This story and headline were updated on Dec. 22 to reflect University President Peter Salovey’s latest statement on the Republican tax overhaul.
As President Donald Trump prepared to sign into law the biggest federal tax overhaul in decades, University President Peter Salovey told the News on Thursday that while he opposes the bill’s tax on endowment income, he is “relieved” and “encouraged” that the final version of the plan does not inflict more damage on higher education.
The Republican tax bill, which passed Congress on Wednesday, will subject Yale and 34 other universities to a 1.4 percent tax on endowment returns every year. In fiscal 2017, Yale — which has a $27.2 billion endowment — would have had to pay around $25 million in taxes on its endowment income if such a tax had been in place.
“The tax on investment income breaks the longstanding consensus that charities should not be taxed,” Salovey said in an email to the News. “I worry that Congress will not stop here, and other schools, as well as libraries and museums, will be taxed in the future.”
Still, unlike earlier iterations of the plan, the final version leaves in place tax exemptions for the tuition waivers that Yale and other elite universities grant to graduate students. In his email, Salovey said he was “relieved” that Congress preserved those exemptions as well as other existing financial benefits for students.
As the bill was signed on Friday morning, Salovey further criticized the tax overhaul in another email to the News, attacking the plan’s tax cuts for the rich and cap on the deductibility of state and local taxes.
The cuts will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, contribute to the growing national debt and ultimately be used as a reason to attack safety net programs, Salovey said. He added that the bill’s cap on the deductibility of state and local taxes will disproportionately hurt residents of New Haven and Connecticut.
“The claims about how much economic growth will be stimulated by these changes are very much overstated,” Salovey wrote. “I feel quite negatively about the impact of the bill on the endowments of universities, including Yale, as well as the impact of the bill on our nation more generally.”
Over the past month, Salovey and other university presidents across the country have lobbied against various provisions in the tax bill, which arrived at President Donald Trump’s desk earlier on Wednesday after winning approval in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The University has raised concerns with congressmen and Trump administration officials and encouraged prominent alumni to reach out to legislators, Vice President of Communications Eileen O’Connor told the News in an email last month.
O’Connor said the tax plan has been one of Salovey’s central focuses this fall and that other University officials have worked with peer institutions, professional groups and student organizations to rally against provisions in the bill.
According to O’Connor, Salovey gave “impassioned” last month at a recent meeting of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education about “continuing the fight.” Still, beyond that meeting, Salovey has yet to speak publicly about the bill.
Salovey told the News he has discussed the tax legislation with “several” members of Congress, but declined to name the particular officials.
“I do not normally discuss my conversations, which I consider private and confidential,” he wrote in an email. “I have also made a considerable effort to engage leadership of other schools, because this bill was an issue where all voices mattered.”
In statements over the past few weeks, Salovey has expressed concern about the tax bill’s adverse impact on higher education, saying he is “deeply concerned” that the bill will “harm the country.”
But his initial remarks on the tax bill were relatively demure compared to a statement released this week by Harvard President Drew Faust.
Following the bill’s passage on Wednesday, Faust decried its “damaging impacts,” saying it could limit the university’s capacity to fund financial aid and other programs.
In earlier interviews with the News, Salovey has said he will only speak out about political issues that directly affect University life, such as federal funding for research and immigration policies that affect students and faculty. In August, he wrote a public letter to Trump defending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. And since the 2016 election, he has sent several campuswide emails vowing to protect Yale’s undocumented students and other immigrant community members.
Compared to his response to the immigration issues, however, Salovey has remained relatively quiet on the tax bill, preferring to lobby congressmen in private meetings rather than through public statements.
Yale spent $397,000 on lobbying in the first three quarters of 2017, according to federal forms.
A recent National Labor Relations Board decision has grim implications for Local 33, Yale’s graduate student union.
The labor board has wasted no time reversing Obama-era rulings to loosen regulations on employers since it turned over to a Republican majority in September. And in one of three reversals last week, the NLRB voted along party lines to make it harder for employees to organize in so-called “micro units” within a larger group of employees. The NLRB is currently considering an appeal by Yale to block graduate students from unionizing in eight academic departments. And now, the labor board has rolled back its 2011 Specialty Healthcare decision, a controversial ruling that formed the legal basis for Local 33’s departmental elections.
“The implications of the board’s reversal are substantial,” former NLRB Chairman William B. Gould told the News. “I would think that the implications are that the board will reverse the departmental findings if they get to that. [But] it’s possible that there could be departmental units even independent of Specialty Healthcare, depending on a number of factors in determining what’s an appropriate unit.”
Graduate students in eight of Yale’s academic departments voted to unionize in February, a piecemeal approach untested at other universities but approved by a regional branch of the NLRB. The elections came six months after the federal labor board gave graduate students at private universities the right to unionize, in a case involving Columbia University. But despite Local 33’s departmental victories, Yale has refused to come to the negotiating table as it appeals the legal basis of the union elections to the NLRB.
The rollback of the Specialty Healthcare decision will work in Yale’s favor as the NLRB evaluates those appeals, said Dan Bowling, a labor expert at Duke School of Law.
“It won’t be determinative because the board will make a fact-based determination case by case,” he said. “But the standard of review now is much more favorable to Yale.”
The 3–2 decision to roll back Specialty Healthcare abolishes a standard that required employers hoping to block piecemeal unionization efforts to prove an “overwhelming community of interest” between members of a microunit and employees excluded from that unit. Local 33 used the Specialty Healthcare standard to argue in labor court in the fall of 2016 that students in different departments ought to unionize separately, while Yale contended that all graduate students share an “overwhelming community of interest.” The NLRB’s regional branch ultimately ruled in favor of Local 33, paving the way for the union’s departmental elections.
Asked to respond to the rollback of Specialty Healthcare, Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said the University is still reviewing the decision and that administrators continue to believe Local 33’s departmental elections were “inappropriate and unfair.” Local 33 Chair Aaron Greenberg ’18 and Co-Chair Robin Canavan ’19 did not respond to requests for comment.
According to Gould, the NLRB rolled back Specialty Healthcare at high speed, without allowing time for public input, amicus briefs and oral arguments, as it often does before making important decisions. He expressed concern that the NLRB rushed to overrule the Obama-era decision before the conservatives lose their majority this month with the expiration of Board Chairman Philip Miscimarra’s term.
But the “more fundamental issue” for Yale and Local 33 is whether the NLRB will reverse the Columbia decision, as well, Gould emphasized.
Now that the labor board is dominated by President Donald Trump’s anti-union appointees, Bowling said, graduate students might see their freshly minted right to unionize revoked with a reversal of the Columbia decision.
“The big picture is I don’t think [a ruling on micro units] is going to matter one way or the other,” Bowling said. “The Columbia ruling is on life support from what I’ve seen this week.”
The Republican tax bill poised to reach President Donald Trump’s desk this week leaves graduate students largely unscathed. But it upends the tax benefits enjoyed by about two dozen large university endowments — including Yale’s $27.2 billion endowment.
The final version of the bill unveiled late Friday leaves in place the student loan interest deduction and the tax break on tuition waivers, both of which would have been struck down under a version of the plan that passed the House of Representatives in November. The final bill — a combination of separate plans passed in the Senate and the House — was approved by the House on Tuesday afternoon and is expected to pass the Senate later this week. Under the original House plan, graduate students at Yale would have seen their annual taxes tripled from $3,000 to $8,500.
Still, the final tax plan is bad news for universities with large endowments. Despite weeks of lobbying by educational institutions, the final version includes a 1.4 percent tax on university endowments’ investment income that targets universities with more than $500,000 in endowment per full-time student.
Yale, which boasts roughly $2 million in endowment funds per full-time student, would have had to pay around $25 million in taxes in fiscal 2017 if such a tax had been in place. Three other Ivy League schools — Princeton, Harvard and Dartmouth — will also be subject to the new tax given the size of their endowments.
“We are relieved that Congress is reaffirming the importance of graduate education by preserving the tax exemption for tuition remission for graduate students,” Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Lynn Cooley wrote in an email to the News. “At the same time, we are dismayed that Congress does not appreciate the vital role that endowments play in enabling Yale and its peer schools to sustain investments in education, financial assistance, and transformative research that benefits society, creating jobs and economic growth.”
Students, faculty and administrators at Yale have come together in the past two months to fight provisions in the tax bill with negative implications for higher education.
University President Peter Salovey has made the tax bill a priority of his fall schedule, calling on Yale alumni on Capitol Hill and beyond to help protect the school’s tax benefits. Graduate students have organized phone banking campaigns to voice concerns to their congressional representative and published op-eds criticizing the tax plan in local newspapers.
“We are grateful for the many students at Yale and campuses nationwide who raised their voices loud and clear on this issue,” Cooley said.
Sarah Smaga GRD ’19, who sits on the steering committee of the Graduate Student Assembly, said that while Republican lawmakers were hashing out the differences between the Senate and House tax bills, several Yale graduate students wrote articles in their local newspapers denouncing the tax on tuition waivers that was ultimately left out of the plan.
Smaga added that political engagement remains crucial as lawmakers work on an extensive rewrite of the Obama-era Higher Education Act, a 1965 law designed to provide financial assistance to students.
“The House has already started on their version of the bill, and it ends a lot of loan forgiveness programs,” Smaga said. “After the holidays, it’s going to be important that students and universities continue to speak out in support of policies that make higher education accessible and affordable.”
The tax plan is projected to add $1.46 trillion over a decade to the nation’s $20 trillion debt.
This story has been updated on Dec. 19 to reflect the latest development.
Despite weeks of student activism, Melecio Andazola Morales, the father of Viviana Andazola Marquez ’18, has been deported to Mexico and barred from re-entering the United States for 20 years, Andazola Marquez told the News on Sunday night.
At 11 a.m. on Friday, Andazola Morales was removed from a detention facility in Denver, Colorado, where he had been held for 64 days. From there, his daughter said, he was flown to El Paso, Texas, and then to Arizona, where he was placed in another detention facility for four hours before being transferred to a bus, cuffed by his hands and feet and driven to Nogales, Mexico.
The case sparked outrage at Yale and on other college campuses across the country after Andazola Morales was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a private detention center in Aurora, Colorado run by the GEO Group. Students signed petitions supporting Andazola Morales and gathered in La Casa Cultural to make phone calls to ICE, while students at other colleges — from Harvard to San Diego University — joined a photo campaign calling for his freedom. The #FreeMelecio campaign also garnered the support of U.S. Reps. Jared Polis and Ed Perlmutter and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, all Colorado Democrats.
But those efforts failed to sway U.S. immigration authorities. On Friday, ICE director Jeffrey Lynch denied Andazola Morales a stay of removal, paving the way for his deportation, Andazola Marquez told the News. She said ICE did not notify her father’s attorney that Lynch had denied her father his final recourse for staying in the country.
Andazola Morales told the family’s lawyer at 8 a.m on Friday that he was still in the
in the detention facility and had made it through a wave of scheduled deportations earlier that morning, Andazola Marquez explained. Thisled her family to believe he had at least one more week in the country, as the deportations usually took place early each Friday morning,Andazola Morales explained. But three hours later, immigration officials asked Andazola Morales to pack his belongings and prepare to leave the facility.
“They didn’t come get my dad until 11 a.m, and my dad was convinced he was going to be released in the U.S. because of that,” she said. “But instead, they took him to the airport.”
In accordance with ICE policy, Andazola Morales was not allowed to contact anyone outside the facility about his imminent removal from the country once his deportation began, but his family was still under the impression that he was not set to be deported on Friday because he had made it past the regularly scheduled deportations.
“For operational security reasons, ICE Denver detainees housed in the Aurora Contract Detention Facility, who have been processed for removal on the next ICE Air Operations flight, are considered to be ‘in transit,’ and are not authorized to make phone calls,” Carl Rusnok, a communications director for ICE, told the News. “The phones for this out-processing area are shut down until the ICE Air flight departs.”
Still, Andazola Marquez said she believes the timing of her father’s deportation after the family believed he was safe was “a calculated decision” by ICE to prevent the family from taking last-minute action to prevent the deportation.
Andazola Marquez and her family first suspected that something was amiss in the evening when Andazola Morales did not call them after detainee phone lines were restored. Andazola Marquez said she contacted ICE with questions, but no one would tell her the location of her father.
Asked to respond to Andazola Marquez’s claim that the timing of the deportation was “calculated,” Rusnok said there were “no out-of-the-ordinary schedule changes with the Dec. 15 ICE Air Operations (IAO) flight” and that “IAO flights routinely change for myriad reasons in detention management.”
On Saturday morning, Andazola Morales called his family to inform them that he was in Mexico and barred from re-entering the United States for two decades.
“My family will not be united for the holidays and will be facing economic hardship,” Andazola Marquez said. “We do not currently have the funds to help my dad secure a home and a vehicle, or to move my two younger sisters, who will be forced to leave the country in the wake of his removal.”
In the wake of the deportation, the Yale community has continued advocating for Andazola Marquez’s family. Director of La Casa Eileen Galvez asked that students and members of the community help the family with expenses related to relocating to Mexico in a newsletter sent out on Monday.
“We’re asking people to please donate anything they can, and help make this transition easier on Melecio, his wife, and daughters,” Galvez wrote. “If you can help in any way during this holiday season, it would be very much appreciated.”
A GoFundMe launched by Andazola Marquez on Dec. 18 has already raised more than $21,000 to help family cover the expenses of relocating to Mexico.
University President Peter Salovey on Friday morning sent an e-mail to the Yale community reaffirming the University’s commitment to preventing sexual misconduct. But to students, this was not enough.
Hours later, students began a call to action, demanding that Salovey explain why Yale has not responded to well-publicized accusations of sexual misconduct leveled against three University professors: English professor Harold Bloom, philosophy professor Thomas Pogge and Spanish professor Roberto González Echevarría. Rachel Calnek-Sugin ’19 and Robert Newhouse ’19 created a Facebook event inviting members of the Yale community to respond to Salovey’s e-mail with information regarding the allegations against the three professors. As of Friday evening, 143 students responded that they were “going” to the event, indicating that they had participated in the e-mail campaign.
“Speaking personally, I sincerely agree with the content of Salovey’s email, and I truly hope we can create a Yale that is ‘a safe, respectful, and inclusive campus where all can learn, work, and thrive,’ ” Calnek-Sugin said. “But doing that means much more than just sending a PR email with an affirmation of values. Confronting outstanding complaints — publicly, and with concrete steps — is necessary and right and would be a great way for the University to show that it’s committed to the work that it’s committed to [Salovey’s] email’s affirmation that ‘sexual harassment and misconduct are antithetical to our purpose and have no place in the Yale community.’”
As of Friday afternoon, Salovey had not yet seen the e-mails. He said he could not speak to any specific case or anything involving specific people.
But he added that “if any member of the Yale community has a complaint against any other member of the Yale community, they should take it to a Title IX coordinator.”
In recent months, the nation has seen a deluge of new allegations against prominent figures in a range of industries, from media to government. But the allegations against Bloom, Pogge and Echevarría date back to long before the floodgates opened.
“For a long time, I’ve been frustrated and disoriented to see how men in all arenas of public life have faced the consequences of their alleged misconduct, but not those at Yale,” Newhouse said. “[The email campaign] is not necessarily an accusation of Yale’s past ineptitude but rather a recognition of Yale’s renewed effort … to combat issues of sexual misconduct on our campus, and a challenge to make good on these promises by addressing the long-outstanding allegations against these three famous professors.”
Others took greater issue with Salovey’s e-mail. For Rachel Suyeon An ’19, Salovey’s remarks were “hypocritical.” An said that, while the e-mail encouraged students to report and speak out, Yale has historically silenced victims. Nurit Chinn, ’20, a member of the Title IX Student Advisory Board, said that Salovey failed to “fully grasp” the reality of widespread sexual harassment at Yale.
In a New York Magazine story in 2004, Naomi Wolf ’84 accused Bloom of “sexual encroachment.” Wolf contacted Yale about the incident in 2003 to try to “start a conversation … to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this story weren’t still occurring,” but she has said that Yale was unresponsive, even after nine months of phone calls and e-mails to University officials.
A 2016 Buzzfeed article chronicled the story of Fernanda Lopez Aguilar ’10, who alleged Pogge had groped her and made a series of inappropriate remarks, among other charges, when she worked as a translator for him in Chile. After she spurned his advances, Lopez said, Pogge retaliated by rescinding his offer to a paid postgraduate fellowship at the Global Justice Program he runs at Yale. Upon reporting the sexual harassment to University administrators in 2010, Lopez said, she was offered $2,000 on the condition that she sign a nondisclosure agreement, which she accepted. But in 2011, Lopez filed a formal complaint against Pogge. An adjudicative panel at Yale did not find Pogge guilty of sexual harassment or that professional retaliation occurred.
In October 2015, Lopez filed a federal civil rights complaint alleging that Yale violated Title IX and asking the government to investigate whether Yale has ignored evidence that she and other women have provided to prove that Pogge is a danger to females students.
Susan Byrne, a former professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department, filed a lawsuit claiming that Echeverría sexually harassed her, that professors in the Spanish department bullied her and that she was denied tenure as retaliation for speaking out against it. According to the lawsuit, Echevarría repeatedly made crude comments to and about female professors in the department, played with the hair of his students and kissed Byrne on the mouth at a 2014 party in front of hundreds of colleagues. Byrne was denied tenure in 2015 and terminated from Yale on June 30 after months of appeals.
Since 2011, the University has used a “preponderance of evidence” standard to determine if an individual is guilty of sexual misconduct. Earlier in that same year, the Obama administration issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” that recommended a set of policies for universities to handle reports of sexual misconduct. Salovey said that earlier in his presidency he had informal conversations with officials in the Obama administration’s Department of Education to discuss Yale’s sexual misconduct prevention programs and reporting procedures, such as the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct.
But earlier this fall, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said that her department would review the Obama-era Title IX policies. In response, Yale said that it would maintain the “preponderance of evidence” standard despite ambiguities at the federal level.
Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs & Campus Development Bruce Alexander ’65 has been appointed to Connecticut’s newly formed Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Growth, Governor Dannel P. Malloy announced on Thursday.
The 14-member commission, established in the recently passed state budget, will develop and recommend policies for state revenues, tax structures, spending and debt, among other fiscal issues. The group, which also includes Webster Bank CEO Jim Smith and Chairman and CEO of the Hartford Christopher Swift, is designed to provide input from members of the private sector to help remedy the state’s long-precarious fiscal situation.
Alexander said he will guide the “transportation infrastructure” and “cities” work streams. He has chaired the Transportation Strategy Board, an earlier Connecticut commission. He was appointed to the latter effort for Yale’s work in “revitalizing New Haven,” he added. Other groups will study fiscal stability, economic growth, and competitiveness.
The committee convened for the first time Friday afternoon and will hold public hearings before it submits a report of its findings to Malloy and the Connecticut General Assembly by March 1. A legislative committee will then draft legislation to implement the recommendations.
At its first meeting, the committee heard presentations from Connecticut budget director Ben Barnes, Commissioner of Transportation Jim Redeker and Malloy. The focus was transportation and short-term funding shortfalls.
On Oct. 31, the state signed a two-year, $40 billion budget into law, ending a 123-day period standoff, the longest in state history.
In recent years, with the state’s population declining, Connecticut lawmakers have scrambled to revive the state’s economy. Before the budget passed, Hartford, the state’s capital, was on the verge of bankruptcy. And since 2016, two of Connecticut’s largest employers, General Electric and Aetna, announced plans to move to Boston and New York, respectively.
The 11 members appointed to the financial stability committee so far — three more legislative appointments are yet to be announced — will discuss strategies to attract businesses and workers to Connecticut. Smith and Bob Patricelli, the former chair and CEO of Women’s Health USA, will serve as co-chairs. Pat Widlitz, a former state representative and co-chair of the legislature’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, will serve as vice chair. In a joint statement, Smith, Patricelli and Widlitz said that the committee will seek solutions to guide the budgeting process and make Connecticut more competitive.
“This is a time in the history of our state when leaders, particularly from the private sector, have to get more deeply involved in the process of government to help our elected officials find solutions to Connecticut’s serious fiscal problems,” the statement said.
Alexander, appointed to the commission by state Rep. Themis Klarides, R-Derby, became a vice president at Yale in 1998 after a career in commercial real estate development.
Yale admitted 842 students out of the record 5,733 early applicants to the Class of 2022 Thursday evening.
The number of admitted students represents 14.7 percent of applicants and is slightly smaller than last year’s figure of 871. This year, 55 percent of early applicants were deferred for reconsideration in the spring, 29 percent were denied admission, and 2 percent either withdrew or submitted incomplete forms.
On Dec. 1, Yale also offered admission to 52 students through the QuestBridge National College Match Program. The program helps high-achieving, low-income students gain admission to and full scholarships at 39 partner colleges, including Yale.
“The Admissions Committee was very impressed with this year’s early applicant pool across every dimension,” Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan said in a statement to the News. “We are pleased to offer admission to this first group of students in the Class of 2022, and look forward to admitting a much larger group of students through our Regular Decision process this spring.”
This year’s pool marked a steep rise in Yale’s single-choice early action application total for the second consecutive year. Last year, 5,086 students applied early to Yale, and in the three previous years the number of applications consistently hovered around 4,700.
Earlier this year, Quinlan told the News that as the early action pool has grown, it has become “increasingly diverse” with a larger number of applicants from groups traditionally underrepresented at Yale and in higher education more broadly. He added that, for the past several years, the University has focused on outreach to students with low-income background who “traditionally did not think of Yale as a realistic college option.”
This year, the increase in applications from “virtually every subgroup of applicants that the admissions office tracks,” including U.S. citizens and permanent residents who identify as members of a minority racial or ethnic group, first-generation college students and international students, outpaced the overall increase in applications, said Director of Outreach and Communications Mark Dunn in November. He added that Yale received early action applications from 49 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and 98 foreign countries. (Dunn did not respond to an email Thursday afternoon asking which state was not represented in the early action pool.)
Earlier this fall, Quinlan told the News that Yale plans to enroll about 1,550 students in the Class of 2022.
As part of its recruitment efforts, Yale will once again offer a Bulldog Saturday in April program in addition to the regular Bulldog Days program aimed to showcase Yale to prospective students and parents. Bulldog Saturday, a mini-version of Bulldog Days, began last year to accommodate the larger size of the incoming class.
“The addition of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray colleges enables us to bring to Yale more students from a more diverse collection of backgrounds.” Quinlan said. “The combination of expanding enrollment and greater representation of students from under-resourced backgrounds means more opportunity for more students.”
The percentage of students that Yale admitted through its early action program to the Class of 2022 is similar to that announced by some of the University’s peer schools. Earlier this week, Harvard and Princeton, which have early action programs similar to Yale’s, admitted 14.5 and 14.7 percent of applicants, respectively.
Jack Montague, the former Yale men’s basketball captain who was expelled in March 2016 for sexual misconduct, has enrolled at Belmont University.
Montague has enrolled in the school’s adult degree program, a course of study designed for adults hoping to complete undergraduate degrees on a time-flexible schedule. Belmont is located in Tennessee, Montague’s home state. In a statement to the school’s student newspaper, the Belmont Vision, Belmont Director of Communications Greg Pillon said the school does not admit candidates that “pose a risk” to the Belmont community.
Pillon and Belmont University Editorial and News Content Director April Hefner did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.
Montague is currently suing Yale in an attempt to undo his expulsion and complete his final semester at Yale. In a court deposition last spring, he claimed that he could not apply to other schools because the University would not release his transcripts unless he paid a $3,000 tuition debt.
“Yale respects the privacy of its former students, strives to help them move on with their lives, and would never vindictively withhold a transcript,” University spokesman Tom Conroy said. “If a former student requested a waiver of owed fees because of demonstrated financial hardship, Yale would grant the request. Mr. Montague has informed Yale that he is currently attending Belmont University.”
Karen Schwartzman, Montague’s spokesperson, told the Associated Press on Monday that Yale had released Montague’s transcripts, allowing him to apply to other universities. Montague exhausted his eligibility to play college basketball at Yale and will not take the court for the Belmont Bruins. And because several of his credits did not transfer, Schwarzman said, Montague will have to complete two semesters at the college to graduate.
“Although Jack is still seeking, through the litigation, to be reinstated to Yale and to be awarded the Yale degree he had nearly earned at the time of his wrongful expulsion, he is at the same time trying to move on with his life, and completing his college education is a big part of that,” Schwartzman wrote in a statement to the AP.
Schwartzman did not respond to request for comment on Wednesday night.
Montague’s case received renewed attention earlier this month when a court deposition from March surfaced showing that unidentified Yale alumni had raised between $25,000 and $30,000 to help his legal case.
In a Dec. 12 article in the Belmont Vision, students interviewed expressed concerns about the college’s decision to accept Montague given his expulsion from Yale. But Yale students interviewed said they are satisfied with Belmont’s decision, as long as Montague does not commit any further acts of sexual misconduct.
“Montague faced appropriate disciplinary consequences from Yale for sexual assault,” Helen Price ’18, the co-founder and former co-director of Unite Against Sexual Assault at Yale, told the News. “As long as he doesn’t sexually assault anybody else, he can do whatever he likes.”
Montague’s case is scheduled to go to trial in February 2018.
It’s a typical Saturday night at Yale. The line for Soads slowly slinks its way along the front lawns of Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges. Beer seeps through the open windows of dimly lit fraternities. Packs of students drunkenly stumble into GHeav for a $4 bacon, egg and cheese.
It’s a typical Saturday night, and Brian*, a junior at Yale, gets off the train at Grand Central Station to meet Richard, a 60-something-year-old Manhattan business type he’s been seeing regularly for months. Brian knows the drill: dinner, drinks, sex. In the morning they’ll cuddle and maybe eat breakfast, and then Brian will catch the Metro-North back to New Haven with $600 in his pocket. Brian needs financial help, and, for him, sex is just another means of getting by.
“People have sex because they’re lonely, because they’re tired, because they’re bored, because they want affirmation,” he said. “So, I was thinking about it, and I thought, ‘Well, why not do it for money?’ I mean, you’ve been dared before: ‘Would you eat dirt for $100?’ Well, why would you not eat dick?”
***
Brian isn’t exactly a prostitute, and neither is Emily, another student at Yale who spends her weekends meeting similar men in New York City. Brian and Emily are both “sugar babies” matched with older, wealthy sugar daddies on a website called Seeking Arrangement. The website was founded in 2006 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Brandon Wade as a way to enable wealthy men without a “fighting chance” in the dating world to appeal to attractive young people through financial incentives. The site champions the slogan, “Relationships on Your Terms: Where beautiful, successful people fuel mutually beneficial relationships.” It claims to foster arrangements between sugar daddies seeking companionship and sugar babies seeking financial benefits — a give-and-take, symbiotic affair.
Critics feel differently. “Accusations of prostitution have clouded Seeking Arrangement,” Wade said in a statement published by CNN. “And I’ll admit there’s a fine line. But my intentions are pure.” He said that relationships are really an arrangement between two people: “My point is that dating is very superficial, so use every superficial means you have to get the attention you want.”
Seeking Arrangement has 4 million users worldwide, and its popularity is only increasing. The site is based on a membership system where sugar babies and sugar daddies and mommas create accounts free of charge and make connections by scrolling through lists of profiles and reaching out to the ones they like — an online shopping spree for the sugar daddy, rich and lonely, and the sugar baby, young and hopeful.
As of 2017, more than 1.2 million college students have registered as sugar babies on Seeking Arrangement. The site promotes its reputation as a “generous sponsor” of financial assistance and offers a variety of special services for students, including a free premium membership for anyone with a “.edu” email address.
In 2017, 44 million students in America took out loans to pay for college, amounting to a national total of $1.45 trillion of debt — a 560 percent increase from total student debt in 2004. Even Yale, a university that prides itself on a system of financial aid that meets “100% of demonstrated financial need,” still sometimes fails to relieve students of intimidating educational costs. Roughly 16 percent of Yale students graduate saddled with loans.
A monthly allowance given to sugar babies by sugar daddies can help relieve students’ significant college costs. Allowances typically range from $1,000 to $5,000 a month, with the average sugar baby making $3,000.
In her encounters, Emily has found that money is a way for sugar daddies to feel like they’re helping someone young to better their life — a kind of noble, philanthropic justification that eagerly anticipates the future success of the sugar baby they invested in. That’s the reason, she said, that sugar daddies are particularly interested in college students.
***
Both Brian and Emily first got involved with Seeking Arrangement at a time when finances were particularly tight.
“I first started out when I was about 19,” said Emily. “I was from an area of deprivation that I was trying to get out of. I’m not from a wealthy family, and even though I was working, and still I’m working three jobs, there was always a [shortfall]. … I couldn’t be at Yale if I didn’t do this.” For Brian, involvement in the industry came at time when he was “a little short on cash” but was also “just bored.” In the beginning, arrangements for Brian mostly consisted of talks on the phone, which sometimes evolved into awkward first dates predictably accompanied by bouts of forced small talk and out-of-pity smiles. It wasn’t until last spring that Brian started having sex with men for money.
Seeking Arrangement doesn’t call for strictly sexual relationships. Sugar babies and sugar daddies can specify whether they’re looking for nonsexual, or even online-only, arrangements. But, in the experiences of both Brian and Emily, sex is almost always implied.
“I began with the idea that it was just like going on dates and seeing what happened, and then I felt my way along,” said Brian. “I think it may be a gateway drug into prostitution. But I also think that if you want to go on and just meet people who genuinely interest you or show interest in you, then sure, you could probably do that.”
Arrangements typically begin with a bit of casual messaging through the website itself. Eventually, numbers are exchanged and the conversation transitions to text, then phone calls, then Skype and, if all goes well, an in-person date.
The first meeting often takes place in a bar or a restaurant and starts out like any ordinary date. But to Emily, courting in real life is very different from courting on Seeking Arrangement. Seeking Arrangement allows for “a lot more room to be yourself” and doesn’t leave much to interpretation. People are more self-aware and forthcoming and define the boundaries of the relationship right away. They know what they want, and they’ve come to Seeking Arrangement to get it.
“It’s more honest thandating,” she said. “In real life, the more honest and transparent you are the more people are scared away, but on this, the more honest and transparent you are, the more attractive it makes you seem, which is so warped and backwards. In real life you’re expected to be someone different, but on this you’re expected to be nothing but yourself.”
There are limits, however, to how honest a person can be on Seeking Arrangement. Identities are often partially concealed, with neither sugar babies nor sugar daddies disclosing too much personal information. All users have their reservations, and no one is immune to the worry of being exposed.
Brian won’t share his real first name with sugar daddies, and Emily draws the line at contact through any form of social media. Both, however, prefer that sugar daddies share a decent amount of information with them before meeting in person. Just to be safe.
“I tend not to trust them if I can’t find information about them, but then I’m also very happy that they can’t find any information about me,” said Brian. “So it’s like a blind faith thing. It’s a relationship built on trust.”
For Emily, when sugar daddies withhold information, it is a definite “red flag.” She said it can sometimes mean that sugar daddies haven’t “processed their internal stigma or their internal self-damnation.” Or, worse, it can mean that they’re married and looking for a mistress on the side. She would know — it happened to her once before.
Risks are embedded in the network of Seeking Arrangement. Both Brian and Emily stress the importance of caution but agree that, as long as people know what they’re doing and are smart in social situations, Seeking Arrangement isn’t any more dangerous than typical millennial dating. Emily said that she’s felt “more threatened on Tinder dates” than she has on Seeking Arrangement and that even with the age difference, she fears 20-something-year-old males more than she fears anyone, especially in a college town.
***
Sugar daddies usually aren’t malicious people. Brian and Emily’s experiences suggest that more often than not, those looking for sugar babies tend to be exactly who you would expect: middle-aged white men who are, above all, lonely.
“You can actually form friendships,” Emily said. “They’re not just ATMs, they’re people.”
Richard, one of Brian’s sugar daddies, is married to a man who won’t have sex with him anymore. A Yale graduate from the class of 1977, Richard has achieved success in standard terms. But he’s lonely. So, on the weekends he travels to New York City and there, he meets young men.
“[Richard] loves to make very wry, nihilistic comments about how being an adulterer is so difficult, which says that he really does think about it,” said Brian. “Some [sugar daddies] are just lonely. It can be a little sad. But these aren’t terrible people. These are people who just want a relationship with a young, attractive, interesting person and don’t mind paying for it.”
But no matter how genuine the relationships may seem, when it comes to Seeking Arrangement, nothing can be removed from the inherent backbone of the industry: money.
“When money’s involved, you never can be entirely yourself,” said Emily. “That doesn’t mean you can’t be completely honest with your intentions, but there’s a certain aspect of your character that’s very different.”
Drawing the line between transaction and romance can be difficult. When an arrangement becomes fairly regular, it can be easy to get lost in the routine. For many sugar daddies, a relationship with a sugar baby can act as a kind of escape, or fantasy, that protects from the vulnerability of real-life dating.
“For men, there’s less chance of rejection when money’s on the line,” said Emily. “For all the women on [Seeking Arrangement], you’re kind of playing a role for [sugar daddies]. You’re presenting as the ‘ideal’ that is their escape; a satisfaction for them. You’re not there looking for a boyfriend. You’re there to entertain the idea of a romance.”
Brian, who often finds himself playing the role of the “ideal undergraduate,” said that, for sugar babies, the novelty can only last so long. No matter how much both people involved in the relationship try to pretend, the romantic bubble Seeking Arrangement constructs eventually pops. At the end of the day, money is still an underlying factor.
But actually talking about money can be taboo. In many arrangements, money is discussed once and not brought up again. In Brian’s experience, a lot of sugar daddies find it awkward or “distasteful” to talk payment and prefer to ignore its presence in the relationship altogether. Often times, money is paid electronically or presented in the form of a gift, creating the illusion that it’s not really there. Direct in-person transactions can be uncomfortable and embarrassing. Brian said that, in his experience, most sugar daddies “haven’t reconciled themselves with the idea of having to pay,” because money evokes the idea of prostitution too closely and shatters the idea of romance.
Money is a way Brian said he can “present himself as a product.” Usually, once something is bought, it’s owned. But in the Seeking Arrangement world, some men don’t like the fact that they have to pay for sugar babies because the purchase doesn’t entitle them to total power. For them, payment suggests they’re “somehow losing” and that the sugar babies might be getting more out of the arrangement than they are.
But for many sugar babies, money can be a way of quantifying their worth, seeing who out there finds them attractive — and just how much.
“There’s a huge number of people who have Tinder, and it’s not dissimilar,” Brian said. “Now [Tinder] has this thing where you can show how many people have swiped you, … and it’s very much like a buzz, it’s exciting. I have a lot of friends who are on Tinder just to see who likes them. See what your value is. [Seeking Arrangement] is not so different.”
“They always call us boys,” said Brian. He thinks it’s an innocence thing.
“On the male side it very much goes back to the Greeks and the Romans — the young male athlete, scholar. Like Antinous. He’s the third most statued person in the world after Zeus and Athena, because Hadrian was so in love with him that he had his face immortalized, which is pretty romantic. But he was 21 when he died and 14 when Hadrian first met him. So that’s definitely a part of this industry.”
Emily, too, said innocence is an aspect of the role she often has to play. But for her, gender is the means through which power is divided.
Seeking Arrangement is notorious for touting arrangements between older wealthy men and attractive young women. So for Emily, a proponent of women’s rights, it’s been difficult to rationalize her position in the industry.
“I self-identified as a feminist for the first time when I was 4, so it’s obviously a really conflicting thing for me that I’m dependent on someone who has reached their position of power through means of their gender,” she said. “It definitely is a struggle because I guess a lot of the negative connotations [of the industry] are that it’s misogynistic men looking to own women.”
Older men on Seeking Arrangement often search for someone to fill the role of the submissive female or the damsel in distress. Some men derive satisfaction and empowerment from the feeling of owning and oppressing a younger woman.
It’s taken women years to claim a place in higher education, yet today, some still have to subject themselves to this kind of submission in order to stay. For Emily, however, the submission in arrangements isn’t always real. To her, it is just an illusion that allows sugar daddies feel like they’re in charge — but control in relationships is very much a two-way street.
Maintaining a healthy balance of power in arrangements is possible, but it hinges on establishing clear boundaries from the start and knowing when a relationship has to come to an end.
“The important thing is definitely boundaries,” said Emily. “Typically for me, if it’s an intense arrangement, it can last comfortably about six months. I’ve yet to have that ‘Pretty Woman’ situation where we fall magically in love. You’ve got to go in with a level head that that’s probably not going to happen. You need to say, ‘This can be romantic, and we can do romantic things, but this is not a romance.’”
***
One of the most difficult aspects of participating in Seeking Arrangement is rationalizing its place in real life. Those who engage in the industry fear they’ll be shamed and condemned if their identities are exposed. Most sugar babies only confide in their closest friends, if anyone at all. The world of Seeking Arrangement is highly complex and built on a network of controversial sentiments, but the industry is far more than just the stigma it carries. Many feel uneasy about the thought of older men purchasing the companionship of younger, often vulnerable, people. But this common stereotype oversimplifies the particular relationships at hand.
Emily doesn’t take issue with the fact that this is something she does. She takes issue with the fact that this is something she has to do.
“The situation that I’m in, the reason that this is something I need to do, is a man-made phenomenon,” she said. “I’m in this situation because I’m an extremely ambitious woman and my gender and my social class have denied me from achieving the means to pursue my dreams. It’s a social problem. And it doesn’t have to be like this at all.”
For many sugar babies, and for many college students like Brian and Emily, Seeking Arrangement is a way to provide a steady flow of financial income when other options have proven insufficient. It’s a source of means. Participating in the industry isn’t just a matter of making an account and having older men throw Fendi purses one’s way. It’s a lot more than that, and it’s a lot more common than people think.
In fact, the prevalence of sugar babies on college campuses has increased substantially in the last few years — a trend to which Yale contributes. Brian said that Yale has “pockets” of students involved with Seeking Arrangement, and that, “once you have one friend who does it,” others become curious and start to follow.
For many students involved in Seeking Arrangement, the industry is not a source of enjoyment but rather a necessary source of income.
“When you think about it, it’s kind of a messed up thing,” said one Yale student not involved in the industry, who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s hard to think that college is so cost prohibitive that it forces young people into prostitution.”
Of course, Seeking Arrangement isn’t always synonymous with prostitution. While some arrangements resemble sex work, Seeking Arrangement offers a platform for the cultivation of all kinds of relationships. It is not a one-size-fits-all industry — it is diverse in its intricacies and various in its intents. No one person has the same experience. It can be what you make of it.
Seeking Arrangement can come across as an elusive, glamorous and even sinister line of work, but at its core, it is really something that any student can relate to — whether it be the struggles of funding an education, barely scraping by to pay the rent each month or just the curiosity of seeing who thinks you’re attractive. Sugar babies are not virtual. They are real people with real intentions who think about what they do.
It’s typical a Sunday morning, and Brian arrives in New Haven on the Metro-North. He calls an Uber from Union Station and gets off at the corner of College and Wall streets. He heads to his dorm, takes a shower, grabs his backpack and walks to Bass Library. It’s been a busy weekend, and he has class on Monday.
*All “sugar babies” names are pseudonyms to protect their identities.
It’s Oct. 27, 2017, and you’ve managed to snag a rare window seat during the lunch rush at the Shake Shack on Chapel Street. You free the Shackburger from its greased paper sleeve, and, as you lean in to take your first bite, she catches your eye through the window. From across the street and behind thick, black frames, her hazel eyes glisten with the hint of a coquettish smile as she watches you hasten to chew, swallow and compose yourself. Meanwhile, she raises a magnifying glass to her topless chest, presenting you with her exaggerated and slightly distorted left nipple. Her sharply raised brow questions: Have you checked yourself yet?
She is larger than life in a 5-by-5-foot painting titled “Check,” each of her breasts at least twice the size of a passerby’s head. Centered on one of the busiest bus stops near the New Haven Green, she is impossible to ignore — exactly what New Haven artist Bill Saunders intended when he installed a pop-up exhibition cleverly named “Bust Op” for the second year in a row. In support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the one-day-only exhibition included six monumental paintings of breast cancer survivors and victims that filled up the entirety of the bus station’s glass panels.
“Bust Op” was born from a June 2015 show titled “Don’t Call Me Baby” at Ordinary, a popular tavern on Chapel Street just across from the bus stop. Saunders hid dozens of 5-by-5-inch painted panels in discreet corners of the oakwood interior only visible through a telescope on the bar, forcing viewers to venture into voyeurism to examine the small paintings of large-breasted women. Half of the featured women are from movies by filmmaker Russ Meyer, a pioneer in the “sexploitation” film genre — a subset of the broader “exploitation” genre — known for his unabashed portrayals of dominant, sexually supercharged women. The other half are from “magazines of the time that I think Russ would have approved of,” Saunders said. He believes that Meyer “is the first one that treated women as empowered people rather than objects. He took big-breasted women and put them in powerful roles.” In Meyer’s 1965 cult classic “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”, three uninhibited go-go dancers drive, kidnap and murder across the Californian desert to a frenetic rhythm, all sporting flimsy blouses, abundant cleavage and Kabuki-style eyebrows. “You don’t want to mess with these girls!” Saunders said with a guffaw.
While painting his panels for “Don’t Call Me Baby,” Saunders discovered another connection among the women in his work: breast cancer. Having watched his own mother’s struggle with her diagnosis, he was inspired to begin a new project. He became even more convinced when, throughout the course of the exhibition, women shared stories from their own battles with breast cancer. One of Saunders’ old friends, Cristina Acampora, opened up about her struggle with the disease and encouraged him to pursue the subject matter more deeply.
The idea resonated with Saunders’ foundational belief that art has a responsibility to engage with the community and resulted in the first iteration of “Bust Op,” which encompassed five large portraits of buxom white women. Exhibited in October 2016 at a bus kiosk on lower Chapel Street, the paintings were labelled with a small sign that included only the title of the exhibition and a tiny pink ribbon in honor of breast cancer awareness. “It reminded me to get checked,” said passerby Maria Ellington, while her young son pointed at the paintings and yelled, “Bee-Bee.” Despite the lack of additional information, “people got it,” Saunders said. “I want to give people more credit.”
This year, Saunders diversified the subjects of his paintings, increasing the representation of women of color and including a black man. Of the seven figures in Saunders’ six paintings, four have starred in exploitation films. Kitten Natividad, Meyer’s longtime partner and Mexican-born film star, is a breast cancer survivor who had a double mastectomy. Lina Romay, portrayed in “In the Headlights,” was a Spanish-born actress, wife of another sexploitation film director and a breast cancer victim. A double portrait, “On the Rail,” depicts Pam Grier and Richard Roundtree, two African-American actors who starred in blaxploitation films and survived breast cancer. By painting these figures, Saunders attempts to address both the lack of diversity in his first version of “Bust Op” and the 1960s American culture of exploitation by taking images from the era and reclaiming them through the lens of breast cancer awareness. “Hopefully the way you perceive the paintings initially gets flipped in your mind when you find out what it’s about and get into the exhibition a little deeper,” he said.
Saunders also included more information about the sickness. Each painting was accompanied by a plaque of facts about the disease, its risk factors and the figure’s personal background. “On the Rail,” for example, was captioned with the disproportionate rate of African American women compared to Caucasian women who die from breast cancer. Another poster, titled “10 Facts about Breast Cancer,” read: “Women’s issues are everybody’s issues.” It concluded: “Get checked out.”
***
Last year’s exhibition opened smoothly. This year, Deputy Director of the Department of Transportation, Traffic, and Parking Michael Pinto trekked down from City Hall at noon to personally ask Saunders if he had a permit for his exhibition. He didn’t. Pinto requested that Saunders take “Bust Op” down within the hour. After a brief negotiation, Pinto consented to Saunders’ initially scheduled end time of 5 p.m. for unspecified reasons. “This is why you can’t ask for permission for anything in this town,” Saunders said.
This odd encounter between Pinto and Saunders derives from ambiguity surrounding New Haven’s regulation of public art. Pinto asked Saunders to present a permit but did not specify what permit Saunders would have even been able to apply for and later declined to comment on the record. The permit and license center provides applications only for vendors and contractors, a title that is not applicable to Saunders. Moreover, it’s unclear which department, category or process regulates Saunders’ — or anyone’s — public artworks. Public art in New Haven thus exists in an undefined sector.
“To be sure, our TEAM under Mayor Harp’s leadership is not lacking for novel ideas to promote ART like never before,” Andrew Wolf, the city’s director of arts, culture and tourism, wrote in an email. Among the formal platforms that manage public art in New Haven is the Percent for Art program, a statewide initiative that requires at least 1 percent of the city’s construction costs be used to commission a public artwork. More than half of the states in the U.S. now maintain “percent for art” policies, but as Wolf is quick to point out, “New Haven was among the first municipalities in America to initiate this civic gesture.” The program’s goal is to “visually enhance municipal facilities,” according to its mission statement, and would likely not support individual initiatives such as Saunders’ “Bust Op.”
Nonprofit organization Site Projects partners with the city to commission artworks that “enhance New Haven’s cultural heritage and diversity,” according to its website. Its upcoming project is an interactive underground light sculpture to be installed in the underpass between Union Station and New Haven. According to Wolf, these public art initiatives promote “New Haven as a global city in the creative economy.” From his perspective, introducing art to the public is a “civic gesture” that adds capital to New Haven’s global standing.
For Saunders, who introduces “Bust Op” with “nothing is for sale,” art is synonymous with free speech. In 2001, he ran for mayor of New Haven dressed in drag as a member of the “Guilty Party,” an act that he calls his first public art project. A year later, he co-founded a free and inclusive fringe arts festival called Ideat (pronounced “idiot”) Village in response to the city’s annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas, which included events that charged a fee. Ideat Village ran for only three days when it first began in 2002. By 2012, it ran for two full weeks alongside the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
“Bust Op” is Saunders’ most recent project, and like his previous public art pieces, it showcases his dedication to building a relationship between art and its immediate community. “This is uncommissioned, unsolicited, not part of an organization,” he said. “Just an artist with a message.” In a forum debate on the New Haven Independent’s website, on which Saunders is a frequent participant, he resolutely stated: “Both Scientists and Artists Seek Truth — One is primarily technically based, the other primarily socially based.”
Saunders’ art is “a reaction to the existing power structure.” In New Haven, where 48 percent of the population is low income, Saunders hopes to increase the accessibility of art. The bus stop sits at a prime location with both high foot and vehicular traffic. It is located at the intersection of two of the city’s major social infrastructures, the New Haven Free Public Library and the Green, and at the point of convergence of six different bus routes. As Saunders said, “It’s about engaging the natural environment and this little social stratosphere that’s going on. It’s black, it’s white, it’s rich, it’s poor. It has a perfect crossroad and a great view from being stuck at the light.”
He recognizes the station as a legitimate social entity that best captures a heterogeneous sample of the population. As opposed to museum exhibitors who display their art in spaces that await the attendance of a self-selecting subset of the public, Saunders uses his art to engage with and break through the class divisions implicit in the decision to view art. He stood by the bus stop the entire day, observing the way people reacted (or didn’t react) to “Bust Op.” “When people do engage it, do the double take, say something, that’s when you have the chance to pull ’em in a little bit, show them around, get ’em interested a little bit more,” he said. He hopes these interactions foster an active and personal relationship with art.
Still, even if Saunders’ intent is to raise awareness for breast cancer, he is a man painting women’s bodies. Might he be, in turn, only continuing the sexploitation of women? Four of the six women depicted are topless, their tan torsos accentuated with strokes of vibrant pink, yellow and orange paint. With so much bare skin on display, the exhibition was undoubtedly provocative. In “La Natividad Roja (The Pink Nativity),” the woman is painted from such a dramatically low angle that even though she isn’t topless, her breasts are still the focal point of the symmetrical painting. Against a background of electric blue, the fuchsia frills — too bright to be breast-cancer pink — attract even more attention to her chest.
“It is bizarre in this Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken world that it’s a white man doing this,” Saunders acknowledged. However, he believes his work stands on its own merits. “I think the collection with the text is undismissable,” Saunders said. “It’s special; it crosses gender, race, and culture.” His ex-wife Diana Mercer, who introduced him to Meyer’s sexploitation movies, agreed. “I don’t think the fact that he’s a white guy should be held against him,” Mercer said.
“He’s got a real sense for people who are underrepresented and who are disenfranchised by the system,” co-founder of Ideat Village Nancy Shea added. “Once you start reading the story behind the women and men he’s painted, that’s where the awareness comes in.”
Saunders acknowledges his own responsibility to treat the paintings “in a way that isn’t exploitation” and to do justice to the women themselves and to the disease. In “Strike or Spare,” a nude woman in profile leans forward while her right arm extends powerfully behind her as she prepares to send the bowling ball — actually a spherical mass of 3D mammography — rolling. She is nude, yes, her hanging breasts on full display, but it is the concentration furrowed in her eyebrows and the power that manifests in the contours of her taut muscles that really capture the viewer’s attention. The painting’s accompanying yellow text provides information about women’s preventative health care options: “Through the [Affordable Care Act], all insurance companies are mandated to provide free access to annual/bi-annual mammograms for women over 40, as well as other preventative services like cervical cancer screening, sexually transmitted disease testing and contraception.”
In “Half Mast,” the woman’s chest is bare except for a halter-neck top fashioned out of a gauzy strip of fabric so thin as to reveal her right breast and left-side scar, presumably from a single mastectomy. She holds a book up to her face, half-hidden behind absurdly large sunglasses. She stands so nonchalantly that from across the street, you might mistake her for a woman reading as she simply waits for the bus.
Ultimately, while “Bust Op” may raise a few eyebrows with its provocative bravado, it also raises broader questions about the relationship between public art and the city of New Haven. The lack of formally outlined legislation for introducing, maintaining, and regulating public artwork is a massive gap in the system. Without this framework, artists are put into nebulous situations that cast doubt on the legality of their actions, as with Saunders and his “Bust Op.” City officials, too, are left uncertain about their right to enforce their authority, which results in scenarios like Pinto acquiescing to Saunders’ schedule.
While Saunders was successful in his negotiation for “Bust Op,” the same cannot be said for all of his public art projects. Ideat Village reached its conclusion in 2012 after Saunders was arrested on the charge of inciting a riot. On June 30, the New Haven police arrived at the festival and requested a permit from Saunders. City Hall had approved the event, but Saunders was unable to present the physical document, which was in the possession of his co-founder Shea, not on site. Saunders then ascended the stage: “We’ll wait for Nancy, the music is going to continue, and the police are going to have to be patient and enjoy the punk rock music with everybody else,” he recounted. “If the police officers have a problem with that, they are going to have to arrest a lot of people.” Officer Betsy Segui instead repeated that the festival was to be shut down as Saunders began to walk away. “If you walk away, I’ll arrest you,” Saunders remembered her saying. Still, he continued to turn, and the next thing he knew he was on the ground.
The arrest was not unfounded, as Saunders directly ignored a warning that Segui had issued. However, it was an unexpected escalation of events that seems especially brash considering the more peaceful alternative: waiting for Shea to arrive from another part of the festival with the permit. “After the end of Ideat Village, when cops crashed the event and arrested me, I decided to eschew the public process altogether and work in ‘private spaces’ or [do] ‘things’ in public that don’t require a permit, that ride the edge,” Saunders stated.
Ideat Village operated under clear administrative guidelines of public space and was officially approved by City Hall, but it ended with a dramatic and controversial arrest. Ironically, “Bust Op” ran smoothly in comparison, despite lacking any official approval. The first time we met Saunders, he described his work as navigating within a “crack in the system.” At our raised eyebrows, he laughed: “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission in this town.”
If the piano player were better, my mind might wander in his direction, wondering where he lives and who he likes and all that, but he isn’t, and instead I’m sitting in this jazz club reliving our game against Belgium: surprise Euro Cup quarter-final victory, three-to-one. I see the field electric green and the undulating Welsh fans in red and white. It’s the 55th minute, the game is tied one-one, and Bale sends a long ball down from midfield that Ramsey pins to the ground and chips to me right outside the penalty box. I’ve got three Belgians on my ass: De Bruyne, Meunier and Fellaini. I hear a short theme from “Toy Story” on the piano but I don’t care, the pianist is playing too many notes and I Cruyff the shot — I fake a kick with my left leg, pivot on it instead and come round for an open goal and a chance for a left-footed strike. That turn — I see it the same every time. I even stumble out of it before I lift myself up and shoot true and the nation of Wales erupts in song.
I’m smiling like an idiot now but I don’t mind, I never try to hide how I feel about this memory. I can still hear my countrymen chanting my name — Hal! Robson! Hal Robson-Kanu! — as I run a victory lap, my teammates trying to tackle me on the sidelines, my body huge and unreal on the replay screen. I hope this pianist doesn’t see me and think I like him. He’s modern and repetitive; I knew I wouldn’t like it, I don’t know why I came. Often I imagine myself in a shoot-out with Michael Jordan when listening to music like this.
I don’t think too hard about leaving, I just do, and soon I’m through the double doors of the club and out on Division Street where the fading sun is golden and pigeons are waddling at the feet of two boys with floppy haircuts. One boy kicks the air, and the birds take flight, alighting on the crosswalk, where I go now, the parting notes from the piano man taking a final whirl in my head until they slip out forever. I’ve never been to Chinatown before, but I visited other parts of Manhattan when I was a kid. I remember these spiderish fire escapes over the narrow sidewalks and old brick tenements that look good in grime. Though I had thick regular hair then, not an asshole Cristiano Ronaldo undercut like these boys on the street, who have just begun to play “Pokémon Go,” who don’t see me in their pathway, who don’t move aside to let me pass and certainly didn’t weep when Wales fell to Portugal in the semifinals. They probably didn’t even watch the game.
“All the way to Hester Park?” one of them groans. “Not worth it for a Bulbasaur.” I look away to keep my thoughts from turning livid.
Above the shops today I’ve counted one-two-three lithe white women smoking cigarettes out of their big loft windows. There’s another one above the Highline deli, slender wrists and a gossamer T-shirt, staring into the beyond. She’s the kind that probably eats doll food, and below her wrinkled men speak Cantonese and smoke and suck up noodles. I wonder why she lives here.
I wonder about a lot of things here. The borders of Chinatown, for a start. Where are they? Is this the name of the neighborhood on the city books, is it zoned as “Chinatown”? The subway crosses the Manhattan Bridge overpass, rattling the skulls of the cellphone salesmen and fruit vendors who work underneath. A dust cloud tumbles off the edge of the entrance ramp, a line of it caught in a beam of yellow sun, and my eyes prickle at the thought of the invisible rest of it floating into my air. I bump shoulders with an small old woman. She looks at me, says something to herself and rolls her laundry cart away. I don’t like her either — she’s having a go at me. She doesn’t even know who I am. No one here does, no one even does a double take and I wish they would, I’m sure at least someone on this sidewalk saw me score. The day after we lost in the semis, I just up and came here, just to get out of France. Just to stop thinking about Portugal. And now I’m dehydrated and I’m sweating in this city, this big clattering kitchen, everywhere pots falling down the stairs.
On the left by the subway station a football team is practicing in the corner park — their T-shirts say the New York City Strangers. I sit and watch them for a while. They’re about university age, nineteen or twenty, co-ed. They’re doing passing drills. Another team in blue lurks by the sidelines, some spraying bottled water into their mouths, others sitting on the bench staring down at the Astroturf.
“You’ve got to watch her this time, you’ve got to mark her better,” one of the blue team members say to his mate on the bench.
“Yeah, I know,” the mate says, “I know.”He looks at the ground again and violently pumps his leg up and down. He’s in the Zone — a place I know well. It used to be a place worth going to. As a teenager on football training squads I could clear my mind until it was humming with concentration, brilliantly lucid. I played defense back then and had a foil striker on a rival team, Evans, who always managed to scramble past me. When we were seventeen we faced off for the last time. I marked him like mad — I killed my thighs doing it — and for two straight minutes we danced around each other, him not able to pass the ball anywhere and me not able to clear it, until he got so frustrated that he punched me in the stomach. He got red-carded. My mates called me Stomach for a while afterward. This, I think, was my last trip into the Zone as it was when I was young, when I was convinced that any task I was put to must be done. Now that I’m older, the Zone has become something much worse: a place of soft focus, where formless thoughts pick me up, bat me around for a while and set me back down again at their whim. I can feel their fingers closing around me during any breakfast bowl of cereal, when I start to wonder where this bowl is from, where’s the factory where it was made, what’s the history of bowls in the United Kingdom — or even worse, on the football pitch, when I start to pick out the pinheads of shouting spectators and imagine their homes in detail. It’s distraction posing as revelation. It’s taking me over and I don’t like it. I lost to Portugal because of it. I’m done with the Zone. Bad ideas happen there, theories of time and the interconnectedness of things, good grammar goes to die there, it seeps into your waking life I tell you, don’t meddle with the horrors of the Zone.
The Strangers start their game and I start walking back toward the subway. I’m caught behind a sauntering family, and for some reason I’m angry about this, even though I have nowhere to be. The East Broadway station exhales a cloud of people onto the sidewalk. They suck me into their mass and bump me down the subway stairs. I hop the turnstile and walk down to the infernal tracks, and right away I realize my mistake — the best subway stations are the ones that have the uptown and downtown tracks running side by side, with metal pillars between them that form glassless frames of the people standing on the platform across the way. Once, on the way to my mom’s house in London, I saw three teenage boys dancing to a speaker that one was holding to his ear. They didn’t smile much, and they moved like they were walking backwards on a luggage carousel, and as one of them knocked the baseball cap off his mate’s head I only wanted to crawl over the train tracks and dissolve into their side of the pillars, join them without introducing myself, say something about their techno beat and follow them onto their train and down their tunnel.
But East Broadway isn’t the right type of station at all. It’s got one platform between the uptown and downtown lines that seems three stories more underground than it needs to be. People stand around frowning, sweating, soaking in the urine-colored lights, and a woman’s voice shrieks from a fuzzed-out intercom: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THE BROOKLYN-BOUND F TRAIN IS DELAYED. IT IS DELAYED LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Seconds later, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THERE IS A HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT. THERE IS A HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT. TAKE CAUTION WITH YOURSELF AND YOUR LOVED ONES. My eyes burn with salt and water. I don’t know who you are, lady. But I hate you.
When the train arrives I sarcastically thank it for showing up, but I can’t hear myself over the shrieking. It stops and within seconds nearly all the talking people from the last ride filter into the yellow dinge of the station and let the rest of us compress into the car’s bright white fluorescence. A woman yawns as she heaves herself into a seat; her varicose veins look like tattoos, she wears flip-flops, both her second toes are strange but in different ways. The sweat on my neck turns to ice in the air conditioning. People scratch themselves a lot, and I think back to something I once read about seventy percent of the air in the New York City subway being human skin flakes. I deeply inhale the air full of skin.
Four stops into Brooklyn two girls squirm onto the train as the doors close, sit in front of the window across from me and sigh out words as they catch their breath. “I love him,” one of them says. “Our bodies just fit right into each other.”
“Like a two-piece puzzle,” says the other. The woman next to them laughs into her cell phone. “Yeah,” the first teenager says, scratching her head dreamily, “like a two-piece puzzle.”
We’re out of the dim tunnel now, shooting down the tracks over the pink and brown buildings of the hobbled Brooklyn skyline, some people resting their heads against the windows as the train car fills with sun. I remember other days on other trains, grey rain on windows, stone walls in the countryside, sleeping football players. The girls talk about the guy for a while and then look at the adverts over my head until one of them gets off at Kings Highway. A grown man takes her old seat; the leftover girl shifts her weight. The sun skirts the tops of buildings in the window behind them, illuminating the edges of the girl in gold, catching her flyaway hairs and softening the angles of her chin and shoulders so that her figure dissolves into the moving sky behind her. She stirs, she hums and her fingers curl over the edge of her plastic seat.
That girl is beautiful — I think that in a sentence. She’s got on jean shorts and a tank top, but I can barely see the color of them under the radiance that surrounds her body. She bounces softly with the train. I can’t think of a word for her though I want to, I want to remember what she looks like, but all I think is beautiful beautiful beautiful until somewhere from the back of my mind comes a quiet voice singing, You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, it’s true …
Wait, who is that? Who sings that? I remember — it’s James Blunt, isn’t it? It’s that song, “You’re Beautiful.” I start to hear an acoustic guitar and a string quartet, and the first verse rises gently: I saw an angel, of that I’m sure, she smiled at me on the subway …
Wait, what? Subway? I look away from the girl. I didn’t like that song when it came out. Why the fuck do I even remember it? Why do I have to remember it now? The girl tucks her hair behind her ears. Thank god she doesn’t know what I’m thinking; she has no idea she even looks like this, she’s looking at the opposite wall.
The digital clock overhead flashes 7:13 p.m. The girl leans her head back against the window, straining her neck, exposing a long column of throat.
“Miss, you need to sleep?” the man next to her says, tapping the wall behind him.
“No, it’s okay. I’m getting off soon,” the girl answers. The man asks her where she lives, she says around here. He tells her he’s a desk clerk at the Port Authority and asks her what she does. She says she’s a camp counselor. “I appreciate that,” he says. She smiles a little sadly. They both look ahead for a while, until the girl uncrosses her legs and the man reaches for them. He stops just shy of her, hovering over above the pink blotch on her left knee where her right leg had been resting.
“Oh, look, it’s red.” He sounds concerned, like a grandmother would.
“It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt.” the girl pulls her knee away. They’re quiet then. “You’re Beautiful” comes back in my head. What the fuck? Is this the world I live in now? Where everywhere I look there’s pop songs? More than that, I’m mad about how little control I have over it all. All these stupid songs that I thought were just ambient noise, all this trash in the world, it’s all in me. My brain is full of trash that I didn’t try to put there, and it spits it out at random, surprise synaptic betrayal.
The train eases into the next station. Out go the woman with the toes and some other people that I hadn’t been thinking about, but the girl stays, still so pretty, still there.
“This is a very good day. You know why?” the man says to her.
“Why?” she says.
“Because I met you.”
“Oh.”
“You want to sleep?”
“No, it’s okay. I’m getting off soon.”
“You married? Single? Married?” The girl stares at me.
“I’m married.”
“Your husband. What’s his name?”
We stare and stare at each other. Does she know me? No, that’s not how she’s looking at me. Keep talking girl, please, forget what I might be thinking. What’s his name, what’s his name.
The girl doesn’t blink. “Bastian,” she says. And looks away.
