Author Archives: Michael Jones

Yale students are often chided for their lack of concern for New Haven. Some folks argue that even those who make community service the focus of their time on campus are not truly invested in the city and its residents beyond their four years in college. I planned on publicly challenging that logic by running »

Nathaniel Zelinsky ’13 got it wrong in his column Wednesday (“An empty Promise,” Nov. 10). The New Haven School Change campaign (including the New Haven Promise) will improve the city’s public schools, and public school teachers and their unions are not “squarely to blame for poor educational achievement,” as Zelinsky suggests. We’ve heard that shortsighted »

The last few days have been tough for our community. We have heard from students who have had their perceptions of the New Haven community radically altered by the alleged actions of a few members of the New Haven Police Department. We have heard from business owners who took a chance on downtown New Haven »

Local government is all about making tough decisions. Unlike the federal government, we can’t run deficits. We must produce a balanced budget every single year. We also have very limited revenue streams — particularly here in Connecticut. While cities in many states receive at least some income from sales, income or local occupancy taxes, New »

Last Monday, I participated in my first meeting on the Board of Aldermen. When I first studied the agenda, I expected the evening to be uneventful. It was the first meeting of the year, and the most contentious item — the selection of the Board’s leadership — had been decided weeks earlier. But much to »

New Haven is at a crucial time in its history. As its manufacturing sector continues to decline, our city is attempting to rediscover its identity and reshape its infrastructure and institutions within a larger region and within the knowledge-based global economy. Our viability as a community directly depends on our success in shaping these crucial »

Campaigns are about offering competing visions for the office the candidates seek. I think our current aldermanic race is a good example of this, as my two opponents and I seem to have different conceptions of the Ward 1 alderman’s role. Ward 1 is overwhelmingly populated by Yale undergraduates and was clearly drawn to give »

The comparison is irresistible. After all, the fierce urgency of then is the fierce urgency of now. America is still in a struggle to reconcile its rhetoric with its reality, and nearly 40 years after the death of one extraordinarily inspirational African-American leader, America was given another. Barack Obama took the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist »

Forty years ago today, our nation lost one if its greatest servants. In our contemporary collective consciousness, we recognize the death of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a great tragedy. Our greater affliction, however, is our inability to realize the magnitude of his legacy. We all know that Dr. King had a »

After Barack Obama convincingly won the South Carolina primary, he made a bold statement about the nature of his quest for the Democratic nomination for president. Speaking before a crowd of enthusiastic supporters, the freshman senator told America that this race was one of historic proportions. In his words, he declared that “[this race] is »