Yale Daily News Magazine | March 2019

On this island, a Yale professor sexually harassed a Yale student.

DID THE UNIVERSITY DO ENOUGH?

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE VOL. XLVI ISSUE 5 MARCH 2019

BY JEVER MARIWALA, ALICE PARK & MARISA PERYER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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DAILY NEWS

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MAGAZINE

Magazine Editors in Chief Jordan Cutler-Tietjen Liana Van Nostrand

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Managing Editors Nicole Blackwood Isabel Guarco

Senior Editors Flora Lipsky Frani O’Toole Will Reid Jacob Stern David Yaffe-Bellany Fiction & Poetry Editor Lucy Silbaugh Audio Editor Cam Aaron Associate Editors Ko Lyn Cheang Julianna Lai Kyung Mi Lee Zoe Nuechterlein Alexa Stanger Magazine Design Editors Lauren Cueto Jesse Nadel

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THE SOCIAL NETWORK Insight by Frani O’Toole

Photography Editor Madelyn Kumar Illustration Editor Keyi Cui Copy Editors Maddie Bender Selena Lee Alan Liu Editor in Chief & President Britton O’Daly Publisher Eric Foster ASSISTANT MAG DESIGNERS: Crystal Cheung Jose Garcia Michelle Guilbald Dani Mirell Laura Nicholas Maggie Nolan Lauren Quintela Ella Stark Nicole Wang Chris West Christie Yu Daphne Zhu

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04

NEVILLE’S WISDOM Portrait by Ryan Benson

insight

Tibet at Yale LYNN NGUYEN

insight

Making History ANNIE NIELDS

essay

Celentano Funeral Home SHEA KETSDEVER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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22

AFTER THE BAN

Feature by Ko Lyn Cheang

ANCHORED IN ALASKA Feature by Aidan Campbell

34

35

poetry

Incumbent SAM BRAKARSH

bits & pieces

How to Understand Art MICHAEL HOLMES

26

I SAW WHAT I SAW

Cover by Jever Mariwala, Alice Park and Marisa Peryer

Yale Daily News Magazine |  3

PORTRAIT

neville’s wisdom A neighborhood fashion designer opens up his studio, past and future.

BY RYAN BENSON

I

walked into the Neville Wisdom retail store in Westville Village, and the door beeped. Nobody was upstairs. I was alone with the culottes and coats in yellows, grays and reds, stacked and racked about the store. Then somebody called out from the basement. I called back, and within seconds, Neville Wisdom bounded up the stairs. He ushered me into his studio — down in the bowels of the store — where a familiar rap song blared from a speaker in the corner. He was working on a summer dress.

“Today I’m feeling pleats,” he told me, picking up a terrifyingly humongous pair of scissors. He snip-snipsnipped the air and got back to work.

Neville Wisdom’s clothing designs live under the white words “Made in New Haven” in the windows of unoccupied storefronts on Broadway. He has retail locations on Chapel Street and in Westville Village, and until recently owned one on Orange Street.

He is a neighborhood designer, which is not to say that his designs don’t circulate beyond the bounds of this city.

(He was recently featured in the New York Times.) Rather, he wants his art to affect and be affected by the local.

He’s dressed Katalina Riegelmann from Katalina’s Bakery; Daniel Parillo and Derek Bacon, partners and owners of the restaurant Nolo; and Toni Harp, the mayor of New Haven. Not everyone Wisdom dresses, though, is a New Haven celebrity. “I had a new customer last week that has been waiting for an opportunity to come here,” he recalled.

“She doesn’t usually spend this money on clothes. She came in and got a dress, and it was perfect.”

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MADELYN KUMAR

Although Wisdom has built his fashion community and clientele in New Haven, the designer’s creative journey began in his hometown of Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica. “Sewing is something that I stumbled upon,” Wisdom explained as he swiveled a mannequin to begin working on the back of his pleated summer dress. “There was a tailor — One Sun, that was his name — in our area. I just would stand at his doorway while he was in the shop and just watch him for many weeks.”

Eventually One Sun asked Wisdom if he wanted to learn to sew. Wisdom answered yes, and the tailor invited Wisdom to return to the shop the next morning. When Wisdom arrived, One Sun handed him a waistband and asked him to recreate it. The waistband is the most difficult part of a man’s pant to sew. “He tried to show me up,” Wis-

dom told me. And then he shrugged: “I did the waistband.”

Wisdom went on to continue his education at a six-month Garmex Academy program in Kingston, Jamaica. The version of Wisdom that stood before me with graying dreads reaching down the back of his violet and turquoise striped collared shirt was a mellowed version of the young boy he remembered. “I had my ears pierced, both of them. I wore a lot of interesting clothes. My hair was bleached blonde.

I was a favorite for making fun of. I was way ahead of my time.” The clothes that surrounded Wisdom in the studio captured his youthful craving for the atypical and extraordinary. “I express myself now more through the clothes that I make and design, than the clothes that I wear. My fashion sense is whatever I can find in my closet.”

PORTRAIT Wisdom’s innovative dresses range from $200 to $800. “We are not trying to compete with making the most economical clothes,” he said of his retail philosophy. “We understand that people like to buy things cheaper. But at the same time, what we do here is economical in terms of what you are getting.”

Wisdom does not expect or desire for his customers to buy 10 new pieces at a time. He pointed out that the prices of his clothing fit into his vision for e n v i ro n m e n ta l ly friendly designs.

His minimalistic attitude about clothing production is rooted in his Jamaican upbringing. “Our contribution to our planet is not over-producing just to make people feel like they’ve made it in life because they can buy a new wardrobe every season. This idea of going out and buying all these clothes and then forgetting what you have in your closet — I never grew up like that. Things were limited.”

He makes a particular effort to be e n v i ro n m e n ta l ly conscious beyond urging clients to be sparing in their purchases.

Four years ago, Wisdom decided to forgo dress patterns for

“‘Sewing is something that I sumbled upon,’ Wisdom explained as he swiveled a mannequin to begin working on the back of his pleated summer dress.”

his designs. He instead works completely from the vision in his mind’s eye, cutting fabric and shaping it directly onto the mannequin, effectively eliminating paper waste in his studio.

In most New York fashion houses, “they have entire rooms of patterns hanging from the ceiling,” Wisdom said.

Instead of printing new fabrics, Wisdom’s fashion house buys and uses whatever the local fabric store is selling at the moment. Wisdom uses at least eighty percent of all the fabric he buys, even without patterns.

Committing to that benchmark is not easy. “Even though it’s not cost-effective, we will sit for 10 minutes trying to move from [using] 77 percent to 80 percent,” Wisdom said.

After 30 minutes or so of our backand-forth conversation, Dwayne Moore, Wisdom’s apprentice, descended the stairs with a takeout dinner in his hands and resumed work at the sewing machine adjacent to where I stood. Moore grew up in New Haven and Georgia. He began working for Wisdom three years ago, after spending a semester at the Art Institute of New York City before the school’s closing in 2017. Reminiscent of Wisdom’s own fashion journey with One Sun in Saint Mary, Moore showed up at the Neville Wisdom location on Orange Street, where the brand director and stylist for Neville Wisdom Designs, Lauren Sprague, was working.

Sprague invited Moore to come in to the studio to meet Wisdom. Moore remembered: “Nev was testing the waters to see where my head was at. He told me to come by. And I just never stopped coming.”

Moore showed me a jacket that he had finalized the day before. It was made of a black work-wear material and stitched with red thread, with two breast pockets on the front and the back of the jacket. The jacket was youthful, practical, cool. I would have liked to wear it out of the studio. Wisdom teased Moore that his clothes will be considerably more expensive than any of Wisdom’s. “Dwayne’s got the owner’s hours. He doesn’t get in until 12,” Wisdom told me. “He doesn’t have to be concerned about time as much, so his clothes are go-

“‘You have to be careful that you don’t limit your dreams.’”

ing to be much more expensive than mine.”

Both of them laughed.

Although Wisdom and Moore joke together about their dynamic, Wisdom devotes much of his time and money to making space for Moore, a younger black male artist, to succeed in an industry that is so heavily white.

“I’ve already bought this equipment, so Dwayne’s not ruled by some of the stuff that I am. I have to make sure that my employees get paid. That this place stays open,” Wisdom said. “Dwayne doesn’t have to. He’s just a lucky kid, and he had an opportunity, so I encourage him.”

Wisdom’s relationship with Moore goes beyond supplying him with a top-notch workspace and bountiful materials. He has taught Moore the attributes that he believes make a good artist and a good boss. Currently, Wisdom is a third of the way through completing a challenge that he created for himself to produce one new garment every day for 100 consecutive days.

Wisdom’s “One-Hundred Day Challenge” is the manifestation of his belief that creativity takes industry.

It takes discipline. It also takes hopefulness.

Wisdom said to me, “You have to be careful that you don’t limit your dreams. Now that I am a designer I have so much more dreams.

I always say to young people, dream past your dream.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

INSIGHT

PHOTOS BY JORDAN CUTLER-TIETJEN

THE social Network How to make (Algerian artist) friends and influence people (on Instagram).

BY FRANI O’TOOLE

A

rtist Brainard Carey is working on his own social network. His methods are old-fashioned, relying on friends’ referrals and outreach over email. Carey connects to five or six new people a week; over eight years, he’s been introduced to over a thousand.

The settings of Carey’s private network are distinctively public — every introduction he makes is documented and published online, having been taped for broadcast on WYBCx, the online Yale student radio network.

Carey’s radio show, “The Lives of the Artists,” takes place Sundays at 1 p.m.

“The Lives of the Artists” is one of the few shows hosted by non-Yale affiliates on WYBCX. Over his hour, Carey inter-

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views figures from the arts and culture worlds: artists, curators, dealers, gallerists, critics, poets, architects. His advice for interviewing is to not come prepared with questions: Let the conversation run its course. The intimacy of undivided attention, Carey believes, means he and his subjects don’t stay strangers for long: “How to win friends and influence people, according to Dale Carnegie [author of “How to Win Friends & Influence People”] is just to ask them a billion questions and be sincere,” he says. “Be sincere. It’s not bullshit, and they will love you.”

Interview subjects reciprocate sincere interest by helping the project move forward. At the end of each conversation, subjects provide Carey names and email addresses of new people to contact. Writer Chavisa Woods introduced him to a clique of gay literary figures living in Brooklyn. Algerian artists did the same for him in Algeria. Confronting what Carey calls a dilemma of “how do we make more friends that are really interesting people,” the interview series keeps Carey from ever needing to close his social circle.

As (inter)personal as these motives are, Carey estimates his show has around 10,000 listeners a month.

A hundred thousand people subscribe

to the accompanying newsletter, “Yale Interviews and Resources for Artists.”

Nonetheless, Carey almost intentionally avoids the prerequisites for popularizing his work. He does not intend to replicate the success of his most clicked-on interview, which features then-Dean of the Yale School of Art Robert Storr. In Carey’s mind, the interview went viral not just because of Storr’s irreverent takedown of art-world aristocrats like Jerry Saltz, but because it was transcribed.

“That’s why The Observer and all the other places picked it up,” he says. “They wouldn’t have listened to that interview and figured out what he said, the interview was just the fact-checking part.”

While Storr’s transcription and a few others made it into his book “The Art World Demystified: How Artists Define and Achieve Their Goals,” Carey feels generally that transcription would compromise the friendly nature of the interviews. “When you transcribe someone’s interview, you have to ask their permission,” he says. “Radio: They talk to me, it’s on, you don’t have control over it anymore, I can do whatever I want with the editing more or less. And I don’t.

People say, ‘Could you remove that, I really felt dumb there’ — all right, I’ll remove whatever you want. But you have control. They spoke to you, and I can

INSIGHT

just air that. … You transcribe it, artists, intellectuals, poets — they want to start pouring over it, and rewriting everything as if they talk like a book … You lose the beauty of the interview, too. You take out all the laughs. All the good stuff …” ­­­­­ — Carey and I, by that time, had met twice. Once at G Cafe, once at The Study at Yale. I’d recorded both sessions, adding to hours of documentation. When Carey mentioned the disconnect between speech and writing, I wondered what, if anything, from our conversations might not translate to print.

It was, I decided, the many times we were brought back to President Donald Trump. Trump is often what reasoning about the present seems to come down to — where it reaches an end. It is delusional to think Trump affects everything and delusional to not. Neither makes us sane.

These are strange times. Carey and I kept coming back to that. What Carey recognizes through his interviews, however, is that strangeness has resulted in what he calls a “golden age of the arts … [It’s] better than the ’60s for film, for everything. Why? Because of the hard right turn all over the world, including Trump … a flourishing of great art, why does it happen under repressive regimes, I don’t know but … something exciting is happening. … Maybe it’s the seeds of revolution, the impulse to revolution that seems to engage people.”

As an artist, Carey is most famous as half of the collaborative he formed with his wife in 1999 known as Praxis.

Praxis had its first major exhibition at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, where as performance art, they offered visitors to their East Village storefront-slashstudio-slash-home either a hug, footbath, dollar, Band-Aid or kiss to make it better. The piece attracted significant media attention, including a review in The Nation that found it a lineage in the Fluxus movement of the ’60s. Carey said inclusion in the Whitney Biennial really made him feel like an “insider” in the art world, relieving “a certain kind of stress.”

Since then, Praxis has also garnered

recognition for its project of a “Museum of Non-Visible Art.” Works that go into this museum are composed entirely of ideas; instead of being presented with an artwork, a visitor is presented with a paragraph description of the artwork.

Carey associates the project with a complicated affair of art and language. “In a way it’s kind of like the rise of conceptual art. I think where the artists’ statement came from was the ascendancy of words,” he said. Unlike the work that received the institutional promotion of the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Non-Visible Art went viral through online mechanisms. James Franco became a major celebrity sponsor, slightly misnaming it on Jimmy Kimmel Live! as the “Museum of Non-Existent” art.

Regardless of the accuracy of the name drop, clips from the Franco interview provided the museum an explosion of recognition.

Strategies for going viral on social media are a specialty of Carey. Social media is the subject of his upcoming book, “Succeed with Social Media Like a Creative Genius: A Guide for Artists, Entrepreneurs, Inventors, and Kindred Spirits.” This is his eighth book. Six

have been for artists; two were self-help guides. Carey’s publications mostly focus on helping artists enter the marketplace, which he acknowledges reflects a “strong capitalist desire for it, which is probably fueled by Trump, and well, every president: earn more, get more, make more.” His advice for social media is based on a model of content generation. Film quality live videos. Post every day. “Be very regular,” he says. “Don’t spam people, but almost.”

At first, I misunderstood this advice to be for a business account and not a personal one. Posting every day on a personal Instagram account is perhaps pushing normal — a perceived convention that is itself extremely subjective and subject to change. Etiquette on social media is not always formally codified, but its expressions are ingrained: Consider “turn-taking” in text conversations, where double-texting unsettles a taboo against over-volunteering without invitation.

I wanted to hear Carey’s thoughts on social media because these days, I am deeply ambivalent. With Facebook I feel mostly fatigue, but with Instagram I wonder how an artist might view socially

CLAIRE MUTCHNIK

Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

INSIGHT

integrated practices of self-curation and image making. As expressive as the content often is, the platform can also be stiff and unforgiving. Every picture is added to a grid of previous ones, creating an inevitable sense of progression and narrative.

Viewed as such, change on Instagram can look like deviation — an inherent contradiction or inconsistency. Even as change happens in real time, the “Like” system creates a system of positive or negative reinforcement, whether or not that feedback is registered as such. The result is a page on which, in most cases, the past affixes stubbornly to the present, even when the “past” is too random and intermittent to be considered representative at all.

Carey, refreshingly, argues with overthinking. I hesitate to delete old photos; to whatever extent it constitutes as self-effacement, erasing oneself is uncannily easy and irreversible. Carey insists I can always start over. Delete my whole account. He says he pulled this off in real life, responding to the social conditions of living on Block Island, a town with a population of less than a thousand. He was The Artist. Everybody waved.

He felt an acute social claustrophobia — applicable, we agreed, to the counterintuitive narrowness of online life — and, in defiance, he changed his name from Brian Salzberg to Brainard Carey, radically reinventing himself.

Carey agreed that, name change or not, a daring art project involving footbaths and Band-Aids would have been impossible on an island where everybody knew him. The same is true, perhaps, of the internet, where the past is so dragged into the present that tradition can be hard to break away from. Carey’s biggest concern

8 | MARCH 2019

with the internet is censorship, both in the sense of algorithms deleting Renaissance art for nudity and in the self-censorship created through “Like” systems of validation. In both cases, artists might adapt their practice to suit a medium incompatible with installation, sculpture, long video, large size or anything that isn’t flattered by the shape of a small box.

For Carey, it’s become a competition.

“Images on the internet, art on the inter-

net, it’s not art you see in a museum for sure, it’s little pictures competing with …

Trump?”

— In part for freedom from Federal Communications Commission censorship, the Yale student radio station WYBC transitioned exclusively to its WYBCX

online platform in 2009. Revenue from selling ads for its FM band gives the station a comfortable lifestyle by most radio standards. For Carey, the relaxed status is what first attracted him to the WYBCx station. “It has a framework for creative expression that’s not so tethered to a bureaucracy,” he says. “Everybody’s so casual … [At] a lot of stations, there’s usually these entrenched community members, people like me, that are sticking to tight guidelines and maybe saying ‘hey, I saw you overrun your slot’ — there’s none of that [at WYBCx].”

Carey credits WYBCx with breaking him out of his music habits, introducing him to artists like The xx. “We tend to listen to the songs that maybe we got into when we were in high school,” he says. “Maybe in the first years of college.

For most people, that’s the music that they listen to for the rest of their lives — or a version of that. Everything is compared against that …

How do you find new music that’s actually really good that you can love?”

“The Lives of the Artists” began as an excuse for Carey to interview artists he already admired; in its social networking capacity, the show started serving the same taste-breaking purpose that attracted him to radio stations like WYBCx. His college student listeners perhaps recognize the crossroads that led to his project: Either let music libraries and social circles seal, designed to last indefinitely, or insist on more and more openings.

Carey’s advice to artists, and really everyone, is to live a life of asking questions.

“Ask questions, ask questions is the ultimate brilliant strategy if you can sustain it.” He nods. “It’s the ultimate Socratic thing. [Pause.] It will inflame people.

[Pause.] It will not work at all. [Pause.]

Why didn’t Hillary win?”

after the ban

FEATURE

Two years in, Trump’s immigration policies continue to disrupt the lives of internationals at Yale.

BY KO LYN CHEANG

I

n January 2017, Mohamed Eltoum ’19 said goodbye to his family, placed his bags in the back of his uncle’s car and headed to the airport to return to Yale for his sophomore spring semester. As he rode, Eltoum thought about the break. It had been uneventful. He’d played soccer with friends, hung out with neighbors in the garden in his front yard and walked the dusty alleys of his hometown, Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. But troubling news from the U.S. had hit the front pages of all the Arab newspapers in the region: The newly elected U.S. president was considering an executive order to ban citizens of majority-Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S. The news had upset Eltoum and his friends studying at American universities, but as of then, no order had been issued. In the car, he thought about his parents. It had been easy to say goodbye; his last trip home had been

in September. They’d barely had time to miss him.

Eltoum arrived in New Haven on Jan. 15, two days before classes began. Had he waited 10 more days, he may never have arrived. Ten days into the semester, President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning all citizens from seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Sudan — from entering the United States for at least 90 days. The order stated that “immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from [these] countries would be detrimental to [U.S.] interests.”

Almost immediately, Trump’s travel ban faced challenges, in court and on campus. University President Peter Salovey released an email strongly condemning the ban, and Yale joined the Association of American Universities to urge the Trump administration to end the ban. More than a thousand Yalies gathered on Cross Campus to hold

MADELYN KUMAR

FEATURE

“

He wouldn’t see his parents again for almost two years.”

a vigil for those affected. “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here,” students chanted in unison. Court cases quickly enjoined the ban, but in June, the Supreme Court allowed a second iteration to take partial effect. A later, fuller version of the ban was upheld — this time in full — in June of 2018.

Over the last two years, a small group of Yale students and scholars from banned countries have suffered the consequences and uncertainty of Trump’s travel ban. If students from these countries leave the U.S., they may be unable to return.

The day Trump ordered the ban, Eltoum’s parents called in a panic. How would Trump’s order affect him? Could he keep his student visa? Eltoum did not know. He made an appointment with Yale’s Office of International Students & Scholars and kept going to class. He wouldn’t see his parents again for almost two years.

—

XANDER DEVRIES

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As of fall 2018, 17 international students from countries that are currently on the travel ban attend Yale University. A comparable number of affected students — 19 — were enrolled in fall 2017.

After the ban was announced, OISS launched into action. Ann Kuhlman, its executive director, and her colleagues reached out to the students affected by the ban, advising them not to leave the U.S. without first consulting OISS or an immigration attorney. They opened their offices for two consecutive afternoons to members of the Yale community for consultations. Ozan Say, an OISS advisor originally from Turkey, met multiple times with Eltoum to explain what was going on.

Kuhlman explained that the role of OISS at the time involved “staying on top of what [was] going on,” providing immigration counsel and connecting international students to legal services.

There is a strong consensus amongst immigration advisors and attorneys nationwide that students from the affected countries should not leave the U.S. while the travel ban is in effect, according to Kuhlman.

“It was, and still is, very hard — as anyone can imagine — to be unsure of one’s future, suddenly,” said Elizabeth Bradley, who served as head of Branford College until early 2017. “Students came to office hours, and friends of the students affected also came to talk and think through how they could support their peers.”

But there are limits to what the University can do in the face of an order issued from the highest office in the U.S. government. When asked what more the University could have done at the time, Bradley, who now serves as president of Vassar College, expressed that the University administration did everything within its capacity at the time.

Attempts by the University to lobby the government or judiciary to overturn the travel ban have been unsuccessful. Along with 30 other universities and colleges, Yale filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court challenging the third version of the travel ban, which “threatens their ability to attract scholars from around the world.” The decision was not what Yale had hoped for. The Court upheld the ban.

— In the weeks following Trump’s order, it became clear to Eltoum and others in his situation that they would not be returning home for a while.

“That whole semester I was thinking, if I had just stayed an extra day or two at home, then it could have been much, much worse, and I would have had to take the semester off,” Eltoum said.

Some international students were not so lucky. According to Eltoum, one of his friends from Sudan, who studies in Michigan and declined to be interviewed, was on a plane to the States when the travel ban was announced. At U.S. customs, he was told he could not enter and had to return home immediately. It did not matter that he had a valid student visa.

As Eltoum realized he would be unable to return home until the travel ban ended, the difficult reality of the year ahead dawned on him.

“The second semester of my sophomore year, I felt the worst,” Eltoum said. “It was just very hard to get through. I felt frustration at the entire system that made the whole semester unbearable.”

Eltoum realized he wanted to become a doctor in high school when he worked at local orphanages and hospitals. While working as an assistant doctor at a local hospital, he shadowed a senior doctor in heart and lung surgery and witnessed the profound impact he had on his patients’ lives. At the time, he didn’t think of attending an American university. It wasn’t until he was one of two students to earn the top score on Sudan’s national exams, earning him a spot in the country’s only International Baccalaureate program, that he was encouraged to apply to

FEATURE

American universities.

Even prior to the Trump administration, immigration processes for students from countries without favorable immigration agreements with the U.S. have been cumbersome and inconvenient.

U.S. student visas for Sudanese students expire every six months. If they leave the country on expired visas and wish to reenter, they need to renew them at a U.S. embassy first, usually in their home country. This has meant that every time Eltoum leaves the U.S, he also has to travel home to renew his student visa. But the visa renewal process takes at least four weeks, sometimes longer, and the three-week winter break is not always adequate time to complete the renewal process.

In Eltoum’s sophomore year, he was stopped at the Istanbul airport in transit to the U.S. because the immigration officers demanded he renew his student visa to be allowed to travel, despite being cleared for travel in Sudan. The visa was due to expire the next day. He had to return home and ended up arriving at Yale three weeks after

classes began.

“That was the first semester of my sophomore year, and that was definitely a very hard semester because I was just playing catch-up the whole time,” Eltoum said.

“That flew into the second semester. Then with Trump being elected, it just ended up making things even worse.”

In the weeks after the ban, Eltoum thought about trying to complete his degree in three years instead of four to minimize the time he spent in the U.S. while the immigration situation was uncertain. To complete his degree early, he overloaded his class schedule that semester, taking five and a half credits.

His grades suffered.

Kuhlman, Say and their colleagues at OISS helped Eltoum secure a research job at Yale, so he could stay on campus for the summer of 2017 while he was unable to return home.

Eltoum tried to stay hopeful. Every Friday, he called his parents. They would update him about the tumultuous situation in Sudan, where the government had just slashed subsidies for fuel and food. They would tell

him how his three younger brothers were doing. One had enrolled in an IB program back home, intent on following Eltoum’s footsteps to study in the U.S. His parents would not let Trump’s ban deter their sons from a quality American education.

Then in September 2017, Trump issued a third version of the travel ban that removed Sudan from the list of banned countries. But Eltoum wasn’t certain that this would be the end of his immigration challenges. He was advised by OISS not to leave the country for winter break.

“The general feeling of people in Sudan [was] that it [was] a very volatile situation,” Eltoum said. “We had seen between one day and the next, we could be on the ban list, and we could not be on the ban list.

One day we were terrorists, and the next day we were not.”

— AJ, a Yale affiliate who requested a pseudonym given the sensitivity of the topic, is a citizen of one of the banned countries. His

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FEATURE

passport was set to expire in late 2016. But civil conflict prevented him from returning home to renew his passport, and in America, the embassy of his home country had been shuttered.

“I would have been effectively stateless if my documents had expired,” AJ said. After consulting with an immigration law clinic, he realized his best option was to seek asylum.

Individuals seeking asylum in the U.S. have to demonstrate they are unable to return to their home country due to a “well-founded fear of persecution” for an aspect of their identity — such as their religion, race or sexual orientation. AJ is gay.

As such, he found the asylum process difficult and intrusive. The most important step of the process is an interview, during which an asylum officer determines if the applicant’s fear of prosecution is legitimate. So AJ had to find people to testify to and provide evidence for his sexuality.

“When you are talking about your religion — yes, you’re talking about something very personal. But you’re not talking about your emotional labor, who you’re attracted to and how you’re attracted to these people. Who you had sex with. Who is the first person you ever had sex with,” AJ explained. “Those types of details are very embedded in and necessary in the asylum process.”

The process of seeking asylum has only become more complicated under the Trump administration. In the same month that he issued the travel ban, Trump temporarily suspended the U.S. asylum program, capped the number of refugees and indefinitely blocked all refugees from Syria.

Though AJ finally gained asylum in July 2017, his immigration woes are far from over. He still cannot travel outside the U.S. without fear of being denied reentry. Under normal circumstances, refugees who lack valid passports can apply for Refugee Travel Documents to travel transnationally. But while the travel ban is in effect, asylees from banned countries find it increasingly risky to travel even with valid Refugee Travel Documents.

In theory, the travel ban is meant to provide exemptions for asylees, granted on case-bycase bases. But in practice, few asylees are granted waivers to bypass the travel ban. In his dissent to the most recent Supreme Court decision, which upheld the travel ban, Justice Stephen Breyer provided evidence that the exemption was effectively nonexistent.

12 | MARCH 2019

“The State Department reported that during the Proclamation’s first month, two waivers were approved out of 6,555 eligible applicants,” Breyer wrote.

As such, AJ has not been able to leave American borders to see his family since he arrived in the country close to three years ago. In June, it will be three years since he has last seen his parents and his brother. He remains hopeful that the wave of national support for refugees will help his situation.

“People are waking up,” he said. “There is a national consciousness about who Americans are and to whom they are committed and who they should be protecting.”

merous ways, such as working more than 20 hours per week, failing to extend an expiring I-20 document — which serves as evidence for the student’s legal status in the U.S. — or neglecting to report a new residential address within 10 days of moving. If discovered violating their visa, students could be barred from returning to the U.S. for three years, 10 years or permanently.

“

I would have been effectively stateless if my documents had expired.”

— While the travel ban and refugee cap dominate headlines, the Trump administration has been working quietly to implement policies that limit opportunities for all international students, not just those affected by the ban. Some executive orders have called into question what students are permitted to do under their statuses.

Kuhlman said that two years after the first order, her office is still “waiting to understand the full implication” of Trump’s policy.

Because the Trump administration is still reviewing these orders, the legal limbo “creates more uncertainty for international students.”

The administration signaled its shift in attitude on Aug. 9, 2018, with what it called the Unlawful Presence Policy Memo. “Unlawful presence” is the policy that governs how long students may stay in the country — their buffer period — before they face deportation.

Since 1996, students who had violated their student visa status would only start to eat into their buffer period on the day an immigration officer or judge ruled that the student had violated their status. The student would have 180 days to regain proper status or leave the country.

Trump’s memo announced a new way to interpret the unlawful presence policy.

Now, when an immigration officer or judge rules that a student has violated their status, immigration officers will subtract the number of days that had passed since the student committed the violation from the 180 day buffer period, effectively shortening it. In this way, the memo introduced harsher penalties for students who violate their visa status.

Students can violate their status in nu-

An international student interviewed, who requested anonymity for fear of legal repercussions, told me they once failed to sign their I-20 before it expired. Another student did not report his new off-campus address within 10 days of moving, because he was unaware of the requirement. In both cases, they rectified the status violation and regained proper status before immigration officials found out.

Mark Gazepis ’21, an international student from Greece, said he thinks that punishing students for flouting the rules on a “firststrike” basis is overly harsh. Gazepis wants to revive the grace period that existed pre-ban, during which students were given the chance to rectify their mistakes.

A slew of memos, policy proposals and executive orders point to a general trend in the Trump presidency of making it harder for foreign nationals to work in the U.S. For instance, Trump called for a review of the H-1B program, the primary vehicle for gaining a work visa. An “extreme vetting” procedure pushed by the administration would introduce new hurdles for students seeking to work in the U.S. Kuhlman expects other such reviews to affect programs like the STEM Optional Practical Training system, which permits recent graduates to work in the U.S for up to three years. But she does not know when they will take effect or what they will entail. She has advised students to start looking for a plan B in case they are unable to secure visas to work in the U.S. after graduation. One possible alternative that Kuhlman explained is attending graduate school in the U.S. Kuhlman said these changes have discouraged international enrollment in U.S. univer-

FEATURE

sities. According to the 2018 Open Doors report published by the U.S. Department of State, the number of newly enrolled international students in the U.S. dropped by 6.3 percent between the 2016–17 and 2017–18 academic years. Graduate school enrollment dropped by 5.5 percent in the same period.

Despite enrollment drops and policy changes, undergraduate applications to Yale from international students have actually increased over the past several years, according to Mark Dunn, director of outreach and communications at Yale’s admissions office. Dunn declined to comment about the admissions statistics for students from travel ban countries.

Still, some international students have reconsidered their post-graduate plans to stay in the U.S. following Trump’s election, citing concerns about racism and xenophobia. Scarlet Luk, GRD ’19, had been keen to work in the U.S. when she first arrived for graduate school in 2013. But as a person of color, her impulse to leave the country has grown stronger, partially due to the political climate here since the Trump presidency began. She now plans to return to Australia after she completes her doctorate.

“There is a feeling you are not necessarily welcome beyond a certain point,” Luk said.

Since graduating last spring, Gregory Ng ’18 has been working as an intern at two New York City museums while completing his graduate school applications. He hopes to get his master’s from New York University in performance studies before enrolling in a doctorate program in the field. But Ng, who hails from Singapore, has little want or need to stay in the U.S. permanently.

Ng noted that the experiences of international students at Yale are so fractured along lines of nationality and ethnicity that the notion of “‘international-ness” at Yale holds little meaning. Eltoum pointed out that the student visa for a Sudanese citizen is six months, while a student visa for his other international peers is four or five years.

For Eltoum, the pull of a U.S. education remains strong. A degree from Yale is a stepping -stone to achieve his goal of working as a doctor in Sudan, where he sees a strong need. Even during the most difficult time in the Trump presidency, when he was unable to return home, he recognized the value of remaining in the U.S. He still hopes to pursue a medical degree here after he graduates.

“You very much have to dissociate the person who is doing this from the whole country,” Eltoum said. “It did not make me see the quality of

education in the U.S. as any less. It’s just at this point now, the U.S. is not a very good place to be a Sudanese citizen.”

For asylees and asylum-seekers like AJ, the desire to live and gain legal status in the U.S. is a question of stability and safety. AJ had been transient for several years before arriving in the U.S after he was forced to leave his home country. He moved between countries where he experienced vicious racism.

“When I arrived in the United States, I was just like, I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t want to move anywhere else, and I want to be stable, and I want to be on the way to citizenship. And I want to be resettled somewhere.

And I want to have a permanent status,” AJ said.

For now, Eltoum and AJ are determined to achieve what they first came to the United States to do.

AJ is in the process of gaining a green card and believes that it is only a matter of time before he is able to leave the country to see his family again.

— Eltoum finally returned home the summer of 2018.

It had been close to two years since he had last seen his family. He was shocked by how much his three younger brothers had grown in the last year and a half. His second brother, 18, who was preparing to enroll in a U.S. university that fall, had matured, stepping up to fill Eltoum’s role as the eldest son in the household.

“My third brother, after me and my second brother, is most aware of the implications of what it means to be a student from Sudan in an American university,” Eltoum said, “[I] went through a lot of issues and struggles, and [my brothers] will learn from that.”

SURBHI BHARADWAJ

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Today, Eltoum mentors first years as an Ezra Stiles first-year counselor and is a molecular, cellular and developmental biology major. He is preparing to apply to medical school. He fully expects that navigating the application process as a citizen of a country where even tourist visas to the U.S. are often denied will be challenging. He intends to stay in the States to work while waiting to interview with medical schools instead of returning home to minimize the chance of being denied entry on

the way back, which would jeopardize his applications. “[Working as a doctor in Sudan] was my original goal in life, and still remains to be my original goal in life,” he said, “I see the U.S. and the U.S. educational system as ways for me to gain the necessary training, the necessary experience, just to reach me to my goal.”

The summer after returning home, Eltoum spent hours walking around Khartoum, taking in what had changed. Everywhere, new billboards

and newly built mosques reminded him of the lost time. He followed the route he used to take to school, before attending university in America, before he learned what it meant to be Sudanese there. He thought about how his younger brother was now a few centimeters taller than he is. It saddened him to realize that he had missed out on two years of his brothers’ lives.

At least in his mother’s garden, the flowers, spice plants and mango tree were still growing.

XANDER DEVRIES

INSIGHT

Tibet at Yale

BY LYNN NGUYEN

How student advocacy led to the creation of a new course.

A

t 9:25 a.m. on the sixth Wednesday of the semester, 16 students filed into a seminar room in Alwin Hall, which hosts International Security Studies at Yale, and took their seats at the table. Professor Charles Hill sat at one end. He began class by describing the rise of the state as the fundamental unit of world affairs during the 17th and 18th centuries. Hill’s “Star Wars” reference in the middle of the discussion about the conflict between systems of statehood and empire — “the empire strikes back” — made everyone chuckle. He then transitioned to the next topic — how did 20th-century Tibet fit into, or chafe against, the international system? Kelsang Dolma ’19 and the rest of the class resumed scribbling notes.

Unlike almost every other course offered this semester, “Tibet: An Enduring Civilization” is largely the product of one student’s

activism: Dolma’s. A first-generation Tibetan-American, Dolma was the only Tibetan undergraduate during her first two years at Yale. “It was very difficult to forge any kind of Tibetan community at Yale,” Dolma said.

Dolma has been vocal about Tibetan human rights since she arrived on campus. She founded the Tibetan Cultural Association during the spring of her first year, but the organization soon rebranded as the Himalayan Students Association at Yale to encompass more cultural groups.

In 2017, she published “The Communist Manifest-no” in the News’ opinion section. “I was very tired of Yalies glorifying communism,” Dolma said about the op-ed. “Tibet and Tibetans and so many people who lived under Mao’s regime suffered tremendously under his communist policies.”

PHOTOS BY MADELYN KUMAR

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In her column, Dolma criticized her classmates’ support for communism, highlighting the atrocities committed against her people: “Tibetans under Chinese rule are silenced through beatings, deliberate impoverishment, rape, starvation and imprisonment. Thousands of nonviolent Tibetan human rights activists fill concentration camps scattered all across China.”

Dolma’s article elicited a response letter from an organization called the Chinese Undergraduate Students of Yale. Thomas Shen ’20, on behalf of the group, wrote, “Tibet was not, is not and does not have reason to be an independent state. The issue is irrelevant to ideology, because for more than 700 years, Tibet has been an integral part of China regardless of the ruling regime.” Dolma said the letter was “very traumatizing” and helped convince her that people did not understand Tibet’s history and global significance as she did.

A Tibetan studies course, she thought, could work to rectify that.

In past years, Yale offered a course on Tibetan Buddhism, taught by professor Andrew Quintman, a scholar of Buddhist traditions, literature and history in Tibet and the Himalayas. However, Quintman left Yale in 2018 to teach at Wesleyan University. “Yale couldn’t retain him,” said Dolma, “and after he left, there [would] be no Tibet-related courses at Yale, at all.”

— During the fall of her junior year, Dolma — an Ethnicity, Race and Migration major — took a seminar called “Comparative Ethnic Studies.” For the final project, she made a syllabus for a Tibetan studies course, and the idea for a Tibet-centric course was born. Dolma spent the spring semester of her junior year trying to get her proposed course instituted.

Student advocacy for the creation of new courses is rare. In 2003, Simon Stumpf ’06 pushed for classes in American Sign Language, but such classes only appeared for course credit in the spring of 2018. Starting in 2012, the Korean Studies Initiative at Yale petitioned for a new major in Korean studies, but they were not successful.

According to the Yale University Registrar’s Office website, instructors and

16 | MARCH 2019

departmental representatives can propose undergraduate courses through an online application. As an undergraduate herself, Dolma had to use an unconventional approach. She reached out to the director of undergraduate studies in the Program of Ethnicity, Race and Migration with a letter containing over 200 signatures of support for her proposed Tibetan studies class.

The next step was to find a Yale faculty member to teach the course, which proved difficult given how specialized the course content would be. At this point, Dolma decided to pursue the institution of a course in modern Chinese imperialism instead.

“It would be more inclusive and touch on larger issues, and I was sure that someone at Yale could teach such a course,” Dolma reasoned.

After emailing a number of professors in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Dolma still could not find an instructor for her course. The East Asian languages and literatures professors recommended that Dolma take a course with Yale professor Peter Perdue, who studies premodern China. Though Dolma acknowledged that this period of Chinese history was important, she explained, “It was not what I was asking for.”

Her experience with the East Asian department led Dolma to question how big a role self-censorship played in academia.

“People who study these hot-topic issues [on modern Chinese imperialism] will have a harder time getting visas to China, which would help their research and further their career goals. A lot of people tend to self-censor these issues,” Dolma explained. “Academia is not neutral at all.

The politics are behind closed doors, layered with money and deliberate secrecy.”

Frustrated, Dolma turned to lobbying for her course to be a residential college seminar, as such courses are designed to “fall outside departmental structure,” according to the Yale College website. But again, Dolma ran into more difficulty with the search for an instructor. The Yale College website states that instructors teaching a residential college seminar for one semester would be paid a stipend consistent with the standard part-time lecturer rate at Yale. Dolma found a Glassdoor estimate of the national average salary of part-time lecturers to be only $22,600. “It’s not super enticing,” Dolma said. “I found Tibe-

tologist professors outside of the US, but with only $22,600 per semester, it wasn’t enough to get them to come.”

— Dolma’s luck changed one day in Sterling Memorial Library. While doing research on Yale-China and Yale-Tibet connections in September 2018, she stumbled across a box of writings on Tibet. Astonished, she pored over pages and pages about Tibetan Buddhism and history.

Dolma looked at the author listed on the documents: Charles Hill, a current Yale professor.

“That was my break,” said Dolma. She emailed Hill in that very room, recounting her struggles to find an instructor for the Tibetan studies course and the modern Chinese imperialism course. Could he teach either of them, or direct her to someone who could? “I didn’t know that much about Professor Hill — all I knew was that he was a global affairs fellow at Yale,” Dolma said.

Hill is a diplomat-in-residence, distinguished fellow of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and lecturer in international studies and humanities at Yale. In 1970, the State Department sent Hill — then a U.S. Foreign Service officer — to be a fellow at Harvard University’s East Asia Research Center where he chose to study Buddhism, a topic integral to both the Vietnam War and Tibet’s geopolitical standing. Having studied the so-called great works of Asia, Hill had even brainstormed a course in Asian classics when he was in the Foreign Service. He raised the idea when he arrived at Yale 25 years ago, but it never came to fruition.

Responding to Dolma, Hill first offered to teach a Tibetan studies course as an independent study course, which only one to three students would be allowed to take. He submitted a syllabus to the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program, which approved the course. But as student interest grew in the class, beyond the allowance in number for independent study, Hill agreed to turn it into a larger seminar, making it more legitimate and open to the Yale community.

The course could not secure a listing under Ethnicity, Race and Migration because Hill is not appointed to that program. Instead, Hill’s own department, the Humanities

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Program, hosts the course.

After a year of thought and effort, Dolma finally achieved her goal. “I got really lucky with professor Hill,” Dolma said. “I got the course because professor Hill believes that Tibetan studies is important. If I had not come across that box on that day, there would not be a Tibetan studies class today.”

— Dolma promoted “Tibet: An Enduring Civilization” on Facebook, and about 25 students shopped the course on the first day of the spring semester. Sixteen students, including Dolma and two Tibetan first years, are now enrolled in the course. Six weeks in, Dolma praised the class: “I didn’t know I was intellectually deprived until I got to this course!” she said, laughing. “This is the first time I’ve read through all the readings, and I’m so rejuvenated and feel validated and seen in the class. It took senior year for me to feel like this!”

Khenzom Alling ’22, one of the Tibetan students in the class, has also found personal meaning in Hill’s course. Alling decided to take the course to gain a foundational knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism and history, which would supplement what she has learned about Tibetan culture from her family.

“With such little representation, it can be difficult to find a strong sense of community and belongingness,” Alling said. “As one of the few Tibetans on campus, I’ve found the class to create that sense for me. It’s especially refreshing and meaningful to see non-Tibetans who are interested in the history of the country and are supportive of its current political situation.”

Dolma’s original impetus for proposing the class was to make Tibet’s history and global political importance more visible. The humanities course does include discussion of political affairs, such as challenges to Tibetan statehood in history.

Yet Hill has shifted focus away from Tibet’s modern political situation. “We’re trying to get a Tibetan civilization — there’s much more about religion and Tibet as a culture.”

He conceded that contemporary questions of statehood and independence recapitulate the region’s history, but said he believed that “those issues are not central to Tibet’s own culture. Tibet is a civilization that was never considered by Tibetans themselves to be a state back in history, because the state was a foreign idea. Not that it shouldn’t be a state, just that it didn’t come into the grounding of Tibetan culture itself.”

Some of the focuses of the course include Tibetan Buddhism; Tibet’s relationship to China during the Qing Dynasty; the “Great Game,” a rivalry near the beginning of the 20th century between Tsarist Russia and British India for Tibet, which was strategically located right between the two competing powers; Tibet’s capitulation to China in 1951; the role of Tibet in the Cold

War; and Tibet’s current government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India. Tibet is also examined as an example of methodologies for the study of other non-state entities.

Despite this conceptual pivot, Dolma has been happy with the course’s trajectory. “Before this course, I had never taken a class from the humanities department,” she said. “I had seen the syllabus, of course, before I enrolled in the class, but I did not expect the extent to which the Tibet course could be linked to Plato’s ‘Republic’ or the Albert Einstein memorial in Washington D.C. Professor Hill sees Tibet as something larger than even I could have imagined, which makes the course even more significant and satisfying to me and to the other students — Hill is a true genius.”

— Where might the Tibet class go from here? Hill said that he would teach the course again next year if there is enough student interest.

What about the potential for moving beyond a single course on Tibet and creating a Tibetan studies concentration within the East Asian department? “I would love a Tibetan Studies concentration,” Dorma said, “but it doesn’t seem very realistic. I think we need to work one by one.”

“Tibet: An Enduring Civilization” constitutes one step towards expanding the Yale curriculum beyond Eurocentric studies — more voices, more stories, more nuances. Moreover, Dolma’s experience demonstrates the potential for students and professors, working in tandem, to actualize diversity and make unheard voices heard.

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Making History

From the classroom to Congress, Jahana Hayes transformed her passion for teaching into political leadership.

BY ANNIE NIELDS

T

homas Bishop, a student at Kennedy High School, ran into then– Congressional candidate Jahana Hayes while shopping at Walmart with his mother.

“It was kind of like meeting a celebrity. I went up to her and was really excited,” he recalled. But Bishop had known Hayes since before she got famous. She was a ninth grade world history teacher at his high school in Waterbury.

“She asked my mom if she would vote for her,” said Bishop. Although she never taught Bishop in the classroom, everyone at Kennedy knew Hayes.

On Nov. 6, 2018, Hayes beat her Republican opponent, Manny Santos, and won Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District seat with 56 percent of the vote. She became the first black Democrat and first black woman to represent the state of Connecticut in Congress.

Her opponent, the former mayor of Meriden, ran a campaign with rhetoric echoing President Donald Trump’s.

Santos called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and praised the president’s proposed border wall. Hayes stuck to her roots and focused on education.

Two years before her election, she was honored as the National Teacher of the Year in 2016. A national selection committee representing major U.S. education organizations selects the honoree from among the State Teachers of the Year. In the year of recognition, the honored teacher tours nationally and internationally, giving speeches about teaching and education advocacy.

Hayes was recognized by then–President Barack Obama, who praised her ability to get students behind a cause.

18 | MARCH 2019

“Jahana inspires her students to give back,” Obama said in his Teacher of the Year announcement. “I think she understands that, actually, sometimes the less you have, the more valuable it is to see yourself giving, because that shows you the power and the influence that you can bring to bear on the world around you.”

In her acceptance speech, Hayes called the moment a “critical juncture” in education. She thought the government needed to address attracting and retaining teachers, especially ones from underrepresented backgrounds. Hayes brought her experience as a teacher to the forefront of her Congressional campaign. Her ability to captivate students in the classroom translated into an ability to captivate voters.

“An opportunity gap, not an achievement gap” Hayes’ own success story was a central element of her campaign platform. On her campaign website, Hayes described her journey from poverty to national recognition. Raised in a public housing project in Waterbury, Hayes grew up in a family that struggled with addiction and poverty. She became a teenage mother at the age of 17.

Hayes’ history with poverty is familiar to many students she taught at Kennedy. According to Connecticut 2015 income statistics compiled by Department of Economic and Community Development research, Waterbury’s $40,467 median household income is lower than Bridgeport’s, Hartford’s, New Britain’s and New Haven’s. Towns within Connecticut’s 5th district in the Farmington valley not far from Water-

bury, such as Farmington, Avon, and Simsbury, each boast more than twice the median household income of Waterbury.

“There’s a lot of inequity throughout the district. … Some have resources, some don’t,” said Mary Glassman, who ran against Hayes in the Democratic primaries. Hayes beat Glassman, the former first selectman, similar to a mayor, of Simsbury, winning 62 percent of the vote. Glassman also had education experience as the current managing director of the Capitol Region Education Council, an organization that aims to meet the educational needs of students in the greater Hartford area. Hayes pitched herself as the outsider candidate for the job compared to Glassman who had experience as the former first selectman of Simsbury.

Although the 5th Congressional District was projected to go blue this midterm election, the seat was historically Republican until now–Sen. Chris Murphy beat Republican incumbent Nancy Johnson in 2006. Ronald Schurin, professor of political science at the University of Connecticut, described the Hayes–Santos race as “one of the more interesting races in Connecticut.”

“There’s a trend in this race and in Connecticut for candidates with no political experience to be elected,” said Glassman, pointing to the 2018 gubernatorial race in which two business executives, Bob Stefanowski and Ned Lamont, ran for governor of Connecticut. “Voters [want] to see something different happen, [they] don’t want to see incremental change.”

Following her selection as National

INSIGHT

Teacher of the Year, Hayes worked on the Waterbury Board of Education as the director of talent and professional development. Elizabeth Brown, the president of the Waterbury Board of Education, said she shares Hayes’ vision for education reform.

“Her platform is a voice for the underprivileged. She will fight for equity in urban school districts that lack in resources and enrichment programs,” said Brown. During her tenure at the Board of Education, Hayes got a state grant that mandated the Board of Education to hire more teachers of color. Out of 90 teachers hired in 2018, 33 percent were teachers of color.

“I share Jahana’s vision that it is an opportunity gap, not an achievement gap,” said Brown. Brown said she believes the 5th Congressional district needed someone to address that gap who would be “the most authentic voice” for students.

Mary Glassman said that under Hayes, she “would like to see more of a regional collaboration in the 5th Congressional district” over educational resource allocation to address the disparity in school funding and achievement between the Farmington Valley and inner city school districts like Waterbury.

Elizabeth Brown explained that she believed Congress plays “a significant role” in Waterbury educational issues. The Waterbury public school system receives $31 million annually in federal funds.

“Her faith in young people” For many at Kennedy High School, Hayes and her influence are a not-so-distant memory. Paula DeSantis, an early childhood education teacher, started teaching at Kennedy just after Hayes won Teacher of the Year, but knew her as the

woman who taught her own son a decade ago. Some students were conflicted that a beloved teacher left Kennedy to continue on a path of fame and renown.

Jenilyn Djan, a senior at Kennedy High School, was Hayes’ student before Hayes left for her international tour as Teacher of the Year.

“When I found out she was running for office, I was a little shocked,” Djan said. Djan wished she had developed a closer relationship with Hayes before she left for her tour.

“We both didn’t really get the chance to really get to know her. We literally had her for four months. [I] just wish [I] had a special relationship with her that the class before us had,” said Djan.

Victor Morales, also a senior at Kennedy, said that things have been changing at the school.

“There are some teachers who are absolutely amazing. Like the best teachers. They have the right amount of, ‘Yes let’s teach,’ but also, ‘Let’s make this a fun experience so you actually want to learn,” Morales said. However, “a lot of the good ones” have recently left.

Morales was frustrated that Hayes had left the Kennedy High School community after receiving the Teacher of the Year award. “She instantly got that award and was gone.”

Others insist that Hayes has remained connected to the school.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS “She still supports us and comes to events, which is good,” said Thomas Bishop, a sophomore at Kennedy High School.

Hayes found crucial political support in students and young people. Farian Rabbani, a student at the University of Connecticut, was the co-founder of Students for Jahana, a group that canvassed for Hayes during the election.

“I would say [running for Congress] is not leaving the

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community at all. She’s giving the community a voice,” said Rabbani.

Rabbani explained that Hayes listened to her student volunteers and put them to work with tasks they found meaningful.

“It’s been almost a life-changing experience,” Rabbani said. “Hayes sees the value in young people, in everyone who comes on this campaign. She gives us real responsibilities. It speaks to her faith in young people.”

“We are a country that educates our children” While setting up a Halloween event for Kennedy students, Paula DeSantis, a teacher of early childhood education at Kennedy, expressed her frustrations with the Waterbury school district and her work environment at Kennedy High School. The Halloween party was organized by a student service club at Kennedy that aimed to provide a safer alternative to students who would otherwise celebrate the holiday in the surrounding high crime neighborhoods.

DeSantis named student–teacher relationships and available resources as two challenges she has faced in her years working at Kennedy.

“A lot of our families are economically challenged,” explained DeSantis.

“The city itself has limited resources as well because the state aid we do get is earmarked for things other than education. And I get that, but it’s hard to teach without the proper resources.”

Rabbani explained that, as a resident of a state that boasts the third highest student debt in the country, he supported Hayes because of her promise to advocate for trade schools and alternative educational paths.

“Me and every student I know still barely have enough to pay for toilet paper in our dorm,” Rabbani said.

During an Oct. 17 debate at Central Connecticut State University, Santos emphasized individual responsibility as a solution for paying off student debt.

“One thing we have to remember is that these are debts that occurred by individuals of their own choosing,” said Santos. “They wanted to attend a college or a school that they may not

20 | MARCH 2019

have been able to afford.”

Hayes strongly disagreed. “We are a country that educates our children.

And the idea that people should not be able to access federal funds in order to go to college is ridiculous,” said Hayes.

DeSantis hopes that Hayes will look out for teachers’ interests in Congress, which mainstream politicians often overlook.

“I know she’s in Congress. I know we’re not that important, but I’m just thinking that it might be good to have somebody who’s a teacher who knows something about education to be in a position to talk about education,” said DeSantis. “A lot of time even the people who are on the [Waterbury Board of Education] are not teachers. They’re business people.

And what do business people know? A lot of them haven’t been in the classroom in 25 years.”

DeSantis observed that Hayes found widespread support among her former colleagues at Kennedy. “A lot of people thought she would shed some light on Waterbury and a lot of the inner city schools in Connecticut as a congressperson,” said DeSantis. “At least I would hope that one of her platforms would be education reform and education funding.”

Students and teachers expressed their hope that Hayes would represent their school and reverse stereotypes about teachers and students in Waterbury.

Kennedy Assistant Principal Peter McCasland explained that 80 percent of the 114 teachers at Kennedy High School work a second job. McCasland argued that the teaching profession does not receive the respect it deserves. “And I’d like to see [Hayes] be able to articulate that and get that out to the public,” said McCasland.

Before election day, Kennedy senior Derya Demirel voiced a similar hope that having Hayes in office would quash preconceived notions about Waterbury schools. “I hope that if she does win on Tuesday [she will] kick the stereotype of Waterbury or public high schools down,” Demirel said. “She’s more of a ‘for the people’ candidate.”

Educators-turned-Legislators Hayes was not the only candidate this election cycle with roots in the classroom.

The National Education Association announced in September that nearly 1,800 educators ran for positions in public office. Early stirrings of teacher activism in the form of teacher walkouts and protests occurred in states such as Arizona, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and California. Around the country, teachers responded to a call to action and ran for office. Even Glassman, Hayes’ primary opponent, had experience in education.

Jane Karr, a Yale professor who edited Education Life at The New York Times for two decades, explained that education is an extremely important issue to voters in local and state elections, as opposed to on the federal level. Teachers, Karr said, “are on the ground” and know the issues. Still, the teacher strikes in Western states have drawn national attention to their concerns about underfunded classrooms.

Karr thinks that the educator figure appealed to voters because they see teachers as political outsiders who prioritize their children’s interests.

Reflecting on her teaching career and her frustrations with the Waterbury public school system, Paula DeSantis teared up when discussing the 5th Congressional district election.

“I’m hopeful that [Hayes] can do some good in Congress,” said DeSantis.

In January, Hayes joined Connecticut Reps. Jim Himes, Rosa DeLauro, John Larson and Joe Courtney in the U.S. House of Representatives. Hayes gave her victory speech before 11 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 6, fighting back tears as she spoke between periods of applause from her supporters. Hayes emphasized her belief in young students and constituents who had overcome obstacles in their lives.

“This was about making sure that everyone from every background from every neighborhood — teachers, firefighters, farmers, factory workers — every person has a voice in Washington,” announced Hayes. “This was never about winning. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure we could do it.”

Hayes brought her Congressional victory back to her roots in the classroom. “Today we are making history.

This history teacher is making history,” she said before more applause.

ESSAY

Celentano funeral home

BY SHEA KETSDEVER

T

he nicest house on the street where I live happens to be a funeral parlor. It’s a huge building, with bare white walls and a flat roof and a long row of columns along the patio. All the windows are shuttered. No one seems to enter or leave. But every night, the sign outside lights up like a billboard on the highway — “Celentano Funeral Home.” I imagine reading: “Next exit.”

I live across the street in the attic of a big green house, overlooking all this. I’ve been trying to convince myself that the building is haunted. Like an ancient shrine, or a Roman monument. There isn’t actually anything wrong with it — I just think it would be easier to have guests over if I had a good story. People are always asking what I think of the funeral home, expecting a clever quip.

Here’s what I think about sometimes, when they ask. A boy at my school died a few weeks ago. I didn’t know him, or anyone who knew him, but my mom read about it and called me. I was at Walmart. They have this new thing at Walmart where you can order furniture online and pick it up from a giant orange tower in the store. I punched in my code and waited. My mom, on the phone, was quiet. I think I was supposed to say something — that I knew him, that I was sad, that I was crying in the middle of this Walmart between an oversized orange tower and two men arguing over a Gatorade. In the end I hung up, because for some reason I had started smiling, and this didn’t seem like the right answer.

— One night in August, a friend and I went up to my roof for fresh air. We dangled our feet off the ledge, sucking on a handful of ice cubes and watching as the Celentano funeral sign flickered across the street. We could hear a radio program playing in the

VALERIE PAVILONIS

neighboring house — the weather channel, I think, and later, an orchestra concert. The night settled into its usual rhythm, with the heat and some crickets and the program from next door, until the radio started to play a new tune: “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous?”

There aren’t any lyrics in Gustav Mahler’s first symphony, but the third movement sounds eerily like this lullaby. It begins quietly, in a minor key, with a single bass player.

A timpani joins, and a bassoon. Slowly the “Frère Jacques” crescendoes into a twisted, off-key version of itself — the kind of music they play in horror movies, right before someone opens the wrong door.

The first audience hated it. You can read angry concert reviews from that night, back in Budapest, Hungary in 1889 — everyone demanded an explanation for what had happened to the lullaby. Symphonies were supposed to have a story. Romantic composers often wrote elaborate program notes. (Hector Berlioz, in maybe the most infamous case, wrote a raunchy description of his opium-crazed romantic dreams.) But Mahler didn’t write about anything. The audience didn’t know how to react. What did the lullaby mean? Was it sad? Ugly? A joke?

I’ve been asking the same questions,

about that boy and Walmart. It would be a lot easier to answer everyone else’s questions — to make up a clever story, or say the right thing on the phone — if I knew what really happened. Was I sad? Did I think some part of it was funny? Would that be such an ugly reaction?

— I’ve played about six of Mahler’s symphonies. It’s not fun. People have special dictionaries just to translate his scores — you have to know the difference between, say, “mit etwas drängendem” (somewhat urgent), “noch mehr drängend” (still more urgent) and “heftigdrängend” (violently pressing forward). Mahler was a perfectionist. Nothing ever repeats. You can’t reduce, summarize or fake his music — there is no program-notes version, no in-between. It’s incredibly frustrating.

But I liked the lullaby, that night. I was glad that the music didn’t rush to a conclusion. It crept over the roof and the funeral parlor and the sign down below, which had busted a few lights and now flickered sort of sadly between “Fun … Home” and “Celentano Fun.” My friend was quiet. So we just sat there, uncomfortably and intensely aware of everything.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

FEATURE

anchored in alaska Why are Yale students living and working in a seaside Alaskan city?

BY AIDAN CAMPBELL

Z

eke Blackwell ’13 couldn’t talk on Friday. Nor the rest of the weekend.

He had a Pink Floyd concert, a cabaret for Planned Parenthood, a rehearsal for the upcoming musical “9 to 5” and a run-through for the circus performance of “Tides.” Based on his social calendar, one might expect to find Blackwell amid the glitz and glamour of Chicago, San Francisco or New York. But all this took place over a single weekend in Sitka, Alaska, a seaside city of 9,000 situated on Baranof Island on the outer coast of Alaska’s Inside Passage.

As declared on the visitor’s website, Sitka is a place where “wilderness and culture collide.” The town sits in the shadow of the snow-covered peaks of the Three Sisters, a trio of mountains stretching up from the green bed of spruce below. The main street looks like an old mining town with flat-faced buildings of painted wood. At the center roundabout, the streets converge around

St. Michael’s Cathedral, the familiar green spire rising above the roofs like the needle of a compass. By the water, fishing boats fill the marina, lined up like toys below the backdrop of Mount Edgecumbe.

There are two traffic lights, two bars and 14 miles of paved road from one end of the island to the other. The only way in is by air or sea. The wild beauty and close community has turned the town into a top destination for hikers, climbers, hunters, fishermen and somehow, defying all expectations, Yalies.

The Yale-Sitka pipeline brought students from across the country, placing them in local government jobs, teaching, community building, arts education and conservation. Most came for a summer or a post-graduate year, seeking an alternative to the typical “Wall Street” internships and the rat race of New York. Once, they arrived, though, it became hard to leave.

“It’s easy to fall in love with the place,”

said Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins. “It has some of the best access to wilderness you can find anywhere in the world, it is sublimely beautiful and it has a wonderful sense of community. People feel at home here.”

“Bulldogs on Baranof” Kreiss-Tomkins was born and raised in Sitka. He spent his childhood exploring the woods of his backyard on the border of the Tongass National Forest. An avid debater and political organizer, he eventually found his way to New Haven. At Yale, he was involved in Yale Outdoors, the Yale Symphony Orchestra and a late-night running club he started called “Harriers of the Night.” Despite immersing himself in campus life, he “always had one foot firmly planted back home.”

Kreiss-Tomkins returned to Alaska every summer. In high school, he had worked frequently with nonprofits in the community, including the Sitka Fine Arts

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JOSHUA HOUSTON

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FEATURE

Camp, which was searching for more summer employees. Thinking his friends at Yale might enjoy spending a summer in Sitka, he passed on the information, introducing them to different organizations in town.

“There were all these great opportunities back home, and there are all these great people, and I wanted to connect the two,” Kreiss-Tomkins said. “I passed on the idea, and they were intrigued, partly because I’d been talking nonstop about Alaska.”

When Kreiss-Tomkins returned home in May 2010, he brought a cohort of Yalies with him. That summer, a group of friends worked at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp as faculty members and counselors, another did field work for a glaciology project and a budding Yale author became the resident writer at the Island Institute.

The summer was a success, and with other students interested, Kreiss-Tomkins decided to formalize his bare-bones operation and recruit Yalies from beyond his circle of friends. He put up fliers around campus, contacted potential host organizations, developed an independent website and baptized his program, “Bulldogs on Baranof,” in honor of his island home. Word traveled faster than rain in Southeast Alaska, and by the following summer, another dozen had arrived in town.

Then, in 2012, Kreiss-Tomkins left campus for good, a credit shy of graduation. He walked out of his final exams, boarded a plane home and hit the ground running with a grassroots campaign for state legislature.

He won, surprisingly, squeaking out a victory over eight-year incumbent Republican Bill Thomas. At age 23, he was the youngest member of the legislature, but within a few years, the name JKT (Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins) became as ubiquitous in Alaskan politics as the “Notorious RBG.” Despite his absence from campus, Kreiss-Tomkins was committed to keeping the Yale-Sitka pipeline running and passed the job of recruitment off to Jeanine Dames — director of Undergraduate Career Services, now known as the Office of Career Strategy. With Dames’ support, the program was officially endorsed by Yale with internships listed on the OCS website under “Bulldogs on Baranof.”

The program exploded with 15–20 students flooding Sitka’s tiny airport every May. In 2015, the Office of Career Strategy identified Sitka as the top destination for Yale students seeking summer employment,

surpassing internships in the metro hubs of London and San Francisco.

“It was a big deal. I don’t even know if we get 20 students in Austin or Pittsburgh,” said Dames. “The opportunities in Sitka were just really good. The employers were invested in the students and their experience in the community. Most were small nonprofits and small government positions, so college students were working side-by-side with founders, owners and senior employees.”

Soon other schools began hearing about Sitka. A few students from other campuses joined the program in 2012, and as word spread, their friends, too, wanted in. The fol-

Fellows” but the “Alaska Fellows Program.”

“We threw together this program and had to adapt because each time it wasn’t big enough to include everyone,” Kreiss-Tomkins said. “In the beginning it was all volunteer, and now we finally have our first executive director.”

To help run the program, Kreiss-Tomkins has recruited two former Sitka Winter Fellows, Meredith Redick ’14, who serves as the first executive director, and Ira Slomski-Pritz ’14, the Anchorage-based co-coordinator.

But, Slomski-Pritz and Redick are not the only Yalies to return. In fact, Sitka is full of them.

lowing year, the program formally opened to all universities, including Stanford University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Bowdoin College, Bates College and Whitman College.

To accommodate the growing demand, Kreiss-Tomkins created the Sitka Winter Fellows in 2014, offering nine-month post-graduate fellowships in the Sitka community. Fellows received a monthly living stipend, provided by the host organization, and a travel budget and housing, paid for by the program.

The program is now in its sixth year with sister locations in Anchorage and Juneau, established in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

Since 2018, the program no longer goes by “Bulldogs on Baranof” nor “Sitka Winter

Settled in Sitka Redick arrived in Sitka in September 2016.

She had flown from Chicago, where she had spent the last two years teaching first grade at a bilingual school with Teach for America.

She had heard about Sitka, but never visited, until she took a leap of faith and, with the 14 other Winter Fellows, committed to nine months of living there.

That first week, Redick and the other fellows were welcomed in true Sitka style — with a community potluck. Neighbors and residents crowded into the fellows’ communal house with venison stew, homemade sourdough bread, huckleberry jam and smoked salmon. As Redick remembers, one community member donated an entire 70 pounds of salmon to the fellows’ freezer.

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Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

FEATURE

To introduce them to the area, Kreiss-Tomkins had organized a retreat at the Samsing Cove Cabin, 45 minutes from Sitka in the heart of the Tongass National Forest. Once the sun finally set, at around 8 p.m., Redick and the other fellows went down to the water. Someone suggested swimming, and a group summoned the courage to wade into the cold shallows. As soon as they began moving, the water lit up with bioluminescent plankton, glowing beneath the surface.

Jellyfish, their tentacles like Christmas lights, trailed through the water. Overhead, green swaths of light moved across the sky — the northern lights, a rare treat for summer in Alaska.

“I wasn’t sure where to look — up or down,” Redick said. “It was the greatest introduction to a place.”

When Slomski-Pritz recalls his time in Sitka, what he remembers most is the “perpetual feeling of awe.” The current coordinator of the Anchorage program, Slomski-Pritz first found his way to Sitka in the summer of 2012, working with other Yalies to renovate the historic Sheldon Jackson Campus, home to the Sitka Fine Arts Camp.

Upon graduation, he returned again as a Sitka Winter Fellow, helping with the Hames Center on the Sheldon Jackson Campus where he organized community activities and afterschool programs.

During his lunch breaks, he would grab a

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24 | MARCH 2019

sea kayak and paddle out into the Sound to watch a pod of humpbacks feeding.

“It was those moments, maybe every day, maybe not, [that] I’d just look up around me and think to myself, ‘I can’t believe this where I live,’” Slomski-Pritz said.

Shannon Flores ’18, a current fellow based in Sitka, never dreamed of ending up in Alaska. Her plan was to spend the summer after graduation studying for the Graduate Record Examinations and apply to master’s programs in education that fall. But, after four years at Yale, she was burned out. Then, in her senior year, she saw a flyer in the Branford dining hall for summer experiences in Sitka. After searching the Alaska Fellows page and browsing Google images of the town, she decided to apply. She knew she wanted a summer or post-graduate experience in the outdoors, but it wasn’t until she found Alaska Fellows that it felt like the right fit. “[Alaska Fellows] combined education and being in a really beautiful place where the culture and environment is so different from Yale,” Flores said. “It’s not about the constant busyness and stress.

Here, it’s so laid-back.”

As a fellow, Flores works as a college and career counselor for the Mount Edgecumbe High School, a state-run boarding school that primarily serves Alaska Natives, many of whom are the

first in their families to apply to college. Flores loves her job, but she is also glad her work doesn’t consume her life.

At the end of the day, she can go home, shut down her computer, put away her phone and spend hours playing board games with the other fellows. Her guilty pleasures: Settlers of Catan, Cambio and Dutch Blitz.

Blackwell tried New York before finding Sitka. An accomplished director, actor and writer, he immersed himself in the theater scene, working as a stagehand while producing his original play “Still Life” for the New York International Fringe Festival. As much as he loved theater, Blackwell struggled to find professional opportunities in New York, and with a high cost of living, just making rent was often a challenge.

In the fall of 2013, after his play’s premier, he left New York to work on a farm in Massachusetts. He returned to the city, but by then, he’d had enough of New York. In September of 2014, he left for good, joining the Sitka Fellows Program as the first community theater director.

For Blackwell, the places he loved most were those that gave him a sense of community, a feeling he had lost since leaving Yale. In the small town of Sitka, Alaska he found it again.

Only one of the local schools in Sitka had a theater department, but it was only offered to high school students. Black-

FEATURE

well built the youth theater program from the ground up, operating out of the Sheldon Jackson Campus, the historic center of town.

In his nine months as a fellow, he recruited over a hundred students and put on three performances. In the spring of 2015, he was asked to continue full-time.

“In Alaska, it is possible to have a great impact,” Blackwell said. “At 23, I was given the opportunity to build and run a children’s theater without a master’s degree or the equivalent in professional experience. It was far above what I would be able to find in another place, and I enjoyed where I was living. …The people here actually want to know you for who you are instead of what you do.”

Blackwell has since made a name for himself in Sitka. He has stayed in Sitka as the Youth Theater director of the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, which receives over 1,000 students every summer. He’s settled down in town or, to be more precise, in the surrounding waters. He lives on a boat in the harbor. Without a doubt, he has the best view in town, waking up in the morning to the sun rising over the Sound.

Passing Through As much as people love Sitka, most eventually move on. A common question of newcomers around town is “How long are you here for?”

When Will Kronick ’14 arrived in Sitka in 2014, he thought he would be there for no more than a year. He had never been West of the Mississippi, let alone Alaska. He had applied to work with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska as the Sheet’ka Kwaan fellow, serving as the family engagement manager. As part of his job, he ran the evening and weekend program for families, working with preschoolers and kids from the native community. During his time in the village, Kronick witnessed a different side of Sitka, one that is often hidden from tourists and even other fellows in town.

According to Kronick, in the native community there is a distrust of outsiders, and in light of Alaska’s history of colonization, exploitation and racial injustice, such suspicion is warranted. Despite good intentions, volunteers often lack the background knowledge and professional experience to address issues within the native communities, sometimes leading to further friction.

Rather than preach, Kronick learned to approach his position with “humility and humor.” He worked to integrate cultural ac-

tivities into the program, such as beading, carving bracelets and necklaces, storytelling and traditional harvesting of fish and berries.

He loved working with the kids, but he also quickly realized that his presence was not going to change much in nine months.

“I think with all these programs, whether it’s the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps or whatever, I think it’s a fiction that the community benefits from it,” he said. “We’re young people who don’t know much. It’s important to go in with that humility. ‘I’m here to help people’ is very patronizing.”

Part of the problem in Sitka, Kronick sees, is the lack of social mobility for residents outside the predominantly white arts community. Although well intentioned, fellows can take opportunities away from locals, many of who grew up in the community. For Kronick, it’s part of a larger phenomenon of Alaska’s history.

“People come here to extract things, whether that’s coal, gold or oil, ” he said. “I think people sometimes look at the Fellows program or other volunteer things as that, too. You are coming here to extract experience, and then they leave.”

The population of Sitka has always been somewhat transient with seasonal workers flying in for the summer, working as fishermen, loggers or construction workers. Besides the Fellows program, there are two other volunteer organizations in town: AmeriCorps and the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Like the fellows, most of the volunteers are outsiders, and although some settle in Sitka, most come for the year and then head back home.

Kreiss-Tomkins and Redick are well aware of this problem. Recently, they have worked to recruit more Alaskans to the program in the hopes that they will put down roots. They have also sought out post-graduate students interested in investing in the community, who can envision themselves staying for the long-term.

For his part, Kronick has remained in Alaska. He left Sitka in 2016 to work in Juneau for the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska where he coordinates the Suicide Prevention program.

Despite his ambivalence about volunteer programs, Kronick still believes Sitka Winter Fellows was one of the best decisions he’s made.

“It thoroughly changed my life,” he said. “[Leaving Sitka] was harder than leaving home for college.”

The Big Picture Kreiss-Tomkins acknowledges that while fellows sometimes gain more than locals do, the host organizations genuinely value the fellows’ presence.

“Both sides seem to have found benefit in enough situations that the programs continue to work,” Kreiss-Tomkins said.

One of these host organizations is the Alaska Humanities Forum, a nonprofit organization based in Anchorage, dedicated to connecting Alaskans through leadership development, grant-making, cross-cultural immersions and conversational programming. The Forum hosted its first fellow this year, who works with the Forum’s Public Programming Manager Grace Harrington.

“I honestly don’t know another vehicle that rivals [the Fellows program],” said Harrington. “It’s this matchmaking where these bright, emerging leaders with so many opportunities are deciding to come to Alaska.

It’s a reciprocal relationship where the state gives opportunities not found elsewhere, and the fellows infuse the state with their energy.”

By attracting students, Kreiss-Tomkins argues, that Alaska Fellows has put Sitka, and Alaska with it, on the map for professional and post-graduate opportunities.

Upon graduation, more than 70 percent of Yalies migrate to one of five regions: Massachusetts, California, New York, Connecticut and Washington D.C. It’s a statistic that troubles Kreiss-Tomkins. According to him, not only is the trend unsustainable, but it’s also inequitable.

“Not only are enormous resources poured into Yale students, but they represent part of the intellectual future of the country, and then they go to the cities,” Kreiss-Tomkins said. “You have the supersaturation of financial capital, intellectual capital, political capital and cultural capital in half a dozen supercities.”

Kreiss-Tomkins sees the Alaska Fellows Program, and other programs like it, as the way to disrupt the monopoly. For many, the pipeline to New York is simply the path of least resistance, but through the Fellows program, Kreiss-Tomkins hopes to give students a similar professional network in Alaska.

“If we can have success in Alaska, we can have success in Wisconsin and Idaho,” he said. “There is something bigger than Alaska about all of this.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

i saw what i saw A Yale student endured serial sexual harassment during a summer internship.

The perpetrator — a School of Medicine professor — retired quietly.

Five months later, the University announced an investigation — but did Yale do enough?

BY JEVER MARIWALA, ALICE PARK & MARISA PERYER

Editor’s Note: This article contains sexually graphic descriptions of misconduct. The student who experienced the misconduct requested the pseudonym Blair to protect their privacy.

O

n a chilly January evening, Blair received an unexpected call from their dean.

The dean told Blair, a gender nonbinary Yale senior who uses they, them, their pronouns, that Yale had launched an independent investigation into sexual misconduct complaints against retired School of Medicine professor Eugene Redmond. Blair was shocked. Seven months earlier, the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct had found Redmond responsible for sexually harassing them. But Redmond had retired before the University imposed disciplinary sanctions. It had seemed like the University’s hands were tied. Blair wondered: What had changed?

Later that night, in a Jan. 28, 2019 statement announcing the investigation, Yale said it was responding to a new complaint against Redmond. The University made a striking admission: Yale had investigated Redmond before. In 1994, former interns alleged that Redmond had sexually harassed them at a research facility on the Caribbean island St. Kitts where he ran an internship program — the same facility where he harassed Blair in 2017. At that time, Redmond

26 | Month Year

promised to end the program, which he did for a few years.

But since at least 2011, he had reopened it to Yale undergraduates, seemingly without Yale’s knowledge.

For a university that rarely — if ever — acknowledges cases of misconduct committed by faculty members, Yale’s announcement was unprecedented. It also seemed impressive: Yale hired a former U.S. district attorney as an outside investigator and named Redmond publicly. It looked like the University was doing the right thing.

“I am committed to the investigation that will shine more light on it: a university dedicated to the pursuit of truth can ask no less of itself,” University President Peter Salovey said in Yale’s statement.

But a five-month investigation by the News exposes Yale’s inability to effectively discipline faculty members found to have violated the University’s sexual misconduct policy. When the UWC found Redmond responsible for sexual harassment, it sent a report to the administrator with authority to sanction faculty — Provost Ben Polak. After receiving the UWC’s findings and all follow-up reports

COURTESY OF BLAIR

COVER and responses — a normal part of the UWC’s adjudication process — the provost usually makes a disciplinary decision “within seven days,” according to the UWC’s website.

Polak had all of the follow-up reports and responses he had requested by July 9, but he did not issue a decision within seven days. Thirty-eight days passed before Blair received an update from the UWC: Redmond had retired without Polak having issued a decision. Another five months passed before the University announced its independent investigation in January.

In a signed letter to the News, Redmond categorically denied sexually harassing Blair. After Yale announced its investigation, he denied the allegations that motivated it in an email to the News, calling them “slanderous and defamatory.”

Fearing the disciplinary and legal action outlined in the UWC’s confidentiality policy, Blair decided not to publish any documentation from their UWC hearing. The News corroborated their story with email exchanges between Blair and University officials, as well as with the accounts of another St. Kitts intern, professors and Redmond himself.

The case against Redmond reveals an inability by the UWC — a highly bureaucratic system, considered a model among Yale’s peer institutions — to accommodate nuance in the cases it adjudicates. At nearly every stage, the University’s response to Blair’s experiences did not uphold its commitment to preventing and addressing cases of sexual misconduct. From the burden imposed on student complainants, particularly those who are nonbinary, to its stringent yet vague confidentiality policy, the UWC’s process can leave survivors feeling powerless and silenced.

And even when the UWC rules in a complainant’s favor, the University is not always able or willing to hold its faculty members accountable.

Polak’s delay in disciplining Redmond and the University’s decision to launch an investigation months after Redmond’s retirement raise the question: Can Yale protect its students?

“I saw what I saw” During the spring of their sophomore year, Blair, a biology major, began searching for internship opportunities for the upcoming summer. They found Redmond’s internship program listed on Yale Career Link — an online job portal run by Yale’s Office of Career Strategy — and decided to apply.

In March, Redmond interviewed Blair in Morse College, where he served as an adviser for at least 20 years.

Eager to build a relationship with their new mentor, Blair invited Redmond to a performance by their spoken word group, which he attended.

Two days after the performance, Redmond told Blair over dinner that they would have to share a room with two beds over the summer. Blair found the idea of sharing a room with a professor “a little weird,” but ultimately agreed. There didn’t seem to be other options.

Despite the sleeping arrangements, Blair was thrilled by the opportunity to conduct research with Redmond, an esteemed scientist and pioneer of stem cell treatments for Parkinson’s disease.

In the weeks after their dinner, Blair and Redmond emailed back and forth planning a joint research paper, which Blair knew would stand out on future medical school applications.

The night of June 11, 2017, Blair and two female interns — also Yale undergraduates — flew into St. Kitts and drove to Redmond’s research facility, roughly a mile from the coastline. The humid Caribbean air hit

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COVER

them as they walked to the main house with their suitcases, ready to sleep after a long day traveling.

After saying goodnight to the other interns, Redmond and Blair retired to their shared room. Without warning, Redmond undressed, Blair said, and stood completely naked in front of them. Blair told the News that Redmond then put on loose boxers and got into his bed, which was situated just a few feet from Blair’s own.

According to both Redmond and Blair, the professor also offered to apply lotion or aloe onto their back regularly that summer.

“I offered to put sunscreen or lotion on the student’s back before going out into sun or at night. In the tropics, unprotected sun exposure can be dangerous,” Redmond wrote in his letter to the News.

Every morning, Blair woke with the other interns and walked across the facility grounds — past Dobermans that roamed the campus and cages of monkeys — to conduct their research. When their workday ended, the students often biked around the island or explored the nearby beach. Night after night, Blair and Redmond retired to their shared room.

On one of those nights, Blair encountered the professor “holding his penis with his hand and moving his hand up and down,” they told the News. A few days later, Blair saw Redmond masturbating in the bedroom for a second time.

28 | MARCH 2019

“You can’t do this again,” Blair told him that night before leaving the room.

Blair recalled confronting the professor the next day.

In response, Redmond denied masturbating.

“I saw what I saw,” Blair told Redmond.

“It’s one of life’s little pleasures,” he responded.

In his letter to the News, Redmond denied “any occurrence of masturbation (or any explicit sexual behavior) in the presence of this student on any occasion in any place.” When asked about this alleged conversation with Blair, Redmond’s attorney did not address it directly but denied any misconduct.

One of the female interns living with Blair and Redmond — who requested anonymity because she did not want to be associated with the case — told the News that Blair confided in her about the second alleged masturbation incident that MARISA PERYER same night.

A day after the confrontation, Redmond asked to speak with Blair alone after work, according to Blair, and inquired about their sexual fantasies. When Blair responded that they felt uncomfortable discussing such topics, Redmond asked whether they masturbate. Blair said “not often,” hoping to end the conversation.

But the conversation did not stop there. According to Blair, Redmond responded, “As someone who cares about you, I am going to prescribe an orgasm a day.” From that day until the end of the summer he continued to ask Blair whether they were following his “prescription.”

In his letter to the News, Redmond defended all of his interactions with Blair during the internship, insisting that conversations about “gender and life experience […] were intended to be supportive and always guided by what the student brought up and seemed comfortable discussing.”

During the UWC hearing, Redmond confirmed that he said that Blair “should have more sex,” according to Blair. In addition, Redmond acknowledged that he had engaged in multiple conversations about Blair’s sexual fantasies, sexuality and sexual history, according to Blair.

Blair added that during the UWC hearing, Redmond also admitted to talking about masturbation and sexual fantasies with previous interns.

Halfway into the internship, Blair missed a day of work after expe-

COVER

riencing “terrifying” stomach pain and constipation for several days.

When Redmond entered the shared bedroom to check on Blair, he asked them to describe their medical condition, Blair recalled.

“Why don’t I do a rectal exam on you?” Blair remembered Redmond asking.

“I’d rather not,” Blair responded.

While Blair was reluctant to allow the rectal exam, they felt coerced to agree after Redmond insisted that it would be medically prudent to do so.

Until that moment, Blair had never had a penetrative rectal examination.

“He feigned giving me a medical exam I didn’t need, and sexually assaulted me,” Blair told the News.

Redmond told the News that he conducted the rectal exam to test for appendicitis. Redmond added that the student “cooperated fully” after he explained the need for a rectal exam; the medical decision was “made for ‘watchful waiting,’” Redmond wrote in his letter.

At the UWC hearing, according to Blair, Redmond told the panel that

before he administered the exam, Blair had not shown symptoms of appendicitis, and that he had not been involved in diagnosing appendicitis in over 30 years. According to Blair, the UWC panel ultimately confirmed what they already knew: The rectal exam was coercive.

In his letter to the News, Redmond said that the rectal exam “did not reveal any signs of appendicitis.”

After the exam, Redmond gave Blair a laxative, and the student recovered fully.

“I do want to emphasize that even the behaviors that Dr. Redmond does admit to in his account — giving me a rectal exam, telling me to have more sex, offering me massages — are not behaviors that should exist in a student/professor relationship,” Blair wrote in their opening statement for the UWC hearing. “As faculty members at this university who interact with students, I respectfully ask that you consider whether you would behave with a student you were mentoring and supervising in this way.”

Even as Redmond engaged in

repeated sexual behaviors, Blair increasingly felt beholden to him, particularly as a low-income student.

When two other interns attended a concert on the island that Blair could not afford, Redmond offered to pay for it and future excursions, provided Blair kept it a secret.

“That created this coercive environment where I felt very thankful to him and wanted to be extra nice to him because he was paying for things for me, and I felt very uncomfortable about it,” Blair said. “I felt like I owed him something.”

Redmond did not see these subsidies as problems. In his letter to the News, he wrote that, “It is odd that this generosity was interpreted by the Yale Committee as ‘harassment.’”

Blair wasn’t the only intern uncomfortable with the power dynamics on St. Kitts. “He took us everywhere,” one of the female interns told the News. “We were pretty much subject to his entire will throughout the summer.” Redmond controlled all of the internship fund-

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Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

ing — including money for stipends, groceries and reimbursements for travel. Interns also depended on the professor to drive them around the island.

Adding to Blair’s discomfort, they said Redmond disregarded their gender identity on several occasions. Blair told Redmond their preferred pronouns when the two first reached St. Kitts in June. At the time, Redmond told Blair that they should not use they/them/their pronouns on the island since, “not everyone will understand.” Blair added that Redmond said he did not believe in transgender identities.

In his letter to the News, Redmond claimed that Blair had never indicated that “non-traditional pronouns (THEY, THEM, THEIR) were preferred.” But in an earlier paragraph in the same letter, Redmond said that over the course of the internship, he had several conversations with Blair about gender.

“I guess he perceived me as a gay male, which is another way that a lot of people perceive me,” Blair told the News. “But simultaneously, in this process of feeling violated, I felt like I was being [romantically] pursued … for someone I wasn’t, someone he thought of me as that wasn’t even the real version of me.”

“He could literally ruin my life” After 64 days on the island, on Aug. 14, 2017, Blair returned to the U.S. “The moment I stepped foot in Florida for the layover, I just cried my eyes out,” Blair said.

Blair returned to Yale that fall to start their junior year. Though Blair had left St. Kitts behind, nightmares from the island persisted.

They would lie awake, unable to sleep, as disturbing moments from the summer “kept playing over and over again” in their head.

About two weeks after leaving the island, Blair decided to abandon their nearly finished research paper with Redmond — they wanted to cut ties with him completely. Soon after, Blair sought help processing the summer’s trauma at Yale’s Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education Center and confided in School of Medicine professor Joanna Radin, Blair’s former professor and a trusted adviser.

In Radin’s office, Blair broke down as their story “just sort of spilled out.”

As a mandatory reporter, Radin notified the University Title IX coordinator of Blair’s experience without naming them. Radin’s response made Blair feel reaffirmed. Blair considered taking the next step — filing a formal UWC complaint, which would launch an investigation into their allegation against Redmond.

The decision kept them up at night. If Redmond — a powerful researcher — decided to retaliate, “he could literally ruin my life,” Blair explained. They worried that if the UWC ruled against them, Redmond would undermine their chances of getting into medical school.

Blair also feared they would repeatedly have to explain their gender identity, as they had done on the island with Redmond. They did not want to relive that discomfort.

“I always felt like I was wrong,” Blair said. “I always felt I hadn’t experienced what I had. … It took me so long to realize that even though I felt so violated, it was valid. Because [Redmond] did a really great job the whole time of gaslighting me. Every time I confronted him, he pretended it hadn’t happened or it was coincidental.”

After months of indecision, Blair filed a formal UWC complaint on March 9, 2018. Later in March, the UWC appointed an impartial fact-finder who began investigating their complaint.

While Blair was determined to hold Redmond accountable, their daily routine was overwhelmed by the UWC process of submitting statements, retelling their story to the fact-finder and waiting for hearings. Their UWC hearing was postponed to take place after Blair

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COURTESY OF BLAIR

COVER

had finished their final exams, but the proceedings loomed over them that semester.

On May 15, 2018, the five-person UWC panel held its hearing on Blair’s complaint.

“This is not something I would have put myself through if I did not feel morally compelled to do so,” Blair said in their opening statement. “I do not want this man to hurt anyone else the way he hurt me.”

Blair told the News that University officials seemed to not understand their gender identity. Blair recalled that, at the start of the seven-hour hearing, a panel member advised them to “do [their] best to not be offended” if anyone misgendered them during the hearing.

According to Blair, UWC panelists used their pronouns properly at the beginning of the hearing. But after Redmond’s testimony — in which he described Blair using he/him/ his pronouns — panelists started using incorrect, male pronouns as well, Blair said.

Mark Solomon, the current UWC chair and the panel chair for Redmond’s case, declined to comment on specific UWC cases and the alleged misuse of pronouns. ThenUWC chair and panelist David Post referred questions to Yale’s Office of Public Affairs & Communication. The other three panel members at Redmond’s hearing did not respond to requests for comment.

Conroy, the University spokesman, first told the News on Dec. 1 that Yale does not “confirm or discuss complaints.” After the University announced the independent investigation in January, Conroy said the investigator will “examine all issues regarding the complaints” against Redmond.

Despite the exhausting UWC process, Blair left the hearing feeling encouraged.

“The panel was clearly in my favor, and they were shocked by the stuff I was saying and Redmond was saying,” Blair recalled.

“That felt great because they believed me.

And it was reaffirming. And I felt good about it.”

About three weeks later, on June 4, 2018, the UWC affirmed Blair’s account. Redmond had violated Yale’s sexual misconduct policy in the form of sexual harassment.

Banned from Yale Polak, the University official who was to make the final decision about the case, received the UWC panel’s report on June 4.

UWC panel reports typically include a recommendation for an appropriate disciplinary

sanction, according to the UWC’s website.

However, the report sent to Polak did not mention any recommendation for what Redmond’s punishment should be, according to Blair, who also received a copy.

After receiving the UWC’s report, Polak requested a follow-up with more information about the rectal exam Redmond had performed on Blair. Both Blair and Redmond were given an opportunity to submit a response to the supplemental report. In an interview with the News, Conroy reiterated that the decision-maker may request further information before issuing a decision, as “new facts may emerge.”

On July 1, UWC Secretary Anita Sharif-Hyder notified Blair that Redmond had requested an extension to submit his response “due to his travel schedule.” Both parties’ deadlines to submit responses were extended.

By July 9, Polak had received all of the additional information he had requested. According to the UWC’s website, a decision-maker “will render his or her decision in writing within seven days” after receiving all reports and responses from the parties. But the UWC did not notify Blair of the case’s outcome until Aug. 16 — 38 days later.

That day, Blair finally received the email they had been anticipating all summer.

The email informed them that Polak had accepted the UWC panel’s conclusions, according to Blair. But Blair read on: Before the Provost issued a decision, Redmond had retired. No disciplinary action had been taken.

Polak referred requests for comment on the extensions and retirement to Conroy, who reiterated that faculty members may retire from Yale at any time. Once a faculty member retires from Yale, the University can no longer impose disciplinary sanctions, such as counseling or suspension.

“It seems that the UWC reporting process was structured in such a way where the Provost allowed him to retire and that should not be the case,” Blair told the News. “No one person should have that sort of power.”

Following his retirement, the University banned Redmond from campus and prohibited him from contacting Yale undergraduate and graduate students, residents, postdoctoral fellows and research associates, according to Blair’s recount of the Aug. 16 email. Yale also banned the St. Kitts facility from recruiting Yale students as long as Redmond is affiliated with the program. Redmond was denied the privileges of most retired faculty mem-

bers, such as emeritus status and University sponsorship for grant proposals, according to Conroy.

But while Blair was left in the dark on Redmond’s fate, five of his undergraduate advisees in Morse College were notified on July 27 that he intended to retire — 20 days before Blair heard the news — according to an email sent to Abhishek Srinivas ’21, one of the former advisees.

“Professor Redmond chose to retire after he was informed of the planned punishment that would be implemented by University leadership,” Conroy told the News on Jan. 29. “In addition, Yale cannot prevent faculty members from retiring if they are contractually entitled to do so.”

Conroy declined to comment on what Redmond’s punishment would have been had he not retired.

In his letter to the News, Redmond confirmed that he retired last summer, but claimed that he was denied “basic due process rights in this matter.” He did not respond to multiple requests for elaboration. On March 2, Ethan Levin-Epstein, a partner at a law firm advocating for workplace fairness, emailed the News on behalf of Redmond.

“Dr. Redmond continues to deny that he engaged in misconduct and continues to strongly disagree with the UWC Panel’s decision and the unfair process by which it was reached,” Levin-Epstein wrote in his email to the News.

“Yale has made me a victim” In an interview with the News on Jan. 29, Conroy insisted that the University imposed “severe restrictions” on Redmond after his retirement. Redmond is barred from engaging in Yale-related activities, according to a Dec. 3, 2018 email Conroy sent to the News.

When asked if Redmond still receives retirement benefits, Conroy directed the News to a University website and read the policy aloud: “All faculty who retire are eligible to receive a subsidy for part of their health insurance.”

Despite the “severe restrictions,” the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a paper for which Redmond is the senior author in September 2018 — roughly one month after his retirement and subsequent ban from engaging in Yale-related activities.

Just last month, Redmond submitted a paper to the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications with his former colleagues in the School of Medicine’s De-

Yale Daily News Magazine | 31

COVER partment of Psychiatry.

This is not the first sexual misconduct case that the School of Medicine has grappled with in recent years. The medical school drew scrutiny last summer for honoring cardiologist Michael Simons MED ’84 — whom the UWC found responsible for sexual harassment in 2013 — with an endowed professorship. In November, the News reported on two additional cases of sexual misconduct that the medical school mishandled.

In a Jan. 30 statement to the News, School of Medicine Dean Robert Alpern said that the school is “committed to creating a culture of respect and inclusion, where sexual misconduct has no place.”

Redmond emphasized in his letter to the News that he sees himself as a “victim” of Yale’s adjudicatory processes.

“Yale and/or its official process has made me a victim and brought great personal damage to me,” Redmond wrote in his letter.

According to Blair, St. Kitts staff decided to put the Yale internship program on hold after speaking with Blair in December 2017. Staff members did not respond to requests for comment.

Still, Redmond said he hopes to continue searching for a treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

“A re-examination of Yale’s approach” Although the University claims that the UWC’s confidentiality policy protects participants, Blair found that it did the opposite. When they wanted to speak, they couldn’t, fearing University retaliation. And when they were resigned to remain silent, the University’s investigation placed an unwanted spotlight on their case.

UWC documents are confidential, and the University may take disciplinary action against any person who shares those documents. The confidentiality policy is designed to “encourage parties and witnesses to participate in UWC proceedings and share all the pertinent information they have to offer,” according to the UWC’s website.

All Yale community members are “expected” to maintain the confidentiality of UWC proceedings, according to UWC policy. Blair does not remember signing an agreement committing to confidentiality, but since their UWC case ended last August, they have felt silenced by the same

confidentiality policy meant to preserve the integrity of the UWC process. Blair feared they would be disciplined

by Yale’s Executive Committee if they made public UWC documents from their case via the News, even though those documents would corroborate their account of events.

Instead, Yale’s independent investigation has inadvertently brought Blair’s experience at St. Kitts into the public eye. Since the announcement, several acquaintances — including those with no knowledge of the complaint — have asked Blair about their experience on St. Kitts and connection to Redmond. A friend currently working on St. Kitts told Blair that the research facility is buzzing with speculation and gossip about Redmond.

“I feel that my privacy has been invaded after the investigation of Dr. Redmond went public,” Blair told the News.

“If things are going to be confidential, they have to be either fully or not.”

Initially, in November, administrators in Yale’s Title IX Office, Office of the Provost and the School of Medicine all declined or did not respond to requests for comment on Redmond’s retirement and on Polak’s delay to issue disciplinary action. These administrators only issued public statements after Yale announced the independent investigation two months later. Conroy declined to comment on whether the University can take action if the independent investigation finds additional survivors, as Redmond is already retired and banned from Yale.

According to Yale’s statement, Salovey ordered the independent investigation — which is being conducted by former U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly — after receiving another formal complaint against Redmond in 2019.

“We must learn whether there are additional survivors who wish to come forward, and we need to understand the facts relating to the internship program,” Salovey wrote in the Jan. 28 statement.

But this is not the first time Yale has launched an investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Redmond. According to the University’s statement, former St. Kitts interns brought sexual misconduct complaints against Redmond to Yale’s attention in 1994. Yale’s investigation that year was “unable to verify those earlier allegations,” according to the statement, but Redmond told

REDMOND’S SIGNED LETTER

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MARISA PERYER

Yale that he would end the internship program.

Yale did not hold him to that commitment.

Since the 1994 investigation, Redmond has recruited numerous Yale students, including Blair and at least six other undergraduates, to conduct research with him on St. Kitts. Amid the new investigation, Conroy said that he could not share who investigated the complaints against Redmond in 1994, at which time the UWC had not yet been formed. He also declined to comment on whether the University followed up with Redmond on his promise to stop taking interns from Yale, or whether Yale ever reported Redmond to the Connecticut Medical Examining Board after he was found responsible for sexual harassment.

Yale has reported the information it has to the Yale Police Department and the New Haven Police Department, “which will be in contact with law enforcement in St. Kitts,” according to the Jan. 28 statement. The University will cooperate fully if those departments conduct their own investigations, according to Conroy.

Radin — the professor whom Blair confided in — wrote in an email to the News that she was “deeply dismayed to learn from the YDN” that Yale had knowledge about Red-

mond’s alleged misconduct dating back to 1994.

“That Redmond was able [to] retire after a long career [at] Yale even as his behavior may have derailed the careers of young scholars is cause for serious concern,” Radin wrote. “The courage and leadership of students like [Blair] should be recognized as such and prompt a re-examination of Yale’s approach to dealing with sexual misconduct.”

Now, a year after they filed their UWC complaint against Redmond, Blair feels resigned to the situation.

When they first reported their case to the UWC, Blair did not know that other interns had reported similar experiences with Redmond in the past. While Blair is hopeful that the independent investigation will have a positive outcome, they feel overwhelmed and frustrated that the University did not launch an investigation into Redmond’s conduct earlier.

“I continually feel like the University did not take my case necessarily as seriously as I had wished,” Blair said. “I think it is now taking it seriously, but I really wish that this had all happened before [Redmond] had been allowed to retire.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

POETRY KELLY ZHOU

Incumbent

BY SAM BRAKARSH I found them resting together in the forest

before new year’s, the rock a metaphor for stasis and the tree —

younger.

The relationship brought authority into question: the rock casting skyscraper shadows in the dusk and the acacia a favorite among the giraffes; its belly, where a branch might have grown,

resting pregnant against the granite.

They balance now.

It requires an over-tidying of nature to call this symbiotic

and as I watched the sand beneath my boot felt agitated; it was experiencing the loss that comes with independence.

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BITS & PIECES

How to Understand Art

PHOTOS BY MADELYN KUMAR

BY MICHAEL HOLMES 11:35 a.m.

“This is Fauve as fuck.” The speaker is a kid about my age, in a dark sweater and fashionable slim-fit jeans. His companion, a taller guy with unkempt hair and round glasses, leans in close and nods his agreement.

“This is Fauve as fuck,” he says.

After a series of incoherent Google searches — “Fove,” “Foav,” “Fava Beans” — I finally come across “Fauve”: a reference to the 20th century French art style, Fauvism, which focused on painting technique and color rather than realism. Also, according to Google, the title of a Canadian short film about two boys coming of age in a surface mine. Two minutes later, I’m watching a YouTube animation of strip mining techniques.

Wait. Focus. I’m here to be cultured.

When I first look at Wassily Kandinsky’s “Improvisation No. 7,” I see an orange parrot with a mottled yellow throat. Then, a waterfall, a volcano, a starship from “Galaga” melting like hot wax into a bottle-green sea. A little figure with a fishbowl head raises a hand in greeting. It’s one of those paintings that you can’t seem to see all at once. Every moment, there’s a new color or shape materializing out of the background, something new to puzzle over. I have no idea what I’m looking at.

It definitely looks like art. It has a frame, a signature and a plaque. And it’s hanging in an art museum. Then again, so is Marcel Duchamp’s “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” which consists entirely of a snow shovel strung from the gallery ceiling. Technically, it’s a replica.

At what point does an object become just an object? When can we stop looking for shapes?

12:02 p.m “Oh look,” someone nearby says. “Jackson Pollock.”

12:35 p.m.

I’ve discovered that there’s a subtitle. The

painting’s full title is: “Improvisation No. 7 (The Storm).” Suddenly the image is a system in motion, violent and full of energy. Colors don’t intermingle; they clash like thunderheads, split through by dark, jagged lines.

Blues and greens swirl in a deluge while Zeus hurls fluorescent orange bolts. Wind roars.

1:27 p.m.

She clicks across the gallery on low suede heels. Her husband, close behind, resembles the dad from “Get Out.” She spots “Improvisation No. 7.” “Ooh, these are the landscapes.”

Is that it then? It’s a landscape?

Her husband shakes his head. “I couldn’t explain this one. I literally couldn’t.” He jerks a thumb at “Multicolored Circle,” another Kandinsky. “I’ll give him credit for that one. That’s got something.”

1:57 p.m.

A little boy in a crimson turtleneck claps his hands and chants tunelessly. “Jack, son Pollock — Jack, Jack, son Pollock. Jack, son Pollock — Jack, Jack, son Pollock.”

2:24 p.m.

March, 1910 Wassily steps back and looks from the canvas to the parrot a few yards ahead of him, then back to the canvas. “Fuck,” he says. “That’s not right at all.” He rubs at the streak of white with a rag.

“No, no, no.” He looks down. How did he even get purple on there? The startled parrot ruffles itself and shrieks. Wassily fumbles with his brushes. Maybe if the white thing is a branch, he can add some green like so …

The next day, the garbage collector encounters a defeated Kandinsky waiting at the curb with his canvas. “New masterpiece, Wassily?”

“It was,” Wassily sighs.

“Huh,” the garbage collector takes the painting. “I kinda like it. It’s a farm, right?”

“No.” “Oh. I just thought, with that green bit there,

and I thought those were hedges …”

Wassily massages his temple.

The garbage collector shrugs. “Either way, it’s nice. There’s definitely a mood to it.” He turns to carry on up the road.

“Wait.” Wassily holds out a hand. He takes the painting and stares. “Do you see anything else?”

2:55 p.m.

The guard touches her earpiece. “I’d like to report a touch. I’m before post nine, so no numbers but it’s “Head of a Jester” by Pablo Picasso. Roger, no damage.” As the perimeter is secured, “Improvisation No. 7” is bustled into a waiting limo. “Improvisation No. 7” watches paramedics rushing towards the fallen “Head of a Jester” and thinks, “That was meant for me.”

3:45 p.m.

The most noticeable images fall away. Forget the parrot, the swan, our friend with the fishbowl head. See mountains capped in white racing towards you from the blue. See a campfire, the particular way that green merges into blue, a palm tree, a cell tower, a pair of twisted Jordans, a heart yellow as a sand pear. Find and lose, make and unmake.

4:12 p.m.

My favorite mark: Follow the swan’s graceful neck, to a perfect thumbnail swatch of white and teal in the crook of a jagged olive-green leaf.

I can’t imagine what it is. I don’t need to imagine what it is. Sometimes paint is just paint.

4:36 p.m.

The brown-haired woman tucks her coat under one arm, steps closer to the Kandinsky until her shadow falls on the jagged signature, and says to nobody, “I love this.” She adjusts the coat and meanders away, past the fidgeting guard and the oscillating snow shovel.

Probably to look at the Pollocks.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 35

After the Ban by Ko Lyn Cheang page 9