THE MAGAZINE ABOUT THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N YA L E & N E W H AV E N
VOL 51 / ISS 2 / OCT 2018
THE NEW JOURNAL
BIAS IN BLUE
editors-in-chief Annie Rosenthal Mark Rosenberg managing editor Arya Sundaram senior editors Antonia Ayres-Brown Chris Hays Robert Scaramuccia associate editors Laura Glesby Max Graham Rachel Koh Sohum Pal Elliot Wailoo
copy editors Kofi Ansong Yonatan Greenberg Sofia Laguarda Sara Luzuriaga Eliana Swerdlow design editors Merritt Barnwell Meher Hans Sam Oldshue Rachel Wolf photo editors Robbie Short Vivek Suri web developer Philippe Chlenski
reporting supported by the Edward Bennett III Memorial Fund members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen
Dear readers, It’s been quite a month. On September 23, The New Yorker reported that Debbie Ramirez had accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of exposing himself to her in a Lawrance dorm during their first year at Yale. Glued to the livestream between classes, Yale students watched the Senate Judiciary Committee interrogate a woman eager to be “helpful” as she shared memories of trauma, and a graduate of our college who responded to allegations of assault with red-faced indignation. Our leaders –– nationally, and here on campus –– were not a source of inspiration or support that week. Yale Law School administrators and faculty teetered back and forth in their positions on Kavanaugh and the College administration declined to take a stance; our mothers called to remind us of Anita Hill’s testimony 27 years ago, and it seemed not much had changed. It was Yale students who rallied around survivors of sexual assault and pledged to build a better culture themselves. For this issue, Mark spoke to the five first-year women who live in the suite where (now-Justice) Kavanaugh allegedly harassed Ramirez. As their story makes clear, Yale’s past is not far removed from its present; as student activists make clear, a better future may be closer than we think. Our cover story this issue is the product of a four-month investigation by associate editor Laura Glesby into policing on and around Yale’s campus. Her dogged reporting uncovered two new allegations of racially biased policing, and situated an incident at the Hall of Graduate Studies that attracted national attention this May within the Yale Police Department’s 124-year history. It’s well worth a read. Reporting a story like Laura’s is time-consuming and can be expensive. If you have an idea for a similarly ambitious story, and are seeking financial and editorial support, apply for the Edward B. Bennett III Memorial Award! We’ll give out grants of an average of $300 to cover reporting costs for stories to be published in TNJ this spring. Application materials are available on our website. If you have any questions, reach out to either of us by email –– we’d love to talk about it. Applications are due by November 1. For now, enjoy the issue! Mark Rosenberg and Annie Rosenthal, Editors-in-Chief mark.b.rosenberg@yale.edu anna.rosenthal@yale.edu
The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.
THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 51 issue 2 OCT 2018
SINCE 1967
www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com 26 cover BIAS IN BLUE Bringing forth new allegations, Black students and New Haven residents say that Yale’s police presence has threatened their sense of safety and belonging. Laura Glesby
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critical angle A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW Science research at Yale is funded by the family responsible for the opioid crisis. Faculty members don’t seem to care. Candice Wang
standards points of departure 4 BROKE BY DESIGN — Zola Canady JESUS CHRIST, SUPERSTAR — Noah Macey 8 snapshot ART OF THE STATE — Leila Murphy Northwest of New Haven, the first museum in the Americas dedicated to Palestinian art has opened its doors. 12 snapshot JUSTICE UNCONFIRMED — Mark Rosenberg As Brett Kavanaugh heads to the Supreme Court, his legacy looms over Yale’s campus. 19 profile THE SCIENTIST AND THE SHRUB — Henry Reichard Michael Donoghue is the world’s leading expert on a plant no one’s ever heard of. 23 essay UNTIL IT CRACKS — Mariah Kreutter 33 poem IT IS THE FIRST DAY OF AUTUMN — Oriana Tang
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BROKE BY DESIGN As expenses pile up, low-income art students at Yale are forced to curtail their creativity. Zola Canady
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his fall, Adam Moftah’s expenses added up quickly. He spent $15 Xeroxing old graphic designs to make new compositions for a project. Then, after he turned the project in, he learned from his professor that he’d approached the assignment incorrectly, and would have to start anew. Meanwhile, he had two credit card bills due soon — nearly $200 for books, school supplies, and other expenses from the start of the semester. For Moftah, a senior from New York City, majoring in art hasn’t come cheap. He estimates he has spent at least $1,000 over the past four years on materials and printing fees. One course cost him $650 alone. One of the main expenses art students face is paying for materials, which, unlike textbooks, cannot be rented
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photos by Robbie Short
or downloaded as a PDF online. For students who are financially secure, then, taking an art class may require only shelling out a couple hundred dollars more. But for students who, like Moftah, receive nearly full financial aid, the extra financial burden can mean the difference between paying bills on time and taking on debt. Recently, Moftah has started combining coding and art to explore virtual reality. Currently, although he is an undergraduate, he works as a graduate fellow at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM). This past August, Moftah’s work with virtual reality was exhibited in a virtual gallery maze at the CCAM called “Labyrinths.” He hopes to graduate with a job at an advertising or marketing firm, or at an art studio. But at Yale, financial strain has affected Moftah’s cre-
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ativity, he says. In trying to buy the cheapest materials and use as little as possible, Moftah says, you’re “basically reducing your experimental ambitions.” Now, he’s starting to take more digital video courses instead of graphic design courses because digital courses don’t charge additional fees to students. The Yale School of Art offers classes to both undergraduates and Masters of Fine Arts graduate students. At the undergraduate level, courses typically require about $150 in course fees, paid directly to professors to cover communal supplies, visits from guest speakers, and transportation costs for field trips. These fees don’t include the cost of textbooks or materials fees. Art students pay course fees once they turn in their schedules, weeks after paying tuition. As a result, these fees are not calculated in students’ cost of attendance, or in financial aid scholarships. To help art students finance summer opportunities abroad or at work, the School of Art offers the Robert Reed Scholarship Fund, but it does not provide scholarships to cover costs incurred during the academic year. Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art Lisa Kereszi says that over the past few years, art students have frequently come to her for help with course fees –– so often that Assistant Dean for the Arts Kate Krier decided to buy cameras for students to borrow from the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Circulation Desk, near the School of Art. Previously, the desk had only offered help with laptops. Still, Kereszi admits, “I can do very little, honestly. And I don’t know if my students now feel resentful.” When a student comes to Kereszi, she suggests that they ask their head of college or financial aid officer if a portion of their financial aid can be applied directly to course fees. This year, Moftah received $600 in addition to the $60,887 he typically receives in his financial aid package. The grant was labeled “Supplemental Allowance,” funds Yale projected he would need for “senior expenses.” In years past, with no additional funding, Moftah had resorted to working up to three campus jobs during the semester ranging from shelving books in Sterling Memorial Library to modeling nude for other art classes. Sometimes, professors try to help. Hazal Özgür is a junior art major from Turkey. Özgür says that an art professor once offered to pay for her materials, but she didn’t take him up on it. “I was like, ‘Nah, I can do this, don’t worry.’ Because I’ve been doing this anyway, $50 isn’t going to solve my problems.” While Özgür praised her professor’s kindness, she does not feel comfortable accepting money from faculty. “It’s a sticky situation to be in,” she said. OCTOBER 2018
As a professor, Kereszi typically uses course fees to fund field trips to museums and host guest critics or lecturers. In early October, Kereszi took two of her classes to New York City and used the course fees to pay for her students’ train tickets, metro cards, and museum tickets. While she realizes that these fees are an extra burden on students — Kereszi was a low-income art major herself — she says that trips like these are necessary for a quality art education. Beyond course fees, there are still more hurdles. Traditionally, juniors who are art majors have worked in studio spaces in the sculpture building, but due to the recent growth in the number of art majors, juniors were not offered studios this year. While some of her wealthier friends rented spaces in New Haven, which can cost $600 each month, Özgür didn’t have the money to do so. Working in her apartment isn’t an option for Özgür; it’s small enough to trap toxic paint fumes. For now, she can’t afford to buy canvases, so she can’t tackle her artistic specialty — large scale paintings. In fact, Özgür is currently working on only one piece, since she lacks the money to do more. “No one really talks about these issues in the School of Art, and in this major in general,” she said. “It’s sort of like an unspoken thing. Because [majoring in art] implies that you know what you’re getting yourself into. It’s like, ‘We’re not forcing you to do this, you’re choosing this for yourself.’” Kerezsi acknowledges that this dynamic is an issue. “I know how hard it is to go to a wealthy school and be one of the students who’s a ‘scholarship kid,’” Kerezsi says. “It’s really important to me that one of the many ways Yale is diverse is class.” Meanwhile, Moftah says that being asked to re-do his graphic design project was an informative experience. Now, when he works on projects, he is forced to account for the financial uncertainty that accompanies doing art at Yale and contend with his steep printing costs. Creating art, for him, is no longer exploratory. “There’s pressure to be doing well. Part of doing well is figuring out printing, and part of doing that is having a lot of money to spend on printing,” he said. “I need to figure this out sooner. I can’t be as experimental; I have to be more deliberate.”
– Zola Canady is a first-year in Trumbull College.
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JESUS CHRIST, A new church on College Street is attempting to convert the masses with guitar riffs and blowtorches. POINT
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very Sunday morning around 6:00 a.m., the interior of College Street Music Hall undergoes a subtle metamorphosis. The bar is shuttered, coffee urns appear in the front lobby, and rows of chairs replace the Saturday-night concert detritus strewn about the 2,000-person venue. The concert lights and an earplug dispenser stay in place. Church starts at 8:30. As congregants meander into the building under a marquee advertising this season’s concert lineup, which features Dirty Heads and Lil Yachty, volunteers clad in black t-shirts distribute grins, information cards, and “good-morning”s. Soaring vocals fight their way through the bellowing synth and guitar and into the lobby: Who the Son sets free, oh! Is free indeed— I’m a child of God, Yes I am! Vox Church, known until June as City Church, holds three services every Sunday morning. In 2011, Christian-rocker-turned-pastor Justin Kendrick started the ministry out of Toad’s Place. The non-denominational, bornagain congregation has since outgrown Toads’ 750-person space and spread beyond New Haven, with a campus down the coast in Bridgeport and another set to open in Stamford in 2019. Vox has also floated up the Connecticut River into North Haven, Middletown, and Hartford, and just crossed state lines this October into Massachusetts—a state where less than one in four people attend religious services weekly, according to Pew’s most recent Religious Landscape Study. Connecticut isn’t much more pious; Pew ranks it as the forty-sixth most religious state, ahead of Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Despite these statistics, the landing page on Vox’s website trumpets a mission
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“to see New England become the most spiritually vibrant place on Earth.” The church’s success is especially surprising given the recent drop in the number of born-again and evangelical Christians, which fell from 26 percent of the nation’s population in 2007 to 17 percent in 2016. Only a tenth of evangelicals are under 30. Vox seems to buck these trends, among others. As Kendrick quipped in a sermon this summer, “This ain’t the church Grandma went to.” The sermons at Vox begin after a thirty-minute musical performance by the church’s “worship team,” often led by Justin’s wife, Chrisy. They belt out pop-hymns in front of LED rectangles. Yellow and fuchsia concert lights sweep over the crowd, illuminating a diverse array of congregants, some with hands raised in praise, others with heads bowed in worship, and at least one infant wearing noise-cancelling headphones. As the band ends on a crescendo, Kendrick, his dark hair and five o’clock shadow visible from the back of the hall, rocks onstage in time with the guitar. He greets the assembled with a voice at least as loud as the band he’s replacing: “Welcome to church!” It’s when he’s behind the microphone that I wish I’d grabbed earplugs on the way in. Kendrick reminds everyone that Vox is “one church in five locations.” His sermon is live-streamed to the church’s offshoots. It’s also posted to the Vox website, with a dubstep-drop intro slapped onto the beginning, so viewers can attend church wherever there’s WiFi. The digital revolution isn’t only for the ministry: Churchgoers with glowing phones aren’t texting during Kendrick’s sermon—they’re following his scripture references with an online Bible. The congregation, which numbers 2,000 each week across the church’s campuses, matches Kendrick’s energy. Applause erupts almost a dozen times a sermon, and con-
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SUPERSTAR Noah Macey
photos by Meher Hans
cert-worthy woooos are more common than you’d think. Vox encourages its parishioners to take notes, which is challenging because Kendrick’s pace is quick: he zings from childhood stories to Biblical exegesis to TED Talk– style life lessons. Once or twice a sermon, he stops to announce, “If you’re taking notes today, you can write this down,” before presenting some of the day’s distilled wisdom. One Sunday in September, Kendrick used a blowtorch, Drano, a straitjacket, and a tennis ball as part of an extended vulnerability metaphor that brought the house down. Minutes later, the woman next to me was moved to tears by the pastor’s story about apologizing to his elevenyear-old son. Tim Gnaneswaran, Connections Director for Vox’s New Haven Campus, says he knows why the services are so powerful. “The Holy Spirit,” he tells me. “[The Gospel] is the book we’re sharing, but the Holy Spirit is moving in our services, and that’s what makes them dynamic.” Raquel Sequeira, a Yale sophomore and one of several Yale students who regularly attend Vox, wasn’t sure about the church’s “rock-and-roll” vibe at first. But alongside the theatrics she found a pastor who takes the Bible seriously—often delving into the original Greek—without losing sight of personal spiritual experience. The flashy style mattered to her less than the biblical content. “What ended up being true was something [Kendrick] says a lot: ‘Connecting with God is more than your brain, more than your mind, more than your emotions.’” For Sequeira, the central question of a religious space is, “Do I feel like the Holy Spirit is here?” She says the answer at Vox is yes. Plus, unlike other churches in the area, Vox doesn’t feel “tailored to students.” Sequeira’s only hesitation is that among the bells and whistles and blowtorches, the church can come off as
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“appearance-focused,” especially compared to the Anglican parish where she was raised. When the pastor is in ripped jeans and the church is in a concert hall, the branding is so pointed, Sequiera thinks, that it might appear disingenuous. Timothy White, a junior, went so far as to call Vox’s marketing tactics “somewhat nefarious.” White, who is gay and grew up as the son of an Evangelical minister, told me that a lack of clarity and inconsistency between marketing and doctrine can make parishioners feel excluded from a community that otherwise espouses, according to their website, “respect and Christian love.” At Vox, he said, “They present an image of diversity, while excluding people under wraps.” White said the church isn’t up-front about its belief, lifted from Corinthians I and common among evangelicals, that sex is a spiritual experience only appropriate in a marriage between a man and a woman. Since White stopped attending in 2016, Vox has held a sermon on sexuality (also featuring a blowtorch) that clarified its adherence to that interpretation of Corinthians. The name “Vox” also arrived after White left, and is part of a push to showcase the church’s self-proclaimed uniqueness. “Although the name City Church carries so much meaning for us,” explained Kendrick in a video announcement of the name change on the church’s YouTube channel, “it’s also a name used by many churches across the country.” Vox has a more distinct flavor. Meaning “voice” in Latin, the name is inspired by John 5:25, which Kendrick quotes later in the same video: “Truly I say to you, an hour is coming and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear”—with or without earplugs, one assumes—“will live.” – Noah Macey is a senior in Timothy Dwight College.
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ART OF THE STATE Northwest of New Haven, the first museum in the Americas dedicated to Palestinian art has opened its doors.
Leila Murphy
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oodbridge, Connecticut, a sleepy suburb fifteen minutes northwest of downtown New Haven, is an unlikely home for Palestine Museum U.S.—the first and only museum in the Americas dedicated solely to Palestinian history, culture, and art. Woodbridge has a sizable Jewish population: two Jewish community centers and three synagogues flank the museum. It’s exactly the kind of place where one might expect a museum dedicated to Palestine to raise more than a few eyebrows. Faisal Saleh, the Palestinian businessman who founded the museum last spring, and now serves as its director, claims no political agenda. He said he hopes to use the museum to showcase the artistic excellence of Palestinians, providing visitors with a glimpse of what Palestinians are like “outside of all the mumble jumble of the political haranguing and arguments.” This “mumble jumble”—which, this past summer, included border protests and shootings in Gaza, paired with the Trump administration’s divisive decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—
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photos by Leila Murphy
overshadows much of the discourse around Palestine in the U.S. The U.S. was the first country to recognize Israel in 1948, and has long been Israel’s largest trading partner and political ally. Most Americans learn about Palestinians through politicians like Newt Gingrich, who has called the Palestinians an “invented people,” or Donald Trump, who recently tweeted that Palestinians do not “appreciate or respect” the U.S. and are unwilling to talk peace. Far more Americans sympathize more with Israel (54 percent) than with the Palestinians (14 percent) in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center Foreign Policy study—in contrast with global public opinion, which is generally more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. In this polarized political climate, Saleh feels that art humanizes Palestinians, providing an entry point into dialogue in a way that no political negotiations can. Saleh was born in El Bireh, a Palestinian city about ten miles north of Jerusalem in the central West Bank — a land east of Israel that today most of the international community considers to be illegally occupied Palestinian territory. His family’s story is “like the story of millions of Palestinians,” he said. “They were refugees in 1948. Their families lost everything. They had to pick up the pieces—they had to struggle.” Saleh came to the U.S. to finish his high school diploma in 1969, when he was seventeen. He received a Bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and an M.B.A. from the University of Connecticut, and has lived in the United States ever since, working in human resources for over forty years. He opened the museum on the ground floor of an office building he owns on a quiet stretch of the Litchfield Turnpike. Renovations began in September of 2017, and the museum opened less than a year later, in April of 2018. According to Saleh, about half of the museum’s visitors are of Palestinian descent, often hailing from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In addition to showcasing Palestinian art, the museum also hosts cultural events. In recent months, it has hosted a traditional Palestinian storyteller, an Arab-Israeli member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), and a comedy show with a Palestinian-American comedian that drew a crowd of THE NEW JOUR NAL
over a hundred people. I arrived for a tour on a Sunday afternoon. A floor-toceiling mural on the left wall of the reception area featured the pensive face of a young white woman, superimposed over a scene of the young woman standing in front of an armed bulldozer. Chris, a volunteer, told me that the mural was painted in tribute to Rachel Corrie, an American pro-Palestine activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003. An aerial photograph of Jerusalem extended across the wall opposite the mural, and a table lined with books related to Palestine stood in between. Dina Omar, an Anthropology graduate student at Yale and museum volunteer, approached and introduced herself. Omar is Palestinian; her family hails from Ramoun, a small village in the West Bank. She led me from the first room, the reception area, into a larger gallery, filled with black-and-white photographs on three walls. A middle-aged man with white hair and glasses was nailing down some of the photographs whose edges had curled up. (“It’s the weather,” he said.) He came over and introduced himself as Faisal. Saleh and Omar took me on a tour of the four-thousand-square-foot museum, which consists of several galleries and a large event space, all on the ground floor of the building. Saleh began with the collection of pre-1948 photographs of Palestine, which he picked out himself. “We wanted to show what Palestine was like in the nineteen-hundreds, that there was a thriving community of Palestinians,” he said. A few photographs depict Palestinian resistance against British rule and Zionist emigration to Palestine. Others present scenes of everyday life: a cotton market in Jerusalem, a class picture of students at a girls’ school. Saleh led me to a case containing an old passport labeled “The State of Palestine” and a small business ledger. These documents belong to Saleh’s father, who owned a business in Palestine that grew and exported fruit. The staple holding the documents together, Saleh proudly told me, had survived since 1946. Most of the artists on display are from the West Bank or Gaza—some still live there, while others live and work abroad. One objective of the museum is to provide a market for Palestinian art. “Art galleries in Palestine caught wind of this gallery and were hungry to show in the U.S.,” Saleh said. The Palestine Museum invites proposals for exhibition from Palestinian artists on its website. Saleh is open to featuring artists working in a variety of media. Maisarah Baroud, an artist from Gaza, draws heavily on mystical imagery in haunting black-and-white ink drawings. His piece “Dialogue” depicts hollowed-out, skeletal bodies, which, Omar explained, represent the OCTOBER 2018
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faded dreams of the “Oslo generation.” The Palestinians who grew up in aftermath of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, which marked the first time that the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) formally recognized one another and committed to negotiate a solution of territorial compromise. The accords, she said, were supposed to provide peace, but “ended up trapping Palestinians into smaller enclaves.” Omar showed me a wall with expressionist paintings of solemn, richly colored figures, made by Malak Mattar, an eighteen-year-old artist from Gaza. One painting—titled “The Memories”—depicts a gaunt woman with sunken eyes and arms held tightly at her sides. “Many of her paintings appear claustrophobic, mirroring what life is like in Gaza,” Omar explained. Depictions of claustrophobia and isolation recur in many of the works on display, reflecting the constraints of life under occupation and in the diaspora. “We are a very scattered population that is, by design, separated,” she said. For Omar, the art is evidence of the power of human expression to triumph in spite of external constraints. “When you can’t say what’s overtly happening to you, 10
oftentimes art can be a separate sort of entity for your own self-expression,” she said. Saleh is content with the success of the museum in Woodbridge, but he has bigger plans. Eventually, he hopes to create branches of the museum in major cities around the U.S. This next stage, however, may present more obstacles: “It’s not just financial cost,” he said. “You’re going to run into opposition from people who don’t want a Palestinian museum in New York.” One exhibit currently on display in Woodbridge features artwork made by Gaza children who survived the 20082009 Gaza War. Saleh told me that this is the first time the exhibit has been shown in the U.S.: a previous exhibition at an Oakland children’s museum in 2011 was cancelled in response to complaints from pro-Israel Jewish community groups. The drawings and paintings, which the children produced as part of post-traumatic stress therapy, depict scenes of graphic violence: Israeli tanks firing on civilians, dead bodies lying on the street. When I asked Saleh how his museum was able to showcase the exhibit, he laughed. “No one can pressure us because we don’t owe anyone anything.” He is financing this start-up phase of the museum alone. THE NEW JOUR NAL
Saleh’s resources—the building and money from his business career—have made the museum possible. But strong community ties have been instrumental too. Mikveh Bells, a member of New Haven’s branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, a national organization that works for justice, equality, and dignity in Israel and Palestine, said the museum would not have come to be without someone like Saleh––“someone having financial capabilities, but also the chutzpah, the courage, and the support of the community behind him to make it happen.” Recently, Judith Alperin, Chief Executive Officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven, which represents the interests of the Jewish community among the thirty towns in the Greater New Haven area, visited the museum, and spoke with Saleh about potential avenues of collaboration between the organizations. The Jewish Federation and the Jewish Community Center, both based in Woodbridge, have each sent delegations to visit the museum. “It’s a beautiful museum, and I found the historical photographs and artworks quite compelling,” Alperin wrote in an email. “A stated goal of the museum is to honor, celebrate, and perpetuate the Palestinian culture, and I think it does a very good job of that.” Alperin knows Saleh as a friend of the Jewish community. In December of 2016, a fire in the Jewish Community Center forced the organization to relocate. Saleh offered up fully-furnished space in his building. Last month, the Palestine Museum hosted a service to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Mikveh helped to organize the service, which was attended by about fifty people. “A lot of holding this event was sinking into living the present and the future we think is possible: something where there’s nothing special about Jews hosting Rosh Hashanah at the Palestine Museum,” she said. Saleh hopes that demonstrating the humanity of the Palestinian people will show what he views as the absurdity of Trump administration decisions like defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. To Saleh, this decision appears particularly unjust when juxtaposed with the three billion and eight hundred million dollars of aid that the U.S. sends to Israel each year, mostly in the form of military support. “I think all we have to show is that the Palestinians are human,” Saleh said. If we convince people that the Palestinians are human, that will be progress.” – Leila Murphy is a senior in Morse College.
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JUSTICE UNCONFIRMED As Brett Kavanaugh heads to the Supreme Court, his legacy looms over Yale’s campus.
Mark Rosenberg
illustrations by Sam Oldshue
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he decorations in the suite on the first floor of entryway B in Lawrance Hall are relatively sparse. When Barbara Mola, Emma Lewer, Macrina Wang, Sofia Ortega-Guerrero, and Kara O’Rourke, all first-years in Ezra Stiles College, moved into their dorm at the end of August, the tall white walls were drab and unassuming. The suitemates have since added some decor: string lights, a fruit bowl, a gray rug that occasionally doubles as a yoga mat, and a tapestry depicting the New York skyline (none of the five are from the city; Ortega-Guerrero, who hails from Oakland, found the tapestry in a dumpster behind Payne Whitney Gymnasium). There’s music playing all the time, often Drake or Kehlani. They’ve made the place their own. Still, on the surface, there’s little that would seem to differentiate their suite from any of the hundreds surrounding Old Campus. But on the evening of September 23, a group of a half-dozen male students gathered outside of entryway B, gawking and talking loudly about the first-floor suite. Earlier that day, The New Yorker had reported that Senate Democrats were investigating an allegation of sexual misconduct brought forward by Deborah Ramirez, a Yale College classmate of Brett Kavanaugh, who was at that point on the cusp of confirmation to the Supreme Court. Ramirez claimed that during the 1983-84 academic year, when they were both freshmen, Kavanaugh had exposed his penis to her during a drinking game, while other students encouraged Ramirez to touch it. Ramirez remembered Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing as he pulled up his pants. The suite where the incident allegedly took place is the same one Mola, Lewer, Wang, Ortega-Guerrero, and O’Rourke now call home. Just over a week before Ramirez’s allegations surfaced, research psychologist and Palo Alto University professor Christine Blasey Ford publicly accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her at a party in suburban Maryland three decades ago, when they were high schoolers. A group of students at Yale Law School, incensed that faculty and administrators endorsed Kavanaugh after his nomination, planned a teach-in. Once Ramirez’s allegations came to light, the news that Kavanaugh had allegedly engaged in sexual misconduct while on campus, before parlaying his Yale pedigree into judicial prestige, bolstered students’ outcry. Amidst the furor, the Lawrance suite became a new landmark in the country’s fractured political geography. “It was ‘The Brett Kavanaugh Suite,’” said Ortega-Guerrero, sitting with Mola, Lewer, and Wang at a picnic table in the Grace Hopper College Courtyard in the late-afternoon sun the day after Kavanaugh’s confirmation. In the days following Ramirez’s allegation, a steady OCTOBER 2018
stream of students paused in front of the quintet’s home, like rubberneckers on a highway, peering up for a glimpse. Several got inside the entryway and camped right outside the suite, waiting for the door to open. A few even brought cameras. Four days after the news broke, Lewer, a bespectacled aspiring linguist from Sunnyvale, CA, saw a tall white man with curly hair who appeared to be in his 30s holding a sign outside of the Yale University Art Gallery that read “Kavanaugh Allegation Tours, $5.” Soon thereafter, a friend sent a photograph of the same man standing outside the gates of Old Campus; after questioning the members of the suite, the Yale Police Department confronted him and he left the premises. “We usually leave our doors open and let people walk through,” said Wang, who spoke fast, her words accelerating by the sentence. “Our [first-year counselor] advised us to lock the doors… It was our common room, our decorations were up and our lives were there, and all of a sudden it didn’t feel like ours anymore.” “It really sucks when something so awful could’ve happened in a place that you consider to be sacred, a safe environment, somewhere where you build your community and have a family,” Lewer said. Her suitemates, seated beside her, murmured in assent. However, they agreed, they all had entered college aware that, as women, they would have to look out for themselves. “I remember when I got here—I’m pretty sure this was still during orientation week—I was given a list of frats that should be avoided,” Lewer said. “I was like, ‘Oh, wow, okay, so this is still an issue. It’s 2018, I just got to college, and I’ve already been warned of places that are notorious for sexual assault, which is a shame.’” The list included Delta Kappa Epsilon, Kavanaugh’s fraternity at Yale. DKE has a history of misogyny dating back to the 1980s, according to alumni quoted in the Yale Daily News. The fraternity was banned from campus from 2011 to 2016 after video surfaced of pledges chanting “No means yes, yes means anal” out-
“It was our common room, our decorations were up and our lives were there,” Wang said, “and all of a sudden it didn’t feel like ours anymore.” 13
side the Yale Women’s Center. In the two-plus years since DKE’s reinstatement, women have brought forward allegations of sexual misconduct against at least six current or former fraternity members, according to multiple Yale Daily News investigations, prompting the University to open a Title IX investigation and DKE’s landlord to revoke the leases for the fraternity’s two houses on Lake Place. Between January 1 and June 30 this year, Yale students submitted 154 complaints of sexual misconduct to the University’s Title IX office, an all-time high. Women and non-binary students submitted 141 of the 154 complaints. Yale has taken steps to publicize resources for victims, like the Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education Center (SHARE), the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, and the Office for Equal Opportunity Programs. But students have been calling on administrators to do more. Many are frustrated with Yale’s failure to address allegations of sexual misconduct against several prominent faculty members, including philosophy professor Thomas Pogge, English professor Harold Bloom, and Spanish professor Roberto González Echevarría. Controversy arose when, this fall, the University readmitted Saifullah Khan, an undergraduate accused of sexual assault and suspended in 2015, after he was acquitted in a February trial. (Khan was suspended again on October 11 after new allegations surfaced.) And, in September, around 200 School of Medicine faculty signed a petition against Yale’s decision to award an endowed professorship to Michael Simons, a cardiology professor who was found guilty of sexual harassment in 2013. The professorship was subsequently revoked. For Wang, the Senate’s confirmation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last week cemented a lesson her parents had instilled in her from a young age. “It hammered deeper into my head that I cannot get myself into a situation in which I would even have to report sexual assault because it’s very likely that I won’t get the justice that I deserve,” she said. “I think that’s why
Amidst the furor, the Lawrance suite became a new node in the map of Kavanaugh’s murky past. 14
parents tell girls, ‘Oh, don’t wear this, and don’t drink, and don’t go to parties.’ It’s incredibly messed up that parents have to imprint to their daughters … how not [to] get raped or how not to get assaulted.” As Kavanaugh’s confirmation approached, students held rallies and blanketed campus billboards with a paper mosaic that read “We Believe Christine Blasey Ford/Deborah Ramirez/Julie Swetnick/Anita Hill/Fernanda Lopez Aguilar/Naomi Wolf/All Survivors.” (The first three women accused Kavanaugh of misconduct, Hill accused Supreme Court Justice and fellow Yale Law School alum Clarence Thomas, Lopez Aguilar accused Thomas Pogge, and Wolf accused Harold Bloom.) On at least four occasions, these signs were torn down and students had to reprint and replace them. Facing pressure, Law School Dean Heather Gerken, who previously declined to take a stance on Kavanaugh’s nomination, and law professor Akhil Amar, who had testified in support of Kavanaugh before Congress, both called for a full investigation into the allegations against him. The FBI did investigate, but its five-day search was limited to interviews with ten people, and found no evidence to corroborate Ford or Ramirez’s allegations. Neither Ford nor Kavanaugh was interviewed. As Kavanaugh’s confirmation became certain, Yale students who had condemned his nomination moved forward with a new sense of resolve. “The theme of my first month here has been sexual assault on college campuses, which on the one hand is incredibly unfortunate,” Mola said. “On the other hand, I do think it’s good that these allegations have garnered national attention.” While the Senate took its final vote, students gathered at the Women’s Table, a monument designed by Maya Lin in 1989 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the coeducation of Yale College, and laid down flowers and notes in support of victims of sexual violence. In chalk, students wrote, “Solidarity with survivors. We hear you. We love you. We believe you.” Roses, zinnias, and chrysanthemums, orange and pink and yellow and white, reflected off the water shimmering on the table’s gray surface. With Kavanaugh set to sit atop the judicial branch for the rest of his life, support for victims of sexual misconduct seems robust on Yale’s campus but lacking in America’s halls of power. Yet the distance between the two has never felt smaller.
– Mark Rosenberg is a junior in Pierson College.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
OCTOBER 2018
 15
CRITICAL ANGLE
A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW
Science research at Yale is funded by the family responsible for the opioid crisis. Faculty members don’t seem to care.
Candice Wang
Y
ale cell biology professor Yongli Zhang conducts his research using tiny tweezers. These aren’t tweezers you’d find hanging in the CVS beauty section. They’re far too small to pluck your eyebrows: about one hundred of them, bunched up, are as thick as a single human hair. With the aid of a microscope, you’d see that the tweezers are used to manipulate tiny glass beads. Together, one or two beads work to trap and apply force onto a single molecule. Using these optical tweezers, Zhang, who joined Yale’s faculty in 2009, studies protein molecules called SNARE complexes, which are key to understanding serious diseases such as epilepsy. Zhang’s potentially groundbreaking research relies on a steady stream of funding, and graduate students who study both biology and physics. That’s where the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute of Biological, Engineering, and Physical Sciences comes in. Founded in 2008 to strengthen collaboration between biology, physics, and engineering researchers at Yale, the Sackler Institute currently facilitates research by Zhang and 50 other faculty members. Donations from the Sackler family fund a wide range of research at Yale, Tufts, Harvard, and Princeton. The family has also endowed Yale’s David A. Sackler Professorship of Pharmacology with $3 billion. This post is currently held by Professor Mark Lemmon at the Yale Cancer Biology Institute. A spokesperson for the Sackler Foundation declined to comment on how much money Yale receives each year, as did the Yale Development Office. But the Sacklers’ $13 billion fortune comes at a cost: their company, Purdue Pharma, a massive pharmaceutical conglomerate and the creator of OxyContin, has been blamed by activists, government officials, and medical experts for fueling the opioid crisis raging across America. *** In 1952, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler bought Purdue Frederick, a small private medical company. Together, the three brothers from Brooklyn built a pharmaceutical empire out of circular white pills no 16
illustrations by Rachel Wolf
larger than the tip of an index finger. OxyContin comes in doses of 10, 80, or 160 milligrams and, unlike other prescription painkillers, has a patented slow-release technology that allows patients to take only two doses every twenty-four hours. The main ingredient of this ‘miracle drug’ is oxycodone, a close cousin of heroin. When OxyContin appeared on pharmacy shelves in 1995, doctors generally believed that opioids only belonged in hospice care centers. Terminally ill patients were frequently prescribed opioids like morphine, because at that point in their illnesses, addiction was no longer a concern. The Sacklers worked tirelessly to overturn these perceptions, according to an exposé by Patrick Radden Keefe published in The New Yorker in 2017. Purdue’s marketing campaign was a massive operation. The company employed over 1,000 sales representatives armed with graphs and statistics designed
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“We are aware of it, but it’s like the Rockefellers and Carnegies and how they got their money,” said Holley. “The world is not black and white.” to convince doctors that opioids were a casual and safe solution to even minor arthritic pain and muscle strains. Representatives offered smiling OxyContin pill plushies colored white, pink, and blue. There were OxyContin tote bags, baseball caps, picture books, and clocks. In 1997, Arthur Sackler was posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame. “The initial marketing of OxyContin was very aggressive,” said Dr. Lynn Madden, the CEO and Director of the APT Foundation, which provides free walk-in addiction treatment to New Haven residents. “Yes, I do think that the marketing campaign did result in lots of powerful medication being prescribed and ultimately being abused.” When asked to comment on their ties to the opioid crisis, representatives of Purdue Pharma responded with the following statement: “Since its approval, OxyContin has been and continues to be appropriately prescribed by doctors to bring needed relief to thousands suffering from severe pain, including those with cancer and terminal illnesses.” Purdue also stressed in its statement that the company has been developing programs to create “meaningful solutions to help stem the tide of opioid-related overdose deaths,” such as providing funds for state prescription drug monitoring programs and spearheading educational initiatives about the dangers of opioids for teenagers. According to Radden Keefe, Purdue Pharma paid off respected scientific authorities to distort the addictive effects of OxyContin. Russell Portenoy, the pain specialist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, claimed that opioids should be destigmatized and used as an effective, safe painkiller with few side effects. He received regular payments from Purdue Pharma. Dr. Curtis Wright of the Food and Drug Administration approved an insert in each OxyContin bottle that reassured users that the drug was safer than rival painkillers due to the delayed-absorption mechanism. He quit the FDA and landed a job at Purdue Pharma two years later. Scientific research, in this case, was crudely manhandled for personal profit at the expense of the common good. In 2007, Purdue Pharma pled guilty in federal court to accusations of deliberate misadvertisement, and agreed to pay $600 million in fines. This, however, was OCTOBER 2018
just a sliver of the $13 billion that Purdue earned by selling OxyContin. *** The name “Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute” calls to mind high, austere stone walls and gold-emblazoned plates. But no such building exists on Yale’s campus. Instead, the Sackler Institute is a forum for researchers. During monthly lunch discussions in lecture halls on Science Hill, Sackler-affiliated professors share their latest research, and participants from a variety of scientific backgrounds meet and chat with their colleagues. Neuroscience Professor Alex Kwan, whose lab is located at Yale’s medical campus, said that the Institute has helped him solidify his connections with associates a fifteen-minute walk away at the main campus. Additionally, the Sackler Institute’s partnership with Yale’s Integrated Graduate Program in Physical and Engineering Biology, or PEB, channels graduate students into research positions with Sackler faculty and connects them to various interdisciplinary lecture courses. Sackler professors, in turn, can recruit from a pool of talented graduate students across multiple disciplines. “Interdisciplinary studies can really drive a field for 17
ward rather than just focusing on one field,” said Milind Singh, a PEB graduate student studying glycolysis, the process by which cells convert sugar into energy. “Just expanding on one field alone probably won’t result in many advances.” Members of the Sackler Institute enjoy access to annual seed grants of $50,000, enough to either start a lab or take on a risky new research venture, according to Kwan. All five Sackler-affiliated professors I interviewed expressed strong enthusiasm for the Sackler Institute. When asked about the controversial Sackler name, Zhang said that the opioid epidemic has never come up during the weekly discussions, and that he had only “heard about it recently, maybe in a conversation.” I asked Professor Scott Holley, head of a biology lab conducting research on the spinal column, whether he had any ethical qualms about the origins of the Sackler Institute’s funds. “Not necessarily,” said Holley. “We are aware of it, but it’s like the Rockefellers and Carnegies and how they got their money. The world is not black and white. I think it’s a good thing that they are supporting scientific research and that’s something that benefits society.” Singh, the PEB student, said he had never heard about the Sacklers’ connection to the opioid crisis prior to our conversation. He said that if he had a position of authority in the Sackler Institute, he would focus on the future and the current scientific research conducted by Sackler-affiliated professors. “There’s always a possibility that if the company really tries to improve… 18
it’s always possible to move on,” he said. *** Some people, however, find it difficult to move on. Matthew Jeffrey Abrams, who received a Ph.D in History of Art from Yale in 2017, led a double life. He spent his teenage years in the suburbs shooting Ketamine and OxyContin, and once smuggled drugs across the Mexican border. By 19, he had reclaimed sobriety and reentered school; he went on to receive a PhD at Yale. Now, Abrams is a writer and art historian living in New York City. In a personal essay published in The Guardian this May, he wrote, “Only last week, during a visit to my alma mater, did I begin to understand the role that Yale played in my own addiction.” In the essay, Abrams wrote, he saw the traces of addiction creeping onto Yale’s campus. From Skull & Bones, whose founder, William Russell, had familial ties to the Indo-Chinese opium trade, to Yale’s sprawling medical campus, whose Sackler Institute lives on a yearly injection of Purdue money, Yale’s connections to the opioid epidemic are omnipresent—and the aftershock is far from over. Dr. Madden, the founder and CEO of the APT Foundation, said the opioid crisis continues to grow in Connecticut. According to Madden, in 2017, 1,038 people in the state died of an opioid overdose. Nationwide, she estimated, upwards of 110 people are dying per day relative to opioid use disorders. While the opioid crisis rages throughout Connecticut and the rest of the country, with 2.3 million Americans suffering from addiction, the scientific researchers at Yale have yet to interrogate the name looming over the Sackler Institute. When I asked Professor Kwan about the Sackler funds, he responded much like the other professors. “I have not put much thought into it.”
– Candice Wang is a sophomore in Berkeley Colllege
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PROFILE
THE SCIENTIST AND THE SHRUB Michael Donoghue is the world’s leading expert on a plant that no one’s ever heard of. Henry Reichard
“
This is yesterday’s flower,” Michael Donoghue said, pointing to a half-wilted bloom. He was standing in the middle of a greenhouse, surrounded by students. The room was filled with insectivorous plants and deciduous trees, the air heavy with pollen and moisture. The plant before Donoghue had heart-shaped leaves, a spindly stem wrapped around a wire brace like ivy, and two huge burgundy flowers that drooped despondently. It was labeled Aristolochia gigantea. “And this is today’s,” Donoghue added, pointing to the larger bloom. He reached out, turned today’s flower around, and revealed a small, cream-colored
OCTOBER 2018
photos by Vivek Suri
capsule behind it. “Flies are lured into the calyx,” he explained, indicating the capsule, “and once inside, they’re trapped. They get drenched in pollen.” Then the flower wilts (it lasts only a day), the calyx collapses, and the flies escape—only to be caught again within the flower of another gigantea. And so the plant pollinates. The students scribbled in their sketchbooks. They were all drawing the gigantea for a class in plant biology: some artistically, others rather unartistically, but all with an attention to detail that they were slowly learning from their teacher. Donoghue stepped back and watched them. He is a short man with a habit of
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dressing simply and practically, often in jeans and a plaid shirt. His thinning hair and thick beard both turned white long ago. He is 66. But his posture is excellent; his eyes are clear and blue; and his voice is calm and rhythmical—the sort of voice that could read pages out of the phone book without boring its listeners. When you walk with Donoghue, he calls your attention to the tiny hairs on the stem of a tomato plant. He points out the scales on the fruit of an Annona cherimola, shows you the chitinous “sugar apple” of an Annona squamosa. And you have the strange feeling that he is teaching you how to see. It’s as if he’s handed you a pair of delicate glasses, and when you put them on you realize that the natural world has always been out-of-focus. Every leaf now tells a story; every piece of bark hints at its owner’s ancestry; every flower is a subtle contraption waiting for the attention of one who looks closely. Donoghue has always looked closely. He has built a career out of noticing the unnoticed. *** For much of his life, Donoghue has studied a genus of about 165 shrubs and small trees called Viburnum. These shrubs were the subject of his dissertation and have been the primary focus of his research for the past decade. They are, according to him, not very interesting. Viburnum isn’t one of those plants that grows to be a hundred feet tall. It doesn’t eat insects, or parasitize trees,
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or grow aerial roots that hang from its branches and extract excess water from the air. It has pretty flowers, but not huge, fly-trapping ones like the gigantea’s. It’s a shrub. It’s one of those plants that most ecologists don’t pay attention to. So, why study it? Because Donoghue likes it and has since he was an undergraduate. Because Viburnum isn’t an extraordinary genus, so insights into its ancestry and genetic makeup translate into insights about many other plants. But most of all, because the more you look at something— even an unremarkable something, such as Viburnum—the more interesting it becomes. Miranda Sinnott-Armstrong has also studied Viburnum for six years. She’s one of Donoghue’s current graduate students. “In some ways,” she told me, “Viburnum is interesting precisely because it’s not that interesting.” “Michael Donoghue” is a household name in the world of evolutionary biology. Look that name up on Google, and you’ll find a laundry list of awards, membership in two national academies, and a Sterling Professorship at Yale. Look that name up on Google Scholar, and you’ll find a list of over 250 scientific papers, some of which have been cited thousands of times. But if you page through that list of papers, ranked by number of citations, you won’t find one about Viburnum until the ninety-second entry. “Michael’s work in Viburnum isn’t well-known,” Erika Edwards told me. “That’s not what he’s famous for.”
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It’s as if he’s handed you a pair of delicate glasses, and when you put them on you realize that the natural world has always been out-of-focus.
Edwards was one of Donoghue’s graduate students from 2000-2005; she is now his chief collaborator. She also studies Viburnum. Like Donoghue, she’s better known for her work in other fields. Both of them hope that, one day, Viburnum will be so well-understood that it will become a model for evolutionary biology: a completely solved problem, a genus with a perfectly charted ancestry. Maybe then people will pay attention to it. After all, Gregor Mendel’s peas were just unremarkable garden plants for most of his life, and his experiments were just the hobby of a friar who had too much time on his hands. Until those peas provided evidence for recessive and dominant traits, that is. Until that friar became the father of modern genetics. “Viburnum is almost never cited, except by people like us. And we cite ourselves,” Donoghue told me. “I’m not doing the Viburnum thing to be popular. Nobody cares about Viburnum papers. But we’re going to make Viburnum famous.” *** One afternoon in September, I joined Donoghue in his office: a spacious white room with desks cluttered by specimens and walls covered by floral sketches. He handed me an old photograph that showed a middle-aged professor, four graduate students, and a younger, long-haired Donoghue. They were standing and smiling together, shin-deep in a forest stream. “Most people can’t trace their career to one particular incident,” Donoghue said, leaning back from the table and smiling. “But I can.” The Donoghue of this portrait was discovering, to his own surprise, that he was scientifically inclined. Ever since graduating from high school, this young Donoghue had travelled and camped across the country. He had hiked through the Canadian Rockies and spent three months fighting forest fires. He had drifted up to Alaska and spent a few months on Vancouver Island. He had seen most of the states. (Later in life, he would see them all.) And he had spent almost no time thinking about further education. In high school he had a strong aversion to science; after high school he had a mistrust of universities. “Back then,” Donoghue told me, “I had no intention of going to college.” Eventually the young Donoghue drifted back home to
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Michigan, where he decided, on a whim, to take a few classes at Michigan State. He liked being outdoors, and while traveling he’d read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. So he enrolled in courses in biology and plant taxonomy, developed a fast rapport with a geography professor, and found himself accompanying that professor on a field trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There, in a cold forest at the top of one of the highest peaks in the Appalachians, he was captivated by an odd-looking shrub. The year was 1972. The shrub was a species of Viburnum. Donoghue graduated from Michigan State, earned his PhD from Harvard in 1982, then drifted from university to university until finally settling at Yale in 2000. He was director of the Peabody Museum from 2003-2008, has been a Sterling professor since 2011, and is widely recognized as the world’s leading expert on Viburnum. As an evolutionary biologist, he tries to understand how physical characteristics of plants evolved over time. Unfortunately, most plants have poor fossil records. It’s often impossible to find million-year-old specimens, extract their DNA, and figure out how today’s species evolved from them. So instead, Donoghue compares the DNA of modern plants, looks for similarities, and tries to infer the past from the present. Take leaf shape. Donoghue’s most recent research paper, titled “Leaf Form Evolution in Viburnum Parallels Variation within Individual Plants,” looks at the different leaf shapes of various Viburnum species and tries to explain why, and how, those different shapes emerged. The paper’s hard to follow if you’re not comfortable with words such as “heteroblasty,” “phylogeny,” and “phenotypic plasticity.” But Donoghue is happy to translate. The paper, he told me, is trying to answer a simple question. “Why do plants have so many different kinds of leaves?” The scientist looked at me expectantly, as if he was waiting for an answer. On the table, he had spread ten dark crimson leaves, each of them dried and pressed into display frames as if they were butterflies framed in glass. Some were long and smooth like the leaves of a willow, others were serrated like an elm’s, a few were lobed like a maple’s, and one was small and round like a young dogwood’s. They were all from species of Viburnum. “Is there a simple answer to that question?” I finally asked, a little hesitantly. “No, unfortunately there’s not,” Donoghue said, laughing. There are partial answers: theories that apply to particular species or environments. Donoghue advances one of these answers in his most recent paper. He hopes someday to find a larger Answer: one that applies to all species of Viburnum. Such an Answer is still far off, but maybe one day Donoghue and Edwards and Sinnott-Armstrong will find it. And once they have found it, maybe another Answer—one that applies to all plants, not merely Viburnum—will follow. 21
*** We were in the greenhouse. It was humid and warm and so green that you could hardly bear to look at it, and Donoghue was walking back from the microscopes in the far room carrying a magnolia bloom. The bloom was small and olive green in his wrinkled hand, like a pea pod, and he held it gently. The students were already leaving their sketchbooks, starting to gather round. “You’ll all want to watch this,” Donoghue said to them. He was standing in the front and holding the tiny bloom aloft. Everyone stared at him in quiet intensity. “You normally use a scalpel to dissect a flower, but for this you’ll want to just use your hands. Now watch closely what I do.” Donoghue pinched the bloom and began to pull. Little green flakes came away. He was peeling it like an onion, and it came undone in tiny green layers. The students watched around him. “I haven’t really done anything important yet,” Donoghue once told me. “I’ve just looked at a lot of plants. Maybe one of these days I’ll do something.” The outer layer of the magnolia lay in flakes on the floor. Inside, the flower was as green as grass in spring. Tiny stalks curled inward. “These are the stamens,” Donoghue said. He pulled one away and looked at it. It was thinner than a needle. 22
“You know, I’ve chosen in the last decade or so to spend a lot of time—an inordinate amount of time—studying these particular plants. And people might say, ‘Why do you keep studying that same plant?’ And the answer is, ‘Because it gets more and more interesting!’ The more I learn, the more I can’t resist the next question.” “And then we can go deeper,” Donoghue said, dropping the stamen. He applied himself again to the bud, removing the stamens and then, with a lover’s lightness, peeling tiny green flakes away from the center. The class watched in silence. The magnolia was now smaller than a thimble. “I could tell you a good story about why this leaf looks like this and that leaf looks like that. But that’s not the deep message. The deep message is dig deeper, and you’ll find more and more. Just keep digging.” Donoghue peeled off the last green flake. At the center of the magnolia, there was a tiny stalk of darkest green. Donoghue named it the carpel and held it aloft. He told the class they should try to draw it. It was the ovary of the flower. – Henry Reichard is a senior in Silliman College.
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E S S AY
UNTIL IT CRACKS Mariah Kreutter illustrations by Merritt Barnwell
“Pick one that doesn’t say ‘Made in China,’ Mariah,” my mother says, the words clipped as usual, but drawn out by a Georgia drawl. (You wouldn’t think a drawl could be clipped, but my mother, in this as in so many things, defies expectations.) She always drawls when Grandmama visits. Actually, it doesn’t even take that much. Once when we were driving through acres and acres of some valley somewhere in Kentucky on some black November night, the only light coming from the GPS, she turned on the radio and heard a few chords of country music (just the guitar, not even anyone singing), and when she spoke next, she could’ve been eighteen again. She could’ve never left Bostwick, population 372 plus cows, best known for its annual cotton gin festival and as the town where they filmed My Cousin Vinny. I can’t even remember what she said. I just know she spoke with the full weight of the American South, and it echoed in the silence of that Kentucky road as we drove in the dark towards Nashville. But today we’re not in the South. We’re in a TJ Maxx in suburban New Jersey, surrounded by discounted Michael Kors bags and overeager Thanksgiving decorations. Grandmama’s staying with us. It’s the last time she’ll see me before I start college, and I’m supposed to choose a mug. Most of them do, in fact, say “Made in China,” which my mother — who at heart is both an isolationist and a socialist, though with enough common sense to vote for Hillary — vetoes. Grandmama, who will later vote for Trump, agrees with this decision. In the end, I OCTOBER 2018
choose one with “Made in Portugal” stamped on the bottom in a pixelated font. It’s unusually large and shallow, so it can be used for late-night cereal or Easy Mac as well as coffee or tea. It has a bluebird printed on it in a faux rustic design. Mom grabs one of the same for herself in an uncharacteristic show of sentimentality. Grandmama pays, and as we’re walking through the parking lot she chastises herself for not getting one too. She debates going back, but in a show of dairy farm practicality and Southern unflappability, decides against it—she doesn’t need another mug. Therefore, what could have been an intergenerational symbol of female familial ties doesn’t quite materialize: the circle is broken, the edges can’t hold. I take the mug with me to Yale and drink shitty dorm coffee out of it. It is the first piece of kitchenware that belongs, specifically, to me, which I don’t think about until junior year, when I move into an apartment off campus with two friends. We all pool dishes we’ve cribbed off our parents: Molly a frying pan, 23
Harrison a bread knife. The bluebird mug becomes one of many, lost among the shatterproofs from Target and the sandy clay ones from my mom. I still think of the bird mug as mine only, though. Not in a territorial way — it just always has been. But, like everything else in our kitchen, it’s absorbed into the communal sprawl soon enough. We’re bad about doing our dishes. Mugs are always scarce. So it’s not surprising, one day, when I walk past Harrison’s room and see the bird mug perched next to his bed. It’s half full of the lemon-honey-cayenne sludge we’ve all been drinking lately to ward off a cold. His bed is unmade; there’s a chalk drawing of his grandmother leaning against a wall. I feel like I’m spying. The mug might be mine, but the context is not. I don’t know why seeing the mug in Harrison’s room makes me sad, but it does. It makes me think of how Harrison doesn’t know the history of the mug and Mom and Grandmama don’t know the history of Harrison, and I could try and explain each to the other, but at a certain point none of it would matter because I’m past the point where anyone can know my whole life story. I think about the life I’m living now — Yale and Connecticut and art major roommates and drinking until I throw up on weekends and writing stories about secular angels in classes taught by famous novelists — and how it isn’t anything (anything!) my grandmother would recognize. My mom can imagine it, but that’s all: she can imagine. Everything is fragmented. Nothing is whole. Here’s a way to drive yourself crazy: if your middle school self had braces and zits and an anime phase, but none of your college friends were around to see it, does it make a sound? Let’s try another one. If I met my grandmother when she was my age, a history major at the University of Georgia who transferred after she found the Baptist college too morally loose for her tastes (did she prefer sin out in the open, where she could judge it? I guess that’s bet 24
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ter than hypocrisy), would we have hated each other? Surely we couldn’t have been friends. Or maybe this is my own failure of imagination: I cannot construct for myself any version of Grandmama’s inner life. If I try (and I admit, I rarely try) I end up banging my head against a metaphorical wall—one somehow shaped like both a Bible and a piece of fried cube steak. And then what about my mom? If I try to write about her she’ll overwhelm this essay. If I try to write about her, then I’ll be writing about everything, because everything I write is at least a little bit about her, because her young adulthood should have looked a lot more like mine and her life is the story of the many reasons why it didn’t. Most of the reasons can be traced to growing up in a small town before the Internet. What prevented her from leaving Georgia more intentionally, from studying English or film or spending her twenties meandering through a career without a husband or kids, was not so much any particular hardship as the stunted imagination that flourishes in small towns like Bostwick. I wonder if she ever uses her bluebird mug. If she does, I haven’t seen it. I think about who I would have been if my parents had stayed in rural Georgia. We could’ve lived down the road from the white farmhouse where my mother and several generations before her grew up. I could’ve grown up there too: playing with the feral cats in the disused milking barn, chasing lizards and killing fire ants, picking figs off Grandmama’s monstrous fig tree and reading in the shadow of the ruined grain silo. I don’t recognize this other Mariah. (At the very least, she bleaches her hair). I wonder if she would have ended up where and who I am all the same, or if — as I suspect — she’s another fragment, the product of a speciation event that took place long before I was born, a case of evolution most divergent. Maybe she’d have a whole flock of bird mugs and a sign in her room that says ‘Live Love Laugh.’ Or maybe I’m being an elitist prick. I just think we’re all split at some kind of OCTOBER 2018
root. And as I sit in our art-filled living room, courtesy of Molly, mostly, with its craggy wood floors and dim yellow boob-shaped ceiling light, the woven coasters Harrison bought in Mexico and the thirty dollar Japanese dish towel I bought in Los Angeles resplendent on the table, sipping coffee out of the bluebird mug, trying to write this essay, the only thing I know for sure is that I’m putting more weight on this poor mass-produced piece of ceramic than it can bear. It’s a wonder it doesn’t shatter. – Mariah Kreutter is a junior in Berkeley College.
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BIAS IN BLUE Bringing forth new allegations, Black students and New Haven residents say that Yale’s police presence has threatened their sense of safety and belonging.
Laura Glesby
A
round two o’clock in the morning, on May 8, Lolade Siyonbola woke up from a nap. Siyonbola, a Black graduate student who lived in Yale’s Hall of Graduate Studies, had fallen asleep on a couch in a common room while working on a paper. When Siyonbola woke up, Sarah Braasch, a white graduate student who also lived in the building, confronted her. Braasch hadn’t recognized Siyonbola, and called the police on her while she was sleeping. As captured by Siyonbola’s video recording of their conversation, Braach intoned, as if disciplining a child, “I have every right to call the police,” nodding her head as she spoke. “You cannot sleep in that room,” she explained. On her phone, she snapped pictures of Siyonbola. “Continue,” Siyonbola told her quietly. “Continue. Get my good side.” It took the Yale Police Department only five minutes to reach the building. Following YPD protocol, the two officers who arrived initially asked Siyonbola to provide her student ID. After she demonstrated that she could open the door to her apartment with her keys, the officers continued to press her for her ID. She relented, handing them her wallet. Upstairs, a third officer also checked Braasch’s identification. But with Siyonbola, a problem arose that took fifteen minutes to sort out; the name on her ID was a nickname, Lolade, which didn’t match her legal name in the Yale Police’s database, Ololade. “I deserve to be here,” Siyonbola told the officers as she waited for them to allow her to go. “I paid tuition like everybody else. I am not going to justify my existence here.” Over the course of a few days, Siyonbola’s video recording of the incident garnered over 1.5 million views on Facebook Live. National news outlets from CNN to The New York Times reported on the story. Jean-Louis Reneson, another Black graduate student, posted on Facebook that Braasch had called the police on him three months before, when he was lost in HGS and had tried to ask her for directions. Four police officers arrived in response to that call, and left upon realizing that Reneson was a student. Reneson declined to comment for this article, and Siyonbola did not respond to multiple requests for comment. After Siyonbola posted the video online, a petition calling for Braasch’s removal from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences gathered 3,000 signatures; Braasch remains a student at Yale. President Peter Salovey, 26
illustrations by Merritt Barnwell
Yale College Dean Marvin Chun, and Secretary and Vice President for Student Life Kimberly Goff-Crews sent out University-wide emails in which a series of meetings and “listening sessions” with students were promised and commitments to diversity and inclusion were renewed. The event became so infamous that students still refer to it as “what happened at HGS.” The HGS encounter is one of several accounts of biased policing brought forth by students and New Haven community members in recent years. This piece reports two new sets of allegations—one at GPSCY, Yale’s grad student bar; the other at an off-campus venue—not previously covered in the media. These events raise questions about the role of the police on Yale’s campus. When does policing at Yale draw a boundary between those who are presumed to belong on campus and those who aren’t? How far should the YPD go to enforce borders between Yale and the surrounding city? When is a 911 call a plea for safety, and when is it a method of exclusion? *** In the middle of the night on January 11, 1824, someone—likely a Yale student—seized the body of Batsheba Smith, the deceased daughter of a farmer, from her West Haven grave. The thief stowed the body on the floor of the Yale Medical College cellar, folding her corpse so it would look like a pile of clothes. When the New Haven constable discovered the body and news got around, six hundred outraged citizens gathered in front of the Medical College building, armed with weapons and stones. “Tear down the College,” they chanted, until city guards stepped in and arrested some of the rioters. As Yale’s website tells the story, this riot was the reason the city assigned two New Haven Police officers, Bill Wiser and Jim Donnelly, to regularly patrol the campus. The University later hired Wiser and Donnelly, making them the inaugural officers of the first private university police force in the nation. It’s unclear whether the riot was actually the catalyst for the formation of the YPD, as Wiser and Donnelly weren’t assigned to police Yale until 1894—a good seventy years after the body-snatching incident. Yet the riot perhaps exemplified the rocky relationship between the school and the city that led to the Department’s founding. In his autobiography, Wiser
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wrote that he and Donnelly were appointed to police Yale because “many stories were told of the troubles and fights between the students on the one side and the city police and citizens on the other.” Wiser and Donnelly’s primary role was to defend Yale students from their neighbors, rather than the other way around. “As outlined by the police,” he wrote, “our duties were to protect the students, their property, and all college property from injury.” According to Wiser, intruders had been wandering onto university land and stealing students’ belongings. Early in his position at the university, Wiser found himself kicking “tramps” out of the basements and forcing a “colored gentleman” to leave one of the building entrances. “The first thing to do, it seemed to us,” he wrote, “was to keep all suspicious characters from the campus.” Yale students initially regarded Wiser and Donnelly with mistrust, regarding them as outsiders and discplinarians. Yet the officers managed to endear themselves to the community. They taught students to sew on buttons and counseled them through periods of homesickness. In time, they were given lodging in campus dorms. As Wiser tells it, the pair grew so attached to the College that when the city police department sought to reassign them to a different post, Wiser and Donnelly quit and were subsequently appointed by the University as “special constables,” now private employees. For decades, the Yale Police Department remained relatively small. But in the 1960s and ’70s, student protests erupted across the country as part of the Civil Rights Movement and the flurry of activism against the Vietnam War. In response, more and more universities began to form their own police departments, hiring officers who were trained to interact with college students. By 2012, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 75 percent of over nine hundred fouryear colleges surveyed across the country employed an armed police force. 86 percent of campus police officers had the power to arrest in regions beyond the campus borders. In the ’70s, Yale expanded its force and tightened its training programs and standards for officers. At first, the University attempted to downplay the YPD’s status as a police force; officers utilized unmarked cars and wore suits as uniforms. John W. Powell, a campus security consultant who served as Director of Security and Associate Dean of Students from 1960 to 1968, described the Department’s transition to blue uniforms that more closely resembled city police officers’ attire, mimicking the NHPD so as to project an image of safety and deter crime. Appearances aside, important distinctions remain between the YPD and its New Haven counterpart. On May 16 of this year, the New Haven Independent wrote that it had filed a request for the YPD’s body-camera footage of the Hall of Graduate Studies incident in May under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which requires all public agencies to proOCTOBER 2018
vide access to their records and files when asked. The Department denied their request, citing a need to preserve the privacy of the students involved under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, as well as a legal exception that allows them to withhold materials related to “uncorroborated allegations.” Had Siyonbola not recorded the HGS incident on her phone, no evidence corroborating her experience would have been publicly accessible. In fact, as the Independent reported, the YPD has a history of denying FOIA requests, bringing forth questions about the transparency the public can expect from a private police force. In 2007, the Department rejected the FOIA request of a lawyer, Janet Perrotti, whose client claimed to have been racially profiled by an officer. At the time, the Yale Police claimed that as a private police force, it was not subject to FOIA at all. The Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) sided with Perrotti. If the Department could arrest people and put them in jail, the Commission concluded, it should have to disclose requested materials to the public under FOIA. But the following year, after the Yale Police union requested that the Department disclose the salaries of top officials, the FOIC ruled that the Department did not resemble a public agency in its financial operations, and thus did not need to disclose that information. Similar legal battles over whether FOIA applies to private university police forces have occurred in recent years at universities across the country, including Harvard and Notre Dame. Yale Police Chief Ronnell Higgins calls the YPD “a private entity with a public purpose.” In this respect, the YPD is similar to a private prison, or a charter school. And like these kinds of institutions, it faces the challenge of balancing the interests of its private organization with its obligations to the public. *** Today, the Yale Police force has grown to ninety-three officers. It works alongside a Yale Security team, which, according to Yale’s website, “serves as the eyes and ears of the YPD” inside buildings and parking lots. Today, when someone dials 911 from an on-campus location, the phone call routes to the YPD. According to Chief Higgins, the YPD and the NHPD frequently collaborate; their detectives confer on major investigations, their patrol routes overlap, and they route calls to each other. Sometimes, officers from each department will respond to a call together. YPD officers walk, bike, and drive along “beats,” or patrol routes, both within the campus boundaries and in areas adjacent to campus. Since Yale’s recent expansion into the Dixwell neighborhood with the opening of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray colleges in 2017, Jeannia Fu, a student at the School of Public Health, has noticed an increased police presence in the area. Fu, who is Asian, has straight, cropped hair and speaks in a level, earnest tone. She has lived in New Haven for nine 27
Around two been o’clock in the morning, on against May 8, Lolade years and has involved in activism police Siyonbolasince woke aupBridgeport from a nap.police Siyonbola, a Black brutality officer fatallygradushot ate student who lived in Yale’s Hall of Graduate Studies, teenager Jayson Negron in May 2017. had fallen asleep in Amy a common room while Last spring, Fuon anda acouch friend, Smoyer, an Assisworking on a at paper. WhenConnecticut Siyonbola woke Sarah tant Professor Southern Stateup, UniverBraasch, a white graduate lived in the sity, saw three Yale officersstudent talkingwho to aalso group of Black building, her. Braasch hadn’t recognized Siyboys, whoconfronted she guesses were around 10 years old, along onbola, and called the police on her while she was sleepthe bike path that runs between Pauli Murray and ing. As captured by Siyonbola’s video recording of their Yale Health. Fu said that as she walked up to them, conversation, Brach intoned, as if disciplining a child, “I the were thenodding boys’ names. haveofficers every right to taking call the down police,” her headFu as asked if the boys were all right. “They looked scared she spoke. “You cannot sleep in that room,” she explained. and didn’t say anything,” she said. Smoyer was She snapped pictures of Siyonbola onWhile her phone. not close enough to hear the conversation between Fu“Continue,” and the officers, she told confirmed the general details Siyonbola her quietly. “Continue. Get of myFu’s goodaccount. side.” It took the Yale Police Department only five Fu recalled that of the officers asked her to step minutes to reach theone building. aside in an “agitated tone.” The officer instructed her the two that officers notFollowing to speak YPD to theprotocol, kids, claiming she who was arrived “incitinitially Siyonbola provide her student ID. After ing themasked to push back,”toFu says. She remembers the she demonstrated openofthe to her officer mentioningthat thatshe thiscould was part an door “investigaapartment the officers press tion.” The with boys her laterkeys, explained to Fucontinued that a YaletoSecuher officer for her had ID. called She relented, handing them rity the police on the kids.her wallet. Upstairs, a third officer also checked Fu approached a security officerBraasch’s stationedidentificanearby. tion. But withconfirmed Siyonbola, that a problem arose that the tookone fifteen The officer she had been to minutes to sort out; the name on her ID was a nickname, call the police. When Fu inquired why she had called Lolade, which didn’t match her legal name in the Yale the police, the security officer, who is white, answered, Police’s database, Ololade. “I deserve to be here,” Siyon“You know, kids around these roughtospots, bola told the these officers as she waited for them allowyou her gotta teach them how to behave.” Fu remembered to go. “I paid tuition like everybody else. I am not going to responding that shehere.” thought the officer was “racist,” at justify my existence which point the officer grew angry and threatened to fileOver a harassment against her. video recordthe course complaint of a few days, Siyonbola’s on,incident Fu wrote about the on her FaceingLater of the garnered overincident 1.5 million views on book page,Live. encouraging thoseoutlets who were to Facebook National news fromconcerned CNN to The New York Timesdirectly. reportedInona the story. Jean-Louis Reneemail Higgins statement posted on the son, another Blackpage, graduate student, posted on Facebook YPD’s Facebook which named Fu directly, Higthat Braasch on were him three months gins said thathad thecalled emailsthe hepolice received “derogatory before, was lost in HGS and had tried toasserted ask her and, inwhen somehecases, inflammatory.” Higgins for directions. Four police officers arrived in response to that there was “absolutely no racism in this situation, that call, and that Reneson a stucertainly notleft onupon the realizing part of Yale police.” was Higgins dent. Reneson to were comment this article, and explained that declined the police calledforbecause the kids Siyonbola did not respond to multiple requests for comwere trying to enter one of the colleges, yet maintained ment. After Siyonbola posted the video online, a petition that the officers spoke “politely and respectfully” to calling for Braasch’s removal from the Graduate School the kids. He noted that one of the officers recognized of Arts and Sciences gathered 3,000 signatures; Braasch the kids,a and thatatone of President the kids Peter remembered remains student Yale. Salovey, seeYale ing the officer handing out Rice Krispie Treats College Dean Marvin Chun, and Secretary and over Vice the summer. “As a proud resident Goff-Crews of New Haven, as President for Student Life Kimberly sent out aUniversity-wide police chief, emails and asinanwhich African-American, I am and all a series of meetings too familiar with racism and how hatred can “listening sessions” with students werequickly promised and comspread—particularly media,” wrote. mitments to diversity on andsocial inclusion wereHiggins renewed. The From Fu’s perspective, exemplified a event became so infamous the thatencounter students still refer to it as “what happened broader pattern at of HGS.” policing New Haven residents. She considers the Yale Police to be a mechanism by which The HGS encounter is one of several of biased Yale has gentrified New Haven. As accounts Yale expands, it policing brought forth by residents, students and Haven displaces New Haven sheNew says, andcomthe munity presence members in recent years. This piece reports two YPD’s enforces the newly-drawn campus new sets of allegations — onewas at GPSCY, stuboundaries. “I think there a lessonYale’s beinggrad taught dent bar; the other at an off-campus venue — not previthat day about who can belong where,” she says of the ously covered media. These events raise questions encounter by in thethe Benjamin Franklin gate. about the role of the police on Yale’s campus. When does *** policing at Yale draw a boundary between those who are
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presumed to belong on campus and those who aren’t? How far should the YPD go to enforce borders between Yale and the surrounding city? When is a 911 call a plea for safety, and when is it a method of exclusion?
“I deserve to be here,” Siyonbola told the officers. “I paid tuition like everybody else. I*** am not going to justify my existence here.”
In the middle of the night on January 11, 1824, someone—likely a Yale student—seized the body of Batsheba Smith, the deceased of athe farmer, herup West Ronnell Higgins,daughter Chief of YPD,from grew in Haven grave. The stowed on theofficer, floor ofand the New Haven. Histhief father wastheanbody NHPD Yale Medical College folding her corpse it would encouraged him tocellar, pursue a career withsothe Yale look like a pile of clothes. When the New Haven constaPolice. After serving as a corrections officer at Bridgeble discovered the body and news got around, six hundred port Correctional Facility, Higgins joined the Yale outraged citizens gathered in front of the Medical College Police inarmed 1997,with and weapons became and Chief in 2011. is now building, stones. “TearHe down the in his forties. As Janet until Lindner, Yale’s Associate College,” they chanted, city guards stepped inVice and President forofAdministration at the time, told the Yale arrested some the rioters.
Daily News, the Yale Police Chief hiring committee appreciated Higgins’ a was longtime city As Yale’s website tells background the story, thisasriot the reason resident. Higgins prioritized a model of “commuthe city assigned twohas New Haven Police officers, Bill Wiser nityJim policing” during his tenure seeking to and Donnelly, to regularly patrol as theChief, campus. The University laterbetween hired Wiser Donnelly, making the build ties YPDand officers and both the them Yale and inaugural officers of the first private university police force New Haven communities. in the nation.speaks in a steady, deep voice, and wears Higgins rectangular tortoiseshell glasses. His schedule is It’s unclear the riotofwasattempts actually to theschedule cause of packed; afterwhether four months the start of the Yale Police, as Wiser and Donnelly an interview, he agreed to speak with me for weren’t a total assigned to minutes. police Yale a good seventy years of fifteen Weuntil met1894 in a–conference room at after the body-snatching incident. Yet the riot perhaps the Office of Public Affairs and Communications on exemplified the rocky relationship between the school and the corner of Whitney and Grove, at a long table that the city that led to the department’s founding. In his autobicould seat at least sixteen people. We were joined only ography, Wiser wrote that he and Donnelly were appointed KarenYale Peart, Yale’s“many Director of External tobypolice because stories were told Communiof the troucations. A cardboard of Handsome Dan, Yale’s bles and fights betweencutout the students on the one side and bulldog mascot, waiting room sofas the the city police andgreeted citizensthe on the other.” Wiser andonDonother primary side of arole glass nelly’s waswall. to defend Yale students from their Higginsrather said that aftermath of the“As HGS incineighbors, thanin thethe other way around. outlined dent, members of the“our Yaleduties community have increasby the police,” he wrote, were to protect the stuingly their voiced concerns him property about afrom perceived dents, property, and alltocollege injury.” According Wiser, intruders had officers been wandering onto disconnecttobetween Yale Police and the comuniversity stealing in munities land they and serve. “The students’ reality is belongings. that we do Early a lot on his at the university, found himself kicking andposition off campus,” Higgins Wiser said, referring to commu“tramps” out of the basements and to forcing a “colored nity outreach. “It was troubling me that people gensaid tleman” leavebe one of the building entrances. “The first that we to could doing more. People were astounded thing do, heard it seemed us,”officers he wrote, “was to keep all whentothey whattoour were doing.” suspicious characters from the campus.” According to Higgins, Yale Police officers organize blood drives and collect school supply donations. Yale students initially regarded Wiser and Donnelly They give regular talks at public schools. The Departwith mistrust, regarding them as outsiders and discplinarmentYetworks with the FBI toto co-run the FuturetoLaw ians. the officers managed endear themselves the Enforcement Youth Academy, which 26 high community. They taught students to sew invites on buttons and schoolersthem to stay in Yaleperiods dormitories for free forIn a week counseled through of homesickness. time, overwere the summer whileinlearning they given lodging campus about dorms.crime-fighting As Wiser tells techniques. it, the pair grew so attached to the college that when the said that after HGS incident, of cityHiggins police department soughtthe to reassign them to aone differhis post, mainWiser priorities is to better the Departent and Donnelly quit publicize and were subsequently ment’s outreach efforts. He designated now two appointed by the University as recently “special constables,” private officersemployees. to comprise a Community Outreach and Engagement Team; the officers will focus full-time on For decades, the the Yale Yale Police’s Police Department strengthening relationship remained with the relatively small. But in the 1960s and that ’70s,the student community. In the couple of weeks team prohas tests erupted across the country as part of the Civil Rights
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Movement and theofficer flurry of activism against Vietnam been active, one has organized an the apple-pickWar.event In response, more and more universities beganhas to ing with a residential college, and another form their own police hiring who invited a group of highdepartments, school students to officers a Yale footwere game. trained The to interact withalso college students. By 2012, ball YPD has added a role-playing according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 75 percent component to its mandated biannual implicit bias of over 900Asked four-year collegesfor surveyed acrossHiggins the country trainings. repeatedly comment, and employed armed police 86 percent of content campus other YPDanofficials did notforce. elaborate on the police officers had the power to arrest in regions beyond of these trainings. the campus borders.
“At the end of the day, the jury is very much still outInasthe to ’70s, how Yale effective implicit bias training is,” said expanded its force and tightened its Michael Sierra-Arévalo, an Assistant Professor at Ruttraining programs and standards for officers. At first, the gers School of Criminal Justice who his PhD university attempted to downplay the received YPD’s status as a in Sociology at Yaleutilized and hasunmarked conducted police force; officers carsethnographies and wore suits of uniforms. several police across theconsultant country, as John W. departments Powell, a campus security including NHPD.of“There evidence sugwho served the as Director Securityisand Associatethat Dean of gests thatfrom pre- 1960 and postsurveys of implicit bias trainStudents to 1968, described the department’s ings that officers better Frankly, transition to blue scored uniforms that after more training. closely resembled city officers’ mimicking NHPDhours so as of to I’m police skeptical. I’mattire, skeptical that athe couple project image of safety and deter crime. traininganwill be able to undo decades of socialization.” While training sessions might not eliminate disAppearancesHiggins aside, believes important remain crimination, theydistinctions do have an impact between the “I Yale Police Department its NewofHaven on officers. think one of the keyand strengths anticounterpart. of this to year, the New Haven Indebias trainingOnisMay the16ability reduce defensiveness pendent wrote that [of it had filed he a request around the topic race],” says. for the Yale Police Department’s body-camera footage of the Hall of Graduate *** Studies incident in May under the Connecticut Freedom Just over a month before Siyonbola was confronted of Information Act (FOIA), which requires all public agenin on the night of April 5, and twofiles Black gradute ciesHGS, to provide access to their records when asked. students prepared to leave Gryphon’s Pub, also The Department denied their request, citing a needknown to preas GPSCY, Yale’s barstudents for graduate students, after serve the privacy of the involved under the Fam-a night out. (OneRights was aand man, the other woman; ily Educational Privacy Act, asa well as a both legal requestedthat anonymity.) On their waymaterials out, therelated female exception allows them to withhold to student realizedallegations.” she’d lostHad herSiyonbola phone, not andrecorded turned “uncorroborated backHGS to search male to the incidentfor on it. herThe phone, no student evidencedecided corroborating herand experience would been publicly leave, exited the bar,have where four policeaccessible. cars, three SUVs and one smaller vehicle, had gathered. A couas the Independent the walked YPD has pleInoffact, police officers stoppedreported, him as he outa history of denying FOIA requests, bringing forth quesand refused to let him pass. tions the transparency public can expect from At about that moment, Tarletonthe Watkins, a white Divinaityprivate police force.stepped In 2007,outside the Department rejected School student, of the bar with the requestand of anoticed lawyer, Janet Perrotti, whose client his FOIA roommate the Black male student, claimed to have been racially profiled by an officer. At who was a friend of his, speaking with the officers. the time, the Yale Police claimed that as a private police “They were in his personal space,” he remembers. “I force, it was not subject to FOIA at all. The Connecticut wouldn’t say they were accosting him, necessarily, but Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) sided with it certainly feltDepartment like they were in his Perrotti. If the couldgetting arrest up people andface, put and I think he was shaken by that.” None of the stuthem in jail, the Commission concluded, it should have dents could identifymaterials whetherto the officersunder wereFOIA. from to disclose requested the public the YPD or the NHPD. Watkins approached them and male stuBut the following year, after thecalled Yale the Police union dent by name, asked, “Are you the doing all right? requested that theand Department disclose salaries of top Do you need any help?” maleDepartment student answered officials, the FOIC ruled The that the did not resemble a public were agencypreventing in its financial and that the officers him operations, from leaving, thus not need to disclose Similar and did Watkins asked one of that the information. officers if there waslegal any battles over whether applies to private university problem. The officerFOIA inquired in return whether Watpolice forcesthe have occurred in Watkins recent years at universities kins knew student, and replied that the across thewas country, including Harvard and Notre Dame. student his friend and classmate. The anonymous student said later that he’d told the officers exactly YaleWatkins Police Chief Ronnell Higgins calls the aYale Police what had told them—that he was member Department “a private entity with a public purpose.” In of the Yale community and that he hadn’t done anythis respect, the Yale Police Department is similar to a prithing wrong. But it was only when Watkins intervened OCTOBER 2018
vate prison, or a backed charter away, school.saying And like of that the officer that these therekinds was no institutions, it faces the challenge of balancing the interlonger a problem. ests“Itof was its private organization obligations to the the most, I think,with starkitsrepresentation of public. my white privilege that I had ever personally expe-
rienced,” Watkins later told me, “where an officer is ***hands-on with my Black friend and then is very very hands off when I, a white man, [approach] to save the Today, the Yale Police force has grown to 93 officers. It day.” works alongside a Yale Security team, which, according Meanwhile, while the female student was searchto Yale’s website, “serves as the eyes and ears of the YPD” ing forbuildings her phone, she noticed the police inside and parking lots. Today, when presence someone outside. an employee of the bar that dials 911She fromapproached an on-campus location, the phone call night and asked the policeAccording had beentocalled. routes to the Yale whether Police Department. Chief The employee, East woman whocollaborate; was also a Higgins, the YPDanand theAsian NHPD frequently graduate student, told becausetheir youpatrol guys their detectives confer on her, major“Yeah, investigations, need tooverlap, go.” That’s when thecalls female student realized routes and they route to each other. Somethe police were there her. She exited the bar, times, officers from bothfor departments will respond to aleavcall together. YPD officers walk, and drive along student “beats,” ing her phone behind, andbike, observed the male or patrolto routes, both within campus boundaries and in talking the police as shethe walked out. But the female areas adjacent to campus. student kept walking, quickly and discreetly, a swirl of what-ifs gathering momentum in her mind. Since Dixwell “WhenYale’s the recent policeexpansion are calledinto onthe you, it’s a neighhuge borhood with you the view opening of Benjamin and shift in how things,” she said.Franklin “It’s almost Pauli Murray colleges in 2017, Jeannia Fu, a student at like a life or death thing.” The day after that night, the School of Public Health, has noticed an increased she remembers, she learned from other employees at police presence in the area. Fu, who is Asian, has straight, GPSCY that the employee she’d spoken to had called cropped hair and speaks in a level, earnest tone. She has the the for male student and She doesn’t livedpolice in Newon Haven nine years and hasher. been involved in know why. “If there’s no consequence for people to activism against police brutality since a Bridgeport police call thefatally police, when someone calls the police, officer shotthen teenager Jayson Negron in May 2017. what do you do for yourself as a student?” she continued. “You justFu call thea police on them, too?” Last spring, and friend, Amy Smoyer, an assistant All three studentsConnecticut have submitted written testiprofessor at Southern State University, saw monyYale of that night to multiple and three officers talking to a groupadministrators of Black boys, who haveguesses reached to resources foralong students experishe wereout around 10 years old, the bike path that runsracial between Pauli Murray and but Yale there Health. said encing harassment at Yale, hasFubeen that as she walked up to them, officers wereofficers taking no response. The students werethetold that the down the records boys’ names. Fu asked if the boys were all right. kept no of what happened, since there had “They looked and didn’t anything,” she said. been no arrest.scared The student whosaycalled the police has since graduated. A representative of GPSCY has not
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The Yale Center for British Art, through the generosity of Nancy Horton Bartels and her late husband, Henry E. Bartels, is pleased to offer paid academic-year and summer internships to Yale undergraduates. Awarded annually, these internships introduce students to museum operations and best practices in the curatorial, conservation, and administrative departments. For more information and to submit an online application, please visit britishart.yale.edu/education/yale/internships or contact Research (ycba.research@yale.edu | +1 203 432 2824).
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responded to multiple requests for comment. “A lot of the times,” the female student said, “students are being policed because they’re presumed to be not from Yale because they’re Black, and New Haven is Black. That’s the assumption.” *** In the immediate aftermath of Braasch’s call to the police in May, a group of graduate students gathered to draft an open letter to the Yale administration. The letter called for specific reforms towards a more equitable campus for Black members of the community, and ultimately accumulated about 670 signatures, according to one of the letter’s authors. Among other requests, the letter asked for the founding of a Title VI office dedicated to eliminating racial discrimination on campus in compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yale currently has a Title IX office devoted to fighting sex and gender discrimination on campus, but the university’s resources for community members who face racism are decentralized across various departments and schools. The administration officially encourages students who have experienced racial discrimination to either confide in their residential college dean or dean’s designee, or else to go to the Office of Equal Opportunity, which handles all kinds of discrimination. On October 9, President Salovey sent out a university-wide email introducing a new website, “Belonging at Yale,” a guide of resources for students who have faced harassment and discrimination. A few days later, on October 11, GoffCrews, the Secretary and Vice-President for Student Life, said in a statement to the Yale Daily News that the university did not plan to implement a Title VI office, but was reviewing the efficacy of the resources it already offers. The students’ open letter also called for a system in which Yale Police Officers would respond to non-violent calls without carrying firearms. When asked about this suggestion, Higgins responded, “Highly trained, empathetic, armed officers keep everyone safe.” Alexia Williams, a Yale graduate student in the African-American Studies and American Studies departments who co-authored the open letter, said she is concerned about how the YPD’s presence alters students’ perceptions of other New Haven residents. “I feel that they promote defensiveness between Yale students and the New Haven community,” she said. Williams, along with other graduate and undergraduate students, attended meetings with administrators throughout the summer to address some of the concerns expressed in the letter. She said the administration was largely receptive to listen to students’ ideas. In an email to the University in August, President Peter Salovey announced that all teaching fellows and new graduate students would undergo mandatory anti-bias and inclusivity trainings this fall, honoring a request that the letter expressed. For Williams, these required training sessions for OCTOBER 2018
graduate students are essential. “During orientation, I remember a police officer saying, ‘Don’t go past this street,’ or ‘Stay in this area on campus,’ or ‘These parts of town might be dangerous,’” she recalled. “That trickles down through the graduate population so that a lot of times, when Black students come on campus, people assume that we are not meant to be there.” “There are students on campus who are really deputized to police people of color in the area,” she said, “and, moreover, who are emboldened and empowered to weaponize the police against students of color who they feel don’t belong.” *** For some students, calling the police doesn’t feel like a viable option. On a Wednesday in October 2016, during the fall semester of her senior year, Chelsey Clark, who graduated from Yale College in 2017, went out dancing with two friends at an off-campus venue that was reserved for Yale students. Clark and both friends identify as Black women. When they gathered by the back staircase inside the venue, a bouncer approached them and asked them to move in what Clark described as a “forceful” tone. The three students cleared from the staircase area. Then, without warning, the bouncer threw one of Clark’s friends to the ground. When Clark protested, he slammed her to the floor, too. He seized the friend on the ground by the neck and clutched Clark by the wrist, and dragged the two of them across the dance floor, pulling them outside. The third friend followed “screaming,” Clark recalled. As the bouncer dragged her out, Clark’s phone and student ID fell out of her hand. The sea of dancing people parted to make way, many of them watching. No one intervened. Outside, Clark was shaken but clear-headed, running on adrenaline. She borrowed someone’s phone and called the police to report the altercation. “The optic of two Black women being dragged out of a party, that really bothered me deep down,” she said. “I know that a lot of people must have seen that and thought that we were being belligerent and maybe aggressive. And that that’s why we were being removed and that the action was justified. And that really, really ate at me for a really long time.” Clark called the police with these thoughts pulsing through her mind. She remembers thinking, “I need proof that I didn’t
“A lot of the time,” the female student said, “students are being policed because they’re presumed to be not from Yale because they’re Black, and New Haven is Black. That’s the assumption.” 31
deserve for this to happen to me, and I need people to know that this was not fair.” Three NHPD officers responded to Clark’s call; two of them exited the car to speak with Clark and the friends she had been with. One of the officers was white, and the other was Black. The officers responded with “dismissive” words and body language and declined to take statements from two witnesses who offered to speak to them, Clark said. At one point, she asked the officers why they weren’t taking the incident seriously. “We were just assaulted,” she told them. “You were not assaulted,” she recalls the white officer responding. After that, Clark left, her statement incomplete. The police contacted her the next morning in order to follow up; she declined to saywhether she pressed charges against the bouncer. But the conversation with the police officers that night was “the worst part” of what happened, Clark said. Clark has long, curly hair; when we spoke over Skype, she wore a sweatshirt from Princeton University, where she’s now pursing a doctorate in psychology. The NHPD did not respond to a request for comment. Clark said she’d always thought of police officers as people who would have her back when she needed it. But after the altercation with the bouncer, “that just totally went away,” she said, “I don’t even want to use that resource anymore. And that’s really dangerous, because what if something else happens and I don’t feel comfortable calling the cops?” In the months after the violent encounter with the bouncer and subsequent conversation with the police, Clark said she barely left her apartment outside of attending classes. She withdrew from friends and had some difficulty focusing on academics. “I never would have spoken about this as a student,” Clark says. “It’s only now that I’m gone that I’m like, ‘I don’t really care that much anymore.’ But while I was there, the people I went to were SHARE [Yale’s Sexual Harrassment and Assault Response & Education Center], which is confidential, and the dean of my cultural center, and I told her, ‘You can’t tell anyone, this cannot get out.’ So I think that we just need to think about the fact that this could be happening to students all the time, and we have no idea.” *** Every August, first-year undergraduates, so new to Yale they’re still wearing their IDs around their necks, convene in Woolsey Hall for a mandatory talk on public safety. In past years, they watched a grainy video that followed “Lance,” a blonde, white male student who neglects to use a U-lock to secure his bicycle and lets slip to a man in baggy jeans and a bandana that he only carries hundred-dollar bills. “Please take a moment to identify with Lance,” the narrator instructed viewers at the beginning. All of the actors shown in the video are white. This year, in the aftermath of the HGS scandal, the OCTOBER 2018
public safety orientation video has undergone a makeover. The new video features a more racially diverse cast and includes footage of Chief Higgins greeting passersby on the street and tossing a frisbee with a young boy. In a voiceover, Higgins asserts the YPD’s commitment to inclusivity, and a message flashes across the screen that “regardless of race, gender preference, religion or background, Yale wants everyone to feel safe, respected and valued.” Later, Higgins explains that “many of Yale’s buildings are open to the public, but some are not.” He instructs students to be prepared to show their student IDs if ever asked by a police or security officer “so that they can identify you as a member of the Yale community.” “We work day and night to keep you safe,” Higgins assures the hundreds of new students watching. The female student involved in the GPSCY incident had participated in efforts to encourage Black prospective students to apply to Yale. But after that night in April, her perspective on welcoming new students has changed. “When this happened, it made me feel like, ‘Am I recruiting students to be vulnerable to policing?’” she says. “I’m all about, ‘Come to Yale, [it’s a] safe space, create your own community.’ But in that moment, I didn’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe. We don’t go into GPSCY anymore.” From Chelsey Clark’s perspective, racially biased policing reduces the number of places and resources on campus that Black students feel are accessible to them. “That can really affect a person,” she says. “For me, I could never feel comfortable going back to this venue after that. And there are instances like at HGS — how could you feel comfortable in your home after something like that happens?”
— Laura Glesby is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
poem
it is the first day of autumn Oriana Tang
It is the first day of autumn. I walk outside, and all the neon in the shops along York Street has been lit up. It is 6 PM, but the church bells are ringing. In childhood I lived near a church. I never saw it, but every day I heard the bells striking the hour at noon and 6 PM. Some days I was inside, the windows shut, and the bells were muffled, or I missed them, and when I look at the clock and it was 2 PM, or 7 PM, the sun setting through the trees in the backyard and making it hard to look out the window over the sink as I washed the dishes, time felt unreal. In the summer the sun would not set until late, and then when I looked at the clock the day was already over. Today the leaves are still green but already it is cold, alread I picture the end of the season: the limbs of the trees, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the warmth of the bed in the morning. Cocooned in the sheets, waking to my mother turning on the lamp on my desk, its light a soft halo in the early dark. That was my childhood with the church bells. Someone on a street corner singing Jacques Brel— Ne me quitte pas Il faut oublier Tout peut s’oublier Qui s’enfuit déjà— each word bleeding into the next like rain streaming down a windowpane. It is the first day of autumn and I am standing in the middle of York Street unable to move. All of that neon bright in the half-dark, bright and sad. The bells have stopped. In the shop windows people with slack faces open their mouths and laugh. Where do we go now? Where do we all go now? — Oriana Tang is a senior in Saybrook College.
33
Yale University
FALL 2018 GRADUATE STUDENT SEMINARS IN
JUDAIC STUDIES PRESENTS:
Jewish Thought Colloquium
November 7th , 12:00pm Mara Benjamin Mount Holyoke College
CHAIR OF JEWISH STUDIES; IRENE KAPLAN LEIWANT ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF JEWISH STUDIES
Medieval Jewish Studies Workshop
November 14th, 12:00pm David Stern Harvard University
HARRY STARR PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL AND MODERN JEWISH AND HEBREW LITERATURE AND PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES
Medieval Jewish Studies Workshop
November 28th, 12:00pm Ephraim Kanarfogel Yeshiva University
WHERE
Judaica Collection Reading Room Sterling Memorial Library 3rd Floor, Room 335b
For more information contact Renee Reed @ renee.reed@yale.edu or 203-432-0843
E. BILLI IVRY UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF JEWISH HISTORY, LITERATURE AND LAW CHAIR, REBECCA IVRY DEPARTMENT OF JEWISH STUDIES
Jewish History Colloquium
December 6th, 1:00pm Alma Heckman UC—Santa Cruz
NEUFELD-LEVIN CHAIR OF HOLOCAUST STUDIES HISTORY DEPARTMENT, JEWISH STUDIES
A LIGHT KOSHER LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED
Truth History Democracy Hear from some of the most outstanding journalists in the world and gain insight into the media and its role in contemporary culture. poynter.yale.edu  36
THE NEW JOUR NAL