Displaced by Katrina, Students Land at Yale
by Adrian Brune
November/December 2005
As Hurricane Katrina loomed off the Gulf Coast on August 29, with the eye of the storm dead set on New Orleans, Tulane University junior Isaac Riisness was helping several freshmen move into their new dorms. Within an hour of his arrival, he got word from university officials: drop the freshmen’s boxes in the rooms and go. Riisness, a native of southern Louisiana, jumped in his mother’s car with a few of his own belongings and headed north.
And kept going. Riisness became one of 11 undergraduates—ten from Tulane and one from the University of New Orleans—who were enrolled as special students at Yale after their semester was suspended by the country’s deadliest natural disaster in decades. “Katrina was hell, and if I could, I’d still be in New Orleans,” says Riisness, whose family’s home in Mandeville, Louisiana, was damaged in the storm. “But Yale was a great opportunity to come out of it.”
When President Richard Levin decided to accept Gulf Coast student evacuees, the Yale College Dean’s Office set up a provisional admissions process that required applicants to submit transcripts and standardized test scores, but not essays and letters of reference. Yale is covering the full cost of their tuition and will not seek any reimbursement from Tulane or the University of New Orleans. Fifteen students from graduate and professional schools on the Gulf Coast are also studying this term at Yale, in the law, management, drama, public health, graduate, and medical schools.
Besides making room for displaced students, Yale is also helping to raise funds for Katrina’s victims. The School of Music and an undergraduate group held benefit concerts, and the university coordinated the collection of donations from students, faculty, and staff—offering to match gifts of up to $1,000 with personal funds pledged by the deans, officers, and trustees. As of October 13, the effort had raised more than $270,000, with 1,098 people contributing. Senior Sarah Stillman donated her $5,000 prize from an essay contest sponsored by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
Though Riisness says that September was “the most stressful month of my life,” he has found New Haven and its inhabitants “very nice and very accommodating,” and he has developed a kinship with his displaced brethren. With a little help from Yale and some money allotted to him through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he found a furnished apartment just off Chapel Street that he is sharing with three other transplants. But Tulane is expected to reopen its doors in January, and Riisness plans on being there.
$30 Million Bequest for Law School
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
An alumnus who headed one of New York’s most prestigious law firms and advised Governor Nelson Rockefeller has left more than $30 million to the Law School. The bequest by Oscar M. Ruebhausen ’37LLB, who died last December at the age of 92, is one of the largest in the history of legal education, says Law School dean Harold Koh.
Ruebhausen’s bequest is divided into four parts: an endowed professorship, to which Professor Roberta Romano has been appointed; a visiting-fellows program that has already brought Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel, among others, to campus; a fund named for Ruebhausen’s late wife Zelia that supports student organizations and publications; and a broader fund that has so far been used for fellowships, the school’s hurricane relief law project, and other initiatives.
Ruebhausen spent his career at Debevoise & Plimpton, where he was presiding partner from 1972 to 1981. He served as president of the New York City bar association and headed up the Law School’s annual fund. “He was an extraordinary person who exemplifies what we’d like our graduates to be,” says Koh. “His career shows that by working in private practice you can nevertheless advance the public interest.”
University to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions
by Christine Woodside
Yale plans to build a million square feet of new building space over the next 15 years. Can it possibly cut its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 57 percent over the same period? Yale environment professors teach that you can build while protecting nature, but the university has never forged its own major sustainability project—until now.
On October 11, President Rick Levin announced that by 2020, Yale would reduce emissions by 10 percent below what they were in 1990. The commitment, which matches a goal set by the Connecticut General Assembly last year, was one of two requests made in early September by the Yale Energy Task Force, a group of administrators and students formed by the university’s new Office of Sustainability. Yale did not agree to the committee’s other goal, to buy 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2010. Nevertheless, “this latest initiative pretty much puts Yale on top of the heap, for the moment,” says Adam Markham of Clean Air-Cool Planet, a nonprofit group that assists universities and corporations with greenhouse gas reduction. “Other universities have set targets, but the primary difference is that Yale has a strategic plan to meet those targets.”
In an e-mail to the university community announcing the decision, Levin, provost Andrew Hamilton, and vice president for finance and administration John Pepper cited the warnings of Yale’s environment school dean, Gus Speth, about the consequences of global warming. They wrote, “Yale recognizes the need to respond to and prepare for the unprecedented circumstances that we face with respect to energy production, consumption, and related carbon emissions.”
In the midst of a building boom, Yale has agreed to reduce greenhouse gases from about 255,000 metric tons (the current level) to 146,700 metric tons (10 percent below the 1990 level). The task will be all the more difficult because in many renovations already completed, the university did not make energy-saving technology a priority. According to the Energy Task Force, Timothy Dwight College’s total energy use increased by 70 percent after its 2003 renovation, which finished off the attic and basement and added air conditioning.
Yale will try to meet the challenge on several fronts. Thomas B. Downing Jr., energy manager in the systems engineering department, says the university is studying wind patterns in the Yale-Myers Forest in northeastern Connecticut with the hope of erecting a wind turbine there, and the university is planning to install a 40-kilowatt solar photovoltaic array on a Divinity School dormitory. Conservation will play a role, too. Individual buildings are expected to cut their energy use by 10 to 15 percent over three years. The university will install motion-sensor lights in common areas, switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, and provide college-wide incentives to encourage students to turn down the heat and turn off computers and lights.
Julie Newman, who came to Yale last year as the first director of the Office of Sustainability, could not say how much the emissions-reduction program will cost. But she says that energy savings will fund much of the later work.
Greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels are mostly carbon dioxide but include methane, nitrous oxides and sulfur oxide. They trap heat in the atmosphere, and most scientists implicate them in the rise in the average yearly temperature of the planet since the mid-1800s.
Until now, Yale has not been considered a leader in its environmental performance. “I had been watching other universities take modest steps on climate and was worrying that Yale was falling behind,” says Speth. “But with this initiative, Yale has jumped into the front ranks of American universities.”
Prof Says he was Targeted for his Politics
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Can being an anarchist get you fired from the Yale faculty? David Graeber thinks so. Graeber, an untenured associate professor of anthropology, says his appointment wasn’t renewed last spring because of his political activism. He has asked Yale to have a faculty committee review the decision.
Graeber says that at his third-year review in 2001, the message was “you’re doing fine.” But during a sabbatical, he became more involved with anti-globalization street actions like those that disrupted world trade meetings in Seattle and Genoa. Afterwards, he says, “people in the department wouldn’t even say hello.”
Only about 20 percent of Yale junior faculty are promoted to tenure; the rest are typically given term appointments to a maximum of ten years. What is somewhat unusual about Graeber’s case is that at his six-year review in 2004, he was given a two-year reappointment—along with a warning about habitual tardiness and the need to do more committee work—instead of the standard four. Graeber says he had worked to address the faculty’s concerns and expected to be reappointed for two more years last spring. But the senior faculty decided not to renew his appointment, making this year his last at Yale. Although no reason was given for the decision, Graeber concluded that his politics were the problem.
As with all personnel matters, neither faculty nor administrators will comment on the case. But deputy provost Charles Long says the criteria for appointments are “quality of scholarship, effectiveness of teaching, and contributions to the academic community. Religious and political views are not appropriate criteria.” Historian Gaddis Smith, who has studied similar controversies, says a candidate’s politics are rarely discussed. “What people might be thinking and leaving unsaid—who knows?” says Smith. “What complicates this is the confidentiality of the process, which essentially means that no one can refute someone’s charge that the faculty was biased.”
Graeber’s supporters, including more than 30 graduate students in anthropology, say he is an excellent teacher and productive scholar. Noted MIT professor Noam Chomsky has expressed his support. Maurice Bloch, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, wrote to the Yale faculty of his “amazement and disbelief” at Graeber’s termination, calling him “the best anthropological theorist of his generation.”
In late October, Graeber and the provost’s office were attempting to resolve the matter informally.
Alumni Director Picked for Admissions Post
by Jennifer Kaylin
As getting into college becomes increasingly competitive—intensely so at elite institutions like Yale—the position of college admissions director has become a hot seat. Admissions directors must answer for their colleges’ policies on controversial issues such as affirmative action, athletic admissions, and how much to favor the children of alumni. At Yale, the latest occupant of the post is Jeff Brenzel ’75, previously the executive director of the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA). Brenzel is new to the admissions field, but says he is ready for “a vigorous ongoing discussion.”
Brenzel was named dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid in early September and took over on October 10, succeeding Richard Shaw, who left last summer to become admissions dean at Stanford University. (Longtime director of undergraduate admissions Margit Dahl ’75 served as acting director in the interim.)
“We were interested in someone with a broad understanding of the university, plus someone who had experience leading a complex organization in an imaginative way,” says Yale College dean Peter Salovey, who chaired the search committee that recommended Brenzel. As an example of Brenzel’s innovation, Salovey cited his success in attracting groups of alumni with shared experiences at Yale—African Americans, Latinos, and women from the early days of co-education, among others—back to campus for conferences specific to their interests.
Before taking the AYA job in 1998, Brenzel had held senior management positions at the National Association of Securities Dealers, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. He earned a PhD in philosophy from Notre Dame, and he teaches philosophy courses in Yale’s undergraduate Directed Studies program. (As director of the AYA, Brenzel served ex officio on the board of Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., the nonprofit that publishes this magazine.)
Salovey says Brenzel’s lack of admissions experience was not a major concern to the search committee: “The depth of experience and talent already on our senior staff allowed us more options in how we think about leadership.”
Brenzel says one of his biggest challenges will be to dispel the myth that you have to be rich to go to Yale. “I worry we’re not getting applications from top-level kids who aren’t aware that Yale is financially within their reach,” he says. It costs roughly $43,000 a year to attend Yale College, but admission is need-blind and the university offers need-based aid. Recently, Yale eliminated the parental contribution for the lowest-income families.
Yale College received nearly 19,500 applications last year and accepted only 9.7 percent—the lowest acceptance rate in the school’s history. Of those accepted, 71.3 percent said yes. Almost 33 percent of the Class of 2009 are minorities, and 14.2 percent are legacies.
As head of the AYA, Brenzel developed close ties with many alumni. Will those connections lead him to favor legacy admissions? Salovey says he doesn’t expect any changes, and Brenzel agrees. “The significance of being a child or grandchild of a Yale alum is considered to be a positive factor,” Brenzel says, “but the entire file has to meet a very high standard. Yale rejects a large number of legacy applications every year.”
Rachel Toor ’84, a former admissions officer at Duke University and author of the book Admissions Confidential, applauds Yale’s decision to look outside the pool of admissions administrators for a new dean. “There’s a professional admissions community that can get mired in doing things just because that’s the way they’ve always been done,” says Toor, who is now an independent college counselor. “An outsider could bring a critical perspective.” This is especially important at a place like Yale, she says, which has the clout to influence admissions practices across the country. “Reading applications and assembling a class is not that complicated, but there are policy decisions that are important, such as the use of SATs and affirmative action. Yale has the power to set the agenda.”
Brenzel says that this constellation of issues is one of the reasons he was attracted to the post: “The things Yale does and says have a ripple effect.”  |
