Author Archives: Matthew Gillum

During my not-so-distant days as an undergraduate, I remember when our dean of judicial affairs said that the panel of students and faculty charged with deciding the fate and future of individuals charged with serious offenses, like sexual assault, had to be about 75 percent sure to convict. While this standard is several orders of »

As the semester ends, we oppressed teaching fellows get a chance to pull ourselves up out of proletarian squalor and participate in the most dysfunctional seasonal act in all higher education: grading. Under the current system, whatever mark your professors give is factored into an archaic index of student performance — the grade-point average — »

On the brink of spring break, players from Duke University’s lacrosse team hired two exotic dancers to perform at a party. According to police reports, three men forced one of the entertainers — a college student and mother of two — into a bathroom and “sexually assaulted her anally, vaginally, and orally” for 30 minutes. »

At least in the 1960s progressives understood the transactional logic of marijuana dealing, and knew that some primate species avoid war by having sex. This enlightened paradise is now lost. In the 2005-06 academic year, Yale students out to change the world attacked the police chief for publicizing the race of crime suspects and helped »

Within institutions committed to the forward march of knowledge, one might imagine it more important to be right than popular. Alas, with Tuesday’s resignation of Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, we know this is a thing of the past. In an ironic turn, Harvard’s faculty has driven its leader into the wilderness for giving them »

In time for Valentine’s Day, it seems appropriate to explore the practice of “hooking up.” The term has varying definitions, but, for our purposes, we will vaguely define it as engaging in any type of noncommittal sexual relations with another person or persons for non-procreative purposes. Although premarital sex — which would fall under the »

Yale is home both to Dwight Hall, the nation’s largest student-run network of service organizations, and legendary scholarship. Yale embodies a unique commitment to learning and human progress. Inscribed on the wall of Linsly-Chittenden Hall is a proverb: “Through wisdom is a house builded and by understanding it is established and by knowledge shall the »

In 1990, Craig Tuerk and Larry Gold, biologists at the University of Colorado, published a paper in the journal Science heralding a new process they called SELEX: Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment. Using the principles of Darwinian evolution — variation, selection and replication — they successfully produced an RNA molecule that bound a »

From the shackles of feudalism to the corruption of the Catholic Church during the 16th century, human history can be seen as a succession of rebellions against unnecessary and repressive systems that benefit those in power at the expense of the ordinary individual. At Yale, where many students aspire to positions of political power and »

After receiving a flurry of concerned e-mails, Police Chief James Perrotti apologized to the Black Student Alliance Thursday for describing the perpetrator of a mugging that occurred on Sept. 18 as a “black male in his late teens or early twenties.” Some of us, however, do not find this mea culpa adequate. As a concerned »

At Yale, rape is allegedly more common than the university lets on. Whether this charge is true or not, ethnographers have yet to discover a community of Homo Sapiens in which rape does not occur [1, 2, 3]. In the interest of promoting human flourishing, we have a common obligation to identify the causes of »