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A Leg Up for New Haven Startups
Summer 1999
An unusual new partnership between Yale and two other local institutions is now helping New Haven-area entrepreneurs turn ideas into businesses. The Enterprise Center, a nonprofit organization funded by the University, the United Illuminating Company, and the New Haven Savings Bank, was founded this spring with a three-person staff and a mandate to improve New Haven’s economy.
“There is great power in the private sector to create jobs and strengthen the tax base,” says Yale vice president Bruce Alexander, who heads the University’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs and is chairman of the new center’s board of directors. “Economic development is one of the most important ways the University can affect its environment.”
With help from faculty and students at the School of Management, the Center provides assistance with business planning, market research, financial structuring, accounting, and legal issues. Alexander says the Center already has “a couple dozen” clients, about half of them from the Yale community, representing business ideas “from Internet to biotech.”
In addition to offering advice, the Center hopes to connect entrepreneurs with the capital necessary to launch their businesses. “One effort will be to link people in the Yale alumni network who care about Yale and who have the ability to invest with those with fresh and creative ideas that need nurturing to grow into businesses,” says Alexander. In addition to pursuing individual investors with an interest in New Haven, Alexander suggests that an alumni-based venture capital fund could be created to focus on local startup businesses.
The Center is housed at 433 Temple Street, next door to the Office of Public Affairs. John Lang, a former treasurer of Aetna, Inc., in Hartford, has been appointed director.
A Fresh Look for Yale on the Web
While the University invests millions in overdue renovations of its buildings, a smaller but equally visible overhaul has just been completed in Yale’s cyberspace. On June 1, the redesigned Yale home page went online, replacing a page with an image of antique books that has been at www.yale.edu for three years—or eons in Internet time.
University Printer John Gambell, who oversaw the redesign by Michael Rock of 2x4, a New York graphic design firm, says the charge was “to create a more up-to-date, truer, more inviting picture of Yale, and to communicate that it’s an institution that has a sense of cohesion.” The redesign does not apply to the thousands of Web pages on the Yale server, but instead provides a framework for finding those pages.
“Our early sketches were much more 'designed' and promotional-looking than what we ended up with,” says Rock. “But we came to the conclusion that what we were designing was a navigational tool that organized all of Yale’s Web sites.” Gambell says the site is organized so that visitors “can get almost anywhere in three clicks.”
Aesthetically, the site is distinguished by its blue color and the use of sepia-toned photographs. “It’s more understated than most of the university sites we looked at,” says Rock, “a calm rather than a frenzied experience.”
The shade of blue is a few steps lighter than what Gambell considers true Yale blue, since the more familiar color would be too dark and appear almost black on some computer screens. For Gambell, the color is what holds the site together. “The blue is the branding element, as the yellow border is for National Geographic, “ he says.
Victim Honored for Town-Gown Work
While most people first heard the name of Suzanne Jovin when she was murdered last December in New Haven’s upscale East Rock neighborhood, the Davenport senior was already well-known to many in the Yale and New Haven communities for her energy and dedication to volunteer work. Her efforts were recognized posthumously in April when President Richard Levin and New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. awarded her a special Elm-Ivy Award. Jovin’s father traveled from the family’s home in Goettingen, Germany, to accept the award in her honor.
Jovin was remembered at the ceremony for tutoring at Dwight Elementary School and for directing the Yale chapter of Best Buddies, an organization that pairs volunteers with mentally challenged adults. “She has given us a shining example of what a Yale student can be,” said Levin, “a model of what our best students are: true citizens of the world who bring people together, build community, and create opportunities for others.”
Jovin had spent the evening overseeing a pizza party for the Best Buddies group on December 4 before she was found stabbed to death near the corner of East Rock and Edgehill roads. Police have made no arrests in the crime.
The Elm-Ivy awards are given annually to honor New Haven and Yale people “whose work enhances understanding and cooperation between the city and the University.” They were established in 1979 by Fenmore R. Seton '38 and his wife Phyllis.
New Courts in Session at Gym
In April, President Richard Levin sank the first basket to inaugurate the new Lanman Center at Payne Whitney Gymnasium. The center, which contains four full basketball courts and a running track suspended above, is built on a former parking lot behind the gym on Lake Place.
Students are applauding the new center because it will provide more courts for intramural and pick-up basketball games. “Instead of holding intramural games until midnight,” says director of athletics Tom Beckett, “they can be completed in a much more reasonable time now.” The courts can also be used for volleyball and badminton—and, as this year’s reunion—goers learned, for parties.
Designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates of New Haven and Ellerbe Becket, Inc., of Kansas City, the $18.5-million Lanman Center is named for Colonel William K. Lanman Jr. '28S, who made a significant gift toward its construction. The center completes the first phase of a long-term plan to renovate the gym and update its facilities. Phase one also included the installation of six new squash courts, a new varsity weight room, and a new fitness center.
Room to Play for the Theater Set
It is a testament to the vitality of Yale’s undergraduate theater scene that there often seem to be more plays going up than venues to house them—leading to innovative but complicated staging areas like dining halls and college courtyards. Now two new theater spaces are in the works: one for extracurricular use in the old Co-op textbook annex off Broadway, and another for the theater studies program in the Whitney Humanities Center on Wall Street.
Theater studies director Marc Robinson says the space on Wall Street—in a former gymnasium that was used until recently for undergraduate painting studios—will be renovated over the summer. The space will get new lighting and a new floor so it can function as a “black-box” style theater. Theater studies majors will have access to the space for senior projects.
The Broadway space, a loft structure accessible to Broadway from an alley, is still in the planning stages. The Yale College Council has proposed that the space be overseen by a committee that would apportion time to extracurricular performance groups such as college dramats and singing and improv groups.
Campus Merger Mirrors Europe
Europe’s Iron Curtain fell in 1989, but in academia, things don’t always move so fast. A full ten years after the Berlin Wall was torn down, the curtain that divided Yale’s Western European Studies Council and its Russian and Eastern European Studies Council has also been consigned to history. As of July 1, the Center for International and Area Studies will have one fewer area studies council, as the two European councils merge into a single Council for European Studies.
Professors in a number of departments make up the membership of the Center’s area studies councils, which meet to discuss curricular issues and host lectures, seminars, and other events. The new council will be led by the former chairs of each council: history professor Ivo Banac for the East, and Political science professor Geoffrey Garrett for the West. In September the unified council will host a conference on the future of the European Union.
Veggieburgers at Meatless Meet
Taking a lesson from the publicity generated by the “Doodle Challenge,” an ongoing competition to eat the most Yankee Doodle hamburgers in one sitting, the Yale College Vegetarian Society staged its own exercise in conspicuous consumption on Cross Campus on April 27. Contestants vied to see who could eat the most
"all-plant-product burgers” in a single sitting.
The contest was part of an effort to call attention to the health and environmental benefits of a vegetarian diet. Showing a keen understanding of the student audience, the Society’s literature touched not only on issues like cholesterol, global warming, and deforestation, but also on “the sexual benefits of vegetarianism.” (Lower cholesterol is said to “improve blood flow to all parts of the body.”)
The winner of the eat-in, outgoing Yale College Council president (and admitted carnivore) Zachary Kaufman '00, inhaled 14.5 veggie-burgers in half an hour.
Society spokesman Glenn Hurowitz '99 said Kaufman’s time was “well
on pace to breaking the Doodle record for meat.”
Coaches Offer Hope for Hoops
Yale’s basketball program got a fresh start in April as director of athletics Tom Beckett named new head coaches for both the men’s and women’s teams. The appointments followed disappointing seasons for both teams that ended in the resignations of men’s coach Dick Kuchen and women’s coach Cecelia DeMarco.
Taking the helm of the women’s team is Amy Backus, who comes to Yale after four seasons as an assistant coach at Northwestern. Prior to that, she was head coach at Middlebury College, where her teams had a 106-41 cumulative record. At Northwestern she helped coach teams that went to the NIT and NCAA tournaments and gained experience in competitive Big Ten play. “I’ve been coaching against or with some of the greatest minds in the game today,” says Backus.
New men’s coach James Jones was an assistant coach for the Bulldogs from 1995 to 1997 before moving on to another assistant’s job at the University of Ohio. Among the players he will be coaching are a crop of juniors that he was largely responsible for recruiting. At the press conference announcing the appointments, Beckett said the athletic staff was glad to see Jones again. “In the five years that I’ve been here, I have not seen as many smiles in this building as I did this morning,” he said.
Last season was not a good one for either team. The men posted a 4–22 record and were at one time ranked last in the RPI computer rankings of 310 division I teams. The women’s team started the season with four consecutive wins but went 10–16 for the season.
Study Says: Give Mom a Break
Opponents of the so-called “drive-through” delivery—the practice of discharging a mother from the hospital less than 24 hours after she has given birth—received strong scientific support from a study published in last month’s edition of the Archives of Family Medicine. The research, conducted in 1995 at Yale–New Haven Hospital by a team of scientists from the School of Medicine, compared a group of 73 women who stayed at the hospital for two nights following delivery with a group of 171 women who were authorized by their health insurers to stay only one night.
The study’s findings showed that the mothers in the two-night group experienced considerably fewer difficulties with their newborns than their counterparts in the shorter-stay group, who reported that their infants had nearly two times the rate of illness and required almost double the number of outpatient pediatric-care visits. Women in the one-day group also reported experiencing significantly more fatigue and concerns over the health of their infants.
The Newborns and Mothers Protection Act of 1996 mandated that health insurers must cover a 48-hour stay in the hospital. The new study, say the researchers, shows that “while the ideal length of a post-delivery stay may vary from one woman to the next,” in general, any attempt to reinstitute drive-through deliveries is false economy.
Masters Wrassle for College Pride
When Edward S. Harkness, Class of 1897, provided the funds to build Yale’s first residential colleges, thus creating the office of college master, he surely never dreamed it would lead to distinguished professors grappling in a pit of orange Jell-O. But the mastership carries with it the charge to keep up college morale, so Pierson master Harvey Goldblatt took on Jonathan Edwards master Gary Haller as part of this year’s Pierson Day festivities, traditionally held on the last day of classes in April.
Goldblatt had twice before faced Silliman master Kelly Brownell, losing both times to the psychology professor (who specializes in eating disorders). This year Brownell was unavailable, so Pierson students arranged a match with the rookie Haller. But Goldblatt seems to have fared no better, although the results are in dispute.
“I claim to have thrown him out of the ring,” says Haller.  |
