YALE DAILY NEWS · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 2014 · yaledailynews.com
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NEWS
“We might come closer to balancing the budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.” RONALD REAGAN AMERICAN PRESIDENT
University Activists call for ‘Not 1 more’ on track for budget cuts BY SEBASTIAN MEDINA-TAYAC STAFF REPORTER
BY ADRIAN RODRIGUES STAFF REPORTER Administrators across the University are working to cut their budgets and rein in spending. With the hope of eventually replacing Yale’s current $39 million budget deficit with a budget surplus, the Provost’s Office has distributed one-, three- and five-year budget targets to the University’s 40 units — which include Yale College, the graduate and professional schools, museums and several administrative units — that will require reductions in personnel and nonpersonnel costs. According to senior administrators, these targets for fiscal 2015 are being met while departments are already working on future goals. “ T h e m os t i m p o rtant reason to look into the future is to avoid layoffs,” Provost Benjamin Polak said. “Avoiding them entirely would be hard. We want this to be done [in a way] that’s the least disruptive possible. That requires planning.” Polak said the University hopes to reduce administrative costs by five percent in three years and by nine percent in five years. In the vast majority of cases, he added, units are already coming in on or under budget. Deputy provost for academic resources Lloyd Suttle echoed Polak, saying that many people across the University are working to develop long-term financial plans that will address the projected deficit in the fiscal 2015 budget and place the University on sound financial footing moving forward. “We’re seeing units come in the vast majority of cases on or under budget,” Polak said. “I’m a little encouraged, but it’s still a very tough budget environment. It’s going to get harder.” Polak expressed confidence that costs would be reduced five percent over the next three years, but cautioned that the nine percent target will be much more difficult to reach. Achieving further levels of savings requires some imaginative thinking, Polak added, pointing to the possibility of various parts of the University performing certain tasks collaboratively instead of independently. In higher education institutions, reducing costs by nine percent over five years is hard, he said: Many of the University’s operating costs are very difficult to reduce. “We all need to be involved in this,” Polak said. “We have to be all committed to keeping administrative costs down. That needs to be University-wide.” Officials from various schools and departments said they are working diligently to reduce costs while maintaining the integrity of their programs. Most officials interviewed said they felt the budget cuts were a fair response to the deficit. Vice President for Human Resources and Administration Michael Peel said his unit is on track to meet or exceed the first-year savings targets and is already working to bring budgets close to the three-year target by fiscal 2015. Still, he emphasized that budget cuts require making difficult decisions. The human resources department at Yale has been through several rounds of cost reduction since 2009,
so finding alternative ways to save money has become more difficult, he said. Peel added that leaving vacant positions unfilled and shifting some work from internal sources to external resources will achieve most of the savings targeted for Human Resources. “I think the budget targets set were prudent given the size of the reoccurring deficit,” Peel said in an email. “Those of us with budget responsibility now have planning parameters for the intermediate term — three to five years. The longer the planning cycle, the more University leaders are able to make these changes in a thoughtful and methodical manner, reducing the impact on our people and organizations.” University Librarian Susan Gibbons said library services submitted a fiscal 2015 budget within the proposed targets, but the spending constraints forced the University Library to be “much more critical and evidence-based in the decisions that [it is] making about collections, services and staffing.” Gibbons added, though, that she did not think there would be discernible differences in the quality of the library in the next fiscal year. Deputy Provost for Science and Technology Steven Girvin said his units have stayed on track for fiscal 2015 cuts by consolidating vacant administrative staff positions, using department endowments to cover essential programs rather than incremental activities and reducing the scope of facilities renovation projects. “We do have a structural deficit which we can cure only by making some further modest budget cuts,” he said. “Not doing this would eat further into the endowment and not be fair to future generations at Yale.” The Yale University Art Gallery plans to achieve its target by continuing its tight focus on cost control, coupled with its ongoing fundraising efforts, according to Jessica Labbé, the museum’s deputy director for finance and administration. Financial staff members in the Athletic Department have been working over the past months with the Provost and University Budget Offices to support the University’s short- and longterm budget development goals, said Forrest Temple, Senior Associate Athletics Director for Finance. He added that the Athletic Department believes in the plan and remains committed to its success. The School of Management and the School of Medicine set their own targets and are not subject to the provostial budget targets, said SOM Dean Edward Snyder and Medical School Dean Robert Alpern. While Snyder said SOM currently has an operating deficit and hopes to balance it soon, Alpern said the School of Medicine is on track but remains dependent on many external factors, including decisions made in Washington. Half of the Ivy League posted budget deficits for the fiscal year that ended in June 2013. Yale had the highest deficit at $39 million, followed by Harvard at $33.7 million. Contact ADRIAN RODRIGUES at adrian.rodrigues@yale.edu .
r e c y c l e y o u r y d n d a i l y
At a crowded meeting at the New Haven People’s Center on Monday night, members of grassroots advocacy group Unidad Latina en Accion recounted stories and cases of brothers, spouses and friends who currently face deportation proceedings, asking activists and community members for support. Among those in attendance was Edgar Javier Marin, who can empathize with their cases — he was just released from Immigration and Customs enforcement two weeks prior, facing deportation proceedings for a crime he did not commit. The resulting felony conviction — which was recently reduced to a misdemeanor — attracted the attention of ICE officials when former East Haven police officer Dennis Spaulding filed a false police report alleging that Marin had assaulted him. It was later discovered that Spaulding beat Marin, breaking his wrist and inflicting other injuries, and charged him with assaulting a police officer. Spaulding is now serving a five-year prison sentence for harassing and assaulting Latino residents of East Haven and filing false reports to cover up his behavior. A legal East Haven resident of 13 years, Marin was detained awaiting deportation on Jan. 31 for six weeks. Marin’s criminal charge was reduced to a misdemeanor on March 17 and he was released from custody. Still, the specter of Spaulding’s assault continues to haunt him, as he awaits his trial in immigration court on May 6, which will determine whether he will be allowed to continue residing in the United States. Marin and ULA joined a national organization called Not 1 More, which calls for suspension of all deportations until immigration reform is achieved. Marin and other members of ULA will be participating in the campaign’s national day of action on April 5 to support Marin and countless other Connecticut residents, both authorized and unauthorized, that are facing deportation. Marin’s case, like many other deportation cases, is “twopronged”, according to Elliot Friedman LAW ’15, a law student working with the Legal Services for Immigrants Clinic (LSIC) at the Law School. Marin was originally involved in a criminal case for his encounter with Spaulding in 2011. Marin feared that his word would not hold up against Spaulding’s in court, so he accepted a plea bargain and pled guilty to the charge of assaulting a police officer. Marin’s sentence gave ICE the grounds to open a second case in immigration court and begin deportation proceedings against Marin — years after he completed
SEBASTIAN MEDINA-TAYAC/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Activists are calling for Connecticut courts to reconsider all of the other cases involving Dennis Spaulding as well. his probation and believed he was in good standing with the law. He was detained on Jan. 31. The New Haven Superior Court reopened his case on March 17, granting him the writ of Coram Nobis, which is employed in cases in which new evidence comes to light after the conviction. In this case, that new information was Spaulding’s conviction and admission to falsifying police reports like the one used to convict Marin in 2011. The judge allowed Marin to plead guilty to a lesser charge of interfering, a misdemeanor. According to court records, Marin’s public defender David Forsythe told the judge the reduced conviction should put Marin in better standing when he returns to immigration court on May 6, where he hopes to close the deportation case. While Forsythe represented Marin in court when his case was reopened, LSIC is representing Marin in immigration court. Friedman said he hopes Marin’s case will be a model for resolving unfair deportation cases. Marin was held in the Franklin County Sheriffs office in Greenfield, Mass., which has a contract with ICE to hold detainees. A congressional directive requires U.S. detention centers to fill at least 34,000 beds per night, which drives ICE agents to reach back into old records to uncover immigrants who are eligible for deportation, even years after their sentencing, said Fountain.
On March 12, the immigration court allowed Marin to post a $7,000 bond and be released from detention. The next day, activists drove to Greenfield to retrieve him. ULA organizer John Lugo said Marin was tearful and traumatized upon his release. Having falsely tested positive for tuberculosis, Marin was kept in solitary confinement to quarantine him for the first week, which was especially traumatic. Lugo said that rather than merely reducing his conviction, the state should have cleared him and compensated him for his pain and suffering, including medical expenses for the broken wrist Spaulding inflicted on him. “It is the responsibility of the state to reopen all of the cases of Spaulding’s victims and give people a chance to clear their names,” Lugo said. “I don’t understand why the state hasn’t done anything like this and hesitated to reopen Edgar’s case.” Marin has thus far escaped the fate of the 110 people who are deported every day, leaving behind families, jobs, and opportunities. In response to the overwhelming number of harmful deportation cases arising in the New Haven community, ULA has joined with the national antideportation organization Not 1 More, which is coordinating a national day of action next Saturday, April 5. Coordinated by the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance and
ULA, immigrant advocacy groups and demonstrators statewide will be driving in large caravans from Connecticut’s eastern and western extremities, picking up new groups as they close in on New Haven. The eastbound caravan will stop in Stamford and Bridgeport, among other towns, and the westbound caravan has stops planned in New London, Clinton, Meridan and East Haven. After uniting in New Haven, they will all caravan northward to Hartford to demonstrate at the federal courthouse downtown. Though the court will not be in session, Lugo said, they hope to stage the demonstration as a powerful media event that authorities will see on the news. He said the event is likely to bring hundreds of people. “The people are demanding change, and the government is not serving our needs,” said ULA activist Jose Luis Piscil, who is currently facing deportation for minor charges that were dropped. “Obama not doing anything for immigration reform, or to stop deportations, so we have to pressure him. I am definitely going to be involved in the April 5 demonstration. That’s how we make change — we take it to the streets, or they’ll keep abusing us.” ICE conducted a total of 368,644 deportations in fiscal year 2013. Contact SEBASTIAN MEDINA-TAYAC at sebastian.medina-tayac@yale.edu .
Researchers commercialize new depression treatment BY J.R. REED STAFF REPORTER A New Haven-based biotechnology startup is on the frontlines of finding a new treatment for major depression and anxiety disorders. In the early 2000’s, researchers at the School of Medicine discovered that small doses of ketamine – known colloquially as the party drug Special K — were effective in treating patients with severe depression and anxiety. This past year, researchers at the forefront of this discovery, including Psychiatry Professors Gerard Sanacora, John Krystal and Vladimir Coric, formed BioHaven Pharmaceutical Holding Company in order to move forward with commercializing the drug. The company received an initial $3.5 million investment from Portage Biotech Inc., a U.K.-based venture company, to advance product development in early January. The money will enable BioHaven to run large-scale clinical efficacy trials on the drug, with the eventual goal of placing it on the market by next year. “It’s a completely different approach,” Sanacora, director of the Yale Depression Research Program, said. “It’s an all-purpose approach that’s physiologicallybased across diagnostic categories.”
Rather than acting on the brain’s levels of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine — the neurotransmitters most often affected by antidepressant medications — ketamine regulates levels of a neurotransmitter called glutamate. Coric said this finding breaks with several decades of research on depression, which until recently was thought to be mainly affected by serotonin and dopamine levels in the brain. The team first observed that a single dose of ketamine resulted in an anti-depressant effect within a couple of hours of administering the drug, a break from other antidepressant medications which take several weeks on average to relieve symptoms of depression. However, ketamine, in its purest form, produced side-effects including distorted vision and hearing. After these observations, the researchers worked to formulate a new drug that would regulate levels of glutamate, based on their work on ketamine and other glutamate-modulating agents. “Those critical observations and studies at Yale were the genesis for the company,” Coric said. “It was so novel at the time that we worked with OCR to patent glutamate-regulating agents.” Working with Yale’s Office of Cooperative Research (OCR), the researchers actively participated
in the prosecution of the patent application Yale filed. They continued to build upon their initial observations, which was essential for licensing and commercialization. OCR Senior Associate Director of Licensing David Lewin GRD ’96 said that it has taken nine years for the intellectual property and the project to reach a level of maturity where it could attract venture capital required to move into product development, a trend that is not uncommon within the biotech start-up community for therapeutic concepts. “We set up an intellectual property strategy, which can take years to execute,” Lewin said. “The patents for this technology were issued just two months ago, and, while it usually doesn’t take this long, five years is not atypical.” Krystal said the research unit received critical support from Connecticut’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, as well as the National Institute of Mental Health and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. “This is an example of how investment in medical research by the State of Connecticut not only pays off by identifying potential new medical advances that could ultimately alleviate suffering associated with mental disor-
ders in Connecticut,” Krystal said. “But [it] also pays off economically for the State by bringing in research grants and by stimulating the creation of new biotechnology companies.” Pfizer veteran employee and Portage CEO Declan Doogan, who serves as executive chairman of BioHaven, said that the startup’s drug could soon enter Phase II and Phase III trials, with the goal being characterizing the new drugs in two to three years. “We have access to top talent and compounds with known safety profiles to be reformulated for the clinic,” Doogan said in a statement. “This will allow us to go into Phase II and Phase III trials. Our goal is to have these new drugs characterized in two to three years.” In the Phase 1 trial, the researchers tested the new drug in a small group of people to ensure its safety, determine the appropriate level of dosage, and identify side effects. In Phase II, the drug will be given to larger group of people to test its effectiveness, and then, in Phase 3, the drug will be given to larger groups of people to confirm it works. BioHaven will operate out of 234 Church St., but Portage Inc. is headquartered in the U.K. Contact J.R. REED at jonathan.t.reed@yale.edu .