Yale Daily News Magazine | January 2022

PROTEST AND PROGRESS A History of Student Protest at Yale

Feature by Lazo Gitchos Page 25 VOL. CXLIV ISSUE 2 JANUARY 2022

EDITORS’ NOTE Dear readers, Welcome to our January issue! The product of several months of hard work from our editorial team, this issue is all about reclaiming hope, and for Gen Z, stepping into adulthood, in a year already being dubbed 2020-too. How does one find meaning in life when they should be focused on growing up but instead they are thinking about the viability of their future?

Magazine Editors in Chief Claire Lee Marie Sanford Managing Editors Abigail Sylvor Greenberg Oliver Guinan Galia Newberger Associate Editors Isa Dominguez Sarah Feng Zack Hauptman Charlotte Hughes Samhitha Josyula Margot Lee Dante Motley Ana Padilla Castellanos Sean Pergola Production & Design Editors Jose Estrada Rachel Folmar Naz Onder Stephanie Shao Isaac Yu Photography Editors Zoe Berg Karen Lin Regina Sung Vaibhav Sharma Illustration Editors Cecilia Lee Sophie Henry Copy Editors Josie Jahng Hailey O’Connor Chris Lee Yingying Zhao Caroline Parker

As COVID-19 cases surge across the nation due to the Omicron variant, feelings of uncertainty and instability arise once more. Some of our stories reflect this uncertain feeling that many students have been experiencing. Wilhelmina Graff explores the observed growing relationship Gen Z has to astrology in her piece “Beyond Costar: Astrology in the 21st Century.” Sarah Feng describes feelings of youth and attraction in her poem “Young, Dumb, &.” Zelda Barnz explores youth mental health as students increasingly rely on social media during the ongoing pandemic in her piece “Plugging Off.” Of course, in times of uncertainty, young people are also known for their unwavering grit. Lazo Gitchos’s cover story “Protest and Progress: A History of Student Activism at Yale’’ tracks the tenuous relationship students have had with administration in the past centuries and explores the present day trials of student organizations like Black Students for Disarmament at Yale and Students Unite Now. Dante Motley reflects on the creative collaborations developed within the film community at Yale in his Insight “Industry Connections.”

As we move forward in the new year, we aim to continue to strengthen our readership with stories that speak to real issues faced by students and members of the greater New Haven community. The semester ahead brings us new challenges and opportunities that command the attention of journalists and readers alike, and we hope we can do them justice.

Until next time, Claire and Marie AKA Marie Claire :)

4 Executive Order 14042: The Fight for Vaccine Exemptions at Yale CHARLOTTE HUGHES

Publisher Christian Martinez

7 poem Gentle Mother ADIN FEDER

Cover Illustration by Sophie Henry

8

Editor in Chief & President Rose Horowitch

Assistant Design Editors Chris de Santis Catherine Kwon Chen Lin Yash Roy Anika Seth Sophie Sonnenfeld

Plugging Off ZELDA BARNZ 16 personal essay MADELINE ART

2 | January 2022

11

INDUSTRY CONNECTIONS: Inside the Insight by Dante Motley

TABLE OF CONTENTS

18

Photo by Zoe Berg

30

SUNDAY STROLL Photo by Leet Miller

REORIENTING DIRECTED STUDIES Insight by Abigail Sylvor Greenberg

22 personal essay Confessions from the Third Place KYLIE VOLAVONGSA 25 feature Protest and Progress LAZO GITCHOS

12

31 poem Young, Dumb, & SARAH FENG 36 A Town of Sharks ARIEL KIM

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BEYOND COSTAR: ASTROLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY Insight by Wilhemina Graff

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INSIGHT

Executive Order 14042: The Fight for Vaccine Exemption

BY CHARLOTTE HUGHES

I

t is a brisk Saturday morning in November, and Rob and Jennifer Frost sit at a table in Louise’s Homemade Food and Baked Goods. Coffee steams behind the cashier’s counter and bright red curtains filter light into the small restaurant nestled in a West Haven strip mall.

Rob Frost clutches a simple black notebook containing a single piece of paper, folded in half. The letter reveals that he seeks an exemption from the COVID-19 vaccine — or as he calls it, the COVID injection — due to the lack of a “long-term study on this type of vaccine.”

A lifelong hockey fan, Frost worked as the athletic trainer, or the unofficial “go-to person for anything medical” for the Yale men’s hockey team before his termination in July 2021. Frost, who has remained skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccine since its initial distribution in the United States in December 2020, was terminated from his job when his exemption request was rejected by the University on Aug. 3, 2021.

Few at Yale share the Frosts’ vaccine skepticism. The University has a 99.7 percent

4 | January 2022

vaccination rate for undergraduate students and a 93.2 percent vaccination rate for staff.

For the 2021-22 school year, the University mandated that all staff have a COVID-19 vaccine or a University-approved medical or religious exemption.

However, Yale still allowed employees with University-approved strongly held personal belief exemptions to hold their jobs in summer 2021. After Rob Frost’s personal belief exemption was rejected and his job was terminated, his wife Jennifer Frost, an independent college consultant, wrote to President Peter Salovey’s office.

She said Salovey himself didn’t respond.

The seemingly inadequate response was from someone else in the president’s office “[saying] ‘Oh, we understand you’re upset.’” The Frosts paid $1,500 for an attorney, recommended to them by other people challenging the vaccine mandate on a Facebook group called Connecticut Residents Against Medical Mandates, or CTRAMM. The group would later write a letter on Frost’s behalf asking for his job back or some form of severance. They never received a response.

INSIGHT

At the same time, Yale granted vaccine exemption requests based on perhaps even more extreme ideologies. In the summer of 2021, Yale student Kendall Cote NUR ’23 submitted a religious belief exemption request to the University with the support of the Connecticut lawyer and self-identified “general hell-raiser” Cameron Atkinson. According to a blog post written by Atkinson, Cote requested this exemption on the grounds that “currently available COVID-19 vaccines were either manufactured with cells derived from an aborted fetus or tested using cells derived from an aborted fetus.”

Atkinson wrote that his client could not receive the vaccine without “violating her conscience.” He also described the University’s COVID-19 policies as “boneheaded, bigoted, and discriminatory.”

Yale granted her the exemption.

This is despite the fact that even the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an “extremist” anti-abortion group, found the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines ethically uncontroversial since fetal cell cultures are not necessary to produce these vaccines.

Though the Johnson & Johnson vaccine does use fetal cell cultures to produce and manufacture the vaccine, the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission both found that receiving the J&J vaccine “morally acceptable.”

For Rob Frost, “it seemed random who was getting denied” and accepted.

“I do not consent to being a part of this experiment,” Frost wrote in his vaccine exemption request. “I strongly believe that every citizen has the right to choose medical intervention and it should not be forced upon any person through means of coercion or threat of job loss.

Medical tyranny and manipulation is never OK.” Frost said Yale has not helped with his job search after terminating his employment. He said he declined a custodial job the University suggested to him by Yale Human Resources. While he hopes to stay in athletic training, with all his qualifications, skills and experience, he feels “a lot of places won’t even look at you without the vaccination.” As such, he’s taking “sort of a pause.”

The Frosts, who have four children, say they became skeptical of the U.S. health care system after they sought treatment for one of their daughter’s Type 1 diabetes.

When Rob Frost’s job with Yale fell through last summer, Jennifer Frost used what she called her mom’s instinct to spend her “every day off, either getting [medical supplies] for our daughter or fighting with insurance.”

The Frosts are not unique in their skepticism. In a recent Gallup poll, only 23 percent of Americans held “a great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence” in the American health care system.

The Frosts, along with other medical skeptics, have found a support network on social media. Jennifer Frost is a member of CTRAMM. It is “a total grassroots organization,” she told me, “a group of people seeing how they can support each other.”

This right-wing group, self-described as founded to preserve and protect peoples’ vaccine exemptions at work, school and daycare, fights against mandatory vaccination. After accusing Facebook of “C€nsoRsh!p” it has since moved to encrypted networks such as Telegram, a messaging app, and the Mighty Network, an app that connects people by shared interests.

Both are favored by right-wing groups for their lack of regulation, after Big Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter worked to curb misinformation on their sites by deleting offending accounts. CTRAMM’s slate of planned events included an ice cream social on Nov. 20, 2021 for “kids who have been inappropriately disciplined for unconstitutional mask mandates,” per a post on Facebook.

The Frosts have not only found online communities like CTRAMM sympathetic to their COVID-19 vaccine skepticism, but also found degrees of support from their homeschool community and church.

Jennifer Frost recounted her frustration when their son joined a recreational hockey team that required the players be vaccinated or receive regular testing. The Frosts were frustrated with these additional

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INSIGHT requirements for their unvaccinated son to remain playing with the team.

“What kid is going to want to deal with that, like, scarlet letter [of being unvaccinated and set apart from their peers] on their face?” she asked. “Now you’re pitting a kid against their parent, who’s in charge of their medical and health decisions.”

Frost told me that he is also skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccines because he believes the vaccine might cause myocarditis, a rare inflammation of the heart. “[Myocarditis linked to the COVID-19 vaccine is] very rare.

But it does happen. It’s not widely published, because I think mainstream media doesn’t want to sound alarms or anything, but you can definitely find [afflicted] boys who are getting vaccinated between the ages of 12 and 18,” Frost said.

Scott Roberts, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine and associate medical director for infection prevention, while acknowledging these rare cases of myocarditis, emphasized that people are more likely to contract myocarditis from contracting COVID-19 than from receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.

Frost gathers much of his COVID-19 information from the Center for Disease Prevention and Control’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting, or VAERS, website, a database

6 | January 2022

that compiles reports of patients’ adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine, among others. He also cites Twitter and Robert Malone, a medical doctor and infectious-disease researcher suspended from Twitter for spreading vaccine misinformation, as sources of his COVID-19 information.

The VAERS website warns that its wealth of data may contain “incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable” evidence and that it should be interpreted in the context of other scientific information — not used to make a claim about the “existence, severity, frequency, or rates” of problems associated with the COVID-19 vaccine.

The website provides a guide to interpreting its data and warns that some reported side effects of the vaccine may be coincidental, but these disclaimers have not stopped COVID-19 skeptics from plumbing the site for evidence.

Regardless of Frost and Cote’s summer 2021 objections, Yale University updated its COVID-19 vaccination policy on Nov. 17, 2021, in order to comply with President Biden’s contested Executive Order 14042. The new policy states that “faculty and staff who previously obtained a strongly held personal belief exemption must either be fully vaccinated or have received a university-approved medical or religious exemption by January 18, 2022.”

Anyone who does not comply with the policy will receive “progressive discipline.”

“Yale has done a fantastic job … ultimately, I think, by forcing decisions, when there is not a true medical reason to be unvaccinated,” said Howard Forman, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, who wholeheartedly approved of the University’s COVID-19 policy.

“By working with people, I think Yale did a lot of the heavy lifting [of enforcing vaccination] on their own without having a federal mandate in place.”

COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective and significantly reduce one’s risk of severe illness. More than 250 million people in the United States have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine safely and COVID-19 vaccines are over 80 percent effective against hospitalization.

It is clear that the benefits of receiving the COVID-19 vaccine far outweigh the costs, given that almost 840,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone.

Though the Frosts, now apart from Yale University, maintain that they are “looking for reasons to say yes [to the vaccine],” they have not found such a reason yet. Rob Frost is taking a pause from athletic training and trying to plan for the future as COVID-19 cases and fatalities surge in Connecticut.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ZOE BERG, JESSAI FLORES AND CECILIA LEE

POEM

Gentle Mother

by Adin Feder

And even though I tumbled carelessly through the world inside you biding my time to give my word, giving my word while breathing in yours, swallowing prayers and splashing in blood you carried me tenderly to hug an oak.

It grew inside you but also around you: your own gentle mother’s memory.

You found shade under that oak danced with your spade and dug me a hole, gave me a kiss let me lie in her kever let me breathe with your mother for nine lifeless months.

You were roots trunk and leaves, containing all three, no sacred self, vitally loving your selves.

And even so, you tore my cord and cut my foreskin, lest love stay buried and Isaac unbound.

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INSIGHT

PLUGGING OFF

Social Media and its effects on Gen Z Mental Health amidst the Pandemic

BY ZELDA BARNZ

T

hree teenage girls sit on the other side of my zoom screen. The first is Phoebe Savage from North Carolina, whose room is immaculately decorated with colorful posters, ivy garlands and LED lights, reminiscent of an aesthetic that belongs on a Pinterest board. She’s in her senior year of high school, where her favorite class is creative writing. The second is Sunday Brown, a 16 year old photographer and poet, who I zoomed with at two in the morning to make up for the time difference between New Haven and Melbourne, Australia. And finally Em Fortner, a high school senior from Chicago, with dyed hair and a butterfly decal on the wall behind her head. Em is a singer and a writer, currently teaching herself to crochet. One by one, they each told me that their screen times can hit 10 hours a day.

Gen Z is a generation characterized by our familiarity with digital communication. Today, 98 percent of Gen Z own a smartphone, and 70 percent are active on some form of social media. But Gen Z is distinguished by another essential quality: our plummeting mental health. According to Pew Research, 70 percent of people ages 13-17 consider anxiety and depression to be a major problem within their age group, and just 45 percent of Gen Z report a generally positive mental state. It’s counterintuitive, but today’s online hyper-connection can often lead to an increased sense of isolation. As outlined in Olivia Rodrigo’s song “jealousy, jealousy,” constant exposure to the carefully self-curated galleries of photo-sharing apps can lead to feelings of detachment, even when you’re aware that what you’re seeing online isn’t a reflection of reality.

so I think it’s definitely made my attention span shorter,” Sunday Brown said.

There has been a lot of variation in how young people handled the isolation periods of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many turned to social media apps to remain engaged, but teenagers also seemed to be aware of the amount of time they were spending online. Sunday Brown deleted social media apps several times over the course of quarantine, when she felt she needed a break from the distressing news circulating on these platforms. She said the apps helped her stay connected to her friends, but taking breaks helped her stay connected to herself and allowed her the space to check in with her mental health.

Over the past two years, Gen Z experienced a screen time spike and a mental health spiral. When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, social media was the easiest way for many to remain engaged in one another’s lives.

Savage told me she once took a year-long hiatus from Instagram and noticed a change in her mental health and self-image. “I think my mental health did improve a little bit, but obviously not enough to keep me off of it,” she said. Yet her social media engagement also increased over the course of the pandemic, when she felt it was important to remain engaged and connected to her friends while unable to see them in person.

“I think [the pandemic] has made me a bit more addicted to be honest. With online learning, it’s so easy to hop back onto Instagram once class is over and scroll endlessly for hours,

“Quarantine made my hours go up a lot,” Fortner agreed.

But unlike Savage and Sunday Brown, Fortner said the only time she’s gone without social media was when she lost her

8 | January 2022

INSIGHT phone for several days. “I did notice a change in my mental health. Positive change, definitely,” she confirmed, but seemed hesitant at the idea of another break anytime soon. “I would consider maybe cutting back. But probably not a full break.”

NEGATIVITY ONLINE The design of social media itself relies upon more than just its ability to provide entertainment; it simultaneously encourages comparison among its users.

Sunday Brown said that social media often feels like a competition: “I think Spotify might include likes and followers and all that just so users can compete more.” Many platforms are designed with this in mind, whether the app’s purpose is social or not.

Snapchat allows each user to track their “Snapscore,” which “increases with each Snap you send and receive!” Venmo includes a “friends” feature, as well as a feed where users can see who their acquaintances are paying. Duolingo, the educational language-learning app, sends users updates when their friends complete certain achievements or earn experience points. Even Snackpass, a mobile order app available at several college campuses, lets users send their friends “gifts” of restaurant credit back and forth while displaying recent transactions on a “friend feed.”

Sunday Brown agreed that it’s impossible not to notice the cynicism that proliferates some parts of the internet.

“There’s a lot of negativity online. If someone posts something, they’re vulnerable with their audience, but then in the comments people will say whatever they want. And I think a lot of people tend to go to extreme

lengths when they disagree with someone,” she said.

negativity online, and it can be really overwhelming.”

Why does negativity circulate so persistently online? Killian McLoughlin, a second year social psychology PhD student at Yale, pointed to the interaction between the design of social media platforms and the brain’s cognitive learning mechanisms.

Many social media users tend to focus a lot of attention toward how we can achieve validation in a digital landscape where people seem so devoted to tearing others down. Instagram’s layout endorses aesthetics as a means of users’ online representation, which can be damaging when combined with this sense of social competition.

“If people continually get rewarded for particular behavior, over time they express that behavior more and more,” McLoughlin said. “My collaborators and I were interested in whether that was playing out in online spaces. We wanted to see if likes and retweets and so on were encouraging behavioral patterns, and we were particularly interested in negative behaviors, and even more specifically, outrage.”

He continued, “One of the things we have found is that expressions of moral outrage are highly susceptible to this reinforcement learning process, such that people, when they get feedback for expressing moral outrage, they are encouraged to express outrage more frequently. So what we see is this snowballing effect of outrage expression over time as a function of this basic psychological process of reinforcement learning.”

In online spaces, anger is rewarded with attention, contributing to a culture of vitriol. Seika Brown, an undergraduate sophomore researching mental health at Cornell College and winner of Mental Health America’s 2021 mPower Award for her work in mental health education, echoes these sentiments: “If everyone around you seems like they’re going through something really hard, that will take an emotional toll on you,” she said.

“There’s a lot of overexposure to

BODY CONSCIOUSNESS For young women, this feeling of competition can be particularly harmful as it relates to body consciousness.

Sunday Brown said she first began feeling self-conscious about her body at the age of nine. She wasn’t on Instagram at that age, but she mentioned that joining social media negatively affected her body image as she got older. “I definitely think if you’re scrolling sometimes and you see, like, a model or something, that can bring you down a bit,” she said. Both Savage and Fortner agreed that photo and video sharing platforms had a tendency to negatively affect their sense of self-worth.

Social media’s effect on women’s body image is a problem that’s only worsened since the rise of photo-sharing apps like Instagram. According to the Minnesota Association for Children’s Mental Health, 78 percent of young women experience body image issues by the time they are 17. Researchers suggest social media’s emphasis on physical appearance is dismissive and damaging. Four percent of people ages 13-18 suffer from disordered eating, and 90 percent of teenagers struggling with anorexia are women.

And by the time they’re 17, 89 percent of women have dieted.

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INSIGHT

OPEN COMMUNICATION AND ADVOCACY While social media is often blamed for Gen Z’s increased anxiety levels, platforms like Instagram and TikTok can also facilitate dialogue and provide spaces for communication and outreach about important issues and movements related to body consciousness.

Sunday Brown said, “My mom actually showed me this body positivity account on Instagram and that really helped me, so I think there’s lots of positives, there’s lots of accounts that help with body image.”

The body positivity movement was created in response to the media’s glorification of a thin and eurocentric beauty standard for women, and body positivity activists have

fought to make social media platforms more welcoming for a diversity of body types. Body positivity focuses on an attitude of always loving the appearance of one’s body no matter what, and began a conversation around self-love in mainstream media.

But Seika Brown brought up the more toxic aspects of body positivity movements, such as the online pressure to always love your body. “If all you see is people who don’t look like you, then obviously you’re going to wonder ‘What’s wrong with me?’” she said. “You don’t have to love everything about you all the time. That’s just not real, that’s not human.”

Several celebrities including Lizzo and Jameela Jamil have also called out the “toxic positivity” the body positivity movement sometimes promotes. As an alternative, Lizzo has turned to body neutrality, a practice that removes all focus

from appearance and instead emphasizes gratitude and rejects the idea that a person’s physical appearance needs to be discussed at all.

Social media has sparked conversation on the toxicity of such movements. Seika Brown commented on the dialogue, “And that’s one aspect where social media can be good, because that toxicity exists, but people are also calling out that toxicity around positivity.”

In addition to sparking conversations about toxic positivity, social media has provided a space for advocacy groups, educators and individuals to advance conversations on destigmatizing mental health. In 2017, actor and writer Chris Wood founded IDONTMIND (@idontmind), a campaign that aims to decrease the stigma surrounding mental health. IDONTMIND is a platform intended to inspire and inform conversations about mental wellbeing, but it’s also a community for those struggling to begin discussions around their own mental health. Conflicted about the campaign’s social media presence, Wood said, “IDONTMIND is on social media. It’s something I’m at war with all the time. We have to meet people where they are. And hope to bring some good content and helpfulness to what so often can just be a vacuum of negativity … The positive here is that mental health is more openly talked about. The downside is that the

10 | January 2022

INSIGHT

words of strangers, or discourse on current events, we can control our response. We can choose who we follow and we can be intentional with the parts of social media we invest our time and energy in.

I asked each person I interviewed for this piece the same final question. “My advice to anyone struggling with mental health would be to find a healthy creative outlet,” Fortner answered, “and remind yourself that you deserve to have a future.”

“I think my own advice would be to talk to someone you really trust, who you know will take your feelings seriously,” Sunday Brown told me. “And also to contact a professional, because I think therapy is truly great and helps a lot of people!”

“Be who you want to be, do what you want to do, and don’t be afraid to reach out for help if you need it,” said Savage.

vehicle partly responsible for driving that conversation is unleashing havoc on our collective mental health.”

The good news is that IDONTMIND has been successful in “meet[ing] people where they are.” The campaign has 164K followers on Instagram, and they recently streamed a mental health summit that featured conversations about mental health and intersectionality with Rainn Wilson, Zaire Franklin, Zelda Williams and several therapists, advocates and artists.

INTENTIONAL ENGAGEMENT It isn’t entirely fair to write social media off as toxic and unhealthy, not when people have found positive and community-focused ways to utilize it. There will always be the negative, influencer, body-image destroying and anxiety-inducing sides of social media, but users themselves get to determine what takes up most of their feed. While we cannot control the negativity uploaded to these platforms, or the

“One of my favorite books is Atomic Habits by James Clear,” Seika Brown added. “I highly recommend that to anyone who’s an avid reader. I think the best thing you can do to take care of yourself is to set realistic goals. With self-care, you often see people online waking up at 5 in the morning and working out and cleaning their room, and it’s satisfying, but it’s really difficult when 5AM rolls around. So being realistic is important, pick a few things that you want to see change in your life, and start with the one that is easiest to address.”

Chris Wood said, “Talk about it. Tell somebody. Once you open the door for a conversation, you open the door for healing. Be thoughtful about who you choose to share with, but know that most of the time people are really willing to listen. If someone isn’t, move on and find someone else.

Healing is possible and you’re not alone.”

If you or someone you know needs help, the following mental health resources are available.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273-8255 Mental Health Services Administration National Helpline: (800) 662-4357 SAMHSA’s national hotline: 1-800-662-HELP The Trevor Project: 1-866-488-7386 Text IDM to 741741

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SEIKA BROWN, EM FORTNER AND PHOEBE SAVAGE

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INSIGHT

INDUSTRY CONNECTIONS

Inside the return of film at Yale

BY DANTE MOTLEY

T

hroughout spring 2020, multiple strangers received a curious message.

“Come to my house and make films.” Excited by the idea of taking time off from school and being able to freely make films, six strangers agreed to join the sender, Charlie Gleberman ’23. Thus, the Foothills Film Collective was born.

“When it was announced that we weren’t going back to in-person classes last fall, I was like, ‘Zoom school sounds kind of bad,’” Gleberman said. “Someone had talked to me already about getting a group together to do short films. He dropped that and went back to school ironically, but I started reaching out to people and seeing who would be interested.” Connected mainly by the common interest in film,

12 | January 2022

many of their curiosities peaked. The strangers, some of whom had only previously met one or two times and some never at all, had a lot to consider. “All of these wonderful people said they’d be at least interested.”

“I think a lot of the convincing [had to do] with COVID,” Annelise Ratner ’23, a member of Foothills said. “The thing is, most of us didn’t know each other.

And we’re like, ‘Ah, living with a bunch of strangers.

There’s this new pandemic that we don’t know much about.’ We wondered, ‘how do we stay safe?’”

True, more generally, COVID-19 caused a lot of health and safety concerns, something that stifled film production internationally.

However, these safety concerns aside, some students

decided to take COVID-19 as an opportunity to create more films, and the Foothills worked towards being COVID-19 conscious.

“I think we all picked up on each other’s skills a lot. At least for me, I came up with feeling much more well rounded in my abilities.”

While the group’s first semester, fall 2020, was less organized, by the second semester, spring 2021, they had better adjusted to COVID-19

and found themselves more structured, including the extension of their production timelines to include two weeks of quarantine where each member could write a script. The second season also came with the addition of a member, Pablo Causa ’24. This increase in organization and an additional member boosted their productivity, with the number of short films produced increasing from the four they filmed in semester one to six filmed in semester two. The films range in theme and genre, from the post-apocalyptic film “End of Days” to a story of “drug-impared” brothers mending their relationship on a camping trip in “The Kindling.”

“When you’re living with each other, you’re working together constantly on all these projects in a very concentrated amount of time,”

INSIGHT

Ratner said. “I think we all picked up on each other’s skills a lot. At least for me, I came up with feeling much more well rounded in my abilities.”

According to Annaelise Kennedy ’24, president of Yale Cinematic Productions, or the Cinemat, those skills have made them valuable assets to the Yale community. The Yale Cinemat is a film organization meant to introduce students to the film community at Yale and to facilitate film production on campus.

Previously, the University has seen many film clubs and organizations with similar goals. Bulldog Productions, founded in 2003, was Yale’s student-run film production house, which has since largely died off.

Since 2015, the Yale Student Film Festival has displayed the work of university-level filmmakers, both at Yale

and elsewhere.

However, this school year, the Cinemat is running a series of introductory workshops called Bulldog Productions — named after the defunct group — where they work with Foothills to actually spread technical knowledge on campus.

“With the Cinemat workshops, it’s cool to see recurring faces come again and again,” Ratner said. “I think people are getting a lot out of it, even though sometimes not that many people come.”

According to Gleberman, though unpolished, these workshops help supplement Yale film production classes, which have a limited enrollment due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Each workshop covers a different film production skill, but feedback from the meetings has implied the condensed structure to be

overwhelming.

“We’re trying to contend with [limited enrollment], but also do it as an extracurricular thing,” Gleberman said. “It’s just hard to try and fit in as much stuff as we feel like would be really helpful to people in the limited amount of time and with the limited resources we have.”

Film at Yale is not as specialized as other universities. Film oriented schools like University of California, Los Angeles or New York University provide wide ranges of production experience through classes. Yale differs. “Something that is kind of lacking in the film and media studies major is more technical skills, which makes sense,” Kennedy said. “A lot of the major is writing papers and things like that.

But for people who want to do production stuff, there’s

not a ton of opportunities on campus.”

For example, Kennedy said that she is glad to have learned how to do things like write screenplays in film studies classes. However, Kennedy and Sophia Hall ’23, a third member of Foothills, are theater studies majors. Alan Lin ’24, another member of Foothills, is an English major. And Gleberman is an art major.

Soleil Singh ’24, a film and media studies major, said that many people take different tracts to gain access to film production while at Yale while here at Yale, including things like majoring in American studies with a concentration in film. Kennedy is another example: though she is a theater studies major she says that she might complete a film for her senior thesis.

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INSIGHT

However, according to Kennedy, prior to the Cinemat, nonfilm majors and those who were not personally connected to the student film community had a hard time getting into film at Yale.

14 | January 2022

“We wanted to just make it more out in the open and easy access for anybody who is interested but didn’t know anyone personally,” Kennedy said.

The Cinemat’s role in fostering this access is important for students trying to break into the film industry, as it is largely based on connections, Kennedy explained.

Derek Webster, senior associate director for creative careers and specialty advisor for the Yale in Hollywood Summer Internship Program, emphasizes the importance of students making “on the ground” connections while facilitating their own interests. The program is supported by an alumni group involved in the entertainment industry and who are part of the Yale Club of Southern California. They offer internship opportunities and streamline the internship search process for students who want internships in entertainment.

“People ask their friends to work with them, even when it comes to the professional world,” Emily Rodriguez ’22, a Foothills member, said.

“They want to know who is involved and they want to know what they are getting themselves into.” One of the Cinemat’s main goals then, according to Kennedy, is to help people develop these collegiate connections.

“[Students] should be engaging with professionals, probably starting from alumni,” Webster said. “On a regular basis, you should be reaching out and connecting through the Yale alumni association and things like Cross Campus, [the University’s online networking program] and the Yale in Hollywood program, which posts positions coming through alumni channels.”

INSIGHT Connections are becoming easier to make as organizations like the Yale Film Alliance, or YFA, open up. The YFA is an umbrella organization — not a club — that oversees independent film clubs including the Cinemat along with the old Bulldog Productions, the Screenwriting Syndicate, the Yale Film Society and the Yale Student Film Festival.

“We are able to bring the film communities from all of the different clubs together. So we’ll host parties for the YFA that everyone’s invited to. We host social events and dinners. We’ve had a couple of movie outings where we’ll go to the theater in New Haven altogether. And because we’re not a club, we can bring from all these disparate parts of the filmmaking community together,” Julia Arancio ’23 said.

Arancio is a co-president of the YFA with Jake Jorgl ’23. She said that they have worked very hard to rebuild the YFA “from scratch.”

“It’s our job to create this new system and this new kind of club and this new order, but it’s also our job to make sure that it stays,” Arancio said. “And so in the coming semester we’re going to be thinking

about board applications and passing that on. Hopefully, we have this new group of freshmen and also sophomores who never really saw the film club in the past year or two. And so now this is all they know of film at Yale.”

“It’s our job to create this new system and this new kind of club and this new order, but it’s also our job to make sure that it stays.”

Both Arancio and Kennedy share a goal of stabilizing the Yale film community on more solid and permanent ground coming out of the pandemic, with hopes of developing a proper network to advance filmmaking Yalies.

“I think the risk that you run with something like the Cinemat though is that Annaelise is doing a great job, but she’s going

to graduate,” Ryan Zhou, a member of Foothills said. “Maybe I am just a pessimist, but I think likely when she graduates the ship’s going to sink. I mean, who knows? Maybe the Cinemat becomes this really big production thing at Yale, and it becomes the thing that survives all of this. But I feel like stuff like the Cinemat has definitely been tried before, and it probably failed because people graduate.”

Zhou’s point is especially prescient considering the shortcomings of the continuation of film clubs in the past. Looking at Bulldog Productions, it is not hard to see how prominent film organizations on campus might fail in the future.

“But for now it’s creating a community, and that’s what will survive,” Zhou continued.

“First years will find people and through those people they will find other people and hopefully that just keeps rebounding and rebounding and networks grow. The best thing though is there will always be people at Yale who want to make films, and so you just have to be willing to put your time and effort into something that isn’t your own so that you can learn to better make your own.

Regardless if the film community exists, I think film can exist and thrive.”

// COURTESY OF ANNELISE RATNER

Yale Daily News | 15

PERSONAL ESSAY

Selective Reflections

BY MADELINE ART

T

he Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts has never been bombed, which means it has fulfilled its founding purpose. In the 1950s, as the threat of nuclear war loomed over New York City, private art collectors Sterling and Francine Clark decided their art was no longer safe in Manhattan and began looking at other possible venues for their art. Williamstown, because of its isolated location and its high cow-to-person ratio, was at a low risk for any attacks. Sterling’s father and grandfather had been trustees at Williams College, so Sterling and Francine packed up their collection and founded a museum just off campus: The Clark Art Institute. In doing so, they joined Herman Melville, Edith Wharton and my grandparents in the set of people who relocated north to the westernmost part of Massachusetts to hide out from the wars and storms of the outside world.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, artists and writers left New York for the Berkshires, a rural region in the mountains of Western Massachusetts.

The countryside provided anonymity and the space to reclaim their art and lives. Edith Wharton wrote that her home in the Berkshires, The Mount, gave her “the companionship of a few dear friends, and the freedom from trivial obligations which was necessary if I was to go on with my writing.” As more and more artists brought their work to the Berkshires, other artists still in the city followed suit, and eventually a glimmering scene of world-renowned theatre, dance and visual art emerged.

Today, the Clark is one of many acclaimed cultural institutions in the Berkshire arts scene. The Williamstown Theatre Festival routinely hosts renowned actors such as Matthew Broderick and Uma Thurman, Tanglewood Music Center is the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival has New York City Ballet legends on its board and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, called Mass MoCA for short, was recently visited by Kanye West and Tyler, the Creator.

16 | January 2022

PERSONAL ESSAY

Its harmony is only honest for a radius of a few miles.

S

eventy years after the Clark’s founding, I know its permanent collection by heart. Fifteen years of visits have brought me into a close friendship with Renoir’s “Girl with a Fan,” and the mountains behind Winslow Homer’s “Two Guides” might as well be my backyard. The backto-back field trips to the museum during my elementary school days tried to instill an intricate knowledge of each painting’s history, but time has now washed away my memory of each artist’s biography, and I am left with a shadowy impression of the feelings associated with each piece in the lilac-walled galleries. Frederic Remington’s horses in “Dismounted” bear a stressful chaos and his “Friends or Foes” a weary solitude, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s “Women of Amphissa” confers a mystical voyeuristic drunkenness and the obscured haze of Monet’s “Rouen Cathedral” carries the childlike awe of optical illusions; the docents’ favorite trick was to show kids how the church’s form only became identifiable the farther you walked from it.

The Degas has always been my favorite. As an aspiring ballerina at age four, I’d follow my mom as she pointed to the dancers’ blue tutus and explained to me that I could one day wear their pointe shoes. When I turned 14, she snapped a picture of me in the iconic fourth position in front of the gauzy tutu of “Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen.” Now that I’ve let go of dreams of pursuing professional ballet, “Entrance of the Masked Dancers” pulls at the part of me that wants, more than anything, to be spinning out of the wings in front of a packed theatre again.

I

ANASTHASIA SHILOV

f the story of the Berkshires is about glimmering art, it’s equally about poverty in the wake of deindustrialization. Pittsfield, the county’s biggest town at 40,000 residents, used to be home to General Electric, and similarly, North Adams housed Sprague Electric in the old mill that’s now Mass MoCA. Both companies’ departures in the 1990s left workers in the Berkshires jobless and drove local businesses that relied on those workers’ spending out of town, leaving a grim landscape. I’ve grown up hearing stories from my mom about the addiction and teen pregnancy that she mitigates as a pediatrician in North Adams. In 2014, the North Adams hospital went under, putting thousands more out of work. Again and again, city planners and advocates use the arts scene to try to revitalize the cities with post-industrial chic galleries and new refined uses for textile mills.

They do succeed at creating jobs and sprucing up the downtowns, but the value of art has never been in its ability to solve socioeconomic disparities.

Shootings still happen outside of the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield, where James Taylor’s children perform in “A Christmas Story,” and residents go hungry up the street from Mass MoCA, which had its documentary narrated by Meryl Streep.

The Clark, perhaps as Francine and Sterling had predicted when they placed their museum next to Williams, has managed to avoid this dilemma.

Williamstown now has more people than cows. but maintains its image as a haven in which artists and academics — and still my grandparents — thrive.

While affordable housing efforts are succeeding in shifting the town’s socioeconomic demographics, Williamstown has remained a bastion of economic comfort and academic prowess compared to the rest of Northern Berkshire County, largely due to Williams College’s presence in the town.

In Williamstown, questions about the role of expensive and famous art in coexistence with poverty are less relevant.

Yale Daily News | 17

PERSONAL ESSAY

L

ike most children of Williamstown, I’ve grown up among the Berkshires’ cultural institutions and its natural beauty; The Clark offers both.

Due to its placement on 140 acres of picturesque land, it serves as a sort of town square. In the front, near the parking lot, is a small pond that freezes in the winter, where my dad ice skated during his youth and where I would have learned to skate myself had my mom not been so anxious about me falling through the ice. Behind the museum near the patio, shallow pools of water called reflecting pools mirror the hill and mountains, pulling the nature of the surrounding landscape into close contact with the oil-painted landscapes inside. In the winter, from the top of the hill, Williamstown looks like it was ripped from a snow globe. In true New England Puritan style, the white steeple of the church peaks above the trees in the center of the town, and you can trace Main Street to the college’s castle-like chapel. When the trees are bare of leaves, you can see the elementary school, and behind it, if you really squint, a glimpse of my house. At the top of this hill, I’ve run (when I convinced myself I enjoyed running) and I’ve walked (when I’ve been more honest), I’ve danced and I’ve picnicked, I’ve cried and I’ve kissed.

Bordering this pasture, the museum maintains a network of hiking paths.

A few minutes onto the Stone Bench Trail, maples and oaks shroud any view of the museum or the town, and if you keep walking beyond the Stone Bench, where my uncle proposed to my aunt, you step onto the spider web of hiking trails that connects the collegiate atmosphere of downtown to the dirt roads and farms of South Williamstown. From that very spot, you couldn’t quite walk to Maine or to Georgia — the Appalachian Trail runs through the other side of town — but with some detours on dirt roads, you could walk from my house to my grandparents’ house, from

18 | January 2022

the forests where my grandfather catalogues plants to the courses where my parents and sister run half marathons.

On summer evenings, the peeper frogs that live around the pond whistle so loudly that I once mistook them for the artificial scream of a museum alarm — I thought I’d beaten the security guards to the scene of a heist.

During the day, locals warn city folk that they shouldn’t set foot in the pasture unless they’re sure they can outrun a cow, mocking the novelty that our nature is to them. New York millennials Instagram the grounds on their weekend expeditions, and boomers summering in Williamstown for the Theatre Festival sip tea on the courtyard.

At night, though, teenagers seeking freedom from the reputational expectations of the town gather for a soiree atop the hill. Here, it’s just us and the cows. With the streets of our youth safely in view and our families tucked into the ant-sized homes below, we’re removed enough to inhabit our own world. Physically, of course, this is the same world we’ve always inhabited. To reach our bastion of adolescent liberation, we nod to the docents who gave us tours in elementary school or sneak wine past the tree we danced under as five-year-olds at the Tuesday night family concerts: a small taste of teenage rebellion on the grounds of our childhood.

When I was 13, German artist Thomas Schütte built “Crystal” outside, at the top of the Clark’s hill — a pentagonal hut made of light wood, just big enough for a cow to stand in if she tried (and she has). The Crystal, as we call it, is where the youth of Williamstown gather on these summer nights to listen to music, dance, eat, look at the stars and wonder at the little town below us.

W

ith the Crystal, the Clark spilled its art into the surroundings, reinforcing its commitment to open and free beauty. The grounds,

and thus the Crystal and other outdoor exhibitions, as advertised in the “hours” section of the Clark’s website, are open at all hours of the day, for free, to anyone who might want to come. The Clark’s central proximity in town and the many intersections it represents — of tourists and locals, humans and cows, students and professors, grandparents and teens — give it a feeling of idyllic freedom and remarkable harmony.

I revel in this harmony. The Clark shows that fine art has the potential to foster striking conversations across nature, dance and generations. It demonstrates a remarkable commitment to making these conversations accessible to all, including free admission for all of January 2022. Its position in Williamstown, though, means that this access to beautiful land and rich dialogue has mostly been enjoyed by those who already live in Williamstown with the advantages of having Williams in their backyard and constant access to nature next door. Its harmony is only honest for a radius of a few miles.

At the end of last August, my best friends and I planned a final picnic at the reflecting pools before we left for college. After we had parked and were almost at the unlocked passageway between the front and back of the museum, we heard the click of high heels behind the summer suavity of saxophone and trumpet coming from the patio on which we planned to eat. A trickle of expensively dressed elderly couples creeping from the reflecting pools back to the parking lot told us there was an exclusive event to celebrate a new exhibition.

We almost left and took our picnic elsewhere, sheepish as to how our T-shirts and ripped denim would look next to the suits and pashminas of the art aficionados, but a museum employee sensed our hesitations and intercepted us.

“The grounds are open 24/7, to anyone,” she said. “Go enjoy the music.”

Reorienting Directed Studies

INSIGHT

With waning support for humanities and pressure from student activists, is it time reconsider its message?

BY ABIGAIL SYLVOR GREENBERG On Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2021, a group of Yale undergraduates and a smattering of professors filed into desks in a classroom in Yale’s new Humanities Quadrangle. It was late in the afternoon, the week before Thanksgiving, and there had been a mixup with the room assignment. Still, attention was rapt.

The audience in question was listening to a lecture by the near Eastern languages and civilizations professor Kevin van Bladel, entitled “Western Civilizations and non-Western Civilizations: Genealogy of the Concepts in Higher Education.” van Bladel’s lecture was the first event of the year in a student-run initiative called ReDirected Studies, or RDS, which provides alternatives to the western canonical tradition widely taught at Yale and explicitly highlighted in the first-year Directed Studies program. The initiative, which hosts lectures, screenings, reading groups and more conducted its first full year of programming via Zoom in 2020–21 and is now operating with full force on campus.

In the words of its founding member and current director, Daniel Inojosa ’23, the organization is “subversive in its fundamentals.” It is committed to facilitating a “substantial reconsideration” of the boundaries of Western-ness and canonicity as organizing educational principles.

In the 2019–20 school year, before Inojosa started RDS, he was one of 100-ish first-years in Directed Studies. Commonly called DS, the program consists of three courses: Literature, Historical & Political Thought and Philosophy. In weekly sections and lectures, DS surveys the bedrock texts of what it calls “Western and Near Eastern traditions”— texts like Sophocles’ Antigone, Plato’s Republic and Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed. DS is rigorous and moves quickly, asking students to turn in a paper every week and jumping, for example, from Homer to Virgil to Dante in a matter of weeks.

The program inspires cultish enthusiasm in many of its past and present participants. Its website is

studded with testimonials from alumni working in fields from film to finance.

“It taught me how to write,” gushes a now-law professor. “I’ve been an architect and planner,” says another alumnus who describes his job as possessing a “breadth of activities, thought, tradition and innovation aspiring to that of DS.” In a particularly intense pull-quote, Mandla Dube ’19, a student from Zimbabwe, writes that DS changed his understanding of his home country: “I saw our relatively younger societies falling prey to pitfalls, like tyranny and class war, that Aristotle and Plato wrote about over two thousand years ago.”

Inojosa, however, was not quite so pleased.

He explained that he felt a “general dissatisfaction with the pedagogical approach of Directed Studies as a program,” which became the impetus for founding RDS. Among the questions on his mind: What made the books on the DS syllabus western? And what made them worth reading?

Bladel’s lecture addressed these very issues. In it, he explained how the idea of western civilization was constructed, and how it manifests itself in Yale classrooms. He told the RDS audience that delineated ‘civilizations’ are made to become “social realities” only in institutions of higher education.

Universities invented the concept of “Western civili-

Yale Daily News | 19

Insight zation” and continue to adjudicate its borders.

Ideas of ‘the West’ originated in step with Christendom, springing from Graeco-Roman heritage and morphing, after World War II, to encompass cultural Judeo-Christianity.

To Bladel, the so-called West is not nearly as closed or definite an intellectual domain as the academy claims. He noted that Greek classical texts were brought into Asia and Africa and took on their own shapes when translated into such languages as Arabic and Indonesian.

Further, though the ‘West’ by classical definition excludes Russia, the course now includes Russian writers like Leo Tolstoy. Russian work was decidedly non-western by the standards of those who first began to define the canon.

Its inclusion now seems to be a function of contemporary designations of whiteness and modern European politics, not an authentic designation in intellectual history.

Notions of a cohesive West were not present in the official language used to describe DS until 1976. At that time, the program was transformed from a two-year learning community which allowed students to choose from a menu of humanities courses to the one-year intensive it is today. In the overhaul, the history professor Dr. Donald Kagan redesigned Directed Studies with an explicit emphasis on what he described in writing as “western civilization’s emergence as the exemplary civilization.”

To be fair, the program has added some variety to its author list since its inception. “The western canon doesn’t mean work exclusively in Latin,” said Dr. Paul Freedman. Freedman is a Medievalist and food historian who has been teaching on and off in the program since he arrived at Yale in 2004. He explained that DS’ History & Politics track has seen the addition of The Hebrew Bible and theory by Al Farabi and Maimonides.

These Near-Eastern texts now make up a small but non-negligible percentage of the DS reading list. Their inclusion is an acknowledgement of a wider global dialogue, though their placement in the syllabus still asserts the primacy of European thought. Students are made to see how the monotheism of the

20 | January 2022

Hebrew Bible transformed into Christianity and made its way to Rome. They note how thinkers in the Ottoman Empire read and responded to Aristotle.

The program has also added a few English-language writers and thinkers from across the Atlantic world, including the likes of Derek Walcott and Virginia Woolf. Such writers appear largely in the latter half of the program.

Inojosa was critical of these additions, calling them “diversity picks … backlogged” at the end of the syllabus without sufficient care or context. “Suddenly we enter the period in which women and nonwhite people ostensibly just sprouted out of the woodwork. And there was no other historical reference to them.

Which is clearly not an accurate historical narrative,” he said.

In Inojosa’s experience, the program’s Eurocentrism meant a sloppy handling of texts with other cultural influences. This crystalized during the reading of Derek Walcott’s Omeros, a Caribbean poem which reimagines the works of Homer. “Reading Omeros requires a tremendous amount of context that DS did not provide, frankly, by the nature of the program,” Inojosa said. He did not feel his professors were “equipped” to teach a “reappropriation” of the artform “in a distinctly Caribbean context … shaped by the effects of colonialism and slavery ... forced immigration and alienation from certain cultural roots and practices.”

These observations provided the basis for one of RDS’ core beliefs: “Diversification is not a sufficient tool.” Simply adding piecemeal to the DS syllabus would not be enough to address the program’s limitations.

Inojosa envisions a total transformation of Directed Studies into a broader humanities program with different tracks, one where there is “room for doubt” about the works on the syllabus, their importance and interrelatedness. For now, he wants to organize targeted RDS events with specific themes, and ensure that the program can continue to exist as a social and intellectual space in coming years. He looks forward to transferring leadership to a successor during this school-year.

He is concerned, however, that he won’t see adequate change. To the contrary, the success of RDS may become “an excuse [for DS] to offload its obligations” onto student organizers.

Nonetheless, Inojosa believes that a flourishing RDS program can be an agent of change.

He is grateful for the support and cooperation of the DS faculty, and made special mention of Dr. Katja Lindskog, the DUS of Directed Studies, as an ally and resource.

The feeling goes both ways. Lindskog wrote in an email that she is “wildly grateful and happy” about the existence of ReDirected Studies.

“Our program will be all the better for having people both within and without it questioning and challenging the kinds of texts and ideas that we debate in the classroom,” she added.

It is not clear how big the student audience for RDS truly is. Those filling the desks at Bladel’s lecture comprise only a small percentage of the total DS community. Of course, this might not be a direct indicator of interest; DS students, like all Yale students, are busy, and the profile of RDS as a program is still relatively low.

Attitudes about the program’s westernness vary from critical to indifferent to favorable.

Arthur Delot-Vilain ’25, a current DS student who did attend Bladel’s lecture, criticized DS for implicitly saying: “We love the western canon. We study the western canon because it is great.” To Delot-Villain, the program “makes some kind of value judgment about what it excludes.”

Other students simply feel they lack an awareness of what they are missing out on. “I’m so entrenched in the western canon that I don’t really know what’s outside of it, and I think that’s an issue,” said Jordan Davidson, another DS student in the class of ’25.

On the other hand, Davidson’s classmate Eli Buchdahl ’25 maintained that the “particular strain of thought” taught in DS “has been more influential in the way that our specific society and country is structured” than have others. “If you are going to teach a program about a certain canon,” Buchdahl added, “it’s good that it’s the one that has shaped the world that Yale students are living in.”

To Dr. Lindskog, however, questions of canonicity are somewhat secondary.

She emphasized that the central aim of DS is not “compiling knowledge” but “practicing skills of thinking about listening to, arguing with, and writing difficult, complex, multifaceted texts that don’t offer any easy answers about how to live and be in the world.” DS is, at least by design, about cultivating skills that are transferable across the many tasks of being a living, learning individual.

With this in mind, Yale’s fervent humanists might be seen more as allies than as enemies — canonical disagreements notwithstanding.

Certainly, they share the same existential threats. Yale, like its peer institutions, is redoubling its investment in STEM, trying to compete in a marketplace ruled by science and tech. President Salovey’s ironically named “For Humanity’’ capital campaign, which launched in October 2021, has an explicit emphasis on the sciences — specifically, per Salovey’s statement to YDN, on areas like data science, computer science, quantum science and engineering.

At the time of DS’ founding in 1947, it was believed that the “common life” could be enriched through the study of a survey of great works, according to Bladel. The program’s originators established DS as a bulwark for intellectual breadth.

They believed that liberal arts, and especially the humanities, had value for all people, not only those in the academy.

But since then, the professional world has changed dramatically, and higher education with it. A list of Yale’s most popular majors is topped by Economics and Biology, where History and English once led the pack.

Students and professors at Yale who are still committed to engaging with old humanistic texts are holding onto a rare conviction, insisting on using their studies to consider life through a “non-utility lens,” as Dr. Freedman put it.

DS students see themselves, in some cases, as actively flouting trends toward STEM and general pre-professionalism. Said Delot-Vilain, “I’m sure people are [doing so], but I’m not reading Aristotle with the idea [that] I’m going to now go into politics and apply these theories.” Delot-Vilain noted an “intrinsic happiness” which he feels when he is engaged in humanistic studies. “I just genuinely really enjoy the structure of reading something, thinking about it, discussing it with other people, and creating some sort of analysis,” he said.

Buchdahl echoed this sentiment. He enjoys the way DS allows him to see intertextual relationships and understand the historical contexts which allowed for them. He appreciates the humanistic texts for their concern with “how we live our lives, how we order our lives,” questions he saw as being “of relevance to everyone.”

“I’m going to graduate and have no hard skills and be unsure about my employment options, but at least I will have thought about things that excite me,” Buchdahl joked.

It would be fair to view this attitude as a kind of luxury, an indulgent approach to education which not everyone can afford. But from a different angle, the humanities are a matter of necessity.

“We cannot escape our human experience at all, no matter how much we delude ourselves into thinking we can,” said Inojosa. He acknowledged that DS taught him to conceptualize things in ways he wouldn’t have on his own, and credits it with introducing him to thinkers he still draws from today, like Aristotle and Hume.

As for Davidson, who was considering dropping out of Directed Studies at the end of the fall semester to pursue fiction-writing and electrical engineering, a lecture by Dr. Marta Figlerowicz on Metamorphoses changed her mind.

Mid-lecture, Dr. Figlerowicz screened the music video for the rapper Lil Nas X’s hit single, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).” The video is ripe with influences from Ovid. Davidson explained that the professor’s illumination of the through-lines from Greek myth

to American hip hop “solidified the applications of DS to creating media to be consumed in [the] modern day.”

This lecture prompted Davidson to rethink the program as a whole and its relevance, and to enroll in its second semester after all. “It’s not a perfect program,” she said, “but it doesn’t have to be.”

Perfection is an unrealistic standard, and there will always be those who love Directed Studies exactly as it is — who are most alive when they are bringing traditions of thought and storytelling into the light, poking and prodding them, fiercely debating them, cherishing them in solitude and community. This is a good unto itself.

But deconstructing DS’ representation of the canon may well be the path forward. It is not only a progressive, inclusive measure, but a logical one, given the arbitrariness of canonization.

In Bladel’s lecture, he cautioned against a false assumption that “the works that survive from antiquity survive because they’re the best.”

There are, he said, works which survive which are not deemed ‘worth reading,’ and plenty of texts which we ought to read but do not, because they were not preserved.

One might then wonder whether the DS trademark, the overfull syllabus, contributes to a false sense of the program’s exhaustiveness. Part of the fervor which motivates students to keep long hours in the library, to read all of Inferno in a week, is a sense that the sum of a DS education will be something total, not partial. A student might justifiably ask: If the syllabus is really just a selection of some texts worth reading, why not switch a few of the texts out for other ones (or even cut a few and let students sleep more)? And why not weave a new, expansive story along the way?

Insight

PERSONAL ESSAY

CONFESSIONS FROM THE THIRD PLACE

BY KYLIE VOLAVONGSA

A

nother day at the store. You’re in the basement, tying apron strings behind your back before heading upstairs to clock in. The pre-work anticipation this time of day is a little dreadful: no barista can predict how the shift will go, whether there’ll be some crazy story about some crazy customer by the end of it or not. You check your pockets to make sure you have a Sharpie, just in case. All good. Time for war.

Upstairs, you hear the steady rumble of chatter and an industrial coffee grinder. The calling of names punctuates every minute. A barista calls one of those names for a mobile order, and a girl — Yale student— grabs her drink, inspects it and doubles back.

“Does this have the foam in it?”

You read it from here: Grande Cold Brew, Vanilla, Caramel, Sweet Cream. The word “foam” is absent from the sticker. This is important because at Starbucks, there is sweet cream and there is sweet cream cold foam. With distinct options for the two, the order-ahead system on the app makes this choice belong completely to the customer.

“It’s not on the sticker, so it’s not on the drink. Just the cream,” the barista replies.

She puts the cup down. “So you made my drink wrong.”

Baristas don’t like being made to feel incompetent when they’re right, but that doesn’t change the fact that the customer is always right. He shrugs and takes the cup back to fix his mistake. The girl is on the phone now.

“Sorry, I’m gonna be late. I’m at Starbucks and the guy made my drink wrong, like I’ve been waiting, and I ordered ahead with the cold foam in it, but he didn’t even put it on the drink.”

Another battle lost.

There’s something about working in coffee that reveals a lot about the people you serve. The New Haven crowd is pretty friendly, with most of their orders being simple drip coffees. There’s the sweet elderly woman who gets a decaf black coffee every morning, then the lady who tipped me because it was my birthday and it happened to be hers too.

And it’s always nice to see the look of relief on people’s faces when I tell them they don’t have to buy anything to receive the bathroom code.

Still, it’s easy to ruminate on how people take advantage of these expected kindnesses. There are the “regulars” who have condescendingly expected me to know what their version of a “regular” is. And the guy who yelled at some of us

22 | January 2022

for being “disrespectful foreigners.” In fact, Starbucks has a reputation for encouraging entitled behavior with its endless drink customizations, not to mention the app’s reward system, which is filled with ambushes of freebies that employees aren’t actually trained to navigate.

All this is to say that working at a massive coffee chain tends to put you on the short end of a very imbalanced power dynamic, where your emotional stability — and maybe even your job — is at the mercy of what exactly someone wants and how picky they are. But when you bring Yale students into the question, as a Yale student myself, this dynamic feels a lot worse.

Another afternoon rush. Yale graduate student. Tall Irish Cream Cold Brew and an Impossible Breakfast Sandwich.

“Can I get a name?” “..ee..” Muffled speech, one of the great obstacles of taking orders. The blenders are blending, masks hide mouths and the sneeze guard between you blocks both germs and intelligible human speech. The guy’s items are safe at least because

PERSONAL ESSAY recognizing names of products is no issue after hearing them day after day.

“Sorry, can you say that one more time?”

“K..ee..”

“Would you mind speaking up? I’m having a little trouble hearing you.”

“K..ee..on..” Okay, he will be ‘Keaton’ today.

You take more orders. They go smoothly. Your stress has mostly leveled out, and you feel friendly and wonderful. Until your co-worker at the ovens approaches.

“We’re out of Impossible, you wanna tell Keaton while I watch register?”

Great. Thankfully, you see him standing near the counter when you walk over.

You yell intentionally in his direction, “Hi, did you order the Impossible Sandwich and the Irish Cold Brew?”

He looks up from his phone. “No.” Okay. If you correct him, would you sound like a know-it-all, start some stupid random argument? Would you cross that subjective line of impoliteness in customer service? You don’t have the energy. It’ll probably sort itself out anyway.

Eventually, the cold brew is on the counter, the only one of its kind. The minutes go by. You keep going back to

call out his exact order, looking directly at him, but you’re mostly ignored now.

He gets fed up, thinking he’s been forgotten. By then, you’re prepping pitchers of lemonade but look up to see him talking to your associate. He’s pointing at you.

“She took my name wrong as Keaton, so someone stole my drink and I’ve been waiting for like thirty minutes.”

You look at the counter to see “Keaton’s” things still on the counter. It doesn’t matter when you tell him they’re here; you must give this man a refund.

He stares at me like he’s using telepathy to say “you’re stupid.” And okay, you kind of are, but it’s a two way street.

His drink is remade, the original thrown away.

To this day, the sight of a heather-gray pullover from a Yale graduate school puts my guard up. My co-workers have told me before about the entitlement of some Yale students, and from similarly recurring scenarios like “Keaton’s” I can see why. On evening shifts, I’ve seen students stay in the store as long as possible, even after our 20-minute, 10-minute, and five minute announcements leading up to closing. When I end their Starbucks hangout, it’s not that I’m being hateful – it’s that I just want to go home and crank out my last minute assignment.

I expected some level of understanding from people my age, people studying in the same libraries and living in the same spaces. But, as the barista in the shop, I am still humbled at the end of the day, picking up my classmates’ trash and sweeping their crumbs before close. From this, I’ve also experienced a tunnel version where I’m admittedly quick to make generalizations about others depending on my mood or from impressions at the store. I don’t want to overlook what should be an eye-opening diversity of student backgrounds – from the financial to academic to geographic – but despite the University’s reported 53 percent of students receiving financial aid, it is from working shifts saturated with that “I want it, and I want it now”

air of entitlement and financial privilege that I’ve seen this diversity fall short.

What’s interesting, though, is I have yet to see something like this from Yalies in the rest of New Haven. I people-watch at coffee shops — at more local spots like Jitter Bus, Koffee, Willoughby’s and the Acorn. It’s rare for me to observe these little spats near their counters. My suspicion is that this pattern of pettiness at Starbucks could be a matter of external perception, from both sides of the bar.

During my time at Yale, I’ve heard a lot about supporting local businesses, especially since the University, and we as its students, take up a lot of New Haven’s spaces. Perhaps Starbucks is seen as another occupier, pitted against the local shops. In fact, a student-wide email from the Office of Student Affairs suggests that for Phase 2 of our arrival quarantine, students “avoid local businesses, restaurants, and bars” to keep both students and New Haveners safe. However, this also suggests the idea that bigger chains and their workers are of lesser concern. Even if this may not have been the intention, the subtle dismissal in the phrasing still holds.

As a corporate chain, meanwhile, Starbucks’ appeal is its quick convenience and a nationally consistent menu. Nothing really goes wrong if it doesn’t get the same support as its local counterparts.

If our store shuts down, you can get the same caramel macchiato at about 15,000 others. From this conformed anonymity, then, it’s easy to get the impression that the baristas here might not care as much about the people paying them, especially as we bark our policies about masks and not reaching over the counter for straws and drinks.

But I question whether more privileged students know what it’s like to toil in customer service, if they see baristas as more than the product they serve. Maybe the uniformity of a national chain exacerbates this idea, the lack of store personality making it easier to overlook its baristas’ individual personalities.

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PERSONAL ESSAY There’s a shift supervisor I work with on weeknights. Alongside Starbucks, she works two other jobs, one of them being her own business as a hairstylist.

Even with the heavy workload, I’ve yet to see her slack off. Instead, she’s mastered efficiency to an art, teaching me how to speedily make drinks and prep for close.

In fact, closes with her and my other supervisor are usually ten minutes early — a world of difference when we’re pressed for time. It’s not a surprise, considering she’s been with the company for years.

If it weren’t for the pandemic, she’d told me once, she would’ve had enough money to focus on her own business.

Some days, she will show me pictures on her phone of skilled, careful braids.

I’ll disgust her with my espresso lemonades, and we’ll joke about the lady that tried to tempt me into a cult when business was slow. Then, there are the times I’ll see her be firm with customers, and I question if it’s too firm or if I’m just being sensitive. I’ve had friends tell me about the snappy barista from when they’ve gone to the store, and I’ll wonder if it was her. I get torn between wanting to sympathize with one or the other, understanding both the circumstances that push her to impatience as well as what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that impatience, something like a sheepish teen and her mom.

On my end, I’ve started to indirectly suck up to baristas at other coffee shops when I don’t have to and maybe even shouldn’t. I fuss to my friends about leaving cafes about an hour to thirty minutes before close. I try to visit stores rather than order ahead so I can see what the staff is dealing with. When it’s busy, I get a drip coffee or a cold brew — iced coffee if there’s trouble with the cold brew keg.

If my order’s wrong, I accept defeat.

Still, the strange experience of being a student barista leaves me with a lot of questions. Exactly how much do we owe the people we pay to serve us, if we should owe anything at all? When

24 | January 2022

I assume the barista identity and force that customer-friendly façade over how I really feel, do I come off as a mere extension of Starbucks’ products? Am I teaching myself to act the same when the apron comes off? Am I forgetting how to be earnest in the right ways?

The closest thing to an answer that I can come up with is this: These jobs are selling their workers short, and there are people a little too comfortable with taking advantage of that. It’s annoying to deal with insulting behavior from the typical Starbucks customer, but when I see this behavior from another Yale student, the insult feels more personal.

Especially in the way it causes my job to follow me beyond the store. I’m far less likely to run into the Uber Eats drivers that fight over mask mandates with me than I am to the students that might

go to the same pregame as me. When you see these students on what should be the equal grounds of our campus, you already feel that lingering sense of hierarchy between barista and customer. You remember the frustration from when you had to cater to them, regardless of who was right or wrong.

To all this I offer a treaty, just so we can try to make the experience better for all of us. The conditions: have patience.

Forget going through the motions more often, and treat people like people. It’s okay to be wrong sometimes, and it isn’t as hard as you think to move on. A latte with too much foam and a cold brew with not enough foam and a cappuccino with the perfect amount of foam will be mostly forgotten in a few hours anyway.

Because as the company motto goes, it’s just coffee.

Protest and Progress: A History of Student Activism at Yale

Protest and Progress:

By Lazo Gitchos

The Yale Bowl does not have stadium lights – even the rare games that go into double overtime have ended before sundown. But the extended halftime of the 2019 Yale Harvard game left players on the field well into the dark. Immediately after the second period of the 2019 Yale Harvard football game, hundreds of students from both schools entered and occupied the field, holding banners reading “Yale and Harvard are complicit in climate injustice,” “this is an emergency” and “Nobody Wins.” Many Yale and Harvard students remember the Game protest as one of the most visible and forceful actions for fossil fuel divestment either school had ever seen.

As some of the media attention on the Yale-Harvard Divestment Protest would suggest, activism at Yale draws on a long and complicated history. In a collection titled “Student Unrest at Yale” at Sterling Memorial Library’s Yale Archive, there are dog-eared and yellowed petitions, letters to faculty and hand-written copies of student demands. With archive headings such as “Conic Section Rebellion of 1830” and “Bread and Butter Rebellion of 1828,” it’s easy to imagine early campus protests as little more than the petty airings of entitled student grievances.

During the Conic Sections Rebellion, Yalies protested against a change to instructional policy that would force them to draw their own geometric shapes on exams, rather than refer to those printed in their textbooks. In response to petitions and walkouts, nearly 50 students were expelled from the University. The Bread and Butter Rebellion, marginally better received, was a response to a perceived drop in the quality of dining hall food.

In 1952, students took sides when two

ice cream vendors’ disagreement over a prime vending location in front of the Yale Station post office reached a stalemate. More than 1,000 students flooded Elm Street, smashing car windows and throwing rocks and paper bags full of water. The two vendors were arrested, as were four students.

According to a New York Times article, the New Haven Fire Department dispersed the riotous crowd using fire hoses.

Though events like these populate Yale’s archives on unrest from the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the first half of the 20th, Jay Gitlin ’71, a senior professor of history and prominent Yale historian commented, “in general, the Yale campus has not been a particularly radical one.”

While Gitlin says that many protests in the 19th and early 20th century “were about food and the lack of quality,” this began to change in the late 1950s. The Ice Cream Riot of 1952, a disturbance that thrust Yalies into the national news, signalled the end of the old paradigm of protest at Yale. Soon, the chaos of entitlement would give way toward a culture of more earnest organizing.

Protests at Yale have shaped university policy and, to some extent, public opinion on issues from free speech to racial justice. Yale’s administration has, in the manner of a firmly-established institution, resisted, inspired and ultimately accepted the existence of student protests. However, students say that this acceptance is qualified and incomplete. While Yale readily grants the right of protest to its students, many activists see the encouragement of polite action as a way to side-step the institution’s responsibility to address student grievances.

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A New Paradigm of Protest In the 1960s and early 1970s, the hippie movement, a nationwide counterculture movement ranging from hardline anti-establishment to frustrated middle-class characteristics, inspired a series of nationwide youth movements with clear demands, factions and increasing demonstrations. In May of 1970, thousands of students, community members and spectators from across the country packed Yale’s courtyards, dorms and dining halls to listen to speakers, attend teach-ins and follow the murder trials of Bobby Seale and three other Black Panthers.

Seale, chairman of the National Black Panther Party, was accused of ordering the executions of a party member and suspected informant while visiting the New Haven Panthers in May of 1969.

The end of the trial — which left Seale unindicted after a deadlocked jury failed to return a verdict — came during a spring that saw many university campuses in turmoil. Harvard’s April 15 protest-turned-riot was also partly in response to the Black Panther Trials (with one group in attendance calling themselves the Bobby Seale Contingent); Kent State saw a May 4 National Guard killing of four students protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War. The student movements came at a time of particularly strong resistance to protest by the establishment. The height of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the police murder of Fred Hampton and many universities’ refusal to acknowledge students’ demands threatened the demands and lives of activists. Yale’s administration under president Kingman Brewster

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faced a high-stakes test of their flexibility: Would they repeat Harvard’s locked-gate antagonism, precede Kent State’s violent martyring or avoid tumult altogether?

The tense atmosphere that spring forced Brewster to think outside the box, responding quickly to protest on Yale’s steps. Finals were postponed, classes changed to universal pass-fail, student activists invited speakers to courtyards and lecture halls and Yale Hospitality provided food for attendees, according to Yale Daily News articles from the time. This reception was enough to turn the event into a community gathering and largely peaceful protest action, avoiding the chaos faced by other universities. Brewster brought the May Day protests under the tent of the university, paving the way for the institutionalization of protest more concretely in the coming decades.

Yale’s South Africa Problem Towards the end of the 20th century, Yale would face a new dilemma: the University’s complicity in injustice abroad.

Elizabeth Juviler ’89 has visited Yale several times since she graduated. Aside from a few reunions and a family member’s graduation, a few years ago she accepted an invitation to attend an event with the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project and Fossil Free Yale. The groups, active in their respective campaigns for social and environmental justice, looked to past activists like Juviler for guidance, support and knowledge. Juviler said she engaged in campus activism to join the “tradition of calling to account this marvelously powerful institution to our values.” In 1986, her sophomore year, the rallying cry for campus activists would sound familiar today: divest.

Juviler remembers the 1986 scene between Woodbridge Hall and the Beinecke Library vividly. The plaza was home to an occupied protest known as “The Shanty Town” for nearly two years. Students and New Haven residents lived in makeshift buildings to avoid their removal. A sign posted near the shanties read “welcome to Winnie Mandela City,” named for the wife of Nelson Mandela. Tents and plywood-and-tarp structures surrounded the sunken courtyard, signs and posters displayed solidarity with Black South Africans under

Apartheid and with Mandela, then imprisoned in South Africa.

At the time, Yale’s endowment owned more than $300 million in stock in companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. “We were looking for a clear financial statement that would support the advancement of democracy,” Juviler said. But first, the students wanted to be acknowledged by the University.

On Sept. 22, 1986, dozens of students occupied the Yale Investments Office at 451 College St. The sit-in ended the same day with the arrest of 21 students, including Juviler. She, along with four other students, were suspended. “It stung,” Juliver said, “to be excommunicated from this institution” that she felt had promised her a forum for free expression. In an interview with the News days after her suspension she said of the Executive Committee decision: “They saw their job as to enforce the rules and regulations without any kind of contextual consideration of the action.” On the day the suspensions were announced, the United States Senate voted to levy sanctions against South Africa. Yale, Juviler felt, had failed its test.

In 1986, David Swensen began his role as head of Yale’s Investments Office. Reporting from that year tracks Yale’s response to Winnie Mandela City, as well as the Investments Office sit-ins and other related protests. While Swensen himself opposed apartheid divestment, the Investments office announced that the endowment would cut ties with one company that did not submit to Yale’s oversight of operations in South Africa. The office declined to name the company, but assured the Yale Daily News that it did in fact exist. That year, Yale committed to the Sullivan Principles of Equal Rights, a set of guidelines that companies in which Yale owned stock were to follow when doing business in South Africa. Among the Principles was the provision of fair pay regardless of race, unsegregated work and eating and increasing the number of non-whites in supervisory positions. Despite Yale’s commitment to these principles, in the mid-1980s one-third of Yale’s South African-involved investments were companies “whose practices violated the Sullivan Principles ... one-fourth of which was located in banks that loaned money directly to the South African government” according to Swarthmore College’s Nonviolent Action Database.

As Apartheid continued, Philadelphia civil rights leader and Sullivan Principles author Leon H. Sullivan grew uncertain of the efficacy of constructive engagement. According to the Philadelphia Encyclopedia, a decade

FEATURE after publishing his Principles and without change in law or policy by the South African government, Sullivan called for a “worldwide boycott” of businesses engaged in production in the country. While Yale reduced its investment in companies doing business in South Africa through the early 1990s, it is unclear whether this is due to the ethical implications of continued investment or the companies’ decreased profit returns. Large scale boycotts, international pressure and capital withdrawal are partially credited with bringing about the end of Apartheid. But Yale still owned shares in companies doing business in South Africa when Apartheid ended in 1994.

Contemporary Protest Issues On April 16, 2019, New Haven community members Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon were attacked and shot by a Hamden Police Officer and a Yale Police Officer while sitting in a parked car. The incident prompted protests on campus and in New Haven, and the formation of Black Students for Disarmament at Yale, or BSDY. Since 2019,

BSDY has worked toward its goal of disarming and abolishing the Yale Police Department, a police force whose officers do not respond to any elected body but carry the authority to arrest members of the New Haven community.

This authority, according to a public letter from BSDY to senior members of Yale’s administration, leads to the racialized violence that is “endemic to [police] departments nationwide.”

After months of protest and community action, the Yale Police Department reassigned officer Terrance Pollock to an unarmed position.

Officer Pollock was not charged with a crime.

On Jan. 20, 2022, Hamden officer and instigator of the 2019 shooting Devin Eaton pleaded guilty to First Degree Assault and resigned his position with the Hamden Police Department.

The charge, a Class B Felony, was brought by the New Haven State’s Attorney after months of community protest.

Now a junior, Callie Benson-Williams ’23 is the executive director of BSDY. Her first year at Yale, interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, ended with a summer of protests for

On the day the suspensions were announced, the United States Senate voted to levy sanctions against South Africa. Yale, Juviler felt, had failed its test.

racial justice and police accountability across the country. In the fall of 2020, after nationwide attention and news coverage on racism and police violence, as well as a widely-shared open letter to the University, BSDY received their first response, a letter from a University spokesperson asking to set up a meeting. But in the three years since their formation, BSDY has had just three meetings with University officials. Benson-Williams describes these meetings as “mostly them explaining their plans behind closed doors,” a frustrating lack of receptiveness. So far, the plans in question have included the formation of the Committee on Policing and the engagement of consulting firm 21st Century Policing to conduct an analysis of the Yale Police Department, which BSDY says is grossly inadequate.

Yale Taking Action?

Yale touts activism as an expected mode of existence, almost a prerequisite for attendance.

Senior Assistant Director of Admissions Hannah Mendlowitz wrote in a University-affiliated admissions blog, “We expect [students who

Yale Daily News | 27

FEATURE come to Yale] to be versed in issues of social justice. We encourage them to be vocal when they see an opportunity for change in our institution and in the world.

We value student voices on campus and we encourage discourse and action.”

Yale’s admissions website touts a similar, though less direct position: “Civic engagement on issues of public concern is consistent with attributes the Office of Undergraduate Admissions seeks in the high school students it admits.” But Benson-Williams said it can feel as though the University, by institutionalizing political action, “treats activism as another class … instead of real-world issues that are important to our lives.”

On one hand, “protest is exactly what [administrators] want from students at a university,” said Yale history professor Beverly Gage ’94. On the other hand, Gage explained, “administrators get pretty anxious about student protest. They’re also concerned about the ways that student protests can put pressure on the University to make decisions that they’re not necessarily interested in making.” Decisions like changes to endowment investment policy, undergraduate financial aid and the Yale Police Department, said Gage. Universities are “soft power” institutions, Gage said, “so [they] tend to be responsive to protest and media coverage in a way that other institutions would not be.”

Yale redefined the institutional investor’s role in 1972 with their adoption of “The Ethical Investor,” a 200page pamphlet written by Yale economists and professors. The adoption of an ethical framework was a radical policy shift from the passive, solely profit-oriented position accepted among institutional investors to what the New York Times called an “activist role,” a move that redefined the position of endowment fund managers and trustees. The primary consideration put forth in the guidelines is that of avoiding “social injury,” a loosely-defined term that the Yale Corporation would go on to refine, amend and dilute with regard to Apartheid and eventually fossil fuel investments by way of the Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility.

Universities are “soft power” institutions, Gage said, “so [they] tend to be responsive to protest and media coverage in a way that other institutions would not be.”

28 | January 2022

After opening campus to protestors in the spring of 1970, this abandonment of financial passivity was the next step in bringing activism into the fold of the University, where it could be sanctioned, controlled and institutionalized. Though it was unclear at the time how the power granted to the Yale Corporation to leverage endowment investments to make political statements would affect activists, today it is clear that the move brought Yale into the political-economic sphere and offered the opportunity for the University to define what was, and wasn’t, acceptable activism.

Professor Gage describes protest movements as responding to one of three types of issues: internal, hybrid or external — beyond the University. Internal issues, like Universal Pass/Fail as an equitable step in the University’s COVID-19 response in the spring of 2020, exist as interchanges between students and administrators. She described Pass/Fail as a rare issue where students were passionate and engaged, but it was “an easy choice for the University” to make the decision. Even then, she said, “there was a lot of back and forth” between organizers and faculty.

While internal issues concern student life and well-being exclusively, hybrid issues attempt to align the University as a role model for other institutions through its own policy. Movements like divestment and abolition, while directed at Yale, seek to make the University a “model of environmental or racial justice,” said Professor Gage. Hybrid demands put the University in a harder position than internal ones due, again, to it’s soft-power response to optics and media coverage.

Issues beyond the University and in areas where Yale has little sway, such as the Vietnam War era anti-war protests, are easier for the University to manage. Gage says these are instances where “if you’re an administrator, you might champion students going off into the world, changing the world, and speaking truth to power.”

To this end, Yale began to embrace Dwight Hall, an undergraduate organization dedicated to “social change” and to “shaping those who one day will shape the world” as well as the Yale College Council, which serves as the primary liaison between the student body and the administration. Much of the student activism occuring on campus today occurs through these same channels that were established after the 1960s.

Of note, since the adoption of “The Ethical Investor,” Yale has periodically tasked committees with defining and redefining the limits and liberties to speech on campus. “Beware the committee,” said Benson-Wil-

FEATURE liams. “It’s another tool Yale uses to “support voicing our concerns without addressing the concerns themselves.”

The most notable of these committees, chaired by prominent historian and Yale professor C. Vann Woodward, published the Woodward Report in 1975. This report would be the first to define the limits of activism in the context of Yale’s own role in the world, interpreting student action and university responsibility, as well as “social injury.” Published in response to protests and in recognition of the need for concrete policy, the report affirmed Yale’s role as an institution founded on “research and teaching,” “the free interchange of ideas” and “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” At the time, the report was seen as a practical pamphlet to guide Yale through a period of social unrest, protest and change. It also proposed harsh penalties, including suspension or expulsion, for students who engaged in “disruptive” protest or expression outside of the University’s accepted scope and scale, like Juviler’s sit-in.

Since Yale has had the power to define social injury caused by their investments, their definition has almost never included that which would reduce the profits of the endowment or compromise the standing of the University. The Yale Corporation has vigorously resisted these difficult hybrid decisions, Professor Gage told me, in the manner of a “conservative and slow-moving force.”

Concerning student protest in the present day, University Spokesperson Karent Peart did not respond to my emails between when I first reached out to her on Nov. 7 2021 and the time of publication. I also reached out to Hannah Mendehlson, whose blog post supported high school students engaged in action against systemic gun violence, an issue beyond the power of schools or universities to address, but she declined to comment for this story.

“If you don’t have a building named after you, it’s very difficult to make change [at the University],” Benson-Williams said.

The Long Game On the other hand, some students also see what Professor Gage describes as a “flowering” of student protest activity on campus in the last two decades. “We’ve seen a real resurgence” of protest action, Craig Birckhead-Morton ’24 said. Birckhead-Morton is a member of the Yale Democratic Socialists of America and Fossil Free Yale. He is also a volunteer for Students Unite Now, or SUN, a coalition of Yale students advocating for financial aid and mental

All photos courtesy of Elizabeth Juviler ’89

health care reform. SUN, Birckhead-Morton says, is well positioned to leverage its ties to union labor, longevity at Yale; SUN has been advocating for financial aid reform on campus since 2012 and popularity of their demands among students to push the administration to change policies that the organization considers unfair and harmful.

For nearly a decade, SUN has been advocating for a change to Yale’s financial aid policy: the removal of the Student Income Contribution, or SIC. Student lobbying has consistently preceded changes to Yale’s financial aid policy, on issues from need-blind admissions to international student aid. The SIC, which SUN considered regressive and unnecessary, spent years in the crosshairs. During this time SUN, like BSDY, found scheduling a meeting with administrators to be nearly impossible.

In October 2021, Yale announced the end of the billed portion of the Student Income Contribution. The press release carried no mention of nine years of organizing by students, but for the University to acknowledge students’ action would be to admit an inconvenient truth: Yale responds to protest and likely would not have made the policy change without sustained student organizing. That the slow-moving institutional force would appear to function without the confrontational input of undergraduate students makes perfect sense: the University would like to appear to be able to make these decisions on its own.

Still, for institutions of higher education, especially those thick with tradition and history, progress happens slowly and quietly. With one-fourth of the student body leaving every year, undergraduates rarely see results of their activism while still on campus. As Birkhead-Morton pointed out, students see “from a moment in time,” while the University sees students come and go on a centuries-long scale: a structural difference in ability to sustain agendas. With a short institutional memory, a lack of university action can be discouraging.

But in the last 60 years, student protest at Yale has moved from untenable, to accepted, to encouraged when polite. Moreover, in the age of softer power and ubiquitous media coverage, Yale is becoming more responsive to not only internal issues but “hybrid” issues of policy and behavior modeling.

The reality of Yale’s long-term malleability is no less relevant today. As Birkhead-Morton said, SUN’s success in advocating against the Student Income Contribution demonstrates that “the administration must move on basic things, or students will make them.”

Yale Daily News | 29

PHOTO

SUNDAY STROLL

BY LEET MILLER

Last semester, I took “Black and White Photography Capturing Light,” which taught me to completely rethink how I compose my pictures. For the class, I continued shooting what had always interested me — architecture, city goers in their environments and nature — but learned to keep my eye out for things that would pop because of contrasting colors and light conditions. “Sunday Stroll” is a striking scene of dark and light contrast: two women dressed entirely in white emerging from the dark abyss of The Study. No passersby, cars, hotel guests or other signs of the bustling city are visible despite that day being quite normal on Chapel Street. I like that the sheer emptiness of the scene feels post-apocalyptic, as if the two masked women chose to brave the feeling of living freely but carefully through the past two pandemic years. x // LEET MILLER

30 | January 2022

POEM

Young, Dumb, &

By Sarah Feng

White trucks shoot through the bridge at night. My house floats behind us, a golden fruit in the refrigerator of the neighborhood. I really wanna stop thinking like this! My radio dials on repeat. I stumble into form, where you are already there, sitting in the driver’s seat on the Golden Gate Bridge. Your face opens like a blade: two halves of a shell, opening to speak. The car whirls wider than the bridge can break; the red is merciless.

Where does a girl go when she is dreaming? Her body remains in that car, pressed like a leaf to the cold. Her eyes are standing outside, peering over the bridge, undressing to slip into the bay. Your mouth ventriloquizes to the radio, words urging the waves. I do not remember how you really sound, I reason with myself. In dreams like these I’m yearning to drive away from you, but blushrug unfurls, a neutron of scentless gaze pinning me here with the cold. All I hear: the canal of an ear flooded with blackwater, gravitating through the blind. All I see, the San Francisco Bay’s deep black pressing me into an arrowhead which pierces the surface, grows green with algae and refuses to sleep, refuses to lean away. Where does a girl go when she is dreaming? I want to break your face in half and hear nothing but the whistle of the water.

There are songs I can only listen to while thinking about you, books that remind me of that golden red haze. On the couch waiting for you to call, “The White Album” by Joan Didion: the politics of water. In my sleep, I trace your hands, the Sol LeWitt-like paper disintegration of your knuckles floating disembodied from yourself.

Black dots hover, midhorizon, noise smashed into the temporary pauses between our words. Water molecules beat against the thin membrane of your fingers.

It is like watching a car try to enter a city at night. It snuffles, trembles, headlights, hesitating to raise the hood on the much larger vehicle of the city itself. I jolt into my garage past 12, drive past the coast at night, wonder if I am still dreaming, but everything shivers beneath my fingers here. I am talking about the scene in my sleep where we are jostled and our vision is cut by the tapesquare of the windshield, the provisional, bandaged arms of our car’s high beam sweeping aside the dry sea of bushes into strains of platinum gold, just for a moment, trembling. You don’t know what I mean but what I mean is the hydrogens feel this way around the oxygens, floating towards the little crackling electrons but never able to approach the city for what it is instead of what they see, to leave it as they found it, to pocket it without arraigning the molecules of my vision anew. Surface tension of this water, unthinking and bowed to the great god of the spinning Mars in your mind, all through the taut cords of your body, snapping.

There is nothing in life that can derail you any more than a car rerouting through a mountain in its own delirium. On the contrary, Murakami once wrote that there is nothing in your life that never takes a step beyond your heart.

31 | January 2021 // JESSAI FLORES

INSIGHT

BEYOND COSTAR Astrology in the 21st Century

BY WILHELMINA GRAFF

O

n the morning of Dec. 2, Rebecca Mironko’s phone pinged with a notification: “Today you might be feeling some deep feelings. This is a good time to go inward and spend some time on your own.”

Every morning between 9 and 9:30 a.m., Mironko ’24 receives a notification from an astrology app entitled “The Pattern.”

Based on the movement of the planets and their interaction with Mironko’s birth chart, the app provides insight into how planetary movement is affecting her personal life, world events or the experiences of those she has “friended” on the app.

Mironko is part of a growing segment of Gen Z interested in astrology. In addition to daily notifications from The Pattern, she receives daily pieces of advice or omens from another popular astrology app called Co-Star, has conversations with her improv group about Spotify Wrapped auras and shares memes about different zodiac signs in her suitemate group chat.

Avik Sarkar ’23 was friends with Mironko before they both came to Yale. Though Sarkar credits their high school friend group for introducing him to astrology, he became more invested in it during the pandemic because he was spending a lot of time alone.

Astrology often gave him a starting point for self-reflection and journaling. For example, he found Mercury in Retrograde helpful for creating a sense of consistency between present and past life experiences. Mercury in Retrograde is when Mercury, from Earth’s perspective, appears to reverse direction due to an optical illusion. In popular culture, Mercury in Retrograde is seen as the cause of technology, planning and communication troubles and often blamed for misunderstandings. Astrologers often refrain from signing contracts or initiating new ventures during this time. For some astrologers, these three week cycles are good times to slow

32 | January 2022

down and reflect. The concept of reflecting during these periods helped “connect my life during the pandemic, to my life before,” Sarkar said.

When asked why Gen Z seems to be particularly interested in astrology, Mironko quickly singled out the “worldwide chaos” members of the generation have experienced during their time growing up. In contrast to the feelings of exhaustion that arise from “being Gen Z and living in this world … especially at a place like Yale, where we feel like our individual decisions matter so much,” Sarkar finds the astrological perspective of meaning in planetary movements to be “so freeing.”

Mironko and Sarkar are not alone in their interest in astrology. Astrology-themed Tik Toks, memes, social media pages and apps have abounded, fueled by large followings from Gen Z, which has been reported as the generation that most believes in astrology. The BBC reported that Google searches about astrology and birth charts hit a five year peak in 2020. Inextricable from the story of astrology’s recent return to the mainstream is the pandemic and the emotional, financial, physical and mental challenges that have ensued. Some have turned to astrology for comfort, guidance, healing or self-knowledge during these trying times.

Jennifer Joseph is a California-based astrologer who advertises her birth chart and tarot reading under the name “Five Star Virgo.” She has practiced professionally for 10 years and informally for another two decades. Joseph explains the connection between Gen Z and astrology by pointing out the alignment of the planets during Gen Z’s birth. For a portion of Gen Z, Uranus is in Aquarius, Joseph says, which explains why we would be more drawn to astrology.

“Aquarius is the sign … of the collective

and kind of out there concepts, technology, understanding larger patterns and Uranus is very kind of quirky, and eccentric and unexpected,” Joseph said. “It makes sense that your generation would be into astrology, because it’s sort of outside of the norm of what came before.”

Defining Astrology Lorenzo Sanford is an astrologer, musician and author of a book called The Beautiful Logic of Astrology. Sanford’s “obsession with astrology” began as a teenager after he got a reading done from an “old woman with mysterious eyes” at Laguna Beach.

Now an astrology reader and expert himself, Sanford counsels clients who book personal readings and speaks about astrology to audiences on Youtube. There are varied traditions and practices “just like we have different cultures, different countries have different approaches to astrology,” Sanford said. A person’s astrological birth chart is determined by the alignment of the planets at their birth time and location, giving each person a unique chart.

Sanford explained that “according to astrological theory, there is no duplication in any chart for 26,000 years.” Each person is “an agent of the time that you were born in,” he said. “So you, on whatever day and time you were born, manifest a certain quality, a certain character that only exists during that time. And when you took your first breath, you started vibrating to the energy of the world around you.” This unique energy is significant, he said, because it can explain and point each individual on a specific path “because you came here to do whatever that energy is, whatever that energy describes.”

Diana Brownstone is a nationally-certified astrologer based in New York City. She has been interviewed on The Meredith Vieira Show and The Today Show, among others,

INSIGHT and has done astrology readings for over thirty years. When describing the influence that the planets have on ourselves and our lives, Sanford and Brownstone both referenced the quote, “as above, so below” from the Emerald Tablet, a Hermetic text from the late eighth or early ninth century. Brownstone mentioned that humans are “electrical beings” and respond to the energy transmitted through the universe. Sanford explained the connection between earthly and cosmic events, by stating that one can explain events “in the microcosm from what’s happening in the macrocosm above.”

Interest in astrology has pervaded throughout history. For many centuries, astrology and astronomy were considered to be aspects of the same discipline.

In a 1599 letter to German statesman and scholar Johann Herwart von Hohenberg, renowned astronomer Johannes Kepler, the first scientist to correctly explain planetary motion, shared his belief in the power of astrology, arguing that “it influences a human being as long as he lives in no other way than that in which the peasant haphazardly ties slings around pumpkins; these do not make the pumpkin grow, but they determine its shape.” He continued, “So do the heavens: they do not give a man morals, experiences, happiness, children, wealth, a wife, but they shape everything with which a man has to do.” Religion and astrology have long had a tenuous relationship. After the end of the war between the Persian and Roman Empires in the mid 300s AD, there was a regional Christian council meeting called the Synod of Laodicea that sought to regulate the behavior of church members. Astrology was deemed dangerous, and became forbidden in this meeting. Traditional science and astrology diverged towards the end of the 17th century, when astrology began to be seen as less in alignment with science.

Sanford thinks that astrology has something extra that science can’t explain.

“The reason why astrology can’t ever be purely a science is because our human

experience is so conditioned on something deeper than a material form,” he said. “We are definitely more than just skin and bones and teeth and the physical things.” He pointed to the belief in the existence of a person’s soul or spirit as the special ingredient animating human life. “There’s something in us that transcends... a purely physical world,” he said.

Sanford agreed that astrology can’t be proven in the traditional way — one “can’t do a randomized, double blind study of human nature” — which causes

100% reliable as a downside, as “astrology gives you at least 70% probability of having an accurate assessment of the areas that it represents,” and when trying to plan and understand your life, those odds are “worth betting on.”

Astrology and Technology The spread of astrology apps, websites, blogs and other astrological technology has undoubtedly partially fueled its rise in Gen Z. “I think apps in general have helped pique people’s interest and then they’ve gone on to perhaps get their chart done,” Brownstone said. Those who come to her consultations tend to know more than just their sun sign, she shared. But according to Brownstone, this increased access to generic astrology information without taking the full chart into consideration can make people “very fatalistic.”

Brownstone and Sanford pointed to the utility and accuracy of digital astrology tools for calculating the alignment of planets and birth charts — something they used to have to do by hand. They are then able to interpret these calculations during their sessions with clients.

//JESSAI FLORES many to be skeptical of astrology’s potential merits. In his view, astrology goes beyond science into the arts. He said of astrology, “[it] is scientific, in that you’re accurately following the precise mathematical movements of bodies and space, but it’s an art in that you are then taking that information and drawing conclusions based on behaviors, and you cannot ever quantify behaviors of human beings into a statistically 100% or even 90% reliable framework.” However, Sanford doesn’t see astrology’s inability to be

Sanford thinks that astrological technology is a good thing so long as it is taken “with a grain of salt.” Nothing beats a professional astrologer’s interpretation of a person’s birth chart, he explained. “A good astrologer,” Sanford said, is someone who looks at “all the elements” of who you are and then “communicates with you to understand what influences have come into your life to help shape you and then gives you an understanding of how those environmental influences work with the way that you are wired, the way your innate patterns are. And an app can’t do that.” Given that apps, videos and internet resources are more accessible for Gen Z, technology has a large impact on how this generation interacts with astrology.

Mironko and Sarkar’s introduction to and experience with astrology has been

Yale Daily News | 33

INSIGHT heavily influenced by technology and social media, especially during the pandemic. Mironko subscribes to a weekly astrology newsletter and she and Sarkar have both run bonds on the Pattern app, which shows astrological compatibility for two people based on their birth charts. During the long months of social distancing and afterwards, Mironko has found that following astrology hashtags and accounts on Twitter is a “fun way to relate to people on the internet.” While “scrolling through miles of Twitter” and following the Capricorn topic, she was able to relate to others while being “all locked away in our separate quarantine.’”

reflected on this connection: “Astrology is not only fun,” he said, “but it’s the … prototype of … all those assessment tests.” But, unlike those, astrology and birth charts are fixed. Mironko finds this aspect comforting: it “is kind of nice to... know [that] ‘I’m indecisive, classic Libra.’ It’s written in the stars, that’s just how you are, [and] it’s okay. You don’t have to change that aspect of yourself.” Astrology “almost relieves the pressure of all of the things that make up you,” Mironko said.

Brownstone highlights the utility of astrol-

Astrology and Self-Knowledge Sanford points out that an interest in oneself and self-reflection is as old as the interest in the movements of the planets. He says there are five main themes that people ask him about during astrological readings: relationships, careers, family, finances and health, especially emotional health.

Like Sanford, Mironko sees astrology as a tool for self-knowledge. “I think … it’s fun to know yourself in any way,” she said. She likened it to different personality quizzes like Enneagram or Myers-Briggs. Sanford

34 | January 2022

Sarkar found that astrology has been beneficial for his interpersonal relationships, because it recognizes that loved ones will sometimes have traits “that bother you” but are fundamental to who they are. Astrology allowed him to “laugh it off” because it “gives you a framework of relating to people” and acknowledging the multifacetedness of their personalities.

Astrology as Spiritual Guidance Joseph underscores the relationship between world events and an interest in astrology. “I think that things sort of emerge and evolve on their own according to how people are and what’s happening and how people want to engage in things,” she said.

“I definitely think that astrology has seen a resurgence, and all things metaphysical have. This younger generation is really into it. And I feel like those sorts of things sort of morph out into the collective.”

Sanford argues that one of the biggest values of astrology is the opportunity to get to know oneself more deeply. Astrology is “a perfect tool [for this purpose] because this is not pop psychology, this is something that has existed for literally thousands of years,” he said. “Through these millennia, people have observed and recorded ... and discerned a lot about humanity.”

Sanford elaborated on the value of astrology for understanding the self.

Nothing “beats astrology, for understanding who you are at a core level, what your motivations are, what your fears are, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are,” he said. At the same time, astrology can also be a valuable tool to point “you in the direction of what you should be doing to make the most of who you are in this life.”

of fun and curiosity underpins Mironko and Sarkar’s interest and belief in astrology, noting that talking about astrology is “always a good conversation starter,” Sarkar said. Mironko agreed, “I love using it to get to know people.” She enjoys pulling up a friend or acquaintance’s birth chart and analyzing the different placements of the planets. “Even if [the birth chart] doesn’t resonate with them ...you’re learning about that person,” she said. “It’s an easy window into getting to know someone at a deeper level.”

ogy in figuring out timing in one’s life. “I think it’s such an incredible map, timing map and guide,” she said. Those who don’t utilize astrology “would not have the same insight into events that are happening in their lives, or the foreknowledge of types of events that could happen,” Brownstone said. “It gives you a broader understanding of your life as a whole.”

Tantamount to the spread of astrology in the last two years is the upheaval people have experienced as a result of the ongoing pandemic. Joseph pointed to the uncertainty people have felt as partly fueling the increased interest. “My business grew during the pandemic,” Joseph said. “Wanting to know that it’s going to be okay is very deep in all of us, that need for stability.”

Astrology in Everyday Social Life

People who are “more worried or more anxious” are going to be more likely in need of a consultation, she explained.

Astrology can be useful “especially when there’s a crisis, because it gives you a start date and end date, you

As many Gen Zers can attest, astrology has taken on a social life of its own, often appearing in casual conversations with friends or acquaintances. A sense

INSIGHT know how long you’re going to be in this.” During prolonged crises like the pandemic, “it gives a sense of comfort, even in a difficult situation, in that you can accept what’s going on and not think it’s your fault that you’re stuck.”

Brownstone highlights the healing effect that astrology can play in people’s lives, drawing comparisons between spiritual guidance to the role that a therapist might play in people’s lives during moments of crisis, indecision or stress.

Joseph also points to the mental factors that can cause people to search for answers in astrology. “I think there’s a huge mental health crisis … because of the pandemic, because of how we live,” Joseph said. “I think there is a need for what I do and what people like me do ... People want healing, people want to feel better in their bodies, and in their minds and in their spirits. And I think situations like these large global situations, they trigger this yearning.” She sees these global crises and movements as part of the reason that astrology and spirituality have “hit the mainstream in a way that wasn’t like that before. So I think it’s time for us to heal collectively and get on with healing this planet.”

Despite astrology’s longevity, there are many people who don’t subscribe to the belief system. Joseph points to a cultural stigma around practices like astrology that are seen as “witchy.” She believes that some of this stigma comes from a “more patriarchal kind of power structure … they don’t want people to be empowered in terms of their own self understanding and their self knowledge. They want people to rely on the structures that they’ve created,” Joseph said. “[But] an empowered person understands themselves …

Astrology is just one tool of empowerment.” That being said, astrology isn’t for everyone. “People are gonna take it or leave it,” Joseph said. Those “who stigmatize it or think it’s rubbish, they’re entitled to their beliefs.”

Whether astrology will be helpful or

not is going to depend on the person, says Brownstone. While Brownstone finds astrology helpful and knows that the people who come to her also do, “there are just some people who it may not be for them, because they already have a certain set of beliefs, and … a sense of faith that they don’t need something beyond that,” she said. “I think a lot of what people get from a reading is a faith that there’s an order to the universe.” Many practitioners of astrology are drawn by the hyper-personalization that comes from the align-

ment of the planets, and also the feeling that each individual is part of a cosmic order that can explain experiences and provide meaning in their life.

Mironko appreciates the macro lens that astrology provides. “You zoom out as much as you possibly can,” Mironoko said. “It helps you feel like just a tiny, insignificant speck in the world. You’re … at the whim of the universal forces.”

Sarkar also feels like astrology lends a valuable perspective to his experiences.

“You feel seen,” Sarkar said. It also helps him make sense of feelings by “people

putting into words, experiences that I might not be able to write.”

On a broader scale, Sarkar sees astrology perhaps filling a role in Gen Z people’s life that religion has traditionally filled for older generations. “My mom is ‘Hindu’ and I put that in quotation marks because she, for all intents and purposes, is not. She does not follow any of the customs and traditions, except that she fasts on Fridays and only eats vegetarian food … it’s like she’s using religion for a specific purpose, which is having a routine, a way of life, a way of looking at life,” Sarkar said. “I think in a similar way, astrology has performed that function for people our age who are into it. It’s just a way of making sense of things even if it’s not real or true.”

Mironko also likens astrology to a faith or belief system. “People use religion in the same way,” she said, but she views religion as coming with “more baggage” and rules. Like many other trends, astrology’s resurgence in pop culture comes with its own dilemmas. Mironko bemoaned how astrology has been “perverted” by consumerism on social media, mentioning memes on Instagram showing “all the signs as a purse and then it’s like a way to sell your purses.”

Sarkar agrees and added, “it has become a money-making industry, just like anything else can be made into a money-making industry, right? And I think what frustrates me is when people will take that as a way to critique astrology, because the problem isn’t astrology; the problem is that it’s being co-opted.”

The chaos and unique challenges that the pandemic has brought on society have caused many to search for meaning, answers and self-knowledge in old and new directions. For some members of Gen Z, astrology has been a source of spiritual guidance during the turbulent last couple of years. Astrology might not be for everyone, but in Mironko’s view, “self reflection never hurts.”

Yale Daily News | 35

“W

FICTION

A TOWN OF SHARKS After Heather Monley, Town of Birds

BY ARIEL KIM

W

hen I first moved to Ashbourne, New York, I wasn’t alarmed to find parents raising their young in tanks. Parents have always been raising their young strategically. Having lived on several different continents as a child, I’ve witnessed various methods of child-rearing — cages, pens, fences, terrariums. Different structures to account for different fears; tactics bent on absorbing the climate. Maybe the neighborhood fears another Genesis flood, I conjectured, and I pictured it: windows collapsing with the crescendo of moving water. No. The water would seep up from beneath the carpet — starting in squelches between toes, then gradually rising to tickle slumbering ears. New York, a submarine empire suspended in time, its demographics diversified to include nekton and zooplankton.

I first observed the tanks through the open blinds of a neighbor’s window. Night had shrouded the streets to the extent that it was difficult to use my bedroom window as anything more than a mirror.

Piercing through the black, a neon green rectangle flickered, replacing my face and encapsulating what seemed to be the silhouette of a child’s legs. As I peered closer, I noticed that the rectangle was actually a tank in the window across the street. The silhouette sunk lower in the tank, fruitlessly lurching against a pair of hands pressing him down. I forgot to breathe as I watched the child’s delicate skin ripple and break from the impact of kicking against a lid clamping him down and closing him off from the world. His chest heaved in an attempt to fill his lungs with anything — even water — and I fought the urge to dash across the street.

This is completely normal, I assured myself.

This town is just like any other.

Just then, as the boy mustered one last kick, the green liquid peeled back his flesh, unveiling grey shark-skin beneath. Like mouths, gills resembling tally marks opened between his face and ears; his pale hair drifted to the floor of the tank. When his hands reopened, thin, ghostlike webbing bloomed in the space between his fingers. His new strokes were lithe and froglike.

36 | January 2022

I shuddered a sigh of relief. Ignoring the raw, red crescents dotted across my palms, I resumed my studying.

Every afternoon since then, I have returned to my windowsill to watch the shark-boy grow. A recent development: two adults — I assume, his parents — took a more active role in his physical development.

I could read the father’s lips: Bite, bite, he would taunt, brandishing a steak dripping ruby above his head. He tossed it up with the piercing accuracy of an insult, and the boy sprung up, drenching his parents’ clothes while snapping a juicy piece between rows of piercing teeth. The parents stepped back, proudly admiring their work.

One day, the mother’s eyes met mine. She shut the blinds and that’s how they remained.

At school, I noticed these similar, sharklike features on my peers. In the halls, some students flaunted their agility by pumping their gills open and closed. The insides resembled the undersides of chanterelle mushrooms, the kind I would often uproot.

Conversely, many peers were secretive, shrouding their gills with strands of deliberately placed hair.

School was a cold dive into a den of sharks: when raising my hand to answer a question, the wide, glinting eyes of my classmates raised goosebumps on every inch of my arm. As I strode down the hallway, tension curled its heavy fingers around my throat; my peers breathed like wire traps, keen to masticate the leathery carcasses of their peers in the snap of a moment.

Sharks lurking in the lull of the ocean deep.

“Opioids activate receptors on nerve cells and release your …” the biology teacher, Ms. Brown, droned on in the background. Students’ faces were dyed technicolor in the glare of their phone screens, their webbed hands scrolling surreptitiously. I glanced down at my web-less hands, feeling naked. My eyes landed on the desk beside me, where a girl doodled

FICTION

on the margins of her notes, balloons of color blooming from her highlighters.

Jellyfish, I mused. Then, I realized with a gasp: her fingers weren’t webbed. My gaze immediately jumped to her neck and found the signature, shark-like gills lining her neck: only they were dormant, like pencilled tally marks and nothing more.

In a burst of impulse, I took out a sticky note.

Hey, my name is Aria. I like your jellyfish, I wrote, gingerly placing the note on her desk.

She flicked her eyes to the note and flashed me a grin. I’m Ashley. Let’s talk later, she mouthed.

“This is — BY FAR — my favorite part of the school.” Ashley swung open a small mahogany door, and sunlight spilled through the opening. Inside, the late sun cradled statues, art stands, and canvas in a golden halo. A freshly-painted mural spread across the cerulean wall: eyes and eyes and eyes, blending together and tearing apart.

I paced around the room, hovering my hand over the paintings and the statues. “I guess Ashbourne’s art department isn’t as bad as they say it is.”

“Oh but it is,” Ashley interjected. “That … and that … and that.” She pointed. “All my work.”

“Oh but you’re fucking brilliant,” I said, face frozen in awe.

Ashley blushed a deep red and mumbled thanks.

I took her hands in mine, and stared into her eyes. “We need to paint together sometime.”

“How about … right now?”

She slid open the cabinet in the wall behind her, displaying an array of paints.

We shared a mischievous grin before running to grab brushes on the counter to begin our work.

During the next few months of school, Ashley and I became inseparable. After bio, she would show me a new part of the school, and then we’d retreat into the art room until the latest bus left the school. One day, I missed my stop and she offered to bring me to her home.

As we descended the school bus to the path leading up to her house, Ashley’s steps faltered. The spasmodic staccato of her gait indicated a desire to retreat, but she continued dragging her feet forward. Gingerly, Ashley slipped her key into the front door and twisted, her movements growing more frantic as the key didn’t budge. As our eyes slid up the length of the door, we found a pair of wide eyeballs staring back: jiggling in their sockets like boiled eggs. The door crashed open, revealing a hulking man.

“You’re late,” he spat. “Who’s this?” he demanded. “Do you want her to see your tank, too?”

Ashley’s eyes darted back at me. “N-no,” she stuttered. “But —” Feeling the sudden pressure in my bladder, I blurted if I could use the restroom. The man took a reluctant step back, pointing directions to the nearest restroom.

While washing my hands, I jolted from a loud crash. Glancing out from the narrow door slit, I gazed in awe at her tank — it dominated her room, spanning its length and rising halfway up the dimly-lit wall. Mr. Gong loomed like an apparition, his hands spread out over the lid while a woman — I assumed Mrs. Gong— lurked from afar. Beneath it, fluorescent lights cast a gradient of translucent shadows across the carpeted floor.

“Open your gills,” he demanded. The solution within shook from the impact of his baritone. That’s when I noticed Ashley clinging beneath the lid, still as a stone. Her hair drifted from the clips in her hair, unveiling five long knife

wounds. They weren’t gills, really. They were dormant, premature, sleeping.

Ashley’s huge, saucer-like eyes blinked frantically in the tank, growing scarlet from the solution. She cupped her hands around her neck in a strained attempt to breathe. Her skin was wrinkled and pale, and I knew she hadn’t evolved, not like the boy I’d seen grow in the tank. Her very anatomy protested against the unrealistic expectations weighing down on her.

I felt my legs wind like springs, ready to pounce, when I found Ashley …morphing. A film glazed over her eyes, and a sense of calm pulled over her face like a new skin, her breath sputtering from the gills on the sides of her head. I could see her new self bursting to the surface.

My gaze flicked to her mother.

Her eyes glinted, nails digging into her palms. Her jaw shifted as her teeth ground beneath her skin. But she didn’t move.

Sitting cross-legged with my back absorbing the cool of the tank, I waited for my friend as her parents left. “That’s such a weird decoration for a shark,” I mumbled, surveying a likely self-painted Eiffel Tower mural with plastic jewels plastered in glitter-glue.

I wiped the thought away as clumps of water tumbled and plopped to the floor from Ashley’s hair, which was tousled like kelp. I glanced at Ashley, half expecting an empty shell where a girl used to be. She asked: “Did you finish the bio lab?”

I shook my head.

After the accidental encounter, I sat sheepishly with the Gong family and pretended Ashley hadn’t been struggling in frigid waters for the past hour. Her mother conjured an entire instant Italian feast, complete with a baked Costco pizza sprinkled with pre-marinated tomatoes and anchovies. Making conversation,

//ZOE BERG

Yale Daily News | 37

FICTION Mrs. Gong asked which APs I was taking, what I scored on the SATs, and what tank model I kept at home. While I obediently listed off my APs, I caught Mrs. Gong side-eyeing her daughter.

“Ashley should’ve taken more AP classes,” she murmured.

After that day, I felt a different energy emanating from Ashley. In contrast to her calm, deadly presence underwater, above land, she became anxiety incarnate. In class, her knee sporadically bounced beneath her desk, and her expressions became tight and twitchy. Her usually clean-brushed hair and mascara-swept lashes were replaced with tousled hair and dry, red eyes.

During the AP Biology test the next week, I discovered the root of the problem.

Silence amplified the pulsing of asynchronized clocks: analog clocks, digital clocks. The clicking of pens and the bobbing of knees.

In my peripheral vision, Ashley hurriedly surveyed the classroom and shakily copied down the answers from a hidden slip of paper, almost dropping her pen before stopping it in its path with a loud smash.

She hyperventilated as if she didn’t know the next time she would come up for air. A student complained of the noise as Ashley began to cry.

By wearing a skin she didn’t fit into, Ashley was beginning to slip. And she wasn’t the only one.

Students at school gasped for air without being underwater. If they weren’t focusing, pure oxygen sputtered through their collapsed gills, and their eyes swam like whirlpools from suffocation.

Their legs wobbled like vestigial structures. Each night, they typed away at their computers as if working were the only thing keeping them afloat — keeping them from drowning. After all, they’re sharks, I thought.

During lunch, I mustered the courage to warn Ashley.

“Hey, Ashley, I’m worried for you,” I breathed. “Cheating isn’t fair to anyone else, or yourself, either.”

“Mind your own business,” snapped Ashley. Everyone else at the table went silent, and I sunk into my chair as if tethered to an anchor.

I should’ve noticed already: the power dynamic between friends, the utilitarian approach to weighing and manipulating relationships. Here, friends were like means to an end: the Future Connection, the Homework Helper, the Popularity

38 | January 2022

Booster. In the way some students stole college portfolios, essays, personas — and yet no one was speaking out. In this symbiotic web of manipulated relationships, I had committed a blunder and tumbled through the cracks.

Success is king here, I thought, and everything else follows.

“Let’s calm down,” chirped Aria with her perfectly symmetrical, plastic smile. It was the same one others wore when anticipating the results of a contest or test. Wishing for your undoing. After all, success is relative to the failure of others.

From then on, I built a mental cocoon distancing myself from my peers. It was a simple feat — even the texture of their skin pricked like tiny teeth called placoid scales. As if I had the electroreceptor organs of a shark, I easily maneu-

vered the subtle shifts in the atmosphere through the pores of my skin. I found that the longer I stayed, however, the more I fell prey to the siren song of a completely self-centered world devoid of ethics.

If dishonesty pays, I thought, then what’s stopping me from doing the same?

When I returned home that day, my parents were waiting for me with a tank of their own.

“Of course, there’s no pressure to use it,” Dad insisted. “It’s completely up to— ” “But we highly recommend it,” Mom in-

FICTION terrupted. She paused. “No pressure, of course.”

I took note of the strong recommendation and bit back my disgust. Acid reflux lurched against the roof of my mouth. Living in a tank isn’t living, I thought unconvincingly. Was I really giving in? No — you’ll forget to breathe. You’ll lose yourself, the way Ashley did. And that boy. And countless others.

Back at school, the speakers crackled while requesting a moment of silence. Amanda Green, they said, cause of death — to be determined.

Discovered with pills scattered around her body.

Everyone knows why she passed, I realized in the way their beady eyes remained dry, without a hint of moisture. Jordan scrolled through Instagram while the homeroom teacher, Mrs. Lyon squeezed her palms together in prayer. I closed my eyes and tried fruitlessly to conjure the girl I had never heard of until her death. I wondered if she was the type to hide gills behind strands of hair or flash them like medallions of war. I wondered which tank model she used.

I imagined Amanda Green, sprawled on the carpeted floor, pills tumbling into the crevices in her throat. I saw her gasping for air, clutching her collarbone as her gills heaved into overdrive. Her ghostly hands caressed my skin as phantom pains, and she seeped like stinging seawater into the cuts in my skin.

I gasped. How was I to survive in this ecosystem that cast aside those who couldn’t adapt?

My knees buckled as my fear grew into a desperate cry for survival. Like a taut violin string ready to snap, my body was on the brink of bursting open.

In my room, I took a step back, watching the tank with tired, weary eyes. Surprisingly, I didn’t recall the memories of Ashley and the boy, nearly drowning in their respective green tanks. Instead, I pictured: Mom, massaging lotion into her palms, cracked //SOPHIE HENRY

dry like asphalt after a long day at the nursery.

Dad, blue light sinking into the furrows of his forehead as he typed in the kitchen with the lights off to allow my sister and me a good night’s sleep.

Mom and Dad, sacrificing everything for my success. My eyes swam.

The realization crashed into me like a tidal wave: I would become a shark for them. But did they truly comprehend the sort of monster their daughter would become?

I collapsed back onto my mattress, eyes glued to the tank. They lingered there until the lights faded.

Today, I woke to the groan of a tank filling with water. The cadencial drip drip of water leaking from the faucet resembled an elegy. I rested my fingertips on the edge of the tank and peered down at my distorted reflection. With an eerie sense of calm, I stripped off my clothes and slid beneath the water. I surrendered to the cool liquid and let it consume me. Now, at the base of the tank, I watch my reflection in a trance. The gentle ripple of the surface refracts light to form patterns across my skin, intertwining like bodies rhythmically collapsing into each other. The ambient noise of the outside world ceases to be comprehensible; waves of sound thumping against a barricade of glass.

I have gills, I think. My smile: perfectly symmetrical, all lips. My eyes: bloodshot and glazed over. I chuckle, and air bubbles scramble to the surface. Was I expecting to see something new hatch from the skin I’ve concocted for myself?

The reflective sides of the glass mirror each other and multiply my image to infinitudes.

It looks like a time vortex or a pathway to another dimension. My future has never felt so infinite, so tangible as it does encased in a tank conceived of glass. The water doesn’t unlatch my skin or reveal anything new; instead, it cradles my every curve and corner in a fluid embrace.

Always swimming, swimming from my own blood.

I don’t want to stop.

In my town, children click their mechanical pencils, scroll through Instagram, stare at their reflections on dark tank surfaces. Here, children forget to breathe, forgo sleep, grow skin like sandpaper.

And like many places, our town trades our present for the future.

Doesn’t yours?

Yale Daily News | 39

CONFESSIONS FROM THE THIRD PLACE KYLIE VOLAVONGSA PAGE 25