Tag Archive: Administration

  1. No more lunch for undergrads at the Law School

    Leave a Comment

    Updated 9:57 p.m. In a stunning, heartbreaking and utterly tragic announcement for those who need their daily chicken avocado wrap, Yale Dining Services announced today that undergraduates on University meal plans will no longer be allowed to swipe at the Law School Dining Hall beginning this fall.

    In an e-mail message to students, the executive director of dining services, Rafi Taherian, also announced several other changes, including improved buttery menus and the opening of a new “healthy, natural and sustainable convenience store.” In addition, Flex Points — renamed “Dining Points” — can now only be used on campus and not at Wall Street Pizza or Yorkside Pizza & Restaurant, where they previously had been accepted.

    “Some of these changes, which come as a direct result of the financial challenges the university is facing, will have an impact in the way your meal plan is structured and we feel it’s important to keep you in the loop throughout this process,” Taherian wrote.

    The Law School, for its part, says it did not seek to have undergraduates booted from its dining hall. “This is a decision that was made by Dining Services,” said Janet Conroy, a spokeswoman for the Law School. “We have nothing to do with the decision.”

    The move comes two years after Yale Dining Services prohibited students from “double swiping” — skipping breakfast and then swiping twice at lunch, once for a meal and once for groceries — at the Law School and other retail dining facilities.

    The double swiping episode demonstrates why Dining Services might want to ban undergraduates from the Law School altogether. Because the dining hall there is run by the Law School and not by Dining Services, several hundred thousand dollars per year in student meal credits were going to supplement the Law School dining program instead of Yale College’s as a result of widespread double swiping, administrators explained at the time.

    “We felt that was a lot of money out of the board program,” said Ernst Huff, the associate vice president for student financial and administrative services.

    That same logic applies here. By keeping those swipes in its own facilities, Dining Services won’t be giving up revenue  — an attractive prospect in a time of shrinking budgets.

    Taherian’s full e-mail is after the jump. We’re trying to get more information from Dining Services and will report back when we do. In the meantime, take a deep breath. We’re going to get through this.

    (more…)

  2. Levin: ‘We all believe Dean Koh will be confirmed’

    Leave a Comment

    Now that his successor has been named, what happens if Harold Hongju Koh fails to win confirmation as legal adviser to the Department of State?

    Put it this way: Yale officials really, really don’t think that’s going to happen.  It better not, at least, or Koh may come back to find himself working in a much smaller office in the Sterling Law Building.

    (more…)

  3. Miller: Sotomayor ‘a dedicated and serious young woman’

    Leave a Comment

    Before Sonia Sotomayor LAW ’79 was nominated to the Supreme Court, she was a student at Princeton — and a classmate of Yale College Dean Mary Miller.

    Along with four other students, Sotomayor and Miller served on a student search committee for a new assistant dean of student affairs. Frustrated with the process, the group wrote a letter to the editor in the September 12, 1974, issue of The Daily Princetonian.

    In the letter, which can be read in full here, the students criticized the search’s focus on selecting a minority candidate and the vague role of the student committee. While Miller is white and Sotomayor is Latina, both were chosen because they are women, at a time when Princeton was largely male.

    (more…)

  5. How does Peter Salovey spend his summers?

    Leave a Comment

    salovey.jpg

    Officiating weddings for the children of his Provost’s Office colleagues, apparently.

    In fact, Salovey’s shout-out in today’s New York Times — for officiating the wedding of Clelia Peters ’00 and Blake Suttle ’97, the son of a deputy provost, Lloyd Suttle, and the coordinator of the residential college seminar program, Cathy Suttle — was hardly his first.

    The Times also ran articles noting Salovey’s participation in the weddings of his colleagues’ children in 2003 and 2004.  And we reported last fall that Salovey officiated at the wedding of K.C. Mills, his assistant at the time and now the operations manager for Silliman College.

    (Photo: Han Xu/Senior Photographer)

  6. Harvard becomes first university to create gay studies chair

    1 Comment

    Harvard University announced Thursday that it is creating an endowed visiting professorship in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies, staking its claim as the first American university to create such a chair.

    The milestone hits a sour note at Yale, given that the University passed up the chance to create such a position more than a decade ago. In 1997, the prominent AIDS activist Larry Kramer ’57 offered Yale funds to create either an endowed chair in gay and lesbian studies or a student center for LGBT students. The University rejected the offer, sparking a major conflict with Kramer that ultimately garnered national media attention.

    (more…)

  9. Levin’s Baccalaureate address

    Leave a Comment

    University President Richard Levin addressed the graduating class and its guests on three separate occasions this weekend as part of the Baccalaureate Service.  Here is the full text of his remarks:

    The Economy and the Human Spirit

    When I welcomed you four years ago, you were exhilarated but apprehensive, excited to be taking on a new challenge, but more than a little intimidated – awed by the imposing architecture of this place, by the grandeur of this hall, by the rumble of its great organ, and by the dazzling accomplishment of your classmates, who all seemed to you to belong here, even if you were not quite sure about yourself.  Now, appropriately, you feel as if you own the place; every corner of your college, every face in the dining hall, is familiar to you.  You have made close friends, and you have memories you will never forget.  While all this happened to you the world around you was flourishing. And Yale was flourishing, too – building and renovating at an astonishing pace, adding new international programs, and enhancing financial aid to make the whole experience a lighter burden on your families.

    Who would have imagined, four years ago, that the world economy would collapse? As you leave here, it is hard not to think about this unhappy reality.  So, as an economist and as your president, I would like to offer you my perspective on what has happened and what it means for you.

    (more…)

  10. Brooke Shearer, founding director of World Fellows program, dies at 58

    1 Comment

    shearer.jpg

    Brooke Shearer, a former Clinton administration official who later served as the founding director of Yale’s World Fellows program, died on Tuesday at her Washington home.  She was 58.

    The cause was cancer, according to The Washington Post.

    Shearer, the wife of former deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott ’68, served as a personal aide to Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 during the 1992 presidential campaign and then directed the White House Fellows program during the Clinton administration.  She came to New Haven in 2001 to serve as the founding director of Yale’s World Fellows program, which allows for emerging leaders from around the world to spend a semester studying at the University.

    She left Yale a year later when Talbott, who had been the inaugural director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, accepted the presidency of the Brookings Institution.

    (Photo: Yale University)

  11. New college renderings to be on display

    Leave a Comment

    New college rendering

    Alumni on hand for Yale reunions over the next few weeks will have a chance to see a large-scale model and blown-up renderings of the proposed new residential colleges. (Click here for a slideshow.)

    University President Richard Levin said in a phone interview that the materials would be made available to alumni so that they could evaluate the plans for themselves — and start thinking about donating funds to support the project. Levin confirmed that the renderings revealed by the News earlier this month are the same ones that Yale will put on display for its graduates. The model and sketches, he said, may be put up in the nave of Sterling Memorial Library.

    Some alums, though, have already seen these materials. The University began showing the plans, designed by School of Architecture Dean Robert A.M. Stern ARC ’65, to top donors in April.

    (Photo: Jeff Stikeman)