Yale Daily News — Week of April 9

T H E O L D E ST C O L L E G E DA I LY · FO U N D E D 1 8 7 8

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · VOL. CXLIII, NO. 23 · yaledailynews.com

Yale’s acceptance rate drops to 4.62 percent

BY AMELIA DAVIDSON STAFF REPORTER Yale College admitted 2,169 students to the class of 2025 from its largest-ever pool of 46,905 applicants, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions announced on Tuesday.

The number of admitted students represents 4.62 percent of applicants for both early action and regular decision. This number is the lowest in recent years — down significantly from the 6.54 percent of students admitted to the class of 2024, 5.91 percent of students admitted to the class of 2023 and 6.31 percent of students admitted to the class of 2022. The record-breaking applicant pool represents a 33 percent increase from the 35,220 students who applied during the 2019-20 admissions cycle.

Students admitted to the class of 2025 represent all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and 72 countries. Their admis-

sion marks the culmination of an application cycle that took place entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic, featuring a heavy reliance on virtual outreach and Yale’s first-ever test-optional admissions cycle.

“The young people we met through the application process have experienced an unbelievable amount of change, disruption, and hardship this past year,” Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan wrote in a press release.

“But their resilience, leadership, service to their families and others, and commitment to their academic pursuits have been truly remarkable. Our newest students will bring an extraordinary range of experiences and identities, insights and ambitions, talents and intelligences to Yale.”

Yale also offered a spot on the waiting list to 1,030 applicants this year, according to Mark Dunn, director of outreach and commuSEE ADMISSIONS PAGE 4

LUKAS FLIPPO/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Yale College admitted 2,169 students to the class of 2025 from its largest-ever pool of 46,905 applicants.

Law professor Chua loses small group

BY JULIA BROWN STAFF REPORTER

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Chua was removed from the list of professors who will lead small groups for the 2021-22 academic year on March 29.

Law professor Amy Chua will no longer be leading a first-year small group at the Yale Law School next year after students raised allegations that she is still hosting private dinner parties at the home she shares with her husband, suspended law professor Jed Rubenfeld, despite having agreed in 2019 to cease all out-of-class hours interactions with students.

Chua did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her 2019 agreement and punishment, the allegations or losing her small group.

Chua previously agreed to stop drinking and socializing with her students outside of class and office hours in response to allegations of misconduct, according to a December 2019 letter obtained by the News from Law School Dean Heather Gerken to affected parties. But law students met with Law School administrators on March 26 and brought forward documented allegations reviewed by the News that Chua has conSEE CHUA PAGE 4

NHPS high schools reopen

BY NATALIE KAINZ AND CHRISTIAN ROBLES STAFF REPORTERS After more than a year of remote learning for New Haven high schools, eager students and teachers were

welcomed back to school for optional in-person learning on Monday.

The partial reopening of high schools marks the final step in SEE REOPENING PAGE 5

CASSIDY ARRINGTON/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

3,411 high school students out of 5,681 total opted into the hybrid system, which amounts to more than 60 percent of all NHPS high school students.

Yale College expands mental health resources amid student criticism

BY JULIA BIALEK AND ROSE HOROWITCH STAFF REPORTERS

VAIBHAV SHARMA/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

In an April 5 email to undergraduates, Chun and Hoffman announced two expansions to mental health resources that will together add 14 full-time staff positions.

On Monday afternoon, University and Yale College administrators unveiled new additions and reforms to University mental health offerings as students continue to push for change.

In an April 5 email to undergraduates, Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun and Chief of Yale Mental Health and Counseling Paul Hoffman announced two expansions to mental health resources that will together add 14 full-time staff positions, ten of which will be MHC clinicians, to Yale’s mental health resources. University Provost Scott Strobel and Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives Pericles Lewis also told the News about Yale’s increasing prioritization of mental health resources.

The changes, though in the works for many months, come at a time of heightened student

CROSS CAMPUS

INSIDE THE NEWS

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY, 1952.

CESOF

The elm trees on Yale's campus are sprayed down to stop the spread of Dutch elm blight, which was being carried thorughout the University's trees by the European elm bark beetle.

Ahead of a new report from the Committee on the Economic Status of Faculty, Yale’s average full-professor salaries rank low compared to its peers, a gap that has widened since 2008 Page 3 UNIVERSITY

DU BOIS

criticism of Yale’s mental health and wellness resources. They were also announced just one day before a new coalition of students, Mental Health Justice at Yale, released a set of demands for reforms to Yale’s mental health services. Those demands include doubling the duration of the default counseling session from 30 minutes to one hour, allowing healthcare professionals to write Dean’s excuses and switching to a Preferred Partner Organization insurance option, which would give students more flexibility to work with outside providers.

The coalition has also demanded that MHC increase current clinician numbers by 50 percent by the end of 2021, 75 percent by the end of 2022 and 100 percent by the end of 2023. The ten new clinicians added to MHC staff constitute a 30 percent increase.“We are doing everything we can to indicate to students, faculty and

Artspace New Haven has opened three new exhibitions featuring works inspired by civil rights activist and writer W.E.B. Du Bois.

Page 6 ARTS

FMRI

Researchers in the Yale Department of Psychology measured activation in babies’ frontal lobes during attention exercises for the first time by using fMRI. Page 8 SCITECH

staff that their mental health and well-being is pivotal,” Strobel told the News. “Use support systems and resources provided by the University and reach out to friends, counselors, mentors, deans, heads of colleges and chaplains. It is important that we remain connected to people and help connect those who need extra support to necessary resources on campus.

We stand ready to help.”

The first expansion of Yale’s mental health resources will be a new program in the residential colleges called Yale College Community Care, also known as “YC³” for short. YC³ will include eight new full-time staff members who will be affiliated with specific residential colleges and will support undergraduate students.

According to the email from Chun and Hoffman, the eight new residential college staff members SEE MENTAL HEALTH PAGE 5 KNAUFF

Gretchen Knauff will serve as New Haven's next director of Disability Services, after serving as executive director of Disability Rights Connecticut. Page 11 CITY

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION Treating students with dignity Y

ale has shown that it does not care about its students or their opinions — at least not in the way it claims to. From shopping period changes to the failures of Yale Mental Health and Counseling and beyond, the University’s top administrators have consistently made decisions that conflict with the needs of Yalies, even as they claim to act in our best interests. Their decision-making processes are steeped in mystery, and the policies that emerge from those backroom discussions often fly in the face of student opinion. And University leadership remains comfortable with the assertion that Yale knows best when it comes to promoting student well-being and success, even as evidence to the contrary mounts.

Yale administrators often claim that they solicit student input from the Yale College Council, but using the YCC as the main proxy for student opinion is flawed. Though it strives to fully represent student interests, the YCC unfortunately does not always do so. Low voter turnout in this past year’s YCC election is evidence to that point, as only 2640 votes were cast in this year’s presidential race even though the entire undergraduate student body was eligible to vote. But even if that were not the case, even if the YCC’s policy positions exactly mirrored those of all students, the way the Yale administration interacts with the YCC would still be of concern.

The council and Yale leadership frequently disagree, and Yale continues to show a hesitancy to compromise.

I could speak at length about the excuses the University administration has made to turn down student proposals and justify unpopular decisions. Want to make Election Day a holiday? Sorry, it’s just not feasible. Want Yale to offer Summer Session courses to FGLI students on campus? That wasn’t what they had in mind. How about stopping Yale from collecting criminal justice information on its college and job applications, or maybe making Yale pay its fair share to New Haven? No comment. But at the end of the day, when the policy decisions have been made, Yale’s administration will confidently say that it solicited and considered student opinions.

What has become increasingly clear is this: When it comes to policy creation, Yale does not treat its students with dignity or respect. If Yale is to continue being a desirable place for college students, Yale administrators must make a concerted effort to seek student opinions and treat those opinions seriously.

To start, Yale leadership must work harder to engage with a wide variety of students and student groups.

Our school has the capacity to reach any student at any time for any reason, student groups aren’t shy about communicating their ideas and Zoom has made meetings more convenient than ever. There is no excuse not to be in constant and open dialogue with students. Furthermore, Yalies are often most affected by the administration’s decisions, so it is only rea-

sonable to expect the University administration to ask us for input in its attempts to create policies conducive to our success.

It is also crucial CALEB that the UniverDUNSON sity administration not dismiss What We its dialogue with students as a forOwe mality. Administrators must instead be open-minded as they imagine how student proposals could shape the University for the better. They must be willing to genuinely consider the vision that Yalies have for their university, and they must show enthusiasm about the opportunity to work with students to make that vision a reality. That means avoiding superficial solutions and being willing to compromise on substantive issues like endowment justice and police disarmament.

Second, Yale must be proactive in soliciting students’ opinions. All too often, the Yale administration finds itself responding to problems retroactively. It took years of student complaints for Yale to release a plan for expanding Yale Mental Health and Counseling’s resources, and even then that plan came only after the tragic death of Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum ’24. When an institution has the wealth of a small nation and is home to some of the world’s brightest minds, there is no reason for it to be behind the curve on addressing student issues. There is no reason for the University to not continually search for ways to support students — using its tremendous resources to solicit input through surveys, focus groups, office hours and any other feasible method. Doing so will build the University’s capacity to respond swiftly to changes in student needs and remain flexible as the demands of higher education shift.

Finally, Yale must be more transparent about its decision-making processes. When a significant policy is made, it isn’t enough to say that some student organization was vaguely involved in the decision-making process.

Yale administrators should clearly state who played a role in crafting key policies and how they came to their final decision. Knowing that they can be held accountable and have their decisions scrutinized will encourage more robust deliberative processes and yield policies that align with both student and administration values.

Ultimately, the Yale administration has a responsibility to lead the University in a transparent and inclusive way. They have a responsibility to lead in a way that recognizes the value in students and their opinions. It’s time for them to live up to that responsibility.

CALEB DUNSON is a first year in Saybrook College. His column, titled “What We Owe,” runs on alternate Tuesdays. Contact him at caleb.dunson@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS PUBLISHING CO., INC. 202 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511 (203) 432-2400 Editorial: (203) 432-2418 editor@yaledailynews.com Business: (203) 432-2424 business@yaledailynews.com

EDITOR IN CHIEF & PRESIDENT Mackenzie Hawkins

CITY Emiliano Tahui Gómez Meera Shoaib

MANAGING EDITORS Jose Davila IV Phoebe Liu

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Charlotte Zimmer

PUBLISHER Susan Chen OPINION Miranda Jeyaretnam Rabhya Mehrotra NEWS Valerie Pavilonis Kelly Wei

CULTURE Freya Savla SPORTS Margaret Hedeman William McCormack WEEKEND Ella Goldblum Elizabeth Hopkinson Andrew Kornfeld

YTV Sevi Burget-Foster Natalie Kainz Maya Weldon-Lagrimas Nicole Westfall

COPY Erin Bailey Maya Geradi Ako Ndefo-Haven Natalie Simpson Katie Taylor

PODCAST Allison Park

PRODUCTION & DESIGN Zully Arias Megan Graham Isabella Huang Louie Lu Annie Yan

DATA Darwin Do Ashley Qin MAGAZINE Macrina Wang Isabella Zou DIR. OF FINANCE Graham Hardcastle

PHOTOGRAPHY Zoe Berg Ryan Chiao Lukas Flippo Vaibhav Sharma Amay Tewari

ILLUSTRATIONS Dora Guo Anasthasia Shilov TECH TEAM Julia Burgiel Yaa Owusu OUTREACH John Besche Crystal Cheung Lucy Wilkins DIGITAL William McCormack Laura Nicholas Eric Wang Maya Weldon-Lagrimas Lucy Wilkins Christie Yu Daniel Zhao

THIS ISSUE COPY STAFF: Mikayla Barber, Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind, Marissa Blum, Meg Buzbee, Olivia Fugikawa, Joshua Gonzalez, Chris Lee, Adam Levine, Alexa Jeanne Loste, Lydia Monk, Hailey O’Connor, Alex Ori, Caroline Parker, Christopher Sung, Yingying Zhao, Sydney Zoehrer COPY ASSISTANTS: Alvaro Romero, Patrick SebaRaj PRODUCTION & DESIGN STAFF: Jose Estrada, Rachel Folmar, Karen Lin, Elifnaz Onder, Stephanie Shao, Isaac Yu EDITORIALS & ADS

The Editorial Board represents the opinion of 12-15 members of the Yale community.

Other content on this page with bylines represents the opinions of those authors and not necessarily those of the Managing Board.

Opinions set forth in ads do not necessarily reflect the views of the Managing Board. We reserve the right to refuse any ad for any reason and to delete or change any copy we consider objectionable, false or in poor taste.

We do not verify the contents of any ad. The Yale Daily News Publishing Co., Inc. and its officers, employees and agents disclaim any responsibility for all liabilities, injuries or

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

damages arising from any ad. The Yale Daily News Publishing Co. ISSN 0890-2240

SUBMISSIONS

All letters submitted for publication must include the author’s name, phone number and description of Yale University affiliation. Please limit letters to 250 words and guest columns to 750. The Yale Daily News reserves the right to edit letters and columns before publication.

E-mail is the preferred method of submission.

ADVERTISEMENT

(203) 432-2424 (before 5 p.m.)

(203) 432-2400 (after 5 p.m.)

Direct all letters, columns, artwork and inquiries to: Miranda Jeyaretnam and Rabhya Mehrotra Opinion Editors opinion@yaledailynews.com Direct all comments regarding the fairness or accuracy of stories to: Mackenzie Hawkins Editor-in-Chief (203) 432-2418 Mary Chen, Serena Cho, Talia Soglin, Asha Prihar Public Editors public@yaledailynews.com

COPYRIGHT 2020 — VOL. CXLIII, NO. 23

GUE ST COLUMNIST DILGE BUKSUR

Live to fight another day R

ecently, I’ve been seeing posts with the hashtag # I s ta n b u l co nve n t i o n saveslives. I wish I was able to say it was just to inform the public about the significance of a treaty, but it wasn’t. It was a cry for help.

For the past year, Turkish women have been posting black and white photos of the victims of femicide and domestic violence. Every week we posted someone new; every week I tried to gather myself after reading about a dreadful story of a coldblooded murder.

However, on March 20, the government made it clear that it has never heard and will never hear us. With a presidential decree that abolished the Istanbul Convention, the president of Turkey disregarded the mournful screams of all the grieving families, the loss of hundreds of young lives and the value of any and all women’s rights.

For the past couple of months, Turkey has been at the heart of unrest and conflict. The governmental appointment of a president to Bogazici University — one of the most prestigious universities in the country — rekindled the issues between the pro-government and opposition groups.

Incidents of anti-LGBTQ actions followed the conflict after an art piece used in the protests was alleged to disrespect the Islamic values. Thousands of people took the streets to protest against the government. Instead of focusing on restoring order and establishing mutual respect and tolerance, the government chose to feed off of the continuous conflict and use it to conceal their decision to abolish the Istanbul Convention.

The Istanbul Convention is a Council of Europe treaty on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. In spite of the ongoing public support for the Istanbul Convention and in the middle of the current conflicts regarding the LGBTQ community, Turkey announced the end of its participation in the convention. The government and its conservative supporters justified the decision with their claims that the treaty undermines the familial values and normalizes homosexuality.

The phrases “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” are said

to be against the Turkish social understandings and construction of family. Therefore, conservatives portray the convention as a threat to the next generations.

Since then, many citizens have joined Bogazici University students in their efforts to change the presidential decision about the convention. Connecting the convention to homosexuality — a topic of long-standing debate in the Islamic community in Turkey — the government framed the abolishment of the convention to be an extension of the prevailing debate between conservative pro-government and opposition groups. Though a red herring, it worked — as it often does — and distracted the general public from the real gravity of the government’s actions that is to undermine women’s rights through abolishing the Istanbul Convention.

In reality, the Istanbul Convention establishes an international legal ground for preventing, prosecuting and eliminating any act of violence against women. Contrary to what opponents say, it seeks to strengthen family bonds and promote respect for gender equality and nondiscrimination for all genders. Though, there are Turkish bylaws aiming to combat violence against women, they haven’t been successful enough for years with many instances of amnesty to related crimes. It has always been a struggle to exist as a woman in Turkey knowing the ignorance against the atrocities toward women. However, as of March 20, any international ground for fighting for women’s lives has been reduced to nothingness.

Today, writing this column, I feel ashamed that I have to advocate for something that is righteous in and of itself. There can be no valid argument for abolishing a treaty which seeks to ameliorate the already disgraceful situation of women’s rights in a country. Last year, at least 300 women were killed and 171 women were found dead under terrible conditions. This means that at least one woman was murdered specifically because of their gender every single day of 2020, on average, in Turkey. According to data obtained from UNWomen, approximately 40 percent of

women suffer physical and/or sexual violence from their partners. There is much more statistical evidence that can be presented but even the loss of one woman is enough to see the significance of this treaty. Abolishment of the Istanbul Convention now serves as a battleground for the fight between conservative and liberal groups. But there cannot be a battleground for this: The only fight should be against domestic violence. It is an unacceptable debate while we have numbers, facts and just one reality.

Our past may have been full of examples that celebrated patriarchal ideologies. Misogyny may have been tolerated in the past.

However, today in the midst of the 21st century, we have to take actions that combat the mistakes that inhibited or reversed social progress. Progress can only be achieved if we can change perspectives against certain long-standing ideas.

With this fact in mind, governments have to take exemplary actions that promote respect among all. If administrators are not on our side, then who will be? How are we going to seek justice when someone rushes into a building and shoots a woman just because of his obsessive mind?

In my country, justice has lost its meaning. For so long, it meant much less than it should have, but today it deprives women from their right to live and to fight for each other. Watching the countless women march for their lives, I feel appalled by anyone who has caused this and anyone who can have a slightest bit of justification for it. As a Turkish woman, I am heartbroken that my country is associated with such a disgrace. More importantly, I am heartbroken that I am scared to go back because the Istanbul Convention doesn’t save Turkish lives anymore. Fear is what suppressed women for thousands of years, but today has to be different. I might be scared but I will not acquiesce.

We will read, talk and write about this. We will live, we will live to fight another day.

DILGE BUKSUR is a first year in Saybrook College. Contact her at dilge.buksur@yale.edu .

GUEST COLUMNIST DENIZ INCE

Beneath the sea’s surface Content warning: This article contains mentions of mental health treatment, some discussion of eating disorders — without specific numbers or health details — and brief references to campus suicide.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call 1-800-273-8255.

To talk with a counselor from Yale Mental Health and Counseling, schedule a session here and also here.

On-call counselors are available at any time: call (203) 432-0290. *** s I sit writing, I am looking out onto the Bosporus, the twinkling reflections of sunlight on the water forming a shimmering, hypnotizing barrier between me and the Asian continent. It’s the first sunny day after weeks characterized by rain and gloom — seems fitting.

I was particularly affected by Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum’s ’24 passing and found myself incapable of writing this until now. We, Yale, as a community mourned her death both individually and collectively while reflecting on the circumstances that led to such a traumatic incident. It prompted my own introspection on the past year, which, for me, has been characterized by a worsening of and reckoning with my own depression. There was a time when I, like Rachael, felt there was little choice but to escape. I was fortunate enough that mine was only an escape from the country.

For me, leaving the United States felt like a temporary, self-imposed exile. At the time, all I knew was that I needed to get

A

out, though I didn’t know where I would send myself or for how long. Now, watching the Bosporus, I feel I was carried by the sea, the current determining my destination. It brought me toward a reconciliation with my family’s, and ultimately my own, culture. I remain at the sea’s mercy, floating idly until it decides to whisk me off again.

This metaphor is too poetic, too passive. In many instances, people impose their will on the sea. Between 1986 and 1995, 63 individuals committed suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Bosporus. In the United States, the Golden Gate Bridge is notorious for this exact reason.

On stormy days, it’s easy to view the sea as an antagonist. A period of seemingly never-ending grief began a week ago, both in Istanbul and throughout the Yale community. Now, the skies have cleared, and the sea reflects it; we have been left without a trace of the past days’ vehement lassitude.

How can it be that what lies underneath does not taint the surface? How is it that the violence of the waves has completely simmered to soft, free-flowing waters?

The Bosporus always shows traces of peril, even on days as beautiful as today. Upon closer inspection one can witness the chaotic abruptness with which the currents flow, change direction and stop. On the waterfront, we see man’s destructive influence on the waterway in the form of old bottles and used condoms camouflaged by the swarm of dead jellyfish. These blemishes on the otherwise unsullied sur-

face only become apparent as the distance to the sea decreases and the relationship with the sea draws closer.

As a lover of the sea — my namesake — how can I reconcile its malevolence? Must the distressing aspects of its nature defile its beauty?

These elements exist as a more accurate portrayal of the sea’s true nature. The same holds true for Yale. Yale boasts what Mark Twain called “the most beautiful street in America,” award-winning professors and an environment designed to allow for individual and academic growth. Yet within all its greatness there exist points of sorrow, many more than will be acknowledged. It is these that define Yale’s truth just as much as the grandeur associated with the school.

In the coming weeks, the world may forget of the tragedy that was Rachael’s passing. Perhaps the world has already forgotten.

As Yale students and organizations work to rectify our mental health system, it is up to all of us as members of the Yale community to hold on to Rachael’s memory. Her story, its own current, has unexpectedly stopped. The rest of us must carry those waters.

As the sun sets behind me, it embraces the Asian shoreline with a soft, warm, golden glow.

The Bosporus now turns a lighter blue, reflecting the soft yellows and greens of the homes and leafy patches above. It is still beautiful.

It is still sorrowful.

DENIZ INCE is a rising sophomore in Ezra Stiles College. Contact her at deniz.ince@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 3

“In a way, we are magicians. We are alchemists, sorcerers and wizards. We are a very strange bunch. But there is great fun in being a wizard.” BILLY JOEL AMERICAN MUSICIAN

Yale faculty salaries rank low compared to peers

BY ROSE HOROWITCH STAFF REPORTER While Yale’s academic departments frequently snag the top spots in national rankings, salaries in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have fallen behind Yale’s peers.

The gap is widest in the science and engineering departments, where Yale has lost considerable ground over the last decade.

Every two years, a Committee on the Economic Status of Faculty assesses how faculty salaries at the University compare to Yale’s peers. CESOF plans to release its report later this spring, but its last report published in 2018 showed that since 2008, Yale’s average full-professor salaries in the biological sciences, physical sciences and engineering had fallen by seven percent relative to the University’s peers, compared to a loss of three and four percent in the humanities and social sciences, respectively.

Assistant professors’ salaries had also fallen by about seven percent compared to Yale’s peers.

Last month, CESOF provided preliminary findings to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate. The data showed that Yale’s salaries in science and engineering have not made up significant ground since CESOF’s 2018 report. In interviews with the News, six professors expressed their thoughts on the state of faculty salaries.

“It’s a great job and it’s awesome to be in the FAS,” said Valerie Horsley, an associate professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology. “But at the same time, it’s just really discouraging to know that you’re not getting paid as much as if you were at Princeton.”

About a year ago, University Provost Scott Strobel told the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate that he saw a relative gap had emerged in Yale’s FAS faculty salaries in comparison to a small number of the University’s peers. “The disparity didn’t come about in a year; it happened over a long period of time. In the same way, it cannot be fixed in a year,” said Strobel, who took over as university provost just over a year ago.

“I have made a commitment to bridge that gap,” Strobel told the News. He said he has committed to increasing the pool of resources available for FAS faculty salary raises but declined to specify an amount or timeline.

The 2018 CESOF report found that raising the average salary by six percent would have cost about $15 million, or only 0.6 percent of the total expenses of Yale’s Central Campus.

Salary discrepancy At the FAS Senate meeting at the end of February, CESOF presented the trajectory of Yale’s salaries compared to a group of its peer institutions. Due to confidentiality rules, the University cannot specify which schools it compares

salaries with, but the list contains universities “similar to” Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Chicago, according to the 2018 report.

Paul Van Tassel, a professor of chemical and environmental engineering, said that as he understands it, Yale at one time had one of the highest average faculty salaries from among its peer institutions, but now is closer to “the middle of the pack.” In the case of science and engineering, Yale may be closer to the bottom, Van Tassel said.

“At Yale we don’t really aspire to be the middle of the top group,” Van Tassel said. “We aspire to be the best.”

Professor of mechanical engineering and materials science Alessandro Gomez said that individual faculty members can compare their salaries with those offered at state schools, as the salaries are available publicly online.

But Yale’s collective data is not publicly available anywhere.

According to the February FAS Senate meeting minutes, up until 2018 the gap in salaries between Yale and its “peers” in the biological and physical sciences and engineering has widened “consistent[ly] with no major [salary] upturn.” By contrast, the administrative efforts to boost salaries in the social sciences were “significant,” according to the minutes. Since the last CESOF report two years ago, the science salary discrepancy has remained largely unchanged, Horsley said in an interview.

CESOF uses salary data from three sources. One is the American Association of University Professors. This data is current and public, and shows that there was a smaller relative increase in Yale’s salaries compared to its peers up to 2017, but that Yale has since gradually lessened the gap, though it is still more than seven percentage points. The AAUP data shows the average salary by rank in universities, and includes all professional schools but the School of Medicine. The data, while current, does not give an FAS-specific picture.

To look at the FAS specifically, CESOF also uses data from the Association of American Universities Data Exchange. This data has a lag of two years, but provides information on the specific departmental level. The AAUDE data shows that up until 2018, science salaries at Yale were consistently declining compared to peers.

According to the meeting minutes, CESOF Chair Costas Arkolakis said there was not a significant effort to bridge the divide. Arkolakis declined to comment for the article, citing CESOF’s ongoing work.

There is a difference between being an FAS faculty member in the sciences and an FAS faculty member in the humanities or social sciences, Horsley said. Science faculty essentially run small businesses, managing a staff of researchers and writing

MARISA PERYER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

According to the 2018 CESOF report, Yale’s average full-professor salaries have, relative to its peers, fallen in the last decade. grants year-round on top of teaching classes, serving on committees and advising undergraduates, she added.

Van Tassel said he thinks the administration is aware of the disparities and wants to pay Yale’s faculty as well as their counterparts at other top institutions.

For the 2018-19 academic year, the most current publicly-available data, among full professors, Yale ranks only below Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Chicago for the highest salaries. But for associate professors, Yale’s ranking falls to 10th. For assistant professors, Yale comes in at 12th among private, four-year universities.

How salaries are set Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives Pericles Lewis said that the makeup of faculty salaries depends on a variety of factors.

For example, some fields generally pay better than others do, and some universities have to pay faculty higher salaries due to the cost of living in the areas around them.

Additionally, people hired by Yale when they are farther along in their careers often have much higher salaries.

CESOF’s 2018 report showed that FAS faculty hired with tenure earn an average of 8.5 percent more than faculty hired without tenure who ascended while at Yale.

Yale used to hire primarily senior faculty who were well-established in their careers, Van Tassel said.

Now, it hires more junior faculty and promotes them from within, which generally leads to lower salaries than when hiring a senior faculty member from another institution. There are benefits to having younger faculty, including more energy and a greater desire to prove themselves — but Yale has to take active steps to counteract lower salaries, he added.

Within Yale’s FAS, faculty report their yearly activity to their department chairs, who then might recommend a raise to the upper administration. The activity report

includes teaching and research achievements, as well as university service. These raises are almost always modest — only a few percentage points or less, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science Corey O’Hern said. He could not comment on what specific achievements and activities qualify for a given raise, as faculty don’t typically receive such feedback.

Faculty salaries play an important role in retention, Van Tassel said. Successful faculty members become very visible around the time they earn tenure, and other universities often make attractive offers, he added.

Three of Van Tassel’s colleagues were poached in this way from his department over the last five years, although he does not know the extent to which the economics of the offers were deciding factors, he said. According to Van Tassel, Yale can be in a better position to retain top faculty by maintaining competitive faculty salaries.

Professor of earth and planetary sciences David Bercovici said the salary disparity primarily affects recruitment, morale and retention. Faculty know they are working for the second-wealthiest university in the world, but that they are paid less than some of their peers are, Bercovici explained.

Questions of transparency While CESOF is made up of Yale’s faculty, professors outside of the committee do not have access to data on faculty salaries, only the aggregate versions released in reports. At its Feb. 18 meeting, members of the FAS Senate called for more transparency around the issue.

Gomez, who serves on the FAS Senate’s Faculty Advancement Committee, was one such professor.

He initially asked that faculty have greater access to the information, but was told that Yale’s administration — and administrators at peer institutions — are legally bound not to divulge the information. Recog-

nizing the legal constraints, he has since stopped asking, he said.

Yale’s Office of Institutional Research shares aggregate data from the Association of American Universities Data Exchange and from the Consortium on Financing Higher Education with CESOF. The data allows the committee to see the ratio of Yale’s average FAS salary compared to the average FAS salary in a set of peer institutions along departmental and school lines. The data from the two sources is confidential, and governed by strict rules as to how much information can be shared with CESOF or in a public report.

But Bercovici said that rules around sharing information frequently change, he said, and the rationale for keeping salaries confidential was “simply to keep you and us in the dark.”

“Specifically, imagine you are negotiating a salary for a new job; having no idea what to shoot for keeps you at a severe disadvantage in the negotiation,” he wrote in an email to the News. “Low-balling new hires is a way of keeping costs down. This is true everywhere, not just Yale.”

Horsley said she has asked administrators for more information about salaries, but was told that departments are small enough that if she were given that information, some faculty would then be able to determine each others’ individual salaries. But in Yale’s medical school, when faculty get their annual salary letter, it includes the range of salaries among their department members with similar positions, she said.

“I think that is something that could be helpful in kind of understanding where your salary sits compared to other people,” Horsley said. “At the moment, it’s just like a vacuum. I have no idea.”

The FAS Senate began meeting in the 2015-16 academic year.

Contact ROSE HOROWITCH at rose.horowitch@yale.edu .

Food entrepreneurship interest soars despite pandemic

DOMINIQUE CASTANHEIRA/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The Food Business Accelerator’s annual Pitch Day was held as a virtual webinar for local food entrepreneurs.

BY DOMINIQUE CASTANHEIRA STAFF REPORTER The New Haven-based Food Business Accelerator program held its annual Pitch Day on April 1 — showcasing the business ideas of food entrepreneurs to community members and potential investors.

Pitch Day marked the culmination of a 12-week training program for restaurant entrepreneurs, created through a partnership between CitySeed, a nonprofit organization that seeks to provide local food to New Haven residents, and Col-

lab New Haven, which serves Connecticut entrepreneurs. The FBA program helps early-stage food entrepreneurs build their businesses. It is open to all Connecticut residents, though the program recruits heavily in New Haven. FBA received a record level of applications for the 2021 cohort. The accepted 2021 FBA ventures include catering, food product lines and food truck businesses.

“During a time like COVID I think Pitch Day is a moment of hope for the community,” said Caroline Tanbee Smith, co-direc-

tor of Collab. “It’s an event that shows the resilience and the creativity of residents in Connecticut who are audacious enough to try to start something that makes an impact on the community that they know and love.”

Smith said that Pitch Day is a confidence-building moment for the entrepreneurs, many of whom have never presented their business before. She added that she believes that the event plays an active role in building a culture of entrepreneurship in New Haven.

Over 175 people registered to attend this year’s virtual Pitch Day webinar, which featured the program’s 10 ventures. Two of the ventures featured Spanish language-predominant owners and thus presented through interpreters in Spanish. Local entrepreneurs, including those of Je T’aime Cupcakes and Cocktails, which serves both alcoholic and nonalcoholic cupcakes, and EatUp LLC, which promises Italian-inspired soul food, made their pitch to those in attendance.

For the entrepreneurs, presenting their businesses came after months of preparation. Since January, teams have attended workshops, participated in individualized coaching sessions with members of the Collab team and

utilized free commercial kitchen space to build their business plans. The FBA program also covered the costs for entrepreneurs to take a ServSafe safety training and certificate program, which is required to run a food business.

Through its free offerings, the FBA program seeks to remove barriers to food entrepreneurship. “[FBA] is a great opportunity to come together, find young entrepreneurs, and try to help connect them with resources so they can get started,” said Steve Fontana, New Haven’s deputy director of economic development.

As part of the program, the FBA program matched every venture with a mentor. Poreyah Benton, owner of the vegan food truck Vegan Ahava, launched her truck through the Food Business Accelerator program in 2018-2019. Benton told the News she worked closely with her mentors, owners of mobile coffee shop The Jitter Bus. Despite the pandemic, the FBA program has seen interest in food entrepreneurship rise — applications for the 2021 cohort were higher than ever before, according to executive director of CitySeed Cortney Renton. Renton attributed this rise in interest to the slow pandemic-era economy, which has specifically reduced jobs for people

of color, low-income residents and women — communities she said the group was designed to support.

Smith agreed. “Given a scarcity of jobs, entrepreneurship is potentially a really exciting pathway because it gives individuals the freedom to try to start something,” she said.

Renton said that a strong sense of community has formed among this year’s cohort, a development she deemed important in an industry that could otherwise be isolating.

She pointed to the inter-cohort collaboration that has already sprung up, such as the businesses supporting one another on social media.

As the ventures finish the FBA program, they remember what brought them to entrepreneurship in the first place.

“I love how food brings people together, makes people smile and changes communities,” Brian Burkett Thompson, co-owner of EatUp, said during the Pitch Day webinar.

The Food Business Accelerator receives support from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce and Yale Community for New Haven Fund.

Contact DOMINIQUE CASTANHEIRA at dominique.castanheira@yale.edu .

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“Beauty is a fading flower / Truth is but a wizard's tower / Where a solemn death-bell tolls / And a forest round it rolls.” ALFRED NOYES ENGLISH POET

Yale admits 2,169 students to class of 2025

LOUIE LU/PRODUCTION & DESIGN EDITOR

Yale College admissions statistics from 2016-2021.

ADMISSIONS FROM PAGE 1 nications at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. 41,599 applicants were denied admission, and 2,107 applications were either incomplete or withdrawn.

Those admitted to the class of 2025 will be joined by an additional 336 students who were originally admitted to the class of 2024 but chose to postpone their matriculation for one year.

Approximately 20 percent of the class of 2024 elected to defer admissions for a year and join the class of 2025 — a significant

increase from the 3 to 4 percent of students who typically elect to take a gap year prior to matriculation.

Despite this increase, the admissions office did not extend fewer offers of admissions to those who applied during the 2020-21 cycle.

“I am very grateful to the University leaders who approved our plan to offer admission to the same number of students this cycle as in a typical year,” Quinlan said.

In early December, Yale admitted 72 students through QuestBridge National College Match — a nonprofit organization that matches low-income students

with selective colleges and universities. In mid-December, Yale offered admission to 837 students out of a record-high 7,939 early action applicants.

In the regular decision round of applications, for which decisions were released Tuesday, Yale admitted 1,332 students out of a pool of 38,966 applicants, marking a 3.42 percent regular acceptance rate.

Despite the significant increase in applications this year, Yale continued to evaluate applications with the same “careful and contextual” manner as in previous

years, Quinlan said. To account for the increase, admissions officers devoted more total hours to reading applications. Due to the pandemic, much of the process was conducted online rather than in person: All student interviews were virtual, and the admissions committee met virtually to deliberate application decisions.

Upon admission, students will take part in virtual recruitment activities rather than the typical on-campus Bulldog Days. The Office of Undergraduate Admissions will be hosting a “Bulldog Days of April,” which will include

video panels, master classes and opportunities for admitted students to connect with one another.

“There is no true substitute for visiting campus, but the spirit and warmth of the Yale community come[s] through loud and clear in every virtual event we host,” said Ashleigh Corvi, director of recruitment and senior assistant director of admissions in the press release.

Students will have until May 3 to reply to Yale’s offer of admission.

Contact AMELIA DAVIDSON at amelia.davidson@yale.edu .

YLS removes Chua from small group leaders list In a 2019 letter from Chua to affected parties obtained by the News, Chua wrote to express her “deep regret for anything [she] said and did in [her] interactions with students that might have impacted any students negatively,” acknowledging that she “can be unguarded or unfiltered.”

SARA TABIN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

YLS removed Chua's name from the list of small group leaders on the YLS academic affairs website and then added Forman.

CHUA FROM PAGE 1 tinued hosting private dinner parties with current Law School students and prominent members of the legal community. Three days later, Chua was removed from the list of professors who will lead small groups, which are intimate groups of around 15 first-year law students led by a professor at the Law School, for the 2021-22 academic year.

“While we cannot comment on the existence of investigations or complaints, the Law School and the University thoroughly investigate complaints regarding violations of University rules and the University adjudicates them whenever it is appropriate to do so,” Gerken wrote in a statement to the News. “Faculty misconduct has no place at Yale Law School. It violates our core commitments and undermines all the good that comes from an environment where faculty respect and support students. The Law School has a set of clearly articulated norms governing student-faculty interactions and is committed to enforcing them.”

The News spoke with seven Law School students and alumni, all of whom were granted anonymity due to fear of professional retribution, about Chua’s alleged misconduct and the terms of her punishment.

They all emphasized the immense

power and influence that Chua holds in the legal community and at Yale, including her prior service on a clerkship committee that helps law students secure their first jobs in the field.

Eleven students independently reached out to the News highlighting their positive experiences with Chua, particularly noting her efforts to support her students and encourage a diversity of opinion in classroom discussion.

Allegations of misconduct Chua and Rubenfeld first came under public scrutiny in September 2018 when they reportedly told female law students that they needed to look and dress a certain way to attain clerkships for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90.

Rubenfeld is currently serving a two-year suspension from the Law School following a University Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct investigation into allegations of verbal harassment, unwanted touching and attempted kissing in the classroom and at his home.

Students have since called for Rubenfeld’s permanent removal and demanded greater transparency about the findings of the sexual misconduct investigation into him, but University President Peter Salovey has not released any specifics about Rubenfeld’s case.

A report published in October by students from two groups at the Law School — Yale Law Women and the YLS Title IX Working Group — details a timeline of the case against Rubenfeld, which begins in September 2008 with a report of the “monthly soirees” held at Chua and Rubenfeld’s household. The report also reveals that Rubenfeld’s small group was reassigned in the fall of 2015 after an “informal investigation” from the Law School into his behavior in the classroom and at his house.

Gerken’s 2019 letter reveals that Law School alumni have brought forward allegations that Chua drank heavily with YLS students and remarked inappropriately on both students and faculty.

One recent Law School graduate told the News that she witnessed Chua and Rubenfeld “deliberate” on students’ appearances, private relationships and other topics during dinner parties that she attended at their house.

“Having been on the receiving end of that behavior, I know personally that it is not always welcome, and that it is not all in good fun,” the recent graduate wrote to the News. “They purport to be provocateurs, but in fact they’re just bullies. But, if you want Chua’s help — and she often touts how much she can help marginalized students — then you play by her rules.”

Chua’s private punishment Gerken outlined the terms of Chua’s punishment in her 2019 letter to Chua.

In the letter, Gerken explains that Chua would not teach any required courses — which include small groups — for the 2020-21 academic year and would not resume teaching required courses until the Law School is “assured that the kind of misconduct alleged will not occur.”

Chua also agreed to a “substantial” financial penalty, the amount and nature of which remains unclear.

The letter also explained that “under [Gerken’s] deanship,” Chua would not serve on the clerkship committee, which helps Law School students secure judicial clerkships.

Chua told the Guardian in August that she voluntarily gave up this role and that it was a “pleasure to step back” because she “never wanted to be on the committee.”

Additionally, Chua also agreed “on her own initiative” to stop drinking with her students and socializing with them outside of class and office hours, according to the letter.

The Law School declined to comment on the terms of Chua’s punishment.

A broken agreement: The small group controversy After not having led a small group since reaching the 2019 agreement, Chua was publicly renamed a leader of a first-year small group on March 22, according to an email obtained by the News outlining the application process for next year’s Coker Fellows — third-year law students assigned to each small group.

The small group is a defining part of the first-year experience at the Law School, with students in the same group attending all the same classes in their first semester and relying on the professor for initial mentorship, academic

advice and professional connections. Students form strong relationships with their small group leader and often interact with the professor outside of regular class and office hours, according to law students that spoke with the News.

On March 26, multiple law students met with Law School administrators to discuss Chua’s appointment to lead a small group.

The students alleged in the meeting that Chua has continued inviting current Law School students to her and Rubenfeld’s house for dinner parties — despite having agreed in 2019, according to Gerken’s letter, to cease drinking and socializing with students in all out-of-class settings.

After the meeting, a student submitted to Law School administrators a written affidavit detailing allegations that Chua hosted law students at her household for dinner on multiple occasions this semester, as well as documented communication between themself and other law school students who acknowledged having gone to Chua’s household. The News has reviewed these communications and has confirmed their receipt by Law School administrators, who declined to comment on the communications or allegations and referred the News to Gerken’s statement.

The following Monday, on March 29, the Law School publicly reversed Chua’s appointment when they removed her name from the list of small group leaders on the Law School academic affairs website and subsequently added law professor James Forman Jr. LAW ’92. Forman did not respond to a request for comment.

Upon hearing that Chua had lost her small group, at least eight law students have sent emails to Gerken and other Law School administrators voicing their support for Chua, according to emails forwarded to the News.

Gerken has encouraged students who have experienced misconduct to reach out to Associate Dean Ellen Cosgrove, who oversees the offices of student affairs and career development and is the Law School Title IX coordinator.

Contact JULIA BROWN at julia.k.brown@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

FROM THE FRONT

“Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.” J. R. R. TOLKIEN ENGLISH WRITER

NHPS high schools begin hybrid model REOPENING FROM PAGE 1 the initial reintroduction of district students into classrooms. On Jan. 19, NHPS elementary school students, some special education students and immigrant English language learners in the New Arrivals program were allowed back to schools for hybrid learning. The same opportunity was afforded to middle school students on March 4.

At Cooperative Arts & Humanities Magnet School, a magnet school on College and Crown streets better known as Co-op, students and teachers alike reflected on the highly anticipated partial high school reopening.

“You can’t even remotely put a price on being in an actual learning space,” said Matt Chasen, a music teacher at Co-op. “For students in high school in New Haven to have been out of the classroom for a year, it definitely was time for them to be able to come back.”

Under the district’s reopening plan for high school students, parents have the option to opt their students in to or out of in-person hybrid learning. Students that opt in to in-person learning are placed into cohort A or B. Cohort A is allowed back to school for in-person learning on Mondays and Tuesdays, while students in cohort B have the same opportunity on Thursdays and Fridays. When it is not their day for in-person instruction, students remain at home and continue remote learning. At Co-op, cohort A includes students with last names beginning with the letters A-Lin and cohort B includes those with names from Lle-Z. According to Michele Sherban, director of research, assessment and evaluation for NHPS, as of Friday, 3,411 high school students out of 5,681 total opted into the hybrid system. That figure amounts to more than 60 percent of all NHPS high school students. For middle and elementary school students, 8,790 out of 13,995 — or about 62.8 percent — have chosen hybrid learning.

Co-op U.S. history teacher Ryan Boroski added his voice in support of the return to in-person education. He told the News that students and teachers alike took human interaction for granted

CASSIDY ARRINGTON/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

According to the school’s website, about 65 percent of Co-op’s student body is from New Haven, with the other 35 percent coming from suburbs. prior to the pandemic, adding that it felt nice to be around his students in person on Monday.

Boroski told the News that only five students showed up in person for one of his Monday classes, and just two students for another. He estimated that between 20 and 25 of his students remained at home but connected virtually, including remoteonly students and hybrid students on a remote instruction day.

Chasen also taught in-person students and remote students simultaneously on Monday. He said that balancing the two pools of students will become easier over time but will always be different from traditional in-person instruction. He noted that he found himself thanking his students often for their patience as he adjusted to the hybrid learning model.

“You don’t have that ability to spell things out for [students] on the computer in the same way that you would if they were sitting in a

chair in front of you,” Chasen said.

“To have that ability with some of them, to look them in the eye and make those adjustments and make that more purposefully and meaning connection, that’s huge.”

For Lauriann Burt, a first-year student at Co-op, being in the classroom felt somewhat similar to being at home. She told the News that watching teachers instruct both the students in the classroom and online made learning complicated.

Today was Burt’s first opportunity to take a class in person at her school. She had visited the school before for a summer camp but had never sat in a classroom as an actual student.

According to Chasen, Burt’s experience is common among many of the first years at Co-op.

He said many of his first-year students were apprehensive about coming back at first because they had never interacted with their

new school in person. He praised both students and teachers for their resilience in coping with the virtual model for so long.

Aayu Adji, a senior, told the News that he came to classes in person on Monday because he missed being outside and interacting with his peers, an experience he could not get from virtual learning. He compared the return to in-person classes to “the first day of school” because he felt a similar level of confusion.

“We went back to school, but we didn’t really know what to do,” said Adji. “How do we make art or do work with [most people] still digital and only six people in the classroom?”

Phillip Honborg, a senior, said that only three students, including himself, were physically present in his jazz band class on Monday, while around 17 others logged in virtually. He compared his first day back to an episode of the 1950s science-fiction horror

TV show “The Twilight Zone,” describing it as “weird.”

“It’s jarring but it feels nice being back finally,” said Honborg. “Honestly, I was expecting disappointment but the teachers — I’ve got to hand it to them — are working hard for us.”

Honborg said that in-person attendance was “worth it” and described in-person learning as much better than the alternative: making eggs at home and listening to class halfheartedly. He also urged his peers to continue to trust in their teachers and school administrators during the shift to hybrid learning.

According to the school’s website, about 65 percent of Co-op’s student body is from New Haven, with the other 35 percent coming from suburbs.

Contact NATALIE KAINZ at natalie.kainz@yale.edu and CHRISTIAN ROBLES at christian.robles@yale.edu .

Chun and Hoffman announce changes to mental health systems

YASMINE HALMANE/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

YC³ will include eight new full-time staff members who will be affiliated with residential colleges and will support undergraduates.

MENTAL HEALTH FROM PAGE 1 include four college care clinicians and four community wellness specialists. College care clinicians are psychologists and licensed social workers available for drop-in support. Their offices will be near the residential colleges rather than in Yale Health. However, the clinicians are still a part of Yale Mental Health and Counseling staff, and meetings with them will be confidential.

On the other hand, the community wellness specialists will be available to work with students on “practical strategies for your overall well-being.” These specialists will eventually have offices in the residential colleges, and they will work with heads of colleges, deans, first-year counselors and peer liaisons, forming a part of each residential college’s support system.

“All eight YC³ clinicians and specialists expand the types and settings for mental health support and

make it easier and faster for you to get counseling,” reads the email from Chun and Hoffman. “You can turn to any of them, even if you are unsure which option is best for you. Along with their own services, the YC³ staff will provide a pathway if you are thinking about pursuing more formal, ongoing therapy through Mental Health and Counseling.”

The other major announcement in the email was that MHC would add six new full-time positions at its Lock Street location, totaling ten new clinicians. There are currently 33 clinicians employed.

While the formal launch for the YC³ initiative is scheduled for the next academic year, the program has already begun operations. According to the email, two college care clinicians and two community wellness specialists have been hired and are working this semester. While students have the option to meet with both the college care clinicians and the community wellness special-

ists virtually this semester, they may also meet with the community wellness specialists in person for socially distanced consultations outside.

According to Chun, both initiatives have been long in the works. According to the email, student groups and individual students have been providing feedback on the program in its early stages, and the program will continue to incorporate student feedback as its rollout continues.

“The University has been hearing from students for many years about the need to expand our mental health resources,” Chun told the News. “The expansion in MHC is something that they’ve been working on for a long time. They have continued to expand over the years, but this will be an even sharper expansion of their staff resources. The separate program of YC³ is something I have been working on for the past two years or so together with the college heads and deans, and also with students.”

The changes are a response to a significant increase in the number of students utilizing the services. Hoffman noted a nationwide increase in the number of students seeking mental health treatment over the past few years. At Yale, there has been a nearly 70 percent increase in the number of students seeking counseling since 2015.

About a third of Yale students seek treatment from MHC each year, compared to a national average of around 12 to 13 percent, Hoffman explained.

The Vice President’s Council — which consists of all the University vice presidents, University President Peter Salovey and Strobel — discussed student mental health at a late March meeting, particularly trying to ensure that Yale has the appropriate staffing levels and structures for responding to students’ mental health needs, Lewis said. He added that the University is “very concerned” about providing students with mental health services.

“The major aim of this plan is to decrease students’ wait time to begin treatment and to allow students seeking counseling to meet more often with their clinician,” Hoffman wrote in an email to the News.

But students who have been organizing for more comprehensive reform said that the changes — though a start — do not get to the root of the problem. Alicia Abramson ’24, of the group Mental Health Justice at Yale, said the University should hire many more counselors, including people who specialize in a broader array of mental illnesses. Yale should have enough counselors that every student can have an hourlong session with minimal intake time, she said.

Josie Steuer Ingall ’24, of the advocacy group Disability Empowerment for Yale, said that while it is good that Yale has increased its

counseling capacity, there are larger structural issues to overcome. The University is structured for students to overwork, she said, and “investment in medical infrastructure that is designed to placate us” can only do so much, Steuer Ingall wrote in an email to the News.

In regard to the YC³ program, Abramson raised concerns that the limited number of residential college counselors would not have the capacity to provide long-term care for students. Additionally, she said the community wellness specialists are not an adequate substitute for therapy.

“We don’t need ‘wellness coordinators’ who give us tools and breathing exercises,” Abramson wrote in an email to the News.

“We need actual, long-term mental health care. The wellness specialists are a band-aid solution to Yale’s completely inadequate mental health resources.”

Abramson added that the culture of productivity and resume-building endemic to Yale is “hugely detrimental” to students’ mental health. Students could change how extracurriculars are run to make them more accessible, Abramson wrote in an email to the News.

But she said the onus lies on the administration and Yale’s faculty to change their policies to prioritize mental health. An example is allowing clinicians to write academic excuses, instead of having students go through their residential college dean, she said.

According to the April 5 email, both new mental health resource initiatives were funded by the support of anonymous donors and the offices of the president and the provost.

Contact JULIA BIALEK at julia.bialek@yale.edu and ROSE HOROWITCH at rose.horowitch@yale.edu .

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

ARTS School of Art to host first virtual Open Studios event

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

BY ANNIE RADILLO STAFF REPORTER At midnight on April 10, the website for the first-ever virtual Yale School of Art MFA Open Studios will go live, allowing visitors to view work by MFA students and virtually enter their workspaces. Open Studios will run through April 11.

The Open Studios website will feature work by students studying in departments of painting and printmaking, graphic design, photography and sculpture, as well as information about students participating in the event. Visitors can attend drop-in hours hosted by students in specific studios along with other virtual events throughout the two-day event. The School of Art

public events calendar contains a developing schedule of events.

“It was kind of a matter of finding a way to present the students’ work in a manner that they wanted it to be presented in that public way, but also keeping to the ethos of Open Studios, which is very organic, and grassroots and student-led,” said Lindsey Mancini, a communications associate at the Yale School of Art and one of the Open Studio’s main organizers.

This virtual Open Studios comes after much discussion between Art School faculty and students about the best way to recreate the annual event, which is typically held in person.

After considering using their own public Art School website and other platforms on which to host Open Studios, the school’s faculty decided

to use Artlogic — a web platform that Mancini said has become popular for museums and galleries to display art virtually — for the event.

“It very much recreates the idea of a white cube in a virtual space,” Mancini said. “It just kind of presents the work and lets it speak for itself, which we knew our students were very interested in doing.”

After choosing the platform, Mancini said she turned to figuring out how to get all the students’ work up on the site. Ideally, she said every student would be allowed to manage their own presence on the platform. But because Artlogic limits the number of logins to a given site, Mancini has had to work with each student individually to build out their portion of the site.

Like in past years, participation in this year’s Open Studios is optional for MFA students.

Students who choose to participate have the opportunity to tailor their involvement according to their artistic needs. For example, some students will have custom viewing rooms for their art linked on the website, while others may feature a representative image along with basic background information about themselves.

This year, 60-70 percent of the Art School’s students will participate in Open Studios, and a third of them will offer Zoom drop-in hours.

“We really want students to engage in a way that feels comfortable to them and that best represents their work and their process,” said Sarah Stevens-Morling, the assistant dean for communications and digital media at the Art School and an organizer of the virtual Open Studios.

In addition to viewing artists’ work on the website, Open Studios attendees will have the opportunity to virtually watch students work in their studios by clicking a “Live on Zoom” link during the event. Other students will offer online studio visits by appointment.

Emma Safir ART ’21, who is studying painting, will be showcasing her work on the website and offering drop-in hours. She said offering these visits virtually has its upsides.

“I think it’s great that I get to keep my personal space mine,” Safir said. “When I’m tired, when it’s done, I just turn off Zoom. So, I have a kind of privacy that I wouldn’t have been afforded if it had been in person.”

But Safir added that showing her work online means losing out on the “phenomenological experience” of experiencing artwork in person.

On the back side of Safir’s paintings are painted colors, created so that their shadows reflect light. “In person, it looks like they’re emanating light from the back and radiating light from the front,” Safir said. But this effect is lost when her works are viewed as two-dimensional photos online.

Safir noted that some students may have chosen to abstain from participating in Open Studios because their work heavily relies on the phenomenological experience of viewing art, citing in particular the example of performance-based works.

Like Safir, Mancini emphasized that virtual drop-in hours allow students to retain their privacy and attend to their studios as “sacred spaces,” which is not always the case in in-person studio visits.

According to Mancini, hosting Open Studios online will make the event more accessible and encourage viewers from beyond New York City — the home of many past Open Studios visitors — to connect with MFA students.

The online platform will also allow students to leave their work on display for longer than in an in-person event. Because the Art School will continue to pay for the Artlogic website for the next year, graduates and students alike can share their Open Studios page link when applying for art programs or jobs in the future.

Contact ANNIE RADILLO at annie.radillo@yale.edu .

Artspace opens three exhibitions centering on W.E.B. Du Bois’ works

COURTESY OF ARTSPACE

BY ANNIE RADILLO STAFF WRITER On March 26, an exhibition inspired by civil rights activist and writer W.E.B. Du Bois called “W.E.B. Du Bois, Georgia, and his Data Portraits” went on view at Artspace New Haven. It is accompanied by two exhibitions featuring Du Bois-inspired works — “Light of Progress”

by Theaster Gates and “In a Heartbeat” by Dana Karwas, who is also the director of Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. All exhibitions will remain on view until June 26.

The exhibition about Du Bois includes a series of data visualization works created by the activist about socioeconomic conditions facing Black Americans in Georgia. Gates’ exhibition — composed of two works in neon lights — is displayed along with these 30 data pieces in the gallery’s main space, while Karwas’ exhibition features three

sculptural works. Karwas’ pieces are inspired by “The Princess Steel,” a piece of speculative fiction written by Du Bois. “[Du Bois’] data visualizations dealt with information from the late-19th and early-20th centuries, but the histories explored within are ongoing to say the least,” said Simon Ghebreyesus ’22, gallery operations assistant at Artspace. “The systems and institutions he centered on continue to serve as sites of oppression today, and the four categories we divided the works into — migration, family, work and property — still occupy contemporary consciousness.”

Ghebreyesus said that Lisa Dent, executive director of Artspace, approached him last semester with a book featuring a collection of 60 visualizations created by Du Bois in 1900.

Dent proposed displaying some of these pieces alongside Gates’

neons. Ghebreyesus and Dent then together selected pieces by Du Bois and Gates.

These portraits trace socioeconomic conditions such as income, marital status and property ownership among African-Americans in the 20th century. They represent a simplified, stylized and modernist approach to data representation with numbers represented though colors and bar graphs of different shapes.

“They’re really, really cool,” said Tina Oyanguren ’23, an intern at Artspace. “[Du Bois] was one of the first to do these stylized data visualizations, and just the information you learn from looking at them is kind of mind-blowing.”

While Du Bois’ data works include text and numbers, Gates’ neons instead rely entirely on shape and color as a pared-down, contemporary reimagining of Du Bois’ work.

Ghebreyesus said his favorite work on view by Du Bois is a graph depicting the income and expenditure of 150 Black families in Atlanta. He said the piece uses an “inviting color palette” that differs from other works in the series.

“It features black-and-white photographs of two people and some houses,” Ghebreyesus said.

“It’s a small detail, but it really embodies the phrase ‘data portrait’ as a descriptor of the work.

It offers an intimate and revealing glimpse of these families and their everyday concerns.”

Karwas’ three sculptures are titled “Counter-Curve,” “Orbital Axis” and “Arc of Near.” These pieces are a product of Karwas’ pedagogy and personal research inspired by themes explored in Du Bois’ “The Princess Steel.” In the story, the protagonist, Hannibal Johnson, creates an invention that allows small moments to

be integrated into “the Great Near,” or the sum of all the usually unnoticed moments in a person’s life that might nevertheless add up to something deeply significant.

Karwas’ sculptural works are forms of visualizing these compiled events. Karwas mapped her own heartbeat for two of her works and modeled a hand gesture for the third.

“What the past year has painfully reminded us all is that any or all moments can be consequential, and the aggregate of them has its own distinct significance,” Karwas said. “I would hope the all three parts of the exhibition gives people the space to consider their own small moments, deliberately and carefully.”

Visitors can visit Artspace from Wednesday to Saturday between 12 p.m. and 6 p.m. and are not required to make prior appointments.

Contact ANNIE RADILLO at annie.radillo@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

ARTS YCBA lecture discusses modern architecture of New Haven in “Model City”

BY MARIA ANTONIA SENDAS STAFF REPORTER On March 31, the Yale Center for British Art hosted scholar Marisa Angell Brown, assistant director for programs at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritages at Brown University GRD ’14. Brown presented a lecture titled “Model City” — focused on modern architecture and leading architects in New Haven in the 1970s — as part of the Center’s “at home” online series.

The lecture was moderated by Michael J. Crosbie, professor of architecture at the University of Hartford. Brown’s lecture highlighted two low-income housing projects commissioned by Mayor Richard C. Lee in the 1960s: Crawford Manor and Church Street South, which was demolished in 2018.

“These stories have relevance today for a few reasons,” Brown told the audience. “[They mark] a period of radical cultural and political change which has to do with the racial injustice and inequity we see now.”

Brown is a cultural historian and curator interested in architecture, preservation, public art and spatial justice. Brown is particularly concerned with questions relating to spatial justice and systems of preservation and heritage: What gets to be preserved? And who gets to decide?

Throughout the talk, Brown emphasized the complex and lost histories of demolished sites. Brown prompted the audience to think about how architecture, public art and design of public spaces can support or mitigate change.

According to YCBA Director Courtney J. Martin, Brown was responsible for creating the “Urban Museum of Modern Architecture: New Haven” when she was a doctoral student in Yale’s History of Art department. The project designated New Haven as “a city of buildings,” and featured seven buildings — including the YCBA — which had been designed during New Haven’s period of urban renewal.

Martin told the News that since 2019, the YCBA has been dedicated in its attempts to connect with the city of New Haven. This talk presents another opportunity to explore the center’s relation with the city.

“Located in the final building designed by Louis I. Kahn, the center is a focal point for modernist architecture,” Martin said. “This conversation is the first in a series on architecture and museum design.

[Brown] is the perfect person to kick off this initiative.”

According to Jane Nowosadko, head of public programs at the YCBA, the center is “one of the great examples of modernist architecture and museum design.” Due to its location in the heart of New Haven, Nowosadko said it makes sense for the YCBA to engage with issues of

CREATIVE COMMONS

urban life in its programming. She added that the YCBA was the first museum in the country to include commercial entities in its building as a compromise with the city.

Martin said that New Haven is often “divided along economic lines.” She said she hopes the lecture enriches listeners’ understanding of New Haven’s socio-economic past and how it relates to architecture.

“I hope that those who may not be familiar with the distinguished architectural history of New Haven will come to know how the city’s approach to architecture has been a crucial component of its

socio-economic outlook,” Martin said. “I also hope that Dr. Brown may help us to better understand the city’s past, so that we can find ways to contribute meaningfully to a path for the city’s future.”

The center’s “at home” series features guests that discuss a wide range of topics and in very different ways. Nowosadko told the News that the center is now inviting different voices to participate in its public programs and provide rich perspectives.

Nowosadko added that the center is expanding its “at home” series to include film makers such as Shi-

rin Neshat and fashion designers like Grace Wales Bonner, Duro Olowu and Katharine Hamnett.

The center’s next “at home” event will host An-My Lê, a Vietnamese photographer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, in conversation with Mark Aronson, deputy director and chief conservator at the center, and Chitra Ramalingam, associate curator of photography at the center.

Contact MARIA ANTONIA SENDAS at mariaantonia.henriquessendas@yale. edu .

Yale School of Drama alumni reimagine Harry Potter with a transgender witch

BY MAIA DECKER STAFF REPORTER “How would a transgender student experience Hogwarts?”

Logan Ellis DRA ’20 and his friends asked themselves this question when assembling a Lego Harry Potter set during quarantine. Their ensuing conversation resulted in a stop-motion animation web series called “LEGO Harry Potter and the Transgender Witch” from Theatre Battery — a theater company Ellis founded in his hometown of Kent, Washington. At its core, the Lego-inspired series is fun and playful while drawing on themes of betrayal and alienation. “[The ‘Harry Potter’ universe] is a world that has so frequently been used in fan fiction circles,” Ellis said. “There’s a really interesting cross-section in the way that people during the pandemic are reverting to childhood comforts and then also this ongoing sense of betrayal and alienation that is taking place in the LGBTQ fandom.”

The web series follows a young transgender witch named Quincy Blueburger after she receives her letter to Hogwarts. Quincy, who is originally ecstatic about her status as a witch, soon finds that Hogwarts is not as welcoming for trans people.

In many ways, the web series is a way for the team to grapple with fans’ reactions to when author J.K. Rowling was accused of making anti-trans comments last year.

COURTESY OF THEATRE BATTERY

Ellis said that he hopes that this series will be a way to invite people “to imagine, a little bit deeper, the realities of [the world of ‘Harry Potter’].”

He hopes the series will raise questions about LGBTQ experiences in major institutions with conservative histories.

Quincy is voiced by Donato Fatuesi, an activist in UTOPIA Washington, a grassroots organization that aims to create safe and welcome spaces in Washington for queer Pacific Islanders.

Fatuesi said that even after the project’s completion, she hopes Quincy Blueburger will continue to live on as a new unofficial character in “Harry Potter.”

For writer and voice actor Mia Fowler ’20, the series helped her grapple with questions about inclusivity in “Harry Potter.”

When Fowler was in elementary school, she said her school

librarian refused to believe that Fowler, as a Black student, was able to read the “Harry Potter” books. In response, Fowler’s grandmother purchased the series for her. Owing to this memory, the “Harry Potter” world has remained special for Fowler. Her grandmother now watches and enjoys the web series.

Fowler said that the fan fiction parody community has always been open to rewriting beloved childhood stories by including previously excluded groups.

The web series follows the original “Harry Potter” plot line, but with Quincy as the lead character. She starts Hogwarts’ first queer affinity group, called “Magical Queers,” and faces many of the same perils as the original characters — Harry Potter, Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger and others — did.

Yet for Quincy, the other main characters of Rowling’s story are bullies rather than the heroes that they are in the original series.

According to Ellis, the betrayal viewers should feel upon seeing their favorite characters mistreat Quincy emulates some LGBTQ individuals’ lived experiences.

Fatuesi agreed, saying that Quincy’s experiences are sometimes part of Fatuesi’s day-to-day life. Fatuesi reflected on one of these moments, when she lobbied for a bill to disallow insurance companies from denying coverage for trans people.

This bill has now passed and will soon travel to the governor’s desk.

Fatuesi said the series allows her to pursue theater both outside of and in tandem with the activist work she typically does.

She added that the series incited conversations about transgender youth with a close friend. Since her friend is a mother, Fatuesi said that the series has allowed her to better understand the experiences that transgender students face at school.

For some viewers, such as Fowler’s nonbinary sibling, the series has welcomed individuals previously excluded from the “Harry Potter” universe. But Ellis said that for others, the mix between the childhood aesthetic of Legos and the discussion of gender and identity has sparked hateful comments about transgender youth.

Ellis said that with the project, the creators are most passionate about “having fun and learning things along the way.”

The series has released five episodes, with more on the way.

Contact MAIA DECKER at maia.decker@yale.edu .

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Yale study uses fMRI to study attention in babies

BY BEATRIZ HORTA STAFF REPORTER Researchers in the Yale Department of Psychology measured activation in babies’ frontal lobes during attention exercises for the first time by using fMRI — a challenging technology to use with infants.

In a study published on March 16, the authors used fMRI — an imaging technique that detects blood responses to brain activation — to measure brain activity when infants paid attention to shapes on a screen. According to Cameron Ellis, a researcher in the lab of psychology professor Nicholas TurkBrowne and first author on the study, their lab is one of few in the world that performs fMRI in awake babies, as it is challenging to keep them in the scanner. According to Turk-Browne, before this study, there were only three published papers on the use of fMRI in awake infants. The authors found activation in the frontal lobe, an area usually assumed to be too immature in babies to be used in attention tasks.

“The research that we have done has shown that [the brain] may not be doing the exact same thing in babies and an adult and that’s what’s really exciting to me,” Tristan Yates, another author of the study, said. “When you take an adult-centric position might be missing some functions that are there.”

According to Yates, for a long time, scientists considered babies’ frontal lobes to be immature. This is because infants do not seem to have a lot of self-control, a trait that is typically associated with frontal lobe activation in the adult brain. However, she highlighted how the developing child’s brain could be using the frontal lobe for different purposes than older individuals’ brains.

Yates explained that through behavioral tasks, which measure changes in

behavior and are the standard practice in the field of child psychology, there is no way to determine what brain areas are activated. Scanning babies’ brains is a challenge, according to Ellis, but the team was able to overcome this obstacle using different techniques to keep the infants calm.

“The mother or father of the infant is always within arm’s reach at any one

sively proven that babies can attend to stimuli from a very young age, there is almost no knowledge of what brain areas are recruited during this process.

Turk-Browne explained that many aspects of cognition, such as memory retention, cognitive control and decision-making are usually thought to develop slowly over a long period of time. Since these processes are associ-

ANASTASIA SHILOV/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

time,” Ellis explained. The infants also lie in a “really comfortable bed” where they are not constrained in any way, unlike in typical adult fMRIs. According to the authors, one of the main motivations of the study was uncovering the many unknown processes that the infant brain uses in visual perception and attention. Ellis explained that while it has been exten-

ated with the frontal lobe, the common understanding in the field of psychology was the area’s development also spanned infancy and researchers would not observe frontal lobe activation in infants.

“We adopted the perspective that [the frontal lobe] might play an important role in infants even if this role differs from, or evolves into, other functions later in development when the

child is faced with different cognitive needs,” Turk-Browne wrote in an email to the News.

One of the goals of the study, Ellis said, was to “disentangle” the neural processes involved in goal-directed attention versus stimulus-driven attention. The former is a person’s ability to keep their attention focused on a task, while the latter happens when a stimulus from the environment grabs their attention.

Ellis explained that in adults, attention tasks are more likely to involve a mix of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. He explained that since the babies in the study were between three and 12 months of age, most of them did not show evidence of goal-directed attention. This fact enabled the researchers to focus simply on stimulus-driven attention.

According to Ellis, this study is part of a series of investigations that he has been working on that involve the imaging of infants’ brain activity. These studies look into cognitive functions such as learning, memory and visual capacities. He explained that there are other ongoing studies, including longitudinal studies, that will evaluate how brain function progresses over time in infants.

“The next steps for the attention project are understanding more goal directed attention and socially oriented attention,” Yates said. “There’s a lot of untapped questions about how infants’ brains work that we’re trying to investigate with our techniques and we’re excited to see where they go.”

The Turk-Browne Lab is located within the Department of Psychology at Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall.

Contact BEATRIZ HORTA at beatriz.horta@yale.edu .

Yale study introduces breakthrough bio-based plastic

BY SAM PANNER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER New research conducted by scientists at Yale, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland could help phase out traditional plastics.

Researchers at the Yale School of the Environment, the Biological Systems Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UMD have created a lignocellulosic bioplastic that is a promising alternative not just to plastics derived from petroleum but also to existing bioplastic materials. Research on the bioplastic’s properties, manufacturing process and environmental impacts are outlined in a study published on March 25 in the journal Nature Sustainability.

“This is a promising technology for circular economy and a great demonstration of industrial ecology approach,” Yuan Yao, professor of industrial ecology and sustainable systems at the Yale School of the Environment and one of the senior authors of the study, wrote in an email to the News.

Wood powder, a cheap wood processing residue, is the raw material that forms the basis of the bioplastic, according to the study.

To deconstruct the wood powder, which has a loose structure composed of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, the researchers used a deep eutectic solvent, or DES, specifically composed of choline chloride and oxalic acid.

In the paper, the researchers explained that they used a DES because of its biodegradable and recyclable properties.

The DES performs two functions: It dissolves the lignin, and it splits the cellulose from the wood cell walls into micro/nanofibrils, the paper explains. Then, it is possible to regenerate or “deposit” the lignin by adding water. Lignin is hydrophobic, or repelled by water, so when water is added, the lignin quickly regenerates from the DES and binds the micro/nanofibril network, yielding a lignin-cellulose “slurry,” according to the study.

The bioplastic is then formed from the slurry by way of a simple casting process.

“The modification of the lignin is the key,” UMD senior author and professor of materials science and engineering Liangbing Hu wrote in an email to the News.

The paper explains that the in-situ lignin regeneration process eliminates the need for the separation and isolation of the lignin and cellulose, a process that is costly and energy intensive. As a result, the bioplastic is inexpensive to produce. High manufacturing costs are a significant obstacle to the widespread adoption of bioplastics, according to the study, making this innovation an

important breakthrough. Furthermore, the in-situ lignin regeneration process can be performed for various types of materials, and the study found that lignocellulosic bioplastic can be made from grass, wheat straw or bagasse, in addition to wood.

The study found that the lignocellulosic bioplastic exhibited a high tensile strength of about 128 MPa. This figure means the material is stronger than two widely used plastic films: acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, and polyvinyl fluoride, or PVF. The bioplastic also demonstrated “excellent” water stability, a common weak point for other bioplastics derived from hydrophilic cellulose and hemicellulose. In one of the

timeters biodegraded completely after three months. The material was also placed in the grass outside for “several months,” where it again biodegraded completely, according to the paper. By contrast, the commonly used plastic polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, did not decompose at all in a similar environment over the course of three months.

The bioplastic can also be broken down by mechanical stirring and returned to its slurry state, from which it can be recycled. The DES used to create the slurry can also be recycled by saving the filtrate produced during processing and evaporating the water, the paper explains. The DES remains effective at deconstructing the wood even after being recycled several times.

The researchers also undertook a life-cycle assessment of the lignocellulosic bioplastic to determine its environmental impact, looking at factors such as the amount of electricity used during manufacturing. They found that it generally had a lower environmental impact than ABS, PVF and several other bioplastics.

“What is remarkable about the study is how the research team was able to address so many of the challenges that had previously frustrated other efforts to make conventional plastic waste more recyclable,” Marian Chertow, professor of industrial environmental management at the Yale School of the Environment and director of the Yale Center for Industrial Ecology, wrote in an email to the News. “Even when something sounds so promising there is always the question of how do we know that this new solution is better in environmental terms than other competing technologies.

The authors, therefore, chose to do a life-cycle assessment, led by Prof. Yuan Yao, who was able to make the comparisons and confirm the benefits of this bioplastic.”

Some questions remain about the scalability of the technology, according to Hu, although the study indicates that the manufacturing processes used to produce the bioplastic can be performed on a larger scale than in their experiment. Hu also suggested that future research might look at how the bioplastic can be produced in different shapes.

ANASTASIA SHILOV/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR “The [Yale] Center for Industrial Ecology is very proud of Dr. Yuan’s involvement in this study’s experiments the lignocellulosic bioplastic retained project, and we look forward to the next research steps on its shape without any fractures after spending 30 days sub- this bioplastic, and eventually seeing it scaled up and commerged in water. By contrast, a cellulose film submerged mercialized,” Chertow wrote. for the same amount of time disintegrated completely. The According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 27 bioplastic also exhibited good heat stability, with a thermal million tons of plastic were deposited in American landdegradation temperature of 357 degrees Celsius. fills in 2018.

In addition to being a strong material, the lignocellulosic bioplastic is highly biodegradable. The study found Contact SAM PANNER at that a sheet of the bioplastic buried at a soil depth of 5 censam.panner@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

NEWS

“I often get mistaken for Dumbledore. One wizard is very much like another.” IAN MCKELLEN ACTOR

After controversy, First Women testimonies to include attribution

COURTESY OF MARA LAVITT

More than 150 members of the first women cohort signed a letter protesting the anonymization of their accounts.

BY AMELIA DAVIDSON STAFF REPORTER The First Women Written History Project — a collection of written testimonies from the “first women at Yale” cohort, who graduated in 1971, 1972 or 1973 — will now include named attributions, after 418 Yale affiliates signed a letter protesting the planned publication of an anonymous version of the project.

In early February, the project managers of the Written History Project were planning to publish two versions of the final book: a private one, which would include the names of the contributors unless anonymity was specifically requested, and a public one, which removed all of the authors’ names.

On Feb. 19, members of the first women cohort sent the collective letter to the project team calling on them to reinstate the names of all authors in the public version unless an author requested otherwise.

Representatives from the petitioning coalition, the Yale Alumni Association and the Written History Project team held a meeting on March 12. Following the meeting, they decided that the project team would destroy all copies of the book with anonymized testimony and survey all contributors to the proj-

ect about whether they would like their names included in the public version of the book. The single, public version — with names reinstated — will be distributed online and entered into the records in Sterling Memorial Library. The new version will also include parts of one woman’s testimony that were edited out in the previously planned public version.

“There was really this overwhelming show of support, because the classmates and others who we shared the letter with understood the importance of this,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin ’71 GRD ’74 GRD ’77, one of the response coordinators and co-authors of the petition, told the News. “It was very special and very gratifying to see even non-contributors say that names are important because they forge a link between who we were at Yale and the accomplished women that we’ve become, and that they felt that Yale should be celebrating us, not erasing us.”

In addition to Fishkin, Lydia Temoshok ’72, Dori Zaleznik ’71 and Connie Royster ’72 helped author the letter and coordinate all communications with the YAA and the Written History Project team. The letter ultimately included 418 signatures: 164 members of the first women

cohort, including 73 contributors to the book; 180 male classmates from the classes of 1971, 1972 and 1973; and 74 additional men who were involved in coeducation, including former professors and members of the class of 1970.

In a joint email, the Written History Project team told the News that they believe the March 12 meeting resulted in a “good plan” that will satisfy all parties.

“In concert with the petition organizers and in light of a very productive meeting with them on March 12, 2021, we believe we have identified a path to satisfactorily resolve all outstanding issues,” the Written History Project team wrote in an email to the News.

“Since the Written History Project began in 2018, alumni volunteers have devoted considerable time and effort to this project and continue to believe that recording, preserving, and now sharing the history of the first cohort of women in Yale College is an important undertaking.”

Barbara Wagner ’73 and Carol Whitehead ’72, the co-editors of the book, were present at the meeting, as well as Eve Hart Rice ’73, a member of the Yale Board of Trustees who was also involved in the project.

YAA director Weili Cheng ’77 helped facilitate the meeting and

told News that the YAA is “pleased that concerns have been addressed.”

In addition to the reinstatement of the author’s names, the new versions of the book will undo edits to the testimony of Julia Preston ’76, who was originally a member of the class of 1973.

Upon originally submitting testimony beginning in September 2019, contributors signed a release that allowed for Yale to edit their testimony. Throughout the editing process, the co-editors of the book removed certain names from women’s testimonies.

Preston’s unedited testimony included an allegation that a professor, the late Kenneth Mills, once forcibly kissed her during a meeting in his apartment. Preston was clear in her testimony and in an interview with the News that the alleged incident had little effect on her time at Yale, and that she only recalled it years later when she read a 2017 report commissioned by the prep school Choate Rosemary Hall — where Mills had resided with his wife — that alleged a history of sexual misconduct by Mills in the late 1970s. Preston said she included her anecdote involving Mills not to levy a similar allegation against him but rather because after reading the Choate report, she realized that had she reported the incident when it happened to her, she might have prevented Mills from continuing such a pattern when he moved to Choate.

“Recalling this story made me realize what Yale women have done in recent years that we didn’t do,” Preston said. “During our time, there were so many other things going on, but what Yale women have done in recent years to force the University to really take this issue seriously, and to create, or at least begin to create effective mechanisms for reporting, and to highlight how damaging this conduct can be — my respect to those women. What they did was very important.”

In Preston’s original submission, she named both Mills and Choate; in their edits, the project team removed both names. Preston also mentioned Mills in a flattering light earlier in the testimony, when she wrote about the May Day rally and related racial protests in the spring of 1970, of which Mills was an integral part. In that part of her testimony, the project team left Mills’ name in.

Preston noticed the changes when she went back to read her own testimony following the anonymization controversy. She told the News that the changes upset her because of the inconsistency of Mills’ name’s inclusion and because of its implications for her story: Through their edits, the co-editors incorrectly implied to readers that the anonymous person was not Mills. Preston, a long-time journalist, said that the inconsistency with Mills’ anonymization did not align with journalistic standards.

By taking out the names of both Mills and Choate, Preston said, the co-editors diminished the purpose of the anecdote. Preston wrote to the co-editors on March 15 detailing that concern, as well as her concern about the inconsistency of Mills’ anonymization. She requested that Mills’ and Choate’s names be re-included in her testimony, and that her letter expressing her objections be included in the Sterling Library Archive alongside the testimony.

A week later, the project team informed Preston that they would make these changes in the new version of the book, as well as include the letter in the archive.

“The general editing guidelines around third party names remain in place,” the project team wrote in an email to the News. “Restoration in this particular essay was a special circumstance owing to an investigative report, commissioned by Choate that documented the behavior of the individual, which had already been posted to the internet and been made publicly available.”

The current timeline for the publication of the new book remains unclear, as the project team plans to survey all contributors to allow them an additional chance to request anonymity or to remove their narratives entirely in the new public version of the book.

Still, all parties interviewed told the News that they are pleased with the path forward.

“We have gotten back so many positive responses, so many people saying that this is such a good outcome,” Temoshok told the News.

“It’s been really gratifying to receive these messages and see this work lead to such a positive resolution.”

Yale College first admitted women in 1969.

Contact AMELIA DAVIDSON at amelia.davidson@yale.edu .

Yale to offer L1 Yiddish class that fulfills language requirement

BY MADISON HAHAMY STAFF REPORTER Starting next fall, Yalies can schmooze, kibitz and kvetch for a language credit.

Currently, there is one main course sequence for Yiddish — a language historically used by Eastern European Jews that combines German, Hebrew and words from languages of the surrounding countries. Today, Yiddish is still spoken in some communities, mainly in Israel, Russia, parts of Eastern Europe and the United States. The existing sequence contains two courses. The first course, “Reading Yiddish,” is cross-listed in German and Judaic Studies. A more advanced course, “Reading Yiddish II,” is offered when there is enough student interest. Occasionally, visiting professors come to teach other courses about the language, such as a spring 2020 course entitled “Desire in Yiddish Literature.”

But none of these courses can be taken to fulfill the University’s language requirement. That will change next semester with the offering of an L1 Yiddish class.

“I’m very excited about these changes,” Maurice Samuels, chair of the Program in Judaic Studies, wrote to the News in an email. “Most of our peer institutions teach Yiddish language and I’ve long felt that it was time for Yale to do so as well. Yale is a center for the study of Jewish history and the Holocaust and Yiddish is central to those disciplines.”

Joshua Price, the current lector for the “Reading Yiddish” sequence and the only faculty member who currently teaches Yiddish, will also be teaching the new courses. He plans to teach L1 Yiddish in the fall and ideally an L2 option in the spring. Beyond that,

he says, faculty and administrators have not finalized plans, but Price hopes to ultimately offer an L3 and L4 option and even more upperlevel courses beyond that.

Price and Samuels, with feedback and help from a few other faculty members, helped draft a proposal for Yiddish to be considered for language credit over winter break. In February, they submitted it to the Language Study Committee, which, according to Samuels, was “enthusiastic” about the idea.

According to Tamar Gendler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Yalies had recently begun organizing their own meetings to practice conversational Yiddish and had also expressed a desire to formalize a Yiddish language sequence.

“This, combined with the longer recent-ish history of Yiddish being taught here, convinced us that it was a good time to experiment with the possibility of an L1/L2 Yiddish sequence, along with the reading course,” Gendler wrote in an email to the News.

“We have decided to situate the Yiddish language sequence within the Germanic Languages and Literatures department so that it once again will offer multiple Germanic languages, and so that our lecturer — who was trained at the long-standing Yiddish program at Columbia University — will have a larger community of experienced lectors to participate in.”

She added that in addition to coordinating with the Hebrew program for students who might want to take both languages, administrators and faculty hope to gauge student interest in the short term and use that information to determine how the program will look in the future.

McKinsey Crozier ’22 took “Reading Yiddish I” and “Desire

in Yiddish Literature” and is currently enrolled in “Reading Yiddish II.” She called the changes “super exciting” and noted that the current Yiddish offerings focus on “passive engagement” with the language, such as reading and listening, instead of the more active speaking and writing that the L1 course is set to emphasize.

While the “Reading Yiddish” sequence will continue to be offered, its emphasis will remain on translation, making it more geared toward graduate students who want to learn Yiddish for research purposes. According to Price, undergraduates who have completed one or two semesters of “Reading Yiddish” could likely place into L2, L3, or even higher-level courses of the new Yiddish language sequence.

In addition to the close reading skills emphasized by the current Yiddish course offerings, the new L1 course will focus on “unscripted, idiomatic conversation” and “expressive writing” through labor anthems, love songs, poetry, folktales and even Twitter, according to the course description.

“It also lowers barriers for students who may be interested in Yiddish because it will now count for a language distributional requirement instead of an elective and allows students to access Yiddish-speaking courses as part of their regular course load rather than taking on the additional cost or stress associated with extracurricular Yiddish courses,” Crozier added.

Maayan Schoen ’23, who took “Reading Yiddish I” and audited part of “Reading Yiddish II,” grew up studying Yiddish with her grandfather and found committing a course to the language “totally worthwhile.”

“I hope that having a language status increases its legitimacy in the eyes of people at Yale,” Schoen said. “[Students] won’t hesitate and say ‘Oh, is this just something I should be getting from my bubbe’s house at the Passover seder.’”

For Giovanna Truong ’23, who is a staff illustrator for the News, offering Yiddish for language credit is the first step toward what she hopes could become a fullfledged Yiddish department with multiple professors and additional courses on the intersection of Yiddish with religion, secularism, Marxism and more.

But, more than anything, Truong is just happy that Yiddish is receiving broader recognition.

“This language deserves your attention,” Truong said. “It’s beautiful, and I really think it is a perfect literary language because of how much meaning you can convey just through word choice.”

The “Yiddish for Reading” course was first offered in 2015, before which students could take Yiddish through the Directed Independent Language Study program.

Contact MADISON HAHAMY at madison.hahamy@yale.edu .

ANASTHASIA SHILOV/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

Currently, there are two main Yiddish courses offered at Yale, neither of which count towards a student’s language requirement.

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS

“My entire life, I dreamed of playing there. I dreamed of coaching there. I don't think anybody loves that basketball program like I love it.”

ROY WILLIAMS RETIRED NORTH CAROLINA MEN’S BASKETBALL COACH

Yale softball’s DeWitt Stadium

Hopkins '23 plays for Tri-City Storm M. HOCKEY FROM PAGE 14

COURTESY OF YALE ATHLETICS

In 2018, the Carol Roberts Field House also opened just beyond the outfield fence and provides additional amenities for the players.

VENUE FROM PAGE 14 used to set in your face. Now it sets on the right.”

Liu thought the new stadium helped draw her friends to games: “It was exciting that we had a new stadium with copper stands for [people] to sit in,” she said with a laugh.

“I remember being able to convince a lot more of my friends to watch.”

DeWitt, who has been the chairman and CEO of the St. Louis Cardinals since 1996, graduated from Yale in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. DeWitt’s family grew up in St. Louis, where his family has now been involved with Cardinals baseball for over 100 years. His father, William O. DeWitt Sr., worked for the Cardinals in numerous positions over his career, while William O. DeWitt III ’90, DeWitt Jr.’s son, currently serves as president of the team.

DeWitt Jr. also has a close relationship with George W. Bush ’68. While the two did not overlap at Yale, their families developed a strong relationship afterwards, according to the St. Louis Dispatch.

DeWitt Jr. was named to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board by Bush, his wife was selected to join the National Council on the Arts and his son served as an “aide to the director” of the Environmental Protection Agency. DeWitt subsequently helped raise over $200,000 for Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004.

2018 renovations: Turf at 5K Corral Field and an upgrade to DeWitt Stadium In 2018, Yale received donations from Karen Yarasavage ’87 and Kevin

Genda ’87 to help renovate DeWitt Family Stadium. Yarasavage played a key role on the Yale softball team in the 1980s. She earned All-Ivy honors for all four years she played.

Prior to the renovations, the Bulldogs faced challenges with weather, coach Goodwin said. “[In the past], when we would come back from spring break … we might not be able to get on the field from [it] being still frozen or still too muddy from the frost coming up underneath,” she said.

Goodwin said she had previously preferred grass but experiencing weather conditions in the Northeast persuaded her to embrace artificial turf.

“Last year, we only practiced indoors once or twice,” Goodwin said.

“Most of the time, we were out on the field. If you’re going to play games in 30 degrees, you need to be able to practice in it anyway.”

Alumni remembered the unveiling fondly: “The turf was the big transition,” Shelby Kennedy ’19 said.

“I remember the first day we came out to the field after the unveiling and we all just laid [down] in the turf … [and said] ‘We’re home!’”

Outside of the turf addition, the renovations included upgrades to the bullpen, batting cages, outfield fence and dugouts. The outfield upgrade was significant: The fence’s height increased from 5 feet to 6, matching the NCAA’s requirement for softball fields renovated after the 2016 season.

son, Hopkins elected to return to the USHL after having previously played five games for the Tri-City Storm as an affiliate list call up.

The 21-year-old explained the rationale behind his decision in an email to the News.

“Since I had missed the entirety of last year’s season due to my injury, and since I was still young enough to still be eligible to play junior hockey, my coaches and I thought it would be beneficial for me to finish out the year in Nebraska and play games with the Storm,” Hopkins wrote.

The 6-foot-1-inch, 185-pound sophomore was selected 124th overall by the Storm in the eight round of the 2016 USHL Phase I Draft. So far in his second USHL campaign, he has been between the pipes for 15 contests, posting a 0.905 save percentage. Furthermore, during the first week of March, Hopkins received his first weekly honor, earning the title of USHL’s “Goaltender of the Week.”

“I am very grateful for the opportunity to be able to be back with the Storm this season,” Hopkins said. “My experience has been overwhelmingly positive. I can’t tell you how awesome it was to get back on the ice and be playing meaningful hockey games.”

and former goaltending coach for the men’s and women’s teams at Bentley University, St. Anselm College and the University of New Hampshire. “[Hopkins has] grown to be not only a very respectful person but accountable as well,” Schultz told the News. “He understands you need to put in work and work hard to not only achieve his goals but surpass them and that’s one thing he has no problem with, hard work and tackling obstacles on and off the ice.”

Schultz also commented on Hopkins' ability to battle and never give up on any situation, as well as his talent to adapt to different situations.

While the sophomore goaltender is currently back rehabbing after injuring his knee in a match a few weeks ago, he is not only looking forward to returning to the ice in general, but also anticipates reuniting specifically with his fellow Bulldogs.

“I am most looking forward to opening night at Ingalls,” Hopkins said. “The next time we get to walk out of that tunnel, hopefully with fans in the building, I know I can speak for the rest of the team when I say we can’t wait to get back out there.”

Ingalls Rink is located at 73 Sachem St. Contact TRISHA NYUGEN at trisha.nyugen@yale.edu .

Read more at goydn.com/YDNsports Contact NADER GRANMAYEH at nader.granmayeh@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF ELDON HOLMES

When being named Goaltender of the Week, Hopkins ranked as the third best goaltender in the USHL by save percentage.

Three weeks of Phase II PHASES FROM PAGE 14 Unlike last semester, sport-specific training is allowed in the Phase I stage of the resumption of athletic activities plan this spring.

Now, the difference between Phase I and II is not as significant as it was last semester, but Yale’s midMarch shift to Phase II still represents progress towards Phase IV, the new phase added this semester that would theoretically allow for athletic competition between Yale teams and local, nonconference opponents.

“Honestly for us, nothing has changed going from Phase I [to] II because there are so few of us already,” volleyball outside hitter and 2021 season captain Ellis DeJardin ’22 said, referring to the high number of teammates enrolled remotely or taking leaves of absence this spring. “It’s been super nice being able to get reps in on a regular basis — we may not have a lot of our team on campus, but we’ve been able to find ways to put work in and get better, regardless.”

Last semester, Yale did not reach Phase III and only spent six days in Phase II, which was then the earliest stage in which teams could participate in sport-specific activities.

But this spring, at least two other Ivy League schools — Brown and Penn — that have reached Phase IV after passing through Phase III have been approved for local competition. On March 27, Penn became the first Ivy League school to compete since the onset of the pandemic when it hosted a baseball doubleheader against Villanova and the track and field “Penn Challenge” at Franklin Field. Nine spring Quaker teams

Goaltending coach Matt Zaba, who was hired by Tri-City in 2017 and had professional stints in both the ECHL and NHL with the New York Rangers, praised Hopkins following the announcement of the USHL award.

Zaba, a 2003 NHL Draft pick, commended the young goaltender for his maturity both on the ice and in the locker room, noting that it has been “instrumental” to the team’s success.

“He provides a calming influence for our group every time he’s in the net.” Zaba said in a press release published by the Storm organization on March 1.

Before competing with the Storm in Nebraska, Hopkins devoted his time to training over the summer in Massachusetts with Stop It Goaltending.

The netminder has spent over 12 years training at the SIG development centers.

“All the guys at Stop It are awesome,” Hopkins told the News. “We have a great group of goalies there and we have a lot of fun getting better every day.”

In addition to working on his own improvement, Hopkins has also begun teaching younger goalies at SIG programs, offering to them his own wisdom as a veteran of the training programs.

One of the trainers that Hopkins credited for being a great help since his youth hockey days is David Schultz, SIG director

Intramurals have been successful this semester INTRAMURALS FROM PAGE 14

MEGAN GRAHAM/PRODUCTION & DESIGN EDITOR

have multiple games now scheduled for this month. Brown Athletics received permission to compete beginning on April 3.

Yale’s phasing progression this semester has been far more linear than it was last semester. Teams’ phasing status changed six times over the course of last fall, usually ebbing and flowing with the status of viral transmission on Yale’s campus. This semester has been more constant, despite a spike in COVID-19 cases among off-campus students that occurred over the course of the week Yale upgraded to Phase II. “Athletics continues to follow all guidelines and protocols in Phase II,” Gambardella wrote in an email to the News. “If Yale Team Physicians advise a promotion to Phase III and the University COVID-19 Review Committee approves it, we will inform our coaches and student-athletes at that time.”

While most sports teams have been practicing their respective sports since the start of Phase I on February 15, there is one notable exception: the men’s golf team. The men’s golf team has not been able to get out on the course for sport-specific training because the Yale Golf Course has been closed since late last fall and is not set to open until April 13. The women’s golf team would be suffering from the same problem, but everyone on the team is either enrolled remotely or currently taking a gap semester, according to women’s golfer Kaitlin Lee ’24.

Yale teams began the semester in Phase 0 with no in-person activity until they transitioned to Phase I on Feb. 15.

Contact EUGENIO GARZA GARCÍA at eugenio.garzagarcia@yale.edu .

not be played this year due to public health restrictions, a lot of the usual participants have not been as involved this year. However, she said that the new sports have brought forth a new audience that was not previously interested in the usual sports.

Fangman told the News that in Silliman the majority of players this season have been sophomores, and Li similarly said that sophomores have been “very eager to participate.” Yet Wyatt Nabatoff ’22, Morse IM secretary, said that compared to first years, who are more willing to participate in a variety of sports, sophomores usually only consistently play in select sports. He said that this year the majority of sophomores involved in IMs have been the ones that participated regularly last year. Thus, it has been harder to find a wider array of participants.

However, according to Scher, Li and Fangman, even though sophomores have been consistently participating, there has been an overall increase in game forfeits compared to a usual semester. Li said that some colleges have been forfeiting games more frequently than others, which means that they have not been involved in the season as much.

As weather conditions improve, outdoor sports — spikeball and ladderball — have seen continued interest from players.

“We are still continuing with indoor sports in Payne Whitney, but we have also begun seasons of outdoor sports like spike-

ball,” Cohen said. “The improved weather allows for more variety in sports. We are already about halfway through our outdoor sports season and are on track to continue moving forward for the remainder of the school year.”

Even though IMs are significantly different than usual, many students are appreciative of the community they have provided during distance learning.

IM participant Calvin Kaleel ’22 told the News that given the circumstances this year, it is wonderful that students can still gather and participate in community activities.

Similarly, Quesada shared that IMs have been encouraging her to leave her dorm room, and she has been forced to go outside and come into contact with some familiar faces that she had not seen since her first year at Yale.

However, not everyone has transitioned as smoothly to the changes in IMs this semester.

“IMs have been fun, but obviously they are not the same as before, so I haven’t been participating as much as last year,” J.R. Stauff ’23 wrote to the News in a text. “The selection [of IMs] is both a blessing and a curse, because it allows me to play fun activities like knockout or ping pong, but I also miss the classic sports like real basketball and football.”

Timothy Dwight is currently in the lead for the Tyng Cup with 408 total points.

Contact NICOLE RODRIGUEZ at nicole.rodriguez.nr444@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 11

“I’m a wizard at poetry.”

GHOSTFACE KILLAH AMERICAN RAPPER

City announces Knauff as leader of New Haven Disability Services

BY OWEN TUCKER-SMITH STAFF REPORTER Gretchen Knauff will serve as the city’s next director of Disability Services, the city announced on Friday.

Knauff has had a 30-year career in disability work, and most recently served as executive director of Disability Rights Connecticut. She will take over as director from Michelle Duprey, who now works as the city’s deputy corporation counsel.

“The opportunity came up for me to do this, and my heart is as an advocate for people with disabilities,” Knauff told the News. “There aren’t a lot of opportunities to assist people with disabilities, and I thought this would be a good way to be doing some of the work I’ve done previously. I see this role as not only working for the city but working for people with disabilities in the city.”

In a Friday press release, city spokesperson Gage Frank and Mayor Justin Elicker expressed enthusiasm about Knauff’s new position in City Hall.

“Today, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker welcomed the newest member of the Administration at New Haven City Hall,” Frank wrote. “Knauff received her Juris Doctorate from the University of Connecticut School of Law and has had an extensive career protecting and upholding the rights of persons living with disabilities.”

Knauff told the News that her decadeslong career in disability work began at the Connecticut Office of Protection and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities — a now-defunct state agency that

worked to protect the rights of individuals with disabilities. In her role as a staffer, Knauff handled referral calls to disseminate information to people with disabilities and their families. Knauff went on to become assistant director of the agency and worked there for 29 years.

After Knauff’s office was shut down by then-Gov. Dan Malloy in 2017, she went on to spearhead the nonprofit organization Disability Rights Connecticut.

“Disability Rights CT took over the functions, and I was the executive director, so I set up the nonprofit, and we continued the services from the previous program,” she said. “We did a lot more investigative work into cases of abuse and neglect of people with disabilities.”

Now, Knauff is coming to New Haven.

Knauff told the News that she is still currently ironing out the priorities for her tenure. But there are some issues that Knauff said she is always focused on — such as voting accessibility.

“I’m hoping to look at the services here and see if there are ways to improve the already very welcoming environment for people with disabilities for people in New Haven,” she told the News. “And I’m always worrying about voting for people with disabilities — making sure polling places are accessible. That’s something that I’m going to be talking with the registrar of voters about.”

Knauff also said she was in favor of supported decision-making — a tool that allow individuals with disabilities to retain their decision-making

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Knauff has had a 30-year career in disability work, and recently served as executive director of Disability Rights Connecticut. capacity after they reach adulthood by choosing trusted advisors.

Though Knauff said she believes that New Haven is already a fairly welcoming place for people with disabilities, she said that it has not necessarily always been that way. Knauff attributed much of this progress to her predecessor, Michelle Duprey. “[Duprey], from the conversations we’ve had, has had an impact in so many different areas in New Haven that it’s much more welcoming than it might’ve been,” Knauff noted.

One challenge for New Haven is that it is infrastructurally old, Knauff said, and some older buildings are inaccessible. That is part of what she

hopes to help address in New Haven — direct, physical change, especially for City Hall buildings.

But she also said that sometimes in conversations about disability issues, people focus too much on necessities, and not on the things people with disabilities may want to do for fun and pleasure.

“Looking at parks and recreation … everybody always focuses on making sure the essential things are accessible, more than looking at the fact that people with disabilities are wellrounded, interested human beings with families just like everybody else,” Knauff said. “Families want to go to the beach.”

In his statement announcing Knauff’s new position, Elicker acknowledged Knauff’s depth of experience in the field.

“I am excited to welcome Gretchen Knauff to the team here at City Hall,” Elicker wrote. “Gretchen has a strong history in the field of disability rights and advocacy — leading by example, fostering open communication and understanding the legal and ethical obligations of all to ensure equal treatment of every member of our community.”

Duprey first took on the role of director of Disability Services in 1998.

Contact OWEN TUCKER-SMITH at owen.tucker-smith@yale.edu .

BOA amends previous order providing affordable reentry housing BY ÁNGELA PÉREZ STAFF REPORTER In their bimonthly meeting on Monday, the Board of Alders amended a previous resolu-

tion that gave the Believe In Me Empowerment Corporation permission to use 53 Sheldon Ave. for affordable housing.

BIMEC — an organization dedicated to providing services to local

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

The amendment proposed the development of two structures with affordable units at 80 percent area median income or below.

youth and adults impacted by incarceration — received permission from the Board of Alders in 2017 to purchase 320 Shelton Ave. for $1,000. In 2019, BIMEC was also able to purchase 53 Shelton Ave. Ward 21 Alder Steven Winter ’11 submitted the motion on Monday to amend the 2019 order selling 53 Shelton Ave. from the original ordinance which allowed BIMEC to develop a single-room occupancy structure with an office on site. The amendment proposed the development of two structures with affordable units at 80 percent area median income or below — which would make housing feasible for low-income communities in New Haven. At Monday’s meeting, alders unanimously approved the amendment.

“These modifications will allow Believe In Me Empowerment Corporation to provide deeply affordable housing and social services to men and women recently released from prison who are reintegrating back into the community and

rebuilding relationships with their families,” Winter said at the meeting. “The modifications will allow all of this while addressing residents’ desire for increased privacy and spaces of their own that efficiency units can afford.”

In addition to offering affordable housing to individuals who were formerly incarcerated, BIMEC offers case management, education, referrals and employment help. On their Facebook page, the organization posts updates on their progress developing housing at 320 Shelton Ave., which they call BIMEC II. BIMEC has faced a plethora of zoning hurdles leading up to its housing developments. James Walker, BIMEC’s founder and executive director, appeared in front of the Board of Zoning in 2016 prior to purchasing property on Shelton Avenue. At the meeting, he requested to adapt the corporation’s headquarters into partial housing. The request was denied — but eventually led

to BIMEC’s collaboration with New Haven’s Livable City Initiative, which has worked with the corporation in order to develop affordable housing.

The Board of Alders’ legislative agenda in March listed affordable housing as a priority for the year ahead. Ward 25 Alder Adam Marchand noted then that the board should focus on developing “policies to support the creation of more affordable units … [and] strengthen [the city’s] inspection programs.

Some alders, such as Ward 7 Alder Abigail Roth ’90 LAW ’94, previously noted that zoning changes are an easy and effective way of creating affordable housing around the city without a significant investment from City Hall. Winter clarified that all of Monday’s updates were made in accordance with the New Haven Zoning Ordinance.

BIMEC was founded in 2007.

Contact ÁNGELA PÉREZ at angela.perez@yale.edu .

Yale Office of LGBTQ Resources reopens in person on April weekends

BY JORDAN FITZGERALD STAFF REPORTER During the fall of 2019, Yale’s Office of LGBTQ Resources — which supports and advocates for issues regarding sexual orientation and gender identity for University students and staff — saw over 5,000 visits. But this semester, the physical office has been empty amid a year of loss. It did not open this semester until the beginning of this month.

For all of April, the office will be open from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends.

Only students enrolled in residence may access the space, though they must adhere to public health precautions including masking, social distancing, reduced capacity and a prohibition on food and drinks. According to an April 1 email, the office will keep a record of visitors to aid possible contact tracing. The office will offer students a physical space to meet with friends, watch movies, read and honor late professor Andrew Dowe, who had been the office’s associate director.

“In a stressful environment like Yale, which can be made more stressful by compounding factors like navigating gender and sexual identity, the resources that the office can provide — community, space, and information — are very important,” Les

Welker ’22, a staffer at the office, wrote in an email to the News.

Welker, who transferred to Yale last fall, created and manages the office’s Discord server, on which he hosts Thursday night “unwind times,” which he hopes will continue and grow as the office moves to in-person programming. Though he acknowledged that he never saw the space pre-COVID, he thinks the physical office can grant students an option for interaction without facing Zoom fatigue.

According to Vincent Gleizer ’22, another staffer at the office, the reopening will give students access to an additional space where they can spend time, preventing them from feeling “cramped and constrained” in their residential colleges.

Maria Trumpler, director of the Office of LGBTQ Resources, emphasized the importance of physical social spaces for the University’s LGBTQ community in particular.

“Queer gathering spaces are very important at a time when some students have been living at home,” she said. “That [home] may not be a very supportive environment.”

She also noted that LGBTQ students may not have been able to interact with other members of their community during the initial quarantine.

Gleizer echoed these sentiments, emphasizing that it is important for LGBTQ students to be able to interact with faculty members who understand their experiences.

“These spaces are important not just for the physical space they provide or the events they sponsor, but because they serve as an anchoring point for our community,” he said. “The people who work here understand what being queer and trans in this world is like and are genuinely invested in uplifting the people around us.”

According to Trumpler, the office had been open in the fall, and they originally planned on reopening for the spring semester on Feb. 15. However, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and death of Dowe have posed an unprecedented challenge, Trumpler said.

“It was a big lift just to get open,” Trumpler wrote in an email to the News. “We will take it week by week. Between COVID and Andrew’s death, this is completely different than other years.”

She added that the office community will have to redefine the space without Dowe’s leadership.

Gleizer told the News that he first met Dowe during Bulldog Days in 2016, and the two grew close during their time working together at the

office — particularly last semester, when COVID-19 restrictions meant the two were among the only people they regularly saw in person. He also added that Dowe’s passing has uniquely affected students of color at the office.

“I think it’s also really important to mention that at the time of his passing, Andrew was the only BIPOC working at the office in an administrative capacity,” Gleizer said. “While the needs of our [queer and trans

people of color] community are a priority of the current office staffers, understandably the loss of a Black queer man in an administrative role at a university with already few mentors and resources for QTPOC students will be devastating and difficult to recuperate from.”

The Office of LGBTQ Resources is located at 135 Prospect St. Contact JORDAN FITZGERALD at jordan.fitzgerald@yale.edu .

LILY DORSTEWITZ/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The Office of LGBTQ Resources was initially set to open for the semester on Feb. 15, but its opening was delayed to the start of April.

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

THROUGH THE LENS

I

walk through campus in search of healing and brightness to recover from the large dark cloud that floated over us two weeks ago. I wanted to externalize kindness, hope and love in every way that I could, so when I stepped outside, camera in hand, she embraced me. I had been longing for her warm loving touch and vibrant energy: sun, my dear, you were in hiding and have emerged in a time of desperate need. I wanted to capture how she snuck into the smallest of crevices, how she inspired friends to lay together on the grass, how she inspired the yellow pants to come out of the closet or inspired jazz musicians to step out and play sweet smooth tunes that danced their way into every open window on Old Campus. I hope she is here to stay.

REGINA SUNG reports.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 13

“The human race is a very, very magical race. We have a magic power of witches and wizards. We’re here on this earth to unravel the mystery of this planet. The planet is asking for it. YOKO ONO JAPANESE ARTIST

In graduate school rankings, Yale GSAS departments claim top spots

STEVEN ORIENTALE/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The English Department and Economics Department were ranked number one in this year’s U.S. News lists for graduate programs.

BY MADISON HAHAMY AND ISABELLE QIAN STAFF REPORTERS Yale departments often take pride in the quality of their students and faculty, and several recently received national recognition.

Four Yale departments received top three national rankings from the 2021 U.S. News graduate school list. The English Department and the Economics Department each snagged the number one spot, while the History Department came in second and the Psychology Department came in third. All four departments tied in these rankings with at least one other school.

“Everyone knows that departmental rankings can be capricious and prone to bias,” wrote Jonathan Kramnick, jobs placement officer for the English Department and Maynard Mack professor of English, in an email to the News. “Everyone pays attention to them anyway. This is therefore a good day for Yale University as well as Yale English.”

Catherine Nicholson, associate professor of English and the English program’s director of graduate studies, recalled that she heard the news through a text from a colleague. Her first reaction, she said, was simply, “Huh!” Nicholson noted that she herself had considered such rankings when

applying to graduate school. However, she noted that while rankings are significant simply because they are consulted by many people, they are not nearly as important as the “lived experiences” of students and the “energy and commitment” of professors. Nicholson added that rankings do not factor into any departmental decisions.

“I’m thrilled by any recognition of the brilliance, generosity, and tenacity of our grad students and alums, who are truly remarkable scholars, teachers, writers, and human beings, and I’m grateful for colleagues who care passionately and think deeply about graduate education,” Nicholson wrote in an email to the News.

However, she added that it is important to avoid any sense of complacency, citing the current pressures on graduate students in the humanities. Nicholson noted that students are struggling with isolation in the midst of the pandemic while simultaneously facing the stress of what she called a job market “crisis.” She said that many programs across the country, including Yale’s, have also cut down on admissions in order to provide for current graduate students.

“I hope the ranking affirms to the university that graduate education in English — and in the humanities more broadly, which has long been an area of great strength for Yale — is worth championing, even and espe-

cially in the face of an unprecedentedly difficult academic job market,” Nicholson wrote.

Nicholson added that although rankings are often met with skepticism by students and faculty within the program — particularly due to the inequitable histories of such honors — she still hopes that members in the department will be able to feel some happiness for this recognition in the midst of a difficult year.

Yuichi Kitamura, director of graduate studies for the Economics Department — which was also ranked number one — wrote in an email that, beyond the ranking recognizing the department’s efforts, it also helps significantly with attracting applicants to the program.

He also noted that the department focuses on “cutting edge research in diverse fields,” which has led to “excellent job placement records” for their graduates.

The chair of the department, Tony Smith, wrote in an email to the News that this is not the department’s first year in the number one slot, which reflects its “world-class excellence in all fields of economics” and is also a result of support received from the larger university.

Noel Lenski, director of graduate studies for the History Department, told the News that its number two ranking was well-earned and the result of “thoughtful and

careful moves” such as new faculty hires, graduate student recruitment, a redesigned major and renewed commitment to diversity and inclusion efforts.

“I’m only surprised that we’re not ranked #1,” he added. U.S. News’ first place ranking for history programs went to University of California, Berkeley.

Alan Mikhail, chair of the History Department, echoed those sentiments.

“I say this as a skeptic of the entire project of these rankings, a proud graduate of the department ranked number one, and as someone with obvious bias — Yale’s is the world’s top history department,” he wrote in an email to the News.

Gregory McCarthy, director of graduate studies for the Psychology Department, did not respond to a request for comment.

Outside the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, a number of Yale’s other graduate schools also obtained high rankings, including number one for the Yale Law School, number two for the Yale School of Art and number two for Yale School of Nursing.

Contact MADISON HAHAMY at madison.hahamy@yale.edu and ISABELLE QIAN at isabelle.qian@yale.edu .

OCS expands reimbursement program for seniors

BY ZHEMIN SHAO STAFF REPORTER This year, the Office of Career Strategy is expanding their travel reimbursement program for seniors to include “career-related engagements” in addition to travel expenses.

In past years, the travel reimbursement program has reimbursed seniors pursuing careers in the nonprofit, government and arts sectors for interview and audition travel costs. With the pandemic limiting travel opportunities for the class of 2021, OCS has expanded the program to cover other career-related engagements — including membership fees for professional associations, conference registration costs and job board subscriptions. Although the program continues to be geared toward students pursuing creative careers, the additional opportunities for reimbursement have been extended to other career fields as well. Students may submit reimbursement requests

for up to $200, with limited funds distributed on a first-come, firstserve basis.

“OCS is thrilled about the expansion of our reimbursement program for seniors,” OCS Director of Strategic Initiatives and Public Service Careers Robyn Acampora wrote in an email to the News. “Due to the fact that the pandemic has greatly reduced the number of students who are traveling for in-person interviews, we wanted to open up the reimbursement fund to some other resources that we thought could assist seniors with their post-graduate plans.”

According to Acampora, the program currently plans to cover nontravel related costs for the class of 2021 only.

Derek Webster ’99, OCS senior associate director for creative careers, echoed Acampora’s enthusiasm for the expansion of the reimbursement program.

“There are many small but meaningful costs that quickly add up at the start of a career,” Webster wrote to the News. “Our office looks forward to making some of these expenses more digestible for our seniors, and helping them, as much as we can, to take those first confident steps into their professional lives.”

Webster noted that the increased opportunities for reimbursement come at a particularly difficult time for students interested in creative careers.

Despite the program’s focus on creative career paths, Webster wrote, the additional reimbursement-eligible expenses cover “a wide range of opportunities” outside the nonprofit, government and arts sectors. In particular, he noted that students interested in health professions or general portfolio-organizing services can find relevant reimbursement opportunities through the expanded program.

“For students interested in the health professions, there are several professional organizations that have student memberships,” Kristin McJunkins, OCS director of health professions advising and STEM Connect, wrote in an email to the News. “Members of health profession associations greatly enjoy mentoring students, and in this year with such a lack of in-person opportunities there are now many ways to connect virtually.”

Both Webster and McJunkins were involved in compiling a non-comprehensive list of potential career-related engagements eligible for reimbursement, which can be found on the OCS website. The list includes registration, membership and subscription fees for various associations and services — including the Professional Association for Design, the Student National Medical Association and the Association of Consultants to Nonprofits.

In addition to these opportunities, students can continue to seek reimbursement for travel expenses associated with interviews and auditions in creative career fields.

Laura Michael ’20, who is currently pursuing a master’s degree in oboe performance at Rice University, was reimbursed through OCS last year for audition travel costs.

“The Travel Reimbursement Plan allowed me to travel to take auditions for Masters in Music programs,” Michael wrote to the News. “Taking auditions can be expensive — between flights, Ubers, and hotel rooms, I probably spent about $500 per audition.

The Travel Reimbursement Plan was great because it relieved me of at least a part of that burden.”

The travel reimbursement program began in 2014.

Contact ZHEMIN SHAO at zhemin.shao@yale.edu .

Clinics, nonprofits adapt to meet needs of expectant mothers

BY SYLVAN LEBRUN STAFF REPORTER The series of challenges expectant mothers face during the pandemic — health concerns, social isolation and increased financial strain — are unprecedented. To confront these obstacles, medical providers and nonprofits across New Haven have adapted care strategies to meet mothers’ needs.

The sensitivity of prenatal and childbirth-related care inhibits any complete transition to the telehealth model that has become increasingly common since the onset of the pandemic. Medical clinics and nonprofits across New Haven have had to find ways to adapt maternity services to meet public health guidelines — shifting some programs to virtual settings and developing vigilant strategies to ensure patients’ safety.

“There are a lot of burdens on women in the prenatal and postnatal period that I think have always been there, but that are really accentuated now in the context of pandemic society,” said Benjamin Oldfield, chief medical officer at Fair Haven Community Health Care, or FHCHC. Oldfield told the News that he has noticed “upticks, locally and nationally” in the prevalence of many social conditions that negatively impact pregnant women. In particular, he emphasized that the economic difficulties brought upon by the pandemic have led to higher rates of substance abuse and domestic violence. Expectant mothers are already one of the highest-risk groups for

domestic violence, so this trend is extremely worrying for maternity care providers, Oldfield said.

Social isolation has also taken a toll on the mental health of new mothers, according to Oldfield, who added that pregnancy and caring for a newborn are, even in normal times, isolating experiences.

With in-person daycare facilities closing and schools in the district going virtual, new mothers with other children at home have also had to balance their own well-being with increased child care responsibilities. This has been a major roadblock for women who are seeking maternity care, according to Nieja Jackson, program coordinator for New Haven Healthy Start.

Healthy Start is a nonprofit that works to reduce infant mortality rates in New Haven and lessen the racial and ethnic disparities in those figures. The organization does this by connecting at-risk expectant mothers with the resources they need: doulas, medical insurance, transportation to appointments and housing services, among other services.

Most clinics have adopted a temporary safety policy preventing visitors from joining patients during appointments, Jackson said. She added that she believes that this policy has led to a higher rate of missed appointments among lower-income pregnant women with younger children, because they are unable to bring their children to the doctor with them but also cannot afford child care.

Millie Landock, lead community health worker for Project Access — a nonprofit that connects underserved New Haven residents with medi-

cal providers — told the News that many of the pregnant women that she works with have struggled with the choice of whether to attend their appointments at all.

“One woman shared that they had to go to a medical appointment, and someone called DCF [Department of Children and Families] because the child was at home,” Landock said.

She told the News that the woman had made the choice to leave her child at home to attend her appointment, “because she felt that she had no other option, because she didn’t have a daycare.”

Oldfield told the News that he has anecdotally noticed an uptick in pregnancies during the pandemic, which he attributes to the effects of stay-at-home orders.

Natasha Ray, director of Healthy Start, echoed this, saying she has seen a greater volume of requests for referrals and connections to “community resources, such as: food pantries, diapers, employment opportunities and most importantly, accurate health information.” The women that Healthy Start supports have also demonstrated an increased need for mental health support, she said, due to anxieties about the pandemic and its hardships.

Maternity care — from prenatal visits to infant health check-ups — is currently being provided in a hybrid model at clinics like the Fair Haven Community Health Clinic. Expectant mothers attend necessary faceto-face appointments with doctors and midwives, but less urgent visits are conducted through telemedicine.

At the Fair Haven clinic, visits for pregnant women and their babies

are conducted at a separate site designated for “well-care,” meaning care for healthy patients not exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms.

According to Oldfield, social distancing is enforced in waiting areas, rooms are disinfected between patients and care providers are required to wear PPE. Ray told the News that Healthy Start has been offering its services through a combination of in-person and telehealth visits. At the height of the pandemic, Healthy Start doulas had to meet virtually with the mothers that they assisted, which Ray said “disrupted” interpersonal relationships.

Since then, a decrease in the rate of COVID-19 infections has allowed for more in-person contact to resume.

Hospital policies have now adjusted to allow for doulas to attend births and check in on women who have recently delivered. Healthy Start’s group parenting classes are currently still offered online.

As a new measure to expand their services, Healthy Start has also partnered with and provided funding to the Yale School of Medicine’s Community Health Care Van. This mobile medical unit now provides safe and accessible maternity care, pediatric health care and connection to other resources free of charge, Ray said.

“The pandemic coupled with racial and ethnic health disparities has been the greatest challenge,” Ray wrote in an email to the News.

“The mobile medical unit provides medical maternal-infant care to communities that suffer from highest COVID-19 disease burden and that have suffered long-standing decreased access to care.”

New Haven Healthy Start is a federally-funded program that has been located at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven since 1997.

Contact SYLVAN LEBRUN at sylvan.lebrun@yale.edu .

YALE NEWS

Providers of prenatal and childbirth care have had to adapt to health restrictions while trying to address the pandemic’s added difficulties.

NCAAW No. 1 Stanford 54 No. 3 Arizona 53

NCAAM No. 1 Baylor 86 No. 1 Gonzaga 70

SPORTS

UEFA CL Real Madrid 3 Liverpool 1

UEFA CL Manchester City 2

Borussia Dortmund 1

FOR MORE SPORTS CONTENT, VISIT OUR WEB SITE goydn.com/YDNsports Twitter: @YDNSports YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021 · yaledailynews.com

BROWN BEARS SECOND IVY TO COMPETE THIS SPRING Brown became the second Ivy League school to reach Phase IV of the Ivy League’s athletics plan and engage in local, nonconference competition last weekend. Penn, which entered Phase IV a week before Brown, began competition on March 27.

CROSS COUNTRY USTFCCCA ALL-ACADEMIC TEAM AWARDS

Both the men’s and women’s cross country teams received the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association All-Academic Team awards for 2020. The All-Academic Team award is given annually to teams with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale.

Behind the Venue: DeWitt Family Stadium

"The fact that we have these three for another year, is just [exciting], for leadership, first and foremost, but also for the ability to contribute on the field … it’s a gift.”

YALE SOFTBALL HEAD COACH JEN GOODWIN

ON GROBMAN ’22, PAPES ’22 AND PONCE ’22

Connor Hopkins ’23 finds success in USHL

BY TRISHA NGUYEN STAFF REPORTER Though a season-ending injury kept sophomore goaltender Connor Hopkins ’23 out of the pipes for six months during his rookie season at Yale, the netminder is now back in play, earning USHL’s “Goaltender of the Week”.

M. HOCKEY ANASTHASIA SHILOV AND ZULLY ARIAS/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR AND PRODUCTION & DESIGN EDITOR

DeWitt Family Stadium underwent a 2018 renovation that upgraded the bullpen, batting cages, outfield fence and dugouts.

BY NADER GRANMAYEH STAFF REPORTER On April 13, 2001, Yale softball played its first game with a new host: the William O. DeWitt Jr. ’63 Family Stadium.

Captain Monica Lebron ’01 and head coach Andy Van Etten led the Bulldogs at the time, while Yale’s current head coach, Jen Goodwin, coached at Simmons College. The old softball field, according to coach Goodwin, is “one of the rec fields now, so it still exists down there.” Seventeen years later, the DeWitt Family Stadium playing surface, which is called 5K Corral Field, underwent an upgrade.

Through the company FieldTurf, Yale replaced the grass field at DeWitt Stadium with “state-of-the-art” artificial turf. The softball team welcomed Harvard for a doubleheader to break in the new renovations.

Twenty years after its opening, Goodwin, who is in her ninth year as

a Yale head coach, and alumnae of the softball program reflected on the state of the venue and its recent history.

“I got to have my senior year on the new field at the time,” Alice Liu ’01 told the News. “That was just really exciting and also really special. … It made me feel like Yale cared about softball and that the softball program had a bright future.”

2001 opening and the stadium’s namesake: William O. DeWitt Jr. ’63 Named for William O. DeWitt Jr. ’63 and his family, the original stadium was designed by Brian A. Ameche ARC ’75, a New Haven architect who passed away in January 2020 and played football during his time with the Bulldogs. Clark Construction Company concluded construction on DeWitt Stadium in 2001.

The New York-based firm specializes in athletic stadiums and helped build other softball stadiums in the Ivy

League, including those at Cornell, Dartmouth and Princeton.

When DeWitt Stadium first opened in 2001, it represented a significant change for the Bulldogs.

The new stadium pushed the centerfield wall back 20 feet.

“If anything, the larger outfield will be an asset,” then-head coach Van Etten told the News in February 2001. “We’re a fast team that can cover the gaps. If our pitchers can keep it in the ballpark, we’ll be in good shape.”

The construction also added a batting cage, expanded the size of the bullpen and changed the positioning of the field. Yale also became the first Ivy League school to have dugouts at their softball field. “[The new field] is going to be really nice,” catcher Kristen Maturo ’01 told the News at the time. “As a catcher, the sun

Student-athletes settled into Phase II

SEE VENUE PAGE 10

COURTESY OF YALE ATHLETICS

Yale teams have been practicing in Phase II of the Ivy League’s plan for the resumption of athletic activities since March 15.

On March 15, Yale Athletics progressed to Phase II of the Ivy League’s plan for the resumption of athletic activities.

PHASES In Phase II, group sizes and spacing between athletes during practices may be adjusted in accordance with campus policies, but the same general requirements as those in Phase I still apply: Sport-specific activity is permitted, and masks are required unless student-athletes are outdoors and spaced at least 12 feet apart.

Yale Athletics’ Director of Strategic Communications Mike Gam-

bardella confirmed with the News in an email last weekend that the Bulldogs have been practicing in Phase II since mid-March, marking the longest stretch that Yale Athletics has spent in Phase II or higher since the Ivy League rolled out its phasing framework before this academic year. Previously, the department had been in Phase I since Feb. 15 after two weeks in Phase 0 at the start of the semester.

“It’s great to be in Phase II and getting more and more opportunities to work at our sport,” Yale baseball captain and catcher Cal Christofori ’21 said. “Seeing my teammates every day has been really nice, and it gives us something to look forward to.”

STAT OF THE WEEK

SEE PHASES PAGE 10

0.905

The Malden, Massachusetts native tore his meniscus during a preseason practice in October 2019 and spent six months in rehabilitation before returning to the ice. The netminder told the News that it took him a few additional weeks on the ice before he was able to “get

caught up to 100 percent.”

Since returning to the ice, Hopkins has found success in the USHL in a year without Ivy League competition.

“The most important thing you can do is just take it day by day,” Hopkins said. “Focusing on the little things and trusting that the work you do every day is eventually going to pay off in the long run is what helped me get through it.”

Although he had fully recovered and was prepared to pull on the blue and white uniform for the 2020-2021 season, fate had other ideas regarding his return to play. After the Ivy League made the decision to cancel the winter athletics seaSEE M. HOCKEY PAGE 10

COURTESY OF ELDON HOLMES

After his first stint in Nebraska, Hopkins went on to play with the West Kelowna Warriors in the British Columbia Hockey League.

IMs progress amid a difficult semester

BY NICOLE RODRIGUEZ STAFF REPORTER Since their official start on Feb. 22, intramurals have progressed smoothly, with all games played as originally scheduled, according to Head IM Secretary Rachel Cohen ’21.

INTRAMURALS

BY EUGENIO GARZA GARCIA STAFF REPORTER

NBA Nets 114 Knicks 112

After adapting to public health restrictions last semester, the group of secretaries executed intramurals successfully, except for a 10-day pause in November due to a cluster of COVID-19 cases.

This semester, IMs have continued without pause, and as the weather warms, they have slowly transitioned to outdoor games. According to the current schedule, badminton and knockout finished playoffs on March 25 and March 24, respectively. Ladderball and spikeball began their season on March 15, and table tennis and pickleball started on March 29. At the moment, the only season that has yet to start is knockout’s second round, which is set to begin next week on April 12.

“Intramurals have been a lot of fun, and a great way to de-stress by enjoying the company of others in-person for a change,” Ben Scher ’23, Timothy Dwight IM secretary and a former sports reporter for the News, wrote in an email to the News. “Intramurals have gone according to plan so far, and I hope that they continue to do so. We’ve been fortunate enough this semester to not

have an outbreak impede upon our ability to migrate around campus, and as a result we have not needed to cancel games as a direct result of COVID-19.”

This IM season is virtually unchanged from last semester in terms of restrictions, with the only noticeable difference being the participation of sophomores, who were allowed back on campus for the spring semester. Cohen told the News that sophomores have been “very spirited.”

While player turnout is significantly lower than during a typical semester pre-COVID-19, it has not changed drastically compared to last fall. Timothy Dwight IM Secretary Jessica Li ’22 told the News that select sports, like spikeball and corn-

hole, which were especially successful among first years, have had slightly less turnout compared to the fall. But she said that overall IM participation has been relatively unchanged since the fall, with sophomores fully replacing first-year students.

“It is different not having the first years because they usually carry IMs a lot, so that has been a noticeable difference,” Blaise Fangman ’22, Silliman IM secretary, told the News. “But I would also say that the sophomores are definitely excited to be back on campus.”

Katie Quesada ’22, head Branford IM secretary, said that since the usual IM sports, such as flag football and soccer, canSEE INTRAMURALS PAGE 10

LILY DORSTEWITZ/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

In their second semester, socially distant intramurals have advanced successfully without any COVID-19-related setbacks.

SAVE PERCENTAGE FOR YALE MEN’S HOCKEY GOALTENDER CONNOR HOPKINS ’23 IN 15 APPEARANCES WITH THE USHL’S TRI-CITY STORM THIS WINTER.