Yale Daily News — Week of Sept. 25

T H E O L D E ST C O L L E G E DA I LY · FO U N D E D 1 8 7 8

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · VOL. CXLIII, NO. 4 · yaledailynews.com

Aliesa Bahri ’22 and Reilly Johnson ’22 elected YCC President and VP

BY AMELIA DAVIDSON STAFF REPORTER

COURTESY OF SURBHI BHARADWAJ AND REILLY JOHNSON

Bahri and Johnson began their term Sept. 21

On Monday, Aliesa Bahri ’22 and Reilly Johnson ’22 began their terms as Yale College Council president and vice president, respectively.

Bahri, who previously served as YCC policy director, and Johnson, who served as a YCC senator and Ezra Stiles College Council president, ran together on a ticket. Bahri and Johnson have previously served together as president and vice president, respectively, of the First-Year Class Council and then reversed their roles on the Sophomore Class Council last year.

Bahri — who is the fourth female YCC president in the past two decades — was elected with 64.17 percent of the vote, while Johnson garnered 44.36 percent of the vote in a three-way race.

Chloe Adda ’22 also began her term as Events Director following an uncontested race. Former YCC Vice President Grace Kang ’21

announced the results in an email to the student body on Sept. 19.

“While we are bracing ourselves for the challenges we'll face ahead in leading students through this pandemic, we are grateful that we have one another and so many of our peers to lean on,” Bahri wrote in a Monday email to the News.

“YCC is about stepping up for one another in difficult times and making a difference in our communities. For those who want to be active changemakers within the YCC, you will always be welcome on this team.”

Bahri and Johnson ran on a platform with three sections: “Ideas for a Just Yale,” “Ideas for an Equitable Yale” and “Ideas for a Safe Yale.” The platform was further divided into 30 different issues the two plan to tackle, including disarming and disbanding the Yale Police Department and expanding Yale’s COVID-19 support and testing efforts to students not living in SEE YCC PAGE 4

A reimagined Omni reopens amidst a monthslong struggle fall for sororities son programming like sisterhood bonding and big-little reveals happening over Zoom, the four Panhellenic sororities — the Yale chapters of Alpha Phi, Kappa Alpha Theta, Kappa Kappa Gamma and Pi Beta Phi — are trying to recast what a meaningful Greek life experience looks like.

BY EMILY TIAN STAFF REPORTER While parties and events thrown

by Greek organizations have caused COVID-19 numbers to surge at colleges across the country, Yale’s four sororities are setting aside traditional fall events as they prepare for a quiet semester.

With traditionally in-per-

SEE SORORITY PAGE 5 COURTESY OF MEGAN MCHALE

A limited number of Omni staff have returned to work, though the majority remains unemployed.

BY ZAPORAH PRICE STAFF REPORTER For the furloughed employees of the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale, the hotel’s long-awaited reopening is only a partial victory.

The downtown hotel resumed operations at limited capacity on Sept. 17 following months of scratched reopening plans. It is the last hotel in downtown New Haven to reopen since the March surge of COVID-19 forced many

MARISA PERYER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Yale sororities are focusing on a mix of virtual programming, diversity and inclusivity initiatives and creative rush events this fall.

YDS administrator to leave Yale

of the city’s hotels to close. The closure led the hotel to furlough more than 150 employees, many of whom lost their primary source of income and health care plans.

Since last Tuesday, employees have come back for training and the hotel has begun to accept reservations for the first time since its March closure. The reopening signals a partial resolution to a monthslong effort by hotel employee union UNITE HERE Local 217 to pressure the Omni to

reopen. A limited number of staff have returned to work, though the majority remains unemployed.

“Unemployment doesn’t last that long and it’s going to run out,” furloughed employee Brenda McPherson told the News. “And I don’t think they [the Omni] were fair with us at all.”

The Omni did not respond to the News’ requests for comment in time for the publication of this piece.

SEE OMNI PAGE 4

Members of YMS protest for Black Lives Matter

BY LUKAS NEL, OWEN TUCKER-SMITH, ISAAC YU STAFF REPORTER Over 100 people congregated at the Sterling Hall of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine on Thursday afternoon, protesting Wednesday’s announcement that no officers would be charged with murder in Breonna Taylor’s death.

The protest was led by Yale

School of Medicine Deputy Dean and Chief Diversity Officer Darin Latimore — who organized the event with others in the YSM Office of Diversity, Inclusion, Community Engagement and Equity — immediately following the announcement. Latimore said he never had a concrete idea of what exactly he wanted to happen SEE PROTEST PAGE 5

COURTESY OF TRINITYWALLSTREET.ORG

The Rev. Dr. Cathy George (center) is Associate Dean at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.

BY LARISSA JIMENEZ STAFF REPORTER The Rev. Dr. Cathy George, who is currently serving as assistant dean of Yale Divinity School, has chosen not to seek reappointment, effective in Spring 2021.

In January, George, who is also the Associate Dean and director of formation of Berkeley Divinity School — the Episcopal sem-

inary at Yale Divinity School — will leave the Yale community to become the Chaplain of the Epiphany School in Dorchester, Mass., an Episcopal school serving economically disadvantaged families. Andrew McGowan, the dean and president of Berkeley Divinity School and the McFaddin Professor of Anglican Studies and Pastoral Theology, will be leading the search for her succes-

sor. He expects George’s successor will join the community by summer of 2021.

“I will greatly miss teaching and mentoring the divinity school students that have enriched my life as an Associate Dean,” George wrote to the News in an email. “I have decided to move on, convicted by the needs of those with SEE DIVINITY PAGE 5

CROSS CAMPUS

INSIDE THE NEWS

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY 1934.

AI & JOBS

Berkeley College opens its doors to students for the first time. The college is named in honor of Bishop George Berkeley and opens through a gift from Edward S. Harkness, class of 1897.

Researchers from several American universities are collaborating to develop artificial intelligence based software to help people on the autism spectrum find and hold meaningful employment. Page 6 & 7 SCITECH

DRAMAT

ISAAC YU/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Prootesters gathered following Wednesday’s announcement that no officers would be charged with murder in Breonna Taylor’s death.

This fall, the Yale University Dramatic Association initiated its “BIPOC Theatremakers Series," a call to theater-related work by Yale’s BIPOC community.

Page 8 ARTS

CLIMATE

As Yale’s researchers scan the globe to see the impacts of climate change, a new report out of the School of Public Health underscores a risk much closer to home. Page 10 UNIVERSITY

BLM

New Haven residents showed their solidarity with BLM New Haven by painting a giant mural on Bassett Street. It's the first of eight similar New Haven murals. Page 11 CITY

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION G U E ST C O LU M N I ST CA L E B D U N S O N

Black lives beyond O these walls T

o be a Black student at an institution such as Yale is to be perpetually hyperaware of your identity. It is to question how others perceive you: an affirmative action case, a criminal or someone otherwise undeserving of a spot on campus. To be a Black student at Yale is to have your rights, and the rights of those that look like you, examined through moral and legal frameworks in class, then to turn around and see the pain and suffering in your community as those frameworks play out in real life. To be a Black student at Yale is to be forced to shove down the sadness and despair you feel when state-sanctioned violence claims Black lives in order to focus on the endless array of problem sets and papers to get done. To be a Black student at Yale is to never get a break, and to recognize that though you face your own challenges, the ones your community faces back home are immeasurably more urgent.

There is a world that exists beyond Yale. For us, it might be easy to remove ourselves from the injustices that happen to the Black community, to frame them as academic talking points or social justice projects, but so many others can’t do that.

The lack of justice for Breonna Taylor has left our communities hurting once again. For those who have grown up with dark skin, it is easy to recognize a pattern of Black lives being taken and no accountability for those who perpetrated the theft. Thus, the grand jury’s ruling on Breonna Taylor’s case does not come as a surprise.

It does, however, send a powerful message to Black Americans: Your life does not have value, you do not deserve justice and you can — and should expect to be — taken advantage of by society without regard for your humanity.

That message has been playing on repeat on this side of the Atlantic since 1619.

Processing the racist signals sent by American institutions hurts, and yet, when I get overwhelmed, frustrated or discouraged, I can retreat into my Blue bubble and remain largely unbothered by the outside world.

Living in Saybrook College briefly relieves me of the near-paralyzing terror that comes with simply existing as a Black person. At Yale, I am allowed to have hopes, dreams and aspirations. I can engage my intellectual curiosity to my heart’s content. I can explore the vast collection of books in Sterling, stroll around campus admiring the University’s architecture or just relax in my college’s courtyard after a long day of classes. I can just be.

The escape to safety and freedom that the University provides, however, is only temporary. Fear and pain are key components of my Blackness, and the status of “Yale student” does nothing to change that. When I exit Yale’s broad gates and the towering Gothic walls of

the institution fade in the distance, I once again become vulnerable in a world hell-bent on taking my life. When I return home after this semester I will inevitably become another Black kid in a city that has a history of brutalizing people like me.

IT DOES, HOWEVER, SEND A POWERFUL MESSAGE TO BLACK AMERICANS: YOUR LIFE DOES NOT HAVE VALUE, YOU DO NOT DESERVE JUSTICE AND YOU CAN — AND SHOULD EXPECT TO BE — TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF BY SOCIETY WITHOUT REGARD FOR YOUR HUMANITY. THAT MESSAGE HAS BEEN PLAYING ON REPEAT ON THIS SIDE OF THE ATLANTIC SINCE 1619 My GPA won’t do anything to counteract the presumption of my ignorance whenever I meet a new person. My resume will not be sufficient evidence to prove to the white people who look at me suspiciously that I am not a threat. If a police officer deems me suspicious, I will not be able to use my Yale hoodie as armor against the bullets that will rip my skin apart.

In the words of former student body president Kahlil Greene, “Black is still Black, even in Yale Blue.”

My op-ed has no easy answers for you. No profound takeaway to meditate on. No new concept to consider. This is just a reminder that a world exists beyond Yale, and that world is hellish. Trayvon Martin showed us that. Rekia Boyd showed us that. Mike Brown showed us that. Sandra Bland showed us that. Laquan McDonald showed us that. Tanisha Anderson showed us that. George Floyd showed us that. Breonna Taylor showed us that.

They didn’t have an easy escape, but their lives sure as hell mattered.

CALEB DUNSON is a first-year in Saybrook College. Contact him at caleb.dunson@yale.edu .

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Days of future past

ur present moment encourages the reconstruction of forgotten relationships and identities. From urbanites who left their Midwestern hometowns to college students who had begun to experience independence, many are now rediscovering their roots, the people with whom they grew up, the landscapes they left behind.

These chains that bind us to our communities and neighbors, usually hidden, now reemerge as palpable sources of humanity. Quotidian acts of kindness, like smiles exchanged behind scarves-turnedmasks, illuminate our days. Indeed, this communal sense of gratitude has been the most efficient bulwark against the pandemic.

Yet COVID-19 has also exposed the cruelty of an individualistic culture gone mad. Six months ago, the lieutenant governor of Texas argued that senior citizens should be ready to “take a chance on [their] survival” to protect the American economic machine. At the time, his position seemed extreme. Now, it has been adopted by countless governments worldwide.

In New York, for instance, Governor Cuomo “placed nursing-home residents in unnecessary danger” by “prohibiting them from testing would-be residents for the virus.” Similar strategies have been adopted in New Jersey, Florida and nationwide; in fact, this phenomenon transcends our borders. Even in countries such as France and Sweden, hundreds of families have accused state-managed retirement homes of mistreating their patients.

In short, the robust welfare states of Europe did not stop their governments from underfunding healthcare facilities for the elderly.

While unacknowledged, the reasoning is always the same. Since the old will die sooner than the rest of us, they have a generational responsibility to sacrifice themselves for our sake. Those who refuse are selfish, cowardly or narrow-minded.

The utility-obsessed rhetoric of economic thinking is on full display here. The elderly become a mass of anonymous nobodies, a dehumanized statistic on one side of an uncomfortable equation. Human worth is now measured by usefulness, and age is inversely proportional to productive potential. An elderly life is worth less, or even worthless. As distinctive stories disappear under the mighty weight of cost-benefit analyses, individual memories and voices find themselves relegated to oblivion.

The idea that the old have a duty to the young — and not vice-versa — would have baffled our predecessors. In his funeral oraMATHIS tion, Pericles BITTON exhorted his contemporarThrough the ies to revere their fathers Lookingand ancesGlass tors, to honor their efforts, to seek the unwavering “seal of their approval.” Centuries later, Montesquieu would argue that respect for the elderly is a precondition of democracy, a way to counterbalance what he called the “spirit of commerce.”

AS DISTINCTIVE STORIES DISAPPEAR UNDER THE MIGHTY WEIGHT OF COSTBENEFIT ANALYSES, INDIVIDUAL MEMORIES AND VOICES FIND THEMSELVES RELEGATED TO OBLIVION Prima facie, it seems strange that we should sacrifice those who have already accomplished something for those who have yet to accomplish anything. Our grandparents’ generation certainly did not have this mindset when they fought war after war to fix the mistakes of their elders. Yet as a society, we have become indifferent to the plight of the old. This attitude is the direct result of a political paradigm shift on both sides of the spectrum, one that extends far beyond COVID-19.

On the Right, the demands of neoliberal economics often overshadow the needs of the elderly.

Conservative lawmakers smile at the sight of veterans and old peo-

ple, but their smiles disappear when the most vulnerable among them ask for federal support. But to honor the past is to protect its representatives against the uncertainties of the present. No matter how convincing performative conservatism may be, an unconstrained embrace of laissez-faire economics is not compatible with a dedication to the happiness and survival of our grandparents.

On the Left, a different pathology plagues generational relations — namely, progressive condescension. Phrases such as “OK Boomer” serve to expose the triumphalism of our generation, that is, our tendency to think of our time as the culmination of human events. In a world guided by “progress,” the present has every right to judge the past with disdain and praise the new as inherently better.

Young people are increasingly reluctant to engage with the elderly.

When met with opposition, they simply deplore the “stubbornness” of their “uninformed” grand-uncles and move on — without convincing anyone of anything. Naturally, generational divides have always existed. The difference here is that persuasion, a central pillar of democracy, is replaced by nothing but momentous eye-rolls.

As Yale students, we often delude ourselves into thinking that we make history more than history makes us. We create a thousand clubs every year because we cannot stand the weight of existing institutions, their rigid hierarchies and antiquated traditions.

It is precisely because we love to “lead” and change the world for the better that we dismiss the voices and concerns of older generations. Of course, this kind of bourgeois condescension is by no means comparable to the more concrete tragedies faced by the elderly during the COVID-19 outbreak. But the coronavirus should make us reflect upon the need to protect and esteem this vulnerable segment of society.

In these frozen times, we find ourselves motionless, forced to abandon the perpetual movements of modern life. Perhaps now is the time to re-create dissolved generational bonds — not just to “respect” our elders, but to defend and honor them and their contributions.

MATHIS BITTON is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College. His column runs on Wednesdays. Contact him at mathis.bitton@yale.edu .

GUEST COLUMNIST IAN BERLIN

Tzedek, tzedek tirdof A

fter the Yale Daily News published my first op-ed a few weeks ago, I received an email from an alumnus — let’s call him Ted. Although he described my piece as “well constructed and somewhat informative,” my excitement waned when I read his complaint that my “liberal bias clouded the message.” I was confused because I focused exclusively on the ways that the pandemic has disrupted the performing arts, especially on college campuses. My liberal bias?

While briefly acknowledging the myriad crises that might demand our attention ahead of the arts, I mentioned President Trump’s repeated efforts to incite violence.

But the real shocker came when he announced, “I cannot understand why a person of the Jewish faith can ever vote Democrat,” seizing on my fleeting reference to having sung in synagogue. Surely a Jewish Democrat is illogical, he added, because “Obama ran around the Middle East kissing Muslim butts” while “Trump … is making peace in the Middle East.”

Ted made a series of assumptions about me, about what it means to be Jewish and about the political choices that he thinks Judaism supposedly requires us to make. Ted got a few things right — I’m Jewish and a staunch Democrat — but his inability to reconcile these two identities by assuming all Jews should be Republicans misses a broader point. I am a progressive because of, not in spite of, my Jewish upbringing. My only bias is towards compassion, charity and justice; to me, the policies of today’s Republican Party seem antithetical to these values.

Trump is no friend of the Jewish people. He has a decades-long history of anti-Semitism, including calling neo-Nazis “very fine people.” Perhaps it’s because he

doesn’t view Jews as real Americans, as evidenced by his call earlier this week with American Jewish leaders in which he referred to Israel as “your country.”

Evidently, Ted subscribes to this way of thinking too. Like many, he incorrectly concluded that my Judaism translates to blind support of Israel. It doesn’t, but even if it did, my Judaism would not require me to reject the Iran nuclear deal. Indeed, a broad consensus of Israeli defense and national security officials agreed that Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement posed serious safety risks for both Israel and the world. Since then, Iran has tripled its enriched uranium stockpile and may have enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon by the end of the year.

Likewise, while the recent Bahrain and United Arab Emirates agreements may prove beneficial to Israel in a vacuum, Trump has still failed to address the fundamental challenge facing the region. These deals are a distraction from the long-term goal of a two-state solution with the Palestinians, a prerequisite for lasting peace.

My views on politics as a Jewish American are not limited to Israel and the Middle East.

While I acknowledge that others might reach a different conclusion, the ethical codes described in our sacred Jewish texts point me towards a broad progressive political ethos.

For example, Leviticus tells us not to “stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor,” while the Talmud reminds us, “One who takes a single life, it is though they destroy the entire world. And one who saves a life, it is as though they have saved the world.” So I support saving lives — and in particular Black and brown lives — through demilitarizing the police

and providing Medicare for All. I mourn the 200,000 souls lost due to Trump’s disgraceful dereliction of duty over the last six months, and I condemn his apathetic response: “It is what it is.”

After God finished creating the world, an act we celebrated this weekend during Rosh Hashanah, God commanded us to protect this creation. Meanwhile, the Midrash tells us, “Do not destroy My world, for if you do, there will be nobody after you to make it right again.” So I proudly support the Green New Deal.

The Talmud argues that one must not sell weapons to someone suspected of wishing harm to others. By completing that transaction, the seller has implicated themselves in the violent act that may follow. So I proudly support universal background checks and gun violence restraining orders.

Next week on Yom Kippur, we will hear the words of the prophet Isaiah. He explains that we fast “to let the oppressed go free” and “to share our bread with the hungry.” So I proudly support funding enhanced unemployment and SNAP benefits, as one in eight U.S. households goes hungry.

We cannot boil Judaism down to a single issue. Our tradition compels us to practice tikkun olam — repairing and improving the world around us — in every facet of our lives. Now, more than ever, the need for this repair is overwhelming, and to me there is a clear political difference in who is prepared to meet that need.

It’s summarized most succinctly in the words from Deuteronomy adorning Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s chambers: “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof.” Justice, justice you shall pursue.

IAN BERLIN is a first-year in Pierson College. Contact him at ian.berlin@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 3

“The various Thatcherite Big Bangs - monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism - have been working their way through the culture ever since.” PETER YORK BRITISH MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT

City and community work to increase street safety

ZOE BERG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

New Haven is looking for new ways to ensure pedestrian safety and reduce accidents.

BY ADAM LEVINE CONTRIBUTING REPORTER This year, Connecticut has seen an uptick in road safety accidents — prompting city officials and local organizations to push for more stringent measures focusing on pedestrian and cyclist safety.

The city’s Transportation, Traffic and Parking Department is currently working on projects to increase pedestrian safety in New Haven, such as ensuring every traffic light in the Dwight, West River and Downtown neighborhoods have updated pedestrian signals. The city is also adding updated handicap ramps to these communities, according to Doug Hausladen ’04, the director of the department.

“Specifically in 2020, the state of Connecticut has seen a drastic increase in overall number of pedestrian deaths that has outstripped and outpaced the increases ever seen over the last decade, leading up to the record in 2019,” said Hausladen.

By updating pedestrian signals, Hausladen is moving away from exclusive phase pedestrian signals, which were the standard under Connecticut state policy. Exclusive phase pedestrian signals refer to all traffic being stopped at a traffic light, allowing for pedestrians on all sides to cross the street.

This year, after pressure toward the state from Hausladen and the department, the city is moving over to concurrent phase crossings, a system where pedestrians can cross

adjacent streets while traffic is moving. The policy change also includes a “leading pedestrian interval,” which allows pedestrians to begin crossing a few seconds before vehicles are given the green light. “[The pedestrian crossing interval] gives the pedestrians three, five, seven seconds of advanced walk time before the vehicles are given a green [light],” Hausladen told the News on Wednesday. “That puts the pedestrian in a place where they may be able to clear the conflict zone and the intersection … so it gives the pedestrian the ability to clear the conflict zone before the vehicles even start moving.”

In addition to efforts from the city, organizations like the New Haven Safe Streets Coalition are pitching in to try to make the streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists. Kai Addae, one of the Safe Streets leaders, has been advocating for the replacement of traffic lights with stop signs and helping with the city’s repaving and restriping projects.

“This would be the time to give feedback to the city and ask for better crosswalks or ask for a bike lane,” Addae said. “[We are] organizing meetings between residents and their alders and city officials so that they can have those conversations and figure out what will make their streets work for them.”

Addae also works part time at the Bradley Street Bike Co-op, a company which seeks to lessen transportation inequality in New Haven by

providing bikes to those who need a mode of transportation.

Inspired by his work with the Bradley Street Bike Co-op, Kapp Singer ’23 is creating a website that will make the data in the Connecticut Crash Data Repository –– a database containing data on crash information collected by police throughout the state –– available and visualized onto an interactive map.

The website includes markers for bike lanes, pedestrian accidents and bicycle accidents from 2017 through 2020. Singer uses red dots to represent cyclist accidents and red outlined circles for pedestrian accidents. By clicking on them, the user is able to see the date the accident occurred, if there were any injuries and how serious the injuries were.

“I wanted to experiment with these tools, and I thought this was a good way to learn how to do that,” Singer said. “It was something important that I wanted to show.”

The city has also been the recipient of multiple grants in order to improve safety conditions for residents. For almost two years, New Haven has received the Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The grant, which provides up to $3.8 million over a span of five years, focuses on decreasing racial and ethnic health inequality. The city also benefits from the Community Connec-

tivity grant from the Connecticut Department of Transportation. This grant, which awarded $317,085 to the city, aims to improve conditions for bicyclists and pedestrians in the community.

With this grant money, the city is hoping to continue to improve the street safety by building sidewalks on Ella Grasso Boulevard, for example.

Hausladen also hopes to engage the community in the discussion of how to make the roads safer. On Sept. 30, city officials will gather on Dyer Street to present a safety project that will increase pedestrian crossings and add a bike lane to the street –– but only with the approval of the residents.

“We’re the infrastructure experts, but our residents are the neighborhood experts,” Hausladen said.

“What we find most helpful is to go on a walk and just to talk to people about what their challenges are.”

He also identified other means of sharing traffic concerns, like the Yale Traffic Safety Committee — which works to improve traffic safety at Yale — and the SeeClickFix program, which allows New Haven residents to contact city officials about concerns they have on their walking routes.

According to data from the Connecticut Crash Data Repository, there have been 74 pedestrian crashes, 63 pedestrian injuries and seven pedestrian fatalities in New Haven in 2020.

Contact ADAM LEVINE at a.levine@yale.edu .

A look into the University’s asymptomatic COVID-19 testing system

BY ZACH MORRIS CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Since arriving on campus in late August amid the pandemic, asymptomatic undergraduate and graduate students have participated in a twiceweekly coronavirus testing program.

Faculty and staff who come into frequent contact with the students undergo weekly testing.

Asymptomatic testing detects and isolates those with early stages of COVID-19 — when community members do not know if they are infected and may transmit the virus to others. Students and staff self-schedule tests at one of 14 testing sites on campus. After checking into a testing site, they use a swab in a testing booth designed to minimize any aerosol-related risk of transmission.

Swabs are then placed in a collection container, before they are processed off-site by the Broad Institute, a molecular diagnostic lab affiliated with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With over 100 higher education schools using its services, the lab has committed to providing results within 24 hours of the tests arriving

at its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“We have been measuring turnaround time from the time the sample is received to the time we receive the results, and our seven-day average is running 21.4 hours, which includes the time to courier the samples to Cambridge,” Chief Quality Officer of Yale Health Madeline Wilson said.

“Right now, the Broad is running over 50,000 samples daily, so [it] has a laser focus on high throughput.”

Wilson has worked on testing strategies for COVID-19 since March. In late April, as the chair of Yale’s Testing and Tracing Committee, she helped design the University’s testing and contact tracing program into the late spring and summer.

According to Wilson, the current testing method is approximately 90 to 95 percent accurate. The false negativity rate is between 5 and 10 percent, and the false positivity rate falls between and 0.2 to 0.5 percent.

“If for some reason the swabbing is inadequate, not enough tissue in the sample, the result comes back as ‘invalid,’ meaning that human DNA is not detected in the sample,” Wilson said. “This affects less than one percent of samples. There are other

technical problems that can make a sample not usable or not able to be processed, but these are uncommon overall.”

In the current system, those with positive test results receive a call from Yale Health before moving to isolation housing in Bingham Hall for all on-campus students, as well as off-campus students who would like the option. The next steps include contact tracing and regular checkins from the Yale Health Care Management team.

Some community members are pleased with the current system.

“I feel safe because of the frequent testing, and I know that we’re super privileged to have really good testing and access to that,” said Tiana Luo ’24.

Anup Bottu ’24 expressed similar sentiments regarding the testing system and compared it to the testing available to him back home. “[It’s] much better than my home state, Georgia, so I feel pretty secure here, to be honest. I was tested once [in Georgia], and I had to wait in line for eight hours,” Bottu said. Yale students, on average, wait mere minutes before being tested, according to Bottu.

Despite more rapid testing methodologies like antigen testing expected this fall, Wilson and her peers seem confident with their approach. While antigen testing can be vital to clinical settings like hospitals, they are “less well suited for high volume, high throughput programs like ours,” Wilson said.

Even so, her team hopes to do some parallel testing with saliva samples this fall to learn more about the SalivaDirect assay developed at

the School of Public Health.

“Overall, while we are eagerly following new approaches, we are pleased with the program’s performance to date and are taking the approach, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’” she said.

Since Aug. 1, Yale has recorded 19 positive cases across faculty and students.

Contact ZACH MORRIS at zach.morris@yale.edu .

REGINA SUNG/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The University has enacted a system of widespread asymptomatic coronavirus testing for students, faculty and staff.

Undergraduates in research labs adapt to remote work

BY OLIVIA FUGIKAWA BYLINE STATUS Many undergraduate students who are not living on campus are continuing to participate in remote STEM research at Yale and are confronting unique challenges in completing their projects.

While some Yale labs are open to undergraduate researchers who live on campus, it is up to the lab’s principal investigator to decide whether to accommodate undergrads in person, according to Associate Dean of Science Education Sandy Chang.

It can be a challenge to open research labs to undergrads, since all researchers have to adhere to social distancing and maximum occupancy guidelines. Even if a lab is open to some undergraduate students, any undergrads who are remote — including almost all sophomores — are not allowed to do in-person research. All of these challenges mean

that many undergraduates are starting or continuing research projects without doing any work in the physical lab space.

“Obviously we want science to continue no matter how we do it,” Chang said. “But … we need to get back to the lab … for undergrads to enjoy the whole gamut of the scientific process.”

While all labs are affected by the pandemic, adapting to remote research takes very different forms across departments.

In the spring of 2020, Zack Andalman ’23 had been building a control system for a physics apparatus called a magneto-optical trap with physics professor Nir Navon’s Ultracold Quantum Matter Lab. He described the project as a “very hands-on, physical thing … [with] lots of electronics.” So when he went home for spring break and did not return to campus for the rest of the semester, he had to pause the entire project

LUKAS FLIPPO/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Yale undergrads face a new reality when it comes to remote research and are largely unable to enter the lab.

while it was still unfinished.

“It’s currently sitting in the lab right now,” Andalman said. “It was just impossible for me to continue working on it.”

Since spring break, he has started two new research projects — a control software and an arbitrary waveform generator — which are programming projects with no hands-on components.

Not all in-person research projects had to be left behind. Chang explained that a common pattern for transitioning wet lab work to remote is to have undergrads work on data analytics from previous in-person experiments.

“The undergrads were taught how to reduce this data and analyze this data,” he said. “And all of them were able to participate at least in part of the scientific process.”

Eric Sun ’23 is an undergraduate who had been conducting his own wet lab experiments in the Xiao Lab at the Yale Stem Cell Center before spring break. But since he has left campus, he can only do bioinformatics work remotely. Since there are some grad students and postdocs working in-person in the lab, he is still able to design his own experiments, have the people in the lab execute the experiment and analyze the data they generate.

“If you have the possibility to do data analysis, which is an extremely important tool for all fields of science, it’s not that bad at all,” Sun said. “You can learn a lot of skills that are applicable.”

And still other types of research experienced no change in research

direction when their work went remote.

Xavier Ruiz ’22, who is creating a simulation environment to test robot navigation in the Interactive Machines Group, did not have to adapt much to the remote circumstances.

“All of my tasks involve creating virtual objects and painting them virtually,” Ruiz said. “There would really be no need to be in person.”

Similar to Ruiz, Emma Levin ’23, who is working in the Seto Lab, has never even stepped foot in her research building. Her work involves analyzing landslide susceptibility models, which she can do entirely virtually. Since most of the data she uses in her models come from sources like satellite imagery and news reports, her research does not require anyone to be in the lab collecting data.

But even when the research itself has not changed, there are aspects of in-person lab interaction that are lost when undergrads are doing research remotely.

“The spontaneity of science, excitement of why we do science, that’s missing,” Chang said. “And I don’t know how to get that back just through video conferencing.”

Chang leads a research lab which employed remote students over the summer, so he noticed the differences between remote and in-person research firsthand.

He explained that many of his colleagues also miss interacting with their undergraduate students in the lab, and that there are some research “intangibles” which cannot be repli-

cated in a remote setting.

“One of the most important things I have to say in terms of research is that undergrads learn how to fail,” Chang said. “If you’re fed data, you’re not going to fail doing online research.”

Many undergrads also mentioned missing elements of an in-person experience, whether that be working with lab resources, forming relationships with other researchers or learning from graduate students and professors.

Even students who do not need to be physically in the lab for their work share these concerns.

“It’s really valuable to kind of develop a network and have a set of people who’ll vouch for you,” Ruiz said. “And I think that that’s something that’s kind of lost in the virtual setting.”

But despite the downsides of virtual research, all of the undergraduates the News spoke with still find value in the work that they do.

“It’s very important to develop skills like ‘How do I properly ask this biological question?’ ‘How do I set up the right experiments?’ ‘Do I actually understand what my data is even telling me?’” Sun said. “These are things that you can still learn without actively carrying out the experiment.”

Yale is currently in Phase 3 of Research Reactivation, which allows some undergraduate students to participate in research while abiding by all public health guidelines.

Contact OLIVIA FUGIKAWA at olivia.fugikawa@yale.edu .

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“One time I tried bangs, and people just weren't feeling it at all, but it's my hair. It's my unicorn mane, and it's definitely very important to me.” JUSTINE SKYE AMERICAN SINGER

Bahri and Johnson take over YCC YCC FROM PAGE 4 New Haven.

Bahri and Johnson told the News that they met at the Women’s Table on Cross Campus to find out the election results, which Bahri called a “fitting place” for the moment. Johnson recalls jumping around outside of Sterling Memorial Library upon hearing the news.

“I was certainly stressed during the election, but it was also a really productive experience,” Johnson wrote in an email to the News on Monday. “The students that helped Aliesa and I on our campaign taught me so much about selflessness and hard work — our team was amazing and they did it all out of passion for the good of the student body.”

Bahri and Johnson ran against Abey Philip ’22 and Matthew Murillo ’22 — who ran on one ticket for president and vice president, respectively — and Carlos Brown ’23, who ran alone for vice president.

Students also voted in Chloe Adda ’22, who was selected as YCC events director. For the past two years, Adda served as YCC

deputy events director and ran unopposed in last week’s election.

Adda told the News that she is planning to prioritize three areas during her time as events director: student wellness, community bonding and working with New Haven. She said that all events in the near future will be virtual, both to adhere to public health guidelines and to include the many students not living in New Haven this semester.

“Having events that inspire community bonding is super impactful,” Adda said. “It really does bring people together, especially in such a rigorous environment like Yale … I'm definitely very excited; I feel very prepared for the role.”

Bahri, Johnson and Adda will replace outgoing YCC President Kahlil Greene ’21, Kang and Events Director Steven Orientale ’21.

Greene, who did not endorse or weigh in on any candidates during the election, told the News that he is “very excited” about Bahri and Johnson’s win.

“Aliesa and Reilly have been in YCC for a long time; they have a lot of experience,” Greene said.

“And I think we're leaving stu-

dent government in great hands with those two. And I'm really excited to see what they do with the organization.”

Greene told the News that he is proud of his legacy of partnering with student activists, and of being a president “who was always visible and who always showed up whenever there was an issue on campus that needed to be addressed.” He said he hopes that future YCC leaders continue in that tradition.

Greene added that as the first Black president of the YCC, he is proud of the strides he has made in terms of diversity within the YCC. “Looking back, we got so much done, and I feel very proud of all the accomplishments and achievements of my team, and the YCC,” Greene said. “But right now, I think after a year and a half of just tons and tons of success, it is a great time to kind of relax and focus more on schoolwork and relationships to round out the senior year.”

YCC elections took place on Sept. 17 and 18.

Contact AMELIA DAVIDSON at amelia.davidson@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF ALIESA BAHRI AND REILLY JOHNSON

Aliesa Bahri ’22 and Reilly Johnson ’22 are the Yale College Council’s newwwly-elected President and VP.

Omni resumes operations at limited capacity OMNI FROM PAGE 1

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The Omni originally planned to reopen in July, but the hotel remained closed until Sept. 17 citing public safety concerns.

McPherson worked at the Omni for 25 years as a banquet server before the pandemic hit. McPherson has collected unemployment

since she was first furloughed in March. Now, McPherson is worried that her unemployment benefits will cease before she is able to

return to work. She has called on Omni management to be more “transparent” about the reopening and rehiring process.

Since the March furloughs, the Omni has offered employees like McPherson access to temporary job databases and accessible community funds through its COVID19 resource center.

Local 217 has also stepped in to help. It has established a COVID19 hardship fund for all union hospitality workers. The fund allocates money to assist in paying for living necessities like food and rent as well as the cost of family health insurance.

Yet the 100-plus furloughed employees have still felt the loss of employment.

The hotel originally planned to reopen in July, union organizer Isadora Milanez told the News.

However, the July reopening never came. Instead, the Omni kept its doors closed, citing concerns over the national state of public health.

“We were getting ready to call people back [to work],” Milanez said of initial conversations between the hotel and the union.

But as the summer months passed, the Omni’s plan for reopening remained unclear. In response, Local 217 sprang into action.

In response to the extended closure, 60 union affiliates and former Omni employees protested

across the Omni on Temple Street on Aug. 31, as first reported by the New Haven Independent. Milanez helped organize the rally; McPherson joined her fellow former coworkers in the crowd. Milanez called for the right to return to work and improved safety guidelines in light of COVID-19. These demands included regular disinfection of workspaces, COVID-19 paid leave and health care with no delay upon return to work.

Ward Alder 1 Eli Sabin ’22, who attended the August protest, said the former employees’ protests were a manifestation of the financial duress the pandemic has placed on the city’s service industry employees.

“The situation at the Omni just reflects a really changing [set] of circumstances that the city and especially the hospitality industry faces right now,” Sabin told the News on Tuesday. “The folks who work at the Omni don’t make too much money and a lot of them are immigrants who need support from the union and all of us in New Haven.”

Last week, after prolonged discussions, hotel management and union leaders reached an agreement on the employee rehiring process and safety guidelines for reopening. The hotel has since reopened for reservations, yet employees have only returned slowly.

The hotel began to rehire its former employees on the basis of seniority. According to Milanez,

the hotel prioritized its cleaning staff and bellmen, as well as employees from its front desk and engineering team. But for the many employees who worked as a part of food services and banquets, like McPherson, the call to come back to work never came.

The hotel has remained at low occupancy and Milanez told the News that the current level of business does not allow for “even a quarter of the regular workforce.” The low business led hotel management to issue 170 “warn notices” to Omni staff on Sept. 11.

The notices furloughed employees for six more months.

With the Omni reopened, Milanez has called upon Yale to “support union labor” by bringing business to the hotel. She hopes that bringing socially distanced events to the Omni would allow employees, like McPherson, to come back to work.

Yale is historically tied to the Omni and the current union-employer contract. In 1998, Yale officials and Mayor John DeStefano Jr. stepped in and took an active role in negotiating a contract between the hotel and the union. The University, its students groups and many affiliate conferences have used the Omni to host large banquet events in years past.

The Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale is located at 155 Temple St. Contact ZAPORAH PRICE at zaporah.price@yale.edu .

Dean Cathy George does not seek reappointment DIVINITY FROM PAGE 1 little educational and economic opportunity which the pandemic and racial injustice has combined to make abundantly clear to us at this time.”

George will be leaving Berkeley after her five-year appointment concluded this past June.

According to Berkeley’s online announcement, she expressed interest in becoming Chaplain at the Episcopal School in Dorchester, where she had previously served two parishes prior to arriving at Yale.

“Even in the twenty-first century, few women occupy senior leadership roles in the Church and the Academy,” the Reverend Dr. Gabrielle Thomas and Lecturer in Early Christianity and Anglican Studies wrote in an email. “As such, we need to do the work as pioneers. To this end, Dean George has forged new paths throughout her career.”

Thomas described how George was acting dean in March, when the COVID-19 pandemic halted life as usual at Yale. George, according to Thomas, led the community during this challenging time with “strength, commitment and care.”

Yale Divinity School Dean Gregory Sterling echoed similar sentiments about George’s role as acting Berkeley dean.

“Throughout the entire process, Cathy has been a dependable and

important voice: from the meeting in which we had to make the decision to cancel spring break trips abroad to the weekly or bi-weekly meetings of the leadership team to work through the issues that we faced in dealing with COVID19,” Sterling told the News in an email. “In particular, I want to recognize Cathy’s pastoral role with the students and her capacities as an administrator when we had to make abrupt shifts, e.g., reworking our annual budgets in a two-week period. Her equanimity, decisiveness, and commitment to serve were exemplary.”

Felicity Harley, a lecturer in the Divinity School and Department of Religious Studies, considers George a “friend rather than colleague” and told the News that she is “excited” that George “has found an opportunity to continue her work with children, and specifically those from disadvantaged backgrounds, which she was passionate about before she came to Yale.” Still, Harley said she will miss George’s support and friendship.

In addition to her administrative role, George taught students at Yale Divinity School and Berkeley Divinity School in homiletics, or preaching, as well as aspects of the Anglican Studies program.

McGowan told the News that George has “been greatly admired and appreciated by Berkeley Divinity School students as mentor and teacher.”

Linford Ranck DIV ’21 said that

while he only recently joined the Berkeley community last spring, he has already developed a relationship with George.

“Before and after joining, I've appreciated her unwavering belief in the importance of formation in [the] community,” Ranck wrote to the News in an email. “As I wrote to her in a personal email recently, I admire her ‘deep spirituality, sense of purpose, and commitment to students' formation,’ and I will miss her steady presence at Berkeley and YDS.” McGowan said conversations about appointing George’s suc-

cessor in Fall 2021 have “already begun” with students and alumni.

He added that he and his colleagues will make “specific efforts” to identify diverse candidates and give “strong consideration” to people of color. This comes a month after the Divinity School established an anti-racism task force.

McGowan told the News in an email that George helped students “in particular pastoral need” in addition to “sharing in wider leadership” with him during his sabbatical last spring when the pandemic left him “stranded

overseas” for a period of time.

“Cathy has always had a strong commitment to issues of equity and diversity and worked in numerous ways to deepen Berkeley’s engagement with anti-racism,” McGowan wrote. “We will miss her contributions but seek to build on them too.”

Students who successfully complete Berkeley’s program earn a diploma or certificate in Anglican Studies in addition to their Yale Divinity School degree.

Contact LARISSA JIMENEZ at larissa.jimenez@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS

George has served as Associate Dean at the Berkeley Divinity School for five years at Yale.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

FROM THE FRONT

“But life is a great school. It thrashes and bangs and teaches you.” NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV SOVIET POLITICIAN AND LEADER

Yale’s sororities adjust to a remote fall SORORITY FROM PAGE 1 “All summer, the four sororities at Yale have been working together closely on how best to transition our day-to-day and long-term operations to adjust to our current circumstances,” wrote Theta President Caroline Moore ’21, a former editor at the News, adding that the sorority’s in-person operations are suspended until further notice.

Alpha Phi Diversity Board Director Gianna Griffin ’23 and President Olivia Probst ’22 wrote in a joint statement to the News that the sorority is committed to disciplining members found to violate Yale’s public health guidelines.

They added that Alpha Phi will not be hosting events that violate CDC guidelines and Yale policies.

“We hold our members to the highest standards and expect them to show respect for the New Haven community,” they wrote.

Pi Phi Chapter President Danielle Martin ’21 shared that the sorority has been committed to abiding by the community compact “to ensure the safety and health of the New Haven community at large.”

Per a statement issued by University President Peter Salovey on Aug. 21, no student in the New Haven area, whether enrolled, withdrawn or on a leave of absence, may host or attend a party with more than 10 people, on or off campus. However, should sororities or fraternities host events that violate Yale’s guidelines, it is unlikely that the University would be able to suspend or sanction an entire organization. That is because, unlike many other universities, Yale has no formal relationship with Greek organizations and does not consider them to be official student groups. But rule violations could nevertheless result in disciplinary action for identified members.

For Alpha Phi members, much of this fall’s lineup of community events have been organized by a recently assembled chapter diversity board, directed by Griffin and Alayna Lee ’22, also a former staffer at the News. According to Griffin, the board was constituted two months ago to reduce barriers to entry and encourage diversity and inclusion.

Greek organizations have long contended with wide-ranging criticism for their reputation catering to wealthy and white students. But following a historic summer of Black Lives Matter advocacy and anti-racist activism, Alpha Phi and other sororities at Yale are trying to reimagine themselves as more accessible and inclusive spaces.

Though historically independent, the four sororities have been working in close conjunction this summer on recruitment, dues structuring and external fundraising initiatives as well as internal fundraising for their respective financial aid programs, according to Moore.

“We acknowledge how Greek life as an institution is deeply flawed, given the financial and social barriers that historically have made it an inherently exclusionary and predominantly white space,” Moore added.

According to Griffin, the Alpha Phi diversity board has established a recruitment team to reform the process and discuss with diverse groups how Greek life can better represent their communities. A separate team is focused on making transparent sorority-affiliated costs during rush and increasing Alpha Phi’s financial aid allocations.

Promoting equity during sorority recruitment through internal bias workshops and reducing financial barriers to entry are top priorities for Moore, too, who shared that Theta has mandated bias workshops prior to recruitment.

An open panel discussion hosted by Theta earlier this summer resulted in the designation of an executive board post for a member of the diversity and inclusion board, a team of 20 led by Alexis Esi ’23 and Ashley Kwak ’23. Chapter President Moore confirmed that similar discussions will be hosted once a month, along with other anonymous forums to address issues surrounding Theta and Greek life at Yale.

Pi Phi also has a director and committee dedicated to diversity and inclusion embedded in the organization’s leadership structure. “[Pi Phi] has, is and will take action that aligns with our goal of meaningful, long-term change to be a more inclusive organization,” said Martin in a statement to the News. “These actions alone may not make the impact we desire but we believe they are part of a collective that will.”

These chapter-wide initiatives are scaffolded by efforts from their umbrella organizations.

Over the summer, Theta’s national organization eliminated preferential treatment given to legacies — members whose relatives are alumnae — during the recruitment process, a move echoed by Alpha Phi’s national chapter.

Pi Phi’s national organization has amended its previous policy to give campus chapters a choice to either eliminate or follow existing legacy procedures, which automatically grant legacies entrance into the first

ERIC WANG/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Yale's sororities are implementing changes to adapt to the pandemic. invitational round and place legacies at the top of their bid list.

A task force established within Kappa Kappa Gamma’s national organization is in the midst of similar discussions to address its legacy policy, according to their website. Board members of Yale’s chapter of Kappa did not respond to requests for comment.

For new Theta sisters recruited last spring, the semester’s dues were not adjusted despite the transition to remote learning. While returning members paid $345 last semester, new members had to pay an upfront cost of $705 in its entirety, including a $160 usage fee to have access to the Theta house.

Even those on full financial aid at Yale were eligible to receive only a partial financial aid allocation from the sorority of up to $230.

This semester, however, $180

per capita fee paid annually by every chapter member for the national organization has been dropped to $135, Moore said, and Theta is not charging its members a house usage fee or standard dues. She added that anyone who is not enrolled will pay “zero dues” this year.

Financial aid programs for each of the four sororities are not written into chapter bylaws, so they must raise money through internal fundraising. Historically, these efforts have been organized without the help of national Greek organizations, who often run scholarship programs but do not have built-in financial aid packages.

“Theta nationals are being very understanding of the situations that members have been placed in this year,” said Moore. A recently unrolled fund from the national

organization is intended to provide dues assistance to local chapters.

While faced with diminished revenue streams, Yale’s sororities do not yet have to worry about organizing confetti and streamer events to pitch sisterhood to prospective members.

That is because, unlike many other sorority chapters across the country who accept new members as the school year begins, rushing a sorority takes place in the spring. But a heavily revised recruitment cycle is expected in January, when a majority of first years will not be living on campus, per the decision outlined by President Salovey in July.

The most recent sorority to come to Yale was Alpha Phi in 2015.

Contact EMILY TIAN at emily.tian@yale.edu .

Black Lives Matter protest led by medical school students

ISAAC YU/ CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Protesters gathered around the Sterling Hall of Medicine’s outdoor plaza among food trucks and passing pedestrians. at the event, but that he hoped to foster a supportive environment.

“Last night I couldn’t sleep at all, and I thought, ‘I’m probably not the only one,’” Latimore said.

“If we can do nothing else, we can create space for each other to come together, to create community and remember what’s important.”

These frustrations come after a summer of activism protesting police brutality against Black Americans. Three Louisville Metro Police Department officers fatally shot Taylor — an emer-

gency room technician by trade — after forcibly entering her apartment on March 13 of this year. On Wednesday, a Kentucky grand jury did not charge any of the three officers with murder. One, Brett Hankison, was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment for imperiling a neighbor with his shots.

After kicking off Thursday’s event with a speech, Latimore opened up the floor to anyone who wished to speak. One speaker was Laura Fuller-Weston, a clin-

ical laboratory technologist at the medical school. She said the landscape of racism in the U.S. is “getting worse and worse” but expressed hope for the future.

“I’m raising six children of color,” Fuller-Weston told the crowd. “I’m terrified of leaving them less than what our parents left for us. I can’t call the police and say help me. I can’t tell my children to go to a uniform anymore. But I refuse to give up hope, and I want to raise them to be the change they want to see. I hope we can share

that in this community here.”

Although the email announcing yesterday’s protest was sent out around 8 a.m., over 100 people consisting of doctors, fellows, nurses, students and other Yale community members attended the protest. Protesters gathered around the Sterling Hall of Medicine’s outdoor plaza among food trucks and passing pedestrians.

Many attendees, like Fuller-Weston, were long-time New Haven residents, but Jose Paez, a YSM child psychiatry fellow, has only been at Yale for three months and has already felt the impacts of racism in the community.

“I’ve already received discrimination,” Paez said. “I see other people who have been here for 10 years, 20 years, but it doesn’t take that long to feel it. What gives me hope is the work I’m doing with the kids, to show them that we can make it to these places and model for them.”

Attendees initially hesitated to take the microphone, but more felt compelled to speak as the event went on.

Associate research scientist Montrell Seay emphasized the need for solidarity among members of the Yale medical community. He encouraged people from all backgrounds to play a role in the fight against institutionalized racism.

“We need to make sure that every organization, everybody, is sounding the alarm often,” Seay told the News. “We need to make sure that every person is doing their part, whether that’s marching in the streets, calling senators or coming to vigils like this.”

Although YSM has an office of diversity and inclusion, Linda Jackson — the office’s associate

director — said there is always more work to be done. According to Jackson, the medical school “can’t do everything alone.”

Despite this, YSM has been making improvements recently, Latimore said.

“We are definitely as a community moving forward, without a question,” he said. “Since Floyd’s murder there have been many more conversations about social justice and what we need to do as a community to bring in people historically underrepresented in medicine. We’re working in the right direction.”

However, Latimore also acknowledged a need for further cooperation within the medical community. He noted that racial disparities in the health care system are often overlooked.

“Breonna Taylor is an example of the criminal justice system’s disparities, but we also have health care disparities that we as a community need to strive toward mitigating,” Latimore told the News.

Towards the end of the event, Latimore asked the crowd to repeat Breonna Taylor’s name. In addition, Ayotunde Ayobello — a clinical fellow in the Child Study Center — expressed optimism about the event’s high attendance.

“It’s so encouraging to see everyone coming out here,” Ayobello said. “It’s not just a Black thing, it’s not just a white thing — it’s a people thing, a human thing.”

The event was one of two Black Lives Matter protests held in New Haven on Thursday.

Contact LUKAS NEL at lukas.nel@yale.edu and OWEN TUCKER-SMITH at owen.tucker-smith@yale.edu and ISAAC YU at isaac.yu@yale.edu.

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Common cold may protect against the flu, Yale study finds

BY MARIA FERNANDA PACHECO AND BEATRIZ HORTA STAFF REPORTERS Yale researchers found that contracting the common cold could help protect against later infection with the flu.

In the midst of one of history’s largest public health crises, assistant professor of laboratory medicine and immunobiology Ellen Foxman and her team published a paper on the relationship between the common cold and the flu. The paper included data spanning three years and a total of 13,000 patients who entered Yale New Haven Hospital with respiratory symptoms. Foxman and her team found that the spread of the common cold and the flu rarely occurred simultaneously and speculated that there could be some unknown interaction between them.

infection was blocked when the tissue had been previously infected by the rhinovirus.

“When the common cold virus comes in and grows in the cells forming the lining of the airway, it triggers the general interferon response,” Foxman said. “This involves changes in the levels of hundreds of genes that protect against many viruses, including the flu.”

Foxman and her team found that the resulting lowered risk of influenza A infection tends to last for an average of five days. They attributed the effect to the presence of previously activated antiviral defenses mediated by interferon proteins, which alert the immune system of the presence of foreign invaders.

Anchi Wu MED ’26 GRD ’26, one of the study’s co-authors, explained that the experimental model they used allowed them to observe tissue

ERIC WANG/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

In order to understand how one virus could interfere with the other, Foxman and her team conducted a study simulating sequential infections of the rhinovirus and influenza A. The rhinovirus is responsible for the common cold, and influenza A is the virus associated with the seasonal flu. Using stem cells to generate tissues like the ones found lining human airways — key targets for respiratory viruses — the group observed that influenza A

repair after the first infection.

“This allowed us to study infections sequentially so we could better determine if and how viral interference was indeed happening,” she wrote to the News in an email.

Viral interference is a protective phenomenon whereby earlier viral infections could prevent someone from subsequently contracting other viruses, Wu explained. Even though it is not a novel concept, Wu said that little is understood about the science

that underlies it.

“Our current understanding of viral interference’s mechanism involves the innate immune system,” Wu wrote to the News in an email.

“This is generally considered nonspecific in what it affects, hence why it is able to defend against multiple types of pathogens.”

According to Wu, examining this phenomenon using an organoid model was an experimental strength, since innate immune responses — the body’s first line of defense against disease-causing molecules — can differ significantly across hosts. The human rhinovirus, for example, does not replicate in mice models, Wu said.

“Because our model more closely mimics the human body’s natural tissue, we were able to better replicate the physiological conditions and immune responses we would expect in a human patient using human viruses,” Wu wrote.

Eleven years ago, the world was grappling with a different pandemic inflicted by the H1N1 subtype of influenza A, popularly known as the swine flu. According to Foxman and Wu, people observed that the virus struck Europe months after original estimates — engendering speculation about how other viruses, such as the rhinovirus, could interfere with H1N1 dissemination.

“The clear starting point of this project [was] the interesting observations from the 2009 flu pandemic,” Foxman told the News.

Both the common cold and the seasonal flu have some degree of annual seasonality. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the common cold season is thought to begin in the winter and end in the spring, whereas the influenza season is typically at its most severe during the fall and winter. In 2009, however, the usual wave of rhinovirus infections that occurs at the beginning of the school year seemed to delay the influenza A pandemic, according to Foxman.

Wu pointed out that H1N1 and the rhinovirus peaked at different times during 2009, with rhinovirus incidence climbing before that of influenza. This indicated that some interaction could be connecting these separate outbreaks. Foxman also added that although there was speculation about viral interference in 2009, “no one had a way of testing it — it was just an idea.”

According to Wu, previous studies have also shown that, for some respiratory viruses, simultaneous detection of more than one virus in the same patient is relatively rare.

Foxman also explained that more studies are necessary to investigate whether this concept of viral interference could apply to other viruses.

“Even though you can try to assume that things would be the

same if you use a different virus, nature is surprising and each virus is a little bit different,” Foxman said.

“We would love to try some other combinations of viruses and see if we can predict, from the biology of the virus, whether there would be interference and, if so, how much.”

Professor of laboratory medicine and infectious diseases Marie-Louise Landry, another of the paper’s co-authors, added that even though this particular study specifically focuses on viral interference between the rhinovirus and influenza, early data from the pandemic suggests that SARS-CoV-2 — colloquially known as the coronavirus — could potentially be inhibited by interferon response as well.

“More work needs to be done, but it is hoped that strategies to induce the interferon airway response will be able to contribute to the armamentarium against SARS CoV-2,” Landry wrote in an email to the News.

Foxman explained, however, that the potential use of interferon response in the treatment for the novel coronavirus may be complicated. Despite the molecule’s ease of manipulation in the lab and common use in the treatment of hepatitis, interferon’s mode of action is extremely limited.

She also mentioned that, because of social distancing, other naturally-occurring viruses have not spread as widely during the pandemic as they have in the past.

“This year, we are really disrupting the natural [epidemiological] cycle with our behavior, and also we have a pandemic virus going through,” Foxman added. “People are wearing face masks and that might really decrease the spread of all respiratory viruses.”

Even if it is too soon to tell whether the coronavirus may be curtailed through viral interference, Wu said that it is generally important to study this unexplored area. According to Wu, a better understanding of the mechanisms of viral interference can help predict how future epidemics may interact with each other.

Wu also emphasized that even though this study could have future epidemiological implications, it does not dismiss the importance of respecting current public health guidelines.

“We are still in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic with no approved vaccine,” Wu wrote. “Wear a mask, wash your hands, maintain social distancing.”

According to the CDC, as many as 56,000 people die from flu-related illnesses every year.

Contact MARIA FERNANDA PACHECO at maria.pacheco@yale.edu and BEATRIZ HORTA at beatriz.horta@yale.edu .

Yale chemistry professor wins Ahmed Zewail Prize

BY JULIA BROWN STAFF REPORTER Last week, chemistry professor John Tully ’64 was named the eighth person to ever win the Ahmed Zewail Prize in Molecular Sciences.

The award — given by scientific publishing company Elsevier and the editors of the scientific journal Chemical Physics Letters — is given on a biennial basis to a scientist who “has made significant and creative contributions” to the field of molecular science. The prize recognizes Tully’s achievements in his “surface hopping” technique to understand the motion of molecules in excited states. Tully will receive a monetary prize, a gold medal and a certificate at the Ahmed Zewail Prize Award Symposium in 2021, where he will also deliver a lecture on his work.

“It was a total surprise — I had no idea that I had been nominated,” Tully said. “There are occasions when somebody makes a breakthrough on his or her own, but more often it’s a team effort.

In my case I have to thank my graduate students and collaborators and all. You don’t do these things by yourself.”

Tully’s research focuses on understanding how atoms and molecules move. He said that previous approximations about molecular movement assumed that electrons follow nuclei instantaneously, but that this is not always the case.

He explained that sometimes the electrons may change their state and “surface hop” from one state to another. His work introduced a model that incorporates this unexpected electron movement.

“What I did was develop ways that you could extend the methods that people had already developed to understand how nuclei move during chemical events to these cases where … you have to take account of the fact that the electrons may change their state, and therefore change the direction of the chemical reaction,” he said.

Tully added that he had been developing his “surface hopping” method since he was a postdoctoral student at Yale in the 1970s.

Chemistry professor Sharon Hammes-Schiffer said that while there have been various minor contributions and improvements to the method since then, scientists generally

return to Tully’s method because of its breadth and accuracy.

“There are lots of situations where you need to take account of the fact that the electrons don’t always follow the nuclei,” Tully said. “For example, any kind of photo-chemistry like photosynthesis and solar energy, or how batteries work or how factories make electronic devices by shining lasers and steering chemical reactions the way they want.”

Rob van Daalan is the publisher of Elsevier’s journal on physical chemistry. He said Tully’s work has been “fundamental” to the advances in catalysis and materials science.

Hammes-Schiffer added that Tully’s method has “sweeping implications” in the fields of chemistry and biology.

“He is highly respected in the community for having a lot of integrity and for being an excellent human being, as well as a great scientist,” Hammes-Schiffer said.

“He’s both brilliant and also a very thoughtful and kind person.”

Tully won the 2020 National Academy of Sciences Award in Chemical Sciences in April.

Contact JULIA BROWN at julia.k.brown@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF JOHN TULLY

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

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Yale researchers develop AI technology for adults with autism

BY EMILIA OLIVA CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Researchers from several American universities are collaborating to develop artificial intelligence based software to help people on the autism spectrum find and hold meaningful employment.

The project is a collaboration between experts at Vanderbilt, Yale, Cornell and the Georgia Institute of Technology. It consists of developing multiple pieces of technology, each one aimed at a different aspect of supporting people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the workplace, according to Nilanjan Sarkar, professor of engineering at Vanderbilt University and the leader of the project.

“We realized together that there are some support systems for children with autism in this society, but as soon as they become 18 years old and more, there is a support cliff and the social services are not as much,” Sarkar said.

The project began a year ago with preliminary funding from the National Science Foundation. The NSF initially invested in around 40 projects, but only four — including this one — were chosen to be funded for a longer term of two years.

“We’re very excited to be part of that selection,” said Brian Scassellati, the A. Bartlett Giamatti professor of computer science, mechanical engineering and materials science at Yale. “I think it’s a recognition of how important this problem is and how close we are to being able to help people.”

People on the autism spectrum tend to have strong visual reasoning abilities and often see puzzles differently from how a neurotypical person might see them. Companies find it beneficial to hire people with strong visual and spatial abilities because these skills can be very useful, especially for working in technology, according to Maithilee Kunda, assistant professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt University.

Kunda leads the effort to develop AI and cognitive modeling that analyzes a person’s visual reasoning abilities. Then, based on the analysis, people are connected with job positions they might excel in. This is done through an assessment con-

sisting of a series of puzzles during which the test-taker wears an eyetracker and is monitored with cameras. The researchers then use the measurements they take from both the sensors and the test to study the visual thinking process of the testtaker, according to Kunda.

Several years ago, Kunda realized “you can give two people the same set of problems to do and they can both be equally successful solving the problems correctly, but they could be doing it in completely different ways,” she said. “This is like the great mystery of cognitive science. All these things are happening inside your head and we cannot directly measure them.”

Eighty percent of people with ASD are either unemployed or underemployed, according to Sarkar. However, Kunda

pointed out that often the issue is not with someone’s job abilities but rather with their social skills.

Sarkar and his lab are creating an interview simulation that would allow someone to practice the interview process, which is often difficult for people with ASD. The interviewing simulator tracks the participant’s stress levels as they undergo a practice interview. Once the sources of an individual’s stresses are known, the individual can work to overcome their stress and better manage their social anxiety.

Sarkar is also working on a “collaborative virtual environment” in which people can practice working in teams. A group of people are given a virtual task and they must work together to

accomplish it. There is an artificial intelligence agent embedded in the software which can help participants if they get stuck and also provide advice on how to improve their social interactions.

One of the great challenges of this project is how to measure if people retain the social skills they learned in the virtual setting and can apply them in a face-to-face setting as well.

“People can make gains in very specific settings where they are being trained, but those gains sometimes don’t translate to the actual settings in which they are performing their work or where the actual interview is happening,” said Jim Rehg, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“We want to be able to validate or ver-

KAI NIP/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

ify that those gains are being preserved, that they are being exhibited in real life settings.”

Rehg and his team give eye-tracking glasses to both the interviewer and the interviewee to follow the paths of their eyes during the interview. The researchers then use the algorithm they developed to analyze the two videos, taking into account eye contact, posture and gestures to identify irregular patterns.

While interviews and collaborative assignments can cause stress in people with ASD, so can simply being in the workplace and dealing with interruptions to their work, according to Scassellati.

“It doesn’t matter whether you are stocking grocery shelves or

whether you are doing data entry or running a high-profile money market, whatever job you’re doing there are going to be interruptions during the day,” Scassellati said. “Minor day-to-day interruptions can be real challenges for adults with ASD in the workplace.”

Scassellati and his team at Yale are tackling this everyday challenge by building a social robot to help neurodiverse people practice coping with interruptions. The social robot is designed to be used in the home, and it is programmed to ask the user questions while they are involved in other activities such as watching TV. The robot pays attention to whether the person addresses the question and uses the appropriate social conventions.

Susanne Bruyere, director of the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability at Cornell, works with the aforementioned researchers to better understand the barriers faced by people with disabilities in the workforce, so that the technologies being developed can address them more specifically.

“We believe that people with disabilities add a needed element to the richness of the American and global workforce,” Bruyere said.

The project’s technology is still in the beginning stages of development. But two years from now, the team expects to deploy some of their innovations to their partners, including the Vocational Rehabilitation Facilities. The research team has also connected with several large private sector companies such as Ernst & Young, SAP and Auticon which have expressed interest in testing the technology at their firms.

Because the project is mostly software-based and the researchers do not need to wait for new innovations in hardware, Scassellati expressed hope that the products might be available soon.

“This is the kind of thing that could go into production very quickly, so we do have some hope that this is not 30 years off or 10 years off but maybe even just a few years off,” Scassellati said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 5.4 million adults in the US are on the autism spectrum.

Contact EMILIA OLIVA at emilia.oliva@yale.edu .

YSPH launches new virtual MPH program

BY AMRE PROMAN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER In a critical time for the field of public health and virtual learning, the Yale School of Public Health’s new online executive master’s in public health (MPH) program offers a new pathway to acquire an MPH degree.

YSPH Dean Sten Vermund explained the basics of the program in a video message released on Sept. 10. The course of study will last for two years and instruction will mostly be delivered online, with the exception of three five-day in-person intensives led by the Global Health Leadership Initiative (GHLI).

These intensives represent a key aspect in the program. All participants will also receive a $10,000 scholarship to help offset the costs of attendance.

“Public health is a public good,” Martin Klein SPH ’86, senior advisor to the dean of YSPH and director of the MPH program, wrote in an email to the News. “By expanding the reach of YSPH we increase our ability to improve health, prevent disease, and advance the school’s and university’s mission to be a force for good in the world.”

Vermund explained that each of the GHLI-led intensives has a different focus and will be taught to all students.

According to Leslie Curry,

professor of health policy and management at YSPH, the intensives will focus on design thinking, strategic management of resources and leadership of complex systems.

The second element is focused on knowledge that is central to the field of public health, such as public health policy and data-driven decision making, according to Vermund.

There are then four different areas of specialization that form the third pillar of the Executive MPH program.

These include: health informatics, environmental health sciences, applied analytical methods and epidemiology.

Students can choose to focus on one or two of these areas, according to Vermund.

The final part of this program is a year-long capstone project, in which students apply all they have learned.

“This has been a strategic goal for the School of Public Health, to expand its offerings, to be able to reach more people, more diverse people, to reach working professionals that can’t necessarily take a full year off, folks that want to stay in the workforce but also want to build their public health capacity,” said Erika Linnander, director of GHLI. “I think it’s been a priority for the School, or a strategic goal of the School, for at least a couple years.”

Klein explained that the program was developed by

consulting members of Yale faculty who were familiar with online education, in addition to staff at the Poorvu Center.

He also said that the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation has supported this program with a grant, which made it possible to develop the experience and technical knowledge necessary to launch the program.

When asked why this program was developed, Klein writes that YSPH “created this program [to] educate working public health professionals who could not leave their jobs and interrupt their careers to come to YSPH to get their degree.”

While this goal is of a broad scope, it nevertheless feels even more prescient given the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Klein points out that “the pandemic has shown us the need for a larger, better trained public health workforce.”

Linnander added that YSPH has “big things to tackle” and hopes that this program will attract a diverse group of people to do so.

Curry described the “twin pandemics,” with COVID-19 on the one hand, and “a second pandemic around racial disparities in everything from health and healthcare outcomes through to wealth accumulation” on the other.

The main goal of this pro-

g ra m is to m a ke p u b l i c health education m o re a c c e s s i ble so that diverse grou ps o f peo ple can gain advantage from it, according to YSPH staff. They can also use that advantage to improve the public health of their communities and the nation at large.

When asked whether this gives an indication of the future for YSPH, Curry said that while the in-person element of education will always be important, the school “has a responsibility to become more facile in online learning,”

YALE DAILY NEWS

especially given that “often online delivery platforms can be an equalizer.”

Applications to the new online executive master’s degree in public health program are now open.

Contact AMRE PROMAN at amre.proman@yale.edu .

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

ARTS Dramat’s Theatremakers Series supports BIPOC

BY ANNIE RADILLO STAFF REPORTER This fall, the Yale University Dramatic Association initiated its “BIPOC Theatremakers Series” — an open call to theater-related work generated by Yale’s BIPOC community.

The series supports any form of theater that can be shown on an online platform. The organization, the Dramat’s website says, is committed to supporting artists by accepting every proposal provided the artist identifies as BIPOC. Projects span a wide range of forms, including a voice-acting project for a visual novel, a digital humanities project involving an algorithmically derived script and a mixed-media murder mystery experience.

“The Dramat has been reflecting about how we’ve served the BIPOC community of Yale in the past, and to be completely honest and truthful, we found [ourselves] very lacking,” said Mikaela Boone ’22, president of the Dramat. “Our original programming was never going to happen as it was planned. It was going to be a year of flux anyway.”

Even though the Dramat hopes to produce projects on a monthly basis this fall, not all works will be produced as some pieces may not be ready by the end of the semester. Dramat Production Officer Adam Wassilchalk ’23, a co-facilitator of the series, said that most works are still in their early stages of development.

He wants to leave space for the projects to evolve and grow with time.

But there is an added incentive for artists to produce work this fall: The Dramat will award a $500 stipend to every series contributor and an extra $250 to artists whose projects culminate

in a public showing. This money can be used at the artist’s discretion, Boone said. Since the pandemic cost many students their jobs, she hopes the stipend will make it easier for Yale’s BIPOC artists to continue creating.

Wassilchalk will assist artists throughout the process by promoting performances and production opportunities, connecting less-experienced playwrights with mentors and providing teams with technology and software training. Wassilchalk said he is most excited by proposals that fall outside “traditional confines of theater-making,” such as the visual novel and murder mystery experience.

Diza Hendrawan ’25, a first year taking a gap year, is currently working on a digital theater play for the series. She plans to use digital platforms, including FaceTime, Zoom and other social media, to create a new theater experience.

The premise for the piece is a video call between friends who wake up after having both blacked out for 24 hours. While Hendrawan will use FaceTime to convey most of the piece’s dialogue, she hopes to add visual supplements via text and Snapchat pop-ups.

Aïssa Guindo ’21, Josh Gonzalez ’23 and Alaina Anderson ’21 are working together on a visual novel game based on Python — a computer programming language — titled “Real to Me” as their contribution to the series.

Guindo described the game as “meta in almost every sense of the word.” She added that the work has many parallels to more traditional theater; the game features real people voice-acting roles, a process Guindo likened to directing a play.

For KG Montes ’22, the series

COURTESY OF YALE DRAMATIC ASSOCIATION

is an opportunity to explore a show she wrote last year in a class called “Advanced Theater Writing.” Montes, a former member of Dramat’s executive board, said she is proud of what thesSeries means for the Dramat in terms

of doing better by Yale’s BIPOC community.

“In partnering with BIPOC creators of this community through this initiative, I feel that the Dramat is moving forward in a really positive way,” Montes said.

The Dramat is accepting proposals through Sept. 30. Those interested should email theatremakers@yaledramat.org.

Contact ANNIE RADILLO at annie.radillo@yale.edu .

New podcast on ties between New Haven, Black Panthers

BY MARISOL CARTY STAFF REPORTER In 1969, the murder of Black Panther Party member Alex Rackley set in motion the New Haven Black Panther trials — a series of criminal prosecutions against members of the Party.

Now, 50 years later, the podcast “Revolution on Trial” dives into an account of the trials.

Co-produced by Artspace New Haven and the Narrative Project, the podcast is an eightpart series featuring interviews with Panthers and recordings of events during the trial. It is part of Artspace’s larger “Revolution on Trial’’ exhibition, which commemorates the trials’ 50th anniversary. Mercy Quaye, founder of the Narrative Proj-

ect, conducts the podcast.

“If you are a New Haven native, chances are you’ve grown up hearing folks talk about this one way or another,” Quaye said.

“Your parents or your uncles or your aunts say ‘Everything’s been different since the Panthers,’ without really having a deeper understanding of what the Panthers did here in New Haven.”

According to a press release on the Artspace website, the exhibition examines events as “an exchange of power” between state control and demands to dismantle racial oppression and colonization, rather than “a historic event in isolation.”

“The beauty of the podcast is that you hear from people representing different generations — I’m confident any young activist

will benefit from hearing these incredible stories of the past,” said Artspace Executive Director Lisa Dent.

The Black Panther Party’s New Haven chapter began with Black Panther member Ericka Huggins’ arrival in the city. By that time, the party was already well-established with members in the city. After interacting with Huggins, party organizers asked her to bring a chapter of the Black Panthers to New Haven.

During Huggins’ time in New Haven, the Panthers suspected that Rackley was an FBI informant. Some Party members interrogated him and he was later found murdered in Connecticut. Following Rackley’s killing, Huggins and other party members were put on trial for mur-

der and conspiracy charges.

This included Bobby Seale — the Black Panthers’ co-founder and national chairman — who was in New Haven to give a talk during the murder.

As Quaye contemplated the sensitivity of the subject matter while creating the podcast, she turned to her background as a reporter. Quaye noted that crafting the podcast included being authentic in her recounting the history of the Party.

“Recognizing that I am a [New Haven] native, I have a unique perspective of the history of the New Haven Black Panthers,” Quaye said. “So I took the perspective of asking, what did I learn about the New Haven Black Panthers growing up and how can I apply that to

the story here?”

The podcast offers a historical perspective of a group confronting institutional oppression.

“So far this summer, folks have been diving into the episodes and learning all they can about the history [of the New Haven Black Panthers],” she said. “We’ve seen folks from California to Georgia to Chicago and beyond really dive into and submit commentary about the podcast. Being in a time of racial and civil unrest in our country, this is the perfect time to be able to explore these histories that often go overlooked.”

Quaye founded the Narrative Project in 2015.

Contact MARISOL CARTY at marisol.carty@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF JESSICA SMOLINSKI

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 9

“Take a moment each day to focus on the good, and then try to carry that with you throughout the day, because while bangs don’t look good on everyone, confidence does.” LAUREN CONRAD AMERICAN TELEVISION PERSONALITY

The Yale University Art Gallery reopens to the public

BY CYNTHIA SUTANTO CONTRIBUTING REPORTER On Friday, Sept. 25, the Yale University Art Gallery will reopen its doors to the public for the first time since March, following Connecticut and Yale University health protocols.

The YUAG’s reopening will provide visitors access to three special exhibitions: “Reckoning with ‘The Incident’: John Wilson’s Studies for a Lynching Mural,” “James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice” and “Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art.” The exhibitions are on view every Friday from 3 to 7 p.m., and every Saturday and Sunday from 12 to 4 p.m.

Stephanie Wiles, the YUAG’s director, noted that all visitors must wear masks and observe social distancing.

“We have worked very hard to meet the state of Connecticut and Yale University guidelines,” Wiles said. “We are eager to ensure that all visitors feel comfortable and safe on their first trip back to the Gallery.”

The YUAG’s safety measures include restricted access to exhibitions, reduced capacity and a free timed-entry ticket for all visitors.

According to the Gallery’s press release, visitors can now reserve tickets in advance on the gallery’s website. In addition, a limited number of walk-in tickets will be available on a first-come, first-served basis each day. Upon entry, visitors will follow an approximately hour-long guided tour of the three exhibitions. They can return multiple times over the course of the gallery’s reopening.

Upon entering the museum, viewers will first walk through the Wilson exhibition, which features a mural

titled “The Incident” that depicts a racial terror lynching of African Americans by the Ku Klux Klan.

According to the YUAG website, the exhibition aims to advance the national conversation about racial violence in the United States. The works on display can be jarring to visitors while encouraging them to visually confront themes of social justice.

Elisabeth Hodermarsky, the curator of prints and drawings at the YUAG, said that even though Wilson’s art was created decades ago, the exhibition still feels relevant.

“It’s both a timely group of objects and a timeless reminder of the realities of racial violence and terror in this country — and a testament to the power of art to move us very deeply and to spur us forward to confront the legacies of lynching,” Hodermarsky said.

Hodermarsky added that the socio-political atmosphere in the country — after George Floyd and other Black Americans’ deaths at the hands of police officers — makes the exhibition important in sparking conversations on college campuses.

Due to the new safety regulations, attending the exhibition is a timed and solitary experience that “might encourage more intimate looking and a more concentrated experience,” Hodermarsky said.

After viewing the Wilson exhibition, visitors will have the opportunity to view “Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice.” The exhibition shows Prosek’s work alongside objects from the YUAG, the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Laurence Kanter, chief curator and the Lionel Goldfrank III curator of European art at the YUAG, noted that the diverse array of

JOHN WILSON/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

After being closed to the public for six months, the Yale University Art Gallery will reopen its Chapel Street doors. objects pushes viewers to see the natural world in a different light.

Kanter said the exhibition includes an “eclectic” mixture of samples, including a color spectrum comprising more than 200 bird specimens.

“Every object is chosen to be so beautiful and so striking that everyone will find something or many things to be fascinated by,” Kanter said.

Besides introducing visitors to the intricacies of the natural world, Kanter hopes the Prosek exhibition will encourage people to see the world “more richly” and in more thoughtful ways.

At the final stop of their visit, viewers will be presented with a range of Indigenous voices and stories in the Indigenous North American Art exhibition. This student-curated exhibition contains over 75 artworks dating to the 19th century.

The exhibition, which presents pieces as works of art rather than historical artifacts, is guided by four main themes. The show, according to the YUAG website, seeks to highlight Indigenous people’s connections to their land, the way objects express sovereignty, how artistic traditions are passed down generations and the relationship nations have with animals, plants and cosmologi-

cal beings. The exhibition represents over 40 Indigenous nations.

The three special exhibitions have been extended through February 2021. Wiles said if the initial phase of reopening is successful, the YUAG will gradually open its permanent collections to the public and expand its hours.

“We are all looking forward to welcoming the community back into the gallery on Friday afternoon,” Wiles said.

The YUAG is located at 1111 Chapel St. Contact CYNTHIA SUTANTO at cynthia.sutanto@yale.edu .

Saladcraft opens on Whitney

YASMINE HALMANE/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Pokémoto owner Thomas Ngyuen’s new project, Saladcraft, opened on Aug. 22 on Whitney Avenue.

BY ÁNGELA PÉREZ CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Yalies have a new reason to trek down to the Whitney-Audubon Dis-

trict for a healthy meal. After having to postpone its opening for almost a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, newcomer Saladcraft Co. has finally opened its doors to the public.

The establishment began to serve customers on Aug. 22, shortly before the mass arrival of Yale students for the fall semester.

In an August Facebook post, the restaurant described itself as “a new healthy eatery located in the Whitney-Audubon District specializing in fresh salads.”

Thomas Nguyen is the owner of the new eatery located on 46 Whitney Ave. Across the street, Nguyen also owns poke shop Pokémoto, a favorite amongst Yalies. He opened Pokémoto in 2017.

The restaurant, with ample seating, is furnished in green and white tones. A glass screen separates customers from a variety of fruits and vegetables. Saladcraft’s menu includes everything from a classic Caesar salad to a more inventive “Tokyo Cowboy,” which consists of tofu, carrots, edamame, broccoli and greens of your choosing. Edwin Ramirez, an employee, told the News that despite the wide variety of pre-

selected salads, most customers gravitate towards the “Make Your Own” salad bowl.

Ramirez also said that most customers are Yale students and local workers. When customers are not there, “pretty much the whole day” is spent disinfecting, he said.

Yale owns the building Saladcraft is located in, which used to be Moe’s Southwest Grill. As part of the University’s Community Investment Program, Yale has bought significant amounts of real estate property immediately surrounding the university, and is renting them to a variety of businesses. “The Shops at Yale” are all part of this program, as are several buildings on Whitney Avenue. Yale is one of the top four real estate tax payers in the city.

Nguyen said that they originally planned on opening mid-January, but due to the coronavirus pandemic were unable to do so. In the weeks that they have been open, delivery sales have

comprised most orders. He added that they had to “adjust a couple of things,” such as getting rid of their original plan to include self-serve teas, in order to reopen around the time Yale started allowing students back.

Saladcraft is sandwiched between Good Nature Market, Whale Tea, Koffee? and Pokémoto. Nguyen told the News that he considers his restaurant “a good healthy option” in the neighborhood.

Isabella Dominguez ’24, a student in Timothy Dwight College, told the News, “I’ve yet to try it myself. Salad is hard to pull off — it’s hit or miss usually.” She added that “the only healthy option near my college is my dining hall, that I know of. To have a healthy option is great.”

Saladcraft Co. is open for delivery and in-person dining.

Contact ÁNGELA PÉREZ at angela.perez@yale.edu .

Jackson Institute expands amid pandemic

BY RAZEL SUANSING CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Even facing a global pandemic, administrators of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs remain hopeful that the Institute’s expansion will continue on schedule.

On April 6, 2019, University President Peter Salovey announced that the Jackson Institute would become the Jackson School of Global Affairs. The statement was made after the Yale Board of Trustees approved a $50 million grant from philanthropist John Jackson ’67 and his wife, Susan, to be instituted for this purpose.

The institute’s core priorities for a successful conversion are to raise an additional $200 million, recruit new faculty members and begin construction of the school.

Despite the pandemic, the institute’s leadership is confident that they can face its challenges.

“It’s still early days, but I am optimistic that the pandemic will not impact the Institute’s conversion into the Yale Jackson School,” Institute Director James Levinsohn wrote in an email to the News. “The two core activities that remain high priorities are faculty recruitment and fundraising. So far, those are on track.”

In a largely virtual world, Jackson has needed to be creative with its fundraising efforts. Vice President for Global Strategy Peri-

cles Lewis said in an email that Levisohn has been successful in engaging donors over the last six months through Zoom events.

The institute has also conducted successful virtual programs exploring the intersection of COVID-19 and global affairs, which drew large audiences and eminent speakers.

One of Jackson’s most popular programs, the World Fellows Program, has adapted to the virtual circumstances. Program Director Emma Sky wrote in an email to the News that the fellows spent the spring and summer acquainting themselves with the program’s virtual format. The program has continued its usual activities, specifically the “Good Society” seminar, where they collate their lived experiences in international affairs and analyze how it contributes to a better society. They will also continue to mentor undergraduates through the “Gateway to Global Affairs” course.

Sky also said that the virtual format allowed for opportunities previously unavailable in person. Fellows have easily connected with other fellows from previous cohorts with the same professional interests. The “Good Society” seminar has also used a forum format broadcasted to a global audience outside of Yale.

Still, Levinsohn shared the difficulties of carrying out procedural changes through Zoom.

“I find I can curate and steward existing relationships in a Zoombased world, but it’s a lot harder to build the new relationships that would otherwise develop,” Levinsohn said.

Another concern for the institute is faculty recruitment. Lewis shared that there are currently 10 permanent faculty members in Jackson. With the pandemic-induced hiring freeze, recruitment has halted. Still, Lewis said that the institute is working with prospective hires and will move quickly towards faculty recruitment after the freeze is over. In the long term, Jackson administrators hope to hire about 30 faculty members.

According to Lewis, one of Jackson’s newest hires is professor of history Arne Westad, who has taught in the Harvard Kennedy School and the London School of Economics. Westad obtained his joint appointment last year under both the Institute and the History Department.

In an interview with the News, Westad provided insights into how the pandemic has affected the Institute’s academic environment.

“The pandemic came, in institutional terms, just when we were starting to build a faculty and begin[ning] to fashion the teaching plans,” Westad said.

Westad added that the pandemic complicates plans to

enrich the academic programs at Jackson.

“I’m thinking about the core curriculum that we are trying to build at Jackson — what should go into that concretely in terms of classes, how should that curriculum be built up,” Westad said. “Not being able to test that in person in the classroom is, of course, unfortunate.”

Even so, Jackson’s professors and staff still remain optimistic about its future. Particularly, Westad believes that the Jackson School will provide a unique approach to global affairs.

“Many of the existing schools of this kind do not emphasize enough going beyond the traditional curriculum to try to look at what people can actually contribute to solving global issues,” Westad said.

“Our vision for Jackson is that we try to draw on the incredible resources — not just in the institute, but in all departments that exist at Yale — in order to address the pressing issues of our time.”

The Jackson School of Global Affairs is set to open in 2022.

Contact RAZEL SUANSING at razel.suansing@yale.edu .

YASMINE HALMANE/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Currently, the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs is headquartered at Horchow Hall on Hillhouse Avenue.

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

“I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.” PAMELA HANSFORD JOHNSON ENGLISH WRITER AND PLAYWRIGHT

Yale report shows alarming climate impacts in University’s own backyard

SCHIRIN RANGNICK/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Climate change significantly impacting New Haven, according to new report from the School of Public Health.

ROSE HOROWITCH STAFF REPORTER As Yale’s researchers scan the globe to see the impacts of climate change, a new report out of the School of Public Health underscores a risk much closer to home.

The report is the most comprehensive review of climate change and health in the state, according to lead author and SPH Center for Climate Change and Health program manager Laura Bozzi ’03. Researchers at the YSPH analyzed 19 indicators of climate change and health in Connecticut. For each indicator — split into the categories of temperature, extreme events, infectious diseases and air quality — the study tracked recent changes, the potential threat to human health and how effects may intensify in the future.

The study noted that although climate change will affect everyone, it will disproportionately harm the most vulnerable members of the population.

The report found that there is still hope to avoid the worst of the threats, but the necessary changes must be sweeping and immediate.

“We’re focused on policy change because, [with] the scale of the problem, we need broad-scale policy to address it, but there’s a lot that individuals can do also,” Bozzi said.

“One is to make clear to their decision-makers that climate change is a priority to them and consider that in their voting.”

Among the report’s findings is that climate change can interact with other longstanding environmental hazards. Connecticut has 16 Superfund sites, or areas contaminated by toxic waste. The report found that seven of these 16 sites are vulnerable to damage from more severe floods or hurricanes, including four sites in New Haven alone. The sites could potentially release contaminants into the soil, air, ground or surface water.

Additionally, the report tracked temperature trends in Connecticut. The average temperature in the state has increased by about 3 to 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit in each county since 1895. The temperature gain far exceeds the global average gain of 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit from 1901 to 2016, according to the report.

The report adds that all evidence points to humans as the pri-

mary cause of this warming. And the effects of extreme heat are particularly detrimental in urban areas where there are more buildings and roads and fewer trees to provide shade.

Outdoor workers, people experiencing homelessness and adults over 65 are especially vulnerable.

Climate change is known as a “risk amplifier,” the report explains, as the effects disproportionately harm the most vulnerable members of society. With increased temperatures specifically, people with lower incomes are at risk of heat-related illness, as they may have poorly insulated housing or be reluctant to turn on their air conditioning and increase their utility bills.

Epidemiology professor and co-author of the report Robert Dubrow said that the drastic increase in extreme weather events in the state was particularly distressing to him. Between 2010 and 2019, there were nine federal disaster declarations for weather events in Connecticut. In the 56 years prior, there were only 13. Climate change intensifies hurricanes, swirling up wind speeds and leading to heavier rainfall, the report notes.

“It’s impossible to predict when, but I think it’s fair to make a prediction that at some point we’re going to get hit by a hurricane with unprecedented intensity for hitting Connecticut and New England,” Dubrow said. “It may be next year, it may be 10 years from now, but that’s probably a fairly safe prediction about one of the effects of climate change.”

Like with rising temperatures, these extreme weather events will likely affect first and foremost people with lower incomes. Government-subsidized housing may have less insulation, and people may not have insurance or emergency credit to make up the property lost.

Chris Schweitzer, program coordinator of the New Haven/León Sister City Project, which organizes the New Haven Climate Movement, advocated for large-scale efforts to combat climate change.

“Nobody’s doing really what they need to be doing to address this problem, we’re just watching it every day get worse and worse,” Schweitzer said. “It’s kind of like if your fiveyear-old daughter has cancer and you go to a doctor and the doctor says take some vitamins, do some yoga, come back in a year. If it’s Stage 3 cancer you probably want chemotherapy, you want a solution that’s the scale of the problem to address it.”

Already, the people who did not cause climate change are the hardest hit, Schweitzer said. Poorer people often live in warmer areas with increased air pollution from toxic fumes, though they often do not use as many resources as people in wealthier neighborhoods. The “nicer neighborhoods” are often farther from pollution but more expensive to live in, Dubrow explained.

“There are these structural ways that climate change disproportionately impacts some populations versus others,” Bozzi said. “It’s important to have policies that are protective of vulnerable populations and those policies need to be determined in collaboration with those that are affected.”

The report outlines a set of recommendations to mitigate the effects of climate change and progress towards environmental justice.

Throughout the report, the authors

emphasize that there is reason for hope. If people act immediately to switch to renewable energy, they can still avert a climate catastrophe.

In addition to the long-term benefits of decarbonizing the economy, the report noted several “co-benefits” — more immediate positive effects on human health and well-being. For example, utility bills place a heavy burden on people with lower incomes, Dubrow said. Switching to more energy-efficient heating and cooling systems would help mitigate climate change and have the important co-benefit of reducing utility costs.

The report outlines recommendations for state policymakers, including increasing education on the topic for health professionals and incorporating climate change into decision-making across all sectors.

The state of Connecticut has pledged to bring greenhouse gas emissions to 45 percent below their 2001 levels by 2030, and to 80 percent below 2001 levels by 2050.

Already, the governor has formed a council to craft pathways to meet the goal.

But, the report notes, this threshold lags behind other states. New York has set the more progressive goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.

Dubrow said that he thinks Connecticut should prioritize switching the electricity sector to renewable energy instead of fossil fuels. This change can then act as the foundation for decarbonizing transportation and heating.

Schweitzer also advocated for a much higher level of ambition on the state’s part.

“Where are the people who run the Chamber of Commerce?” Schweitzer said. “Where are the people who run Yale? Where are the people who run all these institutions, who have power right now? They’re asleep, generally. I think they care but they’re not acting like they feel it in their gut.”

The Yale Center on Climate Change and Health’s website says that climate change poses the greatest public health challenge of the 21st century.

Contact ROSE HOROWITCH at rose.horowitch@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 11

NEWS

“There may have been many big bangs, one of which created our universe. The other bangs created other universes.” BRIAN GREENE AMERICAN THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

BOE faces funding threats, discusses trans athletes policy

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

The New Haven BOE met Monday night to discuss recent threats from the Office of Civil Rights to withhold public school funding.

BY OWEN TUCKER-SMITH CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Amid threats from the U.S. Department of Education to pull funding from its charter school system, the New Haven Board of Education has dug in its heels.

On a Monday night special session, the Board continued to prepare for what could be a legal fight against possible federal funding cuts. The federal DOE and Office for Civil Rights asked New Haven Public Schools to leave the Connecticut Inter-

scholastic Athletic Association in early September due to the league’s policy of allowing transgender athletes to participate in sports based on the gender they identify with.

At their Sept. 9 meeting, the BOE announced that it would not comply with federal orders and that it would consider legal recourse. Several board members expressed anger that NHPS had been singled out for the purpose of the DOE’s broader agenda. The Board’s non-compliance could cost New Haven Public Schools

Black Lives Matter mural painted on Bassett Street

LUKAS NEL/CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Volunteers paint the Black Lives Matter mural.

BY LUKAS NEL CONTRIBUTING REPORTER On Saturday, about 40 New Haven residents gathered to show their solidarity with Black Lives Matter New Haven by painting a giant mural on Bassett Street.

This is the first installation of eight similar murals planned across the city. The event included live music and poetry readings, an open mike and several vendors selling themed clothing.

From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., activists denounced police brutality across the United States and demanded justice for Black Americans.

“It is important for all of us to show we care about this issue and be a part of the public proclamation of that care,” Mayor Justin Elicker told the News on Saturday. “It has become more and more clear every day ... that our system disadvantages Black and brown people.”

Elicker pointed to the disparity in the impact of COVID19 on Black communities and police brutality against Black Americans as evidence of these systemic problems. According to Elicker, attending the mural painting on Saturday was a way of demonstrating support for the Black Lives Matter movement and encouraging change in the Elm City.

Local artist Kwadwo Adae was hired by the city to sketch the outline of the large mural in the Newhallville area, a process that took him three full days to complete given the size of the piece.

Adae has painted 17 murals during his career. While four of them were completed in New Haven, some of his other works can be found on the streets of Ecuador and Guatemala.

Adae told the News he had a personal stake in creating the mural, saying that it was a way

for the community to engage creatively with activists.

“The feeling when you grow up as a Black man in this country is that you are not wanted, you’re not welcome and you watch people treat you like you actually don’t matter,” Adae said. “This [event] is something that helps to reinforce the fact that we are all human.”

New Haven’s mural is part of a broader effort by Black Lives Matter chapters across the nation to dedicate public spaces to the movement. Since the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in May, murals have accompanied protests against police brutality throughout the U.S. Bold, yellow letters have been painted across streets in New York City, Los Angeles and outside the White House in Washington, D.C. Adriane Jefferson, the New Haven Director of Cultural Affairs and an organizer for the event, said that the mural required three months of preparation since they needed to obtain permits to close down Bassett Street so that volunteers could paint safely.

Jefferson also highlighted that the event’s goal was to bring the New Haven community together.

“The purpose of the event is Black joy,” Jefferson said. “Black joy matters.”

Shelley Quiala, a local resident and attendee, told the News that the mural painting had helped garner support for the Black Lives Matter movement in New Haven.

Black Lives Matter New Haven, in conjunction with the city, is planning to paint another mural on Temple Street on Oct. 3.

Contact LUKAS NEL at lukas.nel@yale.edu .

millions of dollars from the funding it receives in yearly federal grants as a part of efforts to desegregate the city’s schools.

“We do believe that this is only the beginning of their actions to withhold education funding, quite frankly, because of their disdain for the LGBTQ community,” said New Haven magnet school coordinator Michele Bonanno.

In a May letter to the various school districts and sports conferences in Connecticut, the OCR announced that the policy of allowing trans athletes to join sports teams based on their gender identity had “resulted in the loss of athletic benefits and opportunities for female student athletes.” The letter stated that transgender athletes must play on the team of the sex they were assigned at birth.

There are currently no known transgender student-athletes among the approximately 1,300 NHPS students that participate in the CIAC. However, Bonanno said that not acting against the newest order could threaten the ability of all NHPS students to participate in school sports and threaten the right of transgender students to play with the gender they identify with.

A second letter from the OCR in late August, Bonanno said, implied that the findings from the May letter had become federal policy and would be enforceable.

After receiving notice in early September that they were being asked to alter their policies surrounding transgender athletes

and to withdraw from the CIAC, Board members met for an emergency meeting and voted to pursue legal action should magnet school funding be cut.

Some members who attended the Sept. 9 meeting said that the threat to funding was politically motivated.

“It is so hurtful to see this administration try to make us discriminate against anyone,” BOE member Tamiko Jackson-McArthur said. “We are not going to be extorted.”

Board member Edward Joyner said the OCR’s funding threat was unfair to the district, because the magnet school grant is used for many school programs beyond athletics.

“I think it should be stated that the magnet school grant covers far more than athletics,” Joyner said.

“But the Office of Civil Rights is using this athletic example to take money from us that really is devoted for academic learning and the resources that we need to educate our kids.”

While the board met with legal counsel on Monday to discuss potential negotiations, a decision has yet to be made on whether or not New Haven magnet schools will still receive assistance from the grant program. The DOE will make their decision by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

“That certainly seems like the position that they’d like to take,” said Bonanno of the proposed cuts.

Dave Weinreb, cofounder of the New Haven LGBTQ+ Youth Task Force and New Haven mag-

net school teacher, told the News he was “very proud” of the district for making the decisions they have.

“I feel shame around [the] national leadership of the Department of Education,” Weinreb said. “Because I believe that all high school students should be able to participate in sports, regardless of their gender identity.”

Maria Trumpler, who directs the Office of LGBTQ+ resources at Yale, told the News that past examples of anti-LGBTQ policy being struck down gave her hope for the current situation.

“Certainly that’s something that the Yale community would get involved with,” Trumpler said.

She noted that in the 1990s, several law schools refused to let military recruiters come because of discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies. “And then the federal government threatened to withhold funding. Harvard stood up to that, and they didn’t dare take funding away from them.”

“This has been done before,” Trumpler said. “It just strikes me that lawsuits are going to be effective, because the way federal law is going is to support states’ rights, and Connecticut is a very accepting state.”

The New Haven Board of Education meets on the second and fourth Monday of every month.

Contact OWEN TUCKER-SMITH at owen.tucker-smith@yale.edu .

Plans for first-year int’l students

BY ZAPORAH PRICE STAFF REPORTER To accommodate the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy on remote learning, Yale departments have created in-person learning options to ensure that first-year international students will be able to study in the United States.

After the federal government announced that all international students were prohibited from fall enrollment in the United States if their college’s instruction model was completely online, Yale — along with 58 other colleges and universities — joined Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in their lawsuit against DHS and ICE. But just 10 days after the withdrawal, ICE announced another guidance that forbade new international students — students who had not yet studied in the United States — from entering the country if all of their courses were online.

“At one point, the administration said no international students could come unless they took an in-person course,” said Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature Pericles Lewis. “Then, they changed the rule and said that first-year international students had to take an in-person course.”

Lewis said that most of the University’s schools and graduate departments have created some type of in-person coursework to ensure that all international students could “get their visas and come here.”

Lewis serves as vice president for global strategy and vice provost for academic initiatives and said that academic planning in response to COVID-19 began as early as April. On July 6, just a few days after the university released a reopening plan for the fall, the federal government announced the international student ban. Lewis also chaired the Academic Continuity Committee for COVID-19 Contingency Planning and expressed that he was “disappointed” with the government’s decision. He said that his committee immediately began plans to have “as many courses as we could reasonably manage in-person.”

While the bulk of Yale’s instruction is entirely online, there are a handful of classes taught in person, following strict public health guidelines.

One of the in-person courses being offered is taught by Lewis.

Enrollment in his undergraduate humanities lecture, “Purposes of College Education,” consists mostly of first-year international students. Lewis said that he feels “perfectly safe” teaching the approximately 50 undergraduate students who attend his class in

Marsh Lecture Hall — an auditorium that can seat up to 500 people.

Along with arriving early to class so students do not crowd the doorway, Lewis mentioned social distancing floor decals and the requirement that everybody wear a mask. Section for the halfcredit course is offered remotely.

And lectures are recorded for students who may not be able to attend the course in person.

A student in Lewis’ class, Sude Yenilmez ’24, expressed frustration with the ICE policy. Yenilmez is currently enrolled in four other courses alongside the humanities lecture, totaling five credits for her first semester at Yale.

She told the News that both the immigration officer at the border and her visa interviewer asked her to confirm that she would be taking an in-person course. Yenilmez said that her schedule was “set in stone” prior to learning about the federal requirement for entering the country. While she said that her college dean was understanding of her unusually heavy firstyear course load, Yenilmez said that it felt like “an extra burden” just to be on Yale’s campus.

Yenilmez said that she was enjoying Yale and learning more about different cultures and customs practiced in America, but that she wished the rules that helped her to stay in the country weren’t so “rigid.”

Other students described the in-person component of the course as an enjoyable part of the campus experience.

“The in-person component is actually interesting and kind of fun because it gives me a sense of what Yale is really like,” said Shan Gunasekera ’24, a first year from Sri Lanka in Lewis’ course.

Gunasekera, who is currently enrolled remotely in Directed Studies and MATH 120, alongside the in-person course, said that social distancing and other public health guidelines were well-enforced in Lewis’ class. He would sit more than six feet apart from his classmates and echoed Lewis’

sentiments that he felt “really comfortable” during lecture.

Gunasekera noted that his transition to campus life was “pretty traditional,” aside from having to move in late. Gunasekera also mentioned that the Office of International Students and Scholars helped him obtain his visa and appreciates the “personalized attention” from the OISS community.

“A lot of what Yale did put us in a really lucky position compared to other colleges,” Gunasekera told the News.

Gunasekera expressed feeling “a lot of uncertainty” during the month of July upon hearing about the federal government’s plan to prohibit first-year international students from studying remotely in the United States. He pointed to other universities like Harvard who were unable to accommodate their students for the fall term. Harvard is completely remote this semester, citing “the unpredictability of current government policies and the uncertainty of the COVID-19 crisis” as reasons against a hybrid instruction model.

OISS has a FAQ page on their website that addresses common questions and assures international students that their “nonimmigrant status” will remain intact if Yale must shift to full remote instruction at any time for public health reasons.

Lewis also mentioned Yale’s contingency plan in the event of a coronavirus outbreak and said that, if necessary, the university will allow international students to remain on campus for the holidays if their home countries close their borders.

“We had to figure out how to accommodate first-year international students because we didn’t want to say [to] just stay home,” Lewis said.

11 percent of the 1,267 enrolled first-year students hail from countries outside of the United States.

Contact ZAPORAH PRICE at zaporah.price@yale.edu .

LUKAS FLIPPO/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Exterior of Marsh Hall, one of the few buildings hosting in-person classes.

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

THROUGH THE LENS

I

solation.

What happens when we are alone?

Do we experience a metamorphosis into something forgotten?

When left untouched, does the overgrowth take over and the ivy overcome?

The weeds enveloping what is left.

Or do we flourish Through a return of what is natural.

To a world of what was before.

Hidden in the middle of Minnesota stands remains from WWII Defined by a crumbling façade and coated with muted graffiti, A factory consigned to oblivion.

What is now, seen as decrepit But later, Will come alive again.

ZOE BERG reports.

WEEKEND

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020

// ANASTHASIA SHILOV

Can We Keep it Real? // BY SYLVAN LEBRUN

Most of us spent the spring and summer talking to strangers on the Internet.

We played Pictionary, complained about time zones, took personality quizzes and sent each other our results. We stayed up hours too late telling stories to a pixelated grid of faces. There were movie nights and a makeshift prom, people dressing up and dancing with their microphones on mute, turning on their phone flashlights during the slow songs. Some of us got into fights.

Some flirted, prefacing everything with the caveat of “if we end up on campus,” making promises to meet that never came through.

Some said far too much or said all the wrong things, cultivating images of themselves that they wouldn’t even recognize.

When my city shut down, I buried myself in this world that felt almost like real life.

And now, I meet people who know my brother’s name and what I dream about, but we still have to introduce ourselves like strangers.

Finding out that reality shows are scripted ruins the fun, doesn’t it? We need to know that it’s all spontaneous — the drinks thrown across the table, the hookups in hot tubs and the tearful confessions. In reunion episodes, beautiful couples sit curled up on loveseats while a live audience shouts and gasps, and the hosts ask everyone the same question. Tell us, was it all for the cameras?

We’re hungry and need to know more about you. Post photos on each other’s birthdays, write lengthy captions comparing your love to the moon or God, prove it’s for real.

We’re fascinated, too, by the vicious sides of our celebrities. We love fights on Twitter, long apologies typed out in the Notes app, leaked dirty videos and phone calls. When these secrets flood our social media feeds, we wait with baited breath for updates,

laughing at ourselves for being so invested.

There’s something powerful in knowing something we shouldn’t know.

Currently, there seems to be a cultural obsession with the “confessional booth,” the urge to get as far into each other’s minds as possible. Why else would we know so much about people that we’ve never met? We chase down their personal lives with a disturbing intensity, whether they are chefs, heiresses, drag queens or influencers. The world of fiction isn’t enough for us, not compared to these things that feel so true.

There was a virtual translation of the pre-orientation programs a week before move-in. I ended up signing up for FOOT. The trip I had originally wanted was in the back of my head the whole time — waking up to birds and making breakfast together, the conversation easy and unscripted. We like our lives like we like our reality TV shows.

We don’t want to sense the metaphorical producer’s hand hanging over every interaction, a puppeteer asking leading questions about our childhood in hopes that we will all magically connect. The fundamental issue with all the bonding exercises over Zoom may be in this, that it necessitates a master organizer and a constant lesson plan.

The leaders of FOOT tried to recreate everything that they could, including the tradition of writing letters to our future selves while sitting around a campfire. For this, we wrote alone in our rooms, in silence and still on camera. Meanwhile, one of the leaders shared their screen and played a Youtube video called “Virtual Campfire with Crackling Fire Sounds (HD)”.

I knew what I was looking for when I came here, because it was the same thing as everyone else. I wanted to be the archetype

of the 18-year-old, cycling through every emotion in a single week, sprinting through the streets and sleeping at dawn. I hoped for a clean break from childhood, the moment that the plane’s wheels lift off the tarmac.

Real connection, real friendships, moments that feel so vivid that you can barely stand it.

I wanted the life that existed in the cautionary tales that I would hear from my parents, in sentences starting with “once you’re in the real world…” Growing up in Japan, America often seemed to me like a character in a storybook, a place of grandparents’ guest rooms and hazy summers at sleepaway camps. I left Tokyo two months before I had to, because part of me was itching to see this country in a different way.

Once here, I had to set up phone plans, doctor’s appointments and bank accounts for myself, making childish mistakes at every step. I drove alone for the first time — few things had ever felt more freeing than that.

Yet the feeling didn’t last long, disappearing when I was rear-ended while driving my grandmother’s car four days before coming to campus. There was no damage, but I will never forget the jolt of it.

When we enter the real world, we play for real odds. I have to keep reminding myself of this because it is so easy to feel untouchable, walking through campus on a bright and cold September morning.

In my philosophy class, we consider reality as defined by Plato, lifting our hands up in front of our laptop cameras when we want to talk. “What we see, touch and hear misleads us,” he wrote. Reality is a realm of perfect definitions. Not the beauty I see in the Matisse poster I put up crooked on my dorm wall, but instead Beauty itself.

Our professor tells us we must understand Plato’s version of reality by appealing

to “similar concepts.” Here’s my attempt.

A drawing of a butterfly is to a butterfly what the world of the senses is to reality. The “Virtual Campfire with Crackling Fire Sounds (HD)” is to a campfire what the world of the senses is to reality.

I keep having the same conversation here, centered around the fear of not being one’s “authentic self.” In a rush of icebreakers and acquaintances, we face our first chance to redefine ourselves on our own terms, to choose what we like from the stories of our lives and throw the rest of it away. In normal times, this would already feel like a performance, and this feeling is only worsened by the virtual format of so much of our first year. Some things feel so present and real: picnics in the grass outside Sterling, shouting the lyrics to favorite songs from high school under the LED lights of someone else’s room. And yet so much of the time, I’m just staring at a screen, not saying a word out loud to another human being until dinnertime.

The worry that I am projecting a false image of myself, or that otherwise I am changing in some strange and fundamental way, has come to mind often in these past weeks. But the more time I spend with the people around me, the more I am able to relent to everything about this year that is chaotic, undetermined and new. Just before I left home, I wrote a line in my journal — “It feels inevitable that I will evolve.” I’ve begun to believe that to stay true to the most authentic version of ourselves, we must accept that there may not be a single, constant version. Maybe living a real life means falling in love with the change.

Contact SYLVAN LEBRUN at sylvan.lebrun@yale.edu .

PAGE B2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND REMOTE

Watching Through a Watching Window: What Through a It’s Like ToWindow: Be What Remote It’s Like To Be Remote // BY AWUOR ONGURU

I’ve lived my first month at Yale completely through a computer screen. Fifty percent of my time has been spent watching on-campus kids get milk tea and donuts on Instagram, another 25 percent attending Zooms at 3 a.m. in the morning. The last 25 percent is spent traversing GroupMe, imagining myself at the several community events my college hosts each night. After it all, I go to sleep, maybe three or four hours, and wake up to do it all over again.

“We’re not built for this. There’s only so much I can learn through a computer screen,” Andrew Dabrah ’24 tells me in another Zoom meeting. It took a few tries to find a time when we could meet, even though he’s closer to me than the rest of Yale — in Accra, Ghana, only 3,600 miles away from my home in Nairobi, Kenya.

This semester, hundreds of students chose to start or continue their education remotely. Most, if not all, were prompted by the havoc that COVID-19 was wreaking all over the world, particularly in America.

Bradley Nowacek ’23 was forced off campus due to Yale’s 40 percent capacity rule that meant sophomores couldn’t spend the fall semester on campus. Nevertheless, he chose to enroll instead of taking time off.

“I couldn’t find a clear opportunity as to what I would do if I took time off … for me, it was also a case of classes being offered this semester that I needed to take.” Lisbette Acosta ’24 didn’t see the benefit of going on campus. As she understands it, college life is made up of three aspects: the academic, the extracurricular and the social. Since classes and clubs are only online, Acosta didn’t see the benefit of going to campus only to enjoy the social third of the college experience. Some students, however, didn’t have a choice. Like me, Dabrah was forced to take the fall semester online due to the slowness of the visa process caused by COVID-19. For various reasons, students that looked forward to starting or continuing one of the most anticipated stages in their lives were suddenly locked out, forced to view their lives through the blinding light of their computer screens.

The academic aspect of school hasn’t changed significantly. As time has passed I’ve found myself in a pattern, having successfully translated what would have been a normal classroom schedule into a tight, clean method of clicking Zoom links. Because I’m one of those kids that takes Directed Studies, this work has become even easier — hour by hour, I traverse from pre-recorded lecture to pre-planned seminar, and back again. I always have things to say, and always enjoy what other people say. It’s become a habit — a routine.

“I don’t know, because I’m not on campus, but I don’t think it’s fundamentally different, since most classes are online, and most resources are online — meetings, writing tutors, etc. I feel that [my classes] are as close as they can be to the in-person experience,’ said William An ’24, who is taking remote classes from Florida. Most students I interviewed said that they were enjoying their classes — with the exception of those taking four-hour chemistry labs. “They [don’t] give breaks. At some point, I was like, I just have to exercise my right to turn off my camera and move around … no way. A couple of days ago, during my third class and with two more classes to go, my vision started to blur. That’s when I realised — we’ve got a problem here,” Nowacek said.

As the semester progresses, some remote students have recognized the widening gap between remote and on-campus students.

William Gonzalez ’24, a first-year student taking his classes in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, mentioned that some of the classes he took were hybrid — meaning that when the in-person components became available, all the remote students were left behind. “Now that people can actually go to class, it’s more, like, just me and the remote kids. I don’t really have much contact with the other kids outside of class.”

Even though our academics are (relatively) manageable, most of us remote kids are still finding it really hard to adjust to Yale. Stuck at home, in our rooms or in our studies, we are in limbo between high school and college, desperately trying to grow up

in the same physical space where we were once children. Our classes are taken in the context of our siblings and other family members existing in the same space, and demanding time from us, since we’ve given them the gift of being around a little bit longer. Acosta wanted to explicitly recognize the privilege of having a good home working space, and acknowledge the remote students who might not be as lucky as she is. “I’m in a place where I am able to get some enjoyment out of being in my house … not everybody is able to do that. A lot of people are not able to enjoy their home situation for a lot of reasons. [A good working environment] is not universal.”

Sam Ahn ’24 recently moved into his tiny dorm room in Berkeley College after waiting out the campus-wide quarantine from his home in Little Neck, New York. “It didn’t really feel like college. I was just in my room, where I had spent all of quarantine. People are always asking, ‘Where are you?’ to which I answered, ‘Well, I’m remote.’ It felt like an extension of what had already been going on. There wasn’t a significant shift.” Moving onto campus, however, has been a lot better for him. Now that he has had both experiences, he noted how being on campus actually made one feel like they were at college, like they had something to do there, like they had a purpose.

Where remote students have suffered the most is our social lives. Many of us looked forward to the joy of people that college brings — new friends, new adventures and experiences. Choosing to be remote cut us off from that reality. “It’s [been] damaging to my general social life … when I would be hanging out with my friends here at home, I have class. It’s a bit more lonely than it would have been,” Andrew said. For remote international students, there is the added obstacle of managing the time zone differences.

I’m eight hours ahead of the East Coast, which means my classes run from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. in the night. Extracurricular activities, however, are where it hits hardest — Yale’s “after-school” scheduling has led me to stay up until two or three in the morning,

often making much more noise than I should be at that time.

Despite the difficulties, us remote kids are making the most of our time at home.

Most interviewees were grateful for the extra freedom they have over their lives to plan their day, which, if they were on campus, would not be exactly the same case. Gonzalez is really excited for his time at home, as it means he has time to travel both within his city and through his state with his other friends who chose to be remote. He’s planning road trips to the coast and to his sister’s house and other adventures that he wasn’t able to complete due to how abruptly his senior year ended. “There’s not as much pressure as there is on campus — we’ve got a little bit more freedom. We can do much more than if we were on campus. We’re creating our own first year experiences.”

Remote learning has been a mixed bag so far. The general consensus among everyone I interviewed was that it’s okay — but we know being physically at Yale is better. This year has changed almost every plan that we made for the rest of our lives. Along with trying to survive a pandemic, we’ve all been asked to learn to navigate our new world — one where our fellow students are miles away, separated by time, space and situation. This separation has not been easy — but I know it’s manageable. Kids on campus, value your time. Connect with people, and make the best of what you have. Remote kids, you’re not alone. You are seen and heard in all your emotions, and I promise you, you’ll be fine. The common thing between both camps is that it’s going to take a lot of looking out for each other to survive. Reach out, look out. I have every confidence that not only will we be able to get through this — we will still be able to create the same magic that our college lives were always supposed to have.

At the end of our interviews, I asked each of my remote peers to rate their experience so far. I got three 8s, three 5s. All are looking forward to what is to come.

Contact AWUOR ONGURU at awuor.onguru@yale.edu .

// MALIA KUO

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND HOGWARTS

First House // BY JORDAN FITZGERALD

// IVORY FU

Yale inspires comparisons to Hogwarts.

Gothic towers loom overhead while secret tunnels hide for the most clever to find.

Residential colleges, like Hogwarts houses, define and divide us. The New Haven Green is our Forbidden Forest — best avoided at night. In “Ninth House,” Leigh Bardugo ’97 extends this comparison one step further, creating a magical world centered in New Haven. “Ninth House” is a magical realism novel about Yale’s secret societies. Yale’s institutional power manifests in these enchantments. As a Yale student, the book feels more factual than fairy-tale.

Familiar scenes fall from the pages: snoozing in Sterling Library, hearing the Harkness bells as you rush to class and avoiding eye contact with your dean in the Jonathan Edwards dining hall.

Some reminders are less quaint. Bardugo’s story reveals how she, a Yale alumna, believes the institution serves its own self-interest by abusing locals and students alike. She recalls the colonialism of Yale’s collections, the gentrification of New Haven’s neighborhoods and the racist stained glass windows in Grace Hopper née Calhoun College. For better or for worse, her portrayal is honest. By grounding the reader in the Yale routine, Bardugo cements the reality of her story. She uses magic spells and rituals to highlight existing injustices.

Bardugo juxtaposes the outsider perspective of her narrator with the reader’s presumed knowledge of Yale to force us to reexamine the evils of this institution.

Alex Stern, the narrator, quite literally possesses the gift of sight; she can see ghosts, or “Grays,” an ability others can only gain by drinking a poisonous potion. Alex knows Yale’s undead victims haunt this campus.

She stares at their decaying faces every day.

Bardugo employs this supernatural element to personify Yale’s troubled history. There is only one way to defeat Grays. They retreat upon exposure to memento mori — reciting literature pertaining to death is a particularly effective repellent. At Bardugo’s Yale,

the only way to survive is to memorize long passages without any actual engagement.

The words’ power lies in their remaining unchallenged. Bardugo’s opinion on Yale’s pedagogy is clear: Shallow efforts beget reward. Bardugo is more overt later in the novel, calling academic prose “an entirely different language” that dissuades Alex, a self-proclaimed reader, from engaging in her English classes. Every incoming first year learns to expect this elitist academic culture. Bardugo challenges us to refuse to accept this and reject meaningless work that kills our passion while providing little in return.

In “Ninth House,” the institutional infractions are more insidious than snobby first-year seminars. Yale leeches off of New Haven, stunting the city’s growth and mutilating its citizens. The book centers on the murder of Tara Hutchins. Though Yalies send thoughts and prayers — that is to say, mourn performatively — her death is unimportant because she’s unaffiliated with the institution. For Yalies, New Haven is little more than a backdrop.

Only Alex looks close enough to see that a Yale administrator, Dean Sandow, orchestrated Tara’s murder to eschew financial ruin. No Yale alumna is ignorant of Yale’s involvement with New Haven’s stratification, gentrification and bankruptcy.

As a student, Bardugo watched her alma mater exploit its environment, driving her to write about the bribery, mutilation and murder of New Haveners on Yale’s behalf.

Yale’s oppression leaves no question why “this town has been fucked from the start,” as a lifelong citizen of New Haven remarks in the book’s 17th chapter.

Though they are (tuition-paying) members of the university, Yale’s students also suffer from the university’s mistreatment.

A lacrosse player sexually assaults Alex’s roommate Mercy, and the girls refrain from filing a report because they know an NCAA champion is more important to the university than a random first year. The magical world faces a similar case later

in the novel; when a ghost assaults Alex, Dean Sandow suggests that she did something to provoke the specter, all but saying that she was asking for it. He makes these claims even though he surreptitiously organized the ambush, threatening Alex’s life and manipulating the situation to undermine her credibility. There were no witnesses to Alex’s attack because she is the only one who can see ghosts. This mirrors sexual assault cases in which the burden of proof relies on victim testimony and little other evidence. This impossible evidentiary standard, combined with a culture of victim blaming, creates an environment of institutional gaslighting. Sandow rejects Alex because he does not want to endanger his funding, just as colleges across the country discredit women who speak out against their more powerful abusers. One in four women in college experience sexual violence. Money matters; student safety is secondary.

Privilege is insufficient protection against Yale’s power. Alex and her mentor Darlington are the only two members of Lethe House, the fictional secret society whose responsibility is policing the other societies. They are the most powerful students on campus (magically), and yet they are still victims of Yale. Although Dean Sandow failed to kill Alex, he successfully murdered Darlington. I personally find it impossible to respect a character who calls himself “Darlington,” but he is exactly that: the school’s darling. He still dies. Yale educates some of the most privileged teenagers in the world — any kid in section could secretly be a billionaire. Bardugo asserts that Yale prioritizes itself over its students, whomever that student is.

Dean Sandow and Head of College Belbalm, the secondary antagonist, represent Yale’s administration. Their transgressions prove that Yale disregards its victims, whether they be anonymous locals or prized students. Open invitations to office hours obfuscate Yale’s position that human life is less important than the University’s

reputation, longevity and monetary gains.

Darlington and Alex’s contradicting attitudes toward magic exemplify their contrasting levels of belief in the system and determine their inevitable fates. To put it frankly, Darlington drinks the Kool-Aid and Alex dumps her cup. Darlington believes “there should be more magic” in the world but Alex believes the stuff is “never good or kind.” To him, magic is otherworldly.

It is salvation. But Alex knows that magic is power, and power cannot exist without oppressing the powerless. These same outlooks, Darlington’s faith and Alex’s skepticism, apply to their trust in authority.

Darlington believes his superiors enact justice. When he learns about crimes in Alex’s past, he feels the duty to report her to Dean Sandow. Although he never gets the chance to do so, his efforts would have been fruitless because the dean already knew and he ignored it. Alex, on the other hand, knows that systems fail. She circumvents institutional channels and holds those guilty of rape and murder accountable for their actions. Trusting institutions, whether supernatural or scholastic, is futile. They fail to serve justice and they fail to save their dependents. Darlington is a believer, but Alex survives.

Leigh Bardugo knows how it feels to be a Yalie. She understands the cognitive dissonance between feeling grateful for Yale’s opportunities and guilty for its sins. Unfortunately, “Ninth House” proves that even magic fails to soothe this headache. The same can be said for Harry Potter fans attempting to reconcile J.K. Rowling’s deeply transphobic beliefs with their love for the series; even Hogwarts is unsafe.

There’s nothing wrong with embracing our college experience, but that comes with the responsibility to assess the impact of our actions. While we traipse through our Bright College Years, it is essential to ask ourselves what shadows we’re casting.

Contact JORDAN FITZGERALD at jordan.fitzgerald@yale.edu .

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PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND

Her Son’s Mền Hoa // BY JOHN NGUYEN

// ANNIE LIN

// MALIA KUO

“Why’re you bringing the mền hoa?” má asked in Vietnamese.

It was August 17th— one week before I flew out of Minnesota and moved into college. I placed my brightest Hawaiian shirts in my suitcase and my school supplies in my backpack, singing while I packed. I inherited my love for music from má. She always sings as she does chores.

When my two bags were nearly full, I realized I had entirely forgotten the most important items: sleep essentials. After much tireless shoving, I successfully squeezed a bedsheet and pillow into my suitcases. My floral blanket was next. As I folded it, má walked into my room, pondering why I even considered bringing my mền hoa.

Responding in our mother tongue, I explained, “It’s my favorite, and I love the patterns.”

My mền hoa is simply exquisite. It bears clusters of magenta tulips and orchids, burgundy camellias, maroon peonies, and pastel-pink cherry blossoms. Green stems and leaves curve and twist in the most satisfying ways. These bundles of flowers are arranged in a diagonal fashion and thrown against a beige background. My mền hoa is regal.

Má insisted, “No, you shouldn’t bring it!

It’s for girls, and everyone will think you are bê đê (gay). You should bring the blue blanket — it’s more manly. If you invite a girl over to your dorm room, she’ll see your mền hoa!”

Well I’ve got news for you, má. You don’t really need to worry about that last part — trust me. Little does má know, I’ll be spending four years at the “gay Ivy,” a colloquial reference to Yale’s queer-friendly atmosphere.

I smiled and thanked má for her concerns.

She stood in my room for several minutes to make sure I didn’t forget to bring anything important. Má checked off the boxes on her mental packing list, putting my pen and paper to shame.

As she inspected my suitcases, the words “I am gay” danced on the tip of my tongue.

I heard myself gasping for air, preparing to utter that life-changing three-word phrase aloud.

But I didn’t.

I decided not to spark a hellfire in my house. But at the same time, I didn’t just want to do as má told me. When she departed my room, I discreetly packed my mền hoa, discarding her recommendation.

My mền hoa has two faces. Behind the ornamental front side, maroon, pink, green and beige colors stripe the back of the blanket. I often faced this less-flashy side of my mền hoa outwards, hiding the flower-laden

front underneath so má or bá wouldn’t pay attention to it.

I treasured the secret pleasure of viewing the front of my mền hoa as it covered me from head to toe each night. Minutes before I fell asleep, wrapped up like a mummy, I’d occasionally use my phone’s flashlight to cast away the darkness beneath the blanket, illuminating the beautiful flowers. The mền hoa isn’t simply a piece of cloth that I wrap myself in whenever I require warmth.

Rather, it’s a teleportation device, sending me to a field of flowers every night. I couldn’t part with it.

This little act — bringing my mền hoa to college — may not be as enthralling as a coming-out story. But it was my own way of making a statement. As I folded the mền hoa, I thought: If there is a time to exhibit my most genuine self, it would be in college.

I considered bringing the blue blanket, as má suggested, to look more “manly.” Although a part of me was sold on the idea of an accepting Yale, another part still had doubts. But I had reached a certain threshold — a point at which I was finished concealing my queerness, my flamboyance and my “feminine” interests in an attempt to fit a conventional masculine mold.

I’ve kept my gayness hidden from my parents since sixth grade, when I myself realized my unorthodox romantic attractions.

It’s a six-year secret. I officially spoke the words “I am gay” into existence during my 2019 summer. I mouthed this phrase to some dear friends while on Princeton’s campus, attending a leadership program called LEDA. For the first time in my life, I proclaimed these words, accepting myself.

After being released from the shackles that came with suppressing my gayness — after experiencing liberation — I returned home to Minnesota and continued to hide this aspect of myself from má and bá. But it wasn’t too stressful because I easily came out to my sisters.

“LOL, who doesn’t know?” Cindy and Angela jokingly exclaimed.

They then asked me when I was going to tell má this secret, because my relationship with her is especially strong. Má knows a lot about me. She has witnessed my most vulnerable, ugly-crying moments to my happiest of joys. I’m comfortable telling má anything. Well, except for that one truth. The night before I left for college was an inappropriate time to reveal my gayness to her. I bore a moral responsibility to ensure my family didn’t break apart. It would’ve been selfish of me to have the privilege of leaving home, letting my sisters deal with the aftermath of my coming out. I felt like Mulan when she saved

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China from the Huns, masking her identity as the only woman in an all-men’s army.

Most importantly, I didn’t want to fight má and have this quarrel serve as my last memory of her when I left for college.

After I successfully passed through airport security, má waved goodbye and pointed to her phone, prompting me to look at a text message she sent.

“Be happy, be yourself and don’t let anyone break your spirits,” má wrote.

She then sent some pictures of the pungent pork broth of her homemade phở, urging me not to miss the delicious meals she conjures up. Her cooking talent transcends that of any Michelin-Star chef. Má still wishes she had the opportunity to attend culinary school, but my grandfather strongly discouraged her from pursuing this dream.

She longs for her children’s lives to unfold differently. Má learned from my grandfather’s poor parenting, applying what she experienced with him to her own approaches to motherhood. She hopes for me to sprout into a person I’m happy being.

But má is oblivious to the fact that this — my self-acceptance, my self-empowerment — is my way of blooming. She is unaware that I want to flourish gleefully like those tulips, camellias and cherry blossoms on my mền hoa. Má may not have envisioned this type of blossoming, but there will surely come a day when she’ll be forced to confront my truth. Má fled wartorn Vietnam and foresaw her future children becoming educated, caring about their community and getting married. This third hope, however, will not exactly be how she expected. When that moment of truth — my coming out — arrives, I dream má will still be invested in my well-being, urging me to “be happy.”

I have some reason for hope. In the past, má has defended me. Whenever bá lectured me about my colorful room, má entered and exclaimed, “Let him do what he likes — he’s just a kid. He’s gonna get tired of his room soon, anyways!”

Má advocated for me, but then she exhorted that I was undergoing a phase — that I’d someday grow tired of seeing the rainbow walls around my room, or eventually cease to adore my mền hoa. She insinuated that it would be peculiar for me to still like these “girly” things as an adult. To má, my interests are short-lived.

But má is incorrect. I’ll love my blindingly vibrant room and my mền hoa until I leave this world, showcasing my colorful bedroom to anyone and everyone, unapologetically carrying my mén hoa to places I’ve never been. And now that I’m on campus, the front

of my mền hoa faces out.

Just as I’ve taken my love for flowers and colors to Yale, I’ve also brought my love for singing. Seated at my flight’s gate, with my mền hoa in my suitcase, I started humming a Vietnamese river lullaby that I used to sing as a middle schooler. In sixth grade, I noticed my mother watching Vietnamese television and heard the song. I was instantly bewitched. These lullabies are traditionally performed by women, but I didn’t care. The elegance of the Vietnamese women singing captivated me. Whenever I sing, I aspire to emulate the gracefulness of these women, as well as the deep, melancholic tone of their singing voices. Their yearning to return to the rivers and valleys of our motherland — the powerful sadness of their vocal timbre — moved my sixth-grade self and continues to move me today. I hope to imitate their majesty.

That sixth-grade afternoon, as my voice permeated the room, má entered, puzzled.

“You shouldn’t be singing a woman’s song!”

My smile shattered. The hobby I grew up seeing má enjoy was deemed unacceptable if I did the same. I didn’t listen though — I’ve continued singing for the past six years. I’m a hummingbird who proudly chirps my song and feels most at home when surrounded by a meadow of colorful camellias and peonies — when covered in my mền hoa. The sound of my singing voice bouncing off the walls enchants me.

But I can’t manifest these aspects of myself in front of má and bá. At least, not yet.

There’s indeed some weight on my shoulders holding me down, knowing I have yet to disclose my gayness to my parents. Will I be happier if and when I come out to them?

Most likely. But until then, I’ll conceal myself around them and shine around everyone else. That’s how I’ve maneuvered through life since I acknowledged my gayness a year ago. In one year, my story went from residing in my mind to being shared with my peers at LEDA, my sisters, some dear high-school friends, and now you. I’m content with having my sun and moon wait their turns.

Did má understand the hidden message behind her son’s colorful room and his love for Vietnamese river songs? Did she realize his mền hoa wasn’t merely a covering, but a banner unveiling his rainbow? If not, when will she? For now, we’ll wait and see.

“Be yourself,” má emphasized at the airport. And so, I shall. I love you, má.

Contact JOHN NGUYEN at john.nguyen@yale.edu .

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