 |
||
 |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
|
Cheers and jeers over Chinese president’s visit From the choice of Sprague Hall as the official staging ground to the Chinese folk music performed as a prelude, everything about the visit of China’ President Hu Jintao to Yale on April 21 was carefully orchestrated. But not everything went smoothly, despite significant enthusiasm among many in the Yale community. Crowds began to assemble around the campus and downtown early on the morning of Hu’s visit. Buses brought hundreds of demonstrators, who jockeyed for places where they and the signs they were holding might be seen by the Chinese leader. Many in the crowd were there to cheer Hu, but many others were followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, protesting alleged persecution of their group in China. Security was tight: a four-block area around Sprague Hall was cordoned off by local police and the Secret Service, and those with tickets for Hu’s speech had to pass through two security checkpoints. During the first event of the visit, a gift exchange with Yale president Rick Levin, Yale officials removed a CNN producer for asking Levin a question about the demonstrators. (Helaine Klasky, director of the Office of Public Affairs, says journalists had agreed not to ask questions during the exchange.) And when Hu’s car pulled away at the end of his visit, more than a thousand protesters, many from the Free Tibet movement, had moved from their designated spot on the Green to the corner of Grove and College streets, to make sure he saw them. “Any time Yale invites a dictator to campus, there should be an outcry,” said Charles Alvarez ’09, the chapter organizer of Students for a Free Tibet. At the gift exchange, Levin presented Hu with a copy of a portrait of Yung Wing, Class of 1854, the first Chinese citizen to earn a degree from Yale. Hu gave Yale 1,346 books about Chinese culture. In Sprague, before 600 invited students and faculty, Levin praised China’s commitment to education and economic growth, adding that “we are hopeful that the development of your economy will be accompanied by continued expansion of the rule of law and strengthening of the rights of individuals.” For his part, Hu joked that “if time could go back several decades, I would really like to be a student of Yale just like you.” (His speech was translated for the audience.) He then delivered a historical lesson on China’s progress, a discourse on its economics, and a summary of his blueprint for development. The speech was designed to reassure both America and Yale, which currently has some 80 academic initiatives in China, of the country’s rise and cautious move toward political rights. But Hu also made clear that he sets limits: “Any act that promotes ethnic harmony and national unity will receive the warm welcome and support of the Chinese people. On the other hand, any act that undermines China’s ethnic harmony and national unity will meet their strong opposition and resistance.” The visit, which was planned for the fall but postponed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, was only the second by a Chinese president to an American university. Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, spoke at Harvard in 1997. Just as quickly as the commotion had descended on campus, it was gone, with the streets cleared of demonstrators and satellite trucks within an hour. A panel that afternoon sponsored by the Law School concluded that China’s president didn?t offer much information about his future plans for the country, especially as those plans pertained to human rights. But Hu’s influence lingered. Popping up all around campus on bulletin boards, streetlights, and bus shelters at the end of the day were yellow signs featuring his likeness and four words: “I agree with Jintao.”
A reprise for music dean Second verse, same as the first—with a short solo in between. “There’s no subtext at all,” says Robert Blocker of his surprise decision to leave his position as provost of Southern Methodist University in Dallas—after less than a year on the job—and return to his former post as dean of the Yale School of Music. Blocker served as dean from 1995 to 2005 and is slated to resume in July. He understands that SMU was surely “shocked—Yale probably was too.” But his abrupt turnaround “was purely a professional decision.” And Blocker happens to be a man with two professions. He’s a skilled administrator, but he’s also an internationally touring pianist. And he has other interests. Between leaving SMU and preparing to come back to Yale, Blocker could be found in Korea, working with a translator on a Korean edition of his collection of choral director Robert Shaw’s writings. “Music has always been the compass for me,” Blocker says. “Being too far away from it was not the best thing for my life. I had high expectations for myself as a provost, as well as being a musician.” Yet he found he couldn’t do both to his standard. “Being a provost was very exhilarating, but there is only so much any one person can do.” So, contrary to public speculation, he wasn’t lured back by last year’s anonymous $100 million gift to the School of Music, a windfall that made national news and that has allowed the school to waive tuition for all its students. “If that had been a factor, I wouldn’t have left in the first place,” says Blocker, who spent years helping negotiate the gift. Meanwhile, there appear to be few hard feelings at SMU. Thomas Tunks, the new interim provost there, calls Blocker “one of my favorite people.” Blocker told the university that he wanted to return to the arts whether or not his old Yale job was open. As for returning, a lot can happen in ten months—and with $100 million. (Deputy dean Thomas Duffy served as acting dean in the interim.) “I would not presume to think that the school has stood still in my absence. The school is a very different place with the infusion of those resources.” Blocker will get to play his own piano recital this fall as part of Yale’s Horowitz Piano Series. Since, as he puts it, “I’m a different person, with the recent experiences I’ve had,” have his musical tastes shifted as well? “At the moment, I’m buried in three Mozart concerti,” he says. “What a glorious place to be! He’s one of my favorite composers. But I’m certainly aware of both the joyousness and of the grief and melancholy that often come up in the second movements.”
You say Hillel, I say halal Two sophomores talked over lunch one day this spring semester about how food can bring people together.They were sitting in the subterranean but sunny dining hall of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. One of the sophomores wore a yarmulke, the other a hijab (the Islamic head scarf). At Slifka, that’s not an unusual sight. When the New York Times Magazine ran a feature on former-Taliban-spokesman-turned-special-student Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the reporter noted that Hashemi eats at Slifka, where the kosher fare attracts not just observant Jews, but also observant Muslims, since kosher meats can satisfy halal dietary restrictions. About a half-dozen Muslim students are often found among the 90 to 200 students in the Slifka dining hall at dinner, when meals with meat are served. As a result, Slifka has become a comfortable place for Jews and Muslims to eat together—and occasionally even broach the issues that prove so divisive in other settings. Students can order a halal hot dog or hamburger at lunch or dinner in any residential college dining hall, and Commons has offered Thursday night halal dinners in conjunction with the Muslim Students Association. But Slifka’s more varied daily options are more attractive, said Iranian-born Altaf Saadi '08, a psychology and international studies major from Irvine, California. “You get sick of hot dogs and hamburgers.” But while the menu draws Muslims through the door at first, “what brings them back is not necessarily the food. The food is okay. It’s the atmosphere,” Saadi said between bites of a veggie burger and oven fries. Saadi was the sophomore in the hijab during lunch that afternoon. The yarmulke-wearing student across the table making his way through a serving of tuna lasagna was Jason Blau '08, an ethics, politics, and economics major from Deerfield, Illinois. “It’s not the specific food,” Blau agreed. “It’s not so much better than the other dining halls. It’s a safe place. When people are eating, they’re social. Slifka is a great common ground where people are comfortable eating.” Saadi and Blau became friends through co-chairing a group called Jews and Muslims at Yale (JAM), which holds its opening-year get-together at Slifka. The group, founded in 2003, organizes social outings and holds informal, low-pressure discussions about religion and about the Middle East. They meet sometimes at Slifka, sometimes in residential colleges. Their most memorable cultural exchange meals? Blau’s took place this semester, when he sat at a table with humanities major Arafat Razzaque '06. Razzaque mesmerized Blau with the tales of two twelfth-century Spanish travelers, Ibn Jubayr, a Muslim, and Benjamin of Tudela, a Jew. Razzaque’s senior essay analyzes the itineraries of the two men, both known as pioneers of travel narratives in their respective traditions. Saadi’s most memorable meal came during Hanukkah of her freshman year, when she discovered that latkes are a Jewish specialty. “We have that at our house all the time,” she said. “I thought it was Iraqi food.”
Not so fast, professor On May 23, Ian Shapiro ’83PhD, ’87JD, Sterling Professor of Political Science, was about to set off for New York City to receive an award when he got a surprising phone call: the Sidney Hillman Foundation had withdrawn its prize for his book on the estate tax. Shapiro stayed home. Shapiro and law professor Michael J. Graetz were to have been honored for Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth, a book they co-authored last year. The reversal stemmed from allegations that Shapiro had violated labor laws during a 1995 grade strike by graduate students seeking to form a union. For the Hillman Foundation, this was a problem: Sidney Hillman had been a union organizer, and the foundation is affiliated with the union UNITE HERE, backer of the organizing drive by Yale’s Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO). Foundation president Bruce Raynor told reporters that objections to the prize came from GESO alumni. Shapiro, who is generally pro-union, says he believes a graduate students' union is not in the best interest of education. The 1996 complaint against Shapiro (and several other Yale officials) was never adjudicated, because an administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled that a partial strike was not a protected action. Shapiro says that he never had a chance to hear or respond to the allegations. “I was dismayed that on the basis of secret testimony from unnamed sources, a committee like that would reverse itself,” he says. “But it’s their prize and it’s their privilege.” A judge for the prize, journalist Harold Meyerson, acknowledged that evaluating “the dancer, not the dance” was unusual. “We had no question in our minds that [the book] deserved the award,” says Meyerson, an editor at large for the American Prospect. But he said Hillman’s legacy sets an “implicit restraint” on honoring someone accused of violating labor laws. Graetz, who also lost the prize, says the imbroglio brought one compensation: the honor had already been announced in a prominent ad in the New York Times.
How to get tenure? If you have to ask … If you’re a junior faculty member, should you ask how to get tenure? One researcher says young faculty sense that the question is taboo. “It’s like not talking about money,” says Janet Jakobsen, director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Jakobsen spoke to graduate students at Yale this spring on how to succeed in the academic “rat race.” The talk was one of a series aimed at “enabling our undergraduate and graduate students to flourish in their careers,” says law professor Judith Resnik of the Women Faculty Forum. WFF—which sponsors the series along with two other Yale organizations, Graduate Career Services and Women Mentoring Women—works on promoting gender equity at Yale, among other goals. Role models and advisers like Jakobsen are part of that project. Studies show that women faculty are asked more often than men to spend time on university service tasks, said Jakobsen—committee work, editorial boards, and community outreach. This “institutional housework,” she argued, can divert young faculty from the projects that are important for tenure, such as publications and high-profile fellowships. Whether you are trying for tenure at a “one-book” university or at a “two-book place” like Yale, she told the two dozen students in the audience, “you need to understand: what does this institution value in terms of my labor?” In order to decide how to allocate their time, Jakobsen advised, young faculty members should change the taboo around tenure discussions by asking tenured professors for advice. When she was beginning her own career at the University of Arizona, her mentor advised her to divide her efforts 80-10-10, with 80 percent going to research, 10 percent to teaching, and 10 percent to university service. Jakobsen told the junior-faculty-to-be to remain true to their interests. “The best piece of advice I was given in the academy was to do what you care about most the first thing in the day.”
Committee adjusts campus drinking policies A committee of students, faculty, and administrators charged with reviewing Yale’s policy on student drinking has found room for improvement but advocates no major changes in a policy that emphasizes student safety over punishment. “We’re not going to advocate prohibition,” explains Peter Salovey, dean of Yale College and chair of the Committee on Alcohol Policy. “Fear of punishment should not be an impediment to seeking help.” Yale’s policy on underage drinking, as described in the Undergraduate Regulations, says students must abide by state and local laws and university rules—no drinking under the age of 21, no fake IDs, no kegs on Old Campus. Students who disregard these rules risk “legal prosecution by the State of Connecticut and may face disciplinary action.” In practice, though, administrators spend little time policing routine underage alcohol use. After a year of interviews with students and administrators in order to better understand the nature of campus drinking, the committee issued a report this spring with recommendations focused on increasing student safety and influencing student culture. The report called for the creation of five new apartments for faculty or staff on Old Campus, to create a permanent adult presence among freshmen; more non-alcohol-centered activities; and increased communication between student organizations and the administration. “It’s not an earth-shaking report,” says committee member and dean of student affairs Betty Trachtenberg. “But it’s doable.” |
A farewell to weenie bins It’s hard to find someone who will shed a tear for the passing of CCL—the Cross Campus Library—as we knew it. Famous as much for its leaky roof as for its sterile off-white decor (“weenie bins” were fluorescent-lit cubicles for hard-core studying), the space will be unrecognizable after a year-long renovation to fix the leaks and recast the space in the Gothic tradition of its parent, Sterling Memorial Library. But at a pizza lunch in the lobby on CCL’s last day of operation, staffers were at least a little nostalgic for the library’s youth as they looked over the empty shelves. Claire Halloran, a library services assistant who has worked in CCL since it opened, told the gathering about the day in 1971 when the staff first walked in through the tunnel from Sterling. “The glass was spotless, the aluminum was gleaming, and the black circulation desk looked like something from a science-fiction movie,” Halloran recalled. “It was like walking into the future.” But the wistful mood did not last long. A few minutes later, the crowd cheered as University Librarian Alice Prochaska put a sledgehammer through a wall to start the demolition. |
Campus Clips Confessed map thief Edward Forbes Smiley took 11 maps from Sterling Memorial Library and another 9 from the Beinecke Library, according to federal prosecutors. Smiley pled guilty to both state and federal charges on June 22; he told prosecutors that over the last eight years, he had taken 97 maps worth $3 million from seven libraries in the U.S. and Britain. Smiley is expected to go to prison for about five years. He was arrested in New Haven on June 8, 2005, after a Beinecke librarian found an X-Acto blade on the floor in a room where Smiley had been working. A new center at the School of Management will explore the role of corporate governance in a company’s success. The Yale Center for Corporate Governance and Performance, which will be directed by attorney Ira M. Millstein, is made possible by $20 million in gifts, including $10 million from David Nierenberg '75, '78JD, and his wife Patricia. Euan Blair, son of British prime minister Tony Blair, will pursue a master’s degree in international relations at Yale. British newspapers wondered aloud about whether the younger Blair deserves his full-tuition scholarship, but Yale officials said Blair’s merit award was typical for the program. The name “Yale Center for International and Area Studies” has always been something of a mouthful. Now you can call it the MacMillan Center. Yale announced in April that the center, which coordinates academic programs on international relations and on specific regions of the world, has been renamed for Whitney MacMillan '51 and his wife Betty, who have made a major gift to the center. One of Yale’s shuttle buses now runs exclusively on cooking oil salvaged from campus dining halls and converted to fuel in a Yale laboratory. The 100-percent-biodiesel bus made its debut at commencement; the rest of the shuttle fleet runs on a biodiesel blend. And no, it doesn’t smell like fish sticks. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
||
©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
||