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Labor Board Affirms TAs’ Right to Organize
December 2000
After ten years of trying to establish a recognized union for graduate teaching assistants, Yale’s Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) saw its prospects grow brighter last month. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a far-reaching decision affirming that graduate students who teach are university employees and can engage in collective bargaining.
The board’s decision upheld a regional decision in a case involving a graduate-student organization at New York University (“Light & Verity,” May). The board said it “will not deprive workers . of their fundamental statutory rights to organize and bargain with their employer simply because they are students.”
The board rejected the idea that such a union could threaten academic freedom by bringing curricular issues to the bargaining table, an argument made by administrators at NYU, Yale, and other private universities. Noting that collective bargaining with faculty members has been going on for 30 years, the board asserted in its decision that “the parties can confront any issues of academic freedom as they would any other issue in collective bargaining.”
At NYU, graduate students appeared to have approved union representation by a 597-418 vote, but an additional 295 ballots were in dispute. If the election results stand up, NYU may still refuse to recognize the union; in that case, the NLRB will likely file suit against the university in federal court.
Yale President Richard Levin was among the first to criticize the decision, claiming that it “creates a conflict between national labor policy and sound national educational policy” and urging NYU to pursue the issue in court. But GESO chair Rebecca Ruquist hailed the decision as “a message to the Yale administration that it’s inevitable that we will win.”
Class Hatches $70 Million Nest Egg
If your investments aren’t doing as well as you'd like, it’s time to make friends with a member of the Class of 1954. By pooling their resources and investing it themselves, 71 members of the class turned $380,000 into $70 million over 21 years. The donors’ idea was to give the money to Yale at their 50th reunion in 2004. But the Class recently announced it would give the money now to help fund the University’s science plan.
Class member Richard Gilder first conceived of what became the “54/50” fund after the class’s 25th reunion. Instead of giving money directly to the Univer- sity, the participants—only two of whom gave more than $15,000—invested the funds under the direction of investment manager Joe McNay '56. The bull market of the last ten years surely helped, but the fund grew in value by a staggering 18,000 percent, while the benchmark
Standard & Poor’s 500 grew by about 1,200 percent.
Of the $70 million, $50 million will help pay for the new Environmental Science Center next to the Peabody Museum and a new chemistry research building on Science Hill. Both buildings will be named for the class. The remaining $20 million will go to a matching fund to encourage class members to make additional gifts leading up to the 50th reunion.
Class members recall that the Development Office was skeptical of their plans in the early days and would have preferred that the money go directly to Yale. But when the gift was announced, President Levin praised the class for its foresight and added that “I hope that this innovative approach to supporting Yale will be emulated by other classes.”
Nursing Links to Dot-Com
This spring, when Stanford University launched a for-profit spinoff company whose main product is an Internet database for physicians, its own medical school provided the content. But when the company decided to create a similar database for nurses, it looked to the Yale School of Nursing.
The company, e-Skolar, of which Stanford owns 60 percent, created the Skolar, M.D., database, a service available to physicians for $240 per year. The database includes professional journals, textbooks, practice guidelines, and drug databases; when a doctor types in a key word, relevant articles come up in a few seconds. Skolar, R.N., as the nursing database will be called, will have comparable information for nurses on patient care.
“Our work will be about identifying and developing the content,” says Catherine Lynch Gilliss, dean of the School of Nursing. Yale faculty members will choose from existing texts and consult with e-Skolar’s engineers to structure the information in the best way for practicing nurses. In exchange for preferred stock in the company, the School will provide such consultation for five years. The company hopes to be testing the database in hospitals by February or March.
At 100, Forestry Surveys Its Future
The School of Forestry and Environmental Studies celebrated its centennial on October 5-8 with events that looked back at the history of the first forestry school in the nation and forward to an ambitious agenda for its next 100 years. The program included a celebration at Grey Towers, the Milford, Pennsylvania, estate of the school’s founder Gifford Pinchot, and then returned to Yale for lectures, field trips, a concert by folksinger Tom Rush, a gala banquet and dance, and a “flapjack” breakfast.
During the festivities, James Gustave Speth, dean of FES, described the School’s new strategic plan, which was recently adopted by the faculty after more than a year of discussions. “Our mission is to provide the new leadership and new knowledge needed to restore and sustain both the health of the biosphere and the well-being of its people,” said Speth, who cofounded the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1969 and served as the head of the United Nations Development Programme from 1993 until last year, when he assumed the deanship at FES.
The strategic plan was conceived to help FES become a global school, what Speth termed a “broad-gauged school of environmental science, policy, and management.” FES is expanding its faculty by about one-third, designing a new headquarters that will be “a landmark in sustainable, ‘green' design,” raising more money for the scholarships needed by international students, and broadening its public outreach efforts. The School is also playing an expanded role in Yale College by offering six new environmentally oriented courses to undergraduates.
“To do these things is not simply good for our School or good for Yale,” said Speth. “Doing them is a moral imperative.”
Can Mudslinging Win the Race?
As in every election season, negative political advertising is the topic of controversy again this year. But what is the real effect of negative advertising on voters? John Lapinski, an associate professor of political science, says we don’t really know—and
he is trying to find out.
“No one has ever done an effective study to determine the effect of these ads on the electorate,” says Lapinski, who is director of Yale’s New Media Workshop. “The previous studies were done with college students in artifical environments.”
Lapinski, using funding from Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies and from CBS News, is trying a different tack. In his current study, 3,000 registered voters nationwide and a separate group of 1,450 New York voters agreed to let a company called Knowledge Networks install WebTV service in their homes. With WebTV, users can browse the Internet and watch television on the same appliance.
For two months, the subjects were shown political advertising in varying combinations, then asked questions about the ads and about how they would vote. (The national sample was shown ads from the presidential campaign, the New York sample ads from the Clinton-Lazio senate campaign.)
The advantage of this approach, says Lapinski, is that the researchers get immediate reactions from people who have seen the ads “on their couch with their remote and their popcorn.” Also, because the researchers follow the same voters over a two-month period, they can see whether advertising causes specific voters to change their attitudes.
The early results from the study suggest that while neither side benefitted much from negative ads, the Bush campaign’s attempts—including the infamous “RATS” ad—were more effective than Gore's. “The bottom line is that after seeing two negative political ads, independent voters leaned more towards Bush than Gore,”
says Lapinski.
What Parents Don’t Know About Childhood
When it comes to raising intellectually, emotionally, and socially healthy children, there’s a disturbingly wide knowledge gap between parents and child development researchers. That is the conclusion of “What Grown-Ups Understand About Child Development: A National Benchmark Survey” in which 3,000 adults, 1,066 of them parents of children six years old or younger, were interviewed by telephone.
The survey consisted of more than 60 questions and explored such areas as the ability of children to react to the world, play, parental expectations, discipline, and national policy. According to the findings, a majority of parents of young children believe, among other things, that a six-month-old can be spoiled, that spanking is an appropriate form of punishment, that flash cards are beneficial learning tools, and that babies and toddlers are immune from depression.
All wrong, says Kyle Pruett, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale’s Child Study Center and president of Zero to Three, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit information resource for parents and professionals. “Responding to your child’s needs is not spoiling. Young children need your attention to develop the faith and trust that their needs matter to you.”
Zero to Three, along with Civitas, a Chicago-based child advocacy group, and the Brio Corporation, the Wisconsin-based toy maker, sponsored the survey. “Parents seem to think that development is some sort of a race, but it certainly is not. It’s a dance, not a race,” says Pruett.
But however uncertain parents (and, as the survey results demonstrated, grandparents and adults who expect to be parents) are about the dance steps, some 60 percent of the respondents indicated a belief that both the government and their employers could do a better job of helping them meet their children’s needs through such programs as paid parental leave and subsidized day care. Providing that assistance should be a high national priority, say the survey sponsors.
“This lack of accurate child development information among adults has very real implications for American society,” said Pruett. “We’re potentially raising overly aggressive children who react to situations with intimidation and bullying, instead of cooperation and understanding; children who won’t be able to tolerate frustration, wait their turn, or respect the needs of others.”
On the Trail of the Well-Coined Phrase
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” You can look it up in Fred Shapiro’s book. Shapiro, a librarian and lecturer at the Law School, has begun work on Quotations: The Yale Dictionary, a Yale University Press book that he says will be more authoritative and comprehensive than Bartlett’s and its ilk.
“There is now a wide range of online research tools that can help determine which are the most popular or famous quotations,” says Shapiro. “Using those tools and traditional methods, I hope to come up with better information on tracing quotations to their sources.”
Quotations, Shapiro says, will also include more entries from modern American culture than its rivals. He notes that such familiar expressions as “publish or perish,” “all politics is local,” and “behind every great man is a woman” are not found in other leading dictionaries.
Shapiro, who is also the author of the Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations, invites readers to submit quotations for consideration to the project’s Web site, quotationdictionary.com
Rowers Launch a New Boathouse
Several generations of Yale rowers gathered by the Housatonic River in Derby on October 21 to dedicate Yale’s fourth new boathouse in 157 years of intercollegiate crew. Varsity crews had just two weeks earlier begun using the Gilder Boathouse, which is named to honor former Olympic rower Virginia Gilder '79 and her father Richard Gilder '54, who gave $4 million toward the $7 million project.
Designed by School of Architecture professor Turner Brooks, the building provides a dramatic site for watching races at the finish line of the Housatonic River race course. Taking advantage of the steep riverbank site, the building is bisected by a monumental stair—entered from beside Route 34 through a gate of cast aluminum oars—that overlooks the water. On race days, spectators are expected to fill the stair, the glass-walled trophy room, and a waterside ramp also used for bringing boats
down to the water.
The building also includes coaches’ offices, dressing rooms, and five bays for boat storage. “For the next 25 years, this boathouse will be everything we could possibly need,” says men’s heavyweight crew coach Dave Vogel '71.
One stipulation of the Gilders’ gift was that a community rowing program be established at the site, allowing New Haven and Naugatuck Valley youths to learn rowing skills during the summer. The program is now in its third year.
At the dedication, President Levin noted that 746 former Yale rowers had given money to help build the boathouse. Among those present for the dedication was 98-year-old Stillman Rockefeller '24, who was a member of the fabled Yale crew that won the gold medal at the 1924 Olympic games.
Sporting Life
The Science of Keeping Athletes in the Game
In the main corridor on the ground floor of the renovated Payne Whitney Gymnasium is a glass-fronted room full of high-tech equipment and struggling young bodies. The public presence of the Dwyer Sports Medicine Center is appropriate to a place that head athletic trainer Chris Pecora calls “the front line of sports medicine at Yale.”
Pecora and his staff of nine trainers and physical therapists coordinate conditioning efforts for healthy athletes and—in conjunction with University Health Services and the Medical School’s sports medicine practice—get injured ones back in the game as soon as is safe. In doing so, they use the tools and tricks of a profession that has grown ever
more sophisticated in recent years.
“Kids used to lift weights,” says Pecora, “but it wasn’t nearly as focused.” Until recently, coaches ran their own ad hoc weight-training programs. Now there are three members of Pecora’s staff who specialize in strength and conditioning programs.
Technology, too, has changed the science of preparing athletes for competition. “In the old days, we'd tape a player’s knee every day for practice,” says Pecora, who has been at Yale for 17 years. “Now we use a titanium and high-carbon steel knee brace that weighs about 14 ounces. I can’t remember the last time I taped a knee.”
Fall is a busy time for the training staff, with a number of sports going at once and his staff spread thin across three facilities: the Dwyer Center, the Smilow Fieldhouse, and Ingalls Rink. Trainers choose to specialize in particular sports, sometimes out of interest in their specific problems—lower back pain for the crew, shoulder pathology in baseball—and sometimes simply out of love of the game. They are on hand for practices
and games, including many games on the road.
Pecora says that Yale athletes tend to have a good sense of balance between the desire to play hard and the need to prevent injuries. “Kids here are very competitive, but they care about their bodies,” he says.
But he also says that an injured athlete’s desire to play becomes more urgent in his or her upperclass years. “When they’re seniors, in most cases they know their career will be over soon, and they really want to play,” he says. “We do all we can to make it quicker.”  |
