NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · THURSDAY, APRIL 9, 2015 · VOL. CXXXVII, NO. 117 · yaledailynews.com
INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING
RAINY RAINY
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CROSS CAMPUS
CLASS OF 2020? RECRUITING FOR FOOTBALL
BALANCING BUDGETS FACULTY POWER And bikes. The Devil’s Gear encounters financial shoals.
PROFESSORS SIGN ON TO FFY CALL FOR DIVESTMENT.
PAGE 10 SPORTS
PAGE 3 CITY
PAGE 3 UNIVERSITY
Two years in, Yale-NUS sets itself apart
Overlooked at Yale. A Wednesday article in The Washington Post revisited conversations between Alexandra Brodsky LAW ’16 and Sabrina Rubin Erdely — who wrote “A Rape on Campus,” the since-retracted Rolling Stone story — about sexual assault cases at Yale that Erdely ultimately decided not to include in the piece, according to Brodsky.
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n March, staff reporter Rachel Siegel traveled to Singapore to examine LGBTQ activism at Yale-NUS and in Singapore at large. This is the second of a twopart series on the young liberal arts college’s evolving role in Singaporean society.
Let freedom ring. Today
marks the 150th anniversary of General Ulysses S. Grant’s Union victory over Confederate forces at Appomattox. To honor the occasion, bell towers (like our very own Harkness Tower) across the country will ring for four minutes, beginning at 3:15 p.m. Mayor Toni Harp and history professor David Blight will be on hand to make remarks on the significance of the anniversary.
Tanks for the memories.
Now that both the Spring Fling headliner and Class Day speaker have been announced, we can finally begin looking forward to the events themselves. Accordingly, the Yale College Council’s Spring Fling Committee released the festival’s official merchandise — tank tops and T-shirts — online yesterday.
SINGAPORE — Nearly 10,000 miles from New Haven, a single building embedded within the National University of Singapore is home to Yale-NUS College. Now in its second year, Yale-NUS is the only independent college bearing Yale’s imprint. It was founded with the guiding principle of bringing the liberal arts to Asia. On the most basic level, the sheer distance between the two campuses could act as a metaphor for how dissimilar Yale-NUS and Yale appear. The former sits within a tiny and relatively young island nation in Southeast Asia — its campus spotted with palm trees and open patios — and is home to only 330 students across two classes. The latter has staked its claim in New Haven since before
PAGE 5 UNIVERSITY
Stark campaign heats up BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH STAFF REPORTER
In the academic sense, Yale-NUS is unique both within Singapore and in Southeast Asia. Yale-NUS is the only liberal arts institution in Singapore, and its Common Curriculum — the foundation of every student’s academic experience — is a signature of the college. “Yale-NUS gives Singaporeans SEE YALE-NUS PAGE 4
SEE STARK CANDIDACY PAGE 4
As a liberal arts college in Singapore, Yale-NUS has inspired a lot of controversy in its two years of existence. . American independence and currently enrolls nearly 12,000 students across Yale College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and 10 professional schools. But ever since plans for Yale-NUS were first announced in 2009, concerns about how a country like Singapore could support and uphold the tenets of a liberal arts education have not abated. Though University administrators have repeatedly assured critics that students at Yale-NUS would have the same academic and social freedoms as students in New Haven, Singapore’s longstanding reputation as an authoritarian democracy provided little comfort: The government bans certain books and films deemed upsetting to the delicate balance of the country’s multi-racial society. Public protests are almost exclusively prohibited, as is any form of hate
Two sororities vie fto become Yale’s fourth sorority.
In the two weeks since Fish Stark ’17 launched his bid for Ward 1 alder, his campaign has heated up around campus. Stark formed a campaign committee in early March, making him one of the earliest candidates in recent history to announce their candidacy. Since then, he and his campaign have begun accepting donations and become increasingly active in promoting his cause around campus. Stark will face current Ward 1 Alder Sarah Eidelson ’12 in the race, who declared her candidacy for a third term last week. “The main thing right now is just getting Fish in front of as many people as possible,” said Sergio Lopez ’18, Stark’s campaign manager. Lopez said the campaign’s early announcement allows Stark to meet with more people and to do so while being an official candidate. Though some donors have come forward, Stark said he has not begun actively fundraising. With the first financial filing deadline coming on Friday, he said, he has received nine donations — eight of which have come from Yale students — since the campaign launched. Campaign treasurer Hedy Gutfreund ’18 said these donations have mostly come from five-dollar pledges made at the launch event two weeks ago. Stark has also begun a series of weekly Friday night dinners in residential college dining halls to discuss policy ideas and strat-
RACHEL SIEGEL/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
BY RACHEL SIEGEL STAFF REPORTER
GOING GREEK
speech against the government or racial or religious groups, and a 2014 report by Reporters Without Borders ranked Singapore 150th of 180 countries evaluated for press freedoms. But Yale-NUS shows no signs of going anywhere. The college’s permanent campus will open in October, and the student body population is slowly growing towards the targeted 1,000 students.
ACADEMICALLY SPEAKING
Do it for the bag. The Office
of Undergraduate Admissions has begun soliciting help hosting prefrosh for Bulldog Days, which will take place from April 20 through April 22. And in return for shepherding a wide-eyed high schooler (or five) through Yale during those days, you receive… a drawstring bag. Shame — we actually kind of liked the T-shirts they used to give out.
Bridging the gap. Alongside a story on the solidarity among first-generation students at Ivy League schools, The New York Times ran “To Become a Bridge,” a poem written by Travis Reginal ’16 on Wednesday. “I rest in two places,” Reginal says, exploring sentiments seemingly shared by students in the main article. Cawlidge Hawkey. Another piece in yesterday’s New York Times, while not explicitly referencing Yale, waxed nostalgic over a topic we’re all very familiar with: the Frozen Four. This year’s rendition in Boston features Omaha, Providence, North Dakota and… BU (sigh). Best on Earth. A screening
of the movie “Speciesism” will take place this evening in WLH 117. The film takes its inspiration from the question of whether or not mankind, in its place atop the world, is entitled to a “larger variety of moral rights.” Is this what it’s like to be a philosophy major?
THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY
1987 The YCC approves open officer elections, passing the relevant amendment with a 20-to-four vote tally.
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M E G H A N S U L L I VA N
Nursing student remembered as champion for health BY LARRY MILSTEIN AND STEPHANIE ROGERS STAFF REPORTERS Meghan Sullivan NUR ’16, who was dedicated to caring for mental health and substance abuse patients, died suddenly on Tuesday. According to Dean of the Yale School of Nursing Margaret Grey, Sullivan passed away in class due to a “very sudden event,” the cause of which is still unknown. She added that there will be a follow-up exam
in the days to come. The University declined to provide biographical details about Sullivan, including her date of birth. Grey said that Sullivan was in class at the School of Nursing’s West Campus facility at the time, adding that the faculty present “handled the situation well” and escorted students out of the room while nearby faculty attended to Sullivan until paramedics could arrive. “[Sullivan] was an amaz-
Online PA program proposal rejected BY EMMA PLATOFF AND AMAKA UCHEGBU STAFF REPORTERS The Yale School of Medicine’s recently announced online Physician Associate program was not approved as a mere “class expansion” to the existing program by the Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant, which published its decision online last Thursday. On March 10, Yale announced its plan to increase its yearly intake of roughly 36 PA students to up to 350 by allowing students to receive their Masters of Medical Sciences degree online. The new degree was set to offer students the complete didactic portion of the roughly
two-year degree via video lectures and discussion sections, with the practical component to be fulfilled during a twoweek course on campus and off-campus clinical rotations completed at pre-approved sites in the students’ hometowns. However, following a wave of criticism from current Yale PA students and program alumni, the ARC-PA turned down Yale’s application for the online PA program to be considered as a class expansion. Now, the online PA program must be evaluated through the submission of a full accreditation application. “The decision was made that this program was too different and that one cannot approach it SEE PA PROGRAM PAGE 6
ingly talented young woman and committed to social justice,” Grey said, adding that Sullivan was well-regarded and loved by her classmates. According to an online biography on the website for the Global Health Justice Partnership — an initiative of the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Public Health for which she served as a student fellow — Sullivan was a master’s degree candidate in nursing in the psychiatric and mental health specialty, and pursued an
interest in social justice issues concerning mental health and substance abuse, particularly in how they affected underserved areas. “[Sullivan] is interested in finding better access to and better quality care for the mentally ill and substance abusers,” the biography reads. “[Sullivan] is also committed to providing better education for the public about what it means to be mentally ill in order to lessen the stigma associated with mental illness.”
Prior to coming to Yale, Sullivan volunteered at a day treatment center in Seattle, where she worked with men and women who were suffering from severe mental illnesses. In a Wednesday email sent to all GHJP fellows and provided to the News, program directors described Sullivan as a “champion of people living with mental illness and struggling with substance use.” The email proceeded to inform the fellows SEE SULLIVAN PAGE 6
At med school, grants determine pay BY BRENDAN HELLWEG STAFF REPORTER While the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine are considered by many to be leaders in the medical community, even tenured professors face uncertainty regarding one of the basic logistics of any job: a reliable paycheck. Though their peers on Science Hill receive a largely Yale-funded paycheck, medical school faculty must rely on grant funding from the federal government to pay for the bulk of their salaries. This payment model causes significant financial insecurity to faculty, who even with tenure cannot necessarily rely on steady pay, said professor of cell biology Yongli Zhang MED ’03. “Faculty are being laid off because they are not able to fully fund their salary, and
funding may not be renewed on a project, so the researchers cannot finish it,” said Douglas Brash, professor of therapeutic radiology at the School of Medicine. Brash added that to be more sure that they will get funding, faculty often shape their grant proposals around more conservative scientific questions — “just confirming things we already know.” “That’s not why I got into science,” Brash said. Seventy percent of Zhang’s salary comes from federal grants, he estimated. With so much grant money focused on professors, significantly fewer funds are available for hiring graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, as well as purchasing research materials. That 70:30 ratio is consistent with the payment model of most professors in the School of Medicine, Brash
said, noting that it may in fact be an overestimate for some departments that provide as little as 10 percent or less of a professor’s salary. Getting the remaining 90 percent is often uncertain. “Many great labs that have done a lot of notable work cannot even get their grants renewed — this is very typical now,” said Zhang. “The grant environment is just getting tougher and tougher.” According to Sandy Chang ’88, professor of laboratory medicine and of pathology, while medical school faculty pay for nine months of their yearly salary through grant funding, Science Hill faculty only pay for three months of the year through grants. Since the 1990s, the research environment has grown increasingly difficult for grant funding, Brash SEE STEM FUNDING PAGE 6