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Volume 38, Number 3 November 2005

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and New Haven

The n1agazine about Yale

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Cover Photo: Courtesy of Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Library. Harvard Yale Official Game Pamphlet, 1955 •

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16 Touch Me, Heal 'Me Alternative Medicine takes up residenq in New Haven. _

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by Romy Drucker

20 A Grave Offense

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Dissecting Yale shistory of grave robbing.

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by Ivy Wang

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How we Hate

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A visual history of a rivalry. •

by Adriane Quinlan ·

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36 Yale

ants You!

Students hit the street{ to redejine what a Yale class can look like.

by Mina

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Points of Departure · · Shots in the Dark: i?J guest photographer Julie Brown Harwood The Critical : Unique New York i?J Summer Banks Essay: Beneath the Beinecke i?J Emi!J Kop~ Endnote: Table Tents au jus by Jonny Dach

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TifE NEW JOURNAL is p ublished five times during the academic year by THE NEW JOURNAL at Yak, Inc., P.O. Box 3432 Yak s-ioo, New H.vm, Cf 06520. O£fi<% aMocss: 305 C..-n Sttcct. Pbonc 203.432.0520. All contents copyright 2005 THE NEW JOURNAL at Yale, Inc. All rights reserved. Rq>roduction either in whole: <Min part wirhout woilllrn pumissioo of 1k publisher and ediroc-in-chirf is prohibited While this mo azioe is published by Yale College students, Yale University is no t responsible: for its contents. Scwcn thousand live hundred of n b issur att disuiburcd fnc to "" llohcas of tk Yale i.od New Haven COII!-"Hi y. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $1 8. Two years, $32. THE N E W JOURNAL is printed by Tndcy P\obf-nboos, Palnwr, MA; and biDing scuiccs att pnwidrd by Colman bookkeeping of ew Haven. THE NEW JOURNAL encout:ages letters to the editor and co miiKOtll on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to F4irori•h. P.O. Box 3432 Yale Station, New Haven. Cf 06520. AII .. IICIS C.X publication must include address and signature. We re,;erve the right to edit all letters for publication. ·

November 2005

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Fork Lift

proved too great for some Yale men. Servingware in the colleges dwindled to IN THE COMMON ROOM OF A STILE S only a few dozen place-settings. freshman, proudly displayed between Eventually, · these survivors were a poster of girls kissing and an empty retired to the Masters' Houses for bottle of rum, overlooking the X-Box safe-keeping and replaced with more and a dusty old rug, sit the crested affordable cutlery, while the aristoplates from several of Yale's 12 resi- cratic plate settings were exchanged dential colleges. The mythical beasts for cheaper ceramic ones. of Jonathan Edwards and Timothy Several years ago, a Calhoun Maste·r Dwight, the quaint jleurs-de-lis of Ezra. awoke to find a full set of stolen sil. Stiles, the stoic battle axe of Morse- verware and eight to ten place settings all speak silently to a long tradition .of at his door, along with an apology Yale pride and theft. Hidden beneath note from a penitent alum. jackets, stuffed into backpacks, and According to Chuck Bennett, most often paraded out in plain view University Dining Service's Director past the dining hall staff, myriad of Support Services, Yale annualplates and cups make their ly spends between $7 5,000 and way back to private pan$90,000 to replace stolen items. theons every year. "We have no way of knowing They can be found in how that china is lost," he says. every college and ahnost This· semester, Si11itnan every entryway, hung triCollege alone will order over one umphantly above bunks hundred new plates and 480 tumand old futons. The tradiblers to replace those that have tion of plate stealing is been stolen or broken. 'We know not new: These it . happens," says ·John Morris, makeshift shrines are Director of Si11iman's dining hall. as old as· the residential ''It's always a problem. Kids take .colleges themselves. them to their rooms and never Flatware thievery dates return them." back to the birth of the res- · But, Yale's flatware fetish is idential college system. not unique. According to Jami Originally, every dining hall Snyder, Cotnrnunications Director had personalized silver for Harvard University Dining flatware engraved with the Services, Annenberg, Harvard's college crest. However, freshman dining hall, loses 250 to even in the raccoon coat three hundred dozen pieces of sildays of the verware, 225 dozen tumblers, 1930s, the and around 150 dozen • temptation pieces of china annually, to own the as well as entire pies, sevsilver of eral potted plants, and one's own decorative pu•npkins. In college addition, House · rivalries •

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have sparked nio~e large scale theft: In recent years, the Harvard dining halls have lost, among other things, a golden gong and a large ceramic elephant. Yale's current plates are manufactured by Syracuse China Company, which, aside from a proud 150-year history of ceramic production, boasts substantial investments in such markets as oil and gas resources, heavy ntining, iron and steel production, and commercial lumber. A patriotic company, during World War II Syracuse _even put its pottery expertise to use producing ..... ·ceramic anti-tank tnines for ·the US Army. Ironic that, while discussing· dri11ing and economic imperialism over Sustainable Food Project meals, Yalies are dining on (and collecting) decorative little pieces of the miHtary-industriaJ complex. Futile attempts by dining hall managers and college Masters to retrieve lost servingware include signs in the dining halls which read, ''Please return stolen silverware" and an official_policy of "blanket amnesty'' for anyone returning missing goods. According to Morris, of the several hundred items lost or stolen from the Si11itnan dining hall each year, the custodial staff recovers only a few dozen. Why the tradition of plate theft at Yale has been and continues to be so strong is anyone's guess. Perhaps it derives from deep-seated - college pride or the capricious greed of spoiled Ivy Leaguers; or maybe, as one Commons worker suggested, "The kids just need plates." Whatever the reason, the anonymous freshman and his suitemates are proud of their flatware collection. ''The plates are cool. They're cool because they have, like, the shields on

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An Artspace gallery introduces unlikefy artists to the public. •

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them," he says. '~t's like when you go into some.One's house and they have antique china on display. It looks cool. It makes the ..s;uite.1ook nice. We have , a competi~on:with. the suite below us to see who· <:a9 _~te~ -pla~e~ from all the dining halls ·first. We take the big ones, they take the small ones, and the suite across the hall steals mugs." J

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-Nick Handler

Secret Artists YALE SCHOOL OF ART GRAD CHRIS

Engstrom swims around his New Haven apartment, preparing to screen his short animated fum, "Sea Net," for a dozen strangers. They mill around his home-studio with a combination of art-museum wonder and open-house voyeurism, glancing from paintings into an adjoining kitchen (where a real, live artist breaks his daily bread), and surreptitiously back again. The fum features line-drawings of a small boy struggling to gather all of the beach its shells and starfish into his ''sea net," to take · back to his studio (where else?) for inspiration. "That's a probletn of tnine," a bubbly Engstrom admits to his audience. "Having to select the most important thing. I want to

push it all in there." As the trespassers tramp out of his apartment at Art Lofts West, an affordable housing complex for working artists in Westville, Engstrom's temptation becomes mine: There is too much to take away as we make for the next stop on the "Neighborhoods" studios tour. The tour is the second installment of the annual City-Wide Open Studios event. Over three weeks, local Artspace showrooms will introduce New Haven's arts community and its public to each other. ·o n this tour, in this town, it becomes increasingly clear that there are too many artists to do them all justice what is the most important thing? On the tour there is a small elderly woman dressed from head to toe in every shade of purple, with the exception of the giant sunflower pinned to the top of her floppy lavender hat. It becotp.es my bobbing yellow beacon as we wander among the numerous studios. 'Where are we, and what is this place?" she asks me. Her name is Matty Dagradi. Together with a young, ponytailed high-school art teacher narned Noah, we are removing our shoes in the foyer of some-

one's Sherman Avenue home; filing by a woman I recognize as a Yale professor, who refuses to go sockfooted ("It's fine among friends, but in the house of a stranger!'~); climbing stairs past dynastic African sculptures to the incense-scented studio of a former Hillhouse High School football player who recently quit his job to become a "full-time artist." Noah corners him genially in the kitchen and proposes a meeting with his class a group of recalcitrant students he's "having a hard time getting to realize that people in their own neighborhoods" make art. Matty pokes covetously around each new studio. "I have half a garage to paint in," she laments so she is an artist tool Oh, she takes a drawing ·class .. at Southern Connecticut State that's free for seniors, but what really gets her going is talking about "the vitality of young artists" and how "it's a different generation now." After studying advertising design at Brooklyn's renowned Pratt Institute, Matty stayed home to raise- her kids all five of whom are now what could be called "full-time artists:'' a painter, a photographer, a / jazz musician, an architect, a aocumentarian. Imbuing them all with J

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come here." By luring new artists, Open Studios feeds itself. And then there's Matty, at once. audience and artist. Kuo explains that Open Studios helps people like her "secret artists" to "step over that line." "We've gotten artists [both] by importing them and by · making them." One of the last. stops our dank Yale-borrowed bus makes . is the · Loretta Staples studio. .A former graphic design professor whom Kuo named as part of New York's art exodus, Staples stands before a set of scrolls decorated with abstract ink designs and tells us, "Everybody has their own way. You just need to find ·the. way that's your way. You can give yourself permission to take yourself seriously and be an artist." Before we part, Matty and I promise to· look for each· other at Alternative Space the next weekend. She tells me I "have a nice, low-key way of doing things," and also to wash my hands when I get home. The following Saturday, I wander the massive old Olin Brass building on Shelton Avenue filled for a weekend with five stories-worth of art, artists, and audience. I don't fmd Matty. I do

that "most important thing," Matty Dagradi has sculpted an entire family of artists. I wonder if she would adopt me. But am I an artist? Noah who takes welding classes at the local Creative Arts Workshop and will display one of · his works at Open Studios' closing exhibition, Alternative Space, the following weekend is an artist. He moved here two months ago from Minneapolis, which he says has an impressive art scene "for being where it is in the Midwest." It buzzes with just the right mix of large galleries and small community venues. Similarly, he says, New Haven "has more opportunities ' than you would expect to find for a city of its size." According to Artspace's communications director Leslie Kuo, New Haven has the "concentration of artists" necessary to support an event like Open Studios. This year, some 500 creative minds participated in "one of the premier" events of its kind across the country. Kuo cites the public exposure that · Open Studios has offered for the past eight years as the key to its success. "It's a self-fulfilling prophecy," she says, fierce with pride. ''Artists leave New York to '

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The oldest black church in New Haven still stands proud!J on Dixwell Avenue

find three shadowy photographs by her daughter, Terry Dagradi, and Noah's piece a chunk of metal from an oil drum, carved into a jagged sunburst. The short caption reads: "I get pulled moving constandy out, but return to the center for more and more and more and more and more and more." -Veronica Madrigal

Dixwell's Gospel DIXWEIL AVENUE that runs from Payne Whitney Gymnasium to the Hamden border is lined with bus stops, quickie food joints, sagging houses and dozens of churches: grand brick ones, storefronts, standThe Dixwell Avenue alones. Congregational United Church of Christ doesn't look like any G( themlwith angular eaves jutting out in every ·-· direction and an empty moat circling its base, Dixwell Church looks more like a cement star. . Founded in 1820, this strange casde is the oldest black church in New Haven, and the oldest black Congregationalist church in the country. For years, it was a stop on the Underground Railroad; in the Civil Rights era it supported demonstrators rallying on behalf of the Black Panthers. Sunday mornings tell a different tale. Most congregants arrive by car, driving in from Hatnden or other outlying neighborhoods. They are an illustrious group. Carlton Highsmith, the US Department of Commerce minority businessperson of 2005, is a Dixwell Church member. John Daniels, first black mayor of New Haven, is in the men's choir. Natalie Hardy, who joined the church in 1928, was the first black girl in the country to be awarded the highest honor by the Girl Scouts. She lived on Dixwell, a few blocks down from the church, for over sixty years; now, she drives in from her Hamden home every Sunday morning. Dixwell Church, home to New Haven's black leaders for over a centu-

TODAY, 1HE STRETCH OF

THE NEW JOURNAL

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ry, is now a congregation of commuters. The membership's slow exodus from the Dixwell neighborhood, spanning half a century, tnirrors middle-class migration out ·of . inner cities across . America. But at Dixwell Church, the pattern may sooh . be interrupted. Reverend John Henry Scott III is charting a new course for the church's future. Now in his tenth year as Dixwell's pastor, Reverend Scott has drawn over a dozen .newcomers to the church this year alone. For an aging congregation of about two hundred, that is a sizable increase. In large part, Reverend • Scott attracts members through his bimonthly talks on financial management and occasional setninars on topics lik~ how to start a small , businesS{:,n~~.re;v.~rend, also a professor of ;: g~_siness at Gateway Community ·College, · is adapting . Dixwell Church to a new era and · a new Dixwell conununity. But the proud steward of his church's long history clairns his mission is really nothing new at all. When Simeon Jocelyn, a white 21 year-old from a protninent local family, helped 24 former slaves found the Dixwell Church in 1820, their quest for autonomy and racial equality in New Haven was nothing short of revolutionary. A retrospective from the church's centennial recalls that its first home, a small frame church on Temple Street, Hwas stoned re y during services." Founder Jocelyn was threatened so often he needed bodyguards and eventually fled · New Haven altogether. At Jocelyn's departure, the church was exclusively black. Throughout the 1800s, some of the most vocal abolitionists and suffragists in the black- community were drawn from its ranks. Before local public schools were desegregated, the founders of November 2005 •

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New Haven's first school for :· black children also came from . ' Dixwell Church. · By 1900, New Haven had several other black churches. ·B ut Dixwell Church relocated to 100 . Dixwell Avenue after . a group of Russian Jews bought its Temple Street building in 1887 had already established a reputation as the religious home for the city's black elite. In 1924, the church donated land for the founding of the Dixwell Community Houseknown later as the Q House a ' staple of the Dixwell community into the twenty f.trst century. Nata1ie Hardy, a 77-year veteran of Sundays at the Dixwell Church, remembers those days as a different era along Dixwell. Many of the city's black professionals lived near her house at 62 Dixwell: Her own father was a lawyer, and their neighbors were doctors and dentists. With only a handful of black churches in the city, Dixwell faced little competition for congregants. By the 1960s, it had 400 members. The community's transformation began in the early 1940s, when a low-income housing project was built in the area. The campaign was intended to be one of urban . renewal, but Dixwell would never be the _same. ''People moved out, some of whom expected to move back, but in some cases that didn't happen," Hardy recalled. Her family stayed in Dixwell, but its church .. was increasingly comprised of commuters from . Hamden, Bethany and other neighboring towns. In the 1960s, the church co-sponsored the construction of a low-income housing unit of its own, Florence Virtue Homes Inc., which drew the neighborhood's first white residents. Of those who move.d in, some remain church members. But low-income housing • •

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to the Davenport College dining hall will disappear within three hours. The Yale Daify News might last from breakfast until dinner. Piles of The Yale Herald distributed on Friday at five vanish by Monday at two. Yet when issues of the popular campus tabloid Rumpus recently ·went missing from four colleges, the story made headlines. This year, Yale undergraduates will write, edit and publish over 35 maga· zines. They range from The Yale Record, the University's long-running humor magazine, to stYle, Yale's first and only fashion mag. Interested in Human Rights? Fishing? Classical Studies of . Ancient Mesopotamia? Check the . .. laden tables outside of any dining hall: somewhere in the piles of printed matTrashed or archived? Where do Yale's maga~nes end up? ter, the perfect magazine awaits. Unlike But .the bulk of the s~imon was the YDN or The Herald, most of these had a dual effect on the church. By 1967, only a quarter of its congregants reserved for talk of the world· outside publications will linger for a few;weeK.s, lived within walking distance..In 1969, the cement star. "Here at Dixwell trying to entice readers, before endin&_ . when the church moved to its present Church, we have a special responsibili- up where the missing piles of Rumpf!.s home at 214 Dixwell, its collaboration ty the same responsibility ¢.at Simeon were found in the trash. Off-campus, "real" magazines need with the Q House tapered off, severing Jocelyn and 24 former slaves felt all those years ago;' he told the congrega- subscriptions and advertisers to justify one of its strongest neighborhood ties. But the reverend is eager for his tion. ''Middle-class folks like us;' he their publication. Many student publichurch to shed its out-of-towne.t; image. added, have no less gf an imperative to cations have neither and thus depend In the last year, he has mailed out hun- fight for social justice for racial equali- on sponsorship from Yale or outside dreds of postcards inviting church ty, improved housing, better education· interest groups. In ~an informal sm vey neighbors to its services, and he has and better health care; for the haves as conducted by The New Journal, twenty overseen the installtnent of a new roof; well as the have-nots. ''That's your ·mis- campus publications reported their publishing costs, which range from new speakers, bathrooms, and carpets; sion. as a Dixwellite!" he bellowed. From the front row, Hardy nodded $500 to $7,000 per term, not including and a fresh coat of paint in the church sanctuary, all in the .hopes of welcom- in approval. Her granddaughter the YDN or The Herald. Combined ing new parishioners. He doesn't want recently joined the church, one in a expenses of these publications, per the church to lose its homey feel but spate of new members. Hardy now term, total $63,700. In comparison, the he also doesn't want it to cede its histo- drives past over 16 churches on her Undergraduate Organizations Funding ry of activism to the comforts of mid- way down Dixwell Avenue ·each Committee, which scramb~es to fund a Sunday. But she has never thought of variety of student groups, has a budget dle-class suburbia. On a recent Sunday, the reverend, leaving: "That's my church. I've never of $90,000. For soine niche interests, Yal~ prints ebullient and fresh-faced, knew all his considered any other church being my congregants by name. He knew who church than Dixwell," she explained more than one magazine. The cadre had surgery last week, and who recent- defensively. "The city changed a lot, of campus conservatives somehow need both Light and Truth and The Free ly lost a son. When the service began, but we kept going." -Paige Austin Press; gunslinger.'s indie rock reviews his greetings rang out from the pulpit work hard to be hipper than The along with the sermon. To a lady in the Herald's Arts & Entertainment secback: ''I know you've been under the Trashy Magazines ' tion; and a series of college-specific lit weather. Good to see you!" To a family in the front: ''You haven't been here in MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY, THE FIFTY mags give a voice to those writers who copies of The New York Times delivered refuse the Yale Literary Magazine. a few weeks. Glad to have you back!" •

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· In this world of literary magazines; the "Ut;' Yale's oldest magazine (over 160 years and · g), easily dominates, often .selecting as few as four poems from over one hundred submissions. . Publisher Jonathan Sherman-Presser . recognizes that the stna11er alternatives serve as welcome venues in which more . writers can publish their work. He adds, ''The kind of publications that irk me are those that needle~sly overlap on others' territory." As part of the found.,. ing team of P.H.: The · Yale Journal of Public Health, he remembers a magazine· with a · sitnilar health policy focus appearing just when P.H. was starting out. ''In a field with as Hrnited a draw for ·writers and editors as public health, a need nor the populathere's ·neither . tion to ~-upport two tnagazines," he says. Working toge_thet; the two sets of ·" magazine "f<;>wtqers could have .better served the ·f}ublig. ~iaith cotrununity. Such nee:#e~~-·competition may ·contribute to the short lifespan of tnany publications. For every tnagazine that lasts for decades, like the Ut or The Record, there are coundess magazines such as Wak.e,Jak.e, or Electric Fence which last only a few issues before disappearing. From his base at Manuscripts and Archives, Bill Massa, Head of Collection Development, fights to catch hold of each student publication no matter how fleeting its existence. Here, in the research room, squeaky glass cases surround scholars with memories of Yale: Yale books, Yale newsletters, Yale photo albums, and Yale student publications. The YDN is on microfiche here, all the way back to 1878. In this piecemeal history of Life at Yale, The Journal of Ethics, a wellheeled pomposity, ages alphabetically with The Eavesdropper, a sheaf of student gossip. All official Yale publica. . tions must donate two copies of each issue; but most of the publications actually find their way here from the Woolsey rotunda, the gyrn, or the Trumbull dining hall, where Massa, a fellow of the college, naakes an effort '

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to collect them. "It's a losing battle," he says. "Sometirnes I feel like a publica.. tions bag lady." Manuscripts and Archives, the last line of defense against disappearing copy, aspires to be a bastion of young Yale genius, a safekeepmg for the fledgling scribbles of great ·men and women.. Although the library has the most complete run of any magazine, issues or even whole volumes are often missing .from the record. Each year, a few Yalies come in search of literary glories past, often to find their words permanendy lost. They, like today's Yalies, lacked foresight. Massa does his best to head off current students' future nos · for their undergraduate prose before their words, like Rumpus, are thrown away. The culprit in the mystery of Rumpus' trashing remains at large, as does the perpetrator of a similar affront last year to The Free Press. But Stan Alcorn, a magazine editor hirnself (of the liberal Hippofytic), believes he saw the thief at work. The crime occurred in Jonathan Edwards college, in the course of a normal delivery of his tnagazine. After leaving one pile of magazines in the mail room, Alcorn moved onto the comrnon room. When he returned a tninute later, he saw a deliveryman from Turley, the Boston company that prints many of Yale's publications, ...... leaving. .His stack of Hippofytics was gone; in its place was The Herald. He hunted about for his rnagazines. There they were, in the trash, along with The Yale College Review of Books and P.H.before anyone, including Massa, had a chance to pick one up. ·-.Sarah l.arkow

Siren Song •

You~ BEEN THERE. WAfTING AT TilE

interminable light on Broadway and York, chatting on your cell phone with a friend who's sitting somewhere secluded and quiet and then it begins. •

Distant, buzzing strains at first, then a mounting screech leading to a series of wails and a shrieking vehicle hurding through your long-awaited walk light. Once the throbbing in your ears seems to have ended, you shatter the newly setded quiet with a shout: ' T WERE YOU SAYING?" Embarrassed by your lack of volume control; you glance around and proffer a quick explanation: "Sorry ... it's New Haven!" As a Los Angeles native, rumors alleging New Haven was a hotbed of crime never fazed me. What I was not prepared for, however, was the neverending symphony of sirens. When I first arrived, walking to class was an overwhelming experience. Already frazzled by the crush of bodies, I seemed to be the only one who noticed the flashing and screeching ambulances and fire engines barreling through crosswalks. I was shocked to discover that when a siren sounds, not only do drivers feel no pressure to pull over (or even to delay a left-hand turn), but pedestrians are also impervious to the signs of a vital emergency. No need to let a blaring fire . truck impede your dash across Elm Street to grab lunch as a Berkeley transfer. 'cyeah, nobody here even notices the sirens anymore," says Sergeant Burgh, a stui:dy man casually perusing The National Enquirer behind the main desk at the police station. "It'd be good to ticket them, but when you're in your squad car with the siren going" his eyes drift from the tabloid as he describes the experience "getting closer and closer to the crime scene, you just get so ... so jacked-up, you know? And it's not like you're really gonna stop for a tninute to ticket some jerk who didn't pull over. It's like a, . you kn ow, a.·~ " "Catch 22?'' I suggest. 'cyeah, one of those," he says, returning to his magazine. ''People say there are a lot more sirens here than in other places," he retnarks, flipping to a story about Britney Spears. ''I would say 9

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only two per cent of those are us, though. The rest are the medical people or the fire department, mostly. The fire guys are required to set the sirens going for every barbecue-fire call they get." · "It's the way Yale is set up, why there are so many sirens around there," Sergeant Burgh continues. Fumbling around for a piece of scratch paper, he explains that Yale's campus is the most siren-ridden place in New Haven. He sketches a quick diagram of the streets around campus, pointing out the fire station and hospitals that make . it a siren epicenter. The main fire headquarters sits at the end of Elm Street, only four blocks east of campus. Yale-New Haven Hospital hems the .school in just south on York Street, and The Hospital of Saint Raphael is located seven blocks west of campus on Chapel Street. Nestled between these three facilities, Yale's campus is an emergency vehicle crossroads, with fire trucks racing through to the city's west and amb~ lances pummeling northward on York Street. Sergeant Burgh also has an imaginative theory as to the way the sirens echo off the Gothic architecture creat. .as h e exp1. tng, a10s, a " tunne1 o f sound" . The theory's scientific basis seems shaky, but I can attest to walking through that tunnel several times each day. A chat with the Fire Marshall shed statistical light on my observations. An 10 •

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chants of "Free Bobby Seale," the name of one of the Panthers on trial, and eventually clashed with police in a violent eruption of rocks and tear gas. Looking back, between the culturally defiant youths, the radical speakers, and the seeming intractability of police-protester relations, this scene seems like a caricature of the era. It epitomizes a polarized America, a cliched conflict of . aggressive authority using old tactics to respond to rebellious liberalism. And yet, Yale University handled the May Day protests of 1970, and the student strikes leading up to it, with a surprisingly liberal approach. President Kingman Brewster decided to end the school year prematurely in response to the strike, and managed the throngs of protesters by opening residential college average of 92 911 calls are received in gates, housing them in courtyards, and the call .center in . the basement of the feeding them in dining halls. -It was a New Haven Courtho-qse each day. "policy of shutting down to 3pen up," Usually, only about ten of these calls remembers Sarah Shapiro '72_• involve ·actual flames; these are passed Recognizing that the protests could f!Ot along to the fire department, while the be contained, Brewster postponed acaother 82 are answered by ambulances. demic deadlines and expanded the That's.92 sirens ·each day indiscriminately option to take classes pass/ fail. William passing through the "tunnel of sound." Farley '72 LAW '77, then-chairman of Siu ing outside Au Bon Pain recently, the Strike Steering Committee explained, I was talking to my' dad on the phone, "As long as people went along with their when suddenly he asked me to repeat daily lives, things would not be confrontmyself he hadn't heard "because of the ed and faced. The only way to get things damn siren." Siren? I thought. I hadn't confronted and faced was to stop normal noticed; I'd just shouted over it. After all, activity and to concentrate on what was it was merely one of 92 that would greet going on around us." my ever-adjusting ears that day. Today, the political atmosphere has -Nicole Allan changed radically. On August 27, 2003, Yale employees' Local Unions 34 and 35 went on strike for better pensions. The surrounding turmoil was undeniably A Striking Difference smaller in magnitude than that of the Bobby Seale triaL The strike was a disWARD 1 ALDERMAN NIC K SHALE K'S anti-union stance would probably have agreement over the terms of a contract, made him totally unelectable thirty years and there was certainly less consensus on ago. Picture the political climate of the the issues. Yet, if the conflict between time at its peak on May 1, 1970: Over Yale and its labor unions was compara15,000 people converged on the New tively small, and the issues less signifiHaven Green, the "largest assoru nent of cant, the Yale community's effort to stifle long-haired youths, film crews, and the conflict stands out. Personal preferNational Guardsmen that New Haven ence replaced political ideology: Every has ever seen" reported the Yale Daify part of the Yale community endeavored News the following day. Protesting the to take politics out of the equation. murder trial of three Black Panthers, they This political apathy extended to even listened to speakers, snake-danced to the highest levels of the administration. •

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Amidst the May Day protests of the 1970s, President Brewster had famously articulated the political nature of the trial, declaring, "I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States. In large part, the attnosphere has been created by police actions and prosecutions against the Panthers." In 2003, President Levin did the opposite: When protesters were arrested for allegedly refusing police orders and blocking traffic on separate occasions during union demonstrations, President Levin said it was a matter for the court and prosecutors to work out. During the 2003 demonstrations, Yale refused to let political protests disrupt normal school functions even if that • meant marching riot police into its ' investment ·offices or harassing students wearing signs of political .protest. The Yale adminisfration was not alone ,' in its desirf 't<? -: co~tain the politically volatile nature'' ~/"gf:;:' t he strikes. Student . :. reactions coUld· ·h.ar'ffiy be characterized as radically political, or · even political. Pundits-in-training rushed to the opinion pages of the Yale Daijy News to express their "respect" for the unions while avoiding discussion of the issues. Others insisted that the sttikes distracted students from their "purpose" on campus. When two politically-opposed professors coauthored an opinion piece, they Withheld their differing views on the issues. and instead offered a purportedly objective solution to the political conflict: simply let a "neutral" third party evaluate the case and rule not on who is right on the issues, but who is more "reasonable" By the end of the conflict, good community sentiments were the new political fad. The Yale College Council held events for Yale workers and students to mingle in ccsocial settings." YCC representative Daniel Weeks '06 told reporters in 2003 that the council's aim was not to endorse the strikes or the union, but sim.. ply to ''build a stronger comtnunity in non-political ways." The YCC also offered to distribute one hundred JEOPARDY! tickets to union employees. As President Levin put it, ''I think it's a very nice gesture to help rebuild a good feel'

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November 2005

ing in our community." Politics were quickly forgotten in the mad rush to kiss and make up. Perhaps it was b ecause Yale's labor troubles were more complex, less polarized , and aroused less student interest than Bobby Seale's murder trial. Perhaps enough progress has been accomplished to render radical ch ange to Yale's political atmosphere unappealing. Yet, as the recent Ward 1 election shows, conflicts about unionism still lurk beneath the surface of student politics. In previous elections, challengers to the Democratic nominee were repeatedly defeated because those who cared enough to vote resoundingly favored the more liberal candidate. Perhaps Nick Shalek defeated Rebecca Livengood because the people who voted were more ambivalent about unions. In 1970, ambivalence would not have carried the day. ~Will Palmer

Something Blue ''EVERYONE DREAMS OF BEING

IN A

place like Battell," says Bill Grenawitzke, sipping from a bottle of seltzer after offering it to his fiancee, Ashley Green. "Especially Ashley," he adds, prompting a sharp look from her. ''What?" he says sheepishly. ''You've been really gung-ho about it." Given the importance of Battell both to this couple and to Yale as a whole no one could blame her. Battell is a house of God amidst freshman housing: It sits on the corner of Old Campus, between Durfee's Convenience Store, home of the $6 bag of Fritos, and Farnam Hall, home of the only washing machines ever available on Old Campus. • The chapel dates back to 1874 and, even on a campus overrun with historic architecture, it stands out as especially gorgeous. ''To be a part of that history is quite an honor," says Bill. As Gale Iannone, Facilities Director for the Office of the Chaplain, says, ''Battell has a very intimate feel about it. The events unfold right around you." Though its high ceiling, booming organ, and imposing history channel that which is •

•

most intimidating and spectacular about Yale, Battell remains a personal site. Its pews have seated myriad patrons from some of .America's greatest thinkers to guests at bar mitzvahs. It is a site of worship adjacent to sites of late-night cramming and a capella rehersals. It is a place where personal histories somehow live peaceably alongside history. Last year, Battell hosted 1,391- events, about thirty of which were wedclit.i.gs. The Chaplain's Office first officially recorded marriages in Battell in 1960, but there were most likely many marriages before then, according to Iannone. Today, to walk down Bartell's aisle, couples must register a year in advance. However, the process is nothing like the rigid standards enforced by the Stanford University chapel, which requires couples to fill out compatibility tests. Despite Battell's Yale heritage, only one in three of the couples who marry there have any previous connection with the University. David Williams and Priya Raman, an undergraduate couple engaged to be married, can explain why, for them, Battell is out of the question. First, it's a matter of practicality David hails from California, and Priya is from Arizona, putting Connecticut far off the map of convenient locations. But equally important is the fact that Battell is a little too Yale. ''I associate Yale with college," Priya says, "which is a distinct period I love Yale, but when I graduate, that'll be it." David and Priya began dating in September 2004, the fall of their freshman year. Before long, they started talking about life after Yale and the possibility of sharing it together. In.January 2005 they decided to get married. ''Either people are really happy for you;' says Priya, "or they don't know how to deal with it." Some of David's friends, he says, still don't know he is engaged to be married. Their plans for the future are far from definite; at the age of 19, there's no rush. David is still chaos. ing a major. They don't know where they will be living and working after grad11ation, or where and when they'll get married. Yet they have already considered what a Battell wedding could mean and, even at this point, they know it is not for them. For Bill, a PhD student in geology, and 11

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Ashley, who received her Master's degree from Yale in Computer Science, the case for Battell is compelling. They met as grad students in September 2003 on the walk over. to Convocation at Battell Chapel. They became friends and started dating a few months later. Next July, they will walk out of the place in which they met as husband and wife. Bill appreciates what Battell means to his relationship: "We met here:that means a lot to us. It's the one thing that brought us·together." For Bill, a Texas native, and Ashley, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, New Haven is a neutral site for their families to travel to. But Battell is more than that, says Ashley: ''It's our common ground." Their wedding, the ultimate gesture of togetherness, will be held at the place that brought them together to begin with. Bill and Ashley hope their wedding day will recreate that experience for others:but with an end-of-ceremony surprise. ''You can enter from the outside of Yale," Ashley says, ''but empty out into the courtyard. That's our plan, to have people dump out into the courtyard after the ceremony, to have champagne and get tanked." ----,·Ben Or/in --

Diversity of Life

SI'EPHFN l<Eu.ERT HAS A VERY COMPUCA1'ED-

•

sounding job. He is a Professor of Social · Ecology at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a member of the Executive Committee of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. He works in what is c"aned "environmen. tal ethics" and recently he has spent much of his time thinking about "biophilia," an idea he helped develop, which hypothesizes that the love of nature is an evolutionary development. This love might even be selfish: A cure for cancer, Kellert points out, is more likely to be found in a world with many plant and animal species. "There are values to be derived," he says, "from a healthy and diverse natural environment." This last statement could be the mottq of the Center that helps support his work. Housed in a small building, tucked away on Prospect Street behind the Institution for Social and 12

Policies Studies, of which it forms a wing, the Center is a healthy environment for the diverse array of scholars who pass through. As the name proclaims, it is very much an interdisciplinary center. "It's hard to think of a field that's more interdisciplinary," says Professor Margaret Farley, one of the Center's . two directors. The Bioethics Course . List, a diverse ftle of all Yale courses relating to bioethics, is fifty pages long, · drawing from most undergraduate departments and many professional schools. Paging through Bioethics · at Yale, . the Center's annual publication (some 270 pages this year), it is easy to forget which discipline you are reading about. Professor Willard Miranker of the Computer Science department worries about the "grave ethical challenges" humans will face when machines "become sentient." Professor Robert A. Burt of the Law School. is concerned with "the .experience and culture of dying in America." Rajesh Rao, a medical student, has cofounded the Yale Stem Cell Interest Group "to discuss the biological, therapeutic, ethical, social, and religious implications of stem cells." In no other book could one turn the page from a proftle of Ian Shapiro, Professor of Political Science ("In the area of bioethics, I have written about abortion policy, euthanasia, and the distribution of health care ... "), to a proftle of John Ohno, High School Junior ("I'm interested in computers, prograrnming, robotics, and anime .. :I atn also a member of the 'Technology and Ethics' working group"). All these people-and hundreds more are united by a word that didn't even exist a few decades ago. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the birth of the term "bioethics" occurred in 1971. That year was a time of "large scale questioning about the nature of moral authority in our society," says Susan Lederer, a science historian affiliated with the Center. "There was distrust that physicians could be left to make responsible decisions on everything •

from test-tube babies to the definiton of death." It wasn't until the mid-80s that anyone at Yale even attempted to organize and bring together people working in bioethics. It was then that Dr. Edmund Pellegrino first convened the "Humanities in Medicine" group. Professors from all departments and professional schools came to speak about their work. "We spent a year and a half just educating each other on what we had been doing," says Dr. Robert Levine, now a director of the Center. ''And just when we were finished, Ed Pellegrino went to become the president of Catholic University." The group dissolved, and for the next decade, professors at Yale pursued bioethics individually, without any coordination of their efforts. When Donald Green, director of ISJ>S, suggested creating a Bioethics ~roject at Yale, Dr. Levine told him not to bother . it wouldn't work. "Fortunately fie didn't listen to me and it worked.'-'The "Project" was only this past year promoted to a "Center" and "The University does not convey 'Center' status lightly," reads the foreword to Bioethics at Yale. The Center has shown results: Its 14 research groups produce papers and sometitnes books, and its conferences can draw audiences of two hundred. Dr. Levine estimates that about a fifth of all Divinity Students and Medical Students pass through its doors. The undergraduate bioethics course taught two years ago attracted a record-breaking 500 students. "It worked" indeedthe small house on Prospect is now a hub linking activities at the remotest corners of Yale's campus. And . in another corner, at the Forestry School atop Science Hill, Professor Stephen Kellett is planning a major symposium on biophilia.specifically, on the principle of "biophilic design." The idea, he explains, is that '<human physical and mental wellbeing can be enhanced by a.built environment that lets you experience nature." Some of our most honored feats of human construction, he feels, •

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operate on just such a principle consider cathedrals, constructed to let in as much natural light as possible. The keynote speakers at the symposium will be Vincent Scully, the architectural historian, and E. 0. Wilson~ the entomologist. This should not surprise you. Naturally, the Center for Bioethics would bring together a devotee of Saint Denis Abbey and a man obsessed with ants.

-David Zax

For the Birds l WAS ILL-PREPARED FOR MY FIRST BIRDwalk. After staying up till three the night

before, I arrived at East Rock Park five hours later armed only with coffee and • a warm coat. The Birdwalk was one ' ' choice iil a: series of nature tours organized by the New Havev Park Rangers Program, alrn9s~ --all~ ~of which Mill River Natq_re 'W~ -Giant Steps Hike, Hawkwatch -·:.at Lighthouse Point Park ,. and Introduction t o Hawks & Hawk Watching involved either birding, walking, or, in some cases, both. I expected, given the early hour, that I would find myself mosdy in the company of children. The Birdwalk seemed the perfect fieldtrip for Madeleine's girls · school class or a nanny with young ones in tow. But as I approached the Trowbridge Environmental Center, the only other walkers in sight were a young guy around my age with dreadlocks and skater pants, who seemed no more comfortable in the forest than I and an older, seemingly more bird-conscious man, who was equipped with binoculars, a huntstnan cap and sturdy hiking boots you could wear to kill a bear. The three of us <;onverged in front of the Trowbridge Center's front door and ventured inside together. There, we toured the Center's main room, which houses small exhibitions about wildlife with names ranging from the banal "Migratory Raptors" to the exclarnatory "Trees are Terrific." Tom Parlapiano, an employee of the Trowbridge Environmental Center, provided an un-outfitted companion and me with binoculars and led our gang November 2005 ;.

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of three outdoors. Parlapiano, a veteran birdwatcher, said the only trick of the trade is observation. Silhouette, flight patterns, habitat: each of these elements must be examined to determine a species. As we began our walk in the woods he appeared to dispense this wisdom to distract us from the fact that there were no 1\) • actual birds in sight. :;• c It seemed that the Ul two hour trip would be spent mulling over pictures and making small talk you've spotted it, maintain that sighting rather than actually spotting a spectacu- for only a few seconds. Parlapiano emphasized how, through practice, birds lar bird in flight. Early on in the journey, we heard a become recognizable not only by their upeep" from some nearby plants. Would physical appearance, but also by their this be the first bird of the day? As the song. Since birdwatchers' eyes often fail older walker, Gil, wisely remarked, "It's them, they rely more on other senses, one thing to hear 'em, it's another thing such as hearing, to distinguish one to see them." The group stopped and species from another. Later that mornwaited in hope of a sighting. In the ing, acute hearing led our group to meantime, Parlapiano provided a draw- uncover a female Downy Woodpecker ing of the loud-mouthed creature: a circling the top of a tree trunk the White-Breasted Sparrow. After a few coolest bird I have ever seen. About halfway through the walk, we tninutes, when it became clear that the bird would not make an appearance, we left the more dense vegetation and hit a wall of open space. This narrow clearing trudged on. Parlapiano explained that the cold was devoid of the massive trees and clutmorning temperature and clouded light tered foliage we had seen along other prevented many birds from leaving their parts of the trail; it seemed an ideal place resting habitat unlike me, the wise to rest. Desperate to ·see another bird, I birds had chosen to stay in bed. focused my eyes and scoured the skies Nonetheless, he said uyou shouldn't let for sudden movement. Nothing. But the non-ideal day prevent you from then, a sound-. "vi-de-o' vi-de-o, vi-de-o' birding." A bit farther along, we vi-de-o, vi-de-o ...." The Carolina Wren. stopped again to ex~e movement in Seconds later, we heard more noise the Yellowthroat then we a bush. Looking through my binoculars Com1non for the first time, I realized how difficult watched it in flight. The tides had turned. it is to capture a still bird. "One thing · ~'I tell you, it's a great birding morning," you know about birds," said Parlapiano, said Parlapiano excitedly, ~'Everybody's uthey know exacdy when you pick your moving." And by that point, at last, so were we. binoculars up." He laughed. -EmifyK.oh Birding requires precision and • patience. You can spend hours searching for a specific bird and then, once 13 •

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positively to this trauma and heal. At one

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what it is you're doing and how it helps." Claire is using her fingers. The surgeons are 16

his wife

improving her knees, reducing her

headaches, relieving her aches, and putting her THE NEW JOURNAL

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to sleep. Last February, when Ken had a colon resection at Yale-New Haven, the doctor, he says, was not hi~ only ·"advocate." Claire was by his side from the moment he arrived at the hospital. "I was not anxious once Claire got started. I felt more confident that things would go right there was a sense that my body would be less traumatized and it certainly reduced my stress," he recalls ten months later. Though he cannot defini.tively say that the duration of his hospital stay was shorter because of Reiki, Ken strongly believes "Reiki played a role in the speeding up of the healing. Yes, the Reiki has an effect on the ·body." In spite of the skepticism it inspires, who can say Ken's triumph 'is not due to the contribution of Reiki? "People look at me and say 'you look great.' I have a ·sense that it's all behind me and I have thirty or forty years ahead of me." Reiki, as conceptualized by Dr. U sui, was intuitive it was, after. all, based on a mystical experience. But after its arrival in the United States, the healing methodology became more structured. Today, Reiki has been lump.e d together with other Complementary Alternative Medicine (CAM) therapies, such as aromatherapy and herbal baths. None of these therapies is ailtnent specific, which is why I've tried them; they are general medical practices that promote relaxation and relief. Call me a Zen seeker, trendy, or Type A, but I have been known to seek out treatments that promise this kind of healing. So though I have never needed them to cure illness, having healing hands on my body is something I've grown used to. Reiki, however, was new to me, and, like all choosy consumers, I was skeptical. I had never tried acupuncture or hypnosis, and Reiki seemed closer to these lessmainstream, but potentially more powerful therapies. Burdened with preconceptions, I set off to deter-

mine if it was the answer to my quest for calm. Theoretically, anyone will benefit from Reiki even me. Ken certainly believed in its power. Maybe I could too. THE

EUS CENTER FOR HEAL1H

and Healing where Amanda Wilson works is a scene that aligns closely with stereotypes of alternative therapy. . Inside the small cottage-turned-wellness center, shelf. upon shelf is weighed down by herbs, vitamins, potions, creams, salves, oils, and pills: diabetes . control, diet formula, diet support, • •

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stream in the past two decades. But there is a wider context for the prevalence of the CAM industry rooted in its tenuous relationship with Western medicine and the evolution of that relationship over tirne. People have been using Chinese herbs for centuries. But recendy, with the health care industry, and specifically pharmaceutical companies, driving costs up, CAM therapies have become a popular alternative to expensive traditional medicine. The bottom line is that, at least psychologi. cally, you will feel better after one ·affordable hour spent with an acupuncturist than you would after ten pricy minutes spent with an internist. On the one hand, CAM therapies are seeking a marriage with Western medicine. On another, they are seeking a divorce. Though she was· raised in the Methodist Church her father was a pastor Amanda has found a'\··new source of spiritual strength in Reiki. It's not necessarily religious, but there , is an otherworldly component. "The great thing about Reiki and giving Reiki is that you're always receiving as you're giving.," she said. "So the energy works through me as well as through the client. So I'm being healed as I'm healing." Amanda leads me into a candlelit room permeated by the scent of burnt sage and the harmonies of · a "Reiki CD," which she pops into an unobtrusive stereo. I take off my shoes and slide onto the treatment table. She covers me with a blanket, and I stifle a giggle. This is my first Reiki treatment, and I am determined to take it seriously. I try to relax my smile and let myself be taken in by the walls of the tiny treaunent room. It takes a few moments. I never seem to feel anxious being worked on by the hands of an unfatniJiar massage therapist. But lying in the dirn pink light, I am not only fully clothed, but covered. It is the anticipation of the unknown that wresdes my n•ind. ' Eyes closed, Amanda works down my chakras, sacred centers of my

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muscle-joint support, digestive system, allergy and sinus, cold and flu relief, immune builders, mood support, Chinese herbs. Welsh musician Enya's "Smooth Operator" lulls in the background. I look up at the ''Evergain Chi Machine." It is on sale for $249 a hundred dollar discount. Too bad I don't know what it does. Centers like Amadeus, though per. haps not as pretty, have cropped up throughout the Elm City, responding to a need and reacting to a trend. On a simple level, wellness centers are havens from the rigors of the everyday world, luring stressed-out seekers like me. They also cater to the popularity of "alternative," organic, and holistic lifestyles that have become more main-

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The gazebo at the Amadeus H ealth and H ealing Center is a far cry from a normal doctors office. •

body that correlate to colors, feelings, Blockages indicate a problem with her melodious voice. Amanda came to and physical symptoms. These energy the function associated with that Reiki by chance, art incident that helped • hot-spots are an important element chakra, like the throat and communi- her heal the wounds of a traumatic of Reiki for Amanda. Sometitnes she cation. The blockage in my sacral, childhood. ''It is a divine energy that is touches me lightly, other ritn,es her Amanda tells me, may indicate tur- brought through the practitioner hands hover a few inches away from moil in the way I relate to my fatnily through the hands and into the client. my body, redistributing my energy. I and friends, and on a physical level, But it's believed that they don't even feel force and heat. "I'm just a con- may be connected to menstrual need to believe in the energy in order duit," she says softly. stress. The solar plexus rela..tes to for it to work," she says compellingly, Time passes, and Amanda quiet- self-love, self-esteem, the color yel- ''because it's always working." Amanda· uses Rejki energy to heal ly finishes her work. While I attempt low, the number three, and digestion. to rouse my limbs from the slumber My blockage means I am struggling the wounds of the everyday world. She they have slipped into, Amanda with deficiencies or conflicts in these had a client who was struggling to sell begins to offer tne _her diagnosis- matters. I have an easy titne putting her New Haven home; Amanda did what she felt and then dealt with dur- all the pieces together; her diagnosis Reiki on the house in a meditative ing my treatment. I'm surprised- does seem plausible. But I can't help state, visualizing the house and drawing • apparently, she has treated problems but think that, like the prophecy of a certain symbols in the air and it sold. fortuneteller shuffling through When she is not at Amadeus, she sends I did not know I had. She tells me I have an excess of energy in my clients, her words are so general, they - distance treatments to the healing center in this satne way so that business throat center it is blue in color and could apply to anyone. is associated with one's ability to ''There is probably a psychosomat- will be sound. The power of Reiki helps conununicate. That seems reason- ic component to all of this, but that's her sister with adult ADD achieve a able. But, she says, there are block- not a bad thing," says Amanda. The meditative state. '~S, Hiv, cancer, all • ages in my sacral center below the purple amethyst dangling from the pale kinds of different pain, emotional physnavel, and at my solar plexus. skin of her neck sways to the sound of ical I would love to see Reiki be more November 2005

19 •

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with shiny instruments protruding like mangled limbs. It is a laboratory .where, two hours later, obstetrics gynecology students from UConn Medical School will rehearse examinations and deliveries. Had I not experienced Reiki for the first ti rne earlier that morning, I would have thought I was in for the worst. Claire came to Reiki when she was training to be a volunteer at the Connecticut hospice in Branford in 2000. In February 2001, she continued her training at a public and optional class offered at the Yale School of Nursing. After that class, Claire was Reiki "one and two," having mastered the second of four levels or attunements. "I said 'this is really great.' And I could go out and start using Reiki on my fa~y, my friends, my cats, whatever," s_~e. says. ''And that's what I did." But a '¥ear later, Claire wanted to do more with ,;· the new power she had tapped into. "During that year, some of the women I met in that class who were at the School of Nursing started to notice changes in me, just a different intensity in my life and a different focus, and I started to evolve into who I am now." If she had a second official position at Yale, in addition to her role at Yale Medical Publications, Claire might be "Sterling Master of the Arts in Reiki." Claire is behind the Reiki at reading week's Wellness Program and other similar programs sponsored by the Hall of Graduate Studies and the Yale Health Plan. She is also an instructor for the program at YaleNew Haven Hospital which sends volunteer Reiki practitioners into the oncology clinic, cardiology, rehab, and the long-term medicine wards. Unlike Amanda's working conditions, at the hospital it is tnandatory that Reiki therapists touch their patients: "Reiki can be done above the bo_dy in the energy field. I don't teach that way; I wasn't taught that way," says. Claire matter-of-facdy. "No matter how a •

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Amadeus sells a pltehora of alternative healing medications. of the number one healing modality used," says Amanda passionately. ''It's helpful because it's not invasive and you can experience change· without feeling traumatic effects." Here, at my first Reiki session, I did experience change. I don't know if Amanda illuminated my wanting chakras with energy, but I did feel a sense of caltn. 'cyOU CAN'T OD on Reiki,'' so that afternoon I drive across New Haven for more, without feeling like a junkie. For Claire Bessinger, Ken's Reiki Master, the sense of intuition and mysticism associated with Reiki is secondary: Its power and importance lies in its physicality and palpability. Claire does not have to tell me that. It is evident in the way she .. .LJ>A. HAD TOLD ME,

guides her hands to specific points on my body, as I lie on the · examination table in the quiet darkness with only the sound of Claire's bare feet pattering on the linoleum. I breathe deeply. This afternoon, I am completely at ease, though it was only several tninutes ago that this woman, now using her hands to generate heat in an area neat my breasts, greeted me for the first tirne. We meet in her office at 100 Church Street, where she has worked at Yale Medical Publications for 17 years. After a brief exchange, she leads me down several passageways into a harshly lit elevator. We are going to a quiet place, a room where she will give me a 35-minute Reiki treatment. She opens a door and reveals ten mock examination beds,

THE NEW JOURNAL

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practitioner was taught, we ask them to use touch. A hospital isn't going to be receptive of Reiki that doesn't involve touch or you go around waving your arms in the air doing things." In the hospital, Claire believes Reiki is an affirmation of the power of touch, an emotional association between the medical world and the patient: HFor a pa:tient in a hospital, if all you have is 30 seconds to hold their hand, it's . ; . going t<? _oe a powerful experience ... A patient who has a need is going to draw ." that energy iri ;t:P,at thirty seconds much faster." · ..r '--~. :;· 'lbirty~tiv"~· mjnutes Jater, in quiet ' repose on the examination table in the basement of 100 Church Street, I feel relaxed and warm not sleepy. Claire finishes quiedy and tells me to take my ' . ttrne geu•ng up. "It's really allowing the person," she whispers, "I don't heal you. What Reiki does is allow you to heal yourself from within. It's not me I just bring . ,, lt to you. . I lay motionless for a few minutes · contemplating my status. I had a basis for comparison. And though the treatments I received were different, I felt peaceful after both sessions an extreme state of relaxation that I had never experienced before, or at least not frequendy enough to identify it. /

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I'm definitely a doctor. People call me . ·doctor all the time." Sal Amadeo practices energy medicine. But as obvious as his credentials may seem, watching hitn do a treatment forces one to admit that there is a methodology to his work that yields a very specific outcome. It may not be science as I know it, but it scientifically achieves its objectives. The word "doctor" can perhaps be used as a relative term: Sal is a doctor of the type of medicine he practices.-. an expert, an innovator, an authority. Energy medicine is a synthesis of CAM therapies, incorporating Reiki,

Chinese medicine, herbal medicine, acupuncture, alchemy, an herb called Moxa, Edgar Casey formulas, and never Jitniting itself to one. "It's the combination of tools I have in my toolbox that makes it unique," Sal says. "Doctors tell me this is real medicine ... It's a whole system." Sal knows · that what people like about energy medicine it is the fact that no two patients are treated alike. "If my medicine were covered by insurance, it would be difficult for you to get an appointment in a tin1ely fashion," he says prophetically. His _opinion gets

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CLAIRE PERCEIVES REIKI AS "BASIC

simple energy work," and Amanda sees it as a '~ealing modality''; but to Sal Amadeo, Amanda's boss and the ·· owner of Amadeus Center for Health and HeaHngJ and Amanda's boss, CAM therapy is a science and a business. When I ask hirn if he's a doctor, his answer is serious and brisk: "Oh yeah,

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back to the dilemma of Western medi- · cine: Rising prices are driving people towards cheaper new age therapies that they may not fully understand, but that make them feel better. "I'm just working my business. . . I need to make a living; I need to pay my bills." Sal says he's not even sure if his busi•

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gers, pahn side ·up. He repeats this sev- the roots coming from your feet pareral risnes, a practice that gives new ticularly kidney one which is at the botmeaning to the word "thumb-tack." tom of your foot. . . gently contract I could never have anticipated what · your anus to bring energy up." After all, he does next. He grabs a needle gun, he is the doctor. tells the patient to ''breathe in," and shoots an acupuncture needle between "I AM THE VICE-CHAIR OF THE the two tacks. ''This is going to help her department of Anesthesiology, the

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ness is making money . but he is smart. By anticipating a trend, he may he on Jhe cusp of success. But for the moment, he can only do what he does best heal. A young wotnan has 41rrived at Amadeus HeaHng Center looking qistraught and appointment...less, so Sal agrees to squeeze her in an \llllik.ely leniency at a traditional doctor's offi.ce~d ushers me into the treatment room with hisn. She is feeling very emotional about · I set myself in the comer of the room, which is decorate~ with Native American regaliafeathers, hides .a nd ·dotted with all kinds of bottles and what I can only · guess are Sal's "tools." First a · He palpates her abdom~n to find the tender spots and concludes, "She is very stressed." Next, he takes her pulse, looks for a between the carotid .and radial arteries, and it becomes very obvious to hi•n to that the left side of her body is imbalanced. His movements are quick but meticulous. H~ scuffles · from a shelf, around, grabs and opens a box with stnaJI silver and gold press-tacks. He rips the plastic open with his teeth, extracts the tacks, and presses them into her fin•

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with anxiety ... balance the root of her problem:. . and also address the symptom," he says, eyes on the patient who has hers closed tight. In the corner, awestruck, afraid to ask if it hurts, I just · nod, as I position my chair so the patient can .rest her needle-ridden arm on it. ''If I had more ri•ne, I would put castor oil on her abdomen with white wool flannel; but because I don't have enough ti•ne, I'm just going to use a Ja•np;' Sal said. I have never seen a la1np like this before. It has seven long, skinny bulbs in the colors associated with each chakra. He carefully places it close to her abdomen. The specialized treaunent Sal has just concocted for this young woman exemplifies his notion of what medicine should be"hwnan and hmnane." As he says, it does not treat people like "car parts." "I feel good, I feel the energy;' the womari says, and then after a moment, "Amanda said I had issues with my third eye chakra." Sal inunediately knows what to do. He sticks an acupuncture needle in the smaJl space between her eyebrows. "She said I had issues with grounding," the woman continues. Sal has an answer: ''Imagine •

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Anesthesiology Chief of Yale-New"".Haven Children's Hospital, and the'' Professor of Anesthesiology, Pediatrics, and Child Psychiatry at Yale University," says Dr. Zeev Kain, a slender, cleanshaven man who has just stored his lunch in the fridge and filled his coffee mug. As if Dr. Kain does not wear enough hats, he is also a researcher: He studies the perioperative stress response the responses of a patient before, during, and after surgery. 'We do research involving pharmacological interventions, behavioral interventions, as well as CAM interventions ... We do exceptionally rigorous science;' he says. ''In the world of CAM, exceptionally rigorous is not always the case. That is one of the problems." Dr. Kain, who is also part of one of the prestigious National Institute of Health study groups, offers a perspective based on his medical expertise and a unique international insight he was born in Israel. "The U.S. is really the country of the free... Doctors of osteopathies, podiatrists, optometrists: these entities do not exist in Europe. It's all the same with CAM therapysomebody wants to say they're a thera~

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pist, all they need to do is put a shingle of Health, the pulse of the medical on and say 'I'm a therapist."' world, established. an institute for alter.. Dr. Kain calls for a more institu- native medicine it would seem logical tionalized basis for CAM, one that that Yale, as a visionary institution, would make it less of an industry and would want to invest in the future of more of a science. "It is a very com- CAM. It would be easy for them to mon sentitnent that anything that back more projects like Dr; Kain's and smells like CAM has nothing to do the two or three other CAM research with science. However, over the past groups at the University. ten years there have been tremendous After all, Harvard has appropriated changes around the world you can such monies. The Harvard Medical see articles published of CAM inter- School Osher Institute is arguably the ventions in multiple top-of-the-line sci- most progressive institution in the entific journals." world when it comes to education and Dr. Kain is leading by example, research regarding CAM therapies. Not advocating change by conducting only does it support multiple impresexceptional research, but his voice is sively-sized research groups, but it has only one in a small chorus of doctors worked to incorporate CAM therapies and scientists around the world. "One into the curriculum of the Medical of the ieaSons why it's changing slowly School. Yale, · by contrast, takes an is because there are... a lot of charlatans unflinching old guard view of CAM. in the world ,af CAM therapy. And so Reiki programming at Yale-New every Joe"bpet;if~g,JJ: clinic of acupunc- Haven may represent the New Haven ture charges·r~iiry;buc~s . a shot and patient's interest more strongly than it ,. _,. .. does sometHing that may or may not does Yale's. help." His research group, including "The list of things that have been documented to work is quite the esteemed Dr. Shu-Ming Wang, short," says Dr. Kain of specific international acupuncture expert, CAM techniques. But CAM and Dr. Halaeh Sadat, the leading therapies have a predeterauthority on hypnosis, is fu1611ing mined future. As much as a scientific responsibility to the • 0~---., they will be incorporated greater cormnunity of into traditional medicine, patients contributing to CAM they will never replace it. literature to show what gets ''Let's be realistic, if you results, and what doesn't. have appendicitis, we Because the disneed to take your course that Dr. Kain appendix out ... and his renowned So I believe in research teana what's called engage in is rele• 1ntegrat1ve v a n t medicine, five years u 0 y ago, the InteNational grate , Institute ~o .. ~

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Western traditional medicine which is the gold standard for me. . . and you add to it.a piece from eastern medicine that helps." · One question is whether Yale will adapt to this model and do some integrating of its own of CAM research and education in its curriculum. Perhaps Yale should model itself after Dr. Kain: traditional at heart, but innovate. and relevant. "Eventually institutions. . . will have to go with the flow. It's just a question of 'are you going to flow today, three years from now, or five years from now?' You will have to go with the flow." •

I CAN CHOOSE TO BEIJEVE THAT REIKI is unscientific and that Claire, Amanda, and Sal do not have healing hands. I can choose to believe that what I felt when I got Reiki was psychological.· I can choose to believe that Reiki is just a glorified massage. But I don't want to believe that. I want to think that over the next week, I will feel more relaxed. M energy levels will catapult and I will fe 1 refreshed, that I can turn to Reiki n~xt tirne I need relie£ I felt it. I experienced it. I am one chapter in a body of evidence, and no doctor can tell me otherwise. For this moment, I'm as good as the best science they've got. Most CAM therapies like Reiki may not be scientifically proven to work, but for a few minutes or an hour, they tnake the patient his or her own doctor. They give you a sense of control; and even if they are only relaxing you, that relaxation improves quality of life and likely promotes healing. Ken Welch only has vague reminiscences of Claire working on hitn before and after his colon surgery. But for the tirne she was with him, and for the tirne she was with me, what Ken and I both had was perhaps more irnportant than pills or splints. It was · the agency to heal ourselves, and that can never be proven otherwise.

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Romy Druckefj a junior in Davenport College, is Editor-in-Chief of TN]. The Reiki technique manipulates the boc!J's seven chakras. •

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November 22, [Oof!] Be it Resolved that the Undergraduate Council allocate $1600 for celebratory tshirts; and Be it Resolved that the Campus Life Committee be charged . with deciding upon an appropriately pompous design for . this shirts [sic], demonstrating our superior senses of humor ... " The •

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The article's author enlisted Ms. Mannersmith, an etiquette expert, to evaluate proper game attire. "The idea is to cheer and have spirit for your team without being nasty," Ms. Mannersmith said, warning Cantabs of the "fine line between displaying school spirit and talking trash."

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Schonberger praises is based on the 2004 debut album cover of rapper The Game, and was produced in secret in Schonberger's common room using iron-on transfers. The boys will have to sell them on the black market. To hawk a shirt sporting the university name at Harvard, one must be part of a

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resolution passed the executive board with unanimous huzzahs, as it does every year. Indeed, the usual Harvard shirts are pompous: most say something along the lines of "Yale: Harvard's Safety School" or "Yale: Harvard fot Dummies." But "Refining the Rivalry," a piece printed in The Harvard Crimson, took issue with those shirts that purported to demonstrate ''superior senses of humor."

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Chris ''Gritz" Schonberger manages Cock Tees Productions, an underground Harvard startup that would certainly disagree with Mannersmith's gentle nay-saying. "Good tees are usually inappropriate or. offensive," Gritz wrote in an email. "That 'safety school' shit is tired. That's why we're going for the black tee look this year, a more thuggish spin on the general Game tee." The Cock Tees design •

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regulated student group and cough up 7.5 percent of profits in royalties to the Harvard Copyright Office. "Or your tees ~ill be seized," wrote a , addened Schonberger, "like so many pounds of cocaine." So what about Harvard Tees that mock the Yale name? Do they have to pay to use our fancy four letters? "There's a sort of informal agreement with Harvard between our licensing offices," said Denise Castallano, Yale's Licensing program Coordinator. "If Harvard sees something with our name on it they tell us. It's common cour.tesy." A dirty blonde who spends her days in a basement office where stacks of solicitations requesting use of the University's logos stretch ceiling-ward, CasteJJano doesn't have a lot of time for tshirts. And anyway, Yale students need not worry about licensing rights: For "internal use" there's no price. But students are expt!cted to uphold the alma mater, and never to produce vulgar designs. Castellano prefers this year's official design at Barnes & Noble, in which the two teams' helmets angle toward each other in a typical faceoff pose. "That was nice," Castellano said of the shirt. "I don't approve of anything thaes

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offensive. Though a lot of people go ahead and do things." Yale student designs have been more "appropriately pompous" than the official bookstore's running the gamut from the classic "Fuck Harvard" to the crass "Fuck Harvard?". For the discrete consumer (perhaps the mother whose children are just learning how to spell) there's ccHuck Farvard." (And Harvard's got its own ccYuck Fale.") en Then there's the most popular Gl Gl design, which appears to be a col(/J n =r umn of blocky nonsense letters :l Cll -· 0.. until the fabric is folded like a Mad ....Cll Magazine back-page or an elegant -4 '::3' Cll window-dressing to reveal the hidz den phrase: "Puck Harvard." "It's ~ '0 our be~t ,_ seller," said Ken, c... :;, who requ~sted a pseudonym. Gl th shirt willyou choose? Througho~t the ~~cund week of November, h'tV' snld the shirt in Commons ..-5 to ' ,: '~lfopefully make students opt for the store's design- anathema to our artistic goals and some money~:-~ r}ls set;J.i<;>r society. your-own-shirt service. "Sure, they hurts our arms.'' -·-~-- Flashy and Jbiquitous, _the design _ go too far sometimes," .Cobden In the retread of forty years of called to arms a November 2001 says, speaking of more vulgar tee designs, Rumpus' goal at their Yale Record satire: "What if we designs. "This is the type of shirt annual tee design debate is to "promade this t-shirt that said 'Fuck I'd recommend," he says, pointing vide a visual gag more clever a~d Harvard.' And then when you fold- to a conservative tee imprinted more timely than a bulldog humped it together it said 'Puck with "The Game, 2005" in a stiff ing a Cantab," · Gattis wrote. Harvard.' Again. And if you folded serif font. "For someone who Though that design "sold like hotit up again, it said 'Puck Harvard' keeps chronological order of all cakes" according to this year'1. again and so on?" their t-shirts, this is the one you designer, Mike Dunham, "we can And so on. And so forth. For pull out to show someone in one usually come up with better ideas the past 25 years, the screenprint hundred years and say, 'This is one than that." A problem, perhaps, and design division of Broadway's hundred years old.'... The other was the 2002 Harvard response to Campus Customs Clothing Co., ones are fun," Cobden admits-,~"but the Cantab "rape" shirt. A year Inc. has captained the bulk of only for the moment." after the bulldog anally raped the Yale's design orders. Wiry manager Those "other ones" are printed pilgrim, Harvard ~~w put out a Barry Cobden doesn't see the by frats, sports teams, and student · shirt that showed a Cantab sitting scrimmage for a winning shirt as publications who proudly proclaim pretty while a bulldog, crouched on anything new: "I wouldn't be sur- with each design that they're pretty the ground before his master, per• prised if at the first game played, sure they won't be alive to see the formed fellatio. Rumpus let the somehow someone wasn't wearing 2105 kickoff. Arguab!y (depending track grass over and the next year something in the spirit of the on your levels of joie-de-vivre and came out with a tee that was either game." Today the store offers the poo-poo humor) Rumpus puts out too highbrow or too lowbrow to "thinkingman's version of a the strongest shirt each year and ·sell well: "Ve-ri-tas My Salad," the ·Harvard-Yale shirt" in the front keeps their design a surprise until a shirt read. "The problem was peowindow (a heather gray short- much anticipated unveiling. How ple either didn't know what the sleeve imprinted with the rhetorical do they do it? "Rumpus does not phrase 'toss my salad' meant or "Harvard does what?" and a corre- vote," wrote Editor-in-Chief Lacy thought it was so gross they • sponding lollipop.) However, most Gattis, in an email, "It would be refused to wear it," said Rumpus -

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staffer Maureen Miller. "We had a few people though, me included, who thought it was brillia'n t." Ultimately, the shirt failed. This year's design steps back slightly: Staffers debated over a shirt that would be "offensive but not too offensive." Ideally, the crew would like to actually turn a profit, which they have in the past: Their very first design sported a linedrawing of the phallic Harkness tower, accompanied by the biting text: "Harvard Sucks. But Yale Sucks Better." The profit they made on that visual "gag" allowed them to print their publication monthly a huge step financially. Sigma Alpha Epsilon's pledges sell shirts ''to raise money for their pledge project usually an improvement to the infrastru<;ture of the house. ''For example,'' said Fraternity president Billy Deitch, "rebuilding the basement bar." ~wo • years ago the frat put out one of the most successful shirts in recent memory, the front of which argued, "You'd have to be crazy to go to Harvard.;." and the back of which provided evidence: a picture of U nabomber Ted Kaczynski, Harvard Class of 1962. A later shirt was more minimal in design, "VE-RI-DUM," which Branford Senior Jonathan Breit claimed as his favorite game shirt: "Everything is perfect: the number of syllables, the latin-esque ending of 'dum,' the fact that 'dumb' is misspelled. It just works." This year for the first time, Community Health Educators (CHE) a group of student sex educators who work at New Haven high schools plans to print a socially conscious t-shirt. "Many of the designs we were debating said something to the effect of 'Herpes ... Heptatitis ... HPV... Fuck Harvard. -But use a condom," wrote Cara Demmerle, CHE co-coordinator. "Ultirnately,

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we were worried that students might not want a t-shirt with 'Herpes' written in on the front .. ; The final design does make a joke at · abstinence's expense, but I think it is ulti• mately much more palpable than the earlier designs." As opposed to the frats and .humor maga•

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passing Yalies. "What is this?" a girl asked one Monday in November, passing the table commandeered by members of the Pundits society. She was pointing to a t-shirt printed in the University's font, which simply said, ''ALE," sans igrec. "It's Yale without the 'Y,"' said the staffer

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only $22 for . one year and $40 for two years

• . zines, CHB was hesitant to print selling the shirt, "It's the essence on Campus Cpst6nis' t-shirts of Yale. There are youth sizes!" When the customer walked away because they ' ~~~e . produced in . to a table offering the usual bland sweatshops. T}le ;group went for ,- ·t-: c ,;;("Harvard Sucks. And more expensive tees offered by fare American Apparel; a chain that Princeton Doesn't Matter"), the sells bulk rates on shirts made in Pundit sighed. "It's the most straightforward design possible." regulated working conditions. Like CHE, the club Water Though the Harvard-Yale Polo team wanted their design to design is often straightforward, fit their moral code a record of it has come a long way from the good sportsmanship. "We wanted game itself, and few shirts ever a shirt that was more clever," said have anything at all to do with Fundraising Coordinator Sherry football. "No one cares who Wang. "We didn't want a shirt wins," said one drunken senior at like 'Who's your Daddy,' or a party two weeks before kickoff. 'Harvard's mom since 1701.'" "Everyone cares who had · the Last year, the team released the fucking coolest shirt." The Yale heart-warming "Everybody loves Record's elegant satire from 2001 a Yalie" shirt, which sold like a summed up what a lot of people pack of Camels in a Texas felt. As their number-one sugprison. This year's design is sitni- gestion, the magazine proposed larly uncontroversial: a group of a shirt that would be blank scarlet stick-figures holding up except for one block of text. placards spelling "Harvard "My hatred for Harvard," it Sucks," and on the b~ck, Yalies would read, ''outweighs my apasay: "You said it, not us," allud- thy for football." ing to-a prank played last year on . Adriane Quinlan, a junior in Calhoun the Harvard fans. For the two weeks before the College, is a managing editor of TN]. game, a row of fold-out tables in the foyer of Corwnons becomes a makeshift bazaar of Ga1ne tees for )

Interested in getting

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November 2005

The New Journal PO Box 3432 New Haven, CT 06520

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Trumbull College is pleased to present a

Master's Tea •

with

PAROMITA GOSWAMI Yale World Fellow FoWidt:r & Presidt:ul of Shramik Elgar (Marching Army ofWorking People) A gtass roots organization that issues of indigenous and rural poor in India. .

Hopes and Consttaints within Indian DetmcracyThe Grass Roots Perspective"

4:00p.m Thmsday, November 10 Co nRoom New Residence.Hall 100 Tower Parkway

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large flat stones) which lookd generallY like the bottom

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of the Cellar but appeard to have a trifle of fresh dirt !Jing scatterd about, hard!J however discernable. I scratchd with the end of my walking. stick -

180 years ago, the

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the stones & .ftnal/y took up a large flat stone where

fin broken into, and

we discovered a white bundle, apparentlY a bundle

cloathes. We examind & found a human body dou-

the body missing. Horrified, the citizens of •

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bled up in a heap entirelY coverd up with the·grave "

at nearby Yale Medical College. The next · morning, on January 12, 1824, public outrage

cloathes. We took it out and it was immediatelY known to be the body

the young Woman we was

forced New Haven's constable, Erastus Osborn, to lead a surprise search party into ·the medical school, then located on the corner .

searching for. Jonathan Knight, a Yale anatomy professor, denied any knowledge of the business and

of Grove and College Street where SSS now

arranged for the body to be wrapped discreetly

stands. The team searched the building from

in a cap and sheet and loaded into a wagon

top to bottom to no avail. They were on the

bound for West Haven. But word of the discov-

verge of quitting when they decided to peer

ery spread quickly. Crowds of

into an unexplored subterranean room.

thronged the wagon as it moved down College

Osborn related what followed in a letter to his

and Chapel Streets. Osborn's letter tells of sever-

father written later that same day:

al bells pealing at once, whipping the mass

At length in a smaJJ low Cellar, we came to a place in the pavement (the CeJJar being paved with 30

into a "great pitch" as the town filled with rumors. Yalies armed themselves and took THE NEW JOURNAL

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shelter behind the campus gates, waiting for an attack. Osborn wrote, "A Drum has beat & the Streets are crowded with the besieging army preparing for the assault." At nightfall, a mob of about six hundred · men armed with pistols, clubs, and daggers hurled stones and burning coal at the medical building. They shouted "Tear down the college" and "Death to the students," drowning out the officers who tried to restore order by reading the state's Riot Act. Meanwhile, the medical students responsible for the bodysnatching stole off amidst the chaos, never to be apprehended. The siege continued for two nights, and the state militia had to be called in to quell the riq.i:. Despite a lack of evidence, the townspeople .eventually found a scapeg<?,at - in ~ Ephraim Colborn, a me.dic:.a Lassis.tant. He was sentenced to nine mo:,nths imprisont;r. , ment, fined $3Qcf Cioflars, · and just barely escaped being tarred and feathered outside the courthouse. Yale was not the first institution to come under siege following the discovery of a disinterred body in its possession, and it would not be the last. Similar uprisings erupted in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and, most famously, New York · the 1788 "Doctor's Riots." But by th~ end of the nineteenth century, legislation, combined with shifting '

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attitudes towards dissection, finally provided physicians with enough legal cadavers to keep the doctors . out of graveyards. By then, the image of "resurrectionists," as professional grave robbers were called, had already been fixed in the popular imagination. Portraits of ·these grim characters, creeping through midnight graveyards wielding pickaxes, shovels, and hooded lamps, as well as horrific portrayals of the cadavers' fates popped up in much of the literature of the time, from the graverobbing Dr. Robinson in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to the creation of a grisly living cadaver in Frankenstein. Though the New Haven riot fueled sensational headlines in 1824, grave robbing by medical schools was old news to New Haven locals. By 1830, nine medical schools had been founded in New England alone, and more were added to the roster each year. Like Yale, all agreed that anatomy was a foundational course, and that dissection of a real human body was indispensable. But where would all these dead bodies come from? At the time, the only legal means of obtaining cadavers was from the bodies of executed murderers, a practice inherited from English Common Law. But in Massachusetts, for instance, only

forty criminals were executed between 1800 and 1830. Most medical schools legally received only one or two cadavers per year a trickle that cou~dn't · satisfy · the swelling number of aspiring physicians. Thus, like its English counterparts, Yale medical students took to scouring the fresh graves of nearby cemeteries, often employing teams :of experienced "resurrectionists" for the job. On that night in 1824, the perpetrators (no one knows for certain whether resurrectionists or the students themselves committed the crime) took a wagon to the West Haven cemetery. Carrying a hooded lamp to avoid catching the eye of anybody still awake, they would have spread a tarpaulin around the fresh grave to catch the dirt they unearthed. To save time and minimize disturbance, they would have only dug a hole at the head of the grave, then sawed through the top end of the coffin. Through the passageway they had created, they would have used a hook, made of an iron bar about five feet long, to extract the body headfirst. Back at the medical school, they may have first put Bathsheba's body inside one of the oblong niches cut into the walls of the cellar to· store cadavers before concealing her beneath the stone floor. As far as -·

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hiding places went, Yale's were less sophisticated than those at its peer institutions; other medical schools · often stored cadavers inside their domed roofs or fashioned pulleys to hoist bodies into the chimneys of large fireplaces. . It is unknown just how many bodies were stolen throughout the nineteenth century. (One historian places the number at several thousand.) However, the extent to which lawmakers and the public perceived the problem to be widespread is well-established. By 1818, every New England state had passed laws against grave robbing, though only a handful of perpe·trators were ever brought to court. Th~ fear of being snatched away from o·ne's final resting place was so great that m_~asutes to protect the deasi>" often surpassed those to pfb_te~i, ¥. t,he · living. The most basic meth6d of keeping •• • bodies underground was ·to pack the grave with bundles of straw, sticks, and large slabs of stone to slow down potential diggers. A more sophisticated variation was to place thick planks lengthwise across the coffin, forcing resurrectionists to exhume the entire grave. Other, usually more affluent New Englanders, preferred to hi_re a night-watch to sit beside a grave with a shotgun. The most grotesque tactic was to simply leave the body in a vault for several weeks, allowing the tissue to decompose past recognition and educational usefulnes before burying it in a cemetery. New Haveners' paranoia was no doubt stoked by sitnilar events in Britain, where the threat of body snatching was so great that macabre ads selling iron coffins ran in the papers: Many hundred bodies will be dragged from their wooden coffins this winter, for the anatomical lecturei.. . The violation of the sanctity of the •

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A dissection room photograph reveals a different view of death. grave is said to be needful, for the whether he had ever been shot at, instruction of the medical pupil, but let replied HOh no, we let private each one ·about to inter a mother, child, cemeteries alone." or friend, say shall I devote this object of Ironically, the one legal channel my affection to such a purpose; if not, for obtaining cadavers was largely the on!J safe coffin is Bridgman~ Patent to blame for much of the stigma wrought-iron one, charged the same price attached to dissection. Donating as a wooden one, and is a superior sub- the cadavers of executed murder• • stitute for lead. ers to sctence was · not JUSt an act Not surprisingly, most of these of efficiency. The prospect of havpreventative measures were finan- ing one's body splayed open and cially unattainable for the poor, taken apart was meant to act as a leaving them vulnerable to the deterrent, a punishment reserved late-night raids of nearby medical for the most abhorrent of murderschools. Well aware of this, in ers creating a cultural association 1788 blacks living in New ~ork between dissection and criminality. City petitioned the Common Thus, the discovery of Bathsheba Council to provide some degree of Smith's body concealed in the bowprotection from resurrectionists. els of the Yale Medical College Their pleas were ignored. Most would have been cause for a particaffluent whites took a cynical view, ularly sharp sense of outrage. The claiming that as long as "the only daughter of a respectable, landed subjects procured for dissections family, Bathsheba was certainly no are the productions of Africa" critninal. So why should she share then ~~surely no person can the fate normally doled out to the object." But resurrectionists were lowest individuals in society? often willing to plunder the graves And yet when the townspeople of poor whites as well; many med- of New Haven picked up their pisical schools targeted graveyards tols and clubs, they were expressing near almshouses. In an 1878 inter- something deeper than the everview, a graverobber, when asked present concerns of race, class, and •

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criminality. Already by the turn of the nineteenth century, the legacy of Puritanism had lost its firm hold on New Englanders. Puritanism's emphasis on the physical tortures of hell was actually a kind of preparation for the threat of the anatomist's knife. Steeped in the orthodox Calvinist preoccupation with mankind's corruptibility, •

opened their doors for business were of dubious quality. The result was often cavalier attitudes towards education, and particularly towards dissection. After forcing his way into a medical school during the New York Doctors Riot, Colonel William Heth recorded his shock at being confronted with the "wantori and inhuman complexion of the

But despite Yale's best efforts, the dissection table still confronts students with the impersonal .. nature of practicing medicine. "When we see patients we generally don't ask them what they do, what they're like," Chen reflected. "The way we see people in hospitals is completely different from who they are. [Anatomy class]

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Puritans viewed the decay of a corpse after death as indicative of human sin, making dissection less of a sacrilegious concept, though by no means an acceptable one. The growing demand for cadavers hit New England at the same time that attitudes towards dea.t h and familiarity with the threat of posthumous physical destruction had begun to shift. As Puritanism faded from view, Victorian primness began to take hold. Increasingly, people in the Northeast sentimentalized the bodies of the· dead. It became common around this time to hold on to keepsakes, typically a lock of hair, from the deceased. In the latter half of the century, postmortem pictures also spread in popularity, taken in the hopes of clinging to an imperishable image of loved ones. This idealized vision of the body as a memorial unfortunately coincided with the growing pains of modern medicine. Nineteenthcentury America needed more doctors, and some of the dozens of medical colleges that suddenly •

room," where body parts had been strung up in "a most brutal position."· At the same time that the general public began to collect postmortem photographs, medical students began their own underground genre, trading amongst each other gruesome · snapshots taken inside the hallowed dissecting room. When Erastus Osborn uncovered Bathsheba's body in the cellar, the townspeople were forced to hold these two opposing concepts of death in contradistinction. Today at Yale Medical School, the approach couldn't be more different. For one, bodies are now voluntarily donated rather than taken from open graves. Before ever stepping into the anatomy lab, first-year students hear a talk by second-years who stress the sacrifice that "donors" as the bodies are called have made in giving their bodies to the medical school and the respect they should be accorded. Justin Chen, a second-year, said that the first time his class saw the cadavers, they were told, "Now you are going to meet your donor."

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brought this home bec~use ·-[the donor] is there so we can take therp apart." Both Chen and his 1824 predecessors hit on one of the (undamental <.:onflicts of medicine: Doctors must look at the body both as a person to be healed and a specimen to be examined. Julia Bess Frank, a doctor at the Yale Medical School in the 1970s once explained, "Medicine, as a serving profession, is accorded great license, permission to inflict all sorts of pain and indignity on patients, doing bad in order to prevent worse, in ho.p es of curing disease." Meanwhile, outside the medical school walls, the rose-washed Victorian view of death persists. At the Beecher and Bennett Funeral Home in Hamden, CT, trained staff members work to meet the expectations of -grieving families. According to Erin Hastings, a funeral director and embalmer at Beecher and Bennett, many family members care most about "the way the deceased looks." Most of the time, she says, "they've seen their loved ones ... go through a lot of pain, so when "'~

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they can come in and see them lqoking peaceful, that's .a last image they're going to have in • their head." When preparing the body for burial, she says, "We take a lot of time when we're doing our job as embalmers and cosmeticians: getting their hair right, making sure that everything is neat and orderly." Though the students in 1824 robbed a West Haven cemetery instead of the more conveniently located cemetery across the street, it seems fitting that the medical school · and the Grove Street Cemetery now stand at oppos.i te ends of Yale's campus. Dissection has shaken off most of its stigma~ so much so that those who- give their / bodies to science are .lauded Ior their , contribution~ - ' / ... ., - ~ ' At the encl;. of:_6ach year, the ~ :~ Yale anatomy -students prepare a remembrance for their -donors. In the Medical Historical Library, nestled amidst the collected knowledge of generations of doctors before them, they read poetry, perform music, and present photo exhibitions in the donor's honor. But when the. donors leav~ the medical school, they are not put back together. They are not given a funeral service, their family members are not afforded one last gaze, and they are not buried. Instead, they are cremated and their ashes placed with those of other donors. Though the practice of anatomy has come a long way, the destination of those who give their bodies to medicine is still a far cry from what most prefer to imagine as our final resting place. •

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"I'm not an admissions officer. I'm just a student." His eyes widened with despair, and, in his oversized glasses, I saw a reflection of my high school selfeager to please, overachieving, and desperate to get into a good school. I hesitated, then . took the ream of forms from his outstretched arms. "Let's take a look at this together."

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A YEAR AGO, I PARTICIPATED IN A Yale program that encouraged students to return to their high schools and give "Thanksgiving Information Sessions" brief visits intended to publicize the University, solicit students to apply, and build relationships with schools in geographic regions rarely visited by official recruitment officers. Unbeknownst to its participants at the tirne, the project was an unofficial prototype for a large-scale proposal that would be realized in the 38 •

out an open application call this September, via e-mail, for "ambassadors." The tone of the first e-mail appealed to the student body's devotion to the University a sort of "for, God, for Country, and for Yale" pitch. ''We hope this program will become a Yale tradition," it read, a tradition in which students would "be paid $50 for their first visit and $20 for each visit after that." While Yale will not release the official number of student ambassadors until after Thanksgiving Break, when their visits have been clocked in, Syverud hinted that the figures were impressive. "The original plan was to send fifty students out; but we underestimated the interest that the idea would elicit about three hundred students' applied." Accepted ambassadors were then trained to . ·a greater degree than I wa~ and given an overview of the purposepf their visits. -_ The schools targeted by the initiative were chosen according to guidelines devised by the admissions office and the YCC. First, the program's creators asked: How many students at the school is question are scoring 1300 or higher on their SATs? Then, are enough of those students applying to Yale? The third consideration, noted Syverud, was the average income level of the students. Though, he adrnitted, the system is "sort of an inexact science," he affirmed that "if two . schools had evenly matched test scores, we went to the lower income." While the goals of the programincreasing low-income recruitment and broadening geographic distribution may seem unsnt pris~g in the contemporary ·context of the University's liberal atmosphere, Yale's drive to realize them is a fairly recent development. Syverud, who is writing his senior essay on the subject, points to the Yale of forty years ago. '1:n terms of adrnissions," he said, ''Yale was the tnost conservative of the Ivy Leagues. We used to send the entire •

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fall of 2005. This new initiative, the Student Ambassadors Program, is a collaboration between the Yale College Council and the University's admissions office. Steven Syverud, President of the YCC, began campaigning for the project shortly after he assumed office. ''We wrote a resolution to improve admissions tactics in January," he said, "because many of us were strongly interested in low income recruitment. All semester, I went to the admissions office every week, asking, ~e we going to do this program?' Jeremiah Quinlan, a Yale adrnissions officer, was adamantly in favor of the idea from its inception. "The Yale adrnissions office is always trying to improve our recruiting efforts as we continue to strive to bring a diverse freshman class to this campus," he said. In seeking to broaden these efforts, the program's architects sent •

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· office to prep schools like Andover and Exeter for weeks at a· tirne, with entire rating systems devoted to those institutions." . He paused, then added with a tone of hushed adrniration: ''All that changed with Inslee Clark." Clark, who became the director of adnlissions at Yale in 1965, essentially blew down the doors to the old boys' club of college adrtlissions. Working with the University's liberal president, Kingman Brewster, he argued that Yale should seek out the most qualified candidates from around the country rather than focusing on elite prep schools _populated by students with appropriate social upbringings. · Clark's initiatives, recounted Syverud, ~aused an uproar. Furious Yale alumhi ~ppealed to Brewster and the Yale Corporatiqn . to revoke its new liberal... poli?_es. 'J)leir argument, they felt, wis"simpfe· :The new, diverse -· class of studerit-s-~ladred the. necessary background to become solid leaders. In response, Clark avowed that the leaders of the future would emerge from untraditional sectors of society. Brewster agreed. As an undergraduate in the late 1930's, he once wrote in the Yale Daify News, ''The world we shall live and work in is being refashioned. •

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Yale remains a point of contention. In · an e-mail urging students to apply for the Student Ambassadors program, a representative from the Asian American Students Association stated, ''Anyone who cares at all about Yale branching out beyond its feeder prep schools needs to pay attention. Even if you went to a feeder prep school." While the fmancial, ethnic, and geographic spread of Yale studentsQuinlan pointed out that the student body now "consists of students from all 50 states in addition to 7 4 countries outside of the United States" has grown remarkably, the ratio between students from public and private schools is still unbalanced. Currendy, just over half of the student body comes from the public school system, a percentage that hardly reflects the national makeup; according to the 1990 census, 88 per cent of American youths were enrolled in public school. Some private institutions even send more students to Yale than entire states Harvard-Wesdake, a private school in California, sent twelve students to Yale in 2003, as opposed to eight from the entire state of Indiana. Quinlan argued, however, that this figure is no longer a consequence of

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an officer receives their territory, they are able to use a variety of research tools, past advice, and statistics to determine what schools or cities to visit in their territory." As a result, some officers. have to stretch visits across broad geographic regions in order to sift through as many applications as a coworker assigned .to a handful of private institutions. · Baolu Lan, a senior who attended the prestigious PhiJiips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, adds that the inflated · nun1ber of students from institutions like Andover may simply reflect the nature of the schools themselves. "I think that the high caliber and wide-ranging diversity of the best students from these extremely selective boarding schools justify the proportion of them," she said. ''Andover selects students from all around the country who are at the top of their classes and show exceptional promise at an early age: Yale is essentially admitting kids from a prescreened applicant pool." Lan affirmed that the relation is correlative, not causal. Still, there in an undeniable disparity between how far Yale goes to establish a presence for itself at differ.

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Parts of the Yale machinery that are · rusty with complacency and stiff with tradition will have to be hauled out and re-exan1ined." As President, Brewster's position enabled hin1 to implement these lofty ideals by revolutionizing the University's recruitment policy. Decades later, however, the percentage of private school .students at November 2005 •

recrUitment policy, but ipstead reflects the nmnber of applications. "One of the larger factors in deterrnining territories is actually the munber of applications that an area will produce each year," he said. ''Adn»issions officers are not only responsible for traveling to their territories, but also for reading all of the applications from those areas. Once

ent schools. c'In addition to Yale's annual visit to our school, I'm pretty sure that there was other cornmnnication," said junior Katie Kadue, an alnrnna of Hat vard-Wesdake. <The guidance counselors were evasive about how close their ties were with colleges, but they all ~ad experience on the other side of the admission process, and they seemed to have cspe39

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icy says that background is important, but it's be~n proven that there's no admissions advantage for students ftom lower iricome backgrounds. We need to target these applicants, but it's difficult .because we use need-blind admittance." The question of how Yale can compensate for this deficit or if it is the . University's job to do so at all is a motivating force behind the Student Ambassador program.

the direct reach of Yale Admissions. Lan · recalled, "Our College Counseling Office was a full-fledged and extremely professional operation, with its own offices, interview rooms, and extensive counseling resource library." As a high school junior, she and her classmates were each "assigned an advisor who conununicated with us closely throughout the next twelve months, wrote us recommendations, collaborated with our

cial relationships' with college admissions officers, which usually meant they. had insider information." Jack Facemyer, also a junior, attended a low-income public high school in Pinelands, New Jersey. "No Yale admissions officers ever c~me to my high school," he said, "and there were never any information ses~ions. My only contact with yale was iny interview with an 3lumnus in tq.e area and . . to campus. '' my Vlslt •

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For students in areas that are scantily populated by Yale alumni, a visit from a Student Ambassador may be their first contact with the University a weighty role for an undergraduate to play. On my own return to my high school, I arrived expecting a figurative victory lap but left feelirig as though I'd been dragged down the bleachers: Although undeniably bright-eyed, the students I spoke to needed more help than I could provide. When faced with an application process in which a single adtuissions officer seems to be the judge, jury, and executioner, an 18 year-old is desperate for someone anyone to be' his or her college counselor, SAT tutor, and essay editor. Evidendy, the greatest discrepancy between Kadue and Facemyer's experiences isn't actually caused by their interactions with the University before matriculation, but rather the stark disparity between their respective high schools an inequa1ity that lies out of

professors when possible, and did his According to Syverud, the project is or her best to make our application "a way to recognize that students who the best that it could be. [There was] a aren't from prep and feeder schools dedicated team of advisors who were don't receive the same sort of help. conversant with the American college Their guidance counselors aren't calladmissions climate and understood ing Yale Admissions to brag about the process from an insider's perspec- them. They deserve a leg up." . tive." Facemyer paints a different picThe mechanism they hope will ture of the application process. enact this "leg up" is not a change in "There were four guidance counselors the adnrission process, but rather an for my school, which has a little over increased attention to disserninating one thousand students. One student information about Yale into the hands applied to Yale myself and one girl of a broader audience. The Student went to U Penn. No one else even Ambassadors sent out over applied to Ivy League schools that Thanksgiving Break will be urged to year, and I was the only person from spread .a specific conununique to the my school ever to go to Yale." masses: Yale has a lot of money, and it • • His assessment points to the larg- wants to gt.ve 1t to you. er problem at hand; in a world "[We] created the Ambassadors where class often determines access Progra•n to send a message that highto such tools as college counselors er education is an affordable option and SAT preparation courses, stu- for all high school students, no tnatter dents from lower incomes often their income levels," said Quinlan, lack the necessary means to com- who called the initiative an outgrowth pete in the admissions process. of the University's recent financia1 aid Syverud noted that "admissions pol- developments. '~inancial aid policy, •

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especially a hundred per cent needbased financial aid and our new enhancements for low-income students and families, is definitely something we want to talk about and explain as we recruit." The new enhancements that Quinlan alludes to are part of recent sweeping changes in Yale's financial aid offerings. Last spring, members of the Undergraduate Organizing Committee staged a campaign for such changes that culminated in February with a sit-in .at the Office of Undergraduate Adrnissions. Although many of the protesters are still pushing for more reform, the new policy is indisputably far-reaching. In March, the Universfty._ announced that, as of this year, if would no longer require any financiar contributio_.Q.-from 'fami" lies with total incJt1ffies under $45,000 ' a year, as wei]}: as ~pr~viOing generous . ' v packages to th9~fe~ - ning less than $60,000. The website for the admissions office now boasts, "The 20052006 academic year marks an important milestone year for Yale's undergraduate financial aid program." For Syverud, these changes are not a conclusion to the battle for closing the education gap, but rather a means to an end. "I firmly believe that a discussion of financial aid at Yale should also deal with the issue of high school recruittnent, because the two are related," he said. ''I'd like Yale to be at the forefront of reaching out to lower income students. I think that, coupled with Yale's new financial aid policy, this program will potentially set off changes in other Ivy League schools. I bet Harvard will make large scale changes to its own policies, and I'd be surprised if they don't also il nplement a more comprehensive recruitment program." In addition to emphasizing Yale's commitment to pursuing students from low income backgrounds, the joint force of the YCC and the adnussions office is also working to support applicants from under-represented •

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schools by building relationships with those schools. One of its aspirations is to implement a program in which incoming students would nominate teachers from their high schools for University recognition. SyVerud added, "We're also trying to b~d outreach to guidance counselors, who have better opportunities to interact with the students. We want them to know how important this is to Yale." Critics of the adrnissions office might ask how important low-income recruitment actually is to Yale. Why, for example, is the University sending undergraduate students to previously unrecognized schools instead of divesting admissions officers from saturated areas? Syverud and Quinlan are quick to point out that the adnlissions staff is already spread thin across the country, reading nearly twenty thousand applications for the Class of 2009, and both cite the advantages that a Student Ambassador brings to the table. Lauren Ezell, a Student Ambassador who has been assigned to speak at a public magnet high school in Tennessee, agreed. ''A student's perspective is perhaps more candid," she said. "The students selected for the job are probably as qualified to 'sell' the school as an adrnissions officer." Syverud added to this statement, "I think it's more effective to hear someone from yoW: ~ea with a similar experience to yourself. Students are also often more straightforward, because they lack the sort of mandatory 'company loyalty' of admissions officers, who are ultitnately Yale employees." Whether students wil1 be sold by recruiters who may be 'only two or three years their seruor is yet to be detern •ined. In December, the YCC and the Yale adnlissions office will assess the success of the progran1, after the Ambassadors return to Yale with questions, anecdotes, and lists of interested students. While an evaluation of these student experiences, and

. the responses of the schools selected for the program are detertninants of the program's success, Syverud suggested that the overa~ching goals of the project are larger in scale. "There are two clashing principles at play here, and Yale needs to decide which one it wants to subscribe to," he said. "The first is that we can use this program to find the diamonds in_the rough spectacular applicants who will come, be accepted, and perform excellendy. The other goal is to change the admissions process beyond Yale. To pursue that will be difficult, because Yale ultimately works to benefit Yale." Syverud hopes to continue to address the inequalities that students from different backgrounds face in the application process, including holding a conference where primary figures in higher education discuss the matter. He concluded, optimistically, "I think that people care a lot about the issue·, because education is supposed to be a mecharusm for social mobility. It's Yale's job to ensure that we match that promise." The extent to which this promise can be realized by a group of freshfaced undergraduates eager to spread the Yale gospel remains to be seen. In my own experience, it was worth taking the tirne to speak albeit in a nervous and ill-prepared manner to a group of students who might not otherwise be exposed to Yale. I walked away from my session with a -belief in the importance· of expanding recruittnent, and a renewed appreciation for the help that I received when applying to college. Several months later, the boy in the suit and the oversized glasses wrote me to say that he was walking away from our high school with letters of acceptance to Hat vard and Yale.

Mina Kimes, ajunior in Dave11_/>0rt College, is Production Manager of TNJ.

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ostumes that appear to have Python's Spamalot. been ftlched from a Medieval How did this deliberately low-budget Times theme restaurant are theater end up in such glitzy company? carefully laid out behind a The answer lies closer to York Square postage stamp-sized stage. The audience than Times Square. The endeavor is waits patiendy, toying with napkins and modeled after the original Yale Cabaret, waiting for dinner to arrive, as the min- a theater located on Park Street that utes tick away. stages bare-bones shows· after only a Finally the house n1anager takes the week of rehearsals .as a release from the stage to introduce the evening's entertain- tensions of rigorous drama school trainment. He greets the audience informa11y ing. The resulting delightful romp and then offers the usual admonition to through groundling theater is the passilence all cell phones: ''The actors will kill sion of a morley group of Yale School of you if you don't turn them off." . Drama graduate~ who . call themselves After realizing that a few of the front the Unofficial New York Yale Cabaret row patrons seem to have slipped in (UNYYC) pronounced with purpose without receiving programs, the director as "unique." emerges from the woodwork (literally) The creators of Yale Cabaret's new and rushes around trying to fmd extras. incarnation wanted to retain the theatriFinally he leaps at an unsuspecting cal immediacy, creativity, and relaxed blonde seated stage left. "Did you read form of the original while freeing it that already?" he anxiously asks the from academia's influence. The anxieties woman, reaching to pluck the program of drama school have been replaced by from her hands like a golden egg from a the pressure of real life in Manhattan, goose. Luckily, a stack of unclairned pro- prompting a redux of an old school tragrams diverts his attention, and the play- dition to alleviate stress. bill remains in the flustered blonde's The driving force behind these • cabaret works is a deep reservoir of gutgnp. And all of this is pre-show! wrenching desire to create without critiThis blend of chaos, spirit, and itnagi- cism, to make art for art's sake and not native theater lives on top of a Bennigan's, for the conunercial success that reigns creating a highly unusual blend of bar over the rest of Broadway. But as anyone who has sat through snacks and sixteenth century history class in the core of the Big Apple. This is not an open-mic night knows, no amount just any Bennigan's. It is the one on the · of heart can turn your next-door corner of Forty Seventh Street and Eighth neighbor into a pop diva. If these Avenue Titnes Square, Manhattan, cen- UNYYC cohorts aren't looking for the ter of American conunercial theater, acclaim craved by many theatrical home of Wicked, Hairsprt!J and Monty artists (TONY TONY TONY) then 42 .

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what exactly are they creating? The company's inaugural production, Most Happy, was written and directed by UNYYC artistic director George· Tynan Crowley, who graduated from Yale School of Drama in 1990. It's a blithely simple one-act play exploring the complicated life __ , ' of Anne Boleyn. The o'l:--ea~ess actors' energy and passion show in their ~mphat· ic diction and excited staging. .f\mbitious lines such as ''Art springs from truth," and ''You're a poet, you're invested in delu· sion" aside, the play is engaging and light, while subdy educational. The actors' complex, detailed emotions are painted in broad, obvious strokes, favoring heightened drama over more accessible, believable naturalism. Popular opinion be damned! The point of this production is to portray the world from its creators' viewpoint. What they lack in slick showmanship, they compensate for in pure devotion to the theater. Dana Watkins, a non-Yale affiliated long-time New York actor who plays Anne's love interest, Sir Thomas Wyatt, twitched about the corners of his mouth when asked about the process of working with C. ''Everyone involved in this ,, has got a tremendous amount of heart, he said, "which tnakes up for a lot." UNNYC board member Mahayana Landowne DRA '98, graduated from Yale and moved to Manhattan to begin her career as a freelance director. She was nai.ve to the cold reality of living as a professional artist, and quickly grew frustrated with the need to constandy market herself in order to obtain more "

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jobs while trying to complete her current one. In order to focus once more on the creation of pure theater, Landowne decided to recreate the cabaret of her college years. She described the cabaret as "a place where it's more about hope and crafting," a haven designed to restore the love of theater often tainted after gradu• anon. "It's more about creating the work;' she explained: UNNYC does not bow to the pressure to produce a hit regardless of its artistic quality, a pressure prevalent in the professional theater world. Searching for a soft place to fall in the jagged landscape of the New York theater scene, UNYYC has recreated a tiny bit of the Yale bubble in the modest theatrical space~ above Bennigan's. Far from being Jirnit~d ' to artists, the nostalgic longing for ~hat was 9nce 1n college"the best years of"..our lives" is a universal sentirnen~. ;(:~llige ·holds the last vestiges of chlldhd6 <f ' it's ~n incubator ,:,.. in which most 'Yale students can still enjoy Jitnited responsibilities and total creative freedom without concern for when the next paycheck is corning or where they will sleep that riight. The thought of leaving the warmth and comfort of the incubator is daunting diploma in hand, forced to take on the world, ready or not. Some members of UNNYC have found the struggle_to be far worse than it is for their I -banking colleagues. Competition is fierce, and although friends are still likely to cast friends (the Yale "mafia" does exist in New York), prospective collaborators no longer see each other in the dining halls or on the lawn, making connections hard to rnaintain and jobs harder to find. Economic need often outweighs the desire to create artistically meaningful work, a problem rarely encountered in the relatively free environment of drama school. The pressure to achieve inunediate post-graduate success leads many actors to emphasize their best attribute and become typecast for a certain kind of role. '~ lot of people are seen as only doing one kind of work," Landowne laments, brushing her hair away from her •

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University

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eyes, which are hidden behind a pair of will .make them the most money. Even black-rimmed glasses. Seven years out of regional and off-Broadway theaters, run drama school, she has found life on the as non-profit companies without the · outside to be fraught with the pitfalls of responsibilities to shareholders that managing a career and living on a tight cotrunercial productions have, must still budget. Leaving the college bubble sell tickets and receive grants to survive. means that making theater will become a They, too, remain bound to the public's different process, but how exacdy does it fickle opinion. • So what does this all inean for change? In the inunortal words of Deep Throat: "Follow the money." UNYYC? A tiny theater above a bar, where College productions are usually funded by the school, which is in turn fund- actors will be applauded for their ed by tuition, donations and grants. The efforts while the audience politely show does not have to be a hit. This ignores the waiter caught in the spotgives crazy college kids the chance to be light, will probably not be too cotnmeras experimental and self-indulgent as cially successful. However, if the they want. Actors try their hand at UNYYC members can attract their feldirecting while set designers become low graduates who also yearn for a lead singers, all to the comforting return to their bright .college years, they applause of their friends in the audience. can succeed in creating "a place where The university is a creative haven where, the audience is also a place for Yale in the words of Crowley's Sir Thomas people to meet," as Landownde hopes. ' By bringing together former classWyatt, students can "write (create, act, sing) because [they] see_ things the way mates, new recruits, and an array of they are" not simply to entertain a pay- actors seeking artistic freedom and innovation into an extended version of the ing audience. In the real world, however, theatrical : Yale bubble, UNYYC may yield a sucproductions have to earn money through cess more valuable than a Broadway hit. ticket sales, or face bankruptcy. Constandy watching checkbooks, public Summer Banks is a Sophomore in Etra Stiles opinion polls and Playbill grosses, pro- College. • ducers pressure their creative teams to shape their work into what they believe 43

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stare at the hundreds of early editions of Leaves cif Grass. Green spines and brown spines, all with gold-lettered tides rendered in plant-like tendrils, crowd the shelves for yards. I pull down one volume that includes Song of MJse!f, and find my favorite passage, section six: '~ child said What is the grass? fetching · it to me with full hands..." Quiedy at first, I begin to read aloud. Soon self-conscious, I pause to see if anyone is near enough to hear me. No one is; I atn alone. I read more confidently through the . end of the section. '~d to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." . Since the fall of my freshman year, I have worked at Beinecke, the library that houses the most rare and valuable items in the Yale Collection. My job is to help Pat Willis and Nancy Kuhl curate exhibits for the Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL). Curating means culling materials from the YCAL archives, which dwell in the basement, and crafting a narrative to tie those materials together. In the basement, however, there is no narrative: a fragment of papyrus lies on a shelf not far from a fifteenth century bible, and a box of nails from Thoreau's cabin is not much farther. Everything sits near

others of their kind, yet the basement gives me the sense that the records of all mankind lie within a ten-foot radius of wherever I stand. Only Beinecke employees have access to this subterranean floor, which is reached by the elevator behind the Public Services desk on the concourse level. Since the library's ferocious security policy mandates that not ·even an employee may take a floor plan of the archives outside the building, the basement must be described instead of shown. Emerging from the elevator '

or a pern1anent pillar. To access a particular shelf, I rotate the handle at its end to roll it apart from its neighbors, creating just enough space for me and ·a box to slip by. Each chamber has several rows of units. To reinforce the sterility of the interior·design scheme, neon tube-bulbs on the ceiling prqvid~ cold, honest light. · . One of the chaanbers contains mostly books, while .the other ..three contain eve · g that isn't a book: manuscripts, letters, maps, periodicals; photographs, microfilrn reels, broadsides, papyri, music '

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into one of four large chambers that take up most of underground Beinecke Plaza, nearly all I can see is white: white linolemn floors, white cement-block walls, the occasional white table stacked with white call slips. Most prominent are the sides of white shelves pressed together to form makeshift walls. White double-faced bookshelves pack together on a floor track, shelves knocking against flanking shelves. Extta space lies between the end of a unit and the wall

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grey boxes ot, if the material is recently acquit ed, plain cardboard ones. 'I'hroughout the basement, amidst the white of the rooms and the grey and brown of the boxes, huge red fire extinguishers offer hints of color that seem ·less a relief than a spght thteat. Also red are the little wall-mounted maintenance units that keep the atmosphere · at seventy degrees Fahrenheit and fifty percent huanidity. In the event of a fire, these units would emit halon gas, which depletes the oxygen supply just enough so that fire can't breathe but people still can. Off of the four main chambers stem •

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a few small maintenance rooms. My favorite is the thirty-degrees below zero "Blast Freezer," to which all new acquisitions are sent to be rid of worms, bacteria, and lice. I often get lost. ·After three years on the jo~· I can still be found wandering · among boxes of playbills when I'm searching for a lantern slide; I scan Chinese book tides when what I want is a first edition of Mol:(y Dick. Sometitnes I am merely not where I am supposed to be. I might poke among the shelves of objects, greeting again the farni1iar bust of Thornton Wilder, the enormous African drum, the wooden rnarionettes, and the inexplicable collection of longnecked ceramic cats. Sometitnes I explore the books or boxes near the one I'm seeking _.yesterday I was loo~g for a Tennyson.manuscript.and discovered a box rnarked 'J}J.e:xi'i!der Pope Collection, Box 1 of 1." -Wlia.t:,. choice had I but to _,..-pause and reaq: · -a. "'":- Pt:Jpe le~er kindly ' requesting that a fashionable lady pay up her debt? I am typically alone in the basement. Most employees descend only briefly, to secure a particular item for someone in the reading room. With no impatient scholar awaiting my ascent, I allow myself to linger. I feel anxious if another employee spots me delinquently unfolding a vest of Gertrude Stein's rather than dutifu11y replacing boxes with call slips. If I interact with another employee, our exchanges are short and awkward. ''Excuse me" is the most frequendy uttered phrase, since I must navigate around others with the wooden YCAI. cart on which I place the loot I have pulled for an exhibition. Solitude allows me the rare chance to be entirely with my thoughts. In the whole World, I am the onfy one at this moment surrounded l:(y p~s written in Eugene ONeill's cramped hand. Or, Nobocfy knows I am holdzng and reading a letter from Melville to Hawthorne. Or even the obsessively literal, I, · Kopfl:y, am clutching a wooden tablet from the fourth century. I cannot read it. It is in Greek. No one knows these things. Occasionally, proprieta 1 y excitement L

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yields to profound spiritual reaction. ing? Why should I be allowed to sift Sophomore year, I worked on an exhi- through Annie Dillard's college notebition of letters written by American books, especially when she is still alive? writers. While crouched on the basement What would Freud think of my analyzfloor, poking around a low shelf of ing the epistolary psychoanalysis he sent loosely organized YCAL boxes, I found to H.D.? I have not the justification of a folder marked "Dickinson." I had being an academic researcher but then, searched the online database for "Emily is even this a justification? Actua11y, it is: Dickinson" and not found helpful these archives, and the exhibitions they resUlts, so this folder startled me. feed into, deepen our understanding of Dickinson has long been a favorite writer history and art. Nevertheless, there is of mine one of those worshipped something a bit creepy and voyeuristic ones whose past physical existence about my basement ventures. I must seems somehow doubtful. I had hardly remind myself that most of the collecopened the box when four small, weight- tions were given to the Beinecke with the less sheets drifted onto my lap. I stared artists' or their family's consent. Annie down at the slanted, widely spaced letter- Dillard knows that scholars might be ing in faded pencil on grayish paper, dis- reading her college doodles and lists of crushes. She put them here. cendng words with difficulty: ~ (To the faithful Outside the library, I often feel like a one-woman PR firm _for Beinecke, urgAbsence is condensed Presence. ing my friends to attend the library-sponTo others-'-sored poetry readings, visit the exhibiBut there are no others. " I got ch111s. I f~lt heady. For the first time tions, and request archives form the reading room. But what is most thril1ing I worried that no one else was around.what if I fainted? I did_not. And since to me about the Beinecke the basethis poem was part of a letter, I included ment cannot be shared. I walk through it in the exhibition. I forgot the call nmn- the basement back to the elevator, havber, and now when I search "Emily - ing fetched with full hands several acidDickinson" on the database, I still can't free boxes. The condensed presence of find the letter. hundreds of poets hovers in the air:. Sometitnes I wonder about my easy access to all this material. What entides Emi!J Kopfl:y, a senior i~ Branford College, is me to read Zelda Fitzgerald's letters, with on the staff of TN]. T\:.1 their sad evidence of her mental unravel•

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"The Bourbon Reds, like the Black Spanish, Blue Slate, and Royal P,alm, are heritage breeds... they are small birds, with a juicy texture and rick, complex flavors." -YSFB "Turkeys" The Yale Sustainable Food Project, a new branch of Yale dining services, believes in good food, food that nourishes the finest minds of New England. From the fabled Berkeley test · '~ ovens to the sprawling basement kitchens of Commons, YSFP fertilizes a community in which the delectable pleasures of growing, cooking, and eating food are woven into the · ·• • undergraduate experience at Yale. Bewitching, 27 year-old Associate Director Melina ,.,. .. Shannon-DiPietro wants to beat the whites of Yale students' eating habits to a frothy peak ··' with "a new approach to food: one where foocl is both sustenance, pleasure, and the ethics of the day." YSFP's applauded grass-:fed burgers, lamb-and-feta patties, butternut squash piz- .· · · ·• • · · zas, and seasonal heirloom tomato salads are he:r way of doing just that. •• · •· · · · -·-

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If the ubiquitous table tents were a squishy lamb-and-feta patty, Melina would be lamb, the main ingredient. She crafts their copy, plucking words from the soil of her wit with the same intensity she turns against the garden's hardy radicchio crop. Gordon Jenkins would be the feta the piquant curd that kicks things up. A dash of flavor thrown in to zest up the table tents, Gordon admits he has "condoned, and in many cases exaggerated the whimsy," though ' · • · •..· :·•. ·• · • he protests that his wordplay "comes from a desire to keep food and environmental literature , .· " fun." Joshua Viertel, YSFP's other director, and Lucas Dreier '04, a full-time farmhand, stand · ., ' . in as .taste testers, editing the table tents' text to ensure their ingredients have been well blended but not over-stirred. Finally, the perfected concoction must be laid out and grilled by Thames Printing Inc., whose head-of-press once telephoned Melina to profess his enthusiasm for printing on recycled paper. :-

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Taking several days and many high-quality ingredients to prepare, the table tents are a rare organic delight. While they can be frozen and shipped they have been found as far afield as Beatrice, Nebraska, Berkeley, California, and New York City, where Columbia University has filched entire excerptS for its cafeterias they are typically served in Yale's own 14 dining halls. There, common as collard greens, they replace the backs of cereal boxes for thousands of homesick college students. Unfazed by the vicissitudes of the seasons that regulate the food they describe, the table tents provide reliable solace, day in and day out. For those who can't make it through the gates of Berkeley College to enjoy Melina's exquisite YSFP treats, the tents are an everpresent alternative. However inedible. -JonnyDach YALE S u sTAINABI.E

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I don't want to · work for The New Journal! 1 have bette · things to do with my time than work for a magazine that has received every major

writing prize at Yale as well as the Rolling Stone College Jou Award. Besides, you and I bott know that The New Journal is just a traininJ ground for media types like TNJ founder, and

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Pulitzer Prize winnel

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Daniel Yergin or past TNJ staffer, and editot

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. · of the · ·•. ·. •· · · · · • .•. •. ·•. :•.· ./· . · . Tribune, Jack Fuller. c. :- ..

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;'':.: · ·. ·. .•. · · · • .· •. · · • ·• · · . · And you think just because The New ,~~1::::;: Journal is the oldest magazine at Yale an also has the largest circulation, 1'm supposed to be · - ·' ,. impressed? Give me some credit. So, l~ beg of you, go ask someon• who cares·.

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·I, while we won't be seeing him at any TNJ meetings, we would •

love to see you!

The New Journal is looking for innovative writers, DTP demigods, cutting-edge designers, dynamic phot ographers, artistes extraordinaires, business tycoons, and interested, interesting Yalies in generaL If one of the above applies to you, come to one of our two snappy organizational meetings or can us.

November 2005

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Recording the Holocaust: SteYen Spielberg

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