All sophomores will be required to complete a 75-minute bystander intervention training session as part of an administrative effort to improve Yale’s sexual climate, according to a Wednesday email to the class of 2015 from Yale College Dean Mary Miller and Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd ’90.
“This is a fairly new area in sexual violence prevention,” Boyd told the News. “Preliminary research at other universities is showing that bystander intervention training can produce dramatic drops of sexual violence on campus, as well as improving the climate overall.”
The workshops, which will each be led by several communication and consent educators and held in groups of 14 to 15 students each, are meant to be small and interactive, according to Boyd. Training is mandatory, but students can choose one of 99 time slots, an option that is meant to encourage students to attend with their friends and promote conversational settings in the workshops. The workshops will consist of a video, an overview of the idea of bystander intervention and group discussions about applicable scenarios.
In contrast to traditional preventative programs that targets potential victims or perpetrators, bystander intervention will treat all students as third-party community members who have the power the shape their community atmosphere, Boyd said. The program aims to “catalyze” behaviors already present in the community, and shifting the broader mindset of the campus is more important than teaching new content, Boyd added.
Workshops will be held from Jan. 31 to Feb. 3.
Read the full email from Miller and Boyd below:
Dear Sophomores,
We write to tell you of a new bystander intervention workshop for the entire sophomore class, an initiative designed to improve the sexual climate on our campus and respond to what you have reported already, both anecdotally and in response to surveys: that sophomore year is the ideal time to strengthen the effort of creating a safer, more respectful community. The workshop, scheduled primarily for the first weekend in February and required of all sophomores, builds on the communication and consent training of your freshman year, adding new skills and strategies you will use in your increasingly active roles on campus.
This workshop adds another obligation to your already busy schedules, and yet we know you understand that establishing and maintaining a positive climate, one of our highest shared priorities, requires us to acquire and practice collective skills. The CCEs will be facilitating these 75-minute interactive sessions, and they have scheduled over 90 of them beginning the afternoon of Thursday, January 31 and concluding in the evening of Sunday, February 3. All sophomores are required to attend one session, so we hope that with this many options you will be able to find one that fits with your schedule. If you can, please sign up with a group of friends — these are skills you will use together!
Register for your session by clicking on the link below. It is personalized, so don’t forward it to friends or use someone else’s. Just follow the instructions to see the options for available times. Please be sure to complete your registration by 5pm on Tuesday, January 29. If you have an unavoidable conflict that stretches over the four days, you should email Dean Melanie Boyd to arrange for an alternate session.
Administrators have launched two new alcohol-related initiatives that aim to evaluate alcohol culture at Yale and seek ways to form a safer undergraduate experience.
In an email sent yesterday afternoon to the student body, Yale College Dean Mary Miller and University Secretary and Vice President for Student Life Kimberly Goff-Crews announced the “Task Force on Alcohol and Other Drugs” and “University Council Committee on Alcohol in Yale College,” which will each tackle alcohol use at Yale. The 15-person task force, which will be chaired by Dean of Student Affairs Marichal Gentry, will focus on three areas of alcohol culture: safety and education, programming and communications.
Gentry told the News on Monday that Miller approached him earlier this semester and asked him to form the task force and develop tactics “to help Yale College make the undergraduate experience safer, and to protect that experience from the risks that alcohol and other drugs present.” The committee’s membership includes Yale Police Department Chief Ronnell Higgins, Associate Dean for Student Organizations and Physical Resources John Meeske and Yale College Council President John Gonzalez ’14.
According to Gonzalez, the task force has met five times since its first meeting on Nov. 7. Gentry said Miller may turn the task force into an “implementation committee” once the group recommends strategies and tactics regarding alcohol use to Miller.
The University Council Committee, which University President Richard Levin will convene in January 2013, will comprise of alumni and parents and aims to provide a “broad overview and more strategic guidance to the University’s senior leadership,” according to the email.
“Save the Ed,” a group of students concerned about the future of Yale’s Educational Studies program, is working to generate dialogue on campus about the future of the program.
Roughly 35 students gathered in St. Anthony’s Hall on Friday for a panel discussion on the future of educational studies at Yale. The panel, which featured a local New Haven teacher, a graduate of Yale’s former Teacher Preparation program and a student studying education at the University of New Haven, addressed topics including student involvement in New Haven schools, approaches to formalized education training and future challenges. The event’s organizer, Sophia Weissmann ’14, said Save the Ed has created a petition that has already collected more than 100 signatures, and will use the information collected during the meeting when putting together a report to present to University President-elect and Provost Peter Salovey after break.
“We want to create a network of people that is sustainable,” Weissmann said. “We’ve all come together to start to figure out how we can bring the community together.”
Panel participants and audience members both emphasized the importance of experience in New Haven classes. Other proposals that will be go into the report included increasing communication between disparate groups that relate to education, cross-listing courses such as “Public Schools and Public Policy” with the Educational Studies curriculum, and preserving the network that former Educational Studies Director Linda Cole-Taylor had created between Yale and New Haven schools.
Weissman said she hopes the administration will take student opinion into account when they assess the program this year and search for a new director to replace Cole-Taylor, who stepped down earlier this year.
Concern about the future of educational studies at Yale began after administrators canceled the Teacher Preparation Track — a program that allowed students to become certified teachers — citing financial concerns and dwindling student interest in accreditation in 2010. Following the cancellation, then-Director of Education Studies Jack Gillette resigned and Cole-Taylor took Gillette’s place as director.
Yale College Dean Mary Miller and Dean of Undergraduate Education Joseph Gordon both said the administration will continue to support the program, and Miller announced last week that former high school teacher and Harvard doctoral candidate Elizabeth Carroll will continue teaching the core courses for Educational Studies while the University searches for a new director.
Well you might want to think again, because according to prominent Mayan scholar and Yale College Dean Mary Miller, the world will not end in 2012.
“I’m no seer, but I am confident that December 22 will see the dawn,” Miller wrote in a special report to CNN.
In an attempt to dispel the widespread “hoopla” and rapid stockpiling of post-apocalyptic supplies, Miller said in her report that she believes the world, will indeed, go on past December.
But Miller also took the opportunity as a teaching lesson, instructing readers that there is much to learn from the Mayans, who, at the brink of their civilization’s collapse, blithely continued their unsustainable way of life. In light of the devastation created by Hurricane Sandy and the real threat of global warming, Miller warned us that we cannot follow the Mayan lead, but rather, must tackle our environmental challenges directly and honestly. Otherwise, she warned, we may become victims of our own “brewing apocalypse.”
But for now, Miller says that we’ll all live to see second semester — so you might want to go ahead and study for that final.
Somewhere in the Dominican Republic, Jordi anxiously hauls sandbags onto the side of a road. Meanwhile, Cora panics amidst the traffic as she attempts to evacuate Manhattan by car. In another hemisphere, Akbar hurries to take shelter in his home in Karachi, Pakistan, as Jack buckles the seatbelt and ducks on his flight to China. It’s Dec. 21, 2012. And it is real. Suddenly, the Dominican Republic goes underwater, and Jordi’s frail body is washed into the Caribbean. Cora looks out the window, just in time to see a massive tsunami pummel New York. The ground splits underneath Akbar’s home in a violent earthquake, and he falls into an endless crevice. Jack screams and watches the destruction below his flight — but suddenly, a meteor falls from the sky and strikes his plane. But wait! It’s actu- ally Dec. 7 — the beginning of the WEEKEND. You have two weeks to prepare, and two weeks to anticipate your ending. How will you survive? How will you perish? WEEKEND investigates.
As we know it
// BY CINDY OK
It was the end of the world. When my parents went to New York one weekend 15 years ago and forgot to tell my sister and me. When my second-grade best friend Emily’s family moved away and we didn’t stay in touch. When I came to college, leaving the place — and all the people — I loved most. In each of those moments, I thought to myself. with childlike earnestness, everything has changed — everything.
And in some ways, everything did change, because it wasn’t just that it felt like the end of the world, it was the end of A World. But those were different worlds than my world today, weren’t they? And my world that I call “the world” today will end — maybe when I move back to California, maybe on Dec. 21, maybe before this goes to print.
Some of my favorite people in the world are graduating this spring, and you should know that it really is the end of the world. Everything will change, because everything can’t stop changing.
The world is always ending, and our hearts are always breaking, but we separate the zombie movies and the Oakland evangelicals’ predictions, and we go on. We get out of bed, we feed the cats in our backyards, we laugh till we almost vomit with the people we love and stop and chat with people we have to tolerate. Because those things are part of what it means to be one of the living, and we’re one of the living as long as we continue to be.
I know that’s a tautology, but are you really about to judge me on the strength of my reasoning at this very moment when we both know that the world is about to end?
And I feel fine
// BY AARON GERTLER
“12/21/12 survival tips?” Bah! If almost everyone’s dead and the world is covered in water/blood/zombies/killer bees/fire/ice/Britney Spears backup dancers, what’s the point of surviving? The real killer app for the apocalypse is ensuring one’s place in the world to come. Each of these tips you remember will increase your chance of a happy afterlife by 33 percent. The other 1 percent involves you being part of the 1 percent, in which case you’re reading this on an escaping space shuttle and chuckling to yourself.
1)If the afterlife is real: There are way too many gods for you to please many of them in the scant weeks remaining, but material trickery is much easier to plan for. When the looting begins, find a costume shop and grab a monk’s robe, a nun’s habit, a Sufi turban, a kippah, a toga and Groucho Marx glasses in case you get to an underworld you don’t recognize. With the right disguise, and given the billions of souls they’ll have to process, you should slip on by to heaven/paradise/Valhalla/whatever.
2)If karma is real: You’ll want to be reborn as a life-form that thrives in the post-oblivion world. I suggest great white shark or honey badger, depending on whether there’s any dry land around. Either way, that’s just a step below human, so commit a minor sin within the next two weeks. Which sin is up to you, but I’m partial to lust and gluttony.
3)If aliens are real: bone up on your math and mime skills. You’ll have to impress them enough to seem worthy of rescue; linguistic babble and/or your political science term paper won’t cut it.
Personally, I plan to mix things up by sneaking onto the space shuttle in Groucho Marx glasses. We all just need to do what comes naturally.
Lama Wilds gets s000 schwasty
// BY WILL ADAMS
I don’t know about you, but I want the apocalypse to be something I REMEMBER. We get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of preparing for the end of the world — everyone’s milling about, all, “Of COURSE I’m stealing this king-size bag of Sour Skittles and a copy of ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’ on Blu-ray because ‘HELLO the WORLD IS ENDING’” and, “What if Karmin doesn’t release another Gucci Mane cover before then, OH NO!” If we don’t take the time to step back and take a breather, we’re not going to remember the important stuff.
That’s why I’m hosting a celebration where we dedicate our last few days to treasuring these moments for posterity! It’ll be at my swanky apartment in Chicago; everyone’s free to come! I’ll set up a fun photo booth so we can take pictures, we can write letters to ourselves in the future, and — this is the best part — we’ll make a time capsule and bury it in Lincoln Park, so 15 years later we can dig it up and see just how much we’ve changed!
So it’d be really awesome if you came. I understand that people are really busy leading up to The Day, so I’ve decided to schedule the party afterwards, on Dec. 22. It’s kinda cheeky, right? Can’t wait!
Will’s “Remember December Forever Bash!”
9 p.m. on Dec. 22, 2012
Will’s Super Cool Chicago Pad
Chicago, Ill. (duh)
BYOB
RSVP at william.adams@yale.edu
Knee pains > World pains
// BY LARA SOKOLOFF
During the last alleged apocalypse, I was in my bed. I was supposed to have arrived at school by 9 a.m. for a club event. At 11 a.m., I rolled over to find multiple missed calls and text messages inquiring after my whereabouts. I had slept through my alarm — happens to the best of us. Most of the text messages and voice mails either directly or indirectly alluded to the apocalypse and how I had somehow managed to be its only victim.
And for this alleged apocalypse, I again expect to find myself in my bed. But unlike last time, I won’t be sleeping through alarms and rolling over to fan mail on my current location. I’ll be recovering from knee surgery.
Backstory: two weeks into freshman year, I tore my ACL. I decided to try out for the girls’ club soccer team the night before tryouts. Having not touched a soccer ball for two years, I knew my chances of making the team were slim, but I saw almost no possible pitfalls. Worst-case scenario, I wouldn’t make the team, and I would be exactly where I had been had I not tried out at all. Fast forward to day three of tryouts and picture me posted in my bed, my knee swollen to double its size with an ice pack on top of it to somewhat mitigate the situation.
So what am I doing to prepare for the apocalypse? I’ll be going extra-hard at my biweekly physical therapy sessions with my physical therapist, Nick.
Me and Jose by the meteors
// BY CHLOE DRIMAL
Dec. 21st: my 22nd birthday. I’ll be drinking margaritas in Mexico with those closest to me — my family and a man named Jose. Even the end of the world can turn into a party. Guess the Mayans meant for me to die at 21.
Sex = Death
// BY MILA HURSEY
In season 3 of the “The Walking Dead,” Lori dies from childbirth. Duh. People have babies when they have sex, and lots of women die from it. There are only two solutions to this problem when you’re about to enter an apocalyptic scenario: Have some foresight by taking control of all the contraceptives and OB-GYNs. You will be rich because you can grow food. You can’t grow condoms. Alternatively, you can bump ‘n grind willy nilly and have babies cut out of you. Good luck with that.
Tonight, Yale College Dean Mary Miller will recognize the eight recipients of the Greer, Heyman and Poorvu prizes, which are awarded annually to recognize the accomplishments of untenured ladder faculty members.
The Greer Prize is awarded to faculty members in the natural or social sciences for exceptional research or publication, while the Heyman Prize is awarded for outstanding scholarly publication in the humanities. The Poorvu Award recognizes professors who have made significant contributions to interdisciplinary research. Each prize includes a monetary reward to support additional research.
Read the list of recipients below:
The Arthur Greer Memorial Prize in the Natural or Social Sciences:
June Gruber, assistant professor of psychology
Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication
Jacqueline Jung, assistant professor of history of art
Pauline LeVen, assistant professor of classics
Birgit Brander Rasmussen, assistant professor of American studies and of ethnicity, race, and migration
Eliyahu Stern, assistant professor of religious studies
John Williams, assistant professor of English
Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching
Paola Bertucci, assistant professor of history of science, history of medicine
