A group of Yale Law School students have rallied to show their interest in more classes about the junction of law and technology. Their medium, naturally: the Internet. With the help of a Facebook group, the students’ petition has gathered 300 supporters — about half the school. Administrators are currently considering how to expand Yale’s offerings in intellectual...
When shopping classes, Yale students usually rely on word of mouth to find out what kind of grades a professor gives. But now a student-run Web site launched this shopping period, Gradifi.com, promises to provide a more statistically sound method of determining the impact certain classes have on grade-point averages, based on students’ previous grades in other classes...
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair may have been treated like a celebrity when he visited campus last weekend, but to Elis, he will soon become a fixture on campus — and not just this fall. When the University announced in March that Blair would teach a seminar in the fall semester on faith and globalization, officials suggested Blair would be on campus only for...
As Yale’s most popular interdisciplinary major undergoes a change in leadership, current professors say they hope to make some key changes to the structure of the Ethics, Politics and Economics program to bring some much-needed stability to its faculty roster. Both EP&E director Seyla Benhabib and Director of Undergraduate Studies Jennifer Bair will step down next...
In an effort to meet increasing student demand for upper-level writing classes and bolster the writing concentration, the English department is augmenting current offerings in both fiction and nonfiction writing classes, English Director of Undergraduate Studies Lawrence Manley said this week. The size of the writing faculty — currently totalling about 14 — will also...
When Michael Koelle, director of undergraduate studies in the Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry department, came to Yale 10 years ago, there were twice as many MB&B majors as there were last year. His initial reaction: it was simple coincidence. Biology-oriented students, he assumed, were probably just drifting to other biology-related majors. But a departmental...
Yale’s Faculty of Engineering will be spun off into its own school, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the University announced Monday. In a move approved by the Yale Corporation over the weekend, Dean of Engineering T. Kyle Vanderlick will take the helm of the new school, whose faculty will be increased in size by nearly 20 percent, the University said in...
Ari Berlin ’10 fared well during his spring-break travels to Morocco and Spain. He mastered “jus d’orange” in French and got by in Barcelona with his high-school Spanish. “I’m not a languages kind of guy,” Berlin says. Yet he speaks — or “interacts,” rather — in four languages: English since birth, Spanish from high school and Zulu and Afrikaans...
When Jill North, an assistant professor in the philosophy department, was considering a job offer from Yale four years ago, she could think of only one real downside: the University’s outdated, opaque tenure system. Under that system, revised last year after an 18-month review, junior faculty members in humanities departments like philosophy had an almost negligible...
Last semester, Japanese Literature professor Edward Kamens, then the acting director of the Whitney Humanities Center, noticed a consistent refrain in conversations with professors — and it wasn’t particularly uplifting. Those with whom Kamens spoke, he recalled, were concerned about drops in humanities enrollment, particularly in history, art history and...
Back in kindergarten, most boys had a fail-proof way of explaining the workings of the female mind: cooties. Soon, though, cooties become obsolete and now — after puberty, hormones and periods — understanding women is often perceived as a hopeless task for the college-aged man. But not for Colin Adamo ’10. As one of only four men who have declared a Women’s...
After spending over 20 years at the University as both a student and a teacher, Divinity School professor Serene Jones DIV ’85 GRD ’91 will leave Yale this fall to become the first female president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Jones’ appointment to Union, which was announced in late February, will halve the number of American Indian professors at...
