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Light
and Verity
Summer
1999
A
Leg Up for New Haven Startups
An unusual new partnership
between Yale and two other local institutions is now helping New
Haven-area entrepreneurs turn ideas into businesses. The Enterprise
Center, a nonprofit organization funded by the University, the United
Illuminating Company, and the New Haven Savings Bank, was founded
this spring with a three-person staff and a mandate to improve New
Haven's economy.
"There is great power in the private sector to create jobs
and strengthen the tax base," says Yale vice president Bruce
Alexander, who heads the University's Office of New Haven and
State Affairs and is chairman of the new center's board of directors.
"Economic development is one of the most important ways the
University can affect its environment."
With help from faculty and students at the School of Management,
the Center provides assistance with business planning, market research,
financial structuring, accounting, and legal issues. Alexander says
the Center already has "a couple dozen" clients, about
half of them from the Yale community, representing business ideas
"from Internet to biotech."
In addition to offering advice, the Center hopes to connect entrepreneurs
with the capital necessary to launch their businesses. "One
effort will be to link people in the Yale alumni network who care
about Yale and who have the ability to invest with those with fresh
and creative ideas that need nurturing to grow into businesses,"
says Alexander. In addition to pursuing individual investors with
an interest in New Haven, Alexander suggests that an alumni-based
venture capital fund could be created to focus on local startup
businesses.
The Center is housed at 433 Temple Street, next door to the Office
of Public Affairs. John Lang, a former treasurer of Aetna, Inc.,
in Hartford, has been appointed director.
A
Fresh Look for Yale on the Web
While the University
invests millions in overdue renovations
of its buildings, a smaller but equally visible overhaul has just
been completed in Yale's cyberspace. On June 1, the redesigned Yale
home page went online, replacing a page with an image of antique
books that has been at www.yale.edu
for three years -- or eons in Internet time.
University Printer John Gambell, who oversaw the redesign by Michael
Rock of 2x4,
a New York graphic design firm, says the charge was "to create
a more up-to-date, truer, more inviting picture of Yale, and to
communicate that it's an institution that has a sense of cohesion."
The redesign does not apply to the thousands of Web pages on the
Yale server, but instead provides a framework for finding those
pages.
"Our early sketches were much more 'designed' and promotional-looking
than what we ended up with," says Rock. "But we came to
the conclusion that what we were designing was a navigational tool
that organized all of Yale's Web sites." Gambell says the site
is organized so that visitors "can get almost anywhere in three
clicks."
Aesthetically, the site is distinguished by its blue color and the
use of sepia-toned photographs. "It's more understated than
most of the university sites we looked at," says Rock, "a
calm rather than a frenzied experience."
The shade of blue is a few steps lighter than what Gambell considers
true Yale blue, since the more familiar color would be too dark
and appear almost black on some computer screens. For Gambell, the
color is what holds the site together. "The blue is the branding
element, as the yellow border is for National Geographic,"
he says.
Victim
Honored for Town-Gown Work
While most
people first heard the name of Suzanne Jovin when she was murdered
last December in New Haven's upscale East Rock neighborhood,
the Davenport senior was already well-known to many in the Yale
and New Haven communities for her energy and dedication to volunteer
work. Her efforts were recognized posthumously in April when President
Richard Levin and New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. awarded her
a special Elm-Ivy Award. Jovin's father traveled from the family's
home in Goettingen, Germany, to accept the award in her honor.
Jovin was remembered at the ceremony for tutoring at Dwight Elementary
School and for directing the Yale chapter of Best Buddies, an organization
that pairs volunteers with mentally challenged adults. "She
has given us a shining example of what a Yale student can be,"
said Levin, "a model of what our best students are: true citizens
of the world who bring people together, build community, and create
opportunities for others."
Jovin had spent the evening overseeing a pizza party for the Best
Buddies group on December 4 before she was found stabbed to death
near the corner of East Rock and Edgehill roads. Police have made
no arrests in the crime.
The Elm-Ivy awards are given annually to honor New Haven and Yale
people "whose work enhances understanding and cooperation between
the city and the University." They were established in 1979
by Fenmore R. Seton '38 and his wife Phyllis.
New
Courts In Session at Gym
In April, President
Richard Levin sank the first basket to inaugurate the new Lanman
Center at Payne Whitney Gymnasium.
The center, which contains four full basketball courts and a running
track suspended above, is built on a former parking lot behind the
gym on Lake Place.
Students are applauding the new center because it will provide more
courts for intramural and pick-up basketball games. "Instead
of holding intramural games until midnight," says director
of athletics Tom Beckett, "they
can be completed in a much more reasonable time now." The courts
can also be used for volleyball and badminton -- and, as this year's
reunion -- goers learned, for parties.
Designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates of New Haven and Ellerbe
Becket, Inc., of Kansas City, the $18.5-million Lanman Center is
named for Colonel William K. Lanman Jr. '28S, who made a significant
gift toward its construction. The center completes the first phase
of a long-term plan to renovate the gym and update its facilities.
Phase one also included the installation of six new squash courts,
a new varsity weight room, and a new fitness center.
Room
to Play for the Theater Set
It is
a testament to the vitality of Yale's undergraduate
theater scene that there often seem to be more plays going up
than venues to house them -- leading to innovative but complicated
staging areas like dining halls and college courtyards. Now two
new theater spaces are in the works: one for extracurricular use
in the old Co-op textbook annex off Broadway, and another for the
theater studies program in the Whitney Humanities Center on Wall
Street.
Theater studies director Marc Robinson says the space on Wall Street -- in
a former gymnasium that was used until recently for undergraduate
painting studios -- will be renovated over the summer. The space will
get new lighting and a new floor so it can function as a "black-box"
style theater. Theater studies majors will have access to the space
for senior projects.
The Broadway space, a loft structure accessible to Broadway from
an alley, is still in the planning stages. The Yale College Council
has proposed that the space be overseen by a committee that would
apportion time to extracurricular performance groups such as college
dramats and singing and improv groups.
Campus
Merger Mirrors Europe
Europe's Iron Curtain
fell in 1989, but in academia, things don't always move so fast.
A full ten years after the Berlin Wall was torn down, the curtain
that divided Yale's Western European Studies Council and its Russian
and Eastern European Studies Council has also been consigned to
history. As of July 1, the Center for International and Area Studies
will have one fewer area studies council, as the two European councils
merge into a single Council for European Studies.
Professors in a number of departments make up the membership of
the Center's area studies councils, which meet to discuss curricular
issues and host lectures, seminars, and other events. The new council
will be led by the former chairs of each council: history professor
Ivo Banac for the East, and Political science professor Geoffrey
Garrett for the West. In September the unified council will host
a conference on the future of the European Union.
Veggieburgers
at Meatless Meet
Taking a lesson from
the publicity generated by the "Doodle Challenge," an
ongoing competition to eat the most Yankee
Doodle hamburgers in one sitting, the Yale College Vegetarian
Society staged its own exercise in conspicuous consumption on Cross
Campus on April 27. Contestants vied to see who could eat the most
"all-plant-product burgers" in a single sitting.
The contest was part of an effort to call attention to the health
and environmental benefits of a vegetarian diet. Showing a keen
understanding of the student audience, the Society's literature
touched not only on issues like cholesterol, global warming, and
deforestation, but also on "the sexual benefits of vegetarianism."
(Lower cholesterol is said to "improve blood flow to all parts
of the body.")
The winner of the eat-in, outgoing Yale College Council president
(and admitted carnivore) Zachary Kaufman '00, inhaled 14.5 veggie-burgers
in half an hour.
Society spokesman Glenn Hurowitz '99 said Kaufman's time was "well
on pace to breaking the Doodle record for meat."
Coaches
Offer Hope for Hoops
Yale's basketball program
got a fresh start in April as director of athletics Tom Beckett
named new head coaches for both the men's and women's teams. The
appointments followed disappointing seasons for both teams that
ended in the resignations of men's coach Dick Kuchen and women's
coach Cecelia DeMarco.
Taking the helm of the women's team is Amy Backus, who comes to
Yale after four seasons as an assistant coach at Northwestern. Prior
to that, she was head coach at Middlebury College, where her teams
had a 106-41 cumulative record. At Northwestern she helped coach
teams that went to the NIT and NCAA tournaments and gained experience
in competitive Big Ten play. "I've been coaching against or
with some of the greatest minds in the game today," says Backus.
New men's coach James Jones
was an assistant coach for the Bulldogs from 1995 to 1997 before
moving on to another assistant's job at the University of Ohio.
Among the players he will be coaching are a crop of juniors that
he was largely responsible for recruiting. At the press conference
announcing the appointments, Beckett said the athletic staff was
glad to see Jones again. "In the five years that I've been
here, I have not seen as many smiles in this building as I did this
morning," he said.
Last season was not a good one for either team. The men posted a
4-22 record and were at one time ranked last in the RPI computer
rankings of 310 division I teams. The women's team started the season
with four consecutive wins but went 10-16 for the season.
Study
Says: Give Mom a Break
Opponents of the so-called
"drive-through" delivery -- the practice of discharging a
mother from the hospital less than 24 hours after she has given
birth -- received strong scientific support from a study published
in last month's edition of the Archives of Family Medicine.
The research, conducted in 1995 at Yale-New Haven Hospital by a
team of scientists from the School of Medicine, compared a group
of 73 women who stayed at the hospital for two nights following
delivery with a group of 171 women who were authorized by their
health insurers to stay only one night.
The study's findings showed that the mothers in the two-night group
experienced considerably fewer difficulties with their newborns
than their counterparts in the shorter-stay group, who reported
that their infants had nearly two times the rate of illness and
required almost double the number of outpatient pediatric-care visits.
Women in the one-day group also reported experiencing significantly
more fatigue and concerns over the health of their infants.
The Newborns and Mothers Protection Act of 1996 mandated that health
insurers must cover a 48-hour stay in the hospital. The new study,
say the researchers, shows that "while the ideal length of
a post-delivery stay may vary from one woman to the next,"
in general, any attempt to reinstitute drive-through deliveries
is false economy.
Masters
Wrassle for College Pride
When Edward S. Harkness,
Class of 1897, provided the funds to build Yale's first residential
colleges, thus creating the office of college
master, he surely never dreamed it would lead to distinguished
professors grappling in a pit of orange Jell-O. But the mastership
carries with it the charge to keep up college morale, so Pierson
master Harvey Goldblatt took on Jonathan Edwards master Gary Haller
as part of this year's Pierson Day festivities, traditionally held
on the last day of classes in April.
Goldblatt had twice before faced Silliman master Kelly Brownell,
losing both times to the psychology professor (who specializes in
eating disorders). This year Brownell was unavailable, so Pierson
students arranged a match with the rookie Haller. But Goldblatt
seems to have fared no better, although the results are in dispute.
"I claim to have thrown him out of the ring," says Haller.
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