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The School of Exile

By Daniel Judt

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I: Run, Keep Running

Place du Palais-Bourbon is a beautiful, cobblestoned little square in Paris’ Seventh Arrondissement. It is about as quintessentially French as a square can be. On its northern side sits the French National Assembly. To its east and west stretch vast wings of government offices. A marble statue in the square’s center named La Loi depicts Marianne — the symbol of the French Republic — seated with a scepter of justice in her right hand, a tablet of law in her left.

Every Saturday morning, 30 refugees jog through the square. They come from a host of countries — Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Tibet, Eritrea, Georgia and many more — but more immediately they come from a Parisian banlieue (suburb), or a night in a metro station, or a friend’s house where they’ve crashed for the month. A medley of languages echoes off the marble walls of the National Assembly. Dari, Pashtun, Arabic; French. The refugees cut through the center of the square and pass directly beneath Marianne’s gaze. They head one block south along Rue de Bourgogne, until they reach number 28bis — two noble blue doors. Next to them, a gold-plated sign reads: “Pierre Claver: Aide aux Demandeurs d’Asile.”

The noble blue doors open onto a small, grassy courtyard. A foosball game with four built-in, well-worn ashtrays sits on the left. In the courtyard’s center, two slender benches flank a thin metal table, where breakfast awaits. The runners gather round and eat: slices of baguette from the patisserie down the street, spreads of fine jams in little bowls with little spoons, dollops of thick cold cream. A glass of tea. It makes for a rare and almost utopic scene: refugees passing by the seat of French government, eating bread and jam in an old hôtel particulier, at perfect ease in their new home.

The runners are students at Pierre Claver, a small private school for adult refugees in the quiet, soft-with-wealth Seventh Arrondissement. Every day, 150 refugees cycle in and out of Claver’s grassy courtyard, up and down two floors of tiny but homey classrooms. They take classes on French language, but also French history, art, poetry — and sport. Not two blocks away from the seat of French government, this school is trying to form the next generation of French citizens — and they are refugees.

—

The question of how to welcome refugees into a nation wary of their presence may well be the defining issue of our time. This is especially true of Europe. In 2015, over a million migrants entered the Schengen zone, and over half a million requested asylum — petitioned a European government for refugee status. The International Organization for Migration expects that over 3 million migrants will try to enter Europe this year. The last time such movement happened on such scale was some 70 years ago, when the continent — the world — had just torn itself to pieces.

In France, refugees are too often the implicit scapegoat of a uniquely French crisis. The country has suffered three major terrorist attacks in two years; Marine Le Pen’s far-right party remains atop election polls; mayors are banning burkinis. The best-seller shelf in French bookstores is flooded with the likes of Éric Zemmour’s polemic “The French Suicide” and Michel Houellebecq’s not-quite-satirical “Submission.” Laïcité, the French term for separation of church and state, is today the center of fraught debate, with critics claiming it discriminates against Muslims – no veil in schools, for example – and defenders insisting that it keeps France secular and equal.

It is a familiar theme. Across Europe and America, the left’s answer to a decade of mass migration and displacement has been multiculturalism. Let refugees import and preserve their culture; let us adapt to and tolerate difference. The right has responded with demands for nationalism and assimilation. Make refugees learn and adopt our culture; let us remain unchanged.

But on both left and right, especially in France, the premise is the same: Refugees rarely integrate. They learn shoddy French and remain either hostile to or ignorant of French culture.

As a result, we often read a narrative of France’s and The West’s crisis as one of cultural disintegration — a clash of civilizations. In the press, we see refugees flooding shorelines and wandering the squalid “Jungle” at Calais. But at Claver, we see a more common truth: Refugees who want to adopt their new nationality, and French people eager to help them do it.

Eight years ago, before Europe’s migrant crisis and before the populist shock that today surges through Western politics, a French philosopher named Ayyam Sureau began to envision a different way to welcome a refugee. She wondered if it would be possible to create a model for integration based neither on uncompromising French Republicanism nor on strident multiculturalism, a model which might, in today’s polarized politics, seem impossible: Accept refugees as they are, but make them French, too.

—

I came to Association Pierre Claver as a volunteer. I had taken a semester off from university and had heard about the school from a friend. I ended up spending six months there, volunteering and teaching. My first day, I walked through the large royal blue doors and nearly toppled over a group of 30 refugees who were circled up, stretching. It was Saturday morning — running time.

Claver’s running coach, a growling Frenchman named Alban, stood outside the circle in a sharp brown jacket, a tee shirt and tight black sports leggings. He smoked, sipped a Nespresso and barked, “Ok, runners, listen up! Regular route. And stick together. Push each other.” He pointed to the team captain, an Afghan in a sleeveless black running shirt, mid-thirties, built stocky like a baseball catcher, with a goofy child’s cackle and a twinkle in his eye. “Rahman, lead us out.”

I got to know Rahman well during my time at Claver. He lives with his wife, also from Afghanistan, and two children — both born in France. He speaks fluent French. Rahman is Pierre Claver’s success story, a refugee poster boy.

He insists I would not recognize the Rahman who arrived in Paris eight years ago. “J’étais sauvage,” he says. He clarifies: as he uses it, sauvage means shy, uncivilized, where civilized means “to be civil,” to interact in the public realm of his new nation.

He grew up a shepherd in a village in the mountains of northern Afghanistan. He tended to 80 sheep and one donkey, and he carried a rifle. He never went to school — not one day — and never thought much of that fact. In a short essay he wrote for himself about his life, he says:

I see myself there: I’m sitting under a tree, playing the flute for my sheep. The wind blows gently and my hair, as though it heard my music, sneaks out from under my Taqa (shepherd’s hat) to dance in the air.

When he was 22, he got into some trouble with the local Taliban and had to flee Afghanistan.

I arrive in France in August 2008, after traversing Iran, Turkey, Greece and Italy, after a voyage full of dangers, adventures and hardships! On foot, running, by train, in the trunks of cars, in trucks, crammed in with hundreds of other people packed tight like sardines or hidden under those hundreds to get across the Greco-Italian border. This dream or nightmare lasts six months.

I met many students at Claver who have taken similar paths. They were pinballed around, nudged and shuttled and chased through Europe. They tended to see movement as linear: You start someplace and end someplace else. And more often than not — like Rahman — you move fast. You run. Massoud, a suave Iranian with a dry sense of humor, bitterly remembers one Greek policeman chasing him full-throttle through a camp. He croons the policeman’s words in French, lengthening his o’s into a blood-curdling howl: coooours, coooours encore. Run, keep running.

But when Rahman arrived in Paris, he decided to stay. He spoke neither French nor English; only Dari with a thick village accent. But he wanted “a place where equality prevails,” and here seemed good enough. He was also tired, and wanted to stop moving. Some Afghans hanging around the train station told him to go request asylum. He got on the metro. Somehow — he’s not quite sure — he found Ayyam Sureau.

II: Fellow-Men

Ayyam Surreau, the founder and director of Pierre Claver, keeps a quotation pinned above her bathroom mirror. She reads it each morning as she puts her makeup on.

“If a human being loses his political status … [he] has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”

The line is from Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In a chapter on refugees, Arendt — who was herself in exile — warns us of the “abstract nakedness of being human.” She cites Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” Burke argued that the Revolution’s emphasis on natural rights — what we today call “human rights” — was dangerous. What counts is not natural right, but “a right to belong to some kind of organized community”: a state. Arendt says that refugees, who retain their natural but not their national rights, are “deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion.” Deprived, in other words, of a civic space. Burke called these national rights “entailed inheritance.”

Ayyam wants to solve Arendt’s problem in 21st century Paris: To offer refugees the tools — the entailed inheritance — to be treated as fellow-man.

Ayyam herself is not a French citizen. Born in New York to an Egyptian family, she came to France 33 years ago. When French newspapers profile Claver, they make a big deal of Ayyam’s decision not to take French nationality. To which Ayyam simply responds: “More French than I, and you’d die.”

And indeed, Ayyam appears right at home her Haussmannian apartment where she and her husband François — both in their 50s — live with two of their three children, one block from Pierre Claver. When I interview her in October, we sit on a deep-red velvet armchairs that surround old, dark wood tables in her living room. Ayyam holds herself in perfect posture, tall and slender. Her long eyebrows arch like waxing crescent moons toward the bridge of her nose, which lends her face a constant sternness. Her dress is impeccable. She wears a long black skirt, a flowing grey chemise with a single black stripe running down the middle, a dark brown leather belt and black leather boots: just a touch severe. Her voice, slightly different for each of the three languages she speaks – English, French, Arabic – is always rich and throaty with cigarette.

French as she is, though, Ayyam still insists on her foreignness. “I am very foreign. I enjoy my place. … A very French way is to be foreign.” In university, she studied the ethics of encounter — a particularly French area of philosophy. “The whole grace of an encounter,” she explains, occurs when you interact with someone “without either imposing yourself on [him] or being crushed by who he is. By creating something dynamic between you both.” Ayyam’s life mirrors her studies: one long, graceful cultural encounter. She is both French and foreign; neither element is crushed. It’s her kind of Frenchness — a Frenchness beyond nationality, independent of documents — that Pierre Claver tries to give its students.

—

In a sense, Ayyam founded Claver by accident. In 2008, then-President Nicolas Sarkozy pushed through a law making it more difficult to petition for refugee status in France. Asylum-seekers rejected by the French refugee agency, the OFPRA, had only 30 days to appeal the decision in court. “For a foreigner!” exclaims Ayyam. “Someone who does not speak a word of French, without resources, legally lost — it is as though you were saying, ‘There is no appeal.’” She decided to create an organization to provide aid to asylum-seekers.

Claver’s name and symbol were also accidents. When Ayyam decided to found the school, her husband François was reading the journals of Pierre Claver, a 17th century monk who aided slaves in Spanish colonies, and who is today the patron saint of slaves. Ayyam used Claver’s name because of a passage he wrote about a donkey:

“Every time I do not behave like a donkey, it is the worse for me. How does a donkey behave? If it is slandered, it keeps silent; if it is not fed, it keeps silent; if it is forgotten, it keeps silent; it never complains … That is how the servant of God must be.”

Ayyam says that when she explains this choice, everyone misinterprets the symbolism. They think the donkey is the refugee. The donkey is the school.

At first, Ayyam thought Claver “was an accident with absolutely no political reason, or even preparation in my life.” But one night made her realize that the school had its roots in her philosophical studies — Arendt in particular. It was Christmas Eve, 2008, a few months after she founded Claver. At the time, the school’s home was the basement of a church behind Gare de Lyon (a generous Jesuit priest lent it to Ayyam). That night, she had opened up the basement to cold asylum-seekers. Suddenly, she and François found themselves facing four hundred desperate faces — “all wanting something, all needing something. A cacophony of needs.”

A young, gaunt Afghan approached her. He shook with fever. A pile of multicolored legal documents trembled in his hands. “I have been rejected by OFPRA because, I sleep outside. This is not possible, I really need help,” he stammered. Ayyam, overwhelmed and exhausted, replied, “Oh, how terrible. Please come and see us after the holidays.”

That night, she lay awake in bed. “I said to François, ‘Did we really say to a guy who had a fever — we didn’t even see about his fever — come back after the holidays? Did we actually say that?’ And we went into a real frenzy, and we sent out all the students to search for him, without a name. He hadn’t a name.”

They searched until the crack of dawn. They went to Gare de Lyon and Gare de L’Est. They peered under countless bundles of blankets. At last, they found him. His name was Habib. (add footnote 1 here)

The ordeal unsettled Ayyam. The encounters she had visualized in her studies were always at a remove. “Two actors on the scene of the world, and the ethics is between you and me. It’s completely different, as I discovered, in Gare de Lyon, when you have an ocean of faces.” This is why she keeps Arendt close by: a reminder never to let an ocean of faces blur into meaningless abstraction.

—

Back in 2008, Pierre Claver had just four students. Rahman was one of them. He remembers noticing Claver’s symbol — the donkey. It reminded him of the one he guarded in Afghanistan. He came to class every day, but didn’t like to talk and didn’t know how to act.

At the prefecture, I speak sign language. I make signs with my hands. The only thing I can say is, “Hello.”

… I start to learn French. I, who don’t even know how to hold a pen, how will I learn, how will I write?

He went to OFPRA, the Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, with François. It helps to have François on your side. He used to serve as a judge on the French court for asylum seekers. “I lucked out,” Rahman says with a sheepish grin.

And yet OFPRA still denied his request for asylum. The interviewer didn’t believe his story. He thought Rahman might not even be Afghan. It had taken eleven months for OFPRA to issue the rejection; it would be another six before he could appeal his case to the court. In the interim, he was not allowed to work.

This didn’t bother him. He had a language to learn, and could get by on 300 euros in welfare aid per month. Every day, he went to class at Claver. Then he went to the Pompidou library and watched French movies on its public computers. He preferred action films — Bruce Lee, he says. He binge-watched “24.” Every time a character said something, he paused the film, copied down the subtitles and looked up each word.

His dream, he says, was to be “just a normal person.” He clarifies: “French.” In a radio interview with France Inter this year, he says that, “When I became a refugee in France, I didn’t know where my nation was. We don’t know. I couldn’t go back to Afghanistan, I wasn’t French. And so: Who am I?”

—

By 2009, Claver had nearly 100 students and dozens of teacher-volunteers — far too big for the church basement they occupied. Ayyam began searching for a proper home for her school.

She scoured the fringes of Paris, where space would be cheap and where, she supposed, folks would be less snooty. She tried neighborhood after neighborhood. Each time, she found an ideal space. Each time, she nearly signed a contract. And each time, the owner backed out when he discovered Ayyam ran a school for refugees. These “fringes” were gentrifying -— no one wanted trouble. Ayyam was shocked. “France keeps boasting about all [its] diversity,” she says, “[but] it’s a very easy thing to accept diversity, and welcome it, and be left wing and so on, as long as it’s on paper. Another thing is to sit on the same bench.”

Despairing, Ayyam happened to walk down Rue de Bourgogne one afternoon on her way home. She noticed a small hôtel particulier that she passed all the time. “I knew it by heart. And — shit! — it was for sale.” She bought it.

Almost immediately, she knew she’d made a good choice. “When you’re making a dough, you make a hole in the center and then you break the eggs,” Ayyam says. “You never try to integrate the eggs from the outside. Doesn’t work.” The seventh, with its haute bourgois allure, (and not some drab suburb) is what refugees imagine Paris to be. “What we believe is that, when you have guests, foreign people who have just arrived from travel, you bring your best things out.”

III: Not a Language School

The unfortunate side-effect of offering only the best is that Claver must remain small. Ayyam takes no more than 150 refugees each semester — which means only 40 new students each fall and spring. To win a spot, refugees line up twice a year — Sept. 15 and Feb. 15 — outside the great blue doors. When Ayyam arrived at Claver on inscription day this past September, her mouth dropped. A line of 750 refugees stretched back to the Place du Palais-Bourbon, all the way to the National Assembly. Claver, her husband François joked, “has become the hottest school in Paris.”

Ayyam interviews each aspiring student. (Former Claver students act as translators.) There are two prerequisites: Students must be refugees or asylum-seekers, and they must be adults — minors go to public school. Beyond that, Ayyam searches for intangibles. She wants “ambassadors”: people who, 10 years down the line, will open their own associations and run their own businesses. “Active citizens,” she says, recalling Arendt. “That would be very important in France. Because there are very few people to embody [refugees’] presence, politically.”

The refugees who queue up for admission think of Pierre Claver as a place to learn French. To Ayyam, this is a mistake. She frequently notes an “urgency” in her classes: As soon as students obtain refugee status, they want to learn just enough French to get by, and then find work. She understands the urge. But she also knows that in order to regain Arendt’s “political status,” one cannot rush through language. She wants her students to slow down a bit. “Pierre Claver is not a language school,” she tells each class at the beginning of the semester.

Ayyam’s philosophy manifests in her teaching style. Every Friday, she leads a class of beginners through a review of the grammar they’ve learned that week. There are four classrooms at Pierre Claver. Fridays, Ayyam teaches in Room C. The room is small and dark, draped in warm, heavy colors: deep red curtains; red-patterned oriental poufs for chairs; two thin, pitch-black wood tables for desks. As with Ayyam herself, there is a sense of passionate warmth and security — but with it, a rigorous austerity. I always find myself sitting up straight. The first time I observe her class, there are five students. Friday is the only optional class of the week. Normally, attendance is mandatory. There are no grades at Pierre Claver, but there is a single strict rule: If you miss three classes unexcused, don’t bother coming back. (“You either belong in this classroom, or you don’t,” Ayyam tells her class one day. “Is that clear? This isn’t the United Nations conference where no one gives a shit. This is my classroom.”) No matter, says Ayyam. Five is enough. She writes the endings of the past imperfect tense on a whiteboard: ais, ais, ait, iez, ions, aient.

She turns to face the class and her eyes narrow. She speaks slowly and carefully, carving her words as a sculptor his marble.

I want you to recognize that sound, she says. Ais. When you hear it, you should feel sad. Someone is telling you about something that once was, but no longer is. She pauses, searches for a good example, one that will sting a little. “J’habitais en Afghanistan,” she says. “I used to live in Afghanistan.” Three students nod, but two still don’t get it. Ayyam tries another, and this time everyone understands: “The Twin Towers were beautiful.”

—

A week after the terrorist attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, someone defaced and destroyed Claver’s blue doors. The attackers left the rest of the school untouched. Ayyam suspects a French person attacked the doors “as a sign of disagreement” with Claver’s model (and its members). “It wasn’t a threat,” she remembers. “But it caused a lot of pain, because it was done to cause pain. A single message.”

After the attack, Ayyam installed a security camera outside the school. She quickly noticed a trend. She would leave the blue door propped open to avoid constant bell-ringing as students arrived. The students, though, would always close the door from the interior. “To form a community,” Ayyam explains. But perhaps also to avoid what lurked outside. “Pierre Claver,” one refugee told me, “is the good side of France.”

As late as 2014, says Ayyam, the anti-Muslim sentiment that today chars so much of French politics simply “was not there.” But the Hebdo attacks, and the Nov. 13 massacre 11 months later, changed everything. To heed Arendt’s words, Claver couldn’t teach French culture at a remove. They had to tackle French politics head-on.

One time this fall, a moody Syrian asked Ayyam whether one of his French culture classes was “obligatory.” She didn’t sleep that night from anger. The next day, she pulled the student over. She took a blank piece of paper and drew a circle: Claver. Inside, she wrote little labels for all the activities at the school: French classes, drawing class, coffee and tea, history class, poetry class, running, evening concerts.

As she wrote, she told him, “Right now, France is in a crisis towards the foreigners. A very huge crisis. They think that you guys are coming to France only to come and get social services, social aid, take whatever you want to take from it, and not participate in anything. You’re not going to respect the laws, or the manners, or take part in the creation of the common project called France. So nothing is obligatory — but that’s exactly what people are hating you for. They are hating you because you are asking, “Is this obligatory?”

“And this school” — Ayyam pounds her hand on the table with every word — “is about not being hated here.”

IV: The French Way

One Friday in March, François Sureau marches through Claver’s blue doors with a canvas army backpack, belting French military tunes. François is, by his own definition, “of a time gone by.” He wears only suits, unless he’s going hiking, in which case khaki army pants, a blue button-down shirt, a light beige vest and a cravat. The tips of his fingers are always charred black with the pipe tobacco he carries in a brown leather pouch in his breast pocket. And he has an astounding memory: songs, poetry, long passages of prose, the furthest depths of French history. The students at Claver see François as the Franc. “When he speaks,” one student told me, “you feel France.”

Every year, François leads 30 students and teachers at Pierre Claver on a weekend to walk to the Cathedral of Chartres, some 80 kilometers outside of Paris. The pilgrimage to Chartres is a Catholic tradition that dates back to before the town’s Cathedral was built in 1193. The weekend before Easter — the weekend Claver makes the trek — is one of the most popular times to go.

François is well aware that the scene he and Ayyam have created here is a strange one. Thirty Muslim refugees taken on a Catholic march by their French school — by François, the Franc, himself a practicing Catholic — to mark the Holy Week.

I ask François if there’s anything to be made of this. He shakes his head. For our group, this trip has nothing to do with religion, he says. This is Claver camping for a night on our way to a beautiful cathedral that everyone ought to see. Plus, he adds, letting the main point seem like an aside, walking long distances builds solidarity. François served in the Foreign Legion.

It’s certainly true that none of the refugees seems concerned with any religious subtext. As we plod through vast stretches of pancake-flat fields (“What a shitty landscape,” François remarks), spirits are high. François bellows round after round of patriotic French songs, and some students join in. That afternoon, we stop in a town square and splay our aching legs out on the grass. The wind blows gently. Rahman sits under a tree and plays his flute.

Sunday, we reach Chartres. Ayyam, Alban the running coach, and a host of other teachers arrive by bus minutes later. Everyone gazes up at the cathedral’s imposing facade. The other groups begin to stream into the cathedral for afternoon mass. We go in, too. François, in his element, circles us up and gives a history lesson. He points out the cathedral’s famous blue stained glass. He talks about Chartres’ principal relic, the tunic Mary wore when she birthed Jesus. He also points out some common features — the cross-like structure, the alter. Ayyam reminds me that if many of the students have never been inside a cathedral.

Listening to François, it becomes clear that this is not just some hike through the French countryside. It is very much a pilgrimage; a way to show refugees a crucial piece of their new country’s history. Bernd, a kind-faced man with a delicate smile who teaches poetry at Claver and whose mind seems to always be somewhere yours hasn’t quite reached, put it to me bluntly: “We’re creating a school of French civiliz …” — he cuts off, searching for the more appropriate formulation — “A school of the French way.”

—

During the semester I spend at Claver, there is one class that every single student and teacher must attend. The class is taught by Didier Casas, a friend of François and a former member of the Conseil d’Etat (equivalent to the US Supreme Court). Over the course of four evenings during the spring, he delivers a sweeping history of laïcité, the French separation of church and state.

Everyone attends the lectures (“I need this just as much as they do,” one professor murmurs). Since Claver’s classrooms are too small, Ayyam relocates the fourth and last session to the side-room of a church down the block. As with the Chartres pilgrimage, the uneasy comedy of a Frenchman teaching a crowd of Muslim refugees about laïcité in a church classroom is lost on no one.

Claver itself is strictly laïque, but not for the reason public schools are. Ayyam explains, “I wouldn’t want anyone to believe that we are forced by the French government. We are not, we carry those rules within us. We don’t give a shit what the French government wants or doesn’t want, it’s going to be that way, because we believe in that — that life is much better if you protect public space from religions. That’s all. It’s the French way.”

Students at Claver tend not to mind this policy at all. “In laïcité everyone respects everyone without knowing their religion. And it’s marvelous,” one remarks to me. But when Casas opens the floor to questions about laïcité in French society, some begin to push him. One asks: Religion can’t be present at schools; why, then, can parents ask for a chaplain who offers an optional class on school premises? Casas wavers; laïcité isn’t as steadfast as it sounds on paper. He responds: “There’s also something that I call the ‘principle of reality.’ It means: depends on the neighborhood. Very simply. I mean, it’s not very systematic, but that’s nevertheless the truth.”

Students latch onto this ‘principle of reality.’ Can one be excused from school for religious holidays? “Depends on the neighborhood!” a student yells. And what about serving halal food in school lunches? More calls of “It depends! Principle of reality!” ring out.

François closes the course. Perhaps he realizes the atmosphere is slightly awry, for what he says perfectly encapsulates the way Claver teaches the elusive “French way”:

“This is the most difficult course to teach. Didier had to explain to you that France is a country where we can believe whatever we want, but where we have to preserve our way of living together despite our different religions. That’s what it is to be French. The law is difficult … And I’m glad it’s difficult, because that’s being French. And now: we drink and eat together!”

—

Sitting on a bench in the courtyard at Claver, I ask Rahman if he thinks he’s changed since arriving in France. He picks up his iPhone and puts it face-down on the metal table. “Before,” he says, “I was like that.” “Now” — he flips the phone over, face-up — “I’m like this. I’m open, I give advice. Often, when one comes from a country that has been at war ever since one was born, one thinks in a negative fashion. In France, that way of thinking has to change. I try as hard as I can to be French.”

He’s spent eight years in France. Things are going well. He was finally granted refugee status in 2011. With Claver’s help, he got a degree in mechanics and a driver’s license. He brought his wife over from Afghanistan. He writes:

Today I no longer learn irregular verb conjugations or complicated tenses. … I learn French songs, I take classes on politics and theater. I go on field trips the school organizes.

He also teaches. For the first time, Claver is offering a class for “Alphas.” These are students like Rahman; Afghans who don’t yet know the Roman alphabet. Ayyam hopes that “les Alphas” will become a new generation of Claveriens. And indeed: Early in the semester, Rahman makes an announcement in Dari. He’s recruiting runners. Saturday morning, he says. Meet in the courtyard.

A few weeks later, he recruits me, too. I join the team for the “regular route,” a 10 kilometer loop through central Paris. I try to imagine the scene from high above: 30 refugees racing through the city, tearing past the Louvre and Notre-Dame and along Boulevard Saint-Germain and through windy side-streets with little cafes, pounding through Place du Palais-Bourbon.

The run ends where it began, in Claver’s courtyard. Alban, the coach, stands next to one of the benches, talking to Ayyam. She asks me how the run was. Good, I say. Hard. She laughs; most of these refugees aren’t used to running for leisure, she says.

I remember Rahman and Massoud: Run, keep running. On their journeys, refugees run from – or are run out of – place after place. Running means being unsettled. But in Paris — at Claver — refugees run loops. They start someplace and end in that very same spot. Rahman does not run through Paris so much as he runs in it (or, as Parisians say, sur Paris: on Paris). This is the Claver model: Take the refugee journey and transpose it, graft it onto a new life. Here, to run is no longer to traverse alone. It is to declare a desire — an ability — to stay in one place together.

A week or so after the last laicité lecture, Rahman walks into the courtyard with a larger grin than usual. Without saying a word, he walks over to Ayyam and hands her an opened envelope. “What is it?” She asks. “Read it!” he says. She opens and reads. Then she too grins wide, and pulls him into a tight hug. I peak at the letter and see the official watermark of the Republique. Rahman has become a French citizen.

V: A School of Exile

In October, I return to Pierre Claver for a final interview with Ayyam and François. The three of us scrunch around a table in a small Vietnamese restaurant. I ask what impact they hope Claver will have on its students. Ayyam and François respond in dialogue. Slowly, they turn away from me completely, and speak directly to one another, still inventing the school together.

Ayyam: I think if we were to say it truthfully, we’re working for their children. There is absolutely nothing we can do — I know that — for a foreigner who has come as an adult from a foreign country to make him happy. There is no way in the world this is going to happen. You can make him less sad, less sorry, less bitter, but you can positively help him make his children happy. Of that I am sure. I’ll take this as a principle in marble.

François: It’s really true, that’s really it.

Ayyam: I have never lost sight of that, whatever we were doing —

François: That’s what’s at the core of Claver, and that’s why Claver is very particular. It’s particular because that assumes something disappeared in modern society, a kind of friendship between generations.

Ayyam: You know, that whole hullabaloo about French values, the Eiffel tower, the beauty of France … that hurts. No country is ever more beautiful than your own. That is a fact. And I think that this is important, and maybe this is very specific to Claver, is that we completely acknowledge and know the pain of exile.

François: This is a school of exile.

Ayyam: Voilà. And I think that this makes it a very human place.

Listening silently, I realize that, philosophy aside, Claver is simply pragmatic. It is a place where refugees can meet and model their new nation – and where the nation can meet and model its refugees. It is not about becoming French; it is about learning to live in France.

The day he became a French citizen, Rahman wrote the end of the piece he’d written for himself, and from which I’ve been quoting, in clear and beautiful French:

Today, I became a French citizen. I have two children, Youssef and, this past June, Rukhshana. They were both born in France. Youssef will start school next year. I hope that they will speak French just as well as they do Dari; that they will study in university; that they will treasure the value of liberty; and that they will have a heart big enough to love two countries.

The choice is yours

By Ryan Gittler

and Chrissy Hart

Published on February 24, 2017

They meet in classrooms, apartments, common rooms and tombs. They gather on Thursdays and Sundays, veiled in nightfall and secrecy. Some don formal wear, others sport party attire — tuxedos, gorilla masks and skunk costumes. They convene to drink and be merry, to dine and debate, to spend the hours with 15 like-minded peers. They are Yale’s senior societies —the much publicized, much fantasized group of 40 or so “secret” social clubs for undergraduate seniors.

The first and best-known, Skull and Bones, was founded in 1833, followed by Scroll and Key in 1841, and Wolf’s Head in 1883. As society prestige peaked in the late 19th century, groups even emerged for underclassmen, including short-lived freshman societies that recruited from prep schools and sophomore societies that were closed in 1900.

Today, Yale has over 40 senior societies, including four with assets of over $4 million, as of 2014. Yale’s societies have even crossed oceans, with the establishment of Leones Luminantes, a secret society at Yale-NUS. With references permeating pop culture, like the 2000 thriller “The Skulls” and the cult-hit “Gilmore Girls,” both of which allude to Skull and Bones, the idea of a Yale senior society has established itself in conventional lore as secretive, elusive and elite.

But this mythology is changing, thanks in part to an array of recent developments. For 25 years now, many senior societies have been coed, and they continue to undergo reforms to increase their diversity and accessibility. Most recently, the Yale College Council has spearheaded multiple efforts, including allowing juniors to remove themselves from the society tap process in February 2014, and supporting the establishment of seven new senior societies in 2015. The seven new societies were part of a larger collective called the Yale Society Initiative, an organization established to create new societies as needed in order to make the entire society system more inclusive for all.

“Some [societies] are still very intense, concerned with their tap lines and alumni network, but I think that’s a very small portion of the societies. The vast majority I would say are just a group of people who you generally didn’t know before and you just hang out with them, get to know each other. It’s not a high-key thing at all”, said senior Jeremiah*, who is in a society.

Jeremiah said he is glad there has been a shift away from mystery and prestige surrounding most societies and is happy to be a part of that change.

In previous decades, when a society’s prestige was more important, some people would try to plan their extracurriculars and life at Yale with the end goal of getting into a particular high-level society. Senior Byron*, who is also in a society, said he knows people who might get caught up in the allure of a prestigious society, but he knows no one who would ever choose their extracurriculars just to gain admittance. Many of the seniors interviewed noted a decline in society exclusivity and influence among students. According to Byron, seniors no longer prioritize senior year societies over postgraduate employment, as societies no longer provide direct connections to job opportunities. Rather, their purpose now is to give seniors the chance to bond with an interesting new group of people.

“I think the experience and the nature of getting to know completely different people from your friend group is super rewarding,” said Jeremiah.

All of the six current society members interviewed feel that their societies are a low-key, fun way to get to know different people outside their own friend groups. But there is a range in how invested each of them are in their societies. They do not see their societies as a huge time commitment or investment, instead viewing them as a fun addition to the rest of their activities.

“I would say even for those that are in rigorous societies it affects who you spend some of your nights with, but I don’t think it affects the composition of your friend group. So the friends that you’ve had, through freshman, sophomore, junior year, you stay friends with them. But it definitely has colored my senior year in a way that would have been different if I was not [in a society],” said senior Donna*.

Senior Leslie* noted that she is not strictly attached to everyone in her society, but “it has been a great way to meet people that I never saw on campus before.” For Leslie, society has not only been an avenue to meet new people, but also a way to spend time with people she already knew in a different context. Her suitemate, whom she has lived with for four years, also happens to be in her society. Leslie found it interesting to hear her suitemate’s “bio,” a lengthy personal biography of a society member and was surprised to find out new information about her. She did say that society takes up a decent amount of time and she considered quitting, but is glad she stuck with it.

Byron agreed that society allowed him to meet new people while still having an ample amount of time to spend with his other friends.

“My senior weekends at the end of the semester are going to be spent partially with my society and partially with other friends that I want to hang out with. But I imagine that there are societies who want you to spend a large chunk of that time with them,” Byron said.

Jeremiah offered a slightly different perspective, as he is more invested in his society than the other seniors interviewed.

“[Investment] definitely ranges in spectrum. … I spend a ton of time with the people because I get along with them very well, and we hang out a lot even outside of designated society times, which are Thursdays and Sundays,” Jeremiah said.

Jeremiah believes that there are many levels of investment across the different societies, and “buying into it” is key. You have to be committed to investing and spending several hours a week with the society, he said. Jeremiah also noted that two people dropped from his society early on, but they were the ones who had committed the least to the society.

* * *

For the most part, societies don’t seem to have much social influence on the senior class, beyond determining where some seniors decide to spend a couple nights a week.

“Once you’re in, societies are sort of nonplayers on the social scene. You do things together — go dancing, get dinner, see a member’s a cappella jam — but getting through bios and tap eats [up] a ton of time, and socializing between societies happens, but not that often”, said Elliot*.

The only time societies branch out socially is through mixers with other societies. According to Byron, this is “a fun way to meet or see seniors you haven’t seen in awhile.”

There is a hierarchical component that emerges with mixers, particularly in regards to which groups participate and where they take place. This is where exclusivity can play a role in the social scene, as the difference between landed and non-landed societies becomes an issue. Landed societies are the more established groups that have a prominent meeting space on campus.

“There’s a big divide there, in terms of which societies will throw mixers with others. You’re kind of trading the secret of your tomb or house, so I can see that as a very real reason for keeping your mixers among [other landed societies]. So for our mixers [with nonlanded societies], we’re going to local bars or common rooms. For me there’s no hard feelings about that, I see it as a natural course”, said Byron, who is in a non-landed society that is around 10 years old.

Beyond determining mixers, the specific society a senior is in—or not in—does not have much social influence on their final year at Yale. According to the seniors interviewed, societies have more social influence on the juniors attempting to join than the seniors themselves.

According to Elliot, “Societies have a role in the social scene, primarily in the way in which they exert pressure on nonmembers. Junior spring can be a really stressful time for hopefuls [and the tapping members], and the prestige game [in my day] was not pretty.”

* * *

The stress level of the tap process varied across the seniors interviewed. Half of the seniors discussed the process said that they did not feel stressed as juniors.

“[The tapping process] was very low stakes for me. I did not feel married to the idea that I needed to be in a society to feel good about my senior year. And so I did not feel pressured, worried, scared or anxious about it. But I do know that some people do feel that way”, said Donna.

Leslie noted that she had actually not been planning on joining a society at all, but quickly decided to apply through the YSI from the influence of friends. She was hesitant at first, but decided on a whim, filling out the application about two hours before the deadline.

On the other hand, for those who were more invested the process was much more stressful.

Jeremiah, who said he felt heavily invested as a junior, said, “I remember being stressed that others of my friends had been tapped and I hadn’t, even though I ended up getting [invitations] and it was fine.”

But this diverse spectrum of feeling stressed or more relaxed based on how much someone is invested in the outcome throughout the tap process could be applied to many other situations.

“It can be a little jarring. It’s like any other extracurricular at Yale, where you’re going to get rejected and it’s probably going to feel bad but you get over it pretty quickly — at least most people I know definitely got over it pretty quickly,” said Byron.

According to Byron, the amount of taps people get vary. Last year, some people got just one letter, but others got 10. Throughout the tap process, societies conduct several rounds of interviews and mixers.

Because each society only admits around 15 people, the process is selective. This is why the traditional tap process has been a matter for debate, particularly in recent years.

As a society member choosing juniors to tap, Jeremiah said, “I understand why [the process] happens [now] because I want to get to know the people before. But on the flip side, when you’re doing it, you have to compete and seem really cool to get in. So that I have more mixed feelings about. It’s been an awesome experience and I love it, but that whole exclusivity thing I have mixed feelings about.”

According to Leslie, “people’s complaint with the more traditional structure is that it’s not as accessible if you don’t have super close senior friends when you’re a junior.”

Traditionally, current members of a society will tap juniors that they know either through extracurriculars or their residential college; it isn’t based on any sort of application. Some seniors like this process because it creates a group of people that they have deliberately chosen and gives the current members the freedom to craft a class that will fit with the vibe of the group.

As Byron said, “I think societies do a good job of selecting the people that would be inclined to join them.”

Another benefit to tapping, according to Jeremiah, is that it sorts a “diverse yet complementary group of people.” He said, “something that I marvel at with my society all the time, is [there are] people that I knew of but had never hung out with, and we all fit together very well but we’re all very different.”

Even though some people prefer the traditional tapping process and think it leads to diversity in the members, one senior thinks that it in some cases it does lead to less diversity.

“My own society happens to be very diverse in terms of socioeconomic status, ethnic background, religious background. But I think sometimes the tapping process—because the people who are part of the group tap the people beneath them—sometimes that can get into people choosing people like them, or people with like-minded interests. So I have seen some groups which are less diverse,” said Donna.

In response to concerns over the exclusivity and stressfulness of the tap process, the Yale Society Initiative has created an alternative process for society applications. According to Chanthia Ma ’17, a liaison on the YSI board, the system is intended to relieve stress and give more choice to juniors.

“Rather than just being picked based on who your friends are, you are actually sorted based on your characteristics,” Ma said.

The YSI application is largely question-based, with each member society submitting two questions they feel are most important to them. Applicants thoughtfully respond to these questions, as well as express their personal preferences. Some characteristics include an inclination for tradition—lending them towards groups created with more established practices—or a desire for lengthier biographies, which would suggest groups with a more personal focus. Taps are based almost entirely on applications, in stark contrast to the traditional society tap process, which heavily relies on recommendations from current members. “It’s the same experience of society without the exclusivity and social posturing of the tap process,” said YSI member Fish Stark ’17. “We sort people into societies based on what they want to get out of the experience, which means that people are well-matched and get along really well.”

All interested juniors are guaranteed a spot in a YSI society, as long as they submit a “reasonable application,” with complete answers. This week, emails for the initial round of YSI applications were sent to the junior class, and, as of Thursday night, the YSI had already received over 120 responses indicating interest. Ma said that even if more juniors apply than the current YSI societies can accept, the board will create additional societies to accommodate all.

“The initiative has been able to bring more of an inclusive and accommodating atmosphere to the senior society scene,” Ma said.

However, student opinions varied on the effectiveness of the YSI system to establish meaningful, diverse friendships within societies. Byron, who tried out the YSI system but then ended up joining a non-YSI society, said he was “fine” with his society placement, but he didn’t really bond with his fellow society members. Elliot, another non-YSI society member, said the traditional system is more effective because it is organized around the idea of meeting new, diverse voices.

“My society in its tap considerations actively sought out people who were different from one another,” Elliot said. “Society is organized around the experience of meeting new people at Yale and, more broadly, reiterating how fascinating and deep other people’s stories are.”

Still, critics of the traditional tap process say it is stressful, exclusive and relies too heavily on tap lines—a system of annually choosing members from specific campus groups. Byron felt that tap lines foster competition between junior members of the same groups, and lead to some feeling left out. Leslie said the traditional structure represents much of what people criticize about Yale, and that juniors should not buy into it just because it’s tradition.

“I like the idea of YSI because traditional society structure was way too exclusive,” Leslie said.

Nearly half of Yale seniors eschew the society process all together, yet most remain happy with their decision. Byron said his non-society friends are perfectly happy “doing their own thing” on Thursday and Sunday nights, and do not feel unfulfilled without a society.

“My impression is the people who aren’t in society likely chose not to be in society, [but] they did have a choice to be in a society. There are still maybe very real reasons to feel left out of more elite or prestigious societies, but I would view it in the same way as extracurriculars. Not everyone can be on the spring fling committee, not everyone can be on the board of the [News], for that matter”, Byron said.

Some seniors also drop their societies early in the fall semester. Byron said that two to three members dropping from each society seems to be standard procedure on campus.

“A lot of people I think go into the society process not knowing that they really are going to have Thursday and Sunday nights pretty much taken up, so that’s why people drop at the beginning of [senior] year as well.” Bryon said.

Coryna Ogunseitan ’17, a former editor at the News, quit her society after the first semester because she didn’t feel close to most of the group. She also said that as the only woman of color in her society class, she felt uncomfortable bridging “the huge culture gap.”

“I think for people who don’t feel happy with their friend group, society can be amazing because you make a bunch of new friends, but I think for people who have a set of close friends, it’s not everything,” Ogunseitan said.

But regardless of those who left or decided not to partake, the storied display of tradition and friendship — the Yale senior society — is alive and well on campus.

Just as it has been since the days of Tafts and Bushes, the society tradition is still attracting hopeful juniors. For Russell*, a participating junior, the entire tap process is teeming with possibility. Still, he acknowledges an opinion that many modern Yalies hold, in contrast to their predecessors — societies are great if you want them, but they’re not a necessity. They don’t need to be secretive, exclusive or stressful.

“If you like meeting new people and having discourse, it seems like a good time, but secret societies are all pomp and circumstance,” Russell said. “You could potentially gain just as much from sitting in your college’s common room and striking up conversation with folks you know.”

*Names have been changed

UP CLOSE: Understaffed, Yale sports medicine struggles with student injuries

By Sebastian Kupchaunis

and Matthew Mister

Published on February 23, 2017

After backing up second-team All-Ivy quarterback Morgan Roberts ’16 for two seasons, Rafe Chapple ’18 finally got his opportunity: The junior earned the starting job ahead of the Yale football team’s first game in 2016. Chapple would throw five interceptions and complete just 51.2 percent of his passes over his next six quarters before being benched by halftime of the Bulldogs’ Week 2 loss against Cornell.

It would be a month before Chapple learned why his throwing arm had failed him. During the sixth week of the season, Chapple was diagnosed with a partially torn rotator cuff and internal impingement in his throwing shoulder — injuries which had likely plagued him since the beginning of training camp.

“Throwing every day, your shoulder is going to be sore, but I was having problems where I was losing arm strength the first few days of camp,” Chapple said. “Every throw was painful.”

Chapple had sought help in the Yale Athletics training room by the second day of camp in August, telling the athletic trainers that he had never felt so much pain while throwing. The injury was dismissed as fatigue or possible tendonitis. Soon after, a team doctor assured Chapple there was no structural damage in his shoulder and sent him back onto the field with a cortisone shot.

But even with the steroid shot, Chapple said he lacked the arm strength that had carried him to Division I football. Still in close competition for the starting job for which he had worked, the junior felt he had no choice but to keep playing. After losing the starting job, however, his performance deteriorated even further. He did not play again in 2016.

Desperate, Chapple insisted to the athletic trainers after the Week 2 game against Cornell that he undergo an MRI, which neither the trainers nor the team doctor thought was urgent, according to Chapple. The quarterback was handed a two-week waiting time, prompting him to reach out to his parents, who were able to schedule an MRI three days later after several phone calls.

The MRI confirmed the torn rotator cuff and internal impingement, and Yale doctors immediately recommended surgery. Chapple’s parents, however, sought a second opinion and consulted James Andrews, a renowned sports orthopedist who has treated countless professional athletes. According to Chapple, Andrews strongly advised against surgery due to the counterproductive effect it would have on his arm strength, suggesting instead a Platelet-Rich Plasma injection followed by physical therapy.

Chapple has not been the only member of the football team to miss significant time due to injury. Over the past two seasons, the team has seen an unprecedented number of players miss time; by the athletic department’s own count, 42 of the team’s 110 players were either injured or sick by Week 7 of the 2015 season. One quarter of the injured players were out for the season. And by Week 7 of the 2016 season, Yale’s offense had been gutted: A quarterback, a top running back and three of the top six receivers from the Week 1 depth chart were out for the year. Multiple would-be starters never saw the field in 2016, and Team 144 won just three of its 10 games.

“I feel that at any other [Division I] program I’d have been in an MRI the next day,” Chapple said. “I think the sports trainers do the best that they can, but they are just so understaffed. There’s not nearly enough trainers to deal with the entire football team plus all the other sports.”

Interviews with eight current and former injured Yale football players as well as members of the Yale athletic department revealed the extent of the struggle to adequately staff the sports medicine department. Football is a violent game and injuries happen, yet many student-athletes voiced concerns over a lack of sufficient staffing, resources and facilities. While Yale Athletics is aware of some of these issues and has made progress in recent years, including making plans to hire additional trainers, student-athletes say there is more that can be done to preserve the physical well-being of athletes across all of Yale’s varsity teams.

BY THE NUMBERS

Yale has fewer full-time trainers than almost all of its peer institutions. Compared to Yale, which employs 10 full-time athletic trainers currently certified to practice in the state of Connecticut, the other seven Ivy League institutions average 12.1 full-time trainers. Harvard and Cornell have 15 athletic trainers, the most of any Ivy League school, followed by Princeton with 13. Dartmouth, Brown, Penn and Columbia have 12, 11, 10 and nine trainers, respectively.

The National Athletic Trainers’ Association’s Appropriate Medical Coverage for Intercollegiate Athletics provides a recommendation for the number of certified athletic trainers needed by a school. The calculation is based on a multitude of factors, including the number of varsity athletes, travel dates and injury-risk calculations for individual sports.

According to head athletic trainer Jay Cordone, the most recently calculated AMCIA number for Yale is 14.34, which was determined using statistics from the 2014–15 school year. Based on this calculation, Yale would need 15 certified athletic trainers to meet the NATA recommendation. Yet, Yale only employs 10 full-time trainers. The department also employs a part-time athletic trainer, and Director of Sports Medicine Chris Pecora assists the staff though his license in the state expired last July.

Even if Pecora and the part-time trainer were counted, Yale’s number of trainers would still fall below the AMCIA recommendation of 14.34. Still, Yale Director of Athletics Tom Beckett told the News that although the department respects the guidelines, the general consensus among Ivy League schools is that the AMCIA is not applicable because of conference limits on the length of seasons and offseason practices, among other factors.

Pecora and Cordone noted some factors which the AMCIA calculation does not take into account, such as the location of Yale’s athletic facilities. The pair said that the concentration of training facilities at Payne Whitney Gymnasium, Smilow Athletic Complex and Ingalls Rink allows the staff to cover more sports with fewer trainers.

While an advanced degree is not necessarily indicative of quality care, Yale falls short of its peer institutions in the number of athletic trainers with advanced degrees. Six of Yale’s licensed, full-time athletic trainers have master’s degrees, as does Pecora, whereas all of Harvard’s 15 have completed graduate work in athletic training, kinesiology, exercise science, human physiology or strength and conditioning, per Harvard Athletics’ website. According to their athletic departments’ websites, all 12 of Dartmouth’s trainers have master’s degrees and at least eight of Princeton’s 13 trainers have received postgraduate education.

“My suggestion would be [for Yale to add] a full-time rehab coordinator,” said a sports medicine expert with knowledge of the Yale football program, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly. “Most universities have them. They are both physical therapists and athletic trainers, and their job is to focus on rehab [post-operation] and treat injuries that the trainers don’t have a chance to work with.”

While there is not egregious understaffing, there is more that could be done in terms of providing the student-athletes with enough resources, this expert said. A misdiagnosis like Chapple’s would be less likely to slip through the cracks if there were staff whose sole purpose was to follow these injuries and manage their progress, he added.

“If you have enough resources, it lets you focus on those players who are specifically injured, whether it be [preoperative] or postop,” the expert said. “The recovery time is much faster. It takes pressure off the trainers so they can focus on what they need to do.”

Beckett said he began to recognize a need to expand the sports medicine staff in the last three to four years due to an increase in the frequency and intensity of student-athletes’ training, particularly out of season.

He told the News that the department is seeking to hire two trainers and a part-time physical therapist for the 2017–18 academic year. One of the two additional trainers will replace senior athletic trainer Richard Kaplan, who is retiring at the end of the 2016–17 academic year, while the other will bring the department up to 12 trainers.

GETTING TREATMENT

Offensive lineman Khalid Cannon ’17 came to Yale with two torn labra in his shoulders that were sustained in high school and had gone undiagnosed prior to his arrival in New Haven. After experiencing intense shoulder pain during the first week of preseason camp in 2013, Cannon sought out the Yale athletic trainers, who advised he sit out of one practice. Following this day off, Cannon claimed he was never contacted for a follow-up and participated unmonitored in practices going forward.

The lineman became well acquainted with the training room during his four years at Yale while undergoing and recovering from two shoulder surgeries. Ultimately, he grew frustrated with the length of time it took to receive treatment and the lack of attention upon arriving at the training room.

“As a double major in chemistry and geology, I don’t have time to wait around all day,” Cannon said. “Sometimes I’d wait 45 minutes to see a trainer.”

Cannon, who missed four games this season due to injury, is not alone in this sentiment. Experiences like his have shaped the culture of the football team to the point where some players question the benefits of even visiting the training room.

“The overall stigma on the football team is that you don’t want to go in the training room because it’s so busy and packed that you’re not going to be properly attended to,” Chapple said.

Former football captain and linebacker Darius Manora ’17 said the perception among players is that the training room is just a place for those with extremely serious injuries. This notion has prevented players from doing beneficial “prehab,” preventative measures to keep them healthy over the course of their season. Manora saw the lack of trust in the training room as a “vicious cycle,” where players do not get their minor injuries treated, leading to more serious and debilitating developments down the road.

The former captain was misdiagnosed during his junior season, when a wrist injury sustained in Week 4 was deemed a sprain or fracture by the Yale athletic trainers. The trainers put his arm in a cast and Manora played every game that season. After the season finale, Manora learned from an MRI that he instead had torn tendons in his wrist and subsequently underwent an offseason surgery.

The tight schedules of Yale student-athletes and the need to get treatment right before practice create the busy hours that players bemoan. Pecora said that activity in the training room varies on the time of day but that waiting in lines is not unique to Yale.

“There are [busy] times at any training room,” Pecora said. “If it’s an hour before a lot of practices start, [around 4 p.m.], it’s going to be crowded. You could walk into the training room at 1:30 in the afternoon and have no wait time.”

Pecora suggested that players could avoid the prepractice rush by coming in between 10 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. to do their necessary rehabilitative work with a team trainer. However, the late-morning and early-afternoon span is often the only block in which athletes can take classes, considering their early-morning workouts and afternoon practices.

“Only having a couple head trainers means it is very difficult to schedule time with them,” Manora said. “They do their best and are very flexible. But with a Yale schedule, it’s very difficult to match those two schedules together.”

In the training room, Cordone serves alongside two assistant athletic trainers, Kaplan and Lindsay Snecinski, and seven interns in sports medicine — although this term does not accurately reflect the group’s credentials. Those listed as interns by Yale Athletics are among the 10 certified Yale trainers, with four of them even holding master’s degrees. Pecora said the intern designation is a University title and simply refers to the temporary, two-year nature of the position.

The department also employs student athletic trainers, for whom the title “intern” more accurately applies. These trainers are undergraduates at Quinnipiac University working towards a degree in athletic training. They receive hands-on experience in the Yale training room, with five working with the football team as unpaid interns this past fall, according to Pecora.

He explained that the role of these student athletic trainers varies depending on their age; younger students may simply observe and assist senior staffers, while more experienced interns may tape ankles. The students are not allowed to work on athletes by themselves. Still, many football players expressed concern about the degree of responsibility that the student trainers hold due to the perceived understaffing in the training rooms.

“You always want to go to the full-time trainers because you feel more confident with them,” Manora said. “A lot of times the interns have to take roles that I would feel a lot more confident with a full-time trainer performing.”

“They’re real good kids,” cornerback Marquise Peggs ’19 added. “But they just don’t have the experience.”

“YOU MIGHT HAVE A DISC”

Quarterback and linebacker Spencer McManes ’17 feels that Yale’s athletic trainers are understaffed to the point where it inhibits them from following individual athlete’s injuries over the course of a season. McManes began to feel discomfort in the back of his left leg in December of his sophomore season, a pain which grew worse and spread throughout his leg in the coming months.

“When I went in to see the trainers, they consistently told me it was [tightness] and I needed to stretch … and roll my calf,” he said. “Then they told me it was a tight hamstring and I had to [roll it].”

Upon McManes’ insistence that the pain was not subsiding, a trainer told him that he “might have a disc” but that it was not serious; like Cannon, McManes was not contacted for follow up, he said. McManes continued to push himself in the weight room, loading up more than 400 pounds on his back for squats. By the end of the first week of spring practices, the Roswell, Georgia, native was having trouble even standing up due to the excruciating pain.

After the 2015 spring game, McManes said he pleaded with a team doctor to check on him, despite the fact that his appointment was not for another week; within minutes, the doctor had determined that the source of his pain was a herniated disc in his back. McManes would have two surgeries, a lumbar microdiscectomy in May and a spinal fusion surgery in December that removed a disc from his back and connected the vertebrae with rods, screws and cement.

“The severity could have been diminished significantly if they had just told me to stop lifting,” McManes said. “I don’t think any of the shortcomings of the trainers were from a lack of care, but from being spread so thinly throughout the team. You can only keep track of so many people.”

However, according to Pecora, the delays that McManes and Chapple faced are the exception rather than the rule. Pecora explained that between athletic trainers, team physicians and orthopedic consultants, the system has “a number of safety nets.”

“We would expect an injured student-athlete to be seen immediately,” Beckett said. “That is our goal, and we are in constant communication with our doctors.”

When asked about this communication, Cordone described weekly meetings between the athletic training staff and team physicians, which are held to “[go] over injury reports, rosters and any sorts of cases that are current.”

In a Feb. 20 interview, Pecora cited an example of an athlete who sustained an injury during an away game two days prior. The athlete was immediately treated by an athletic trainer, who scheduled an appointment for the player with the team physician on Saturday, the night of the injury. By 5 p.m. the following Monday, the athlete had already been examined by the team physician, an orthopedic surgeon and had a diagnostic test performed, Pecora said.

Even if initial treatment is timely and thorough, players expressed concerns with treatment in the long term.

Linebacker Remick Kawawaki ’17 tore his ACL, MCL and meniscus on the fourth day of preseason camp his freshman year. His initial experience with the athletic trainers was positive, he said, as the training staff knew the severity of his injury from the moment he went down. The linebacker had surgery to repair the ligaments in his knee and was impressed with the effectiveness of Cordone and then-head trainer Dave DiNapoli, who no longer works for Yale Athletics and did not respond to multiple requests for comment, in helping him regain strength in his knee.

But ultimately, the senior felt he experienced a decline in the quality and quantity of care he received as his recovery progressed.

“Initially I felt like I got the right amount of attention, and then eventually it just fell off,” Kawawaki said. “Even with the best athletic trainers, which I think [Yale’s trainers] are in terms of care and the amount of time they put in, it’s tough to keep tabs on everyone, and little things slip by that turn into big things.”

With less attention from trainers, however, Kawawaki eventually hit a wall in his rehab, and the swelling in his knee would not recede. The following fall, he eventually discovered that he had a patellofemoral defect in the operated knee that would require a second surgery.

Though he eventually recovered from the knee injury, Kawawaki would have more troubles during his senior year. In October, he approached trainers about a pain in his back and sought a doctor’s opinion when they initially told him it was just a strain, he said.

After hearing the ordeals of McManes and other teammates who suffered herniated discs, Kawawaki said he believed he should get an MRI since he felt a similar pain down his leg. However, the Yale doctor he saw told him an MRI was not worth it and unnecessary, and diagnosed him with a bulging disc. A month later, another doctor on Yale’s staff diagnosed Kawawaki with a herniated disk, which represents a more advanced degradation than bulging. The senior felt the initial dismissal of an MRI hindered and delayed his eventual rehabilitation.

YALE LOSES KAI

Kawawaki attributed much of his success in recovering from his original knee injury to physical therapist Kai Aboulian, a former member of Yale’s staff. Chapple, Cannon and others echoed Kawawaki’s comments.

“[Aboulian] was essential to all guys who were dealing with shoulder injuries,” Chapple said. “As soon as he was gone, it led to the demise of a lot of the guys’ injuries.”

Aboulian is a physical therapist and certified athletic trainer who worked for the Yale sports medicine department on a part-time basis from 2009 to 2012. He returned in a part-time capacity in 2015 and worked until May 2016 exclusively with the football and men’s lacrosse teams. He briefly helped the football team during the 2016 preseason on an even more limited basis.

Aboulian had a close, working relationship with many players on the team; according to several of those players, he had expressed interest in working for Yale full time. The players on the football team said they have noticed a steep decline in the quality of their rehabilitation and physical therapy since his departure.

While recovering from an injury this fall, wide receiver Bo Hines ’18 chose to make the hourlong round-trip drive to receive treatment from Aboulian in the physical therapist’s home on the Connecticut Shoreline. Hines transferred from North Carolina State University following a rookie season that garnered him Freshman All-American First Team honors. Yet in his two seasons at Yale, he has played in just three quarters of a single game, all in 2015, due to a gruesome shoulder separation his sophomore year and a collarbone injury his junior year.

“The [shoulder] injury was probably a cumulative thing [from my time at NC State],” Hines said. “That being said, if we had the proper resources here and the trainers [were able to] invest the proper time, they could have seen the weakness in my shoulder and given me things to do to strengthen it.”

Cornerback Marquise Peggs came into Yale with a pre-existing left shoulder injury which was diagnosed as a torn labrum by Yale staff during preseason camp. He played his freshman season with the injury by wearing a brace and underwent surgery in November, six days after the season finale.

According to Peggs, the Yale coaching staff ensured that the rising sophomore would partake in rehabilitation to strengthen his shoulder on campus over the summer. However, this did not happen: Cordone said Aboulian was not under contract with the University in June and July 2016. Peggs said that no other physical therapist coordinated with him — a fact the coaching staff was not aware of until after training camp had started.

Peggs, who missed half of the 2016 season due to injury, never got his shoulder feeling close to full strength leading up to the season, he said. While he knew this lack of strength was due to a shortage of rehabilitation, the staff kept telling him it was a confidence issue.

“[It went wrong] once the summer came along and Kai [Aboulian] wasn’t here,” Peggs said. “The coaches thought he was here. Ultimately, it was a huge miscommunication. It shouldn’t happen at the level of college football that we play.”

RAMIFICATIONS BEYOND YALE

According to Cordone, the Dwyer Sports Medicine Center — the training room at Payne Whitney that serves as the sports medicine department’s central hub — is open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Either he or Snecinski has coverage of the room during these hours. The training room at the Smilow Center is typically open from 2 to 7 p.m. to care for athletes before and after practice.

Despite these wide hours of operation, former Bulldog and National Football League running back Tyler Varga ’15 had a different experience during his Yale days.

“As an athlete at Yale, I had to befriend Payne Whitney staff [members] so I could sneak into the training room when it was closed during the daytime during its regular hours so I could do rehab by myself,” Varga said. “It wasn’t open when it was supposed to be because our staff was spread too thin.”

Varga’s most important run-in with the sports medicine department proved less effective than he would have liked. During his junior year, the running back suffered multiple broken bones in his foot and ankle. He said he was disappointed to find that Yale lacked what he considered a common machine used to treat such injuries, called a bone growth stimulator.

Varga was unable to play his junior season and took up upwards of eight months to get back on the field. Yet the injury never healed properly, with the still-damaged bones in his foot continuing to hurt the professional prospect. The former Indianapolis Colt remembers waking up the week of the NFL Scouting Combine and not being able to walk.

“A year and a half down the road, I had complications from this injury and missed the NFL Combine, the biggest stage you can be invited to as an NFL prospect,” Varga said. “Then I had to get ankle surgery before the NFL Draft. It couldn’t have helped my resume, and I think it possibly could have been avoided if the training staff had the necessary tools available.”

While the burden of rehabilitation undoubtedly falls on the players in addition to the sports medicine staff, Varga said he felt that the trainers were not able to maximize the effectiveness of his rehabilitation.

“You got a couple full-time guys that really care and are doing a great job,” Varga said. “I just felt they weren’t getting the resources they needed to do their jobs to the fullest of their abilities, whether that be manpower or different modalities [of rehab equipment].”

Many players echoed Varga’s praise of the training staff members and their care but raised similar concerns about limited staff and resources.

Chapple recalled several instances in the offseason when he went to the training room after a workout, only to be told that treatment priority was reserved for in-season athletes.

And according to Cannon, the facility at Smilow contains just one column of resistance bands ,which are key for rehabbing shoulder injuries. He estimated that 15 members of the 2016 football team battled shoulder injuries, meaning “we’re just piling around [the column], and it’s not very effective.”

Though the department has no plans to expand the size of the training rooms, Beckett and Pecora speculated that the space could be used more efficiently to give players more room.

STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Yale Athletics has made improvements to the facilities and modalities in the past. According to Pecora, almost all of the equipment at the Smilow Center was replaced within the last two years, and the Dwyer Center has received some upgrades as well. However, members of the football team note that requests made to the Yale athletic department regarding improvements in resources, which in turn go to the Provost’s Office, have not seen much success.

“The most common thing I hear is that we are always on a budget,” Manora said. “Even the trainers themselves say we need more trainers and resources. This year was a step in the right direction as far as receiving more equipment.”

Manora cited an increase in the number of Game Ready machines in the training room as an example of increased protection of Yale’s student-athletes. A Game Ready is a compression wrap connected to a machine that runs cold water through the wrap, which, according to Cordone, delivers more benefits over a conventional ice pack. Yale currently has six machines.

Manora credits alumni donations for providing the machines, saying that they have been an enormous success with athletes from all sports. The former captain believes this is a positive step for Yale Athletics to build on in terms of providing student-athletes with adequate resources to keep themselves healthy.

Pecora characterized a different experience with regard to obtaining funding. While noting that every department at any institution has to be realistic about how much funding it will receive, Pecora said the sports medicine department has had largely positive experiences with the Provost’s Office.

The Provost’s Office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The athletics department is currently in the process of securing funding for the addition of another two athletic trainers and a part-time physical therapist in anticipation for the 2017–18 school year, though Beckett said the process with the Provost’s Office can take months.

“It is a very fair process,” the athletics director said. “No matter where you are in an organization you need to have accountability, you need to be prudent and you need to go through all of your … needs versus wants.”

In terms of other advancements, Yale has also invested in NormaTec Recovery Systems, which are compression boots that help move fluid out of extremities. Additionally, Cordone said members of his staff have recently started dry needling, a method of muscle stimulation for the purpose of pain relief.

Cordone hopes to create an endowment in the coming years to help the department become more sustainable and also help it meet five-year goals, although he noted that the endowment is still in the “idea phase” and few support staffs have their own endowment.

“People go to Yale for one reason: because it’s one of the best institutions in the world, if not the best,” Varga said. “That should be across all the phases of the student-athlete experience. … Whatever it is, you should be empowered to do that at Yale. If you aren’t, then we are not living up to the Yale pedigree.”

Trading Places:
A Portrait of Yale’s Transfer Program

By Philippe Chlenski

Published on February 17, 2017

To most Yalies, you can transfer a meal swipe, or at most, a residential college. Perhaps because so few transfer out, they often say things like, “Oh, I didn’t know Yale had a transfer program,” or “you’re the first transfer student I’ve met here.”

This September, 20 or 25 new transfer students will receive room keys, submit immunization records and wave handkerchiefs embroidered with the year “2021” alongside 1,550 or so freshmen — Yale’s largest intake ever, owing to the newly constructed Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin Colleges.

Even if Yale is not rushing to fill these new beds with transfers from other colleges, the residential college expansion is still good news for students in a world where Ivy League transfer admissions are increasingly competitive — and uncertain. In a 2008 memo, the Harvard Admissions Office stated that, because “overcrowding in Harvard’s residential houses was more extensive than previous information had indicated,” Dean David Pilbeam “had no choice but to suspend transfer admission” and to announce a moratorium on transfer applications for the following two years. According to an email from Moira Poe, director of transfer admissions at Yale, the admit rate for transfers has hovered around two and a half percent for the last couple of years — less than half of what it is for high school applicants.

According to a July 2015 report by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, over a third of college students would transfer at least once.

* * *

“I wasn’t academically inclined in high school,” Sean Moore ’17 says. “I went to a high school that was under-resourced and didn’t have a good track record for getting people into college. I didn’t really see the value in it.” He has sandy blond hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a Black Flag tattoo on his bicep. He is sitting in one of two blue leather armchairs adjoining the Davenport College common room. Behind him is an ersatz tombstone to John Davenport. It’s a quarter to one in the morning.

After a circuitous path through California, Mexico and more than a couple different fishing vessels, Moore found his way back to New Jersey. “I was roofing houses and miserable,” he recalls, “so I signed up for County College of Morris in Randolph, NJ.” With the help of his mentor — a family friend named Michael Klinger who transferred from community college to Cornell — he began applying to colleges. After receiving the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship, which helps community college graduates seeking bachelor’s degrees after graduation, Moore entered Yale as a sophomore in 2014.

“I came to Yale very comfortable asking for help,” Moore recalls. Even so, he credits Karin Gosselink, who taught his ENGL 114 class his sophomore fall, for getting him “plugged in to a network of support that existed.”

“It’s not always apparent that those things exist. Although it’s becoming a lot more apparent now,” he adds. “The formalized transfer programming wasn’t super helpful.”

At this point, Erich Prince ’18 ambulates into the room eating a sandwich from Good Nature Market. Himself a transfer student, he listens in eagerly on the conversation. Prince has a different experience of the formalized programming: “Dean Pamela George was extremely helpful in getting me settled into Yale,” he notes. “I was meeting with her up to a year afterwards to check in on how things were going.”

The pair begins to reflect on the peculiarities of the transfer students they know. “Because the transfer class was sort of brave enough to take the leap of applying to school and starting from scratch, they sort of come into a circle that already exists and end up most of the time in more interesting niches than randomized housing can provide for freshmen,” Moore says. “They’re people who always want to try something else,” Prince adds. “I think they tend to be more interesting to take interesting jaunts, like going to the Coast Guard Academy or the Irish Hunger Museum.”

Prince and Moore both agree that, although transfer students definitely spread out in their own niches, they still retain a special connection with one another. Moore likes moments when transfers “will sort of encounter each other. Like I’ll run into some random transfer from our class and have a great time.”

Moore eventually hopes to go into public interest legal work helping ex-offenders re-enter their communities out of prison. He is a 2016 Truman Scholar.

* * *

Ashley Suan ’18, a transfer from Wesleyan college, has just finished recording for the night. As a member of Yale’s folk singing group, Tangled Up in Blue, Suan has spent a lot of time this semester recording an album that the group records every four years “so every class year has a chance to be on it.” She also plays varsity squash.

“I did not have the best freshman year [at Wesleyan], and for me I just assumed that getting into Yale was gonna fix all my problems,” she says. “It was interesting to be a student-athlete [at Wesleyan], because there’s a definite split between the more artsy side and the athletic side. At Yale it’s a lot more seamless.”

Nevertheless, she experienced the all-too-common transfer student demand for aggressive self-promotion just to catch up with one’s peers. “When I transferred in I was placed in a suite with two seniors, and I had a single. I didn’t have an opportunity to meet people in my college, which is a common issue in living situations. My main friends on campus are mainly people I’ve met through activities. On the one hand, I’m very lucky to have that; on the other, I don’t have a random group of friends,” Suan notes, adding that she suspects this may have been different had she come to Yale as a freshman.

“I definitely felt a lot busier. Part of that was being in a D1 program on top of coursework. What people always say during orientation is to make making friends your fifth class, and it’s hard to know what to do when you’re getting bombarded like that.” Suan also adds that, although she feels much more integrated into Yale than she felt a year ago, transferring still isn’t “a complete process.”

For all of the difficulties inherent in the transfer process, Suan sees a lot of value as well. “If you just accept people who simmer into the fold it doesn’t really do as much as if you bring in people who can really make an impact,” she says, remarking — as many other people involved with the transfer program are wont to do — that transfer students contribute vastly different experiences and perspectives on Yale than many other undergraduates do.

Suan sees an injunction for transfer students to be honest with themselves about their expectations and disappointments at Yale. For her, the most meaningful part of orientation was an unscripted moment “when Tim Gavin ’17 said his first semester sucked.” This position on the Student Life Panel has been taken by one student for at least the past three years, and every year a significant subset of new transfers recognizes it as the most important part of their orientation. That year, “you could tell the head transfer counselors didn’t want [Gavin] to be telling us that. I think it was really important to have that perspective … to be prepared for what was going to happen, and to know there was nothing wrong if my experience wasn’t perfect.”

* * *

Pamela George, assistant dean of student affairs, who served as director of the transfer program from 2011 to 2015, said in an email that “the transfer program began to assist in the establishment of coeducation at Yale. The first class of women at Yale, the class of ‘71, were considered transfer students.” Since then, it has continued without disruptions until the present day. Once Yale achieved the desired gender balance, the transfer program was opened up to students of all genders.

Many of the changes that make the transfer program what it is today happened under George. In addition to the complicated logistical and bureaucratic tasks involved in transferring students — things like evaluating academic records for transferring credit to Yale; housing assignments; facilitating transfer student orientation materials/programs and hosting transfer orientation dinner; and providing ongoing academic advising — she also spearheaded the creation of the transfer counselor program.

Yale’s website for transfer students says “the Transfer Counselor Program is designed to help incoming students adjust to life at Yale and explore the full realm of their interests.” “‘TroCos’” — a play on the commonly used shorthand expression for freshman counselors — “are students who transferred to Yale in previous years, and who are interested in providing guidance and mentorship to the incoming class. Each new transfer student will be assigned a TroCo during the summer, and this TroCo will serve as both a friend and a mentor to them throughout the academic year,” the website says. Think of them as freshman counselors with minimal institutional oversight and a shoestring budget.

Additionally, George expanded transfer orientation to take one week and to dovetail with freshman programming, created and enhanced structures for the academic advising of transfer students and “increased communication and services for transfer students within their assigned residential college.”

Since 2015, George’s position as director of the transfer program has been filled by Risa Sodi, director of advising and special programs and assistant dean of student affairs. George continues her involvement with the transfer program as an academic adviser. George currently chairs the Committee on Reinstatement. Sodi stepped in as the director of special programs at the Yale College Dean’s Office two years ago, taking the mantle from transfer program mainstay George.

In response to concerns that something like Harvard’s transfer moratorium may happen at Yale, Sodi says, “I don’t believe [the program] has ever been threatened in the past or ever will be threatened … you can see that because we have a dedicated admissions officer.”

“I think the fact that about two transfer students get assigned per residential college per year demonstrates that we hope students will transition into Yale easily and quickly, but also that they will spread their knowledge and perspectives through the university and the residential college system,” she adds.

Sodi at once makes a compelling case for the value and the security of the transfer program, but its continued existence does not come without its own peculiar demands. There is perhaps nobody to whom these are more apparent than the director of special programs. Transfer students have complex and unusual advising needs, especially during their first semester and the preceding summer. For example, transfer students are required to complete the same distributional requirements as all Yale undergraduates but do not have to meet sophomore or junior year milestones. Much of this advising has to take place in a way that is both satisfying and legible to every transfer student before the end of the first shopping period.

“One reason transfer students are assigned a Yale College dean as their adviser is to help them with those requirements when they come in,” said Sodi. Another is because “Deans have a good overview of the curriculum and resources [transfer students] may need” to navigate a different academic system successfully.

On the other hand, transfers don’t need institutional advising on extracurriculars and social matters,” according to Sodi. Instead, the dean relies on the transfer counselor program, which started in 2013, to handle these needs.

Recalling a dinner that took place for Yale’s transfer students shortly before winter break, Sodi recalls a real sense of “unity and community” between the transfer population, as well as a strong transfer identity. “Students would change places and talk enthusiastically with other different groups of transfer students,” many of whom were among one another’s first acquaintances. “I know them as individuals on their own path, but also it’s great to see that there’s this real cohesion among students.”

“Since I am the director of advising, one of the reasons why I was asked to step in was to think about the transfer program in terms of best advising practices,” she explains. Her involvement with special programs is part of a variety of efforts Yale has taken over the past several years to foster positive change in the transfer student experience. “I’ve relied on my colleagues here and on the TroCo system … but I really would like to think more holistically about what the best advising structure is for transfer students, and to do that I would need feedback. I really hope to focus on that going forward.”

* * *

The peculiar culture of Yale transfer students is largely a product of individual student input during Camp Yale, when new transfers scramble to get their requirements, classes and social niches figured out. Lucas Riccardi ’17, one of four students heading the TroCo program in the Fall of 2015, is a major architect of the program as it exists today.

“I personally met my TroCo once in October sitting on a bench on Old Campus, and that was the only time I ever saw her in person. The TroCo relationship wasn’t actually enforced until 2015,” he says. He attributes much of the restructuring of the transfer program to an Oedipal reaction his class had to its own lack of oversight. “That was the year that the mental health stuff exploded and so then that whole spring sparked a whole debate around reinstatement and the Dean’s Office issued statements on reinstatement and Pamela George headed reinstatement in addition to transfer stuff,” he continues, adding that this conflict stretched institutional resources for transfer students predictably thin.

According to Riccardi: “My explicit goal for the coming year was to provide more structure and accountability,” and to “informally try to fill the inevitable gaps in people’s relationships” on entering an ossified social scene. “If there was anything I felt proud of the year after, it was taking some of that burden off of the new transfers and making friendships here feel more reciprocal.” The Yale College Dean’s Office relegates all social programming to the TroCos.

Reflecting on his own first year, Riccardi recalls finding himself overwhelmed with the uncomfortable social position of being a new transfer. “I don’t think people are very receptive to a gaggle of 10 or more strangers coming into their social space. Trying to find approachable, friendly ways for people to appear in places is really hard,” he notes. “And that’s a responsibility that a lot of transfer students have felt: you take people under your wing and you take groups under your wing. That’s where the problem lies: I trust that individuals can make their own friends, but it’s harder with groups. It’s really hard to integrate as a group, socially.”

Additionally, Riccardi focused extensively on the emotional challenges of transferring to Yale. “I really pushed my new transfers to reflect, both over the summer and throughout their first few months here, on how they made meaning of their experiences at their last institutions: what they were coming away with, what they were looking for here and what they were trying to get out of transferring. It helped me process some of the disappointments of being here, and I hope it worked for others as well,” he says. “No one arrives here with a clean slate.”

In spite of his demonstrated commitment to the transfer program, Riccardi has taken a backseat in all transfer student matters since his tenure as head TroCo. He notes that the best transfer counselors often still carry with them the rawness of their own experience. For him, that rawness “is a really important part of the structure of the program. People who just went through it know it best. You don’t get wiser with time, you lose it with time. It’s by no means a rational process, and the people who are best prepared to deal with it are the ones who are least removed from the emotion of it. As much this program has been a formative part of my time at Yale, I just don’t feel those things as strongly anymore.”

When asked about the value of the transfer program, Riccardi notes a high level of awareness about “the University’s harmful or problematic aspects from the transfer students.” “I’m happy I know people here who went to community college or didn’t go straight into college or went to nontraditional universities or colleges. I think as a whole I just feel like it helps bring people out of this unfortunate Yale bubble.”

Jake Brussel Faria ’18, who transferred in during Riccardi’s tenure as head transfer counselor, shares some of these views. Compared to Northwestern University, his previous institution, “it was a revelation that I would have my own space that wasn’t psychotically policed. I know that if I stayed at Northwestern, the things that were ingrained to me in those early, manic weeks would still be stuck with me, so it’s actually a great luxury to have some distance from that.”

Brussel Faria also has suspicions about the freshman experience at Yale. He notes that the University tends to congratulate students for “beating the odds” and getting in while taking the earliest opportunity to constrain them to a tiny, sanitized sliver of New Haven for four years.

For all this, Brussel Faria notes that transfer students miss out on important social moments that may take place freshman year. “The social life of the transfer is a lot about staking up space,” he says, recalling a bench across from the Davenport dining hall that, for a spell, became a sort of transfer student watering hole.

“You have these fairly stark situations where you have the weird institutional exclusivity of frats versus the amorphous exclusivity of the readily available nonfrat social spaces,” Brussel Faria said. “There are also things that float in the middle, and a lot of those fly under the radar because they are between friend groups. That’s something transfers don’t have access to.”

Like Riccardi, he feels an obligation towards other transfer students and students who may feel similarly out of place in social spaces to try something different. “It’s a great way to meet people, or invite people in and communicate that I’m interested in spending time with them. It is hard to get into other social spaces, cause we don’t, as transfers, get involved through people we know.”

“A friend of mine once said that transfer students wear their institutional neglect as a badge of honor,” he adds.

Bulldogs in the White House:
Yalies in the Trump Administration

By Ryan Howzell

And Ahmed Elbenni

Published on February 10, 2017

As the dust settled in the aftermath of the most bruising election season in recent memory, stunned Clinton supporters and elated Trump supporters alike looked to the future. All eyes lay on the President-elect’s next move. His nominations for the cabinet, the group of his closest advisors, would reveal much about the shape of the incoming administration. On Yale’s campus, students would soon learn of their institution’s own role in the Presidency of a man so many of them had vocally opposed.

* * *

Throughout the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised that as president he would hire only the “best people.” Despite running as a populist candidate, Trump often touted his elite credentials, pointing to his Ivy League education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance as evidence that he was “highly educated.” Now, as President, Trump has assembled a cabinet of individuals from similarly elite schools, thus continuing on a classic governmental tradition.

Featured prominently in Trump’s cabinet are three Yale University graduates. Ben Carson ’73, a neurosurgeon who ran for president in the 2016 Republican primaries, was nominated for the position of secretary of housing and urban development. Steven Mnuchin ’85, a former executive at Goldman Sachs and national finance chairman for the Trump campaign, was chosen to serve as the secretary of treasury. Wilbur Ross ’59, an investor and former banker, was tapped for the position of secretary of commerce.

Since the Reagan administration, a total of 12 Yale College or Yale Law School graduates have served as attorney general, or secretary of treasury, secretary of labor, secretary of defense or secretary of transportation, including Hillary Rodham Clinton LAW ’73 and John Kerry ’66, who both served as secretary of state under the Obama administration. Furthermore, at least one Yale graduate has served as a cabinet member in every one of the past five administrations. John Ashcroft ’64 served as defense attorney general under President George W. Bush ’68. Under President Bill Clinton LAW ’73, Les Aspin ’60 acted as defense secretary, and Robert Reich LAW ’73 served as labor secretary. Dick Thornburgh ’54 served as attorney general under both President George H. W. Bush ’48 and President Ronald Reagen. Nicholas Brady ’52 acted as secretary of treasury under both presidents as well.

Beyond these high-profile positions, Yalies have long held lower level administrative posts, as staffers and advisors, in several presidential administrations. For example, 17 Yale Law School graduates served as appointees in the Obama administration, while over 40 Yale affiliates, including alumni and faculty members, contributed to the 2009 administration’s transition team.

Trump has assigned an unusual number of Yalies to his cabinet. Of the nation’s last five presidents, only Reagan has appointed a higher number of Yale graduates to top posts, appointing five to serve as heads of executive departments during his eight-year administration. Barack Obama ties Trump with three Yale appointees throughout his tenure: the two secretaries of state as well as Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke ’72.

By any other measure, Trump has chosen extremely atypical appointees. In contrast to the experienced political backgrounds of the cabinet picks of prior administrations, Trump’s three Yale appointees have limited past experience in government. Carson, Ross and Mnuchin forged their public careers in the fields of neurosurgery, banking and hedge fund management respectively. Their appointments mark a major shift away from the tendency to appoint career politicians to executive positions. This anti-political stance is a feature consistent with the rest of Trump’s cabinet, with the recently confirmed, controversial Secretary of Education Betsy Devos.

* * *

Still, President Trump’s cabinet nominees are broadly unpopular among the Yale student body. A Yale Daily News survey conducted in January before Trump’s inauguration found that over 62 percent of students are “very unconfident” about Trump’s nominee picks. An additional 20 percent were “unconfident,” with just 9 percent “neutral.” Only 9 percent of students were either “confident” or “very confident” in Trump’s picks. Despite widespread general disapproval of the president’s cabinet as a whole, however, attitudes towards the Yale graduates in particular were more complicated.

Attitudes toward Trump’s Yale nominees are predictably split along party lines. Josh Hochman ’18, president of the Yale College Democrats, expressed concern about all three Yale alumni serving in the new administration’s Cabinet, pointing to their lack of experience and problematic policy proposals.

Emily Reinwald ’17, co-president of the Yale College Republicans, held a different view. She stated her belief that “all the Yalies [in Trump’s cabinet] will do a fantastic job.” Reinwald praised Trump for assigning “conservative and principled” alums to his cabinet. The Yale New Republicans, despite its vocal opposition to Trump in the months leading up the election, expressed similar sentiments. Benjamin Rasmussen ’18, co-chair of the organization, believed that the Yale graduates tapped for Trump’s Cabinet would provide sufficient guidance for their respective departments.

“I am confident that Mnuchin, Ross and Carson will give their best effort to achieve our national goals,” said Rasmussen. “However, only time can tell whether these good intentions will translate into successfully executed policy.”

Rasmussen also emphasized his belief that the Yalies in Trump’s cabinet “will do a far better job” of leading their departments than other individuals that Trump has nominated for top-tier positions. Rasmussen’s lack of confidence in Trump’s broader slate of nominations reflects that of much of the Yale student body. Many are dismayed in particular by the President’s nomination of DeVos, a Michigan philanthropist and political activist, to the position of secretary of education. The Senate narrowly confirmed DeVos this week with an unprecedented, tie-breaking vote cast by Vice President Mike Pence.

According to the same pre-inauguration News survey, nearly 44 percent of respondents indicated that their opinion of Trump has become either “less favorable” or “much less favorable” since election day. Many cited Trump’s nominations as a major factor in their decreasing regard for the then-president-elect. Descriptions of his nominees ranged from “toxic” to “horrendous” to “awful.” Several respondents pointed to DeVos as an example of a poor nominee, while another cited Tillerson. One student wrote that Trump’s “picks for head of the department of energy (Rick Perry), department of education (Betsy DeVos) and secretary of state (Rex Tillerson) are horrible.” Others were more positive. One respondent suggested that a number of Trump’s appointments “make sense,” while another supported “most of his picks for cabinet and cabinet-level positions.”

Notably absent from the responses were specific criticisms of Mnuchin, Ross or Carson. While the Yale alumni in Trump’s cabinet have been subject to some critical scrutiny, they are not the focal points of criticism. One respondent even called the choice of Carson “wonderful.”

Carson, a Davenport alum, graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School to pursue a successful career in pediatric neurosurgery. He wrote six best-selling books, including an autobiography published in 1992. Carson retired as a surgeon in 2013 and announced the launch of his first presidential campaign two years later. Following the Super Tuesday 2016 primaries, Carson withdrew from the Republican national primary race and pledged his support to candidate and eventual president, Donald Trump in March 2016.

Compared to his fellow Yale graduates, however, Carson is the most widely disliked alum serving in Trump’s cabinet. Forty-one percent of students viewed him “very unfavorably,” while another 32 percent viewed him “unfavorably.” A mere 12 percent viewed him “favorably” or “very favorably.” Neither Mnuchin nor Ross was as widely disliked as Carson, but neither did they benefit from a distinctly supportive minority either. Instead, the majority of students appeared ambivalent about the two. Forty-three percent of students indicated they felt “neutral” or “unsure” about Mnuchin, while nearly 55 percent indicated the same about Ross. However, even though more students viewed Mnuchin “favorably” or “very favorably” (10 percent) than they did Ross (6 percent), more also viewed Mnuchin “unfavorably” and “very unfavorably” (47 percent as compared with Ross’s 37 percent).

Survey administrator and staff reporter for the News Jon Greenberg ’19 suggested that the apparent ambivalence toward Ross and Mnuchin likely occurred “because they know more about [Carson] than Mnuchin and Ross.” Even in this exceptionally high-profile administration, only a few specific appointees, like DeVos and Carson, have attracted widespread attention.

* * *

Four more Yale affiliates are being considered or have been selected for lower-level posts and advising positions in the Trump administration. In December, Stephen Schwarzman ’69, Yale alumnus and co-founder of the Blackstone Group, joined the administration as an advisor on economic policy. Schwarzman will also chair the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum, which includes fellow Yale alumni Dan Yergin ’68 and James McNerney ’71.

Yergin is best known as a prominent economic researcher and author. His book “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money,” which details the history of the global oil industry, won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. He is also the co-founder of energy research consulting company Cambridge Energy Research Associates which specializes in advising private companies and government bodies on energy trends and markets. McNerney, a business executive, served as the president, CEO, and chairman of the Boeing Company from 2005 to 2015. Both have extensive experience advising and consulting in the corporate world.

Schwarzman’s name is a familiar one on campus, due to his recent $150 million donation to Yale to renovate Commons and construct the Schwarzman Center, a space dedicated to student life and activity. The extensive, three-year renovation is expected to begin this fall and projected to be completed by Spring 2020.

Additionally, in January, the Washington Post reported that Yale computer science professor David Gelernter ’76 was being eyed as a potential candidate for science adviser. Gelernter, who has expressed doubt over the legitimacy of man-made climate change, would be the first computer scientist to ever fill the role of science advisor as well as the only science advisor to not belong to the National Academy of Sciences.

As a computer scientist, Gelernter served as a key figure in the field of parallel computation, his research contributing to the increased processing power of modern computers. He has also acquired fame for his disdain for modern academia, despite his Ivy league roots and current status as a Yale professor. In his 2013 book “America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats),” Gelernter expresses his belief that modern intellectualism is to blame for the dismantling of what he sees as traditional American values. Given these controversial positions and lack of preexisting connections with the established scientific community, Gelernter’s appointment would reflect a continuing attempt by the president to incorporate political “outsiders” into his administration. When approached for an interview with the News, Gelernter declined.

“I have nothing more to say to any newspaper,” Gelernter said. “Of course I’m not a member of the Trump administration. If I should be at some future point, I’d be happy to answer questions then. For now, my credentials are exactly what they were the day before the election.”

Although the identities of Trump’s cabinet picks have been available to the American public for weeks or months, many of Trump’s nominations have yet to be confirmed by Congress, including the nominations of Ross, Mnuchin and Carson. Compared to the average timeline for confirmation hearings, Trump’s picks have had their hearing dates slightly later than the picks of his predecessors. The media coverage of these confirmation hearings reflects an unusual level of engagement on the part of both politicians and average citizens with the cabinet appointment process. Judging by the highly contentious confirmation hearings that have taken place over the last few weeks regarding the nominations of DeVos and Sen. Jeff Sessions, R–Ala., American citizens can only expect more partisan debate and Congressional gridlock.

BANNED: Trump’s Executive Order Hits Home

By Rachel Treisman

Published on February 3, 2017

Ali Abdi GRD ‘18 is stuck. The Iranian anthropology PhD candidate, who has been a permanent resident in the United States for over five years, left for Kabul on Jan. 22 — two days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump and one day after participating in the Women’s March on Washington — to begin six months of fieldwork. His journey is currently paused in Dubai, where he is waiting to hear if he will receive the visa needed to enter Afghanistan. If not, he will be stranded; a vocal human rights activist, Abdi has been barred from returning to his native Iran. And although he has been granted asylum by the U.S., going back is no longer an option for the foreseeable future.

On Jan. 27, President Trump issued an executive order restricting immigration to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. Under the order, citizens of these countries are banned from entering the U.S. for 90 days; admission of refugees is stalled for at least 120 days; and those from Syria are barred indefinitely. Although President Trump has denied that the order is a “Muslim ban,” claiming instead that it targets “Islamic” terrorists, many argue that its preferential treatment of Christian refugees is discriminatory. In the days following the signing of the order, protest and demonstrations, both at Yale and in cities across the country, have erupted.

There has also been confusion about the implementation of the order, with the White House and Department of Homeland Security debating whether or not it applies to permanent residents. Consequently, members of the Yale community affected by this travel ban are both upset and confused about what the future may hold. They are torn; many say the U.S. feels like home, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want the option to leave and come back.

Abdi recalled that after being arrested in Iran for participating in a political protest, security forces gave him the choice of either staying in the country and cooperating, or leaving. If he were to leave, they said, their lives would be easier.

“When Trump signed the executive order, he said ‘we do not want them here,’” Abdi said. “And the moment I read that, it reminded me of what I had heard seven or eight years ago by Iranian security who were telling me the same thing. To me, home is a place where I feel I am welcome, I feel safe, I feel I am not constantly threatened by people in power. And neither of these contexts look like that to me now.”

***

Abdi is not alone; he is just one of many Yale students affected by the travel ban. According to Ann Kuhlman, director of Yale’s Office of International Students & Scholars, there are approximately 15 students from the designated countries currently in the U.S. on nonimmigrant visas and 18 visiting researchers. Several undergraduates contacted by the News declined to share their stories, citing privacy and legal concerns.

Abrar Omeish ’17, president of the Muslim Students Association, said she knows of four students in the Yale Muslim community who are nationals of the countries in question and many more who are indirectly affected either because they are dual citizens or because they have family and friends from those nations. As a Libyan-American, Omeish added that her own family is affected; for example, her grandparents will not be able to attend her graduation this spring.

“People are in different places with this,” Omeish said. “Some are sad, some are angry, some are energized to act and work. For me, I view this as part of God’s plan. It’s another test we have to face, and we’re going to move forward in the best way we can.”

Omeish added that she finds it ironic that her faith, the very thing the executive order tries to ban, is one of the most positive forces in the Muslim community driving people to stand up for justice.

Even students not directly impacted by the order have expressed their outrage and sadness. Although the number of Yale students whose lives are touched by the ban is relatively small, the number of students who know or know of such people is not.

Garima Singh ’20, an international student from India, said although she is not Muslim, she knows what it feels like to immigrate to the U.S. and not feel accepted.

“[The idea] that there’s a ‘proper American’ is literally the most un-American thing possible,” Singh said. “This country is made up of people who were fleeing religious persecution, and now we’re religiously persecuting people and not allowing refugees into the country … People seem unable to grasp the idea that nobody is native to this country other than Native Americans, who we’ve also treated terribly.”

Arvin Kakekhani GRD ’16, an Iranian post-doctoral candidate at Stanford University, said he has not visited his home country since he arrived in the U.S. more than six years ago and has only seen his parents once in this period. He added that it is risky for him to return to Iran as a person studying physics and engineering, or will at least make obtaining a visa more difficult.

The uncertainties and contradictions surrounding the executive order make this time especially painful, Kakekhani said. He added that because of his qualifications and education, he is hopeful that he will be able to build a life in another country, if necessary, but worries about the stress he is causing his parents in Iran.

“I had comfort and peace of mind, of course I had made lots of sacrifices … but I was happy with the minimum,” Kakekhani said. “But now they’re taking away the minimum, which is the power to predict a little bit in the future. Now I don’t have the luxury to know what will happen to me tomorrow.”

Immigrants are essential to intellectual progress, said Daniel Spielman ’92, a professor of computer science and director of undergraduate studies for applied mathematics. He said the practice of excluding immigrants, particularly those in certain academic fields, also poses the risk of them moving to and working for countries in conflict with the U.S.

Spielman said he worries about people like his colleague and collaborator, professor of electrical engineering and computer science Amin Karbasi. Karbasi’s wife and daughter traveled to visit family Iran a few weeks ago and do not know if or when they can return.

Situations like Karbasi’s are “distressing” both personally and academically, according to Spielman. He added that Karbasi could easily work anywhere in the world, and if the U.S. does not make him feel welcome, he will move.

“Many of the most talented scientists and engineers move to the U.S. to study, discover, invent and build,” Spielman said. “If they stop coming here, the engine of progress in the United States will lose steam. Iran produces some of the best scientists and engineers in the world. I have personally trained and worked with many of them — we are only hurting ourselves if we make them unwelcome.”

These worries were echoed by professor and department chair of computer science Joan Feigenbaum, who called the executive order “despicable.” She added that there has only been one female recipient of the Fields Medal — the highest individual honor in mathematics — and the woman, Maryam Mirzakhani, is Iranian.

While the long-term future is uncertain for individuals trying to make sense of the ban’s stipulations, it is clear that those with travel plans for this semester or even this summer will have to consider other options.

Razieh Armin GRD ’18, who moved to the U.S. two years ago from Tehran, said both she and her husband are weighing their next steps. Armin was planning to intern abroad this summer, hopefully at a United Nations office in Beirut, but can’t foresee being able to leave the country. She had also hoped to visit her sister and father back home. Armin added that her husband, who is pursuing his Ph.D. in Florida, will likely have to change his thesis topic because his research currently requires him to do fieldwork in Iran.

Still, Armin said her family’s situation is not as bad as that of her other Iranian friends, some of whom are students in the U.S. but were on vacation when the executive order was signed and therefore cannot return.

The silver lining, as students pointed out, is knowing they are not alone in their opposition to Trump’s actions. Members of the Yale community have been vocal in their objections and genuine in their allyship.

“Feeling that you are not welcome in a place where you are living is one of the worst things that can happen to a person,” Armin said. “Fortunately, my friends and the people who I am surrounded with have been very, very supportive and right now I don’t feel that I’m alone. I’m really thankful for that.”

***

Members of the Yale community have criticized both the moral shortcomings and political inexperience they see reflected in Trump’s executive order.

One major objection is that “extreme vetting” is unnecessary, seeing as international students already undergo a thorough vetting process prior to arriving in the U.S. For example, Armin and Kakekhani both pointed out that the ban’s call for more background checks is excessive, especially considering the extensive visa process they went through.

Armin acknowledged that as an international, she understands why the U.S. is concerned about security. However, she said Iranian visa applications go through very “intense and difficult” background checks, a process which is taking increasingly more time. It took her more than two months to get her visa. For Kakekhani, the process was even more involved.

There is no U.S. embassy or consulate in Iran because of the tense relations between the two countries, Kakekhani said, so he had to go to the U.S. consulate in Dubai to complete the visa process prior to arriving at Yale. He added the visa was not issued for 70 days, less than two weeks before his flight. His memories of his last days in Iran consist mostly of anxiously anticipating his visa and stringing together backup plans if it did not arrive in time for the semester. Kakekhani added that one of the reasons he has not been back to Iran in six years was because he was wary of going through the process again and having to postpone his education.

Other critics of the ban have pointed out that if its goal is to target countries that pose a significant terror risk to the U.S., Trump has made a miscalculation. The order does not apply to the countries that were home to the individuals who carried out the Sept. 11 terror attacks: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Critics have suggested that these countries were made exempt because of President Trump’s business interests there.

Psychology professor Paul Bloom, who is from Canada, commented that experts on the left and right agree the ban will be harmful for the U.S. He added that it is “cruel, causing needless suffering.”

While the policy continues to antagonize many people, legal challenges to the ban are building. The counterargument is twofold: the blanket ban on individuals from designated countries is said to violate the fifth amendment right to due process, and the preferential treatment of Christian individuals violates the first amendment’s guarantee of freedom to religion.

Several judges have also impeded the execution of the ban: on Jan. 28 a New York judge ordered an immediate halt to deportations of travelers from the targeted countries who had just landed at U.S. airports, a case aided in part by the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at the Yale Law School. And on Wednesday, a judge in California did the same.

There has also been much confusion throughout the federal government about how to implement the ban itself. Arash Ghiassi LAW ’18, an Iranian-Canadian citizen, said the “badly written” order is confusing because it does not specify who it applies to, particularly when it comes those with dual citizenship like himself.

“That limbo situation is in itself a bad thing, and something we should draw attention to,” Ghiassi said. “The fact [is] you don’t know where you belong, you don’t know what your rights are … [it is] the state of not being able to plan for the future and not knowing what is going to happen for a long time. The anxiety that comes with it is very significant and nobody deserves to be in that situation.”

***

The Yale administration has responded to the executive order in various ways, but many students say the leadership’s initial response was lacking. Beyond this, the circumstances of the ban itself make it difficult for the University to provide tangible resources beyond statements of support.

According to University President Peter Salovey, the executive order was signed at 4:42 p.m. on Jan. 27, and the first email from the OISS to students and researchers from the seven affected countries was sent out just 24 minutes later. A second email was sent to this group at 7:37 p.m. the following day, and the OISS website is updated daily, he added.

Still, Salovey’s own campuswide email was met with mixed reactions: Students said his Jan. 28 message was vague, and an online faculty petition urging him to take a stronger stand against the order garnered nearly 250 signatures in several days. On Jan. 29, Salovey sent a follow-up email with more concrete information about the order and available campus resources, concluding that “we at Yale join our voices with all those who are calling for swift reversal of these measures that undermine our university’s — and our nation’s — core values.”

Zeshan Gondal ’19, vice president of the MSA, said he was disappointed by Salovey’s first message but heartened to see the subsequent denouncement of the executive order and display of support for the Muslim community. He added that he understands the importance of patience, acknowledging that a lot must go on behind the scenes of each email.

MSA president Omeish said that the administration has been supportive, and the group has already met with the Chaplain’s Office and the director of the OISS. She said the administration has emphasized that they are on the same side and hope to work in collaboration to support community members affected by the ban.

“In meeting with administrators, we were encouraged to encourage our membership to be patient, although this is a time when people have high levels of emotions and are likely to demand quick action,” Omeish said. “Perhaps the wisest, most helpful action is deliberate and thought out, which would require time — and that is reflected in Salovey’s letter, an attempt to sit down and think it through with different parties.”

Still, not everyone was pleased with this response. Omeish said various students in the Muslim community have expressed feeling pressure from the administration to inform them of any actions they are working on. So far, the group has organized a meeting on Monday night for people to share their thoughts in a safe space and held a panel-style talk about “navigating the Muslim ban” on Tuesday.

Yale has also drawn criticism from those who would like to see more immediate displays of support for affected members of the community, citing actions taken by other American universities. For instance, Mark Schlissel, the president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, recently announced the school would not share sensitive information, like students’ immigration status, unless required by law — taking a definitive public stance against Trump’s order.

Kakekhani, who is currently at Stanford but whose visa is still sponsored by Yale, said he has received similar emails from both universities saying they are thinking about students affected and will keep them updated, but he does not expect much from either because they “don’t have the power to help” him significantly.

He added that Yale could use its lawyers to contact United States Citizenship and Immigration Services directly to seek out credible information about what might happen to people from the designated countries who are already in the U.S., or contact organizations that are responsible for extending and issuing visas.

The University could also show its support for students affected by the ban through a statement, Kakekhani said. He suggested that Yale publish an official complaint vouching for these students, as they have already been vetted and in the country for years and are trustworthy.

“If Yale could do some official letter or complaint about this, I think it would be a really good action,” Kakekhani said. “Other universities can do this also — there would be some momentum to at least keep the visas, at least give the students that have already spent years here the chance to stay here and continue their education and research.”

The OISS, in addition to communicating with students and offering regular advising, held two open meetings this week for students to ask questions. Kuhlman of the OISS explained that the office is available to any student or scholar with questions about how the executive order might affect them, and will work alongside the Office of General Counsel to help students with an urgent need obtain consultations with an immigration attorney.

Kuhlman added that the resources offered by the OISS and Yale are very similar to those of other institutions. She said U.S. institutions of higher education and their international offices are committed to supporting their communities and are working to seek clarification about the implications of the executive order to address both short and long term needs. However, she said the lack of clear information impedes these efforts.

“It is challenging because you want to be timely in your release of information, but you also want to be accurate, to make sure what you are sharing is confirmed fact and not speculation,” Kuhlman said. “That is why we have been hesitant to comment on the draft executive orders, as they are very likely to change when and if they are finalized.”

***

As many are denouncing this era as full of bigotry, others are noticing a renewed wave of solidarity and activism. Racism is not unique, but what is unique about this moment is the response to it, Omeish said. She praised the campuswide and national public “refusal to tolerate” the executive order. People who have never thought of activism are out in the streets, something she described as “beautiful.”

“Something growing up I was bullied for is now becoming a mainstream defended identity,” she said.

Omeish added that she urges allies to educate themselves about the values of Islam to counter the “racialized” way the religion has been portrayed for the majority of the lifetimes of current college students. She also commented on the importance of coalition-building with different groups and supporting activism on social media and through word of mouth.

So far, solidarity is evident. On Jan. 29, over 1,000 members of the Yale and New Haven communities gathered on Cross Campus for an hourlong vigil denouncing the executive order. The word “solidarity” itself was projected onto Sterling Memorial Library as several students and community members spoke to a sea of candle-holding, sign-waving participants, denouncing the order and calling for resistance. Immediately afterwards, Battell Chapel was filled to capacity for a pre-planned concert benefitting the local Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, which ultimately raised $14,000.

Similar events are taking place beyond New Haven. Armin praised the ongoing demonstrations across the country, calling them “impressive and important.” She cited the release of detained green card holders at airports as a victory, adding she expects more progress will be made as people continue to protest.

The future is uncertain and unpredictable, Abdi said from Dubai, but he remains hopeful. He added he is confident that “things will not remain as they are,” citing demonstrations happening across U.S. airports, government officials denouncing the ban, lawyers challenging the order and messages of support pouring into his inbox as reasons to be optimistic.

“I, as a human being, always believe in people’s’ power, and even though it sometimes sounds cheesy, it is my firm and deep belief that forces of good will eventually prevail over forces of evil,” Abdi said. “The situation will change, I have no doubt about it.”

Zainab Hamid and David Yaffe-Bellany contributed reporting.

Contact Rachel treisman at

rachel.treisman@yale.edu .

A week in the White House

By Elizabeth Miles

Published on January 27, 2017

At Yale, in New Haven and across Connecticut, local organizations have stopped bracing for impact. As the Trump administration makes its policy plans clear, groups invested in reproductive rights and immigrant rights have begun a four-year fight.

* * *

At first, Sharlene Kerelejza thought she’d be spending the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration with a hundred others, listening as five or six speakers passed around a bullhorn. Instead, over 10,000 gathered on the steps of the state capitol building in Hartford on Jan. 21. “It grew so fast — first by 100 folks a day, then by 500 folks a day,” said Kerelejza, executive director of Meriden-Wallingford Chrysalis, an organization offering support and shelter to victims of domestic violence. She organized the event on Facebook along with five others. They had to turn away many interested speakers and performers, and the event ran an hour over the intended duration. One of over 600 marches worldwide, the Women’s March on Hartford was blanketed in homemade signs, of the same type held by 3.2 million Americans across the country. They ranged from feminist inspiration (“Women’s rights are human rights,” “Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than anger”) to blunt and devastating honesty. One sign, detailing opposition to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, read “I have stage 4 cancer. Still I rise.” Another neon pink sign read “We Won’t Go Back.” A slim black coat hanger was drawn alongside the phrase.

“Nasty women from all walks of life,” as one speaker put it, had gathered in Hartford, motivated by a wide range of grievances, fears, and hopes for the next four years. Speakers discussed immigration, disability rights, LGBTQ rights, a rise in hate crimes directed at Muslims and the fear of nuclear war. Yet, the crowd seemed energized to fight for every cause mentioned. In Washington, the effect was largely the same. Maraya Keny-Guyer ‘19, president of Reproductive Justice Action League at Yale, who attended the march in the capital, called it “inspiring to be a part of a crowd of women and men and nonconforming individuals fighting for a common purpose. You were surrounded by determination and hope.”

But after the marchers across the country and the world put down their signs and went home, a question emerged, posted in the Facebook events used to organize the rallies. Where should those 3.2 million, participants in the largest inauguration demonstration in history, go from here? In the short week since his inauguration, President Trump has signed or drafted four executive orders and eight presidential memoranda that have alarmed many of those who marched for reproductive rights and the protection of immigrants. Across the state, community-based organizing groups have begun to mobilize just as quickly in response.

* * *

On Monday, in a presidential memorandum, Trump reinstated the “Mexico City” abortion policy, also known as the “global gag rule.” Blocking the use of U.S. taxpayer funds towards foreign NGOs that, among their services, perform or promote abortions, it has been rescinded by Democratic presidents and reinstated by Republican presidents since its implementation by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Speaking for herself and for RALY, Keny-Guyer called Trump’s presidency “anti-abortion and anti-women,” and the policy change “dangerous,” citing studies that showed a rise in abortion rates as contraceptive use declined abroad under the Mexico City policy during the George W. Bush administration.

However, Keny-Guyer also believes that the “real world consequences” of Trump’s inaugural moves have pushed activist groups like RALY to continue their efforts. “We’re disheartened, but not pessimistic.” Sarah Croucher, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut, echoed Keny-Guyer at the Hartford march, telling the crowd, “This is not the time for complacency!” Croucher spoke with her young daughter strapped to her back. “When she grows up,” Croucher said, “she’ll have less access than I have.”

Speaking by phone later in the week, Croucher said that she has been surprised by several anti-choice bills proposed already this session in the Connecticut state legislature, musing that some lawmakers may have felt “emboldened” by the strong anti-abortion stance taken by the federal government. On Monday, she joined Democratic lawmakers proposing a legislative package of five bills united around women’s healthcare. One bill aims to continue the protection of preventative services under the Affordable Care Act; another aims to fight medically unrelated restrictions on abortion. The group wants to make sure that the key provisions of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in “Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt,” a June 2016 ruling favoring abortion rights, remain in state law. Keny-Guyer mentioned that this semester, the organization is hoping to mobilize Yale students to support legislation of this kind. RALY plans to participate in phone banking events with NARAL, as well as Planned Parenthood, in addition to volunteering and protesting.

NARAL itself will continue to encourage its members and the greater public to call and email state representatives and senators. The organization saw public engagement level off into December, increasing in January around the inauguration. “People are looking for how to get involved. As people mobilize, they connect with us. They can go out and be activists,” Croucher said, citing a town hall meeting in Middletown, held on Jan. 25 by state Sen. Len Suzio, of Connecticut’s 13th State Senate District. Suzio is personally introducing Proposed H.B. 5566, which would require parental notification for minors seeking abortions. Over 300 showed up in protest. “Connecticut voters support choice, they support reproductive rights, they support Planned Parenthood in particular,” said Croucher.

* * *

Two of Trump’s four executive orders took aim at immigrants, provoking a strong response from New Haven activists, especially as Trump begins to back up a threat to restrict federal funding to sanctuary cities. In these areas, local law enforcement and officials will not aid federal immigration officers in enforcing federal immigration law. New Haven has claimed the title for 11 years.

One executive order increases border security measures, directing the secretary of Homeland Security to identify funding for Trump’s signature campaign promise: a border wall with Mexico. Trump also included the construction of detention facilities, the hiring of 5,000 additional Border Patrol agents and the empowerment of state and local law enforcement officers to act as immigration officers.

Another order, signed on Wednesday, directed the secretary of Homeland Security to prioritize the deportation of immigrants living in the country without documentation charged or convicted of a crime. The order prohibits federal funding to sanctuary cities, and reinstates the Secure Communities program, enabling state and local law enforcement to act as federal immigration agents. It directs the hiring of 10,000 immigration officers hired at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and sanctioning of countries that refuse to accept the return of immigrants deported under this policy. The order would also see a list created, and updated weekly, of crimes committed by immigrants without documentation in sanctuary cities.

In New Haven on Thursday, Jan. 26, Mayor Toni Harp rejected the President’s order. Speaking from the steps of City Hall to a crowd of a couple hundred, Harp decried a “growing sense of fear and unrest” among her constituents. She declared the city of New Haven’s priority — and first response — to safeguard the wellbeing of residents. “New Haven police officers, school district employees, and other city workers do not — and will not — act to enforce federal immigration law,” Harp said.

However, the executive orders did not catch City Hall or immigrant rights activists off guard. Harp met with Ana Maria Rivera, director of advocacy at JUNTA for Progressive Action, right after the election. Since then, a sanctuary city working group has met five times. Originally led by JUNTA and Unidad Latina en Acción, the working group has grown to include Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, New Haven Rising, New Haven Legal Assistance and other organizations, in addition to representatives of the mayor’s office, New Haven Public Schools, and the police department.

Two days before Harp’s speech at City Hall, the working group met to focus on a specific, recent issue. Fearing deportation raids, parents in the city have stopped sending children to school, said Fatima Rojas, a member of ULA, at the meeting. Harp concurred at the Thursday night rally. She argued that fear among a wider swath of New Haven residents, causing reluctance to send children to school, does more harm than violations of federal immigration law. Urging residents, including migrants, to follow their daily routine, Harp stated, “New Haven remains a safe haven for all those who live here.”

Rivera aims to add awareness to the daily routine of both children and their parents. JUNTA has held community defense workshops called “Know Your Rights” in two schools in New Haven. So far the organization has worked at Fair Haven and Hill Central, but “our idea is to go anywhere and everywhere, anyone that wants us to come in.” Many parents attended the events, as the schools sent out flyers and robocalls. At Fair Haven, students from an English as a Second Language class performed skits on the eponymous theme. Typically, the workshop presents different scenarios in a potential raid or immigration case, then asks workshop participants what they’ve learned — “what you do right, what you do wrong.”

“It’s a little heartbreaking that we have to have these conversations with kids as young as they are, but I think it’s important that if a young person learns that at school, they might tell their parents, don’t open the door unless there’s a warrant,” said Rivera. “They knew their rights better than anyone else there,” she said of the students.

According to a statement from Mayor Harp, a team of Board of Education members has been investigating the legality of ICE agents entering schools. She stated that the team has found that both state and federal laws protect students who wish to attend public schools without documentation. To enter a public school, ICE agents must have warrants. And, if Harp’s statements on Thursday and the city’s past policy hold fast, local police officers will not aid them.

The sanctuary city working committee also seeks to codify the status quo with law enforcement. The committee is currently working to update 2006’s general order, which restricts law enforcement from asking an individual about their immigration status. The committee is also drafting a resolution with members of New Haven’s Board of Alders. Initially, its purpose was to reaffirm New Haven’s status as a sanctuary city, and set out steps for city employees accordingly. But, given the recent executive orders, Rivera said, “We might have to shift a little bit… mention something about the direct attack against our city.”

* * *

At Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, a New Haven based nonprofit, Kelly Frank is waiting for her own call to shift. Now a development specialist, Frank spent 10 years at IRIS as deputy director. After the executive orders on immigrants, Frank says IRIS is “dreading the announcement of the draft [of the presidential memorandum] that related more specifically to refugees.” Leaked on Wednesday, the memorandum contains instructions to halt entry of refugees from seven countries including Syria, if it is signed.

For the moment, IRIS is proceeding “full steam ahead” with their regular programs for refugees, welcoming a family from Syria yesterday. Frank emphasized that IRIS will determine how to react if the memorandum is formalized, but did state that the direction of the leaked draft would be “absolutely devastating” for the refugee resettlement program. “We can’t speak out against that strongly enough,” said Frank.

This week has been extremely busy at IRIS, as the staff fielded calls and emails from people asking how to help. The organization has been encouraging callers to contact the White House, to show “widespread support” for refugee resettlement. In 2016, IRIS welcomed 530 individuals, more than double the previous year’s count of 242. According to Frank, this was only possible due to community support across the state, such as co-sponsoring of refugees from community-based groups. “We’re stronger as a state,” she said. IRIS will soon release a joint statement with Bridgeport’s International Institute and Hartford’s Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement condemning the presidential actions. The statement argues that they “go against the fabric of our nation.” The three agencies also plan to capitalize on their close working relationship to advocate, through Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal LAW ’73, in Washington.

Student groups also plan to increase partnerships with Elm City activists. In a statement made January 25, titled “A Letter to President Donald Trump,” the Yale Refugee Project urged President Trump to accept an invitation to visit IRIS “and meet the refugees who have sought refuge here and have become patriotic members of our country.” Rosa Shapiro-Thompson ‘19, YRP’s advocacy and awareness coordinator, told the News that the organization publicized the event to its members. She told the News that the YRP is “preparing for a long fight, both for the continued resettlement of refugees in the country and for the protection of our local refugee community here in New Haven.”

Rita Wang ‘19, political action coordinator at the Yale Women’s Center, believes “Yale student issues and New Haven resident issues go hand in hand, and we as campus activists have to do both to help erase the Yale-New Haven dichotomy.” Wang reached out to ULA to support New Haven residents who wanted to attend the Women’s March on Washington. Many members of the Women’s Center have expressed interest in organizing nights of support for Planned Parenthood to write postcards to senators, an effort Wang intends to coordinate. She is also thinking of trying to revive the Student Group Coalition at Yale, an attempt by the Yale College Council, Dwight Hall, the Co-op and the Women’s Center to hold bi-weekly meetings for campus activist groups.

“Because of the new administration, I hope to do some soul searching and structural reworking with the rest of campus activists to see how to better do our work,” said Wang. “I do think that some of the old things that we were used to under the Obama administration are not going to happen anymore. We’re fighting against much scarier people now.”

* * *

Even before the election, which caused a definite spike in street marches, City Hall played host to several protests or community meetings each month in New Haven. Ana Maria Rivera believes activism moves more rapidly in the Elm City, an effect of “years and years of struggle, real organizing by the people that are most impacted,” together with a friendly administration since 2005. Through the Connecticut Immigrants Rights Alliance, JUNTA has been working with other organizations across the state to advocate for immigrants in their cities. “Since we already have policies in place, we’ve been lending our skills,” said Rivera. Windham, Connecticut recently declared itself a sanctuary city, intending to defend immigrants in case of a raid and instituting a municipal ID program in the vein of New Haven’s Elm City ID card program, according to Rivera. In Bridgeport, a petition was recently delivered to the mayor in favor of sanctuary policies.

Local organizations, from NARAL-CT, headquartered in Hartford, to New Haven’s JUNTA and IRIS, all mentioned their plans to work across the state. Rivera and Frank both mentioned their organization’s participation in a rally on Friday, Jan. 27 in Hartford. The rally is organized by Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance, an umbrella group of 30 member organizations — community based, faith based, unions, youth organizing, and others. All, Rivera said, intend to ask Gov. Dannel Malloy to take a strong stance against the executive order affecting the estimated 108,000 undocumented immigrants in the state of Connecticut, as of March 2016.

* * *

The state capitol has likely not seen the last of Sharlene Kerelejza, organizer of the Women’s March on Hartford. Together with over 20 organizers of other Connecticut events and Connecticut residents who marched in Washington D.C., she is part of the Women’s March Connecticut Chapter. Through Facebook and Twitter, the group continues to publicize events in Connecticut, on a range of causes as diverse as the signs that floated above every march in the country.

According to Melody Oliphant, another organizer of the chapter, the group hopes to serve as “a conduit for action at the local, state, and national level,” collaborating with the Women’s March national organizing team. “We’re eager to mobilize folks in Connecticut to support the important and progressive work already happening around our state,” Oliphant said. The 27 organizers plan to encourage local and state groups to reach out to the chapter, to figure out how to best support those groups. The Facebook page, created only a week ago, posts links to events, including press conferences, local meetings, and rallies supporting immigrants, the Standing Rock pipeline protest and Planned Parenthood.

After a short week under a new administration, things have changed. From the White House, the administration’s intended policies have galvanized activists of all stripes. On Thursday, the crowd at City Hall again held signs advocating for a range of causes, from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ rights. Vanessa Suarez, speaking for Unidad Latina en Accion, accused Trump of picking a fight with “everyone,” eliciting a huge cheer when she shouted, “Trump is gonna come for us with his executive orders? We’re gonna come after him!”

Yale, Ivies prep for change in immigration policy

By Andrew Ballard

Published on January 26, 2017

The presidents of all eight Ivy League schools announced in December that they are preparing their campuses for changes to national immigration policy under President Donald Trump’s new administration.

The Ivy League leaders joined another 601 university presidents across the country who signed a letter calling upon United States legislators to uphold the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy — an immigration statute that postpones deportation or other actions by the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services for young undocumented immigrants. Implemented in 2012, the policy is expected to be assailed by Trump’s administration.

Ivy League schools have articulated the importance of diversity and education for all on their campuses. Each pledge of support has differed in approach, but all of them aim to respond to students who fear they will be unable to graduate amid changing immigration policies. Still, the promises from university leaders have not always satisfied the calls of community activists.

Many such calls have focused on the creation of “sanctuary campuses” — a label derived from the recent nationwide “sanctuary city” movement. Many activists have argued that sanctuary status is necessary for protecting undocumented community members, but some campus administrators have disregarded these calls due to the legal ambiguity of the sanctuary label.

On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order clamping down on sanctuary cities. The order, titled “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” will drastically limit federal funding to cities that do not comply with federal immigration enforcement agents. It did not cite any specific federal grants.

Below, the News compares the statements, policies and initiatives concerning the standing of undocumented students at each Ivy League institution.

Yale University

On Nov. 16, following an initial statement urging the campus community to “act with decency” in light of the presidential election, University President Peter Salovey issued a second statement in which he addressed the condition of undocumented and international immigrants at Yale. Additionally, a group of faculty, students and administrators is currently exploring potential responses to any changes in immigration law under the Trump administration, according to his email to the Yale community.

On the same day, at a campus protest, local activists said Salovey’s response was insufficient and demanded he work to transform the campus into a sanctuary camps that “actively” protects immigrants. Three days earlier, a petition calling for the designation of Yale as a sanctuary campus had garnered more than 2,300 signatures.

Salovey responded to the activists in a column published in the News on Nov. 18, in which he alluded to the calls for the creation of a sanctuary campus, but indicated neither support nor opposition to that proposal. However, he did say that the Yale Police Department would align itself with the policies of the New Haven Police Department — which currently disregards the immigration statuses of residents, a policy in line with New Haven’s sanctuary city status.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, Yale has also launched a website that addresses the threat Trump’s administration poses to DACA. The site states that the University will provide support for and aid students navigating any legal or financial challenges that result from immigration policy changes.

(Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Harvard University

At Harvard, where Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 had overwhelming student support, protests broke out shortly after the election outcome. Administrators responded with promises to protect undocumented students. But in a Nov. 28 statement, Harvard President Drew Faust said definitively that the school would not declare its campus a sanctuary, despite pressure from students in rallies and from over 350 faculty members who signed a letter calling for sanctuary status among other responses to the election.

Faust said she worried that such a designation could be counterproductive because it possesses little legal significance and could jeopardize the safety of students, according to the Harvard Crimson. Like Salovey, Faust reaffirmed the Harvard Police Department’s policies to disregard immigration status and to leave enforcement of immigration law to federal officials. Those policies match those of the police departments in both Cambridge and Boston, which have both declared themselves to be sanctuary cities. She added that the university would bolster legal resources for community members, expand the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program and continue to push for federal policies that advance the interests of undocumented students, such as DACA.

Faust’s decision against labeling the campus a sanctuary was met with criticism from both faculty and students.

Princeton University

Amid calls from the community for administrative action to protect undocumented students affected by anticipated changes in immigration policy, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber said he would advocate for the preservation of DACA and uphold policies to assist undocumented students in completing their degrees. However, he said the university would not declare itself to be a sanctuary campus — a title Eisgruber said has “no basis in law” in a Nov. 28 statement.

The announcement came a week after hundreds of Princeton community members demonstrated outside of the president’s office and demanded that the administration declare the university a sanctuary. A petition harboring a similar demand gathered the signatures of over 2,300 people.

While Eisgruber said he was committed to doing all that was possible to protect students, he also emphasized that Princeton should not attempt to exempt itself from federal law.

And unlike at other schools that have had the freedom to stipulate whether university police enforce federal immigration policy, a 2007 New Jersey State directive issued by the state’s Attorney General mandates that New Jersey police officers inquire about immigration status when “there is reason to believe that the arrestee may be an undocumented immigrant.”

Police are responsible for alerting federal immigration officials in that case, the directive says. Town of Princeton Police Chief Nicholas Sutter said in a 2015 statement that the policy does not leave such discretion up to the local authorities, despite the Princeton mayor affirming the city as a sanctuary in July 2015.

(Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Columbia University

Columbia University announced a plan on Nov. 21 to provide undocumented students with sanctuary and financial assistance in light of expected immigration restrictions on immigration in Trump’s term. Columbia’s provost, John Coatsworth, pledged in an email that the university would withhold student information from immigration officials lacking a subpoena and would bar such officials from entering the Columbia campus without a warrant. In response to Trump’s vow to repeal DACA, Coatsworth further pledged to increase financial aid for undocumented students who may lose the ability to work.

In a Dec. 22 email, President of Barnard College Debora Spar issued a statement in line with Columbia’s announcement and asked the community to join her in “rejecting hatred.” She said the college would provide financial support and work to protect the “privacy and safety” of the campus community.

Both Spar and Coatsworth emphasized that New York City is a sanctuary city and that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently affirmed the city’s commitment to maintaining that title, which in this case stipulates that local police will not inquire about immigration status or turn over such information to federal officials unless a criminal conviction is made.

Columbia President Lee Bollinger has been vocal in his criticisms of Trump. In a February talk before Trump’s victory, he said it would be a “real pity” if Trump were to be elected, according to the Columbia Spectator. And in the election’s aftermath, Bollinger said Trump’s presidency would challenge the university’s “fundamental values.”

University of Pennsylvania

After facing criticism and pressure from students and faculty for her silence amid calls that she deem the University of Pennsylvania a “sanctuary campus,” Penn President Amy Gutmann announced that the school would “stay” a sanctuary campus in a Nov. 30 email to the Penn community, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian.

She said the campus “has always been a ‘sanctuary’ — a safe place for our students to live and to learn,” — and she pledged that the university would work to protect and support the community, including undocumented immigrants. Gutmann added that the university would not allow federal immigration officials on the campus without a warrant, would provide financial support to DACA students if need be, would maintain a set of advisors for students under DACA and would “continue to advocate passionately for comprehensive immigration reform.”

The Penn declaration of “sanctuary” aligns the school with its home city of Philadelphia, whose mayor signed a law in January 2015 restricting the cooperation of city police and federal immigration officials, thereby transforming Philly into a “sanctuary city,” according to the Daily Pennsylvanian.

In the days following the university’s announcement, many community members praised what some saw as a show of solidarity. Yet some said there was still more work to be done and that they were frustrated that Gutmann did not meet directly with undocumented students as they had requested.

Other students, some represented by the UPenn College Republicans, showed disapproval of Gutmann’s statement and the policies set forth. When the Daily Pennsylvanian reported on the release, the UPenn College Republicans shared the article on Facebook under the caption, #NotMyPresident.

Cornell University

Interim President of Cornell University Hunter Rawlings released a statement on Nov. 22 seeking to reassure students upset by possible changes in immigration law in the wake of the presidential election that the university would “ensure that all can participate fully and freely in the life of the institution.”

His release followed a petition that garnered 2,000 signatures and calls from 15 university departments, programs and assemblies expressing concern about the security of students protected under DACA. And an additional 50 Cornell law professors appealed to the University to support undocumented students, according to the Cornell Daily Sun.

Responding to these messages, the interim president released a statement on Dec. 22 outlining specific policies that he said constitute Cornell’s “commitment” to protecting students under DACA. Cornell would provide financial support if DACA were discontinued, would “vigilantly protect” student information from unlawful searches and would not permit Cornell Police to inquire about immigration status unless related to criminal violations, he wrote. Rawlings added that Cornell Law School planned on launching a program for students wishing to consult a lawyer about implications of the new presidential administration’s policies.

Rawlings’s addresses did not use “sanctuary campus” language, but many of his outlined policies satisfy the details of student and faculty demands. Cornell law professor Aziz Rana — one of the faculty members involved in post-election advocacy — recognized the concerns expressed by administrators at other universities such as Brown and Harvard, who have declined to take on the title because of the ambiguity of its legal significance. Still, Rana urged the university to do all that is possible to protect its community.

Brown University

The election of Trump spurred protest and concern among students and faculty at Brown University. Brown President Christina Paxson and University Provost Richard Locke responded with affirmation of the school’s future efforts to support and protect undocumented students. But the two Brown leaders have been cautious in their pledges, noting in a Nov. 16 letter to the community that there are limits to what the university can do in the case that federal immigration officials present the school with court warrants and subpoenas.

On the same day, a walkout of around 400 students marched on the university’s administrative offices, where they attempted to present a list of demands to officials detailing measures to support students, such as refusing to voluntarily share information with federal immigration officials.

Paxson and Locke were not present, according to the Brown Daily Herald, so protestors taped their demands to the president’s door. The organization that led the event, called “Our Campus,” later expressed frustration with the administration in a Facebook post.

“The administration does not wish to listen to us. … We chanted for over 10 minutes. No one came out,” wrote Our Campus on the event’s Facebook page, according to the Herald.

Despite community frustration, releases from the president’s office and university webpages addressing “post-election” challenges to undocumented and DACA students suggest that Brown plans to take measures similar to those of its Ivy peers, such as providing additional financial support and legal help to undocumented students in the case that DACA is discontinued.

Dartmouth College

On Nov. 18, Dartmouth College President Phil Hanlon said the school would take action to uphold standards of inclusivity and student safety in light of Trump’s intentions to discontinue DACA.

The announcement came in response to a petition released three days earlier calling on Dartmouth officials to commit greater support for undocumented students, according to the Dartmouth.

“We will work within the bounds of the law to mitigate any effects on our students caused by possible revisions to DACA and other immigration policies,” Hanlon wrote.

Details of those efforts are not outlined in the statement and no further release has been made since, but Hanlon pointed out that Dartmouth was one of a number of universities who filed a friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the expansion of DACA during recent efforts to expand the program.

Dartmouth has updated a website with resources for DACA and undocumented students. It refers students to several legal organizations and says the school has “engaged the services” of Curran & Berger LLP — a firm that will provide free or discounted workshops, consultations and representation to affected students.

Hanlon’s statement said Dartmouth’s financial aid policies do not take into account domestic applicants’ immigration status, but it did not address whether measures would be taken to provide further financial support to student who lose the ability to work, in the event that DACA is ceased.

Living in Limbo

By Kate Cray

Published on December 15, 2016

Living in Limbo: Aymir Holland’s Year in Pre-trial Detention

At 6:34 p.m. on Nov. 27, 2015, the New Haven Police Department received an urgent phone call — Charles Hill, a lecturer in International Studies at Yale, was lying on the ground, badly injured, at the intersection of Bradley Street and Whitney Avenue. According to a press release from NHPD spokesman David Hartman, Hill had been viciously attacked from behind by a group of five men. Gathering his strength, Hill later made it home, where his wife called the police again. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital for treatment of his multiple facial injuries, broken knee and two broken ribs. He was 79 at the time.

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

Hill has since recovered, and over a year later, three of his five alleged assailants sit in prison. Aymir Holland and Kelton Gilbert, who were 16 and 18 at the time of the assault, are detained at Manson Youth Institution for offenders up to age 21; Lawrence Minor, who was 20 during the incident, is detained at an adult institution. The last two of their group remain at large. Each of the three suspects are being charged with five felonies: first degree assault, assault of an elderly victim, first degree robbery, first degree conspiracy to commit assault and first degree conspiracy to commit robbery. The identical felony charges reflect no distinction of the relative levels of culpability among the three defendants, or any special treatment for Holland’s juvenile status.

Having just turned 17, Aymir Holland is the youngest of the accused group. He had never been suspended from school or arrested by the police before. A young black man, Holland’s mother described him as a “gentle giant,” and friends and family mentioned his diverse interests in computer game design, music and football. Now, he faces up to 61 years in prison, as well as the possibility of being tried in court as an adult. But his family remains hopeful that he might be tried as a youthful offender so that even if convicted, Holland would have a second chance: He would not be legally considered a criminal, and the maximum sentence he could accrue would only be four years. Not only would his case stay private, but at 21 the crime would also be stricken from his record, protecting him from the job discrimination that many felons face.

Hill declined to comment due to the sensitivity of the case and the approaching trial. I was also unable to access Holland’s arrest records at the courthouse because of his juvenile status. LaToya Willis, Holland’s mother, said she does not believe he assaulted Hill.

“I’m not going to accept that my son is guilty, because I know that he’s not,” Willis said. “I know my child, and I know that in this situation he didn’t do what he’s being accused of. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Holland and the others have yet to be convicted, but with bail set at a quarter million, none of them can afford to go home. So they wait — more than a year and counting — behind bars in pretrial detention.

—

The morning of Hill’s assault, Holland attended a funeral in his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut. His best friend had battled leukemia but recently passed away, Holland’s mother explained. The two had played together in their church band, Holland on percussion and his friend on piano.

While the public spotlight is focused on Holland’s upcoming hearing, Willis lingered on the funeral of her son’s best friend. Up till this day, in the midst of his own criminal proceedings, she believes that he has yet to find a time to grieve for his best friend.

At Holland’s best friend’s funeral, Willis couldn’t help but think back to another funeral she attended with her son over six years ago, when the grandmother of Holland’s friend had passed away. At that funeral, Willis recalled, a ten year old Holland walked over to his friend and held her so that she could cry on his shoulders.

“It touched my heart to see him do that on his own at that age,” Willis said. “He didn’t even ask for permission. He saw her hurt, and went to try to console her. That’s how he’s always been. That’s how he is now.”

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

Diana Gonzalez-Valeta, a West Haven resident, was struck by this story. On a change.org petition for Holland to be tried as a youthful offender, she blamed the stringency of Holland’s potential punishment on his race.

Almost all activists, family members, and friends I interviewed felt the need to describe Holland as a large black man, an appearance they believed to be the first strike against him. “He can, by his mere size, look threatening, “ said Dave Colton, who mentors Holland in prison as a volunteer through Family Reentry, a Bridgeport organization aiming to stop the cycle of mass incarceration through community-centered interventions.

Those who are familiar with Holland, however, were quick to defend him. “He’s not the kind of big that’s imposing. He’s very friendly. You can see it. He’s got a nice smile,” said Mark Fitzgerald, Holland’s former ninth-grade English teacher.

The accusation against Holland shocked his friends and family. Colton said he found it difficult to imagine that Holland would do anything malicious, and Fitzgerald pointed to the teen’s school record. Holland had never been suspended and was known around school as an anti-bullying advocate. When somebody was being bullied, Holland would always tell the bully to “knock it off,” Fitzgerald recalled.

His mom agreed. “He’s always for the underdog. He doesn’t like to see anyone get bullied or he uses his size to intimidate bullies from bullying people who are smaller,” she said. “He doesn’t like to see anyone hurt.”

And Holland’s kindness has not gone unrecognized. Willis told me that since his arrest, his peers have written letters to the judge commending Holland’s kind actions. By doing so, they hope the trial will be ruled in Holland’s favor.

—

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

Holland’s story — a year behind bars in the absence of any conviction — is a sad but familiar one.

“That story sounds unfathomable — that a kid who was 16 years old, now 17 years old, could be in jail for more than a year having never stood trial. It’s sort of mind-boggling,” said Patrick Sullivan ’18, who co-founded the Connecticut Bail Fund with two other Yalies. “Across the United States, there’s about 450,000, maybe more, people in pretrial detention right now.”

A New York Times article written in August 2015 first cited 450,000 as an approximate number of individuals in pretrial detention, including those denied bail and those who are unable to afford it.

Sullivan, Brett Davidson ’16, Simone Seiver ’17 and Scott Greenberg, a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine, formed the Connecticut Bail Fund last year with a grant from the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute. The Bail Fund aims to solve the injustice of money bail by posting bail for clients who can’t afford it.

A 2011 report from the Bureau of Justice revealed that at any time, 60 percent of the prison population is awaiting trial, just like Holland. In Connecticut, about 3,000 people await their trial behind bars at any one time for no reason other than being unable to afford bail. For John Mele, Mentoring Coordinator at Family Reentry, the injustice of pretrial detention cases is a frequent part of his work.

“I just had a young man who was in Manson [Youth Institution] for two and a half years, and who ended up not being found guilty,” Mele said, shaking his head. “Innocent until proven guilty, but for two and a half years he sat in a cell. What kind of system works like that?”

Daee McKnight, who is involved with Family Reentry, said the entire bail system is rife with classicism. “It’s almost like the person is guilty to stay in pretrial detention because they’re in poverty,” McKnight said. “It’s almost like you’re guilty because you’re in poverty.”

Sullivan agreed, adding that in theory, pretrial detention and bail are supposed to incentivize individuals to show up in court. But the current practice has only produced a “two-tiered system of justice,” where the wealthy can pay their bail and go free no matter how severe their crime is, while those without the money are forced to wait for weeks or months in pretrial detention.

And pretrial detention also produces negative long-term consequences. A study commissioned by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation revealed that, on average, those who had been detained before their trial were three times as likely to be sentenced to prison and two times as likely to receive longer prison sentences. In other words, pretrial detention hurts the outcomes of a trial. Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” hypothesized in a column for the New York Times that this may be caused by the pressure to take plea bargains, a special deal in which the defendant agrees to plead guilty in exchange for dropped charges or a lower recommended sentence. She pointed out that over 90 percent of criminal trials are resolved in these bargains, which are often coercive in nature.

McKnight, who served 17.5 years of a 25 year sentence, is no stranger to the effects of incarceration on all aspects of life, even after release. Among many factors, he cited job discrimination and his inability to receive money from his mother’s will, because the state extracted a significant percentage of his inheritance to cover his incarceration costs. In fact, in a system where the costs of a criminal record are so high, the effects of accepting any kind of conviction can be crippling.

“We’re supposed to be a second chance society,” McKnight said. “For that statement to become a reality, there are a lot of things we have to do right here in Connecticut…Taking juveniles and trying them as adults is a step backwards to the progress that we’re trying to make.”

—

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

Turning down a plea bargain, Holland has stayed in Manson since last November, waiting for his turn to stand a just trial. Meanwhile, his case — and the surprisingly high bail for someone who has never committed a crime in the past — has mobilized the larger New Haven community. Touched by Holland’s situation, Fitzgerald looked for legal support and other ways to financially support Holland’s trial efforts. He tried to contact Yale Law School’s public defender program, but it was no longer in place; he then turned to Quinnipiac, but the public defender program there was tied up; he found Modest Means, a program affiliated with the New Haven Bar Association, but Willis still couldn’t afford one of their lawyers, Fitzgerald explained.

But things started to change when Fitzgerald met Addys Castillo, executive director of the Citywide Youth Coalition. Even though the coalition did not normally pursue criminal justice advocacy, Castillo was swayed by Holland’s story. And when she shared his story with young people in the coalition, she saw an immediate response.

“They were so upset,” Castillo said. “They wanted [Holland’s] story to be told and to see if we could get some type of movement around it. So we held a rally, dinner and dialogue called ‘Justice or Just Us.’”

The movement has only grown from there. Once other young New Haven residents heard about Holland’s case, many decided to get involved. Together, they wrote and published a change.org petition that has gained 626 signatures and started a fundraiser on GoFundMe that has raised over a thousand dollars. Every time Holland went to court for his preliminary hearings, members of the coalition demonstrated in front of the courthouse, calling for the justice system to try Holland as a youthful offender.

The Youth Coalition’s efforts convinced New Haven Mayor Toni Harp to write a letter on Holland’s behalf. And Holland now has a new lawyer — Jason Goddard, who agreed to work on the case on a pro bono basis. Goddard’s presence and the support from the New Haven community have been “such a relief,” Willis said, expressing her gratitude for the extra help.

But the Citywide Youth Coalition did not just change Holland’s case — in fact, the case has transformed and mobilized the coalition into a group of criminal justice advocates. Members have now spoken at the Bail Project about bail reform; they used Holland’s story and his bail of a quarter million to illustrate the ways that the money bail system unfairly targets poor victims. Advisory Board member Cowiya Arona assured me that no matter how the case proceeds, the coalition will continue to fight and protest.

“When I was approached by [Fitzpatrick] and [Willis], it was going to be a passion project on my end to get involved, but then I told the youth about it in the hope that they would want to get involved and I just told them the story and they took it and ran,” Castillo said. “This is really new for us, but we’re really proud of the work that they’ve been able to accomplish.”

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

Yet despite the passionate local activism, representation from the Yale community has been largely absent. Yale Police Chief and Director of Public Safety at Yale Ronnell Higgins sent out an email on the day of the attack last November, but in the absence of any University-wide emails, only a few members of the Yale community have followed Holland’s case and even fewer have taken any action.

Sullivan of the Connecticut Bail Fund suspects that the quiet around Holland’s case might be because so much of the Citywide Youth Coalition’s planning occurred over the summer when students were off campus. But he was quick to emphasize that this is not an excuse. “I think it’s troubling that there’s not [more activism],” Sullivan said. “I think this is a perfect example of that Yale-New Haven separation.”

As a leader of the Connecticut Bail Fund, Sullivan has attended several of the Citywide Youth Coalitions events centered around Holland’s case. He shared the names of several other Yale students he had seen at these gatherings. When I reached out, one student declined to be interviewed because she did not feel like she was representing Yale, but was rather engaging as an individual in the New Haven community. Others echoed her sentiments.

Since my interview with Sullivan, the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, a student ] organization aimed at reducing recidivism and promoting dialogue around mass incarceration, has sent out an email with more information on how to get involved, promising a different future for Yale activism around Holland’s case.

—

On Nov. 30, I sat among the crowd in the New Haven Judicial District Courthouse — Gilbert and Minor were set to appear in court for a pretrial hearing. That morning, family members and friends scattered around the courtroom, waiting anxiously as they sat in the benches. A lawyer approached Gilbert’s family. “He’s okay, he’s okay,” she said. When she left, the courtroom grew quiet again. No judge appeared. Finally, a man approached the security guard in the room.

“Is Lawrence Minor here?” he asked.

The security guard consulted a sheet. “He’s been here and left already. He’ll be back for another hearing on January 5,” the guard finally said.

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

And Kelton Gilbert? He, too, will return to the courtroom on January 5. Their lawyers had consulted independently with the judge to put off the hearing, seemingly without the families’ knowledge. The result? Another five weeks in prison. Their constitutionally mandated “speedy trial” did not seem to be approaching anytime soon.

When the families stood up to leave, Gilbert’s mother noticed another family in the room, here for the next hearing that involved another young man who was waiting justice. She waved to a woman, perhaps a friend. The two women hugged — it seemed like they knew each other well.

—

At Manson Youth Institution, the correctional facility in Cheshire, Connecticut where Holland is currently being held, the young men are separated into units called “cottages” based on age, sentence-length and other factors. There is no separation between boys who are already convicted and those still awaiting their trial, Mele told me.

Colton, who mentors at Manson Youth Institution regularly, said he tries to do his best to help the inmates transition.

“I come with my eyes and my ears and then just be receptive to who they are,” Colton said of his usual method. But Holland was a slightly atypical case — he believes the young man has had “a more sheltered life” than the other inmates.

Willis agreed. “Aymir’s in a foreign land right now,” she said. “My son’s not even street smart. He wasn’t raised that way.”

For a long time, Holland was not able to go to church services, the bedrock of his Sunday mornings. Willis said she had to send study materials to her son to “keep up with his spiritual belief.”

Perhaps most difficult was the blow to his education. Attending school is mandatory in Connecticut up to age 17, and that mandate pertains to those who are incarcerated as well. Manson Youth Institution operates its own fully accredited school within the prison walls with over 60 teachers, a library and a computer lab that contains resources for graphic design but with no Internet service, which inmates are forbidden to use. Despite these efforts, students still lag behind.

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

“The education in there is nothing compared to the education he was receiving outside. My son has been in charter schools all of his life,” Willis said. “Then he goes to prison and they’re teaching him fifth grade things, and he’s in high school.”

When Jillian Valeta, a member of the Citywide Youth Coalition, heard that Holland was studying Mandarin, she wrote him a letter asking him if he’d like to practice Mandarin with her. He agreed, so she concluded her next letter with some of the new characters that she had learned in her language class.

“And it’s funny but not funny, but [the prison guards] actually wouldn’t give him the letter, thinking that it was gang-related mail,” Willis said, explaining that the security staff at the prison was under the impression that the Mandarin characters in Valeta’s letter were gang symbols. “They actually came to the cell and told him, ‘You can’t have your friends writing you in gang symbols,’ and he’s like ‘I’m not in a gang, what are you talking about?’”

Prison has been isolating, but Holland holds onto the ties that he has from home. In addition to members of the Citywide Youth Coalition, Holland’s classmates take time to write to him regularly. And mother and son talk on the phone on a daily basis.

“I speak to Aymir everyday,” Willis said, holding back tears. “It’s really expensive, but he calls home everyday. It’s about four bucks a phone call, and he calls everyday.”

—

Looking forward, Holland’s mother expressed a mixture of hope and anxiety. Many friends and family described him as an ambitious young man full of potential, but Willis said his future prospects have changed because of the interruption in his education.

“Aymir knows that this situation isn’t his destination,” she said. “He’s ready to come home and pick up the pieces and make something of his life, because this is the time that he would be planning for his life. This situation has stagnated his growth in every area. He’s anxious, I’m anxious and we’re anxious for him to come home and put his life back together.”

Mele recalls a conversation that he had with Holland at their last visit, when he asked Holland what he’d learned in his time in prison. Holland paused and thought for a while. “‘The thing is, we’re all there, we’re all trying to do better in our situation,’” Mele recalled Holland saying.

Holland is scheduled for a court hearing on Dec. 22. At that hearing, the judge will determine whether he will be tried as a youthful offender or as an adult. But it is unclear if the question will be answered then. This is what pretrial detention in Connecticut looks like for Holland and thousands like him — if they do not accept plea bargains, they will have to wait in jail for what feels like an eternity before getting a fair trial.

Still, Holland’s legal team has pledged lasting support for his case.

“We truly care about this young man and we believe in his potential to be a wonderful member of his community,” Meredith Olan said on behalf of Holland’s attorneys. “We are doing everything in our power to give Aymir the best possible representation in his case.”

The Man Alone and I

Credits

The School of Exile

The choice is yours

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Trading Places:
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The Man Alone and I

Credits

The School of Exile

The choice is yours

UP CLOSE: Understaffed, Yale sports medicine struggles with student injuries

Trading Places:A Portrait of Yale’s Transfer Program

Bulldogs in the White House:Yalies in the Trump Administration

BANNED: Trump’s Executive Order Hits Home

A week in the White House

Yale, Ivies prep for change in immigration policy

Living in Limbo

Trading Places:
A Portrait of Yale’s Transfer Program

Bulldogs in the White House:
Yalies in the Trump Administration