Amid ChatGPT’s rising popularity and a computer science cheating scandal, Yale students, professors, and administrators wrestle privately with the proper role of AI in education. What happens when everyone gets to decide for themselves?
Dear readers,
Welcome to Volume 58, Issue 2 of The New Journal
In our cover story, Alex Moore ’26 interrogates Yale’s artificial intelligence culture. AI is here. Machines churn out essays and problem sets, professors scramble to rewrite syllabi, and a mass cheating scandal raises the question: what does a college education look like now?
Elsewhere, David Rosenbloom ’25.5 explores Rosette Neighborhood Village, an unorthodox alternative to traditional homeless shelters. Our other writers search for answers to tree afflictions, trace the genealogy of artworks, and bolster a space for queer community amid federal threats.
Technological progress, policy changes, puzzling phenomena. In this issue of The New Journal, join us as we navigate institutions in flux.
Searching, Chloe, Calista, Mia, Tina
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The Rosette Alternative
In the backyard of a Catholic Worker House, a transitional shelter community offers a new approach to caring for New Haven’s rising homeless population.
By David Rosenbloom
Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI
Amid ChatGPT’s rising popularity and a computer science cheating scandal, Yale students, professors, and administrators wrestle privately with the proper role of AI in education. What happens when everyone gets to decide for themselves?
By Alex Moore
By Sabrina Thaler
By Makena Senzon
Fiona Jin
Zoe Kanter
Allie Gruber
Pride, In the Center
New Haven’s LGBTQ+ community center continues to hold strong as federal policy threatens the rights and liberties of queer people.
By Sabrina Thaler
John Allen was a master’s student at Southern Connecticut State University on December 20, 1993, when the New Haven Board of Alders voted to establish a domestic partnership registry: a formal recognition of same-sex unions in the city. On the evening of the vote, anti-gay demonstrators were “revved up,” Allen said. Protesting against the registry, they yelled epithets, vandalized cars, and assaulted people outside City Hall.
The alders heeded the protesters’ calls and voted no. That night inspired Allen’s master’s thesis: an action plan to launch a safe, dedicated space for the city’s gay community. In November 1996, Allen opened the New Haven Gay and Lesbian Community Center.
More than thirty years later, Allen’s vision endures under a new name. The New Haven Pride Center dwells in a vibrant, airy home on Orange Street. A nonprofit with full-time staff, it offers a comprehensive suite of resources: a food
pantry, legal and housing support, and affinity spaces. It is a vital part of a vast ecosystem of agencies and non-profits serving LGBTQ+ New Haveners.
Today, the Center holds its ground through the slew of federal threats to New Haven’s queer community.
On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It stipulated that the government will only recognize a person’s sex assigned at birth, regardless of their gender identity. Another order directed executive branch departments and agencies, such as the NIH, to ensure grant recipients did not provide gender-affirming care.
On a sunny afternoon in June, Laura Boccadoro ate frozen blueberries rescued from a torn bag sitting in the Pride Center’s food pantry. Boccadoro, the Pride Center’s operations director and longestserving employee, wore her bleach-blond hair in a ponytail, revealing a neat undercut and brown roots.
The week of Trump’s election, people “flooded” into the New Haven Pride Center in tears, Boccadoro recalled. Among them was the mother of a transgender boy.
“She was really concerned about him not being able to get his hormones and him not being able to get his top surgery,” Boccadoro said. A week later, the
mother came in “completely breaking down” and told Boccadoro that her son had attempted suicide.
Two weeks after Trump’s inauguration in January, the Pride Center hosted a community education night informing people about changes to LGBTQ+ policy. In July, the Center hired a full-time Social Services Coordinator to run a case management program, referring people to legal aid, housing assistance, and mental and physical health services.
Mallory Sanchez, a lawyer with the Center for Children’s Advocacy—a nonprofit firm and Pride Center partner— explained that since Trump’s second term began, anti-discrimination protections for queer youth have weakened.
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in Boston, for instance, was one of six offices the Trump administration closed in March. The Boston office’s work oversaw cases in Connecticut, and its closure stripped the state’s students of a crucial avenue for recourse in civil rights violations. Now, when a school administration forbids students from using their chosen bathroom or fails to address instances of misgendering, students have to turn to the state’s Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, which Sanchez said can take between one to three years to address complaints.
“How are they supposed to access their education when they can’t be themselves?” Sanchez asked, referring
to the youth she serves. “How are they supposed to be affirmed in their identities when they’re being told by the federal government that they don’t exist?”
Each year since 2024, the city has allocated $30,000 for general expenses to the Pride Center. But local and state support alone cannot meet community members’ needs—especially now as federal cuts to programs such as Medicaid force states to revise their financial priorities.
To fill the gap, the Center increasingly relies on a patchwork of non-governmental support. The Pride Center regularly seeks grants from philanthropic partners such as the Fairfield-based Leonard Litz Foundation. It runs a food pantry in collaboration with Connecticut Foodshare and relies on sponsorships to put on larger events.
In July, Yale New Haven Hospital announced it would stop providing hormone-based gender-affirming care for patients under 19. Historically, the
hospital had been a major sponsor of the Center’s New Haven Pride block party. Two days before the event in September, the Pride Center wrote on Facebook that it had returned the hospital’s funds, noting that while “this was not an easy financial decision, it was a necessary moral one.”
Yale New Haven Hospital’s cancellation of gender-affirming care deepens longstanding domestic tensions for minors who encounter resistance within their own homes. The Pride Center’s Support Services Coordinator, Mike Sanger, said the “number one” issue in his case management work is housing insecurity—often a consequence of familial hostility when a child seeks gender-affirming care.
Sonimar Colón first approached the Pride Center in 2024 seeking legal assistance to gain custody of her toddler daughter, whom she had as a teenager. Before coming to the Center, she had been homeless for about a year, spending time in a homeless shelter before moving
into an apartment. Her parents were her daughter’s primary caregivers while she worked to get back on her feet.
Colón, who is in her early twenties, is one of hundreds of thousands of American LGBTQ+ youth who have experienced homelessness or housing insecurity. A 2018 report by Chapin Hall found that queer youth are more than twice as likely to experience homelessness than their non-LGBTQ+ peers—a disparity driven by mental health struggles and family disapproval.
Encouraged by her partner, a transgender man already familiar with the Pride Center, Colón walked into the building in the spring of 2024. She recalled Boccadoro pulling out “every single paper” that could help Colón’s case.
When I met her over a year later in June, Colón, aided by the Pride Center’s case management program, was in the midst of court proceedings over custody of her daughter. She was also working as an intern at the Pride Center, a welcome
The Pride Center’s enduring push for visibility is on display in its vast collection of books, which contains decades of queer novels, memoirs, and histories.
change from more mundane jobs at a barbershop and a Dunkin’. She appreciated seeing other queer staff members’ happiness amid a world she saw as increasingly hostile.
For the Center’s earliest patrons, today’s moment feels uniquely dangerous.
“I don’t remember the same kind of vitriolic discussion that I see right now,” John Allen said. To him, the federal government advocates division and discrimination with that same vitriol.
Allen grew up in a period when it was illegal to be gay. The American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973. As he and his husband enter their retirement years, he wishes the political atmosphere were different.
“We should be enjoying our lives,” Allen said. “I think it’s much more violent right now. I never felt this sense of fear, like I do now.”
Even as policy changes threaten to undo much of the progress Allen’s generation fought for, an eager crop
of leaders at the New Haven Pride Center have stepped forward to carry on that work.
“I always say, we can’t do this alone,” Boccadoro said. “If we want to be representatives for our community, we have to show up fully.”∎
Sabrina Thaler is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College and an associate editor for The New Journal
The Rosette Alternative
In the backyard of a Catholic Worker House, a transitional shelter community offers a new approach to caring for New Haven’s rising homeless population.
By David Rosenbloom
layout design by Jessica Sánchez
Photos by David Rosenbloom
When David Minore returned to New Haven in April 2024, he knew he’d be sleeping outside. A decade earlier he had spent a year navigating the city’s shelter system, but disliked its institutional feel: no privacy, strict limits on personal belongings, rigid entry and exit hours. This time, he wasn’t going back to the oversight and curfews. He’d trade a night in a shelter for a night on the streets.
Walking in The Hill, New Haven’s southwesternmost neighborhood, Minore was recognized by a volunteer he knew from the Amistad House of Hospitality, where he used to go for community meals. She invited him back to the House.
Minore, 56, tall with a gentle smile and two missing front teeth, pushed past the familiar gate to Amistad’s backyard. But he didn’t find the empty lot he remembered. Instead, he found two canvas canopies covering communal picnic tables; a central, elevated, 15-by-10 foot wooden gazebo; and six aluminum-framed, tiny homes forming an L-shape along the edge of the yard. Minore had arrived at Rosette Neighborhood Village, a third option for homeless people beyond the shelters or the street. He became its newest resident.
In 2023, New Haven reported 257 individuals on its verified unsheltered list. This number more than doubled to 633 the year after. At that time, the city’s eight shelters collectively supplied only 307 beds. The shelter system’s inability to meet the needs of New Haven’s growing homeless population, however, isn’t fully represented by these numbers. Deterred by crowded dorms, strict oversight, and limited freedom, many people experiencing homelessness never
even join the weeks- or months-long shelter waitlists. For them, the backyard community at Rosette offers an alternative.
In July 1994, Mark Colville and his wife Luz established the Amistad House of Hospitality at their home on Rosette Street. The Colvilles are part of the Catholic Worker movement, leading lives of “voluntary poverty” and hospitality oriented around the works of mercy, a set of charitable practices–such as “feeding the hungry” and “comforting the afflicted”– emphasized in certain traditions of Christian ethics. At Amistad, they opened their doors to the community, providing free breakfast and lunch to those in need.
The City of New Haven has a policy of clearing homeless encampments by posting a 72-hour eviction notice at the site. After the notice period ends, any remaining tents or structures are removed. When COVID-19 began, however, the city relaxed this policy. As the mayor’s office worked to transfer New Haven’s shelter population to hotels, the city tolerated people sleeping in public spaces, such as outside of City Hall. Sensing a temporary shift in city policy, Mark and an Amistad volunteer identified a lot by the West River off Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. They collected tents and invited homeless community members to start an encampment. Mark hoped that the city would designate that land or another for homeless persons to sleep.
The encampment quickly grew, reaching a peak of roughly thirty-five residents, according to Mark. Although he claims the city directed homeless persons to the site, Mark saw no indication that the long-term policy change he sought was on the horizon. A year and a half after starting the encampment, he feared that it was only a matter of time before the city ordered it cleared in a post-COVID-19 return to the status quo.
Guided by the Catholic Worker philosophy, which calls on each individual to practice the works of mercy directly, Mark refused to wait around. “We don’t need the government or the churches to do the work that our faith and conscience calls us to,” he said. “We simply do it from where we are.”
If the city wasn’t going to safeguard his neighbors’ rights to seek refuge, then he would. In June 2021, he declared his backyard open for public use, stapling a notice on his gate:
WARNING: YOU ARE ENTERING A HUMAN RIGHTS ZONE. By sending the New Haven police to evict our neighbors from homeless encampments, Mayor Elicker has taken a position of non-compliance with the U.N., in violation of international laws to which the United States is bound by congressional treaty. We have therefore established here a zone in which this basic human right is respected, and anyone who enters it is required to behave accordingly. WELCOME
The notice signaled Mark’s new perspective on what the works of mercy mean today. “We’ve always been involved in human rights work,” he said, “but
David Minore stands at the entrance to a tiny home.
The notice Mark put up on the gate to the backyard in June 2021.
The Rosette Alternative
we hadn’t been directly helping people assert their human right to seek refuge.” Mark believed New Haven’s encampment-sweeping policy violated this right to refuge, recognized in the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Homeless people streamed into Mark’s backyard. He estimated that by the end of 2021, as many as twenty-five residents, living in tents and other fortified structures, called the yard home. Community support was high, too. Donations arrived in waves— food, clothes, sleeping bags, and tents—and within weeks, a neighbor built a gazebo in the center of the yard. The Rosette Neighborhood Village Collective (RNV), as it would later be called, was born.
RNV sought to reimagine what a shelter environment could be, said Sean GargamelliMcCreight, one of the collective’s co-founders.
“In the social service world, we want to manage everybody’s life. It begins with: you’re poor, your whole life has to be managed, we’ll decide all that,” Mark said, referencing the regimented daily entryexit schedules and restrictive personal possession policies that typically govern shelters. “At RNV, we’ve really just been trying to set up a space where people can actually live like human beings.”
Today, RNV is home to fourteen residents. Eight live in tiny homes, and six reside in the gazebo. Suki Godek lives in one of the tiny homes. A visual artist with amber hair and blue-gray eyes, Godek had previously lived in the encampment on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. In March 2023, city officials, citing safety concerns—evidence of open fires, propane tanks, and an illegally built shower—ordered the encampment dismantled, as Mark had predicted.
That’s when Godek met Mark. Godek loved the freedom Mark’s backyard community offered. A typical shelter would have forced her to leave her dog—a Jack Russell named Ruckus—behind, to check in most of her belongings upon entry, and to return to the streets each morning. A shelter would also typically set a three-month limit on her stay, which she believes is “unrealistic” if a shelter’s goal is to get people back on their feet and ready to take sustainable next steps. At Rosette, none of these restrictions apply.
That doesn’t mean Rosette is anarchic. Residents adhere to a set of community guidelines. They cannot publicly consume drugs or alcohol, must attend Tuesday-morning community meetings, and complete weekly chores coordinated by Luz Colville.
For Mark, weekly chores are central to the ethos of Rosette. “Everybody living here is expected to participate in the work of hospitality,” he said. On a rotating schedule, members cook breakfast and brew coffee for both residents and homeless visitors. Additionally, they heat donated food for lunch or dinner, manage deliveries, and clean the backyard and rear of the house.
The result is a sense of community rarely found in traditional shelters, said Annie Harper, a social
The Rosette Alternative
From top to bottom: Harvey Bradley, Suki Godek and Ruckus, Strongbow Lone Eagle.
anthropologist at the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, who researches alternative shelter settings.
Godek’s experience echoes Harper’s observations. “There’s definitely a kind of family feeling,” she said.
Robert Harris, who was born in New Haven and raised in Bethany, Connecticut, is entering his sixth month living in a Rosette tiny home. He’s in his forties and has been on and off the streets for a decade.
In 2013, Harris spent four months in an emergency overnight shelter in New Haven that housed seventy-five men in one central room. “That place is like a prison,” Harris said. “Everyone’s got an attitude inside.” Shelters, he said, aren’t an option for him. “So God bless this place right here. I don’t know where I’d be. Likely in a tent somewhere in the woods.”
John Labienec understands Harris’ disillusionment with traditional shelters. Labienec works at Continuum of Care, which operates the city’s only non-congregate shelter, where residents have private rooms rather than shared dormitories and are not forced out every morning. But because of “decades of underfunding,” he said, even a more non-traditional shelter like Continuum has limited capacity to adequately cater to the diverse needs of the homeless community. “Shelters promise to offer the world,” he added, “but with current resources, they often can’t.”
Representatives from congregate shelters Columbus House, Liberty Community Services, and Upon This Rock Ministries did not respond to a request for an interview.
New Haven’s budget for homelessness services increased by 20 percent in the 2025 fiscal year, while its homeless population increased by 146 percent. The disparity will likely grow: the federal government has proposed slashing the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s state and local housing and homelessness budget by 44 percent. This change would limit or completely eliminate key grant streams that New Haven relies on for shelters and supportive housing services.
When asked why he returned to the street instead of seeking a bed in a shelter, Minore offered a similar answer to Harris.
“You check in your stuff, and don’t see it until the morning. If you’re a smoker, you get two smoke breaks; after that, you can’t go out. And they kick you out in the mornings, even in the winter,” Minore said. “I felt treated like a thing.”
He gestured to the backyard of 203 Rosette from the chair outside of his tiny home. “Here, you’re given kindness and freedom, like an actual human being.”
Life at Rosette is not for everyone, said Harper, the social anthropologist. “We’ve heard from people who stayed at Rosette for a period of time, and it was really hard for them,” she said. “So they left for a shelter.”
Some of these difficulties stem from the community’s daytime open-door policy. Throughout the morning and afternoon, homeless non-residents are welcome to enter the space for meals and use RNV ’s facilities, including a basement laundry unit, a first-floor shower and storage lockers in the yard. Though residents can collectively decide to bar certain individuals from RNV, disturbances still occur. In August, someone stole the house’s window AC unit, and on a Saturday in late September, a woman who had already been banned hurled hot coffee at Minore after he blocked her entry to the house.
Drug use on the premises is also a problem. “Non-residents are nodding out in the hallway, passed out at the dining room table, in the bathroom,” said Strongbow Lone Eagle, who moved into a tiny home last month.
For Lone Eagle, a native Oklahoman with a rugged gray beard and a gentle demeanor, these external disturbances are not the only challenges he’s encountered at the collective. Despite Rosette leaders’ emphasis on shared responsibility, he told me, very few residents help sustain the community. “Last week, I cooked breakfast every day, because nobody else wanted to do it. Many people just don’t show respect for their neighbor,” he said as he picked up a used napkin someone had left in front of his tiny home.
Still, Lone Eagle, who stayed in two shelters in New Haven and was arrested for trespassing while sleeping on the Green, is grateful to be at RNV. “This is the safest spot I’ve had.”
For other residents, Harper said, the difficulty of Rosette is that it provides too much independence. The degree of freedom residents should be given remains contentious amongst RNV ’s leaders. For Mark, it has always been paramount that residents are given the space to decompress and plan their next steps on their own terms and schedule.
But Luz feels that the laissez-faire approach risks enabling rather than empowering residents. “There are some people who just don’t seem to want to move forward,” Luz said. “And it’s because they’re comfortable.” While she’s proud of creating an environment where people want to stay, she also points out that spaces at Rosette are precious and few. “We need to be able to say, you’ve been here for almost two years now. How can we move you to the next level?”
For Luz, more structure at Rosette would mean adopting a system of checking in with residents every three months about their progress in completing important steps towards independent living, such as enrolling in a rehabilitation program or securing the documents needed to apply for a housing voucher. Nobody will be forced out under this arrangement, she emphasized, but enforcing clear expectations would better help residents in “becoming their best selves.”
Luz’s approach seems likely to win out. This January, the collective registered as a 501(c)(3) and Mark chose not to sit on the board.
“I decided that I could fight the new direction, or I could decide to let it ride,” he said. He chose the latter option: “This has become its own movement in the backyard, there’s a lot of younger volunteers that are really engaged, and I would like to get out of the way and let them decide.”
The challenges at RNV, however, are not only internal. The tiny homes are illegal. Under Connecticut building code, a legal dwelling unit must have both bathing and cooking facilities. The homes, designed for communities with shared restrooms and kitchens, lack both. Throughout 2023, as the collective began thinking about installing tiny homes, its leaders tried to engage state officials. Ultimately, the state and local building departments agreed to grant a 180-day temporary approval permit predicated on their eventual compliance with the Connecticut building code. This was an impossible demand, Rosette’s leaders said, given the nature of the units.
Legal or not, the tiny homes were going up. RNV ’s leaders believed providing the dignity of private space as well as more robust shelter from the elements was essential, said Gargamelli-McCreight.
“We came to the decision that, from a human rights standpoint, the units had to go up,” he said. “We’d deal with the legal consequences afterwards.”
In July 2024, the conditional permit expired. The Mayor’s Office directed United Illuminating Co. to cut off power to the backyard. Since then, the tiny homes have been powered solely by extension cords running from the main house. These cords can only run a simple electric heater in each home.
“Winters have been miserable here without the electricity,” Mark said. “Paradoxically, officials argue it’s not safe in these units and then do the only thing that actually makes them unsafe.”
A spokesman for the mayor, as well as officials from the Department of Community Resilience, the City Plan Department, and the Office of Building Inspection
and Enforcement, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Managing the summer also proved difficult without a reliable electricity supply. Unable to consistently power an AC unit, many residents said that the tiny homes felt like saunas with beds.
Still, for residents, the benefits of the homes outweigh these hardships.
Minore values the tiny homes’ privacy the most. “In shelters and even tents, everything is open, everybody’s around, there’s no privacy at all. But here, I have my home,” he said. Godek appreciates the ability to cultivate her own space. Over the past two years, she has gradually layered her own artwork on the walls of her tiny home.
RNV represents a new model of community-based transitional housing for homeless individuals. It joins similar projects in Rhode Island, Oregon, Texas, and Washington, and is now a talking point amidst debates in the Connecticut legislature. During the last legislative session, lawmakers considered two bills related to RNV: one to fund the construction of five hundred tiny homes across the state and another to allow religious organizations to install temporary shelter units on their property. Though neither reached the floor, Representatives Anne Hughes and Tony Scott said they expect both bills to return next session after minor revisions.
The model of RNV is unable to address a rising urban homelessness crisis on its own. “Tiny homes in churches or other organizations are not substitutes for deeply affordable housing or reforms that make evictions and rent hikes harder,” said Colleen Shaddox, chair of Rosette’s 501(c)(3) board, “but they’re one tool in the toolkit.”
Miguel Crooks, who’s been homeless in New Haven for nearly three decades, has slept in Rosette’s gazebo since April.
Though Rosette does not offer formal assistance in the housing process, Crooks secured a housing voucher through the help of nurses from the Cornell
Scott-Hill Health Center who provide free, on-site care every Tuesday at RNV
“I’m doing good here,” Crooks said. “But I’ll be even better once I get into my apartment.”
Other residents hope to be on their way soon as well.
Godek, who has long been interested in psychology, hopes to build on connections she’s made with agencies and mental health professionals while at Rosette to form her own addiction recovery community. She envisions an environment “where we could be mainly self-sufficient, put up some of the tiny homes, organize community classes, grow our own food, and have a couple animals,” she said. “That’s what I’m working towards.”
Minore, like Crooks, is also leaving RNV. After moving into Rosette, he enrolled at an addiction treatment center, got a job as the morning custodian at Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, and joined the Whole Earth Co-Operative, a farming and landscape co-op founded by GargamelliMcCreight. Minore got his voucher approved in
May, and is now moving into an apartment by Edgewood Park.
Minore’s excitement is bittersweet. He looks forward to having a place of his own for the first time, but is also hesitant to leave the community he considers family. When he came down with a fever while moving into his apartment, he returned to Rosette for a few nights to recover.
“They care about me here,” Minore told me. “They took me in, they gave me a shot. Without this, who knows what could have happened to me out there?”
Minore has promised to visit Rosette every morning before work to brew coffee.
“These are my people,” he said. “This is my community.”
David Rosenbloom is a senior in Saybrook College.
The Rosette Alternative
Godek’s prints from a collaboration with U-ACT.
Air Conditioning
BACKYARD
RUSTED-THROUGH FIRE PIT
too many thursdays thin light through the basement blinders chilled sweat expiring across my carotid outside capillaries of white picket fences kill themselves as i breathe in out i used to survive beijing heatwaves & today my father burns cardboard tells me no place to hide when not even shadow is shadow asks me what i do for respiration? refrigerators are so yesterday in my dreams dry ice chainsmokes in the garage a temperature high -est at 2 p.m. i don’t watch tv anymore limbs cold on the bedspread yes no yes again centralized mechanism involuntary contraction boolean bones & electrified nerves i wanna circuit my damage to the generator automated breath manufactured cold the sinusoidality of these lungs collapsing over & over under smothered air
TREE 1 TREE 2 TREE 3 [struck by lightning] Fiona Jin
Inside Yale’s
Quiet Reckoning with AI
By Alex Moore
Gwen, a junior political science major, first learned about ChatGPT near the end of her first year at Yale. Other students, she heard, were using it to write their papers. “I really dreaded writing my own essays,” Gwen told me. She decided to see what ChatGPT could do. Its instant output, she said, was “incredible”—a contrast to the stressful hours she would spend doing her own work.
In the fall of her sophomore year, Gwen began falling far behind in all of her classes. She struggled to prepare for tests, and forgot deadlines until the last minute or missed them altogether. It was a “sophomore slump,” she said. Too embarrassed to seek out her professors or peers for help, Gwen turned to ChatGPT. (She asked to be referred to by a nickname to speak openly about her artificial intelligence use, out of fear of disciplinary action.) By the end of the semester, she was using it to help complete many of her assignments.
By last spring, her struggles had only worsened. In a philosophy seminar—“my favorite class I’ve taken so far,” she said—Gwen used AI to write almost all her essays just to avoid late submissions. With AI, Gwen could hide her struggles from friends and professors. She never told them she was using AI. On rare occasions, when her friends saw she was falling behind, Gwen said they would joke: “Oh, your essay’s due tomorrow? Just use ChatGPT.”
AI helped Gwen turn her philosophy papers in on time. But guilt, she said, “was just eating me alive.” She felt that she was deceiving her professors and betraying the purpose of her education. “If I’m using AI instead of doing the work myself, why am I here?”
When her professor emailed her feedback on an AI-written paper, she refused to open it. She still hasn’t. “It’s wasting his time because he’s editing a fucking machine,” Gwen said. “Whatever he has to say is meaningless to me anyway, because it’s not my writing.”
If you walk around Sterling Memorial Library these days, you’re almost certain to see a student’s computer screen split: half black, half white. The white side displays an English essay, a chemistry problem set, or a lab report. On the black side: ChatGPT. A single bold line of text prompts the student: “Where should we begin?”
Since the moment ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, writers have lamented the future of college education. If we believe their reports, students have ceded all work to AI, professors are despairing, and chatbots are being trained to teach students skills that they won’t even be able to use since AI is taking their future jobs. The headline of a recent viral piece in New York Magazine reads, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.” At Yale, the reality is much more complicated. The complexity starts with the word “cheating” itself. The usual story of cheating with AI goes like this: ChatGPT does your math homework. You turn it in. You get a good grade, which you didn’t deserve, and it’s unfair to students who did the work
themselves. While this is true, “the much more grievous wrong is to the cheating student” who is “giving away the very substance of their educations,” as the Yale Undergraduate Regulations policy on academic integrity reads.
“Very few assignments have the product as the main outcome,” said Alfred Guy, director of Undergraduate Writing and Tutoring at Yale. “The main outcome is learning to make the product, and you can’t learn that if you don’t do the making.”
Noor, a pre-med junior who asked to be referred to by her middle name, understood that if ChatGPT did too much thinking for her, she might not learn. She thought that through conscious effort, she could avoid this risk and use AI to accelerate her learning. “As long as I’m making an attempt to learn this material and I understand what I’m learning,” Noor said, “I should be fine.” But like most students, Noor also saw ChatGPT as an obvious tool to ensure a good grade. “We don’t want to risk getting the wrong answer,” she said.
Over three months, I spoke to fourteen students, sixteen professors, and six administrators about AI culture at Yale. (Many of the students I spoke with are not identified by their full names in order to speak freely about violating rules on AI use.)
These days, students can use AI to replace the previously irreplaceable: studying with friends, learning from professors, and putting their thoughts into writing. In doing so, they encounter the gray area of cheating not the system but themselves. When professors use AI, set rules about its use in class, or ignore it entirely, they must contemplate what their students should learn and how much their students can be trusted to do it themselves.
Each day at Yale, community members quietly struggle to decide what role AI should play in their lives. These decisions present people with questions about the purpose of a college education—questions that they are answering on their own.
In January 2024, Provost Scott Strobel assembled a crew of professors and administrators into the Yale Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. Their mandate: study faculty engagement with AI, envision the future of AI at Yale, and recommend actions to realize that future. In his preface to a section of the task force’s July 2024 report, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis cites the Yale Reports of 1828 by Reverend Jeremiah Day, then the President of Yale. Lewis quotes Day to make an argument for teaching students “how to learn.”
But Day’s Yale Reports go deeper. Day forcefully rejected pre-professionalism and argued that students must study widely to become open-minded citizens of good character. But he acknowledges that Yale can’t force students to do so. “The scholar,” Day wrote, “must form himself, by his own exertions.”
Yale is quite different today. Jennifer Frederick, the executive director of the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, believes a Yale education maintains a “healthy tension” between “learning for the sake of learning” and “workforce preparation.”
I often hear students suggest that a Yale diploma alone will guarantee professional success. This assurance might give students more freedom to learn for the sake of learning. Or, on the contrary, the career opportunities a Yale diploma affords might draw them even more to pre-professional pursuits.
Aside from limited distributional requirements forcing students to explore different subjects, today’s Yale students have to strike this balance themselves.
The upshot of the task force report is that Yale wants itself and its students to be leaders in “an AI-infused future,” as the report called it. Yale is investing $150 million in teaching, training, and computing resources related to AI. The tone of the report, though—121 pages split between each Yale school—is more unsettled than triumphant. In most classrooms, the impact of Yale’s administrative stance is unclear.
“Yale doesn’t do top-down mandates,” said Ben Glaser, an associate professor of English and, as of July, Yale’s inaugural director of AI initiatives in the humanities. Glaser isn’t interested in pushing students or faculty toward a particular view on AI. Mostly, he’d like them to be able to assess when AI aligns with their own educational priorities—and when it doesn’t. He wants to help them learn about AI’s strengths and limitations to hone this ability.
Without clear AI policies, even well-informed people will inevitably disagree. At a university that prides itself on a collaborative spirit, when it comes to AI, everyone is making their own decisions.
When Sea ’28 talks about ChatGPT, it often feels like she’s talking about a smart person named Chat.
Sea, who asked to be referred to by a nickname, told me she would often run her economics homework answers by ChatGPT and ask if they were right. “Then they would redo it,” she said, “and we’d come to the same answer.” (Sea refers to ChatGPT with the pronoun “they.”) Sometimes ChatGPT “hallucinates,” or makes stuff up. Sea admitted she struggled to tell when it was right or wrong.
She also liked using ChatGPT to brainstorm her art history essays. She felt like AI helped her explain what she “wanted to say”—but thought its ideas were better than hers. When ChatGPT outputs an idea, Sea and other students I spoke to often feel that the idea was already present in the recesses of their own minds—and that AI simply helped them to locate it.
I asked Sea how she felt about using AI to generate ideas for her work. “It wasn’t my idea, but then at the same time, it could have been my idea,” she
said. “It’s not like Chat is like a person, so I feel it’s not like I could plagiarize it. But then it’s also somewhat kind of plagiarism.”
She paused. “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.”
Noor, the pre-med junior, initially treated ChatGPT as a teaching assistant. She continued attending office hours, but she sometimes wasn’t sure what to ask. She found that AI helped her understand what was confusing her. It was also, unlike human teachers, always available. “If we’re all stuck on one thing in the middle of the night,” she said, “we’re obviously gonna go to Chat.”
“These days, students can use AI to replace the previously irreplaceable: studying with friends, learning from professors, and putting their thoughts into writing. In doing so, they encounter the gray area of cheating not the system but themselves.”
Initially, Noor opposed using ChatGPT to check her homework answers. Seeing her friends doing this changed her mind. Even if she didn’t use AI, if she was going over her answers with a friend who did, Noor figured: “I’m kind of the same amount of guilty?”
Her views have since shifted. Even as students such as Noor try to avoid compromising their learning with AI, sometimes, other priorities— friendships, more exciting classes, or good grades— win out. Among her friends now, Noor said, “there’s no shame, like guilt, admitting that you used [AI].”
Gwen thinks Yale’s culture drives the use of
AI. Students, she said, view failure and struggle as signs of incompetence, rather than natural parts of learning. “I think the expectation is to always be on top of everything,” she said. “I really feel like AI would not be so common if people were willing to be a beginner and struggle and have moments of failure.”
John Hall, a math professor who directs parts of Yale’s calculus sequence, agrees that students often equate excellence with ease. To many students, he said, being good at math means, “you look at a problem, you know how to do it.” These students
might not choose to struggle or wait for human help if they can use ChatGPT.
But Hall has another explanation in mind for students’ AI use. Part of Yale culture, he said, is to “take advantage of every possible thing.” Demanding extracurricular activities crowd out learning. “I don’t think people are trying to get by and not learn,” Hall said. “But I think they don’t realize in the moment what they’re learning or not learning.”
I interviewed professors in sociology, music, computer science (CS), English, and humanities, who are teaching new classes about AI in their respective fields. Their views on education barely differed from those of professors who were avoiding AI.
Whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about AI, professors often expressed sadness or frustration at the prospect of students losing out, knowingly or not, on opportunities to learn. “Yale offers you this astonishing opportunity to stretch your brain,” said Shelly Kagan, Clark Professor of Philosophy. “If you want to just waste your time [by using AI], then you’re an idiot.”
Economics professor William Hawkins is the course director for Introductory Macroeconomics, which now offers students a custom chatbot trained on course materials. Hawkins was more concerned that students who used AI to avoid thinking about an unfamiliar subject would “miss that chance to be interested.”
Still, many were optimistic that students had the right priorities despite the competing pre-professional instinct. “I think that almost all Yale students understand that, really, the point is for them to learn,” Hall said. Most of the professors I spoke with thought students would avoid using AI in courses critical for a future job or those they enjoyed.
This wasn’t the case for Gwen in her philosophy class. And around the same time she was turning in her AI-written papers, one Yale professor noticed his own students cheating en masse, and he decided he had to intervene.
On March 25, Edward and around 150 other students in the difficult CS course CPSC 223 received an email. It was an hour before their first class after spring break.
“We have identified significant AI usage,” wrote Ozan Erat, one of the three faculty members teaching CPSC 223. On one problem set, he wrote, “one third of submissions have shown clear evidence of AI usage.”
Students had two options: admit to using AI and take a 50 percent penalty, or stay silent. If they stayed silent, and had been among the one third of students identified for AI use, they’d receive a zero on their work and face Yale’s disciplinary body, the Executive Committee. The kicker: students had to make this decision without knowing if they had been flagged for AI use. (Several days later, after students voiced their frustration, Erat notified the accused students.)
“Everyone was freaking out,” said Edward, now a sophomore, who asked to be referred to by his first name only. He and Santiago Gonzalez, another student in the class, agreed that almost everyone used AI in some form. The problem was that nobody knew how Erat and the other professors detected it.
Erat had seen signs of AI use early. Office hours attendance was down by half from previous years, posts on the course’s online question forum were down 75 percent, and, as Erat told me with a smile, “test scores declining, p-set scores, inclining.” (In an introductory 150-person CS class he taught last fall, Erat said only one student came to his office hours during the whole semester.)
While grading the first CPSC 223 assignment, Erat found that many students’ submissions included programming techniques they hadn’t been taught. Suspecting ChatGPT, Erat added a question to the first exam asking students to explain one such technique. “95 percent or 99 percent were not able to answer that question,” he said.
Erat spent his spring break reading through each student’s homework. He searched for bits of reoccurring code that were neither taught in class nor necessary to do the assignments—and that he’d rarely seen in previous semesters. When Erat asked ChatGPT to do the assignments, he found that it used these bits of code consistently.
This method of detecting AI is flawed. While Erat accused around 30 percent of the students of using AI, he says “it’s probably 70 percent or more in reality,” most of whom he couldn’t detect.
Erat also found that ChatGPT-4.5, a feature of ChatGPT Plus that is available for a fee of 20 dollars per month, did not generate the characteristic flags. And even without paying, a savvy student could edit AI-generated code to alter those parts that appear inhuman. Edward thought that students who used AI the least—and lacked practice in covering it up—were more likely to be accused. In his view, “the heavy AI users actually weren’t getting touched by this.”
When the amnesty policy expired, around fifty students had admitted to using AI and accepted the 50 percent penalty. A few of the flagged students, such as Edward, were able to show Erat how they had learned to write the code that was flagged as AI. These students avoided the penalty. (Edward had
learned the material from various online tutorial websites.) The remaining handful of students were sent to the Executive Committee for further investigation. Erat says that after the accusations, students seemed to use AI much less. But the episode was less of a pedagogical triumph than a cautionary tale.
Enforcing AI restrictions fairly is impossible. Detection methods are ineffective and self-defeating because students easily learn to evade them. Erat himself told me he knew this was the last time he would be able to detect AI. Yale’s Poorvu Center states on its website that “there is no tool or method to detect AI use with any certainty.”
Edward seemed unsure what to think of the situation. One part of him figured that many students just didn’t want to learn. “If you’re gonna cheat, you’re gonna cheat, right?” But another part of him saw a more fluid reality. Maybe by “revamping the entire course,” professors could fix a learning system that AI seemed to have broken.
In core Yale CS classes such as CPSC 223, students learn programming languages that are no longer widely used in industry and programming tasks that AI could now easily do for them. The problem of AI raises the old debate between a liberal arts education and
career preparation. This is the core of a serious tension in the CS department: what is it supposed to teach students?
Many students view the CS major as a “bootcamp” that teaches you only the information you need to land a well-paid job, Erat said. Gonzalez, the other CPSC 223 student I interviewed, thinks most students take classes similar to CPSC 223 not “for the love of the game,” but as “a means to an end”—the “end” in question being a job.
“It’s not like that,” said Erat. The point of computer science classes, he said, is to “learn how to learn.”
The “game” that Gonzalez is talking about is computer science, emphasis on science. Computer science is an academic discipline like any other. Computer scientists study problems in the interest of discovering new science. Practical applications are often secondary.
A degree in CS mostly prepares students to become computer scientists, just as a history degree mostly prepares students to be historians. The idea is not that every student will become an academic— few do—but that the initial training in this direction will prepare students for varied pursuits. When the world changes, Erat argues, the student who studied CS will have the creativity to “learn how to search, how to integrate things.” But for the student who just used AI to make programs, he said, “It’s going to be impossible.”
Conversely, CS professor Lin Zhong thinks Yale’s core CS curriculum is “stuck in the 1980s.” He wants students to develop the AI expertise that they would need as professional software engineers. “If your student[s] don’t learn how to use [ AI], they lose their job,” he said. Students in Zhong’s Computer Systems Design course earn extra credit for using AI creatively to do their homework.
Zhong made this class much harder after AI emerged. Students are supposed to have AI do simple tasks that they previously would have done themselves. With this new power, Zhong said, students attempt problems that used to be reserved for more advanced students. “You have to design the curriculum so that students are forced to learn, right?” he said.
This fall, I went to the first day of Erat’s CPSC 223 to see what had changed since last spring. Within minutes, I learned that 90 percent of the final grade is now based on a trio of three-hour written exams. Homework is worth 0 percent. Erat explained that he no longer bans AI in his class. He spent several minutes discussing the pros and cons
of using AI, but focused on the cons. “If you let AI do the job for you, AI will take your job,” Erat warned—directly contradicting Zhong.
As Erat said this, I watched the student in front of me download Microsoft Copilot, an AI coding assistant, to help with his work. In another tab, he opened up a job application.
Would using AI help this student get the job, or cause him to lose it? It’s impossible to know. Nearly half the students I interviewed were asked to use AI at their summer jobs. Meanwhile, professors who teach advanced CS electives have told Erat that students who took CPSC 223 last spring have arrived in their classes not knowing how to code.
When I spoke to Erat again several weeks into the semester, he said the changes to the course were going well. Students still submit clearly AI-generated code for the ungraded problem sets, and office hours remain rather empty. “If you’re learning,” Erat said, “that’s not a big issue.” Strong scores on the first exam suggested that students were indeed learning, just without human help.
Education is changing at Yale because of a few tech companies’ unexpected breakthroughs. Most students get their non-human help from OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, though some also use Google’s Gemini chatbot or Anthropic’s Claude. Yale’s AI culture is linked to these chatbots’ changing flaws and abilities, which in turn reflect their creators’ interests. All three companies have launched marketing campaigns specifically targeting college students. During final exams last spring, OpenAI offered a premium version of ChatGPT for free to college students nationwide. A representative of OpenAI declined to comment.
Shubham Phal is a founding engineer at Google’s AI for Education division. He’s young: Phal graduated from college in 2020 and received his master’s in computational data science in 2022. In July, we met up for lunch at the gleaming Googleplex in Mountain View, California. I wanted to know how his understanding of learning informs the way he builds AI.
The “real learning experiences that you remember for your life,” Phal said, are “the ones where you actually collaborated with people, you discussed a bunch of ideas with them, you came up with your own theories.” He was one of the lead engineers behind Google’s recent efforts to make a chatbot tutor— something that could teach anything to anyone.
Phal talks with a Silicon Valley mix of technical explanations and utopian futurism. He hoped AI tutors would “accelerate the pace” at which students can have those collaborative experiences, he said. But Phal wasn’t sure how this would work in practice. “I’m not an expert on how to teach,” he said.
Phal thinks professors should view the potential of teaching with AI as “something transformative.” I mentioned Erat’s empty office hours and asked Phal how he planned to enact his vision of the future, one where AI filled classrooms rather than emptied them. “The professors themselves,” he said, would be responsible for figuring that out. Phal was sure they would succeed. “That’s good,” he said, because that’s “ultimately progressing as a civilization.”
Phal seemed already to have moved on—he had another question on his mind. “How do we progress faster?” he asked.
By the end of the spring semester, Gwen reached a breaking point with AI. “I felt like I didn’t deserve to be a Yale student,” she said. She thought that she was throwing away her education and the scholarship paying to support it.
She decided to quit using ChatGPT altogether. She didn’t ask AI to help her sentences flow or to strike the right tone. She didn’t even use it to brainstorm. “I think that’s a skill you need to have on your own. That’s the core of being original, anyway.”
Gwen recalled completing her final assignments without AI, sitting in the middle of a crowded library so that she felt watched. “I struggled. And they weren’t very good.”
It was only then, she said, that she started to understand just how much learning she had missed out on. ∎
Moore is a senior in Grace Hopper College and publisher of The New Journal.
Alex
An Art Sleuth at Work
Sherlock and Watson? No—a curator and a writer at the Yale Center for British Art.
By Allie Gruber
Edward Town stares quizzically at his laptop. Ancestrylibrary.com. Search bar: John B. Gibbons. The first result is a man born in Staffordshire in the 1770s. Ed turns to me and cracks a grin. “That’s our guy,” he says.
We are sitting in a bright seminar room on the fourth floor of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). Ed has dark brown hair and wears a pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses. He’s what a strict, bonnet-wearing mother might call “good-mannered.” Ed’s eye contact is direct, his handshake gentle. And his accent. Oh, his accent! It’s of the soft, mellifluous kind that never fails to delight American ears. In other words, he’s British.
“Look at the ceiling,” he says, and I notice that the roof is translucent. During the museum’s recent two-year renovation period, a new film was installed in the roof, subtly reducing the amount of natural light that enters the space. “For the sake of the preservation of the collection,” Ed announces with a stately air.
Since 2014, Ed has served as the YCBA’s assistant curator of paintings and sculpture. To be a curator is to wear many hats at once. When he’s not choosing which paintings go on display, Ed researches provenance.
“Provenance,” a lovely word made lovelier if pronounced in a French accent, refers to an artwork’s history of ownership. Paintings have parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, so-great-and-grandthat-no-prefix-does-them-justice parents. When Ed wants to display an archived painting, he must first trace its genealogy. He follows his nose, sniffs about. He pores over ancestry data, combs through online databases like The Getty and the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, scans old auction catalogs, and rifles through letters. In short: he’s an art sleuth.
Currently, Ed is trying to track down the provenance for a painting in the collection called “Lock Gate.”
A description of the painting in the YCBA’s online catalog reads: Attributed to William Mulready, 1786–1863. Ed
shakes his head. “Attributed implies uncertainty,” he says.
Ed always begins his sleuthing the same way: he examines the back of the canvas, usually plastered with signs that contain the names of art dealers, their addresses, and notes by previous owners. This is where the fun begins.
And yet—sometimes the clues are insufficient. The back of “Lock Gate” reveals only one sticker: a hardly legible cursive note that looks like it was written with a quill and ink. This charming bit of Painting by W. Mulready was bought by Mr. Wyatt of Oxford at Mulready’s Sale, exchanged by him with W. Delamotte, artist. From his son Philip Delamotte it passed to me Geo. Gaskoin. Ed reads it and sighs. That’s all we know. Our luck stops with Gaskoin.
Ed is not demoralized. “Art is in many respects a secret history, and I enjoy the discoveries that reveal those secrets,” he explains with wide-eyed zeal.
His first order of business is to examine the back of another painting by
Mulready, “An Old Gable,” in the YCBA’s collection. The two paintings might have been bought by the same person, Ed tells me. On the back of “An Old Gable” are several yellowed labels bearing the names of previous owners. “Painted in late 1809 for Thomas Welsh,” one reads. And then, on the next line: “The property of John Gibbons.” Aha! Hallelujah! Holy mackerel! If John Gibbons was an art dealer, Ed deduces, he might also have collected “Lock Gate.” Therefore: ancestrylibrary. com. Therefore: “John B. Gibbons” in the search bar.
Curators strive to map out complete provenance histories of every artwork in their collections. They don’t like gaps in the narrative, which point to doubts, uncertainties, suspicions. Sometimes, people who bought paintings at auctions or inherited them as family heirlooms incorrectly identified the sitter or artist. “Knowing who owned it subsequently can also account for why a spurious identity may have been grafted onto the portrait at a later date,” Ed explains.
The history of a painting’s ownership also involves questions of restitution. In the last fifty years, museums have been reckoning with their responsibility to find out if artworks have been looted, stolen, or sold on unfair terms. Paintings that were acquired illegitimately might then be returned to their rightful owner or country of origin. Provenance is not just a history of ancient bloodlines and family heritage. It’s also a legal history.
Ed’s interest in provenance stems from his work on portraiture under the Tudor and Stuart reigns, where the names of many artists and sitters have been lost. Before coming to the YCBA, Ed worked as a curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London. There, he saw firsthand that discovering the history of a painting’s ownership can lead to clues about who’s depicted in it. The titles of artworks are often changed when they’re passed on from owner to owner. Tracking down a painting’s owners helps curators figure out why the sitter or artist was misidentified.
Like all detective work, provenance research leads to many red herrings. Curators sometimes spend hours—days! weeks!—going down a rabbit hole, Ed tells me, only to discover many wasted hours later… Deary me, there’s nothing there. “It sounds like it’s something that would be occasionally rewarding and often frustrating,” I venture. Ed’s eyes grow wide. “Oh yes,” he says with a vigorous nod. “That’s very right.”
After scouring ancestrylibrary.com, I stroll with Ed through the YCBA’s Long Gallery, a corridor lined floor to ceiling with paintings. With no labels and no blank space, it mimics the portrait gallery of an English country house. Back then, you were just expected to know who painted which painting. No explanations needed.
Ed was in charge of curating the Long Gallery. This came with a lot of difficult choices. One of the idiosyncrasies of the building itself is that the partition walls are flexible; you can arrange them as you please. This means
“Lock Gate” (left); a portrait of Edward Town (right).
photos by Yale british art center (left); jessica david (right)
that there’s an inconceivable number of ways to configure the gallery rooms. Fewer walls means less hanging space. But it also means opening up large passages—vistas, as they’re known in the art world—that spark visual dialogues between the paintings.
We weave through the Long Gallery and stop at a portrait of a man dressed in Armenian garb, painted in 1771. The man flaunts a stylish red turban and rests one hand on his hip. He has an air of quiet complacence. A smile flickers at the corners of his mouth. A gold medal adorns his neck. For several centuries, art historians referred to this portrait simply as “The Armenian.” No one knew who he was. The YCBA curators’ best guess was the famous Armenian horse dealer, John Phillippo Nighorus, but they had no way to be sure.
Last year, a scholar pointed out to Ed that Nighorus had been awarded a gold medal by the Royal Society of Arts not long before the painting was made. Upon receiving the scholar’s email, Ed inspected the painting, and he noticed that—lo and behold!—the gold medal around the man’s neck has the exact insignia of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2024, more than two centuries after the portrait was completed, Ed and the scholar discovered the identity of the mysterious Armenian. The painting’s
name was changed accordingly from “The Portrait of an Armenian” to “John Phillippo Nighorus.”
“This new information swiftly recontextualized many of the artworks in our collection that depict horses, hunting or racing subjects that could be thought of as being simply British and insular, but in fact belong to a global story,” Ed explains. “The best horses in the world”—he leans in close ands his voice grows softer and more urgent—“came from West Asia.”
Context has the power to draw our attention to a global story. Nighorus was the main actor in bringing horses from Armenia to Georgian England, Ed tells me, “travelling to and from West Asia with steeds that would be bred to produce thoroughbred racehorses.” Horse racing was enormously popular in the eighteenth century, and horse wagering was often a source of local economic growth. Ed wanted to honor Nighorus’s importance in this network of trade between Britain and West Asia. So he did what only a curator can do: he surrounded the portrait with depictions of horses in the English countryside. He placed Nighorus in the center of the wall.
Ed and I return to the seminar room. He leafs through his file on “The Old Gable” and pulls out a copy of an
annotated auction catalog. Two hundred years ago, a top-hatted, fitted-trousered bidder had the good sense to note down who purchased which artwork. Next to each artwork, names are scrawled in a loose hand. “Gooden, I recognize,” Ed mutters. “Agnew, I know.”
He stops when he gets to the painting he’s interested in. Col, it reads in that same barely legible scribble. “Col?” Ed wonders. “Who’s Col?” In an instant, Ed’s detective hat is back on. He opens his laptop and reloads ancestrylibrary.com. I look away and smile. Here we go again.∎
Allie Gruber is a senior in Pierson College.
Personal Essay
Before the Trees Fall
A writer unravels New Haven’s tree history as she investigates the strange affliction spreading across her trees back home.
By Makena Senzon
organisms.” — E. O. Wilson
The road into my neighborhood in Jupiter, Florida belongs on a magazine cover. Dozens of healthy southern oaks line each side of the road. The trees have tangled branches that form an arch over the asphalt. In the shade, I can look up at the canopy and see patches of clear sky through the leaves. Next to cookie-cutter houses, there are lakes home to great blue herons, ibises, and roseate spoonbills. It feels like I live in a nature preserve rather than in a neighborhood of artificial golf courses and manicured palm trees.
Though beautiful, my neighborhood trees are frail. Raised at the same nursery and planted at equal distances apart, every tree is almost identical. But a forest is strongest when it is diverse. When one oak tree falls, the others may fall with it.
A few years ago, I noticed fingerprint-shaped black marks had appeared on a tree in front of my house. Each day, the marks grew into circles: seven, nine, then thirteen circular markings where bark bulged black. Something inside was trying to break free, as if the tree were giving birth to death.
Within a year, the circles had spread until they were no longer separately defined. A reddish brown color tinged the dark bark. Then, the dark circles appeared on the tree next door. The leaves still looked healthy. They still turned slightly brighter shades in the spring and dropped acorns in the fall.
A Google search could not explain what was causing the tree stress. Perhaps it was sickness. Perhaps it was the stress of aging in a cramped space. I frantically
emailed the Homeowners Association ) president. Three years later, I am still waiting for a response.
I had to leave the oak trees when I moved to New Haven for college, but I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Wanting to help my own oaks and learn more about human connection to landscaped and urban trees, I reached out to Susanna Keriö, who researches tree stress at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.
When Keriö was a child, a large rotten tree fell over in a city park in her hometown in Finland. It landed on a group of young friends, crushing one of them. As a forest pathologist, she cannot help noticing the symptoms of stress— signs of disease and management defects on every landscaped tree she passes— wondering which is in danger of dying or falling next.
Through talking to her, I learned that centuries before my oak trees started getting sick, New Haven had a massive tree epidemic of its own.
In 1686, two juvenile elm trees were planted on what is now Elm Street. For seven decades, these trees were left with no companions but each other. Seventythree years later, New Haven planted a row of 250 sycamore and elm trees around the town green.
In the late eighteenth century, the “Great Planting” occurred, when a US senator, James Hillhouse, planted hundreds of elms from Temple to Grove Street. By this time the trees took over New Haven, and the town became known as “Elm City.” It was said to be the most beautiful town in New England.
Urban tree landscaping was integral to New Haven, one of America’s first planned cities. City planners assigned each tree a space. Confined to a grid, the trees had no choice but to fight for room in the canopy. And as they grew, their roots spread over the gridlines and cracked the sidewalks.
James Hillhouse and New Haven residents were not prepared to care for their elms. They assumed that the trees could take care of themselves.
By 1883, the neglect spiraled: bites from horses, burns from electric lines, and poison from gas lines meant only a few elms had bark left unscathed. At the city’s plea, Yale forestry graduate George
Alexander Crombie led the removal of 5,000 sick trees and the planting of 10,000 new ones.
That was in 1921. Twenty-five years later, the trees faced risk beyond mere neglect.
In 1936, the elm bark beetle from the Netherlands infected American Elms with a fungus known as Dutch Elm Disease. The trees all suffered together. The beetles burrowed through their bark, leaving forklike patterns in their wake. As the trees died, Elm City risked losing its nickname.
The New Haven Green had become a graveyard for dying trees. Eventually, the city removed elm corpses and planted ash trees in their place.
I did not want my oak trees to die the same collective death.
On a rainy day in 2025, Keriö and I trudged from her lab to a rotting ash tree stump. Judging by the number of rings the stump had, it seemed at least fifty years old. Keriö pointed at a carved-out band, one centimeter wide, wrapping around the base of the tree. It was the tunneled wake of the emerald ash borer, a fluorescent green beetle that came to Connecticut a decade ago. At least one hundred million ash trees have died because of this beetle, Keriö said.
In December, I returned to Florida and saw that the affliction of my oaks had spread. A row of over thirty trees had bark turned black. One oak was entirely consumed by the darkness from its base to its topmost branches.
On an afternoon walk, I noticed a gap in the tree canopy over my neighborhood. The blue sky pierced through a large hole that a tree once covered. My parents told me that while I was gone, a moderate hurricane ripped through our town. The wind took with it a couple of roof shingles and a twenty-five-year-old tree. Within minutes of the first gust, the tree crashed down onto the asphalt. The stump stood severed from its body.
Within a week of the tree’s fall, the HOA removed the stump and planted a new young oak. I saw the puny, threefeet-tall oak amidst its mature peers. Would the pathogen, fungus, whatever it was, attack the baby tree?
Felicia Millett, Keriö’s colleague, often receives diseased tree samples. A plant and tree diagnostician, Millett analyzes twigs, leaves, and bark to identify
sick plants. I thought she might be able to solve my tree mystery.
In her early career, Millett was a sky scraper rope access technician, but after moving out of New York City, she turned to climbing trees. After getting an arborist license, she pruned branches and removed sick specimens, chainsaw in hand.
She told me with a roll of her eyes that arborists are much more likely to have to remove trees than to care for them. After eight years of being a “green Grim Reaper,” Millett wanted to use her knowledge to help sick trees, not just remove them. She put down her chain saw and went back to school.
When I showed Keriö and Millett the pictures of my trees, they were both per plexed. Neither of them have any experi ence with Floridian climate and wondered if the discoloration was just a result of the intense humidity of the area. They won dered: is it caused by climate change? or a physical fungus? a gall? a deep cut? Both experts noted that just seeing a picture of a faraway tree does not offer the whole story.
Online experts did not help either. A University of Florida agriculture exten sion local chapter has left my most recent voicemails unanswered. Tree forums and stack exchanges gave me contradictory answers. And I was ghosted on identical posts I made on Facebook and Reddit.
I refuse to believe that the oak tree feet from my front door is patient zero. That my neighborhood is home to the first recorded outbreak. Someone must have a diagnosis, a prognosis, a medicine for my trees.
The possibility remains that these black splotches are harmless to the trees. Maybe the trees are going through puberty, and the fingerprints are just pim ples rather than a pox. Perhaps my hours of research and conversations did noth ing. I can’t save my trees if they do not even need saving. But what if they do?
I am worried that the fate of New Haven’s ash and elm will repeat in my town. I am worried that the live oak will be stolen from me. I am worried that the black splotches will grow into mighty hands that will rip down my canopy. My trees will not live forever, but I want them to at least outlive me. So before the trees fall, I’ll keep searching for answers.
Makena Senzon is a junior in
On the Worst of Days I Write a Poem
this isn’t poetry this is just bearing witness and writing it down today I watched a man in Gaza attend a wedding in the rubble today I watched a child shake with hunger and wished I believed in God today I watched and it did not help anyone I stayed watching gritting my teeth writing no poetry whispering no prayers bearing witness like Atlas bears the earth it is not natural for us to scroll from one emotion to the next; feel them ricochet bloom and spin and flick them away but what about this world is natural? what is left untainted? what is there left other than to live and do our jobs and hug our friends and go to protests and fade into the crowd our voices forming an ugly, broken song I think I’ve forgotten how to make words sound beautiful I want to write about crying in metaphors of larger bodies of water streams; rivers; the ripples of a pebble hitting a lake I am the smallest body of water and I have too little tears no one has ever taught me how to write
about anyone else’s pain so in the presence of the worst pains I write about bearing witness and feeling helpless I try to find words that end in -ing to convince myself I am doing anything almost none of them are true I am barely even bearing I have the smallest job the smallest body of water and I am still failing it trailing it behind me in drips and splashes what do you do when you can’t bear it? where do you go when you are already in the most safe place?
On Rosh Hashanah the world begins anew and nothing changes A too-wise 40 year old looks my hopelessness in the eye and tells it that, now our fingernails scratch futilely but a crack is coming that someday soon there will be a fissure to grab onto
to tear open and it is our job now to gather up ourselves and our communities to make ourselves ready
On Yom Kippur I pour my atonements into this promise of a crack and make myself ready
Zoe Kanter
Mini Crosswords
The New Journal, founded in 1967, is a student-run magazine that publishes investigative journalism and creative nonfiction about Yale and New Haven. We produce five issues a year that span reportage, personal essays, and creative work.
Email chloe.budakian@yale.edu and calista.oetama@yale.edu to join our writers' panlist and get updates on future ways to get involved. We're always excited to welcome new writers and artists to our community. You can check out past issues of The New Journal at www.thenewjournalatyale.com.
The New Journal was founded in 1967, under the following mission statement: “This university has once again reached that stage in history when people are talking about the New Yale, presumably to be distinguished from the Old Yale, which in its own day was presumably considered new. Wishing to share in this modernity, we have chosen The New Journal as the name for our publication. Besides, things seemed slow around here.”
Today, The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. One thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven community. The New Journal is printed by TCI Press, Seekonk, Massachusetts; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. Office Address: P.O. Box 3311, New Haven, CT 06515.
THE FRANCIS WRITERS SERIES and THE YALE JOURNALISM INITIATIVE
Co-sponsored by the English Department’s Creative Writing Program and the Traphagen Alumni Speakers Series, Yale College Office of Student Affa irs
ISAAC ARNSDORF
IN CONVERSATION WITH HALEY COHEN GILLILAND, DIRECTOR OF THE YALE JOURNALISM INITIATIVE
INTRODUCED BY ANNE FADIMAN, FRANCIS WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE
Isaac Arnsdorf, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News, covers the White House for the Washington Post. He is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America and the author of Finish What We Started, on the MAGA movement after January 6—a book that has been called “chilling,” “bracing," “disturbing,” “enlightening,” and “extraordinary.”
