YALE DAILY NEWS · THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2013 · yaledailynews.com
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NEWS Food studies may be offered in spring
“Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults.” MITCH HEDBERG AMERICAN COMEDIAN
West Campus emphasizes collaboration
BY HANNAH SCHWARZ AND YUVAL BEN-DAVID STAFF REPORTERS With a proposal submitted to Yale College Dean Mary Miller by a slew of interested faculty and students, a food studies program may be offered in the spring semester, according to three Yale faculty members interviewed. Following the precedent of similar nonmajor programs in Energy Studies, Education Studies, and Global Health, professors of food and sustainability have gotten together to propose a parallel program that focuses on the intersection of food and sustainability, said Maria Trumpler GRD ’92, professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. While a food and agriculture concentration already exists for environmental studies majors, this new program would allow students of any major to pursue studies in the area. Trumpler, Director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project Mark Bomford and history professor Paul Freedman said they expect the program will start in the spring, pending approval from the Dean’s Standing Committee on Majors. “In the past few years, students and professors have expressed interest in more study opportunities for food sustainability, and we’re responding to the demands they have,” Bomford said. The program would require the completion of certain food and sustainability courses, bring guest speakers to campus, and require students to complete a sustainable food-related internship, said Trumpler, who is spearheading the initiative. She said she expects around twelve students in the initial class and will reevaluate program size after the first year. Currently, there are around five to ten professors working with Trumpler to help gain approval for the program, Bomford said. Trumpler said the idea of a food studies initiative had long been discussed among faculty with interests in food and sustainability, but creating a major and associated department did not seem feasible. The University created guidelines last spring for establishing nonmajor academic programs, and Trumpler said they will make the process for the program more efficient.
Some students seem to be waiting and hoping that a program like this would be approved. MARK BOMFORD Director, Yale Sustainable Food Project Bomford said although the food concentration within the environmental studies program exists, humanities and social science majors interested in the area were left without an avenue to pursue their interests. “Some students seemed to be waiting and hoping that a program like this would be approved, so they could jump into it,” he said. But establishing non-major courses of study has proven to be a lengthy process in the past. According to Yale College Dean Mary Miller, the energy studies program was first proposed to her when she took office in 2009 and only became official last spring. Professors Paul van Tassel and Maria Piñango, the co-chairs of the Committee on Majors, both said in emails to the News that the committee has not received a proposal for food studies. In order to be approved by the Committee on Majors, non-major courses of study must partner with sources of funding and administrative support. Miller said such programs need to show they are financially sustainable to gain approval from the University. History professor Paul Freedman, whose research focuses on the spice trade and medieval cuisine, said such programs are neither allowed to allowed to hire their own faculty nor ask for funding from the University. Contact HANNAH SCHWARZ AND YUVAL BEN-DAVID at hannah.schwarz@yale.edu and yuval.ben-david@ yale.edu .
CROSS CAMPUS THE BLOG. THE BUZZ AROUND YALE THROUGHOUT THE DAY.
CLINTON WANG/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGR APHER
Y-Hack is hosting their 24-hour Y-Hackathon at the West Campus facilities, which includes the newly moved and renovated Yale School of Nursing. BY JENNIFER GERSTEN STAFF REPORTER When the co-founders of Y-Hack Charles Jin ’16, Mike Wu ’16 and Frank Wu ’16 were considering where at Yale they could host a 24-hour hack-a-thon for a projected few hundred competitors, West Campus was the last place on their minds. But after an unanticipated 1000-plus undergraduates from across the country and Canada signed up for the coding competition, the three discovered that the only place at Yale available and large enough to accommodate them all was 410 West Campus Dr. West Campus is a fitting home for Y-Hack beyond offering room for the competition — when the coders arrive this Friday evening, they will compete in a location that has reflected Y-Hack’s same spirit of innovation and collaboration. Six years after Yale purchased the 136acre facility from Bayer Pharmaceuticals for $109 million, West Campus has become a hub for interdisciplinary conversation and teamwork that is helping to strengthen the spirit of collaborative science research at Yale. “It’s like an artist’s colony,” said Farren Isaacs, researcher at the Systems Biology Institute on West Campus. “You have a bunch of people from different perspectives infusing their own creativity into their labs, their institutes and West Campus-wide culture.”
According to Scott Strobel, vice president for West Campus planning and program development, while each of the six institutes — Chemical Biology, Cancer Biology, Nanobiology, Systems Biology, Microbial Diversity and Energy Sciences — is focused on a particular research topic, the members of those institutes span the gamut of scientific disciplines. Strobel said that the close proximity of researchers to others from different backgrounds within each institute, and of different institutes to each other, is facilitating interdisciplinary work that has become characteristic of the research conducted at West Campus. Isaacs, who said his research is by nature interdisciplinary, credits the academic diversity at the West Campus institutes for facilitating his most recent research on rewiring the genome of E. coli to make it more disease-resistant. Collaborating on that project were faculty from Yale College and the School of Medicine, all of whom worked together at the Systems Biology Institute. “In many ways, the sciences are all coalescing right now,” Isaacs said. “We’re seeing advances in biology leveraging advances in physics, chemistry, engineering and so on. West Campus is the hub for that, [and] that’s the kind of environment that a lab like mine thrives in.” After the selection of Andre Levchenko this summer as the director of the Systems Biology
Institute, one last West Campus directorship remains to be filled at the Microbial Diversity Institute. As with the hiring of all other institute faculty at West Campus, Strobel said, an advisory committee of academically diverse members from the institute will conduct the search with a committee of members from the applicant’s home department. Unlike search committees in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, whose members hail from a single academic background, search committees at West Campus are comprised of members from numerous departments. Strobel said that the process of conducting these searches has fostered stronger connections between committee members in different fields of study. The result of these connections, he said, has been “cutting-edge” work from faculty members who might not otherwise have cause to interact together on research. Collaborations are being facilitated within institutes as well. Levchenko said that Systems Biology faculty members are working with developers on upcoming renovations to the institute that will make it more spacious and attractive, producing labs that are more conducive to interdisciplinary research. “Essentially, you feel that this place is wired from the outset so that everything you want to have is more or less available to you,” Levchenko
said. “You are only limited [here] by your imagination.” Although the Yale School of Nursing is not affiliated with the institutes or their search committees, School of Nursing Dean Margaret Grey said that her school has benefitted from the “interdisciplinary culture” of West Campus after moving into its newly renovated West Campus space this fall. Grey cited nursing researchers’ closeness on West Campus to facilities like the Yale Center for Genome Analysis, and other researchers in labs from a variety of scientific disciplines, as critical to conducting collaborative research at her school. She hopes that the connections West Campus has made available to YSN will attract potential applicants and encourage Yale undergraduates to explore “the west side of town,” which is home to a nascent arts and cultural community as well. When YSN was first considering the move, Grey said the administration told her she would be “crazy” to turn the offer down. “It’s the opportunity to bring all these pieces together in the service of science and growing interprofessional relationships,” Grey added. “And that’s just absolutely exciting.” Shuttles connecting Yale, West Campus and the West Haven train station run three times an hour. Contact JENNIFER GERSTEN at jennifer.gersten@yale.edu .
YLS attracts Yale undergrads BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID AND LAVINIA BORZI STAFF REPORTERS Of the 199 students that matriculated to Yale Law School this year, 23 graduated from Yale College. This year’s figure is consistent with the past several years, during which the number of Yale College graduates entering YLS ranged from 23 to 33. Students and faculty interviewed credited this track record to Yale College’s strong liberal arts curriculum. Professors and administrators at the Yale Law School confirmed that students with wellrounded academic backgrounds often make the best applicants for law school, and students interviewed who are interested in law said they are confident in their chances for securing admission to law school following graduation. “At Yale we are known for many things but maybe pre-eminently for liberal education,” said Akhil Amar ’80 LAW ’84, who teaches both at Yale College and at YLS. “At Yale Law School, Yale College is consistently one of our best appliers.” Due to their varied academic background, Yale College students are often some of the best applicants to YLS, YLS director of admissions Craig Janecek said. Though the lack of a defined pre-law track at Yale might cause anxiety among students, Janecek said institutions with pre-law tracks do not generally produce the strongest candidates for YLS. Janecek said this is not because these institutions are not top-tier ones, but because the pre-law track is often a “homogenizing factor” and it makes it more difficult for students to distinguish themselves. Still, YLS professor Peter Schuck said relying on their first-rate academic training to get into law school could disadvantage Yale students by putting them on equal footing with students from other top institutions. Extracurricular organizations
WA LIU/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Roughly 23-33 Yale well-rounded undergraduates have matriculated to Yale Law School each of the past few years. such as the debate and mock trial teams, along with the Yale Political Union, may help some students prepare for a legal career, said Dean of Yale College Mary Miller. Amar teaches “Constitutional Law,” a course that many undergraduates interested in the legal discipline take each year. Though his course may also serve to augment Yale College students’ pre-law resumes, Amar said the class is more importantly part of the varied liberal arts curriculum that makes Yale undergraduates such strong candidates for law school. “When you come to a place like Yale, you should encounter Shakespeare, and Newton, and Darwin and the American Constitution,” Amar said. “It’s a perfect part of the classical liberal education.” Camy Anderson ’14, who is currently applying to law schools, said that unlike students anticipating medical school, applicants to law school are not responsible for a body
of technical knowledge so much as analytical thinking skills. Most Yale classes can teach students to think critically, she said. Amar said a liberal arts education composed of courses like “Constitutional Law” also enables students to experiment with the legal discipline and decide if they are truly interested in it. Students interviewed echoed this sentiment. Robert Batista ’15, for example, said taking Amar’s class cemented his desire to go to law school. Brad Rosen ’04 GRD ’04, who teaches undergraduate courses on the intersection of law and technology, said the preprofessional nature of a pre-law track would tamper with Yale students’ self-discovery. Many students also go to law school for the wrong reasons, perhaps because they want to postpone making decisions about their careers, Rosen said, adding that a pre-law track would only reinforce this mindset.
“It lets you kick the can down the road,” he said. Still, Juliann Jeffrey ’14, a psychology major who is president of the Yale Pre-Law Society, said that she would like to see Yale giving law school applicants more support, like it does with prospective medical school students. She added that she revived the Yale Pre-Law Society this year in part to make up for this lack of support. Rosen said if he could change one thing about Yale’s approach to prelaw, he would emulate Harvard’s system and provide prospective law students with student advisors from YLS. In the past five years, the highest number of students to enter Yale Law School from Yale College was 33 in 2010. Contact YUVAL BEN-DAVID and LAVINIA BORZI at yuval.ben-david@yale.edu and lavinia.borzi@yale.edu .