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More aid for low-income students
May/June 2005
by Melinda Tuhus
Declaring that “we want to attract the most promising students from all economic backgrounds to Yale,” President Richard Levin in early March unveiled major changes in undergraduate financial aid. Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw says Yale will now be able to compete “head to head” on financial aid with any top-tier university in the nation. That includes Harvard and Princeton, which in the past few years have greatly reduced or eliminated the financial contributions required of students and parents from low-income families.
Beginning with the 2005-06 academic year, families with incomes below $45,000 will no longer have to pay anything toward their children’s Yale education. This is a switch from Levin’s earlier policy. “In my view,” he told the Yale Alumni Magazine last June, “families ought to have a stake, however small, in their children’s education.” But Levin says he changed course when Harvard was able to attract a large number of low-income student applications after making a similar policy change last year.
Levin also announced several other new financial policies for Yale College. Families with incomes between $45,000 and $60,000 will pay significantly less in the future than they do now. The university will increase its outreach to prospective students in low-income communities. Yale will now underwrite the cost of a trip home for international students in each of their four undergraduate years, instead of just once. (Earlier this year, the administration also announced a new program to help financial-aid students fund a summer internship or study program abroad.)
Student activists who pushed for the reforms believe that their occupation of the admissions office in February hastened the changes, which Levin announced a week later. But Shaw says the announcement was simply the culmination of several months of conversations with interested parties, including the Yale College Council.
Yale meets the financial needs of all students admitted, through a combination of outright grants, loans, and part-time work. Around 40 percent of undergraduates qualify for need-based scholarship grants from Yale. But members and supporters of the Undergraduate Organizing Committee (UOC), which spearheaded the February protest, say the jobs and loans are too burdensome a part of the equation. While lauding the announced changes, the group wants another change: a reduction in the student self-help portion of financial aid.
Myra Smith, director of financial aid services, says undergraduates on financial aid work an average of six hours a week. But she acknowledges that this figure reflects only on-campus jobs set up through her office. Phoebe Rounds '07, a UOC member, says she is one of many students who’ve had to work 15 or even 20 hours a week, often at off-campus jobs. “No one’s arguing it’s a bad thing to have a job,” she says, “but more than ten hours a week really cuts into other experiences students could have.”
Will other financial aid reforms follow? “It’s final for this year,” says Dean Shaw. But he added that the university’s financial aid policies are reviewed annually.
Nobelist loses to Yale in lawsuit
by Kate Moran '02
In the 1980s, Yale chemical engineering professor John Fenn '40PhD developed a new technique for analyzing large, complex biological molecules. His discovery revolutionized the use of mass spectrometry, propelled the development of new drugs and tools for diagnosing cancer, and earned him a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in chemistry. But that breakthrough also led to a dispute that may cost him a million dollars, now that a judge has ruled that Fenn defrauded Yale of its share in the patent.
In February, U.S. District Judge Christopher Droney found that Fenn willfully skirted the university’s policy on intellectual property by patenting the invention himself and then licensing it to a private company, Analytica, which he founded with a former graduate student. The judge told Fenn to pay Yale $545,000 in royalties and penalties and another $500,000 for the university’s legal fees.
The dispute originated in 1989, not long after Yale required Fenn to accept mandatory retirement and a smaller lab space. When the university inquired about Fenn’s invention, he suggested it was of little scientific and commercial value. Yale, relying on his assessment, did not act on its right to pursue a patent. Fenn meanwhile filed a patent application on his own.
Yale discovered the situation in 1993, when a private company traced the invention to the university and requested the right to license it. Fenn refused to turn the patent over to Yale, so the university entered into its own licensing agreement with Analytica. Fenn sued; Yale countersued.
Thomas Conroy, a university spokesman, said Yale repeatedly tried to settle the dispute out of court. “Yale has the utmost respect and admiration for Professor Fenn’s scholarship and research achievements,” Conroy says. “It was important, however, for the university to have its reasonable patent policy applied.”
Judge Droney criticized Fenn harshly, characterizing his actions as fraud and embezzlement. Court documents show that Fenn was intimately familiar with the university’s stance on intellectual property: he twice served on panels that reviewed the policy.
Fenn, who now works at Virginia Commonwealth University, did not answer calls or e-mails to his office in Virginia seeking comment. After the judge’s decision in February, however, he told the Hartford Courant that he will probably appeal the federal court’s decision.
Cornell fund-raiser tapped as VP
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
As Yale prepares to launch a major capital campaign next year, it has commissioned a seasoned general to lead the fight. But don’t try those martial metaphors on Inge Reichenbach, who was appointed vice president for development in April. “I don’t know where those military terms come from,” Reichenbach says with a laugh. “I don’t see fund-raising that way. I see it as a much gentler process.”
Reichenbach comes to Yale from Cornell, where she has been vice president for alumni affairs and development for ten years. She first went to Cornell in 1978 and has worked in development there ever since, except for short stints at Colonial Williamsburg and Wesleyan University. From 1988 to 1995 she led Cornell’s last capital campaign, which raised $1.5 billion.
Yale has already begun the preliminary phase of its campaign, but the timing and financial goal have not yet been made public. “I look very much forward to the upcoming campaign,” she says. “It’s a wonderful way of involving new people and reaching out to a younger generation of alumni.” But Reichenbach, whose department raised $386 million for Cornell last year (Yale collected $265 million), says that even when a university is not mounting a campaign, it should act as though it is. “At Cornell,” she says, “we ended the campaign with a billion and a half, and in the next seven years we raised another three billion dollars.”
Reichenbach, 57, is a native of Germany who studied philology at the University of Heidelberg. She succeeds Charles Pagnam, who resigned in October and is now senior vice president for development at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. Associate Vice President Joan O'Neill served as acting vice president in the interim.
Yale chips in for the city
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
On April 12, President Levin and New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. stood at the foot of East Rock to announce an agreement under which Yale will raise its annual voluntary contribution to the city to $4.18 million, an 80 percent increase. At the same time, DeStefano announced that three other local institutions will begin making voluntary contributions.
Since 1991, Yale has made an annual contribution equal to 6 percent of the city’s fire budget, or $2.3 million this year. But DeStefano approached the university last year about increasing its contribution and adopting a new formula that could also be applied to other local nonprofits. “We thought it was an important step forward in our relations with the city,” says Yale vice president Bruce Alexander '65.
Starting next year, Yale will pay the city $250 a year for each full-time employee and resident student. The Hospital of Saint Raphael will contribute $100,000 next year, and two New Haven-based charitable foundations, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Community Foundation of New Haven, have pledged $61,000 and $25,000, respectively. The mayor’s office says negotiations are continuing with Yale–New Haven Hospital, the city’s second-largest nonprofit.
The request for such contributions is DeStefano’s response to budget problems related to the state’s tax structure. “In this state, so dependent on property taxes,” said DeStefano at the announcement, “50 percent of the property in New Haven is exempt from taxes.” Although Connecticut has a “payment in lieu of taxes” law (PILOT), under which the state compensates cities for a portion of the tax value of its tax-exempt properties, the state legislature has cut the rate of compensation from 75 percent to 63 percent over the last five years.
In addition to its voluntary contributions, Yale is New Haven’s largest payer of property taxes, paying $3 million a year in taxes on its commercial properties. But some say the university should do more. In 2003, New Haven’s Board of Aldermen passed a resolution calling on Yale to make up the difference between the tax value of its exempt properties and the state’s PILOT payment—about $12 million at the time.
Seeing stars on Prospect Hill
by Cynthia Wolfe Boynton
Far below Yale’s Farnam Memorial Gardens, nighttime constellations of headlights, streetlights, and dim windows shine across the city. But it’s the lights shining above that people are now coming to see at Yale’s new student observatory on clear evenings.
The public viewing nights began in 2000 at the student observatory atop Pierson-Sage Garage. In 2003, when renovations on the garage began, the new observatory was built. It will be dedicated in May as the Leitner Family Observatory.
The stars draw anywhere from 5 to 75 people every first and third Thursday of the month. At these free public viewing nights, graduate and undergraduate students of astronomy give students, professors, kids, and all other comers a close-up look at stars, planets, and galaxies. They use a collection of telescopes. The largest is a historic hundred-year-old Reed eight-inch refractor telescope that Yale astronomy students spent more than a year restoring.
“The seasons have a lot of say in what stars we can and can’t see, but we never have a strict agenda,” says graduate student Hugh Crowl, who has served as viewing coordinator for several years. “We’re happy to take a look at whatever our visitors want to see.”
On March 3, star clusters in the Perseus constellation and the crystal-clear rings of Saturn have visitors oohing and aahing as they look through the huge telescopes in the observatory’s two rotating domed towers. Even outside on the grass, visitors are pointing and staring at the bright, white Pleiades star cluster.
“I never get tired of looking at stars, and it’s neat when you can share your enthusiasm,” says Meredith Hughes '05, an astronomy major and copresident of the undergraduate Society for Telescopes and Astronomical Research and Recreation at Yale (STARRY). “It’s amazing what you can see with a telescope even from downtown New Haven.”
Also amazing is the zeal some people bring to the 90-minute viewings. This time of year—when stars in the Scorpius, Libra, and Hercules constellations are among those most visible—visitors often bring picnics, blankets, and lawn chairs to the gardens. “It’s great when families come,” Crowl says. “It can be a lovely night out.”
GESO stages a kinder, gentler strike
by Melinda Tuhus
As undergraduates attended their last week of spring classes—and as more than a thousand admitted students visited the campus for the Bulldog Days recruiting event—the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) staged a five-day teaching assistants' strike beginning April 18. GESO officials said that 250 TAs in the humanities and the social sciences, about half those currently teaching, participated in the strike. (GESO no longer includes graduate students in the sciences, whose support for unionization has traditionally been weakest, in its organizing efforts.)
Strikers hit the streets on Monday after an Old Campus rally featuring Connecticut secretary of state Susan Bysiewicz '83 and state attorney general Richard Blumenthal '73JD. U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro voiced her support at a lunchtime rally that day, and on Thursday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson addressed a GESO rally on Cross Campus. But despite the demonstrations, the strike was far less disruptive than recent strikes by the university’s clerical, technical, service, and maintenance workers. “The picket lines, as they’ve been envisioned, are not going to be hard and fast picket lines,” GESO organizer David Huyssen told the Yale Daily News before the strike began. “Our goal is certainly not to keep people out of the buildings.”
Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said on the strike’s fourth day that “there’s been a very minimal impact on undergraduate education. All courses are meeting this week, and only a few lecture courses—fewer than ten, in fact—have had discussion sections that didn’t meet as scheduled.” Professors and other graduate students covered some of the strikers' classes.
Ten undergraduates interviewed on Cross Campus on the third day of the strike said that some TAs who supported the strike had moved their classes outside or covered extra material in advance of the strike. But of the ten, only one had had a class canceled. “I have a TA who’s in GESO, but she’s not striking,” said senior Marisa Benoit. “Nobody I know has been too disrupted as far as their TAs not showing up or trying to reschedule.”
The decision to strike was made at a GESO meeting on April 13, after President Levin did not respond to an ultimatum by the group to recognize them as a union. GESO officials said that 82 percent of teaching assistants who attended the meeting voted to strike, but they would not say how many TAs had participated in the vote.
Since the National Labor Relations Board ruled last year that TAs at private universities do not have the right to organize, voluntary recognition by Yale appears to be GESO’s only chance. But Levin maintains that graduate teachers are students, not workers, and that a union would interfere with the mentoring relationship between graduate students and their professors.
In addition to the right to organize, the strikers said they are seeking family health care and child care benefits, pay equity across academic disciplines, and a grievance procedure that includes mediation by an independent third party. The university argues that its financial package for graduate students is attractive, with free tuition, health insurance for individual students, and an annual stipend starting at $18,000.  |
