In all my crisscrossing of campus, it had never really occurred to me to sit down in front of the Beinecke and stare at its marble tiles for two hours. Yet this past Sunday night, accompanied by a crowd of onlookers, I found myself doing just that.
What had brought us there? “Lux: Ideas through Light,” a series of towering images and graphics projected onto the facade of the Beinecke and symbolizing Yale’s history and research. As the night wore on, luminescent DNA helixes gave way to an explosion of multicolored dots and a tour of the galaxy. Between each segment was a minute-long sequence in which each of the Beinecke’s tiles displayed a different idyllic image of campus: a true celebration of Yale.
And according to those involved, celebrating Yale was a primary intention. Five undergraduates organized the exhibition in conjunction with the Dean’s office: Emily Bosisio ’16 and Laurel Lehman ’17 produced it, while the gifted lighting designers Asher Young ’17, Doug Streat ’16 and Eli Block ’16 curated it. The exhibition was made up of short segments of no more than four minutes, designed by students from across the University who worked with researchers to graphically represent elements of the researchers’s work.
I wish I had been able to see how these collaborations had happened, and for a long time, I wished I had been given a program. At an exhibition where the goal was to take advanced research and make it accessible to the masses, a little explanation was sometimes needed.
But Lux had anticipated as much. Digital programs synced to the live display were available on small screens throughout the plaza, informing viewers of who had designed the current projection and what it symbolized.
Even though I didn’t understand “the point” of each segment, Lux was nonetheless one of the most enjoyable evenings I have had at Yale. It was more than just an exhibition of talent. It was an experience.
Technically, Lux was flawless. I had seen nothing like it. There was one moment where the projection showed bouncing dots trapped inside each individual tile, and another where the squares of a huge Rubix cube perfectly aligned with the Beinecke’s marble squares. Coming from a theater background, I can tell you that getting light cues correct is difficult. Yet I doubt that the curators had the option of running tests until they got it right — projections on to Beinecke in the middle of the day would hardly go unnoticed. Ensuring that much accuracy without multiple rehearsals astounded me. But my experience was not limited to appreciating the incredible talent on display.
I was once told that art connects people. For a long time, though, this confused me, because art had always appeared to be a solitary experience. Yet Lux invited people to experience art together. Few people arrived at Lux alone, and if they did, they were bound to see someone they knew. Just as the creation of Lux demonstrated collaboration across different parts of the University, the audience was also a cross section of the Yale community.
When I stood up on Sunday night, having sat through the entire two-hour-long show, it saddened me to know that on Monday the projections would stop. But I knew that I had witnessed something truly special.
If you didn’t get the chance to stop by, I’m sorry, but you missed out. Instead of moping, though, you should join the large group of people asking Lux when they’ll be doing it again.
Yesterday was senior society tap night at Yale. Hundreds of students wandered and stumbled around campus half drunk, feeling as if they were on top of the world. Hundreds of others didn’t give a shit. And hundreds of others who weren’t tapped tried not to care but still cared. A lot.
It’s hard not to when everyone else seems to have gotten something that we just missed. Whether we put on a brave face and tell people “I’m not in a society,” joke about the stupidity of the whole process, or pretend not to care, it’ll probably take a while before we stop feeling the sting of rejection.
It’s not necessarily a new feeling. For most of us — except that one over-validated Yalie who gets all the prizes and does all the reading and gets into every group (fuck him/her) — Yale is full of little disappointments, of which society is just one example. At times, it seems as if Yale is designed to undo our sanity, our serenity, our well-being. Why should we be crying because we don’t feel good enough, when we have made friends with people we love, taken a few great classes and learned a thing or two about ourselves?
For one thing, Yale is an incredibly trying place. It’s safe to assume that a good portion of us come here with a reasonable measure of self-worth and self-respect. This is inflated at first. We have little bonding sessions with our pre-orientation groups and FroCo groups and we’re coddled in the extreme. Sometimes we forget to call Mom and Dad because we feel so at home.
Then the bloom comes off the rose. We don’t get into seminars. We get rejected from a cappella groups. Our poem doesn’t get published in whatever periodical we think is the bee’s knees.
It doesn’t matter, we tell ourselves. It’s not a big deal. Then we suspect that some kind of motivational speaker homunculus is deluding us with the power of positive thinking. Suddenly, it is a big deal. And then on nights like April 9, we cry, we crumble, we wonder: What was it I did wrong? Why am I not the person they wanted? What was I supposed to do?
Here is a complicated metaphor: Yale is a bunch of nested Russian dolls. Tiny exclusive communities within tiny exclusive communities. And we keep opening the dolls, joining the clubs and running for positions, because we think we’ll find a kernel in the smallest painted doll. Validation! Certainty!
This is an illusion. The smallest Russian doll is just a stupid wood chip, with a too-big mouth and too-big eyes. The smallest Russian doll is the ugliest one of the bunch. In other words, the most tiny, exclusive community will provide neither validation nor certainty. You can join every club and get every title, and still wake up wondering, “Does anyone love me? Is all this coincidence and not merit?”
If you have decided, today or yesterday or three months ago, to stop opening the dolls, know that you are brave. In a way, you are dropping the dolls and facing the truth: yourself. Yourself without the resume, the accolades and prizes.
In 1961, Joan Didion wrote: “To give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” It’s sound advice. Quit opening the dolls, and when you go looking for yourself, you’ll find that someone’s home.
On the evening of March 14 at the University of Pennsylvania’s historic Palestra arena, the Harvard and Yale men’s basketball teams were tied at 51 in a game that would send the winner to the NCAA tournament. Then, with seven seconds left, Harvard forward Steve Mondou-Missi hit a 15-foot jumper left to pull ahead of Yale by two points.
Yale got the ball back in time for Javier Duren ’15 to make one final drive to the net, but he missed a layup as time expired, and Yale failed to advance to tournament play, just as they had for the past 52 years.
Ansh Bhagat ’18, who doesn’t play a varsity sport, caught up on the highlights after the game.
“I think I just forgot about it, to be honest,” he said. “I might have been asleep.”
Many Yale students might have had a similar experience: of 155 students who responded to a News survey, 70 percent knew the game’s significance, but only 43 percent reported that they watched it. But Bhagat and others’ relative ambivalence would have seemed out of place on campus 50 years ago.
History professor Jay Gitlin ’71, who teaches the course “Yale and America,” recalls the sense of dejection that gripped campus in the days following Yale’s infamous 29–29 “loss” to Harvard in 1968. In the last 42 seconds of the game, Harvard scored 16 points, tying the game against a heavily favored Yale squad.
“We were in a foul mood,” he remembers. “These things affected the mood of the campus. When it was a Yale victory, everybody was happy.”
But Gitlin also remembers that the Yale team won a lot more than they do now.
UConn, for example, posed no problem. “We assumed that we’d win more than we’d lose, and the teams that we thought we might lose to were more often than not, Dartmouth or Harvard.”
But even with the football team going 8–2 this season, attendance at their games paled in comparison to the sold-out games of Gitlin’s day. This part of Yale’s culture, it seems, has been lost to history.
Some, though, are not content to let sports slip from the campus consciousness. Ralph Molina ’16 is the president of the Whaling Crew, an organization dedicated to supporting Yale’s sports teams.
“I think the Whaling Crew’s job isn’t done until every single sporting game is sold out,” he says. “We’ll probably never get there, but that’s the goal.”
* * *
In 1914, construction crews finished work on the largest amphitheater built since the Roman Coliseum: the Yale Bowl.
Costing the University $17.7 million, the imposing concrete stadium reflected the athletic dominance of a football team representing a school that had helped invent the sport. But the administration’s efforts came too late: By the time the Bowl was completed, the Bulldogs had already won 26 out of their 27 total national championships.
The 80,000-seat behemoth would never again see the kind of national spotlight it once enjoyed. Since then, attendance has fallen, and renovations to the stadium have reduced its capacity to just over 60,000
Still, attendance didn’t suddenly fall off once Yale stopped winning national titles. According to Joel Alderman ’51, “It was a gradual process.” Alderman, a retired lawyer who now writes about Yale athletics for SportzEdge.com, said Yale was still a top team in his day, and the noticeable decline in attendance came in the late 1980s through the 1990s.
Prior to that, though, sports — and football in particular — remained an important part of campus life. Gitlin emphasized the greater importance that football had in the University’s social culture when he was a student.
“Football was part of the social calendar,” he said. “You went to football games. We dated a lot, and dating often included going to the football game and then to a dance.”
Since then, though, student interest in sports has declined markedly.
Last fall, the Bulldogs celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Yale Bowl with a rare contest against Army. In an extravagant pre-game spectacle, the game ball was delivered by a cadet parachuting out of a helicopter and landing at midfield. That day, the Bulldogs managed an unlikely victory over a highly competitive team.
But the Bulldogs’ rousing win came in front of tens of thousands of empty seats. Pat O’Neill, associate director of marketing for Yale athletics, estimates that there were around 1,000 fans in attendance, a figure dwarfed by the crowds of 50 and 60 thousand that Yale games drew during the mid-20th century.
And the Army game offers only one example: 58 percent of survey respondents said they had been to three or fewer sporting events this year.
Alderman thinks this dip in attendance is a symptom of something deeper.
“Sports themselves don’t carry as much meaning to the students,” he said.
* * *
Yale students’ attitudes towards sports have been shaped by social and institutional factors. But according to athletes and administrators alike, the most important determinant in a team’s support remains its win-loss record.
“In my experience being here at Yale, kids are pretty educated when it comes to our sports teams,” O’Neill said. “You can’t fool Yale students. Our teams need to win and they’ll come out.”
But since their heyday early last century, Ivy League sports in general have ceded ground to other, larger institutions.
In 1923, Harvard, Princeton and Yale signed the Three Presidents’ Agreement, affirming that all athletes would be admitted as students and would have to conform to the same academic standards expected of others. This restriction opened the door for schools like Michigan and Ohio State to surpass Yale in athletics by using scholarships to recruit top talent. In 1945, the other Ivies agreed not to offer athletic scholarships either, clearing the way for bigger schools with millions of dollars to spend on their athletic programs.
An Ivy League policy prohibiting postseason play further isolated the league’s teams, preventing them from participating in much-publicized bowl games.
“A lot of the time academia and national [athletics] don’t really work well together,” said Molina.
But some say that certain aspects of Yale itself keep athletics from flourishing on campus. Many remarked on the distance from campus to athletic facilities like the Yale Bowl, Yale Field and Coxe Cage.
Although Caroline Lynch ’17, a member of the women’s tennis team and secretary of the Yale Student-Athlete College Council, said sporting events at Yale are generally well attended. She added that those taking place at the Smilow Field House, as opposed to in Ingalls Rink or Payne Whitney Gymnasium, tend to attract fewer viewers because of the distance from campus.
Ree Ree Li ’16, also on the women’s tennis team, reiterated that sentiment.
“We always have good showings for sports that are in the gym because it’s so close,” Li said. “The biggest challenge is getting people to come out for the games that are at the fields.”
Jackson Stallings ’17, a member of the football team and the president of YSACC, said he would like to see an investment in the Yale Bowl’s infrastructure. He thinks that making seating more comfortable or adding or a jumbotron, like Cornell or Harvard have, would encourage more students to attend football games.
O’Neill said budget constraints left no room for investment in the Bowl’s infrastructure right now. But Li said there are non-financial measures that Yale can take to show more support for its athletes. She mentioned a policy in place at Princeton that ensures classes never take place while sports teams practice, meaning athletes could take whatever classes they want. Yale’s athletes, who must tailor their schedules to avoid conflicts, do not enjoy this luxury.
Li said she didn’t receive full credit for a course last fall semester because she had to miss class to travel to California with her team.
Those institutional features might also bleed over into Yale’s campus culture itself: Molina said one source of student disinterest might be administrative attitudes toward sports. Since Yale can’t give athletic scholarships, he said, many feel that sports aren’t important.
But not everyone thinks that Yale’s campus culture doesn’t support sports.Lynch, for one, said the idea that Yalies don’t support their sports teams isn’t true. Some will know more about sports than others, she added, but that can be said of any aspect of Yale’s campus life.
If people are divided as to how Yale students feel about sports, everyone agrees that a supportive campus is vital to thriving athletic programs. And key to that support is a sense of connection between athletes and non-athletes.
“If we can create a culture where the students as well as student-athletes are all close, people will want to go out to support each other,” Li said. “I go to plays and dance shows because I have friends that are in them. If more people have friends who are athletes, they’d be more willing to go out to games.”
But the distance that some Yalies feel between themselves and those representing them on the field became clear in a video released by the Harvard comedy group “On Harvard Time” before the Game last fall.
In the video, disguised Harvard students interviewed Yalies about the state of Yale’s football program and asked them to sign a petition to defund it.
Li and Molina said it disappointed them to see how easily the actors were able to convince Yale students to publicly endorse cutting funding for the football team.
“We have funding issues already within athletics, and to see people wanting to take money from a program that hundreds of students are a part of, I was surprised by that,” Li said.
* * *
If such a petition ever passed, at least two names would certainly not be on it.
In their first weeks as freshmen, Andrew Sobotka ’15 and Hal Libby ’15 noticed a lack of support for Yale’s sports teams. They decided to take matters into their own hands.
“The first football game had decent attendance but the second one was absolutely abysmal,” Sobtoka said. “Hal and I were shocked that on this beautiful fall day, nobody was out at the Bowl cheering on the ‘Dogs.”
In response, the pair founded the Whaling Crew, the organization of which Molina is now president. Starting out as a small group of friends, it now has over 1,300 likes on its Facebook page.
This year alone, the Whaling Crew has organized student tailgates, ordered pizza for fans in the student sections at home games and arranged transportation so interested students can travel to away games.
“Before the Whaling Crew existed, there was no group to get students to come out to athletics,” Molina said. “It was just the athletics office, or through the grapevine. It’s different when you’re hearing about it from students than when you’re hearing about it from the administration.
O’Neill said the Whaling Crew’s efforts have had a tangible effect on sports attendance, enticing more students to come out to games, and the group now receives funding from the athletics office. “We value them immensely,” O’Neill says.
The Whaling crew also appeared in August at a new event called Yale UP!, which Molina says added to their legitimacy and increased student interest in joining.
Yale UP!, inaugurated this year during Camp Yale, consisted of presentations made by members of the athletics department to the incoming freshman class. Students were taught Yale’s historic cheers, and the event featured a relay race between residential colleges, among other competitions. Yale UP!, a conscious administrative effort to encourage support for Yale’s sports teams, was mandatory.
* * *
Despite the lackluster competitive spirit of the past few decades and the eight-year winless streak in the Game, Yale sports fans have reason to hold out hope.
The Bulldogs have seen major successes in recent years that are leading to attention on a national scale: the men’s hockey team took home the NCAA title in 2013, Yale football star Tyler Varga ’15 is competing for NFL consideration and the men’s basketball team missed March Madness by a hair. And survey data suggests that campus support is on the rise: more than a third of respondents said they were more interested in Yale sports this year than last.
“Sports are on the up at Yale,” said Molina. “My attitude about athletic attendance on campus is not necessarily proud, but it’s optimistic.”
I live in Branford — the most beautiful residential college. Also the loudest residential college, not because of our raucous parties, but because of Harkness Tower. We hear Harkness’ chimes every day — the perfect alarm clock after a late-afternoon nap — but we don’t really put faces or names to the sweet melodies. I had a chance to meet the students behind the bells recently: I ventured up the narrow winding staircase and chatted with five members of the Yale University Guild of Carillonneurs — Paige Breen ’16, Thomas Gurin ’18, Andy Zhang ’16, Megan Brink ’17 and Jonathan Shao ‘17. With the largest dynamic range of any musical instrument, the carillon can be heard from miles away. It’s also the biggest and heaviest instrument on the planet. Yale’s Carrilon is only moderately sized at 43 tons! (Pro tip: If you become friends with a Yale Carillonneur, or just go on a tour, they might let you play “Hot Cross Buns” to wake your friends from their late afternoon naps.)
Q: Some people at Yale perceive the Carillonneurs to be a secret cult or a secret society. Do you think you are secretive? How do people react when they find out you are Carillonneurs?
Paige Breen: They sometimes say “Oh I didn’t even realize people played the bells in Harkness Tower.”
Jonathan Shao: One of the members didn’t even find out about the bells until his sophomore year. People think the bells are automated or played by a machine.
Andy Zhang: Even people who do know think “Oh, I don’t know what goes on up there in that tower.” But we do have tower tours whenever people request them. We try to be very open on campus given that the Carillon is a very public instrument.
Megan Brink: We are trying to get people to know more about the Carillon tours — we had senior class gifts and people entered a raffle to win a tour. But they are actually free and you can take them anytime! [laughs] So, yeah we are trying to get more people to know about the tours.
Q: What drew each of you to the bells? Why did you want to become Carollinneurs?
PB: It’s something pretty unique to Yale. Not many universities have carillons and when they do, they don’t have a student-run group like ours.
Tom Gurin: It’s kind of hard not to be aware [of the Carillon] when there is a huge sound coming from the middle of campus … it’s pretty obvious. So, I was keeping my eye out a for an info session.
AZ: I thought it was a unique opportunity to play a new kind of musical instrument that not a lot of people can play. No other carillon is run by students in the whole world.It is a unique instrument and a unique community.
MB: It’s independent — you don’t have to rely on an orchestra— but it’s also a group community. You can hang out with other people; you can even play duets. You have to know how to read music but there are no other requirements.
JS: Zero percent of the Carillonneurs had bell experience before [playing here].
Q: How does it make you feel when people petition each year to stop the bells?
AZ: When you look at the results from that petition, most of the responses were overwhelmingly positive [in favor of the Carillon]. So, people can submit these things but when the actual results come out you see people like [the bells].
PB: My first thought is — I wish they would come and take a tour! I feel that if they knew more about it and how the instrument works and saw how much time we spend learning the pieces they would have a different point of view.
MB: I think it’s funny how they try to spell “Carillonneurs.”
[aside about pronunciation of “Carillonneurs” ensues]
Q: Do you have any crazy Carillon stories — any wedding proposals take place in the tower?
PB: There was this one couple who rented the top of the tower —
AZ: No, they didn’t, they didn’t go to the top of the tower. They actually came up to the tower [afterwards]. First, they met in this room in WLH —it was this whole saga — and he filled that room with roses. Like, a lot of roses. It was WLH 119, which is a big room. Then, they came here and we played a bunch of pieces that they requested.
Q: And she said yes?
AZ: I think so …
PB: I hope so!
AZ: I think they said yes earlier [in WLH 119] and then came to the tower. This was their celebratory round.
Q: Have there been any funny Carillon stories?
MB: One time I had a tour with these two [older] women. I told them how the carillon is like a piano: you can play notes. I turned around and one of the women started playing “Hot Cross Buns” on the real Carrolin. And I was like no, you can’t touch the Carrolon. You have to go through 9 weeks first.
Q: Could you describe the audition process? Is it really rigorous?
JS: So, my position this year was the heel-a-monster, which is basically a rush manager. We had a ton of sign-ups during the bazaar: 186 [names], a little bit more than 15 percent of the freshmen class. We call it the heel process. It’s a 10-week process during which the heelers — the students who want to join the guild — take lessons from current members and, on the 10th week, they audition. Then, we decide who [will be new members]. We ended up with six this year. Not all 186 auditioned.
AZ: It’s really intensive. You have to practice a lot and near the end, if you’re dedicated, it takes up a lot of time. So, a lot of people drop before the audition.
MB: We had 22 who actually made it to the audition day.
JS: Each teacher has four or five students and once the heelers make the guild, we call them our children.
PB: Tommy is my son.
AZ: We have a family tree on one of those family tree websites. It goes back a long way.
PB: I just met my great-great-great-great-great grandmother from the 1990s. She was class of ’94.
AZ: We use a real family tree website.
TG: [The website moderators] are probably wondering, “How do these people keep having kids by themselves?”
AZ: [The new members] are not children until they get in — we try to keep the relationships more formal in the beginning. But then, once they’re in the Guild, it becomes more like family. The Guild is a group that does more than just play music.
TG: Definitely. Being a freshman in the guild, it was really interesting to go from a professional relationship to becoming really close friends with all of the people.
MB: We had karaoke night on Saturday in the tower.
Q: What do you do together?
PB: We go on tour. This Friday we’re leaving for our Eurotour. We’re going to the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark. We’ll get to meet a lot of official carollinneurs there and take lessons.
Q: Do you get many song requests?
PB: Sometimes, it comes in spurts. On average, we get a couple a week.
TG: I think that when it comes in spurts that might be my suitemate [making requests] …
Q: What have been some of the strangest requests?
AZ: I’ve played a bunch of Miley Cyrus.
JS: Sometimes people even send in their own compositions.
AZ: Someone wrote a song with really weird lyrics.
Q: It’s not like you would have been able to play the lyrics.
TG: Exactly!
AZ: But [we couldn’t play it because of] what the song was about.
MB: Some people have requested “Boyz-N-The-Hood!”
AZ: Some things [sound really good] on carillon, and some things, like “Uptown Funk,” just do not. When Macklemore came for Spring Fling everyone was like, “Play Macklemore!” That was decent but “Thrift Shop” is kind of hard to play on the carillon.
MB: There have been some really cute requests. Once, one girl got homesick and so her dad requested we play “My Old Kentucky Home.” Sometimes people ask if we can play things for their boyfriends.
Q: Do you feel like you have a special power over campus? That you can set the tone for the day?
AZ: Some [of the Carillonneurs] think about that more. I always feel really self-conscious if I play dark pieces at noon. I just don’t want the music to be jarring. If the weather is nice, you can’t play something dark and stormy. Don’t play something horribly sad on a Sunday afternoon.
JS: Because of midterm season, I recently got a request to play “Bad Day.”
AZ: I think it’s so funny to be really relevant.
PB: We were playing some break-up songs after Valentine’s Day. Some people noticed.
TG: On Valentine’s Day, I played the “Friends” theme song because it’s not just romantic [it’s also about friendship]. Then I played “On My Own” because that was the reality of my Valentine’s Day.
Q: What is the Carillon’s history?
AZ: In 1921, the first bells were brought in with the original Harkness Tower. I think they brought 10 bells in from England with funding from Anna Harkness, in memory of her son. The Carillon used to be called the Harkness Memorial Carillon. In 1966, Florence S. Marcy Crofut commissioned another 44 bells — we have a total of 54, now called the Yale Memorial Carillon. 1966 was the beginning of the Guild as it is today. Before, when they had 10 bells, it was the Yale Guild of Bell Ringers. They rang at 7:30 every morning.
MB: Funny fact, when the bells were first installed, the hammers were too far away [and hit the bells with more force]. The first time they played the bells, all the glass in Branford shattered.
AZ: People reported hearing it four miles away. They adjusted accordingly. Today, people can usually hear it from three-quarters of a mile away. If the wind is just right, you can hear it all the way from KBT.
Q: Have you always played in Harkness?
AZ: In 2009, they did a renovation and so they brought in a mobile carillon on a truck and parked it up by the Whale. People couldn’t really hear it in the center of campus.
MB: People did miss the real Carillon.
AZ: Afterwards, the people on Science Hill said, “You should build another carillon up here so we can hear it.” I would love another carrilon.
PB: More carillon is always great.
Q: Do you have 24-hour access to Harkness?
JS: Yeah, it’s a nice hangout space. We have these two empty levels … and we’re thinking of maybe building an exhibit there — like a museum of Guild history.
MB: It’s the 50th anniversary next summer. The exhibit will be part of that.
AZ: 1966 to 2016. The Guild of Carillonneurs [in North America] is this big organization and every year they have an annual meeting. And that meeting will be here [in June 2016]! The whole carillon community of the world will be here too.
Q: Are there any final thoughts you want to share?
AZ: Come on our tour! And we have a website.
PB: We have also started tweeting.
Q: Can I tweet at you requests?
AZ: I suppose that could be done. You would be the first person to do it. We also have a live-stream of the music.
MB: We are getting really tech-y.
Q: Do you get a warm feeling in your heart every time you hear the bells?
PB: Definitely.
AZ: If you shared an instrument with only 20 other people in your community and you knew them all so well, [you would too]. It’s nice that I get to share this with them.
“My amazing psychologist knows that she is willfully violating your rules.”
Caroline Posner ’17, buoyed by members of a nodding audience, challenged a panel of administrators, including Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway. She explained that she had long since passed the 12-session limit imposed by MH&C.
MH&C Director Lorraine Siggins pushed against the accusation.
“We do not have an absolute limit of number of sessions,” she said, adding that each case is handled on an individual basis. “When someone comes back from the fall semester and things are still not going well in January, we would not stop treatment.”
She asked that patients who have been given this misinformation reach out to her.
Posner then addressed the audience, asking those same misinformed students to raise their hands. Roughly 50 hands shot up.
Siggins began to explain that the MH&C website doesn’t mention any such limit, when a voice sounded.
“My therapist told me in every single meeting where we were in our 12 meetings.”
“Mine too.”
“Same.”
“P-Set or Mental Well-Being”
Eugenia Zhukovsky’s weekend has been a little surreal. She hasn’t been back much on campus since electing to take time off earlier in the semester. She decided she needed to focus full-time on managing her anxiety and depression. Technically a visitor, she has no ID card to access campus buildings.
Seconds after being guest-swiped into her residential college dining hall, several of her friends materialize, and hug her.
“How is it, being back in the hellhole?” one asks.
Zhukovsky squints a little. “Weird.” She says she’s happy with her decision. “But it’s not fun. It sucks.”
For Zhukovsky, being a Yale student and managing her mental health were mutually exclusive. Panic attacks, medication adjustments, subsequent side effects and bouts of depression — all with little help from relatively infrequent sessions with Yale Mental Health & Counseling — simply took up too much time in an unyielding, rigorous academic environment.
“No one was explaining how I could do it at Yale,” she said, “We’re not given the ‘our health comes first’ [message] as directly as we have to be.”
Instead of feeling that her health was of primary concern, she felt like it was another, unsolicited, course or extracurricular. She added that the same has been true for other Yale students; friends have admitted feelings of anxiety to her but added that they “didn’t have time” to see a counselor. Zhukovsky calls this notion absurd.
Posner and Zhukovsky each described a “P-Set or mental well-being” dilemma: nights when they had to decide between sleep-inducing medication and studying. In other words, they had to choose between missing a deadline and facing the repercussions of a mental illness left untreated.
In Zhukovsky’s eyes, Yalies are high achieving perfectionists. She likes that: their energy, success and drive drew her to the school to begin with. But that same energy can heighten the effects of anxiety.
Julie* said that when she arrived on Yale’s campus last fall, she found her brilliant peers inspiring, but that they also caused her high school confidence to shrink. During her freshman fall, she began to doubt herself and started to experience intense anxiety.
She described her daily routine: class, practice for her varsity sport, and then crying while doing her homework in her single. Meanwhile, she felt that everyone around her was gaining confidence and accolades. Julie felt increasingly inadequate, weak and alone — but she kept her feelings secret.
Almost all of the students interviewed who have experienced anxiety or depression at Yale said that finding and maintaining a supportive social network was one of the most, if not the very most, important way to cope with mental illness on campus. But several have found that the majority of Yale students seem more focused on their own schedules than on the well-being of their friends.
Monica Hannush ’16, who has experienced severe depression at Yale, has felt this on a personal level. In moments of profound despair, she has resorted to sending her friends desperate text messages. Those texts, she said, follow less desperate messages. Often, when she texts her friends less urgent messages about feeling sad, she receives ostensibly empathetic but distant responses: “so sorry! writing an essay, sending you hugs.” “About to go on a date, but you’re beautiful!”
A News survey on mental health resources, completed by 233 students, found that although 61 percent of students have experienced symptoms of depression, anxiety or other psychological conditions, only 28 percent have sought formal treatment, either on campus or elsewhere.
Julie recalled the moment in her freshman year when she felt like she couldn’t take it anymore. She decided to visit Yale Mental Health & Counseling. On her walk over, she was wracked with paranoia and shame. Afraid of being seen, she kept her head down in the waiting room — but she felt comforted by the presence of other people in nearby chairs. She was not alone.
Breaking the Stigma
Once, when Posner went to her chemistry professor to explain why she had been having particular struggles in the class, she ended up in tears. Posner said that when she told him about her severe anxiety and depression, he simply responded, “T.M.I.”
Although diagnoses have been rising steadily for years — a Harvard study showed that the number of patients in the U.S. increases by about 20 percent each year — many still consider mental illness an uncomfortable, even taboo, subject. While 60 percent of the News survey respondents confirmed that they felt comfortable talking about their own mental health with others at Yale, 27 percent of survey respondents said that they were not at all comfortable with such discussions.
And that mindset, according to Posner and Zhukovsky, perpetuates a culture of undeserved shame for the suffering. Anxiety disorders affect nearly one out of every five American adults, a 2014 statistic listed by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
Zhukovsky feels that Yale, specifically, needs to better educate its students.
“I didn’t really know what depression or anxiety were until I had them,” she said. “There was this time when I felt alone, and like there was nothing I could do about it, and it was the worst time in my life … it’s so important to me to talk about this, and to help people from getting stuck in that place. It can be treated. It can be helped.”
Following the death of Luchang Wang ’17 in January, members of a shocked and grieving community have resolved to push for the changes they feel are necessary. Concerned students have been speaking up, demanding that Yale reevaluate resources and policies, and that the community take steps to break the stigma surrounding mental illness.
Many have begun fighting for change on campus — friends like Posner, or like Geoffrey Smith ’15, who co-authored a pledge to boycott the Senior Class Gift along with six other seniors. Smith suggested that alumni and the administration regard participation in the Senior Class Gift as a bellwether for student opinion, and so he called on seniors to abstain from what he sees as an endorsement of University policy. Nearly 97 percent of seniors donated to the Gift in 2014. This year, 78 percent of seniors chose to participate.
A few days after Wang’s death, Posner, Korbin Richards ’15 and Charlotte Storch ’15 created “Nox Et Veritas,” a Tumblr blog, where they publish stories, sometimes written anonymously, about MH&C, withdrawal and readmission. With this new forum, they hope to bring untold stories of mental illness to light and foster dialogue on campus. Already, seven entries have been posted, and Posner said that the blog has between two and three dozen followers.
According to Richards, the problem is not that Yalies do not want to talk about mental illness.
“Once the topic is introduced, everyone wants to join the discussion,” she said.
Rather, she believes that the problem lies largely with the Yale administration. She feels that the administration has been less open and eager to converse with students. After Wednesday’s forum, she said she was proud of the active and vigorous student participation, but disappointed in the continued administrative distance.
“If the panel’s job was to not answer questions, then they did exceptionally well,” Richards said.
Even if students are engaged in the conversation on mental health, Genevieve Simmons ’17 worries the renewed discussion may be short-lived.
“The prevalence of talking about mental health has been sensationalist — movements when we hear a horrible mistreatment about behind the scenes, or a loss of one of our peers,” she said. “Then the discourse fades into the background.”
Moments like this have come before. MH&C Director Lorraine Siggins recalled, for instance, student meetings similar to Wednesday’s event that took place in the 1970s. She said that in her more than 40 years of working on campus, she has seen interest in mental health on campus wax and wane.
To many students, like Zhukovsky, letting this moment of heightened discourse slip away is not an option. She said she could not overstate the importance of creating mental health reform: this, she said, is about quality of life, and life itself.
Phone Tag
When Richards was evaluated at MH&C during her freshman year, she only told one lie. She said that she hadn’t been having suicidal thoughts.
She called this self-defense, as some of her friends had been sent home because they had expressed suicidal thoughts. These stories frightened her— withdrawal was a financial impossibility for her family, and would worsen her condition. Richards says that the fear of MH&C forcing students to leave campus, or keeping them from returning, prevents those with suicidal thoughts from expressing them. And that, she believes, is dangerous.
Holloway agrees that the fear surrounding the treatment policies of MH&C is unsafe. Before Wednesday’s panel, he told the News that he worries many public perceptions of treatment at MH&C are incorrect, and that he hoped the event would clarify misconceptions and alleviate unfounded fear.
Richards told the panel about her lie. She explained that the fear she had felt was pervasive on campus — a statement echoed by the snaps around the room — and asked how the panel planned to address it.
Siggins responded by pointing out that MH&C sees around 2,500 students each year, and that the vast majority of students who withdraw on medical leave do so voluntarily. Later, she described circumstances that might lead to a forced withdrawal. She said that a patient would need to have a plan for self-harm, as well as the means to execute it — “in other words, if we’re concerned imminently that this person in the next 24 hours may be at great risk.” She added that the individual in question would be hospitalized, and never simply sent home, under such circumstances.
Zhukovsky, for instance, withdrew without any pressure from Yale administrators or MH&C clinicians. She said that MH&C could not provide her with weekly therapy, which she needed, and so she saw no alternative to leaving. It was not until she withdrew that her mental health began to improve.
The thought of other students continuing to wade through the support provided by MH&C saddens her.
“I know that they’re struggling, because I struggled through it, and it wasn’t helping,” Zhukovsky said. “The care I was getting was just okay, and ‘just okay’ is not an option.”
Others remember experiences of MH&C therapy that were worse than mediocre.
Richards called her first and only appointment after her initial consultation “one of the worst experiences [she’s] ever had with another person,” recalling how her doctor skipped the handshake in their greeting. “He didn’t shake my hand, didn’t ask about how I was doing. He went straight into ‘Why are you here?’ and then ‘When’s the last time you menstruated?’”
Julie, initially comforted by the presence of other students in the MH&C waiting room, gave up on MH&C after a couple of unsuccessful visits. She said that the therapist she was assigned to was cold, clinical and impossible to open up to, and so she turned to long-distance communication with a therapist from home.
Still, others have had positive experiences at MH&C.
Adriana Miele ’16 has been regularly seeing the same therapist since the beginning of her freshman year, an experience that she said has “kept her afloat in a lot of ways.”
MH&C also allows patients to request a change in therapist if they are dissatisfied, a process Posner went through at the beginning of this academic year. She’d seen a therapist throughout her freshman year, but found their sessions unproductive, so requested a change. Even though she had to wait for six weeks for MH&C to process her request, Posner said that her new therapist has made a tremendously positive impact on her mental health.
On Wednesday, when Posner publicly praised her new therapist’s violation of the supposed 12-session protocol, snaps and murmurs of accordance echoed throughout the forum: evidence, perhaps, of her belief that MH&C’s largest problems have less to do with the quality of therapy that most of its practitioners provide than with its difficult bureaucratic system.
As the MH&C system stands now, according to Posner, students must advocate for themselves in order to obtain quality care. She equated communicating with MH&C to a game of “phone tag,” with constant missed calls and miscommunications. At the forum, when Šimon Podhajskỳ ’16 asked why MH&C does not utilize email communication, students banged their desks in agreement.
Siggins responded that she “couldn’t agree more” with students that communication between MH&C and patients needs to be improved. She explained that the system currently does not allow email correspondence because MH&C had been concerned about the security of emails, but that it was currently pursuing ways of legally incorporating email communication.
She and Genecin have announced their commitment to reforms at MH&C. In an attempt to hear student voices, they held a series of “listening sessions” in the residential colleges last spring. Last week, Genecin sent an email to the College with a set of MH&C improvements, including an increased staff size and expediting the period of time between a consultation visit and a first appointment.
In the News survey, 54 percent said they believed that Yale’s mental health resources are insufficient for those who use them, and 30 percent of students responded that they felt dissatisfied with the reforms described in Genecin’s email. One survey respondent commented that “there were no concrete numbers given to the proposals, which makes me deeply skeptical.”
Indeed, it appears that students crave more numbers and facts from MH&C. At the forum, multiple students asked the panel for more statistics and greater transparency from administrators.
Holloway and Genecin emphasized, though, that many specifics cannot be discussed because federal law mandates strict confidentiality. Holloway told the News that his inability to be fully forthcoming is “totally appropriate,” though he added that he is always as transparent as possible.
For instance, Holloway said that the withdrawal and readmission committee he formed in January cannot disclose information about its discussions until the committee finalizes its recommendations. He expects this to happen in four to six weeks.
Given such legal constraints, Holloway said that he did not believe assertions that the administration has been silent or unresponsive were fair.
At Wednesday’s forum, English professor John Rogers, the chair of the committee, mentioned that one of its six members was a student. He also pledged to take seriously the recommendations and complaints that students had expressed to him.
Zhukovsky worried that administrators would view Wednesday’s event as a way for complaints to be aired, rather than attempt to get to the roots of the grievances. She simultaneously felt that complaints alone would not lead administrators to make changes.
“I’m all for talking,” she said. “I just think that there has to be more push from students to make a specific change. There’s been a lot of reaction, and a lot of opinion, but there needs also to be initiative.”
Alternatives, and new options
Natalie Wolff ’14 suffered from depression between the ages of 13 and 21, and credits her recovery in large part to the care she received at MH&C while she was an undergraduate. At Wednesday’s event, she presented a list of 10 recommendations to streamline MH&C’s system — recommendations that included using the medical program MyChart to schedule appointments, administering screening questionnaires and hiring more secretaries to field more phone calls.
The panelists expressed gratitude for Wolff’s recommendations, asking for her written list, but Siggins noted that some of the items, such as mandatory follow-up phone calls if a patient misses an appointment, are already MH&C policy. She encouraged students whose therapists have broken MH&C policy by sharing misinformation to contact her. She said that, in those cases, she would remedy the misunderstanding.
At the same time, several students said that MH&C policy was so obscure that they would not know if their therapist had misrepresented it. Siggins admitted that MH&C has not done an adequate job in the past of educating Yale students on its policies, but she added that administrators are working to increase transparency. She then cited the MH&C advisory committee, a liaison between the department and students convened at the beginning of the spring semester in 2014.
Corinne Ruth ’15 and Olivia Pollak ’16, currently serving on the committee, seconded Siggins’ view. Pollak recognizes that communication between students and MH&C can often seem “starkly two-sided,” but hopes that both sides can listen to each other.
“They [MH&C] want students to be happy, they want them to be successful, they want them to come back. The discussion then comes to … how do we best listen to each other?” Ruth said.
The Mental Health Advisory Committee began at the end of last spring, as part of the Coalition for Mental Health and Well Being, a larger umbrella student organization. The committee members convey to the administration their impressions of campus culture.
She cites the coalition as key, a way to bring together students in organizations concerned with wellbeing. Last year, the committee updated the YCC resource sheet and the FAQ section of the MH&C website.
Ruth and Pollak assert that the relationship between MH&C and students is a difficult one to navigate — they echoed Holloway’s comment on confidentiality, as did the forum’s panelists, but asserted that some channels between the administration and students have opened in the past few years.Ruth cited last year’s listening sessions with Dr. Genecin, which fewer students attended than was expected.
Ruth and Pollak also pointed to resources outside of MH&C that they feel are underutilized, notably Walden Peer Counseling, the Chaplain’s Office and the Peer Liaisons.
One day in the fall of 2014, as Natalie Rose Schwartz ’17 wrestled with new symptoms of depression amid long-standing anxiety, her mother told her over the phone that she had to find someone to be with, if she could. Schwartz’s dean, who had been very helpful during regular weekly meetings, was unavailable, so she walked into the Chaplain’s Office. Schwartz knew Sharon Kugler, the University chaplain, from “Cookies and Coloring,” a weekly study break held in the Welch basement.
“I just went to her office, and she happened to be free, and she immediately took me in, and hugged me, and let me talk,” Schwartz said.
In the News survey, only nine students reported they had used the Chaplain’s Office as resource, while 72 students had gone to MH&C and 82 had relied on residential college deans, masters and freshman counselors. Twelve students had gone to Walden Peer Counseling as a resource.
Pollak believes Walden’s minimal visibility on campus is a necessary result of its policy of anonymity. Because confidentiality restricts peer counselors from reaching out and putting a face to their services, students may have misconceptions about the issues that Walden addresses. Pollak worries that students think they shouldn’t call Walden unless they have a very acute problem, although she asserts that this is not the case.
Zhukovsky, on the other hand, said that while Walden allows students to reach out to peers, peer counselors could not and should not replace mental health professionals. She has suggested that Yale implement a its own version of “Let’s Talk,” a drop-in program started at Cornell University, and that 25 other universities have adopted.
Like Walden, “Let’s Talk” offers drop-in hours for students to talk or seek advice. Unlike Walden, though, “Let’s Talk” employs certified counselors. This would provide immediate professional advice — on medication, for instance — that Zhukovsky believes MH&C does not currently offer and that a peer counselor cannot give.
Other students are also considering ways to widen the University’s network of resources. Joseph Cornett ’17 has recently proposed an initiative in a News column to implement mental health fellows in residential colleges. Representatives from MH&C, masters and deans would select upperclassmen to serve as fellows. The main job of a mental health fellow would be to refer students to mental health resources, explaining their nature and functions.
“The mental health fellows should be someone who everyone knows they can talk to about emotional health.” Cornett said. “It will end up normalizing discussion about mental health and destigmatizing it, much in the way CCE’s have destigmatized discussion about sexual health.”
At the forum, Wolff proposed a safe space to discuss mental health, in the vein of the Sexual Education Literacy Forum, a suggestion greeted with snaps and applause.
Ruth and Pollak believe that friends sharing correct information with each other may be the most long-lasting, effective improvement to the current mental health climate.
Smith believes that while friends can complement professional help, they cannot replace it.
“Friends will ideally be capable of listening and providing love and kindness, but it is too much to expect them to … provide serious help with a specific condition,” he said.
***
After reading out her ten recommendations at Wednesday’s forum, Wolff turned to the audience.
“Anyone can be an advocate. You also need to be an advocate for yourself. So when they tell you that it’s going to take two months to switch your therapist, say no,” she said. “Just don’t give up.”
The applause was deafening.
But before Wolff’s recommendations, and before the applause, Holloway opened the forum. He explained that he wants to close an information gap between students and the administration, to make sure that students have enough faith in the system to get help when they need it, instead of being afraid.
“The floor is now yours,” he said. “Raise your hand. Speak loudly.”
Tuesday morning, Beinecke Library staff set up a small, modestly lit stage and 40 chairs upstairs to prepare for the announcement of this year’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize winners. The prize awards $150,000 to each of nine writers — three in drama, three in nonfiction and three in fiction.
Though this certainly makes for a noteworthy accolade, few people attended the ceremony. Almost all those who came worked at the Beinecke. University President Peter Salovey read a short speech: He named the winners, summarized their careers, thanked listeners and left. The whole thing took less than 20 minutes.
Despite the small reception in New Haven, the event attracted a much larger audience than could be contained in the Beinecke. Michael Kelleher, program director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, opened proceedings by saying, “We’re being watched all over the world live right now.” Indeed, the announcement was live-streamed over the Internet.
The ambitions of the Windham-Campbell Prize certainly merit global attention. It aims to reward writers in the English language from all over the world for demonstrating achievement or promise in their respective genres. In an interview with the News, Kelleher joked that he was happy that this year was the first when over half the winners already knew what the Windham-Campbell Prize was, and that no one thought the phone call notifying them that they’d won was a Nigerian Prince scam. But in all seriousness, the vast scope of the award has attracted international attention, and though it was created only three years ago, the Windham-Campbell Prize has quickly acquired significant prestige.
The prize was created by Donald Windham who, upon his death in 2010, left the majority of his estate to Yale in order to fund the Windham-Campbell Prizes. Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, Windham moved to New York City soon after graduating high school to become a writer. There, his career took off when he collaborated with Tennessee Williams on “You Touched Me!,” and he went on to become a critically acclaimed novelist.
Windham’s success never came easy. He never went to college, and as a young, financially struggling writer, he worked odd jobs in New York City. It is perhaps because of this difficulty that Windham wished to create a prize that would not only honor well-known authors with impressive bodies of work, but also — and perhaps more importantly — provide younger, less established writers with the financial opportunity to focus on their craft.
Eugene V. Kokot, co-executor of the Windham-Campbell estate, says he ensures that the selection committees choose winners that match Windham’s goals. “It was Donald’s intent to give someone the prize who would really benefit from money to aid [their] writing, without having to work a second job to make ends meet,” he said. In keeping with this mission, last year’s winners have expressed their gratitude for the prize, which has enabled them to stop looking for temp jobs and worrying about money, and to finally focus on establishing themselves among literati.
The newfound ease of the prizewinners is the result of a long and complicated process. Each year, Kelleher travels to a different part of the world to familiarize himself with the region’s literary circles. He then chooses 60 nominators — usually writers or academics — who will each choose one “established” writer and one “up-and-comer” to nominate for the prize. He cited the importance of having what he called a “saturation” of nominees from a particular part of the world, so that every year selectors can closely examine the literature of a given country, rather than annually comparing literature from all over the world.
Selection committees choose winners not based on a single masterpiece; instead, they look at the writers’ entire bodies of work. Judges on the committee then pick a book they think is indicative of the overall quality of an author’s work to send to a panel of jurists, who decide on the final winners. It’s a long process, and usually takes an entire year. In fact, Kelleher begins searching for new nominators the day after winners are announced.
This involved procedure yields promising results. “The proof that the selection process works is in the people who are selected,” said Richard Deming, an English professor at Yale who teaches the popular creative writing course Daily Themes. “By and large, they aren’t household names, but they have been very impressive.”
The names of the nominators are never made public, and nominees do not find out they’ve been nominated unless they win. The selection committees, also composed of anonymous members, work in seclusion throughout the process to determine the best nominees. Even after their term ends, previous judges cannot reveal their identities to the press.
“The process is anonymous because we wanted to avoid conflicts of interest,” Kokot said. “We want nominators to nominate purely on the basis of their review of authors who deserve a wider audience.”
This could explain the modest reception that accompanied the announcement of the winners; unlike prizes such as the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, there is little fanfare surrounding the selections. While other literary prizes have celebrity judges and long processes involving publicized longlists, short lists and finalists, the Windham-Campbell doesn’t make a show of its procedure. As J.D. McClatchy, editor of “The Yale Review,” puts it: “The Windham-Campbell has prestige, like the Bollingen, more than glamour, like the Pulitzer.”
McClatchy is not the only person to compare Windham-Campbell to more established prizes. Though the Windham-Campbell program is still in its infancy, members of the literary community have high hopes for its future. The prize was profiled in a Foreign Policy article about prestigious global literary awards, along with the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Man Booker Award. Unlike these accolades, the Windham-Campbell does not allow almost-winners to benefit from being named finalists. However, Teju Cole, one of this year’s fiction winners, says he wouldn’t have wanted to know had he been a finalist. For him, the anonymity de-emphasizes the competitive nature of literary prizes. “Making art is not about rivalry,” he said.
Most commonly, interviewees compared Windham-Campbell either to the Macarthur Genius Award, as the decision processes are similar, or, perhaps more aptly, to Yale’s Bollingen Prize, which is essentially Windham-Campbell’s poetic counterpart.
The Bollingen Prize has awarded literary excellence ever since its inception in 1948, when Ezra Pound was the first winner. Also affiliated with the Beinecke, the Bollingen selects American poets who have published the best book of poetry in the two years preceding the prize’s announcement. It also takes into account lifetime achievement that the judges deem particularly impressive. Its goals, then, are somewhat different than those the Windham-Campbell — the Bollingen is not international, and is rarely given to a junior poet without a significant body of work.
Nancy Kuhl, curator of American Literature at the Beinecke and Program Director for the Bollingen Prize, thinks that, because of these different functions, the Bollingen and Windham-Campbell will mutually inform and enrich one another.
“The two prizes together highlight Yale’s deep investment in great literature,” she said. “This isn’t just a deep investment in research, but also in the creation of great works of art.”
The relationship between Yale and the prizes is, in a sense, symbiotic: The prize enhances Yale students’ experience of literature, and association with Yale lends the prize automatic prestige. Kuhl went on to explain how awards such as these impact students and aspiring writers who are considering entering the field: “When we give an award to a writer, we don’t know what’s going to arise from their imagination, or how that will spark the imaginations of others at a distance.”
The Windham-Campbell has already put significant effort into sparking young imaginations. Since its inception, the prize has maintained a partnership with Co-op Arts and Humanities High School in New Haven. Each year, six students concentrating in creative writing or theater coordinate a panel and workshop with one of the winners.
Lynda Blancato organizes the cooperation between the Beinecke and Co-op High School. “This program shows students that the prizewinners have very diverse paths to their careers as writers,” said Blancato. Even just meeting new people who aren’t from New Haven, she said, is exciting for students — so working with writers from all over the world was especially rewarding.
The high school’s affiliation with Windham-Campbell winners is, in a sense, indicative of the realization of Windham’s goals — for many writers, especially those from outside the U.S., local recognition in New Haven is the first step to recognition abroad. “I’m literally trying to bring these writers to the world,” Kelleher tells me. According to him, the Windham-Campbell Prize intends to bring acclaim to writers who deserve it and whose art should be appreciated by literary enthusiasts around the world.
That said, fame is not the ultimate goal of most writers. “I think making art is about having a voice — prizes are not the reason we do this work,” said Cole. (This was, of course, after saying that he was very happy to have received the Windham-Campbell this year.) “But any opportunity to develop that voice is very meaningful. Money is not the end in itself, but it allows the work to go on.”
The first time Giahoa Nguyen ’17 and her mother visited campus, they were struck by its beauty: the dignified stone buildings, the enclosed college quadrangles, the architectural surprises hiding around every corner.
After touring Cross Campus and Old Campus, they made their way south to Crown Street, where they had heard the Asian American Cultural Center was located. Having walked a few blocks, they were surprised to find themselves surrounded not by ivy-covered stone but looming apartment buildings. The shabby facade of 295 Crown St., the home of the AACC, did not match the vibrant image painted in admission brochures targeted at minority students — a jarring experience that many students of color face when they arrive on campus.
“Is this even Yale?” Nguyen’s mother asked her.“You shouldn’t come here. It’s not safe.”
Two years later, Nguyen was one of dozens of students who crowded into LC 102 to share their experiences with Yale’s cultural centers at two town halls on Feb. 15 and 17. The town halls — led by Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway and University Secretary and Vice President for Student Life Kimberly Goff-Crews, with Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley attending the first one — were forums for students to share their thoughts on a November 2014 external review of the cultural centers. But they quickly turned into a space for students to voice their concerns about the University’s approach to diversity in general.
Yale has made major strides in its racial attitudes, not only from its earliest days — its namesake, Elihu Yale, was a slaveowner, as were many of its earliest faculty — but also in recent years. The oldest of the four cultural houses, the Afro-American Cultural Center, was founded in 1969 and was followed by the Asian American Cultural Center, La Casa Cultural and the Native American Cultural Center in the subsequent decades. Yale University, once the bastion of privileged white males, is now 20 percent Asian-American, nine percent African-American, nine percent Hispanic, and two percent Native American. These statistics do not account for international students, who make up 19 percent of the University population.
“I think there’s a greater understanding now, more than ever before, that diversity in all of its forms equals excellence,” University President Peter Salovey said in an interview with the News. “You cannot have an excellent faculty or an excellent student that is not diverse.”
But Yale has been slow in realizing Salovey’s enthusiasm for diversity. The report that came out of the external review — the first of its kind for Yale’s cultural centers — detailed nearly 12 pages of criticisms. Of great concern were the myriad physical problems with the houses – ranging from unsafe locations to lack of handicap accessibility to the neglected presence of carcinogens. The report also called for greater administrative advocacy for the centers, equalized and stabilized funding for all four houses and enhanced community outreach efforts.
The report also described the confused leadership structure in the housesas “problematic at best.” Students themselves have echoed these complaints: Earlier this week, 147 students presented a 60-page petition calling for the removal of Assistant Dean of Yale College and Af-Am House Director Rodney Cohen, citing complaints of neglect, poor character and questionable financial management.
But particularly concerning were the report’s descriptions of “disjointed and episodic” diversity initiatives, which it said diminish the power of Yale’s stated goals.
“Because diversity is expressed as a major theme in the University’s current leadership agenda, it is essential that cultural centers develop […] a clearer sense of direction that articulates and grounds their work as being mission critical,” the report reads.
These are not new complaints. Last February, the Yale Diversity Summit — another group of external educators and administrators — released its Report of Discussions and Recommendations, expressing many of the same concerns. The University, it said, is “diversity conscious, diversity sensitive, but not diversity driven.”
Students within the cultural house communities echoed the sentiments put forth by outside experts.
“Yale likes to talk about diversity being a hallmark of the University’s mission and central to its thriving nature,” said Christopher Melendez ’15, a recruitment coordinator for La Casa. “It looks good on paper. It doesn’t always translate to reality.”
A PLACE TO CALL HOME
The first of Yale’s cultural centers, the Af-Am House, was founded in 1969 through the efforts of Yale’s small but rapidly growing population of African-American students.
“[It was] formed out of student protest over lack of representation,” Holloway said. “The mentality was that white students had Yale as their space, and black students wanted something different.”
The next few decades saw a rapid succession of initiatives, driven by administrators and students alike, intended to diversify Yale’s historically monochromatic campus. 1969 saw the creation of the Asian American Students Alliance, which would help found the Asian American Cultural Center in 1981. La Casa was born the same year. Students founded the Association of Native Americans at Yale in 1989, leading to the 1993 establishment of the Native American Cultural Center, although it would not receive its own building for two more decades.
But when the economy stalled in 2008, so did this steady progress.
The University’s endowment fell by 24.6 percent in the fiscal year ending June 2009. Budget cuts were implemented across the board, resulting in everything from layoffs to the postponement of major construction projects. The cultural houses were no exception.
According to Jessica Liang ’17, co-head coordinator for the AACC, the annual budget that the AACC receives from the Yale College Dean’s Office has fallen by $60,000 over the past six years. In the past year alone, the AACC’s funding has been cut by 40 percent, said former AASA co-moderator Candice Hwang ’16. La Casa’s allocation from the University has also fallen every year that she has been here, said La Casa student coordinator Evelyn Nunez ’15.
Such cuts are felt far beyond the walls of the houses themselves, as between the four of them, the centers are responsible for funding over 80 constituent undergraduate organizations.
“I don’t think the cultural centers have been singled out for budget cuts — they’re definitely happening all around campus — but at the same time, I would say we feel it pretty hard,” Liang said. “Especially when the University, while making cuts, is also trying to recruit more students who are from different ethnic backgrounds and who would identify with these cultural centers — the responsibility that comes with that makes us feel these cuts more.”
Goff-Crews told the News that the cultural houses, like any other space in the University, play an important part in forming the Yale community. But students from three of the houses pointed to the physical condition of their spaces as further evidence of administrative neglect — a point repeatedly raised at the first town hall. James Ting ’15 explained that because the AACC’s basement remains unfinished, there is no room large enough to host cultural performances. Roman Castellanos ’15 said that with a growing number of students affiliating with La Casa, there is insufficient space at the house to hold its traditional senior events, such as a dinner for students and their families. This year, the dinner will likely take place at the larger Af-Am House.
“We grew up here for four years, and now we can’t celebrate in this space with our families,” Castellanos said.
Location is also a concern. Three of the four cultural houses are located several blocks from main campus, on Crown and High Streets. Several students at the town hall complained that the remote location deters students from attending events and makes walking home at night feel unsafe. This problem will only worsen when the center of campus activity shifts northeast with the addition of two new residential colleges on Prospect Street — nearly a mile away from the cultural houses.
Students’ grievances with the physical condition of the cultural houses also extended to health and safety concerns. Wiring in La Casa’s basement poses the risk of electrical shock, Hwang said, and up until the end of spring 2014, one of the AACC’s conference rooms was contaminated with asbestos — a known carcinogen.
But while members of the cultural houses expressed discontent with the disrepair of their facilities, University spokesman Tom Conroy said the overall condition of space within the houses resembles the rest of campus. He noted that a total of $6 million has been spent on the cultural houses over the past 10 years, funding both the “comprehensive renovation” of the NACC — formerly used as graduate student housing — and various renovations at the other houses.
He added that the University’s next investment, in the AACC and La Casa, should be implemented by the end of this academic year.
Liang said she had not heard of any of the plans Conroy mentioned but is excited if they are indeed in place.
“I hope it means more than just fixing the heating system,” she said.
But the condition of the houses has a symbolic significance as well. The external reviewers emphasized the importance of physical infrastructure to the promotion of diversity on campus.
“The physical presence of the cultural centers will offer visible evidence of the quality of the institution’s commitment,” the report concluded.
OVEREXTENDED AND UNDERSERVED
But beyond improved facilities, the cultural houses also need improved leadership, the report said.
“Because of the range of responsibilities, extensive time demands and community expectations of the position, the current director/dean role is unsustainable,” it said. “The simple analysis is that there should either be additional staff assigned to the centers or the position should be redesigned with more streamlined responsibilities focused on the needs of the centers’ respective communities.”
Concerns about the difficulty of reaching Cohen, the current Af-Am House director, featured prominently in the petition calling for his removal. Cohen, who is also an Assistant Dean of Yale College, is responsible for overseeing the Science, Technology and Research Scholars program and also holds a position as a university fundraiser, said Eshe Sherley ’16, who is affiliated with the Af-Am House and was one of 147 students who signed the petition.
Although Assistant Dean of Yale College and former Af-Am House Director Pamela George suggested that conflicting responsibilities should not be a problem if a director has “a clear commitment and respect for the communities in which [they] are fortunate enough to serve,” students at the other cultural centers — who emphasized their productive and affectionate relationships with their directors — agreed that the leadership is overstretched.
Nunez said that while Amanda Lynn Hernandez MED ’16, La Casa’s interim director, tries her best to meet with students whenever they request meetings, she also must balance her duties as a student here at Yale.
Christopher Cutter, the NACC’s interim director, also holds an appointment at the School of Medicine.
And according to NACC staff member Leanne Motylenski ’16, “the under-resourcing and enormous amount of responsibility given to the directors has been a factor in some previous directors’ recent decisions to leave Yale.”
Of the four current cultural center directors, all except AACC Director Saveena Dhall did not return multiple requests for comment.
The directors are not the only ones who are overextended. The houses themselves simply cannot support the influx of students of color that the Admissions Office is working so hard to attract. Dhall noted that the University’s current Asian-American population is nearly 4,000 students, a number which will only grow after the two new residential colleges are completed, increasing the undergraduate population by 12 percent. The AACC’s largest room holds only 40 people.
In recruiting incoming students, Yale markets its cultural centers as a major advantage over its peer institutions, said Crystal Kong ’18, co-community development chair for AASA. Kong said she was disillusioned when she first became active in the cultural community she had heard so much about, only to find out that it was struggling to maintain its finances.
Yale makes a lot of promises about diversity, Liang said. But after students decide to matriculate, the University stops trying to make good on those promises.
For Melendez, who has worked as a recruitment coordinator for the Admissions Office since sophomore year, the problem of false advertising is particularly difficult. Working in admissions, he has watched Yale market its cultural center communities to great effect: the Class of 2018 includes the largest Latino population in Yale’s history. But Melendez worries that the environment awaiting students on campus will fall short of what was promised in admissions brochures or at Bulldog Days.
“The administration likes to make a point of this being something that’s not only relevant but integral, but it hasn’t taken the steps to convey that importance to the entire community,” Melendez said.
What frustrates Sherley most about the administration’s lip service to diversity is that these outreach efforts use Yale’s current students of color as a mouthpiece.
While there is nothing wrong with depicting Yale as a “vibrant, happy place,” Sherley said, the University should provide the actual resources to turn its glossy brochures into a reality for the students who are doing the hard work of recruitment.
“[Yale] students of color are put in this position where they make promises and say, ‘Oh, there’s a great community here,’” she said. “And there is. But we also feel uncomfortable talking about all the structural challenges we face because we don’t want to scare away other [prospective] students of color.”
“RESEARCH OR ME-SEARCH?”
Those in the know will tell you that if you want to get a Ph.D in Native American Art, you go to the University of New Mexico. But Anya Montiel GRD ’18 — despite being in the know herself — decided on Yale for its superior libraries and closer proximity to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
After doing her undergraduate work at University of California Davis — with its rare, autonomous Native American Studies department — Montiel was particularly disheartened to see the dearth of course offerings at Yale.
“I had choices, I took all the classes available,” she said of her experience at UC Davis. “But for the young undergraduates [at Yale] who want to pursue Native American art, I don’t know what to tell them.”
Across the University, student concerns about Yale’s commitment to underrepresented groups extend beyond the cultural centers and into the classroom.
With professor Ned Blackhawk as the only faculty member focused exclusively on Native American Studies, students interested in the discipline find themselves at with few courses to choose from. This semester, Blackhawk is teaching just two classes, only one of which is geared towards undergraduates. It’s a substantial course load for a professor — especially on top of independent scholarship — but it still leaves student interest unmet. Students who want to pursue senior theses or other independent work in Native American Studies can, but the process is difficult; with so few course offerings, it comes down to a lot of self-educating, Blackhawk said. Worse still, when Blackhawk goes on leave, there are often no courses available.
“The growth of cultural centers demonstrates Yale students’ tremendous capacity to query issues of inequality,” Blackhawk said. “But now that we have the centers, we should have the scholarship.”
Meanwhile, student demand for these courses is only growing. Several graduate students in Native American Studies mentioned oversubscribed courses from which tens of interested students had to be rejected. And the problem is hardly limited to their discipline.
American Studies professor Mary Lui is the one faculty member focused exclusively on Asian American Studies — a statistic Courtney Sato GRD ’19, an AACC Graduate Assistant whose work is in the field, described as “appalling.” Lui, who focuses on Asian American history, said she wishes Yale could offer courses in Asian American visual and musical arts, literature and sociology. She and interested students have been trying to carve out a larger, permanent place for Asian American Studies at Yale since her arrival in 2000.
Students interested in the discipline described the dearth of faculty — and subsequent dearth of course offerings — as the single greatest barrier to expanding ethnic fields of inquiry.
Recently named Deputy Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity Richard Bribiescas said ethnic studies are a priority for Yale, and will certainly be included in upcoming conversations about faculty hiring.
But Lui and Blackhawk both said they are not aware of any targeted University efforts to hire another faculty member in their fields. Sometimes, hiring searches in other departments turn up candidates who specialize in one or more niche of ethnic studies. But so far none of these hires have come to fruition, and without a targeted search for an ethnic studies professor, there are no guarantees.
“There is a lot of improvement in terms of what Yale could do to support [this field of study],” Sato said.
Beyond just limited resources, the discipline has to contend with issues of perception. Lui said many people unfairly conflate the academic discipline of Asian American Studies with the cultural concerns of Asian-American communities. While intrinsically related, she said, the spheres are distinct and need to be treated as such so that the discipline can be taken seriously. LiLi Johnson GRD ’19, an AACC Graduate Assistant and student in the field, said another challenge to Asian American studies is distinguishing it from fields like East Asian Studies. Distinctions like these are crucial if it is to be recognized as an independent, flourishing field of study, she said. But Yale isn’t quite there yet.
“I’ve heard stories about Asian-American students, when they’re trying to work with faculty, proposing something Asian-American-related and getting asked whether this is ‘research or me-search’,” said Austin Long ’15, the student director of the Asian American Studies Task Force.
The first step in changing this perception may be demonstrating the groundswell of student interest in Asian American studies. One of the advocacy group’s most important goals, Johnson said, is to do just this. And bringing visiting scholars who specialize in areas of Asian American studies beyond Lui’s area of expertise will further expose the campus to the vast swath of work being done in the field.
Next week, Lui and other advocates will bring these areas of study to Yale for a day, hosting an Asian American Studies conference. So far almost 200 participants have registered to hear scholars from institutions like Wesleyan, Harvard and Syracuse discuss their work on issues including literature, film, migrant rights and minority empowerment. Lui said she made a point of featuring work outside her own expertise in order to expose students to scholarship they rarely see on campus.
“The hope is to convince programs, departments, administrators of the importance of having the scholarship here on campus on a permanent basis,” Lui said.
Sato said the conference is a tangible result of the student advocacy on these issues, which Johnson said is almost entirely driven by undergraduates.The conference’s turnout will demonstrate that there is unmet student interest in these areas of study, beginning a dialogue surrounding expansion of ethnic studies that Johnson said should never be considered over.
Kong, another student activist, said she believes the administration will take action if the Task Force can demonstrate that such action is necessary.
But ultimately, student and faculty efforts can only go so far.
“It’s going to be up to administrators, whether or not [a standalone department] is something they can carve out space for— it’s a question of staffing and faculty, and maybe that’s just not feasible,” Lui said. “But I certainly don’t see why we couldn’t have more Asian American Studies faculty represented across the disciplines.”
DEPARTMENTAL DIVISIONS
In the spring of 1970, Yale became the first Ivy League school to offer a course in Asian American Studies. Although Don Nakanishi ’71, along with several other members of Yale’s fledgling Asian American Students Association, convinced political science professor Chitoshi Yanaga — the first Japanese American to receive tenure at Yale — to run the class, the students largely taught it themselves.
But 45 New Haven springs later, there is still only one Asian American Studies course offered this semester.
When it comes to ethnic studies at Yale, not all disciplines were created equal. While some fields of study, such as African American Studies, have their own departments and offer independent majors, others exist as pockets of inquiry or tracks within larger programs.
History has shaped some of these differences. In 1969, African-Americans were conspicuously absent from history books and English syllabi, often only appearing in social science literature where they were represented as a “problem,” African American Studies Department Chair Matthew Jacobson said. In this hostile environment, AfAm Studies grew “out of quite a tidal wave of students’ civic protest,” Holloway said. Over four decades later, Yale’s department has grown to be one of the foremost such programs in the world.
By contrast, Blackhawk said Native American studies essentially did not exist at Yale before his arrival in fall 2009, as he was Yale’s first tenured professor in the discipline. Most Latino studies courses are housed in the Ethnicity, Race & Migration program, which was first offered as a major in 1997 but not as an independent one until 2012. And while Lui was not the first Asian American Studies professor Yale hired, she was the first to be given tenure.
But Jacobson added that historical trends are no excuse for Yale’s failure to maintain these areas of study.
“Part [of the problem] is University priorities, say what they will about Yale’s commitment,” Jacobson said. “We have not kept up.”
No one disputes the quality of scholarship put forth by Yale’s faculty in the study of underrepresented groups. But despite its overall strength, Jacobson said Yale is “nowhere near” achieving consistency between different areas of ethnic studies.
Lui said the programs within which Asian American studies exists — American Studies and ER&M — are comfortable places, and Sato said that at least for now, an autonomous Asian American Studies Department might not improve the discipline’s situation.
While Long agreed that it is not yet time to consider an independent department, he said he believes the ER&M program lacks Asian American representation in its curriculum. This sends a strong message that Asian American issues of ethnicity, race and migration are not as valid as those of other groups, he said.
“That’s the wrong message for Yale to be sending,” he said.
These curricular concerns are hardly unique to Asian American Studies.
Montiel expressed a similar concern about the American Studies Department, noting that undergraduates in the major do not have to take any Native American Studies courses. The major does require that at least two of undergraduates’ required fourteen courses are taken in “cultural history/cultural studies,” but these requirements are non-specific, and with minimal choice in offerings, students are unlikely to select Asian American or Native American Studies. This semester, Blackhawk’s only undergraduate offering is a capped seminar, and Lui is not teaching undergraduates. The AfAm Studies Department, by contrast, is offering more than 20 courses in topics ranging from dance and pop culture to antebellum America.
“You can become an Americanist without knowing anything about the native population,” Montiel said. “I don’t understand how that works.”
Melendez said the inequalities between disciplines are hard to deny and especially troubling given that many of those disciplines are housed within Yale’s American Studies program, one of the best in the country.
The uneven allocation of academic resources is yet another way Yale pays lip service to issues of diversity without translating its stated goals to reality, he said.
Still, regardless of the discrepancies in size and scope, scholars in each department emphasized that they are not competing. Instead of bickering over their individual slices of the pie, they said, they’d rather increase its size across the board.
“I don’t think it does anyone any good to be comparing or trying to reallocate a [budget] that’s already too small,” Johnson said. “The whole point is that they should all be growing.”
Although such programs seem to have escaped administrators’ attention, some acknowledge the issues facing ethnic studies. Holloway conceded that Yale is far behind where it should be on courses related to Asian American Studies.
For the first time this year, the Yale Group for the Study of Native America was allocated a small budget — enough to pay for its two lunches each month, Blackhawk said. They are also able to find financial support from areas of the University with deeper pockets, and when the group requests funding, administrators are receptive. But the YGSNA wouldn’t have to make these requests if it had a real programming budget, he said.
Salovey is very supportive of native students at Yale, Tyler Rogers GRD ’18, who works on Native American studies, said, though he hopes Salovey will show that support at an academic level as well. Next week, the Saloveys will host the reception for the Asian American Studies Conference in the President’s House. Several other administrators have also expressed enthusiasm for the event, Lui added.
Still, some students feel that the University is not putting its money where its mouth is on the issue of ethnic studies.
“The money is there — Yale has this massive endowment,” Rogers said. “It’s more so the willpower — that the higher administration doesn’t seem to be behind it.”
LOOKING FORWARD
Until Provost Benjamin Polak responds to Holloway and Goff-Crews’s recommendations regarding the cultural houses, the future of the centers remains uncertain. Alongside renewed support for the cultural houses, perhaps the University will also turn its attention to ethnic studies. But the growth of underrepresented groups at Yale has historically come through student protest and advocacy. This trend is unlikely to change any time soon.
Blackhawk said he is confident in the abilities of devoted undergraduates to make lasting and meaningful change. And student leaders — even those who are graduating — don’t plan to stop anytime soon.
“When I came in as a freshman, I was taught a lot about the history of these centers and the struggle that students had to go through to secure these spaces,” Melendez said. “That’s why I’m dedicating so much time to this process as a second semester senior — not even for the students who are here currently, but to make sure that the future of these cultural centers are brighter than they are today.”
There’s always a party that you’re missing out on.
You know the party that I’m talking about. You’re sitting on the couch, planning to kick back with a plate of mint-flavored Milanos and watch all three hours and 21 minutes of “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.” Laptop propped by your side, you quickly scan through your Facebook newsfeed only to discover that someone has posted a photo of a party they’re hosting in their suite.
One glance at the photo, and you can tell it’s the party of the century. You can envisage it clearly: They’re playing the perfect combination of music you like (indulgent pop, some jazz, Kendrick’s best tracks), somebody has strung up multi-colored Christmas lights, and everyone is at a perfect level of content, conversation-inducing, pink-cheeked tipsiness.
All those people that you’ve ever wanted to meet and get to know — the kid in your freshman seminar, that cool junior you met in the line at Blue State, that friend who happens to also be into botany and DC comics, your future spouse — they’re all there, at the party. The party you’re missing out on.
Despite the underlying understanding that nothing will satisfy you more than watching Aragorn and Legolas pal up with the Army of the Dead and crush Sauron’s forces, all you can think of is The Party, the Fireball and plastic cups of Popov’s that you didn’t consume, the Kendrick you didn’t bop around to, the potential spouse that you failed to meet.
You think of those Christmas lights, twinkling pixels of diamond and ruby and amethyst, taunting you from the photo on your newsfeed. You are restless and anxious; you feel like you have a phantom limb with this itch that you just can’t scratch.
This malaise is called The Fear Of Missing Out, a source of anxiety that has become so ubiquitous, thanks to the likes of Facebook and Instagram, that it has been bequeathed its own acronym: FOMO. The Facebook newsfeed, a treasure trove of parties unattended, of friends unmade, of roads not taken, exacerbates its symptoms.
One quick scroll-through, and you’ll find that in the hour you’ve been waiting to collect your package from the post office, somebody went jet-skiing in Bora Bora, and someone else finished writing a screenplay. While you scarfed down a P&B sandwich for lunch, someone else dined on authentic Moroccan couscous. When you did five crunches at the gym, somebody else finished a half-marathon in the desert of Inner Mongolia.
What makes things worse is that these people are not celebrities or moguls or millionaires, but people you know, friends and acquaintances. And if they could do it, you could accomplish the same. Opportunities dangle like tropical fruit, overripe and waiting to be plucked.
And so you fill your basket, pack your schedule with poetry readings at the Beinecke and intramural soccer games and dates and Free Jazz concerts and tailgates in the hope that there is a never a party missed out on. You are in a constant state of insatiability, of restlessness — a Jay Gatsby on steroids.
Instead of strolling down to the beach every other evening to check out the green light by Daisy’s dock, you find yourself constantly gazing at the world through a viridian lens of longing and endless possibility. Free meal at Geronimo’s with the Liberal Party, mixer with the ski team, master’s tea with Egyptian civil society expert, lunch with the kid who sits next to you in Econ section. The green light shines 24/7.
***
If anywhere remains shielded from the green glow, it’s Deep Springs College, where 26 students live on a ranch in the empty desert near the California-Nevada border. Unlike Yale, where one is surrounded by the constant thrum of college life, there is nothing there to distract and entice but scrub, sand, rock and a horizon of mountain ridges and ice-capped peaks. There are no human inhabitants for 100,000 acres, and unless they are on official school business, students may not go into the nearest town.
Lucas, a Deep Springer, wakes up after six, just as the farm team disperses across the 11 fields to move irrigation lines. Over the White Mountains, the sun rises; its rays catch the gleaming alfalfa and the back of his coat as he bikes towards breakfast. A scoop of homemade yogurt, then three hours of class — the first has ten students, the second, three.
After class, he gets the baler and makes his way down to Field 4. Deep Springs runs on student labor, and students rotate through jobs ranging from “general labor” (digging ditches, repairing fences, fixing vehicles) to “student cowboy” (keeping an eye out for calving heifers from the late afternoon until sunrise each night). Today, Lucas is in charge of the tractor.
In the afternoon, he decides to curl up by the fire to read and write. Later, as the sun sits on the ridges over the West, he takes a slow stroll down to the corrals before setting off to the field for half an hour of soccer.
After dinner, Deep Springs’s weekly Student Body meeting is called to order; all 26 students convene to share their thoughts on the day, elect a treasurer, evaluate a professor and discuss proposals to build a new cowboy house and to ban certain technologies.
At midnight, Lucas sinks into the couch with his books, and when his eyelids begin to droop, he stumbles across the corridor into his hammock and falls into a deep, dreamless slumber.
If you find something incredibly appealing about Lucas’s lifestyle, you are not alone. We have long sought to temper the chaos of modern life with natural quiet and solitude — just as Thoreau retreated to his cabin at Walden Pond and Coleridge “reared in the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim,” yearned for the tranquility of a frosty midnight, we too want to carve out a refuge from today’s hectic and hyper-connected world.
Think of Lucas, as he shifts gears in his tractor, walks to class and cooks omelets for dinner. Is FOMO even part of his vocabulary? I assumed that the longing to be everywhere, to see everything, to meet everyone, was muted and tamed by the barrenness of the landscape. I wanted to know what that felt like.
I decided to email another Deep Springer, a high school friend who chose two years in the Valley over big names like Stanford and Brown, with my qualms about the endless hubbub of college life.
His response, a week later, surprised me. His experiences bore less of a resemblance to Leo’s than to my own freshman fall.
“Here, as at Yale, there is also never time,” he wrote. In addition to academics, governance (he’s reading faculty job applications) and labor (gardening), he’s been playing an hour of piano a day, joined a Zarathustra reading group and recently tried to make a Chinese milk/egg pudding for Sunday dinner.
“In my eagerness to do things last term,” he told me, “I ended up living like a machine – going from task to task endlessly on a treadmill.”
He also wants to fix pianos, go climbing and read more outside of class, but he never has time. And he feels like he’s missing out on “Big College Opportunities”: He wants to learn French, math and analytic philosophy, classes not offered in the Valley. Simply going up to the mountains or down to the sea, it appears, does not cure us of these anxieties. “I’m too fucking busy doing all kinds of shit to properly hear the voice of the desert,” he said.
So it seems that we aren’t seeking refuge or isolation, but instead this elusive voice — a sense of reassurance, of guidance.
It’s not jealousy that lies at the root of FOMO, but confusion. We suffer from FOMO not because we really want to do a half-marathon in inner Mongolia but because we realize that somebody else has made a choice different from our own. Deep Springs, rather than an isolated haven, is simply another path that I chose not to take. And my anxiety stems not from having too many options, but from fear of choosing the wrong one, an anxiety inherent in any decision.
What we’re looking for is clarity. But thanks to Facebook, we’ve been thrust into a massive, swirling, chaotic galaxy of infinite alternatives; we are pulled back and forth by an anarchic tangle of status updates and parties that we couldhave attended. But social media has only exacerbated insecurities that have always existed. The questions driving what we call FOMO predate the acronym: Have I made the right decisions? How do I want to live my life?
And so we move from party to party, from East Egg to West Egg, from city to valley, from the suburbs to the mountains to the woods to the lakes, with these questions always on our minds. There are, no doubt, ways to learn restraint and humility, to gain focus and satisfaction, to find answers. But they won’t be written in the landscape.
Something’s been missing from my writing, as of late. Yes, my thesis for that paper needed a little tightening, and sure, that quote worked better in the second paragraph than in the conclusion. My writing rambles, my arguments deflate, and I’ve truly been trying my hardest to eliminate the passive voice — still, this isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how little I’ve been using the word “I.”
Teachers tell us to avoid the first person, to weed out the “I” out from our scholastic vocabularies like an unwelcome guest. We start writing for teachers, for schools, for good enough grades. There are exceptions, of course — perhaps our teachers assigned creative or personal writing projects at some point. But still, these are assignments to complete and return, eventually reduced to red marks in the margins and single letters at the top.
This isn’t an argument against schoolwork. After all, we need the writing skills we learn as students — they teach us to argue more eloquently, to analyze more effectively, and to express ourselves more comprehensibly. This is an argument against writing exclusively for other people, against forgetting the “I” in writing. (There are two, technically, but that’s another story.) When we write, we articulate our selves, putting our identities into words, explaining our ideas from an inherently personal perspective. When we write, we look in a mirror: We should see ourselves reflected on the page.
I feel like I haven’t written in months, even though I’ve turned in several papers, published a few articles and sent hundreds of emails. In trying to impress my peers or my professors, I’m afraid that my “I” gets lost the moment my fingers hit the keyboard. Not that the papers, articles and emails are devoid of meaning, but I have trouble experiencing the pleasure I once derived from writing.
It bothers me that we don’t write for ourselves anymore. I admire those who write in their spare time, those who reflect for the sake of reflection. It serves as a way to meditate and I value that intimacy — at a place like Yale, where privacy is one of the few privileges we lack, the line between solitude and loneliness can blur.
I think my argument has veered a little off course. I’m not just arguing for writing, I’m arguing against performance at the expense of the self. Maybe it’s because I’ve lost my own “I” during the last semester and a half here. My “I,” perhaps, has been overwhelmed by the number of incredible people I’ve met, swallowed up by the amount of things I feel compelled to do. In my very brief time at Yale, I’ve realized that I’m constantly surrounded by thousands of people, most of whom I’ll never meet. That sense of community can be a good thing. But how much time do we spend on our own? Sequestered in a cubicle in Bass, studying away for the next test or banging out Monday’s paper? Checking a P.O. Box, or waiting in line at Durfee’s? We’re almost never truly by ourselves here, just as we almost never write for ourselves anymore.
I love the stimulation, the energy, the excitement of being on campus. But Yale doesn’t always encourage us to step back, away from the bustle, and to remember our “I”s. I don’t think we should fear solitude; it’s a way to unburden ourselves from our social and academic anxieties. So, if you find yourself with fewer things to do one afternoon, no paper to write, no party to prepare for, no hookup to worry about, then sit down, grab a pencil and start to write. You might just see yourself reflected on the page.
Most of my friends were taken aback when asked to recall moments when they felt happy at Yale — whatever that meant, if anything. The answers varied from winning IM pingpong to tailgates with their residential college. Most were community-centered: having someone to ride exercise bikes with at the gym, group applause for a revealing tale at a storytelling event, bumping into friends at parties. There was another common denominator among my friends’ answers: They were most often non-academic and unstructured, occurring neither in the classroom nor in extracurricular settings.
Personal meanings of happiness, my peers revealed, are a survey in scope. For some, insignificant moments were paradoxically rendered significant in retrospect. For others, happiness involves a deliberate vision about how the seemingly disparate components of their lives correspond with one another. This second conception, which looks at the big picture rather than the little things, is centered on finding meaningful order in one’s life.
But if happiness can mean such different things to different people, perhaps Yale is off-target in marketing itself as the“happy Ivy” and pitching happiness as the ultimate goal for a Yale experience. Some of my friends felt pressure to provide scripted answers to university inquiries about well-being, from freshman fireside chats to university-wide surveys. Even if well-intentioned, such efforts seem wooden, incapable of engaging with the actual issue. Informal discussions among close friends, expectedly, provide a more honest snapshot of how people feel. But it’s still a weird question to ask or answer: “Are you happy?”
And maybe it’s not always the right question. A healthier and more productive goal might be to learn how both happiness and sadness are integral to the human condition. My friends and I couldn’t resolve the relationship between happiness and mental health; one friend suggested that happiness here often becomes a substitute for mental health, when it might be more honest to say “There are things that worry me, but I am still OK.”
As confused as my friends and I might be about happiness, we could agree on wanting more of an emotional and personal education from Yale. Peter Salovey may have championed emotional intelligence years ago, but it is still lacking in many of our professors’ teaching methods. One of my friends thought that classrooms would benefit from the professor checking in for a minute: “This is a rough week, how is everyone doing?” Classrooms should be part of our lives, not insulated from them.
“We were talking about ‘King Lear,’” a friend of mine recalled of a recent class. “I like it as a work of art but, why I really like ‘King Lear’ has nothing to do with that. It’s the same way I appreciate music theory or the physics of a building. But the Eiffel Tower isn’t just something that is physically astonishing. It’s the magnificence I feel when I look up at it … Professors need to be able to articulate that mysterious awe, that magic about literature, science, music…” He trailed off.
Even if we aren’t sure exactly what happiness means, we need professors, to the best of their ability, to really teach us about ‘King Lear,’ the Eiffel Tower and ourselves. Yale classrooms have too long demanded a separation of students’ emotional and intellectual lives, but the “mysterious awe” my friend described doesn’t fall neatly into either of those categories. We want answers from our professors, so we can learn to feel that awe ourselves, but too often we just get more questions. Students have deans and masters to approach with questions about how to guide their lives, at the cost of professors not understanding what it means to be a Yale student. As a result, it’s hard to connect.
Everyone agreed that Yale has offered them a place of newfound acceptance. A home. But this comfort does not undermine the sincerity of concerns about what happiness here means. It’s a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer. Which is perhaps why “mysterious awe” is a good place to start.
Just off the central rotunda of the Yale Medical School, past the teratology (the study of monsters) display and above the collection of human brains, you’ll find the main room of the Medical Historical Library. It’s an imposing, wood-paneled room, and on most days, the first thing you’ll see walking into it is the giant portrait of Andreas Vesalius hanging over the fireplace. Vesalius, whose depictions of public dissections in “De humani corporis fabrica” are considered the foundation of modern anatomy, is a grim-looking man in somber clothes: He matches the décor.
If you walk into the library from now until Feb. 28, however, you’ll find Vesalius slightly obscured. Brightly colored signs with the names of the four Hogwarts houses hang from the second-level balcony; a display of magical kitsch and multi-lingual editions of “Harry Potter” rests to the left of the entrance; and a set of panels containing a combination of text and images stands directly in front of the fireplace. The space is temporarily home to the National Library of Medicine’s traveling show, “Harry Potter’s World: Renaissance Science, Magic and Medicine,” and although the Potter aesthetic might seem incongruous under Vesalius’s stern gaze, the exhibit is concerned with making a strong case for their relation.
From the immersive theme park in Orlando to the interactive reading experience of pottermore.com, the Harry Potter universe is continuously being animated and re-animated — virtually, physically, culturally — for a variety of purposes. “Harry Potter’s World” capitalizes on the power of the magic metaphor; each of the six large panels that comprise the exhibit links a thematic aspect of the wizarding world to a specific person and text in the history of science. The subject of “Herbology” is paired with Jacob Meydenback’s plant catalogue, “Hortus Sanitatis,” and “Immortality” goes with Agrippa’s “De Oculta Philosophia,” and so on. In this context, Harry Potter acts as both cultural access point and mnemonic device. The task the exhibit asks of you is simple: You can use one story to understand another.
The exhibit argues that the fantasy of Harry Potter is based in real historical truths: Magic, we learn, has “an important role in the development of Western science.” In sometimes comically jarring or forced ways, the information on the panels illustrates this interpretation. “Like Harry’s professors, 16th-century Swiss naturalist and physician Konrad Gesner appreciated the knowledge gained by studying nature,” begins one such clumsy simile on the “monsters” panel. Later, words from Sirius Black on the persecution of merpeople are juxtaposed with information about the medical reformer Paracelsus, who apparently “appreciated what other cultures could teach about healing.”
The beliefs that Gesner, Paracelsus and others held about animals, plants and people are often fascinating, but the exhibit locates them in contemporary scientific discourse in a way that feels didactic. A clear ideology is at stake, one of respect for the diversity of life, objective observation and the sanctity of the experimental process. The environs of the Medical Historical Library reinforce this argument; Harry Potter is implicated in a history of “the steep ascent from the unknown to the known.”
I’m more invested in an inverse proposition: that the processes we consider to be objective and scientific have their roots in the mystical and the occult. The panel on “potions” insists that the practice of alchemy led linearly to modern chemistry. But the text referenced, “Aurifontina Chymica,” relates a story in which alchemy and chemistry are inextricably entwined. The spelling of the word itself, “chymica,” reveals its double origin. Tracing a narrative of influence becomes harder when the objects in question are not easily described or differentiated.
Just as I don’t really want to yoke Paracelsus and Sirius Black together in a quality called “tolerance,” I’m also skeptical that the knowledge found in herbals or alchemical treatises was incorporated smoothly into the bodies of thought called “biology” and “chemistry.” Perhaps this reaction is partially the point, or at least the point that I drew from my observation: What’s really interesting about this exhibit is not the content itself, but the potential for interactions, congruent or not, among the objects, bodies and literatures that it evokes.
If you go, make sure to attend one of series of related talks (I’m going to “Herbals: food as medicinal and medicinals as food”), look at pictures of human dissections in Vesalius, or investigate a set of surgical instruments for amputating and trepanning. Be curious, be critical, and don’t let the exhibit alone determine the terms of your engagement.
