NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2014 · VOL. CXXXVII, NO. 60 · yaledailynews.com
INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING
RAIN CLOUDY
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CROSS CAMPUS Snow Fall. In case you missed
the white chunks on the ground, New Haven saw a decent amount of snow over break, signaling the beginning of everybody’s favorite time of year. Don’t let the brief thaw fool you — we’re due for more as early as Tuesday.
Staying active. Protests
against the no-indictment decision in the Michael Brown case continue today on Cross Campus, where the Black Student Alliance at Yale will be gathering at 12:01 p.m., hands held up. The demonstration will eventually proceed to the New Haven Court House to join another, citywide protest.
Power hour. United Nations
Ambassador Samantha Power ’92, a former magazine editor for the News, will be speaking in Levinson Auditorium this afternoon at 4:30 p.m. Returning to campus as a Chubb Fellow, Power earned a Pulitzer Prize before joining President Barack Obama’s Cabinet.
The Ivy Factor. Fox News’s Bill
O’ Reilly dispatched reporter Jesse Watters to The Game to quiz Yale and Harvard grads on current events. Though representatives from both camps floundered on questions about ObamaCare and the Ukraine Crisis, the only person to answer everything correctly was, in fact, an Eli.
VOLLEYBALL TEAM EARNS SPOT IN NCAA
TO ENGLAND
NEEDLE EXCHANGE
Four Yalies receive the Rhodes, six receive the Marshall
FORMER USERS DRIVE PROGRAM TO STAMP OUT HIV
PAGES B1-B4 SPORTS
PAGE 3 UNIVERSITY
PAGE 5 CITY
On the 16th anniversary of the unsolved murder of then-Yale College senior Suzanne Jovin ’99, investigators will convene to reexamine her fatal stabbing. The Jovin investigation team has scheduled a community meeting at Wilbur Cross High School for Dec. 4 at 6 p.m. The event is intended to allow members of the public to come forward with any information they may have regarding Jovin’s murder, which remains a cold case. The 21-year-old Yale student was found
dead near the corner of Edgehill and East Rock Roads on the night of Dec. 4, 1998, with a slit throat and 17 stab wounds to the back of her head and neck. “The purpose of this community meeting is to find people in the community who may remember details which, to them, may seem inconsequential but could be important to the investigation,” said Mark Dupuis, communications and legislative specialist at the Office of Chief State’s Attorney. “We will not be making any announcements or discussing any details of the investigation.”
The team probing the murder — which includes representatives from the New Haven Police Department, the Division of Criminal Justice, the Office of Chief State’s Attorney’s Cold Case Unit and the Office of the New Haven State’s Attorney — will seek information on three principal leads, the New Haven Register first reported. The first concerns a passenger in a taxi near the scene of the crime. At 9:30 p.m. on the night of the crime, less than 30 minutes before police were alerted to Jovin’s murSEE JOVIN PAGE 4
FOOTBALL
Elis come close, but fall short In the 131st Harvard-Yale game, the Bulldogs fought valiantly, coming back from a 17-point deficit to tie the Crimson in the fourth quarter. But Tony Reno’s bunch could not seal the deal, with Harvard intercepting the final pass of the game to clinch a 31-24 victory. PAGE B1
We get it. A group from
Boston.com tried the same trick, asking Game tailgaters basic SAT questions.
Numbers *sometimes lie.
On Saturday, The New York Times published a piece discussing the meaning of plummeting admissions rates at the nation’s top universities. According to the article, wider application pools are partly responsible — ultimately, good students will face good odds, it concluded.
hockey game pitted Stu Wilson ’16 against his father, Wayne Wilson, the head coach of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s team. Though the younger Wilson already came away victorious, he clearly wanted more, having fired off three shots on-goal.
Dubious honor. Last week,
Movoto Real Estate named New Haven Connecticut’s most dangerous city. “There are some areas best left avoided. Unless you like crime,” the site said.
Still got it. George H.W. Bush ’48 made an appearance on the Houston Texans’ Kiss Cam over break. A true politician, the former president gave the people what they wanted, to much applause. THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY
2009 The Spizzwinks(?) perform at Carnegie Hall in New York, N.Y. Submit tips to Cross Campus
crosscampus@yaledailynews.com
ONLINE y MORE goydn.com/xcampus
Harvard approves joint CS50 project BY EMMA PLATOFF AND STEPHANIE ROGERS STAFF REPORTERS CS50 is coming to Yale. Harvard approved the joint venture — in which students at Yale will watch live or archived lectures of the popular Harvard computer science course — Harvard computer science professor David Malan announced to his CS50 class last Monday. “So the rumors are indeed true,” Malan said during his final fall lecture last Monday. “For the first time in history students at Harvard and Yale alike will be able to take a course called CS50 this coming fall 2015. We will put aside the rivalry.” Harvard’s approval was the last step in the process of finalizing the joint venture after Yale faculty voted overwhelmingly to bring the course to New Haven earlier this month. Following Harvard’s approval, Yale Computer Science Department Chair Joan Feigenbaum confirmed that Yale will introduce the course for the first time in fall 2015. While Yale students will watch Malan’s lectures from afar, they will participate in sections and office hours in New Haven. According to Yale computer science professor Holly Rushmeier, Harvard’s decision to approve the venture does not come as a surprise. Indeed, Yale computer science professor David Gelernter said “they’d have been crazy not to” do so. “They have a successful course and can only make it more successful by adding some Yale-Harvard rivalry and — even better — some Yale students,” he said in an email. “Yale undergrads are the best around when it comes to creative entrepreneurship and independent thinking; and we can learn a lot from Harvard about this sort of hypermodern, high production value Disneyland course.” Computer science and mechanical engineering professor Brian Scassellati will direct the course at Yale, and Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis said Scassellati will work to build a program akin to the popular Harvard course. Scassellati will recruit undergraduate learning assistants to staff the Yale version of CS50, and Feigenbaum said in November that the training for these assistants will begin in the spring. The course will also be overseen by current Harvard senior Jason Hirschhorn, a longtime CS50 teaching fellow who will work full-time at Yale after his graduation. Hirschhorn said a top priority will be to integrate CS50 with the preexisting Yale Computer Science Department infrastructure and other “robust [computer science]
KEN YANAGISAWA/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
Wil-Son. Saturday’s men’s
Amidst criticism, Yale stands by Schmidheiny BY LARRY MILSTEIN STAFF REPORTER Although Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny emerged victorious from a prolonged court battle, faculty and experts maintain that Yale should rescind his 1996 honorary degree. Earlier this month, Schmidheiny’s conviction regarding thousands of asbestosrelated deaths was overturned in the Italian Supreme Court. Schmidheiny, who was a majority shareholder in Eternit Genova, a company that controlled four factories in Northern Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, was convicted in 2012 and sentenced to 18 years in prison for negligence in over 3,000 deaths due to asbestos exposure. However, the Italian Supreme Court nullified this ruling on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired in the charges filed. Although members of the Yale community have called upon the University throughout the legal proceedings to rescind the honorary degree it bestowed upon Schmidheiny nearly 20 years ago, the University has repeated it would not revoke the award. “It is a scandal that Yale has protected this
guy despite the pleas they have been receiving from so many parties both in the outside world and within the Yale community,” Barry Castleman, a witness for the prosecution in the case and author of “Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects,” wrote in an email. “Regardless of the arbitrary basis for the dismissal of the case, it is clear from the statements of the prosecutor and others that Schmidheiny is guilty of the acts charged and only evaded responsibility through the use of a legal technicality.” Castleman called upon Yale to submit the issue of the honorary degree to an independent expert faculty and alumni committee, tasked with fully reviewing and making recommendations to the Yale Corporation on the matter. Castleman joins a multitude of other voices calling for University action in the case of Schmidheiny, both on campus and across the Atlantic. Over 50 alumni have signed a petition urging the University revoke the degree. In addition, Concetta Palazzetti, the mayor of the Italian town Casale Monferrato, wrote an open letter, along with 34 other mayors of SEE SCHMIDHEINY PAGE 6
Away from campus, students take to Facebook to debate PAGE 5 UNIVERSITY
Authorities re-examine Jovin case BY ERICA PANDEY STAFF REPORTER
FERGUSON
SEE CS50 PAGE 6
Students petition Yale to rescind Cosby degree BY RACHEL SIEGEL STAFF REPORTER As allegations that comedian Bill Cosby serially sexually assaulted women proliferate, some inside and outside the Yale community are calling on the University to rescind Cosby’s honorary Yale degree. Inspired by an editorial posted on Inside Higher Ed on Nov. 25, Marissa Medansky ’15, a former opinion editor for the News, started an online petition calling on University President Peter Salovey to rescind Cosby’s honorary doctorate, which was awarded in 2003. On Sunday evening around 9 p.m., the petition had 198 signatories. Though many interviewed, including Medansky, acknowledge that rescinding of the degree would be purely symbolic, the petition’s backers spoke to a broader purpose: confronting Yale with an opportunity to demonstrate its
support for victims of sexual assault. “If Yale can’t do the right thing in this black-and-white instance, how can we have faith that the University will adjudicate more ambiguous cases of assault and harassment in goodwill?” Medansky said. Medansky added while it is unlikely that Cosby will ever stand trial, society has an obligation to take sex crimes seriously, even though the legal system is still behind. In an editorial published on the website Inside Higher Ed, Jonathan Beecher Field, an associate professor of English at Clemson University, called on 17 colleges and universities — including Yale — to rescind honorary degrees granted to Cosby. In an email to the News, Field said he is dismayed by the pervasiveness of rape culture on college campuses and the lack SEE PETITION PAGE 4