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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · MONDAY, APRIL 16, 2012 · VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 125 · yaledailynews.com
INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING
SUNNY SUNNY
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CROSS CAMPUS
W. TENNIS ELIS SWEEP IVY FOES IN NEW YORK
FROSH OLYMPICS
HAROLD AND KUMAR
M. LACROSSE
Timothy Dwight steals flags, trophy as Morsels edge out competition
ASIAN-AMERICAN MOVIE STAR REFLECTS ON RACE
Yale clinches spot in Ivy League tournament with 4OT win over Brown
PAGE B1 SPORTS
PAGE 3 NEWS
PAGE 5 NEWS
PAGE B3 SPORTS
Inflated eliteness?
It’s here. Bunches of prefrosh
will arrive on campus today for Bulldog Days, which brings various bazaars and open houses to campus until Wednesday. The News welcomes prefrosh, and hopes they enjoy their stay in New Haven.
‘NEGLECTED’ CLAUSE IN YCC CONSTITUTION CAUSES DISPUTE
Stiles festivities. Ezra Stiles
College played host to two celebrations this weekend. First, on Saturday, a petting zoo brought cuddly animals to the college’s courtyard. And while many students celebrated Easter a week ago, on Sunday the Stiles courtyard hosted a celebration in honor of Orthodox Easter, which comes later because the Eastern Church uses the Julian calendar.
Everyone loves it. In an email to Silliman students, Dean Hugh Flick invited Sillimanders to watch Sunday night’s episode of the HBO series “Game of Thrones” in Silliflicks. Shout-out. An article in the
New York Times about the apps students use on college campuses included among its selections “Fast Track,” an app that allows students to see how crowded a dining hall is before taking the leap. Also included was the Yale Fruit Report, a Twitter account run by “Eli and Nathalie” that gives students the lowdown on the campus’s best fruit options.
A new venue. Moving beyond
men’s hockey and football games, the Yale Precision Marching Band played at softball and baseball games this weekend.
Contested election heads to runoff BY SOPHIE GOULD AND MADELINE MCMAHON STAFF REPORTERS
fell yet again this year to 5.9 percent and 6.8 percent, respectively. Over a dozen college guidance counselors and admissions experts interviewed said they expect admissions rates at the nation’s most elite institutions will continue to slope downward for the foreseeable future. “The big question is, ‘When does it stop?’ Will we see a day that a school like Yale or Harvard only
Late Friday evening, John Gonzalez ’14 receieved a call from Yale College Council Vice President Omar Njie ’13 informing him that he had won the YCC presidency. But just hours later, Gonzalez was told that the race was not yet over, and several days of campaigning remained before him. The YCC Elections Committee, chaired by Njie, announced in a campus-wide email Saturday that Gonzalez and Eric Eliasson ’14 will compete in a runoff election due to a clause in the YCC constitution that has been overlooked in recent years. Since Gonzalez won less than 40 percent of the vote and beat Eliasson by less than 10 percentage points, the constitution stipulates that the election must be decided in a runoff. “Although this election rule of the YCC Constitution has been neglected in years past, we feel it is our responsibility to uphold the YCC Constitution,” the Elections Committee wrote in a press release. Gonzalez won 39.79 percent of the vote, and Eliasson won 30.73 percent. Eliasson said he contacted the Elections Committee Friday night “to get an opinion” after seeing the percentages and realizing that they did not fit the constitution’s requirement for declaring a winner of the contest. “[That was] not good timing because of what the Elections Committee [had already] announced, but I wanted to be clear about the rules,” he said. The clause in the YCC constitution
SEE ADMISSIONS PAGE 4
SEE YCC ELECTION PAGE 6
Participants in Bulldog Days this week were accepted in the most selective admissions cycle in Yale history. How will the University’s low admissions rate and perceived eliteness factor into their college decisions? JOSH SATOK/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Bulldog Days, the University’s annual program for admitted students, begins today and lasts through Wednesday. BY ANDREW GIAMBRONE STAFF REPORTER At last fall’s Harvard-Yale football game, students scattered throughout the Harvard section wore mesh jerseys with the slogan, “We are the 6 percent.”
UPCLOSE The jerseys referred to the percentage of applicants accepted to
Harvard’s class of 2015: The school had admitted 6.2 percent of its applicants, while Yale’s admissions rate was 7.35 percent — the lowest rates the two universities had ever posted. Prefrosh who arrive on campus today for the kickoff of Bulldog Days, the University’s threeday welcoming event for admitted students, have just emerged from a college admissions process that was even more competitive. Both Harvard’s and Yale’s acceptance rates
You thought it was over.
Sunday night was tap night for Yale’s endlessly prestigious junior societies. One young man was spotted wearing a skirt and singing Britney Spears outside Starbucks. Others were in similar states. Awarded. Chemistry professor
Seth Herzon and astronomy professor Daisuke Nagai were both awarded Cottrell Scholar Awards for their research and teaching in the sciences. The award, given out by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, comes with a $75,000 prize.
Justice? Before he visited Yale last Thursday, Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan was held at customs in White Plains, N.Y., for two hours. He’d been detained at customs once before, in a 2009 incident that led to an apology on the part of the United States. Once again, immigrations officials expressed their “profound” apologies for detaining Khan. THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY
1970 More than 400 students vote to demand that the Yale Corporation give $500,000 to the Panther Legal Defense Fund, to support Black Panthers on trial in New Haven. Submit tips to Cross Campus
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ACA D E M I C S
The rise of the interdisciplinary
Facing uncertain future, Occupy celebrates six months
W
ith more major programs than most of its peer schools, Yale has introduced an increasing number of interdisciplinary majors that aim to prepare students for a more globalized world. LORENZO LIGATO reports. Every May for the past three decades, about half of Yale College graduates leave the University with a degree in history, economics, English, political science or biology — each of which has been a part of the Yale curriculum since at least the early 1900s. But over the past 15 years, Yale’s undergraduate curriculum has expanded to include at least six new interdisciplinary majors that combine academic approaches from a variety of fields. Some of these majors, including modern Middle East studies and South Asia studies, focus on specific geographical areas of growing international importance, while other programs — such as ethics, politics and economics; ethnicity, race and migration; and global affairs — synthesize different academic fields. “Just as the scholarship has
become deeper and more interdisciplinary, so the world has become more complicated and more international,” said Stephen Pitti ’91, director of the program in ER&M that was established as an independent major this February. “The frameworks for studying have diversified and grown and that reflects the diversity of today’s world.” While Yale College has more major programs that most of its peer institutions, the introduction of these new majors both accommodate students’ academic interests and seem to evidence profound changes within academia. “The quest for knowledge is dynamic, never reaching a final state in which we can say, we now have all the methods and all the materials we need,” Dean of SEE NEW MAJORS PAGE 4
JENNIFER CHEUNG/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Occupy protesters celebrated last week after an appeals court’s injunction prevented the city from evicting them from the Green, where they have been since Oct. 15. BY NICK DEFIESTA STAFF REPORTER Occupy New Haven celebrated its sixmonth anniversary Sunday afternoon amid calls to leave by city officials, New Haven residents and some of their own members. Over 50 people gathered at Occupy New Haven’s encampment on the Upper Green for an afternoon of music and food as they commemorated the protest’s arrival at the site on Oct. 15. But with some mem-
bers leaving the protest and calling for its removal from the Green and Occupy’s third court date in its lawsuit against the city set for Tuesday, protesters may not have much more to celebrate. Following a ruling by federal Judge Mark Kravitz that the city’s request for protesters to clear the Green was legal, city workers began to evict protesters last Tuesday. But Occupy attorney Norm Pattis successSEE OCCUPY PAGE 6