Author Archives: Akbar Ahmed

On March 15, 2011, while most of Yale’s undergraduate students took a respite from campus over the course of spring break, 16 students and alumni filed a federal Title IX complaint against the University, launching Yale to the forefront of national discourse and opening up an ongoing conversation about the University’s modus operandi. In the »

As they toil and tweet alongside other interns, some Yalies learn about exotic parts of the world. They might grasp new ideas or engage with different ways of thinking. They’ve even been known to discover the kind of romantic connection that lasts a lifetime or, like, some random collection of nights. What I gleaned from »

Cameras rolled, questions were fired out and stock phrases — “conversation with the administration,” “high-impact changes,” “real leadership is critical” — were bandied around like colorful sunglasses in the hands of Spring Fling revelers. The Yale College Council Election Debate on April 7 was a chance for the three Yalies competing to lead the council »

1977: Professor George Chauncey ’77 GRD ’89 and a group of other undergraduates organize Yale’s first Gay Rights Week, the event from which the current Pride@Yale claims ancestry. In a 2009 article in the Yale Alumni Magazine, Chauncey described the event as “one long effort to encourage people to come out: first by asking them »

When Sophie Nethercut ’14 arrived at the now-infamous Occupy Morgan Stanley protest on Nov. 16 last semester, the chants had already started. “There’s something so powerful about being in a place where 50 people are reciting the same thing over and over,” Nethercut said. “‘Twenty-five percent is too much talent spent!’ – to join in »

Yes, the Students for a New American Politics Political Action Committee is one of those PACs you keep hearing about. Yes, they’ve raised over $200,000 and sponsored 30 candidates since being founded at Yale in 2004. But the way they use their money is less like the vilified Super PACs spawned from Citizen United and »

I mean, are you ready for a new sensation? Dancefloor Diplomacy, a project co-founded by Yale’s very own Jakob Dorof ’12, has internet music reviewers going wild, writing up a storm and drawing comparisons with Girl Talk. The group released “We Are Ready,” its first video, earlier this week, pulling audiences into the world of »

Patrick Cage ’14 looks at his hands, one wrist bedecked with bracelets of every color in a post-nuclear rainbow, and calls Control Group “the marzipan of theater companies.” Charlie Polinger ’13 says, in an email he wrote to me five days after the close of the ninth show he’s directed at Yale, that Control Group »

She spent years lying to everyone but her family about her job, she publicly shamed the Bush administration, she moved to Santa Fe because she was receiving too many threats at her home in DC — Valerie Plame Wilson has led a complicated life, but she’s not done fighting yet. The ex-spy who infamously had »

On their website, they say they “believe Yale can do better.” In their eyes, they’re making a stand against our campus’ prevalent sexual climate — and they know they’re right. To others, they’re everything from repressed, self-loathing Victorians to killjoys who should stay at Global Grounds to representatives of a larger division at Yale. In »

Sometimes, making a critical comment in class can entail thinking twice. Last week, IvyGate revealed that a teaching fellow in Professor Alexander Nemerov’s popular art history course was fired after sending a series of increasingly aggressive emails to fellow TFs and, eventually, Edward Barnaby, the Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. »

For Julian Reid ’13, pretty much everyone is a “cool cat.” He plays with his musical ensemble every Sunday in Morse Dining Hall (“Master Keil is a cool cat”). He promised himself before coming to college that, “worst come to worst, [he’d] practice music in his room.” One of his biggest problems sophomore year was »