Yale Daily News Magazine March 2018 by Yale Daily News

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

INCORPORATING CONNECTICUT

VOL. XLV ISSUE 5 MARCH 2018

BY ISABEL BYSIEWICZ

EDITORS’ NOTE

ear all:

Last semester, a group of architects walked into the Hall of Graduate Studies’ common room during daytime hours. While students busied over papers and coffee, the architects gathered around the fireplace. A few started pushing at the bricks, pointing to where new walls and windows will, one year, appear. Everyone else remained in their seats, unaware that their surroundings were, in pencil, being drawn out from under them.

New Haven. Andy Sandweiss ’19 looks at the many entrances to a strip mall on Dixwell Avenue. Talia Soglin ’21 knocks on fraternity doors in the company of Engender, while Luna Beller-Tadiar ’18 takes us into the Comparative Literature building, “a strange spatial heteroglossia.” Will Langhorne ’21 addresses crises in a natural landscape; Liana Van Nostrand ’20 maps problems in a political one. Elaine Wang ’20 enters an elementary school experimenting with a new childhood trauma response system. Miles Kim ’18 writes a poem on drifting; in Amman, Jordan, Claire Haldeman ’19 finds a place to rest. Itai Almor ’20 proves the world is fragmented while Ellie Garland ’20 proves, through stories, there’s a way for it to come together.

Yale is at once fixed and fidgeting. The University fusses around the edges, turning things inside out, finding Centers in what used to be Commons. Each new blueprint sketches out a new structure for our campus, reinforcing Thanks to the effort of our writers, some lines and fading others. editors and production team for building this issue from the ground This March issue, surveying the up. It’s all ready, now, for a look inside. city, finds new ideas to build on. Our cover, written by Isabel Bysiewicz Till April, ’20, explores the landmark vacancy left by Alexion Pharmaceuticals in Frani & Flora

2 | March 2018

table of contents 8

insight

Story Circles ELEANOR GARLAND

personal essay

The Place of Comparative Literature LUNA BELLER-TADIAR

TRAUMA WITHOUT INJURY Feature by Elaine Wang

insight

An Invasion Intervention WILLIAM LANGHORNE

feature

When Women are Around TALIA SOGLIN

insight

Part III: State of Emergency LIANA VAN NOSTRAND

poetry

SNAPSHOTS OF A PLAZA Feature by Andrew Sandweiss

The Shore MILES KIM

ARRESTED MOMENTUM Personal Essay by Claire Haldeman

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Magazine Editors in Chief Flora Lipsky Frani Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Toole

Photography Editors Schirin Rangnick Vivek Suri

Managing Editors Kate Cray Nicole Blackwood

Illustrations Editors Michael Holmes Sonia Ruiz

Associate Editors Liana Van Nostrand Lucy Silbaugh Jordan Cutler-Tietjen Elaine Wang

Copy Editor Brett Greene

Magazine Design Editors Mari Melin-Corcoran Valeria Villanueva

Editor in Chief & President Rachel Treisman Publisher Elizabeth Liu Cover photo by Flora Lipsky

PAINTING IN FRAGMENTS Art Spread by Itai Almor

INCORPORATING CONNECTICUT Cover by Isabel Bysiewicz

ASSISTANT DESIGN EDITORS: Allen Chang, Austin Mills BUSINESS LIAISON: Alexa Tsay

Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

feature

Trauma Without Injury // BY ELAINE WANG // PHOTOS BY VIVEK SURI

efore entering the playspace of Truman School, the clinician asked Ronnie*, an 11-year-old with a timorous smile, what was on her mind that day. She shuffled her feet on the glossy, marble-tiled hallway. “I’m worried that my dog will die,” Ronnie said. “Have you had one that died?” “Last year.” The two entered a small room with blue foam mats padding the concrete floor and surrounding walls. The space was devoid of sharp angles; two fluffy pale-yellow pillows lounged in the far corner. The clinician had 15 minutes with Ronnie. She was a professionally trained drama therapist at Animating Learning by Integrating and Validating Experience, or ALIVE, a school-based socio-

4 | March 2018

emotional program. The clinician began by imitating her partner’s movement — lengthening her arms and scuffling her feet as they began chasing each other imprecisely, running in a circle and then suddenly kneeling, hands clasped behind their heads. Suddenly, the clinician’s brows furrowed. She began whimpering. Ronnie understood. “Fetch!” she laughed, throwing an imaginary ball. The clinician rolled across the floor. She mock-carried the ball between her teeth and launched it back to Ronnie. She was loud, too — grumping, sneezing — until Ronnie suddenly lurched as if she were driving an automobile. The clinician raised her eyebrows briefly, then groaned. “No,” she said, and her body went limp. The scene culminated in what drama

therapists would characterize as a moment of recognition, when the student realizes that the play is familiar to their own life. “This realization is accompanied by a sudden relaxing or releasing in their bodies,” according to the 2014 essay “Trauma-centered Developmental Transformations.” “Ring ring, this is the hospital,” the clinician said in an authoritative tone. “You have to come say goodbye to your dog.” “No.” Ronnie backed across the room. “No.” “It’s OK.” The clinician took Ronnie’s hand. “Let’s do a little magic. Woof !” The clinician barked and went down to the ground again. She looked up. “Say hello to your new dog.”

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LIVE was created by the Foundation for the Arts and Trauma Inc. in 2007 to implement a preventive, trauma-informed, arts-based approach to facilitate student success. The program has been adopted in six elementary schools in New Haven, one in Bridgeport, one in New Britain and two in Minneapolis. “We believe that the primary cause of the achievement gap is not in the conditions of schools, but in the conditions of students, who have been exposed to toxic levels of psychological stress,” explains ALIVE’s 2015–2016 annual report. Childhood maltreatment is easily evaluated in allegations of abuse and neglect — throughout 2016, 4.1 million cases were filed involving approximately 7.4 million children, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In Connecticut, there were 40,187 allegations, equivalent to 53.3 maltreatment allegations per 1,000 children. As a public health program not singularly focused on mental health, ALIVE counteracts the behaviorist model employed in most U.S. school systems. The model assumes that student behaviors are produced by environmental factors in the school. The U.S. Department of Education, for example, offers “Supporting and Responding to Behavior” — an evidence-based classroom decision-making flowchart — as a guidance resource for teachers. Teachers, they say, should begin by reflecting on whether the classroom interventions — such as predictable classroom routines, constant supervision and specific corrections to misbehavior — are implemented with consistency. They are asked to consider whether problematic behaviors are major or minor and how many students are involved. If there are only a few students involved, teachers should simply request additional support for those students. If there are many, teachers should “review, adjust and intensify practices.” By contrast, ALIVE seeks to promote awareness of the significance of childhood trauma to students’ behavior. According to the organization’s mission

statement, “Current teachers, principals, and social workers are spending much of their time attending to the many students who are disruptive during the school day. They are not, however, attending to those students who might be disruptive tomorrow.” “The society understands that kids cannot verbalize the things that are going through — you’re losing access to a whole lot of information,” explained Cat Davis, the director of ALIVE. The organization strives to find the language to understand childhood lived experiences. “The behaviorist perspective tries to extinguish the perverse,” Davis continued. “It’s not as much looking at the reasons why they’re behaving they are but simply trying to alter it.” “People often use the metaphor of Pandora’s jar,” said Dr. David Johnson, who is the supervisor of ALIVE and the co-director of the Post Traumatic Stress Center in New Haven. In the Pandora myth, Epimetheus, disregarding the warning of his brother Prometheus, took Pandora as wife; it was then that she opened the fatal box that let out all the evils and plagues that man had previously been free of. “People forget that, at the end of the story, there’s also hope.”

he structure of ALIVE follows the response to intervention model, a multitiered approach to behavioral and academic intervention in U.S. schools. The method was invented in the 1970s as a screening model to identify students with learning disabilities. Instead of using the “discrepancy model” that compares students’ IQ scores to determine eligibility for special education, response to intervention is an accommodating approach that closely monitors the students’ learning rate and level of performance. In 2004, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act included the model as a way for districts to identify students with learning disabilities and provided funding to start programs. The response to intervention model includes three tiers: The first, prevention,

involves screening struggling learners by comparison to an established academic and behavioral baseline; the second, intervention, requires supporting students unresponsive to classroom strategies in tier one with intensive instruction; and the third, intensive intervention, provides individualized interventions that target the student’s specific skill deficits. Ronnie’s session was an example of the third tier, which offers the individualized setting necessary in order to most efficiently and accurately identify the stressors in students’ lives. Counselors employ a nonpsychotherapeutic version of a technique called developmental transformation, a drama therapy approach developed by Johnson. Developmental transformation, Johnson contends in his 2009 article, does not attempt to perfect a person, eliminate neurotic conflict or repair character flaws. Rather, these pernicious aspects of living are revealed more fully. Students in the third tier have a chance to describe, portray and play out elements of their actual traumatic personal experiences. The counselor acts out a number of roles or actions to place a demand upon the student, gently raising their anxiety to provoke their attention and protective defenses. No rules are applied to the play except a restriction from harm and a lack of real objects. As the counselor did with Ronnie, they begin by asking the student what is burdening them in their life. They then jump into an action initiated by the student, such as play-fighting or circling. The movements are closely tracked by the counselor as the basis for the student’s action responses. The sessions prompt students to engage in an embodied way. The goal is to find the situation that evokes the greatest amount of tension and stress in the student.

ndividual students are referred to stress reduction sessions. All students of ALIVE, however, engage in second tier activities called “Miss Kendra time.” As the counselors tell students, Miss Kendra is a mother who has lost her only Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

feature child and can’t have another. Her life has been devoted to the safety and wellbeing of children, and she is always present to listen, vigilant in imagined space. Miss Kendra’s beliefs are outlined in a document titled “Miss Kendra’s List”: “No child should be punched or kicked. No child should be left alone for a long time. No child should be hungry for a long time. No child should be bullied or told they are no good. No child should be touched in their private parts. No child should be scared by gun violence at home or in school. No child should have to see other people hurt each other.” The philosophy of Miss Kendra is expanded on every week for 30 minutes. Miss Kendra was invented by ALIVE as a pseudo–Santa Claus, except, instead of incentivizing children with performative “niceness” in exchange for Christmas presents, she believes all children have their own stories. “The story is based on what the kids were telling us,” described Johnson. “[Miss Kendra is] a kind of internal guardian figure that the children have inside them that is not located in any particular space or time.” On Valentine’s Day at Truman School, a counselor addressed a pale-pink firstgrade classroom. “I know today you will be with my friends at Truman,” she read from a two piece, broken-heart shaped

6 | March 2018

card from Miss Kendra. “It’s wonderful to celebrate the love we have for each other — I know it can also remind us of people we love, who we have lost, who are far away.” She lifted her head: “Who have you lost, who are far away?” In a different fifth-grade class, another counselor entered the room as if she were an enraged peer. “I’m breaking my computer to smithereens!” she exclaimed with balled fists. “Where is ‘Miss Kendra’s List’? I need some guidance, people!” A student gingerly asked, “Did your dad delete all the apps on your phone?” Another said, “Maybe, you told a secret to your mom and your mom got mad at you, and now you feel like you can’t trust her.” After the counselor explained that she was upset because “I can’t talk to my mom and I miss my dad,” a student told her, “You can write notes to him. My dad is in jail and that’s what I do.” The counselor said she designed the performance because a student in the class had shared a similar experience with her privately the week before. She wanted the student to know they were not alone. Clinically, the method is known as desensitization. Students are encouraged to formulate and express their traumas repetitively because the process of communication can not only show them the source of the worries but also discharge

some of the emotions attached. “We don’t bring a snake in to heal the trauma from a snake bite,” explained Charlotte Steuter-Martin, a volunteer coordinator of ALIVE and a staff clinician at the New Haven Post Traumatic Stress Center. “We allow them to imagine a snake and to tell us their memories of the snake. Then they tell the memories of a stick. Then we do it over and over again until all the details about the snake are out, so they become able to differentiate.” The legend of Miss Kendra also facilitates the first tier screening stage of the response to transformation model. Students are encouraged to convey every minute feeling of their day to Miss Kendra. In their weekly sessions, counselors provide them with special envelopes, paper and stamps, as well as mailboxes with her name in a floral cursive font. In the 2016–17 school year, Miss Kendra received 24,000 letters. In the ALIVE office on 18 Nash St., each child has their own folder of past correspondences. The letters are neatly stacked by school, grade, class and name. “I’ve learned that kids are always trying to show you their truths and that they’re finding ways to tell you every day,” said Steuter-Martin. The counselors are referred to as Miss Kendra’s helpers; they might change, but Miss Kendra will always be there to write

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and to listen. Her presence is manifested on paper by a team of 25 volunteers who reply to every received letter. “The primary goal is to make sure that the children feel heard and see what feeling the child identifies or how we can identify it,” said Steuter-Martin, who trains volunteers in the letter-writing process. “And if we are good at this, [we] let them feel validated.” “Dear Miss Kendra, “I enjoyed the Super Bowel,” one student wrote. “Dear Miss Kendra, “One day my mom told me that before my sister was born I had a sister that died inside my mom’s belly. When my mom told my that I was so sad I was crying … I thout in my head ‘she would be pritty,’” said another. “Dear Miss Kendra, “Mommy and daddy and titi saved me when someone broke in.” “Dear Miss Kendra, “I’m righting to you because I just realized that my dad is going to stay in jail for a long time then he is suppose to I’m really sad because know I’m not going to see him for a long time the reason he went to jail is

because he was delivering something he was not suppose too and my real dad is in jail too so know I have know dad. Can you tell me what to do?”

“K

ids are getting messages every day not to tell about the bad things that have happened to them from various sources,” Steuter-Martin said. “We want to not only counteract any symptoms of PTSD that are developing post-trauma but also to counteract the robust societal level of avoidance that they’re exposed to every day.” The counselors at ALIVE, therefore, are very conscious of the way they respond to the students’ feelings. Steuter-Martin said, “In my response letter, I wouldn’t write, ‘I hope next time you’ll be feeling better,’ because this can be read as a signal that they shouldn’t be having any worries.” The vision is supported by organizations with similar mission statements. Among the eight elementary schools implementing ALIVE, two are partnered with the New Haven Trauma Coalition, which was created by United Way after the shooting at Sandy Hook

Elementary School in Newtown to “help students learn positive strategies to deal with anger, loss and conflict.” In 2016, former Missouri Governor Jay Nixon enacted a law that required the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to create a website about the trauma-informed schools initiative, including information regarding the trauma-informed approach and a guide for schools about how to become trauma-informed. “A ‘trauma-informed approach’ is not a program model that can be implemented and then simply monitored by a fidelity checklist,” the website reads. “Rather, it is a profound paradigm shift in knowledge, perspective, attitudes and skills that continues to deepen and unfold over time. ” The paradigm shift requires localizing individual traumas within its societal responses. “There’s a qualitative difference between fixing the symptoms of these kids and changing the norm of conversation,” added Davis. It is important to determine where the trauma ends. It also matters how it begins. *Ronnie is a pseudonym used to protect the privacy of a child.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

insight

Story Circles

// BY ELEANOR GARLAND // PHOTO BY VIVEK SURI

ozens settled into peagreen plastic chairs as Elizabeth Nearing, a redheaded Long Wharf Theatre professional, began her story: “When I was about 2 years old, I stabbed my sister in the ankle with a fork.” Nearing was one of two New Haven residents to take the stage on Feb. 5 at “Storytellers New Haven,” a monthly gathering in the Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology’s Orchid Cafe. Nearing spoke candidly about how personal mental health issues had distanced her from her sister and how the declining physical health of their aging parents brought them back together. Each sentence was met with murmurs of agreement and nods from the audience. Nearing concluded by describing herself and her 30-year-old sister curled up in a pillow fort in their parents’ Ohio living room. 8 | March 2018

When the applause ended, several audience members asked Nearing questions. Karen D uBois-Walton ’89, who launched Storytellers New Haven with her husband Kevin Walton last fall, champions this post-presentation dialogue. “We want to encourage curiosity. I think it’s part of that expanding awareness of each other,” she said.

ew Haven and Yale can feel similarly divided as perception-based judgments impede connections across lines of difference. Advocates in both circles have proposed a common solution: storytelling. Performative or organic, storytelling can dissolve bias and inspire activism. Storytelling can be a valuable tool both in knitting communities together internally and in connecting them to other communities.

uBois-Walton is the executive director of the New Haven Housing Authority. Her husband is a youth mentor and basketball coach. Through their community work, the pair has observed New Haven’s fragmentation firsthand. To cultivate community empathy, they created a platform for sharing some of New Haven’s 130,000 life stories. “When we lump [people] by gender, race and ethnicity, by economic standing, by town and gown, we automatically put a whole set of assumptions on people, some of which may be true but a lot of which are not, and that’s the nuance of finding somebody’s story,” DuBois-Walton said. DuBois-Walton and Walton are alumni of the Community Leadership Program, a workshop where they first witnessed how stories bring people together. The

insight program, founded in 2002 by Bill Graustein, a former researcher in Yale’s Geology and Geophysics Department, aims to inspire and motivate Greater New Haven’s community leaders by providing a space for collaboration and connection across boundaries of difference. Through monthly discussion-based meetings, Graustein’s curriculum encourages participating leaders to practice “deep listening.” Instead of concentrating on the similarities that lead to related follow-up stories, as in cocktail party conversations, Graustein hopes listeners will focus on differences and turn those differences into questions, fundamentally shifting the dialogue and building collective trust. DuBois-Walton, Walton and Nearing are three of the 430 community leaders who have completed the leadership workshop program. In the Community Leadership Program’s opening exercise, participants are given 90 seconds to describe what they do and why they do it. Listeners are then encouraged to share what they want to know more about. The curriculum culminates in a final exercise of “deep listening,” when several participants wrestling with big professional or personal decisions share their stories with the cohort. Listeners are prohibited from giving advice or telling their own stories. All they can do is ask questions. “It’s about setting up a structure where there is equality of voice, and that is something we are really conscious of in a community where access to resources or privilege is not uniformly distributed,” Graustein said. In an article he wrote for the The Museletter of the League of Advancement of New England Storytelling, Graustein explained that narratives dispel fear, guilt and anger and welcome respect, curiosity and hope. In order to fully benefit from the power of the narrative, he said, it must be shared equally. “My strong sense is that the power of story to change our vision grows as the diversity of experience of those in the story circle increases,” Graustein wrote. Graustein hopes working with story

will allow a form of communication to develop organically in New Haven and lend equality of voice to the residents of a structurally inequitable city. Storytellers New Haven expands the story circle beyond the community’s leaders to its everyday people. Thanks to grassroots work with the New Haven community, DuBois-Walton and Walton can extend invitations in ways that Graustein cannot.

atherine Conant, a regular at Storytellers New Haven events, helps storytellers to prepare for their performances. After a long and varied career as a real estate agent, florist, event planner, mother and antiques dealer, Conant found her calling when she attended the Connecticut Storytelling Center’s annual festival. Over the past 25 years, she has “never for a nanosecond considered doing anything else.” She coached Graustein through his first public performance at a 1995 festival in Chester. Conant believes that stories are not made but found, and she helps others dig into their inventory of personal experience to extract what needs to be shared. At the end of the event, in an effort to expand the story circle, Conant offered her services to anyone in the room interested in performing at a future event. Lee Cruz, a community activist at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, took the stage at the Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology after Nearing. Amid colorful anecdotes about Star Trek, diamond-cutting and an intensive summer of Spanish schooling via the New Testament, Cruz told a poignant story of perseverance. When Cruz was 9, his family moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Puerto Rico. When his family later returned to the States, federal policy prevented him from re-entering the general education classrooms, despite his status as a native English speaker. Today, Cruz works closely with the New Haven Hurricane Response Committee. In his work, Cruz looks to connect with people through story. He tells

the story of his own childhood to the displaced Puerto Rican families whose children are now entering the New Haven public school system. “I have found that stories, much more than statistics, inspire us and tell us about what role we can play — how we can give our time or our money and make these human connections,” he said later on the phone. The Storytellers New Haven narratives span a wide variety of topics: growing up as an undocumented immigrant, raising a special-needs child and navigating the vicious cycle of incarceration and re-entry are just a few. DuBois-Walton hopes Storytellers New Haven will broaden the audience’s understanding of the human experience and open up their hearts. Eventually, she hopes stories will inspire concrete action and improve the New Haven community. Like Graustein, DuBois-Walton sees value in expanding the circle and understands the limits of her project. In order for communities to fully benefit from the power of narrative, they must keep in mind who is speaking and, more importantly, who is not speaking. The stories that most need to be heard are often the hardest to tell, and many New Haven residents lack the time, resources and fluency to perform at the Orchid Cafe. DuBois-Walton and Walton are working to make the event as accessible as possible by considering alternative venues and reaching out to a greater variety of tellers. She hopes to demystify the performative aspect by creating more informal story sharing spaces. Still, delivering a personal narrative can be heavy emotional labor. Though DuBois-Walton and Walton can nudge, storytellers must be internally motivated to share their stories. That’s true across the board.

igitally and in dining halls, students open themselves up to stories everyday. Still, because similarity and simplicity are far easier to grasp than difference, they often don’t apply Graustein’s “deep listening” techniques. Particularly on social media, Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

insight

people create and consume narratives without fully processing or reflecting. Carefully constructed online highlight reels become the only story. While structured storytelling may not be a common feature of day-to-day interactions on campus, some of Yale’s closest-knit microcosms revolve around swapping stories. For those who do orientation trips and join societies with “biography” components, the college experience is framed by personal narrative. First years and seniors welcome spaces of emotional vulnerability as an opportunity to catch up on the nearly two decades of life they led without each other. They tell not to impress but to reflect and inform, and they listen not to be impressed but to gain insight and find commonality. In the fall of 2014, a group of Yale undergraduates started Telltale as a platform for sharing true personal narratives and bringing the Yale–New Haven community together. Each semester, Telltale hosts shows ranging from formal events to open mic nights. As its audition sign-up sheets read, its goal is to “promote sharing of experiences and narratives across Yale’s campus and beyond to foster understanding and expression in our community.” “I walk around Yale and see all these brilliant, interesting people I will never meet,” Matt Thekkethala ’19, a member of the Telltale board, said. “Telltale is a platform for otherwise faceless people to present their lives and share parts of themselves with everyone. It’s a cathartic, humanizing experience for everyone who participates. It makes 10 | March 2018

people relate — a beautiful, necessary thing for campuses.” This year, Telltale has transformed into a space for activism. Last December, the group put on a show called “Stories of Migration.” In addition to storytellers from the Yale community, two New Haven public school students from Puerto Rico, assisted by Spanish translators, shared their experiences arriving in the United States after Hurricane Maria. Thekkethala is excited by the critical conversations Telltale shows can spark. Audience members often linger long after performances to talk to speakers about their stories. Through Storytellers New Haven, the Community Leadership Project, first-year orientation programs, secret societies and Telltale, diverse groups of loosely acquainted individuals connect by means of performative and spontaneous acts of storytelling and listening. “It is utterly unpredictable what connections are going to occur, but it is almost absolutely predictable that some very profound and unexpected connections will develop. Because they are unexpected, they are all the more powerful. They disrupt one’s sense of expectation for what is normal,” Graustein said.

n Feb. 5, Arnie Pritchard GRD ’76 was among the dozens seated in the Orchid Cafe’s pea-green plastic chairs, listening to Nearing and Cruz. At the end of the meeting, Pritchard distributed flyers for his monthly story sharing workshop at the Institute Library. On the third Thursday of each month, Pritchard and an ever-evolving group of roughly eight to 12 New Haven residents gather around a wooden table and a loaf of banana nut bread. For two hours, storytellers of all levels and experience share

personal narratives and the occasional folktale. Over the years, Pritchard has collected feedback from his story circle. Participants value giving and receiving feedback. “They feel welcome and affirmed, even when they’re getting suggestions for improvement. They feel like it makes connections,” Pritchard said of the group. DuBois-Walton, Pritchard and Graustein, three major proponents of storytelling in New Haven, all have close ties to Yale University. Sara deBeer ’81, a studied teller of international folktales who performs at elementary schools and assisted-living homes through the Connecticut Storytelling Center, is yet another Yale alumna working with storytelling in and around New Haven. Whether performing for 5-yearolds or 95-year-olds, deBeer marvels at the binding power of co-creation. “There is an intimacy and directness when telling to people who are listening without a book in the way. My words are reaching out, and their minds are reaching out, and together we are creating a story,” she said.

hekkethala, still an undergraduate, ventured down Chapel Street on Feb. 15 to join Pritchard’s story-sharing group at the Institute Library. Officially called the Young Men’s Institute, the 192-year-old library is one of the last remaining membership libraries in North America. Surrounded by leather-spined books, framed taxidermy butterflies and bronze busts, Thekkethala and Pritchard each told a story, and the two offered each other feedback. Pritchard invited Thekkethala to the Connecticut Storytelling Festival, and Thekkethala invited Pritchard to Telltale’s upcoming show. The Yale and New Haven story circles are slowly shifting closer together.

personal essay

“C

omparative Literature. The department?” My friend’s face shows no sign of recognition, a typical response. Then: “Ohhh.” A pause. “So like English?” A few minutes later I pull open the heavy front door of 451 College St. and nearly crash into the next one — the first door opens onto a window that is in fact another door, itself confusingly set between two more interior windows and a step above ground level. Taped to the warped panes are several curling paper signs: “Please do not press a glass pane to open the door,” reads the first (Times New Roman font, first letter capitalized, period stubbornly in place). “STEP UP,” says another more colloquially. It’s a strange spatial heteroglossia, and in its disorienting complication of something fairly mundane I

The Place of Comparative Literature // BY LUNA BELLER-TADIAR // PHOTO BY VIVEK SURI

can’t help but read the entrance as some kind of metaphor for the discipline. Inevitably, I end up taking the access ramp to the left, obviously a later addition, which leads directly to the two corner trash cans before the path veers into the lobby. Inside, the gleaming wooden bannister no longer gleams; the stairs sink heavily in the center. The place feels not just old but vaguely degraded. Weak flo-

rescent lights cast a shadowless nonlight, and someone has covered the floors with thin corporate carpeting, dyed an amalgamation of indistinguishable grays. These days I head straight up these stairs. I declared the major last year, but only as a senior do I have consistent reason to creak my way upwards to where the faculty members have their dens, hidden behind doors of imposing solid wood. Upstairs even the florescent lights

falter; my creaking continues through an eternal twilight. Strange objects are scattered on the several mantelpieces that line the looping hall, contextlessness turning them helplessly into kitsch: a pixely framed print of the New York skyline, labeled “New York, New York”; a small ceramic statue of what might be a monk, if a monk can wear a conniving expression; a diorama of small circular clay dolls, bright red cheeks inappropriately cheery, glued to a background of reed and dried flowers. A few chairs in different styles are scattered around these mantles, presumably for waiting students who never seem to be there. I get the feeling that whoever decorates dentists’ offices made a half-hear ted attempt here. But I’m pretty sure it’s just that no one is actually in charge. If there is a center of organization, however, it’s downstairs. This time I skip the stairs, and turn directly into the main office, a better lit room where Pat Benatar sings defiantly from a tiny beige Wilson sports radio in the corner, the sound low and crackly enough to become comforting ambient noise. No one is behind the decorative metal “LOVE” that sits on the main desk, so I plop myself down in a voluptuous floral Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

personal essay

armchair and proceed to study the candy options on the cupcake-shaped plate in front of me. “Oh, hello,” says Mary Jane Stevens as she comes in. She is the administrative coordinator, and it’s her desk I’m across from. “Wait, were you waiting for me?” I explain that I was, that I was curious about the building and thought she might be the best person to ask. My instinct seems confirmed when I find out that Mary Jane has been with the department for twenty-seven years, and forty-five at Yale. “People say I must have started when I was 6,” laughs Mary Jane, shaking her head of auburn hair, and indeed she doesn’t look old enough for such a tenure. While she had intended to finish college, she began working for Yale after only a year of school, a fact she delivers with a slight wistfulness. “But you were asking me about the building,” she says quickly when I inquire, and I feel suddenly as if “Yale student” were stamped on my forehead. I think of my grandmother — the white, if Jewish, American one — who did finish college but gave up a number of possible careers to be the housewife to my grandfather’s cardiology. I would have liked to hear Mary Jane’s story. I don’t press. The printer whirrs loudly. A bespectacled man comes in. “Hey David,” says Mary Jane. “Hello Mary Jane,” says David. “Say, do you know if I’m going to be able to get out of here tonight?” They discuss the upcoming bike race, and the streets that will be blocked off. “I have nothing against bicycle races,” says David, partly to me. “Paul de Man loved them. They ‘only exist as a literary event,’ he said. Because, you know, it’s like, it’s the Tour de France and you’re in some small town and it’s like — here come the bikes! Then —” He makes a

12 | March 2018

motion with his hand — “Whoosh! And that’s it. So your enjoyment of it is all a function of highly developed sports writing.” He pauses. I’m grinning. “Anyway, I have nothing against it. I think it’s great. As long as I can get out of the parking lot.” “I’m printing out your copies, by the way,” says Mary Jane. “All 800 pages.” “We just can’t read things on screens at our age,” says David to me, as if to apologize.

ary Jane tells me that 451 College St. began life in 1909 as a fraternity house and passed through an era as the bursars’ office (“Everyone hated it, because you had to come here to pay your bills. It was all cubicles upstairs.” I imagine this explains the carpeting.). Sixteen years ago it was converted to its current function. I am surprised. “Well it looks like a frat house if you think about it,” says Mary Jane. I do, but promptly realize I don’t have much to go on in the way of frat house architecture. “You can imagine — a bunch of frat boys on that — that semi-circular thing…” “Balcony?” I offer, “Veranda?” “Yeah. Drinking and throwing their cigar butts over the side … ” She trails off. This I can imagine, and do, vividly. There is a frat house on Lake Place, a few doors down from where Sappho parties have been held in the past few years. On these rare lesbian evenings, I pass there looking gayer than usual, simultaneously wary of the crowd and filled with a vague sadness. Sadness for the girls in their identical skirts and

identical crop tops, identical heels and waterfalls of straight blond hair, shiny as if cleaned by Windex. A better world is possible, I want to whisper to them. For the boys I feel no sadness. Perhaps I am simply incurious. Sometimes I feel like walking into 451 College St. is like going to a Sappho party. There’s the Political Science Department up the hill, shiny and new, or the Yale School of Management, shimmering and secure under its 2.25 million pound glass facade, or even the English Department, buttoned up in the staccato constants of “Linsly-Chittenden Hall,” basking in the glow of sumptuous stained glass … And here we are, unmissed, ignoring the crappy carpet and discussing Latin American film until midnight in the sickly-lit basement. It’s called 451 College because it’s not endowed, explains Mary Jane. No one gave money. So we don’t get a name. And yet — Well it looks like a frat house if you think about it. After David leaves she opens an adjoining door to reveal a spacious room whose centerpiece is a gleaming wood table made of a dark, heavylooking wood. On the table is a crystal dish; on this are some paper napkins, printed with a blue Yale crest; finally all of it is crowned with a stack of flimsy plastic cups. “There’s Paul de Man,” says Mary Jane, pointing to one of the black and white portraits that line the walls. The walls here are a clean cream, uncluttered by the riotous array of posters that stick to the doors upstairs. The portraits, with similar propriety, are

equally all of t names a a clean, Ah, s shrine. the … c fies, wh familiar as well “Heideg “But about a the pee doorwa “Tha David ply Goo ties spir knowle current nymity dent bo ture is a in the l came to new sch of yet a larly fie conserv cism in of Yale rida in them cr as postfundam West c tory, art like a t 1986 ar tic Mafi monike

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personal essay

evenly spaced, all of them equally sized and identically framed, all of them of white men in suits, names and dates traced underneath in a clean, inky script. Ah, so this is the remainder of the shrine. The relic, the meeting place, the … chair’s office, Mary Jane clarifies, which explains the desk and the familiar pair of shoes behind the door, as well as the stack of books stamped “Heidegger” in aggressive titular font. “But you should really ask David about all this. He can tell you about the peeps,” says Mary Jane from the doorway. “Thanks.” I could ask professor David Quint, but I could also simply Google it — or, in dusty humanities spirit, go to that realm of sanctified knowledge, the library. For despite its current appearances and seeming anonymity among the undergraduate student body, Yale Comparative Literature is a historic name, so much so that in the late seventies the “Yale School” came to refer to its radically disruptive new school of thought. On the heels of yet a previous heyday — the similarly field-altering, if ultimately more conservative appearance of New Criticism in the ’50s — an influential group of Yale thinkers followed Jacques Derrida in his deconstructive turn, all of them creating what came to be known as post-structuralism. These new ideas fundamentally changed the way the West could think about culture, history, art and language — and seemed like a threat to some. Indeed, in a 1986 article in which “the Hermeneutic Mafia” is recorded as an alternative moniker for this group of academics,

The New York Times writes that “a dense jungle has grown up around this house of literature […] as if a tropical French colony […] had sprung up from the turf.” The metaphor is closer to apt — and more revealing of the resultant alarm — than the writer was perhaps aware, given both Derrida’s upbringing as a Jew in French Colonial Algeria and the ways postcolonial and feminist theorists would bring out the anti-hegemonic potential they found in his work (though, it should be noted, this last was part of already powerful movements and certainly can’t be credited to those at Yale). It is hard to overstate the impact of these new ideas about texts, language and meaning; the beginning of what we now simply call “Theory,” it was an intellectual watershed whose echoes still resonate in a variety of disciplines today. Many of my friends, I’d guess, aware of it or not, go through their daily lives thinking in ways traceable to this department. Of course, some of this legacy sticks in an institution; some of it doesn’t. I go in deeper, peering at these people who, New Critic or post-structuralist, all remain white men in suits. Mary Jane’s story is still on my mind, and I wonder, abruptly, where someone like me might have found herself forty-five years ago. Female, mixed-race, queer to boot, one parent a Jew and the other from a former colony? The legacy that cloaks this room is what I’d sometimes like to show my friends, and yet if deconstruction held some seeds of feminist, anticolonial thought then it seems remarkably barren down here. I find myself tense, squirming next to the patent leather shoes and the Heidegger texts (wasn’t he a bit of a Nazi?), skeptical of the monogrammed nap-

kins. In fact, I realize, I prefer it upstairs: I like the disorder, the anarchic furniture, the posters in different languages; I like the tchotchkes on the mantels, tiny portals to the worlds they came from, their traces of elsewheres not entirely lost in their absurdity. Even the lobby I like, its cacophony of entrances and exits making it hard to tell in from out, requiring you to rethink your own placement, disrupting easy lines from A to B.

“W

e’re gonna have to leave the building in three or four years,” Mary Jane tells me back in her office. The University is building more graduate dorms, and planning to put offices where they used to be. “They’re gonna put all the humanities there. Not all of us”— she says ‘us’—“but most of us. For example I think English is staying where they are.” Another relocation, and, though she doesn’t say it, I realize: another degradation. In its heyday the department occupied the top of Bingham tower, a faux-gothic rise with stone and iron filigree windows. It still retains the library on the tower’s eighth floor, a sun-drenched space suffused with the scent of old manuscripts and the kind of dust that floats in beams of window-warped sun. “They were gonna try to take that away from us too, but we protested,” she says, and despite Paul de Man staring down at me, I feel a flash of anger at the increasingly corporate University, casting aside its former treasures. Together we look at the wide windows, the trees that wave gently just outside. “I’m just so lucky to have this office,” she says, and the dust fades a little from my vision. The wood seems stained a shade deeper, the sun a touch more golden. She smiles, only a little sadly. “It’s phenomenal.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

insight

An Invasion Invervention // BY WILLIAM LANGHORNE // PHOTOS BY CAROLE CHEAH AND SCHIRIN RANGNICK

n a July afternoon in 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt stood backed by the Blue Ridge Mountains of Shenandoah National Park and delivered a promise. “Through all [national parks] we are preserving the beauty and the wealth of the hills. … We seek to pass on to our children a richer land.” Less than 90 years later, this promise is under serious threat by, of all things, an insect slightly larger than a grain of salt. Hemlock woolly adelgid, a species of insect native to Japan, first invaded the United States in the 1920s. It feeds on the sap of the eastern hemlock, an ancient and ecologically vital species, and can kill a tree in four to 10 years. Unchecked by natural predators and spread by birds, wind and infected vegetation, there has been little to stop its rapid march across New England and Mid-Atlantic States. In the late 1980s, infections broke out in Shenandoah National Park and the forests of Connecticut. By 2002, it had reached Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In 2015, the National Park Service estimated that the infestation had killed up to 80 percent of Shenandoah National Park’s hemlock population.

14 | March 2018

David Orwig, a senior ecologist at Harvard Forest, has been monitoring the impact of hemlock woolly adelgid in woodlots near Petersham, Massachusetts. These forests contain eastern hemlocks ranging from 70 to 200 years of age. “The vast majority of these hemlock trees are already infested with woolly adelgid,” Orwig says in a video posted on the Harvard Forest site. “We anticipate tremendous change over the next decade or two.” Orwig considers the adgelid, which has already killed hundreds of thousands of trees in 18 states within the past thirty years, a serious threat to Northeastern forests. The dynamic of the Harvard Forest has already started changing. Deciduous trees such as the black birch have begun replacing the towering evergreens. As the hemlocks die off, their deep canopies will disappear, changing the feel of these ancient woodlands. The open forest floors, covered in spongy carpets of evergreen needles, will give way to shrubby undergrowth. The cool, moist environments created by the shade of their branches will vanish. Streams flowing through these woods will warm, putting stress on trout and other cold-water fish. Slowly but surely,

this invisible species is dismantling the region’s visual majesty. According to a U.S. Forest Service study, the eastern hemlock also plays an important role in regulating forest water cycles. The large surface area of its evergreen canopy transpires, or releases water, in large quantities during the winter. The hemlock’s replacements — deciduous trees, which transpire in the spring, and shrubby evergreens, which have a smaller canopy area — will not be able to maintain this winter water release. This change in transpiration levels will likely cause a rise in stream flow in the summer and a decrease in the winter, further altering the dynamics of old hemlock forests. But hope remains. Some think the threat of the adelgid can still be stopped. Since Carole Cheah was hired as a postdoctoral researcher in 1994, she has been working at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station to regulate hemlock woolly adelgid. Her research focuses on using Sasajiscymnus tsugae, a Japanese lady beetle, as a method of biological control. Cheah thinks this beetle is especially promising since it has the longest annual predatory impact on the adelgid populations and can be easily mass reared in labs. Directly monitoring the impact of the beetles is done completely by hand and requires careful inspection of tree branches. “I’m a one-woman show,” said Cheah. When she started, her team was larger, but it has since been reduced due to insufficient funding. This has led her to focus on gathering tree health data in areas where the beetle has been released rather than monitoring the beetles by hand. However, the Maine Forest Service, with its larger workforce, has conducted extensive monitoring and found that despite cold winters, the beetles have established colonies along the coast.

insight Nonprofessionals can now take part in this form of biological control thanks to the commercialization of the Japanese lady beetles. Tree Savers, a company based in Pennsylvania, has been mass rearing and selling the adelgid predators. “Their lab is top notch and they really care about the quality of the beetles,” Cheah said. These sesame seed–sized insects are sold for $2 apiece, which Cheah said is reasonable when considering the large impact a small number of beetles can have on controlling adelgid spread. Beetles released by Tree Savers have caused significant reductions of adelgid numbers in southeastern Pennsylvania. Last year the

effects of the winter kills are magnified. In 2016, an unusually warm winter, a polar vortex caused a cold snap that lasted only a few hours but brought temperatures as low as minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of Connecticut. Normally, adelgid mortality rates can rise above 90 percent in typical winter temperatures. This sharp burst of cold killed 98 percent of adelgids across the state. While these results are very promising, adelgid populations are always able to bounce back during the spring. As an allfemale species, these insects reproduce parthenogenetically, meaning they do not have to mate to produce offspring.

company donated 2,000 beetles to Cheah, allowing her to expand her research into new state forests. Overall, Cheah is very optimistic about the decline of adelgid populations. In addition to the impact of the Japanese lady beetles, the data she has gathered on adelgid winter mortality since 2000 have shown that New England winter weather can have a drastic effect on controlling the pest. Cheah has also noticed that climate change has had a positive impact on reducing the adelgid populations. Northern hemisphere polar vortexes, weather phenomena in which cold air descends south from the North Pole, have been increasing in strength and frequency in recent years. As this cold air reaches New England, the

“Any survivors can just explode. One female is capable of producing over 250 eggs. I once counted up to 500,” Cheah said. She believes the Japanese lady beetles will be most effective after these mass spawnings. “It would be a very good system,” Cheah said. “They would come in and just clean off the adelgids, regulate the numbers that survive from the winter.” With the adelgid population presently under control, Cheah has turned her attention to two other factors, which she believes are having an even bigger impact on the eastern hemlocks of Connecticut. Her recent research has shown that the past two years of drought have severely

weakened the moisture-sensitive hemlocks. In combination with the resilience of elongate hemlock scale, an invasive insect that is capable of withstanding New England winters, this effect has caused more devastation than the adelgid infestation. “I believe [the elongate scale] has been the quiet enemy, not getting all the fanfare that the adelgid does,” Cheah said. Even in the southern Appalachians, where the adelgids are a more significant threat, other factors have made it difficult to determine the main culprit of hemlock decline. The proliferation of native insects such as hemlock borer and hemlock looper have further strained the already-weakened trees. In recent years, drought has also had a big impact in the region. “Very few reports will tell you about these droughts,” she said. “They want you to concentrate on the insects. It’s much more exciting to say the trees are dying from the insects than to say years of droughts also helped to kill the trees.” Several studies based on hemlock pollen records have found huge decreases of hemlock populations about 5,000 to 9,000 years ago due to drought alone. “It’s a complicated picture out there,” said Cheah. Despite these compounding factors, Cheah is still optimistic for the future of the eastern hemlocks. She doesn’t believe they will go extinct, at least not in the northern parts of their range, such as New England. “There’s a lot of literature out there … that says it’s on the brink of extinction, but I’m out there all the time. I’m amazed at how resilient these hemlocks are.” If these regions get more precipitation, Cheah is certain the health of the hemlocks will improve and that they will have a better chance of fighting off the insect infestations. In concluding his speech on that afternoon in July 1940, President Roosevelt addressed the importance of not only the “recreation” but also the “re-creation” that Americans would find in their national parks. The future of the eastern hemlock might not be as dark as it seems. Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

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addie Bogert ’19 remembers waiting outside the door of one of Yale’s fraternities during her first year at Yale. She was with a group of friends, both male and female, and a fraternity brother at the door told her group that the women could come in but not the men, “which was horrifying to me and awful,” Bogert said. She remembers thinking, “I don’t want to be let into this party as a sexual object.” This incident stuck with her. Now a junior, she is a member of Engender, a student organization at Yale with the stated mission of creating a more inclusive social environment on campus. According to Engender, this starts with the gender integration of Yale’s all-male fraternities. Multiple members of Engender said that the root of a host of issues on campus, including sexual assault and harassment and power imbalances in the social scene, lies in the fact that fraternities exist as all-male spaces. The group believes that the issues of sexual assault and harassment on campus cannot be solved if fraternities continue to exist in their current single-gender form. “At the end of the day, even if sexual assault is an important issue to a man, for 16 | March 2018

“when women are around”

most men it will never be as important, as urgent, as critical as it is for most women, because they’re just not threatened or affected by it in the same way,” said Will McGrew ’18, a co-director of Engender. While Engender seeks more than fraternity reform, other campus groups like Unite Against Sexual Assault Yale and the Communication and Consent Educators work with fraternities and in other venues on campus to educate students about sexual assault prevention. Helen Price ’18, who co-founded Unite Against Sexual Assault Yale and was a co-director of the group until this fall, said she considers coeducation a “medium-term” goal and that, in the short term, Unite Against Sexual Assault Yale is focused on helping fraternities create safer sexual environments on campus. At the same time, she wrote in an

// BY TALIA SOGLIN // ILLUSTRATION BY JOY LIAN

email to the News, “It ’s unproductive to talk about sexual assault as if it only happens at fraternities. It’s a problem in all social spaces at Yale, and we need to be having a broader conversation about how sexual disrespect is normalized in our campus culture.” Engender’s most publicized tactic has been the group’s repeated attendance at Sigma Phi Epsilon rush events. SigEp is the only fraternity at Yale to allow women to participate in its rush process. Last

feature I’m not going to be blindly loyal to a national organization that wants to implement de jure, by definition, sexist policies,” he said. Bogert, who rushed SigEp with Engender this year, said that McGrew’s position as a member of SigEp was invaluable to the group’s ability to rush the fraternity. “Without him, I don’t even think we would have had access to the rush calendar,” she said.

B academic year, Engender began asking fraternities to consider coeducation. According to McGrew, most fraternities did not respond to Engender’s request to rush. Others, he said, declined to integrate their rush processes, citing freedom of association as a reason for remaining singlegender. This year, about 15 to 20 nonmale students rushed the fraternity with the group, according to Anna McNeil ’20, a codirector of Engender. Eleven students submitted bids, she said, all of which were rejected. In addition to his leadership position with Engender, McGrew is also a member of SigEp, which, he acknowledged, some people find hypocritical. He rushed the fraternity his first year, although he said he’d always been skeptical of all-male spaces. McGrew emphasized that he has formed close relationships with many of his fraternity brothers and said that many members of SigEp are feminists. At the same time, he said, his loyalties lie with individual members, not the organization itself. “At the end of the day,

ecause Engender has so far focused its efforts exclusively on the gender integration of Yale’s fraternities, some of the group’s detractors criticize its logic as hypocritical. Grant Richardson ’19, a member of the LEO fraternity, said that he thinks Engender targets fraternities because they are an “easy punching bag” compared to other single-gender groups on campus, such as sororities and sports teams. “It’s easier to target fraternities, because some fraternity brothers have committed sexual assault, so it has kind of a bad connotation in that sense,” he added. Engender does not have an official position on sororities yet, and the issue of all-female spaces is contested within the group, according to McGrew. Still, multiple members of Engender emphasized that the focus on fraternities stems from the significant difference in impact that fraternities and sororities have on campus. McNeil emphasized that sororities are not “sexually predatory environments” in the same way that fraternities are. McGrew agreed. “It’s always more problematic when a powerful group segregates a less powerful group away from itself than it is vice versa.” Other critics of Engender maintain that there is a unique value in single-gender spaces. One anonymous fraternity president emphasized what he says is a particular benefit inherent in all-male spaces. “The friendships formed in fraternities occur in groups of all males because they allow for greater vulnerability, sensitivity, and shared experience,” he wrote in an email. “It is especially important to have these elements in a time where there need to be honest conversations about what it means to be a man.” In a recent op-ed for the News, Rich-

ardson, the LEO member, pushed back against the idea that all-male groups breed misogyny and argued that the tight-knit social groups created through fraternities are valuable in their own right. “Fraternities are all male for a reason — it begets brotherhood,” he wrote. Members of Engender say that any value in a single-gender space is outweighed by concerns surrounding Yale’s sexual climate and gendered social dynamics. “I don’t really think the alcohol-fueled, sexually predatory nature of fraternities makes that their primary function on this campus,” McNeil said of the idea that fraternities can be valuable bonding spaces for men. Richardson disagrees, continually emphasizing the brotherhood aspect of fraternities. “Simply put, guys act differently when there are girls around,” he said. In many ways, this is the crux of the issue. Members of Engender and members of fraternities both agree that social spaces are altered when women enter previously allmale spaces and that men change their behavior when they are around women. The two groups simply disagree about what this means. Members of Engender see gender integration as a way to fix what they see as harmful gen dered power dynamics and an unhealthy sexual

Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

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environment on campus, particularly within fraternities. They believe that these issues will not change until women are allowed to enter these spaces. “There’s a way in which men change their behavior when women are around,” McGrew said.

f any fraternity at Yale were to choose to permit women to join, it

18 | March 2018

would likely first need to disaffiliate from its national organization, which typically preclude nonmale students from joining. Disaffiliation does come with challenges for fraternities; national organizations often own fraternity houses and provide insurance, allowing fraternities to host open parties without fear of liability. It’s unclear to what extent and with how much seriousness SigEp in particular has discussed the possibility of coeducation. According to an email obtained by the News, in January 2017, the group responded via a Google Form to the question, “How do you want the fraternity to respond to the group of girls planning to rush?” Members were able to vote for one of three options — not to allow women to rush at all, to allow women to rush but not offer them membership or allow women both to rush and to join the fraternity. In the email, former SigEp president Tyler Morley ’18 wrote that, should the chapter vote to extend membership to women, “There is a very real possibility in this case [the national organization] would choose to sell the house and revoke our chapter.” However, he added that SigEp nationals had not “expressed a clear dissatisfaction” with the possibility of allow-

ing women to rush without offering them membership. Morley did not respond to request for further comment. In a subsequent email, Morley wrote that after a “very close vote,” the fraternity would allow women to rush, but would not offer them membership. According to McGrew, the combined votes for allowing women to rush and allowing women to rush and join narrowly edged out the votes against allowing women to rush. McGrew said that SigEp did not revote on the issue this year but again allowed women to rush without extending to them offers of membership. Women who rushed SigEp with Engender said that some fraternity brothers seemed genuinely interested in the idea of coeducation. However, Ananya Kumar-Banerjee ’21, who attended the first SigEp rush event with Engender, described the process as “super uncomfortable.” She described the members of SigEp as practicing “performative allyship,” a sentiment echoed by Bogert, who also rushed SigEp with the group this year. They said that, at times, it seemed like members of SigEp were putting on a show of acceptance. Jojo Attal ’21, a co-director of Engender, agreed, saying that sometimes it seemed like members of SigEp were “asking for our forgiveness.”

feature McNeil, one of E n g e n d e r ’s co-directors, said that drinking games at rush events were typically “almost exclusively male,” something Kumar-Banerjee mentioned as well. “You’re a part of the scenery when you’re there, you’re not allowed to actually engage in the rush process,” Kumar-Banerjee said. Attal said that, at each of her five rush meals, the SigEp member she ate with seemed to be on the side of coeducation. “They just are stagnant in their infrastructure and action,” she said. Bogert agreed. “One of the brothers said to me, … ‘I think fraternities will not be here in 10 years,’” she said. “I just think they’re not really willing to give up all of the privileges that they have right now.” This is a sentiment echoed by multiple members of Engender. They tended to agree that fraternity brothers are genuinely interested in making fraternities safer spaces, particularly with regards to sexual misconduct and assault. And the women who rushed SigEp with

Engender said that some members of the fraternity seemed interested in discussing coeducation. At the same time, they emphasized that even fraternity brothers who are open to the conversation are typically not compelled to act. “I think it’s difficult to talk about social change as a thought experiment,” McNeil said. “The conversations surrounding the benefits of coeducation are decades old at this point, centuries old.” Bogert said that one of SigEp’s rush chairs, Yani Fabre ’20, told her that the fraternity was “looking at ways to disaffiliate and negotiating ways to disaffiliate.” Fabre did not respond to the News’ request for comment. McGrew said that he thinks SigEp is very divided on the subject of gender integration but that members of the fraternity don’t talk about it much, at least openly.

ngender’s next steps include a plan to bring the issue of coeducation to the Yale administration, in the hopes that the administrators will be willing both to push fraternities to go coed and to assist them in the process of disaffiliation. Members of Engender point in particular to a passage in the Yale College Undergraduate Regulations that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender, which they say could be construed as prohibiting single-gender organizations. McGrew said the group would be working on filing a formal complaint with Yale over the next few months. Associate Vice President of Student Life Burgwell Howard wrote in a statement that the administration “does not take a position on who is the member of any student organization, just as long as they are students in good standing with the university and are not under any sanction or

restriction.” He added, “Yale students select members for their clubs and groups, and in the case of our Greek organizations, they also adhere to the policies of their national organizations. And while the policies for many of these organizations are slowly changing to more accurately reflect the changing definitions of gender, there will inevitably be a lag that raises questions about how we will interact here at Yale.” There are also whispers of a national lawsuit, though the details seem murky at this point. Kumar-Banerjee, who is not on Engender’s executive board, said she didn’t know much about a potential lawsuit, and that the group is “pretty tightlipped” on the subject “because they don’t want the frats to know what their line is going to be.” Kumar-Banerjee said that she had heard that a potential lawsuit would be a national lawsuit filed against fraternities across the country, not just at Yale. According to McNeil, who is the co-director of Engender’s legal work, a potential lawsuit is on the back burner now that the group has begun to have conversations with the administration. For the time being, Engender will continue to knock on fraternities’ doors, pushing for coeducation. Fraternities, it seems, will continue to push back. The future is uncertain.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

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Snapshots of a Plaza A strip mall on Dixwell Avenue plays host to an unorthodox series of tenants and a fierce spirit of community.

// By Andrew Sandweiss // Photos by Schirin Rangnick

et back from Dixwell Avenue, behind a narrow parking lot, and peeking out from a crowded and uneven brick row of businesses, a thin steel sign beckons. The sign reads “Dixwell Corridor Community Partners.” From across the street, you can see the space in its entirety. At a distance, it appears as one unified, red-brick building with an awning spanning the main block. At either end, two tan blocks mark the borders. You cannot perceive the diversity within from afar. It seems a strip mall just like any other. But, upon closer inspection, the main block emerges as a series of buildings, each of varying height. Each section is 20 | March 2018

distinct in character. The awning moves from light blue to white. The facades transform from pink metal to red brick and from red brick to glass. Some have a second story, some do not. Some of the businesses stand close together, some far apart. And some mask larger operations. The main block goes far back, up to 70 feet. It also delves underground. Down a staircase wedged between two brick walls, there is a door and, just through it, a subterranean lobby, complete with potted plants and armchairs. A labyrinth of hallways radiates from the space. This is the hidden network behind that cohesive facade. A solitary picture of Muhammad Ali hangs above a couch.

The nave of the Greater New Haven Business and Professional Association lies in a conference room at the end of a hallway. In many ways, this spot is also the nave of Dixwell Plaza. “[The association] was formed to provide assistance and to advocate for and on behalf of small black and minority businesses,” explained Ray Harp, executive director of the association — and brother-in-law to Mayor Toni Harp by way of his late brother, Wendell Harp, an architect. The group was founded in 1965, when a group of black professionals in the New Haven region felt that the area was not doing enough to assist and promote minority business owners

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and professionals. According to Harp, the organization has always operated from Dixwell Plaza: first at the corner of Dixwell Avenue and Charles Street and then at its current location at the heart of the strip. Centering operations in Dixwell was, in many ways, an obvious choice: “Dixwell is and always was the heart of the black economic community in New Haven,” Harp said. Setting up shop in Dixwell Plaza, however, was another story entirely. Marquis Santiago, a lifetime resident of the Dixwell neighborhood, demonstrated the importance of both the structure and its location. “It’s the only plaza on Dixwell Avenue. This reaches out to all the communities. You got community here, you got another one down the street, back there you got a community,” he said, pointing to each in turn. “This is a home base for everybody to come to. People come here, for these stores, for Greater New Haven … from all different towns.” The Greater New Haven Business and Professional Association plays a key role in Dixwell community-building, but the plaza’s reputation depends on its other tenants as well. As academics and urban planners strive to strike the perfect balance of “mixeduse” spaces in burgeoning cities, Dixwell Plaza has transcended into a sort of “omni-use.” There are, in order, a health center, a church, a pharmacy, a restaurant, a library, a photography studio, a beauty parlor and a dojo, among others. Business and service know no boundaries here. Community organizations and storefronts sit side by side to provide a common area for the Dixwell neighborhood. JAZZ AGE Dixwell Avenue, and thus the Dixwell neighborhood, was originally named for John Dixwell, one of the three judges who fled to the Elm City to escape persecution in England after

condemning King Charles I to death. Two of his fellow judges, William Goffe and Edward Whalley, give their names to the other roads that spin out from Broadway. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, the land around the avenue had developed into a dense region. The neighborhood began to form as one of the largest and most culturally important black neighborhoods in the city. By 1930, blacks accounted for 50 percent of the neighborhood’s population, growing to 75 percent just 30 years later. The factories of New Haven were a major draw for black migration from the South. In 1888, the site of Dixwell Plaza was sparse, host only to a smattering of single family homes. By 1924, however, the area had become denser and more mixed-use: Three cleaning and dyeing businesses, two bakeshops, two garages, an auto parts store, a plumber, a movie theater and a drug store, located not far from the current pharmacy. The other side of Dixwell hosted several more shops, a few lunch rooms and a confectionary store. The jazz scene was a predominant part of the neighborhood’s culture. George Clark, president of the Dixwell Plaza Merchants Organization, remembers the jazz clubs: “Plenty off and on, one of the most popular ones was the Monterey, … and that was a wonderful club, run by a gentleman named Rufus Greenlee. He had been a New York dancer, decided to open this building [and] ran it for at least 20 years. Some of his family is still around.” The club hosted greats like John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Ella Fitzgerald and was a place for music lovers, black and white, to come together. A new documentary, “Unsung Heroes,” chronicles the jazz scene. But the clubs began to disappear as unemployment climbed steadily, urban renewal projects devastated well-established communities, and television took over entertainment. Now, only faint hints remain

apparent only to those looking for them: The housing development across the street still bears the name “Monterey Place,” after Greenlee’s club. In 1967, the site was targeted by the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, responsible for other destructive urban renewal projects throughout the Elm City. They removed the original buildings and built Dixwell Plaza. There are no records of the architects. The current home of the Christ Chapel New Testament Church at the north end was built for a supermarket but assumed its current use in 1979. The library opened with the plaza and was designed by Orr, deCossy, Winder and Associates. In Elizabeth Mills Brown’s “New Haven, a Guide to Architecture and Urban Design,” the transformation was recorded rather jarringly: “This has been a program to rebuild a neighborhood completely, wiping out the memory of the past … and creating a brave new world — new streets, new centers of public life, new symbols of community. The Plaza is the hub of the new community, pulling together shopping, institutional and cultural functions.” Dixwell Plaza’s omni-use would be present at its inception. Built at the same time as Dixwell Plaza was the space’s long-lasting but ultimately ill-fated complement: the Q House. The brutalist-style community center, designed by New Haven’s first African-American architect, Edmund Cherry, offered community programs and activities that worked in conjunction with many of the tenants at Dixwell Plaza. “We had the Q House … for the kids, for the community,” Dixwell resident Santiago lamented. “That’s what brought all the community together.” Unfortunately, the Q House closed in 2003 after filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The building sat abandoned for more than a decade until it was torn down in 2017. Thankfully, the building was demolished to make way for a new Q House. But nothing has materialized

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yet, and the empty lot boasts only a sign and fenced pasture. Optimistically, the Q House is set to open later this year. Since the closure of the Q House, the role of Dixwell’s community center has fallen on Dixwell Plaza. Its omni-use core allowed it to maintain operational off of the private businesses it hosted, in conjunction with public services. The library, according to Santiago, is “all they have” for the neighborhood’s children. Dixwell Plaza, unlike most modern strip malls, does not have a single owner, although the general uniformity of the plaza’s architecture indicates otherwise. The plaza actually comprises 11 separate buildings with nine owners, according to George Clark, a consultant for the Greater New Haven Business and Professional Association and the president of the Dixwell Plaza Merchants Association, which was formed in 2006. The condo association was a joint effort by various merchants and Yale Law School students, who created a legal structure for the organization. The tenants of the various buildings make contributions to the operation of the association, which then provides services such as snow removal and parking lot lighting. Additional clauses in the organization’s founding document prohibited the sale of alcohol and the presence of adult bookstores, pool halls, pawn shops and 24-hour convenience stores. A C-Town grocery store opened in Dixwell Plaza in 2007, underscoring the resurgence in the plaza’s economic development. The grocery store, however, closed within two years. THE CONTEMPORARY PLAZA Each tenant has their reason for being in Dixwell Plaza. Mo Soliman, the new owner of New Downtown Pizza & Fried Chicken and a 30-year veteran of the industry, wants to be “close to Downtown, so it’s easy to do business with Yale and Southern Connecticut.” After learning the trade at

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Wooster Square’s historic pizzerias, he bought the original Downtown Pizza & Fried Chicken four months ago. He has hired a delivery man, a kitchen staffer and his son. But, when it comes to the preparation of the food itself, “I make the pizza.” At the opposite end of the plaza sits another traditional tenant: the Community Health Pharmacy. Also a newcomer, it employs two pharmacists, three technicians and a delivery man. The pharmacy moved to the Dixwell Plaza “because of the community” and plans to stay in the spot for the foreseeable future. Pizza stores and pharmacies are not really out of the ordinary for an urban mall, but, at the center of the plaza, one of the few buildings with a second floor houses a much rarer find: the Dynamic University Shadow Dojo. Jahad Shabazz, a sensei and professor with over 50 years of experience, runs the place. Shabazz got his inspiration from a group of engaged community members. “The professor saw what we were doing, he liked how we were out in the community, thought we could team together [and] came back from retirement,” Yansee “Born” Horan said. “He had the building, we had the manpower, so we came together to see what we could do to change the atmosphere of the community.” Horan believes it is essential for black children to gain a sense of self-confidence and self-esteem and that instilling these values can solve a lot of the Dixwell community’s struggles with poverty and unemployment. “We got to remind them that they’re a little better than they think they are.” The “black dojo” was a concept created in the ’60s, when great black martial artists like Moses Powell came to fame. Many of the techniques taught in these dojos were transferred to the teaching that martial artists gave to local police forces. Horan explained that Shabazz has participated in training police officers here in New Haven.

“[If ] you know how to control a person physically, you ain’t got to shoot them. You won’t have a shoot-first mentality. [It] removes the barrier between the police and the community.” The dojo itself is a series of small rooms with low ceilings and ambient lighting, all surrounding the large, brightly lit central space, where the professor trains his students. Sitting in the small lobby, one can feel the rhythmic vibrations that come from the synchronized kicks and stomps. A horizontally stretched window provides a viewing frame. Music is always on. “A lot of times the Eastern dojos are super quiet,” Horan explained. “We don’t really do super quiet, because we got rhythm. … If you’re in a real situation, there might be any type of noise going on, and you’ve got to focus.” The walls are adorned with pictures of famous black leaders. “The real skill is the skill of imagination. We want to give them dreams, inspiration. That’s why we put up great black people on the wall. We got Malcolm [X], Marcus Garvey, Freddie Hampton.” Horan and his group strive to make the program affordable, charging $35 a month, but he still has problems finding students. “Here, the parents think martial arts is to attack somebody. They don’t want to put their child through a program where they could learn to be a threat to somebody else or seem like a threat to anybody. But here you know how to control yourself, how to make decisions. You think first. … Intelligence is the new gangster.” These are the teachings Horan and Shabazz try to impart to their 16 students, all kids of varying ages. As for Dixwell Plaza, Horan strongly believes in “this sense of black entrepreneurship. That’s what’s really needed on Dixwell Avenue. That’s what’s going to bring back jobs and revenue to the community. Then you can look forward to passing

feature the businesses onto the youth.” A prime example is located just below the dojo: B*Wak Productions. Founded by Edmond “B*Wak” Comfort 10 years ago in his bedroom at the now-shuttered Church Street South housing complex, his photography, graphic design, signage and air brush business has grown. B*Wak Productions moved into one of the medium-sized storefronts of Dixwell Plaza last summer. Comfort has two reasons for choosing Dixwell Plaza. The first is unsurprising: the Greater New Haven Business and Professional Association. “When I first started my business, I sought them out to solidify it, and they gave me pointers, a direction to go in, in order to solidify it.” Comfort is incredibly grateful to the association and has watched the organization continue to support black- and minority-owned businesses over the past 10 years. “We’re sort of an incubator, before incubators got sexy,” said Harp. Seven businesses, all connected by the labyrinth of hallways, make up the central core of Dixwell Plaza. One of them, New Haven Firestop, is run by Robert Carter. Carter has been designing fire-proof structures for seven years. Carter owes much to Gerald Clark, one of the organization’s founders. “When I first came here, I didn’t have a business. I came to Mr. Clark, one of the founders. I told him that I wanted to be here but I didn’t have money, and he gave me office space. He said, ‘I’ll let you set up your office here,’ because, when I need to put my paperwork in, I need to have an address, and I didn’t want to do it from home. He told me, ‘You can stay here rent-free until you get a little business.’ So my first total year, they didn’t charge me a thing.” It should be no surprise then that B*Wak’s production shop has two entrances: one on the Dixwell Plaza main strip and another in the maze of hallways that connects all of the association’s controlled properties. Comfort isn’t the first in his family to operate a business at the site of Dixwell Plaza. His grandfather, according to Clark, operated the Harlem

RAY HARP

Barbershop in one of the buildings that Dixwell Plaza replaced. Beyond the business and professional association, Comfort, who lives in the Dixwell neighborhood, enjoys being close to work. But above all, he appreciates Dixwell Plaza for a phrase that he coined: “A Freddie every day.” The Freddie Fixer Parade is a “Clean-up Campaign started in the Dixwell-Newhallville community, first started under the guidance of the late Fred Smith, a well-known and respected physician and pediatrician in the Dixwell area,” according to the organization Walk New Haven. The idea was to encourage residents in the Dixwell community to have a sense of pride in their space and to help clean it up as well. The annual parade is “the largest African-American parade in New England.” By 1972, the parade was already drawing 20,000 spectators.

This year will be the first time Comfort participates not as a vendor but as a business owner. “It’s important for me to let people know that they can own their own art, they can be their own ambassadors of their own neighborhoods. There is another “anchor” to Dixwell Plaza: the Stetson Branch of the New Haven Public Library, which has been in the plaza for almost as long as the plaza has existed. The space is warm and inviting, exterior included. The addition of a covered porch and large mural makes it stand out among the other storefronts. On the inside, soft lighting, wooden chairs, tables and the mainstay of any library, books, offer a comforting image. People read or use the computers in the back. The library sponsors several events for people of all ages: free tutoring, a family Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

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literacy day, African dance classes, computer help, chess, Wii U gaming, crochet courses — the list goes on. It has been this way for a long time. “I used to come here 30-plus years ago,” Horan remembered. “I was under 10, coming here, getting books, reading books. The library is the anchor of this plaza. It keeps the youth drawn in, especially after the Q House closed.” When the new Q House opens, however, the library will move to a new home inside. THE “G” WORD But Dixwell Plaza isn’t perfect. The two arcades on either end have fallen into disrepair. The parking lot situated behind Dixwell Plaza is of particular concern. “If you’re standing on Dixwell Avenue and you look toward the building, you see the building, but you don’t see the parking lot. And that parking lot, in my opinion, is not safe,” Clark explained. Although the city has put in plans to redevelop the site and entertained other proposals for redevelopment, getting everyone to agree to any plan is difficult. “You’re dealing with 11 buildings and nine owners. Each of them has their own ulterior motive for what they want. And neither the city nor the mayor has wanted to have an article come out that they’re forcing people out of business.” The southern side of Dixwell Plaza is marked by the abandoned C-Town 24 | March 2018

supermarket. “Anytime you have a vacant space that big, it’s a problem,” explained Harp. “People drive by and it’s empty, vacant.” But losing C-Town was not as damaging as one might expect. “We ain’t never had nothing around here like that anyways,” explained Santiago. The overarching problem was not C-Town’s departure but the near-continuous lack of grocery stores in Dixwell. Whalley Avenue offers the closest grocery store, but trudging there through snow and rain can be tough. But, if there is one problem that has the community truly concerned, it is an external force, a “force of nature,” as described by Harp. Gentrification. “We’ve been watching it,” said Comfort. “You can see it coming. It’s almost like it’s coming to get you.” Talk of gentrification inevitably means talk of Yale. Ever-encroaching development has begun to make its way up Dixwell. “Yale is already moving down. You’ve got the UPS right down the street. They’re right there,” Horan said. A recent parking lot for The Shops at Yale, a housing renovation right next to it and the opening of Tropical Smoothie Cafe near Payne Whitney Gym are all part of the phenomenon. Horan believes that “the more money getting into the community, the better the community is, [but] it’s about pushing people out that’s the problem

— the displacement of the people from the community.” Development and business “shouldn’t be at the expense of your rent being $500 higher.” Santiago agreed. “With the housing cost rising, it makes a lot of things difficult for low-income [residents].” He described the Winchester Repeating Arms Factory, whose recent rehabilitation into loft apartments has been “weeding out these low-income families that can’t afford these types of rent.” Santiago doesn’t want to see anything like that descending on the Dixwell Plaza or the Dixwell neighborhood. Jerome James, a Dixwell resident, worries too. “They’re going to push us out. Everybody is grabbing more. And we’re grabbing less and less. Everyone is on top of me. … I’m tired of being on the damn bottom.” His cousin, Tyronda James, a businesswoman in the Dixwell neighborhood, wants this to change: “Yale students are unaware of Yale politics.” Yale needs to play a role in curbing gentrification in its hinterland, and it needs to be a holistic effort, she said. “Everybody in this community has been around this community for years,” Santiago said. “There are people living in this community that I’ve known my whole life, that knew me before I was born, who knew me when I was in my mother’s stomach. … It’s a nice spot to live. It came a long way.” It’s something he doesn’t want to lose.

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Arrested Momentum // BY CLAIRE HALDEMAN // ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN GATTA

watch the Super Bowl every year. This February, 6,000 miles and seven time zones away from home, I made my way to a bar a stoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s throw from the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan, to watch the Patriots lose to the Eagles. When the broadcast began at 1:30 in the morning, my hands were sticky from my late-night barbecue wings, and I was surrounded by expats: black Baptist missionaries from New Orleans, weathered nongovernmental organization administrators chatting

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personal essay in somersaulting Arabese with unreasonably cheerful embassy staffers, students in fraternity sweatshirts and students in hijab, both groups eating curly fries and drinking watery Egyptian beer. In that moment, watching on a phalanx of flat screens as Pink — still a rockstar — belted out the national anthem, the room rustled to silence, and I felt myself settle into a surprising, heart-clenching equilibrium. It wasn’t that I missed home (though I did) or that I am particularly moved by displays of American diversity (though I am). It was more that, for the first time in many, many years, I felt like I was able to be wholly present for this Great American Spectacle. Last year, I hosted a Super Bowl party in my suite. I checked out a projector from the art school, baked some lopsided chocolate cookies in the Pierson kitchen and mashed some avocados for homemade guacamole. We had PBR, Coors and Narragansett in the fridge. It was, by collegiate standards, an embarrassment of riches. Though well-attended and well-appreciated, nobody was totally there. Everybody, instead, was working on something: frenetically flipping through Chinese notes, halfheartedly underlining in a Tyco course packet, scrolling through political science seminar readings, responding to club emails, editing an article for The Yale Herald. I had an Arabic quiz at 9:25 the next morning, so I was writing out flashcards between plays. At that time, I had already decided I was going to study in Jordan. At that time, it was just a name. I could point it out on a map and summarize its geopolitical significance in two sentences, but it was never real for me. Imagining my future there conjured nothing but white static. So I was never excited, I was never informed and I could never give a satisfying answer to the question of why I was going, except a vague notion that I needed to get away. I am in love with New England — with the trees and the ocean, the cold, the mountains and the tight-lipped, self-sufficient people. But I wanted to make myself uncomfortable, maybe just to prove that I could. I did not come to Yale intending to study abroad, but I also did not come to Yale understanding it for what it was: a place of insensitive, breakneck momentum. At school there

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is a deeply ingrained and irrational conflation of feasibility with obligation. “Could” becomes “should” without hesitation or critical assessment. People are talented and motivated enough to know how much they can do, and the perceived necessity of fulfilling that potential drives forward this relentless machine of public achievement. Contentment is an indulgence few feel they can afford. People are not gentle with themselves or with their friends, neighbors and classmates. Maintaining physical health — eating well, working out, staying hydrated, sleeping enough — is only discussed aspirationally. Pursuing emotional health is a radical countercultural statement unless it occurs between 11 a.m. on Saturday and 4 a.m. on Sunday. Last semester I did laundry only 6 times, two of them at home during breaks. A good night saw me sleeping 6 hours. I was chronically late. I signed up for exercise classes at Payne Whitney Gym and went to exactly two sessions. Every day, from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell into bed, there was this tension in my back, stomach and head. I felt like my time was under siege from all sides. I have cried returning to school every semester, once — embarrassingly — while sitting with my parents in the middle of Prime 16. This is not because I hate school but because I hate feeling like I’m barely treading water. It takes a person of outstanding self-awareness, self-assurance and self-love to swim upstream against all the agitation and anxiety around them. This is not yet who I am, but it is who I want to be. Not at some indeterminate point in the future, contingent on Success, but now. And so I am in Amman and not in New Haven. But if I wanted a vacation, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was the wrong place to study. It is extremely resource poor, and water in particular is severely limited. The tap water is not potable, and it arrives in a weekly ration. When showering or washing dishes, I have to shut the water off when soaping and scrubbing. Amman has grown faster than its infrastructure can accommodate, so the public transportation is haphazard and does not run on a time schedule, and the sidewalks are treacherous and overgrown where they exist. This means that, for a foreigner with no car, the only practical way to navigate the city is by

taxi. There is a 26 percent tax on alcohol, cigarette smoke hangs in every hallway, cafe and cab, and — initially most shocking to me — flushing used toilet paper is not allowed. And even with all the logistical and cultural differences to consider, the anxieties of home have still managed to reach me. A week ago, I made the mistake of thinking a little too hard about summer plans. It’s a familiar panic. What if nobody hires me? What if I can’t find a job after graduation? What if I’m unemployable? How will I be happy? Describing this catastrophic vortex to my mother later, I said, “I felt the Yale feeling,” by which I meant more than just flashing through the thought patterns familiar at a school so preoccupied with carefully planned steps to prestige. My body physically reverted to the same tense agitation that it carries through every day at school: the hunched shoulders, the clenched gut, the slow, encephalitic throbbing between the temples. Got to send some emails, got to check my GCal, got to hurry up, there’s hardly any time left. But then I managed a thought. Tea. I wanted tea. Lipton yellow label, seemingly the only kind anybody drinks in this country. I lit a burner on the stove with a bright orange cigarette lighter. I poured hot water out of the portly steel kettle into the chipped china teacup. Glopped honey on top. Breathed in the steam. Drank as slowly as I could manage. That evening I lay on my bed with the sliding door to my balcony wide open. My laundry was drying on the railings outside, and the floodlights from the maternity hospital across the street lit the tops of the date palms growing up from the middle of the sidewalk. The night air was cool and quiet, the silence broken only by the muezzin from the local mosque calling the evening prayer. At the tail of his diminuendos, the vibrato in his voice sounded like nothing more than the echo inside a seashell. I felt like a feather, floating among the whitecaps out at sea, being carried by things outside of my control. I remembered, suddenly, the prayer pinned above the sink in the washroom at my childhood church: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” Even though I was alone, my

personal essay

cheeks flushed with embarrassment. In general, I’m skeptical of epiphanies, and maybe this wasn’t that, but it was a moment of quiet, self-conscious understanding. I’ve spent a lot of my time at Yale trying to control things over which I have very little say. So much of college is selling yourself — to friends, to professors, to lovers, to employers — and so much of success is determined by how these people respond to your pitch. There is this illusion, then, that, if you are in control of the outcome, if you check all the boxes and do all the right things, you will be able to magic your way to any place you desire — so the narrative goes. But this could not be further from the truth. People are wonderful, strange and mysterious, systems of people all the more so. So it’s not that pursuing goals is useless but that it must be done with serenity, with eyes wide open. What is the friendship, the mentorship, the relationship, the employment for, anyway? My guess is that, when you trace everything back to its source, the answer is happiness. But happiness is not like Elon Musk’s salary: It isn’t contingent on the achievement of a series of public benchmarks. It is an outlook, a reaction and — largely — a choice. At the same time that I was trying to force the world to accommodate my goals, I also spent my time at school forgetting how much say I actually had over how I felt. Yale, for me, has always been an emotionally battering experience, mostly because there is neither time nor space to breathe deeply, to make myself a cup of tea and really think — in the calm and the quiet — about why I’m feeling the way I’m feeling. I spend a lot of time under the impression that my well-being is driven solely by the gales of nature and circumstance. But this semester is different. That calm

self-awareness that I felt, lying in bed, listening to the azan, has strung together many of my waking moments. I feel light, and I feel small, but also — for the first time in a long time — I feel powerful. Maybe this would have happened anywhere I studied, but I think there is something particularly humbling about this place. Living here forces me to understand just how much electricity, food, water and internet it takes to keep me happy and healthy. The absentmindedly limitless culture of American consumption grates against the realities of demographics and geography. You can almost feel the city quivering as it tries to meet the demands of millions of people who have asked for too much too quickly. It is loud, and it is jumbled, dusty and crowded, and the masses of blockish limestone buildings seem to go on forever. It is a place that is both very young and very, very old. I climbed into a cave that has sheltered humans for 25,000 years only to find a Kentucky Fried Chicken bag and a spent Wi-Fi scratch card cast among the dusty stones. It is also a place where God is never that far from mind. Every greeting, every desire, every appreciation and every exasperation is couched in terms of God. Cab drivers play suras of the Quran on the radio and hang prayer beads from their rearview mirrors. The call to prayer echoes throughout the city five times a day, from hundreds of minarets: “There is no god but God.” Jordan also observes its Sabbath. On Friday, the cars that crowd the roads at all hours of the weekday seem to dissipate. Stores are closed. People don’t answer their phones. Anybody in the street moves slowly and speaks quietly, weighed down by the languid silence of a city of four million, paused. And for the first time in a long time, I am truly at rest.

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Part III: State of Emergency // By Liana Van Nostrand // Photo by Vivek Suri

onnecticut’s not used to this. Nearly 30 candidates have filed to run to be Connecticut’s next governor. At least another five have filed as exploratory candidates. In all likelihood, more candidates will enter before the deadline to file in June. In 2010, the most recent election without an incumbent, only 14 people total filed as exploratory candidates. Five made it onto the primary ballot for their party. Even more unusual, it’s possible that the next governor will be a Republican. A recent poll by Tremont Public Advisors, a public affairs firm, showed that, while 50.9 percent of Connecticut residents said they would support the Republican candidate, only 44.8 percent would support the Democratic candidate, even though registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in the state nearly two to one. Though both parties are outnumbered by Connecticut’s 861,766 unaffiliated voters, the state has voted blue in every presidential election since 1992. And it’s currently one of only eight Democratic trifectas in the country, meaning that the governorship and both state houses are controlled by the party. Despite Democratic Party’s hold on Connecticut state politics, 2018 has revealed some deep-seated unrest in state functionality. Candidates on both sides of the political spectrum have campaigned on promises of change. On some important points, the Republicans and Democrats in the race don’t sound that different. The state’s financial situation has emerged as the biggest of several key issues in 2018. Candidates from both parties have criticized the current governor and the state legislature for their handling of the budget and mounting debt. Dave Walker, a Republican, and Susan Bysiewicz LAW ’83, a Democrat, both

said that the state’s finances were “a mess.” “The state is sinking,” Walker said. “This election is arguably the most important in the state’s history. You need to vote for who can get the job done, forgetting about their political party.” He pointed to the flight of businesses and high net worth individuals from Connecticut as a major problem. “The dam is leaking, and the town is filling up with water,” Democratic candidate Sean Connolly said. “And too many people are pointing fingers and assessing blame. We’ve got to come up with results and solutions.” Fellow Democrat Ned Lamont said he was the best person to navigate the “perilous waters” of the state’s finances. The growing budget deficit could amount to $3.5 billion over the next two years, according to Reuters. But the deficit is only one part of the state’s financial disorder. Connecticut’s General Assembly could not reach a budget agreement during its 2017 legislative session, which ended July 7. To avoid a shutdown, Gov. Dannel Malloy had to sign an executive order to keep the government running. On the very last day in October, after the state had gone 123 days without a budget, Malloy signed a new one into law. By that time, his approval rating had plummeted to 24 percent, one of the lowest in the nation — and more than 10 points lower than President Donald Trump’s at the time. The only governor with a lower approval rating was Republican Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey. Christie decided not to run again, and Democrat Phil Murphy claimed his seat in the November 2017 election. Murphy was one of two Democrats who flipped governorships that night. The other was Ralph Northam, who won 53.9 percent of the vote in Virginia. Many cited these two elections as evidence of an impending blue

insight wave that would flip governors’ mansions across the country. Statistical analysis blog FiveThirtyEight listed 18 governorships that Democrats could pick up in 2018. Despite a galvanized Democratic base, Connecticut’s governorship is a true tossup between the parties. Though Malloy could run for a third term, in an emotional announcement last April, he said that he would not. During his remarks, he addressed his low approval rating, saying that his “personal popularity has never driven [his] decision-making as governor. Period.” But that assurance doesn’t mean that his perceived poor management of the state won’t hurt the Democrats running to succeed him. To that end, many Democratic candidates are distancing themselves from him. Bysiewicz pointed out that, unlike some of the Democrats running, she had never served a day in office with Malloy. Lamont brought up the fact that he had run against Malloy in 2010. Others have statements opposing the governor on their websites. Even Connecticut’s Democratic Party skirted a question of how Malloy’s approval ratings might affect the race. “Governor Malloy is not on the ballot,” said Christina Polizzi, the organization’s communications director. “But the Democrat candidates, who are up and down the ballot, are talking about their ideas. And our grassroots base is focused on implementing those ideas.” But among the Democrats — and even the Republicans — the voices decrying Malloy seem to have become unified. Candidates on both sides believe Connecticut taxes are too high. Republican Dave Walker said that, though his home value has decreased over the years, his property taxes have increased. He’d like Connecticut taxes to be lower, but until the state’s finances are in order, that is not possible, he added. “I have talked to people who have sold their homes and are moving to Florida because they can’t afford property taxes,” Bysiewicz said. The average effective rate of the Connecticut property tax is currently among the 10 highest in the nation. Many candidates also identified the

departure of businesses and residents for other states as a major problem. From July 2016 to July 2017, 22,000 residents left for other states. The state’s population grew by a net total of just 499 people during that period. Businesses are also moving out. General Electric Co. — which employed 5,800 people as of January 2016 — left Fairfield for Boston. “Businesses and people vote with their feet,” Walker said. As Connecticut looks to emerge from its fiscal nightmare, candidates have focused on revitalizing education and job training as essential for spurring the economy. Democratic businessman Ned Lamont said that, though Connecticut has “the best-trained workforce in the world,” the population is aging and the next generation doesn’t necessarily have the same skills. Bysiewicz said that she has spoken to many parents who are frustrated that their children cannot find well-paying jobs in the state. Most candidates are concerned with the economy, education and emigration. They all have something else in common: They each believe that they alone can solve the state’s problems. “I think I’m a very different breed of cat,” Lamont said, referring to his work in the private sector. Connolly also has never held office before, which he said allows him to elevate “service over politics.” Though Bysiewicz previously served as Connecticut’s secretary of state for over 10 years, she said that, during her time as a corporate lawyer, she had helped “over 80 companies grow thousands of jobs.” Walker said he’s the only candidate that can answer three essential questions: “First, Why are you running? Second, What do you want to accomplish? And third, Why do you believe you are uniquely qualified for the job?” The next step for the candidates is to raise $250,000 in donations between $5 and $100. If they do so, they can qualify for public financing through a statewide program that provides candidates who make it onto their party’s ballot with grants of up to $1.25 million to finance their pri-

mary campaigns. Candidates from each party have to obtain at least 15 percent of the vote at their party’s statewide convention in May in order to appear on the primary ballot. They can also collect verified signatures, which is difficult, in order to be on the ballot if they do not meet the 15 percent threshold at their party’s convention. Candidates who meet the fundraising requirement and make it to the general election are eligible to receive grants of up to $6 million. Walker has already met the threshold. Other candidates are getting close. Bysiewicz has raised $145,000, according to the most recent report her campaign has submitted to the state. But many candidates will likely not meet the $250,000 threshold. Jacey Wyatt, a Democratic transgender woman who supports President Donald Trump, has raised just over $1,000, according to her financial reports. Another fringe candidate, Lee Whitnum, a perennial candidate, has raised just $25 but reported that she had spent $311 on her campaign committee’s credit card. Whitnum claims that her campaign is being derailed by erroneous claims that she stalked the judge who presided over her divorce case. She was later exonerated and maintains that the judge was “politically motivated” in the claim. Whitnum previously sued Malloy for defamation after he called remarks she had made anti-Semitic. Malloy’s impending departure seems to have left a gaping hole at the top of the state’s government, with dozens on both sides of the aisle vying to fill it. Walker thinks that many of the other candidates would be qualified to steer the state if the situation wasn’t so dire. In previous years, he didn’t think it was necessary for him to run. But this year is different. “The ship is sinking,” he said. “And this may be our last chance to save it.” It’s unclear whether the next governor will be able to correct the state’s course. All that’s clear for now is that it’s all hands on deck. This is the third installment of a threepart series that has appeared in the Yale Daily News Magazine. Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

art

Painting in Fragments

// BY ITAI ALMOR

art

art spread

ntil this year I thought of my drawings and paintings as two entirely different arenas of play because I could only see them as products. The former were small, unmarketable and lived in my sketchbook, and the latter were none of those. I was silly and stymied, and now my work is singular and process-focused. In the fall, I let myself ignore notions of product and sat with the materials, and I realized that they are all — pen, acrylic and otherwise — equally tools, each simply with its own weight and substance quality. The excitement of my practice has since stemmed mostly from the investigation of the various mediums’ relative presences. In order of least substantial to most, I rank the ones I’ve been experimenting with as follows: water, pencil, watercolor paper, ballpoint pen, thread, colored pencil, flowy pen, watercolor, embroidery floss, marker, charcoal, gouache, crayon, duct tape, melted crayon, water-soluble oil pastel, muslin, canvas, acrylic paint, yarn, oil paint, photographs, laminated photographs, collages of found cloth and leather,

and wood. Substantiality, but also plasticity, dirtiness, shininess and associative quality define a material, among other things I have not yet thought about. Materials can oscillate around their default by means of thinning, thickening and layering, and they can even become indistinguishable from one another, which is a game I play. Generally, the tradition of painterly practice is to stay with one or two materials and perfect your relationship with them. I like to think that, by using so many, I’m responding to the present moment and its superfluous commodities, the absurd availability of an absurd variety of absurd tools. Sometimes it even feels like commentary. I am building relationships with each material, but all together. I am of the internet age and in need of too much stimulation. I’ve been taken in by abstraction in college, but I cannot abandon representation because rejecting the image culture entirely feels unproductive, like a tantrum. The reason for my use of many materials, especially ones mass-produced for kids, like Crayola, is of this vein.

My works tend to feel fragmentary, like a collage of many pictures. Using different materials with different presences at different levels of detail creates an effect similar to a photograph with multiple areas of differing depths, viewing each of which requires a refocusing of the eyes. I think of this as a type of processing of our flashingimage, Photoshop society. When my artworks don’t feel fragmentary, they are the opposite — too full — and you can still only view one area at a time, and the effect is nearly the same. I think a lot about kidishness. I am in awe of childhood every time I recognize in my behavior another way that I was formed. I’ve struggled with how much to control, or, conversely, how much to trust a viewer, and broadly how important my intentions as maker are. I often default to childlike gestures as a respite from that self-consciousness, making like before it was art. I’ve done many pictures of my own childhood and family because building must happen from the foundation up, and I am still in the beginning.

cover

Incorporating Connecticut: Urbanizing Business in a Suburban State

// BY ISABEL BYSIEWICZ // PHOTOS BY VIVEK SURI AND COURTESY OF THE JACKSON LAB, ILLUSTRATION BY SONIA RUIZ

lexion returned to New Haven with a pair of oversized scissors and a big blue ribbon. Dignitaries gathered to welcome the company. Yale University President Peter Salovey posed next to to Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal as local news channels filmed the celebration. New Haven Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Mayor Toni Harp beamed into the cameras. Alexion’s CEO and chair proudly shared the honor of the ribbon clipping with children who had benefited from the pharmaceutical company’s drugs. In February 2016, after a 16-year absence, Alexion was coming home. And the reunion was even sweeter than anticipated. New Haven took pride in the pharmaceutical company’s choice to build a brand-new 10-story headquarters that, in its final form, exceeded expectations: 14 stories of shimmering glass with roughly 500,000 square feet of laboratory and office space occupied prime real estate

at 100 College St. No one could miss the new headquarters when merging off of the interstate. As hopeful as the reunion was, it would prove short lived. Two years later, the glass icon of Downtown stands as an uncomfortable reminder of what might have been. After all, Alexion, like so many Connecticut companies before it, was fleeing to Boston. Alexion announced sweeping restructuring plans in September 2017: It would lay off 20 percent of its employees worldwide and close its facility in Rhode Island. Amid these changes, the company announced in a statement that a move to Boston in mid-2018 would provide a larger “talent pool and a variety of life-sciences partners to further support future growth initiatives.” The promises of the ribbon-cutting were now broken, but, in hindsight, the move should not have been a shock: When management changed in early

2017, Alexion began to set its sights on more prominent cities. But it was a disappointment nonetheless. Local representatives were quick to share their negative feelings about the move and push back on the notion that the company only relocated to meet its financial and employee needs. “Alexion’s decision to move their headquarters out of New Haven is shocking and shameful. New Haven is home to some of the most talented and brightest minds in the world, and Alexion will be worse off for leaving, both financially and intellectually,” DeLauro said. In a press release issued shortly after the announcement, the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development said that, even though Alexion will maintain a significant number of employees in state, all of the $20 million loan and $6 million grant must be repaid — with interest and penalties — to the department in accordance with the

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cover terms of the agreement. “There are a lot of startups, and some progress, and some don’t, but what you’re hoping for is a breakout company,” Executive Director of the Connecticut Bioscience Growth Council Paul Pescattlo said. “Alexion was our breakout company.” BORN & RAISED Yale professor Leonard Bell founded Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc., a company that now concentrates on serving patients with rare diseases, as a tech startup in Science Park in 1992, but it has since transformed into a publicly traded giant. Alexion grew up alongside a burgeoning biotechnology industry in New Haven, which was virtually nonexistent in the 1970s. At that time, only 21 percent of city jobs were in the fields of education and health care, a number that has since doubled. Science Park, too, is far ahead of where it was in the 1990s, when it was built on the site of the former Winchester Repeating Arms Company. At the time, parking lots weren’t paved, and a gate prohibited residents from entering the complex without permission. No one expected the company to be so large, according to New Haven Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson SOM ’81. Jon Soderstrom, the managing director of the Office of Cooperative Research at Yale, is on a mission to help support startups. The office provides licensing to existing companies, encourages corporate sponsorships for research with faculty members and helps others launch new ventures based on the intellectual property available. Eighty percent of Yale’s research budget is in the life sciences, Soderstrom said, so a lot of effort goes into the biotech industry. According to Soderstrom, Yale’s efforts to stimulate new ventures have paid off. Last year, Yale supported 11 venture-backed companies that raised $80 million, and over the last decade, 60 34 | February 2018

ventures have raised $700 million, Soderstrom said. But even among the many other Yaleaffiliated biotech projects, Alexion stood head and shoulders above the rest. As of 2016, it had 3,000 employees and served patients in 50 countries. In 2011, Alexion was added to the Nasdaq-100, a stock market index of the 100 largest nonfinancial stocks traded on the Nasdaq composite. A year later, the company joined the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Connecticut, for its part, has done a lot more than just praise Alexion. The state offered financial help in the form of tax breaks and incentives. In 2012, the company received $50 million from Connecticut taxpayers as part of a new economic development program. Throughout Gov. Dannel Malloy’s administration, Alexion continued to profit from tax breaks codified under state law. Malloy, like many of the state’s residents, regarded Alexion’s transformation from a small startup to a global company as one of Connecticut’s success stories. The First Five job creation initiative, which Connecticut rolled out in 2011, provides direct state aid and tax breaks to businesses that create a minimum of 200 full-time jobs in the state within two or five years, depending on the size of a given company’s investment, from the time their applications to the program are approved. Alexion, Cigna, ESPN and NBC Sports all signed up for the program. According to the governor’s website, the program — which Malloy signed into law on July 8, 2011 — was designed to attract new companies from other states, retain companies already in Connecticut and encourage businesses to expand. Connecticut did not stop there. Large investments in other projects have proved successful. Another biotechnology hub is growing in Storrs, just 60 miles away from New Haven. In 2014, Jackson Laboratory opened a 4-story, 183,500-square-foot space on

the campus of the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. The lab focuses on discovering genomic causes for diseases. In 2011, a Democrat-controlled state legislature made a $291 million investment in Jackson Lab. The facility is projected create 300 jobs in research and technology by 2024. Like Alexion, the Jackson Laboratory started small. The nonprofit was founded as a cancer research center in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1929. The emergence of industry centers in New Haven and Storrs is not a coincidence. The main driver of the biotech industry is the quantity and quality of academic, basic and life sciences research, according to Pescattlo. Storrs has the nearby University of Connecticut, and New Haven has Yale. THE CONNECTICUT LAG Connecticut has struggled more than other states to keep major employers and taxpayers, perhaps because it lacks a major city to attract companies amid the recent trend of urbanization. Recent high-profile departures from suburban areas and small cities fall in line with a national pattern of large companies moving to larger urban centers. It seems that the pendulum of investment and growth has swung away from the countryside to city centers. Companies no longer want to isolate themselves from the rest of the world on quiet campuses but instead seek the energy of urban networks. Nemerson, New Haven’s economic

development administrator, said that no one who was watching Alexion closely was surprised by the move. Once founder Leonard Bell left the position of CEO in 2015, the company’s personal ties to New Haven seemed less significant. “I think a lot of people thought it was only a matter of time,” Nemerson said. “[The move] was disappointing, not surprising.” In Rhode Island, Hasbro Inc., the third largest toy maker in the world, moved 350 jobs to Providence from smaller towns in the state. In Illinois, dozens of companies, including The Kraft Heinz Company, an American food company, moved from the suburbs closer to Chicago. Although the suburbs still hold the majority of the metropolitan workforce, downtown areas are closing in on that difference. Between 1996 and 2013, the proportion of metro area jobs within three miles of a city center grew 7 percentage points, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But Connecticut has no major city. Hartford and Bridgeport are not as large as Chicago or even Providence and have yet to solve major urban problems such as public transportation, poverty and crime within city limits. If a business cannot find what it needs from New Haven’s midsize population, its next step is generally to leave the state. Alexion’s move is only one of several significant departures from the state in recent years. General Electric Co., a multinational conglomerate corporation, announced on Jan. 13, 2016,

that it would leave Fairfield, where itcover had been headquartered since 1974. In 2017, GE ranked as the 13th-largest firm in the nation by gross revenue, according to Fortune magazine. In 2018, GE moved its global headquarters to Boston. After the company announced it was considering a relocation, several states offered GE incentives to leave suburban Connecticut. With tax incentives from Massachusetts, the move would be cost-neutral. The company received over $150 billion in incentives and grants from Boston and the state of Massachusetts, which is one of the top investors in research and development. In addition, Boston will position the company in closer proximity to a variety of technology startups and global conglomerates in the seaside area. Following GE’s departure, Malloy continued to praise the bioscience industry. In response to the news, Malloy still noted Connecticut’s draw to large companies on Channel 8 News. “You can’t objectively look at Connecticut and not appreciate that we are making progress, whether that takes us to the level one company wants or sees in its future, I can’t tell you,” Malloy told the local news outlet. But last summer Connecticut residents could not help but notice that, when Aetna Inc., a health care company and one of Hartford’s top employers and taxpayers, announced a $100 million relocation to New York City in June 2017, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio approved a $9.6

cover million incentive plan for Aetna. GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt has said that the company’s relocation to the Seaport District of Boston would provide a more attractive, technologically savvy workforce, in line with the company’s push to develop a larger software scale. And if a technologically savvy workforce is what Immelt is looking for, Connecticut may not have been the right place to find it. Boston is home to over 50 colleges and universities, while Fairfield only hosts a few. Millennials, for their own part, may play a significant role in the anti-suburban trend. New Haven demonstrates this phenomenon. Only 138 of the 1,399 Yale students in the class of 2016 stayed in New Haven after graduation, according to the Yale Office of Career Strategy. Nemerson noted that New Haven’s location, in between Boston and New York, is a challenge. He said that companies tend to move within a 100-mile radius. Boston is 130 miles from the Elm City, and New York is less than 70. Because these cities

are so close, New Haven often loses out, but it also means that New Haven has the potential to gain. “People often say how horrible it is that young people are leaving Connecticut. But they’re just actually moving to New York and Boston. And they can still be home, they can see their parents, they can see their friends, they’re an hour away. If you were in Los Angeles and you moved an hour away, you might still be in Los Angeles,” Nemerson said. Yet some are still skeptical of the reasons behind large corporate moves. In March 2017, Ludwig Hantson, a resident of Boston, was named the CEO of Alexion, three months before the move was announced. Soderstrom described Alexion’s stated desire to gain access to a larger pool of highly skilled workers as “puffery.” Pescattlo noted that most members of Alexion’s new management team had no connection to Connecticut and New Haven but had built their careers in Boston. And still, recent news has not all been

sour. Last December, news broke that CVS Corporation would purchase Aetna for $69 billion, making the company’s planned move uncertain. And in early January, de Blasio withdrew the incentive proposal. On Jan. 12, Hartford Eyewitness News Channel 3 reported that Carolyn Castel, the vice president for corporate communications for CVS Health, said in an email that CVS views Hartford as “the future location of our center of excellence for the insurance business.” Soderstrom says that Connecticut is quick to highlight what it is doing wrong or what it could have done better but often doesn’t make note of its improvements. But, though it may not be useful to harp on the past departures, they do point to larger questions facing Connecticut. The reality is that Connecticut has experienced a decadelong decline in the number of bioscience jobs. The reality is that Connecticut needs to take a critical look at its future in bioscience.

cover SO WHAT NOW? Connecticut is lagging behind other states. Conglomeration of worldwide companies and the changing demographics of the workforce have fostered an environment of competition among states. It may be dangerous to chalk departures up to corporate management and the shifting desire to be near flashy cities. Changes can make Connecticut more of a competitor. If Alexion’s move says anything, it is that providing large companies with major tax breaks will likely not be enough to incentivize them to stay in state. And even if Connecticut legislators wanted to do more, the state’s finances may be an insurmountable barrier. Last year, after the state added more than a billion to its debt, the Connecticut General Assembly passed a new, far more restrictive state budget. Pescattlo, the head of the Connecticut Bioscience Growth Council, says that the most signficant “macro” issue in the state is its budget. “[Companies] do their research. And they find that Connecticut has really, really deep fiscal issues and deep budget problems. And they make a calculation [about] what’s going to happen in 15 years given this fiscal mess we’re in. And … unless things change in a fundamental way, it looks like higher taxes and fewer services, and that’s not a good profile to attract companies.” But even if the state solves its budget crisis — something unlikely to happen without major changes — several issues make Connecticut particularly unfavorable relative to other states. First, despite the small area of the state and constant praise for its ideal location between Boston and New York, transportation remains a problem throughout the state. Executive Director of DataHaven Mark Abraham said that, while New Haven and smaller cities and suburbs serve smaller companies and startups well, larger companies gravitate toward sites with commodities such as long, heavy railroads and subway systems. Connecticut is still fighting to fund infrastructure. On Jan. 30, a debate arose between Malloy and the state’s top Republican lawmakers over transportation, a center point of the governor’s proposed budget. While Democrats expressed urgency to make strides on the issue, many Republicans want to wait on any major infrastructure spending. State Sen. Len Fasano, R-North Haven, thinks that Democrats are trying to do too much too soon. “One of the biggest challenges facing our state is the decadeslong refusal to invest in our roads,

bridges, tunnels and rail,” Malloy spokeswoman Kelly Donnelly said on Jan. 30, according to the Hartford Business Journal. “Yet, perplexingly, the Republican leaders’ solution is to further slash our transportation investment.” 2018 may not be the year for a major economic stimulus package, as elections across the state will likely be contested. Connecticut may also not be able to offer the potential employee pool that other states can. In a statement issued after GE announced its departure, which was due in part to the availability of skilled workers, the governor’s office responded to the move: “Businesses care about talent, and we will continue our investments in our higher education system in order to connect them to the needs of high-tech employers.” Even though Malloy has made a point of defending the public education system, Connecticut has recently had difficulty funding state colleges. In the state budget passed last year, the University of Connecticut’s state funding was cut by $139 million, enough for students to mount a #SaveUConn campaign to air their grievances. Though New Haven has actively pursued large companies, major proposals have not proved fruitful, in part due to faults in state operation. In October 2016, New Haven, in conjunction with Bridgeport, submitted a proposal to host the new Amazon.com Inc. headquarters. The New Haven–Bridgeport proposal would have provided the company with roughly 16 million square feet of office space. In addition, major statewide officials praised a Hartford–Stamford joint offer. But, on Jan. 18, Amazon released a list of 20 finalist cities out of the 238 that had submitted proposals. The list included New York and Boston but no Connecticut entree. MORE THAN AN OUTPOST In 2014, an article in FierceBiotech, an online publication, ranked New Haven as the 13th best biotech city that year, ahead of Los Angeles and Chicago. “Connecticut may not be the first place that biotech entrepreneurs have in mind when they start a company, but when the circumstances are right it can make a lot of sense,” the article read. Soderstrom, the managing director of the Office of Cooperative Research at Yale, said that Alexion represents the success of Yale’s Science Park, and the company’s departure will not put the brakes on any Yale Daily News Magazine | 37

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projects or Sciences Park’s future successes. He disagrees with any assessment that Alexion’s leave will cause long-term trouble for the city, instead arguing that Alexion was a symbol of a burgeoning critical mass of bioscience innovation in New Haven. While Alexion’s move has shocked residents across the state, other biotech companies in New Haven are improving. The 2014 FierceBiotech article did not mention Alexion, but it did note that, in 2013, Canaan Partners’ Tim Shannon launched another Yale startup. Arvinas Inc. is a New Haven–based private biopharmaceutical company that aims to produce protein degradation therapeutics for cancers and other rare diseases. Arvinas announced major partnerships at the end of last year and the start of this year, one with Genentech Inc. and one with Pfizer Inc. The company is poised to perform better this year, as they move forward with clinical development and filing new drug applications. BioHaven Pharmaceutical, a clin-

38 |March 2018

ical-stage pharmaceutical company that targets neurological disorders, was one of the strongest biotech initial public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange according to Soderstrom. There is a new fashion in the life sciences industry. Companies want to be close to the academic research that spawned their company, as well as potential scientists and employees, Pescatllo said. In a sense, companies want to be near their competitors. Soderstrom seemed tired of having to re-explain why it’s time to move past Alexion’s departure. “The Alexion thing was a time to celebrate. It was a brand new building in the center of the city,” Soderstrom said. “But it is just one of those things that happens.” Alexion’s presence in the city will not come to a complete halt. Research will continue in New Haven — Alexion CEO Ludwig Hantson said that 450 workers will stay Downtown, and the city will now be home to the company’s “Center of Excellence.” Abraham stressed that, while mov-

ing headquarters can be symbolic, it does not always mean a large base of workers will move with it. For example, insurance company The Travelers Companies Inc. moved headquarters to New York, but its Hartford office is still its largest branch. Abraham said that the fact that Alexion has retained research and parts of its financial and administrative branch in New Haven indicates an ongoing relationship with the city. The fashion in the life sciences industry may now be urban settings with a fluid workforce cross-pollination, Pescattlo said, but the trend may not be permanent. He pointed to high housing costs and congestion as incentives push employees and companies in the other direction. “Fashions come and go. There is probably an overemphasis on that density, and I think we may have reached a peak,” Pescattlo said. “I could see a shift back to what Connecticut has.” Now Connecticut has to adjust to the times or wait for another swing of the pendulum.

poetry

The Shore // By Miles Kim // Illustration by Keyi Cui

Over worms and through the wormlike probes of people, a man in a red hoodie along a path — found! The link to myself. How many times have I tried? In the woods by a lake, a rock nice to write on. I won’t be seen here, the water is peaceful. A question — water only asks a question. I watch from the shade as the sun shimmers on it, whereas from the trees a wooden, tireless rhetoric. They are all my instruments, and I love them, the wind in the leaves and the ripples, the soundloop of hurtling cars, even the silent ones. Some days we want nothing more than to reach into the metaphors of the world: black branched fingers outward to the blue that is in all directions the mind takes us. A sort of firmament — we glide through like dolphins Magical creatures, are they not? Pictures of grace and sociability, each one a part of the other or else a drifting intelligence in the wide ocean

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