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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2014 · VOL. CXXXVI, NO. 66 · yaledailynews.com
INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING
RAINY RAINY
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CROSS CAMPUS
TOURETTE’S RESEARCHERS UNCOVER CAUSE
Q HOUSE
GREEK LIFE
WEATHER
Plans to rebuild community center move forward
NEW FRATERNITY, CHI PSI, ESTABLISHED
Yale braves polar vortex with few complications, ready for winter
PAGES 10-11 SCITECH
PAGE 3 CITY
PAGE 3 NEWS
PAGE 5 NEWS
NH Green rules contested
Business Ethics Bloodbath.
Professor Vikram Mansharamani’s “Business Ethics” seminar devolved into a charged debate over what criteria should be used to select students for the oversubscribed course. Suggestions included “having previously worked at a bailed-out bank,” and the ability to bring in guest lecturers. Most of the students vying for spots in the Ethics, Politics and Economics seminar were willing to stab each other in the back for a spot.
BY MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMAS AND WESLEY YIIN STAFF REPORTERS
were forced to leave the New Haven Green. The purpose of the amendments was to expedite the process of removing protestors from the Green, but activists are now concerned that these amendments, if passed, will be detrimental to the homeless population that sleeps on the Green. “Homelessness in New Haven
Eighty-six current and former members of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity at Yale are the targets of two new lawsuits over a fatal collision at the 2011 Harvard-Yale tailgate that left one woman dead and two others injured. Thirty-year-old Nancy Barry, of Salem, Mass., was killed in November 2011 when a U-Haul truck driven by Brendan Ross ’13 — heading toward the tailgate area assigned to the fraternity at the Yale Bowl — accelerated and swerved out of control. Sarah Short SOM ’13 and Harvard employee Elizabeth Dernbach were also injured. Last month, Short and Barry’s estate filed new suits, identical but separate, individually naming all the students who were members of the Yale chapter of the fraternity at the time of the crash, regardless of whether or not they were present at the tailgate. With Short’s medical expenses exceeding $300,000, Short’s attorney Joel Faxon said he expects a jury to award a sum to Short reaching into seven figures. Paul Edwards, who represents Barry’s estate, said he is looking to recover several million dollars over the death. The new lawsuit, filed in Connecticut Superior Court in New Haven, is a result of an unusual relationship between the national Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and the local Yale chapter. According to Faxon, although Short initially sued the national Sig Ep fraternity in 2012, University Director of Risk Manage-
SEE HOMELESSNESS PAGE 4
SEE SIG EP LAWSUIT PAGE 6
Self-promote to survive.
Professor Robert “Nobel Prize” J. Shiller began talking about his recently won award in his first lecture of the semester for “Introductory Macroeconomics.” Of course he did. Bribes accepted. Professors are upping the ante on impressive first-day lectures with economics professors in “Game Theory” and “Economics of Poverty Alleviation” giving out cold hard cash to students during economics guessing games. Teaching fellows in undersubscribed seminars, take note. Class roulette. Signing
up for a residential college seminar can be like playing a game of darts in the dark. Among the spring semester choices are “Performance and Perfomance-Enhancing Drugs” and “Mastering the Art of Watercolor.”
Punch lines. The Daily Princetonian released their joke issue on Jan. 10 with articles including “Ivy blames gastroenteritis outbreak on commoners sitting outside club,” “Snowden revealed as leaker of Salinger manuscripts,” and “Undercover sting operation seeks to identify Honor Code violations during final exam period.” You know what they say about things being funny because they could be true. Zombie mammoths. Two
experts wrote opposing pieces for Yale Environment 360 on the de-extinction debate, arguing over whether or not scientists should revive the extinct species. Futurist Stewart Brand made the case in the affirmative and biologist Paul Ehrlich argued the notion was morally wrong. Meanwhile the Yale Poltical Union filed away the idea for a future debate.
Starz on Ice. The Saturday
hockey game against Harvard included a star-studded guest list with former governor of New York George Pataki ’67, Secretary of State John Kerry ’67 — who played hockey at Yale as an undergraduate — and University President Peter Salovey.
THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY
1950. One Yale student accidentally hits another Yale student with his car outside of Yale Station on a rainy day. There are no injuries. Submit tips to Cross Campus
crosscampus@yaledailynews.com
ONLINE y MORE goydn.com/xcampus
86 Sig Ep members sued
KATHRYN CRANDALL/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
Amendments to New Haven’s park ordinance would institute a 10 p.m. closure and ban overnight sleeping in the Green. BY SEBASTIAN MEDINA-TAYAC STAFF REPORTER Homeless residents in New Haven may soon have more difficulty finding a place to sleep, as proposed regulations to the city’s park ordinance would close the New Haven Green at 10 p.m. and prohibit people from sleeping there overnight. Led by Amistad Catholic Worker
and Yale Divinity School student group Seminarians for a Democratic Society, a coalition of advocacy groups and individuals are organizing to oppose the amendments, which City Corporation Counsel Victor Bolden proposed to the Board of Aldermen in December. The amendments were suggested in reaction to the Occupy New Haven movement after occupiers
“People’s caucus” formed
Yale shuts down YBB+
GROUP OF SEVEN ALDERS SEEK TO COUNTER UNION INFLUENCE BY ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER STAFF REPORTER In deep blue New Haven, where Democrats hold every elected office, ideological consensus has come to prevail on the Board of Aldermen. But the solidifying power of organized labor in successfully electing candidates for municipal office has tested that proposition, even for local lawmakers who declare themselves sympathetic to union interests. Seven alders — three of them in their first term — have formed a coalition designed to counterbalance the political sway of Yale’s UNITE HERE unions, Locals 34 and 35. Its members have provisionally termed the group the “people’s caucus” and will seek the input of city residents at its first public meeting on Jan. 25. The caucus counts among its members two alders specifically recruited by UNITE HERE who say they now wish to cut ties with the unions that helped get them elected: Claudette RobinsonThorpe in Ward 28 and Brenda Foskey-Cyrus in Ward 21. Robinson-Thorpe was first elected in 2009. She won re-election in 2011 along with a slate of 19 other labor-backed alders, including Foskey-Cyrus, who displaced candidates backed by City Hall. “During my second term I soon realized that I had left one master for another,” RobinsonThorpe said in a statement. She said she had traded her legislative independence for membership in a team of alders led by Board President Jorge Perez, UNITE HERE organizer Gwen Mills and former Ward 3 Alder and Democratic Town Committee Chair Jackie James. Robinson-Thorpe argued that the UNITE HERE’s electoral influence has forged a new political machine — akin to the Democratic Party machine it sought to replace — in prescribing how alders vote and promising retribution for not toeing the labor line. “By making this statement I was told I would be committing political suicide and the Unions SEE PEOPLE’S CAUCUS PAGE 4
COURSETABLE
Yale Bluebook+, available the past three semesters, was blocked without notice on University servers on Monday. BY VIVIAN WANG STAFF REPORTER As the first day of shopping period opened at Yale College, the 1,418 students who had entered their tentative course schedules on Yale Bluebook+ found the website blocked on University servers. The application, designed by brothers and co-developers Peter Xu ’14 and Harry Yu ’14, used data from Yale’s course information database to offer students a convenient way to compare class evaluations and ratings, Xu said. Though the program has been available for students’ use for the last three semesters, it was only last Wednesday that the brothers were approached about the website. University Registrar Gabriel Olszewski sent them an email citing concerns that the website
was “making YC course evaluation available to many who are not authorized to view this information,” asking how they obtained the information, who gave them permission to use it and where the information is hosted. In subsequent exchanges Olszewski raised concerns over the website’s unauthorized use of the Yale logo and the words “Yale” and “Bluebook,” the prominence of class and professor ratings, the application’s accessibility to non-undergraduates, and the fact that it wasn’t hosted on Yale’s servers. When the brothers met with Olszewski two days after the first email, they said they were told that the website had to be shut down. Olszewski did not respond to multiple requests for comment Monday. “This was very sudden,” Xu said.
“We thought they’d work with us to resolve the problems. But they were very straightforward and asked us to shut it down, right at the start of shopping period when a lot of students had worksheets on it.” Rather than taking the website down immediately, Xu and Yu looked to the case of another popular shopping website, Yale BlueBook. That website encountered similar issues when it first came out, but the site’s designers talked with the administration, and Yale eventually purchased the website. Hoping to make a similar compromise, Xu and Yu said they presented several new mockups of the website to the administration. The revised versions changed the website’s color scheme, removed the SEE YBB+ PAGE 4