated the kinds of gallery visits that were a staple of many of the department’s pre-pandemic courses.

“It was absolutely wonderful to be able to bring the students back into the gallery and have them move around the works of art even though it was not open to the public and the hours were more restricted,” Jung said. “The gallery was incredibly accommodating and they worked with me and with so many other [faculty] who needed those resources to make [their courses] work.”

Professor Morgan Ng, who joined the department this fall, has also found ways to integrate technology into his teaching even with the return to in-person learning.

Ng studies Renaissance architecture and visual culture, so much of what he teaches requires more than just observing standalone artwork. Ng discussed using 360-degree panoramic images and Google Maps in his classes to supplement more traditional artistic media.

“So many of the artworks that we often study in Italian Renaissance courses, such as Raphael’s frescoes, are often sort of seen flat in isolation when in fact they’re deeply interlinked with the mosaic pavements, the ceilings and so on and so forth,” Ng said. “So it actually has enriched some of our teaching to look beyond even our collections to think about the broader tools available.”

But, even though classes have been in person this year, the department has faced another challenge: low numbers of faculty on campus.

Out of 17 ladder faculty members in the department, nine — more than half — are currently on academic leave, reducing the number and variety of courses offered.

According to Jung, the high number of faculty on sabbatical is due to the postponement of leave during the earlier part of the pandemic. But the faculty deficit also came during a surge of interest in art history courses.

“The physical numbers of people wanting to take classes is higher [and] our numbers of faculty have been lower,” Jung said.

“So this has definitely led to an unusual sense of people really clamoring to get into full classes.”

According to Ng, the department has historically held mostly small classes, so the increase in interest this year posed a challenge.

“I [think] that COVID-19 had something to do with this [surge in interest],” Ng said. “After such a long period of virtual teaching and dematerialized engagement with life, art history, being a field deeply engaged with the physicality of objects . . . [might have become] suddenly attractive to students who have been sapped of that opportunity for such a long time.”

But for the most part faculty don’t believe the enrollment “mosh pit,” as Jung called it, will continue. Departmental faculty who have been away this year will return to teach courses next semester, and Jung and Ng both noted that the department will have more expansive course offerings in the fall.

New courses to be offered in the fall include “London Art Capital: Black Death to Brexit,” “The Body in Indian Art” and “In, Out, and Back: African Art Collection, Exhibition, and Restitution.”

The History of Art Department is located at The Jeffrey Loria Center for the History of Art at 190 York Street.

Contact EVAN GORELICK at evan.gorelick@yale.edu .

M TENNIS Columbia 7 Dartmouth 0

M LACROSSE Brown 12 Penn 10

SPORTS

BASEBALL Penn 27 Harvard 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

SOFTBALL TRAINING LIONS The Bulldogs took two of three against the Lions, climbing back to .500 in conference play, and vaulting to fourth in the league. The Elis will return home this weekend for a series against Princeton.

Coach Guth leaves Yale for Loyola W BASKETBALL

MUSCOSPORTSPHOTOS

Guth spent seven years as the Bulldogs’ head coach while setting program record for most wins in a single season.

After seven years as the Yale women’s basketball head coach, Allison Guth is leaving for a new role at the helm of the Loyola University Chicago Ramblers’ program. Loyola Chicago, which parted with its former coach Kate Achter in late March, announced the hire Friday afternoon.

Guth, who became Yale’s head coach in May 2015, won 99 games during her tenure as the 10th leader of the program. She piloted the Elis to a school-record 19 wins during the 2017-18 season, which included a game in the Ivy League’s postseason basketball tournament and a championship run through the Women’s Basketball Invitational (WBI). The team hit the 19-win mark again in the 2019-20 season despite a canceled postseason due to COVID-19. A

W LACROSSE Dartmouth 22 Columbia 6

FOR MORE SPORTS CONTENT, VISIT OUR WEB SITE goydn.com/YDNsports Twitter: @YDNSports

TENNIS DOWN GO THE TIGERS Contributing to the Bulldogs’ momentous win over the Tigers, Chelsea Kung ’23 defeated the nation’s then topranked singles player, Daria Frayman, on Saturday. Frayman has ranked No. 1 in the nation since March 23.

BY ANDREW CRAMER AND WILLIAM MCCORMACK STAFF REPORTERS

SOFTBALL Cornell 2 Princeton 1

native of Arlington Heights, Ill., Guth started her coaching career as an assistant with Loyola Chicago from 2005 to 2007. Excluding one season she spent coaching at Missouri, Guth has split her career between New Haven and Chicago. Now, she, her wife Jess and their two sons are returning to the Windy City.

“Yale has been my dream, and it’s my heart and soul, so this was a very, very challenging decision,” Guth told the News in a Sunday phone interview. “We’re feeling all the feels right now, but this is an incredible opportunity for us to go home and for Jess and I to raise our boys where they’re going to know their grandparents and they’re going to be around their aunts and uncles and cousins. Sometimes [with] life decisions like that, opportunities don’t come by often.”

The hiring process unfolded rapidly. Guth said she first got a call from Loyola about a week before

her hire was publicly announced last Friday. The process began with a conversation with Loyola Chicago’s deputy athletic director and continued with a second phone call with Ramblers Director of Athletics Steve Watson. Loyola flew her to Chicago for a day and a half last week to see the campus.

Guth then returned to New Haven, where her team was in the midst of holding end-of-season workouts, and learned she got the offer on Wednesday. She said her family was praying on the decision and complimented the Yale administration for being supportive.

By Thursday night, Guth decided to accept the opportunity, and she met with her Yale team to inform them Friday morning.

“It definitely came as a shock just because she’s such a fundamental part of all of our lives, but we all see and understand that this was the right move for her,” forward Grace Thybulle ’25 said.

“We all could feel and see how difficult this decision was for her because she really is an amazing person that deeply cares for us and the family that is [Yale women’s basketball], which is so much bigger than basketball. She’s built something amazing here, and I think we’re all just focused on continuing that legacy as well as excited for the new opportunities that will present themselves in the near future.”

Guth’s reunion with the Ramblers comes as the school, currently a member of the Missouri Valley Conference, prepares to start competing in the Atlantic 10 next year. Guth said the move to the A10 presents an exciting professional challenge. A10 women’s basketball, on average, is SEE W BASKETBALL PAGE 14

“This was a 100 percent player-earned win and credit to our seniors for getting our team prepared for the game.”

ANDY SHAY YALE MEN'S LACROSSE HEAD COACH

Eli squads cruise to victories

BY NICOLE RODRIGUEZ STAFF REPORTER On Saturday, the Yale rowing teams dominated their respective races, with the women bringing home the Cayuga Cup, the heavyweights keeping the Olympic Axe at Gilder Boathouse and three of the four lightweight boats coming in first over Georgetown University.

CREW It was another impressive weekend for Yale crew as the teams gear up for the remainder of the season. The women’s team traveled to Saratoga, NY where it raced Syracuse, Bucknell, Wisconsin and Cornell. The men’s crew teams faced their opponents at Gilder, with heavyweights competing against Dartmouth and lightweights against Georgetown.

“We had a good day of racing across the board,” women’s team head coach Will Porter said in a Yale Athletics press release. “We still haven't found our top speed and racing lineups, but we learned a lot today and look forward to making some adjustments this week.”

In Saratoga, the No. 2 Bulldogs swept No. 14 Syracuse and Wisconsin in the morning and went on to win all five races against Cornell and Bucknell in the afternoon. Against Syracuse, the first and second varsity eights posted a seven-second and 10-second victory, respectively. The varsity four completed its race with equally impressive results, clocking in a nine-second victory over Syracuse. In the afternoon, the Bulldogs won all five races by more than 20 seconds.

Since their victories against Iowa and Michigan State earSEE CREW PAGE 14

COURTESY OF RB LAWRENCE

As the spring season continues, Yale's crew teams secure two trophies and place first in a multitude of races against different colleges.

Bulldogs rise to 4–0 in conference play Marat Israelian elevated to head coach

YALE ATHLETICS

Yale narrowly defeated Harvard to keep its undefeated streak against Ivy League opponents alive.

BY RYAN VAKIL CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Coming off three straight wins, the Yale women’s lacrosse team (8–2, 4–0 Ivy) defeated Harvard (4–5, 2–2) 13–12 on Saturday and rose to 4–0 in conference play.

WOMEN'S LACROSSE The Bulldogs narrowly defeated their biggest rival, Harvard, on Saturday afternoon. Yale has some of its most difficult matchups of the season coming up, with No. 20 ranked University of Connecticut, No. 5 ranked Stony Brook and No. 12 Princeton being some of their opponents.

Harvard came in tied for fifth in the Ivy League Preseason Poll, the Bulldogs sat at seventh.

However, Yale has surpassed expectations so far, defeating Penn, Dartmouth and Brown, ranked second, third and fifth

in the Ivy League, respectively, before putting the icing on the cake by earning a win against old rival Harvard.

“We are extremely excited about getting another Ivy win.

We are such a young team, but the freshmen are stepping up and playing a huge role,” captain Kelsey Dunn ’22 said.

This was somewhat of a historic victory, as this is the first time since 1995 the Yale women’s lacrosse team started 4–0 in conference play.

The talented first-year class stepped up with midfielder Taylor Lane ’25 and attacker Caroline Burt ’25 breaking an 11–11 tie in the final 5:25. The Elis were able to cling onto the lead and hold off the Crimson onslaught to secure a 13-12 victory.

Just like last week’s 10-goal run against Brown (5–5, 2–2), the Bulldogs’ goals were scored

STAT OF THE WEEK 45

in clusters. Harvard managed to keep Yale scoreless for nearly 12 minutes to start the game, but over the course of the next two minutes, the Elis scored four goals, two of which came from attacker Taylor Everson ’25 and assisted by midfielder Fallon Vaughn ’25, which gained Yale a 4–2 lead to close out the first quarter. Though the game was close, Yale never gave up the lead after the early four-goal run. The rookies definitely put on a show, with seven of Yale’s goals coming from the class of 2025, and the remaining six coming from Olivia Markert ’22.

“The leadership on our team has been tremendous and it was evident in our game today,” head coach Erica Bamford told Yale Athletics. “Olivia Markert was excellent and efficient on the offensive end. Credit to Olivia Penoyer ’23 for consistently quarterbacking our young offense. It was not an easy feat aga i nst Ha rva rd's exceptional defense.”

Both offenses gained steam in the second quarter, with Harvard and Yale hitting the back of the net five times apiece. However, both teams’ defenses stepped it up in the third, each only allowing two goals.

Yale goalie Clare Boone ’23 made three saves in the fourth, but Harvard midfielder Callie Hem scored twice in four minutes to tie the game at 11 goals apiece at the beginning of the fourth.

“We competed really hard and executed our game plan. We're SEE W LACROSSE PAGE 10

BY HAMERA SHABBIR STAFF REPORTER After finishing the 202122 season with a top-10 finish at the NCAA Championships, Marat Israelian has been promoted to head coach of Yale’s varsity fencing teams.

FENCING Two-time NCAA epee champion Israelian held the position of interim coach for seven months before it was announced that he was promoted to the position fulltime through a Yale Athletics press release. Israelian first interacted with the Yale fencing squads in 2018 and joined the coaching staff as an assistant coach in 2019. After the abrupt dismissal of head coach Haibin Wang in 2021, Israelian was named interim head coach a month before the fencing team began competition. Israelian is now the third head of the fencing program in four years.

“I basically [hunkered] down and just tried to focus on what I have to do, and tried to not mess this up,” Israelian said. “I try to do the best I can to … promote the team because there's a lot of things I had to learn right away. I started two weeks before the season started so everything was new to me. It was important for me [that the] team did not feel like they did not have my support, or I did not know what I was doing

or if they were … in limbo with regards to leadership.”

Israelian — a 2005 European Championship finalist — graduated from St. John’s University in 2013 where he had won the NCAA epee championship in 2010 and 2011. After graduation, he coached youth teams in New England and was named New Jersey High School Coach of the Year.

Ahead of the 2018 Ivy League Round Robins, Israelian was asked by epeeists at Yale for assistance and volunteered for the Bulldogs as a strip coach.

“It was actually circumstantial,” Israelian said. “The team SEE FENCING PAGE 10

COURTESY OF YALE ATHLETICS

Marat Israelian has been promoted to head coach.

THE NUMBER OF GOALS THE YALE MEN’S LACROSSE TEAM SCORED ACROSS TWO GAMES LAST WEEK. THEY BEAT BU 22–15 AND DARTMOUTH 23–6.

FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022

WEEKEND // DORA GUO

THE HOUSING GAMES

// BY MIRANDA WOLLEN

Chapter One: The Wheel of Misfortune The clock strikes eight. It is time. We sardine ourselves on our crumb-crusted couch, breathy and blissfully ignorant of the psychological terrors which await us. I am wearing a fluffy pink bathrobe. This would become my uniform for the sadistic virtual obstacle course created by the Silliman Housing Committee in what was probably a dark grotto with stalactites dripping acid onto the floor, or perhaps a haunted 1950s bomb shelter under PWG. They probably all have little mustaches they fondle as they plan the demise of half of Silliman’s relationships. They probably all stroke little ugly bald cats.

We log onto the Zoom. Names, faces, it’s all a blur. 11 groups, nine quads. Friends are foes; up is down; trust is a luxury of a past life.

“Ashley,” if that’s even her real name, pops up all too cheerfully, shattering the sublimity of our virtual purgatory. She explains the rules of Round 1 to us: a wheel, segmented by the representatives of each housing group, will be spun twice. The chosen sacrifices will be forced to disband and regroup with four

terrifyingly anonymous stragglers. What the fuck. How is this legal. May the odds be ever in our favor.

The wheel is spun; the first foursome felled. Just to twist the rusty, corrugated knife, the Chosen One’s name is brought onto the screen in a flutter of confetti. The computer shouts, “Congratulations to the winner!”

“Ashley” unmutes herself: “Unfortunately, in this case, you are not a winner. Your suite is disbanded.” This is dystopian. Whatever, we’re still in the game.

Every Sillimander for themself. Eat or be eaten, baby.

The Wheel of Death is spun once more; it slows, it slows, it DOESN’T SLOW FAST ENOUGH, IT’S COMING RIGHT FOR US, I CAN’T LIVE IN A CO-ED SUITE, AND OH GOD we’re safe. By an eighth of an inch, the only three women in this Zoom room who know my shower schedule will remain my suitemates. I’m going to worship Ashley as my new god. I’m going to send Ashley an Edible Arrangement. I’m going to offer up a kidney at the Altar of Ashley, whether she needs it or not.

Chapter Two: The Open House of Horrors We’ve made it through the prelims, and now even more unspeakable tragedies loom over us. Of the nine quads, four are literally worse than our current hovel. Like L-Dub level travesties.

It is the Hour of the Open House. We’ve snagged the fifth lottery spot, narrowly escaping sleeping butt-to-butt in the inexplicably long and narrow dorms of A Tower.

Were people taller and skinnier when Silliman was built in the ‘20s? Who did this?

The Silliman courtyard buzzes with wideeyed innocents; the top lottery-pick royalty refuse to make eye contact with the lastplace pondscum. It feels like the Stanford Prison Experiment, when a bunch of psychiatrists arbitrarily gave a couple of student participants guard privileges and they started beating up their classmates. The Algorithm has decided our lots in life for us.

All hail the StarRez overlords.

My suite, comfortably occupying the middle echelons of the Silliman room hierarchy, flits from quad to quad, indignant when we are not afforded our Godgiven right of snooping around in random

strangers’ rooms that we might-but-probably-won’t live in next year. One of the second-pickers toys with us, mercilessly refusing to tell us where her group plans to live. We genuflect, we beseech, we exhort.

Nada. Suddenly, we are mere feudal peasants, Sid from “Toy Story’s” deformed playthings. We are worms. I think I get what Marx was on about.

Chapter Three: Fallout We’ve secured it: perfectly mediocre housing. We are sharing a suite of two doubles with a two-stall bathroom that will be used by at least six other floormates, and for some reason our suite has three fireplaces ???, but so be it. We mourn the fallen soldiers who will remain trapped in the inferno of bunk-bed housing and common-room desks. We realize why people move off campus.

A text dings on the suite groupchat: one of the bedrooms has two windows, the other only one. Let the games begin again.

Contact MIRANDA WOLLEN at miranda.wollen@yale.edu .

PAGE B2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND STORM

EVERYTHING YOU MISSED at the Ted Cruz Event

// MEGAN VAZ

// BY MEGAN VAZ On Monday night, Texas Senator Ted Cruz visited Yale to record an episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz before a crowd of liberal students presumably bent on stifling his right to free speech by exercising their own rights to free speech. Since the nation struggles with a desperate shortage of masochistic men who host podcasts, the Senator provided Yale with a special opportunity to reach intellectual enlightenment.

Liz Wheeler introduced the event to a crowd of 500 people by referring to recent protests over a conservative group at Yale Law School as “violent,” citing all zero pieces of evidence there was any violence at all. In another entirely substantiated claim, she noted that Yale does not care about the conservative donor base it alienates because it is “underwritten by the Chinese Communists.”

The audience shouldn’t mind the $150 million that Stephen Schwarzman — an ally of President Trump who has given over $34 million to the Republican Party, Republican candidates and conservative PACs since the start of 2020 — donated to the University to create the eponymous Schwarzman Center. Would Wheeler have been more pleased if they made us watch “Ben Shapiro OWNS the SJW libs” compilations every time we ate in Commons?

Preceding their complaints against college professors and teachers for spreading leftist perspectives, Knowles and Cruz chastised liberal students for complaining about the spread of conservative viewpoints.

Notably, the 51 year old Senator blasted “Yale’s very own Peter Parker” Ely Altman ’25 — an undergraduate who is one-third of his age — for writing that he and Knowles are “chipping away at democracy.” Naturally, being compared to the world’s most popular superhero is the worst thing that can possibly happen to you.

Altman was mistaken in his Op-ed in the News. There is nothing more democratic than, in Cruz’s own words, “leading the charge” to stop the certification of an election with no evidence of systemic voter fraud. Or conspiring to delay states’ certification of the 2020 presidential election results through a “minor violation” of the

law — each effort of which over 90 other U.S. Senators foolishly shut down. Or supporting the Texas attorney general as he filed a case asking a federal court to toss out the election results in four different states, which his own chief of staff called “a dangerous violation of federalism.”

Of course, the Jan. 6 “patriots” and “peaceful protestors” deserve Senator Cruz’s support — unlike the Yale Law protestors that he demanded disciplinary action against, these QAnoners have absolutely no experience engaging in “groupthink” or “[screaming] down anyone who disagrees.”

During his talk, Senator Cruz immediately jumped into the most urgent crisis facing the nation — white parents having no choice but to pay over $70,000 for their adult children to discover racism. The Senator also touched on the intellectual terrorism waged against white schoolchildren, like the babies apparently being labelled racist in “Antiracist Baby.” In tune with the blown-up pages from the book he presented during the recent Supreme Court nomination hearings, he subsequently displayed excerpts from another damning piece of left-wing propaganda — The Very Hungry Caterpillar. He blasted the titular caterpillar and the book’s setting in a “welfare state,” both of which teach children to freeload off of hard-workers — the butterfly class — to unfairly be handed baseline subsistence.

As Cruz and Knowles repeatedly argued, lessons that acknowledge critical race theory and the existence of gay people have absolutely no place in children’s classrooms. Senator Cruz claimed that Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill rightfully protects children from learning the specific mechanics of gay sex by making sure gay people are not acknowledged overall. As a resident of Florida’s “gay capital,” Fort Lauderdale, I could not agree more. I can attest that when I developed my first crush on a girl in third grade after learning people could have two moms, all I could think about was scissoring.

Speaking of sex, Knowles made clear that he had none of it during his own time at Yale. He spoke of his “worst memory” from college as the day Barack Obama was

WKND RECOMMENDS Class outside

elected president. Over 3,000 liberal students gathered outside to celebrate in a haze of marijuana clouds while Knowles and the six other conservatives he knew allegedly found some courtyard to sit in and throw back shots of vodka. Coincidentally, that is what each Saturday night looked like for Knowles after he unsuccessfully tried to sneak into frat parties.

As a guest of the Buckley Program, Knowles zeroed in on the importance of intellectual diversity and civil debate by calling Ketanji Brown Jackson “stupid.”

Cruz even invited guests who disagreed with him to the front of the Q&A line to prove his commitment to a free exchange of ideas. Unfortunately, since Senator Cruz answered a simple request to say two nice things about Jackson with a rant on her sentencing record that lasted several minutes, some of us did not have the opportunity to listen to him skirt around our questions. I am sure the audience member who asked whether he believed Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 presidential election was thrilled when Cruz answered that Joe Biden is the current president.

Alternatively, Cruz lamented conservative students’ silence on cultural issues in order to “protect the job at Goldman Sachs.” Luckily, anyone who has taken a history, global affairs or political science course can tell you otherwise — I myself encountered a riveting criticism of anti-colonialism movements as “I don’t know, they sound pessimistic” by one such conservative student during class.

We also all know Goldman Sachs, which recently resumed donations to lawmakers who opposed certifying the 2020 election, to be a staunch bastion of cultural leftism — Senator Cruz’s own wife has worked as a managing director at the firm for ten years!

The largest chunk of the event was dedicated to blasting liberals over their Supreme Court nominee — a staunch supporter of critical race theory and apparently pedophiles, according to Cruz and Knowles. Senator Cruz claimed that leftist media outlets went silent over his attack on Jackson’s sentencing record on child pornography cases and instead chose to cast it as a “QAnon con-

spiracy.” He may have missed this Washington Post article, this ABC article, this New York Times article, this CNN article or this AP article evaluating her past sentencing practices as mainstream. Maybe this Wall Street Journal article would work instead, since the outlet is more palatable?

Senator Cruz lamented how he is unable to criticize someone who is a minority, like Jackson, without being “held up as the modern day Klansman.” Although his later declaration of support for Nazis’ free speech did not exactly negate that title, he claimed that even saying “good morning” to a Black woman would earn him the labels of “sexist” and “racist.” As a woman of color myself, I would like Senator Cruz to consider that many minorities might look offended after hearing a “good morning” from him because he might just be a generally unpleasant person. Since fellow prominent conservatives have dubbed him a “miserable son of a bitch” and said that “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” I wonder what their reactions to that “good morning” would be.

Senator Cruz did hit back at these Republican detractors for not “taking on the orthodox” by refusing to ask Jackson hard-hitting questions, like whether babies can be racist or what a woman is. I suppose taking on the orthodox is only unacceptable when it comes to teaching critical race theory or considering the oxymoronic “false thesis” of the 1619 project, but it’s clear that Cruz’s colleagues left him in the dust this month.

“Where were the conservatives?”

Knowles asked Cruz during their discussion of Jackson’s nomination.

My best guess? The trials for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists started two weeks before the Supreme Court hearings, so probably at the defendant’s table in some courtroom.

(Author’s note: Unfortunately, the only thing in this article that did not actually happen at this event was the exhibition of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.)

Contact MEGAN VAZ at megan.vaz@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND PROFILES

PAGE B3

AND POETRY

CARRY ON, KAREN WANG // BY MICHELLE AMPOFO

I emailed Karen Wang ’24 about whether they would like to be the subject of a profile. While receptive, they were a little hesitant, and perhaps confused, as to why they would be chosen to be interviewed. But it’s often people who think they are uninteresting that have the most appealing characteristics to find.

For our first meeting, Wang and I met at Pierson for dinner. I showed up first and got us a table, and a few minutes later Wang walked in wearing a dapper outfit, one that was 70’s-esque. They donned a brownish tweed coat and worn-in Doc Martens, both of which I thought paired nicely with their mullet, which had dirty blonde streaks that framed their face.

Immediately, I complimented this hairstyle, as it was the first thing about Wang that captured my attention. Throughout the interview, though I insisted against calling it that — “it will be super informal and chill” I said, through the email. “it won’t feel like a clinical interview in any way. just two people talking!” Wang recognized and said hello to many different people in the dining hall. We laughed about funny things that happened that week in class and somehow, the topic of Yale Twitter came up. I was embarrassingly excited to find out that they were active. We scrolled through their timeline and joked about a couple of tweets, then began to talk.

To ease any awkwardness, I decided not to bring any questions with me for this first interview. We started with the usual niceties. Wang is a sophomore in Branford College; I’m a first-year in Pierson but live in L-Dub. They are from Indiana; I’m from Long Island. They’re an ER&M major, considering doubling in Theater Studies; I remain undecided. But after some time, the questions began to center more on them. Wang is involved on campus, which explains why they know so many people. They coordinate events for Dwight Hall and tutor English — although, they’re a “reformed English major.” I made a mental note to ask more about this later. They are involved in Broad Recognition but are focusing their efforts on starting a radio show with their friend that will showcase not only music, but poetry.

At this point, or maybe a little later, Wang asked me about my day. “Ah, this is literally the hardest question for me to answer,” I said. “I honestly don’t know what I do or am doing on any given day.” Wang nodded sincerely, “Me too.” I had said this in the most literal sense; as in I honestly don’t remember what I do during the day, so I find it hard to recall when asked. But I suspected that Wang took my words to mean something deeper than what I intended, that I didn’t know what I was doing with my life in general. I didn’t correct them because I figured the two interpretations mean essentially the same thing. “I do remember,” I said, “seeing a dick drawn in the snow on my way here.” At this, Wang’s eyes glimmered playfully and they smiled saying, “Huh. I wonder what shape Old Campus would be if it were a dick.” We both laughed, agree-

ing that it would be frighteningly curved and deformed. We disagreed on what section would be the scrotum— they argued for L-Dub, I insisted on the Vanderbilt circle.

Wang objected, “No, that would mean that I’m living in a ballsack.” I gave a shrug that meant “oh well.” Next, we bonded on being shit-talkers — “You really are a hater,” they said. “I love it!” talked about their plans to move into an apartment next year with a couple of friends and complained about the dining hall food. Wang offhandedly revealed that they were planning on dyeing the blonde streaks in their hair blue or shaving their hair off completely. I took that as a personal offense. They also said, while giggling, “To be honest, I imagined your face to be slimmer.” I gasped, offended, but then they quickly said, “I mean with a more narrow jawline! Not so… round.” I laughed, “That’s going into the profile.” And again over their protests, “Nope. That’s going into the profile!” But I knew what they meant.

Their face was different from what I was expecting too. I had pictured them to have a softer, fuller face rather than the angular and defined countenance that I saw. We seemed to imagine each other to have features similar to our own.

The next time I see Wang, their hair is blue. I was out of breath because I was late

— “i’m so sorry!” I text them, “literally running. almost there!” they respond, “sure… i’m about to write a whole novel waiting for you.” I smile when I see them, “Look at you being so productive,” I teased. We walked out of the library and ended up sitting outside the Schwarzman Center. I came prepared with questions, and things that were revealed in our first meeting took on a fuller shape. Wang is from a working-class family in Indiana. They were born in Massachusetts but sent to live with their grandmother in China for a couple of years, until returning to America with their siblings, an older sister and a younger brother. Their grandmother was not a good caretaker, so they were brought back to America out of necessity. And it was a relief, at first, when they arrived.

But as Wang grew older, the pressure placed on them as child and heavy misogyny started to take their toll, causing Wang to question their identity. They were happy to get into Yale, although they are vocal about the school’s faults. I used this as a segue to revisit why they were no longer an English major. “It’s too constricting, I think. I’m only interested in the creative writing classes that are being offered, but not the other classes I would

need to take. I’ve never been super sure of what I’m going to do anyway. But I know I won’t kill people for a living.” No consulting or government job either. Maybe academic work on the secondary or postsecondary level, but no private schools.

Students in public schools need love too, and after all, Wang thought they probably wouldn’t be here if not for the support of their public high school English and French teachers. They came into college thinking they would be a “STEM baddie,” but no longer have an interest in pursuing STEM nor identify as a woman. They are okay with that change. “Whatever I do, hopefully I’m writing and telling stories about people I care about.”

After Wang said this, I looked up at them and analyzed their expression. It was contemplative, almost grave. More serious than how I figured we’d been taking the interview so far. “You’re so serious,” I tell them. “I don’t think I would survive a day in your brain.” “It’s important to reflect,” they said. “People don’t usually take the time to do this.” I sat straighter as we continued. While Wang talked, I refrained from telling too many personal anecdotes out of respect for their story and the vulnerability that they shared. But the more they said, the more I found in common about truths we both keep.

It was getting colder then, so I asked Wang to tell me fun things about themself. They love Amine — “I used to love Willow, but now she’s weird, Indie Pop and R&B, rom coms, Marvel superheroes and Pixar movies. They don’t like the news, but love consuming media. They use Twitter instead of TikTok, say “comparison is the death of all joy” instead of “comparison is the thief of joy.” They are addicted to buying cheap things off of Depop. We talked about our tattoos — I asked why they chose a dragon. “I just love dragons,” they said. “But it also has cultural meaning.” IBS, whether we prefer to use debit or cash, the indie scene at Yale, their violent dreams. And then we speed round. Favorite movie? “A Sun.” Favorite song? “buff baby” by tobi lou.

Music artists? “SZA and Frank Ocean, but in a shallow way.” Most recently read book? “‘Severance’ by Ling Ma.” Favorite part of the day? “Calling my partner and listening to soft rock while I fall asleep.” Someone rides quickly past us on a motorized scooter; we got told by security not to sit on the ledge.

I closed my notebook and told them that we’re finished. I had all the information I needed. “Cool, cool,” they said.

We walked back to Old Campus, and while crossing the street, Wang stepped on a shaky manhole cover. “Oh shit,” they said while laughing. “What would you do if I fell?” I acted out what I would do, which is stand wide-eyed in the middle of the street and say an emotionless “oh.” We both laughed and entered our scrotums.

Contact MICHELLE AMPOFO at michelle.ampofo@yale.edu .

HUMPHREY: THE RAIN HAS STOPPED // BY NOAH HUMPHREY Introduction As a person who has lived in South Central LA and is currently a settler of the sovereign nation of Hawaii, I wrote this poem about the injustice both on Hawaii and the U.S (Mainland/Turtle Island/ Etc). The purpose of this poem is to highlight marginalized groups such as the South Central LA youth and the youth in Kalihi on the island of Oahu.

As a poet, I use poetry to address the social issues, particularly the police brutality against the youth that happens around Kalihi and in South Central. The death of Chuukese teen Iremamber Sykap, who was posthumously labeled as an 16 year old adult on the news; Valentina Orellana-Peralta, a 14 year old teen shot by police in LA and dies in her mother’s arms at a department store; and many marginalized victims of police brutality. They are who I call out in my poem.

This poem is my call for ‘just aloha,’ a term I’ve coined that means creating joy and justice in low-income communities without true social justice. ‘Just aloha’ is one viable path that will create joy and justice within

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not only KVIBE but the Native Hawaiian community as a whole. ‘The Rain Has Stopped’ shows that we have to unite in love and understanding. We need to search for solutions amidst the injustice in low income communities. For me, regardless whether it’s Vernon, KKV, Kam IV( I told y’all boys I’ll find a way to shout you out), Crenshaw, Kalihi, or Compton, I just want to give space for those who are in need of umbrellas.

“The rain has stopped” No more rain in the corners of South Central No more tears in the rain of faces for Kalihi You look ahead and note that a child is on the ground Lifeless, heavy, barren, and unable to get up You look ahead to see the officers You look ahead to see the helicopter You pick up the news and see the headlines A young Micronesian boy…..A young Hispanic girl….

Who wanted to see sunny days but was blocked by reports falsified and smeared.

And when they have to make their own decisions Break other’s umbrellas, or are placed in circumstances unregarded by the rain Cry out to the leaders who say they see them There is nothing but remorse, false promises, and negligence Happy days for the officers, happy days for the policies, systematic oppression 2 kids and their family’s lives changed forever All those involved changed forever People play games all the time with the headlines 16-year-old adult, a 14-year-old girl shopping for clothes with her family And yet end the bullets with the same rounds, just look across the street The mall, or a system designed to drag bullets and lack of detail on youth And you see the pain of the marginalized You see the sunshine coming from

KVIBE, to get the boys out of the rain You see a Place Called Home, getting South Central kids out of the rain You see a family trying to keep their young children out of the rain Iremamber Sykap and all the Micronesian boys, I hear you Valentina Orellana-Peralta and all the children vying for life in Los Angeles, I hear you This is why when I get an umbrella, I get two One to hide my tears, and one to bounce off the stigmas Shout to Justice for Valentina, Justice for Iremamber to make the rain standstill And when the rain stops, let’s enjoy the sunshine for as long as we are here RIP Iremamber “Baby” Sykap/ Rip Starsky/ RIP Valentina Orellana-Peralta e both laughed and entered our scrotums.

Contact NOAH HUMPHREY at noah.humphrey@yale.edu .

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND SCREW?

SEX ON THE WKND: THE IMMACULATE CON(TRA)CEPTION Welcome back to Sex on the WKND! We’re an anonymous YDN column dedicated to answering your burning questions about sex, love and anything in between.

Last year, we had one writer, but now we are a collective of students, each with our own unique sexual and romantic experiences. We’ve had straight sex, queer sex and long, long periods without sex. We’ve been in long-term relationships, we’ve walked twenty minutes to avoid former hookups on Cross Campus and we’ve done the whole FroCogroup-cest thing. We may be different this year, but we’re still sex-positive, we’re still anti-capitalist, and we sure as hell still support the Green New Deal.

Obsessing over sex is a Yale tradition as old as the Oldest College Daily itself.

Whether you’re fucking your roommate, still yearning for your first kiss, or dealing with an unsettling skin rash, Sex on the WKND is here for you. Nothing is too personal or silly. Ask us anything ;) Submit your anonymous question here: https://bit.ly/sexonthewknd My partner and I got tired of using condoms and recently had a pregnancy scare. It’s time to look at some birth control options, but there are just so many. How do I choose?

-OhhhBabyNoBabies Let’s start with this: condoms don’t have to be boring. Sure, if you’re going to the local

Walgreens, the most exciting option you’re gonna get is “thin and ribbed.” But check Yale laundry rooms, and you’ll find a variety of neon colors. Some shops have a range of flavors. My personal favorites are the condoms that glow in the dark; is there anything more alluring? However, I completely understand the desire for a more concrete form of birth control. In fact, I’ve been protected for three years now! It’s the sense of security that most are drawn to.

Maybe you’re thinking, “I need something more advanced!” I got you covered. The intrauterine device (IUD) is an up-and-coming yet slightly controversial method. The process is simple and long-lasting; a small T-shaped device is inserted into the uterus, serving as your personal bodyguard for 8-10 years. No entry permitted. It’s tighter security than the frats on High Street on Friday night. With something so long-lasting, you may be wondering what the downsides

The first and preferred mode of defense is abstinence. Just kidding, as if. The pill is a classic first-time contraceptive. In fact, this is still my birth control method of choice.

However, despite the advertised ease of use, the pill is the most difficult to manage. When taken correctly, skin and sperm are easily cleared. But one wrong move, and you’re risking the next 18 years and nine months of your life. You need killer time-management skills. Even with the added inconvenience, a sense of camaraderie results from taking the pill. In a crowded room at 9pm, you’ll be sure to hear the alarms of other members of the contraceptive community.

are. While doctors claim this procedure is painless, there are several horror stories.

I’m talking fainting, cysts, infections, and excruciating pain. Also, you may be subject to what I call RPS (robo-pussy syndrome)— sexual partners may occasionally feel the wires that protrude from your cervix. Is that sexy? I’ll let you decide.

Next, we have a series of shots. No, not the good, fun-feeling kind. First is the Depo-Provera. Every 12 weeks, you’ll be subject to a needle in your ass for only 94% effectiveness. This one’s for my masochists and risk-takers. You know who you are. The next is Nexaplon, which implants a contra-

ceptive device into your forearm. If you opt for this method, I’d try not to look; the thing stabbing you is more of a sharp metal straw than a needle. It lasts up to four years with over 99% effectiveness. Beyond preventing unwanted pregnancy, asking someone to feel it serves as a cool party trick. One of my friends was able to trick her conspiracy-loving coworker into thinking the COVID vaccine actually did microchip her.

If you’re feeling really experimental (and really trusting in your partner), male birth control is on the rise. Honestly, this makes a lot of sense to me; a wise woman once said, “it makes more sense to unload a gun than to shoot a bulletproof vest.”

The most seductive form of this contraception is the “ball bath.” This baby-blocking-bidet uses ultrasound heat to temporarily block sperm mobility, lasting for a maximum of six months. Essentially, it’s a premium massage.

Regardless of your choice, make sure that choice is highly informed. Though I think my advice is objectively great, try talking to an experienced doctor, a trusted friend, or your partner. Sometimes, hearing your ideas reflected in another person can help guide decision-making. But in the end, trust your instincts; you know what’s right for you. And if all else fails, there’s always Plan B!

Much Ado About Nothing? What was with the hype around first-year formal?

// BY ANDREW CRAMER

I shaved my prepubescent-looking mustache for the first-year formal. I regret wasting even that much effort.

“It’ll be the night of your life,” they told me.

“You’ll fall in love with a blind date, and everyone who’s anyone will be there and ready to cut loose. It’s wild. Imagine the first-year dinner, but without the parade of comestibles and not at all like the first-year dinner except for venue and attire.”

They lied to me. They let me get my hopes up for nothing. Who are ‘they’ you ask? I don’t know. Older students? The FCC? The grapevine? All I know is that my expectations were turned all the way up.

Maybe my inability to claim the formal as the time of my life represents a personal failing. Sure, I went through the physical motions of getting into the right headspace. I showered,

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put on my baby blue blazer and a crisp white button-down and crashed a shindig in some stranger’s suite beforehand: the works, you know.

But my heart wasn’t all the way in it. I was tired from a long week. I thought the whole premise was a little bit goofy. I had my doubts.

And I’ll be the first to admit, maybe the fact that my blind date and I didn’t fall in love was my fault. I don’t know if I was ready. Oh, she’s a lovely human being, don’t get me wrong, but we just didn’t seem to hit it off.

Alright… now that I’ve offered the disclaimer of my own potential shortcomings, allow me to recount the evening for you.

Perhaps a brief antecedent is necessary: $15 for a ticket, with gas prices what they are, set the bar mighty high. If I’m shelling out fifteen big ones, I’m expecting all the works: fondue,

an indoor rollercoaster, and a night of extravagance and debauchery.

Instead, this is how it went down…

As I pulled up outside Commons, I found myself stuck in the back of a lengthy and slow-moving line. This, of course, was a forgivable offense. After all, this was the hottest ticket in town. Tickets had sold out. There was a waitlist for goodness sake. What are we, despairing high-school seniors, hopelessly resorting to entering our names on a Yale waitlist?

We waited in the relatively cold air for what must have been fifteen minutes, although this was less of an issue for me, as I had my — allow me to reiterate — dashing baby blue blazer to keep me warm. But many students donning just their finest dresses or shirts began to shiver and complain.

One silver lining of the wait was the opportunity to talk with my date. We chatted about the weather, our prospective majors, which colleges we were in, etc. But such pleasantries felt like filler as we allowed our anticipation to build.

At last, we made it through the pearly white gates of Commons, only to find ourselves lost in a sea of chaos. Helpless first-year organizers yelled at us to line up against the wall in an orderly fashion, but this was first-year formal: we were rowdy, we were eager and we were growing very, very impatient.

I snaked my way up to the front of the line, sneaking by inattentive lovebirds too caught up in each other’s eyes to notice the 6’4” lanky goon in the suave baby blue blazer slithering past them. And then, after getting my ticket checked and a Sharpie mark on my hand, I was in. And so, I believed, my magical night was set to begin.

The room was nearly empty. My date and I moved off to the side, where she got a Dr. Pepper and a bag of SmartFood™ popcorn. I stood there awkwardly surveying the crowd for my other friends. What I saw, instead, was a middle school dance.

I want to make it clear: for me, there was some joy in this. My middle school didn’t have dances. Maybe first-year formal was the closest I’ll ever come. But if that was the case, then I think I’m a little upset we didn’t lean all the way in and throw out the Old Hollywood theme for Middle School Dance. I think we should have split by gender, standing in opposite corners of the room, pointing and whispering nervously.

Instead, I spent the night drifting around the room, catching up with all the friends I’ve accidentally been blowing off since the semester began and forcing them to take photos with me to appease my mom. (She thought we looked very handsome.)

It was a lovely night, in its own peculiar way, and I mean no disrespect to all those who put in so much time and effort planning this event. But when I’m told it’ll be “a night you won’t remember, but one you can’t forget,” my expectations exceed a bag of SmartFood™ and some awkward meandering. I’m not saying I want my $15 back, but maybe $10 would be fair.

Contact ANDREW CRAMER at andrew.cramer@yale.edu and