Author Archives: Nora Wessel

Before 2001, no woman had ever held tenure in the Physics Department, much less served as the department’s chair. No one, that is, until Meg Urry. When Urry, 52, left her senior post at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, for Yale in 2001, she arrived on Science Hill as »

When a former head of government visits Yale, Yale is guaranteed to pull out all the stops. And when Yale pulls out all the stops, it’s guaranteed to be quite a spectacle. Thousands of students, faculty members and New Haven residents, including Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and Yale College Dean Peter Salovey, filed into Woolsey »

Yale’s newest professor had a rather action-packed first day of school. By the time Tony Blair appeared before a packed Woolsey Hall for a conversation with University President Richard Levin and others on Friday, he had already been interviewed on several television networks and taught his first class. His Faith and Globalization seminar kicked off »

Yale’s newest professor had a rather action-packed first day of school. By the time Tony Blair appeared before a packed Woolsey Hall for a conversation with University President Richard Levin and others, he had already been interviewed on several television networks and taught his first class. His Faith and Globalization seminar kicked of his three-year »

“There have been none like this — none at all.” In two years as a Yale University Art Gallery employee, Ralph Aiello had never seen the numbers he saw the past three months. “It’s a steady flow every day,” the gallery guard said. The reason: students and local residents alike have flocked to catch a »

This article has been corrected. You may view this article’s correction here. Could the choice of a traditional architect to build Yale’s two new residential colleges actually betray the University’s tradition? That’s what some critics are arguing one day after University President Richard Levin announced that he had tapped Robert A.M. Stern, the staid architect »

WEST HAVEN, Conn. — Next to the West Campus’ gleaming, brick-and-steel laboratory buildings lies an unadorned warehouse, clad in metal paneling and weathered from many a New England winter. To Yale’s scientists, those gleaming, state-of-the-art research buildings seem like the complex’s biggest prize. But art aficionados may argue otherwise. To them, that distinction belongs to »

It is Tuesday morning at John C. Daniels Magnet School. Class is in session and the building is quiet, save for faint music echoing down the sunshine-flooded halls. Inside the music auditorium, more than a dozen sixth-grade students perch in front of music stands, flutes, clarinets and trumpets in hand. Some play Brahams, others Christmas »

WEST HAVEN, Conn. — Wild turkeys are a rarity on Yale’s campus in New Haven, but only seven miles away, a flock of dozens roams free across the rolling hills of the newly acquired West Campus. The turkeys are all that inhabit the 137 acres of Yale’s newest scientific treasure, the former home of the »

Behind every Yale art major, there is an adviser. With the recent media coverage about Aliza Shvarts ’08 and her incendiary senior art project, Pia Lindman, a little-known lecturer at the School of Art, has been thrust into the spotlight. But the attention was not wholly unfamiliar to the performance artist, who has raised eyebrows »

A team of Harvard officials looked to Yale as a model for the arts in a visit to campus on Monday. Several members of the Harvard Task Force on the Arts, including students and faculty, traveled to New Haven to examine up-close Yale’s way of organizing and supporting the arts on campus. Task Force members, »

As details have emerged in recent weeks about the Yale Philharmonia’s trip to the Beijing Olympic Games this summer, School of Music officials are seeking to put the tour in the context of an “arts march for peace.” “If one looks at artistic enterprises at their very best notion, the arts do offer hope and »