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Law School Panel Ponders the President’s Future
December 1998
Like parents asking “Where did we go wrong?” a panel of seven Law School professors met in the School’s packed auditorium on September 24 to consider the fate of alumnus Bill Clinton '73JD. While the discussion revealed almost as many ways of looking at the President’s recurrent troubles as there were participants, the professors all decried the President’s “lawyerly” semantic hairsplitting over his relationship
with Monica Lewinsky.
“I worry that we’re teaching you that the Constitution means whatever you can make it mean,” said Kate Stith, the Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law. But Dean Anthony Kronman maintained that such tactics are not necessarily the product of legal training. “I think you have to tell the truth,” Kronman told his students. “It has to be part of your professional character.”
As for the scandal’s likely outcome, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science Bruce Ackerman predicted that Clinton would survive an impeachment inquiry. “This is not a constitutional crisis,” said Ackerman. “This is a tempest in a teapot.” (The Yale Daily News disagreed, calling in an editorial the next day for Clinton’s resignation.)
Meanwhile, Yale University Press has released a new edition of Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law Charles L. Black Jr.’s 1974 book Impeachment: A Handbook. Widely praised at the time of its original release during the Watergate scandal, the book was written “for the citizen,” in Black’s words, as an unbiased guide to the impeachment process.
For his part, the President canceled plans to attend his 25th Law School Reunion on October 17. But the White House said the change in plans was due to the Palestinian-Israeli summit in Maryland—not annoyance with his alma mater.
First Black Graduate Gets His Due
The rise of Edward Alexander Bouchet, Class of 1874, the first African American to graduate from Yale College, is one of Yale’s favorite inspirational stories. Bouchet, whose father had come to New Haven in the 1840s as the personal slave of a Yale student, went on to receive his doctorate in physics in 1876, making him the first African American anywhere to earn a PhD degree.
But less well known are the frustrations of his life after Yale: Unable to find a job at a university despite his outstanding credentials, Bouchet spent his career as a high school teacher and administrator in the Midwest; when he retired to New Haven and died at the age of 66, he was buried without a tombstone at Evergreen Cemetary.
Thanks to the efforts of Curtis Patton, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the School of Medicine, Bouchet’s grave is now marked with a granite monument. The stone, which was paid for with contributions from a number of organizations, including the University, was unveiled at an October 17 ceremony.
Professor Patton, who says he first heard of Bouchet as a freshman at Fisk University, has encouraged the University to honor his memory since coming to Yale in 1970. It was at his urging that President Kingman Brewster commissioned the late Rudolph Zallinger’s portrait of Bouchet, which now hangs in the transept of Sterling Memorial Library. “Everyone needs a personal hero,” says Patton, “and for me it’s Bouchet.”
Getting Into Print: A Soph’s Story
On his East Coast college tour in 1996, Ohio high school senior Josh Berezin didn’t think much of Harvard, and assumed he wouldn’t think much of Yale. But something clicked when he got to New Haven. “I felt like I had fallen in love,” remembers Berezin, now a Yale sophomore. Calzones at Tony and Lucille’s clinched the deal. Now, the only question was how to get in.
Berezin’s answer to that question, devised with the help of a family friend in the publishing business, was to keep a diary of his road to college for possible publication—then write about the experience in his application essay. Last fall, Berezin became a freshman at Yale. This fall, his diary was published by Hyperion as Getting Into Yale: How One Student Wrote This Book and Got into the School of His Dreams.
Although the title suggests a how-to guide, Getting Into Yale is not full of tips for extracting good recommendations or aceing interviews. It is instead a diary of events and emotions that describes Berezin’s quest to get into Yale, as well as the frustrations and joys of football, girls, and grades. The journal culminates in the joyous entry of December 16, published with the original wordprocessor typos intact: “I got ion IO g ot uin!”
Now happily ensconced in Davenport College, Berezin says his hard work was worth it, and that getting into Yale has softened the intense drive he displays in his book. “If anything, I’m more relaxed,” he says. “I’ve found more of a balance here.”
Meanwhile, MTV has bought the rights to the book as the basis for a television movie. While details of the production have not been made public, the Yale Daily News Magazine—citing anonymous Hollywood sources—reported in October that the story has undergone a few changes. The protagonist’s name has become Flynn Kelley, and the title has been changed to—are you sitting down?—Getting Into Harvard.
Hormones Boost Female Libido
Menopause brings a number of dramatic changes in a woman’s life, and for many, one of the most troubling is a loss of sexual desire. But according to Yale researchers, a new therapy that combines both female and male hormones appears to provide a way around this problem, while at the same time offering the benefits of conventional hormone replacement therapy—reduction in the risk of both heart disease and osteoporosis.
In the October issue of the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, coinvestigators Philip Sarrel, professor of psychiatry and of obstetrics and gynecology, and Barbara Dobay, a nurse midwife at Yale University Health Services, report on a study involving 20 post-menopausal women. Half the group received estrogen alone; the other half was given a combination of estrogen and testosterone, the male hormone that women normally manufacture, but only in minuscule amounts, before menopause. (Production of both substances declines sharply during and afterwards.)
Following a study period of eight weeks, the researchers, using interviews and questionnaires, assessed sexual functioning and desire and discovered that both had markedly increased only among those women taking the combination pill, which is called Estratest and is manufactured by Solvay Pharmaceuticals. “This is a way of maintaining an active sex life in the later years,” says Dobay.
St. Thomas More Celebrates its 60th
In 1938, when the Reverend T. Lawrason Riggs '10 founded Saint Thomas More, the Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale, Catholics made up around 13 percent of the College. Today, the number is between 20 and 25 percent, and Saint Thomas More’s community has grown, expanding to include graduate and professional students, faculty and staff, and their families.
So when the Center celebrated its 60th anniversary with services and a symposium October 2-4, part of the agenda was to find room for all that growth. The Center used the occasion to kick off a five-year, $10-million capital campaign, including a $5-million building fund for a new student center and $5 million to strengthen its endowment for program expenses. The Reverend Robert L. Beloin, Saint Thomas More’s chaplain, says the capital campaign is directed at Catholic Yale alumni, and that President Levin has agreed to count gifts made to the building fund toward class and reunion gift totals.
According to Beloin, the new student center is critical to meeting the physical needs of Saint Thomas More’s program. “Instead of emphasizing the Sunday assembly, we offer small groups that discuss the week’s readings during the week,” he says. “These groups need places to meet; they’re meeting in my residence every night now.”
The celebration featured a symposium titled “The Legacy of Thomas More: Catholic Faith and Intellectual Life at the Threshold of the 21st Century.” Speakers ranged from former Law School dean Guido Calabresi, Yale professors Paul Kennedy, Bruce Russett, and Louis Dupre to National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. '50.
Tennis Tourney Defects to Austria
Seven years after the State of Connecticut built an $18-million tennis stadium near the Yale Bowl to house what became the Pilot Pen International tennis tournament, an Austrian tennis promoter has bought the tournament and will move it to Kitzbuhel, Austria, next year.
The tournament has not been financially successful in the years since it came to New Haven as the Volvo International. The Austrian group purchased it to upgrade an existing tournament to the level of a championship series event.
Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said that while the loss was regrettable, there is reason to celebrate: the Pilot Pen women’s tournament that was inaugurated immediately after this summer’s men’s tournament in August. “The women have been a lot more popular in their appearances here in New Haven,” said DeStefano.
Students Catch Swing Fever
Wander into a residential college dining hall on a Saturday night these days, and you just might see a large crowd of undergraduates doing the Lindy, the Charleston, or the jitterbug. Along with collegians and twenty-somethings across the country, Yalies, it seems, are rediscovering swing.
A swing dancing club formed by a group of undergrads has a mailing list of 400 people, and the Payne Whitney Gymnasium is now offering two sections of swing dance classes taught by drama student Boudicca Todi. Even the venerable rock club Toad’s Place—in a development that must be music to the ears of its neighbors at Mory’s—has been having monthly swing nights this fall.
A number of recent movies and a widely admired television commercial for the Gap have helped promote the swing revival, which includes a set of new swing bands with names like Squirrel Nut Zippers and Indigo Swing.
“I went to Roseland in New York to hear Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and the place was full of people in zoot suits and fedoras or twirly skirts,” says Catherine Price '01, who is one of the founders of the Yale Swing Club. “Of course, they also had pierced tongues and tattoos.”
Shootout Bucks Crime Trends
Students, merchants, and others near the corner of York and Chapel Streets got a scare on the afternoon of Friday, October 23, when gunfire was exchanged between two youths in groups on opposite sides of the intersection. While witnesses said that around ten shots were fired before the suspects fled the scene, no one was injured in the 15-second incident.
New Haven police arrested a 16-year-old New Haven high school student who they say admitted to being one of the shooters. He says he acted in self-defense when his group was fired on. Assistant chief Douglas MacDonald said the dispute that led to the gunplay is believed to be “between a couple of individuals with no gang affiliation.”
While crime in New Haven has dropped 30 percent since 1990, and crime on campus has followed a similar trend, the incident was the second shooting this year to shake the Yale community. In April, Medical School professor Eiji Yanagisawa was shot in the collarbone outside his York Street office in a late-night robbery.
“Down the Field” in the Big Leagues
A Yale football team going up against Michigan or Notre Dame would not be a pretty sight. But a new book suggests that Eli fans are still in the big leagues at halftime. In College Fight Songs: An Annotated Anthology, authors William Studwell and Bruce Schueneman rank the Bulldogs' “Down the Field” number four, behind the “Notre Dame Victory March,” Michigan’s “The Victors,” and “On Wisconsin.”
Studwell, a professor of library science at Northern Illinois University, says he and Schueneman looked for good, rousing songs that were suitably distinctive. And while they decided to impose a one-song-per-school rule in making the list, Studwell has a soft spot for Yale songs. “If I had to rate one university for the best fight songs,” he says, “it would be Yale,” praising “Boola Boola,” “Bulldog,” and “Bingo Eli Yale.” In fact, “Boola Boola” actually did make it to the number 16 slot, but in the guise of the University of Oklahoma’s adaptation “Boomer Sooner.”
Saybrook Master Faces Charges
A geology and geophysics professor who also served as master of Saybrook College has been charged with receiving and storing pornographic images of children on computers in his office. Antonio Lasaga turned himself in to federal authorities on November 19, two weeks after he resigned as master and took a leave of absence from his teaching duties.
FBI agents searched the Saybrook master’s house and Lasaga’s office on November 6. The agents reportedly seized two computers and numerous photographs in the search.
Lasaga was released on $50,000 bond. Each of the felony charges against him—knowingly receiving child pornography and knowingly possessing three or more images of child pornography—is punishable by a fine, a prison sentence of up to five years, or both.
Lasaga had been master of Saybook since 1996. Harry Adams, a former Yale chaplain and former master of Trumbull College, has stepped in as master of Saybrook.  |
