Author Archives: Eamon Murphy

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When I came back to Yale this fall after having sat out spring 2008, I wanted variety in my class schedule. In my previous semester I had taken four English classes, which proved disastrous. Each course was worthwhile in isolation, but all together the sameness of the work was stultifying. I could barely finish the »

What a contrast between last Tuesday and Election Night four years ago. Back then, the entire celebration consisted of two or three guys running around Old Campus shouting, “We won!!! We WON!!!!” The rest of us responded, as I recall, with silence. The flip side of our recent rejoicing is the near-hysterical fear among some »

I just saw my fifth Parents’ Weekend. My parents stayed home, sensibly stopping at four. In their absence, I observed the holiday the way we used to — by doing an on-campus activity that would have never occurred to me otherwise. I went on a student-led tour of the Yale University Art Gallery. The tour »

At 9 a.m. on Election Day 2004, I was sitting in the basement of the Whitney Humanities Center, waiting for my Directed Studies literature section to begin, when a girl in the class entered wearing a red, white and blue hockey jersey, emblazoned with the words “Team Bush” and the number 43. I think of »

Early Tuesday morning, someone spray-painted “White Guilt” on Dwight Hall. Yesterday the News reported that this same message was also graffitied on two nearby private schools. Dean Marichal Gentry told the News that he thinks the vandals are unlikely to be Yale students. I think he’s right, and I’m relieved. While I want to call »

The greatest TA I’ve ever had once told me he “did a victory dance” when his advisor got tenure. We were discussing English professors, and his happy relief reminded me of how my favorite teacher and one-time advisor went on leave in the middle of my junior year and never came back. He nodded in »

So: Aliza Shvarts ’08 doesn’t get to hang her senior project; Art Department lecturer Pia Lindman has been suspended and another Yale official disciplined; Chase Olivarius-McAllister ’09 wants Yale College Dean Salovey out; and Salovey himself has gone white as a sheet — he is appalled. Meantime, prefrosh tread nervously the campus greens these Bulldog »