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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2012 · VOL. CXXXV, NO. 36 · yaledailynews.com
INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING
CLOUDY CLOUDY
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CROSS CAMPUS
GALLERY ROOM DESIGN ACCOMPANIES ART
STARTUP
HONG KONG
SOCCER
Program started by Yale psychiatrist looks to New Haven
REPRESENTATIVE DISCUSSES ECONOMIC GROWTH
Bulldogs fall to Mountain Hawks for third consecutive loss
PAGE 6 CULTURE
PAGE 3 CITY
PAGE 5 NEWS
PAGE 12 SPORTS
Democrats eye Elm City
Shake it up. A 4.6 magnitude earthquake struck Maine yesterday night, sending shockwaves across the entire New England region and Twitterverse. Though some users who had not felt the quake voiced their confusion online, others expressed surprise, wondering whether the earth’s movements could be attributed to abnormally large acorns falling from the sky. According to the United States Geological Survey, moderate shaking could be felt across the Northeast, including in Boston, Hanover and New Haven.
BY KIRSTEN SCHNACKENBERG AND JULIA ZORTHIAN STAFF REPORTERS
Family feud. Pierson College officials announced Tuesday morning that on Sunday nights, students without a Pierson sticker on their ID cards would not be admitted to the dining hall for dinner. Sunday nights are traditionally “family nights,” during which students are encouraged to eat in their own residential colleges. The move follows the new dining restrictions launched by Berkeley College, which limits its dining hall to transfers on Mondays. Third time’s the charm.
The third debate leading up to the Nov. 6 presidential election took place Tuesday night between U.S. President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The debate adopted a town hall format and was the second presidential debate between the two candidates. The third debate, which will focus on foreign policy, will be held in Boca Raton, Fla. Watch your back. Berkeley
College crowned its stealthiest student on Tuesday. Charly Walther ’16 won the college’s annual “Assassins” game, a feat that earned him $60 and a spot in the college’s eternal champions plaque. In an exclusive email interview with the News, Walther dedicated his victory to his mother and Berkeley College Master Marvin Chun. One night at the museum. For art history majors, a recent art heist at a Netherlands museum is bound to cause some headaches. Seven works of art, including pieces by Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet, were stolen from the exhibit Tuesday. Local police said they have secured evidence and are speaking with potential witnesses and looking at security camera footage. Making travel easier. Metro-
North has added 15 weekday and 30 weekend trains to the New Haven Line to give city residents more opportunities to get around town during the winter holiday season.
THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY
1976 The Yale Dramat decides to cancel its production of “Antigone” just two weeks before opening night, citing artistic differences between the play’s director and the Dramat’s Executive Board. Submit tips to Cross Campus
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Search surveys released
tioned to deliver Murphy a victory depending on how many city Democrats turn out to the polls. Murphy, who currently represents the Connecticut’s fifth congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives, has run much
After weeks of open forums, office hours and surveys, Search Committee Student Counselor Brandon Levin ’14 released the complete data about students’ priorities on the qualifications of Yale’s next president. Levin released the results of a survey and three reports outlining the student body’s opinions on the presidential search. Though the three reports — compiled by the Yale College Council, the Graduate Student Assembly and the Graduate and Professional Student Senate — represented the entire student body across all of Yale’s schools, half of the students interviewed said they questioned the influence the reports and surveys will ultimately have on the selection of Yale’s next president. Now that Levin has submitted the results to the Search Committee, his role as student counselor in the remainder of the search process is not clearly defined. Based on the findings of Levin’s fourquestion survey, which received between 769 and 774 responses for each question, students were divided on whether the next president should hold a Yale degree, with 42 percent answering “Yes” and 56 percent answering “It is not important.” Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the next president should come from an academic background, and 88 percent said the next president should have administrative experience. Levin said he will remain available to transmit students’ concerns to the Search Committee, as well as to advise the committee if they request his input, though he said he will not be involved in candidate selec-
SEE ELECTION PAGE 8
SEE SEARCH PAGE 4
SHARON YIN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Yale students wait to vote in the 2011 elections. High voter turnout in New Haven can impact this year’s Senate race.. BY MICHELLE HACKMAN STAFF REPORTER On the night of the Democratic primary election, which he won over former Conn. Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz ’83, U.S. House Rep. Chris Murphy watched results come in at the Omni Hotel in New
Haven — rather than in his home district. The latest polls show Murphy with a small lead over Republican Linda McMahon in the race to replace U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67. New Haven, which has the largest number of registered Democrats in the state, is uniquely posi-
Suit reacts to employment dispute BY CYNTHIA HUA STAFF REPORTER The Title IX retaliation suit filed Friday afternoon by employee Susan Burhans is a common reaction to employment disputes, according to attorneys in the field. Burhans’ suit claims that after she was hired as a Communications and Education Specialist for the Office of the Vice President in 1999 her efforts to bring the University’s alleged Title IX violations to the attention of administrators led to a series of changes to her employment status ending in termination of her current position, effective this November. In 2009, Burhans brought a separate suit against Yale alleging gender-based discrimination by the University after not being granted several promotions she had previously been promised. Several Title IX experts and employment dispute lawyers interviewed said that to win her most recent case, Burhans must prove causality between her “whistle blowing” on issues of sexual misconduct and Yale’s retaliatory actions toward her. “It’s not uncommon at all to see someone lodge a discrimination claim, lose, and lodge a retaliation claim [after the discrimination claim],” said Peter Lake, director for the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University. “It is a little easier to prove a retaliation claim over a discrimination claim.” Patrick Noonan, who represented Yale in the 2009 lawsuit,
said the complaint Burhans initially filed with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities in 2008 was dismissed by the Merit Assessment Review Program due to a lack of evidence. Noonan said that in response, Burhans filed a civil suit in Connecticut State Court, a case that is still pending but parts of which have been dismissed, including the allegation that Yale fosters a “hostile work environment.”
It’s not uncommon at all to see someone lodge a discrimination claim, lose, and lodge a retaliation claim. PETER LAKE Director for the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University Burhans declined to comment Wednesday. Multiple claims from the 2009 complaint are repeated in the 2012 suit, including the allegations that she was discriminated against when forced to interview before a panel of four men and that she was given a new job title without an appropriate increase in compensation. Fair employment cases reemerge as retaliation suits all the time, said Michael Rose, a SEE BURHANS PAGE 8
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Menocal remembered for vivacity BY SOPHIE GOULD AND JULIA ZORTHIAN STAFF REPORTERS María Rosa Menocal, a humanities professor known for her work on medieval Spain whose vivacious presence spearheaded a rapid expansion of the Whitney Humanities Center, died Monday of melanoma. She was 59. A renowned scholar and author, Menocal became a Sterling professor of the humanities in 2005 and served as director of the Whitney Humanities Center from 2001 to 2012, where she launched an effort to rebrand the institution and broaden its influence. She emphasized bringing scholars from all fields, including the sciences, together to share ideas and cultivate a sense of academic community in the Center. Considered a “mother hen” figure by the doctoral students who worked under her, Menocal nurtured an extensive network of friends and mentees with whom she shared her passion for good food, music and scholarship. “She had this ability to understand people that was unique and remarkable,” said Menocal’s husband, R. Crosby Kemper ’74. “Part of it was about work, part about food, but it was ultimately about her sympathy to character.” Born in Cuba in 1953, Menocal left the country at the age of seven with her family as exiles of the Castro Revolution, Kemper said, adding that this “profound childhood experience” shaped the rest of her life. Impassioned by the idea of exile, Menocal lived in Cuba, Philadelphia, New Haven, Cairo, Madrid, Paris and New York, and her research popularized the notion that Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups played equally important roles in molding medieval Spain’s culture. Kemper said Menocal’s identity as an exile helped her form strong relationships with others.
YALE
María Rosa Menocal nurtured students throughout her 11 years at the Whitney Humanities Center and time as professor. “She’s a genius at conversation in both the normal everyday sense and the larger sense, in the cultural sense of conversation across all barriers — cultural, ethnic, relgious, age,” Kemper said. “She was a genius in that, in part because of her very positive sense of exile, her sense that we’re all exiles in one way or another.” Menocal’s former students praised her willingness to take them under her wing, and several said she had motivated them to pursue studies related to medieval Spain. After reading Menocal’s book “The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage,” Lourdes Alvarez GRD ’94 said she was so inspired by the material that she contacted Menocal by phone and eventually decided to apply to Yale. “I hadn’t even applied to Yale, and she was happy to talk on the phone for 45 minutes,” Alvarez said. “This was only the first glimmer of her unbelievable intellectual generosity.” Though she initially commuted to New SEE MENOCAL PAGE 8