Volume 48 - Issue I

staff editors-in-chief Maya Averbuch Caroline Sydney managing editor Isabelle Taft senior editors Hayley Byrnes Kendrick McDonald Lara Sokoloff associate editors Ruby Bilger Joyce Guo Sophie Haigney Libbie Katsev Elena Saavedra Buckley copy editors Douglas Plume Spencer Bokat-Lindell design editors Chris Paolini Ivy Sanders-Schneider Edward Wang photo editor Jennifer Lu web designer Mariah Xu

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh advisors Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

with support from

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 2015 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. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. 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.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

Volume 48 Issue 1 Sept. 2015

FEATURES

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www.thenewjournalatyale.com

Of a Certain Age Fake IDs remain a hallmark of campus life

by Spencer Bokat-Lindell

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For Country?

The military moves back into formation at Yale

by Jane Darby Menton STANDARDS

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points of departure

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essay The Anthropology of One

by Julia Hamer-Light and Natalie Yang

by Juliet Glazer

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poetry

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snapshot Missing the Mark

by Malini Gandhi

by Rachel Brown

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poetry

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critical angle Manufacturing Cool

by Jillian Kravatz

by Jordan Coley

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endnote First-Name Basis

by Caroline Sydney

SEPTEMBER 2015

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points of departure

OPENING THE SPACE With plaster and paint, New Haven students chronicle injustice story and photo by Julia Hamer-Light

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THE NEW JOURNAL

R

uby slowly peels the tape off her canvas, exposing turquoise and red between the stripes of black running down the painting.

“I don’t usually use black because it seems too harsh, but this time it seemed right,” she says.

Ruby is one of eighteen New Haven high school students of color participating in Artspace’s fifteenth annual Summer Apprenticeship Program. Artspace is a nonprofit in New Haven’s Ninth Square neighborhood that connects emerging artists with audiences in the New Haven community. Every year brings a new topic for the apprenticeship program, and this year the aim is to include the young participants in a growing conversation on race in the American justice system. For three weeks in July, the students take over the gallery and turn the exhibition space into workshops. Some students were encouraged to apply to the Artspace program by teachers at their schools.

Others saw the program advertised on the street. On the application form, students were asked to explain their interest in the program and whether or not their family had any personal encounters with the criminal justice system.

Many of them said yes.

Throughout the summer, I worked in the offices of Artspace and watched the students influence the rhythms and energy of the building. Earlier in the summer, a busy day at the gallery often meant three visitors over the course of one afternoon. Now, at the end of the summer while the exhibition is up, the gallery attracts around twenty people each day.

The students worked with Aaron Jafferis and Dexter Singleton from New Haven’s Collective Consciousness Theatre on poetry, songs, and skits. Lead Artist Titus Kaphar, who received his MFA at Yale in 2006, instructed students in visual art. Kaphar’s own work draws on and reappropriates the art historical canon, often to explore themes of racism and black experiences.

“The thing I am good at, if I’m good at anything, is helping people to take the seed of an idea, and water it, and grow that into a larger project,” Kaphar says of his teaching approach. Over the course of the program, the teenagers speak with ex-convicts, visit a level-four correctional facility, and learn about the history of racism and the criminal justice system. After each activity, they return to Artspace to process their experiences through art.

Before coming up with the idea for her painting, Ruby recalled a day when she had gone straight from a correctional facility to her job at New Haven’s Union League Café. A morning defined by deprivation followed by an evening submerged in excess. The next day, she approached Kaphar with a burning idea for a new direction in her art.

SEPTEMBER 2015

At the workshop, Ruby’s piece was bare except for a wash of indigo blue with turquoise squares here and there. She mentions the unexpected similarity between her trip to the prison and her job as a waitress. In those spaces, customers and prisoners both expect silence from her. She and Kaphar discuss the parallels between the men behind bars with whom she was not allowed to talk, and the men at tables, whom she was supposed to serve silently. He suggests “dichotomy” as a word to formulate her ideas.

“Yeah! Like between these two worlds,” she says.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “Art is made in that space in between.”

In 2013, Kaphar created The Jerome Project, a series of ninety-nine portraits of men in the prison system who share the historically black name of his father. The students’ show shares the same name as his exhibit and culminated in the joint display of their work beside that of established artists. Kaphar’s work has always focused on themes of racial disparity, but only within the past year has it earned attention for its message.

“A lot of people ask, ‘Do you think that your art can, like, change the world in a way?’” he said. “I don’t think that in general people walk up to a painting, and their lives are changed. I don’t think that that’s what happens. But I think that the kinds of conversations that happen around paintings—those can have an impact on society.”

On the night of the student opening, Ruby’s piece hung on the wall—the turquoise background now held concentric squares of red, purple, and grey. The black lines contrasted starkly with the other warmer colors.

People trickled in before the show formally opened. By the time the students were performing the poetry, skits, and songs they had created, the room was full.

From the front desk, I watched a crowd that far exceeded what I had come to expect at Artspace events filter through the galleries. For hours, some four hundred people from across New Haven gathered together, murmuring as they lingered over Ruby’s piece and over others, their voices rising in discussion as they left.

-Julia Hamer-Light is a sophomore in Silliman College

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SEE SPOT THINK Even dogs take tests at Yale

by Natalie Yang

Illustration by Ivy Sanders-Schneider

Z

oe the chocolate lab stares at the two overturned white buckets on the other side of the room. A screen is placed in front of the buckets, blocking her view, and a treat is placed under one of the buckets.

But which one? The dog strains against her leash, her tail twitching uncontrollably. As the screen rises, she rushes toward the buckets. Researcher Rebecca Spaulding points emphatically to the correct container, but Zoe ignores her gesture. She turns to the other bucket, trying desperately to overturn it with her large brown nose. It slides only a few inches across the smooth floor. Why doesn’t Zoe respond to the pointing?

This scene plays out just behind Science Hill in a tiny white building visited by dogs from across the tri-state area. The Canine Cognition Center (CCC) opened a year and a half ago as part of Yale’s Comparative Cognition Lab. “Our center is devoted to learning more about canine psychology—how dogs perceive 6

their environment, solve problems, and make decisions,” Laurie Santos, the CCC’s director, wrote in an email. Scientists already know that both nature and nurture play a role in development, but the question is how much “nurture”—or environment—matters.

The researchers refer to their test subjects as “dog scientists” on the CCC’s website, but they caution the leash-holders against believing that dogs always understand what’s going on. Even so, the owners tend to become invested in the experiments’ outcomes. “I am always rooting for her to do well!” laughs Theresa Schenker, Zoe’s owner, who said she hoped the research would give her a chance to bond with her pet.

In the laboratory’s curious social dynamic, owners must be instructed to sit with their heads down and eyes closed to avoid giving helpful cues while their barking counterparts are put to the test.

For all the big questions the researchers try to answer, the laboratory building is surprisingly small. But THE NEW JOURNAL

many dogs troop in and out over the course of the day, sometimes leading to confusion. “Wait,” Spaulding says at one point, while looking at the whiteboard with the list of dogs coming in. “Is Zoe the dog or the owner?” Upon closer examination, we confirmed that Zoe is a dog. “We keep getting dogs with people names,” she explains in the lab’s office.

In keeping with this theme, I observe Lily, a large black poodle whose tightly curled fur is adorned with bright pink rubber bands. She pants and tugs at the leash held by her owner, Catherine Kelly, who sports a black T-shirt decorated with a bejeweled poodle.

Kelly straightens her glasses on her nose as she apologizes for the state of Lily’s unkempt fur. “She has all these clumps here! I need to take her to the groomer,” she says, attempting to smooth down the black curls. Lily pants happily, unfazed, and examines my hands for treats.

“We’re going to have three parts to your visit today,” Spaulding explains to Kelly. “First, we’ll have Lily warm up and get some easy treats. Then we’ll do the first test, where we’ll hide a treat and see where Lily chooses to look for it. Next, we’ll present Lily a scene with certain cues and see how she responds.” Kelly and Lily enter the testing room as Spaulding switches on a television screen in the waiting room. A live camera feed appears, allowing me to watch Lily’s session.

The tests are often derived from experiments that comparative psychologists give to monkeys or babies. But dogs come in all shapes and sizes, and the tests must sometimes be customized to take that into account. “The difference between a very small Chihuahua and a large Bernese mountain dog is huge, and setting up the same things for both of those dogs will get different results,” says Linda Chang, the lab’s manager at the time. This trial-and-error process is complicated by the fact that, unlike human subjects, “dogs can’t tell you what they found confusing, and they can’t tell you what they thought was hard. So you have to take your best guess,” Spaulding explains. As a result, the researchers must often repeat the same test for months with many dogs.

Soon after Lily and Kelly leave, Mary Coates arrives with her dog Logan, a golden retriever who lumbers over like a friendly bear and grunts happily when I reach over to rub his back. He and Coates are led into the study room, and I watch on the screen as the familiar treat-hiding scenes play out with Logan.

All I can see of Logan is his large nose at the bottom left of the screen, pointing attentively at the white buckets in front of him. Occasionally, he turns back to Coates for reassurance, but she follows the rules and keeps her eyes averted.

SEPTEMBER 2015

Despite some test results like Zoe’s, Santos says that after months of conducting the pointing test, the researchers have found that most dogs do respond to human pointing gestures. Michael Bogese, the lab’s current manager, explained to me that the ability to recognize human gestures is uncommon among animals. “Indeed, even our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, are very bad at the task,” Bogese says. But the CCC researchers still need to figure out which types of pointing dogs pay attention to, and the extent to which our gestures influence their decisions.

The “dog scientists” of Yale’s CCC are just happy to get treats, but in the meantime their owners are watching to see whether they measure up. They sit in the next room, hoping that their pup will be the one to prove dogs’ emotional genius. “I just know Logan thinks and understands,” Coates says after the tests are done. “And I love being part of something that validates that.”

-Natalie Yang is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College

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essay

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ONE Working through loneliness in Buenos Aires

by Juliet Glazer

T

he woman I’m interviewing reaches across the yellowed plastic table and takes my chapped hands between her own. I’ll call her Lucía. She is middleaged, with creases around her eyes but girlish dimples on her cheeks. We are sitting in a dimly lit café on the edge of the sprawling slum, or villa, where she lives in Buenos Aires. I have just asked if she misses her home in Peru. It’s June, winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and she pulls her thickly knit sweater tighter around her middle. “De vez en cuando,” (Sometimes), she says. “Do you miss yours?” Sí, I reply. The tip of my nose tingles the way it does before I am going to cry.

I had lasted through only three weeks of classes about Argentinean infant mortality statistics before I quit my study-abroad program in Buenos Aires. Instead, for two months, I walked the city’s narrow cobblestone streets from barrio to barrio. Recoleta, Palermo, Almagro, Abasto, San Telmo. Broad-leafed palms dripping flowering vines. Walls painted with pink and purple nymphs. Parks filled with roses and patchy grass and very small kids who were very good at kicking soccer balls. And everywhere, strange, faded Spanish colonials and tall, quiet apartment buildings whose walls, I was sure, had harbored yesterday’s militants and their torturers.

I made friends in bars, in chamber-music classes, and on the bus. But I had promised my time only to myself, and I often turned down plans in order to sit in hundred-year-old cafes in the late afternoon where the light from stained glass windows cast colored diamonds on the marble tables. Crossing the noisy street near my apartment at dusk, I would sometimes feel a sudden tightness in the pit of my stomach. I was far from home and about to cook another omelet in a dark kitchen alone. But I could shake off my gloom by remembering that here, I had chosen independence. I could transform loneliness into alone-ness.

The days got colder and dusk fell before dinner-

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time. More and more, my unplanned hours seemed to expand frighteningly. Hoping to feel productive and useful, I joined a volunteer team at an NGO. I would work in the office and, once a week, help give workshops about healthcare and rights to migrant women like Lucía who lived in the villas of Buenos Aires. During my time off, I planned to interview some of the women about their access to healthcare as part of my senior anthropology project at Yale.

On a Wednesday evening, I followed the other volunteers to Lucía’s home in the villa, where we were to lead the workshop. Dim light from an unshaded bulb on the ceiling illuminated the single groundfloor room. Twenty-odd women leaned against stained, unpainted walls or settled on the sunken couch and overturned buckets on the concrete floor.

Another volunteer made introductions and began to explain that under Argentina’s Law 25.271, migrants have the right to free healthcare, education, and adequate housing. “But there is discrimination against us everywhere,” a stooped, older woman said, stepping forward. Others said they envisioned a future when making an appointment at the local public clinic would not mean waking up at 4 a.m. to get in line, and ambulance drivers would no longer refuse to enter the villa out of fear. Some nodded along, but most were already chatting amongst themselves and scolding one another’s toddlers. Realizing that it was late and that the group was losing energy, we packed up and promised we’d discuss the issues further the following week.

I shivered as we walked back to the bus stop along one of the narrow, unpaved streets. Dinnertime.

The spicy smell of grilling meat mixed with something rotting. A maze of slender buildings, three and four stories, jumbled stacks of colored boxes rising on either side of the road. Young men outside small restaurants blasting music and stands with Quilmes beer signs. Skinny dogs weaving between legs. Dogs THE NEW JOURNAL

sprawled on their sides, rib cages heaving. A woman stepping from an open doorway and slopping a bucket of grey water into the street.

By the time I got off the No. 92 bus back in “the rest” of Buenos Aires, I felt weak. I was safe in my air-conditioning, safe in my clean cotton sheets. But I was sweating right through them. Some roll of the dice had dropped me in the right side of Buenos Aires on a comfortable mattress in a freshly painted apartment. I knew that if I thought about where I had just been I would cry, so instead I thought about what I was doing there. But I was hardly the right person to be teaching these women about their rights in Argentina. I, who could barely remember the names of the Argentinian presidential candidates, who still felt like a third-grader trying to read the news in La Nación and Pagina 12 each morning. And on top of all this, I wanted to take these women’s stories and share them with a few students and professors who spoke a different language in a different hemisphere.

I forced myself to take deep breaths as I sat in the NGO’s office that week, working on posters for our next workshop and researching Law 25.271. Taking the train back to my apartment at rush hour, I couldn’t suppress the sense that everything I was doing was wrong. At night I ate alone so I wouldn’t have to answer my friends’ questions about my work. I was too embarrassed to email my advisor at Yale to ask for help.

I assured my supervisor at the NGO that everything was going well, but when we returned to the villa for our second workshop, I felt the bile rise in my throat. I had woken up that morning with my stom-

ach churning. We were finally here, and the buildings were too close together. Motorcycles, loud bass beats, and human shouts competed in the dark. I forced my gaze down and saw chicken bones in the mud. I pressed two fingers to the pressure point on my wrist to keep the nausea under control as we walked inside Lucía’s house, but the scent of baking bread was overwhelming. As Lucía offered the other volunteers rolls off a baking sheet, I yanked the metal door back open.

Hands on my knees, I dry-heaved in the street. Several yards away two men carrying a mattress up a ladder to a second-story landing stared at me. “Colorada!” they called. “Redhead!”

I snuck back inside and whispered an apologetic excuse to Lucía about food poisoning. She placed her hands on my shoulders, led me to the couch, and handed me a roll. Lying down and biting into the warm bread, my breathing eased. A middle-aged woman perched on the arm of the sofa and introduced herself as Soledad. She began to rub my ankles. “This is what my oldest daughter likes,” she said.

“Does it help?” As the other volunteers hung up the posters I had made listing the clauses of Law 25.271, I stayed on the couch with Soledad. Thinking it was safe to open my mouth again, I asked her where she was from. “Lima,” she said, the capital city of Peru.

Now she was Lucía’s neighbor. “Lucía knows all my secrets!” she said in a false whisper. “Last night I came home at midnight and she was scolding me.” We both looked over at Lucía and laughed.

That night I smiled at everyone on the No. 92 bus. Helping to give the workshops and starting my anthropology project were things I could actually do,

Illustration by Katie Colford

SEPTEMBER 2015

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I realized. With her hand on my ankle, Soledad had given me the care I hadn’t been able to admit I needed.

The next day I asked my supervisor at the NGO for advice on drafting a list of questions for the women who came to our workshops about how they understood their right to healthcare in Argentina. I emailed my advisor at Yale and held practice interviews with my friends. “When did you arrive in Argentina?” I asked a friend as she sat at my kitchen table. “When was the last time you saw a doctor?” “Do you know that you have the right to free healthcare as a migrant?”

Over the next month, I interviewed Lucía, Soledad, and three other women in the café on the edge of the villa. I hugged Soledad when she walked into the café in July. As she sat down, I asked about her daughter who has just turned eleven. “The birthday cake we made was so big that Lucía had to help me carry it!” she said. She asked me how my weekend was, whether I had friends there, or a boyfriend. “No,” I told her, men take too much time. Soledad smiled and rolled her eyes. “Men take time because you have to explain everything to them,” she said. “I know,” I said. “They don’t even understand themselves.” She agreed. “You and I, we see everything. Even what we wish we didn’t!”

In one of my last interviews, I turn on my voice recorder and ask another woman when she came to

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Buenos Aires, and whether it was hard for her to adjust to living here. She tells me that when she first arrived ten years ago, she cried every day for her mother back in Bolivia. “I cried so much I thought I’d be sick,” she says quietly. She pauses and I don’t interrupt. “You know,” she says finally, “I haven’t talked about this in a long time.” As I settle my elbows on the café table, it occurs to me that as an anthropology student, at least I can give her this. By listening, by trying to understand, I can show her that I care. “I cry a lot here, too,” I say. “But it’s different for you,” she replies, raising her eyebrows. “At least you know you’re going home.”

-Juliet Glazer is a junior in Silliman College

*The names of the subjects involved in the research project have been changed to protect the subjects’ confidentiality.

THE NEW JOURNAL

Drought The summer of the water rationing, the zinnias in clay pots steam in the sun.

The hummingbirds we usually fed with sugar water hover around the empty feeders, still thrusting their bills to drink— confused, they fly into each other, falling dazed into the dust.

You sit on the windowsill eating a red fruit with your fingers, legs dangling out the window.

Every twenty minutes, a plane takes off from the airfield bordering the yard and flies so low that the house is hit with wind; you drop the fruit, reach out your hand.

The swimming pool is bright and drained of water— in the afternoons, I watch as you walk barefoot along the bottom of the pool for hours, pausing to press your palms against the walls: the plaster of the pool is white, without cracks.

Late at night, when I wake and walk out onto the deck, I find you asleep folded in a corner at the bottom of the empty pool, in the hollow of the deep end, like a child in a dark church.

In June, the cracks start to appear in the earth.

At first they are thin and delicate, like the lines around your lips, but then they grow wide like wounds.

On the airfield bordering the yard, there are hundreds of arrows painted on the runways, pointing in many directions.

You start to spend more and more time in the empty pool.

From the deck, the heat shimmering off the asphalt makes the airfield appear to be a vast lake.

In the yard next door, there is a small boy and an empty cage.

Slowly, the hummingbirds begin to die. The dying takes weeks and weeks.

They are frantic at first, wheeling into each other, but then they lie still in the shadow of the sweet acacia, breathing very slowly.

You have not come out of the pool for days.

Then one night I lift the hummingbirds and hold them in my hands.

In the kitchen, I fill nineteen tall glasses with water, slip the birds in and hold them under.

The next morning, the empty pool is a blinding white.

You climb out, arched shoulders and pink lips and damp hair, as if you had been swimming.

-Malini Gandhi

SEPTEMBER 2015

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snapshot

MISSING THE MARK Do the recent changes to the GED close an avenue for social mobility?

by Rachel Brown

Illustration by Ivy Sanders-Schneider

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ment’s font size. Using the computer to take tests frustrates Goldburn. “I read slower, and I type slower, and the time runs out. If I was doing it on paper that would be different,” she says. Barnes and Goldburn are not attending a computer skills class—they are studying for the GED, the test that allows adults to obtain the equivalent of a high school diploma.

Barnes, now fifty-four, left high school before receiving his degree. Thirty-five years later, in September, 2014, he returned to the classroom to earn his GED through courses offered two nights a week

by Hamden Adult Education. The classroom likely resembles those Barnes occupied in high school— a world and U.S. topographical map hang over the blackboard, and dictionaries fill the shelves. But the

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THE NEW JOURNAL

n the computer lab at Keefe Community Center in Hamden, Connecticut, Steven Barnes pecks at his keyboard with his right index finger. He is retyping an essay about reusable bags and the environment. Neatly dressed in a checkered blue shirt and rectangular black glasses, Barnes has the clean-cut air of a model student. He runs his own business moving heavy machinery, but he is unfamiliar with the one kind of machine that every small business owner seems to need nowadays. “The first time I sat at a computer was with Ms. Judy,” he explains.

Eva Goldburn, one of Barnes’s classmates, sits at a computer nearby. She summons Ms. Judy—Judy Taddei, their instructor—to help adjust her docu-

similarities end there. The curriculum is dramatically different from what Barnes encountered at school a generation ago.

The General Education Development (GED) test, a staple of the adult education system for the past seven decades, was entirely revamped at the beginning of 2014. The new test has become more challenging and is offered only on the computer.

The previous version of the test, which had been used since 2002, included one essay and multiplechoice questions in five subjects: math, writing, science, reading, and social studies. The new exam combines the reading and writing sections and includes question formats such as drag-and-drop, fill-in-the-blank, and extended response. You can’t get lucky and guess your way to a passing score.

The GED has long helped Americans escape poverty by steering them toward college or a better job. The GED test became nationally popular after World War II when an assessment was needed for returning soldiers who had not completed high school. Soon the appeal spread to non-veterans. Today, over 800,000 people take the GED each year, earning it the nickname “America’s Largest High School.”

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, twenty-one percent of high school dropouts eventually receive a GED. But the changes may threaten this long-standing avenue toward upward mobility. Students in Connecticut already feel the effects. In 2013, 3,500 people in the state passed the GED. In 2014, just 280 people passed. The decrease of ninety-two percent reflects both the new test’s increased difficulty and the rush of students who took the test in 2013, before the changes. The trend was similar nationwide.

The GED Testing Service is a collaboration between the American Council on Education, an association of leaders in higher education, and Pearson, a for-profit testing and publishing company. Pearson establishes the GED curriculum, but states can decide whether to offer the GED or another high school equivalency test. State and local education boards finance programs to help students prepare for and take the test. This web is complicated, but the fundamental premise is not: the GED is a credential of last resort, a door left open to people who may have few other options in their quest for education.

Even with recent changes, the GED faces something of an identity crisis. Should it replicate the American high school curriculum, down to the accomplishments of President James K. Polk, or should the material be tailored to the diversity of test takers’ professional aspirations? Most students interviewed— SEPTEMBER 2015

both those employed and unemployed—hoped to use the test as a step toward additional schooling, typically vocational. But in seeking to rescue the GED from the moniker “Good Enough Diploma,” the bureaucrats and educators at the GED Testing Service have erected what many adult learners view as frustrating and arbitrary barriers to opportunity.

Goldburn works at a child development center in New Haven caring for six- to eight-month-old infants. She is studying for the GED because her job requires a Child Development Associate (CDA) credential, which mandates a high school degree or equivalent.

OVER 800,000 PEOPLE TAKE THE GED EACH YEAR, EARNING IT THE NICKNAME ‘AMERICA’S LARGEST HIGH SCHOOL.

“I really don’t want to do it,” Goldburn says, shaking her head. She came to the U.S. from Jamaica in 1989 and is less familiar with some of the content on American history and civics, which are included in the GED social studies curriculum, along with economics, geography, and world history. I ask Goldburn whether the material on the GED is relevant to her job. She responds, “It has absolutely nothing to do with the children.”

A classroom at the East Haven Adult Learning Center (EHALC), a nonprofit education center in East Haven, Connecticut, offered a snapshot of the challenges facing test designers: the students ranged from a middle-aged woman from Sierra Leone who had been out of school for years to young men who had only recently left American high schools.

According to a pamphlet provided by the GED Testing Service, the recent changes align the GED’s content with the demands of employers and higher education institutions. Businesses sometimes wrote 13

off the old GED as too easy to be a meaningful measure of ability. And when it came to salaries, a U.S. Census Bureau study found that individuals with a GED earned approximately 1,600 dollars less each month than those with a diploma. The new test is meant to change this statistic.

“It’s a wonderful new instrument. It’s brought students who have taken this test into the twentyfirst century,” says Joe Ferraiolo, the principal of the EHALC. On the edge of his desk teeter stacks of paper containing student forms and information on tests and grant applications. Ferraiolo leafs through them as he explains that some of the GED changes are good. Ferraiolo is particularly enthusiastic about the more detailed transcripts students receive, which make it easier for employers to understand results.

Adama Jalah, who attends the EHALC, went to

I ASK GOLDBURN IF SHE

the survey’s sample size. Across the table, a teenager in a loose gray sweatshirt thumbs through notifications on his cellphone with clear disinterest.

Later, Albright tells me that much of the new material is simply too hard for students to master in a typical GED course. Many students are already behind when they come into adult education programs, and it takes time for them to catch up. In general, it takes students at EHALC six months to a year to prepare for the test. Since many students work full time while studying, they often have little time to review outside of class. Albright says that sometimes students show up to class without having slept the previous night.

Students’ frustrations with the test’s new challenges are evident in the classroom. The school currently serves around 230 students, with approximately forty-five in the GED program. Ferraiolo says that when the new test was introduced, EHALC saw a dramatic drop in attendance. A similar decline occurred after the implementation of the 2002 test, and he expects that the numbers will start to bounce back in the next year.

HAS A BACKUP PLAN IF SHE DOESN’T PASS THE GED. SHE RESPONDS, “HOPEFULLY, WHEN I TAKE THE TEST, I’LL PASS IT.”

high school in her native Sierra Leone, but after she emigrated in 1979, she had trouble getting her transcripts out of the war-torn nation. Jalah took the old test and missed the passing score of 2,250 by just thirty points. “I thought I was going to get it before it changed,” she laments. But Jalah remains diligent.

She works as a nursing assistant in West Haven and is studying for the GED with the hope of attending nursing school.

Jalah’s GED instructor, Diane Albright, has been teaching at EHALC for twelve years. In class, Albright pla ys Simon and Garfunkel as background music and offers muffins and chocolate to her students as “energy food.” On a Wednesday morning in late April, she holds up news clippings on everything from the earthquake in Nepal to a survey on the world’s happiest country. Jalah pipes up with questions about 14

The changes to the GED, born in America’s industrial heyday, are intended to keep the test relevant in a transformed economy.

Even so, some have already decided the new test isn’t worth it. In response to higher costs and standards, certain states have adopted alternatives. New York, Nevada, and Indiana have all begun to use the Test Assessing Secondary Education. Six states now offer the High School Equivalency Test. Both cover material similar to that of the GED, but are cheaper and can be taken online or on paper.

Connecticut also offers classes for a Credit Diploma, which is geared toward those between seventeen and twenty-three who are completing high school credits, and the National External Diploma Program, which is more focused on professional life skills, such as proficiency in Microsoft Office.

But even in this more crowded testing landscape, the GED remains the most popular choice. Sitting at a plastic wood table in the Keefe Community Center, I ask Goldburn if she has a backup plan if she doesn’t pass the GED. She responds, “Hopefully, when I take the test, I’ll pass it.”

-Rachel Brown is a 2015 graduate of Saybrook College

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SEPTEMBER 2015

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critical angle

MANUFACTURING COOL The trials of Yale’s fledgling pop minority

by Jordan Coley

J

unior Seungju Hwang pointed to the guitar case on the floor of the recording studio in Timothy Dwight.

“Open it up!” he told me.

“I’ll lead, and you just jump in,” Kalaeb Tessema instructed from his seat behind the keyboard. The room was reminiscent of the home studios featured on MTV Cribs—quaint enough to suggest amateurism, yet sufficiently equipped to convince otherwise.

“Uh, I don’t really know how to do that,” I responded. Hwang was gravely overestimating my guitar skills, which I mostly picked up back in 2007, from an instructional DVD. “Alright. How about you just start playing, and we’ll follow?” he replied, scratching his head.

Hwang, a singer and guitarist, and Tessema, a keyboardist, were bandmates and had been coming to the studio since last winter, when Hwang wrote his first song, “Voltage.” Tessema had been Hwang’s freshman counselor, and was spending the year following graduation doing research and applying to medical school. The pair had just finished their first, multisong project, The Froco-Frokid Sessions. Hwang had invited me to sit in on a celebratory jam session. Now, he was asking me to play.

Together, Hwang and Tessema occupy a unique niche in Yale’s music performance world. With a number of acts on campus embracing a less accessible sound, Hwang and Tessema dedicate themselves to covering pop radio regulars like Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars and writing originals of a similar style.

At Yale, where students who write and perform their own cultivate what some would call a more “alternative” type of music, Hwang’s and Tessema’s mainstream taste causes them the same sort of musical insecurity that I felt while preparing to jam with them.

Nervously, I started in on a chord progression I had thought up in my bedroom a few days earlier. Within moments, Tessema weaved an improvised

16

melody around each bar, and Hwang followed with a steady drum pattern. Soon, a pop-rock ballad of Goo-Goo-Doll-proportions took audible form. After a couple rounds of verse and chorus, I began the gradual diminuendo. Our song slowly faded to a triumphant silence.

Yale’s music scene has as many cliques as a high school cafeteria. There is a symphony orchestra for the classically trained instrumentalists and a glee club for the vocal equivalents. There’s a set of a cappella groups that perform the latest radio hits, nineties favorites, and time-tested standards. And, of course, there’s the collection of student bands, performers, and their respective devotees existing contently on the fringe.

It wasn’t especially surprising that a rendition of Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2012 hit “Call Me Maybe” appeared on The Duke’s Men’s latest album, Busted. But you would probably find it hard to believe that the song—or one like it—would ever be performed at 216 Dwight, the dim basement venue that features local and student bands. There is an accepted division: bands and independent performers at Yale are the indie rockers, bar spitters, jazz players, electronic DJs, R&B singers—the “alternative.” Pop blares from the speakers of a crowded party or is preceded by a pitch pipe.

“There is an attitude that that which is popular, in all forms of art, is lesser because it appeals to the lowest common denominator,” junior Chris Cappello said. He’s the Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Broadcasting Company’s music magazine, Relatively Dark Blue Neither Purple Nor Green (otherwise known as the Zine), and guitarist and lead singer of local band, Loner Chic. “College kids tend to shy away from buying into [pop music] explicitly because so much of what we do is THE NEW JOURNAL

somehow geared toward accruing cultural capital.” In the college setting, the constant game of intellectual jockeying takes on a fierce form among those in the music scene. “There is really so little to be gained from being an out-and-out Pop music fan,” Cappello said bluntly.

Senior Sarah Solovay, who writes pop music, has been on the other end of this blanket dismissal. When we spoke in late July, she had recently returned from a two-week writing stint in Nashville and was preparing to make a similar trip to Los Angeles. In college, she has found that not even her professional credentials can save her from pop-focused ridicule. “The other day I was talking with another Yalie about my music, and when I told her I try to write Top 40-ish music, she said, ‘What?! But you so aren’t a Top 40 kind of person!’” Solovay does not believe such a person exists, but at Yale, “a lot of people think this way,” she wrote to me over email, “like the kind of music you make reflects how complex you are, so making mainstream music exposes you as shallow or basic.”

That isn’t to say, of course, that pop music can’t be of some value to the shrewd undergrad looking to bolster their music credibility. “There are artists that have an ironic ‘cultural cash,’ if you’re into them,” Cappello continued, citing pop megastar Taylor Swift’s latest album, 1989. He recalled attending a party at 216 Dwight where Swift’s “Blank Space” was playing.

“Everyone was super into it, but it was like, ‘Look at us, we’re arch! We’re going to play Taylor Swift and PC Music [an otherworldly, London-based electropop collective] one after another, and we don’t have a problem with that. Isn’t that cool?’” Though Cappello said this somewhat mockingly, he didn’t exclude himself from the critique. He and his peers at WYBC don’t represent some sort of tastemaking vanguard.

He knew that. They simply reflect a “certain subset of college taste,” he said. And ultimately, the subset that one falls into does not only depend of the quality of the music, but also on how it is sold.

Junior Stefanie Fernandez, Assistant Editor of the Zine, shared this point of view. “I think it’s an issue of marketing,” she told me. Fernandez said many of the groups popular amongst her cohorts at WYBC Radio write songs that could be “Pop” but are labeled “alternative” to protect them from allegations of selling out. This may seem like a paradox—alternative music, by its nature, isn’t “Pop,” but that does not mean alternative music can’t be widely popular. There’s an important distinction between “Pop” the genre and “pop music” the cultural phenomenon. For some Top 40 acts, whether or not their songs end up on the Top 40 “Pop” chart is not a question of genre, but SEPTEMBER 2015

Photograph by Jennifer Lu

simply a matter of how popular they are. Songs that have topped the Billboard’s charts have been sonically disparate. In 2012, indie rock musician Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” earned the #1 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” end of the year chart; just four years earlier, it was “Low” by rapper Flo Rida.

The modern popular music industry with all its bells, Seacrests, and whistles has sustained itself on bringing the niche to the masses, from early Southern ragtime to nineties grunge.

But music executives have not been afraid to invent the “next big thing” themselves. In a 2012 piece for Pacific Standard magazine, Columbia music sociologist Jennifer C. Lena catalogued the controversial origins and rise of Lana Del Rey. As Lena describes, Del Rey initially charmed the indie world with her aloof, do-it-yourself aesthetic, but when word broke that she “was bankrolled by her wealthy, marketing-savvy father, and that she had worked with professional 17

Illustration by Katie Colford

songwriters, managers, and possibly even plastic surgeons,” the façade came crashing down. It became clear that Lizzy Grant (as she was first known) was merely another product of the traditional pop engine.

Even if her sound was “different,” it was Pop in its truest form: the genre instead of the cultural phenomenon—the Pop that birthed talents like Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber. This is the Pop that Hwang and Tessema like to write and cover, and it’s also the type that is most often mocked by music critics at Yale and beyond.

As terse and reductive as his assessment seemed, I couldn’t help but feel that it was, at least in part, true.

It’s not that student Pop acts can’t be good, but if they don’t have polished, professional production quality, it’s just that we—average music listeners—have been geared to expect it of the genre. This sense of professionalism has become less a feature of Pop and more a part of its essence. That might be why we can enjoy the oft-gritty and imperfect qualities of traditional college band music, but are unable to do so if the performer is singing a Bruno Mars song.

These were the pieces of the puzzle that were finally coming into place as I sat across from Hwang On an afternoon in July, I chatted with Hwang, at a wooden picnic table at the base of Kline Biolwho worked as a summer research assistant in the ge- ogy Tower’s south side. A college student performing netics lab, during his lunch break. I asked him why he amateur Pop music will always sound a little karaoke thought there were so few pop acts at Yale. because, by its nature, the genre is not amateur. But “If you can imagine Jason Derulo’s original ver- Pop’s universality has afforded it a low rank within sion of ‘Talk Dirty’ done in TD Studio acoustics with the cultural taste hierarchy. Hwang accepts this, and a guitar, a ukulele, and clapping,” he looked at me he is not interested in scoring any cool points. He frankly, “would people want to listen to that?” I gave says he wants wants to make music people can “lisno answer. “Nowadays, Pop is really polished.” When ten and groove too.” There was something appealingly it fails to meet this standard, he concluded, nobody humble about this, even hip. wants to listen.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

Invitation 1. Write your creed on a napkin, assuming you have one.

1a.

If you don’t have a creed, one is provided for you here:

A cholesterol breakfast, cracked egg shells on the counter.

A cold breakfast of yogurt and string cheese.

A continental breakfast delayed by

inclement weather.

Orange juice flood

when the porcelain breaks.

Shades of beautiful pollution in the sunrise.

Orange juice filling the Grand Canyon on given Thursdays.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Sing your creed by the lakeside.

Sing your creed at dawn.

Sing your creed in the town square.

Sing your creed in the fitting room.

Take your creed to the church and slip it inside the book of psalms.

Sing your creed to the heavens.

If they dance, keep singing your creed.

8a.

If they do not dance, keep singing your creed.

-Jillian Kravatz

SEPTEMBER 2015

19

N

ora is anxiously awaiting a package. She is lying on her bed in her suite when she finally gets the USPS delivery notice on her iPhone. After class that afternoon, she picks up a bulky envelope from the Yale post office. Two of her friends are already waiting for her back in the suite. They eye the package impatiently. “Moment of truth,� one of them says.

Nora rips open the pouch and removes a small, lilac box tied with pale purple ribbon. She flips off the top to reveal a dinky beaded bracelet.

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SEPTEMBER 2015

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“It’s not really my aesthetic,” she jokes, and tosses it on the couch. She removes the thin layer of foam on which the bracelet had rested. Underneath, a small packet wrapped in paper is taped down to the base.

She wrestles the packet free and unwraps the paper, revealing a stack of six pairs of South Carolina driver’s licenses. She locates the pair meant for her.

“Wow—these look legit,” she says, inspecting the scanning strip on the back and flicking the card’s holographic face in and out of the light. She splays the other ten cards out on the table so her friends can pick out their likenesses. Sitting down on her couch, she grabs her laptop and pulls up an image of a stateissued South Carolina ID. Everything—the color and font scheme, the picture placements, the ZIP code format—matches perfectly. The personal information and photo match those on her ID from her home state. The name on the South Carolina card, however, is a pseudonym, and two years have been subtracted from her date of birth. On her real driver’s license, Nora is twenty. Nora from Columbia, South Carolina, is twenty-one.

She searches her new address on Google, trying to memorize where it is on a map. A housing appraisal pops up on Zillow.

“Ninety-two thousand dollars—I’m a broke bitch!” she laughs.

Three weeks prior, Nora had visited the Western Union kiosk at the Walgreens on York Street and transferred six hundred dollars—plus a fourteendollar fee—to an account in Guangzhou, China. She and five other friends had already submitted their personal information, along with photos taken against a white wall in a college basement, to a 22

website recommended by a freshman acquaintance.

The order had taken longer than the eighteen-day shipping time listed on the site, but the product did not disappoint.

“I want to try it tonight!” she said, dismissing her friends’ grousing about their approaching final exams.

Later that evening, I accompany Nora to Barracuda, a Latin-inspired bar on the corner of Chapel and Elm. We settle in at a booth, and Nora flags down a waitress to take her order.

“Can I see your ID?” she asks nicely. Nora slides her South Carolina driver’s license across the table.

The waitress gives the card a quick once-over and hands it back.

A few minutes later, she returns with a mangoinfused mojito. As she turns away, Nora cracks a smile.

Of all the illicit activity on campus, the use of fake IDs is probably among the most prevalent and least scrutinized. According to a survey conducted by the Dean’s Office in the 2011–’12 academic year, Yale students drink more than the average American college student. But there’s an astonishing lack of people—university-employed or otherwise—telling us that buying false identification might be a bad idea. We never receive any administrative emails about fake IDs, and as a Branford freshman counselor told me, they are not a required topic for Freshman Orientation and fro-co meetings.

I wanted to understand why the phenomenon of fake IDs is being ignored in the Yale–New Haven community, and to better grasp the impacts of a tacit culture of acceptance. At the beginning of February 2015, I began sending a Google survey to students in three randomly selected residential colleges: Morse, Pierson, and Saybrook. I asked fifteen questions that ranged from whether students had ever purchased a fake, to the price they paid and how they got it, to whether they had ever faced disciplinary action for using one. Over the course of two months, I emailed the survey to 1,078 students, allowing participants to remain anonymous if they chose. My goal was not to get dead-accurate statistics, but rather a general understanding of fakes at Yale.

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Of the 230 students who responded to my survey, eighty-four, or approximately thirty-seven percent, reported that they had purchased a fake ID, a figure that was relatively consistent across the three colleges. The majority of respondents acquired their IDs during their freshman year or, in about a third of cases, while they were still in high school. Roughly a quarter purchased them on websites in the same way Nora did. Many students organized bulk orders among their friends or Greek organizations in order to take advantage of online discounts.

Students pay a wide range of prices for fake IDs, some shelling out as little as twenty dollars or as much as 160 for a pair, in case one gets lost or While twenty-seven percent of those who responded taken by a bouncer. But the price that Nora paid was to my questionnaire said that they used their fake IDs consistent with what most people spend for a quality most often at liquor stores, the majority of responcard—properly laminated so that it doesn’t look or dents—sixty-five percent—used them to enter bars feel flimsy, outfitted with a convincing hologram and and clubs. a data strip that will scan reliably at clubs and liquor Jane, a member of a sorority, bought a fake ID in stores that are strict about checking for minors. part because of the social exclusion she says is creIn addition to online sources, many students said ated by the drinking age. that they acquired their IDs through friends who “At [sorority] formal, there will be a twentydid not go to Yale, or “other” sources—often older one-plus area, and a lot of my friends are going to friends or siblings who passed on their IDs after be in that area, and I want to be able to hang out turning twenty-one. Thirty-five percent, however, re- with them at my event … that I paid for,” she said. ported that they obtained one from another student. “There’s an unnecessary divide in a social scene where Several sources identified a Yale student who acted I’m not allowed to hang out with my older friends.” as an intermediary for them two years ago, relaying Katie, who has a late August birthday, expressed orders to a dealer in New York and ferrying fake IDs similar frustrations and discussed buying a fake ID back to Yale in exchange for a small commission. while interning in Manhattan last summer, even I interviewed thirteen students and survey rethough she rarely drank. Like Jane, Katie felt that the spondents to get a sense of how the Yale–New Haven social freedom that comes with a fake ID was more community participates in this increasingly sophisimportant than access to alcohol itself. ticated marketplace. Those conversations made clear But while there are easier, more prudent ways of that a culture of permissibility at every disciplinary getting alcohol at Yale than purchasing it in a store, level has afforded the Yale student body a cavalier, if there is also a sense that a fake ID gives people more naïve, disregard for the law. Yale students routinely control over what they drink. Nora, for example, has put themselves in positions that could theoretievery intention of using her fake ID at liquor stores. cally land them in jail, and they often do so with At a frat party, she’s at the mercy of whoever is surprisingly little forethought. These interviews also pouring drinks, she explained, “whereas if it’s my revealed a story of larger dysfunction, about how bottle of [Grey] Goose, I know where it came from.” slippery fault becomes when it belongs to everyone Nora made another common claim: drinking in and no one, and of what can go wrong when you designated public spaces tends to be less conducive only have to pass for twenty-one to drink in the state to binge drinking, as bartenders are trained to recof Connecticut. ognize when customers are too intoxicated. “When “Most people don’t buy fakes to buy alcohol,” you drink at a frat,” Nora said, “there’s no one who’s Amelia, a junior, said. “Most people buy fakes to going to say, ‘No, you’ve had too much, go home.’” access spaces.”

While there are sometimes Communication and As students get older, the social scene can shift Consent Educators and friendly bystanders at college from dorm parties to off-campus bars. For people parties, the risk of unmonitored drinking is higher. under twenty-one who want to branch out from the But there’s also a more defiant element behind archetypal college party scene of keg stands and beer students’ eagerness to obtain fakes, an implicit belief pong, the options can be limiting without a fake ID. that the law is simply not worth observing. Underly24

THE NEW JOURNAL

ing students’ commentary was a blatant contempt for the drinking age.

“I think we’re a little bit backwards,” Nora said of the United States, comparing its drinking age with that of Israel and European countries. “Obviously, I don’t think 15-, 16-year-olds, should be drinking. But I’m an adult. I’ve worked, I’m experiencing some semblance of the real world … I can legally drive a car—I can kill someone with a car if I’m not careful,” she said. “I’m an adult in every aspect of my life.”

John, who acquired his ID in high school, views the drinking age the same way. “It feels stupid,” he said. “It feels inane.”

Regardless of where and how they planned to use them, many students bought fake IDs simply as a logical extension of the existing culture.

“We’re already drinking, whether in [dorm] rooms or restaurants and bars,” Nora said. “It’s still happening. It’s constantly a game of remembering where will serve us. I can acquire booze already, so I just don’t want to play that game anymore.”

Now is probably the time for a disclaimer: I don’t own a fake ID, nor have I ever seriously considered buying one. I’d like to say it’s because I’m a highly principled person, but more realistically it’s because I’ve never been very good at lying. There were certainly Friday nights during my freshman year when, pint of Ben & Jerry’s in hand, I wished I could have been at a chic bar with my upperclassmen friends, but it was always the nebulous legal implications of buying a fake ID, and not the moral ones, that gave me pause.

As it turns out, many Yale students don’t see ownership of a fake ID as a moral lapse either. Of the 146 people in my survey who did not own fakes, only four said that a respect for the law or moral principle was their reason for not buying one.

SEPTEMBER 2015

“I don’t like breaking rules. I don’t even download illegal movies,” said one student who owns a fake. “But it’s so normal here for people to have fake IDs that it just feels like there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Regardless of one’s opinions on the matter, though, denying that the law carries any moral weight is still quite different from actively defying legal authority. When I first started interviewing Yale students, I thought that the insouciance with which they skirt the law was perhaps rooted in a sense that going to Yale, or more generally being in a college town, offers them protection. Financial resources must also play into that sense of entitlement, because while most Yale students have little patience for what they perceive as draconian drinking laws, not all of them can afford to break them. And when certain strains of false licenses begin to group themselves into distinct brands, peppering the campus like designer sunglasses, fake ID ownership can sometimes seem like the exclusive province of the wealthy.

But while it would have been easy after talking to these students to reduce fake ID ownership to the cliché of Ivy-League entitlement, that explanation fails to account for the scope of what appears to be a nationwide issue. A 2007 study published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors showed that at a large, unnamed Midwestern state university, thirty-two percent of the student body possessed a fake ID by their sophomore spring, suggesting that Yale is by no means unique.

Most students’ disregard for the legal consequences of owning a fake was due not so much to complacency as to ignorance. Twenty-nine percent of survey respondents who lacked a fake ID cited a fear of legal or administrative repercussions as their reason for not buying one. But of the thirteen students I interviewed, only John had fully researched the potential consequences before purchasing his.

Though some said that they probably should have 25

looked into it more, most students blithely ac“The participants tend to be young, and unless there knowledged that their understanding of the issue are extreme circumstances, it’s a recognition of the originated largely from hearsay. One student said she realities of life.” In most cases, prosecutors are willhad “no idea” what the legal fallout of owning a fake ing to accept a “reasonable” amount of community could be. service—anywhere from ten to forty hours.

According to Seth Garbarsky, a Connecticut state Some people I interviewed were concerned that attorney, flouting the Connecticut Liquor Control the consequences could be worse for international Act with a fake ID normally constitutes a low-class students like Carmen, who could be thought of as misdemeanor, for which the potential maximum impersonating an American citizen. But Jeffrey Alker sentence is a five-hundred-dollar fine and thirty days Meyer, a federal court judge for the state of Conof jail time. Few students are aware of these potential necticut, said that it is “very unlikely” that federal consequences, but perhaps the absence of a collective prosecutors would charge a college student who understanding about how fake ID use is punished used a fake in the way Camen did. When I asked confirms that such understanding is unnecessary. Of Dow whether student cases could escalate, he told the eighty-four students who admitted having fake me that I was making too big of a deal. “Underage IDs in my survey, only three reported getting in any kids drinking [is the crime], O.K.?” kind of trouble beyond refusal of entry or sale.

So, as with underage drinking itself, it seems that For instance, Carmen was drinking margaritas students can afford to be ignorant about fake ID laws at Viva Zapata, a Mexican eatery, her freshman year because they are so rarely relevant. In cases where when New Haven police raided the restaurant. When New Haven police are not involved, Yale also tends to an officer demanded to see her ID, Carmen panicked be permissive. In the 2011–’12 academic year, Yale and handed over her fake, a Rhode Island license Police found fourteen undergraduates who had purshe had purchased through a student intermediary. chased alcohol with a fake ID at liquor stores or used The officer could tell that the card, which lacked the one to gain access to Toad’s Place. In all but one case convincing hologram of more expensive IDs, wasn’t (in which the student had a previous disciplinary real, but she was generous: Carmen admitted that history), the only punishment was confiscation of it was counterfeit, and in the end the officer only the ID and a reprimand—the administrative equivacharged her for underage drinking—an infraction, lent of a slap on the wrist. not a misdemeanor.

Jane, who purchased her fake ID in high school, Carmen was offered the option of paying a fine was caught at the beginning of freshman year as she of under two hundred dollars and having the charge was exiting a liquor store with a bottle of wine. Both remain on her driving record, or doing community her infraction and her misdemeanor charges were service. Even though she doesn’t have an American dropped after she completed twenty-five hours of driver’s license, since she is an international student, community service. Unlike Carmen, though, Jane she wanted to ensure that any charges were dropped. was caught by Yale Police officers, and as a result She hired a lawyer who secured her twenty hours of was required to sit before Yale’s Executive Commitcommunity service, which she fulfilled at a nearby tee. She said that the disposition, in which she was soup kitchen over the course of three months. She pointedly questioned about how her parents raised never had to appear in court, and she never told her to approach alcohol and whether she intended to her parents. drink again before she was twenty-one, proved more William F. Dow III, the lawyer Carmen hired, intimidating than her court hearing. gets five to ten such cases every year, the majority of “They definitely try and scare you,” she said of which involve Yale students. Dow said that arrangethe disciplinary process. “But you’re not going to ments like Carmen’s are typical. get suspended. They recognize that there are enough “[Students] are given a citation, and they either people here [with fakes] that it’s not worth compay a fine, or oftentimes if the prosecutor is generpletely screwing over someone’s future because of it.” ous, he or she will allow them to perform hours of Jane was also assigned to talk at Yale–New community service in exchange for dropping the Haven Hospital with an alcohol counselor, who case,” Dow said. stopped their meetings after a preliminary session Garbarsky told me that the charges in fake ID and follow-up. Jane said she thought the counseling cases are up to the discretion of the prosecutor. Why, was simply a way for Yale to cover its bases. (Pamela then, isn’t the punishment more severe?

George, the secretary of the Executive Committee, “It’s because it’s a nuisance crime,” Dow said. could not be reached for comment over email, and 26

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Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway declined to be interviewed.)

Two students I interviewed mentioned cases that didn’t involve Yale Police and so didn’t even reach the Executive Committee. Instead, the students were given a lecture by their residential college dean.

Both Jane and Carmen still use the fake IDs of other students who look like them to get into clubs from time to time, though they say they do so with more anxiety.

Perhaps Yalies would be more clued-in to the mild punitive repercussions of having a fake ID if more students had to sit in front of the Executive Committee or hire a lawyer, as Jane and Carmen did. Getting caught, however, appears to be a rare occurrence: only eighteen percent said that their IDs hadn’t worked on more than one occasion.

Garbarsky told me that this may be because fake IDs have become more sophisticated since 2002, when he started working in a lower court that prosecuted their use. At the time, nine out of ten of his cases involved cards that had been doctored with Wite-Out. C.P., a bouncer I talked to at Kelly’s Bar on Crown Street, confirmed that it’s become more difficult to spot illegitimate licenses. He said that while some fake IDs are obvious, many have the same technology scanning machines and ultraviolet lights screen for.

“These IDs fool the police,” he said. “A trained eye is really your best bet … but nobody can be a hundred percent with it, I don’t think. Not at all.”

Like other bouncers I talked to, C.P. seemed to have a defeatist attitude about underage drinking.

While he used to keep an ultraviolet light on hand to check for holograms, he stopped after the batteries ran out. He also admitted that he’s sympathetic to underclassmen who might feel excluded—he used to borrow his older brother’s ID to get into clubs when he was younger—and thinks that the drinking age should be eighteen. So when he does spot fakes, he just gives them back.

“What could you do?” he said. Theoretically, he could call the police. But he doesn’t.

BAR Pizza, another local restaurant, makes an earnest effort to combat fake ID use, but with a similarly soft hand. Dan Brodoff, BAR’s manager, told me that he’s dedicated to maintaining the venue’s twenty-one-plus environment and requires his bouncers to use a booklet of state-issued driver’s licenses to screen for fakes. Despite BAR’s self-professed austerity, though, Brodoff tells his bouncers to hand back any IDs they catch to avoid legal entanglements or alienating future clientele.

SEPTEMBER 2015

BAR has a reputation among students for being particularly strict at the door, but there are a number of establishments in New Haven that students feel are far more complicit. Amelia told me that the bouncer at Box 63 once checked her ID using a scanner and admitted her even though her ID didn’t register as authentic (the manager at Box 63 declined to comment). Two students also pointed out that Toad’s Place has a weekly event on Wednesdays advertised as a “Yale Dance Party,” but will accept non-Yale IDs from people over twenty-one for a five-dollar charge.

When I asked a doorman at Toad’s about what precautions they take to prevent minors from using fakes, she said there was an overhead camera at the entrance, but “when it comes to a machine, we don’t really enforce it.”

So while it’s true that Yale students are the ones who buy and use the fakes, the people accepting them don’t seem particularly up in arms about it either. The current generation of IDs is highly sophisticated, and in a college town, the revenue that proprietors stand to gain from a lenient approach could very well be worth the risk of incurring exorbitant fines. If there were any pretense left that the people in charge of keeping alcohol away from minors regarded their mission as a moral one, my talks with local bouncers dispelled it.

Some students did note that there has been a police crackdown on admitting and serving minors during their time at Yale. Local liquor store College 27

Wine, for example, had its liquor license suspended last year and was fined $13,500 for selling to minors.

Another liquor store near campus called Gag Jr’s, which multiple students described as “the place” to buy alcohol with a fake, recently started requiring two forms of ID from Yale students after police officers started catching more minors leaving the shop.

When the store instituted the policy last spring, it saw a marked decrease in business, and an employee told me that he’s sure that students will soon find a way to counterfeit Yale IDs. (John, who recently bought alcohol there with his fake ID, simply told the cashier that he was a New Haven resident and so didn’t have to supply a second form.)

Of the 134 students who had an opinion on the matter, eighty-five percent described the general policy of New Haven institutions with respect to fake IDs as “fairly lenient” or “very lenient.” That perceived leniency undoubtedly contributes to the openness surrounding fakes on campus. One sophomore in Calhoun told me that her English professor once invited her to get drinks with him if her “fake was good enough,” and C.P. told me that minors often ask him which bars in the area are least strict about checking IDs. Even if students do get caught outside a store or in a raid, the punishment is small, so they remain relatively unfazed.

It would be tempting to think that Yale and New Haven authorities truly cleave to the idea that drinking under the age of twenty-one is harmful, but merely do a bad job of enforcing this belief. But around Yale’s campus, the law simply lacks the courage of its convictions, and many people in charge—a large portion of whom could drink when they were eighteen—don’t seem particularly invested in what it stands for. From bouncers to prosecutors, there is a 28

passive acceptance of Yale’s fake ID culture that often borders on complicity.

Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe students can keep wiring money to accounts in Guangzhou and sneaking into bars with laissezfaire bouncers. Maybe Yale can continue to have soft punishments for fake IDs, and prosecutors can keep letting students off easy. Maybe this strange, unspoken agreement among all parties involved is actually a satisfactory equilibrium. The legal system still gets to pay lip service to the law, and college can continue to remain as fun as it’s always looked in Hollywood comedies. And given that an eighteen-year-old can legally purchase a gun before they can a gin and tonic, New Haven police officers probably have a better use for their resources than catching underage drinkers.

But part of me also thinks that the current system has problems. For one, it teaches young adults that it’s O.K. to have a blatant disregard for the law.

While that’s not such a bad thing when it comes to fake IDs, it’s certainly not an attitude that one would want brought to, say, hard drug use or drunk driving.

Fake IDs have also displayed potential to smooth the edges of Yale’s drinking culture, but that leaves fewer, perhaps riskier social options for those without them. Yale students don’t need fake IDs to drink alcohol, and they won’t as long as some subset of the college population is able to buy liquor. Instead, the majority of students use their fakes to access social spaces, to spend time with friends in bars and clubs.

For many students, especially as the novelty of dorm parties wears off, that kind of drinking is far more appealing, and potentially healthier.

Of course, it’s difficult to generalize as to whether bar culture is in fact less conducive to dangerous drinking patterns, as many students maintained.

I imagine that there are other campuses drier than Yale’s where alcohol is hard to come by and the nearest THE NEW JOURNAL

bar is a car ride away, making off-campus drinking a much riskier activity. But for students looking to get thoroughly intoxicated at Yale, at least, where alcohol flows readily and drunk driving is for the most part a nonissue, the wobbly walked path of least resistance seems to bend away from five-dollar shots and back towards campus. And as C.P. told me, a lot of students he sees get drunk at home and go out after “for the environment.” That’s not to say that people don’t get wasted in public spaces, but it’s probably reasonable to assume that an underage student is better off getting a cocktail from a real bar instead of from the trigger-happy freshman consigned to pouring vodka from plastic bottles in Saybrook’s overcrowded, twelve-person party suite. The irony of our current drinking laws, though, is that without a fake ID, the former avenue is by far the more restricted.

So yes, we could continue like this, in this bizarre, liminal space where a significant portion of the Yale student body is buying fake IDs and little is done to stop it. But this tacit agreement perpetuates a culture in which minors who choose not to buy fake IDs may find it easier to get a handle of vodka or a drink with grain alcohol than to order a glass of wine. The drinking age is ostensibly set as high as it is because we believe that it will make minors safer, but the current environment is such that those who want to drink in less precarious spaces can only do so if they’re willing to break more laws and jump through a number of costly hoops.

If, as Dow said, the principal crime here is really underage drinking, then it’s difficult to condemn those who own fakes as being culpable of some unique moral transgression without also vilifying every Yale student who drinks before the age of twentyone. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem fair to place an even larger burden on local businesses for not playing by the rules when doing so has become virtually impossible. And because such a large portion of fake IDs is acquired through massive distributors, local authorities simply aren’t equipped to combat the source of the problem.

“What ends up happening is that the law exists,” Nora said, “and everyone dances around it.”

Until someone with much more power than college students and bouncers recognizes that this is not how a legal system and its citizens are meant to interact, a huge portion of the Yale population will continue to see fake IDs as a rite of passage, the law a half-hearted scarecrow to be made their perch.

– Spencer Bokat-Lindell is a senior in Morse College

SEPTEMBER 2015

29

30

For Country?

the ‘Renaissance’ of Yale’s Relationship with the U.S. Military

by Jane Darby Menton

T

he seventy-five men and women in blue and black uniforms trace the perimeter of the basketball court in Payne Whitney Gymnasium with crisp, synchronized movements. As the students march, the patriotic chords of “Anchors Aweigh,” “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder,” and the “Marine’s Hymn”— the traditional songs of the United States Navy, Air Force, and Marines—resonate across the gym.

Row by row, the cadets and midshipmen of Yale’s Air Force and Naval Reserve Officer’s Training Corps battalions salute Yale President Peter Salovey, the presiding officer for this review late last spring. Wearing a plain black blazer in the middle of a row of decorated military uniforms, Salovey cuts a conspicuous figure. At one point in Yale’s history, the President’s Review was an annual event, but today marks the first time in over four decades that Yale’s president has presided over a public event honoring students who have committed to serving in the United States armed forces.

“This is a historic day for the University and for ROTC,” Salovey declares. “The spirit of sacrifice that links these military men and women is a hallmark of the spirit of Yale itself.”

“Bright College Years,” Yale’s unofficial alma mater, famously concludes with the line, “For God, for Country, and forYale.”The middle prepositional phrase SEPTEMBER 2015

harkens to a certain noblesse oblige that once compelled thousands of Yale men to serve in the United States military.

Relics of this ethos are ubiquitous on campus. Every day, students walking through Woolsey Rotunda pass the names of hundreds who died serving their country. The whale-shaped Ingalls Hockey rink bears the name of the U.S. Navy’s only ace pilot (a pilot who has shot down five enemy aircrafts) during the First World War. The alumni rosters of Yale College include the class of 1945-War (’45W)—a designation for students who completed their undergraduate degrees in thirty-one months to ship off more quickly to the frontlines of World War II. Yale became home to one of the country’s six original Naval ROTC units in 1916. According to a 1917 issue of the Yale Alumni Weekly, approximately 9,500 Yale students and alumni fought in the First World War. During World War II, so many students left to join the military that Yale could fill only three residential colleges, mostly with men deemed medically unfit for service. The University rented the other seven colleges and Old Campus to the U.S. Military for training purposes. In total, 18,678 Yale students and alumni served in Word War II—an almost incomprehensible statistic today, at a time when few Yale students volunteer to serve and the draft is no longer in effect.

31

At Yale and across the country, disillusionment with the armed forces set in as the death toll rose in Vietnam. In 1970, while the campus roiled with anti-war protests, the University severed ties with its strongest institutional attachment to the armed forces: the ROTC program. The military’s presence on Yale’s campus virtually disappeared, and animosity continued for years. In 2005, for example, Yale Law School banned military recruiters from their annual career fair to protest “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—the policy barring homosexuals from serving openly in the military. The two institutions ultimately spent almost two years settling the issue in the court system.

Ultimately, in 2007, an appeals court forced the Law School to choose between allowing military recruiters and forfeiting approximately $300 million in federal funding, so the recruiters returned to campus.

In the last five years, however reengagement has occurred voluntarily and on multiple levels, both official and unofficial. The military has become a significant presence at Yale once more. In 2012, after the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the ROTC returned to Yale and soon turned into one of the largest and fastest-growing student military programs in New England. Other changes include the hiring of highprofile personnel, such as retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, and the uniting of Yale veterans in the Yale Veteran’s Association (YVA). In April, the YVA—which sought to connect the roughly 10,000 Yale veterans across the country—hosted the Ivy League’s first Veteran’s Summit.

“Up until five-and-a-half years ago, there was nothing for the military here. It all dissolved in 1970… but things have changed dramatically,” explained YVA co-founder and chairman Army Captain Frederick Nagle ’66.

Gallup’s annual institutional confidence survey reports that the military is now the most trusted institution in the United States. It handily beats out the church, the medical system, the Supreme Court and the presidency. But the topic of the YVA summit—the civilian-military divide—suggests that rebuilding a relationship within the academe may not be easy. The bridge the University has chosen is an elite one, with illustrious faculty, officer-track students, and only a handful of veterans to inform classroom debates with first-hand experience. For the modern liberal arts university, the frontlines still seem far away.

“I think there’s a little bit of responsibility for me and other veterans to bring the perspective of combat to the table and to help enlighten undergrads and grads and faculty members as to what the reality on the ground is like,” said Chris Harnisch, a master’s student at the School of Management and the President of the Yale Student Veteran’s council.

Students like him are facing a large swath of the Yale population that has set foot on campus without ever having met a member of the U.S. armed forces, even though the country has been at war for the majority of their lifetimes. Though they enroll in seminars to discuss military policy and war in the abstract, few end up in the less than one percent of the Ameri

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THE NEW JOURNAL

can population currently enlisted. Fostering a spirit of trust toward the military on Yale’s liberal campus falls to the burgeoning population of military-affiliated individuals who, with lingering uncertainty as to their place, march across the campus.

wall of the NROTC wardroom in 55 Whitney, there is a large photograph of ROTC midshipmen conducting rifle drills on Old Campus during World War II. Unlike its predecessors, today’s ROTC program keeps the most blatant reminders of combat outside of the ivory tower. “You would never see that today,” midshipman Sam Cohen told me. “We don’t drill with rifles anywhere on campus.”

The program explicitly avoids cloistering its participants from the Yale community at large. Colonel Phil Haun, the commanding officer of Yale’s Air Force ROTC program, acknowledges that the ROTC is time-consuming, but not prohibitively so. ROTC has a “pretty light footprint,” allowing cadets and midshipmen to participate in varsity athletics teams, a cappella groups, improvisational comedy troops, and student government. Last year’s Yale College Council President, Michael Herbert, is a NROTC midshipman.

“If you are in physically good shape, you can get a good haircut, and you know the three basic responses, you would do just fine,” Clapper said.

ROTC’s growing presence on campus has stoked little public controversy, though a few students and faculty have criticized Yale for embracing an institution with a conservative stance on social issues. In an op-ed for the Yale Daily News in October 2013, columnist Scott Stern ’15 criticized Yale for embracing the military despite its policies on transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals.

“The University’s non-discrimination policy should be enforced equally for everyone,” he wrote.

“Unless ROTC ends its discrimination, Yale cannot allow the program to remain on campus.”

The administration has been quick to defend ROTC against these charges, stating that the program does not discriminate against any students or condone discriminatory policies. There are multiple openly gay participants in Yale’s ROTC program, and the program’s gender divide is far more equitable than the military itself—eight out of seventeen of the Class of 2018 Air Force ROTC cadets are women, although women still only make up 14.5 percent of the active duty force in the military.

In its return to campus, ROTC consciously adapted to its environment. Cadets and midshipmen only wear their uniforms once a week. Students fulfill their ambassadorial potential by being a part of the student body, not by standing apart from it.

The uniform of an ROTC cadet or midshipman is designed to be conspicuous: shiny shoes, crisply ironed slacks, hats with gold roping for the midshipmen, and narrow flight caps for the cadets. When ROTC students walk around campus, their uniforms are a physical reminder of their “ambassadorial role,” believes Captain Vernon Kemper, the commanding officer of Yale’s Naval ROTC program.

“Freshman year I tried to smile a lot when I was in uniform because I was worried there was this perception that military people weren’t friendly,” said midshipman Josh Clapper ’16.

The day after the official repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 2010, Yale President Richard Levin called Defense Secretary Robert Gates to inform him that Yale was interested in bringing ROTC back to campus. The wheels moved quickly. By summer 2011, the faculty had officially discarded the regulations that prevented ROTC’s return. Many attribute the relatively smooth reintegration of ROTC to strong administrative backing, particularly from former President Levin, former University Vice President Linda Lorimer, and former Yale College Dean Mary Miller.

Though the voting records are not publicly available, history professor John Gaddis estimates that the decision to bring back ROTC passed with the approval of seventy percent of the faculty.

Though ROTC had only four participants in the fall of 2012, there are now seventy-five students in the program, and both the Air Force and Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps commanding officers estimate that the programs will continue to grow in the next several years to enroll over a hundred students.

Most of these students are supported by the national ROTC program, which offers merit-based scholarships to promising students at civilian universities in exchange for a commitment of military service after graduation. To maintain their scholarship, Yale ROTC students must engage in weekly physical training and complete a core military curriculum of eight classes, in addition to the thirty-six credits required of all Yale students.

Lukas Berg, a veteran and graduate student in The University now faces the question of how a historical tie must stretch to fit today’s Yale. On the the Jackson Institute, sees the return of the miliSEPTEMBER 2015

33

tary to campus as just part of the larger process of Yale rediscovering this spirit of service that has existed since Yale’s founding. Berg cites the example of Nathan Hale—the famous Yale alumnus who was executed for spying on the British during the Revolutionary War. “If you’d have asked him to scrub toilets for his country, he would have scrubbed toilets because, as he said, anything done in service of one’s country becomes noble in the execution,” Lukas said. “I think that’s part of Yale’s heritage.”

This heritage has not always been embraced.

When military history professor Paul Kennedy arrived at Yale in the 1980s, he remembers a “distinctly anti-military culture.” Fueled by anti-Vietnam sentiments and concern about the military’s policies towards women and LGBTQ people, the majority of the student body and faculty saw the military as an institution that was fundamentally incompatible with Yale’s espoused liberal arts values.

But time has mitigated many of these concerns.

“As I see it, there’s been a rebalancing of attitudes at Yale, and it’s found itself happening when you could say there’s also been a rebalancing of public opinion about the military,” Kennedy said.

This new tone has impacted the classroom dynamic, allowing for friendlier conversation, according to many of the military personnel interviewed for this article. Students and teachers alike are far more accepting of ROTC’s presence than in decades past.

Still, Yale’s reputation since the 1970s as an anti-military school has caused some of the military recruits to approach with apprehension.

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Faint, for example, said, “I’m in the military, I’m from the South, I’m conservative, and I had no desire to go to what I perceived was going to be an anti-military, anti-Southern, gun-hating state and college where I’d just never lived before…I was envisioning fist fights with the hippies on the green.”

Faint came to Yale on the Army’s dime in 2011 to get a master’s degree in Global Affairs so that he could return to West Point to teach social studies.

Though he was not initially interested in attending Yale, the presence of General McChrystal—whom he worked under in the Joint Special Operations Command—led him to reconsider. While the atmosphere was not as anti-military as he anticipated, he soon realized that misconceptions went both ways. “They assumed because I’m a white hetero Christian male from the South that I’d be anti-gay, that I’d have racial animosity…It really was a mutual growing process across the two years,” he said.

34

Despite the perception that Yale and the military make for strange bedfellows, most veterans I talked to said the transition from military life to the University was much smoother than they expected. Faint attributes this to the nature of academic debate. “We could have a knock-down drag-out fight in the classroom and we’d all be downtown drinking beers afterwards,” he said.

Professor Emma Sky, who teaches seminars on the Iraq War and Modern Middle Eastern politics, offered a similar rationale. “The classroom is a safe environment where people can get to know each other,” she explained. “It doesn’t matter if the person is a colonel or lieutenant colonel, in the classroom everybody is equal.” Though her courses are consistently oversubscribed, she preferentially admits former servicemen and women, because she thinks they introduce a valuable perspective about the conflict.

But these positive experiences may also reflect a certain degree of self-selection. Many veterans who come to Yale pursue fields in which military experience is valued, such as management, global affairs, or area studies. What may be true in these fields might not hold consistently across disciplines.

Adam Keller is a master’s student in the English department. He was in Afghanistan in 2012 when he received an email from his West Point English teacher, a Yale alumna, who encouraged him to get a graduate degree so that he could come back to West Point and teach. After three deployments, both Keller and his family were looking for a respite from the constant uncertainty of active duty, so he applied and was accepted to Yale’s English literature terminal master’s program. Unlike many other Yale veterans, Keller’s course of study is a less obvious fit with his military background. And unlike his peers, Keller says he encountered some hostility from his professors and classmates.

“I know that there were members of the faculty who didn’t agree with the fact that I am here,” he said. “[There’s] the idea that what I do for a living is not consistent with the types of values a humanities education is supposed to inculcate.”

Keller thinks some of the opposition is a manifestation of academic insularity—he is the only one of his cohort not pursuing a long-term career in traditional English academia—but he thinks the primary bent of the animosity is ideological.

“Yale College still feels more foreign than Afghanistan,” he said.

THE NEW JOURNAL

If you saw Ben Shaver in Book Trader Cafe, with his mop of untidy curls and oversized tortoiseshell glasses, you probably wouldn’t guess that he’s a former Marine— he looks like he belongs in Brooklyn, not Baghdad. Shaver enlisted in the Marines in 2005, immediately after high school. After almost five years working in linguistics and intelligence in Iraq, he returned stateside to get a college degree. He spent two years at Deep Springs—a two-year, alternative college in California—and then transferred into Yale’s Eli Whitney program for non-traditional students.

Shaver thinks that Yale’s rejuvenated discourse with the military is not as comprehensive as it purports to be, because it includes few of the largely workingclass people who put their bodies on the line to carry out American foreign policy.

The overwhelming majority of servicemen and women on Yale’s campus today are or were members of the officer corps, and ROTC graduates follow the same path. The officer corps accounts for only 16.4 percent of the United States military. Enlisted soldiers SEPTEMBER 2015

comprise the other 83.6 percent of the United States military, and only 5.9 percent of them have a Bachelor’s degree or higher.

“To speak of a veteran community at Yale within the undergrad population—it just doesn’t exist,” Shaver said. “There are people in the grad schools, but they’re not at all representative of the military…

They’re the elite within the command of the military, and they’re careerist. Their perspective is different— they’ve bought in.”

There are currently over one million American college students paying their tuition with GI Bill benefits, but you won’t find many of these veterans at élite institutions. According to the New York Times, in the 2013-2014 academic year, Brown University housed only eleven undergraduate veterans of the American armed services; Harvard, four; and Princeton, one. Though Yale will not release the number of veterans in the undergraduate community, those I talked to were confident that you could count the number on one hand.

35

Why aren’t there more enlisted veterans at Yale?

Part of the answer may lie in demographics. More than sixty percent of student veterans are first-generation college students, compared to roughly twelve percent of Yale students. According to the most recently available Department of Defense statistics, in 2007, 42.97 percent of enlisted military recruits came from the Southeast and 12.81 percent from the Northeast. In comparison, fifteen percent of Yale’s class of 2018 is from the Southeast, up to forty-one percent from the Northeast. The geographic regions from which Yale and the military draw are almost exact inverses of each other.

“THERE IS THE GERMINATION OF THE IDEA OF SERVICE.” — STANLEY McCHRYSTAL, RETIRED U.S. ARMY GENERAL

Shaver thinks his admission to Yale doesn’t necessarily reflect what the reality for most enlisted veterans. “It’s about class dynamics. A big part of the military going to college afterwards, these are people who probably wouldn’t have gone to college otherwise. That’s not really my experience…For me it was more like I was resuming what would have been my life trajectory outside of the military,” he explained.

Though Yale has made some effort to recruit such veterans, for instance, by mailing admissions brochures to the honors societies of community colleges and by sending a recruiter to the local Marine base, these measures have not amounted to much so far.

“It’s easy for Harvard or Yale to get complacent or content that they have plenty of vets on campus just because they have former officers at the business school, and nobody really talks about the fact that the top schools are doing a not so great job of going out and finding the enlisted veterans,” said Jesse Reising. As a Yale undergraduate, Reising was set to enter the Marine Corps upon graduation, but a debilitating football injury during his senior year Harvard–Yale Game rendered him medically ineligible. Because he could not serve, Reising wanted to find another way to engage with the military.

He co-founded the Warrior-Scholar Project, now 36

a nationwide academic boot camp designed to ease the transition of enlisted veterans to civilian universities. As part of the Warrior-Scholar Project, veterans sleep in Saybrook College dorm rooms, attend classes taught by notable Yale professors, and participate in panels run by the Yale Admissions Office on the college application process. Reising thinks that Yale and other élite universities can do better. “If someone told [veterans] it was possible to go to a top school, they could do it. They just need to be told they can,” he stated.

Earlier last semester, I spent a chilly February afternoon walking around campus with a group of West Point cadets. One of the cadets on the walk was sporting a black eye and a set of electric blue stitches from an injury sustained during training; another was wearing large, black medical sunglasses because he had recently undergone Lasik eye surgery (20/40 uncorrected vision is required to apply to be a military pilot). The cadets’ commanding officer was a wiry man in an olive green beret who walked with a pronounced limp—the remnant of an old battlefield injury.

Walking around campus with these men in uniform, I could feel the curious eyes that followed us.

One friend jokingly asked what I had done to merit such an escort. At the gawtes of Old Campus, another group of students came up to ask if the cadets were part of the security retinue of some famous person visiting campus. Neither of these interactions was hostile, but the sight of a large group of people in uniform certainly did not go unnoticed.

Had this been 1946, the cadets could have been marching in formation with rifles and nobody would have batted an eye. Had this been 1970, the cadets would have been targeted by vitriolic protesters. But in 2015, the West Point cadets were simply here visiting General McChrystal’s leadership course.

An explosive Rolling Stone article spurred McChrystal’s resignation as the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, but the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs invited him to teach at Yale in the wake of the political controversy. McChrystal is indicative of the University’s embrace of high-profile military personnel. He is now in his fifth year at Yale, and he looks at home in his third-floor Hillhouse office.

When I ask him what role he thinks the military recruits play on Yale’s campus today, he answers immediately. “I think they are harbinger of a new future at Yale University. I think there’s a different mindset growing,” he says. “It’s going to take a while, but I THE NEW JOURNAL

think there is the germination of the idea of service.”

This shared commitment to public service has provided the rhetorical common ground for Yale and the military. “It’s a desire to serve, this is what characterizes this University,” Salovey declared at the ROTC President’s Review. “Within these walls you can hear the echoes of history—a love of country, dedication, humility, and humanity—echoes that ring out loud all around us today.” But, in practice, few Yale students enter public sector jobs after graduation. Last year, the Office of Career Services survey reported that the five largest employers of the class of 2014 were Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, and Yale University itself.

Every military affiliate I interviewed was quick to say that the military is not the path most Yale students will—or should—choose. Still, “the idea of service should be something that is implied for Yale

students,” McChrystal said. Neither the ROTC members nor the veterans nor the military faculty want to turn back the clock to days when students drilled on Old Campus. But they are charged with bridging the gap between two powerhouse institutions, amidst a student body that is more ambivalent about and distanced from the path of service they have chosen to take. The people in uniform on campus today are only a small section of campus—a far cry from the military’s large historical footprint—but, at the very least they have started a cordial dialogue between those who serve and those who probably never will.` -Jane Darby Menton is a 2015 graduate of Silliman College

endnote

FIRST-NAME BASIS Notes from the Caroline Party

by Caroline Sydney

Illustration by Ivy Sanders-Schneider

T

he text came through from an unknown number: “Caroline is here.” It had the ring of a pronouncement made by a footman in a Jane Austen novel. But Caroline was already here. For one, I was there. At least five other Carolines were also there. I surveyed them in my living room, tallying them up. Taking roll. Then I went to get the door. Because, well, Caroline was here. Which is to say, another Caroline was there. The other Carolines waited expectantly to sum up the new addition to our set.

SEPTEMBER 2015

With each arrival, we wanted to know how this Caroline would fit into the pantheon. How the namebearer bore our name, if she would be worthy of a glass of mediocre white wine, tolerant of the gluten free vegan cookies I had made to please all the various versions of her, regardless of her preferences and health needs.

For years I dreamed of hosting an exclusive party for every Caroline on campus. I had wanted to meet them. I had wanted them to meet each other. I had 37

wanted to learn their middle names. At the time, I was not aware that the Sams of Yale apparently have an annual standing brunch. At last, this evening had come.

But my efforts were almost thwarted by one of my own—“it’s a Rumpus prank,” a certain Caroline had told her friend Caroline, starting a rumor that prevented perhaps a dozen Carolines from discovering their other selves. Despite this act of betrayal, the evening of Saturday, March 28 had arrived, and of the twenty-six of us at Yale that spring, nine ultimately gathered in my Park Street living room.

At points in my life, I have felt distinctly not Caroline. That the name produced a first impression out of line with the one I wanted to create. It seemed too prim, too Southern. This stance has mellowed since coming to college, a moment at which I could have switched to another name but chose not to, mostly for the sake of simplicity. I wondered if this evening would affirm my decision to remain in the league of Carolines.

Now gathered, when our language mirrored one another’s, and it often did, so too would our actions.

“Caroline” someone would say, and we would all turn. In a setting where we were reminded constantly that we were Caroline, in every encounter our very Caroline-ness was questioned. One Caroline, upon receiving my email, subject line: “Hello Caroline,” initially thought it was an email from herself.

As if seeking to extrapolate my influence in the Caroline hierarchy, I constantly did the math on attendees and no-shows. Three Carolines were tied up at the Whim concert (two performing, one watching), and one wrote to me in advance to apologize for being out of town, leaving thirteen who were either too busy, too cool, or too scared to show up. To those who were too scared: should there be a next time, please come! To those who were too cool: you are a disgrace to your name. If Caroline falls from the Gawker’s rankings of popular Yale names and our numbers dwindle, don’t seek solidarity with me.

You see, as it turned out, the Carolines of Yale do in fact have commonalities extending beyond the first letter of our net ID. For one, we were all white—an uncomfortable, Freakonmics-in-the-wild realization.

Even with this small sample size, we nearly confirmed the inkling that we were on the whole slightly more southern than the general Yale population. I anticipated that discussion would migrate away from Carolinecentric topics toward standard getting-to-know-you 38

discussions, but this never really occurred. After the obviously streamlined introductions, conversations gravitated back to our established common ground.

This micro-smalltalk was more amusing and personal than garden-variety conversations with strangers.

Somehow, the opportunities to discuss the impact of growing up Caroline never dwindled. We debated “Sweet Caroline” versus “Roses” (Neil Diamond beat out Outkast by a narrow margin) and the fact that Carolyn just isn’t Caroline. It would be unfair to argue that anything profound happened in that period of just over an hour. A random set of Yale students came together on the basis of a chance common denominator. Yale loves to do this to us, we love to do this to ourselves, the cycle continues. We were not so similar as to reveal an obvious underlying commonality, previously invisible outside of this context. Yet, neither were we so different that one looking hard enough at the Rorschach test of my living room couldn’t come up with some generalized conclusions.

We arranged my laptop for a photo booth picture.

Unfortunately, no Carolines came prepared with a selfie-stick. We invented a hand sign for the occasion: double Cs, crossed, Chanel-like, a symbol of our newfound kinship. Later, on Facebook, someone I don’t know would comment on the picture: “I think its really awesome that yer in the nerdy girl frat.” Well. At the very least, we seemed to be friends, and I guess that’s saying something, given that many of us were complete strangers less than an hour before the flash went off.

Soon after, a Caroline had to go. Once the set had broken, the appeal of lingering dwindled. But each of us would turn the next time we heard our name called now able to imagine at least eight others who might respond, knowing that in this encounter we were the intended Caroline.

-Caroline Sydney is a senior in Silliman College and an editor-in-chief of The New Journal

THE NEW JOURNAL

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Rice/Salad Bowl

Roti Wrap

Fresh | Healthy Yummy | Convenient New Haven’s Top rated Restaurants on Yelp

SEPTEMBER 2015

Hrs: Mon – Fri: 11.30 am to 8 pm

T: (203) 562-1299 F: (203) 562-1297 T: (203) 624-1299 F: (203) 624-1297 135Orange@tikkawaygrill.com 2Howe@tikkawaygrill.com FREE PARKING

Call us for delivery & catering options Like us on Facebook & Follow us on Twitter @TikkawayGrill & #tikkaway tikkawaygrill.com

10% off with an entree valid in 2 Howe street store only.

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