The Yale Herald
Volume LIV, Number 2 New Haven, Conn. Friday, September 14, 2012
Sanctuary city?
From the staff We just have one thing to say this week: God bless sweater weather. It’s that glorious (unofficial) first week of fall, when you can wear a fleece with flip flops, order the Starbucks pumpkin spice latte (we’re not into it, but you might be!), and still pretend that you’re not actually enrolled in classes. Plus, there’s so much sun that we forgot why we bought that happy lamp. So enjoy! It’s a lovely time to be a New Havener. And by Halloween, it’ll be snowing. We’ve come in from the great outdoors to make this issue for you, so listen up! This week, the ever-intrepid Lucas Iberico Lozada, MC ’13, examines the combination of factors that make New Haven into a “sanctuary city”— and where the limits of that status are sharply drawn. In Features, Julia Calagiovanni, SM ’15, explores the way the Yale administration’s recent alcohol crackdown has manifested so far this year, especially for the class of 2016. In a look at a different side of campus enforcement policy, E-Lynn Yap, TD ’14, writes on a string of off-campus robberies that you may not know occurred this summer, because the Yale community at large was never notified. It’s sports week in Voices. Phoebe Gaston, PC ’13, writes about life after varsity cross country, and Hayley Byrnes, SM ’16, sits down with Scott
The Yale Herald Volume LIV, Number 2 New Haven, Conn. Friday, Sept. 14, 2012
EDITORIAL STAFF: Editor-in-chief: Emily Rappaport Managing Editors: Emma Schindler, John Stillman Executive Editor: Lucas Iberico Lozada Senior Editors: Sam Bendinelli, Nicolás Medina Mora, Clare Sestanovich Culture Editors: Elliah Heifetz, Andrew Wagner Features Editors: Ashley Dalton, Sophie Grais, Olivia Rosenthal Opinion Editor: Micah Rodman Reviews Editor: Colin Groundwater Voices Editor: Eli Mandel Design Editors: Serena Gelb, Lian FumertonLiu, Christine Mi, Zachary Schiller Photo Editor: Julie Reiter BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: William Coggins, Evan Walker-Wells Director of Advertising: Shreya Ghei Director of Finance: Stephanie Kan Director of Development: Joe Giammittorio ONLINE STAFF: Online Editors: Ariel Doctoroff, Carlos Gomez, Lucas Iberico Lozada, Marcus Moretti Webmaster: Navy Encinias Bullblog Editor-in-chief: John Stillman Bullblog Associate Editors: Alisha Jarwala, Grace Lindsey, Cindy Ok, Eamon Ronan, Jesse Schreck, Maude Tisch
Ramsay, the caretaker of the Yale golf course, which recently topped Golfweek’s list of the best campus courses in the country. In Culture, Lara Sokoloff, TC ‘16, takes us to the School of Art, discussing the work of Eugen Shonebeck. All this and more inside. In retrospect, it seems like we had more than one thing to say. But we really do love our sweaters. —Emily Rappaport Editor-in-chief
The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, nonpartisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office. If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please send a check payable to The Yale Herald to the address below. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 20122013 academic year for 65 dollars. Please address correspondence to The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 Email: Emily.Rappaport@yale.edu Web: www.yaleherald.com The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2011, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day. Cover by Lian Fumerton-Liu YH Staff
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The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
IN THIS ISSUE
COVER 12 Lucas Iberico Lozada, MC ‘13, explores the possibilities for—and limitations on— immigration policy in New Haven.
VOICES 6
Hayley Byrnes, SM ‘16, sits down with Scott Ramsay, superintendent of the award-winning Yale Golf Course.
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Phoebe Gaston, PC ‘13, on failure and fulfillment in a life after varsity cross country.
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FEATURES 10
Looking into a recent spell of burglaries of off-campus houses, E-Lynn Yap, TD ’15, investigates the Yale Police Department’s policy for reporting crimes around campus.
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Julia Calagiovanni, SM ’15, examines the administration’s approach to substance education during freshman orientation.
OPINION: Jordan Ascher, SM ‘14, on dishonesty in the presidential campaign; Vincent Tolentino, PC ‘14, on kindness.
REVIEWS
CULTURE 18
Kevin Su, MC ’16, explores the role of the student DJ on (and off) campus. Also: German artist Eugen Schönebeck and Yale’s Collection of Musical Instruments.
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Gabe Audu, BR ’14, explains why the xx came up short. Also: Robot & Frank, Swans, Meatball House, and a student film.
The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
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THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY The Herald’s week in review: what rocked, what sucked, and who took the lead in IM bowling.
CREDIT/D/FAIL Cr:
The effects of rain If you guys could only complain about one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? Would you pick technology, or country music, or how much you hate your body? I would pick, to complain only about weather the rest of my life. P.S. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, can you tell? I’d pick weather, but today I’m not complaining about it. This past weekend I sang a song, it’s called “I’m singing in the rain,” and I sang it in the rain. It was hot hot hot last week, and not the cute kind of hot, but the sweaty, unsexy hot that was dragging down our spirits and really dragging down our game. Not only did rain turn down that heat really seriously, but it also made everything suddenly feel cinematic. It gave us impetus for dramatic revelations and gratuitous tears. (I mostly just hung out in different people’s rooms and in Book Trader because it’s warmer than Blue State, don’t know about y’all.) The rains made things a lil more humid, as you can tell from the State of the Hair of your curly-haired friends. But isn’t that worth the chilling? Both and every definition of chill. —Cindy Ok YH Staff
D:
Beginnings Beginnings. They’ve always been the best of times, but the first lesson of shopping period is that they are also truly the worst of times. It’s not just the beginning of the semester that gets us down, though. It’s the beginning of fall (just get there, and commit, you ugly gods of weather), the beginning of friendships (before, you know, you can sheepishly suggest eating off campus rather than suffering another meal in Branford), and even the beginning of sentences in section. The lowlights of those beginnings include, but are not limited to, “I just think it’s so incredibly interesting that…” and, “Just to piggyback on that last thing…” The shame is that it’s so easy to stop listening after those buzzwords. But while these comments start off miserably, they often quickly lead to solid middles and awesome endings. So let’s all keep that in mind, especially those who have had strange starts to the year, now that we’re safely and surely entering The Middle. Staff —Cindy Ok
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The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
F:
The reply-all button The reply-all button. It’s a good thing I don’t embarrass easily, because lately my fingers have compulsively mistaken it for the regular “reply [just] to sender” button. Thanks, fingers, for making me use this one email chain as an effective personal blog. And this other as my daily scheduler. At bottom, I’m no better or more skilled in the ways of electronic communications than the newcomers on campus using email seriously for the first time in their lives. How’s that EliApps situation treating you, lil ones who shall never know the perils of Horde? We’re going to figure this out before we graduate, together. One day you and I will both remember to always, always take half a second to check if we’re responding to our best friend or to the eboard she’s emailed. On the brightside of my many cyber faux pas though, I recently called an entire panlist “babycakes,” so I’m looking forward to the immediate close friendships that will arise from that move. Babycakes: I’m so down to chill with you during The Middle. — Cindy Ok YH Staff
BY THE
BOOM/BUST INCOMING: The Clintons Unless you’ve been living in a Bass cubicle, Bill’s speeches have been blaring from your television and his dreaminess has been the subject of your grandmother’s Facebook. Hillary spoke out against the anti-Islam film provoking uprisings in the Arab world and her name was even thrown into the pool of potential Levin replacements. Now, Monica Lewinsky is shopping a “top-secret book,”according to the New York Post.
OUTGOING: Clint Eastwood He freaked you out at the convention. “What’s the deal with Clint?” became the go-to talking point for making conversation with your awkward freshman-year suitemate. Now he’s back to where he belongs: the movies and his wife’s E! reality show.
NUMBERS
#
TYNG CUP STANDINGS 1. Jonathan Edwards 2. Davenport 3. Trumbull 4. Ezra Stiles 5. Saybrook 6. Pierson 7. Berkeley 8. Timothy Dwight 9. Branford 10. Morse 11. Silliman 12. Calhoun
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
INDEX 4
TOP FIVE
Number of Americans killed by demonstrators in Benghazi, Libya, protesting the American-made film, The Innocence of Muslims, considered blasphemous to Islam.
Ways section assholes begin their comments
1,600,00 The number of views the trailer has on YouTube in Afghanistan.
5 4 3 2 1
“As it were...” “I was reading another book by this author, and...”
“I was in Qatar this past summer, and...” “In a manner of speaking...”
5,000,000 The reported budget, in dollars, of the film.
224 Number of people wounded in protests against the film in Cairo.
2 Number of times the suspected director, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, was found guilty of intent to manufacture methamphetamine.Sources: 1)
Clearing throats—brilliance requires clarity! Huffington Post 2) New York Times 3) Reuters 4) Associated Press 5) NBC News —Olivia Rosenthal YH Staff The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
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SITTING DOWN WITH SCOTT RAMSAY by Hayley Byrnes (Rebecca Wolenski/YH) Scott Ramsay has served as superintendent of the Yale Golf Course since 2003. Directing a staff that fluctuates between 10 and 30 people throughout the year, he oversees the maintenance of the course, as well as its refurbishment. Under his supervision, the course has ranked first in Golfweek’s college course category for two years running. The Herald sat down with Ramsay to discuss the course, its future, and a little-known sport called “flogton.” YH: What sparked your interest in managing a golf course? SR: I was an engineering student at the University of Rhode Island, and I was sitting inside doing mechanical drawings and I couldn’t stand being inside any longer. So I took a basket-weaving course called Plant and Soil Science 101. One of the [professors] was a golf course manager and told me what a great career it [was]. YH: What’s the architecture of the Yale course like? SR: The Yale Golf Course was built in 1926 by Seth Ranor and Charles Blair MacDonald (some people refer to it as a MacRanor). Their genius and the art to their science was how they would take a hole from Scotland or France and incorporate it into New Haven or Long Island or Chicago. We’re just trying to bring the Yale Golf Course back to that original 1926 design. YH: So the course has worldly inspirations? SR: Correct, correct. We have the Redan golf hole, which is our 13th hole, named after a famous golf hole in Scotland. We have another green that’s called the Barritz green, and it’s designed after the Barritz green in France. We mimic golf holes from all around the world. YH: What attracted you to the Yale course specifically? SR: The first time I played it was in 1984. I had never seen another golf course like it. It had inspired me then, and the job came open in 2003. At the time I was at The Orchards Golf Course, on the campus of Mount Holyoke. We were about to host the Women’s Open and I gave up the chance to host the fifth largest golf tournament in the world to come to Yale. It’s been the best thing I’ve ever done. YH: What the course’s most distinctive feature? SR: The scale. Everything is big. Every green is three to four
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The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
times larger than any green elsewhere in the country. The movement, the topography, everything is magnified. And it’s a thinking [person’s] golf course. Some people don’t like it, because they have to say, “Oh, if I don’t hit it there, I’m not going to score well.” YH: What do you consider the best part of your job? SR: Seeing everything coming together. Restoring the look and feel—it’s almost as if you’re in the wilds of Maine, and yet you’re still in the city of New Haven. YH: There have been several instances of labor strikes or protests. How has your relationship with the staff been and what have you done to redefine it? SR: My first day of work was the first day of the work stoppage in 2003. So I had some time to get my bearings about the golf course and wait for the staff to return. We had a very good, professional staff but they were not really being supported. YH: Walk me through how it was that first day, having to deal with labor issues. SR: On day one, labor issues were huge. We were just coming off of a work stoppage and everyone was up to the challenge. There was a lot of yelling, there was a lot of difficulty, and I realized that my goal was to improve the golf course. And piece by piece, other serendipities came for the staff: being recognized, getting better tools, getting better hours, adding people to the workforce, incorporating the dining hall staff during the summertime. This past summer we had 12 students join our staff. We had members of the hockey team and football team stay all summer, and everybody worked together. It’s a brilliant thing. We come to a coffee shop like this and we might see a groundskeeper, a dining hall staff person, and an undergrad all sitting at the same table saying, “Oh, what a great summer we had.” YH: What are some of the key changes you’ve made to make the Yale course the number one college golf course in America? SR: My best ideas are borrowed. We took a picture from 1934, an aerial photograph with the original bunkering, the original tree lines, and we use that as our snapshot in time. We’re going backwards to go forwards.
YH: How have you addressed some of the environmental issues surrounding all golf courses, such as water conservation and tree conservation? SR: Right now we’re one of the greenest golf courses in the country. We’re upgrading our irrigation system to the greatest and latest technology that’s available, and we’ve probably reduced our water usage by at least 30%. We are doing everything we can to [have] a softer, smaller footprint. But golf is not in the organic mode yet. YH: I did a cursory Wikipedia search recently and discovered the sport of “extreme golfing.” Do you think the Yale course would ever expand to do something like that? SR: We could, we could. Golf right now is in a challenging spot. Skiing was in the doldrums back twenty years ago. Ski areas were closing up, ski areas were not doing well financially, and then along came this goofy sport called snowboarding, which essentially revived ski areas. And to come up with a “goofy” game of golf could reinvigorate the game of golf, because golf is in the doldrums right now. Financially, it’s in the doldrums. Another game that you should look up is called flogton—it’s “not golf” backwards. YH: How do you envision the future of Yale golf? SR: We need to have snowboarding come to golf. Whether it’s flogton or extreme golf or marathon golf. It’s probably a sport we haven’t seen yet. Maybe it’s flogton. YH: What’s your favorite hole, and why? SR: Oh, that’s like asking me my favorite child. I’ll say the eighth hole, just because of its use of the land. It seems to be set naturally in the ground, but was completely 100 percent constructed, and the green is one of the biggest greens on the property. YH: The Yale Course has been voted the number one college course in America, correct? SR: Correct. A lot of people might call it hyperbole, but I think the golf course is as good a course as Yale [University] is a [University]. I don’t say that lightly. We are moving forward and we are the number -one college golf course. The other stuff is ancillary. —This interview was condensed by the author.
OUTRUNNING FAILURE by Phoebe Gaston his summer, I started running again after a year-long interlude of sloth. During that year, I deluded myself into thinking that six years of training for track and cross-country might yield some sort of magical carry-over effect, as if I had paid enough in dues to have the special privilege of putting my fitness on hold until I was able to use it again. In some respects, this was like having a phantom limb: I still dressed like I had practice after class, ate like I had workouts to fuel, and maintained a mental block between the hours of three and six p.m. even though I had nowhere to be. I had too much energy to sleep at night and regularly forgot to shower for days at a time, because for me the necessity of doing so had always been inextricably linked to the state of being drenched in sweat. Unsurprisingly, these unwitting pantomimes did little to maintain my actual fitness. A year of sitting on the couch and eating snacks does not an athlete make, even if the snack-eater still attends her team’s meets and mans the stopwatch during their workouts. My tentative jogs around the track in mid-April, eight months after tearing a muscle in my hip, were therefore not nearly as triumphant as I had envisioned them during the winter: eight months is sufficient time, I learned, to lose the muscle memory it requires to avoid tripping over yourself when you accelerate. It took me another three months to work up to three-mile runs, sidelined again in June when I threw out my back in a reckless incident of sitting cross-legged in the grass and reading without anything to lean against. But since the unfortunate day this July when I removed my headphones and realized how alarming my ragged breathing must have sounded to passers-by, things have been going more smoothly. As of August, I am back on the roster, training with the team again in the hopes of returning to competition before I graduate. Last September, I could never have imagined that I would be physically or mentally capable of beginning to train again so soon. At that point the only prospect darker than forfeiting my identity as a runner was continuing to hobble out to practice on my crutches, each ache in my hip a pulsing reminder of what was once again at stake after an 18month cycle of hope and bodily betrayal. I cried after every team dinner and grappled with quitting each night, tortured by the idea that once I was done, I’d be done—that once you’ve dropped the ball on a commitment like a varsity team, its inertia is irretrievable. But I thought I was OK with being done, and in the months that followed I thought that I had proven this to myself when I maxed out my GPA, joined research teams and clubs, resumed community service, and started writing again, finally soothing the anxiety I’d
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always felt about missing out on some crucial aspect of the Yale experience by leaving campus every afternoon. I signed up for a class that began after 2:15 p.m., took naps before dinner, and stayed up half the night because it didn’t matter. I met my first real boyfriend, entering a relationship I don’t think would ever have fit into the regiments of my former life. A sedentary lifestyle was shockingly and disturbingly easy to embrace. I downshifted from compulsive exerciser to casual walker in a matter of days, shedding a layer of neuroses I’d always thought was intrinsic to my personality. I wondered why I’d ever found pleasure in a rigid training schedule, reveling in spontaneity and telling myself that by indulging it I was living for the first time. I missed running with my teammates on the days that I went out to help with practice and surrounded myself with the forbidden fruit. I missed having an excuse to spend the afternoon outside. But otherwise I was happy, and I think I could have stayed happy. It was being happy, however, that made me uneasy. I’ve been running since I was 13, and running has been the one constant in each of the many transitions I’ve completed in that time. Finding out that even without a training plan I could be busy all day and fall asleep content was like realizing that all along I’d had a second, secret life playing out in parallel. Suddenly the singularity of my identity as an athlete seemed tenuous. Did it mean that nothing I did actually mattered if I could assimilate to a state of contentment regardless of how things changed? The theory of a set point for happiness is comforting but also vaguely discomfiting. Adaptability is admirable; a shape-shifting personality less so. This existential calculus boiled down to a simple equation. Before I started getting hurt, running made me happy. I liked the order it imparted to my life and the confidence it gave me in my own strength. And now I had discovered an equivalent sort of fulfillment in its absence, an exhilarating freedom in which my physical parameters were irrelevant and my body was never an obstacle. Injuries happen in this sport with apparent spontaneity. In freeing myself from the frustration of fighting something I couldn’t control, namely the burden of gravity on my own bones, I regained a sense of agency that had clearly foundered. What I had desperately needed was to shake the mindset that there was something fundamentally wrong in my life when I couldn’t run; the prospect of completing four years with this feeling at heart was deeply unsettling, and it was clear that the physical issues weren’t going to budge. So my intention in stepping back from the team had been to remove myself from the
immediate and most painful reminders of what I was missing, to soften the blow as I came to terms with a life without running and found a way to be provisionally happy. But what happened instead was a paradigm shift in the way I measured happiness itself, something that was completely unexpected and, in hindsight, the only answer. This happened not as a downsizing of my expectations but as a patching of the hole that competitive running left behind with something far more sustainable and internally motivated, leaving me with a buoyancy I had never experienced and an underlying satisfaction with the potential of a given day. The crucial question, as I weighed the decision to return to competition, was whether I could merge the two perspectives. Whether the idea of bodily strength as outcome and bodily strength as vehicle could ever exist in harmony. Whether the discrete forms of happiness in my two parallel lives could sum to something larger, instead of cancelling each other out as they had clearly begun to do by my junior year. And as I’ve made my way back to fitness, reintegrated myself with the team, and reignited my desire to race, I have carefully considered the following questions: if you take the depression and the fear out of injury, does that make you a less effective athlete? Does it obviate the desire to compete if you aren’t devastated by a setback that forces you to stop training? Because this, effectively, is what my year off accomplished: it destroyed my fear of failure. If I injure myself again this year and it turns out I’m unable to race, or if I humiliate myself on the track because six months isn’t enough time to get back in shape, what will I have lost? A year ago the pros-
pect of this sort of failure, embodied most saliently as wasted effort, drove me to quit. But I have spent the last 12 months facing failure head on, living out what used to be one of my greatest fears. Over the course of six years I came to count the number of miles I could run as a shorthand for each day and week’s success, an algorithm that both cheapened the joy in those miles and set me up for crushing disappointment down the line. But I don’t need running, anymore, to feel that my life is moving in a forward direction: I’m running purely out of love, for my sport and for my team. I find myself, then, in an unusual position. I walked on to the team freshman year, competed for a semester, trained through stress fractures for the following three, and then finally made the decision, as I limped around campus last September, that I needed to take a step back. I have approached life at Yale in various semesters as a competitive athlete, as an athlete in rehab wondering how much she was willing to sacrifice, as a non-athlete, as a team manager, and now as a senior making one last stab at her dream to compete in a five-kilometer race on the track. I have convinced myself, at various points, that as an athlete I am missing out on nothing, that as an athlete I am missing out on everything, that as a student I am maximizing my time at Yale, that as a student I am wasting my time at Yale, and today, at last, that as a student-athlete I can do it all, finally running for reasons that complement my life rather than completing it. Secure in the richness of what I have outside of practice, I am comfortable putting far more on the line than I have in any other season, with the happy corollary, now, that I also have far more to gain. —graphic by Madeline Butler The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
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OPINION LIAR, LIAR
BARKING AT SEA LIONS
by Jordan Ascher
by Vincent Tolentino YH Staff
Political lies are not new things. They’ve dotted leaders’ speeches for as long as there have been leaders. They are so ubiquitous, I think, that some people assume all politicians are liars. Maybe they are right. But ironically, the distrust many Americans feel toward the powerful (and the powerful-aspirant) numbs the urge to talk about when we’re being had. The memory of the two major parties’ national conventions is fresh. These affairs gave both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney a chance to make their pitches to the American people. We got little in the way of honest talk. We were mostly treated to distortions, attacks whipped up context-free, and narratives that subtly but willfully reimagined the facts. We even got a few of what political scientists call “whoppers.” Not that any of this is surprising. In fact, we have become so used to this blurry rhetoric that we don’t even bother to get our ire up about it. And each time we hear a lie with an uncritical ear, we reinforce the bad behavior. It’s a cynical thing to knowingly lie to the public; during this election cycle, we are legitimizing that cynicism with apathy. It would be wrong to absolve both candidates of this behavior, but it would also be disingenuous to say that they are equally guilty. At the DNC, Barack Obama and the Democrats drew a contrast between the president’s policies and Mitt Romney’s agenda that, at moments, swerved into dangerous territory: the president’s budget-cutting acumen overstated; Mitt Romney’s comments that the end of the Iraq War was “tragic” and that hunting down Osama bin Laden was not worth moving “heaven and Earth” were taken out of context; and Joe Biden’s claim that the middle class will pay 2,000 dollars more in taxes under Romney’s tax plan has not been sufficiently supported. So yes, the speeches at the DNC bore a patina of overstatement. The economy is recovering more slowly than the party line would have us believe, and Mitt Romney probably did not commit any crimes dur-
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The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
ing his time at Bain Capital, missing tax returns notwithstanding. But the true masters of manipulation in this election have been Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan. Their campaign has been maddeningly vague on policy. And when forced to offer something up, their proposals seem nonsensical. For instance, the Republican platform at its heart makes two promises: to balance the budget and to lower taxes. That is quite a needle to thread, especially given that the Republicans have presented no concrete proposal on how they will accomplish those goals. In his RNC speech, Ryan boldly reinterpreted the past four years. He claimed the Affordable Care Act would gut Medicare (one, not true; two, he embraced in his budget the same monetary savings as those in the ACA). He claimed the president was to blame for America’s credit downgrade (a result of brinksmanship in Congress of which Rep. Ryan himself was a part). He even blamed the president for a factory closing that happened in 2008. Both campaigns have spent time taking quotations out of context, but it speaks to the shamelessness of Team Romney that a night of the RNC was themed “We Built It”—a reference to a syntactic error Obama made during a stump speech. Romney-Ryan 2012 seems to be betting that the American electorate will not bother to investigate their claims. And they are probably right. I don’t mean to spin a polemic here, it’s just that systematic, brazen, and pervasive lying is something worth getting mad about, no matter who you’re voting for. And I don’t blame Obama or Romney (well, yes I do). But they are both trying to win an election, and prudence takes a backseat to ambition in the frenzy to become the Most Powerful Person on Earth. We should blame ourselves, and our media. Lies should be evaluated with gravity and persistence. Over the past two weeks, we heard them acknowledged by grinning talking heads in the midst of balloon-andconfetti hysteria. What usually followed was a tacit shrug.
This happened one night whilst barking at sea lions: La Jolla, California—my friend Kat, Richard Duardo the printmaker, and I were in La Jolla for an art show opening, but now that that was over, and dinner was done and ways were parted, it was the three of us again, on a cloudy cove with a bottle of wine. Ocean waves, sea lion sounds, the cry of a seagull as it passed overhead on its midnight errands. We were talking primordium and sea creatures. Then Christ and seagulls. Lilies of the field. Kat walked away to use the bathroom, and Richard—master conspirator, master raconteur—turned to me and flicked on the Richard Duardo eye-fire. “Listen,” he said, shattering my mood of cosmic reverie. “It’s easy for them, right?” “Hmm? For who…the seagulls?” “The seagulls, yeah, and the sea lions. Waves, flowers, the rest. It’s easy, isn’t it?” “Mm, yeah, it is.” I had no idea what he was saying. You learn to nod your head when Richard’s talking. “Then why is it so goddamn difficult for us?” I thought I was starting to see what he meant. “Why do we stress?” “Why are we mean.” He was back up in the cosmos, he was looking at the horizon. I pressed him. He stared at me for a second, and then he said: “Imagine you’re rolling into a room full of people, or a party, like we were doing today. You walk in, right, and you just know—you can, like, feel it, or smell it—you know immediately when there’s someone who’s just gunning for you. You know, glancing over, giving you their back, talking about you to their friends. You know what I mean?” I knew exactly what he meant. “Well here’s what you do: you make your way directly to them, however you need to, you look them in the eye, and—“ Here we go. “You bow to them.” Richard genuflected on the sand.
I didn’t say anything as he stood back up. I wasn’t sure if he was kidding. “You shake their hand, send them nothing but good vibes. And you talk. That way, when you walk away, they’ll turn back to their friends and have nothing but good things to say about you. ‘Oh, Richard? He’s actually just a really nice guy.’ They’ll even rep you.” Not kidding. That’s good. “It’s like defusing a bomb. You go right up to them, you see, like—red wire, yellow wire.” Richard pulled wires out of the air. “And then you’re good. You’re safe.” That’s what he meant by “easy.” This was so simple. This was so easy. “And then.” He lit up. “What do you do next? You turn and find the lowliest person at the party—and you go and talk directly to them. You give them the time of day. Lift them up. Bring the high-up people down, and lift up the low. And then you’re all on the same level. And everyone can talk.” YOU KNOW, I CAN’T TELL IF EVERYBODY knew this and I’m just catching on late. Clear the air, make things right, be kind, equalize. Simple, right? Anyway, it felt like a revelation, like some secret knowledge, but of course it shouldn’t be a secret. That’s the beauty of it—everybody should know this so that everybody’s on the same, lovely page. How was my summer? Well, I got this in June. So, very good. It was very, very good. We’re a couple weeks in now; the postsummer glow is fading from our cheeks, and a palpable old anxiety is settling over campus. So I think it’s as good a time as any to bear something like this in mind: talking to people is easy, being kind is easy, and we’re all, always, afforded these basic decencies of human interaction. My housemate has this semester off and she’s pointing out the sunset, every single afternoon, making coffee, singing in the hallways, mixing drinks. She’s got it right. Let’s take care of each other. Let’s be good to each other. And let’s talk. —graphic by Christine Mi YH Staff
Off-campus burglary To the Yale Community: I write to let you know that.... by E-Lynn Yap
t 5 a.m. on Thurs., July 19, Andrew Wagner, TD ‘15, woke up to find that his house had been burglarized. Wallets, laptops, a bike—even the Internet router had been stolen. Although the front door was open, there was no sign of forced entry: the locks and the windows were intact. Wagner (current culture editor for the Herald) and his housemates had all been present during the burglary, sound asleep in their beds.
A
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The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
The incident at 37 Lynwood Pl. was one of several break-ins that occurred in Yale off-campus housing this past summer. But the Yale community received an email from Yale Police Department Chief Ronnell Higgins on only one occasion. For the victims of this summer’s burglaries, that may have been the most unsettling part of the experience. One of Wagner’s housemates, Celine Cuevas, TD ’15, called the YPD several days af-
ter the burglary to ask why they had not sent out an email. “I wanted to warn our neighbors since Lynwood is close to campus,” Cuevas said. “But the Yale police said that since there are cases every day, they have to sit down to review which ones are threatening enough to be sent out. Otherwise, they’d be sending too many emails.” Wagner took issue with the process. “As students, we’re given the impression that every incident gets reported,” he said. “That is not so.” A federal law called the Clery Act requires the YPD to inform the student body of certain crimes that occur within close
proximity of the campus. But the decision of which crimes warrant an email is left to the YPD’s discretion. In emails to the Herald, Janet Lindner, associate vice president for administration at Yale, who oversees police and security services, explained, “Crimes are assessed on a case-by-case basis to determine if the incident poses a serious or ongoing threat to the community—and, if so, the Police Chief issues a Timely Warning, called “Message from the Chief,” to the entire campus community of faculty, staff and students.” If breaking and entering doesn’t
Off-campus crimes affect students who live on campus as well: “Just because you live off-campus doesn’t mean it’s not Yale.” —Yasmine Hafiz, MC ‘13 qualify as a serious threat, where does the YPD draw the line? According to Lt. Steven Woznyk, assistant YPD chief, it depends on “what we know about the facts surrounding a particular crime, the nature of the crime, the continuing danger to the campus community and the possible risk of compromising law enforcement efforts.” The YPD reserves the right to assess these factors before announcing a crime to the community. The process that determines whether students wake up to an email from Chief Higgins or not cannot be called an exact science. Of the off-campus burglaries this summer, the only one the YPD determined to be worth reporting occurred on Edgewood Avenue. A Morse junior, who asked to remain anonymous, discovered her house had been burglarized in a similar manner as the Lynwood house. Like Wagner and Cuevas, her valuables were stolen from her room while she was asleep. The burglar unplugged her laptop charger and took her MacBook, as well as two purses and a wallet. Waking to see a male figure leaving through her bedroom door, the victim promptly called the police. The New Haven Police Department investigated both cases, but the Yale community only saw the report of the Edgewood case. Even then, the only YPD sent the email after the victim insisted they do so.
“When an email didn’t go out that night, I called the next morning to ask why, and it appeared that they required NHPD to register the case first,” the Morse junior wrote in an email to the Herald. “I was very upset, and said that students had a right to know that someone was in my room—clearly a dangerous situation. After that, I was called back by the chief of police, and he sent Yale officers to the location right away to retake details of the case. They were very helpful with the case, and the email went out right away.” Beyond the administrative priorities of the police department, the Clery Act mandates that the college notify the community of crimes in the campus area. Passed in 1990, the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act was named after a Lehigh University freshman who was raped and killed in her
dorm. The act requires colleges to keep a daily log of all reported crimes and to distribute an annual security report to students and employees. In her capacity as administrative liaison to the police department, Lindner sends this report out on October 1 of each year. The YPD handles the daily crime log, posting it on Yale’s public safety website. Then, of course, there are the email blasts that reach the student body—but only, as the Clery Act specifies, for “crimes considered to be a threat to other students and employees.” The apparent haziness of the criteria for threatening crimes aside, not all students see the need for more comprehensive email alert coverage of crimes that occur off campus. Liana Saussy, TD ’14, whose valuables were also taken this summer from her bedroom on Howe Street while she was sleeping, said
that while she could see how emails might be helpful to those “deciding whether or not to rent houses in the area,” current residents already know how to protect themselves against crime. “I was already taking basic precautions, like putting my valuables in less obvious places and securing them. Even if I had received more emails, it probably wouldn’t have helped me.” Although Saussy and her housemates had secured all the doors and windows, the burglar gained entry by breaking the lock on the front door. The question then becomes how Yale can do more to ensure the safety of the sizeable number of students who opt out of on campus housing each year. Lt. Woznyk pointed to the emergency blue phones and door-todoor safe rides available after dark—important safety measures that protect students not just on but around the actual campus. Totally securing the off-campus apartments and houses, however, presents a problem that the administration and police department have not yet been able to solve. Yasmine Hafiz, MC ’13, whose house on High Street was burglarized twice this year said that living off-campus “feels very different from having a locked gate around your college.” Hafiz went on to point out that off-campus crimes affect students who live on campus as well. “Just because you live off campus doesn’t mean it’s not Yale,” she said. “Our house is very social, with lots of people coming and going.” Yale isn’t strictly separated into on-campus and off-campus communities. All Yale students, whether they live on Lynwood or in Pierson, form a part of the Yale community—and it is to the entire Yale community that Chief Ronnell A. Higgins’ emails are addressed. —graphics by Zachary Schiller YH Staff
The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, , 2012)
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The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
The limits of local power Lucas Iberico Lozada, MC ’13, traces how the Elm City became a sanctuary city
t’s Sunday morning in Fair Haven, a New Haven neighborhood where local businesses bear the flags and images of Latin America. In one store window, wool ponchos hang next to a mannequin draped with scarves representing different soccer clubs. Down the street, Raimundo, Hugo and Juan—all from Mexico City—have cooked their legendary barbacoa, a sumptuous breakfast of 30 pounds of pork, 20 gallons of yellow broth, at least two pounds each of chopped limes, onions, and cilantro, not to mention two large wooden bowls filled with salsa, one a pale orange and the other a pale green. A small crowd of mostly men trickles in to snap up the food, share gossip and drink Coronas. Every so often a doña so-and-so will pull up in a minivan and take home a few plastic containers of the barbacoa. It feels like it could be any immigrant neighborhood in any American city, but in fact it’s the epicenter of the most farreaching attempt to create a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants. By a combination of grassroots organizing, community-City Hall interactions and top-down directives, the city of New Haven has expanded the rights of undocumented immigrants further than any other town in America. Here, police have been ordered not to cooperate with federal authorities to identify and deport people; immigrants are given ID cards; and now, the mayor is pushing for all residents of New Haven, even if they are not citizens
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of the United States, to be able to vote in city elections. The changes have been implemented with the overwhelming support of the Board of Aldermen. But America’s overall policy has gone in the opposite direction, with a nearly sevenfold increase in deportations from 88,897 in 2004 to 584,436 in 2009, before dropping to 343,932 last year. What caused New Haven, run by a white mayor and an overwhelmingly white
migrants—nearly all of them from Latin America and undocumented—moved in, usually to Fair Haven. Lugo began to notice a disturbing correlation between the rising number of undocumented immigrants and the rise in crime perpetrated against them. “I was working as a community mediator for the city at the time, so I was seeing all sorts of cases where people would come to me because I was Latino,” he
for Progressive Action, a Latino advocacy group, and ask for her help in a collaborative effort to lobby the city for change. “The challenges faced by our clients were systemic challenges, systemic issues. Fixing them would involve large-scale work,” says Matos. So in the winters of 2004 and 2005, Matos, Lugo and leaders from various churches in the community organized a series of community meetings with New
By a combination of grass-roots organizing, community interactions, and top-down directives, New Haven has expanded the rights of undocumented immigrants further than any other town in America. and African-American Board of Aldermen, to push such cutting-edge policies? And can those policies make a difference if New Haven remains an island surrounded by a larger country bent on removing undocumented immigrants? COMMUNITY ORGANIZER JOHN JAIRO Lugo remembers when New Haven’s immigrant population began to swell in the mid-1990s. He arrived in the city in 1991, when there were “hardly any Central or South Americans here. It was mostly all Puerto Ricans, all citizens.” Over the next few years, however, Lugo watched as im-
remembers. “They were too scared to talk to anyone else.” In 2002, Lugo decided that something needed to be done— something more than City Hall was able to offer the residents of its city. He formed Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA) along with a group of Guatemalan day laborers who had been unsuccessfully lobbying Connecticut officials for the right to a driver’s license. In 2003, crimes and abuses being perpetrated by criminals—and, even more terrifying, by police officers—against the Latino community led Lugo to meet with Kica Matos, executive director of JUNTA
Haven’s then-chief of police, Francisco “Cisco” Ortiz. Next, they met with New Haven’s long-serving mayor, John DeStefano, Jr., in whom Matos and Lugo found a willing ally. He asked them to come back with a set of ideas that they would like the city to help them with. In March 2005, Lugo and Matos returned to the mayor’s office and presented a document outlining six proposals. According to DeStefano, he was already mostly aware of the problems facing the Latino community when Matos and Lugo first came calling. His office had noticed an “uptick in street robberies and home in-
The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
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vasions of undocumented residents in the city,” and he suspected that many crimes went unreported due to threats—by landlords and criminals—of being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.), the branch of the Department of Homeland Security tasked with enforcing federal immigration law. Yale Law School professor Michael Wishnie and his students in the Community Lawyering Clinic reviewed the proposals to determine their legal feasibility and draft them into concrete policy proposals. One of the solutions proffered by Wishnie and his team was a municipal identification card, designed to provide undocumented residents with the photo identification they needed to open bank accounts. The rise in number of robberies committed against undocumented immigrants could be directly traced, the team argued, to the amount of cash carried by immigrants, itself a result of their legal inability to keep money in a bank. While such identification would not confer any of the rights afforded to citizens or legal residents, it allows for a few key abilities. The ID, known as the Elm City resident card—which would function as a limited debit card, a library card, and a means to feed parking meters in New Haven—became a matter of controversy two years before the first cards were ever issued. In an Oct. 4, 2005, article headlined “Mayor to offer ID to illegal aliens,” the New Haven Register reported that DeStefano, then a contender for the Democratic nomination for governor, had announced a plan to provide identification for all city residents—including its undocumented community. Lugo was taken by surprise at the announcement, which he felt was premature and represented a troubling “slippage in communication between the mayor’s office and the community.” Local and national press editorial boards immediately jumped on the may-
A further setback, however, would expose serious tensions between the undocumented community and the city. On Jun. 7, 2006, Lugo was helping a group of undocumented immigrants living in a crowded house on Elm Street file a housing complaint with the city against their landlord for trespassing and harassment. At some point during Lugo’s visit to the house, New Haven police officer Jon Haddad arrived. According to a New Haven Independent article written the next day, Haddad deduced that the tenants were undocumented because the landlord had
nandez trained his sights on bolstering Fair Haven and other poor neighborhoods through progressive economic initiatives. When Fernandez first came to New Haven in 1993 as a law student, Fair Haven was “in pretty desperate shape,” he says. He credits a combination of an accommodating city government and an entrepreneurial-minded population with helping to restore the neighborhood. Fernandez, who helped push city dollars into redeveloping Grand Avenue, Fair Haven’s busiest commercial street, sees a very clear moral—and pragmatic—imperative
“What’s the use of a New Haven identification card if I’m working in Guilford all day? —Raimundo, Fair Haven resident, undocumented immigrant been screaming at the tenants and was threatening to call immigration officials. Haddad returned after speaking with the landlord and announced to Lugo, Ramos and the tenants that the landlord’s threatening visits would stop. He then added that he’d also placed a call to federal immigration agents. “We said to him, ‘Hey! You can’t do that!” Lugo recalls. “‘We have an agreement with Francisco Ortiz!’ And [Haddad] said, ‘I’m just complying with the federal order.’ Thankfully,” Lugo adds, “he didn’t do his job very well, so no one ever followed up with the [tenants].” Once again, Matos, Lugo and others went before the mayor, and this time emerged not only with a promise of support but also with a general order signed by Ortiz, the chief of police. The general order turned into policy what had long been privately promised by the police chief and the mayor: an explicit refusal to enforce warrants served by I.C.E. or
for the work of city officials: “When you’re managing a city, you’re balancing a number of social justice obligations as well as a number of economic policies. What side of the border someone was born on doesn’t affect how you’re going to treat them. And further, if someone is willing to take an empty storefront and put a business there, they’re an asset to the city.” This exuberance for the innovative spirit of immigrants is matched—and often exceeded—by the mayor himself. DeStefano is well known for referring to his immigrant past—his grandparents immigrated to the United States from Italy through Ellis Island in the 1930s. DeStefano likes to use the fact of his grandparents’ immigration to “remind” Italian-Americans where their grandparents and great-grandparents came from. In DeStefano’s mind, it is inconceivable that members of his own ethnic group could be anti-immigrant, especially given that the “great institutions of [the Italian-American] community—in
“When you’re managing a city, you’re balancing social justice obligations and economic policies. What side of the border someone was born on doesn’t affect how you’re going to treat them.” —Henry Fernandez, LAW ‘93 or’s office, which responded the next day by flatly denying that the city would issue the ID. After a week of confusion and mixed messages, the mayor ultimately retracted his retraction, clarifying his position in a press release the next week by announcing that the ID card was still being discussed as a “potential policy initiative,” and not as a definitive plan. ULA sent DeStefano a large Christmas card that December. After thanking him for all of his good intentions, the card asked him to “quit playing” with the community and make the ID card happen. “He was furious,” Lugo remembers with a smile, “but six months later he announced that the card would happen.”
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The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
term Alderwoman from Ward 16, which encompasses most of Fair Haven, says that paying for the ID card was a matter of serious concern for a city that was already struggling to get by. “It’s been difficult times,” she sighs, “but Kica [Matos] was able to find funding, and I’m very happy to have been a part of a vehicle that got [the card] passed.” Matos found funding in the First City Fund Corporation, a 501(c)(3) public charity on whose board the mayor sits, according to tax documents from 2010 (the mayor does not draw an income from this
other federal immigration agents; a prohibition against inquiring into the immigration status of anyone not suspected of a crime; and a promise of confidentiality for anyone who reports or is the victim of a crime. SHORTLY AFTER THE PASSAGE AND enforcement of the general order in 2006, Matos was asked by DeStefano to join his office as a deputy mayor of community affairs, joining her husband, Henry Fernandez, in City Hall. Fernandez, an economic development administrator, had himself joined City Hall in 2004 at the mayor’s request. With Matos focused on making the municipal ID a reality, Fer-
healthcare, in education, and in social justice—were largely organized around immigration challenges.” On the political level, the mayor sees federal immigration policy largely as a failure. DeStefano believes that it is up to local communities to arrange policies and practices that work to the benefit of, as he put it, the “entire community.” “I think this country greatly disadvantages itself by not fully embracing immigration,” he said. “It disadvantages itself economically, culturally, and socially.” Eventually, after continued lobbying by ULA and support from DeStefano, Matos was able to write a piece of legislation that satisfied everyone. Migdalia Castro, five-
position). The Aldermanic vote that approved the card was actually a vote to approve funding from First City for the card. On June 4, 2007, the New Haven Board of Alderman approved funding for the ID by a vote of 25 to one. The only ‘nay’ came from Republican Arlene DePino, who later decided not to seek reelection in the 2011 aldermanic elections. (Ms. DePino did not respond to numerous phone calls seeking comment for this article on her position.) As Alderwoman Castro puts it, with the passage of the Elm City resident card, the city “stated loud and clear that ‘our house is your house.’” TWO DAYS LATER, IMMIGRANTS’ RIGHTS activists, city residents and the mayor awoke to the news that federal I.C.E. agents had swept through the city and conducted a major raid early that morning. By late morning on Jun. 6, 2007, 29 New Haven residents had been arrested in their homes, all without search warrants. Three more were arrested three days later. “It was clear then and it is clear to me now that [the I.C.E. raid] was retaliatory—that it was not formed by any sense of urgency regarding national security, or threat of violence,” the mayor told me. Lugo, surprisingly, has a much more balanced take on the raids. “Look—the raids were clearly illegal, and were clearly a snub to the mayor. I didn’t worry too much about it because I knew we would take [I.C.E.] to court and win—everyone was on our side then.” I.C.E. spokesperson Ross Feinstein denies that the raids were retaliatory. “Our targeted immigration enforcement efforts make our communities safer, and are in no way connected to initiatives undertaken by the City of New Haven. Our efforts targeting convicted criminal aliens and those who put public safety at risk, occur on a regular basis throughout the United States—each and every day.” A subsequent Freedom of Information request by lawyers at Yale Law School representing ULA and Junta, however, revealed that I.C.E. agents and officials
had been watching the proceedings of the city’s march towards the Elm City resident card for many months before the raids. These discussions—one referred to New Haven’s immigration policies as “the Amistad sailing illegal immigrants to freedom,” according to the AP—formed part of a subsequent case taken up by lawyers from Yale to dismiss the case against some of the immigrants.
rhetoric, even the most liberal among them were surprised when he announced a plan in December of last year to support a push for immigrants and non-citizens to be able to vote in city elections. Such a move has raised all the same questions—and fierce criticism from outside New Haven—as his October 2005 announcement about the municipal ID plan. This time even his most steadfast
have in mind when they laud the creation of small businesses. When asking over two dozen New Haven residents—all Latinos and nearly all undocumented—about their relationship to the Elm City resident card, I was surprised by the variety of answers I received. Most, like Raimundo and Hugo, are happy to have it for the quotidian concerns and responsibilities most citizens take for
ter job with outreach.” Though small and seemingly insignificant, for a population mostly suspicious of government services, such missteps could severely compromise the card’s effectiveness. One problem commonly faced by these undocumented immigrants cannot be fixed by city administrators—in fact, cannot even be fixed by Mayor DeStefano. Many immigrants spend their summers
Over the past five years, two of the arrested immigrants have been deported, 15 have had their cases dismissed, and four are still awaiting judgment on their cases. In February 2012, the remaining 11 immigrants, represented by the Yale lawyers, won a lump sum of $350,000 from the government, as well as an agreement to stay the deportations after the federal government and I.C.E. agreed to settle their case.
Democratic allies and supporters outside the city—including Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy and New Haven Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro—opposed the plan. The people such legislation would most affect, however, seem unconcerned with—and often ignorant of—any of the mayor’s grand statements. The lives led by people like Raimundo and Hugo are fairly straightforward: “Live where you can and take whatever job you can get,” as Hugo puts it. Raimundo sends whatever is left from his $8.25 per hour paycheck home to Mexico City, after paying his share of rent, utilities, and cable in the house. His weekly barbacoa—food is $5 per person, beers $3 each—is probably not what conservative politicians
granted—opening a savings account, paying their cable bill, having a phone line. Angelica, an older woman, tells me the card allows her 25-year-old son to buy beer legally in the supermarket. There were also people like John, who, as legal residents—and proud owners of Connecticut state driver’s licenses—don’t need cards, but have them anyway and insist on dragging all of their friends down to City Hall to get theirs too. Still, there are problems. When the office issuing the card was moved from the front of City Hall into the back, many immigrants interviewed expressed concern that the program was being phased out. As City Hall spokesperson Elizabeth Benton, BR ’04 (a former managing editor of the Herald), acknowledges, the city “could do a bet-
landscaping, roofing, and doing whatever other jobs that contractors who prowl the streets of Fair Haven in pickup trucks are offering. These jobs are rarely in New Haven—it is much more common to be trucked out to towns like Branford, Guilford, North Haven, or even Danbury, a city notorious for its anti-immigrant mayor. As Raimundo puts it, “What’s the use of a card from New Haven if I’m working in Guilford all day?” Such a response underscores that while the card provides concrete advantages to undocumented immigrants, these advantages end outside of the city walls—and sometimes, when the federal government gets involved, don’t even count for much within them.
“IMMIGRATION,” SAYS MAYOR DESTEFANO, “has been central to America’s emergence as a powerful democracy, as a powerful economy, as a powerful culture, and frankly is a powerful beacon of both individual rights and collective responsibility.” Despite being used to his lofty
—Graphic by Christine Mi
The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
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An after-hours education Teaching 2016 how to drink safely by Julia Calagiovanni
t turns out that the bright college years are, at the beginning, pretty boring. Freshmen spend their first Camp Yale shuttling between a series of meetings, presentations, and discussions. Alcohol, campus safety, and sexual assault—what one freshman counselor called “the big three”—are covered in an early workshop called “Navigating Your First Days.” In the following weeks, freshmen meet with Peer Health Educators, Communication and Consent Educators, their masters and deans, and, most frequently, their entryways to continue these conversations. It’s a lot of meetings, freshmen say. This is, to some level, unavoidable: masters, deans, and freshman counselors are tasked with imparting an enormous amount of information to freshmen in a short period of time. Most students contacted said that they found the sessions tedious, but understood that they were, in the words of a Saybrook freshman who asked to remain anonymous, “a necessary evil.” Alcohol use on campus is, of course, a perennial topic of discussion, especially during Camp Yale. In the past year, several new policies—stricter tailgate rules, a ban on fall rush for freshmen, and a mandatory registration policy for off-campus events among them—have been announced and implemented, not without controversy. The administration’s recent efforts to curb student drinking were also apparent at this year’s Camp Yale; some students felt that freshmen had to attend more meetings than in years past, whether those meetings were about alcohol specifically, or scheduled just to keep students out of trouble. Grace Brittan, SM ‘16, said she attended about six meetings with her FroCo about drinking in particular, in addition to two other meetings with her dean and larger groups. Her FroCo emphasized safety procedures such as calling Yale Health in case of an emergency, and also covered some more practical points. “At one meeting, we had to pour water in a red solo cup and estimate
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The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
how much a shot was, so that we would know how much that looked like in a cup,” Brittan said. Although she acknowledged that the meetings made her “more conscientious” when going out, Brittan said she knew most of the information already, and it quickly became redundant. “They could have just told us once,” she said. These meetings, though tedious, are definitely not new. Grier Barnes, SM ’14, said she remembered constant meetings during Camp Yale her freshman year. “Meetings would often purposely start at 10, as if they were trying to keep us from going out. I remember having to go to at least two or three scheduled events a day,” Barnes said. Some freshmen overdo it, of course. They come to college with little to no experience drinking, attend a party with unexpectedly strong punch, and don’t eat enough beforehand. “It’s not a situ-
As the first line of support when a student has a problem, FroCos say it’s important to them that their freshmen trust them. Joanna Cornell, SY ‘12, a former freshman counselor, said in a March 2012 interview with the Herald that “[her] job as a FroCo is to make sure they can always come to me no matter how drunk they are.” If one of her friends were seriously sick from drinking too much, Sarah Bull, DC ’16, says she would call the Yale Police and have them taken to Yale Health. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?” she says. In the marathon of orientation sessions, new names, and late nights, this is something that freshman counselors and administrators alike emphasize. Yale’s “medical amnesty” policy holds that drinking is a health issue first; a student should get medical assistance when necessary without the possibility of disciplinary action. While other regulations may have changed, W. Marichal
deans. While exact figures are unavailable, ExComm reports reveal that over 100 such referrals are made each year. Some students are also asked to participate in alcohol abuse counseling at Yale Health. Alcohol-related incidents such as buying or consuming alcohol as a minor, serving alcohol to minors, and falsifying ID in order to buy alcohol appear frequently as the reasons for dispositions—hearings in which students plead guilty to their charges and are levied a punishment accordingly. In the 2008-09 school year, 25 of 67 dispositions involved alcohol; in 2009-10, 24 of 80; and in 2010-11, 29 of 79. For the 2011-12 academic year, ExComm shifted to semi-annual reports. The fall 2011 report listed 52 depositions, eight of them involving alcohol; the spring 2012 report will be released in October. So, while alcohol use remains a concern, it does not appear that more students are facing disciplinary action
“Meetings would often purposely start at 10, as if they were trying to keep us from going out.” —Grier Barnes, SM ’14 ation that I want to be in,” said one current FroCo, “but I feel like... FroCos are prepared.” The FroCos contacted said that they felt that they were well-equipped to handle students who had had too much to drink; their training specifically addresses how to tell if a student needs to be sent to Yale Health or Yale-New Haven Hospital. But no training can cover every situation, and there are often difficult decisions to be made. For example, a student’s condition may warrant a trip to Yale-New Haven, but that comes with a consequence: a student’s dean will be notified and his or her parents will receive a bill for the ambulance ride.
Gentry, dean of student affairs, stressed in an email to the Herald that “students should not fear that they will be charged merely for being intoxicated.” The reports of the Yale College Executive Committee confirm that students are not called before it simply for being intoxicated. They can, however, be held responsible for any other violation of the University Regulations—vandalism, assault, or serving alcohol to a minor, among other things—that occurs while they are intoxicated. But evading ExComm doesn’t mean that a student is off the hook. Students with alcohol issues may be referred from ExComm directly to their residential college
as a result. Marvin Chun, master of Berkeley and a professor of psychology, wrote in an email that he would warn students against the “dangerous illusion” that they are “invincible.” “As much as people are going to tell you about how to pick classes, until they do it themselves they’re not going to learn,” Cornell reflected. “I think alcohol works the same way.” Students crave fun, but the administration stresses safety, and the class of 2016 learns an important lesson, one Saturday at a time. —photos by Julie Reiter (top) and Rebecca Wolenski (bottom)
In the 2010-11 school year, ExComm heard 79 depositions, 29 of which were related to alcohol. The report for fall 2011 listed 52 depositions, eight of which involved alcohol.
The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
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CULTURE The DJ blues by Kevin Su
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t was Friday night, and a familiar scene was unfolding in the Davenport courtyard. There were circles of friends dancing awkwardly, drunken encounters between new and old acquaintances, a constant stream of traffic on and off the dance floor—and, of course, a DJ sitting behind his laptop blasting the same Top 40 songs you heard last weekend. I found myself wondering how much I knew about my DJ that night, or how much anyone knew about him. He was a fellow student, after all, not some stranger hired for just that party. Beyond requesting the entire discography of Nicki Minaj, did people really interact with this guy? For a little perspective, I spoke to Ishan Sinha, BR ‘14, the DJ of another party that night. That Friday, Sinha DJ’d for his largest audience yet, at a party hosted by the International Students Organization at Thali Too. “You’re sort of controlling the crowd,” he said with a laugh. “It’s really cool to be able to manipulate hundreds of people that way.” Both Sinha and the anonymous Davenport DJ occupy a position at a party that gives them a chance to interact with people in ways that they couldn’t on a daily basis. The presence of student DJs at Yale, however, does not seem to indicate any kind of DJ community. In fact, every DJ or producer I spoke to agreed that neither DJing nor music production, which often go hand in hand, has a “scene” here at Yale. To Max Gordon, SY ‘15, a DJ back home in Westchester and producer for the student band Nero, My Panda, what motivates parties like the ones in Davenport and Thali Too is not an electronic music culture, but a “hookup culture.” Sinha agreed: “People don’t usually go to these parties for the music. Music is never the focal point.” This attitude towards music can, surprisingly, be very rewarding for DJs. “When I was performing a lot with my band last year, it was hard to get people to come out to shows,” Sinha told me. “Everyone just wants to get drunk and party. It’s very cool to have that crowd [at Thali]. I’ve never performed anything with a crowd that large.” For others, like Gordon, it can be discouraging: “I like playing music that people can’t grind to. I like old house, disco stuff.” Thomas Rokholt, SM ‘14, DJ and electronic genre music director at WYBC, also laments the state of taste here at Yale. “My biggest complaint at Yale is that as I’m DJing there is no patience in the crowd for pace in the set,” Rockholt said. “Maybe you can point some of the blame at electro-house [because] it’s just like ear candy: it’s easy to digest, its tasty for a while, but you get too much of it and you’re sick.” A DJ’s greatest hope is that he can make a crowd love the music he plays as much as he does; just look at Sinha, who takes such pride in his place of influence at an
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The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
event. As student DJ Demetra Hufnagel, BR ‘14, put it, “The day when I can open with Flying Lotus’ remix of ‘I Feel Like Dying’ at a party that isn’t solely for my friends will be a good one.” But does catering to Yale’s exclusive tastes then guarantee success? Not necessarily, says Alex Bae, BR ‘14, a member of the board of 17O1 Records, a member of campus band The Keep Calm, and former producer for Yale student rapper, Yaakov. “I’ve been in [this music culture] for two years and I still don’t really understand it,” Bae said. Bae cites Plume Giant, an indie folk group of recent Yale graduates that recently played a debut show in New York City’s Mercury Lounge, as an example of the popularity musicians can gain at Yale through more unconventional sounds. Producer Sunik Kim, ES ‘16, feels confident that he does not need to cater to pop sensibilities at Yale and in the broader American culture to be successful. Kim’s goals for his new project, Beat Culture, lie beyond New Haven. “I don’t need to have a mass appeal, because it’s not like I’m only building my music on campus,” he said. “The campus stuff is a kind of bonus. I didn’t expect anyone would have any idea what I was doing here…but now that it’s here it’s cool.” Regardless of the indifference he expressed, Kim, whose influences include artists like James Blake and Flying Lotus (who are far from reaching any Top Hits list), has already been contacted to perform at multiple venues around campus, including WYBC’s performance space in the basement of 216 Dwight St. This enthusiasm and support for an atypical act like Kim’s seems at odds with the Yale that has parties packed with students who are satisfied to have a DJ play PSY’s “Gangnam Style” twice in one night. Despite the apparent demand for electronic music in a variety of forms, one wonders why Yale does not
have a more cohesive “scene.” Gordon attempted an explanation: “I think a lot of that has to do with the nature of making your own music and the nature of people at Yale. The people at Yale are very structure-oriented. That’s how you get here. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I think it’s antithetical to making your own music, which is all about independence. There is no structure really.” Rokholt attributed it more to the nature of academia and scholarship at Yale. “I think people write off dance music as the most senseless of all the musical genres because it’s designed to be physical,” he said, “and because it’s designed to be physical it’s separate from the mental and what we want to do at Yale…It’s disappointing to me that people look at music and think, ‘That’s what you put on at a party.’” Rokholt and Gordon agree that Yale’s student body simply has other concerns, with the overwhelming number of organizations and academic demands. Just within the group I interviewed, interests ranged from LGBTQ rights to improv comedy. Yet most Yalies will, inevitably, encounter a student-spun DJ set sometime during their four years at Yale, regardless of his or her interests. It’s also clear from the people I’ve spoken too that the DJs will be just as varied, from those like Sinha, who play popular, ready-for-the-floor dance songs, to those like Kim, who create electronic music for its own sake—and that each can affect partygoing Yalies in a different and perhaps powerful way. But whether serious or casual, whether because of the music or the hormones (or both), the ends of student DJing tend to justify the means: as Rokholt told me towards the end of our conversation, “I’m just happy people are dancing; as a DJ that’s all I want to see.” —graphic by Julia Kittle-Kamp
Antique sounds If you were to make a list of Yale’s romantic hotspots, the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments on Hillhouse Avenue might not be the first place to come to mind. (Or the second. Or third.) Yet this museum will spellbind visitors with its many hidden charms. The dusty smell of old artifacts, leaflets, and books greeted me as I walked into the museum, where curator Susan Thompson took me on a tour of the three main galleries. The collection was founded in 1900 when local piano dealer Morris Steinert gifted his personal instruments collection to Yale, and continued to grow through various acquisitions and donations. I was immediately struck by the array of finely wrought, antique instruments. Many of the instruments in the collection were dedicated to romance, among which the stunning Viola d’Amore, or “viola of love,” stood out. Thompson passionately explained that the viola had flameshaped F-holes and “sympathetic strings,” additional strings which lend it a richer, more ethereal sound than the fourstring viola. Countless cupid’s heads crowned the tops of other instruments, many of them blindfolded to illustrate the adage that “love is blind.” At the rear of the gallery, an 18th-century guitar made by craftsman Joachim Tielke is on display. Inlaid with ivory, tortoise shell, and mother-of-pearl, it boasts numerous richly carved medallions on its sides and back. Love scenes unfold, with inscriptions in—what else—the language of love, French. Many of the restored instruments are still in use—a concert series is held year-round where students can hear world-class musicians perform with them. Here you might see a performance on any one of an exquisite set of keyboards stored in the upper gallery. One particularly beautiful keyboard that you might see in concert, a Flemish double virginal called the “Moeder und Kind”—mother and child—shows a graceful picture of Apollo defeating Pan in a musical contest. I cannot guarantee that you will find your soulmate at the Collection of Musical Instruments, but at the very least, you’ll find yourself immersed in the romance of music and music-making. Go, peruse the exhibits, and fall in love with musical instruments for an hour or two. —Andrew Koenig —Graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff
A German artist, forgotten Projected on the screen is the image of a young man, slouching in a tidy button down and trousers while a cigarette dangles from his mouth. Behind him is a painting, a white blob of angry brush strokes against an even black background. A few black gashes stand out against the white, tying the piece together. It’s a Monday night, and students and faculty have gathered at the Yale University School of Art to hear German art historian Pamela Kort’s insights on the artist Eugen Schönebeck. After receiving her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles, Kort has spent much of her career in Berlin, where she developed a personal relationship with Schönebeck. Schönebeck’s work is largely unknown. “Most of you probably don’t know a great deal about him,” Kort told the audience. He began his career in 1959 in a rent-free gallery space in Berlin, with an exhibition he curated entirely by himself, showcasing both oil paintings and drawings.
Schönebeck sold no paintings from that first show, and according to Kort, critics accused him of creating a “chamber of horrors.” Following the exhibition, he continued to intensify his radically gruesome pieces, producing more images of brutal deaths, ripped open mouths and dangling body parts. In 1965, Schönebeck began producing huge canvases of images inspired by photographs. Kort pulled up a slide of a photo of Mao Zedong, and afterwards showed Schönebeck’s painted take on the photo: he added a rose to Zedong’s right hand, a detail that looks grossly out of place and humorously mocks the communist leader. The stark red, meanwhile, stands out against the otherwise neutral piece, and creates a visually striking contrast. Schönebeck’s career lasted a brief five years, after which he removed himself from the art community entirely. Kort suggested that the time has come for Schönebeck to return to the art world: “40 years later, maybe he is angry enough to pick up his brush and show us what engaged painting may look like in the 21st century.” —Lara Sokoloff —Graphic by Lian Fumerton-Liu YH Staff
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REVIEWS Growing pains and more of the same: the xx’s Coexist by Gabe Audu t is quite uncommon for music groups to reach such a widespread level of fame as rapidly as the xx did with their 2009 self-titled album debut. The record was mystifying, delicate and youthful, providing for an overall sincere, serene experience. It was delightful to hear something so refreshing and pure: three infatuated London teens singing their hearts out over scintillating beats and blissful refrains. The album not only received resoundingly positive reviews—including the esteemed Mercury Prize, awarded every year to the best of British music—but it also cemented the band as a staple for the kind and heartbroken. The xx’s rise to the top after the release of their debut album was so quick that expectations for the band began to overshadow their ascent. This is the burden put upon all bands and artists who achieve instant fame: the scourge of the sophomore album. The importance of the sophomore record lies in the fact that it enables an artist to eliminate predictability, experiment, and most of all, move beyond old labels. The xx’s latest album, Coexist, however, simply fails to achieve any of the aforementioned marks, managing to favor consistency over inventiveness, and stagnates as a result. It’s a collection of alluring tracks that, as the title of the album suggests, merely coexist, and as a result, reveal the stylistic shortcomings of a band once regarded as infallible. The first track, “Angel,” continues with the band’s thematic exploration of love and devotion. It is certainly a deep, beautiful song, but it inevitably evokes memories of sounds and themes previously visited in the band’s first album. The word “love” is repeated over and over, solidifying the overarching theme of the album, which is unfortunately, once again, love. The second track, “Chained,” offers a refreshing change of pace from Angel, but halfway through the song, the familiarity of it all ends up becoming too evident to go unnoticed. The enduring bassline struts alongside a complementary steady drum beat as the two vocalists methodically alternate between the standard verse-chorus
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structure right until the abrupt ending of the song; it’s essentially a track on cruise control. The next track, “Fiction,” attempts to shift the mood as it intensifies towards the halfway point of the song, but then suddenly retreats, returning to the static state that characterizes the entire album. Coexist edges along with “Try,” a pleasant serenade lacking in substance or originality, and “Reunion,” an offering of experimental club beats shrouded by harmonies and familiar xx spacey soundscapes. Tracks like “Sunset” and “Missing” continue to disappoint with a repetively gloominess that feels forced and showcases bassist Oliver Sim’s vocal shortcomings. “Tides” is a mild pop song that never reaches a real climax, and “Unfold” presentd more of the same sadness and despair immersed in overall colorlessness. As the album reaches its end, the blatant repetition becomes noticeable—and to a certain extent, unbearable. “Swept Away” is the only track from Coexist that adds some life to a record burdened by lifelessness. It gradually grows and grows until it fully blossoms, layered with sensational instrumentation and assisted by the vocalists’ enthusiastic choruses. Unlike the majority of tracks on Coexist, “Swept Away” flourishes and shines, causing one to think of the potential of the entire album if every song had been given the freedom to peak. Sadly, however, this is not the case. Coexist ultimately comes to a close with “Our Song,” a familiar minimalist ballad that sluggishly brings the album to an underwhelming, familiar end. Where the xx could have moved forward, pushed the boundary and redefined themselves only three years into their indie hit-making careers, they instead chose the same path set by their eponymous debut. A mere sigh of a record, Coexist is static and habitual, persistently wallowing in a memory of things long past. Every theme supposedly explored in this album was visited three years ago in their first album, when the subject matter seemed more original and less forced. After all, three years have passed, and broken hearts do indeed heal with time.
Music: Swans
Movie: The Bike Robber
The Seer is the kind of record you finish and try to describe— only to realize you’re not sure where to begin. The title track is a psychedelic Western symphony that fades down to one guy playing a banjo in the distance five minutes in. But the same song roars back at the half-hour mark—the song is over 32 minutes long—as lead singer Michael Gira either curses us out or talks himself through a nightmare. ”A Piece of the Sky” and “Apostate,” which end the second disk, could be a rich and varied LP unto themselves. It’s better not to consider The Seer a unified album. Some tracks are pleasantly exhausting prog-rock workouts, while “The Seer Returns” and “93 Ave. Blues” almost sound like conventional songs, showing off Swans’ more marketable talents: the tuneful jangling of a veteran alt-country band, Gira’s vocal prowess, and an intricate rhythm section that gets plenty of space to itself. “Space” is the operative term—The Seer has more of a physical than musical presence. Hearing it is like driving down a long stretch of highway: with each listen, the landmarks, flashing by amidst waves of drone, become more familiar and a little less spooky. Every road trip has a destination, of course; after pulling an all-nighter with the apocalyptic “Apostate,” Swans hit the coast, in time to catch the bells of a departing ship as guitar echoes undulate like waves. But from the crazed chanting of “Lunacy” to a power-pop interlude at the end of “Avatar,” The Seer is one hell of a ride. Best of all, the album’s final minute is a burst of solo drumming, something we haven’t heard in the past two hours. A new sound, it heralds Swans’ inevitable return—this is a band that always (thank goodness) sees endings as arbitrary. —Aaron Gertler
Last year, Steven Garza, TD ’12, created The Bike Robber, an independent short film conceived in brainstorming sessions between friends. It profiles the monotonous life of David, a plaintive bike thief residing in New Haven. By night, David searches for flashy bikes; by day, he sells them. He justifies his profession as a form of opposition to the “systematic nepotism” of the upper class. David claims to be content with his life; many visually disorienting scenes, however, accompanied by an unpolished and sometimes grating soundtrack, render the viewer skeptical of the authenticity of David’s professed satisfaction with his life. With the help of his male lover, David reevaluates his life and ultimately decides to move to the south, despite his previous conviction that “every place is the same.” While the cinematography in The Bike Robber is compelling and creatively executed, lackluster acting inhibits the overall emotional drive of the storyline. The film’s script contains moments of depth and poignancy, but subpar acting makes the film unable to deliver on those moments. For instance, there are select exchanges between David and his boyfriend clearly intended to substantiate the film’s overall figurative significance, whose thematic impacts are diminished by acting that is ultimately ineffective in those passionate moments. Without much emotional investment, it is difficult for the viewer to fully comprehend the story’s message, which is muddled by contradictory dialogue to begin with. In sum, the overall delivery of the film’s message does not do justice to the sense of humanity and inspiration that are the clear motivation for Garza’s efforts. The Bike Robber is currently available on YouTube. —Logan Gregoire-Wright
Movie: Robot & Frank What happens when a seasoned and powerful acting ensemble and an ambitious but recent addition to the burgeoning indie directing pool collide with an imaginative yet unknown writer? Robot & Frank happens. Jake Schreier’s feature-length directorial debut written by newcomer Christopher D. Ford, this story of a divorced exjewel thief (played by Frank Langella) fading into senility is at once moving, fun, and a little bit cheap. Set in “the near future,” the film’s imagination of the world of tomorrow is well executed, but hints at the inexperienced creative force at its helm. Frank’s son leaves his impossible-to-deal-with and increasingly forgetful father with an all-purpose helper-robot —named Robot—who seems, paradoxically, to be aware of his own non-sentience. Voiced by a 2001-esque Peter Sarsgaard and impressively embodied by dancer Rachael Ma, Robot is programmed to keep the deteriorating Frank in good health by any means necessary, including allowing and even helping Frank to return to his life of jewel thievery. Robot & Frank strives more for its laughs than tears, sometimes venturing into the realm of cliché. Schreier offers a powerful glimpse or two into the frustrations of the fading mind, but at times appears inconsistent in his treatment of Frank’s mental deterioration. Wellacted and fairly well put-together, Robot & Frank is a charming and funny little film, but fails to fully explore its potential as a poignant look into our immediate future. —Ben Boult
Food: Meatball House Maybe a hyper-specialized, hip dining establishment is just what New Haven’s been missing. Even if this one seems to be little more than an uninspired carbon copy of the famed Meatball Shop in Manhattan, the chunky, decadent snacks at Meatball House are more than a good reason to take a trip down to 1180 Chapel St. The meatballs are prepared as you would want them: quick and dirty. For $7, you’re offered a choice of beef, pork, chicken, or vegetable, over which they’ll ladle a layer of thick, gooey sauce. Throw in another $3, and you can have it over mashed potatoes, spaghetti, rigatoni, or mac and cheese. The DIY combo is straightforward, but it works. Sure, the Meatball House has its faults when it comes to seasoning (particularly with the jalapeños and walnuts), but there really is nothing to deter those who are just craving a juicy bowl of meatballs. Take a look at the kids at the neighboring table devouring their spaghetti and meatballs. They’re enjoying themselves. Chances are that grandma still makes better meatballs, but that’s no reason not to go bathe yourself in musky mood lighting and Passion Pit, and get a bowl of meatballs at the Meatball House this weekend. —Lucas Sin
The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
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The Yale Herald
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We mean business Positions currently available in advertising & ďŹ nance Join now: shreya.ghei@yale.edu
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Choose your fillings and toppings! build it just the way you like it! We also serve quesadillas and nachos
SUN-WED 11.30-11.00 THU-SAT 11.30-12.00
P (203) 782-6000 F (203) 782-6002 320 Elm Street New Haven, CT
BULLBLOG BLACKLIST An endless row of sizzling reminders that we were stupid to stay on the meal plan.
This shall be blacklisted every week until it no longer blows.
A miracle every now and again would be nice.
SOMESOM
Section
York St. food carts
Do re mi, blah blah blah. Please change your T-shirt immediately.
Shake Shack
Educated Burgher: till death do us part.
Just kidding! She couldn’t care less.
A capella rush
Justifying your schedule to your adviser
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Lack of divine intervention in our lives Hearing what classes you’re taking
Classes are like shits: Everyone takes them, and no one wants to hear about them.
FellFe
Vegan ravioli in Commons
Impromptu FOOT reunions Wouldn’t both vegans and non-vegans prefer regular pasta?
I’m drunk, you’re drunk, don’t tell my co-leader.
The Yale Herald (Sept. 14, 2012)
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