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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · VOL. CXXXV, NO. 10 · yaledailynews.com

INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING

SUNNY SUNNY

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CROSS CAMPUS Remembering. Eleven years

ago today, nearly 3,000 people died in terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. There will be a memorial today in Battell Chapel from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., providing space for “quiet reflection, prayer, and meditation.”

It’s official. The leaders of

Yale-New Haven Hospital and the Hospital of Saint Raphael are slated to sign closing documents today making the merger of the two official. Yale-New Haven’s $160 million acquisition of St. Raphael’s will make it one of the largest hospitals in the country.

FIELD TRIPS NOT YOUR TYPICAL INTERNSHIP

THE OTHER BAZAAR

NEW HAVEN POLITICS

W. SOCCER

Activist groups join forces on Cross Campus, seek stronger ties

LOCAL POLITICOS IMPLORE YALIES TO ENGAGE CITY

After ACL tear, JacksonGibson’s ’13 Yale career comes to an end

PAGES 8-9 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

PAGE 3 NEWS

PAGE 5 CITY

PAGE 14 SPORTS

ACA D E M I C D I S H O N E ST Y

Blurring cheating and collaboration

A

t Harvard, 125 students from one course have been accused of cheating on an exam they took last semester. But the students maintain that line between cheating and collaborating on the take-home test was a blurry one, and the sentiment has been echoed by some Yalies with regard to courses here. Staff reporter SOPHIE GOULD reports.

Live Laugh Love. Whether

you’re going into consulting or running away to Timbuktu after graduation, a new ranking out from The Alumni Factor says Yale alumni are number 2 in the nation not only in terms of career success, but of happiness in life. Always a bridesmaid, it may seem, but this time it’s a new bride: Harvard is way down the list at number 37.

Number 1? Washington and Lee University, in Virginia, the New Haven Register reported.

GRAPH CASES OF ACADEMIC DISHONESTY SEEN BY DISCIPLINARY COMMITTEES

CHALLENGE OF REPRESENTING MIX OF FACULTY OPINIONS

60 50

BY GAVAN GIDEON AND TAPLEY STEPHENSON STAFF REPORTERS

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more than university administrators.”

Levin’s 2010 pay, which is determined by the Yale Corporation’s compensation committee, was about $16,000 less than in 2009, but roughly $1 million higher than it was a decade prior. Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said last year that Levin’s compensation reflects his longevity as president and the quality of his performance over his 20-year tenure.

The final members of the committee that will select a successor for University President Richard Levin were announced Friday, and the newly appointed faculty representatives said they will look to their colleagues for guidance when considering candidates for the job.

Professors Judith Chevalier ’89, Amy Hungerford, Richard Lifton and Anna Pyle joined the eight Corporation fellows serving on the committee. Bass also appointed professors Michael McBride and Ruth Yeazell GRD ’71 to act as faculty counselors to the search committee, responsible for gathering input from professors and forwarding it to the committee. The faculty counselors said there will soon be a website launched as part of their efforts to solicit feedback from professors.

Still, Yeazell said she expects it to be challenging for faculty members involved in the process to represent all views of their colleagues, given the large volume and diversity of opinions.

“Representing the faculty as a whole is going to be tricky because the faculty isn’t going to speak as one voice,” Yeazell said.

The faculty appointments were made by Yale Corporation Senior Fellow Edward Bass ’67 just two days after he closed a four-day nomination period in which he said he received over 800 emails from the Yale community and more than 200 nominations of professors to serve on the committee.

Yale College Dean Mary Miller and Graduate School Dean Thomas Pollard, as well as current and former faculty divisional directors, considered professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences nominated by their colleagues before forwarding him a shortlist, Bass said in a Sept. 6 campus-wide email. Deans across the University’s professional schools also reviewed nominees in their respective faculty, and then forwarded Bass their suggestions.

Levin said the professional school deans received about 70 or 80 suggestions in total across

SEE LEVIN PAGE 4

SEE SEARCH COMM PAGE 6

20 Harvard

10

Next steps. The Boston

Consulting Group held an information session on campus Monday evening at the Omni Hotel, as seniors in Yale College prepare for recruiting season to hit in full force. Up next: Bridgewater and Bain tonight.

Over the summer, 125 Harvard students and recent alums received notice that they had been accused of unauthorized collaboration on the final exam for “Intro to Congress,” a class they took last spring.

They are scheduled to begin appearing individually before the school’s Administrative Board, which determines disciplinary action, over the next few weeks. If convicted, those who are still undergraduates may be suspended for one year. Those who have grad-

0

Yale

2005-6

2006-7

2007-8

uated may lose their diplomas.

“These allegations, if proven, represent totally unacceptable behavior that betrays the trust upon which intellectual inquiry at Harvard depends,” Harvard University President Drew Faust said in a statement.

In interviews with national media, many of the accused students claimed

2008-9

2009-10

they are not at fault. The exam instructions explicitly prohibited discussion of the take-home test with others but permitted use of books, notes and the Internet. Students said they were led to suspect that collaboration would be tolerated, despite the instructions, as SEE CHEATING PAGE 4

Levin’s salary among top in Ivies David Swensen $3.5 million

What is honor? Yale

Law School student reps announced on Monday that they’re convening a committee this year to discuss possible changes to the current grading policy, which stipulates that honors should go to no more than 30 percent of large lecture courses.

Richard Levin $1.6 million

She didn’t even go there.

For the past few weeks, a woman calling herself “Rhea Sen” has been pretending to be a freshman at Columbia University, the Columbia Daily Spectator reports.

Her real name, according to authorities, is Briva Patel, and she’s not a freshman. She’s 26.

Claiming to be a student from Philadelphia, Patel attended freshman orientation events for two weeks before she was removed from campus for trespassing.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Elm

City Market has revamped its New Haven-themed sandwich menu — which originally featured 16 sandwiches named after the 16 neighborhoods of New Haven — replacing all but three of the neighborhood names with numbers. Only the Dixwell, the Green, and the Downtown sandwiches survive.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY

1946 The News returns to regular publication after a three-year wartime hiatus.

Submit tips to Cross Campus

crosscampus@yaledailynews.com

ONLINE y MORE cc.yaledailynews.com

Faculty members join pres. search

YALE

The compensation figures for Chief Investment Officer David Swensen and University President Richard Levin are shown above.

BY GAVAN GIDEON STAFF REPORTER University President Richard Levin may be the longest-serving president in the Ivy League, but he’s not quite the highest-paid.

Levin’s total compensation — his base salary, benefits and deferred compensation — amounted to just over $1.6 million during the 2010 calendar year, placing him second in the Ivy League behind Columbia President Lee Bol-

linger, who made more than $1.9 million, according to the two universities’ most recent tax filings. Among Yale employees, Levin trails Chief Investment Officer David Swensen and Investments Office Senior Director Dean Takahashi, who earned roughly $3.5 million and $2.5 million in 2010, respectively.

“These levels are driven by the market, by comparables in other universities,” Levin said. “Chief investment officers are in a market that pays a lot

Female profs still form minority

BY MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMAS AND AMY WANG CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS Though the female portion of the Yale faculty has increased steadily over the past decade, women remain significantly underrepresented across the University, according to a report released Monday.

The 49-page report, titled “The View,” collects gender data from across the University and

is released every five years by the Women Faculty Forum, an organization that works to create dialogue on gender issues at Yale.

According to the report, while women make up 50 percent of students in the University and 48 percent of non-ladder faculty, they constitute only 34 percent of ladder faculty — which includes all term or tenured professors — and 24 percent of tenured faculty.

SEE WFF PAGE 4

McMahon files ethics complaint

BY BEN PRAWDZIK STAFF REPORTER GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon announced Monday that her campaign has filed a formal complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics against her Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, over a home equity loan.

The issue dates back to 2007, when Murphy, who represents Connecticut’s fifth congressional district, missed several payments on his mortgage and

faced foreclosure. Murphy paid his overdue balance and stopped the foreclosure lawsuit, and in 2008 was subsequently able to obtain a $43,000 home equity credit line from Webster Bank with a 4.99 percent rate — a much lower rate, the McMahon campaign alleges, than was available to the public at the time.

Murphy, who had previously represented Webster Bank as a private lawyer, has denied all allegations of wrongdoing.

The complaint, writ-

ten by McMahon campaign manager Corry Bliss, calls for an investigation into whether he “has accepted a prohibited gift and used his official position to secure himself personal and political financial benefit.”

“No average American would have been able to secure a loan such as Congressman Murphy’s,” Bliss said in the letter. He added that Murphy’s ability to secure a mortgage at all, 14 months after being sued for SEE MCMAHON PAGE 6

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTE,BER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION

.COMMENT “We drive cars too, which kill more people than any drug, legal or yaledailynews.com/opinion

Don’t begrudge happiness Back in 1960, the famed Objectivist author Ayn Rand came to New Haven to deliver a lecture at Yale. Ever the harbinger of controversy and debate — are you listening, Rick Santorum? — our dear Alisa Rosenbaum drew quite the crowd, with students from both Yale College and the professional schools packing the auditorium of the Law School.

Lecturing for nearly an hour, Rand posited a link between altruism and authoritarianism.

Reports of the lecture were contested; Rand even penned a letter to Time Magazine accusing it of misrepresenting her philosophy.

“I would never use so evasive an expression as ‘tolerance of the incompetent,’” Rand wrote as she curtly challenged the “straw man” leveled against her. “It has no intelligible meaning.”

You can listen to Rand’s speech, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” online, but it isn’t really important to the story.

What is important to the story is this: In the audience that February was Stanley Tigerman, the famed Chicago architect, who was then a student at the Yale School of Architecture. He had read “The Fountainhead,” and he had loved it — loved it so much he knew he wanted to do nothing more than become an architect.

For that, he had Howard Roark to thank — and, of course, Ayn Rand.

REMEMBER THAT HAPPINESS IS AN INFINITE RESOURCE So when Stanley Tigerman heard that Ayn Rand was coming to deliver a lecture at Yale, he knew he had to be there.

When the lecture was over, he approached her. He told her his name, that he was a student, that he was pursuing a degree in architecture — and that, of course, it was all thanks to her.

And according to Tigerman’s story, our dear Alisa Rosenbaum stared at him with two critical eyes, gave him the old onceover — probably the twice-over, too — and said little more than a devastating “So what?”

This is not a story about discouraging you from sharing your personal accomplishments and preferences with famed Russian authors. Nor is it about the pleasures and pitfalls inherent in the Objectivist mindset — you can check out the online comments to this article for that inevitable discussion. This is a story, at its core, about being happy for other people.

Yes, it seems incorrect to expect that Ayn Rand — she who wrote “The Virtue of Selfishness” and MARISSA made a livMEDANSKY ing challenging genSidewinder erosity and gratitude — would take delight in the accomplishments of others. We are not Ayn Rand, and her standard need not be ours. And yet how often have we responded to the enthusiasm of others with cynicism? With contempt? We aimlessly scroll through our Facebook newsfeeds and dismiss each proclamation of joy.

The friend asking you to support his charity or startup? Bragging. That high school classmate who nagged a spot in a selective seminar at her college? Disingenuous. A pre-concert pep talk, or post-show binge of thank yous? That’s self-indulgence at its best.

This kind of attitude — where we are immediately skeptical of the success of others — is not only harmful but also indicative of a culture in which we perceive success as a zero-sum game. Yes, there are a few circumstances where our success is indeed contingent on the failure of others. It sucks; embrace defeat; move on. But there are far, far more situations in which there is room for everyone to feel relatively accomplished while neither falsely inflating egos nor indulging already-inflated ones.

After all, does that writing seminar at the University of Michigan really have any bearing on your existence?

So don’t assume the worst in others; be happy for them.

Like that Facebook status, favorite that tweet, listen with intent about that seminar, that research proposal, that project. Your happiness — especially sincere happiness, though well-feigned happiness works in a pinch — makes happy people happier, and happiness is an infinite resource.

Plus, when you acknowledge and engage with the successes of others, they will reciprocate. They will be happy for you, which will make you happy — you will feel special and important, and maybe even powerful.

You will benefit. Your self-interest will be sated.

Even our dear Ayn Rand would be alright with that.

MARISSA MEDANSKY is a sophomore in Morse College. Her column runs on Tuesdays. Contact her at marissa.medansky@yale.edu .

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COPYRIGHT 2012 — VOL. CXXXV, NO. 10

otherwise, ever could.”

‘LAKIA’ ON ‘BEHIND GENTRY’S EMAIL’

G U E ST C O LU M N I ST J O NAT H O N CA I

Decisions at Yale Camp Yale, for a wee freshman like me, has officially reached its terminus. I’m starting to pick up on the lingo here, from Wenzel to Durfee’s to the correct pronunciation of Au Bon Pain (previously I enunciated Pain like Bain). My midnight strolls from the peak of Science Hill to the crevasses of the Asian American Cultural Center have installed a rough mental map of the campus in my mind.

My introduction to Yale, of course, is not over; the last required meeting, Saturday night’s Kaleidoscope performance, only further strengthened a statement of the obvious: Yale is overwhelmingly diverse, not only in terms of people, but also in terms of classes, clubs and leisure.

You can really do anything you want here — arrive at lecture groggy from an endless night of roving for substance, while your hours away in Bass listening to treatises on critical mass, code the

entire night in a space reserved by the Yale Entrepreneurial Society, be known by many, associate with few or isolate yourself in one of Yale’s many ivory towers, chasing enlightenment. Yale is a microcosm of the opportunities offered by the real world, although we live in a much safer and insulated environment, and we can’t really fail here unless we are too brazen to concede we need help.

I must admit, though, that it is exhausting for a freshman like me to make so many decisions.

Every choice I make comes with an opportunity cost. As Jean-Paul Sartre puts it, I’m condemned to be free. I’m still kicking myself for missing that Purple Crayon Show (opting instead for Wenzels at the Entrepreneurial Society), dropping D.S. in favor of a more wellrounded schedule and sitting at that mainstream rectangular dining hall table instead of the round one where I’d invariably meet more people.

Of course, there are only so many hours in a day. I’m constantly seeking to stretch the boundaries of what I can do in that allotted time, attempting to drink from a fire hose (I mean this purely figuratively). During shopping period, I tried to package every possible class period with two or three alternatives, in case I decided to walk out; however, I stayed for most of the ones I went to, thus attending less than half of my desired classes. I was unable to steel myself from videos of cute babies altruistically opening doors for people who exhibited need (PSYC 110), Platonic entreatments about how to die (D.S. Philosophy) and beautifully artistic scenes from Italian noir films (FILM 150). The reality is that this semester, having sealed my schedule, I’m not taking any of the aforementioned classes, and that harrows me.

But I still appreciate the way shopping period, and, more gen-

erally, Yale, densely packages how much we actually do with our time. We are forced to select, decide and act. Any values we held before are now challenged, fortified or weakened by what we do with our present tabula rasa.

Our current choices reflect who we are, what we regard important.

And the end result is this culling; we are forced to cull from these vast fields a more coherent sense of ourselves. It frustrates me that I eventually have to specialize and settle on a major, an activity, a friend, but this acceleration, this compact phase of prototyping and test-driving, better illuminates what I hold most dear and true to myself. After all, I have placed my faith in Yale, where I chose to spend the next four years, to show me the path to my elusive self.

JONATHON CAI is a freshman in Ezra Stiles College. Contact him at jonathon.cai@yale.edu .

G U E ST C O LU M N I ST B I JA N A B O U T O R A B I

The not so liberal arts What to think of self-styled defenders of the liberal arts who refuse to take seriously the father of Western philosophy? That is the question raised by certain condemnations of Yale’s partnership with the National University of Singapore. Singapore’s censorship laws, argue the outraged, are inimical to the liberal arts spirit.

A truly humanistic education demands political and academic liberty — especially freedom of expression.

Plato was one educator who would not agree. In the Republic, Socrates notoriously argues for extensive artistic censorship.

Education, for Plato, was more than the exercise of the intellect; it was inculcation in the knowledge of virtue, preparing the student for a life ordered by the love of goodness. Therefore, says Socrates, morally ambiguous stories, like Homer’s, “must cease, for fear that they sow a strong proclivity for badness in our young.” Far from obstructing education, censorship went hand in hand with the pedagogue’s project of providing an ordered curriculum in the true, the beautiful and the good.

Likewise, the Middle Ages, an epoch devoted to the liberal arts, hardly conceived of them as license to study whatever one liked. Rather, the liberal arts curriculum was a strict progression

from the foundations of learning — logic, grammar, rhetoric — to the sciences of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. These studies were believed to train the mind’s essential abilities, laying the foundation on which all further endeavors could be erected.

The assumptions underlying these old, programmatic theories of education strike us as odd.

We are used to thinking of the liberal arts as vaguely coextensive with the humanities, and we have emptied the term so far of its curricular significance that the socalled liberal arts colleges are the likeliest to boast minimal or nonexistent general requirements.

This suits our liberal, democratic disposition. Why should anyone else be able to tell me what education means?

And yet: Is that not partly the point of education? Should we not trust our educators, not only to be more knowledgeable than we about their specialized academic provinces, but to be wiser, and to know better than we do what will make us wise?

Such was the role of the educator in premodern philosophies of education, and such is the natural relationship between teacher and pupil. The causes of its decline have been manifold: academic specialization, and the concomitant loss of a general theory of wisdom; the overeager applica-

tion of egalitarian prejudices to education; and a lack of principle and courage on the part of administrators. But none of these causes was inevitable or stands as an immutable fact. Each was the outcome of human choice, and each is open to human re-evaluation.

Similarly, can’t something be said for that most reviled YaleNUS policy, the ban against oncampus political parties and protests? Are we not we Yalies familiar enough with students whose learning comes a distant second to their social and political advocacy? I know I’ve been guilty of this fault, and I’m surely not the only one.

Yale would be a better place to study if liberalism (and reactive conservatism) could take a back seat to the liberal arts. There’s something topsy-turvy about devoting the bulk of one’s energies to politics during the short period of life when one is theoretically freest to live contemplatively — to ascertain (no easy task!) the principles to ground future practice.

And the same cart-beforehorse mentality is what most bothers me about the current epidemic of anti-censorship indignation. Leave aside Plato’s arguments; look at human nature.

Most societies have not been liberal. History would suggest that

the common sense of humanity regards censorship as a natural function of government. If a commitment to freedom of expression is to be tenable, its advocates have to recognize this fact and admit that such freedom must follow from arguments produced by the kind of inquiry the liberal arts embody. By insisting on the opposite — that freedom of expression is a prerequisite for the liberal arts to flourish — opponents of the Singapore project do exactly what they want to avoid: they treat a political dogma as though it anteceded the life of reason.

This is not a comprehensive defense of Yale-NUS. Frankly, I have little zeal for a venture of which the primary motive seems to be brand marketing. Still, let me conclude by pointing out that Yale-NUS boasts something Yale College doesn’t: a robust core curriculum mandating serious study of literature, philosophy, political thought and the sciences, both social and natural. Students might not read de Sade, but they will read Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Confucius and the epic poets of ancient Greece and India. I wonder: which school has a better understanding of the liberal arts?

BIJAN ABOUTORABI is a senior in Trumbull College. Contact him at bijan.aboutorabi@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T I S A A C S TA N L E Y- B E C K E R

On sexual consent, an elaborate dance I will be frank: If Yale intends to take sexual misconduct seriously, as it absolutely must, it should address the issue head on. So far, in freshman orientation, the University has only danced around the question — with frozen yogurt and little else.

“Do you want to go get froyo?”

This was the question weighing on every freshman’s mind last weekend when the entire class was required to attend communication and consent workshops. In sessions organized by freshman counselor group, volunteers acted out a series of awkward dialogues, all surrounding a simple proposition for a late-night froyo run.

In ensuing discussion, the lessons drawn were sensible if simplistic. People communicate using nonverbal cues, and, when pressured, we often display discernible discomfort. I credit the student leaders for engaging us dynamically at least on these topics. The tone of the discussion was just right, but the issues were all wrong.

The Calendar for the Opening Days of College lays out the workshops’ aim: “The interactive sessions offer conceptual frameworks and concrete strategies: What does it look like when one person pushes at someone else’s romantic or sexual boundaries?

How do you avoid doing this?

How might you respond if some-

one puts pressure on you?”

Talk of conceptual frameworks stopped at froyo. Concrete strategies were nonexistent.

And there was little mention of any boundaries, sexual or otherwise. The workshops treated the fleeting discomfort stemming from a spurned froyo invitation with more candor than the lasting harm of actual violations of sexual boundaries.

This is a real shame. The workshops were freshmen’s sole introduction to these issues and could have set the tone for honest dialogue about sexual misconduct — the forms it takes, the responsibility it imputes and the scars it leaves.

The forms it takes, for instance, can be complex. As much as we might wish it were so, a sexual encounter is not a categorical matter. Consent is messy; it falls on a spectrum, not at two extremes. Inebriation, for one, complicates the requirement for consent. If someone is too drunk to give consent verbally, sex cannot be consensual. But what if someone’s level of intoxication is difficult to gauge? What if we just don’t know?

Yale recognizes this complexity — this inability to impute clear responsibility — and offers victims of sexual misconduct two options: a formal complaint resulting in a hearing at which both parties tes-

tify or an informal complaint with no formal investigation or disciplinary measures. The former may result in punishment from the Executive Committee or beyond, while the latter may only result in the accused being asked to stay away from the victim.

Absolutely none of this was discussed at my workshop. Instead, we talked about froyo.

Perhaps an introduction to Yale’s sexual climate ought to have included a discussion of past wrongs, informing freshmen of the abuses that continue to weigh on our collegiate psyche. Most have heard by now of the infamous DKE chant. Instead of pretending such wrongs never happened, what about using them as concrete examples for our edification?

Ignorance leads people to blindly accept, or even encourage, atrocious acts of sexual violence. In Friday’s News, Courtney Hodrick cited Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd’s defense of the College’s silence on past indiscretions: “Boyd convincingly argued that to tell freshmen these are things that happen every year would perpetuate the belief that these are things that happen every year — and are therefore okay.”

This logic seems backwards.

I can’t imagine how educating freshmen about past trans-

gressions would legitimize those transgressions. What is more, these things do happen nearly every year, in some fashion or another: The 2010 DKE chant, which was a repeat of a 2006 incident: “No means yes, and yes means anal!” The 2009 “Preseason Scouting Report” ranking freshman girls based on “how many beers it would take to have sex with them.” And the 2008 incident when Zeta Psi fraternity members shouted “Dick, dick dick!” outside the Women’s Center shortly before uploading to Facebook a picture of themselves with a sign that read “We Love Yale Sluts.” These wrongdoings are not isolated, but recurring, and they leave real scars.

It’s clear that these acts are not tantamount to rape. Wha is also clear, though, is the powerful connection between the sexist behavior and derogatory language condoning sexual misconduct and the misconduct itself.

Changing the way we think and talk about sexual violence is the only way to prevent the deed itself.

So forget the froyo and talk about the real issues at stake. This talking should begin with freshmen.

We’re still waiting.

ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER is a freshman in Jonathan Edwards College.

Contact him at isaac.stanley-becker@ yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 3

Political apathy at Yale Charges of political apathy have long been leveled at the Yale undergraduate population.

In 1934, then-professor A. Whitney Griswold, who went on to become president of the University, established the Yale Political Union in order “to combat the insular and apathetic Yale political culture of the 1930s,” according to the YPU’s website.

New bazaar seeks to connect activist groups

SAMANTHA GARDNER/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Students involved with Yale Organizes!, a loose collection of 20 activist organizations, gathered on Cross Campus Monday night for the new Activist Bazaar, designed to bring together campus activist groups with diverse causes.

BY JANE DARBY MENTON STAFF REPORTER On Monday night, Patrick Reed ’15, a member of Yale’s Student Environmental Coalition stood in the center of the women’s table — water still running — to speak to a small crowd of students about the importance of campus activism.

He was representing one of 20 groups at the Yale Activist Bazaar, a new student-run event designed to raise awareness about Yale’s student activist groups and to encourage collaboration among them. While many of the University’s undergraduate organizations engage in activism, those groups typi-

cally keep their efforts separate and have few established systems for communicating and working together. But this fall, three undergraduates have attempted to boost conversation in Yale’s activist community by hosting the bazaar on Cross Campus and forming a larger effort they call “Yale Organizes!”

“We want it to be clear that there is not apathy among students at Yale,” said Alejandro Gutierrez ’13, one of the creators of Yale Organizes! “The problem is that there are a lot of pockets of activism at Yale, where it should be a united front.”

Marc DeWitt ’15, another of the students behind Yale Organizes!,

said the initiative is intended to encourage dialogue among activist groups but insisted that it is neither a “group” nor an umbrella-type organization like Dwight Hall. DeWitt said that Yale has benefited in the past from student activism, but that these efforts would be more “forceful, powerful and frequent” if a platform existed to help the diverse groups collaborate.

The Monday bazaar attracted a wide range of activist leaders — from groups including Amnesty International, Broad Recognition, the Black Student Alliance at Yale and WYBC Yale Radio — along with a few dozen students interested in joining the groups.

Ivy League LGBTQ conference to come to Yale

BY ISABELLA D’AGOSTO AND CAROLINE TAN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER AND STAFF REPORTER The main Ivy League conference on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer issues will hit Yale’s campus for the first time this February.

Roughly 500 students from across the Ivy League are expected to convene at Yale for the four-day event, which organizers say they hope will highlight prominent issues facing the LGBTQ community and encourage activism among participants. Hilary O’Connell ’14, president of the LGBTQ Co-op, said organizers are particularly energized as Yale lost a previous bid to host the conference, but beat out Cornell to coordinate IvyQ this academic year.

The IvyQ conference is designed around the “trifold goals of education, activism and empowerment,” said O’Connell, who will lead the IvyQ efforts as head of IvyQ Student Conference at Yale College, the group organizing the event. The conference will include workshops, a speaker series and panels centered on LGBTQ issues and will revolve around six themes: identity, internationality and culture, health and sexual assault, sex and body positivity, queer histories, and real-world applications of LGBTQ activism, such as in politics and the law.

Organizers are aiming to hold the conference’s cost to roughly $30,000, O’Connell said — about two-thirds the price of last year’s event at Brown University. In addition to money brought in through the estimated $20 student registration fee, she said organizers plan to solicit funding from cultural houses, student organizations, University administrators and corporate sponsors.

Last February, administrators banned corporate sponsors from Sex Week 2012, a biennial campus event that addresses sex-related issues in college life. O’Connell, who was an associate

director for Sex Week, said she thinks IvyQ will likely not face the same restrictions, since corporate sponsorship will make up a smaller percentage of its funding.

Yale’s student organizers learned in May that the campus would host IvyQ in February, which will run from Feb. 7 to Feb. 10, and began planning immediately after winning the bid. They also decided to incorporate alumni into some of the conference’s activities for the first time.

“It’s a huge deal to us that we’re going to be able to spend time with the people who paved the way for us to be who we are,” O’Connell said. “We’re hoping to have a workshop or panel to talk about alumni experiences to ask what it was like to be where you were when … we are now.”

Seven Yalies interviewed said they thought the campus would benefit from hosting the event — which they said demonstrates the University’s support of LGBTQ issues — though none said they plan to attend. Some were surprised that Yale has not previously hosted an LGBTQ conference, while others expressed concern that the conference is only open to Ivy League students. “[They] should look to expanding [the conference] to other institutions,” Natalie Willis ’13 said. “It can come off as elitist.”

Madeleine Jennewein, who helped run last year’s conference at Brown, said in a Monday email that she felt the conference had a positive impact on the school’s community. She said Brown saw a “definite burst in programming for the LGBTQ community” following the event.

The IvyQ conference began in 2010 and has been previously held at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Brown.

Contact ISABELLA D’AGOSTO at isabella.dagosto@yale.edu and CAROLINE TAN at caroline.tan@yale.edu .

All who attended the bazaar were added to a panlist, DeWitt said, which he hopes will be used by groups and individuals to generate more coordinated activist efforts.

Sterling Johnson ’15, campus and community organizer for the Yale College Democrats, said his organization decided to participate to inform students about the Dems’ lesser-known work with community activism, and to form bonds with other activist groups.

“I really hope this event helps both involves freshmen and helps activist organizations work together on important issues.”

Johnson said. “There’s a lot of overlap in what each group does,

and it would be better for everyone if we worked together.”

Drew Morrison ’14, the president of New Haven Action, a nonpartisan activist group that focuses on local issues, said it was helpful to meet and hear from fellow student activists. He added that having a specific bazaar for activist organizations was more beneficial for outreach and recruitment than the “disorganized” bazaar held for registered undergraduate organizations in Payne Whitney Gymnasium at the start of the fall.

Dennis Tran ’16, who is looking to integrate activism into his extracurricular commitments, said the gathering on Cross Cam-

pus introduced him to some organizations he had not seen at the start-of-term extracurricular bazaar. Still, he added that Yale Organizes! could have done a better job advertising the event to freshmen and other students.

“I wouldn’t have known about the event if I weren’t already interested in getting involved,” Tren said.

The Bazaar of Registered Undergraduate Organizations is held on the second Sunday of freshman orientation.

Carlee Jensen contributed reporting.

Contact JANE DARBY MENTON at jane.menton@yale.edu .

New institute comes to West Campus

BY ASHTON WACKYM CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Gary Brudvig, the Benjamin Silliman Professor of Chemistry and professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, was appointed last week as the director of Yale’s new Energy Sciences Institute.

The institute is the sixth such group added to Yale’s West Campus, and represents the newest leg of the University’s push in sustainability science.

As part of the institute’s opening, Brudvig said he is looking not simply to move current faculty to West Campus, but to also hire new researchers.

Although the facility opened earlier this month, Brudvig is still filling out his ranks in order to get projects started.

“I am most excited to bring in 10 new faculty members in the energy area,” Brudvig said. “It is great for the University and will help to build a critical mass of faculty working in this area to Yale.”

By bringing in new staff, Brudvig said he hopes to also bring in new ideas, perspectives and research opportunities, all key ingredients to the collaborative science mission of West Campus. While the emphasis of the Energy and Sciences Institute is research in energy storage, conservation and conversion, it is also part of a larger initiative to promote interdisciplinary research at Yale.

“The institutes are independent, but we are hoping some

of the faculty of the various institutes will have overlapping interests so that collaboration can take place,” Brudvig said.

“The focus of West Campus is on interdisciplinary research.”

The West Campus institutes generally represent the “crosspollination of ideas and disciplines,” according to chemistry professor Jason Crawford. He added that the multi-institute model will succeed by “drawing upon strengths collectively.”

I am most excited to bring in 10 new faculty members in the energy area. It is great for the University and will help to build a critical mass of faculty working in this area to Yale.

GARY BRUDVIG Director, Energy and Sciences Institute Three researchers interviewed by the News said they are hopeful that collaboration will take place between the West Campus institutes, but they are also enthusiastic about the amount of interdisciplinary research that will go on under the auspices of the Energy Sciences Institute. Engineering faculty will regularly work with physical scientists, chem-

ists, geologists, applied physicists and other experts to tackle some of the most challenging energy problems of the day, according to the institute’s website.

“I think the new Energy Sciences Institute on West Campus will be a focal point for scientific research on energy conversion at Yale,” said electrical engineering professor Larry Lee. “The opportunity to recruit some new junior and senior faculty that will be able to broaden and deepen the quality and quantity of research on energy conversion at Yale is exciting.”

By occupying the same facility as the Chemical Biology, Cancer Biology, Nanobiology, Systems Biology and Microbial Diversity institutes, the new Energy Sciences Institute hopes to bring in experienced researchers to work on groundbreaking solutions to contemporary energy problems, Brudvig said.

While the Energy Sciences Institute is not yet fully staffed, it will eventually focus on developing new technologies for energy production and storage as well as innovations in solar energy, alternative fuels and carbon mitigation, Brudvig said.

Purchased in 2007, West Campus is a 136-acre former Bayer facility with 1.6 million square feet of research space.

Contact ASHTON WACKYM at ashton.wackym@yale.edu .

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one’s self. All sin is easy after that.”

PEARL BAILEY SINGER AND ACTRESS

Harvard scandal sparks conversation at Yale CHEATING FROM PAGE 1 they said it had been throughout the class.

The case highlights the problems that can arise from vague course policies such as those used in the Harvard class. But Yale students interviewed said Yale professors, too, can be unclear about expectations.

Dean of Yale College Mary Miller said the news of the investigation at Harvard has prompted administrators to begin brainstorming ways to further combat cheating at Yale.

“It’s paramount in our minds here in the Dean’s Office this week, particularly in terms of the kinds of communications we want to have with faculty and students at the beginning of the semester,” she said last Wednesday, adding that the community should “stay tuned.”

OUTLINING POLICIES

While students may point fingers at instructors’ lack of clarity, the fact remains that Harvard and Yale’s rulebooks — the Student Handbook and the Undergraduate Regulations, respectively — have blanket policies that state students are ultimately responsible for maintaining their academic integrity.

Harvard’s rulebook states that students may assume that collaboration is permitted on assignments if the instructor does not specify otherwise, but adds that “collaboration in the completion of examinations is always prohibited.”

Yale does not have the same policy forbidding group work on exams, but the University also does not allow students to assume that collaboration is acceptable. When in doubt, Yale students must “seek explicit clarification from the instructor,” the Undergraduate Regulations state. Collaboration is only allowed “to the degree precisely and specifically described by the instructor.”

Both schools’ rulebooks stress the role of the instructor in setting the ground rules for group work and require students to abide by the professor’s policies on collaboration as established in the syllabus.

Yale professors who encounter academic dishonesty — which includes plagiarism and other forms of cheating — in their courses should bring the case to the Executive Committee, according to the Regulations. Past ExComm reports show 53 cases of academic dishonesty during the 2010-’11 school year and 50 cases during the 2009-’10 school year.

I n d e c i d i n g p e n a l t i e s, ExComm wrote in the 2009’10 year that the level of clarity of the rules written about academic honesty in a course’s syllabus is taken into account.

“Ambiguity in instructor’s guidelines on collaboration — or the lack of such guidelines — can influence the coordinating group’s sense of the degree of wrongdoing on the part of the student,” the committee wrote.

Yale expects instructors to be clear about their rules: Since 2007, professors writing course proposals have had to describe how they would define and deal with academic dishonesty in that course, Dean of Undergraduate Education Joseph Gordon told the News last fall.

To help students avoid the pitfalls of plagiarism, residential college masters go over the rules about academic dishonesty with the freshman class each year. Some professors, especially in introductory English courses, also review the definition of plagiarism with their students.

“In the freshmen ‘fireside chats’ we spend a lot of time on academic dishonesty and go over the nuances of it,” said Branford Master Elizabeth Bradley. “It’s helpful especially for people … who have never been in an environment where there’s such a strict honor code surrounding this.”

FACULTY ROLES

Yale professors interviewed saiwd they have developed their own approaches to curtailing academic dishonesty inside and outside the lecture hall.

Yale instructors said they try to be specific about their expectations for assessments at the beginning of the term.

After encountering widespread plagiarism while teaching at Peking University in Beijing in 2007, Stephen Stearns, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, said he began using a plagiarism-checking software program that scans students’ papers for familiar passages.

I think faculty have to be very clear about their expectations in written form in the syllabus.

ELIZABETH BRADLEY Master, Branford College Stearns said he takes time at the beginning of his Yale courses to let students know how seriously he takes academic dishonesty, asking them to visit the Writing Center website to review definitions of plagiarism and warning them that their work will be checked against the software.

“I tell students that I use plagiarism software to check their papers — however, not which software I use,” he wrote in an email.

Other professors said that they have established rules specific to their classes that allow collaboration on assessments.

Ray Fair, professor of economics, who teaches the 140-student course “Introduction to Macroeconomics,” said he allows students to talk about their problem sets with other students as long as they do any needed research themselves

and write up the answers on their own. They must also list the names of the students with whom they consulted on their answer sheets, he said.

Priyamvada Natarajan, professor of astronomy and physics who teaches “Introduction to Cosmology,” said she encourages her students to make a “cheat sheet” of crucial equations for exams and work together on problem sets and “concept question” exercises to promote “active learning.” She has never had a case of cheating in her eight years of teaching the course, she said.

Some professors also try to deal with issues of academic dishonesty internally before turning to the ExComm. In 2011, Kurt Zilm, professor of chemistry and engineering, sent an email to his CHEM 115 class reporting that he had learned a group of students had purchased a teacher’s problem set manual and were submitting copied work as their own.

“Until now I had been very proud that this class appeared to be free of any cheating, but apparently I was mistaken,” Zilm wrote in the email.

He asked that each of the students who had plagiarized send him and their teaching fellows written apologies; otherwise, he would refer them to the Dean’s Office. Any future academic dishonesty would be reported to the ExComm, he wrote.

‘WILDLY DIVERGING EXPECTATIONS’

Still, students interviewed said they feel that the policies are blurry.

Markus Boesl ’14 explained that he thinks few students cheat on exams or plagiarize papers, but noted that problem sets and take-home exams can constitute a gray area due to the “wildly diverging expectations of professors.”

Two similar classes can have drastically different policies on academic dishonesty, he said.

He described taking a chemis-

try class in which students got in trouble for copying problem sets from the solutions manual; the next semester, students were instructed to purchase the solutions manual and use it as a reference.

Sanjay Mathur ’13 said “everyone has heard stories” about students forming groups to work together on a takehome test or sports teams sharing study guides.

“Often the professor encourages collaboration,” Mathur said. “So it’s collaboration, but not really cheating.”

Neither Mathur nor Boesl said they believe the University has a severe academic dishonesty problem.

But in 2010, more than 600 of the 1,037 undergraduate respondents to a Yale Daily News survey reported that they had witnessed cheating during their time at Yale, and 15 percent of respondents said they had consciously cheated on an assignment or exam.

The survey also found that 31 percent of respondents did not know that turning in the same paper for two different classes constitutes cheating according to the Undergraduate Regulations. Sixty-six percent of respondents had never read Yale’s policies on academic dishonesty.

MOVING FORWARD

If the University decides to review its cheating policies in light of the incident at Harvard, students and faculty interviewed said it was important that administrators keep the benefits of group work in mind as well as the risks.

“In the real world, you don’t sit at a desk in a classroom with only a pencil and a blue book,” said Zara Kessler ’12, an assistant editor and producer for Bloomberg View who wrote an opinion piece for the site’s “Ticker blog” last week about the Harvard cheating scandal.

Kessler is a former editor of the Yale Daily News Magazine.

Indeed, Boesl called the “culture of collaboration” among Yale students “one of the strongest and most appealing aspects of the Yale experience.”

Students benefit from group work because students have different ways of processing information and can learn from each other, Natarajan said.

“Some of us are more abstract, some are more intuitive, some are more mathematical,” she said. “A group with different sets of skills gets exposed to different ways of thinking and subconsciously gains insight into critical and creative thinking styles.”

But the scandal at Harvard has reminded some that collaboration is more complex today than it used to be.

“Technology is creating all these ways of talking to people and sharing things with people,” Kessler said. “At the same time, teachers are coming up with more creative and looser testing scenarios. Those two things together are blurring the lines between what is and isn’t acceptable.”

For now, Kessler believes Yale and similar institutions should return to in-class, proctored examinations, but faculty interviewed stressed the need for greater transparency rather than denouncing harder-toregulate methods of assessment in favor of traditional exams.

“I think faculty have to be very clear about their expectations in written form in the syllabus,” Bradley said. “Don’t have any ambiguity at all. Is it okay to share notes, to go to last year and look up case results, or is that not okay?”

Similar cheating scandals have happened recently at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

Contact SOPHIE GOULD at sophie.gould@yale.edu .

WFF calls on grassroots activism to attain greater equality WFF FROM PAGE 1 The presence of women in the faculty also varies greatly between departments and schools, with women making up 30 percent of the tenured faculty in the humanities but only 11 percent in the physical sciences. WFF chair Priyamvada Natarajan said in addition to science departments, the School of Management, Law School, and School of Medicine all have low numbers of women.

The report also found that minorities are even more underrepresented, with minority women making up only 4 percent of tenured faculty, which Natarajan described as the “most sobering” part of the report.

While the report did not include suggestions on how the University can work towards gender equity, Natarajan noted the importance of mentoring, worklife balance, and an articulated vision from University leaders. In addition, she placed a special emphasis on the importance of student engagement.

“It’s time for the undergraduates and the stakeholders in the University to also articulate how they feel and to gather their reactions to see how to galvanize after progress,” Natarajan said.

Representation of women in the faculty has risen in recent years. In 2002 women made up 17 percent of tenured faculty, and in 2007 that number grew to 21 percent. The University launched a faculty initiative in 2006 to hire more female professors in the sciences and economics, and in 2007, it reworked its tenure system in an effort to make the process fairer and more transparent.

Allison Tait, one of the report’s authors and a postdoctoral associate in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, said the percentage of women on the faculty has not risen more quickly for a variety of reasons, including gender fatigue — the idea that people are “tired of talking about gender issues” and believe that current policies have already remedied the situation. Natarajan added that there can be “an amplification of implicit biases” that occurs during the hiring process.

University President Richard Levin said one reason for continued underrepresentation is that “many faculty were tenured 20 or 30 years ago, when there were far fewer women.” Frances Rosenbluth, deputy provost for social sciences and faculty development, added that issues such as childcare and strained time commitments make it particularly difficult for some women to progress as faculty members.

Physics Department Chair Meg Urry said she believes it is important to hire a diverse faculty for students to have role models that are like them.

“When I came to Yale, I was the only woman faculty member in my department,” Urry said. “I had a lot of young women come to talk to me. It’s such a value to the students.”

The report noted that the gender statistics at Yale are similar to those at Princeton and Harvard.

Contact MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMAS at matthew.lloyd-thomas@yale.edu and AMY WANG at xiaotian.wang@yale.edu .

GRAPH PERCENT TENURED AND TERM WOMEN FACULTY ACROSS YALE 50 Term Women 40 Ladder Women 30 Tenured Women 20

10

0

1982’83

1986’87

1991’92

1996’97

2001’02

2006’07

2011’12 SOURCE: WOMEN’S FACULTY FORUM

recyclerecyclerecyclerecycle

YO U R

YD N

DAILY

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

NEWS

The New Haven Department of Public Works

Among other services, the department handles trash collection, snow plowing, sidewalk and road maintenance, drainage repairs, bridge maintenance, recycling, street sweeping, eviction storage and collection, and maintenance of city vehicles.

Local politicians urge student involvement

City pushes for public works salary hike

BY DAVID WHIPPLE CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

1 alderwoman represents most Yale undergraduates on the Board of Aldermen, encouraged the Dems to explore both politics and New Haven community activities, explaining that she missed out on learning about the city during her first two years at Yale.

In an interview with the News, Dems president Zak Newman ’13 said the Dems have been working especially hard to make sure that all eligible New Haven voters have the opportunity to vote in the upcoming election.

“We have worked hard to make a difference, especially in regards to voter identification laws,” Newman said.

DeStefano, who won a record 10th term as mayor last fall, will run for another term in fall 2013.

When New Haven Director of Public Works John Prokop told city officials that he planned to retire on Feb. 1, 2013, some City Hall officials began to worry that the city is ill-prepared to enter the market for a replacement.

Despite overseeing the second-largest municipality in the state, the Elm City’s director of public works currently earns the 39thhighest salary for that position of Connecticut’s 169 towns and cities. City officials said this comparatively low salary will make it difficult to attract high-caliber candidates to take over Prokop’s post. In a bid to allow the city to make competitive offers as the search for a replacement begins, Chief Administrative Officer Robert Smuts ’01 is pushing to raise the salary range for the position.

Last year, Prokop earned $98,921, a figure far below the average for directors of public works departments in Connecticut cities of comparable size. According to a statewide survey by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, the average salary for a director in Connecticut cities with a population greater than 60,000 sat at $124,140, 25 percent more than Prokop made.

In fact, none of these towns paid its director of public works less than New Haven did, and some Connecticut towns with fewer than 60,000 inhabitants paid their directors more.

Smuts said this salary has remained low over the years due to a tight budget.

On Aug. 27, Smuts sent a letter detailing his support for a salary range increase to Ward 5 Alderman Jorge Perez, president of the Board of Aldermen.

“It is clear from the facts that New Haven is very far from offering a competitive salary at present,” Smuts said in the letter. As evidence of New Haven’s inability to compete, Smuts pointed to the departure of two of the city’s deputy public works directors for higher-paying directorships in other towns. Smuts asked the Board of Aldermen to consider the director position under the “key employee” provision established in 2008, which allows for increases in pay range before the city begins the hiring process of an important official.

Smuts said he hopes that the salary will be raised by mid-October, although the motion had yet to be formally filed on Monday afternoon. In light of New Haven’s tight budget, he said he expects the board to view his proposal “skeptically” at first, but he believes that he can convince them of its importance in finding a strong replacement for Prokop.

“They’re interested in making the city work,” he said.

Ward 2 Alderman Frank Douglass Jr. and Ward 9 Alderwoman Jessica Holmes, said they had not heard of the proposal and declined to comment on whether they would support it.

Filling administrative jobs in New Haven can be difficult because of the city’s tight budget and the requirement that directors of city departments live in New Haven, Smuts said.

“Right now we’re having a very difficult time filling two open positions [in the Department of Public Works],” Smuts said.

City hall spokeswoman Elizabeth Benton ’04 said that, despite these obstacles, New Haven cannot simply lower its standards when it comes to “attract[ing] highly qualified officials.” Benton added that the city has made salary adjustments in the past in order to attract viable candidates.

In 2008, for example, the city raised the salary ceiling for the police chief to $160,000 from $115,000 in advance of the national search that ultimately brought former Chief Frank Limon to the New Haven Police Department.

Prokop, who has yet to formally announce his retirement, has held the post since 2007.

Contact DINEE DORAME at dinee.dorame@yale.edu .

Contact DAVID WHIPPLE at david.whipple@yale.edu .

BENJAMIN ACKERMAN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Mayor John DeStefano Jr. addressed students in the Branford Common Room Monday night, urging them to get involved in New Haven politics.

BY DINEE DORAME CONTRIBUTING REPORTER The Yale College Democrats invited local politicians to campus on Monday evening for their first official meeting of the year.

In a packed Branford common room, Ward 1 Alderwoman Sarah Eidelson ’12, Ward 22 Alderwoman Jeanette Morrison and Mayor John DeStefano Jr. addressed prospective and returning Dems. Eidelson and Morrison emphasized the importance of youth services in New Haven, while DeStefano focused on the city’s efforts to improve its accessibility to new immigrants and the need to politically engage all segments of the city’s population. The majority of attendees were freshmen looking to learn more about the Dems, and members of the Dems board said they have been pleased by Yalies’

involvement in campuswide events and local politics in the opening weeks of school.

“Students are going to have a huge impact this year, especially in terms of registering new voters,” said Dems Elections Coordinator Nicole Hobbs ’14. “It’s very exciting that we’ve been so visible on campus.”

DeStefano, the event’s final speaker, encouraged students to get involved in local politics, calling Yale “the heart of the downtown district,” in contrast to most Ivy League universities.

“It is so imperative for young people to get involved in New Haven politics,” DeStefano said. “The city is currently focusing on many youth-oriented issues, all of which affect Yale students.”

The mayor addressed i m m i g ra t i o n p o l i c y, describing his success in

championing the Elm City Resident Card program in 2007. He said the program, which issues identification cards to both documented and undocumented residents and allows them to open bank accounts and borrow library books, among other things, is intended to welcome all types of people to New Haven. He added that his office works closely with both faith-based and community-based organizations in helping undocumented high school students get to college.

DeStefano, who was born and raised in the city’s East Shore neighborhood, also emphasized New Haven’s cultural and ethnic diversity and said that he always welcomes new populations to the city.

“We need to focus on voter registration,” DeStefano said. “Historically, we have had turnout issues,

but we have such a rich, diverse environment in this city and we need to engage more folks.”

Eidelson and Morrison echoed DeStefano’s sentiments and encouraged students to attend meetings of their ward committees and get involved in local advocacy, especially in preparation for the upcoming local and national elections.

In her speech, Morrison focused on the relationship between Yale and New Haven. Growing up in New Haven, she said, she was not encouraged to interact with Yale students, but later realized the importance of town-gown cooperation in bettering the city.

“Yale has an extremely important role in New Haven politics,” Morrison said. “Ward meetings make it so easy for students and residents to speak up and give public testimony.”

Eidelson, who as Ward

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS JOE LIEBERMAN ’64 LAW ’67 Lieberman is currently serving his fourth term as U.S. senator. Born in Stamford, he served 10 years in the Connecticut State Senate before practicing law privately and becoming Connecticut attorney general.

Lieberman is an independent but caucuses with the Senate Democrats.

Successor’s pay likely to track Levin’s GRAPH MOST HIGHLY COMPENSATED YALE OFFICIALS

GRAPH PRESIDENT LEVIN’S COMPENSATION, DOLLARS 2000000

DAVID DAVID SWENSEN SWENSON DEAN TAKAHASHI DAVID LEFFEL RICHARD LEVIN TIMOTHY SULLIVAN SUMAIRA AASI SUKU EMRE THOMAS RUTHERFORD ROBERT ALPERN INGE REICHENBACH LINDA LORIMER PETER SALOVEY SHAUNA KING DOROTHY ROBINSON BRUCE ALEXANDER MICHAEL PEEL

1500000

1000000

0

500 K

1 MIL

1.5 MIL

2 MIL

2.5 MIL

3 MIL

500000

3.5 MIL

2000

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

2007

2008 2009 2010

SOURCE: YALE UNIVERSITY TAX FILINGS

LEVIN FROM PAGE 1 Swensen declined to comment for this article, and Levin declined to comment on his own compensation.

Brian Vogel, senior principal at Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm Quatt Associates

and an expert in compensation of not-for-profit executives, said top administrators in higher education are often paid more the longer they hold a position, especially if liked by the institution’s board of trustees. But he added that a correlation between longevity and compen-

Deans helped build shortlists for committee

sation is not always “clear cut” because when administrators do eventually step down, their replacements sometimes expect to earn a similar or even greater salary from the start.

Investment officials generally receive higher compensation than their administrative coun-

terparts for a number of reasons, Vogel said, chief among them that the marketplace for investment and finance expertise simply pays more than the marketplace for university presidents.

Investment officials also tend to have higher incentive payments, which are given when employees

meet specific standards of performance.

Furthermore, the two types of employees are treated differently under tax law, Vogel said. A university president is classified as a “disqualified person” who is assumed to be able to influence his compensation, while

employees in the Investments Office are not.

The University’s second highest administrator, Provost Peter Salovey, made about $560,000 in 2010.

Contact GAVAN GIDEON at gavan.gideon@yale.edu .

McMahon files House ethics complaint against Murphy

SEARCH COMM FROM PAGE 1 the schools, and forwarded roughly a dozen to Bass, while the FAS deans and directors received about 139 suggestions and forwarded a list of six.

All four appointed faculty members are tenured and have had some administrative experience — two characteristics that Bass said in an Aug. 31 email that he would look for in potential search committee members.

Faculty on the committee and the faculty counselors said they will do everything they can to consider the opinions of all faculty members.

Hungerford said in a Sunday email that she expects presidential candidates will have different qualifications and views on the “University’s sense of citizenship, its role in the world, in enterprise, in the professions and the arts more specifically,” but did not discuss specifics.

“I think it would be a good idea to have a committee discussion about exactly what we’re looking for,” Chevalier said. “In many ways I’m trying to not form a picture of what we’re looking for [before the committee meets].”

Representing the faculty as a whole is going to be tricky because the faculty isn’t going to speak as one voice.

RUTH YEAZELL GRD ’71 Faculty counselor, University presidential search committee Bass did not respond when asked if faculty members on the committee would be eligible candidates for the presidency. Chevalier, whose name has been floated as potential presidential candidate, said “it’s a good idea to not be on the search committee if you thought you wanted to be a candidate.”

“That’s how I view search committees,” Chevalier said, “but I don’t know how other people view it.”

Still, that kind of final decision has precedent in recent history: Pollard was appointed dean of the Graduate School in 2010 after serving as chair of the search committee.

Corporation members Charles Goodyear ’80 and Paul Joskow ’70 GRD ’72 will serve as chair and vice chair of the search committee, respectively.

Contact GAVAN GIDEON at gavan.gideon@yale.edu and TAPLEY STEPHENSON at preston.stephenson@yale.edu .

ELISE AMENDOLA AND JESSICA HILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Linda McMahon, right, and U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, candidates to replace Senator Joe Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67, have attacked each other’s financial histories.

MCMAHON FROM PAGE 1 mortgage default, “is precisely the sort of shameful conduct that sows public distrust in Congress.”

The call for a congressional ethics investigation marks the apex of McMahon’s continued efforts over the past weeks to draw attention to Murphy’s financial past. But the move will not have any formal consequences for Murphy, as the Office of Congressional Ethics cannot move forward on the complaint within 60 days of an election.

As an example of one “violation … of ethical conduct,” Bliss noted that Murphy served on the House Committee on Financial Services

and voted in favor of the Toxic Asset Relief Program which gave Webster Bank $400 million in bailout funds, one month after receiving the credit line from the bank. Shortly before the TARP vote, the bank’s political action committee contributed $1,350 to Murphy’s campaign.

The McMahon campaign argued that Murphy’s conduct violated the House Ethics Manual, which states that members “should not in any way use their office for private gain” and that loans that are not “generally available to the public … are prohibited.”

The Murphy campaign has denied all allegations of wrongdoing and has tried to shift the media spotlight

to McMahon’s past financial difficulties. McMahon and her husband Vince filed for personal bankruptcy in 1976 with about $1 million in debt.

But after founding World Wrestling Entertainment, the McMahons now have an estimated net worth of up to $370 million.

Webster Bank issued a statement denying the McMahon campaign’s claims as well.

“Murphy met the terms of all of his loan agreements with Webster.

He received the same high-quality service extended to all Webster customers,” the bank’s statement said. “Murphy’s service in Congress and on the House Financial Services Committee had no effect on

Murphy’s banking relationship with Webster.”

McMahon and Murphy are both running for the Senate seat that will be vacated when Senator Joseph Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67 departs in January, and while the seat was originally expected to be an easy win for Murphy, the latest Quinnipiac University poll of likely voters shows that McMahon has a slight upper hand.

The August poll of 1,472 voters shows 49 percent of respondents supporting McMahon and 46 percent supporting Murphy, with a 2.6 percent margin of error.

Contact BEN PRAWDZIK at benjamin.prawdzik@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

BULLETIN BOARD

TODAY’S FORECAST Sunny, with a high near 75. North wind around 9 mph becoming west in the afternoon.

TOMORROW

THURSDAY

High of 80, low of 57.

High of 81, low of 51.

WATSON BY JIM HORWITZ

ON CAMPUS WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 4:30 PM “‘Near China Beyond the Seas’: 19th-Century Indian Convict Tales From Singapore.” This talk, by Anand Yang of the University of Washington, will examine the exile experience of the Sikh rebel Singh (also known as Bhai Maharaj Singh) and of his disciple Kharak Singh in mid-19th-century Singapore. Luce Hall (34 Hillhouse Ave.), room 203.

5:00 PM “The Song of Achilles — Reading and Discussion.”

The Franke Lectures in the Humanities present a reading and discussion of “The Song of Achilles” with the author Madeline Miller. Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.), auditorium.

ZERO LIKE ME BY REUXBEN BARRIENTES

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 4:30 PM “Portraiture and Memory Amongst the Middling Elites in Tudor and Early Stuart England.” Robert Tittler of Concordia University will speak as part of the British Historical Studies Colloquium. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (121 Wall st.), room 38/39.

7:00 PM “Meek’s Cutoff.” This 2010 film, about an unfortunate band of travelers on the Oregon Trail in 1845, is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Robert Adams: The Place We Live” and will be followed by a discussion with the film’s director, Kelly Reichardt, and screenwriter, Jonathan Raymond. Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.), auditorium.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 5:00 PM “The New Haven Green: Heart of a City.” The 452nd Meeting of the Beaumont Medical Club will include a screening and discussion of this new documentary film, followed by discussion with its producer and director, Karyl Evans. Open to the general public. Sterling Hall of Medicine (333 Cedar St.), Historical Library.

THAT MONKEY TUNE BY MICHAEL KANDALAFT

8:00 PM The Mingus Big Band. The Grammy Award-winning 14-piece Mingus Big Band will perform as part of the Ellington Jazz Series. Tickets $20-$30, students $10. Sprague Memorial Hall (470 College St.), Morse Recital Hall.

y SUBMIT YOUR EVENTS ONLINE yaledailynews.com/events/submit DOONESBURY BY GARRY TRUDEAU

To reach us: E-mail editor@yaledailynews.com Advertisements 2-2424 (before 5 p.m.)

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Mailing address Yale Daily News P.O. Box 209007 New Haven, CT 06520

Questions or comments about the fairness or accuracy of stories should be directed to Max de La Bruyère, Editor in Chief, at (203) 432-2418.

Bulletin Board is a free service provided to groups of the Yale community for events. Listings should be submitted online at yaledailynews.com/events/ submit. The Yale Daily News reserves the right to edit listings.

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16 Newcomer to Capitol Hill 19 Long story 20 Vessels like Noah’s 21 Frère du père 22 Massage facility 24 Begin a trip 25 Promising rookies’ doses of reality 31 Nitwit 32 They may be locked in battle 33 Flexed 34 Heavenly head covers 35 “Whatever shall I do?”

39 Writer Diamond or actor Leto 40 Overfill 41 Young company supervisor 46 Amerigo Vespucci, vis-àvis America 47 Score-raising stat 48 Whoop 49 Home of the Buckeyes 52 VCR insert 56 Breaks for AARP members 59 Quod __ demonstrandum 60 “The Razor’s __”: Maugham novel 61 Make sense, to a detective 62 China’s Sun Yat__ 63 Arthur of tennis 64 Varnish component DOWN 1 TV E.T. and namesakes 2 Former coin of Italy 3 Designer Cassini

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9/12/11

By James Sajdak

4 Just might pull it off 5 “Bah,” in Bavaria 6 Hollywood Walk of Fame feature 7 Sound from a snout 8 A smaller amount 9 Salem is its cap.

10 “Scrubs,” for one 11 Get ready for production 12 White wading birds 15 African language group 17 Hat-tipping address 18 Yuletide carols 23 Stovetop item 24 Federal IDs 25 One of the fam 26 Shelley tribute 27 Wrestler’s objective 28 Windy City airport 29 Pricey timepiece 30 Wash away slowly 34 Injure 35 Cockpit reading 36 __ polloi 37 Dallas NBAer

Want to place a classified ad?

Saturday’s Puzzle Solved

SUDOKU MEDIUM

5

(c)2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

38 Août’s season 39 “__ the World” 40 Fella 41 James and Owens 42 “Psst!” from above 43 Political columnist Peggy 44 Alaskan native 45 Gator’s cousin 49 __ and ends

9/12/11

50 A bit tipsy 51 “Makes sense to me” 53 Common conjunctions 54 Seed-spitter’s sound 55 “Baseball Tonight” channel 57 Stephen of “V for Vendetta” 58 Rowing need

6 4 3 8 7 8 5 4 9

9 2 6 7

7 4 6 3

9 2 5 6

7 3 5

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

“The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one’s self to be acquainted with it.”

LORD PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE CHESTERFIELD STATESMAN AND MAN OF LETTERS

Geology majors make summer treks

BY EMILIE FOYER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER While most Yalies spend their summers in air-conditioned labs or offices, many geology and geophysics majors take to the field instead, unearthing Triassic-era skulls or examining billion-year-old rocks.

Students say doing outdoor field work is a way to solidify their interest in the major and get a feel for a geology career outside of the classroom, as well as providing an opportunity to travel to unusual locales. This past summer, Yale geology majors worked at sites from Arizona to Peru to Namibia, either joining larger research teams or pursuing their own senior project research. Majors interviewed said the department facilitated these trips, providing funding through professors’ grants and helping students find opportunities and fellowships.

In June, Chris Brown ’15 and Will Gearty ’14 joined a team of researchers that drove from New Haven to Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona on a dig orga-

nized and funded by the Peabody Museum of Natural History to search for remains of phytosaurs.

Phytosaurs lived during the Triassic Period, approximately 225 million years ago, and looked much like today’s crocodile, though probably larger, Gearty said.

The team succeeded in finding a phytosaur skull as well as other smaller fossils from prehistoric fish during the course of their five weeks in Arizona. The specimens excavated will be studied further at the Peabody Museum.

Gearty and Brown described the experience, their first doing field work outside of a class field trip, as strenuous but rewarding. Each day they woke at 6 a.m. and walked a mile to the dig, where they worked under a tent to stay out of the heat.

From morning until nightfall they dug for fossils, occasionally venturing out to search for fossils in the as-yet unstudied surrounding area.

“Though [the researchers] did not acknowledge the existence of weekends, the work was very fulfilling,” Gearty said.

Other undergraduates assist

professors in their research. In May, Jennifer Kasbohm ’13 worked with Maureen Long, professor of geology and geophysics, on a project to gather seismology data in Peru.

Long is part of a research team that has placed seismographs across Peru in an effort to understand the unique geological processes that occur in the region.

Kasbohm acted as a Spanish language interpreter and data recorder for a team of graduate students that had to visit every seismograph to collect its data. Some of the locations were very remote, Kasbohm said.

“It was also an eye-opener on local culture,” she added.

Kasbohm’s geology work for the summer was not confined to Peru. She also spent four weeks in Namibia where she conducted her own research as part of her senior project. She received her funding through the Karen Von Damm ’77 Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Geology and Geophysics and the Alan S. Tetelman 1958 Fellowship for International Research in the Sciences to examine the

paleogeography of the Sinclair terrain in Southern Namibia.

The rocks in that area are special because they are old enough to help piece together Rodinia, an ancient supercontinent present around one billion years ago. The earth’s magnetic field varies and these variations allow for dating of the rocks through paleomagnetism. This research is an offshoot of research on supercontinents by David Evans, the director of undergraduate studies of the Geology and Geophysics Department, to which Kasbohm had contributed.

She was joined in Namibia by graduate student Joseph Panzik GRD ’14, who worked on a related project and by Jenna Hessert ’14 who served as Kasbohm’s field assistant. Hessert said that the Namibia experience was less structured and more actual field work than the “geology tourism” of some class trips.

Some G&G majors pass up the opportunity for field work to do research instead. Stella Cao ’14, a G&G major in its newly developed energy and environment

track, spent the summer in Alaska researching Arctic energy for the Institute of the North, an Anchorage-based nonprofit.

“What people don’t realize is that the United States is an Arctic country and that we will be more and more dependent on resources from Alaska,” she said.

Cao said she had thought about doing field work but decided her time could be better spent learning communication skills and informing the general population about science issues. She added that she was drawn to the internship partly for the opportunity to travel to Alaska.

Evans said that although students were encouraged do field work, theoretical and laboratory work were also crucial to geology research. He added that the department is trying to push the new energy and environment track of the major, which includes courses on renewable energy and fossil fuels, with the hope of eventually instituting a new energy fellowship program for students.

“We want people to know that

Research reveals bias elusive for consumers

BY DAN WEINER STAFF REPORTER

WILL GEARTY

Geology and geophysics majors traveled to locations around the globe this summer for research and learning opportunities. the geology department is not just about rocks and dinosaurs,” Evans said.

This year, the department is taking advantage of the new fall break to send a group of majors, as well as

the students in the “Dynamic Earth Lab and Field Methods” course, on a field trip to Canada.

Contact EMILIE FOYER at emilie.foyer@yale.edu .

While consumers generally believe that they are good judges of their own preferences, two new studies out of the Yale School of Management suggest that, counterintuitively, individuals have a poor understanding of what motivates certain purchases.

In one of the studies, researchers found that associating guilt with the consumption of a hedonic object like a candy bar actually increased the pleasure the individual got from the experience. The other study found that consumers actually perceive two items as more similar when the prices were slightly different rather than the same.

The two findings, which are scheduled to be published in the coming months, have implications both for the way consumers think about purchases and how marketers brand their products, said Ravi Dhar, a professor of management and marketing at the Yale School of Management who was a co-author on both papers.

Subjects in the study on guilt were primed with the concept of guilt by unscrambling words associated with the emotion. Those individuals reported enjoying a variety of indulgent activities, from consuming candies to browsing online dating profiles, more than the individuals in the control condition who had unscrambled neutral words.

“Guilt has the unique effect on pleasure specifically because the consumer maintain a cognitive association between guilt and pleasure, which is to say that when we think about guilt, we often think about pleasures that is associated with guilt,” said Kelly Goldsmith SOM ‘09, study co-author and professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Goldsmith worked on the study with Dhar when she was a doctoral candidate at Yale.

Both Dhar and Goldsmith said that the findings have implications for the way firms market indulgent items.

While some companies encourage consumers to buy indulgent items by minimizing the feelings of guilt associated with purchase, this finding suggests that companies should do the opposite.

“If you have an online dating website and you want to provide consumers online with an experience that is maximally pleasurable, we would argue that letting them feel a little bit guilty and a little bit naughty searching around on those online ads is perfectly OK,” Goldsmith said.

The inspiration for the study on guilt arose anecdotally, when one of the administrative assistants at the School of Management complained how difficult it was to adhere to her diet when

Obesity epidemic ‘simple’ to defeat

BY MICHELLE HACKMAN STAFF REPORTER This summer, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed banning the sale of large sodas in New York City.

This new policy, intended to limit access to products that are widely thought to contribute to obesity, sparked a national conversation about the ban’s effectiveness. The News sat down with Dr. David Katz, a professor of preventive medicine at Yale Medical School and an expert on

obesity, to discuss the ban and other ways to fight the obesity epidemic.

Q

. You are a doctor in the field of preventive medicine. Can you define “preventive medicine” for our readers?

A

. As the name suggests, preventive medicine is about identifying and changing vulnerability so disease is avoided rather than treated whenever possible. The serious chronic diseases that plague our

society, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer, have known risk factors, and long timelines. Fully 80 percent of all chronic disease could be prevented just by avoiding tobacco, eating well and being physically active. Preventive medicine is a field dedicated to turning what we know about disease prevention into what we do at both the individual and societal levels.

You wrote in a 2006 paper pubQ.lished in the Harvard Health Pol-

icy Review, “In the United States, obesity is not only an epidemic, but arguably the gravest and most poorly controlled public health threat of our time.” What made you come to that conclusion?

A

. The epidemiology showing the relentless advance of obesity prevalence over recent years and decades is perfectly clear. As for the effects, obesity is a major risk factor for the diseases that are, in turn, the leading causes of death in our coun-

try: heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes. So it’s a pretty straightforward tale.

are Americans so suscepti. I am ambivalent. I have not had Q.bleWhyto obesity?

Does it have more Aa soda in 35 years, and consider to do with the food industry or our exercise habits?

A

. It’s both. We eat too much of all the wrong foods and do too little. If we had to pick one, diet is the more important factor for weight control per se, although both are comparably important to health.

Everything about “modern” living that makes it modern — from highly processed food to labor-saving technology — contributes to the perfect storm of “obesogenic” factors in our society.

Are there ways that we think Q.about obesity that perpetuate the

CREATIVE COMMONS

David Katz, an expert on obesity, believes that banning soda is not necessarily the right way to go about reducing obesity and consumption of sugary beverages.

Q

. What is your take on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s large soda ban proposal in New York?

such beverages chemistry experiments in a cup. Nobody needs them!

And the sizes are ridiculous. But people do not like being told what to do, and that strategy can backfire badly. It empowers those who rail against the “nanny state,” and who contend that the government wants to tell us all how to live our lives and what we can have for breakfast. If our proposals inspire strong enough resistance, we can actually go backward instead of forward. So, while I support what Mayor Bloomberg is trying to do, I am not convinced this is the best way to get it done.

problem?

Do you think a tax would be more Q.effective than a ban?

A

A

. Obesity in the United States is a genuine crisis, taking years from life, and life from years. We don’t take it seriously enough because it is a calamity in slow motion. If a natural disaster caused this much damage, it would rank among the worst of all time. We bog down in debates about whether this is a matter of personal responsibility or public policy, instead of accepting it is both and doing all we can to put an end to the crisis. We also act as if obesity is complex and needs endless research into causes. While it will not be easy to fix, it is simple: we eat too much, and do too little. When the food supply was more wholesome and close to nature and calories not so abundant, and when everybody did physical work every day, obesity was almost nonexistent. This is not rocket science.

. No one knows, since there has been no direct comparison of the two strategies. In my opinion, we should regulate food marketing to children; provide clear, unambiguous, at-a-glance nutrition information about all products to empower consumers; and provide financial incentives to choose more nutritious foods. I favor these approaches over either a tax or a ban.

say that the soda ban Q.willCritics adversely affect people of

lower socioeconomic status because healthier foods are more expensive.

How would you respond to this criticism?

A

. First, anyone who is thirsty and can’t afford soda is at liberty to drink water. There is no inalienable right to drink sugar-sweetened beverages. And people who can’t afford

chocolate tasted so good, Goldsmith said. While people generally believe that people enjoy experiences less when plagued by feelings of guilt, Goldsmith said she was intrigued by the possibility of a reverse relationship.

Juliano Laran, an assistant professor of marketing at the School of Business Administration at the University of Miami who was not involved in the study, said that the finding is “an amazing piece of research,” in part because it is one of the few to show that a negative emotion like guilt can have a positive effect.

While the study on guilt looked at the influence of the emotion on pleasure, the paper on perception of similarity probed the connection between small variations in products and, ultimately, the consumers’ willingness to purchase the items.

In one part of the study, subjects were asked to rate the similarity of two types of tea. In one condition, the products had equal prices, while in another, the prices were slightly different. The team found that individuals rated the teas as seeming more similar when the prices were different.

Nathan Novemsky, study co-author and professor of marketing at the Yale School of Management, said people sense more difference as overall simi-

University of Pennsylvania, said that he would like to see the research team explore what other attributes, apart from price, apply to the phenomenon.

He said that he suspects small differences in quantitative attributes will have more of an effect on global perceptions of similarity than manipulations of qualitative components. “[The] difference between blue and red is not the same as between $1.50 and $1.60,” he said. “It will be nice to see them expand it later.”

Dhar said the studies on guilt and similarity suggest that for those interested in knowing consumers’ preferences, asking the buyers themselves may be misleading.

Indeed, asking consumers to describe how they would respond to certain situations is the most common way for firms to conduct consumer research, Dhar said, but these studies contribute to a growing body of research questioning that method.

“People don’t necessarily have proper intuitions about how they would behave in a certain situation,” he said.

Dhar is the director and co-founder of the Center for Consumer Insights at the Yale School of Management.

larity because identical characteristics, like equal price, drop out of consideration and consumers are left to focus on the more salient differences, like tea flavor, that remain.

“When you are focused on an attribute that is actually quite similar like $3.68 verses $3.73 for price, you start thinking, ‘Well these teas are kind of similar,’” Novemsky said. “The similarity of price bleeds over to a global similarity between the two items.”

While the finding is surprising and interesting on theoretical grounds, it becomes important in practice when extended to purchase incidence, Novemsky said. Dhar had found in a previous study that when individuals perceive two items as more similar, they are more likely to purchase one because of decreased anticipated “buyer’s remorse,” according to Novemsky.

Indeed, Novemsky and Dhar found in the study that slightly varied prices did make individuals less likely to defer purchase.

Companies have historically believed that pricing similar items at the same price makes it easier for consumers to chose which one to buy, Novemsky said, and the study suggests that this intuition is mistaken.

Gal Zauberman, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the

Contact DAN WEINER at daniel.weiner@yale.edu .

CREATIVE COMMONS

Would you enjoy this chocolate more if you felt guilty about eating it? A new Yale study suggests you might.

Study links stress, brain shrinkage soda certainly can’t afford the endocrinologist to treat their diabetes. As for more nutritious food being more expensive, it is in part an urban legend. It’s true sometimes, but often the problem is that people don’t know how to identify the more nutritious food that isn’t more expensive.

What are some solutions you Q.propose?

A

. We need physical activity to populate our daily routines once again. We need healthful foods in reasonable quantities to constitute our diets once again. We need time for food preparation. We need to sleep better and manage stress so that we have the energy and equanimity to eat well and exercise. But there are problems with [this] “fix everything” platform, no matter how defensible it may be.

First, no one is in charge of everything: food marketing, farm subsidies, sin taxes, school programming, school food, nutrition labeling, work-site wellness, transportation, and so on. And since no one is in charge of everything, calls to fix everything have the potential to lead nowhere, because everyone assumes someone else should get it all done.

And second, even if we can figure out where the buck should stop, fixing everything can be quite overwhelming. And when we feel overwhelmed, we may not even bother to try. That tends to happen at the individual level, where people who don’t feel they can succeed at eating well or being active simply abandon the effort. But it can also play out at the level of policy, where if doing it all is out of the question, the alternative all too often is doing nothing.

Contact MICHELLE HACKMAN at michelle.hackman@yale.edu .

BY ROBERT PECK STAFF REPORTER As if you needed yet another reason to get through shopping period as quickly as you can, a team of Yale researchers have discovered a cognitive mechanism that can cause stress to shrink the human brain.

The study, led by postdoctoral researcher Hyo Jung Kang, found that a type of genetic switch called a “transcription factor” can repress the expression of certain genes necessary for connections between brain cells, or synapses, to form properly. Without these connections, a loss of brain mass in the prefrontal cortex can occur, since cells cannot properly grow without the expression of the gene. The study found that the transcription factor in question, GATA1, is activated in conjunction with stress and feelings of depression.

“We wanted to test the idea that stress causes a loss of brain synapses in humans,” Ronald Duman, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and senior author of the study, said. “We show that circuits normally involved in emotion, as well as cognition, are disrupted when this single transcription factor is activated.”

Duman said that researchers based this new study on previous research that had been conducted on rodent models. He said these tests showed chronic stress could cause atrophy of neurons in brain regions that control emotion, mood and cognition, and that this helped the team to identify the genes that were altered in a depressed subject’s brain.

To isolate the genes involved in synaptic connections, the researchers examined the entire genome to find the genes whose expression was affected by the transcription factor in question.

YALE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS AND COMMUNICATIONS

Yale researchers have found that stress can interfere with the formation of synapses, leading to a loss of brain mass.

Once the brain regions in question were identified, Duman said, the team collected samples for analysis. In this case, samples of brain tissue from deceased depression and chronic stress sufferers were examined.

Duman said the study’s findings demonstrate atrophy of synaptic connections in human depression for the first time, consistent with the rodent studies. The results also show that GATA1 underlies the effects of depression and stress on synaptic atrophy, he said. “[The study’s results] identify specific synapse related genes that are altered in depression,” Duman said.

Duman added that linking neural atrophy to depression could mean treatments that reverse the atrophy of neurons or that increase synaptic connections may be useful antidepressant measures.

University of Michigan associate psychiatry professor Bruno Giordani said the study could be useful for scientists trying to understand not just stress, but other conditions as well. He said that previous research in the field shows connections between stress and afflictions such as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and that this new study could prove useful in identifying those at greater risk for such issues later in life.

Matthew Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth and the executive director of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, said further study of GATA1 could help to treat PTSD as well.

“This is an extremely important finding,” Friedman said. “Identifying how a single transcription factor, induced by depression or stress, can disrupt synaptic connections will focus future research on mechanisms that reverse this process.”

The study was published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine on Aug. 12.

Contact ROBERT PECK at robert.peck@yale.edu .

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

“The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one’s self to be acquainted with it.”

LORD PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE CHESTERFIELD STATESMAN AND MAN OF LETTERS

Geology majors make summer treks

BY EMILIE FOYER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER While most Yalies spend their summers in air-conditioned labs or offices, many geology and geophysics majors take to the field instead, unearthing Triassic-era skulls or examining billion-year-old rocks.

Students say doing outdoor field work is a way to solidify their interest in the major and get a feel for a geology career outside of the classroom, as well as providing an opportunity to travel to unusual locales. This past summer, Yale geology majors worked at sites from Arizona to Peru to Namibia, either joining larger research teams or pursuing their own senior project research. Majors interviewed said the department facilitated these trips, providing funding through professors’ grants and helping students find opportunities and fellowships.

In June, Chris Brown ’15 and Will Gearty ’14 joined a team of researchers that drove from New Haven to Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona on a dig orga-

nized and funded by the Peabody Museum of Natural History to search for remains of phytosaurs.

Phytosaurs lived during the Triassic Period, approximately 225 million years ago, and looked much like today’s crocodile, though probably larger, Gearty said.

The team succeeded in finding a phytosaur skull as well as other smaller fossils from prehistoric fish during the course of their five weeks in Arizona. The specimens excavated will be studied further at the Peabody Museum.

Gearty and Brown described the experience, their first doing field work outside of a class field trip, as strenuous but rewarding. Each day they woke at 6 a.m. and walked a mile to the dig, where they worked under a tent to stay out of the heat.

From morning until nightfall they dug for fossils, occasionally venturing out to search for fossils in the as-yet unstudied surrounding area.

“Though [the researchers] did not acknowledge the existence of weekends, the work was very fulfilling,” Gearty said.

Other undergraduates assist

professors in their research. In May, Jennifer Kasbohm ’13 worked with Maureen Long, professor of geology and geophysics, on a project to gather seismology data in Peru.

Long is part of a research team that has placed seismographs across Peru in an effort to understand the unique geological processes that occur in the region.

Kasbohm acted as a Spanish language interpreter and data recorder for a team of graduate students that had to visit every seismograph to collect its data. Some of the locations were very remote, Kasbohm said.

“It was also an eye-opener on local culture,” she added.

Kasbohm’s geology work for the summer was not confined to Peru. She also spent four weeks in Namibia where she conducted her own research as part of her senior project. She received her funding through the Karen Von Damm ’77 Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Geology and Geophysics and the Alan S. Tetelman 1958 Fellowship for International Research in the Sciences to examine the

paleogeography of the Sinclair terrain in Southern Namibia.

The rocks in that area are special because they are old enough to help piece together Rodinia, an ancient supercontinent present around one billion years ago. The earth’s magnetic field varies and these variations allow for dating of the rocks through paleomagnetism. This research is an offshoot of research on supercontinents by David Evans, the director of undergraduate studies of the Geology and Geophysics Department, to which Kasbohm had contributed.

She was joined in Namibia by graduate student Joseph Panzik GRD ’14, who worked on a related project and by Jenna Hessert ’14 who served as Kasbohm’s field assistant. Hessert said that the Namibia experience was less structured and more actual field work than the “geology tourism” of some class trips.

Some G&G majors pass up the opportunity for field work to do research instead. Stella Cao ’14, a G&G major in its newly developed energy and environment

track, spent the summer in Alaska researching Arctic energy for the Institute of the North, an Anchorage-based nonprofit.

“What people don’t realize is that the United States is an Arctic country and that we will be more and more dependent on resources from Alaska,” she said.

Cao said she had thought about doing field work but decided her time could be better spent learning communication skills and informing the general population about science issues. She added that she was drawn to the internship partly for the opportunity to travel to Alaska.

Evans said that although students were encouraged do field work, theoretical and laboratory work were also crucial to geology research. He added that the department is trying to push the new energy and environment track of the major, which includes courses on renewable energy and fossil fuels, with the hope of eventually instituting a new energy fellowship program for students.

“We want people to know that

Research reveals bias elusive for consumers

BY DAN WEINER STAFF REPORTER

WILL GEARTY

Geology and geophysics majors traveled to locations around the globe this summer for research and learning opportunities. the geology department is not just about rocks and dinosaurs,” Evans said.

This year, the department is taking advantage of the new fall break to send a group of majors, as well as

the students in the “Dynamic Earth Lab and Field Methods” course, on a field trip to Canada.

Contact EMILIE FOYER at emilie.foyer@yale.edu .

While consumers generally believe that they are good judges of their own preferences, two new studies out of the Yale School of Management suggest that, counterintuitively, individuals have a poor understanding of what motivates certain purchases.

In one of the studies, researchers found that associating guilt with the consumption of a hedonic object like a candy bar actually increased the pleasure the individual got from the experience. The other study found that consumers actually perceive two items as more similar when the prices were slightly different rather than the same.

The two findings, which are scheduled to be published in the coming months, have implications both for the way consumers think about purchases and how marketers brand their products, said Ravi Dhar, a professor of management and marketing at the Yale School of Management who was a co-author on both papers.

Subjects in the study on guilt were primed with the concept of guilt by unscrambling words associated with the emotion. Those individuals reported enjoying a variety of indulgent activities, from consuming candies to browsing online dating profiles, more than the individuals in the control condition who had unscrambled neutral words.

“Guilt has the unique effect on pleasure specifically because the consumer maintain a cognitive association between guilt and pleasure, which is to say that when we think about guilt, we often think about pleasures that is associated with guilt,” said Kelly Goldsmith SOM ‘09, study co-author and professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Goldsmith worked on the study with Dhar when she was a doctoral candidate at Yale.

Both Dhar and Goldsmith said that the findings have implications for the way firms market indulgent items.

While some companies encourage consumers to buy indulgent items by minimizing the feelings of guilt associated with purchase, this finding suggests that companies should do the opposite.

“If you have an online dating website and you want to provide consumers online with an experience that is maximally pleasurable, we would argue that letting them feel a little bit guilty and a little bit naughty searching around on those online ads is perfectly OK,” Goldsmith said.

The inspiration for the study on guilt arose anecdotally, when one of the administrative assistants at the School of Management complained how difficult it was to adhere to her diet when

Obesity epidemic ‘simple’ to defeat

BY MICHELLE HACKMAN STAFF REPORTER This summer, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed banning the sale of large sodas in New York City.

This new policy, intended to limit access to products that are widely thought to contribute to obesity, sparked a national conversation about the ban’s effectiveness. The News sat down with Dr. David Katz, a professor of preventive medicine at Yale Medical School and an expert on

obesity, to discuss the ban and other ways to fight the obesity epidemic.

Q

. You are a doctor in the field of preventive medicine. Can you define “preventive medicine” for our readers?

A

. As the name suggests, preventive medicine is about identifying and changing vulnerability so disease is avoided rather than treated whenever possible. The serious chronic diseases that plague our

society, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer, have known risk factors, and long timelines. Fully 80 percent of all chronic disease could be prevented just by avoiding tobacco, eating well and being physically active. Preventive medicine is a field dedicated to turning what we know about disease prevention into what we do at both the individual and societal levels.

You wrote in a 2006 paper pubQ.lished in the Harvard Health Pol-

icy Review, “In the United States, obesity is not only an epidemic, but arguably the gravest and most poorly controlled public health threat of our time.” What made you come to that conclusion?

A

. The epidemiology showing the relentless advance of obesity prevalence over recent years and decades is perfectly clear. As for the effects, obesity is a major risk factor for the diseases that are, in turn, the leading causes of death in our coun-

try: heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes. So it’s a pretty straightforward tale.

are Americans so suscepti. I am ambivalent. I have not had Q.bleWhyto obesity?

Does it have more Aa soda in 35 years, and consider to do with the food industry or our exercise habits?

A

. It’s both. We eat too much of all the wrong foods and do too little. If we had to pick one, diet is the more important factor for weight control per se, although both are comparably important to health.

Everything about “modern” living that makes it modern — from highly processed food to labor-saving technology — contributes to the perfect storm of “obesogenic” factors in our society.

Are there ways that we think Q.about obesity that perpetuate the

CREATIVE COMMONS

David Katz, an expert on obesity, believes that banning soda is not necessarily the right way to go about reducing obesity and consumption of sugary beverages.

Q

. What is your take on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s large soda ban proposal in New York?

such beverages chemistry experiments in a cup. Nobody needs them!

And the sizes are ridiculous. But people do not like being told what to do, and that strategy can backfire badly. It empowers those who rail against the “nanny state,” and who contend that the government wants to tell us all how to live our lives and what we can have for breakfast. If our proposals inspire strong enough resistance, we can actually go backward instead of forward. So, while I support what Mayor Bloomberg is trying to do, I am not convinced this is the best way to get it done.

problem?

Do you think a tax would be more Q.effective than a ban?

A

A

. Obesity in the United States is a genuine crisis, taking years from life, and life from years. We don’t take it seriously enough because it is a calamity in slow motion. If a natural disaster caused this much damage, it would rank among the worst of all time. We bog down in debates about whether this is a matter of personal responsibility or public policy, instead of accepting it is both and doing all we can to put an end to the crisis. We also act as if obesity is complex and needs endless research into causes. While it will not be easy to fix, it is simple: we eat too much, and do too little. When the food supply was more wholesome and close to nature and calories not so abundant, and when everybody did physical work every day, obesity was almost nonexistent. This is not rocket science.

. No one knows, since there has been no direct comparison of the two strategies. In my opinion, we should regulate food marketing to children; provide clear, unambiguous, at-a-glance nutrition information about all products to empower consumers; and provide financial incentives to choose more nutritious foods. I favor these approaches over either a tax or a ban.

say that the soda ban Q.willCritics adversely affect people of

lower socioeconomic status because healthier foods are more expensive.

How would you respond to this criticism?

A

. First, anyone who is thirsty and can’t afford soda is at liberty to drink water. There is no inalienable right to drink sugar-sweetened beverages. And people who can’t afford

chocolate tasted so good, Goldsmith said. While people generally believe that people enjoy experiences less when plagued by feelings of guilt, Goldsmith said she was intrigued by the possibility of a reverse relationship.

Juliano Laran, an assistant professor of marketing at the School of Business Administration at the University of Miami who was not involved in the study, said that the finding is “an amazing piece of research,” in part because it is one of the few to show that a negative emotion like guilt can have a positive effect.

While the study on guilt looked at the influence of the emotion on pleasure, the paper on perception of similarity probed the connection between small variations in products and, ultimately, the consumers’ willingness to purchase the items.

In one part of the study, subjects were asked to rate the similarity of two types of tea. In one condition, the products had equal prices, while in another, the prices were slightly different. The team found that individuals rated the teas as seeming more similar when the prices were different.

Nathan Novemsky, study co-author and professor of marketing at the Yale School of Management, said people sense more difference as overall simi-

University of Pennsylvania, said that he would like to see the research team explore what other attributes, apart from price, apply to the phenomenon.

He said that he suspects small differences in quantitative attributes will have more of an effect on global perceptions of similarity than manipulations of qualitative components. “[The] difference between blue and red is not the same as between $1.50 and $1.60,” he said. “It will be nice to see them expand it later.”

Dhar said the studies on guilt and similarity suggest that for those interested in knowing consumers’ preferences, asking the buyers themselves may be misleading.

Indeed, asking consumers to describe how they would respond to certain situations is the most common way for firms to conduct consumer research, Dhar said, but these studies contribute to a growing body of research questioning that method.

“People don’t necessarily have proper intuitions about how they would behave in a certain situation,” he said.

Dhar is the director and co-founder of the Center for Consumer Insights at the Yale School of Management.

larity because identical characteristics, like equal price, drop out of consideration and consumers are left to focus on the more salient differences, like tea flavor, that remain.

“When you are focused on an attribute that is actually quite similar like $3.68 verses $3.73 for price, you start thinking, ‘Well these teas are kind of similar,’” Novemsky said. “The similarity of price bleeds over to a global similarity between the two items.”

While the finding is surprising and interesting on theoretical grounds, it becomes important in practice when extended to purchase incidence, Novemsky said. Dhar had found in a previous study that when individuals perceive two items as more similar, they are more likely to purchase one because of decreased anticipated “buyer’s remorse,” according to Novemsky.

Indeed, Novemsky and Dhar found in the study that slightly varied prices did make individuals less likely to defer purchase.

Companies have historically believed that pricing similar items at the same price makes it easier for consumers to chose which one to buy, Novemsky said, and the study suggests that this intuition is mistaken.

Gal Zauberman, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the

Contact DAN WEINER at daniel.weiner@yale.edu .

CREATIVE COMMONS

Would you enjoy this chocolate more if you felt guilty about eating it? A new Yale study suggests you might.

Study links stress, brain shrinkage soda certainly can’t afford the endocrinologist to treat their diabetes. As for more nutritious food being more expensive, it is in part an urban legend. It’s true sometimes, but often the problem is that people don’t know how to identify the more nutritious food that isn’t more expensive.

What are some solutions you Q.propose?

A

. We need physical activity to populate our daily routines once again. We need healthful foods in reasonable quantities to constitute our diets once again. We need time for food preparation. We need to sleep better and manage stress so that we have the energy and equanimity to eat well and exercise. But there are problems with [this] “fix everything” platform, no matter how defensible it may be.

First, no one is in charge of everything: food marketing, farm subsidies, sin taxes, school programming, school food, nutrition labeling, work-site wellness, transportation, and so on. And since no one is in charge of everything, calls to fix everything have the potential to lead nowhere, because everyone assumes someone else should get it all done.

And second, even if we can figure out where the buck should stop, fixing everything can be quite overwhelming. And when we feel overwhelmed, we may not even bother to try. That tends to happen at the individual level, where people who don’t feel they can succeed at eating well or being active simply abandon the effort. But it can also play out at the level of policy, where if doing it all is out of the question, the alternative all too often is doing nothing.

Contact MICHELLE HACKMAN at michelle.hackman@yale.edu .

BY ROBERT PECK STAFF REPORTER As if you needed yet another reason to get through shopping period as quickly as you can, a team of Yale researchers have discovered a cognitive mechanism that can cause stress to shrink the human brain.

The study, led by postdoctoral researcher Hyo Jung Kang, found that a type of genetic switch called a “transcription factor” can repress the expression of certain genes necessary for connections between brain cells, or synapses, to form properly. Without these connections, a loss of brain mass in the prefrontal cortex can occur, since cells cannot properly grow without the expression of the gene. The study found that the transcription factor in question, GATA1, is activated in conjunction with stress and feelings of depression.

“We wanted to test the idea that stress causes a loss of brain synapses in humans,” Ronald Duman, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and senior author of the study, said. “We show that circuits normally involved in emotion, as well as cognition, are disrupted when this single transcription factor is activated.”

Duman said that researchers based this new study on previous research that had been conducted on rodent models. He said these tests showed chronic stress could cause atrophy of neurons in brain regions that control emotion, mood and cognition, and that this helped the team to identify the genes that were altered in a depressed subject’s brain.

To isolate the genes involved in synaptic connections, the researchers examined the entire genome to find the genes whose expression was affected by the transcription factor in question.

YALE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS AND COMMUNICATIONS

Yale researchers have found that stress can interfere with the formation of synapses, leading to a loss of brain mass.

Once the brain regions in question were identified, Duman said, the team collected samples for analysis. In this case, samples of brain tissue from deceased depression and chronic stress sufferers were examined.

Duman said the study’s findings demonstrate atrophy of synaptic connections in human depression for the first time, consistent with the rodent studies. The results also show that GATA1 underlies the effects of depression and stress on synaptic atrophy, he said. “[The study’s results] identify specific synapse related genes that are altered in depression,” Duman said.

Duman added that linking neural atrophy to depression could mean treatments that reverse the atrophy of neurons or that increase synaptic connections may be useful antidepressant measures.

University of Michigan associate psychiatry professor Bruno Giordani said the study could be useful for scientists trying to understand not just stress, but other conditions as well. He said that previous research in the field shows connections between stress and afflictions such as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and that this new study could prove useful in identifying those at greater risk for such issues later in life.

Matthew Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth and the executive director of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, said further study of GATA1 could help to treat PTSD as well.

“This is an extremely important finding,” Friedman said. “Identifying how a single transcription factor, induced by depression or stress, can disrupt synaptic connections will focus future research on mechanisms that reverse this process.”

The study was published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine on Aug. 12.

Contact ROBERT PECK at robert.peck@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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T Dow Jones 13,200.00, -0.28% NASDAQ 2,778.00, -0.23%

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Chicago teachers strike in bitter contract dispute

BY DON BABWIN AND SOPHIA TAREEN ASSOCIATED PRESS CHICAGO — For the first time in a quarter century, Chicago teachers walked out of the classroom Monday, taking a bitter contract dispute over evaluations and job security to the streets of the nation’s third-largest city — and to a national audience — less than a week after most schools opened for fall.

The walkout forced hundreds of thousands of parents to scramble for a place to send idle children and created an unwelcome political distraction for Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

In a year when labor unions have been losing ground nationwide, the implications were sure to extend far beyond Chicago, particularly for districts engaged in similar debates.

The two sides resumed negotiations Monday but failed to reach a settlement, meaning the strike will extend into at least a second day. Chicago School Board President David Vitale told reporters that board and union negotiators did not even get around to bargaining on the two biggest issues.

“This is a long-term battle that everyone’s going to watch,” said Eric Hanuskek, a senior fellow in education at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. “Other teachers unions in the United States are wondering if they should follow suit.”

The union had vowed to strike Monday if there was no agreement on a new contract, even though the district had offered a 16 percent raise over four years and the two sides had essentially agreed on a longer school day. With an average annual salary of $76,000, Chicago teachers are among the highest-paid in the nation, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

But negotiators were still divided on job security measures and a system for evaluating teachers that hinged in part on students’ standardized test scores.

The strike in a district where the vast majority of students are poor and minority put Chicago at the epi-

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S&P 500 1,422.50, -0.27% 10-yr. Bond 1.68%, +0.02 Euro $1.28, +0.14

Ohio at heart of presidential campaign

BY THOMAS BEAUMONT ASSOCIATED PRESS

SITTHIXAY DITTHAVONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Public school teachers cheer as they march on streets surrounding the Chicago Public Schools district headquarters. center of a struggle between big cities and teachers unions for control of schools.

Emanuel, who has sought major reforms while also confronting the district’s $700 million budget shortfall, acknowledged his own fight with the union, even as he urged a quick resolution.

“Don’t take it out on the kids of Chicago if you have a problem with me,” he told reporters Monday.

As negotiators resumed talks, thousands of teachers and their supporters took over several downtown streets during the Monday evening rush. Police secured several blocks

around district headquarters as the crowds marched and chanted.

The protesters planned to rally through the evening at an event that resembled a family street fair. Balloons, American flags and homemade signs hung above the crowd.

Teacher Kimberly Crawford said she was most concerned about issues such as class size and the lack of air conditioning.

“It’s not just about the raise,” she said. “I’ve worked without a raise for two years.”

The strike quickly became part of the presidential campaign. Republican candidate Mitt Romney said

teachers were turning their backs on students and Obama was siding with the striking teachers in his hometown.

Obama’s top spokesman said the president has not taken sides but is urging both the sides to settle quickly.

Emanuel, who just agreed to take a larger role in fundraising for Obama’s re-election, dismissed Romney’s comments as “lip service.”

But one labor expert said that a major strike unfolding in the shadow of the November election could only hurt a president who desperately needs the votes of workers, including teachers, in battleground states.

MANSFIELD, Ohio — It’s all about Ohio, again.

The economy has improved here, and so has President Barack Obama’s standing, putting pressure on Republican Mitt Romney in a state critical to his presidential hopes.

No Republican has won the White House without winning Ohio, and Romney hopes to catch Obama here by slashing at his jobs record in working-class regions.

“America doesn’t have to have the long face it has had under this president,” the Republican shouted Monday to a cheering audience in hard-scrabble Mansfield, just weeks after Obama visited. “We can get America rolling again, growing again.”

In a sign of the state’s importance, hardly a week goes without the candidates appearing in Ohio. Same goes for their running mates; Republican Paul Ryan was campaigning in the Appalachian southeast Wednesday, following a similar weekend trip by Vice President Joe Biden, who is to return to the state Wednesday.

Less than two months from Election Day, both parties say their internal campaign polling shows Obama with a narrow lead in Ohio, a Midwestern state that offers 18 Electoral College votes and has played an important role in determining every recent White House race.

Numbers tell the story of the high stakes and, perhaps, show why Obama has been able to maintain an edge - and why Romney remains within striking distance.

The candidates and supportive outside groups have spent a stunning $112 million on TV advertising in the state - one-sixth the total spent nationwide. And Obama and groups that support him have been outspending Romney and Republican-leaning independent groups here all summer, outpacing the GOP $2 million to $1 million last week alone. That’s despite Romney having tapped into his general election bank account last week to boost his ads here.

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 11

WORLD

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS HAMID KARZAI Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, will step down in 2014, 13 years after he took office. According to The New York Times, Karzai is “charming, urbane,” and “favors flowing capes,” and his government is considered by many to be among the world’s most corrupt.

Al Qaida’s No. 2 in Yemen killed in airstrike

BY AHMED AL-HAJ AND LOLITA BALDOR ASSOCIATED PRESS SANAA, Yemen — An airstrike killed al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader in Yemen along with six others traveling with him in one car on Monday, U.S. and Yemeni officials said, a major breakthrough for U.S.-backed efforts to cripple the group in the impoverished Arab nation.

Saeed al-Shihri, a Saudi national who fought in Afghanistan and spent six years in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, was killed by a missile after leaving a house in the southern province of Hadramawt, according to Yemeni military officials. They said the missile was believed to have been fired by a U.S.-operated, unmanned drone aircraft.

Two senior U.S. officials confirmed al-Shihri’s death but could not confirm any U.S. involvement in the airstrike. The U.S. doesn’t usually comment on such attacks although it has used drones in the past to go after alQaida members in Yemen, which is considered a crucial battleground with the terror network.

Yemeni military officials said that a local forensics team had identified al-Shihri’s body with the help of U.S. forensics experts on the ground. The U.S.

and Yemeni military officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release the information to the media.

Late Monday, after speculation surfaced that the attack was carried by a U.S. drone, Yemen’s Defense Ministry issued a statement saying al-Shihri and six companions were killed during an operation by Yemeni armed forces in Wadi Hadramawt, but it did not elaborate on how they were killed.

Yemeni military officials said they had believed the United States was behind the operation because their own army does not the capacity to carry out precise aerial attacks and because Yemeni intelligence gathering capabilities on al-Shihri’s movements were limited.

A brief Defense Ministry statement sent to Yemeni reporters on their mobile phones earlier in the day only said that an attack had targeted the militants. It did not specify who carried out the attack or when it took place.

Al-Shihri’s death is a major blow to al-Qaida’s Yemen branch, which is seen as the world’s most active, planning and carrying out attacks against targets on and outside U.S. territory. The nation sits on the southern tip of the Arabian Pen-

insula and is on the doorstep of Saudi Arabia and fellow oil-producing nations of the Gulf and lies on strategic sea routes leading to the Suez Canal.

The group formally known as Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula took advantage of the political vacuum during unrest inspired by the Arab Spring last year to take control of large swaths of land in the south. But the Yemeni military has launched a broad U.S.-backed offensive and driven the militants from several towns.

After leaving Guantanamo in 2007, al-Shihri, who is believed to be in his late 30s, went through Saudi Arabia’s famous “rehabilitation” institutes, an indoctrination program that is designed to replace what authorities in Saudi Arabia see as militant ideology with religious moderation.

But he headed south to Yemen upon release and became deputy to Nasser al-Wahishi, the leader of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Al-Wahishi is a Yemeni who once served as Osama bin Laden’s personal aide in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaida in Yemen has been linked to several attempted attacks on U.S. targets, including the foiled Christmas Day 2009 bombing of an airliner over Detroit and explosives-laden

parcels intercepted aboard cargo flights last year.

Last year, a high-profile U.S. drone strike killed U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been linked to the planning and execution of several attacks targeting U.S. and Western interests, including the attempt to down a Detroit-bound airliner in 2009 and the plot to bomb cargo planes in 2010.

Unlike other al-Qaida branches, the network’s militants in Yemen have gone beyond the concept of planting sleeper cells and actively sought to gain a territorial foothold in lawless areas, mainly in the south of Yemen, before they were pushed back by U.S.-backed Yemeni government forces after months of intermittent battles. The fighting has killed hundreds of Yemeni soldiers.

The Yemen-based militants have struck Western targets in the area twice in the past 12 years.

In 2000, they bombed the USS Cole destroyer in Aden harbor, killing 17 sailors. Two years later, they struck a French oil tanker, also off Yemen.

U.S. drone strikes have intensified in Yemen in recent months, killing several key al-Qaida operatives, including Samir Khan, an al-Qaida propagandist who was killed in a drone strike last year.

U.S., Afghans locked in dispute over detainees

BY AMIR SHAH AND DEN RIECHMANN ASSOCIATED PRESS BAGRAM, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai welcomed Monday’s handover of the main Americanrun prison to Afghan forces as a victory for Afghan sovereignty, though he and U.S. officials remain locked in a dispute over the fate of hundreds of Taliban and terror suspects behind bars.

The United States is withholding the transfer of scores of inmates, reportedly out of concern that Afghan authorities may simply let some detainees go and no longer hold dangerous prisoners without charge.

American irritation was apparent at the ceremony at the prison, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Kabul.

No higher ranking American officers attended, although the Afghan government sent its defense minister, army chief of staff and other officials.

Karzai also did not attend, though he released a statement calling the handover a “very big step regarding the sovereignty of Afghanistan.”

“Now, the Bagram prison is converted to one of Afghanistan’s regular prisons where the innocents will be freed and the rest of the prisoners will be sentenced according to the laws of Afghanistan,” the statement said.

The more than 2,000 Afghan military policemen now at the prison said the inmates were pleased to be guarded by Afghans.

“We are Afghan and they are Afghan. They are Muslim.

We are Muslim,” said Ashna Gul, a military policeman from Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. “We can see each other through the steel windows. Sometimes we are laughing and joking with the prisoners and they are happy with our guys.”

Firoz Khan, another military policeman from Nangarhar, said some of the inmates ask him to get them more soap and shampoo.

“We sympathize with them because they are prisoners and they are away from their families,” Khan said.

Hours after the handover ceremony, a suicide attack killed 15 people and wounded 25 others in the northern city of Kunduz. The bombing was a stark reminder that insurgents continue their fight against Afghan and U.S.led coalition troops and that many detainees at the prison are suspected of organizing such attacks.

The U.S. began detention operations at Bagram Air Field in early 2002. For several years, prisoners were kept at a former Soviet aircraft machine plant converted into a lockup. In 2009, the U.S. opened a new detention facility next door. The number of detainees incarcerated at the prison, now called the Parwan Detention Facility, has swelled from about 1,100 in September 2010 to 3,110 in the spring of this year.

The prison has been the focus of controversy in the past but never had the notoriety of the prisons at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Had al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden been captured instead of killed, CIA Director Leon Panetta said he would have been taken to Bagram first, then probably to Guantanamo Bay. Earlier this year, the prison gained unwanted attention when hundreds of Qurans and other religious materials were taken from its library and sent to a burn pit at the military base. The event triggered scores of deadly antiAmerican protests across Afghanistan. More than 30 Afghans and six U.S. soldiers were killed during the violent demonstrations. Karzai said Qurans would never have

been burned if Afghans had been in control of the prison then.

Karzai and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding about the future of the detention facility on March 9, following tense negotiations that frequently stalled.

Since then, the U.S. has transferred 3,082 detainees to Afghan control, according to Afghan Army Gen. Ghulam Farouk, who now heads the prison. He said Monday that the U.S. was in the process of transferring the remaining 30 inmates picked up before the memorandum was signed plus another 600 captured after the signing.

We are Afghan and they are Afghan. They are Muslim. We are Muslim. We can see them through the steel windows.

ASHNA GUL Military policeman, Nangarhar, Afghanistan But a few weeks ago, the U.S. stopped all transfers.

“Some 99 percent of the detainees captured before 9 March have already been transferred to Afghan authority, but we have paused the transfer of the remaining detainees until our concerns are met,” said Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition.

Graybeal would not describe the concerns, but a report released last week by the New York-based Open Society Foundations said the rift was over whether the Afghans will have a so-called “internment” system that allows some detainees to be held without charge or trial.

The U.S. has been holding detainees in internment at Bagram for years.

Although the Afghan government agreed to embrace an internment system by signing the accord in March, some top Afghan officials and legal experts contend it violates the Afghan constitution, the report said.

Moreover, Karzai himself is opposed to administrative detention, according to the report.

The U.S. is now worried that the Afghan government will discontinue internment and either release dangerous detainees or forward their cases to the loosely run Afghan judicial system, which is tainted by corruption and secrecy, the group said.

“There are concerns on the U.S. side about division in the Afghan government over internment and that it is not constitutional,” said Rachel Reid, a senior policy adviser on Afghanistan for the Open Society Foundations. “The basic concern is that if they don’t have internment, they will be released.”

On the flip side of the legal issue, some Afghan legal experts are worried about Afghan officials abusing any authority to hold detainees without trial.

“Consider the fact that even our regular laws are ignored by powerful people,” said Abdul Qawi Afzali of the Legal Aid Organization Afghanistan. “What will happen when you give them the actual, legal power to detain people like this law does?”

Panetta, the Pentagon chief, spoke with Karzai by phone Monday and “expressed a shared commitment to implement the terms of the memorandum of understanding on detention operations,” said his press secretary, George Little. He said the phone call was cordial.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

AROUND THE IVIES

“It is … happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.” SAMUEL JOHNSON WRITER

T H E H A R VA R D C R I M S O N

T H E C O R N E L L D A I LY S U N

Harvard could face student lawsuits from cheating probe

Medical amnesty policy expanded to include drug emergencies

BY NATHALIE MIRAVAL AND REBECCA ROBBINS STAFF WRITERS After Harvard issues verdicts to the roughly 125 undergraduates being investigated for academic dishonesty in Government 1310: “Introduction to Congress,” several lawyers predict that the University could face a slew of lawsuits from students facing punishment.

One student currently under investigation said he may consider suing Harvard, depending on the outcome of his case. He said that he has already contacted a lawyer and has spoken to about ten others accused of academic dishonesty who have done the same.

“Harvard has created this war between the students and the fricking school, and this is a war that I am willing and very eager to fight,“ said the student, who was granted anonymity by The Crimson because he did not want it known that he is accused of cheating.

Lawyers and experts who specialize in higher education law said they expect that any students who choose to sue the University are most likely to claim that the Administrative Board did not properly follow its procedures as listed in the student handbook during the Government 1310 investigation.

These lawsuits could have merit if Harvard “substantially” deviates from its delineated processes during the investigation, said Peter F. Lake ’81, a professor at Stetson University College of Law who specializes in higher education law. While administrative mistakes, such as misnumbered pages in procedural documents, will

be unlikely to generate successful lawsuits, he said, students could have a valid legal case if HARVARD administrators make more egregious errors, such as the denial of promised hearings.

Lake added that he thinks problems could arise from the unusually high volume of students implicated in the investigation.

Harvard has created this war between the students and the fricking school, and this is a war that I am willing and very eager to fight.

ANONYMOUS HARVARD STUDENT One of 125 undergraduates investigated for academic dishonesty “Particularly with 125 matters to resolve, it takes a lot of diligence to make sure that [all of the students] get what they’re supposed to get,” Lake said. “It gets that much more likely that you’re going to make a mistake.”

Harvard could also face a number of lawsuits from punished students claiming that their future job prospects have been jeopardized, said Michael R. Schneider, a Boston lawyer who has acted as a consultant for students in the Fac-

ulty of Arts and Sciences, Medical School, and Law School facing Ad Board processes.

Potential punishments issued at the conclusion of the investigation, such as withdrawal, will always appear on students’ transcripts and may impact their likelihood of being accepted at graduate schools or hired for a job.

“I think the University needs to realize that it is really making it difficult for some really solid students who may have had one lapse in their academic careers,” Schneider said.

Students who say they have lost jobs or other opportunities as a result of being falsely accused of plagiarism could also sue the University for intentional or negligent infliction of emotional distress, Boston education lawyer Laura E. Gillis said.

But it will be difficult to prove that the University was sloppy in carrying out its investigation, or that Harvard intentionally caused emotional harm, Schneider said.

Experts interviewed for this article also said that Harvard can take preventative measures while the investigation is still ongoing to defend itself from these possible suits.

In response to these possible lawsuits, the University should be careful to draw a clear line separating collaboration from cheating, said Robert Holmes, president of the Association for Student Conduct Administrators.

“There’s a difference between similar answers and copied answers,” Holmes said.

The Ad Board should also ensure that each student is investigated and prosecuted as an individual, Schneider said.

BY JOSEPH NICZKY STAFF WRITER The University has revised its medical amnesty protocol to protect students from action by the Judicial Administrator if they call 911 to report a drug overdose while on campus.

The previous policy, which was implemented in 2002, only granted amnesty to students who called concerning alcohol-related emergencies.

The Good Samaritan Protocol, which went into effect on July 1, brings Cornell’s policy in line with New York State’s Good Samaritan Law, which went into effect last September, according to Deborah Lewis, alcohol projects coordinator at Gannett Health Services. The state law, passed in 2011, protects anyone calling to report a drug or alcohol-related emergency from underage drinking charges and other legal ramifications.

“One of our changes is just this name change to bring it in parallel with the New York State law,” Lewis said. “The other piece around this is it’s an expansion of what’s covered under amnesty.”

Prior to the implementation of Cornell’s new policy in July, students on campus could have still faced punishment from the judicial administrator, but students off campus were out of the J.A.’s reach. Students both on and off campus already received amnesty when calling about an alcohol-related emergency and will continue to do so under Cornell’s new policy.

“The purpose of the Good Samaritan Law is to encouragepeople, no matter who they are or where they are in New York State, to call for help for both alcohol and drug emergencies without [worrying] about legal consequences,” said Sharon Dittman, associate director for community relations for Gannett. “It was important to make Cornell’s policy, which relates to the campus code of conduct and applies on campus, parallel to the new law.”

Cornell’s revised medical amnesty protocol may also eliminate the confusion that students experienced in the past, according to Lewis.

She said that several students told Gannett officials they were confused by the previous policy because whether or not it protected students depended on whether they were on or off cam-

pus when they made the emergency call and the type of emergency they were calling to report.

Interfraternity Council President Chris Sanders ’13 added that the previous policy “wasn’t very CORNELL well written.”

“There were a lot of questions of what medical amnesty actually entailed [and] what were the limitations of the policy,” Sanders said.

The purpose of the policy change is to reduce this confusion, Dittman said.

“The average person who’s calling for help for someone else won’t necessarily know or be able to say ‘alcohol only, no drugs on board,’ or ‘drugs only, no alcohol on board,’” she said.

“What we all want is, when someone is in trouble, that there be no hesitation to get help and no delay due to worrying whether it’s safe to call for this but not that.”

Sanders agreed that the revision was necessary to ensure that students are not afraid to call for emergency services when they need help.

“If it’s removing a barrier that might be prohibiting a person from calling, it’s absolutely necessary,” he said. “I think the most important thing is emphasizing the importance of calling and that you’re doing the right thing by calling.”

While the new medical amnesty policy went into place this summer, Cornell had been considering changing its medical amnesty policy since before the state law was passed, according to Lewis.

“Having the New York State law had pushed us to take action, but we really started the review in part because we had just celebrated our tenth anniversary of having amnesty, and we wanted to take a look at ‘Is this protocol still serving the way we need it to be serving? Is it clear?’” she said, adding that “we were certainly hearing from students that it was not clear.”

The new policy change means that not only does Cornell’s medical amnesty policy now match the state’s law, but also that it matches the policies of other local colleges, including Ithaca College and Tompkins-Cortland Community College, Lewis said.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS TOM BRADY Brady finished the New England Patriots’ game against the Tennessee Titans on Sunday with both a win and a nosejob. The quarterback had his nose bloodied after being sacked, and was unsure Monday whether it was broken. He still managed two touchdown passses in the game.

Swimming feature jump hed M. SWIMMING FROM PAGE 14 at feeling and adjusting to the flow of the water.

The Yale men’s swim team, whose members average five feet 11 inches — shorter than their Ivy rivals — can look to the professional swimming circuit for strategies to succeed.

South Korea’s Park Tae Hwan, for example, won the gold for the 400m freestyle event at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the silver in the 400m freestyle in London this summer. Park stands 6 feet tall, 3.6 inches below the Olympic average, and his body frame is smaller and less powerful than rivals such as U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte and Sun Yang of China. Despite his size challenges, Park has developed his own distinct style of swimming that helped propel him to his medal-winning records.

“Park lacked elasticity whereas he demonstrated strengths in his ability to react quickly. Tall and big players like Michael Phelps tend to be very powerful and rely very much on their power,” Roh Min Sang, Park’s head coach during the Beijing Olympics, told the News in an interview in Korean in August.

Park’s first step to beating his competition was to discover the type of race that best suited him and then to analyze his rivals, such as Michael Phelps, in order to take advantage of Phelps’ weaknesses and emulate his strengths given Park’s smaller size, Rho said. Although Park has yet to best Phelps in a race, he surpassed rival Lochte in London.

Because he cannot reach as far, Park must use one more stroke to cross the finish line than his rivals, though it takes him less time to make each stroke. This difference is less pronounced in longer events that require more strokes in total, so short swimmers like Park do not normally attempt the 50-meter freestyle.

But even in longer events, arm length can play a decisive role. During the London Olympics, although Park was faster than Sun Yang, who stands 6 feet 5 inches, both players recorded the last touch at the same time because Yang could reach farther. Roh stressed that short swimmers can overcome this disadvantage if they push through the last stroke and stay focused on moving their arms faster than their rivals until the very end.

“It was great to see him tie China’s Sun Yang,” freestyler Pat Killian ’14 said.

“Sun is about six inches taller than him.

Park’s pretty short. They were an odd pair on the medal stand.”

Park enhanced his ability to breathe on both sides of the water in order to observe all eight lanes with both eyes.

Through practice, he was able to better understand the flow of the water and how to react to it.

Park’s technique of judging the movement of the water is also important for the Bulldogs.

While bigger players will rely heavily on their strength and size, I am able to compete by making fewer technical errors while racing.

ANDREW HEYMANN ’15 Men’s swimming Breast stroke swimmer Danny McDermott ’14 said a swimmer’s “feel” for the water can be a decisive factor in his race, and the Elis focus on this factor in training.

“Some people have a natural technique that allows them to efficiently pull more water than others, but it can be perfected through conscious effort,” he said.

Roh added that maintaining balance is a crucial weapon for short swimmers such as Park.

Like Park, Killian believes that balance is key and that a swimmer should know his or her body reacts in the water.

“I would say that swimming is largely a game of balance, which is keeping oneself level in the water, and to master that, each swimmer has to deal with his or her own body, and that develops individual technique,” Killian said.

Whereas the Bulldogs might look up to Park, the Korean himself looked to Ian Thorpe for techniques to overcome his physical advantages. But Rho and members of Yale’s swim team interviewed all said each swimmer must assess his own physical strengths and weaknesses.

The Elis carefully consider which events they should compete in given their statures, and analyze body movements to maximize their power.

“I have formed my particular technique through countless hours of training. My team at home did a lot of drilling and sculling, both of which help isolate particular body movements and make them more efficient,” McDermott said.

“Breaststroke is arguably the most technically difficult stroke, and since I am smaller than most of my teammates and competitors both in height and weight, I naturally gravitated towards a stroke that requires more technique than brute strength.”

Captain Jared Lovett ’13 said physical proportions might be just as important as height in determining a swimmer’s potential. An ideal swimmer’s body is a long torso, shorter legs, longer arms, big hands, and lean but not bulky muscle, he said.

“Personally, I was lucky enough to have long arms, with my wingspan being longer than my height, and a long torso relative to my height,” Lovett said.

He added that height definitely helps, but it is not a limiting factor in determining one’s speed in the water.

Besides having a clear understanding of their physical limitations, the Elis looked to swimmers like Park and developed their own tricks to compensate for these drawbacks.

“I do have a lot of respect for Park. He is well known for having a nearly “perfect freestyle stroke,” Lovett said. “He is also a relatively short Olympic swimming medalist, so his technique has to be perfect if he wants to keep pace with the taller players, and actually finishes his races really fast,” he added.

Heymann ensures he is able to maintain a faster stroke throughout his race by practicing solid technique when fatigued.

“Since I am at a size disadvantage, I focus on efficiency in the water,” Heymann said. “While bigger players will rely heavily on their strength and size, I am able to compete by making fewer technical errors while racing.”

Yale took third in the Ivy League Championships last season.

GRAPHIC 200 M FREESTYLE GOLD MEDALISTS OF THE 21ST CENTURY 6 FEET, 7.5 INCHES

Yannick Agnel 2012, FRA

7 ft.

6 FEET, 5 INCHES

Ian Thorpe 2004, AUS

5 FEET, 11 INCHES

6 ft.

Average Yale men’s swimmer, 2012-’13

6 FEET, 4 INCHES

Pieter van den Hoogenband 2000, NED

6 FEET, 4 INCHES

5 ft.

Michael Phelps 2008, USA

4 ft.

3 ft.

2 ft.

1 ft.

Contact EUGENE JUNG at eugene.jung@yale.edu .

Men’s crew makes change

Goalie battles injuries JACKSON-GIBSON FROM PAGE 14 from her teammates and classmates, saying that their encouragement is “the only reason I can smile every day.”

She said she still plans on retaining an active role within the soccer and track and field teams this year.

“Adele is the hardest-working player I’ve ever seen,” Butwin said. “I know she will be a big part of our success this year, even off the field.”

Before her injury, Jackson-Gibson planned to join a professional soccer

team abroad. While her goals are still possible — about half the members of the United States women’s national team have torn their ACLs — she said she still has to evaluate how far she can push herself after recovering from the injury.

“I will always be an extremely active person,” Jackson-Gibson said. “Once I get better, I’ll be right back at it, trying to get back to where I was before.”

Contact MASON KROLL at mason.kroll@yale.edu .

Murray finally wins Grand Slam with US Open title

BY HOWARD FENDRICH ASSOCIATED PRESS

LINDSAY UNIAT/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Men’s crew was the last collegiate sport that separated the freshmen from other levels of competition.

M. CREW FROM PAGE 14 “The freshman category worked fine,” Card said in an email to the News. “There was less pressure on each freshman to get to a varsity level right away, since they had their own separate category, and they could start their academic career off properly in the fall when so much is new to a freshman.”

Lightweight crew captain William Ferraro ’13 noted that with the new regulation, freshmen are expected to “hit the ground running” and forgo a period of time to transition to college-level rowing. He added that the youngest members of the Bulldogs’

squad have stepped up to the challenge and realize that it is special to be potentially the first freshman ever to race varsity.

But with more rowers in the running to race varsity, the competition for those coveted seats will be stronger.

“We say on our team that under nobody’s seat is a name, and now that freshmen are varsity-eligible the intra-squad competition is going to be that much fiercer,” Ferarro said in an email to the News. “We welcome that competition because we know that it’ll translate to more boat speed.”

David DeVries ’16, a freshman on

the heavyweight crew team, said that all the freshmen are excited with the prospect of competing at varsity level this year. DeVries said he expects the new regulation to heighten unity on the squad and help the rowers push harder in practice.

Last spring, the heavyweight crew varsity boat placed 12th overall in the IRA National Championship, and the lightweight crew varsity boat placed third.

Contact LINDSEY UNIAT at lindsey.uniat@yale.edu .

NEW YORK — His considerable lead, and a chance at history, slipping away, Andy Murray dug deep for stamina and mental strength, outlasting Novak Djokovic in a thrilling five-set U.S. Open final Monday.

It had been 76 years since a British man won a Grand Slam singles championship and, at least as far as Murray was concerned, it was well worth the wait.

Ending a nation’s long drought, and snapping his own four-final skid in majors, Murray finally pulled through with everything at stake on a Grand Slam stage, shrugging off defending champion Djokovic’s comeback bid to win 7-6 (10), 7-5, 2-6, 3-6, 6-2.

“Novak is so, so strong. He fights until the end in every single match,” Murray said. “I don’t know how I managed to come through in the end.”

Yes, Murray already showed he could come up big by winning the gold medal in front of a home crowd at the London Olympics last month. But this was different. This was a Grand Slam tournament, the standard universally used to measure tennis greatness - and the

287th since Britain’s Fred Perry won the 1936 U.S. Championships, as the event was known back then.

Murray vs. Djokovic was a test of will as much as skill, lasting 4 hours, 54 minutes, tying the record for longest U.S. Open final. The first-set tiebreaker’s 22 points set a tournament mark.

They repeatedly produced fantastic, tales-in-themselves points, lasting 10, 20, 30, even 55 - yes, 55! - strokes, counting the serve. The crowd gave a standing ovation to salute one majestic, 30-stroke point in the fourth set that ended with Murray’s forehand winner as Djokovic fell to the court, slamming on his left side.

By the end, Djokovic - who had won eight consecutive five-set matches, including in the semifinals (against Murray) and final (against Rafael Nadal) at the Australian Open in January - was the one looking fragile, trying to catch breathers and doing deep knee bends at the baseline to stretch his aching groin muscles. After getting broken to trail 5-2 in the fifth, Djokovic had his legs massaged by a trainer.

“I really tried my best,” Djokovic said.

IF YOU MISSED IT SCORES

MLB Philadelphia 3 Miami 1

MLB Washington 5 N.Y. Mets 1

SPORTS QUICK HITS

WOMEN’S SOCCER TO PLAY ST. PETER’S TONIGHT The women’s soccer team will take on Saint Peter’s at Reese Stadium tonight.

The Bulldogs are coming off a weekend in Chicago, during which they lost to both Loyola and Northwestern. Last year, the Elis defeated Saint Peter’s 4-0.

NFL Baltimore 44 Cincinatti 13

y

WOMEN’S TENNIS FOUR CHOSEN FOR CHAMPIONSHIPS Women’s tennis captain Elizabeth Epstein ’13, as well as teammates Annie Sullivan ’14, Blair Seideman ’14 and Hanna Yu ’15 were all selected for the ITA All-American Championships. The championships will be held from Sept.

29 to Oct. 7 in Palisades, Calif.

MLB Milwaukee 4 Atlanta 1

MLB Oakland 3 L.A. Angels 1

FOR MORE SPORTS CONTENT, VISIT OUR WEB SITE yaledailynews.com/sports

“It’s a step forward for men’s crew, after a century and a half.

STEPHEN GLADSTONE HEAD COACH, HWT CREW YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

In pool, height poses challenge

New rule lets frosh row varsity

BY LINDSEY UNIAT STAFF REPORTER For the first time in the history of the oldest American collegiate sport, freshmen will be permitted to compete at the varsity and junior varsity levels in the upcoming spring crew season.

In June 2012, the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) decided to allow freshmen to compete in the IRA National Championship regatta, held every spring and considered one of the definitive races of collegiate crew. This decision applied only to the national championship, which annually takes place in late May or early June.

Then, when the Ivy League administrators heard of the change, they voted to open freshman eligibility to all levels of varsity competition throughout the entire spring season, including non-championship races, cup races, and the Eastern Sprints championship, according to lightweight crew coach Andy Card.

The new regulation is in effect for both the heavyweight and lightweight crews, and marks the first time since 1852 — when Yale and Harvard first went head-to-head on the water — that freshmen will be able to compete outside of their own race category in the varsity or junior varsity boats.

FLORIAN KOENIGSBERGER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Park Tae Hwan has revolutionized techniques for turning a small body frame to the swimmer’s advantage.

BY EUGENE JUNG STAFF REPORTER In swimming, size matters. But short swimmers are finding strategies to succeed.

Tall swimmers are capable of propelling themselves more quickly

through the water and can reach out farther to cross the finish line.

The average height for an Olympic gold medalist in the men’s 200meter freestyle is 6 feet 4 inches over the past 12 years. But shorter professional swimmers and swimmers at Yale use their ability to

make quicker kick-turns and react faster to changes in the water to overcome height disadvantages.

“Tall swimmers are at an advantage because they have bigger feet to kick with and longer arms, longer levers, to pull with. They arguably have to exert more energy to move

their longer arms and bigger legs,” freestyle and breast stroke swimmer Andrew Heymann ’15 said.

He added that smaller swimmers can overcome size disadvantages because they are more adept

Two-sport athlete Adele Jackson-Gibson ’13 bid an early goodbye to her Yale sports career last week.

After suffering a season-ending injury in the women’s soccer team’s match against Dartmouth last October, goalkeeper Jackson-Gibson came back into action for the first three games of the 2012-’13 season. The dynamics keeper totalled 12 saves and earned a save percentage of .800 during the opening games of the season. But during last week’s match against Sacred Heart, the two-sport athlete tore her ACL when she jumped to make a save and landed hard on her left foot. Jackson-Gibson told the News she will not return to compete in soccer or track and field for the remainder of her time at Yale.

“This is going to be one of the biggest mental challenges of my life so far. Sports have been a major part of my life for so long … I need to find a way to center myself and figure out what else I can bring to the table,” Jackson-Gibson said.

The injury will take eight months to heal, Jackson-Gibson explained, adding that she expects to undergo surgery in October. Jackson-Gibson said she knew the Sept. 4 injury was

serious when the pain did not recede after several minutes. She retired from the rest of the game. Soccer team captain Jenny Butwin ’13 said Jackson-Gibson always worked hard and pushed herself even in non-Ivy League games such as the match against Sacred Heart.

“It was an amazing save,” Butwin said of the play that left Jackson-Gibson injured. “It was a play not any keeper I know would make.

Every shot is a shot she wants to save. We know Adele’s personality is to let nothing by her. She [injured herself] playing the Adele way.”

Jackson-Gibson was recruited to Yale after attending a Yale-Wesleyan soccer camp the summer after her sophomore year of high school.

There, she caught the eye of both head women’s soccer coach Rudy Meredith and Marc Davis, the head sprints coach of the track and field team, who was directing the camp’s warmups. Both Meredith and Davis soon offered her spots on the Bulldog roster.

In track and field, Jackson-Gibson excelled in short sprints and jumps.

After recovering from the fractured humerus she sustained during the game against Darthmouth last year, Jackson-Gibson set a personal record in the long jump. In the meet against Harvard, she won the

“Adele is a person of really incredible character … It’s very sad to see her unable to compete,” Rue said.

Jackson-Gibson mentioned the incredible support she has received SEE JACKSON-GIBSON PAGE 13

SEE M. CREW PAGE 13

SEE M. SWIMMING PAGE 13

YALE ATHLETICS

Adele Jackson-Gibson ’13 has a career save percentage of .808. long jump in a collegiate-best of 5.87 meters.

Women’s track and field team captain Allie Rue ’13 mentioned Jackson-Gibson’s personal drive to get back up and compete in track after her humerus injury.

STAT OF THE DAY 161

WILLIAM FERRARO ’13 Captain, lightweight crew Heavyweight crew coach Stephen Gladstone said that men’s crew was the last collegiate sport to segregate freshmen from upperclassmen in their own competitive division. He added that most collegiate sports used to be structured in this way.

While freshman-only races will still take place at regattas throughout the spring season, the youngest members of the teams will be able to vie for a spot in the varsity or junior varsity boats.

“It’s a step forward for men’s crew, after a century and a half,” Gladstone said. He added that men’s crew has now joined women’s crew and the rest of the NCAA in allowing freshmen to race outside of their own category.

Heavyweight crew captain Jon Morgan ’13 said that the freshman-only division has lasted so long in men’s crew because the sport was the first collegiate sport in the country and is technically not a member of the NCAA. Morgan added that the debate over freshman eligibility has been ongoing in the rowing community and that he sees it as an exciting and positive opportunity for the team to improve.

Gladstone said he expects this “healthy development” to make the team atmosphere a meritocracy, allowing the strongest oarsmen to compete at the highest level. He added that he thought a number of freshmen last year would have be able to compete in the varsity boat, but that the old regulations prevented them from doing so.

Clemens Barth ’15, who rowed in Yale’s freshman eight last year, said he enjoyed getting to know his classmates on the team, but would have liked to opportunity to prove himself amongst the upperclassmen. “[The new regulation] will allow people who have the capability to race in the varsity boats, and it will make room for walkons and give them the opportunity to race,” Gladstone said.

But there may be drawbacks to the new regulation. Card said he liked the former organization of the crew teams with freshmen in their own race categories.

Jackson-Gibson ’13 hangs up jersey

BY MASON KROLL STAFF REPORTER

Now that freshmen are varsityeligible, the intra-squad competition is going to be that much fiercer.

THE NUMBER OF YEARS SINCE YALE MEN’S CREW FIRST FACED HARVARD HEAD-TO-HEAD ON THE WATER. Since then, freshmen have always competed separately from the varsity and junior varsity boats. After a rule change this summer, however, freshmen can compete at all levels.