Yale Daily News — October 24, 2025

Yale outspends Ivies on lobbying Campus police union ratifies contract

BY ASHER BOISKIN STAFF REPORTER

Yale spent $370,000 on lobbying the federal government during the third quarter of 2025 — its highest quarterly total this year and an increase from the $320,000 it reported over the summer — according to new federal disclosures filed Monday.

That brings the University’s total lobbying expenditures for 2025 to $890,000, extending an upward trend as Yale expands its engagement in Washington amid threats to its endowment and research funding. Yale also spent more this quarter than the six other Ivy League universities whose lobbying disclosures were available — all but Brown University.

“The university works to communicate higher education’s

Trust task force starts listening sessions

BY LEO NYBERG CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

The committee of professors assembled by University President Maurie McInnis to examine declining trust in universities kicked off a series of listening sessions Wednesday to hear commentary from students and staff.

The Committee on Trust in Higher Education, whose formation McInnis announced in April, plans to publish a report at the end of the academic year with findings and recommendations. In an interview with the News last November, McInnis said that declining trust in universities was one of her top concerns.

“Our mandate is a little bit more the external trust question,” committee co-chair and history professor Beverly Gage ’94 said in an interview. “But it seems pretty intimately tied to the campus climate and people’s own bonds of trust with each other here.”

The committee has not yet decided what to focus on, Gage said, but the group — which consists entirely of tenured faculty — will consider suggestions from the listening sessions to determine its focus.

According to Gage, participants brought up issues of internal trust

impact and Yale’s mission and priorities to legislators on both sides of the aisle,” Richard Jacob, the associate vice president for federal and state relations, wrote in a statement to the News. “We are also sharing the ways in which Yale is addressing problems across American society.”

The University spent $250,000 in the first quarter of 2025 and $320,000 in the second.

Yale ranks at the top of the pack among Ivy League institutions for lobbying expenditures in quarter three. Columbia reported $290,000, followed by Cornell with $240,000, Harvard with $220,000, Penn with $200,000 and Princeton with $160,000. Dartmouth spent $80,000. Brown’s filing had not yet appeared in the public database as of Tuesday.

Dartmouth and Yale are the only Ivy League universities not yet hit with direct funding cuts by the Trump administration.

Yale’s latest report shows that the University’s lobbying targeted legislation related to taxes, student financial aid and federal research funding. That includes the Republican-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which raised the tax on endowment investment returns from 1.4 to 8 percent for Yale and other similarly wealthy universities.

“Since last year, the university has increased its engagement with government officials – opening an office in Washington, D.C., and adding more in-person meetings for the president with government officials in Washington, D.C,” Jacob wrote.

BY REETI MALHOTRA STAFF REPORTER

The Yale Police union ratified a new contract agreement with the University last week, ending over two years of tense negotiations.

Yale has not had a contract with its police union since June 2023, when the previous one expired. The new contract will be in effect until June 30, 2028. It marks a major breakthrough after years of fraught back-andforth between the Yale Police Benevolent Association, or YPBA, and Yale negotiators.

The two parties had been at an impasse since November 2024, when the University presented its “Last, Best and Final Offer” and rejected the union’s counterproposal a month later.

Yale negotiators’ refusal to schedule continued negotiations in May prompted the union’s members to vote unanimously to authorize a strike in June. Though

no such strike occurred, the authorization marked a low in the collective bargaining process.

“I am pleased to announce that Yale University and the Yale Police Benevolent Association have reached a new contract agreement that continues to promote the safety and security of the Yale campus,” Joe Sarno, Yale’s head of union management relations, wrote in a statement on Tuesday afternoon.

Union leaders were ambivalent about the latest offer from Yale, Mike Hall, the police union’s president, wrote in a Tuesday email to the News, but members voted to ratify the contract last Wednesday, Oct. 15.

“Unfortunately, the collective bargaining process was contentious from the start, with Yale playing hardball and employing union-busting tactics,” Hall wrote.

In particular, Hall expressed concern that the pay increases in

GOP fighter, mayoral underdog

BY ELIJAH HUREWITZ-RAVITCH STAFF REPORTER

Steve Orosco likes being the “black sheep.”

On a sunny Friday afternoon recently, the 44-year-old businessman, ex–mixed martial arts fighter and Republican candidate for mayor of New Haven, laid out a hypothetical scenario to illustrate his point.

“There’s two rooms with a bunch of venture capitalists in both rooms,” he said. “Room A has one hundred African Americans.

Room B has one hundred white people. I’m walking in the white room every single time, because I’m gonna be the one person that’s different. And everyone in that

room is gonna say, ‘Yo, who is this guy, and why is he in here?’”

After three failed runs for state or local office, Orosco is used to hearing that question. He faces an uphill battle as the Republican challenging the incumbent Democratic mayor, Justin Elicker, in a deep-blue city.

Early voting in the election began on Monday. In interviews with the News and at a mayoral debate last month, Elicker has criticized Orosco for a lack of active engagement in New Haven’s civic life and defended his own record on education, affordable housing and public safety.

But Orosco is undaunted, fueled by an unrelenting desire to win.

“Going into the Democratic machine,” he said, “people are like,

‘You’re crazy.’ That’s all right. I like being David versus Goliath.” Orosco comes from a mixed-race household. His mother, who is white, was raised in what he described as an upper-middle-class family in Taunton, Massachusetts. Her parents “disowned” her when she decided to marry Orosco’s father, an immigrant from Trinidad, and for several years did not allow him in their house, Orosco said. He was raised in Newport, Rhode Island, where his mother worked as a nurse and his father as a bouncer and salesman.

At age 8, Orosco began wrestling — the pursuit that “made me the man I am today,” he said.

DS eyes expansion

BY JAEHA JANG AND OLIVIA WOO STAFF REPORTERS

Directed Studies, Yale’s yearlong Great Books program for firstyear undergraduates, could expand by as much as 25 percent next year, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis said in an interview.

On Wednesday, Lewis said Yale intends to offer as many as 10 discussion sections instead of the current eight, which would expand the total program size from 120 students to approximately 150. Lewis attributed the expansion of Directed Studies, often referred to as DS, to the program’s popularity, which reached new heights this year with the highest waitlist in known records.

“I hope to expand the number of slots in DS because DS is popular — and rightly popular,” Lewis said. “We’re in the process of hiring the faculty for next year to make that possible.”

The proposed plan drew generally positive responses from the Directed Studies community, though faculty members emphasized that the small seminar sizes are part of the program’s essence. The program provides a survey of the Western canon through three courses each semester on historical and political thought, literature and philosophy.

This year, more than 110 first years were waitlisted for the program. Waitlisted students previously told the News that upperclassmen told

Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch, Staff Photographer

Kimberly Angeles, Contributing Photographer

Brown University's filing has not appeared in the public database as of Tuesday,

Aiden Zhou, Data Editor

This Day in Yale History, 2016

October 24, 2016 / Student Teams Up with Two-Star Michelin Chef for Exclusive Dining Experience

Abdel Morsy ‘17 partnered with Shin Takagi, head chef of the two-star Michelin restaurant Zeniya in Kanazawa, Japan, to host an eight-course Japanese dinner for 12 guests in New Haven. The event celebrated Morsy’s collaboration with Takagi and marked the one year anniversary of Stickershop, Morsy’s art-focused dinner series featuring musicians, chefs and designers.

Morsy first met Takagi while working at Zeniya the previous summer and invited him to co-host the event, where dishes ranged from deep-fried sesame tofu to raw seafood and handmade soy ice cream. Yale musicians performed live, and attendees received custom-designed stickers for the occasion. One guest described the night as “hands-down amazing,” blending culinary artistry with New Haven’s creative community.

Behind the Headline

By Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch

I met Steve Orosco for lunch on a sunny afternoon at P&M Deli, where he ordered a chicken pesto sandwich and mentioned to me that he was an intermittent fasting adherent. Although we were in East Rock, which Orosco called “enemy territory,” several people approached him to offer words of support. Eventually, after Orosco and I had discussed MMA, Black conservatism, and segregation in New Haven — among many other topics — we drove to Westville Manor, a dilapidated public housing development on the northwest edge of the Elm City. As Orosco walked its grounds with Perry Flowers, the Republican candidate for Ward 30 alder, curious heads popped out of concrete homes to say hello. But Orosco was on a tight schedule: he had to be at the Milford gym he co-owns to train a twelve-year-old future fighter. Orosco is fond of saying that getting into the cage is “human chess” — not so different, perhaps, from running a city.

Read “GOP fighter, mayoral underdog” on PAGE 1.

HANNAH

OPINION

American universities are in trouble, and there is much pressure from the outside to change. Unless you are so conservative as to believe that things are fine as they are and no change is needed, then why not consider changing from within rather than from without? The time has come to radically rethink the curriculum and structure of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, whose mission, according to a statement adopted in 2020 by the FAS Senate, “is to preserve, advance, and transmit knowledge through inspiring research, teaching, and art.”

Let me put forth a strong thesis: Yale ought to reassess its curriculum and the departmental structure that organizes the transmission of knowledge along the lines of a global core that would put us at the forefront of American universities and address many of the issues that currently inhibit us from being all we can be.

Such a curriculum would work across departmental lines and even schools, and would be structured by multiple perspectives upon important issues that prepare students for life in the twenty-first century — such as family, religion, community, justice, ethics, politics, the good and bad uses of technology, among other topics. Such a project would encourage civil discourse among faculty who would be encouraged to consider what and how they teach and how their teaching intersects with other areas of inquiry.

The shared nature of a certain number of core required courses

for students in their first two years would work towards the making of community via intellectual means rather than through class, religion, gender, race or ethnicity, which have served to weaken rather than strengthen a sense of shared belonging.

There are certain moments at which universities are called upon to think about purpose: what they do and how they do it. This was the case during the Interwar years when a few institutions — Columbia, the University of Chicago, St. Johns — established a core curriculum. It was again the case after World War II when the research university took a quantum leap forward and when colleges thought about the shape and methods of undergraduate education.

Harvard took the lead with its celebrated General Education in a Free Society, also known as the Harvard Redbook, beginning in 1945. My own alma mater, Amherst College, followed with a radical rethinking of the goals of a liberal education along with the means of achieving those goals. Yale in 1946 took a small but significant step in the direction of curricular reform with Directed Studies, which originally offered about 10 percent of firstand second- year students a curated constellation of courses thought to be necessary for future leaders of the free world. All of these programs along with many others placed the rethinking of curriculum at the center

STAFF COLUMNIST HOWARD BLOCH

of evolving institutional identity. It is time for Yale again to take the lead among American universities and to rethink in full the shape

IT IS TIME FOR YALE AGAIN TO TAKE THE LEAD AMONG AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES AND TO RETHINK IN FULL THE SHAPE AND CONTENTS OF ITS UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION.

and contents of its undergraduate education. This is a golden opportunity to assess what belongs in the curriculum and what does not, as well as to reorganize how a university like Yale is structured.

The college is currently governed by a departmental system, which is thought to be a good way in which to manage university resources. Each department has its budgetary allocation and is responsible for staying within budget.

Yet, this organizational model has become unfair and outmoded. Some departments have developed private resources not available to others. Current departmental structure does not best articulate what an education is or should be today or will be tomorrow. Departments are defined by disciplines, and disciplines have changed over time. Foreign literature departments grouped along national lines once corresponded to the colonial empires of the late nineteenth century, while the literatures of every area of the globe have more in common than the particular languages that separate them by department. Almost every department in the humanities teaches some version of history, uses the visuals of art history and has adapted to the demands of digital media and artificial intelligence. Departments are not agile bodies. They are ruled by a certain selfreproducing defensive inertia that leads them to respond neither to developments within the field they originally designated nor to changing relations between fields.

New areas of inquiry have emerged such as Film and Media Studies, which are not so hidebound by nationalist interests. The Humanities Program has consolidated disciplinary differences in a way that also reflects student interest in studying across departmental lines. Nor is the Humanities Program unique. Yale has spawned major programs and certificates — Mathematics and Philosophy, Ethics, Politics and

Economics, Human Rights Studies, Translation Studies. These stretch departmental bounds and correspond to educational pairings within a world of disciplines changing internally and in relation to each other.

We are in some ways unique, given our strengths in the humanities, social sciences, and natural and physical sciences. The consequences of avoiding self-examination are clear: from my observations, science departments which did not reorganize some three or four decades ago to reflect the revolutionary change in the relation between biology and chemistry, and even physics, did not do well.

A response to the current crisis that begins with the matter of education and not government funding, free speech, institutional neutrality, or international diversity offers a chance for those involved in the enterprise of education — faculty with some student input — to seize the initiative in redefining ourselves instead of simply reacting to attacks from without. It is something that should have been undertaken decades ago. It is not too late for Yale to do something radical that might also, by taking charge of the thing we know and do best, do more than anything else I can imagine to restore public trust in higher education.

HOWARD BLOCH is Sterling Professor of French and Humanities. He can be reached at howard.bloch@yale.edu.

Earlier this month, a colleague sent me a story from Campus Reform, a right-wing website I know well. As someone who studies the strategies and politics of the contemporary right, I am familiar with its usual fare: breathless “exposés” of campus decadence, liberal overreach and the alleged persecution of conservatives. The formula is predictable. But this particular story stopped me cold. It claimed to cover a recent meeting of our American Association of University Professors chapter at Yale, in which faculty from several other universities joined us over Zoom to discuss the settlements that the Trump administration had sought to impose on their institutions. A core tenet of academic freedom is protection from unlawful government coercion, a principle that faculty across the political spectrum hold dear. The meeting was widely publicized and open

to all, with nearly 70 professors in attendance on Zoom and in person. Yet the Campus Reform story presented the meeting as a clandestine

Y ET THE CAMPUS REFORM STORY PRESENTED THE MEETING AS A CLANDESTINE EVENT WITH A SINISTER AGENDA.

event with a sinister agenda. The headline read, “Yale AAUP leads panel to prepare for a Trump admin-led Title VI investigation.”

That description was entirely false. There was no discussion of preparing for a Title VI investigation.

But the real surprise came from the accompanying image. The site appeared to have taken a photograph originally published by the News, where I was shown standing at a podium introducing the discussion, and replaced it with an altered, possibly AI-generated version.

In this fabricated scene, the room was dimly lit and on the projection screen appeared several AI-created graphics, including an image of Donald Trump and a slide that displayed the fabricated title text from the headline. Nothing in the picture was real.

Much of the article mirrored the News’ story and included quotations invented, mischaracterized or taken out of context, as well as false claims. There was no mention that the image was AI-generated. Readers are left to believe that Campus Reform had been present at the meeting and conducted original reporting.

That alone would have been strange enough. But what truly caught my attention was the byline. The author is a recent Yale graduate who wrote for the News, won a major prize from the English Department and interned for several prominent journals. By every measure, she had the beginnings of a serious literary career.

So how does someone like that end up attaching her name to a distorted, AI-padded article on a right-wing propaganda site?

When I attend conservative conferences for my research, I often ask participants what drew them to these movements. Their stories are usually about experience and belief. But this case felt different and far more transactional. It reveals how wealthy outside groups on the right are reshaping the political terrain of higher education.

The literary, news and media worlds are contracting. For young writers, breaking in often means years of unpaid internships, endless pitching and uncertain prospects. Campus Reform, by contrast, offers something more immediate. The website

is a project of the Leadership Institute, founded in 1979 by right-wing political operatives, which now brings in nearly $45 million annually from deeppocketed conservative donors. Campus Reform’s business model appears simple: scrape stories from student newspapers and university press releases, attach modified images with menacing faces and darkened rooms and repackage them as evidence of “liberal bias.” Writers are not expected to report or investigate. Campus Reform will pay them and give them a byline simply for feeding the machine.

To be sure, there is a long tradition of conservatives who came of age at Yale, including many prominent figures in the current administration.

WHAT LOOKS LIKE A SILLY LITTLE CAMPUS SIDESHOW OF STUDENTS CHURNING OUT MANUFACTURED STORIES FOR CLICKS AND DONOR DOLLARS IS ACTUALLY A MICROCOSM OF A BROADER RIGHTWING PROJECT.

Historically, conservative students might have gravitated to a right-leaning journal, a legislative office, or a think tank, hoping to develop an intellectual foundation for their ideas. That is not the legacy in which Campus Reform operates. Conservative strategists seem to understand that their agenda on higher education,

including defunding universities, intimidating international students and privatizing loans, has little public support.

What remains for them is spectacle. They rely on the invention of enemies, the creation of crises and the fabrication of offenses that can be used to mobilize outrage. It is fair to call it a grift, not only because it exploits young writers but because it deceives the movement’s own donors and audience, feeding them falsehoods and generating illusions as if they were news.

Attaching such stories to a byline associated with a lauded Yale English major provides a credibility such an article would otherwise lack.

I laughed at the AI version of myself standing in a darkened room before a fake slide with a fake headline. But the laughter stops quickly. That same week, a professor at Rutgers was reportedly fleeing the country with his family after receiving death threats following a smear campaign by the local Turning Point USA chapter.

The grift is not harmless. What looks like a silly little campus sideshow of students churning out manufactured stories for clicks and donor dollars is actually a microcosm of a broader right-wing project. It is a politics that has abandoned ideas altogether and replaced them with simulation.

And for one Yale graduate, that is apparently where a writing career now begins.

DANIEL MARTINEZ

HOSANG is Professor of American Studies and President of the Yale Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. He can be reached at daniel.hosang@yale.edu.

“I must be crazy now. Maybe I dream too much.”

Yale spent $370,000 on lobbying in most recent quarter

Yale retained Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld during quarter three, which lobbied on “issues related to endowment tax and free speech” and engaged with the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate and White House.

Akin Gump policy advisor Zach Deatherage — who served as legislative director for New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican, from 2023 to 2025 — lobbied for Yale this quarter. In 2024, after Yale police arrested 47 pro-Palestinian student protesters for trespassing on Beinecke Plaza, Stefanik posted on X that the University’s “failure to protect students is outrageous and unacceptable.”

Akin Gump consultant Lamar Smith ’69, a former Republican congressman from Texas, continued advocating for the University this quarter.

Yale retained Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck in quarter three, which lobbied for “issues related to higher education,” according to its filing. As in quarter two, Brownstein employed lobbyists Evan Corcoran, a former personal defense attorney for Trump, and Marc Lampkin, whom the firm describes as a “veteran Republican lobbyist,” to advocate for Yale.

Yale’s lobbying touched on eight bills besides the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Seven of the bills — including the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026” — have implications for university research funding, according to the filing.

During quarter three, Yale also engaged with the “Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act,” which, according to the filing, contains

“provisions related to name, image, and likeness rights of student athletes in college athletics.”

“Yale has not taken a position on the SCORE Act,” Jacob wrote in his statement. “The univer -

New Yale police contract caps off two years of tense negotiations

the new contract failed to make up for recent years’ inflation.

“The YPBA brought the proposed Collective Bargaining Agreement to its membership without a recommendation on whether or not to ratify,” Hall wrote. “It believed the wages offered by the University were inadequate to compensate for the record-level inflation which occurred during 2021 and 2022. Inflation reached a forty-year high, with soaring grocery and housing costs.”

The wage increases in the new contract are “generous,” Sarno wrote.

“Since the police union’s last contract expired, Yale has worked diligently to come to this new agreement, which provides generous pay — among the best in the state — along with outstanding and enhanced benefits,” Sarno wrote in his statement.

Sarno insisted that the University had negotiated in good faith.

“The agreement is the result of extensive and thoughtful negotia-

tions by all involved and reflects a fair balance of interests while also achieving long-term sustainability for the university,” he wrote.

“From the outset, the university’s priority has been protecting the safety and well-being of our students, faculty, staff, and visitors.

This contract achieves that.”

In September, the YPBA and University reported that relations between the two organizations were improving after the strike authorization over the summer.

But over parents’ weekend this month, a truck displaying the Yale police badge and signs that read “Yale is a union buster employee” and “Yale doesn’t negotiate. Yale dictates” was seen driving around campus.

In a phone call on Oct. 8, Hall declined to comment on the surge in the union’s advocacy and whether it marked a downturn in negotiations.

The truck’s signage continued a pattern of YPBA advocacy during high-visibility events to drive support for their contract demands. During Bulldog Days this past spring,

more than 30 union members handed leaflets to parents and students outside the Schwarzman Center, imploring them to support a fair contract for “the people protecting you.”

The union had been noticeably quiet during this year’s freshman move-in — a day leveraged by the union for the two consecutive prior years to put public pressure on the University.

Hall wrote on Tuesday that despite the contract ratification, the YPBA’s “experience with the University in this round of bargaining” has prompted the union to “reevaluate its negotiation strategy going forward.”

The union had continued to work under a contract extension agreement after the previous contract’s expiration. However, Hall stated that the union may have to “abandon that practice.”

The YPBA’s previous contract with the University came into effect in 2018.

Contact REETI MALHOTRA at reeti.malhotra@yale.edu.

sity took the introduction of the SCORE as an opportunity to explain Yale’s approach to college athletics.” Yale’s fourth-quarter report, covering lobbying activities

from Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, is due Jan. 20, 2026. Contact ASHER BOISKIN at asher.boiskin@yale.edu.

Committee on trust plans class, events

at Yale, especially as budget constraints cause cutbacks across campus. Around 10 students, faculty and staff attended Wednesday’s private listening session.

“I think it’s really important to include in this report how Yale’s affordability affects how we are perceived on a national scale,” Riley Avelar ’27, one of three undergraduates who participated in the session, said.

The sessions are intended to be small-group discussions about trust in higher education, according to the invitation. Gage pointed to political diversity, cost of education and admissions as issues the committee might address.

In an email to the News, sociology professor and committee co-chair Julia Adams described gathering feedback from Yale students, faculty and staff as “vital for the committee’s work.”

McInnis allowed the committee to choose how they would like to present their findings to the University and the public. According to Gage, the committee has decided to write a report to outline the problem of trust in higher education and propose a set of ways for Yale to chip away at internal and external mistrust.

“Our assumption is that the report is going to be one node

of what we do,” Gage said. “But then once the report comes out, there’s a lot more conversation to facilitate.”

The committee is also set to teach HIST 3127: “Trust et Veritas: The Public Legitimacy of Universities” next semester. According to Gage, the class will engage with primary sources in Yale’s archives to unpack the ways in which American universities have lost public trust.

The committee has previously been criticized for having a faculty-only membership. Gage said the solution to mistrust in higher education has to come from universities, not outside commentators.

“We need to face some of the critiques and problems that we’ve encountered quite seriously and then think about solutions that align with our values, our priorities,” Gage said.

The committee is accepting comments on its website, and they are actively soliciting concerns from outside groups and alumni, according to Adams. Neither Gage nor Adams specified which outside groups have been influential in the committee’s deliberation.

The next listening sessions will be on Oct. 23, Oct. 28 and Oct. 29. Contact LEO NYBERG at leo.nyberg@yale.edu.

FROM THE FRONT

“You're

Directed Studies cohort could grow by 25%, dean says

them that it would be easy to get off the waitlist, but that was not the case this year.

Katja Lindskog, the program’s director of undergraduate studies, clarified in an email that the proposed expansion is “very much just an idea that has been suggested to us.”

“We would love for more students to participate if possible,” she wrote, “but we also want to make sure in that case that we get the resources we need to preserve part of what makes DS special, which are the small section sizes and making sure we have enough qualified and passionate faculty teaching to ensure all students can feel as supported, challenged, and inspired as possible.”

Lindskog added that the recent increase in interest in the program is “great news for the humanities in higher education.”

Ruth Yeazell GRD ’69 ’71, who teaches Directed Studies literature and enrolled as a student in the program in 2020, praised the expansion plan.

“I think the increased interest in DS is exciting, and I’m delighted that the College is responding by adding more sections,” she wrote in an email to the News.

Yeazell added that it’s important to preserve the 15-student cap for sections and that she doesn’t expect each student’s experience to change significantly from adding two sections worth of students, “as long as

we can all fit into the HQ lecture hall.”

The program’s weekly lectures are held for the entire cohort in the Humanities Quadrangle’s room L02, which accommodates 187 people, according to a University webpage.

While Paul Freedman, who teaches historical and political thought for the program, wrote in an email to the News that lectures are “already crowded,” he added that he doesn’t think expanding the program would “undermine the overall experience.”

Daniel Schillinger, who teaches historical and political thought for the program, called the proposed expansion a “great idea” — as long as seminar sizes remain small.

“If the students are eager and deserving, why not allow them to join?” he wrote in an email to the News. “The more humanities nerds, the merrier.”

Schillinger also wrote that students’ and faculty’s enthusiasm “fuels” the program, adding that what makes Directed Studies unique from Great Books programs at peer institutions, such as Columbia University’s core curriculum, is its voluntary nature.

Lewis echoed this remark, noting that a required undergraduate core curriculum can limit students’ abilities to explore course offerings.

“For Chicago and Columbia, it’s a big part of their identity, and I always hear from alumni of Columbia and Chicago about what a great experience they had,” Lewis said. “I think having optional cores

like DS works better at a large university with a very diverse set of student interests.”

Anthony Dominguez ’28, a Directed Studies alum and current peer tutor for the program, said that he thinks it is important to make the curriculum more accessible.

“A big problem of this notion of studying the Western canon and being at an institution like Yale is just the inherent tinge of elitism, so if there’s any way to accom -

modate, to democratize, then we should absolutely be doing that,” Dominguez said in an interview.

Dominguez said that opening up the course to additional students is “in line” with making the curriculum more accessible.

Eugenie Kim ’29, who did not get off the program’s waitlist earlier this year, called the proposed expansion “exciting,” although she noted that she is “extremely happy” with her current courses.

“As someone who really wanted to do DS, I think it’s great that more people are able to delve into the literature and enjoy the awesome academic experience,” she wrote in a text message to the News.

The Directed Studies program began in 1947.

Contact JAEHA JANG at jaeha.jang@yale.edu and OLIVIA WOO at olivia.woo@yale.edu.

Republican mayor candidate wants to shake up City Hall

For a while, though, Orosco planned to fight his way to Wall Street. He went to Pace University and eventually moved to New Haven to work at the Shelton-based Barnum Financial Group and pursue a dual degree at Albertus Magnus College.

But Orosco could not resist the allure of mixed martial arts, or MMA.

In 2009, he moved to San Diego — MMA’s “mecca” — to pursue a career in the sport. He fought professionally until 2015, when he moved to Los Angeles to establish SMASH MMA, a league and events production company. In 2019, he moved back to New Haven’s Morris Cove neighborhood, where his wife had grown up.

Two years later, Anthony Acri, a businessman who is running for Ward 18 alder this year, asked Orosco to run for that seat.

He won just under 40 percent of the vote in the 2021 general election.

In 2022, Orosco decided to challenge then-15-term incumbent Martin Looney for state senator. In that race, and again when he ran last year, Orosco lost by about 55 percentage points.

“You’re not a loser until you quit,” Orosco said. “At some point, you’re not gonna be able to deny me.”

Orosco is upset, he said, by Democrats’ longstanding dominance in New Haven.

“You can’t vote Democrat in New Haven anymore, just like you can’t vote Republican in these places that are in the Deep South,” he said. “When one party reigns for too long, anywhere on the planet, they always fail, always, because they don’t have to earn your vote anymore.”

The biggest hurdle running as a Republican in New Haven — where there are more than 10 registered Democrats for every registered Republican, according to data from the city’s Registrar of Voters office — is finding enough volunteers, Orosco said.

At present, Orosco said that he has four people on his campaign staff. As of Sept. 30, his campaign has raised $21,150. Orosco said that money came mostly from donors outside of New Haven.

With early voting already underway, the race is now entering its final stages.

In interviews with the News and at a mayoral debate late last month, Elicker has voiced his disapproval of Orosco’s social media rhetoric and for what Elicker sees as a lack of sincere engagement in New Haven. And Elicker has defended his record on education, affordable housing and public safety.

For now, Orosco is most focused on mobilizing voters. Tom Goldenberg, the Republican who challenged Elicker in 2023, won 2,322 votes to the mayor’s 10,064. But there are 4,149

registered Republicans in New Haven — and 6,626 residents who voted for Donald Trump in 2024. In the 2021 and 2023 mayoral elections, 12,980 and 13,058 total votes were cast, respectively.

“If you look at that number, somewhere around the 6,500 mark seems to be a magic number,” Connecticut Republican Party Chairman Ben Proto said in a telephone interview.

He said he discussed that target with Orosco over the summer.

“In the past, there’s been a lot of voter apathy,” John Carlson, the chair of New Haven’s Republican Town Committee, said in a telephone interview. “Steve is getting people in his campaign to notice what’s going on, and now they’re more cognizant of the issues. And I think there’s a lot more interest in his mayoral campaign than there’s been in the past.”

If he loses next month, Orosco said he plans to run for mayor again in 2027. But he is confident that “no one’s gonna have moved the needle as much as I have in this election.”

“For the first time in a long time, I’ve seen so many Democrats that are actually nervous,” said Oliver Augustin, vice chair of New Haven’s Republican Town Committee. Augustin clarified in a telephone interview that he was not referring to anyone in particular but “more of a general vibe.” He added that he has noticed that some Newhallville and Westville residents who normally

“would tune out of local politics are taking notice of Steve.”

Orosco traces his “conservative nature” back to the values instilled in him by his father’s parents — “marriage, church, education.”

“Before the Civil Rights Movement, Black America was at its peak,” Orosco said. “That’s when everyone went to church on Sunday. Two-parent home was everything. Mother stayed home, fathers went to work. We wanted education so bad, we risked our lives to go to white schools. We spent all our money within our own community.”

Orosco said he once identified as a conservative Democrat and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but he registered as a Republican in 2020.

To be sure, Orosco — who is also running on the Independent Party line — is not a traditional member of the GOP. He said he dislikes the two-party system, is “pro-choice” in regards to abortion and believes in “what a lot of progressives say with ‘tax the rich.’”

The mayoral hopeful wants to be a change agent — to “disrupt the system” — and likened himself to younger Republicans such as the Ohio gubernatorial candidate and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

As he runs for mayor, Orosco said he has two core priorities: “fully funding the police, and then fully funding education.”

But, he added, “you can’t fund all that stuff unless you audit the city, uncover money.”

He aims to bring a business-minded approach to what he sees as a bloated municipal government.

“We waste money here,” he said. “We’re so central office-heavy and bloated, it’s almost ridiculous.”

He pointed to New Haven having spent over $43,000 on fans a week and a half before the end of the past school year to alleviate high temperatures in buildings without working air conditioning.

A spokesperson for New Haven Public Schools did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Orosco is also determined not to raise taxes — which he said requires building up the local economy. For Orosco, that means development. To begin with, he wants Long Wharf built out.

“I see water taxis going up and down the coast and through Mill River District,” he said. “I see our New Haven Beach, beautiful, having a boardwalk, having restaurants so people can actually use it and create revenue for our city. I see the airport continuing to grow.” Projects like these will create jobs and generate revenue, Orosco said, adding that he would give tax breaks to firms that hired New Haveners below the poverty line.

Orosco wants New Haven to be a place that drivers passing on I-91 and I-95 want to visit.

“We’re more than just pizza,” he added. Although campaigning keeps him busy, Orosco still makes time to train kids to fight at the Milford gym he co-owns.

“There’s nothing like training a kid and pushing them and watching them succeed and win,” he said. He wants to do the same for New Haven.

Despite his three campaigns, Orosco has few ties with the dominant forces in New Haven’s politics. He said that he has not yet spoken with any Yale administrator and that he does not have a relationship with any of its politically powerful unions.

“It’s clearly a tough row to hoe, no doubt about it,” Proto said.

“It’s a heavily Democrat city. But you know, we’ve seen stranger things happen.”

Orosco, for his part, may not want to stop at City Hall.

“I want to be the mayor of New Haven until New Haven is fixed and really moving slow, then maybe I’d be governor,” Orosco said.

The Elm City’s last Republican mayor left office in 1953. Contact

Steve Orosco — a businessman and former professional mixed martial arts fighter — is challenging Mayor Justin Elicker. Early voting began Monday. / Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch, Staff Photographer

If hiring capacity permits, program spots would increase for the class of 2030, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis said in an interview. / Zoe Berg

“You’ve been dreaming of the fate of Ophelia” “THE FATE OF OPHELIA” BY TAYLOR SWIFT

McInnis creates ombudsperson role for employee, grad student concerns

BY ISOBEL MCCLURE, JERRY GAO AND ASHER BOISKIN STAFF REPORTERS

Yale is hiring an ombudsperson to provide confidential support to faculty, staff and graduate and professional students regarding concerns about the University environment, President Maurie McInnis announced last Tuesday.

The announcement came in a message addressed to those groups and posted to the president’s office’s website. The ombudsperson will act independently of the University’s existing “procedures and administrative offices,” McInnis wrote.

The role of the ombudsperson, according to McInnis’ message, will be to serve as an impartial actor who informs faculty and staff, as well as graduate and professional students, of their rights under the law and university regulations.

The ombudsperson will report directly to McInnis and will not serve undergraduates, according to the announcement.

“I am prioritizing this role— even during our period of restrained spending—because of the comments and suggestions I have received from all of you,” McInnis wrote. She

cited the community feedback she received during her first year as president, including on “administrative and conflict resolution processes.”

The University is expected to lose $280 million next fiscal year to an elevated endowment tax of 8 percent, signed into law on July 4 by President Donald Trump. On Sept. 30, Provost Scott Strobel, Senior Vice President for Operations Jack Callahan Jr. ’80 and Chief Financial Officer Stephen Murphy ’87 released plans for reduced budget targets and a retirement incentive program for managerial and professional staff.

The establishment of the ombudsperson position comes after years of advocacy from faculty as well as graduate and professional students.

In the spring of 2023, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Science Senate, or FASSEAS Senate, convened a committee geared towards advocating for the creation of an ombuds office. Around the same time, the Graduate Student Assembly and Graduate and Professional Student Senate passed a resolution “calling for a University ombuds office.”

Yale has stood apart from peer institutions in its lack of

an ombuds office. The News reported in 2013 that Yale and Dartmouth were the only two Ivy League schools without an ombudsperson. Dartmouth appointed its first ombudsperson in 2022.

Nathan Suri GRD ’25 ’28, the chair of the Graduate Student Assembly, wrote in an email to the News that the group’s executive board applauded the establishment of the position.

“This role will provide graduate students and other members of Yale’s academic populace with direct access to critical resolutions that will improve the academic environment,” Suri wrote.

Saman Haddad LAW ’26, the president of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, said in a phone interview, that the University’s current conflict resolution system is “very decentralized.”

“An ombudsperson helps you navigate that system, which is otherwise very unclear,” he said.

But he expressed concern about the title “ombudsperson,” noting that students might be unfamiliar with it. While he expects the office may see “limited uptake” at first, he believes that choosing a more accessible name and hiring a “high quality candidate” could help overcome that challenge.

Yale has several University-wide offices and centers intended to address misconduct, discrimination and complaints, including the Office of Institutional Equity and Accessibility, or OIEA, the Title IX Office and Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Education Center, or SHARE.

Students and staff who have contacted the OIEA have criticized the office for slow responses, opaque processes and disappointing results.

In 2019, the office dismissed a Yale Hospitality employee’s allegations against a former hospitality director without meeting with the employee, a News investigation last year found. The office found that the former administrator had committed “severe” sexual misconduct in another incident in 2023, and he left Yale last year.

Prior to her role as Yale’s president, McInnis served as president of Stony Brook University, as well as in administrative positions at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia. All three other universities had an ombudsperson role during her time there.

“The ombudsperson will serve as a neutral advocate for fair treatment and processes, operating under strict confidentiality and helping faculty, staff, and G&P students understand their rights and options based on all laws and university policies and procedures,” McInnis wrote in the announcement last week, referring to graduate and professional students.

She added that the official will also “provide informal dispute resolution services” and “offer referrals” to related resources.

Merle Waxman, who was the ombudsperson for the School of Medicine for over 30 years, endorsed the change in an email to the News.

“I am delighted to hear that Yale is moving forward on this important initiative,” Waxman wrote. “Yale is an incredibly wonderful institution, but even the best institutions can benefit from the Ombudsman concept.” McInnis wrote last Tuesday that she has established a search advisory committee for the position. The committee is chaired by Elizabeth Conklin, the Uni -

versity’s associate vice president for equity and accessibility and its Title IX coordinator, and David Post, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor.

Conklin and Post wrote in a joint statement to the News that the committee planned to meet this week to discuss the qualities it will seek in candidates, emphasizing skills in active listening, mediation and negotiation, as well as the ability to remain impartial, independent and credible.

“In her first year at Yale, President McInnis heard many faculty, students, and staff speak of the need for a university-wide ombudsperson, and she recognized the value of an ombudsperson for the Yale community,” Conklin and Post wrote.

Conklin and Post noted that candidates for the role must have certification through the International Ombuds Association or “eligibility to obtain certification.”

Other members of the search committee include doctoral candidate Alex Rich GRD ’27, psychiatry professor Robert Rohrbaugh MED ’82, and Vice Provost for Health Affairs Stephanie Spangler. McInnis noted in her message that the committee would be soliciting comments from community members and linked a webform for people to submit feedback.

McInnis also noted that she would be establishing a “new council to review Yale’s faculty and staff employment policies and procedures.” The group will consider these practices and their support of Yale’s mission, “academic excellence,” the University’s compliance with laws and support for faculty and staff.

McInnis listed the eight members of the council — four professors and four University administrators. She wrote that their work will be completed “by the end of the spring semester” and that she would provide an update on both of the initiatives she announced “by the end of the academic year.”

The word “ombuds” comes from the Swedish word “ombudsman,” meaning “representative.”

Contact ISOBEL MCCLURE, at isobel.mcclure@yale.edu.

JERRY GAO at jerry.gao.jg2988@yale.edu. AND ASHER BOISKIN at asher.boiskin@yale.edu.

Thirteen Yalies successfully walk from New Haven to New York City

BY SARAH MUKKUZHI AND ANNA KOONTZ CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS

Last Wednesday, 41 Yale undergraduates met on Cross Campus and began walking to New York City. Four days and many blisters later, 13 students from the original group arrived at Grand Central Station, hollering and singing in celebration.

Many participants, regardless of whether they completed the journey, considered it a rewarding and transformative experience. Some students, like Bryce Falkoff ’29, signed up without knowing who else would be on the walk. At the end of completing the full trip, Falkoff said he had found a community.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. It’s one of those things that you tell your kids, and something that you don’t ever forget,” Falkoff said. “It had to have been one of the most supportive groups I have ever been a part of.”

The idea for the trip started as a joke between four friends — Freeman Irabaruta ’26, Joshua Li ’26, Brian Moore ’26 and Michael Zhao ’26 — but became a reality after they dedicated many late-night hours to preparing routes, researching lodging and planning a budget.

After compiling a seven-page-long planning document and color-coded map, the organizers extended an open invitation for anyone in the student body to participate in the walk.

Their route roughly followed the Metro-North railroad along the Connecticut coastline, allowing an alternative mode of transportation for those who could not complete the entire trip.

“Every Yalie has the experience of taking the Metro-North from New Haven to New York,” Zhao said. “But to say you walked from New Haven to New York is crazy.

It’s such a trip of perseverance and patience.”

The group took brief rest stops about every three to four miles and shared group meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The group planned to stay in hotels along the route each night. Along the way, the group encouraged unexpected hospitality. Dunkin’ Donuts donated extra food, a Chinese restaurant in Stamford offered significant discounts and a bakery in Greenwich gave them free baguettes and eclairs, Zhao said.

The group also received free lodging on the final night of the trip. They originally planned to stay in a hotel in New Rochelle, N.Y., but every hotel was fully booked or not affordable, Moore said.

The organizers frantically reached out to student groups, fraternities and Yalies in the area, Moore added, and, finally, one junior agreed to host the group in her family home, accommodating 15.

That night, the walkers also threw a surprise celebration for Kear O’Malley ’28, who turned 20 during the trip. O’Malley said that he had quickly forged strong friendships with the group, despite only having known one participant — his roommate — initially.

“I was exhausted and that was one of the hardest days because my feet were really hurting that day, and when they brought out the birthday cake I was just really overwhelmed,” O’Malley said.

Despite the physically taxing journey, the group persevered by finding joy in small moments. In addition to the birthday party, students celebrated major road signs and borders marking their progress.

“It’s really funny because the city line between the suburbs of New York and New York City was like in between an IHOP and a Wendy’s,” Moore said. “We were in the middle of nowhere, and then we crossed it and we were like ayyyy!”

Eliana Peyton ’26 was one of three female students who finished

to New York City. “We were very vastly outnumbered, but it was never ‘the men are leading the pack, and the women are following behind.’ I was in front a lot of the time,” Peyton said. “We’re all very attached now that we’ve been through an intense experience together.” Li reflected about how the trip changed for the better when it evolved from the four senior organizers to a larger group of students.

“I really don’t think that us four could have done it without the rest of the entire group,” Li said. “The vibes would not have been there. The mutual support. We did not expect so many new friendships, so many new memories and the energy of the entire group.” Driving from New Haven to New York City takes around 2 hours. Along the route, the group encountered numerous instances of hospitality – from a Trumbull junior spontaneously hosting the walkers to free baguettes and eclairs in Greenwich, Connecticut.

OF JOSHUA

and unexpected mishaps.

At the start of the trip, the Yalies walked side by side in two columns that extended a city block. As they walked, students joked, sang sea shanties and shouted compliments to passersby. Irabaruta was nicknamed “CEO of Vlogs and Vibes” and helped foster a welcoming, energetic atmosphere through games and silly conversations. Contact SARAH MUKKUZHI at sarah.mukkuzhi@yale.edu. AND ANNA KOONTZ at anna.koontz@yale.edu.

the walk

“At night the fog was thick and full of light, and sometimes voices.”

City joins suit challenging conditions for federal funds

BY ELIJAH HUREWITZ-RAVITCH STAFF REPORTER

New Haven joined eight other American cities and counties on Monday in suing the Trump administration for alleged “unlawful conditions” included in the Department of Homeland Security’s recently updated terms for receiving federal grants.

Chicago, the suit’s lead plaintiff, along with Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York City, Ramsey County, Minn., Saint Paul and New Haven, claimed in the lawsuit that the “Executive Branch has now determined to use this critical federal funding as a cudgel, threatening to hamstring local governments’ emergency-management functions unless they acquiesce to unrelated Executive domestic policy goals.”

The nine cities and counties take issue with sections of the DHS’s updated terms and conditions that require grant recipients to agree not to “operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology” and to agree to comply with all past and future executive orders.

A DHS spokesperson wrote in an email to the News that the lawsuit obstructs the president’s agenda. Recipients of federal funds, the spokesperson added, are required to follow anti-discrimination laws and cannot use funds for climate activism or for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. FEMA has put in place new controls to ensure that all grant program activity follows the law, the spokesperson wrote.

At issue in New Haven is $93,597 awarded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s port security grant program, which would fund maintenance, upgrades and expansions to the camera systems around the city’s port, according to Mayor Justin Elicker. Those cameras are used to respond to incidents within the port — the busiest between New York and Boston — per Rebecca Bombero, a city administrator.

At a Monday press conference, Elicker said that the new grant stipulations “are ones that the City of New Haven cannot abide by, both because it does not align with our values, but also because it is just not practical for

any municipality to be able to agree to such requirements.”

Michael Bowler, an assistant counsel for New Haven, said on Monday that the DHS’s new terms and conditions will apply to federal grants from all agencies.

“We’ll be continually applying for federal grants, like the city always does,” Bowler said, “but the standard terms and conditions now have these troubling terms with them, which we have to decide whether we will accept.”

The mayor described the new guidelines, along with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, as “intentionally vague.” The DHS did not immediately respond to the News’ request for comment about the new guidelines.

The city submitted an application in mid-August for over $2 million in grants to fund various port-related projects, according to Kayla Bland, the city’s emergency operations director. In September, New Haven was offered funding for just one project — the camera upgrades.

Bland said that she thought that the grant was approved because it “fit within” the Trump administra-

tion’s “priorities of cyber security and physical security.”

The deadline to sign the grant is Nov. 27. Elicker said he hopes that a federal judge will grant the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction before then, which would prevent the federal government from halting funding.

But if New Haven does not receive the money, Elicker said, “we’ll have to make a decision on whether we want to keep this infrastructure there — keep old, dilapidated infrastructure that may break — fund it in another way, increase taxes to fund these things.”

Monday’s lawsuit, filed in a Chicago federal court, is the third that New Haven has joined against the Trump administration. In February, along with San Francisco, Portland and King County, Washington, New Haven sued the federal government for allegedly targeting sanctuary city jurisdictions, and in March, it joined five other cities and eleven nonprofits in suing the government over funding freezes to environmental and climate projects.

A federal court granted two preliminary injunctions in the sanctuary cities case.

As in both of those suits, the Public Rights Project, a progressive, California-based legal advocacy nonprofit, is helping represent New Haven and covering many of its legal costs, according to Elicker.

The mayor said that despite the aggressive posture he has taken toward the Trump administration, he is not worried about drawing more attention to New Haven than it otherwise might receive.

“I hear from some of my mayoral colleagues out there that they don’t want to make their cities a target,” Elicker said.

“Now is a time that we should not be hiding. Now is a time that we should be standing up and fighting for the values of our community, both because at some point we’re all going to be a target anyway, but more importantly, because this is the right thing to do.”

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is the lead defendant in the case.

Contact ELIJAH HUREWITZRAVITCH at elijah.hurewitz-ravitch@yale.edu.

New shop to open in former Donut Crazy location

BY MAYA CHATTERJEE

CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

New signs at 290 York Street signal the opening of “Glaze and Grind” in the storefront formerly occupied by Donut Crazy, which closed in the spring after its license was suspended for violating sales tax regulations.

The Donut Crazy storefront in New Haven was opened in 2016 by owner Jason Wojnarowski and shuttered this past March by the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services. The company has also closed its four other locations across Connecticut after a series of evictions.

Despite similarities between Donut Crazy and the new company, Glaze and Grind — including two shared locations and similar menus — managers at Glaze and Grind stressed that the new shop is an entirely separate venture. Donut Crazy owner Wojnarowski was present at the location, helping set up Glaze and Grind, on at least two days last week.

Jimmy Lyons, one of Glaze and Grind’s main operators, described the company as a newly established Connecticutbased business created by a team of six professionals in the restaurant industry.

“We’re pretty much just joining forces, putting a team of Avengers together in the industry and trying to come up with something interesting and unique,” Lyons said. “It’s a totally new company comprised of existing owners and operators of other companies.”

Lyons and several of his partners, including Mauro Tropeano, Marc Goldberg, Jason Garelick, Joe Grosso and Howard Saffan, each bring experience from their respective business ventures. Lyons is the owner of North Fork Doughnut Company on Long Island and co-founded Grounds Donut House in Danbury with Tropeano. After the closure of Donut Crazy, Lyons and Tropeano saw the vacated storefronts as well-suited for Glaze and Grind.

“We saw the opportunity with the old Donut Crazy spaces and we thought this would be a perfect fit for us to launch our brand where we wouldn’t have too much overhead,” Lyons said. Lyons emphasized that there would be no crossover between the Donut Crazy and Glaze and Grind staff. Yet some of the current staff have connections to the previous business.

“As far as any sort of leadership that was at the helm of Donut Crazy, there’s no throughline there whatsoever,” he said. “Anybody that’s in an equity or ownership or partnership position in Glaze and Grind has nothing to do with Donut Crazy.”

Saffan, one of the operators of Glaze and Grind, also owns the Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater, which has partnered with and promoted Donut Crazy. Additionally, Saffan’s real estate company, Bishop Development III, LLC, served as the landlord for Donut Crazy’s Shelton, Conn., location. A 2025 lawsuit filed by Bishop against Donut Crazy owner Wojnarowski alleges the tenant’s failure to pay rent.

Grosso, one of the owners of Glaze and Grind who oversees construction, told the News that he joined the project through Saffan.

The News spoke with Wojnarowski at the York Street site last week. He identified himself as “Jason Wojo,” and said he was assisting Glaze and Grind with construction and design. Wojnarowski added that no one working at Glaze and Grind had worked for Donut Crazy in the past. He did not comment on the closure of Donut Crazy.

“We are just starting to put the finishing touches on. We kept the layout, but it’s all new art and paint,” Wojnarowski said of the construction process.

Both Grosso and Lyons said Wojnarowski’s involvement would be limited to transitional and consulting responsibilities.

“Jason has no equity or stake or partnership in the new company at all,” Lyons said. “It was more just involvement on the end of taking over the leases and transitioning us into the new spaces. He helped with a little bit of design because he had a creative background.”

Lyons added that Glaze and Grind has taken some of Wojnarowski’s guidance during the process.

“We took a couple pages from his book on what worked for Donut Crazy and what we think

would work moving forward.” Lyons emphasized that Glaze and Grind is beginning with a clean slate.

“We’re just excited to bring something new and unique to New Haven and to Shelton,” Lyons said. “We’re really excited to be part of the community.”

Glaze and Grind will begin staff training on Wednesday and intends to open at the end of this week, according to Lyons.

Adele Haeg contributed reporting.

Contact MAYA CHATTERJEE at maya.chatterjee@yale.edu.

New Haven Public Schools unveils line-item budget

BY SABRINA THALER STAFF REPORTER

New Haven Public Schools

released a more detailed version of its 2025-26 fiscal year budget Monday night, the culmination of a months-long process to meet union members’ calls for increased financial transparency.

At a virtual meeting of the Board of Education’s Finance and Operations Committee on Monday, the school district’s chief financial officer, Amilcar Hernandez, presented a spreadsheet that included the district’s budget allocations for more than 100 line items, including salaries, electricity and transportation.

“Whereas earlier documents showed only the general funds budget, we now are showing special funds and interdistrict funds, as well, and tracking projected expenditures across these three categories,” NHPS spokesperson Justin Harmon wrote in an email. “We believe this change will give people a far better understanding of where our funding comes from and where it goes.”

The district’s total budget is over $331 million, more than a third of which comes from special funds — 16 external grants, mostly from the state and federal governments — and state-administered interdistrict funds, according to the line-item budget spreadsheet.

Members of the city’s teachers’ union, the New Haven Federation of Teachers, have demanded that the district release a more detailed lineitem budget as a measure of transparency. Over 40 teachers and union members gathered at a Board of Education meeting in late September, some toting signs that urged NHPS to “show us the money.”

Board of Education Vice President Matthew Wilcox, who also serves as the chair of the finance and operations committee, said the newly released document reflects updated data from previous drafts, including up-to-date personnel expenditures and the precise dollar amounts NHPS received from grants.

When the school district released the initial draft of its 2025-26 fiscal year budget in the spring, it pro-

jected a budget deficit of more than $23.2 million, according to a press release published in the New Haven Independent. The district conducted a series of mitigation efforts, including the elimination of 76 vacant staff positions, the closure of one school and the merging of two schools.

After the Board of Alders voted to set aside $3 million in surplus state funding to a reserve for education earlier this month, NHPS narrowed its projected budget deficit to under $1 million, a step which Wilcox told the News would help the district prevent layoffs during the current school year.

At Monday’s meeting, Hernandez noted the significance of outside grants, labeled as special funds in the budget, in covering some of the district’s major costs, including teacher salaries. This year, the district will receive roughly $81 million in special funds.

Last fiscal year, the district received $107 million in grants, according to a separate presentation Hernandez gave at Monday’s meeting. He said that next fiscal

year, the district’s supply of special funds could decline to the low $70 million range, bringing the total budget further from the $350 million he said it would need to meet the school district’s needs.

“If we cannot sustain this level of special funding, there’s no other funding for us to use to replace whatever those costs are,” Hernandez told the committee, referring to pandemic-era federal grants that have run out. “If we are able to receive more special funds, or we’re able to receive more general funds through the state, then we’re able to alleviate the pressure that special funds have to cover some of the items that normally could be covered by general funds.”

NHFT President Leslie Blatteau said in a phone interview that the new document is a “step in the right direction,” but that she would like to see more detail added to certain line items, including the “Other Contractual Services” item, which comprises seven percent of the budget.

A tab in the spreadsheet entitled “Line Item Descriptions”

includes details about 23 of the budget items. “Other Contractual Services” comprises “contracts for cleaning, professional and technical development of school district personnel including instructional, administrative and service employees,” according to the document. Hernandez said that he would continue to field questions and update the document as community members request more details. “I think that in the future, that will be the theme of our budget process: transparency, and making sure that there’s a trust relationship between us and the community, that they understand how we’re using the funding, how we’re allocating the funding, how we’re implementing equity across all these pieces,” Hernandez said to the committee.

The school district’s 2025-26 fiscal year began on July 1. Contact SABRINA THALER at sabrina.thaler@yale.edu.

CAMILA PEREZ / CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Following Donut Crazy’s statewide closures, a new team of restaurant owners is launching a similar shop, Glaze and Grind.

‘The Shape of Things’ will explore art and love at the Underbrook

BY GILLIAN PEIHE FENG CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

“The Shape of Things,” a play written by Neil LaBute and directed by Emiliano Caceres Manzano ’26, will premiere on Thursday in the Saybrook Underbrook.

“The Shape of Things” examines the lives of students in a Midwestern college town, illustrating themes of love, art and the concept of “change.” The play premiered in London in 2001 and was adapted into a 2003 film that starred Paul Rudd and Rachel Weisz.

“I love ‘The Shape of Things’ because I found it particularly quick and quite witty while still exploring themes of art, its meaning, and the limits of creativity,” Isabella Panico ’26, one of the show’s producers, wrote in an email to the News. “To someone who has never heard of it, I’d just ask them,‘do you think self improvement is a voluntary experience?’”

Other members of the cast and crew said the play’s nuanced exploration of art and love as attracting them to the project.

“I was drawn to The Shape of Things because it is a play that is unafraid to explore difficult questions,” Dorothy Ha ’28, the show’s sound designer, wrote in an email. “How far should we go for art? How far are we willing to go for art?”

“The Shape of Things” unfolds as socially-awkward Adam meets Evelyn, a charismatic art student. Evelyn’s arrival causes every aspect of Adam’s life — from appearance to living habits — to change. Most significantly, Evelyn’s presence alters the dynamic between Adam, his friend Phillip and Phillip’s fianceé Jenny.

Evelyn is played by Isabella Walther-Meade ’26, who is also one of the producers of the show. Walther-Meade wrote in an email that she is drawn to Evelyn’s moral complexity and sees her as multifaceted despite being the sort of woman

“who people think are wrong.”

“Say what you will about Evelyn, but she is very aware of her ability to influence other people, and her self-perception as an artist lets her take that further than we expect,” Walther-Meade wrote.

“She is a deeply passionate person who is willing to do whatever it takes to prove a point that she believes in more than anything, and I can relate to that, but it took me a while to get there.”

Walther-Meade further noted that playing Evelyn has had an impact on the way she approaches art and how she portrays a character on stage.

“The time I have spent preparing for Evelyn has changed the way I think about art, for better or worse,” Walther-Meade wrote. “I hope she does the same for the audience.”

Leila Hyder ’28, who plays Jenny, spoke in a voice memo about the challenges and rewards of playing a character very different to herself.

“I feel like Jenny is very different from me and I guess that’s part of the challenge in a sense, but that’s also what I love about playing her,” Hyder said. She added that she is “excited” to portray her character’s development arc on stage.

According to Hyder, the cast spend a lot of time building backstories to navigate the complex relationships between the characters. Hyder said that improvisational acting has been an important part of the process. To prepare for her character, Hyder said she keeps a notebook to sketch out Jenny’s backstory and track her daily life according to the timeline of the play.

“I think Jenny comes off as a very sweet, very kind of simple girl, very level-headed, which isn’t a bad thing, but I just think there’s more to her than just that,” Hyder said. “By the end of the day, I think I really enjoy seeing who she becomes by the end of the play.”

The complex characters are

backed by an experimental, relatively minimalist scenic design.

According to Panico, the production is “quite stripped down,” focusing mainly on the main character Adam’s external and internal transformations.

Alexa Druyanoff ’26, the scenic artist in the production, emphasized the close relationship between the show’s visual elements and the character’s development.

“The set is composed of painted boxes that are rotated and reconfigured by the actors throughout the show,” Druyanoff wrote in an email. “Their transitions mirror the progres -

sion of the scenes and the lovers, so they create a fluctuating atmosphere that is directly connected to the characters.”

Druyanoff added that the scenic designs for the production were influenced by pop art, with a focus on “abstracting the human body and classical figure.”

When discussing the production’s sound design, Ha highlighted the ties between character development and the production’s aesthetic designs.

“I was aiming for an unsettling vibe,” Ha wrote. “The music becomes more and more distorted as the play goes on,

until the original song is virtually unrecognizable, to mimic the storyline of the play.”

Hyder said the costumes for the play are styled after “a 2000s Midwestern college town kind of vibe.”

“This is a story for everyone who has ever said ‘I can change him,’” Panico wrote. “I hope that it makes audiences equally joyous and uncomfortable.”

“The Shape of Things” will run for four performances between Thursday and Saturday.

Contact GILLIAN PEIHE FENG at peihe.feng@yale.edu .

Bard professor gives lecture on new translation of ‘The Odyssey’

BY ANGEL HU STAFF REPORTER

Daniel Mendelsohn, a human-

ities professor at Bard College, gave a lecture Monday about his experience translating Homer’s epic poem, “The Odyssey.”

Mendelsohn’s translation of “The Odyssey” was published by University of Chicago Press in April, joining the list of the 29 English translations of “The Odyssey” that have been released since the end of World War II.

In an email to the News, Megan O’Donnell, an associate communications director at the Whitney Humanities Center, which hosted Mendelsohn, praised the way his translation “offers future translators a model of how close attention to form, linguistic precision and cul-

tural nuance can reinvigorate even the most familiar classical texts.”

Mendelsohn’s talk was a part of the Humanities Now lecture series, a new initiative created by the Whitney Humanities Center which “examines questions at the heart of the human condition and invites us to cross boundaries of geographies and disciplines,” Cajetan Iheka, a professor of English and the director of the Whitney Humanities Center said. Chris Kraus, a Latin professor, introduced Mendelsohn to the audience. Kraus recounted that she first met Mendelsohn in 1994 when he was a graduate student at Princeton and said that he has since “turned a nascent academic life into a thriving freelance writing career.”

Mendelsohn has been teaching “The Odyssey” and its many trans-

lations since 1989 — “all of which have something to offer,” he said.

Mendelsohn had not planned on undertaking his own translation of “The Odyssey” until he had published a memoir titled “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic” in 2017. The memoir delves into the spring semester of 2011, when Mendelsohn’s then 81-year-old father decided to enroll in his firstyear seminar on “The Odyssey.”

Through this experience, Mendelsohn described “getting to know his father as a student through ‘The Odyssey’” and hearing his “grumpy reactions” to the book. After the class was over, Mendelsohn and his father discovered and boarded “a cruise that recreates the voyages of Odysseus.”

“Then, my dad fell ill and died not long after we got back, so

the book was sort of an account of what turned out to be the last year of his life as weirdly prismed through ‘The Odyssey,’” Mendelsohn said.

Mendelsohn included snippets of his own translations of “The Odyssey” in the memoir. A few months later, he said he received a phone call from an editor from the University of Chicago Press who read the memoir, liked the snippets of translation that he did and asked him if he wanted to translate “The Odyssey” in its entirety.

“When you love a text, you have a sense of what it is in your head, and I wanted to bring that sense across to English readers who don’t know Greek,” Mendelsohn said.

Mendelsohn described some of his choices and challenges

when attending to the meter, syntax, language and form of the original work — demonstrating how his work differed from previous translations.

For instance, Mendelsohn opted to spell Calypso’s — the nymph who held Odysseus captive on her island — name as Kalypso in order to reflect the original Greek name spelled with the letter kappa.

“I think it’s very important for us to experience these names in a way that slightly estranges them from what we think we know,” Mendelsohn said. Mendelsohn explained the challenges in translating the Greek word for “a meal to which many people contribute.” While previous translators have opted for the word “picnic” or “potluck supper,” Mendelsohn believed that those words are “stoppers” that “pull the reader out of thinking about what’s going on in the text.”

Mendelsohn eventually decided on the translation “neighborly feast” — a choice he attributed to his former professor Jenny Clay. Additionally, Mendelsohn discussed his process of translating Homeric epithets, descriptive phrases that characterize a person or place in Homer’s epic poems. Seeking to “peel away the varnish” of previous translations, Mendelsohn said he took a different approach to translating epithets like “grey-eyed Athena.” Mendelsohn expanded upon previous translations that emphasized the “gleaming” quality of Athena’s eyes by drawing upon the Greek word for owl — which is related to the Greek word for gleaming — to come up with “she of the bright owl eyes.”

“A brilliant translation reignites interest in a text, no matter how many times it’s been translated before,” O’Donnell wrote, reflecting on the role of translation across generations. “To me, that renewed excitement is the first step in connecting readers to a different period and culture.”

The Humanities Now lecture series was founded in 2023. Contact ANGEL HU at angel.hu@yale.edu.

POLING /

The play, which is directed by Emiliano Caceres Manzano ’26, will open Thursday

Sweet dreams are made of this, Who am I to disagree?

Yale expert on emotional intelligence pens book on managing feelings

BY EMMA QIAO CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Happy, sad, mad, glad. We all know what these emotions feel like, but do we know how to deal with them?

Last month, Marc Brackett, the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and professor in the Child Study Center, released his second book, “Dealing with Feeling,” which aims to share a set of skills and strategies to assist with understanding and responding to your emotions.

“It was, for me, very important to write a whole book just on one skill, which was to help people learn how to regulate their own emotions, but also importantly, how to engage in healthy co-regulation,” Brackett said. “Meaning, how do you help people to help other people manage their feelings?”

Brackett’s first book, “Permission to Feel,” which was published in 2019, revolved around understanding what emotions are and the value of learning emotional intelligence. It has been widely read around the world, and Brackett said readers then wanted to know how to manage such emotions. In response, Brackett began writing “Dealing with Feeling.”

To begin the book, Brackett said he applied his background in emotional intelligence research toward answering the questions of what

people were hoping to learn and what they had not learned before.

The book begins by describing an imaginary world where everyone knows how to regulate their emotions. He then transitions to exploring why emotional regulation is such a foreign topic to many.

The book progresses through answering what emotional regulation is and what current attitudes towards emotions are, then ends with multiple chapters detailing specific regulation strategies.

Brackett ultimately concluded that emotional regulation is the set of learned intentional skills for managing feelings wisely that align with our goals and values.

Brackett said writing this book proved challenging at times.

“I’m a much better storyteller when I’m on stage than I am sitting around thinking about a story to tell,” Brackett said.

Brackett recalled using the very regulation strategies he describes in the book — such as self-talk, seeking social support and physical activity — to assist in the writing process.

He especially credited Karen Niemi and Robin Stern as colleagues at the School of Medicine who provided support for his book after reading it thoroughly.

“We had never-ending cycles of discussions on how to frame the information to strike a delicate

balance in adding humor, relatability and research,” Niemi said. “My focus was always being practical, specific and consistent.”

Stern echoed the idea of helping the book become more relatable.

“One of the things we have done together is create a space for people to reflect as they’re reading,” she said. “He did a beautiful job of being personal and compassionate while also presenting a strong case for science.”

Brackett stressed that he wanted a way to share this valuable information with more people through this book. Because there were only so many places he could go in one week, he said, “the only way I thought to do that was I had to write a book.”

Brackett said he has three ultimate goals for the impact of “Dealing with Feeling.”

His first goal is that people see the value and importance of emotion regulation in areas ranging from health to academic and workplace performance to longevity. His second hope is that people understand that emotional regulation is learned and refined through practice.

His third goal, which he called “audacious,” is that people will see emotion regulation as a new definition of success.

“If we define our success by how skillful we are at managing life’s ups and downs and at helping other people to do the same, the world will be a very different place than having our definition of success being how much money you make, the status of your job

Contact EMMA QIAO at emma.qiao@yale.edu.

New medical school center set to investigate healthy aging with HIV

BY EDIS MESIC STAFF REPORTER

A new center at Yale’s medical school dedicated to discovering strategies for healthy aging for patients with HIV is set to launch with the support of a five-year grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

The Aging Well with HIV Through Alcohol Research and Risk Reduction and Education — or AWAR3E — Center is led by Amy Justice MED ’88, a professor of internal medicine and public health at the School of Medicine; Julie Womack NUR ’94 GRD ’08, an associate professor of nursing at the School of Nursing; and Vincent Lo Re, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Rutgers University’s Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

“There are more people aging with HIV now than ever before, thankfully, because we have therapy to suppress the virus and to extend people’s life expectancy, and they are subject to a greater risk or vulnerability for a number of medical conditions that are associated with aging, whether it be cancer, cardiovascular disease, liver disease, diabetes, etc,” Justice said in an interview.

“So we want to understand why that is both in terms of being able to help manage aging with HIV better, but also to gain

insights into aging more generally as well,” she added.

Justice explained that while both people with HIV and people who are aging have immune dysfunction, HIV causes “immune dysfunction with a vengeance.”

She said many HIV-infected people continue to use alcohol and other substances, are co-infected with hepatitis C and may be socioeconomically disadvantaged — all of which are factors that could contribute to premature aging, and that the center will explore to help guide designs of future health interventions.

The center builds on the foundation created by the Veterans Aging Cohort Study, or VACS, Consortium, which was originally founded by Justice to study the impact of alcohol use on aging in HIV-infected and uninfected individuals. VACS provides access to over two decades of longitudinal data representing as much as 13.5 million people from the national electronic health record data system.

Justice said the team spent years learning how to use and interpret the data from VACS and, in the process, developed a network of experts in different fields to support the project. Womack has extensively studied preventing falls and fractures among people aging with HIV, and the team also has world experts on liver disease,

neurologic disease, heart disease and cancer.

As a general internist who has experience studying multiple research domains, Justice noted that having a less specialized position also has its benefits.

“I think it doesn’t hurt for me to be aware that I’m not an expert in any of these areas, because I can listen to the expertise of others,” Justice said.

For Womack, one key challenge was the process of writing the grant for the center.

To get each draft finished on time, everybody on the team had to agree to a timeline and meet regularly throughout the grant’s development.

Justice said the team started work on the grant in January 2024. Every member would produce a draft of their project, and then the entire team would discuss questions and goals with one another to make each iteration of the grant more and more consistent.

Despite the challenges of preparing the grant itself, Womack said the experience of working with an interdisciplinary team has been rewarding.

“We have the evaluation and dissemination core, and we’re bringing in providers. We’re bringing in people from different HIV related agencies. We’re bringing in people who represent the HIV community. You know, just the opportunity to work with all these different people

who have all these different interests and all these different lenses on the problem was just fascinating,” Womack said in an interview with the News.

The grant is particularly centered on determining whether or not stress from different sources such as alcohol use and socioeconomic deprivation contributes to premature aging through inflammation.

According to Justice, a lot of premature or adverse aging has been associated with chronic inflammation in people with or without HIV. She further noted that obesity, bad diet, lack of exercise, substance use and stress are all factors that can drive chronic inflammation.

One of the team’s projects focuses on biological markers of stress and inflammation in people living with HIV. Even those who have their HIV managed with treatment can have tiny traces of the virus — known as viral reservoirs — lingering in their body, and the study seeks to determine whether these reservoirs contribute to stress and inflammation.

Another project seeks to better understand how aging-related health problems like falls, fractures, dementia and hospitalization might be linked to socioeconomic disadvantage.

When asked about the team’s goals for the center, Lo Re emphasized the importance of research and mentorship.

“From my standpoint, aside from the terrific science that we will advance with our new center, one of the big benefits of our new center is that it will nurture the generation of significant research in alcohol-HIV/AIDS research, provide valuable mentorship to early-stage investigators, and attract scientists new to alcohol-HIV/AIDS research,” Lo Re wrote in a statement to the News.

Womack also voiced excitement for another focus of the center: widely sharing its findings from each project.

“Actually one of the core groups within this grant is a group of people who are going to look at all the different projects and give advice and input about, how do you get this information out there? Who do we need to get this to?” Womack said. The team hopes that this core will help inform patients, clinicians, providers and organizations of the results from their research.

According to 2022 estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 1.2 million people live with HIV in the United States.

Contact EDIS MESIC at edis.mesic@yale.edu.

and the objects that you own,” Brackett said.

Former Yale President Peter Salovey helped develop the concept of emotional intelligence.

YULIN ZHEN / PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

The interdisciplinary research team at the School of Medicine will work together to explore the effects of factors like alcohol use on aging in patients with HIV.

COURTESY OF MARC BRACKETT

Marc Brackett has published his second book, “Dealing with Feeling,” arguing that emotional regulation skills are central to every aspect of life.

Women’s crew wins third straight title at the Head of the Charles

BY SOPHIA LE CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

The Yale women’s crew team on Sunday claimed the varsity collegiate eights title for the third time in a row on the Charles River.

“That has never happened in the history of YWC,” Will Porter, head coach of the women’s crew team, wrote to the News. “Our club eight three peated as well.”

The women’s crew team entered one boat for the women’s club eight and two boats for the women’s championship eight. All three boats placed first in their respective events.

The Head of the Charles regatta came after a successful weekend for the Bulldogs at the Head of the Housatonic race. At the Head of the Housatonic, the women’s teams swept the top four spots in the women’s collegiate eight, defeating Fairfield University and Lehigh University. They also placed first in the women’s openweight four.

They returned to water in Boston over the weekend with the same drive and passion, though the regatta did not come without its challenges.

Porter said the biggest obstacle at the Head of the Charles came during the Bulldogs’ race against the Leander Club, which

interfered with Yale’s boat.

Porter commended the expertise of coxswain Hope Galusha ’26 for navigating the crew through the situation.

The men’s lightweight and heavyweight teams also experienced several challenges at the Head of the Housatonic and Head of the Charles regattas.

At the Head of the Housatonic, the lightweight team’s three boats in the openweight eight placed fifth, 12th and 13th. Their three entries found slightly more success in the openweight four, placing first, third and ninth. The four boats in the open weight pair placed in second, third, fourth and fifth.

The heavyweight’s five entries in the openweight eight placed second, fourth, sixth, ninth and 14th.

On the Charles River over the weekend, both the heavyweight and lightweight crews didn’t achieve much better results.

The men’s lightweight team sent one lightweight eight to the Charles which placed eighth out of ten boats.

“Many miles to row before we put away our oars for the winter! The team has responded with courage to every challenge so far. I am proud of them for that. The fall racing has shown there are more challenges ahead,” Andy Card, head coach

of the men’s lightweight team, wrote in an email.

The heavyweight team submitted two entries into the men’s championship eights, which placed 13th and 22nd out of 30 boats.

“Fall racing is a great opportunity to compete and to get a checkpoint of boat

speed relative to other teams,”

Benjamin Heathcote ’26, the captain of the men’s heavyweight team, said. “It’s a useful section of the fall but ultimately is just a stepping stone to the dual season, the eastern sprints, the IRA and the all important YaleHarvard regatta.”

Heathcote said he is positive

that winter training will prepare the heavyweight team for the spring season.

The Head of Charles is the world’s largest three-day rowing competition and takes place in Cambridge.

Contact SOPHIA LE at sophia.le@yale.edu.

MEN’S TENNIS: Three Bulldogs qualify for singles, doubles championships

BY REMI CLARK-REDSTAR STAFF REPORTER

Three members of the men’s tennis team are preparing for big tournaments — Eric Li ’26 and Ethan Chung ’29

for the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s sectional championship and Vignesh Gogineni ’26 for the NCAA singles championship.

To qualify, the Bulldogs earned hard-fought victories over

several rivals at the New England Regionals Tournament between Oct. 9 and Oct. 13.

“Overall, we had a pretty good week with some great individual results,” interim head coach Eduardo Ugalde wrote in an

email. “We have been putting a lot of emphasis on becoming good competitors in practice and I think that definitely showed at the tournament.”

Of more than 40 matches played, the Elis clawed out 16 singles victories and nine doubles victories against Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, Holy Cross and Sacred Heart.

On the singles side, the Bulldogs started with a bang. The team was undefeated on the first day, making it to the second round without losing a single singles player. The second day was the opposite, with only Gogineni making it to the quarterfinals.

Jim Ji ’27 and Jason Shuler ’27 did not go quietly, notching early victories against Stonehill (6–0, 6–2) and Brown (7–6, 6–4) before both falling to the Crimson. Gogenini powered through a tough draw with a straight sets blowout (6–1, 6–1) and a (7–5, 7–6) brawl against Harvard to make it to the finals. There, he was crowned co-champion, automatically qualifying him for the NCAA Individual Championships.

“I am very happy that Vignesh is going to NCAAs for a second year in a row,” Ugalde wrote. “He has established himself as one of the top players in the country. He already had a great run at All Americans where he beat some top 10 players and he knows that he has the level to compete with them.”

On the doubles courts, the Bulldogs enjoyed a particularly strong showing, with all their duos reaching the round of 16. Edward Liao ’28 and Gogineni earned hard fought wins against Stonehill, Brown and Dartmouth, squashing opponents in 8–0, 8–4, and 8–5 matches respectively before falling to Bryant in a 9–8 nail-biter. Dylan Tsoi ’27 and Schuler served up Bryant and Quinnipiac 8–2 and 8–3, with their exit from the tournament coming at the hands of Boston College, who beat them 8–6. Most stunning for Yale tennis fans was the finals run of Li and Chung, where they dismantled Harvard twice (8–7, 9–8), Quinnipiac (8–6), Buffalo (8–5) and Boston College (6–2, 6–4). Though they lost the final match to Cornell (6–4, 6–3), they still qualified for the ITA sectionals championship.

“The atmosphere was great. The guys were all supporting each other, each other’s matches” Gogineni said. “A lot of our parents and friends came out a couple days so that definitely helped in terms of support and confidence.”

The Bulldogs’ next match will take place Friday at the Ivy League ITA Masters qualifying tournament in Philadelphia.

Contact REMI CLARK-REDSTAR at remi.clark-redstar@yale.edu.

MEN’S BASKETBALL: Two alumni to begin NBA rookie seasons

BY AUDREY KIM AND INEZ CHUIDIAN CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS

The National Basketball Association had its tip off earlier this week, marking the start of two rookie campaigns by Yale basketball alumni: Bez Mbeng ’25 and Danny Wolf, once a member of the class of 2026.

Wolf played for the Bulldogs for two seasons before transferring to Michigan for his junior year. He was a standout center for Yale his sophomore year, helping the men’s basketball team win the Ivy League Championship and earn a spot in the NCAA March Madness playoffs, where Yale advanced to the second round after upsetting Auburn.

Following his junior season at the University of Michigan, Wolf declared for the 2025 NBA draft and was selected in the first round by the Brooklyn Nets as the 27th overall pick.

“You could certainly see that the IQ on the court was something that stood out for Danny,” Justin Gallanty, a former ESPN play-by-play announcer, said in a phone interview. “But more than anything

else, a guy who’s seven feet who can bring the ball up the court, distribute to his teammates, shoot from the outside, operate on the inside, is something that is pretty unique in the game of basketball.”

Gallanty said that Wolf started as a guard early in his basketball career but experienced a sudden growth spurt by the time he was suiting up for Yale. This gave Wolf a unique combination of traits: He had the skills required of a guard, but the build required of a power forward or center. His diverse skillset would set him up for success once he fully grew into his body.

With the Nets looking to rebuild and their coaches’ intentions to get creative with Wolf’s diverse skillset, Wolf is in a position to continue developing his unique playstyle and begin seeing the court more often, Gallanty said.

“If you look at the guy who’s, according to most people, the best player in the NBA right now, Nikola Jokić for the Nuggets, he has a lot of the same skills that Danny brings to the table being a six-eleven, seven-foot guy who does the majority of the ball handling for his team,”

Gallanty said. “The sort of the things that Danny is able to do on the basketball court we’ve seen translate really well in the NBA.”

Nets Head Coach Jordi Fernandez has said he is aware of the similarities between Wolf and Jokic and hopes to let Wolf explore his full potential as a nontraditional player. The experience Fernandez gained while coaching Jokic as an assistant to Nuggets head coach Mike Malone could prove key to facilitating Wolf’s growth.

“Hopefully, he’ll be somebody in the NBA that is similar to who he was in college, it was somebody who’s not only really good himself, but also makes his teammates better,” Gallanty said about Wolf’s potential as both a solo and team player.

Mbeng — who played alongside Wolf for two years — is another former Bulldog star now transitioning to NBA life. As the 2025 Ivy League Player of the Year and the recordholder for most basketball steals in Yale history, Mbeng is a dynamic and physical player.

In his senior year, Mbeng led the Bulldogs to an Ivy League Championship while scoring double-fig-

ures 23 times and notching three 20-point games. Mbeng finished his college career with 1,189 points and 449 assists.

On Oct. 14, Mbeng signed with the Miami Heat.

“Getting signed to the Heat was an unbelievable feeling,” Mbeng wrote to the News. “Being given the opportunity to develop my game, and knowing that they believe in me to be given this opportunity means so much — especially from one of the most storied franchises in NBA history.”

Mbeng’s signing this fall follows his summer stint with the Golden State Warriors, where he competed in the California Classic and NBA Summer League. Mbeng has spent most of his summer season in training camp.

“I was super thankful to be given the opportunity to be around such an inspiring environment.” Mbeng wrote. “My time spent in Miami was amazing and I will be playing with their G league team to begin the year.”

The G League is the NBA’s development league where teams send players to improve skills and

prepare for call-ups to the main roster. The Heat’s G League team “The Sioux Falls Skyforce” competes alongside 31 other teams in the division.

Nick Townsend ’26, a current senior on the Yale men’s basketball team, described Mbeng as an athlete who “played with a special intensity.”

“I’m definitely going to miss playing with him this year, but I can’t wait to see what he accomplishes,” Townsend said.

Mbeng credited his four years at Yale for shaping his mindset heading into the NBA.

“Yale helped me nurture my work ethic, and that is definitely something that I will carry over to prepare for the next level,” Mbeng said.

Wolf and the Nets will next face off against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Oct. 24, and Mbeng can expect to make his G league debut at the Tip Off Tournament on Nov. 7.

Contact AUDREY KIM at audrey.kim.ajk234@yale.edu and INEZ CHUIDIAN at inezchristina.chuidian@yale.edu.

YALE ATHLETICS

Yale’s crew teams competed at the Head of the Charles regatta in Boston over the weekend.

LIZA KAUFMAN, PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

At the New England Regionals Tournament, three members of the tennis squad made it to the finals and qualified for future tournaments.

“What can it mean to a daydream believer and a homecoming queen?”

Faculty group urges Yale to reject potential Trump compact

BY ASHER BOISKIN AND JAEHA JANG STAFF REPORTERS

The Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors urged faculty members in a Thursday email to pressure the University administration to reject a federal compact reportedly being sent to all universities by the Trump administration.

In an Oct. 13 article, Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration had offered to all U.S. colleges a compact that would provide preferential government funding in exchange for certain policy changes. The offer was initially extended to nine select universities earlier this month.

Karen Peart, the University spokesperson, did not confirm nor deny whether Yale had been sent the compact.

The compact would require universities to end academic departments or initiatives that “purposefully punish, belittle,

Yale

and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” according to Inside Higher Ed. It would also require the consideration of standardized test scores for admissions, freeze the cost of tuition and cap international undergraduate enrollment.

“In the last ten months we’ve seen dozens of attempts from the White House to impose an ideological agenda on U.S. colleges and universities,” Daniel HoSang, the president of Yale’s AAUP, wrote in an email to the News.

“Our AAUP Chapter, together with national AAUP and many dozens of chapters across the country, recognize the danger it poses to academic freedom.”

In an email addressed to the Yale community, the executive committee of Yale’s AAUP called the proposal — formally titled the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” — “extremely dangerous,” arguing it would coerce universities into adopting the Trump

administration’s political priorities.

The email urges Yale faculty members to attend an upcoming AAUP membership meeting and to write directly to University President Maurie McInnis and Yale’s board of trustees, offering an email template addressed to McInnis that describes the compact as “a severe threat to academic freedom and to the students and faculty at Yale.” The Yale AAUP’s goal is to have at least 100 faculty members write to McInnis, according to its email.

“Our chapter and members are speaking out against it because it’s unlawful and dangerous to free inquiry and expression,” HoSang wrote to the News. “We have to be vigilant in protecting those principles.”

Peart did not answer the News’ questions about whether the University would sign the compact or if the University shares Yale AAUP’s concerns about political interference in university affairs. She wrote in an email statement to the

News that Yale is “open to faculty input and remains committed to advancing its mission.”

The AAUP’s email also asked community members to attend the “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration, which took place across the country, including on the New Haven Green, on Saturday, and sign a petition that demands university leaders to reject the compact.

The petition claims that the “Trump administration is trying to blackmail schools” and “dictate what schools teach.” It accuses billionaires of “kidnapping our neighbors, stripping our rights, and squeezing every drop of money they can out of us to fatten their own wallets.”

In their Thursday email, the executive committee of Yale’s AAUP warned that Trump’s compact would “essentially end the faculty’s role in governance of the university” and “be devastating to academic freedom.”

The Massachusetts Institute of

Technology on Oct. 10 was the first university to announce its rejection of the compact. The University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, Brown University, the University of Virginia and Dartmouth College followed suit. No university has announced that it accepted the compact yet.

In April, Yale AAUP joined the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Science Senate, often called FASSEAS senate, in sending a letter to McInnis, Provost Scott Strobel and the Yale board of trustees, urging them to “resist and legally challenge any unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance.”

Yale’s AAUP chapter was revived in November 2024.

Contact ASHER BOISKIN at asher.boiskin@yale.edu and JAEHA JANG at jaeha.jang@yale.edu.

can’t just dip into its endowment to pay for Trump’s tax. Why?

BY DANI KLEIN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

As Yale endures budget cuts and financial tightening tied to Trump’s endowment tax hike, students can’t help but ask the question: why does the University need to make budget cuts, when it has, supposedly, access to billions of dollars of endowment money?

Yale comes in second in university endowment total size at around $41 billion and second in university endowment per student at over $2 million.

Trump’s July financial megabill adjusted the annual tax on endowment revenue from the 1.4 percent tax passed in 2017 to a tiered tax which gives Yale an 8 percent tax rate. Taxable income is more widely defined under the new bill. The tax will affect Yale’s returns in fiscal year 2027, which begins this coming summer.

Yet, three tenets of the stewardship of Yale’s endowment make it impossible to immediately increase spending — the endowment is managed with a goal of promoting intergenerational equity, it is invested using a high risk, low liquidity approach and it contributes funds to the university based on a formula that aims to smooth the effects of market and policy fluctuations.

Intergenerational equity

In 1974, James Tobin, an American economist, Yale professor and Nobel Prize winner, defined what is now called intergenerational equity: the idea that institutions and individuals owe fiscal responsibility and growth to future generations.

But while many individuals and businesses invest so that they or their direct descendants can benefit from returns, Yale’s endowment is invested in the interest of Yale generations far in the future, wrote Rooney in an email. Per Rooney, this value means that the endowment can’t act as an unlimited pile of money for the University in times of economic uncertainty.

“While Yale Investments manages the endowment funds as a single pool to ensure that future generations benefit from the same excellent resources available today, the University cannot dip into that

pool as if it were a piggy bank available for any worthy expenditure,” wrote Rooney.

Low liquidity, higher returned with the Yale Model In 1985, Tobin suggested an unexpected candidate to manage Yale’s endowment: a young former mentee of his named David Swensen. Swensen would go on to develop what is now called “The Yale Model,” the prevailing investment philosophy of top endowments today.

The Yale Model, also known as the Swensen Model or the Endowment Model, can be defined as a specific investment strategy that takes on significant financial risk and leaves money in the market for long periods of time.

The model invests the portfolio across several asset classes, or different kinds of things that an individual or corporation can own, buy or sell, according to Alex Hetherington ’06, a managing director at the Yale Investments Office.

Historically, endowment funds are invested in between five and eight asset classes at a given time, depending on how the asset classes are defined, per Hetherington. Examples of asset classes include stocks, bonds, real estate and private equity — an exclusive financial market which allows large stakeholders to buy controlling stake in private companies, make them more profitable, and sell them at higher prices. The model diversifies heavily and aims to avoid asset classes with low expected returns, Hetherington noted.

Swenson’s investment philosophy, which has been widely adopted by university endowments, centers around the innovative idea that liquidity — basically, how easy it is to cash out an investment — should be avoided rather than desired.

According to information from the Yale Investments Office, the Yale Model is characterized by heavy investment in less liquid asset classes such as private equity, and less investment in things like the stock market, which are usually considered to be low risk and low reward. Because a university of Yale’s size is well-positioned to take on

significant financial risk, over a 30-year period, Yale’s investment strategy has added over $30 billion in value. This result demonstrates that the Yale Model is far more lucrative than a passive investment strategy that would leave Yale’s endowment in lowrisk investments for long periods of time.

The advantage of a high risk, low liquidity investment strategy that tends to leave money in the market for long periods is that you avoid the costs that come with moving money in and out of the market in response to market changes.

But this complex approach comes with an obvious disadvantage: a less liquid portfolio means cash is a lot harder to get your hands on at any given moment — the endowment can’t always move huge amounts of money around the market easily, even in times of political pressure, financial crisis and uncertainty, such as the endowment tax hike.

“You want to figure out how much risk you want to take, and then you want to allocate your portfolio, and then don’t fool around every time you see something happening in the economy,” said Andrew Metrick, a professor of finance at the School of Management who served as an undergraduate research assistant to Tobin and was later a close colleague of Swensen’s.

“There are rewards for people who are willing to stay put and wait out the bad times,” Metrick said.

Kelly Shue, also professor of finance at the School of Management, echoed Metrick. The downside of the endowment’s illiquid strategy comes to the fore under economic stress, she said.

“All institutions are trading off: they care about current needs, they care about future needs, they have different weights on each, and people can disagree on what the correct weights are,” Shue said. “What we are learning in the current climate is that many universities do want liquidity right now, it turns out, and in many cases they wish they had more liquid investments.”

The smoothing formula Endowment managers use some-

thing called a smoothing formula to calculate how much of the endowment will be spent in a given year.

In order to sustain itself, the endowment must necessarily outpace inflation rates as years pass to achieve positive real returns — to have returns be effectively positive over time.

Instead of spending the actual funds in the endowment on current university financial needs, Yale spends a carefully calculated percentage of endowment revenue. Every year, Yale aims to spend 5.25 percent of its endowment value. Higher ed inflation — measured on its own index, separate from consumer inflation — occurs at a rate of roughly 4 percent per year as noted on Yale’s website page explaining the endowment.

Therefore, the endowment needs to grow by 9.25 percent per year, through investment returns or new donations, in order to maintain its real value while also providing essential funds to the university at a relatively constant rate.

The goal of the smoothing formula is to make the university’s endowment spending rate, and therefore the amount it is able to contribute to the budget, less reactive to changes in the value of the endowment due to market fluctuations. The function slows the incorporation of those fluctuations into Yale’s budget. Every year, spending from the endowment is calculated in the context of the target spending rate of 5.25 percent. In reality, though, that spending percentage is calculated using the following formula: (see graphic)

This formula means that crises can hinder flexibility for multiyear periods.

For example, in the case of the -25 percent return on the endowment in 2009 as a result of the Great Recession, that loss in value was incorporated into endowment spending over the course of the next two years and beyond, allowing endowment spending to fluctuate far less than it would have under an annual calculation.

The reactivity of endowment spending to market conditions is minimal by design, aiming to provide “predictable, sustainable funding for university operations, regardless of market volatility,” wrote Rooney. If the smoothing equation changed every time the United States experienced an economic downturn, the endowment would not be able to fulfill its promise of its stewardship for future generations.

Even through the early 2000s financial crisis and the economic downturn of COVID-19, the smoothing formula has kept endowment spending values safe from knee-jerk reactions.

“The approach is disciplined and emphasizes staying the course through turbulent markets and avoiding reactive decisions during downturns,” Rooney wrote. “The University can tolerate significant short-term volatility in Endowment performance and stay focused on the longterm as the spending policy’s smoothing rule serves to transmit more gradual adjustments into the budget.”

According to Hetherington, the liquidity for endowment spending comes from cash that the YIO plans to make sure is available to hand over to the university. That cash comes from a variety of sources, he said, such as interest payments, rental income distributed from real estate partnerships and other distributions from illiquid partnerships due to sales of underlying private assets.

The Yale Investments Office is only one of the parties that controls how the endowment is funded and how its revenue is disbursed. The YIO invests endowment funds, but donors supply those funds and the Yale Corporation, in response to recommendations from administrators and staff experts, sets the formulas that the university uses to calculate what funds they use and when.

Much of the final of the final decisions is not up to the corporation or the investments office. A majority of Yale’s endowment –– 75 percent –– is made up of restricted funds, meaning donations intended to serve a specific purpose. According to an email from a Yale Development representative, a donor may choose to make a donation of any amount that is either completely unrestricted or is designated to a particular area of the university, such as a college or a school. Some contributions are donated for immediate use, meaning they must be spent in their entirety in the year they are donated to Yale. Otherwise, donors can contribute financially in the form of an endowed fund, which is a contribution to the endowment for the continued stewardship of a certain part of the university or the university itself.

In accordance with the concept of intergenerational equity, endowment managers must balance the immediate demands of the university’s growing student population with their responsibility to the future Yale. Even if endowments were “massive, unrestricted piles of money,” long-term priorities prevent reactive endowment spending changes, wrote Rooney. The smoothing formula, and the investment values behind it, are the reason the endowment does not change the percent of endowment revenue it contributes to the budget on a year to year basis.

“We have a diversified and resilient investment strategy that has enabled us to grow the Endowment in a variety of economic climates,” Rooney wrote. “Unfortunately, though, we do not expect to be able to mitigate the full financial impact of the tax increase.”

Yale’s endowment is not designed to contribute the same funds to Yale’s budget while taking an 8 percent cut from their revenue. The new tax will require the University’s budget to adapt “if Endowment spending is to remain sustainable,” wrote Rooney.

The Hall of Graduate Studies, the central tower of the Humanities Quadrangle, was named Swensen Tower in honor of Yale’s longtime chief investment officer.

Contact DANI KLEIN at dani.klein@yale.edu.

“I’m dreaming my life away.”

To woo students, French department makes courses easier

BY PABLO PEREZ STAFF REPORTER

In a recent push by the French department to make language courses less daunting to students, the department has attempted to reduce the workload demands of some of its courses.

This semester, many French courses designated as L1 through L4 have eliminated final exams and adopted a weekly “4 plus 1 model,” which consists of four days of in-person instruction and one asynchronous class on Friday.

“We want to attract students to the study of French as they would to any other language,” Constance Sherak, the department’s language program director, wrote in a statement to the News. “Rigor doesn’t mean an unsurmountable degree of work and shouldn’t discourage students from pursuing a language they want to study for their own personal reasons.”

Other changes to the L1 through L4 courses include a focus on oral assessments and in-classroom collaboration between classmates, reduced homework load and a larger emphasis on Francophone cultures as opposed to just French culture — a move broadening the global relevance of the curriculum to include scholarship from cultures such as the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb.

Shifts in the curriculum and

workload of these courses are the results of student feedback and departmental reviews, French Department Chair Maurice Samuels wrote to the News. The department aimed to align its courses with those of other language departments at Yale and French courses at other institutions, Samuels added.

“There was definitely a sense among many students that while French language courses were rigorous and effective, they were too difficult in terms of workload and grading,” Samuels wrote.

To address the concerns of students and the department, Samuels said he appointed a commission last spring to review feedback and lay out recommendations for changes to the courses. According to French Director of Undergraduate Studies Thomas Connolly, the commission conducted an official online questionnaire for students taking department classes and drew further from course evaluation forms.

The commission included members of the faculty, the language program director, the DUS and a member from within and outside the department.

“We took these complaints very seriously and compared our classes to other language classes at the university as well as to French language classes at other schools,” Samuels wrote. “We decided to make some key changes that we hope will alleviate the perception that French is a more difficult lan-

guage to study at Yale.”

Sherak added that she is “currently overseeing a series of working groups to revise syllabi and implement changes.”

Student responses to the changes have been mixed. Some have expressed appreciation for the department’s former workload expectations.

Luke Parish ’28 expressed concern that “you lose a lot in doing an asynchronous day.” Parish said that he averaged 10 to 15 hours of work per week in his intensive L3/ L4 course last semester.

While the student feedback received by the department highlighted concerns about the demanding workload, some students emphasized its importance for their learning.

“I don’t think you’d be able to learn in general language without it being this rigorous,” Julia Niemiec ’28 said. “French is a difficult language. There’s a lot of grammar structures. There’s a lot of nuances.”

Other students appreciated the additional free time that came with the lighter workload.

“I have an assignment on the asynchronous day, but it normally takes a little bit less time, and it’s just nice to have a day off of having to go to class” Ella Benedetto ’29 said.

Modernization efforts by the French department stretch beyond the L1-L4 sequence. In fall 2024, the department launched a BA/MA path, also known as the ‘simultaneous MA,’ which allows students to pursue a master’s degree in

In response to surveys conducted by a committee and course evaluations, the French department largely eliminated final exams and reduced in-class hours.

French at the same time as a bachelor’s degree in the same field.

“I want Yale’s French language program to be serious and rigorous but I also think that studying language should be enjoyable,” Samuels wrote. “Students who want to study French because it’s a beautiful language or because they are

fascinated by the literature and culture should not be scared away by onerous requirements and a difficult grading scale.”

The French department is offering 14 courses this semester.

Contact PABLO PEREZ at pablo.perez@yale.edu.

Students heartened, wary about tenuous Gaza ceasefire deal

BY ANAYAH ACCILIEN, JOLYNDA WANG AND SARA AGRAWAL CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS

Miguel Cardona, Joe Biden’s secretary of education, recently joined the faculty of Yale’s School of Management.

Cardona, who once taught at an elementary school in Meriden, was

previously Connecitcut’s commissioner of education. Since Cardona served in the Biden administration, President Donald Trump has significantly reduced the Department of Education. Earlier this year, he signed an executive order demanding the closure of the education department in favor of sending its responsibilities to the states.

“We’re at a time where the current administration is taking aim at anything related to equity. And the appointment and the call of Secretary Cardona to come teach at SOM shows that there is a commitment on the part of educators at Yale to still value equity,” Nathan Dudley ’82, a lecturer on public school education policy, said.

Cardona will co-teach the elective course “Education Policy” — which will cover such as accountability, college access and economic returns to education — with professor Seth Zimmerman during the 2025-26 academic year.

Dudley highlighted Cardona’s stances on improving “college affordability” and creating “career pathways” as ones he hopes students learn from in the course.

Beyond teaching, Cardona will also participate in programs run by The Broad Center — a School of Management program focused on K-12 public school students — to engage with leaders of school systems.

“What I think will be special about the course is that we will take on education policy issues in the context of specific decision points.

Dr. Cardona’s experience as leader at the local and state level here in Connecticut and then at the federal level

as Secretary of Education will give us a window into what the people making key choices were thinking,” Zimmerman wrote to the News.

Cardona and Zimmerman will explore how institutions like Yale fit into the higher education landscape and challenge their students to reflect on how policy decisions are made in circumstances of uncertainty and limited information.

“This is an incredibly challenging time politically nationwide, especially for the field of education, which I love so dearly as a strong believer in the federal government’s role in empowering and supporting schools, especially public and low-income schools, so it is not surprising that Yale made this call” Roy Kohavi ’26, a student in the intensive education studies certificate, wrote. Dudley added that Cardona’s commitment to supporting teachers is especially valuable now, when teachers and teachers unions have been under attack by the current administration.

“I’m interested to see how Dr. Cardona’s experience in high-level governance will impact his teaching, particularly in how to maintain focused commitment

to students when there are so many stakeholders vying for an education leader’s attention. Because that’s really who education leadership is about: students,” Noemi Liu ’26 wrote.

Liu added that “though Cardona was a prominent politician and has much insight to share on navigating federal leadership,” she is “the most excited about his experience as a practitioner and local leader.”

There is a large “policy-practice divide in education,” according to Liu, where the guidelines implemented by policymakers are often not translated effectively into practice within classrooms.

This reality makes a professional such as Cardona, who has worked at every level of public education, invaluable, she said.

Cardona, a Connecticut native, became the state’s youngest principal at age 27 and later its commissioner of education.

Contact ANAYAH ACCILIEN at anayah.accilien@yale.edu, JOLYNDA WANG at jolynda.wang@yale.edu and SARA AGARWAL at sara.agrawal@yale.edu.

Widespread web service outage disrupts Canvas for hours

BY SARAH RIVAS, JERRY GAO CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS

On the first day after October break, students logging onto Canvas, Yale’s online course management system, were met with a message that Canvas was “experiencing issues due to an ongoing AWS incident,” referring to a widespread Amazon Web Services outage.

Early Monday morning, disruptions to Amazon Web Services, or AWS, a cloud service provider, led to outages for hundreds of websites, including Canvas, the learning management system used by Yale. Access to Canvas was restored Monday evening.

“I am encouraging professors to use their flexibility and ingenuity in responding to this unusual situation; if the outage goes on much longer, we will issue guidance, but it looks like it is already being resolved globally,” Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis wrote in an email to the News Monday afternoon before

Canvas was restored. Some students felt that the Canvas shutdown was especially impactful this time of year, when students often have midterm exams.

“The canvas shutdown has me tweaking out—I’m a girl that religiously checks her canvas so not being able to submit my assignments or even see them has been really worrisome,” Faven Wondwosen ’27 wrote to the News.

Wondwosen added that she relies on her online assignments and the materials her teachers have uploaded to Canvas to help her study for her exams.

Another student, Nikolai Stephens-Zumbaum ’26, said that the Canvas outage was helpful for some students whose exams or assignments were postponed because they couldn’t access necessary course materials.

Anurag Khandelwal, an assistant professor of computer science who is teaching, told the News that the AWS outage seems to have occurred in two phases.

Khandelwal, referring to outage updates by AWS, said that the initial failure was likely related to the Domain Name System, or DNS, which associates domain names — such as yale. edu — with numeric addresses. DNS is needed for websites and services such as Canvas to access DynamoDB, a database service provided by AWS, Khandelwal wrote in an email.

By early morning on Monday, an update by AWS wrote that the “underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated at 2:24 AM PDT.”

However, the outage continued, and another update at 7:14 a.m. PDT confirmed “significant API errors and connectivity issues.”

Khandelwal wrote that the previous outage may have caused another outage if AWS was overwhelmed by a backlog of queries.

“Once the DNS failure was resolved, there was still likely a backlog of query requests that had to be serviced by the DynamoDB after recovery. This backlog — combined with new queries coming in — can over -

whelm the system,” Khandelwal wrote.

By Monday evening, the issue was marked as “resolved” on AWS’ status website, and the latest Monday update said that backlogs would be processed “over the next few hours.”

According to an announcement by AWS, the outage was resolved at 2:24 a.m. PDT on Monday. Instructure, the Utahbased company that operates Canvas, announced that Canvas became accessible at 5:16 p.m. MDT. Brian Watkins, an Instructure spokesperson, wrote in an email to the News on Monday evening at 8:01 p.m. confirming that Canvas access has been restored.

“We recognize the integral role Canvas plays in the daily lives of educators and students, serving as a central hub for teaching and learning, and we know today’s AWS outage had a significant impact on that experience.” Watkins wrote. “Our teams have worked closely with Amazon

Web Services (AWS) to restore service and continue to monitor stability. All affected users should now have full access.” Khandelwal wrote that the usage of cloud computing platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure is mainly due to “cost-efficiency, flexibility and ease of deployment,” akin to the difference between renting and purchasing a home.

“Canvas could host its service on its own infrastructure (at significant capital investment), but this would not necessarily avoid such outages — it might actually make it worse since they may not have enough resources to stay on top of issues that arise,” Khandelwal wrote. AWS reported an operating income of $39.8 billion for 2024. Olivia Woo contributed reporting. Contact SARAH RIVAS at sarah.rivas@yale.edu, JERRY GAO at jerry.gao@yale.edu.

RANA ROOSEVELT/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

COURTESY OF XIMENA SOLORZANO

Two weeks after Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire, students have expressed joy about the release of hostages, as well as doubts about the future of peace in Gaza.

THROUGH THE LENS

TOWERS OF YALE

Contributing Photographer

Photos by Ayman Naseer

FOOTBALL: Bulldogs to host Quakers Saturday

BY BRODY GILKISON STAFF REPORTER

The Yale Bulldogs (3–2, 1–1 Ivy) will take on the Penn Quakers (4–1, 2–0 Ivy) Saturday at the Yale Bowl.

The Bulldogs come into the matchup after thrashing the Stonehill Skyhawks (2–5, 1–1 Northeast) last weekend, winning 47-7, while Penn enters with an undefeated conference record after taking down Columbia last Saturday (1–4, 0–2 Ivy). The Quakers’ impressive start to the season was good enough to place them in the receiving votes portion of the American Football Coaches Association Football Championship Subdivision coaches’ poll over the weekend.

After Saturday’s contest, each team will only have four games left in the regular season. If Yale wants to keep its conference championship hopes alive, it needs to pick up a win against Penn.

“Obviously this game is huge for us,” kicker Nick Conforti ’26 wrote to the News. “Given the circumstances, our only goal is to go 1-0 every week going forward.”

While each team has only played five games so far, they share three common opponents. Earlier this season, Yale lost to both No. 7-ranked Lehigh and Dartmouth, but defeated Stonehill by 40 points. On the other side of the ball, Penn also lost to Lehigh, but defeated Dartmouth and beat Stonehill by three points.

Limit the air attack

Penn currently has the No. 2 scoring offense in the league,

thanks in large part to quarterback Liam O’Brien. He is averaging over 260 yards-per-game (YPG) through the air, as well as over 50 YPG with his feet. O’Brien’s favorite target has been Jared Richardson, who leads the Ivy League in receptions, receiving touchdowns and receiving yards.

The Quakers’ potent offensive attack will be met by the Bulldog defense, which has allowed roughly 17 points-per-game this season. Recently, the unit has faced some adversity. After a strong start to the year, the Eli defense gave up 31 points to Lehigh (7–0, 2–0 Patriot League) in their third game. Then, the defense couldn’t stop the floodgates in a fourth-quarter collapse by Yale in which they gave up 17 points to Dartmouth (4–1, 1–1 Ivy).

Recently, the Bulldogs bounced back with a strong defensive showing against Stonehill, with the Skyhawks only able to get on the board in the final minute of a blowout loss.

Last week, the Yale defense showed that when they’re playing as a unit, opposing teams tend to struggle.

“I felt like we played a complete game as a team, from wire to wire,” defensive back JP Schmidt ’28 said. “We were on the same page all week leading up to the game, and the product on the field was a result of that.”

To win this week, the Bulldogs will need to focus on containing Richardson, who accounts for nearly half of the Quakers’ total receiving yards, and force O’Brien to rely on less explosive options

downfield. With a deep roster of dynamic defensive athletes, Yale’s coaching staff may mix up coverages early and use their playmakers creatively to disrupt Penn’s offensive rhythm.

Hot on offense

In last week’s win, Yale scored on all five of their first half possessions, putting up 23 points in the process. In fact, the Bulldogs scored on every drive

except for their last, meaning they came away with points in nine of their 10 drives.

In previous weeks, part of the problem plaguing the Yale offense has been starting out slow and digging themselves into a hole early. To keep up with the Quakers’ fast-paced offense, quarterback Dante Reno ’28 — and his two favorite targets Jaxton Santiago ’28 and Nico Brown ’26 — will need to push the ball down the field early and often to maximize their scoring opportunities. The Bulldog offense will look to replicate the consistency they showed last week against Stonehill in a game where putting points on the board often may be needed. Yale kicks off against Penn at noon at the Yale Bowl on Saturday.

Contact BRODY GILKISON at brody.gilkison@yale.edu.

MEN’S SOCCER: Bulldogs set to face undefeated Tigers at Reese Stadium

BY LIZA KAUFMAN STAFF REPORTER

The Yale men’s soccer team (2–7–3, 1–2–1 Ivy) is set to square off against the No. 6 nationally-ranked Princeton Tigers (10–1–2, 4–0–0 Ivy) on Saturday night under the lights of Reese Stadium. After a hard fought game last weekend — a narrow loss to Dartmouth (3–5–3, 2–2–0 Ivy) despite outshooting the Big Green — the Bulldogs will look to bounce back and return to the win column when they host the conferenceleading Tigers this Saturday.

“We are really looking forward to the matchup,” defender Nick Miller ’27 wrote in a text message. “It’s always exciting to host a nationally ranked opponent, even more so when that matchup is in-conference. We are very hungry to get a result.” Princeton enters Saturday’s game following a scoreless home draw to the Bryant Bulldogs (13–0–2, 4–0–0 AEC), a dominant Atlantic East Conference opponent. The Tigers, the defending 2024 Ivy League Champions, have had success both in their Ivy League and out of conference games.

S tat of the W eek

They have non-conference victories over Rutgers (8–4–2, 3–3–1 Big Ten), Villanova (5–4–5, 1–1–3 Big East), UMass (6–4–5, 1–2–1 Summit), UAlbany (4–5–4, 2–1–1 AEC), Seton Hall (6–2–6, 2–0–3 Big East) and Army (4–5–5, 2–3–1 Patriot). In Ivy play, the Tigers have gone undefeated, downing Harvard (5–4–4, 1–2–1 Ivy), Brown (5–5–2, 1–2–1 Ivy), Cornell (10–2–1, 3–1–0 Ivy) and Columbia (1–6–4, 0–3–1 Ivy).

In the last seven matchups between Yale and Princeton, the Elis have come away with four victories and one draw. The Bulldogs defeated Princeton

three years in a row from 2017 to 2019. When the teams met last fall at Princeton’s Myslik Field, Princeton defeated Yale 1-0 with the lone goal of the game coming in the 23rd minute. The Tigers’ clean sheet victory over the Bulldogs was their first against Yale since 2021.

Heading into this weekend, the Bulldogs sit in a threeway tie for fifth in the 2025 Ivy League Men's Soccer Standings alongside Harvard and Brown. Meanwhile, Princeton holds first place outright. With only two Ivy games left after this weekend, a win for Yale

could prove crucial in the race for a postseason berth. Instead of feeling pressure, the Bulldogs say they are embracing the opportunity to prove themselves against a top-ranked opponent.

“The team is extremely confident heading into Saturday’s match against Princeton,” Andrew Myerson ’27 wrote in a text message. “Over the last few Ivy games, we’ve really found our identity as a team, and we trust that if we stick to it, we’ll put ourselves in a great position to get a result.”

On the Yale side, first-year midfielders Billy Altirs ’29 and Angelo Zhu ’29 have been key contributors on offense, leading the team with two goals each. Defender Sven Meacham ’28 has also tallied a goal and leads the Bulldogs in assists with five. In goal, Conrad Lee ’26 has been a consistent presence, recording 52 saves and a solid 73.2 save percentage.

On the other side of the pitch, Daniel Ittycheria has led the Tiger offense with his seven goals, four of which were gamewinners. Princeton’s goalkeeper, Andrew Samuels, has anchored the Tigers’ defense, contributing to the team’s perfect Ivy record and non-conference victories. Samuels has only let up four goals all seasons, accounting for a 91.5% save percentage.

With Princeton boasting the Ivy League’s top-scoring offense, averaging nearly two goals per game, the Bulldogs will need to stay compact defensively. To come out on top, the Elis must convert early opportunities and rely on Lee’s shot-stopping to keep the game within reach. Kickoff is slated for 6 p.m. on Saturday at Reese Stadium.

Contact LIZA KAUFMAN at liza.kaufman@yale.edu.

LIZA KAUFMAN, PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

The Yale football team welcomes the Penn Quakers to town this weekend.

LIZA KAUFMAN, PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Yale is hoping to snap Princeton’s perfect Ivy record and keep postseason hopes alive in the Saturday night matchup.

// BY HANA TILKSEW

Taking my time

Keeping suburban life alive in the city.

// HANA TILKSEW

Before coming to Yale, I thought of myself as a city-adjacent suburban girl. Sure, my hometown of Fresno, California, is best known for its agriculture, and driving 40 minutes out of any populated neighborhood lands you in empty brown fields, but I didn’t think it was that rural. After all, we had two Nordstrom Racks and a few bougie cafes selling $10 matcha. When the middle-tier malls and outdoor festivals got monotonous, I could always drive three hours in either direction and end up in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

New Haven is considered a micro-city by many East Coasters. To me, it’s proper urban living. Being able to walk two minutes from my room to G-Heav to buy over

ButwhileI’veneverbeen surroundedbymore ambitiouspeople,I’vealso neverseenanyonemore exhausted.

priced grapes? Having cappuccinos ready to go down stairs in Pierson’s dining hall? Living within 15 minutes of all my friends? This might as well be Manhattan.

jarring adjustment to urban life is the way people treat their time. I’m used to savoring time. I believe in extended morning routines, in saying your daily prayers and fixing your hair and eating a real breakfast. To discover that my fellow Yalies will jump out of bed to an alarm that sounds like a demolition warning, chug coffee on an empty stom ach and run to their first morning class is a revelation. ute shower “leisurely.” A 10-minute shower means I’m in a rush. When I sit to read at home, I like having a cup of tea at my side.

A Yale work load means there’s no point in grab

bing the tea because I’ll be done skimming my 40-page reading by the time two sips go by, and then it’s off to do whatever’s next on the GCal.

In some ways, this atmosphere is motivating. When I’m around people who are constantly hustling, I feel compelled to hustle too. But while I’ve never been surrounded by more ambitious people, I’ve also never seen anyone more exhausted. Here we are on the most beautiful campus in the world, surrounded by some of the most interesting people our age, and we can barely look

tracurriculars, then we’ll finally be able to savor our time, right? But many of us were once high-powered high school students who told ourselves college would be a breather. And in 20 years’ time, we may find that fulltime jobs and family obligations have us running from place to place just as much as we do now. Maybe the people in Fresno have it figured out. After all, if we do not choose the present moment to reclaim our time, and by extension our humanity, will we ever?

What it’s like to be a rural student at Yale.

“Did you know you are the only person I have ever met from Kansas?”

My new friends, my suitemates, my classmates, my professors — these are people whose first impression of me is my novelty. A throwaway question identifying something that doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Yet, every time I am greeted with my role as the only girl from Kansas, I am reminded of the loneliness of the sentence.

It is a common myth that it is easier to get into an Ivy — to get into Yale — coming from a rural school, an idea unsupported by the fact that I personally know everyone from the class of 2029 who also happens to be from the Sunflower State. But this idea of the rural student making it out, or not being “in Kansas anymore,” leaves many rural students in an isolated position. Coming to Yale was supposed to, or is supposed to, be a new beginning. For me at least, that beginning was quite rough. The hidden curriculum of learning the campus and its structures, unspoken social rules and even new types of friendships created situations that I had no map for. I quickly realized that being the first person from my high school to get into Yale in the past few decades also made me the first person from my high school to be at Yale in the modern era. I am more aware than ever of these problems in the moments that I try to articulate them. For my friend Michelle Lin ’29 — not the only person I have met from Missouri — and me, we are frequently burdened by not

what to say, but how to say it. The dispersion of rural students on the Yale campus is enforced by the uniqueness of the dialect we brought with us. Without intending to, I have begun to speak in code.

Rather than a simple conversation between small-town girls who have spent their lives together, our gossip now has moral and political implications. “I just feel like the way we communicate is different than the people here,” Michelle told me. Regional differences in communication have been known to manifest in accents, but I have encountered a greater disparity. The very ways and things about which I seek to communicate clash along lines of rurality and urbanity. The language difference informs much of how I am able to interact with Yale. Walking into a Yale classroom was a hurdle I wasn’t entirely ready for. I didn’t know assignments were in the syllabus, and I didn’t know how best to phrase an email to ask the questions I needed answered. My communication hurdle didn’t

stop at my friendships — it directly influenced my interactions with professors.

At a meal with my Silliman-assigned big sibling, Bella Amell ’27, I had the chance to ask about her opinion on her rural origins, both as a “bumpkin” — her word to describe being a rural student at Yale — and as the chief of staff of Rural Students Alliance at Yale. When asked for her opinion on being a rural student at Yale, she identified “an issue in academia largely where most people are not from rural areas” and that, “if you teach at Yale, you aren’t from a rural area.” While this may not seem like that big of an issue, considering rural students are far outnumbered on campuses such as Yale, perhaps making our problems comparatively less important, the lack of understanding about rural spaces at Yale has caused some interesting — and troubling — situations.

Whether it was being asked if I owned a tractor, or as Bella put it, “I have had people ask me if I went to school in a oneroom schoolhouse,” the isolation of being

a rural student is an issue that Yale doesn’t seem to know how to fix. It makes sense that a school that wants a student body reflective of the world it teaches about would have similar problems to that world — that rurality comes with associated stereotypes is just one of those problems. So where does that leave the few hometown heroes who “made it out”? What does that mean for the kids whose accents or dialects reveal their rurality?

“In my first year especially, I would tell people that I was rural or from a small town, not from a place of pride but from a place of ‘I am sorry,’” Bella said, a feeling I know all too well. But as her time has progressed, she channeled that feeling into a sense of pride. Now, instead of being ashamed or uncertain of her background, she openly discusses her rurality. “I am really proud that I grew up in this way.”

So, for the rural few, know that the sense of displacement that comes with coming to a small institution from a small town is not one you feel alone. You might be the only person from your school here, but you are not the only one to be the only one. Life as a rural student is certainly not perfect, but with programs like Rural Students Alliance at Yale — and the big siblings your randomly assigned residential college could randomly assign to you — they are not an unconquerable hurdle. Contact MADI FINCH at madisen.finch@yale.edu.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: EXPLORING A NEW CITY

// MADI FINCH

Breaking musical boundaries, bridging cultural divides

Hadas

Bram GRD ‘31 combines Islamic and Jewish musical traditions.

// BY ANYA GEIST

The santur sounds out of another time. Out of place, too, in a New Haven apartment.

The Persian instrument has been played for centuries. As first-year music doctoral student Hadas Bram GRD ’31 sits criss-cross on the floor, gently hitting its dozens of strings with small mallets, the twangy sound resonates through her living room. It sounds to my untrained ear almost like a beautiful cross between a guitar and a xylophone.

“Playing the santur feels like home for me. It’s a home I must continually work for, nurture and care for,” Bram later wrote to me over WhatsApp. “Playing the santur is both difficult and comforting. Difficult, because of its infinite and almost overwhelming possibilities; comforting, because even in the hardest moments, I find so much comfort in it.”

Bram’s academic work concentrates on connections between Jewish and Muslim sacred music. After an accident in her early adulthood, Bram became interested in exploring music through the sublime. Her released works, under the stage name Princess Laila, deepen these nuances and facilitate understanding between people of disparate backgrounds.

Bram is descended from Persian Jews, and she grew up in Jerusalem surrounded by Persian music, literature and poetry. She encountered a santur at age 16 and knew she wanted to play the instrument.

Her whole family pitched in and found someone who imported the instrument to Israel via Turkey — since Israel does not import anything from Iran directly. Bram said Persian Jews generally struggle to maintain their connection to Iran, because once they have immigrated to Israel, Iranian policies dictate that they cannot return.

“Being the hyphenated identity, being Israeli-Iranian, it’s always so weird,” Bram told me. “People just don’t think that between

How long, O soul, shall I not see a trace of the union with you? For my heart no longer has the strength to witness separation; If, at the path to your dwelling, your nature shall be thus — I have set my heart to witness countless cruelties

- Saadi, No. 466

these two political entities that are fighting, there are people who are in the middle.”

And yet, Bram feels it is important that Jewish Persian culture continue to live.

When she was 20, after playing for a few years, Bram enrolled in a conservatory in Jerusalem, where she studied Arabic and Persian music. She went on to pursue Arabic and musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

It was there, in 2020, that Bram was hit by an ambulance and nearly died.

It took her ten months to be able to walk again. Even today, five years later, she has major health issues. The experience transformed her relationship with spirituality.

“There was something in that near-death experience that made me want to explore sublime things and transcendence,” Bram said.

Bram’s newfound sense of purpose has led her to look for meaning in Persian Jewish music and explore the connections between Jewish and Muslim music in the Middle East.

In Iran and other places, Jews historically often borrowed pieces of texts or melodies from Sufi communities and then sang them in a Jewish context. And, Bram told me, there are many knowledgeable Jewish scholars of Islamic mysticism, strengthening the ties between the two traditions.

Bram is working with Professor Edwin Seroussi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to compile a database of documents, photographs and recordings that illustrate the Jewish-Muslim relationship in sacred music. Seroussi, a former fellow of sacred music at the School of Music, hopes the database will be released online in late 2025.

“It’s a huge amount of material that we are processing photographs, for sure,” Seroussi said. “So we want to present a quite comprehensive audiovisual documentation of this shared space.” Seroussi’s colleague, Nili Belkind, a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that researching and documenting Jewish Arab musicians

WEEKEND BOUNDARIES

and Arab musicians from other cultures is crucial.

Bram’s work with Sufi communities is unique within the project, Belkind added, because, especially in Israel, not much of Sufi tradition remains.

“There are very few Sufi lodges in Israel or Palestine,” Belkind told me, because few cultural groups are invested in the maintenance of Sufi gathering sites.

For Bram, this work is vital in understanding how Jewish and Muslim cultures coexist and grow together.

“We can learn a lot about their own existence from listening and engaging with the spiritual traditions of Jews in the Middle East and Iran and North Africa,” Bram said, “because there are so many points of commonality.”

Bram said that sometimes she’ll listen to a piece of music, and although it sounds like it could be Muslim, it is actually Jewish.

Like music, language provides Bram with a way to create connections across cultures. Hebrew was also something she almost took for granted, because she grew up speaking it. But when she

learned Arabic, a whole world opened up to her.

“You can find new ways to express yourself and find new emotions that you weren’t able to express in your known environment,” Bram said. It is a phenomenon familiar to her from playing the santur. Bram and I sat in her apartment, the santur between us, and she showed me the different strings and the soft mallets she uses. Sometimes, she feels like she is still learning how to play it.

The santur is both percussive and melodic — by hitting the strings with mallets, the musician creates a rhythm, but by varying where they hit it, they can change the pitch. It’s easy to make a beautiful sound using the santur, Bram told me.

Some people say that even a cat walking across the strings could make music. But the skill lies in the technique of playing each distinct note, the ornamentation of the melody and even the tuning.

It took Bram three years to fully learn how to tune the santur. Though she played for me on a smaller version,

And I said: Oh that I had wings like a dove! then would I fly away, and be at rest. Lo, then would I wander far off, I would lodge in the wilderness… We took sweet counsel together, in the house of God we walked with the throng.

- Psalm 55

she has used a santur with 96 strings, each of which has to be tuned.

“It’s a very educated instrument, because you really have to know how to tune it, and you have to think about it, and it’s always a bit like a puzzle,” Bram told me. “How am I going to tune it? How am I going to play this piece? It’s challenging, and I like this challenge.”

The nuance, the multiple dimensions to playing a santur — it all reminded me of how Bram spoke about her music and her academic work. Breaking the barriers between percussion and melody created a thoughtful fusion of sound.

I wondered how this syncretism impacted Bram’s outlook on life. What did it mean for her to read and absorb Sufi mysticism, to live in Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi and to play the infinitely intricate santur?

On the one hand, she said, it makes her more empathetic.

“I speak Arabic, I speak Farsi, I speak Hebrew, and this makes me very sensitive to human suffering around me, because I can see it in its own language,” Bram she told me. Bram finds a sacred “human-to-human” connection through the music she releases under her stage identity, Princess Laila. Invented during the time after her accident, while Bram was recovering at home, Laila embodies the fluidity that Bram harnesses in her academic work and her identity.

Laila lives in a “sort of third dimension,” Bram explained, where there are no borders in the Middle East, where someone could travel all the way from Israel to Iran. Laila speaks Hebrew and Arabic, and represents the syncretic, evolving identity that Bram herself feels when she speaks different languages.

Using the santur alongside hip-hop beats and rap, Laila also blends the musical styles

that Bram described as exciting and “empowering.”

To date, Bram has released two albums as Princess Laila. Her second one is mainly about Jerusalem.

“It really talks about the very material feeling of the city, and all of its tensions and conflicts, with this sublime feeling at the same time. This album tries to bring together my feeling of Jerusalem as a city of hope,” Bram told me. “And on the other hand, a city of things that I feel like are very far from transcendent and sublime.”

The album ends with a prayer, inspired by the Persian Jewish tradition of interweaving pieces of Sufi poetry with Jewish texts. Bram connected a Poem No. 466 by the 13th century mystical poet, Saadi of Shiraz, with part of Psalm 55 and layered it with electronic sounds. Then, she added the santur.

Contact ANYA GEIST at anya.geist@yale.edu

RECOMMENDS: GETTING YOUR EARS PIERCED

REVIEW

In my mother’s tongue

// BY GULAM MONAWARAH

Listening to “Ami Banglay Gaan Gai,” the shy finger-picked notes of the sitar might stand out first. They poke out sadly and nostalgically, drowned out by singer, producer and composer Pratul Mukhopadyay. When I asked my mother for a song that had influenced her, I was surprised she referred me to such a slow and preening melody.

My mother recalls her music taste in the 1990s as very unpatriotic. As a teenager in a then-20 year old nation, Bengali music did not really interest her. NSYNC posed on her bedroom walls. Her CDs were those of Celine Dion and Shania Twain, or the closer Pritam and Lata Mangeshkar of Bollywood. She interpreted Bengali music as too sad, underproduced and heavy on the country-hugging.

“Ami Banglay Gaan Gai” is no exception to that genre. BBC Bangla currently holds the song as the sixth greatest Bengali song of all time. The list itself is overwhelmingly filled with

Banglay Gaan Gai” speaks to the complex history of the language.

patriotic music of the same fabric. For the non-Bengali speakers, Mukhopadyay’s magnum opus is a moving confession to his unwavering and helpless devotion to speaking, thinking and loving in the fraught language. Slow, nostalgic and nodding to the intricacies of Bangla, “Ami Banglay Gaan Gai” represented to many a reclamation of Bengali legitimacy via an exploration of the nation’s expression. It is also a retrospective on the sadness of the 1971 war for independence.

The 1971 war was fought over the Bengali ethnic group’s right to speak Bangla as an official language. The ensuing genocide of Bengali peoples by the Pakistani government fueled an outpouring of sorrow that infected film, music and literature.

The next generation, which included my mother, found refuge from national mourning within Mukopadhyay’s music.

“Ami Banglay Gaan Gai” is a masterpiece

for how it repackages that sadness in a soft, hammering reclamation of Bangla after a violent war that sowed doubt in that movement.

To a non-Bengali Westerner, the combination of string instruments to back the melody seem standard for “desi” music. Who would guess a sitar would be in a Bengali song? But the song notably lacks a percussive element, like the Indian tabla, to ground the listener. Mukhopadhyay and his strings hence float along in a stream of consciousness.

Throughout my reading, I have had to rely on informal translations of the song, my own fluency and my mother’s translations. There are so many nuances and instances of wordplay that are so subtle yet so powerful. Often, they have little to no equivalence in English.

The song begins with a slight switch of words that links the significance of the mother tongue to nationality. The first line, “I sing in Bangla,” and the second, “I sing songs of Bangla,” leverage “Bangla/Bengali” as a term for a language, an ethnicity, and a geographic entity.

CULTURE

Such switches in language have made it hard to translate, and even harder for nonBengalis to understand. One rather crude version, and one of the only one’s available online, combines the next stanza into “I am in Bangla always.”

A more fitting meaning utilizes a noun-verb switch to say, “In my dreams I find Bangla,” recalling the sentiment of having to restore or search deep within one’s heritage to preserve the language. Another one says: “I Am Myself, I Search For This Bengali Language.” My mother agrees that a combination of the two matches

Makhopadhyay’s inability to untangle his perceived self from his language. “I search for who I have always been in Bangla” (Ami Amar Ami Ke Chiro Din Ei Banglai Khuje Pai). Bangla is so intertwined with the process of translating thought into spoken speech, and Mukhopadhyay illustrates that perfectly.

The rest of the song continues the same way. Each line explores how he does every action, feels every emotion and aims for every aspiration in Bangla.

Perhaps this unapologetic usage of the most complex, fabled Bengali appealed to youth like my mother. Mukhopadhyay intentionally muddles verb conjugations so that two listeners can understand them differently. A non-native may not understand it at all. English, on the other hand, is exclusive to none. The plasticity of the global Western pop bands of the age, with widely appealing branding and vague mixtures of genre, my mother says, were nothing like Mukhopadhyay’s intentional targeting. He wanted to create a Bengali-only listener’s society. Such an idea must have meant the world to a teenager as old, new and malleable as her nation.

When I asked my mother for a song that shaped her childhood the most, I expected one of the Western boy band songs or run-filled feats of iconic vocalists like Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston, who she had always talked about with me. Instead she reached for this obscure, elderly singer who she never mentioned in two decades. “I would listen to this song a lot, on the TV ads and on the CDs. He made me feel proud to be Bengali,” she recalled, “and not in a political way. In my way.”

I realized that she fiercely guarded “Ami Banglay Gaan Gai” from those she felt would not understand the Bengali plight. Guarded it in the same way the singer fenced off his tender attachment to Bangla from outsiders. And I, no matter how close I could get to speaking the tongue, could never translate her quite right.

Contact GULAM MONAWARAH at gulam.monawarah@yale.edu.

Rural Reflection on Urbanity

// BY HANNAH ROLLER

I spent the beginning of my life loving trees and fearing the city. The Berkshires span the western highland region of Massachusetts. Here, this place that I have always called home, the trees morph into forests which blend into mountains which roll into each other, divided at random by rivers or lakes or the occasional town. The rurality of this place has gained appeal each year that I get older. Growing up in the company of nature forces you to examine yourself as part of the broader uncultivated world. The rawness of the seasons, the quiet darkness of the woods, the fire red auburn of the fall foliage, the cold white of the snow, the clarity of the Green River, all telescoping to create a place where one becomes a person as naturally as the seasons change. To grow up in the woods is to become oneself undistracted by preconceived notions of humanity. It is to live as you are. In a rural setting, there is no guarantee of city convenience. No Instacart or Uber or public transportation or a 24-hour convenience store at the street corner. Instead, my childhood was marked by twenty-minute drives to the local library, leaf piles, snow-blown sled paths, muddy rain boots, fresh corn from the farmstand on the drive home and a nightly harmony of peeper frogs and crickets. Being a kid in a rural area was challenging. I was completely at the mercy of my mother and her willingness to drive me twenty, thirty, forty minutes to see a friend or to the movies or out to dinner for a first date. My independence was limited by the geographical distance, and my town was tiny, so small that there wasn’t a single traffic light. But then I got my car keys. The last two years I spent at home were soaked in independence. Hours spent in the car blaring music, late night

drives, bonfires deep in the woods, freezing hands filling the gas tank, picking friends up, dropping them off, and hourlong conversations in driveways with the engine off. Being able to drive was revolutionary. The time spent in the car, staring out at the mountains and the trees and the rivers, made me appreciate it more. And the final rotation of the seasons leading up to my leaving for college really made me take it in. I love living in the woods, I loved that my school was surrounded on both sides by a range of mountains, I love the foliage and the snow and the animals and the sunsets and the raw aliveness of it all. And for that reason I didn’t want the city. It was the one thing about Yale that made me hesitate.

To me, home has always felt serene and simple and rhythmic and natural. Cities, in comparison, always felt messy, overcrowded, overpolluted, laced with desperation, depression, and intensity. New Haven, while a comparably small city to the hometowns of other students, feels huge. On campus there is no open air and no complete silence. There is a constant rush and flow of people, events, cars, scooters, voices, emotions, work and bikes. You don’t ever really hear birds here. I walk everywhere. The squirrels are weird, they’re unfazed by people. The nature is squished between buildings instead of the other way around. Businesses stay open past 10pm. And you don’t hear frogs and crickets at night, you hear car tires and music and laughter.

Three weeks ago I was standing at the intersection of Trumbull and Prospect, the light had just turned red and the crosswalk indicator white and there was the blur of people and the hum of waiting engines and among it the thrum of lives diverging and intersecting. A moment of collectively heading the same,

the opposite, the tangent direction. It brought me back to the essay I was working on for a class, centered on the Ancient Confucian Analects. In Analect 4.1 Confucius states “It is beautiful to live amidst humanity. To choose a dwelling place destitute of humanity is hardly wise.”

That segment, when I had initially read it, made me pause. I have spent the majority of the past few years with the stubborn belief that it is far more beautiful to live in nature, away from the complicated convoluted mess of desire and convenience and ease. The rurality of the Berkshires — the peace, air, trees, and calm — always felt like a more accurate representation of what life is, what it is meant to be. But New Haven has led me to realize that the city also holds a true, albeit different, version of life. The city holds humanity in all its riches, poverty, emptiness and depth. I won’t stop loving trees, but I have stopped fearing the city. As rurality reminds us of the responsibility we have to the Earth, urbanity reminds us of the responsibility we must and necessarily do have to each other. The city is now one of the things I love most about Yale.

I find myself feeling as though I have found home in both of the polar opposites. I went back to the woods over break. I don’t know if this is universal, but the first time coming home made the past months at Yale feel like an illusion, a hazy summer camp-like day dream. Weirdly, the Berkshires also felt slightly foreign.

Nights quiet and sleepy, travel long and mundane, the sky open and empty. Home felt strangely solitary, since at school we are constantly witnessed by each other. You are rarely alone, rarely with yourself. At home it felt like it was just the woods and me. I missed that feeling, but I also started to miss being witnessed. And while I have loved being submerged in the apple orchard, the hikes, and the long winding roads, I found myself missing New Haven itself. It seems I now hold the city, right there along with the trees.

Contact HANNAH ROLLER at hannah.roller@yale.edu.

Bangla anthem “Ami

ILLUSTRATION

BY HANNAH LIU