Ward 22 Alderman Rev. Drew King was formally arraigned on three misdemeanor offenses at a New Haven Superior Court hearing on Tuesday.
King promised to return to court to enter his plea on Feb. 5, Deputy Chief Clerk Kathy Naumann said. He will face charges of disorderly conduct, assault in the third degree and unlawful restraint in the second degree.
King, 55, was arrested on Friday after a 24-year-old woman who described herself as his girlfriend told police that he had pushed and choked her at a Dixwell “sober house” he runs, New Haven Police Department spokeswoman Bonnie Winchester said. King then left the scene but turned himself in to authorities Friday night.
The court also issued a protective order on Tuesday barring King from further contact with the accuser, Naumann said.
But in an interview on Sunday, King said the woman lied to police. He said she attacked him first, hitting him with a stick after he took a piece of sausage off her plate.
King, who chairs the Public Safety Committee on the Board of Aldermen, represents Dixwell, Silliman College, Timothy Dwight College, and Swing Space.
Ward 22 Alderman Rev. Drew King — who represents the Dixwell neighborhood as well as Silliman College, Timothy Dwight College, and Swing Space — was arrested Friday for allegedly pushing and choking a woman at a Dixwell “sober house.”
King, 55, was charged with third-degree assault, unlawful restraint and disorderly conduct, the Associated Press reported Saturday. The two-term alderman, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, said he left the scene before police arrived but turned himself in to the New Haven Police Department after a police supervisor contacted him later that day.
NHPD representatives were not available for comment throughout the weekend.
In an interview on Sunday, King maintained his innocence. He said the incident began when he asked a woman, who he said was a friend, for a piece of sausage while dining with others at his “sober house” — a residence he runs for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. Though she refused, he said, he took a little piece anyway.
“She went berserk about the sausage,” King said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
King said he asked the friend to leave, but that she grabbed a stick and began to hit him instead. He said he took the stick from her — denying that he ever pushed or choked her — and she left. King was arrested several hours later after the woman called the police, he said.
“I’m just going to go to court, just basically tell the truth, and leave it alone after that,” said King, who will appear before New Haven Superior Court on Tuesday.
King said he has lodged several complaints recently with the police because some residents have been coming to the “sober house” to smoke crack-cocaine and take heroin. He was particularly surprised that the policeman charged with guarding his house would arrest him, King said, since it was he who had requested the officer’s presence in the first place.
“This is the saddest thing, because… they’re going to prosecute me and we have shootings all around, murders all around,” he said. “I said to the policeman, ‘I’m the head of Public Safety. Why would I come down and lie to you?’”
King also co-chairs the Committee of the Whole, the ad hoc body that is currently considering a proposed youth curfew.
Ward 24 Alderwoman Elizabeth McCormack, who chairs the Aldermanic Affairs Committee, said she has not spoken with King but urged residents to not rush to conclusions.
“I believe that we have to have a fair process,” McCormack said. “He hasn’t been convicted of anything.”
King is the third alderman to have allegedly violated the law in the past four months — and the second alderman arrested who represents Yale students.
In late August, Ward 1 Alderman Nick Shalek was arrested outside a city saloon and charged with breach of peace, criminal trespassing, and interfering with an officer.
And in September, a federal judge convicted former Ward 28 Alderwoman Barbara Rawls-Ivy of stealing nearly $50,000 in grant funds meant to help city public housing tenants. She ultimately resigned under public pressure, including calls from Mayor John DeStefano Jr. to step down.
McCormack said the offenses say nothing in particular about the 30-member Board of Alderman besides that “we’re all human and we all make mistakes.”
King said he is “very hurt” because of the accusations and is “on the point of resigning,” though he will probably stay on.
The divide between Yale-New Haven Hospital and the union seeking to organize 1,800 of its employees continues to grow, as union and hospital officials show no signs of reaching an agreement within the upcoming weeks.
The hospital’s union election had been postponed from last week by the National Labor Relations Board following a report that showed the hospital had acted illegally in campaigning against the union. The election will likely not be rescheduled until two investigations into the hospital’s recent alleged misconduct are complete, which will probably not happen within the next month.
Margaret Kern, a private arbitrator hired by the hospital and union, will hold hearings in early January to hear testimony about the more than 200 individual complaints workers have lodged against the hospital. Those grievances are separate from the major complaint, filed by the union on Dec. 6, that ultimately led to the election’s postponement.
City and community leaders have continued to weigh in on the conflict. The New Haven Board of Aldermen condemned the hospital’s actions Monday night, and expects to hear testimony from officials to explain violations which some aldermen perceive to have been planned by the administration. And at a Dec. 14 press conference, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. called for changes in the structure of the unionization vote and reforms in the hospital’s board of trustees.
In a report released last week, Kern stated that managerial staff at Yale-New Haven had convened mandatory meetings to discuss hospital business, but would follow those meetings with voluntary meetings to discuss unionization. Kern found that those voluntary meeting were compromised because any employee who left would be automatically labeled “pro-union.”
Yale-New Haven has offered to sit down with the Service Employees International Union to help resolve the tensions, hospital spokesman Vin Petrini said, but SEIU has declined.
SEIU communications director Bill Meyerson said the union will not discuss a settlement until it better understands who in the hospital administration knew about or ordered allegedly mandatory meetings held during work hours that were anti-union and possibly violated federal law.
“We expect as a number of parties investigate, we’ll get a better idea of what happened and who allowed it to happen,” he said.
In addition to delaying the scheduled election, the union complaint filed with the NLRB has led the Board to open an investigation. John Cotter, assistant regional director for the NLRB, said the Board is not taking any steps to reschedule the election until after an investigation is complete, as is standard practice.
How long the investigation will take is unclear.
“It’s hard to tell in a case like this,” Cotter said. “Are we going to have three witnesses or 300?”
He said a typical investigation would be complete by the end of January, but a case of this scope — including the independent individuals who are starting to file complaints with the NLRB in addition to the union complaint — could take much longer. After the investigation phase is complete, the Board will seek the hospital’s response before taking further action. The NLRB has sole authority to reschedule an election, though so far only the union charges are preventing it from doing so. Cotter said that if the union withdraws the complaint or settles with the hospital, an election could be rescheduled earlier than February.
But the pending investigations are not the only motivation behind the union’s reluctance to sit down with the hospital, Meyerson said.
“There’s been no admission of wrongdoing [by Yale-New Haven],” he said.
Petrini said that in retrospect the meetings some managers called should not have been held, but that they occurred during an intense period of time in the week after the NLRB set the election date on Nov. 28. He said managers held them as a way to address questions about the union from their employees. There was no systematic directive from the hospital administration to hold such meetings, Petrini said, and once administrators found out about the meetings, managers were told not to continue scheduling them immediately after mandatory staff meetings.
The Board of Aldermen plans to have hospital officials appear before it in early January to discuss the meetings, Board President Carl Goldfield said. The Board passed a resolution denouncing the hospital’s actions, and a second resolution asking administrators testify was referred to a committee.
Goldfield said the hospital violations seem to have been planned from above, and he wants administrators to explain themselves. Though there have been some complaints against union organizers, Goldfield said the hospital’s misconduct was more jarring.
“I don’t think you saw the same sort of mass violations [with the unions],” he said.
The hospital is overseen by a Board of Trustees, including Yale President Richard Levin, who appointed one quarter of the Board’s seats. Goldfield said he would also want to hear from the trustees.
DeStefano called for reforms to the Board of Trustees, saying it does not represent the public. He has asked the New Haven delegation to the state legislature to investigate how the board’s structure could be changed, mayoral spokesman Derek Slap said.
DeStefano also called for a “card-check” election, in which a union can represent workers once at least 50 percent of the employees sign union cards — a less stringent requirement than a secret ballot election.
Though DeStefano was instrumental in bringing the two sides to an agreement last spring, Slap said the mayor will no longer be involved in mediating between the hospital and union due to Yale-New Haven’s actions.
“It’s difficult to do business with an organization that breaks a trust,” Slap said.
SEIU District 1199 has been attempting to represent workers at Yale-New Haven for nine years. Tensions between the union and hospital eased last March when the two settled on an NLRB-supervised secret ballot election. The agreement, brokered by DeStefano and Yale Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs Bruce Alexander, was part of a broader package that led the Board of Aldermen to approve construction of YNNH’s $430 million cancer center.
SEIU already represents 140 food service employees at the hospital, and has been seeking to represent 1,800 additional workers, including nursing assistants, housekeepers and clerical employees.
Yale accepted 19.7 percent of early action applicants for the Class of 2011, an increase of two percent from last year, Dean of Admissions Jeff Brenzel announced Wednesday.
709 students were selected from 3,594 early applicants this year, while 61 percent of applicants were deferred and 18 percent were rejected. Although the acceptance rate increased this year, the number of students accepted into the class actually decreased.
Last year, 724 early applicants out of 4,084 were accepted for the Class of 2010, for an acceptance rate of 17.7 percent – the lowest in the Ivy League.
Of the Ivies that have announced their early admissions statistics for this year, Yale’s acceptance rate is again the lowest.
Harvard University admitted 21.5 percent of its early action pool, while Princeton University accepted 26 percent through its early decision program. The University of Pennsylvania accepted 29 percent of its early applicant pool this year, Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson said.
Brenzel said the acceptance rate rose slightly this year because of the strength of the applicant pool. In addition, a higher proportion of students were deferred this fall for consideration along with regular decision applicants in the spring, he said.
“We did this in part because the applicant pool has strengthened significantly over the past few years,” Brenzel said. “We wanted to take particular care that competitive applicants received another review in the context of the total admissions pool.”
This was the final year that Harvard and Princeton offered the option of applying early, which allows students to receive their admissions decisions by mid-December. Starting with the Class of 2012, students will only be able to apply through regular decision and will hear whether or not they were accepted in the spring. Representatives of Harvard and Princeton have stated that the elimination of early admissions will reduce the pressure on high school students and will make the process more fair to applicants from low-income households, who are less likely to apply early.
Yale is currently reviewing its single-choice early action program and has not yet disclosed whether early admissions will continue beyond this year, but an announcement is expected by early January.
Brenzel said approximately 88 percent of students admitted early have chosen Yale in the four years the school has offered early action. The admissions office expects a similar percentage to matriculate at Yale this year, he said.
Students who apply to Yale by the Jan. 1 regular decision deadline or whose early applications were deferred will be notified of their admissions outcomes by the beginning of April.
On Sunday, Yul Kwon LAW ’00 won the controversial “Survivor: Cook Islands” competition, which featured a twist on the series in which contestants were divided along racial lines.
With a cool head and focus on strategy, Kwon beat out 20 other contestants — including the runner-up Oscar “Ozzy” Lusth, who bested Kwon in physical challenges — to win. As the first Asian winner in the 13 seasons of “Survivor,” Kwon will take home a $1 million prize.
During the show, Kwon said that victory would not come as a result of simply outsmarting his opponents.
“The key to winning the game is maximizing the good luck and minimizing the bad luck,” he said.
Survivor host Jeff Probst said he was torn by the close vote of 5-4 in favor of Kwon.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever felt bad that somebody didn’t win,” he said. “It was so evenly matched.”
This season’s Survivor caused controversy because for the first weeks of the show, the contestants were split into four tribes along racial lines — white, Hispanic, Asian and black. Ratings released Tuesday indicated that while the Survivor finale was the most watched show on television Sunday night, it was less popular than the finales of previous seasons.
Before the finale, when the contestants were whittled down to two Asians, one Hispanic, and one black, Kwon said on the show that he was glad the winner of Survivor would be a minority.
“It think it speaks volumes, that oftentimes the strongest teams are the ones that have a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds,” he said.
Kwon was the only contestant to raise concerns about the racial segregation of the tribes, Probst said in a conference call with the media earlier this year. He called Kwon one of the “most interesting” and “definitely one of the smartest guys” he knows.
In an interview with the News this fall, one of Kwon’s close friends, Nisha Chhabra LAW ’00, said Kwon went on the show in order to break stereotypes about Asians.
“He’s very concerned with racial groups being expected to behave and perform according to stereotype or being treated in a discriminatory manner,” she said. “One of the reasons he tried out was because it really was important to him that there be a greater presence of Asian members on TV.”
Kwon, who is 31 years old, lives in San Mateo, California and has worked at McKinsey and Google. While working for Sen. Joseph Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67, Kwon drafted parts of the Homeland Security Bill. He went through officer training for the U.S. Marine Corps while studying at Stanford.
The next season is currently being taped on the Fiji island Vanua Levu, where a military coup recently took place.
Students from a Yale Law School human rights clinic filed suit Thursday against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, accusing it of discrimination against Latino immigrants in Danbury, CT.
The case stems from the trial of 11 immigrants living in Danbury, most of them represented by the law students, who were jailed after an undercover officer posing as a building contractor baited them with the promise of day labor. The government has accused them of living in the country illegally. The suit represents the second time in the past month that the Law School has taken legal action against Homeland Security over immigration policy.
Justin Cox LAW ’08 said the intention of the lawsuit is to force Homeland Security to turn over records pertaining to the Sept. 19 incident. But while the documents will specifically be used to defend the men in their deportation cases, he said, the lawsuit could also lead to legal action against the city of Danbury or the Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of the Homeland Security Department.
“There are suggestions that this sting operation violated their constitutional rights,” Cox said. “If it turns out either Danbury or ICE’s actions were motivated by … anti-Latino or immigration animosities, they would be vulnerable for damages.”
Cox said the men were targeted because they are Latino, which would constitute a form of racial profiling — a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton said the case was “absolutely absurd” and that the city did not violate anyone’s constitutional rights.
“We apply those laws evenly across the board to all residents,” he said.
In a separate interview on NBC Thursday, Boughton said, “This is really just a bunch of Yale law students who don’t have much to do with their time.”
Marc Raimondi, a representative for ICE, said his organization targets specific violators based on prior intelligence.
“Our enforcement actions are not random,” he said in a statement. “We conduct targeted enforcements.”
In November, the Yale Law School human rights clinic sued the Department of Homeland Security in federal court to release records on Operation Front Line, a secret national security program targeting illegal immigrants.
Simon Moshenberg LAW ’08 said ideally the students would receive all the records pertaining to the sting operation, which would clarify who was behind the incident and the sequence of events. In particular, he said he hopes the records will reveal the motivations for the operation.
“The government is trying to deport [our clients],” Moshenberg said. “This information will be invaluable in helping that case.”
The students have also filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records from the city of Danbury, and said they will sue the Danbury Mayor’s Office if it fails to release documents by the upcoming deadline this month.
Police have arrested a suspect following a Thursday night robbery in which a student was held at knifepoint in the foyer of his Howe Street apartment.
Yale Police Department Chief James Perrotti announced the arrest to members of the Yale community in an e-mail on Friday, saying the YPD and the New Haven Police Department are working on adding police coverage to the Howe street area beyond the walking beats currently in place in there. The student involved in the robbery, Chad Callaghan ’07, escaped unharmed.
Callaghan, a senior in Morse college, said a man followed him into the foyer of his building at 70 Howe Street when he was walking home from the University Theater at around 11:30 p.m. Assuming the man also lived in the complex, Callaghan said, he was about to open the second door of the building when the man slammed the door closed and pulled out a knife.
After ordering him to surrender his wallet, Callaghan said, the man removed the cash and threw the wallet on the ground on his way out.
Callaghan said he was shocked by the robbery because it took place on a brightly-lit street near the University security station on Edgewood Avenue. He was also surprised that someone with his physical stature would be targeted, he said.
“I’m six feet and 180 pounds and I’m [still] a target,” he said. “I will not let friends walk home from my apartment alone anymore … A lot of my smaller friends have never thought twice about walking home alone before.”
Despite the incident, Callaghan said, he still feels safe in the area because of the quick police response and investigation. Callaghan is a scene columnist for the News.
NHPD Spokeswoman Bonnie Winchester confirmed the details of the incident, but the name of the suspect has not been released.
Weeks of mounting tensions involving public allegations of misconduct and violations of federal law culminated Wednesday night in a decision by a private arbitrator to postpone Yale-New Haven Hospital’s long-awaited union election.
The election, originally scheduled for next week, would have decided if the hospital’s 1,800 employees will join the Service Employees International Union, which has been attempting to unionize Yale-New Haven workers for nine years. After hearing union complaints last week, private arbitrator Margaret Kern decided Yale-New Haven acted illegally, but hospital officials denied any wrongdoing and urged a timely rescheduling of the election.
In a hearing last week with Kern, representatives from District 1199 of the SEIU claimed that Yale-New Haven authorized managerial staff to hold mandatory meetings during working hours in which supervisors discussed the drawbacks of unionization, such as possible pay cuts and lost jobs. With Kern’s permission, the SEIU filed a motion with the National Labor Relations Board to postpone the union election in lieu of the allegations of misconduct. The NLRB subsequently granted the motion.
SEIU communications director Bill Myerson said the alleged mandatory meetings violated election procedures and federal law.
“The activity that led to these violations and this environment would not allow a free and fair election to take place,” he said. “The hospital violated the agreement, violated the law as well as the [integrity of the] process itself.”
Kern’s ruling cites evidence and testimony that managerial staff convened workers for mandatory meetings in which hospital staff business was discussed. These mandatory meetings were then followed by voluntary meetings about the unions, for which supervisors announced that workers were free to stay or go.
Kern, who could not be reached for comment Thursday night, said in the ruling that the voluntary nature of the hospital meetings was compromised because employees would be labeled as being “pro-union” if they were to leave the meetings.
While hospital spokesman Vin Petrini said voluntary meetings were a long-standing practice at the hospital, he added that their scheduling immediately after required meetings in recent weeks was a mistake.
“When we learned of it we immediately asked managers to stop scheduling them that way and asked that voluntary meetings be held outside hospital time,” he said.
Kern’s ruling comes after weeks of public allegations of both pro- and anti-union worker intimidation, ending a relatively peaceful nine-month period in an otherwise conflict-ridden relationship between the hospital and the union.
Local 35 President Bob Proto released a press release Thursday urging investigation into the role of Yale School of Medicine Dean Robert Alpern and University President Richard Levin, both of whom sit on the hospital’s Board of Trustees, in approving the hospital meetings, suggesting that the two Yale administrators must have known about the misconduct.
But Levin said he called for the immediate cessation of the hospital staff meetings when he learned of them last week and was disappointed by the news of the hospital’s violations of its agreement with SEIU.
“I am dismayed by the recent actions of the hospital that violated the letter and spirit of its agreement,” he said. “I have consistently urged hospital management to abide by its terms. The leaders of our local unions also know we have made efforts to ensure compliance.”
Alpern said the University would like to see a legitimate union election take place sometime in the near future.
“From the University’s point of view we would like to see a fair election and we’d like to see it as soon as possible with both the hospital and the union feeling they had their say and had their day to get the vote out,” he said.
But Myerson said more details about the hospital staff’s conduct are necessary before discussion about rescheduling can take place.
“We need a comprehensive disclosure of how this happened,” he said. “We need to know what is the depth and scope of these violations, who was involved, who gave the orders. [T]here needs to be a bright line shined on the activities of the hospital in order to move forward.”
Mayor John DeStefano Jr. brokered a deal between Yale-New Haven and SEIU last March in which the Yale-New Haven cancer center was approved by the Board of Aldermen with the understanding that the hospital and union would agree to a set of election procedures, and select a neutral arbitrator to settle disputes.
Just when it looked as if the patrons of Partners had all paired up and the Batmen and Robins of Gotham Citi had stopped flying solo, recently opened “alternative nights” at various New Haven nightclubs have increased options for local gay club-hoppers.
A year after members of the on-campus LGBT community began protesting against Toad’s Place for hosting allegedly homophobic artists, LGBT students said they are excited that local club offerings catering to the their community are increasing. But some LGBT students said the increased marketing toward a gay demographic is double-edged — while it offers gay people more destinations that cater to their tastes, club owners may be more interested in increasing profit margins than seeking to include the LGBT community for altruistic reasons.
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Last month, Hula Hanks on Crown Street decided to open its doors every Wednesday night to the LGBT community, turning itself into “The Lagoon” for five hours of discounted drinks, drag performances and special giveaways. The Lagoon also features a table sponsored by AIDS Project New Haven with free condoms, lube and information on sexually transmitted infections.
“Overall, we are trying to offer an alternative to the existing gay scene in New Haven,” Lagoon coordinator Adam Rapczynski said
In addition to Hula Hanks, local nightclubs Oracle and BAR offer alternative nights. There are also two Elm City nightclubs that cater primarily to LGBT clientele — Partners and Gotham Citi. Nikita Gale ’07, coordinator of PRISM, a minority-focused LGBT organization, said nightclubs are integral to LGBT life.
“Nightclubs have always been one of the only places for gay people to have the opportunity to go out and meet each other in a fun social environment,” Gale said. “I’m not a huge fan of the campiness of some of the alternative nights in New Haven, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.”
Executive Director of the Town Green Special Services District Scott Healy said he thinks gay nights are profitable for many Elm City nightclubs because the city and the Greater New Haven region have a vibrant gay community that tends to go out often. Though two gay nightclubs already exist in the city, he said there is a high demand for more events catering to the LGBT clientele.
“Either there is a club seeing an opportunity because there is a large untapped market on that night, or [the nightclubs] are trying to animate a night when it wasn’t working,” Healy said. “The gay marketplace is remarkably loyal to places that do a good job marketing to them.”
But Anna Wipfler ’09, coordinator of the LGBT Co-op, said she had some reservations about expanded nightclub options for the gay community because the trend is largely motivated by self-interest.
“I am glad to see more nightclubs developing alternative nights,” she said, “despite the implications that trend carries about appreciating queer people [or] patrons only because of their growing economic power.
She also said the changes could reinforce a notion of sexual identification that could ultimately be divisive.
The owner of a New Haven club that has been the target of a boycott by Yale’s Queer Political Action Acommittee, Toad’s Place, said it has a 20-year history of inviting artists from the queer community to hold concerts, including a recent show by lesbian artist Melissa Ferrick.
“We do shows that appeal to the gay community,” Phelps said. “If shows of this nature come around, I book them if it makes economic sense.”
Toad’s currently has no weekly “alternative night,” though it did host an event targeted to the gay community in May. The turnout was low, a result that Wipfler attributed to QPAC’s ongoing stance against the club.
Eight internships in Uganda will be offered in the summer of 2007 through a new International Bulldogs program, Undergraduate Career Services representatives said Tuesday.
The East African nation of Uganda joins five other new Bulldogs locations offered this summer, for a total of 15 locations overall, UCS director Philip Jones said. This is the second Bulldogs offering in Africa following the program in Capetown, South Africa, which is also being offered for the first time this summer and was announced last month. Some Yale students said they had concerns about safety and prohibitive costs, but others said they think those reservations are misplaced.
The available internships, all located in the capital city of Kampala, will include positions working in musical ethnography, an AIDS hospice and educational programs for children, Jones said. The musical internship will allow students to participate in the recording of tribal music in an effort to preserve culture, while students at the hospice will address one of Uganda’s main public health initiatives, he said.
“[The students] will see what it’s like working in a third-world country with limited medical resources in an AIDS hospice,” Jones said. “There’s a tremendous learning opportunity here.”
He said the impetus to create the Uganda program this year came from the positive experience of a Yale student who spent last summer working there. UCS had already been considering expansion of its programs to other African nations, he said, and Uganda is considered one of the safest from the pool they were considering.
Yale students in Kampala will be connected to two alumni currently working in the American embassy in there, he said. The students will live together in a compound in the city.
Nancy Steedle GRD ’07, a member of the Yale Council on African Studies, studied in Uganda for a semester during her time as an undergraduate at Villanova University. She said she considers Uganda to be an attractive option for students going abroad because of the country’s focus on economic development and its relative safety. Although 20 years of violent conflict in northern Uganda have instilled a belief that the country is too volatile for tourists, she said, Uganda is in fact considered a successful example of the positive effects of initiatives such as its campaign against HIV/AIDS and the structural adjustments of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Steedle said students need not be deeply concerned about security in the southern city of Kampala, which is considered to be a safe environment for foreigners.
“There’s often a fear that if students who are going are white or not African-American, that they’re going to stand out,” she said. “To some degree this is true, but it is offset by the tremendous hospitality of Ugandans, who will be advising you and treating you like an honored guest more than targeting you.”
Kampala native Doreen Adengo ARC ’05 said an increased Yale presence in Uganda could benefit the country. Yalies could disseminate more information about educational opportunities in America, she said. She also expressed hope that Yale will contribute resources to Uganda directly, such as offering textbooks to schoolchildren.
But some Yale students said they had reservations both about safety and the potentially prohibitive costs of the Bulldogs program.
Charles Alvarez ’09 said he would need to be more informed and confident about the level of risk involved before embarking.
“If safety is such a big deal that you can’t see much of the country, then that would make me unlikely to go,” Alvarez said. “But it is interesting to see more opportunities in Africa for Yale students. I don’t assume that just because it’s in Africa it’s unsafe, so I would be willing to go if it fit those criteria.”
He also said that the likely lack of financial compensation in many offered positions could prevent students from participating — a complaint that has been common among students in previously offered Bulldogs programs.
Last month, UCS announced new Bulldogs summer programs in Montreal, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Budapest and Cape Town.
During the holiday season Americans feel the senseless compulsion to raid shopping malls like bands of toy-obsessed pirates. Yet they never stop to wonder what it might be like to be constantly immersed in the dollar-bill green cheer of American Christmas.
Based on an essay by David Sedaris and adapted for the stage by Joe Mantello, “The Santaland Diaries” at the Long Wharf begins with a man (Thomas Sadoski) standing in front of a gift-wrapped stage, relating how he’d laughed when he first saw a help wanted ad for Christmas elves at Macy’s. He goes on, in a tone of disbelieving horror, to tell us how he applied, got the job and passed the mandatory training classes to work at the mall’s Santaland. He dons his uniform on stage — complete with cap, shoes and black stomach pillow — as an expression of maniacal, masochistic glee spreads across his face. A shimmering figure of chartreuse and green, the man now known as Crumpet continues with the tragic story of a position that is easily the most humiliating ever conceived by the human race.
Though it’s entertaining, “Santaland” often has the feel of premeditated stand-up comedy. The entire plot consists of a single monologue, a construction that removes some of theater’s dynamic potential: The audience is certain that no character will suddenly rush on to the scene, that there will be no theatrical surprises in the play, only rhetorical ones. “Santaland” is, therefore, not so much theater as a lively and often uproarious speech that unfortunately adds little to the poignancy of Sedaris’ writing.
Sadoski’s delivery occasionally further increases the artificiality, acquiring a tone that seems slightly too stilted for his character. However, he often lapses into a colloquial and personal style that is reminiscent of a friend telling a bizarre story over dinner. Those moments, which occur consistently at the monologue’s more significant sections, reveal the potential warmth and intensity possible in this dramatic format.
At moments the satire is almost terrifying, revealing the phantom of racism and chauvinism that persist in a modern New York. Two of the Santas in Macy’s are black and, realizing this, some of the shoppers express a preference. “White,” one woman mutters to Crumpet, “white like us.” Though we laugh at the elf’s decision to do the opposite of what she asks, we cannot laugh at the comment itself. Unlike blind consumerism, into which every American openly hurls himself with feral zeal, racism is not something that we are willing to see in ourselves — or even in those with whom we share our shopping malls. Here Sedaris deals not with harmless human eccentricity, but a basic fact of dark and ignorant human nature.
Spouting numerous and rapid caricatures of the hapless shoppers that Christmas Eve found at Santaland, Sadoski reaches a moment at which his story staggers on the edge of believability. But the monologue suddenly slows, and what could have easily followed the logical progression of yuletide cynicism topples in exactly the opposite direction. Snow begins to fall, and the first signs of unembittered human emotion appear on the elf’s face. The result is somewhat discomfiting: The audience member cringes, expecting Crumpet to look beatifically to the rafters and lisp, “And that, Charlie Brown, is what Christmas is all about.” Alternatively some child or baby animal could be crushed in the consumerist fray (a death that Sedaris would have certainly exploited). We are spared such a extremely saccharine or melodramatic conclusion and left with something more subtle but in the same spirit. The play’s biting last line recovers it from fluffy sentimentality.
As an acerbic indictment of America’s obsessive love of Santa, “Santaland” ultimately succeeds. But it probably would be better and more fitting to spend a simpler, quieter night reading Sedaris’ essay, removed from the expensive and ultimately unnecessary sparkle of professional theater.
