the Sam Jackson College Experience

Hey everyone! I promised this some time ago and am happy that it’s all now finally done: along with the other members of my class, I chose a subject to research using the Yale Manuscripts and Archives collections and then worked to help curate an online exhibit centered around a series of documents that I selected. This was done for my class The Intellectual in Politics, taught by Justin Zaremby.

Here is a link to the online exhibit, and here you can reach my particular section of the exhibit. It was a very short final writing assignment, but it was difficult to write so concisely and to try to capture all the themes and ideas that I wanted to express. I am happy to finally get to check it out with everything in place, and hope you enjoy it too.

Here is the blurb that Prof. Zaremby wrote for the exhibit, reproduced below:

According to the late Edward Shils, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, intellectuals are those members of society “with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness about the nature of the universe and the rules which govern their society.” In this position, intellectuals occupy a position apart from society, working as scholars, writers, philosophers, and social critics. Given their role studying and criticizing society, intellectuals need to balance the need to maintain a critical distance from politics with their desire to influence political life. Some intellectuals attempt to have an impact on society through their writings. Others work as educators in institutions of higher education. Others choose to enter public service. In addition to the value that intellectual engagement might offer to the political world, the decision to enter politics encourages intellectuals to consider their responsibility to society, scholarship, and the intellectual class itself.

The students who curated this exhibit chose topics that reveal the tensions that confront intellectuals in their engagement with society. Students used the holdings of the Department of Manuscripts and Archives at the Yale University Library to illustrate the forms of engagement that intellectuals have attempted, as well as the responses to such engagement from both the intellectual and political worlds. The richness of the collection allowed students to explore a wide array of topics relating to political expertise, higher education, and the role of science and philosophy in society.In each case, the students reveal what lies at the intersection of intellectual life and political action—conflict, risk, and the potential for creative flourishing.

This exhibit is the final project for “The Intellectual in Politics,” a political science and humanities seminar taught by Justin Zaremby. In the course, students discussed authors ranging from Plato and Martin Heidegger to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walter Lippmann in an attempt to understand the relationship between intellectual life and political life. Students attempted to define the needs and goals of the intellectual class, whether intellectuals serve as advisors, teachers, or social critics.

It was a fun class and I really enjoyed getting to work with the archival collections. There is just a huge, amazing treasure trove of papers, photographs, and much more available to students.I had a really hard time choosing a final subject, but I just enjoyed getting to explore the personal notes and letters of important and famous people. It’s a very special opportunity that I hope more Yale students take advantage of — I had gone to the Archives before out of curiosity to do some research into Yale’s history just for fun, and you don’t need to go for class. It’s just at the library, so there is no excuse not to go!

A reader recently wrote me wondering whether or not Yale is in a real crime zone, and I thought I would post my reply here for all to see. Other Yalies, New Haveners want to chime in with comments? I welcome questions in general, so please feel free to send more in. Happy to help.

> Elizabeth wrote:
> Hi Sam
>
> I took my daughter to visit Yale and she loved it. My husband has some
> issues with Yale and I don’t know quite what to believe. He knows two recent
> grads who insist that New Haven is a serious crime haven and getting worse. Is
> it?

I’m glad your daughter liked Yale – it’s a great place! – and I hope she saw New Haven as offering the potential for a good college experience. Then-president Kingman Brewster Jr. said, some 40 years ago, that the problems of New Haven were an advantage for Yale because they promoted community and cohesiveness, which may have been true – today, things are much better both for Yale, New Haven, and the town-gown relations.

So, on to your principal question: the safety of New Haven, or lack thereof. If we’re looking at New Haven in terms of crime statistics, you’ll find it is not so much worse than many other places with well-regarded schools; I’m from the Boston area and would go to Harvard Square ever since I was young with my friends, and there are certainly fewer panhandlers and homeless people around during the day; at night, while Harvard Square felt safer, my Harvard friends receive just as many unsettling crime notices in their inboxes as we do (for one particular comparison which I can speak to from personal experience). New Haven has some risks to it, but it is a very safe place as look as people keep their heads about them.For that matter, while many of my female friends make it a common habit to walk alone in bad places late at night, they have not had any unfortunate incidents – this isn’t to say that none exist, but just to emphasize that your daughter is not going to be seen on the nightly news if just once she goes alone for a falafel pick-me-up at 2 am or to visit a friend on the other side of campus.

While there have been a few unfortunate higher profile incidents at Yale in the two years that I have been here, for the most part incidents involving students occur on the far periphery of campus — graduate students living farther away and the like. Central campus is well protected, well lit, and generally quite safe at all hours. This isn’t Penn, where gangs of children were robbing people in broad daylight. What’s more, our lovely ivory tower environment offers another layer of protection; while it’s not exactly perfect protection, the gated courtyards in which we live our lives really insulate us from any of the city’s jagged edges. What’s more, the University does offer extensive shuttle se rvices both on schedule and on-call; in addition, security is available to act as escorts to take students from point A to point B safely. (This is what tour guides no doubt told you; for students unwilling to wait long enough for these resources to make their way to them in the event of non-emergencies, walking may be the only immediate option).

That said, can bad things happen, and do they?  Of course – but, as I mentioned at the start, general misconceptions about the true dangers of New Haven aside (overstated and outdated) there are good restaurants, there are nice places to go, but there is not *too* much. I would personally be happier in a busier place, but there is something to be said for the fact that everyone cannot so easily melt away from campus after class, as they do in New York City — although many people, including myself, go to NYC often. In any case, I’m not sure what other issues your husband has with Yale — is it just to do with supposed crime problems? Let me know if I can answer any more of your questions, and if you need help finding raw numbers about the safety of Yale, I can try to find the FBI-required reporting statistics for you (flawed though they may be, New Haven’s violent crime numbers are generally on the decline, and segmented geographically are really not so bad).

Thanks again for reading and for asking questions, I really appreciate it!

Addendum: Thanks to a Yale senior friend from the New Haven area who, in discussing the safety of New Haven, mentioned the humorous nickname [largely in jest] which I had never heard before, ‘pistol-wavin’-new-haven.’ Again, not representative.

E-mail we received this afternoon enclosed below. The bloodletting at Yale looks like it will really not be so bad; while market declines were comparable to Harvard, they were looking to freeze things more aggressively, while Yale is forging ahead (relatively speaking). We all knew that the downturn would affect Yale, the question was by how much. The answer: So far, about 25% of the market value of the endowment has gone down with the markets. This means there is a fairly significant budget shortfall next year, growing again the year after. But, relax – the endowment is now in the same place it was in 2006, and long-term, everything will be peachy. Right, President Levin? “17 billion is still a very large endowment.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Or, “It’s not lying when admissions office does it” –

Just wanted to quickly highlight something which is not gross lying, but just mild misrepresentation. The Yale Admitted Students website has fantastic images of student rooms which are really really scrumptious and gorgeous and make you feel like everyone at Yale lives in wonderful palaces — also, that they all clean their rooms. I was stunned when I first saw them and asked the admissions office if they were real rooms of undergrads or if they were staged photos (when I was applying) and I was told, no, they’re all real.

And they are, in a certain sense, at least… anyway, of couse, they want to put Yale’s best face forward, and I don’t mean to say that rooms aren’t often great! I am still puzzled why they had Emma Watson stay overnight in one of the less spectacular freshman dorms, if they’d wanted to really court her; still. (Emma, if you’re reading, I hope you chose to apply and matriculate! Harvard is Azkaban and if you come to Yale I’ll never mention Harry Potter when you’re around. Feel free to e-mail me with any questions about Yale; this offer applies to prospective Yalies who aren’t movie stars, too.) Read the rest of this entry »

你们好 (Hello all)! I know I have been seriously remiss in my posting, but am here to check in. Sophomore year has been very busy, moreso than I had expected. Although my usual calculus tells me that blogging comes before homework, having Chinese every day means that things have shifted to the back burner a little bit. I’m still at Yale, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, so I thought at the very least I should take a moment here on Thanksgiving break to update everyone on the kinds of things that have been keeping me away from the “write post” button.

I collected information about most of the events that I went to the week before vacation and am going to share them here, so take a peek at a few – normally things are booked more heavily, but these last few weeks (and unfortunately, the next few) are dense indeed with papers and studying for finals.

11/15 – Student Environmental Program-organized tour of the Yale Power Plant

This was a really cool chance to go tour the Yale Power Plant, the large heating, chilling and electrical production hub of main campus. Learning about the specifics of Yale’s cogeneration tech was very interesting, and though the industrial machinery was fascinating, it was the environmental impact of the University that was most interesting to me. President Levin is really keen on expanding the sciences at Yale, and while I’m a big supporter, I didn’t realize what it meant to install a new cooling plant with 20,000 tons of chilling just for the labs on Science Hill… let alone the new space on West Campus. Fellow Exonian Libbie Cohn (who needs a better web presence for me to link to!) joined me on the tour and agreed that gas turbines are really cool.

11/15 – Fox International Fellows + Trumbull College film screenings

This was pretty fun – I helped organize a series of movie screenings in the theatre of my residential college. We have a nice space in the basement which is usually used for theatrical productions, but I spoke to our master and reclaimed it for a film series or two. This evening I teamed up with another group, the Fox Fellows, to show a cool international movie and then host a discussion about it. More below:

A series of screenings comprised of contemporary cinema from each country that form the Fox Program (England, Ireland, Turkey, India, Japan, China, South Africa, Brasil, Mexico, France, Germany, Russia and Israel). Chosen and discussed by the respective native fellows with the main purpose of portraying aspects of contemporary life in their countries.

WHICH FILM? “Head-On” (Gegen Die Wand) by Fatih Akin (2004)

Synopsis by Laurissa Muhlich – Fox International Fellow – Germany. “20 year old Sibel tried to commit suicide although she just yearns for a free and self determined way of life. She arranges a fictitious marriage with Cahit, a Turkish immigrant to Germany who is twenty years elder than her in order to escape from the traditional lifestyle of her Turkish parents’ house. Once she indeed falls in love with her husband, her fortune takes an exceptional turnaround…

11/17 – Genius in a Bottle: Perfume as a Copyrightable Creative Work?

This was  a very interesting lecture that I came across from my visits to the ISP events at the Law School (Information Society Project, some of whose events are not listed here) – essentially asking what it meant for something to be able to be copyrighted and what a creative work actually means, through the interesting lens of perfume legal debate. Definitely worth looking into more if you are interested in the movie/book Perfume, perfume itself, or especially the intricate legal details of creative authorship and intellecutal property law.

Copyright protects expressive works of intellectual endeavor: literature, music, films, perfume… Perfume?? “Yes,” said the Netherlands Supreme Court in a recent decision; “Yes” and “No” have said various French courts grappling with the same question over the past twenty-five years. This presentation considers whether copyright should be extended to such products of human ingenuity, and the role of human perception in determinations of copyright eligibility. We will experiment with a number of fragrances, and all who attend should leave in an “odour of sanctity” (or at least that of Chanel).

11/17 – Panel on Socio-economic Status and Class: “Dialogue on Class: At Yale and Beyond,”

This was a great discussion which gave me huge respect for Jeff Brenzel, who is now very much cooler than I had first imagined. Though I still am angry for some of the ways he is keen to reject the internet and its utility in running the Yale Admissions Office, his talk about what the declining stock of affirmative action means, and how some want to focus on class instead, was really great. Very relevant to this blog, too — I wish I had a copy! I wish I could sit down and talk more about it with him, in fact, though when the admissions officer of a school like Yale has time to sit still and think at all during admissions season is a great mystery to me indeed.

Joseph Gordon, Acting Dean of Yale College, will be the moderator, and he will be joined by panelists Jon Butler, Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of History, American Studies, and Religious Studies; Jennifer Klein, Professor of History; Jeff Brenzel, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid in Yale College; and Marichal Gentry, Dean of Student Affairs in Yale College.

11/19 – Master’s Tea, Trumbull College:

Yale has many, many, many master’s tea, and this day I was coming back to class ready just to skip all five (yes, five) that were going on this afternoon, but decided instead to stop by the one literally right across from my entryway at our college master’s home. Orzala Ashraf Nemat gave a really fascinating talk about her life growing up as a refugee trying to make sure she could get her education and then trying her best to serve Afghanistan, especially the women of Afghanistan, through the Taliban years into today. Check out her bio at the Yale World Fellows program site – the YWF progarm is another blog post in and of itself, just amazing.

A Master’s Tea with Orzala Ashraf Nemat, Trumbull World Fellow Founder & Chair of the leading NGO Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan.

So, that is a little bit of what keeps me busy! Readers, please write in and let me know if there are more things about Yale that you would like me to write about and I’ll try to bring that to the forefront as I try to make time to blog more going forward.