Yale Daily News -- Week of Dec 2, 2022

Students and alumni sue Yale

Plainti s cite discrimination over mental illnesses

BY ANIKA SETH AND SARAH COOK STAFF REPORTERS

Yale has failed to appropriately accommodate and support students with mental illnesses, a lawsuit filed Wednesday morning alleges.

The 41-page suit — which was brought forth on Nov. 30 by the mental health advocacy group Elis for Rachael as well as two current Yale undergraduates — accuses the University of discriminating against students who face mental health challenges.

Specifically, the suit alleges that students with mental illnesses, especially those who choose to withdraw, are held to harsher standards than those without. Plainti s also say that students with mental illnesses who hail from “less privileged backgrounds” — including students of color, students from

poor families or rural areas and international students — are especially harmed by these discrepant protocols.

“Yale has ignored student demands for change for decades, doing only the bare minimum to accommodate students with mental health needs,” Alicia Abramson ’24, one of the student plainti s, wrote to the News. “Yale has refused to make substantive changes to policies that discriminate against students with mental health disabilities despite our federally

Grad students head to the polls

What would their union look like?

BY MEGAN VAZ AND MIRANDA WOLLEN STAFF REPORTERS

On Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, thousands of Yale’s graduate and professional students will head to the polls to decide whether to form a union recognized by the University.

Approving the measure would open up a host of possibilities for what this union might look like and how it would function on campus.

Depending on the results of the upcoming election, the University may begin negotiations with organizers at Local 33 — the currently unrecognized graduate union — to create a legally binding contract called a collective bargaining agreement. This would outline labor terms and may include new working benefits for all graduate students and professional students employed in union-eligible positions on campus.

Local 33 organizer Micah English GRD ’26 told the News she worked a union job before coming to Yale, where the di erence in pay, healthcare access and agency over her working conditions was palpable.

“To be a worker anywhere, but especially at an institution with the resources Yale has, and to not have basic protections to make you feel

Bobbi

BY KAYLA YUP STAFF REPORTER

Nine-year-old Bobbi Wilson of Caldwell, New Jersey was welcomed to Yale for a “Black girl led Science Tour” after a viral incident where her neighbor called the cops on her while she was protecting trees from lanternflies.

The little girl had been spraying a formula to help exterminate spotted lanternflies — an invasive species in New Jersey — when her neighbor reported her to the police, who then stopped and questioned her. In response to this incident, Ijeoma Opara, Yale School of Public Health assistant professor, designed a tour to introduce Bobbi to Black female scientists and reward her for her e orts to save the environment.

“I didn’t want this traumatic experience due to racism to harm Bobbi,” Opara said. “I didn’t want it to prevent her from continuing to explore her environment and from continuing to pursue a career in science.”

The lanternfly incident

On Oct. 22, Gordon Lawshe called the cops on a “real small woman” who was wearing a “hood,” according to a bodycam recording published by CNN.

“There’s a little Black woman, walking, spraying stu on the sidewalks and trees on Elizabeth and Florence,” Lawshe said in the bodycam recording. “I don’t know what the hell she’s doing, scares me though.”

The “woman” was in fact nine-year-old Bobbi, under 5-feet tall, who was spraying a mixture meant to help exterminate spotted lanternflies. The hood of her hoodie was not on her head, and she was Lawshe’s neighbor of almost eight years from just across the street.

Bobbi made this spray herself — it consisted of water, apple cider vinegar and dishwasher soap. She discovered this recipe and how it

could be used to combat the dangers posed by spotted lanternflies on TikTok.

The spotted lanternfly is an invasive planthopper native to Asia. It can cause extensive damage by feeding on the sap found in its host plants, including trees and other plants. New Jersey’s “Stomp it Out!” campaign urges people to extinguish and report the lanternfly when there is a sighting because of the damage the species can cause to crops.

“She was not only doing something amazing for our environment, she was doing something that made her feel like a hero,” Bobbi’s 13-yearold sister Hayden Wilson said at a Nov. 1 Borough of Caldwell Council Meeting. “Our neighbor across the street saw my sister spraying the trees with the solution and didn’t know what she was doing. Instead, he decided it would be

“[Lawshe] did not want to become involved in a confrontation, so he called the Caldwell police to look into the matter,” Gregory Mascera, Lawshe’s attorney, wrote to CNN in an email. “Mr. Lawshe did not call 911 but called the police non-emergency dispatch line. Mr. Lawshe had no reason to believe that he would be putting anyone in harm’s way by calling the police.”

The bodycam footage continued: after the responding o cer talked to Joseph, he

Five New Haven cops charged

City sidesteps responsibility

BY NATHANIEL ROSENBERG, YASH ROY AND SOPHIE SONNENFELD STAFF REPORTERS

On Monday, five New Haven Police o cers were arrested for reckless endangerment in the second degree and cruelty to person — both misdemeanors — for their actions that left Randy Cox paralyzed while being arrested on June 19.

The reckless endangerment charge comes with a prison time of up to six months while cruelty to person has a maximum one-year prison sentence.

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker announced at a Monday press conference with NHPD Chief Karl Jacobson and the city’s Corporation Counsel Patricia King that all five o cers had turned themselves over to state police in Westport that morning.

The announcement was not without criticism. At a press conference outside New Haven City Hall on Tuesday, Cox’s lawyers and family members castigated the leniency of the charges brought against the o cers responsible for his paralyzation and questioned Elicker’s commitment to helping Cox’s case in light of recent legal filings by the city.

“They got a misdemeanor slap on the wrist where they will probably see little to no jail time,” Cox’s lawyer Ben Crump, a nationally renowned civil rights attorney said. “And Randy Cox has a life sentence. How’s that fair?”

Cox’s attorneys asserted that if a private citizen had paralyzed Cox in the manner that police did, they would be charged with a felony. They specified that assault with a motor vehicle was a charge they would like to have seen filed.

Ho, Branch speak at Buckley

Boycotting federal judges say Law School climate "improved"

BY INES CHOMNALEZ STAFF REPORTER

Federal judges leading a boycott against Yale Law School will soon arrive on campus at the invitation of Yale’s primary conservative student organization.

The Nov. 30 discussion, titled “Is Free Speech Dead on Campuses?”, will be hosted by the William F. Buckley Jr. Program in William L. Harkness Hall. The speakers, Judges James C. Ho and Elizabeth Branch, announced their decision to bar future graduates of Law School from their clerkships over concerns about the institution’s culture around free speech in September. The event will be moderated by law professor Akhil Amar ’80 LAW ’84.

The boycott’s ties to free speech debates make the Buckley Program a “natural” fit for such an event, said Buckley Program founder and executive director Lauren Noble ’11.

“Yale’s free speech environment has been deteriorating for some time,” Noble wrote to the News. “We are glad that these judges have brought this problem to national attention and look forward to working with them to make Yale a welcome home for a wide range of perspectives.”

students for breaking into a church near Harvard Yard, St. Paul's Catholic Church, during the weekend of the Harvard-Yale game.

Cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who authored the graphic novel Fun Home, visits Yale to speak.

from admissions.

appropriate to call the police on my sister.”

Monique Joseph, Bobbi’s mother, also spoke at this meeting, revealing that her daughter had been afraid to leave their house immediately after this happened.

Nine-year-old Bobbi Wilson of Caldwell, New Jersey was welcomed to Yale for a tour / Courtesy of Jeoma Opara

SEE UNION PAGE 5 On Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, thousands of Yale’s grad and professional students will vote / Abraham Payne , Contributing Photographer

Finding my stylebirds, buildings, silhouettes and solos from DC and New Haven

Photos by Gavin Guerrette Photography Editor

Queer rights are under attack

As it has been forced to far too often, the LGBTQ+ community is grieving the losses of yet another hate-fueled mass shooting. The latest victims — five killed and another 19 injured — were patrons at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This slaughter is not an isolated incident: rather, it is the culmination of a broad rollback of LGBTQ+ rights across queer social and political life over the past few years. The Editorial Board condemns the heightened violence and moral panic against queer and transgender communities in the United States. We further call on institutions such as Yale to desist from platforming and legitimizing homophobia and transphobia and to provide greater institutional support to local and regional queer communities.

This shooting is one of the many attacks on queer nightlife spaces that have occurred across the United States. Queer nightlife holds incredible historical significance to the LGBTQ+ community, as they were some of the only spaces queer people could be themselves, find friends and love and build community based on their shared identity. Queer nightlife still acts as an important community space where people find employment and explore their identities. No one should have to put their lives in danger to enter a safe, validating space like Club Q, which is and will continue to be such for the members of the Colorado Springs community. In this manner, the Club Q shooting is a symptom of a larger trend of attacks on all aspects of queer life, from representation in textbooks to community centers. Both far-right politicians like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert — whose district begins less than an hour away from Colorado Springs — and more “mainstream” politicians, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have propagated hateful rhetoric that paints queerness as a threat to American social life.

The American public is becoming desensitized to news of violence and hate. In this past week alone, a Chesapeake, Virginia, Walmart shooting shortly followed the Colorado Club Q shooting. In particular, the Club Q shooting is a harrowing reminder of the Pulse

Nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016, which killed 49 people and wounded 53 more. We cannot allow ourselves to become desensitized to violence. We need to consciously recognize these shootings as hate crimes — the aggressors are motivated by hate and bigotry against members of the LGBTQ+ community.

In order to truly grapple with this nationwide hatred towards the queer community, we must understand the process by which bigotry and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric leads to violent hate crimes. The Colorado Springs shooter has a history of both espousing and being immersed in antiLGBTQ rhetoric. In an interview with the gunman’s father, the New York Post quoted him saying that he was worried about the fact that his son had been at Club Q, not because a deadly shooting had just transpired at that location, but because he was scared his son might be gay. It is no wonder that the current rates of antiLGBTQ violence are increasing as discussions concerning the pathologization of transness and LGBTQ grooming conspiracy theories reach a breaking point. The logic is simple: the more negative light is shone upon the LGBTQ community, the more likely queer folk are to suffer from violent transgressions. The legitimacy of queer identities should not be a topic of debate. Debates over queer personhood endanger queer life.

Yale does not play a passive role in the attacks on queer lives and livelihoods currently occuring in the country. Yale, as a university with incredible wealth and influence, has the power to direct not only local, but national conversations on LGBTQ+ rights. As a university, Yale has not only failed to formally condemn these attacks, but has also, in the past, provided platforms to many of the individuals who peddle the abhorrent lies that lead to violence against queer individuals. In March of 2022, the Yale Federalist Society invited Kristen Waggoner, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, to speak at Yale Law School. The Alliance Defending Freedom is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT

hate group, and has advocated for conversion therapy, the criminalization of homosexuality, the mandatory sterilization of transgender people and false links of homosexuality to pedophilia. When Yale Law students protested Waggoner’s presence, Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken called the behavior of protesters trying to disrupt the event “unacceptable” and reiterated her commitment to free speech. Yale must recognize that while free speech is important to the intellectual health of the University, as an institution with disproportionate national and international influence, it has an ethical responsibility to consider the implications of whom it affords prestigious and powerful platforms. What message is Yale sending to its students, especially its queer students, when it amplifies and creates space for individuals who foster hate, division and violence?

If Yale is to not only support all its students, regardless of their sexuality or gender identity, but also adhere to its commitment of serving the public good, then it must take into serious consideration the direct and indirect impacts of hateful voices it fosters and amplifies. But Yale shouldn’t stop there. Yale has the ability and resources to take a strong and clear stance in support of its vulnerable queer students at this time. This can and should begin with acknowledging and condemning the violence against queer people happening across the nation. Further, it should extend to providing proactive support for queer students on campus, including further financial and administrative investments into the Office of LGBTQ Resources. Though significant, these are just first steps in assuring that Yale creates a safer environment for its queer students: further measures should include investing resources into New Haven queer community centers and expanding Yale Health Basic Coverage to include reproductive and gender-affirming care.

Contact the YALE DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD at editorialboard@yaledaily news.com .

DE GENNARO: An atheist’s ode to Christmas

Harkness ringing, Whi enpoofs singing, all is merry and bright. The end of Thanksgiving o cially ushers in the holiday season: that sacred period during which it becomes acceptable to play Mariah Carey on loop. Never mind that night falls at 4:00 p.m., the New Haven cold nips at your fingertips and finals loom on the horizon. It’s the most wonderful time of the year — and no, it’s not because Christ our supposed savior was born 2022 years ago this month.

There are many things I would prefer to keep religion out of — notably, our Supreme Court. Ironically, I’d like to add Christmas to the list. Perhaps I want to give my lost atheist soul something to believe in. Perhaps religious exclusivity seems antithetical to the spirit of unity that makes this season special. Perhaps unity is exactly what we need.

There aren’t many things that have escaped the bite of politics of late. Thanksgiving has been reconsidered for its roots in America’s fraught colonial past. The Christmas classic “Baby It’s Cold Outside” has been a target of criticism for its coercive flirtation. Even this year’s World Cup has been tainted by controversy over the choice to host it in Qatar, among other things. These developments seem to disprove an assumption I used to hold dear: if anything can overcome division, it’s soccer and Christmas.

Over a hundred years ago, during a much darker and drearier winter season, soldiers found themselves in the trenches of World War I’s vicious Western Front, robbed of the hope that they would be home by Christmas. The Christmas Truce of 1914 is the story of a minor Christmas miracle — for one night, German and British soldiers ceased fire and emerged from their trenches. What followed was a variety of shared traditions, from caroling to conversation to a game of soccer — apparently won by the Germans, unlike the war.

“The Christmas Spirit” is the sort of abstract magic invoked mostly in the world of fantastical holiday films. But I’m a sucker for Home Alone, and perhaps this miraculous force rears its head in reality every once in a while. If the Germans and British could put down their guns, perhaps we can put down our grievances for a moment and, if nothing else, appreciate the amalgam of absurdities that make up our annual Christmas celebrations.

Christmas began as a combination of various winter festivities that preceded Christianity itself, including Germanic celebrations of the pagan god Oden and Norse observances of the Yule. The greatest influence on our contemporary Christmas traditions was Saturnalia, the Roman holiday in honor of the god Saturn, complete with wreaths, gift-giving, singing and feasting. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Jesus’s birth date, unspecified in the Bible, neatly supplanted Rome’s largest holiday.

Today, while many still observe Christmas as a religious holiday, it is celebrated equally often as a secular and blatantly capitalist tradition, as one look at Shops at Yale will prove. Christmas tunes, glittering lights and tree-trimming are commemorated globally, including in many non-Christian nations. My mother has often recalled her father, a Japanese Buddhist priest who for many years managed his own temple, sneaking Santa-like through the night to place presents underneath the tree.

All of this is to say, Christmas is something of a cultural Frankenstein. It is an embodiment of the best and worst of what America has to offer: a multicultural capitalist extravaganza that may claim to be sacred, but is actually just fun, primarily because we have the creativity and resources to deck the halls with boughs of holly, gigantic Rockefeller Christmas trees, Radio City Music Halls and an endless slew of wannabe “All I Want for Christmas is You”’s.

Christmas was never entirely a Christian holiday. At its best, it is an exercise in tolerance, multiculturalism and the ability to lay down our differences and bridge the no man’s land that sometimes seems to stretch out between us. For just this one time of the year, let’s unite under the anthem of Mariah Carey and remember that it’s both beautiful and bizarre that of all the things to survive the darwinist course of History, this singular holiday is certainly one of the best.

We can all go back to arguing in January.

Contact ARIANE DE GENNARO at ariane.degennaro@yale.edu .

LETTER 11.29

We are three of the thousands of graduate teachers and researchers who are voting this week for our union, Local 33. Our reasons for voting yes are varied — shaped by the disappointment and anger we have felt about how Yale values us, our colleagues and our work. But more than this, we know that as union members, we can help bring about a university where our value is recognized and our contributions count. Our union will do this by giving us a formal seat at the table, yes — but more deeply, by establishing that each of us has agency and a voice that matters; that each of us makes a real contribution to knowledge, to academia and to the communities that we care about. Our votes for the union are not votes against Yale, but for a university that takes our work as seriously as we do.

For as long as we can remember, academia has been in a deep, multifaceted crisis. For graduate students the crisis appears in the form of a contradiction. On the one hand, there are the high ethical ideals of scholarly work, which supposedly give it the quality of a calling, and which drew most of us to graduate school: we have questions that we want to answer,

scientific or social issues we want to understand, problems that we want to help address. Our motivation to do this through our research and teaching is strong enough that we seek to commit our lives to it. On the other hand, upon making that commitment, we encounter the degraded — and for many, impossible — material conditions under which we have to carry out this work.

Across the humanities and much of the social sciences, stable academic employment has deteriorated significantly — in some fields almost zeroing out. It is not that there is no need for our work, or no value that we create for Yale: one of us — Abigail — works in the French Department, for example, where it is common for graduate language instructors to put in workweeks double the ocial workload, because this is what it takes to do the job properly. When the university takes actions like assigning o cial workloads that are less than it takes to teach a course, it is not taking responsibility for what it would mean to properly carry out its academic mission. So in the classrooms, we handle it instead as best we can.

In the sciences, professors spend their time applying for grants to keep their labs running

and there’s tremendous pressure on graduate researchers to produce results at a faster and faster pace to keep up with grant cycles. We run experiments, manage lab operations, author papers and secure federal grant funding that pays for our work and even tuition. Yale tells us we’re here in graduate school for our own training and benefit, but it’s up to us to keep basic science alive.

Our work enriches Yale, and Yale says it is committed to diversity, but one of us — Micah — is the only Black woman who is a graduate worker in her department, political science. This isn’t only a problem of representation; It’s a problem of the integrity of our scholarship. How are we supposed to succeed in understanding political institutions and dynamics — of which race is, of course, a key element — if only some people are participating? Read more online at yaledailynews.com .

ABIGAIL FIELDS GRD ’24

MICAH ENGLISH GRD ’26 AND ARITA ACHARYA GRD ’24. Contact them at abagail.fields@yale.edu at micah.english@yale.edu and at arita.acharya@yale.edu .

New Jersey girl invited to Yale after police incident

explained to Lawshe that Bobbi was merely catching lanternflies. “What a weirdo, huh?” Lawshe said in the video.

A Black female scientist-led tour

When Opara initially heard what happened, she took to Twitter to find the little girl’s family and arrange a science tour at Yale. Opara wanted to encourage Bobbi in her love for science and her environment.

Opara described Lawshe’s call to the police as a “waste of resources” and as an example of “weaponizing the police” against Black people.

“I just didn’t want any young girl who has big enough ideas and big enough dreams to feel demonized for taking the initiative to go above and beyond to save their environment or to explore their interests,” Opara said. “She wasn’t harming anybody. And like many Black children, who are criminalized and punished in school and have the police called on them, a majority of them aren’t doing anything criminal — they’re merely just existing and being Black.”

The Nov. 16 tour began at Opara’s lab, the Substances and Sexual Health Lab at YSPH. Opara’s work seeks to challenge gendered racism and its impact on the health outcomes of racial-ethnic minority youth. Alongside several Black female scientists at Yale, Bobbi was joined by her parents and her sister Hayden.

The next stop on the tour was the Bei lab, where Ife Desamours Adeyeri GRD ’26, a doctoral student in microbial pathogenesis, showed the family around the lab and YSPH’s insectary. Adeyeri, who works with mosquitoes,

taught Bobbi about the life cycle of mosquitoes and how they connect to her work studying malaria. Hoping to bring “something good” out of a “terrible situation,” Adeyeri was happy to reinforce Bobbi’s interest in insects and biology.

“I thought it was nice for her to get to see female Black scientists, which is something that I never got to see in person until graduate school,” Adeyeri, who grew up in Florida, said. “That’s an experience I never had that I hope was instrumental to her because I would have definitely appreciated that.”

Up Science Hill, the tour continued in the Horsley lab, where Kristyn Carter, a postdoctoral fellow, explained how she researches diabetes in mice. Carter is the president of the Black Postdoctoral Association at Yale.

Opara described this segment of the tour as “one of the biggest moments” for her, seeing Bobbi’s excitement about the lab mice. Bobbi told the News that this was her favorite part of the tour. She enjoyed learning how Carter worked with mice, even when it came to skin removal and other procedures.

“I was hiding because I didn’t want to see [the mice], but Bobbi was like, ‘Give me more,’” Joseph said.

“I made this correlation that wow, Bobbi’s into the sciences.”

The last stop on the tour was the Peabody Museum’s entomology collection. The group met Lawrence Gall, the entomology collections manager, and Nicole Palffy-Muhoray GRD ’16, Peabody’s assistant director of student programs.

“I was also a little girl who liked bugs,” Palffy-Muhoray said during the tour. “I got made fun of for it … so when I hear about a little girl who’s thinking about bugs, I get excited.”

Gall quizzed Bobbi on the definition of entomology and talked to her about “structural color,” which is a form of color created by the refraction of light that is naturally found in insects and bugs.

At the end of the tour, Gall revealed that the Peabody had not yet acquired lanternflies. He asked Bobbi if she could catch some for them from New Jersey.

“If you bring us lanternflies, we’ll make labels with your name on it as the collector, and they’ll become part of the permanent record here at the Peabody Museum as our first lanternfly,” Gall said during the tour.

Bobbi would permanently be listed as a collector in the Peabody’s database, and anyone who uses the lanternfly specimen contributed by Bobbi would have to credit her.

“The [scientists] were young, they were female, they looked like [Bobbi and Hayden],” Joseph explained. “It could have been their auntie, their cousin, their sister. It’s not just this man in a white coat. … Whatever you can see, you can be; it makes it possible.”

Changing the trajectory

The language used by their neighbor was “hurtful and scary” to Bobbi and her family, Joseph described.

Joseph’s biggest concern from this incident was the adultification of Black children. She explained that Black girls and boys have been treated like adults, charged as adults and held in jail cells. To Joseph, it’s important to amplify this story for the people who do not understand “how the language used to describe Bobbi and what she was doing had tones of racism.”

“I brought this conversation to my town because I wanted them to be aware that this language is dangerous,” Joseph said. “We’re not all guaranteed to stay in our little bubble in Caldwell

or wherever we live, but if you take this language and you speak it, it could be life or death for someone.”

Joseph is focused on ensuring that Bobbi is emotionally healthy and feels safe to explore her world. Now when Bobbi prepares to go outside independently, Joseph will spend a few minutes talking with her to make sure they both feel safe while she is out. Her mother does not want to sacrifice her child’s chance to explore and grow. “We can’t live in fear,” Joseph added.

Like Bobbi, Opara grew up in New Jersey and was a “young Black girl who dreamed big,” she said. However Opara’s parents were terrified to have her go outside by herself in the early 1990s because of incidents like these. Her parents did not want anyone calling the cops on her or mistreating her in their absence.

This fear that Black parents in America have stems from society not letting “Black children be Black children,” Opara explained. But actions taken to shield children from potential racism can also threaten their ability to explore and learn from their surroundings.

Opara admitted to not being able to explore her environment the way she would have wished to as a child.

“When you are growing up in this constant state of fear and paranoia because you genuinely believe that society not only doesn’t see you as a human being but that they are willing to harm you because they see you as a criminal — you’re literally just trying to live,” Opara said. “You’re literally just trying to explore as a child.”

Opara wants to use her position of power to change this narrative, to let Black children “live” and be free to “explore like all the other children.” This tour was important to nurturing

“Bobbi’s brilliance” and making her feel safe, Opara explained, to remind her that she did nothing wrong.

“These are young women. They are Black, they are scientists, they’re doctors, they’re professors — they’re brilliant,” Joseph said. “It was just beautiful. I wanted to make sure that the Yale community knows from the bottom of my heart, how much they meant to us, … that it gives my girls hope that this can be their reality too.”

Opara described her life’s work as empowering Black girls to be aware of how racist and gendered stereotypes harm them. She hoped to expose Bobbi and Hayden to Black female scientists like herself to inspire their continued engagement with science.

After returning home from the tour, Bobbi worked to catch spotted lanternflies for the Peabody, capturing around twenty from a local tree that was infested with the species. The specimens were shipped to the Peabody for arrival on Nov. 29.

Through this tour, Joseph realized that science was “right up Bobbi’s alley.” Seeing Bobbi’s fascination with understanding the diabetic mice reminded her of when Bobbi helped care for her grandmother. The little girl had wanted to understand why each medication was given to her grandmother and how it worked.

This lanternfly-fighting formula was just one of Bobbi’s forays into science. She enjoys using leaves, flowers and grasses to concoct original mixtures.

“I like to mix things and make potions,” Bobbi told the News. “I like science. … I want to help cure things.”

The spotted lanternfly feeds on over 70 different plant species.

Contact KAYLA YUP at kayla.yup@yale.edu .

Judges Ho and Branch speak on campus about free speech

BOYCOTT FROM PAGE 1

The Buckley Program aims to promote free speech, intellectual diversity and “serious conservative thought,” according to its mission statement. The program has made waves on campus for hosting high-profile, right-wing figures — this year, they have hosted Texas senator Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Both Ho and Branch are staunch conservatives.

“[Buckley] serves as a group that challenges you to grapple with a diversity of political, legal, and intellectual perspectives,” Axel de Vernou

’25, a Buckley Student Fellow, told the News. “The experts they invite are practitioners with a rich background in their craft.”

The two judges said in a letter published online earlier this month that they had also been invited to campus by Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken for a January event. The law school’s press office declined to comment for this story and has not confirmed whether the proposed January event will take place.

According to Noble, the program is one of the largest student organizations on campus, boasting a record 526 Buckley Fellows, includ-

ing students in Yale College and the professional and graduate schools.

Despite making national headlines, Jake McDonald LAW ’25 said the event featuring Ho and Branch has gone largely under the radar of students at Yale Law School. However, McDonald added that he hopes the talk “will highlight the ongoing need for an active exchange of ideas on campus.”

Judge Ho announced his boycott at the Kentucky Chapter of the Federalist Society after speaking out against “cancel culture” and identifying boycotting institutions that engage in a culture of cancellation as a solution

to dwindling free speech in the legal profession.

Ho went on to qualify that he would only enforce the boycott for students who matriculated to Yale Law School after his announcement, meaning that students currently attending Yale Law School would not be penalized by the decision.

“[Students should] think about the kind of legal education they want, and the kind of academic environment that will help them grow,” Ho said at the conference.

This is not the first Buckley event of the semester centering around free speech. Early this month, the

program hosted a seminar with Floyd Abrams LAW ’60, founder of the Floyd Abrams Institute of Free Speech at the Law School.

“Yale’s free speech environment has been deteriorating for some time,” Noble wrote. “We are glad that these judges have brought this problem to national attention and look forward to working with them to make Yale a welcome home for a wide range of perspectives.”

The Buckley Program was launched in 2011.

Contact INES CHOMNALZE at ines.chomnalez@yale.edu

.

New Haven officers charged over paralysis case

COX FROM PAGE 1

In his announcement of the arrests, Elicker struck a more positive tone.

“It’s clear that the state's attorney believes that there's probable cause that the actions of these officers violated state criminal laws,” Elicker said at the Monday press conference. “I'm glad to see the process move forward to ensure that justice is served.”

Cox sustained spine and neck injuries — leaving him paralyzed — on June 19 while being driven to a police station in a van without seat belts after being arrested for weapons charges that prosecutors later dropped. According to Lou Rubano, another one of Cox’s attorneys, doctors have determined that Cox will never walk again.

The injuries occurred when the New Haven Police Department officer behind the wheel stopped abruptly to avoid a car crash while speeding. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, the officer drove Cox to the police detention center. Officers then dragged Cox out of the van, processed him in a wheelchair and put him into a holding cell – all without providing medical care. Cox repeatedly told the officers that he could not move while the officers brushed him off, telling him he “just drank too much.”

LaToya Boomer, Cox’s sister, echoed the call for harsher charges against the officers. She described how if she, as a mother, failed to properly care for her child who broke their neck accidentally, she would be arrested on the spot and lose custody, her job and her house.

“These charges were a slap in the face.” Boomer said. “How is this fair?”

Boomer also read a statement by Cox to the crowd of reporters and supporters gathered on the steps of City Hall on Tuesday. Cox was glad to hear about the arrests, seeing them as the criminal justice system working and the start of a path towards justice.

“It's time for a change,” Cox wrote in the statement. “This ain't about me. It's about the people that come after me, so no one else has to go through this. I have faith that all things will work out. I just have to trust the process and wait and see.”

Lawyers and legal experts object to filings faulting Cox

In September, Cox’s attorneys filed suit against the city and the officers involved for $100 million in damages.

At the time, Mayor Justin Elicker signaled he was ready to settle, telling reporters settlement was “certainly on the table.”

Last week, the city seemed to reverse course, with a filing claiming the city should be protected by “governmental immunity.” This move, New Haven Corporation Counsel

Patricia King told the New Haven Independent, was a required legal filing to preserve the city’s legal rights.

ACLU Connecticut Legal Director Dan Barrett explained to the News that the vast majority of governmental actions to enforce or uphold the law are done at the discretion of government officials, because it would be difficult to lay out step by step the responsibilities and actions a government official might take.

Thus, the city can claim that since the officers involved in Cox’s paralyzation were not following explicitly

laid out governmental regulations but were instead using their own discretion, the city is not liable for the harm done to Cox.

“It's astonishing to us in the family, the responses that we saw from the city and the officers is absolutely astonishing,” Crump said. “Unbelievable. Because the city has said they are going to take accountability for what happened.”

Barrett explained that government immunity has traditionally been a firewall for municipalities to avoid responsibility in civil claims.

“On a matter of principle, why would the city invoke the immunity doctrine which would get them entirely off the hook while saying they want justice for Cox?” Barrett added.

The city also suggested that Cox was partially responsible for his paralyzation, introducing a defense of “contributory negligence,” meaning Cox’s negligent behavior either led to or exacerbated his injuries.

When asked Tuesday whether he thought Cox was responsible for his paralyzation, Elicker declined to give a definitive answer. He instead said the city was interested in continuing the conversation with Cox’s legal team with the goal of coming to a settlement.

“I represent the city and the lawyers have advised us that that is an appropriate legal filing as we continue this conversation,” he said at the press conference.

NAACP Connecticut State Conference President Scot X. Esdaile was sharply critical of Elicker’s legal posture.

“Elicker’s talking out of both sides of his mouth,” Esdaile told the News.

“You can’t publicly say that you want justice for Randy and that you want to help him, but in court try to blame him for his own paralysis and claim immunity. Elicker keeps proving to us that he can’t be trusted to do justice for Randy.”

Four of the five officers named in Cox’s civil lawsuit also filed briefs arguing that their behavior, which included dragging a paralyzed Cox into a holding cell and handcuffing him, was reasonable and covered under “qualified immunity.” In large part, these claims pointed to Cox as at fault for his own “negligence and carelessness.”

“Police like to remove themselves from the narrative when someone is injured,” Barrett told the News. “But, they’re skipping over the part where they were required to use adult judgment and discretion, like not handcuffing a guy in the back of a bare police van and then driving the way they did.”

Crump said that the brutality Cox experienced and the delays in his search for justice were in part because Cox is Black.

“At what point do we keep saying Black lives don't matter?” Crump asked the assembled crowd on Tuesday. “You cannot deny that [Cox’s mother] is heartbroken, and her son is paralyzed. And why is that? Because it's from a system that doesn’t value black people.”

What’s next?

New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobson initially launched an Internal Affairs investigation into the incident which was then paused as state police conducted their fivemonth investigation that wrapped

up in October. Now that Connecticut State's Attorney's office has charged those officers, Jacobson said the NHPD is reopening their IA case.

The investigation could end in the termination of employment for the five officers in NHPD, but the final outcome remains unclear. Jacobson told the News that his department will work to “expeditiously” carry out its investigation.

“You're never happy when a police officer is arrested,” Jacobson told the News. “But the bottom line is to be transparent and accountable. And I believe that this is part of the process, and we need to move forward with our investigation. You cannot treat people the way Mr. Cox was treated. And we've said that since the beginning.”

As for the officers charged, after being processed, all five posted $25,000 bonds each and were released on the expectation that they appear for their first court appearance on Dec. 8 in New Haven’s Superior Court.

Esdaile promised that the NAACP would turn out supporters of Cox at the cops’ court appearance.

“The NAACP will mobilize and organize individuals from across the state and across the nation to come to court and let their voices be heard when these individuals are arraigned in court,” Esdaile said.

Randy Cox was paralyzed on Juneteenth, a day celebrating the emancipation of enslaved people.

Contact SOPHIE SONNENFELD at sophie.sonnenfeld@yale.edu, NATHANIEL ROSENBERG at nathaniel.rosenberg@yale.edu and YASH ROY at yash.roy@yale.edu .

“Having family responsibilities and concerns just has to make you a more understanding person.” SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR FORMER SUPREME COURT JUSTICE

Graduate students decide union question in NLRB election

seen, respected, and safe is a reality that nobody should have to accept,” English told the News. “I’m done accepting it, and that’s why I’m fighting for a union.”

Local 33 has long argued that a contract with the University will drastically improve working and living conditions for graduate and professional student workers. Potential benefits they have advocated for include increased stipend payments, a strong grievance procedure for claims of discrimination and harrassment by supervisors, improved dental and vision coverage, legal protections for international students and guaranteed sick pay.

To best understand the potential path forward, the News spoke to graduate and professional students and faculty, along with organizers from recognized graduate unions at Columbia University, New York University and Harvard University who shared their experiences during contract negotiations and the impact of unionization on their campuses.

What kinds of work do graduate and professional students do?

Teaching is included in graduate students’ funding packages and “is considered part of [an] academic or financial requirement,” per the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’s site.

Teaching fellow positions are classified as either at Level 10, which goes up to 10 hours a week of work, or Level 20, which goes up to 20 hours a week. Professional school students are appointed at the same stipends and levels as teaching fellows, but are called teaching assistants. After completing their departmental teaching requirement, students might teach as “non-stipend” TFs, whereby they can earn $4,000 or $8,000 per term, depending on whether they are Level 10 or Level 20.

Graduate and professional students can also hold a variety of other employment positions on campus. They might conduct research or perform clerical duties, which can come with intricate power dynamics –many student workers do work for professors they also study under and depend on to graduate.

"For some in academia, student labor, and even post-doc/post-bac labor, is not acknowledged as such because of the “in training” status of those performing it,” John Gonzalez GRD ’24, a GSA representative who co-sponsored a bill to create an ad-hoc committee investigating unionization, wrote to the News.

A potential union would cover most teaching fellows, writing fellows, project assistants, research assistants and teaching assistants from the GSAS and professional schools, with some exceptions.

A wave of academic worker unionization at private schools

Although academic workers at dozens of public universities have successfully negotiated union contracts since the 1960s, only nine graduate and professional worker unions at private universities have secured them.

The bulk of these organizations received recognition amid a recent wave of academic worker unionization, which kicked off in 2016 after the NLRB ruled that private university graduate students have the right to unionize. Additionally, several private school graduate unions have since won elections and currently await contract negotiations.

After the ruling, Local 33 submitted a series of petitions for “microunit” unions by a handful of departments that held successful elections, which University officials challenged in court as undemocratic.

They eventually dropped petitions in 2018, anticipating hostility toward labor unions from a more conservative, Trump Administration NLRB.

Four years after the setback, Local 33 has made a striking comeback to campus life, which some attribute to the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic put students’ monetary and lifestyle concerns into a new perspective for many in the community. Gonzalez referred to the pandemic as a “major energizing force” that has lasted beyond its worst days, as issues impacting student workers’ living and working conditions remain.

“Graduate student workers are frustrated by a lack of progress on key issues that affect their quality of life, like the stipend being below cost of living with inflation,” explained GSA president Jo Machesky GRD ’24.

On Oct. 25, Local 33 filed a petition with the NLRB for an official union election after spending the previous two semesters collecting election authorization signatures from a majority of union-eligible graduate and professional students. The University announced it would hold an election four days later.

What happens after the union election?

If a majority of students vote for the recognition of a union, the collective bargaining process begins in which the union, the University and their lawyers negotiate to form an official labor contract.

According to graduate union organizers at Columbia, NYU and Harvard, their contracts addressed several demands raised by their respective unions, many of which were similar to those of Local 33. Some contract wins included increased yearly pay, strong protections for international students, more affordable vision and dental care, a grievance procedure system and more support for the spouses and children of student workers.

Most notably, graduate and professional workers at the three universities received yearly pay raises in their contracts. Ashley Williams, an organizer with the graduate union Student Workers of Columbia, emphasized that Columbia’s contract, like those at the other two universities, also included a retroactive pay raise that added money to wages paid during previous semesters.

Tova Benjamin of NYU’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee union categorized their key contract victories into rights, benefits and protections. At NYU, rights in the contract included affordable health care and terms for parental leave, while benefits included union-funded reimbursements for out-of-pocket health expenses and a tax and legal aid fund for international students.

Ege Yumusak, who organized with the Harvard Graduate Student Union as an international student, described the personal impact of similar benefits in their contract.

“Materially, the results are clear — you can see the last contract’s results, but over a million dollars in benefits

distributed to people every year,” she said. “For myself, there were immigration costs, over $1,000 of which got reimbursed by my union in my last year.”

Local 33’s English told the News she wants to fight for a union grievance procedure that would address and investigate workplace harassment, discrimination or other kinds of adversity. At NYU, Benjamin said that she investigates such working conditions, brings notice to them and advocates for the students involved through her position as a union unit representative.

If a contract is secured, actively working graduate and professional students covered in the collective bargaining unit must pay dues or agency fees, which may cover a variety of operational costs. Dues are usually taken as a percentage of wages — at Harvard and Columbia, they stand at 1.44 percent, while at NYU, they stand at 2 percent — through automatic deduction from paychecks.

At Columbia, according to Williams, members included in the bargaining unit during the year — meaning they are actively employed in a union position — receive a bonus in their raises that aim to cover union dues.

Contract negotiations at private universities typically last years after a union yes vote, though some bargaining processes have lasted far longer than others. At Harvard,

it took two years for the university and union to settle a first contract after the election, while at Columbia, it took about five. Columbia recognized the union in 2019 after waging a failed legal battle against their December 2016 election victory, and they only reached a contract in January 2022 after three years of contentious negotiating.

Local 33 maintains that an NLRB contract will bolster existing efforts to better the lives of graduate and professional students across schools.

“A union and a contract would provide graduate workers with a sense of security and stability at Yale,” Buğra Sahin GRD ’26, a Local 33 organizer, wrote to the News. “I want to work at a university where all graduate workers advocating for improvements—on the GSA, the GPSS, or through our union Local 33—can work together to make our workplace more just, equitable, and accessible for all of us.”

After polls close on Thursday night, graduate and professional students will wait about another month until election results are announced by the NLRB on Jan 9.

Contact MEGAN VAZ at megan.vaz@yale.edu and MIRANDA WOLLEN at miranda.wollen@yale.edu .

Yale hit with suit alleging discrimination over mental illness

protected rights to accommodations. There is no excuse for Yale’s refusal to change their punitive and disciplinary policies.”

Abramson and Hannah Neves ’23 join as undergraduate plaintiffs alongside Elis for Rachael, an advocacy group composed of Yale alumni and the loved ones of Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum ’24, who died by suicide in 2021. The group’s website lists a slate of specific changes they demand Yale make to its mental health care infrastructure.

This lawsuit follows a recent Washington Post article criticizing the University’s policies for withdrawal and reinstatement. The article led administrators to publicly defend the University’s mental health policies, citing recent efforts to expand mental health care.

Last spring, the News reported that students feel that the withdrawal and reinstatement policies at the time left them with no choice other than to leave Yale in the case of a serious bout of mental illness. The University has since made reforms to its policies, which the lawsuit acknowledges.

The plaintiffs seek injunctive relief, meaning they would like Yale to make further reforms to their mental health policies to remedy the alleged discrimination. They do not seek financial compensation.

Abramson started at Yale in the fall of 2018 and withdrew in October 2019 for mental health reasons. Abramson wrote to the News that the lawsuit is an effort to prevent other people from experiencing the same “agonizing process” that she endured when she withdrew.

According to Abramson, this process included the “denial of accommodations, unreasonable burdens for seeking reinstatement and punitive consequences for withdrawal.”

She wrote she is on the “fortunate end” because, with her family’s support, she could access treatment outside Yale. However, she says University policies are especially harmful to students from backgrounds that

may limit access to health insurance, treatment options, familial and financial support or housing outside of Yale.

The lawsuit is class-action, which means it is filed on behalf of an entire group of people, which in this case is “all Yale students who have, or have a record of, mental health disabilities and who are harmed, or reasonably fear being harmed, by the illegal policies and practices challenged in this lawsuit.”

The lawsuit alleges that the University’s mental health policies violate the American with Disabilities Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Affordable Care Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and it seeks class-action status from the U.S. District Court of Connecticut.

Interim Vice President of Communications Karen Peart wrote to the News that the University is “confident” their policies comply with applicable laws and regulations. Nevertheless, she said University leaders have been working on policy changes that are “responsive to students’ emotional and financial wellbeing” and are working to increase supportive resources.

“Yale’s faculty, staff, and leaders care deeply about our students. We recognize how distressing and difficult it is for the student and their loved ones when a student is facing mental health challenges,” Peart wrote on behalf of the University. “When we make decisions and set policies, our primary focus is on students’ safety and health, especially when they are most vulnerable.”

Peart noted that in many cases, the “safest plan” for a student includes involving their parents and family.

Peart also noted in her statement that the University has recently simplified the process of returning from a medical withdrawal.

Elis for Rachael organizer Paul Mange Johansen ’88 told the News that the lawsuit was filed largely due to a lack of University response to numerous student reports. He explained there have been six reports from various student groups, includ-

ing a mental health advocacy group from students at Yale Law School, detailing problems with Yale’s mental health policies over nine years. He characterized student’s requests for policy changes as “very thoughtful” and “not unreasonable,” and he claimed that “very little” has happened in response.

Johansen also expressed appreciation for the students who shared their experiences with mental health at Yale. In addition to the two current students who are plaintiffs, numerous alumni shared their experiences accessing mental health care and withdrawing from Yale.

“I think it takes a tremendous amount of courage as current students to accuse your college of the things that we are accusing them of,” Johansen told the News.

In addition, Johansen said Elis for Rachael has had numerous conversations with Hoffman, which have also led to little change.

Maia Goodell LAW ’06, the lawyer representing the two current students and Elis for Rachael, told the News that Elis for Rachael sent a complaint to the University in early August with her counsel. The complaint aligned with the claims in the lawsuit, but they have not met or discussed the issues in the complaint.

“We all decided, the legal team and the clients, we were happy to keep trying, but it was time to take the next step,” Goodell said.

She added that now that the lawsuit has been filed, the University can either comply with the policy requests or file a motion to dismiss the case if they find the legal claims invalid. Choosing not to file an answer would trigger a significant period of legal argument.

When a defendant argues that the claims are invalid, they would follow the steps of a typical civil lawsuit, Goodell explained. Usually, this briefing does not involve substantial evidence, but some cases lead to a more thorough court argument. Should the case take the court route, it will then go into a discovery period, in which both sides will exchange

case-related documents and information and perform depositions.

After the depositions, the case would go to trial. At any time during this process, however, either parties can reach a settlement or choose to engage in a structured negotiations agreement. Negotiations involve both parties coming together to plan a way of resolving the claims without going through a trial.

Alicia Floyd ’05, another organizer of Elis for Rachael, told the News that one of the main goals of the lawsuit is to force the University to listen more directly to the experiences of students.

“Our top priority is to compel Yale to listen to students and hopefully in the process, give them some practice and improve their skills for the future going forward,” Floyd told the News. “We’re definitely in this for the long haul.”

Goodell explained that this is one of the reasons this was filed as a class-action lawsuit.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure explain the criteria for a judge to deem a class as valid, which include size and similarity across the group, among other traits. If the class is deemed invalid, the case is typically dismissed.

The legal team, according to Goodell, has spoken with a number of students in the course of an “extensive investigation” of potential claims and continues to welcome speaking with Yale students who may be affected by issues raised in the complaint.

“We’d love to hear from people who are having these kinds of experiences on whatever their perspectives are,” Goodell said.

Johansen also added that the lawsuit does not preclude other efforts Elis for Rachael is involved with.

Floyd and Goodell both emphasized that the lawsuit is not about animosity towards Yale, but instead an effort to make Yale better. Floyd described the lawsuit as only a “piece of the larger puzzle” for mental health advocacy.

“Students have rights and there are legal means to approach students

not having those rights upheld,” Floyd said. “But there are other things that we’re looking to do. We want it all for students.”

The discourse around Yale’s policies is part of a larger conversation about mental health at higher education institutions.

In 2018, Goodell helped file a similar class-action lawsuit against Stanford University, which accused the school of forcing students with mental disabilities off campus and treating them like a “legal liability.”

Stanford settled in 2019, agreeing to give students a greater say in whether to take a mental health-related leave of absence. For students who choose to remain, Stanford agreed to provide disability-compliant accommodations.

Some say the Stanford settlement did not extend far enough.

Harrison Fowler, a student plaintiff in the Stanford case, told the Washington Post that while their lawsuit brought attention to the problem and prompted some policy change, problems still persist. Fowler cited a friend who recently checked into a Stanford hospital and had no choice but to take a leave of absence.

Separately, U.S. Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts sent a letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and Attorney General Merrick Garland asking the federal government to issue new guidance to prevent colleges from forcing students to take involuntary medical leaves of absence. He asked for detailed responses on the issue, and relevant data, by Dec. 20 and expressed a need for urgent action given the rapidly rising numbers of mental health crises reported at colleges.

The case against Stanford was brought on the behalf of Stanford Mental Health and Wellness Coalition by the Disability Rights Advocates in San Francisco.

Contact ANIKA SETH at anika.seth@yale.edu and SARAH COOK at sarah.cook@yale.edu .

“Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.”

Approving the measure would open up a host of possibilities for what this union might look like and how it would function on campus. / Abraham Payne Contributing Photographer

Yale researchers establish link between plant evolution and drought resistance SCITECH

BY SELIN NALBANTOGLU STAFF REPORTER

Plants with more complex water transport structures are more resistant to drought conditions, making them more likely to survive and pass this characteristic on to their offspring.

That’s the conclusion Yale researchers have reached after poring over the fossil records of ancient plants that span tens of millions of years.

Earlier this month, a group of University affiliates working with faculty from Bates College, the University of Maine and Haverford College, among other institutions, published a paper on identifying the impact of droughts and drought resistance in determining plant structure over time.

“This study is an excellent example of how a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach can yield novel insights into evolutionary questions,” Jonathan Wilson, an associate professor of environmental studies at Haverford College and an author on the paper, wrote in an email to the News. “Bringing together modeling, physiology and paleontology and integrating their data and methods shed a great deal of light on this period in plant evolution.”

Lead author Martin Bouda GRD ’17, a researcher at the Institute of Botany at the Czech Academy of Sciences, studies the network properties of plant parts such as root systems and how these systems affect water intake of plants. In this paper, he was responsible for conceptualizing the water transport within the plants and building computational models to analyze these hydraulic processes. Craig Brodersen, a professor of plant physiological ecology at the Yale School of the Environment, was the principal investigator for the paper.

According to Brodersen, this new research stems from his team’s previous work on drought tolerance in plants such as grapevines. Previously, they have used new imaging techniques to study the vascular systems of various plants

and the effects of different vascular organization on plant survival in droughts.

Brodersen explained that during extreme drought conditions, plants may accumulate air bubbles in their vascular systems.

“These bubbles block the flow of water from the roots to the leaves,” Brodersen wrote in an email to the News. “One air bubble among the many hundreds to thousands of vessels in a plant might not cause too much harm initially, but these bubbles can spread between vessels wherever there is a connection to an adjacent one. Understanding how the vessel network of a plant is connected can then tell us something about how air bubbles spread, which becomes a greater problem during prolonged drought.”

The researchers used this framework as a guiding question to study the evolution of vascular plants over millions of years, according to Brodersen.

When conducting this research, the team of scientists referenced a collection of images put together over the past century by various paleobotanists. The images depicted xylems, a specialized tissue responsible for transporting water and nutrients, of extinct plants. The fossil record, which spanned approximately 50 million years, gave the researchers an understanding of the arrangement of various vascular systems in plants.

“In this particular case, some of our previous work on the very fine structure of a vessel network got me thinking of the big picture instead: our living plants almost all have a gap in the middle of the network, whereas in the earliest land plants, the network occupied a solid cylinder of tissue,” Bouda wrote in an email to the News. “I built a little simulation to see if embolism spread differently on the two different cross-sections. The results were encouraging and fit in well with Craig’s ongoing work on seedless vascular plants.”

While Brodersen produced the actual microscope images of the networks within the plants the

researchers were studying, Bouda constructed idealized, possible networks to use as comparison cases for the observed networks.

Then, Bouda added, the researchers worked with Wilson to study fossil plants and realized that the fossil plants’ networks were more vulnerable to droughts than those of present-day plants.

“[T]here’s a clear pattern of xylem network shapes starting out with simple forms and becoming more complex,” Brodersen wrote. “Using the arrangement of the conduits within those vessel networks we were able to map out the possble pathways that air bubbles could spread from conduit to conduit. We then compared networks from extinct plants to living relatives today such as ferns and lycophytes.”

Using a computer model, the researchers were able to simulate drought conditions and study the effects of those conditions on various xylem configurations. The results suggested that the xylems of the earliest plants, which were also

the simplest in arrangement, were the most vulnerable to air bubbles during a drought. Plants with a more complicated vascular system outperformed other species during the drought, according to Brodersen.

This paper is the result of interdisciplinary collaboration of experts in mathematical modeling, plant anatomy and paleobotany. The researchers applied current plant water transport theory and experimental work to their own inquiry. Brodersen explained that the team at Yale, including Bouda, developed the computer model and anatomical observations used to test their hypothesis. He added that Wilson served as the paleobotanist who helped “guide the species selection from the fossil record.”

Brodersen explained that this research stems from his laboratory’s collaboration with the plant breeding community. The findings could potentially inform the development of more drought-resistant varieties of plants.

According to Bouda, this paper helps elucidate “something funda-

mental about the structure and function of vascular plants that has been overlooked for a long time.” While the practical applications of the research are not immediately apparent, Bouda hopes that the findings might help diminish the tradeoff between crop yield and drought resistance, which has traditionally been a problem in agriculture.

“I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the paleobotanical fossil record,” Bouda wrote. “A lot of this was completely new to me, and I daresay both Craig and I got pretty excited discovering the variety of vascular forms that evolution had tried out over 400 million or so years. In the end, we found that we had taken a roundabout way to broadly reconstruct the dataset used by F. O. Bower a hundred years ago to show that vascular complexity depends on plant size, and that’s when the final piece of the puzzle snapped into place.”

Xylem comes from the Greek word xylon, meaning wood.

Contact SELIN NALBANTOGLU at selin.nalbantoglu@yale.edu.

Yale undergraduates develop award-winning strategy to prevent gun violence

BY ABEL GELETA CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Three Yale undergraduates developed a multi-pronged approach to address the gun violence epidemic in the United States through various community resources and entity synergies, winning the Tulane Health Policy Case Competition and highlighting the potential for combining a youth mentorship program and firearm safety training to mitigate gun violence.

Abe Baker-Butler ’25, Patryk Dabek ’25 and Allie Dettelbach ’25 had the winning plan for reducing firearm homicides among the 41 teams from 22 universities that participated in the THPPC. After analyzing the status quo of gun violence in Opelousas, Louisiana, they created a plan — called Operation Healthy Homefront, or OHH — that integrated an after-school mentoring program and firearms safety instruction led by veterans in these communities.

“Gun violence is such a pressing issue, and it is so under-addressed,” Baker-Butler said. “There are so many common sense solutions attracting broadbased support. We’re happy knowing that we’ve been able to make at least some addition to the policy discussion around gun safety with our proposal, but we’re not done yet.”

The idea focuses on involving at-risk youth and veterans in the strategic development of a viable solution for communities with a high incidence of deaths or injuries from a firearm, while also serving as a mutually beneficial program aimed at providing essential skills and opportunities to youth and employment opportunities for veterans.

Baker-Butler described how his earlier experience with public health work tackling substance abuse in his high school and trying to provide accessible healthcare to low-income senior cit -

izens inspired him to compete in this event. All team members combined their interests in policy-making, public health and healthcare to produce a novel solution to a pervasive problem in the United States.

The strong collaboration between the three teammates in this competition allowed them to capitalize on each other’s skills and use the competition to gain new knowledge and create something of long-lasting impact.

Dettelbach noted how the team “wanted to think about how [they] could address that problem from a public health angle but also an angle of political feasibility.” This case competition allowed participants to analyze the multiple levels of government to devise solutions that would withstand the political obstacles to reducing gun

violence in the United States.

He argued that numerous stakeholders must collaborate to commit enough resources and efforts toward reasonable, effective and sustainable attempts to mitigate the issues diverse populations face.

“We all learned about the policy-making bodies at each of those levels and the organizations that exist at those levels that we can harness to come to this final proposal,” said Dettelbach.

Dabek, along with Butler-Baker. initially brought up the idea to enter this competition with Dettelbach after hearing about it from Howard Foreman, Professor of Diagnostic Radiology, Economics, and Public Health. Dabek spent his summer delivering healthcare as an EMT and establishing a nonprofit to improve health condi -

tions in war-ravaged Ukraine. In light of his summer experiences, he evaluated the public health issues plaguing the United States and accepted the opportunity to participate in this competition.

To comprehend how to advocate for social justice and health equity effectively, Dabek emphasized the importance of policy formation in implementing health equity in diverse communities.

Beyond policy proposal and implementation, all team members highlighted the need to collaborate closely with those communities they look to serve with this plan. Dabek said this proposal was only one step in developing the muchneeded solution to gun violence.

“We don’t forget about the people that we’re actually serving and the issues they’re dealing with, and we want to ensure we are in contact

with the community and see what the community has to say,” said Dabek.

Baker-Butler recognized that the team is grateful to have won and received recognition from the judges. Still, he said, the solution to the gun violence epidemic requires numerous people to continue thinking and coming up with potential ideas to solve this problem.

Foreman encouraged his students in his Health Economics and Policy course to participate in this competition because the THPCC “was perfectly aligned with the mission of the class” which aims to “prepare students to critically think about actual challenges in society.”

In many cases, Foreman stated, individuals might propose policy solutions and ideas that are “juvenile and naive” and make various suggestions and solutions that are not feasible in implementation.

Foreman highlighted the thoughtful and detailed nature of this team’s proposal.

“Every measure [for judging] that I’d look at … either passed or far exceeded my expectations,” said Foreman. “My expectation for a proposal of this type is to see something that agrees with the law; It’s not basically imagining a world where certain laws don’t exist … It’s not going to demand such enormous resources to be out of the scope of the problem.”

Foreman expressed his desire to witness this proposal be piloted on a small scale, improved and then scaled further to accommodate and assist vulnerable populations. In many ways, these are how programs are kick-started and implemented nationally.

Foreman believes that the students’ passion for this issue, coupled with the ability to gain enough attention and support, could be the catalyst for this proposal to be implemented effectively.

The presentation the winners presented to judges can be viewed at this link.

Contact ABEL GELETA at abel.geleta@yale.edu.

“The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.”

ROBERT FROST AMERICAN POET

TIM TAI/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Yale faculty has helped in publication of a paper detailing plant structure in determining outcomes during drought conditions.

COURTESY OF SAM RIFKIND-BROWN

Yale students place first for their proposal for reducing gun violence in communities at the Tulane Health Policy Case Competition.

SCITECH

WALES

Is the COVID-19 pandemic over? Yale experts weigh in

BY BRIAN ZHANG AND OMAR ALI STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

In a September interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” program, President Biden declared that the COVID-19 pandemic had come to an end. His remarks were met with firm reservations and retracted shortly after by the White House.

Amid changing attitudes regarding the virus’ future landscape, the News spoke with several members of the Yale community, across disciplines and backgrounds, to weigh in on whether the pandemic can be considered o cially over.

What is the present situation?

Mark Schlesinger, professor of health policy and a fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, explained that around 500 people are still dying from COVID-19 each day in the United States alone. Under present circumstances, it might seem inhumane and even disrespectful to allude to the pandemic being “over,” he said.

“Even setting aside the emotional overtones, when a pandemic becomes endemic (though most recent estimates being that about 94% of Americans have had at least a brush with COVID to date), that does not mean that the pandemic is over, since each new variant represents its own distinctive challenges and threats,” Schlesinger wrote to the News.

Schlesinger continued to explain that in this sense the pandemic might never be over but very few would want to say that with candor because of the toll since the pandemic began.

Moreover, for immunocompromised individuals, the privilege of assigning and debating a defi ned end to the pandemic was never theirs in the first place, according to Arden Parrish ’25.

While they understand that more people will want to “pretend that the pandemic never happened” as cases decrease, the attitude also puts immunocompromised students like themself — who are more prone to infection and severe side e ects — in a vulnerable position, they said.

Parrish emphasized that Yale has actually “moved backwards” in its response to accommodate immunocompromised students during COVID-19, mention-

ing that professors have stopped making lecture recordings available. Many have also reinstated “old ableist” attendance policies, they said, that punish sick students for missing class and thereby force classmates to show up with contagious illnesses.

“Yale in particular sacrifi ced the health and safety of our most vulnerable members,” Parrish said. “The pandemic proved that it is possible to have a learning environment that does not discriminate against disabled or immunocompromised students in these ways, and it’s frustrating to watch our school reverting back to the way things were before even though COVID is very much still present on our campus.”

Cases are likely to rise as we head into the winter months, shared Yale Sterling Professor of immunobiology Akiko Iwasaki. Many indoor places are not requiring masks and do not have adequate ventilation or humidifi cation, creating optimal conditions for virus transmission.

Is the course of the pandemic relevant?

According to Cary Gross, professor of medicine and public health and director of National Clinician Scholars Program at Yale, the question of when the pandemic is over is a symptom of the very thinking that has led to America’s fragmented, suboptimal response to COVID-19.

“By perpetuating the fallacy that the pandemic will have a clear finish line — and that line may be just around the corner — we risk delaying important work that needs to be done,” Gross told the News. “We need to revamp and reinvest in our public health system to enable preventive options. We have to ensure access to healthcare and address the fact that our nation’s health care system is more fragile than we had thought.”

Gross drew attention to the importance of carefully monitoring COVID-19 transmission, hospitalization and death rates moving forward — and using these rates as guidelines for assessing risk and adjusting the fl exibility of our day-to-day routines. Ultimately, politicians, scientists and citizens must persist in doing the hard work of revamping America’s approach to pandemics now and in the future, he said.

What will constitute the end of the pandemic?

According to STAT, the end of a pandemic is usually defi ned by a point when human immune systems have become adapted to fight against the most fatal manifestations of an infection. Traditionally, when contraction with the disease causes a milder illness, the pandemic becomes endemic and is less concerning.

Political science professor Gregory Huber believes there are two di erent ways to think about the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under strict definitions of the word “pandemic,” COVID-19 may no longer qualify as a “novel” virus as more populations worldwide acquire immunity from exposure or vaccination. Despite widespread outbreaks, particularly among undervaccinated populations, COVID-19 may simply be understood as an endemic virus, ebbing and flowing like the seasonal flu.

“Another way to think about the COVID-19 pandemic as having ended is behavioral — the widespread disruption of human activity has subsided,” Huber wrote to the News. “This does not mean that COVID-19 is not a threat to

many, but for those for whom the disease is less threatening, the extreme behaviors that we took to reduce the risk of disease are no longer worth the social cost.”

What measures should the public maintain moving forward in regards to stopping the spread of COVID-19?

Sumaira Akbarzada SPH ’21 agreed that the declining public consciousness of COVID19 can be rooted in psychology. She explained that widespread depression and isolation have perpetuated an exhaustion and a desire to move on prematurely, with many Americans thinking that it is no longer worth it to continue practices such as self-isolation and social distancing.

“Vaccinations cannot and will not provide 100 percent immunity, and vaccinated individuals can still carry the virus and infect others, even if … asymptomatic,” she said. “Therefore, it’s very important for public health … experts to continue educating the public and working directly with policymakers on the national level, to make sure mitigating the spread [of] COVID-19 is still a priority in this country.”

In an interview with the News, Shaper Mirza, associate professor of biology at the School of Science and Engineering at Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan, also compared COVID-19’s long-term survival to the flu.

Mirza, who won the World Bank’s grant in 2020 for her research in COVID-19 epidemiology, echoed Akbarzada in saying that although immunization might weaken the virulence of the disease, it does not chart an end to the pandemic.

She urged the public to watch out for more virulent variants that can breach immunities developed post-infection or post-immunization, affirming that self-education is critical to the international conscience of a world sustaining its fight against the pandemic.

As of the morning of Nov. 28, 3,007 people in New Haven have passed away from COVID-19-related complications.

Contact BRIAN ZHANG at brian.zhang@yale.edu@yale.edu and OMAR ALI at omar.ali@yale.edu .

BY ISABEL MANEY AND NEHA MIDDELA STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

This fall, Yale received a gold rating from a college sustainability tracking group, scoring higher than in previous years but falling well short of the system’s highest platinum rating.

The high rating, granted by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, recognized Yale’s sustainability efforts in several areas while also highlighting the need for improvement in sustainable finance and campus engagement.

Out of a possible 100 points, the university scored 70.5 total points, an increase from its previous score of 67.8, which it achieved in 2020. The scoring rubric is made up of five overarching categories — operations, planning and administration, innovation and leadership, academics and engagement. The gold rating, which requires a minimum of 65 points, is the second highest score on the scale.

Platinum, the highest rating, requires a total score of 85 points.

Yale could increase its score for future years by upping engagement with students in the professional and graduate schools, according to Lisa Noriega, a data analyst at the University’s O ce of Sustainability.

“The [STARS] report itself reflects areas needing attention as we develop our office’s programming,” Noriega said. “As a result of this reflection, new programming is underway to target a broader student population more effectively.”

By submitting data to STARS, according to Noriega, the Uni-

versity is also automatically submitting data to college sustainability rankings, including the Princeton Review’s Guide to Green Colleges and the Sierra Club’s Cool School Ranking.

Princeton University also received a gold rating this year, while Stanford University scored at the platinum level. Several other peer institutions have not yet received ratings.

The rankings are another way to highlight the University’s sustainability efforts. According to the AASHE STARS website, universities derive several benefits from self-reporting for STARS ratings, including connections

with other STARS institutions, suggestions for community engagement and concrete metrics to drive future sustainability efforts.

Sebastian Duque ’24, co-president of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, cautioned against putting too much credit on the results of the report and others like it, noting that reports like STARS are not always e ective at measuring campus sustainability and that the University is more open to making changes to its sustainability plan when pressured by student activism.

“In general, institutions can very easily use ratings like these

to greenwash themselves and promote themselves as sustainable spaces or sustainable institutions when they’re not really fulfi lling the full share that they could be,” Duque said.

Even though Yale’s overall performance received a gold rating, the University did not perform well in all categories. It received its lowest scores in the subcategories of “investment and finance” and “wellbeing and work.”

The University received a 0.83 out of 5 possible points for “sustainable investment” and 0 of 1 possible points for “investment disclosure.” According to AASHE, schools are scored on the acces-

sibility of information related to investments, the presence of an effective sustainable investments policy and engagement with divestment e orts.

“I think Yale is a sustainability leader in a lot of ways, in their operations and buildings, thought leadership and research,” said Jamie Chan ’23, a former president of YSEC. “There are still definitely substantial ways that they can improve, particularly with sharing Yale’s sustainability resources with New Haven and taking serious calls for fossil fuel divestment.”

Student groups like the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition have pressured the University to divest from fossil fuels, a commitment Yale has so far refused to make.

The current Yale Sustainability Plan outlines the University’s goal for divestment to “encourage Yale’s external investment managers to consider the risks and opportunities associated with climate change in their investment processes with respect to Yale’s portfolio.”

The University’s sustainability plan was not created to align with the STARS rating system, according to Noriega. Yale’s sustainability plan was created years before the STARS assessment system, but in creating the next sustainability plan for 2025, however, the results of the STARS report can help shape more of the University’s goals for sustainability efforts in the future.

AASHE was established in 2005.

Contact ISABEL MANEY at isabel.maney@yale.edu and NEHA MIDDELA at neha.middela@yale.edu .

CLARISSA TAN / CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATOR

Yale earned its second gold rating from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s STARS.

CATE ROSER / CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATOR

Yale School of Public Health and political science department a liates discuss whether the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

Graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel to speak at Yale

BY ROSE HOROWITCH AND ENZA JONAS GIUGNI SENIOR REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Alison Bechdel, the graphic artist, autobiographical author and MacArthur Genius, will visit Yale on Thursday to speak about her life and writing.

Bechdel first gained prominence for her weekly comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Running from 1983 to 2008, the comic was an early representation of lesbians in popular culture. In 2006, Bechdel became a bestseller with the graphic memoir

“Fun Home,” which was billed as a “family tragicomic.”

The memoir was later adapted as a Broadway musical and won five Tony Awards. Bechdel published her second graphic memoir, titled “Are You My Mother?”, in 2014. Most recently, in 2021, she released the memoir “The Secret to Superhuman Strength.”

Bechdel is well known for her vulnerable and honest depictions of family life, sexuality and gender nonconformity.

Bechdel will address the Whitney Humanities Center at 4 p.m. in an event open to the Yale community.

“I think young people today want something that’s really honest and genuine and this is that,” said Ellen Handler Spitz, lecturer in the humanities. “She’s really somebody who wants to say what she believes.”

“Fun Home” chronicles Bechdel’s childhood in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, where her family owned and operated a funeral parlor. She writes of her fraught relationships with her parents — particularly with her father — who she discovers is gay, as Bechdel herself is. “Fun Home” follows the years before and after Bechdel’s father’s death, which Bechdel suspects is a suicide.

Bechdel came out as a lesbian when she was 19 years old. In a 2015 interview, Bechdel told NPR that she is purposefully open about her sexuality after seeing her father hide his sexuality prior to his death.

“In many ways my life, my professional career has been a reaction to my father’s life, his life of secrecy,” Bechdel said in the interview. “I threw myself into the gay community, into this life as a lesbian cartoonist, deciding I was going to be a professional lesbian. In a way, that was all my way of healing myself.”

Handler Spitz and Sterling Professor of French and humanities R. Howard Bloch invited Bechdel to campus. Handler Spitz said she had heard Bechdel speak before and was stunned by her honesty.

“I was astonished by her because she seemed to me to be a person of such incredible honesty, bravery and authenticity,” Handler Spitz said. “She was able to speak about elements of her life and her feelings and her thoughts that most people never dare to bring forward publicly.”

Though Bechdel had a unique childhood, both Handler Spitz and Bloch said that there are elements that everyone can connect to.

Bechdel’s works cover the themes of love and being loved, alienation and family connections.

“Our capacity for empathy is enlarged by these graphic confessions where a moment in someone else’s life revives a buried moment in our own,” Handler Spitz said. “Sometimes painful, sometimes not, sometimes very different from what is on the page itself but connected in feeling, and, when we encounter it, we are chastened and enriched thereby.”

Handler Spitz said the memoirs are meant to be read slowly,

as each element is intentional and adds to the experience. She pointed to the depiction of Bechdel and her mother in “Are You My Mother?” While all the other women featured are blonde, Bechdel and her mother have dark hair. They are twinned and connected in a realm outside of language, Handler Spitz said.

The graphic medium of “Fun Home” also allows for nuances that could not be conveyed in words. Handler Spitz provided the example of the first page of “Fun Home,” in which a game between Bechdel and her father is shown from three different perspectives.

Bloch described Fun Home as a “family scrapbook,” in which the drawings appear as candid snapshots of Bechdel’s childhood.

Students who attend the talk should question what in the memoir is not true, Bloch said. They should take a critical perspective to the question of what someone cannot know about themselves. Bechdel is well known for including ambivalence and ambiguity alongside brutal honesty in her works.

“Not knowing everything is sometimes a good thing in a memoir: a mystery or quest is better than laying out all the facts,” Bechdel said in a 2017 interview.

Bechdel is also known for originating the “Bechdel test,” which assesses films by whether two named female characters discuss something other than a man.

The Whitney Humanities Center is located at 53 Wall Street.

Contact ROSE HOROWITCH at rose.horowitch@yale.edu and ENZA JONAS GIUGNI at enza.jonasgiugni@yale.edu.

Yale researchers develop first FDA-approved drug to delay type 1 diabetes

BY CHLOE NIELD AND JAMES STEELE STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Teplizumab, a drug that delays type 1 diabetes, recently became the first drug to delay an autoimmune disease approved by the FDA. A Yale professor played a crucial role in its development.

Kevan Herold, C.N.H. Long Professor of Immunobiology and of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, led the clinical trials for the drug’s development over the past thirty years. Teplizumab’s approval provides a new frontier regarding the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes and paves the way for future work in disease prevention.

The drug was found to delay the development of type 1 diabetes for a median of 2 years.

“If you’re 8 years old and you are not going to get diabetes for two years [because of teplizumab treatment], that’s a big deal, because now you are going to be 10 years old when you develop diabetes, and hopefully a ten-year-old is a little more mature than an 8-year-old,” Herold said. “Same thing if you are about to go into middle school, you are not going to get diabetes until you are in high school, or even after high school … [diabetes’] absence, even for a day, is a gift.”

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease where your body destroys the cells of the pancreas that secrete insulin. Insulin is a hormone that signals cells to uptake sugar that can be used for energy. When the insulin-secreting cells are destroyed, the sugar in the bloodstream cannot be absorbed. Approximately 1.9 million Americans have type 1 diabetes according to the American Diabetes Association. The treatment is insulin injections, which can be extremely costly.

Teplizumab, sold under the brand name <Tzield>, is a monoclonal antibody, a type of antibody manufactured by cloning a white blood cell that was exposed to a target protein. Teplizumab targets the epsilon chain, which is part of the CD3 receptor protein complex. The CD3 complex is a component of the T-cell membrane responsible for recognizing the respective targets of that T-cell, which is a type of immune cell.

The exact mechanism of the reaction between teplizumab and the epsilon chain is not certain, but Herold and his colleagues

expect that teplizumab sends a signal to the T-cell by binding to the eрsilon chain. This signal is thought to partially or wholly deactivate the T-cells responsible for destroying the pancreatic cells that produce insulin in patients with type 1 diabetes.

Even after teplizumab treatment, the effectiveness of the immune system will not be impeded, Herold explained. The signal created when the CD3 complex encounters a viral antigen is much stronger than the signal from teplizumab reception.

“If you look at the long-term safety profile of people [in trials] who have been treated with the drug, there is no evidence of an infectious disease risk,” Herold said.

Herold predicts that the strength of the signal given by teplizumab lies somewhere between that of the antigen signal and the autoimmune signal. This prevents the T-cells from destroying beneficial tissues while allowing them to retain their efficacy in combating viruses.

While the development and approval of teplizumab have been a long process, Herold has been“very interested in using immunotherapies to change the course of autoimmune disease, specifically diabetes” since the beginning.

The median age of participants in the teplizumab trials is 13 to 14; however, many different ages were included in the trials. Participants were not yet diagnosed with diabetes before their participation in the trial and were identified by their familial relationship to someone with type 1 diabetes, Herold explained. They were then screened for typical immune markers of type 1 diabetes, and if it was determined they were at risk for the disease’s development, they were administered teplizumab over the course of two weeks and the progression of the disease was monitored in the years after.

The clinical trials found that, compared to a placebo group, the development of type 1 diabetes was delayed a median of 2 years in participants who received teplizumab. However, some patients had delays significantly longer than that. One patient even experienced an 11-year delay of type 1 diabetes development.

“We are very keen to understand what’s the difference between those [patients] that have long responses and those that have these short responses, and how we convert those short responses to

long responses,” Herold said, referencing how this will be a primary focus of future research.

Herold explained that while two years may not seem like a significant delay, this extra time disease-free is valuable.

For example, there would be more time for research in the field of type 1 diabetes treatment to advance. Herold explained that the way we treat and diagnose diabetes now is different compared to how it was just three years ago.

“Dr. Herold and his colleagues have spent years working to understand how a person’s own immune system can destroy the beta (or insulin-producing) cells in the pancreas, leading to type 1 diabetes. That work led to trials of teplizumab, ” Nancy Brown, Dean of the Yale School of Medicine, wrote. “To make discoveries that transform lives and health, that is what faculty at YSM aspire to do.”

On Nov. 17, the FDA approved

teplizumab for use as a treatment to delay type 1 diabetes in those aged 8 and older. This approval means that it is appropriate to start screening patients for type 1 diabetes with the intent of administering the teplizumab treatment.

Herold explained that the patients identified to undergo the treatment should eventually extend to the general public, not just those identified on the basis of having relatives with type 1 diabetes. This is especially important, given that most people who develop type 1 diabetes do not have a familial history of the disease, according to Herold.

“That’s a new frontier, screening even in the general population for a disease that you can prevent, not just coming in afterward,” Herold said. “I think that that is a new exciting area of medical investigation.”

Trialnet is an international network of scientists dedicated to type 1 diabetes research. Yale is one of twenty-two Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet

International Clinical Centers at the forefront of type 1 diabetes research. Jennifer Sherr, principal investigator of the TrialNet site at Yale and professor of pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine, talked about the importance of teplizumab’s development.

“[The development of teplizumab] opens the door to prioritize development of new therapies for slowing and stopping T1D and moves us one step closer to TrialNet’s ultimate goal: a future without T1D,” Sherr wrote. “While TrialNet does not have any studies of teplizumab currently underway, we will build on the success of the Teplizumab Prevention Study by continuing to find new ways to slow and eventually stop T1D.”

Herold was the third person to hold the position of TrialNet Chair.

Contact CHLOE NIELD at chloe.nield@yale.edu and JAMES STEELE at james.steele@yale.edu .

“Family, nature and health all go together.”

OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN BRITISH-AUSTRALIAN SINGER

COURTESY OF YALE DAILY NEWS

Bechdel, who wrote the memoir “Fun Home,” will address the Whitney Humanities Center on Thursday at 4 p.m.

ERIC WANG/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Kevan Herold led the clinical trials for teplizumab, a drug found to delay the development of type 1 diabetes.

A guide to Yale’s reproductive resources

“From my experience, supplies are restocked about once every one to two weeks, but this can be adjusted depending on the rate of consumption,” Huynh wrote to the News. “The goal is for these baskets to be stocked at all times.”

According to Huynh, there are other spaces beyond the residential colleges where menstrual products are available.

These include the Yale Women’s Center and Yale Health, who have, according to Huynh, “similar programs and resources with respect to the distribution of free menstrual products on campus.”

Yale College Council partners with Yale Women’s Center

In the Yale College Council’s Oct. 2 meeting, the YCC approved a $500 partnership with the Yale Women’s Center to improve “quality and accessibility of women’s products across campus.”

with access to higher quality menstrual products than those that are provided in the residential colleges.

In an email to the News, Interim Director of the Office of Gender and Campus Culture, or OGCC, Eilaf Elmileik wrote that the placement of the products was decided in 2018, when the YCC first began working on a program to make menstrual products more available on campus.

“If there are concerns or feedback about this aspect or others, I’d be glad to talk further with anyone interested,” Elmileik wrote. “In my work with OGCC, I meet weekly with two members of the Women’s Center, and I have also let them know that I’m happy to continue this conversation.

Chatelle expressed concerns that the currently available products in residential colleges are not of sufficient quality.

Menstrual products in other campus locations These ongoing efforts to offer period products in student restrooms are reminiscent of initial proposals promoting menstrual equity – even before the CCEs’ involvement.

“The dispensers in the bathrooms have long been difficult to support,” wrote Melanie Boyd, Yale College Dean of Student Affairs, “and so the YCC chose to focus on the residential colleges and Old Campus instead.”

According to Boyd, the YCC began working on a project to make disposable menstrual products more available in 2018. The program was designed to supply free menstrual products in each residential college and on Old Campus, with the support of former Yale College Dean Marvin Chun and the heads of the colleges.

BY ANIKA SETH, MADELINE CORSON AND GIA-BAO DAM STAFF REPORTER, CONTRIBUTING REPORTER, AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Yale first started offering free pads and tampons in residential facilities three years ago. Now, students and staff are reflecting on the University’s ongoing efforts to promote menstrual equity on campus.

Since 2017, the Yale College Council has explored providing free menstrual products to students. Today, pads, tampons and condoms are primarily available to students in the basement laundry rooms of their residential colleges and in two entryways on Old Campus, with supplies provided by the Office of Gender and Campus Culture. Most recently, the Yale Women’s Center has announced a partnership with the YCC to expand period product accessibility on campus.

“We just want a really directed, concerted effort on the part of the University to make something that increases accessibility on campus, instead of an afterthought,” Theia Chatelle ’25, the political action coordinator for the Yale Women’s Center, said.

Unlike toilet paper, soap, paper towels or other personal hygiene essentials, period products are not commonly offered for free in campus restrooms. Moreover, the inflationary economic climate is exacerbating the cost burden of purchasing period products,

inflicting an undue financial burden on people who menstruate.

As of June 9, for example, average pad prices rose 8.3 percent and average tampon prices rose 9.8 percent compared to last year’s prices, straining many budgets. In its 2017 fall survey, the YCC found that “the purchase of menstrual hygiene products posed a financial burden for approximately half of Yale students.”

Pads, tampons and condoms in residential colleges

Presently, Yale’s Communication & Consent Educators, or CCEs, are responsible for stocking residential colleges and Old Campus with menstrual products, including pads, tampons and liners.

There are currently 57 CCEs at Yale, spread across each of Yale’s 14 residential colleges. One CCE from each college is assigned the responsibility of distributing sexual health products in those same locations, such as internal and external condoms, lubricant, dental dams and other supplies.

Ryan Huynh ’23, a project coordinator for the CCE program, explained that the location varies by college, but that supplies are often kept in residential college laundry rooms in small baskets. On Old Campus, they are located in the laundry rooms in the basements of Farnam Entryway B and Bingham Entryway D.

The frequency with which the colleges are restocked with menstrual products is contingent on how often products are used.

In an email to the News, YCC President Leleda Beraki explained that the YWC reached out a few weeks into the school year requesting this funding for menstrual and contraception products.

“The YWC sent the YCC an itemized list of products they intended to purchase with the cost totalling to $500,” Beraki wrote. “Whether this is enough to achieve their goals for the year, we can’t really speak to. The YWC has a much better idea of what they need and how often! Our only role in this was to fill a need that was asked of us.”

Per Beraki, the YWC products will be available to both Yalies and New Haven residents, in accordance with the YWC’s timeline of purchasing and providing the products.

Chatelle expressed concern about the lack of accessibility for menstrual products in student restrooms. In particular, Chatelle referred to the current system as a “stopgap approach.”

”No one really uses [the products provided in residential college basements] because it’s in a very awkward place,” Chatelle said. “It sort of creates this further stigma – why are you putting it in the corner of the basement in the laundry room?”

The Yale Women’s Center, located in the basement of Durfee Hall, is “staffed all week by student volunteers, who can offer support, advice, and free dental dams and condoms,” according to the website for the Office of LGBTQ+ Resources. The YWC’s objective in working with the YCC, Chatelle explained, is to provide students

“Condoms [are] what everyone comes to the Women’s Center and tells us that they want,” Chatelle said. “The multicolored condoms, no one uses because you can go to the laundry room and see that they might have been there for eons.”

Chatelle hopes to use the $500 provided by the YCC to make higher-quality products more easily available to students. But the YWC also hopes to expand this work, with YCC support.

Beraki explained that the YCC plans to assist the YWC by supporting proposal writing and presentation to administration, particularly around their goals to make Plan B more widely available and to offer better-quality brands of menstrual and pregnancy resources on campus.

Chatelle compared efforts for accessible sexual health products at Yale to the programs of peer institutions — such as Middlebury and Harvard — who provide products to students in restrooms at no cost.

In 2017, Middlebury College converted 54 tampon dispensers on campus to “free-dispensers.” Additionally, since 2019, a variety of menstrual and sexual health products have been provided in freshman and sophomore dorms at Middlebury. Similarly, at Harvard, in fall 2017, the College Council allocated $1,000 for a pilot program in freshman dorms, which was expanded to four upperclassmen houses by the end of that year.

“Now we’re sort of evaluating different policy proposals [with the YCC],” Chatelle said. “The ultimate goal would be to push the university to provide menstrual products in all of the bathrooms on campus.”

A pilot run occurred in the spring of 2019, organized by different configurations of students and staff in each college, which resulted in 14 different processes for the YCC to keep track of.

In the fall of 2019, the YCC asked the Office of Gender and Campus Culture if the CCEs could distribute menstrual products along with the condom supplies, to which the CCEs agreed to try out. Over time, the OGCC has taken over the ordering process and made the system simpler.

Beyond the residential colleges, Graduate & Professional Student Senate and the Women Faculty Forum initiated its program to place free period products in Sterling Library restrooms. Rather than rely upon students to restock baskets or bags outside frequently visited spaces, it primarily relies upon period product dispensers installed directly in bathrooms.

Accessibility in Sterling — and around campus — is discrepant. Often, these dispensers are present but unstocked or broken.

The News visited 10 different bathrooms across five campus buildings on Oct. 21. One of the 10 offered menstrual products.

Huynh encouraged students with questions or concerns to contact the CCEs assigned to their residential college.

The Yale Women’s Center is generally open from Sunday to Thursday during the evenings.

Contact ANIKA SETH at anika.seth@yale.edu, MADELINE CORSON at maddy.corson@yale.edu and GIABAO DAM at gia-bao.dam@yale.edu .

Jackson launches five-year B.A.-B.S./M.P.P. program for undergraduates

BY OLIVIA LOMBARDO AND BENJAMIN HERNANDEZ STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Yale’s global studies school will launch a five-year program for undergraduates in the spring, allowing a select few to obtain a Masters in Public Policy in Global Affairs ahead of schedule.

The new B.A.-B.S./M.P.P. program fits squarely in the school’s commitment to global leadership and service, Lorenzo Caliendo, deputy dean of the new Jackson School for Global Affairs, said at an info session to prospective applicants.

Director of Undergraduate Studies for political science David Simon stressed that students will receive significant guidance from Jackson faculty to guide them through their coursework and summer experiences.

“How can we at Jackson help you become the person with a profile that you want to be?”

Simon asked. “[The five-year B.A.-B.S./M.P.P. program is] a tremendous opportunity to be able to do that in just one year right out of your college.”

The program exposes undergraduate Yale College students to Jackson’s courses beginning their senior year. Requirements include taking classes in Jackson’s core curriculum, a language class up to L4 and a leadership and ethics workshop, along with an approved summer experience between their fourth and fifth year in the program.

To successfully complete the program, students are required to complete 36 college credits in pursuance of a B.A.-B.S. and 12 graduate-level credits for the M.P.P. For

the required Yale College credits, 32 courses must be non-professional.

Simon noted the differences between traditional M.P.P. students and students enrolled in Jackson’s five-year program.

Whereas two-year M.P.P. students are expected to take 16 classes, roughly four credits per term, students enrolled in the new program fulfill 12 credits for the M.P.P. In their senior year at Yale College, the equivalent to their fourth year in the program, students are expected to take four of Jackson’s core credits.

The Jackson School stresses the importance of its intentionally small, tight-knit community, enrolling only 35 students. Admittance to this program is similarly small: an anticipated 3 to 5 undergraduates will be accepted this year, according to Jackson’s Assistant Dean of Graduate Admissions Asha Rangappa LAW ’00.

“We are a new school, and we are in a way bringing all our best resources and our best practices that we know from different schools to create leaders for global affairs,” Caliendo said.

Rangappa said that the school plans to have the special application portal for the program go live on Jan. 1, 2023 and close on Feb. 15, noting that it will require a personal statement about students’ focus area and interests, two letters of recommendation with at least one from a Yale course instructor, a resume and a letter of approval by the student’s residential college dean. Faculty involved in the application review process will recuse themselves from writing letters of recommendation for applicants to this program.

Applications will first be screened by the dean of admissions

and assistant dean for undergraduate students at Jackson before a final review committee consisting of the deputy dean, assistant dean for graduate studies and a Jackson faculty member.

Although information about the review committee is public and was shared at the information session, Rangappa noted that it would not be communicated via the Jackson website. In an email to the News, Rangappa wrote that “prospective Yale applicants can reach out and ask about the admissions process, members of the faculty review board, etc.”

While Rangappa said that the program encourages applications from all majors and gives no preference for a particular background, she noted that a demonstrated interest in international relations and global affairs through an applicant’s academic, personal or professional experiences will be taken into account.

“Students interested in this program and who are earlier in their Yale education should take this into account in choosing courses and summer experiences leading up to their junior year,” Rangappa wrote in an email to the News.

Rangappa added that she expects the biggest challenge for the undergraduate students applying to the program will be a lack of work experience, noting that “[Jackson’s] regular applicant pool is coming in after having worked generally for two to five years.”

Eming Shyu ’25, a prospective applicant to the program, said that he looks forward to the opportunity of focusing solely in an area of study that he is particularly interested in.

“My specific interest [in the program is] ... the practical appli -

cation of macroeconomics,” Shyu said. “There’s [a] lot of practition-based macroecon classes that don’t interact with history or polisci, which are two disciplines that I am still interested in but not as much as macreconomics. So, the freedom to take classes means that I can laser-focus on my specific interest without being worried too much about fulfilling a matrix of studies.”

Despite his enthusiasm for the program, Shyu expressed confusion about some of its logistics, such as how many credits can be carried over from their undergraduate studies. In particular, he noted that the program only allows students to carry four credits from one semester of their senior year into their graduate studies to fulfill the program’s 12-credit requirement.

Accepted students will receive their financial award at the time of admission. According to Rangappa, the award will only apply to students’ fifth year when they are in residence at Jackson.

“We hope to offer the same level of aid to the 5-year program as we do to the ‘regular’ MPP cohort,” Rangappa wrote. “The current first and second year classes have their tuition fully covered through a Jackson tuition fellowship, outside funding, or a combination of both; we aspire to continue that trend.”

Decisions for admission to the program will be released on April 1, 2023.

Contact OLIVIA LOMBARDO at olivia.lombardo@yale.edu and BENJAMIN HERNANDEZ at ben.hernandez@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF XANDER DE VRIES

Yale College Council, Women’s Center and Communication & Consent Educators work to continue strides in accessibility of menstrual and sexual health products on campus.

“Family is not an important thing. It’s everything..”

MICHAEL J. FOX CANADIAN-AMERICAN ACTOR

COURTESY OF KAI NIP

Current Yale College juniors will be eligible to apply for Jackson’s five-year B.A.B.S./M.P.P. program in the spring.

Bulldogs go 2–1 over break Bulldogs ready for NCAAs

won a set since Harvard University lost 3–1 in 2016.

Yale will play the University of Central Florida (27–1, 19–1 AAC) in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

“Making the tourney is kind of like a dream come true,” Cara Shultz ’25 said. “I mean it’s what we’ve spent all season preparing for, and in terms of morale and what this means for the program, it’s huge. Our team is so excited to compete on the largest stage, and it’ll be a blast. I’m so proud of what this team has done so far and I’m excited to continue playing with this team.”

The fifth-seeded Knights are favored to win the game as they enter the matchup on a 15-game winning streak and rank in the top five in the nation in assists per set, hitting percentage and kills per set.

Erin Appleman. “Maile Somera, our libero, is really good, both of our outsides, Mila Yarich and Cara Shultz, are really talented in the back row.”

Knights head coach Todd Dagenais expressed confi dence in his team’s ability heading into the tournament, as he believes that his team has the ability to make a deep run in their fifth consecutive tournament appearance.

Ahead of the match, Dagenais explained that he was pleased to see Yale as UCF’s first-round opponent.

“We love this draw,” Dagenais told Nicholson Student Media. “I think it's a great draw, especially in terms of travel, keeping in our own time zone and, you know, teams that we feel like we're really competitive with. So I don't think we could have asked for a better draw as a five-seed.”

mates,” Mahoney said. “John [Poulakidas] is a great shooter. I’ve got boatloads of confi dence in Bez [Mbeng ’25] shooting the ball. So when my teammates can rely on me to make shots and we’re all shooting the ball well and looking for each other, we’re pretty hard to stop.”

Mbeng knocked down three 3-pointers of his own on his way to a strong 13-point, eight-assist performance. Mbeng was unfazed by Howard’s 2-3 zone defense, demonstrating his vision and passing instincts by constantly finding his teammates behind the arc. On the first possession of the second half, Mbeng caught the ball from well beyond the threepoint line and threw a lob with pinpoint accuracy to forward Isaiah Kelly ’23 for a highlight reel alley-oop.

It was arguably the best performance of the year for the Maryland native, who had made just three of his 21 attempts from deep all season coming into the game.

“It felt pretty good to see one go in,” Mbeng said. “I just try to keep shooting with confidence

because I work on those shots all the time, and yeah I was in a little slump so hopefully tonight got me out of it.”

The game was long out of reach by the 15:57 mark in the second half as the Elis went up 59–29 on a layup by forward Matt Knowling ’24. Knowling, who leads Yale in scoring and ranks third in the Ivy League with 18.1 points per game, did not have much to do on the night, scoring eight points on six attempts from the field.

The 46-point victory was the latest in a trend of blowout victories at home. The Blue and White are 4–0 at home this season, winning each matchup by an average of 47 points. The Bulldogs came into last night’s matchup as 13-point favorites.

The wide margins of victory have largely been thanks to Yale’s swarming defense, which has given up just 51.9 points per game this season, the third fewest among all of Division I basketball 352 teams.

“In games, we do a great job,” Jones said. “The guys have stepped up and done a really good job of defending.”

Yale will hope to continue limiting its opponents scoring as the

Women’s Basketball keeps record at .500

team now heads on a six-game road trip, which includes matchups against tough non-conference opponents such as Butler and Kentucky, a top-20 team in the nation.

The Bulldogs dropped their first game in a 65–62 heartbreaker last Sunday against Colorado, one of three Power Five teams on Yale’s schedule.

Coach Jones remained adamant that despite not having many high-major teams on the schedule, his team does not go into difficult matchups unprepared.

“No, no absolutely not,” Jones said. “The defense when you play against teams like Kentucky, Colorado is obviously on a much different level than what we faced tonight. Those guys are better, bigger and longer. But our guys play against those kinds of guys all the time during the summer in scrimmages and that kind of stuff.”

The Elis will look to improve upon their strong start as they head to the shores of Long Island for a Saturday evening matchup against Stony Brook.

Contact BEN RAAB at ben.raab@yale.edu .

However, the Bulldogs seem to be the perfect foil for UCF, as they allow the fifth lowest opponent’s hitting percentage in the country. They will also try to pick up some easier points on their serve, as Yale ranks third in the nation in aces per set.

“We’re a good defensive team which makes it hard for people to score against us,” said head coach

If the Bulldogs manage to pull off the upset against the red hot Knights, they would face the winner of UMBC (17–8, 7–3 America East) and Penn State (24–7, 13–7 Big 10).

Yale and UCF will face o at 5:00 p.m. on Friday evening in State College, Penn.

Contact

HENRY FRECH at henry.frech@yale.edu .

14

ico State, the Bulldogs won 73–65. Clark and Nyla McGill ’25 each scored 11 points while rookie Kiley Capstraw ’26 led the team with 23. This was Capstraw’s second time this season scoring over 20 points.

“It’s great to have a freshman that can contribute in so many different ways,” Egger said. “She’s going to have a great career at Yale and it’s great to see her grow each game.”

In their next game against Houston Christian, Yale could not pull ahead and fell 68–61. Four Huskies scored in double digits and guard Kennedy Wilson, scored her season-high with twenty points. Wilson was not the only player on the court to put together a career game, however, as Yale received a highlight night from Clark.

The junior guard led the Bulldogs in points, rebounds and assists with a stat line of 15–8–5 and earned a career high with eight rebounds.

Leaving Denver, Yale played at UMass on Wednesday night and fell 72–57 to the Minutewomen, who

have won six straight games since their early season loss to Tennessee. At the time, the Volunteers were ranked No. 5 in the country.

Against Yale, UMass surged ahead early in the game. The Bulldogs fell behind by 14 points at the end of the first half, and despite season highs in assists from McGill and points from Grace Thybulle ’25, the team could not cut the deficit down in the second half. McGill led the Bulldogs with seven assists and 11 rebounds while Thybulle earned 16 points.

On her season-high performance, Thybulle wrote to the News, “I’ve definitely been in a little bit of a rut prior to this game so I’ve been working with Coach [Dalila Eshe] and my position coach to remedy that. We worked a lot on me using my physicality more e ciently and taking more time around the rim.”

The Bulldogs will next play in Payne Whitney Gymnasium against Syracuse (5–2, 0–0 ACC) at 12:00 p.m. on Sunday.

Contact HENRY FRECH at henry.frech@yale.edu .

Bulldogs exceed high expectations

heights, you know the program has a bright future.”

Less than a minute after DiAntonio’s goal, Emma Harvey ’25 scored to make the final score of the game 2–0. Yale goalie Pia Dukaric ’25 made 26 saves against the Terriers, recording her third shutout of the season.

The game against Minnesota comes as one of the biggest in the team’s history, and Yale stands alone as the only remaining undefeated squad in the country.

In the first period of the game both teams filled the nets, with six goals scored between the teams.

In the first two minutes of the game, Rebecca Vanstone ’23 gave the Bulldogs a 1–0 lead as she notched her first goal of the season in her second game back after sitting out for approximately six weeks due to an injury.

“I think it’s huge in any game for the team to score first, as it gives us momentum and confidence, and this was no di erent,” Vanstone said. “We were especially hyped up since it was such a huge game for us, and I think getting the first goal set the tone for the game.”

The teams appeared set to enter the first intermission tied at two goals apiece with under a minute remaining in the period. However, with under 37 seconds remaining in the first, rookie Jordan Ray ’26 scored to put the Bulldogs back in the lead.

Four different underclassmen earned points for Yale against Minnesota, continuing an early season trend of big contributions from young players.

First-year forward Ray leads the Bulldogs in goals and points at five and 10, respectively. First years have folded into the team seamlessly, contributing up and down the lineup.

“We are building this program into a championship team, and the underclassmen are huge parts of our success,” Elle Hartje ’24 wrote to the News earlier this season. “We keep getting questions about how we are going to respond after last year’s success, and I think that the production from the younger players is proof that we have every intention to be even better this year than last.”

At 3–2 against Minnesota, Yale wasn’t finished. Rather than settling for one goal, Dalton scored 11 seconds later to double the lead going into intermission.

Minnesota scored a power play goal in the second period to narrow Yale’s lead to 4–3. Despite the Gophers outshooting Yale 8–5 in the third period, Dukaric was a brick wall in net

and managed to secure the Bulldogs’ victory.

“Beating Minnesota was amazing,” Dalton said. “This will be very important for overall team morale. We have a big weekend coming up against Cornell and Colgate, and we will need to come in confident to take down these two talented opponents.”

Yale will return home to Ingalls Rink to compete against ECAC opponents Cornell and Colgate. The puck drops on Friday, Dec. 2 at 6 p.m. as the Bulldogs play the Big Red. Yale will face Colgate on Saturday, Dec. 3 at 3 p.m. Both games will be live streamed on ESPN+.

Contact ROSA BRACERAS at rosie.braceras@yale.edu and SPENCER KING at spencer.king@yale.edu .

Yale Athletics

Yale will be back at home on Wednesday, Nov. 30 to face Howard.

JULIA SUN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTGRAPHER

If the Bulldogs manage to pull o the upset against the red hot Knights, they would face the winner of UMBC and Penn State.

YALE ATHLETICS

Yale will face Colgate on Saturday, Dec. 3 at 3 p.m. Both games will be live streamed on ESPN+.

W BASKETBALL FROM PAGE

“Because we're a young team, we have our own swagger, we have our own style, we have our own way that we play, the way that we connect with each other and you see we did it today.” WESTON MCKINNIE US SOCCER MIDFIELDER

W HOCKEY FROM PAGE 14

YALE ATHLETICS

The Bulldogs will next play in Payne Whitney Gymnasium against Syracuse (5–2, 0–0 ACC) at 12:00 p.m. on Sunday.

University fundraising spiked during the pandemic, but a dip may be coming

BY EVAN GORELICK STAFF REPORTER

Yale benefited from unprecedented rates of monetary donation during the COVID-19 pandemic. But because of recent market downturns, fundraising may soon decline from this elevated level.

Yale launched its five-year “For Humanity” capital campaign on October 2, 2021, in the throes of a global pandemic. The campaign, which focuses on science priorities outlined in the University’s 2016 Science Strategy Committee Report, was originally scheduled to enter its public phase in April 2021 but was suspended because of COVID-19.

After a half-year delay, Yale began the campaign virtually, making it the University’s first fundraising campaign to launch online. Events that would have been held on campus before the pandemic were held remotely, and alumni, parents and benefactors could watch live from anywhere in the world.

“The two years we [fundraised] on Zoom were the best two years of fundraising in the University’s history,” University President Peter Salovey told the News. “We raised more money in new commitments and pledges than ever before. I think COVID gave people the chance to think about their priorities, to think about the For Humanity campaign, how Yale can improve the world in so many different ways through its scholarship and its educational missions.”

According to the most recent campaign report, released Tuesday, Yale received $905.7 million in commitments and a record $914.6 million cash for 2022. Last year, Yale received a record $1.18 billion in commitments and $738.5 million cash.

The University hopes to reach $7 billion before the campaign ends on June 30, 2026. Now, in just the second year of its public phase, the campaign is already 60 percent of the way there.

The University’s Office of Development told the News that virtual programming during the pandemic

allowed more people than ever to engage with the campaign.

“One of the biggest differences between this campaign and the last is that [For Humanity] is inclusive of more people because we can communicate in person and digitally,” Associate Vice President for Development and Campaign Director Eugenie Gentry said. “We can now maintain a higher level of engagement with a broader group of alumni.”

The campaign’s largest virtual program, which drew over 6,000 registrants, was its launch event in October 2021. According to the Development Office, an in-person launch event — the pre-pandemic norm — could have accommodated only 600 to 700 people.

Because planning for the campaign began as early as 2018, the University had to adapt when the pandemic hit in spring 2021. Instead of on-campus gatherings and face-to-face fundraising, the University planned webinars and virtual social events.

On the fundraising end, the higher volume of engagement opportunities has made it easier for Yale to connect with potential donors. Gentry told the News that the pandemic has “changed the landscape of philanthropy.” Though they “can’t fully replace” in-person events, virtual events are not going away any time soon.

Beyond the increased reach of a virtual campaign, Yale has benefitted from pandemic-driven research visibility in public health and medicine.

“We saw an increase in gifts in the medical and public health areas, in large part because donors could see the impact of [Yale’s] research that supports those issues,” Gentry said.

The campaign has also seen increased gifts for financial aid and emergency funds, which Gentry said is likely a result of public health conditions, too. Though Yale benefited from many campaign-specific changes, it also rode the favorable macroeconomic tides that prevailed during the pandemic.

Gentry told the News that there is a “strong correlation between the health of the market and giving.”

When markets are doing well, Yale tends to see increased fundraising, and when markets are declining, donations usually slow down. When the Great Recession hit in 2008, for example, Yale saw “huge decreases” in both endowment and fundraising performance.

“Giving increases when donors feel wealthier,” School of Management professor Jacob Thomas said, “assuming that donors hold their wealth in assets that do well when the market is up, giving must also rise when campaigns are ongoing.”

School of Management professor James Choi agreed with Thomas, adding simply that “people can give more money when they have more money.”

Though the pandemic began a two-year bull market in March 2020, it peaked at the end of 2021 and has been declining to pre-pandemic levels ever since.

This year, the University’s endowment saw its slowest year of growth since 2009, largely in response to market downturns that tanked college endowments nationwide. In fact, Yale’s 0.8 percent return on its investment holdings was the only positive result in the Ivy League during the 2022 fiscal year.

The University has not yet seen a drop-off in fundraising performance as it has endowment performance. But fundraising rates may soon fall.

Thomas and Choi said that the time-horizon of donors’ monetary commitments could cause a delay between market and fundraising trends. After donors commit to a future gift, it may be difficult to renege when markets dip.

“I imagine [there is a delay] because major gifts occur after a series of conversations that take place over an extended period of time,” Choi wrote in an email to the News. “So, by the time somebody is on the brink of making a gift, the giving decision has a lot of momentum behind it that won’t be

derailed by a market downturn that has just occurred.”

Economics professor and Nobel laureate Robert Shiller provided an alternative explanation for the rise in fundraising, pointing to recent pushback against legacy admissions.

Though Shiller said that “as usual, we cannot provide a decisive explanation for human behavior in speculative markets,” he pointed out that legacy admissions preferences have recently come under fire at Yale and around the country.

Alumni, many of whom have an interest in maintaining legacy favor for their children, may be giving more so that Yale has a stronger financial incentive to preserve the practice and keep donors happy.

In September 2021, history professor Beverly Gage resigned as director of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy due to pressure from donors to control the program’s curriculum. In the wake of Gage’s resignation, faculty voiced support for her decision and raised concerns about the influence donors have over academic freedom at Yale.

In February 2022, Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan testified in favor of leg-

acy admissions practices before the Connecticut General Assembly after state lawmakers proposed a bill that would end the practice.

According to sociologist Jerome Karabel, Yale and other elite universities began using legacy admissions in the 1920s to keep out “social undesirables,” especially Jewish people, at a time when immigration to the United States was sharply increasing.

In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions brought two lawsuits to the Supreme Court, alleging that the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill are discriminatory.

During hearings, the plaintiffs also questioned the legality of donor and legacy admissions practices. As Supreme Court decisions loom, these policies have received increasing public scrutiny.

For each remaining year of the capital campaign, Yale will hold events in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and London as part of its “For Humanity Illuminated” event series.

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

With LSAT in limbo, Yale Law students divided on test’s merits

students, she explained, while interview experience, resumes, internships and recommendation letters are often more difficult for low-income students to obtain.

“I didn’t go to a fancy private high school, nor did I attend an Ivy League undergraduate institution. I didn’t have a law school application coach,” Campbell wrote to the News. “But I did score in the 99th percentile on the LSAT, all thanks to some free online courses and a couple of books I bought from Barnes and Noble.”

In fact, she believes that her admission to YLS would have been “highly unlikely” without the help of a high LSAT score.

Campbell and other students took to the Wall, a physical forum for student debate inside the Sterling Law Building, to voice disagreement with Gerken’s characterization of the LSAT.

if I showed up on test day, and did what I needed to do that I could then really stack up against anybody else.”

Not all students agree on this point. Chisato Kimura LAW ’25, a recipient of this year’s Hurst Horizon scholarship, described standardized testing as “incredibly classist” in an email to the News.

“The LSAT especially requires people to master new skills and ways of thinking and that consumes time and money,” Kimura wrote. “A de-emphasis on the LSAT for law school admissions would hopefully mean that there are more holistic admissions decisions that would add greater weight to people’s lived experiences, their essays, and other components of their application.”

strated to be more predictive of undergraduate success than the ACT or SAT, the LSAT has been established as a more accurate predictor of success than undergraduate GPA.

Performance data, however, demonstrates significant score discrepancies across gender and racial lines. According to a report published by the Law School Admissions Council, female test takers consistently scored approximately two points lower on average compared to their male counterparts on the LSAT from 2011-2018. During the same period, white and Asian test takers scored averages around 152/153 as opposed to averages around 141 for Black and African American test takers and 145/146 for Latinx test takers.

BY INES CHOMNALEZ STAFF REPORTER

Law schools across the country may soon stop requiring the LSAT for admissions, pending a decision by the American Bar Association.

The policy change, which would go into effect in the fall of 2025, would strike the requirement that law schools use the test to receive accreditation. Yale Law School has not indicated whether it would continue to require the LSAT in the absence of a mandate.

An arm of the ABA voted to strike the mandate earlier this month, with the final decision going before the ABA House of Delegates in February.

“Requiring LSAT scores appeared to be a somewhat artificial requirement, not clearly linked to whether candidates for law school should be lawyers or will provide competent representation to their clients,” wrote Michael Downey, a member of the ABA Task Force for the Future of Legal Education.

The Law School press office declined to comment on the pending vote. Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken had previously

cited concerns with the test and other numerical standards in her decision to withdraw Yale from the U.S. News and World Report’s ranking system.

“Today, 20 percent of a law school’s overall ranking is median LSAT/GRE scores and GPAs,” Gerken wrote. “While academic scores are an important tool, they don’t always capture the full measure of an applicant. This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford expensive test preparation courses.”

Yale Law School currently boasts the country’s highest median LSAT score in a three-way tie with Harvard and Columbia.

Some Yale students voiced concerns about axing the requirement, claiming that the LSAT was one of the most meritocratic aspects of the admissions process. Others heralded the decision.

For Olivia Campbell LAW ’23, the absence of an LSAT requirement would give greater weight to other factors that are even more prone to inequity. Free or cheap online resources for LSAT preparation are highly accessible to many

“I disagree with Dean Gerken’s statements suggesting that current admissions practices weigh the LSAT too heavily,” Campbell wrote in an email to the News. “It is probably true that compared to wealthy students, low-income students are disadvantaged in nearly every aspect of the admissions process. But the LSAT is one of the least-inequitable admissions factors.”

Jake McDonald LAW ’25 was similarly emphatic about the equalizing capacity of the LSAT. McDonald, who graduated from a state school, described the LSAT as “easily the most egalitarian” component of the admissions process.

McDonald described the discrepancy between institutional support provided at private — and especially Ivy League — institutions as opposed to public state schools. When he approached career advisers at his university about law school, he said he knew the system was tailored for students targeting “different schools” than he was.

“In a lot of ways, the LSAT was about providing an opportunity and an equal playing field.” McDonald said. “I knew, even though I maybe didn’t get the benefits that were conferred by some of the higher institutions,

Both Campbell and McDonald said that it would be a mistake for Yale Law School to stop requiring the LSAT. Campbell specifically highlighted US News’ use of median rather than mean LSAT scores in formulating its ranking, pointing out that this metric allows law school admissions committees to save 49 percent of its spots for students scoring below a desirable class median.

McDonald described Yale Law School administration’s choice to exit the rankings as a trend of “wanting to go from objective to subjective” in law school admissions. By his estimation, this trend ultimately hurts the people it aims to protect.

“I think that it’s a bad way to approach law school admissions, and I think it’s going to lead to harmful results when it comes to screwing non-elite people out of elite admissions,” McDonald said. “I think that’s my concern: that someone like me is going to slip through the cracks a lot more easily than in the previous system that was there.”

According to a study conducted by the Law School Admissions Council, the LSAT is the best-predictor for academic success in law schools. Compared to undergraduate admissions, where high school GPA has been demon-

Downey, who works for the ABA, described the LSAT requirement as just one of many “unnecessary and dubious regulations” in the field of legal education. He pointed out the lack of remote or online alternatives to conventional legal education as well as the fact that American legal degrees can only be earned in post-graduate study as barriers, especially contrasted against European standards.

Downey indicated that getting rid of the LSAT had the potential to increase diversity in the legal profession, where he described diversity as “severely lacking.” However, he also highlighted the importance of making sure that admitted students were well prepared to pass the bar exam.

“It would be a further failure of the legal system if we allow law schools to remove the LSAT requirement to maintain (or increase) student enrollment, but then — after spending the time and financial resources of completing legal students — students struggle to pass the bar, obtain admission, and actually practice law,” Downey wrote.

The LSAT was first administered in 1948.

Contact

INES CHOMNALEZ at ines.chomnalez@yale.edu .

TIM TAI/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

In February, the American Bar Association will vote on whether or not to continue their LSAT requirement for law school accreditation.

“I love cooking for myself and cooking for my family.” AL

LUKAS FLIPPO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER New virtual programming and favorable markets drove Yale to its strongest two years of fundraising ever. But changing market tides may soon reverse pandemic trends.

Law School clinic sues Department of Veterans A airs for discrimination

29.5 percent of Black veterans’ requests for disability compensation, compared to 24.2 percent of white veterans’ requests.

The lawsuit accuses the VA of negligence, stating that although the VA knew or should have known about these disparities, they did not address them. As evidence of this disparity’s widespread recognition, it points out that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission prevents employers from requiring applicants to have honorable discharges because of pervasive discrimination in the discharge system.

“For decades, there have been anecdotal reports and widespread suspicion of racial discrimination in the VA benefits programs,” said Adam Henderson LAW ’23, an intern at the VLSC. “The VA has denied countless meritorious applications of Black veterans and thus deprived them and their families of the support that they are entitled to.”

Monk is one such veteran.

VLSC, that Monk began to receive disability compensation, and only in 2020 did the VA recognize that Monk should have been eligible for benefits since his initial application for compensation in 1971.

Henderson described the two claims as evidence of “the generational harm that the VA has caused.”

The speakers expressed their hope that Conley’s lawsuit sets a precedent for other Black veterans to also seek out compensation.

“My lawsuit is also going to lead the charge for other veterans,” Monk said. “We are hoping and praying that we are successful in our fight because it’s not only for me and my father, it’s for thousands of other veterans that are undergoing the same type of situation.”

The lawsuit also alleges that even after Monk received some benefits, they were insu cient and did not address “the unique harm Mr. Monk su ered due to VA’s pattern of racial discrimination.”

BY SADIE BOGRAD STAFF REPORTER

When Elm City resident Conley Monk Jr., returned from the Vietnam War, he expected to receive support from the Veterans’ Administration — now known as the Department of Veterans A airs, or VA. Instead, he became one of the thousands of Black veterans to be denied benefits by the VA.

Monk announced that he is suing the VA for negligence at a press conference at the Dixwell Community Center on Oct. 28. The press conference included words by Monk’s legal representation — The Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale Law School, or VLSC —

Senator Richard Blumenthal LAW ’73 and the nationwide nonprofit Black Veterans Project.

“Since our nation’s founding, our government has relied on Black Americans to win its wars,” said Richard Brookshire, the executive director of the Black Veterans Project. “Yet for decades, it has allowed racially discriminatory practices to obstruct Black veterans from equally accessing veterans’ housing, education and healthcare benefits.”

Monk is seeking compensatory damages for the VA’s negligence. He has separately submitted an administrative claim on behalf of his father, a World War II veteran who was also denied benefits.

The lawsuit alleges that racial bias in the military justice system made Black service members less likely to receive honorable discharges, which in turn a ected their eligibility for VA benefits.

In 2021, the VA provided records of disability compensation claims in response to Freedom of Information Act requests from the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress, which Monk co-founded and directs and the Black Veterans Project. The records the VA disclosed reveal that there are statistically signifi cant racial disparities in the outcomes of veterans’ benefit claims.

Between 2001 and 2020, for example, the VA on average denied

After serving in Vietnam in 1969, Monk began to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He received an undesirable discharge, now known as a discharge “under other than honorable” conditions,” in 1970 after an altercation caused by his PTSD-induced hypervigilance.

When the VA conducted a Character of Discharge determination, they failed to consider the circumstances surrounding Monk’s discharge and declared him ineligible for education and housing benefits, leaving Monk temporarily homeless. The VA also denied Monk disability benefits for PTSD, and later for diabetes.

The department repeatedly declined to conduct a new Character of Discharge determination, even after Monk received a formal PTSD diagnosis. It was not until 2015, after an appeal in which Monk was represented by the

Blumenthal said that regardless of whether the lawsuit is successful, it will call attention to the VA’s practices and encourage the department to reexamine the discharge and benefits system.

“At the very least, the VA and the Department of Defense are going to have to look at themselves in the mirror and say, ‘What is the reason for these disparate outcomes?’” Blumenthal said. “What we need to do is examine the whole system: the less than honorable discharge system, bad paper discharge, general discharge. These kinds of labels can stigmatize a veteran and stain his chances for success throughout life, not just with the VA, but throughout professional and personal life.”

Monk is suing under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which was enacted in 1946.

Contact SADIE BOGRAD at sadie.bograd@yale.edu .

Yale College pushes for geographic diversity

BY ANIKA SETH, TRISTAN HERNANDEZ AND HANNAH KURCZESKI STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS

When Lianna Byler ’24 first arrived at Yale, she had never taken an Uber or ordered any kind of food delivery.

Byler is from Hartstown, Pennsylvania — which, per the 2010 census, stood at a population just over 200. She told the News that coming to Yale marks the first time many rural students encounter such services, which are childhood staples for many of their urban or suburban peers. The same goes for public transport, from the Metro North to the Amtrak to airports, Byler said.

In line with these varied experiences, the University has worked over the past six years to increase emphasis on recruiting, enrolling and supporting students from rural and small-town areas.

“Geographic diversity is a complex topic, but one way to think of it is not just admitting students from all 50 states, but from diverse communities within and across those states,” associate director of undergraduate admissions Corinne Smith wrote to the News. “States are vast and each one has rural, urban, and suburban areas. Yale’s admissions process allows us to review students holistically within their specific context, background, high school, neighborhood, and geographic setting.”

Smith also serves as one of two co-advisors for the Rural Students Alliance at Yale, a group that works to offer community for rural and small-town students. Byler currently serves as president of RSAY.

Looking to the future, Byler and founding RSAY member Franklin Eccher ’19 expressed support for an expansion of on-campus support through a peer liaison program geared toward rural and small-town students. Smith, too, favors the idea.

“I think rural PLs would be such an asset for the campus because a lot of rural and small town students don’t realize their identity as small town students until they get here and even afterwards,” Byler said. “I think

it would be invaluable, especially as rural students navigate public transport for the first time to the academic rigors and just overall want to find other people that have had the life experiences they had in high school.”

Geographic diversity in the admissions process

According to Smith, the push for increasing geographic diversity on college campuses stems from growing recognition that many students from rural and small-town areas think of schools like Yale as “unattainable or una ordable,” and may face disproportionate barriers to entry — such as lack of information and a reduced college-going culture.

At the same time, rural and smalltown students often bring unique and valuable perspectives to campus. There is a strong correlation between students from rural and small-town areas and those who are first-generation or low-income, which means that many students have to be particularly creative to seek opportunities that further their academic and extracurricular interests, according to Smith.

As early as 2017, the Yale admissions office began to expand their outreach efforts to include Zoom tours and information sessions that are specifically geared towards students from these backgrounds and make information about Yale more accessible. Transitions to virtual outreach models, brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, made it possible to bring more accessible live information events to rural and small-town students, who are sometimes situated in areas geographically di cult to reach in-person.

This past fall, the admissions o ce returned to its first in-person school visits in three years. The admissions o ce now o ers a mix of in-person and virtual outreach programming, including information sessions and tours.

Smith also pointed to the newly-returned Ambassadors Program, which hired current Yale students to visit high schools in their hometowns over the November and winter recesses, as a tool to reach out to more rural and small-town students.

The admissions office’s work around geographic diversity specifically refers to domestic

applicants. While the College recruits and admits students worldwide, their discussion of and approach to geographic diversity in this way is specifically geared toward applicants from U.S. states and territories.

Rural students face certain challenges when applying to college, such as fewer AP/IB courses offered in high school, further distance to travel for college fairs and a perception that top colleges may not be attainable, according to Byler and Eccher.

“There are different expectations and different requirements for a student who’s applying to [an Ivy League school] than your local public university,” Byler said. “There is also the idea that very selective institutions and Ivy Leagues are just so expensive. There’s that sticker price of how much it is a year and there isn’t a lot of knowledge about the generosity of their financial aid programs. I think that also ties in that perception of attainability.”

There are around 80 to 100 rural and small town students that enroll in Yale each year, according to comments Smith gave to the Daily Yonder.

Campus experience

When they arrive at Yale, many rural and small-town students seek community. In 2018, Eccher and Jared Michaud ’19 founded the Rural Students Alliance at Yale to provide exactly that. The organization provides help with adjusting to living in a city like New Haven, such as navigating public transportation and how to get to and from campus.

Smith serves as a co-advisor for RSAY, alongside Timothy Dwight Dean Sarah Mahurin.

A core part of RSAY’s goal is to o er a space where students can discuss similar experiences associated with the transition from a rural to an urban environment and to then collectively advocate for more support.

“It was a two-day Odyssey to get back and forth from my hometown to campus,” Eccher said, speaking of his journey between Yale’s campus and his home in Montrose, Colorado, while he was a Yale College student. “That was something that RSAY couldn’t necessarily support, but it was helpful to find other people who have that experience and then could talk to the admissions o ce and say, ‘this is what it’s really

like to get back and forth to campus which can be a real challenge.’”

According to Byler, RSAY is now working to plan events for the end of the fall semester.

Their other events over the term have included an ice cream social and a blue-booking event. Generally, RSAY also works with the admissions o ce to host Q&A webinars for prospective rural and small-town student applicants, according to Byler.

What’s next?

Smith and RSAY are also supportive of a rural peer liaison program, similar to current offerings through Yale’s cultural houses, Student Accessibility Services and the O ce of LGBTQ+ Resources.

In existing peer liaison programs, University student employees are assigned by residential colleges.

Smith, Byler and Eccher all described ways in which the presence of peer mentors, especially early in a student’s time at Yale, could help support the rural or small-town experience.

“Rurality and the experiences of rural and small-town students are not monolithic,” Smith wrote. “They differ by state, region, and community. However, there are absolutely things that many rural students have in common. Whether that’s needing to learn how to use public trans-

portation, struggling to sleep due to street noise, or being overwhelmed by the vast curricular options at Yale. So many transitional moments can be aided by the existence of mentors or Peer Liaisons who can relate to that experience and offer advice.”

Eccher also noted the value in having a peer that can assist in finding other supportive communities.

For him specifically, as he is from a small town in Colorado, he missed being part of the outdoors.

“I didn’t really know how to access parks like East Rock or Yale’s outdoors program, so trying to find opportunities to get out of the New Haven bubble was also a real challenge,” Eccher said. “Having a peer liaison to help you find communities that are able to access some of those things can be really amazing.”

Aside from a potential peer liaison program, Byler is planning for the future of RSAY. Specifically, she hopes to build community through events, sharing playlists and other social activities this spring.

RSAY was founded in 2018.

Contact ANIKA SETH at anika.seth@yale.edu , TRISTAN HERNANDEZ at tristan.hernandez@yale.edu and HANNAH KURCZESKI at hannah.kurczeski@yale.edu .

SADIE BOGRAD/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The clinic is representing Conley Monk Jr., a Black marine who was denied veterans’ benefits.

“You don’t have to give birth to someone to have a family.”

SANDRA BULLOCK AMERICAN ACTRESS AND PRODUCER

MADELYN KUMAR/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Over the last six years, Yale Admissions has worked to enroll more rural and smalltown students. The Rural Students Alliance at Yale has expressed support.

GIOVANNA TRUONG LU is a senior in Pauli Murray College.

Contact her at giovanna.truong@yale.edu .

CLARISSA TAN is a first-year in Jonathan Edwards College. Contact her at clarissa.tan@yale.edu .

ZI LIN is an alumna of the Class of 2022 .

SQUASH TEAM

VOLLEYBALL: Elis secure Ivy title, prep for NCAA

BY HENRY FRECH CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

After losing just one conference matchup all season, the Yale volleyball team (23–2, 13–1 Ivy) dominated the Ivy League tournament to secure the 12th conference title in school history.

The Bulldogs swept Dartmouth College (16–9, 8–6 ) in the first round to advance to the finals, where they matched up against Brown University (15–10, 10–4), who had just upset Princeton University (21–4, 13–1) with a first round sweep of their own. The Blue and White beat Brown in four sets to claim not only an Ivy League championship but also a ticket to the NCAA tournament. The win capped o one of the most decorated seasons in Yale volleyball history.

“Words can't describe how proud I am of this team,” wrote captain Renee Shultz ’23. “Since the very beginning of the season, all the way back in the summer, we established team goals and ever since then

we've been working hard to achieve them. Now that we've earned our Ivy League championship and are heading to the NCAAs to represent Yale, I'm so excited to see what else we're capable of.”

In the opening round of the Ivy Tournament, the Big Green proved to be no match for the Bulldogs, failing to reach even 20 points in any of the three sets. Mila Yarich ’25 — who ranked in the top eight in the Ivy League in aces, digs, kills and points scored all season — led the Bulldogs with three aces and 14 digs. Yarich’s nine kills ranked second on the team for the game.

While many expected a Yale-Princeton matchup in the finals, as the two teams split their regular-season matchups and went undefeated against the rest of the league, the Bulldogs instead met the Bears in the final. On Friday, Brown stunned the Tigers in three highly competitive sets and knocked Princeton out of the tournament.

On Saturday, Brown opened the finals on a 5–0 run, carrying over

W BASKETBALL: Bulldogs split four games

their moment from their upset victory. However, the Bulldogs roared back to win the set by a 25–21 margin. They won the second set by the same score, but the Bears refused to back down, winning a hard-fought third set 27–25. The Blue and White closed things out in the fourth, however, as they took an early 7–1 lead and never looked back.

Gigi Barr ’25 — with 17 kills and six blocks — and Carly Diehl ’25 — with 43 assists, 16 digs and two aces — led the way for the Bulldogs in the final, allowing them to host the championship banner on Yale’s home floor.

In addition to conference bragging rights, the win also clinched a berth in the NCAA volleyball tournament. After losing only two games all year, and only once since Sep. 3, Yale looks to be one of the best Ivy League teams in recent history. No Ivy League school has won an NCAA tournament game since Penn defeated Army in the first round in 2009. No Ivy team has even

M BASKETBALL: Colorado snaps Yale’s unbeaten streak

BY BEN RAAB CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

The Yale men’s basketball team (7–1, 0–0 Ivy) hit a new school record with 18 three-pointers as they cruised to an 86–40 victory over Howard (4–6, 0–0 ME) at home Wednesday night.

“That’s what was available,” head coach James Jones said. “The guys were wide open for catchand-shoot opportunities. We found good rhythm jumpshots for our shooters, so we’re certainly going to take those.”

Guard August Mahoney ’24 propelled the Bulldogs to a

dominant 47-point first half with 15 of his 18 points — all of which came on three-pointers — coming before the break. Guard John Poulakidas ’25 also scored all his points from three, fi nishing with 12 points on four of eight shooting.

The stellar shooting performance was a continuation of a strong campaign for Yale’s three-point specialists, who are shooting 47 and 51 percent from three, respectively.

“I’m confi dent in myself just as I am confi dent in my team-

BY HENRY FRECH CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Eight games into the season, the Yale women’s basketball team is 4–4. Since the start of Thanksgiving break, the Bulldogs (4–4, 0–0 Ivy) have played four games. The Elis beat Maine (3–4, 0–0 America East) on Nov. 19 to start o the break strong.

“We just moved the ball around well and continuously made the right passes and found the open person,.” Jenna Clark ’24 wrote. “We were feeling it on o ense that night and shot the ball well.”

The next week, Yale traveled to Colorado to play in the University of Denver Classic against New Mexico State University (2–4, 0–0 WAC) and Houston Christian University (3–2, 0–0 Southland). The Bulldogs beat

NMSU and lost to HCU. After returning to the East Coast, the Bulldogs played at UMass (7–1, 0–0 Atlantic 10) and fell to the Minutewomen.

In their game at Maine, the Elis outscored their hosts 17–3 in the second quarter to end the first half ahead 30–10. The Bulldogs held o Maine for the rest of the game and won 55–46. Clark led the squad with 15 points and five assists. Elles van Der Maas ’24 scored 11 points and Mackenzie Egger ’25 added on 10 more.

The Bulldogs then traveled to Colorado to play in the University of Denver Classic. Yale brought their offensive attack as at least three players scored in double fi gures in each game.

In the first game against New Mex-

W HOCKEY: Bulldogs win in early season games

BY ROSA BRACERAS AND STEPHEN KING STAFF REPORTERS

The Yale women’s hockey team (8–0–0, 4–0–0 ECAC) has proven to be among the nation’s best following early success in an undefeated start to the season and winning the Henderson Collegiate Hockey Showcase.

After big wins over nationally ranked ECAC foes No. 4 Quinnipiac (14–1–0, 6–1–0 ECAC) and No. 15 Princeton (4–5–1, 2–4–0 ECAC), the Bulldogs faced off with No. 12 Pennsylvania State University (11–8–1, 3–1–0 Big 10) in a pair of home games, downing the Nittany Lions twice.

Following the wins over Penn State, the Bulldogs

headed to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving break to play in the Henderson Collegiate Hockey Showcase. This was the teams’ first year playing in the showcase, which made its debut this year. The tournament replaced their usual Nutmeg Classic that the Bulldogs have played in since 2007.

“The Vegas tournament was really fun,” captain Claire Dalton ’23 told the News. “I am glad we got the chance to participate!”

Once there, victories against Boston University and No. 5 University of Minnesota propelled the Bulldogs to No. 3 in the nation in the USCHO poll, where the team also received three first-place votes. Minnesota fell from No. 3 to No. 5.

The Bulldogs battled against the Terriers for two scoreless periods before Carina DiAntonio ’26 knocked one past the BU goaltender off of assists from Charlotte Welch ’23 and Dalton. Dalton’s assist marked her 100th career point as a Bulldog, making her the third player to reach this milestone in program history.

“It is an honor,” Dalton said about reaching the milestone. “It is indicative of the corner this program has turned. We have plenty of girls on pace to break and set records, some of whom aren’t even seniors. When both the team and individuals are reaching new

“The first couple months of the year haven’t gone how we wanted them to, but we’re not looking in the rearview mirror and only focusing on how we can get better from here on out”

RYAN STEVENS

’24

YALE MEN'S HOCKEY FORWARD

FENCING YALE TO COMPETE AT BRANDEIS Yale will join Cornell, St. John's, MIT, Tufts, Brown and host school Brandeis to compete at the Brandeis Invitational in Waltham, Mass. for their second tournament of the year this Sunday.

ROOKIE KILEY CAPSTRAW ’26 HAS MADE NINE OF HER 14 THREE-POINT ATTEMPTS. SHE IS

JULIA SUN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Yale’s volleyball team will face o against fifth-seeded UCF this weekend in State College, Pennsylvania.

YALE ATHLETICS

Yale cruised to consecutive victories against John Jay and Vermont before falling to Colorado 65-62.

VAIBHAV SHARMA/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

The Yale women's crew team clocked in five victories, e ectively sweeping Radcli e and Northeastern on the Housatonic.

YALE ATHLETICS

SEE

W HOCKEY

WEEKEND

THANK YOU SPISSUE

// LIZZIE CONKLIN

// BY GIA-BAO DAM

Walking around campus, you will find many interesting characters, but there is only one celebrity — and he walks on four legs.

A GLIMPSE INTO HANDSOME DAN’S HEALTH ROUTINE

Handsome Dan XIX has been the face of Yale in both athletic and public events since his introduction in 2021, making him one of the most recognizable figures on campus. The key to Kingman’s — Handsome Dan’s real name — elegance can be demystified by his moderate diet and exercising habits, as well as his sleep schedule.

“Handsome Dan leads a very active lifestyle and maintains a well-balanced diet,” said Kassandra Haro ’18, Handsome Dan’s handler and a Yale program administrator.

Haro continued to explain that Kingman is a very active dog. When it comes to exercising, his activities are manifold. He enjoys running around the Silliman Courtyard, Edgerton Park and going on long walks around New Haven. He also loves socializing — not only as a duty, but also as a fun pastime. One of Handsome Dan’s favorite recreations is playing tag and tug-of-war with his canine friends.

Just like Yale students, Handsome Dan works hard on both his body and mind.

“Mental enrichment is just as important for canine health and happiness,” Haro explained in an email to

the News. “He also does a lot of mental enrichment like training, hide and search and puzzle work.”

Handsome Dan also keeps a regular sleep schedule. He has a long stretch of sleeping through the night, and if he has an active day with lots of work and playtime, he will usually take a nap in the afternoon. Adorable footage of Kingman’s napping sessions are readily available on his o cial Instagram account.

When it comes to diet, Handsome Dan’s selection of food is heavily based on the recommendation of his breeder, Wicked Good Bulldogges, who have many years of experience with the breed and whose dogs lead long and healthy lives.

“When it comes to diet we are big believers in whole foods here,” Jessica Seiders of Wicked Good Bulldogges wrote to the News. “We like to feed as much raw, whole foods and lightly cooked meals as possible along with their daily kibble.”

Following this advice, Haro keeps to single ingredient treats when it comes to snacks, as they are low in calories and easy on dog stomachs.

“He eats his turkey-based dog food everyday, which I soak in water

and broth,” Haro said. “This helps him stay hydrated, feel satiated and digest his food better. I like to add a little frozen pumpkin cube for fi ber and his daily vet-recommended probiotic. Sometimes I will add green beans, blueberries, cucumbers or a little plain boiled chicken as a treat.”

As for Handsome Dan’s Thanksgiving feast, Haro chose a plain Cornish hen, green beans, blueberries, frozen molds of greek yogurt, bananas, apples and pumpkins.

Not much has changed in Handsome Dan’s diet since he was a puppy, apart from increasing his calorie intake and slowly introducing new foods. Regarding his exercise habits, it’s not recommended for young puppies to do too much exercise for fear it would be harsh on their growing bones.

Handsome Dan spent a majority of his playtime and mental enrichment indoors when he was younger, along with occasional short walks. Now, Dan has become much more active and enjoys long walks and playtime, especially sprints.

For health needs, Handsome Dan goes to the Vet Wellness Center in New Haven.

“According to his vet, he is very healthy,” Haro said. “He has a perfect weight, great bloodwork and is up to date on all of his vaccines and preventatives, [specifically] heartworm and tick/flea meds.”

Thanks to a well-balanced health routine, Handsome Dan continues to boost morale, lifting the spirits of Yale campus and bringing joy to the faces of thousands of students and faculty sta .

It comes as no surprise that Yalies very much enjoy seeing Handsome Dan around campus.

“He is certainly looking very happy and healthy,” Halle Sherlock ’26 said, on meeting Handsome Dan at her volleyball send-o on Nov. 30.

Daniel Carrillo ‘26 agreed.

“Handsome Dan is the handsomest dog I’ve ever seen,” Carrillo said, on seeing Handsome Dan on Cross Campus before the Harvard-Yale Game. “I wish I was as handsome as Handsome Dan.”

Yalies can request Handsome Dan to come to an event through the Yale Visitor Center website.

Contact GIA-BAO DAM at gia-bao.dam@yale.edu .

JOY IN THE LIFE OF THINGS

BY JESSAI FLORES

On Thanksgiving Day, I danced with the portrait of the woman in blue who was hung over the mantle of the Davenport Common Room. She was as old and as dead as many of the other painted people on the walls of the University. But there was something to be said of the liberation I felt to spin top-like in a reckless beeline around the stuffy hotel furniture of the room. I spun and spun as she looked down. Down through her block glasses, following the arrow of her sloped nose and to the dirty carpet beneath her. Was she lonely? I wondered. Perhaps she was, but was not everyone who came before and after her?

Yale has a reputation of being lonely and loud, protruding from the center of the city like a cathedral to education. It is a collection of gothic spires where legacies are remembered, tended to, and forged by generations of pupils according to rules written and rewritten across the institution’s many years. In these years, there are small gaps in the University’s phonographic record of loud student life. The recesses, the breaks and snaps in the sounds of Yale’s history, occur when the voices and cheers subside and a salve of silence fills the vacuum left behind.

Those of us who stay during the breaks, like me and the woman in blue, are given a rare sight: a Yale that is quiet but not lonely. It is true what they say about never knowing what you have until it is gone. This idea has haunted me this semester. It is my last year at Yale, and I have kept myself busy tending to the garden of my many commitments: pruning the roses of my readings, organizing the lilies as paper-white as all the canvases I had to fill as an illustrator and swatting at the aphids of procrastination that ate what I had planted. Anything to keep me hunched over my plot with my back to tomorrow. A cloudy tomorrow that would usher in the spring and its commencement, raining down caps that would bid my class farewell for the last time. I do not like to think about it — graduation and having to leave this place. This year’s Thanksgiving Break, my last one, forced me to contend with this place and the beauty of it that I got to enjoy. And Yale is beautiful. I let the silence of the empty campus fill in the noisy corners of my memory

that had been slanted by the pressure to perform. So, I looked up, and I spent my break waltzing among Yale’s many oaks, screeching out songs in silent rooms, and taking in its history. I never knew what I had until my commitments were postponed, and I could enjoy time to myself.

The silence is not lonely, though it can be if you choose to resist it. You have got to learn to sing with it, to fill it with a quiet appreciation for what you have. Is that not what the spirit of Thanksgiving is: a ritual counting of blessings? The break afforded me a cornucopia-like silence for me to fill with the thanks I gave for the honor of a lifetime — of getting to be a student here — and its many quiet moments of reflection and joy.

There is joy in the life of things, and the silence of the break allowed me to recite its praises by enjoying the time I was afforded to be alone. I meandered through the many overpriced boutiques on campus, like the one by

the ice cream shop that sells beige sweaters for three-hundred dollars, and pretended that I was a rich man and there was joy in that. I manned the reference desk at Sterling Library, the one place where the silence was filled with the noise of tourism, and I ate donuts with my desk partners — there was joy in that too. There was joy in the leaves I crunched beneath my heels, in the laughs over sticky packing tape that I shared with the mailwoman at the post office, in the blush of my face braced against the cold, and in the circles I spun in front of the woman in blue.

Joy! In the lives of all the things! Staying behind on Thanksgiving is a joyful type of loneliness, full of the things called memories and friendships and telephone calls with loved ones. To stay behind is to see the blanket of silence hush over the cupolas, cross braces and eaves of empty campus buildings — and to see this place come to life again when it is all over.

When the break ended and the noise of students burst from the trumpet-mouths of airport shuttles and taxi cabs that dropped their cargo outside Phelps Gate, I was satisfied with the knowledge that at least I had the week to enjoy the University alone. To walk its many corridors and make note of its many joys. But I was also relieved to be once again surrounded by my peers because there is joy in that too. During the break, I savored the leisure of being alone, of swinging on the swing set behind the Lock Street parking garage and dancing under the fixed gaze of the woman in blue whose smile was painted upon her face. She, too, knew of the joy of things. The night after the break ended, someone played Mozart on the common room piano, and my sly eyes met the frozen ones of the woman in blue. We smiled because even as the old dramatic performance of Yale life continued as if it was never interrupted, the secret of Yale as a place of quiet joy was something only we — and you now — know.

Contact JESSAI FLORES at jessai.flores@yale.edu .

Thanksgiving Dinner Rankings

BY BRI ANDERSON

Thanksgiving in the South is basically the culinary Olympics. Think Hell’s Kitchen, except instead of Gordon Ramsey yelling at you, it’s a seemingly sweet little old lady at the church potluck telling you that your attempt at a cornbread casserole is “so precious.” Or worse, asking “Did you get this recipe out of Southern Living?” The answer is always yes, even the family recipes probably come from a magazine your grandma picked up in 1960, but you could never say that to a church lady.

Lucky me, my family is not a pre-thanksgiving church potluck type. But I’ve tasted enough unique dishes, family recipes and yes, recipes right from the casserole gospel Southern Living itself to consider myself qualifi ed to rank the Thanksgiving dishes I’ve seen on my family’s table and maybe yours.

10. Creamed Corn

I don’t know if you’ve had the misfortune of eating this often watery, sloshy corn pudding, but I wouldn’t wish this dish on my worst enemy. If you listed this as one of your favorites, my back-home slang might just slip out with a, “bless your heart.”

9.

Cranberry Sauce

Placing cranberry sauce so low on this list might turn some heads, but if the turkey is cooked well and the gravy is good, there is absolutely no need for cranberry sauce. And as much as I hate to say it, if your cranberry sauce isn’t sliced with the lines of the can showing, I want it even less.

8. Turkey

The main dish of Thanksgiving is theoretically great. A juicy, well-seasoned turkey is probably my favorite dish on the table. But it is so rare for a turkey to not be absolutely bone-dry. (Dad, since I know you’ll read this, your turkey is never dry, but this article is speaking generally.)

7. Dinner Rolls

Not good, not bad. I have no complaints, but at the same time I have no compliments in comparison to every other dish on the table. People go wild for them, but it’s bread. It’s bread, people.

6. Mac and Cheese

Mac and Cheese is one of those Thanksgiving dishes that just has to be done the right way. I’m not opposed to a casserole, but I am opposed to weird toppings on the

mac and cheese. Feel free to experiment with your food, but do not put goldfish on your mac and cheese on Thanksgiving Day unless it’s going straight to the kids’ table.

5. Green Beans

For a long time, green beans were one of the only vegetables I actually liked to eat. I argue they aren’t good green beans if there’s no chopped bacon bits in it to give it a little more flavor.

4. Mashed Potatoes

I had a childhood obsession with mashed potatoes. There were a solid two years where I made my mother cook mashed potatoes with every meal possible. So maybe it’s nostalgia that slides this dish into my top 5.

3. Stu ng

Stu ng cooked in the turkey with some homemade turkey gravy over the top is incredibly underrated. The savory, salty mix of bread, spices and vegetables is irreplaceable. It’s not Thanksgiving without it.

2. Pumpkin Pie There’s something special about pumpkin pie in that there’s a very limited time of year that you can get it. Just like its other pumpkin flavored

counterpart, the pumpkin spice latte, it isn’t even the flavor, but the limited fall only availability that makes pumpkin pie so desirable. That said, I love pumpkin pie for the flavor. Especially of the Costco variety. That pie could feed a small army and it’s absolutely delicious, for only ten dollars. It should be illegal.

1. Sweet Potato Casserole

To be fair, I’m not sure if this is all that common, but mashed sweet potatoes with melted, browned mini marshmallows on top are the crème de la crème of the Thanksgiving table. I’m the kind of person who would eat dessert first if it was socially acceptable, so having these on my plate satiates me until I can bite into #2 on this list, pumpkin pie.

By the time you’re reading this list, I know you’ve already put the creamed corn on your table and dressed your dry turkey with homemade cranberry sauce and beef gravy. But with any luck, this list will save you next year when you’re prepping to deal with the yearly passive aggressive dinner table arguments with relatives and “walks” with your favorite cousins.

Contact BRI ANDERSON at bri.anderson@yale.edu .

JESSAI FLORES

// JESSAI FLORES

thanksgivings

At every Cramer Thanksgiving dinner, we go around the table and say what we’re thankful for. The answers have ranged from health and family to LeBron James coming home to Cleveland — shoutout grandma Marge.

It’s not a unique tradition, but it feels as if it’s taken on added meaning in recent years. As my cousins, brothers and I have left home for college, we’ve found greater appreciation for the support from each other and our parents

But why is gratitude a oncea-year exercise? With so much to be grateful for, why do we only express it on the fourth Thursday of November?

I’ve tried, over the past twoand-a-half years, to break into the habit of continued gratitude. It began with a recommendation from a high school tennis coach.

On March 10, 2020, we were finishing our final practice before spring break. As we wrapped up, our coach huddled us up and gave some long-winded speech. I forget most of what he said, but the main idea was this: we had to shift our mindset during the season’s most important points. For us to appreciate those moments more, he asked us to keep gratitude journals to start a practice of appreciation for the small moments.

The next day, I selected a small moleskine notebook to use as my journal. In the morning, I wrote down three things I was looking forward to that day. And that night, I wrote down three things I was grateful for.

That week, spring break of 2020, also happened to be the start of COVID-19 shutdowns. I never went into school again that year. The tennis season was canceled within a few days. We never discussed gratitude journals again.

That journal did not achieve the desired results of making me a bona fide tennis superstar. But it became much more important than that.

As the world around me seemed to be crumbling and I suddenly felt very isolated from my friends, it

forced me every morning to find those three things every morning and every night.

It made me appreciate big things I had taken for granted like my health and family. That was perhaps an obvious outcome. But it also forced me to find small things to be grateful for: pasta and meatballs, beating my brother in video games, my dad reading the word of the day on Urban Dictionary at family dinner, FaceTime calls with my friends and private Zoom chats.

It’s been two and a half years now, and I haven’t missed an entry. What I once thought of as a somewhat cheesy exercise has become one of my most cherished rituals and changed the way I think about my days.

When I face scary days — like catching up on the homework that somehow piled up over Thanksgiving on the Sunday before classes resume — there are still always three reasons for optimism. And at the end of the most difficult, exhausting and frustrating days, I’m forced to remember that it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

There is always something to be grateful for.

So if I’m so perfectly grateful all the time, why do I still care so much about the Thanksgiving tradition? It should be just another day.

But Thanksgiving captures something so central to the idea of gratitude that I seem to ignore: sharing.

It’s one thing to write down that I enjoyed a meal with a friend. It’s another to send a text saying, “I’m thankful to have you in my life.” I can be grateful to be home, but it’s not the same as telling my parents how happy I am to see them.

I find it challenging to express gratitude unprompted. It feels awkward. But there are so many people that mean so much to me, and it feels so deeply wrong to only acknowledge that once every 365 days. Let’s normalize Thanksgiving.

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

On Thanksgiving morning, I woke up earlier than any sane college student on vacation should. Why would I do this? Obviously to participate in my family’s annual tradition: the Turkey Trot. My parents, two siblings, grandparents, visiting aunt and aunt’s new dog drove 20-odd minutes to participate in the race, along with a handful of other local Trotters with a propensity for pain.

My family’s participation in the Turkey Trot has taken several forms over the years. The tradition originated with my dad’s family when a group of neighbors gathered to jog, walk and bike around the block to infuse some flavorful exercise into an otherwise sedentary day.

Then, when my family moved out of town, the Trot became a long, circular walk on the property behind my house. Because the property technically belongs to the city and not to us, the Trot involved coaxing twenty relatives and four dogs over/under a gate bearing a “no trespassing” sign written in large red letters. Sometimes, a city official would drive by in a truck, prompting an exciting round of “hide in the bushes.”

This year, the famed Trot consisted of a 5K run on a local race route that makes cross country kids cry. I like to imagine the addition of a generous layer of snow, ice and mud on top of the steep hills was intended to remind us trotters of mashed potatoes and put us in the Thanksgiving spirit. The sheer, ice-encrusted slopes kept me on my toes — literally — and the biting, winter-morning air reminded me of my utter dependence on albuterol inhalers.

But I confess I enjoyed the Trot. The sparkling snowy views

were spectacular, and I was grateful to once more be surrounded by the scenery of home. Even more, I was glad I have a — somewhat wacky — family who likes to

partake in frigid adventures, even at early hours of the morning. Most heartwarming of all, though, was my grandfather’s positive energy and perseverance.

He completed the entire race in his neon orange jacket, despite the mashed potato snow, despite the fact that he just celebrated his 80th birthday. I can only hope that

when I’m 80, my dedication to the Trot will be as faithful as his.

Contact

MARK at h.mark@yale.edu .

HANNAH

// BY ANDREW CRAMER

// JESSAI FLORES // ARIANE DE GENNARO

// BY HANNAH MARK

// BY HANNAH KURCZESKI

Going Home

My car jumps as it rides over the trademark Pennsylvania potholes, tracing the familiar path through my town to Haylie’s house. The sights outside my window haven’t changed in the three months I’ve been gone, save for some trees that have been chopped down across from my elementary school to make room for more houses. Other than that, home is exactly the way it has always been. Except it isn’t.

The bed that I’ve slept in for the past 18 years of my life feels cold and fresh, the same way a bed at a hotel does. It doesn’t take time to mold to your body, because it knows you won’t be there long. My walls are still adorned with peeling pink paper and old Broadway playbills, but there are noticeable gaps in the decor. Once upon a time, every inch of wall space was covered. Now, colorful tacks stand in the wall, sticking out like tombstones in a floral pink field. They trace the outline of what used to be, what I’ve since torn down and transferred to my new home five hours away.

When I arrive at Haylie’s doorstep, she greets me with her usual toothy grin. “I almost burned my house down!” she exclaims as soon as she sees me, then proceeds to explain all of the things that went wrong while she was cooking the turkey for our Friendsgiving. She’s dramatic and full of life just like she’s always been, and the sight of her soothes my aching heart.

When our other two friends arrive, I’m hit with another wave of nostalgia. Val is still Val, arranging her charcuterie board with utmost precision and groaning about her tummy hurting after dinner. And Angie is still Angie, joking about the people we know from high school and pretending to bite my shoulder when I give her a hug. Together, the four of us make up the Pinocchio Hate Club. It’s not because we hate Pinocchio; It’s an old inside joke that became the name for our group chat, and now it’s too iconic to be replaced.

“It’s nice to know some things never change,” I think to myself as we pass around a box of Crumbl cookies. Minutes later, I accidentally knock said box of cookies off the table, and it becomes clear that my time at college hasn’t

made me any less clumsy. Haylie laughs, Angie gasps, Val looks at the now-crushed cookies in dismay, and I wish I could bottle the moment and save it forever. I wasn’t ever homesick at college, but at that moment, I realized I was people-sick. I missed having these three sunbeams of light in my life more than I knew possible. They’re familiar, they’re safe; they’re constants in an endless sea of ever-changing variables.

was before — which none of us thought was possible. Val stayed closer to home than the rest of us, but even she is different. She’s much more articulate about her feelings and doesn’t shove them aside the way she used to. The changes are so minute, I’m sure my friends don’t notice them themselves, but I have the privilege of seeing them anew, after months apart. As I kneel next to Haylie to scrub cookie icing o the floor, I wonder what changes they, in turn, must be

I complained earlier about how home feels foreign, but perhaps it is me who is the foreigner. Life at Yale couldn’t be more different from life in my tiny hometown — not in a bad way, just in a “di erent” way. The changes in myself and my friends are the same: not bad, just di erent. They’re probably good, if anything. It’s not human nature to be static.

When we first arrived at Haylie’s house and reunited after months apart, Val had joked that the Pinocchio Hate Club was taking on its “final form.” “You make us sound like Pokemon,” I teased her, but perhaps she was right. We’re still evolving, just like Pikachu. That evolution might mean feeling like a stranger in our own bed or eating overcooked turkey with friends on Black Friday, but it’s all growth. It’s all change, whether we see it or not. It took me a drive down memory lane to realize it was happening. Maybe that should make me sad, but the idea of growth just makes me excited. “Home” is defi ned less by place than by people, so really, “home” is growing with me. It’s already expanded to encapsulate the people I’ve met at Yale, in addition to the ones I love back in Pennsylvania.

My physical “home” feels di erent, yes, but my “Home,” capital “H,” will always be the friends and family I love most. And if I ever get people-sick, I know the Pinocchio Hate Club is just a call away.

Contact HANNAH KURCZESKI at hannah.kurczeski@yale.edu .

This Perfect Petit Monde

// BY ANABEL MOORE

I’ve long loved the way streets are deserted on Thanksgiving evening and Christmas morning. The world stops. To go anywhere alone down these eerie roads means you are running on an empty heart or a full stomach, neither particularly satiating, leaving the coziness of home perfectly definable. Family priorities feel so real and clear as the world folds itself into the indulgence of the holidays.

But my mom and I spent this Thanksgiving in Paris, wide boulevards already awash with the jewel tones and twinkling lights of Christmas. It was my first time in the city, despite having studied French since I was young, and my mom had only visited for a few days twenty years prior. It was a long overdue true vacation for us both. We ate our Thanksgiving dinner at a small brasserie across the street from the Louvre — I laugh, remembering my ridiculous art-history nerd exclamation in a gallery: “Mom, I’m so excited to see the ‘Gates of Hell!’” I had that one line from Abba’s “Our Last Summer” stuck in my head as we “walked along the Seine, laughing in the rain,” despite the barren trees and brisk breeze. We poked fun at overzealous selfie-takers even as we struggled to get a photo both of us liked; I translated phrases we saw as we walked, trying to teach my mom basic navigational words: right, left, straight ahead, stop, oh-my-god-what-is-thatdriver-doing-don’t-get-run-over.

The brasserie was poorly lit by yellow light, smelling of exhaust, cigarette smoke,

Every building on campus is too warm.

two

My mom and I kept asking one another: “Can you believe it’s Thanksgiving?” The obvious answer was no — what even is Thanksgiving, without feasts and massive crowds at Costco, bizarre family disputes and the infamous post-gorge nap? But despite being in the heart of France, surrounded by Parisians going about their usual Thursday evening activities, “yes” was my undaunted response.

I had my mom right in front of me, after the longest stretch of time in which I hadn’t seen her. We soaked in not just the touristy delights of restaurants and museums but the rich, bone-warming homeyness of nights spent sprawled on the hot pink hotel carpet, listening to Gary Clark Jr, Adele and Sinatra. We laughed and laughed at my terrible packing skills as bubbly conversations from the street below wafted up to our window until the “wee small hours” of the morning. Nights would end in dark chocolate, and I would find myself near tears, not with my usual stress but with joy. Ah, so this is happy. What a feeling. I haven’t valued laughter enough recently.

Joy and gratitude are inexplicably intertwined, in a way I hope I’ll one day understand. For the first Thanksgiving in as long as I can remember, in a country that doesn’t even celebrate the holiday, I grasped gratitude with the palm of my hand. I poured my heart, not into a communal cornucopia of plenty, but the small beloved space between my mom and me.

Contact ANABEL MOORE at anabel.moore@yale.edu .

the table swapping stories from our respective colleges, I realize that that isn’t entirely true. Though she’s still the same person at her core, Angie sits a little taller when she speaks, and her words carry a newfound confidence. Haylie’s stories about the people she’s met at University of Michigan are hard to follow because they contain so many characters, and it’s clear that she’s become even more outgoing than she

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steak and liquor. My mom and I were curious props in the dance of prim waiters carrying white wine. I felt steeped in the

most bizarre blend of youth and age in this stale yet proper establishment, brought to life by the palpable buzz of the city. Even home, I feel a little less young than I did at this time last November.

Our waiter and I switched between French and English as we ordered; turns out he would be going to the U.S. in

years — his second time ever — to complete training to be a pilot. Mon père était pilote, I told him. Vraiment? Quel petit monde. I felt no weariness at sharing old stories, a small world indeed.

// LIZZIE CONKLIN

// ARIANE DE GENNARO