the Sam Jackson College Experience

My dedicated readers will no doubt already be aware, but for those who missed a beat: I am currently writing a biweekly column for the Yale Herald about reflections from my return from studying in China last semester. The last column was about the way institutional controls on electricity and dorms affect the lives of students. This week we continue that theme by addressing mealtimes in PKU, though only briefly. Unfortunately, this is not the comprehensive account of all the gustatory delights China has to offer – that’s a post for another time.

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!

I decided to try to write a column for the Yale Herald this spring semester about my time in China, since it didn’t end up working out that I would write one while there. It’s been a strange experience readjusting to Yale, and I’ve come to appreciate many things about it that I once took for granted. At the same time, there are certainly lessons learned from China that are worth applying here, and there is plenty worth missing about Beida. This first article falls more into the latter camp, and is reposted below.

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?）

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.

One of my classes this semester, The Intellectual in Politics (HUMS 331 / PLSC 328), has a final research project which revolves around the use of the Yale University Archives and the Manuscripts and Archives division. An institution hundreds of years old has a great deal of interesting documents pertaining to its own history, but Yale also has thousand upon thousands of other collections of papers from noted intellectuals over time. All told, Yale has more than 12 miles of papers entrusted to it by various persons.

Our final project for this class will be to create an online exhibit around five different documents, so I will definitely share it when I’m done.Everywhere you look, there are amazing things to find – you can request the personal notes and documents of people from important people hundreds of years since left to the history books, or zoom in to chronicle the personal diaries and thoughts of noted government figures and other intellectuals. It’s really just like a time machine, except with more paperwork to fill out.

At the moment, I am in Sterling Library reading through some of the records associated with the presidency of Kingman Brewster, my personal favorite Yale president. While there is too much to type altogether, I am going to share one piece that I really like that I just read. It makes me sad to think that in 1965, it was a *problem* that students were not motivated by money. How different were the problems facing educators in 1965? Read on to find out:

This is text of a speech of President Kingman Brewster, Jr. before the American Council on Education, Washington, D.C., October 8, 1965

“If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?”

Boredom is not a newcomer in the halls of academe. But there is a mounting impatience and if we admit it, a new and unpleasant aroma of scorn among some student groups –impatience with education, scorn for educators.

Of course faculties are, and always should be heavily populated by people who are dedicated to the proposition that the search for truth is an end in itself. I am not one of those who buy the notion that the only worthy end of thought is action. Thought and learning, like experience and beauty can be ends in themselves. Not the least part of our job is to awaken a capacity for this enjoyment in the oncoming generations so that theirs may be delight in living as well as doing.

But the tragedy of the highly motivated impatient young activist is that he runs the serious risk of disqualifying himself from true usefulness by being too impatient to arm himself with the intellectual equipment required for the solution of the problems of war and poverty and indignity. You and I have seen too many among our students of high promise squander their talent for a lifetime of constructive work at a high level for the cheaper and transient satisfaction of throwing himself on some immediate barricade in the name of “involvement.” Posturing in the name of a good cause is too often the substitute for thorough thought or the patient doggedness it takes to build something.

Because we assume our own faith in education perhaps we have not preached it well enough. We have left it to the economists and the politicians to translate teh value of education into earning power and let it go at that. A generation whose brightest minds are unsatisfied with the dollar as the measure of success cannot be expected to find relevance in such appeals.

One of the new responsibilities for our old generation of educators is to remind the most highly motivated among the oncoming generation that there is no shortcut to the intellectual capacity which is now required to be useful in this ever shrinking ever complicating world. The chance to make a constructive difference in the lives of others, not the full dinner pail, is the highest reward of a higher education. If impatient anti-intellectualism of the radical left is not to seduce many of our best brains away from true usefulness; we and our faculties have to resassert again and again that emotional oversimplification of the world’s problems is not the paper to their solution.

But let me return to my text. What of the ends? If they don’t justify the means, what does?

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.