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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · VOL. CXXXVIII, NO. 96 · yaledailynews.com

INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING

RAIN CLEAR

50 19

CROSS CAMPUS

HAVING A BALL YUAG HOSTS DADA BALL AND EXHIBIT

SAVING THE SLICE

FELLOWSHIP FEVER

Pizza at the Brick Oven retains Howe Street lease amid buyout talks

MACMILLAN FELLOWSHIP OFFERINGS EXPAND

PAGES 12-13 CULTURE

PAGE 3 CITY

PAGE 3 UNIVERSITY

Dancy, Diaz win Ward 22

Thirteen states later.

According to Associated Press projections at press time, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 won in seven states, while Donald Trump, her Republican counterpart, also won seven.

Both candidates won in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee and Virginia.

The best program of all time. In response to an online

request on FiveThirtyEight, chemistry Ph.D. candidate Allison Walker GRD ’18 developed a computer program that correctly predicted the winners in five of six categories at the Academy Awards. The program downloaded online movie reviews and screened them for key phrases such as “best movie of all time.”

Sweet sixteen. Sixteen Connecticut residents appeared on this year’s Forbes list of the world’s billionaires, which is an increase from the 13 that were on the list last year. Of those who made the list, 10 were from Greenwich and two were women. At the top of the list was Ray Dalio, CEO of Bridgewater Associates, who has a net worth of $15.6 billion.

PAGE 5 UNIVERSITY

A NA LYS I S

Admins downplay student role

p.m., only 133 of the 1,872 voters registered for the election had cast ballots.

Morrison said the race provided her with an opportunity to educate community members on the functions of the ward co-chairs, who register voters and work with the alder.

Both Morrison and the Thorpe– Watley team had stationed themselves outside of the school when polls opened at 6 a.m. They were joined by a rotating cast of volunteers, other elected officials and a guest appearance from Boodie Watt’s Hot Dogs truck, owned by Watley’s brother.

Watley and Thorpe told the News Tuesday afternoon that the “Q” House — a former youth and com-

In November, University administrators moved quickly to keep up with student protestors. Next Yale, a student activist group, demanded a more inclusive and diverse campus, even marching on University President Peter Salovey’s house, and Salovey responded in less than two weeks with a set of initiatives as part of progressing “Toward a Better Yale.” Since the start of the semester, student activists have remained quiet as Woodbridge Hall moves quickly to implement these policies. But even as the administration moves to do so, administrators have mainly looked inward, and emphasized that students were not primarily responsible for the inception of the initiatives.

Salovey, Senior Advisor to the President Martha Highsmith, Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway and other administrators all told the News that they have not recently been in communication with Next Yale. Implementation groups for the initiatives, coordinated by Highsmith, do not include any students, and the recently established Presidential Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion has only one undergraduate: Abdul-Razak Zachariah ’17, who told the News he believes more students should have been included on the committee.

SEE WARD 22 PAGE 6

SEE INITIATIVES PAGE 6

MICHELLE LIU/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Dancy and Diaz received news about their co-chair wins at Wexler-Grant Community School.

BY MICHELLE LIU STAFF REPORTER Just after 8 p.m. on Super Tuesday, canvassers and candidates alike crowded through the side entrance of Wexler-Grant Community School, seeking primary results for the city’s only contested co-chair race this year.

As a poll worker announced the number of votes received by the first two names on the ballot — 182 for Vicky Dancy and 188 for Gabrielle Diaz ’18 — Dancy’s and Diaz’s supporters began to clap. Incumbent Cordelia Thorpe was not present to learn that she had received 66 votes, while her running mate Angela Watley garnered 70. The results wrapped up a day of heavy canvassing for the Dancy-Diaz slate, which received

support from both Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison and outgoing Ward 22 Co-Chair Maxwell Ulin ’17. Dancy and Diaz begin their two-year terms on Wednesday.

“I’m not trying to start a political career,” Diaz said. “I’m just trying to help out Dixwell.”

Diaz, a student in Timothy Dwight College, attributed the wide margin of support she and Dancy — an adjunct professor at Gateway Community College — received to votes from Yale students. Diaz herself had personally reached out to undergraduates living in TD and Silliman over the course of the day, knocking on doors and making phone calls.

Earlier that afternoon, the school’s side entrance remained sparsely populated, while the poll numbers indicated low voter turnout. By 2:30

Will the real Miss Sunshine please stand up? Campus

buzzed with rumors of a celebrity sighting yesterday.

Actress Abigail Breslin visited Yale to attend the Film Studies Center’s 10th anniversary screening of her critically acclaimed debut, “Little Miss Sunshine,” at the Whitney Humanities Center.

NPR hosts debate about free speech being threatened on campuses

BY DAVID SHIMER STAFF REPORTER

Cloud nine. Yale awarded the

Windham Campbell Prizes for excellence in writing. Each winner will receive $150,000 in prize money. This year’s winners hail from Canada, Ireland, India, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. One of the winners in nonfiction, essayist Hilton Als, said he was “gobsmacked and humbled” when he heard the news.

FIRST AMENDMENT

Club sports face limited funding

BY DANIELA BRIGHENTI STAFF REPORTER Two weeks before Yale secured a national championship in men’s squash and a share of the Ivy League title in men’s hockey, another less-known Eli team fought its way to a championship win.

A 5–4 win over Fordham gave the Yale club men’s hockey team a championship in the Metropolitan Collegiate Hockey Conference, following months of practice and competition.

With nearly 50 teams, Yale’s club sports program is one of the biggest in the country in terms of both participation numbers and variety of sports offered, Director of Club Sports Tom Migdalski said. Teams vary in their competitiveness and size, but all club athletes interviewed highlighted the program’s large role in their daily lives and a positive experience playing for their team.

Still, members from many of the larger teams called for additional support from the University to run their programs. Teams

did not disclose figures for their annual budgets, but members interviewed from 16 of 17 teams said the funding they receive from the University is not sufficient to cover all of their team’s expenses. Most teams supplement their University grants with fundraisers, member dues or alumni donations.

“We fundraise and pay for a considerable portion of our budget,” Yale club skiing captain Dustin Vesey ’17 said. “I know from participating in divisionwide meetings that we are the

only team in our division not fully funded by our school. A few schools even have coaches, which we cannot imagine having the money to pay for.”

Vesey added that when talking at meetings with representatives of other schools who participate in the U.S. Collegiate Ski and Snowboard Association, he found that the Yale club skiing team seemed to be the only one that worried about “financial issues.”

The club skiing team is one of multiple Yale programs that

requires members to pay dues in order to participate in the sport. The club baseball team, for example, gets most of its budget from the University — covering the team’s league fee, equipment and travel expenses — but each member must also pay $100 in yearly dues, captain Noah Asimow ’17 said.

The membership fee for the club gymnastics team is $350 annually. Team co-president Alden D’Souza ’18 said that SEE CLUB SPORTS PAGE 8

The gender question. The

Muslim Students Association will host a conversation with Yale lecturer Meriem El Haitami about gender equality in Islam. El Haitami specializes in the dynamics of female religious authority and activism in contemporary Morocco. The talk is at 5 p.m. this evening.

Oyés ’r us. ¡Oye! Spoken Word

invites students to share work at the second Cafecito open mic of the year. Tonight at 9 p.m., students can bring poems, stories, raps or songs to perform at the Native American Cultural Center.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY

1955 Campus police capture a Yale graduate student accused of stealing at least $3,500 of personal property from other students. The robber is caught at 4:30 a.m. in Saybrook College.

Follow along for the News’ latest.

Twitter | @yaledailynews

y

Staff members seek greater inclusion

BY FINNEGAN SCHICK STAFF REPORTER After a Feb. 22 town hall meeting about the diversity of Yale’s staff, employees and administrators continue to debate the degree to which the University promotes an inclusive workplace.

At the town hall, which was hosted by administrators including Deputy Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity Richard Bribiescas, Director of the Office for Equal Opportunity Programs Valarie Stanley and Office of LGBTQ Resources Director Maria Trumpler GRD ’92, staff members underscored unique and persistent problems with inclusion among Yale’s employees. They also noted that staff are often excluded from campuswide conversations about diversity, which often focus on faculty and students. While staff members interviewed said they were glad the University seems to be turning its eye toward inclusion

among its over 9,400 staff members, they also reported inconsistent experiences with diversity on campus, with some saying Yale has made great strides in recent years and others still seeing much room for improvement.

Staff members also suggested initial steps the University could take to diversity its staff. In particular, they noted a lack of record keeping with regard to Yale’s LGBTQ staff, as well as a perceived administrative bias against staff. Elysa Bryant, an assistant administrator of human resources at the Law School, said staff members are often viewed as less important than other groups at Yale.

“In all truth, I’ve never heard anyone explore the reasons that we tend toward less diversity,” Bryant said. “The staff are left out of conversations because they are not considered equals to faculty and students.”

SEE STAFF PAGE 6

Harvard sees new pass-fail policies

BY VICTOR WANG AND DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY STAFF REPORTERS The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted Tuesday to approve an overhaul of the college’s General Education requirements that will allow students to fulfill as many as half the requirements pass-fail.

The new system will require Harvard students to take four courses in an updated set of General Education categories and fulfill three distributional requirements across the FAS and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In interviews with The Harvard Crimson, Harvard administrators said students could take up to four of those requirements passfail. At Yale, undergraduates must take classes in six distributional areas for letter grades to fulfill graduation requirements. But although the academic requirements at the two universities are

COURTESY OF THE HARVARD CRIMSON

Harvard will allow students to take up to four of their academic requirements pass-fail. not identical, the Harvard announcement has raised the oft-debated question of whether Yale students should be permitted to take

courses in mandatory subject areas pass-fail.

Students interviewed SEE HARVARD PAGE 8

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION

.COMMENT “He is propagating the US Constitution should follow half baked attempts yaledailynews.com/opinion

Not being OK T

his isn’t a column about mental health at Yale.

I’ve written several of those columns already, and countless others exist regarding the topic. Now, while mental health is certainly a huge problem at Yale. I suppose that, eventually, the dead horse you’re beating really is dead.

This isn’t a column for those who are afraid to admit that they may be depressed because of fear of judgment or fear of Yale Health’s inadequacy. This isn’t a column for those who don’t think they have any problems. No. This isn’t about an “unwillingness” to ask for help because of pride, fear or whatever.

This is simply a column about not being okay.

This is a column for those who know they could be better, but think that they’re not justified in making a “big deal” out of it. For those who will admit that they’re unhappy at the drop of a hat, but will quickly follow that admission up with a hasty “But that’s Yale,” or whatever permutation of the phrase they prefer.

This is a column for those of us in the gray area who don’t feel the need to bring it up, not because we’re afraid or in denial, but because we figure “Why bother?” when it’s so insignificant. This is for those who think they should deal with it themselves because they know that there are people with bigger problems — and please, don’t be patronizing and say that this isn’t true.

We all know it’s true.

This is for those who don’t feel remarkably overstressed or depressed or anxious, but also haven’t felt particularly happy in a long time. For those who have come to expect muddier hues in their lives.

To all these people, I’m sorry. I’m sorry because I can’t offer a definitive solution. I’m sorry because I’m writing this just as much for me as I am you — because I thought that getting it on paper would help sharpen the fuzzy edges of an all-too-intractable problem.

I suppose I could tell you to go to Yale Health, but my call would probably fall on deaf ears. I know how many times I’ve read columns telling me to do just that, and I haven’t listened. Why burden an overburdened system with complaints that just don’t seem that urgent? I could tell you to talk to friends. But, while that might alleviate the symptoms of this annoying fog, it rarely gets to the root of the problem.

I can only offer some banal and obvious advice that I’ve found helpful in my own life: Do what makes you happy. Do the things that you know you want to do but don’t because you’re “too busy,” or because they would take too much effort, or require you to miss Toad’s.

A friend once told me that Yale takes kids with passions and molds them into some-

thing efficient.

It i m b u e s them with an absurd drive to be the best at everything.

Yale is filled LEO with former KIM m u s i c i a n s, artists and On us writers — just about anything that you can think of — who have quit because they don’t stack up to the other musicians, artists and writers at Yale.

So don’t do something because you want to be the best, or because it’s supposed to be “your thing.”

Do it because you know that it is something that would make you happy. It’s an obvious truth — a trite, overused, almost hollow truth — but it’s something we too often fail to internalize.

I SUPPOSE I COULD TELL YOU TO GO TO YALE HEALTH, BUT MY CALL WOULD PROBABLY FALL ON DEAF EARS I KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I'VE READ COLUMNS TELLING ME TO DO JUST THAT, AND I HAVEN'T LISTENED. WHY BURDEN AN OVERBURDENED SYSTEM WITH COMPLAINTS?

at Constitutionalism”

'SCRUPEUS' ON 'KROK: THE GLOBAL CONSTITUTION'

Discourse on diverse method T

oday is March 2. The dust has long settled since the March of Resilience in November, and the only time I now hear anyone say “we gon’ be alright” is when I put Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” on shuffle. Maybe I’m in the wrong circles, but it surely seems like the prominence of activism on campus has fizzled, and we’ve all retreated into our familiar routines. Undisrupted. Undisturbed.

But has our education at Yale become any more diverse?

I don’t think mine has markedly changed in light of the events last fall. While I’m glad that there have been discussions surrounding faculty diversity initiatives, they seem to be happening on too broad of a scale. Some disciplines — like philosophy — are markedly less diverse than others.

I’ve known that I wanted to study philosophy since I was around 14. When I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” and excerpts from Plato’s “Republic,” I knew that the discipline was right for me. Unlike many other subjects that I’d previously studied, philosophy required vigorous proofs and justifications for all arguments. It wasn’t polemic, and it didn’t require useless memorization. Talking about philosophical concepts required a beautiful synthesis of information drawn from areas including science,

math, aesthetics and logic.

Although many people question the relevance — and p ra c t i c a l i t y — of philosoISIS phy, it teaches DAVISimportant skills in critiMARKS cal thinking, reading, writThe dark ing and logiside cal reasoning that are translatable to any discipline. Moreover, many of these philosophical questions can be applied to pressing issues concerning race, gender and sexuality — I was hooked.

Unfortunately, the discipline doesn’t seem to love me back.

Every time I go to Connecticut Hall for office hours, I mainly see white faces on the wall displaying pictures of the faculty. In a November 2013 article in The Guardian titled “How can we end the male domination of philosophy?” reporter Jonathan Wolff writes that philosophy is one of the most male-dominated disciplines in the humanities. Popular blogs such as “What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?” also outline sexist practices that arise from the gender gap, even instances of sexual assault. However, sexism isn’t the

only problem. Emory professor George Yancy describes about the field in his November 2014 New York Times article “Lost in Rawlsland.” In it, he interviews Charles Mills, a prominent philosopher who teaches at Northwestern.

Mills describes that philosophy is one of the least racially diverse disciplines in academia; it’s about 97 percent white demographically.

However, in spite of issues concerning racism and sexism, I do not think that such problems for the discipline are unsalvageable. The first way that we can begin to ameliorate this problem is by diversifying the curriculum. Today, it seems as if much of academia is fixated on analytic philosophy, as opposed to post-colonial or continental theory that analyzes our relationships with power structures such as race, gender and class. Courses like “Feminist and Queer Theory” should be cross-listed in the Philosophy Department. Additionally, more classes in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and the African American Studies Department should be cross-listed. Although there are student-run groups — such as the newly formed “anti-Directed Studies” group I’m a part of — that discuss connections between “critical theory” and philosophy, these are topics that should be more central to the mainstream

discipline. Placing issues such as sexism, racism and classism on the periphery of philosophical education does not help to solve many of the problems that plague the discipline.

Another way in which we can improve the department’s relationship with these issues is by looking for specific faculty members who specialize in the intersection between “traditional” philosophy and theory that discusses post-modern and continental theory. Saidiya Hartman GRD ’92, Cornel West, Charles Mills, Martha Nussbaum, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson are all contemporary scholars who specialize in many of these areas. Although there is a disparity in the amount of scholars of color in the field, they do exist.

Philosophy has some major problems with diversity,but it is by no means the only discipline with these issues. However, the fact remains that each department needs to take a different approach to inclusion.

And we don’t need a proof to know that.

ISIS DAVIS-MARKS is a freshman in Jonathan Edwards College. Her column runs on alternate Wednesdays. Contact her at isis.davis-marks@yale.edu .

Though the busyness of this school may make you think otherwise, it’s just not true that every moment needs to be spent doing something that defines the trajectory of your Yale career. Some moments can be spent on whatever you want.

To be honest, I’m not sure about the long-term results of this lifestyle. But I’ve done my best to try to live by my own words. And while I’m not sure it’s made me happier per se, I will say this: I’ve begun to notice brighter shades of color returning to my life, one at a time.

SONIA RUIZ /STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

LEO KIM is a junior in Trumbull College. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays. Contact him at leo.kim@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T S T E FA N I K U O

Diversity under a Rock

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T

his year at the White People’s Choice Awards — I mean, the Academy Awards — host Chris Rock took a biting stab at the lack of diversity in nominations and the very, very pale audience sitting in front of him. But if Chris Rock was taking five leaps forward for diversity at the Oscars and in not-crossburning-racist-but-sororityracist Hollywood, he was also leaving other minorities behind.

This was especially evident when two little Asian children and one Russian child, dressed as accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers, were invited onto the stage midway through the ceremony.

“They sent us their most dedicated, accurate and hard-working representatives,” Rock said, “Please welcome Ming Zhu, Bao Ling and David Moskowitz. If anybody’s upset about that joke, just tweet about it on your phone also made by these kids.”

There was an audible gasp, and then laughter. At the time, I was in a room with four other Asians and we were upset. But was there a reason to be? We live in a coun-

try that believes stereotyping is not quite as crippling as racism, where minority is not the same thing as disadvantaged minority. My mother was an investment banker, and I grew up surrounded by the world of finance where the most intelligent people I knew were Asian and worked in the industry. So where is the film about my mother being the first Asian woman to make partner at Goldman Sachs? Where are the stories of my mother working in a room full of men who competed on bathroom runs over who could pee the fastest?

“Spotlight,” “The Revenant” and “The Big Short” were all films based on true stories, so of course the people in films have to look like the people they portray, right? So white casting is justified? Does no other race have a true story to be told? My mother would beg to differ.

If there should be an Oscar category for “Best Black Friend,” as Rock joked, then where is the category for “Best Asian Nerd” or “Best Chinese Supermarket Manager #1”? Or “Best Illegal

Immigrant”? When Chris Rock invites “hard-working little yellow people with tiny dongs” on stage, should we feel guilty that we think of little Asian people before a group of Minions run on stage? Such a joke is intelligent since it preys on our prejudices, so where is the intelligence of making diversity diverse? It has been over 50 years since a Hispanic or Asian actress has won the Best Actress category. If the only way that we can call attention to diversity in film is through historically based stories, such as “12 Years a Slave,” Hollywood will eventually get tired of warfare and tears. If the answer to #OscarsSoWhite is #OscarsMoreBlack then it only stretches one dimension of diversity. What we need is not more black nominees, what we need are films with black actors who are not just starring in films about slavery or guns. What we need are films in which the sidekick is not the fat black guy, or the lanky Asian genius, the sexy Hispanic girl or a Native American afterthought to Leonardo DiCaprio’s star power.

Post-racism America cannot make movies to teach the world about a post-racism America. It doesn’t exist. I know what you’re thinking — we have TV shows such as “Fresh off the Boat” and “Master of None,” series that call attention to Asian-Americans as minorities. How progressive of us. But if the only way for us to speak about race is to do so in an overt and almost satirical fashion, how can we cross over to casting minority actors in films that show them as people? According to a USC Annenberg study, 78.2 percent of lead roles go to white actors, 14.3 percent go to black actors, 2.7 percent go to Latino actors, 1.3 percent to Asian actors and 3.4 percent to actors that do not identify in these groups.

It’s time we discuss color and cast color — and it shouldn’t take an adoption story, a slave revolt or a crude joke by Chris Rock to do so.

STEFANI KUO is a junior in Pierson College. Contact her at stefani.kuo@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 3

NEWS

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

NELSON MANDELA FORMER PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA

CORRECTIONS TUESDAY, MARCH 1

The article “No tax hike in FY17 budget” incorrectly stated that Mayor Toni Harp’s previous budgets contained tax increases; in fact, only one of her two previous budgets increased taxes.

NHPD recruits read to Elm City students

BY JAMES POST STAFF REPORTER Clapping and cheering, New Haven Police Academy recruits greeted King/Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School students as they arrived at school on the morning of Feb. 24.

The 29 recruits of the academy’s current class came to the New Haven magnet school to help celebrate World Read Aloud Day, an international holiday that emphasizes the value of reading aloud and sharing stories.

After welcoming the students to school, each recruit spent roughly 30 minutes reading with a group of two to three students in pre-K, kindergarten and first grade. Students’ family members also joined in the reading and festivities of the day, which included a slam poetry workshop and featured guest speakers. NHPD Capt. Julie Johnson, who is in charge of training across the entire police department, said the significance of the recruits’ participation in the holiday extends beyond supporting childhood education. Johnson said the recruits’ participation strengthens the bond between the NHPD and the community.

“The purpose obviously is to get kids to read,” Johnson said.

“What really we wanted was to give the recruits an opportunity to go into the community …

We’re trying to do more of that.”

World Read Aloud Day is one of many community programs that police recruits, who are given a conditional offer of hire by the NHPD contingent on their completion of the New Haven Police Academy, participate in as a part of their 30-week training. The recruits will also partner with the United Way of Greater New Haven to partake in Read Across America Day at Clinton Avenue School on Wednesday.

The New Haven Police Academy also offers a graduationwith-distinction program for recruits who complete at least 40 hours of community service during their training. The recruits

can meet neighborhood management teams and alders as well as connect with NHPD district managers who direct community service projects in the Elm City.

“Each year we become more and more involved [in the community],” NHPD Chief Dean Esserman said. “Such programs are as important for our public servants as they are for the students. I’m grateful to the academy staff and recruits for their interest and participation.”

Including community involvement in recruit training contributes to the NHPD’s efforts to practice community policing, Johnson said.

Matthew Presser GRD ’10, a literacy coach at King/Robinson, first reached out to the NHPD to invite recruits to the celebration.

Presser said King/Robinson has made a concerted effort to partner with the NHPD on different initiatives before.

“Given the fact that in other communities the relationship between police and young people can be strained, we thought that it’s really important for us to build those connections early on,” Presser said. “We really think it’s important for our kids to have positive first impressions of the police officers and for [the officers] to have a positive impression of our students … I think it’s beneficial for all parties.”

Bringing recruits to read at the school is an important step in introducing the students to officers who will be patrolling their neighborhoods, Johnson said.

Presser said the enthusiasm and spirit of the event were “contagious.”

“I think young kids have incredible energy and enthusiasm to show off their early reading skills,” Presser said. “There’s just really exciting energy around learning how to read and early academic skills.”

The King/Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School has about 550 students.

MacMillan to guarantee grad fellowships

BY DAVID SHIMER AND VICTOR WANG STAFF REPORTERS The MacMillan Center, a research center for international affairs, will beginning this summer guarantee fellowships to all eligible Ph.D. students in the humanities and social sciences and raise the cap on those fellowships from $15,000 to $18,000.

MacMillan Center Director Ian Shapiro GRD ’83 LAW ’87 made the announcement in a Monday afternoon email to faculty affiliated with the center. To be eligible for the grants, applicants must intend to engage in research abroad and have completed all pre-dissertation requirements. Last fiscal year, the center awarded $700,000 in grants and fellowships to nearly 200 graduate students as part of a competitive application process. MacMillan Center Deputy Director George Joseph estimated that 50 to 75 additional students will receive funds as a result of the more inclusive policy, at an additional cost of roughly $300,000.

“The meaningful point of inflection is not that we are putting more money in, but

that we are guaranteeing support to students who want to do research — that is critical,” Joseph said. “That means in terms of their planning and applying for external funding, by knowing they have the funds available, they can get going on their research sooner and do more.”

Many graduate students in the humanities and social sciences need to undertake international research in order to write their dissertations and complete their degrees. These students mainly fund their research through a combination of Yale funding packages offered upon admission and competitive external awards and fellowships. Shapiro said most students will require more than $18,000 to fully conduct their research, but administrators and faculty members interviewed said they expect the guaranteed funding to alleviate some of the pressure that comes with applying for competitive grants.

Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Lynn Cooley said she expects that students in the humanities and social sciences will continue to

apply for and receive external awards and grants, but that the “extraordinary commitment” from the MacMillan Center gives graduate students essential financial support regardless of the grant applications.

Shapiro said since the financial crisis, outside funding for students has become more difficult to secure. The MacMillan Center has responded by increasing the amount of resources it provides to graduate field work and is now tapping into “reserved resources” to make the latest expansion possible.

“Our central mission is research and teaching. We see this as the most important thing we do — support research, faculty and students. We’d much rather spend resources on this than just about anything else,” Shapiro said.

Faculty members in the Political Science and Anthropology Departments — fields that often require international research — said the guaranteed fellowship will also help attract more candidates interested in related research.

Political Science Department Chair Steven Wilkinson

said many graduate students in his department already benefit from the support of the center, and this guarantee of support will make Yale even more competitive in attracting doctoral candidates.

Anthropology Director of Graduate Studies David Watts said the department and its graduate students are grateful for the funding, though some students will still require outside funding.

“We expect — and in fact will require — that students seek outside funding, but the availability of MacMillan Center funding to all qualified Ph.D. students will allow them to make up for any shortfalls in outside grants and expand and strengthen their research projects in ways that would otherwise be difficult or impossible because of budgetary constraints,” Watts said.

The MacMillan Center supports 28 ladder faculty positions and 75 visiting scholars across the arts and sciences.

Contact DAVID SHIMER at david.shimer@yale.edu and VICTOR WANG at v.wang@yale.edu .

Contact JAMES POST at james.post@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF MARILYN WILKES

The MacMillan Center will guarantee fellowships to all Ph.D. students in the humanities and social sciences.

Brick Oven to remain on Howe

BY JIAHUI HU STAFF REPORTER

ALEXANDRA SCHMELING/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

New Haven Police Academy recruits visited the King/Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School as part of World Read Aloud Day.

Amid fears that Pizza at the Brick Oven’s lease on Howe Street would be purchased by real estate firm Noble Investment Group, the eatery received confirmation that their brick-and-mortar space will not be transformed into a new Marriott hotel during a Tuesday meeting.

At the monthly Dwight Center Management Team meeting, which comprised neighborhood representatives and alders, Courtyard by Marriott Assistant General Manager Fernando Solio said Noble — the firm that purchased the Courtyard by Marriott on Whalley Avenue behind Brick Oven last March — does not intend to buy out Brick Oven’s lease and develop an additional Marriott franchise.

Another firm’s previous plans to develop a Marriott franchise had led community leaders and residents to speculate that Noble would attempt the same when it signed up to

speak at the meeting. Solio instead came to the meeting to announce that the firm hopes to establish a positive relationship with the neighborhood.

When prompted to elaborate on Noble’s development plans, he said that the firm will build a parking garage on Howe Street and renovate the interior of the Whalley Avenue hotel.

“We have no plans to expand right now,” he said. “With the new ownership, Marriott just has plans to renovate the hotel.

We’re in the midst of doing that and we’re waiting for warmer weather to do parking garages at Howe.”

Solio said he believes building a hotel at Brick Oven’s current location would be a “nightmare” because of parking shortages on the block.

In the fall of 2014, the Newport Hotel Group attempted to build a new Marriott Residence Inn on Brick Oven’s lot. But NHG President Douglas Cohen abandoned his plans after neighborhood anger about the developer’s disregard for community engagement led the

Board of Zoning Appeals to halt Cohen’s progress.

At the meeting Tuesday night, community leaders warned Noble to learn from Cohen’s mistakes by working closely with neighborhood leaders. Dwight Management Team Co-Chair Curlena MacDonald said NIG should attend all monthly meetings to listen to and share ideas with the community. Tuesday evening’s meeting was the first that the firm has attended, she said.

“You’re here tonight,” MacDonald said. “But we meet every month. We would want more than a great presentation and then you’re gone. We just want to make sure the people are getting a fair share.”

MacDonald added that she also wants the firm to be transparent about its hiring practices and to increase the job opportunities available to local residents. Solio said that Marriott’s starting wage is $11.50 an hour, and New Haven’s Courtyard Marriott will hire 16 additional employees to develop a relationship with the commu-

nity by attending meetings and cleaning the streets, among other tasks.

Rafi Bildner ’16 attended the meeting as a neighborhood resident to advocate for Brick Oven, just in case the rumors that NIG would buy out Brick Oven’s lease were true. Bildner said the pizza shop has become a well-loved fixture and that any attempts to replace it would encounter discontent from both the Yale and Dwight communities.

“Though I haven’t been here as long as others, I’ve grown to care a lot about this neighborhood,” Bildner said. “Some of the stuff that you said is troubling me. You’ve refereed to Brick Oven as ‘that pizza place.’

It’s not just ‘that pizza place,’ it’s a well-established restaurant that is equally frequented

by Yale students and community residents.”

Natalina Lopez contributed reporting.

Contact JIAHUI HU at jiahui.hu@yale.edu .

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

the stanley h. arffa lecture series

Constructing Jewish Gender Moshe Rosman Professor of Jewish History Bar Ilan University

First Lecture Begins Today, March 2

Moshe Rosman was born in Chicago, USA and studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Columbia University. He has lived in Israel since 1979 where he teaches in the Koschitzky Department of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University. In 2010 he served as the Horace Goldsmith Visiting Professor at Yale. Rosman specializes in the history of the Jews in the early modern period in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His books include: The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov; and How Jewish Is Jewish History?

5:00 pm

•

Comparative Literature Library, Bingham Hall, 300 College St., 8th Floor

March 2

A Protofeminist’s Challenge to Gender Order: Leah Horowitz’s Tekhino Imohos Reception to follow

March 8

Gender Under Construction: From Genesis To Hasidism Reception to follow

March 10

Reconstructing Gender: Market, Literature, Halakhah, Synagogue Reception to follow

For information, please contact Renee Reed at (203) 432-0843 or renee.reed@yale.edu sponsored by the judaic studies program at yale university

OPINION. Send submissions to opinion@yaledailynews.com

YOUR THOUGHTS. YOUR VOICE. YOUR PAGE.

Christopher Buckley, Samantha Power, Marie Colvin...

You? Join the Mag at ydnmag@gmail.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

NEWS

“We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust…We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.” THURGOOD MARSHALL SUPREME COURT JUSTICE

Vigil commemorates three Fort Wayne murders

BY MONICA WANG STAFF REPORTER The faint sound of cars rushing down Elm Street could be heard in the distance, but amidst the sea of faces and flickering candles gathered around the Women’s Table, silence gently enveloped students who huddled in the cold on Tuesday night. “Peace be with you,” University Chaplain Sharon Kugler eventually said, concluding the vigil’s opening moment of silence.

Around 200 people gathered on Cross Campus to remember and commemorate the lives of three young black Sudanese men — Mohamedtaha Omar, 23, Adam Mekki, 20, and Muhannad Tairab, 17 — who were killed in Fort Wayne, Indiana executionstyle on Feb. 24. Police officials have since ruled out the possibility of a hate crime, though they have been unable to identify a suspect or motive. Still, the

death of the three men, two of whom were Muslim, has sparked outrage among many Muslims and non-Muslims alike, who are infuriated by the paucity of mainstream news coverage and the general indifference on the subject within American society. For the Yale community, the tragedy also hits closer to home: two of the young men killed were the cousins of Emi Mahmoud ’16. The Tuesday night Vigil for Our Three Brothers was both a commemoration of the three men and a display of solidarity for Mahmoud. Coinciding with the Islam Awareness Week organized by the Muslim Students Association, the vigil also called to attention specific issues facing the Muslim community both on campus and beyond.

“Thank you for taking the time to be here,” Mahmoud said during the vigil. “I don’t know how to say thank you, but half of these are tears of joy because there were times when we didn’t

have anyone to turn to. There were times when people didn’t know about the genocide in Darfur, and when someone died, no one knew and it stayed that way.

In a way I’m glad that it’s different now.”

Mahmoud, who recited an original spoken-word poem about the time her brother was shot during her sophomore year of college, moved many in attendance to tears.

Eleanor Pritchett ’19, a production and design staffer for the News, who went to the same high school as Mahmoud, said it was “heartbreaking” to see the impact of this tragedy on someone she knows. Pritchett added that the vigil emphasized the importance of not remaining silent on these issues.

Kugler echoed a similar sentiment, adding that the Tuesday night gathering was critical for healing and empowering attendees.

“It’s important for a commu-

nity to come together and support one another,” Kugler said.

“More than words, the presence of brothers and sisters on a chilly night just being together and being tender is the very best we can do and what we ought to do … I feel helpless at times to ease the pain, but providing some space for people to gather — that really does matter.”

Daad Sharfi ’17, one of the vigil’s organizers, told the News that her first thought upon hearing about the murders was feeling the need to “show up” for Mahmoud, whom Sharfi called a close friend and sister. As a community, Sharfi said it was necessary to stand with Mahmoud in solidarity.

Coordinator of Muslim Life Omer Bajwa also noted Mahmoud’s multiple roles on campus, as well as the greater implications of the Fort Wayne murders.

“Emi is in many communities [on campus]: the Mus-

lim one, the Sudanese one, the [Afro-American Cultural Center], Next Yale,” Bajwa said. “On one level, she is someone whose life intersects with many people around her, and she is very much affected by this. On the larger level, it is drawing attention to the increasingly rampant Islamophobia and the fear-mongering portrayed by mainstream media and politicians. Coupled with the issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, there is still a sense of frustration that black bodies are being brutalized but many people are not aware of it.

These are all multiple threads to pay attention to.”

Bajwa added that it is important for Yale students to understand the intersection between the discourse about race, Islam and xenophobia. Although the vigil was not planned as a part of the Islam Awareness Week, Bajwa said he hopes it will help raise awareness of the plight many Muslims and blacks suffer

in this country and open up conversation about these issues.

Sharfi also told the News that the point of Islam Awareness Week is to shed light on the fact that Islamophobia does exist and affects people both on this campus and nationwide. What the community can learn from the Fort Wayne tragedy, Sharfi said, is that rhetoric has “very serious consequences.”

“I think race and religion — we can’t say if they played a role or if this is a hate crime — but in the society we live in today, no one seems to care when certain people die. We need to ask ourselves why and we need to correct that,” Sharfi said.

The Muslim Students Association is hosting a Gender in Islam talk and dinner tonight featuring Meriem El Haitami, a fellow and lecturer at the MacMillan Center.

Contact MONICA WANG at monica.wang@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF GABBY DEUTCH

Two hundred people gathered Tuesday night to commemorate the lives of three young black Sudanese men.

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YOURYDN DAILY

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YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“I haven’t eaten at McDonald’s since I became President.” BILL CLINTON LAW ’73 42ND U.S. PRESIDENT

Staff diversity concerns persist STAFF FROM PAGE 1 Minorities are underrepresented in Yale’s managerial staff, which includes 4,200 employees. 30 percent of Yale’s staff is from minority groups, but minorities represent only 21 percent of managerial staff, according to Vice President for Human Resources and Administration Michael Peel. Women managers, on the other hand, are overrepresented relative to the total staff population, as they represent 64 percent of managerial staff, compared to 60 percent of total staff.

Peel acknowledged that these minority discrepancies were problematic.

“The greatest remaining diversity challenge we face with our staff is having more minority and female role models and mentors at the very top of our organization,” he said. “We have made great progress in recent years, but we are still not where we would like to be.”

Still, staff members and administrators disagreed on how much Yale needs to improve its staff diversity.

Trumpler said she does not see a problem with the staff’s diversity. She said she thinks campus affinity groups, like those for LGBTQ people, have already addressed the difficult questions.

Trumpler also said staff members’ experiences differ greatly depending on where they work. While some staff may have opportunities to engage in campus discussions about diversity through opportunities like administrative committees, other departments at Yale offer fewer outlets. There is no norm for staff engagement at Yale, she said, and while some schools at Yale have committees with staff, student and faculty representation, other schools do not.

But Trumpler also noted that because many staff members are private about their LGBTQ identities, and Yale lacks any method to compile diversity statistics, the University does not have accurate statistics about how diverse it really is or whether it is truly meeting its staff’s needs. Yale should collect better information about its staff in order to tackle diversity, she said.

The University has taken first steps toward promoting workplace inclusivity: the LGBTQ Staff, Faculty and Postdoc Affinity Group, run through Yale’s LGBTQ Network, has targeted LGBTQ candidates at Yale’s job fairs by offering information about what working at Yale is like for LGBTQ individuals, Trumpler said. Once hired, openly LGBTQ staff have one-on-one meetings with new employees who sign up for the affinity group.

Peel said that after a decade of diversity work, Yale’s staff is more diverse than it has ever been. Yale’s staff diversity is also better than schools both in and outside the Ivy League, he added.

One of Yale’s strategies for finding more diverse staff members, Peel said, is to hold available positions open for longer and wait to hire more diverse candidates. Yale must

GRAPH DIVERSITY IN YALE’S STAFF 60%

INITIATIVES FROM PAGE 1

TOTAL STAFF: 9,490 30%

WOMEN

MINORITY GROUPS MINORITY GROUPS

WOMEN

21% MANAGERIAL STAFF: 4,200 64% MIRANDA ESCOBAR/PRODUCTION & DESIGN STAFF

exhibit care and discipline when selecting the candidate pools it draws its staff from, he added. Expanding the candidate pool over the last three to five years has been especially effective in diversifying the staff, Peel said.

Different sections of Yale’s staff have dealt with increasing diversity in different ways.

The medical school, for example, has made efforts to expand resources for people with disabilities. Medical School professor Carl Baum, who chairs the provostial advisory committee on disability resources, said the committee has collaborated with many different staff members, from architects and human resources to Information Technology Services and librarians, to make Yale more inclusive.

But Bryant said the intimidating public persona the University exudes, with its prestige and traditions, may discourage staff participation in conversations about inclusion. If Yale is to improve its diversity, she said, it must change the staff’s perspective by being less scary and more welcoming.

If staff feel intimidated by the University itself, there are other places where they can feel more comfortable engaging with Yale on diversity. Laurie Kennington, president

of the union Local 34, pointed out that the union offers some staff members a space to negotiate and discuss issues of diversity along with the rest of the Yale community.

Staff diversity has been a priority for Local 34, which was integral in Yale’s recent commitment to hire 500 staff from New Haven’s poorest neighborhoods. Kennington said that if Yale follows through on this commitment, it could help improve the racial diversity of the staff, since those neighborhoods are predominantly black.

Still, Kennington acknowledged that Local 34 does not reflect the racial diversity of the city. Kennington said her neighborhood, Fair Haven, is predominantly Latino, while Local 34 is only around 3 percent Latino.

“We were proud to be a part of the protest that the undergraduates led, and we’ll follow their lead in this discussion,” Kennington said, referring to student activism last semester surrounding racial justice.

In fall 2014, Yale employed 1,168 service and maintenance staff.

Contact FINNEGAN SCHICK at christopher.schick@yale.edu .

Dancy and Diaz win Ward 22 WARD 22 FROM PAGE 1 munity center which received a $14.5 million revitalization grant from the state in January — was being used as a political tool by Morrison’s team. Thorpe claimed that she and state Sen. Gary Winfield secured those funds in a promise from then-Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic gubernatorial primary. That year, Malloy lost to former New Haven Mayor John DeStefano.

The Thorpe–Watley slate had instead focused on “grassroots” campaigning through door-knocking and phone-calling, Watley said.

That afternoon, Morrison and Watley clashed briefly in front of the school. One of Watley’s supporters insisted that the ward — which Morrison said was a 50–50 split between Yale and Dixwell — was actually comprised of 35 percent Yale stu-

Students unengaged in policy initiatives

dents and 65 percent other neighborhood residents. Watley then accused Morrison of pandering to the University.

“We have to respond to both sides of the ward,” Morrison said. “We can’t just focus on Dixwell or Yale.”

Morris Cove Alder Sal DeCola, present that afternoon, was one of a slew of alders — including President of the Board of Alders Tyisha Walker, Westville Alder Adam Marchand GRD ’99 and Hill Alder Dolores Colón ’91 — who joined Morrison outside Wexler-Grant over the course of the day.

DeCola said this aldermanic support demonstrated the teamwork of the BOA. He added that co-chairs who stand with their alder help the alder further neighborhood outreach.

“When you have two co-chairs that fight against you, it causes disharmony,” he said.

Dixwell resident Barbara Whitaker, who greeted Morrison that afternoon with a hug, said she voted for Morrison’s candidates solely because of her support for the alder.

Former Democratic Deputy Registrar of Voters Helen Powell, who said she had campaigned without help from other volunteers, received 24 votes. Standing outside the polling place in a maroon coat and holding a lit cigarette, Powell said her loss would not affect her as she plans to run for Democratic registrar of voters later in the year.

Thorpe could not be reached for comment Tuesday evening.

Connecticut’s Democratic and Republican primaries for the U.S. presidential election will be held April 26.

Contact MICHELLE LIU at michelle.liu@yale.edu .

r e c y c l e recycler e c y c l e recycle

“There is no doubt that students were very visible on these issues and have contributed many good and significant ideas toward it,” Salovey explained, in reference to the composition of his task force.

“But at the end of the day, we are working on initiatives and imagining future ones that will have benefits across many aspects of the Yale community. I am not in any way unappreciative of students, but I recognize that what the task force will work on will transcend the interests of any one part of the Yale community.”

Looking back on last semester, Highsmith and Vice President for Communications Eileen O’Connor are also pushing back against the notion that students should be disproportionately credited with catalyzing “Toward a Better Yale.”

Highsmith downplayed the role of students in the creation of the initiatives, stating that students, alumni and faculty all contributed ideas. Concerning implementation, she repeatedly said it is the responsibility of the administration to carry out the operations of the University. This semester, the University has established several of its programs, including a center for race and ethnicity, an updated reporting mechanism for harassment and discrimination and the presidential task force.

Students interviewed seem to accept, for the time being, their lack of involvement in implementing the policies. But they disagreed with administrators on the impact of their activism in November, expressing pride for the way they catalyzed change.

Sebastian Medina-Tayac ’16, a staff reporter for the News who worked with Next Yale in the fall as a student organizer, said student exclusion from implementation groups and the presidential task force is not of great concern to him because he has found student participation in formal committees ineffectual in the past. Rather, what matters is the substantive change students produced on their own, Medina-Tayac said.

“We have seen what happened when we got on committees and played by the rules: they stalemated us into bureaucratic pigeonholes,” he said. “But when we went outside the system and did something huge, they had to respond and responded immediately, efficiently and constructively … Committees are where change goes to die.”

As their involvement and access decline, involved students appear unwilling to push back on the administration. Medina-Tayac explained that given how exhausting the events of last fall were for student activists, it would be unfair for the administration to expect students to “do their jobs for them.”

But the decrease in student engagement seems to go beyond implementation. In November, members of Next Yale told the News that they wanted to communicate directly with the Yale Corporation. Karleh Wilson ’16, a member of Next Yale who met with Salovey on two occasions during the protests, told the News in November that she wanted “to look Corporation members in the eyes” and help them understand students’ perspectives. But during listening sessions hosted in February by two members of the Corporation to discuss naming issues, just a handful of undergraduates came, leaving the Law School auditorium mostly empty.

Both sides downplayed the low turnout: Administrators said attendance met expectations, while students said the events were poorly publicized. Mary-Claire Whelan ’19, a member of Fossil Free Yale who helped organize a Feb. 19 protest against the Corporation, said students may not have attended because it was unclear how the listening sessions would influence the body’s decisionmaking.

Still, compared to the hundreds of students who attended protests last semester, far fewer seem willing to engage now that their concerns have been heard.

O’Connor said students can communicate any thoughts they may have through the cultural centers and that staff closely associated with students, such as masters, are involved in implementation. But she said the reality is that many of these initiatives have been long in the making and it is now up to the administration to “operationalize” them.

“I don’t think there is a grand design to exclude students,” O’Connor said. “But many of these initiatives were under discussion before November. Part of the problem was students didn’t already know about them, so I think it’s not necessarily right to characterize the plans as catalyzed by students. I’m not saying that meanly, it’s a fact.”

Contact DAVID SHIMER at david.shimer@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

NEWS

“Freedom of expression and freedom of speech aren’t really important unless they’re heard.

The freedom of hearing is as important as the freedom of speaking.” TOM SMOTHERS AMERICAN COMEDIAN

Students unswayed by free speech debate

BY SEAN WALKER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Before a nearly full auditorium at the Yale Repertory Theater Tuesday night, the NPR show “Intelligence Squared U.S.” hosted a debate on the motion that free speech is threatened on college campuses. But despite the robust turnout, most students’ opinions on the topic remained largely unchanged, with students stating that many of the arguments advanced at the debate were ideas they had already heard last fall.

The debate was held in response to the widespread protests surrounding racial justice and freedom of speech across college campuses that occurred last year in the United States. While Yale was one of the campuses where such protests occurred, the debate’s moderator, John Donovan, made sure to emphasize that the debate was not specific to Yale’s situation. In the end, the side arguing that free speech is threatened was declared the winner, garnering 66 percent of the audience vote.

The debate was conducted Oxford-style, where each side is comprised of two debaters and each debater is allotted two speeches to make their arguments in hopes of convincing the audience to vote for their side.

Between the two speech periods is a moderated question period, during which the two teams engage each other.

The debate opened with author

and lawyer Wendy Kaminer arguing for the motion that free speech is threatened on campus. Asserting that “speech policing of faculty, students and speakers has become routine,” Kaminer cited various examples at different universities, such as the University of South Carolina, where administrators investigated students who held signs protesting free-speech censorship after other students called the protest “offensive.” She also highlighted a case at Modesto Junior College in California, where a student was ordered to stop handing out copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day. “Your right to speak may depend on the unpredictable, subjective responses of your audience,” Kaminer argued. “But free speech can’t consist simply of what people don’t mind hearing said.”

Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley was next to speak.

He strongly affirmed that “free speech is alive and well at American universities.” Stanley, citing the examples of previous Yale Political Union guests John Ashcroft ’64 and Robert A. Levy, said intellectual diversity abounds at Yale and at other college campuses. Ashcroft is a conservative lawyer who served as U.S. attorney general under former President George W. Bush ’68, and Levy is chairman of the rightleaning Cato Institute.

“Some cast today’s climate as tension between anti-racism and

free speech. This is a false dichotomy,” Stanley stated.

John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, rebutted Stanley’s statements shortly thereafter. McWhorter, adding to Kaminer’s statement, argued that what is occurring on college campuses is not open discourse, but “shaming people and shutting them down via ample abuse of buzzwords and slogans and sonorous cadence.”

When you call someone a racist in America in 2016, you’re effectively silencing all but the bravest people who most enjoy an argument.

JOHN MCWHORTER Professor of Linguistics, Columbia University The last speaker was Shaun Harper, executive director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. Harper offered an anecdote that had been told to him by a student during one of the studies his center performs, describing the experience of a lone black student in a 200-person lecture who had been emotionally hurt by his professor

reacting in disbelief to him acing an exam.

After the opening statements were given, the debate transitioned into the second round, where the moderator asked questions to specific speakers, offering teams the opportunity to directly respond to each other and their points. Both sides continually made reference to a “disconnect” between their respective argumentative positions.

Kaminer and Harper’s disagreement centered on the use of “speech codes,” or restrictions on speech beyond legal limitations, which Harper argued were rare. Even when they do exist, he said, they are meant solely to guide people away from crossing the line to harassment or hate speech. Kaminer, however, contended that the codes are not enforced as guides, but rather as invasive policies that evidence a threat to free speech. When asked to give specific examples of such cases, Kaminer directed the moderator to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group she said had recorded many such occurrences. Harper countered that he never heard students make a demand for speech codes throughout his studies.

Meanwhile, McWhorter engaged Stanley and Harper by arguing that even if there are no official policies governing speech, people still feel social pressure to censor themselves.

“When you call someone a

racist in America in 2016, you’re effectively silencing all but the bravest people who most enjoy an argument,” he said. “When you call someone a racist, you shut them down.”

Harper responded by arguing that the person making the offensive remarks in the first place is shutting him or herself down.

Stanley added that the conversation taking place across the country is not actually about free speech but is really about racism and anti-racism.

Audience members questioned both sides, with one asking the debaters whether there was a line beyond which professors can be so offensive that it is actually justified for students to demand their resignation. Kaminer argued that although students have a right to demand anything they want, the broad and contested definition of hate speech makes it hard to come up with objective standards by which speech can be limited.

Each speaker then gave concluding remarks, and final audience votes were tallied. 9 percent of attendees remained undecided at the end of the event.

Student reactions were similar on both sides of the debate.

Vasilije Dobrosavljevic ’16, said that although he thought the debate was well-run and he enjoyed it, given the contentious nature of the topic, he would have liked to see more back and forth between the debaters, rather than moderated questions alone. Dobrosavljevic voted that

free speech is not threatened. He added that although the debate did not change his opinion, it was good because it would promote further discussion.

However, he also noted the lack of diversity in arguments provided.

“The arguments tonight took me back to the same conversations I had on campus,” Dobrosavljevic said. “I feel like the views have not evolved much.”

Josh Mandell ’16 agreed that the debate was well-run and lived up to his expectations, noting that although “there was disconnect at first, eventually there were some good exchanges.” Mandell, who sympathized with the side arguing that free speech is endangered, also did not change his opinion throughout the debate.

Dana Wolfe, the executive producer of the show, said the debate has been in the works since student protests started to erupt last fall. She added that she hoped the spirit of civil debate would resonate across Yale’s and other campuses.

“This debate affects millions of students at colleges and universities nationwide,” she said. “Our message to the Yale student body is no different than our message to national radio audiences: We encourage students to attend the debate with an open mind, and listen to both sides with respect and civility.”

Contact SEAN WALKER at sean.walker@yale.edu .

Author speaks on literature and politics

BY LUKE CIANCARELLI CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Dinaw Mengestu — acclaimed journalist, essayist and novelist — delivered a lecture titled “The Politics of Aesthetics: The Danger of Writing from the ‘Margins’” Tuesday evening. At the talk, Mengestu meditated on the tendency of the contemporary literary community to believe that incorporating social and political realities into literature invalidates a work’s claim to aesthetic greatness.

Mengestu called attention to the bias he saw working against the socially conscious work of African, African-American and minority literature in contemporary literary appraisal. Mengestu, the winner of a 2012 MacArthur Genius Grant, asked his audience to consider the different attitudes that artists of the 20th century took when approaching political subjects. Noting that much of high literature is associated with “looking toward the stars,” he pointed to the importance of 20th-century writers, including James Baldwin and Albert Camus, who explicitly wrote about the “anguish” they saw in their surrounding racial and social communities. Mengestu suggested that this literary shift toward more political subjects was not a turning away from the demands of aesthetic literary criterion, but a necessary change engendered

by the unavoidable suffering artists came to see in the modern world.

“The aesthetic priorities of the artist have to bend to current need,” Mengestu said. This contrasted with Mengestu’s former belief that his own knowledge and experience had no literary value.

He found the cause of this belief in the prevailing narrative that any subject relating his experience as an Ethiopian-American could not be great literature “because it wasn’t universal; it was concerned with subjects too singular, too marginal and therefore less compelling, less important.”

Mengestu also related how various aspects of his experiences as a young reader and writer informed his outlook on the intersection of literature and racial politics. Starting his story in the third person and ending it in the first, Mengestu told of how he had been made to question the literary merit of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” In the novel, Ellison addresses many of the intellectual and social issues facing AfricanAmericans at the turn of the 20th century. While Mengestu said he had been moved by the work, his teacher and classmates only focused on problems with the text, leading Mengestu to reread the book to “rediscover the greatness he once saw” in it. It was not until years later that Mengestu said he managed to admit to him-

self that he reread the work looking for its weaknesses, not believing that anything resembling his personal experiences could give rise to great literature.

Among his early life experiences that made him aware of his fear of writing on political topics, Mengestu talked about the unpublished novel that he began writing while a senior at Georgetown University. “[My first novel] had a meaningless and pretentious title, ‘All the Points In-Between,’ and inside there was a great, big biblical flood that was just about to happen, and none of the characters had any distinguishing mark or trait, anything that could identify them as black, or white, or Latino or Asian. These characters were there to engage in a great, grand philosophical debate, the kind that I imagine come from looking at the stars.”

It was only after Mengestu was unable to get his novel published that he realized the work was “empty” because it did not engage with his own personal life and history. Mengestu came to realize that he need not sacrifice the quality of his work by writing about issues of race and politics.

Still, Mengestu wondered “why it is fair to ask all male writers of my generation what impact David Foster Wallace has had on their work, as opposed to, say, the country’s only living male Nobel laureate.”

LAVINIA PETRACHE/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Dinaw Mengestu spoke on “The Politics of Aesthetics: The Danger of Writing from the ‘Margins.’”

Students in attendance found Mengestu’s talk moving, poetic and eloquent. Frazer Tessema ’17, who is also of Ethiopian descent, thought Mengestu accurately represented the Ethiopian-American experience, adding that he found it empowering to see someone come so far and receive as much recognition as he has.

“I think he intertwines the African-American and the African experience so beautifully, and

makes it seem one,” Tessema said.

Yale professor and judge Guido Calabresi ’53 LAW ’58 believed his mother would have deeply enjoyed Mengestu’s lecture. Calabresi co-founded the lecture series which hosted Mengestu — the Finzi-Contini Lectureship — to honor his mother.

“He speaks and writes beautifully,” Calabresi said of Mengestu, noting how much his mother would have related to Mengestu’s history. Mengestu fled Ethiopia

with his family after the country’s political revolution, and similarly, Calabresi’s mother fled fascism in Italy to come to New Haven in 1939.

Included on The New Yorker’s 2010 “20 Under 40” list, Mengestu is the author of three New York Times Notable Books, including his most recent novel, “All Our Names.”

Contact LUKE CIANCARELLI at luke.ciancarelli@yale.edu .

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT Insufficient funds for club sports

“Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.”

MICHAEL JORDAN BASKETBALL PLAYER

Harvard changes Gen Ed policies HARVARD FROM PAGE 1

YALE DAILY NEWS

The Yale club men’s rugby team is one of nearly 50 club programs at Yale.

CLUB SPORTS FROM PAGE 1 although the University gives club gymnastics a “fair” amount of funding, members must pay the membership fee and raise funds due to the high cost of the sport.

The club men’s basketball team’s budget is about half University funding and half member dues, co-captain Thomas Aviles ’16 said. He added that the level of funding the team gets has historically been a barrier for members.

“I know the club team at Harvard, in this year alone, joined a league with a fairly steep entry fee, [competed in] the same regional tournament we played in with yet another noteworthy entry fee for one weekend of basketball and flew their whole team to Miami for a similar regional tournament,” Aviles said. “Had we attempted to do all of those things, we would have exhausted all our funding even before factoring in rental car costs to travel to league games, any lodging that would have been necessary, fees for referees or uniforms.”

Still, Aviles said he did not know the details of Harvard’s funding, including how much of the team’s funds come from member dues.

Member dues can be a barrier to increasing diversity in teams.

According to club cycling men’s captain Michael Grome GRD ’19, many students cannot race in cycling simply because of the financial burdens of the sport.

Each student in the team contributes $45 to $250 annually to cover events, and must also pay for his or her own clothing, bicycle, bicycle maintenance and insurance.

“Club fees can prevent a lot of students from getting into some of the more costly sports,” D’Souza said. “This can be a pretty large issue for more costly sports as you wouldn’t get enough members and many of the people who want to be a part of those clubs simply can’t.

If there was a way to have financial aid for these sports, for students who can’t pay, I think that would really improve the climate and the diversity within our clubs.”

Club cricket president Shantanu Gangwar ’16 added that some of the financial issues have been

caused by a large increase in the number of club teams over recent years, which he said has not been accompanied by an equal growth in total funding.

The addition of two new residential colleges in the fall of 2017, and the ultimate addition of 800 undergraduate students could spread the funding even thinner.

However, Migdalski said the University is “very much aware” of the incoming expansion of the student population and the additional recreation needs it will bring. The fact is currently being taken into account in the University’s and athletic department’s planning, he said. “[Migdalski’s office] has done a lot for the club in recent years,” Gangwar said. “But I have to say that some of our competitor teams at other colleges receive more support from their respective universities, and in that regard there is more that can be done.”

Although large-scale funding for their teams can cause significant stress, a majority of club athletes interviewed were satisfied with other, less costly types of support they receive from Yale athletics.

Gangwar said the office helped the club cricket team secure a field on the intramural fields last year, so that the team could start hosting home games. “[Associate Athletic Director of Payne Whitney Gymnasium Anthony Diaz] helped with the team tremendously, allowing us to use Yale Field for a game and getting us a coach bus for the league championship, which we played in for the first time ever,” Asimow said. “[Diaz] also reached out to the coach of the Yale varsity [baseball] team, who in turn gave us some old gear.”

Still, Asimow said, the team still struggles to find transportation to games and practice fields.

He added that the team’s success is due largely to the involvement and dedication of its players, rather than support from administrators.

Members of other teams cited similar experiences, and said active student contributions to a

club program is essential to keeping their teams on track.

“I think the support we get from the University is limited in a lot of ways,” student-coach and captain of club water polo Calvin Rhodes ’17 said. “We are provided funding and facilities, but the rest is pretty much on us — along with my fellow captains, I’ve had to plan and design all our practices, book travel and organize tournaments.”

The student-run Yale College Council also plays a role in Yale’s club sports program. This year’s YCC budget included $55,867.50 — nearly 15 percent of funds raised from the student activities fee — going toward grants that individual club teams apply for.

Co-captain of club wrestling Matthew Chavez ’16 said the team’s performance depends on having committed leaders in club wrestling, who have responsibilities such as reserving rooms and organizing events.

Migdalski recognized that club sports are largely student-run and said this a key element of Yale’s program.

“The biggest benefits of club sports are that they are non-regimented, flexible and studentorganized and run,” Migdalski said. “Unlike varsity sports, club sports athletes receive the learning experience of how to manage a team, fundraise, plan and conduct practices, format match schedules, coordinate travel and work within a budget.”

He added that the skills students learn from running a club sports team are skills and values that can be applied to students’ future endeavors.

Senior Associate Athletic Director Duke Diaz agreed, and said this “student-directed philosophy” is the key to the club sports experience.

“If I was not as involved with club baseball as I am, it probably would not exist,” Asimow said.

“Yet I guarantee, if you ask the people who play, it is one of the most valuable things they have done at this school.”

Contact DANIELA BRIGHENTI at daniela.brighenti@yale.edu .

mostly expressed enthusiasm about the possibility of similar changes at Yale, saying a pass-fail option for distributional requirements would reduce stress and encourage students to take challenging courses outside their major.

But according to Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway, faculty and administrators at Yale are not currently considering changes to the rules around distributional requirements, which cannot be taken Credit/D/Fail. “[The Harvard announcement] is complete news to me. I do not know of any current agitation among the [Yale] faculty on either side of the issue,” Holloway said.

“Having not studied the specific issue closely I’m not in a position to offer a firm opinion on the matter. In the past, I have heard compelling arguments advocating both sides of the debate.”

The changes to the General Education requirements at Harvard mark the culmination of a yearslong faculty review process designed to address long-standing problems in the program. A faculty report released last November concluded that General Education courses were often overenrolled and that the

program itself lacked a coherent purpose.

Yale faculty interviewed expressed mixed feelings about the prospect of similar adjustments to Yale’s distributional requirements, despite widespread student complaints that the requirements are onerous and ineffective at promoting intellectual exploration.

French lector Ruth Koizim said students taking courses Credit/D/Fail often put limited effort into their classwork.

“It is not unworth some consideration, but I have some strong reservations about making distributional requirements pass-fail,” Koizim said. “We are expecting to hold students to some standard and that is not inappropriate.”

Yale history of art professor Diana Kleiner said the changes at Harvard are focused more on evaluating the efficacy and value of the General Education program than on the question of whether the courses should be taken pass-fail. But Kleiner added that although the introduction of Credit/D/ Fail electives would likely encourage students to experiment outside their areas of expertise, it might also tempt students to pay less attention

to those classes.

All five students interviewed said they would support changing the distributional requirements at Yale to allow students to fulfill some requirements Credit/D/Fail.

Anthony Rocco ’18 said changing the system would encourage students to take harder classes rather than ones know to be easy.

“It would really appeal to athletes,” said Rocco, who plays for the varsity lacrosse team. “Because of our hectic schedule, it’s impossible to do those hard classes.”

But Xinyuan Chen ’17 said the creation of an easier, lowstress route to fulfilling the distributional requirements would represent an unnecessary adjustment to the current system.

“Yale already has classes geared to kids who aren’t in the major,” Chen said. “If you were to Credit/D one of those, it would be a bit excessive.”

Yale’s distributional and skills requirements are in humanities, sciences, social sciences, quantitative reasoning, writing and foreign language.

Contact VICTOR WANG at v.wang@yale.edu and DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY at david.yaffe-bellany@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF THE HARVARD CRIMSON

Yale administrators and professors say they are not currently considering a similar academic overhaul.

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

AROUND THE IVIES

“In the 21st century, I think the heroes will be the people who will improve the quality of life, fight poverty and introduce more sustainability.” BERTRAND PICARD SWISS PSYCHIATRIST AND BALLOONIST

T H E C O R N E L L D A I LY S U N

C O L U M B I A D A I LY S P E C TAT O R

Student Assembly discusses sustainability

40 faculty sign Apartheid Divestment Petition

BY KYLE OEFELEIN The Cornell Student Assembly addressed environmental sustainability, the transparency of course enrollment and “Big Red Change” — an online forum for students to create petitions about different university initiatives — at its meeting Thursday.

The SA passed a resolution to convert all lighting in Willard Straight Memorial Hall from incandescent to LED. This change is an easy step that will save the university both money and energy, according to Gabriel Kaufman.

“We are actually sitting under about 300 incandescent light bulbs. What that means is that we are wasting a lot of electricity,” Kaufman said. “We talk a lot about carbon neutrality.

We talk a lot about becoming more sustainable, and I think it is time we put our

money wh ere o u r mouth is.”

T h e univerCORNELL s i ty i s a b o u t one-third of the way through the process of switching from incandescent to LED lights, according to Mark Howe, director of campus energy.

The SA also passed a resolution to promote increased academic transparency during the course enrollment process. The change will give students access to course syllabi during open enrollment.

The resolution will also allow professors to post syllabi on an opt-in basis, allowing students to access both a course description and syllabus before pre-enroll, according to Kaufman.

BY TEO ARMUS Forty faculty members have signed a petition calling upon Columbia University to “divest from corporations that supply, perpetuate and profit from a system that has subjugated the Palestinian people.”

The petition, released Monday morning on the first day of Israeli Apartheid Week, notes that the signatories are in solidarity with student groups Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. CUAD demanded in February that Columbia divest from eight specific corporations “that profit from the State of Israel’s ongoing system of settler colonialism, military occupation and apartheid law” as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

“As both scholars and community members, we are professionally, intellectually and morally invested in our university. We deem it our duty to hold our institution accountable for the ethical implications of its own actions, notably its financial investments and their implications around the world,”

the petition said.

“In particular, we take issue with our financial involveCOLUMBIA m e n ts i n institutions associated with the State of Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian lands, continued violations of Palestinian human rights, systematic destruction of life and property, inhumane segregation and systemic forms of discrimination.”

In 2002, a group of 74 faculty members drafted a similar petition, calling on Columbia to divest from companies that manufacture and sell military hardware to Israel. As a policy, the university does not comment on specific holdings in its endowment portfolio.

The list of signatories includes several department chairs and prominent faculty members.

Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies professor Partha Chatterjee, who signed the petition, said in an email that he wanted to protest Israel’s security regime, which “virtually

amounts to apartheid.”

“I fully support every effort to put pressure on the Israeli government to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands,” he said.

As a gesture, it’s supposed to make Israelis think, ‘What are we doing? Where are we heading? Is this really who we want to be and how we want to relate to our Arab neighbors?’

DIRK SALOMONS Senior Lecturer, Columbia School of International and Public Affairs English professor Bruce Robbins, another signatory, compared CUAD’s campaign to efforts in the 1970s and ’80s pushing for divestment from apartheid-era South Africa, noting that many opponents labeled these efforts as “too radical” at the time.

“I have also seen what it’s like for Palestinians on the West Bank to live under the occupation,” Robbins said. “Once you’ve seen that, and you are offered a form of nonviolent protest that is also endorsed by Palestinian civil society, it seems like a no-brainer.”

Dirk Salomons, senior lecturer at the School of International and Public Affairs, said that he hopes that divestment can serve as a symbolic measure to push Israel to become more aware of the needs of its neighbors.

“One gets used to injustice, and when it goes on long enough, sometimes one takes it for granted,” Salomons said. “As a gesture, it’s supposed to make Israelis think, ‘What are we doing? Where are we heading?

Is this really who we want to be and how we want to relate to our Arab neighbors?’”

“I’ve always had a feeling as a Jew that a Jewish state should rise slightly above the lack of morality of its neighbors,” Salomons added. “It pains me to see how a country which I love and which I have visited many times can be so blind to the needs of its neighbors.”

r e c y c l e recycler e c y c l e recycle

YO U R

YDN

D A I LY

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS

“Never ask anyone over 70 how they feel.

They’ll tell you.”

GEORGE H.W. BUSH ’48 FORMER PRESIDENT AND YALE BASEBALL CAPTAIN

Yale looks toward 2016–17

A positive first step

FENCING FROM PAGE 14 by the new scoring system came in the men’s epee matchup against top-seeded Penn, as the Bulldogs managed to hold onto a lead over the Quakers until the very last bout.

Jonathan Xu ’19 was a key to that near upset with a notable victory over Penn’s Justin Yoo in the second-to-last bout. Penn had substituted in Yoo, the team’s best fencer, because of Yale’s lead late in the match, and Vella said that Xu’s 5–3 win over Yoo gave the team “a lot of hope.”

Although Vella recorded the most touches of the epee squad on the day with 42, he ultimately credited Xu with much of the team’s success in the championships. “[Xu] had the best performance on our squad,” Vella said.

“He was just fencing incredibly smart and incredibly well.”

The Yale men were not the only Bulldogs who took advantage of the cumulative scoring system. Women’s epee Lucy Friedmann ’19 skewered NYU opponent Joanna Tabor 12–4, pulling the women’s epee squad from an eight-point deficit to a single-point lead against the thirdseeded team. Though Friedmann proceeded to win the final bout 6–5 against NYU’s Han-

BRONSDON FROM PAGE 14 just makes sense. But let’s also realize that this is by no means the finish line.

Players need to be educated on the dangers of concussions from a young age.

Independent doctors, hired by conferences rather than schools, should be at every game, evaluating players and dictating whether they can return to action. More research must be conducted on the dangers of head injuries, especially in the NFL. The NFL has a long history of covering up concussion risks. A classaction lawsuit was settled last year with thousands of retired players receiving up to $5 million each for head trauma-related injuries and diseases. On the big screen, Will Smith’s “Concussion” debuted this winter and educated many fans on the dangers of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease that has been found in the brains of scores of deceased NFL players.

JULIA HENRY/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Every one of Yale’s six squads — epee, foil and saber in both men’s and women’s — placed either fourth or fifth. nah Bennett, losses elsewhere in the matchup gave the Bobcats the 45–44 team victory.

Friedmann served as anchor for her team, meaning that she closed out each matchup. In addition to her role in the near-victory over NYU’s A team, this position allowed her to top off a win against NYU’s B team, which secured Yale its final ranking of fifth. “[Anchoring is] a crucial position, and I’ve actually never done it before,” Friedmann said. “Mentally it can be very tough, but I

think I did pretty well with that.

I made comebacks and kept my cool.”

In addition to men’s epee, the Yale women’s foil and men’s saber squads made it into the semifinal rounds of their tournaments, placing fourth after losses in consolation bouts.

The U.S. Collegiate Squad Championships marked the end of team competition for the Bulldogs, as the NCAA Regionals and the NCAA Championships will feature individual Yale fencers

representing their school. Members of both teams will now take what they learned this year and look toward the future.

“I look forward to next season where we’ll have pretty much the exact same starting squad and we’ll see where we can grow and do better,” Vella said The NCAA Regionals will take place in Poughkeepsie, New York, on March 13.

Contact FLORA LIPSKY at flora.lipsky@yale.edu .

Despite that, football remains as popular as ever, with no signs of slowing down. And with the vast sums of money available to professional players, it could take a lot to convince many from pursuing gridiron glory. And for top-tier college programs that essentially act as pseudo-professional teams, no incentives currently exist to sacrifice money or the level of play in exchange for player safety.

That is why the Ivy League’s step Tuesday was so crucial and why other conferences need to follow suit. We must protect players, not only on the field, but also from head trauma that can destroy their entire lives, long after they’ve played their last down.

Change starts at the bottom. Let’s hope the Ivy League’s initiative reverberates all the way to the top.

GRANT BRONSDON is a senior in Ezra Stiles College and a former Sports Editor for the News. Contact him at grant.bronsdon@yale.edu .

First pitch of Bulldogs’ season on Friday BASEBALL FROM PAGE 14 Honorable Mention recipient, also recorded four saves and a 3–2 record in 21 appearances, with 20 coming out of the bullpen.

The depth, which figures to play a prominent role during the conference double-headers, further includes Chasen Ford ’17, a righty who tossed the secondmost innings on the club, striking out 39 batters in 49.2 innings en route to a 3–3 record.

Also coming off a 3–3 record is Eric Brodkowitz ’18, a righthander who started six games last

season and earned two completegame victories over Princeton and Harvard. Brodkowitz was impressive in the fall: Against Wesleyan, in a celebration of the two teams’ 150-year history, Brodkowitz started and held the Cardinals scoreless through the first two innings. In that game, he tossed two no-hit innings and struck out three of the seven batters he faced.

While each returning pitcher from last season is right-handed, left-handed pitcher Kumar Nambiar ’19 may provide some versatility out of the bullpen. Another

34–17 16–4 Ivy

(T-1st in Lou Gehrig)

The Lions came out on top of the Lou Gehrig Division with a 16–4 record before claiming the Ivy Championship over Dartmouth. While improving upon its 34–17 record seems a tall task, Columbia appears capable of doing so. The Lions return seven players that have earned All-Ivy League honors in their careers, including senior first baseman Nick Maguire and pitchers George Thanopoulos and Logan Boyher. Maguire slugged seven home runs and racked up 23 RBI last season, while senior Robb Paller carries a 36-game on-base streak into the season. Paller hit 0.264 with seven home runs and 35 RBI last season.

CORNELL 2015:

13–27 9–11 Ivy

(3rd in Lou Gehrig)

2015:

11–28 6–14 Ivy

(T-3rd in Red Rolfe)

YALE DAILY NEWS

Head coach John Stuper is set to begin his 24th season at the helm of the Elis.

2015:

22–15 16–4 Ivy

(T-1st in Lou Gehrig)

DARTMOUTH The Quakers finished tied with Columbia atop the Lou Gehrig Division with a 16–4 conference record. Pitcher Mike Reitcheck finished 2015 with a 5–3 record and a 1.72 ERA to lead the league. He combined with Jake Cousins to form a dominant top of the rotation. The Quaker pitching staff as a whole led the league with a 3.41 ERA. However, Penn will have to cope with the graduations of Ronnie Glenn, a left-handed pitcher who earned Second Team honors, as well as a pair of All-Ivy infielders, though Second Team selections lefty Mike Reitcheck and outfielder Matt Greskoff return to Philadelphia.

HARVARD

Of the four Big Red players to earn All-Ivy honors a year ago, three have since graduated, leaving only second baseman Tommy Wagner. He received honorable mention recognition after batting 0.348 in Ivy play with a team-high 15 RBI. Cornell’s inexperience may limit its ability to improve upon last year’s 9–11 mark, though perhaps those returning can build off the team’s three-game win streak to end last season’s Ivy slate of action. However Cornell will again have to deal with strong Columbia and Penn squads within its division, after the Big Red went 1–7 against the two schools last season.

BROWN

Contact JACOB MITCHELL at jacob.mitchell@yale.edu .

PENN

COLUMBIA 2015:

freshman, right-handed pitcher Scott Politz ’19, is set to compete for a spot in the rotation.

“It’s important for the pitching staff to get off to a good start and keep the teams in games, which we didn’t do last year,” Ford said.

“We have a lot of guys who experienced that and need to use it as motivation to keep it from happening again.”

The first game of the Texas A&M three-game series will commence on Friday at 7:30 p.m.

T-

6

The Bears open their season in the USA Baseball-Irish Classic this weekend, with Bucknell, Notre Dame and Albany all on the schedule. Brown matched Yale’s 6–14 Ivy record last season, 10 games behind division-winner Dartmouth. This year’s squad will be built around junior centerfielder and leadoff hitter Rob Henry, an All-Ivy Second Team selection last season. Henry built a 0.363 batting average behind a league-best 58 hits, while leading Brown in nearly every offensive category. Brown’s weak link a season ago was its rotation, as the Bears posted a 7.14 team ERA, second-worst in the league.

2015:

18–24 7–13 Ivy

(2nd in Red Rolfe)

Led by a solid group of seniors, the Crimson finished second in the Red Rolfe Division last season with a 7–13 record. However, skipper Bill Decker will have to replace First Team All-Ivy League catcher Ethan Ferreira and Second Teamers infielder Jake McGuiggan and centerfielder Mike Martin who all graduated last spring. Infielder Mitch Klug, who hit 0.308 in 143 plate appearances last season, and sophomore outfielder Connor Quinn will carry the offensive load for the Crimson. With the departure of Ferreira, catcher D.J. Link will take over behind the plate. He hit 0.309 with 15 RBI as the designated hitter last spring.

PRINCETON 2015:

7–32 4–16 Ivy

(4th in Lou Gehrig)

If the Tigers hope to claw their way out of the basement of the Ivy League — Princeton won the fewest games in league and non-league action among Ancient Eight squads last season — they will have to rely on their infield. Second baseman Danny Hoy earned First Team honors while third baseman Billy Arendt was a selected honorable mention.

The duo led the team in hitting at 0.311 and 0.299, respectively, and will attempt to reverse a worrisome team trend in their senior seasons: Princeton went from 11 Ivy wins in their freshman campaigns to eight in 2014 and just four last year.

2015:

21–22 16–4 Ivy

(1st in Red Rolfe)

The Big Green has already played three games this season, dropping contests to Iowa, Villanova and Indiana State. After demolishing the competition in the Ivy League’s Red Rolfe Division last season, Dartmouth will look to build upon that 16–4 performance this spring. One step in the right direction is the return of the reigning Ivy League Pitcher of the Year, Duncan Robinson, who was named the team’s co-captain along with infielder Thomas Roulis for this year. Robinson picked up a loss against Indiana State, but he was 6–2 last season with a 2.62 ERA and a career-high 52 strikeouts.

YALE Inside Lacrosse

2015:

15–23 6–14 Ivy

(T-3rd in Red Rolfe)

A year removed from a disappointing 6–14 campaign, the Bulldogs will rely on a veteran staff, some returning pop in the lineup as well as a potentially rejuvenating freshman class to try and make a run for the Red Rolfe Division title. Yale went 4–4 against division opponents Harvard and Brown last season, but was swept by division-winner Dartmouth in four games. The offense, which tied for fourth in runs last season, will have to cope with the loss of Ivy batting leader Eric Hsieh ’15 while the pitching staff will seek to improve upon its leagueworst 7.53 ERA.

2015 Ivy League Standings T-1 T-1 3 4 1 2 T-3 T-3

Lou Gehrig Division Columbia* 16–4 Penn 16–4 Cornell 9–11 Princeton 4–16 Red Rolfe Division Dartmouth 16–4 Harvard 7–13 Yale 6–14 Brown 6–14

*2015 Ivy League Champion

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 11

BULLETIN BOARD

TODAY’S FORECAST

TOMORROW

Rain, mainly before 10am. Breezy, with a southwest wind 16 to 21 mph in the afternoon.

FRIDAY

High of 34, low of 23.

High of 35, low of 24.

A WITCH NAMED KOKO BY CHARLES BRUBAKER

ON CAMPUS WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2 1:00 PM Retirement: Planning for the Rest of the Story. All are warmly invited to this talk by medical school professor Leo Cooney MED ’69. Cooney stepped down as chief of the Section of Geriatrics in 2012, but continues to have an active clinical, educational and program development role in the section.

Sterling Memorial Library (120 High St.), Lecture Hall.

4:00 PM “Ukraine Two Years Later: Unfinished Revolution?”

A roundtable discussion among Ambassador Yuriy Sergeyev, former permanent representative of Ukraine to the U.N.; Thomas Graham, senior fellow at Jackson Institute for Global Affairs; and David Cameron, professor of political science. Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.), Rm. 208.

THURSDAY, MARCH 3 4:00 PM Where History and Autobiography Meet: Gathering Life Stories of Latinas in the Midwest. Theresa Delgadillo will discuss her recently published book “Latina Lives in Milwaukee,” which examines women’s everyday leadership experiences in religion, education, business, politic, and family, including women’s struggles with exclusion based on ethnicity, race, gender and sexual orientation. William L. Harkness Hall (100 Wall St.), Rm. 207.

7:00 PM In Between: A One-Man Show. “In Between” is a semiautobiographical one-man show that portrays the complexities and contradictions inherent in Palestinian-Israeli identity.

Ibrahim Miari stands on the precipice between two cultures. His play recalls his childhood in Acre, memories of his Jewish and Palestinian grandmothers, of war and of the struggle to shape and understand his own multifaceted identity. Morse-Stiles Crescent Theater (302 York St.).

To reach us: E-mail editor@yaledailynews.com Advertisements 2-2424 (before 5 p.m.)

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Mailing address Yale Daily News P.O. Box 209007 New Haven, CT 06520

Questions or comments about the fairness or accuracy of stories should be directed to Editor in Chief Stephanie Addenbrooke at (203) 432-2418.

Bulletin Board is a free service provided to groups of the Yale community for events. Listings should be submitted online at yaledailynews.com/events/ submit. The Yale Daily News reserves the right to edit listings.

To visit us in person 202 York St. New Haven, Conn. (Opposite JE) FOR RELEASE MARCH 2, 2016

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

CLASSIFIEDS

CROSSWORD Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Lewis ACROSS 1 Gin and tonic, e.g.

6 Outback birds 10 “Pardon the Interruption” channel 14 Photographer Leibovitz 15 Island hoppers 17 1985 film featuring Doc Brown and Marty McFly 19 Sesame __ 20 Julio to julio 21 Potter’s practice 22 Possible place for a train ticket 27 AFL partner 28 __ Bator 29 Dude 32 How storybooks are often read 35 Bibliography abbr.

36 “Nessun dorma,” e.g.

37 Concept that small changes can have large consequences, as in theoretical time travel 40 Cheese with an edible rind 41 Shakes a leg 42 White House staffers 43 “You got it!”

44 Bombard 45 Michael Caine title 46 Improvisational music genre 51 Pastoral tribe of Kenya 54 Sch. with a Phoenix campus 55 “__ you nuts?”

56 Olympic medley found in order at the starts of this puzzle’s four other longest answers 61 Heredity sources 62 Gala or ball 63 Got off the ground 64 Brogan or brogue 65 Fizzy beverages

EGG DONORS WANTED Give a family the choice at happiness Receive up to $48,000

CLASSICAL MUSIC

24 Hours a Day. 98.3 FM, and on the web at WMNR.org.

“Pledges accepted: 1-800-345-1812”

Quality for FREE Egg Freezing Apply at donate-eggs.com

By Pawel Fludzinski

DOWN 1 Big wheel 2 Broadcast sign 3 Claudius, to Caligula 4 Suffix with peace 5 Shelve 6 Legally prohibit 7 “Whatevs” 8 Oil-rich fed.

9 50+, e.g., on a L’Oréal tube: Abbr.

10 Erode 11 Form-fitting 12 Meter starter?

13 Fraction of a min.

16 Light bulb unit 18 Hip about 23 Under 90 degrees 24 Factory stores 25 Potter’s supplies 26 Mustard family member 29 Born partner 30 Stuffed pepper filling 31 Wild things to sow 32 First name in advice 33 It may be found at the end of the line 34 Big name in elevators 35 Taxpayer’s option 36 Burning

Tuesday’s Puzzle Solved

3/2/16

SUDOKU LUKEWARM COFFEE

2 7 1

4 7 6 9 1 3 8

7 4 ©2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

38 South Korea’s first president 39 Learning opportunities for many 44 Do the do just so 45 Betting aid: Abbr.

46 Renowned 47 Café cup 48 Did a fall chore 49 Venue that often sells its naming rights

3/2/16

50 Kid brothers or sisters, at times 51 High-ranking NCO 52 __ bit: slightly 53 Trig ratio 57 Apple mobile platform 58 Japanese drama 59 Shine, in brand names 60 Ab __: from day one

5

9 5 7 4 5 2 3 4

6 5 9 7 3 8 4 2

8 4

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

ARTS & CULTURE Dada ball launches YUAG exhibit

BY VEENA MCCOOLE STAFF REPORTER Modern art enthusiasts donned avant-garde attire to enjoy a celebration of Dadaism at the Yale University Art Gallery’s “Dada Ball.”

Held last Thursday evening at the YUAG, the event was organized in conjunction with “Everything is Dada,” an exhibition commemorating the centennial of the eponymous artistic movement. Attendees were encouraged to wear Dadainspired costumes, and were served a variety of playful finger foods. An unconventional soundtrack and photo booth paid homage to irreverence that characterized early 20th-century Dadaists.

Frauke Josenhans, curator of “Everything is Dada,” said she thought the ball was a fitting tribute to Dada events that took place 100 years ago in Zurich, which brought together artists from different backgrounds for improvised performances at the Cabaret Voltaire.

“The Dada Ball connected the art gallery with the larger community in a wonderful celebration of the Dada spirit, which, clearly, is still alive,” Josenhans said.

Many of the costumes worn by attendees were inspired by the works on display in the YUAG exhibition, Josenhans explained.

She added that homemade renditions of Jean Arp’s Schnurrhut — one of the pieces on view in “Everything is Dada” — were popular costume choices.

Daphne Martin ’19, who attended Thursday’s event, said that she was impressed by the variety of outlandish clothing choices, which she added seemed representative of the aesthetic nature of the movement.

“I was overwhelmed and pleasantly surprised by the plethora of people in ridiculous

costumes,” Martin said.

The theme of overturning expectations extended to other elements of the ball. Quinoa canapés were presented in ice-cream cones and dessert-inspired dips were served on savory platters.

Attendees sipped “fake absinthe,” served in place of one of the Dada era’s most popular alcoholic beverages.

Jin Ai Yap ’17, the DJ for the event, said her soundtrack was inspired by Dada sound poems.

Yap altered songs’ pitches, added filters and played with tempo to create sounds reminiscent of the movement’s erratic poetic stylings. In particular, she highlighted PC Music — a record label that satirizes pop music by combining spoken or poorly sung vocals with “manufacturedsounding” beats — as a source of inspiration for her multi-layered musical creations.

The event’s photography station was intended as a revolt against the traditional photo booth, explained Mistina Hanscom, whose photography firm, Lotta Studio, conceptualized the structure. Hanscom mentioned that the perspective of the booth, which was divided into two separate halves, “force[d] closeness, provoking comfort or discomfort in patrons while maneuvering around the piercing skewers.”

Josenhans said the ball accurately conveyed the Dada spirit and gave YUAG patrons a chance to consider the works on display in the exhibition in a more experiential context.

“The Dada Ball exceeded all of my expectations; it was playful, irreverent, eclectic and most importantly everyone was enjoying themselves,” Josenhans noted.

“Everything is Dada” will remain on display at the Yale University Art Gallery through July 3.

Contact VEENA MCCOOLE at veena.mccoole@yale.edu .

CATALINA SEQUEIRA/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

YUAG celebrated the opening of “Everything is Dada” with a ball inspired by the art movement’s aesthetic.

YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 13

“Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.”

MARCEL DUCHAMP PAINTER, SCULPTOR AND WRITER

Exhibit showcases Beaux-Arts pedagogy

BY SAMUEL LEE CONTRIBUTING REPORTER D raw i n gs, p h o tog ra p h s and assignment sheets from a recently rediscovered collection offer a glimpse into the world of architectural education at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

“An American in Paris: the Beaux-Arts Education of Shepherd Stevens,” which opened Tuesday at the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, showcases artifacts from the personal archive of Stevens, a professor at the Yale School of Architecture from 1920 to 1947. Curated

by Suzanne Noruschat, an archi-

vist in the Manuscripts and Archives Department of the Yale University Library, the exhibition highlights Stevens’ architectural training at the École des Beaux-Arts. Drawing on selections from the Shepherd Stevens Papers — an archive bequeathed to the library decades ago and brought to light four years ago by a researcher working with the collection — Noruschat said the show offers a valuable perspective on the typical trajectory of a particular class of architect at the beginning of the 20th century.

“This is a typical snapshot of a typical class of architects, predominantly male,” Noruschat

explained. “[The exhibition] provides a new view into the scope of the pedagogical process of the École, as well as the social life of the students affiliated with the school.”

Noruschat said Stevens’ archive was rediscovered four years ago by a researcher who was writing about American architects trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. Papers contained in the collection chronicle Stevens’ education in Paris, his broader architectural practice once back in the United States and his teaching strategies as a professor in the School of Architecture.

The exhibition displays sketches from Stevens’ years as an under-

graduate at Columbia University, photographic travelogues and the drawing that secured his admission to the École.

Prior to the opening of “An American in Paris,” conservation policies had limited viewing of works in Stevens’ collection to a select number of students in the School of Architecture enrolled in classes on architectural drawing. Kerri Sancomb, the exhibition’s production coordinator, added that related conservation issues obliged organizers to digitize certain particularly fragile photographs and documents which were too delicate for extended display.

Noruschat said she hopes

exposing the Stevens archive to a broader audience will generate greater interest in the research collection. She added that the collection — which contains speeches, correspondence and diaries kept by Stevens — offers extensive material on the social and professional networks of American architects affiliated with the Beaux-Arts tradition.

Current students at the School of Architecture expressed interest in the exhibition’s presentation of pedagogical strategies common to a Beaux-Arts education, which continue to influence architectural teaching today.

“The École’s focus on an architectural education based on

design and competition is still very much part of the program in schools such as Yale,” Nicolas Kemper ARC ’16 said.

Noruschat added that “An American in Paris” also “speaks to a broader narrative” on display in “Pedagogy and Place: Celebrating 100 Years of Architectural Education at Yale,” the School of Architecture’s centennial exhibition, which features a historical survey of the institution’s teaching practices since its founding.

The exhibit will remain on display through Aug. 19.

Contact SAMUEL LEE at samuel.lee@yale.edu .

NGAN VU/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

A new exhibition at the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library highlights the legacy of Beaux-Arts architectural pedagogy.

School of Music program supplements public arts education

BY IVONA IACOB STAFF REPORTER For nearly 10 years, the Yale School of Music’s Music in Schools Initiative has worked to enrich musiceducation programs in New Haven Public Schools.

The program was originally envisioned as a way to connect the School of Music to the broader New Haven community, Rachel Glodo MUS ’13, the initiative’s music administrator, said.

Its centerpiece project brings School of Music students into public schools to act as “teaching artists,” where they work alongside NHPS music teachers to supplement the system’s performing arts curriculum. According to Michael Yaffe, dean of the School of Music, Music in Schools gives students at the Music School a chance to engage with New Haven beyond Yale.

“It is really important for great musicians to give back to the community and have a social conscience,” Yaffe said.

“We are trying to show them how important it is to make a difference in someone’s life, especially if they are on a different end of the socioeconomic scale.”

Glodo explained that the program’s vision of supplementary music education

centers around both mentorship and “active musicmaking.” She emphasized the importance of the School of Music’s partnership with NHPS in coordinating many of the initiative’s activities throughout the year, such as the teaching artist program. Supplementary programming — often organized in tandem with NHPS — includes a student orchestra, intensive summer music lessons, music festivals, solo concerts in Sprague Hall for student performers and symposia on the role of music education in community development.

According to Glodo, much of the work of Music in Schools is team-taught by public school teachers and School of Music graduate students.

“Our program is intended to support and augment music education in the public school classroom, and thus most our activities include not only Music School graduate students, but NHPS teachers as well,” Glodo explained.

Complementing the initiative’s recurring programs, Music in Schools also features special events, Glodo added. This January, the initiative provided free Yale Philharmonia concert tickets to 120 of the program’s stu-

dents and family members, and hosted a pre-concert party for attendees to interact with guest conductor Caroline Kuan. Next Saturday, March 12, five of the initiative’s student participants will perform with the U.S. Navy Concert Band, and on March 19 the School of Music will host three concerts featuring Music in Schools students.

Ruben Rodriguez MUS ’11, the initiative’s lead teacher, highlighted the program’s social impact.

“For some of [the students] it is about indispensable and healthy self-esteem, while for others it is about expressing themselves and experiencing music as an outlet for feelings and life struggles,” Rodriguez said.

“For others it is a way to be part of the community they live in … for others it is to have a social network — real, not virtual — where they feel accepted, respected and appreciated; [and] for others it is the opportunity to enjoy art and discover or develop their talents … a path to define who they are and, through music, build their dreams.”

The Yale School of Music was founded in 1894.

Contact IVONA IACOB at ivona.iacob@yale.edu .

ELIZABETH MILES/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

A School of Music initiative supplements NHPS music education programs.

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SPORTS QUICK HITS

NYASHA SARJU ’16 IVY LEAGUE PLAYER OF THE WEEK Sarju, who led her team to its first win in over a month on Saturday at Dartmouth, earned recognition for her work with her first Ivy League Player of the Week honor of the season. Sarju combined for 50 points and 18 rebounds over two games this past weekend.

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MAKAI MASON ’18 ALSO IVY PLAYER OF THE WEEK Mason was another player who played a vital role in a Yale victory, as the Eli point guard hit a jump shot with five seconds remaining to send Yale’s game against Dartmouth into overtime. He then made four free throws near the end of overtime to lock up Yale’s 76–71 win.

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“We’re hoping … to turn up some chaos and give our bigger bats some good opportunities to knock us in.”

SIMON WHITEMAN ’19 BASEBALL YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016 · yaledailynews.com

Elis set to embark on 2016 campaign

BY JACOB MITCHELL STAFF REPORTER When the Yale baseball team opens its season on Friday against No. 4 Texas A&M in College Station, Texas, former U.S. President and Yale baseball captain George H.W. Bush ’48 will be in attendance and may even throw out the first pitch.

The president will have the opportunity to watch the team attempt an upset against a topranked SEC team, a feat which the Elis are hoping to accomplish for the second time in three seasons.

Two seasons ago, the Bulldogs toppled the then-No. 2 Louisiana State Tigers by a final score of 8–7 in the team’s opening weekend. The victory jumpstarted a season that ultimately ended one game short of the Ivy League Championship Series, though the Bulldogs’ 15–23 (6–14 Ivy) record in 2015 season was good for just third in the Ivy League’s Red Rolfe Division.

“Last year was a pretty disappointing year for all of us,” third baseman Richard Slenker ’17 said.

“It was clear what we needed to change, and we have all done our best to make those changes and hopefully they turn out well.”

Entering 2016, the Bulldogs feature a solid mix of experience and newcomers. The roster consists of five seniors, four of whom are starters split evenly between the field and the pitcher’s mound.

Right-handed pitcher Chris Moates ’16, who was named captain during the offseason, and righty Chris Lanham ’16 will

head the rotation while middle infielders Tom O’Neill ’16 and Nate Adams ’16 provide experienced bats for the Bulldog lineup.

Much of the offensive burden this season will fall on the shoulders of Harrison White ’17, who hit 0.302 last season with 12 RBI while primarily serving as a designated hitter, and Slenker. Slenker notched a 0.290 batting average and team-highs in home runs and doubles with two and 11 respectively last season, while also stealing a team-high 10 bases.

“I had a pretty strong freshman year but I got hurt, and I came back last season and had a good year. I had one bad weekend at Harvard that numberswise skewed the stats a little bit,” said Slenker, who competed in the Cape Cod Baseball League as well as the New England Baseball Collegiate League during the offseason. “I played 50–70 games this summer. I had a good summer and I am comfortable and healthy. I think I am going to be able to have a great year.”

Head coach John Stuper will have to replace graduated first baseman Eric Hsieh ’15, a First Team All-Ivy League player last season who led the conference with a 0.370 batting average. Among the candidates to fill that void are Griffen Dey ’19, Alec Hoeschel ’17 and Benny Wanger ’19. Whoever wins that job may be joined in the lineup by second baseman Simon Whiteman ’19 and centerfielder Tim DeGraw ’19, two freshmen who made an impact in the Eli lineup during the team’s fall slate of games.

BASEBALL

The freshmen experienced their first taste of college baseball in October, as the Bulldogs hosted the annual City Series against Southern Connecticut State University and the University of New Haven. In the consolation game against UNH, Whiteman collected three hits and one stolen base, flashing the skill set that can help him make an immediate impact on the field.

“I play for more of a speedoriented game, as does Tim DeGraw,” Whiteman said. “We’re hoping to get on the bases as much as possible so we can run around, turn up some chaos and give our bigger bats some good opportunities to knock us in.

We’re both looking to be tablesetters for the other guys in the lineup this year.”

After the team’s mediocre finish last season, the Bulldogs are poised to improve upon that record, due in part to a veteran pitching staff. Though the staff ranked last in the Ancient Eight in 2015 with a 7.53 staff ERA, the team’s top seven inning-eaters return to this year’s club.

In addition to Moates and Lanham, who combined for five wins and 100.2 innings pitched in 2015, righties Mason Kukowski ’18 and Drew Scott ’18 look to build upon their promising debut campaigns. Scott logged 49 innings and finished the year with a 4.04 ERA to go along with 24 strikeouts, while Kukowski had the lowest ERA on the team for any pitcher that threw more than one inning. Kukowski, an All-Ivy SEE BASEBALL PAGE 10

JACOB MITCHELL/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Yale opens its season this weekend in Texas, squaring off against No. 4 Texas A&M for a three-game series.

Fencers finish team competition

GRANT BRONSDON

Heading in the right direction Change rarely happens at the top, even in sports.

Ask the NBA, where the threepoint arc was not introduced until 1979, a dozen years after its use by the upstart American Basketball Association. In baseball, some minor league contests feature a pitch clock to help speed up the game, and this trial run is being used to inform potential MLB rule changes down the road.

It’s precisely due to this history that gives the Ivy League’s pending decision to ban tackling in football practices, as reported on Tuesday in The New York Times, such weight — but there is still more to be done.

Though the eight Ivy League schools haven’t won a national championship in football since the era of leather helmets, nor do they contend for the best recruits or the top coaches in the country, the news that the Ancient Eight will follow Dartmouth’s lead by forbidding full-contact hitting in practice is a huge step. It makes the Ivy League the first conference in the country to stop tackling and to recognize the concussion epidemic for what it is: a threat to football and a threat to general human wellness.

In the fall of 2014, I helped edit a three-part series on concussions at Yale, and what we found was disturbing. Student-athletes with concussions reported “always [having] a headache” in social situations, not remembering having finished tests, lasting insomnia, not being able to look at a computer screen. These aren’t simply injuries that hamper one’s playing ability — they severely impact one’s life.

It should be noted that the Ivy League has already made strides in reducing concussions, as it already possesses among the NCAA’s strongest limits in fullcontact practices.

But this additional step demonstrates commitment and concern toward student-athletes beyond the norm. And if Football Bowl Subdivision conferences start pursuing these rules as united leagues — thus diminishing the competitive disadvantage of individual programs in installing such regulations — coaches can truly embrace caring about the well-being of their players.

Thank you, Ivy football coaches, for agreeing that this SEE BRONSDON PAGE 10

STAT OF THE DAY 23

JULIA HENRY/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Though none of the six Yale teams placed in the top three of a bracket, the Bulldogs walked away proud of multiple near upsets.

BY FLORA LIPSKY CONTRIBUTING REPORTER With each weapon squad competing in a separate tournament bracket, the Yale men’s and women’s fencing teams produced consistent performances at the U.S. Collegiate Squad Championships on Sunday. All six Eli teams placed at or above the seeding at which they entered the event.

FENCING Playing in brackets that each featured between seven and 10

schools, the Eli women took fifth place in both saber and epee while taking fourth in foil.

The men did the reverse, with their top epee and saber squads placing fourth and foil falling to fifth. Although the Bulldogs failed to crack the top three in any weapon, Yale fencers expressed pride in a few narrow losses, most notably a 45–43 score against Penn in men’s epee and a 45–44 showing against NYU in women’s epee.

“Penn came in as a topranked squad, we were number five and we were ahead of them until the last two min-

utes — well, to the last minute really,” men’s epee Avery Vella ’18 said. “It would have been really great to beat them and to go to the finals, but we had a really strong showing from our epee squad.”

Unlike Yale’s meets earlier in the season, the event featured a scoring system that adds up points from all matches rather than simply the number of bouts won.

Women’s captain and saber fencer Joanna Lew ’17 noted that the new system — which allows bouts to continue for longer than in dual meets —

requires a different strategy.

The goal is not only to defeat one’s opponent in a match, she said, but to accumulate as many points as possible in a specific time frame.

“I think that the bouts the way we fenced them this weekend are a lot of fun,” Lew said.

“There are chances for epic comebacks and for crazy turnarounds, and it’s definitely a lot more thrilling in that sense because they’re a lot more up in the air.”

One such moment afforded SEE FENCING PAGE 10

THE NUMBER OF GAMES THE YALE BASEBALL TEAM WILL PLAY ON THE ROAD IN ITS FIRST 25 CONTESTS. Besides a home doubleheader on March 19 versus Holy Cross, the Bulldogs will not play at Yale Field until April 6 against Fairfield.