Comment on this article Campus Mourns Loss of Four Students
March 2003 “This is as black a day as I’ve seen.” That is how Yale College dean Richard Brodhead described the day a highway accident killed four Yale undergraduates. And nobody on campus could disagree. “I will never forget this,” said sophomore Meera Shankar, voicing the sentiments of many. “It will never leave me.” On January 17, members of the Yale community received the cruelest education a university can offer. At around five o'clock in the morning, a sport utility vehicle carrying nine students—eight of them current or former varsity athletes—was returning from a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity event in New York. As they hit an icy, unlit stretch of highway near Bridgeport, the car slammed into a tractor-trailer that had jackknifed on the slick road. Investigators have concluded that drugs and alcohol played no role in the accident. Kyle Burnat, a sophomore from Atlanta, and Sean Fenton, a junior from Newport Beach, California, were pronounced dead at the scene, as was Andrew Dwyer, a sophomore from Hobe Sound, Florida, and the son of Andrew T. Dwyer '71. Nicholas Grass, a sophomore from Holyoke, Massachusetts, died at an area hospital the next day. The other injured students were Zachery A. Bradley, Eric Wenzel, Brett Smith, Cameron A. Fine, and Christopher W. Gary. The crash occurred during the first week of spring semester, a time when students customarily reconnect with friends after the holiday break and choose their spring courses. But this year, the return to campus and the weeks that followed were marred by the full range of emotions—shock, sadness, anxiety, and guilt, to name a few—that are typically experienced by those struggling to come to terms with a traumatic event. On the steps of the DKE house, candles surrounded photographs of the brothers who died in the accident. Elsewhere on campus, students found other ways to channel their sadness. Some wore blue and white ribbons, others attended vigils and services, and the athletics department organized a blood drive. University Health Services opened its doors to students who wanted counseling. “Even for those students who didn’t know the boys, one feels it personally,” says chief psychiatrist Lorraine Siggins. She said the death of a peer is something many students are facing for the first time. “It really is a loss of innocence.” “It feels like someone blocked out the sun, and you just don’t know where to go and what to do next,” says director of athletics Tom Beckett, who knew most of the accident victims personally. As supportive and sympathetic as the Yale community has been, Beckett knows that grieving is a personal thing, and that for some it will take longer and be more intense than for others. “We just have to be mindful of that and do all we can to help.” Information about memorial funds can be found at www.yale.edu/opa. 
Few Good Signs in Labor Talks It’s a good thing union and University negotiators didn’t have to agree on the shape of the bargaining table, because they'd probably be bickering over that, too. A year after labor contracts expired for Yale’s nearly 4,000 clerical, technical, service, and maintenance workers, negotiators for both sides are still far apart on settling a new labor pact. In fact, the only thing they seem to agree on is that chances of reaching a settlement anytime soon are remote. In a January letter to the Yale faculty, staff, and students, President Richard Levin wrote that there’s been little progress in the negotiations and that “looking forward, there is cause for concern.” Local 35 President Bob Proto was even more blunt. “We’re headed toward another train wreck, another strike,” he says. What are the major sticking points? As with just about everything else concerning these two historic adversaries, there is disagreement on this. The University says it’s the union’s insistence on linking contract talks to the organizing drives of Yale–New Haven Hospital workers and the Graduate Employees and Students Organization. “If that weren’t on the table, we'd have a contract now,” says University spokesman Tom Conroy. Wrong, says Proto: “There’s the pension plan, which hasn’t been adjusted in over 18 years, parking relief, training and placement, workers' comp. It’s a lot more complicated than just the hospital and GESO.” On the positive side, both parties seem satisfied with the benefits package, and unlike the battles being fought by other employers and unions around the country in these lean economic times, there’s no talk of give-backs or concessions. “Compared to last time, when everyone was so worried about subcontracting, there’s no horrible problem, no line in the sand, so a settlement shouldn’t be that hard to reach,” says Conroy. Proto is less optimistic. “This is about as discouraged as I’ve been in the process.”
Profs, Courses Rated Online Those full-throated student gripefests about courses, instructors, and teaching assistants—usually conducted over slices at Naples—just got a little more structured. Now students can fill out an online evaluation that asks their opinions on such things as the course’s format and teachers, how the class compares to others, and whether it would be recommended. The evaluations will initially be available to instructors and other Yale faculty, but starting this fall, students will be able to use them when choosing their classes. The Yale College Committee on Teaching and Learning ran a small-scale trial run last spring. Based on those results, the new system was implemented campuswide for the first time last semester. “The response has been really great,” said committee chairman Charles Bailyn. “I’m very pleased that the students took this as seriously as they did.” He said roughly 24,000 evaluations were submitted. A total of 86 percent of Yale College students filled out the anonymous survey, with only three percent declining. The remaining evaluations were incomplete and won’t be used, Bailyn said. Students who chose not to participate were able to skip the evaluation form and go straight to their grades, which are also available online. Bailyn says that in the future, professors will be able to see their evaluations online, rather than waiting for them to be printed. Andrew Klaber '04 wrote the Yale College Council resolution that supported the switch to online course evaluations. “Up until now, there was no formal means to evaluate a course or to find out what students who had already taken it thought of it,” he said. Under the old system, a critique of a sampling of courses was published by the Yale Daily News, or professors independently asked their students to evaluate their classes. The Yale faculty unanimously approved the move to an online evaluation system last November.
More Room for Campus Cops There’s no place like home. Yale Police chief James Perrotti would surely agree, but he might put it a little differently: A home is no place for a police department. For the last 16 years, the Yale University Police Department has been headquartered in a two-family house on Sachem Street. Perrotti says the building is so small and ill-suited to its purpose that three desks are crammed into one room, the dispatchers are off-site, barricades used for special events have to be stored in an old FedEx truck behind the New Haven Police Department building, and there’s no place to service the cruisers. “It was never designed for police use,” says Perrotti, “and now, with the evolution in policing in general, there’s much more equipment we have no storage space for.” But that’s about to change. Plans are underway to build a new police station and community center on a two-acre lot behind the Grove Street Cemetery. Perrotti says the new building will accommodate the 80-person force with room for growth. But what he’s most excited about is sharing the space with the neighborhood. “It’s invaluable for us to have day-to-day contact with folks in the community,” he says. “We want them to see us as good neighbors and friends.” The $10 million facility is a partnership between Yale and New Haven. Besides the Yale police, the building will house the Dixwell-Yale University Computer Learning Center, where Yale students will teach computer basics to neighborhood residents. The facility will also have a meeting room for community functions and offer athletic programs for children. “We see it as providing an important linkage to Yale and the neighborhood,” says University Secretary Linda Lorimer. “It will be occupied 24 hours a day, providing life and vitality to both the campus and the neighborhood.” Groundbreaking is scheduled for the spring, with a ribbon cutting expected about a year later.
Professor Earns Fuzzy Namesake Scholarly achievement is often acknowledged by naming something after the accomplished academician: a lecture series, an endowed chair, maybe even the wing of a building. But when Jacques Gauthier’s colleagues wanted to pay tribute to him for his contribution to the field of paleontology, they named a dinosaur after him: Incisivosaurus gauthieri. “It was very gratifying,” said Gauthier. Although he already has a lizard named in his honor, Gauthier says that doesn’t have “quite the same cachet” as a dinosaur. This time around, “my son was duly impressed; dinosaurs will do that.” Incisivosaurus gauthieri is a small, bird-like dinosaur that had feathers and walked on two legs, but couldn’t fly. It lived 128 million years ago, during the early Cretaceous era in what is now known as the Yixian Formation in northeastern China. Gauthier received the unusual honor because of his groundbreaking work on the evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs. “Our view of the dinosaur world has changed so radically,” he says. “We used to think dinosaurs were giant lizards, but we now know T-rex had feathers. Imagine a giant fuzzy chick that was able to bite a Volkswagen in half.” Gauthier says the data makes it very clear that birds are living dinosaurs. “Many people believe that dinosaurs are extinct, but they’re still out there entertaining us at the bird feeder,” he says. “What would Thanksgiving be like if they actually were extinct?” Gauthier came to Yale seven years ago and has appointments in the departments of geology and geophysics and ecology and evolutionary biology. In receiving the eponymous honor, Gauthier joins renowned Yale paleontologists O.C. Marsh and John Ostrom, who also have dinosaurs named after themselves. “I’m gratified to join the giants,” he said. “It’s an honor just to be mentioned in the same breath with them.”
Sporting Life
Frosh is Big in Squash
by James McElroy ’95 Like most freshmen, Julian Illingworth ended his first semester at Yale by studying for and then taking four final exams. Unlike his classmates, though, he managed to work in three squash tournaments on three continents before and after finals. And how did it go? “On the squash side, it went well,” he says. “And on the studying side, it was a little tougher.” As reading period began, Illingworth was in Chennai, India, competing in the World Junior Men’s Championship. The number-one seed on the U.S. team, he led the Americans to a seventh-place finish, their best ever, and also cracked the top ten in the individual championships. After returning and taking his exams, he competed in the U.S. Junior Squash Racket Championships, besting 460 players from 16 countries to become the first American ever to win the event. After that, he flew home to Portland, Oregon, for four days, celebrated Christmas, and then took off to Sheffield, England, where he competed in the British Junior Championship, considered the most competitive international squash tournament because it draws the best players from the major squash powerhouses, including India, Pakistan, Egypt, England, and Australia. There, Illingworth knocked off the tournament’s number-two seed and finished seventh, the best-ever finish by an American. Already, Illingworth is drawing comparisons to Mark Talbott, the Yale women’s squash coach who held the number-one U.S. professional ranking for 15 years and is widely considered the greatest-ever American squash player. Dave Talbott, the Yale men’s squash coach and Mark’s brother, says, “Physically and mentally, Julian and Mark have a lot of the same characteristics, very free-flowing, very natural physically, with a very patient demeanor. They’re both fiercely competitive but always focused on the court.” It has only been in the last few years that young stars like Illingworth have strengthened the American presence in international squash. Until 1992, U.S. squash players used a harder ball and a smaller court than the rest of the world. Eleven years ago, however, the U.S. junior circuit and the American collegiate system officially switched over to the softer ball and larger court, and now young players like Illingworth are emerging—players who grew up with the softer ball. Illingworth’s future in the sport certainly appears rather promising. But he’s also got backup plans. “I’ll probably pursue it professionally for a couple of years,” he says. “Then go into something in medicine maybe, or something to do with Wall Street.” There’s plenty of time for him to figure that out. First, he has to decide on a major.  |
