Although institutions like Yale have had generous financial aid policies for a while, said Katherine Pastor-Lorents — a counselor at Flagstaff High School, a school in Arizona with a relatively high percentage of low-income students that Yale visits yearly — students often stop thinking about attending Yale when they see the sticker price. But Pastor-Lorents said visits from university representatives can alleviate such fears.

Still, with thousands of schools around the country, personal university visits are not always feasible, which makes spreading the word more difficult. Yuridia Nava — a school counselor at Riverside Polytechnic High School in California, another school with a high percentage of low-income students, which Yale does not visit — said that because students at her school have more difficulty meeting admissions officers or other university representatives, they do not feel they can attend top universities. Because of that, many do not bother applying and end up at community colleges or “safety schools,” she said.

“Not only in my home, but also no one in my high school was really telling me to apply to a place like [Yale],” said Laura Plata ’19, current co-president of A Leg Even, who applied to Yale through QuestBridge, a nonprofit that connects high-achieving, low-income students with top-ranking universities. “I had the GPA, I had the leadership skills, I had the ACT, it was all there. But even when I spoke to my own counselor, the most I heard was, ‘You might get into Northwestern, but that’s a long shot.’”

A lack of encouragement from school counselors is another problem students in under-resourced high schools often face. The American School Counselor Association recommends a student-to-counselor ratio of 250-to-1. The actual national average for the 2014–15 academic year — the most recent data available — was almost twice that: 482-to-1. Often overworked and underfunded, public school counselors on average devote only 22 percent of their time to college counseling, whereas their counterparts in private schools spend 55 percent of their time doing so, according to the 2015 data from the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Nava added that often, parental fears also prevent students from applying to more selective institutions. Many parents from lower incomes and who have not gone to college themselves, she said, “lack the knowledge of what these schools represent” and are afraid to send their children away for school because, for example, they lack the money to pay for the winter clothing necessary on the East Coast. Nava said that a lack of university outreach to parents perpetuates the issue.

Both Nava and Pastor-Lorents said that in their experiences advising high schoolers from low-income backgrounds, the students also often think they aren’t good enough for selective institutions or believe they would struggle to fit in for reasons as minor as the way they dress. The “myth about Ivy League schools,” Pastor-Lorents said, has persisted for so long that breaking it down will likely take some more time.

CHANGES THROUGH HISTORY

There are many high-achieving, low-income students who never think to apply to Yale. But for more than half a century, the University has been implementing policies designed to remove some of the obstacles that keep such students from applying and matriculating.

In the 1950s, Yale had just six or seven admissions officers, all of whom reached out almost exclusively to prep schools, according to longtime Yale administrator Sam Chauncey ’57. Before 1966, each application to Yale was marked with either an “S” for “scholarship” or “N” for “nonscholarship.” The admissions committee knew exactly how much financial assistance each student applying for aid would require given their specific needs.

But in 1963, Kingman Brewster became University president, bringing with him a team of younger administrators, including Chauncey and R. Inslee Clark Jr. ’57, who became the dean of undergraduate admissions in 1965.

“You have what I call the ‘changeover from old guard to new,’” Chauncey said. “People had a new view of what Yale ought to be. Yale ought to be a national university, seeking students from national and, later, international areas, and it’s got to be men and women, black and white, rich and poor — everything.”

When Clark took the helm of the admissions office, he doubled the number of admissions officers, mobilized alumni across the country to visit high schools previously overlooked by Yale and started taking Yale students on the road whenever the admissions officers traveled to other parts of the country, Chauncey said. In February 1966, the Yale Corporation officially approved the new administration’s proposal to make the University’s admissions process need-blind.

The class of 1970, which came to the University in the fall of 1966, was Yale’s most diverse ever. Almost 60 percent of students came from public high schools, the largest number in the University’s history up to that point. The class also had the largest number of minority students and considerably fewer legacy admits — only 37 percent of the sons of Yale College alumni who applied were admitted. And for the first time, the rate of matriculation for applicants on financial aid outpaced that of students not on financial aid.

“By 1970, the student body really changed,” Chauncey recalled. “There was still ‘the face of Yale,’ but underneath we had a very different population.”

Still, at the time, Yale’s financial aid package almost always included some type of a loan, he said, making it different from the institution students know today.

Another slate of changes to financial aid and the socioeconomic diversity of the student body came about 40 years later. In 2004–05, according to Admissions Office data from the time, 31 percent of undergraduates had to take out student loans and the “sample parent contribution” for a student whose parents made between $20,000 and $40,000 a year was $2,000. But in February 2004, Harvard eliminated any parental contribution for students and families earning less than $40,000 a year and substantially decreased parental contributions for families earning between $40,000 and $60,000. Yale students and administrators took notice and began to consider similar changes.

In the summer of 2004, then-University President Richard Levin told the Yale Alumni Magazine that he had “mixed feelings” about Harvard’s policy, but that he had assembled a task force to review Yale’s financial aid policies.

“I wonder whether it is in fact a step forward to say, ‘Now it’s free,’” Levin told the magazine, explaining that most parents earning less than $40,000 a year already paid a very small sum for their children’s Yale degrees. “In my view, families ought to have a stake, however small, in their children’s education.”

But in March 2005, Yale announced sweeping financial aid reforms. The University eliminated the expected parental contribution for families with incomes less than $45,000 and decreased it for families with incomes between $45,000 and $60,000. At the time, Levin told the News that he decided to decrease the parental contribution after seeing a substantial increase in low-income applicants to Harvard.

Immediately following the changes — in May 2005 — Yale saw an unprecedentedly high yield to the class of 2009, with 1,340 students choosing to matriculate from a pool of 1,880 admitted applicants, representing 72 percent of admits. From 2004–05 to 2007–08, the average need-based scholarship for first years who qualified increased by almost $7,000, according to the Office of Institutional Research, while the cost of tuition and room and board rose by only $5,000 during the same period.

Since then, Yale has significantly changed its financial aid policies twice, both times following in the footsteps of Harvard. In January 2008, Yale eliminated parental contribution for families with incomes less than $60,000; started requiring families earning between $60,000 and $120,000 to pay only 0–10 percent of their yearly incomes toward tuition, room and board; and allowed families making between $120,000 and $200,000 to contribute only 10 percent of income. The last large overhaul to the financial aid policy came in 2010, when the University raised the $0 parental contribution bar from $60,000 to $65,000 annually and announced that families earning between $65,000 and $200,000 would be required to contribute between 1 and 20 percent of their income toward tuition, room and board.

Since then, Yale has also expanded its financial aid initiatives to include $2,000 start-up grants for first years with the highest financial need and $600 annual grants for those students for the next three years, as well as covering hospitalization insurance costs, which this academic year amounted to $2,332 per student.

BATTLING THE MYTH: CURRENT OUTREACH EFFORTS

Yale and its peers have changed dramatically in the past 50 years. Still, many high-achieving, low-income students do not consider Yale in their college searches because they and their families are not aware of the shifts that have occurred.

To battle those misconceptions, Yale employs multiple outreach strategies that specifically target students who may consider the University to be out of reach.

Like other institutions, Yale buys test score information both from the ACT and the College Board to identify prospective applicants, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan said. Yale has three main outreach programs that target high-achieving, low-income students: travelling consortiums with other institutions, the University’s flagship Student Ambassador program and a direct mailing campaign to low-income students.

Yale also communicates with guidance counselors in high schools throughout the country — by sending information about Yale’s financial aid and diversity to counselors on its mailing list prior to student ambassador visits, as well as sending it with any admissions officer who goes on the road, according to Director of Outreach and Communications Mark Dunn.

“We have a good number [of high-achieving, low-income students] in our applicant pool, but keeping that quality and quantity requires constant work because every year it’s a new set of students and a new set of parents and a new set of communities,” Quinlan said.

Yale often goes on the road with Harvard University, Princeton University, Wellesley College and the University of Virginia, Quinlan said. Until about 2006–07, traveling to high schools alone was “the main strategy” for Yale’s outreach to students, he added. However, he said, most students who came out for presentations exclusively about Yale “were already committed to [the University].” Travelling alongside peer institutions allows the office to spread the word about Yale and college affordability to more students, which is “better for the student and better for [Yale],” Quinlan said.

Admissions officers themselves, though, are not the only ones travelling on Yale’s behalf. In 2005, Quinlan, then acting director of student outreach and senior assistant director of admissions, created the Student Ambassador program in the wake of Yale’s sweeping financial aid reforms. During breaks, ambassadors, who are current Yale students, visit schools close to their home communities with potential high-achieving, low-income applicants and tell high schoolers more about Yale and its affordability.

“We wanted to reach as many high schools as possible [with] students who are currently at Yale who are from the area … to try and emphasize the fact that there are students like [those high schoolers] at Yale,” Quinlan said.

In the first year of the program, Yalies visited 249 schools. This academic year, that number was 860.

The increase has resulted mainly from the more robust data available to the admissions office today, Dunn said. In the first years of the program, the admissions office had to rely primarily on the experience of admissions officers who visited the schools themselves or read applications from them, and sometimes they struggled to assign even one or two schools for each ambassador to visit. That has changed in the past five years, since the office started cross-referencing the addresses of roughly 70,000 to 80,000 prospective applicants with the information available about their U.S. census block.

Dunn added that although the data is imperfect, since having high test scores and living in an area with an income below national median do not necessarily translate to “high-achieving” and “low-income,” it’s better than nothing. With census block data at its disposal, the admissions office can now identify more schools for ambassadors to visit by looking at a list of schools in the system within a 30-mile radius of their hometowns.

All ambassadors receive training before conducting their visits, Dunn said. But there is only one mandatory component to their presentation: talking about Yale’s financial aid policies. Everything else depends on what ambassadors themselves want to highlight about their Yale experiences.

Frances Harris ’18, an ambassador from Alaska, said that she had been to schools where people had never heard of Yale. Other students, she said, wanted to leave the room at the beginning of her presentations because they thought Yale was too expensive and sitting through her talk would be a waste of their time. Ultimately, though, those students became interested.

Eli Westerman ’18, a student from rural Arkansas who has served as an ambassador since arriving at the University, said that in his part of the country there is no “institutional or cultural knowledge” about places like Yale. He praised the program for giving high school students a better look at selective institutions.

“I feel like we’re in this great exciting cycle now where we’ve been able to assign more schools to ambassadors, which means more successful visits have occurred, which means that more ambassadors … tell their friends to do it, and so we get more ambassadors and more schools and more outreach than we did before,” Dunn said. “It’s been exciting to me, and for me identifying the data behind it was the key piece in unlocking the potential that was left in the program.”

Although it is difficult to track whether ambassador visits had an impact on the number of applications from those high schools, Dunn said, the applications Yale did receive tended to support the admissions office’s assumption that the schools would have relatively high numbers of high-achieving, low-income applicants.

Another program made possible by more robust data is the admissions office’s postcard campaign. Since 2013, Yale has sent out postcards detailing its financial aid policies and application rules to thousands of high-achieving, low-income students across the country. The idea for the mailing campaign, Quinlan said, came straight from the 2013 Hoxby and Avery research and a follow-up piece by Hoxby and Sarah Turner, which showed that low-cost interventions like sending postcards with information about affordability can make a difference in the behavior of low-income applicants.

Today, around 32,000 such students receive a five-piece mailing during their junior year of high school — “a search letter” explaining how the University got the student’s name and telling more about Yale, two postcards about Yale’s financial aid policies, a letter from a current student talking about their experience applying to Yale as a first-generation college student and, in August, a card detailing how to apply for an application fee waiver.

Every card is marked with QuestBridge’s logo to make students less skeptical of its message, Dunn said, as the admissions office understands that mentioning a neutral third-party gives the mailing credibility. The card also contains the link to a website that gives prospective applicants information on MyInTuition — a quick financial aid estimator for families, which Yale adopted this January — links to application advice and more information on Yale’s financial aid policies and a comparison between Yale’s median net price for students on financial aid and the average cost of attending an in-state public institution for students on financial aid.

Dunn added that the University does not conduct any direct outreach to students before their junior year of high school in order not to “drum up the applications.”

“The idea is to wait so that people don’t get the sense of, ‘I’m a freshman at high school and Yale wants me,’ which could have some unintended consequences in terms of students developing their search lists,” Dunn said.

Based on the numbers, the outreach strategies seem to be working for the University, even if change seems slow to some. From the class of 2015 to the class of 2021, the number of incoming first years who receive Pell Grants — subsidies the federal government provides to students with financial need — or who are first-generation college students increased by almost 100 and the percentage of such students in each incoming class has risen almost every year.

Last year, Quinlan added, students who would be the first in their families to attend college comprised around 20 percent of Yale’s applicant pool. Now, his main goal is to maintain the number of high-achieving, low-income students in Yale’s pool, though he would like to see the percentage increase. If Yale’s applicant pool overall were to expand again, however, Quinlan would rather that expansion be from “not just the sort of the students who have been traditionally applying to Yale,” he said. The rise in applications from lower-income neighborhoods in recent years has outpaced the overall growth in applications, he added — this year, the former grew by about 10 percent, the latter only by 7 percent.

If Yale were to stop conducting outreach, Quinlan said, applications from would-be first-generation college students would likely be the first to drop off.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Aside from conducting its own outreach, Yale has been working with multiple nonprofits to expand access to colleges for high-achieving, low-income students throughout the country.

“I really see this work as being part of a larger national conversation, national initiative to ensure that all kinds of selective institutions with high financial aid and high graduation rates are really working to enroll and graduate more of these students,” Dunn said. “I’m very conscious that what we do at Yale is very important … but Yale is just one and a relatively small part of a much larger ecosystem.”

One of Yale’s oldest and closest partnerships is with QuestBridge. Yale has worked with QuestBridge’s National College Match, a program that helps talented students gain admission to and full scholarships at 40 partner colleges since 2007, and has consistently increased the number of QuestBridge finalists it admits. Between 2011 and 2013, the average was 75–80; in 2016, it was more than 160.

QuestBridge conducts its own outreach to prospective high-achieving, low-income applicants and sends letters and emails to students together with its partner colleges “to show students those schools are interested in them and support them,” according to Ana McCullough, QuestBridge’s co-founder and CEO. Last year the organization had more than 15,500 applicants for the National College Match program, McCullough said.

QuestBridge also works with high school juniors through its College Prep Scholars program, which allows students to spend time on university campuses over the summer, including through Yale’s Young Global Scholars Program, and get a head start on college applications.

“We’ve seen just how genuine and sincere a lot of the colleges are about diversifying their campuses, as well as providing support and investing in the students’ ability to thrive, and I think that sometimes students and communities do not get those messages,” McCullough said. “I do feel that colleges have improved, I think that we progressed, but I think there is a lot more to do.”

Furthermore, as part of its efforts, Yale partnered with Matriculate, a nonprofit organization, co-founded by Madeline Kerner ’07, that helps low-income students apply to top colleges by connecting them with student advisers. Since the spring of 2017, Yale has been providing awards for Yale students serving as Matriculate advisers. The organization works primarily with students who lack access to high-quality, in-person advising, Kerner said.

Matriculate’s Advising Fellows conduct virtual sessions, help applicants create a balanced college list and work on other parts of their applications and also try to help them build self-advocacy skills, according to Sara Harris ’19, who was admitted to Yale through QuestBridge and now serves as an advisor for Matriculate. Matriculate’s Advising Fellows train for more than 50 hours over the course of their fellowship to better serve their students, Kerner said. She added that the organization has already worked with over 1,500 high school students across the country since its inception in 2014.

“We believe talented, low-income students are our future leaders, and it is in all of our interests to make sure they have a shot at pursuing their dreams,” Kerner added.

On a larger scale, in 2016, Yale became one of the founding members of the American Talent Initiative — a coalition of universities that aims to increase the number of low-income students enrolled in top institutions by 50,000 by 2025. The American Talent Initiative is open to colleges and universities that consistently graduate at least 70 percent of their students in six years. Out of 290 eligible institutions, 100 have already become members of the initiative.

Elizabeth Pisacreta, a senior researcher at Ithaka S+R, which co-leads the American Talent Initiative with the Aspen Institute, said the initiative was founded with the idea that “talent is equally distributed across the income distribution, but opportunity isn’t.” Members of the initiative make outreach, recruitment and retainment commitments and share information on the best outreach policies. Pisacreta added that the American Talent Initiative institutions have a lot to learn from “institutions who have historically served and served well low-income students” in the U.S.

“I think we will have a meaningful impact not just on lives and opportunities of lower-income students who will come to those universities, but on the lives of those students who would come to those campuses either way,” she said.

Pisacreta added that the work of the initiative’s members was to take a “hard look” at what barriers students are facing and figuring out how to break them.

Looking at all that Yale and other institutions have done in recent years, Quinlan said he sees early evidence of many other institutions moving in the same direction as Yale. He added that he is hopeful that universities across the country soon will offer opportunities to “hundreds and thousands more students than they had in the past from these backgrounds.”

“Yale is already bringing 100 more low-income students a year to this campus. Multiply it over four years, then multiply that across 20, 30 institutions, and you’re starting to get some serious numbers,” Quinlan said. “That being said, I think a lot of attention is paid to institutions like Yale because of our name and our history, but there is a huge missing story of how, with the lack of funding, our public institutions are not able to offer these types of opportunities to students as they have in the past. … Hopefully a lot of the national narrative can begin to focus on what we are doing to fund higher education, to keep it affordable in places that serve even more students.”

Anastasiia Posnova | anastasiia.posnova@yale.edu

UP CLOSE:
Yale's Greek dilemma

Written by Britton O'Daly

Photos by Lucas Holter

Published on April 23, 2018

In January, a Yale student brought a formal Title IX complaint against a Sigma Phi Epsilon sophomore, alleging sexual misconduct. The sophomore was suspended from Yale in early April, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, and withdrew from the fraternity around the same time.

This was not the first time in recent years that a brother left SigEp under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations. Almost exactly one year ago, the fraternity expelled a member because he was facing a Title IX complaint from Yale. Several weeks later, the student was suspended by Yale for sexual misconduct. In the aftermath of his expulsion, SigEp created a new rule: If a member is brought before the University Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, he must notify SigEp’s leadership and recuse himself from the fraternity pending a decision by Yale.

“Within the last year, SigEp has instituted policies that hold our members fully accountable for any actions regarding sexual misconduct, as it is something we take incredibly seriously,” said SigEp in a statement to the News. “Any member that is implicated in a Title IX/UWC investigation is required to withdraw from SigEp until the investigation has concluded. … If a member fails to withdraw from SigEp in the event of a Title IX/UWC investigation, regardless of the result of the investigation, the member is expelled from the fraternity.”

But in the case of the SigEp sophomore who was suspended in April, that did not happen. He waited three months after the Title IX complaint was filed before leaving the fraternity for “personal reasons,” which the SigEp leadership did not know were linked to sexual misconduct. Because the Title IX process is entirely confidential, fraternities have little way of knowing definitively whether one of their members is under scrutiny.

The failure of SigEp’s internal processes demonstrates the difficulty of fraternity self-governance, raising the question of whether Yale should do more to regulate its Greek organizations at a time when other Ivy League universities have been more proactive. In 2016, Harvard announced controversial sanctions on off-campus, single-gender groups in an effort to undermine their gender requirements. The University of Pennsylvania has been similarly aggressive in regulating Greek life by shutting down any parties that are not properly registered with the University.

Now, with a new committee in place to evaluate the University’s social scene, Yale must make a choice. After years of what students, administrators and fraternities themselves agree have been ineffective attempts to discipline fraternities, students and administrators who oversee Greek life are trying to work out whether greater University control over fraternities and sororities at Yale would benefit the community.

DANCING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

Rumblings have already begun. Dean of Student Affairs Camille Lizarríbar chairs the Yale College Committee on Social Life and Community Values, which was recently tasked with making recommendations on how to improve campus culture and engage with student groups both on and off campus. Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun said the situation at SigEp is exactly the type of issue the new committee should consider as it begins work.

Meanwhile, Yale Deputy Title IX Coordinator Jason Killheffer is currently conducting a review of allegations that the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity has a hostile sexual climate, while also investigating the culture of other student groups.

And three years ago, Yale hired Associate Vice President of Student Life Dean Burgwell Howard in part to provide guidance to the Dean’s Office on Greek life affairs.

Howard believes the Yale administration has dawdled for too long on the question of whether it should work more closely with the Greek life community to better manage it or simply accept that the fraternities and sororities will remain off-campus groups beyond Yale’s control.

“I always use the example of a squirrel running across the road: If the squirrel just runs, there’s a chance he’s going to get hit. But if he runs and he’s focused, he might get to the other side,” Howard said. “But the squirrel that stops in the middle of the road and says, ‘Oh this might be a mistake,’ and heads back is definitely going to get hit. I tell my friends, ‘Don’t be the squirrel. Make a decision. Stay on the sidewalk or go for it, but don’t dance in the middle of the road and definitely get hit.’ And Yale has been dancing in the middle of the road.”

He said that Yale prefers a collaborative approach to solving student life issues as opposed to the more aggressive, top-down plans that universities like Penn and Harvard have adopted. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth in the 1980s, Howard was a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. During his career as a college administrator, he has worked at Colgate, Bowdoin and Northwestern. At Bowdoin, he helped the college dismantle Greek life on campus. And at Northwestern, where he worked before coming to Yale, he helped oversee the college’s fraternities — sometimes disciplining them, sometimes offering advice about which students to recruit.

At Yale, some fraternity members describe Howard as a stalwart defender of Greek organizations, while others say he is even-handed and doesn’t play favorites. An internal report issued this year by the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity described Howard as an “ally.” But for his part, Howard describes himself as an ally of all Yale students. Since coming to the University in 2015, he has worked to expand the Greek council — a body comprising the leaders of all Yale’s Greek organizations — and encouraged fraternities and sororities to do more community service.

On March 1 — the first day of a vicious nor’easter that caused the roof of a University storage facility on Sachem Street to collapse — Howard met with a News reporter and editor at his office in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall to raise concerns about what he considered excessive coverage of DKE. Over the course of the semester, DKE had faced criticism from students after stories in the News and Business Insider documented allegations of sexual assault against fraternity members, including the organization’s former president, Luke Persichetti, who was suspended from Yale for “penetration without consent” in 2017.

The News had published a story in late February about DKE’s decision not to release an internal report on the sexual misconduct allegations against the fraternity. At the March 1 meeting, Howard said it would be unfair to expect DKE to release the document: The fraternity had good reason to believe the News would not cover its internal investigation fairly, he said.

Howard then likened the Yale chapter’s handling of the allegations of rape and sexual misconduct against members to an incident he remembered from college, when someone broke a window at the Beta Theta Pi house at Dartmouth. An individual brother had acted poorly, he said, but the rest of the chapter’s members were left scratching their heads over how the window had broken.

“When dealing with groups, I definitely recognize that the actions of an individual can have a negative (or positive) impact on the group as a whole,” Howard wrote in a follow-up email. “However, the choices of that individual cannot always be generalized to the entire membership – even if the membership must accept the collective consequences.”

At one point in the meeting, Howard said he had recently received a suspicious package in the mail — a response, he claimed, to the News’ coverage of Greek life more broadly, which he said had made him a target of some readers’ frustrations. Howard said that the package did not turn out to contain any explosives or toxins, “just lots of hateful language” referencing the News’ coverage of Howard’s advice to fraternities to allow students regardless of gender, which Howard said was “misleading.”

In light of the experience, Howard said he sympathized with Persichetti, the former DKE president who was suspended for “penetration without consent.”

“I don’t want to think about the packages he might be receiving,” Howard said.

“ONE OF THE BOYS”

That sympathy seems to run both ways.

In February, DKE’s national organization sent its internal report on the Yale chapter’s sexual climate to Chun. Its description of Howard as “an ally of DKE” generated ire on social media in the “Overheard at Yale” Facebook group after the News published the report a few weeks later.

In an interview, Howard said the label was fair — but that students who were upset by it missed the larger point.

“The students on Overheard … make an issue of ‘Oh, Dean Howard is an ally of DKE,’” Howard said. “Well, yeah, and I’m an ally of Alpha Phi Alpha, an ally of Kappa Alpha Theta, and I am an ally of all students at Yale”

Students on Yale’s Greek life scene said they view Howard as a friendly enthusiast of fraternity culture. One member of a fraternity, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, remarked that Howard is “one of the boys” when it comes to working with the fraternity because of his easygoing personality. Another person involved in Greek life at Yale, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it is common to hear fraternity members endearingly say that it’s “time to see our boy Howard” whenever they need to meet with him.

In an email to Yale’s ten fraternities on Jan. 20, Howard shared a list of tips for how to recruit “high quality people.”

“Just for grins, I am sharing this useful, but somewhat dated list of tips I came across, because I am cracking myself up with the outdated references… ;-),” he wrote.

Howard declined to comment on how students view him.

As a lacrosse player at Dartmouth in the mid-’80s, Howard was an officer on the executive board of Beta Theta Pi. His Twitter bio still describes him as a “lax junkie.” When he was in college, he said, Beta Theta Pi was known as the “athlete fraternity” and resembled DKE or Zeta Psi at Yale.

Beta Theta Pi’s Dartmouth chapter has a checkered past. Shortly after Howard graduated from Dartmouth, the college suspended Beta for a year after the fraternity hosted a party with the Sigma Kappa sorority during which Beta’s emcee referred to women as “sperm receptacles,” listed “ten uses for women in fraternity basements” and joked that the sorority sisters used crack cocaine, according to The Dartmouth, the school’s student newspaper.

Several other incidents involving violence and hate speech led Dartmouth to kick the fraternity off its campus in 1996. In 2008, the organization returned to campus under a new name, Beta Alpha Omega. It was suspended again in July 2016 for violating Dartmouth’s standards of conduct, but returned to campus in the winter term of the 2016–17 school year.

“In the case of my chapter being sanctioned after my graduation, I think that, while members of the organization were disappointed the fraternity was disciplined, people accepted the discipline because we agreed that the behavior alleged ran counter to the expressed values and expectations of the organization and of the university,” Howard said.

One member of the SigEp executive board told the News he has taken note of Howard’s affiliation with Beta Theta Pi at Dartmouth. “Yeah, Beta, … those fraternities at Dartmouth are insane,” he said with wide eyes.

After DKE referred to him as an ally in the internal report, Howard told the News he also considers himself an ally of Engender, a campus organization that advocates for gender integration in fraternities. But Engender disagrees. In a statement to the News, the group said Howard holds it to a double standard compared to fraternities.

“Dean Howard has very much defended fraternities in the face of dozens of complaints of harassment, discrimination, and violence against them this year alone,” the statement said. “It is noteworthy that while DKE leadership considers Dean Howard an ‘ally’ in the fraternity’s internal report, it takes us multiple follow-ups on our concerns about fraternities before we hear back from him.”

Howard said that this critique is not accurate, as Engender’s messages to the University address themselves to multiple administrators and do not single him out as the recipient meant to respond.

Howard did not respond to an email requesting comment on Engender’s criticism or the “one-of-the-boys” label. Still, not all members of the Greek community share the perception that Howard is overly friendly with the fraternities.

“Dean Howard seems to be well liked by people who interact with him,” said Robert Proner ’19, president of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. “To say that he is showing disproportionate deference to Greek life at the expense of other groups and organizations is a mischaracterization. … I wouldn’t characterize him as ‘one of the boys.’”

TOOTHLESS PUNISHMENT

In February 2015, Yale banned the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity from on-campus activities — including communication via Yale email systems and the use of campus bulletin boards — after the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct found that fraternity members had made inappropriate sexual comments about a female student during an initiation ceremony. During the ban, SAE also rebranded itself as LEO and said it would dissociate from the SAE national organization.

But the ban had little effect on LEO’s day-to-day operations, then-LEO president Jesse Mander ’18 told the News in Fall 2016, after Yale lifted the ban. Yale’s SAE chapter has since rebranded as LEO.

“We weren’t allowed to use Yale in our name. We weren’t allowed to put up flyers around campus, things like that,” Mander said. “Things that, honestly, because we’re off campus already — and a lot of fraternities are off campus — didn’t affect us that much.”

The only other Yale fraternity besides LEO to have been punished by the University in at least the past 15 years is DKE. Dean of Yale College Mary Miller banned the fraternity from on-campus activities in 2011 after it held a recruitment event in which pledges chanted “no means yes, yes means anal” outside the Women’s Center on Old Campus.

Over the past month, the News has obtained records of email correspondence among members of DKE’s national organization that shed light on the fraternity’s response to the recent scandals. An email sent in 2012 by DKE Executive Director Doug Lanpher to an alumnus of the Yale chapter suggests that, like SAE, DKE suffered little as a result of the campus ban.

“Our five-year suspension had minimal effect on our ability to operate successfully,” Lanpher wrote. “Mary Miller was actually pretty cool during the ‘chant’ controversy, but the fallout is that we’re expecting more and more attempts by Yale at regulating Greek life.”

Miller told the News she was direct, detailed, polite and clear with Lanpher as Yale responded to the “no means yes” controversy. “As for ‘cool,’ I can only say that it was clear communication,” she said.

Lanpher did not respond to request for comment.

In October 2016, DKE returned to campus. Luke Persichetti, who at the time was president of DKE, said after the ban ended that he believed the sanctions against DKE had brought about “a positive impact on the culture of our fraternity.” Five months later, in March 2017, Yale suspended Persichetti until the summer of 2018 for “penetration without consent,” after a female student accused him of rape.

In an interview in mid-April, however, former Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway acknowledged that the terms of DKE’s campus ban would have worked better in a different era: With so much of campus social life coordinated over social media, he said, such punishments have become ineffective.

“Yeah, we used the Yale platform ban, and it’s frustrating as heck when you’re trying to actually do the right thing, and the people who are supposedly in punishment are just, you know, going about business as usual — like, how do you stop it?” Holloway said. “It’s like, how do you grab hold of Jello?”

In a fall 2016 report on Greek life, the Yale College Council criticized Yale for failing to effectively discipline fraternities.

“When the University does attempt to discipline Greek organizations, punishments are more or less toothless,” the report states. “The perception that Yale has no power over its Greek organizations is incredibly harmful and decreases campus trust in Greek organizations as responsible, accountable parts of campus life.”

Still, not everyone at the University thinks the Yale-platform bans are ineffective.

“I believe it has had an effect on their activities,” Chun said. “In future cases, if there does seem to be some need to discipline a group, again we don’t know what forms that would take or whether we could take those, but that is something the committee will discuss.”

Yale’s problems managing fraternities go beyond discipline, though. In the wake of the 2010 DKE controversy, Miller instituted a rule in the undergraduate regulations prohibiting Greek organizations on campus from inducting students during their first semester at Yale or engaging in “rush activities,” defined by the University as events at which individuals are targeted for solicitation of membership.

In spite of the rule, three sources with knowledge of DKE operations said, the fraternity begins its rush events on Halloween each year. Other fraternities that actively recruit members of sports teams — as DKE does with members of Yale’s football and rugby teams — also break the rule and allow first years to rush in the fall, three students involved in Greek life at Yale confirmed.

Chun told the News in fall 2017 that the rush rule was put in place before his time and that he is more interested in policing the final tap process for fraternities — not rush events “that involve getting to know people.”

A DKE spokesman did not return a request for comment in time for publication.

Chun said that Yale does not bar fraternities from holding social events with potential rushes in the fall; the University simply wants to keep Greek organizations from reaching the final stages of the rush process before winter break. Asked specifically about DKE’s apparent violations of the rule, Chun said, “the Executive Committee will investigate whenever a charge is brought before it.”

A LOT OF TALKING

Members of SigEp’s executive board acknowledged that the rule requiring members who face Title IX complaints to voluntarily withdraw is difficult to enforce. Other social groups operate in similarly murky territory when it comes to vetting members. Yale’s secret societies, for example, maintain a master Google spreadsheet containing the names of juniors who are blacklisted for alleged sexual misconduct. But truly verifying the existence of Title IX complaints kept confidential by the University is difficult.

“Anyone can put things on the [secret society] spreadsheet,” remarked one member of the executive board.

Despite the complexities of fraternity self-governance, the University has yet to follow in the footsteps of universities like Penn or Harvard to take a more hands-on approach to organized social life on campus or even have University staff dedicated to managing Greek life.

“Helping students have that self governance where they can look at their own activity and make decisions and really base it on campus norms and campus experiences for students, … to provide that from a University standpoint [through a Greek life adviser], when it works well, is the ideal liaison between the campus and the students directly,” said Lynda Wiley, executive director of the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors.

Six years ago, in an email, Lanpher, the DKE director, told a Yale DKE alumnus that “the days of Yale allowing the fraternities to operate independently seem to be over,” predicting that the University would attempt to take charge of its fraternities following the Women’s Center incident.

But for the most part, Yale fraternities are subject to the same rules that governed them in the mid-2000s, before DKE and SAE were suspended from campus. Even so, Howard said, Yale’s fraternities are different now — they want “the University’s help.”

“They’re like, ‘Bring us together with a council,’ ‘We want sexual assault prevention training,’ ‘We want alcohol training,’” he said.

Chun has said he is relying on recommendations from the new social life committee to inform how his office should manage and discipline off-campus groups like fraternities in the future.

For now, however, the committee is still just getting started. Chun said he hopes to receive some preliminary results by the end of 2018 — but the process could take even longer.

“It is too early to get into any specific recommendations from the committee,” Lizzaribar told the News. “There is a lot of information to gather, and we are focusing on that as a first and crucial step.”

Faced with a similar dilemma about how to manage off-campus groups, Harvard President Drew Faust signed off in May 2016 on a plan to sanction “unrecognized single-gender social organizations.”

Yale administrators are wary of mimicking Harvard’s aggressive approach. Chun and Howard both told the News they do not think Harvard’s sanctions stand on sound legal ground. And two years after the sanctions were first announced, fraternities, sororities and Harvard final clubs are gearing up to sue the university over the new regulations, the News reported earlier this month.

The University of Pennsylvania in February in 2017 set up its Task Force on a Safe and Responsible Campus Community, similar to the committee that Yale has just established.

The committee’s recommendations led Penn crack down on all unregistered parties. But in the wake of that move, 2,000 students signed a petition, titled “The Ability to Have a Social Life at Penn,” that accused the university of hurting students’ mental health with its aggressive policies.

Two former administrators at Yale — Holloway and former University Secretary Sam Chauncey ’57 — said that when it comes to getting student groups to fall in line with the University, extensive dialogue is better than force.

“The only time that is sort of similar, was during the late ’60s and early ’70s, when we had the radical movements at Yale. People were doing a lot of things, like sitting in buildings, that sort of thing,” Chauncey said. “We found that there’s nothing that takes the place of a lot of talk, long conversations, negotiations, convincing.”

Holloway agreed. Still, he said, no university in America has found a perfect solution to managing Greek life.

“The best thing to do is be as proactive as possible, before the school year starts, and you have to do it every year because these groups constantly turn over, and try to appeal to their best selves,” Holloway said. “And it’s a lot of talk. It’s a lot of sweeping water back into the ocean. But you have to do it.”

Britton O’Daly | britton.odaly@yale.edu