Author Archives: Kanya Balakrishna

Fifty-four years ago, David Shire ’59 arrived on campus with a single goal: to write at least one of the Yale Dramatic Association’s annual musicals. He wrote two. He also informally pioneered the undergraduate music major, earned Phi Beta Kappa distinction and met his lifelong collaborator, Richard Maltby ’59. Two Grammys, one Academy Award and »

If he were to be Yale College Council president next year, Richard Tao ’10 would forge a “working relationship” with the Yale administration — something he said currently does not exist. As president, Tao said he would continue the structural changes that current president Rebecca Taber ’08 put into place this year — initiative-based project »

Just five days after moving all her possessions into her room on Old Campus, Carrie Albert ’11 had to confront what may have felt like one of the most difficult decisions of her life: choosing her courses. The day before classes started, she — along with every other freshman — was introduced to a professor »

Five months after the University finalized changes to the process of granting tenure, many junior faculty members are choosing to switch to the new system. In an informal poll of 42 junior professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 34 said they would switch to the new system, one said he would remain on »

Undergraduate humanities classes saw their lowest enrollment in three decades last year, according to data released by the Office of Institutional Research. During the 2006-’07 academic year there were about 16,500 registrations for humanities courses, compared to about 19,000 in 2000. The number of undergraduate course registrations in the social sciences dropped slightly, while those »

Wedged between the wide variety of freshman seminars and the countless advanced junior seminars, sophomore year is something of a no man’s land for those looking for the seminar experience. Although the report released by the Committee on Yale College Education in 2003 called for the creation of a “modest but critical number” of both »

The choice of history professor Donald Kagan to give the keynote address at today’s Sept. 11 memorial service provoked the Yale College Democrats to withdraw its sponsorship of the event. The College Democrats, who had co-sponsored the event last year alongside the College Republicans, declined to participate in the service after Kagan, a noted conservative, »

As it prepares to move into a new home this fall, the anthropology department is again close to full capacity after losing four popular faculty members in the spring of 2006. Department chair William Kelly said the building — a freshly renovated historic house located on the corner of Whitney Avenue and Sachem Street — »

The University will welcome its first female dean of engineering in January 2008, President Richard Levin announced this week. T. Kyle Vanderlick, the chair of the Chemical Engineering Department at Princeton University, will replace current Engineering Dean Paul Fleury, who has served in the post for seven years. A chemical engineer who studies interfacial forces »

Yale’s course catalogue has thickened in certain fields this year to accommodate increasing student demand, as the University moves forward with plans to add new majors in those areas. Course offerings have increased in South Asian Studies, which became a major last year, and Modern Middle East Studies and Health Studies, which are on the »

The cutoff grade point averages for academic honors at graduation this May rose slightly from last year, generating some buzz about the increasing competitiveness of academics at the University. The cutoff for cum laude, the lowest level of Latin honors, awarded to 15 percent of the class, increased from 3.72 to 3.75 last year. To »

Computers containing 10,000 SSNs are stolen from Dean’s Office Over 10,000 current and former students, faculty and staff had their Social Security numbers compromised in July following the theft of two Yale computers. The computers were stolen from the Yale College Dean’s Office on July 17, resulting in one of many privacy breaches at universities »