YDN Magazine, December 2017

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

VOL. XLV ISSUE 3 DECEMBER 2017

UNDER THE WING

BY WILL REID

Editors’ Note Dear readers, Over break, away from Yale, what can we say about our semester?

Which conversations will carry over, and how might they change from dining hall to dining room, from friends to family? At Yale our opinions are shaped by the places we’re from; the moment we flip homes, the inverse takes effect. Whatever direction we move, communicating our experiences — mundane, funny, political — becomes an effort in translation.

these cases, Yale becomes both the subject and the reader.

In features, we comment on politics as they unfold in New Haven. Four of our reporters go on assignment in the city — one to report on the ghostly remains of a once bustling residential neighborhood, one to cover the superintendent’s selection, two to explore an art show at a bus stop on the Green — while Liana Van Nostrand ’20 continues her coverage of city politics with an installment on local elections.

We hope the magazine will start conversations — 10 individually — here and at home. In our cover story, Will Reid ’19 introduces the controversy surrounding Christine Lattin, a postdoctoral associate whose research put her in PETA’s crosshairs. The article reminds us that academia does not exist in a vacuum: It can be messy and public and divisive.

Annotated poetry, fiction and humor point to the personal amid the political. They remind us that ultimately our experience starts and ends as individuals.

In our insights, we catalog conversations that are happening on campus. Pieces on Tony Reno and the website Seeking Arrangement turn an eye to topics on and under the radar. In

We hope you take this issue with you. Let it hit home.

Thank you to our writers for engaging and to our editors for accompanying them. Behind all this issue puts forth, they’ve been there, moving us forward.

Till next time, Flora & Frani

table of contents 15

poetry

Annotated SIDNEY SAINT-HILAIRE

17

feature

Boom & Bust ELAINE WANG AND ALICE OH

22

insight

4

PART II: NO CHOICE

FEATURE by LIANA VAN NOSTRAND

Betting on Reno WON JUNG

30

fiction

He Walks in His Sleep Into Your Life RUBY BILGER

38

bits & pieces

The Art of the Reluctant Pre-Med JACOB SWEET

8

GOING SOUTH

FEATURE by ANDREW SANDWEISS

11

A COMMUNITY HEART, NOT LISTENED TO FEATURE by ISABEL BYSIEWICZ

26

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Magazine Editors in Chief Flora Lipsky Frani O’Toole

Photography Editors Schirin Rangnick Vivek Suri

Managing Editors Kate Cray Nicole Blackwood

Illustrations Editors Michael Holmes Sonia Ruiz

Associate Editors Liana Van Nostrand Lucy Silbaugh Jordan Cutler-Tietjen Elaine Wang

Copy Editor Brett Greene

Magazine Design Editors Mari Melin-Corcoran Valeria Villanueva

Editor in Chief & President Rachel Treisman Publisher Elizabeth Liu Cover photo by Robbie Short

SEEKING ARRANGEMENT INSIGHT by ISABEL GUARCO

33

UNDER THE WING COVER by WILL REID

ASSISTANT DESIGN EDITOR: Sam Berek BUSINESS LIAISON: Alexa Tsay

Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

feature

Part II: No Choice // By Liana Van Nostrand // Photos by Vivek Suri and courtesy of Alexandra McDaniel and Charles Decker

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his past Election Day, three candidates for New Haven alder stood the legally mandated 75 feet away from the polling place in each of their wards. With temperatures hovering around 40 and rain starting to fall, candidates had their last chance to convince constituents before they voted.

Luckily, candidate for East Rock alder Charles Decker GRD ’18, who moved to New Haven to study political science, could take cover under a fellow Democrat’s nearby tent. Decker wasn’t reaching out to voters alone — his ward’s current alder, who knew the constituency better, chatted on his behalf. Until the polls closed at 8 p.m., the trio welcomed voters under the tent as they dashed from their cars into the polling place. Decker, an academic, also handed out bookmarks with his face and contact information. He wanted constituents who had never met him to know who he was and how to contact him. Though it was Election Day, he did not really have to convince anyone to vote for him. Decker was the only name on the ballot and was therefore almost guaranteed to assume office the following January. His ward was one of 22 — out of the city’s 30 wards — with uncontested races for alder. Out of the over 12,500 residents who voted for an alder, around 9,000 saw only one name on the ballot for their alder.

Downtown, Abby Roth ’90 LAW ’94, a Democratic aldermanic candidate in Ward 7, stood outside the Hall of Records ready to meet voters. When the rain started, Roth, now a communications officer at the School of Medicine, had already been outside for 11 hours. But she was prepared: She pulled out an umbrella and continued to talk to voters even though she was running virtually uncontested. Her only challenger was an eccentric write-in candidate. Despite the miserable weather, Roth stayed positive. It was good to see the residents she’d met through canvassing.

Blocks from New Haven Harbor, Joshua Van Hoesen was greeting voters while soaked. Unlike Decker and Roth, he had no protection from the downpour. He had forgotten his umbrella, and the only thing he had to keep him dry was his signature sailor cap. It didn’t do a very good job. Van Hoesen, a 27-year-old software engineer, remained determined, waving at every car that passed and trying to talk to as many voters as possible. As a Republican challenging a Democratic incumbent, he needed every vote.

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arly last summer, Jessica Holmes, the outgoing Ward 9 alder, told Decker that she wasn’t going to run for another term because of work

4 | December 2017

feature and family commitments. Holmes first met Decker in 2011 when she knocked on his door during her aldermanic campaign, so it was fitting that she supported Decker as her political successor. Over the years, the pair, both union organizers, grew closer through Decker’s work on the Board of Zoning Appeals.

Holmes sometimes came to the board’s meetings when its members discussed development in her ward.

Holmes didn’t ask Decker to run, but they talked about what she had accomplished in her three terms as alder and where she hoped the next Ward 9 representative would pick up. Though Decker said he would not have run if she had not decided to step down. He began discussing a run with her shortly after their initial meeting. She supported him right away.

When Decker’s campaign launched on July 13, just five days before the deadline for candidates to seek the endorsement of a political party, Holmes introduced his speech. Holmes also connected Decker to the ward’s most involved residents, those who were likely key votes.

Decker was not the first to benefit from an inherited election. Ward 9’s Roth first ran in a special election in 2009. Doug Hausladen ’04 called Roth the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day and told her she had until the following Tuesday to decide whether she wanted to run for what was then his position. Hausladen had to vacate his seat on the board to head the Transportation, Traffic and Parking Department under the newly elected Mayor Toni Harp.

Roth decided to run and triumphed over her Republican challenger 174 to 19.

But in 2015, Roth decided not to run for reelection. She was recently engaged and wasn’t sure if she and her fiance were going to move out of the ward. Alberta Witherspoon took over her seat.

Last March, Roth filed the paperwork to challenge Witherspoon, who told the New Haven Independent she was “feeling inspired” and “ready to go.” But

Witherspoon never filed any paperwork.

In July, she resigned from office citing “health struggles.”

Van Hoesen, the Republican running in Ward 18, came to the election with little experience with New Haven politics but strong opinions about government. His favorite section of “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine, which he carries with him wherever he goes, argues that “government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”

One bureaucratic rigmarole serves a particularly strong example: Van Hoesen was ticketed for parking on the sidewalk, but he claimed he parked on the verge — the grassy section between the sidewalk and the street — and couldn’t get a straight answer from the city about whether the verge was legally considered a part of the sidewalk. In Van Hoesen’s eyes, the city needed to do a better job communicating with residents. And he thought he could do a better job than the ward’s current representative, Democratic Alder Salvatore DeCola.

So when the Republican Town Committee started recruiting candidates, he approached committee Chairman Jonathan Wharton, a political science professor at Southern Connecticut University, to tell him he was very interested in running. After Wharton first moved to New Haven in 2014, he found the “Democratic Machine” disagreeable, though he doesn’t consider himself particularly partisan. He said he reached across the aisle to City Hall and offered to do research.

But a number of alders pushed him to become involved by organizing for local unions, including the Yale graduate student union, instead.

“I can understand. I was a graduate student,” he explained. “It was just assumed that since I was an academic that I ‘should just be on board with this.’ But I’m not a Yale graduate student. That’s not my battle. To prove my stripes, I shouldn’t have to do that. And I shouldn’t have to motivate my students to do that either.”

He then took over running the

Republican Town Committee. This election cycle, Wharton had hoped to run six Republicans citywide. The committee ended up fielding a candidate in just four of the 34 races across the city: two for alder, one for probate judge and one for a seat on the Board of Education. Though he didn’t reach his goal, Wharton was proud of the committee’s well-attended fundraisers and revitalized online presence, including a new website and more activity on social media.

Van Hoesen was just one part of the committee’s efforts to increase its influence. Though the Republicans are competing against New Haven’s very wellestablished Democratic party and its powerful supporters like the unions. But he considers that a natural part of politics, not an unfair machine.

“Larger, more uniform organizations can have a larger influence in politics,” Van Hoesen said.

If the small Republican operation could win anywhere, it was Morris Cove.

Though Republicans make up just over 6 percent of all registered voters in New Haven, many are concentrated in Van Hoesen’s ward. The most recent Republican on the Board of Alders, Arlene DePino, who declined to seek re-election six years ago, hailed from the same ward. And Donald Trump received more votes there than any other ward in the city.

He wanted to give his ward’s residents a choice. But he wasn’t sure if they would choose him. ecker spent his summer balancing his dissertation research and canvassing three times every week.

Even after he learned that he was running unopposed, he and his volunteers continued to knock on doors in East Rock. One day, he got a call from one of his friends who was volunteering for him. A resident wanted to meet him. So Decker traveled to the other side of the ward and sat down in a rocking chair on the man’s porch.

Over glasses of iced tea, the man, who has lived in East Rock for over 50 years, reflected on years of seemingly endless

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Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

JOSHUA VAN HOESEN

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development. The two talked about how important community input is to these projects. The resident specifically referenced the inspiring work Holmes did to create dialogue between the developers of the Corsair apartment building and the community. Decker, who moved to New Haven six years ago, wanted to be as in touch with the ward’s residents as Holmes had been.

“As much door knocking as I’d done, she knows more people,” Decker said.

Roth also tried to meet as many of her would-be constituents as possible through canvassing. She said many residents did not know exactly what an alder does, so sometimes she explained that. The role has two parts. Alders are responsible for passing citywide policy.

But they also have to take care of dayto-day constituent services. In Ward 7, Roth said she hears a lot about stolen packages and speeding cars.

After Witherspoon resigned, Roth, who raised a total $8,660, not including in-kind donations, over the course of her campaign, stopped fundraising. But she didn’t stop knocking on doors in her ward until the election in November.

Van Hoesen, the Republican running in Ward 18, started canvassing much later than Roth. It took the first-time candidate until September 6 | December 2017

to pull his campaign together. First, he had trouble finding a treasurer, and once he did, they had trouble setting up a bank account for the campaign.

Even after they had set up an account and made deposits, the bank told him the account was misconfigured and, therefore, invalid. So he couldn’t pay to print any campaign literature for voters.

“It’s not very straightforward on the [State Elections Enforcement Committee] website what you need to do to run,” he said. “I want the [Republican Town Committee] to put together that document, because it should be easy for people to get involved.”

He also thought it should be easy for people to find information online about city government. Until this past summer, the city government’s website had not been updated in 17 years.

“Do you remember the old website?” he asked me. “It was a joke. As a computer scientist, I can say that. And now with the new website, you still can’t find anything you need because every page is ‘in progress.’” When Van Hoesen finally was able to canvass, he targeted houses with Republicans, Independents and “soft” Democrats.

He said that no one refused to hear him out because he was a Republican.

But a few people did think he was a

Jehovah’s witness.

“I had to say, ‘I’m not trying to sell you anything!’” he said, wearing all white, with his red leather jacket and sailor cap nearby. “Well, except myself a little bit, but that’s because it’s politics and it’s weird.”

He even talked to one staunchly liberal couple, doing yardwork when he encountered them. Or, at least, he assumed they were staunchly liberal because they had a gay pride flag and a Black Lives Matter flag outside of their house.

“Perception would say that a Republican wouldn’t understand either of those things,” he said. “But I understand both of them. I really do.”

He didn’t mention to them that he was a Republican. Instead, he just told him that he was running for alder. The couple had recently moved, so they discussed what it was like to be new in Morris Cove. (Van Hoesen is relatively new himself; he bought his house in 2012.) He joked that anyone who has lived in the neighborhood for less than five years was new because so many people have lived there for 25 or more years. He thought he could represent all of the neighborhood’s residents better than their current alder.

He just needed to convince them that that was true.

A

t 8 p.m. on election night, after hours outside, the candidates were finally allowed into the polling places to hear the votes counted. Though he was guaranteed to win, Decker stayed to hear the tally.

After learning that he had received 331 votes, he stopped by Mayor Toni Harp’s victory party and headed home early. He didn’t want to speculate about why so many races were uncontested, but he acknowledged that both running for alder and being an alder are demanding.

Unlike Decker, Roth wasn’t technically running uncontested, but her write-in challenger turned out not to be a threat. Robert Kiley, who had lost

CHARLES DECKER GRD ’18

feature feature when he ran as a write-in candidate in 2005 and 2007, did not win this cycle either. Roth beat him 456 to 1.

After spending only a little over a quarter of the money she raised, Roth announced that she would donate $6,000 to four local charities. Roth, like Decker, said that most people do not have the time or interest to become an alder. She also recognized that many people don’t know how to run.

“There’s also probably a sense that there’s a machine,” said Roth. “And if you’re not a part of that, then how can you run against the incumbent? It can be intimidating to run when most people are supporting the incumbent.”

It’s even harder to run when you’re a Republican. But Van Hoesen was upbeat.

“I just tried to impart to everyone to have pride in the process,” Van Hoesen said earlier in day. “I know most people have already made up their minds.

Kudos to them for coming out. I was just trying to show them that I was willing to stand out there in the rain.”

Per Connecticut law, candidates are only permitted to enter the polling place once before the vote count — to vote. Van Hoesen made the most of his trip inside, buying dozens of boxes of Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies from scouts who had set up a table. (The cookies are now in his freezer — he likes to eat them frozen.)

Van Hoesen lost to DeCola 183 to 656, garnering about a fifth of the vote.

“I told Sal [DeCola], ‘In two years, let’s do this again.’ He was very friendly. He said, ‘Yeah, but don’t expect a different result,’” Van Hoesen recounted. “Twenty-two percent of his constituents thought I could do a better job though.”

Van Hoesen believes that his share of the vote shows that constituents want more choice. He said that Republicans don’t run because they think they will lose, which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Until the next election, Van Hoesen said he has “commissions to join and

rabble to rouse.”

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ven the overwhelming majority of Democrats cannot explain why so few aldermanic races are uncontested. New Haven’s neighbor West Haven has only one Republican on its City Council, as an at-large councilman, but every single one of its races had a candidate from both parties. Admittedly, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is far higher in New Haven than West Haven. New Haven had the second highest percentage of votes for Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 in all of Connecticut, with 86.4 percent. West Haven also went blue, but less drastically. Only 59.5 percent of voters cast their ballots for Clinton.

But Wharton, the New Haven Republican Town Committee’s chairman, attributed West Haven’s contested elections to more than the town’s demographics.

“Over there it’s about the personality, not the political party,” he said. “You saw that with [Mayor Ed] O’Brien not even getting support from his party.”

He might be right. O’Brien, West

Haven’s current mayor, lost in the primary to a fellow Democrat, Nancy Rossi. After promising to support her campaign for the good of the party, he reversed his decision and launched a write-in campaign against her, inciting a heated three-way race for mayor.

Both Democrats accused the other of misleading the public.

“If he cared about West Haven, he’d bring the Democrats together,” Rossi told the New Haven Register. She admonished him for causing infighting within the Democratic Party. But, in the end, O’Brien’s surprising decision showed democracy at work. Despite the same miserable weather as New Haven, so many West Haven residents showed up to vote that one district had to request more ballots to meet the demand. O’Brien ultimately lost to his Democratic challenger 4,825 to 3,265.

In West Haven, voters came out in droves to exercise their right to choose.

In neighboring New Haven, the vast majority of alders had already been chosen.

This is the second installment of a threepart series that will appear in the Yale Daily News Magazine.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

Going South // BY ANDREW SANDWEISS // PHOTOS BY ANDREW SANDWEISS AND RENDERING COURTESY OF GOODY CLANCY

“I

t’s a ghost town,” Jeffrey Jones, a Hill neighborhood resident, lamented. “It’s a total ghost town.”

He was right. On the morning of the Yale-Harvard Game, while droves of Crimson students poured out of Union Station into Ubers and Lyfts, across the street an entire housing complex lay quiet.

Its single convenience store was shuttered, P.O. boxes rusted, parking lot emptied. 283 families once lived there. Now, there are 16.

This startling divide is not new.

Opened in 1971, Church Street South, a privately owned, government-subsidized low-income housing complex, has been a center of controversy, derelict and crime.

Dreams of its reconstruction have floated for years.

“It was brought to our attention that rebuilding Church Street South, or maybe tearing it down, or maybe coming up with a new concept was a very important thing,” described Matthew Nemerson SOM ’81, chief of economic development for the city, “and that was in 1987. … We’ve been looking at this stuff for a long, long time.”

And now, with all but a few residents still living in the complex, the city and the site’s current owner, the Northland Investment Corp., have entered a deal 8 | December 2017

to build a $450 million new 1,000-unit, mixed-use, mixed-income space. “Finally achieving this is a huge achievement for the mayor and for [Livable City Initiative] and quite frankly for Northland. It’s an exciting time for New Haven. We’re probably going to have a half billion dollars worth of construction next year, and that’s just pretty exciting.”

The redevelopment of Church Street South has been mired in debate, from questions of how to replace all the affordable units to whether Northland should still maintain ownership of the property.

Jones, a Hill resident, has lived next to the complex all his life and many of his friends grew up there. He wishes the city would just rehabilitate the current buildings: “I shed a few tears when I heard they were tearing it down. What are they going to do? Make a parking lot for the train station? Y’all can’t fix them up and move families in?”

But even with those reservations, everyone can agree that the housing project failed.

Originally, then-Mayor Richard C. Lee had radically different plans for the space across from Union Station. According to a 2012 report by Emily Dominski ’12, the site originally hosted a popular market directly across from the train sta-

tion. This market was swept up in 1960s urban renewal spearheaded by Lee. With a new highway to the north, the space was set for luxury housing to be designed by the famous modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The luxury housing element was suddenly abandoned. The area was designated for low- to moderate-income housing with an elementary school, according to an earlier report compiled in 1980.

However, in 1967 the plan changed again: Mies left the project and the city repurposed the site for exclusively lowincome housing in the form of a co-op.

The new architect, Charles Moore, ended up creating 32 different plans for the site before a final design was accepted by the Redevelopment Agency of New Haven.

Moore had good intentions, but his design had flaws. The complex was inspired by an Italian villa in a “lowrise, village-style” according to the 2012 Dominski report. A series of rectangular, tan, two-story blocks were scattered across the site. Small plazas, green spaces and parking lots were formed in the spaces between. It was unique among typical public housing sites: towers and blocks arranged along a rigid grid. Yet a Yale Urban Design Workshop report from 1997 criticized the design for its

feature “lack of a sense of entry to the buildings, overly dense planting of trees, and limited visual access created by wall clusters.” These surroundings isolated the site and made it more prone to drug trafficking and crime. The 1980 report, which was compiled by current New York University professor Kim Taylor-Thompson LAW ’80, described Church Street South as resembling “army barracks rather than housing.” The same is true today. Blank walls and concrete plazas make the complex a maze of rectangular prisms. This is one of several reasons the project was infamously branded “The Jungle.” You can easily lose yourself, without sight of a normal street.

CLANCY

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erhaps the most consequential aspect of Church Street South’s history was in its construction and later maintenance. “Thirty years ago, when the project was only 20 years old, people were saying this needs to be rebuilt and taken care of,” Nemerson explained.

And in reality, the structural and financial problems of the site go much further back. The 1980 Taylor-Thompson report uncovered that not enough sewer lines were included and several instances of cross-wiring occurred during construction. Not to mention the fact that con-

struction took twice as long as projected.

Cheaper wall materials were used due to budget constraints. The contractor for the project’s construction, the Development Corporation of America, “cut corners and tended to sacrifice quality and sometimes even safety in order to save money.”

Nemerson affirmed that the housing site was a victim to intense value engineering.

Later maintenance was also problematic. The first development company to oversee the complex was Jaycee Housing Corp., labelled “well-intentioned idiots” by the 1980 Taylor-Thompson report.

Poor financial planning meant that the site was always having trouble funding services. The 1997 Yale Urban Design Workshop report reads: “Previous suspect management saw many basic maintenance issues ignored. Community rooms and nurseries lapsed into disuse and the increased drug trade on the site led to crime and the literal walling-in of the development.”

However, Nemerson is skeptical that the site was ever mismanaged: “I don’t know if they ever dreamed that [Church Street South] would still be there in 50 years. I wouldn’t ascribe anything to mismanagement or negligence. Sometimes, things just happen.”

Former New Haven Mayor John

DeStefano disagrees. He reaffirmed that the largest issues during his tenure as mayor were “consistently poor management through a series of owners and operators that created living conditions that were not acceptable to [the city].”

DeStefano’s administration tried to get the Department for Housing and Urban Development to fail the project in its regular real estate assessments, yet it kept getting “passing scores” up until last year, for reasons unknown. Essentially, the Real Estate Assessment Center conducts inspections of housing sites such as Church Street South and gives them exam-like scores out of 100. If the site passes inspection, then Housing and Urban Development’s funding is secured for operators like Northland. In 2011, for instance, Church Street South received a 68, barely passing (but high enough to secure $3,693,408 in funding). The Livable City Initiative was surprised. Yet, the assessment center only inspected 25 out of 301 units and failed to report defects in the site such as absent carbon monoxide detectors and “mis-installed furnaces” that forced 26 people to evacuate due to possible poisoning. The most recent 2016 Housing and Urban Development report that led to the failing grade described “exposed wires,” “inoperable windows,”

severe “mold/mildew,” “leaking pipes,” “inoperable vents,” “missing doors” and “blocked fire exits.”

Many residents have blamed the conditions on the current owner, Northland.

The situation worsened to a point where residents tried to sue the company, albeit unsuccessfully.

“I think that some people have suggested that we shouldn’t reward these derelict private owners who have allowed these properties to deteriorate,” said Yale professor of urbanism Elihu Rubin. “We shouldn’t reward them by now allowing them to develop this site as a profitable venture. They should be punished and dismissed. It is unsettling to think that the owners that hastened the deterioration of this housing estate would now be the beneficiaries of their own poor actions and behaviors over time.”

However, Northland isn’t entirely to blame for the dilapidated buildings. As stated before, decades of neglect snowballed into the lap of the company, and their original plans were to rebuild the site immediately upon purchase.

When Northland arrived in 2008, Nemerson explained, everyone expected them to tear down the existing project and start with a blank slate. That all changed when the city rejected Northland’s proposal. Upon rejection, Northland did not know what path to take with the site. It took them until 2015 to pick up steam with a new proposal.

The important thing, according to Nemerson, was that Housing and Urban Development finally came on board.

Nemerson believes the relationship between the city and Northland has been “very positive.”

Beyond poor maintenance and ill design, crime plagued the housing site for decades. “Down here it was bad, really bad,” Jones remembered. “Lost a few friends who got murdered behind that mess. Really sad, yes.” A 2015 report by Urbanismo explained that the drug-trafficking gang known as “The Jungle Boys,” formed in 1984, committed six murders and a number of drive-by shootings.

Most of its members were from Church Street South, where the gang was prominent. Between 1991 and 1992 alone, they were responsible for “three homicides, 14 shootings, and over 50 drug arrests,” former Mayor John Daniels told a Norwalk newspaper in 1992. It was in that year that a contingency of authorities was able to dismantle the gang, but the violence did not end. Between 2010 and 2012, three murders took place in Church Street South.

Even in light of the violence, a former resident, George Capri, now homeless, said that the site was not as bad as people thought. “We all look out for each other in here. We brothers: blacks, Puerto Ricans, whites, we work together. And we look out for each other, all the time. But everyone talk about this place over here, it’s not too bad. It’s not like people said.”

Jones agreed: “We used to come by here to play football, parties, all that. This was our stomping grounds. … Everyone clicked together, all the families knew each other. It wasn’t just black, it was white, Spanish, multicultural, everyone mixed, got along and everything. We had our good days and bad days. It brings back memories.”

Had Church Street South not been shut down, Jones would have moved to an

apartment within the complex later this year. Although an official date has not yet been set, all of Church Street South will be torn down soon. A few of the structures, the laundromat and day care center specifically, have already been demolished.

The smell of mold was unavoidable as the buildings came down. As for the timeframe for completion of the new development: “no idea,” Nemerson said. The same is true for when former residents can move back to the site.

DeStefano is worried: “I wonder if a dense housing project is right for that site.

It was always an isolated site. … Are we about to make the same mistake all over again? Maybe not. Maybe I’m thinking about it too much.”

According to Nemerson, certain elements of the redevelopment plan have remained consistent: “replacing the 300 affordable housing units, adding 600 to 700 market-rate units and having a whole base of parking, having retail, and perhaps even some office space.”

What replaces Church Street South will be remarkably different and hopefully better. In the meantime, there is a limited window to learn from the soon-to-bedemolished site. Rubin said: “I think that architectural, urban historians will continue to explore this chapter of design and housing policy and that the stories should be documented, the site should be documented as best as possible.”

But these stories are not just of camaraderie and peace.

“Any documentation now would be a document of neglect.”

Visit the Yale Daily News website for an accompanying film feature.

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A COMMUNITY HEARD, NOT LISTENED TO // BY ISABEL BYSIEWICZ // PHOTOS BY VIVEK SURI AND ISABEL BYSIEWICZ

“S

hame on you! Shame on you!” attendees screamed at the New Haven Board of Education members when they elected Carol Birks as the new superintendent of schools.

After a yearlong search full of tension and setbacks, New Haven community members hoped for a superintendent who reflected the wishes of parents, students and organizers. But Birks, who was named to the position following a 4–3 vote by the Board

of Education on Nov. 20, will start her term without much community support. The Bridgeport native will leave her position as Hartford Public Schools’ chief of staff to serve New Haven.

Through an agreement with the Board of Education, Garth Harries ’95 stepped down as superintendent last year. Since October 2016, former Superintendent Reginald Mayo has held the position in an interim capacity. The New Haven Board of Educa-

tion, with help from Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, a national headhunting firm, reviewed applicants from all over the country.

For Letisha Harris, the vice president of the Citywide Parent Team, a volunteer organization of parents in the school district, the process has been a year of disappointment. She and her children used the three minutes allotted to speakers at the Nov. 20 meeting to stand in front of the board’s members, duct tape covering

Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

feature their mouths. Harris said nothing. It was a symbolic demonstration meant to show that the board’s inclusive rhetoric of wanting “parent engagement” and to “put students first” was merely performative.

Nijija-Ife Walker, president of the Citywide Parent Team, and Harris carry a copy of the New Haven city charter and of the Connecticut Education bylaws and have access to emails showcasing the Board of Education’s internal disputes. For many parents and community members like them, this has been a year of learning: learning the challenges a district faces without an effective superintendent and learning that community organizing is sometimes not enough to sway a decision that falls on a mostly appointed city board.

Walker and Harris got involved in the Board of Education after they became concerned about their children’s safety in New Haven Public Schools. Walker, whose son has a life-threatening allergy, would come home with a swollen face after the school’s nurse gave him the wrong medicine, and the school would call her instead of 911 when her son had an allergic reaction, she said. When she realized that hundreds of other children in the district have similar conditions to her son, she knew that she needed to make her voice heard. Harris’ daughter was subject to extreme bullying that she felt was not being addressed adequately by anyone in the district: her child’s teachers, the principal or the superintendent.

THE CANDIDATES After seeking input from community members through interviews, focus groups and an online survey, Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates gathered input to assist the board in determining desirable characteristics in the new superintendent — someone who understands the struggles facing urban youth, establishes meaningful relationships with all segments of the education community and ensures effective daily operations of the district, among others.

On Nov. 10, after two days and 12 hours of interviews, the New Haven superintendent search committee narrowed a list of seven finalists to three — Pamela Brown, 12 | December 2017

Carol Birks and Gary Highsmith.

These three would have final interviews with the search committee and the opportunity to engage in community forums held on Tuesday, Nov. 14.

Search committee co-chair Darnell Goldson hoped these forums would push the candidates to “sell themselves” to the community. Goldson added that the votes from the forums wouldn’t determine the committee and the board’s final decision, because he thought the metric was “unscientific” and because the community would not be able to sit in during interviews of the candidates.

Brown, a graduate of Stanford and Harvard universities, is the chief of elementary schools in Fontana, California. Brown served as superintendent in Buffalo, New York, and as the assistant superintendent and chief academic officer of the School District of Philadelphia.

Birks is currently the chief of staff of Hartford Public Schools but served as the school system’s assistant superintendent from 2013 to July 2017. A graduate of Hampton University and Columbia University’s Teachers College, Birks was born in a low-income household in Bridgeport and attributed her success to education and perseverance.

Highsmith, who emerged as the community favorite, was born and raised in New Haven and graduated from Southern Connecticut State University. He was added to the list of candidates after members of the public and the board expressed

concern that there were no locals considered. Highsmith currently directs human resources for the Hamden Board of Education. He is the former principal of L.W. Beecher Elementary School in New Haven and of Hamden High School.

In a poll published in the New Haven Independent, 67.5 percent of the over 1,200 respondents preferred Brown or Highsmith over Birks. #NOTMYSUPERINTENDENT After a year of board members neglecting to attend meetings and inadequate advertising of community forums for public input, New Haven parents would not be placated. On the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 15, the Board of Education met privately for a final interview of the candidates. Afterward, during an informal vote, four out of the seven members backed Birks. Hours before this vote, 44 parents, 10 teachers and six community organizers wrote a letter to the Board of Education, outlining their disapproval of Birks and describing Brown’s and Highsmith’s qualifications for the job.

Opposition to Birks mounted closer to the final vote, as parents saw their hard work fall to the wayside. On Nov. 19, 60 community members attended the New Haven Educators’ Collective press conference outside City Hall, hoping that a final push would compel a change of opinion.

A flyer distributed at the event explained why the group saw Birks as the least qualified of the three candidates: She has just

feature three years of teaching experience; many of her policies, such as support for charter schools, which they believe harm the public school mission, mirror those of the former superintendent, Harries; there are ethical questions about her past employer SUPES, an educational consulting firm that was involved in a kickback scandal.

Sarah Miller, a parent of two children in the district, read aloud a statement from Maria Pereira, a member of the Bridgeport Board of Education and former classmate of Birks.

Pereira shared a story about visiting Warren High School while Birks was the principal. Pereira witnessed 187 children skipping class and Birks ignoring a student who swore at her.

“If Carol Birks couldn’t manage an urban high school with 1,100 students, how can she manage a district of 21,000 students,” Pereira wrote. “If she was a candidate for superintendent of the Bridgeport Public Schools, I would be extremely concerned for the well-being of our students, staff and the district as a whole.”

Over 1,000 individuals signed an online petition to “Give NHPS Students a Superintendent Who Puts Them First: Birks is Not the Right Choice.” Hundreds signed school-based petitions, organized over the few days between the preliminary vote and the Board of Education vote, though none were in the rooms when candidates were interviewed.

Posters at the rally insinuated that politics played a role in the choosing of the superintendent. Birks and Mayor Harp, one of the four board members to back Birks in the preliminary vote, were both part of Delta Sigma Theta, a nonprofit sorority of women dedicated to public service.

Both Goldson and Harp have emphasized that, in their judgment, Birks emerged as the most qualified individual for the job after the long and careful process.

“My endorsement of Dr. Birks is the result of lengthy, in-depth interviews with the finalists, during which I got to know each of them,” Harp wrote in a statement on her Facebook Page. “My choice was

determined with the best interests of New Haven Public Schools in mind.”

Goldson said in a public statement, “The public lynching of this extremely accomplished professional African American woman, and the attempted harm to the philanthropic organizations to which she was a member, was shameful and immoral.”

THE BOARD This process has shed light on the fighting, animosity and alliances within the Board of Education that divided the group. Once allies, over the past year, the two elected Board of Education members — board President Edward Joyner and Goldson — have become adversaries, as shown in emails available to the public and action at Board of Education meetings fit for reality television shows.

Most recently, on Nov. 13, the Board of Education meeting ended with a gasp from attendees as Goldson revealed that Joyner had sent out the candidates’ resumes and personal information such as addresses, past salaries and phone numbers to members of the community, including to the News.

On the Nov. 20 board meeting, in which four police officers were present, physical fighting seemed imminent. Joyner, who did not vote for Birks, announced to attendees that the vote was “a done deal,” insinuating that no amount of public organizing would compel supporters of Birks to change their positions. He then proceeded to tell the audience that a person on the board had two bankruptcies, pointing at Goldson. When Goldson fired back that Joyner was “about to get sued,” the president told Goldson the two could “have a duel” at Bowen Field and then asked, “Are you scared? Are you scared?” as Goldson extended his hands in front of his face.

In an opinion article posted in the New Haven Independent on Nov. 17, Jacob Spell, a senior at Creed High School and one of the two nonvoting student representatives, summarized his criticisms of Birks and called on the Board of Education to reconsider its preliminary vote. He

further noted the “travesty” of having two students on the board who sit through all deliberations and interview processes yet have no final say in choosing the superintendent, a choice that will most directly affect their education and the climate of their schools.

“We cannot vote on the matter, and the unofficial vote casted by the board did not reflect the candidate that we would have supported,” Spell wrote.

Kimberly Sullivan, who served on the board as a student representative two years ago, yielded her speaking time during the public comment portion of the Nov. 20 meeting, sharing with attendees that she herself never felt heard as a student representative.

With Spell and Makayla Dawkins — a junior at Hillhouse High School and the other student representative — the board has nine members. If the students had been able to vote, Birks likely would not have been elected.

Since the Nov. 20 meeting, Joyner has begun to ask the students how they would have voted on a decision after the motion is resolved. In the Nov. 27 meeting, the Board of Education rejected a motion to look into wording of a policy that states that it takes five affirmative votes to appoint a new superintendent. If the students had voted, the motion would have carried.

Carlos Torre, who voted against Birks, said at the Nov. 20 meeting, “Tonight, this was a turning point in the New Haven Public Schools. The future of our students’ education is now in the hands not of those who dedicate their lives and their careers to education but … of those who dedicate their lives and their career to power and politics.”

Some question why Harp, who was until recently the board president, even sits on the board. Joyner has repeatedly pointed at the potential conflict of interest that arises when a mayor sits on the Board of Education. Joyner, who voted against Birks, backed Marcus Paca, Harp’s challenger in the most recent mayoral elections, and has criticized the control Harp exercises over the board Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

feature

through appointments. Except for two elected members, Goldson and Joyner, the rest of the board is appointed by the mayor. Jamell Cotto and Frank Redente, board members who voted for Birks, were appointed by Harp herself. Harp recently announced she would nominate Dr. Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, a pediatrician and fellow member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority, to the board.

However, Harp’s influence on the board does not come close to that of former mayors. Under John DeStefano’s tenure, the board was fully appointed and included no student representatives.

Board of Education meetings saw the near antithesis of one member threatening another to a duel: almost no debate at all.

Another concern is lack of community involvement in the surveys set out by the national headhunting firm Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates. In June, only 14 members attended a community forum. Most of the firm’s public input came from online surveys designed to determine desired characteristics in the next superintendent, but only 1,022 people responded, just 14 of whom were students. Only 41 individuals, none of them students, engaged in stakeholder interviews or focus groups

14 | December 2017

aimed at collecting information regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the school district.

Some parents think that there was no room for community input when it mattered the most: the period between when final candidates were chosen Nov. 10 and the Nov. 20 meeting.

“I don’t think we had much to talk about until we had actual candidates,” Miller, a parent organizer, said. “Theoretical discussions about what we want to see in our superintendent is kind of meaningless.”

WHAT’S NEXT Parents continue to demand more openness from the Board of Education.

In a statement released Tuesday, Nov. 21, a group calling themselves the “New Haven Public Schools parent community,” which included Waters and Miller, expressed disappointment at the board’s decision.

“The board’s vote deepens the perception already held by many parents that ‘parent engagement’ is a buzzword to be deployed when convenient, but not reflective of district practice,” the statement said. “We are shut out of our children’s classrooms, not given a defined role in school planning and

decision-making, and we have been flagrantly ignored in our expressed preference for superintendent.”

The superintendent of the New Haven Public Schools directly impacts education. Birks will manage a school district of over 21,000 children, dozens of schools and a community that is now invested in seeing that this personnel change produces a positive change.

Birks, who redirected requests for comment to a public statement, understands the full scope of the situation and opposition she faces. In the statement, she writes that one of her first steps as superintendent will be to aid in the healing process, trying to listen and learn from those who felt left behind in the search process.

“Since this moment in New Haven’s story is wrought with disagreement and distrust, building a strong foundation in transition will require honesty, transparency, and cultivating relationships,” the statement reads.

“So I invite all families, students, educators and community members to work with me, learn more about my beliefs, and help inform my leadership vision and theory of action for New Haven.”

poetry

Annotated // By Sidney Saint-Hilaire // Illustrations by Zihao Lin and Jiyoon Park

The Tempest You Become What thirst comes From fighting off the drought?

Are you meant to breathe the fire you put out?

Does bathing in the torrent Make you the riptide?

Even if you are drowning all the same?

I can’t lick the waves And spit flotsam into life But I can pluck the feathered Notes from the wind and Flick them back into existence A reanimator, not a birth But a reunion Between spark and ash Looking to kindle again

Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

poetry

Weaponwork Weaponwork[1] A seed bloomed bullet gold in my dreams It is a textbook turned pistol[2] Forgetting guns are flash and heat and Sun burrowed in the dead blue sky But wrath plays the long game And it brings its own dice That pens and blades bleed the same[3] But the innocence of inheritance Is remembering the sword in the stone And not the wound in the golem[4] Pointed steel prodding geode lungs Wondering how could it be so

Bright In here if no one is meant to see it.[5] I am the last time I thought of fighting back The meaning of weaponwork is The time you saw someone cock their lips and fire The throb of air around words Souring the wind it pierces.

It’s the heat etched on air Coloring everything kindling Still waiting for the flash[6]

The title of the piece is actually a made up word, but, in the dream that gave inspiration to it, I felt this visceral understanding of what it meant, despite having no idea how to use it in a sentence. I hoped weaponwork would be able to allude to the longer hand of violence that pervades a lot of our society — longer in the sense that it is enacted through far more removed and subtle methods than a bullet to the head.

[2] I was looking for a quick way to draw a connection between the banality of violence seen through statistics and how that in itself is destructive.

[3] I think everyone knows the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword,” but I wanted to repurpose the words to say that both things are equally dangerous for different reasons.

[4] My idea for this piece came partly from realizing how disorienting a lot of “discourse” in academic spaces can be. I think depending on the perspective, it can either be the unintelligibility and inaccessibility of traditionally intellectual fields or a subversion of the very language that’s been formed to pathologize and alienate. I’m always fearful of the tendency of intellectualization to rob perspectives of emotion and humanness, and that’s what I was hoping to convey in these lines, drawing comparisons between the famous King Arthur story and how easy it is to forget the violence inflicted on things we’ve deemed unfeeling.

[5] I honestly thought this was just a really cool line because it brought together the idea of the insides of rocks with that of humans? Kind of like a way to empathize with the stone.

[6] My last line was me wanting to end the poem on a warning, just thinking about how innocuous language makes violence seem innocuous, too.

[1]

16 | December 2017

art essay

BOOM & BUST HOW THE NEGOTIATION FOR PUBLIC SPACE CAN BE A WORK OF ART

// BY ALICE OH AND ELAINE WANG // PHOTOS BY ALICE OH

I

t’s Oct. 27, 2017, and you’ve managed to snag a rare window seat during the lunch rush at the Shake Shack on Chapel Street. You free the Shackburger from its greased paper sleeve, and, as you lean in to take your first bite, she catches your eye through the window. From across the street and behind thick, black frames, her hazel eyes glisten with the hint of a coquettish smile as she watches you hasten to chew, swallow and compose yourself. Meanwhile, she raises a magnifying glass to her topless chest, presenting you with her exaggerated and slightly distorted left nipple. Her sharply raised brow questions: Have you checked yourself yet?

She is larger than life in a 5-by-5-foot painting titled “Check,” each of her breasts at least twice the size of a passerby’s head. Centered on one of the busiest bus stops near the New Haven Green, she is impossible to ignore — exactly what New Haven artist Bill Saunders intended when he installed a pop-up exhibition cleverly named “Bust Op” for the second year in a row.

In support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the one-day-only exhibition included six monumental paintings of breast cancer survivors and victims that filled up the entirety of the bus station’s glass panels.

“Bust Op” was born from a June 2015 show titled “Don’t Call Me Baby” at Ordinary, a popular tavern on Chapel Street just across from the bus stop. Saunders hid dozens of 5-by-5-inch painted panels in discreet corners of the oakwood interior only visible through a telescope on the bar, forcing viewers to venture into voyeurism to examine the small paintings of largebreasted women. Half of the featured women are from movies by filmmaker Russ Meyer, a pioneer in the “sexploitation” film genre — a subset of the broader “exploitation” genre — known for his unabashed portrayals of dominant, sexually supercharged women. The other half are from “magazines of the time that I think Russ would have approved of,” Saunders said. He believes that Meyer “is the first one that treated women as empowered people rather than objects. He took big-breasted women and put them in powerful roles.” In Meyer’s 1965 cult classic “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”, three uninhibited go-go dancers drive, kidnap and murder across the Californian desert to a frenetic rhythm, all sporting flimsy blouses, abundant cleavage and

Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

art essay

Kabuki-style eyebrows. “You don’t want to mess with these girls!” Saunders said with a guffaw.

While painting his panels for “Don’t Call Me Baby,” Saunders discovered another connection among the women in his work: breast cancer. Having watched his own mother’s struggle with her diagnosis, he was inspired to begin a new project. He became even more convinced when, throughout the course of the exhibition, women shared stories from their own battles with breast cancer. One of Saunders’ old friends, Cristina Acampora, opened up about her struggle with the disease and encouraged him to pursue the subject matter more deeply.

The idea resonated with Saunders’ foundational belief that art has a responsibility to engage with the community and resulted in the first iteration of “Bust Op,” which encompassed five large portraits of buxom white women. Exhibited in October 2016 at a bus kiosk on lower Chapel Street, the paintings were labelled with a small sign that included only the title of the exhibition and a tiny pink ribbon in honor of breast cancer awareness. “It reminded me to get checked,” 18 | December 2017

said passerby Maria Ellington, while her young son pointed at the paintings and yelled, “Bee-Bee.” Despite the lack of additional information, “people got it,” Saunders said. “I want to give people more credit.”

This year, Saunders diversified the subjects of his paintings, increasing the representation of women of color and including a black man. Of the seven figures in Saunders’ six paintings, four have starred in exploitation films. Kitten Natividad, Meyer’s longtime partner and Mexican-born film star, is a breast cancer survivor who had a double mastectomy. Lina Romay, portrayed in “In the Headlights,” was a Spanish-born actress, wife of another sexploitation film director and a breast cancer victim. A double portrait, “On the Rail,” depicts Pam Grier and Richard Roundtree, two AfricanAmerican actors who starred in blaxploitation films and survived breast cancer. By painting these figures, Saunders attempts to address both the lack of diversity in his first version of “Bust Op” and the 1960s American culture of exploitation by taking images from the era and reclaiming them through the lens of breast cancer

awareness. “Hopefully the way you perceive the paintings initially gets flipped in your mind when you find out what it’s about and get into the exhibition a little deeper,” he said.

Saunders also included more information about the sickness. Each painting was accompanied by a plaque of facts about the disease, its risk factors and the figure’s personal background. “On the Rail,” for example, was captioned with the disproportionate rate of African American women compared to Caucasian women who die from breast cancer. Another poster, titled “10 Facts about Breast Cancer,” read: “Women’s issues are everybody’s issues.” It concluded: “Get checked out.”

L

ast year’s exhibition opened smoothly. This year, Deputy Director of the Department of Transportation, Traffic, and Parking Michael Pinto trekked down from City Hall at noon to personally ask Saunders if he had a permit for his exhibition. He didn’t. Pinto requested that Saunders take “Bust Op” down within the hour. After a brief negotiation, Pinto

art essay consented to Saunders’ initially scheduled end time of 5 p.m. for unspecified reasons. “This is why you can’t ask for permission for anything in this town,” Saunders said.

This odd encounter between Pinto and Saunders derives from ambiguity surrounding New Haven’s regulation of public art. Pinto asked Saunders to present a permit but did not specify what permit Saunders would have even been able to apply for and later declined to comment on the record. The permit and license center provides applications only for vendors and contractors, a title that is not applicable to Saunders. Moreover, it’s unclear which department, category or process regulates Saunders’ — or anyone’s — public artworks. Public art in New Haven thus exists in an undefined sector.

“To be sure, our TEAM under Mayor Harp’s leadership is not lacking for novel ideas to promote ART like never before,” Andrew Wolf, the city’s director of arts, culture and tourism, wrote in an email.

Among the formal platforms that manage public art in New Haven is the Percent for Art program, a statewide initiative that requires at least 1 percent of the city’s construction costs be used to commission a public artwork. More than half of the states in the U.S. now maintain “percent for art” policies, but as Wolf is quick to point out, “New Haven was among the first municipalities in America to initiate this civic gesture.” The program’s goal is to “visually enhance municipal facilities,” according to its mission statement, and would likely not support individual initiatives such as Saunders’ “Bust Op.” Nonprofit organization Site Projects partners with the city to commission artworks that “enhance New Haven’s cultural heritage and diversity,” according to its website. Its upcoming project is an interactive underground light sculpture to be installed in the underpass between Union Station and New Haven. According to Wolf, these public art initiatives promote “New Haven as a global city in the creative economy.” From his perspective, introducing art to the public is Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

art essay a “civic gesture” that adds capital to New Haven’s global standing.

For Saunders, who introduces “Bust Op” with “nothing is for sale,” art is synonymous with free speech. In 2001, he ran for mayor of New Haven dressed in drag as a member of the “Guilty Party,” an act that he calls his first public art project. A year later, he co-founded a free and inclusive fringe arts festival called Ideat (pronounced “idiot”) Village in response to the city’s annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas, which included events that charged a fee. Ideat Village ran for only three days when it first began in 2002. By 2012, it ran for two full weeks alongside the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

“Bust Op” is Saunders’ most recent project, and like his previous public art pieces, it showcases his dedication to building a relationship between art and its immediate community. “This is uncommissioned, unsolicited, not part of an organization,” he said. “Just an artist with a message.” In a forum debate on the New Haven Independent’s website, on which Saunders is a frequent participant, he resolutely stated: “Both Scientists and Artists Seek Truth — One is primarily technically based, the other primarily socially based.”

Saunders’ art is “a reaction to the existing power structure.” In New Haven, where 48 percent of the population is low income, Saunders hopes to increase the accessibility of art. The bus stop sits at a prime location with both high foot and vehicular traffic. It is located at the intersection of two of the city’s major social infrastructures, the New Haven Free Public Library and the Green, and at the point of convergence of six different bus routes. As Saunders said, “It’s about engaging the natural environment and this little social stratosphere that’s going on. It’s black, it’s white, it’s rich, it’s poor.

It has a perfect crossroad and a great view from being stuck at the light.”

He recognizes the station as a legitimate social entity that best captures a heterogeneous sample of the population. As opposed to museum exhibitors 20 | December 2017

who display their art in spaces that await the attendance of a self-selecting subset of the public, Saunders uses his art to engage with and break through the class divisions implicit in the decision to view art. He stood by the bus stop the entire day, observing the way people reacted (or didn’t react) to “Bust Op.” “When people do engage it, do the double take, say something, that’s when you have the chance to pull ’em in a little bit, show them around, get ’em interested a little bit more,” he said. He hopes these interactions foster an active and personal relationship with art.

Still, even if Saunders’ intent is to raise awareness for breast cancer, he is a man painting women’s bodies. Might he be, in turn, only continuing the sexploitation of women? Four of the six women depicted are topless, their tan torsos accentuated with strokes of vibrant pink, yellow and orange paint. With so much bare skin on display, the exhibition was undoubtedly provocative. In “La Natividad Roja (The Pink Nativity),” the woman is painted

from such a dramatically low angle that even though she isn’t topless, her breasts are still the focal point of the symmetrical painting. Against a background of electric blue, the fuchsia frills — too bright to be breast-cancer pink — attract even more attention to her chest.

“It is bizarre in this Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken world that it’s a white man doing this,” Saunders acknowledged.

However, he believes his work stands on its own merits. “I think the collection with the text is undismissable,” Saunders said. “It’s special; it crosses gender, race, and culture.” His ex-wife Diana Mercer, who introduced him to Meyer’s sexploitation movies, agreed. “I don’t think the fact that he’s a white guy should be held against him,” Mercer said.

“He’s got a real sense for people who are underrepresented and who are disenfranchised by the system,” co-founder of Ideat Village Nancy Shea added. “Once you start reading the story behind the women and men he’s painted, that’s where the awareness comes in.”

art essay

Saunders acknowledges his own responsibility to treat the paintings “in a way that isn’t exploitation” and to do justice to the women themselves and to the disease. In “Strike or Spare,” a nude woman in profile leans forward while her right arm extends powerfully behind her as she prepares to send the bowling ball — actually a spherical mass of 3D mammography — rolling. She is nude, yes, her hanging breasts on full display, but it is the concentration furrowed in her eyebrows and the power that manifests in the contours of her taut muscles that really capture the viewer’s attention.

The painting’s accompanying yellow text provides information about women’s preventative health care options: “Through the [Affordable Care Act], all insurance companies are mandated to provide free access to annual/bi-annual mammograms for women over 40, as well as other preventative services like cervical cancer screening, sexually transmitted disease testing and contraception.”

In “Half Mast,” the woman’s chest is

bare except for a halter-neck top fashioned out of a gauzy strip of fabric so thin as to reveal her right breast and leftside scar, presumably from a single mastectomy. She holds a book up to her face, half-hidden behind absurdly large sunglasses. She stands so nonchalantly that from across the street, you might mistake her for a woman reading as she simply waits for the bus.

Ultimately, while “Bust Op” may raise a few eyebrows with its provocative bravado, it also raises broader questions about the relationship between public art and the city of New Haven. The lack of formally outlined legislation for introducing, maintaining, and regulating public artwork is a massive gap in the system. Without this framework, artists are put into nebulous situations that cast doubt on the legality of their actions, as with Saunders and his “Bust Op.” City officials, too, are left uncertain about their right to enforce their authority, which results in scenarios like Pinto acquiescing to Saunders’ schedule.

While Saunders was successful in his negotiation for “Bust Op,” the same cannot be said for all of his public art projects. Ideat Village reached its conclusion in 2012 after Saunders was arrested on the charge of inciting a riot.

On June 30, the New Haven police arrived at the festival and requested a permit from Saunders. City Hall had approved the event, but Saunders was unable to present the physical document, which was in the possession of his co-founder Shea, not on site. Saunders then ascended the stage: “We’ll wait for Nancy, the music is going to continue, and the police are going to have to be patient and enjoy the punk rock music with everybody else,” he recounted. “If the police officers have a problem with that, they are going to have to arrest a lot of people.” Officer Betsy Segui instead repeated that the festival was to be shut down as Saunders began to walk away. “If you walk away, I’ll arrest you,” Saunders remembered her saying. Still, he continued to turn, and the next thing he knew he was on the ground.

The arrest was not unfounded, as Saunders directly ignored a warning that Segui had issued. However, it was an unexpected escalation of events that seems especially brash considering the more peaceful alternative: waiting for Shea to arrive from another part of the festival with the permit. “After the end of Ideat Village, when cops crashed the event and arrested me, I decided to eschew the public process altogether and work in ‘private spaces’ or [do] ‘things’ in public that don’t require a permit, that ride the edge,” Saunders stated.

Ideat Village operated under clear administrative guidelines of public space and was officially approved by City Hall, but it ended with a dramatic and controversial arrest. Ironically, “Bust Op” ran smoothly in comparison, despite lacking any official approval. The first time we met Saunders, he described his work as navigating within a “crack in the system.”

At our raised eyebrows, he laughed: “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission in this town.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

insight

// BY WON JUNG // PHOTOS BY SAM RUBIN, KRISTINA KIM AND NEEHAAR GANDHI

“I

am the right man for the job,” Tony Reno proclaimed on Jan. 12, 2012. “There is no question that I am the right man for Yale football.”

In the famed Yale Bowl, Reno stood tall behind a podium adorned with a Yale University insignia. It was his first public appearance as the 34th head football coach in the school’s history. With a fresh buzz cut and a youthful smile, he exuded a confidence that could have inspired just about anyone.

But Reno was young, just 37 years old, and unproven. As a first-time head

coach, he was tasked with the monumental challenge of rebuilding the tarnished image of a program that had once been the gold standard of college football.

Reno’s predecessor, Tom Williams, was unceremoniously ushered out of New Haven after evidence of embellishments on his resume surfaced in the national media. Williams, a high-profile coach who came to Yale after an assistant coaching stint in the National Football League, falsely reported that he had been a Rhodes Scholarship candidate and that he had signed with the San Francisco 49ers practice squad.

Amid pressure from both within and without the program, he resigned from his post at Yale after three years.

Williams’ players didn’t help Yale football’s reputation, either. During the ousted coach’s tenure, allegations of sexual misconduct arose against star quarterback Patrick Witt ’12. Other players who were brothers of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity found themselves embroiled in a hazing scandal.

“Obviously

there was animosity or whatever you want to call it at the end of the Tom Williams era,” said Jack Siedlecki, who was Yale’s head football coach before Williams and hired Reno in 2003 as an assistant. “Whenever you walk into a head coaching situation under those circumstances, it’s hard on everybody. But Tony understood what he was walking into.

He knew that the program needed to be rebuilt and that it’s not done overnight.”

In 2017, six years after the tumultuous transition, Yale entered its seventh offseason under Reno as the reigning Ivy League champion following a 9–1 campaign. In the aftermath of an up-anddown start to his tenure, Reno has coupled an honest and accountable coaching style with relentless recruiting to lay the foundation for what many expect to be a championship-contending program for years to come.

T

he night of his introductory press conference in 2012, Reno and a staff of assistant coaches leftover from Williams’ tenure began recruiting for a season that was just nine months away. One of Reno’s first phone calls as a head coach went to Tyler Varga ’15.

Varga had just completed an impressive first season as a running back at the University of Western Ontario. Several Football Championship Subdivision schools had recruited Varga in high school, but he opted to stay near home in Canada. However, after he garnered numerous conferencewide and national accolades with his rookie-season performance, Varga decided to test the recruiting waters once more as a potential transfer.

As he remembers it, his first conversation with Reno began something like this: “Hey, it’s coach Reno, I’m the new

insight

head football coach at Yale. I want you to fly out [to New Haven] this weekend.”

Although taken aback by Reno’s candor, Varga was simultaneously captivated, and, mere days following the phone call, the international running back was on Yale’s campus for Reno’s first recruiting weekend.

“That was the first interaction I ever had with him,” Varga said. “I was obviously pretty surprised with his aggressive recruiting style, but he’s had a ton of success with it, and he’s arguably one of the best recruiters … in Division I football.”

At the end of the weekend, Varga was convinced. He committed to attend and play football at Yale University the upcoming fall.

R

eno’s direct and honest recruiting style was cultivated over his 15 years as an assistant coach and intern at colleges of increasing stature. His first break came less than a year after his playing career at Worcester State College

had ended. Reno joined Richard Manello’s staff as an intern for the football team at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he labored for over 100 hours per week in 1997.

As an intern, Reno made a lasting impression on Manello, who happened to be good friends with Siedlecki, Yale’s 32nd head football coach. Reno left after just one year with Manello to coach at his alma mater, clueless that word of the work he had done in Pennsylvania would find its way to Siedlecki.

“Richie just absolutely raved about his work ethic, his recruiting ability [and] his coaching ability,” Siedlecki said. “So, I originally hired Tony as a part-time coach [in 2003], and then I promoted him to a full-time position. Everything that Richie had said about him came to fruition.”

Even in his early days at Yale, Reno’s talent was undeniable. He helped the Bulldogs win an Ivy League title in 2006 and coached several All-Ivy talents in the defensive backfield. At the young age of

33, he was one of Siedlecki’s top assistant coaches.

But with the close of the 2008 season, in which the Elis dropped their second straight contest to Harvard, Siedlecki stepped down from his head coaching position. Siedlecki’s departure came with little explanation — after all, he had posted an impressive 23–7 record in his final three seasons. Faced with the uncertainty of a coaching transition, Reno returned to Massachusetts, where he had grown up and his family still lived, to coach at Harvard.

Under the tutelage of Crimson head coach Tim Murphy, who had then guided the Crimson to five conference titles in 15 years, the up-and-coming coach reached the pinnacle of Ivy League football. In Reno’s three seasons in Cambridge, Harvard won at least seven games and never finished below second place in the conference.

But a part of Reno never quite left New Haven.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

When Yale’s athletics director Tom insight

Beckett began yet another football head coach search following the controversial resignation of Williams, Reno found himself on the short list of candidates.

“We’re always looking for that coach who understands, first and foremost, the important aspect of the experience of our students who participate in the sport of football at Yale and the importance of their desire to seek a great education,” Beckett said.

At Harvard, Reno deepened his understanding of what it takes to be a successful coach in the Ivy League.

Coupled with a unique knowledge of the intricacies of Yale football, this made him a viable candidate for Yale’s head coaching position. “I think [going to Harvard] was a tremendous decision that coach Reno made,” Beckett explained.

R

eno’s first season in New Haven was a struggle. He inherited a roster composed primarily of players recruited prior to his arrival who were far from championship caliber. The Bulldogs went 2–8 that year.

In his second season, Reno improved the team’s record to 5–5. He continued this progression in a breakout third year that saw All-Ivy running back Varga couple with fellow transfer and quarterback Morgan Roberts ’16 to lead Yale to an 8–2 record. But it was a short-lived success.

During the following two seasons, Reno’s fourth and fifth as head coach, injuries depleted the roster and demoralized the team. Limited staff in Yale’s sports medicine department left the team poorly equipped to handle these setbacks, and the Bulldogs’ record dropped first to 6–4 in 2015 and then to 3–7 in 2016.

The low point came in week 6 of the 2016 season when the Elis were pummeled 42–7 by Penn and dropped to 1–5 for the season. For some Yale students, the only thing keeping Reno in their good graces was a shocking upset victory in The Game four weeks later.

But within the Athletic Department and the Yale Football Association, which serves as the program’s booster club, individuals preached understanding and patience with Reno. They were

well aware of the injuries that plagued Reno’s teams and withheld judgment until they could see a healthy and fully Reno-recruited team.

“It takes four years before a new coach has a team that’s filled with kids that he actually recruited,” said former Yale football captain Dr. Patrick Ruwe ’83 MED ’87, who previously served as the team’s orthopedic physician and currently serves as the president of the Yale Football Association. “So the early year of success was great, but it wasn’t truly a reflection of what the process takes to build a program. Over the years, what we saw in coach Reno was a structural change in the program and something that we were willing to nurture and allow to grow.”

Those who interacted daily with Reno noticed what outside fans simply couldn’t. They looked beyond final scores and season records and understood the change in program culture that was occurring under Reno’s supervision.

W

hen Reno took over the program in 2012, he outlined a three-step plan to rebuild Yale football. He wanted to objectively assess the state of the team, get to know his players and recruit the right people to instill a winning culture.

From the outside, selling Yale University to high school juniors and seniors seems like it wouldn’t be all that difficult. With a world-class education, a picturesque campus and the opportunity to play Division I football, Yale leaves most qualified recruits with little to ask for. However, the real challenge lies in separating Yale from a pack of seven other Ivy League institutions that offer all of the same things and non-Ivy programs that can provide scholarships and the potential of a postseason.

While some coaches resort to selling their programs through modern facilities or shiny equipment, Reno aims to sell the core values of his program, which include being intentional, consistent and accountable on and off the field. Although fiercely competitive as a recruiter, he will be the last to sacrifice these values for talent that simply does not fit the mold of the Yale football family.

In line with this philosophy, Reno has shown and continues to show a genuine investment in the players he recruits. He trusts his coaches and players to serve as living testaments of what his program stands for. “[Coach Reno] truly believes in leaders on the team being able to step up and show how it’s done,” All-Ivy linebacker Matt Oplinger ’18 said. “He puts a lot of stack in our captain to be able to show everyone how to be a Yale football player, how to be a Yale student [and] how to be an incredible person.”

His philosophy has completely turned Yale’s program around.

Yale’s last two recruiting classes have ranked among the top five in the Football Championship Subdivision, according to Herosports.com, and have brought highly ranked recruits to New Haven. But more importantly, they have brought like-minded individuals who share Reno’s vision of a program that transcends football.

“Jon Bezney [’18] was my host, and my thought process after leaving [my recruiting] visit was that, if the Yale football program can produce people with the kind of character that Jon has, then this a place that I really want to be,” said Sterling Strother ’20, who has started on the offensive line for the last season and a half.

In 2017, this cohesion off the field finally rewarded the patience of those like Beckett and Ruwe on the field.

After a tumultuous first five seasons, Reno led his sixth team, the 145th in school history, to an Ivy League championship. With their remarkable bounce-back campaign, the Bulldogs snapped an 11-year title drought and a 37-year outright title drought. Not coincidentally, 2017 also marked the first year in which Yale’s football team was filled entirely of Reno recruits who remained healthy.

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ut Reno wasn’t hired for one good run every six years. What Yale football saw in a 37-year old Reno back in 2012 was the potential for sustained excellence, the potential for a coach and a program to grow alongside each other.

Throughout Yale’s remarkable turnaround in 2017, Reno seemed content

insight

with each win, but he never seemed completely satisfied. No matter how well the team played, Reno preached staying the course and working toward reaching the team’s potential.

“Coach Reno always talked about how he wants … to be part of a revolution for Yale Football, to propel the program to the top of the Ivy League [again],” Strother said. “It’s one thing to come into a program that’s been winning for a long time and maintain that, but it’s a different thing to come in and try to reset the standard.”

For this reason, Reno was back in the office just two days after completing a 9–1 season, working to do it all over again. Although his 100-hour work weeks as an intern are long behind him, Reno continues to put in the work to get Yale football right.

“Just from face value, I think he’s one of the hardest working coaches I’ve ever seen,” said Steve Conn, associate athletics director and director of sports pub-

licity. “He’s always in his office, always trying to present an image; you can call it old-school, you can call it professional, you can call it respectful, but every time you see him he’s wearing a coat and tie unless he’s on the sidelines or at practice. He really, really loves doing what he’s doing.”

Conn, a lifelong Yale football fan and Yale Athletics employee for 31 years, said that Reno reminded him of legendary Yale coach Carm Cozza. Much like Reno, Cozza, who went on to become the winningest head coach in Yale history, was hired as a first-time head coach at the young age of 35 in 1965. Over the course of the next 32 seasons in New Haven, he led the Bulldogs to 10 Ivy League Championships. Cozza was and is the standard of Yale football.

Conn isn’t the only one to draw this comparison. Although it’s just six years into Reno’s tenure, Beckett, who has seen his fair share of coaches in almost 24 years as Yale’s athletics director, also

sees similarities between Reno and Cozza in the way that they interact with their players.

“Coach Reno has convinced his students how much he cares. I am beyond confident and as excited as I have ever been about the future of Yale Football under the guidance of coach Reno,” said Beckett, who plans to retire this upcoming June.

Just six years ago, the Yale football program was in shambles. Rocked by integrity conflicts with its head coach and sexual misconduct accusations against its players, a team that was once the heart and soul of Yale University brought scandal to New Haven. But under the guidance of head coach Tony Reno, the Bulldogs have begun to lay the foundations for sustained programwide success.

“I’ve said this to Tom Beckett many times,” Siedlecki said. “The best decision he’s made in his whole career was hiring Tony.”

insight

Seeking Arrangement // BY ISABEL GUARCO // ILLUSTRATION BY ISABEL GUARCO

I

t’s a typical Saturday night at Yale. The line for Soads slowly slinks its way along the front lawns of Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges. Beer seeps through the open windows of dimly lit fraternities. Packs of students drunkenly stumble into GHeav for a $4 bacon, egg and cheese.

It’s a typical Saturday night, and Brian*, a junior at Yale, gets off the train at Grand Central Station to meet Richard, a 60-something-year-old Manhattan business type he’s been seeing regularly for months. Brian knows the drill: dinner, drinks, sex. In the morning they’ll cuddle and maybe eat breakfast, and then Brian will catch the Metro-North back to New Haven with $600 in his pocket.

Brian needs financial help, and, for him, sex is just another means of getting by.

“People have sex because they’re lonely, because they’re tired, because they’re bored, because they want affirmation,” he said. “So, I was thinking about it, and I thought, ‘Well, why not do it for money?’

I mean, you’ve been dared before: ‘Would you eat dirt for $100?’ Well, why would you not eat dick?”

B

rian isn’t exactly a prostitute, and neither is Emily, another student at Yale who spends her weekends meeting similar men in New York 26 | December 2017

City. Brian and Emily are both “sugar babies” matched with older, wealthy sugar daddies on a website called Seeking Arrangement.

The website was founded in 2006 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Brandon Wade as a way to enable wealthy men without a “fighting chance” in the dating world to appeal to attractive young people through financial incentives. The site champions the slogan, “Relationships on Your Terms: Where beautiful, successful people fuel mutually beneficial relationships.” It claims to foster arrangements between sugar daddies seeking companionship and sugar babies seeking financial benefits — a give-andtake, symbiotic affair.

Critics feel differently. “Accusations of prostitution have clouded Seeking Arrangement,” Wade said in a statement published by CNN. “And I’ll admit there’s a fine line. But my intentions are pure.” He said that relationships are really an arrangement between two people: “My point is that dating is very superficial, so use every superficial means you have to get the attention you want.”

Seeking Arrangement has 4 million users worldwide, and its popularity is only increasing. The site is based on a membership system where sugar babies and sugar daddies and mommas create

accounts free of charge and make connections by scrolling through lists of profiles and reaching out to the ones they like — an online shopping spree for the sugar daddy, rich and lonely, and the sugar baby, young and hopeful.

As of 2017, more than 1.2 million college students have registered as sugar babies on Seeking Arrangement. The site promotes its reputation as a “generous sponsor” of financial assistance and offers a variety of special services for students, including a free premium membership for anyone with a “.edu” email address.

In 2017, 44 million students in America took out loans to pay for college, amounting to a national total of $1.45 trillion of debt — a 560 percent increase from total student debt in 2004. Even Yale, a university that prides itself on a system of financial aid that meets “100% of demonstrated financial need,” still sometimes fails to relieve students of intimidating educational costs. Roughly 16 percent of Yale students graduate saddled with loans.

A monthly allowance given to sugar babies by sugar daddies can help relieve students’ significant college costs. Allowances typically range from $1,000 to $5,000 a month, with the average sugar baby making $3,000.

insight In her encounters, Emily has found that money is a way for sugar daddies to feel like they’re helping someone young to better their life — a kind of noble, philanthropic justification that eagerly anticipates the future success of the sugar baby they invested in. That’s the reason, she said, that sugar daddies are particularly interested in college students.

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oth Brian and Emily first got involved with Seeking Arrangement at a time when finances were particularly tight.

“I first started out when I was about 19,” said Emily. “I was from an area of deprivation that I was trying to get out of. I’m not from a wealthy family, and even though I was working, and still I’m working three jobs, there was always a [shortfall]. … I couldn’t be at Yale if I didn’t do this.” For Brian, involvement in the industry came at time when he was “a little short on cash” but was also “just bored.” In the beginning, arrangements for Brian mostly consisted of talks on the phone, which sometimes evolved into awkward first dates predictably accompanied by bouts of forced small talk and out-of-pity smiles. It wasn’t until last spring that Brian started having sex with men for money.

Seeking Arrangement doesn’t call for strictly sexual relationships. Sugar babies and sugar daddies can specify whether they’re looking for nonsexual, or even online-only, arrangements. But, in the experiences of both Brian and Emily, sex is almost always implied.

“I began with the idea that it was just like going on dates and seeing what happened, and then I felt my way along,” said Brian. “I think it may be a gateway drug into prostitution. But I also think that if you want to go on and just meet people who genuinely interest you or show interest in you, then sure, you could probably do that.”

Arrangements typically begin with a bit of casual messaging through the website itself. Eventually, numbers are exchanged and the conversation transi-

tions to text, then phone calls, then Skype and, if all goes well, an in-person date.

The first meeting often takes place in a bar or a restaurant and starts out like any ordinary date. But to Emily, courting in real life is very different from courting on Seeking Arrangement. Seeking Arrangement allows for “a lot more room to be yourself ” and doesn’t leave much to interpretation. People are more selfaware and forthcoming and define the boundaries of the relationship right away. They

know what they want, and they’ve come to Seeking Arrangement to get it.

“It ’s more honest than Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

insight dating,” she said. “In real life, the more honest and transparent you are the more people are scared away, but on this, the more honest and transparent you are, the more attractive it makes you seem, which is so warped and backwards. In real life you’re expected to be someone different, but on this you’re expected to be nothing but yourself.”

There are limits, however, to how honest a person can be on Seeking Arrangement. Identities are often partially concealed, with neither sugar babies nor sugar daddies disclosing too much personal information. All users have their reservations, and no one is immune to the worry of being exposed.

Brian won’t share his real first name with sugar daddies, and Emily draws the line at contact through any form of social media. Both, however, prefer that sugar daddies share a decent amount of information with them before meeting in person. Just to be safe.

“I tend not to trust them if I can’t find information about them, but then I’m also very happy that they can’t find any information about me,” said Brian. “So it’s like a blind faith thing. It’s a relationship built on trust.”

For Emily, when sugar daddies withhold information, it is a definite “red flag.” She said it can sometimes mean that sugar daddies haven’t “processed their internal stigma or their internal selfdamnation.” Or, worse, it can mean that they’re married and looking for a mistress on the side. She would know — it happened to her once before.

Risks are embedded in the network of Seeking Arrangement. Both Brian and Emily stress the importance of caution but agree that, as long as people know what they’re doing and are smart in social situations, Seeking Arrangement isn’t any more dangerous than typical millennial dating. Emily said that she’s felt “more threatened on Tinder dates” than she has on Seeking Arrangement and that even with the age difference, she fears 20-something-year-old males more than she fears anyone, especially in a college town.

28 | December 2017

S

ugar daddies usually aren’t malicious people. Brian and Emily’s experiences suggest that more often than not, those looking for sugar babies tend to be exactly who you would expect: middle-aged white men who are, above all, lonely.

“You can actually form friendships,” Emily said. “They’re not just ATMs, they’re people.”

Richard, one of Brian’s sugar daddies, is married to a man who won’t have sex with him anymore. A Yale graduate from the class of 1977, Richard has achieved success in standard terms. But he’s lonely.

So, on the weekends he travels to New York City and there, he meets young men. “[Richard] loves to make very wry, nihilistic comments about how being an adulterer is so difficult, which says that he really does think about it,” said Brian.

“Some [sugar daddies] are just lonely. It can be a little sad. But these aren’t terrible people. These are people who just want a relationship with a young, attractive, interesting person and don’t mind paying for it.”

But no matter how genuine the relationships may seem, when it comes to Seeking Arrangement, nothing can be removed from the inherent backbone of the industry: money.

“When money’s involved, you never can be entirely yourself,” said Emily.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t be completely honest with your intentions, but there’s a certain aspect of your character that’s very different.”

Drawing the line between transaction and romance can be difficult. When an arrangement becomes fairly regular, it can be easy to get lost in the routine. For many sugar daddies, a relationship with a sugar baby can act as a kind of escape, or fantasy, that protects from the vulnerability of real-life dating.

“For men, there’s less chance of rejection when money’s on the line,” said Emily. “For all the women on [Seeking Arrangement], you’re kind of playing a role for [sugar daddies]. You’re presenting as the ‘ideal’ that is their escape; a satisfaction for them. You’re not there looking

for a boyfriend. You’re there to entertain the idea of a romance.”

Brian, who often finds himself playing the role of the “ideal undergraduate,” said that, for sugar babies, the novelty can only last so long. No matter how much both people involved in the relationship try to pretend, the romantic bubble Seeking Arrangement constructs eventually pops.

At the end of the day, money is still an underlying factor.

But actually talking about money can be taboo. In many arrangements, money is discussed once and not brought up again. In Brian’s experience, a lot of sugar daddies find it awkward or “distasteful” to talk payment and prefer to ignore its presence in the relationship altogether.

Often times, money is paid electronically or presented in the form of a gift, creating the illusion that it’s not really there.

Direct in-person transactions can be uncomfortable and embarrassing. Brian said that, in his experience, most sugar daddies “haven’t reconciled themselves with the idea of having to pay,” because money evokes the idea of prostitution too closely and shatters the idea of romance.

Money is a way Brian said he can “present himself as a product.” Usually, once something is bought, it’s owned. But in the Seeking Arrangement world, some men don’t like the fact that they have to pay for sugar babies because the purchase doesn’t entitle them to total power. For them, payment suggests they’re “somehow losing” and that the sugar babies might be getting more out of the arrangement than they are.

But for many sugar babies, money can be a way of quantifying their worth, seeing who out there finds them attractive — and just how much.

“There’s a huge number of people who have Tinder, and it’s not dissimilar,” Brian said. “Now [Tinder] has this thing where you can show how many people have swiped you, … and it’s very much like a buzz, it’s exciting. I have a lot of friends who are on Tinder just to see who likes them. See what your value is. [Seeking Arrangement] is not so different.”

“They always call us boys,” said Brian. He

insight thinks it’s an innocence thing.

“On the male side it very much goes back to the Greeks and the Romans — the young male athlete, scholar. Like Antinous. He’s the third most statued person in the world after Zeus and Athena, because Hadrian was so in love with him that he had his face immortalized, which is pretty romantic. But he was 21 when he died and 14 when Hadrian first met him. So that’s definitely a part of this industry.”

Emily, too, said innocence is an aspect of the role she often has to play. But for her, gender is the means through which power is divided.

Seeking Arrangement is notorious for touting arrangements between older wealthy men and attractive young women. So for Emily, a proponent of women’s rights, it’s been difficult to rationalize her position in the industry.

“I self-identified as a feminist for the first time when I was 4, so it’s obviously a really conflicting thing for me that I’m dependent on someone who has reached their position of power through means of their gender,” she said. “It definitely is a struggle because I guess a lot of the negative connotations [of the industry] are that it’s misogynistic men looking to own women.”

Older men on Seeking Arrangement often search for someone to fill the role of the submissive female or the damsel in distress. Some men derive satisfaction and empowerment from the feeling of owning and oppressing a younger woman.

It’s taken women years to claim a place in higher education, yet today, some still have to subject themselves to this kind of submission in order to stay.

For Emily, however, the submission in arrangements isn’t always real. To her, it is just an illusion that allows sugar daddies feel like they’re in charge — but control in relationships is very much a two-way street.

Maintaining a healthy balance of power in arrangements is possible, but it hinges on establishing clear boundaries from the start and knowing when a rela-

tionship has to come to an end.

“The important thing is definitely boundaries,” said Emily. “Typically for me, if it’s an intense arrangement, it can last comfortably about six months. I’ve yet to have that ‘Pretty Woman’ situation where we fall magically in love. You’ve got to go in with a level head that that’s probably not going to happen. You need to say, ‘This can be romantic, and we can do romantic things, but this is not a romance.’”

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ne of the most difficult aspects of participating in Seeking Arrangement is rationalizing its place in real life. Those who engage in the industry fear they’ll be shamed and condemned if their identities are exposed.

Most sugar babies only confide in their closest friends, if anyone at all. The world of Seeking Arrangement is highly complex and built on a network of controversial sentiments, but the industry is far more than just the stigma it carries.

Many feel uneasy about the thought of older men purchasing the companionship of younger, often vulnerable, people.

But this common stereotype oversimplifies the particular relationships at hand.

Emily doesn’t take issue with the fact that this is something she does. She takes issue with the fact that this is something she has to do.

“The situation that I’m in, the reason that this is something I need to do, is a man-made phenomenon,” she said.

“I’m in this situation because I’m an extremely ambitious woman and my gender and my social class have denied me from achieving the means to pursue my dreams. It’s a social problem. And it doesn’t have to be like this at all.”

For many sugar babies, and for many college students like Brian and Emily, Seeking Arrangement is a way to provide a steady flow of financial income when other options have proven insufficient. It’s a source of means. Participating in the industry isn’t just a matter of making an account and having older men throw Fendi purses one’s way. It’s a lot more than that, and it’s a lot more

common than people think.

In fact, the prevalence of sugar babies on college campuses has increased substantially in the last few years — a trend to which Yale contributes. Brian said that Yale has “pockets” of students involved with Seeking Arrangement, and that, “once you have one friend who does it,” others become curious and start to follow.

For many students involved in Seeking Arrangement, the industry is not a source of enjoyment but rather a necessary source of income.

“When you think about it, it’s kind of a messed up thing,” said one Yale student not involved in the industry, who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s hard to think that college is so cost prohibitive that it forces young people into prostitution.”

Of course, Seeking Arrangement isn’t always synonymous with prostitution.

While some arrangements resemble sex work, Seeking Arrangement offers a platform for the cultivation of all kinds of relationships. It is not a one-size-fitsall industry — it is diverse in its intricacies and various in its intents. No one person has the same experience. It can be what you make of it.

Seeking Arrangement can come across as an elusive, glamorous and even sinister line of work, but at its core, it is really something that any student can relate to — whether it be the struggles of funding an education, barely scraping by to pay the rent each month or just the curiosity of seeing who thinks you’re attractive. Sugar babies are not virtual.

They are real people with real intentions who think about what they do.

It’s typical a Sunday morning, and Brian arrives in New Haven on the Metro-North. He calls an Uber from Union Station and gets off at the corner of College and Wall streets. He heads to his dorm, takes a shower, grabs his backpack and walks to Bass Library. It’s been a busy weekend, and he has class on Monday. *All “sugar babies” names are pseudonyms to protect their identities.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

fiction

He Walks in His Sleep into Your Life // BY RUBY BILGER // ILLUSTRATION BY IRENE KIM

30 | December 2017

If the piano player were better, my mind might wander in his direction, wondering where he lives and who he likes and all that, but he isn’t, and instead I’m sitting in this jazz club reliving our game against Belgium: surprise Euro Cup quarter-final victory, three-to-one. I see the field electric green and the undulating Welsh fans in red and white. It’s the 55th minute, the game is tied one-one, and Bale sends a long ball down from midfield that Ramsey pins to the ground and chips to me right outside the penalty box.

I’ve got three Belgians on my ass: De Bruyne, Meunier and Fellaini. I hear a short theme from “Toy Story” on the piano but I don’t care, the pianist is playing too many notes and I Cruyff the shot — I fake a kick with my left leg, pivot on it instead and come round for an open goal and a chance for a left-footed strike. That turn — I see it the same every time. I even stumble out of it before I lift myself up and shoot true

fiction and the nation of Wales erupts in song.

I’m smiling like an idiot now but I don’t mind, I never try to hide how I feel about this memory. I can still hear my countrymen chanting my name — Hal! Robson!

Hal Robson-Kanu! — as I run a victory lap, my teammates trying to tackle me on the sidelines, my body huge and unreal on the replay screen. I hope this pianist doesn’t see me and think I like him. He’s modern and repetitive; I knew I wouldn’t like it, I don’t know why I came. Often I imagine myself in a shoot-out with Michael Jordan when listening to music like this.

I don’t think too hard about leaving, I just do, and soon I’m through the double doors of the club and out on Division Street where the fading sun is golden and pigeons are waddling at the feet of two boys with floppy haircuts. One boy kicks the air, and the birds take flight, alighting on the crosswalk, where I go now, the parting notes from the piano man taking a final whirl in my head until they slip out forever. I’ve never been to Chinatown before, but I visited other parts of Manhattan when I was a kid. I remember these spiderish fire escapes over the narrow sidewalks and old brick tenements that look good in grime. Though I had thick regular hair then, not an asshole Cristiano Ronaldo undercut like these boys on the street, who have just begun to play “Pokémon Go,” who don’t see me in their pathway, who don’t move aside to let me pass and certainly didn’t weep when Wales fell to Portugal in the semifinals. They probably didn’t even watch the game.

“All the way to Hester Park?” one of them groans. “Not worth it for a Bulbasaur.” I look away to keep my thoughts from turning livid.

Above the shops today I’ve counted one-two-three lithe white women smoking cigarettes out of their big loft windows. There’s another one above the Highline deli, slender wrists and a gossamer T-shirt, staring into the beyond. She’s the kind that probably eats doll food, and below her wrinkled men speak Cantonese and smoke and suck up noodles. I wonder why she lives here.

I wonder about a lot of things here. The

borders of Chinatown, for a start. Where are they? Is this the name of the neighborhood on the city books, is it zoned as “Chinatown”? The subway crosses the Manhattan Bridge overpass, rattling the skulls of the cellphone salesmen and fruit vendors who work underneath. A dust cloud tumbles off the edge of the entrance ramp, a line of it caught in a beam of yellow sun, and my eyes prickle at the thought of the invisible rest of it floating into my air. I bump shoulders with an small old woman.

She looks at me, says something to herself and rolls her laundry cart away. I don’t like her either — she’s having a go at me.

She doesn’t even know who I am. No one here does, no one even does a double take and I wish they would, I’m sure at least someone on this sidewalk saw me score.

The day after we lost in the semis, I just up and came here, just to get out of France.

Just to stop thinking about Portugal. And now I’m dehydrated and I’m sweating in this city, this big clattering kitchen, everywhere pots falling down the stairs.

On the left by the subway station a football team is practicing in the corner park — their T-shirts say the New York City Strangers. I sit and watch them for a while. They’re about university age, nineteen or twenty, co-ed. They’re doing passing drills. Another team in blue lurks by the sidelines, some spraying bottled water into their mouths, others sitting on the bench staring down at the Astroturf.

“You’ve got to watch her this time, you’ve got to mark her better,” one of the blue team members say to his mate on the bench.

“Yeah, I know,” the mate says, “I know.”

He looks at the ground again and violently pumps his leg up and down. He’s in the Zone — a place I know well. It used to be a place worth going to. As a teenager on football training squads I could clear my mind until it was humming with concentration, brilliantly lucid. I played defense back then and had a foil striker on a rival team, Evans, who always managed to scramble past me. When we were seventeen we faced off for the last time.

I marked him like mad — I killed my thighs doing it — and for two straight

minutes we danced around each other, him not able to pass the ball anywhere and me not able to clear it, until he got so frustrated that he punched me in the stomach. He got red-carded. My mates called me Stomach for a while afterward. This, I think, was my last trip into the Zone as it was when I was young, when I was convinced that any task I was put to must be done. Now that I’m older, the Zone has become something much worse: a place of soft focus, where formless thoughts pick me up, bat me around for a while and set me back down again at their whim. I can feel their fingers closing around me during any breakfast bowl of cereal, when I start to wonder where this bowl is from, where’s the factory where it was made, what’s the history of bowls in the United Kingdom — or even worse, on the football pitch, when I start to pick out the pinheads of shouting spectators and imagine their homes in detail. It’s distraction posing as revelation. It’s taking me over and I don’t like it. I lost to Portugal because of it.

I’m done with the Zone. Bad ideas happen there, theories of time and the interconnectedness of things, good grammar goes to die there, it seeps into your waking life I tell you, don’t meddle with the horrors of the Zone.

The Strangers start their game and I start walking back toward the subway. I’m caught behind a sauntering family, and for some reason I’m angry about this, even though I have nowhere to be. The East Broadway station exhales a cloud of people onto the sidewalk. They suck me into their mass and bump me down the subway stairs. I hop the turnstile and walk down to the infernal tracks, and right away I realize my mistake — the best subway stations are the ones that have the uptown and downtown tracks running side by side, with metal pillars between them that form glassless frames of the people standing on the platform across the way.

Once, on the way to my mom’s house in London, I saw three teenage boys dancing to a speaker that one was holding to his ear. They didn’t smile much, and they moved like they were walking backwards on a luggage carousel, and as one of them Yale Daily News Magazine | 31

fiction knocked the baseball cap off his mate’s head I only wanted to crawl over the train tracks and dissolve into their side of the pillars, join them without introducing myself, say something about their techno beat and follow them onto their train and down their tunnel.

But East Broadway isn’t the right type of station at all. It’s got one platform between the uptown and downtown lines that seems three stories more underground than it needs to be. People stand around frowning, sweating, soaking in the urinecolored lights, and a woman’s voice shrieks from a fuzzed-out intercom: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THE BROOKLYN-BOUND F TRAIN IS DELAYED. IT IS DELAYED LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Seconds later, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THERE IS A HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT. THERE IS A HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT. TAKE CAUTION WITH YOURSELF AND YOUR LOVED ONES. My eyes burn with salt and water. I don’t know who you are, lady. But I hate you.

When the train arrives I sarcastically thank it for showing up, but I can’t hear myself over the shrieking. It stops and within seconds nearly all the talking people from the last ride filter into the yellow dinge of the station and let the rest of us compress into the car’s bright white fluorescence. A woman yawns as she heaves herself into a seat; her varicose veins look like tattoos, she wears flip-flops, both her second toes are strange but in different ways. The sweat on my neck turns to ice in the air conditioning. People scratch themselves a lot, and I think back to something I once read about seventy percent of the air in the New York City subway being human skin flakes. I deeply inhale the air full of skin.

Four stops into Brooklyn two girls squirm onto the train as the doors close, sit in front of the window across from me and sigh out words as they catch their breath.

“I love him,” one of them says. “Our bodies just fit right into each other.”

“Like a two-piece puzzle,” says the other. The woman next to them laughs into her cell phone. “Yeah,” the first teen32 | December 2017

ager says, scratching her head dreamily, “like a two-piece puzzle.”

We’re out of the dim tunnel now, shooting down the tracks over the pink and brown buildings of the hobbled Brooklyn skyline, some people resting their heads against the windows as the train car fills with sun. I remember other days on other trains, grey rain on windows, stone walls in the countryside, sleeping football players.

The girls talk about the guy for a while and then look at the adverts over my head until one of them gets off at Kings Highway. A grown man takes her old seat; the leftover girl shifts her weight. The sun skirts the tops of buildings in the window behind them, illuminating the edges of the girl in gold, catching her flyaway hairs and softening the angles of her chin and shoulders so that her figure dissolves into the moving sky behind her. She stirs, she hums and her fingers curl over the edge of her plastic seat.

That girl is beautiful — I think that in a sentence. She’s got on jean shorts and a tank top, but I can barely see the color of them under the radiance that surrounds her body. She bounces softly with the train. I can’t think of a word for her though I want to, I want to remember what she looks like, but all I think is beautiful beautiful beautiful until somewhere from the back of my mind comes a quiet voice singing, You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, it’s true …

Wait, who is that? Who sings that? I remember — it’s James Blunt, isn’t it? It’s that song, “You’re Beautiful.” I start to hear an acoustic guitar and a string quartet, and the first verse rises gently: I saw an angel, of that I’m sure, she smiled at me on the subway …

Wait, what? Subway? I look away from the girl. I didn’t like that song when it came out. Why the fuck do I even remember it? Why do I have to remember it now? The girl tucks her hair behind her ears. Thank god she doesn’t know what I’m thinking; she has no idea she even looks like this, she’s looking at the opposite wall.

The digital clock overhead flashes 7:13 p.m. The girl leans her head back against

the window, straining her neck, exposing a long column of throat.

“Miss, you need to sleep?” the man next to her says, tapping the wall behind him.

“No, it’s okay. I’m getting off soon,” the girl answers. The man asks her where she lives, she says around here. He tells her he’s a desk clerk at the Port Authority and asks her what she does. She says she’s a camp counselor. “I appreciate that,” he says. She smiles a little sadly. They both look ahead for a while, until the girl uncrosses her legs and the man reaches for them. He stops just shy of her, hovering over above the pink blotch on her left knee where her right leg had been resting.

“Oh, look, it’s red.” He sounds concerned, like a grandmother would.

“It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt.” the girl pulls her knee away. They’re quiet then. “You’re Beautiful” comes back in my head. What the fuck? Is this the world I live in now?

Where everywhere I look there’s pop songs? More than that, I’m mad about how little control I have over it all. All these stupid songs that I thought were just ambient noise, all this trash in the world, it’s all in me. My brain is full of trash that I didn’t try to put there, and it spits it out at random, surprise synaptic betrayal.

The train eases into the next station.

Out go the woman with the toes and some other people that I hadn’t been thinking about, but the girl stays, still so pretty, still there.

“This is a very good day. You know why?” the man says to her.

“Why?” she says.

“Because I met you.”

“Oh.” “You want to sleep?”

“No, it’s okay. I’m getting off soon.”

“You married? Single? Married?” The girl stares at me.

“I’m married.”

“Your husband. What’s his name?”

We stare and stare at each other. Does she know me? No, that’s not how she’s looking at me. Keep talking girl, please, forget what I might be thinking. What’s his name, what’s his name.

The girl doesn’t blink. “Bastian,” she says. And looks away.

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UNDER THE WING

IS ONE YALE RESEARCHER PREYING ON BIRDS OR PREYED-UPON BY PETA? // BY WILL REID // PHOTOS BY ROBBIE SHORT

O

n the evening of Oct. 18, 2017, University President Peter Salovey rose to address a gathering of Yale alumni at an event in Seattle.

About a hundred people were settled into the small auditorium’s staggered seating.

Behind the stage, the city skyline — with its famed Space Needle — filled the projector screen. Just as Salovey began his speech, a woman leapt onto the stage and faced the audience at large: “Excuse me everyone, can I have your attention please?”

A prominent public figure, an interjecting protester, an imposing security guard hovering in the wings — perhaps more important than the actors on the stage was the protester’s accomplice in the audience, who was recording a video destined for YouTube.

In the video, activist Marlene Blanco brandishes a sign that droops and folds as she paces the stage. “President Salovey:

Stop cruel sparrow experiments,” it reads.

Below the message, the name of the group that had dispatched her to Seattle is written in cursive: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Since last May, the Norfolk-based nonprofit has mounted a sustained campaign online and in person against a Yale postdoctoral researcher named Christine Lattin. In her work, Lattin examines how wild house sparrows respond to stress.

She induces this stress by placing birds in cloth bags, rattling their cages and adding small amounts of crude oil to their millet.

PETA considers the research torture and the researcher, who has euthanized 250 birds since 2008, a killer. While PETA’s campaign targets her methods not Lattin herself, the group’s tactics have a very personal edge. PETA’s online posts identify her by name, which has enabled internet users to flood Lattin’s email, Facebook and Twitter inboxes

with hate mail. PETA has also revealed her home address: of their six protests, one was staged outside her New Haven condo, where she lives with her husband and 20-month-old son.

Meanwhile, the University has defended Lattin. Her methods meet all the guidelines on bird research set by Yale’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and by the Ornithological Council.

Back on stage, Salovey spoke dryly into the microphone, asking Blanco to leave.

But she persisted, yelling, “Shame on Yale! Stop killing birds! Shame on Yale!”

The crowd, at first quiet, grew agitated.

“Begone!” one alumnus shouted, with a touch of melodrama fitting for the occasion.

“You’re going to have to carry me out!”

Blanco yelled back.

A few minutes of pacing later, Blanco left of her own accord; security had called Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

cover

the police, and Blanco decided not to risk arrest. It was clear as she exited the stage that her act was over.

O

n a crisp day in November, Lattin, dressed in jeans and a dark cardigan, stepped off a shuttle onto the curb outside the Yale School of Medicine. As we walked toward her lab along the sun-dappled sidewalk, her demeanor scarcely showed the six months of harassment she had endured.

Lattin came to Yale in 2014 after 34 | December 2017

receiving her doctorate from Tufts University. She came to Yale for access to world-class equipment: PET scanners, doughnut-shaped instruments that use particles of antimatter to peer inside the organs of a still-living body. Yale has one of the best PET labs in the world, according to Richard Carson, director of the University’s PET Center and Lattin’s boss. The scanners enable researchers to quantify everything from organ function to brain density by examining how organic molecules, such as sugars or hor-

mones, are concentrated in the various parts of the body. The scanning process is complex and expensive, not least because it requires researchers to have a stock of radioactive molecules on hand to inject into their subjects.

The School of Medicine is a fitting home for such a complex operation. Clinicians use PET scanners to find cancerous tumors; medical researchers use them to make sure new drugs hit their target. Lattin wanted to use them to study how different hormone levels in the brain influence bird behavior.

“It’s kind of amazing to me that they let me put feral sparrows in their million-dollar scanner,” she said. “Not everyone would be as open to doing this work.”

Carson said they had never scanned a bird before. About 25 percent of PET Center scans involve animals, but most of these examine more typical research subjects, such as mice or chimpanzees. Lattin had to develop new techniques to use the scanners on sparrows. She worked with engineers at Yale’s Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design to build a specialized plastic gurney for the birds that holds their bodies steady while they lay anesthetized in the scanner. And she’s had to develop a new method for injecting the radioactive tracer into the sparrows’ tiny bodies.

“Now the birds are being scanned the same way people are being scanned,” said Carson.

The research harks back to Lattin’s time before academia, when she was on staff at animal shelters and other conservation centers. Her work has already contributed to scientific discourse, racking up a total 384 citations, according to Google Scholar. Her crude oil study has been cited by researchers working with dolphins, sea turtles and other species exposed to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Lattin’s study found that even tiny amounts of crude oil induced the birds’ stress response. Even if they appeared normal, the birds’ hormones revealed internal distress. In other words, stress can be hard to detect — in birds being researched or in a researcher herself.

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I

n 1980, PETA began with five members and a philosophy. Since then, its numbers have grown to over 6.5 million — a million and a half more than the National Rifle Association. Inspired

by Peter Singer’s manifesto of the modern animal rights movement, its founders sparked a revolution. They believe that the mistreatment of animals is morally equivalent to the mistreatment of any human group. “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment or abuse in any other way,” the PETA slogan goes.

Among the general public, PETA is perhaps best known for its provocative advertisements, which advocate for adoption of a vegan lifestyle. Provocative puts it lightly: In a recent Thanksgiving-themed ad, a family happily slices into a roasted human child, dressed like a turkey. But PETA’s efforts at persuasion don’t stop with consumer choice.

Among other watchdog agencies, PETA has a department devoted to investigating and lobbying against the use of animals in academic and commercial research.

PETA’s lab investigators first looked into Lattin’s work last year, after an article published in the Yale Engineering magazine detailed her collaboration with the CEID. A few things stood out immediately, said PETA’s chief of laboratory case management Alka Chandna. Lattin’s abstracts made no mention of the potential human benefit of her research.

Chandna and her colleagues doubted that Lattin’s discoveries in wild sparrows could be applied to other bird species — let alone humans.

“Right away, we can say, ‘She’s harming animals and there’s no human benefit,’” Chandna said.

Ingrid Taylor, a veterinarian on staff at PETA, pored over Lattin’s articles, searching for evidence of cruelty in the experiments she conducted at Yale and Tufts. For Taylor, the worst part was that these were not accidents that occurred during the course of research — they were part of the research itself. Lattin’s crimes were premeditated.

In May 2017, PETA, evidence in hand, sprang into action. It filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the district attorney of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, where Tufts is located. (Most states, including Connecticut, exempt research animals from their cruelty laws, but Massachusetts does not.) Then, the campaign for popular opinion began.

“Right from our inception we’ve known that media is critical to our work,” said Chandna. Social media has only made it easier to amplify their message.

It’s a change for Chandna, who’s been involved with animal rights work since the 1980s. It used to be that, as an undergraduate, she would spend $15 to order VHS tapes from PETA through the mail.

Now, videos surface right in your news feed.

One such video begins with a photo of Lattin holding the blue plastic device that keeps the sparrows in place while they are in the scanner. She’s grinning directly into camera. “This woman is torturing songbirds,” reads the superimposed text. The video has over 2 million views on Facebook and about 9,000 “angry” reactions.

“You better believe that we’re sponsoring advertisements on Facebook,” Chandna said. “You better believe that whenever there’s an opportunity to get this video footage in front of people, we’re doing that.”

PETA has used other channels as well,

sending letters to the Yale President’s Office and appealing to alumni for support. A recent alumna, Hanh Nguyen ’17, first heard about Lattin’s research when she started working for PETA the summer after graduation. She wasn’t personally involved with the campaign until October, when she joined a group of demonstrators outside a Yale Corporation meeting at Woodbridge Hall. That month, she sent a letter to alumni organizations, urging them to express their disapproval of the experiments.

After the first online posts against her in May, Lattin’s inbox started filling up with messages from unfamiliar addresses. Some described her research in a way she didn’t recognize. “Unsuspecting birds who have been lured to feeders and trapped or netted are being systematically tormented to induce stress and fear,” read one. Others addressed Lattin directly: “SHAME ON YOU” and “STOP TORTURING BIRDS YOU SICK FUCK!” Notably, a majority of messages criticized the alleged purposelessness of Lattin’s work.

At first, Lattin thought it would blow over. Things weren’t too bad for Lattin — the controversy didn’t even show up on the first page of Google results for her name.

Some colleagues advised her to keep her head down. This type of incident hadn’t happened at Yale in about a decade. The last target — Marina Picciotto, a neuroscientist studying addiction — remained Yale Daily News Magazine | 35

cover at Yale.

A turning point came when PETA protesters demonstrated outside a conference in Long Beach, California, where Lattin was presenting. Lattin described the experience of having protesters shout her name while she spoke to her colleagues as “incredibly traumatic.”

The situation worsened. Lattin could tell by spikes in harassment whenever PETA uploaded a new post. Some of the messages she received were so threatening she shared them with the New Haven Police Department. She also keeps a file on her computer in case something happens to her, so she can have evidence to provide the FBI. Chandna thinks it’s regrettable that Lattin has felt threatened, but she emphasized how PETA’s communications have been polite. “Clearly, our intention is never to have people be harassed,” she said. “It is never our intention to stir up the masses.”

As for the protests PETA has organized, Chandna doesn’t see them as harassment. Rather, she sees the tactics against Lattin as similar to those deployed by any other campaign for social justice.

“I don’t even think of home demonstrations as being harassing,” she said.

“And I like to remind people that the body count here, the harassment here, has been done by Christine Lattin. There are more than 250 birds that have been captured from birdfeeders.”

Taking a step back, for Chandna, Lattin’s work represents one battle in a larger “war on animals” being waged by researchers across the country — against which PETA’s prepared to fight back.

“If you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna.’” Chandna said. “That’s PETA’s modus operandus [sic]. We’re in it to win it.”

W

hen Lattin needs more sparrows, she gathers a mix of potter traps and mist nets and goes herself to catch them. The sparrows she finds are an invasive species, introduced to North American cities in the 36 | December 2017

1850s as a solution for urban pests and a salve for homesick European immigrants.

They’ve since spread across the whole continent, which is one reason Lattin felt comfortable using them in research — she knew they weren’t going extinct anytime soon.

Lattin acquired her bird-handling skills as a young science educator at the Glen Helen Raptor Center, near Springfield, Ohio. The center is part nature preserve, part animal shelter for the area’s birds of prey. Primarily, Lattin led gradeschool children on hikes and taught them about local bird populations. Toward the end of her time, she became an assistant to the veterinarian on staff. Sometimes, she said, birds would be brought in who could not be saved. While the vet euthanized them with a syringe, Lattin held their bodies still.

“That was really hard for me,” she recalled, taking a long pause. “It was pretty sad. But you know, definitely better than … starving to death is definitely a worse way to go.”

In her current research, Lattin prides herself on her ability to handle birds deftly, injecting them with radiotracer and taking blood samples. By doing things smoothly, she minimizes the stress birds otherwise would have felt from having someone reach into their cage or pull them out of a net.

Enjoying the work at raptor shelter and subsequent nature preserves, Lattin moved to Eastern Kentucky to study birds full time. To obtain her degree, she chose a topic not far from her undergraduate work in linguistics: analyzing the songs of the blue grosbeak, a seedeater common to the southern United States.

Male grosbeaks sing to impress potential mates and, like human speech, their songs are made up of a complex line of syllables strung together by the singer. And like some humans, when male grosbeaks get worked up, they blow a gasket, launching into a tirade of syllables several times longer than a typical song.

Lattin wanted to capture these tunes in the wild, so she packed up her recording equipment and drove to where most

humans stayed clear — a local chemical weapons depot. The 14,000 acres of uninhabited land had become a haven for wildlife, favored among local hunters, and the perfect spot to record birdsongs on a spring morning. Lattin got out of her car and started unpacking her equipment. Immediately, she noticed something was off. It was April, peak breeding season. The hills should have been alive with the sound of birdsong. Why was it so quiet?

The answer, it turned out, was weather: A harsh late May frost had shocked the local ecosystem, halting flowers at the bud, hardening the ground and scattering the insects. Without grasshoppers to eat or seeds to chew on, there was no sense trying to attract a mate. “Of course, I was like, ‘Oh my god, what am I going to do?’” recalled Lattin. “I’m trying to do this research project on song and the birds aren’t singing. But for them, it made sense.”

The frost was a stressor, a threat in the birds’ environment that influenced their behavior — like a lion on the savannah or the loss of control from captivity. While eventually grosbeaks returned to the area, the spring silence alerted Lattin to stress as a phenomenon worth studying further.

And so her research began.

“I

t is amazing that they chose Christine,” Carson said. Given that a lot of animal research is done at Yale, Carson and his colleagues struggle to rationalize PETA’s unilateral focus on Lattin. “Whether that’s because they think more people will care about birds than care about mice and rats,” Carson said, “I don’t know.”

Lattin has her own theories, but mostly she feels vilified unfairly. She’d deliberately switched to PET scanning because the procedure was less invasive. In the future, she hopes to be able to release caught sparrows back into the wild with tiny transmitters so as to track and, later, recapture them. Not only would that be better for the birds, it would be better for the research.

It would feel better for Lattin too. She’s

cover never liked killing the birds, but legally, that’s the requirement: her scientific collector’s permit, issued by the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection, doesn’t permit her to release captured birds back into the wild.

The department has an interest in reducing sparrow populations. They’re invasive, and they compete for nest space with local species like bluebirds, whose numbers have declined in recent decades. The permit isn’t something Lattin likes to talk about publicly because she fears it will sound like she isn’t taking responsibility for her work.

PETA has repeatedly argued that Lattin should stop using animals altogether and switch to modern methods, like computational modeling. This perspective misapprehends the state of alternate methods, Lattin said. It’s hard for her to think of something more modern than PET scans. And without animal research, she said, “all scientific discovery would come to a screeching halt.”

Throughout the controversy, the Yale STEM community has come to Lattin’s defense. Graduate students in biology and immunology have written op-eds in her defense, and in October, an undergraduate chemistry and molecular, cellular and developmental biology major circulated a letter of support. One hundred and twenty people have signed.

Lattin’s case has garnered attention from outside Yale as well. Science magazine and the New Haven Register both covered the story. Other concerned researchers, like Kevin Folta at the University of Florida, have sought to protect her reputation. Folta, who has faced protests himself for research on genetically modified organisms, wrote a paean to Lattin on his blog and hosted her on his podcast. Folta believes she is being targeted because, as a young female scientist without tenure, she is vulnerable.

But perhaps the most vigorous defender of the research has been Lattin herself. She has replied to PETA’s claims on Twitter, rewritten her personal website to make it more accessible and made

an effort to speak to journalists interested in her case. So far, that seems to have helped — after she started to speak out, the harassment declined.

“A few people early on said, ‘Oh well, keep your head down and it’ll blow over,’” Lattin said. “I kind of think those people are wrong. If you don’t speak up for yourself, you don’t make it easy for people to rally around you.”

T

hough many have flocked to Lattin’s defense, PETA remains undeterred. It will continue its campaign; Lattin will continue her research, though her current focus is elsewhere. This semester, she is teaching the undergraduate class “Comparative Physiology” for the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department. And she’s searching for a professorship — somewhere she can run her own lab.

Although PETA’s aim has been to stop Lattin’s research, the experience has only hardened her resolve. PETA’s accusations have not undercut her belief that the work she does is important, that the

questions she’s asking need answers and that, without plausible alternatives, work that kills sparrows is justified.

PETA emphasizes that Lattin’s research has no direct application; she’s not working on a new drug or developing a new conservation method. Lattin and her supporters argue scientific inquiry doesn’t work that way. Sometimes research directly solves a problem or answers a question, sometimes opening up space for more.

PETA argues the animals aren’t ours, for research or otherwise. Chandna said the group only approves of animal research that meets the same standards as human trials. Latin says she’s as humane as possible.

“I’m good at this work. And I try to do it in a really thoughtful and respectful way, and be ethical in everything that I do,” she said. “Who do I want to do this research? I want it to be people like me.”

For PETA, Lattin’s research on birds is yet another piece of evidence in their larger case against animal research. For Lattin, that research is her life’s work.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 37

bits & pieces

The Art of the Reluctant Pre-Med // BY JACOB SWEET

If you’re sure of one thing, it’s that you don’t want to become a doctor. If you’re sure of another, it’s that your parents do want you to become a doctor and will stop at nothing to make sure you achieve this goal.

There’s good reason that your parents want you to become a doctor — it is the holy grail of professions — and everything you’ve accomplished in life has shown that you are among the best.

You spoke your first word at the age of 10 months, sooner than anyone else’s kids. As a toddler, you performed complex cosmetic surgery on an American Girl doll, wielding your Fisher-Price doctor’s kit with remarkable dexterity as your family watched, mouths agape.

Even in your elite preschool, you were the only one in your class capable of counting to one 100; when your teacher asked you what your favorite number was, you said, “100,852.” She fell to her knees, astounded. In middle school, Ms. Smith, your sixth-grade science teacher, informed your parents that your Styrofoam representation of the solar system was the best she’d ever seen. No one else had ever accounted for Pluto’s abnormal orbit.

High school didn’t knock you down a peg; it reaffirmed your greatness. You studied the most, received the best grades and won your teachers’ affection. Your junior year, you worked in a cancer laboratory with a doctor well-respected in her field — a close friend of your parents. You microscoped, Bunsen-burned and Erlenmeyer-flasked your way to negligible 38 | December 2017

scientific advances and a great recommendation letter. After checking your SAT scores on the College Board website, you cried tears of joy for the first time. Then, you were accepted to Yale.

You said goodbye to your best friend, who happened to be your chemistry teacher, and headed off to school. And suddenly, you realized you didn’t want to be a doctor anymore.

It’s too late to explain this to your parents; when you tried in October, they called the head researcher of your lab and staged an intervention in your living room. You even suggested that you were considering a field just as honorable — law. You tried explaining that most people respect lawyers as much as they respect doctors and, crucially, that saying your child goes to law school sounds about as impressive as saying your child studies medicine. You thought you had convinced them that this was an acceptable switch until you received a call from your Mayo Clinic cousin, urging you to reconsider.

You’ve covered all the angles: the “I don’t think I’ll be happy in this field” angle, the “Med school is expensive, and what if I don’t get a job?” angle and, most absurdly, the “I am passionate about something else and want to pursue it so that I don’t look back and wonder what could have been” angle.

Weak.

You’ve been forced to get creative with your potential solutions, one of which is the “Thoreau Method.” The first step: run away. After a week of

police searches, helicopter flyovers and the complete and utter devastation of your parents’ lives, they will forget that that they ever wanted you to become a doctor! In the meantime, you will be hidden away in a musty log cabin on a serene lake, pondering the human condition. When you reemerge, your parents will be so relieved that they will neglect to confirm your enrollment in a Medical College Admission Test prep class. You’ll become a media sensation — missing persons are a big hit — and your autobiography will end up on Oprah’s Book Club reading list.

You’ve also considered the “inventing Facebook” option. In “The Social Network,” Jesse Eisenberg decides he wants to join an exclusive Harvard final club, steals an idea from two Olympic rowing hunks and makes a billion dollars — all in two hours. If some guy in Alpha Epsilon Pi can meet Justin Timberlake, you can too. Plus, it’s tough to see the looks of disappointment on your parents’ faces behind a thick stack of money. You could even buy new parents.

The last possibility is to tell your parents that you’re an adult and want to make your own decisions. Tell them that, if you decide your future based on what they want, everyone will end up miserable. Say that you know they want what’s best for you but that you also know you won’t be happy doing exactly what they have in mind.

Or maybe you should just hide in a transcendental pondside cabin.

Christopher Buckley ’75.

Marie Colvin ’78.

Samantha Power ’92.

You?

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