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Hiring Well is the Best Revenge
July/August 2004
by Marc Wortman
In recent years, several prominent School of Medicine faculty members have been lured away by competing institutions. President Richard Levin must have noticed that several were making their way to the University of Texas-Southwestern in Dallas, where the dean, Robert Alpern, was leading a surge in the school’s standing—in part through his success in attracting top-flight scientists and clinicians. But then, says Nobel laureate and Southwestern professor Alfred Gilman '62, “Yale got revenge.” They got Alpern.
Alpern left Southwestern in June to become the new dean of Yale’s medical school. He had been at Southwestern for 17 years and served as dean for the last six; colleagues praised his success in improving research and expanding clinical services while bolstering education. “You guys got lucky,” says Gilman, who is now serving as acting dean of Southwestern. “I can’t say enough good things about him. He was good at listening, identifying major priorities, and getting the faculty to buy in and implement them.”
Alpern, who maintains a laboratory in molecular nephrology, is a popular professor whose students have several times voted him an outstanding teacher. He served as chair of the Southwestern admissions committee when the Hopwood court decision, prohibiting the use of race and ethnicity in admissions, became law in Texas, and he is credited with developing a race-neutral admissions policy that helped maintain diversity in medical school classes.
At Yale, Alpern succeeds David Kessler, who left last year to become dean of the University of California-San Francisco. (Neurosurgery chair Dennis Spencer served as acting dean during the past year.) Alpern faces a number of challenges, including a multimillion-dollar budget deficit and a squeeze on space available for expansion. He calls last year’s opening of the 457,000-square-foot Anlyan Center “a great move forward”—but adds, “it’s not enough. There are programs the school wants to grow, and they’re going to need space.”
He says Levin persuaded him to come to Yale after “I outlined what I needed in terms of resources to take the medical school where I wanted to go. And he delivered.”
Police in a Holding Pattern
by Jennifer Kaylin
“We almost feel like the forgotten union,” says Christopher Morganti, chief steward for the Yale Police Benevolent Association, the union representing the university’s 55 police officers. The union contract expired at the end of June 2002, and officers have been renewing their existing contract month by month, without a raise, ever since.
Yale spokesman Thomas Conroy denies that the university has in any way given the police officers short shrift. “The proof, from our point of view,” he says, “is the effort we’re making with negotiations, including bringing in a federal mediator.”
Union and university negotiators have held a series of off-the-record conversations since January to resolve a range of economic and non-economic issues. Both sides declined to talk about the sticking points, citing a mutual agreement not to discuss the specifics of the negotiations publicly. However, Morganti did say the union wants a contract that is more reflective of the duties its members perform.
Yale police carry badges and are sworn in by the New Haven Police Department. They have the same authority and arrest powers as do their city counterparts. “We do the same job as the New Haven police: motor vehicle enforcement, felonies, burglaries, rapes; it runs the gamut,” Morganti says. “Our goal is to get benefits comparable to a municipal police department,” he says. That would mean drafting new language for discipline and grievances and the way pensions are calculated.
Conroy stresses that for Yale to attract and retain a “top-notch” police force, negotiators are prepared to offer a highly competitive compensation package. As to whether Yale is considering a municipal model, he says, “you’ll probably find differences. What’s important is the total package, including working conditions and environment.”
After Yale reached eight-year accords with Locals 34 and 35 this past winter, both sides said the settlement marked the start of a new era of labor cooperation and harmony on campus. But Morganti questions whether that includes the YPBA. “It sure hasn’t been displayed in our negotiations,” he says, adding that the failure to settle a contract has hurt morale within the department. “This isn’t a happy place to work at this point. Everything’s on hold.”
Conroy says that’s the wrong way to look at it. “As we speak, they have a contract in effect,” he says. “We’re not asking for givebacks, the way so many employers are these days. There are going to be wage and pension enhancements. The only question is how much.”
Best Feet Forward at York & Broadway
by James McElroy '95
Since April 15, more than a few pedestrians have done a double take as they walked past the corner of York Street and Broadway. There, on the corner across the street from Saybrook College, is an upscale shoe store specializing in traditional men’s dress shoes. But wait. Didn’t that store close a little while ago? And wasn’t it another case of Yale sticking it to the little guy? What’s going on?
Last October, Barrie Ltd. Booters closed its doors after 70 years of selling shoes on York Street. The store’s owner, John Isaacs (grandson of founder Harry Isaacs) had decided not to renew his lease with Yale, the property’s owner, after Yale insisted that Barrie extend its hours and stay open until 9 pm on weekdays, instead of 5:30 pm. Isaacs said at the time that although he could afford the increased rent and the cost of staying open later, he feared that the store’s much-loved customer service—including free shoe shines for anyone at any time—would suffer from the increased hours and the need to hire less experienced sales people. For its part, Yale, in the person of University Properties director David Newton, insisted that it made “no sense” for a shop in such a prime location to be dark after dark, given the university’s efforts to promote activity on Broadway in the evenings.
Critics of the university’s development plans saw Barrie’s closing as more evidence that Yale was pushing out mom-and-pop businesses in favor of national chains. (Yale points out that 65 of its 70 retail tenants are locally owned.) But long-time Barrie customers took the news even harder. New Haven residents and Yale men around the world who had been loyal to Barrie for decades would have to find a new place to buy their shoes. And shoes like these weren’t available just anywhere: Barrie’s most popular lines were one-of-a-kind, made specifically for them in England and at a small family-owned company in Maine.
But Jim Fitzgerald had an idea. After 20 years as manager of J. Press down the street, he had observed Barrie’s success and knew the store’s closing would leave a retail hole worth filling. One night in November, he went out to dinner with his friend Paul Cuticello, Barrie’s long-time manager, in order to persuade him to help start a new business: a shoe business. And Paul Richard's, a new store specializing in exactly the same handmade shoes that Barrie had become known for, re-opened at the corner of York and Broadway just six months after Barrie closed.
The store’s name, a combination of Cuticello’s first name and Fitzgerald’s middle name, now appears on the loafers and moccasins custom-made by Barrie’s old suppliers. Unlike Isaacs, Cuticello and Fitzgerald have no problem with the extended store hours. The customer service is as good as ever, they say. In part, that’s because Cuticello—a New Haven shoe-selling institution in himself—is so excited about the new business that he can’t seem to tear himself away from it.
“It’s different when you’re the boss,” he says, laughing about the long hours he’s been keeping at the store. “I’m working because I want to. And I’m single, you know. So this is kind of my wife right now. Last week, I washed all the windows.”
Yale’s Newton is also thrilled about Paul Richard's, and in more ways than one. Certainly, he’s happy to have a “lively, vibrant, and accessible” store on “arguably the best corner in that district.” But also, now he won’t have to find a new place to buy his shoes.
“I grew up in New Haven,” says Newton. “So I started buying my shoes there [at Barrie] when I was 12 or 13. And I’m 55. I’m wearing a pair right now.”
Teaching Nonprofits to Make a Buck
by Lauren Kern
There’s an interesting idea sweeping the nonprofit sector: profits. Many nonprofit organizations are launching for-profit subsidiary ventures that can help fund the parent organization. “They need resources as funding, government sources, and grants dry up,” explains Stanley Garstka, deputy dean at the School of Management. But starting a business is risky. “A lot of nonprofit people approach the marketplace from the perspective of needs,” says Garstka. “And when you’re in the for-profit world, you’re dealing more with wants than with needs. So we’ve got to help them.”
Thus was born the Yale School of Management-Goldman Sachs Foundation Partnership on Nonprofit Ventures. Founded in 2001 with $6 million from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Goldman Sachs Foundation, the partnership runs an annual business plan competition designed to educate and support nonprofits. This year, 551 nonprofits competed for four grand prizes of $100,000 each, four runner-up prizes of $25,000, and hundreds of hours of free consulting. (For a complete list of winners, go to www.ventures.yale.edu.)
Twenty finalists worked with SOM students and professional consultants to revise their business plans and prepare presentations for a panel of judges at a May conference in New York City.
Along with the students, some 500 SOM alumni provided feedback to competition entrants. Garstka, who is co-faculty director of the partnership along with SOM professor Sharon Oster, calls such involvement “a phenomenal boon to the school.”
But to the finalists, winning mattered too. At the three-hour awards ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton, every speech and every new food course was met with quiet groans from anxious finalists dying to know their fates. Once the winners were finally announced, cell phones began buzzing and cries of “We won! We won!” relayed the news to supporters back home and student-consultants in New Haven.
“It’s like a blessing,” says Michael Gurau, whose community venture capital fund won a grand prize. “You get the mark of Yale and Goldman Sachs and Pew, and people say, ‘They can’t be that stupid. They must be doing something right.’”
Eyes on the Street
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Wherever Yale goes, remarked New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. a few years ago, it improves the surrounding area. The main area Yale where hadn’t yet gone when he said that was the neighborhood northwest of the Grove Street Cemetery, where residents and Yale students have often felt unsafe. (A graduate student was hit in the head with a brick on Mansfield Street this spring.)
But in April, the university broke ground on the Rose Center, a new campus police headquarters at Ashmun and Lock streets that will incorporate a community center. The design, by Boston architect William Rawn '65, puts the police dispatchers in a glass-enclosed room right up at the sidewalk, where they will be a visible presence 24 hours a day.
Rawn credits Secretary Linda Lorimer '77JD with the idea of putting the dispatchers out front. “It always seemed to me unfortunate that our dispatchers, who are there 24/7, don’t have contact with the community at large,” says Lorimer. “And as we now have students who are seemingly up all hours of the night, heading home from a science lab or a party on Mansfield Street, this building can provide a beacon for the whole neighborhood.”
In addition to badly needed facilities for a growing police department, the building (named for donor Deborah Rose '72, '77MPH, '89PhD) will house a computer classroom for the Dixwell-Yale Learning Center and a meeting room for community groups. “The Yale police have adopted community policing,” says Rawn, “and the building takes that philosophy a half-step further and welcomes the community to the police station.” Says Lorimer, “We wanted something with a sense of hospitality.”  |
