Author Archives: Zachary Abrahamson

Yale professor Ernesto Zedillo, president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000 and now director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, recently led a review of the governance and international priorities of the World Bank. The 46-page report, “Repowering the World Bank for the 21st Century,” calls for a restructuring of the Bank’s »

The words could have been written yesterday. “Extra-curricular activities have hindered academic interest due to the concept of the successful Yale man,” wrote the Aurelian Honor Society in their 1957 report entitled “Academic Indifference at Yale.” “If there is to be a revival of academic interest at Yale, then there will have to be a »

With the opening of the Broadway Rehearsal Lofts earlier this month, members of undergraduate dance and theater groups are breathing a sigh of relief that the new space will help relieve what has for several years been a chronic crunch on rehearsal and performance spaces on campus. But despite the plush new digs, dance groups »

There is a beginning for all things. For Rafi Taherian, Yale’s new executive director of dining services, that was Stir (or, to undergraduates, the “Ivy Noodle station in Commons”). But Stir chef Nuanmin Guo’s wontons are only the beginning — the first visible consequence of Taherian’s move to New Haven and the exit of food »

It has been one year since the Yale College Council stopped passing resolutions. Fall 2007 introduced the “project team,” a YCC platoon devoted to a small, specific issue or policy change, to the Yale lexicon. And last year it worked — sort of. In-house projects — Eli Days, a student DVD library — came off »

There weren’t any students on the search committee when the University tapped a popular psychology professor, Peter Salovey, to serve as dean of Yale College. Nor were there any in 1992, when Richard Brodhead — then the chair of the English Department and now the ninth president of Duke University — assumed the deanship in »

It’s not easy to get Yalies to talk about race. But Kirk Hooks is trying to do exactly that. In early August, the University announced the hiring of Hooks — its first intercultural czar — with little fanfare. He was a multicultural specialist from the University of Michigan. He was multiracial. And he would be »

It’s not a czar: It’s an educator. That about sums up the University’s vision for Yale’s first-ever director of alcohol and substance abuse initiatives, a new Dean’s Office post the University is trying to fill by fall 2009. The director, administrators said, will be tasked with centralizing the University’s broad but scattered resources for drug »

It’s not a response, administrators said. Then what is it? The University’s decision to add an alcohol educator to the rolls of the Yale College Dean’s Office begs explanation. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And for many Yalies, the University’s network of ad hoc alcohol educators — freshman counselors, »

It was the piece that ended Raymond Ou’s piano career. Over a decade later, it was the piece that brought him to Yale. In 1992, a nervous 17-year-old seeking a spot at Baltimore’s elite Peabody Institute, Ou chose as his audition piece Maurice Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit,” often called the world’s hardest piece to »

The new cultural component of this year’s freshman orientation aimed to turn heads, but instead left some freshmen simply scratching them. Administrators in the Yale College Dean’s Office introduced Kaleidoscope this year, a theatrical production of monologues that introduced incoming students to questions of race and diversity that they might face during their years in »

The University has tapped staff from the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute to fill posts in the Yale College Dean’s Office, Dean of Student Affairs Marichal Gentry announced in a press release this week. Raymond Ou, currently residence-life and student-activities coordinator at the Peabody Institute, will take over as assistant dean »