UP CLOSE: Before and after “Varsity Blues”

UP CLOSE:
Before and after "Varsity Blues"

By Skakel McCooey
Photos by Madelyn Kumar
Published on April 25, 2019

Of the applications Yale received in 1976, one in particular — Andreas Stephan Alrea’s — was perfect.

An orphan of a Cambridge-educated anthropologist and a Stanford-educated anesthesiologist, Alrea had cared for himself and his younger brother since the age of 12 after his parents died in a car crash. Before coming to Yale, he amassed a $30 million fortune through investments and business deals in the three years since he graduated from high school — enough to buy a house in Brazil. In his spare time, he managed to master several languages, including a no-longer-spoken Native American dialect.

Admissions officers were impressed with his glowing recommendations and his nearly perfect high school transcript. They accepted him without second thought. One admissions officer called him “a modern Horatio Alger,” according to a News story at the time.

But four months after matriculating, the 21-year-old Timothy Dwight College freshman finally decided to tell the truth — everything about Andreas Alrea was a lie. In reality, Alrea was Patrick Michael McDermit, an odd-jobs worker from California with a shoddy high school record, no special gift for languages and certainly no fortune.

In January 1977, he told University officials that he had forged transcripts, faked recommendations and falsified documents. He reportedly spent around $15,000 renting a post office box and printing fake stationery to write fictitious recommendations for himself.

When the gig was up, students and faculty members alike saw McDermit as a hero. His final days at Yale were filled with congratulatory phone calls from strangers, kudos from professors on the street and a standing ovation at lunch in the Timothy Dwight dining hall. His roommate said that McDermit “did everything I would have done if I had had the balls.”

Then-Dean of Admissions Worth David told the News in 1977 that his office did not verify all applicants’ records.

“As long as the transcripts look legitimate, we don’t question the student’s record,” he said.

The New York Times reported that because McDermit had withdrawn from the school, the University was not addressing the matter “with any urgency.”

That was 1977.

Forty-two years later, the cheers in Timothy Dwight have transformed into a national outcry against another type of fraud with the same aim — admission to elite universities like Yale. In March, federal prosecutors announced the findings of an investigation into what they called the largest admissions scandal ever. Over 53 people were implicated in the scandal, including former women’s soccer head coach Rudy Meredith, who was charged with accepting bribes in exchange for recommending at least one fraudulent women’s soccer recruit to the University.

As Meredith left the Boston courthouse after pleading guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy charges in March, one reporter, perhaps channeling the nation’s sentiment, shouted after him — “How do you feel about the students you betrayed?”

What has happened in the past four decades that has transformed enthusiastic cheers for someone who has the wiles to cheat the system into outrage against those who “steal someone else’s spot?” And after the largest admissions scandal in the history of the Department of Justice, what can Yale do to better protect itself from the fraudulent applications that have plagued its admissions office for at least 40 years?

NO STRANGER TO APPLICATION FRAUD

Since Alrea’s remarkable case, two other notable examples of fraudulent applications have slipped through the cracks of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.

In 1995, Lon “L.T.” Grammer — colloquially known as “Yale’s O.J.” due to his abbreviated name and the concurrence with the O.J. Simpson trial — was a popular Davenport senior who transferred to Yale with an almost perfect grade-point average and stellar recommendations.

He was arrested in April 1995 when his roommate overheard him bragging about his successful gaming of the system. After the roommate reported it to Yale officials, the University discovered that almost every item in his application was fake. He was arrested and charged with first degree larceny — on the grounds that he allegedly stole $35,875 in Yale financial aid and $25,000 in federal grants and loans. Even then, students wanted more accountability, with an anonymous student telling the News at the time that admitting the student was a “huge mistake … that no one will ever forget.”

Despite students’ frustrations, the administration downplayed the incident’s importance. According to a story from the News, then-University President Richard Levin said in 1995 that he did “not see this as a serious problem for the majority of Yale graduates.”

Still, in 2006 Akash Mahraj — an allegedly straight-A student from Columbia University — also transferred into Yale only to be kicked out the next year for lying on his application. Mahraj, like Grammer, was charged with larceny and forgery and had his admission rescinded.

When interviewed by the News in 2008, then-Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel said that Mahraj’s alleged forgery had not initiated any changes in admissions procedures. Despite these examples of admissions fraud, forgeries remain rare, he said.

Brenzel declined to comment for this story.

While each instance of fraud has temporarily stolen the spotlight, it eventually passes and fades out of memory. Or, as the News predicted in 1977, “Alrea’s joke, in the long run, will not affect admissions policy much, if at all.”

“You don’t want to, because of any one incident, arrive at drastic conclusions about a process which is fundamentally sound,” then-Director of Undergraduate Admissions Margit Dahl told the News in 1995.

Barmak Nassirian — the director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities — said that up until the 1970s, many admissions offices operated with a “genteel-era” mindset, in which officers considered themselves “academic gatekeepers.” Because of the much lower number of candidates, he said that many offices simply needed to differentiate between the candidates who could and could not do the work, and then “things … worked themselves out.” He admitted that this relative dearth of candidates was a product of “fundamental inequities in our society.”

But over the past 40 years — and especially over the past 20 — a college degree has turned into a much more valuable commodity than it was in the 1970s, according to Nassirian. He explained that many institutions do not realize that “what they are dealing out might be worth half a million dollars.”

“If you are running an admissions office, I may very well understand why it doesn’t even occur to you that you need anti-fraud techniques similar to those in an investment banking house,” he said. “But guess what? We are in an age where what [admissions officers] do — certainly at most selective institutions — is beginning to be that sort of a perceived commodity.”

A DIFFERENT BRAND OF FRAUD

In each of the six years since Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan took the helm of the admissions office, the Admissions Committee has voted to withdraw some applications because of “concerns about the veracity of the credentials and/or other information in the application.”

It is not uncommon for outside actors — applicants — to provide fraudulent information to the school. To Yale’s knowledge, just three undergraduates over the course of four decades before the admissions scandal —  McDermit, Grammer and Mahraj — made it through the cracks.

But “Varsity Blues” was unlike past cases of application fraud at Yale.

This time, the fraud came from within. In March, federal prosecutors unveiled that an insider — Meredith — had accepted bribes from outsiders to provide false information to the admissions office. This type of insider plot was new.

As acceptance rates continue to plummet and admission to Yale becomes an increasingly scarce commodity, parents and prospective students alike are increasingly willing to carry out more elaborate schemes to gain entry into an institution that they see as a ticket for success.

In the past five years, application numbers at Yale and its peer institutions have skyrocketed. For the class of 2016, for example, Yale received fewer than 30,000 applications. This year, Yale received 36,000. For the first time in recent memory, Yale’s acceptance rate  — for the incoming class of 2023 — dipped below 6 percent.

Associate Vice President for Enrollment Management at DePaul University Jon Boeckenstedt told the News that universities benefit from increased competition to gain admission. He explained that the marking of any given school is based off its admissions rate — how exclusive it is. As a result, universities try to deflate their acceptance rates in an effort to elevate their profile, he said. Boeckenstedt calls this the “admissions industrial complex” — an “increasing escalation in the militarization of the tools and other things we use to make those numbers look good” to improve a university’s ranking.

According to Boeckenstedt, studies show that the deflation of college acceptance rates is a self-perpetuating cycle — the lower an acceptance rate in any given year, the more applications the school will receive in the next cycle.

Still, after Yale received a record number of total applications for the class of 2023 in January, Quinlan told the News that “quality matters much more to the admissions committee than quantity.” Still, he said that the scarcity of spots at Yale can cause people to “lose perspective” and want to “manipulate the process for gain.”

“Visibility, importance, prestige bring consequences,” said Nassirian. “One of those consequences is that you become a target for much more insidious, much more potent potential attacks than you imagine in your wildest nightmares.”

THE LENGTHS THEY’LL GO

William “Rick” Singer — the mastermind behind the “Varsity Blues” scandal — believes there are three ways to get into college.

In conversations with parents recorded by the FBI, Singer said that there is the “front door” — apply and see what happens. Then, there’s the “back door” — apply and benefit from one’s parents’ multimillion donations to a university. And finally, there is the side door — Singer’s special entrance. To access this entrance, ultra-wealthy parents paid Singer to bribe testing administrators and varsity coaches to facilitate cheating on standardized tests and fake sports endorsements to universities’ admissions offices, respectively.

Following news reports of the “Varsity Blues” scandal, many students questioned whether there is an ethical distinction between bribing one’s way into college and receiving an added advantage in the admissions process because one’s parent is a significant donor.

“Technically, the donors aren’t bribing Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, and Yale isn’t breaking any law. But Yale is still sanctioning the unethical. Giving an advantage to children of donors erodes the admissions meritocracy on which our University depends. When social structures that we believe in, like admissions, perform unethical deeds, it undermines those systems’ principles, breaking a kind of social law,” wrote Sammy Landino ’21 in a News opinion piece on March 28.

Late last year, the News reported that some prospective applicants who are children of major donors — which Yale labels “VIP” candidates — receive special treatment and are allowed to visit campus and organize meals with first-year counselors before they even submit an application. No such formalized program exists for non-”VIP” candidates until after they are admitted to the University.

In response to the News’ story, Quinlan said in a statement that all applicants submit the same materials and are “evaluated through the same whole-person review process.”

Daniel Golden — author of “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates” — told the News that there is often a price tag associated with getting students into elite universities.

Although he noted that things may have changed since he wrote his book in 2005, he said that a decade ago, the price tag depended on the caliber of the applicant.

 

“The further the candidate was from admissibility, the bigger the gift [would have to be] to make it a reality,” he said. “You have a system that’s vulnerable to wealth, people will come up with more sophisticated schemes to get what they want.”

Still, even students applying through the “front door” sometimes cheat. According to experts interviewed by the News, most common are small exaggerations on applications.

Julie Zauzmer, author of “Conning Harvard: The True Story of the Con Artist Who Faked His Way Into the Ivy League,” said that based on her research, cheating is often “driven out of pressure that kids feel — especially in some very competitive high school environments — to get in [to college].”

“Cheating is a broad term. There are people who say they spent 20 hours a week on an activity that they actually spent five hours a week on,” she said. “And, maybe say they were the president of the French club when they were actually just a member. That, I think, is very common.”

Experts also said that students often lie on application essays. Nasirian called a student’s application essay “almost a piece of literary fiction.”

“So much of [the essay] is conjured and embellished and not really grounded in any verifiable fact,” he said. “And even if they are verifiable, I’m not sure if anyone ever verifies them.”

HOW YALE SAFEGUARDS

On the day officials announced the findings of the “Varsity Blues” scandal, Yale University President Peter Salovey did not respond with the same nonchalance as administrators in admissions scandals in the past.

Within hours, he sent a community-wide email asserting that the University was “the victim of a crime” and claiming that Yale did ”not believe that any member of the Yale administration or staff other than the charged coach knew about the conspiracy.”

To protect against such conspiracies, the Admissions Committee relies on several safeguards to protect against fraud, according to Quinlan. First, students’ applications have to “verify across dimensions.”

Quinlan explained that in an applicant’s file, the Admissions Committee receives information from the student, two different teachers, a guidance counselor, an alumni interviewer, a third-party standardized testing agency and other people who may write third-party letters of recommendation.

“We are talking about five different perspectives, at minimum, about an applicant by the time we are viewing the application,” said Quinlan. “So you can imagine … that there is a lot of different verification about who the student is.”

While these different sources may talk about different parts of a student’s profile, Quinlan said that “the stories you get, the accomplishments you hear about, the vibes you get — when that all adds up, that’s the type of student that ends up separating themselves in the Admissions Committee.”

If consistency is not apparent, it does not necessarily raise concerns about fraud, but it does make it very difficult for an individual to stand out in a pool of nearly 37,000 applicants, according to Quinlan. When faced with inconsistent information, admissions officers often “pick up the phone” to verify recommenders’ letters, transcripts or any other information they are confused about. Quinlan explained that if the Committee ever has doubts about an applicant’s credentials, they will instruct the responsible admissions officer to try to get an explanation from the applicant’s school, councilor, recommender or coach.

“Just a few weeks ago, there was a student whose high school transcript was trying to represent the community college-dual enrolment courses they were taking and the high school courses they were taking at the same time,” recounted Quinlan. “The committee couldn’t get a 100 percent grasp on the courses the applicant had taken so they told the admissions officer, ‘Call the community college directly, and see if you can get the transcript so they can get better information and figure out exactly what classes this young woman is taking.’”

In addition, Yale will only accept transcripts if they are sent by the school in a sealed envelope, faxed by a school official or submitted via direct transmission. Yale will not accept transcripts sent by students or by coaches.

What is more, Yale relies on “hand-selected, well trained, long-term” interviewers to make sure that an interview “lines up” with everything else in the application.

Still, Yale’s reliance on third-party information might at times do the University a disservice, since some testing companies have had difficulties protecting their tests from fraud.

As recently as last month, SAT tests were cancelled in Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia because advanced copies of the test were allegedly being sold to test takers.  In another incident that occured last August in South Korea, posts on social media suggested that a SAT test was available online before the testing date. In response, the College Board issued a statement that it would cancel the test scores of anyone who they found to be cheating and in some cases, ban individuals from retaking the test.

Kurt Landgraf — president of Washington College in Maryland and former CEO of the Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the SAT — said that there is “increased scrutiny in Asia” when it comes to standardized testing, requiring additional security measures to ensure the validity of test scores.

“Any time you have something that is so life changing, there are always going to be people who go around doing it the honest way,” Landgraf said.

Landgraf said that ETS implemented major security changes in 2011, in part as a reaction to a major cheating scandal in Great Neck, New York. Changes will include mandating test takers to bring a photo ID and mandating proctors to verify them.

Landgraf said ETS also became “far more … thoughtful” before granting “disability waivers” and now uses algorithms to mark major jumps in scores “beyond what would be normal.”

“While ETS has always been very concerned with test security — after all, without test security, ETS has nothing — we found out there had been some lapses … that prompted us to increase our test security procedures significantly,” he said.

Still, in spite of all these precautions, this scandal still transpired.

Quinlan noted that, in light of the most recent scandal, the admissions office is conducting a “bit of a process audit.” In a set of two March emails, Salovey announced several changes to the admissions process for athletes — now, Director of Athletics Vicky Chun will conduct reviews of every coach’s roster of recruits before these rosters are sent to the admissions office. Salovey emphasized that situations in which a recruited athlete “fails to make a team will receive close scrutiny.”

Alongside Quinlan, Chun will “implement a code of conduct for athletic recruitment,” and the two will implement “more robust training for all coaches to ensure they understand” Yale’s recruitment policies, according to the email.

Quinlan told the News that even more changes are forthcoming, although he declined to comment on what those changes were specifically, saying that discussion would be “premature.”

“You don’t go through something like this without thinking of other safeguards that could be added,” he said.

Still, he stressed that he “feel[s] deeply” that Yale will continue to rely on standardized testing agencies, schools, counselors and students to “put an honest foot forward in this process.”

“The events of the last few months doesn’t necessarily shake my confidence in most of the work being done out there to put the best foot forward,” he said. “I think we have to acknowledge and create better safeguards, but I trust in some of these important partners.”

CAN WE DO BETTER?

 

In 2008, in conjunction with the Mahraj case, Nassirian — then-associate executive director at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers — said that “absolutely ingenious credential fraud is hitting us like a tidal wave” and that higher education was unprepared for “the triple whammy of globalization, the Internet and higher education becoming big business.”

Against these forces, some college admissions experts question whether elite schools like Yale can do anything at all to prevent fraudulent admissions. Still, they told the News that there are ways to help decrease its prevalence.

Zauzmer suggested iThenticate for admissions, a service provided by plagiarism-detection provider TurnItIn, to help detect forged application essays. A spokesperson for TurnItin told the News that since being released in 2005, their service for college admissions has spread to 65 percent of colleges and universities in the United States.

“Without [our service], admissions officers are relying on gut instincts and manual efforts, such as running an essay through a search engine, to check each essay for potential plagiarism. Checking for plagiarism in this way is not only time-consuming for an office with tens of thousands of applications and hard and fast deadlines, but also only addresses search engine plagiarism,” said the spokesperson.

According to the spokesperson, institutions that use iThenticate for admissions find, on average, that 5 percent of applicants have potentially plagiarized their essays.

While Quinlan said they have considered using it in the past, Yale does not use iThenticate. He noted that one of the challenges in implementing it would be that Yale uses three different platforms — Common App, Questbridge and Coalition Application — to accept applications.

On the topic of standardized testing, one answer to prevent fraud is to make testing optional all-together, according to Robert Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest — a long-standing critic of the College Board.

“We have never claimed that test-optional admissions is a magic bullet that solves manipulation of college admissions process or cheating or diversity issues. It’s one tool that schools use,” he said.

Yale is not test-optional and Quinlan reaffirmed the Office’s commitment to rely on the work of the ACT and SAT to identify and respond to instances of cheating.

“Both organizations share information with Yale and other colleges when they uncover instances cheating — either by individuals or through coordinated efforts by larger groups,” he said. “Although these instances are unfortunate, they are relatively rare among the millions of test-takers worldwide.”

Some experts, however, argue that fundamental changes are needed in order to improve the system.

Boeckenstedt argues for a “clearing house” system which would give better information to students and colleges about chances of admission rates and better connect students to colleges that want them. Others, like Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Natasha Warikoo, have argued for a lottery system, where students who hit a certain academic threshold would be randomly sorted into different schools.

Still, many experts say that there may not be a “silver bullet” to “fix” the problem of fraud. The key is that admissions offices are aware that it exists and try their hardest to address it.

“Other than creating a system that is so heavily laden with bureaucracy and compliance, which would bring its own problems, I don’t think you can leverage against every potential weak spot in any system,” said Boeckenstedt. “So as long as there’s one coach, for instance, who’s willing to sell a spot on his team for $100,000 to an athlete who is not an athlete, you’re going to have problems and issues.”

When the News asked Nassirian whether the American higher education system is better equipped to handle the effects of globalization, the internet and the corporatization of the admissions process now than it was a decade earlier in 2008, his answer was simple.

“No … I think in many ways things have gotten worse,” he added.

That “genteel” mindset of admissions offices half a century ago has not changed, said Nassirian.

Perhaps this summer, as Quinlan and Chun are set to announce more changes to admissions procedures, it might.

 

Credits

By Skakel McCooey
Photos by Madelyn Kumar

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UP CLOSE:
Defeating doubt — the path to the pros

By Cristofer Zillo
Photos courtesy of Kristina Kim, Judy Holland, Steve Musco, Joe Murphy and Marisa Peryer
Published on April 24, 2019

At a height of 198 feet, Payne Whitney Gym towers over campus. But despite its prominent spot in Yale University’s skyline, the building — which bears more resemblance to a cathedral than an athletics complex — blends in with the rest of Yale’s academic buildings.

Payne Whitney is a symbol of Yale Athletic’s lack of visibility at large. Yale, of course, is known for its academic prowess, but many forget — even current students — that it boasts 35 varsity sports teams and competes in Division I with schools such as Ohio State, Duke, Florida and other universities that boast top-tier athletic programs.

Still, through sheer will and determination, each year, several current and former Yale student-athletes participate in professional sports as players, owners, or general managers, according to Director of Athletics Vicky Chun.

“At Yale it is all about excellence and leadership in all areas of life and athletics is no different … history has shown you can even be the President of the United States,” Chun said.

In interviews with the News, Yale athletes and coaches said that the sports world often underestimates the Ivy League. In response, the conference has worked in recent years to increase its exposure and elevate the talents of its players to a national platform. In 2018, the conference took a monumental step forward when it signed a long-term deal with ESPN that guaranteed 1,100 conference events would be available on its new subscription-based streaming service ESPN+. In addition, the deal assured that 24 regular-season and post-season events would air on ESPN’s television stations.

Though this deal may not convince students to flock to the Yale Bowl or John J. Lee Amphitheater, professional sports leagues across the country are starting to take notice of what the Ancient Eight has to offer.

“It’s just an opportunity, someone to believe in you to the point where you can be successful,” Yale men’s basketball head coach James Jones said. “There are a lot of kids that just don’t have that chance, but I believe the leagues’ eyes are starting to be opened up, and they’re seeing a bit more broader.”

But as TD Ierlan ’20, Carlin Hudson ’18, and Miye Oni ’20 show, the distance between the Ivy League and the world of professional sports may be narrowing.

THE TRANSFER

As confetti floated down from the upper part of Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., the men’s lacrosse team — accompanied by University President Peter Salovey and Yale College Dean Marvin Chun — basked in the glory of the 2018 national championship trophy — their first ever NCAA title.

With the class of 2018 asserting itself as the winningest class in school history — collecting an impressive 51 wins altogether — lacrosse fans wondered how the team would fair in 2019. Meanwhile, the team’s seniors were wondering what to do with their lives.

Before the conclusion of the 2018 regular season, six graduating seniors — attacker and 2018 Tewaaraton winner Ben Reeves, midfielders Jason Alessi, Tyler Warner, faceoff specialist Conor Mackie and defenders Christopher Keating and Jerry O’Connor — were drafted to the Major League Lacrosse, one of the two professional lacrosse leagues in the United States.

But despite the competitiveness of Yale’s men’s lacrosse team, many players who pass through Yale do not consider playing professionally as an option. With a base MLL salary ranging from $10,000 to $25,000 per year, MLL athletes often possess a second job while they pursue a professional lacrosse career.

“A lot of the guys don’t necessarily want to do that,” head coach Andy Shay said. “They want a good job or maybe grad school, so the Yale guys don’t exactly lineup for that league … Some of the best players in the pro league are former Ivy League players. Our guys don’t go to Yale to be a lacrosse player. Despite the fact that we’re a good college program, it’s not really what these guys want to do. They want to go to med school; they want to go to Wall Street or they want to go to law school.”

Still, Yale’s newest faceoff specialist, star transfer Ierlan, may be the one to break that mold.

A New York native, Ierlan played for his high school’s football, wrestling and lacrosse teams. His successes on the wrestling mat — he broke a Victor record after he totaled 161 wins throughout his career — gave him the skill set necessary to become one of the top faceoff recruits. Although Ivy League schools appeared on his recruiting radar, he initially did not give strong consideration to their programs. As a high school junior, he committed to play lacrosse for head coach Scott Marr at Albany.

In his rookie campaign with the Great Danes, he led the team to a quarterfinal appearance in the NCAA tournament and boasted the nation’s second-best faceoff percentage — just shy of Denver’s Trevor Baptiste, who had been widely considered the country’s most unstoppable force at the faceoff X.

In his second year of collegiate play, Ierlan etched his name into lacrosse history, setting Division I records in faceoff percentage, faceoff wins and ground balls — with 0.791, 359 and 254, respectively. His efforts carried the Great Danes to the semifinals of the 2018 national championship tournament. But Albany ultimately fell short 20–11 against Yale.

During his sophomore season Ierlan decided that he wanted to transfer to a school that would provide higher academic rigor. After Albany granted his release from the university on June 7, he was free to join any lacrosse program in the country. Though initially convinced he would join his brother Chayse at Cornell where he plays goalie, Ierlan ultimately decided to play for the Blue and White after much coaxing from Reeves, Shay and midfielder John Daniggelis ’19.

Now a political science major in Pierson College, the Victor, N.Y., native has his sights set on the finance world. But his career intentions directly after college have nothing to do with Wall Street.

“I want to play lacrosse as long as possible,” Ierlan said. “Professional lacrosse is definitely something I want to do. I didn’t exactly come to Yale just so I can play lacrosse after school, so I came here to set up myself for the next 40 years of my life instead of four years of lacrosse… If a job or my education or something comes first, then it comes first… It’s got to work with my work schedule after college, but I definitely look forward to playing professional lacrosse.”

THE WALK-ON

When she set foot on campus as a first year in 2014, Carlin Hudson ’18 was content with the fact that her soccer-playing career would be over upon graduation.

Four years after walking on to the women’s soccer team, Hudson heard her name called in the fourth round of the 2018 National Women’s Soccer League’s College Draft. She was selected by the North Carolina Courage — marking the first time a Yale women’s soccer player was ever drafted by a professional team.

As a walk-on, Hudson didn’t even consider playing professionally until her senior year. Even then, she thought that overseas leagues would suit her better, since she didn’t think she possessed the talent to play in the United States. Her first goal, she told the News, was to get playing time.

Heralded as a hard-nosed defender, Hudson asserted herself as the Bulldogs’ leader and one of the best defenders in the Ancient Eight. Her physical play allowed her to shut down Harvard’s Margaret “Midge” Purce — a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year winner — and force a shutout in one of her best performances at Yale. But the shift from the Ivy League to the pros was tougher than Hudson expected.

“The change between Yale and the level, when I went into preseason, was definitely a really big shock,” Hudson said. “While I feel, like I belong here, and anyone with the talent necessary will be able to raise their level to match whatever level they’re at, I think that I had a bigger jump than most coming from the Ivy League.”

Now, as a member of the Washington Spirit, Hudson plays against — and alongside — her long-time athletic heroes and members of the US national team. In addition to fighting for playing time, she said she continues to fight against the preconceived notions that hold Ivy League professional–hopefuls back.

The Ivy League is unique in the rules it enforces regarding when preseasons can begin and how many hours each team can practice during the week. The later start time for the Fall preseason is especially helpful for most athletes in the conference, as it allows them to have internships and working-opportunities in the summer to bolster their resumes in efforts to find ideal jobs after their time at Yale. But these rules can hinder athletes who want to play professionally.

“Because the Ivy League makes those rules to prioritize academics over athletics, I think that a lot of people believe that, right or wrong, athletes that play in the league prioritize academics over athletics,” Hudson said. “They might have a viewpoint that says that maybe they are not as serious as someone coming from a school that is a big athletic school.”

THE UNDERDOG

It is not clear when basketball fans around the country began to realize the talent and cohesiveness of the 2018–2019 Yale men’s basketball team.

Was it after the Bulldogs opened the season with an impressive win against Cal Berkeley roughly 8,000 miles from home at the Baoshan Sports Center in Shanghai? Could it be when they staged a come-from-behind upset of Miami at the American Airlines Arena during their grueling nonconference schedule? Maybe it was when they downed rival Harvard in the finals of the tournament to clinch an NCAA tournament berth or after their four-point loss to the SEC champion LSU Tigers in the first round of March Madness.

Or did they even realize how good the team was at all?

“Everyone thinks we’re going to be soft or not as talented or not as athletic,” star guard Miye Oni ’20 said. “It’s definitely a stigma, which is clearly not true, but it is what it is. You really have to break the stigma and fight it with just showing people that you’re better than what they think.”

And Oni did just that.

Coaches and fans alike have underestimated the 6-foot-6-inch, 210-pound guard ever since he set foot on a basketball court. Originally undersized, Oni longed to play professional basketball despite only receiving Division III offers at the conclusion of his high school career in California.

Then, Jones and Yale called, interested in bringing him in to play for the Elis. But it was past the admissions deadline for that cycle, so Oni was forced to play an extra year of high school ball at Suffield Academy in Connecticut where he was named the NEPSAC Class A Player of the Year.

Steadily improving each year at Yale, Oni raised his initial points-per-game average from 12.9 to 17.1 and evolved from a reliable starter to the 2018–2019 Ivy League Player of the Year. Even before earning the title of the Ancient Eight’s top player, he consistently drew the attention of numerous NBA scouts including individuals affiliated with the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks.

“Sometimes I’m practicing and I’m like ‘oh wow,’” Oni said after defeating Harvard in the Ivy League tournament final. “You’re going through a scout and I’m the top of the other team’s scout and I’m like ‘how did I even get here?’ Literally four years ago I was going to play Division III. Sometimes I reflect, but it’s just a testament to the coaches here believing in me.”

The attention was justified — the California native possesses everything a scout would look for: length, athleticism, leadership, playmaking ability, shot-creating ability, competitiveness and a drive to play defense. Oni tore up the league with ferocious one-handed slams, impressive dimes and tremendous step-back threes.

But when he — like many other basketball players — fell victim to a cold-shooting performance against the Bayou Bengals in the first round of the NCAA tournament, many wondered if he would in fact declare for the NBA draft or return to Yale for his senior year.

On March 29, Oni told ESPN that he had signed with Harrison Gaines of SLASH Sports — the same agent who represents NBA player Lonzo Ball — and that he would be throwing his name into the mix. If selected, he would become the first Ancient Eight player drafted by an NBA team since the Minnesota Timberwolves selected Penn’s Jerome Allen as the 49th pick in 1995.

In preparation for the draft, Oni requested an evaluation from the NBA Undergraduate Advisory Committee.

Since 2016, college basketball players who declare have been able to remove themselves from the draft and maintain eligibility if they withdraw within 10 days after the invite-only NBA combine in May. Oni has taken measures not only to preserve his eligibility to return to school but also to ensure the completion of his degree regardless of whether he is drafted. Additionally, new NCAA policies allow basketball players who request an evaluation from the NBA Undergraduate Advisory Committee and attend the combine to return to school if they are not selected. They must notify their institution’s athletics director by 5 p.m. the Monday following the draft — which will take place on June 20 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

Former Yale player Makai Mason ’18 also appears on a few mock draft boards this year. The guard transferred to Baylor at the end of his senior season to utilize his remaining year of eligibility due to a season-ending injury he suffered during his time in New Haven. As a Bear, Mason averaged 14.9 points, 2.5 rebounds and 3.4 assists per contest. He even recorded a 40-point explosion against Texas Christian University on Feb. 2.

Both Mason and Oni’s triumphs on the court are testaments to the prowess of Jones and other Ivy League coaches, and represent a shift in talent distribution across all of the Division I conferences. In particular, the story of former Harvard guard Jeremy Lin cannot be ignored. Not only did he impressively break out as a member of the New York Knicks in 2012, but also as the only active Ivy League player in the NBA. After almost a decade the league, Lin has paved the way for more Ancient Eight talent to break through into the professional spotlight.

“Our league has gained a lot of attention over the last 10 to 12 years,” Harvard head coach Tommy Amaker said after winning at Yale this season. “The kinds of players that have been coming into our conference, I think the Jeremy Lin factor is real. It is a piece to the puzzle of our conference as a whole, and certainly we anticipate for people to take notice of our league around the country in different ways, but certainly for scouting for the NBA … you see some of the talented players coming into our league and performing in our league at a high level.”

THE MESSAGE

The stories of Ierlan, Hudson and Oni are merely three of the many epics to emerge from Yale athletics and the Ivy League as a whole. 

Although it is impossible to predict whether or not these efforts will stop the sports world from underestimating the Ivy League, the conference’s increased visibility and the impressive play of its athletes could positively affect its perception in the future.

“[Professional sports leagues] have more of a vision on [the Ivy League], and I think that down the road here many more kids are going to get opportunities,” Jones said. “People are starting to understand that this league is really good.”

UP CLOSE:
“Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art”

By Rianna Turner
Photos courtesy of Dawn Kim, YUAG and Daniel Zhao
Published on April 23, 2019

At the outset of spring, Book Trader Cafe’s expansive, floor-length windows allow the afternoon sun to slice across the room. The light is harsh, straining the eyesight of those who occupy the too-small tables. Katherine McCleary ’18 sits at the corner of two tables pushed together — a necessary feat for a conversation amongst four people. With her back facing west, she is rendered a silhouette.

“In the fall of 2015, as all stories start,” McCleary, who is Little Shell Chippewa-Cree, said, “there were a lot of discussions about representations of race and ethnicity on campus.”

She shared knowing glances and a giggle with the other two students around the table — Leah Shrestinian ’18 and Joseph Zordan ’19, who is Bad River Ojibwe. McCleary and Shrestinian have acquired their degrees and Zordan is finishing his last semester, but all three have remained on campus in order to finish one final project at Yale: curating the largest exhibit of indigenous North American art to ever go on view at the Yale University Art Gallery, or YUAG. The exhibit, which was recently titled “Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art” will be on view at the YUAG from November 1, 2019 to June 21, 2020.

The process behind this exhibit has taken years — years of activist efforts from on-campus Native American students and professors, years of grappling with institutional barriers and pushback, years of dedicated work by the student curators and centuries of history to contend with.

The student curators had three distinct goals, which foster conversations that will fundamentally alter the ways in which Yale institutions interact with and exhibit indigenous art.

“GOAL ONE: ADDRESS THE MISREPRESENTATION AND UNDERREPRESENTATION OF INDIGENOUS ART AT YALE”

In the fall of 2015, McCleary, Shrestinian and Zordan, two sophomores and a first year, respectively, participated in one of the largest waves of on-campus activism Yale had ever witnessed. Next Yale — a coalition of Yale students of color and their allies — formed in 2015 in response to various controversies: the alleged exclusion of black women from a Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity party, a letter from a Yale administrator concerning cultural appropriation and the debate surrounding the renaming of what is now Grace Hopper College.

In early November of that year, Next Yale presented a variety of demands to the Yale administration. The list included issues the University is still contending with today — including the first demand on Next Yale’s list: the promotion of the Program of Ethnicity, Race and Migration into a comprehensive department. In section 4b, Next Yale requested that the University acknowledge it was founded on Quinnipiac land by installing a monument designed by a Native artist.

Following the report, some of the requests — like the resignation of Nicholas and Erika Christakis from their master and associate master positions in Silliman College — were met, while some — like the art installation — were not. Ned Blackhawk, a member of the Te-Moak of Western Shoshone and a professor of history and American studies, noted that “these initiatives were interrelated by the same social pressures and processes that brought heightened attention to the Peabody, to the YUAG, to the name of the colleges.” He added that students’ heightened scrutiny of campus issues necessitated change.

“Ned Blackhawk was the one Native tenured professor at Yale, and other students in the past have been talking to these institutions for a really long time,” Shrestinian said. “2015 made the institutions realize that they had to pay attention, but the activism surrounding misrepresentation of Native people on campus has been ongoing.”

The only demands in Next Yale’s list that specifically concerned Native students were the requests for a monument installation and the promotion of Native American studies to program status under an ethnicity, race and migration department. Yet the misrepresentation of indigenous people extended to other areas of campus, primarily in the University’s galleries and cultural institutions.

“Native students feel that we are misrepresented in the Gallery and the Peabody,” McCleary said. “Because there has been a lack of commitment to Native art on campus, a lot of objects have been attributed to the incorrect nation and catalogued in ways that made them difficult to research.”

In response to the activist environment students fostered on campus, the YUAG and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History initiated the Native American Art Initiative Summer Internship in 2016 — a paid internship that involved spending time at the YUAG, the Peabody, the Denver Art Museum in Colorado and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Wyoming. The internship required students to conduct research regarding each institution’s collections management policies, education practices and interpretations of those collections. The internship also included compiling a report of recommendations for best practices in engaging with Native art.

McCleary and Shrestinian were the two students chosen for the internship. The two looked through the Native art that each institution housed, noting the gaps in and the representation of the collections. At the end of the summer, they authored recommendations for the best practices of both the YUAG and the Peabody. Zordan spent the summer of 2018 participating in a similar internship for which he spent time at both Yale Center for British Art and the National Museum of the American Indian in order to construct a report for the former institution.

Yet this work did not ensure that representation of indigenous people in those institutions would improve. In the fall of 2016, a series of football programs commemorating the 100th Yale-Dartmouth football game printed by Yale Athletics included historical programs that depicted racist images of indigenous people. Later that semester, the YUAG commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Peabody with an exhibit entitled “Yosemite: Exploring the Incomparable Valley.” An article posted in online arts magazine Hyperallergic described the exhibit as “rather discreet with historical events,” with wall texts referring “almost casually to the annihilation of Native Americans, unwilling to let this distract viewers from the exhibit’s noble message” of Manifest Destiny.

The Association of Native Americans at Yale released statements responding to both events. Thomas Beckett, who was the director of athletics during the time of the controversy, released a statement in a schoolwide email noting that the images were offensive and that his department would “continue to work with any and all members of the Yale community to address this topic in any way possible.” Soon after, the directors of both the YUAG and the Peabody reached out to the Association of Native Americans and the groups proceeded with discussions that allowed staff to acquire a better understanding of how Native students were affected by the harmful depictions.

Following these discussions, the YUAG’s chief curator, Laurence Kanter, approached McCleary about the possibility of curating an exhibit. McCleary chose Shrestinian and Zordan to join her in the curatorial process and their work began.

Marie Watt, Seneca Nation, First Teachers Balance the Universe Part I: Things That Fly (Predator) and First Teachers Balance the Universe Part II: Things That Fly (Prey), 2015. Reclaimed wool blankets, embroidery floss, and thread. Yale University Art Gallery, Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

“GOAL TWO: SHOW THAT NATIVE ART IS ART, NOT ARTIFACT”

Curating the largest exhibit of Native North American art that the YUAG has ever presented required pulling objects from three Yale institutions — the YUAG, the Peabody and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

“There is not very much Native art in the Art Gallery — most indigenous art on campus is in [Peabody Museum of Natural History] collections, which reinforces ideas and misconceptions about indigenous people as being part of the past,” Shrestinian said. “So, I think the move of indigenous art from the natural history museum to an art museum is one of our major goals.”

The group acquainted themselves with the collections at all three institutions, spending most of their time at the Peabody. The curators noted that Peabody staff members were always willing to assist, but the sheer amount of objects in its collections required months of research. Zordan described this process as sorting through wooden drawers and finding what intrigued them. The tediousness is a function of the way collections in natural history museums are often structured.

According to George Miles, the curator of the Beinecke’s Collection of Western Americana, “libraries anticipate that collections will be accessed” and often have comprehensive catalogues of their holdings, as well as staff members like himself who are deeply acquainted with a specific sect of the library’s collections. Therefore, choosing items from the Beinecke primarily involved discussions with Miles about the various prints, ledgers and photographs in the collection. Miles, the Beinecke curator who worked most closely with the students, added that he is “excited to see Yale’s collections talking to each other.”

“Beinecke’s exhibit spaces couldn’t do this material justice,” Miles said. “To treat this material as creative expression, as art, is exciting.”

After selecting about 400 objects and uploading the images into a Google Drive, the group embarked on an elimination process.

“We decided not to use a lot of objects based on concerns about where they came from, how they were obtained and not having enough information about that object to make an informed curatorial choice,” Shrestinian said. “But, we have been able to give find the names of the artists who made many of the objects and find out what nations they came from by reaching out to different scholars and community members.”

The curatorial process not only involved bringing together three separate Yale institutions, but also required a disparate, wide-reaching support system of various professors and mentors. In order to gain some knowledge in Native art history, McCleary and Zordan took an undergraduate survey course instructed by visiting professor Ruth Phillips in the department of the history of art in 2017. In order to spend more time with the project, the student curators enrolled in independent study courses with art history professor Edward S. Cooke Jr. and anthropology faculty member Kelly Fayard, who is also dean of the Native American Cultural Center.

Phillips said her course focused on “historic art made in traditional genres and media” through the 20th century. These traditions are often referred to in scholarship as “post-contact” periods of production, though Phillips noted that the divisions between “pre-contact” and “post-contact” periods are misleading functions of the structure of literature addressing Native art.

“The challenge is partly to eliminate those barriers and embrace continuities,” Phillips said. “When you’re teaching, you have to take into account the ways that our knowledge and museum practices have developed and responded to those kind of divisions. It’s a good moment to be teaching, because there has been a real post-colonial critique of modern collecting processes.”

The curators incorporated these post-colonial critiques and their knowledge of history and museum practices into their independent studies with Cooke and Fayard. In these directed reading courses, the curators adopted the task of synthesizing their knowledge into a cohesive exhibit.

Cooke noted that he was impressed with the “thoroughness and deliberateness” with which the students approached their task.

“When you’re doing an exhibition, oftentimes you have ideas and then you have objects — the two don’t always align with one another,” Cooke said. “What I believed would be a useful exercise that semester was to really get them thinking. You test ideas out on objects. Sometimes the objects will bear the weight, sometimes they’ll take it in a different direction and you have to recalibrate — it’s a process I often refer to as going from the outside, inside and back out again. Good exhibitions really come from that kind of interaction.”

The curators also engaged in extracurricular trips to help inform their decisions. In the fall of 2017, the curators travelled to Montreal and Ottawa in order to tour the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of History, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and a First Nations Arts exhibition at the Carleton University Art Museum. The students — accompanied by Phillips, Blackhawk and five other students in the Yale Group for the Study of Native America, an interdisciplinary working group interested in topics relating to Native America — took the trip as an opportunity to study contemporary curatorial practices in Canadian museums, which are known for engaging more thoroughly with indigenous communities than museums in the United States.

Cooke noted that this trip was a “crystallizing moment” for the curators.

“They came back with this idea of willingness and a confidence to just talk about Native art at Yale,” Cooke said. “Just the simplicity of this — the story is not simple, but the simplicity of the organizing principle allowed them to delve further into it.”

In order to have fruitful conversations about Native art at Yale, the curators felt it was crucial to engage with the communities of Native people on campus. The curators established an all-Native student advisory committee that they consulted throughout the process.

Richard Hunt (Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw), Sea Monster Mask, 1999. Wood, plastic, textile, and paint. Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, inv. no. YPM ANT.256928. Photo: Div. of Anthropology, Yale Peabody Museum, 2009

According to Anna Smist ’21, who is Sac & Fox and Seminole and a member of the student advisory committee, all of its members share the goal of addressing misrepresentation and the question of what constitutes fine art.

The committee has engaged in conversations about the specific language that should be used in the exhibit’s title and captions, helped make decisions about what objects should be included and is currently considering how to keep the exhibit’s legacy alive on campus after the curators leave Yale. In part, the committee has served as a way for first- and second-year students to heighten their involvement in on-campus efforts to address misrepresentation of Native people.

“The advisory group, and this entire project, comes from not wanting to depict Native groups as a monolith,” Smist said. “People tend to look at them as static peoples — but all of us are very different. … Every member of the student advisory group is Native, but we don’t all look the same, and neither do our tribes or the art that comes from our tribes. I think this project provides the diversity and appropriate representation that all of us need to feel in order to feel connected to this place.”

“GOAL THREE: EXAMINE YALE’S ROLE IN THE SETTLER-COLONIAL PROJECT”

The attitudinal shift influencing how Yale institutions exhibit Native art has also taken place across indigenous art scholarship. According to Phillips, museums in both the American West and Canada have been engaging with Native art for a while, but the “context in which the students are working is a very active one at this moment, specifically in the eastern part of the United States.”

When Phillips arrived as a visiting professor at Yale, discussions surrounding indigenous art were prominent in the museum world. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston put up an exhibit of Native art in April 2018 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art followed suit in October 2018. At the time, Blackhawk, who also brought 30 students to the opening of the Met’s exhibition, served on an advisory committee at the museum and authored an article for the exhibition catalog called “The Radical Potential of Indigenous Art History.”

Blackhawk noted that today, many American museums are beginning to realize that they house vast collections of Native art but lack the professional specialists to manage them appropriately.

“Many of these academic institutions pride themselves on providing — they pridefully provide — what they consider to be very robust, humanistic understandings of the development of American history and culture,” Blackhawk said. “But those visions of what constitutes American art and culture have often ignored non-Europeans. In the last couple of decades, activists and individuals have sought a more capacious understanding of art history and in those understandings, community-based, vernacular or everyday items can be seen as representative of American experience, as well.”

The shifts occurring in academic and cultural institutions have been tangible, according to active scholars in the field. Nadia Jackinsky — an indigenous art scholar and employee at The CIRI foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to maintain pride in culture and heritage among Alaska Natives through education — said that as a graduate student, museums would not allow her to access Native objects in their collections.

“I think there’s a lot of interest in trying to figure out what it means to be doing art history from an indigenous perspective,” Jackinsky said. “It’s starting to change the way people teach art history classes, as well, because there’s this understanding that you can’t just learn about history from reading books. You can’t just learn about indigenous art history by looking at objects — it involves deeper discussions with communities, understanding the holistic aspects of art and not just the formal qualities.”

Curating from a perspective that respects indigenous people involves incorporating those communities into curatorial decisions and establishing community trust. In addition to reaching out to local Native communities, the curators integrated the community into their decision-making process by hosting public discussions at the YUAG.

The goal of the first discussion, which took place Sept. 27, 2018, was to introduce the exhibit and its themes to the public. The discussion provided an avenue for members of the community to learn about art curation and the importance of the curators’ goals. The second discussion, which occurred Feb. 21, 2019, was a panel discussion with Montreal-based curator and critic Lindsay Nixon. With Nixon, the group focused on topics at the forefront of contemporary indigenous art curation, including gender, sexuality and kinship.

The curators said they are excited to create a space in the gallery for programming that exposes the subjectivity of curation. They stand by the notions that no single authoritative voice can dictate how to interact with objects and that curatorial decisions are informed by the specific experiences and voices of those involved.

The exhibit will be both communal and individual, thematically broad and specific. It contends with histories and possible futures while pushing back against chronological narratives. According to the curators, an important element of this dialogue between the modern and the historical is an attention to Yale’s role in settler-colonialism — a type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of indigenous populations with a settler society that develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty. Many natural history museums in the United States built their collections during the late 19th-century, a period of extreme duress for indigenous people in the country. This period included forced relocations, reservations, boarding schools and intense assimilation. Anthropologists of the time perpetuated the idea that indigenous people were disappearing to justify seizing as many cultural objects as possible.

While working with the Peabody, the curators helped initiate discussions about how to address these histories. In the report they presented to the museum following their summer internship, McCleary and Shrestinian suggested that the Peabody renovate the Connecticut Native Americans Exhibition in collaboration with local Native communities, among other initiatives. According to David Heiser, the director of student programs at the Peabody, the museum is planning to reinstall the exhibition during the full Peabody renovation scheduled for June 2020.

“We are actively thinking about what it means to be an institution stewarding such objects, what our responsibilities are and how we best share our collections with our visitors and with others,” said David Skelly, the director of the Peabody. “We are well aware that this is an ongoing project for institutions like ours.”

Skelly added that though the Peabody is not an art museum, it does identify as a “museum of culture.”

“We have exhibitions on cultures of the past and also of the present,” Skelly said. “The ways that we can display objects and develop narratives differ in some important ways from an art museum. Neither is better than the other. They are just different missions.”

In response, the curators noted that the exhibit is intended to incite further thought among members of the Yale community in regard to these topics.

“We understand that the Peabody considers itself to be a museum of culture,” Shrestinian said. “One of the questions we hope our exhibition will prompt the Yale community to think about is which cultures? Which cultures’ historical and contemporary arts are displayed in natural history museums instead of art museums? And what are the implications of that?”

THE FUTURE OF NATIVE ART AT YALE

The end of this semester also marks the end of the curators’ time at Yale. Although they plan to return to campus for the exhibition, the group will no longer live in New Haven. Yet this process will not be over once the exhibit goes on view. The curators have initiated conversations with the potential to enable projects like theirs for many years to come. One way to ensure the longevity of the curators’ initiatives is to implement institutional structures such as an advisory council.

“Like a lot of our work, we were sort of building the infrastructure for there to be an exhibition of Native art, while also making the exhibit,” Shrestinian said. “So, ideally, an advisory council would be in place before someone tried to curate an exhibit, because it would streamline the process, but also because it’s best practice to curate with indigenous people at all levels of planning an exhibition or installation. We did that in a lot of informal ways, but there weren’t the formal resources in place when we started the project.”

Implementing temporary advisory councils to assist with ethical curatorial practices has become common practice in recent years. Scholars like Jackinsky, Phillips and Blackhawk have all served on temporary advisory councils in museums and universities across the country. The council for Yale’s Native art exhibit is funded for two years via a Mellon grant and is scheduled to convene at the University on April 24 and 25 — with the second day entirely devoted to discussions regarding curatorial practices; the staffing of scholars devoted to indigenous art and history; and the structure of a potential permanent advising body.

The all-Native council is comprised of 11 advisers from across the country. Some of the them include Brian Vallo, governor of Pueblo of Acoma; Greg Hill, the senior curator of indigenous art at the National Gallery of Canada; and Jamie Powell, the associate curator of Native American art at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth University. According to Smist, many Native students are hoping that the council’s discussions will result in the appointment of a Native art curator at Yale.

The advisory council was organized by Phillips and Kaitlin McCormick, the current Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Native American art and curation.

“At the end of day 2, we’re looking to gain advice from them on what direction to take the advisory council as a more permanent body,” McCormick said. “This meeting is an introduction to this process — we’re hoping to get advice on how to form a more permanent group of people, what that might look like and how the consultation process will go once we have a permanent group of advisers.”

The committee also plans to discuss the feasibility of implementing a permanent council that could advise multiple institutions across campus.

For future students, the presence of professionals who focus on indigenous art history and curation will provide the support required to embark on further projects. According to the professors who worked with the curators, McCleary, Shrestinian and Zordan accomplished most of the project on their own. Their remarkable focus drove this project, but an ideal future would include more assistance from University faculty and museum staff.

“That’s part of the reason why we think this exhibition is so important,” McCleary said. “We believe that there should be a permanent department devoted to indigenous North American art at the gallery and that indigenous art should be presented in a gallery space and not in a natural history space. That department should have a full-time, paid staff working on this — not three undergraduates.”

UP CLOSE:
Playing the last hand

By Carly Wanna
Photos by Logan Howard
Graphics by Christie Yu
Published on April 18, 2019

On the evening of April 6, Yale alumni came from far and wide to celebrate the Asian American Students Alliance’s 50th anniversary.

But just moments into University President Peter Salovey’s opening remarks, a mass of 80 students walked silently into the room carrying a banner that read “Ethnic Studies is our studies.” Alumni rose from their chairs and revealed their own signs that read “We stand with ethnic studies.” Members of the audience began to pepper Salovey with questions: Why had the demands surrounding the Ethnicity, Race and Migration program not already been met? When would the University “solve the problem[s]” facing ethnic studies?

To some recent alumni in the room, the event struck similarities with one that had occurred just four years ago, when members of Next Yale — a group formed in the wake of a series of racial controversies in the 2015–2016 academic school year — found themselves face to face with Salovey. The group had formulated a list of demands in November of that year and submitted them to the president. The first on the list — the “immediate promotion of the Ethnicity, Race and Migration program to departmental status.”

In response, Salovey finally gave the ER&M program the power to recruit scholars for four faculty slots especially designated for ethnic studies.

Since its inception as an undergraduate major in 1997, ER&M has become one of the fastest growing programs. But despite its popularity among undergraduates, the administration has frequently restricted the interdisciplinary program’s ability to hire, tenure and recruit faculty members. Four years ago, eight years ago, 11 years ago, 17 years ago and 22 years ago, faculty members’ predecessors as well as the campus’s students faced battle after battle. And finally, the professors — perched behind countless calls for more — dealt their last card.

On March 29, 13 professors — including four endowed chairs, two heads of residential colleges and four current department or program chairs — informed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Tamar Gendler of their “intention to withdraw their labor” from the ER&M program.

“If the University decides it does not want to take that action, the future of the program would be in doubt,” associate professor of American studies Daniel HoSang, one of the 13 faculty members, told the News. “If the University does not take action, the program will die off.”

A MYSTERIOUS PROCESS

In the 1990s, a group of students designed a syllabus for an advanced Asian American studies course and asked American studies and English professor Michael Denning — who knew very little about the field at the time — to teach the seminar.

“This was one of the groups of Yale students who was more interested in the shape of their education than most Yale students that I had encountered,” Denning recalled.

He said that from the outset, undergraduates like these had been a driving force in developing Yale’s ER&M program.

According to Denning, efforts to develop an ethnic studies curriculum came to fruition in the 1990s. Yale College decided on six classes — two in Mexican American studies, two in Asian American studies and two in Puerto Rican studies — to be taught under the umbrella of the American Studies Program and set out to recruit part-time faculty members to teach the ethnic studies courses.

Denning said the scholars hired to teach the courses were often paid little, and he “felt embarrassed” asking faculty members from established universities in cities like New York to take the position. As interest grew, ethnic studies looked to hire more professors in the field, which remained the program’s primary objective from 1992 until 1997.

The University moved toward the next step of establishing more formalized professorships, but Denning and his colleagues were cognizant that recruiting and retaining faculty members would be difficult. Since ethnic studies did not yet have a major or a program formally associated with it, the discipline relied on appointments from neighboring fields — ranging from history to religious studies — to fill positions.

By 1997, ethnic studies had momentum. Scholars in the field had successfully attained University funding to bring in more faculty members through the years, and students began to petition for a major. Once approved, the University offered ER&M as a double major, meaning that interested students would have to couple it with another degree.

In those early years, ER&M housed itself in the MacMillan Center both “physically” and “institutionally,” according to Denning. But it soon became clear that ER&M required more space. They moved to 35 Broadway St., tucked behind the shops on York Street, where the program remains to this day. But the status of ER&M on campus remained in flux despite these developments.

“There are very clear ways about how you make a major,” Denning said. “How you create a program … is a much more mysterious process, and that requires long conversations with provosts and presidents and people who make decisions about hiring.”

THE LONG FIGHT

HoSang, an ER&M faculty member, and Ana Ramos-Zayas, professor of American studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and director of undergraduate studies for ER&M, entered Yale in the 2017–2018 academic year. According to the advertisement for their positions, their appointments would be made jointly through ER&M and “another fitting academic department or program.” They were to be the first hires specifically recruited with faculty lines in ER&M, a commitment made in the wake of the 2015 student protests.

Alongside the guarantee of the four ER&M faculty lines following 2015 activism, the University established the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration and guaranteed the allocation of $50 million over five years to recruit and retain diverse faculty members. Yuni Chang ’18 and other members of Next Yale considered the changes, specifically the creation of the RITM, as successes.

It was in the context of the 2015–16 student protests that faculty members and administrators launched into a renewed set of conversations on an old set of topics. Following the protests and the University’s commitments, faculty members still remained unclear as to what the closed-door negotiations had yielded.

“Yale did not honor those demands because we’re asking for the same stuff now, and it’s only three years later,” Chang told the News. “The University is lying about what it’s doing on this issue, or it has deluded itself into believing it is supporting ER&M and its faculty.”

Since 2002, faculty members in the program have requested enhanced powers for ER&M, including oversight over faculty appointments and the ability to develop courses in ethnic studies. In 2008 and 2011, faculty members met behind closed doors with administrators to push for increased support for the program. According to Denning, the administration’s response to many of these meetings aligned with “the administration’s response to lots of things”— faculty members were assured that they were heard and that the University would investigate their concerns.

ER&M became a standalone major in 2012, by which point it had an increased number of faculty members associated with it. But some issues — including attainment of faculty lines, a commitment to a unit or field of study that allows that entity to search for and hire ladder faculty members — did not immediately change.

Last academic year, the University commissioned an external review of the American Studies Program and commissioned a group of visiting scholars in February to provide guidance on American Studies. According to HoSang, external reviewers explained to him that the faculty dean’s office informed them that neither his appointment nor that of Ramos-Zayas resided in ER&M.

HoSang was subsequently provided with documents that effectively showed that ER&M had no faculty slots.

“It’s a sign when the faculty members themselves are unclear about the nature of their appointments about a sort of institutional disregard,” HoSang said. “The intention was to appoint us in ER&M, but even if we have appointments there, it’s only 50 percent. … It’s inaccurate to say two appointments have been made to ER&M.”

The revelation that HoSang and Ramos-Zayas did not have formal appointments in ER&M in University documents left HoSang and other faculty members confused as to where their appointments truly lied.

In an email to the News, Gendler explained that Ramos-Zayas and HoSang are listed in a variety of official University documents — including their letters of appointment and the Yale College Program of Study — as being ER&M faculty members.

She said ER&M does, in fact, have four faculty slots, adding that this is twice the number of slots assigned to the interdisciplinary Program of Cognitive Science. Units like ER&M and cognitive science rely on faculty members associated with other departments and programs, according to Gendler. These slots provide the program hiring power, but according to Gendler, ER&M, like many other units, share these hiring powers with other programs or departments. This means these units may search for faculty members who have existing full appointments in other units, while others make external joint appointments.

“Nearly a third of the searches that we conduct every year are joint searches between two or more units: This is in no way unusual in the faculty,” Gendler said.

Still, Gendler said that Workday — a University-wide computer system which stores faculty records and manages payroll and other finance operations — “unfortunately” did not have an option to list faculty members as ER&M.

She explained that when the university converted to using Workday, “hundreds of thousands” of adjustments had to be made and clerical errors were inevitable. According to Gendler, this is the only such location in which the faculty members are not formally recognized for their appointments in ER&M.

“Faculty associated with the program were not recorded in that way in [Workday], or in documents that we generated on the basis of that system,” Gendler wrote in an email to the News. “We are grateful that professors in the program have alerted us to this simple anomalous bookkeeping oversight, and we are adding a node for ER&M so that their appointments can be recorded appropriately.”

Gendler said that by July 1, when the new appointment season begins, her office will ensure that “these appointments are recorded appropriately.”

Denning said he hoped this inconsistency was a misunderstanding surrounding the program’s faculty appointments.

“That’s one thing where I agree with [Salovey] entirely,” Denning said, referencing Salovey’s remarks that he had thought the matter of faculty lines in ER&M had been worked out by 2016. “It seemed to a lot us that we had worked these things out. … He thought it was all worked out. We thought it was all worked out. But it turned out that it wasn’t.”

THE CATALYST

In 2018, the Program of American Studies announced on its website that its Director of Undergraduate Studies Albert Laguna had received “yet another book award” for “Diversión,” his widely acclaimed work employing popular culture to examine the Cuban diaspora. His program unanimously approved him, promoting him to the next stage of the tenure review process under the humanities Tenure Appointments Committee — composed of a group of professors across various units within the humanities.

But to many of his colleagues’ suprise, the humanities Tenure Appointments Committee denied Laguna tenure. The specifics of tenure cases are confidential. Dean of the Humanities and chair of the tenure committee Amy Hungerford told the News that four women and two faculty members of color have worked on the committee, which lists 13 members on its website. According to Hungerford, the committee pulls its members from a variety of intellectual areas, taking into account factors such as the professors’ disciplines and geographical focuses. The committee — which will hear approximately 25 to 30 cases this year according to Hungerford — assesses a range of factors in evaluating cases, including the candidate’s scholarship, letters from experts in their field and course evaluations.

Gary Okihiro — visiting professor of American studies who has helped shape a variety of ethnic studies programs at peer institutions such as Columbia University and Cornell University — said that universities nationwide view ethnic studies with great skepticism. He said that universities use the discipline as “fire insurance”  — a way for universities to diversify their faculty while protecting themselves against student protests and negative publicity.

To many representatives from the Coalition for Ethnic Studies at Yale, Laguna’s tenure denial was the catalyst behind their movement. In just two months, the group, which held its first organizing meeting in February, garnered over 1,000 followers on Facebook and spearheaded activist efforts across campus — from banners reading “Protect Ethnic Studies Faculty” to a pop-up library honoring the works of the 55 ER&M faculty members who have left the program since its founding.

But faculty members and students interviewed by the News were careful to note that the frustration that ultimately led to the current activism surrounding the ER&M program began far before the start of this semester, Laguna’s tenure denial and the questions prompted by faculty administrative documents. For many, the impetus behind the withdrawal was a gradual buildup of frustration regarding the continuous decline of the program’s ability to function.

According to HoSang, as the number of undergraduate ER&M majors has increased, the number of faculty members with appointments in ER&M has effectively declined in recent years. HoSang and Ramos-Zayas both added their labor to the program in the 2017–2018 academic school year, but three faculty members left ER&M in that timeframe, according to HoSang. The model of the program, which borrows labor from faculty members across the University, is not sustainable given the growing student interest in the program, Hosang added.

Though he was on leave this past fall, HoSang said that he found himself on campus every week in order to meet with undergraduates due to a lack of faculty advisors in the program. As he looked ahead to the 2019 semester, HoSang knew his workload — which includes research, teaching and administrative requirements — would only worsen in the months ahead.

“We’ve long known that these issues were making our situation increasingly precarious,” HoSang said. “I felt like I would be misrepresenting our capacity and the status of our program by suggesting that it was something that it was not.”

A PATTERN

Birgit Rasmussen, a former assistant professor in American studies and Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale, came to the University in 2009, and she understood that her appointment would be 50 percent American studies and 50 percent ER&M. When she went up for promotion to associate professor — an intermediary step which has since been abolished in the new tenure system — her colleagues in American studies promoted her for consideration under the Tenure Appointments Committee in what her colleagues later told her was a unanimous decision.

Still, she, like Laguna, was denied tenure by the committee.

Rasmussen, who left the University in 2016 and currently works as an associate professor of English at Binghamton University, stressed that her specific experience was not necessarily important on its own.

“It’s easy to dismiss me and then potentially dismiss the whole thing,” Rasmussen said. “For me, what matters here is that there’s a real pattern, and the pattern is a shame.”

She expressed solidarity with Laguna, stating that although the denial of tenure can be “devastating, both professionally and emotionally,” she knows he “is an outstanding scholar [who] will do well.”

Two other former professors, Guillermo Irizarry and Jason Cortes, recalled positive experiences within the ER&M program. But because of the locations of their appointments, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese had oversight over their tenure and promotion cases. Hostilities within the department left them feeling disadvantaged in the tenure review process. Both professors departed from the University, Irizarry before facing the tenure review process and Cortes after his contract was not renewed. Cortes said that the ER&M program’s lack of involvement in the tenure process provided the unit with no ability to protect the scholars’ positions within the University.

Iritzarry’s decision to leave the University before facing the tenure review process is not uncommon. Lillian Guerra, who began at the University in 2004 as an assistant professor of history, said she often had to prove to her colleagues the merit of her research on the modern Caribbean and, more specifically, Cuba. According to Guerra, a senior faculty member frequently told her that the “little country” of Cuba had a predictable future and past. Guerra said colleagues often encouraged her to focus on a larger country and described her specialization as “nonessential.” According to Guerra, another professor in the department referred to her as “Maria” for several years.

“You have an intellectual economy that has been driven by racial assumptions about the value of certain cultures and the value of certain histories — what is a grand narrative that is institutionalized and monumentalized at Yale,” Guerra said. “It’s bigger than [racism]. It’s imperial. It’s driven by theories of what is good and what is bad, what is relevant and what isn’t.”

While she battled with members of her department belittling her work, Guerra received an offer from another university. She weighed her options — uprooting to a completely new institution or remaining in what she described as a hostile environment. Guerra ultimately chose to leave Yale in 2010, tired of trying to defend herself and her scholarship, as she said she had done from the moment she arrived on Yale’s campus.

Guerra, now a tenured Cuban and Caribbean history professor at the University of Florida, said that she regrets the choice to leave the University and believes it would have been hard for Yale to refute the value of her scholarship in the tenure review process had she chosen to face it.

“How much impact do I make [at the University of Florida], and how much impact would I have made [at Yale]?” Guerra asked. “The impact that you make for the same amount of effort in a place that is automatically resourced is much greater. It’s a political defeat that I have accepted that, unfortunately, I am responsible for.”

All five professors formerly associated with Yale’s ER&M program interviewed by the News said they respected the 13 faculty members’ decisions to withdraw their support from the program. They represent just a fraction of the professors who have left ER&M since its founding.

And at the end of next academic year, this number will grow by at least one. Inderpal Grewal — professor of American studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies —  will retire. She has been at the University for 10 years.

“I was a little tired of struggling against a lot of forces here at Yale,” Grewal said of her decision to retire.

THE FUTURE OF ETHNIC STUDIES

When the News reached out to Guerra to discuss her former experience with the University, she sent back a reply expressing various frustrations with the Yale administration and her department. Still, in spite of all the “negative stuff” about Yale, she expressed admiration for her dedicated students.

“They are also Yale,” she said.

Irene Vázquez ’21 declared herself an ER&M major in April 2018. She was halfway through with the major by her sophomore fall, and she discovered a community within the program, including faculty members and her best friend and roommate. But according to the 13 faculty members’ press release, while junior and senior majors will receive advisory support, first years and sophomores are not guaranteed the same. Now, Vázquez is unsure whether she will be able to major in the program.

After the faculty members announced their “intention to withdraw their labor” from the program, she recalls walking to her class, looking around and realizing that there are students on campus who can “just spend their time studying” unburdened by concern for the institutional issues on campus. The privilege, she said, spans a variety of mediums — including income level and race — and for Vázquez, added onto the stifling environment of Yale is now the mental bandwidth of constantly thinking about her intended program of study, what it has given her and what its future may or may not look like.

Vázquez — who organizes with the Coalition for Ethnic Studies at Yale and raises awareness for ER&M across publications like Broad Recognition, a feminist publication on campus — says that in this political moment, the stakes are incredibly high for ethnic studies.

“I kind of hate the phrase ‘now more than ever we need ethnic studies.’ But now more than ever, we need ethnic studies,” Vázquez said. “We’ve always needed ethnic studies, it’s just particularly visible now as to why.”

Janis Jin ’20, who also organizes with the Coalition for Ethnic Studies at Yale, said she is pushing for ER&M’s survival — the program that made her recognize the ways in which Yale’s exploitation of its faculty members of color is connected to “imperial power, colonialism and racism at home and abroad” — beyond her time at Yale.

Like Next Yale, the Coalition for Ethnic Studies is demanding that ER&M become a freestanding department. But Salovey, when confronted by over 100 alumni and students protesting his speech at a gala dinner earlier this month, hinted that departmentalization of ER&M was not likely. Instead, he expressed a desire for the unit to remain a program, but with expanded power over hiring.

“The study of race, ethnicity, migration, and indigeneity is a central part of Yale’s mission of education, scholarship, and research,” Salovey wrote in an email to the News. “University leadership shares the view of our faculty colleagues that the ER&M program needs appropriate recognition of its status as a distinct and vital area of study, with commensurate appointing rights. I am committed to ensuring that Yale will be a leader in research on these topics and in supporting a vibrant intellectual environment for teaching and learning in this area.”

But, according to HoSang, the 13 professors understand that changes regarding the status of ER&M would likely need to come from the faculty dean’s office. For this reason, the faculty members submitted their individual letters of withdrawal from ER&M to Gendler. They did not enumerate a specific list of demands.

“We don’t create the structures,” HoSang said. “The administration does.”

Gendler told the News that the external review of the American Studies Program — the same one that informed HoSang and Ramos-Zayas of the ambiguity surrounding their appointments — should be completed before the end of the term.

According to Gendler, the findings will inform decisions regarding the best structure for ER&M at Yale.

“Yale has a long history of supporting work in the areas of race and ethnicity,” Gendler wrote to the News.

Faculty members with past or present associations with the program — who have either left the University or withdrew their labor from ER&M — generally refrained from explicitly demanding a department. Most simply cited the need for increased control over hiring as well as more influence in the tenure process, including the ability to narrate cases to the Tenure Appointments Committee and to present external letters of recommendation. But for some, the future of ER&M at Yale has implications far beyond the University walls. Many stressed that Yale should serve as an example for peers and institutions across the country.

HoSang told the News that the interest exhibited by both students and faculty members in ER&M during his time at Yale has exceeded his expectations. HoSang said he hopes his students — the juniors and seniors who will finish with degrees in ER&M as well as the sophomores and first years who may not be able to — know that the decision to withdraw his labor did not come from disregard for the students or a lack of dedication to the discipline. The current model, he said, had simply become impossible.

“Yale could have such a profound role to play in modeling what a unit like this could look like,” HoSang said. “And I hope it doesn’t miss the opportunity to do that.”

UP CLOSE:
An update, years delayed

Story and photos by Marisa Peryer
Graphics by Lauren Quintela
Published on April 17, 2019

On weekends, the Yale School of Medicine campus feels more like a ghost town than a medical school. The corridors of the Sterling Hall of Medicine are silent. The kids that usually play on the daycare’s playground are all at home. The food trucks that line Cedar Street, save maybe one or two, are nowhere in sight.

But a few weekends ago — as the remaining food trucks sold their wares to an exhausted resident coming off a shift at the hospital, or to a graduate student taking a break from slaving away on an experiment — John Encandela and Michael Solotke ’13 MED ’20 SOM ’21 stood in front of a crowd of LGBTQ students and health care professionals from across the country. The School of Medicine’s first-ever conference on queer leadership in medicine had entered its second day, and the duo was set to present a workshop on how trainees could help implement effective LGBTQ health curricula at their own respective institutions.

In the span of four years, the School of Medicine has overhauled its LGBTQ curriculum. Prior to 2015, the medical school offered just a few sessions related to the topic. Now, Associate Dean for Curriculum Michael Schwartz says that Yale is “clearly amongst [the] top group of medical schools in country beginning to thoughtfully address these issues in curriculum.” By the time they graduate, Yale’s medical students will have interacted with LGBTQ-specific health issues 24 different times across their four-year education.

Still, the Yale School of Medicine only began to implement these changes at the school four years ago, and many medical schools today only spend mere hours of a four-year curriculum learning about LGBTQ health and how to treat patients who identify as a sexual or gender minority.

In a nation that has made large strides over the past decades in how it addresses LGBTQ issues — why has medicine lagged so far behind?

A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM

After wrapping up a job grant writing for UC Davis, Nix Zelin MED ’18 arrived at the School of Medicine in 2014. Zelin, who identifies as queer and pansexual, knew she wanted to specialize in LGBTQ health as a doctor. With its attractive research programs and seemingly up-and-coming support for LGBTQ issues, she chose Yale over other medical schools offering her full-ride scholarships. She felt good about her decision.

But when her first year started, Zelin discovered that she was the only person in her class openly out to students, faculty members and members of the administration. Though she had other LGBTQ classmates, they were not comfortable with superiors knowing their identities.

Worsening the situation, Zelin said she felt that the School of Medicine provided minimal social support for its LGBTQ students and offered few resources for them to find mentors or take part in community activities.

“I had a rosier picture coming in than what I found as a first-year student,” she said. “It was pretty rough the first couple months, and I didn’t want anyone else to have that experience.”

Back at UC Davis, Zelin had been surrounded by allies and other LGBTQ-identifying individuals who shared her passion for LGBTQ health. But at the medical school, she lacked this support.

“I felt alone,” she remembered.

As a student looking to specialize in LGBTQ health, Zelin took note when the medical school’s curriculum glossed over gender and sexual minority health issues. Among the few offerings was a panel discussion about being queer.

“One of the first questions was, ‘What’s it like to be gay?’ and three out of the four or so people sitting on it were white, cisgender gay-identified men in their 20s,” Zelin said. “One of them said, ‘It doesn’t really affect me.’”

She found the session unproductive; students walked away with a limited understanding of what being LGBTQ means for a variety of people with different identities and backgrounds.

Feeling increasingly isolated as the grind of medical school ticked up, Zelin grew frustrated. She gave herself two choices: either stay frustrated, or take action.

So she got to work.

FIRST, DO NO HARM

The year after Zelin arrived at the medical school, she teamed up with other researchers to survey how competent medical students felt treating LGBTQ patients. That study, published in 2018 on Medical Education Online, found that 76.7 percent of 658 surveyed medical students felt “not competent or somewhat not competent” treating gender minority patients. It also showed that more than half of medical students from northeast medical schools felt that the curriculum did not to adequately cover topics relevant to sexual and gender minority health.

Studies like Zelin’s — in addition to interviews with six medical students, residents and professors — demonstrate that medical schools often miss the mark when it comes to educating their students on LGBTQ health.

A 2018 Gallop Poll estimates that 11 million people in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ. Three professors interviewed by the News said that the LGBTQ population has a heightened risk for certain medical conditions. Some are more well known, such as HIV or mental health issues, but others like asthma or cancers are not. If health care providers are unable to address sexuality and gender in a way that makes patients feel comfortable sharing their identities, the 11 million people who identify as LGBTQ could receive inappropriate care or lose out on preventative screenings.

“Part of the etiology of those disparities is inadequate training of health care professionals,” Solotke said. “It would be impossible to address those disparities without also ensuring that the next generation of physicians are appropriately trained.”

While some residency programs help curb this — specialties such as psychiatry or endocrinology train students on certain LBGTQ topics such as hormone therapy — generations of doctors have entered the workforce with limited formal training on treating LGBTQ patients.

Benjamin Mazer, a third-year pathology resident at Yale New Haven Hospital, said he never felt uncomfortable being out as gay while training to become a doctor — his upstate New York medical school had a progressive social environment. Still, his school only taught LGBTQ health for a couple days out of its four-year curriculum.

“The assumption is that everyone’s intentions are good and they’re trying to provide the best care,” he said. “But people come from all parts of the country, all sorts of social environments and different levels of comfort interacting with LGBTQ patients.”

Mazer said that he has had conversations with colleagues whose medical schools offered students even less LGBTQ health education than his school’s few-day stint.

And the research agrees: one study from the Stanford University School of Medicine found that of 132 medical schools, nine reported zero hours of LGBTQ curriculum during the first two years of medical education. Forty-four schools reported zero hours during the latter two years — when students are trained in clinical skills. The median time spent on LGBTQ health issues at the 132 medical schools was found to be just five hours.

“Some people just don’t even get an idea of how to discuss these topics in a respectful way,” Mazer said.

Carl Streed, a psychiatrist who now works with national medical associations to improve LGBTQ curricula, said that his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, hardly taught LGBTQ health. Though he graduated in 2013, it was only addressed during a lecture on HIV/AIDS and during a “pathological” discussion of trans-identifying patients.

Streed said that while most medical schools want to offer their students the best education possible, roadblocks often stand in the way. Some schools just do not have the resources to update their curriculum. Some are apathetic. A few refuse to change.

But each year, hundreds of doctors graduate from these schools — regardless of whether or not they are adequately trained in LGBTQ health.

“If we don’t introduce people to the topics on sexual and gender minority health, these providers are going to continue to do poorly by their patients,” Streed said.

STIGMA THRIVES WHERE KNOWLEDGE DOES NOT

Go back a couple decades and the state of LGBTQ medical training was much worse than today: Several School of Medicine professors told the News that before HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — came onto the medical scene during the 1980s, LGBTQ health was hardly, if ever, discussed during training.

After the first patient in the U.S. develop AIDS, pandemonium reverberated throughout the medical community as doctors and researchers scrambled to understand the virus raging throughout the nation. The New York Times reported in April 1984 that “within the week, two officials have declared that the guilty virus has at last been found. Less reassuringly, each named a different candidate.” A year later, the Times reported the infection as “incurable” and “believed to be always fatal.”

A resident trainee at the time, School of Medicine infectious disease specialist Rick Altice watched the AIDS epidemic unravel around him. Due to a lack of knowledge, the virus developed a stigma. Altice remembered a high-ranking physician telling him that Yale does not take care of “those kinds of patients.”

School of Medicine clinical professor Sidney Phillips remembered hospital staff leaving meals outside the rooms of patients with AIDS, fearing that they would contract the virus if they entered. If an infected patient needed an X-ray, he said staff would schedule their appointments late into the night to avoid interactions with other patients. Meanwhile, doctors avoided direct contact with those infected.

“At a time when someone needed human contact the most, people were going in gloved and gowned,” Phillips said.

A SEA CHANGE

Halfway through her first year, Zelin met with Schwartz to address the lack of LGBTQ health curricula at the medical school. Her hook? Yale could be a leader. A model for other medical schools.

Zelin pitched a new LGBTQ health curriculum. She explained what medicine knows regarding LGBTQ health issues, how it affects patients and why the School of Medicine needed to talk more about it.

To Zelin’s surprise, Schwartz agreed.

Schwartz told the News that the former LGBTQ curriculum was “piecemeal” — it was not effectively woven throughout the four-year curriculum, leaving students with an unclear takeaway. But now, he says that Yale “is clearly amongst the top group of medical schools in country beginning to thoughtfully address these issues in the curriculum.”

Given the green light to address gaps in the curriculum, Zelin partnered with Encandela to design a novel  LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum. Zelin said that the medical school faculty and administration were “amazing” in terms of instituting the changes.

“Our education leaders assessed the curriculum for content related to LGBTQI health disparities, patient care and scientific knowledge,” School of Medicine Dean Robert Alpern told the News in an email. “From this needs analysis, we created a unified longitudinal thread of content throughout all four years of the medical school curriculum, tied to educating our students on the care and treatment of LGBTQI individuals and addressing the health disparities they experienced.”

Some of the new offerings include lectures titled “Healthcare for our LGBTQ patients,” “The Role of the Physician in Caring for LGBTQ Patients” and “Abnormal Puberty.”

To Encandela, the curriculum still needs more work to adequately train medical students in LGBTQ health. Though the new updates are a starting point, he said that building the curriculum is an ongoing, collaborative effort.

“You shouldn’t have to make your whole career about LGBTQI+ health in order to get some training, some education,” Zelin said. “It shouldn’t be some specialized thing that only the queer kids are into.”

KEEPING THE TIDE ROLLING

When Phillips, the psychiatrist who practiced in New Haven during the AIDS epidemic, was asked whether students feel comfortable being out at the School of Medicine, he compared its environment to that of the College.

“In some ways, it’s easier to be LGBTQ than it is to be in certain fraternities or Republican,” he joked.

Ten other LBGTQ faculty members and students interviewed all voiced the same sentiment: They, personally, have not felt uncomfortable being open about their identities at the medical school.

School of Medicine professor Marcella Nunez-Smith put it simply: “I don’t care, and I never have.”

Over the course of her time at the School of Medicine, Zelin played an instrumental role in instituting changes to foster inclusivity in the medical school’s LGBTQ community. She changed the name of the student group Gay-Straight Medical Alliance to the more inclusive OutPatient. She organized new events and social gatherings for LGBTQ students. She helped found — then chaired — the Dean’s Advisory Council on LGBTQI+ Affairs that meets regularly with the administration to discuss new initiatives.

After the council was established, Zelin remembered receiving feedback following a community meet-and-greet — “We got anonymous comments from community members saying things like ‘I’ve been here 30 years and I’ve never met another gay faculty member,’ and then there would be someone from their same department saying the same thing.”

Zelin’s efforts helped establish an institutional scaffolding for bridging the silos present in its LGBTQ community.

For her, “that is what I’m most proud of.”

UP CLOSE:
The Opioid Crisis — A cure and its challenge

By Angela Xiao
Photos by David Zheng
Graphics by Crystal Cheung
Published on April 15, 2019

Editor’s Note: The News has chosen to redact patients’ last names to protect their privacy.

Congress Avenue is quiet. The low hum of the Yale New Haven Hospital complex is only occasionally pierced by the wail of an ambulance arriving in the darkness. The streets are mostly empty, and New Haven is still asleep.

But every day, before the crack of dawn, cars begin to pull in and out of a nondescript parking lot a block further south. A steady stream of people walk in and out of the adjacent building.

This building, the APT Foundation’s Congress Avenue location — which opens its doors at 5 a.m. Monday through Saturday — is one of New Haven’s oldest and most prominent substance abuse treatment centers. Daily, doctors and nurses walk in before the sun rises to administer treatment to individuals with opioid use disorder.

The building, which was constructed in the early 19th century as a school building and has mostly retained its unassuming exterior, is located just one block away from Yale New Haven Hospital. Patients arrive by walking, driving or taking public transportation. Some arrive in medical taxis from around the city or nearby suburbs, others board the 265 route bus and get off right in front of the treatment center’s parking lot.

Patients move quickly. The busiest buses, which arrive just after 7 a.m., unload more than a dozen people at once. From the time an individual climbs the short set of stairs under the foundation’s blue awning to the time they come out of the building, mere minutes pass. Some briefly mill around after, smoking cigarettes or conversing with others. Most leave once they emerge from the facility — sometimes less than two minutes after they enter — walking, driving or crossing the street to wait on the bus in the other direction, which drives toward downtown.

The APT Foundation’s five locations served 7950 unique individuals last year. Hundreds more enter similar clinics’ doors every day in the Elm City alone. Each person varies in background, gender, race and age. But they share one common trait — they are recipients of medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder. Their visits are a small part of their routines but a critical one that keeps them stable and alive.

And their visits are symptomatic of a larger problem.

The opioid crisis has emerged as a public health crisis in communities across America. New Haven, like many urban areas, is struggling to curb and address the epidemic on various different levels.

But what makes this crisis so pervasive?

“THE PUBLIC HEALTH SCOURGE”

Opioids, a class of drugs that includes heroin and its synthetic versions, such as fentanyl, have become one of the United States’ leading causes of death. In Connecticut, the toll is high and rising. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2016 and 2017, the overdose death rate increased significantly — by 12.8 percent.

In the short term, opioids are extremely effective painkillers. Certain forms, such as Vicodin, are often prescribed to patients struggling with post-operation pain. Despite their effectiveness, however, tolerance grows quickly. Within days, dosage has to be increased to feel the same initial pain-relieving effect.

In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 47,000 deaths from opioid-induced overdose — more than 67 percent of all drug overdose deaths. And approximately 2.5 million people in the United States are currently suffering from opioid use disorder, according to APT Foundation President Lynn Madden.

Connecticut’s rate of drug overdose deaths, within the nation’s top quintile, has also outgrown that of most of its peers. In 2014, the age-adjusted rate was 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people. By 2017, that number had almost doubled, to 30.9. In comparison, the national rates in 2014 and 2017 were 14.7 and 21.7 percent, respectively.

The numbers — staggering as they are — “truly do not tell the whole story,” Madden said. “This is the public health scourge of our time.”

In general, the crisis involves a significant pipeline effect. Prescription opioids are hard to come by in the long term, and they are much more expensive than their illicit street counterpart: heroin, or its synthetic form, fentanyl. Fentanyl is cheaper, more potent and more dangerous.

Opioid overdoses result from the drug’s depressive effect on the respiratory system. When a person overshoots a dose, instead of producing a high, their body fails to react to the carbon dioxide buildup, stopping their breathing.

In the case of the most powerful synthetic opioids, the difference between a high and an overdose is a matter of micrograms, one-thousandths of a milligram.

A WAKE-UP CALL

In August 2018, a mass overdose downtown shook the Elm City. On the New Haven Green — adjacent to Yale’s Old Campus, which would bustle with members of the class of 2022 just days later — 100 overdoses occurred within a 24-hour period. Most individuals involved displayed the characteristic signs of opiate-induced overdose. The city jumped into response, sending patients to local hospitals for treatment by the dozens.

The culprit emerged — K2, the colloquial name for synthetic cannabinoids. The street drugs had caused collective overdoses in the Elm City before — in both January and February 2018, multiple overdoses were linked to synthetic cannabinoids, which target the same receptors in the brain as marijuana.

The public overdoses made national news, garnering even more interest when city officials found that the synthetic cannabinoids, which are themselves often degrees of magnitude more potent than marijuana, had been laced with some kind of opioid.

In the aftermath of the mass overdoses, Mayor Toni Harp commissioned an Overdose Response Task Force. The task force meets monthly and was the first initiative mayoral spokesperson Laurence Grotheer pointed at when asked about how New Haven is addressing the crisis.

“The city is working very closely with the state to confront the issue of substance abuse disorder and the potential for overdose,” Grotheer said.

Although K2 is not an opioid, the task force was an acknowledgement, albeit a small one, that polysubstance abuse is common. Implicit in its focus on opioids was another acknowledgement: Opioid abuse is the one that causes the city the most pain.

THE DOWNSTREAM RESPONSE

In every city and state proposed solution on how to reduce overdose fatalities, one substance comes up repeatedly: naloxone.

Naloxone, often sold under the brand name Narcan, blocks the effects of opioids and can reverse an opiate-induced overdose. The zero-fatality outcome of the August 2018 K2 overdoses can be chalked up to the drug, which, based on the symptoms of overdose exhibited, was the primary treatment given.

Narcan has become a primary pillar of Connecticut’s and New Haven’s plan to tackle opioid overdoses. When newly inaugurated Gov. Ned Lamont SOM ’80 unveiled new measures to address the opioid crisis earlier this month, providing Narcan to first responders and equipping towns and cities with adequate amounts of the drug were at the forefront of his plan. In the Elm City’s Overdose Response Task Force meetings, Harp and other leaders on the issue have pushed for and touted increased trainings to teach residents how to use Narcan and to ensure its wide availability.

Narcan can serve as a final measure to keep fatalities from opioid overdose low. But it doesn’t keep people away from opioids to begin with. It is extremely effective in saving lives, but it cannot stymie the progression of opioid use disorder once an individual is already suffering from the disease.

Opiates target the brain’s reward systems. They are highly addictive. But not all of those who are physically dependent on opiates are afflicted with opioid use disorder, according to Gail D’Onofrio, an emergency room doctor at Yale New Haven Hospital and researcher on substance abuse.

There are three hallmark signs of opioid use disorder that distinguish it from a physical dependence on opioids alone — craving, total loss of control and lack of regard for consequences.

An individual can be physically dependent on some type of opioid without those three conditions. The public often associates individuals’ turning their backs on responsibilities and loved ones with physical dependence. But, in reality, these symptoms — and instability — are actually a result of opioid use disorder, not isolated physical dependence.

Melanie has received treatment at the APT Foundation for opioid use disorder for the past 11 years. She remembers the first time she tried heroin, when she had no intention of becoming a regular user. She understood what the implications were on her commitment to her children and the strains of drug use on her already-tight finances. But just days later, she found herself battling, and losing to, her urges.

“It’s a true disease,” D’Onofrio stressed.

Madden noted that opioid addiction also causes a wide-reaching public health epidemic.

Opioids, even in comparison to other physically dangerous drugs, are highly associated with other risky behaviors, such as needle use. Those who consume the drug through injection, even only occasionally, are at higher risk for disease transmission.

“WE KNOW THAT WORKS”

Opioid use disorder is a medically treatable disease, D’Onofrio clarified. A widely embraced and “very successful” form of treatment for the disorder in the medical community — medication-assisted treatment — takes two common forms: the prescribing and administering of either methadone or buprenorphine.

Methadone and buprenorphine, unlike naloxone, are not lifesaving drugs. They cannot pull a person back from an overdose, but D’Onofrio and Madden stressed that they shut down the root of those overdoses to begin with: the disease.

Both methadone and buprenorphine, which are used almost identically except for some specifics about dosage and case-by-case effectiveness, are opiate medications. Like heroin or fentanyl, they are painkillers. Like those two drugs, they attach to the receptors in the brain that control the reward system that causes the withdrawal and craving. But unlike heroin or fentanyl, those on properly administered, orally ingested doses of methadone and buprenorphine — while physically dependent — do not exhibit the three hallmark traits of opioid use disorder.

It is a counterintuitive concept to wrap one’s head around: the most medically sound method of addressing opiate addiction and its many evils is to use another opiate.

For Lisa, a decadelong patient and client at the APT Foundation, methadone treatment took some time and adjustment to become effective in long-term maintenance and stabilization of her addiction. Early on, Lisa found that her cravings were not completely satisfied and turned to nonprescribed opioids during treatment. But since APT was able to fit a proper dosage — too much and patients struggle with symptoms, too little and it does not fully satiate the desire to use other opioids — she has not used anything else.

The proof is conclusive: Methadone and buprenorphine attach to the brain’s receptors and stabilize the lives of people demonstrating opioid use disorder. The physical dependence part is transferred onto the medication. The “hallmarks of addiction,” as D’Onofrio describes them, lessen and eventually dissipate if administered properly.

THE MYTH OF MORAL HAZARD

If medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder has been proved effective by some of the world’s most highly regarded researchers and doctors, nothing should stand in the way of the complete eradication of opioid use disorder — and, in turn, opioid overdoses.

In reality, though, the science of methadone and buprenorphine run up against entrenched resistance. For decades, drug use has been demonized as a societal moral failure, not a health epidemic. Addiction, and all of its detrimental consequences, have been viewed as personal, moral choices by individuals.

Madden, who is also a postdoctoral associate with the Yale School of Medicine, and D’Onofrio both point at one critical social issue: stigma.

In a society that has long been told that addiction and substance abuse are a choice, it is really hard to change people’s perceptions about who should get help, and what that help ought to look like. It is even harder when the decision-makers — those who are elected by voters to make or implement policy and regulations — are not necessarily medical or clinical experts.

“For better or for worse, we’re not a technocracy,” Aidan Pillard ’20, president of Yale Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, said. “We have a long history of telling people that drug use is a personal moral choice.”

That long history means that embracing the opioid crisis as a medical crisis with a medical solution is politically burdensome, largely because it demands meeting individuals where they are.

In September 2018, in a 4 1/2-hour hearing, nearly 100 residents turned out to City Hall to air grievances. The hearing featured arguments between local residents and medical professionals associated with the clinic over why residents should have to bear the burdens of such treatment in their communities and neighborhoods.

Misconceptions also easily persist in a system where institutions are often intertwined over time — as many in the Elm City are.

Some of the most important actors in the city’s political scene are also social and cultural institutions. Labor unions have long been one of the city’s most powerful political forces — candidates hoping for New Haven’s vote make alliances with local unions and stump with them on the campaign trail.

Beyond a union affiliation, the city’s political community is also deeply intertwined with its faith-based community. Many local churches have provided important social services over the years. Still, both Pillard and Sylvester Salcedo — an advocate for drug policy reform and founder of the Connecticut Heroin Users Union — surmised that drug use would likely be embraced more as an issue of moral, personal reform and salvation.

Salcedo broached the issue of changing the way substance abuse is regarded and addressed with prominent church leaders when he lived in nearby Bridgeport — a city with a similar demography and set of challenges as New Haven. He was often met with a kindly delivered promise to keep him and the cause in their prayers.

“I felt like the most prayed-for man in the world,” Salcedo remembered with a wistful smile.

A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

The provision of methadone or buprenorphine as part of medication-assisted treatment of opioid use disorder is almost perfectly uncontroversial in the medical community. While the drugs do not inherently eliminate physical dependence on opioids — both methadone and buprenorphine are, after all, technically classified as opioids themselves — they transition individuals away from both the physical dependence on and, more importantly, the loss of control and increasingly addictive nature associated with heroin and fentanyl.

As methadone treatment has received more political scrutiny, some methadone clinics in the area have already closed their doors. But the demand for treatment has not decreased, leading to higher traffic for the still-open facilities and the neighborhoods they are located in.

Salcedo is a retired member of the Navy and an attorney who now spends most of his time and energy on his two young children. Both are students at the John C. Daniels School, a magnet school whose building is separated from APT Foundation’s Congress Avenue location by a crosswalk. The school was built in its location long after the treatment center had already occupied its lot. Salcedo, who is president of the parent-teacher organization, told the News that he has never had his own or heard of other parents’ concerns with the foundation or its clients.

Salcedo is frustrated by the weaponization of the imagery — of school children just 200 feet away from hundreds of drug users — by those who feel animosity toward the APT Foundation or its presence in their neighborhoods. “How they use us” strikes Salcedo as “really, really ridiculous.”

Then, there is also the uncomfortable truth that New Haven is already known as a place where individuals can come to receive treatment. New Haven is caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pillard, Salcedo, Grotheer, and Ward 1 Alder Hacibey Catalbasoglu ’19 all acknowledged the dilemma of well-supported service providers.

The city’s desire to address its own crisis of those struggling with opioid use disorder is delicately balanced with the understanding that providing the services to do so might make “New Haven’s problem” then expand in scope. Those struggling with the disorder in neighboring towns and suburbs — as their own service providers have shuttered or imposed additional conditions to the provision of treatment — will travel to New Haven.

“It is tough to live next to,” Pillard admitted. The concern that out-of-town patients — with their needs fulfilled by New Haven’s services — will bring increased and unwanted social ills is understandable, he recognized.

Grotheer went a step further. When asked if he thought the self-fulfilling prophecy of setting out to provide treatment and services for those with opioid use disorder might attract more individuals from elsewhere — and thereby perpetuate the image that New Haven has an ever-growing problem on its hands — Grotheer said that it has already contributed to the labelling of substance abuse as an “urban issue.”

And as long as substance use disorders are still viewed as reflections of moral character and failure, Madden said, the presence of clinics and treatment centers in neighborhoods also forces their residents to grapple with the question of what that says about their communities if such facilities are needed.

THE CULTURE OF “CHOICE” AND “COMMITMENT”

Madden compares opioid use disorder to chronic illnesses like diabetes. Patients do not get better “all at once,” and it might take adjustment and trials to find the precise prescription and dosage that will result in stabilization. In the meantime, the occasional spike in blood sugar — or use of unprescribed opioids — does not code for complete failure, just additional work and treatment.

What that means for APT — and what makes it a particular target of community ire and political controversy — is that abstinence is not a condition of treatment. Patients are tested regularly, and their doses continue to be tinkered with throughout their years of treatment, but a drug test that shows that a patient is not “clean” does not mean the end of the road but rather a return to the drawing board as to how the clinic can provide more adequate and effective care — whether through dosage changes or other support services such as group meetings.

Although there is no controversy from a medical perspective, Madden attributed the lack of initiative to increase the provision of treatment to the fact that “the treatment is controversial, and the people that need the treatment are also stigmatized or controversial.”

The APT Foundation’s nonrequirement of complete abstinence has faced questioning from community members and politicians. The foundation does not have to answer to most of them, since their funding mostly comes through insurance payments, including Medicaid. The nonprofit organization is a $36 million operation and, aside from treatment payments, gets a grant of approximately $6 million from the state.

The city cannot influence the standards and regulations of APT and other methadone clinics, but Grotheer expressed concern over their methods, questioning the practice of continuing to offer medication-assisted treatment to those who do use nonprescribed substances.

Those individuals, he said, might not be, “100 percent committed” to getting well.

That cultural misconception and stigma, Madden explained, is pervasive, and the primary challenge in improving access to treatment. The language of getting “clean,” as if relapsing makes one “dirty” or otherwise inferior, is representative of a larger cultural discomfort with addressing patients as patients, instead of “criminals or deadbeats.”

The medical treatment of substance abuse is still a relatively young — although well-backed — clinical practice. The early treatment of opioid use disorder was largely based in programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, which center around the concept of self-help.

The belief that complete commitment and willpower can control disease and recovery is still deeply embedded in the country’s social culture. Melanie and Lucia — who has struggled with her own substance use disorders and whose boyfriend receives treatment at APT — both adamantly told the News that actually getting “clean” from their addictions, even with methadone treatment, depended on “making a choice” to do so, and then committing to that choice.

“The stigma is both endogenous and exogenous,” Madden said. “It’s cultural, but it’s also internalized by people, because all of us are a product of our culture.”

We do not chastise diabetics, Madden mused, for needing medication to stabilize their lives — some who suffer from Type 2 diabetes can manage their disease and eliminate the risk of spikes and dips in blood sugar through lifestyle and choices alone, but most need some kind of long-term supplementary treatment.

PATIENTS, PEOPLE AND POLICY

Madden has spent the last few years looking for clues from the HIV/AIDS epidemic on how to further the advocacy that will hopefully transform the opioid crisis. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, persons who had HIV or AIDS were “completely vilified” and denied adequate care and cultural understanding of their challenges.

HIV/AIDS activists’ work to overcome the deep cultural stigma assigned to the disease and its sufferers serves as the primary historical parallel from which Madden tries to draw — opioid use disorder is a disease that is often medically manageable. But its cultural perception and associations hinders the delivery of treatment.

“We have to stop marginalizing people who have substance use disorders and try to find ways about thinking about their lives and stories and challenges and hopes and dreams like we do everyone else,” Madden said.

But policy efforts at both the state and city level focus on preventing opioid use and minimizing the fatality rate of opioid overdoses.

On April 1, Lamont — in conjunction with the Department of Public Health and the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services — announced two new initiatives to counter the opioid crisis. The first, LiveLOUD, is a statewide awareness campaign. The other is the launch of a new smartphone app, NORA, short for Naloxone and Overdose Response App. The free app instructs individuals on how to administer Narcan.

In the press release announcing the launch of the initiatives, Lamont and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz ’83 focused on informing the public on the issue and publicizing access to resources.

“Educating the public is a critical component of addressing the opioid crisis,” Bysiewicz said in the press release. “We believe the LiveLOUD campaign and NORA smartphone app will make it easier for people across the state to learn about what services are available to them.”

Public awareness campaigns and prevention of further proliferation of the disorder have long been the primary ways in which government has addressed the opioid crisis, Madden explained, because they seem more, “politically palatable.”

“There isn’t a lot of political will, in general, no matter what level of government that you’re at, to actually provide the treatment,” Madden said about the lack of policy initiatives related to the provision of medication-assisted treatment.

But at the New Haven level, Madden cited city officials’ willingness to cooperate in expected ways, given the cultural conceptions still widely associated with medication-assisted treatment.

Since the K2 overdoses — when Harp and the city faced criticisms such as Republican state Sen. Len Fasano’s claims of poor and lacking policy — Madden has had “excellent, ongoing conversations” with Harp and relevant staffers and have settled on “a good path forward together.”

The city and the APT Foundation will work together to prevent overdoses and educate the New Haven Police Department. They are also partnering with other organizations to tackle mental health and first aid. Addressing some of the contributing factors to the crisis, Madden believes, will potentially put New Haven at the forefront of combating the national opioid crisis.

“This is the kind of issue that is happening all over the United States,” Madden said.

UP CLOSE:
Picking up the pieces of Connecticut's economy

By Nathalie Bussemaker
Photos by Ken Stier
Graphics by Ella Stark
Published on April 12, 2019

Hop on a Metro-North out of New York City on the New Haven Line. Soon, you’ll hit the pristine picket fences and well-manicured mansions of Fairfield County — the wealthiest metropolitan area in the nation, where finance and industry titans rake in million-dollar incomes and send their children to elite private schools the likes of The Hotchkiss School and Choate Rosemary Hall.

But leave behind the golf courses and glittering beaches, and you will come to the Devon Bridge in Milford. Built in 1905, the bridge carries more than 150 trains over the Housatonic River between Milford and Stratford each day — making it one of the busiest railroad bridges in the nation.

Rated as structurally deficient and in “serious condition,” the 114-year-old structure is covered in rust and requires emergency work on its three main towers. The Devon Bridge is not alone in its state of disrepair. The Federal Highway Administration classified hundreds of Connecticut bridges as structurally deficient in 2018. Statewide, the average grade in 2018 for key infrastructure network components was an abysmal C-minus, according to the Connecticut Society of Civil Engineers Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Around 15.4 percent of Connecticut bridges’ deck surface area is rated in “poor condition,” compared to 4.8 percent nationwide.

In spite of Connecticut residents’ impressive personal finances, for the last few years, the state’s economy has ranked among the worst in the nation. In 2017, Connecticut’s economy was one of two in the nation to shrink in size, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

This contradiction between the state’s immense private wealth and its struggling economy has driven a rift between the state’s two political parties. Republicans have blamed excessive taxes and a bloated entitlements system for the economic downturn, while Democrats have decried the state’s extreme income inequality and called for a greater investment in Connecticut’s cities.

Newly elected Gov. Ned Lamont SOM ’80 has crafted his platform and his early policy decisions around his ability to use his knowledge of the private sector to bring more business to the Nutmeg State. But Connecticut’s fiscal quagmire requires more than a one-stop solution.

A DECADE OF BLUNDERS

The leafy suburban tranquility of Greenwich transformed into an atmosphere of quiet panic in 2008, when the New York-based investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed on Sept. 14 as a result of the subprime mortgage market crisis that started in 2007.

The financial collapse contributed to the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression. Unemployment in the United States jumped from 4.7 percent in November 2007 to 10.1 percent in October 2009 — and monthly consumption per capita dropped by around $175 in the same period.

Two of Connecticut’s major industries faced especially large losses between 2008 and 2018. The nondurable goods manufacturing industry contracted by 75 percent, and the finance and insurance market shrunk by 30 percent, according to the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis. As the recession raged on, Connecticut residents elected Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy in 2010. Malloy — the four-term mayor of Stamford — came into office facing not only the economic downturn, but a multibillion-dollar deficit as well.

Malloy responded to the deficit by implementing two of the highest income tax increases in state history and courting large corporations with tax breaks to keep them in the state.

“We didn’t have leadership that really understood private sector activity,” said Gary Rose, chair of the Department of Government, Politics and Global Studies at Sacred Heart University. “A lot of business owners and corporate executives under Malloy did not feel that there was enough support from the governor to facilitate investments and so forth.”

A decade later, the rest of the country has — for the most part — bounced back from the recession. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nationwide unemployment rate is at a mere 3.8 percent, and the economy grew by 2.7 percent in 2018.

But this growth has not extended to the Nutmeg State. At the end of 2017, the Connecticut economy was smaller than it was in 2004, and even the state’s fastest-growing markets like the information sector lag behind neighbors in the region.

TAXATION AND MIGRATION

Republican legislators have tended to blame this economic stagnation on the state’s high tax burden and what they view as a hostile business environment in the state. The state and local tax burden is now at 12.6 percent, leaving Connecticut behind only New York among states with the highest individual taxes. According to the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index ranking, Connecticut ranks 44th in the U.S. for its ability to attract and keep businesses in the state.

As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince potential residents — especially young families and retirees — to make Connecticut their home. According to the most recent National Movers Study, 62 percent of moves in the state were outbound rather than inbound. This places Connecticut third in the nation among states with the most residents moving elsewhere.

The outflux of primarily wealthy residents who contributed significantly to government revenue streams has caused a “vicious cycle”. While the state needs to cut taxes to attract new residents, it also needs to increase taxes to raise more revenue, according to Rep. Gail Lavielle GRD ’81, R-Norwalk and the ranking member of the Connecticut General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee.

“We have a huge revenue vacuum,” Lavielle said. “If you’re going to attract people back here who have a lot of resources, you need to lower the taxes or they won’t bother. But at the same time you need to grow the tax base.”

Individuals are not the only ones leaving the Nutmeg State en masse. The state has also seen an exodus of big corporations, especially in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

Among the big corporations to leave were Fairfield-based General Electric in 2016 and New Haven-based company Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc in 2018. Both companies set up shop in Boston, although Alexion kept a number of employees at its Elm City building.

The biggest hit came in June 2017, when health insurance giant Aetna announced it was moving its headquarters to New York from Hartford, where it had been located since 1853. But CVS Pharmacy acquired Aetna later that year, and the move was cancelled. CVS promised that Aetna would stay at its Hartford headquarters for at least another decade.

“Today’s announcement confirms that Connecticut is a tremendous place to do business, with a talent pipeline and quality of life that are second-to-none,” Malloy said in a statement at the time of the announcement.

But in spite of this victory, the overall tide is still pushing companies out of the state.

In an effort to stem that tide, Malloy instituted tax breaks and “corporate welfare” programs giving direct state assistance to large corporations — policies that drew criticism from both the left and the right. This aid, which totaled more than $250 million in 2016, went to 13 companies almost exclusively employing more than 200 workers, bypassing many small businesses who felt they were struggling more than the corporate giants receiving government benefits.

But many of the companies leaving are not moving to states with low taxes. Two of Connecticut cities’ greatest rivals in the fight to recruit growing companies are Boston and New York: cities with some of the highest tax burdens in the country, even in light of tax breaks that these cities have offered some companies to win them over. Boston’s reputation for its significant taxation has even prompted a new nickname for the state: Taxachusetts.

MILLENNIAL FLIGHT

Why are companies leaving Connecticut for high-tax cities? Many think the answer can be traced to the preferences of millennials.

“The trend of millennials — as well as certain retirees — has been to go toward urban areas,” said David Lehman, the recently confirmed state commissioner of economic and community development. “This trend toward urbanization has been happening for the last 15 to 20 years, and I expect it to continue.”

Whereas young people used to move back to the Connecticut suburbs from cities like New York in their 20s, millennials are staying single longer and postponing heading back to smaller cities and towns — if they move back at all, according to Mark Abraham ’04, the executive director of the New Haven-based data analysis nonprofit DataHaven.

As a result, companies are flocking in large numbers to where they can find the most millennial talent.

University of Connecticut political science professor Ronald Schurin said that addressing “deep structural problems” like demographic shifts and debt issues is no easy feat.

As a first step, he said, Connecticut should capitalize on its intrinsic advantages, such as its proximity to New York City. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of jobs present in the New York metropolitan area numbered almost 10 million in July 2018.

The number of Connecticut residents traveling into the city every day has made the Metro-North New Haven Line the busiest commuter railway in the nation, with about 125,000 riders daily.

The cracks in the system from so much use — combined with an insufficient level of funding — have started to show. On March 29, a power transformer along the railway in Westport failed, reducing trains to 50 percent of their normal electrical power and causing massive delays.

Commuters travelling on the road instead encounter similar delays. According to a Connecticut Department of Transportation study in 2016, the segment of the Interstate 95 between New Haven and the New York state line experiences “extraordinary amounts of recurring delay.” Often, more than half of the 47-mile distance between the two cities is congested in both the mornings and evenings.

In addition to harnessing the full advantage of Connecticut’s location, University of Connecticut economics professor Fred Carstensen GRD ’76 argued that the government must better utilize the quality of the Nutmeg State’s institutions of higher education.

Carstensen commended institutions like Yale for engaging more with the “real world” in recent years, as evidenced by Yale’s growing number of annual patents, its role in starting dozens of new companies and its collaboration with Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut on stem cell research under former U.S. President George W. Bush.

But universities can only do so much without state support.

“We have no collaboration between institutions of higher education,” Carstensen said. “The whole in Connecticut is much less than the sum of its parts.”

Even if Connecticut fixes its transportation infrastructure and encourages educational collaboration, its economy will remain precarious if it does not weaken the stranglehold that a few key industries hold on available jobs.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2015, Connecticut has the most insurance jobs per capita nationwide. The finance and insurance industry accounts for $16 billion in annual payroll. The second-largest sector — healthcare and bioscience — employs almost 20,000 Connecticut residents.

“Connecticut has relied on a few key industries, and when they have not done well, the state has a whole has not done well,” Schurin said.

VANISHING OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

While Republicans rally behind the call for lower taxes, Democratic legislators often point to the extreme income inequality in the state as a major cause of Connecticut’s struggling economy.

According to a 2018 study by the Economic Policy Institute, Connecticut has the largest gap between the richest one percent and the poorest 99 percent in the country. And as wages for low-income residents remain stagnant, the state’s revenue streams have also faced a growing crisis.

“We’ve added a lot of people who are down at the very bottom of the income spectrum,” Lavielle said. “There’s nothing wrong with people down at the bottom of the income spectrum, but they don’t contribute to income taxes and sales taxes at a high level.”

The growing gap between rich and poor is also visible in the state’s geography. According to a 2015 DataHaven report, the percentage of Connecticut residents who live in neighborhoods of concentrated wealth or poverty has grown by 30 percent since 1980. Meanwhile, the percentage of Connecticut residents living in middle-income neighborhoods has shrunk by seven percent.

The fastest rate of growth was among residents who are poor and live in an area of concentrated poverty — a phenomenon that DataHaven terms “double jeopardy” due to the difficulty of overcoming poverty under these circumstances. This group — which comprises people below the federal poverty line — grew 66 percent since 1980 to four percent of all Connecticut residents, which came about largely due to an influx of Hispanic immigrants to the Nutmeg State.

The gap between rich and poor in the state also intersects significantly with race. As the result of a long history of redlining — or refusing housing loans in predominantly black neighborhoods — and other racist housing practices in the 20th century, Connecticut cities still see extreme levels of housing segregation, according to 2018 DataHaven report.

The segregation between white and black neighborhood in the Milford-New Haven metro area was rated very high in 2015, while segregation between Hispanic and white neighborhoods was ranked in the worst 10 percent in the country.

FALTERING CITIES

Many of Connecticut’s worst-hit residents live in the state’s biggest cities, including Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven. In addition to providing for their own residents, these cities also function as resources for the entire region — without any increase in revenue to provide services to more people.

“Cities like New Haven are centers of commerce, education and healthcare,” said mayoral spokesman Laurence Grotheer. “But there is no regional support structure for cities.”

City governments rely heavily on property taxes to fund municipal services. But a variety of exemptions from such fees often deprive city governments of much-needed revenue.

In New Haven, for example, almost half of property in the city is exempt from property taxes, according to Grotheer. Much of this property belongs to Yale, which is largely exempt because state law grants property tax exemptions to universities and hospitals. Although Yale makes a voluntary annual contribution to the city of around $8.7 million, this is a fraction of what the University would pay without exemptions.

“The city effectively has to provide all its programs and services while only being able to generate revenue from 45 percent,” Grotheer said.

City officials blamed much of the controversial 11-percent tax hike in the most recent New Haven budget on these missing tax streams and called for greater financial support from the state.

But at the state level, spending often already outpaces revenue — in large part due to the cost of funding the pensions of state employees. These payments totaled over $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Transparency Connecticut.

According to Lavielle, the state’s failure to rein in this entitlement system in recent years stems from the influence that public worker unions exert on the Democratic party.

“In order to keep their captive constituency happy, the folks in the majority don’t want to bring [public employee unions] in line with people in the private sector,” Lavielle said.

MALLOY’S AWKWARD EXIT

For a record-setting 123-day period in 2017, the state government left Connecticut residents and municipalities without a state budget, as Malloy and legislators in the Connecticut General Assembly were unable to reach a final budget agreement by the time the previous budget expired in June. Negotiations dragged on for months until both Democrats and Republicans decided to lock Malloy out of the budget talks and eventually passed a veto-proof budget.

Although residents were relieved to finally have some certainty, the budget nevertheless made significant cuts. The University of Connecticut, for example, lost $130 million in funding over the course of two years.

“It’s better than the worst-case scenario, but it’s still going to be difficult,” University of Connecticut Deputy Spokesperson Tom Breen told the News days after the budget passed.

The political crisis prompted by the state’s poor fiscal performance had almost caused Malloy to lose his reelection bid against Republican opponent Tom Foley in 2014.

But the painful eight-month budget process was the final nail in the coffin. Malloy left office in a state of disgrace, with fewer than 15 percent of voters expressing approval for the governor, according to an October 2018 joint survey by Sacred Heart University and Hearst Connecticut Media. At the same time, President Donald Trump’s approval rating in the state was more than double at 35 percent.

Connecticut has long been one of the bluest states in the nation. Hillary Clinton easily carried the state in the 2016 presidential election, garnering 54 percent of the vote compared to 40 percent for Trump. The state also voted Democrat in the six previous presidential elections.

With Trump as the Republican boogeyman on the right and Malloy as the Democratic nightmare on the left, the stage was set for a contentious gubernatorial race.

A NEW AGE?

Enter Ned Lamont and Bob Stefanowski.

In an election year marked by historic numbers of women and people of color running for office, Lamont and Stefanowski stood out for their traditionality. Both men are white, middle-aged and exceptionally well-off. Stefanowski and his wife reported $9.7 million in income in 2017, while Lamont and his wife reported $18 million in income in the past five years, according to tax returns they released before the election.

These numbers are no coincidence. Both candidates drew on their experience as successful businessmen — Stefanowski as a former General Electric executive, Lamont as a telecommunications tycoon — as evidence that they had the necessary economic insight and business acumen to turn the state around.

Lamont started off strong in the polls, holding a 53 to 37 percent lead over Stefanowski in an August 2018 Quinnipiac University poll. But his once clear path to victory became increasingly convoluted as Bob Stefanowski doubled down on his anti-taxes platform, dubbing his opponent, “New Tax Ned.”

By October, most major polls showed the two candidates neck and neck. On a nail-biting election night with unprecedented voter participation for midterm election, Stefanowski held the lead until early in the morning. But Lamont cinched a narrow victory in the end thanks to wide Democratic margins in Connecticut’s cities.

In his inaugural address, Lamont pledged to reinvent Connecticut.

“For generations, Connecticut was the most entrepreneurial, inventive, and fast-growing state loaded with amazing opportunities. And we still can be,” Lamont said in his speech. “I will not allow the next four years to be defined by a fiscal crisis. Together we will craft an honestly balanced budget which does not borrow from the future, but invests in the future.”

That night, as Lamont’s awkward-yet-endearing dancing at his inaugural ball made local headlines, Connecticut voters asked themselves: Will he really be able to follow through with these promises?

As Lamont heads toward his hundredth day in office next week, a preliminary answer to the question is starting to form.

The first clues came at Lamont’s presentation of his budget proposal on Feb. 20.

The budget, which is projected to generate $19.3 billion in fiscal year 2020, eliminated several sales tax exemptions and made changes to health care prices for state workers, among other changes.

Many Democratic legislators applauded the practicality of the budget and Lamont’s support for progressive policies like increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour and a paid family and medical leave program.

But municipalities have expressed concern about a lack of municipal funding from the state as the services required of them increase.

Grotheer expressed hope that the final budget would include sufficient funding for the payment in lieu of taxes program, or PILOT. The program gives municipalities funding to make up for the loss of revenue due to real estate exempted from property taxes.

In theory, this funding should cover around 45 percent of lost revenue, but state funding for the program has dropped steadily over the past decade. In the most recent fiscal year, municipalities made back only 14 percent of the funds they could not collect.

In fiscal year 2018, municipal aid including funding for PILOT totaled around $356 million, which Lamont proposed to cut down to $325 million in 2020 and $328 million in 2021.

The proposed budget has come under fire for its changes to education funding. Lamont proposed that municipalities cover 25 percent of teacher pension obligations, which Lavielle said would cause further increases in property taxes.

Union officials similarly opposed the change in teacher pension obligations.

“We’ve already made clear we’re not willing to shift more risk onto the backs of retired state employees, which threatens to pick the pockets of seniors living on fixed incomes,” AFT Connecticut President Jan Hochadel said in a statement on the day Lamont presented his budget proposal.

Lamont has received the most flack for his plan to institute tolls on Connecticut highways — a turnaround from his stance during the campaign. The administration has justified the proposal by pointing out that an estimated 40 percent of vehicles on Connecticut highways come from out of state.

Lavielle emphasized that Lamont’s budget is just a proposal and that the approval budget is still far from over.

“So far we’re not seeing a proposal that would [fix the economy,]” Lavielle said. “Essentially the budget that he has proposed … is all based on new taxes.”

Lamont’s economic policy extends beyond the confines of the budget. The governor has brought a host of top private-sector executives into his administration, including Lehman — a former partner at Goldman Sachs — as well as former PepsiCo CEO and chairman Indra Nooyi SOM ’80 and former Webster Bank CEO and current chairman Jim Smith as co-chairs of the Connecticut Economic Resource Center.

These administrators are tasked with reversing the outflux of businesses from the state. Lehman emphasized the importance of “proactive recruitment” of companies that does not rely solely on the bilateral deals of tax breaks and direct state aid to big companies that characterized Malloy’s economic policy.

Lehman pointed out that Connecticut is not suffering from a lack of jobs but rather from a lack of qualified and educated employees. Although the number of jobs in Connecticut has increased over the past few years, jobs coming into the state pay significantly less than the jobs that are leaving, according to Carstensen

As a result, Lehman said that Lamont’s new strategy will revolve around drawing in skilled, educated employees and the companies hoping to hire them by playing to Connecticut’s strengths, from its great schools and beaches, to its proximity to metropolitan centers like New York City, to its potential for greater collaboration between universities and businesses.

To improve Connecticut’s infrastructure, the state hopes to implement what Gov. Lamont has dubbed his “30-30-30” plan, which would invest significantly in the state’s rail system to decrease train travel times to 30 minutes between three pairs of cities: Hartford and New Haven, New Haven and Stamford, and Stamford and New York City.

If the plan succeeds, commuters would be able to reach New York City from New Haven in 60 minutes, which Lehman called a “game changer.” The journey on Metro-North currently takes about two hours one-way.

But the number one priority for Lehman is addressing the problem of Connecticut’s cities and their inability to retain young talent. He hopes Connecticut will be able to at least double the size of its four biggest cities: Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven and Stamford.

“One of the keys toward the success of the Connecticut of tomorrow is [growing] our cities,” Lehman said.

HOPE ON THE HORIZON

In spite of the gloomy statistics on the economy, there is still reason for optimism. The state’s nonpartisan budget office has projected a surplus of more than $500 million for the current fiscal year ending on June 30 — $512 million in the general fund and $70.5 million for the Special Transportation Fund.

“2018 might be the first year with solid economic growth in ten years,” Carstensen said.

Although the office also projected a deficit of $1.5 billion for the following fiscal year, Lamont has vowed to close the gap with his proposed budget. And in spite of concerning statistics regarding employment and population trends, Connecticut residents still have reason for hope in the current economy.

“When people say the economy is performing poorly, mainly they’re talking about jobs and productivity. Those indicators are the ones that don’t look good,” Abraham said. “If you look at average wages, how much people earn relative to the cost of living and all of that, Connecticut is up there as one of the strongest economies.”

There is hope on the political front as well. As tensions between Democrats and Republicans peak at the national level, Connecticut state politicians expressed hope for renewed collaboration across the aisle.

“He’s created a very different atmosphere than we had under Gov. Malloy,” Lavielle said. “It’s a much more civil environment.”

Lamont started his political career as a progressive outsider, but his first months in office have seen him strike a more moderate and conciliatory tone, according to many — especially in comparison to his predecessor.

As his toll proposal demonstrates, the governor has been willing to change his policies in light of feedback from legislators, advisors and constituents.

“Malloy was ‘my way or the highway,’” Rose said. “Lamont will come in with a plan, but if it gets blowback from various people, he immediately thinks, ‘Well, then let’s talk and see if we can make adjustments.’”

On a brisk day in March, Lamont stood before a small group of transportation advocates holding up banners calling for more jobs in Milford to ask the legislature to increase funding for the state’s infrastructure.

“We have an aging infrastructure in Connecticut that greatly impacts the daily lives of our families and the development of our businesses,” Lamont said. “Modernizing our infrastructure would employ thousands; it would improve the quality for our residents and advance us towards the state we deserve to be.”

The rusting Devon Bridge loomed behind him.

UP CLOSE:
"Crime is decreasing" — rhetoric or reality?

By Sammy Westfall
Photos by Adrian Kulesza
Graphics by Jesse Nadel and Chris West
Published on April 10, 2019

When William Outlaw III was released from prison in 2008 after two decades behind bars, the New Haven he returned to was not as different as he had hoped.

He still witnessed a great deal of “neighborhood versus neighborhood” violence among youth. For example, if youth from Newhallville area were in a fight youth in the Fair Haven area, the whole Newhallville neighborhood would have the same attitude: “We don’t like them and so on sight, we are going to shoot or fight.”

Aged 13 to 25, members of the groups would be “fighting and jumping” at each other, which led people to start picking up guns, Outlaw said. Even those not deeply involved with the conflict feared attack because of association. Sometimes, even groups from two different streets in the same neighborhood would fall into conflict. Disputes resulting in violence would erupt “on sight, day and night,” Outlaw remembered.

Now, Outlaw sees a changing New Haven. He does not see interneighborhood violence erupt in the street. Crime in New Haven still occurs, but its nature has shifted — and its rates have decreased.

Today, as a New Haven street outreach worker who mentors youth, Outlaw is glad to be playing a role in the reduction of violence throughout the city.

Violent crime in New Haven has been steadily marching down for the past decade. With 156 gun assaults reported in 2008 and 50 in 2018, many agencies and individuals in New Haven are jumping to take credit for the significant decrease. But crime reduction is markedly more complex. The News spoke to 19 New Haven residents to understand the forces behind the changing face of crime in the Elm City. From a changing policing strategy, to a changing culture, to a changing collective will — what is the reality behind the statistics, and what is driving the change?

THIS CAN’T GO ON

For decades, the Elm City has grappled with a reputation for violent crime. In 1991, The New York Times published an article headlined “Armed Youths Turn New Haven Into a Battleground,” describing a “crisis in the streets” — spurred on by the gun and drug trades, gang culture and turf battles claimed the lives of many teenagers. The city saw 15 homicides in the first three weeks of May that year.

“Without a question, we’re worn out from grief,” local Rev. Robert Newman told the Times in 1991.

Steve Hamm, a police reporter for the New Haven Register from 1983 to 1986 who is currently working on a documentary about New Haven community policing, said that when he reported on crime in the 1980s, he could hear gunshots from his reporting hub on Long Wharf. Often, he was able to get to the scene even before an ambulance arrived.

In the early 2010s, the Elm City continued to experience high crime rates. New Haven made headlines in 2011 when Business Insider named it the “fourth most dangerous” city in the United States. New Haven reported 15.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people — ranking fourth following St. Louis, Missouri, Detroit, Michigan and Flint, Michigan, based on preliminary FBI data.

Leonard Jahad, director of the New Haven Street Outreach Worker Program — a team of four that forms close relationships with youth and stages interventions to prevent crime — remembers 2011 as the year the city went “bonkers.” That year, New Haven saw a decade-high homicide rate: 34 homicides, 10 more than the year prior. Crime was a problem, and it became a dominating political issue in the city.

“So many people were shot that year — and there were funerals going all summer long in New Haven — and I think that the community was just revolted by it,” Director of the Connecticut Statistical Analysis Center Ivan Kuzyk told the News. “Internally, people just said this can’t go on.”

And it didn’t. Though the road the city has traveled has not been easy or straightforward, things have, on the whole, changed.

YOU CAN FEEL THE CHANGE

Like Outlaw, residents in and around New Haven interviewed by the News agreed that the city feels safer than it did a decade ago — and commended actors working on reducing crime in the area.

Jahad emphasized that the presence of gangs and gang violence in the community is “way, way, way down,” noting that most of the murders that have occurred in the past few years are those related to personal issues rather than to street gang violence.

Hamden city councilman Justin Farmer, who lives on the border line between Hamden and New Haven, said that six years ago, he lived next to drug dealers. Now, most of his neighboring homes are occupied by new homeowners or by first-time family renters. Just a few years ago, his neighborhood could see as many homicides in a year as the entire city of New Haven did in 2018.

“It feels almost surreal because I still see petty drug dealers all the time, but I don’t see [them] to the same extent that I used to see. I used to see dime bags all the time,” Farmer said. Still, he added that he sees fluctuations — a few months ago, he saw a bag with crack in his neighborhood for the first time in years. 

And the statistics concur.

This January, former New Haven Police Chief Anthony Campbell ’95 DIV ’09 stood in front of an audience of officers and community members at the NHPD headquarters to present a summary of last year’s crime numbers. Plastered on the walls behind him were large-scale prints of bar graphs and tables representing nonfatal shooting victims and homicides. Sorted by year from 2003 to 2018, they all presented a general downward trend in citywide crime, from shootings to aggravated batteries.

“On many of these charts, you’ll see a significant drop in our crime — not just violent crime but quality-of-life crimes, including robberies and burglary, are down,” Campbell announced. “When you walk around this city, you can feel the change.”

The statistics showed a reduction in nonfatal shooting cases over the decade. From 2003 to 2006, New Haven saw an average of 111.5 nonfatal shooting victims, while between 2007 and 2010, the average was 147.5. From 2011 to 2014, the average nonfatal shooting rate decreased to 87.75, and then further decreased by 2018 to 60.25. There were a reported 426 shots fired in 2011, 229 in 2013, 105 in 2015 and 134 in 2017. Campbell pointed out that the city’s 10 murders in 2018 were nowhere near its 34 homicides in 2011.

“Five years ago, halfway through the first month of my first term as mayor, I had already been to a funeral for a New Haven teenager — the victim of gun violence that was all too common at the time,” Mayor Toni Harp said at the press conference. “Today I stand before you … to describe a much improved New Haven, a much safer New Haven, a city much better equipped to quash the scourge of gun violence.”

At the press conference, things seemed to be looking up. But what exactly has changed in the Elm City? And who is responsible?

MANDATED COMMUNICATION

In the past few years, the New Haven Police Department has attempted new methods to improve its policing and reduce crime in the Elm City.

Every Thursday at 10 a.m., dozens pile into a fourth-floor room at the NHPD headquarters for COMPSTAT — the weekly crime information–sharing meeting that began in 2012. Sitting side by side at desks in a two-layered U-formation, NHPD officers, unit heads, local department members and community program leaders share information about the crimes committed in the past week. One by one, representatives give updates about crime from institutions including the Department of Corrections, Yale New Haven Hospital and the Traffic and Parking Department.

At each meeting, eight NHPD district managers — lieutenants who oversee at least one of the city’s 10 policing districts — present crime data and trends over the last week, flashing graphs up on a screen that show weekly comparisons of individual crimes, such as robbery, aggravated assault and firearm discharge. After each district manager presents, anyone in the room has the chance to ask questions.

At the April 4 meeting, a district manager reported a shooting near Alpha Delta Pizza on April 1 and noted that he had immediately increased police presence and extended officer hours in the area. Another district manager informed his peers that in the area of a shooting at an apartment complex, 15 street lights were out — the officers made sure the light bulbs would be replaced.

“Bridgeport, Hartford are trying to do [COMPSTAT] like what we do, and they’re not really doing it. That’s why their numbers are higher than ours,” Jahad said. “All these similarly situated cities, their numbers are higher. They aren’t talking.”

Lieutenant Karl Jacobson — the NHPD officer in charge of the shooting task force, Drug Enforcement Administration task force, narcotics enforcement unit and criminal intel unit — told the News that law enforcement operated in silos prior to COMPSTAT in 2012 and the daily Intel meetings in 2013. He said it was kind of a “do your-own-thing” process, with some people even fighting for cases or hiding things from each other.

Now, communication is mandated. Different stakeholders in the crime reduction process must show up to the meetings and share information. And unlike most cities, New Haven’s COMPSTAT is open to the public.

Jacobson said that the NHPD “turned a corner” when they began communicating through COMPSTAT and daily intel meetings, as well as working more with federal partners on projects and investigations. He noted that the NHPD takes crime stats, and overlays them with intelligence coming in through informants, anonymous tips and interviews, adding that the department gets “a ton” of information from the State Department of Corrections.

The reduction in crime, however, is not just a function of city efforts to improve communication. On the street, there has been a substantive shift in the culture of crime.

A NEW ATMOSPHERE

Now — rather than neighborhood versus neighborhood gang activity — Outlaw describes the new atmosphere of violent crime in the city as a few “hot pockets” where individuals incite violence against other individuals for personal reasons.

With this changing atmosphere, city officials and community members looking to reduce crime have had to adapt their methods to better reflect the state of the city.

New Haven Youth Services Director Jason Bartlett told the News that when Mayor Toni Harp took office, she made youth the priority. Harp’s philosophy says that by re-engaging youth and reaching out to neighborhoods, crime will reduce, Bartlett said.

“Really identifying kids who might be the victims or perpetrators of crimes and trying to help them overcome obstacles, giving them interventions, wraparound services — it makes a big difference in terms of crime,” he added.

One example? New Haven’s Street Outreach Worker Program, which was established in 2007.

The program’s four outreach workers — some of whom have been involved with crime and turned their lives around — form personal connections with youth and intervene in disputes with the potential to become violence.

In the past, outreach workers would often wait on street corners for violence to erupt. Now, in light of the changing atmosphere, the outreach workers monitor social media. Once an outreach worker catches wind of the potential for violence, they will reach out to involved individuals to talk through the issue.

“Don’t make this a neighborhood thing,” Outlaw, a street outreach worker, would tell them over a personal meeting or lunch.

For Outlaw, working on crime reduction as a street outreach worker in New Haven is a 24-hour job. Beyond one-time interventions, he ensures continuous communication between those who need help. He gets the kids’ numbers and calls them constantly —  “What’s up? How you doing? What’s going on?” He wants to talk with them not just about the worst times, but also about the “good times, the bad times and the times in between.”

On a Thursday in April, Jahad, Outlaw and Tommy, a high school sophomore whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, sat clustered at one edge of an otherwise empty 20-seat conference table at an office on Grand Avenue. Tommy was having a hard time and reached out to Jahad for mentorship.

The meeting marked Tommy’s official introduction to Outlaw. At their 8 a.m. meeting, the three spoke about Tommy’s family life, social life and school experience — and then the outreach workers gave him advice about joining a basketball team, finding a job and staying in school.

As Tommy stood to leave the meeting, he exchanged phone numbers with Outlaw — they planned to stay in touch. Outlaw said he will try to speak with and learn as much about Tommy as he can — “so that he won’t turn that corner.”

As he left the meeting to make it to school on time, Tommy told the News that he was going to find a job.

ARE WE POLICING BETTER?

Jacobson stressed that it is “amazing” that New Haven’s crime has stayed consistently low, even while the violent crime numbers for Bridgeport and Hartford — nearby cities with similar population sizes and demographics to New Haven — have gone up.

According to their respective police department’s numbers, Bridgeport’s non-fatal shooting rate has been on a steady incline from 2017 — increasing from 70 shootings in 2011 to 111 in 2017. Hartford’s non-fatal shooting rate has fluctuated from 116 in 2011, down to 97 in 2014, and peaking to 123 in 2016.

“We used to have the same [crime numbers] as them…. So we’re obviously doing something different,” Jacobson told the News, adding that 50 shootings in New Haven is still a lot considering the size of New Haven’s population.

Jacobson, like others interviewed by the News, attributed crime rate reductions to Project Longevity — a collaboration between law enforcement, community representatives and social service providers to stop gun violence in Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven. According to Project Longevity’s website, in addition to providing a range of services to youth and promoting messages about their value in the community, the program also communicates a clear message that “the next group to commit homicide, or the most violent group overall, will be met with the full force of the law and all of their group members will receive focused attention from members of local, state, and federal law enforcement.” 

Jacobson also noted that the NHPD also follows up with personally-driven shooting incidents. He added that high numbers are driven by the logic: “I shoot at you, and then you shoot at me. But he’s my boy, so he shoots at your people, and they shoot at his people.”

In these personal incidents, either members from community programs like the street outreach workers will intervene, or the NHPD will employ the use of probation and parole.

At daily intel meetings, shooting victims are displayed on a screen, allowing other officers to point out if the victim is on probation.

“So, yes, he’s a victim, but he’s probably going to retaliate. We don’t want to victimize a victim, but we are going to put him on GPS and make him stay home until he gets a job. Or make him limit the area that he’s traveling so that he doesn’t get shot again,” Jacobson said. 

He said that the first few times, the “guys get mad at you,” but then they see the solution “for what it really is” and sometimes thank him. After a month or two, the NHPD takes the victims off GPS monitoring, he added.

“Now what does that do? They didn’t get involved with the beef, they didn’t get arrested, and now they move on and get off probation. It’s the best tactic possible,” Jacobson said.

AN OUTSIZED EFFECT

Though local actors are working to decrease crime in New Haven, broader forces are shifting the landscape of crime in the Elm City.

Kuzyk runs the the State’s criminal justice research unit for the Office of Policy and Management, conducting statistical studies on Connecticut crime, courts and prison systems. In his sixties now, Kuzyk has studied crime in the state for decades.

“It’s kind of odd to talk about Connecticut,” Kuzyk told the News, explaining how the state has a handful of small cities that are generally poor and have scored lower on negative social indicators. These cities carry a disproportionate amount of reported state crime and a disproportionate number of residents who are dragged into the criminal justice system.

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, Connecticut saw 78 murders in 2016, while Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven combined saw 38 homicides. Approximately half of the state’s homicides were committed in those three cities, which comprise just 11 percent of Connecticut’s population.

Within any one of these cities, a few people have “sort of an outsized effect,” Kuzyk said. With violent crime caused by a disproportionately small number of people, it is difficult to compare New Haven to state or even national trends.

Nationally, violent crime rates are decreasing — a fact many New Haven residents noted to the News. According to FBI data, the national number of reported violent crimes per 100,000 people has decreased by approximately 49 percent from 1993 to 2017.

“[The NHPD] act like they’re doing something special. No, it’s been decreasing for years, across the nation,” New Haven activist and community leader Barbara Fair told the News.

Kuzyk noted that “each community is like a “retail sort of situation,” and that there are many factors specific to each city that affect the crime rate — including political will, policing strategy and community programs. However, Kuzyk mentioned a major factor that is reducing crime: collective behavior. He has noticed that people’s behavior has shifted over time, and that even though there is no tangible way of quantifying and assessing it, “behavior is really everything behind shootings.”

“A neighborhood can be exactly the same, the community is the same — but something is different,” Kuzyk said.  “There’s no data on behavior. So where you don’t have data on behavior, everyone is sort of able to fill in between the lines with how they want to explain what happened.”

Kuzyk also emphasized the changing urban drug market and culture from the 1990s and the early 2000s to today.

He described drug markets of the past as being reliant on geography —  people were getting killed because drug dealers needed territory to be selling drugs. They needed to hold “corners.” But cell phones have basically killed that. Now,  transactions can happen anywhere and are not tied geographically. Kuzyk said many drug dealers have two cellphones — one personal and one for drug transactions. Every time the latter phone rings, that person will make $50. So, Kuzyk said, when the dealer goes to prison, he can sell the phone to his competitor or friend for $30,000.

The drug market of today no longer reflects the geographic necessity of holding corners. Though it is impossible to quantify the effect this changing drug market has had on crime rates, Kuzyk noted that if much of the violence a decade or two ago was related to drug markets, and those drug markets have changed dramatically in the past decade — then it would follow that the amount of crime has changed dramatically as well.

“What’s happening is society is changing, behavior is changing, the markets are changing, the nature of criminality is changing,” he said. 

Jahad echoed Kuzyk’s sentiments.

“[The street outreach workers] changed our strategy because before we’d hang out more on the streets before things would happen,” Jahad said. “A lot of drug dealing on the curbs in certain pockets. Now, people don’t sell drugs on the street anymore. They’ll text someone, they’ll [direct message]. That’s stopped a lot of street violence.”

In addition to natural changes in the market and community programs, federal officials have worked with with local law enforcement agencies to conduct sweeps, taking some gangs and violent groups off the streets.

In 2011, the FBI and NHPD did a joint investigation into the city gang Grape Street Crips, and charged 18 individuals, according to a 2015 FBI press release. The identified leaders of Grape Street Crips were sentenced to 188 months in prison for “heading a gang-related narcotics distribution ring,” the press release stated.

In 2012, DEA agents, NHPD and Hamden police officers carried out an year-long investigation called Operation Bloodline, breaking up much of the Tre Bloods gang and charging more than 100 individuals. The joint investigation targeted drug trafficking and gang violence, with agents wiretapping telephones and conducting “extensive physical surveillance,” according to the U.S Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut.

In 2016, there was a sweep of the Red Side Guerilla Brims. And the following year, there was another sweep of the Goodrich Street Boys — a Newhallville-based gang — which was responsible for approximately 40 percent of the shootings that year, according to Jacobson.

“I gotta give the feds credit recently, they didn’t just go and arrest lower-level people. They were getting the right people,” Jahad said. 

Despite the local and federal actions taken to address crime, a more complicated reality persists.

SUCCESS HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS

Fair, the local activist, said that it bothers her when the police “want to take all the credit” for crime decreasing, when there are many factors that bring crime down.

“It’s a scripted thing to say: ‘Crime is down. Look how great we are,’” Fair said. 

Kuzyk described this dilemma to the News with an aphorism: “Success has a thousand fathers, and failure’s an orphan.”

Pointing to the New Haven data, Kuzyk highlighted that in 2016 there were 13 homicides, and in 2017, there were seven, a 50 percent drop. Yet, he is skeptical about assigning credit or blame for a drop of that magnitude.   

“You know, I would have a hard time to say that reflects policing,” Kuzyk told the News. “Because the next year it goes up to 10. So, if you’re going to take credit for the drop between 13 and seven, then who takes the blame for when it goes up to 10 again?”

Kuzyk finds it unreasonable to think that there is “one silver bullet.” 

To add to this distortion, Fair said that homicide numbers are often used to illustrate crime.

“Then they’ll report on murders — okay, there are two less murders than there were last year,” Fair said. “But how many shootings have there been? Is that success because the people didn’t die?”

Even Jacobson of the NHPD acknowledged this fact, saying that many victim’s lives are saved in hospitals such as Yale New Haven— they may not have been saved somewhere else like Hartford.

Fair said it is harmful for communities that continue experiencing high crime rates to continually hear officials touting that crime is down.

“[Those communities] feel like they are excluded when people talk about crime going down, because they hear gunshots every night,” Fair said.

She also noted that if you look around the city, there are parts of the community that can say crime is decreasing, while other parts remain more neglected, “so to stand publicly and say everything is better, that’s hurtful,” Fair said. 

Outlaw employed a metaphor for explaining what he believes to be the reason behind the citywide crime decrease. If it were a piece of pie, Outlaw said, he would give the NHPD 70 percent of the credit, and 30 percent to other city initiatives, such as Project Longevity and the Street Outreach Worker Program.

“People like myself who were once a problem in the neighborhood, or created violence or destructed communities, I think we should have a role in fixing this program,” Outlaw said.

To fully understand the forces decreasing crime, one must look from the macro-level of shifting drug markets and collective behavior, to the micro-level of the individual interventions. New Haven has changed as a city, and along with it over time, so has the nature of crime.

Still, the 50 non-fatal shootings and 10 homicides that New Haven saw in 2018 are too many — a point many city residents acknowledged.

Outlaw told the News that with the reputation he built before prison — involved in violent drug operations and tried four times in New Haven for violence — gives him an in into the community. The respect he commanded in the past — he still feels it. But it is a different kind of respect now.

“Back then I wasn’t helping my community, I was destroying my community,” Outlaw said. “But now, they see help, they see hope.”

UP CLOSE:
Similar problems, across the world

Story and Photographs by Asha Prihar
Published on April 5, 2019

Jordan Young ’21 has “no time to breathe” at Yale.

“Every day, I’m expected to be at work so I can give money back to my family, or so that I can just enjoy leisure,” he said at a Feb. 28 town hall hosted by the activist group Students Unite Now.

The February town hall gave students like Young the opportunity to describe the difficulties they faced because of the student effort portion of the financial aid — colloquially known as the Student Income Contribution — and to advocate for eliminating the requirement. Yale College Dean Marvin Chun later clarified and justified the student effort in response to student concerns at a Yale College Council town hall, citing the University’s limited budget for financial aid and emphasizing its numerous other major expenses.

Almost 9,500 miles away, Lorngdy Pon YNUS ’22 works several days a week on Yale-NUS College’s campus in Singapore, in part to help support his two younger brothers at home in Cambodia. Pon — whose mother had previously passed away — lost his father two weeks before his first-year orientation.

But since coming to Yale-NUS, Pon has also had to cover another expense. Although they reside on different campuses across the world, Young and Pon face the same challenge — having to cover the student effort portion of their financial aid package.

“I wish I could get more time,” Pon said in an interview with the News on March 19 . “I lose a lot of time and social events that I wish I could go to.”

At Yale-NUS, the Student Effort Contribution appeared in financial aid packages for the first time in the 2018–19 academic year, affecting just the incoming first-year class. While the newly implemented policy will not affect classes graduating in 2021 and prior, students receiving need-based scholarships in the classes of 2022 and subsequent years must pay S$1,500 per academic year — equivalent to about U.S.$1,100. The college expects students to earn the money from working on- or off-campus jobs during the term or over the summer.

In March, the News traveled to Singapore and spoke with six Yale-NUS administrators and staff members, six first years paying the SEC and seven other students connected to issues of socioeconomic class at the college. While some first-year students paying the contribution told the News that they understood the rationale behind the new policy, other students — both first years and upper-level students — are questioning its merits.

SHARING THE COST OF EDUCATION

Yale-NUS College, Yale’s sister school on the island-state of Singapore, is an anomaly in more ways than one.

Not only is it the first liberal arts college in the country, but it is one of the few institutions of higher education in the world that is both need-blind and meets full demonstrated need regardless of citizenship — at a school where international students comprise 40 percent of the student body. Currently, only seven U.S. colleges and universities, including Yale, are both need-blind and meet the full demonstrated need of all students.

In interviews with the News, Yale-NUS administrators stressed the college’s commitment to financial accessibility and diversity of all kinds. Just over 50 percent of students receive need-based financial aid, according to Yale-NUS President Tan Tai Yong. Yale-NUS Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Laura Severin said that the institution’s financial aid policies ensure that “there is space for students of all socioeconomic backgrounds at Yale-NUS.”

“We’re a very intentionally diverse community,” said Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Joanne Roberts. “When people look around, they say we have a lot of diversity that is visible, but we also have a lot of diversity that is less visible, because of this socioeconomic diversity.”

Yale-NUS calculates the amount of financial aid awarded to a student based on billed expenses, including tuition, residential fees and miscellaneous student fees. Students with “high financial need” may also receive a Book Allowance in their award to cover the unbilled cost of textbooks, Severin said. The new student effort contribution at Yale-NUS is applied towards billed expenses, unlike at Yale where the majority of student effort goes to cover unbilled expenses, like books and personal items.

Severin added that the total amount of the contribution is split between two semesterly bills, meaning that students pay S$750 twice a year. The amount is factored into each student’s term bill along with the student’s family contribution. Unlike at Yale, where the “student effort” portion of financial aid is lower for students from “high-need” families and first-year students, all Yale-NUS students receiving financial aid pay the same contribution regardless of the amount of aid they receive.

According to Tan, the college had been planning to introduce the contribution since its establishment in 2011 but could not immediately implement the policy because it “did not have the wherewithal” to provide a sufficient number of campus jobs for students. But as Yale-NUS and its programming and research have grown, so has the jobs base. Tan explained that jobs have been created as departments and faculty have begun seeking students to “help staff their programmes and assist them in research work or curricular work.” Tan added that most jobs pay around S$12 an hour — roughly equivalent to U.S.$9.

Tan said that the college introduced the SEC both to reinforce the idea that paying for college is a collaborative endeavor that should be shared by students and to give the college more financial flexibility. Tan did not specify how much money the college expects to raise through the SEC.

“The principle is very clear,” Tan said. “I think we first believe that the cost of education should in [a] way be shared by the school, by the state, by the families as well. I think this contribution is a way of saying that look, you are not here to stick out your hands and ask for a handout, but you are contributing partly to your own education.”

Tan added that this money ultimately “comes back to the students” in the form of better resources. The funding for the jobs comes from a variety of sources within and outside of the college — including departmental budgets and faculty research grants. But all money generated from the SEC returns to Yale-NUS’s financial aid budget “to help fund those who need it,” Tan explained.

“We don’t take the money and then say, ‘Okay, the president needs a new car,’ or that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s redistributed back to financial aid. It just makes the money travel and get optimally used in a more sort of distributive manner.”

LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD?

When Pon first learned of the student effort requirement from his financial aid award letter, he initially thought that the college would assign him a job where he could earn enough money to fulfill the contribution. Areet Roychowdhury YNUS ’22 said that he did not realize the S$750 would be due along with the rest of his fees in October. And upper-level students like Swarnima Sircar YNUS ’19 only heard about the new policy through their conversations with puzzled first years.

“I think that we thought that we had communicated it well,” Roberts said. “But I think … we really only communicated to first-year students because they were the only ones affected. I’ll be honest — this was a mistake. Our students … advocate for one another, so our upper-year students were [thinking], ‘Hey, how come didn’t we hear about this?’ And so if I could go back in time, we would have communicated it in a more explicit way to our upper-year students.”

Sircar said that when she learned about the contribution, she and Jin Hee Lee YNUS ’21 began meeting with administrators to clarify what the contribution was and to understand why it exists. Following advocacy from older students, the financial aid office issued a set of FAQs about the SEC, made available publicly on the school’s website. Once the student body became more informed about the new contribution requirement, students began voicing their objections to it. In early November, Matas Vitkauskas YNUS ’22 wrote an op-ed criticizing the SEC in the campus newspaper, The Octant. And on Jan. 22, the Student Government’s Senate — a body that acts as a liaison between administrators and student interests, according to Senate Speaker Jiang Haolie YNUS ’21 — passed a unanimous resolution condemning the SEC for “disadvantaging already underprivileged students.”

“As a student who has an incredible respect for Yale-NUS’s financial aid policies … I see the SEC as a regression of those principles,” Sircar said. “Fundamentally, the SEC is instituting a difference in experience for students who are on financial aid, and students who are not on financial aid.”

Sircar added that she believes that the inequity of experience that the SEC perpetuates is an even bigger issue at Yale-NUS than it is at Yale because the Singaporean college deliberately aims to create a “common experience” for every first year through programs like the Common Curriculum — a set of a required courses spanning several disciplines that all first years must take.

“I think our school has been doing a really good job of trying to level the field out, which is why I don’t want this to be a barrier to that,” Lee said. “I don’t think there’s a huge divide amongst us … which is why I’m like, ‘Don’t mess this up, yo!’ Don’t mess up what’s good.”

Still, many Yale-NUS students interviewed by the News seemed more indifferent towards the contribution. Kay Lee YNUS ’22, who receives financial aid, said that she “see[s] where the administration is coming from” with the SEC, even though she believes the financial aid office should take individual financial circumstances into account to determine the SEC’s amount for each student. Anupriya Ramamoorthy YNUS ’22 also said that she understands the rationale behind the contribution but pointed out that her fall term bill was due in October — fewer than two months after the semester began — making it nearly impossible for first years to earn enough to pay their share on time, she said.

Roychowdhury said that he did not have enough money to pay his fall semester bill and felt guilty that he placed that extra burden on his parents. Similarly, Vitkauskas was not able to secure a campus job for two months and relied on his parents to pay his initial bill — but plans to cover the other ones on his own.

And although Roberts, vice president of academic affairs, told the News that Yale-NUS has a surplus of jobs, several students told the News that they had difficulty finding employment. Roychowdhury pointed out that many of the on-campus jobs — such as positions in the college’s IT department — require special skills that first-year students are not likely to have.

But Severin emphasized that not all campus jobs “require specialised skill sets or academic backgrounds.”

“At Admissions and Financial Aid alone, we hire several first-year students as our student associates across a range of roles including student tour guides [and] managing our social media channels and video productions, for example,” Severin said.

She added that the college has encouraged students to either work off campus during term time or semester breaks, or to seek assistance from the financial aid office or the Centre for International and Professional Experience if they cannot find a job. And the college is planning ways to better inform first-year students about the on-campus employment process during orientation in future years, Severin said.

THE “MENTAL PRESSURE” OF THE SEC

Yale-NUS administrators interviewed by the News stressed that if students feel burdened by the SEC, they should approach administrators and staffers to discuss their individual circumstances.

While Severin has received a number of questions about the contribution generally, she said that no students approached her to talk about their specific situation. Still, she noted that she cannot speak to whether others on the financial aid team have spoken to students individually. She added that students who are having trouble meeting payment deadlines for any reason should contact student services, and that Yale-NUS “remains committed to helping students on an individual basis for such cases.”

But Vitkauskas, who had to ask his parents for money to pay his S$750, said that he did not approach the financial aid office because he did not think that the added mental pressure he felt from having to work a job was a valid reason for seeking help.

“It’s very hard to quantify what’s the effect on the student,” Vitkauskas said. “It’s mainly the increased mental pressure on you — feeling dissatisfied, feeling pressured by your parents. … I think that’s one of the reasons why I never went to the financial aid office. … You can’t change institutional policies because of subjective people.”

In his op-ed for The Octant, Vitkauskas wrote that he experienced “constant anxiety” because he was afraid he would not save up enough for his second semester bill and did not join extracurriculars out of fear that he would “[waste] money and not [dedicate] enough time to [his] ‘paying job.’”

After his father’s death at the end of the summer, Pon said he was left with both the SEC and his family contribution to pay on his bill first semester. While he said he had enough money to pay the initial bill out of pocket, Pon stressed that he will heavily rely on campus employment in the future to pay his share.

“If I don’t have a job, I just have no backup,” Pon said.

Pon added that he did reach out to the financial aid office about the changes in his family’s circumstances to ask if they would reconsider, and possibly reduce, his SEC. He said that the office told him that there were enough jobs on campus and that paying the SEC would not be a problem if he found one.

Despite discontent among some members of the class of 2022, few affected first years are speaking out against the SEC. Instead, upper-level students such as Sircar and Lee, along with members of student government, are leading the charge to fix the problems surrounding the contribution and to eliminate the requirement altogether.

“I think because financial conversations are a great challenge here … very few freshmen actually voice their concerns regarding the SEC,” Roychowdhury said. “I think some of them don’t want to go against the college, maybe that’s why. Because they think they would face backlash, because they are also in a way privileged because they are getting this financial aid.”

While their leadership has raised the profile of the issue, Sircar and Lee both said that they feel that the fact that the SEC does not personally affect them has worked against their agenda.

“I’ve been directly questioned: ‘Why do I care about the SEC?’ … I find that very condescending and patronizing,” Sircar said. “I care about this community. I care about the people who are going to be part of this community. As an alum, I want to be able to be proud of this institution and everything that I’ve gotten from it, and the SEC directly interferes with that.”

Lee concurred. She added that she finds it “upsetting” when people question her involvement since she cares about her community and wants to be an ally to first years who are responsible for paying the contribution.

Sircar related first years’ reluctance to speak out to what she says is a culture of not expressing dissent on campus, and in Singapore more generally. She explained that at the college, people can often be dismissive toward those who are confrontational about their views, even if the points they raise are valid.

“It is a bit frowned on here to protest, in the sense that making your views known in an overly controversial and aggressive way is a surefire way to get people to be immediately dismissive of your point,” Sircar said. “That is definitely particular to the Singaporean context, just because of the way civil society has to work here, but also that’s a way that dialogue [works] at Yale-NUS. Because of that, talking about the SEC or talking about financial accessibility is difficult because it’s overtly political in a way that people do not want to get into it, or might not even care about it.”

THE “INVISIBILITY” OF CLASS

The culture of avoiding confrontation on campus has manifested in students’ unwillingness to talk not only about the SEC but also about socioeconomic issues on campus more broadly. As a result, many challenges affecting the college’s low-income population are rarely discussed — if at all.

While many colleges and universities in the U.S. have established programming, resources and affinity groups to support first-generation low-income college students, Roberts explained that similar endeavors at Yale-NUS come with added complications because of the school’s international makeup. The first-generation designation and its underlying implications are specific to the North American context, she said. While there are indeed first-generation students at Yale-NUS who face disadvantages due to their backgrounds, the variety of cultural contexts at the school means that there are also many students in similar socioeconomic situations whose parents did attend a higher education institution.

Student Government Director of Diversity and Inclusion Kristian-Marc James Paul YNUS ’19 said that when he sought to establish a support system for first-generation college students at Yale-NUS, other student government members told him that previous attempts did not work due to a lack of inclusivity. With this in mind, Yale-NUS’ student government established the “In-Betweeners” network during this academic year, which aims to provide support not only for students who are the first in their family to attend college, but also for those who may not fit into the category by definition but still feel that they face similar challenges.

In February, Olivia Dure and Jane Zhang YNUS ’18 assembled “Money Matters,” a library display featuring a collection of students’ thoughts on the meaning of money and class at the college. They work as Dean’s Fellows — recent college graduates who support students and foster community on Yale-NUS’ campus. Zhang said that they conceived the exhibit after realizing that many of the issues for which students sought support related to underlying socioeconomic factors. With this in mind, she and Dure brainstormed a way “to elevate voices of people who want to talk about [class] but don’t know how,” Zhang said.

Sircar noted that visible status symbols are not particularly prevalent on campus, making socioeconomic status less obvious to the naked eye.

“We don’t have Canada Goose jackets here,” Sircar, who studied abroad at Yale last spring, said.

Still, Sircar noted that the lack of obvious status symbols “invisibilizes” issues of financial accessibility. While low-income students are not publicly pegged as coming from less privileged backgrounds, she said that they face less noticeable issues that affect them socially, such as having to work on the weekends or avoiding extracurricular activities that cost extra money.

“I don’t think we have conversations about class enough at Yale-NUS,” Paul said. “I think that is the product, to some extent, of the lack of conversation in Singapore. … I know of people … who come from a place of financial privilege in very specific spaces because of the high schools they were in, and so class is never necessarily something that they have had to interact with in the way that … other people have had to.”

As a student at Yale-NUS, Zhang — who graduated last year — said she identified as lower-middle class and worked multiple jobs through college without her parents financially contributing to her education. Still, she found that she rarely felt comfortable discussing issues of class with her peers and had no idea how to find students of similar backgrounds.

While conversations about first-generation or low-income students occasionally popped up in “small pockets,” Zhang said the conversation was never as sustained as this year’s dialogue surrounding the SEC.

“It can feel very suffocating to have a reality that affects how you live and how you operate on campus that you can’t put your finger on why that is or why that’s different,” Zhang said. “I’ve had students come to me about a variety of things, feeling like they’re not doing well enough in classes or aren’t able to pursue different opportunities, and blaming it on themselves. … I think when the conversation starts, you start realizing it’s more than just personal. … They’ve had different access to opportunities, and I think validating that is important in helping shift conversation … [rather] than students having those battles in their own heads.”

TRADE-OFFS

Just weeks after the YCC town hall in early March, Chun, along with the senior trustee of the Yale Corporation Catharine Bond Hill GRD ’85, once again found himself in conversation with students about the student effort component of financial aid. But this time, the two were not in New Haven. Rather, Chun and Hill were in Singapore at Yale-NUS, where they both sit on the Governing Board.

In the March 18 discussion, Chun and Hill listened to an influx of student concerns and objections to the SEC, both broad and specific. Students discussed the difficulties of finding jobs, the inconvenience of billing cycle timing and first years’ reluctance to go to administrators about their individual cases. After talking over these issues, Chun and Hill told students they would pass along their concerns to the rest of the Governing Board.

When students asked the two board members whether it was possible to get rid of the contribution, both explained the SEC to students in terms of “trade-offs.”

“Eliminating something like the student effort for all students is going to be quite challenging for a budget, and it will have to entail some trade-offs, and so any discussion about the student effort probably needs to be about what trade-offs are an institution and students willing to accept,” Chun told the News a week after the session.

Tan explained that funds from the SEC are not meant to directly “generat[e] income for the College,” but rather to “ensur[e] that resources continue to feed back into the financial aid pool so that we can continue to be not just needs blind but also needs fulfilling.” The financial aid pool also funds co-payments for things like emergency support funds, Center for International and Professional Experience programming and financial support for unpaid internships — “things that less advantaged students will benefit from [having] access to,” Tan said.

And beyond giving disadvantaged students access to funds while they are at the college, the expanded financial aid budget will allow the college to sustain its need blind admissions process for years to come, administrators argue. According to a transcript of Chun and Hill’s meeting with students that was obtained by the News, Hill drew a parallel between SEC’s institution at Yale-NUS and the policies she adopted during her her tenure as president of Vassar College to explain the SEC’s necessity. She said that when Vassar eliminated loans from its financial aid and moved toward a need-blind model that allowed more students with lower family incomes to be admitted, its financial aid packages had to include a work expectation — without it, Hill said, it would have been difficult to maintain need-blind admissions.

In a March 7 interview with the News, Chun offered a similar explanation for retaining Yale’s student effort requirement.

“If [students] recognize that there are trade-offs, then the community should have a discussion as to what those trade-offs should be,” Chun said. “I just don’t see what the options are. In theory, we could reduce the number of students on financial aid; I don’t think anyone wants that. We could raise tuition on those who are paying; I don’t think anyone wants that either. … I think it’s important for students to be practical about the notion of, even in large, million-dollar scales, we all have a fixed budget — money, like what it would take to eliminate the student share, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere.”

Still, the question of whether it is better to admit more low-income students and keep the SEC or to admit a smaller number of students requiring financial aid while providing them with greater financial support is open-ended.

Ramamoorthy told the News that she understands that the contribution allows the college to give out financial aid to a higher number of people, and although she thinks the amount of the contribution should be lowered, she does not object to paying the SEC in order to give more students on need-based aid the opportunity to attend Yale-NUS.

But Vitkauskas questioned that notion.

“It doesn’t matter that you create more spots for people to get financial aid, to the point where the education hurts people when it comes to their mental health … and to the point where you actually feel like you don’t have the same type of opportunities as your fellow classmates,” Vitkauskas said. “I don’t know if it’s worth it. I don’t know if it’s worth it to take in more people as opposed to taking care of the people that you already have.”

Correction, April 8: A previous version of this story stated that Jane Zhang YNUS ’18 graduated from Yale-NUS in 2017. In fact, she graduated in 2018. 

MEN'S BASKETBALL: March Madness coverage 2019

Published on March 24, 2019

The Yale men’s basketball team advanced to March Madness for the second time in 57 years. Here is a compilation of the News’ coverage of the Bulldogs’ 2019 Big Dance experience.

No. 2 Yale advances to March Madness with 97–85 win over No. 1 Harvard

For just the second time in 57 years, Yale men’s basketball earned a berth to the Big Dance.

In a 12-point victory over No. 1 Harvard (18–11, 10–4 Ivy) at John J. Lee Amphitheater, the Bulldogs (22–7, 10–4) built a second-half lead with a 15–0 run to overcome 38 points from Crimson guard Bryce Aiken and persistent foul trouble for guard Miye Oni ’20. Guard Alex Copeland ’19, named the Most Outstanding Player at Ivy Madness, facilitated Yale’s second-period surge and scored a team-high 25 points to help crown the Elis as the 2019 Ivy League Tournament Champions. Oni added 17, guard Azar Swain ’21 scored 15 with stellar three-point shooting and Yale shot over 60 percent to extend an already memorable postseason run.

For Alex Copeland ’19 and UC Irvine’s Max Hazzard, NCAA tournament berths turn middle-school dream to reality

Yale men’s basketball guard Alex Copeland ’19 knew he needed a good sleep before an Ivy Madness final against Harvard on Sunday. The senior dropped 16 points in a six-point semifinal win over Princeton Saturday afternoon, setting the stage for a Harvard-Yale matchup that would send the Elis to March Madness.

There was only one issue. UC Irvine (30–5, 15–1 Big West) guard Max Hazzard — Copeland’s best friend, former rival in Los Angeles’s Mission League and the Anteaters’ leading scorer — was preparing to lead his then-29-win squad over Cal State Fullerton in the Big West tournament championship, a contest that did not tip off until midnight on the East Coast. The Yale (22–7, 10–4 Ivy) senior, who said he talks with Hazzard every day and tunes into as many Irvine games as he can, settled on a compromise.

“I knew that I had to wake up early for our game against Harvard, so I sent him a really long text right before I went to sleep,” Copeland said. “I ended up waking up at four a.m. and checking it, and I saw that they won. I remember just smiling and feeling so overwhelmed and then going to bed with a smile…When I woke up, I then texted him and we talked a little bit and he said, ‘Hey man, go get it… I’m proud of you, whatever happens today.’”

What you need to know about Yale’s first round opponent, LSU

The Yale men’s basketball team, for the second time in four years, earned an NCAA tournament berth. After downing rival Harvard in the final of the Ivy League tournament, the Elis earned a 14 seed in the East Regional of March Madness. They then headed to Jacksonville to go toe-to-toe with the third-seeded LSU Tigers, who rank 12th in the country according to the AP Top-25 poll.

In this story, the News highlighted a few things to know about the Bulldogs’ first-round opponent.

No. 14 Yale earns early respect as trendy upset pick

Although some have grumbled that Yale deserved a thirteen seed, the No. 14 Elis have garnered early attention — from college basketball analysts, average fans and even celebrities  — as a popular upset pick.

Keys to the Game for Yale-LSU

Last time the Bulldogs made an appearance in the NCAA tournament, they toppled a fifth-seeded Baylor squad and earned the program’s first NCAA tournament victory. With head coach James Jones stating on Wednesday that the postseason will not alter the brand of basketball that Yale will play, there are some specific focuses that could be key in slaying the Bengals of Baton Rouge.

No. 14 Yale hopes to tame No. 3 LSU Tigers in NCAA tournament

Early Thursday afternoon, Yale men’s basketball head coach James Jones hoped to lead his Bulldogs to another upset victory in only his second career NCAA tournament appearance — and the school’s second in 57 years.

After defeating Princeton and Harvard in New Haven to capture an Ivy Madness crown by scoring a combined 180 points across both games, No. 14 Yale (22–7, 10–4 Ivy) and its high-octane offense will meet the regular season champion out of the SEC, No. 3 LSU (26–6, 16–2 SEC). In attempting to shut down the Tigers and their star sophomore guard Tremont Waters — a New Haven native who Jones recruited — the Bulldogs will meet an athletic squad that has generated hype about its pace, freshmen class and dominance on the offensive glass.

But as Jones pointed out at media day, the Elis have largely held their own against high-major opponents like Miami and No. 1 overall seed Duke while defeating fifth-seeded Baylor back in the 2016 tournament — a win that featured minor contributions from the current senior class — without letting the opponent alter their approach to the game. Jones, in fact, watched the historic 79–75 win over the Bears on his laptop Tuesday night.

With Yale playing in Jacksonville, Austin Williams ’20 is back home

Of all eight cities hosting opening rounds of the 2019 NCAA tournament, Hartford and its XL Center may have attracted the largest Yale crowd.

In 2016, after all, the Bulldogs (22–7, 10–4 Ivy) played in Providence’s Dunkin’ Donuts Center, drawing a large Bulldog crowd in their 79–75 defeat of Baylor. But after Yale secured its spot in the NCAA tournament Sunday afternoon, forward Austin Williams ’20 had his heart set on another site. And within minutes of the Elis convening to watch CBS’s Selection Sunday show live, Jacksonville native Williams saw his wish realized.

“I was really hoping for [Jacksonville] for sure, just to get a chance to get home and see my friends and family,” Williams said. “And our closest game has been in Miami and a lot of my family didn’t end up being able to make it with work and stuff, so it’ll be a good chance — and the weather is nice.”

Yale’s postseason run ends after 79–74 tournament loss to No. 3 LSU

In its opening-round NCAA tournament matchup, Yale men’s basketball trailed third-seed LSU 68–62 with just over 60 seconds remaining when the Bulldogs began to foul.

The Tigers (27–6, 16–2 SEC) had hit only 10 of their 18 free throw attempts of the game when guard Miye Oni ’20 fouled Tiger guard Javonte Smart after a great three-point look that spiraled out. So when No. 14 Yale (22–8, 10–4 Ivy) started hacking Tigers on the inbounds, hopes of a late-game takeover remained. After shooting only 4-for-30 from deep for the first 39 minutes, Yale’s rushed pull-up attempts began falling — first it was guard Alex Copeland ’19 on the fast break with 44 seconds to go then forward Jordan Bruner ’20 in the corner. Copeland would hit from deep again while Bruner drained another three-pointer to cut the LSU lead to 77–74 with 12 seconds to play.

But LSU calmly knocked down its shots from the charity stripe down the stretch, shooting nine of 10 from the free throw line in the final minute. After trailing by 16 at halftime, Yale’s sustained second-half comeback and 24 points from Copeland kept the Elis a mere arm’s length from LSU’s lead for much of the period. It forever felt as if Yale was just one key stop and one big shot away from swinging its postseason fate around. LSU benefitted from a balanced attack that included double-doubles for forwards Naz Reid and Kavell Bigby-Williams and 19 points from guard Skylar Mays.

“I’m so proud of this group and just the fight that we showed,” Copeland said. “We were in the locker room at halftime, and I think we were a little down for a moment, but we all kind of came together and told each other, look, we can do this. We can fight back. We’ve been down before, and to come out and battle back like that and put on a show for our fans that were here and that were watching across the country feels amazing.”