Author Archives: Paul Needham

It is fair to say that Regina Starolis did not have a great first day of work. In July of 1973, she arrived at Woodbridge Hall, the University’s main administrative building, to begin her new job as secretary to Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster. Her first official act in that capacity was to break his clock. »

It seems that “The Cartoons that Shook the World” may shake Yale’s campus again. Both Jytte Klausen, the author of the book about the violence surrounding Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, and Kurt Westergaard, the original author of one of those cartoons, will be on campus Thursday. The events, each organized separately, will occur »

Value engineering, the process by which clients eliminate costly elements of building designs in order to save money, is understandably unpopular with architects. Some designers like to point out that all value engineering does is suck the values out of buildings; Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic for The New York Times, once called it “a »

There was a time when New Haven was a major manufacturing center, when factories in town stayed busy making everything from rifles to Erector sets. Those factories have now closed, of course, and the plant where A.C. Gilbert’s company built millions of Erector sets in the first half of the last century today has a »

The fellows of the Yale Corporation spent the weekend at Duke University, where they learned about some of its strongest programs and discussed priorities for the next five years at Yale. The Corporation, which is the University’s highest governing body, usually meets five times per year and holds its first session of the academic year »

Amid all the uproar over demolition in preparation for the two new colleges, there has been relatively little attention given to the political science “diner” right in the middle of that site. The building, which opened in 2002 and was always intended to be a temporary home for the department, is a one-story modular structure »

The Yale Police Department’s job is to enforce the law. But now, its own officers are accusing the department of breaking it. In July, the Yale Police Benevolent Association, a union that represents 65 YPD officers and detectives, requested information — including a copy of the YPD’s budget and the salaries of its top officials, »

The final results are in: Yale’s endowment lost 24.6 percent of its value between July 1, 2008, and June 30. The endowment’s value plummeted to $16.3 billion, from $22.9 billion, in that period, the University announced Tuesday. But Yale said the return “falls in the range of expected outcomes” in a year when equity markets »

The fire alarm that sounded at 10 Amistad St. on the day Annie Le GRD ’13 was murdered had nothing to do with her death, New Haven Police Department Chief James Lewis said Monday. In a wide-ranging interview in his office at police headquarters, Lewis said authorities have uncovered no evidence to support the theory »

A headline above Monday’s New York Post article about the murder of Annie Le GRD ’13 screamed, in large block letters, “Bride’s Body Mashed.” But the story of how Raymond Clark III broke Le’s bones in an attempt to fit her body “through a wall opening the size of a computer screen” turned out to »

The body of Annie Le GRD ’13 was flown back to California this weekend as the authorities continued to search for a motive in her murder. Le’s family left New Haven on Friday, and her relatives have made plans for a funeral that will take place this coming Saturday at the Holy Trinity Church in »

Raymond Clark III, a Yale animal lab technician, was arrested Thursday morning and charged with the murder of Annie Le GRD ’13, a 24-year-old doctoral student in pharmacology who authorities say was strangled to death at an on-campus research facility. A warrant was issued for Clark’s arrest shortly after 8 a.m., New Haven Police Department »