Yale Daily News Magazine September 2018 Issue

DAILY NEWS

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MAGAZINE

ZINE

NEWS

AZINE

FIGURE MAGAZINE OF SPEECH DAILY NEWS

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

VOL. XLVI ISSUE 1 SEPTEMBER 2018

Jamie Kirchick’s Run for the Yale Corporation

BY HAILEY FUCHS

editors’ note Dear all: And just like that, right as we start to get the hang of it, our time is up.

College can be like this. You’re allowed to stay in your comfort zone for only so long.

You move classrooms every semester and dorms every year. You learn not to get too close to any one morning routine, or to any one storefront on Broadway. The point isn’t for you to feel like you know what you’re doing — the opposite, actually. As students, we’re supposed to always be starting from a state of unfamiliarity.

This is true of work at the Yale Daily News Magazine as well. Each year, new editors take over one September and are gone by the next. In this way, the magazine is always in a process of relearning itself — always approaching issues critically, pressing for meaning, precision and perspective.

Our writers approach all of their subjects with a similar care. Alex DiMeglio ’21 tells the story of opening Yale a cappella outward.

Serena Cho ’21 probes New Haven’s policy toward magnet schools. Andrew Sandweiss ’19 rides the Hartford Line, revealing how something old can be made new again. Sydney Steans-Gail ’20 and Savannah DiGiovanni ’20 leave their own mark by reimagining the campus map. Zoe Nuech-

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terlein ’21 and Ko Lyn Cheang ’21 bring us stories from beyond the confines of that map, taking us into various corners of the outside world. Candice Wang ’21 explores what sorts of groups should be allowed to impact our world. Alejandra Larriva-Latt ’21 asks whose job it is to hand down “life skills.” Alexa Stanger ’21 and Lara Schull ’21 wonder if we might learn something from our predecessors about the healthiest way to socialize. Eric Krebs ’21 interviews a New Haven musician and learns how the songs he makes have changed with the medium.

Molly Ono ’20 and Claudia Mezey ’19 share their views through art and poetry. Hailey Fuchs ’20, in a cover story on James Kirchick ’03, informs us on the status of debates that concern our community.

We want to thank these writers, as well as our team of Production & Design, Photo, Illustrations, Copy and Mag staff editors who put all this together. We’re excited to be turning the magazine over, and we’re especially glad that this process leaves space for things to be done differently. To the next editors, incoming first years, anyone committed to leaving Yale better than you found it: This year is yours.

With love, Frani and Flora

table of contents 11

campus map

School of Women

SYDNEY STEANS-GAIL & SAVANNAH DIGIOVANNI

15

insight

CrossFit at Yale ZOE NUECHTERLEIN

18

4

FIRST DO NO HARM Feature by Serena Cho

art essay

Mother 3 and Mother 4 MOLLY ONO

20

feature

Singapore’s Golden Mile Dilemma KO LYN CHEANG

26

poetry

Formations

UP THE LINE

CLAUDIA MEZEY

27

7

Feature by Andrew Sandweiss

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Men’s Rights Moves in on Yale CANDICE WANG

30

insight

Finance, Personally ALEJANDRA LARRIVA-LATT

38

interview

Ed Askew: “Asking the Unicorn” ERIC KREBS

13

VOICES OF YALE Feature by Alex DiMeglio

24

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Magazine Editors in Chief Flora Lipsky Frani O’Toole

Photography Editors Schirin Rangnick Vivek Suri

Managing Editors Kate Cray Nicole Blackwood

Illustrations Editors Michael Holmes Sonia Ruiz

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

Copy Editor Brett Greene

Magazine Design Editors Mari Melin-Corcoran Valeria Villanueva

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

DESIGN ASSISTANTS: Jesse Nadel, Lauren Cueto, Andre Costa, Rebecca Goldberg, Chris West, Karena Zhao, Maggie Nolan, Lauren Quintela, Emily Lin BUSINESS LIAISON: Alexa Tsay

TWENTY-ONE OR YOUNGER Insight by Alexa Stanger & Lara Schull

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FIGURE OF SPEECH: JAMIE KIRCHICK’S RUN FOR THE YALE CORPORATION Cover by Hailey Fuchs

Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

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FIRST DO NO HARM // BY SERENA CHO // PHOTOS BY SCHIRIN RANGNICK

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ive months ago, Zuhah Syed, a sophomore at Cortlandt V.R. Creed Health & Sports Sciences High School, harbored dreams of becoming an emergency medical technician and saving lives around the New Haven community. From shadowing firefighters on their medical emergency

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missions to participating in medical science fairs, Syed sought all opportunities that would help him achieve his goal.

Creed, a magnet high school where most classes and extracurricular activities have a focus on health science, is where Syed discovered and cultivated this interest. But by May, when the

New Haven Board of Education voted to shut down Creed for failing to meet the racial quotas set by the Connecticut State Department for Education, Syed had stopped “thinking about medicine all together.�

In Connecticut, interdistrict magnet schools are required to integrate white

feature and Asian students to at least 25 percent of the student body. However, the percentage of African-American and Hispanic students has increased over the years, and 91.2 percent of Creed’s student body said they identified as black or brown last October. After years of threatening to close Creed, the Board of Education decided that it was “done kicking the can down the road,” as its Vice President Jamell Cotto said during a budget meeting last February. Faced with a 6.58 million-dollar deficit last year and an even bigger shortfall of at least $14.35 million this year, the board decided that Creed would be the first to go.

For his junior year, Syed has transferred to High School in the Community, a magnet school with a focus on social justice and law. Nevertheless, Syed said he is “not interested in the law at the slightest.” No longer able to pursue medicine without paying extra money or taking extra time out of his day, at his new school, Syed will focus on completing the requirements he needs to graduate.

“I’ve lost all my trust and hopes in the New Haven public school system,” Syed explained. “I just want to survive high school at this point.”

According to Syed, he isn’t the only Creed student being forced into a new school where his needs won’t be met.

While some are “trying to stay positive” about exploring something new, many are disappointed that they won’t be able to gear their studies around medicine, he explained.

Years ago, a racial integration policy was instituted to provide a better education for minorities. But Syed’s story raises the question: How did a policy intended to give better opportunities for

black and brown students come to interfere with their educational future?

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n 1989, 18 school-age students from Hartford sued the state for violating their rights to education and equal protection under the law in the case Sheff v. O’Neill. According to the Sheff plaintiffs, Hartford schools’ high concentration of poor African-Americans and Latinos, children from single-parent homes and immigrants still learning English overburdened the public school system and shortchanged all students.

Citing low test scores as evidence, the plaintiffs asked the city officials to testify about outdated textbooks and poor school conditions.

After a loss in the Hartford Superior Court, the plaintiffs took the case to the Connecticut supreme court, winning in a split 4–3 decision in 1996.

Ruling segregated schools unconstitutional, the court ordered the state legislature to find remedial measures for the public school system.

After the supreme court decision, in 1997, state representatives announced a new statewide, interdistrict public school program to “reduce racial, ethnic and economic isolation.” Under the new legislation, interdistrict magnet schools and cooperative programs that successfully “[reduced] isolation of students” were eligible for new state funding. In other words, magnet schools were to attract more white suburbanites to study with black and brown students in the city.

A year after the act was announced, New Haven tapped into the pool of money to revamp its public school system. In fact, all but two high schools and some elementary schools were built with some funding from the state. Over the years, the new flow of cash helped the city spend $1.7 billion to build or rebuild almost every school in town.

Last year, however, the state Department of Education increased the required percentage of white and Asian students in New Haven magnet schools to match its counterparts in Hartford.

Under the new law, schools do not qualify for state funding if more than 75 percent of the student body is African-American or Hispanic, as opposed to the previous 80 percent. Meanwhile, as white populations in the suburbs surrounding New Haven shrink, it remains difficult to recruit a sufficient number of white students to urban schools.

According to Ariana Buckley, Creed’s magnet resource teacher in charge of recruiting suburban students, the changing demographics in the t ow n s s u r ro u n d ing New Haven make it challenging to reach that benchmark.

Although H a m den, Ansonia and West Haven residents generally think highly of Creed, these residents are mostly black or Hispanic, Buckley explained in an interview with the New Haven Independent. Because of the longer bus ride, efforts to bring in students from white-dominated suburbs of Cheshire, Orange and Guilford have also been unsuccessful, she added.

Citing the new administration’s “strict policies about teachers speaking with the press about controversial issues,” Buckley declined to be interviewed for this story.

Further complicating the issue, Caltha Benitex, a junior who transferred from Creed to New Haven Academy this year, pointed out that under the current law, students who are half white and half black are classified as African-American and excluded from the white category. Noting that the school had many half-white and half-black students, Benitex added that the state department’s system was “too simplistic” and “didn’t allow students to exist as both.”

When asked about the state department’s racial quotas, President of the Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

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New Haven Board of Education Darnell Goldson and Chief Operating Officer of New Haven Public Schools William Clark declined to comment. Laurence Grotheer, director of communications at the mayor’s office, also didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Last year, with 91.2 percent of the school identifying as black or brown, Creed far surpassed the state department’s 75 percent cutoff. Had the school not shut down, Creed was at a risk of facing a $121,000 penalty this year for noncompliance to the state’s racial quota and could have lost all of its magnet funding of around $738,000 in two years.

Like Creed, many of New Haven’s interdistrict schools are struggling to recruit enough white and Asian students.

In fact, only two of 16 magnet schools — Betsy Ross Arts and Engineering & Science University — are keeping up with the state’s integration guidelines. In May, the state department notified four schools that they may face financial penalties if their racial demographics don’t change.

New Haven public schools rely heavily on the state, expecting to receive 6 | September 2018

$35.31 million — or around one-sixth of the system’s budget — from the Connecticut interdistrict magnet program this year. Already struggling to remediate a budget deficit, the Board of Education announced early this summer that Superintendent Carol Birks is considering closing or consolidating six other schools.

“While unfortunately today it’s Creed, it may be another school next year if we don’t fix this broken magnet system,” Mayor Toni Harp said last May, when the board of education voted to shut down Creed. “It’s really time to get the rules changed.”

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n May 17th — three days after the vote to shut down Creed and exactly 64 years after the Supreme Court ruled that separate cannot be made equal in Brown v. Board of Education — Creed students walked out in protest, holding signs that read, “education should see no color.”

In pouring rain, students stood outside for 26 minutes, a symbol for Creed’s time in operation. For 26 years, the

school “provided students from different backgrounds with the opportunity to have an education, and have another place to call home,” wrote Creed junior Aurea Orencia in an op-ed published in the New Haven Independent.

Darius Burgess, a graduate who led the walkout, said Creed was “one of the most diverse places [he] has ever experienced.” While the majority of the students were black and brown, they represented many different cultures, he said, which was clear in the school’s potluck parties, where one could find any cuisine they desired. In fact, all seven students interviewed said Creed’s student body was diverse, despite failing to meet the racial quotas mandated by the state department.

“With our debacle with the Board of Education, we began to feel like statistics,” Burgess said. “You ask how we got here. They were telling us about ourselves – that we aren’t meeting the quota and that we don’t deserve to be here. But we aren’t numbers. We are people. And at the end of the day, black and brown kids are the ones getting sacrificed.”

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Up the Line // BY ANDREW SANDWEISS // ILLUSTRATIONS BY KEYI CUI // PHOTOS BY SCHIRIN RANGNICK New Haven Union Station’s Grand Hall, traditionally only glanced at by rushed commuters, looked the same as it did a week, month or year ago. But there were differences, scattered across the station, subtly celebrating a new arrival. In the far right corner by the Greyhound office, a series of sleek black boxes sported touch screens and a slick red and grey logo. The same logo appeared on the banner hung from the balconies that sat above the ticketing windows. The most significant, yet inconspicuous difference was on the oversized LCD timetable, where orange bars ran across the screen, highlighting two destinations: Springfield or Hartford.

After nearly 25 years of proposals, debate and construction, the country’s newest passenger rail line has arrived. The automated announcer made it clear: “The Hartford Line is now boarding.”

The Hartford Line is a new commuter rail service that operates between Springfield and New Haven, a line that was originally only operated by Amtrak. No new destinations have been added, but the Hartford Line provides a much more frequent, convenient and accessible service to towns and cities once at the fringe of the national rail network. Where there were once six daily trains, there are now 16. New

platforms have been built in New Haven and Hartford, and every station in-between has gone through total reconstruction.

With increased service, the Hartford Line now allows easier connections to New York City–bound trains, linking Hartford, Springfield and towns in between to metropolitan New York. New developments are sprouting next to stations and more affordable housing is becoming accessible to larger job markets.

Such capital improvements and intermodal connections, however, have not come quickly; the Hartford Line has been a long process, and issues of cost and accessibility are still present.

The line was first proposed in 1994, with three recommended round trips between New Haven and Hartford only, at the cost of $4.4 million.

This initial proposal was left untouched until 2001, when a much more comprehensive version was floated, extending the line to Springfield with trains running every half hour, a frequency not yet achieved, even today. Total construction capital costs were projected at $249 million. A similar plan was reintroduced in

2004, but adding three new stations along the line, and a new intermodal transfer station at Windsor Locks (to connect with Bradley International Airport). Weekday ridership was projected at 3,044 and the total cost was approximately $263 million.

Although this plan was the most similar to the current line, no action followed, and the project remained that way for years.

The Hartford Line’s ultimate push for action, however, is thanks to an unlikely suspect: Florida Governor Rick Scott. In early 2011, the Tea Party–backed Republican turned away $2.4 billion in funding from the Obama administration to construct a high speed rail network in Florida, intended to connect Tampa and Orlando. Scott proudly proclaimed, “The government cannot spend more than it takes in.” Nevertheless, the money originally meant for Florida’s rail network was instead redistributed to rail projects across the country, including the Hartford Line in Connecticut. According to Jim Cameron of the Commuter Action Group, “When Florida turned that down, Malloy used his democratic connections and said, ‘We’ve got this project we’ve been wanting to build for decades’ and got federal funding,” making the Hartford Line a possibility.

Although kickstarted by the Obama Administration, the Hartford Line relied Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

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heavily on state funds. According to Richard Andreski, public transportation chief for the Connecticut Department of Transportation, the federal government provided $200 million, but the total cost of the project was $768 million, leaving the state to subsidize the gap. This hefty price tag has left some wondering if the money could have been better spent. “Clearly, the main line of Metro North is under-invested and needs a lot of money spent to get it into a state of good repair,” said Jim Cameron of the Commuter Action Group.

It is not just rail lines that are hurting.

Yearly reports propose destructive changes to transportation service statewide. In late 2017, “anticipated cutbacks” included a 25 cent fare increase for the state-wide bus system and a reduction in transit district subsidies by 5 percent. Shore Line East rail service was also slated for cutbacks, with a “possible elimination of the entire service in 2020.”

“But that’s not to say we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time,” asserted Cameron, “I think it was smart of the Malloy administration to grab the federal money to invest in the Hartford Line before Interstate 91 looks like Interstate 95.”

Construction began in 2015 and ended this year — a surprisingly short period of time given the almost-quarter century devoted to proposing and planning the Hartford Line. Funding is the main rea8 | September 2018

son behind the use of these secondhand, 30-year-old rail cars, with savings running into the billions of dollars when compared to purchasing new cars.

Sitting down on a leather bench in one of the rail cars, however, I felt perfectly comfortable. As I settled in, the train pulled out of Union Station.

The cars were not as modern as expected, despite a fresh coat of paint with the same livery as the ticket vending machines. “[It was] difficult to find cars that were built after 1990,” said Richard Andreski of the state Department of Transportation. “We did a national search, contacted dozens of rail operators, and there were only two choices that would’ve worked for Connecticut: Maryland … and the [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority] had cars. After reviewing both, the ones that were best suited were the MBTA cars.” Although it would be ideal for the Hartford Line to have the most up-todate equipment available, “The truth is that most railroads run these cars as long as they can and rarely have spare equipment.” New cars are in the works, but they won’t be ready for at least five years.

The Hartford Line’s first stop north is only, according to the schedule, seven minutes away.

The actual journey feels much shorter, and, unbeknownst to many, is free.

State Street Station, opened in 2002, is located at the corner

of State and Chapel streets, less than a 10-minute walk from both Old Campus and Wooster Square. Hartford Line improvements have led to the construction of a new platform (that has, strangely, not been used yet), as well as an increase in the frequency of trains between State Street and Union stations. Currently served by all Shore Line East trains and select Metro North trains, the construction of the station, even back in 2002, has had consequences for downtown New Haven.

“From the moment the station went up in 2002,” explained Matthew Nemerson SOM ’81, New Haven’s economic development administrator, “people have been contemplating the impact of the train station.” Although he did not attribute development in the area solely to the train station, Nemerson does see it as a great asset to the neighborhood.

The development perhaps most tied to the station is located right across from it: 360 State, the city and state’s largest residential building.

“As a Connecticut native, I’ve witnessed suburban sprawl and a lack of smart growth,” said Bruce Becker, developer of 360 State. “We visited [360 State St.] and immediately saw it was the best Transit-Oriented Development site in Connecticut because of the railroad station and its walking and biking proximity to Yale, the hospital and other employment centers. We proposed what was built, [a] 32-story tower with 500 apartments.”

These apartments, a major addition for the Elm City, were not just built for one socioeconomic class. Subsidized affordable housing was built in too. According to Becker, “We incorporate affordable

feature housing, something I’ve done in every project. It makes sense to me to diversify the marketing risk of the project, marketing to different groups of people.”

When the development was first proposed in 2006 and completed in 2010, State Street Station was relatively new, and its service was limited. The New York Times called it “a gamble,” and a critic quoted in the article called out its massive parking garage, claiming it detracted from a focus on auto-independency. Paradoxically, the

more optimistic: “Now you’re at the nexus of three different directions (east, west and north). I wouldn’t be surprised if someone living at 360 State couldn’t, within an hour, get to a third of the jobs in Connecticut.”

But it became clear as we branched north off the Northeast Corridor and left the Elm City that the impact of the Hartford Line is not limited to Connecticut’s big cities. The next stop, Wallingford, sits in an exciting position: only a 16-minute, $3.50 ride from New Haven.

same critic disapproved of the proximity of State Street Station to downtown due to noise concerns.

“State Street Station is such a great asset to the downtown, you can come right in and walk right there to most of the downtown destinations,” according to Becker.

“We have a lot of offices on that corridor. Take a look at SeeClickFix, Square Nine, Prometheus or any of our high tech companies: They always assumed there’d be train service to the north.” But for more than 15 years, the six daily trains departing for Hartford and Springfield bypassed the station. Now, with more frequent service as a consequence of the Hartford Line project, Nemerson explained that “it’s great to see it happen” although there’s “nothing earth-shattering about this.” Becker was

“Since they announced that [the Hartford Line] is going to happen, there has been activity,” explained Tim Ryan, director of economic development for Wallingford. Ryan pointed to a residential development called Parker Place, currently expanding to include 200 new apartments, as a good example of the positive benefits already affecting the downtown area. The town’s downtown area now hosts a brand new station, complete with two high-level platforms, a fully accessible crossover, and clear signage and lighting. But the station, according to Ryan, is not the most important factor.

“The big thing is the schedule. The fact that there are 17 trains a day, and there were 6 before — it creates so much more convenience. Gets people thinking about, ‘Jeez,

maybe the train is an option.’”

Wallingford rental rates, according to Ryan, are more affordable than New Haven.

The average rent for a studio in Wallingford is $914, while New Haven’s is $1,210. This means that more affordable apartments will be within reach of large job markets such as New Haven and Hartford.

As the train pulled out of Wallingford, gaining speed, I thought it might be useful to make a quick run to the bathroom, so I stopped the conductor as he walked through the car, checking for tickets.

“Is there a bathroom on this train?” I asked.

“Yes, they’re open now,” he replied. The answer seemed oddly phrased — as if the bathrooms had been closed.

Apparently, this was exactly the case.

“The railcars we leased … were built before the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990,” explained Andreski, “so they did not meet all of the current accessibility requirements.” One of these requirements concerned the bathrooms, which (based on a personal inspection) are too narrow for a wheelchair.

“Under the direction of the Federal Railroad Administration,” continued Andreski, “we were asked to keep the restrooms closed until they were all made accessible.”

This all changed on Aug. 7, when a group individuals with Crohn’s disease petitioned the Federal Railroad Administration to allow the restrooms to be opened to accomodate their medical conditions.

Although temporarily appropriate for those afflicted with Crohn’s disease, the cars still need to be retrofitted with accessible restrooms, a process currently under way. This issue highlights the challenges of operating three-decade-old cars. At Meriden, the next stop after Wallingford, a family boarded the train, and the mother, shocked, exclaimed, “There are no outlets!” drawing attention to yet another, though less critical, issue.

At Meriden, the presence of transit-oriented development is unmistakable.

“Meriden is a great example,” Becker states. “New station, huge investments.”

“In Meriden, you will hear that the rail line is the single most important thing Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

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happening,” Andreski explained, “If you stand at the station, you will see four to five development projects underway or completed. From the green, you will see new apartment condos with ground floor retail.”

This scene was impossible to miss at Meriden station, where the new platforms were snugly fit between older commercial buildings and new, multistory developments.

The following station on my journey north, Berlin, did not show a similar impact.

Its surroundings are far less interesting: parking lots and industrial buildings. I saw very little new construction.

This dichotomy between Meriden and Berlin highlights a process explained best

by Nemerson: “You are going to see towns falling into two camps: One camp will absolutely see the train as a way to diversify their housing stock, allowing them to build more apartments, more commuters in the city. In the other camp people will be horrified by that, wanting it not to happen.” It is obvious which camp Meriden falls into, and Berlin perhaps fits into the other.

Approaching Hartford, the skyline and the statehouse made grand appearances right before the train slid into Union Station. The station was added a new, highlevel (and accessible) platform with Hartford Line funding. More than half of the riders in my car disembarked — many Hartford Line trains terminate here.

There are only two more stations between Hartford and Springfield, both served by a single track. The first, Windsor, still uses a low-level platform, although construction of an accessible replacement has begun.

Andreski explained that a wheelchair lift is used at such stations, but the improved convenience of a high-level platform for wheelchairs is obvious.

10 | September 2018

At Windsor Locks, the current “station” is a platform and bus shelter, surrounded by parking lots and trees, south of downtown.

Fortunately, a new station is in the works, and the town of Windsor Locks is full of excitement.

“We can’t wait for construction,” stated Jen Rodriguez, Windsor Locks’ town planner. The station will be closer to downtown, adjacent to developments that have already begun construction.

“Being between two cities with a lot to offer, including jobs, puts Windsor Locks in a strategic location. The added train trips and relocation of the train station to the downtown setting drew the attention of developers,” added Rodriguez.

Windsor Locks is most famous as the home of Bradley International Airport, the primary airport for Hartford, Springfield and many New Haven residents. In the 2004 plan, an intermodal station was proposed for Windsor Locks, with a shuttle to Bradley. Currently, no such shuttle exists.

“A shuttle service to the airport would be an important connection. Nothing is solidified, the conversation is continuing,” Rodriguez stated, but unfortunately for Windsor Locks, the Department of Transportation has decided that any new shuttle service to the airport would (for the time being) go direct to Hartford. The reasoning is that not all trains continue north of Hartford because of the limitation of the single track, and so to provide easier connections for fliers, a shuttle bus running from Hartford Union Station would be better. Although fine for those south of Hartford, residents in Windsor, Windsor Locks and Springfield would find it more convenient to take another form of transit to Bradley.

As we left Windsor Locks and crossed the Connecticut River, the towers of my final destination peaked above the treeline. We rolled into Springfield, the terminus station, whose abandoned platforms reminded me that the Hartford Line, particularly north of Hartford, needs improvement. Although a renovated station recently opened, the platform remains inadequate and worn. “If there’s one thing we wish we could see improved,” explained Cameron, “that would be the service north of Hartford to Springfield.”

Although the benefits of the line are visible throughout, it is clear where refurbishment was focused. The unfinished northern section, dated rail cars and systemwide budget concerns could become a problem in future years. As it stands, the Hartford Line is a vast improvement over the status quo and provides a level of service lacking in central Connecticut for decades. More development along this corridor is leading to more housing, particularly at rents lower than what might be found in New Haven or Hartford.

Where the Hartford Line has been built to completion, it has been built right. But there is still anticipation for what’s to come next.

As I waited in line for my train home, a young family with a stroller prepared to board from the low-level platform.

The conductor, quick to assist, was forced to tilt it nearly 90 degrees, while paper bags, loosely strapped onto the stroller, began to fall, littering the worn asphalt with plastic toys and candy. The baby had, thankfully, been carried up with the mother. On the platform, and on all the platforms along the Hartford Line, were people of all walks of life, waiting.

An attorney from Berlin working in New York. A Yale student coming back from a visit to the University of Connecticut.

A biker just trying to transfer to Metro North. A wheelchair user keeping to himself. We were all waiting to board, waiting for our own arrival in Hartford or New Haven, down the line.

campus map

A School of Women // BY SYDNEY STEANS-GAIL AND SAVANNAH DIGIOVANNI

BASED ON THE NEW YORKER’S “CITY OF WOMEN”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

campus map If in 1718 a small college in Connecticut, hadn’t accepted £562.12 (over $100,000 given modern inflation) in goods, 417 books and a portrait and coat of arms of King George I from the wealthy textile merchant, Elihu Yale, this university might still be known as the Collegiate School. While we do not explicitly venerate our namesake as an individual, his presence lingers in the four letters emblazoned on blue placards, T-shirts and baseball caps across campus. To say that Elihu Yale’s legacy has informed the school’s culture for the past 300 years may be an exaggeration, but undeniably, the elite university’s paragon of success is the entrepreneurial white male donor.

The significance, both subtle and overt, of a name is well-known to the Yale community. Moving daily through Yale’s campus, it’s nearly impossible not to feel a yawning gap between our progressive student body and the institutions of tradition that surround us. This school was not created for the multicultural, dynamic set of learners it now houses. Campus tours often ask prospective students to consider whether they can envision themselves here as part of a diverse, dynamic student body. But the question is whether they see themselves represented “here,” against the University’s brick and mortar foundations.

The narrative lived by Yale students every day is one of male achievement, or rather recognition of male achievement.

There are comparatively few representations of women and nonmale accomplishments. For men, it is a city of mirrors, while for everyone else, it’s more of fun house that requires mental labor to reconcile one’s sense of self with the distortion reflected back.

We wondered what it would be like to erase the masculine facades and in these blank spaces choose to celebrate and recognize the achievement of women.

“Welcome young, bright-eyed prospective students to Collegiate University! As we embark on our tour we encourage you to look to our buildings and boulevards,

12 | September 2018

our reading rooms and residential colleges and question not only whether you could see yourself here, but whether you see yourself represented here.

“Let’s begin at Mary Goodman College.

In 1872 Mary Goodman, a former slave and owner of a laundry service, bequeathed her savings to the Yale Divinity School to establish a scholarship fund for black divinity students. This was the University’s first gift by a person of color and served as a catalyst of social change within the Div School.

Admitting more students of color, the Div School became committed to training its students to be leaders in communities facing systemic inequities and growing wealth gaps. Today, the scholarship in her name persists, providing education to black students all thanks to Mary Goodman’s donation 146 years ago.

“Just north of Goodman is Florence Bingham Kinne College. When Kinne was hired to teach in the pathology department in 1905, she was the first female instructor in the department, with the title assistant in instruction. Yale School of Medicine did not begin admitting women until 1916, so Bingham Kinne would have been the only woman in nearly every space she entered during her time at Yale.

“Here on the left we have Clinton and Sotomayor colleges — very popular for aspiring law students. Then we’ll be passing the Alice Rufie Jordan Blake Law Building. Jordan Blake was the first woman to graduate from a graduate school with a law degree in 1885, before the law school officially began admitting women. Jordan Blake’s impressive intellect and ability to spot a loophole (the school depended on tradition rather than an explicit written policy to exclude women) earned her a place in the program.

“We’re now coming around to Sylvia Ardyn Boone College, named for the first black woman to be granted tenure in 1989. She was an art historian specializing in female imagery in African art and she taught at a time when only a handful of the students were women, even fewer women of color. Her seminal course “The Black Woman” and her founding of the Chubb

Fellowship contributed to the development of community and recognition for students and scholars of color at Yale.

“Circling back to the middle of campus, we’ll pass Renée Richards College. Richards is an opthalmologist and former professional tennis player. She won a landmark Supreme Court case challenging a transphobic policy instituted by the U.S. Open stipulating that female players undergo genetic screening before being admitted.

This policy was instituted after Richards announced her transition. Richards’s success in court ultimately allowed her to compete in the Open and the policy was denounced as discriminatory.

“Here at the center of campus and the end of our tour is the Alma Mater Library.

Pulling open two sets of wooden double doors and gazing down the nave, every visitor confronts the painting “Alma Mater” depicting the female allegory of the Alma Mater. She represents the spirit of scholarship and academic pursuit here.

It is often the case that visual representations of women are limited to the allegorical and symbolic, standing in celebration of the achievements of men, while actual women appear less. Alma Mater serves as a repository of knowledge and information as a physical space, but also as a body to house the memories of other great women whose names have been forgotten but whose work has marked this campus, city, or world in some way.”

Inequity between men and women in academic and professional spheres is more than just symbolic. For instance, of all the student loan debt incurred by students nationally, women bear two-thirds of the burden — the result of lesser pay for equal work and fewer women being hired into prestigious, higher-paying positions. While rebranding an entire campus for the empowerment of women would be highly impractical and, in fact, not the solution (though it sounds like a utopia), increased representation could be one element of a cultural shift needed to ensure that this is a school ready to nurture the ambitions of anyone regardless of gender, sexuality, race or religion.

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// BY ALEX DIMEGLIO // ILLUSTRATIONS BY ZI LIN

A

s first years explored Yale’s a cappella scene this fall, they encountered something subtly different than all their predecessors had. Three of Yale’s singing groups identified themselves “all-gender TTBB” or “all-gender SSAA.” This terminology was new to campus. In the past, Yale a cappella broke down into single-gender and mixed groups. Mixed groups varied in arrangements but encompassed both high- and low-range singers of all genders. Of the single-gender groups, the all-male groups sang a repertoire written for lower voices, and the female groups for upper voices. Until now.

In July 2017, Doox of Yale, then known as the Duke’s Men, opened its membership to students of all genders. In doing so, the Doox stimulated a conversation on Yale’s campus about the role of gender in vocal music. They called on the Yale vocal music community to “examine the ways in which we include and exclude trans and non-binary people in our shared spaces.”

Seven months later, Yale’s all-senior a cappella groups, The Whiffenpoofs and Whim ’n Rhythm, announced a joint decision to lift their gender restrictions.

Gender is cemented into the Western musical tradition and especially into vocal music. The ways in which a singer’s voice is described, categorized and utilized by ensembles are tied up with gender identity.

Traditionally, basses, baritones and tenors are men. Altos, mezzos and sopranos are usually women. A number of physiological characteristics separate the lower bass, baritone and tenor voices from the

higher altos, mezzos and sopranos. Hormones play the largest role in differentiating higher and lower voices.

Testosterone, for example, can alter the voice permanently during puberty, inducing thickening of the vocal folds. Thicker vocal folds create a lower, heavier voice with different transition points between vocal registers. These characteristics that describe the sound of the voice (vocal range, weight, timbre and transition points) have been, until recently, conceptually bound together with gender. Adult voices that are higher and less affected by testosterone are assumed by virtue of their classification as alto, mezzo or soprano to be female, and lower voices male.

This dichotomy has excluded transgender and gender nonbinary singers, especially from single-gender vocal groups.

For example, some transgender women, unless they received puberty blockers, were exposed to high levels of testosterone during puberty and have singing voices that sound more similar to those of cisgender men than those of cisgender women.

A woman with that kind of voice would not fit in any single-gender vocal group on Yale’s campus. Transgender men are similarly excluded. And a nonbinary singer might sing a “tenor” part comfortably but be excluded from an all-male group.

The conversation around gender identity in singing group has grown in recent years. “In the past, few questioned the musical or social value of single-gender choruses,” Jeffrey Duoma, professor of choral conducting at the Yale School of

Music and director of the Yale Glee Club, wrote in an email to the News. But it is recently “becoming the norm, particularly in college settings, for choruses not to identify themselves by gender, but rather by vocal range.”

The Whiffenpoofs and Doox now refer to themselves as “TTBB” ensembles — containing tenor, baritone and bass voices — while Whim ’n Rhythm is “SSAA,” or made up of soprano and alto voices.

Duoma believes these kinds of developments “will strengthen our choral communities; one of the best things about the choral art form is its inclusiveness — almost everyone has a voice.”

Two-time Grammy Award winner Ben Bram, who writes vocal arrangements for Pentatonix and teaches transgender and nonbinary high school students, agreed. In an email to the News, Bram said, “I think it’s fantastic that some [single-gender] groups are opening their membership to all genders, particularly in groups like the Whiffenpoofs that have special once-ina-lifetime opportunities for its members.”

The Whiffenpoofs take advantage of their prestige as the country’s oldest collegiate a cappella group by embarking on far more extravagant world tours than their peer groups. Noticing that only men had access to this experience, women on campus had been agitating for the gender integration of the Whiffenpoofs years before they ultimately lifted their gender restriction.

The imperative to reassess the relationship between gender and vocal music has Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

feature extended beyond the world of college a cappella. In March, the powerful lyric baritone Lucia Lucas landed the principal role in “Don Giovanni” at the Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma. Lucia Lucas is a transgender woman, the first to sing a principal role on an American operatic stage. Also this year, Liz Jackson Hearns and Brian Kremer co-authored “The Singing Teacher’s Guide to Transgender Voices,” an early entry into scholarship that thinks critically about gender’s role in voice pedagogy.

Kremer, who is a musical theater professor and voice teacher at Elon University, said he felt “inadequate as a teacher” when he was “unable to service every student who came through [his] door,” some of whom were transgender or nonbinary and for whom gendered vocal categorization was unsuitable.

So, he reached out to Hearns, who in 2014 founded The Voice Lab, a Chicagobased vocal coaching company that specializes in transgender voices. Hearns and Kremer told the News that in order to include transgender and nonbinary people in the singing community, there need to be “new ways of classifying voices that remove gender” as a consideration. According to Hearns and Kremer, focusing on a student’s vocal anatomy and hormonal history is a more inclusive way of classifying voices than focusing on their gender.

Kremer said that realizing this has “completely reshaped the way” he “approach[es] students and look[s] at the voice.”

While the main criteria that classify a voice as a soprano, alto, tenor or bass are independent of gender, the terms themselves are heavily gendered. Hearns and Kremer said that to make voice classification truly inclusive, the gendered associations of classical voice types must be dealt with or new terminology must be invented.

But even people who advocate a more inclusive attitude toward gender in vocal music believe that the performer’s gender can be sometimes relevant. Morgan Baker ’21, who is nonbinary and the first nonmale member of Doox, argued that some “works that speak to the experiences of specific groups, especially those of mar14 | September 2018

ginalized groups, can demand consideration of their performer’s identity.” Kremer voiced a similar opinion: “Gender does not have to be a consideration when singing a song whose meaning is universal, like ‘My Funny Valentine’ — everyone can have a funny valentine,” but when performing a piece that gives voice to the specific experiences of a marginalized group, it is important to consider “who the narrator of that story is.”

The gender identity of the performer is one of many aspects of a singer’s identity that groups may consider when selecting their repertoire. The Doox, Baker noted, carefully consider the racial identity of the soloist when they sing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” a 1970 hit that protested the Vietnam War and later became an anthem of solidarity for people of color.

Addressing the topic of all-female singing groups, Hearns noted that “trans women [can] often get excluded from those spaces. Having a cis-women-only space is problematic,” as would be having a group that is cisgender-men-only, so it is important for single-gender spaces to be inclusive toward all of those who share that gender identity.

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ofía Campoamor ’19 is a cisgender woman and the first nonmale Whiffenpoof. She is also probably the first singer in Whiffenpoofs history whose voice has not been heavily altered by testosterone. Throughout her singing career, she has sung soprano, alto, and occasionally tenor parts in choirs, musicals, and a cappella groups. In the Whiffenpoofs, she will sing the highest tenor part. Campoamor acknowledged that there is some difference between voices affected by testosterone and those mostly unaffected. But she has proven, as has Baker, that she can comfortably sing music written for testosterone-affected voices.

She suggested that, rather than focusing on a black-and-white binary consisting of voices that were exposed to high levels of testosterone during puberty and those

that were not, we might view testosterone-affected and -unaffected voices as “two spectra that may actually overlap.”

Even if all of Yale’s a cappella groups were to remove their gender requirements while retaining their repertoire — as Doox, Whiffenpoofs and Whim ’n Rhythm have done — there would remain 10 exclusively low- or high-voiced groups and six mixed groups in the Singing Group Council.

Could the way Western music has labelled high voices female and low voices male have inflated Yale’s emphasis on the differences between them? Buzz Mauro ’84, an alumnus of Doox and a successful musical theater teacher and performer, seemed to think so. He suggested that “the practice of segregating social groups by gender” and Yale’s long history of only admitting men led to the sheer number of exclusively highor low-voiced a cappella groups on campus today. Range-restricted groups may still serve a purpose. The limited range and homogeneous timbre of an exclusively lowvoiced ensemble create a unique sound, just as a trombone trio offers a sonic experience that a brass quintet cannot. However, trombone trios are vastly outnumbered by brass quintets, which include the entire range of standard brass instruments, from the tuba to the trumpet. The future of vocal music might require a compromise between specialized, range-restricted groups and those committed to making room.

Alex DiMeglio ’20 is a member of the Doox of Yale.

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CrossFit at Yale

// BY ZOE NUECHTERLEIN // PHOTOS BY VIVEK SURI

Y

ale’s campus was quiet at 7:45 a.m. the day before fall classes began.

Just two miles away at CrossFit New Haven, chatter and the clanging of dumbells mixed with a pop-music playlist.

Minutes before the 8 a.m. CrossFit class, a handful of athletes were warming up: A 30-something-year-old woman with defined muscles bent down in a squat; an older man in baggy clothing reached down to touch his toes. Two fit men paced the perimeter of the small turf field just outside — on their hands, with their legs dangling in the air. Daniel Stein ’19, the youngest athlete and only Yale student in

the 8 a.m. class, extended one leg back in a calf stretch.

Sunlight streamed in from the large windows lining the warehouse-style space, hitting the judicious selection of equipment like rowing ergs and pull-up bars. There were no mirrors. In the front, a whiteboard displayed several members’ goals in a “what, by, or else” diagram: Vicky will perform three perfect pullups by Oct. 31 or else she will “not [be] allowed to loiter in gym after class.” May had to master the “ring muscle up” by Aug. 30 or else subject herself to “zero coffee pre-workout.”

When the clock struck 8, the instructor called for everyone to gather in a circle.

The athletes nodded and smiled at each other and Stein reached across the circle to shake hands with a newcomer.

CrossFit, a fitness organization with thousands of gyms around the world, teaches training regimens of primarily aerobic exercises, body-weight strengthening and Olympic weightlifting. But to many outsiders, CrossFit is a cult of intense athletes who dedicate their lives to extreme training schedules (and don’t shut up about it). In a 2017 article, The Atlantic referred to CrossFit as a church with

Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

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“evangelical zeal” in an increasingly secular society — an idea that made several CrossFit New Haven athletes laugh. In reality, CrossFit is just another way of working out. It provides members with the opportunity for intensity, but to many, it is simply a fun way to fit in a challenging workout around a busy schedule.

In CrossFit New Haven, Stein found a positive community, a welcoming space between a sports team practice and gym workout. Like athletes on teams, Stein and the other CrossFitters train together at high effort levels and focus on what their bodies can do, not what they look like. But like average gym members, their end-goal is health, not competition, and all fitness levels are welcome.

Before his first CrossFit class, Stein’s perception relied largely on the CrossFit Games, an annual televised competition for the world’s top CrossFit athletes.

In August, CrossFit members worldwide tuned in: Sweat beading on her neck and chalk stains smeared across her jersey, TiaClair Toomey lunged for the finish line, securing another first-place event finish.

As she raised her arms in celebration, her shoulders and biceps bulged. Her openmouthed grin and sparkling eyes suggested ferocity; she looked like a cartoon superhero. Several victories later, Toomey and Mathew Fraser were named the fittest woman and man on earth — the faces of CrossFit — for the second and third year in a row, respectively.

Of the CrossFit athletes who watched, a few share these professionals’ intensity and impressive physiques. Most do not.

“I had always thought of CrossFit as this really intense thing that scary jacked guys do,” said Victoria Bartlett MED ’21.

Bartlett never considered herself athletic before she started training at CrossFit New Haven.

Aaron Poach, the manager and head trainer at the gym, said his main goal was to combat these misconceptions. Though 16 | September 2018

CrossFit classes and the CrossFit Games share similar exercises, the great majority of CrossFit New Haven athletes do not resemble the CrossFit Games athletes. Coaches work closely with each athlete, modifying exercises to ensure that, as Poach claims, “Crossfit is for everybody.”

That is not to say that CrossFit is easy.

While commitment varies on a weekly basis, CrossFit athletes are expected to exert high effort levels in each session.

Classes begin with a warm-up, which often involves running and stretching, then lead into the strength portion and finally the workout of the day, or WOD. At Stein’s 8 a.m. class, the strength portion was farmers carry sets and barbell “hip ups.” The WOD was a cycle of rowing sessions on the ergs and “wall balls” — squatting with a weighted ball, then throwing it high up against the wall. CrossFit prides itself on its constant variation, so WODs are rarely repeated. The New Haven and Science Park locations near Yale offer hourlong classes throughout the day, generally with the first around 5:00 a.m. and the last around 7:30 p.m.

Part of what makes CrossFit so intriguing is that the tradi-

tional reward of competition does not follow most members’ fierce training. Competitive athletes often refer to games and meets as “rewards” — chances to show off their hard work while facing off against competitors. Some CrossFit members participate in CrossFit competitions, but according to Stein, even those meets do not feel oppositional. During competitions, Stein feels like he is competing primarily against himself.

Instead of games, CrossFit athletes find motivation in day-to-day victories, whether it is mastering a new lift exercise or a new personal record number of pullups. Anna Ayres-Brown ’20 compared tracking her progress in CrossFit New Haven to playing video games: “When you unlock a new movement, that’s really exciting,” she said.

This philosophy of functionality sets CrossFit apart from sports teams and gym workouts like spin classes. While soccer players train to be good at soccer and everyday gymgoers work out with a more

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general sense of health, CrossFit members focus on “functional” workouts. This means that CrossFit exercises are mirrored in everyday life.

“A deadlift is picking up your kids,” Poach explained. “A press is putting the groceries away or a piece of luggage in the overhead storage bin.”

According to Poach, the main goal of CrossFit is for participants to live longer and better. He wants his athletes to be able to play with their grandkids without knee pain.

Body positivity naturally accompanies CrossFit’s focus on functionality. Forget summer body transformations — CrossFit athletes tend to care about how many pullups they can do and how fast they can run, not what they look like.

Stein first joined CrossFit partly because he wanted to look as muscular as the CrossFit Games athletes he saw on TV. But once he began celebrating his victories in various CrossFit exercises, he focused instead on his body’s abilities.

Likewise, many athletes who join CrossFit with a goal to slim down and lower calorie counts begin to value strength over slimness. This shift promotes healthy relationships with food: CrossFit athletes are encouraged to eat more because food fuels their workouts. Food becomes nourish-

ment, not a pesky source of calories and fat. The absence of mirrors at many CrossFit gyms, including CrossFit New Haven, ensures that athletes focus on their exercise and on each other instead of their appearances.

CrossFit’s marketing proves particularly significant for female athletes — instead of portraying only small, thin women, CrossFit presents a variety of body types, including women as buff as male bodybuilders. Women make up about half of CrossFit athletes and they work out in the same classes with the same basic exercises as the men. Kaitlynn Sierra ’21 noted that, since joining CrossFit New Haven, she has felt more confident lifting next to crowds of men in Payne Whitney Gym. Just as this confidence does not come without work, it also carries a cost. At CrossFit New Haven, a drop-in class costs $20, a three-class-per-week membership costs $134 per month and an unlimited membership costs $174 per month, not including tax. CrossFit New Haven offers a 10 percent student discount. This sacrifice proves tricky: Unlike many people who decide between buying a gym membership and CrossFit, Yale students can work out at Payne Whitney at no additional cost. But Payne Whitney does not

offer the same community, so Yale CrossFit members are willing to pay.

At CrossFit New Haven, athletes typically do not stack their equipment until after they have cheered on the last remaining athlete through his or her last rep. Manager Poach remembered a moment from one of his first CrossFit classes: Leaning against a box for a break from box jumps, he locked eyes with another athlete. “We both looked at each other like, ‘Wow, this is really hard,’” he said. “Then we both stood up like ‘Oh, this is hard for you too, so it’s not just me.’” With that understanding, they returned to the box jumps with new energy.

Not every Yale student can pay, but those who can and do think these benefits are worth the price. Stein recently reflected on this sacrifice; he considered cutting back his membership to three classes per week. He wonders if he will be able to craft even more productive workouts with more lifting for himself at Payne Whitney but knows something would be lacking.

“CrossFit is the most humbling thing because you always realize how much improvement can be done,” he said. “There are workouts where I know I’ve pushed myself harder than I thought I could.”

Far East Movement’s “Like a G6” blasted as Stein finished his final set of Wall-Balls. Exhausted but refreshed, he sat down and worked into a stretch. It was only his second time back at the gym after summer, and some of his friends were walking in for the next class. He had not seen them since May, so they paused to catch up. After chatting for awhile, they said goodbye quickly. Tomorrow he will lift in Payne Whitney, but they will see each other again at a future class.

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art essay

Artwork by Molly Molly Ono Ono Mother 4

18 | September 2018

art essay

Mother 3

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feature

Losing Losing Luster Luster

Singapore’s Golden Mile Dilemma

A

nde Lai has a great view. He bought his two-bedroom apartment in Golden Mile Complex in 1986 with this view in mind. Standing on his 14th-floor balcony, he could see where the Kallang River emptied in the Straits of Singapore. He could see the old national stadium. At low tide, he could smell the ocean. He hoped that moving closer to his photography shop, which he ran out of the first floor of the building with his wife, would allow him to spend more time with his 1-year-old daughter.

This was before Golden Mile Complex itself and three other post-independence landmarks were under threat of demolition. These buildings were completed in the wake of Singapore’s independence from Malaysia in 1965 and are widely 20 | September 2018

considered to be architecturally significant.

“For these buildings, we are at an inflection point in time,” said Karen Tan, the founder of an independent cinema in Golden Mile Tower. Tan acknowledged that there may be economic reasons to sell and demolish the buildings, but questioned the decision on a personal level: “How do you factor in all the intangible things? The history, the heritage, its relevance to the city and people’s identity.”

Golden Mile Complex is one of the four post-independence structures including People’s Park Complex, People’s Park Centre and Golden Mile Tower that are up for sale by their owners.

Each of the four properties is held under strata-title ownership, a technical term

// By Ko Lyn Cheang // Photos courtesy of Philipp Aldrup

describing a multiowner collective. Each collective has begun the search for a buyer who will take over the building from the current occupants. If the sales are successful, these buildings might be demolished and the site redeveloped. Right now, none of the four buildings have been publicly designated for conservation.

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n New Haven in 1958, a decade before the first stone was laid for Golden Mile Complex, the tide was turning in favor of conservation. New Haven residents, architecture students and preservationists worked together to save the historic Wooster Square district from being bisected by the new Interstate 91.

But in this city, not all architecture has been considered worth preserving. New

feature Haven has had a checkered relationship with architectural monuments, in particular, monuments designed in the Brutalist style like Golden Mile. The city’s residents have experienced the sometimes imposing nature of Brutalist architecture. Examples include the New Haven Coliseum, an arena and parking garage designed by Paul Rudolph, built in 1968 and demolished in 2007.

Herbert Newman, founder of Newman Architects, a New Haven architecture firm, said that not all architecture can accommodate change and thus avoid demolition. Reflecting on his city’s experience with urban renewal, he posed two questions that could be useful in navigating this conundrum: First, can the buildings accommodate change without losing what makes them special? Second, should they be cherished for their value to the city’s history and therefore be preserved?

W

hen Singapore became an independent country in 1965, the site now occupied by Golden Mile Complex looked very different. Visitors saw a haphazard and congested landscape of shophouses, kampongs — traditional villages — and shipyards.

Golden Mile Complex and Golden Mile Tower were developed as a part of the Government Land Sales Programme, started in 1967, which leased land for 99 years to private entities to transform the city of shophouses to one of skyscrapers.

City planners envisioned a “golden mile” of architectural showpieces stretching along Beach Road, a major coastal road in Singapore built under British colonial rule. Golden Mile Complex was the first building to be built on the golden mile in an effort to increase middle-class housing options.

In Golden Mile Complex, the commercial, retail and residential areas intersect. In the decade after gaining its independence, Singapore changed rapidly. People moved out of congested shophouses or kampongs and into new apartments. Golden Mile Complex, with its iconic stepped form, emerged as a symbol of this rapid national

development. Brutalist and Metabolist, Golden Mile Complex synthesized the prevailing international architectural aesthetic with a young nation’s ambitions of urban renewal.

“This [landscape that represented an era] is what we are trying to safeguard for the future generation, because you only go through nation-building once. Once that era has passed, you can never replicate the people who built it, who dreamed this, who believed they could do it — local architects, planners, builders,” said Ho Weng Hin, a local conservation architect.

Golden Mile Complex was completed in 1973, and Golden Mile Tower, its nextdoor sister building, was completed just a year later.

As the city changed around him, James Ang Chai Yong made plans to leave teaching and start his own insurance business.

He found a unit in the newly completed Golden Mile Tower.

Finding the space too big for just an insurance business, he decided to expand his enterprise to include selling stationery.

Meanwhile, in the neighboring Golden Mile Complex, a new Thai restaurant opened its doors to the burgeoning Thai community in Singapore, especially Thai construction workers.

Twenty-threeyear-old Yuang Somchua had just arrived in Singapore four years prior from her hometown Chiang-

mai in Thailand. In 1983, she opened her first restaurant, Diandin Leluk Thai Restaurant, serving Thai food in Golden Mile Complex.

Ang and Somchua still occupy their units, but little else has remained the same for this Brutalist icon.

In 2006, a politician described Golden Mile Complex as a “vertical slum” and a “national disgrace.” Years of poor maintenance, low occupancy and low rent had caused the building’s physical state to deteriorate.

Ho explained that the physical decline of Golden Mile Complex stems from its status as a strata-title leasehold property.

Unlike many malls built in the past decade that are often owned by one developer, strata-title malls have hundreds of individual owners. At the start of the lease, everyone pools money into a fund, known as a

Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

feature sinking fund, which is used for building repairs. But over time, the money dries up.

“There is no mechanism for the sinking fund to maintain the cash flow,” explained Ho, who works as a architectural conservation consultant. “Lousy contractors do a shoddy job, things start giving way. Complaints grow. People start to get frustrated. Instead of pouring money down the drain, they move out.

Moving out, they hold the property and rent it out or sublet. Once you sublet, it’s downhill.”

The shared swimming pool has long been drained and lies unused, abandoned. A 2004 effort to upgrade the air-conditioning vents left exposed airconditioning pipes snaking across the mall ceiling.

Pipes often leak into residents’ bedrooms and balconies. Individual owners embarked on DIY construction projects, covering their balconies — with the view that Lai so loves — with corrugated sheet metal, marring the iconic stepped facade of the building. One of the elevators is broken; the parts used in the elevator are now obsolete and have to be custom ordered from Japan, explains a sign.

As original residents abandoned the deteriorating building, some units were subdivided and rented at low cost to Thai workers.

Five to 10 people live in units meant for a small family. Lai estimates that nine out of 10 of his current neighbors are Thai.

22 | September 2018

Even with the in-house Thai community, business has been hard for Somchua and she is planning to relocate her restaurant to Guangzhou in China later this year.

Customers have stopped frequenting her restaurant the way they used to. At midafternoon one day in June, Diandin Leluk was a quarter full with customers.

Somchua, along with 724 other owners who together hold 80.83 percent of the total share value of Golden Mile Complex, is in favor of the collective sale.

“Most owners are quite old, so I don’t think they want to continue [to run their business],” Ang, who runs the stationery shop in Golden Mile Tower, explained.

Ang and his wife hope to retire after selling their unit.

Many owners make money by renting out their units. But because the rental value of the space is very low, it is hard to make a living this way. On the other hand, the building sits on prime real estate, welllocated in the city center, and could sell for a higher price.

While the vast majority of people who own commercial units support a collective sale, Lai said that there are more residents who do not want to sell their units.

For one, residents expect that there will be a disparity in the payout for residential and commercial owners. Lai, who is on the collective sale committee for Golden Mile Complex, said that the en bloc price will be about $1,000 per square feet in U.S. dollars for an apartment unit. But shop owners like Ang in Golden Mile Tower predict the commercial unit en bloc price will be a little under $1,500 per square foot, if not more. If the building is sold, Ang could walk away with as much as a million dollars.

Many residents are tenants who have little say over the fate of the building. Others, including Lai, find themselves in the minority of homeowners unwilling to sell their homes. For each of the four buildings to be sold, there needs to be a consensus among owners holding 80 percent of the building’s share value and area. As long as the 80 percent agree to sell, minority homeowners will be silenced.

“If 80 percent [of the people want to sell their units] then I have to go. … I’m not against the 80 percent of people who want to sign it. You can’t fight the 80 percent,” Lai said.

He added that many people attach a strong sentimental value to the place. He and his wife, for one, enjoy living there.

Most importantly, he does not think he will be able to buy a new home with the same view, convenient location and spaciousness that he has in Golden Mile with the money he expects to receive from the sale.

Some people, particularly architects and historians like Ho and Chang Jiat-Hwee, a professor in modern architecture at the National University of Singapore, hope that the government will take steps to protect the building from being demolished by designating the building for conservation.

Citing concerns about sustainability and limited energy, Ho criticized the idea that these buildings should be torn down just because they are old and obsolete.

“In fact, it is a very wasteful and unsustainable way to develop a city,” Ho said, “I think we’ve gone past that era of building and demolishing big buildings and reconstructing new buildings in their place.”

Ho believes that Singapore’s laws should not encourage such frequent en bloc sales for buildings that are less than halfway through their 99-year lease. Government regulations can reduce en bloc sales by limiting such sales to older properties.

Most post-independence buildings designated for conservation in Singapore are state-owned, making any conservation of the privately owned Golden Mile and People’s Park buildings unique. “[Urban Redevelopment Authority] is open to explore win-win solutions with owners of private modern buildings that have merit for conservation,” Kelvin Ang, director of conservation management at the Urban Redevelopment Authority, said in a formal email statement.

But what does a win-win solution look like in the seemingly zero-sum world of real estate? Tan Cheng Siong, a pioneering

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architect who designed Pearl Bank Apartments, another post-independence Brutalist landmark in Singapore, offered voluntary conservation as a possible answer.

For the past three years, he has worked with residents of the Pearl Bank Apartments to create an owner-led development plan, which would allow architects and consultants to work with owners to rejuvenate and upgrade the building.

But the plan fell through. Tan had obtained the consent of 93 percent of residents, but proposals for voluntary conservation that will involve alterations to the building require a 100 percent consensus among owners. This makes it significantly harder to gain support for upgrading the building than selling it, which only requires an 80 percent approval.

Both Ho and Chang also proposed measures to incentivize developers to conserve the building, should it be sold.

For example, if a developer rehabilitates the building instead of demolishing it, the government can waive development charges or extend the leasehold on the land.

“Right now, the main problem is that there are no clear urban planning policies to incentivize the conservation of these buildings,” Chang said. “And this is important because Singapore developed a lot in the 1970s, and many of these buildings are now entering their fifth decade.”

A more organic and long-term solution would be to let the building gain stature and importance in the public eye over time. Ho made an analogy to Singapore’s shophouses, which were once dilapidated but have since been designated for con-

servation by the Urban Redevelopment Authority.

“In the past we didn’t romanticize shophouses as heritage because everyone living in them was in dire conditions.

But we took a step back, decided to conserve them, and now they are much coveted buildings,” Ho said. Three Liang Seah Street conservation shophouses recently went up for sale at just under $22 million U.S dollars.

He thinks that there is a similar potential for enhancing the value of Golden Mile.

The phenomenon has already begun. In recent years, the Golden Mile buildings have been revitalized as young entrepreneurs and creatives take advantage of the low rent and generous space available in the building to set up creative design studios, bars and an independent cinema.

“It is kind of attracting a more artsy crowd because of its pedigree as a piece of good architecture, and it also has a very gritty, urban fringe kind of vibe, with the Thai discos, the bars, the food and the mixed crowd,” said Ho. When Karen Tan’s friend told her that his landlord had an old theater with original fittings, floorings and seats on the fifth floor of Golden Mile Tower for sale, she knew she had to do something special with it. She decided to open The Projector, Singapore’s first independent cinema, with her sister Sharon and Blaise TriggSmith. The cinema, known for screening films by Singaporean filmmakers and arthouse films, occupies the space that was previously Golden Theatre, which was at one point Singapore’s largest cinema with

a seating capacity of 1,500.

Two floors below The Projector is Eden, a gallery space created by Zarch Collaboratives, a local architecture firm.

Tan is optimistic about the conservation possibilities for the Golden Mile buildings.

“If we could turn old complexes into places with this sort of ethos and approach and energy, how great would that be?”

Tan said, “I think there is an opportunity here. It’s not straightforward how one can unlock it, … but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to do it.”

O

n a Monday afternoon in August, Ande Lai left his photography shop for a brief moment, letting his wife handle the steady trickle of customers he had — mostly Thai — to give me a tour. He is proud to live here. To him, this building is special and well-designed.

We pause at the ninth floor void deck where a high atrium allows sunlight to filter into each of the outward facing apartments. At midday, the bright light illuminates the columns, which are painted royal yellow like the gold that is the building’s namesake.

Singapore’s urban landscape is notable for its modern skyscrapers and hightech designs. But perhaps this high level of development should mean Singapore is more capable, not less, of prioritising conservation over development.

“We have already become a developed state,” Tan Cheng Siong said, “We are now ready to adopt new solutions for a new kind of urban living where people matter.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

insight

Twenty-one or Younger // BY LARA SCHULL AND ALEXA STANGER // PHOTO BY VIVEK SURI You must be 21 years of age to drink in the state of Connecticut. n the Yale vernacular, it’s generally tongue-in-cheek, yet this familiar warning is more than just an embellishment to Facebook event descriptions.

It’s an important reminder that alcohol — which, for better or for worse, occupies a significant role in campus social life — is legally inaccessible to the majority of Yale underclassmen. The Solo cups littering Old Campus by 10 p.m. on Friday nights hardly indicate any shortage of access to alcohol, yet for about half of their college experience, most Yalies cannot legally order a beer with dinner, buy a bottle of wine to share with friends or venture into the New Haven bar scene.

On a college campus, where social life is often confined to Yale’s grounds and alcohol is often procured from peers, the problems caused by the higher drinking age are more far-reaching and profound than questions of how to get one’s hands on drinks and fake IDs: power to control campus social life, previously held by the University, has been passed to fraternities. Lack of alternatives for students and financial incentives for the University have led to lags in fraternity reform and the institutionalization of the social capital, which fraternities represent. While sororities represent an important facet of this culture, the prohibition imposed by the National Panhellenic Conference, which prevents sororities from serving alcohol, distances them from the conversation.

In 1984, Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, a law that pressured states to raise the legal age for the purchase and public possession of alcohol from 18 to 21. Prior to the passage of this legislation, Greek life didn’t have the hosting influence that it has today.

Indeed, Yale Daily News articles written between the ’50s and early ’80s paint the picture of a Greek life scene struggling to

I

24 | September 2018

stay afloat in the face of financial problems and declining student interest: In May 1983, an article titled “Yale Fraternities: a dwindling breed” stated that “Today, DKE and Zeta Psi continue to operate, … but they have none of the widespread influence of their bygone days.” According to a Yale alumnus from the class of 1980, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, University-hosted events were “generally well-regarded, proper ‘fixtures’ on campus.” Such events, ranging from in-college happy hours and cocktail parties hosted by the college masters to University-wide prom, attracted a diverse crowd. Asked to describe the campus community during his time at Yale, the alumnus replied that “life was not diluted by Greek life or largescale off-campus living,” which made for an inclusive culture. A September 1985 article in the News shares that “on any given Saturday night there might be 600 people dancing to amplified New Wave sounds in a beer-soaked college dining hall.” Indeed, history professor Jay Gitlin ’71 remembers that “on a Saturday night when you walked down Elm Street, you heard a live band playing in every dining hall in every college.” Yet, by 1986, Keith Ferrazzi ’88, founder of the Yale chapter

of Sigma Chi, was quoted lamenting that “the idea that you will see all your friends at [Student Affairs Committee] parties is lost.” It’s worth noting that Connecticut’s drinking age policy has been far from uniform and that Gitlin graduated a year before the minimum drinking age was lowered to 18. Yet, with the passing of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, Yale was forced into a less tolerant stance on alcohol and on-campus social events.

So dramatic was the change that in February 1987, a letter from the Joint Committee of Social Chairpersons argued that “the new policy, if implemented, would likely sound the death knell of [the Student Affairs Committee] as we know it.”

As the Student Affairs Committee lost its significance, fraternities gained traction.

In a February 1986 letter to the News, student Geoff Kabaservice ’88 argued that in the wake of Yale’s curtailing of Universityfunded, alcohol-fueled nightlife, “Fraternities and sororities have been rushing in to fill the vacuum.” In April of the same year, a News article reported that, “After 10 years without a strong Greek presence, fraternities are enjoying a revival on campus.” Indeed, the change was so pronounced that in 1985, The New York

insight Times noted that “Formation of fraternities is on the increase at Yale,” linking it to the increased drinking age and the University’s stricter regulations.

And it makes sense: For many students, going out entails drinking, and as the University’s willingness to accommodate social demands floundered, a “vacuum” opened, giving fraternities an opportunity to assume the responsibility and, in turn, to grow. These events require large organizations with the financial ability to provide real estate and to shoulder the liability that comes with large, rowdy groups of inebriated youth. Unable to fulfill this responsibility, the University, whether willingly or not, hands jurisdiction over Yale social life to Greek organizations across the country.

Of course, there are other causes behind the proliferation of frats: By November 1984 — before the University had passed administrational changes — an After Hours article in the News had already acknowledged that “The Greeks are making a comeback of sorts at Yale” and cited mindset changes as a potential cause: The story quoted Laura Hunter, then the president of Alpha Kappa Alpha, who said, “Today there is a conservative movement in student thinking which leads students back to sororities and fraternities … as a way to make acquaintances that might provide an advantage in the professional world.” Other reasons put forward by the founder of Kappa Sigma included “brotherhood” — the “common male bond that puts us all at ease and makes it easier to relate to one another” — and “positive community service projects.”

Yet it nonetheless appears that Yale’s new drinking policy expedited the growth of fraternities by eliminating the opposition posed by Student Affairs Committee events and previously popular “entryway parties” and by making the New Haven social scene inaccessible to most students, just as it was beginning to grow.

Today, the effects of the 1980s rise of Greek life appear to be twofold: stagnancy in fraternity policy and the entrenchment of fraternities as centers of social power. The stagnancy is the result of adverse incentives for both students and

the administration. In terms of places equipped with the space and audio systems required for dancing, frats are essentially the only option. Consider the disdain that Yale students express toward Soads and the willingness with which the very same students rock up to Woads every Wednesday. It’s not just a space that Yalies want, it’s a space plus other Yale kids to party with. Frat parties are often well-attended, despite endless accusations of sexual assault and ethical reservations about supporting a gendered and socioeconomically exclusive institution, precisely because there are no comparable alternatives. As a result, fraternities do not face external pressure to shoulder the responsibility of creating safe and accessible social spaces.

W

hy doesn’t the University take action? According to Jojo Attal ’21 — a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College and a board member of Engender — Yale is uninterested in cooperating with Engender to promote fraternity reform and the establishment of non-Greek social spaces because “the legacy and the money that fraternities bring in” constitutes a “steady income that will contribute to Yale’s endowment.”

More importantly, it’s not the national fraternity representatives in conference rooms who operate as kingpins of Yale social life; it’s the Yale fraternity brothers themselves. With this, power which fraternities traditionally represent — maleness, socioeconomic privilege (membership fees make Greek organizations inaccessible to many), access to connections and a history of institutionalized privilege — becomes their social currency. It’s perhaps worth noting that not all the brothers want this degree of social power, andthey would not profess to endorse the institutionalization of privilege as social capital. Yet as the lines of partygoers on High Street doorsteps on the weekends and the role of brothers as bouncers and bartenders clearly attest, “partying” is a scarce good on Yale’s campus, and the fraternity brothers are the chief distributors.

The legislation is not within our control,

but the potential for change remains. The fact that Greek life gained momentum actually represented an opportunity for those wishing to limit the dominance of Greek organizations over Yale social life.

Many students attributed the rise of fraternities to the failure of the University to provide a satisfactory social environment to students. In an April 1986 column in the News, Kenneth Pollack ’88 wrote that “these people are joining fraternities because they have a social need which Yale’s current system does not meet,” while in a letter to the News in the same year, Kabaservice wrote that Yale was in no way “actually fulfilling its social responsibility towards the undergraduate.”

Over 50 years later, little has changed.

Yale professes to be an institution for the holistic nurturing and development of its students, a place where the residential colleges once threatened to render fraternities moot in Yale’s social climate. Having expressed this commitment, the University is shirking its responsibility to respond to the needs of its students and work actively to dispel toxic social currents. With Yale’s undergraduate body now larger than ever, the shortage and thus exclusivity of social spaces will only grow more severe.

If the administration continues to endorse through passivity the social monopoly that Greek organizations hold, it might come to be regarded as conservative, mercenary and ethically barren.

Yale’s most tangible attempt to intervene in campus social life came with Bulldog Bash, a University-wide party complete with live music, dancing and food.

Though the attendance rates were likely influenced by the free pizza and beer garden for upper-level students, wellattended dry (and often pizzaless) campus events like college screws hosted on campus and Pierson Inferno indicate that students will and do populate Universityhosted social spaces. The popularity of Bulldog Bash marks a path forward: With the drinking age unlikely to change, University-funded social spaces are our best bet for reinvigorating campus spirit and establishing an inclusive social environment.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

poem

Formations // BY CLAUDIA MEZEY

There’s the one rock type that I remember, sedimentary, the one that’s stasis in drag — evidence of where humans have jousted with time.

It’s petrified history that tells of us, the restless, and of us, the content.

Sometimes I can recognize sedimentary rock in the immaterial, in the layered air when we were doing crunches on the gym floor, calcified in the hum of that Beirut song a Pangea state of what’s-in-store urgency tonight in a world full of thrills — and I stood up, climbing atop the ledge to crack a window where would we be now if I’d taken your hand — and drink in that new stratum.

26 | September 2018

feature

Men’s Rights Moves in on Yale

BY CANDICE WANG || GRAPHICS BY JESSE NADEL AND COURTESY OF YALE UNIVERSITY

K

ursat Christoff Pekgoz has never been to Yale — a school he accused of harboring a toxic environment for its male students. Pekgoz, a Turkish-born lecturer of English literature at the University of Southern California and a former member of a feminist group in Turkey, is now an active member of the National Coalition for Men, the largest international men’s rights organization.

With his Title IX complaint — officers in the Yale Title IX Office declined to comment for this article — Pekgoz launched what would result in a serious ongoing investigation of the university’s female-specific programming, conducted by the Department of Education.

According to Pekgoz, women dominate in the realm of higher education and have been outpacing men in both attending and graduating from college for decades now, so there is little to no need for women’s programs. His logic is that instituting these programs — for example, the Women Empowering Women Leadership Conference, Yale Women Innovators and Women’s Campaign School at Yale — is sexist.

Pekgoz is right that there are more women in higher education than men;

according to the Pew Research Center, even back in 1994, white women enrolled in college at a rate 4 percent higher than men. By 2014, the gap expanded to 10 percent. For black students, the difference is even more extreme — in 1994, men had a 9 percent lead on women, but by 2014, the trend switched to favor women by 12 percent. For Hispanic and Asian students, the disparities are similar.

“I oppose feminism in colleges because women often have special privileges in academia that men do not have,” Pekgoz told Refinery29. “It would make much more sense to implement affirmative action for men than for women.”

In a list of demands provided to the News by Pekgoz — though Pekgoz declined to further elaborate — he emphasized that women are no longer underrepresented in STEM education, though the source he provided analyzed only students enrolled in high school math and science courses. He also pointed to a study that found that men’s grades are lower than women’s in all subjects. Additionally, Pekgoz pointed out, women who apply to academic STEM positions are more likely to be hired, a statement which is substantiated by an academic study when those positions

are limited to tenure-track. Pekgoz, relying on an analysis performed by a consulting recruitment organization, wrote that women are 36 percent more likely to receive a job offer than men.

The demands written by Pekgoz include the conversion of all female-centric programs into gender-neutral initiatives and the creation of male-specific programs to balance any remaining female-centric programs.

To promote further action, Pekgoz published a guide on Scribd titled “Dear Colleague Letter: How to Abolish Affirmative Action for Women,” in which he imitated the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague Letter,” which paved the way for sex-selective scholarships that favored females. In the letter, Pekgoz described in minute detail exactly how to file a Title IX complaint and how to look for discrimination against men in universities, including a method of scrutinizing women’s studies departments. No male applicants involved in a scholarship pool? No male professors involved in the department? File a Title IX complaint.

P

rofessor Margaret Homans, a lecturer in the English Department and the Women’s, Gender, and Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

feature

Sexuality Studies Program, said women at Yale are still striving to achieve equal opportunity, especially in STEM, where affirmative action is vital in balancing the ratio of male to female faculty members. In response to Pekgoz’s proposal to include a men’s program to balance each women’s program, Homans claimed that women are still disadvantaged in the working world and benefit from femalecentric programming.

“There has been a men’s scholarship program for a few centuries,” said Homans. “There has been a men’s studies department for a few centuries. These legacies aren’t over.”

In an anonymous survey of student opinion conducted by the News, 159 Yale undergraduates volunteered their opinions on the Title IX complaint. A majority of females — 78 percent — believe that Pekgoz’s complaint is completely unjustified. Meanwhile, 62 percent of female respondents claimed to have been victims of sexual discrimination at Yale.

The incidents cited range from “mansplaining” and being talked over by male peers during debates to more serious allegations such as discriminatory treatment from professors and sexual harassment.

Anna McNeil ’20 is co-director of legal at Engender, an organization dedicated to making fraternities and sororities at Yale coed. She believes that women’s rights and needs are overwhelmed by Yale’s entrenched patriarchal roots and that Pekgoz’s complaint is unfounded.

28 | September 2018

“As a co-director of Engender, I investigate the ways in which undergraduate culture at Yale benefits men and disadvantages women,” said McNeil. “Men live in and control most off-campus party houses, including fraternities, which host and interact with the most substantial portions of Yale students.”

For McNeil, on-campus groups that support the interests of women are necessary in what she sees as Yale’s patriarchal social and academic culture.

More surprising were the male responses. Sixty-one percent of male respondents believe that Pekgoz’s complaint has at least some grounds, while 12 percent of the 61 percent claim that the complaint is absolutely justified, and 26 percent responded that they have been sexually discriminated against on campus. Many men surveyed mentioned difficulty applying to scholarships and fellowships that catered specifically to women and minorities. Multiple students claimed that women have greater social power and have priority when it comes to admittance to parties and events. Additionally, feeling like a second priority within STEM was attributed to coming across women-only scholarships or fellowships when applying for summer research. Other male respondents mentioned the inability to voice their opinions during debates for fear of being ridiculed by their female peers.

Tomi Odukoya ’21 is a male student prospectively majoring in chemistry. As a male STEM student focusing on acquir-

ing summer research opportunities and fellowships, he understands the feelings of his male peers who disagree with what they see as an overabundance of female-centric STEM scholarships.

“I understand why people don’t agree with scholarships that only cater to women,” said Odukoya. “But I also am fine with these programs because it’s to fix an issue that’s been plaguing society for decades.”

Most male students’ responses suggested that they understand why female-centric scholarships exist but believe that they represent an obstacle when applying for summer funding. However, a deeper look at the state of fellowships and funding at Yale reveals that of the 269 fellowships in the Yale Center for International and Professional Experience database, only three programs favor women — the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize, which is awarded to a woman who excels in the arts, and STARS I and STARS II, special summer research programs designed for undergraduates interested in STEM. STARS favors women, students of color, students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, first-generation college students

feature and the physically challenged. However, in 2018, the STARS I program was exactly 50 percent female.

T

he men’s rights movement was conceived in 1925, just five years after women had won the right to vote and while they still could not attend the nation’s top schools.

On July 27, 1925, Samuel Reid was sent to jail in Willow County, California. He hadn’t paid child support to his ex-wife and had publicly flaunted his decision.

He blamed the county court for denying him joint custody of his daughter.

He stayed in jail for three years, growing a famously long beard, and later became a living martyr for those suffering the same fate. From the 1920s onward, the roots of the men’s rights movement began spreading in the form of groups with different focuses, such as antialimony, divorce reform and fathers’ rights.

“Meninism” has come a long way from Samuel Reid. As scholarship on the movement is virtually nonexistent, there exists a gap of approximately 70 years before the emergence of the internet gave birth to the so-called “manosphere,” a dark hole of blogs and websites and forums populated by infuriated men empowered by their sudden online anonymity.

Protest signs soon emerged: “Don’t Mess With History,” “HE FOR HE,” “Stop Demonizing Male Sexuality,” “#RepealTheRegistry” and “He Can Do It Too!” (complete with a crudely Photoshopped male Rosie the Riveter). But the movement was lacking a face until one man was found — Warren Farrell, an illustrious writer and adored board member of the National Organization for Women.

Farrell entered the men’s rights movement after NOW pronounced its distaste for joint custody. Horrified by NOW’s decision, Farrell immediately retreated from New York City’s feminist scene and began a lifelong project of researching gender dynamics, fathers’ rights, and the trials and tribulations of men. He became a board member of the National Coalition for Men, of which Pekgoz is also an active member. Farrell had the correct look.

Farrell even produced a “bible” for his disciples in the form of “The Myth of Male Power: Why Men are the Disposable Sex.” Farrell’s tactic is to claim rationality. In Farrell’s world, boys are suffering. Although Farrell admits that men make up the majority of leadership positions in this nation, he believes that this merely obscures the troubles that men face. Fathers are often separated from their children by custodial courts, the White House hosts no council on men’s and boys’ issues, universities do not have men’s studies departments, and men drop out of college and commit crime and suicide at higher rates than women. (In 2010, 79 percent of those who committed suicide in the United States were men.) Men on average also have shorter lifespans.

“We need to know not only why are our sons committing suicide, but also why are our sons much

more likely to be the ones to shoot up schools?” said Farrell, who declined to comment for this article, at the first International Conference for Men’s Issues in 2014. “We’re all in jeopardy if we don’t pay attention to the cries of pain and isolation and alienation that are happening among our sons.”

In many ways, the way forward is through education — education especially on the challenges posed to successful and inclusive progress. As the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague Letter” states, “Education has long been recognized as the great equalizer in America.” After 19 pages outlining recommended steps toward this end, the letter concludes with one last assertion of the country’s goals: to “work together to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to learn in a safe and respectful school climate.” Pekgoz’s “Dear Colleague” letter, on the other hand, ends on the note that, if additional evidence of disparate treatment emerges at Yale, he will be ready.

//Symbol for the Men’s Rights Movement

insight

Finance, Personally // BY ALEJANDRA LARRIVA-LATT

Jennifer Cha ’18, an economics major who is working at Goldman Sachs a year out of Yale, says she knows little about saving for retirement. She’s filling these gaps by looking to internal resources in her company for advice on her 401(k) and to friends a few years older than her, who have already made many of the financial decisions she is facing.

Cha is not alone in her lack of personal finance know-how. Without access to personal finance coursework, many Yale College students graduate lacking basic knowledge on how to manage their money. But economic considerations infuse so many aspects of life at Yale — even the decision to attend in the first place.

In his article “The Birth of a New Aristocracy” for The Atlantic, philosopher and social critic Matthew Stewart writes that for children of the 9.9 percent, attending an Ivy League school is one of the simplest ways to replicate one’s parents’ success — and to accumulate even more than the previous generation. In an article for The New York Times, personal finance columnist Ron Lieber reports on a new tool for high school students to simulate the economics of attending college. Payback is an online game that tracks students’ virtual debt and their steps to eliminate such debt — from choice of major to professional connections. It’s becoming clear: The business of going to college these days is driven by economics.

Yale curates not only a specific intellectual experience for its students, but also a social and economic one. At the annual winter holiday extravaganza, dining services staff don formal attire and parade around a full-sized turkey and yardsticklength loaves of bread. Weekly teas bring

30 | September 2018

// ILLUSTRATION BY VALERIE NAVARRETE

prominent authors, politicians and other figures of intellectual, social and economic clout to speak to and mingle with undergraduates. Attending Yale, students are lifted into higher social strata. While Yale is about intellect, it’s also about positioning — a kind of social and economic jockeying for a spot amongst the elites.

While the financial benefits and drawbacks of attending college are more and more on people’s radar, few incorporate it into their view of what constitutes worthy coursework. Yale economics professor James Choi, who teaches in the School of Management and specializes in household financial behavior, believes that personal finance doesn’t belong in Yale’s undergraduate curriculum. Instead, he’ll be teaching a new School of Management elective course in the spring 2018 term called “Personal Finance.” Designed for what he calls the next generation of “thought-leaders,” “Personal Finance” is largely inaccessible to undergrads, mostly due to the high level of math involved. Professor Choi doesn’t believe that Yale College should offer a simpler version of “Personal Finance”: A lighter descendant would simply lack the “intellectual heft” of its predecessor and would teach material that proactive students could otherwise read out of “Finance for Dummies,” he said.

As Choi makes evident, those who create curricula see Yale as a place of only academic learning in the strongest sense of the word academic. But a small group of Yale alumni have insisted that Yale students need a practical education in personal finance. In 2005, Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives for the Association of Yale Alumni Steve Blum ’74, along with Tara Falcone ’11 and John Caserta ’01, started holding “Financial Life After

Yale” workshops in Yale residential colleges and graduate schools. Thirteen years later, Blum and his team have held more than 160 sessions and taught almost 4,000 members of the Yale community. But, given the time constraints, these 90-minute workshops are only able to cover so much material.

College students are graduating with very little idea how to handle their money.

Levi Sanchez, a fee-only financial planner at Millennial Wealth in Seattle who also did not take any personal finance courses while attending Washington State University as an undergraduate, says he gets high-salaried tech employees knocking at his door all the time. Of his 25- to 35-yearold clients making 100 to 200K per year, “the vast majority aren’t very financially literate,” he said. These are people who have gone to elite universities, taken high-level coursework and been hired by some of the top tech companies in the world.

“If I were to talk to them about the difference between a mutual fund and a collective trust fund, more than half wouldn’t be able to explain that.”

As longtime University of California, Berkeley personal finance instructor Fred Selinger says, “paychecks don’t come with instructions.” The problem for Yale students and their peers is obtaining those instructions after they’ve already graduated. In the absence of accessible coursework, privilege seems to play the biggest role in ensuring that students become financially literate. Aaron Resnick ’18, who majored in cognitive science with a concentration in behavioral economics and co-founded the real estate startup Astorian at Yale, says he doesn’t know much about saving for retirement and buying a house. He is relying on his parent’s advice

insight and on the skills he has developed paying taxes for his startup when it comes to making future personal finance decisions.

Today’s college students face unique financial challenges. Selinger says it is possible that Social Security and Medicare may run out of money by the time millennials reach retirement age. The conversation in Selinger’s classroom is not about how to plan for one’s eventual use of these services but how to reach financial self-sufficiency. Anne Witte, who taught personal finance for around 10 years at Wellesley College, says the whole calculus regarding whether to attend college at all has changed.

The first half of her course almost exclusively focuses on students’ choice between attending college or entering the workforce straight out of high school.

One can find plenty of personal finance courses online, at community colleges or at larger public universities, such as the University of California, Irvine and Ohio State University. But many professors, students and administrators alike at elite universities hold the conviction that personal finance is a life skill — one that does not belong in a classroom.

A personal finance course would not be the only course to teach a life skill at Yale. “Life Worth Living,” which combines teaching from foundational religious texts with discussion of what it means to lead a meaningful life, has been taught in the Humanities Program since 2014. Last year, psychology professor Laurie Santos debuted “Psychology and the Good Life,” a course that combined the latest psychological research on happiness with real-life

exercises to help students build healthy habits. A Yale professor might consider pairing personal finance skills with discussion of what it means to be “wealthy,” of socioeconomic concerns at Yale and of the financial lives students themselves hope to lead after college. Indeed, personal finance instructors say that, when taught right, the subject has intellectual heft. Witte considers the personal finance course she taught at Wellesley just as rigorous as her courses in econometrics and microeconomics.

Other factors may be holding up the establishment of a personal finance course.

According to Witte, young faculty members aren’t often rewarded in their academic careers for teaching a less technical course like personal finance. There may be greater underlying reticence on the part of educational institutions, too. A strong personal finance education includes analysis of opportunity costs — including that of attending college. Former Oberlin personal finance instructor Beth Tallman says that, after taking her course, one of Tallman’s students decided she would be better off leaving Oberlin than spending money floundering there.

The lack of a personal finance course has definite impacts on students’ lives, and the people affected most are at-risk students.

“People who are most literate in these things have parents who have their own accountants or work in some sort of financial service industry or have a higher net worth,” Cha said. A course would be especially helpful for people from “more challenging backgrounds where maybe your parents are immigrants and they’re not as familiar with 401(k)s or accounts in the states,” she said. For these at-risk students, a personal finance course takes on the tenor not of being optional or for personal enrichment, but of being necessary to avoid costly potential mistakes they might make out of college.

Right now, Blum is working on transf or ming his 90-minute workshop into a semesterlong, for-credit course offered as a residential college seminar. His associate Falcone is launching LIT, an online financial literacy platform which will be home to 80 personal finance instructional videos and will be freely available to Yale students. Carefree intellectual evironments seem impractical as financial concerns grow. Yale, at least, is starting to blend consideration of the two.

The expanding personal finance offerings, and student support for them, confirms that. Alumni like Blum and Talcone are spearheading these personal finance efforts; the next step is for Yale faculty members to join in.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 31

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“I assumed college kids didn’t want to be policed and coddled and now we have a situation where students are basically begging for the administration to micromanage their lives,” said James Kirchick ’06, leaning back in the desk chair in his D.C. office at the Brookings Institution.

Two months ago, Kirchick — a journalist and former notorious campus conservative — announced his candidacy for alumni trustee of the Yale Corporation, also known as the board of trustees. He chose to run in part because he feels that “there doesn’t seem to be anyone on the board of trustees who is representing [his] viewpoint.” Kirchick is the first candidate in 16 years to campaign for a seat on the Corporation without University support. In order for his name to officially appear on the ballot, he needs 4,266 signatures — 3 percent of the total number of ballots distributed in last year’s election — by 11:59 p.m. on Oct. 1. As of early September, his campaign estimates that it has garnered 1,500.

In a June op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Kirchick announced his candidacy and vowed to protect free speech, even amidst attacks by “fashionable 32 | September 2018

opinion.” His goal is “to restore Yale values.” To spread his message, Kirchick has appeared in Yale clubs across the nation, sent mail to alumni and mounted a full-fledged media tour.

With the support of the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program — whose mission is to increase ideological diversity on Yale’s campus — Kirchick hopes to restore the right to free expression, a right he believes came under attack on Yale’s campus during a series of protests during the fall of 2015.

In the fall of 2015, then-Associate Master of Silliman Erika Christakis sent an email to the college, expressing frustration with an earlier University statement that urged students to refrain from dressing in racially or culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. Students, upset by the suggestion that the right to free speech should supercede other concerns, later approached thenMaster of Silliman Nicholas Christakis in the college courtyard. They criticized the email as racially insensitive and demanded an apology.

The confrontation alone, which was filmed and went viral on social media, was not the sole impetus for Kirchick’s campaign. Rather, according to

Figure of Speech: Jamie Kirchick’s Run for the Yale Corporation // BY HAILEY FUCHS // PHOTOS BY ERIC WANG, SCHIRIN RANGNICK, ROBBIE SHORT AND COURTESY OF JAMES KIRCHICK

n

RTESY

cover Kirchick, it was the University’s decision in 2017 to award two of the students involved — whose contentious standoff with Nicholas Christakis in the Silliman courtyard was widely shared on the internet — the Nakanishi Prize, dedicated to graduating seniors who have enhanced “race and/or ethnic relations at Yale College.”

Kirchick was appalled that Yale had honored “the ringleaders of that mob.”

Nothing like that would ever have happened while he was an undergraduate in the early aughts, he said. The rhetoric used in the Silliman confrontation was not a way to speak to a fellow student, let alone an elder, he added.

Kirchick resents this growing intolerance and dogmatism in the student body. He noted that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a campus free speech advocacy group, labelled Yale with a “yellow light.” The yellow light is one of four designations — green, yellow, red and warning — designed to compare the protection of the right to free speech at colleges nationwide through a uniform standard. As the intermediate designation, a yellow indicates that the university in question has ambiguous regulations that allow administrative exploitation and subjective application. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, such policies include Yale’s definitions of sexual misconduct, consent and harassment, as well as complaint procedures for racial or ethnic harassment, among others. In comparison, both Harvard and Princeton received a red light, a graver assessment of policies that unambiguously restrict free speech on campus.

“A lot of the alums looked at [the Christakis controversy] and [said], ‘What the hell is going on?’” Kirchick said.

As member of the Yale Corporation, Kirchick promises to uphold the pillars of the Woodward Report, the 1974 booklet on the University’s free speech policy. He also intends to bring those principles into the Corporation, the governing and policymaking body of the University.

The group’s 17 regular members, includ-

ing University President Peter Salovey, ten appointed members and six elected alumni, convene five times annually, filing into the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall.

Decisions that shape the future of the University, such as the coeducation of Yale College, the renaming of Calhoun and the expansion of the undergraduate population, rest in the hands of the Corporation.

The six alumni trustees are elected by Yale graduates across the University’s

schools, and in most election cycles, all candidates are appointed by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee. Yale’s alumni population chooses between these cherry-picked candidates, whose resumes often boast finance and consulting gigs such as McKinsey, or who have the namebrand power of Maya Lin ’81 ARC ’86 and Janet Yellen GRD ’71. But, with the selectivity of the cohort, two candidates, prior to Kirchick, have successfully petitioned to be included on the ballot and won the general election.

These candidates — one, the first Jew and another, a local New Haven pastor —

have sought to usher in major change to a notoriously secretive body, once a group of Protestant ministers. But in the past, when candidates like Kirchick have upended the usually quiet election process for alumni trustee, Yale powers-that-be have not hesitated to initiate a counter effort to maintain the status quo.

To Kirchick, a seasoned political commentator, upsetting the status quo is his trade. Since his days as an undergraduate in Pierson College, Kirchick himself has long challenged “fashionable opinion.”

GAINING NOTORIETY During Kirchick’s freshman year, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization — the precursor to Local 33 — held a protest demanding recognition from the University. Glancing down from his fifth floor LanmanWright dorm room, a freshman named Jamie Kirchick shouted, “Go teach a section!”

Over the course of his undergraduate career, Kirchick continued to argue against graduate student unionization both in person and in print. As a columnist for the Yale Daily News, he adopted controversial stances — so controversial that he recalled the “dirty glances” he used to receive from passersby across the street. Once, he received a threat from a graduate student over his pieces about graduate student organization in the News, in which the graduate student warned she would jeopardize his grade if she were ever to teach a class in which he was a student. Kirchick said he reported the threat to the Yale College Dean’s Office.

Though the Yale Daily News was not Kirchick’s only extracurricular — he was the vice president of the Independent Party in the Yale Political Union and a member of the the Dramat, the comedy group Fifth Humour and the Jewish society Shabtai — it was by far his most prominent platform.

When asked what he thought about being a controversial figure, Kirchick replied, “I guess it’s just a certain type of masochism.”

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Kirchick describes himself as a “classical liberal” and “aggressively centrist.” To his fellow classmates, however, Kirchick was “the pre-eminent conservative at Yale” at the time, one who threw himself into battles with the campus liberals, said former classmate Aryeh Cohen-Wade ’05, who did not know Kirchick personally.

“Jamie, as we all called him, then was was just one of these few people that did enough unusual things that pretty much on campus knew who he was,” Cohen-Wade said. “At a place like Yale, if you’re known by the whole campus, there’s probably something very strange about you.

When the Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing Kirchick’s candidacy was published, Cohen-Wade’s small group of friends from Yale was shocked. He added that, to run for the Yale Corporation at Kirchick’s age, one must have a high opinion of oneself.

In February of his freshman year, Kirchick sat in the back of a room in the AfroAmerican Cultural Center for a lecture by Amiri Baraka, former poet laureate of New Jersey. Months earlier, the writer had drawn criticism for claiming Israeli workers had knowledge of the September 11 attacks and was later stripped of his honorific for those remarks. At Yale, Kirchick recalled, Baraka read that poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” and received a standing ova34 | September 2018

tion.

During the event, Kirchick, who is Jewish, asked Baraka to defend his remarks with facts and sources. Baraka asserted that he had read it in Arabic newspapers, Kirchick said, scoffing at Baraka’s claim 15 years after the fact But noting the freshman’s skepticism, the writer — in front of a crowd of Kirchick’s peers — announced that the teenager appeared to have “constipation of the face” and required a “brain enema.”

In wake of the invectives, the former News columnist penned an editorial condemning the affair as one of “the most disturbing events of [his] entire life.” Kirchick criticized the event not for the personal insults Baraka spewed but for the Afro-American Cultural Center’s and Black Student Alliance’s decision to invite the controversial poet to campus and for the praise he received. Kirchick claimed the organizations demonstrated a disregard for “civil discourse on campus.”

“I wish the Yale students today would behave in a similar fashion,” Kirchick said of his method of response: writing an op-ed as a retort and conversing with fellow students. He compared his response to that of the students who confronted Nicholas Christakis in the Silliman courtyard. Still, Kirchick contends he would not even know how to converse with someone who found the Christakis email racist. If any rational person found it offensive, “We have a real serious problem,” he said.

As an undergraduate, Kirchick had a fondness for those who brought controversy to campus. The News columnist was a member of the Yale College Students for Democracy, which supported U.S. involvement in the Iraq War, and a chapter of a conservative think tank known as the Middle East Forum. The latter invited Daniel Pipes, the founder of the Middle East Forum, to speak on campus. Pipes had drawn controversy for his remarks on Islam, stating that “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene. … All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs

are more troublesome than most.”

During Pipes’ 2003 lecture, the room in Linsly-Chittenden Hall was packed.

Cohen-Wade, who attended the event, recalled that Betty Trachtenberg, then-dean of student affairs, served as a bouncer at the door, in anticipation of protest. At least a third of attendees donned black clothing and black gags across their mouths, in opposition to Pipes’ derogatory comments about brown-skinned peoples and Muslims. Cohen-Wade speculated that Middle East Forum President Eliana Johnson ’06 may have cherry-picked questions for the Q&A session after Pipes’ remarks to alternate between critical comments and queries from the contingent of neo-conservatives on campus.

But Kirchick recalled the event as a model for controversial campus speakers.

Attendees protested and asked questions, without forcing the event to be shut down.

Matthew Louchheim ’04, the former President of Yale Students for Democracy, said he remembered a kind of “knee-jerk pacifism” of many students at the time. But Louchheim, who met Kirchick through the Independent Party, said that the aspiring Corporation candidate was never one to shy away from challenging conventions.

“To be honest, he didn’t identify as a conservative back when we were at Yale,” Louchheim said. “He was willing to stick his neck out. … He cares more about pursuing the truth than he does about offending people.”

In his freshman year, Kirchick also published an editorial with Johnson, a good friend, in FrontPage Magazine. The piece, published not long after the fall of Baghdad, directly criticized the remarks of professors who spoke at an anti-war teach-in, calling them “nihilists” and their remarks “a spectacle of self-aggrandizement.”

“If Jamie believes in free speech on campus, why did he write an article for a national conservative magazine, impugning the patriotism of professors who are protesting the Iraq War?” Cohen-Wade questioned. “I don’t really trust Jamie Kirchick’s definition of [free speech].”

The piece resulted in a public back-andforth between Kirchick and Johnson and

cover professor James Sleeper. After its publication, Sleeper wrote an op-ed in the News of his own, in which he noted that two freshmen — whom he did not refer to by name — had “arrive[d] here primed to attack professors in public.”

Kirchick and Johnson then appeared on Joe Scarborough’s show on MSNBC, condemning the professor for his remarks. Scarborough criticized Sleeper for calling the young students “Fedayeen Uncle Sams” and signs of a “neo-Stalinism.” Kirchick and Johnson demanded an apology, to which Sleeper responded with another op-ed in the News claiming that the alleged “ad hominem epithets” were exaggerations.

Today, tension remains between Kirchick and Sleeper. Sleeper declined to be interviewed for this story but sent a link to a video along with a statement. The video shows Kirchick, donning rainbow suspenders, appearing on Russia Today, a network paid for by the Russian government.

At the time, the live panel intended to discuss the awaited sentencing of the leaker Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley.

In an act of protest, Kirchick refused to discuss Manning’s sentencing, citing a hostile and violent climate for gay people in Russia and the “gay propaganda law,” which prohibited exposure of minors to content that normalized homosexuality.

“Being here on a Kremlin-funded propaganda network, I’m going to wear my gay pride suspenders and speak out against the horrific, anti-gay legislation that Vladimir Putin has signed into law,” Kirchick said in the video.

“It’s part of a desperation for public attention and vindication that began in 2003 when, at 18, he went on Joe Scarborough’s MSNBC show to denounce professors opposed to Iraq War drum-beating,” Sleeper wrote in a statement to the News.

“He veils a seemingly unquenchable, neoconnish craving for revenge by touting his gayness and devotion to free speech. It illsuits him for any role in governing Yale, let alone in defending liberal education against the real threats to it.”

Questioning why his sexuality was relevant, Kirchick called the comment, on the

part of Sleeper, a “low blow but characteristic.”

Indeed, as his old friend Louchheim noted, Kirchick does not shy from controversial comments or quips, whether directed at a professor or then-Dean of Yale College Peter Salovey.

As a senior, Kirchick co-authored the script for the senior class skit, performed on Class Day. In that year’s production, the graduate student union kidnapped Salovey threatening to shave off his mustache unless the University recognized their group.

But Trachtenberg, the dean of student affairs at the time, cut the jest, which she believed was disrespectful.

Afterward, Kirchick bumped into Salovey, who lauded the script. Kirchick told the Yale College dean the story of the axed mustache joke, which delighted Salovey, who called the plot-line “brilliant,” Kirchick said. Salovey questioned why the storyline had been censored in the first place, he added.

In this instance, he and Salovey saw eye to eye, Kirchick said: Both opposed oversensitivity. In moments like these, the University president has offered appropriate recognition of the right to free speech, but, in some cases, the administration has fallen short of those principles, he said.

“A HAPPY WARRIOR” The night of the Yale Daily News 125th celebration in 2003, Kirchick bumped into William F. Buckley Jr. ’50 and his son Christopher Buckley ’75 while the two toured the paper’s headquarters. The elder Buckley had once served as the chairman of the Yale Daily New and his son as the founding co-editor of the Magazine. William F. Buckley, like Kirchick, published columns in the News. He too often disparaged Yale liberals and weighed in on the controversies of his times, most notably defending then-U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy in his anti-communist efforts. Buckley was once called “the most dangerous undergraduate in the history of Yale” for his controversial editorials attacking the liberalism and atheism that he claimed overwhelmed the campus. Buckley later hosted the popular television program “Firing Line” and

founded the National Review, a magazine with a conservative editorial stance.

Face-to-face with Kirchick, Buckley told the student that his wife would be unable to attend the banquet for the News’ celebration later that evening and asked Kirchick to fill her empty seat at the table. Though Kirchick could not attend due to an evening showing of a student-written production, the two began corresponding. As an undergraduate, Kirchick even helped thenNew York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus research archival documents for a biography of Buckley.

For his present campaign, Kirchick said he drew some inspiration from his conservative predecessor’s 1965 run for mayor of New York City. Then, Buckley ran an unlikely campaign as an ideological conservative.

During the campaign for New York City mayor, Buckley was once asked what he would do if he won.

“Demand a recount,” he retorted.

“I think I’m more inspired by that,” Kirchick said, chuckling. “I’m trying to come at this with sort of being a happy warrior. … Levity, that’s what I take from Buckley.”

Like Kirchick, Buckley also ran for the Yale Corporation. Buoyed by the popular reception of his treatise “God and Man at Yale,” Buckley looked to effect some real change at his alma mater. In the book, he criticized Yale for its seeming secularity and hostility toward religious beliefs, as well as its emphasis on collectivism. Similarly, Buckley’s campaign for alumni fellow of the Corporation stood in direct opposition to actions by the Yale administration. “[Buckley] thought there should be more ideological diversity on campus,” said Al Felzenberg, who authored a book on Buckley and taught a seminar on his life at Yale.

“He thought ... that religion and capitalism were downplayed if not ridiculed.”

Kirchick’s and Buckley’s campaigns took a decidedly reminiscent tone. Each candidate recalled the better days at Yale. Both lamented an emerging ethos on campus that seemed to suppress ideological minorities. Where Buckley advocated for the rights of the religious, Kirchick said the same for the campus conservatives.

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cover Still, Kirchick rejected the comparisons between his own candidacy for the Yale Corporation and that of Buckley. He noted that maintaining the rights of legacies in Yale’s admission process was the core tenet of the Buckley campaign. Indeed, Buckley lodged an attack against Yale’s admissions process for the advantages it gave to students from underrepresented backgrounds — a practice which Buckley called “egalitarian hocus-pocus.” Kirchick commented that his predecessor’s platform was “reactionary” in that respect.

Lauren Noble ’11 — Kirchick’s campaign advisor and William F. Buckley, Jr. program executive director — contended that his platform was “far superior.”

In his 1968 Corporation campaign, Buckley succeeded in securing enough signatures to make the ballot but ultimately lost to Cyrus R. Vance ’39 LAW ’42, who would later serve as secretary of state under Jimmy Carter, in the general election.

Vance, the favorite of then-University President Kingman Brewster, was not the last cherry-picked candidate to defeat an outsider in the race.

In 2002, the Rev. W. David Lee DIV ’93, a minister at the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church, successfully found his way onto the ballot, garnering 4,000 signatures along with $30,000 in union funding for his campaign. The minister boasted a long list of high-profile endorsements — including then-Mayor of New Haven John DeStefano and U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67. But the University alumni and administration had coordinated efforts to thwart Lee, who early on had signaled his allegiance to Yale’s unions. A group of alumni led by former University Secretary Henry Chauncey ’57 and Frances Bei-

necke ’71 spent over $80,000 on mailings to convince alumni to vote against Lee. Chauncey, who led the group dubbed “Alumni for Responsible Trusteeship, argued at the time that Lee would be beholden to special interests. Meanwhile, the Association of Yale Alumni spent over $60,000 on controversial mailings to educate alumni about Lee’s candidacy, the Association of Yale Alumni board of governors said at the time.

In the end, Lee lost; the minister received only 16.7 percent of the vote and was defeated by Maya Lin, the architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Women’s Table on Cross Campus.

Kirchick is similarly critical of the University, though on a largely different set of issues. If he were to gather the necessary signatures, the University could very well put another candidate like Vance or Lin — one who would secure a surefire victory for the Association of Yale Alumni — to ensure his defeat. Nevertheless, Kirchick is not worried. He has not faced any institutional resistance yet.

“I’m joking that, if I get on the ballot, they’re going to choose, you know, Meryl Streep [DRA ’75] to run against me.”

CONTESTING THE ELECTION Working alongside Noble, Kirchick has organized a national listening tour across America. His campaign has four pillars: reforming the Alumni Fellow Election to promote transparency, protecting free speech, promoting viewpoint diversity and reducing administrative bloat.

He noted that former Corporation candidate David Lee had the unions behind him in his 2002 race. But with a full-time job and little campaign experience, Kirch-

ick is relying on word-of-mouth to publicize his campaign. He’s been asking class secretaries to mention his candidacy in the class notes at the back of the Alumni Magazine. “[Campaigning] is a much bigger task than we set out for ourselves,” he lamented.

With about 1,500 signatures, Kirchick has a long way to go before he even secures a spot on the ballot. And the figure is only a guess. Yale uses a third party for the election services, obfuscating the process for assessing campaign progress, he added.

Indeed, for years, elections for alumni trustees have been anything but transparent.

In 2017, the News invited two alumni fellow candidates — Roger Lee ’94 and Kate Walsh ’77, both of whom were chosen by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee — for endorsement interviews, which the two accepted. Additionally, more than 450 alumni signed a petition calling for Lee and Walsh to participate in a Buckley Program free speech forum. But University Secretary and Vice President for Student Life Kimberly Goff-Crews instructed the candidates to cancel the meetings, citing a policy against campaigning in the alumni fellow election — a policy not recorded in the University Charter, the Corporation Bylaws or the Miscellaneous Regulations.

After pushback from activists, the policy was formally recorded the following year.

Yale Corporation Senior Trustee Catharine Bond Hill GRD ’85 questioned whether asking candidates to run would attract the best trustees for the Corporation.

“What is the point of voting in such an

cover election?” Noble, Kirchick’s campaign advisor said. “Agree or disagree with Jamie on any issue, at least he will tell you his views and wants to reform the process.”

As part of his campaign platform, Kirchick has proposed greater transparency in the alumni fellow election to allow voters to learn more about the candidates’ stances on key issues. Further, he lamented the obstacles, including an arduous process to even secure a spot on the ballot, for petition candidates.

“I think the way in which members of the Yale Corporation are chosen is frankly undemocratic,” he said. “They’re chosen by a combination of the administration and the Yale Alumni Association and presented to the alums.”

In his campaign platform, the candidate vows to “reform the rigged system,” in which he believes administrators “muzzle their hand-picked candidates chosen in an opaque process.” Kirchick believes that voters should be aware of contenders’ stances on key issues in higher education, including free speech on campus and graduate student unionization.

THE POLICY The primary issue for Kirchick, though, is ultimately the administration’s attitude toward campus controversies. According to Kirchick, the way the University treated the Christakises was part of a broader trend, one in which the administration has placed a virtual “kick-me sign” on its back and exposed itself to ridicule.

He criticized Salovey’s response to the incident in May, in which a graduate student called the police on a black graduate student napping in a common space. In an email, the University president had announced a set of diversity and inclusion initiatives, including increased implicit-bias training for Yale Police officers and renewed efforts to build police-community relations. Kirchick said the University president was “falling on

his sword” — just as he did three years ago, in the wake of the Christakis controversy.

“All of this new bureaucracy over an isolated incident of one student who apparently has a problem with this sort of thing,” Kirchick complained. “Why are we extrapolating from one isolated incident this claim that the YPD is racist? Yale University is racist? This is ridiculous. The University should be standing up to these slanderers.” In contrast, one-third of incoming firstyear students reported that they think there is institutional racism at Yale — only 20 percent said there is not.

Kirchick suggested that the graduate student who called the police take up the issue with her therapist, rather than Yale instituting a set of new bureaucratic procedures and initiatives that would increase costs. He believes tuition has become far too high.

He opposes using a preponderance of the evidence as the standard in campus adjudications of sexual misconduct and believes cases should be arbitrated in a court of law — he alleged that University campuses have a tendency to “railroad” the accused and statistics of campus sexual misconduct are often overestimated. In his campaign platform, he noted the size of Yale’s Title IX staff, as well as other offices at the University related to gender and diversity, questioning whether Yale needed all its hires in these bloated administrative bodies.

“The accused do have rights in this country, whether they are black criminal defendants or white athletes at Yale, they have rights, and I feel like all too often those rights have been trampled upon,” Kirchick said.

According to a News survey distributed in fall 2016, nearly 75 percent of respondents said that Yale does not provide a welcoming environment for conservative students to share their opinions on political issues. He would relish the opportunity to bring the voices of alumni who fear this kind of climate to the Yale Corporation.

Hill, the Corporation senior trustee, rejected the notion that the Corporation was uninterested in free speech.

Further, she argued that the media selectively covers college campuses, focusing on situation where freedom of expression is jeopardized.

“My sense is that free speech is alive and well on college campuses across America,” said Hill, who is the former president of Vassar College and current managing director of the higher education arm of a research and consulting firm. “On most campuses, thousands and thousands of speakers of all different points of view come into campuses, and students are getting to hear from them and participating in discussion and debates and

hearing those different points of view, and none of that gets reported.”

Kirchick is not worried that his critical stance on the University’s politics will be an issue in the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall. He noted that in boards of trustees where consensus is the goal, some principles are often sacrificed or overlooked. Most trustees on the Corporation are chosen by the administration, meaning that there’s no real skepticism challenging the consensus, Kirchick said, adding that disagreements are sometimes necessary, even healthy.

“I’ve never admired any writers who don’t have any enemies,” he said.

When asked his thoughts on likability, Kirchick responded: “Overrated.”

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interview

“Asking the Unicorn” // BY ERIC KREBS A tiple is an instrument with four groups of three strings dating back to the mid-18th century. It has an otherworldly, delicate sound, though. you have likely never heard of it. Ed Askew ART ’66, now 78 years old, a lifelong musician, visual artist and New Havener living in Queens, New York, resembles his instrument to a surprising extent. Though Askew never achieved large-scale commercial success, his 1968 “freak-folk masterpiece LP” “Ask the Unicorn” is largely regarded as a cult classic of the era. I met Askew at his apartment to talk about what he’s been up to in the 50 years since, the ukulele craze of the 1930s and the liberating power of digital technology.

EK: SO HOW DID YOU GET THE TIPLE? EA: Years and years ago, before the dinosaurs, there was a big craze in ukulele playing. The tiple, which happens to be tuned similarly, became part of that craze. My father used to play a uke, and there was also this tiple that we used to play with in the attic. Before it fell apart, I started playing it in picnics, family gatherings. At that time, you could get ukulele tabs for any popular song, and I would pick out songs from the TV show “Hit Parade.”

When I was at Yale Art School, I went down to a small music store in North Haven called Goldie’s. They had a tiple, but it was $25, more than I could afford. After Yale, I got a job at a private school, so I had some money. I went back

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and I talked to a [Goldie’s] employee, and they brought out this Martin tiple. I was dying to get it. I asked, “how much is it?” and it was a couple hundred dollars. I said — without mentioning that it was years earlier — “Goldie said I could have it for 25.” He calls out Goldie and explains it — looking at me like I was crazy — and Goldie looks at me, looks at his partner, at the tiple and back at me, shrugs his shoulders and walks away. The guy sold it to me for $25.

EK: YOU STARTED WRITING WHEN YOU BECAME AN ART TEACHER AT A PREP SCHOOL. WHAT WAS IT ABOUT YOUR NEW PLACE IN LIFE THAT INSPIRED YOU TO START CREATING? EA: Well, I had the old tiple even when I was at Yale, and I had been writing poetry. So I thought it seemed like a no-brainer to start writing songs. So, I started with two-chord songs, simple stuff, and that’s where it began. …

Once I got going, I stopped making art. I just started writing, whatever came to my head. … [“Ask the Unicorn,” a record picked up by indie record company ESP-Disk, and re-released by Tin Angel Records in 2015,] had fans across the world: England, Argentina, you know. I just didn’t know about any of them.

EK: HOW HAVE YOUR STYLE AND MEANS OF MAKING MUSIC EVOLVED SINCE YOUR FIRST RECORD?

interview EA: [In the beginning] I just would sit down with the tiple. And I would generally find chords and then look for words that would fit with them. At the time, I would just play and play and play and sing and sing and sing until I had a piece. Now, I can’t even do that physically.

EK: WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT? EA: Hand problems make it difficult to use my thumbs because of arthritis in the joints. I’ve taught myself to play my synth and harpsichord without using my thumbs very much. I don’t play during shows; someone else accompanies me.

When recording, I’m limited to playing a few bars at a time. I put up a stereo track and start playing. I then lay down short sections which I later combine to make progressions for new songs, and I capture all this using my computer with Pro Tools [a digital music interface widely used for recording and producing] as an interface. The pieces then form a collage. Then I cut it up and put it together, listen to it and find words, add a track, and then that’s pretty much a song.

EK: WHAT WAS YOUR TRANSITION FROM PHYSICAL TO DIGITAL MEDIA LIKE? EA: You know, recording on tape is complicated.

I used to work with it and record using a little tape recorder. I’d make a master tape, and it’d be a big process of cutting them together. I went from sending tapes to friends, not really trying to sell anything, to having a Bandcamp where I could occasionally sell something and have my work heard by a lot of people all over the world. [Pro Tools] is so easy. I’ll make this stuff and put it on Bandcamp, then Jay [one of Askew’s bandmates] and I will listen to it and choose one to produce.

I’ll make up other parts and play along and put it together like that.

EK: I’VE NOTICED THAT YOU’VE COMMENTED ON ALMOST ALL OF YOUR YOUTUBE VIDEOS AND BANDCAMP POSTINGS. EA: Or I put it up [laughs].

EK: I’D LOVE TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR USE OF THE INTERNET, HOW YOU BECAME SO SAVVY AT IT. EA: Well it was just a matter of time. My painter friend Bob was using an internet cafe. He

thought it would be useful for me, so I signed up to Yahoo Mail. I had been doing home recording on tape, and two friends offered to buy me a computer — they figured I ought to have one for my music. This was the early 2000s. I got Pro Tools at the same time. At first I was completely baffled by it, but my friend Russell took me through some of the basics and I got used to it.

EK: TO DATE, YOU’VE UPLOADED OVER 50 ALBUMS AND SINGLES TO BANDCAMP. HOW AND WHEN DID YOU COME TO USE THE PLATFORM? WHAT WERE YOUR INITIAL THOUGHTS? EA: I joined bandcamp in January 2001. I thought it was great from the beginning.

Bandcamp was very easy to understand, very convenient, and they got back to you when you had a problem.

EK: DO YOU THINK USING BANDCAMP COMES WITH A CERTAIN LEVEL OF AUTONOMY? EA: I don’t know. They give you a set of tools and pretty much leave you alone to work with the platform. I will say that I am talking about home recordings; I have found that unless a recording is associated with a label, no one in the music media will review it. So it is limiting.

EK: WHAT ABOUT YOUTUBE? EA: I got into YouTube when a friend told me I could use iPhoto to make simple videos for my songs, using pictures from the web. YouTube can be confusing — especially so since Google took over.

EK: WHAT ADVANTAGES DO YOU THINK THE INTERNET HAS FOR ARTISTS TODAY? EA: Well, without the internet, one would depend on newspaper articles and word of mouth to get the word out. Someone like me who has a rather low-key lifestyle, without much notoriety, would have to set up tours through friends or calls. You can always get shows living in Brooklyn or Portland or Los Angeles. Being on a label that will promote you, getting reviews and touring all make a big difference. At the end of the day, if you want to get your music beyond your own town, having email and a cellphone is way better than calling people up on on a landline. … I adapt as best as I can.

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