Volume 41 - Issue 1

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Publisher Lauren Harrison

Editor-in-Chief Nicole Allan

Managing Editors Mitch Reich, Laura Zax

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THE NEW JOURNAL •

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Volume 41, Number 1 September 2008

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FEATURES

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PRISONER's DILEMMA

Statehouse politics lead New Haven to forge its own solution to prisoner re-entry.

by Nick Handler

16 MISSION IMPROBABLE For young Mormons who c~oose to spread their faith at home and abroad, college can wait.

by Pria Anand

SNAPSHOTS 7 RENOVATION VACATION Contractors recount JE's construction woes.

by Mitch Reich •

23 MAGNAC TER A New Haven charter school treads uncommon ground.

by Kate Selker

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STANDARDS 4

POINTS OF DEPARTURE

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PROFILE Prince of the Elmhurst by Rachel Engler

26 PERSONAL ESSAY A Whole Latte Love by Aditi Ramakrishnan

28 THE CRITICAL ANGLE Scene and Not Heard by LauraZax

30 ENDNOTE We Salute You, JE Students by Staff • •

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06S20. Office address: 30S Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2008 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor in chief is prohibited. While this magazine is

published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Seventy-five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to memben of the Yale and New Haven community. ' Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $18. Two years, $32 The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing servkes are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

September 2008

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UPPER CRUST "Big Pete and Little Pete are big pizza-eaters," says Alicia Mehr, Big Pete's daughter and Little Pete's mother. Raising Alicia in Cheshire, Connecticut, Big Pete inculcated her in the ways of pizza. The family eschewed New Haven's holy trinity Pepe's, Sally's, and Modern for anonymous suburban joints. "There's an awful lot of really good pizza other than those tourist trap places," Alicia confides.

Whenever she visits Connecticut from Washington, D:c., where she's planted her own family, she eats at Grande Apizza, a nondescript restaurant on a strip of East Haven highway. And after she and her husbc;1nd, Joel, tasted nearly every pie on the Eastern seaboard in preparation for the launch of their own pizza restaurant last April, they settled on Grande's as a model.

Joel trained in the Grande's kitchen to perfect ~e crispy, blackened crust that sets "New Haven-style" pizza apart from New York-style, Naples-style, Chicago-style, and every other entry in the serious pizzaeater's index. "In New York," Joel says, "the dough has usually some olive oil in it, possibly a little honey or sugar. In Naples, the dough has egg in it. We're j~t flour, water, salt, and yeast."

When settling on a location, the couple looked no farther than a Metro stop away from Petworth, their own D.C. neighborhood. Joel grew up in a nearby suburb, but he imagined his long yearned-for "pjzzaconcept" restaurant not on the leafY av-

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young, decidedly hip patrons attracted to enues of Friendship Heights or the babyColumbia Heights' manageable rents and strollered sidewalks of Bethesda, but in the hipster cache. bizarre mish-mash of drug deals, dive bars, Culinarily, Alicia and Joel merge their and superstores that is the "transitioning Elm City loyalty with their shared Italian neighborhood" of Columbia Heights . fetish. White clams adorn their "New HaBordering Howard University and the ven" pie, while the vegetarian bounty of frat-infused bar scene of the Adams Morthe "Edge of the Woods" pizza references gan neighborhood, Columbia Heights still Whalley's ancient health food store and bears the scars of the 1968 riots that ravthe meaty "Staven" gives a jocular nod to aged Washington, D.C. after Martin LuEast Haven. ther King, Jr.'s assassination. Ten years ago, The centerpiece of the menu, Pete's the area was notorious for barbed wire, va"homage to the birthplace of pizza," is cant lots, and crime. While crime is still "Sorbillo's Original." In a stunning bea problem though it is decreasing the trayal of Pete's civic namesake, however, barbed wire and lots are being torn down this birthplace is not New Haven but Italy. and snatched up by developers. In 1999, The Sorbillo is more calzone than pizza, a after the city built a Metro stop on 14th and big slab of dough filled with ricotta and Irving, two of the neighborhood's main salumi that is as foreign to the New Haven thoroughfares, the stars aligned for the "urpizza scene as Pete's floral centerpieces and ban renewal" of Columbia Heights. Flankeclectic wine list. ing the heavily trafficked Metro stop today But, according to Alicia, even the fiercare a spanking new Target and Best Buy, est devotees of Pepe's and Sally's don't seem a sparkling Washington Sports Club, and, to mind. "We get a lot of people who grew wedged between Potbelly and Five Guys, up or went to school at Yale," she says. two of D.C.'s largest fast food chains, a . .

"Recent graduates, older graduates. A lot Peroni-umbrella adorned restaurant called of people with silly attitudes like 'Oh, this Pete's New Haven Style Apizza. can't be like New .Haven pizza. I'll try it, On a Wednesday evening in July, care. wont' compare... ' But we've b ut I 'm sure 1t fully scruffy men in straw fedoras lounged · built quite a good fan base out of those reunder the umbrellas with local microbrews ally skeptical people." · while two young families shared pizzas at a Five months after opening Pete's Apizza's long, blond wood table inside. An Adidasattired man awaited a take-out pizza after . doors, Alicia estimates that the bulk of the restaurant's regular customers resides with· a work-out across the street, and a solo pain a five to six-block radius. While this area tron drank wine with her pizza while readincludes everything from dilapidated row ing a novel at the polished counter. Weavhouses to futuristic condominium building throughout them all was an ancient ings to public housing blocks, Pete's happy Italianate man with a smoothly folded face munchers of $23.95 pizzas seem more and one gold tooth, wiping down tables aligned with Barack Obama's brand of and clearing plates, a silent fixture of old arugula elitism than a government-assisted world charm. lifestyle might allow. As Columbia Heights And somewhere between old and new treads the gentrification path of other iconwould Pete's Apizza (pronounced, Joel inic neighborhoods such as Brooklyn or San sists, "ah-BEETS") like to be. Despite its Francisco's Mission District, New Haven, New Haven moniker, the restaurant grasps ironically, is gaining culinary name value. at an Italian sensibility. Photos ofVenetian After all, first it's a metro stop, - then canals, medieval stone alleyways, and sunit's a Target, but once the New Havensoaked vineyards beam down at diners; a style pizzeria moves in, the yuppies have framed Italian newspaper hangs near the truly arrived. bathroom; and a clock ticks off what suspiciously appears to be Italian time. Yet the cement floor, imported sodas, and eco-Nicole Allan conscience (a sign in the ladies' room reads: "The hand dryer is a bit of a drag ... but we use way less paper this way!") appeal to the •

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PIANIST ENVY Last spring, Cafe Bottega on the Green blitzed the Yale campus with an arsenal of hand-drawn flyers beckoning students to pair an epic and ancient martial art with their Friday night martinis. Why not take a break from school, sit back with vour " girlfriends, and enjoy a piano duel?

While I vividly imagined menacing Baby Grands slashing each other's strings with rapiers clenched between their keys, or at least pianists from warring fan1ilies duking it out with sabers and epees, I realized that the reality might be a bit tamer than expected, more friendly musicians' rivalry than all-out bloodbath. For starters, the so-called piano duel was to take place in a cafe with an identity crisis demure coffee shop by day, not-quite-raucous bar by night. What's more, the event's name, "Keys to the City at Cafe Bottega on the Green," was too cutnbersome for an effective battle crv. ' Piano duels, to my initial disappointment, are relatively civil affairs and, for the most part, do not include a Galoisian fight to the death. They don't even have a winner. At Bottega, two pianists, decked in starred sunglasses and glittery pink tophats, switch off playing minute-long, eminently si~gable renditions of songs that often sound straight off a mix tape made for the middle school dance. The audience's role is not only to sing along, but also to toss money, strip dub-style, at the selfSeptember 2008

dubbed "piano whores" in order to request a favorite song. Perhaps song prostitution ler.s the audience feel like they are part of the duel dropping Hamiltons just like Aaron Burr. l thought I'd arrived unfashionably early at 8:30, but the line was already out the door. I felt like a Very Important Person as the manager whisked me past the partiers corralled by red velvet ropes to the bar for a free drink, until I saw him sidle up to three already-tipsy women with the proposition: «You guys want some free shots?"

At least the bachelorette party attendees were singing for the.irs. The promise of dueling pianos attracted an impressive array of local characters, and the lure of free alcohol, it's fair to say, brought out the best in them. I somehow became a party to two fifty-year-old women grinding during "Baby Got Back," with only their outfits topping their performance: skintight denim miniskirts, matching heels, and Lycra halters that might have seen a previous 1ife as safari camouflage. At least their shoes were shielded from the stick of spilled alcohol by a thin layer of crushed peanut shells.

On the other side of the room, a gaggle of sixty-year-ol.ds sipping wine under a pinata and a balloon printed with the words «Over The Hill" seemed less enticed by the prospect of getting liquored up.

"It's alcohol: Smile, for the love of God," a pianist chastised them between renditions of "Sweet Caroline" and a surprisingly authentic "Gin and Juice." The ladies were good sports, only wincing slightly as the crowd acted out the Divinyls' greatest hit, «I Touch Myself" Chowing down on their pizzettes and Kobe beef sliders, they murmured quietly, impervious to the duel raging on all sides. %en "Great Balls of Fire" entered the battle zone, however, the Over the Hill group couldn't help but join in, ballroom-dancing and head-bopping with the best of them.

The pianists used their powerful positions as guardians of the Keys to the City to forge peace between warring camps.

Unless, of course, thev had started the ' feud, pitching Sox fans against Yankees in a name-that~tune contest, or reminding a birthday girl forced onstage that "your friends have pimped you out to us, so, uh, we can do anything we want." Occasionally, they transformed into oracles dispensing opaque pop-culture prophesies.

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"Only you can prevent forest fires," one harangued, "or keep Brittany in rehab."

Nor did the patrons feel a need to silence their opinions. "The crowd is getting sluttier, don't you think?" shouted one man, trying to look displeased as he scanned the women in the crowd. "Soon it will just be the sluts and the jacked-up beefheads/' He had reason to fear the "jacked-up beefheads." Moments later they caused the night's first duel-related fatality a table, succumbing to wounds incurred during the "Soulja Boy'' dance.

Miraculously, I survived to see the emptying bar, still litter~d with peanut shells, as I departed from the courageous few who were still, as one patron put it, "immersing themselves in the cheesy." Like a witness to an execution, I imagined, I felt elated, exhausted, and alive.

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FRAMING OF THE SHREW On a cloudy Friday morning at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Beatrice Babbs is feeding two giant elephant shrews their first meal of the day. A pair of brothers named Makya and Bindi, the shrews scamper around the leaf litter lining their glass cage as Babbs, a full-time assistant at the Peabody, tosses them rnealworms. "In the morning," she explains, "they get the worms, and we toss them crickets in the afternoons." The brothers' diet is supplemented throughout the day by a metal dish of diced apples and dried

catfood sprinkled with peanut oil. Luckily, This is not the first live animal exhibit to grace the Peabody's diorama and Babbs is not the only one responsible for taxidermy-filled halls. In 2004, the mu- ~ the upkeep of these picky eaters. seum housed a family of cuttlefish in a Jim Sirch also cares about elephant five-hundred-gallon marine tank as part shrews. As Babbs' supervisor and the priof the "In Search of the Giant Squid" exmary caretaker of Makya and Bindi, he hibit. Before that, it played host to a litter coordinated the year-long loan of the enof emu chicks in the Great Hall, placing dangered pair from Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Makya and the fledgling birds next to a reconstructed Bindi star in "Travels in the Tree of Life," Stegosaurus skeleton to emphasize their a temporary exhibit based upon two words · evolutionary link. ("Most paleontologists the non-premeds among us have ·probably believe that birds are directly descended forgotten from some · long-ago biology from dinosaurs," Sirch explains). And if all class: genomics (the study of organisms ·. goes according to plan, the brothers won't in terms of their DNA) and phylogeny be the last live residents of the Peabody. As (the evolutionary history of a spedes). The their year-long tenure approaches its end, exhibit aims to demonstrate the intercon- . Makya and Bindi will have to make room nectedness of all life forms, revealing some · for the next exotic species to crawl to the museum: Babbs, Sirch, and the rest of the surprising interspecies links along the Peabody staff are currently installing a new way. Though elephant shrews are neither glass enclosure for an upcoming exhibit of elephants nor shrews, Sirch says, they are tropical leaf-cutter ants. · distantly related to the elephant through a common ancestor of the .superorder Afrotheria, which evolved out of Africa about "----:Mai \%ng 100 million years ago.

Sirch, a tall man with a salt and pepper moustache that gives him the authoritative air of an Ivy League professor crossed with the host of a home improvement show, says that there are 16 .known species of elephant shrews in the world. Weighing in at roughly one pound each, Makya and Bindi's clan of Black and Rufous Giant Elephant Shrews were knQwn as the largest of these miniature creatures until recently, when an even larger speCies weighing in at one and one-third pounds dwarfed them • tn status.

Originally from the forests of Eastern Tanzania, elephant shrews are now endangered due to both habitat loss and their status as the favored bushmeat of the indigenous population. Only in the past ten years have they been kept in captivity, and, besides the Peabody, zoos in Philadelphia and Denver are the only other places in the country where the long-snouted, naked-tailed, speedy-legged creatures can be found. Their bizarre appearance and rare status has bred some confusion among visitors. Sirch, officially the Peabody Education Coordinator, mourns the inaccuracy with which Makya and Bindi are often identified. . ''A lot of kids will come over and say: 'Look at the anteaters!"' he says. ''And this one elderly man who came into the exhibit stubbornly insisted that he was Illustrations by Ali Seitz looking at a pair of opossums."

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Yale's best annual traditions are meant to be seen: the Game, the Safety Dance, the reopening of a newly renovated Residential College. What's not meant to be seen are the screw-ups: the how-could-I-havedone-that expression after a fumble, the lights drunkenly flipped on in Commons, or and this is the nightmare scenario . a ¡ move-in day at Jonathan Edwards with fewer beds than students angling to sleep in them.

"I don't think any college has been as far behind as JE," says the college's master, Gary Haller, of the much-delayed renovation. "Certainly no college has been forced not to house some of its students." Fifteen students, to be exact, are currently holed up in style at the Omni hotel, courtesy of Yale's pocketbook, while construction crews render their intended rooms in JE's Weir Hall habitable.

The cause of this administrative disaster is simple enough: triage. Either the college was to have no functioning servery, kitchen, or dining hall in time for its freshman banquet on September 1, or it was to be unable to house some of its students. The University chose the latter. It was forced to make that decision in the first place, howSeptember 2008

ever, because the college's renovation had just barely righted itself from the brink of a full-fledged catastrophe.

The problems at Jonathan Edwards began shortly after its fifteen-month renovation began, during the project's ripping-up and gutting-out phase. Tearing apart old walls often reveals structural problems that aren't apparent at the outset of a renovation. While cutting into JE's seventy-yearold terracotta tiles, Yale's construction crew ran into constant difficulties. "There was a tremendous amount of demolition that had to be done," says Tim Galvin, the project manager at William A. Berry & Son, the private contractor that oversaw the project's implementation. "Many times the actual conditions were different from what the design team may have anticipated." Again and again, Galvin was forced to return to Yale's architects at Herbert S. Newman & Partners to ask them to revise their designs.

Alex Mackenzie, who runs the painting subcontractor working on the site, contrasts the JE job with his experience working on the 2006 renovation of Silliman College. "In my opinion," he says, "the JE building seemed older, and there's

a lot more issues we ran into."

Demolition was initially supposed to have been completed, and reconstruction well underway, by December. But Galvin, Yale's Construction Manager David Cripe, and the project's architects were still troubleshooting the deconstruction a month later. "It's not a new observation, the fact that we're behind schedule," Haller noted a week before the college reopened. "It's been dear since January of this year." Demolition wasn't fully completed until February, causing a further spiral of delays.

"The demolition went q~ longer than what had originally been planned," Galvin concedes. ''And any time the demolition is continuing, the design can't be finalized.

Then certain materials had to be ordered later than you originally anticipated." .

The project didn't kick into crisis mode. until the weeks surrounding Commencement, when, after a few attempts to play catch-up, work remained two months behind schedule. Yale has no "Plan B" in case a college renovation prohibitively spills over into the fall. JE students cannot be moved back into Swing Spac.e , which will already be crawling with Calhoun refugees

by September, and four hundred beds at '

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Simone Berkower JE '09 will pound out her first assignments in her Omni hotel room.

the Omni is a charge most Yale administrators would be loath to make. "The end date can't move," says Galvin plainly. "Ev~ erybody woke up when they realized things weren't going to happen, and things got a little more hectic," says Anthony Masucci, the project manager at Enterprise, the renovation's plumbing and heating subcontractor. "There was never panic," continues Galvin, speaking carefully. "There was a lot of close scrutiny."

This scrutiny has manifested itself in ten'- to twelve-hour workdays for the construction crew, seven days a week, since May. "We've brought up our manpower," says Mackenzie with a touch of machismo.

The construction crew has been working ten to twelvehour days> seven days a week> since May. "Typically we would cut back on our manpower in the last couple of months of a job," Masucci adds, "but we had to keep 8

our guys up to 18 or twenty guys." While a little overtime in a bad economy is a blessing, too much is "pretty inefficient, to be honest with you," says Masucci. Several subcontractors quietly point fingers at the . front end of the project;, from the derelict designers to the demolition delays.

The two-month overtime marathon allayed fears that the college would be unusable come September, but the scheduling gap was still closed by only a month.

"The project team was acting to minimize any impact to the students at the start of school," says Tom Conroy, a spokesperson for the Univ~rsity. This meant that, in order to move students in, work had to be stopped cold on some portions of the basement, the faculty offices, and Weir Hall while all resources were devoted to finishing the bulk of the residences and the dining complex. The abandoned areas will be finished in two phases, the first scheduled to conclude by September 19 and the second by October 17.

Even so, a few corners had to be cut to make it to the finish line. "The symmetry of the ceiling and the lighting fixture [is off], the links should be matched and

they're not," says Haller, blaming a construction error. "There was a choice, either go back and take it all out and put it all in again, and have the servery not open, or have slight modifications. I'm convinced that nobody who doesn't know what the problem was will even notice a difference."

Sod was laid down in the courtyard only days before studen~s arrived, and JE students will have to endure construction in their college for at least six weeks after they have moved in.

Yale has no "Plan B" in case a college renovation prohibitively spills over into the all The most notable victims of the delays, of course, are the Omni fifteen. But Lesley Kiger' 10, a field hockey player exiled from her suite for the time being, is keenly aware of the perks. "Living in the Omni definitely has its benefits!" she writes in an email.

"King-size bed, air conditioning, wireless, big television. We even get chocolates on our pillow!" Haller has also assured that all students living in the Omni will have single rooms and have their clothes laundered on the University's tab. The hotel's isolation, however, is what makes Kiger most eager to return to her college. Hiking to team practice shortly after dawn is an ordeal, and "it's really lonely and lacking the residential college atmosphere. My room is on the same floor as my suitemates' but is not near them and not connected by a common room," she explains.

For its part, Yale has kept mum about its reported frustration with the contractors for letting this mess get out of hand.

The University has worked with Galvin's crew before on Science Hill, and Jerry Warren, the former associate vice president for Construction and Renovation, selected him again. But there is still some audible grumbling. "They have, of course, tried to make me happy in every way," says Haller.

"But there's certain things they can't do.

They can't get all the students in. They do things they're not supposed to. They can't deliver what they need to deliver, which is a completed college."

·TN Mitch Reich, a senior in Pierson College, is a managing editor o J. THE NEW JOURNAL

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During the last few days of August, while the majority ofYalies awkwardly haul boxes up residential college stairwells, those not living in dormitories can be found in the neighborhoods surrounding the university, moving into their first apartments, buying kitchen gadgets, and dreaming of dinner parties and queen-sized beds. According to the Yale Daily News, a third of Yale seniors move off campus, and the Elmhurst, a large brick building on Elm Street, becomes home to many of them.

One resident of the Elmhurst, however, never needs to unpack. Phil Prince TD '52 YSM '59 lives comfortably in his fifthfloor apartment. Prince is the only nonundergraduate resident of the notoriously grungy student colony. A New Havener for the past sixty years, he has made his home in the Elmhurst for the past twenty ~

September 2008

graduating as a Latin major, he studied music history at the graduate school before receiving his master's at the Yale School of Music. An organist, he was employed for 22 years by Christ Church on the corner of Elm Street and Whalley -Avenue. In 1974, Prince was awarded an associate fellowship in Stiles College for his contribution to the New Haven community. For a while, he took his meals in the dining hall so he could get to know the Stiles undergraduates.

Prince moved to the Elmhurst in 1988 to live near his retired mother on Lynwood Place. At that time, he explains, the Elmhurst housed mostly law and other graduate students. "There were a few couples. One or two of them had children actually, or a child; it wasn't really a large enough place to raise a family decently so

-and has no plans to move.

Rudys and Phil Prince may~ very well be the oldest establishments on the block.

Prince grew up in Illinois, the son of a preacher-man. When his father took a new job as a minister in Greenwich, Prince enrolled in a Connecticut prep school. "I liked it, but I didn't really fit in at all, being a preacher's son. A lot of the people had come from really wealthy backgrounds.

This was the same with Yale," says Prince, who worked to put himself through Yale.

"No fraternities or anything for me." ¡ Prince arrived in New Haven for his freshman year in the fall of 1948. After

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they didn't stay there too long after that.

Then gradually it became almost entirely inhabited by undergraduates."

The neighborhood, like the building within it, has undergone a significant transformation. Prince remembers a quieter New Baven without today's gourmet restaurants and ambulance sirens. Over the years, the view from his fifth-floor window has changed. Three now-absent poplar trees stood before the building, and the Cosi restaurant down the street was a firehouse. The only establishment that has always been a fixture .of Elm Street life is Rudy's Restaurant, though Prince is none too fond of the infamous bar: "Rudy's has been here for a long time, and it's been one of the detriments of living in the Elmhurst," he grumbles.

Rudy's and Phil Prince mayverywell be the oldest establishments on the block. After the only other non-undergrad, a Vietnam War veteran, was evicted from the building about a year ago, Prince recalls, he found himself alone in a sea of young Yalies Though he doesn't mind existing in this demographic, he admits that his presence can be off-putting for current students. "I can remember maybe ten or 15 years ago, . it was this time of year, and the people who were moving into the apartment next to me were describing who lived where, and they said, 'There are some undergraduates living across the hall and diagonally from us, and, urn, downstairs there are some . graduate students, but next to us there is this really old man!' Of course, now I fit that definition, but that was twelve or 15 years ago, and I don't think I was one th en."

In recent undergraduate mythology, the Elmhurst has come to be known as both a filthy apartment building and a hipster hangout. The building's reputation leaves little room for senior citizens. Though Prince does wear thick-framed glasses and loafers, staples of the hipster wardrobe, neither are meant to be ironic.

Allegra Long ES '08, a two-year resident of the Elmhurst's fifth floor, describes her former home as a scene that's "become synonymous with these certain sort of parties and these certain people who live there. When you tell people you live in the Elmhurst, you get an 'Ohhh, you live in the Elmhurst. You must dress this way and study this thing and be really into talking •

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about this thing.'''

Prince was surprised by his building's reputation. He has not noticed any particularly bohemian tendencies among his neighbors, and Prince knows hipsters: In 1966, he began teaching organ lessons at nearby Wesleyan University, whose students he describes as "sort of extreme, very different from Yale."

Though Prince does wear thick- oamed glasses and loa -· · ers, staples o ·the hipster wardrobe, neither are meant to be • • zronzc.

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Long graduated last June, abandoning the Elmhurst and what she considers to be its deplorable conditions. "It's the cheapest building in New Haven,'~ she explains.

"You pay for what you get. We had holes in our walls, we had crooked floors, and we had mice. Literally everything you can imagine being wrong with an apartment, we had." Though she says she "loved" her time in the Elmhurst, she is quick to qualify this statement: "We don't really mind, because we're college kids, but the idea of that being your permanent home ... by the end of two years we were done, we were ready to be out." When. asked about her neighbor, Mr. Prince, Long admits that she doesn't know much. "Phil is a mystery wrapped in an enigma," ·says Long, who shared her bedroom wall with him for two years. "No one knows what he does for a living." Many Elmhurst undergraduates speculate about their elderly neighbor, wondering what his apartment is like and if it's nicer than theirs.

Miranda Popkey BR '09, an editor of this magazine, observed Prince from afar during her time living on the Elmhurst's fifth floor. "He dresses like he's from the 1950s he's kind of stuck there. He wears this tan trench coat and a fedora. In the summer, he wears those funny white linen button-down shirts that no one has worn since Marlon Brando in 'A Streetcar Named Desire,"' she says. "He's basically Marlon Brando."

Though he keeps his distance, Prince cannot remain oblivious to his student neighbors. "I've had a lot of trouble, from time to time, with undergraduates living

in the apartment below me," he says. "They come in and they turn on their Hi-Fi or whatever you want to call it, their sound system, very late at night, 2 a.m., 3 a.m., which wakes me up." Prince also acknowl.edges that, as the neighborhood has generally improved, the building itself has only deteriorated during his tenure there.

Despite the Elmhurst's sorry state, Prince finds enough to recommend it. "I like living close to the library and gym," he says. He swims five days a week in Payne Whitney's pool he's an avid freestyler.

Prince also appreciates the area's restau.rants. "I like Hunan Cafe on York Street and Royal India on Howe Street. Those are pretty much my favorites," he says.

His swimming lungs are especially valuable when he is forced to trek up some seventy steps to his apartment on the nottoo-rare occasion that the building's notoriously fickle elevator is out of commission.

His landlord often suggests that he move down a few floors or out of the building altogether. Prince has so far ignored this suggestion, but he admits that "it's getting harder and harder" to continue his decades-long residency.

For now, however, until he can gather enough energy to .haul his life down four flights of stairs and out of the building which has housed him for the past twenty years, Prince remains the enigmatic common denominator amongst a flurry of students on their way to somewhere else.

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TN Rachel Engler is a junior in Ezra Stiles College.

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Statehouse politics lead New Haven to forge its own solution to prisoner re-entry.

By Nick Handler

For the last four decades, controversies over crime, punishment, and rehabilitation have contributed to the breakdown of urban America and the outcome of elections. For the last 14 years, John DeStefano has been New Haven's revitalizing mayor, fighting a slow battle to turn the city around. And for the last six months, he has tried to tackle one of the most acrimonious crime and punishment controversies of them all: prisoner re-entry. On February 26, the morning after three New Haven shootings left one man dead and two police officers in critical condition, DeStefano called a press conference and placed the blame squarely on Governor Jodi Rell, citing her refusal to develop a meaningful prison re-entry program. for ex-convicts. All three shooters had criminal records, DeStefano charged, and all had fallen through the cracks of a system with virtually no state-funded support for people released from prison. These convicts, the allegation continued, were September 2008

only the tip of the iceberg. DeStefano accused Rell, to whom he had lost a bid for governor in 2006, of "dumping" between -25 and thirty prisoners released from state prison in New Haven each week. Without a structured re-entry program or adequate ~ social services, these prisoners seemed destined to commit further violent crime. the bitter partisan battle over New Haven's ex-convict population, one New Haven administrator has a plan to evade existing politicallandmines and funding quandaries to provide released prisoners the support they need. This fall, Kica Matos, director ofNew Haven's Community Services Administration (CSA), is launching an ambitious new prison re-entry initiative designed to fill the gap left by the relative indifference of statewide leadership. If successful, the New Haven Reentry Initiative will become one of the first government programs in the country to AFTER

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unify city social services and community outreach resources, both governmental and non-governmental, in one comprehensive, city-wide resource network.

As Matos quietly released background information on her initiative, Rell engaged DeStefano's accusations in a highly public feud .that was the climax of what had been an eventful year for ConnectiCut's criminal justice system. In August of 2007, months after progressives had won an extended battle to legally raise Connecticut's minimum age for adult prosecution from 16 to 18, two parolees who had met at a Connecticut halfway house viciously murdered three members of the Petit family in suburban Cheshire, a town home to three of the state's largest prisons. In response to weeks of national media attention and a public outcry by voters demanding tougher parole restrictions, Rell instituted a nearly six-month-long ban on parole hearings for prisoners convicted of violent felo11

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nies. This measure provoked outrage and protests from Connecticut communities, New Haven among them, angered by 'the delayed return of incarcerated loved ones.

In early February of 2008, Rell lifted her parole ban and instituted new guidelines for parole hearings. After DeStefano's press conference weeks later, she struck back in a public letter released on March 1 '· accusing DeStefano of a "frankly shocking" lack of understanding of the criminal justice system. None of the three shooters that February night, Rell correctly pointed out, had been under the supervision of the DOC at the time of the shootings; they had been on probation under qmrt supervision. She also accused DeStefano of failing to recognize the "extraordinary assistance almost entirely at Connecticut tax payer expense" that the state police had provided New Haven to combat crime. "If I were in an ironic frame of mind," Rell continued, noting that New Haven accounted for 12 percent of Connecticut's prison population, "perhaps I might complain about the city of New Haven 'dumping' its problems with drugs, violence, and

othet crimes on the state -of Connecticut."

Though the governor and mayor later met with the Department of Corrections (DOC) commissioner, Theresa Lantz, to discuss their differences, the contentious "dumping" issue remained unresolved.

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HoWEVER UGLY, Rell and DeStefano's feud drew attention to the disturbing fact that Connecticut, a state with over 18,000 Connecticut citizens currently incarcerated and a recidivism rate for released offenders calculated by the DOC at 40 percent, lacks a comprehensive .plan to smoothly transition released prisoners back into society.

Many pinpoint this deficiency as a central cause ofNew Haven's crime problem. · · "What we found when we looked at the statistics," Matos explains, "was that a lot of these crimes were being committed by folks with criminal records." Her conclu-sions resulted from a year of researching the city's crime and incarceration statistics, existing social services for released prisoners, and successful models for prison reentry in other cities around the country.

Diagnosing New Havens failings, Matos

Kica Matos plans to unify City Hall and community organizers to compile a .c entralized resource index for prisoners released into New Haven.

asserts that "there are definitely structural problems with the system. Right now, there seems to be a missing link between the DOC and the people trying to navi, gate th e system.

New Haven's numbers on crime and recidivism the propensity for ex-convicts to commit more crimes reveal the uphill battle the city faces. According to the CSA, in 2007, 70 percent of New Haven's homicide victims, 51 percent of its non-fatal shooting victims, and 80 percent of suspects for both crimes had criminal records.

70 percent of all people released from prison, according to the Connecticut DOC's annual report on recidivism, are rearrested within a year. More than half of them will be r~corivicted and a third re-incarcerated.

Especially troubling for the city is that half of these ex-convicts live in only three of New Havens neighborhoods: The Hill, Fair Haven, and Newhallville. ·

70 percent of all people re•

leased 'Om przson are rearrested within a , year. More than hal of them will be reconvicted and a third will be re-incarcerated.

"What people have to realize," says Mike Lawlor, a Democratic state representative from East Haven, the Chair of the Connecticut House Judiciary Committee, and a long-time advocate for judicial reform, "is that it's the guys that are getting out of prison that are causing a lot of these problems."

According to both Lawlor and Matos, recidivism occurs so frequently because ex-felons have no way to meet their basic needs. "In a lot of these cases it's not hard to figure out," says Lawlor. "You need housing, services, you need supervision." One obstacle for released prisoners seeking to meet these needs is a lack of legatrights to protect them from discrimination. People with criminal records are disqualified from public housing, a policy that often separates them from family and leaves them with nowhere to go. Connecticut, unlike some states, does not have laws explicitly banning discrimination based ~n criminal records, which makes it easier for employ-

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ers to turn down ex-offenders looking for jobs. · "Jobs are a huge problem," says Sally Joughin, a coordinator of People Against Injustice, a New Haven community group that advocates for Elm City residents affected by the criminal justice system. "Not only because someone spending a long . time in prison may not have a marketable job skill or education, but also because there is discrimination against people who have been in prison."

The prevalence of untreated mental health and substance abuse issues 15 percent of all people released from prison have a serious mental illness often makes it harder for former criminals to find jobs.

Many parole and probation officers, officially tasked with addressing these problems, are burdened with heavy case loads that do not allow them to effectively administer to parolees. Compounding these obstacles is the lack of a consolidated and accurate list of the few resources available to prisoners released in New Haven. "If folks come back into the community and don't have options," Matos summarizes, .

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"it's hard to make sure they don't go out · and relapse."

Unlike Lawlor and DeStefano, who have prioritized increasing state aid and funding for existing programs, Matos' · initiative involves working at a local level . to encourage cooperation and innovation . among existing re-entry resource providers. Some of the initial changes slated to premier this fall are an accurate and updated guide to resources available to every prisoner upon release, increased coordination amongst court support services, and regular meetings among state, local, nonprofit, and faith-based organizations working on re-entry issues.

Joughin emphasizes the need for streamlining re-entry service funding. "Should a well-funded state re-entry program be developed, just as there is a state incarceration system?" she asks. "Right now there are many different non-profits providing various kinds of re-entry programs and competing for state funding. There shouldn't be a competition for funds. Every released prisoner should automatically be getting the services he or she needs."

Some community activists are skeptical not only of governmental services, but also of non-profit efforts to ease re-entry.

Barbara Fair, a long-time organizer with People Against Injustice who first got involved in criminal justice activism when her brother was incarcerated in a prison system, she says, that "neither of us really understood" insists that "the only thing that is 'non-profit' about most non-profits is the pay that direct service providers:the real workers receive." Fair sees the entire system, non-profits included, as fundamentally corrupt. "Incarceration is a huge business," she says. "[It is] the fastestgrowing, most recession-proof industry in America today, and it is so huge that stock investments are available. Because it is a huge business, there is no incentive to deincarcerate because empty cells lead to loss on the stock market and loss in jobs for thousands who might otherwise be unemployed or unemployable."

Matos is aware that many activists share Fair's cynicism, but she remains optimistic about large-scale grassroots cooperation. "The overwhelming consensus

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Prisoners released into New Haven are disqualified from public housing in buildings such as Westville Manor, often leaving them with nowhere to go.

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Politics in Hartford's capitol building have prevented the legislature and community groups alike from alleviating the strain a steady stream of released prisoners has placed on New Haven .

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from community-based organizations," she explains, "is that the city does have a major role to play, and we want to bring everyone to the table." Matos, along with Joughin and other community organizers, currently hopes to garner support for New Haven's new "Ban the Box" campaign to officially remove questions about criminal history from preliminary job applications.

"We think it would be better if that subject came up later in the interview process," Matos says. Her pilot proposal for the Re-entry Initiative explains that the "Ban the Box" project would help inmates rejoin the workforce. This program would include outreach to local businesses to increase awareness of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, a federal tax incentive for employers to hire ex-felons.

IN FOCUSING ON THE EXCHANGE of information, Matos has found an innovative solution to the biggest sticking point in the re-entry debate. While Lawlor, DeStefano, and Rell battle endlessly over funding"Governor Rell just doesn't want to fund these programs," Lawlor complains, even

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though ~'the Department of Corrections Brian Garnett, a DOC spokesperson, emphasizes that, since 2003, when a new ran $19 million over budget in _2 007 and is expected to run $24 I)lillion over budget commissioner came on board, the Departthis year" Matos emphasizes that many ment has made significant improvements of the city's initial programs will be "non- · . to encourage re-entry. "The old way of resource heavy." By focusing on informadoing corrections," Garnett explains, "was tion, outreach, and streamlining, Matos showing an offender the front door on has created a program that requires little their last day of incarceration and waving funding. goodbye that doesn't work and it isn't But she has not given up hope for good for public safety." He points out that significant improvement in the degree since · 2003, the DOC has doubled the of state-level support for New Haven innumber of halfway house beds in Conmates. In the past few years, both she and necticut to 1,200 and significantly stepped Lawlor are quick to note, the DOC has up re-entry preparation during incarceraadopted a more enlightened view of pristion. "From day one we are planning for oner re-entry. "They seem very much on releasing an offender back into society," he board with working together," Matos exsays. plains. "We've had some very productive Both he and Lawlor also mention that • discussions."

Connecticut's prison system is still "in a much better place" than those of many other states it is one of only a handful of In focusing on the exchange of states, according to a recent, highly publiinformation:~ Matos has found cized Pew study of national incarceration trends, whose incarcerated population has an innovative solution to the not grown over the last three years. States biggest sticking point in the like California and Florida face re-entry . and recidivism crises of a much higher · re-entry debate: nding.

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degree.

Despite these promising steps, however, the DOC and Governor Rell remain locked in disagreement with New Haven reformers over the extent to which the present system is broken. While almost every state and local representative in New Haven insists that more re-entry funding is needed, Garnett avers that "Governor Rell's support has been more than sufficient we do not need any more money."

And while Garnett merely points out that Connecticut's overall reconviction rate of 40 percent drops to 24 percent when prisoners are released under the close supervision of parole officers, Lawlor is actively pursuing funding to hire new parole officers so that existing officers can work more effectively.

Garnett also flatly denies DeStefano's charge of state prisoner "dumping" in New Haven. "We are not dumping anybody anywhere," he explains in language reminiscent of Rell's March letter to DeStefano. "We are simply returning people to their homes. People want to go horne after they are released and that is where we take them." Though, in the summary of her pilot program, Matos included interviews with prisoners from around the state who were dropped in New Haven rather than their hometowns, Garnett classifies these . " accounts as ".JUSt maccurate.

The question of their origin aside, no one denies that ex-convicts are streaming into New Haven at a steady rate and that they can't be helping the city's already-epic battle with crime and violence. But while · Matos continues to search for common ground between community groups and political opponents, the core controversy between reformers and the status quo re• mams.

"Both Democrats and Republicans familiar with the issue realize that you're going to have to spend this money one way or another," Lawlor explains. "It's just a matter of whether you want to spend less now on re-entry, or more later on new . , pnsons.

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Missionaries live, eat, and proselytize in two-person "companionships:'

ages to deploy over fifty thousand full-time Mormon missionaries across the globe, the vast majority of whom are men and women in their early 20s. A handful are Yalies who have formally withdrawn from the University to serve.

Although their methods vary, they are all geared toward a common goal: to recruit converts to the Mormon Church.

And while they've all faced countless reJections in their quest to share their faith, these young missionaries' efforts have undoubtedly helped make Mormonism one the fastest-growing religions in the world.

ON A SuNDAY MORNING in May, Syphus sat in the middle row of an assembly room in a modest brick building on Trumbull Street. The blue folding chairs were filled with the entire New Haven ward of the . Mormon Church, congregants of every demographic a harried, young-looking blond couple with an infant and two toddlers in tow; a dark-haired teenager who directed hymns from the front of the room; a middle-aged Hispanic woman who affectionately patted the cheek of a white-haired man as she hurried past him , on her way to her seat.

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In St. George, Utah, Randen Syphus' · hometown, it hardly ever rains. But one Saturday night in July, Syphus is far from home, and as the blue Dodge Caravan he rides in sidles up to the curb, he steps out of the passenger seat to a New Haven sky heavy with rain clouds. In black suits, collared white shirts, nametags, and ties, Syphus and Chris Eyres, his companion, are strangely formal, out of place amidst the abandoned, broken-windowed industrial buildings northwest of the Yale Divinity School.

Just 21 years old, Syphus and Eyres make for unlikely religious shepherds, but for the past two years, this has been their job. Both left their homes in Utah to serve two-year, full-time mission trips for the Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints that eventually brought them to the Elm City. In 2006, they numbered among the over 80 percent of 19-year-old boys from Mormon families who undertake such trips.

During his first weeks in New Haven, a passerby stopped Syphus on this street and warned him not to return at night unless he wanted to risk being shot. Now, •

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he's walked it an uncountable number of times, and he confidently ushers Eyres across the wide parking lot of the Sheffield Oaks apartment complex.

The downpour hasn't yet starred when the two enter the first-floor vestibule. Syphus punches in the access code and they climb to the second floor, where a woman named Beulah lives. When they reach her door, Syphus is the one who knocks one long, four shorts, two longs. They wait.

Beulah has no phone, but Syphus has visited her apartment for their thrice-weekly standing date enough times to know: "She's not here. If she was, she'd have yelled for , us by now.

They descend .the back stairway a little more slowly than they ascended it, looking for a place to sit down. When they stop at a wooden porch by a dumpster in the parking lot, the sky finally breaks open, and they sprint for the van. "We just can't catch a break," they groan over their shoulders. .

The seclusion and asceticism the Mormon Church demands of missionaries like Syphus and Eyres is a far cry from the hedonism of college. Yet the Church man'

When Smith served with Syphus~ they each kept all o their belongings two years' · worth in two suitcases. New Haven is Syphus' third assignment, and Smith can no longer recall how many cities he served.

A young Hispanic couple had been baptized the week before and was being confirmed just in front of the wooden podium. "Welcome as part of a great brotherhood and sisterhood," announced Mike Turner, the ward bishop and a third.-year graduate student in molecular biology at Yale.

In the back row, a young blond man repeated Turner's words in quiet Spanish into a black headset; roughly a fifth of the congregants listened to his translation through receivers and headphones they grabbed from an over-full bin by the door. The church has no shortage of SpanTHE NEW JOURNAL

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ish translators, Turner explained, because of the number of former missionaries who learned the language in order to serve trips in Spanish-speaking countries.

The Mormon Church is known for its painstaking missionary reach not just into Spanish-speaking areas, but into almost every corner of the world, an approach that has successfully turned a once-persecuted religion into a global faith. There are 344 "missions" geographic regions to which missionaries may be assigned across the globe. Although there are not always active· missionaries throughout each mission, almost the entire populated world falls within one of these sets of boundaries. Syphus and Eyres serve in the Connecticut Hartford Mission, which means that they may be reassigned at a moment's notice to any of a number of sites in Connecticut, Rhode Island, or Massachusetts. "You could get a call on Sunday, and on Tuesday, you'd have to drive to the mission center in Hartford and move on to another assignment," explains Justin Smith, Eyres' predecessor, who finished his mission in June. When he served with Syphus, they each kept all of their belongings two years' worth in

two suitcases. New Haven is Syphus's third · desirable." assignment, and Smith can no longer reTo compensate for such incidences, call how many cities he served.

New Haven missionaries often take a Missionaries always serve in pairs, or . more scattershot approach, starting con"companionships," living together; sharversations on city buses about sports teams ing meals, and proselytizing with a partner and the weather and waiting for the ineviat all times. Companionships aren't transtable question about their clothes, or the ferred together, however, and missionaries black-and-white nametags emblazoned work with as many partners as they have with their title and surname "Elder Sytransfers. Currently comprising Syphus phus," "Elder Eyres." Syphus recalls meetand Eyres, the New Haven companioning a man named Eddy outside of a thrift ship shares exclusive responsibility for the store .in West Haven who announced that roughly · 124,000 residents of New Hathe missionaries' ties were ugly and invited ven and an apartment on Elm Street them inside to buy new ones. Within a with two missionaries who serve the Spanyear, Eddy had quit smoking nicotine, ish-speaking contingent of the city. caffeine, and other stimulants are taboo Syphus and Eyres split their time bein the Mormon Church in the hopes of tween "tracting" choosing a neighborone day being baptized into the Mormon hood and knocking on every door Church. "street contacting," or stopping passersby The same approach led Smith and Syon the sidewalk, and arranging meetings phus to Beulah, whom they met one day at with "investigators" like Beulah who have a McDonald's. After enough one-on-one already expressed an interest in their mesmeetings with the missionaries, she has sage. Although they've found the last tactic only to quit smoking and drinking coffee to be the most effective, they often run the before she can be baptized. risk of being stood up, or, in missionary Still, easy successes like Beulah and lexicon, "boached." "Lately," says Syphus Eddy are rare, and before he completed his dryly, "our boach rate has been higher than mission, Smith resorted to unconventional

Austin Pulsipher, currently serving a mission in Taiwan, worries about how he will transition back into college life.

September 2008

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Jennifer Gardner, far left, on mission in Sweden.

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tactics to reach out in New Haven. To draw students, he and Syphus set up an afternoon study room on the fourth floor of 84 Trumbull Street, advertising free Internet access and a limited library. He e-mailed a Yale Divinity School professor in the hopes of lecturing his class on Mormonism "that didn't really work out." Once, he stood on a box in Elm Street, opened his arms, and started preaching his gospel to passersby, and another time, he invited a trumpet player panhandling outside the British Art Center to accompany his preaching with a rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In." On Wednesdays, he and Syphus played pickup football at the park, fielding the inevitable questions about their faith by offering a copy of the Book of Mormon and tutoring sessions on the scriptures.

These resourceful methods, like Smith and Syphus themselves, are emblematic of •a new generation of missionaries that has replaced the standardized, memorized lessons once aimed at potential converts with "teaching by the spirit," allowing their impulses to dictate lessons and dialogue.

Mormon missionaries once taught solely 20

hours from 10 a.m. until 9 p.m. are set aside for missionary work proselytizing and service and missionaries are expected to be in bed by 10:30 p.m. They are allowed one "preparation day" per week, for buying groceries, doing laundry, cleaning, and letter-writing for Syphus and Smith, it was pickup ·football Wednesdays and they attend Sacrament meetings on Sundays.

Missionaries are allowed only one hour of Internet access per week and only two phone calls per year, one on Christmas and ~he other on Mother's Day. Thayne Stoddard MC '11, preparing for a 2009 mission, finds this prospect hard to imagine . ''I'm worried about being isolated [during my mission]," he admits. "I've called my mom every single day this year."

The New Haven missionaries have access to a car for half the .week, but spend the rest of the time traveling by bicycle, bus, and foot; whenever possible, missionaries are required to rdy on public transportation in the cities they serve. "Nothing can prepare you for what it's like to be out there," explains Sebastian Swett}E '09, who left Yale in 2004 to serve on mission in Milan. ''I'd get tired, and it was a different fatigue than what I was used to it's this constant output of energy."

Each missionary is responsible for paying his or her own way, sending $400 to the Church for each month of service, money which is then redistributed among all of the missionaries worldwide for housing and food. Smith worked for a sign installation company before he started his mission, while Syphus saved $10,000 working for his father's concrete-cutting business.

"That money is sacred money," says Smith. "[My mission] means so much more to me because I had to work for it."

But in spite of the thousands of hours spent knocking on doors and distributing pamphlets and the thousands of dollars toward housing and food, the Church relies on its quantity of missionaries, rather than their rate of conversion, to spread the faith: Church statistics estimate that an average of just 4.7 new converts join the Church for each year one missionary spends on the job.

from a set of six lessons entitled "The Uniform System for Teaching the Gospel."

They memorized the lessons in whatever language they would .. be teaching in and recited them, word-for-word, to their charges.

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"People would ask . questions by default when you have two big, blond Americans in suits and nametags:~ :~:~Swett laughs.

In 2004, however, the "System" was replaced with "Preach My Gospel," a 13chapter guide with sections like "How Do I Develop Christlike Attributes?" and "How Do I Recognize and Understand the Spirit?" "It's more about saying what people need to hear, when they need to hear it," explains Turner, the New Haven ward bishop andYale graduate student.

However, even teaching by the spirit requires rigid commitment. Missionaries are expected to rise each morning at 6:30 to study the scriptures as well as to ·plan lessons for the day, exercise, and eat. The

THIS RATE IS OFTEN higher in overseas mission areas, particularly in Africa and South America, despite the linguistic and cultural barriers missionaries in these ar-

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eas face. Because fluency is essential for a the word 'Amish' was replaced with 'Mor·mates graduate and move on. "I was close mon,"' he laughs. "People would b-e like, group peddling such intangibles as faith, with the class of 2006, but I really had no all missionaries attend one of 17 Mission'Oh, Mormons! We respect you and your interaction with my new graduating class," ary Training Centers (MTCs) worldwide simple way of life ... no electricity.. .' and says Frandsen. before embarking on their trips. Most are we'd be like, 'No, wrong one!"'

Austin ' Pulsipher BK '12 is currently sent to the MTC in Provo, Utah, where For Turner, the challenge wasn't skepserving a mission in Taiwan, and although they spend between three weeks if they . ticism, but rather an existing faith: He he has yet to rejoin the Yale community, he will be proselytizing in English and three · served in Poland, a country that is 89 peralready has misgivings about what it will months studying the scriptures and learncent Catholic. "People say that you're not entail: "I am scared that I won't know how ing the intricacies of both teaching their a Pole if you're not Catholic," he says: "The to speak fluid English in a seminar at Yale gospel and speaking the language they will people who joined the Mormon Church and that my essay writing skills went to adopt for the next two years. Before emin Poland sacrificed a lot to join and were trash," Pulsipher writes in an e-m;:til from denounced by their families." While he barking on his trip to the Poland-Warsaw Taipei. ''And I am not in the football shape was there, the one hundred missionaries mission in 1998, Turner attended two that I was before my mission." four- to five-hour Polish language classes throughout the country saw just sixty baptisms each year. and an evening session on the gospel every Swett was jarred when his day for nine weeks at the MTC. THE NUMBERS ARE DAUNTING, but Turnet · A second complicating factor is the ootball coach yelled at him . range of responses Mormons can expect says that he never used them to measure on his second day back.

'1 his success as a missionary. "Success is real .. from country to country and culture to like, 'Why is he yelling at me? culture. Jordan Frandsen MC '08 served ly anytime you help to convey to someone his mission in Russia, where tracting is ilthat God lives," he says. "It doesn't mean That's not very Christian o that they join the church." · legal. Instead, missionaries would go into . ,, htm. elementary schools to stage puppet shows For Jennifer Gardner ES '05 GRD '08, • about the evils of alcohol, drugs, and tosuccess in her mission meant expanding His fears are prescient. Rejoining the bacco and offer free English lessons in her own beliefs to include a new kind of Yale football team after two years, Swett . peoples' homes, always ending with a mesfaith: faith in people. "I've gained a greater was jarred when his coach yelled at him on sage of faith. During his mission in Italy, appreciation for individuals of the world his second day back. ''A mission is about Swett also spent time on service activities.

-·their diversity and also their commonaleveryone trying to uplift each other," says In one city, he jokes, he and his fellow ity. Everyone is looking for meaning in life Swett, "and I was like, 'Why is he yelling missionaries noticed that everyone always and purpose, and at a basic level, everyseemed to be moving, so they borrowed a one needs the same things," she explains. · at me? That's no't very Christian of him.'"

The first Yale paper Swett wrote upon revan from the local Mormon church to act Gardner was one of few single women to turning was only five pages long, but he as the "muscle of the congregation" and serve a mission, and while the trip remains says that he wrote three drafts and e-mailed help people move. Since Swett felt una rite of passage more for 19-year-old male one to his mother for editing before he felt comfortable stopping people on the street, Mormons than their female peers, not all confident enough to hand it in. He'd gone he'd often strike up conversations about · young men serve missions. Some are protwo years without writing a single paper. faith with strangers he met while traveling. hibited by health concerns, both mental In some ways, the mission life was easi- · "People would ask questions by default and physical, some simply choose not to er, he says. At Yale in the spring, he worried serve, and some are prevented from servwhen you have two big, blond Americans about packing, about storing his belongin suits and nametags," he laughs. ing by the Church itself on the groun<!_s ings for the summer, about one last p~per, that they are "unworthy," which can enDuring his trip to Romania, Walker about finding a job. ''As a ·missionary, the compass anything from homosexuality, to Frahm JE '1 0 found that the people he only thing I worried about was 'Who can I fathering a child out of wedlock, to unreencountered were wary of his intentions. help today, and how?"' he says. , solved debt.

"Romania is still struggling to get out of It's an experience familiar to Smith and Still, Yale students serving mission trips the shadow of communism, and you can Syphus. Answering questions about their are common enough that there is now a see that in the way people have a hard time mission experience, they comment that it's process in place for students to leave the talking to others who aren't in their immeunnerving to spend so much time talking diate family," he says. "Something like 60 University for two years without fear of about themselves when they're so used to percent of people ratted on their neighbors losing their spots. Prospective missionaries to the secret police; when everyone is a spy, focusing on the needs of others. "I'm motiwithdraw from the University and then reyou cant' trust anyone." vated by something much bigger than myenroll a formality, the returned missionAnd, Frahm continues, in the rare cirself- eternity," Smith says. "My message aries say in a new graduating class with a cumstance when he encountered people is to prepare people for life after death. If brief essay about the time they spent away who were familiar with Mormonism; they we don't hit the streets, 140,000 people in from Yale. But while the bureaucracy of reNew Haven won't have the restored gospel were sorely misinformed. "You know the turning to Yale may be trivial, the intricaof Jesus Christ. It's much easier to motifilm Witness? That movie was translated cies of readapting to college life rarely are, vate yourself to get out of bed if yo:u're not especially after watching friends and classinto Romanian such that every instance of •

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just doing it for you, but for others."

concerns have been put to rest by the basic principle of faith, and the belief that IN HIGH SCHOOL, Jenna Felici ES '08 was my family and I will be taken care of," he one of those "others". "It was difficult to says.

Swett, for his part, found that changing start coming to the church at Yale, because himself was just as important as changno one here could have guessed that I had ing others. His experience with one famjust joined the Mormon Church eight months earlier," she says. "I hadn't gone to ily whom he met during the second year of his mission particularly affected him. church my whole life."

With a Catholic father and a mother . He visited their house two or three times a week over the course of seven months. who had lapsed from Mormonism because "They really opened their home to me," of her husband's opposition to it, Felici followed her parents to churches of a host . he says. "It was the closest I have ever felt to being in a family other than my own." of different denominations, but says that Both parents and all three daughters were it was only when she attended a Mormon baptized, which he describes as the protochurch with her maternal grandparents . . that she felt "something special.'J She be- · typical mission success, but "that wasn't what mattered" for Swett. gan meeting with missionaries and thinkWhat did matter was that he felt a deing about joining the Church. Because of gree of responsibility toward the family. her father's disapproval, she had to sneak out of her house at 5:50 a.m., before her - They had made drastic changes in their lives in order to join the Church, giving up ·parents awoke, to attend 6 a.m. seminary coffee and wine and paying tithes. "Most classes at the local Mormon church. of all, I felt a responsibility to teach only At the end of high school, Felici was things I felt a personal testimony about," baptized with her family father includhe says, "because I believe in an afterlife ed in attendance. When she started her and that these things will someday matfreshman year at Yale, she knew .s he want, ter. ed to serve a mission herself, which she What also mattered was a feeling Swett has now scheduled for · December 2008, experienced one day in their kitchen before before she will attend medical school. She their baptisms. He found himself humbled is working full-time as a medical assistant by this family, humbled at the thought of in a dermatology clinic, and because her teaching them about religion. ''As a family, parents won't contribute to her · missionthey already embodied the love and goodary stipend, families in Felici's home ward ness that God wants," he says. "Who was I have offered to make up the difference. to be teaching them?"

"In some ways, I'm like the people I will teach they, too, may have families telling them it's wrong," she says. "It helps when someone has experienced the same thing as you. It gives people hope. Some people might take my words differently, because I made that choice for mysel£" •

THAYNE · STODDARD,

who will leave 'n ext summer to b~gin his mission, has struggled with his faith in the past and does not share Felici's confidence in proselytizing.

"I don't know how to share my own beliefs without forcing them down peoples' throats, which I absolutely do not want," he says. "I love the Church and would love to share my faith, but I don't think I have the right as a person to believe that my Church is the only right Church."

Stoddard says he can hope only to expose himself to others' faiths and others to Mormonism in a positive way throughout the course of his mission. "My 22

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Pria Anand is a junior in Berkeley

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It's 1:45 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon, and Alexis Wilcox is leading twelve highschoolers balancing five-pound medicine balls in their hands up a large hill. Students who'd rather play hooky than suffer the haul may find themselves making a 6 . a.m. "sunrise hike" the next morning no student in Ms. Wilcox's class gets away without making up for an absence. She tolerates neither tardiness nor poor discipline. Each student has exactly three minutes to get dressed in athletic clothes, and even the slightest infraction is punished.

At the beginning of each academic year, Ms. Wilcox's students sign a contract including the key clause: "YOU WILL BEHAVE." Needless to say, Wilcox is serious about her course iri Physical Education at Common Ground Charter High School, but that doesn't faze senior Latelia Bunch, who insists that her authoritarian teacher is "a really cool person." As Bunch explains, "It's really intense. Whether it's rain or shine, you're going outside."

Wilcox is exhibit A for charter school advocates who see schools like Common •

September 2008

Ground as an exciting new approach to public education, sanctioned and paid for by the public school system but free of its bureaucratic hurdles. Smaller than regular public schools and run by a "governing board" of teachers, parents, and administJ~tors, charter schools were initially conceived as a solution to educational underperformance in public schools. Connecticut adopted charter legislation in 1997 _ ~ and has since built 18 charter schools throughout the state, three of them in New Haven.

Common Ground's unconventional ethos, which could never be supported in a regular public school, centers on an expansive definition of the word "environmentalism." Oliver Barton, the school's founding director, explains that Common Ground's approach to nature "isn't necessarily forestry or global warming, but using the local community and physical environment as a classroom for teaching." Although teachers still tailor classes to state testing standards, the curriculum at Common Ground is designed to spur

both environmental consciousness and a commitment to the city in which its stu- • • dents live.

"We're talking about the place," says Joel Tolman, who has taught history and social studies at Common Ground for five years. "New Haven is an incredibly rich learning community, and our students can · explore it on the city buses." So while other New Haven students study geometry, Common Ground's pupils map the angles of architecture throughout the city. Instead of a cut-and-dry biology· Class, they take a class in biodiversity, plotting local data on charts and graphic models.

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Common Ground's approach to nature ''isn't necessarily forestry or global warming, "Barton explains, "but using the local community and physical • envtronment as a classroom for teaching. " •

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Though reputed among New Haven youth as "the school where kids chase chickens all day," Common Ground students don't just plant strawberries and dig up potatoes for credit (though both garden tasks are part of the curriculum). The curriculum .is rigorous enough that 90 percent of the school's graduating class matriculates to college: The high-achieving nature of the Common Ground student body should not be surprising, given that the school, like many of its charter cousins, . was planned and founded by teachers. As Barton explains, the Connecticut school board wasn't always enthusiastic about their plans, and it was difficult to sell the program to kids who had never been hiking before. By February of 1997, though, the board had come around and approved the proposal for Common Ground. Seven months later, the school opened its doors. "It was like building an airplane while you're flying it," Barton recalls. "But it was an exciting plane to be flying. We were living on raw energy. " That energy continues to . drive Com-

mon Ground's. unusually dedicated faculTen years ago, the West Rock park in ty. Because the school runs itself with little which Common Ground now stands was a trash-heap, a makeshift dump when the interference from the State, its survival denearby Hamden Waste and Recycling Fapends on the above-and-beyond efforts of cility was closed. The park authority was teachers like Wilcox and Tolman. Though the average Common Ground teacher eager for change and welcomed Common Ground's plans. Early on, "part of our makes over five thousand dollars less each year than other New Haven teachers, the work was just making the park a useable space again," explains Barton. school's faculty and staff pride themselves on knowing the name of every student in Yet even with an innovative curricuschool by the third week of classes. Some lum, involved faculty, and an apparently take on other responsibilities as well, such . happy student body "it gives you someas leading extracurricular. programs, helpthing normal public schools couldn't give ing out with administrative paperwork, or ·. you," notes Bunch, a senior Common participating in public outreach: A few ofGround and its fellow charter schools are fer job training to students or work at the not without their critics. Stephen T. Casschool's summer camp. Others help match sano, the former mayor of Manchester and students to social services around the city. a prominent member of the Connecticut Each year, teachers run a commencement Coalition for Justice in Education Fundceremony called "Step-Up," during which ing (CCJEF), claims that charter schools they tell personalized stories about each - are merely private schools usurping public . graduate. And that hard work seems to pay school funding. "Unfortunately, educatio~ off as one student says, "You can talk to a spending remains a zero-sum game, and charter school gains mean further public teacher like they're your friend." school losses," CCJEF stated in a 2006 These unusual faculty members are attracted, in part, by Common Ground's testimony to the Connecticut Education Committee. Cassano faults charter schools unique history and alternative mission.

Common Ground students garden, hatch chickens, and hike for credit.

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for their ability to skirt the rules and not bother with expensive special education classes. "If a kid acts up in the charter schools, you throw them out," he explains.

"You can't do that in the public school system." Not only do charter schools pull funds from traditional public schools, Cassano contends, but they deplete human resources as well, attracting the most highly motivated students and involved parents in the city. This phenomenon, he says, often contributes to racial imbalances within charter schools.

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Cassano -aults charter schools or their ability to skirt . the rules and not bother with • expenstve special education classes.

But Cassano's anti-charter argument, while common enough, fails to tell the whole story. 88 percent of Common Ground students are minorities, a number similar to those of New Haven's noncharter public schools: Wilbur Cross and Hill House High School educate 90 and 98 percent minorities, respectively. Common Ground does possess a devoted parent population, and its student body often arrives at the school better-prepared than their Wilbur Cross or Hill House peers students who end up in a charter school are 20 percent more likely to have attended pre-kindergarten programs than their public, non-charter school peers. But state statistics from 2002 show that charter school parents participate in "limited" volunteering at their children's schools, if at all. In fact, the charter school population tends to be of lower income and lower family education history than that of regular public schools, and charter schools receive less per-pupil funding than their regular counterparts. But Tom Murphy, the state's educational spokesman, insists that of all Connecticut parents, those considering charter schools are among the most invested in their children's education.

According to the Connecticut Department of Education in 2002, "charter schools were not having an easily discernible positive or negative impact on traditional public schools"; if anything, competition between charter and local district schools

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Having helped create the school, Common Ground facutly members are highly devoted to their students.

might have led to mutual progress. Tom Murphy maintains that "there is a place for charter schools ..... but they're not for everyone." Connecticut's 18 charters are slim pickings compared to states like Arizona or Florida, which have twenty times as many.

Murphy notes that charters are necessary for "choice" in education, though he acknowledges the exclusion inherent in these smaller schools. While charter schools can cull the best students from a pool of applicants, "neighborhood schools have the responsibility to educate all children who walk through their doors."

Because property taxes pay for public schools, Connecticut's wealthiest children will always be at an advantage. With teachers in Greenwich making $20,000 more yearly than their New Haven counterparts, the achievem.e nt gap in low-income communities is unsurprising. Last year, just over 60 percent of New Haven eighthgraders scored "at/above proficiency" on the math portion of the Connecticut Mastery Test, as opposed to 90 percent of students in the nearby suburb of Branford.

Common Ground, however, seeks an economically diverse student body, and 15 percent of its students hail from the sub-

urbs. Wilcox, Tolman, Barton, and their colleagues hope that in comprehending the effect of "place" on their lives and educations, their students will be able to establish a "common ground" across economic, racial, and geographic lines.

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While you, dear reader, were NYC-DC/ Euro/Mrica/Asia/South America-tripping, I was left in New Haven to brood on my withering relationship. I had dated a boy until June, when he had graduated and moved to California. During his one trip back East, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and broke up. I spent the rest of the summer single, and it didn't help that I could see the roof of his old house from the window of my summer sublet on Edgewood Avenue. Riding his roommate's ricke;.ty red· bike tlown Chapel Street and staring at a computer all day ("research," they call it) only facilitated my angst.

But it was summer, I needed to study for the MCAT, and my wallowing had to end. Unfortunately, during the sweltering New Haven summer, libraries kick students out by sunset and cafes dose by twilight. Only the sterile lights of Starbucks beckon to the tired, the poor, and •

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By Aditi Ramakrishnan the internet-deprived masses yearning to breathe free air conditioning until 11:30 p~m. By mid-July, I found myself shelling out crumpled bills for the cheapest tea merely to sit and study. .

One Monday night, Starbucks was hopping with students, artists, and homeless people alike, with no empty table to be found .. I spotted two souls engaged in earnest conversation: a boy and girl sitting at two separate little tables. I pointed them out to my companion, who kindly asked if the two could sit together. After much head-tilting and questioning (Her: ''Are you sure my Orgo book will fit on the table?"; Him: "I suppose I can place these papers on my lap and read ... "), the girl scooched over. I smiled guiltily at them as I sat down, realizing I'd seen them here before. She was that girl with the I-smellsomething-awful face and the too-tight ponytail who was perpetually trudging •

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into Starbucks and collapsing at a table with her heavy textbook. He was that boy in the plaid shirt who read papers from a briefcase and stared too much

By mid-ju~ I found mysel shelling out crumpled bills for the cheapest tea merely to sit and study.

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Until now, they had sat apart. Over the next two hours, while I tried to plumb the depths of the kidney's nephron system, the girl complained about lab grading while the boy nodded sympathetically and gave pointers about the MCAT. I tried to listen in, but all I could catch was- that he went to Yale's graduate school (so he took the MCAT for fun?). Taunted by the kidneys in my book and Starbucks' Frank Sinatra THE NEW JOURNAL

soundtrack, I feebly walked out.

The next night,. I spotted Granola.

Browned and muscular, glossy hair in a ponytail, a few rings and hemp bracelets, reflective sunglasses. When I saw him, I dreamt of mountaineering and camping trips. I had glimpsed him striding around the medical campus, sometimes discreetly donning a doctor's white coat. Granola liked to study at Starbucks too. He espe..: dally favored the large desk in the middle of the room, the one with the blue lamps.

Today, I sat at a table nearby with a friend who gleefully slid her eyes from his ebony locks to me. As soon as two seats at the central table freed up, she pranced over with me in tow. Predictably, she left shortly thereafter, leaving me, Granola, and my MCAT book. I glanced up between scanning diagrains of the kidney. He read with intense fury and wore a Medecins Sans Frontieres T-shirt. My heart fluttered.

An hour later, as he stood up to leave, he murmured, "Good luck with that." I stammered and asked about his shirt. Still shining with intensity, he moved his hands gracefully as he talked about years spent working with Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF. Our two-minute conversaon stirred in my MCAT-stuffed brain, inspiring many a daydream until the next evening at Starbucks.

Only this time, he sat at a window table with his papers and a girl. She smiled sweetly and he gazed disgustingly (in love).

Though two feet of table separated them, they bent towards each other, hanging on to every word and loving glance. I was left alone again to brood over my books. The plaid-dad grad student in the far back looked up when the bitter pre-med walked · in and dropped her textbook onto a table.

He quickly glanced down. She looked at him. While she bought coffee, he casually walked by the counter (Him: "Oh, hello!

Didn't see you there!"; Her: "Hey, what a surprise!") Ten minutes later, the coffee cooled as love simmered between them.

1he plaid-cladgrad student in the far back looked up when the .bitter pre-med walked in and dropped her te~tbo()k onto a table.

September 2008

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yarnLLC.com receive a 5% discount with this ad During my last night at Starbucks, Granola was there, though we ignored each other. The grad student and pre-med cheerfully studied together while the product of another match made in Starbucks, a cute Japanese boy and half-Asian girl, drank Tazo lemonade and spoke in muted tones.

I re-read the chapter on the kidney, hoping to finally conquer the difference between dilute and concentrated urine. The summer flings that had fed and tormented.me from afar drifted, one by one, or hand in hand, out into the velvety night. When Starbucks kicked me out and I neared my apartment, I saw Plaid-and-Ponytail standing dose, absorbed in conversation, in front of the house next to mine. The fluorescent light created halos around their

heads. They were nearly entwined.

Though I had witnessed love blossom among the lattes, I was not so lucky. I never made it to my MCAT, and I never got asked out in the glow of those blue lamps.

But by the end of the summer, my heart did tug me out to California.

Aditi Ramakrishnan, a senior in Timothy Dwight College, is a former senior editor ojTNJ.

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Fragmented and neglected, Yale's alternative music community redefines battle of the bands .

ByLauraZax

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Rock lives or so I've heard.

But let's face it: Original rock 'n' rolland all alternative music, for that matter, from pop to punk, emo to electronic is as good as dead on the Yale campus. Naming even a handful ofYale bands (or Yale rock shows, or Yale alternative music venues) is harder than getting into Yale. That's not to say that Yale is a silent campus. Concerts featuring classical music ensembles and . a capella groups crowd Yale's extracurricular calendar. So whatever happened to rock 'n' roll? · It might be tempting to blame inherent flaws in our generation for a decline in campus music, much as our parents have pinpointed everything from our ambition to our apathy to ~xplain today's supposed lack of campus activis~. But look no farther than Yale's Connecticut cousin Wesleyan, whose Middletown campus is an experimental music hub, to dispel this theory.

Wesleyan junior Ben Bernstein describes a "climate ... [of] appreciation and openness to new music." Bernstein transferred to Wesleyan from Colby College where he says he had formed "basically the only band on campus" specifically because he had heard "how great [Wesleyan's] music . " scene ts..

The most recent Wesleyan posterchild was the duo MGMT (The Management), whose catchy but fresh synth tune "Time to Pretend" was this year's de facto indie anthem. The indie afro-pop sensation Vampire Weekend, formed two years ago .

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at Columbia University, just found mainstream success in the ample airtime their song "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" enjoyed during the Beijing Olympics. As Wesleyan and Columbia prove, elite co.llege campuses can and should · be sites of musical experimentation. And Yale College, with its creative student body and its world-class music school, should be no • exception.

Enter Michael Waxman,' Timothy Dwight junior, the' singer-songwriterentrepreneur who very well may be the. change Yale's alternative music scene has been waiting for. Waxman is the founder of the imaginatively named Yale Music Scene, a new organization committed to promoting original rock music on campus.

The organization's most significant contribution is its website, Yalemusicscene. com. The site launched in early spring of 2008 with deliberately little fanfare. "It's sort of a strawman," says Waxman of the current site, meaning that it is a blueprint of sorts for his burgeoning ideas for Yale's music scene. But Yalemusicscene. com shows no outward signs of being a work-in-progress. The site not only looks professionally rendered it is. Waxman convinced buddies from Silicon Valley, where he relocated for 18 months after his . freshman year in order to co-found an internet startup company, to design the site.

"It was a low key deal because this is their passion," he says.

The result is a website that is arguably in better shape than the music scene it promotes. "It makes the music scene look more legitimate than it really is," says Ted Gordon '08, co-founder of the music magazine gunslinger., which was recently rechristened and reimagined as the glossyfronted Volume. The site features cheeky band biographies, photos, a forum for listing upcoming shows, and even a music player that allows users to download Eli originals. From the logo's iPod-ad-esque silhouette of a badass with a badass guitar down to the trendy font of even the smallest headings, the site's graphics are flawlessly professional. But bells and whistles do not a music scene make. The fact that, in order to populate his site with content, Waxman had to organize events such as last spring's Party Like A Rockstar, which featured performances by several of the ten bands included on the website is a • • case m pmnt.

Rock 'n' roll has always identified as the enemy of the establishment, and Yale is, well the establishment.

It's fitting that the home of Yale's music scene should be on the World Wide ' Web, not only because of the central role the Internet plays in music distribution in the 21st Century, but also because of THE NEW JOURNAL

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the centralizing role cyberspace can play to compensate for . fragmented physical space. In fact, the website's most promising potential is as a common forum where a scattered music scene could achieve some degree of unity, however small and however cyber. After all, the essence of a "scene" is a group of people coming together because of a shared interest~ A music scene demands the interaction of musicians both with one another and with their fans. But at Yale, alternative music is disjointed by a residential college system that can make the logistics for staging a show or even just a rehearsal prohibitively burdensome. "You can try to get into the DMCA . .

[Digital Media Center for the Arts] · or try to get into a college that has whatever equipment you're looking for, but there's nothing centralized," Gordon laments.

During his freshman year, Waxman also experienced the frustration of Yale's fragmented music scene. After succeeding .in reserving the Silliman common room for a show, he learned that finding a venue was only half the battle. "It was such an ordeal," he remembers.

While every college has a music practice room equipped with a piano, only Calhoun, Silliman, and Timothy Dwight have drum kits. (A handful of others are home to students' personal drum kits during the academic year, but whether any old Eli can use them is at the discretion of their owners.) Silliman and TD are the only colleges with recording studios. Though the studios can be reserved by students from any college, Yalies are denied access to the equipment and practice spaces of any but their own residential colleges. So if you want your rock band to have percussion, make sure you get a drummer in Calhoun, Silliman, or TD. Speakers are another issue. "The only sound system is in Calhoun's basement, and getting it out is basically the bottleneck for setting up concerts," says Waxman. The Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee owns a PA available to any student group, but it's a coveted resource. "It's really hard to • • reserve every organtzatton wants to reserve it," says Gordon.

While residential college red tape is a perennial problem for bands at Yale, construction tape will prove an additional stumbling block this year. The one dependably accessible venue for alternative music shows is the Calhoun Cabaret, an September 2008

intimate space in the basement of Calhoun which can open up to incorporate the. Buttery space for larger, louder shows. It's a favorite partly because a drum kit and PA system are housed just down the hall in Calhoun's music practice room, and partly because it's managed by the inspiring David Kant, a senior musician whose band Lady Lovelace and the Calculator Death Machine is the most prolific and prominent current Yale band.

During Calhoun's renovation, the experimental music scene will be exiled from its only reliable home and will have to improvise. College common rooms and dining halls are potential venues, but hosting shows in spaces not designed for them is a logistical nightmare, and it's often a bureaucratic one, too. "People don't want to have rock concerts [in their colleges] be- . cause they assume there's going to be beer and it's going to be loud and destructive," Gordon explains. House shows are another possibility; Wesleyan's music scene, for instance, is intimately tied to off-campus houses. However, because off-campus housing at Yale is anything but institutional, there's no guarantee that houses that have been hosts to the alternative music scene in the past 109 Howe, for instance will fall into the hands of tenants who want to have the responsibility of carrying on a tradition of loud music.

That's not to mention the fact that offcampus shows do not benefit from Yale's protective stamp of approval. On the Friday that the class of2012 moved in, thesemester's -first rock concert a performance -by Great Caesar and the Go-Getters at a house on Elm Street was shut down by the cops only two songs into the setlist~ But Waxman has faith that the music~ scene will ultimately secure the institutional infrastructure it needs. At an event last year, he wound up brushing shoulders with Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College and a musician himsel£ Waxman broached the subject ofYale's nearly non-existent music scene with Salovey, who was effusive about the effect of Stanford's music scene on his own college experience. From Salovey, Waxman learned of a proposed music cafe at the site .of the new colleges. Waxman was delighted, but hardly satisfied. "That's a 2015 thing," he says. "Their time frame is on a much larger scale than mine."

In the meantime, the music scene could benefit from even the most modest shared

space and equipment. Forget, for now, a concert hall: The Yale music scene needs a. closet. Indeed, Wesleyan's music scene . thrives ·in part because of such a closet"a little shed," in Bernstein's words, that stores amps, speakers, and PAs. The shack also serves as the humble headquarters of Wesleyan's Sound Co-op, a group that exemplifies the type of centralized and institutionally supported organization that Yale's music scene lacks and that Waxman hopes to create. The Sound Co-op is exac.t - · ly what it sounds like: a team of students trained as technicians who run sound at all student shows, alternative and otherwise.

What's more, the administration at a school whose endowment is a mere 3 percent ofYale's pays the students to do so.

Such administrative support exists at Yale for other undergraduate artistic endeavors.

Theater thrives here and the a capella scene is, if anything, a little too vibrant.

Perhaps alternative music is simply too lowbrow for an institution as historically elite as Yale. The three R' s of the alternative music ethos are Rock, Rebellion, and Revolution. Rock 'n' roll has always identified as the enemy of the establishment, and Yale is, well, the establishment. It's not surprising, then, that, excluding Buddy Holly, rock's nerdiest founding father, the purveyors and promoters of alternative music have looked very little like the foureyed, penny-loafered types who end up at Yale. Three-fourths of the Beatles didn't go to college, and 100 percent of them never graduated: The coursework that earned Sir Paul's honorary degree from Yale last spring was a lifetime of creating rock music. In fact, perhaps the most famous alternative singer, songwriter, and innovator to come out ofYale made nothing more than a pitstop on campus: David Longstreth, the mastermind behind the -experimental group The Dirty Projectors, dropped out ofYale before completing a B.A. in music in order to launch his successful indie career. Hence the argument that Yale's lack of support for alternative music is exactly what the scene needs: "Would you really want it that the administration would embrace an alternative music culture?" Waxman asks rhetorically. "You can't have a superhero without its foil. It's a relationship created out of contrast."

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TN

Laura Zax, a junior in Silliman College,

29

JONATHAN EDWARDS STUDENTS, WE SALUTE YOU '

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On August 27, 2008, hundreds ofyoung Yale men and women returned to New Haven to find a home. Instead, like sinners in the hands of an angry God, they found a place ofturmoil. Some lost power, some lost boxes, and some were even exiled to the cold halls ofthe Omni Hotel, for from friends andfrat parties. To each proud Spider who bravely stayed on campus, who wakes up each morning to the pounding ofconstruction, and who sleeps cold and dirty at night because they cannot wash with hot water, the staffof 7he New journal sends its thoughts and its wireless. we have compiled some missives from their courageous leader during this difficult time in order to commemorate their struggles. '

TUEDAY, AUGUST 5TH

Dear Members of the JE Classes of 09, 10 and 11, . I assume that you are getting organized to return to your JE home so I thought I should give you a heads up, i.e., not all of the construction is going to be finished when you get here. As things now stand, we expect each of you to be able to move into the room that you have chosen ...

What this also means is that they will have just laid down the courtyard sod and we will have to be protective of it for the first couple of weeks after you return. I will try to give you a more specific update before August 27th-a lot can change in three weeks, I have discovered.

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MoNDAY, AuGUST 2

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12:15 AM Dear JE Students, I will probably be sending you more than the usual move-in messages. This one is about desks and the courtyard grass.

DESKS IN YOUR ROOMS: on Friday I discovered that we are short 60 new desks for JE rooms. The desks were to be assembled and shipped overnight so I hope they will be in your rooms on Wednesday or Friday (August 27 or 28). Thus, I am requesting that you NOT bother me about your missing desk until after Friday 29 August, but invite you to if your desk is still missing (and I have no idea which 60 rooms will be without a desk).

COURTYARD GRASS: Of course, the weather is likely to be nice and you will not be into homework for your first few days back on campus--an ideal time for a game in the courtyard. However, they have just laid the sod and it needs a little time to take hold before being walked on so I ask that you stay off the grass for two weeks, that is, PLEASE DO NOT PLAY ON THE COURTYARD GRASS BETWEEN 27 AUGUST AND 10 SEPTEMBER. Imagine you are at Oxford or Cambridge where they don't let you walk on the grass all year long. .

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tomorrow, SATURDAY 30 AUGUST, and will require SHUTTING DOWN THE POWER FROM 9 AM TO 5 PM to entries A, _B, C, D, E, F, G, H, AND I.

9:33PM Dear JE Students, .

The master's Office will continue to be open Saturday and Sunday ...

You may also.key my cell phone number into your address book, but if you use it to ask about a key, you better pretty well have ·. exhausted all other options and be standing naked in the courtyard (and then I am going to have to ask some questions about how you carry your cell phone). '

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SATURDAY, AUGUST

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Dear JE Students, Several of you have told me that your cable is not working, but I keep forgetting to give you the bad news--it probably will not be turned on before Wednesday of next week. Sorry. You are just going to have to . catch up on your reading or visit your offcampus friends.

9:46PM Dear JE Students, Well, the good news is that we have sod in the courtyard (that you can only·look at until mid-September); the bad news is that all students will be moving in on Wednesday 27 August. Fifteen of your peers and Erin Walsh (resident graduate afffiliate) will be living in the Omni Hotel until 20 September.

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SUNDAY, AUGUST

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Dear JE Students, I am still getting quite a few messages about missing boxes, missing furniture, things that need to be repaired, etc. PLEASE BE AS EXPLICIT AS YOU CAN, I.E., HOW BOXES, AND INCLUDE YOUR ROOM NUMBER AND CELL PHONE NUMBER. Yes, I can look up both, but why do you wish to waste my time doing that for you?

Thanks for your consideration and your patience with this move-in.

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WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 2 7 .

Dear JE Students, If you discover a problem in your suite, room, or elsewhere in the Collge, please send it to me by reply. Here is some general information. . . · 3) We have had some problems with hot water, i.e., twice it has been at best just warm and had to be adjusted. It is a very weak promise again tonight BUT PLEASE TO NOT EMAIL ME ABOUT THIS BECAUSE I WILL GET THEM TO WORK ON IT EARLYTOMORROW 4) Plese keep entryway and suite doors locked.

5) And please stay off the grass. '

TuESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

Dear JE Students, Starting tomorrow (September 3rd), construction workers will arrive at 8:00 pm to check in and get organized. They will be instructed not to do any work that will cause noise and generally move around and talk quietly until 9:00 am--and then the sawing and hammering will begin but by that time you will all"be in class. Right?

• This might not work out ideally on the first day so wait until about Friday to complain again. Of course, if you really are roused from sleep between 6-6:30, you can let me know right away. And when you do complain, be specific: who did what where and at what time exactly so we can get ahold of the guy. Thanks.

-Gary Haller, Master of JE

FRIDAY, AuGusT 29

Dear JE students, The electrical contractor is ready to install a portion of the new circuit breakers today, and will require shutting down the power for D entry and C entryways. THIS OUTAGE WILLOCCUR FROM 2 PM TO APPROXIMATLEY 7 PM TODAY, FRIDAY 29 AUGUST. The remaining breakers will be installed

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