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Law faculty wins suit over military recruiting
March/April 2005
by Jennifer Kaylin
Three days before the Law School’s spring job fair was to begin, faculty and students got the news most had been hoping for: a federal judge ruled the school could refuse to assist military recruiters without fear of losing millions of dollars in federal funding.
“So we immediately disinvited them,” says Robert Burt, lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, filed in September 2003 by two-thirds of the Law School faculty against the Defense Department. The suit argues in part that when the Pentagon forces members of the Law School to assist recruiters, it prevents them from sending their message of non-discrimination, violating the school’s constitutional right to free speech. In late January, U.S. District Judge Janet Hall agreed.
Since 1978, the Law School has required recruiters wanting to participate fully in the job fair to sign a non-discrimination pledge. The military couldn’t comply because of its ban on open homosexuality—and that’s how things stood for nearly 25 years. But in 2002, the Defense Department argued that a law known as the Solomon Amendment allowed the government to withhold federal funding if recruiters weren’t accommodated, even if they hadn’t signed the pledge. With more than $300 million at stake for Yale, the Law School waived its policy and cooperated with military recruiters. The faculty sued.
Law School dean Harold Koh stresses that Yale’s policy has never kept the military from recruiting Yale law students. All recruitment takes place in off-campus hotel rooms, and students are free to meet on campus with anyone they choose. What is at issue, Koh says, is whether the school should be forced to assist military recruiters by using its computer database to match students with recruiters and schedule interviews. “If we help an employer who discriminates,” Koh says, “what message does that send our students? It will nullify the anti-discriminatory message we teach in the classroom.”
Not true, says James Blacklock '05JD, chair of the Yale Law Republicans. He notes that during the three recruiting seasons when the military was allowed to participate, the campus was plastered with anti-military signs, a protest march was held, and Koh sent e-mails reaffirming the school’s commitment to non-discrimination. “If JAG’s [Judge Advocate General’s Corps] presence had any effect,” Blacklock says, “it was to strengthen the school’s message, not confuse it.”
Blacklock, who interviewed with JAG in the spring of 2003 and is keeping it in mind as a job possibility, says the Law School should make an exception to its anti-discrimination policy for the military. “The military needs the brightest lawyers it can get, now more than ever,” he says, “and it needs them a lot more than law firms need another document proofreader.”
But what if that brightest lawyer is gay? “It’s wrong that a classmate who is incredibly qualified for a job would be treated differently because of his or her sexual orientation,” says Rebecca Tinio '06JD, who belongs to a student group that filed a similar free-speech lawsuit this fall. A Defense Department spokeswoman wouldn’t comment, saying the decision is under review.
Lawsuits filed by other law schools have also been successful, but in December the government asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a case won by a consortium of law schools. “We don’t expect this is over, but for now we’re very happy,” says Burt.
New building planned for cancer center
by Marc Wortman
Over the course of her treatment, a breast cancer patient typically needs care from at least four separate medical specialists. To see them at Yale, she needs to come ready to walk: her treatment may require visits to as many as six different medical center locations. “You want patients to get one-stop clinical care for all their cancer needs,” says Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center (YCCC) director Richard Edelson, “and you want physicians working in adjacent areas so they can interact easily. We haven’t been in a position to offer that.” That will be possible for the first time with the consolidation of all YCCC clinical services in a massive new Yale–New Haven Hospital building slated to open in the fall of 2008.
The $430 million, 14-story building, planned for the site of the former Grace building at 25 Park Street, would be by far the hospital’s largest building project in its 179-year history. The new 500,000-square-foot structure will accommodate 112 in-patient beds, outpatient treatment rooms, diagnostic imaging services, expanded operating rooms, infusion suites, and one floor for radiation oncology services.
But the project must first win several approvals from the city, a process that could become politicized as the Service Employees International Union intensifies its campaign to organize hospital employees. Yale–New Haven (which is separate from the university but closely affiliated with it in operations and through its board members) says that it is open to its employees voting on unionization, but only under National Labor Relations Board rules; the SEIU, which wants an election in which the hospital agrees not to try to “influence or interfere with” the process, has begun advertising heavily in the region to criticize Yale–New Haven’s lack of a union. The campaign may make it more difficult for the hospital to secure a go-ahead for the Cancer Center from the city.
Yale’s reputation in cancer work goes back many years. In 1974 it became one of the nation’s first Comprehensive Cancer Centers, a designation from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for medical schools supporting an exceptional combination of basic, clinical, and prevention and control research. Receiving more than $120 million annually in outside grant support for its research, the YCCC remains one of only 39 NCI-designated centers in the country and the only one in Connecticut. While Yale is widely recognized for its research unraveling the biological mechanisms of cancer, the YCCC’s reputation as a clinical center has languished. This is due in part, according to School of Medicine dean Robert Alpern, to the center’s scattered, outmoded, and crowded facilities, which the NCI has urged Yale to improve. “Our facilities,” says Alpern, “are just not optimal. This new cancer center will help make our success more well rounded.”
“We don’t intend to rival the best-known cancer centers in total patient populations,” explains Edelson, “but we do intend to be the elite cancer center in translating scientific discoveries into new treatments.”
As part of the medical school’s expanding investment in advancing new therapies, Yale has begun a recruitment drive to add more than 20 new faculty members in cancer care research. Several of them will be associated with the multidisciplinary Women’s Cancer Center, comprising the Breast Center and the GYN Cancer Center. “A breast cancer patient will finally be able to get all of her cancer care in a single location,” says Alpern. “This is the way cancer care needs to be practiced.”
But the road ahead is not clear. Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said in January that “failure to resolve [the labor issue] is going to create a severe impairment to moving the Cancer Center forward.”
Student pop star sings for Sri Lanka
by Christopher Arnott
Ranidu Lankage '05 had long been scheduled to play the January 21 kickoff concert of Yale’s first annual Winter Arts Festival. But after a tsunami devastated his home country of Sri Lanka, the concert was redesignated a benefit for disaster relief, and Lankage’s presence took on new meaning.
Lankage, an economics major and varsity squash player, has become a pop star in Sri Lanka only since enrolling at Yale. His first album had yielded a hit ballad, “Obamagemai,” but it was the dance remix of “Ahankara Nagare,” from his second album, All My Life, that has earned him international airplay and club fame. Lankage shuttles between his Yale studies and his career. “I have to go back every break,” he says. “I’m kind of living two lives. Here, I’m a student, an athlete. There, I play the role of an artist.”
Lankage’s own family was affected by the tsunami. “My father’s village has been completely wiped out,” he says. “My uncles got away with their lives, but they lost a lot of their possessions.” He says the tragedy has given him a sense of obligation. “I owe it to the people of Sri Lanka to come back and do something for them—do a charity concert, rebuild a village.”
Lankage played at the end of the concert, which featured several other campus acts. He sat down at a grand piano and said, “I was back home in Sri Lanka when it hit. I saw a lot of things that were unimaginable.” He then played two original soft pop songs about love and longing. His soothing voice and flowing New Age playing style calmed the crowd. “You went away,” he sang, “and left a hole in my life. Why did you do me wrong like that? Why did you go away?”
Committee calls for changes in religious life
by Tim Townsend '04MAR
A committee of religious and educational leaders, charged by President Rick Levin with considering “ways to strengthen the growing expressions of religious and spiritual life within the university,” reported its findings and recommendations in December. While the committee addressed a number of issues concerning how Yale responds to the religious diversity of its students and faculty, one particular recommendation has sparked a controversy within Yale’s oldest religious community.
The University Council Committee on Religious Life calls for Yale to sever its official ties to the United Church of Christ (UCC), the denomination once known as the Congregational church. Yale’s chapel service has been tied to Congregationalism since 1757, when the Church of Christ in Yale was founded. That congregation, which today is made up of members of both the university and New Haven communities, meets in Battell Chapel on Sunday mornings with the university chaplain as its pastor.
University secretary and vice president Linda Koch Lorimer '77JD says that Yale has to become more supportive of an increasingly diverse religious student body. She says that both the Slifka Center for Jewish Life and St. Thomas More Catholic Center have become models over the last decade on how to engage “worship, programs, and fellowship” and stresses the need for similar support for Muslim and Hindu students, among others. The committee—which included John Bryson Chane '71MDiv, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C.; and Leo O'Donovan, former president of Georgetown University—calls for Yale to create more and better physical space for religious observance and to have more religious diversity in the chaplain’s office.
At the same time, Lorimer says, “we do need to support our historical base of Protestant worship.” The committee recommends establishing a new associate chaplain’s position to expand programming for the Protestant community. In order that students from different Protestant traditions will feel welcome, the report calls for public worship at Battell to “become clearly ecumenical and not be linked to any one Protestant denomination.”
The Church of Christ in Yale will be dissolved if Levin acts on the recommendation, a prospect that angers some of its members. “The current congregation are folks who are there not just because Battell is the university chapel, but because it’s a UCC chapel,” said Dianne Davis '72MSN, moderator of the church. While the church’s members would still be welcome at Battell, they would no longer be part of an autonomous congregation.
While the dispute with the Battell congregation does not appear to be settled, the Rev. Frederick J. Streets, University Chaplain, has said he expects the suggestions of the committee will begin to be implemented by July 1.
Teaching assistants, sans scientists, back a union
by Alejandra O'Leary '04
In May 2003, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) at Yale suffered a blow when, in a non-binding referendum, graduate students voted 694-651 against forming a union. But in a voluntary card count late last year, a majority of participating students opted in favor of unionization. The difference? A redefined pool that includes only graduate and professional students who are currently teaching undergraduates—and excludes graduate students in the sciences.
On December 14, GESO announced that 315 out of 521, or about 60 percent, of eligible professional students and graduate students in languages, the humanities, and the social sciences had signed cards agreeing to form a union. In the fall of 2004, there were 2,590 total graduate students studying at Yale, approximately 2,100 of them PhD candidates.
GESO spokesperson Emma Ross, a graduate student in the history of art, says it made sense to vote without the scientists, especially since funding structures and relationships with professors are different for scientists. “After the 2003 election it was established that the science students didn’t want or weren’t ready for a union,” says Ross, “and we decided that we weren’t going to let that hold back the grad students who do want a union.”
But even with a majority of all graduate students, forming a union would be impossible without Yale’s support. In July 2004, the National Labor Relations Board reversed a 2000 decision allowing graduate students at private universities to organize without their schools' assent. Yale spokesman Tom Conroy says that the GESO vote does not change Yale’s long-held position against graduate student unions. “To transform the faculty-student relationship to one of manager-employee would, in the university’s view, harm that relationship,” Conroy said.
Scandal claims SOM prof
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
School of Management professor Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, who headed the school’s International Institute for Corporate Governance, has resigned over what university spokesman Tom Conroy called “financial misconduct and irregularities.” Lopez-de-Silanes, a tenured professor, is on unpaid leave until June 30, when his resignation takes effect.
The university would not comment any further on the nature of the misconduct. It was widely reported in the media that Lopez-de-Silanes had double-billed the university for around $150,000 in travel expenses, but sources familiar with the case have since said that the amount was greater. Lopez-de-Silanes is also under investigation by the World Bank, which had awarded him consulting contracts.
“I made a mistake, and I deeply regret any unintended harm,” Lopez-de-Silanes said in a prepared statement. “I have taken appropriate corrective steps with all affected parties, and I can offer no excuse except the intensity of my focus on my work.” Lopez-de-Silanes’s resignation obviates the need for the university to begin the protracted process of revoking his tenure.
Lopez-de-Silanes, 38, was lured away from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2001 to found the institute. As its director, he traveled around the world advising governments and private corporations on corporate structures and policies.
The irony of an adviser on corporate governance resigning in a financial scandal was not lost on the media, especially given SOM’s reputation for teaching business ethics. But Douglas Rae, a professor at SOM and in the political science department, says he thinks that Yale’s swift response to the problem will avoid damage to the school’s reputation. “The school—and the university—responded intelligently and vigorously,” says Rae.
Deputy Dean Stanley Garstka says that the School plans to retain the International Institute for Corporate Governance. “We are looking to get new leadership and continue its work,” says Garstka.
A passage to India
With more than 60 Yale projects under way in China, the university has now begun to seek academic partnerships with the world’s second-largest country. In January, President Rick Levin led a delegation of Yale faculty, administrators, and trustees on a trip to India, where they kicked off three new collaborative programs and met with academic and political leaders.
Yale officials say the trip was intended to raise the university’s profile in South Asia. “India is rapidly emerging as a global economic and political power, and our students and faculty are increasingly interested in working and studying in the region,” said Levin.  |
