Volume 20 - Issue 4

THE YALE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Alasdair Neale, Music Director INVITES YOU TO THEIR

ll.~~~ GAlLA IB1JENJEIFII1r C<Q)N<CJEJRT SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13TH at 8 O'CLOCK WOOLSEY HAlL, NEW HAVEN

WITH SPECIAL GUEST ARTIST

ELISABETH SODERSTROM SOPRANO

William Tell Overture Rossini Four Last Songs Strauss Elisabeth Sijderstrijm, soprano Symphony No. 2 Rachmaninoff

..

Elisabeth Soderstrom

Alasdair Neale

"A rare and distinctive brand of song interpreter.

There seems no end to her gifts."

-San Francisco Examiner

"When the orchestra players stamped their feet for Neale ... the appreciation seemed 11.nderstandable."

-Los Angeles Times

"She brought more passion, more immediacy to {Strauss's Four Last Sonesl than we are accustomed to hear. Whatever the mood there was always sensuous delight."

-The Times, London

'The fantastic college-age mii.Sicians of the Yale Symphony ... reminded me again of the astonishing level of performance thal young Americans are capable of" -High Fidelity Magazine

Fill out this form to order tickets by mail. Tickets ordered in advance can be picked up at the reservations table in the Woolsey rotunda between 6 and 7:30 the night of the concert.

Daytime Phone: _ _ _ _ _ _ __

Please Print Name: Number of Tickets:

_ _ _ @ $20 includes post-concert reception with Miss Sl5derstrl5m (Area A) _ _ _ @ $12 General admission, $6 students (Area B) _ _ _ @ $ 8 General admission, $4 students (Area C)

Tax-deductible Main

Contribution

=

= = = =

$ $ $ $

_ _ _ _ __ ,---_ __

Enclosed check made out to Yale Symphony Orchestra for total $ _ __ Floor First Balcony Please send this form and your check to: Yale Symphony Orchestra 1945 Yale Station New Haven, Connecticut 06520 or call: 203-432-4140 Second Balcony Please mark a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice of seat locations on the charts to the left.

2 The New JoumaVFebruary 5. 1988

Covu design by john Stella Covu photo by Pearl Y. Hu

Letter

5

NewsJoumal

5

AIDS testing and red tape . . . help for the homLiess . . . ChaunÂŤ)' checks out . . . winning by a prayu.

Features

8

What P rice Freedom?

Professors discuss the hidden costs

10

of Shopping Period.

By jonathan Hoyt.

Answers in Another Voice Apocalyptic poetry and anti-Scvid. politics drove Tomas Vencwva from his native Lithuania. Now teaching at Yale, Vencwva expresses the experima of exile through his writing. By Erin Kelly.

16

Patchwork Dogged by an enormous workload and a history of inefficiency, Physical Plant makes anothu attempt at reform. By Martha Brant.

24

BoOks

28

H armonic Convergence

Studies of medieval artists, choral music, Amy Grant, and Christian art in the Third World inJersect at the Institute of Sacred Music. By Mitchell Hammond.

E Pluribus Una Nancy Cott's new book, The Grounding of Modem Feminism, traces the paradoxes wiJhin the women's movnnnu. WiJh unjl4gging optimism, Cott finds feminism's strength in its disharmony. By Margtry Sokoloff.

The New journal/ February 5, 1988 3

Publisher Carter Brooks Editor-in-Chi¢ J ames Bennet Business Manager Norman Dong Managing Editors Susan Orenstein Jennifer Sachs Designer John Stella Production Manager Mary Chen Photography Editor Pearl Hu Associate Business Manager Grace White Associate Editors Martha Brant Daniel Waterman Skye Wilson • Peter Zusi Associate Designers Pamela Geismar• Jon Wertheimer• Associate Photography Editor Ann Light National Sales Manager Laura Smith Circukltion Manager Pamela Weber Staff Cynthia Cameros Jennifer Fleissner John Gill* Mitchell Hammqnd Jonathan Hoyt Erin Kelly

David King• Jodi Lox* Heidi Schulman Kirk Semple* Barry Shimelfarb• Stu Weinzimer Doug Wright

M embers and Directors: Edward B. Be nnett III •

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4 The New J ournaVFebruary 5. 1988

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Letter

NewsJournal

To the Editor: I enjoyed the three articles on AIDS in the December 4 issue. In the last paragraph of page 20 (first of page 21), however, Sachs appears to list being tested by donating blood as an option.

That is totally inappropriate- seriously so. It is unethical to go to a blood bank to be tested. The reason is that falsely negative results are sufficiently common so th at some blood recipients will die as a result of such behavior. No person who believes that he/she may realistically be positive can ethically donate blood!

Being tested in the blood bank setting is a lso -ill-advised since counselling is not done. No one should ever willingly be tested for HIV antibodies without professional counselling.

Anyone can be tested anonymously, with pre- and post-test counselling, at the New H aven H ealth Department.

Your name is never used and the result is never entered into your ~edical record .

Paper Chase

Sincerely, Alvin Novick, M.D. P rofessor of Biology The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comment on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to James Bennet, Editorials, 62 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520.

All letters for publication must include address and signature. The New Journal reserves the right to edit all letters for publication.

personal thing between me and her," o n e of these students said. "My under¡standing was that it was not going on m y file in any way." H e said that if he had thought the test would appear o n his medical record, he would not h ave consented to it.

Rasmussen said that she still does not record test results. "I just say, 'H ere. It's yours.' That's how I've been doing it and that's how the providers I know have been doing it," she said.

She explained that until she comes across a patient who tested positive, "all these things are not big terrible issues." Despite th e insistence of both R owe and DeBernardo that physicians have started to heed the guidelines of the new policy, Rasmussen said she has no plans to begin "enveloping" immediately.

Rasmussen's reluctance stems from a simple factor- the lack of envelopes on any of the charts. "I d on't know what kind they're going to use, and I'm not going to use my own envelope.

That would be like a red flag," she said.

R asmussen said that as soon as the record room supplies envelopes she will begin using them. For now, the efforts ofUHS to find a coherent AIDS policy continue to suffer from confusion, miscommunication, and now from an a pparent shortage in the supply closet. â&#x20AC;˘

Anyon e who has considered getting tested for AIDS at U n iversity Health Services (UH S) but feared that the r esults would appear on their charts should know that for the time being they can get a completely anonymous test here at Yale. While the AIDS testing policy at UHS mandates that physicians record patients' results in sealed envelopes on their medical charts (TN] 12/4/87), the Health Services has not fully implemented this policy. Instead, individual physicians have continued to determine the confidentiality of each test however they see fit.

R ecording all results will have several benefits. People infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, which can cause AIDS, may need special treatment. In addition, health care providers who come into contact with a patient's bodily fluids may determine whether they risk infection.

To avoid stigmatizing people who take the test, U H S will put envelopes, some empty, on ten percent of all charts.

According to D r. Daniel Rowe, the director of UHS , the Board of University H ealth approved this new policy only last week. However, ~e -Jennifer Sachs said in early November that "in the meantime, we are proceeding under the new policy. We are operating as if that were our policy."

Man on the Move Dr. R obert DeBernardo, the AIDS coordinator at UHS, denied that the policy was to have been implemented last fall. He said that he had not When Henry "Sam" Chauncey Jr. ( D C distributed instructions on "envelop- '57) announced recently that he would ing" results until the middle of resign as president of the Science P ark January, but that caregivers had Development Corporation (SPDC), he followed the policy since then. At least startled many people in the Yale and two students who took the "AIDS test" New H aven communities. As soon as a at UHS in early December confirmed search committee finds his replacethat their provider, Dr. Jane ment, Chaun cey will become president Rasmussen, assured them that their and chief executive officer of Gaylord tests would not appear on their medical H ospi tal, a rehabilitation center in records. "She told me the test was a Wallingford. Chauncey feels that The New Journal/February 5, 1988 5

A Landholding Class

Students in a Law School course hope to find N ew Maven's hom eless places to call their own.

Science P ark will benefit from a new perspective on its development. His decision also coincides with his own agenda . "Change is something that some people seek out," Chauncey said.

"I am one of those guys that likes to do different things in life."

From behind the scenes, Chauncey has supported a series of high-profile professors and presidents and has acted as a catalyst in the development of New H aven. H e worked in the University administration from 1957 to 1981, serving in such positions as assistant to former President Kingman Brewster and secretary of the University. He a lso founded the Community R elations Office and was a member of the New Haven Development CommiSSIOn for more than 10 years, initiating renovations of the Union R ailroad Station and the Taft H otel.

Chauncey was selected as the first president of SPDC in 1981. With Yale University, the Olin Corporation, and the City of New H aven, he established the high-tech research park on the site of the Olin-Winchester gun factory, just west of Science Hill . The industrial complex provides space and managerial facilities for new companies and small businesses. With a budget that has increased from $51,000 to $5 million in six years, Science Park now houses about 110 companies and has resources valued at well over $20 million. "Sam took a piece of paper which had a concept o n it and made it into one of the most e ffect ive post-urban development pr~j ects in the country," said Matt Nemerson, president of the Greater 6 The New journaVFebruary 5, 1988

New Haven Chamber of Commerce and former vice-president of SPDC under Chauncey.

Chauncey was initially attracted to the proposal because of his interest in the revitalization of New H aven. "It seemed like a g reat opportun-ity io build a strong economic base in New H aven, which was losing it~ old industrial economic base," he said.

The project promised to encourage business and to stimulate the city's development. Richard Bowerman (BK '39, LAW '42), chairman of S P OC, believes that with the president's departure, people will realize how much they have taken Chauncey and his guidance for granted.

But residents of the neighboring Newhallville-Dixwell community have criticized Science P ark for not providing more employment opportunities. Willie Green, executive director of the Newhallville Neighborhood Corporation, also voiced his dissatisfaction early in the project.

However, since cultivating a relationship with Chauncey, he has found him accessible and sensitive to the needs of the community. "Sam was responsible for opening many doors," Green said.

"I fear that progress is going to come to a grinding halt unless the search committee can find another Sam Chauncey." Chauncey, however, remains confident in the search committee'~ a bility to select a successor who will make Science P ark into "the damnedest thing you've ever seen."

•

- Kirk Semple

T o confront the shortage of housing for New H aven's h omeless, a Yale Law School course called H ome Operations Management Enterprises (HOME) · assigned its students to design a program that 1 • would create and preserve low~i ncome residences.

After two years of paperwork and fundraising, the stud ents currently enrolled in the course anticipate completion of the project. But their final product will not be a written report. By the middle of this year, · under the leadership of professors Michael Graetz and Robert Solomon, the corporation formed by the class will own over 130 units of low-income housing worth several million dollars.

"The driving force of the class started as a vision," R oger Barnett (LAW :89) said. "But this year the vision came together." If the project succeeds, other cities, including New York, might duplicate it. The course had grown so complex that this year the professors recruited students from the Schools of Architecture, Public H ealth and Safety, and Management in addition to the 14 law students.

Janet Stearns (LAW '88), a veteran HOME student, has watched the class progress. " The Mayor (B iagio DiLieto] h as endorsed our program, and we are waiting for the approval of our board before we start purchasing the units," she said. The board , which makes all the final decisions, heads a non- profit corporation formed . by the students. They created the permanent leadership so that their . project will outlast their graduations. According to Solomon, "The class is an operating law ftrm, representing and advising this corporation." The board includes

real estate developers, tax revisionists, community volunteers and city officials concerned with the homeless, and a formerly homeless person.

As a non-proht organ1zat10n, HOME receives federal low-income housing tax credits for each unit purchased. HOME's corporation can then use the credits as collateral to acquire low-interest loans from banks, which in turn are matched by cash donated by Yale, New Haven, and the Ford Foundation.

The cou rse began in the fall of 1985 as a legal clinic. Students would visit the homeless at local shelters such as the Columbia House to inform them of their legal benefits and rights . They found that this approach failed to attack the problem at its root.

"The need then was not for our advice," Stearns recalled. " Our homeless clients simply could not find affordable housing." Widespread redevelopment had left New Haven's residents with high rents and few alternatives. The following year, Stearns, with other students, expfored different options, researched possible funding, and combed the city for lowincome property units. "We felt the money and energy fC?r our course should not go into litigation, but rather into creation," Stearns said.

Barnett stresses that the success of the course relies on the cooperation of the private and public sectors. "It's not just Yale that is working to provide housing; it's a triangle coalition between the Law School, the government, and local community agencies," he said.

Solomon believes that government agencies make possible a course like HOME. "As a class, we basically develop (public] subsidies and credits through the private market," he said.

The government, he believes, has the resources and the inclination to help the homeless; HOME provides the mechanism.

â&#x20AC;˘ -Jamie Workman

Greater Glory

During the first game, the inmates looked threatening. Every two weeks last spring, and starting again last week, the members of Athletes in Action (AlA), a Yale C hri stian mmtstry of Campus Crusade for Christ, trekked 60 miles to play basketball at the medium-security Danbury Federal Prison. "At first, the inmates were staring at us, but we really liked them , and I think they liked us as we got to know them," Steve Essick (TC '90) said. "It gave us a real chance to practice what we had been learning in our Bible study sessions and to influence the inm ates positively."

Yale Chaplain Miles Ahrens, himself a former college athlete, leads these weekly interdenominational discussions for 25 male and female undergraduate athletes. The students play a variety of team sports, ranging from football to swimming. Ahrens believes that Christianity can help competitors both on and off the field.

In addition, he feels that athletes, as role models, have a unique platform from which to spread Christianity.

"Since athletes endorse other things, why shouldn't they endorse a lifestyle?"

Ahrens asked.

As he has for seven years, Ahrens quotes verses from the Bible during AlA meetings and forms small problem-solving groups to alleviate athletes' worries. The discussion focuses on fear of failure, injury, and embarrassment. "Athletes tend to have self-satisfying goals- to be undefeated and to lead in tackles. These goals can hurt them when they don't reach them.

But if their goal, as a Christian, is to glorify God, then whether they win or lose, they reach their maximum goal," Ahrens said .

Given the three last-second wins in the past football season, many players

felt overwhelming pressure to meet their own and their spectators' expectations. For Essick, a varsity football player, some of that tension was relieved by his feeling that "God is a lot more important than football.

When I missed a tackle it wasn't the end of the world as long as I played up to my full potential to represent God." Brent Hinkle (SM '90), like many AlA athletes, joined similar organizations before college, such as the Fellowship for Christian Athletes. At Yale, Hinkle followed up on his high school experience by joining AlA. With Ahrens, he continues to combine athletics and his religious beliefs in order to enhance his performance and to affect others with his Christian philosophy. Hinkle believes, " Being an athlete can give you the chance to influence people positively. I t takes a while, but you can change people's attitudes."

â&#x20AC;˘

-josh Barkan Yale Chaplain Miles Ahrens believes that athletes can inspire Christian behavior in others.

The New JournaVFebruary 5, 1988 7

ory 316b (50476 ), AN INTaooucrioN TO MoDERN CHINESE H

'onaf}tan Spence.

II( 34) fhc rise and fall of China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing ( 1 roles of foreign imperialism and domestic rebellion in ch ·es for ?,JWP It. 30·12. 2.0

le's Re

What Price Freedom?

Jonathan Hoyt Shopping Period, says History Professor Frank Turner, is expensive. He demonstrates this by s imple arithmetic: two weeks times eight semesters equals 16 weeks, or a full semester of a student's Yale career spent selecting courses. At this years tuition, that costs $6,060. Turner's logic would surprise most students, who seldom question the freedom of this system.

But professors, who must ride out students' early semester whims, have a different viewpoint. Many of them believe that Shopping Period impedes serious work. Students, they feel, buy their freedom at too high a price.

"What worries me is the consumerism," says Lila Freedman, editor of the Yale College Programs of Study (the "Blue Book"). She fears that students choose a class that amuses them over one that would educate them. A host of subjective factors creeps into the decision process: where a course is located, whether the professor is e ntertaining, perhaps even what the

instructor looks like. "ll doesn't sell short the serious students," Berkeley College Master Robin Winks says, "but it caters to immaturity, and caters to those who look for 'guts."' Students may base their selection on a course's workload rather than its content.

Further, according to Associate Professor of History William Cronon, Shopping Period promotes Yale's "star system," by which certain courses become huge solely because of the professor's popularity. "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer," Winks says.

To avoid low enrollment, professors occasionally alter the style of their first lectures. Young instructors, Turner says, may cram too much into these lectures; later they run out of things to say. Others try to be funny. "There is a temptation of a cheap sell," Psychology Professor James Dittes says. Some professors, however, try to scare students off, e ither to reduce their own workload or to eliminate "dead wood"

in seminars -that is, students who do not participate in discussions.

Shopping Period also imposes a psychological strain on instructors.

"You feel like you're talking to people in a shooting gallery or on a conveyor belt," says Eve Sandberg, acting instructor in Political Science. Gene Outka, Religious Studies professor, says that when students walk out, "You wonder if you've checked your appearance that morning."

Unless profe~~ors bury their noses in lecture notes, they can't help noticing the rudeness of "shoppers." Steve Gillon, a fellow of Silliman College and an instructor in History, recalls two male students who stood on opposite sides of the classroom during his introductory lecture of History 131.

When one looked at the other with an inquisitive shrug of the shoulders, Gillon couldn't help looking himself to see what the other student's reaction would be. "H e made a sign with his hand as if to say 'so-so,"' Gillon recalls.

He says other shoppers take one look at the syllabus, frown, and then leave, perhaps banging into a chair o r two on their way out. "Unless you're really brash a.J)d gutsy, and have a good ego, it's tough," says Turner. "Everybody has the same feeling of despair and fear," agrees Jennifer Wicke, director of undergraduate studies in Literature.

"I ask myself, 'Did I do something wrong?'"

According to Turner, shopping "institutionalizes bad manners" and is "disruptive to the entire process" of teaching a course. The Academic Haruiboolcfor Freshmen agrees. On page 14, it reads, The course selection period is not what some students may lead you to believe it is. It is, for example, popularly called among students the •shopping period." That phrase is, in fact, a misnomer, and has some

8 Tht" Nt·w .Journai/Ft"bruaoy 5 , 1988

j

"You feel like you're talking to people in a shooting gallery or on a conveyor b elt." seriously misleading implications.

Students may think of themselves as "shoppers," but members of the faculty do not conceive of themselves as vendors, nor their courses as goods on display . . . Under no circumstances shouldyou leave a classroom in tlu middle of a lecture.

Despite the HandbooiCs distrust of the connotations of "shopping," the preferred term "Course Selection Per iod" hasn't quite made it into the Yale vernacular.

Shopping Period creates knotty logistical problems as well. If a course is larger than expected, the Co-op runs out of books, and the professor must scramble to find a new classroom and extra teaching assistants. Turner laments the fact that TAs often have no time to prepare for their responsibilities. "The course billows forth, and TAs have to swim." Casual shoppers also consume mounds of syllabi : Last semester, Sandberg had to make new ones three times. An advantage 6f the pre-registration system is that ' each department can match the "supply" of courses with student "demand."

Yale abandoned the pre-registration system in the fall of 1971. Previously, students could change th eir courses at the beginning of th e term by submitting a form. Registrar John Meeske OE '74) recalls huge numbers of course changes, perhaps as many as 50,000 a year. It often took until the next semester to establish final enrollment figures. The late dean of Undergraduate Studies, Martin Griffin, was among those who supported the "shopping period" idea. According to Meeske, Griffin's philosophy was that "students are going to end up in the course they want regardless of the regulations." The faculty have debated Shopping Period occasionally, the last time about four years ago. They voted to keep it.

Despite complaints, instructors

changed. As Political Science P rofessor H. Bradford Westerfield puts it, "I'm enthusiastically in favor of it . . . . I don't want any students who will regret being here." After some experience, instructors develop a thicker skin. A student's departure in the middle of lecture, after all, is not always a judgment. History Professor Donald Kagan says, "People who worry about [Shopping Period] are missing the point."

Shopping Period seems necessary when the inaccuracies of the Yale College Programs of Study are taken into account. Sandberg was dismayed to discover that the Blue Book editors had dramatically shifted the emphasis in her own course description. Similarly, a colleague's description of his International Trade seminar had been cut from a paragraph to a sentence.

With changes such as these, added to the swarm of last-minute alterations, students need to shop just to ensure that they get what they expect.

Furthermore, according to Winks, Shopping Period maintains and enforces the "social contract" that exists between teacher and students: In order to attract students, instructors have to have syllabi ready, and they must present their subject in an interesting way. This contract encourages students not to disrupt lectures once they have enrolled in the class. Viewed in terms of the social contract, Shopping Period may help students to mature by forcing them to make educated choices. Wicke notes, "It's part of the self-directedness that we try to foster."

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The New .Jo urnal/February 5, 1988 9

I '

"The aesthetics becom es ethics, the language becom es morality."

Answers in Another Voice Erin Kelly Tomas Venclova emerges from his tiny office and walks across the hall of HGS into his Russian poetry class.

The seminar room is spacious, but Venclova charts his course around the disarray of chairs with concentration.

Once in his seat, he bobs his head formally and greets his students like a nervous host. They respond politely, knowing that as V enclova immerses himself in Pushkin's poetry, his awkwardness will fall away. He speaks more quickly, the flow interrupted by small mistakes in h is English. The articles "a" and "the" still give him fits- he guesses that only native Americans can figure out when to use them. And although he has lived in the United States for 11 years, ever since 10 The New Journal/February 5 1988

fleeing the Soviet-dominated nation of Lithuania, Tomas Venclova retains the air of a poet in exile.

A stanza from his poem "Autumn in Copenhagen" reflects this experience: for every atom's long since been replaced in your body. The dislocated consciousness fumbles in the language, as in a desk drawer. The din of declensions, conjunctions, negations, the blind incessancy of particles, the cramped phrases, and only occasionally, dry (like something someone else experiences, but breath-taking) pain and silence.

Venclova's poetry reveals more of his

emotion than does his conversation.

He can discuss his life in the Soviet Union without inflection. Apparently ~t is -~. story he has told many times before.

Venclova grew up in a household which taught him to command a language rather than find confusion within it. Born in 1937 in the strategically vulnerable nation of Lithuania, Venclova and his family had to flee their home in Klaipeda when Hitler invaded in 1939. T hey moved to the city of K aunas and later settled in the nation's capital, Vilnius.

Venclova's father, a left-wing writer, turned to orth odox socialist realism when the Soviet U n ion annexed Lithuania in the Second W orld W ar.

The elder Venclova became a prominent literary figure in the newly Sovietized state. He penned the lyrics to the new Soviet-Lithuanian national anthem.

His father's prestige resulted in a life of relative privilege for Venclova, who enjoyed access to his father's official and unofficial libraries. He began to write poetry, which his father praised, but which authorities condemned as "decadent." He subscribed to Marxist doctrine for a while, but on November 4, 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to suppress strains of liberalization, Venclova lost faith in Soviet communism. He refused to alter the style of his poetry, and augmented this insolence with attacks on human rights violations within the Soviet Union. In response, Soviet authorities snatched copies of his poetry from the bookstores. Venclova also lost his job teaching at Vilnius University, where he had lectured on literaturf and semiotics. His friends suffered;· more violent fates. KGB agents reputedly murdered Konstantin Bogatyrev, the Russian translator of Rilke, to whom Venclova dedicated a memorial poem: I turned the key that bared the corridor.

My heart beat raggedly, weighed down my breast.

It's true: within the confines of this state Death even, sometimes, was an accident.

Although the government banned his poetry, Venclova was able to support himself as a translator, a vocation he had practiced all his life. His translations of T.S. Eliot's The Wasu Land drew acclaim, as did those of W. H. Auden's verses. He also translated Russian poetry. especiallv the works of writers like lsvetaeva and Akhmatova who rebelled against the growing totalitarianism of the Stalinist state.

These men and women helped shape his poetic ideals-"just to give some meaning to the universe that surrounded them, not only by their work, but by their behavior, their life."

Poetry for Venclova creates mean-

ing and purpose in an environment which seems senseless. He sees the threat of "nonexistence" everywhere, and uses his poetry to. hold it at bay.

Venclova explains,"The poetry is one of the last possibilities in our world to remind people of some morality questions." He views good poetry as moral or ethical because its very structure stands in opposition to the chaos and meaninglessness which have gained power in Eastern Europe. "It's the only solid point you can find in the universe," he says. "It's just this firm structure of the poetry. The aesthetics becomes ethics, the language becomes morality."

Venclova's apocalyptic vision drew him to the company of other poets and artists who share his perspective.

Joseph Brodsky became such a soulmate. Brodsky, who now lives in New York and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, was a Russian poet living in Leningrad when Venclova first met him. Venclova considers Brodsky the greatest living Russian poet, and refers to him constantly as a model for his own life.

The two poets have dedicated works to each other. Venclova's poem to Brodsky, "The Shield of Achilles," speaks to the power of poetry to hold back the nothingness which threatens to conquer.

Peace be to you. To you and me, both, peace.

Let it be dark. And let the seconds hurtle.

Through densest space, that dream of many layers, I read each chapter your pen's released.

Whole cities disappear. In nature's stead, A white shield, counterweight to nonexistence.

In its engraving both our different eras Lie double-etched.

Last December Brodsky selected V enclova as one of ten friends who would accompany him to Stockholm for the Nobel ceremonies. The formal aspects of the occasion intimidated Venclova, who is not always at home with social niceties. "The main problem was to fmd tailcoats for the

big evening at the Stockholm town hall, where the Swedish King and Queen were present, so everybody was expected to be in a tailcoat. It was a socalled white tie evening, the first such in my life, and I hope the last.one also," he laughs.

When his anti-Soviet poetry forced Brodsky to head for exile in the West, Venclova gave his friend a bottle of liquor and asked him to drink it with W. H. Auden. Brodsky heeded his wishes, and with Auden, toasted the poet. Venclova was soon to follow Brodsky's path to the West.

As a result of his increasingly antiSoviet convictions, Venclova became interested in the Helsinki Group in Moscow. This committee monitored and publicized Soviet violations of the Helsinki Accord, a Soviet-approved international agreement which outlined mm1mum standards of human freedoms that each member nation promised to honor. Soviet citizens approached the Moscow group, reporting government persecution, harassment in the workplace, and restriction on travel abroad. Lithuanians decided to organize their own Helsinki group in 1976, which Venclovajoined, knowing it might result in imprisonment.

As his work with the group

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participant except Venclova had been arrested on what he calls "trumped-up charges." Most were sent to Siberia.

Venclova escaped arrest, partially because of Western pressure. Playwright Arthur Miller, then American president of PEN, an international organization of writers, wrote letters to the Soviets in defense ofVenclova. Brodsky publicized the cause in New York hoping that he could embarrass Soviet authorities into releasing the dissident.

Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish emigre poet teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, invited Venclova to come lecture on Russian literature. Milosz, a 1980 Nobel laureate, says that he came to admire "\! enclova when he was still in Poland and received an underground copy of his poems, one of came to v1s1t. The VISitOr brought which he translated in.to Polish. He Venclova a clipping from the New York learned of Venclova's situation from Review of Books, in which the recently Polish friends: "Our university worked emigrated Brodsky described the for nearly two years to get him out." persecution Venclova faced in the H e speculates that the reputation of Soviet Union. Venclova stood in his Venclova's father may have saved 'him apartment discussing his case with the from arrest to this point, but that this American, when suddenly there was a protection might not have continued. knock on the door. Workmen had " I mmediately after this press arrived to install the telephone, conference, I came back to Vilnius, Venclova explains, "and the phone was and I was told by my mother and my apparently already with the bugging wife that I was invited to the Ministry devices in it." df the Interior," Venclova says. "Now, In 1976, Venclova's boldness the Ministry of the Interior is not the reached its peak when he and other same as it is the the United States. It is members of his group staged a police." H e was certain as he left for Moscow press conference to tell the meeting that he faced arrest. "So I Western reporters about repression in went there, with some anxiety, but at Lithuania. "So we went to Moscow on that time I was still very stubborn, very three different trains, just in case if enthusiastic"- a smile plays on his anybody is arrested, the other ones will lips-"about my dissident activities, remain free. But nobody was arrested, and pretty sure that it is well worth to we reached Moscow all three of us, and serve some time in prison for this we arranged a press conference in Yuri case." To his surprise, Venclova was Orlov's [a prominent physicist] ¡ not arrested. Instead, authorities apartment in Moscow." The group encouraged him to accept his invitold reporters about the situation in tation to Berkeley. They issued him a Lithuania, with the dissident Anatoly passport.

Scharans k y acting as English When Vendova learned that fellow translator. "It was a date that made poets were campaigning for his release, history in Lithuania, or for Lithuania," he considered the implications of Ve n clova says. Surprisingly, leaving his home. He received authorities did not interfere with the postcards from Brodsky on the other press conference, the first of its kind. side of the world, attempting to explain Within six months, however, every what the new life was like. H e con-

continued, Venclova received more signs that the government was displeased with his activities. He explains that his request for a telephone in his Vilnius apartment had been delayed for months, as is common in the Soviet Union. He waited and complained, but nothing helped- until one day an American

Venclova's poetry reveals more of his emotion than does his conversation.

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sidered his status as a Lithuanian. If Lithuanian language and culture were unappreciated in the rest of the Soviet Union , they carried even less weight in most of America. Venclova also had to reconcile himself with the probability of never again seeing his mother, wife, and daughter. But, as painful as the possibility of exile seemed, he knew he would be imprisoned with other members of his group if he stayed.

Friends convinced him to become the group's spokesman in the West.

His family also supported the idea of leaving. "When m y mother heard about my situation in Lithuania, she just told me that she perfectly understands me. She told me, 'Well, it's my fate - I married a revolutionary, and I produce one. So it's just

normal situation ."' H e laughs warmly at the memory.

Venclova left the Soviet Union o n J anuary 25, 1977. He was alone and his E nglish was "pretty shaky." He tr aveled first to Paris for three weeks, wh e re he learned of the imprisonment of the head of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, Viktor Petkas. He wrote a poem to his friend Petkas, who remains in internal exile in a Siberian village.

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By July of that year, every member of the Helsinki Groups in Moscow and Lithuania had been arrested.

After arriving in Berkeley, Venclova used the American media to publicize his friends' situations. Americans listened to his remarks, but Moscow heard them as well. While at Berkeley, he received a letter from the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco informing him th at his Soviet passport had been revoked, meaning that he could not return home to his family. Venclova had expected the letter, because he knew of this outcome in the cases of other dissidents. Stalin's daughter, Svetlana; and . the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn received letters ¡ before him. Venclova's letter was the ninth.

"We always joke that this is the most exclusive club in the world," he says proudly. He applied for political asylum , and eventually became an American citizen. Later, his wife and daughter were allowed to join him, although the couple has since divorced.

Venclova spent several months at Berkeley, lecturing in Russian.

Although the University seemed to him like "a real garden of paradise," his problems with English frustrated him.

Venclova learned to read English by translating poetry, but understanding the spoken language continues to present challenges. "It is a problem for me, for example, in the criminal movies- quite often I cannot understand the plot, because people talk fast, and talk in slang. It's absolutely confusing for me," he says.

He suggests that perfect mastery of English is impossible for someone who emigrates in middle age-"but Brodsky did it, his English is perfect.

Of course, Brodsky is a genius."

Venclova's comment reveals the selfdeprecating manner with which he describes himself in relation to his friends Brodsky and Milosz. He believes Brodsky "has made better use of his emigration," partly because Brodsky's ability to communicate with Americans exceeds his own. The fact

that Czeslaw Milosz bothered to translate his poem , "Dialogue in Winter," made him "immensely proud," Venclova says, adding, "of course the translation is very much better than the original, I'm afraid."

He also mentions his emigre friend Vasily Rudich, an assistant professor of Classics at Yale, saying that he admires Rudich's social ease and wishes he had more of this quality.

Still, Venclova has been productive in the roie o( an emigre intellectual.

Pursuing an American academ1c t '

.

"We went to Moscow on three different trains, just in case if anybody is arrested, the other ones will . remain free." career, he left Berkeley for a teaching job at UCLA, and then in 1980 came to Yale at the invitation of Professor Victor Erlich of the Slavic Department. Venclova became an assistant professor after completing his doctoral thesis, an intricate analysis of several Russian poets which is now on the shelves of Sterling.

In both interpreting and creating poetry, V enclova focuses on the technical structure of the poem. In his own work, he generally adheres to standards of rhyming and strict metrical patterns. He gains a sense of the format of the future poem before anything else becomes clear. "Before beginning, I already know that it should be for example an eight-stanza poem, and I have this space to fill , just like a painter who has a canvas before him or her and has to fill in the colors," he explains. "And then several images start appearing to me, and then a few words, at different positions in the poem . And then I try to create the words or ideas that will connect these

1-------------------------------------4 THE

"My mother told me . . . 'Well, it's my fate. I married a revolutionary, and I produce one.'" images."

The language and shape of Venclova's poetry are decidedly Lithuanian, with an echo of Russian rhythm. Paradoxically , Venclova believes that leaving Lithuania has allowed him to preserve this style. He views his poetry as one way to preserve Lithuanian cultural identity, which has become fragile in a nation dominated

by Russian language and culture. He compares the Soviet Union to America, explaining that both serve as melting pots for disparate cultures.

"We have a melting pot in the United States that is pretty successfuleverybody melts in it, but people choose it. In the Soviet Union it is not their free choice to melt."

Venclova, however, has hardly melted into an American mold. He says his poems, only about ten percent of which have been translated, do not read well in English. This does :not concern him, because his prirxiary audience reads his poetry in the original Lithuanian . Venclova's principal American audience is in C hicago, where the Lithuanian community numbers about 100,000. "I can read my poetry in Chicago, and 300 people, 500 people will fill the room," he says. He also believes that his poetry and political essays find their way back to Lithuania through underground channels. But writing from exile, he says, quoting a Russian poet, is "a little like putting poetry in a bottle and throwmg it mto the ocean."

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The workers wonder why they have such an unrealistic schedule. The management wonders why the workers can't keep on schedule. And the students simply wonder why the sink still leaks. Short on efficiency, Physical Plant has been controversial ever since it was founded as the Yale University Service Bureau in 1918. Roy Dulac, a mason at Yale for 33 years, says people blame Physical Plant for the majority of the University's maintenance problems. "They say, 'It's them, it's them , it's them.' It's not us, it's the system. The system hasn't functioned since the day they put it in here. They take the same system and they modify it. Within six months it's right back where it used to be."

Dulac has gone through more managers and supervisors than he eares to count and has witnessed three ;dliciency companies fail in their attempts to reorganize Physical Plant, ~ 1967, 1973, and 1977. Underltandabl~, he and many workers like him feel skeptical of a new management and computer system.

Based on his past experience, Dulac predicts that these changes will merely the long series of unsuccessful to improve Physical Plant. (:Ome in like a blaze of glory and into the woodwork," Dulac

Plant, which services all of campus except the Medical School, is divided into a central and a science area. Each has a control center to process all the jobs and a crew made up of skilled tradespeople such as carpenters and electricians. The 50 administrative workers at Physical Plant include control center specialists who take phone calls, determine a job's importance, and decide which trade suits the work.

To coordinate daily services, the administration introduced a new

Bob Collins, a plumber: at Yale for 27 years, said, "The logistics of working here make it impossible to work a full eight-hour day." computer system about a year and a half ago. Before, job assignments were handwritten on tickets, and workers had no way to keep track of them. If a ticket got lost, the job never got done.

The new computer serves to a void such problems. Control center specialists enter each job into the computer, which then prints out a ticket. The trade supervisors then distribute the tickets to their workers.

At the end of the day, the tradespeople turn their tickets back in to the computer and it does some thinking. Is the job complete or on hold? Does it require a follow-up by someone from another trade? If the job is incomplete, the computer generates a new ticket and the same worker continues the next day. Every job has a time estimate, and the computer determines not only who did the work, but how long they took. The system does allow workers to justify any delays on the backs of their computer tickets.

Although this computer system will not eliminate the backlog of jobs, current administrators hope that it

might expedite the work process. But Christa Soell (DC '88) and her roommate wish some improvements had come sooner. When they moved into their room last year, they were told that their ceiling still leaked after a year and a half. They left for the ~ summer with no response to their calls t_ to Physical Plant. When they returned to the same room in September, the leak had progressed to the bathroom and the water was prying loose the tiles in the shower. Paralyzed from the waist down, Socii's roommate happened to be under those tiles when they fell, and she could not move out of the way.

In labeling a job first priority control center specialists must ftnd the situation threatening to life, limb, property, or "the Yale investment."

Sometimes an urgent request also qualifies, as a short walk through a freshly painted dean's apartment will demonstrate. Yet students and Physical Plant often disagree on the definition of urgency. When Timothy Shoettle's GE '90) showerhead broke ofT one day last year, he reported the damage to PhysicalPJant immediately.

Two weeks later, he started to call irregularly for about two months. With no results and the inconvenience seeming less and less temporary, the eight people who once used the shower began a call-a-thon. They called three times a day, every day for a month.

Finally, Shoettle took his showerhead over to Physical Plant, walked into an offic.e, exchanged a few angry words, and got action.

The computer may prevent these kinds of delays and oversights. But a computer can't account for human error. Often, stalls occur because supplies are inaccessible. Workers have to fill out a form for charging materials to the job. But according to Bob Collins, a plumber at Yale for 27 years, â&#x20AC;˘About a third of the time they don't have the materials in the stockroom." Then the worker has to go over to the supply bouse and fill out another form. ..The logistics of working here make it impossible to The New Journal/February 5, 1988 17

wo rk a full e ight-hour day," Collins said .

G a ining access to work areas poses a nother proble m. When Braun assumed his post, workers had only two people they could go to for keys: the lockshop foreman , who has access to all m aster keys, or the college secr etary , who can provide access to a residential college. If they could not reach the lockshop foreman and had a j ob in a college, workers often faced the inconve nience of waiting for the se cre tary to arrive in the morning, som e times an ho ur later than they sta r ted wo rk. According to workers, ho wever , UPS a nd Federal Express de liver y people have keys. Braun has tried to smooth out such flaws and has already simplified access to keys on Old Campus.

In denying the workers easy entrance to colleges and dorm rooms, th e Univ e r s ity has indicated tha t it include!! Physical Plant workers amo n g its sec urity risks. Many wo rke rs resent the fact that Yale does no t trust them. Dulac asked, "Why don't they give m e a unifo rm of black a nd white stripes so they can see me coming?" An incide nt of fraud exposed this fall served to fuel the negative image of worke rs. Between 1983 and 1986, an electricia9s' supervisor and a N orth Haven efectrical contractor cheated Yale out of several thousand dollars worth of material. Workers claim that during the investigation FBI agents came to their houses to search for missing material. They came while the workers were out on strike, and conducted all checks at the same time to prevent one worker from warning another.

In the fraud case, although the management faced the criminal charges, the workers did not escape suspicion . Such suspicion surfaces in their everyday jobs. According to Dulac, "They say, 'The workers are stealing the batteries, the workers are stealing this, the workers are stealing that!' It's always on us, not the management, God forbid!" Dulac feels that greater distrust has emerged in re18 The New joumaVFebruary 5 , 1988

cent years and has contributed to Physical Plant's inefficiency.

He and a number of his co-workers feel that poor service has harmed their image among students. Students stereotype workers based on glimpses of them performing jobs around campus, rather than on knowledge of what particular workers do. Allan Tulchin (TD '90) , said recently, "Who is in the pool room and the TV room during the day? More often than not it's the workers." Collins admits that the system allows for less motivated workers. "There are all kinds of ways you c¡an dupe the system. If you didn't want to work, you could absolutely not work eight hours a day and you could look like you did a million things," he said. Since workers and managers

stay at Yale for very long. When Lewis Beach (YC '28) retired as manager in the late 1960's, he took with him both a record of 40 years of service and a tradition of stable management. "In 1970 I went through seven bosses in three months. We used to take a dart board and throw darts against the wall to see who the boss of the week would be," Dulac said. During a recent year-anda-half period, Physical Plant did not have anyone officially in charge, and the vice-president of Finance and Administration had to moonlight as part-time manager. When seeking new management, Xale often does not promote from w(thin, because workers don't want supervisory positions.

Collins, a leadman- or head worker- in plumbing, was offered a promotion to foreman. But he didn't want a discip~ linary position since his brother-in-law ~ and son, as well as his friends, work in 1t Physical Plant. ~ Because Yale hires from outside the '3~ ranks of workers, its administrators do not always know the trades or the i system. "Sometimes they come to us, I! and ask 'what should we do?' What do they mean 'what should we do?' What the hell are they the boss for?" Dulac said. Many workers feel that they must compensate for ineffective supervisors.

"Nobody has any power. Nobody can make a decision over there. Years ago we went to the boss and the boss made a decision. Nowadays you're more or less on your own most of the time," Dulac said. Workers who fmd themyean at believes that selves "on their own" often look to each efficient than ever. other for support. They trust their alike cannot assume diligence on the leadman for advice more than they part of workers, many have started trust their supervisor. This preference keeping record books to prove that only widens the distance between they have used their time well. workers and management.

Workers find themselves in a defensive Braun hopes to improve workerposition. Professor Charles Perrow, management communication. He has who teaches Organizational Disasters instituted a new policy of meeting with in the Sociology Department, believes, his 50 supervisors every three months.

"The workers get a b~d rap. They're In his office, behind a large oak desk the easiest to blame." He would blame spread with copies of Army Times, he a weak leadership that fails to motivate described this new approach. "It gives a supervisor, even two or three ¡levels and organize people.

Often, this weakness stems from the removed from me, an opportunity to fact that administrators tend not to talk to me knowing I will never go to

!

his boss and say anything derogatory.

It is a good way for me to manage my subordinates." But Braun does not meet with workers directly, and they feel frustrated that he does not hear their ideas. After all, they reason, they know best how the system works and doesn't work. "We've come up with some ideas to save them money and save them grief. But they don't want to listen to you because you don't have a degree behind you," Collins said.

Collins' belief that Yale overlooks his opinion reveals workers' low morale.

Though Braun recognizes this problem, his solution is limited. "One thing we don't have here at Yale is a good system to pat our employees on the back when they do a good job," he said. He has started a new employeeof-the-month program in which a University officer will present the winner with a savings bond worth 50 dqllars.

But some workers feel that the new computer system continues to lower . their morale. No monthly awarc(¡will smooth out the kinks in that system.

"Nobody seems to care as long as the numbers are right," said Collins.

Because it emphasizes the time rate, rather than the quality of work, the system offers little reward for a job well done.

Braun recognizes the workers' dissatisfaction, but he attributes it to their resistance to technological change.

"Tradespeople traditionally don't like any kind of paper work. So when they have to fill out a single form it is hard for them to adjust," he said. But the workers can provide numerous examples of how the computer system does not suit th e nature of their work.

If they happen upon something that needs repair, they cannot just stop to fix it, because the computer will not give them credit for the job. "We are not factory workers. When you go to knock at a student's room and they've been up all night studying, you just can't go barging in and throw them out. They're the customers. You can't say, 'Let's go, I've got to work because I'm on a schedule.' .You can't do that here ," Dulac said. The high demand

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for repairs at Yale requires a tightly controlled system. But the tickets and time schedules make workers feel that they no longer have the flexibility needed to perform daily repairs.

The administration and the workers seem to agree on at least one problem: Physical Plant does not operate smoothly. According to Braun, "Until we get out of that cycle where everyone is running around answering calls all the time, we will never be able to have enough people to do what we need to do." Dulac, however, claims that the Buying and selling 19th and early 20th century University has cut the number of American art, art pottery, art glass, and furniture workers in recent years, and he does not understand'this logic. Resting his Open Tues.-Sat. 10:30-5 Sun.-Mon. by chance or appointment hands heavily on a restaurant counter, Dulac said, "They say it doesn't seem D. SMERNOFF 900 Whalley Ave .

389-6722 389-2334 to be working right, meanwhile they're getting rid of more and more people."

He orders a · bottle of beer and chuckles, "You need this working JACKSON-MARVIN HARDWARE . here." Workers who have been with Physical Plant as long as Dulac recall established 1922 the elimination of whole trades and dramatic cutbacks in others. Although Everything for your dorm or apartment ·Braun insists that Physical Plant has grown since the mid-1970's, the • Paints statistics show a more complete picture. I n fact, the University has • Housewares hired more lower skill level workers • Building Supplies than tradespeople. Many workers say • Tools that these hiring practices lead to ' greater inefficiency.

The tradespeople in Physical Plant 843 Whalley Ave., New Haven (in Westville Village) 387-2521 generally have the highest labor grade status that Yale offers, level 17, which corresponds to a wage rate. They had their labor level upgraded in the last contract in exchange for the introduction of lower labor grad e building attendants into Physical Plant. Administrators claimed that the building attendants, each of whom acts as superintendent for two colleges, would speed up everyday repairs. But breakfast, lunch ·Or dinner according to Ron Altieri, negotiator for Local 35 and an electrician in gourmet-to-go Physical Plant, "My concern is that they want to fill this- place with handymen, therefore eliminating the 24 Whitney Aoenue. N~ Haven 62'1-3663 need for labor grade 17 people, -skilled Comer ofDi.noell & Evergreen. Hamden 2'18-3663 tradespeople."

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Skepticism and •low morale complicate Allan Braun's efforts to improve workermanagement relations at Physical Plant.

With fewer tradespeople, Yale must subcontract out more large maintenance projects to the public sector.

Physical Plant does get chance to bid on these projects. According to union rules, Yale can subcontract out work normally done by Physical Plant workers if Physical Plant's bid is not competitive. And often it isn't.

Depending on the job, Physical Plant often costs more. It has a high overhead- the price of running ~~ts operations- because of a large support service. Employees take calls and respond to emergencies 24 hours a day, seven days a week. These types of services create expenses which outside contractors don't have. In addition, tradespeople may lack the skills required for a project. Even if they had these skills, their daily routines would prevent them from keeping on schedule.

Physical Plant's unusual system rnakes it a poor competitor with outside firms. But some management experts think that Physical Plant has P<>tential. Charles Perrow and a group of other professors, many from the School of Management, volunteered to examine Physical Plant and to suggest structural improvements a few years ago. "The Universitv gav~ us an informal response. Bas.ically, 'We have a perfectly adequate personnel system and we don't need any help or anyone mucking around," Perrow said.

The tradespeople and their union, l..ocaJ 35, share Perrow's optimism. l'hey want more workers, and hope Physical Plant's Trades Helper

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Manageme11t monitors the workers' progress as they move up the ladder from labor grade 9 to 17, one level every year. Currently, nine workers participate in the program, and the union would like to see more. They argue that the University benefits from well-trained workers familiar with the system.

The existing training program opens a door to Physical Plant for women and minorities. Although many women work on the administrative end, Physical Plant currently employs only three women in the central area and two in the science area. These women work in such capacities as building attendants and truck drivers -lower labor grade positions. Physical Plant also employs few minority workers. According to Altieri, "The University does not really meet the minimum requirement of 6.9 percent female and 25 percent minority. When they hire from outside they have to give preference to that ratio, which is an average based on the New Haven population. The University claims to have this percentage, but that is really a smoke screen. Rationally speaking, black people and women wind up in lower labor grade jqbs."

According to Peter Vallone, the University's negotiator during this round of labor negotiations, Yale does

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not feel a resp onsibility to train its workers. This attitud e astonishes Altieri. "It is remarkable that an institution like Yale U n iversity which is here to educate people doesn't thin k it has the responsibility to tra in and educate its workers to try and better themselves," he said. In the recent contract talks , the u n ion asked for 50 more workers, and, according to Altieri, it d idn't mind if they were all trades helpers. Local35 even offered to give up its righ t to dispute University subcontracting in exchange for these jobs. While promising to maintain the current number of P hysical Plant union employs:f!s, the new contract includes no provisions for hiring additional union workers. The contract also allows the University greater flexibility in the use of subcontractors.

For their part, the union gain ed a six percent wage increase for all workers.

Even with the wage incr ease, tradespeople in Physical P la n t receive about three dollars less p er hour than the average New H aven sk illed worker.

Yet outside comparisons also show that working in a university setting differs marked ly from working elsewh ere.

Yale workers rarely face layoffs, th eir work stays consistent, and the University provides extensive monetary as well as personal benefits.

Wearing a brown sh irt with a large blue and white Yale tag and toying with the job tickets in his pocket, Collins said, "Although I do n't always like the people I have to work for, you do meet a lot of n ice people. You meet a lot of importan t people too."

But the consta nt battle b etween the union and the University every three years over similar issues does not speak well for worke r-admin istration rela· tions. According to P e r row, "Th ere is a legacy of labor activ ism in New H aven. But this is not fostered by Yale. Yale is an elite inst itution and it is an ti-union." The University has had five strikes to date, and many Physical P lant workers feel that tn ey may n ever resolve certain issu es.

M eanwh ile, the b u ild ings get older and the complaints mount. Allan

The New Journal Tulchin, a Yale College Council representative, has been collecting ~~qn~s ilie WI fur ilie Operations ~n~ Advisory Committee.

Broken windows, leaky faucets, water damage, and falling plaster are all common problems. As Dulac explained, "Since I've been here the buildings have gotten 30 years older and we have fewer people to take care of them." Yale has been planning a long-overdue renovation project. If Yale gains the needed $350 million, this project will renovate the whole campus, excluding . the Medical School, over the course of five years.

The University Capital Planning Committee, chaired by Provost William Nordhaus, will also oversee a separate $90 million residential college project. Yale will subcontract out most of the work, but Physical Plant will eventually benefit. With renovated buildings, the demand for daily repa,irs will decrease and Physical Plant may be able not only to respond to emergency calls faster, but to have time for preventive maintenance projects projects.

In ilie long run, improved service might chip away at one of Physical Plant's most damaging problems: its poor public image. As the Yalt Banntr from 1963 shows, however, stereotypes don't readily change. "Last fall," the Banntr reads, "members of TO returned to find that the painters were working at presumably top speed to 'rehabilitate' each and every room . . . .

Two or at the most three were always on the job while the fourth was passing out the coffee for the continual coffee break. Rumor has it that one student returned to his room to find a painter fast asleep in his bed." But just as public opinion resists change, Physical Plant remains equally stubborn. New rnanagers and technology haven't helped poor worker-management relations or sped up daily repairs. Given enough time, Physical Plant seems able to fix anyth ing on campusexcept itself.

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Harmonic Convergence Mitchell Hammond

It's a good walk from the center of town to the Institute of Sacred Music, up Prospect Street past Farnham Memorial Gardens. +he building stands like E a one-room schoolhouse on the edge of :=¡ town, poised on the top of the slope ~ behind the Divinity School. _!3ut a ~ glance at the . surrounding buildings e and the sound of organ music from ~ inside quickly dispel the sense of isolation. Despite its distance from the center of the University and the paths of most Yale students, the Institute is a crossroads, a meeting place for the worlds of music and religion.

Begun in 1973, the Institute bridges Yale's School of Music and Divinity School, two professional programs which are traditionally separated at other universities. The Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) embraces the interdisciplinary study of all arts and religion, though its primary orientation is Christian. Endowed independently of Yale by Clementine Tangeman and Irwin Sweeney Miller. a Yale Corporation member, the Institute provides the University with professors whose interests and expertise extend beyond one field of study.

Originally, the founders visualized ISM as part of a Yale music complex in downtown New Haven. When the University abandoned these plans, the fledgling Institute established a foothold on the back quadrangle of the Divinity School. Only the dim outline of a backboard high on the wall of the convocation hall remains as a reminder that the building, in an earlier life, served as the .gymnasium for Divinity 24 The New Journal/February 5, 1988

School students. The sounds of basketball have been traded for the music of six practice organs and four grand pianos crammed into a space half the size of Woolsey Hall.

Perhaps because of its small size, the Institute attracts far less attention than the other professional programs on campus. Before applying to the School of Music, organ student J ohn Sherer had never heard of the Institute of Sacred Music. After graduating from the Cincinnati Conservatory, where he studied organ and music education, Scherer was drawn to Yale by the reputation of the organ faculty and of Woolsey Hall's Newberry Memor ial Organ, one of the finest in the world.

"But once I got here ," he explained, "I realized the full potential of where I was." In his first year at the School of Music, Sherer learned of ISM and decided to apply.

All I nstitute students are accepted from either the Music School or the Divinity School, and they complete degree requirements in their origi~al schools as normally enrolled students do. ISM does not confer a d egree and has no established curriculum. Its students take classes at the Institute and at the Music and Divinity Schools; its faculty teaches courses open to students from both professional schools as well as to Institute students.

The I nstitute's only requirements are attendance at a weekly colloquium and a final project in the students' last academic year. The final project, in the form of a research paper and a performance or lecture, must address a topic combining religion and the arts.

In addition, some Institute students may, like Sherer, enroll in a dual degree program that confers both the Maste r of Arts in Religion (MAR) and the Master of Music (MM) degrees after three years. Perhaps its most valuable resource, the Institute's faculty members serve as advisers and encourage the independent exploration of topi cs and issues that cross disciplinary lines.

For Marian D olan , a second-year choral conducting student who directs

the Yale Freshman Chorus, th e Institu te offers an op portunity to study the intricacies of choral texts and music in separate courses. According to her, "What people encoun ter as they listen [to a re ligious choral work J is the text through the music. If I were just at the School of Music, I would only wrestle with th e musical aspects of a piece."

Dolan hopes that her training will give her a more complete understanding of the music she rehearses with h er uuden~. ¡ Since the Institute encourages field work, its students are scattered among the churches in the New Haven area as musicians and assistant pastors. But despite this emphasis on the actual performance of music and liturgy, Institute faculty members dismiss the suggestion that ISM is merely a practice ground for its music students.

"We are distinctly not a conservatory," asserted John Cook, the Institute's director since 1984. "Our students come here to get what they can't get in a conservatory."

What students get is a unique education which integrates the study of theology and the artistic expression of faith. The disciplines converge at the meeting of the colloquium, the embodiment of the Institute's interdisciplinary philosophy. Each week, the Institute's students and faculty gather for a lecture and discussion of academic and social issues in the arts and religion. "In colloquium, we are constantly engaged at the nexus where art, liturgy, and worship come together," Cook said. "It's a meeting place for the talents and the minds of the I nstitute." Colloquium topics range from the secular influences on Handel's Messiah to Christian art in the Third World to music in contemporary black churches.

Although faculty and v1sltmg professors deliver most of the lectures, occasionally students, like Dolan, present their final projects at the Wednesday afternoon meetings.

Dolan's project, which she researched for nearly a year, deals with the evolving relationship between

organized religion an d con temporary Christian music. "T wo h u ndred years ago, when ch urches p atronized the arts, art re fl ected t h eology," she explained. Now, Christian artists attempt to em p loy popular music, a medium totally beyond the control o f the established church, to convey the message of th e Gosp.el. Their efforts raise ethical questions for Dolan about the place today's Christian music has in religion. "Should a Christian artist like Amy Grant be sold under a secular label? Should she be singing m

The sounds of basketball have been traded for the music of six practice organs and four grand . p1anos. churches or Madison Square Garden?"

The Institute's approach transforms some students' perspectives on the performance of music in a worsl)ip setting. "Before I came [to ISM], music was personal," Sherer explained.

"It was me, the pe1¡son, and the keyboard. And the audience. Now, I have a clear understanding of who I play for and why. I see it as more of a Yehicle for the person in the pew to come closer to the Spirit." In his field work at Trinity Church on the Green and the Episcopal Church at Yale, Sherer experiences a "magic moment" when liturgy and music work together.

"They feed off of each other. They create sort of a heightening of awareness." He paused for a moment, and then offered an example. "Before, I would have been comfortable playing a hymn. I even used to have a formula set-loud on the first verse, softer, then a little louder, then the last verse as loud as the first. With the I nstitute, that all goes out the window." Now, Sherer approaches the organ's console as a minister approaches the pulpit, The New J ournaVFebrua ry 5, 1988 25

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trying to complement the liturgy of a worship service 路 For those who do not study music, the Institute presents a different range of challenges. Joanna Weber, a Divinity student, explained that ISM encourages her to experiment with different approaches to her work. A second-year MAR candidate, Weber feels that theologians overstress the impor tance of documents and ignore the religious significance of artwork.

This term, she will be comparing the aesthetic principles of thirteenth century Franciscan friars to the ideas developed by Martin Luther over 200 years later. Weber's interdisciplinary approach to history will allow her to go beyond analyzing the text of a theological document. S h e hopes to project herself into the artists' environment to understand their inspiration.

The Institute's approach to the spiritual world sometimes causes problems in the material one, namely the difficulties of pursuing a course of study between two or more professional schools. The Institute's hallway echoes with complaints of schedules with conflicting classes, and of

astronomical parking fines levied against students as they shuttle up and down Prospect Hill.

More taxing still are the intellectual demands of walkin g straight from a class on Biblical exegesis to an Art History lecture or a conducting seminar. Weber admits that "by constantly shifting gears, you have the sense that you're never getting a hold on something. You have a half hold in two different areas." Frustrated students can turn to the strong community that has developed among students and faculty, centering on the Institute's lounge. There, faculty and students compare notes on theology, music, or long days at class and work.

It is the students, musicians and scholars from diverse backgrounds and with different goals, that draw faculty to the Institute. "It never occurred to me to pursue an academic career," said organist Tom Murray, an assistant professor of music since 1981. "But when the opportunity arose, I couldn't pass it up. Working with gifted stu路 dents is o ne of the most satisfying things I know." The reward路s are simiiar for Paul Brainard, a professor of musicology, who teaches

manv dl\·mitv students in the introductorv cour;e Christianitv and thf Arts.

Braina.rd left a full professorship at Princeton to join the ISM faculty.

"The purpose of most music departments." he observed. "is to produce scholars who will go and teach other scholars. It's a kind of cloning process.

It has its advantages but also some disadvantages. I'm very happy to be working with students whose professional interests arc not those of a musicologist."

T he priorities of the Institute differ from those of graduate schools and even from those of more orthodox professional schools. To Cook. the Institute's mission is clear. "We arc professional the way the Divinity School or the Music School is professional. We are not a grad uate school, although research is an important part of what we do. We continue to work-in the middle of the dialogue between worship and art forms, theology. aJild Biblical studies." Although Instituie students must stretch between many disciplines and consequently jeopardize their chance to master any, Weber· feels that the flexibility they gain is worth the risk. "Someone who's wearing at least five different hats and changing them quickly and efficiently, that's an I nstitute student," she said.

"They're students, they're professionals, they give concerts." She laughed. "You grow up pretty fast over there."

For the Institute, 1988 marks the end o f the beginning of Tangeman and Sweeney's religious and artistic experiment. The last member of the original faculty recently accepted a · position with the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut. But with the support of the endowment and the enthusiasm of its members, the Institute will continue its exploration of music and faith, and where they join company. After 15 years, even from the top of the hill. the end is nowhere in sight.

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E Pluribus Una

The Grounding of Modern Feminism

by Nancy F. Cott, Yale University Press (New Haven and London: 1987) 829.95, 372 pages.

Nancy Cott's most recent book, The Grounding of Motkm Feminism, would perhaps be more appropriately titled The Groundings of Modern Feminisms, for in defending feminism's vitality, Cott stresses its diversity. While many historians identify the disunity of the post-suffrage era as a sign of feminism's failure, Cott, professor of American history and chair of Women's Studies at Yale, locates in this disharmony modern feminism's. roots. Describing the period between 1910 and 1930 as one of "crisis and 28 The New Journal/ February 5, 1988

transition," Cott shows how the pervasive "decentralization and diversification, competition and even sectarianism" among women during those years not only informed but actually made possible the birth of a mass women's movement in the later twentieth century.

The book concentrates on women's activities during the 1920's. F or those unfamiliar with women's history of the early twentieth century, who have never heard of the Spiderweb Chart or are unaware that during the 1920's, 47% of undergraduates and 15.1% of Ph.D. candidates were women, the factual content of Cott's book is fascinating and easy to read. For those committed to the feminist cause, however, the book's optimism 1s especially at-

tractive. From a conflict-ridden period of women's history, Cott manages to resurrect a coherent picture of feminism inspirational in effect if sometimes only wishful in fact.

Cott begins by distinguishing the nineteenth century "woman movement" from the more recent "women's movement," and then criticizes historians who attempt to apply retrospectively the language of feminism to the events of the earlY twentieth century. Disenfranchised and therefore politically voiceless, women at the turn of the century "were a distinct social class~" forced into cooperation by their common mute¡ ness. As the singular "woman" in the movement's title suggests, their "womanhood" alone easily defined

their¡ individual and group identities: "rich and poor, socialist and capitalist, occasionally even black and white could be seen taking the same platform."

Once women had attained the goal of suffrage ¡ in 1920, however, they began to vocalize their different, even contradictory, views on significant social, economic, and political issues.

Some women, for example, favored assim ilation into the established bipartisan system, while others rallied for a separate "women's bloc." Some advocated the combination of career an d marriage; others called the married woman wa.ge-earner "the enemy of society." Some supported the ERA; others defended gender-based labor legislation. After passage of the N ineteenth Amendment, paid membership in the National Woman's Party (NWP) declined from approximately 50,000 in 1919 to a mere 151 in 1921, a sure sign of feminism's emerging aversion to single-issue politics. .

"I do not think women can be jofned together for any one purpose because the difference between the reactionary and the p rogressive is too great to be bridged," wrote Carrie Chapman Catt to a friend in 1927; however, according to Nancy Cott, such rifts already existed at the turn of the century. Even during the fight for su ffrage, Cott points out, disagreements between the Congressional U nion (later the NWP) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association over methods could not be resolved: the NWP favored a m ilitant fed eral campaign; the NA WSA prefered an educative state-level approach. When in 1917 the NWP began to picket the White House, "o u traged and disgusted with what they saw as absence of political sense as well as decorum in the NWP, [ member s of the NAWSAJ desperately hoped to quarantine their own public irnage from contamination." Cott not only documents the numerous postsuffrage disputes, she also dispels the rnyth of unity in the suffrage moveme nt itself.

R ather than mourn this apparent

loss of solidarity, however, Cott reinterprets "the fracturing of th e nineteenth century's singular woman" as "a success of th e movement."

Conflicts, she believes, are consistent with feminism since they enact the movement's two fundamental paradoxes: Feminism asks for sexual equality that includes sexual difference. It aims for individual freedoms by mobilizing sex solidarity. It posits that women recognize their un ity while it stands for diversity among women.

the end of the suffrage movement, Cott locates the movement in a specific historical moment. Cott seems to want simultaneously to distinguish feminism from preceding movements and to assert the prevalence of modern feminist traces in those earlier times.

This sort o f vacillation, though often confusing, is character istic o f genderbased analyses of h istory and culture.

Because the social and linguistic construct called "gender" happens to have a b iological counterpar t called "sex," woman's relation to her genderidentity is necessarily complex.

Feminist literary critics, for example, maintain incompatible notions of their own school of thought. While con-

Cott shows how as early as the 191O's tensions existed between "Human Feminists," or followers of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ellen Key's "Female Fem inists." The former emphasized similarities between all humans, the latter glorified woman's uniqueness. These differing opinions are both compatible with feminism since feminism recognizes diversity among women, and moreover, since the basis for women's differences reflect feminism's own ambivalence about the meaning of sexual equality.

Women and men are of the same species though of different sexes, and, without denying gender, feminism tending that fem inist literary criticism demands an end to the stigmatization invades and rethinks other cr itical of this difference. According to Cott, schools, they also want to believe that disagreements among women have their criticism is valid and useful on its tended to reflect this essential own. Feminist literary theorists want doubleness of feminism's main tenets. both to combine w ith and to remain Cott herself grapples with the separate from t r aditional critical implicitly paradoxical nature of modes. T hey want to be Marxistfeminism as she tries to define the Feminists, Freudian-Feminists and term. On the one hand, Cott calls for just plain Feminists; they want to an ahistorical redefinition of feminism assert the artificiality of gender and that comprehends the nineteenth still believe that women have the century woman and suffrage move- potential for a language of their own. ments and that embraces rather than Thus, Cott's own ambivalence in this avoids conflict. Opposition to sex respect does not necessarily reflect a hierarchy, belief that woman's personal confusion but rather affirms condition is socially constructed, and the inherently paradoxical nature of a recognition of women as a social feminist project. grouping are, Cott contends, the three Cott complicates her definition even core components of any "feminist" further , however, when she attempts to perspective, regardless of historical justify the content of her book. context. At the same time, however, Although she claims to have chosen by positing the origin of modern only those women and organizations feminism in the 1910's and its debut at "who themselves claimed the name of

A perha ps temporary diversion of women's attention from their "womanness" can b e seen only as a victory.

The New JournaVFebruary 5, 1988 29

Conflicts, she believes, are consistent with feminism. 'woman's cause' or feminism," many of the wom~n described reject feminism outright. For example, the professional women, attracted to the rationality and objectivity of the "learned" areas, tended to characterize their achievem ents as human, not female. Similarly, as feminism became increasingly associated with socialism and . lesbianism, women fighting for sexual liberation associated their effor ts more with the social sciences than with feminism. By and large, Cott admits, " I n contrast to nineteenth-century women's small likelihood of distinction except in woman's rights or woman-oriented activities, twentieth century women stood out as individuals, for pursuits not obviously determined by sex nor undertaken for the advancement of their sex." Unfortunately, this growing individualism among active women often con tradicts Cott's ration ale for including them in her book.

It is perha.p s more helpful to consider the content of Cott's book in light o f the ambitiousn ess of her undertak ing. I n celebrating the heterogeneity of women Cott enters dangerous territory. She r isks being either too broad, and thereby equating feminism with "what women did," or too narrow, and not accounting for all variation. The Grounding of Modem Feminism achieves an awkward balance between the two: it seems a little of both. Although in the first chapter, Cott mentions the th ree core components of feminism, she never alludes to them again, and instead, the mere inclusion of an event seems to define it as feminist. In extolling the diversity of feminist women, Cott often obscures underlying similarities, and after seven chapters of conflict, one loses sight of the overarching unity.

But while the book seems, at times, art i ficially compreh ensive, Cott actually limits her discussion mainly to privileged women. In a book that professes to document heterogeneity among women and to endorse the developmen t of various "feminisms," such a limitation seems inappropriate 30 The New Journal/February 5, 1988

if not irresponsible. Cott admits ¡i n the introduction that, "The woman's rights tradition was historically initiated by, and remains prejudiced toward, those who perceive themselves firc:t and foremost as 'woma.>1', who can gloss over their class, racial and other status identifications because those are culturally dominant and therefore

relatively invisible." Instead of dismantling this racism and classism, however, her book recapitulates it.

Black women are dropped from the book as quickly as they dropped out of the NWP after the 1921 convention.

Although she devotes one section of one chapter to the differing attitudes of working class and educated women toward having a career, this chapter, more than any other , stresses the similarities over the differences of women in conflict.

Cott concludes, "Without coalescing i n to one movement, without mobilizing the mass, and often declining the label feminist, individual and group efforts nonetheless sparked again and again." By the end of the book it seems that the only workable definition of "feminism" is its paradoxical nature or essential doubleness. T he definition Cott initially p roposes for early feminism

befits her conception of modern feminism as well. "What distinguished the feminism of the 1910's," Cott insists, "was its very multifaceted constitution, the fact that its several strands were all loudly voiced and mutally recognized as part of the same phenomenon of female avant-garde self-assertion. None of its single tenets was brand new ... [only] that potential to encompass opposites."

On the one hand, such a definition compromises an immediate sense of unity within feminism. On the other hand, a perhaps temporary diversion of women's attention from their "womanness" can be seen only as a victory for a movement aimed to invent a "human sex." Moreover, if as Cott indicates, our culture has traditionally asserted the similarity between all women and registered gender difference hierarchically, the . recognition that diversity exists among women, as among men, is certainly an achievement. Women, though of the same sex, differ racially, socioeconomically, politically, and as human beings.

In the last paragraph of the book, Cott briefly alludes to the revocali-zation o f feminism in the 1960's and 1970's when, she claims, women began to speak again in terms of unity- now derived not from their "womanhood" as in the nineteenth century, but from th eir exper ience as members of a "sex-class." The modern women's movement is, she contends, a culmination of several decades of diversification and proves that plurality need not preclude transcendent solidarity. Thus The Grounding of Modem F"eminism, much like Cott's previous The Bonds of Womanhood, is ultimately an optimistic book not only because it favorably reinterprets a chaotic period of women's history, but also because by so doing, it inspires a sense of solidarity, purpose, and hope for the women's movement now and in the future.

â&#x20AC;˘

Margery Sokoloff is a senior in Saybrook.

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