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A view from the top

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Left on the margins

short by JESSICA BLAU

feature by EVE HOUGHTON

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Pipes

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feature by HAYLEY BYRNES

essay by COLIN GROUNDWATER

Summer time essay by ERIC SIRAKIAN

Mirror, mirror short by YUVAL BEN-DAVID

A love story

fiction by MINAMI FUNAKOSHI

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A company of twitters, a society of friends

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feature by MARISSA MEDANSKY and AARON BERMAN

22 Doing your dreamwork

feature by ABIGAIL BESSLER

26 27

Confidential, or else cover by KATY OSBORN

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DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Editors Jennifer Gersten Oliver Preston Managing Editors Yuval Ben-David Lucy Fleming Photography Editors Wa Liu Alex Schmeling Magazine Design Editor Amra Saric Design Editors Olivia Hamel Carter Levin Illustrations Editor Thao Do

Associate Editors Abigail Bessler Jessica Blau Elizabeth Miles Copy Editors Eva Landsberg Adam Mahler Isabel Sperry Sarah Sutphin Design Staff Emily Hsee Holly Zhou Editor-in-chief Isaac Stanley-Becker Publisher Abdullah Hanif Cover photograph by Alex Schmeling

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by Jessica Blau

O

ne morning, I watched a video of Alex Honnold climbing a vertical mountain face in Mexico.

He was free-soloing, climbing without a rope or harness or any sort of safety gear.

He wore a red t-shirt. It billowed in the wind. I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a helmet, and then I laughed. The wall was over 2500 feet high. If he fell, he would die.

He moved methodically. Right foot up, left hand jammed into crack, then left foot into crack, right hand pinching the rock. At one point, he reached his left arm over his right to grab onto a good hold. His feet were close together and his whole body was at a diagonal. He was more than half way up the wall. He looked down, probably to find a place to put his left foot. He must have noticed how high he was, but he just moved his foot, looked up, and continued on. The video ended when he reached the top, safe and smiling.

I couldn’t tell you why, but I was certain that the climb would be his only one. I thought of it like skydiving: fun to do once, but stupid to test death like that over and over again. Later, I googled him. In 2007, he free-soloed two climbs at Yosemite National Park: Rostrum (800 feet, difficulty 5.11c) and Astroman (1100 feet, 5.11c). In 2008, he

4 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

free-soloed Moonlight Buttress (1000 feet, 5.12d) in Zion National Park. In 2012, it was The Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite (2900 feet, 5.14a). The list went on.

I joined the Yale Climbing Team in the fall. We practice two nights a week at a local climbing gym. We don’t freesolo. We climb inside with harnesses and certified belay partners. The walk to the gym – twenty minutes down a lonely bike path – is more dangerous than the climbing.

At practice, Dante traverses the wall.

He moves slowly, deliberately. He places one hand on an orange hold high above his head and moves his right foot to a tiny yellow one. His black pants make me think of a sensei. This is his second traversing circuit – he’s spent the past half hour two feet above the ground travelling horizontally across the walls.

I’ve never seen Dante top-rope before, only train-traversing and ab exercises and bouldering problems – so I know he must be good.

“Which one did you just climb?” he asks when he reaches the wall in front of me.

“The yellow 5.9,” I say proudly.

“How did it go?”

I think about it and tell him I got stuck towards the top. I had nowhere

to move my hands. I hung back in my harness for a long while.

“Are you going to do it again?” he asks.

I hadn’t thought about it. I nod my head.

I’m reminded of a scene in Wordsworth’s Prelude when Wordsworth, as a young boy, rows across a lake, looks up at the cliff in front of him, and notices how it seems to blend into the skyline, how it seems to never end. It’s a sublime experience, wonderful and terrible and humbling all at once. I imagine that climbing the way Alex Honnold does it feels the same way. I imagine that this is why he does it — to feel small and strong and in awe, all at the same time. I imagine that once you know that feeling, it feels impossible to live your life without it.

Later that night, I will climb another 5.9. The tags will be pink. It will be named “Tutu Time.” I’ll get halfway up and the next foothold will be too high. I’ll fall twice. Eventually, I’ll reach the end and grab onto the top ledge with both hands.

I’ll feel accomplished and exhilarated and breathless. I will stare at the ceiling a foot from my face. Then, I’ll look over my shoulder to the ground below and realize there’s nowhere to go but down, nothing to do but do it again.

by Eve Houghton photography by Wa Liu

Left on the margins

O

n the second floor of the glass book tower in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, there are two unremarkable-looking volumes of Shakespeare’s works. Beneath the covers, many pages are covered in elaborate cursive handwriting. It is not a neat hand; the reader seems to get ahead of herself, erasing words, writing upside down, and straying out of the margins. She makes symbols: triangles, exclamation points, squiggles, circles.

She underlines copiously. And, over and over again, she scrawls the letter B. The reader’s name was Delia Bacon, a writer and schoolteacher who lived in New Haven during the first half of the 19th century, and this 1834 edition of Shakespeare was her personal copy of his plays and poetry. In the 1850s, she became convinced that she had uncovered the secret of the true authorship of the plays: according to her, they were not in fact written by William Shakespeare, but instead by a heroic “Round Table” of Elizabethan courtiers led by Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, and Edmund Spenser.

She had difficulty convincing others of her theories, but she was convinced that her cause was just. “This has not been a selfish enterprise,” she wrote in her manifesto, a 700-page, ponderous tome called The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. “It is not a personal concern. It is a discovery which belongs not to an individual, but to a people.”

There was no English department at Yale in the 1830s, but Delia believed that to uncover the secret of the authorship of the plays required an exercise in careful, critical close reading.

Her annotated books are a testament to that concern; in an era before searchable online texts, she had a prodigious ability to identify clusters of words and images which recur in Shakespeare’s works and had clearly memorized large swaths of the plays. She may be the madwoman in the attic of Shakespeare studies, then.

But perhaps, in a sense, she was also New Haven’s first English professor.

6 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

D

elia Bacon’s annotated copies of Shakespeare currently reside in the student curatorial office at the Beinecke. In 1853, Nathaniel Hawthorne saw them on her table.

At this time, Delia was living in London, where she had taken lodgings at Spring Street, Sussex Gardens and was working on her book. Hawthorne was also in England, and decided to pay a visit to the woman who would later become infamous for her eccentric theories about Shakespeare. In his essay “Recollections of a Gifted Woman,” he recalled that “I was ushered up two (and I rather believe three) pair of stairs into a parlor somewhat humbly furnished, and told that Miss Bacon would come soon. There were a number of books on the table, and, looking into them, I found that every one had some reference, more or less immediate, to her Shakespearean theory — a volume of Raleigh’s History of the World, a volume of Montaigne, a volume of Lord Bacon’s letters, a volume of Shakespeare’s plays.”

When Delia appeared in the parlor, Hawthorne was surprised. “Having no other ground of such expectation than that she was a literary woman,” he wrote, he had expected “a very homely, uncouth, elderly personage.” But he describes her as “rather uncommonly tall,” with “a striking and expressive face, dark hair, dark eyes, which shone with an inward light as soon as she began to speak…making allowance for years and ill health, I could suppose her to have been handsome and exceedingly attractive once.”

This rather tenuous compliment seems to capture something of Delia’s magnetism. In New Haven she had found employment as a public lecturer, where her audiences seemed to find her supremely charismatic. One spectator called her “graceful and intellectual in appearance, eloquent in speech, marvelously wise.”

Her teacher Catherine Beecher wrote that Delia had “a melodious voice, a fervid imagination, and the embryo of rare gifts of eloquence in thought and expression... preeminently one who could be pointed to as a genius.” Even allowing for the typical embellishments of nineteenth

century prose, nearly every contemporary description of Delia remarks upon her rhetorical gifts and formidable powers of persuasion.

“She was indeed an admirable talker,” wrote Hawthorne, and she managed to “produce in the listener’s mind something like a temporary faith in what she herself believed so fervently.” But, he added, “the streets of London are not favorable to enthusiasms of this kind.” He left Spring Street somewhat bemused, but undeniably impressed.

D

elia Bacon was born in 1811 in Ohio, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. The Bacon family had long been established in New Haven, but her father was determined to found a new ministry on the western frontier. The new church foundered, and Delia’s father died quickly after the family returned to Connecticut.

All of their limited financial resources seem to have been dedicated to sending Delia’s brother, Leonard, to divinity school at Yale. At fifteen, her formal education ended and she became a schoolteacher in New Haven.

She was, by all accounts, a gifted teacher.

The young women under her charge may have been denied a Yale education, but they followed a rigorous curriculum. A former student wrote that “she imparted to them new ideas; she systematized for them the knowledge already gained; she engaged them in discussion; she taught them to think... she knew both how to pour in knowledge and how to draw out thought.” Delia’s method of teaching Shakespeare was somewhat unusual for the 19th century; she encouraged her students to pay close attention to every word and phrase, asserting that “there is nothing superfluous in any of these plays...

Every character is necessary; every word is full of meaning.”

In 1836, when Delia was twenty-five, she moved to New York City to become a writer. She wrote short stories and even a play, but felt ambivalent about the suitability of a theatrical career for “a lady and a Christian,” as she wrote to her

brother Leonard, now the Rev. Dr. Bacon.

She returned to New Haven a few years later and rented permanent lodgings at the Tontine Hotel on the New Haven Green, where she continued to teach classes and hosted an informal salon.

In the 1840s, Delia became particularly friendly with a young Yale theology student and fellow boarder, Alexander MacWhorter. They shared an interest in Shakespeare and a belief that they were on the brink of world-changing textual discoveries (MacWhorter believed that he had found a link between Rabbinic texts and early Christianity), and they soon became inseparable.

Their intimacy occasioned comment, so much so that Leonard publicly confronted MacWhorter in the street and accused him of dishonorable conduct towards his sister. Delia and MacWhorter seemed to have had a falling out shortly afterwards, and reports emerged that he had taken to reading her letters out loud to his friends.

In 1847, Leonard instigated an ecclesiastic trial, accusing MacWhorter of “calumny, falsehood, and disgraceful conduct, as a man, a Christian, and especially as a candidate for the Christian ministry.” The trial called upon accounts from numerous witnesses, as Catherine Beecher recounted in Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Testimony of a Gentleman Boarder.

I boarded at ---- Hotel in the Winter and Summer of 1845. I observed that Mr. A would leave his seat often and go and sit at the table where Miss D sat; not at breakfast only, but at dinner and sometimes at supper. He would often walk out of the room with her. The gentlemen where I sat were accustomed to talk of Mr. A’s attention to Miss D as indication of interest in her. By interest I mean, something more than that he was pleased with her intellectual attainments. It was that he was interested in her personal attractions.

Testimony of the Servant.

I had charge of Miss D’s parlor. Mr. A used to be there as often as two or three times a week. He stayed late in the evening, sometimes

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

till ten, sometimes till eleven o’clock.

The trial scandalized the New Haven Congregationalist community and subjected Delia to humiliating inquiries into her personal life. She seemed to have found the scrutiny unbearable, and in 1848 she left New Haven for Boston. For many of Delia’s biographers, the MacWhorter affair was the defining turning point of her life, a deeply spiritually destabilizing event which may have precipitated her obsession with Shakespearean authorship. James Shapiro writes in Contested Will that “the pursuit of the authorship question, for Delia Bacon, was both a product of, and illuminated by, personal and religious crisis.”

Still, it seems reductive to attribute Delia’s tireless support of the Baconian theory solely to romantic disappointment, or to assert (as some critics have done) that in William Shakespeare she had found a man she hated even more than Alexander MacWhorter. For centuries, critics have mythologized, romanticized, and pathologized her; it is nearly impossible to find the “real” Delia, since her history is often obscured by patronizing assumptions.

We often hear about Delia from others.

There may be something revelatory, then, in letting her speak for herself.

W

ho, exactly, did Delia Bacon think wrote the plays of William Shakespeare? It is not as straightforward a question as it seems; in her own writings, she is often maddeningly cryptic. A few things are clear in The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded: for her, the Elizabethan and Jacobean period was an era of tyrannical political repression, in which a “mad licentious crew...armed against the commonweal” was pitted against “the natural chiefs and elected leaders of the nation,” a group of aristocrats and their hangers-on including Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and — first and foremost — Sir Francis Bacon.

These “Elizabethan Men of Letters” turned to playwriting under the name of the obscure actor William Shakespeare, she asserts, because the political establishment

8 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

of the time could not accommodate their radical republican ideals. In this era of “diabolical tyranny,” they were “driven into books, cornered into paragraphs, and compelled to unpack their hearts in letters.”

Delia’s emphasis on the repressiveness of the Elizabethan and Jacobean regimes undergirds her assumption that every text of the period is an exemplar of doublespeak and euphemism; in her reading, all the plays of Shakespeare become ciphers to unlock, if she can only break the code.

In her copies of Shakespeare, the plays Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Pericles, King Lear, Hamlet, and Coriolanus receive the most annotations — although mysteriously, either Delia or someone else appears to have attempted to erase all the marginal commentary on the latter play. Her comments range from multipage expositions to isolated words and phrases. Often she annotates with simply the word “Bacon,” “Raleigh,” or “Spenser,” presumably attributing individual passages to one of the authors of the Round Table.

Her annotations display a supreme faith in her own powers of perception, although the conclusions she draws can sometimes feel rather tenuous. When Moth asks Armado to “say the moral again” (3.1.) in Love’s Labour’s Lost, she writes “I will add the sense. Say the word Raleigh again.”

Often she seems to be speaking a language that only she can understand. “This comes off well,” she writes triumphantly of the banquet scene in Timon of Athens, but the textual evidence she has found to support her theories of Shakespearean authorship remains elusive.

The impression garnered from her notes, then, is that of a reader who sees what she wants to see. “What trash is Rome what rubbish and what offal when it serves for the base matter to illuminate so vile a thing as Caesar,” she scrawls on another page of Timon of Athens, her virulent underlining conceivably referring to William Shakespeare, the glover’s son who she believed could never have written works of literary genius.

Ironically, however, the upstart crow from Stratford-upon-Avon may have provided her with the evidence

she needed to formulate her theories.

“Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader,” writes Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth.”

I

n June 1857, the Mayor of Stratfordupon-Avon wrote to the U.S. consul expressing concern about “an American lady” residing in the town. “She is in a very excited and unsatisfactory state, especially mentally, and I think there is much reason to fear that she will become decidedly insane.”

Earlier that year, Delia had left London and moved to Shakespeare’s birthplace. She had submitted her book for publication, but was very ill and running low on funds. When Leonard asked her to return home, however, she refused.

I am calm and happy. Never happier,-never so happy. I do not want to come back to America. I can not come. I pay seven shillings a week for my rooms and it takes very little to keep me alive. I do not want any luxuries.

But I think this is the place for me at present.

Your ever affectionate sister, Delia Bacon.

Brimming with frustration, Leonard wrote to Hawthorne (who was supporting Delia financially and had facilitated the publication of her book) in irate terms: “The crisis at which my sister’s case has arrived, requires me to say, plainly, that in my opinion her mind has been ‘verging on insanity’ for the last six years. She knows that since 1851 I have habitually distrusted the soundness of her judgment.

She knows that I have all along regarded her darling theory as a mere hallucination.

She therefore distrusts me.”

The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded “fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public,” as Hawthorne put it.

But Delia was convinced that the final proof of her theory could be discovered only in Stratford-upon-Avon, at the

grave where Shakespeare was buried.

“Curst be he that moves my bones,” reads the epitaph inscribed on his tomb: Delia seems to have ignored the warning.

Her grave-robbing efforts were unsuccessful, however, and in 1858 Leonard sent his oldest son to England to escort her home. By this point, she had experienced a nervous breakdown; and when she returned to Connecticut she was placed in a mental institution in Hartford. On September 2, 1859, she passed away at the age of forty-seven.

She was buried in New Haven at Grove Street Cemetery. Her tombstone, a simple brown cross, bears this inscription: “So He bringeth them to their desired haven.”

T

he final chapter of Delia’s life has been overshadowed by her association with Nathaniel Hawthorne; because he provides the most vivid depictions of her, she is inevitably transformed into the heroine of a Hawthorne novel. But while Hawthorne may have romanticized Delia, his imagining of her encounter with Shakespeare’s grave at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon Avon, has an undeniable Gothic appeal: She went thither with a dark-lantern, which could but twinkly like a glowworm through the volume of obscurity that filled the great dusky edifice. Groping her way up the aisle and towards the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of the pavement above Shakespeare’s grave… if Shakespeare’s ghost would rise at any provocation, it must have shown itself then; but it is my sincere belief, that, if his figure had appeared within the scope of her dark-lantern, in his slashed doublet and gown, and with his eyes bent on her beneath the high, bald forehead, she would have met him fearlessly and controverted his claims to the authorship of the plays, to his very face.

How do you solve a problem like Delia? She is doomed to be remembered as the mad despoiler of

Shakespeare’s grave, not a pioneering advocate for women’s education, but this passage captures something of her radically iconoclastic spirit. She was always on the outside of the scholarly conversation; although she might now be considered an ultimate insider, one of the founding figures of antiStratfordian authorship theories and perhaps even an intellectual ancestress of later critical movements such as New Historicism.

For better or worse, the debate about Shakespearean authorship has continued. But it continued without her. She might have been ahead of her time, or behind; she could never quite join the conversation. And even if she could, she was always faced with a silent interlocutor. In this sense, perhaps Hawthorne was right to leave us with our most enduring image of Delia Bacon: a woman alone in the dark, arguing with a ghost.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

a company of twitters, a society of friends

by Marissa Medansky and Aaron Berman illustration by Caroline Tisdale

I

t was spring, and the weather was beautiful. Last Saturday, we were sitting under a tree on Old Campus, admiring the newly warm weather and the bustle of outdoor activity it brought: fresh Nantucket red shorts framing pasty thighs, men’s rugby practice, a clump of Herald editors with their bicycles. It was a Beautiful Day To Talk About The Internet.

An earnest student approached us, shattering the peace of this admissionsbrochure-worthy tableau, and shouted at Marissa: “Oh my God, I’m such a huge fan!” (The first of many times this will happen in her lifetime.) He wasn’t talking about Marissa’s fame as a renowned political scientist/belly dancer. He was talking about her Twitter.

Charlie Bardey ’17 had followed both of us on Twitter for several months, but we had never interacted in person before that Saturday. “Yale Twitter” — a nebulous subculture of Yale affiliates on the popular microblogging platform — had facilitated this blossoming friendship.

What is Yale Twitter? Yale Twitter is not the official Yale University Twitter account, nor is it simply a collection of tweets about Yale. It’s not something you can easily put into words.

By way of analogy: Yale Twitter is like a great dinner party where you don’t know anyone but feel like you should and all end up best friends by the dessert course. Yale Twitter is like a great dinner party except everyone is SHOUTING AT EACH OTHER LIKE THIS BECAUSE THIS 10 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

IS HOW WE TYPE ONLINE. Yale Twitter is like a great dinner party except everyone is e n u n c i a t i n g e a c h w ord like this because we al s o t y p e l i k e t h i s. Yale Twitter is like a great dinner party except everyone is CACKLING, SCREECHING, or SOBBING (because we like those words, too).

And, yes, this dinner party is LAVISH. If Joe Biden had a Twitter account, and also had gone to Yale, he would have been a member of Yale Twitter.

M

arissa joined Twitter in October 2009. Aaron joined Twitter in October 2011. Before we teamed up to write this article, the number of times we’d interacted over social media was exponentially greater than the number of times we’d interacted in person. And we were okay with that: Aaroncé @abermz 1 Feb 2014 Not sure if I want to meet @mdnsk in person because then my platonic conception of her based on her twitter presence will be ruined But eventually the stars aligned, and our paths crossed in the most momentous of ways. marissa @mdnsk 1 Apr 2014 Tomorrow is the first time I'm going to be in the same room as @abermz get ready Yale.

marissa @mdnsk 3 Apr 2014 Just met @abermz -- his head is a circle.

(In Marissa’s defense, Aaron’s head is pretty circular.)

Meeting a Yalie in person after you’ve followed them on Twitter is a unique and humbling experience. Unlike meeting your freshman-year suitemates for the first time after a summer of hesitant/overly enthusiastic emailing, meeting someone from Yale Twitter isn’t about making a good first impression. After months of sustained digital contact, Twitter followers already know your most intimate thoughts and deepest anxieties.

Instead, meeting a member of Yale Twitter IRL puts their so-called “personal brand” to the test. On Yale Twitter, selfpromoters, aspiring political elites and would-be comedians all come together to shape their personas into digestible, 140-character packages. We tweet, we delete, we revise, we curate. Getting to know someone outside of the virtual world — like Marissa met Aaron and we met Charlie — puts that personal brand to the test. Does the man behind the curtain really TALK LIKE THIS? Though Bardey sometimes tweets in all caps, we learned he doesn’t speak like that.

A member of campus comedy groups, he hopes to one day become “Twitter famous for the clever jokes and sassy asides he posts online from his handle, @chunkbardey. (A recent example, from April 18: “describing

the case of Benjamin Button as curious is a huge understatement imo.”)

For Bardey, Twitter can be an outlet to talk about anxiety and general frustration with the Yale experience. At the same time, he said he strives to strike a balance between Yale-specific humor and jokes that outsiders can understand. He said he’s influenced by a subset of the Twitterverse known as “Weird Twitter”: a subculture of users fond of anti-humor and general absurdity. Much of Weird Twitter involves emulating a certain style — unusual sentence constructions, purposely wonky grammar AND YES, ALL CAPS — and recycling certain memes or templates with updated content. Examples include “Starter Packs,” tweets that feature four photos centered on a particular theme, and “Iggy, Freestyle for Us,” text posts in which rapper Iggy Azalea stumbles over a freestyle verse and blurts out a nonsequitur or a famous phrase.

To reach the widest possible audience, Bardey tries to divorce his content as far as possible from University mainstays, like the names of libraries, dining hall dishes or weekend haunts. Other members of Yale Twitter — like both of us, for example, frequently pepper our tweets with references to senior essays, society tap and Toad’s. Though we all draw inspiration from the Weird Twitter subculture, the difference in execution points to the diversity of the Yale Twitter community.

W

hen Yalies discuss Twitter, “Don’t you want to get a job?” is a frequent refrain. Often, students feel pressure to tone down their online image to appear more respectable or presentable. Perhaps one of the clearest manifestations of this phenomenon is what several students we interviewed called “YDN Twitter.” Unlike members of Yale Twitter, who traffic in jokes and memes, members of YDN Twitter — who need not be (but frequently are) YDN staffers — share noteworthy news articles with the occasional personal remark.

Students with professional Twitter accounts see them as a way to market themselves in the working world. “I

created a professional Twitter because there were many articles and thoughts and ideas I wanted to share with others,” said Jessica Leão ’16, who tweets about international affairs, technology and economics as @JMaguilnik.

Austin Bryniarski ’16, who frequently tweets about food policy from @ ambryniarski, agrees.

“Professional Twitter accounts exist to present oneself as interested in something specific,” he said. Bryniarski actually has two Twitters: one a polished, professional account, the other more uninhibited.

I

f the history of Facebook is a jackrabbit teleology from dorm room start-up to global media empire, then Twitter, more realistically, is a shaky fawn: optimistic about the future, best in small doses, with legs folded under its torso.

While nearly three-fourths of all adults on the Internet use Facebook, less than a quarter are active on Twitter. Because of this, the folks at the Pew Research Center — who developed those aforementioned statistics — write that Twitter “is not a reliable proxy for public opinion,” even though, to us, the website feels ubiquitous.

Pew’s research showed that Twitter users tend to be more educated and more political than average Internet users.

The Yale Twitter community is, in some sense, a testament to this. The University’s official @Yale handles has over 195,000 followers. Academic departments like History and Physics have accounts. So do student publications, a cappella groups and athletic teams. The Classics Library.

The Institute of Sacred Music. Fossil Free Yale.

And professors. Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology Paul Bloom, who has nearly 20,000 followers, told us via email that “Twitter is a quick/ easy way to keep up with what’s new in science, philosophy, professional gossip, etc. #BoringAnswer #Sorry.”

American Studies Professor Birgit Rasmussen uses Twitter in the classroom.

Students in her “Race and Gender in American Literature” course can receive extra credit if they post certain homework

assignments — short thesis statements about the readings — on Facebook or Twitter. “It’s a really useful assignment for this class,” she said. While some of her students are American Studies majors, others primarily study economics and science — the introduction of social media can make them feel more comfortable.

Twitter and Facebook “have made the skill of expressing yourself well in a succinct way newly relevant,” Rasmussen said. “I thought I would bring this option into the class to help the students recognize that no matter what their major is, even if they will never write another literary analysis in their life, these writing skills are useful life-skills as well as important academic and professional skills.”

W

hile researching and interviewing students for this article, we encountered a few surprises. We were surprised to learn that Twitter and its constituents occupy only a portion of the Internet.

Even Pinterest is more popular. We were surprised (although not too surprised, since we aren’t conspiracy theorists) that the Admissions Office does not cull the tweets of applicants for evaluative purposes. Mainly, though, we were surprised that we struggled so much with defining Yale Twitter — with more than 12,000 posts (and counting) between us, how could describing something we engage with daily prove so difficult?

Other students empathized with our struggle. “I feel like social media as a whole is a questionable social experiment that none of us truly understand,” Leão said.

The challenges we’ve contemplated speak to the diversity of Yale’s Twitter community, which encompasses Weird Twitter aficionados, over-eager future politicians, over-eager future journalists, professors, publications and libraries.

Although Twitter has been a community for us, we acknowledge that isn’t true for everyone. And yet we tweet on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

by Hayley Byrnes illustrations by Caroline Tisdale

N

ot long after my father died, a pipe under our kitchen sink must have burst. Leave it, Mom said. Her reasoning changed from one day to the next: a plumber cost too much, she was busy. There was a man — a mysterious figure named Adam, said to live “just down the block” — who might be willing to help.

At some point or another.

We ate from paper plates, to keep from having to wash dishes. To clean our pots and pans, Mom boiled bottled water over the stove and poured the water in a large plastic tub on the dining room table. She left the dishes to soak in the basin, fishing them out with a pair of yellow latex gloves in a careful way.

Like much of our house, the sink was old. Flecked in brown, the stream seemed to spurt from the spigot at its own will.

Water pooled at the drain.

In the spice rack above the sink was a glass, and inside the glass a crumpled bullet. Mom found the bullet when remodeling the upstairs bathroom earlier that year. An old widow had killed herself in the bathroom around the turn of the century. Mom read about the widow in a slim history of our town in Michigan, in which the author declared our house to be 12 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

PIPES

haunted since the woman’s death. She had the exact page dog-eared.

Mom kept the glass on the same shelf as the book, both ready to be pulled out whenever she performed the bullet-in-thebathroom tale to scare my friends.

Whenever things in the house fell apart — a loose doorknob, a broken light switch — Mom would recite the same line from the book she had memorized: “‘The house is believed by townspeople to be haunted by the ghost of a Hooper who had committed suicide,” she said, her voice low. “There’s something to that, Hayley.”

I thought she was kidding, but I could never tell for sure.

O

n the morning of November 20, 1819, walking along a forest trail not yet plotted on any map, Joseph Francis and his crew of surveyors had nearly finished charting their part of Michigan, just north of Francis’ native Ohio. Where Francis began his journey is still not known today, though he landed less than a quarter mile east of my house.

It was a good time of year to be surveying. The wet swamps were tolerable, mosquitos were gone. The leaves had fallen

from the oak trees to clear a view of the land.

When Francis spotted a small dell in the oaks, he paused to listen. He had heard of an Indian uprising in Monroe, north of the trail, so he walked gingerly. As he walked, Francis noted how light the soil had become: the ground was white in the sun. Just before noon, Francis paused to eat his lunch on the bank of a river nearby.

Something easy enough: a hunk of bread, maybe a smear of cheese. It’s hard to say if Francis ever got around to the meal.

Only after he had placed a bit of the soil to his tongue did Francis confirm what he had suspected: the land was a solid bed of salt. Because of the ground’s salinity, there were no plants in sight. Francis’ feet crunched over the pockets of white gravel.

He recorded his findings in a small field diary. One he could slip in and out of his pocket. He noted a strange glop of fleecy soil, locating himself about two hundred feet south of the river. He even gave this salt bed a name. He called the spring — and the salty area around it — Saline.

M

y family moved to Saline when I was two. Things were finally falling into place. My father

had quit his job at a corporate law firm in Washington. He had saved enough money to pay off the last of his student loans and move us back to Michigan. My mother had just started her first teaching job at a university outside Detroit.

It was a good time to buy a house in Saline. They bought one on a whim, the first to crop up. Three years later, we moved into the place next door — the big, beige Victorian house where I grew up.

You could hardly see that house, set in the shade of two catalpas. It had a wide driveway, its gravel cut into a bed of sharp stones. If you got close enough to reach the gate at the pebbles’ edge, you could make out a fur of ivy on the side of the house.

Green weaved up the clapboard as if the house were a trellis. My parents called the house their Eden.

The house had a good skeleton — that was how my father put it. The floors were a bed of solid maple. Sturdy, like the cul-desac ranch where my mother grew up and where her parents still lived. Years earlier, my father had dropped out of school to paint houses, furnishing small repairs along the way. He thought of himself as a pragmatic man, jumping to ask about the right caulk to use on gutters and whether you ought to seal a maple porch in the summer.

It is hard to say what kind of house my father had known. He was the youngest of seven children. Over the years, depending on the sibling to whom I spoke, I had heard about places in Ann Arbor, Texas, Grand Rapids, Birmingham, Illinois, Oakville and Hamilton, near the Canadian border. His father did not have a steady job, and often disappeared for large stretches of time. His mother got sick easily.

Once, near Christmas, I asked Anne where my father was born. My aunt paused, sat down at the kitchen table in her Manhattan apartment to think. The question was the kind of thing I had always been afraid to ask. At Yale, I wrote for the campus newspaper. But when I turned to Anne — in a casual way, as if the thought had only just flitted into my mind — I tried not to sound like a journalist.

She stooped over and scribbled on a napkin. A timeline emerged, each inky

stipple a different home in the family’s history. They had never lived all together in the same place, so it was hard for Anne to remember some patches of time — like just how long my father had lived in Texas, with their sister and her husband. After that, Sault-Ste.-Marie was a definite possibility.

“Briefly — very briefly,” she muttered.

“Of course, these are all very approximate,” she said, handing me the napkin. “I hope it helps.”

It seemed like things were falling into place. When I was four, the couple next door put my parent’s Eden up for sale and offered it to them. They accepted.

My parents moved into the house at the end of that summer. Dad decided to plant a lilac bush in the front yard. The lilac was meant to mark the start of our time in the house. In August, when he planted the bush, it was a little too late in the season for the purple buds to bloom.

T

he summit of ice that then stretched from the western ridge of Wisconsin to New Jersey was called the Laurentide. It is the last known glacier to have existed in the area. Over thousands of years, the Laurentide crept south — sweeping? the ground to form the floor of the Great Lakes on its way down to Indiana and Ohio.

Geologists trace the origin of Saline’s salt springs to the thaw of the Laurentide ice sheet. At the foot of Michigan’s lower peninsula, the ice melted. It seeped below the earth’s surface to form a sea. The water mixed with a pocket of salt already underground. As the water table rose, the sea surfaced as a salt spring.

Geologists are still not sure why springs are active in some pockets of land and not others. If Joseph Francis had surveyed the Saline River a few years later, the soil might have been a forgettable brown. The springs have a certain caprice in that regard. No one can predict when one might become active.

D

ad only kept one journal, as far as I know. The thick sheaf is bound in reddish-orange. Cheap: like leather, but not quite. The cover is bright, like a blush that still burns. The notebook is easy

to spot. It gives the distinct impression of an object left untouched.

Dear Hayley. Your Aunt Ellen thought it would be nice if I wrote to you in this thing.

The first page is wispy, lightly furled at the corner. Dad kept a diary, and in the pages he wrote four entries. Not consecutively: the first is dated exactly one month before my birth on New Year’s Day. There was talk, in the final lines — inky, frantic — of going to the hospital. Mom, he wrote, was past her due date.

You sure are causing her a lot of trouble in there. What’s with all the kicking?

I first read the words on my bed.

Splayed, stomach-down, I lay. My room was full of boxes for the move out of the house. Mom had gotten the eviction notice in July. We left early that August. I had found the journal in a box Mom had labeled “SENTIMENTAL.” Under Dad’s old baseball glove, the journal glinted like a ruby.

I

n 1865, long after Francis left Saline, a man by the name of Finch sold his farm. It was well known that the Finch farm sat over the city’s famed salt springs.

The men who bought his land were businessmen. They had a clear purpose in mind: drill. Not for oil, but for salt.

To dig, they built a derrick. The drill mined Finch’s land at two separate points.

Each derrick cut two hundred feet below the surface of the earth . Above ground, the wells stand about as high as a fire hydrant.

Each one is little more than a very long pipe. You pour enough water down the mouth of it, and the salt relents, dissolving into a stream of grayish-white. As watery brine, the liquid is easy to extract — and, once above ground, easy to boil back into solid salt.

The men stayed for three years, and then they left. Most histories hint at some outside force at work – a rival interest, a man from some other town, Detroit maybe, who paid the company to give up digging. Soon people began to wonder if the salt miners ever existed in the first place. (A local historian, writing in 1870, seems eager to nip away the prevailing mood of doubt. He points to the existence

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

of iron kettles, their purpose in holding salt understood to be clear enough.)

After the men left, Finch got his land back. His family still owned the land in 1940, when, one day, Finch’s grandson Harry felt his tractor sink into the ground.

The wheel had struck some whitish brine.

As Finch watched the sludge ooze up out of the soil, he thought back to a story his grandfather had once mentioned — some bit of lore about the existence a salt well, just under the farm’s surface. His grandfather had insisted on the fact, though Harry, at the time, had no reason to believe him.

M

y father died on a weekday, about two years after we moved into the house. When I asked Mom about it, she hesitated. She knew it had to have been a weekday, because he had come home early from work. Before lunch was how she remembered it. But I was home, too — back from school. Cassie, my babysitter, had already picked me up.

He died of a heart attack, before the

14 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

ambulance pulled up. My father had been adopted. The doctors assumed that the long-term cause was congenital. They could not be sure, though: it was always impossible to say, especially in cases when the family history is not known.

W

hen I show Dad’s journal to Mom, she laughs. At the stove, she reaches for the burner’s dial. I hear a creak as the knob twists. The stove plate turns red-hot.

“That thing?” she says. “Ellen’s gift?

Did your father even have time to use that thing?” She can’t seem to look up.

The cast-iron lip of the pan is her favorite — the one we’ve left off packing. Here and there, a shallot crackles.

I say nothing. She has a point. Most of Dad’s words are apology. He is sorry — for his job, the long hours, for being tired, but mostly, for not writing more.

Mom lets the onion brown, then blacken. The window is open, as if in anticipation, and the breeze sucks up the

smoke. I trudge back upstairs.

So this is the place where I’m going to give you some advice.

My eyes catch on an ink smear, a brownish-black cloud over the “I.” Coffee? Dad drank pop in bed, Mom told me once. It is easy to see his head against the cherry wood bedframe, a can of Faygo in his left hand, a cheap hotel pen in his right. My own hand holds a clay mug. I teeter. A drop of my coffee spills. When I dab the paper dry, lightly, the ink sticks to my thumb.

So this is the place where I’m going to give you some advice.

I read the sentence once, twice, three times. The words begin to wear.

I let myself seep in the moment of anticipation. I could stop here. At his desire to give me something, this vague promise, this hazy “some.” Mom calls up, mujadara is ready.

N

ot long after my father died, a pipe under our kitchen sink must have burst. My mother finally called a plumber when she found the basement had flooded. There was never a reason for either of us to go down there unless the weather forced us, so we found the flood during a storm.

The first tornado of that year was in March — early, even for Saline. The yellow grass was still flecked with ice. My mother had turned the television on, as she always did. She turned the volume up as high as it would go, so that we could still hear the weather report while safe under the ground.

The air had a musty smell. To avoid the inky slop, we ended up standing at the foot of the stairs until the storm passed.

The shag rug at my feet was sopping, cold.

When the plumber came, he explained that the flood had been caused by the same problem that broke the kitchen sink. The pipes had not burst. If you saw them, they looked the same as ever. The problem was apparent only if you peaked inside: catalpa roots had taken hold, clogging the water’s usual path. It was not an uncommon problem to have in an old house, especially one with so much foliage.

I imagined a monster — a subterranean boogey man — when I heard this. Mom had a hard time explaining it to me. How did roots get through solid metal? It had something to do with slight fissures — parts of the pipe that had cracked over the years. Like holes in a sweater that you could not see but you felt, all of the sudden, if the wind picked up.

Terry, the plumber, came back a few days later. He had what looked like a leaf blower slung over his back. Placing the nozzle, I imagine, at the pipe’s mouth, he sucked it dry. I listened from upstairs.

Cassie and I tried to play a video game over the ruckus. When the man left, my mother put the bill on the fridge. She had circled the date at the bottom with a red marker: like the mileage you need your car to reach before getting an oil change, the date was a reminder for when to call Terry. The roots would begin to take hold again soon, so it was best to clear them again in about one year. Clearing the pipes became routine.

L

ater, after the mujadara, I find Mom crying in bed. She asks why I had dug up the journal in the first place. Her voice is quiet. I spot a pack of Marlboros under the linen, the sheet too thin to hide their bulk. Mom catches my stare.

I promise to put the journal back in its box. Mom asks me to turn off the lights on my way out.

So this is the place where I’m going to give you some advice.

This is the place. Dad’s writing is large, booming. There seems to be little worry of running out of space. The page is wide.

Crisp, bare, still waiting to be built, this page is his place.

I read each word in a voice that I’ve made up in my head. In my mind, he drawls. The sentence has a bobbing cadence, each word touched with a slight twang. He lived in Texas once, for a bit. I remember someone telling me he lived in Texas. I couldn’t say exactly where.

Promise me you won’t ever become a lawyer?

An invitation. Well, I think, maybe I’ll write back.

T

here is still some debate about whether the salt springs under Saline exist at all. Joseph Francis could have made it up. If Francis was right about the salt flat, Saline sat on a bed of riches. It would have made sense for someone — Francis, maybe, or an entrepreneur — to tap into it. Everyone knew how valuable salt was in those days.

No such industry blossomed. Farmers swept up from Ohio and settled the land.

Corn flourished, planted in tidy rows. No one mentioned any worry of salty soil.

You can tell a lot from how people say

Saline. If you grew up in the area, you know that it’s suh-leen. Everyone else says Sayleen.

“Like say-leen solution?”

When a friend asked me that, something clicked. It was the first time I made the connection to Saline’s history. Snippets of old history lessons bubbled up: Mrs. Harsh (6th grade) lecturing in front of a bust of Joseph Francis. The more I thought about it, the more none of it made any sense.

There was a sea of salt under Saline. The salt surfaced, the soil a plane of white crystals.

I had to ring up Mom to be sure.

THE TUB STORY Jake Orbison

I mean to say: the first time I realized I would die, I was in the bath.

You don’t believe me because this is all too asked and answered, because this is all and then I learned, but here are facts: My mother sat on the closed-lid toilet.

I had yelled for her. When my face got too hot and red I would dunk my head in the bathwater, which was cold.

We had been sitting there for a while, in winter.

I said, “Mother, I am quite sure of my pain because everyone dies, and everyone has to watch as everyone dies.” Or something like that.

She consoled me then, but I cannot remember how.

She turned on the warm water and kissed my head.

White tile gently confronting my body in a small space—plenty reason to wonder about inevitable things, unforgiving things, coldness.

Also when I think of that I see, two colors—black and very dark blue swirling so fast they were practically indistinguishable.

But maybe the growing heart distills these things: now I am reminded by the image of deep space I set as my computer desktop.

I tell my brother it is getting harder to write each day.

He jokes. He says, “What has healed your heart?” yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

[ ]

by Colin Groundwater

1.

2.

The written word, though, is another thing. Derrida called it “a mark that subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of its inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it,” (Limited 9). When we talk about it these days, we mostly talk in those Derridean (o be honest always thought he seemed like kind of an assh) terms, through an abstract notion of language set down, in opposition to oral communication. Whether or not this constitutes a physical object, however, is unclear. The written word is the adaptive technology by which language is converted into the physical world, but one cannot engage with writing, text on a physical page, as one might with the page itself. But the most important point is the point – meaning, living in flux, making everything harder for everyone involved: “a written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription,” Derrida wrote/said/did what he could to ccmmunicate.

The word on the page is a fly caught in a web (more of ointment, really) of connotations, which problematizes any effort to extract meaning from it. While we can empirically study a book, measure its weight, density, word count, et cetera, the meaning of its contents always escapes, lost in the free play of signs.

But the written word has another meaning, one all to often and easily forgotten: the obvious, literally written word. REALLY, Derrida’s “written word” can’t be called a physical thing, since Derrida’s entire project is so far up its abstracted ass. That is the written word that forms Shakespeare’s plays or Nietzsche’s philosophical works. Consider however, not the written word but a written word, a single unit of language in Language, of course, is not an object.

The book, of course, is an object. You can Structuralists have convinced most disciplines touch a book, feel it, hold it, flip its pages or tear that the words we use emerge from a set of rules we them out, put it on your shelf or burn it in the street. No call “language,” and rules aren’t a physical thing, no matter how it has changed, the medium has always more than Hammurabi’s Code was been a physical one, a thing, commensurate with an undeniably there. etched tablet.

isolation

20 || Vol. 16 Vol.XLII, XLII,No. No.54||April March 2015 2015

. Then consider the composition of that unit, a particular ordering of letters and the spaces between those letters. When you begin to examine each word for itself without regard to their placement, it becomes possible to understand a word as an object, something placed on a page in a specific location. Under this paradigm, meaning doesn’t emerge from the interplay of denotation and connotative, but at an earlier, eve more fundamental level: spatial orientation.

7.

But why even ask these questions? Regardless of whether we can deconstruct meaning, reduce the words we use to objects or less, why would we even want to?

I asked.

3.

Convention has funneled readers down particular pathways through the page.

In western languages, writing proceeds from right to left, top to bottom. Writers place one space, traditionally the length of an en dash (-), between completed words and punctuation. Sometimes we’ve switched it up. Typographers have introduced a number of variations over time, and the word processor has made kerning, the practice of minutely adjusting space between characters, more common. Distinct bodies of thought are divided into paragraphs, and paragraphs can be grouped into larger sections. Both these types of division are contingent on the notion of “line,” in which thoughts progress horizontally, then move down when a new thought is introduced. In prose, this is almost always the norm.

Poetry can be a bit more lax, but the medium’s use (or disuse) of line and meter invites a whole other set of structural limitations. Generally speaking, notions of spacing and lettering have adhered strictly to the RULES.

Seems counterproductive.

Because the words I say and the words I write mean to ME something Doesn’t that count? To say they don’t, that they’re just words or objects, lost in the ether makes it all (me) feel diminutive

4.

Stephane Mallarmé was the first to pose a meaningful challenge to these preconceptions. His landmark work, the BIG ONE, “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,” is a wild experiement with the book-object and placement of text on the page. Lines, if they can be called such, progress across pages with large gaps of space between words. Capitalization and font size are irregular. The result, according to Derrida, is that the poem “catches our attention and forces us, since we are unable to go beyond it with a simple gesture in the direction of what it ‘means,’ to stop shorts in front of it or to work with it” (Acts 114). The poetry has a pausing effect, the sensation that each word is capable of standing alone, regardless of its larger context; you’re allowed to form connections between words not normally circumscribed by traditional reading. Take, for example, the final two pages of the poem.

But I can’t deny, something to it, r u n n i n g through it.

There’s something PRIMITIVE about all of this.

there’s

Calligrams and altar poems something from Lascaux

NOTHING of the memorable crisis or the event might have been

SPEAKING OFF THE PAGE

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.a7 eseht ksa neve yhw tuB ew rehtehw fo sseldrageR ?snoitseuq eht ecuder ,gninaem tcurtsnoced nac yhw ,ssel ro stcejbo ot esu ew sdrow ?ot tnaw neve ew dluow .deksa I .evitcudorpretnuoc smeeS dna yas I sdrow eht esuaceB ot naem etirw I sdrow eht EM gnihtemos yeht yas oT ?tnuoc taht t’nseoD ro sdrow tsuj er’ yeht taht ,t’nod ,stcejbo rehte eht ni tsol evitunimid

leef )em( lla ti sekam

gnihtemos s’ereht ,yned t’nac I tuB ,ti ot r u n n i n .ti hguorht g gnihtemos s’ereTh EVITIMIRP .siht fo lla tuoba smeop ratla dna smargillaC xuacsaL morf gnihtemos

GNIKAEPS FFO EGAP EHT 18 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

“NOTHING,” dominating the left hand page, commands the majority of our attention through its capitalization and spatial isolation. That voice in your head (what are you saying?) pronounces it louder, more dramatically, than the words that follow.

At the same time, you can’t ignore “the memorable crisis.” It forces you to navigate the challenges of the text, to “work with it.” Yet the word nothing also works with other words of the same font and capitalization. On the next three pages, Mallarmé writes “WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE,” “BUT THE PLACE,” “EXCEPT,” “PERHAPS,” and “A CONSTELLATION.” While lines of text and a sea of blank space separate all these phrases, the typographical resonance invites the reader to put them together, where indeed they form a complete sentence of their own. And “A CONSTELLATION” is an apropos image: tiny points of light on black, whose spatial orientation creates meaning.

If, as Derrida says, the spatial experimentation of Mallarmé creates a halting effect, one might also consider e.e. cummings, whose poetry performs similar experiments to opposite results. If Mallarmé’s space captures distance and pause, then cummings’s space captures claustrophobia and momentum. Consider poem 48, often referred to as “mortals)”, from the collection 50 Poems.

mortals) climbi

ng i nto eachness begi n dizzily

While Mallarmé destabilized the space between words, cummings goes a step further by destabilizing the space between letters. The result is a hastening, letters pulling the reader down into the maze of cummings’s poetry when he or she would proceed across into nothing. George Haines IV called this the “assured movement” of cummings’s poetry (Haines 22), which pulls the reader through poem 48 all the way to its final line, “(im”, which loops the reader back to the beginning.

5.

A spectrum emerges: Mallarmé, stasis, and weight on one end, and on the other energy, movement, and cummings.

In a way, however, they are two forces of the same thing, the visual power of the written word Mallarmé a centrifugal force pulling the reader inward towards individual words, cummings centripetal, hurling readers outwards.

Together they form an orbit of sorts, the center of a literary/spatial tradition.

The most direct inheritors of Mallarmé’s and cummings’s legacy were the concrete poets, most notably Eugen Gomringer and the Noigandres group in Brazil. In their

“pilot plan for concrete poetry,” the Noigandres group directly cited the two poets as their inspiration, seeking to explore “the space-time isomorphism, which creates movement,” while Gomringer sought to move from “line to constellation,” evoking the close of A Throw of the Dice. The concrete poets came together in their goal to use space to defy the essential component of the written word, the act of reading. Take Gomringer’s untitled poem, copied here: How does one even begin to read such a poem? There is no designated start or end point. There is no context, so one cannot know whether Gomringer is playing with “wind,” the movement of the air, or “wind,” to move in a twisting, bending way. The Noigandres goal to create poetry embodying “Cybernetics. The poem as a mechanism regulating itself: feed-back,” comes to mind.

There are no words, or even meaning, in this poem: only letters and space cannibalizing one another.

The concrete poets, and even Mallarmé and cummings, were always plagued by disciplinary categorization. Their poetry is not literature, said the critics, but visual art. It’s a fair question: if one so radically destabilizes the written word, when does it cease to function as language at all? These poems don’t fail to signify; they simply signify on their own terms. They take words, our most basic units of language, and treat them as objects in their own right rather than simple building blocks. Even a poem like Gomringer’s “wind” “means,” at least as much as anything can. That meaning is subjective and difficult to parse, but all language is when one considers the multiplicity of meanings that abound in any written communication.

6.

or here

Or here

The lessons taught by the concrete poets and their forebears are more important today than ever, for the word has come into its own objecthood more than ever before. The advent of the word processor was really an update on the typewriter, but the introduction of new software, most notably the Adobe Suite, has brought a truly unprecedented ease to the placement of text on the page. While one might not be able to pull a word off a page, one can freely move a word all over an electronic display, placing a word here or here

with a little as a fingertip. You can play with the words on a page almost as much as they play with each other. It’s an invitation to consider why we place letters where we do, and to think more critically about the space we place between them.

Or even here. yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

Summer time T

he cop pulls me over on I-89. He wants to know why I’m driving 80 miles per hour. Behind him, trucks rip through the darkness. It’s almost three a.m., and I’m late. I don’t tell him I have only seven hours to spend in Vermont. I don’t tell him I’ve been on the road since midnight, with only two bottles of iced tea to keep me awake. He lets me go with a warning, but as soon as he’s gone I’m doing 70, then 75, then 80 again… I can feel the phone vibrating in my pocket. It’s Mom, probably, calling for the third time. When I get there, I’ll tell her this was a stupid idea. Who cares about hot air balloons anyway?

I’m a real person now. I’m nineteen, and I’m working at a summer theater, my first real acting job. I have eight hours of rehearsal tomorrow. I have a paycheck.

I should be catching up on sleep or running lines. This isn’t summer vacation.

I don’t have any time.

I get off at Exit One and turn left for Quechee. I open the windows to feel the breeze. The roads are empty — not even the farmers are awake. But a few porch lights are on, and I can see cars crammed in to the driveways. They’ve come from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and even Florida for the balloon festival. In this touristy town, it’s always fun to read the license plates.

The landscape changes from golf course to cornfields. The pavement turns to gravel, and my ears pop as I speed all the way up our hill. A pheasant-shaped signpost announces our house. Orange light from the kitchen spills onto the trees.

Jazz blares from the stereo. Dad must be awake. I brace myself for interrogations about my future and even worse, the guilt thing: Why are you so late? I park. I pee in the grass. The frogs are screaming. A mosquito whines in my ear.

My parents don’t hear me come in.

They’re dancing by the fireplace, Mom’s face nestled against Dad’s shoulder, Dad making funny faces and strumming her back like she’s a guitar. I feel like I’ve stumbled in to somebody else’s life.

There’s a steak and cheese sub in the oven. There’s a bottle of red wine with three glasses. I turn on the kitchen faucet and let the water run over my hands. I feel the warm glow of candles flushing my face. I splash myself. I yawn. Dad kisses the back of my neck, and Mom squeezes my waist. “Hi, Puchi,” she says.

We eat and drink and dance. I don’t tell them about the cop. I’m too tired to explain.

Dawn waters the sky, and the grey light startles me awake. On the horizon, hills turn into mountains. We’re in the car, and then we’re in a field. The earth is soft, and water seeps into my sneakers.

The balloonists are firing up, one after another. Multicolored orbs rise to greet the light. We’ve always wanted to do this.

We step up to one of the baskets. The balloonist shakes my hand and shows me where to stand. He unrolls the cloth and lights the burner. A checkered pattern swells above our heads as the balloon inflates and we start to float. The chase crew unties us and we rise above the fried dough vendors and the balloons all around. From the birds eye view they look like Easter eggs, checkered or speckled or swirled. “Look up,” Dad says, and then I can see it, all of it, more than I have ever seen before. It’s like being in an airplane, except that the world is all around me and I don’t have to cram my face against an oval-shaped window. I can hear it, too.

Despite the roar of the flame, I can hear the rushing waters and the birdcalls and the whoosh of the wind. Our balloonshaped shadow passes over the Quechee

by Eric Sirakian photograph by Wa Liu Inn. There’s Main Street, and the glassware shop by the waterfall. The river winds its way to the Quechee gorge, the antique mall, the covered bridge… I trace the road towards Woodstock with my finger. I trace the road to I-89.

Our balloon is headed for the highway.

I watch the cars speeding towards Maine in one direction and Massachusetts in the other. I remember that I have to go. But we’re moving as slowly as a cloud. What if the ride takes longer than planned? What if I don’t make it back in time? But the balloon man has tightened the gas valve, we’re descending towards an empty parking lot, and the ride is almost over, even though we’ve only just begun. How much did they pay for this? I wonder. Probably $200, $300, or something crazy. I feel cheated. I don’t know why we did this. Was it worth the money, the long drive, the loss of sleep?

“That’s us,” Dad says. He points to our hill, and I can just make out the edge of our green roof among the trees.

That’s us, he says, but we’re here, we’re in the basket. I imagine the three of us down there, dancing in that house in the woods. I imagine someone opening the front door at this very instant and finding us as we were last night, halfdrunk and wholly happy. What if it were true? What if we could be here and there at the same time? The landscape is a map of my life. At the gas station down below, I’m ten years old, buying a Hershey’s Bar. On the slope by the river, I’m kissing my wife. I turn in place to see everything. The whole world is laid flat before me, but then I blink, we’ve descended, it’s over, we’re getting out, I’m getting in the car, and I’m waving goodbye.

But every time I see a hot air balloon, I imagine the three of us still in the sky.

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22 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

doing your dreamwork

by Abigail Bessler photography by Alex Schmeling

O

n March 30, Chareeni Kurukulasuriya ’16 found herself trapped inside a castle.

Out the windows, she could see a mountain and a wintry forest. Inside the castle were a flashing orange light and a playful yet threatening dragon that had transformed itself into a human. She was mid-conversation with the dragonhuman when she suddenly awoke in her bed at Morse College.

Still half-asleep, she reached her hand out of her covers to type down the main plot points into her iPhone.

Chareeni estimates that records of her dreams make up 60 percent of the recent notes on her phone’s Notes app. (The rest, she says, are to-do lists and IOUs.) She’s always been able to remember many of her dreams — maybe one or two a night. But this month, she made a habit of recording as many dreams as she could. She said she started it for use as fodder for dining hall conversations, not self-analysis.

Then came the dragon dream.

Chareeni says her dreams are usually mundane “school life” dreams, so the dragon dream stuck out. Hearing about it, a friend suggested Chareeni visit a dream analysis site, “Dreammoods. com,” to see what the dream might mean.

Chareeni was suspicious of the site, which houses a “Dream Dictionary” of symbols ranging from the abacus (“You have an old fashion [sic] perspective on certain issues”) to zoomorphism (“To dream that you are changing into the form of an animal indicates that you are becoming less civilized, less

restrained”). The definitions seemed vague. Some, like “Guacamole: To eat or make guacamole in your dream indicates a positive change,” seemed less than scientific.

Some of the entries, however, for “dragon,” “mountain,” and other images in her dream, accurately described feelings she’d been having recently about a personal decision. She says that, to a certain extent, the accuracy was probably a result of the site’s vagueness and of her looking for a way to make sense of the dream. Still, since then, she’s been paying even more attention to her dreams.

“I see [dreams] to be more relevant to my actual life than I did before,” she says. “I’d always just assumed it was random, just random electrical signals.”

P

eople used to be more interested in what dreams had to tell them.

In the heyday of psychoanalysis, from the 1920’s post-war period to the 1970s, dream analysis was a mainstream part of psychology, and Sigmund Freud’s 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams was a huge hit. In it, Freud theorizes that dreams have deeper meanings that can reveal a person’s deepest motivations or desires going back to childhood. The book found its way to America via a 1913 English translation, though it was shocking to many at the time because of its explicit sexual content.

Inspired by Freud’s theories, therapists began putting more emphasis on dream analysis during their sessions.

By the 1970s, people around the world

were interested in playing therapist and analyzing dreams on their own. Books like British psychologist Ann Faraday’s The Dream Game, which offered stepby-step dream analysis instructions, grew popular.

Like many psychologists at the time, Faraday thought dreams gave us important information and new ways to understand our preoccupations and ourselves, believing that dreams should be interpreted literally and then metaphorically. In The Dream Game, she wrote, “Dreams do not come to tell us what we know already.”

Today, however, emphasis on dream analysis in therapy and pop culture has declined, and many of Freud’s ideas are no longer taken seriously. While still a part of psychotherapy, dream interpretation has been replaced by newer, more proven techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses on helping patients address the thoughts and feelings that might be having a negative influence in their behavior. Today, “dream interpretation” may summon thoughts less of science and psychology than of crazy-sounding theories and psychedelic hippie culture.

Yale professor Paul North, who has taught a Yale Summer Session philosophy course called “The Logic of Dreams” for the past five years, thinks that it’s a problem that our society is paying less and less attention to dreams.

“Psychology has turned away from introspection toward empirical studies, and dreams don’t make good evidence,” North said. He decided to teach the class to help students get in touch with

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

the different type of experience that is dreaming. “A general assumption in a scientific society is that dreams are logical,” he pointed out, “but a lot of people think that there’s just a different logic.”

Deirdre Barrett, a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School, agrees. Barrett, who teaches a class on dreams to Harvard undergraduates, recently published a book called The Committee of Sleep about the benefits of using information from dreams in waking life.

During sleep, Barrett says, the brain shows lowered activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with reasoning and censorship, but higher activity in the secondary visual cortex, which creates visual images. Barrett believes this altered, less-censored state can be useful for problem solving, as it makes us less likely to cast away out-ofthe-box ideas.

In one 1986 study of 76 college students, when the students were asked to briefly ponder a personal problem before going to bed for a week and record their dreams, around half of these students believed that by the end of the week, they’d had a dream related to the problem. Of these, a majority said their dream had revealed a solution.

Academics who study dreams disagree on whether most people can really rely on dreams for problem solving. But, Barrett said, the visualization that goes on in dreams can be useful for anyone.

“Our culture puts so much emphasis on logical, linear, verbal reasoning,” she said. “We certainly have something to gain from emphasizing and paying more attention to the kinds of thinking that go on in dreams.”

E

very student in Paul North’s “The Logic of Dreams” seminar, to be offered at Yale again this summer, must keep a dream journal.

North thinks that keeping records of dream experience is important because of what they can tell us about ourselves.

24 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

UPPER RESERVOIR Caroline Kanner

In the high desert at the start of winter, the reservoir freezes over overnight and stays frozen for months.

We climbed up to see it just before midnight, under a moon so full we were convinced that day was about to break.

The August before, we dove in in our clothes to escape the heat.

The walls were slick with algae and angled toward the bottom. We filled the bowl of the valley with our voices and when we left, our clothes dried as soon as we were above water.

Tonight we are mostly quiet and I am handing you rocks to throw to crack the foggy reflections on the reservoir’s surface.

Because the ice is not yet thick and doesn’t reach the edges, each break traps a few pockets of air and we watch them: small ghosts drifting toward the perimeter and surfacing here, by our feet in the half-light.

He says students in his class often feel opened up to new aspects of themselves through recording and interpreting their dreams.

For Ed Dong ’17, dream interpretation can come at a cost. Ed said he always enjoyed the escapism of dreams. That is, until he read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in his “Introduction to Theory of Literature” course this semester.

For a month during the class, Ed obsessively psychoanalyzed his dreams, to the point that he stopped enjoying them. He did say, however, that the over-analysis did make him discover things about himself. Sometimes, people he knew in real life would appear in his dreams with some gross deformity, like “a goat’s head” or “weird fins.” Upon waking from these dreams,

Ed realized that something about the people who had appeared in the dreams hda been making him uncomfortable.

He just hadn’t been able to admit to himself before.

Peter Morgan, an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine who studies lucid dreaming, thinks that considering how “welldefended” people are in daily life, dreams do provide a crucial reality check.

“People who are dreaming are reflecting on something in their life,” he said. “People benefit from being able to look into themselves and see what’s affecting them.”

T place.

he trouble, Morgan finds, is that students aren’t sleeping enough to even dream much in the first

Caroline Kanner ’17 always remembers her dreams first thing in the morning. Since she usually doesn’t write them down, she often forgets them later. But, every other day, a dream sticks. Her favorite dream from last week involved her driving her car past a golf course covered with flamingoes, enough that the grass was no longer visible.

Caroline gets between nine and ten hours of sleep a night (she’s found she “can’t function on eight”). So even though Caroline doesn’t always remember her dreams, she’s probably dreaming a lot more than her peers are.

Dreaming, along with a lot of memory retention, mainly happens during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep, occurring starting 70 minutes after falling asleep, comes in spurts every 90 minutes that grow longer and longer as you sleep from a few minutes in the first REM period to more than 20 minutes by the end of the night.

That means that if you sleep four hours instead of eight, you aren’t losing half of your potential dreaming time — you’re losing three-fourths of it. Even with six hours of sleep, you’re losing at least half of your REM sleep, and with it a lot of dreaming time.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute recommends seven to eight hours of sleep each night for adults. One Stanford University sleep researcher suggests most college students should get “well over eight hours.” Yet 70 percent of college students get under eight hours a night; most average only around six-and-ahalf to seven hours of sleep a night.

The college student sleep deficit has gotten worse over the years. One 1992 study found a nearly 10 percent decrease in consistent sleep schedules among students between 1978 and 1992. Now, under a page of “Common College Health Issues” on Brown University’s website, a section about sleep begins: “College students are among the most sleep-deprived people in the country.”

Morgan finds this upsetting. He calls voluntary sleep deprivation an “epidemic.”

“Our bodies haven’t evolved to get as little sleep as we do on average,” he said. “We have to make a commitment to being in bed for eight hours a night, and as we get older that commitment is harder to make. People don’t value sleep as much as they should.”

Maybe if students became more aware of dreams, Morgan said, they would appreciate sleep more. That, he thought, would be a “major success.”

A

t Harvard, Deirdre Barrett teaches a 15-person undergraduate seminar on dreams, in which students keep a dream journal and learn about theories of interpretation. Every year, she says, around 200 students try to sign up.

Barrett hears the same thing from colleagues who study dreams: when you suggest dreams as an idea for a class, other psychologists think it shouldn’t receive high priority in the department, and doubt that there will be much demand. She says she can understand the first thought. Neuroscience is making huge advances, and she gets why it might take precedent over the murkier realm of dream psychology. The second thought, she says, is “absolutely dead wrong.”

“Students are extremely interested in [dreams],” she told me. “And if you give a talk in a bookstore on dreams, it will be one of the best attended talks.”

Paul North’s “The Logic of Dreams” seminar is taught only during the summer. He tried the class during the school year, but found it was less successful because students signed up thinking it was a place to discuss their own dreams rather than learn about philosophical theories on dreaming.

When I asked Peter Morgan, who has worked at Yale for years and went here as an undergraduate, if he’d heard of dream classes being taught at Yale, he responded that he wasn’t aware of any strong history. Dreams, he said, tend

to be an offbeat topic — “not because people think they’re not important.

But, with psychotic states, the problem is people haven’t understood how to study them or how to apply knowledge into something meaningful.”

Recently, an explosion of new scanning technologies in the field of neuroscience has sparked new findings about the dreaming brain. In 2013, Japanese scientists in Kyoto used MRI technology, an electroencephalography machine, brain scans and a computer algorithm to predict the images seen by dreamers with 60 percent accuracy.

The machine, which considers data and analyzes the neurological patterns of its subjects, could translate contents of dreams into objective data. And from dream recording apps like DreamCloud and Dreamborad, Barrett said scientists today have hundreds of thousands of dreams to use as data points in their studies.

Chareeni said she would like to be able to take a class on dreams at Yale, especially one that discusses contemporary science research. She’s found that since her dragon dream, she’s been more confident in the decision she’d been contemplating.

And while she hasn’t analyzed any more of her own dreams, she’s gone on Dreammoods.com again to analyze a friend’s dream.

“I think it’s mostly an entertainment thing,” she said of the site. “I don’t think I’m going to base life decisions on that, but at least it makes what you dream about less random and more of a way to think about what things you’re fixated on or self-conscious about.”

Chareeni doesn’t know what Yale would be like if students decided to focus more on their dreams. She said she thought most people would enjoy it, and maybe it would incite people to take more chances and be “a little more brave” if they were inspired by what they could do in their dreams.

One thing she’s sure of: “Dreams are fun stories, and they’re worth having to remember.”

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mirror,

mirror

by Yuval Ben-David

T

he funny thing about social media is that, for its whole mirror-ofreality shtick, it doesn’t invite any fetishes. If “to Facebook” were a verb, which it nearly is, you wouldn’t be able “to Facebook” oddly, quirkily. It would happen on a single scale of use, from hyperactive Facebook use to the online presence of a Siberian hermit. Social media is strictly functional; it tells us how to use it. We post. We comment. We like.

Some people over-share and some people under-share, but the content, however sundry — no matter how tacky, tactless, gross or Republican — never really shocks us. A selfie with Bill Clinton? Yawn. A screenshot of your text with mom? @crazyjewishmom probably did it better.

To lift a phrase from Keats, Facebook is life; life, Facebook. And so, Facebook numbs us to life and life to Facebook.

This isn’t unique to Facebook.

Feminism has split over the similar critiques of pornography: during what were known as (i.e., what Wikipedia calls) the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s, feminist theorists quarreled about whether pornography is a site of domination or liberation. Does the passivity of women on screen invite male viewers to objectify women? Does porn deaden us a little bit? Or is pornography a venue of sex-positivism — something women, long chafing at the hypocrisies of male prudishness, should welcome and celebrate? By analogy, this debate cuts to the heart of Facebook. The antipornographers might argue that it anesthetizes us to reality, locking us into little jealousies the way pornography locks 26 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

us into misogyny. We scroll through our walls so quickly, selectively, the way pornviewers fast-forward through the bad acting and skip all the foreplay. Facebook gives us license to see what we want to see — which is to say, it’s a gawking, solipsistic experience.

But for the sex-positive folk, Facebook isn’t about spectacle. It’s about connection — a celebration of humans as social animals. For them, all social media is a bit like Couchsurfing, where indie Swiss people connect with dreadlocked Argentines and crash on each others’ couches as they bum around and find themselves.

My problem with that is the problem I had with Harry Potter: nobody goes to the bathroom. Which is to say, how can we actually connect on Facebook when our profiles are so curated, indeed, when we live for the sake of our Facebook personas?

We objectify ourselves. We see the world through Facebook — “what will look good on our profiles?” as opposed to “what looks good to me now?” I remember how hard it was to climb Wat Pho in Bangkok when one hand was clutching my iPhone, trying to take a selfie with an orangerobed monk clambering impatiently behind. I remember very little of the view, except for how it reflected on the iPhone.

Yale is a bit like this, as was high school, which is why we’re at Yale in the first place. We do things — run clubs, edit newspapers — to make us look good. During the week we live for our LinkedIns; weekends and spring break are for Facebook. But at least LinkedIn is honest; at least it’s up front about its sleazy

self-presentation. During the winter months when I rarely left the house, I spent a lot of time splayed across a variety of Ikea furniture, clicking my way around LinkedIn. I was trying to figure out how to be successful: what internships to do, what classes to take. It felt dirty, kind of like porn. And LinkedIn is somewhere in the genre: plot is excess. Achievements and work histories are listed, drawn up like cool, sleek sex acts.

Since we’re living in what a guy from section calls “late capitalism,” you might be tempted to think this is just some elaborate ad for LinkedIn. It’s not, trust me. My 500+ connections can attest to the fact that “LinkedIn campus rep” isn’t on my resume. But since, of course, we’re living in what another chump from sections calls “an age of irony,” you might still be tempted to think I’m plugging for LinkedIn. Really, I’m not. If you really want to know what I’m thinking, let me refer to another term from section: “the male gaze.”

It’s as if LinkedIn is social media’s answer to the Feminist Sex Wars. Social media is all about these scrutinizing gazes.

Government watches us. We watch, and judge, each other: oppressive, one-way spectatorship. But there’s something about LinkedIn, the whole “so-and-so viewed your profile” feature, that brings the gaze down to a wink. You see me seeing you, and though staring is wrong, on LinkedIn it’s whitewashed by these insecurities and careerist pretensions that make it all seem as if we’re walking around in tuxedo tops and naked on the bottom. And that feels very college.

A love story

by Minami Funakoshi photography by Alex Schmeling

A love story March 3, 2015.

I

am trying to write a story—a love story—about a man and a woman I know. I’ll call them Satoshi and Yuriko. I am writing and erasing, writing and erasing. Sometimes I think I should stop trying. Or write instead in Japanese. But if so, how to title the story? Koimonogatari — — love thing told — is too sappy.

My story isn’t about some girl’s first kiss. Ren’ai shousetsu — — heterosexual love novel—is, well, a novel. Rabu sutōrī — — isn’t even real Japanese, just a bastardised form of “love story.” Besides, in all Japanese stories about love, the man and woman are always in love and are always honest. The obstacles to their love are external (war, leukaemia, amnesia), and I cannot but pity these perfect, impossible characters.

I mention this to Okaasan on the phone.

“What’s the name of the female character?” she asks.

“Yuriko.”

“That’s what we almost named you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“How is her name written? Which kanjis? The same ones we would have used?”

“Um.” I lick my lips. “The story is in English.”

“Oh.” My parents think I’m not Japanese enough. I don’t sit with my knees shut.

I open my mouth when I laugh. I walk too fast. I can’t distinguish between sonkeigo, kenjōgo, and teineigo: respectful language, humble language, and polite language. But I don’t need grammatical constructions to tell me where I stand in the Japanese hierarchy.

I know. I am the dainty little

28 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

daughter. The one who serves green tea to father and uncles and brothers, then disappears behind the sliding doors.

This is why I don’t write in Japanese.

March 4, 2015.

I

am trying to write a story about Satoshi and Yuriko, but these aren’t their real names. I don’t remember their real names. I met them only once, at an izakaya in Tokyo, where we ordered beer and sake and soba and grilled shiitakes that Yuriko, who hates mushrooms but didn’t dare refuse them, quietly passed, under the table, to Satoshi, who ate them for her. I remember Satoshi and Yuriko are twenty-two, because we laughed about how we were all the same age, but leading such different lives.

My ex-boyfriend is the one who planned that dinner. He knew Satoshi liked Yuriko and Yuriko liked Satoshi and he wanted to put them together.

Don’t tell Yuriko about Satoshi’s job, he said, I don’t think he wants her to know. Oh. If I were him I’d tell her and if I were her I’d want to know, I thought, but maybe they have different expectations because they are pure Japanese. In any case, it was none of my business. I kept quiet.

But Yuriko seemed to know. Or at least she knew Satoshi harboured a secret, which made her feel both slighted and seduced. He has such darkness in his heart, she whispered to me, such loneliness — I wish he would let me help him. I said, Hm, huh, maybe he’s just shy.

Satoshi works at a nuclear plant in Fukushima. The one hit by the tsunami.

Ten hours a day, six days a week, he shovels caesium-laden debris into sandbags.

So? I asked my ex-boyfriend as we walked to the izakaya. He looked at me sideways, and said, No one wants his genes. He’s damaged goods.

March 5, 2015.

I

have clouds of scenes and lines in my mind. (“I am deformed inside,” Yuriko thinks, “but I still have silky hair.”) I know I will pick the most tragic details from the real Yuriko and the real Satoshi, fuse them, make this amalgamated character female, and make her my Yuriko. I want my Yuriko, the girl, to be the “damaged goods.” She will be short and shy, just as I am, but she will be from Fukushima. She will have a birthmark the colour of soot below her collarbone, above her heart.

I have one in my left armpit. She will move to Tokyo, alone, and try to start a new life. And look for love.

No one knew where she was from.

Or where she used to live; which university she went to; whether she had siblings. She just appeared in Tokyo one day. Men fell in love with her secrecy.

I am staring at these four sentences on my computer screen. I delete “Or,” and put it back in. I type “secretary,” catch the mistake, and change it to “secrecy.” I edit “university” to “college,” then edit it back to “university” because colleges don’t exist in Japan; just universities. But even universities don’t really exist in Japan — what we have is daigaku: . Literally, big learning.

Back to Yuriko. Should I call her Yuriko? Give her my alternate name, the name I almost received? Because I am not her, I know nothing about her than that she is twenty-two and paleskinned and fries chicken at a cheap restaurant chain in Fukushima, which is where she first met Satoshi.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

We were drinking more beer and sake and shochu on the rocks. Satoshi told us he felt stiff from riding rushhour trains in Tokyo (where are all these people going?) and that he hasn’t had good shochu since 3/11. You don’t find good shochu anymore, he said, not where he lives. All the distilleries in his town have collapsed, or been abandoned, or irradiated.

My house is like that, Yuriko mumbled. Then she went quiet.

Maybe I’ll make my Yuriko’s grandparents shochu distillers. Her grandmother is the wife of a famous shochu master who handwrites his spirit’s brand name (Yakimugi: : burnt barley) with ink and brush on labels made of rice paper. But he abandons his barley and brush to defeat the American beasts, and to die for the Emperor. To bloom and explode like a thousand falling sakura petals—all pink and red.

The sakura-suicide simile — is this too much? Or is it just right?

Nagasaki is famous for its shochu; Yuriko’s grandparents can be from there. I’ll make the grandfather die, maybe in a kamikaze attack. I’ll make the grandmother, with her two-year-old daughter who later becomes Yuriko’s mother, go to the outskirts of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, to help her sister through labour. They hear the blast; they see grey clouds mushrooming toward the heavens. They survive. Yes –– saved by the newborn.

Am I going too far? Too many convenient coincidences, too much tragedy?

In their situation, survival is relative.

People call these women “Nagasaki women.” The grandmother knows her daughter will never find a spouse in their hometown, where survivors will forever remember how muscles melted and concrete crumbled and DNA mutated.

So they leave. To Fukushima.

March 6, 2015.

30 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

W

hat if Yuriko’s grandmother and mother did almost die of the atomic bomb? Because then, I can write a passage like this: The women in Yuriko’s family carry a secret. A terrible secret that began as a lie.

It goes like this: “I am from Fukushima.” So said her mother. She might as well have been; she spent almost all her life there, and knew of no other place.

But no — she was from Nagasaki.

When she became pregnant with Yuriko, she prayed every day to the Shinto gods. She prayed to chase away her nightmares of brainless, limbless, soulless babies.

Yuriko was born. Beautiful; normal.

Now, twenty-two years later, she flees from Fukushima, just as her mother once fled from Nagasaki. She can never go home — even their house’s doorknob is contaminated. She stares at her reflection in the mirror and thinks, My genes are ruined. I am deformed.

I pause and read the passage out loud.

Not bad, I think. Then I wonder if I could write this in Japanese. In Japanese, to be deformed — kikei: — is to possess a rare or strangely fantastic form.

To diverge from the shapes surrounding it, like a red cube floating in a garden of grey pebbles. These oddities are collected and displayed at museums: polka-dotted boar, sunflowers that grow from another sunflower. Aberration, from a safe distance, is precious.

But Yuriko, my Yuriko, is not a work of avant-garde art. She is distorted within.

March 7, 2015.

I

reread the last lines from my passage.

My genes are ruined. I am deformed.

Dramatic. Melodramatic?

Why make Yuriko deformed? Why not write about a beautiful, healthy woman blooming with love and youth?

I have tried to write happy stories, but as the characters grow into themselves they reveal their acne and bulimia and their

urge to strangle their own reflections in the mirror. It’s not me — they are already deformed.

Yuriko: was she already deformed?

That is, the woman I’m calling Yuriko, the one whose name I no longer remember.

Yuriko, with her crooked dimples. As we were leaving the izakaya, I saw Satoshi reach his fingers toward one of them, touch it gently. A tremor; joy.

My Yuriko: does she have dimples?

No — she can’t. She doesn’t smile; she’s named after me. My Yuriko, my Lily Child.

If she — I — were named after a flower less haughty, then maybe I could write a sunlit story about first kisses and sakura petals and smiling girls. But to do this, we must learn to be a different flower: yamato nadeshiko: .

A delicate pink carnation, which the Japanese call the “caressed child of the great harmony.”

The name Yamato Nadeshiko looks human. Can you imagine a gentleman bowing at the hips and lowering his gaze to say: Hello Miss Yamato, how do you do? But I am not fooled; I know its other name. Dianthus superbus.

How distasteful it would be to invite a creature named Dianthus Superbus to tea. The truth is that everything about it is rudely unfeminine. It shoots up lanky. Its petals branch into filaments, wiry as split ends. It hides in its cells a toxin, though it is too feeble to cause any harm. The Chinese sages grind it into a contraceptive — maybe this suits the Japanese ideal, for no woman should dare give birth to what is not pristine, perfect.

All this violence, just to tell my story.

March 11, 2015.

I

just came back from the clinic. It’s a girl.

What will I name her? English or Japanese? Any name would be false: she is not and will not be Japanese. But Japanese blood courses through her veins and she can never be anything else.

I cannot name her.

Confidential, or else Inside Yaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s disciplinary proceedings

by Katy Osborn

photography by Wa Liu

I

wore a string of pearls and a boatnecked blue dress for my day in front of the Executive Committee — periwinkle blue, because I thought it looked wholesome. It was a midSeptember Wednesday morning in 2012 during my sophomore year at Yale, and as I stepped into the elevator of SheffieldSterling-Strathcona Hall to make my way to the fourth floor ExComm meeting room, a gothic hall with high, mahogany-beamed ceilings that make you feel appropriately small, I remember thinking, “Shit.”

Three weeks before, I had been at a party at an off-campus fraternity house — an annual welcoming party for Yale’s international freshman hosted by their Orientation for International Students counselors, myself included. The music was loud, the house was crowded, and, in line with a then-well-established tradition that has since been abolished, booze was in plentiful supply. I was standing in the backyard when, shortly after midnight, I began to notice an alltoo-common college party phenomenon: a mildly panicked exodus. An ambulance had been called, and an inebriated freshman was en route to Yale-New Haven Hospital for the night. The Yale Police were out front.

As I started to make my own way out of the party, I came across a freshman whose walk toward the door had devolved into a no longer-forward-moving stumble.

I soon decided, along with another counselor and a friend of the freshman, that the freshman would benefit from a trip to Yale Student Health. We set off through the front door, only to be stopped at the sidewalk by four University police officers. They scolded us, saying that the freshman was too drunk to be helped at Student Health, took down our names, and subsequently delivered to Yale-New Haven its second freshman of the night.

On the following Wednesday, I received a charging letter (marked “CONFIDENTIAL”) from the Yale College Dean’s Office. The same one was issued for seven other students: three OIS head counselors, three non-senior OIS 32 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

counselors (part of a group of counselors that totaled almost twenty-five), and one fraternity president. The fraternity president had not been present at the party — and, in fact, some of us had never met him. He was being charged because he had allowed us to host the event in his fraternity house. Still, on the day I wore my periwinkle dress, all seven of us appeared in front of ExComm together.

There, we sat across from a line of five or six Committee members (they never introduced themselves, but included Pamela George, the Secretary of ExComm, Carol Jacobs, its thenChair, and a student member who sat awkwardly at the end of the line).

The other charged students and I had brought a residential college master or dean along as a personal advisor, each of whom stood at the beginning of the hearing to give statements (primarily lists of extracurricular activities) on our behalf.

A brief interrogation round followed in which questions like “Who bought the alcohol?” — directed at no one in particular — were thrown out into the room’s stale air. There were no satisfactory answers. Not having been involved in the alcohol purchase, I couldn’t say for sure who had been, and my guess is that this was the case for most of us. Eventually, all seven of us were asked to leave the room with our advisors while the members of the Committee deliberated.

The specific charges we faced were unclear, as was the potential punishment.

Under paragraph C.3 of the Disciplinary Procedures of the Executive Committee in Yale’s Undergraduate Regulations, the Chair of ExComm has to provide any student brought through ExComm with “a written statement of the alleged infraction” at least four working days before his or her hearing, with “any statement prepared by the fact-finder [and] copies of all other relevant documents” attached. My charging letter stated that my conduct “may have violated” the “Yale College Regulations on Alcoholic Beverages” (a four-page section of the regulations) and the “Regulations on Social Functions” (a five-

page section), but didn’t give any further detail. Of the attachments, one was a Yale Police Department Incident Report that listed the names of the seven students charged by ExComm (some labeled “participant,” others labeled simply “other”) and named our non-criminal offense (“Medical Assistance Needed,” “Suspected of Using: Alcohol”). The other attachment was a party registration form that one of the three head counselors had filled out and submitted to the Yale College Dean’s Office a few days before the event. The last question on the form read: “Will alcohol be available?” The response provided: “Yes.” Still, I opted to accept what is called a “disposition without a formal hearing,” which my charging letter said would be taken as an “admission to the validity of the complaint.” I decided to do so after my Master warned me that asking for a formal hearing might result in harsher sentencing, and that it would involve appearing in front of the full Executive Committee rather than a subset of five or six members. In other words, I was advised to plea bargain.

As the Undergraduate Regulations currently stand, according to rule II.A of the regulations for “Social Functions,” anyone and everyone of legal drinking age who is affiliated with a party’s hosting organization can be held liable for alcohol violations at that party — serving to minors, for example — if a specific responsible party within the group or the host of the party can’t be identified. The only exception to this rule comes from Yale’s Medical Emergency Policy, which offers amnesty from disciplinary action to students who seek help for another student during a medical emergency. But in September 2012, the Undergraduate Regulations were different. There was no anyone-and-everyone-affiliated rule; no Medical Emergency Policy. In a case like ours, the only person who could have reasonably been held responsible for alcohol violations, according to the Undergraduate Regulations as they then read, was an of-legal-drinking-age, registered host of the party. Our party

registration form listed just one name as this of-legal-drinking-age host. Yet there we sat, all seven of us.

This reading of the regulations may or may not have had any bearing on the sentences doled out to the three nonsenior counselors who were charged by ExComm. The Committee elected to withdraw all charges, and the three of us went unpunished. For the other charged students in the room, however — the three head counselors and the fraternity president — such a reading seemed to have no effect. They all received a reprimand (an innocuous sentence that doesn’t appear on a student’s disciplinary record), but the two head counselors who also happened to be in the fraternity at whose house the party was held also received a second sentence. They were told that their deactivation from their fraternity would be effective immediately, that they were prohibited from entering the fraternity residence for the rest of their time at Yale, and that should the fraternity president encounter them there and fail to report the incident to ExComm, all three of them would face more serious consequences. Ironically, it was the third head counselor — the one who received just a reprimand — who had been listed on the party registration form as its host.

We were ultimately dismissed from the hearing, but not without a caveat: the details of our case, along with the proceedings of that day, were to be kept entirely confidential.

Two years later, there are no visible traces of the ordeal. Our academic records are unmarred. Some of us have already graduated; the rest of us soon will. The Orientation for International Students has reformed its welcome rituals: The counselors have everyone play Capture the Flag on its last night, and no one tells the freshmen the story of why. My residential college master now knows my name, and asks how I am when we pass on the street. I’m fine; unscathed.

This, however, is a story about invisibility: about the dozens of students that have since appeared before

ExComm, the hundreds that appeared prior, the potentially thousands that will follow; students whose disciplinary processes have been hushed by variably welcome and unwelcome but uniformly unexplained demands that they keep their cases confidential. It’s a story about what it means for our University to administer extralegal disciplinary rulings, and for these rulings to occur behind closed and confidential-or-else doors.

The Quiet Rule

B

etween the 1998–1999 and 2012– 2013 academic years, the years for which Yale’s Executive Committee Report is publicly archived on its website, 1625 students and approximately 1,000 cases (cases often include more than one student) have gone in front of ExComm.

Only 75 of these students had their cases adjudicated in formal trials, fact-finders and all. The rest chose, as I did, to have a disposition without a formal hearing.

A little more than a third of these 1625 students were charged with some form of academic dishonesty, while the rest were charged with offenses ranging from drug and alcohol violations to hazing to hitting other students with snowballs and even to fraud, as in an incident during the 2004–2005 school year in which 22 students changed their birthdays on their student accounts so they could obtain fake IDs. Until 2011, when the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct was formed, ExComm also handled cases of sexual misconduct (though the conclusion of the federal Title IX investigation against Yale suggested that it did so inadequately).

For the fifteen academic years covered in these reports, ExComm outcomes for all dispositions and formal hearings — for all offenses — break down roughly as follows: A little less than 1% of students had their degrees withheld; 8% were suspended; 15% were put on probation; 62% received reprimands; 14% saw their charges dropped.

This averages out to about 108 students being ExCommed in any given academic year—about 2% of the student body—resulting in one degree withheld, nine suspensions, 16 students on probation, 67 students reprimanded and 15 sets of charges dropped. It’s a small but not insignificant population, sketched vaguely by one-sentence summaries within the chairs’ reports, “Four juniors were reprimanded for setting fire to a bench” (1998–99). “Sophomore charged with Theft for taking potassium hydroxide from a chemistry lab, then found to be lying when the explanation was it was needed to clean a friend’s (nonexistent) aquarium, was given probation for 1 term” (2008–2009). These summaries also exist in printed form: in a thick “precedent book” binder—organized by both sanction and by violation—often used by the Executive Committee for reference in determining a student’s most appropriate punishment.

Under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, universities have a legal obligation to keep their students’ education records—disciplinary records included—confidential. But, at Yale, confidentiality restrictions seem to stretch beyond the parameters of the law.

Members of the Executive Committee claim that they are prohibited from speaking in any capacity about the committee, as do residential college masters and deans, citing the possibility of unintentionally disclosing or alluding to the confidential details of students’ cases. As I attempted to interview members of the Executive Committee, several of them expressed confusion with my interest in the topic: “You are the second student and 3rd request I have received for an interview regarding workings of the Executive Committee this term,” Ruth Blake, the Geology and Geophysics professor who serves as ExComm’s Chair, wrote in an email. “Not sure why there is an impression of mysteriousness or lack of access to information on the process, but it is all public knowledge available on Yale websites and in the Undergraduate

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Regulations, also available on line… beyond the descriptions of procedures followed — which appear in online documents and are indeed followed as written — I am not sure what else I could add.”

Pamela George, assistant dean of academic affairs and secretary to the executive committee, wrote: “I don’t understand what your question or purpose is regarding ‘demystifying’ the process, especially when someone in this class interviews me every year. What is your thesis based on? Have you read the disciplinary procedures in the Undergraduate Regulations?” When we ultimately met for an interview, Dean George was upset to hear that I intended ultimately to publish this piece, and refused to let me record our interview, despite my repeated requests. “You’re welcome to take notes,” she said. “And if you want to quote me, I’ll check them.”

Despite their claims to the contrary, the administration is far from oblivious to what former ExComm Chair Carol Jacobs’ identified in the 2012-2013 Executive Committee Chair’s Report as “student apprehension of the Executive Committee.” In fact, in the report, Jacobs hit the crux of my “thesis” on the head, writing: “Perhaps misconception is inevitable given that all participants in the meetings of the Executive Committee are required to maintain strict confidentiality.”

Beyond ExComm members maintaining that they cannot discuss the work of ExComm even generally, they also claim, citing a “rule” of ExComm, that students are required to keep their own cases completely secret. Harvard has a similar rule for their disciplinary committee, the Harvard Administrative Board, which is written clearly on the board’s website: “All participants are to keep confidential any information contained in a case document or otherwise obtained from their participation in the complaint process… Disclosing these materials to anyone other than those with a need to know is prohibited and may subject a student to disciplinary 34 | Vol. XLII, No. 5 | April 2015

or legal action.” But a search through Yale’s Undergraduate Regulations yields little to this effect beyond a passing reference to members of the committee “maintaining the confidentiality of the Executive Committee hearings” and a note that all documents pertaining to ExComm are “strictly confidential.” The Yale administration seems to rely almost entirely on FERPA, the federal law governing the privacy of student records, to back up their confidentiality rule.

It is one thing for the administrators of disciplinary action to invoke confidentiality under federal law. But in cases that pertain exclusively to the student being charged, claims that the law binds students themselves to silence are like asserting that federal privacy laws related to medical records (i.e.

HIPAA) prohibit medical patients from complaining about poor treatment. In other words, they’re patently false.

When I point this out to Pamela George, the Secretary of ExComm, she backpedals on her initial justification invoking FERPA and explains that the confidentiality rule is, in a bigger sense, about fairness. “It’s difficult to have information about a hearing out there without all of the information being available,” says George. “If a student is the only one talking, only one side of the story is being heard. And that’s not transparency.”

Were Yale a public institution, due process requirements might ultimately outweigh an internal confidentiality rule should a student believe that his or her right to due process had been violated. Since the 1961 federal court ruling on Dixon vs. Alabama, in which six students brought Alabama State College to court after having been expelled without a hearing (presumably for their involvement in civil rights demonstrations), federal law has dictated that public universities can no longer act in loco parentis — “in place of a parent” — to discipline their students without first providing due process.

Because Yale is a private institution, it isn’t held to that due process standard.

And because Yale isn’t a governmental institution, students don’t have First Amendment rights when it comes to Yale prohibiting them from speaking, either.

Put simply: If Yale wants to impose a quiet rule on ExComm, it can. This was demonstrated in 2004, when a Yale student who had been accused of cheating on a chemistry exam six years prior and suspended for the subsequent two semesters sued Yale in the Connecticut State Court (Okafur vs. Yale University).

Her claim was based primarily on the fact that her residential college dean had advised her during the process, and not a licensed attorney.

“No civil claim can be based on an alleged violation of constitutional rights,” the judge ruled, later adding, “Note that the rules at Yale specifically say that the adviser is not an advocate…but rather ‘a source of personal and moral support.’”

What’s at play in this ruling is a general application of contract law — that is to say, Yale need not provide due process to its students (much in the same way that it needn’t pay heed to the First Amendment), and is free to ExComm again and again any student who fails to maintain confidentiality — likely under a “Defiance of Authority” clause.

According to Pamela George, no student has ever been charged for such an offense, because, to her knowledge, no student has ever gone public. When I ask her if there are any potential ramifications for students who speak to me for this article, she hesitates. There was a student fairly recently, she tells me, who was charged with “Misconduct at a formal hearing” after erroneously representing the outcome of his ExComm case to a professor. Should the ExComm accounts in my article contain errors or falsehoods, she explains, the students who provided them could meet a similar charge. Later, I look up “Misconduct at a formal hearing” in the Undergraduate Regulations, and find that it has nothing at all to do with “publicly sharing erroneous info intentionally,” as George puts it. It’s a rule about misrepresentation or lying during a formal hearing.

As a private university, Yale is understood by most courts as being bound to the contract established by its Undergraduate Regulations. But with ExComm as opaque as it is, there’s little incentive for Yale to adhere even to its own rules, and even less hope that the University will be held responsible where it does not. At a point, the only actual safeguard available to students in disciplinary proceedings is a general but difficult-to-apply promise that disciplinary treatment will not be “arbitrary and capricious.”

ExCommunicated

S

itting in Yale College DeanJonathan Holloway’s wood-paneled first floor office of SSS, three floors below the Executive Committee’s regular meeting place, I find myself thinking that “arbitrary and capricious” treatment by ExComm is hardly a concern. Holloway is eloquent, thoughtful, and seems willing to engage — his response to my initial email request for an interview acknowledged the need for confidentiality, but concluded, “I remain happy to sit down with you.”

“When ExComm is really working well,” he tells me, “it’s trying to figure out a balance between disciplinary action and education. It should never be functioning as a place just to discipline, but always to teach students that there are certain norms in a community. Without somebody — some organization, some unit, somebody maintaining those norms — you get chaos in a system and the place does not function.”

“Truth be told,” he adds, “I think student members of ExComm are way harder than the administrators or the professors on the panel. They think, ‘I was put in a similar situation and I decided to go this direction — this person choose that direction and now they’re crying about it! The fact is, the adults on the panel are often looking for mitigating circumstances, complicated contextualizing circumstances. There is a better appreciation for the fact that you find yourself in situations you never

anticipated for a whole variety of reasons.

The thought is ‘Let’s try to ferret out what those reasons are.’”

A review of recent ExComm reports and statistics suggests that the notion of ExComm as a committee with a mission to educate as well as mete out punishment is plausible. The vast majority of students brought in front of ExComm receive reprimands, and those who receive greater sentences (disciplinary probation, suspension, withheld degrees) tend to have been charged with academic or violent offenses (their actual guilt, of course, is up for debate).

But students who have gone through the ExComm process tend to disagree that the high rate of inconsequential sentences — namely, reprimands — mean that ExComm is an educational body. They argue that sentencing statistics speak to the fact that ExComm is meant mostly to intimidate, and often fails to provide due process along the way.

After all, it’s not as though Yale students speak of potential disciplinary consequences in terms of probations, reprimands, or suspensions. The fear is a general one: “I don’t want to get ExCommed.” So is the threat: the term “Executive Committee” appears no less than 129 times in the 130-page Yale Undergraduate Regulations (128 in 127 pages, if you exclude the title page and table of contents). “Probation” appears six times. Essentially, all this means is that the Executive Committee is the adjudicating body at Yale College for all offenses not related to sexual misconduct. But as one student who had gone through both the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct and ExComm pointed out to me, “UWC actually adjudicates — ExComm deals mainly with dispositions, which indicate an un-nuanced admission of guilt.”

“If their intent is to scare students, they 100 percent did in my case,” one student, Jessica, told me of her ExComm disposition, which resulted in a verbal reprimand. Jessica was charged on behalf of her music group with eight different violations pertaining to use of a

University space for a concert. “I agreed to a disposition because technically I agreed with some of the accusations, and as the president of the group hosting, understood that I had to be held responsible for the event more generally.

I’d also been told that I would have to appear in front of the entire ExComm board if I asked for a formal hearing,” she explained. “But really, none of what went on was intentional — there were a lot of factors thrown into the mix that were beyond my control.”

Ultimately, Jessica left her disposition frustrated, feeling that there had been no regard for nuance exhibited by the panel members who Holloway claims are so ardently searching for “complicated contextualizing circumstances.”

“Their questions were very accusatory — it was pretty clear that what I said didn’t really matter, and that they hadn’t read my statement,” Jessica said. “They didn’t really help, or help us think of what we could have done differently. Now our concern is not so much about breaking the rules again — it’s about getting caught.”

In fact, for many of the students I’ve spoken to whose “contextualizing circumstances” have come into play in their ExComm hearings, these circumstances have actually worked against them. They include being Greekaffiliated, a freshman counselor, or having a negative history of some sort with ExComm, a college dean, or a college master.

Rebecca, a freshman counselor and president of her performing arts group, was in the midst of a UWC case she had filed alleging sexual assault when she was first summoned to ExComm. Her group had been reported by a resident fellow awoken at 4 a.m. by their making rounds to wake up newly inducted group members in their dorm room, and was now being charged for violating paragraph V.B of Social Functions on “quiet hours,” which prohibits social functions from going past 11 p.m. on Sunday through Thursday or 2 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night. The charging

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letter was unclear, Rebecca recalls, and lumped Rebecca’s group in with a few others on similar but separate charges related to initiation celebrations. Facing these charges alone on behalf of her organization, Rebecca also remembers her confusion regarding ExComm’s requests that the charges and eventual disposition be kept entirely confidential.

How was she supposed to tell the other members of her group the outcome?

Rebecca ended up never having to attend such a disposition, however: ExComm eventually decided to withdraw all charges. At the time, she was told this meant there would be no record of her almost-date in ExComm.

When she was later charged under Hazing regulations for blindfolding a consenting junior on secret society tap night, however, this turned out not to be the case. Her master informed her that her former ExComm charge for breaking

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quiet hours and her position as a freshman counselor would both work against her in ExComm, in that they spoke to her “poor judgment.”

Pamela George says this sort of thing isn’t impossible, especially if two incidents are similar. “At the very least we like to ask, ‘You were aware of this sort of situation last time charges were brought against you. You knew rules were broken. Therefore, we’re just curious: why you didn’t take lessons you learned there into account here?’” I point out that this goes against the absolution that comes with charges being dropped, to which she replies: “You might see it as counterintuitive, but we don’t see it like that.”

In an ExComm disposition that included three other seniors answering the same blindfolding charge, Rebecca was unable to answer the sort of question George describes. She was afraid of

breaking UWC’s confidentiality rule by even mentioning her then-ongoing case to these other students — one of whom Rebecca had never even met before. In what Rebecca reflects on as a “shockingly inappropriate” oversight within a rushed process, ExComm wrongly assumed this fourth student to be a member of Rebecca’s senior society. “They asked such pointed questions in the disposition that they never bothered to ask the very simple question of whether we all knew each other,” Rebecca recalls. And the fact was, she hadn’t really been that aware of the situation for which her charges were dropped: She had been otherwise engaged in the emotionally draining process of a UWC complaint at the time. ExComm decided to put Rebecca on disciplinary probation for her “hazing violation” — a sentence that will appear permanently on her disciplinary record. The other students just received verbal reprimands.

“Having gone through both UWC and ExComm,” Rebecca tells me, “I was really blindsided by how unheard I went in the [ExComm] process. I felt totally helpless.”

She feels that the ExComm process ruined formerly strong relationships with her master and dean, too. “I went four years as a model student here, and suddenly none of it mattered,” Rebecca said. Her biggest concern in our interview was anonymity, which she attributes to what she views as “the intimidation that ExComm really seems to want to project.” She shows me an email from Pamela George that she received the summer after her probation sentence was administered; a response to her request for a final sentencing letter, which she had never received and wished to reference as she updated the tap procedures for her organization. (This update was an additional requirement of her ExComm sentence.) “I’m not quite sure I understand your intent with the letter,” George writes. “In what way are you going to be referencing a decision that is confidential?”

Another student, Jordan, asks if we can walk and talk for our interview — from her college courtyard to a printer in her college library, where she continues to speak at audible volume (much to the interest of two students sitting nearby).

It’s clear that she’s not particularly concerned with keeping the details of her case private — at least not beyond her basic fear of ExComm seeking reprisal.

Like Rebecca’s story, Jordan’s begins several months before it actually begins: with her first ExComm disposition.

Jordan was brought in front of ExComm for plagiarism following what she admits was a “definite mess-up.” She explains: “There was a class that I was taking Credit/D/Fail but was going to drop soon, and I had a reading response that I had signed up for that was supposed to prompt all the other reading responses. I went on Spark Notes, and translated [an analysis] from English to French with my own French knowledge.” That Wednesday, Jordan was suspended immediately for the remainder of the term. She was given until Sunday to vacate her dorm entirely.

Jordan moved to an off-campus residence and went about making the most of her now-vacant semester. She emailed one of her teachers to tell him that she had been suspended, asking if he would be willing to continue to accept her assignments and meet once or twice with her over the remainder of the semester. He said that he would need to check with her residential college dean, and after he did so, agreed. Not long after, Jordan applied for a summer job on Yale’s campus, a job that would begin after the terms of her suspension had been lifted, and was hired. On May 8, two days after the spring term — and thus, the terms of her suspension — had officially ended, Jordan called her residential college dean’s office to ask if she could be given back her Yale ID in order to obtain swipe access for her job.

Exactly one week later, on May 13th, Jordan received an email from her dean that read, “I contact you on behalf of the Executive Committee, who are concerned about your recent effort to seek student employment as [redacted]. I do not have a charging letter to send you yet (which I’ll receive later this afternoon), but the Executive Committee is eager to know from you as soon as possible whether you are available to discuss this case on Thursday morning, May 15th, at about 12 noon.” Jordan responded that she would be available.

When she received her charging letter, Jordan learned that she was being charged with “Defiance of Authority.” Attached was an email that her Dean had written to Pamela George at 11:38 a.m. that day — less than two hours before his 1:07 p.m. email to Jordan — reporting her attempt to seek employment and her contact with professors as “efforts to participate in official on-campus activities while withdrawn from Yale College.” In it, the Dean wrote that one professor, who had contacted him to ask why Jordan wasn’t allowed to meet with her on campus, was “shocked to learn that [ Jordan] had withdrawn.” In fact, this wasn’t the case at all. In an April 8 email exchange, Jordan and that professor had discussed Jordan’s

suspension.

It came to Jordan’s attention soon after receiving her charging letter that by agreeing to appear in front of ExComm, she had unknowingly agreed to a disposition —which would be taken as an admission of her guilt. She promptly informed her dean and Pamela George in an email that she would not be coming to the disposition, and that she felt as though she had been “tricked.” Neither Pamela George nor her Dean responded to Jordan’s email, but she’s worried they’ll follow up any day now.

Jordan and Rebecca’s stories speak to a larger trend in the way that ExComm operates — often without adjudication, with a sentencing process that relies heavily on gut notions of the culpability of the students appearing in front of them. Sometimes, ExComm works to its desired effect, jolting students into submission. More often, it comes across as a system that’s not a system at all: “arbitrary and capricious,” even.

Bad Apples

O

ne spring evening, Yale University Police caught Hunter and a few of his suitemates smoking pot outside on Old Campus. The members of the suite immediately emailed their master and dean, who Hunter recalls, were “kind of baffled by our stupidity.” Still, Hunter said, the ExComm disposition went well. He’d been terrified, but ended up being let off with a reprimand. His residential college dean had come to the support of the suite during her statement, mentioning an email she’d sent out right before the incident chastising students in the college for recent cases of smoking indoors. After the disposition, she hugged them all. “ExComm didn’t seem to care that we had smoked weed — they seemed to care that we’d been dumb enough to do it in front of security cameras and get in trouble for it,” Hunter says.

Hunter’s college master was less sympathetic. Months later, this master would send an email to Hunter’s suite, which by then said master had begun

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to identify as a problem. Citing recent entryway upsets that included the setting off of a fire extinguisher and general messes in communal bathrooms, the email threatened Hunter’s suite with punishment — but not by way of ExComm. Instead, it evoked possibilities of both a fine (“I want the fines set high,” the email read) and rustication, a policy whereby students are forced to move off campus and barred from entering their residential colleges.

Such an email speaks unequivocally to ambiguous space within Yale’s disciplinary framework — space left by ExComm’s shortcomings. “If a master feels that sending certain misbehaving students to ExComm is not going to return anything but at most a reprimand… what is the master left to do?” Jonathan Holloway, Dean of Yale College, asks me when I present him with this scenario.

(He comments only in the hypothetical; Holloway is careful to avoid engagement with the details of specific cases throughout our interview, out of apparent respect for confidentiality and professionalism.)

Here was a suite that had been through ExComm once and come out undaunted; whose deserved sentence was somewhere beyond a reprimand but short of probation.

What was their master to do next?

The threat of a heavy fines and rustication seem to suggest an almost parallel disciplinary framework to that of ExComm, one that penalizes financially needy students and not wealthier ones. After all, the policy of rustication disadvantages of students whose oncampus housing is covered by financial aid. Yale has shunned disciplinary policies with financial implications of this sort for over forty years. In a 1969 letter exchange between then-President of Yale University Kingman Brewster and then-Graduate School Dean John Perry Miller, Brewster wrote of recent calls by Robert Finch, Nixon’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, to withdraw federal aid from students who violated criminal law during student disruptions. Brewster declared that he found “the effort to use loans and scholarships to regulate local conduct…

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repugnant to the spirit of the United States Constitution.”

Today, things seem to run on a far more discretionary basis. “In trying to deal with social nuisances — I mean, just being bad citizens — …it’s about community standards in the college…It’s a judgment call by masters and deans about how stern you are going to be with students who just don’t seem to be getting it,” Dean Holloway says.

“Rustication is actually last resort in the sense that if someone is being a jerk you just don’t say, ‘Yeah, you are outta here,’” he explains, telling me that in his former position as master of Calhoun he inherited one rustication case and has since threatened two or three more students. “I am actually curious as to what the effect of rustication is to people on financial aid, but it wouldn’t affect my decision to rusticate somebody.”

“If you have one bad apple, it spoils the bunch,” Holloway says. “If you simply can’t understand the implications of your behavior then you’re doing a disservice to the rest of the community that is abiding by these rules. If someone is on financial aid and [rustication] means they can’t stay at Yale, then that’s their consequence.”

Hunter’s suite was never rusticated, nor have they since had to appear in front of ExComm. Should either threat reemerge, two things seem likely: their “bad apple” status may figure into this new verdict, and there’s little that is entirely off limits.

“Students simply want to know what is going on…”

I

n 1969 — the same year that President Brewster wrote to Dean Miller; the same year, not at all coincidentally that students were shutting down Swarthmore and the University of Pennsylvania; that the Yale School of Architecture went up in flames; that New Haven saw the arrests of the New Haven Nine — Brewster appointed a committee of faculty and students “to advise on how Yale ought to approach the study and reform of its governance.” The

results, released two years later, were far from groundbreaking, and can perhaps best be summarized by a single sentence from their report: “Students simply want to know what is going on, what is being decided, by whom, and why.”

Herein lies the essential problem of Yale’s Executive Committee, one that Holloway readily acknowledges. The Committee claims that it provides due process to students, but with so many students contradicting this narrative while the quiet rule holding strong, it’s hard to know for sure. “I think in the abstract there is a missed opportunity for providing more education about the ExComm process,” Holloway concedes.

“Especially in those really messy ExComm cases, you want to be able to say, ‘These are the reasons why this was decided this way.’”

Still, Holloway says, “We have to weigh these things with the need for confidentiality, and I actually think that the weighing is done properly.”

I ask him if he thinks students could or should be punished for breaking ExComm’s confidentiality rule. He thinks for a moment, but his response is ultimately steadfast. “I don’t see why not,” he says. “If they know what the rule is, they should follow it.”

The elephant in the room as we talk, is, of course, obvious. I’m reporting a piece that relies entirely on students’ willingness to break ExComm’s confidentiality rule; that undermines the very foundation on which ExComm’s system of endless disciplinary dispositions stands. It feels like confrontation, with a man I respect and whose general vision of ExComm I respect. Does the confidentiality rule apply to me? Can journalists get ExCommed? I wonder, and for a moment, I’m back in that periwinkle dress, back in the elevator of SSS, and I’d like nothing more than to never see the inside of the ExComm meeting room.

But then I think back to the report, to that one simple sentence: “Students simply want to know what is going on, what is being decided, by whom, and why.”

And I think: I guess we’ll find out.

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