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World Markets Watched From Hillhouse Landmark
October 1999
In 1832, Aaron Skinner built a Greek Revival house on Hillhouse Avenue that doubled as a short-lived boys' school. Now, the house has finally returned to its educational roots as the home of the International Center for Finance, a recent initiative of the School of Management. The Center moved into the house in September after an extensive renovation.
The new center provides a home for collaborative research into financial markets in the United States and abroad. In addition to supporting faculty and graduate-student research, the center sponsors conferences and weekly seminars. Director William Goetzmann says the new facility is part of the effort to raise the profile of the 23-year-old School of Management. “A number of other institutions have such a center,” Goetzmann says. “It’s a necessary condition to keep us on the front lines in financial research.”
While the center has been operating for more than two years, it was more a conceptual center than a physical one until it moved into its own building. “One of the things visitors noticed was that our group was scattered across three buildings,” says Goetzmann. “They wondered how we could work together, and we wondered too.”
The building, bequeathed to Yale by the late Rachel Trowbridge, now features a conference room, a computer center where researchers can gain access to financial databases, a faculty lounge, and 16 faculty offices.
Politics Trumps Theater in Moscow
Two years ago, a joint company of drama students from Yale and the St. Petersburg Academy of Theatre Arts reconstructed a seminal 1926 production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General at the Yale Repertory Theatre. This summer, drama professor David Chambers and nine students from the School of Drama traveled to Russia to reunite the company for a performance in Moscow. But after two weeks of rehearsal in St. Petersburg, their performance at the Moscow Art Theatre was canceled. The problem? Politics. The half-American troupe turned up in the Russian capital during the NATO bombing of Serbia, when anti-American sentiment was running high.
It was not the first time the work of pioneering Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold had been the subject of controversy in Moscow. Meyerhold, whose production the company recreated from notes in Russian archives, pioneered a radical, highly physical approach to theater that Chambers says is like “seeing reality through the prism of the dream.” His production of The Inspector General is considered his masterwork. But like most of the early Soviet avant-garde, Meyerhold’s work was condemned under Stalin, and the director was executed in 1940. Only in recent years has his work been reexamined by scholars.
The disappointment in Moscow aside, the company went on to be well-received at a student festival in Amsterdam. Chambers and coproducer Nikolai Pesochinsky of the St. Petersburg Academy have received invitations to perform the work and lecture on Meyerhold throughout the world. “The response has been astounding,” says Chambers. “I think people are looking for a theater vocabulary to counter Stanislavsky-based psychological realism, and Meyerhold is the only person—other than Brecht, perhaps—to develop a vocabulary that works both theoretically and on stage.”
School Offers Real-Life Writ Small
Two years ago, a group of students at the Law School and the School of Management with an interest in educational policy began brainstorming about how they could contribute to improving public education in New Haven. Their answer, a charter school for fifth and sixth graders called the Amistad Academy, opened last month in Fair Haven.
The school, whose 90 students were selected by lottery from 550 applicants, emphasizes citizenship and personal responsibility along with academic excellence, says executive director Dacia Toll '99JD, one of the school’s founders. Students at the Amistad Academy spend part of their days in classroom situations, but the rest of the time they build and maintain a “microsociety,” operating their own bank, legislature, courts, media, and small businesses.
In addition to teaching citizenship, says Toll—a Rhodes Scholar who taught full-time in New Haven schools during her final year of law school—microsociety “is a way of applying skills. A lot of these kids are still learning multiplication, which they will use to calculate interest for the bank.”
The school, which receives $2,000 less per student from the state than local public schools spend, relies on community foundations, the Law School, the University, and individual Law School alumni donors for additional financial support. Its “institutional partners,” who will advise students in the operation of the microsociety institutions, include the New Haven Savings Bank, the New Haven Board of Aldermen, and the New Haven County Bar Association.
Class of 2003 by the Numbers
Like other elite colleges, Yale has regularly topped itself in the last few years in admissions statistics. This year was no exception. The pool of applicants for the Class of 2003 was the largest ever (13,271), which led to the lowest admission rate in recent memory (16.1 percent). The yield, or percentage of admitted students who came to Yale, was 65 percent this year, another modern record.
Of those 1,373 students who chose Yale and arrived at the end of August, 49.7 percent are men and 50.3 percent are women. All 50 U.S. states are represented, as are 44 foreign countries. Foreign nationals schooled abroad make up 4.3 percent of the class, and 27.4 percent of the freshmen identify themselves as members of minority groups. The class’s median SAT scores were 740 verbal and 730 math.
The class’s noteworthy matriculants include a three-time high school All-American swimmer, a national table tennis champion, a figure skater who represented Lithuania at the world championships, the president of Boys Nation, an actress who was featured on As the World Turns and in the television miniseries The 60s, the teen spokeswoman for the Scoliosis Foundation of America, and a direct descendant of Yale’s first rector, Abraham Pierson.
Turning the Tables on Diabetes
A key discovery by immunologist F. Susan Wong and her colleagues at the School of Medicine and the University of California at Berkeley about the cause of Type-1 diabetes, the form of the disease that generally begins in childhood and requires a lifetime of insulin injections, may help researchers develop a vaccine. Scientists have known that “juvenile” diabetes is an auto-immune disease, an ailment in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissue, rather than foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses. Researchers did not, however, know the precise target of this misguided attack.
Writing in the September edition of the journal Nature Medicine, Wong’s group showed that in a kind of mouse specially bred for diabetes research, the so-called “killer” T cells of the immune system zero in on an unfortunate antigen: a minute part of the insulin molecule, the substance that mammals produce to regulate blood sugar. Attacks by these and other kinds of T cells eventually destroy the body’s insulin-producing machinery and cause a condition that can result in blindness, limb loss, and early death.
While there is no cure for the ailment, Wong’s discovery lends credence to a novel strategy of diabetes prevention in which fragments of insulin are employed as a kind of vaccine. “Now that we know that insulin is an important autoantigenic target, we can use this knowledge to find our how to prevent the attacks,” says Wong.
Preservationists Win One, Lose One
A month after the Connecticut Supreme Court threw out a preservationist lawsuit to prevent the demolition of four buildings at the rear of the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, the University announced on September 14 that the buildings will be retained after all. The resolution of the controversy came after a summer that saw another preservation battle end with the demolition of Maple Cottage, a 163-year-old house at 85 Trumbull that preservationists had sought to save.
The new $38-million plan for the Divinity School is to repair and “stabilize” three of the four buildings, leaving them available for future use. The fourth building, the School’s library, will be restored and will continue to be used as a library.
A group of preservationists and Divinity School alumni had opposed the original plan since it was announced in 1996. Last spring, Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art Vincent Scully said he would consider leaving Yale if the buildings were demolished.
University planner Pamela Delphenich says the threat of continued legal action from opponents of the plan led to the revisions. “This project really needs to move forward,” says Delphenich. “We just knew we would have been tied up in litigation for years to come.”
Maple Cottage was razed on July 7 despite protests from a group called Friends of Hillhouse Avenue, which argued that the house was an important example of the work of architect Alexander Jackson Davis.
Younger Women Face Heart Risk
Researchers have long known that men under 50 are far more likely than their female contemporaries to suffer heart attacks, but a recent Yale-led study has shown that when both groups get to the hospital, women are far more likely to die. This surprising conclusion is the result of an investigation led by Viola Vaccarino, an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, and a team of scientists from EPH, the School of Medicine, and several other universities.
In the New England Journal of Medicine, Vaccarino and her colleagues described their analysis of the medical records of women and men who had been treated for heart attacks at 1,658 hospitals around the country. The overall death rate during hospitalization was 16.7 percent among the women and 11.5 percent among the men. But when this patient population was compared by age, the mortality rate among women under 50 was twice that of men.
The reasons for the difference are unclear. Three factors were found to contribute to the disparity: the likelihood that women who suffer heart attacks have other aggravating conditions, the tendency of women not to go to the hospital as quickly as men, and the fact that women are less likely than men to be properly diagnosed and treated for a heart attack.
But Vaccarino says these factors only accounted for about one-third of this inequality between the sexes. The rest may be due to lower-than-usual estrogen levels (the female hormone exerts a protective effect on premenopausal women) that somehow make these younger women vulnerable to a more deadly form of heart disease.
“The signs and symptoms we have now are based on what we know about men and older women,” said Vaccarino. “What we are doing may not be good enough.”
Room to Grow at Child Study Center
For 88 years, the Yale Child Study Center has been a hub for research into child development and the treatment of children. But like a child outgrowing his clothes, the center recently found itself needing something a bit more roomy. Last month, the center moved into a new building at the corner of the School of Medicine’s Harkness Lawn, adjacent to the center’s existing space.
The Irving and Nieson Harris Building, named for the principal donors to the project, contains office space for the center’s doctors and a 160-seat meeting space. Architect Mark Simon of Centerbrook Architects in Essex, Connecticut, says the project was complex because of the many types of people who will be using the building. The center’s visitors include patients and research subjects (both children and adults) and doctors and researchers from around the world. “The place needed to feel distinguished and substantial,” says Simon, “but be welcoming to children and families and not seem scary.”
And perhaps appropriately for a building full of psychiatrists and psychologists, the architects were given seemingly contradictory charges. “They wanted a building that fits in and yet stands out,” says Simon.
The solution: A five-story octagonal structure, clad in brick and limestone and detailed in the manner of the Sterling Hall of Medicine next door, that connects Sterling to the Harkness Dormitory. “It’s a building that acts like a psychiatrist: friendly but reserved,” says Simon.
Imported Elis Sample Bluegrass
The Yale Club of Kentucky has a message for 33 undergraduates who spent their summers in Louisville: “Y'all come back now.” The students were lured to Louisville by a new program designed to demonstrate that there is life between the coasts.
The program, called “Bulldogs in the Bluegrass,” collected commitments from area companies and nonprofit organizations to provide paid internships to Yale students, who could peruse a list of positions and apply online. The program, using private donations, paid part of the students' wages, provided a $300 travel stipend, and secured free lodging in a local college dormitory.
“We tried to level the playing field and make the program competitive with going home for the summer,” says Rowan Claypool '80, who conceived and organized the program. Claypool says the idea was to get bright young people to see Louisville and consider coming permanently after graduation. “If you come and experience it, you see the benefits of living in a town this size,” he says. “You can be known and make a difference here.”
Yale senior and Massachusetts native Gillian Bohrer, who worked for a labor union in nearby Frankfort, left with just the impression the organizers were hoping for. “I’d never thought about anywhere besides New York, Boston, or Washington,” she says, “but I’d definitely consider a place like Louisville now.”
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