Mass movement for Catholic center
Sunday Mass is standing-room-only these days at St. Thomas More, the Catholic chapel and student center at Yale -- a big change from ten years ago, when the pews were typically one-third full on any given Sunday. And so, despite stagnant church attendance nationally and the recent abuse scandals in the Catholic church, St. Thomas More has recently outgrown its Park Street home and is planning a $20 million addition.
One of the reasons, says Lindsey Mergener '05, a member of the undergraduate Yale College Council, is St. Thomas More's emphasis on "exploring the synthesis of scholarship and faith, which is a fascinating concept not a lot of us have been exposed to before." Some 125 students participate in weekly discussion groups of 8 to 12 people in which students read the next Sunday's scripture lessons and consider them in the context of their own lives. The center also sponsors a lecture series, in which Catholic faculty talk about their faith, and daylong fellowships for speakers who discuss religion in relation to law, science, and culture.
In his ten years as chaplain, Reverend Robert Beloin has developed a number of such programs, designed to bring Catholic students' understanding of their faith up to the level of their academic studies. Students from Catholic backgrounds make up 20 to 25 percent of Yale's undergraduate population (between 1,000 and 1,200 students), but "a lot of them have no basic vocabulary for talking about Catholicism," Beloin says. "They are constantly challenged in late-night conversations. That's why a big part of our program is nurturing Catholic intellectual life."
But all this activity needs space -- space that is sorely lacking in the 1938 building that houses the center. (Beloin regularly turns the living room of his adjacent apartment over to groups that have no other place to meet.) Seven years ago, St. Thomas More bought the building next door, which had housed a shoe repair shop and Park Street Subs, and started planning a $1 million addition. But Beloin says it soon became apparent that an addition of that size "was too small to accommodate our current program, let alone expansion." Instead, the center made a swap with the university. For $20, Yale is granting St. Thomas More a 99-year lease on a parcel south of the center. St. Thomas More will demolish the retail building on that site and build a 30,000-square-foot addition designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates. At the same time, the center will construct a small retail and student office building for Yale on the first site it acquired north of the center. The basement of the existing building will be remodeled as a theater.
The new addition will be named for Thomas E. Golden Jr. '51, '52MEng, who has pledged a large contribution to endow the building and its program. (St. Thomas More is raising $20 million for construction, largely from Catholic alumni.) Built around a small courtyard and an enclosed atrium, the addition will house offices, a lecture hall, a dining hall, a library, and seminar rooms. Groundbreaking is scheduled for this fall, and the building should be complete by 2006.
Beloin says the new building will send a signal to Catholic students and prospective students: "They will be able to tell just by looking at the building that Catholic life at Yale isn't just about Mass on Sunday."
During his sophomore year, Tyler Golson '04 conceived the idea of a Yale quiz show with a revolving panel of students and professors who would answer trivia questions. ("In kindergarten, someone told me I'd make a great game show host," he explains.) But Golson found out Yale didn't have a TV station. "I realized if I wanted to make a TV show, I had to make a TV station first."
When cable television was installed throughout the residential colleges in 1996, the university arranged to reserve six channels for its own use. They were mostly used, if at all, for running foreign-language instruction videos and news. From the beginning, students petitioned the administration to permit the use of the channels for student programming -- without success, until now.
After three years of planning, Golson's brainchild, the student-run YTV (www.yale.edu/ytv), was launched in October.
Golson started by researching student-run stations at other schools, including Duke, Cornell, and Columbia. He and his friends drafted a business proposal and submitted it to Yale administrators. "They were very supportive, but they wanted to make sure we had thought through all the financial, organizational, and legal issues, including how we would sustain ourselves from one year to the next," Golson says. "We were able to calm their reservations one by one, and in the middle of last year they said, 'Okay.'"
Today, YTV broadcasts coverage of campus events, student productions, and other university-related programming. It is housed in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall in offices outfitted with a fiber-optic cable connection, tape decks, VCRs, and monitors. "It's kind of guerrilla filmmaking," Golson observes. "We're borrowing cameras, recruiting students, using empty classrooms." A committee of professors and administrators advises the students.
Some of the programming now airing on YTV includes The Yale Show, a comedy/variety talk show; YTV News; A la Mode, a fashion-makeover show featuring local businesses; and Head to Head, a political debate show modeled on Crossfire. Still in development is Queer Eye for the Yale Guy.
"I have no idea what I'm doing," says Golson. "One minute I'm general manager, the next I'm holding a camera shooting a football game. But it's lots of fun."
International scholars fight visa red tape
Because he was a young Pakistani male studying in America in the post-September 11 era, Ahmed Afzal prepared carefully when he went back to his native country last August to renew his student visa. Afzal, a PhD candidate in anthropology, brought three letters from Yale officials attesting to his full-time student status, as well as some of his dissertation work. But nothing could prepare him mentally for the two-month delay that ensued. "When I initially came to the U.S. in '98, the application process took me only one week," said Afzal, who finally returned to the states in mid-January.
Afzal's troubles left him angered over the tightened restrictions international students, especially those from Muslim countries, must now face when entering or re-entering the U.S. "The new visa guidelines fail miserably in achieving their stated goal of guarding U.S. territory against terrorism and attack," Afzal said. "Quite simply, they are racist and unjust."
Statistics from the U.S. Department of State show that 27 percent fewer visas were granted between October 1, 2002, and August 1, 2003, than in the same period two years before. (The number of applications fell, too, by about 17 percent.) In addition, the State Department has implemented additional background checks, including a security clearance by country of citizenship -- adding four to eight weeks to the waiting period for citizens of 28 mostly Muslim countries -- and a security clearance by field of study, which subjects students and scholars to further scrutiny if their work falls into categories on the government's technology alert list.
About 2,500 international students and scholars are currently enrolled at Yale, including many postdoctoral scholars who contribute significantly to research. Afzal is not the only one who has had difficulties. Nine graduate and professional students and nine postdoctoral scholars and faculty missed the beginning of the fall semester due to visa delays, but eventually arrived on campus, according to the university's Office of International Students and Scholars (OISS). Several more are still stuck in visa snafus.
Yale officials say they have been wrestling with such issues since the Patriot Act was passed. "Trying to resolve inddividual cases has been frustrating. We've tried to stay in contact with the state department to ensure that the cases are moving forward," says OISS director Ann Kuhlman, "but generally we have not been able to get cases expedited." Yale is also part of an American Association of Universities lobbying effort on the issue. "While one understands that terrorism is a threat and the United States has to take measures," says President Rick Levin, "educaing foreign students in this country is about the best investment in global security that we can make."
The delays most often come when a visa application is referred by the State Department to the Department of Homeland Security -- for reasons that are not always clear, according to Levin. "Homeland security hasn't quite sorted out how to do this or what they're really looking for," he says.
But Afzal thinks Yale could have done more to help him with expenses and practical problems caused by his plight. "Unlike my colleagues at other universities who could at least boast of a proactive administration, I felt Yale was quite indifferent to the very real delays faced by its international students, particularly Muslim students like myself," he wrote from Pakistan. Kuhlman says the OISS kept Afzal abreast of his situation but couldn't intercede in any other way.
Afzal is one of nearly 6,000 people who have signed a petition, drafted by the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) at Yale, urging reforms to the system. Graduate student Qin Qin and other GESO members posted the National Petition for Academic Visa Reform on the Internet last fall. It not only calls on the government to create a more streamlined process for visa applications and appeals, but also calls on universities to lobby on students' behalf and absorb some of the financial burdens caused by heightened security measures. 