Author Archives: Sophie Gould

At 11:25 p.m. on Tuesday, a pack of about 15 students, two of them shirtless and waving their T-shirts in the air, spilled out of Farnam Hall onto the lawn of Old Campus and began a victory lap. “Obama!” they cheered. “Four more years!” The sound of Young Jeezy crooning “My President Is Black” emanated »

It was Wednesday afternoon, and Miranda Melcher ’16 and Khalid Attalla ’16 waited for the New Haven Limo Service at Melcher’s cousins’ New York City apartment. Their ride was already an hour and a half late. Six other car companies had told Melcher they could not help. She had exhausted her other options: The train »

Though Yale posted a subdued 4.7 percent return on its investments for the latest fiscal year, the University outperformed many of its peer institutions in endowment growth. Returns across the Ivy League for the fiscal period that ended June 30 were significantly lower than in the year prior, with Yale experiencing a sharp decrease from »

Though the student body will grow by roughly 800 students when Yale’s two new residential colleges are completed, the size of the faculty has remained stagnant since the onset of the nationwide economic recession in 2008. The number of tenured and tenure-track professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has hovered around 700 over »

María Rosa Menocal, a humanities professor known for her work on medieval Spain whose vivacious presence spearheaded a rapid expansion of the Whitney Humanities Center, died Monday of melanoma. She was 59. A renowned scholar and author, Menocal became a Sterling professor of the humanities in 2005 and served as director of the Whitney Humanities »

Arlen Specter LAW ’56, a former United States senator from Pennsylvania who stood out in Congress for his independent politics, died Sunday in Philadelphia of complications related to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 82. Considered one of the few remaining moderates, Specter served as a Republican senator for almost 30 years before announcing in 2009 that »

After a three-year fight with melanoma, humanities professor María Rosa Menocal passed away Monday afternoon. A Sterling Professor of the Humanities since 2005, Menocal served as director of the Whitney Humanities Center from 2001 to 2012. She told the Yale Bulletin in 2005 that the WHC is “the University’s center for conversations across the arts »

Discontented with what they perceive to be increasingly top- down decision-making at Yale, several professors are teaming up with a national organization in an effort to promote shared governance at the University. The professors are working to reinstate a chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national organization that represents professors in promoting »

After efforts to gather student, faculty and alumni opinion on the search for a new Yale president, the Search Committee released a statement Tuesday morning outlining the most important qualities University President Richard Levin’s successor must possess. The committee wrote that the person who will replace Levin at the end of the academic year must »

Students in the middle of presenting policy briefs in “Studies in Grand Strategy” Monday did not expect to see U.S. Senator John McCain walk through the door. While campaigning in Connecticut for U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon, Senator John McCain stopped by Yale Monday afternoon to see the campus and participate in a policy briefing »

Students who found their shopping lists for this term clustered within the same time slots were not alone. This fall, as in past years, seminars and large lecture classes are concentrated in the middle of the week during the late morning and afternoon, despite past efforts to get departments to assign course times more evenly. »

Though Yale’s newest fraternity Beta Upsilon Chi (BYX) has announced a policy of admitting only Christians, it will have to change its membership rules if it intends to comply with Yale’s anti-discrimination policies. Victor Hicks ’15, the founder and president of Yale’s chapter of BYX, which is the largest Christian fraternity in the country, told »