Follow all the posts in this series by looking for the tag “a semester returned.”

A modified version of this piece originally appeared in the Yale Herald, February 26, 2010, titled "So much food, but so little community."

If you want to learn about a place, watch its people eat. At Yale, the magical camaraderie said to characterize the residential college system is manifest best in the college dining halls. At Peking University, mealtimes are no less illustrative of the often quite different dynamic which underlies student life for China's most elite students.

Consider a 'day in the life' of an average student at PKU, compared with Yale. Here, we'll consider breakfast: At Yale, you roll out of bed and are able to eat breakfast as you please, with only a slight hiccup in the half-hour between breakfast and lunch; your experience is one of groggy leisure marked by free copies of New York Times and Cross Campus.

In China? You must bravely arise early decide what you want to try to eat (and quickly). Your options are many: unlike those hapless students in New Haven, you have hot breakfasts to choose from without needing to go to Commons! Unfortunately, also unlike Yale, you have to be sure to get up early to try to get this food, because many of the dining halls close around 830am and don't reopen until lunchtime.

Worse, this foreshortened time means that you have to fight swarming crowds of other students for the privilege of ordering food: after opening at 6am, the tastiest breakfast treats are usually gone by 730 at the dining hall nearest our dorm, for example. But, don't get discouraged just yet. You have so much to choose from! You can have red-bean filled buns, soups, noodles, whatever your heart desires, as long as it's Chinese and still available, and as long as you don't need to try to find two seats next to each other to breakfast with a friend!

Not interested in the shi tang chaos? Try one of the abundant carts on the streets or a smaller shop. Here you can get a tasty Taiwanese-style breakfast pancake fried to perfection, or fresh-steamed baozi filled with cabbage or meats. Mission accomplished.

Good work. You've made it through breakfast, and all for about 75 cents - if you weren't too stressed by the ordeal, you're certainly looking smug compared with that Yalie and his 10 dollar swipe for a bagel and tea, even if he does have relative peace and tranquility. You go to class, where - lucky you! - you decide to stop at one of the snackeries conveniented located in your classroom building and buy some bread and candy to make it through lecture. You then fill up your tea-bottle from one of the hot water dispensers outside the classroom.

The abundance of choices may dull your mind to the dangers of this system. Busy though we are at Yale, we take for granted that our academic schedules allot almost all an hour or more to eat. In China, if one had time at all between classes, it's generally under 30 minutes.

Asked how to deal with this inconvenient conflict, Chinese students I polled suggested most frequently 'not eating' as their solution.

Because students are forced to keep such eccentric schedules,  because the dining halls are so painfully unaccommodating to so many, and because labor is so extremely cheap, there are a fantastic variety of wonderful options that would make zero economic sense to offer in New Haven! You can get spicy-boiled-vegetables and noodles on a stick up till about 11pm on campus; from 6-12, you can get spicy grill-fried meats, tofu, and other delights, or go to the fruit stand and buy all oranges, melons, and tomatoes; after those on-campus shops close, you can head outside the gates to get delicious chuan'r, kebabs fresh cooked for you. The 24 hour McDonalds will deliver to the dorm for about a dollar.

What does this story say about the institutional objectives and mores at Beida? As Yalies, our biggest point of confusion was why no one complained more. With tables bolted to the floor and unable to seat more than 4 people around them, mealtimes often feel like a return to middle school, without the recess.  People do, in fact, complain - in small doses and almost always in mediated, monitored contexts. And even if the uncaring policies of the school created hassles for students, people still try to eat together, cramming several miniature hot-pots onto their tables and catching up.

At Yale in Chinese 140 right now we're taught how important family meal time is in Chinese culture.  University dining differs greatly from home habits anywhere, but the sheer number of people eating alone in a rush offered a vivid demonstration of the ways Beida - intentionally or otherwise - isolated its students within a built world of schoolwork and other time obligations. Beida is a source of great scholarship, but where student life is concerned, it remains rigorously managed and controlled just like grade school. Mealtimes manifest a philosophy wherein individual student needs are rendered subordinate to the greater group.

Thanks for reading, and please join in by posting any questions you have here in the comments, or anything you’d really like to hear about for future columns / posts. I'm open to suggestions!

Original Publication: January 29, 2010, in the Yale Herald.

Time spent abroad reveals volumes about the world left behind. I had the pleasure and privilege to study in the Peking University-Yale Joint Program last semester, and my experience both defied expectations and eludes easy explanation. In this column, I will share some of those reflections formed abroad and narrate the everyday rediscoveries in a life newly reunited with Yale.

I’d like to talk about one of the first unique features I noticed at Beida, the school I attended in China. It’s a feature that Yale lacks in a very quantifiable way: animal camaraderie. Yale is lacking in the four-legged friends department, while China’s flagship university has a surfeit of semi-domesticated animals that roam its grounds. Never have I met so many different cats in so little time: big cats, small cats, feral cats, and more recombination still. Outside of campus, I would meet felines in temples, restaurants, and alleys; on campus, they roamed the grounds, as fearlessly and assuredly as any of the students. One cat liked to sit by the window and listen to East Asian demography lectures; another occupied special turf next to a noodle shop. I learned to recognize these different cats by their territory and their habits­—the same was true for dogs, though they were fewer in number.

At Yale, however, our visible animal life appears to center around rodents. During my freshman year, devious squirrels plotted a grand invasion of several Bingham rooms and managed several reconnaissance forays before students rebuffed their advances. Though obnoxious, these Old Campus squirrels are key contributors to the inter-species dialogue here at Yale, and we welcome their presence as a check to impressions of overwhelming urban sterility. Recently passed New Haven ordinances now allow enterprising residents to raise chickens, but I have yet to see any campus examples thus far.

While I was in China, there was one cat in particular that, through charm and good looks, stole the hearts of all who met her. She was called Xiao Huang （小黄）meaning “little yellow,” and she proudly wore her golden-orange coat every day as she and her on-again-off-again boyfriend Xiao Bai, （小白） “little white,” lazed about their turf outside our Chinese class every day. While some of the semi-homeless animals at Beida suffered and begged for the attentions of motivated bystanders, Xiao Huang knew how to work the system to her advantage. The little minx and her beau were fed every day by staff at the building they frequented, and in return they offered their adorable services—usually in the form of purring—as a pick-me-up to anyone who had just bombed a Chinese test. I was a frequent patron.

But there were also the animal-welfare situations that left me at a loss for action. One such recurring experience would pass at night on busy streets: As I walked, I’d spot a small crowd forming, bottlenecking the sidewalk with interested bystanders. Getting closer, the crowd would thin and reveal a man or men in nondescript parkas, vending merchandise from a cardboard box at their feet. Only when it’s too late to escape without heartbreak does the occasion’s interest become clear: puppies for sale. Of course, in Shanghai one could buy live ducks a block outside our downtown hotel. I was discouraged from doing so, perhaps, by the startling variety of other animals—alive or otherwise—available for purchase there. But its being commonplace didn’t erase its impact.

Xiao Huang’s sad story came together in bits and pieces as I learned more about her. She lived outside one of the foreign student’s dorm, and she had originally been rescued by a foreigner, but left behind when that woman’s stay in China was up. Those strays outside Beida appear to manage with their feline wits, but for every Xiao Huang being taken care of, there are a dozen more that struggle. The more helpful comparison between Yale and Beida comes when considering the relevance these cats have for Chinese students. One official club devotes its time creating shelters for—and feeding—the hungry cats on campus: Plenty of people want to help. What do we have at Yale?

I wish there were fewer cats lounging in Beida’s bamboo groves. As Beijing’s winter took a bite, I saw so many suffering—kittens shivering and groups of cats huddled together for warmth. Like so many ephemeral observations about China, closer analysis revealed a more complex problem. I bought catnip and lamb kebabs for my feline friends, but I learned that just because they speak Chinese doesn’t mean Chinese cats like spicy food. I also recognized that it was human feeding of these cats which allowed so many to survive on campus.

What does it mean to surround ourselves with animals? It’s important because it helps to ground us. I appreciated the increased presence of animals not just for the daily dose of adorable cat behaviors, but simply because nature in this active embodiment captures the attention and reminds passersby that no matter what color the sky is, how much homework you have, or what personal struggle you face, nature still exists all around. When you watch animals play, the exigencies of student life fade away like magic.

I couldn’t take Xiao Huang back to Yale, so how can that wonderful appearance of the wild be recaptured? The answer starts with you, readers: If your Master or Dean doesn’t have a pet, start a petition to insist on real-life college mascots. If professors at Harvard can graze cows, why not a real life Trum-bull?）

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!

> 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.

Dear Yale Students:

I want you to have a copy of the letter I sent to faculty and staff addressing how we will respond to the economic downturn.  You will see that we are committed to maintaining our strong financial aid programs, and that we do not intend to overreact to the decline in the value of our endowment, since markets remain volatile.

I trust that you have had a productive semester.  Best wishes for a refreshing winter recess.

Sincerely yours,

Richard C. Levin

December 16, 2008

To:         The Faculty and Staff of Yale University

From:     Richard C. Levin

I know that all of you are concerned about the effect of current economic conditions on the University, and I recognize that these are trying and uncertain times for all of us.  The precipitous decline in housing prices and stock market values has had consequences for many of us personally, and, naturally, for Yale as an institution.  The officers and I have spent the last six weeks analyzing the implications of the downturn for Yale, and last weekend we recommended a course of action to the Yale Corporation.  I write now to describe how we have been affected and how we will respond.  By acting thoughtfully and strategically, I am confident that we can weather this storm while continuing to advance our most important objectives, albeit at a slower pace.

Despite the downturn in the economy, it is important to keep in perspective that the University is much stronger than it was a decade ago.  Through your devoted efforts, we have made enormous progress.  We have renewed our facilities, expanded access by offering more generous financial aid, and built a pre-eminent faculty across the disciplines and professions.  We have also provided expanded international experiences for our students, advanced important sustainability projects, and contributed to the renaissance of New Haven.  In all these efforts, we are supported and enabled by the thousands of alumni and friends who have contributed to the Yale Tomorrow campaign, and whose contributions have remained steady through the first months of this economic downturn.

It is not our custom to announce the mid-year status of our endowment portfolio, but these unusual circumstances call for a departure from custom.  Thanks to the outstanding work of David Swensen and his colleagues in the Investments Office, our endowment has declined significantly less than market indices.  Taking into account only the value of marketable securities, our investment return from July 1 through October 31 was a negative 13.4%.  But this does not tell the whole story. Our endowment is invested in both marketable securities (chiefly stocks and bonds) and “illiquid” assets, such as real estate and private equity investments that are not traded on a daily basis and are difficult to value with precision.  The value of our marketable securities has declined further since October 31, and, even earlier, we began to establish reserves in anticipation of substantial decreases (“write-downs”) in the value of our private equity and real estate investments.  As a consequence, our best estimate of the endowment’s value today is $17 billion, a decline of 25% since June 30, 2008, and this is the value we are using for purposes of budget planning. We are also assuming that the endowment will remain flat during the 2009-10 academic year and resume growth after June 30, 2010, at the rate that we have historically used in our budget modeling.

It is important to recognize that $17 billion is still a very large endowment.  This was where the endowment stood as recently as January 2006.  Still, the 25% decline we have experienced has a very significant impact on our operations because income from the endowment supports 44% of the University’s annual expense base of $2.7 billion.  Fortunately, our endowment spending policy spreads the effect of market changes over several years, allowing us to respond gradually.  But the ultimate consequence of the market decline is still substantial, causing an annual budget shortfall on the order of $100 million next year (2009-10) and growing to over $300 million by 2013-14.  The question before us is this: how much of this pattern of projected future budget deficits should we seek to eliminate by taking action now?

Of course, we have no crystal ball.  We need to balance the benefits and costs of acting now against the benefits and costs of postponing action.  Markets have been extremely volatile, and the endowment could do better or worse than we are forecasting.  Because of this very high degree of uncertainty, it is important that we not overreact.  Thus, we deliberately will not reduce our budget immediately to close the entire gap created by the assumed 25% decline in our endowment.  Instead, in preparing our budget for the 2009-10 academic year, we will seek to achieve half to two-thirds of the reductions required to close the gap now forecast for the years ahead.  If markets rebound significantly, we would need to make no further adjustments.  If markets remain flat or decline further, we will need to undertake a second round of actions next year.

In reflecting these past few weeks on budget scenarios, I have had as my principal goals supporting the faculty and staff who are here, ensuring access for the most talented students, and remaining a good citizen of New Haven.  To achieve these goals, certain activities will be protected as we reduce overall expenditures.  Three in particular deserve mention.

First, we will maintain our commitment to the improvements in financial aid for students in Yale College announced last year.  These policies, which offer greatly improved support to low and middle income families, will be especially welcome this year as families experience economic hardship.  They are absolutely necessary to ensure that access to Yale remains open to the most promising applicants, regardless of their families’ financial circumstances.  Our strong financial aid program in the Graduate School also will be maintained, and I will encourage the deans of the professional schools to make every effort to maintain their financial aid budgets in the coming year.

Second, we will continue to recruit faculty.  Authorized searches in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will proceed, and the deans in each of the professional schools will work with the Provost to strengthen their faculties.  We do not want to lose the momentum of recent years, and we believe that it will be to Yale’s long-run advantage to continue to recruit outstanding and diverse faculty.  This said, we will need to be judicious in authorizing new positions and filling vacancies, and departments will have to make a strong case for searches that are not yet authorized.

Third, although we will proceed at a slower pace, we will continue to develop plans and initiate programs on the West Campus.  Because the facilities are already in place and we face no significant capital costs, we should not miss the opportunity to strengthen permanently and substantially Yale’s capacity for path-breaking research in the sciences, engineering, and medicine.  Nor should we forego the opportunity afforded by the West Campus to map out innovative uses of our library and museum collections that will support Yale’s excellence in the arts and humanities.

Even closing half to two-thirds of the budget gap that we anticipate over the next few years has consequences that I wish we could avoid.  But if we fail to make significant adjustments now, we would inevitably need deeper cuts later.  In recent years, we have been in the fortunate position of being able to pursue many new ideas and exciting initiatives.  Now we will have to make harder choices.  I am confident that faculty and staff throughout the University will rally to the challenge as we make the following adjustments:

1. Effective immediately, all postings of new positions must receive prior approval.  In the case of faculty, approval must be sought from the Provost or relevant deputy/associate provost.  In the case of staff, positions must be approved by an officer of the university or a deputy/associate provost.  In addition, departments, schools, and units should review all open positions, including those currently posted, with their responsible officer or provost.  For those staff positions that are authorized, qualified internal candidates will be given priority.

2. We will restrain the growth of salaries.  For the 2009-10 academic year, faculty and M&P staff with salaries below $75,000 will be eligible for merit increases of up to 2%.  Merit increases for faculty and staff who earn over $75,000 will be capped at $1,500.  Employees represented by labor unions will receive the increases scheduled for the final year of their contracts.

3. We will reduce 2009-10 budgets by an amount equal to 5% of the salaries and benefits of all non-faculty staff.  We believe that we can accomplish this reduction largely through attrition in all categories of staff: managerial, professional, clerical, technical, service, and maintenance.  It is clearly of the utmost importance that this process be handled thoughtfully and carefully.  When we undertook a 5% staff reduction five years ago, we achieved the overwhelming majority of our goal by retirements, departures, and leaving vacancies unfilled.

4. We will also need to reduce budgets for all non-salary and wage expenses by 5% for 2009-10 and by an additional 5% the following year.  I know that this reduction will be difficult for many units, because we have had no increases in this category for the past several years.  The challenge will be to find less critical expenses that can be eliminated.  For example, we will find ways to reduce expenditures on outside consultants.  Reducing travel, consuming less paper, and decreasing energy use will also help us achieve our sustainability goals.  We want to continue to provide training opportunities for staff, but we will save money by conducting more of these programs on campus.

5. All new buildings and renovation projects currently under construction will continue until completion.  But we will not be able to issue as much debt for construction projects as we had anticipated in our multi-year capital budget.  Consequently, with the exception of essential utilities projects and the renovation of Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges, we will defer the initiation of construction (both new buildings and renovations) until the conditions in debt markets permit going forward or additional gift funding can be secured.  This means, concretely, that the Yale Biology Building will be delayed for one year, while the construction of the new School of Management campus, the second phase of the renovation of the Yale University Art Gallery, the renovation of Hendrie Hall, and the move of Dwight Hall to a renovated 143 Elm Street will not begin until funding is secured or market conditions improve.  Meanwhile, we will move forward with design work on these and other pending projects.  We will also continue both design and fundraising for the new residential colleges with the hope that we can keep to the current schedule, but postponement may become necessary.  I know these delays will be disappointing to those schools and departments that have been awaiting facility improvements, and it is a great disappointment to me.  I want to underscore that we are not cancelling any projects that have been approved; we are simply delaying the initiation of construction.

As I mentioned earlier, the actions we are taking at this point, though challenging, will not fully compensate for the decline in the value of the endowment that we have experienced to date.  With the exception of the Great Depression, all market downturns of the past century have been followed by at least a partial rebound within one to two years.  If such a rebound occurs, we may not need to undertake further budget reductions, but, if such a rebound does not occur, we will need to take additional action.  I hope you agree with our decision to avoid a possible overreaction at this time.

Yale University today is an institution of which we can all be justifiably proud.  We will manage through this downturn in a way that will preserve our great strengths and seize the most important opportunities for the future, so that Yale can continue to serve the nation and the world by advancing the frontiers of knowledge and educating the most talented and promising students for leadership and service.

I ask all of you to help.  We need your assistance in identifying within your own units and elsewhere opportunities for savings that will not impair our ability to advance our most important missions.  If you have ideas for achieving our budget reduction targets, please share them with your colleagues and supervisors. The officers would also welcome any suggestions you would wish to make by e-mailing suggestions@yale.edu.  I know that I can count on you to respond to the challenges ahead with renewed dedication and commitment.

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.)

Yale Admitted Students Website 'Yale Cribs' competition - Prizes?

In any case, remember, Yalies: push your trays to the back if you want movie stars to come join us here in New Haven.

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.

So it's a fair question and reasonable point of comparison. How is it at Yale? Can you walk to class without tripping over roving bands of camera-wielding tourists, gawking at undergrads like they're all in a richly furnished zoo enclosure? Is Yale a tourist attraction?

In a word, no.

It's true that old campus has a fair number of tour groups circulating in lazily predictable routes, and that they can be spotted on a couple other hotspots on the campus tours which leave from the admissions office. But the individual group sizes, and the overall volume, is very manageable. We do not have people trying endlessly to sneak into our dorms or libraries--the libraries, in fact, don't require ID to enter the main areas.

Compare with Harvard where the library has regular 'incidents' when people try to sneak in just to take a look... or so I am told. The libraries at a lot of schools have this nice level of access for prospective students, so it's not that Yale is special about it, it's just a nice benefit from the medium-high volume rather than the stupidly-crowded nature of certain other schools.

Sometimes I like to join the tour groups silently, listen for a minute, then leave. This seems to really confuse prospective students, and leaves me sad that the tour guides are always giving the same semi-duplicitous accounts of Yale lore; still, it helps me stay in touch with the prospective student mindset and is good for blogging. It seems that sometimes, the worse the weather is, the better the tour, as guides work harder to make Yale appealing aside from the good weather and usual cheer of New Haven.

There are busloads of Chinese tourists / visitors who come to Yale, foreign-language tour guides leading them around campus--Yale is actually much better known in China than Harvard, a lot of the time, but when I just stopped at Harvard over spring break I did see a nice number of well-heeled Hong Kong students heading around on a big tour group.

If you stopped reading after my "in a word" explanation, and skipped to the end, don't worry! You didn't miss any super-insightful truths about Yale. There is a reasonable level of outsider interest, but because they don't go inside residential college gates it's not much of a problem at all.

Of course, I think Yale is quite worthy of being a tourist attraction... : )

Headline part-inspired by Snively @ MIT blogs, but mostly by the exact question asked by my bff Greta when visiting her this past week at Harvard.

I received an e-mail this evening from one of the Yale mailing lists I'm on with this disturbing message:

Dear friends,
I am writing to let you know that, on Friday night, some of my close friends discovered a swastika and the "SS" symbol written in packed snow on a tree on Old Campus. The Yale Police were notified and the graffiti was removed, but I think it behooves us all to not let this disturbing event go unnoticed. It is shocking for these kinds of hateful images to appear anywhere, but it is even more disturbing when it is within the locked gates of Old Campus. I don't think anyone can even speculate as to who did this, but we should be loud and insistent that it is completely intolerable.
Pictures of the tree were taken as evidence, and I've attached them below. May this be the last hateful image we have to see on our campus.

I will try to write more about this and the other sad events sometime soon--it's an issue that I have really wanted to address, and has really been on my mind in the last couple of days in general. For now I just wanted to get the word out about what happened, to initiate discussions about it.

Update: the Dean sent out an email, it is attached below.

Dear Yale College Students:

Over the weekend students and others forwarded to the Yale College Dean's Office photographs of trees on the Old Campus on which a swastika and other Nazi symbols appeared. This disturbing incident is not the first aimed at specific groups of students on our campus this academic year. As you are well aware, in recent months students have discovered racist and homophobic graffiti spray-painted on University walls, and a group of individuals held a sign containing a sexist slogan in front of the Women's Center.

Even on a campus committed to freedom of expression, acts such as these are offensive and corrode the spirit of community so cherished at Yale. We do not know who is responsible for some of these offensive acts, but I implore all members of our community to consider the impact of words and actions on others and to treat each other with dignity and respect.

If you become aware of incidents such as those described above, report them to the Yale University Police, who will investigate whether a crime has been committed and, if so, will attempt to identify the perpetrator. You should also contact your college master or dean and Marichal Gentry, the Dean of Student Affairs, who convened a committee last semester that developed a protocol guiding our response to such incidents.

My colleagues and I join with others on campus in condemning these deplorable acts.

Peter Salovey

Dean of Yale College

Update: Hillel also sent out an email, also attached:

Dear Yale Hillel Community,

Many of you no doubt already know that several Nazi symbols were pasted in snow on Old Campus trees this past Friday evening.  We condemn in the strongest possible terms both this act and the ideology it stands for. This isolated incident is not representative of any wider anti-Semitic trends or overtones within the Yale community. That said, there are also other groups at Yale who have been and continue to be hurt and marginalized both by hate speech and other types of unacceptable behavior.  We are unequivocally opposed to all such acts of hatred.  Students wishing to talk about these recent events or with any questions or concerns should not hesitate to contact either board or staff members.

Sincerely,
The Yale Hillel Board

Photos are attached after the break.

Please feel free to comment here with your thoughts on this and related issues. This isn't something that should be ignored or lightly brushed off.

My column in the Yale Herald is about 'things that outrage me' and is titled 'Snakes on a What?!' : )

The first, "Definition of rape eludes Ivy League students" is exactly what it sounds like. Here's an excerpt:

The Yale College Class of 2011 doesn’t know what rape is. Not all 1,322 of us are completely ignorant, mind you, but a disturbing number seem to be out of the loop. During the orientation program Sex Signals, a scenario played out where the actors indicated to the audience several times that consent was lacking in a sexual encounter. When asked if we thought that a rape had been committed, the barest sprinkling of hands went up. Men and women alike rose to defend the actions of the character accused of rape, arguing that the ambiguity of the situation precipitated the rape. From a legal standpoint, there could be no question in this (admittedly fictional) case—rape had taken place. But every single Sex Signals group failed to recognize a problem with the lack of consent. This graphic failure of the newest inductees into the Yale community to collectively identify a crime is deeply troubling, but it hasn’t provoked in most of us the lingering shock which compels me to write this column now. Why hasn’t it?

The second is more lighthearted, titled "A plateful of grapes makes the long nights go by." This one is perhaps more topical to the blog and touches back on my thoughts on the esthetic of schools and admissions offices from a few weeks ago. Excerpt below:

A bowl of grapes in the Pierson dining hall convinced me to come to Yale. The admissions office would no doubt like to know the secret of these grapes—their dark magic, and how they might harness it—but truth be told, it’s all very straightforward. My love of fruit compelled me. Visiting a school far from Napa in late fall only to find that, wonder of wonders, grapes were abundant in the dining halls, I was powerless to resist.

So... have a look, let me know what you think! I will be at the College Board forum in New York later this week (I have a little presentation on Saturday) so I am dying as I try to get everything done before I go. Hopefully I'll see some of you readers there!

Dear Freshmen,

Some of you were visited several nights ago by upperclassmen who delivered to your suites invitations to "The Masquerade." The invitations read:

"You and one guest are cordially invited by a distinguished group of peers to attend the Masquerade on Saturday, the Fifteenth of September. Please arrive in formal attire at the gates to the Hall of Graduate Studies at nine thirty post merediem. Tell no one and do not be late. Non Ducor, Duco."

An image of the invitation, for your reference, is attached. Some of you may be under the impression that you have been tapped for something, or invited to a gathering hosted by a secret society, such as the Yale Society for the Exploration of Campus Secrets (YSECS).

Sadly, this is not the case. Your 'hosts' are the Pundits, the infamous Senior pranking society.

Should you choose to go to the gates of the HGS this evening, here is what will happen:

1) You will be led to an off-campus location by the Pundits.

2) There will be a party there.

3) Before very long, and at a certain cue, the Pundits will take off all of their clothes.

4) You will feel rather awkward, unless you're into that sort of thing.

The party is the first of the Pundits' well-known naked parties this season, and you were invited--if you were--in hopes of making you uncomfortable for their amusement. It seems to me that while the Pundits are often very clever and entertaining, that deceiving freshmen for one's own entertainment should not be anyone's idea of a good time, and that the intended victims of the prank should at least have the opportunity to choose to go, or not, in full knowledge of the nature of the event.

So! Should the idea of a naked party excite you--it is, after all, a Yale tradition of its own--feel free to meet the Pundits, in all their transgressive glory, at 9:30 at the gates of the Hall of Graduate Studies. If not, there are many fun things to do on a Saturday that don't involve being tricked by a bunch of Seniors.

I wish you all the happiest of weekends. Enjoy the beginning of your Yale experience. Take it from someone who's nearing the end of his:

it's pretty awesome, and there's nothing else like it.

Yours,

Anonymous

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In a way I think it's sad that he ruined the surprise of the event, if it is what our anonymous tipster says, but quite a lot of people will be thanking him. The pundit parties are apparently not the really cool naked parties, so I am told. I'm not saying that he was wrong to spoil it, either. Anyway, Yale is fun. Me, I wouldn't have gone to some mysterious event even if I'd received an invitation--I've got a date for Old Campus hide and seek tonight at the same time : )

I was also up much much too late last night working on a website for the Freshman Class Council elections, which you can see at http://www.samjackson.org/FCC. If you're a freshperson in Trumbull reading this, please consider voting for me and joining the Facebook group! If you're in Trumbull at all, consider voting for me for the YCC--many of my same ideas apply to both. And if you're not in either, check it out anyways, I put a lot of time into it and puppies are involved.

Today I had class (conversational french, intro psych, intro cognitive science) until around 4 with a short break for lunch--my first class was at 11:35 (Before you start envying me, I got up really early to fight Ticketmaster in an attempt to buy my mom springsteen tickets). When I got back to my room this afternoon I wrote up statements for my Freshman Class Council and Yale College Council campaigns. Tonight I will have to skip the Yale Record meeting because I am going to be trying out for two improv groups from 7 to 11 pm. I'll also be missing the Yale ACLU and Democratic club meetings for the same reason. Tonight I may start work on a column for the Yale Herald, too. All in all, a lot of very fun things to do. My only regret is that there was more time to do more things!

I have to go run to buy some course packets now for classes, so I'll end here.

Again, I have trouble emphasizing enough how awesome Yale is.

I don't know that I can sufficiently articulate my supreme delight and excitement for the next four years here at Yale. Based on the last 10 days this place and these people are proving to be amazing and awesome in every respect possible. Aside from the fact that I have the smallest suite at Yale, sharing my small room with someone 6' 9" (that is not hyperbole) , everything is better than I ever imagined.

The upside of the ultra-cramped room is of course that I am forced out of the room to get out and do things, socialize, study in other places, etc. Excepting those times, like right now, when I'm blogging from my room...

The list of reasons why Yale is so excellent would be obscenely long, as everywhere I look I find new reasons to be in love with this place. The classes today? Superb. I liked most of my professors that I was shopping today and was even impressed with the ones that I wasn't so fond of (personality differences?). All the courses looked interesting, though the French that I was shopping turned out to be too easy, but my very cool professor there recommended me some other very neat courses to take which I will shop post haste.

I have some more fantastic courses to look at tomorrow, too. The only problem where classes are concerned seems to be a lack of time to take all the ones that I want.

I will try to make more posts in the coming days about specific interesting / super fun things that are happening / have happened; there are almost too many to keep track. I wish Yale had a Wesleying equivalent; maybe I will have to think up a clever name and start one. In the meantime, my adventures continue!