the Sam Jackson College Experience

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.”

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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.

Thinking about schools as possible tourist attractions seems to be in line with the marketing and school “branding” talk that I try to discourage. However, any Harvard student would counter that it’s just a fair description of their state of affairs: sit down in a lawn chair with a notepad and a sharp eye for an afternoon and you’ll see an endless stream of tourists, all constantly rubbing the same toe of the John Harvard statue (to which drunk students forever do unspeakable things).

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.

There were a fair number of Yale Daily News stories last semester about various incidents of news-worthy intolerance; this sad trend seems to have continued this term with the “We Love Yale Sluts” debacle where, for those unfamiliar, a group of Zeta Psi fraternity pledges posted photos on Facebook of themselves holding a sign with that moniker outside the Yale Women’s Center, causing quite a few problems for themselves and quite a lot of talk on campus.

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.

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