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Light & Verity On Tuesday, September 11, the Yale Alumni Magazine staff came to work prepared to send this issue to the printer. But the magazine's plans, like so much else in America, changed when hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and rural Pennsylvania. The magazine will have further coverage of the University's response to these events in subsequent issues. On campus, the Yale community struggled to comprehend the enormity of the attacks so close to home. Administrators decided not to suspend classes or close offices, but most other events were canceled, including all athletic events through the following Sunday. Blood drives set up at Yale-New Haven Hospital and the Omni Hotel on Wednesday were so successful that potential donors were turned away and asked to return another day. An estimated 3,000 students attended a vigil on Cross Campus Tuesday night, holding candles as University chaplain Frederick J. Streets and President Richard Levin spoke. "Yale is a community of concern, and to those of you who grieve and to those of you who are afraid, I say, we will do everything we can to help and support you," said Levin. "I know that the generosity of spirit that pervades this community will prevail."
Current and future Yale students -- and the admissions office -- got a big back-to-school gift in September, when the University announced that it would increase its undergraduate financial-aid budget by 28 percent starting next year. Under the new aid guidelines, the portion of the term bill paid by students themselves -- through summer and term-time jobs and loans -- will be reduced by $13,780 over four years. The decision to reduce the "self-help" requirement, which will cost the University an estimated $6.3 million a year, comes after similar aid reforms at Princeton, Harvard, MIT, and Dartmouth last winter. Yale will also spend an additional $1.2 million on aid as a result of an agreement it signed with 27 other colleges this summer that standardizes the way the participating colleges calculate a family's expected contribution. Unlike Princeton's plan, which eliminated the expectation that students take out loans as part of their aid package, Yale will allow students to choose between reducing their loan burden or working less during the school year and the summer. Freshmen will be expected to contribute $5,500 through summer earnings, loans, and term-time work, down from $7,820 under the old policy. Upperclassmen will contribute $5,900 -- significantly less than the $10,420 now expected of juniors and seniors. Undergraduates will also benefit from an increase in the student minimum wage from $7 an hour to $9. President Levin acknowledged that the changes at peer institutions had something to do with the new policy. "One can't deny that it was done partially to respond to Harvard and Princeton," he said. "We need to remain competitive." The agreement signed over the summer is the first collaboration among colleges on financial-aid matters since 1989, when the U.S. Justice Department, citing antitrust law, forced the Ivy League and other allied schools to stop its practice of offering identical financial-aid packages for individual students. Taking advantage of a limited antitrust exemption for need-blind colleges passed by Congress in 1992, 28 colleges banded together in 1999 to make their diverging policies more uniform -- without discussing individual cases. The group produced guidelines for calculating a family's expected contribution to a student's education, considering such issues as divorced and separated parents, families with other children in college, assessing family businesses, and regional variations in the cost of living. For Yale, the new methodology will result in changes primarily in two areas: The exemption for home equity will be raised, and student savings accounts will now be considered according to the same, more generous policy applied to parents' savings.
Students Issue Slavery Scorecard How do the men whose names were given to Yale colleges measure up on the slavery issue? That is one of the questions asked and answered in a document released in August by a New Haven group called the Amistad Committee. "Yale, Slavery, and Abolition" documents the ties of Yale benefactors and honored alumni to the institution of slavery. J.J. Fueser, who wrote the paper with fellow graduate students Antony Dugdale and J. Celso de Castro Alves, says the project was in part a response to the University's Tercentennial materials that emphasize Yale's role in the abolitionist movement before the Civil War. The authors found that of ten individuals for whom residential colleges were named, eight were slaveholders themselves and one (Samuel F.B. Morse) supported slavery in his writings. Only Abraham Pierson emerged unscathed; the authors could not determine whether or not he owned slaves. The report also discusses the role of slavery profits in early gifts to the University. The first endowed professorship, for example, was funded by and named for slave trader Philip Livingston, and Yale used income from Bishop George Berkeley's Rhode Island plantation -- which likely was worked by slaves -- to fund scholarships. Finally, the report notes how, in 1831, Yale-affiliated civic leaders opposed alumnus Simeon Jocelyn's proposal to found the nation's first "Negro college" in New Haven. The paper's authors are present and former leaders of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, which is seeking to organize a teaching assistants' union at Yale. Union volunteers helped research the article. The University's official response, released by the Office of Public Affairs, did not discuss the report's specifics but praised it as part of Yale's Tercentennial exploration of its history. "No institution with a history stretching long before emancipation is untainted by the evil of slavery," the statement said, "and our discussion of those connections is important and worthwhile." The report and related materials have been posted online at http://www.yaleslavery.org.
Residents of Saybrook College returned to their renovated home at the beginning of the semester after a year of exile in the "swing dorm." But college master Mary Miller and her family had to wait a little longer. A fire on June 16 caused serious damage to the master's house, which was then in its final stages of construction, setting back completion until late September. The fire apparently was caused by spontaneous combustion of painting materials stored in the living room of the master's house, according to Arch Currie of the Office of Facilities. Three firefighters sustained minor injuries in the late-night blaze. Saybrook is the third college to undergo a 15-month renovation process that features reconfiguration and modernization of student rooms, updating of kitchen and serving areas, and basement renovations to provide more activity spaces for students. (Timothy Dwight is getting the treatment this year.) Saybrook's basement squash courts have become a multipurpose room, with an enlarged game room adjoining it. Above ground, the college master's and dean's offices were moved to more accessible locations, and the library was rebuilt. Perhaps most jarring for Saybrook alumni, though, is the relandscaping of the college's well-known "stone courtyard," which may need to be renamed: It now has more turf than stone.
Alumnus Aims for Mayoral Upset Most analysts predict that New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. will easily win a fifth term on November 6. The Mayor handily defeated state senator Martin Looney in the Democratic primary on September 11, and the general election is traditionally but a formality in the heavily Democratic city. But the race looks more interesting than usual with a Republican challenge from well-known developer and Yale alumnus Joel Schiavone '58. Schiavone, best known for his role in the redevelopment of Chapel and College streets adjacent to the Yale campus, has stressed the need to make downtown New Haven a residential neighborhood. His campaign has emphasized using the city's downtown and waterfront for retail and entertainment, rather than light industry and other functions. Schiavone would be the first Yale alumnus in the job since Frank Logue '48, '51JD, who governed the city from 1976 to 1979. Schiavone has long urged greater cooperation between the city and the University, and he won the Yale Medal in 1998. But his business relationship with the University ended in acrimony. In 1999, Yale bought Schiavone's former Chapel Street properties, which he had lost to the FDIC eight years before. Yale hired Schiavone's ex-wife's company to manage the buildings, but the University canceled the contract in the midst of a public dispute with Schiavone over the property's management. Looney made Yale an issue in the primary campaign, calling for taxes on campus buildings, supporting unionization efforts among graduate students and hospital employees, and urging Yale to subsidize city schools. But despite a string of scandals in DeStefano's administration, primary voters responded positively to his campaign, which stressed improvements in the city's fortunes during his eight years in office.
Senior's Ordeal Still Unexplained The disappearance of a Yale senior in South Africa over the summer after a series of alarming communications with her mother raised fears for her safety among her family, friends, and officials at Yale and in the State Department. Natasha Smalls of Queens, New York, arrived safely in New York on August 26, three weeks after she was reported missing. But she and her family have not spoken publicly about what happened to her during the last weeks of her year abroad. Smalls was hospitalized upon her return to New York and apparently will not return to Yale this term. Smalls spent her junior year and the following summer studying at the University of Natal in Durban. Her mother, Glory Smalls, says that Natasha told her in March that she had been assaulted. Later, in July, her mother says, Natasha wrote to say she had been drugged and held in a mental hospital in Zimbabwe. On July 31 she called to say she was flying to New York the next day, but she did not arrive as planned. Yale officials learned that Smalls was missing on August 8 and contacted the State Department, which was already looking for the student. Smalls finally called her mother from Johannesburg on August 23. Her family arranged for Sandra Sanneh, an African languages lector at Yale who had taught Smalls, to accompany her home. At a press conference on the day of Smalls's return, Mrs. Smalls and U.S. Representative Gregory Meeks criticized both the State Department and Yale for not doing enough to help find Natasha. "I felt that if I was white, they would have reached out more," Mrs. Smalls said. But Department officials said they had been "actively involved in the case," and Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said the University had cooperated fully with the government.
Class of 2005 Is Smaller, Broader Last fall, Yale announced that it would extend its "need-blind" admissions policy to students from outside the United States and Canada. As the 1,301 members of the Class of 2005 arrived last month, the effects of that change became apparent. Non-Canadian international students make up 7.3 percent of this year's freshmen, up from 6.0 percent of the Class of 2004. (Canadians make up 2.5 percent.) More striking is the portion of foreign students who receive financial aid: 62.1 percent, compared to 24.7 percent in the Class of 2004. The switch to need-blind -- and a recent increase in the financial aid budget for international students -- also means more of this year's students come from previously underrepresented countries such as India (8 freshmen) and China (7). Overall, there are 49 states and 44 foreign countries represented in the class. The admittance rate for this year's class -- which had a record 14,809 applicants -- was 13.8 percent. The yield -- or number of admitted students who chose to attend -- was 65 percent.
Eli Students Are Mother's Favorite College rankings are a dime a dozen these days, but Yale just topped a list that might surprise those who associate the University with the "grim professionalism" that once worried Kingman Brewster. The latest issue of the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine rated the University number one on its annual list of the "top ten activist campuses." Yale was selected because of the effort of student protesters to "shame the University" into working with Bristol-Myers Squibb to make the Yale-developed anti-AIDS drug Zerit available at lower cost in Africa. Mother Jones has been compiling the list annually since 1994 by polling activist organizations to find out where students have been effective. Richard Reynolds, the magazine's director of communications, says the list is designed to cover a range of issues and campuses. Yale made the list once before, in 1996, when students' volunteer work and union-related efforts were cited. One alumnus and May Day veteran who says he was "surprised" and "proud" is Roger Cohn '73, the magazine's editor, who assures us that he had no part in determining the rankings. (The magazine's publisher, Jay Harris '82MPPM, is also an alumnus.) "In the last five years, there's been a real surge in social and political activism on campuses," says Cohn. "And issues like these, globalization and AIDS, are not selfish ones. It's about the lives of people beyond the campus."
Son of Sterling Profs Just Wants to Play Ball Jon Steitz '02 brought a heck of a "what I did on my summer vacation" story back to campus in September. Steitz, an ace pitcher for the Bulldog baseball team last spring, was picked in the third round of the amateur draft by the Milwaukee Brewers on June 5, making him the highest Yale draft pick since Dan Lock went in the second round in 1995. Steitz spent the summer traveling the West with the Brewers' Class A rookie team, the Ogden Raptors, where he posted an earned-run average of 6.68 and a 2-4 record. It's unusual enough for an Eli to have a shot at big-league ball, but Steitz's background certainly did not foretell that he could make a living by throwing a baseball 94 miles per hour. A native of Branford, Connecticut, and a graduate of the Hopkins School, Steitz is the son of two Sterling professors of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, Thomas and Joan Steitz. Steitz says that although his parents were not especially interested in sports themselves, "they supported me because it was what I liked to do." At Yale, Steitz struggled through two difficult seasons, both for him and for the team, which was 16-29 in 1999 and 13-31 in 2000. "Sometimes for a pitcher it takes a while to click," he says. Last year, he finished the season with a 2.66 earned-run average, led the Ivy League in strikeouts, and was 15th in the nation in strikeouts per nine innings. The team, though, fared little better than in his previous seasons, finishing 12-22 and 6-14 in the Ivy League. "It's very easy in baseball for things to snowball," says Steitz. "Everything starts to go wrong and it's hard to get back on the right track." While the team will be without Steitz next year, they will have the services of another pitcher whose statistics rivaled and in some cases surpassed Steitz's last season. Craig Breslow '02, next year's captain, had a 2.61 ERA and was ranked 13th in the nation in strikeouts per nine innings. Steitz says the highlight of his Yale career was spent on the bench-watching Breslow pitch a one-hitter against Harvard on April 13. After
Steitz finishes his degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry
this fall (he accelerated by one term), he will head to Arizona
for spring training, then an assignment with a full-season Brewers
affiliate. And does the pitcher have a plan for what he'll do after
baseball? Steitz says if he's not playing, he'll be coaching or
working in a front office. "Hopefully, there is no after baseball,"
he says. |
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Yale
Alumni Magazine, PO Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905. USA.
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