SPORTS

VAMPIRE WEEKEND

// ARIANE DE GENNARO

Welcome to Vampire WKND! While we’re unfortunately not the four-person indie-rock band, we are your favorite four-person team of YDN editors excited to present the first WKND spissue of the year!

The Halloween spissue explores the spookiest and silliest parts of the holiday — comprised of pieces from fans and haters alike. Did you know that the term “trick-or-treat” actually comes from Charles M. Shultz’s Peanuts comic strip? Neither did we. Or, did you know that Grove Street Cemetery has its very own sex scandal? Trust us, it’s not as weird as it sounds. Did you know that Hallowoads is actually recognized by the U.S. government as a national holiday? Okay, we made that one up.

Join us for a Nightmare on Elm Street (aka the Hopper dining hall) and read on, if you dare.

Happy haunts, Alex, Ava, Eda, and Jackie

THE LITERARY VIXEN OF GROVE STREET CEMETERY

// BY MIRANDA JEYARETNAM

Down Cedar Avenue in Grove Street Cemetery sits a small, unremarkable gravestone topped with a cross. Its base is inscribed, “In grateful remembrance, this monument is erected by her former pupils.”

Here lies Delia Bacon, who lived from 1811 to 1859. By the time she died, at 48, Delia had held history lectures for women, been embroiled in a controversial romantic scandal and attempted to open Shakespeare’s tomb.

Delia was born into a devout Puritan family as one of six children. Her father, Reverend David Bacon, was a congregational minister from Connecticut who oversaw religious conversions of Native Americans in the Midwest. He went broke when Delia was 6 years old, and the family moved back to Hartford, where her father died immediately. Her older brother, Leonard, graduated from Yale in 1820 where he later taught, in addition to serving as a minister and anti-slavery advocate.

Throughout her adolescence, Delia was plagued with ill health and bad luck, suffering from recurring malaria and almost dying from cholera. Still, she was brilliant. She began teaching at just 15 after being mentored by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and soon after won a short story competition against then-small time writer Edgar Allen Poe.

At the age of 35, Delia met Alexander MacWhorter, who was studying at the Yale Divinity School. He was 23 and fell deeply for Delia. His pursuit of her took him to a spa in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Delia and her friend Catharine Beecher — Harriet’s sister — were partaking in hydropathy. Delia, perhaps as a result of her many illnesses, had been a devoted follower of the water cure, a form of pseudoscientifi c medical treatment popular in the 19th century that used cold water, ice baths and wet towels to treat any and all illnesses.

Catharine and Harriet, under the impression that Delia and Alexander were a couple, spread the news that the two were engaged. Alexander was enraged and humiliated and rejected Delia, claiming that she had essentially stalked him.

Many have attested that Delia was initially aloof and had essentially been worn down by Alexander’s advances in the decades since, yet the case scandalized her. Her brother took Alexander to trial in 1847 for “slander, falsehood and conduct dishonorable to the Christian ministry,” which divided the jury of 23 ministers who ultimately acquitted Alexander. Catharine, too, attempted to restore Delia’s name, publishing a 300-page manuscript in 1850 titled “Truth Stranger Than Fiction: A Narrative of Recent Transactions, Involving Inquiries in Regard to the Principles of Honor, Truth, and Justice, Which Obtain in a Distinguished American University.”

However, their attempts only further humiliated Delia. She left Connecticut, first for Ohio, then to Boston and finally to England, driven to seclusion and near-hysteria. She briefly rejoined The Bostonian Society with the support of Harvard-affiliated women, where she put forth a literary theory that Shakespeare was not one man, but a group of writers led by Sir Francis Bacon.

The idea of Shakespeare as a fraud obsessed her. Delia, who had become friends with and found support from the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, left America for England in 1854 to pursue her belief. The trip had been funded by a friend of Emerson, who later called Delia “a genius, but mad.” While her ideas were commonly dismissed, both Emerson and Hawthorne — who secretly funded the publication of Delia’s book — felt that Delia was one of the greatest Shakespearean scholars.

Huddled in a small room in England, Delia, frail, sick, just 5 years away from death, poured over Shakespeare’s plays and wrote away at her own book unveiling their real authorship — a 682-page tome published in 1857. Convinced that the truth of Shakespeare’s identity lay within his tomb, she made requests to open it, ignoring its engraving: “curst be he that moves my bones.” She would visit the altar at night and stare at it, her face illuminated by lamp-light.

Ultimately, the tomb remained unopened. Delia feared that what lay within would disappoint her.

Just a year after her book was published, Delia was committed to an asylum in Hartford by her brother due to fevers, suicidal tendencies and a sudden, burgeoning belief that she was related to Sir Francis Bacon. A year later, she was dead.

Her thesis and writing were later praised by Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Henry James. But others, according to Irving Wallace, remembered her only as a “sex-starved spinster.”

Read more about Delia’s life in an essay by late Yale archivist Judith Ann Schiff.

Contact MIRANDA JEYARETNAM at miranda.jeyaretnam@yale.edu .

YOUR HALLOWEEN FILM RECOMMENDATIONS FROM A TEAM ARISTOTLE HORROR AFICIONADO

// BY JESSICA SÁNCHEZ

I’ve made it my personality to love horror movies. I watch several a month, almost one a day on school breaks. I listen to horror movie podcasts and watch horror movie YouTube channels. Every other post on my Twitter feed is about horror movies. You could say I’m a horror kind of gal.

Last year, a friend sent me a YouTube video about the paradox of horror.

It addresses the question of why some people watch horror movies, why some find themselves enjoying the violence, suspense and scares when they don’t want a negative emotion like fear in their everyday life.

On one side we have Aristotle’s “Poetics” and his belief in the cathartic power of engaging in horror. He does not believe that people avoid things that cause negative emotions; instead, there is a purification of negative emotion that results from engaging in the tragic spectacle. This catharsis, in the modern age, might be thought of as “horror escapism.”

On the other hand, we have David Hume’s “Of Tragedy,” which rejects the assertion that fictional horror causes negative emotions in the first place. Because the tragic spectacle we witness is fictional, we experience a fear that is different from the fear we feel in a real-life tragedy. The fear produced by a fictional tragedy, in its fictional context, does not outweigh the pleasure granted by the tragic spectacle.

Whatever side of the philosophical fence you stand on, here are some recommendations for the squeamish, the stone-faced and the superiority-complex-holding horror explorers.

The beginner:

You can’t go wrong with a good classic.

The first horror movie I remember watching was “A Nightmare on Elm Street” when I was 6 years old — shoutout to my older sisters — and I went years without a sound night of sleep after that. Eventually, though, it became my favorite horror movie, and I wielded it like a shield as I dove into the genre.

Late-20th-century horror movies are scary enough to feel accomplished after watching them, but not so scary that you can’t sleep for days. So roll a die to choose between “Nightmare,” where you come for finger knives and stay for Johnny Depp in a football jersey crop top; “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” which is surprisingly not as gory as the title makes it seem; “The Evil Dead,” which inspires me to become a filmmaker; the “It” mini-series if you have 3+ hours to spare — and you should because Tim Curry as Pennywise is iconic beyond words; “The Thing,” which is the original “Among Us;” and “The Sixth Sense,” arguably the tamest one on this list.

Good luck, newbie!

The psychopath:

Damien Leone’s “Terrifier 2” made a huge splash with its limited release in theaters this month, reportedly causing people to pass out, throw up and leave the theater. But you can’t watch a sequel without watching the first film, and “Terrifier” is, in my opinion, just as horrific as the sequel seems to be.

You can even make it a quadruple movie night by watching the “Terrifier” 20-minute short, released five years before the feature-length film, and “All Hallow’s Eve,” a 2013 anthology film which also stars Art the Clown, the gore-master of Leone’s oeuvre.

The laugher:

There’s no better combination than laughing and screaming!

Horror-comedies tend to combine a fun amount of gore and body horror with a witty script and loveable characters. These kinds of films are some of the most fun to watch with friends. I recommend “Zombieland” and “Freaky,” the former being a delightful take on the zombie apocalypse that stars Twinkie-obsessed Woody Harrelson and the latter being a spin on “Freaky Friday” starring Vince Vaughn, a 6-foot-5 giant who does an incomparable job of playing a teen girl trapped in a serial killer’s body.

The thinker:

“Elevated horror” is a term that first started appearing in 2019 in the wake of A24’s wave of horror movie releases. It’s a term used to describe films which generate fear from more than just blood and guts; there’s a theme and a message — often about the scariest parts of what it means to be human — that the film drives home under the guise of a horror movie. Critics of the term argue that these films are simply psychological horror and delineating what is “elevated” creates divisions in the horror community by attempting to legitimize a genre which historically hasn’t been taken seriously.

At the forefront of the elevated horror movement are directors like Jordan Peele (“Get Out,” “Us” “Nope”) and Ari Aster (“Hereditary,” “Midsommar”), both of whom have created some of my favorite films of all time.

But if you’ve heard these names and titles so often that they’ve stopped having real meaning, herWe are a couple of recommendations that still hit the elevated horror mark:

“The Night Eats the World” is a 2018 French zombie flick that plucks its strings of terror by exploring the damage isolation can have on the human psyche. It’s a mind-bender with plenty of fabulous zombie special effects to match.

“Fresh” was released to stream on Hulu this year with what I think was much less fanfare than it deserved. It has a gorgeous color palette, fantastic acting, a rockin’ soundtrack and social commentary that leans obvious (but not too obvious!).

The documentarian:

Thought I was going to recommend “The Blair Witch Project”? Okay, you’re only half-right.

I watched this film for the first time over October break, and let me just say: it sort of, kind of is worth the hype? But if you’re looking for found-footage that is truly nightmare-inducing, consider “Incantation,” a 2022 Taiwanese found-footage horror film that pulls no punches. After watching this with some friends over the summer, we had to immediately turn on “Total Drama Island” to wipe the terror from our brains. It mostly worked.

If you’re looking for something less supernatural than what “Incantation” brings to the table, “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” is a mockumentary about a sadistic killer’s snuff films. More grounded in reality than “Incantation,” “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” completely fucked me up in a different yet still totally awesome way.

The not-like-other-horrorfans fan:

My toxic trait is listing these movies as among my favorites of the genre in hopes of impressing whomever I’m talking to. I will not comment on whether it’s successful or not. Anyway, here’s to no more gatekeeping!

A grand majority of werewolf content in horror is about men who are werewolves, so “Ginger Snaps,” where a teen girl is the werewolf, checks a lot of boxes that other films in this niche don’t.

I would’ve put “Lake Mungo” in the documentary section of this list if not for the fact that it’s a more quiet, eerie kind of horror film. This movie unsettled me so terribly that I need to rewatch it because the first time around I was shielding my eyes too much. It’s structured as a mockumentary rather than a straightforward found-footage, which is fresh in the world of “Blair Witch” and “Paranormal Activity.”

And a note to end on: what makes the horror genre so unique is that every film is an exploration into what its team is capable of. I’m constantly delighting in special effects, cackling from a sharp script or cowering in my seat as I anticipate a jump scare. Horror movies force you into a dynamic state. They encourage conversation during and after. They’re an experience I couldn’t recommend enough.

Contact JESSICA SÁNCHEZ at jessica.sanchez.jms469@yale.edu .

// JESSAI FLORES

WKND RECOMMENDS

Dressing up.

Witches: The original badasses// BY ROSE QUITSLUND

Walking home from dance class during October was terrifying as a little kid. I would sprint the whole two blocks home — running between the street lights, stopping to catch my breath every 50 feet in the warm safety of their fl uorescent glow. The cold night air made me shiver in my leotard and tights; I didn’t want to risk an off chance run-in with the monsters lurking in the shadows. And I may not be 10 years old, fl eeing for my life down the quiet streets of my neighborhood after ballet practice anymore, but I’ve always erred on the side of caution when it comes to scary stories.

I think ghosts are too boring, zombies freak me out and werewolves are too niche. I prefer witches. Let me tell you why. First of all, they’re not too scary. As you might’ve fi gured, my Halloween entertainment tends to stay more along the lines of “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” rather than Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary.” But witches have never really given me those chills of horror, just a feeling of intrigue. Now, I’ll admit that this sense of of intrigue. Now, I’ll admit that this sense of security might be ill formed — I grew up in security might be ill formed — I grew up in Alaska, about as far away from the Salem Witch trials as you can get. But even if witches are everything they’re made out to be in the hub of witchcraft lore in the Northeast, the degree of nightmares that they instill is less severe than that of the supernatural halloween creatures.

I think that witches are badass, they’re just misunderstood. The first “witches” were merely women practicing medicine who were persecuted for going against patriarchal traditions. And from that ancient persecution, the story transformed into the lore of witchcraft that we have today. Witches stand at a crossroads between paganism and satanic worship. Frightening as they may be, they’re much more fascinating than blood chilling. There is a wealth of lore and it can’t be boiled down to a boiled down to a singular singular story. story.

They defy being categorized. I categorize them as bewitchingly badass, pun intended.

Think about the Harry Potter franchise. Hermione is arguably much cooler than either Harry or Ron. She’s a witch. Maybe I’m projecting everyone’s unspoken desire to be a Harry Potter character, which has come to fruition in attending Yale and a minor fascination with witches. Either way, tion with witches. Either way,

// ELIZABETH WATSON

witches are the badass counterpart of the wizarding world with a feminist agenda.

My favorite Halloween movie is “Hocus Pocus.” I watch it every year. And I’d be lying through my teeth if I said that there wasn’t some part of me that’s always wanted to be a Sanderson Sister. Admit it. You want to be one of them too. They cast spells, fl y on broomsticks and shapeshift. “I Put a Spell on You” by the Sanderson Sisters? A banger. Not to mention their outfi ts. The witch look may not be my everyday choice of style, but it’s undeniably an aesthetic. The cloaks, pointy boots and hat, gloves, ritualistic jewelry. There’s a reason being a witch is such a popular Halloween costume. October street style is modeled on the blueprint of the witchy wardrobe. Have I convinced you to mentally rebrand witches as badass women who do magic and wear cool outfi ts? I think that witches are antagonized because we’re all a little bit jealous of them. A bit jealous of them, a bit afraid of them. Their version of a club is slightly more intense than any we have here at Yale. I don’t think they have a tap night, and the audition process might look a bit different, but a witches coven is basically a glorifi ed club. A girl group forming a coven to do witchy activities together? Whether the purpose of it is purely recreational or to wreak havoc, sign me up.

Surrounded by the pseudo gothic backdrop of Yale, the sense of witchcraft in the air is even more poignant. I’ve begun to appreciate the witch aesthetic of the Northeast. So this Halloween, I’m honoring the original badass. See you at the coven, I’ll be the one in the witch’s hat.

Contact ROSE QUITSLUND at rose.quitslund@yale.edu .

// BY FELSE KYLE

Halloween, a day of costumes, candy and chaos. Who doesn’t love a not-so-scary scary movie, the ridiculous surge in chocolate prices and makeshifting a costume last-minute? If you were to ask a little kid their opinion of the holiday, they may even declare it to be their favorite day of the year (after Christmas, or their birthday of course!).

I personally believe that Halloween has lost some of its zing. Nights of trick-or-treating (emphasis on treating) as superheroes and benevolent cartoon characters have left people feeling too secure and too cheery. Collecting pillowcases of soon-to-be cavities and reveling in self-proclaimed dress-up superiority has been done to death.

It's about time that Halloween festivities circled back to their roots: the celebration of All Hallows Eve or Mischief Night, a night of pranks, jokes and wild parties. The “trick” part of the holiday has faded away in most places, as Halloween has become more focused on ele-

Trick-or…Trick!

mentary schoolers and dressed up adults out on a midweek binge, instead of on teens and practical jokes. You rarely see anyone TPing neighbors’ trees or applying shaving cream to their cars or mailboxes. Gone are the days of fl aming poo, for obvious safety reasons (although who wouldn't relish the notion of “bulldog in a bag” scattered throughout Cambridge Mass?).

To a certain extent, I think Yalies as a collective should embrace a little mischief this October 31, so here are some ideas to get the ball rolling: 1. If you want an easy and doable prank, you can write messages on mirrors in the bathrooms with isopropyl alcohol, and shower steam will reveal whatever spooky memos you wish to share. You could go with the traditional “redrum” or write something more personalized to your fl oormates that’ll send shivers up their spines. 2. Stepping it up a notch, why not throw a party? But not just any party … throw the exact party your roomies have been planning out for the past 2 months. It will be great fun for all … except your suitemates. Trick them into a late night study sesh and throw that rager without them. You know it has to be done. 3. If you feel like being bold, suggest to your roommate that a hair-cut could serve them well. If they disagree, you know what to do … in the dead of night, pull out those safety scissors that your mom packed you and snip-snip-snip away (while they're asleep of course). A classic bowl cut or a bob with bangs is always a smash hit! And remember, it’s for their own good. 4. Want to get back at a frat for not letting you in after you walked twenty minutes from your dorm to get there in the freezing cold? Create invites and tell all of your friends that there’s going to be an Adam Sandler themed party at your least favorite house. When a hundred Adam Sandlers appear at the door of Sig Chi on a night when they’re not hosting, some hell should break loose.

5. If you’re looking for a giant group prank, a library fl ash mob is the perfect solution. Get your friends together and perform your song of choice (perhaps a Backstreet Boys classic) in the stacks or late-night in Bass. People may view it as a great study break … or not.

Whatever your trick of choice is — even if you revert back to the simpler rearranging of furniture or the good old knock-and-ditch through your dorm — there is always value in a little mischief during spooky season. There will be plenty of time to indulge in treats, so do not squander this perfect opportunity for a little hooliganism. Just remember to never risk property damage (that's just vandalism) or expose anyone to the risk of bodily injury. The best pranks are those which everyone can laugh about … at least eventually!

Contact FELSE KYLE at ali.kyle@yale.edu .

Snickering Through the Ages

// BY HANWEN ZHANG

The second-most ba ing part about Halloween (besides the length of the annual Hallowoads line) might be its age. The day of king-sized Twix bars and fun-sized kindergartners draped in white bedsheets holds a few millennia of tangled history to its name (which itself has changed roughly 5 times) and has mutated its way through more eras than most historians can count. You’d be forgiven if you failed to recognize the holiday’s ancestor in the Celtic bonfi res over 2,000 years ago.

All the same, the costumes would have been a running motif. The Celts were known to wear animal heads and skins to ward o ghosts as they tossed sacrifi ces into sacred fi res. The holiday—then called Sanheim—had been meant to mark the beginning of winter’s brutal four months and the time when the dead returned. At night, spirits were believed to roam the earth while priests received heightened prophetic powers. Most Celts gathered the remains of the bonfi re after their celebrations to re-light them in their homes.

The story only gets more complicated from there. History suggests that the holiday merged with existing Roman festivals after Claudius conquered the Celts in 43 AD. Feralia—the day on which the Romans honored their dead—just happened to fall somewhere in late October, allowing most Celts to continue their Sanheim customs. Here, Halloween might have started rounding closer into form as the celebrations borrowed from Pomona, another Roman holiday that honored the goddess of fruit and trees (think costumes, prophecies, maybe bonfi res, and now apples at this point).

By the time the Catholic Church rose to power in the 9th century, Christian infl uence had gained enough traction in Celtic territory to challenge the region’s traditional spiritual beliefs. In his letter to Abbot Mellitus, Pope Gregory I urged the missionaries to integrate Christianity into the fold of local Roman-Sanheim festivals. Sanheim celebrations eventually shifted to November 2nd—the day after All Saint’s Day—taking on the title “All Soul’s Day” in its transition to a Church-sanctioned holiday.

The change had little e ect on the holiday’s spirit: costumes and parades continued as they did before. The day’s name would morph over a few more centuries—from “Alhalomesse” to “All-Hallows”, then “All-Hallows Eve”—and, fi nally, “Halloween”.

It didn’t take long for Halloween to associate itself with romantic rituals. 18th century Irish cooks would bury rings in their dinners on Halloween night, supposedly wishing true love to whoever that happened to stumble across it. Scottish fortunetellers would give hazelnuts to a girl’s suitors and encourage them to toss them into the fi replace. On the same night we spend stu ng our pillowcases, revelers in the past would have stared at bowls of egg yolk, tossed apple peels, or drank sweet mixes of nutmeg and walnuts in search of love.

Halloween’s arrival on American soil is somewhat tinted with tragedy. While the day was celebrated in certain mid-Atlantic settlements, it hadn’t entered mainstream Protestant culture until the wave of Irish immigrants fl eeing from the Potato Famine gave it roots. Halloween eventually became secularized as parents catered the holiday for their children. It had gathered a strong following among adolescents by the early 1900s, and pranks and vandalism had even escalated to the point where mayors had briefl y considered banning the day altogether. Following the Great Depression, hundreds of teenagers destroyed cars and telephone poles in what became known as the “Black Halloween” of 1933.” In the centuries since, Halloween’s emphasis on mischief and superstition would be tamed down to suit middle-class, suburban families.

Historians are divided over the precise origins of trick-ortreating. Some theories trace the beginning of the “treats” to Pomona, or the Scottish custom of “guising”—in which beggars prowled the streets performing tricks in return for sweets. Still others propose infl uences from “belsniking”, a German-American Christmas tradition in which children would dress in costumes and earned sweets when adults guessed their identities. Either way, candy factories capitalized on those cravings by mass-producing treats in the years after World War II. “Trick or

// CATE ROSER

treat” was coined when Charles Schulz released his 1951 Peanuts comic strip.

Our sugary excesses haven’t left us. America hoards up to 600 million pounds of candy for the occasion every year, making Halloween the second-largest commercial holiday (only after Christmas). Candy corn remains as polarizing a treat as ever, with roughly 35 million pounds of it consumed over the month. Chocolate is still the fan favorite.

For all its twists, turns, and changes of hand, Halloween’s story perhaps stands as a reminder, among other things, that parts of us remain unchanged even as others move on. I outgrew the rituals of going door-to-door sometime after middle school. My sugar tooth, though, still thinks otherwise—I consider any excuse for buying a party-sized bag of red-40 infused SourPatch, after all, to be a good one.

Contact HANWEN ZHANG at hanwen.zhang.hhz3@yale.edu .

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A Harry from "When Harry Met Sally" Costume without the Sally.

FROM THE FRONT

“I've always been misrepresented. You know, I could dress in a clown costume and laugh with the happy people but they'd still say I'm a dark personality.” TIM BURTON AMERICAN FILMMAKER

Local 33 submits union authorization to National Labor Relations Board

LOCAL 33 FROM PAGE 1

marched through campus two weeks ago.

“Yale has still not publicly committed to neutrality during the process,” Acharya said. “We hope that Yale does not delay during this process and gets back to us so that we can vote.”

According to National NLRB Press Secretary Kayla Blado, the NLRB will now review the petition to ensure compliance with unionization rules, namely that Local 33 has surpassed the 30 percent mark of interested workers. NLRB will then work with Yale and Local 33 on setting the terms of the process.

“We’ve just received the petition and are reviewing it,” said University spokesperson Karen Peart. “Yale supports a free and robust debate over graduate student unionization among those who may be affected by it, including the graduate students who would make up its ranks as well as faculty and other students.”

When asked by the News if the University will remain neutral, Peart said “we have nothing further to add until we review the petition.”

Interested parties can follow the process on the NLRB’s website in the coming days.

“The Hartford office will work with the parties on an election agreement that will have the details of the election,” Blado told the News. “If the parties do not agree on parameters for the election, there will be a hearing. After the hearing, the [NLRB] Regional Director will issue a decision with the details of the election.”

Monday’s action comes on the heels of graduate student workers winning unionization votes at Harvard University , Brown University, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University. Unionization drives across the country have increased in recent years, including efforts at Amazon and Starbucks.

Local 33’s call for neutrality follows concerns among Local 33 organizers that the University will take an anti-union position. This concern derives, in part, from the University’s past dealings with anti-union law firm Proskauer Rose LLP, which pushed against unionization efforts at Columbia and Duke.

Another source of concern has been a Sept. 22 email sent out by Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Lynn Cooley sent an FAQ to graduate students with information related to unionization which Local 33 also deemed concerning and contained “misinterpretations.”

The FAQ told workers that unionization could force students into paying dues and insinuated that unionization could cause the Graduate School of Arts and Science Student Government to lose power. The email also encouraged students to call campus security or police if they felt threatened by union organizers.

“When we were forming our union Yale said we didn’t need one,’” Barbara Vereen, chief steward of Local 34 — the Union of Clerical and Technical Workers at Yale — told the News. “But what we were fighting for was respect and equal pay for equal work. Now, our jobs are some of the best jobs in the region, something we are very proud of. We are thrilled to see the graduate workers file their union cards and cannot wait to celebrate with them when they win!”

Local 33 is also calling for haste in the process of formally unionizing.

“One of the tactics used to prevent unionization is delaying the process,” Acharya told the News. “The University can slowwalk the entire process which makes it more difficult for all of us to exercise our right to cast our ballots for unionization.”

Why are graduate students calling for a union?

Local 33 has been organizing for a union for more than 30 years, with supporters arguing that a union will provide stronger healthcare benefits, better wages, improved working conditions, a meaningful grievance redressal system and better access to mental health services.

Local 33 Co-President Paul Seltzer GRD ’23 told the News that the current healthcare plan provides very little dental care and unreliable access to mental health care. Seltzer added that unionled collective bargaining would improve healthcare.

Graduate workers have also cited low pay as a large reason behind the push. According to Seltzer, graduate workers were expected to work longer hours with very few increases in pay during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, with the current rise in inflation and cost-of-living crisis, many graduate workers are facing further challenges covering their bills.

“When my sister was 17 and working at a [frozen yogurt] cashier, she was making more money than me as a graduate teaching fellow,” Arielle Hazi SPH ’23 told the News. “It's just really frustrating because if we want to work in academia, we have to be doing this work. And the fact that Yale doesn't really respect our work enough to pay us what we're worth. The collective bargaining of a union can help raise our wages.”

Many graduate workers also hope for an independent grievance system since the current system means that many times graduate students can only raise concerns with their direct superiors, who many times are the subject of the complaint.

Monday’s NLRB petition follows a withdrawn 2018 petition

In August 2016, the NLRB allowed graduate students across the nation to unionize. In January 2017, NLRB regional director John Walsh accepted a request from Local 33 to hold micro-elections across the 56 departments of Yale instead of one large unionization vote across the graduate school.

In February 2017, Local 33 then called for election in nine departments and won elections in eight, losing one. Yale appealed Walsh’s ruling up to the federal NLRB, arguing that the graduate school should be treated as one unit, thus voiding the elections. Local 33 pushed forward and called on the NLRB to recognize the eight mini-unions.

During this process, presidential administrations turned over from a pro-union Democrat, Barack Obama, to an anti-union Republican, Donald Trump. This transition and the subsequent change in the NLRB’s membership makeup led to the withdrawal of the 2017 call in February of 2018.

Current Local 33 co-president Paul Seltzer GRD ’23 explained to the News that the petition was then withdrawn due to fears that a Trump administration NLRB would be hostile to the Union effort and set back unionization efforts on other campuses. Independent of Local 33, graduate students at Boston College and the University of Chicago also withdrew their petitions.

According to Fields, the ball for the current petition lies in Yale’s court as Local 33 and the NLRB await the University’s answer on terms for a unionization ballot as well as on neutrality.

Undergraduate organizers in the student advocacy group Students Unite Now have launched a petition in support of Local 33, calling on University President Peter Salovey to commit to neutrality. The petition states that graduate students' working conditions are directly correlated with undergraduates' learning conditions.

The National Labor Relations Board was founded in 1935.

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

University to build new theater performance spaces for students

ARTS BUILDING FROM PAGE 1

ing spaces being booked for two groups at once.

“The dance world is a little bit meeker here on campus, and it would be wonderful to have more resources,” Simon said.

According to Tyler Cruz DRA ’23, students involved in theater “absolutely need a new building.”

Cruz described existing dramatic arts facilities, which include buildings 149 York Street and 305 Crown Street, as “terrible,” having witnessed visible leaks “coming down the walls” as well as holes “in some places.”

“There are things that are just falling apart,” Cruz told the News.

Cruz described the Yale Repertory Theatre, which is a regional theater where students perform professionally, as having several challenges, including poor auditory quality and a small performance stage. Actors can’t really feel the sound reverberate “the way they feel it in other theaters,” Cruz told the News, and the space itself is not optimal for performances. While the Repertory Theatre itself was founded in 1966, the building was originally constructed in 1846 as the Calvin Baptist Church.

“It’s probably my least favorite [of the theater spaces],” Cruz said. “The way that it’s set up, it’s kind of hard to connect to the audience in that space.”

Cruz has performed at other spaces, such as the Yale Cabaret, which she described as a theater meant to allow students to “kind of throw paint on the wall” by experimenting with new artistic ideas. But the existing facilities did not meet the infrastructural or technical support needed to allow students to do that.

She hopes that the designs for the new theater facilities will be able to “meet students’ ideas” by fixing these problems with the existing buildings.

“That’s something that I really hope to see if these plans come to fruition,” Cruz said.

Theater professor Joseph Roach also welcomed the change but expressed skepticism over its implementation. Roach told the News that he sat on a series of planning committees for new facility proposals over the last two decades — the University, he said, made grand promises towards the arts in these proposals but later failed to follow through on them.

In a 2012 external routine review of the University’s departments and programs, a panel of experts examined existing theater spaces for Yale undergraduates and found poor infrastructure. The status of theater buildings was “appalling,” Roach said.

To rectify the issue, Roach said, a committee consisting of members from the Theater Studies Department set out to scope out a site for a new theater, and discussed the plans with architects and consultants. According to Roach, the committee brought their plans to administrators, who began to cut out features over concerns of cost.

But Roach said these features were necessary to make the building serve a purpose which could not be served by what the University already had.

“By the time they got through, it wasn’t … really worth building,” Roach said. “So the committee just folded.”

Soon after, Roach said, planning for the Schwarzman Center commenced. While the Schwarzman Center was designed to be a center for the arts at Yale, it is not necessarily a practical space to host student-run theater productions, according to Roach.

“It’s always been a promise deferred,” Roach said regarding the prospects of a new theater space. “There’s always been a reason why we couldn’t fund or we couldn’t get to a performing arts center, or even just a workable theater.”

Where the theater studies department planned to build a new dramatic arts building on the corner of Sachem and Prospect a decade ago

Salovey told the News that the Schwarzman Center and the theater Roach spoke of were two unrelated projects and that “any decisions about one did not affect the other.”

He added that arts faculty members, deans and other university leaders looked into whether the theater should be built, but decided at the time that the building’s “location and the timing were not aligned.

Dean of the David Geffen School of Drama James Bundy declined to comment for this article, referring the News to the University communications website.

The School of Drama is located at 222 York St.

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

Delays in furniture shipment raise equity concerns between colleges

FURNITURE FROM PAGE 1

In the past, Panter-Brick explained, students in all colleges supplied their own common space furniture and were provided summer storage space for it. Panter-Brick said she was not sure how administrators chose which colleges got common room furniture first.

Senior Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives and Communications for Yale College Paul McKinley wrote to the News that furniture in all colleges is paid for from the University’s capital projects budget, adding that the long-term goal has been to provide common room furniture to all student suites. McKinley wrote that furniture was first provided on Old Campus and the suites in Silliman and Timothy Dwight assigned to first-years. Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray received common room furniture when they opened.

The original move to provide furniture aimed to address “equity issues across the colleges” according to Panter-Brick, who explained that each of the colleges had varying opportunities for summer storage. However, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented all colleges from immediately receiving furniture, she said.

McKinley wrote that these disruptions were caused by how all construction was suspended in the summer of 2020 and how the supply chains broke down. He also wrote that there was further complication of the original planning due to the need to provide furniture to the suites used to house first-years in the four additional residential colleges including Morse, Saybrook, Branford and Davenport, in addition to Silliman, Timothy Dwight, Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray in the 2021-2022 school year.

“Many of the disruptions are now easing, and the timeline is getting back on track,” McKinley wrote to the News.

The News spoke to seven students across the five colleges that do not have common space furniture. Each expressed concerns over the cost of having to acquire, store and move their own furnishings.

For most students, the main issue with having to provide their own furniture was the cost.

Ashley Reyes ’25, who is in Pierson, told the News that not being provided common room furniture was largely a financial concern, as every member but one in her suite are first-generation, low-income students.

“Furniture is crazy expensive and just not something we accounted for,” Reyes told the News.

Reyes said she and her suitemates bought used furniture, but were not sure if it would be sanitary. She also mentioned the time-intensive process of transporting furniture and having to limit their furniture to what would fit in a car.

William Hin ’25, who also lives in Pierson, told the News that having to furnish his suite was “definitely a financial burden.” Given the transportation costs on top of the cost of the furniture itself, Hin said that getting furniture overall was “fees on top of fees on top of fees.”

Other students also agreed that buying furniture creates an extra financial burden.

“As an FGLI student, I was worried that I would not be able to contribute any money to my suite’s furniture fund, but luckily, my suite was very resourceful and figured out a way to avoid having to spend money on furniture,” Joanna Ruiz ’25, who is in Jonathan Edwards, wrote to the News.

Ruiz said that her suitemates found free furniture through different outlets like Craigslist and rescued items from a dumpster, borrowing a car to move the furniture. However, Ruiz added that her suite was “very lucky,” as trying to source furniture would have been a “greater burden” if they did not live on the first floor.

Ogora, who is in Davenport, also wrote to the News that finding furniture and transporting it was “very frustrating” and “sours” the relationship between students and their residential college.

Ellie Barlow ’25, who is in Grace Hopper, also found buying furniture difficult and expensive for her and her suitemates.

“Even to buy from For Free and For Sale [on Facebook] is expensive and when you are already paying a lot of fees, it feels very unjustified to have to spend that much,” Barlow wrote to the News.

Karley Yung ’25, who lives in Berkeley, said her suite is still in the process of getting furniture, but they had to take time out of their summer and school year to find the furniture they have.

In addition to the cost of the furniture and the time to move it, students also expressed frustration with the impact the policy has on the social community within the colleges.

“It is especially hypocritical that we are expected to form bonds and friendships within our college in these shared spaces since, without a comfortable common room with seating, it is nearly impossible,” Ogora wrote to the News.

Reyes agreed, adding that the disparity in furnishing across colleges “drives people away” from suites without furniture and “isolates students.”

Students also expressed concern over having to store their furniture, which was what prompted the move to provide furniture in the first place, according to Panter-Brick.

Head of Berkeley College David Evans ’92 wrote to the News that he looks forward to when furniture can be provided in the college. For now, Berkeley allows students to store a limited number of tagged furniture items in the following year’s suite, saving the cost of finding storage.

Ari Essunfeld ’24, who is in Grace Hopper, described finding storage as “super tricky.”

Panter-Brick said the colleges still need to consider storage for personal items as Yale-issued furniture becomes standardized across colleges, explaining that storage systems vary widely across colleges.

“It's a large issue, right in the summer when you're taking exams and then you have to move out and then you have to store your stuff,” Panter-Brick said.

The first seven residential colleges were opened on Sept. 25, 1933.