Yale Daily News - Week of Feb. 18, 2022

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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · VOL. CXLIV, NO. 13 · yaledailynews.com

SPECIAL INSERT

CLIMATE

YNHH

CELEBRATING BLACK COMMUNITIES

ACTIVISTS CALL OUT YALE'S POWER PLANTS

The Yale New Haven Health System announced an expansion of its hospital network, including the purchase of three hospitals.

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PAGE 3 UNIVERSITY

PAGE 7 SCITECH

CROSS CAMPUS

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY, 1988.

All heads of colleges agree to take responsibility for the replacement of condom machines in the residential college bathrooms after some were vandalized.

t m r s

YALE, THE DEFENDANT Updated filing

University tries

Update filing claims claims Yale is Yale is need-aware need-aware

University tries to to squash Amy squash Chua Chua suitsuit

BY JORDAN FITZGERALD STAFF REPORTER

BY PHILIP MOUSAVIZADEH STAFF REPORTER

An amended complaint in the 568 Presidents Group lawsuit directly accused Yale of practicing need-conscious admissions, thus violating antitrust law in its collaboration with other schools to determine financial aid formulas.

On Jan. 9, five alumni sued the 568 Presidents Group — 17 elite universities who collaborate in devising financial aid formulas — on the grounds that they breached section 568 of the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act, which states that such a collaboration can only exist if all members of the group do not consider financial need in their admissions process. In an earlier complaint, only nine members were alleged to consider student need in their admissions practices. The new complaint charges that all 17 schools, including Yale, factored family finances into the process through methods including the consideration of donor gifts and the examination of ability to pay during waitlist and transfer admissions.

“Defendants have ... made admissions decisions with regard to the financial circumstances of students and their families, thereby disfavoring students who need financial aid,” the claim reads. “All Defendants, in turn, have conspired to reduce the amount of financial aid they provide to admitted students.”

The News first reported this development on Feb. 8 after sources close to the case revealed that Yale would likely be named in the amended complaint.

The original Jan. 9 lawsuit was filed against 16 of the 568 Presidents Group’s members. Johns Hopkins University, which joined the Group in 2021, was added in the updated suit.

Previously, only Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Georgetown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Notre Dame University, the University of Pennsylvania and Van-

A legal battle at Yale Law School, involving two students who say their refusal to sign a statement condemning professor Amy Chua cost them professional opportunities, is now entering its fourth month — and the University wants it shut down.

Yale’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the Nov. 15 lawsuit on Monday in a 46-page motion arguing that the seven alleged claims of legal violations perpetrated by the University are all legally baseless. The students, Sierra Stubbs LAW ’23 and Gavin Jackson LAW ’22, accused three Law School administrators — Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken, Law School Associate Dean Ellen Cosgrove and Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Yaseen Eldik — of breach of contract, defamation and intentional interference with prospective business relationships, among other claims.

Stubbs and Jackson had initially filed their suit anonymously, but following a

SEE NEED-AWARE PAGE 4

COURTESY OF MOLLY WEINER

Halfway through its nine-year plan, Yale a status report oncomply sustainability goals. provisions.

The 83-page complaint alleges thatreleased the University fails to with state

Fossil fuel investments Complaint attacks fuelchallenged holdings

BY LUCY HODGMAN STAFF REPORTER Student activists in the Endowment Justice Coalition claimed in a complaint filed Wednesday that the University’s continued investments in the fossil fuel industry violate state law.

The EJC, a group of student activists focused on the ethical allocation of University endowment funds, acted alongside students at Princeton, Stanford, Vanderbilt and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who filed simultaneous complaints to the attorney generals of their schools’ respective states. Divestment activists at Harvard and Cornell have pursued the same approach, spurring both schools’ complete divestment from the fossil fuel industry within six months after the filing of the complaint.

COVID-19

Casesclimb, rise, U.U. pulls Cases scrapsisolation isolationtracker tracker

BY LUCY HODGMAN AND OLIVIA TUCKER STAFF REPORTERS

As undergraduate cases hit the highest daily count since the start of the spring semester, the isolation housing capacity tracker has been quietly removed from the University’s COVID-19 data dashboard.

A total of 84 undergraduates tested positive on Feb. 14, according to the Yale COVID-19 data dashboard. The figure represents a significant jump from previous daily case counts over the past week, ranging from 18 cases on Feb. 13 to 48 cases on Feb. 8. Meanwhile, the Connecticut positivity rate has fallen to 4.87 percent.

Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun and Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd addressed the spike in a Feb. 16 email to the student body, characterizing the numbers as “unprecedented” and urging students to take action to reduce transmission.

“This is a far higher number than we have ever seen, and we are bracing for the possibility of worse numbers ahead,” Chun and Boyd wrote.

The deans pointed to unsanctioned social gatherings as the primary source of the surge, citing conversations with infected students about their activities prior to testing positive. They characterized the gatherings as “dense, unmasked” events taking place on- and off-campus with food and drink. Official University activities — such as eating in the dining halls — account for “only a very small number” of cases, and

ZOE BERG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

The isolation housing capacity tracker was removed from the University’s COVID-19 data dashboard as a record number of undergraduates tested positive. winter recess. Boyd and Spangler did not respond to questions as to whether the University would alter its policies or change its alert level in response to the spike.

“This positivity rate is putting more and more students through the challenges of isolation,” Chun and Boyd wrote. “... [T]he teams at Yale Health, Dining, Hospitality, [Yale Conferences and Events] and Facilities, as well as the residential college staffs, are straining to take care of them.”

According to the email, 253 undergraduates are currently in isolation. Boyd in her email to the News stated that while isolation numbers are “constantly in flux,” there are currently 123 students isolating SEE SPIKE PAGE 5

YALE DAILY NEWS

ADMISSIONS

Tests optional for applicants next year

BY JORDAN FITZGERALD STAFF REPORTER

The deans pointed to unsanctioned social gatherings as the primary source of the surge, citing conversations with infected students about their activities prior to testing positive. They characterized the gatherings as “dense, unmasked” events taking place onand off-campus with food and drink.

Official University activities — such as eating in the dining halls — account for “only a very small number” of cases, and no known positives have been traced back to in-person classes, according to the email.

Cases still remain below the University’s highest single-day case count of 167 positives on Jan. 3.

The majority of those cases, however, were among Yale staff, faculty and graduate and professional students, as most undergraduates were away from New Haven during

SEE LAW SCHOOL PAGE 5

“It’s obvious that fossil fuel investments are immoral, but I think that if we’re able to successfully show that they’re not just immoral, but that they’re illegal, it changes the whole game,” EJC organizer Molly Weiner ’25 told the News. “This law has been in existence for a while, but now I think students have the confidence and have been put in touch with the resources to explore this legal avenue. I think it’s really exciting. It marks sort of a turning point in student activism.”

The EJC’s 83-page complaint alleges that by maintaining fossil fuel holdings, the Yale Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — fails to comply with the provision of the 2009 Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds stipulating that tax-exempt nonprofit entities, SEE CLIMATE PAGE 4

The Office of Undergraduate Admissions announced on Feb. 16 that it will not require standardized test scores from applicants during the 2022-23 admissions cycle.

The office attributed this policy to continued difficulties caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, making this the third year in which Yale will conduct a test-optional admissions cycle due to the pandemic. All of Yale’s Ivy League peers have suspended test requirements for the next round of applications. Harvard University and Cornell University have extended this policy through students enrolling in the fall of 2026 and the fall of 2024, respectively. Over 1,800 colleges in the United States will not require test scores for students planning to enroll during the fall of 2022, and the University of California system permanently did away with standardized testing in November.

“If public health conditions improve, Yale will decide on a long-term standardized testing policy in winter 2023,” Dean of Undergraduate

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Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan wrote in an email to the News. “This decision will be informed by the data and insights generated from the 2021, 2022, and 2023 admissions cycles.”

In Apr. 2021, the News reported that test-optional policies are one factor behind recent record-setting numbers of applicants. Particularly, the waived testing requirement is linked with a more racially-diverse applicant pool, as well as a pool that consists of more international applicants.

Yale’s middle 50 percent of test scores consist of a 720780 on the reading portion of the SAT, a 740-800 on the math portion of the SAT and a composite ACT score of 33-35.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the Department of Education, white students who graduated high school in 2019 earned an average score of 1114 on the SAT, Black students earned a 933, Hispanic students earned a 978 and Asian American students earned a 1223.

Bob Schaeffer, the executive director of FairTest, an orgaSEE TEST-OPTIONAL PAGE 5

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

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OPINION Reckoning with the reckoning N

ational news outlets presented 2020 as a year of expansive progress on the journey toward racial justice in America, a racial reckoning so to speak. George Floyd’s death — as well as Ahmaud Arbery’s and Breonna Taylor’s — started a nationwide crisis of conscience, as the country’s eyes were opened to the horrors of police and vigilante violence against Black Americans. The response was tremendous. People took to the streets by the millions, celebrities donated large sums to social justice organizations, major corporations announced new DEI initiatives and bookstores started stocking their shelves with anti-racist works.

The size and reach of 2020’s movement led many to compare it to the 1960s civil rights protests, the protests that helped produce the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Whether you were in favor of the movement or not, it seemed a foregone conclusion that significant social and institutional changes were bound to take place.

But, a year and a half removed from the height of that movement, not much has changed.

I voiced skepticism about the 2020 social justice efforts at the end of that summer, pointing out how nothing became of either of the two federal police reform bills that were proposed that summer and how support for Black Lives Matter, which had peaked that summer, fell below its pre-2020-movement level. These facts seemed an omen of the inaction to come. Still, in that moment I held out hope that at some point, something substantive would get done.

But that is clearly not the case.

Take, for instance, the financial promises top companies made in support of racial justice. A Washington Post report found that 90 percent of the nearly 50 billion that America’s top companies pledged to racial justice was “allocated as loans or investments they could stand to profit from, more than half in the form of mortgages.” Setting aside the dubious alignment of profit incentives and racial justice, the report also found that the companies’ investments would only make a small dent in racial wealth and homeownership gaps, gaps that those companies had a large role in creating.

But what we may not expect companies to do — take sweeping action to promote equality — we should expect the government to do. And yet, many recent legislative attempts at starting racial justice initiatives have failed in unsurprising, but still disappointing, fashion.

The Congressional hand-wringing and speech-giving has yielded little more than a few empty pedestals, a new federal holiday and an amusing photo of Democrats in kente cloth. One could attribute this lack of progress to gridlock and an obstructionist party. But there is something to be said for Democrats’ deprioritization of protecting

voting rights, an issue that Black activists had long been advocating for federal action on.

I don’t make a habit of quoting Sen. Mitch CALEB McConnell, but DUNSON he has a point when he says What We “Citizens are meant to believe Owe a return of Jim Crow is on the table, but [federal voting rights legislation] was only President Biden’s sixth priority.”

In recent months, much of the country has begun to sprint away from the concept of racial justice altogether. Critical Race Theory has become an imprecise catch-all for everything about racial progress that white people fear, and Republican-led state legislatures have used this new boogeyman to effectively ban any mention of contemporary racism in the classroom. On the legislative front, our country went from talking about how to remedy systemic racism to denying that it even exists, and the swiftness with which that change occurred is terrifying.

If you paid any attention in history class, you would know that these developments are unsurprising. Each move we make toward racial justice is met with a countermove that reestablishes racism in a different form. Legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw describes the phenomenon well, saying “...reform [will] inevitably reproduce retrenchment and backlash. That has been the history of progress around race in the United States: Modest reform creates tremendous backlash. And sometimes the backlash is more enduring than the reform.”

While institutional efforts to achieve racial justice have stagnated, there is room for all of us to take responsibility in allowing for that stagnation. At some point between George Floyd’s death and now, we stopped caring. The social justice slideshows flooded Instagram and then they disappeared. The Black Lives Matter donations rolled in, until they didn’t. The protests swelled in size and then dwindled in number. We moved on with our lives, and in doing so we conceded that we were okay with the status quo, that there were more pressing things for us to do than advocating for racial justice, that our work was done.

So it seems we will remain in this sad equilibrium until the next murder stirs us to action, and we will go through the motions of fighting for racial equity again, and there’s a good chance we will end up going nowhere.

CALEB DUNSON is a sophomore in Saybrook College. His column, titled ‘What We Owe’, runs on alternate Thursdays. Contact him at caleb.dunson@yale.edu .

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GUEST COLUMNIST MORGAN BAKER

Everyone may get COVID, but not everyone will be ok

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veryone may get COVID-19, but not everyone will be ok.

The newsletters in my inbox reassure me that we’re on our way out of the pandemic.

Apparently, we’re well on the way to COVID-19 being declared endemic, like strep, mono or the flu. The New York Times says Omicron isn’t as bad as Delta; Dean Chun reassures us that if we’re “young, healthy, vaccinated and boosted” our COVID-19 cases will be mild — only the elderly, the sick and the unvaccinated need worry.

These claims are misleading.

If keeping the most vulnerable members of our community safe isn’t incentive enough, consider some advice from a COVID-19 long hauler: You should be taking COVID-19 seriously to protect yourself.

If all 4,664 undergraduates were to contract COVID19, almost 500 of them would likely experience the long-term symptoms that come with long COVID-19. We’re talking about struggling to walk to class, light sensitivity that makes every classroom feel uninhabitable, fatigue that makes reading for more than fifteen minutes impossible and an uncountable number of other challenges with activities of daily living. If you get COVID19, there’s a small but significant possibility that you’ll come out on the other side qualifying for accessible transit. Hard to enjoy a frat party if just getting to High Street leaves you exhausted.

The media talks about long COVID, or post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 — PASC — either in the abstract or as an exceptionally severe illness that afflicts the unfortunate few. And while headlines pop up almost daily claiming that we’ve found the key to long COVID, none have translated into clinical treatment options that make it easier for long haulers to get through the day.

It’s been six months since my own COVID-19 infection.

I’m still sick, and I’ve learned firsthand that most doctors don’t know how to help long COVID patients. Before a postCOVID-19 specialist prescribed me beta-blockers, a cardiologist offered me physical therapy to get

me “back in shape” – nevermind the fact that my condition deteriorated severely only after I began exercising again, a common yet under-recognized symptom called post-exertional malaise.

I’m told I’m one of the lucky ones. My symptoms are mild enough for me to manage my own care, and because of my parents’ insurance I have access to doctors outside of Yale Health with more experience treating patients like me. Even so, this privilege didn’t save me from going the entire fall semester without enough oxygen in my brain. My healthcare providers didn’t think my persistent symptoms were anything worth investigating until I learned I had to advocate for myself.

Before I had doctors, I had support groups. Communities like Body Politic and organizations like Long COVID Physio have given me strategies and advice that my doctors didn’t, advice that has made it more possible for me to function. At Yale, the Chronic Illness Peer Support Network has offered me a crucial safety net.

All of us with long COVID-19 are indebted to people who have been living with post-viral syndromes like POTS and ME/CFS: those who have learned to live with chronic illness despite societal neglect and medical mismanagement and have been generous enough to share their accumulated expertise. After losing a week of my fall semester to a 20 minute jog, the chronic illness community is why I’m likely to finish my senior spring — even if I have to crawl my way across the platform at graduation.

We are in collective denial about the potentially life-altering effects of a COVID-19 infection. If we were more aware of the risks, it’s hard to imagine that we would be so cavalier in saying that “everyone will get COVID” as if it were a benign inevitability.

Long COVID brings to light something that has always been true: We are all only temporarily able-bodied. Ignoring the significance of long COVID and other post-viral syndromes allows us to continue entertaining fantasies of our own omnipotence and insulates us from the deep-

seated anxiety that one day we may no longer be able to work or care for ourselves — anxiety, not fear, because we all know how the world treats people with disabilities. When we say that COVID-19 is only a risk for the immunocompromised and elderly, we affirm the tacit cultural belief that the chronically ill, immunocompromised, elderly and disabled aren’t worth protecting. Ableism breeds stubborn hubris, but trust that if you get sick, the world will disregard you just as much as it does the rest of us.

COVID-19 isn’t going anywhere, nor are other viruses that cause similar post-viral syndromes. As a result, we have an ethical obligation to be more intentional about how we support people with disabilities — not only for the sake of hypothetical others, but for ourselves. Long COVID-19 offers us the chance to take steps toward dismantling the systems and beliefs that keep some of the most marginalized among us from living their lives to their fullest potential.

As a start, members of the Yale community need to understand that as much as campus life has to gain from looser COVID-19 restrictions, post-COVID-19, we have our lives as we know them to lose. The institution, of course, also has its obligations: Yale can ensure that everyone coming out of COVID-19 isolation receives counseling and follow-up on long COVID-19, recovery, pacing and accommodations available to them through Student Accessibility Services if needed. As a nation, we need to build our health and social services infrastructure to support those who become disabled in the process of “ending” the pandemic.

Going “back to normal” and “bringing college back” would certainly increase the scope of some folks’ individual freedoms.

But informed consent requires that we acknowledge the benefits and risks. Everyone may get COVID-19, but not everyone will be okay.

MORGAN BAKER is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College. Contact them at morgan.baker@yale.edu .

Running out of time “I

am afraid of the change.” I wrote in my journal only a few days ago. “I wish there was an alternative reality in which I didn’t feel the need to run or worry about the future.”

It is ironic, because only a couple of years ago, I yearned for change. I wanted a new beginning in a different country. I dreamt of new possibilities to shape my future. I longed to meet new people. Only a year ago, in fact, I remember how much I was afraid of stagnation. Being satisfied, fulfilled with one’s life seemed impossible. How could someone be content with everything they had? How come they did not try to achieve more?

“I AM AFRAID OF THE CHANGE.” I WROTE IN MY JOURNAL ONLY A FEW DAYS AGO. “I WISH THERE WAS AN ALTERNATIVE REALITY IN WHICH I DIDN’T FEEL THE NEED TO RUN OR WORRY ABOUT THE FUTURE.”

Now it feels like the excitement for new beginnings has expired as fear has started to dominate. The fear of uncertainty. The fear SUDE failure. The YENILMEZ of fear of disappointment.

Piecing Perhaps the double lines Together on my rapid test, indicating a positive result, exacerbate all of these feelings. Time feels frozen as I watch people walking on Broadway from my window. In the meantime, pending assignments pile up; my inbox overflows with flagged emails, reminding me of the reality that I will soon return. Hope to return.

But this disorienting sense of unease with change is not just a product of these five days spent in isolation. The pandemic in general certainly has a big impact on it as circumstances seem to be constantly changing depending on public health guidelines.

The abrupt ending of last semester is one such fresh memory.

After tasting a little bit of normalcy, I hugged all my friends so tightly last December, almost sure that I wouldn’t see them again for months. No wonder I add “hopefully” to everything I say now.

It is not only the pandemic though. Time flows differently on this campus regardless of COVID19. People start or break relationships only on a weekend. Majors change after attending only one “life-changing” class. Only one opportunity email turns friends

into rivals. In this environment, it is natural to feel unsatisfied. It is natural to desire change. It is natural to feel as if we are running out of time.

It feels wrong to write “we are running out of time” when most of us are not even at legal drinking age. This feeling did not exist when we were only sixteen. But that’s the point. When life consists of home, school and friend hangouts, it is easy to think that we have it all figured out. In fact, that sense of security in my standing was the reason why I craved change so much. But as the transitions from all those steady states exponentially proliferate, there is not much room left for such a sense of security. Is the goal to live in those constantly evolving transitions or to reach a certain destination? I don’t know. Perhaps that is the paradox. Perhaps that is the unanswerable question.

There is no right or wrong to feeling this way; no actionable item or solution. Contrary to my other articles, this is not a critique of the University’s policies or world politics.

It is merely an acknowledgement, merely a validation for how some of us might be feeling recently. I don’t know if I will ever stop feeling as if I am running out of time. I don’t know if I will ever have a healthy relationship with change itself. But perhaps that’s the excitement, the beauty of it. Perhaps that’s why I yearn to return to my reality. Perhaps that’s why I would rather run out of time than to remain frozen in it.

SUDE YENILMEZ is a sophomore in Berkeley College. Her column, ‘Piecing Together,’ runs every other Thursday. Contact her at sude.yenilmez@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 3

“Marriage is miserable unless you find the right person that is your soulmate and that takes a lot of looking.” MARVIN GAYE AMERICAN SINGER AND SONGWRITER

Students push for Persons with Disabilities Cultural Center

Yale student disability activists and leaders continue a years-long effort to create a new cultural center for students with disabilities.

BY MICHAEL NDUBISI STAFF REPORTER Advocates for people with disabilities are working alongside University administrators with the aim of creating a cultural center for students living with disabilities. If established, a disability cultural house would become Yale’s fifth cultural center and the first in 29 years.

The push for the creation of a new cultural center began in the fall of 2019 with Disability Empowerment for Yale, which is an undergraduate advocacy and affinity organization for students with disabilities. DEFY’s then-president, Paige Lawrence ’21, and a collection of board members including Joaquín Lara Midkiff ’24, worked with the Yale College Council in drafting a proposal for adoption by

the YCC Senate. DEFY worked with the YCC, the then-Resource Office on Disability (now Student Accessibility Services) and the Yale College Dean’s Office to get their proposal for the Persons with Disabilities Cultural Center off the ground.

“We knew it would be a long and difficult journey,” said Lara Midkif. “One whose end likely none of us would see or enjoy.”

By spring 2020, DEFY met with Yale College Dean Marvin Chun and continued to meet with University administrators through the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021, securing wins including an increase in Student Accessibility Services staffing, the creation of a YCC accessibility policy team, the establishment of a disability peer liaison program and the institutionalization of a Disability Peer Mentor Program.

For Lara Midkiff, these victories were the first indicators that the formation of a Persons with Disabilities Cultural Center was possible.

“These victories were game changing not only because they will go on to help and support generations of students with disabilities,’’ Lara Midkiff said, “but because they were the first indication that the University considered the disability community a community not only worth recognizing but supporting and celebrating.”

Still, a Persons with Disabilities Cultural Center has not yet been established on campus, and many in the University community are still advocating for its creation.

Chisom Ofomata ’25, the current president of DEFY, said the creation of a cultural center is integral to achieving a sense of belonging for people with disabilities.

ZOE BERG/PHOTO EDITOR

“With a cultural center that provides a community and advocacy base, students with disabilities will have a greater voice on campus and a place they can call home,” Ofomata said.

In addition to creating a safe space for people with disabilities, Ofomata said, the new cultural center will aid in the recognition of disability as a sociocultural identity with its distinctive history, shared experience and culture.

“The University’s failure to acknowledge the cultural aspect of disability needs to be remedied,” Ofomata said. “In addition to creating a more inclusive campus, recognizing disability culture with the establishment of the PDCC will help students with disabilities feel empowered and facilitate necessary discussions with the student body.”

According to Disability Peer Mentor Program Coordinator

Josephine Steuer Ingall ’24, “it is only a matter of time” before students with disabilities get a cultural house.

Ingall said there is a rapidly growing population of students registered with Student Accessibility Services, and therefore a cultural center is long-needed.

A disability cultural center could resemble the LGBTQ Student Co-op, Ingall proposed, because like the queer community and other marginalized groups, people with disabilities need acknowledgment, support and visibility to counter centuries of discrimination and dehumanization, she said.

“I think the framing of disability as an identity rather than a medical condition is very similar in many ways to the transformation of how we’ve come to understand queerness; it’s not an aberration, it’s a natural part of human experience and variation,” Ingall said.

With the support of the YCC, DEFY continues to push for a cultural center alongside Middle Eastern and North African students who also hope to have a cultural house of their own.

Lara Midkiff, the Community Policy Director for the YCC, said that in addition to the establishment of the two new cultural centers, the YCC is working to add a MENA category to admissions applications and University data collection. Lara Midkiff added that the Asian American Cultural Center has recently opened a MENA room for community building thanks to advocacy.

“While these critical efforts continue, I have hope. …I see no evidence that the fight for belonging will slow, and so future successes are no longer a matter of possibility but one of time,” Lara Midkiff said.

Brown University, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Syracuse all have cultural centers for students with disabilities.

Contact MICHAEL NDUBISI at michael.ndubisi@yale.edu

Despite calls for innovation, Yale sticks with natural gas

BY CHARLOTTE HUGHES STAFF REPORTER Yale currently plans to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, but scientists and activists say the University cannot wait to address two of its largest sources of pollution — the Central Power Plant and the Sterling Power Plant — which together accounted for 98.5 percent of the University’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2020.

According to Chair of the US Collegiate Energy Consortium Sena Sugiono ’25, Yale produced 198,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas in 2020, representing a 43 percent decrease in its emissions since 2005. Publicly-available data from the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that the University’s two power plants were responsible for 195,000 of those 198,000 metric tons of emissions. But experts and activists said that Yale has the resources and power to act now and develop renewable energy solutions.

“Given Yale’s status as a premier research institution, I really do think Yale has the responsibility to lead by example with its own transition towards decarbonization and environmental justice,” Noah Lerner SOM ’22 wrote in an email to the News.

In its 2021 Sustainability Progress Report, Yale announced its plans to use “emerging technologies” like deep earth geothermal heat, biomass gasification and green hydrogen processes to reduce its actual carbon emissions to zero by 2050.

However, these projects are slated to begin in the mid-2030s.

“Using language like mid2030s and ‘emerging technologies’ is pretty telling on how confident Yale and other industry folks are in being able to transition existing fossil fuel infrastructure into clean infrastructure,” Noah Mitchell-Ward ENV ’22 wrote in an email to the News.

To reach carbon zero emissions, Mitchell-Ward explained, Yale is

looking to use technologies that have not yet been developed.

The Central Power Plant and Sterling Power Plant form the backbone of Yale’s power grid.

Since these combined plants generate heat and power, they are “relatively” energy-efficient, according to Lerner, but still burn natural gas.

Isabel Harrison ENV ’22 explained that “getting off natural gas is one of the biggest challenges that many institutions are facing on their climate journeys.”

The Central and Sterling Power Plants are two of the three “large facilities” emitting greenhouse gas in New Haven, according to the EPA. The other facility is the New Haven Harbor Station. While the Station emitted 14,297 metric tons of greenhouse gas in 2020, the Central and Sterling Power Plants emitted a combined 194,958 metric tons of greenhouse gas.

Since both power plants contribute to air pollution in New Haven, Lerner believes that the University will need to transition to more environmentally friendly sources of energy to fulfill its climate commitments.

In 2019, New Haven produced 1,422,668 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. According to Pamela Torola ’18, an economics doctoral student at Yale who helped New Haven conduct a greenhouse gas inventory, it is difficult to accurately determine how much of these emissions were produced by the University as a whole. Though EPA data shows that Yale contributed to 13.7 percent of New Haven’s overall greenhouse gas emissions through its two power plants, it also contributes to the city’s emissions through other avenues such as bus and commuter transport.

Mitchell-Ward and Lerner described the technicalities of how Yale could make the transition to renewable energy.

First, they said Yale could retrofit, or add new technology to, the existing power plants. The

power plants could run on “some new blend of fuel that might come from biomass gasification or ‘renewable natural gas’ captured from landfills,” Mitchell-Ward said. He acknowledged that this retrofitting process might be expensive — but necessary — to make Yale’s energy grid fully carbon-zero.

Yale’s power plants currently burn natural gas, but many other universities have heat and power facilities powered by renewable fuels. Middlebury College, Green Mountain College, Northern Michigan University and Eastern Illinois University use wood as a source of renewable fuel. The University of California, Davis uses landfill gas and The State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and the College of Wooster all use digester gas.

Second, Yale could decommission the existing power plants and build new facilities to generate and store solar energy. Mitchell-Ward believes this should be Yale’s “primary strategy.”

Lerner estimated that it would take around one to two years and cost between $25 million and $35 million to build and develop such facilities. Though at present, it might be cheaper for Yale to run its existing power plants, Lerner added that in the long run, a new solar project would be cheaper than “running existing dirty infrastructure.”

Other universities have embarked on solar energy projects. In 2020, the University of Pennsylvania signed a Power Purchase Agreement to create a solar power project that will provide about 75 percent of the campus’ electricity demand.

Mitchell-Ward added that Yale could make a “more immediate climate positive impact” by following in the footsteps of the University of Pennsylvania and signing a wind or solar agreement to bring more renewable energy to Yale at a utility-scale level, in

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Community calls for emissions cuts as Yale runs two of three large polluters in New Haven. addition to Yale’s existing small on-campus solar installations.

Allegheny College, American University, Bates College, Bowdoin College, Colby College, Colgate University, Colorado College, Dickinson College, Middlebury College and the University of San Francisco have all achieved carbon neutrality as of 2020. Yale plans to have net zero emissions by 2035 and to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050.

“It’s like there’s a factory that’s emitting a lot of smoke,” said Chris Schweitzer, activist and director of the New Haven Leon Sister City Project. “And they find out a lot of families are dying and getting sick from that smoke. And the factory comes back and says, ‘Oh, we got a solution. We’ll cut that smoke by five percent each year over the

next 20 years.’ The families are like, ‘wait a minute, we’re getting sick and dying now.’”

University President Peter Salovey acknowledged the need for energy innovation in a June 2021 email addressed to members of the Yale community.

“Yale intends to be at the forefront of universities in utilizing power plant turbines fueled by non-fossil fuels,” Salovey wrote.

“Similarly, Yale will be an early adopter of innovations that advance the drive to electrify thermal loads, such as the next generation of geothermal energy systems.”

The Central Power Plant was built in 1918 and the Sterling Power Plant was built in 1923 on the Yale School of Medicine campus.

Contact CHARLOTTE HUGHES at charlotte.hughes@yale.edu .

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

"If I get married, I want to be very married." AUDREY HEPBURN BRITISH ACTRESS

In complaint, EJC says Yale investments in fossil fuels are illegal CLIMATE FROM PAGE 1 including universities, must invest with charitable interests in mind.

The act is in effect in every state except Pennsylvania.

The EJC complaint, which was prepared with the assistance of attorneys from the Climate Defense Project, requests that Connecticut Attorney General William Tong open an investigation into Yale’s fossil fuel investments. Should the Office of the Attorney General find that the University violates the UPMIFA upon further investigation, Tong could direct Yale to sell its holdings in the fossil fuel industry, according to Climate Defense Project cofounder Alex Marquardt.

Both Harvard and Cornell divested from fossil fuel industries before their respective state attorney generals opened an investigation.

“We’ll be happy with either outcome,” said EJC organizer Avery Long ’24. “If schools divest before investigations can be filed, then that’s wonderful — schools are divesting, that’s amazing. If an investigation happens, and then an attorney general comes out and says fossil fuel investments are illegal, then that’s huge.”

In the past decade, according to a press release from the EJC announcing the filing of the complaint, 1,485 educational institutions have divested from the fossil fuel industry, representing an estimated $39.2 trillion of assets under management. In 2020, a Yale College Council referendum reported that 71 percent of student respondents agreed that Yale should divest from all fossil fuel industries immediately.

Among the current co-signatories of the complaint are linguist Noam Chomsky, former SEC commissioner Bevis Longstreth and environmentalist William McKibben. The EJC has encouraged Yale students, alumni and employees to now sign on as well.

Although Yale’s continued investment in the fossil fuel industry has long been a subject of public scrutiny, the exact percentage of Yale’s endowment invested directly into fossil fuels remains unclear. The Yale Investments Office estimates that $800 million of the University’s endowment was invested in fossil fuels as of April 2021.

“I don’t think there is a problem in the world today more serious than climate change,” University President Peter Salovey told the News in April 2021. “It is clear that human action contributed to it and human action is going to address it.”

When asked for comment, both University spokesperson Karen Peart and a spokesperson from the Yale Investments Office directed the News to previous steps Yale has taken in response to call for divestment. These steps include setting new carbon reduction targets, establishing new principles to guide fossil fuel investment and funding the Planetary Solutions Project to engage in climate change research.

Recently, the University added ExxonMobil and Chevron to a list of companies ineligible for

Yale investment, accusing the companies of violating the third ethical investment principle by “undermin[ing] sensible government regulation and industry self-regulation addressing climate change.” Although the list of companies ineligible for Yale investment did not include either ExxonMobil or Chevron as of Dec. 20, 2021, they were added without comment from the University before Jan. 31.

The next step in the EJC’s fight, organizers told the News, is encouraging students who agree with the EJC’s stance on divestment to sign on to the complaint. Since it went public this morning, Weiner said, hundreds of people have already added their names.

Katie Schlick ’22, co-executive chair of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, was one of the students who added their names to the complaint today, voicing her support for Tong opening an investigation into the University’s fossil fuel holdings.

“One of the main things that I felt today was just pride in seeing how much research and care and thought was put into the filing,” Schlick said. “It's just very cool to see that a group of students has been working so diligently, coming at this from every single angle. They sat on the football field. They’ve sat in meetings with the leadership of this institution. And now they’re also bringing it to the courtroom, in a way, and that's just really exciting.”

The EJC complaint includes research that the organization compiled about the University’s continued ties to the fossil fuel industry. According to the press release, four current members of the Yale Corporation — Charles Goodyear ’80, Joshua L. Steiner ’87, William Earl Kennard ’81 and Paul Joskow GRD ’72 — maintain or have recently maintained financial ties to the fossil fuel industry.

The complaint also points to the University’s most recent SEC form 13F, filed on November 22, 2021, as evidence of $263 million of Yale’s endowment invested in the EQT corporation. The largest producer of fracked gas in the United States, the complaint alleges that the EQT corporation has a history of environmental malpractice and lobbied for the expansion of liquified natural gas pipeline infrastructure.

One of the aims of the complaint, organizers told the News, is to make public more of the information about the University’s fossil fuel investment that has previously flown under the radar.

“The complaint is just a petition to ask the Attorney General to investigate Yale’s holding in fossil fuels,” EJC organizer Melissa Wang ’23 told the News.

“We have to make this move because Yale has been so untransparent with their timeline, their processes and the fact that they have classifications on good versus bad fossil fuel companies, which we don’t really think is a fair classification to make.”

For members of the EJC, Wang said, all companies involved in fossil fuels committed some

LUKAS FLIPPO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Yale’s Endowment Justice Coalition filed a complaint alleging University fossil fuel investments violate state law. form of “grave social injury.” The University’s divestment from fossil fuels has long been central to the EJC’s ideological mission.

In November 2019, members of both the Endowment Justice Coalition and Divest Harvard led a joint effort to storm the field of the Yale Bowl during the annual Yale-Harvard game, demanding that both universities divest from fossil fuels. The EJC has continued its advocacy through direct action since then, staging an occupation of Cross Campus in October 2020 and a rally in Beinecke Plaza in November 2021.

“EJC has done a lot of direct action that has gotten a lot of attention, but once you take a legal avenue — you do almost 80 pages of sustained research, you have an attorney helping you write, it’s formal and in fancy rooms — people think of it in a more legitimate way,” Weiner said. “There is, and I think this unfortunate, a level of supposed validity that is not given when someone storms a football field.

We’re kind of acting like the grownups here.”

The precedent set by Harvard, Weiner said, put pressure on Yale divestment activists to take similar action towards divestment.

At the beginning of this semester, organizers from Divest Harvard put the EJC in contact with the Climate Defense Project to consult on filing a complaint against Yale.

A nonprofit legal organization formed by Harvard Law graduates in 2016, the Climate Defense Project has previously provided pro bono criminal defense of climate protestors, and more recently began assisting University students with filing similar complaints against their schools.

In addition to advising Divest Harvard on their complaint last year, the Climate Defense Project has aided Princeton, Stanford, MIT and Vanderbilt in their respective complaints and helped to facilitate the simultaneous filing.

“It’s more powerful, I think, for each individual school to be part of a group,” Marquardt told the News. “That way they can sort of coordinate the media strategy and bounce ideas off of each other. It’s a strategic thing, but

we always leave it up to the individual campaigns to decide how they want to do that exactly.”

Since joining forces with the other schools, Weiner said the organizers have met in group Zoom meetings to discuss plans for their joint filing.

EJC activist Moses Goren ’23 emphasized that the EJC had always tried to locate its activism as part of a broader movement towards divestment, an issue which he said touched all wealthy and influential institutions.

All five of the universities filing complaints argue that their school’s financial ties to the fossil fuel industry violate the UPMIFA, which Marquardt said “codifies the aspects of fiduciary duty” and is state law in every state but Pennsylvania.

“The basic idea is that in exchange for not paying taxes, they’re required to promote the public interest,” Marquardt told the News. “The duty to further their own charitable purposes is unique to public charities. For universities, that means furthering their educational mission, and any other purposes that are laid out in their charters and governing documents.”

Marquardt noted that the filing of the complaint did not immediately set in motion a specific set of processes from the Office of the Attorney General, and that “you may hear from them or you may not.”

Marquardt added, however, that the Climate Defense Project planned to follow up with officials in each state after the filing of the complaints.

Goren said that the filing of the complaint created an opportunity for the University not only to divest their holdings in fossil fuel industries, but for an investigation by the office of the Attorney General to provide clarity on why Yale has not divested before.

Charles Skorina, an expert in university endowments, questioned the efficacy that the complaint will have in encouraging Yale to divest.

“I think that this suit filing this morning, it may draw attention to their activism,” Skorina said. “But as a practical tool, it's not effective. It may be for publicity.”

Skorina explained that when university endowments partner with investment managers, such as private equity programs and hedge funds, they must sign contracts that ensure the partnership lasts for a specified period of time. These contracts are legally binding and prevent endowment managers from retracting their funds in the short-term. Immediate divestment from fossil fuels would lead to massive losses resulting from violating previously established contracts, Skorina said.

While schools like Harvard have announced divestment from fossil fuels, Skorina said, it will take “years” for them to fully divest.

Skorina added that while student organizers could still protest Yale’s investments, he would be surprised if anything came of the decision to file a complaint, adding that he “didn’t follow the logic.”

But EJC organizers were undaunted by Skorina’s concerns.

“I think [Yale knows] that these investments are indefensible on moral grounds and that they’re probably indefensible on legal grounds as well,” Goren ’23 told the News. “I would be very scared if I were them.”

Weiner pointed to the extensive research that the EJC has conducted into the University’s ties to the fossil fuel industry, as well as to the aid students received from attorneys in the Climate Defense Project, as evidence of the complaint’s legitimacy.

Support for the EJC’s effort extends beyond the student body, Weiner added, pointing to the environmentalists and Yale faculty members that have already signed onto the complaint.

“It’s not just students,” Weiner said. “It’s dozens of faculty, prominent alumni, elected officials, New Haven alders. They can’t be like, ‘Oh, you know, it’s just kids causing trouble.’ We have so much entrenched institutional support that it’s really hard to write off.”

Yale announced its guiding principles for investment in the fossil fuel industry in April 2021.

Alex Ye contributed reporting.

Contact LUCY HODGMAN at lucy.hodgman@yale.edu .

In new filing, plaintiffs accuse Yale of need-aware admissions NEED-AWARE FROM PAGE 1 derbilt University had faced needaware accusations.

Brown University, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, Emory University, Rice University and Yale were originally named in the suit solely for being members of the group, but must now reckon with the same charges of their 568 Group peers.

"Yale’s financial aid policy is 100% compliant with all applicable laws," University Spokesperson Karen Peart wrote in a statement to the News.

Penn State Law School in University Park professor John Lopatka said that on the surface, it seems like charging all the schools with practicing need-conscious admissions does not make a difference because every member of the 568 Presidents Group could be implicated if one school violated the exemption.

However, Lopatka explained that accusing all the schools of considering need can prevent the defendants from pushing for a separate view of the law.

“A school that did follow a need-blind policy might argue for a different interpretation, claiming that Congress did not intend to withhold the exemption from any school that followed a need-blind admissions policy even if it collaborated with schools that did not,” Lopatka wrote in an email. “That interpretation is not untenable.”

Lopatka speculated that the plaintiffs might have always intended to sue all 17 institutions for examining need but did not have the evidence to do so.

The updated lawsuit also adds information about the universities’ endowments, citing recent endowment growth as proof that the universities in question have the ability to provide more

robust financial aid awards. The lawsuit particularly points to Yale’s 1096 percent endowment growth between 1994 and 2021, when the University’s endowment reached $42.3 billion.

“These facts, the amended complaint contends, illustrate that the defendants easily had, and continue to have, the financial means to provide more generous financial aid awards to their students—in particular, for low- and middle-income families struggling to afford the cost of a university education and to achieve success for their children—if the defendants were not colluding,” a news release from the plaintiffs’ legal team read.

The original suit was filed in the Northern District of Illinois federal court.

YALE NEWS

Contact JORDAN FITZGERALD at jordan.fitzgerald@yale.edu .

The News first reported this development on Feb. 8 after sources close to the case revealed that Yale would likely be named in the amended complaint.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

FROM THE FRONT

"Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution." MAE WEST AMERICAN STAGE AND FILM ACTRESS

Law School suit enters fourth month, Yale lawyers want it shut down LAW SCHOOL FROM PAGE 1 Dec. 6 University motion to name the plaintiffs, a Connecticut judge recently ruled that the students could not proceed anonymously.

The University’s recent Feb. 14 motion to dismiss the lawsuit in its entirety addresses each individual claim and argues that the plaintiffs misunderstand the law and University regulations and fail to demonstrate specific damages.

“Plaintiffs have not soundly alleged any of their seven causes of action,” the motion reads. “Therefore, and for the reasons stated below, the [second amended complaint] should be dismissed in its entirety.”

Jackson and Stubbs alleged that they were “blackball[ed]” from job opportunities after they refused to endorse a statement in the ongoing investigation against law professor Amy Chua. They further alleged that the administrators violated the University handbook by retaliating against them for their decision, interfered with their business and professional opportunities and defamed them within the Yale Law School community.

University spokesperson Karen Peart declined to comment further, but has told the News in the past that the lawsuit is “legally and factually baseless.”

“We are confident that our clients have pleaded claims which should proceed to trial and look

forward to litigating the motion,” lawyer for the plaintiffs John Balestriere LAW ’98 wrote in an email to the News.

The University's motion first addresses the central allegation that the administrators are guilty of a breach of contract by retaliating against the students. The motion argued that the plaintiffs’ claim fails to meet the necessary criteria for a breach of contract.

The University's legal team pointed to the fact that the contract at hand — the Yale University Policy Against Discrimination and Harassment — was not in effect when the events took place. They also noted that the plaintiffs never reported a concern or filed a complaint pursuant to this specific policy. Therefore, the motion argues, the administrators cannot be in violation of this contract, regardless of whether any retaliation occurred.

Stubbs and Jackson also had alleged that the retaliation interfered with the students’ relationship with a professor — and that this had a negative impact on their academic and professional careers by jeopardizing “prospective relationship[s] with Yale’s professors and judges’ chambers around the country.”

The University’s response argued that the sweeping nature of this claim invalidates itself: in order to demonstrate interference, the students would need to point to a spe-

cific third party. While the plaintiffs do reference a specific law professor — known to be Paul Kahn, although he is not named in the suit — arguing that the administrators defamed the students directly to Kahn, the University’s motion argued that the underlying claim is “baseless” and that the plaintiffs did not face any retaliation from Kahn.

The retaliation, according to the plaintiffs, primarily materialized in Stubbs’ inability to serve as a Coker Fellow, a prestigious fellowship at Yale Law School. However, the claim notes that the students were never denied the opportunity; Stubbs did, in fact, receive a Coker Fellowship.

“Plaintiffs have not adequately alleged they suffered actual loss,” the University's motion reads.

“They don’t allege the Professor [Kahn] denied either of them a Coker fellowship, or that they even applied to the Professor for a Coker fellowship… They don’t allege that, because they ‘lost’ the fellowships, they made less money this year than they currently make in other jobs. In short, they plead no factually-based theory of actual loss.”

David Lat LAW ’99, the author of “Original Jurisdiction” — a newsletter about law and the legal profession — explained that a motion to dismiss argues that even if everything the plaintiffs say in their complaint is true, the plaintiffs still do

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Lawyers for the University filed a motion to dismiss the case of retaliation brought by two students. not have a case. Here, the University’s lawyers are asserting that the behavior alleged in the plaintiffs’ complaint breaks no laws.

However, Lat explained that there might be a secondary reason behind the decision to seek to dismiss the case altogether.

“The goal of filing a motion to dismiss is to get a case tossed before the discovery process, since discovery could unearth damaging or embarrassing information about the defendants,” Lat said.

“To avoid discovery, you need to

get the entire case dismissed. So it makes sense that Yale is trying to get the whole case dismissed.”

He also explained that if the University’s motion is dismissed and the case proceeds, the parties will exchange information as part of discovery and use that in further litigation.

The original lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the State of Connecticut.

Contact PHILIP MOUSAVIZADEH at philip.mousavizadeh@yale.edu .

Yale to stay test-optional through 2022-23 admissions cycle TEST-OPTIONAL FROM PAGE 1

In January, the College Board moved to administer the SAT online in the United States beginning in 2024.

UNSPLASH

nization that opposes the use of standardized tests in admissions, said that the test optional policy is a “win-win” for applicants and universities.

“Yale will experience more applicants, better academically qualified applicants, and more diversity of all sorts in its applicant pool,” Schaeffer wrote in an email. “For teenagers considering Yale, the policy extension will be reassurance that they will be evaluated as ‘more than a score.’"

According to the announcement, applicants who have taken standardized tests “should consider” submitting their scores, even if they do not seem to meet Yale’s median numbers.

But Quinlan assured the News during past test-optional admissions cycles that applicants would not be penalized for not submitting their scores; rather, other aspects of their application will be given more weight in considering students’ fitness to attend Yale.

Although the office claims that ACT and SAT scores are “a significant predictor” of a student’s academic success during their undergraduate years, scores form just

one aspect of the admissions process. Students without scores will be evaluated based on other factors such as high school transcripts, letters of recommendation and essays.

The announcement follows recent developments in the world of standardized testing.

In January, the College Board moved to administer the SAT online beginning in 2023 for international students and in 2024 in the United States.

Priscilla Rodriguez, a vice president at the College Board, said in a press release that “the digital SAT will be easier to take, easier to give, and more relevant.”

And on Jan. 24, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to affirmative action in a case that makes significant use of standardized test scores. The case alleges that Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminate against Asian American and white applicants by accepting students of other races with lower standardized test scores.

The SAT debuted in 1926.

Contact JORDAN FITZGERALD at jordan.fitzgerald@yale.edu .

University pulls isolation capacity tracker amid rising cases SPIKE FROM PAGE 1 in place, 70 isolating in Arnold or McClellan Halls and 59 isolating in off-campus housing. An additional 23 students chose to travel home to isolate, Boyd added.

On Feb. 9, Boyd wrote to the student body announcing the implementation of an isolate-in-place policy, triggered by demand for isolation housing “reaching capacity.” The plan dictated that moving forward, many students in single bedrooms would be assigned to isolate in their rooms if they tested positive, rather than moving to official University isolation housing.

Still, Yale’s isolation housing capacity tracker had remained stagnant at 76 percent capacity since at least Jan. 28. The tracker was removed from the website entirely as of Feb. 16.

The isolation-in-place plan, University COVID-19 Coordinator Stephanie Spangler explained, was developed to isolate students effectively should a surge like this occur.

The plan requires that some isolation housing capacity be kept available for students who do not live in double bedrooms, altering the accuracy of isolation housing capacity as it appeared on the dashboard.

“Once we began isolating in place, we determined that the dashboard information about iso-

lation was not as informative as it might be,” Spangler told the News.

“We are working on new isolation information for the dashboard.”

In her email to the News, Boyd added that there is no longer a “clear denominator” for isolation housing capacity given the shift in policy.

Capacity largely hinges on whether COVID-positive students live in single or double bedrooms, she wrote — about half of all on-campus students live in singles.

Additionally, determining the capacity of Arnold and McClellan Halls is “more complex than it might seem,” Boyd wrote. There are 71 total bedrooms between the two buildings.

According to Boyd, while most can be double-occupied if necessary, “[i]n practice, it’s not possible to fill every single bed.” She pointed to several factors, including the need to clean rooms between residents, attempts to avoid housing asymptomatic COVID-positive students with symptomatic ones and the reservation of select rooms for students with accessibility concerns.

After the disappearance of the isolation housing capacity tracker from the COVID-19 dashboard on Wednesday, Howard Forman, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, public health management and economics, emphasized the importance of making “a reasonable effort to have accurate data.”

“From the beginning, I think they've been trying to be as transparent and as correct as possible,” Forman said in an interview. “When I identified a problem with [the tracker] early on, I spoke to the person who was charged with that particular data element, and they acknowledged the particular day when it was wrong. You’re dealing with human beings, and you're dealing with data, that while it's consequential, it's not the type of data that if you get it wrong, the plane crashes.”

Though the University’s dashboard noted 89 student cases on Feb. 14, Chun and Boyd in their email referenced 94 positives on the same day.

Spangler explained in an email to the News that disparities between publicly-reported caseloads and actual counts may be attributed to the fact that new positive cases are reported more frequently than the dashboard is updated. Spangler also noted that the University’s COVID19 resulting team sometimes receives reports of positive tests which are performed outside of Yale’s testing program and therefore not represented on the dashboard.

Boyd reiterated Spangler’s sentiment in an email to the News, stating that the 94 positives mentioned in Chun’s email included students who tested positive outside the Yale system

ISAAC YU/PRODUCTION & DESIGN EDITOR

A total of 84 undergraduates tested positive on Feb. 14.

— typically using a rapid antigen test — and called the University’s Campus COVID-19 Resource Line to report the result.

Housing COVID-positive students has posed challenges for the University in recent weeks, given the notable spike in undergraduate cases. On Feb. 10, students reported being asked to isolate in place in double rooms with their COVID-negative roommates,

contradicting official University policy. This weekend, Boyd reprimanded students in isolation housing for hosting disruptive parties.

The Yale vaccine clinic is located at 310 Winchester Ave. Contact LUCY HODGMAN at lucy.hodgman@yale.edu and OLIVIA TUCKER at olivia.tucker@yale.edu .

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Yale researchers investigate immune response in severe COVID-19 cases said David A. Hafler, chairman of the neurology department, professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine and senior author of the study.

Single-cell multi-omics allows scientists to analyze the function of individual

BY CHLOE NIELD CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine are investigating how immune responses differ in patients with severe COVID-19 side effects.

In an interdisciplinary undertaking, over 40 researchers from five laboratories at the Yale School of Medicine collaborated to investigate how immune responses among patients with severe COVID-19 that progressively worsens differ from those of patients who improve.

The researchers studied the blood cells of these patients and discovered that, in progressive patients, there is a dyssynchrony in the immune response between the two major parts of the immune system, as well as an increase in type I interferon signatures, proteins that activate an immune response. To do this, these researchers turned to the novel technology of multi-omics. “[Multi-omics] is the new way of doing science that, to me, changes the paradigm,”

SARAH EISENBERG/CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATOR

cells through gene expression-based profiling. Tomokazu S. Sumida, the paper’s co-first author and assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine, explained that “determining this gene expression is very central for determining cellular function” because genes code for proteins, and proteins are what carry out functions.

Before this technology, researchers had to decide what specific proteins to target prior to the study. Single cell multi-omics allows for a non-hypothesis oriented approach which gives an “unbiased view of what’s there,” according to Hafler.

In this study, researchers analyzed the blood cells of patients with COVID-

19 pneumonia using a cross sectional method. They took cells at two different points of the virus’ development in every patient and found that in progressive patients, “there is a dyssynchrony between the two arms of the immune system,” explained Avraham Unterman, the study’s other co-first author and former member of Yale’s Kaminski Lab. These two arms are the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system. The innate system is the first defense mechanism that fights viral infections. It is non-specific and fast acting. The adaptive is a specialized immune response designed to only target the specific virus on hand. It is therefore a more powerful defense.

In a synchronous immune system, the innate component presents the antigens to the adaptive component. The specific immune cells that are involved in this presentation function are called monocytes, which present the antigens to adaptive immune cells called T cells.

The researchers found that, in patients with severe, progressive COVID-19, the monocytes do not effectively present antigens to T cells, but the adaptive immune system is still very active.

Charles Dela Cruz, associate professor and director of the Center for Pulmonary Infection Research and Treatment at Yale, explained that this activity increases the inflammatory response of the immune system, which can have damaging effects to the rest of the body’s tissues. This finding relates to current COVID-19 treatment in severe cases, which is to give patients steroids that lessen the adaptive immune system’s response.

In patients with progressive COVID19, there are more type I interferon signatures in both immune system cell types, which are released by infected cells. Sumida explained that it is widely agreed upon that type I interferons may be involved in facilitating antigen presentation, but that the mechanisms of its function are complex because it is highly context dependent. Furthermore, in the case of severe patients, the level of interferon signatures is higher than it should be during the resolution of the disease, which contributes to a damaging immune response.

Dela Cruz explained that this interaction between the monocytes and T cells could be targeted, which could aid in the treatment of severe COVID-19. He also explained that, through the use of multiomic technology, researchers know the specific subsets of immune cells that are represented in progessive patients, so they know exactly what to target.

According to Sumida, if scientists are able to tweak the innate or adaptive immune system, they might be able to “rewire what is happening in severe patients.”

Sumida discussed the possibility of injecting patients with interferons in the early stages of the disease to assist their immune response. However, this would not be a viable treatment for patients who have developed severe COVID-19 because injecting the interferons at that later stage would exaggerate the immune response, contributing to the damaging bystander effects.

“Science doesn’t work in a straight line,” Hafler said when explaining the broader implications of their findings. Both Hafler and Sumida emphasized the surprising similarity between immune responses in severe COVID-19 and those in patients with cancer. According to Hafler, this overlap is a “beautiful example of how this horrible pandemic is teaching us about, for example, cancer, in unexpected ways.”

On Feb. 13, the CDC reported 34,034 new COVID-19 cases in the US. Contact CHLOE NIELD at chloe.nield@yale.edu .

Yale students advise state officials on engaging marginalized communities in climate change resilience tactics

YALE DAILY NEWS

BY YASH ROY STAFF REPORTER Public participation in Connecticut’s response to the climate crisis is not accessible to members of marginalized communities across the state, according to a new report from a team of researchers that includes two Yale students.

In the report, titled “Community-Centered Climate Resilience in Connecticut,” Trinidad Kechkian ENV ’22 and Nicolás Esguerra GRD ’22 detailed possible methods to increase communication between Connecticut’s government and marginalized communities.

The report provided two main takeaways related to public participation in crafting climate solutions: most people viewed the process as inaccessible or lacking in meaningful involvement. Moreover, the report illustrated the impacts of as well as concerns related to climate change that many members of marginalized communities have.

The report was submitted to the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, as well as the Governor’s Council on Climate Change. The gathered information is being added into a larger report on climate resilience.

“I became involved because I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to apply what I had learned in college to a real world project before graduation,” Kechkian said.

“Our team felt a great responsibility to do right by the underrepresented communities

of Connecticut because we understood that if they were not included in resilience plans, extreme weather events due to climate change could be life-and-death situations.

So we thought it was a unique opportunity to bring decision makers and the decision making process closer to communities.”

Over the course of the semester, the team of Yale and UVM Law School students first conducted a literature review to gain a better understanding of climate change’s effects on the state, with an emphasis on how it affects marginalized communities. The group then shifted toward developing focus groups, in which the students would hear directly from these communities across the state.

In response to the challenge of fostering trust between the researchers and members of the marginalized communities, the team made sure to be “very aware” of their position and tried to form more than “genuine extractive relationships,” Kechkian said. With the help of Lee Cruz, the Community Outreach Director at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, the students spoke with 30 residents from Hartford, Bridgeport, Willimantic and New Haven — with 43.3 percent of participants from the Elm City. The 30 individuals came from organizations like the Young Women’s Christian Association, Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services and the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental justice.

“I was brought in specifically because of my background in community organizing

and community engagement,” said Cruz.

“We talked at great length with the students about different approaches to different communities, and then provided a list of nonprofit 501c3 religious and civic organizations, with the names of specific people that they should reach out to [and] followed up by them reaching out to those organizations and just giving them a heads up.”

The researchers divided the individuals who participated in the study into groups no larger than six and conducted Zoom focus groups, where the students posed questions related to climate change as well as public participation in the process of crafting solutions to climate change.

Based upon the information that the students collected from the focus group, which Kechkian said they published largely without editing to maintain the voice of the participants, the report recommends increasing public outreach through social media, advertisements in papers like the New Haven Independent, on radio stations and at places where large community groups come together. While the report included a summation of the different responses, the authors also included an appendix that included the verbatim responses of all 30 participants.

On specific issues related to climate change, Kechkian said participants in the study spoke about concerns related to energy security, food security, flooding in areas around Hartford and New Haven, clean air and the response to natural calamities like major storms.

“Furthermore, this research confirms that climate impacts are disproportionately affecting BIPOC and low-income communities across Connecticut,” the researchers wrote in the report. “Repeatedly, participants who identified as being part of these communities reported higher instances of power outages, food insecurity, and lack of access to basic resources needed to remain safe during extreme climate events.”

The larger report — which is being compiled by the GC3 and the Equity and Environmental Justice Working Group — will also be consolidated into a planning guide, which community members can reference.

“In the aftermath of the report, we definitely internalized the public participation aspects,” said Alanis Allen ’20, a research analyst in the Office of Climate Planning at DEEP. “We hope to incorporate these especially as we’re moving forward…I think that’s one way we’re kind of adjusting based on the report is that some people are affected in overburdened and underfunded communities that are affected by climate change, and the impacts of climate change, as well as other environmental issues.”

The Governor’s Council on Climate Change was formed in September of 2019 following Lamont’s executive order no. 3 which re-established and expanded the membership and responsibilities of the Governor’s Council on Climate Change.

Contact YASH ROY at yash.roy@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 7

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”

JANE AUSTEN ENGLISH NOVELIST

An exhibition against time: Artspace features four artists in new exhibition

BY OLIVIA CHARIS CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Artspace New Haven’s newest exhibition “Dyschronics,” features four distinct artists whose works all have one thing in common: They don’t want to conform to chronology.

The idea of Dyschronics was formally proposed by Spanish writer Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, who suggested that marginalized groups could operate within a “fourth time,” antagonistic to the Western “chronos” and “kairos” conceptualizations of linear and present time. Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin said that prior to Navarro’s proposal, migratory time was generally viewed as a “mal-adjudgment.”

In contrast, Carolina Caycedo, Emily Jacir, Baseera Khan and Tsedaye Makonnen — the four artists represented in this exhibition — embody Navarro’s notion of time as a form of resistance against displacement, injustice and exclusionary Western ideologies.

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are first met with the “Reading Room, on purpose” — a work by Baseera Khan. Khan’s work focuses heavily on the idea of rest, inviting onlookers to sit down, take their time and operate within the space in their own way.

This first piece, a literal reading room, is furnished with bean bag chairs situated about round tables.

Each table contains pens and reading materials, including those titled “The Darker Nations” which visitors are encouraged to sit with and annotate.

The second portion of Khan’s showcase, featuring the work “Karaoke Spiritual Center of Love” and the “Psychedelic Prayer Rugs” series from 2017, also invites viewers to interact with the exhibit by sitting in it. The cushions in this second section are constructed from multi-colored fabrics situated on top of a LED light display. As the light’s colors change,

Khan alludes to the idea that each “bodily experience” in this space is incomparable to the next. The idea that one’s time and experiences are not one’s own, but rather necessary for a larger productive mechanism, is a product of Western culture that Kahn seeks to erase in this work, McLaughlin said.

The exhibition’s second artist, Carolina Caycedo, approaches the removal of Western time mainly through her critiques of “extractivist” efforts. Her work, “Serpent River Book,” which is accompanied by a video titled “To Stop Being a Threat and To Become a Promise,” documents her time spent with Indigenous people in Colombia, Brazil and Mexico. Caycedo highlights how the Indigenous people utilize the river systems in a way that is contrary to capitalism-driven forced extractions.

The video portion of Caycedo’s showcase emphasizes these divergent ways of interacting with the land through a split screen effect. One side contains a straight-forward, non-linear documentation, while the other presents a distorted, optically illusive sequence of images. Caycedo said that the two screens represent ways “of understanding and relating to nature.”

“These two views of the world have clashed, and continue to clash through processes of colonization, slavery, damming and resistance, spirituality, solidarity,” Caycedo said.

Emily Jacir, who currently works and lives in Palestine, also utilizes both physical and digital media in her work “letter to a friend.” In this 43 minute documentary made over the span of 10 years, Jacir explores the concept of what McLaughlin called “anticipatory time” as she recalls writing to a friend in anticipation of a crime occurring at her family’s generational home in Palestine. This home, situated between occupied territory and a displace-

Artspace New Haven exhibits “Dyschronics,” featuring the work of four artists. ment camp, witnessed much of the region’s violence. In a way, McLaughlin said, this documentary is a video “diary,” recounting scenes as Jacir remembers them, rather than in a linear fashion.

In an unfortunate materialization of the artist’s fears, her family home was destroyed by fires shortly after the documentary was released. Jacir had been using her home as an art center for local Palestinian artists, and now all proceeds made through the film’s viewing go toward rebuilding it for this same purpose. In addition to the film, Jacir exhibits photographs that depict scenes from within the documentary itself.

These more digestible snapshots of her film highlight gentrification and her own experiences with living in hostile territory.

As viewers round the final corner of the gallery, the work of Ethiopian artist Tseydaye Makonnen

is displayed. Makonnen’s section of the exhibit, entitled “Astral Sea I, III, and IV,” contains four videos and three textile works. McLaughlin said Makonnen’s works “typically focus on forced migrations,” including the Atlantic slave trade and the current migration crisis of North and East Africans to Europe.

Yet another artist utilizing multiple mediums, Makonnen’s videos show how she has used the textiles she makes in performative protests. She has performed with her textiles in several locations, notably in London in front of Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament, signaling once again the rejection of colonialism.

The textiles themsewlves are meant to honor “Black ancestors” in their reference to another one of Makonnen’s works in which she creates what her studio manager Aisha White called “obelisk” like public light towers resembling

COURTESY OF LAUREL MCLAUGHLIN

Ethiopian grave markers. These markers or “steles” tell “multi-register stories” about those who have passed, according to McLaughlin. Makonnen uses this same concept but modernizes it, with her light towers referencing the lives of Black women who have been killed, including Breonna Taylor. In “the negative space left over from these towers,” she creates the designs visible on her textiles.

As viewers walk through the gallery of Makonnen’s work, an audio recording can be heard, calling out the names of Black women who have lost their lives.

Throughout the entire gallery, a conglomeration of sounds from each section of the exhibition can be heard, gesturing once more to this asynchronous, fourth dimension of time.

Contact OLIVIA CHARIS at olivia.charis@yale.edu

YNHH purchases three CT hospitals, transitions them to nonprofits

BY SOPHIE WANG AND BRIAN ZHANG STAFF REPORTERS On Feb. 10, Yale New Haven Health announced that it will expand its network through the purchase of three hospitals, whose ownership will switch from for-profit to nonprofit to increase health care accessibility.

The three hospitals are Waterbury Hospital, with 357 beds, Manchester Memorial Hospital, with 249 beds and Rockville General Hospital in Vernon, with 102 beds. In addition to these 708 certified beds, YNHH will also be admitting the thousands of employees currently working at the hospitals. Per the release, the purchase is part of a larger agreement between Yale New Haven Health System and Prospect Medical Holdings Incorporation for YNHHS to “acquire two Connecticut health systems from Prospect,” scheduled to be finalized by the end of this year.

According to YNHH Chief Clinical Officer Thomas Balcezak, Prospect is a private equity firm that has expressed interest in selling some of the hospitals it owned, and after engaging with investment banker Morgan Stanley, the firm entertained bids at the end of 2020. There were several institutions that had a sealed bid for the three hospitals, but bankers and Prospect reviewers ultimately chose YNHHS to continue with an exclusive negotiation, he said.

“Having th[ese] area[s] be part of our network is advantageous to our physicians, [who can] use those facilities,” said Robert McLean, medical director for the Northeast Medical Group and former president of the American College of Physicians. “I think it will really be a good thing to help better … serve the healthcare needs of the Waterbury area.

The decision to buy the hospitals was driven by a desire to expand

urgent and acute care facilities, as well as to bridge current gaps in healthcare accessibility. YNHH Chief Executive Officer Marna Borgstrom puts “innovation” at the forefront of engineering a successful post-pandemic world, echoing McLean’s sentiments that forprofit companies may cater more to their “shareholders” than to people receiving healthcare, putting “innovation” at the forefront of engineering a successful post-pandemic world. She emphasized that hospitals must start “thinking creatively” when it comes to ensuring local access to healthcare.

Balcezak noted that several factors led YNHH to choose these three hospitals. According to him, YNHH believes that “healthcare is local,” meaning they would like for organizations based in Connecticut to serve Connecticut residents. Furthermore, he cited several instances of YNHH working with “distressed hospitals’’ to help them grow their clinical and operational portfolio through protecting jobs and increasing clinical services.

“We did that with the hospital [of] Saint Raphael, which was struggling more than 10 years ago. [It] had about six days of cash on hand, had an underfunded pension, [and] was having all kinds of difficulties,” Balcezak said. “Since then, it’s been an incredible success … [We’ve] preserved jobs, we built programs, and we brought excellent medical care to the communities. We also did it at Lawrence [and] Memorial and Westerly hospitals … and then most recently … at Milford … We think we can do the same thing for these three hospitals which are struggling in some cases.”

Balcezak said that as a consequence of inflation, hospitals all around the world are facing increased equipment, labor and pharmaceuti-

cal costs with little change in revenue.

This introduces the need to streamline programs and clinical care, he said — a process he said needs to be consistent among “communities” of various backgrounds.

Nonetheless, he emphasized the progress that YNHH hospitals have made throughout the enduring challenges of the pandemic, including lower mortality rates overall in comparison to other hospitals in the U.S. and similar mortality rates across groups of different races and ethnicities.

“That’s because of the way we’ve integrated our clinical programs,” Balcezak said. “Because of the way we have our emergency and [intensive care unit] physicians talking about treatment protocol and ensuring that it’s the same.”

McLean noted that health systems, even those that are nonprofit, should prioritize having an adequate market share and doing effective marketing. YNHH adding other communities and health systems to their network, he said, could help bring in more patients and create a larger referral center.

According to McLean, Yale needs to ensure they are attractive enough so that doctors and communities want to receive specialty care from there. McLean noted that YNHH already has “tremendous people.”

However, he said that because Yale seems to be “kind of in the middle” of New York and Massachusetts, it needs to establish its own presence as a referral, academic health center.

“There’s clearly an interest in making sure that the local network and catchment area is as large as it needs to be,” McLean said. “I don’t know that Yale is specifically thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re losing too many patients to Danbury, to Hartford,’ but I think in a large, big picture, any academic health center is going to look at expanding in [a] different way.”

YALE DAILY NEWS

YNHH announced an expansion of its hospital network as part of a larger agreement with the Prospect Medical Holdings Incorporation.

However, the plan to purchase these hospitals has been met with some backlash from the community, with some members criticizing YNHH for creating a monopoly.

Others are concerned that rising healthcare prices and hesitation from insurance companies to keep the same providers — as well as the “consolidation” of health care services — can exacerbate existing barriers for women, children and financially disadvantaged patients who must travel long distances to receive healthcare.

McLean acknowledged people’s concerns that “as these hospital systems get larger and larger, they have more monopoly or more power in the marketplace, and care gets more expensive.” Yet, he believes that more scrutiny should be directed toward for-profit insurance companies.

“I think there are reasons for consolidation that make a lot of busi-

ness sense to the hospital … so I think there’s much greater concern that the insurance companies and our health insurance companies, which are quite a strong presence in our state, are able to make zillions of dollars, time after time, year after year,” McLean said. “But there are concerns that are valid when we’re talking about large entities … My bigger concern is that there’s not enough regulatory scrutiny on the insurance companies.”

The three hospitals will be joining YNHH’s current network of five hospitals across seven campuses, which are Bridgeport Hospital, Greenwich Hospital, Lawrence and Memorial Hospital, Yale New Haven Hospital in New London and Westerly Hospital in Rhode Island.

Contact SOPHIE WANG at sophie.wang@yale.edu and BRIAN ZHANG at brian.zhang@yale.edu .

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

BULLETIN BOARD CROSSWORD Pride Parade

ACROSS 1. Play parts 5. Utterly horrified 11. Up to 14. Buona ____ (Italian greeting) 15. My love, in Madrid 16. Partner of Lennon 17. Explanation that doesn't hold water 19. Race part 20. Honolulu hellos 21. English : summer :: French : ___ 22. Singer Fitzgerald 23. Violinist's aid 24. One living on the range 26. Huge puddle 28. Greenish blues 29. Boeing bomber housed in the National Air and Space Museum 33. Insects seen in clouds 35. One counted in the gym 36. Multiply 39. One may make one red in the face 40. Curling match 43. Cold War competition 46. Author Scott who wrote Presumed Innocent 48. Workplace safety org.

49. Inhabitants of the largest Indonesian island 52. Make no excuses 56. It can be difficult to make them meet 57. Skater Midori 58. Period of infancy 59. Game cube?

60. What Pride Month celebrates...or a directional hint to the theme of this puzzle 62. Rev 63. People often grow out of them 64. Surrounded, old-style 65. MMM 66. Walked with purpose 67. Command to Fido

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DOWN 1. To the same extent 2. Yo-Yo Ma's instrument 3. The Chicks, et. al.

4. Individual whose name is often exclaimed indignantly 5. Vegetarian frozen food brand 6. Supermodel Carangi 7. More healthy 8. Good feeling 9. "Very well then."

10. Cycle beginning 11. Turnpike 12. Not stretchy 13. Boston hub 18. Persian Gulf capital 22. Pulitzer winner Jennifer 24. It may make one quake 25. - (abbr.)

27. C.I.A. enemy 29. Hosp. locations

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Greek equivalent of Cupid Private IG conversations Time periods Fate Japanese version of the Indian game that became chess in Europe Nog ingredients Orville or Wilbur Marshy plant In court "On the contrary."

Perfect, for a pitcher Prefix with -venous Waspish Jerk, to a Brit Vinyl Proof letters

JEM BURCH is a first-year in Jonathan Edwards College.

Contact him at jem.burch@yale.edu .

SOPHIE HENRY is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College.

Contact her at sophie.henry@yale.edu .

ANGELIQUE DE ROUEN is a sophomore in Grace Hopper College.

Contact her at angelique.derouen@yale.edu .

GIOVANNA TRUONG is a senior in Pauli Murray College. Contact her at giovanna.truong@yale.edu .

EMILY CAI is a sophomore in Pauli Murray College.

Contact her at emily.cai@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 9

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE GERMAN PHILOSOPHER

Franklin HoC Charles Bailyn to step down

BY LUCY HODGMAN STAFF REPORTER In a Thursday email to the Benjamin Franklin College community, inaugural Head of College Charles Bailyn announced that he will step down from his role as head at the end of the 2022-23 academic year.

Bailyn, who is a professor of astronomy and physics, was set to finish his five-year term as head at the end of the semester, but will stay on for an additional year without formal review for reappointment. Although Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun told the News that this was a “long-standing practice,” students have questioned the timing of Bailyn’s announcement of his imminent departure.

“It was difficult to know what to do — on the one hand I didn’t want to step away right now, just as we were coming out of covid and in the process of restarting traditions that had only barely begun before the pandemic hit,” Bailyn wrote in an email to the News. “On the other hand, I was a bit daunted by the prospect of a second five year term — being a HoC takes a lot of energy! So in the end it seemed like the best solution was to stay on for one additional year, rather than to try to complete a full second term.”

Chun and University President Peter Salovey wrote in an email to Benjamin Franklin students on Jan. 13 that they had begun the process of conducting Bailyn’s reappointment review. The email laid out the review committee that advised the process, which included three Benjamin Franklin College Fellows and four students.

Chun and Salovey’s email invited students to contribute feedback on Bailyn’s leadership to the review committee via an anonymous online form.

Bailyn announced that he would step down on Feb. 10. It is unclear how far the reappointment process had progressed at the time of his resignation announcement.

Reflecting on his time as Head of College, Bailyn pointed especially to his pride in developing new Benjamin Franklin traditions, including the college’s Founders Ball, Drink of the Month club and an annual Lord of the

Rings movie marathon traditionally held in the Head of College House. “[The movie marathon] was the last event we had in the Head of College House, three days before Yale shut down in March 2020, and I keep looking around the empty living room reliving that event,” Bailyn told the News. “In the coming week we’re going to start up events in the House again, and I’m really looking forward to that.”

But student reactions to Bailyn’s departure were mixed. The News spoke to five Benjamin Franklin students, three of whom criticized Bailyn’s leadership.

Some students, such as Hana Galijasevic ’22, told the News of their positive experiences with Bailyn . Galijasevic said that she often came to Bailyn to seek advice throughout her time at Yale.

“I think Head Bailyn was the perfect HOC fit for me personally — he’s passionate about unironically being a nerd and the conversations one has with him that tend to fit that energy are always insightful and cheerful or motivating,” Galijasevic said. “He welcomed me as a lost and scared international student by appealing to my interests and background — which he appeared eager to learn about.”

But other students said that Bailyn appeared disengaged from his position, and did not do enough to support the students under his purview.

Dannie Daley ’23 told the News that she did not remember the last time she spoke to Bailyn, and that her primary association with him was the emails he sent to the college.

“Even though I have been heavily involved in the HoC office (I was a college aide, buttery worker and manager, and a housing committee member) I can count on one hand the number of conversations and interactions I have had with Head Charles,” said Bianca Beck ’24.

“Despite being the person meant to foster involvement in the Franklin community, he is, in my opinion, notably uninvolved.”

For one student who requested anonymity because they work

within the Head of College Office, Bailyn’s perceived disengagement from Benjamin Franklin extended to his treatment of conflicts within the college.

One conflict occurred when careless conduct in shared bathrooms resulted in students exposing themselves to their floormates on multiple occasions. The student felt disappointed by Head Bailyn’s response to the situation.

“I quickly discovered that I couldn’t count on Head Bailyn when it came to serious matters,” one student said. “I have a lengthy history with encountering sexual harassment and assault and after a situation that occurred within the college, I decided to go to Head Bailyn. I was met with laughter and inept leadership. I don’t think I can wholly describe the devastation I felt after being laughed at while divulging a vulnerable and triggering experience to a position of authority.”

The student wrote that they had hoped to share this experience with the reappointment committee, but the announcement of Bailyn’s resignation, and one-year extension, came before they had the chance to.

Another student, who was also affected by the same situation, described a similar interaction with Bailyn upon raising the issue to his office. An email reviewed by the News shows that when Bailyn raised the issue to students, it was in a vague message in the final paragraph of his weekly message to the Benjamin Franklin community.

“I guess they simply decided that listening to student feedback is not a ‘longstanding practice,’” the student wrote.

Bailyn emphasized to the News that he had never and would never make light of sexual assault, and that any related complaints would be “handled with great care and seriousness,” and appropriate confidentiality.

Daley was alarmed by Bailyn’s decision to announce his resignation only after the reappointment process had begun. By resigning, Daley wrote that Bailyn received a

YALE NEWS

Bailyn announced on Feb. 10 that he would serve an extra year as Head of Benjamin Franklin College before stepping down at the end of the 2022-23 school year. “grace year of transition,” an option that she did not know was a possibility while following the process.

Bailyn declined to comment on whether the committee’s timeline affected his decision, but noted that he was “not privy to student [feedback]” that was sent to the committee.

Chun, however, told the News that the University only conducted formal reviews for full-term reappointments, not short-term extensions.

“As one current example for this long-standing practice, Professor Mark Saltzman, Head of Jonathan Edwards College, is generously serving an additional year now beyond his five-year term,” Chun wrote. “I am grateful to Professor Bailyn for devoting an extra year to Benjamin Franklin College. “ Multiple students told the News that Bailyn’s resignation came as a surprise due to the fact that his reappointment process seemed to already be underway.

“I was quite surprised when I saw the news,” Nina Huang ’23 said. “I don’t think I recall him expressing any similar sentiments about stepping down. Especially considering that I got emails about the review committee and about reappointing Head Bailyn for a second term a few weeks earlier, I thought that it implied that he would still be Head

of College. I was quite caught off guard by that email.”

Huang emphasized, however, that she was happy for Bailyn in his decision. While Huang acknowledged that others in Benjamin Franklin “had very different impressions” of Bailyn, she said that he had always been accessible and helpful to her during her time in the college.

As Benjamin Franklin begins the search for a new head of college, Bailyn emphasized administrative skill and the ability to “relate to and support the students” as qualities that are crucial to the role.

When he steps down at the end of next year, Bailyn will return to full-time teaching and research.

“It’s been quite a while since I’ve been focused on teaching and research — before I was at Franklin I served for five years as Dean of Faculty at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.” Bailyn wrote. “I love teaching, and I’m excited to spend more time in the classroom.

And the Universe — and research regarding it — seems to have gone on without me, and I’m looking forward to catching up.”

Bailyn was appointed as head of Benjamin Franklin College in 2016.

Contact LUCY HODGMAN at lucy.hodgman@yale.edu .

Intramural sports remove gender quota

BY TIGERLILY HOPSON STAFF REPORTER After months of advocacy, a longstanding gender quota that aimed to increase female participation in Yale’s intramural sports has been removed to improve inclusivity for transgender and non-binary students.

The IM gender quota, instituted in 1978 with the goal of boosting female participation, required a specific number of women to play in every intramural game. But students said that the gender categories and requirements left out transgender and non-binary students. Since the gender quota meant that players had to keep track of the number of women and men on any given team, students were often categorized by gender.

“But what if I’m neither?” a Branford student — who was granted anonymity due to concerns for personal safety due to their family not knowing their gender identity — first asked when they tried to sign up for IMs. Greeted with a spreadsheet separated into two categories — male and female — the student, who does not identify as either, said they did not feel comfortable signing up in either of the categories listed, and so decided not to participate. Now, with the removal of gender requirements, Google Forms and spreadsheets used for signing up will not ask participants to sign up within a specific gender identity.

Discussions that led to the new policy began in September, when a student submitted an anonymous query to the Branford College Council stating that the gender categories used for IM participation felt “isolating” for transgender and non-binary students.

After receiving this comment, IM Event Manager Josie Schmidt, Head IM Secretary Grayson Phillips ’24, Branford Title IX coordinators and

NOAH CIRISOLI/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Intramural sports will remove gender requirements for all gender teams in hopes of increasing inclusivity for transgender and non-binary students.

IM secretaries from several residential colleges convened to reconsider the gender requirement policy.

“It was becoming increasingly clear that current policies, both in their wording and, more pressingly, in their application, were leading to a sense of exclusion or apprehension around intramural participation, which is the diametric opposite of the culture we are striving to foster,” Phillips wrote to the News.

After months of discussion starting early last semester and spearheaded by Schmidt, IM secretaries and Title IX coordinators met after the fall IM season ended. Before the winter IM season began, they collectively agreed that a shift in the gender quota policy was “necessary,” Phillips said.

But, according to Maria Trumpler, senior lecturer of women’s, gender and sexuality studies and the founding director of Yale’s Office of LGBTQ Resources, discussions stemming from the September complaint were not the begin-

ning of this conversation. Since the start of her work in 2005 to increase equality and belonging for people of all genders at Yale, she said that IMs have been a point of contention, and there have been ongoing discussions on how to make them more inclusive. With IMs being student-run, decentralized and with frequent position turnovers, Trumpler said real change has been hard to coordinate.

“I think it’s huge,” Trumpler told the News in reference to the removal of gender requirements.

“It’s one of the last places … in undergraduate culture or practice that there’s pressure to identify as male or female … and not another gender, and so to take that away is huge, and to give everybody access to the benefits of intramural sports.”

Four of the students who spoke to the News also expressed that gender quotas were not effective even for their primary goal: to welcome women onto the teams.

Before the recent policy change, there was a maximum and minimum number of women and men who could play on each team. For example, for some large sports, there could not be more than seven players who identify as either male or female, and no fewer than two who signed up as the other gender. According to the Brandford IM secretaries, often teams had trouble finding the number of women necessary to play, and not wanting to forfeit, pressure could be put on women to join an IM game.

James Larson ’22, who was a photo editor for the News and has been a Branford IM secretary since 2017, posted in the IM secretary GroupMe about how IM secretaries would sometimes “guilt trip” women to participate so their team did not have to forfeit.

“This isn’t fun for either party, as the IM secs obviously don’t like being annoying but want to do their job, and puts the women in an unfair position where they feel like they have to choose between doing what’s best for them on a particular night (e.g., doing homework, going to another extracurricular, taking a personal day, etc.) and letting down the team,” Larson wrote in the GroupMe post. “The removal of gender requirements takes the pressure off of both sides.”

Anika Seth ’25, a staff reporter at the News and a Branford Title IX coordinator, noted that on top of being isolating for transgender and non-binary students, gender requirements can be isolating towards cis gender female students, too.

“Many times these cis female athletes will be tokenized on the field, only there because they have to fill a quota to allow the team not to forfeit, but then never passed the ball,” they said.

But ending the gender quota also brings up larger concerns about participation of women in IMs. While three students men-

tioned the concern that without the quota, IMs could become dominated by cis gender men, according to Seth, this is due to larger cultural issues that need to be addressed, and the gender requirements were not helping to improve these issues.

Mary Callanan ’23, a Saybrook IM secretary, said that despite the end of the gender requirements, her focus is still on fielding women and trying to get them to come to games. Callanan was an active proponent of the end of the gender requirements, and believes the change is key to a more inclusionary space, and one where “we don’t have to misgender our athletes.” She added that she believes the push for women to get involved in IMs should continue.

Beyond the end of gender requirements, those who spoke to the News discussed alternate policy changes that should be considered, such as centralizing the sign-up system, providing diversity and inclusion training for IM secretaries and putting policies in place to make sure colleges are not regularly fielding all-male teams.

“Simply abolishing the quota is by no means enough to spark inclusive engagement in sports because of how cis male dominated they are,” Seth said.

Max Velasco ’25, Branford IM secretary, said that ultimately, the goal of intramurals is to be an inclusive space for students to have fun, and where everyone, no matter their gender identity, can participate and compete. A place, he said, where “everyone feels welcome to come play.”

The full IM schedule for the winter season is available on the Yale Intramurals website.

Contact TIGERLILY HOPSON at tigerlily.hopson@yale.edu .

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS W GOLF YALE CLINCHES NINTH, LEADS IVIES In their opening tournament of the spring season, the Bulldogs traveled south for the Columbia Classic. Over three rounds, the Blue and White finished with a cumulative score of 925, or 61 over par.

M HOCKEY Dartmouth 7 Princeton 3

W BASKETBALL Cornell 68 Brown 61

W TENNIS Columbia 5 Penn 2

WRESTLING Penn 20 Princeton 13

W HOCKEY CLUTCHING CLOSERS The Yale women’s hockey team will hit the road for their last two games of the regular season against Quinnipiac and Princeton. The Bulldogs have already clinched home ice advantage in the playoffs.

W SQUASH Dartmouth 8 Brown 1

“I get the biggest kick when my players come back and introduce their wives to me, or their kids.”

JOHN STUPER BASEBALL HEAD COACH

Penn, Princeton visit New Haven for clash of top Ivy teams

BY WILLIAM MCCORMACK STAFF REPORTER A trio of men’s basketball teams have separated themselves above the rest of the Ivy League this season, and all three play in New Haven this weekend.

Atop that tight, three-team contingent is Yale (14–9, 8–1 Ivy), which hosts second-place Penn (11–12, 8–2) and thirdplace Princeton (17–5, 7–2) Friday and Saturday at the John J. Lee Amphitheater.

Models created by Luke Benz ’19, a former president of the Yale Undergraduate Sports Analytics Group who continues to analyze and publish Ivy League men’s basketball playoff odds, make it clear that all three squads have practically already secured spots in Ivy Madness — the league’s postseason basketball tournament, whose winner receives an automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament. According to his model, which runs 5,000 simulations of the rest of the regular season, Yale and Penn each currently have a 99.9 percent chance to make Ivy Madness. Princeton has a 98.6 percent chance. But Yale’s games this weekend might carry major implications for tournament seeding and the league’s regular-season championship.

“A weekend sweep would mean the Ivy regular season title, and along with it the top seed at Ivy Madness, would be firmly Yale’s to lose down the home stretch of the season,” Benz said. “Any result other than a weekend sweep and we’re looking at [a] messier picture with the title race likely going undecided into the final weekend.”

The back-to-back, the conference’s last until Ivy Madness next month, occurs as the end of the regular season is fast approaching.

Yale and Princeton each play three more games after this weekend, while Penn, which has not had any league games postponed due to COVID-19, faces just two more teams before the top half of the Ancient Eight travels to Boston for Ivy Madness on Mar. 12 and 13.

According to projections Benz shared with the News, a Yale

win over Penn on Friday would increase the Blue and White’s chances of finishing first in the Ancient Eight to over 70 percent from his model’s current estimate of 57.8 percent. A Bulldog win over Princeton Saturday, not fixed to any outcome in the YalePenn game, would increase that first-seed percentage chance above 80.

Penn presents the Elis’ first challenge of the weekend, giving Yale an opportunity to avenge its only loss to an Ivy League opponent this season. Penn beat Yale, 76–68, when the two teams played in Philadelphia last month.

“If Yale is to split the pair, a win against Penn is a little more important, given Yale already beat Princeton and lost to the Quakers,” Benz added.

During that January meeting at the Palestra, Penn outplayed Yale in the first half and led by a dozen points at halftime. Looking back on the lone Ivy loss, forward EJ Jarvis ’23 said he thought Yale “came out flat” in the first half, digging themselves into a hole that the Bulldogs could not recover from after the break.

“Even though they beat us, we’re still #1 and Penn is #2,” Jarvis said. “So if I’m on Penn’s team, I’m coming into JLA looking to make a statement. With the top three spots being so close in the rankings, this game is definitely going to be intense. And if we want to win, we have to be ready to play the moment the ball is tipped.”

The Bulldogs, Quakers and Tigers all enter the weekend with momentum. Penn has won five consecutive games, while Princeton is coming off an 85–40 takedown of Dartmouth. Following last weekend’s 25-point victory at Columbia, Yale’s win streak stands at six. That stretch includes its 80–74 win at Princeton on Jan. 29, when the Bulldogs started with a dominant first half before losing distance from the Tigers in the final minutes.

Penn guard Jordan Dingle — whose 20.1 points per game now surpasses Yale guard Azar Swain’s ’22 average of 19.1 this season — leads the Ivy League in scoring.

TIM TAI/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Yale hosts Penn and Princeton in a back-to-back with major implications on the Championship title and Ivy Madness seeding.

He dropped 31 points to lead Penn past Yale last month, recorded a new career-high last weekend with 33 points in a win over Harvard and is averaging 27.4 points per game during the Quakers’ current five-game streak.

While Yale leads the Ancient Eight in field-goal and threepoint percentage defense, the Tigers lead the conference in both of those offensive categories. “[With] players like Dingle and teams like Princeton, we know the coaches have a plan, and we just try to go out there and execute and give our best effort,” Yale guard Bez Mbeng ’25, who played a key role locking down Harvard star Noah Kirkwood last week said.

Yale forward Matt Knowling ’24 earned the Ivy League’s Rookie of

the Week award on Monday after scoring a career-high 19 points against the Lions. The honor is his third of the season.

The Yale campus has experienced an uptick in undergraduate COVID-19 cases over the last week and a half, with 253 undergraduate students in isolation as of Wednesday afternoon.

Because of COVID-19 protocols, several Yale players wore masks throughout the course of last Saturday’s win in New York City.

Starting forward Isaiah Kelly ’23 did not play the game or appear on the bench.

Tim Bennett, the athletic department’s assistant director for strategic communications and sports contact for men’s basketball, said he was not aware of any-

one being ruled out for this weekend’s games due to COVID-19 protocols in a Wednesday afternoon email to the News.

Given updated fan attendance policies that permitted fully-vaccinated fans from outside the Yale community to return to indoor arenas at 75 percent capacity starting Feb. 11, this weekend’s slate will also mark the first set of Ivy League men’s basketball games that the general public can attend at Yale since the Bulldogs’ last Penn-Princeton weekend in February 2020.

Both games this weekend tip off at 7 p.m. and will be broadcast on ESPN+.

Contact WILLIAM MCCORMACK at william.mccormack@yale.edu .

Mixed weekend for men’s; women’s face off against Ivies in New York

MUSCOSPORTSPHOTOS.COM

The men’s team fell to St. John’s University on Saturday, but beat Boston University on Sunday.

BY GRAYSON LAMBERT CONTRIBUTING REPORTER The Yale men’s tennis team (4–2, 0–0 Ivy) hosted St. John’s University (6–1, 0–0 Big East) on Saturday and Boston University (0–5, 0–0

Patriot) on Sunday, while the women’s team (3–4, 0–0 Ivy) traveled to Ithaca, New York where they battled Columbia University (5–2, 0–0), Cornell University (0–5, 0–0) and Brown University (3–4, 0–0) in the ECAC Indoor Championships.

While the men’s team fell to St. John’s (2–5), the squad quickly bounced back in its match against Boston University, taking all seven points.

“I thought many of our guys played with a lack of clarity and con-

fidence,” Chris Drake, the men’s team head coach, said of his team’s match against the Red Storm. However, Drake noted that his team “did a better job of committing to its games [and] trying to play with conviction regardless of circumstance or situation” against the Terriers.

Drake was particularly proud of captain Arnav Dhingra ’22, who “battled injuries throughout the year” but still competed in both the singles and doubles events.

Dhingra shared his excitement about being “back out on the court for the first time this season,” and shared that “there is no feeling like being out there with your teammates.”

Although the men faced a tough loss on Saturday, Walker Oberg ’25 was proud of his team bouncing back and dominating the Sunday competition.

Michael Sun ’23 and Dhingra led the Saturday doubles line-up, followed by Aidan Reilly ’25 with Theo Dean ’24 and Luke Neal ’25 with Renaud Lefevre ’24.

Sun also played the top line of singles, ahead of Dean, Reilly, Oberg, Shervin Dehmoubed ’25, and Neal. On Sunday, Cody Lin ’22 and Sun played the first line of doubles, followed by Neal with Lefevre and Daniel Gale ’23 with Dhingra. Reilly took on the top line of singles, ahead of Dehmoubed, Oberg, Neal, Lefevre and Dhingra.

Meanwhile, the women’s team faced off against other Ancient Eight teams at the ECAC Indoor Championships. The Bulldogs opened their weekend with a 2–4 loss to Colum-

bia on Friday, followed by a 4–2 victory against Cornell on Saturday and a 1–4 loss to Brown on Sunday.

“I thought we competed well, and we played really well in doubles,” said Rachel Kahan, the women’s team head coach.

According to Kahan, the tournament was a great opportunity to see how her squad compares to the other teams in the Ivy League before regular league matches begin. The team’s first conference match will be against Brown on April 2 at the Cullman-Heyman Tennis Center.

Kathy Wang ’22 echoed Kahan’s sentiments. Her personal highlight of the weekend “was coming back in doubles from 2–5 down against Columbia” with her doubles partner Caroline Dunleavy ’22. Wang also shared praise for her teammates, believing that they “did a great job of fighting in every match and keeping [their] energy high.”

The women’s team held the same line-up for the entire weekend. Chelsea Kung ’23 and Jessie Gong ’22 played the first line of doubles, followed by Dunleavy with Wang and Vivian Cheng ’23 with Jamie Kim ’25. Kung also led the team in singles, ahead of Dunleavy, Gong, Rhea Shrivastava ’23, Cheng and Wang.

This weekend, the men’s team will journey to Ithaca, New York for the ECAC Championships.

The women’s team will travel to New Jersey to take on Rutgers University on Saturday.

Contact GRAYSON LAMBERT at grayson.lambert@yale.edu

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE A11

WEEKEND EXPECTATIONS

STANDING OUT // BY MAHESH AGARWAL

When I was eighteen years old, I visited India for the first time. It was the climax of a cliche gap year story: an American teen saves money from shifts at a supermarket and rents an apartment in his father’s homeland in order to “find his roots” and “discover himself” Days after landing in Delhi, I learned that a distant cousin of mine was about to be married. I’d never met the bride and would need to travel five hours outside the capital to reach her ceremony. Nevertheless, this was a family wedding in the same continent as me, which, in Desi culture, is known as a mandatory event.

The invitation excited me because I’d come prepared.

Another relative — a verified first cousin from Britain — had made her nuptial vows two years earlier and I’d bought an intricately embroidered “Kurta” for the occasion. The traditional knee-length shirt proved to be a compliment magnet at its London debut but had languished in my closet ever since.

Now, on my way to a real Indian wedding, I had the chance to showcase my costume in its natural habitat. I spent the car ride flipping through Hindi vocab flashcards and rehearsing my script for whenever someone new approached me. Of course, with an American accent and unfamiliar face, I would never blend in completely. But there’s no one more cringeworthy than the obscure relative who barges into a wedding and becomes the center of attention.

By embracing the culture, I could at least avoid standing out and stealing the spotlight. // JESSAI FLORES That night, the universe was in the mood for irony. Instead of stepping into a sea of Nehru jackets and flowing silk pyjama, I found what looked like a Model UN conference. Every man obeyed a strict dress code: dark suit, white shirt and a brightly colored tie. I shuffled toward the

other guests and mumbled in Hindi, “My name is Mahesh. I’m Radikas’s cousin from America.” The newly discovered relative then pinched my kurta, laughed for roughly ten seconds and replied in English, “ I see you are representing Indian attire!

Very good, my brother, this is beautiful.”

Although most male college students are reluctant to admit it, deciding what to wear is kind of complicated. Dressing in a way that’s appropriate without looking boring or pretentious requires knowing just how much to adapt. As overachieving first years learn every fall, it’s embarrassing to show up to a YPU debate in a t-shirt. But you also don’t want to be the rower who dresses identically with everyone else on the crew team and you certainly don’t want to be that quiz bowl nerd who spent his entire life collecting Asics but suddenly starts wearing boat shoes in order to fit in at frats. Miscalculating how much we need to adapt can lead to disaster; that’s what happened when I assumed that my cousin’s wedding in India would be just like the diaspora celebrations I’d attended before.

I haven’t experienced that level of sartorial alienation since coming to Yale. My wardrobe is dominated by the same earth-toned chinos and waffle-knit sweaters that I wore in high school. It’s the mark of a student who wants to appear moderately well-dressed without taking any risks — the style of a J.Crew model in a hurry and on a budget.

But I sometimes wonder if my gap-year wedding trauma pushed me too far. During that same trip to Delhi, I bought an entire set of tops that combine the color palette and band collar of an Indian kurta with the length of a Western dress shirt. The plan was to wear them to class and add a pinch of flavor to my style. Instead of making an appearance in Directed Studies seminars, however, the shirts have remained in my suitcase. Will they ever emerge? I’m not sure. Finding the Goldilocks level of conformity requires understanding the culture of a group and one’s place within it.

Contact MAHESH AGARWAL at mahesh.agarwal@yale.edu.

URGENT: Your Missed COVID Test // BY ANASTASIA IBRAHIM

Dear Nameless Yale Student We Only Know You by Your MyChart NetID Login, It seems as of early this morning, like around 4:37am, you haven’t gotten your routine COVID test. I write to inform you that you will be personally — and respectfully — drop kicked by Dean Marvin Chun if you don’t comply. If you have already made up your missed test today, you can disregard this email, but know that we don’t make mistakes and we also don’t believe you. If you haven’t, haul your ass to York St. or Commons or wherever the fuck you want to get your damn test. You’re overdue by 6 minutes, and if you don’t complete your test within the next 15 seconds, we’re going to sue you in a court of law for violently violating our Community Compact. You will also be locked out of the gates of Yale and thrown into the gates of Hell, which is marked Lanman-Wright Hall from the outside. If you become a repeat offender, campus security and Chief Ronnell Higgins will be forced to escort you out of Connecticut and send you back to wherever you came from. Even if you live in Connecticut, your Connecticut resident status will be revoked, and you will be reassigned to Massachusetts, home of John Harvard.

If you are having issues scheduling a test, please call the COVID Resource Line at We-Don’t-Have-One-It’s-Not-That-Hard, or you can try We-Actively-WantTo-Expel-You-And-This-Makes-It-Easier to speak to the only nurse in all of New Haven who is desperately burnt out and overworked but we don’t care because we VaLuE yOuR sAfEtY. Or, you can review our detailed testing instructions and FAQs online.

To schedule your test go to: www.yale.everydayacovidtesteveryhouracovidtesteverymomentacovidtest.edu.com.net and LOGIN TO FUCKING MYCHART SO WE CAN FUCKING SCAN YOU IN. DO NOT LOG IN AS A GUEST YOU FUCKING MORON. HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS??????

If this is a technical inaccuracy — and indeed you tested yesterday — no it is not, bitch! But please let us know right away if this is the case so we can tell your Dean to get ‘public indecency’ engraved on your transcript and all of your professors to fail you.

Thank you for your swift attention to this matter.

Best regards,

// SOPHIE HENRY

The YCDO “Health” and “Safety” Team Please get your COVID test immediately or we will personally inject and infect you with Hepatitis C and saw your head off on cross campus for everyone to see — we’d all rather be safe than sorry!

Contact ANASTASIA IBRAHIM at anastasia.ibrahim@yale.edu .

WKND Recommends Selling out for McKinsey

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022

WEEKEND

YALE’S NAKED TRUTH

// SOPHIE HENRY

// BY IRIS TSOURIS

Bass Library. 11 p.m. It is the last day of reading week, and a sea of bodies — clad in just running shoes and face masks — floods unlatched doors. Students crowd on the sidelines and teem with anticipation. Someone cheers, gleeful and wild. A security guard switches on the intercom.

Yale’s bi-annual naked run has commenced.

The logistics of a naked run are deceptively simple. Participants, invited by email, strip down at the top floor of the Sterling Stacks and run down the 14 flights of stairs to Bass, where spectators await them. “It’s very affirming,” said Robert Hughes ‘22*, who attended the run as a sophomore. “Some people are definitely eager for different reasons, but it’s a very supportive space. Like, there’s folks with popcorn. Some people want high fives. It’s one of the happiest experiences I’ve had at Yale as part of a collective group.”

Hughes told me he had struggled with body dysmorphia and self-acceptance in the past. Running through a throng of cheering people, naked and loved, played a part in overcoming this, he said.

I asked him, then, about consent, if there were ever any unwilling spectators.

“The guard has to say, like, very awkwardly, ‘If you don’t want to see any naked people, now’s a good time to leave,’” Hughes explained. “To the very best of my knowledge, people are spectating with the intention of staying in the space, with the intention of seeing.”

Hughes, additionally, is a member of the Pundits, a secret society dating back to 1884. Their aim, he told me, is to resist

WKND Recommends Class solidarity

the stifling, more inhibiting parts of Yale’s social scene, a resistance that includes hosting one of Yale’s most infamous and coveted traditions: naked parties.

“We have cultivated a list of people based on who we’re comfortable inviting,” said Hughes. “Then from there, if they have any plus-ones, that cultivates a good population of around, say, 100 people or so that get the [naked party] email invites.”

First years are not permitted to enter the naked party panlist, and sophomores make occasional, albeit rare, appearances.

Upperclassmen, who may have missed out on such opportunities due to the pandemic, are prioritized instead.

“It’s kind of jarring, your first naked party. Because you go there and like, no one gives a shit,” laughed Hughes. “You might go around in your underwear at first, and that’s fine. And then you realize that no one’s looking down and that everyone’s just looking at each other’s faces, maybe even more so than at a typical party.

Because, you know, you’re very incentivized to. It might feel awkward at first, but you really feel listened to.”

Naked parties are spaces of thorough planning and supervision, where sexuality and nudity are entirely divorced.

Drinking is limited. Photos are prohibited. Flirting is discouraged — sometimes, even, a cause for removal. During the parties, the Pundits, marked with Sharpie ink, enforce these security measures with meticulous care.

“You might be like, ‘Hey, that person looks pretty nice,’” said Hughes, “but it never goes beyond that because there’s no reason for it

to… It empowers you and makes you rethink your relationship with both your body and the campus community.”

Mark Novak ‘23*, a participant in last semester’s naked run, also found his experience with public nudity to be entirely non-sexual.

“It’s very much like, you’re all standing around in the cold,” he echoed. “It’s a real out-of-body experience.”

But Yale’s fixation on nudity does not always lack sexual overtones. There are times, on campus, where nakedness is spontaneous and impassioned. Sex in forbidden, tucked-away places is often revered and, in the case of the Sterling Stacks, transformed into time-honored pastimes.

I spoke with Elaine Schafer ‘24*, who told me about her experience with sex on a rooftop.

“We were outside of a frat, and even though it was open, they were just being kind of rude,” Schafer recounted. “They were like, ‘No, we don’t wanna let you guys in,’ so I said to [the person I was with], ‘Let’s go somewhere even more exclusive.’”

The allure of sex on a rooftop, Schafer added, lies in its intimacy and danger, in how it holds the promise of both a beautiful and perilous view. This was one of the few places where she felt she and her partner could be together, alone.

Even in a non-sexual context, Hughes, too, acknowledged that nudity strips away barriers to genuine emotional connection.

“We build up these immaculate shells around ourselves, whether it’s with a Canada Goose, or a 4.0 GPA or the next intern-

ship at McKinsey,” he said, “and when you’re just naked in a room of strangers… it feels as if no one’s looking at who you are or what you do outside of that space.”

And because it is socially forbidden, that makes it all the more precious.

“There’s something to be said for doing things that feel out of the norm,” Novak said, “and internalizing that part of the Yale experience is doing odd things. Things that really feel valuable and validating.”

It makes sense that Yale is so captivated by the bizarre and unconventional; these are students who are settling into themselves, understanding their bodies and discovering their desires. For many, Yale may be the first place where they find some sense of total self-reliance, where their wills and agencies seem absolute and boundless. Naked parties, runs, sex in impromptu places — “random, stupid fuckery” as Novak calls them — feel as though they are sacred expressions of this power.

I asked Schafer if she had any sexploits in mind for the future.

She paused, jokingly. “I would love to bang in Harkness Tower.”

I thought about how it would be — those great, impersonal bells and the fervid, hushed closeness — how vulnerable one might feel, how terrifying it could seem, to be fucking on top of the world.

Literally. *names changed to protect identities Contact IRIS TSOURIS at iris.tsouris@yale.edu .

CELEBRATING

BLACK COMMUNITIES BLACK PANTHERS PAGE 2 DEAN INTERVIEW PAGE 3 THE AFAM HOUSE PAGE 4 BLACK HISTORY MONTH PAGE 4 TEACHERS PAGE 6

// JESSAI FLORES

PAGE B2

SPISSUE LOOKING

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

BACK

MEMORIES OF MAY DAY: A look back at Black Panther protests at Yale // BY MEGAN VAZ On May 1, 1970, also known as “May Day,” thousands of protestors from around the country joined Yalies and New Haveners on the New Haven Green to rally in support of the Black Panthers. The murder of Panther Alex Rackley by others in the New Haven chapter gave the FBI, who had kept the organization under surveillance for years, the opportunity to prosecute national Party leaders.

Black student activists collaborated with the university’s admin-

headquarters where Warren Kimbro and his family lived. After Rackley eventually “admitted” — under torture — he was an FBI informant to Sams and Williams, he was driven to the swamps of the Coginchaug River on May 20, 1969. Sams told Rackley he would be able to leave on a boat. Instead, he gave Kimbro the order “from Nationals” to shoot and kill Rackley. Lonnie McLucas, another Panther, fired an insurance shot to make sure Rackley was dead.

The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, played a large role in the case against the Panthers, according to Panther press materials and Bass. In the midst of a political atmosphere marked by dissidence, including the anti-war and Black Power movements, COINTELPRO projects sought to illegally conduct surveillance, infiltration, and disruption within groups deemed subversive. According to Bass, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover spe-

// YALE NEWS

People gathered on Yale’s campus and the New Haven Green to protest the trials of prominent Black Panther Party leaders.

istration and the local chapter of the Panthers to advocate for racial justice and a fair trial for those charged, creating widespread conversations on race and repression at Yale and across the nation.

Yale’s administration, residential colleges, dining staff, professors and medical personnel took up the challenge of accommodating protestors and ensuring peace.

The Case Before the Rackley murder, New Haven Panther programs enjoyed support and success.

Veronica Kimbro, daughter of Panther Warren Kimbro, said that the New Haven Panthers stood up for the right to self-defense among Black people. In addition, she said they worked to give Black community members greater access to education and medical care. Lew Miller ’70 said he sometimes volunteered with the Panthers’ free breakfast program, where they would feed children before they went to school.

“I wanted a fro like Angela Davis, you know, and we knew that it was something they were doing for the betterment of our people,” Veronica Kimbro said. “And to this day, I don’t feel like they were starting trouble or they were cop-killers or any of that… they were trying to protect their neighborhoods and trying to protect their people.”

One New Haven Panthers press release obtained from Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives collection detailed their aims, activities and fight against government repression. In its first few months of operation, the chapter opened a “liberation school,” solicited donations for the free breakfast program, protested against lead poisoning and distributed newspapers. According to the press release, the police confiscated funds raised for the free breakfast program in the 1969 raid following Rackley’s murder.

According to Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer, National Panthers George Sams and Landon Williams arrived in New Haven from California to “whip East Coast chapters into shape.” They “evoked the paranoia” that the Party was permeated with FBI and police informants, and as soon as the pair arrived, they told others to keep an eye on Rackley. The book states that this suspicion could have stemmed from a name mix-up. Sams would later claim that even he did not believe Rackley was an informant.

As a result, 19 year old Rackley spent days captive and tortured in the New Haven Panther

Veronica Kimbro, who was eight at the time of the murder, still holds vivid memories of her time living in the New Haven Panther headquarters. She still remembers details of Rackley’s captivity in the present. Before he was killed, she came home to find Rackley in her bedroom.

“I saw women go on from the bathroom, and coming back in and tending to him. And his face was all busted up, and swollen and bloody, and he was laying in my bed,” Veronica said. “I kept looking at this man who looked like he was just in so much pain that he couldn’t even talk. And the looks on the women’s faces... They looked sad, but they were attending to him.”

The New Haven police, who had spied on the Panthers throughout Rackley’s captivity, raided the headquarters soon after his body was found. Veronica remembers waking up to flashlights and guns pointed at her and her brother.

She came down the stairs during the commotion to see cops handcuff several Panthers, including her father.

Murder in the Model City stated that “swarming in, officers moved in every direction, stepping over the women on pallets. They overturned flour bins and ransacked the premises.”

After several Panthers were arrested, Warren Kimbro and Sams pleaded guilty to the murder in exchange for a reduced sentence, while Lonnie McLucas chose to go to trial. Charges against other Panthers who frequented the headquarters were eventually dropped after they spent months to years in jail. Ericka Huggins, a leading member and visionary of the New Haven chapter, was charged with aiding and abetting Rackley’s murder, among other charges.

According to Paul Bass ’82, Editor of The New Haven Independent and co-author of the book, Huggins’ arrest marked a turning point in public attitudes surrounding the trials. Widespread dissent erupted across the country after national Panther leader and party co-founder Bobby Seale was also arrested in California, despite being out of state at the time of Rackley’s slaying.

This prompted thousands to plan “May Day” protests on the New Haven Green, right beside Yale’s Old Campus.

Bass said to the News, “But the government really wanted to get Huggins and Seale — only really there was no case against Seale, or that much of a case against Huggins — and that’s what made it a national story.”

cifically targeted the Black Panther Party because they “posed a threat to racist power structures” and because he feared the rise of a “Black messiah.”

Yale and the Panthers Yale’s classes of Black students had long fought against discrimination on and off campus. Hundreds of members of the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY) gathered in Woodbridge Hall in 1969 to meet with then-President Kingman Brewster and the Yale Corporation concerning harassment by both the Yale and New Haven police departments.

According to former BSAY leader Ralph Dawson ’71, who received the Yale Medal in 2021, students had pushed for Yale to create the African American studies department and to bring more diversity to the student body and faculty.

Yale student organizations and the Panthers shared a short history of collaboration before the 1970 protests. Yale’s chapter of the New Left organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) teamed up with the New Haven Panthers to organize picket lines and sit-ins in support of a local welfare advocacy organization in late 1969. Panther leader Ericka Huggins had previously spoken at Yale and cultivated a following of students, according to Bass’ book. The week of Rackley’s death, Seale had delivered a fiery speech on campus before returning to California.

After Seale’s arrest, student activist groups organized demonstrations at Yale in support of the Panthers’ cause. According to archives of the News, the student groups Revolutionary Youth Movement and Branford Liberation Front interrupted around 20 lectures to speak about “police harassment of the Panthers” and collect funds for the group’s legal defense in December 1969. Five students involved were suspended for the remainder of the term.

The BSAY eventually joined with the Third World Liberation Front, or TWLF, to form the United Front for Black Panther Party Defense.

Hundreds sat in the Berkeley common room as a variety of speakers representing faculty, the Yale Divinity School’s Black Seminarians, and Asian American and Latin-American student groups shared their messages. Dawson introduced the speakers by reading the group’s prepared statement.

The statement said that Yale must “take a vigorous stance on releasing these political prisoners,” and called for a student strike, a 500,000 dollar donation from Yale to the Panthers’ defense fund and

for Yale to host a national conference of Black community groups.

Meanwhile, law students and faculty joined forces with other legal academics to study the trial and sometimes to provide Panther defendants with legal assistance.

Early on, several Yale Law students dropped out of the school to devote time to the New Haven Panther Defense Committee, which comprised mainly white radicals. Leading up to the trials themselves, panels at the law school, including one organized

by Hillary Rodham Clinton LAW ’73, took efforts to monitor proceedings and review jail terms for the charged Panthers.

Some devoted themselves entirely to the movement to support and free the Panthers, according to Tap Taplin ’70. His best friend, the late Glenn deChabert ’70, served as the BSAY’s first leader and helped found the Afro-American Cultural Center alongside Dawson. According to Taplin, deChabert eventually received four incompletes in his final semester because he “was spending 24 hours a day immersed in protests.”

“We had a number of firebrand African American students from the northeast, out West and from the South. But the northeastern guys, who had been kind of into protesting and movements, were kind of the natural leaders,” Taplin said. “And of the natural leaders, Glenn was the natural leader.”

Aside from firebrands like deChabert, others supported the Panthers in different respects. Taplin, who had earlier worked for the Southern Regional Council’s voter education program, said he took a different ideological approach than his friend did. He identified as an organizer more than a protestor and was less supportive of calls to boycott classes.

“I thought a lot about what’s going to happen to the African American freshmen, sophomores and juniors if classes were boycotted,” Taplin, who was a senior at the time, said. “I was very sup-

captain Doug Miranda for insight.

“So there was some rough sledding at times. [Panthers] demanding certain things, suggesting to both Black students and students alike, that they are to be more militant, they ought to do this, that or the other. And, you know, we took cognizance of that,” Dawson said. “But we tried to work with them to the extent that we could to try to get the University to position itself in a context where it was standing up for fair trial for the Panthers.”

Miller additionally noted a sense of skepticism among some Black students when Panther advocates called for more radical support. He had spent months in Brazil in the company of revolutionaries before returning to Yale in January 1970 and contrasted the work of Yale students with that of activists like the Brazilian students.

“We might be civil rights attorneys, but we’re probably not going to be revolutionaries,” Miller said.

“Or like, Thurgood Marshall, but we’re not going to be Malcolm X.” The Panthers and their supporters at Yale also received criticism. Several op-eds published in the News questioned Panther ideology, while others took issue with popular claims that the Panthers would not receive a fair trial.

One controversial opinion piece written by Douglas Hallett ’71 claimed that protestors intimidated the judicial process and that “the militant tactics of blacks and students in the past two or three years” hurt the prospect of positive change. One editorial published by the News’ staff disputed that it was impossible for the Panthers to receive a fair trial.

Brewster, his administration and Yale faculty were tasked with responding to student demands on the Panther issue.

Brewster was characterized as an “extraordinary leader” by Dawson, who he collaborated with in efforts to diversify the student body. At the same time, Brewster initially held back from throwing the University’s full support

// YALE DAILY NEWS

Ralph Dawson ‘71 and Doug Miranda at speeches in the Berkeley College common room.

portive of what was going on in the streets and the protests, but I was also concerned about making sure that students behind me were going to have a fair shake at completing this place.”

Dawson told the News that some Panther representatives who gave speeches to students told them they should engage in more radical forms of support.

He added that although some of the speakers were less “persuasive” than others, students shared many goals with the Panthers.

Student leaders often communicated with Panthers, and Dawson himself often spoke with Panther

behind the Panthers, but made clear that Yale had to protect the principles of legal justice and a fair trial for the Panthers. His efforts to respond to dialogue on the Panthers included appointing a faculty committee to “recommend what course of action seems most appropriate for Yale,” which was led by Ernest Osborne.

To continue reading, go to yaledailynews.com where the rest of the piece will be published.

Contact MEGAN VAZ at megan.vaz@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

SPISSUE PROFILES

A profile of Reginald Dwayne Betts and his writing life

BY DANTE MOTLEY STAFF REPORTER Reginald Dwayne Betts, legal scholar, writer, and education and prison reform advocate, aims to build 1,000 libraries in prisons across the country. Now, he will put copies of his own book — on the craft and significance of writing — in these very libraries.

Betts, a doctoral candidate, has become a Yale law graduate, nationally acclaimed writer and a National Magazine Award winner.

He started his writing career while serving a nine-year prison sentence. Betts recently collaborated with PEN America, an organization dedicated to protecting and celebrating freedom of expression in America, to release a writing guide for people in prisons titled “The Sentences That Create Us.” “I read similar books when I was inside and those books always helped me think about what it meant to be a writer and the process of actually putting pen to paper and going one letter to the next,” Betts told the News.

“What’s interesting about this book is it’s both for craft [and], it’s also an exploration of what it means to do that particular job, what [it means] to write an essay.”

Betts said the book will help people in prisons explore the craft and significance of writing, but would also be helpful to those outside of prison.

Since the book’s release last month, more than 75,000 free copies of the book are being distributed in prisons, and 18,000 people have requested to read it.

But Betts emphasized that this book should only be one aspect of the repertoire of books that helps one craft a “writing life”.

Still, he said, the book is important in helping people in prisons know that writers have written both inside prison and after they have gotten out.

Since 2009, in his own writing life, Betts has released six books.

“The first version of my writing life has been in terms of ‘what does it mean to build community as a writer?’” Betts said. “So the first thing I did was teach poetry in local schools. But while doing that I was going to workshops. That somehow allowed me to build community in a different way.”

Betts went on to attend Warren Wilson College for creative writing, where he said he continued to build community.

He then matriculated to Yale Law School, where he got his juris doctor. His work as a writer intersects with his law and advocacy work.

“It’s all part of the same package,” Betts said. “It overlaps.

When you write you try to educate somebody about something. But also, you try to create a world. And a lot of the worlds I write about are worlds while in prison. Obviously, the advocacy work I do revolves

around literature and freedom and books, and your medium is the word, just like it is as a writer.”

Originally from Maryland, Betts was arrested at age 16. He was prosecuted as an adult and sentenced to nine years in prison.

After being released, he would go on to serve on former President Barack Obama’s Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in 2012. He moved to New Haven and has served as a member of Connecticut’s Criminal Justice Commission since 2018. Betts is currently working towards a doctorate at Yale Law School. While writing and studying at Yale, the years he spent in prison are central influences on his writing and advocacy.

“Some things you can’t run away from,” Betts said. “There are some things you really can’t get away from. It’s just such a part of life that I’ve lived.”

Betts says that he got into law and prison advocacy by coincidence. He worked in a legal library with the hopes of learning how to type so he could type his poems up. His first published piece in prison was about juveniles being tried as adults. When he got out of prison, he started speaking at events and thinking about the problem of mass incarceration.

Those experiences taught him that “the law can be used as a way to freedom.”

COURTESY YALE LAW SCHOOL

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a writer and legal scholar who won the MacArthur “Genius Grant.”

Yet he notes that his success can’t be purely attributed to skill, but also to an element of luck.

“I took advantage of opportunities that presented themselves,” Betts said. “If I were to put a percentage to it, it might be 95 percent skill and 5 percent luck. But without that 5 percent, I might not be where I am.”

Betts was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “Genius Grant,” for $625,000 in September 2021, which helps the recipient explore their potential.

Contact DANTE MOTLEY at dante.motley@yale.edu .

In the Shadow of Bouchet: An Interview with Ferentz Lafargue [Thomas] Near. One of the things that he noticed both as a fellow of Saybrook and eventually as a head of college was that pictures in the dining hall did not align with the diversity that is now represented at Yale. Head of College Near knew about the legacy of Bouchet, saw the Bouchet entryway and thought that Dr. Bouchet would be a great addition to the portraits in the Saybrook dining hall as a way of modernizing what the artwork can look like in the Saybrook dining hall.

Q. When was the Undergraduate Fellowship Program founded, and how has it remained after all these years?

A. The Bouchet Program is in its 20th year and is connected to the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship here at Yale, which is in its 38th year. The Mellon Mays Program is a national program. It serves about 40 different college campuses. Ours is one of the few that has a partner program with the Bouchet Program. It’s supported by generous donors, primarily the Robinson family, and it’s their gift that allows the fellowship to continue to live on.

COURTESY OF THOMAS NEAR

Saybrook College Dean Ferentz Lafargue, Yale’s only current Black residential college dean, speaks on the legacy of Edward A. Bouchet.

BY MICHAEL NDUBISI STAFF REPORTER

its operation and his reflections on the last three years.

On the tall walls of Saybrook College’s dining hall hangs the portrait of Edward A. Bouchet, class of 1874. The portrait, first displayed to the Saybrook community on Oct. 9, 2020, is the first of a person of color to hang in the dining hall in the college’s 89-year history and comes after the Saybrook renovation in 2001 that created a new entry named for the Yale alum.

Bouchet was the College’s first Black student and the first African American to earn a doctorate in the United States. Bouchet was also among the first 20 Americans to receive a doctorate in physics, the sixth to earn a doctorate in physics at Yale and for his academic achievements, was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1874.

The legacy of Bouchet lives beyond just a portrait and entryway through the dean of Saybrook College, Ferentz Lafargue.

Lafargue is Yale College’s only currently serving Black residential college dean and director of the Mellon Mays and Edward A. Bouchet Undergraduate Fellowship Program. Last week, I sat down with him to discuss the aims of the program, his role in

Q. How does the legacy of Edward A. Bouchet live on at Yale?

A.The Bouchet legacy lives on in a couple of different ways. The entryway in which the dean’s office at Saybrook College is located is the Bouchet entryway.

There is the Edward A. Bouchet Society, a graduate society run out of the Office of Graduate Student Diversity. And then there is the program that I administer, the Edward A. Bouchet Undergraduate Fellowship Program, which provides support for students from underrepresented backgrounds who are considering PhDs primarily, but features in higher ed. The goal is to diversify the professoriate, so underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, as well as first-gen, low-income students and students from a variety of different backgrounds end up applying for the program.

So there, there are a few different ways that the legacy of Bouchet lives on.

Q. Why does Saybrook College memorialize Bouchet?

A. The Bouchet Portrait is a project that was steered and completely driven by Head of College

Q. When did you take the program over?

A. I became co-director first in my second year here in the 2019 academic year. And my co-director, professor Renee Barnes, who was the dean of Pierson, left to take a role as a chair of women and gender Studies at Smith College.

And so, I’ve been director since spring 2020.

Q. As Yale’s only currently serving Black residential college dean, what does it mean to you to head the program?

A. It means quite a few different things. One, I was drawn to the program because of my own experience with the Mellon Mays Minority Undergraduate Fellowship at Queens College. I’ve actually been involved with the program for over 20 years. I was a graduate assistant for the Queens College Program, helped serve as a graduate assistant at the Wesleyan program and worked with the Williams program when I was at Williams, so I’ve been involved with Mellon since 1996. So, when I arrived at Yale, I knew the program really well and when the service opportunity to work with Bouchet Program opened up, it was something that I knew that I was completely interested in.

It aligned with my values and it aligned with my long-term academic and professional interests.

It’s a unique opportunity to work with students who are incredi-

bly driven, who are coming from a variety of research backgrounds, so I’ve learned much more from the students than I could have ever imagined instructing them.

Q. You mentioned that the program aligns with your values, could you speak on what those values are?

A. One of the things that we strive to do in the program is give the students as clear a sense of what it means to give back and be part of a community in higher education. The program is a cohort model. They get a chance to interact with fellows who have a couple of similar programs throughout the Northeast. It’s an opportunity to promote research and scholarship, and it’s an opportunity to work with students on things that they are passionate about. So it’s also an opportunity for me to both learn in terms of being a lifelong learner and also helping someone else to achieve a goal that they have defined and devised for themselves.

Q. I really like the idea that you, the director of the program, are learning from the students who are part of it. What sort of things have you learned from students over the years?

A. Everything. I’m always inspired by the drive students have. They’re conceptualizing and thinking through things that I was not when I was their age. Now more than ever, students are doing transnational or international work, so projects that initially seemed to be very domestically based, students are applying for the [International Study Award] taking part of their summer stipend through the program, when travel was permitted, to do language study to sort of advance their language skills and do research abroad, for example.

There’s also the maturity our students have. They’re able to just live on their own in far-flung parts of the world for two or three months at a time, at the end of the summer. I often think to myself when I was in college, I was just focused on making it through the term so I could maybe earn some money over the summer at some local summer job or get an internship, and these are students who are taking on or pursuing these fairly ambitious research projects.

I’m also learning a lot from the students about how to have faith.

They don’t always know where they will ultimately end up on a project, but they still have enough faith to pursue it. A lot of them are anxious about their projects because they think that what they produce

will be their only gateway to graduate school or work outside of higher ed before returning to grad school.

So, there’s a certain level of pressure the students apply to their projects, but they maintain faith that they’re going to complete it. And I’m always inspired by that because there are plenty of things that I’ve started in my own life and don’t always follow through on. It’s just amazing being surrounded by plenty of people who have the time and who are on their own time working to make these things happen.

Q. What are some of the challenges that you face in running the program?

A. The only challenges that are faced are the challenges that we’re all facing. It’s the restrictions and the upheaval caused by COVID. So the biggest challenge really has been for two years now, watching the students having to reel back.

They’ve done a masterful job in a number of ways to kind of meet the moment and kind of reconfigure their projects based on whatever constraints that they have.

But when we select the students, and they join the program, I’m as excited about what they’re planning to do as they are sometimes, and it’s painful sometimes to know that the student who had a really great project idea that involves relocating to a particular community to interview members of that community is not going to be able to do it.

Q. How do you feel about the current state of the program, and where do you see it in the next 20 years?

A. I think the program is in really good shape. We’ve been able to do a lot. We have a really good team.

We’re now able to offer a halfcredit seminar and that additional structure allows us to create deeper partnerships with other campus offices. We get a chance to do a lot of research and development with the Poorvu Center, and we’re able to bring in program alums for work in progress talks or keynote talks.

Ideally, over time, one of the things that I would like to eventually work on is a Summer Institute for the new students in the program so that we’re able to form the cohort bond sooner. That way, they’re able to kind of pick up some of the key concepts of developing a research project and working with a mentor, so we’re able to do even more during the course of the year.

This interview was edited for clarity and flow.

Contact MICHAEL NDUBISI at michael.ndubisi@yale.edu .

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

SPISSUE HISTORY

Advocacy to actuality: a history of the Afro-American Cultural Center

BY YEJI KIM STAFF REPORTER When organizations and schools nationwide celebrate Black History Month, they recognize the generations of African Americans who built a home for the Black community in the United States. At Yale, this narrative is found close by as well, in the University’s Afro-American Cultural Center.

In 1964, a record number of 14 Black men started their first year at Yale. They decided to start what was called “Spook Weekend,” in which they, along with other Black upperclassmen, brought hundreds of Black students to Yale. Over the course of a year, Spook Weekend developed into the Yale Discussion Group on Negro Affairs. From this, the Black Student Alliance at Yale was formed. From this, a vibrant community was formed for Yalies.

Dick Tolbert, a founder of the Black Student Alliance at Yale, told the News on May 4, 1967 that BSAY’s founders had doubts about how the first all-Black weekend would “come off.” He feared it might further isolate Black students from the overwhelmingly white student body at Yale.

But his doubts were dispelled when “it came off very well.”

The four original goals of the BSAY were as follows: “Increased Black enrollment; The development of Afro-American Studies; Better relations with the Black New Haven community; An Afro-American Cultural Center.”

“The AfAm house is truly a space that fosters a community for Black students here at Yale. it’s nice to have a space like the House amidst the trials and tribulations of attending a [predominantly white institution].” Kadija Nabe ’25 wrote to the News.

Originally called Afro-America, the Afro-American Cultural Center, also known as the House, officially opened its doors in the fall of 1969. It was originally located on 1195 Chapel St., close to the New Haven community, which allowed for students to create an even bigger community. The House is currently located at 211 Park St.

//YALE DAILY NEWS

The Afro-American Cultural Center has a deep history dating back to the 1960s.

The House has undergone numerous physical changes since its first opening. After the 35th anniversary of the House, renovations began with a group of alumni volunteers; this was under the guidance of former Af-Am House Dean Pamela Y. George, who helped to raise almost four million dollars for these renovations and leadership programs.

Many figures were crucial in the growth and development of the House, including Khalid Lum. Lum advocated for a wider range of events to be sponsored and for student staff to be hired.

Each director of the Af-Am House brought about a new philosophy and vision. Former Director Rodney T. Cohen believed in the House being a space for students to discuss, learn and become scholars, beyond just socializing. He created a number of different outreach programs

and even created connections with Ghana and West Africa.

Risë Nelson is the current director of the House and is an assistant dean of Yale College.

Her vision for the House includes rebuilding bonds with the community, as she was raised in New Haven, as well as supporting students through any social justice or student wellness initiatives.

Students detailed their positive experiences at the House. Leleda Beraki ’24, student assistant at the House on the Student Outreach and Programming Team, wrote to the News: “My experience at the House has been nothing but incredible.

There are so many student groups that operate out of the House, not to mention the many people that are on staff. It’s a testament to the diversity and beauty of the Black community both at Yale and in New Haven.”

The House explores Black history throughout the entire year with a monthly discussion series on Black identity and culture. Previous discussions have included “The Convergence of Black and Brown Power: The Relationship between the Black Panther Party and the Brown Berets” and “Ever So Humbled: African Americans, Settler Colonialism, and the Elusive Quest for Home.”

Nabe also said that events like the Jubilee! New Student Welcome Ceremony and the Harvard-Yale block party have allowed her to build a support system throughout her time at Yale thus far.

“I’ll forever be grateful for the House for being a safe space for all Black students,” Nabe wrote.

Specifically, this year for Black History Month, affiliate organizations of the House are hosting

numerous events — including film screenings, guest speakers, dance classes and a trivia night — which the House has compiled in a list.

Beraki added that the role of the House does not change during Black History Month, as “At the House, Black joy, Black success, and Black history isn’t confined to 28 days.”

What started out as four original goals of the BSAY has grown into a vibrant community for Yalies and beyond. The Af-Am House is a place where many feel safe and comfortable, and it has expanded its influence to be a cultural staple of Yale.

The Afro-American Cultural Center is the first and largest Black cultural center amongst the universities in the Ivy League.

Contact YEJI KIM at yeji.kim@yale.edu.

“I hate Black History Month.”

YALE DAILY NEWS//WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Abiba Biao examines the lingering need for Black history in curricula.

Hearing that was enough for the whole class to turn their heads towards our sixth grade history teacher. It was such a baffling statement for us to hear, especially when she was teaching us Black and Brown kids.

Our looks of confusion vanished once she elaborated, stating that Black History Month is used as an alternative to avoid yearround integration of Black history into curricula.

While I couldn’t imagine what she meant at the time, it certainly has clicked for me now.

Many months have been created to increase the visibility of minority groups — such as Pride

Month and Hispanic Heritage Month — but they may do more harm than good. For some, these months foster a sense of complacency and performative activism.

We’ve normalized the meager acknowledgment of the BIPOC community through reposting “woke” Instagram infographics and buying social justice merch instead of actively fighting for social change. The triumphs, trials and tribulations of BIPOC Americans can never be encapsulated in just four weeks.

Not a day goes by this month where Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou and Jackie Robinson haven’t been mentioned. Although they’re all

notable figures who have created strides in their respective fields, there’s no doubt that we are selective with the people we talk about. The overemphasis of certain minority figures creates an oversimplified, idealized presentation of history, leaving others who don’t fit our desired molds to go unrecognized.

There’s a reason why Martin Luther King, Jr. is taught more often in schools than Malcolm X. King reinforces the principles of civil disobedience and passivity while Malcolm frequently voiced his hatred against the white man and permissibility of violence. King’s words are

much easier to swallow than Malcolm’s. As a pastor, he could more easily appeal to the White Christian households across the nation rather than Malcolm who along with his race faced an added barrier of Islamophobia. We’ve immortalized King’s speeches through quotes because we favor his words of amnesty over Malcolm’s words of retaliation.

The responsibility of social justice on the oppressed is a heavy weight to carry. We discuss our struggles when we are framed in a positive light and erase the contributions of controversial figures to avoid defaming our cause. Our infatuation with

Black struggle stories leads to the over glorification of systemic racism, ignoring the fact that we shouldn’t have to beg and fight to be treated as human beings.

I wish that the upbeat energy we have this month lasts beyond Feb. 28 and that we in the Black community use this as a time to grow, to reflect on our internal biases and the implications of our actions. But most of all, I wish we could sit down and finally ask ourselves, what is Black History Month really about?

ABIBA BIAO is a senior at Achievement First Amistad High School in New Haven, CT.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

SPISSUE OPINION

Classica Delenda Est

BY TILLY BROOKS CONTRIBUTING WRITER “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change,” Audre Lorde remarked in a 1979 panel.

In a 2021 New York Times article, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics at Princeton University, recounted a heated exchange he had had with independent scholar Mary Frances Williams at a 2019 conference run by the Society of Classical Studies. In the course of their back and forth, Williams contended that classicists should work harder to defend the discipline, arguing that “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West,” and proceeding to address the following directly to Peralta: “You may have got your job because you’re Black, but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”

Peralta responded simply and straightforwardly to Williams: “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined. I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”

Peralta’s response generated as much, if not more, controversy as Williams’ claim that Peralta may have been hired on the basis of race. After all, it is not a usual claim for a scholar to call for the death of their own field. What, really, did Peralta mean when he expressed the hope that Williams’ iteration of classics would die, and what factors most informed his perspective on the matter?

If, in terms of Lorde’s metaphor, the master’s house is representative of white supremacist structures in the classics, then the master’s tools are the readings of the field which facilitate those structures, both those which do so by explicitly endorsing them and those which do so implicitly by failing to deconstruct them.

Applied broadly, this idea contends that the master’s house is not classics itself, but rather any reading of it which is not intentionally inclusive. Applied to Peralta’s perspective, Lorde’s idea of the master’s house requires further analysis and some definitions. Classicism has been broadly characterized by Yale’s department as the study of the “histories, languages, and literary and material cultures, of ancient Greece, Rome and the ancient Mediterranean.”

In view of this definition, it should be noted that there is no pure form of classics; scholars in the field spend as much time studying interpretations of the world of the ancient Mediterranean as they do primary resources. The classical world is one which has been constructed and reconstructed on the basis of research, ideology and conjecture, among several other means. Thus, the iteration of classics which Peralta attributed to Williams is merely an interpretation of the field, not the field in and of itself.

This point becomes all the more clear when one considers that the

concept of “the West,” much less the modern idea of race, that Williams referred to was one that existed in full force in the ancient world. Consequently, any iteration of classics that purports to uphold unequal race structures is a construction rooted more in racialized scholarly interpretation than in the culture of the ancient Mediterranean.

If white-supremacist readings of classicism are revisions made on an earlier tradition, which was itself not possessed of the modern concept of race, then other iterations of classics that seek to remove white supremacy from the field are simply other interpretations of the field, not pernicious efforts to destroy it altogether.

To better understand the nature of anti-racist readings of classicism, one must first possess an understanding of classics as it is known today as a tradition steeped in inequality as well as a historical, cultural and linguistic study.

It is important to remember that studying classics has been and is now a status symbol. Classics was designed precisely as a way of signaling status. The Latin word for which the field is named, classicus — a term for members of the highest class in Roman society — is itself an indicator of elevated social status. At their core, class-based intellectual traditions, especially those that posit that success in the field is rooted solely in merit rather than privilege, go a step beyond exclusivity.

As is often true of exclusionary practices, the cliquishness of classics is not as simple as prohibiting others from engaging altogether in the tradition, since it is impossible to have an upper class without also having an underclass. Therefore, it is not only important for the power holders in exclusive traditions to deny others the opportunity to engage in the tradition; it is also essential to keep the under class ever present in the background of it. W.E.B. Du Bois famously commented on this phenomenon: “In the folds of this European Civilization I was born and I shall die, imprisoned, conditioned, depressed, exalted and inspired. Integrally a part of it and yet, much more significant, one of its rejected parts.”

The feeling which Du Bois articulates above is quite similar to Lorde’s idea of the master’s house. There is no recourse within the world occupied by Du Bois by which even the most talented members of the under class could have achieved a status truly equal to that of those in the upper class.

Such is the limitation imposed on everyone but the master by the tools of the master.

Beyond the exclusivity of the field, the dark shadow of its historical practice further contributes to white supremacist readings of the tradition. Many famous intellectuals, including Yale’s own John C. Calhoun, insisted that an education in classics was a marker of worth and simultaneously denied entire communities the right to study it. Alexander Crummell humorously pointed out the incoherence of this line of thought in his

Audre Lorde’s work prompts one writer to examine the meaning of the Classics.

1897 address, “The Attitude of the American Mind Toward the Negro Intellect:” “One of the utterances of Mr. Calhoun was to this effect ‘That if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man.’ Just think of the crude asininity of even a great man! Mr. Calhoun went to ‘Yale’ to study the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. His son went to Yale to study the Greek syntax, and graduated there. His grandson, in recent years, went to Yale, to learn the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. School and Colleges were necessary for the Calhouns, and all other white men to learn the Greek syntax. And yet this great man knew that there was not a school, nor a college in which a black boy could learn his A, B, C’s. He knew that the law in all the Southern States forbade Negro instruction under the severest penalties. How then was the Negro to learn the Greek Syntax? How then was he to evidence to Mr. Calhoun his human nature?

Why, it is manifest that Mr. Calhoun expected the Greek syntax to grow in Negro brains, by spontaneous generation!”

Crummel’s analysis of Calhoun’s thought process betrays a bizarre inconsistency in the logic of white supremacy; those who subscribed to Calhoun’s ideas possessed some understanding that Black achievement in America was limited by oppression and inaccess, rather than innate ability. As Crummel contended, “there was no denial that the Negro had intellect. That denial was an afterthought.”

Calhoun was far from being alone in his beliefs regarding race and the classics. The founder of the American Journal of Philology Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve was a white supremacist and Confederate soldier in the American Civil War, which he likened to the Pelopponesian War. As Patrice Rankine argues in his 2019 essay “Classics, Race, and Community-Engaged Schol-

arship,” those who blend the classics into their white supremacist beliefs are similarly likely to blend their white supremacist beliefs into their work in the classics.

Rankine contends that “Once it is clear that motives — those causes that instigate individual action — are impure, the uneasy connection between race and the Classics is exposed as iron-clad, rather than incidental.”

Given this, it is important to consider that the field of classics is not one unimpacted by the prejudices of the scholars who work within it, both currently and historically. Rather than a purely observational field, classics may be considered a tradition made up of two elements: the demonstrably true and the constructed.

There are the known facts of the ancient world, consisting of artifacts, documented and deciphered languages, geography and the like. Beyond these facts, however, there is a remaining element of classics, the unfilled gaps of knowledge, which classicists seek to fill both by looking for new evidence and by using conjecture to construct a version of the classical world which is comprehensible to them.

Consisting of translation, reception, interpretation, adaptation, theorization and the like, it is in this second element that bias of several forms makes its way into classics. For example, Samuel Butler, an English classicist and author, developed the theory that the “Odyssey” was composed by a woman based as much on his understanding of women as the evidence in the epic itself.

The bias in Butler’s theory reveals itself more clearly at some moments than others.

One particularly absurd turn in his argument sees Butler insisting that, if written by a woman, the “Odyssey” is excellent and, in fact, better than the “Iliad.”

On the other hand, he contends, if the “Odyssey” was written by a man, it “would be ridiculous.”

Therefore, because the “Odyssey” is excellent, and not ridiculous, it was likely composed

YALE DAILY NEWS

by a woman. This logic is rooted almost entirely in Butler’s own understanding of gender roles in 19th century England, a point he himself confirms by comparing the “Odyssey” to the works of Jane Austen.

Butler is just one of many examples of the combination of evidence-based inference and biased conjecture characteristic of what is now known as the classical tradition. Composed of these two elements, classics reveals itself to be an invented field, which can be and has been constructed and reconstructed, appropriated and reappropriated, to various ends, with varying success, and among various peoples.

How, then, might Peralta and Williams’ exchange be better understood, and what would an antiracist iteration of classics look like? On the one hand, it may be the unfortunate reality that the field of classics has not completed its work in deconstructing racism in the field. On the other hand, it is well worth celebrating that classics is an intellectual tradition which can be observed and reinvented in many rich, antiracist forms.

One excellent example of this is “The Island,” an Apartheid-era play by Athol Fugard, Winston Ntshona and John Kani telling the story of a perfomance of “Antigone” in Robben Island, the famous location where political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, were held.

In the academic perspective, the work of Peralta and Emily Greenwood both provide valuable insights into how anti-racist classics can be executed in academia.

In classics, as in all academic disciplines, it is the responsibility of the field’s practitioners to deconstruct the legacy of white supremacy in their area of study.

In view of this, it may well be time for white supremacist interpretations of classics to die so that newer, more inclusive readings of the tradition may take form.

Contact TILLY BROOKS at tilly.brooks@yale.edu

OLA: Young, gifted and Black: America’s obsession with the Black prodigy It is so easy to feel empty and directionless in a predominantly white institution without examples of Black excellence in front of me. I used to blast “Young, Gifted and Black.” by Nina Simone into my ears in hopes of absorbing the confidence, the audacity. Now I crumble under the weight of the pressure of my own ambition. But where did I get this astronomical ambition?

Who gave it to me? Did I give it to myself?

I say I think history gave it to me.

My dad asks me why I think so many exceptional Black artists and athletes have been found in such a short time in the U.S. How is it we found all of our Duke Ellingtons, our Nina Simones, Aretha Franklins, Billie Holidays, Jimi Hendrixes. I shrug. He mentions the Harlem Renaissance, pokes around at it. He focuses, though, on the opportunities for Black people at the time to funnel themselves into the entertainment industry.

Entertainment was, and still is, one of the few avenues where Black people can compete and talent can flourish: sports, arts and music.

It’s hard to see such concentrated Black talent in other forums, not even here at Yale, where everyone is expected to thrive on every career path. Here, Black students are especially expected to thrive, to play their prodigious part within an institution that was built off of the collective Black historical trauma of slavery.

What resulted in this need for Black people to perform for an antiblack nation was an extraordinary constellation of Black talent. The process of competition to make it was insanely hard: iron sharpened iron. One had to be hyper brilliant to make it through, or at least appear to be so; there was a narrow funnel to pass through. The process was hypercompetitive, nurturing and grilling the “genius.” In order to

survive anywhere, you had to be the best — there was no room for Blackness otherwise.

Wrestling with the burning light under a magnifying glass, one finds it terribly easy to be paralyzed. This is the situation I find too often amongst my Black peers. Black youth are trapped by a pressure to be “different” and “excellent”. Maybe it is the effect of being surrounded by whiteness, and an obsession with coming out on top despite racial barriers and obstacles. I recall middle school dances in predominantly white areas where I was asked to dance for them. And now I am here, at Yale, and still feeling like something is missing.

After writing countless essays on my Black struggles, in hopes for acceptance, I still feel that to the world around Black people, our win is not quite so beautiful as is our struggle to achieve said win.

However, the phrase “Black

mediocrity: feels equally as trapping; we are rarely loved in our in-betweenness — we must be an extreme, an archetype. In a modern twist of dehumanization, narratives involving Black life barely escape the godlike or caricature.

Outside of spectacle, we simply aren’t interested in Black life. We aren’t interested in seeing Black people outside of situations of extreme heroism or extreme poverty.

There is a tendency for people to accept damaging stereotypes due to a pleasant surprise of the stereotype’s seeming positivity. I understand. But I beg us to let ourselves rest and exist in our bodies without feeling the need to be superheroes and prodigies; it’s impossible. Even God rested.

We are obsessed with the “rose blooming through the concrete”— Black perseverance through pain. With striving for excellence, despite, despite,

despite. Choosing to funnel ourselves into the areas where we were most allowed to thrive.

It’s only natural we harden. The ferocity that results from hardship can be beautiful, but we forget the pain, and fear of being trampled without said ferocity, behind it. We obsess over the confidence, the audacity, the novelty of the Black genius. We never did this to be beautiful, or gods. We did this to survive. We deserve this month not only to celebrate the blossoming of our talent and how we performed, but how we lived day to day, how we survived and how we took up space, reaffirming our own lives.

It wasn’t the process of a struggle that made us beautiful when we were already beautiful to begin with.

SEMILORE OLA is a Sophomore in Timothy Dwight College. Contact her at semilore.ola@yale.edu.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022 · yaledailynews.com

SPISSUE ESSAYS

Give Pennington A Degree

BY NOAH HUMPHREY GUEST COLUMNIST Rev. James Pennington, the first Black student at the Yale Divinity School, has not received a posthumous degree. My name is Noah Humphrey. I am a second-year master’s of divinity student at the Divinity School and I am working towards getting Pennington a degree.

I know that the YDS administration tried twice to award a posthumous degree to Pennington, but, in the 2014-15 school year, the request was turned down as Yale “traditionally does not offer degrees to the dead.”

However, looking back at the honoring of Rabbi Sacks, I wanted to see if Yale can offer posthumous degrees not just for those who have accepted and passed away before the commencement date, but also for those who have made historical contributions that have affected our campus as of today in diversity, new ideas and the fight for equity. In this fashion, I want to engage in getting Pennington an honorary degree.

This is the context taken from the Honorary Degrees page: Since the commencement of 1702, the Yale Corporation has awarded honorary degrees to recognize outstanding achievement. Currently, the honorary degrees awarded annually at the University’s Commencement are the highest honors conferred by Yale.

From Martin Luther King, Jr. to Frank Lloyd Wright and Cole Porter, those who have received honorary degrees from Yale collectively represent the aspirations of this institution. Recipients over the years have been models of excellence and service to our students, to our graduates, to our community and to the world.

It is only recorded that in 1874, Edward Bouchet became the first African American to graduate from Yale College. But in actuality, Pennington attended YDS from 1834-39. He was barred from entering the classrooms, so he studied outside and listened to the lectures. Especially considering that YDS is the main constituent of Yale and hosts its first founding building, Yale actually awarded the first official degree to Bouchet without handing one out to Pennington –– even with his five years of schooling through racial barriers. I believe that after centuries, we should finally follow the guide of the University of Heidelberg of Germany, which awarded an honorus causia, honorary doctorate, to Pennington.

We want to bring recognition to Pennington by giving the man who took great strides and brought change to Yale through his pres-

ence and resilience the official In 1945, Pauli Murray wrote, “As the Saybrook College event, Joahonor he deserves. In the years an American I inherit the magnifi- quín Lara Midkiff spoke about the before I got to YDS, the Yale Black cent tradition of an endless march history of settler colonialism and Seminarian Council has worked toward freedom and toward the Yale’s complicity by failing to offito advocate the Divinity School dignity of all mankind.” We have so cially recognize Indigenous Peoto make this a reality. In this same much more to do to foster and sus- ple’s Day as a “Story of life, permanner, I am looking to convince tain an equitable society. Instead severance, and love as it is a story the administration to break away of feeling the isolating effects of of loss, suffering, and hatred. Five from the antiquated tradition fear when our sense of commu- hundred years on and, somehow, that honorary degrees cannot be nity is shaken, we must remem- we are still here — albeit transber that we are connected in more formed and still fighting,” he said. awarded posthumously.

In an email that I received on ways than we are divided. And that Fighting for recognition for Pennington is Indigenous People’s Day also a pull for — Oct. 11, change for 2021 — MarIndigenous tha Schall members of wrote that the commushe and her nity — specolleagues in cifically that the Office of Yale will hear Institutional the voice of Affairs are Indigenous part of the peoples. It staff supis a part of port for the a s to r i e d Corporation resilience Committee to t ra n s on Honorfo r m a n d ary Degrees. fight policy, They said as Yale has that the yet to award H o n o r an honorary ary Degrees degree to a Commitman whose tee, which first eduYale’s trustcation was ees lead, has outside of a longstandthe classing pracrooms that tice against we occupy g r a n t now because ing honorof his and ary degrees others’ fights posthufor freedom mously. The and equity. exception My email SOPHIE HENRY// ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR that I listed was a call of before with Noah Humphrey calls for Reverend James Pennington to recieve an honorary degree. passion for Sacks was the change of that he died Pennington’s after accepting their invitation and where we are divided, we must degree status. I prayed diligently before the Commencement date work, now, in the interest of unity for guidance and direction as to for the degree. Conclusively, Schall and justice. This is a matter of the how we can move forward. Thanks wrote that the committee “would highest importance. to the work of Black alumni, pronot be open to considering a nomSo, let us act as Pauli Murray test from YDS students and overination for Reverend Pennington.” would have us act toward those we all awareness, Pennington now has In an email to the News, Schall know well but also those to whom a portrait and a room named in his reiterated that the committee we are connected simply by a com- honor. Despite these honors and “has a long-standing practice of mon and powerful dream. I am acknowledging the school’s racialnot considering nominations for grateful that you and I share Yale ized past, YDS and the powers that posthumous degrees.” She added and its mission to improve the be still refuse to budge in awarding that the committee aims to iden- world today and for future gener- Pennington his degree. Where is tify and honor current leaders ations. In looking forward to the freedom and liberty, Lux et Veritas, in their fields who it hopes will work we have ahead of us, I wish if we have not given the time of day inspire graduating students in you peace and strength. nor night to give homage to a Black their professional lives.

To improve the world we must man that predates all Black DivinDoes Yale understand that after improve the community surround- ity School students and BIPOC as decades of advocacy, they have ing us and listen to the people in a whole by awarding him a degree? denied the request to get Penning- need. This work that has been put Yale originated from YDS, ton an honorary degree in times in by those before me warrants and yet we have not changed the such as these, on the backs of the more than this denial. Receiving archaic structures that align with challenges today? After the recent an email denying Pennington a social issues. We have not fulfilled murder of George Floyd by police, degree on Indigenous People’s Day the promise of changes in equity.

President Peter Salovey promised after a rally held by the Associa- Change the Honorary Degrees change. Here is an abbreviated ver- tion of Native Americans at Yale, Commitees if the MLB can showor ANAAY, was demoralizing. At case the Negro League; the U.S. sion of his response:

Embassy can honor six women posthumously; Mississippi College can award a Black U.S army veteran a posthumous degree; and Grambling State can honor a deceased student’s family with a posthumous degree.

Why can’t the Honorary Degrees Committee create an acknowledgement of that degree? It propagates an elephant in the room in terms of Yale’s history to have a policy that prevents early Black scholars from being recognized.

Salovey noted that Yale in 2020 will be “acknowledging that slavery and the slave trade are part of Yale’s history — our hwistory. We do this because moving forward requires an honest reckoning with our past. And because the purpose of our University — to create, preserve and disseminate knowledge — calls us to do so.” If that is the case, then with the name change of Calhoun College to Grace Hopper College –– selecting a great thinker and naval officer over a vice president and senator that was passionate in advocating for slavery –– then so too can we overturn this long history of denying posthumous degrees. It is time to make things right; it is time to make a new path for honoring the fallen who have paved the way for Yale students to get their degrees.

In this purpose we give and create a new path: one where Pennington, made to sit out from classes while a student, gets a degree that honors his academic excellence and strides. I respectfully ask why turn to Yale University when it is the Divinity School that has the power in the first place in this manner? There’s already support and over 500 signatures on a petition for Pennington to receive a degree, and yet we have no response or place to share these complaints again.

This is not a resume booster, a performative action, but a decades-long protest to correct a wrong from the books of Yale University that has not been corrected.

An honorary degree is needed to come even a little bit closer to justice for Pennington’s educational career at Yale, as it will break barriers in addressing the dark past that Yale holds. If Pennington has a room and a painting for him at YDS, why can’t he as a fellow YDS scholar hold a degree that we all aim for? To end with a quote from Pennington himself: “There is one sin that slavery committed against me, which I can never forgive. It robbed me of my education.” Let freedom ring with an honorary degree on his grave.

Contact NOAH HUMPHREY at noah.humphrey@yale.edu .

To Those Who Have Been Kind

BY SYDNEY MCCORD GUEST COLUMNIST To Those Who Have Been Kind I am a lot of things. I am both a daughter and a sister, a roommate, a teammate, a friend, an athlete, a student and a Black woman.

How I see the world in the present is directly correlated to the manner in which it saw me, in the past. The past before I was a Black woman, but still a Black girl, journeying into a society that I soon learned would not always be kind to me. Kindness was something I discovered was not like karma; it didn’t always come back when I gave it out. At times, I felt as if I was on a boundless pursuit for the only thing I so desperately needed.

Someone to eulogize the part of me that was ever so often the origin of ridicule. And I found that.

Or rather, it found me. In different people at different times. And almost always, in the Black teachers, coaches and mentors that had a hand in helping me become all the things I am in the present.

My first Black teacher was my sixth grade algebra teacher. He wore up-to-date sneakers and didn’t let anyone come into his classroom with chipped nail polish. I was never particularly good at math, and so I often struggled in his class. And though I can say I’ve mastered middle school algebra now, I could not tell you one piece of mathematical material that I learned that year. What I can tell you is that Mr. Riley was welcoming. He was funny, understand-

ing and thrived off the success of his students. In his classroom, I felt safe from everything except a pop quiz. I didn’t know it then, but I would not have another Black

call me “Miss McCord,” a nickname some of my teammates also adopted later on. He was the first person who made me truly believe that I was good enough

me, Coach Yapo was compassionate when I made mistakes, and taught me that I deserve to give myself grace, to not be too hard on a body and mind that

CECILIA LEE// ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

Writer Sydney McCord recalls the influence her Black mentors had on her. teacher until college.

In my junior year of high school, I began training with my first Black coach. He was previously a sprinter from France, and in his thick accent he would

to continue running after high school. Coach Yapo gave me a new sense of confidence that can only really come from having been where I was. Aside from the practical track knowledge he gave

were trying their best.

But before sixth grade math and varsity track, there was home. My parents and older brothers, my earliest teachers. They were the first to ever tell me that “Black

is beautiful.” They were also the first to warn me that in addition to its beauty, Black is feared, suppressed, overlooked and underappreciated. I’d have to work twice as hard to get half as far. Growing up in a place where you’re the other, it was easy to become jaded and hardened to the people around you. And regardless of whether you were kind and good, there would still be those around who would not respect you, and see you as nothing more than someone who did not belong. Evenso, I cannot remember a time when my Black mentors were anything but kind and good. Not only to me, but to everyone around me, as well.

I was lucky enough to have a lot of excellent teachers and coaches over the years, not all of them Black, actually the majority of them not. But there is something about learning from and standing in the light of a Black mentor. The feeling that I could do anything, because they did. The feeling of reveling in the type of kindness that has been where I’ve been and is better for it. A type of kindness that gives its entire self, wholly for someone else. To be Black and kind is to be a lesson in the nevertheless, the regardless, the despite. Nevertheless, I will be gracious. Regardless of your feelings towards me, I will respect you. Despite everything, I will be good. And without those who raised me, that is one lesson I would not have learned.

Contact SYDNEY MCCORD at