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Light & Verity
March/April 2008
Yale loosens purse strings, offers more aid
by Mark Alden Branch '86
Responding in part to pressure from Congress and
from its rivals, the university made two highly publicized announcements in January: first, that Yale would begin spending more money each year from its $22.5 billion endowment, and second, that it would increase its budget
for undergraduate financial aid by more than 40 percent to make Yale College more affordable.
The change in the endowment spending policy will make an extra $300 million available in next year's university budget. The bigger payout is made possible by the extraordinary returns the endowment has achieved in recent years. The rate of spending was just 3.8 percent of the endowment's value last year. Under the new rule, spending will be kept between 4.5 percent and 6 percent of the endowment's value.
President Rick Levin said that some of the money would be used to pay for increased financial aid, for expanding research in the sciences, and possibly for the proposed expansion of Yale College. In the sciences, some of the money will help fund new research initiatives at the West Campus, a 136-acre research facility in West Haven Yale acquired from Bayer Pharmaceutical last year.
Levin says that the change was in part due to recent criticism and scrutiny by Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee. Grassley has called on wealthy universities to use their endowments to make college more affordable, and his committee recently requested detailed financial information from the 136 American colleges and universities with large endowments. Grassley has suggested that Congress might require such schools to spend a minimum percentage of their endowments each year. "It just didn't seem right to be spending only 3.7 or 3.8 percent of the endowment," says Levin. "We recognized that [Grassley] had his finger on something that was indeed a problem."
"This is a great day for parents and students," Grassley said in a press release. "For the first time in years, we're hearing good news about tuition and affordability."
Although it amounts to only 8 percent of the
new spending, the increase in undergraduate financial aid announced a week later got the most attention. The change in the aid policy had been in the works for months, but it was characterized in the media as a response to a similar announcement by Harvard in December. The new plan increases aid to most families earning less than $200,000 a year, eliminates the requirement that students take out loans, and reduces the student contribution from $4,400 to $2,500 per year. The university also said it plans to tie future tuition increases to the Consumer Price Index, and that it will have a financial-aid calculator available online by this summer to help prospective students estimate their family's expected contributions.
Under the new aid formula, families earning less than $60,000 per year will not be expected to make a contribution to their child's education, except for the $2,500 self-help requirement, which a student can earn with a seven-hour-a-week campus job or by taking out loans. While the formula varies depending on family assets and the number of children in college, families earning between $60,000 and $120,000 will be expected to contribute 1 to 10 percent of family income, and those earning between $120,000 and $200,000 will pay an average of 10 percent. About 43 percent of undergraduates received financial aid this academic year, and Yale estimates that another 5 percent of current students will be eligible under the new rules.
The death of the Doodle? Maybe not . . .
by Mark Alden Branch '86
On January 29, Rick Beckwith posted a sign on the front door of his Yankee Doodle Coffee Shop announcing, "the Doodle is closing its door for good." But Beckwith soon learned that after providing Yalies with burgers, pigs in blankets, and a listening ear for 57 years, the Doodle was not going to be allowed to disappear so quietly.
The day after the closing, Beckwith found himself overwhelmed with phone calls, media inquiries, and more than a thousand e-mails. "People want to do anything to keep the Doodle going," he says. Alumni and other fans mobilized to see what could be done to reverse the decision, raising thousands of dollars for the restaurant through donations and the sale of Doodle merchandise. (Beckwith says he sold out his entire inventory of mugs, mouse pads, and apparel and has had to restock.) A "Save the Doodle" group on Facebook.com called for graduates to volunteer legal and business expertise. Yale's retail properties arm came forward with an offer to find a new home for the Doodle. And in a purely symbolic but rousing show of support, the Lancraft Fife and Drum Corps appeared one Sunday afternoon in full Revolutionary regalia to perform "Yankee Doodle" in front of the diner.
Founded by Beckwith's grandfather, Lew Beckwith Sr., in 1950, the Doodle had changed little by the time it closed. It had 12 stools, a cash register that could ring up no more than two dollars at once, and a simple menu of burgers, eggs, real soda-fountain Cokes, and genuine diner coffee. Its pigs in blankets -- hot dogs stuffed with melted cheese, then wrapped with bacon, enveloped in a buttered bun, and topped with a special sauce -- were legendary among certain undergraduates. In more recent years, the diner was known for the Doodle Challenge, a perennially open competition to see who could eat the most burgers at one sitting. (See "Lunch of Champions," July/August 2006.)
Beckwith, who left a career in futures and commodities trading to run the Doodle after his father, Lew Beckwith Jr., became ill, says that declining business and increased costs made it impossible for him to continue operating. One aspect is the rent he pays for his Elm Street storefront: at $77 per square foot, he says, it is nearly three times the per-square-foot market rate in the Broadway area.
Many Doodle partisans focused their anger on the Doodle's landlords, John Parker and Michael Iannuzzi. But Iannuzzi, an owner of Tyco Copy Center, which is also in the building, says that rent increases in the 25 years he and Parker have owned the building have been minimal. He adds that comparing rent rates per square foot is misleading because the space is unusually small, and there is a minimum value for street frontage in the area. "I've tried to assist in any way that I could," says Iannuzzi. "I've been friends of the family for 37 years, and I gave the eulogy at Rick's father's funeral. The closing saddens no one more than me." Although Iannuzzi initially offered to leave the Doodle space vacant for two months while Beckwith and his supporters created a new business plan, he later rescinded the offer after a public war of words with Beckwith and said that Tyco will expand into the space.
But there is still hope that the Doodle will be revived. In early February, Yale vice president Bruce Alexander '65, who oversees the university's commercial properties, approached Beckwith about finding a Yale-owned property in the area to house a reincarnated Doodle -- perhaps a larger one with an expanded menu and hours. The discussions continued as this magazine went to press. Beckwith wrote on the diner's website in mid-February that "there is now hope that the Doodle will be able to reopen soon."
Prof speaks out on Chinese plagiarism
by Paul Bass '82
When Stephen C. Stearns '67 sent an e-mail message about plagiarism to his students at Peking University last December, he thought he was writing for an audience of 38. He had no inkling he would tap into a deep vein of concern running through the Chinese academy. But within days, his e-mail went viral on the Internet -- and became a test case of Yale's policy of constructive engagement with the world's newest superpower.
Stearns, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at Yale, was in China teaching two seminars as part of an exchange program with Peking (known familiarly as Beida). While grading a paper, he encountered a passage written in English prose far more sophisticated than that spoken by the student. He plugged the first paragraph into a Google Scholar search and discovered that it had been lifted word for word from a published paper. He took a closer look at other papers and found that several more also passed off published work as original.
Outraged, Stearns told his students that such plagiarism was unacceptable. He gave them three days to resubmit their papers with proper attribution. Most students complied. Two more, however, handed in clearly plagiarized papers. "By that point, I was getting pretty irritated," Stearns recalls.
On December 19 he e-mailed a cri de coeur to the 38 students in his two seminars. "Plagiarism disturbs me greatly, both because it corrodes my relationship with you as my students, and because it tells me things about China and Beida that neither you nor I want to hear," Stearns wrote. "When a student whom I am teaching steals words and ideas from an author without acknowledgment, I feel cheated, dragged down into the mud." Stearns proceeded to decry a "larger pattern of behavior in China" encompassing not just widespread plagiarism, but also pirating of DVDs and production of defective and dangerous products -- all unpunished, even encouraged, by authorities.
Stearns immediately heard back from two students. They asked for permission to post his piece on the university's official biology website. He said yes. He returned to the United States two days later to an outpouring of e-mails from academics throughout China and around the world who shared and amplified his concerns (although a few questioned his right as an outsider to judge Chinese society). The episode was the subject of articles in the Chinese press and, in this country, the Chronicle of Higher Education. More than 800 websites posted translated versions of his letter and hosted extended debates, in which commenters wrote of rampant plagiarism and of professors who encouraged students to plagiarize.
More encouraging was an e-mail from Yi Rao, dean of Peking University's College of Life Sciences. He thanked Stearns, acknowledged the problem, and vowed to fire professors found to engage in academic dishonesty. He urged Stearns not to give up hope. "We will regain our long-held tradition of honesty and trust."
Stearns indeed maintains hope. The episode has revealed to him a great movement by a younger generation of academics like Yi Rao to reinstitute standards in the academy, he says. China can change, he concluded. If he could write the letter over, he would have softened some of his sweeping condemnation of Chinese society.
In this way, Stearns's experience was indeed an educational exchange. He influenced China's educational system, and he learned lessons in turn. All of which supports one rationale for Yale's extensive ties with China: that constructive engagement can produce positive change.
Is he pleased by the outcome?
"Not pleased, but certain that I was correct in doing the right thing. On balance it was constructive."
A night at Mory's for Bush the Elder
by Mark Alden Branch '86
When George H. W. Bush '48 made his way toward the back room of Mory's on December 14, flanked by Secret Service agents and mobbed by well-wishers, one guest shook Bush's hand and asked if it was gratifying to be awarded the Mory's Cup (an honor his son has not yet received).
"I don't even know what it is yet," Bush replied with a smile.
Despite its being a lower-profile award than, say, Bush's honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, the former president and his wife, Barbara, made the trip up from Houston to claim the prize after persistent lobbying from Christopher Getman '64, a member of Mory's Board of Governors.
"He turned us down at first, saying that he didn't think he was worthy," says Getman, who is handler to Handsome Dan, Yale's bulldog mascot. "But I wrote him back and told him that the bulldog is a very tenacious beast, and we don't give up easily."
Mory's president Cheever Tyler '59 says the Mory's Cup is given annually to "someone who has been of great service to Yale and Mory's and to their community. When you look at his career, putting aside any partisan politics, [Bush] has always been committed to public service in a very important way."
A crowd of around 200 -- including university and Mory's dignitaries, students, Bush family friends, and, yes, Handsome Dan -- were on hand for a cocktail reception, and it was surprising to see how the power of the presidency (even the former presidency) can daunt a group of normally confident people. Some paused to rehearse before trying a quip or anecdote on the president; others never worked up their nerve to join the throng around him.
After the Bushes had expertly worked the room for nearly an hour, a deputation from the Yale Precision Marching Band burst in to serenade them, very loudly, with four songs, including "Bulldog" (to which Barbara Bush sang along) and Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" (to which she did not). When the band members all got down on one knee for the finale, Bush followed suit -- with visible difficulty; he was to go in for back surgery three days later -- and took over on one of the drums for a photo-op.
Then he and a small group of VIPs disappeared upstairs for dinner, where Bush was feted with speeches and songs -- but not before a band member broke away from his group and approached Bush with his instrument and a Sharpie, shouting theatrically, "Mr. President, will you please sign this mellophone?"
Medicine as theater
by Cathy Shufro
Anna Deavere Smith fastens on a glittering necklace and becomes Dr. Peggy Bia, a Yale nephrologist. Bia is one of more than two dozen characters that Smith portrays
in her new one-woman show, Let Me Down Easy. From the stage of New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre, Smith-Bia describes the despair her patients feel as they assimilate "the sucky deck they've been dealt": the failure of their kidneys. "I do a lot more crying in my car than I did in my younger years," she says.
The real-life Peggy Bia watched herself in Smith's play about "the resiliency and vulnerability of the human body" when it premiered in New Haven in January. The play owes a great
deal to New Haven and Yale: Smith (who played the national security adviser on The West Wing) came to the medical school in 2000 as a visiting professor. After interviewing numerous doctors, patients, and others, she wrote what she called "a
first draft" of a play on the doctor-patient relationship and performed it at the school.
In Let Me Down Easy, Smith incorporates some of those original New Haven interviews, but broadens her scope. Building on interviews she conducted in places ranging from New Orleans to New York and from South Africa to Rwanda, Smith portrays people coming to terms with their bodies and the bodies of others -- in health, in illness, and in death. She signals the move from character to character with a change of accent, props, or clothing, slipping into a pair of stiletto heels to become a supermodel, clipping on a massive belt buckle to play a rodeo rider. Characters include cyclist Lance Armstrong (who speaks on the drive to win); playwright Eve Ensler (on the sexually alive woman); Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel (on the hot-housing of privileged children as "privatized eugenics"); and genocide scholar Samantha Power '92 (on the danger of shrinking "circles of identity").
One of the characters is Hazel Merritt of Connect-icut, who recalls the day her daughter's dialysis went awry, showering blood on the screaming girl. In the play, Merritt asserts that she won't take her doctor's advice to begin dialysis herself.
It was Merritt's doctor -- Yale professor of internal medicine Asghar Rastegar -- who brought Smith to Yale seven years ago. He and then-chair of internal medicine Ralph Horwitz hoped Smith would spur medical students, who are often enthralled by technology, to discover the richness of their patients' stories.
Watching Let Me Down Easy, Rastegar made his own discovery. Hazel Merritt had never told him about the day her daughter's dialysis failed. He wonders if the trauma was what caused her to reject dialysis for herself. Smith, he says, was able "to get information that was maybe censored from the physician. Or physicians maybe don't cross that barrier. That's her power -- that she's able to do that." 
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