YDN Magazine, November 2017

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

GOD & THE LEFT AT YALE

BY CHRIS HAYS

VOL. XLV ISSUE 2 NOVEMBER 2017

editors’ note Dear readers, At the pitch meeting for this issue, we asked everyone in the room to introduce themselves by where they’re from. Texas, California, Maryland, Massachusetts. We went around the table, ending on a writer from Connecticut. Connecticut, it so happened, was the answer we all had in common. It’s what brought us to the boardroom in the first place: We felt close enough to Yale to take it on as a subject. Or, we felt close, but not that close. Which seems to be where most writing comes from — a place familiar, but then again, not that familiar.

Ideas put on the table that afternoon have since moved forward, bringing us with them to Yales found and Yales left behind. Inkyu Cheng (Seoul, South Korea) ’20 returns from a two-year conscription in the South Korean army. Steph Barker ( Johannesburg, South Africa) ’19 stages her artwork on the New Haven Green, the heart of Downtown. Hope Allchin (Chicago, Illinois) ’18 tracks the women’s rugby team on the field and off. Adrian Rivera (Mission, Texas) ’20 considers the intrusion of public life into the private homes of heads of college.

Poets and writers Griffin Brown (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) ’18, Rachel Calnek-Sugin (New York, New York) ’19 and John Lee (Baltimore, Maryland) ’18 map terrain of a more personal kind.

Daisy Massey (Bethesda, Maryland) ’19 examines bariatric surgery at Yale New Haven Hospital, reflecting on her own future in the world of medicine. Ryan Gittler (Brick, New Jersey) ’20 looks at how natural disasters storm state lines and devastate hometowns, including his own. In the first of a three part study, Liana Van Nostrand (Brooklyn, New York) ’20 traverses the political landscape of the Ward 1 election.

Our cover, written by Chris Hays (Charlottesville, Virginia) ’20 looks at how the religious left has situated itself at Yales past and present. It’s a cover that, as we near the anniversary of the 2016 election, argues home resides in the places we choose to defend. The places that we make reflect ourselves and our values. Places that, with work, might start to feel familiar.

We want to thank our team of writers for their dogged interest and insight. We want to thank our editors for the same. Their work carries us forward, and we couldn’t have done it without them.

All this to say, keep the issue. Bring it home.

Take it where you’re going. Share where you’re coming from.

Till soon, Flora (Brooklyn, New York) & Frani (Chicago, Illinois)

table of contents 9

personal essay

Through a Soldier’s Eyes INKYU CHUNG

12

fiction

Lost & Found JOHN LEE

17

4

PART I: THE CANDIDATE Feature by Liana Von Nostrand

poetry

No Unique Delays GRIFFIN BROWN

18

poetry

Jazz & the Pilgrims RACHEL CALNEK-SUGIN

20

art essay

Missing: Public Art on the New Haven Green STEPH BARKER

30

UNSEEN CUTS

Feature by Daisy Massey

insight

Study in Furniture ADRIAN RIVERA

38

13

bits and pieces

Up the Country ROBERT SCARAMUCCIA

23

IN THE WAKE

Feature by Ryan Gittler

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

VARSITY BLUES Insight by Hope Allchin

32

GOD & THE LEFT AT YALE Cover by Chris Hays

BUSINESS LIAISON: Alexa Tsay

Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

Part I: The Candidate // By Liana Van Nostrand // Photos by Vivek Suri

T

wo years ago, first-year move-in day had an added layer of chaos. Campus teemed with the usual flurry of parents carrying Ikea furniture into imposing neo-Gothic dorms and students coated in grime from pre-orientation hiking trips, but it was also a political battleground: The race for the Democratic primary for Ward 1 alder, the representative for more than half of Yale’s undergraduates, was underway. Both the Fish Stark ’17 team, decked out in blue, and the Sarah Eidelson ’12 team, wearing her signature yellow, set up tables to register students to vote. The winner would join New Haven’s 30-person Board of Alders, which passes legislation and approves the city budget.

In the frantic two weeks between movein day and the primary vote, the campaigns had descended on campus in such a furor that one student suggested in the Facebook group “Yale Ideas” that a do-not-call list be created so that students could opt out of incessant phone calls from campaign volunteers. Other students made do-not-

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knock signs for their dorms.

But this year — an election year — movein day was uneventful. The race for Ward 1 alder is uncontested for the first time in a decade. This past summer, deadline after deadline passed for candidates to file with the town clerk, but only one did. Finally, in late October, the deadline for write-in candidates passed. No registrations.

That locked in the win for Haci Catalbasoglu ’19 come Nov. 7. A New Haven local.

Son of Turkish immigrants. Political science major. William F. Buckley, Jr. Fellow. Former member of the heavyweight crew team.

Brother of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity.

Catalbasoglu seems to have stepped onto the political scene at the perfect moment,

a time when politicians don’t need to run on policy to win. His slick campaign video emphasizes his authentic connection to the city — though for high school he attended a private boarding academy an hour and a half away from New Haven — and the pullyourself-up-by-the-bootstraps ethos of his family, which owns a beloved local pizzeria. His campaign slogan is even “I <3 New Haven.” But some wonder: Is his background enough?

C

atalbasoglu started mulling over a run for alder during the spring of his first year. He mentioned the idea to two of his suitemates during one of their many late night talks in their common room.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

feature

“You don’t know how serious some things people say are,” said Cameron Koffman ’19, who lived in the bedroom next to Catalbasoglu. “But he talked about it and about the types of things he could do, and then he actually started doing it.”

Last winter, Catalbasoglu reached out to Yale politicos to form the core of his campaign team. They then asked Koffman, who hosts a political radio show on Yale’s radio station, to be their policy director.

“Haci was going to try to get policy experience concretely in that eight-month period before the election,” Koffman said. His role was to teach Catalbasoglu about the important issues in New Haven. “I don’t have much experience with New Haven home-

6 | November 2017

lessness. I’m from New York City. But I did learn a lot through my research, and I passed that on to Haci.”

Koffman’s first task was to prepare a multipage memo for Catalbasoglu about mechanisms at the local, state and federal levels to address homelessness, because, as the campaign has frequently mentioned, Catalbasoglu was appointed last spring to New Haven’s Homelessness Advisory Commission, which recommends policies to the mayor.

Catalbasoglu said he was motivated to seek an appointment to the commission because “at that time and place that was probably one of the most effective ways for me” to help the people of New Haven.

The memo was the only project Koffman

feature worked on for the campaign. He did not draft any policies before he quit after a month as policy director, citing the time commitment and the already robust and competent campaign team.

Catalbasoglu’s former crew teammate Cole Tilden ’18 rattled off the campaign’s pillars — education, immigration and small business — easily when I spoke to him. When I commented on how well he knew the campaign’s issues, he shrugged.

“It’s easy to remember his pillars,” he replied, reclining on a couch in the offcampus house where some members of the heavyweight crew team live. “They’re central to him as a human being.”

Catalbasoglu never competed on the crew team, but Tilden was impressed by his attitude.

“In the dead of winter, when it’s not pretty out, and it’s cold, and you’re like ‘fuck this,’ it’s really great to have someone hootin’ and hollerin’ and yelling ‘c’mon boys!’”

“Haci is just a really good guy,” Tilden added.

B

y all accounts, Catalbasoglu is the kind of guy you’d want to get a beer with. That is, if he were over 21, which he won’t be for more than a year. What seems to strike the people who know him is what a really good guy he is. But does that mean he’ll be a really good politician? Don’t politicians need policy?

Jeanette Morrison, the Ward 22 alder who represents the rest of Yale’s residential colleges, told me that values correspond to policy: “When you think of seniors or safety, people know how I’m going to vote.”

When New Haven voters head to the polls this November, residents in 25 out of the 30 wards will not have a choice.

Only five alder races are contested in this general election. One of the uncontested candidates, Abby Roth ’90 LAW ’94, is running to regain her alder seat in Ward 7. When she canvasses, she tries to convey her responsiveness and accessibility. She sees two sides to the alder’s role.

The first is concerned with constituents’ everyday problems, such as speeding cars, stolen packages and garbage pick-up. The other is concerned with policy.

Roth is not campaigning on a specific policy agenda, but she does have priorities, including the dysfunction of the New Haven Board of Education and the state of the New Haven Green and the Civilian Review Board, among others.

For her, a good alder doesn’t need extensive political experience, only to be curious and caring.

“No one would be expected to know, until they’re in the role, exactly how it plays out.”

W

hen Stark ran for alder, his campaign released pages of single-spaced, detailed proposals for each of his 10 issues. The campaign even promoted these documents, posting a new one each day during the week and a half leading up to first-year move-in. In a Facebook group with the members of the class of 2019, Catalbasoglu, who was one of Stark’s freshman organizers, posted a graphic with the title “10 days until move-in, 10 visions for New Haven.” Stark, the son of a congressman, who ran a by-the-book political campaign, would seem like an unlikely supporter of a candidate without concrete policy proposals. But he’s served as a mentor to Catalbasoglu and an adviser to the team.

“There’s this thing in Yale where people want to play policy jeopardy,” he said.

“Frankly, it’s kind of annoying and classist to negate everything he knew about the city from living here, working here, going to schools here, by playing policy trivial pursuit.”

What about Stark’s own intense focus on policy when he ran two years ago?

“I made it a priority because Yalies expect it. Yalies expect the bullet pointed list. No other alder campaign in the city does that. What most people do in New Haven is they say these are my principles and values I’ll have making decisions.”

Stark said he helped Catalbasoglu navigate the Yale political scene, “a

world that is foreign if you didn’t go to Andover or Exeter or didn’t go through the Yale [College Democrats].”

E

sul Burton ’20, the campus and community coordinator of the Yale College Democrats, was the campaign’s first press secretary before, like Koffman, she quit after a month.

She anticipated the time commitment would increase as the election drew closer. Though she thought Catalbasoglu was a good candidate because he has a stake in what happens to the city, she had reservations about the team’s approach to policy.

“I personally felt a little concerned that there was no consistent policy or principled messaging in terms of what Haci would do once he became an alder,” she said. “That was one of my concerns because, after this huge structure dissipates, would there be any sustainable platform that he could use once he became alder?”

She was not the only executive board member of the Yale College Democrats to quit the campaign. The Dems’ legislative coordinator, Makayla Haussler ’19, served as the chairwoman and treasurer before she abruptly quit in late September. In an email explaining her decision she wrote that “Since Haci has no opponent, my role on the campaign was no longer essential.”

When I met with Yale College Democrats President Josh Hochman ’18, he wore a collared shirt, held a coffee and seemed prepared to give a statement.

One of the two factors that can qualify someone for office is that constituents trust the candidate to represent their interests, he said. “The second is that they need to have a grasp of solutions to challenges that constituents face. They need to have a strong grasp of policy.”

C

oncerns about Catalbasoglu’s leadership ability, in addition to his apparent lack of policy, emerged during Yale’s 2017 FOCUS on New Haven pre-orientation program, Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

feature which aims to bridge the gap between Yale students and New Haven. FOCUS Co-Director Margaret Kellogg ’19 observed that Catalbasoglu, a FOCUS student leader in charge of a group of sophomores and transfers, came late and left early, skipping the breakfasts leaders were supposed to prepare and cutting short the evening discussions for his student group. Before the program started, Kellogg said he struggled to find a service site on time for his group late last spring as leaders were asked to do.

Catalbasoglu had to leave events early because one of the chefs at his father’s business, Brick Oven Pizza, left suddenly, putting pressure on Catalbasoglu to help out his family, explained Ben Mallet ’19, one of his campaign managers.

“He should have communicated that with us,” said Kellogg. “Had he said that, I would be much more charitable to him right now. I would respect him more. It seemed like he didn’t care about the program and his participants.”

Before the start of the program but after all of the leaders returned to campus, the program unexpectedly faced a bed shortage, forcing some group leaders to sleep in common rooms. Catalbasoglu volunteered to sleep on an air mattress in the common room.

“I could not figure out this ‘air mattress’ thing so I will be ko on the futon,” he wrote, using the text shorthand for “knocked out,” in a message to the group chat of FOCUS leaders. “Be not alarmed; though I look like one, I’m not a homeless intruder.” After I asked the campaign press secretary about the message, Catalbasoglu sent me a statement apologizing if anyone was offended and calling it a self-deprecating joke. But the message was striking because the so-called joke was at the expense of a marginalized group that Catalbasoglu, as a member of the Homelessness Advisory Commission, is charged with aiding.

“In the end, it’s too bad he’s running unopposed,” Kellogg said, naming a few 8 | November 2017

friends who were also FOCUS leaders.

“We don’t feel comfortable with him being our next representative. … I hope that he does a better job than he did at FOCUS.”

“W

hat does FOCUS have to do with this?” Catalbasoglu shot back at me after I asked him to confirm that he was a FOCUS leader. Every few minutes a friend of his passed us on Cross Campus, and he took a quick break from my questioning to greet them. I replied that since he’s campaigning on bridging the gap between New Haven and Yale, FOCUS, which aims to do the same, seems like a good way of working towards that goal. He evaluates my justification before accepting it. During the six-day program, his group built a sign for a community theater. “If that’s a microcosm of my campaign, then I’ll be happy.”

Though he told me that, because he’s running unopposed, he won’t have to “learn the ropes” and can “hit the ground running,” he admitted that the “first day, to be honest, doesn’t look too, too different from what’s going on right now.” The campaign’s strategy is to rely on conversations to crowdsource ideas.

But, in the seven months since announcing, his countless conversations have generated little concrete policy. When asked to clarify if he had any ideas for policy, he paused.

“This isn’t a policy, but one thing I learned throughout discussions with people is that many people are a proponent of programs that help bring resources to kids within the city.” He’s been working with the crew team to create a program that would offer rowing lessons and tutoring to local kids.

While Catalbasoglu couldn’t articulate why the campaign had yet to announce policies, then–campaign chairwoman Haussler gave a succinct explanation. They haven’t announced any policy “for the sake of it” because that would “shut down conversations with groups Haci is taking meetings with.” In

other words, the campaign was focused on dialogue over bullet points.

“Haci sees the role as connecting students and these assets with the city. It would be a waste of that to say, ‘This is my entire policy platform, and I consider all the views of my students to be irrelevant.’”

Haussler also serves as the Yale College Democrats legislative coordinator, responsible for leading the group’s advocacy of bills before the Connecticut General Assembly. However, six months into a local election campaign, Haussler said it was too early to announce any policy.

Two weeks after this interview in September, she quit the campaign.

S

ince I spoke to Catalbasoglu and his team, they announced, what his press secretary called, “a comprehensive policy initiative.” Catalbasoglu held a rally on Cross Campus to announce his plan to increase the number of bike paths. Weeks after that announcement, his website not only has no information about the plan but also does not have the word “bike” on any of its pages. He told a News reporter that the funding for the bike plan was “a bit of a tug and war.”

The election two years ago was also a tug of war. In the primary, Stark and Eidelson each struggled to pull Democrats to their side. And, again in the general election, Eidelson and Republican challenger Ugonna Eze ’16, fought for votes, dividing students in the process.

In the end, Eidelson topped Eze with a narrow margin of victory: 17 votes. But there’s no need for such strong-arming this time. And no need for phone calls, or door knocks, or debates.

Instead, Catalbasoglu will quietly assume office next January. Students have been spared the nuisance of aggressive campaign tactics.

All it cost was their vote.

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

personal essay

Through a Soldier’s Eyes // BY INKYU CHUNG // ILLUSTRATION

BY JULIA SHI

I

cried three times during my period of mandatory service in the South Korean army. The first was at boot camp when I realized I had been stripped of my civilian lifestyle overnight — my phone, my clothes, even my name (they called me trainee No. 122). The second was when I got tear gassed. The third was the incident with the chocolate milk.

Prior to achieving the rank of a private, everyone conscripted starts with five weeks at boot camp, acquiring rudimentary skills such as how to shoot a gun, throw a grenade and put on a gas mask in under 12 seconds. Above all else, we learn obedi-

ence. Blind, unqualified obedience.

They tell us to run a lap; we run a lap. They tell us to run a lap with 50 pounds of gear strapped to our backs; we do exactly that. They can teach a man how to pull a trigger in a day, but scraping away his thought takes longer. It takes about five weeks.

The end of those five weeks produced mixed reactions. Some trainees could not hide their smiles as they attached the insignia of a private to their chest, fixing the single black bar countless times until it made a perfect line. Others knew, however, that privates started as everyone’s punching bag. The next day, we would all be sent

on trains and buses to our respective units. There, we would live out the remaining 20 months of our service.

Our squad stayed up late that night, the guy on the edge of the bunk keeping an eye out for any patrols. I sat leaning against my duffel bag, feeling the jagged line of the spare pair of military boots jab against my spine.

“Do you think it’ll be worse than here?” someone wondered in the dark.

“I’m just glad to be done with the gas chambers. That was the only thing I was scared for.”

“It won’t be worse, just different.

You just gotta shove your ego up your

Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

personal essay

ass and suck everyone’s cock until you get to private first class.”

“That sounds horrible.”

“Not horrible, just different. Just wait till you’re a corporal. Then you’ll be on the receiving end of it.”

People snickered. I laughed along, but inside, I was trying to figure out what I actually felt. Did I feel glad about moving on to the real deal? No. Scared, then? No, I discovered, surprising myself. I just felt ready. Shove my ego up my ass?

That’s easy, I thought. I barely had any left.

Once I got to my new unit, perhaps that resolve helped me persevere through tasks that may have otherwise seemed demeaning. Taking out the trash, waking everyone up in the morning, scrubbing the toilets — these all constituted the daily routine that I accepted with no real grudge. I committed to these norms with the mindset of an actor playing a role on stage. I’m a character in a play, I would tell myself as I collected crumbs from the floor while a small group of sergeants and corporals munched on their snacks and watched TV. I’m just performing my part.

The unit, thankfully, offered new liberties. I could use the phone booth whenever I wanted to, without having to first gather “15 merit points.” Then there was the ever-beloved post exchange, a tax-exempt convenience store. The first thing I bought was chocolate milk, which I had been craving for weeks. Sipping the sweet drink,

10 | November 2017

I headed to the red phone booth and dialed home. My right hand savored the weight of the milk carton as my left hand clutched the receiver. Part of me even wished that nobody would pick up so that I could bask in the fluttering joy of each beep on the line, enjoying the wait, enjoying the drink. Of course, the daily flux of chores kept enjoyment from being consistent.

One such chore was working at the garbage dump. Because our unit had recently moved its base, the dump had not yet been partitioned. All the recyclables and nonrecyclables were piled together into one gigantic mountain of filth. They needed sorting, and predictably, each echelon sent its privates to do the glorious job.

Not that this counted as “structurally endorsed hazing,” something strictly forbidden by military law.

Rather, participants would receive five merit points, 80 of which could earn them a two-day vacation. The merit system allowed the enlisted soldiers to fill out a slip of paper called a “point card,” have it signed by an appropriate supervisor and submit it to their respective platoon commanders. Vacation was, of course, highly coveted.

We often entertained hypothetical auctions for one day of break, and the bidding price ran as high as $100. It was with this in mind that I slipped the point card in my chest pocket, pulled on a pair of black leather gloves and set out to the dump.

It was early December. We had recently seen our first snow, which

had turned much of the garbage into a moldy, mucky blob. The snow-coated waste loomed ahead, at least twice my height.

The supervisor was a master sergeant with a square face and a gritty voice. He stood a few yards away from the garbage pile, arms akimbo. Pointing at the modest assortment of tools lined up against the wall, he bellowed, “Let’s get finished with this already! Move!”

My teeth were chattering from the cold, but I felt no inner resistance as I picked up a shovel and charged at the monstrous pile. I was only thinking about the job.

Khlush. The shovel made an anticlimactic, almost comical noise as its plastic blade sank into the snow. A putrid stench attacked my nostrils.

A few others joined me while a dozen more used brooms and rakes to sort out the unrecyclable trash and collect it in plastic bags. Still another group scavenged around for bottles, cans and metals, which they then disposed of in separate boxes. All the while, the master sergeant stood still, his head oscillating left and right like a surveillance camera, occasionally calling out slackers and making them do pushups.

It took us an hour to sort just one tower of garbage. The sun had begun to tilt westward. Whatever warmth it radiated dissipated in the wind, which I could almost visualize as arrows slicing past us.

Every time I bent over to pick up something, my ears suffered from a cruel friction against the air. I kept reminding myself: This is a stage.

personal essay

Perform the act. I glanced at another private who was picking out empty cans barehanded. At least I’m wearing gloves.

I spluttered when the wind blew a vinyl wrapper smudged with a greenish-yellow sauce into my face.

“Anything the matter?” barked the master sergeant. Only a trainee would be naive enough to answer “Yes.” “No, sir!” I yelled, tearing the vinyl off. Out of instinct, I raised my hands to wipe the sticky sauce off my face, but I caught myself just before the gloves touched my cheek.

We had arrived at the dump at noon. We were still working at 4 p.m. Both my gloves had ripped apart in the process of trying to extricate a bunch of clothes hangers from a discarded chair. The sleets of ice, which now had a fecal hue after being trampled by our boots, seeped through the gloves. I could feel neither my ears nor my hands. I lifted objects by holding them between my wrists. A couple of times, the master sergeant made us empty out a 5-liter trash bag after he spotted a bottle or can in it. Even then, I felt no resentment about the situation. I still had one thing keeping me going: I would get the five merit points. At least I would be rewarded — what more could I hope for in the military?

By the time the grounds were clean, the sun had sunk out of view, leaving us shivering in the indigo chill of early winter evening. After one last inspection, the master sergeant gave the OK. He grumbled

at us to bring the point cards. The garbage sorters lined up before him with obvious eagerness, each holding a white slip of paper gingerly by its corner to avoid getting it dirty. I joined the queue, already prepared to put the past five hours behind me.

When I reached the front of the line, the master sergeant wordlessly opened up his hand. I reached inside my chest pocket to fish out my point card. Nothing was there.

“Where’s your card?” he grunted.

“One moment, sir, it was — I had it right here,” I stupidly fumbled in my other pockets as well, not caring that I was smudging slushy black goo all over my uniform. The card was nowhere to be found.

“If you don’t have the card, you don’t get the points. Next!”

“Sir, I really did bring it — it must have fallen out during the task, sir!”

He answered with a shrug. With his chin, he indicated that I should leave. I stepped aside, knowing there was no use arguing. There never was.

I trudged back to the barracks, not knowing what to think or even what to feel. I grimaced against the wind, partly to make sure that my facial muscles still took orders from my brain. Something liquid and hot moved deep inside me, but I couldn’t quite locate its presence.

I knew I had night shift that day, which meant I would have to go up to the office in approximately 10 minutes. This left me no time for dinner, let alone a shower.

I tried to register this as a neutral fact. Another psychological exercise was to narrate my situation in the third person: Inkyu does not have time to eat or shower tonight.

Inkyu will have to work past midnight. Inkyu should at least get some snacks.

I dashed to the post exchange, bought a chocolate milk and then continued to a phone booth; I wanted to be in a private space, and it was either this or a bathroom stall. Did I even want to call someone? I picked up the receiver and pressed it against my left ear, unable to think of a single person I could talk to. The weird liquid feeling had begun to churn and roil.

I opened the carton of chocolate milk and raised it to my lips.

For a second, I was afraid I would taste something alien. But it was chocolate milk all right. Sweet and creamy.

Some things stayed constant.

Even though I was transformed from a first-year student at a prestigious university to a piece of machinery, the chocolate milk remained the same. And that made me so relieved, so fulfilled, so exultant that, even before I registered happiness, I noticed the deranged desperation with which Private Inkyu rushed to feel it, the liquid within me erupting upward like geysers.

I stood there holding the phone, listening to its monotonous beep, teardrops running down my cheeks. I had never known self-consciousness to be so destructive.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

fiction

e

LOST & FOUND S

eated, Mark holds a telephone. He drums his free hand between the tapered spindles of a Windsor chair. From the telephone, his mother’s caretaker weeps quietly.

Last night, Mark’s mother passed.

Betty B. tugged herself free of that worn body, its ruined mind.

Betty B. silently danced across the room’s carpet, taunting the lifeless body. Her invisible shadows loomed over the bed sheets. Acknowledging plenty of good in a lifetime — racing through orchards with Judie M., penning the history of Georgie R.’s fur trapping ancestors (and her own), loving Georgie R. in all their homes — Betty B. stopped to pay respect to used garbs. She shut both eyelids, then closed the mouth agape.

From there, Mark can imagine exactly what Betty B. must have done: opened the second floor window, crept onto the moonlit roof, stretched herself atop all six gables and asked the waxing moon where Georgie R. might be. Mark closes his eyes and remembers standing in Coventry’s one cemetery atop his father’s grave. He sighs

// BY JOHN LEE // PHOTO BY JOHN LEE deeply, the late summer heat filling his chest. There will be room for one headstone to stand beside another.

Georgie R. loved Betty B. more than he loved all his children. And Betty B. loved Georgie R. more than she loved all her children.

When Georgie R. left this world, Betty B. was already trapped in a helpless body, a pitiful mind. A year before the death of Mark’s father, Betty B. woke one morning to realize she was lost in her own body. That September, when Mark’s father passed — the consequence of unbearable sorrow — Mark’s mother seemed unaware. Betty B.’s body could only reveal her grief piecemeal — in contained cries over seemingly trivial events: the absence of chocolate milk at a meal, loud music or large company, the yielding of a sunflower to torrential rain.

Soon, if not already, Georgie R. would find Betty B. atop their roof.

The sun or moon would smile down, tease them with a subtle beam.

Mark wonders if, after six years, his brothers have let their portions of his father’s ashes to the wind. In Men-

docino, Rick might have dispersed them off a cliff, let them settle to the ocean. Fishing for trout, George might have washed his urn clean in the Hammonasset. Today, Mark will call and ask them to perform this simple task. “Soon,” he will urge.

Then, his father’s ashes might gust up to heaven, gather as a young man, clothed in full Navy uniform. Once cremated, his mother’s will do the same, her handsome smile emerging from under a wide-brimmed straw hat.

Georgie R. twirls a delighted Betty B. on a cloud. They embrace.

Mark stands. Through the phone, he hears the ambulance arrive at his mother’s home. He tells his mother’s caretaker to leave now. He thanks her. “You were her daughter too,” he says. He puts down the telephone and walks across the room. In a windowpane, Mark watches his reflection.

He wonders if his skin is normally so pink. He feels the contours of his neck. He looks past the window.

On the porch, his beloved wife sits and reads.

feature

Unseen Cuts: Bariatric Surgery in New Haven // BY DAISY MASSEY // PHOTOS BY SCHIRIN RANGNICK AND VIVEK SURI

I

t was 4 p.m., and Labonita “Love” Monk had yet to eat that day, despite being surrounded by food. “What time is it?” she asked, looking around the Jonathan Edwards College dining hall, where she works. She had only taken sips of water. Monk wasn’t worried, though.

Since her 2003 gastric bypass at St. Mary’s Hospital, a Yale-affiliated hospital in Waterbury, she was only hungry for one meal a day. “What they did

was, they took half my stomach away,” she said matter-of-factly. And she wasn’t wrong.

Monk takes pride in her weight-loss photos. While looking for a before shot, she confessed to me she had gotten “big” because, after she gave birth to her two now-adult sons, she “ate constantly” and “indulged in food.” Bariatric surgeons like to display before and after photos too.

When Monk finally found her before picture, she is drawn to it. “You can see how big my face was,” she points. But often, in the surgeon’s versions, the patients don’t have heads. Instead, their obese bodies fill the image. As the after photos reveal, the goal of any bariatric surgery is reduction: reducing the stomach, which in turn reduces weight, which in turn reduces the occurrence of Type 2 diabetes and other health problems.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

feature Or at least that’s the message Yale New Haven Hospital pushes. Making the stomach smaller is supposed to make patients thinner by forcing them to eat less and resetting their metabolism through hormonal changes.

But is reducing the stomach to the size of an egg really improving patients’ health? A vocal minority would argue no. It merely hides larger bodies from a society that is too prejudiced to accept them. The risks are not only societal: Many studies show that bariatric surgery patients are at increased risk of gastrointestinal problems, depression and death.

Still, as the surgery becomes less invasive and more frequently covered by insurance plans, more patients are opting to go under the knife.

After Monk underwent surgery in 2003, she had 38 staples in her chest and couldn’t go back to work for four and a half months. But today, the surgery is most often done laparoscopically, or using small incisions and a tiny camera.

Dr. Andrew Duffy was fascinated by the procedure and the challenges of operating on obese patients. Starting out as a minimally invasive gastrointestinal surgeon, he now directs bariatric and metabolic surgery at Yale New Haven Health System, the largest health care system in Connecticut. Last year, the system’s five gastrointestinal surgeons treated about 650 patients — triple the number from three years ago.

Though these surgeries generally net $60,000 to $80,000 and represent a large portion of income for gastrointestinal surgery practices, Duffy’s Temple Street office was unremarkable. The building was beige and the waiting room drab.

While Monk’s treatment at St. Mary’s was covered by her employer, Yale New Haven Hospital accepts Medicare and Medicaid for the surgery, both of which have covered the procedure since 2005.

Gastric bypass, the surgery that Monk underwent, is the most drastic type of bariatric surgery, but Duffy, a soft-spoken middle-aged man who sported a tie with autumn leaves, thinks it is also the most successful at inducing weight loss. All 14 | November 2017

types of gastric bypass divide the stomach into two, creating a new, smaller stomach.

For a laparoscopic gastric bypass, Duffy operates through trocars, or thick metal needles that allow him to slide his tools into the stomach. Passing through the custard-yellow fat, lifting up the beetred liver, Duffy reaches the pale pink stomach.

The first step reduces the total capacity of the stomach to no more than three or four tablespoons by stapling the top of the stomach. This cuts the top off from the lower part. The edges of the new, smaller stomach now look like half of a zipper. The bottom of the stomach, while

cut off from food, will still be supplied blood and secrete stomach juices into the small intestine. The small intestine is connected to the smaller stomach by burning a hole in the stomach lining and suturing around the seam.

The patient loses weight for up to a year after the procedure — and not just because the stomach can hold less food.

The decreased surface area of the stomach and the small intestine change the hormonal makeup of the body. For instance, the surgery reduces cells called ghrelins, hormones that stimulate food intake and weight gain, by 90 percent. And, on top of that, the restricted surface area can absorb

feature fewer nutrients.

“The patients can still get all their nutrients,” Duffy said, so long as “they’re on nutrient supplements for life.” Vitamin B12, calcium, zinc, iron and vitamin D deficienes are the most common.

Linda Bacon, a professor of nutrition at the University of California, Davis worries for these patients. She is a leader in the Health at Every Size movement, which seeks to separate weight from health. Instead, she argued, doctors should focus on getting patients to eat healthfully and exercise, regardless of body type. As for bariatric surgeons, she thinks they should be honest that they are

damaging “a previously healthy organ so that it can’t do its job.”

In many ways, Bacon is the opposite of Duffy. She is from Berkeley, California, bakes her own granola and asked to be called “Lindo.” She first encountered Health at Every Size because of her own challenges with body image. Skeptics who have not met her often assume that she herself is large, but she’s not. She disagrees with the fundamental idea that there is an ideal healthy weight.

Her methodology is, if anything, more data-based than current nutritional medicine. She is unsatisfied with the “common sense” approach to fat. While doing

meta-analyses on previous studies and conducting her own research, she found that, once she controlled for health factors like diet, exercise and socioeconomic status, increased rates of disease almost or totally disappear. Studies have shown that obesity is instead correlated with higher survival rates amongst people with diseases including Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease and that “obese” senior citizens live longer than thin senior citizens. This currently unexplained phenomenon is called the “obesity paradox.”

Monk never heard this story from her doctors. Now 50 years old, she believes her weight loss will help her live longer.

She could not fathom a health philosophy that, like Health at Every Size, didn’t see larger bodies as unhealthy. Instead, she acknowledged only that people with willpower can lose weight on their own.

“If a person wants to lose weight, they’re going to lose weight.”

Monk’s thoughts mirror Duffy’s language. However, Duffy added that poor self-control and exercise are only part of the picture. There are “genetic issues, a lot of behavioral, psychosocial issues” and a pattern of coping with stress by eating.

He proudly displayed a framed article on his office wall about the center at Yale New Haven’s St. Raphael Campus, which opened a bariatric center in 2016 that offers extra-large chairs, hallways, beds and equipment to help safely lift obese patients. The article boasted that the staff was trained in fat suits to practice sensitivity.

Duffy does agree with Bacon that dieting is ineffective. Only 5 percent of people over their “target” weights, he believes, lose weight by dieting. The rest go through “weight cycles.” Their weight drops at first, but eventually their metabolism slows and their weight goes back to where they started.

But Duffy said that the surgery, by changing the hormone balance, can reset the metabolism. When Duffy spoke of why patients fail to lose weight from bariatric surgery, have side effects or do not recover from diabetes, he said that Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

feature it all came down to the patient not following the diet and exercise plan. Duffy acknowledged that as high as 20 percent of patients gain back all of their weight because, “invariably, they didn’t stick to the diet.”

Having surgery was Monk’s own idea.

Since she had kids, she had been trying to lose weight using pills, Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisines. Because of her epileptic seizures, scoliosis and asthma, her family doctor was adamant that she lose weight. She found out that AT&T, her employer at the time, had added the surgery to its employee insurance plan. Monk was intrigued. Could this be the solution she’d been looking for?

Bacon has compassion for people who choose to get the surgery. “To get the message all the time that there’s something wrong with you, I understand why someone wants to escape that pain,” she said.

But doctors often only want to talk about weight loss and not the larger picture of health outcomes. The private weight loss industry, which rakes in $58.6 billion annually, does not help the information war.

As a result, giving up on weight loss is hard for people to accept. When Bacon performed her first study at UC Davis, half of the women were in the “control” group, which lacked any diet and instead followed the Health at Every Size program. Bacon recalled that the women in the control group were visibly disappointed. “If they could have walked out then, I think they would have.”

But the women on the diet eventually regained the weight they lost, while the Health at Every Size group instead showed improved physical health, selfesteem and relationships with food. As one of the Health at Every Size participants said after the study, “I know that everything I want in life is available to me now, not 20 pounds from now.”

Bacon explained the weight-cycle phenomenon as a reaction to the low-calorie intake. The body thinks it is famished and causes the metabolism to slow down.

Bariatric surgery, Bacon noted, may fol-

16 | November 2017

low weight-gain pattern, but long-term data is not available right now. She argued that everyone has a “set point,” or a normal body weight, which correlates to a healthy diet and exercise rather than body mass index.

Duffy said that he thinks the current longest bariatric surgery studies are five years long. But Bacon found that in dieting studies, patients regained the most weight in 10 years.

The fundamental difference between these two camps is perhaps most obvious when looking at the surgery’s adverse effects. Monk was one of the 15 percent of patients that did not experience dumping syndrome after surgery. If a patient with dumping syndrome eats too much, she vomits. If she eats sugary or fatty foods, she gets diarrhea. Duffy explained that, if the patient gets a spike in sugar, “the body says ‘Whoops, missed that one,’” and the patient experiences a spike in heart rate, sweats and diarrhea for a couple hours afterward — “for their trouble,” he said, adding that it’s “usually not very pleasant.”

All of this causes patients to ask themselves, “‘What did I just do?’”

As Duffy explained it, dumping syndrome is not a side effect but an intentional safeguard that helps patients stay successful. He attributed patients’ adverse reactions to meat and dairy projects to the same cause.

In Bacon’s view, doctors need to start “taking responsibility” instead of “blaming patients when they start to show the signs of malnutrition.” The most telling data, she said, is what’s not being published. The full story is hidden when “people are ashamed to talk about all of the ways in which the surgery hasn’t been successful for them” because they’ve been told that the only important outcome is whether or not they lose weight.

But to Monk, losing weight was the main goal. When she finally found the before photo she was looking for, she pointed out her face to me. She nodded her head, as if agreeing with her doctor. “I was big,” she said.

Duffy hears his patients’ desperation,

which is why he’s a “true believer” in the procedure he performs. He knows that there is fat prejudice; he sees discrimination in airline seats, job interviews and in his patients’ stories. He loves his job because he believes the surgery gives people a new start.

Monk switched back and forth.

“I do not regret getting the surgery,” because it changed her life and body image, she said. And yet it “messed with her mind,” she continued, saying that she required therapy, which reflects multiple articles showing increased rates of depression following the surgery, not all that surprising given the quick change in hormone levels. Duffy thinks that every patient is different, but that the group that gets the surgery tends to have a lot of “psychobehavioral issues.”

And at one point Monk even tells me that she “wouldn’t recommend the surgery” to anyone. Studies have found a sevenfold increase in the death rate of patients in their first year after the surgery — that is, they are seven times more likely to die than patients within their own BMI range and age group.

Bacon was clear that she wanted to “honor the experiences” of patients who opt to get the surgery. She understands their vulnerable position, the “lies” that they are fed and the hope that they feel looking at possible outcomes. But she said that she wishes doctors would pay more attention to the anecdotal stories not being captured by researchers. Because what we will find when we listen is “really, really depressing.”

Perhaps the most telling part of Monk’s story is not hers at all. When she worked at AT&T, she had four friends who got the surgery with her. She went first, outside the Yale system at St. Mary’s, and her friends followed months later at St Raphael’s. Two of them are still dealing with gastrointestinal complications. One of them is involved in a lawsuit. And the other two died. Monk did not know how or why, only that one died in surgery and the other immediately after. For these two friends, there were no after photos to show.

poetry

No Unique Delays // BY GRIFFIN BROWN // PHOTO BY SCHIRIN RANGNICK

Or, in less bureaucratic language: washing oneself in the bathroom sinks at the public library was an issue introduced and tabled by the board one day and quickly erased from the minutes of that meeting.

Thus the placard.

But yes, of course, you can reserve the hall, peruse the collections with your shoes off, wait outside for the slate Noguchi mobiles to arrive, if he makes them.

Let’s see. In the same bulletin: Recently the renovations ended at the Trevi Fountain.

People have been wading around in the marble basin like Mastroianni and Ekberg.

Library cards require proof of address.

Respite is a funny word that’s often mispronounced.

On Tuesdays Wednesdays and Thursdays in the fall the central branch closes early to become a rooftop beer garden — DJ, PAs, microbrews, along with visions of downtown to the southeast and patrons exiting, heading north.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

poetry

Jazz and the Pilgrims When the rain was falling, the rain people came out, invigorated. And god said something, but too softly, or the rain was too loud or the thing was the rain.

// BY RACHEL CALNEK-SUGIN // ILLUSTRATION BY SUSANNA LIU

Simon lights up the joint and hands it to Corey who passes it to you without taking a hit. Simon insists on etiquette: you hold the joint even if you don’t want it, you make eye contact no matter what. Corey asks what he’s thinking as one asks a lover after sex, when the answer is sex or nothing. Simon says the pilgrims.

He says how crazy they must have been to leave for somewhere that might not even have existed.

Simon, you say, You are ridiculous. Of course he would be thinking about the Pilgrims.

He’s added chamomile to the weed and the smell of tea wafts out from the overhang into the rain.

Everything that was ever created was created to fight loneliness, so the Pilgrims created salt cod and matchlock muskets and predestination.

You stare through the rain at the couple on the bench and feel the space between them, which is love, a small space. Think how crazy the Pilgrims must have been.

Think how they must have felt when that first winter cut through them and it was so cold the bodies didn’t even smell.

Sometimes, you have a dream where you are lying on the ground and a jazz band is playing. It’s a big band with laughter and a huge brass section and they are having so much fun. The sun and the blood in your head are warm on the pavement. People are dancing you could be dancing, you could be people: you are young, the bodies are bathed in light so dazzling it is impossible to look straight at them.

18 | November 2017

PAGE NAME

// ILLUSTRATION BY LAURIE WANG

ART ESSAY

Missing: Public Art on the New Haven Green // By Steph Barker // Photos by Steph Barker

A

year ago today, I placed a wooden sculpture on the New Haven Green. At the time, I was doing an independent study centred on public art. This wooden sculpture was meant to be the first in a series of works I intended on installing anonymously in and around Yale and New Haven. The plan was to install the work and return at a later stage to observe how people reacted to it.

Oct. 24, 2016, 10 p.m. [Yale Sculpture Building, 36 Edgewood Ave.] I finished the “wave wall” today. The piece dried off around 9:30 p.m. I couldn’t lift it alone, so two graduate students helped me turn it vertically. The two pieces of wood fit snuggly on the cart between the two railings. I sanded off the final few bits of glue on the wood, and we set off for the New Haven Green.

Oct. 24, 2016, 10:30 p.m. [Corner of College and Chapel streets] We found a relatively flat patch of grass.

Moving each piece one at a time, we laid the biggest section flat on the ground. I put the sharpened rods into the holes I had drilled in the bottom of the sculpture’s curve and lifted the wood until it 20 | November 2017

stood vertically.

Oct. 24, 2016, 10:34 p.m. [Corner of College and Chapel streets] While we had been setting this all up, a homeless man dressed in black tracksuit pants, a warm hat and a loose grey sweater came to spectate. He offered his help, but we were almost done. He lounged on the grass and watched. He asked if any of us had change to spare.

We didn’t. We asked him what he thought about sculpture. He responded that what he liked was the smoothness of the curves and the light color of the unfinished wood.

Would anyone else notice it?

Oct. 24, 2016, 10:39 p.m. [Bingham Hall, 300 College St.] Alone on the Green the wave looked small. We wheeled our cart back up Chapel Street, and the man drifted off.

Looking back, I could see the wave easily from the Yale-side of the street.

Oct. 26, 2016, 9:07 a.m. [Corner of College and Chapel streets] On my way to class this morning, I biked down Chapel and turned on to College. The sculpture was gone. It

looked as though nothing had ever been there.

Who saw it and decided that it couldn’t be there?

Oct. 27, 2016, 3:47 p.m. [Phone call: New Haven Parks Department] I looked up the New Haven Green and found a “203” number. A woman answered. I explained to her that I had left a sculpture on the corner of Chapel and College on Monday evening and that, by Wednesday morning, it was gone. I explained that it was about 60 inches tall and 7 feet long. The woman asked me to hold.

Oct. 27, 2016, 3:51 p.m. [Phone call: New Haven Parks Department] She transferred me to a woman called Lynne Peacars. I repeated my story to Lynne. She asked if I had a permit to place the sculpture on the Green. I didn’t. She didn’t seem particularly bothered. Unless it had been stolen, maintenance would have dealt with the structure. They stopped work at 3:30 p.m., so she asked me to call again tomorrow.

Oct. 28, 2016, 11:35 a.m. [Phone call: New Haven Parks Department]

art essay “Hi, you’ve reached Lynne Peacars at the New Haven Parks Department. I’m away from my desk right now. If you need immediate assistance please call 946-8020. After the tone please record your message.”

Did one need a permit to install public art?

Oct. 28, 2016, 11:37 a.m [Phone call: New Haven Department of Traffic and Parking] 203-946-8076 Oct. 28, 2016, 5:57 p.m. [Phone call: New Haven Parks Department] Lynne wasn’t in when I called, but I spoke to another lady at parks and recreation. She spoke to maintenance. They hadn’t seen or heard of the sculpture.

The lady suggested that someone might have stolen it and used it to construct a kind of shelter. I went back to look, and details showed up. A maintenance team was working on a bus stop near by.

ing I went back and it was gone, and I’m just trying to figure out where it went. It was pretty big. It was like this big, and like this wide. So I’m just curious as to where it went.

I’m sorry I didn’t see it.

Do you know if, if there’s someone who normally stays in that area that would have seen it?

It’s hard to say. People come, people go. People come, people go.

Okay.

A lot of people sleep over there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, maybe I’ll come back later and see if anyone …

What’s your name?

Steph.

Steph? My name is Gordon.

Gordon. Nice to meet you.

Are you a student?

Yes. And … what’s your major?

Ahh. Ha. I haven’t decided yet, actually. I’m thinking maybe politics or maybe art, ‘cause I’m making sculptures.

Wow. That’s just so cool.

Haha. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, it’s good.

So this is what, your first year?

Second year?

Second year? And you still haven’t decided?

How would anyone have stolen a 6-foot by 6-foot, 100-pound sculpture?

Nov. 1, 2016, 3:44 p.m [Voice message: parks maintenance team] To save press 9. “This is Bruce Fisher from the New Haven traffic department.

I, uhh, spoke to the foreman on the job, working on the bus shelter there, uhhh, been on the job everyday. Uhhh, he says he took no notice of the artwork, and he can’t be of any help. Uhh, sorry. Thank you. Bye.” Nov. 1, 2016, 3:48 p.m. [Phone call: New Haven Police] 203-946-6200 Did whoever saw the wooden piece even register that it was a sculpture, or was it just a piece of wood?

Nov. 1, 2016, 7:51 p.m. [New Haven Green] Excuse me, do you mean to tell me that somebody … stole this sculpture?

I’m not sure, I put it there on Monday evening and then on Wednesday mornYale Daily News Magazine | 21

art essay How was it possible that no one had seen or heard anything?

Nov. 3, 2016, 5:05 p.m. [Phone call: New Haven Police Department] What did you lose?

A sculpture.

A sculpture?

Yup. All right. Uhh. Are you in New Haven at this point?

Yes. I don’t know if we have access to cameras on the Green. I don’t know who does.

Did you report this missing?

So I spoke to someone at the records department and they said that I needed to file a police report. The thing is …

Are you in New Haven at this time?

Yes. All right. I can send a police officer to you to, uhh, file a report and perhaps they can help you, umm, determine, if there is anyway to view the cameras, if there are any, and who they might belong to.

Nov. 3, 2016, 5:05 p.m. [Phone call: New Haven Police Department] 203-946-6316 Nov. 3, 2016, 5:19 p.m. [900 Chapel St., No. 703] “On 11/03/16 at 17:19, I was dispatched to the lobby of 1 Union Ave for

a late report of a theft that occurred at College and Chapel streets. After arriving, I located the complainant (identified as Stephanie Barker) and she explained the following: On 10/24/2016 at approximately 22:00 hours, she placed a 6-foot wooden art structure on the New Haven Green near College and Chapel streets.

On 10/26/16 at approximately 09:00 hours, she returned to the said location and saw that the said art piece was on longer there. Barker didn’t see this incident occur.

Barker explained that there’s no actual value for the said art piece.

Barker wanted this incident documented so she can go to the New Haven Hall of Records to try and watch any video surveillance in the area on her own.

Nothing further at this time.”

What was it worth? The value of wood?

Nov. 3, 2016, 3:52 p.m. [New Haven Police Station Records Department, 1 Union Ave.] Can I have your case number?

Yeah, umm, it is 16-56776.

Yeah, we would only have 14 days of worth of camera footage, and it’s been already a month, over a month. We won’t have back to November, the beginning of

November. We have like two weeks from today back.

A

month later, I made another wave and placed it back on the corner of College and Chapel. For 24 hours, I watched it from a Bingham dorm window. After 12 hours and 10 minutes, a pickup truck drove onto the Green. A man got out, broke the sculpture into four pieces and loaded them into the back. He drove away. I watched the Green for another 11 hours and 50 minutes. While I waited, I read an article about the performance artist Ana Mendieta. In the article, Ara Osterweil writes about Mendieta’s land art. The artist had a signature process. She would lie down on the ground and bury herself in a landscape, covering her body with rocks, soil, and flowers. When she climbed out of her grave, her outline would remain – a reminder of her body, and where it had been. Osterweil concludes her article with the sentence. “Absence can often feel like the most conspicuous form of presence.” 10:30 p.m. rolled around, and my 24 hours was up. I left my perch on the window and went to bed. A kind of heaviness settled over me. When I woke up the next morning, I decided not to call anyone.

feature

In the Wake

// By Ryan Gittler // Photos by Schirin Rangnick

A

disaster often implies a finite point in time. But not all disasters have as finite an end as they do a beginning. Years later, aftershocks still unsettle affected communities.

Two of New Haven’s recent “disasters” — hurricanes Sandy and Irene — are in the past for most residents and Yalies, but not for chef Prasad Chirnomula. In his case, the two events have persisted and now reemerged.

Thali and Thali Too — two New Haven restaurants owned by Chirnomula’s Five Star Restaurant Group — closed on Sept.

30 and Oct. 29, respectively, to the dismay of Elm City foodies. The establishments served the community over the past decade, even expanding beyond their brick-and-mortar stores by offering to-go lunches in Yale eateries like the Kline Biology Tower Cafe. Their closing left a hole in New Haven’s food scene, with little explanation.

The reason is, in fact, a disaster. While Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria inundated news feeds across campus and led to stu-

dent-led efforts like the Hearts for Houston bake sale, it was the lasting effects of Sandy and Irene that prompted Chirnomula to close his restaurants. Though more than five years had passed since the storms struck, the hurricanes’ damage to some of Chirnomula’s properties outside New Haven forced him to borrow money from banks — a financial strain that prompted the closings.

Perhaps no one knows the damaging effects of disaster better than Rick Fontana, deputy director of the New Haven Emergency Operations Center. I met him at the center, New Haven’s headquarters for combating flooding, storms and disasters. Four long rows of desks, topped with computers and phones and marked with placards indicating the desks’ intended occupants — fire chief, parks director, Yale Police Department, mayor — fill the room.

At the front of the room is a large screen emblazoned with the center’s seal and, above that, a line of TVs displaying security camera feeds. The center is situated in the basement of the Hall of Records build-

ing, which is, ironically, below sea level.

“This place was built as a fallout shelter,” Fontana said. Constructed in 1981, the shelter is equipped with an air filtration system, concrete walls and 16,000 gallons of stored potable water. These protections are from a bygone era: the Cold War, when New Haven’s most pressing concern was an atomic bomb falling from a clear blue sky.

As Fontana explained, today’s picture of crisis is cloudier, windier and wetter than that image. Storms are now more frequent and severe, and sea level rise is worsening flooding. These two risks share the same root cause: climate change.

“H

ere we overplan for the worst,” Fontana said, “because we can always scale back.”

The center’s resilience and mitigation plans fill a thick binder beside the mayor’s desk. And next to the large screen at the front rests a selection of crisis maps: flood levels, evacuation areas, hurricane inundation zones. Maps for the latter category are Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

feature

usually redrawn every 5 years, but, after Hurricane Sandy, the maps drawn that same year had to be discarded and reassessed.

“During Sandy, we saw water in places it’s never been before,” Fontana said.

“But the frequency of flooding has been increasing every single year, and, in 10 to 20 years, we’ll see more water in places it’s never been.”

The major task of the operations center is managing emergencies through city departments, such as police, fire and emergency medical services, as well as contacting New Haven residents when disaster strikes. Using its phone system, the center can selectively notify citizens of any kind of emergency with a phone call or text message in under three minutes. It’s a system so advanced, Fontana said, that it helped the city earn a Class 7 rating from Federal Emergency Management Agency’s community rating system program — the highest level of recognition for coastal disaster resilience. The designation saves New Haven homeowners 15 percent on flood insurance. Out of 65 participating New England communities, only seven have received Class 7 distinction.

To contact the homeless, who cannot receive traditional notifications, the center works in tandem with New Haven police, visiting shelters and homeless areas to get the word out, Fontana said.

Fontana added that he is proud of New Haven’s disaster alert and mitigation strategies but that the risk of flooding will 24 | November 2017

continue to grow more severe over time.

After East Shore Alder Salvatore DeCola watched his ward and other parts of the city succumb to storm damage during Sandy, he was spurred to action.

“Sandy showed us where our weakness were,” DeCola said. “No one did anything wrong — it was a whole new issue for the entire East Coast.”

Less than one month after the storm, DeCola and then–East Rock Alder Justin Elicker introduced a bill that would mandate improved planning from the city in preparation for climate change. DeCola said climate change will bring more severe storms to New Haven and that the city and its residents need to be prepared.

He cited new flood barriers and waterdraining bioswales throughout the city as two examples of post-Sandy improvements.

“The city is doing the best it can with the funds we have, which are limited,” DeCola said. “With climate change, it’s like rolling the dice. … You never fully know what will happen. We just have to be proactive.”

Though the effects of climate change are a more recent concern, the city has always been at risk for natural disasters, said Judith Schiff, Yale’s chief research archivist. Schiff said the most famous of these was the hurricane of 1938 — a Category 3 storm when it made landfall just east of New Haven. It remains the strongest and deadliest storm in Connecticut’s history, having left 5,000 buildings destroyed and 600 dead in New England.

The storm felled most of the Elm City’s elm trees, which were already weakened

by Dutch elm disease. Overall, however, New Haven has been largely spared from natural disasters, Schiff said.

As to what to expect in the future, the answer is of course unclear. “What once flooded periodically now floods often, and sea levels will continue to rise,” Fontana said. But he didn’t need to make that point hit home for me — it hit home in 2012.

I come from a coastal town on the New Jersey Shore, and, before Hurricane Sandy, we never thought disaster could affect us. But as the flood waters rose, so too did a realization that there had arrived here. The denial mentality is all too common in places where disasters don’t strike — until, of course, they do.

I

n a conference room at City Hall, the Downtown Wooster Square Community Management Team holds its monthly meeting. On Oct. 17, Executive Board Chair Caroline Smith ’14 called the room of citizens, neighbors and friends to order with introductions: “Tell us your name and the New Haven street you live on.” It’s a personal touch that helps create a welcoming atmosphere.

“The roots of the organization trace back to broad citywide communitypolicing efforts, but now our role has expanded,” Smith said. “We are kind of a neighborhood association that focuses on quality of life, safety and other community issues.”

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But recently, in addition to its typical neighborhood discussion, climate change has been on the community management team’s agenda. In July, Susmitha Attota from the City Plan Department spoke to Downtown and Wooster Square residents about the risks of climate change in New Haven. With rising seas and a growing frequency of storms, Attota said a primary risk for the city is flooding in low-lying areas, such as East Shore and Long Wharf.

“We wanted to raise awareness on conservation and safety,” Attota added.

“There is a huge education campaign letting people know what to do when there is an impending flood or disaster.”

In at-risk neighborhoods, flooding can be predictable and its devastation prevented, but Attota said that any neighborhood can be inundated when systems fail.

“We coordinate with departments and talk to other municipalities to coordinate how best to deal with this issue,” Attota said. “But this isn’t something you do once and you’re done with. In order to maintain good standing, one needs to keep doing the work that is necessary.”

In light of the flooding in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, Attota said disaster is always unexpected but that strong preparation is key to preventing destruction.

“Houston never imagined it would get so inundated with rainfall,” Attota said.

“Everyone in the country has a risk — it’s just the nature of climate change.”

When I spoke with community management team members after the group’s October meeting, most expressed fears about climate change and its effects on New Haven. Like Attota, York Street resident Lydia Bornick understands New Haven’s vulnerability to sea level rise as a coastal city, and she is worried.

“New Haven and the shoreline communities sit on a coastline that is easily affected by rising tides and increased water temperatures. … We already know we sit in a very precarious situation,” Bornick said. “I am concerned about climate change.”

Attendee Emly McDiarmid said that, as a grandmother, she worries about climate change. Yet, despite her concern, McDiarmid said that she remains hopeful, trusting in the “talent and knowledge” of the New Haven community to confront the threat head-on.

One promising example of that talent and knowledge is professor Alexander Felson’s team at the School of Forestry and Environmental Science. Felson works with municipal and state governments to develop efficient and effective climate change mitigation plans. With a focus on sea level rise, the group works to create innovative strategies to reduce risks and share these findings with homeowners.

“Our work is most effective by empowering local governments and decisionmakers and then having the conversations with private citizens in public forums to educate them and chip away at

any assumptions against climate change,” Felson said. “We’re in this situation where we have to make choices today based on assumptions, and I think that’s a hard thing for everyone to do.”

In addition to public forums, Felson’s group educates citizens through real estate agencies and town planners, but getting his message across to every homeowner remains a challenge, especially when not all are civically minded, he added.

On an undergraduate level, the Yale Student Environmental Coalition looks to educate Yalies about what they can do to affect climate change. Media Chair Dani Schulman ’20 said the main issue on campus is not that students do not believe climate change or are unwilling to support preparation projects but that they fail to think about how their actions contribute to climate change. Schulman said that people are generally reluctant to act to prevent a slow-moving, impersonal threat.

“Most Yalies think climate change is real and abstractly care about it, but they’re not going to bother about it,” Schulman said. “People can know about climate change, but we are reluctant to blame ourselves for our role in the issue. … It’s really hard to make people change.”

While climate change may still appear abstract and distant, when Yalies walk between Ezra Stiles College and Broadway, they’ll see the vacant storefront of Thali Too. Most will keep walking, but some, maybe, will stop to think.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

insight

VARSITY BLUES

WOMEN’S RUGBY AND THE COMMITMENT TO CLUB

// BY HOPE ALLCHIN // PHOTOS BY KINGA OBARTUCH

W

hen the Yale women’s rugby team took to the field this fall, the Bulldogs faced off against only three Ivy League opponents. Each competitor shared one defining characteristic: Its program lacked varsity recognition.

Prior to 2016, Yale competed against seven Ivy League opponents over the course of the fall in pursuit of the championship. However, beginning this season, the Ivy Rugby Conference partitioned the women’s programs into two separate subconferences of four teams 26 | November 2017

each. The Ivy Rugby Conference, a combination league of both club and varsity women’s teams, determined where to place each school based on its official athletic designation and skill level.

Yale, which finished the regular season with a 5–1 record, was pitted against Columbia, Cornell and Penn — all programs that hold club status at their respective Ivy League institutions.

In general, club teams represent the lower echelon of Ivy rugby. Princeton makes a notable exception to this generalization: The Tigers play in the top

division with the three Ivy varsity teams — Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard.

Princeton enjoys this privilege thanks to its notable past record.

Yet subconferences may represent only a temporary solution to problems of talent disparity within the Ivy Conference.

Despite the Yale team’s support for this system and administration’s ambivalence, a commitment to this division could exacerbate an already growing skill gap within Ivy women’s rugby.

This new setup gives Yale a fighting chance in national competition in the

insight coming years. With a strong club program, the Bulldogs will now face only teams similar to them in skill level. Prior to the 2017 season, each Ivy Conference squad played the rest of the league, which meant fledgling programs would compete against varsity teams. With a higher level of commitment, more resources and a greater ability to draw recruits, varsity teams are fast outpacing club programs on the field.

By taking the most serious teams off the club squads’ schedules, the new division creates a stronger winning culture and more competitive environment for Yale, which resonates well with rookie players. The Bulldogs, who won five games before losing to Penn in the conclusion of their six-game campaign on Oct. 28, fell just short of a postseason opportunity. The Quakers — who also finished with a 5–1 record but with one more point — were elected to participate in the USA Rugby Division II Playoffs, a chance that is expected to be awarded to the top team in the subconference in future seasons as well.

“The split between club and varsity teams in the Ivy League has allowed us to play against teams … with similar experience levels and physicality, creating competitive matchups,” co-captain SGH Gavis-Hughson ’19 said. “This means an opportunity for us to play at the top of our league. While we’d love to be able to play against all Ivy teams, this isn’t an option right now due to the unique nature of varsity programs mixing with club sports.”

As dictated by tradition, Yale opened its season against Harvard — the Bulldogs’ fiercest rival and one of the most established varsity programs in the NCAA. After the last annual rendition of the historic matchup, current on-thefield captain Eli Ceballo-Countryman ’18 left the field happy that her team had “scored and no one was dead.”

Following three years of getting stomped — the cumulative score was 249–5 — enough was enough for Yale.

Harvard’s recruits, who arrived for training in early August, were simply more skilled, better prepared and frankly dan-

gerous to play against for a lineup composed primarily of walk-ons, some of whom have never played the sport before.

Yale could no longer safely start rookies for fear of injury, and retention suffered amidst safety concerns.

Importantly, the new subconference system is markedly safer for all teams, especially club squads. According to Ceballo-Countryman, who is serving in a heightened leadership role because both Gavis-Hughson and co-captain Reanna Wauer ’20 are currently sidelined with injuries, a greater skill gap between two competing rugby teams means a higher chance for a player to suffer serious injuries. Furthermore, a matchup against a team like 2017’s season-opener Columbia is a better, and more fair, learning experience for new and old players alike.

The Yale women could not be happier with the new system: This split division structure represents the best possible option for women’s rugby on campus.

Despite the rise of varsity women’s programs across the country in the last five years, Yale players are hesitant to give up

Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

insight their club status.

While the lure of NCAA recognition and better resources is tempting, the Bulldogs have something more valuable: a community. Though athletic teams of all levels are often characterized by their incredibly close-knit relationships, the culture of women’s rugby has become an especially important aspect of the sport itself. At Yale, most rugby players had never played the sport before stepping onto campus, which players credit with creating a welcoming environment for all skill levels.

In addition, rugby has its own set of traditions. After competitions, players engage in a practice called singing, a convention in both men’s and women’s rugby in which players share songs after competitions during a combined social. According to Ceballo-Countryman, singing within women’s rugby repurposes these traditionally culturally male songs to include themes of body positivity and the sexuality spectrum. Both teams bond over the tradition and are able to connect off the competitive playing field.

The Yale Athletic Department and the women’s club team are in agreement: The Bulldogs should not pursue varsity status, at least in the near future. While the team itself bases its argument on the community and tradition of Yale club rugby, the University likely has different incentives, mainly the elevated costs and resources needed to run a varsity program. “[The Yale Athletic Department has] had no plans or conversations about men’s or women’s rugby to transition to varsity,” Yale Director of Club Sports Tom Migdalski said. “Yale rugby is very satisfied with its status as a club sport team and runs a safe and successful program at this level in the Ivy League.”

In spite of Migdalski’s adamant comment that this discussion is not on the table for the Yale administration, President of the Ivy Rugby Conference Stephen Siano noted that “all five teams who are not varsity have considered varsity status in the last few years.”

The benefits of an official NCAA varsity status rest primarily in access to ath28 | November 2017

letic resources on campus and in recruitment. The women currently finance their program through support from Yale, alumni and parent donations, and player dues. An alumni endowment allows for the Bulldogs to hire a full-time head coach and access weight rooms and training staff. The men enjoy a similar financial situation.

The Yale women of the team are content with the current state of affairs. Official recruitment, which has the largest potential to single-handedly transform a program, would in many ways alter this culture irreparably. And NCAA regulations, which, according to CeballoCountryman, prevent varsity teams from participating in the post-game social and singing, would detract enormously from the current culture.

Just as the women’s team is standing strong in support of its club sport identity, the Yale men’s rugby team — and all men’s rugby teams at Ivy League institutions — is relegated to club status, and the men also seem satisfied with this designation.

According to former men’s rugby captain John Donovan ’16, many of the concerns that stem from being a club program are in the process of being addressed while the benefits remain intact. In the past few years, the team has received access to the varsity gym and strength and conditioning coaches, in addition to Under Armour gear under the new contract.

“These resources have attracted more recruits, unified the team and made practice more official,” Donovan said. “Institutional support has created more legitimacy on both the men’s and women’s sides.”

Donovan also credited the men’s program with providing a welcoming environment and fostering student leadership and a sense of ownership. Like the women’s team, the majority of the Yale men’s rugby squad had never played competitively before coming to campus. Donovan, who walked onto the team his first year without any experience, went on to become the Bulldogs’ manager, secretary

and finally captain during his senior year after falling in love with the sport.

Currently, none of the eight Ivy League men’s programs compete at the varsity level, and there is a greater parity within the men’s conference than the women’s.

Men’s programs would face the additional barrier of overcoming Title IX regulations at their respective institutions. In order to comply, men’s teams that desire varsity recognition would likely have to wait until the women’s club team was elevated before their statuses were considered.

While the subconferences may present a happy reprieve for individual programs, they present a puzzle for the conference.

In 2012, Harvard took a pioneering step forward, becoming the first Ivy League institution to welcome women’s rugby as a varsity sport. Brown and Dartmouth followed in 2014 and 2015, respectively, suddenly establishing the Ancient Eight as the sport’s pre-eminent hope for the creation of a full varsity league.

In 2002, the NCAA categorized women’s rugby as an emerging sport, a distinction that is intended to “help schools provide more athletics opportunities for women and more sport-sponsorship options for the institutions and also help that sport achieve NCAA championship status,” according to the organization’s website.

According to the NCAA, women’s rugby is one of the fastest growing club sports, with more than 350 registered college teams and 5,000 high school participants. And while NCAA support is important for the success of college teams, this is a far bigger moment for rugby, which debuted as an Olympic sport at Rio de Janeiro in 2016. The international recognition is a further incentive to begin establishing Division I leagues for the continued development of the collegiate game.

“Rugby is a growing sport in America,” Donovan said. “It’s becoming more legitimate beyond Yale and beyond the Ivy League. I could see the discussion [about potential varsity status] happening down the line.”

insight Yet the addition of the subconferences, which presents safer and more competitive play for all involved, puts the possible achievement of an eight-team varsity Ivy League for women’s rugby in question.

“Simply, the varsity status of Dartmouth, Harvard and Brown is beginning to create a gap in the on-field play between the varsity teams and the rest,” Siano said. “Princeton has been the best of the nonvarsity programs in the last few years. Their willingness to play up creates the four-and-four split.”

And while the gap in play may be noticeable now, it will continue to widen the longer the subconference system is left in place. In this system, club teams would be at an increased risk of injury if they were to play against more experienced programs, and the barriers to becoming varsity would be higher.

In addition to worries about differing

skill levels, Siano expressed concerns over whether club programs would be able to withstand the demands of travel and funding it would take to compete at the varsity level.

The longer the Ivy Conference employs the subconference system, the less likely it is to achieve a full eight-team varsity league. Given this outlook, Ivy women’s rugby will have to choose whether it will go the way of the Ivy gymnastics and hockey programs — both of which joined another conference, the Eastern College Athletic Conference — in order to sustain the sport or whether it will stand by the storied tradition of a complete Ancient Eight league.

“I think the long-term solution is for the Ivy League to lead the growth and safety of the collegiate game and as a league decide to all elevate women’s rugby to varsity,” Harvard varsity head coach

Melanie Denham said.

And while that might be the hope of many, Siano said that the Ivy Conference is taking structural changes one season at a time. The subconferences are only in effect for the fall 15s season; the spring 7s season, which is characterized by fewer players on the field and a much shorter game clock, will still see all eight Ivy programs competing against each other.

The Ivy Conference will re-evaluate the split divisions, and the growing skill gap, in January 2018. The decisions will play a hand in the determining the future of Yale’s club rugby community — and perhaps address the lingering question of whether the Ivy League is positioning itself as the most powerful conference in women’s rugby or crumbling without player and institutional support. But for now, at least, the women of Yale rugby will keep on singing.

Whim ‘n Rhythm 36 years of all-senior women’s a cappella For bookings, email whim.yale@gmail.com Find us online at whimnrhythm.com Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

PAGE NAME

A Study in Furniture // BY ADRIAN RIVERA // PHOTOS BY SCHIRIN RANGNICK

A

ll the furniture is moving. The American Decorative Arts Furniture Study, where most of the University’s furniture collection lives, is migrating to a facility in West Campus.

Construction of the facility began about two months ago. The reason, Associate Curator of the American Decorative Arts John Stuart Gordon explained, is to treat the “art as art because it will be with other works of art, with conservation labs, near our digitization studios.”

Logistically, the process of transferring may take some time. Officially, the University has until May 2019, which is when the Furniture Study is slated to reopen.

A crew of art handlers will arrange the physical transport, while conservators are responsible for making sure the objects are secure during the trip.

Furniture at Yale, really, has been mov-

30 | November 2017

ing small-scale for years — often, to the houses of University administrators. An unofficial program arranged by the Yale Furniture Study facilitated the loaning of objects to the private collections of prominent administrators. The “perk” began in the 1930s, made possible through a donation from a class of 1897 graduate, Francis Garvan, of over 10,000 objects. Curators at the time thought placing items in residential spaces on campus would put them on view for the public. The impulse, Gordon said, was to treat “the then-master’s houses and the president’s house like house museums.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, incoming masters sent decorators and, more often than not, wives to pick out the furniture that would best complement their desired aesthetic. But as time went on, the museum and university worlds professionalized

and became more bureaucratic. Tastes changed, and people preferenced utility over style.

“People want stuff they can live with,” Gordon said, thinking of a story about University President Peter Salovey. At the beginning of the president’s term, one of Salovey’s decorators called the Furniture Study in search of a desk for a Yale Corporation member’s guest room. Gordon sent some images of possible antique candidates. His decorator responded: “These are all lovely, but none of them are right — none of them look like they would work for a laptop.” Electricity, as Gordon said, was still being discovered at the time these desks were created, let alone semiconductors and microchips. The decorators wound up passing on the desk.

In the 20th century, the Furniture Study had a registrar who was in charge

insight

of keeping track of the locations of furniture on loan. Years ago, when the furniture directors started doing inventory, they noticed some discrepancies.

They had a paper record that said which things were in which colleges, but when they tried to verify, things were missing.

So they started hunting.

The retirement of one master in 1975, for example, coincided with the disappearance of a few choice objects. “You never want to accuse someone of stealing, so you just quietly watch,” Gordon said. When the master’s widow finally passed away in 2008, Gordon and his partner called the real estate agent and said they were interested in buying the house.

“This is about as cloak and dagger as I get,” Gordon said. During the house tour, Gordon’s partner distracted the real estate agent while Gordon pulled away furniture from the walls to sleuth for Yale University Art Gallery accession

numbers on the back. They found a mirror and a table they knew were missing.

Contacting the estate, Gordon wrote to say there were “some things in the house that weren’t actually owned by the person.” The estate was respectful and returned the objects.

Gordon says these incidences were a habitual consequence of the loaning project. “If you are an administrator and you live in these houses for years, surrounded by objects, you may grow quite attached to them and forget that you didn’t buy them.”

Because of shifting preferences and concerns for the well-being of the art, the directors curtailed the loans. Now, only the University president, the provost and dean of Yale College can request new objects.

Some furniture was recalled, though not all. Museum curators sometimes toured houses to identify what could be allowed to stay and what had to be confiscated for preservation.

One object that was allowed to stay was a 200-year-old bureau in the Grace Hopper House dining room. Head Julia Adams doesn’t know why. “I always make sure to cover it when guests come

over so they don’t use it as a place to set their glasses.”

Until spring of 2016, a stern portrait of John C. Calhoun, a class of 1804 graduate and the former namesake of Hopper College, gazed from above the mantle of the Hopper House’s living room. Now, Harry Potter potion bottles decorate the space below where it hung.

Adams chose Harry Potter in an effort to counterbalance the lingering gravity of the portrait’s removal. But the stuffed Hedwig owl and bottles filled with pseudo-polyjuice potion are only temporary. A “caesura,” in Adams’s words.

As for what might be installed permanently, Hopper College is in the process of acquiring Grace Hopper memorabilia. Already, they have one of her nanoseconds — nanoseconds were a teaching aid used by Hopper when demonstrating how quickly electricity can travel in onebillionth of a second. “But I would really love to have a portrait,” Adams said.

In the meantime, the portrait of Calhoun has changed hands, as furniture and art at Yale does. The school still keeps it in its collections. It is in the process of being cleaned for storage and study.

cover

God & the Left at Yale

Religious Liberal Activism on Campus

// BY CHRIS HAYS // PHOTOS BY ROBBIE SHORT AND COURTESY OF ARNOLD GOLD AND HENRY CHAUNCEY JR.

T

he Rev. Robert Beloin sits against the marble wall of the Abraham A. Ribicoff Federal Courthouse in Hartford. Next to him, a line of men and women in suits, tie-dye shirts and clerical attire wraps across the front of the building, blocking the doors. The St. Thomas More priest’s own white collar peeks out from under a Yale-emblazoned vest.

It’s 8 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 25. The flagstones are still damp from the previous evening’s rain. Beloin, his fellow priest the Rev. Karl Davis, Yale history professor Jennifer Klein and 33 other protesters have gathered to support Franklin and Giaconda Ramos, both scheduled for deportation on the 29th. The Ramoses are at their jobs — it is the start of a workday for them, in some ways just like any other workday of the 24 years they have lived, paid taxes and raised a family in the United States.

The Ramoses’ two college-aged

32 | November 2017

sons are there. At moments, the protesters lock arms, resting a 20-foot orange banner that reads “ICE Stop Your Ethnic Cleansing” against their knees. In front of them, a crowd of 200 supporters chants, “No borders, no nations. Stop the deportation,” and “If you don’t let us dream, we won’t let you sleep.”

“We had very clear instructions,” Beloin remembered about his arrest.

“Do not resist, do not be dead weight, don’t be carried to the van.”

St. Thomas More graduate affiliate Catherine Rodriguez DRA ’18 alerted Beloin to the protest. “Pope Francis is saying, ‘Go to the periphery and accompany people,’” Beloin said. “Immigration is a way to go to the edges.”

In the days after the demonstration, a New York immigration judge reopened the Ramoses’ case, giving them a temporary stay of deportation. Though a federal judge issued

an order of removal for the couple in 2005, immigration officials did not act on the ruling until Trump-era enforcement protocol took effect. “The tone of anger and hatred and ‘us against them’ is really taking a toll on the moral fiber of the country,” Beloin said.

The St. Thomas More priests’ intervention places them among an emerging community of Yale activists called by their religious convictions to take progressive action. Organizations like the Yale Black Seminarians, the Muslim Students Association and the Chaplain’s Office are working to promote social justice in the Trump era.

Though religion is often overshadowed by politics at a largely secular institution like Yale, a recent surge in faithbased political activism revealed the complex — and storied — relationship between theology and liberal activism on campus.

For Beloin, these ideas find expression through prayer: at the pulpit, in

cover front of the courthouse and in his holding cell during his daylong stay in jail.

W hen the protesters arrived at the correctional facility at around 11 a.m., they were each fingerprinted and asked to turn in their possessions. Beloin handed over his wallet, phone, keys and, finally, the clerical collar from around his neck.

& ft O le

n the national stage, conser vative religious activism has long eclipsed its liberal counterpart in American politics and media. White evangelical Christian voters have been the Republican Party’s base since President Richard Nixon’s term in office. Although there are significant political disagreements among different right-leaning Christian communities, Christians overwhelmingly vote Republican. In the 2016 presidential election, Christians voted for Trump by a margin of 15 percent, and evangelicals favored Trump by a margin of 64 percent, according to a Pew poll.

Yet, as Latino Catholic and Arab Muslim communities come under threat of immigration restrictions and political vilification, the religious left is garnering grassroots support.

The Hartford rally was one of a series of progressive political actions taken by religious leaders across the country in past months. Just three weeks after Trump’s election, the Rev. William J. Barber II led an 80,000-person “Moral March” in Raleigh, North Carolina, mobilizing a national network of interfaith leaders and earning the title of

the “strongest contender for [Martin Luther King Jr.]’s mantel” from many supporters, according to The New York Times. In protest of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, faith leaders linked arms and marched silently through the city.

Just a few weeks later, on the Aug. 28 anniversary of the March on Washington, the Rev. Al Sharpton led the multifaith One Thousand Ministers March for Justice rally along the path of the 1963 march. Wearing clerical collars, yarmulkes and vestments, the demonstrators protested Trump’s racial politics in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville.

Yale has seen a parallel increase in liberal religious activism in recent times, but this movement is not without precedent. Progressive icon and Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’49 DIV ’56 leveraged his religious authority on campus to promote anti–Vietnam War and civil rights causes. Though the student body may no longer recognize his name, Coffin’s influence persists.

COFFIN’S PULPIT On Oct. 2, 1967, Coffin stepped up to the lectern at an anti-war press conference in New York City. Yale’s Battell Chapel, he announced, would be “a sanctuary from police action for any Yale student conscientiously resisting the draft.” Following the speech, nearly 300 draft resisters burned or turned in their draft cards to Coffin in an act of collective civil disobedience. A New York Times article about

THE REV. KARL DAVIS

the announcement ran under the headline, “War Foes Are Promised Churches as Sanctuary.” A Yale Alumni Magazine article later observed that Coffin’s Oct. 2 address cemented Yale as the center of the draft resistance movement in New England.

Yale faced an onslaught of incensed calls from alumni even as Yale President Kingman Brewster ’41 denounced Coffin’s speech. Brewster reminded Coffin that Battell was under the authority of the administration, not the chaplaincy; the chapel was not his to give away.

By age 40, Coffin had been arrested three times, including one instance in which he was arrested while leading a Freedom Ride to protest segregation in Alabama. When

the New Haven trial of Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale brought thousands to the city, Coffin led a student–faculty committee tasked with keeping the protests nonviolent. Though he twice graced the cover of Time magazine and never faded from the national public consciousness, Coffin was most visible on campus arguing with students, as he tirelessly sought to change minds one at a time.

Coffin’s friend and former University Secretary Henry “Sam” Chauncey Jr. ’57 laughed as he said, “I don’t know anybody to this day who thinks they are entitled to march into the president’s office and just go right in without permission or anything else, right in the middle

Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

cover of a meeting or whatever, but he would just go right in. He would come in and say, ‘Damn it, Kingman, you can’t let this happen!’”

Confrontation was Coffin’s style.

Chauncey remembered that Coffin once walked into a fraternity house unannounced during the group’s officer elections to interrogate the students about why they weren’t electing black leaders.

He leveraged his oratory to rail against the old-boy-network attitude that still pervaded campus.

“In a world in which traditions need to be reshaped and purged as much as protected to support what we already hold, O God, bless us all with uncertainty,” Coffin said at a luncheon in celebration of Brewster’s inauguration as University president.

As Yale shifted from an elite white Protestant school to a more progressive, diverse and pluralistic place, Coffin was an unapologetic advocate for reform.

The cultural context of Coffin’s time at Yale makes his faithbased activism even more striking. The 1970s were a time of decreasing religious engagement on college campuses. Amid an anti-authority cultural revolution, religion had fallen by the wayside. The deep and seemingly inalterable connection between tradition and religion would create a tension that generations of progressives before and after Coffin struggled to reconcile.

Yet Coffin was an uncompromising revolutionary. Drawing on the Protestant Reformation as a parallel to the civil rights movement, he liked to quote Martin Luther: “My conscience is captive to the word of God. … To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other,” Coffin repeated.

“God help me.”

34 | November 2017

Omeish said of the Jan. 29 rally, which was led by a group of organizers that included members of the Women’s Center, the Slifka Center for Jewish Life and the Yale Democrats. “It needed all of the student groups involved to fulfill that purpose.”

The student organizers projected the word “solidarity” onto the stone facade of Sterling Memorial Library. About 1,000 people attended, holding candles and standing in silence until a series of speeches spurred the crowd into chants.

For Omeish, the power of the rally rested in a “faith-based model of activism.”

Selflessness and humility before God guided the organization of the rally. “It was successful because of the blessing of God,” she said. Only by approaching the rally with a focus on the issues, rather than grandstanding or selfpromotion, could the event fulfill its purpose: “bridge-building across these communities who feel marginalized and alienated.”

The night of the rally, Associate Chaplain Maytal Saltiel was busy “schlepping,” WILLIAM SLOAN COFFIN JR. ’49 DIV ’56 as she affectionately called it. Saltiel is practiced in the logistics Collective action — the concept that of event organizing; she held the offilinks her most closely to the other reli- cial title of “repair the world coordinator” gious leaders involved in the protest — is while working at the University of Penna moral imperative of Judaism for Klein. sylvania Hillel. Last January, she was one “Tikkun olam,” the religious duty to work of the few people who could find power collectively to “repair the world,” under- outlets and a sound system for the rally. pins her beliefs.

“We are the behind-the-scenes people,” Nine months earlier, repair work on Saltiel joked. campus was focused on those in the Yale The Chaplain’s Office has weathered community affected by Trump’s travel its own turbulent political moments over ban. The ban targeted seven predomi- recent years. In October 2015, Univernantly Muslim countries. Abrar Omeish sity Chaplain Sharon Kugler found her’17, former president of the Muslim Stu- self at the center of a national controdents Association, helped coordinate the versy. Kugler, acting as a member of the January rally in support of affected Yalies. Intercultural Affairs Council, co-signed “The purpose was showing unity,” an email to the Yale student body about REVOLUTIONIZING, AGAIN Professor Jennifer Klein was standing near Jason Ramos, the Ramoses’ eldest son, the morning of her arrest. As a historian of social movements, she noticed what others might have missed: The rally did not focus solely on Christian prayer, even though, 15 years ago, a similar protest would have. “The language has become more ecumenical,” she said.

For Klein, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric on immigration echoed anti-Semitic chants by neo-Nazis at her alma mater, the University of Virginia. A threat to Latino Americans is a threat to every historically marginalized group, she said.

cover cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes, asking students to “avoid those circumstances that threaten our sense of community or disrespects, alienates or ridicules segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression.”

The directors of the AfroAmerican Cultural Center, Native American Cultural Center, La Casa Cultural, Asian American Cultural Center and Slifka Center cosigned the letter. Within a week, Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis sent out a response challenging the basis for labeling costumes appropriative and affirming “freedom of speech.”

As protests escalated, reporters from national news outlets descended on campus.

“That semester set us on a course of trying to figure out how to listen to each other better,” Kugler reflected. She said she did not regret sending out the email. But she emphasized the importance of dialogue amid political contro-

versy, perhaps directing her comment at the alienation and pain many on campus felt during the semester-long period of protests. “It’s an office that attempts very delicately to keep people talking and to feel accessible to everyone. The prophetic voice that is found in accompaniment and radical hospitality and a kind of endurance.”

Kugler and Saltiel, in some ways, are the new, pluralistic continuation of Coffin’s legacy. The chaplaincy, when it was first created in 1927, was intended for one person, the campus pastor. When Coffin was appointed in 1958, the Chaplain’s Office had hardly changed — his voice was the prophetic one. Over time, the staff expanded, adding a Jewish associate chaplain in the ’80s as well as Muslim and Hindu staff members in the mid-2000s.

Today’s chaplaincy comprises Catholic, Protestant and Jewish chaplains as well as Muslim and Hindu directors of student life. With this new pluralism, its voice is dif-

fused among many chaplains.

As outspoken as Coffin was, the chaplaincy today takes a much more subtle tone on social justice. “It’s no longer the case that the chaplain assumes the role of standing at the pulpit and having the prophetic voice be that one voice,” Kugler said. “I think if Coffin were alive today, he would probably be among us.”

LIBERAL DIVINITY Coffin spent three years on the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, where his legacy persists in the Divinity School’s activist student body. Much like the College, the Divinity School has a slew of liberal-minded student organizations: the LGBTQ group DivOut; FERNS, an environmentally focused group; and Peace, Action and Justice, a race-focused social action group. The organizations tackle social issues both in preparation for ministry and advocacy work at large.

Attending the Divinity School is often just as much about social history as it is

about theology. Qadry Harris DIV ’18, a member of the Yale Black Seminary, grew up going to a black Baptist church in the Bronx. His studies center on radical scholarship in religious academia.

“Black religion in the Americas begins with antebellum chattel slavery,” Harris explained. “It’s not a secret that white slave masters were using Christianity to justify slavery.”

Harris sees a racial divide in American religion. On one side stands the slave master’s religion of oppression and, on the other, the religion of liberation and resistance developed by slaves to subvert slavemaster Christianity. Harris explains today’s Christianity in terms of its past: Enslaved people “started appropriating Christian symbols to say, ‘God wants me to be free.’” Social justice, for Harris, is the inevitable consequence of faith in something larger.

“The Black Lives Matter movement — these protestors and activists are responding to the Trayvon Martins of the QADRY HARRIS DIV ’18

cover world,” Harris said. “There are those that would assert that Black Lives Matter has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian gospel and the church. I’m of the opposite opinion. It is a manifestation of the church because it is people of the church fighting to protect our personhood.”

When asked how he reconciles his Christianity with the religion of oppression from which he believes it is descended, he said, “I don’t know if reconciliation is the right way to put it.” Harris acknowledged that his faith is not unimpeachable and that even the black Baptist tradition has internalized elements of dominance and suppression, though those influences are difficult to identify. His black liberation politics bears the marks of a religion that was once an instrument of oppression, and that does not sit easily with him.

The culture of the Divinity School lends itself to radical action. In fall 2017, Divinity School Dean Greg Sterling introduced “Religion and Ecology” and “Latinx and Latin American Christianity” as new concentrations of study. Earlier this year, the school also announced plans to construct the “regenerative village,” a highly energy-efficient residential complex designed to dramatically reduce waste.

Julia Johnson DIV ’18 and Emily Bruce DIV ’19 run Faith, Environmentalism, Religion, Nature and Spirituality, or FERNS, the religious ecology student group at the Divinity School. Johnson, a nondenominational Protestant, and Bruce, a Unitarian Universalist, both regularly attend programming at the Yale School of Forestry. One event last spring, a film festival, convinced Johnson to discard her trash bin and practice a zerowaste lifestyle.

“A lot of my energy goes to thinking about how the church doesn’t talk about climate change,” Bruce said. Johnson also expressed frustration that, even at Yale, faith leaders do not recognize the religious importance of environmental stewardship. Climate change is something “that’s very Christian and very political.”

Despite Johnson’s frustration with reli36 | November 2017

gious leadership on environmentalism at her school, divinity schools at elite secular universities like Yale and Harvard are much more liberal than their counterparts at other institutions. According to several Yale Divinity School students, Yale’s liberalism derives from the University’s broader secular liberal tradition; the College and the graduate and professional schools have attracted a liberal student body since the ’60s. Saltiel, the associate chaplain, attended Harvard Divinity School and said that Yale and Harvard are two of the most pluralistic of their kind.

Not every religious school focuses on social history the way that Yale Divinity School does. At most Southern and Midwestern theological schools, the political outlook is different. In a 1995 Atlantic article exploring Regent University in Virginia, Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox characterized the mission of the school: to produce an “elite of religiously trained professionals to exert a spiritual influence on the secular realm.” He described a series of op-eds in the campus newspaper debating the extent to which Christians have a right to dominion over society. Cox argued that the school was a microcosm of debate within conservative Christian communities at large.

Mike Lally DIV ’18 attended St. Louis University, a Jesuit Catholic school whose curriculum is centered on theology. Lally seemed bemused by the Yale Divinity School’s liberalism.

The Divinity School, he said, is “basically a liberal secular institution with some Christian language tossed on top.”

A PLACE IN THE TRADITION On a rainy Sunday in

October, Lally stood near the steps of the altar at St. Thomas More, offering communion with two other parishioners and Beloin. Two lines of congregants proceeded toward them. Earlier during the service, Beloin preached about change in the Church over time. It was the Sunday before the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, and Beloin joked that, if Martin Luther were alive today, he would find a place in today’s more grounded Catholic faith.

He delivered a homily about neighborly love and the importance of putting aside differences to find consensus.

He cited the case of the Ramos family.

It is hard to take action from a place of comfort and privilege, he said, but love of God is parallel to love of neighbor, so we must act. Quoting from the daily liturgy,

SHARON KUGLER

cover

THE REV. ROBERT BELOIN

he added, “You shall not wrong any alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.’”

The quotation harkens back to the prophet Moses, who claimed the divine authority to free the Israelites, restructure society and make political demands to the pharaoh. Similarly, Jesus was crucified in part for being a political threat, and Muhammad was nearly assassinated by the Meccans for upending the existing social order. Revolutionary change is a fundamental element of every prophet’s story.

The theologies founded around these figures have taken on a life of their own.

Religions created millennia ago have continued to shape the many societies within which they thrive, impacting the daily experience of each individual.

Struggling with the inertia of their religious traditions was one of the things

that prompted Saltiel and Kugler to take positions working at a university, where they would interact and collaborate with campus activist culture. Saltiel reflected that her understanding of patriarchy in religion once prompted her to question the role of feminism within faith. Women struggle against religious institutions that are just as patriarchal as the broader societies that they inhabit, she said. There has always been a kind of friction between religious tradition and the social change these activists fight for.

But this kind of wrestling is a motivating factor as often as it is an alienating one. The stakes of social change are higher when considered in an explicitly religious context. Though it is often impossible to tell where religious doctrine ends and cultural custom begins, religious activism is just as much about grappling with religious issues as it is social ones. Especially as Yale’s liberal religious activists navigate a campus that is increasingly secular — more than half of Yale’s students are religiously unaffiliated — contemplating the role of their faith gives language and power to their activism.

Coffin was notable for his backstory.

He was the third generation of his family to attend Yale and the heir to a family fortune. “His wealth always hung over him,” Chauncey said. He spent his life at elite institutions: Phillips Academy Andover, Yale College, the CIA, Williams College, Yale Divinity School and the Yale chaplaincy. Yet he worked tirelessly to change the institutions that produced him.

Over the past six decades, aspects of Coffin’s vision have come to pass: Yale has become more pluralistic, and Chris-

tianity at large has adapted to socially progressive trends. Over the course of his life, Beloin has seen a version of this change in the Catholic faith: “I look for times when the Church gets it right, I am inspired by that,” he said. “And when I think the Church gets it wrong, I try to learn from that.”

For Beloin, morality is too connected to social issues for him to stay aloof. His views demand that, while he stands above the congregation at his pulpit on Sunday, he also sits down in front of the doors of the Hartford courthouse and stoops to pick up trash during his court-ordered 24 hours of community service.

He remembered, “When I was walking down to the corner to be fingerprinted, one of the cops walking with me turned to me and said, ‘Hey Father, it wasn’t worth it, was it?’ I looked at him and I said, ‘Well as a matter of fact, it was.’”

At the Hartford jail, police put the protesters into two-person cells. Each cell had a bunk bed and an exposed toilet.

Its walls were brick. Everything in the cell was nailed down, and Davis remembered empathizing with those threatened by deportation. In his loss of freedom, he experienced “just a fraction of what they experience.” His only lifeline was the lawyer’s phone number written in permanent marker on his forearm.

Beloin was placed with Pentecostal Elder Ron Hurt, who preaches at Deliverance Temple Church in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood. The church sometimes takes in people with addictions, helping them on the path to recovery.

It owns a house next door where people looking for shelter can stay. Hurt has preached and done advocacy work in the neighborhood for 12 years.

“We talked for quite a while about our different experiences of faith and church and why we were there,” Beloin remembered. They discussed poverty, the voiceless and their congregations. They stretched out on their beds, Hurt in the top bunk and Beloin in the bottom. Privately, Beloin contemplated the Exodus narrative of the widow, the orphan and the alien. They prayed.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 37

bits & pieces

UP THE COUNTRY THE YALE DAILY NEWS MAGAZINE IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE INTRODUCTION OF ITS BRAND NEW PODCAST: “TALK IN THE TOWN” Norman Pattis has seen the future for the rural town of Bethany, and it’s grim.

“Connecticut lost a town last night, but it did not lose either territory or population,” Pattis writes in a blog post dated April 16, 2024. “Two suburban entities simply merged into a new, larger, town: New Hamden.”

Pattis’s doomsday scenario is the merging of Hamden with Bethany, a small town 20 minutes from downtown New Haven with just over 5,500 residents, dozens of farms, a school bus depot and little else. According to Pattis, Bethany will soon look like any other Connecticut suburb, its “rural character” replaced with rows and rows of lookalike condominiums. The first step on this path to suburban obsolescence? “A community of geriatric do-gooders dancing around a Maypole” who plan on invading Bethany “in the name of peace, love, granola and good feeling for all.”

Charlotte Hitchcock doesn’t look like she’s ready to invade anything. She’s a semiretired architectural historian with two border collies, a middle-aged Subaru hatchback and a desire for a house that’s “so snug that you can heat it with a tea kettle.” Hitchcock is a typical member of Green Haven, the organization Pattis thinks will devastate Bethany. Founded 10 years ago, Green Haven’s goal is to cre-

38 | November 2017

ate Connecticut’s first co-housing community. This November, it hopes to start construction on a 33-acre site that is currently home to a dairy farm.

A few architects brought cohousing from Denmark to the United States back in the 1980s. Cohousing’s form — a bunch of privately owned, relatively small houses clustered around a massive common house — is meant to encourage a close-knit community, following the thinking that, in fact, fences do not make good neighbors. Green Haven’s development, named Rocky Corner, will consist of 30 homes and a common house built on a couple acres at the corner of the farm, leaving the rest as open space. Thirteen of those homes will be affordable according to the state’s standards, significantly increasing Bethany’s stock.

“I look forward to doing the morning dog walk,” Hitchcock said. “Maybe with a couple other people, having a little dog play group, getting some exercise in the morning and then going and having breakfast. Then getting down to work, hopefully before noon.”

The 320 people who showed up to a public hearing of Bethany’s Planning and Zoning Commission in April 2013 weren’t there to join Hitchcock’s dog walking club. Six percent of Bethany’s population attended — the equivalent of 7,000 New Haven residents cramming into a school board meeting. That many people don’t come to a zoning meeting unless they’re upset about something.

“It was surprising to a lot of people

// BY ROBERT SCARAMUCCIA about how many people showed up, and out of those, how many were basically in opposition,” David Berto, Green Haven’s development consultant, said. What they opposed was an amendment to the town’s zoning regulations allowing Green Haven to build its homes so closely together. For Green Haven, this meant cozy community and preserved open space; for Bethany residents like Pattis, it looked like a precursor to condominiums popping up all over town, or, as he put it, “a suicide pact with suburbanization.”

By the time Green Haven won its zoning battle a year later, it had convinced many in Bethany that Rocky Corner might benefit the town, or at least wouldn’t obliterate it. Yet that fight had cost the zoning commission’s Democratic members their seats, while the town’s first selectman, who’d supported Rocky Corner’s promotion of diversity, had won reelection by a margin of only 25 votes.

Why have a bunch of retirees from the greater New Haven area given up suburban homes for smaller dwellings out in the country even after facing such heavy resistance? Is knowing your neighbor worth 10 years of convincing local residents, state officials and banks that cohousing isn’t just a hippie commune? Will Rocky Corner be a refuge for New Haven’s old and environmentally inclined population, another step in the inexorable urbanization of the region, or the solution to Connecticut’s affordable housing shortage? Listen on our website to find out.

Christopher Buckley ’75.

Marie Colvin ’78.

Samantha Power ’92.

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