THE OLDEST COLLEGE DAILY · FOUNDED 1878 CROSS CAMPUS MORE ONLINE cc.yaledailynews.com y INSIDE THE NEWS The Koutroumanis Joan Cavanagh The Panzarellas Camille Chambers Dorian Grinspan Jin Ai Yap Nicole Sore Jon Kreiss-Tomkins The Interview Issue MORNING RAINY 39 EVENING RAINY 31 MEN’S LACROSSE Taking on No. 17 Fairfield, Bulldogs hope to continue winning streak PAGE 12 SPORTS TRAFFIC COMMITTEE LOOKS INTO IMPROVING CAMPUS SAFETY PAGE 7 CITY EDUCATION City report documents city graduation, matriculation rates PAGE 5 CITY INTERVIEWS! WKND CHATS WITH CAMPUS’S BEST PAGE B1 WEEKEND Spring break: It’s finally here. As midterm season wraps up and the snow finishes melting, take advantage of this time to wind down and relax before the cycle begins again. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis & company. This Spring Fling, it looks like Yalies will get a chance to thrift shop and rock out. Indie band Grouplove, best known for its hit song “Tongue Tied,” will perform at Yale on April 29 — the same day as Spring Fling — according to a concert listing on Grouplove’s website Thursday afternoon. As of last night, the listing had been taken down. Those three words. Yalies across campus were greeted Thursday morning with a standard email from the Student Employment Oce informing that they had received their payment for a student job. Normal enough, but the subject line of the email? “You been paid.” That’s right, and don’t you forget it. Check your academics. Midterm season is rough, guys. That’s why this is a friendly reminder that today is the last day to drop a class without receiving a “W” on your transcript. It’s also the deadline to apply for double credit in a single-credit course. Hail to the chief. In a Thursday email to the Yale community, Secretary and Vice President for Student Life Kimberly Go-Crews ’83 LAW ’86 and music professor Daniel Harrison announced a series of inaugural festivities that will take place in October to celebrate Peter Salovey’s ascendancy to the presidency. The inauguration ceremony will be held from Oct. 10-13, though inaugural festivities will happen throughout the week. Science superstars. Eight Yale science professors have been named to the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. Election to the academy is based on significant contributions in theory or applications to scientific and engineering fields. The fabulous eight will be celebrated at the Academy’s 38th annual meeting and dinner on May 22 at Quinnipiac University. Globe changer. Yale senior Sejal Hathi ’13 has been awarded a 2013 Jeerson “Globechanger” Award for her work in establishing the international nonprofit organization “Girls Helping Girls,” which works to bridge international cultures and focuses on issues concerning poverty, education, public health and peace. THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY 1887 The newly formed New Haven Camera Club meets for the third time to discuss the use of the “swinging back” in the camera and the principles of proper photography. Submit tips to Cross Campus [email protected]NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2013 · VOL. CXXXV, NO. 105 · yaledailynews.com BY AMY WANG STAFF REPORTER On an ordinary day, the lobby of the Student Financial Services Center is clean, brightly lit — and almost com- pletely empty. The center, which contains the financial aid offices for Yale Col- lege and other Yale schools, occu- pies the first floor of 246 Church St., an administrative building that sits at the eastern edge of campus and also houses the ID Center and Stu- dent Employment Office. Student Financial Services employs a team of 14 full-time sta members, roughly two-thirds of whom are qualified to provide students with information on financial aid, financial policies and personal finance, upon request. The only things missing from the equation are the students themselves. A Feb. 27 report by educational- technology company EverFi titled “Money Matters on Campus” found that the majority of college students are highly inexperienced in matters of personal finance. After surveying 40,000 first-year college students from around the country and finding that nearly 80 percent of the students “frequently” worry about debt, the report concluded with a strong rec- ommendation that all colleges imple- ment a mandatory financial literacy curriculum for students. University Director of Financial Aid Caesar Storlazzi said he and his sta are eager to help students get started managing their finances, but he added that his oce must first raise aware- ness about the services it oers. When the oce partnered with the Yale College Council last month to hold a “financial literacy forum” for students interested in learning more about personal finance, a group of 40 students attended and fired o ques- tions for a full hour and a half. Even- tually, Storlazzi had to conclude the forum and agree to plan another date for later in the semester to continue addressing students’ questions. “I was amazed by the level of interest,” Storlazzi said. “The bulk of the questions were about credit scores, income tax, IRS rules. … I just [thought] students know this already, but I realized they didn’t. There’s a real hunger to learn about it.” Storlazzi said the Yale College Dean’s Oce introduced the idea of increasing financial literacy on cam- pus roughly three years ago, but the initiative did not begin until this BY ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKA STAFF REPORTER Though the School of Management reported a slight decrease in the overall par- ticipation rate in its alumni fund for fiscal year 2012, the school has maintained high levels of alumni participation over the past 10 years in comparison to peer institutions. The SOM’s alumni fund raised roughly $1.5 million during fiscal year 2012, and over 44 percent of alumni made donations — down from roughly 49 percent in the 2011 fiscal year. With over 40 percent of SOM alumni participating in the alumni fund each year over the past 10 fiscal years, the school has the second-highest alumni participation rate among U.S. business schools after Dart- mouth’s Tuck School of Business, where par- ticipation exceeded 70 percent last year. SOM administrators and alumni interviewed said alumni keep donating to the school because the small class sizes enable students to forge lasting relationships with one another, pro- fessors and administrators. “Alumni giving at SOM is strong first and foremost because the school is a mission- driven organization, so even though the school has gone through changes over the years and will continue to do so, people expe- rience the school in a deep way,” SOM Dean Edward Snyder said. Joel Getz, SOM senior associate dean for development and alumni relations, said the SOM alumni donation rates high BY DAN WEINER AND JULIA ZORTHIAN STAFF REPORTERS Three days after the seques- ter began to slash federal budgets, roughly 10 University ocers met to consider the grim reality of the cuts and their potential effects on the University. The series of blunt reductions to the federal budget is likely to reduce Yale’s allocation of federal financial aid by around $125,000 and shrink the number and size of University research grants, said Associate Vice President for Federal and State Rela- tions Richard Jacob and Deputy Pro- vost Steve Girvin in a presentation at a Tuesday meeting of adminis- trators. Because the exact reper- cussions of the budget reductions are not yet clear, Jacob and Girvin Grants, aid hit by sequester BY SOPHIE GOULD STAFF REPORTER A committee responsible for con- ducting an extensive academic review of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is homing in on possible ways for the University to allocate teaching posi- tions across departments. For the past four years, the Univer- sity has been unable to fund as many new teaching positions and initia- tives as it could before the onset of the recession in 2008, Provost Ben- jamin Polak said, adding that new strategies are necessary to ensure that departments can plan for the future. Last fall, then-Provost Peter Salovey, who will become Univer- sity president on June 30, formed a 14-person Academic Review Com- mittee, a group charged with deter- mining the optimum size of the fac- ulty and with recommending a new system for allocating teaching posi- tions, known as “slots,” between departments. Economics professor Steven Berry, who serves as the chair of the com- mittee, said he expects to release a “broad set of ideas” to the FAS by the end of this term. “We’re too far away from decid- ing, so I think it’s misleading to say, ‘Well, we’ve had this one idea, but we also had this other idea,’” Berry said, declining to comment more specifi- cally on possible solutions the com- mittee might recommend. “We’re focused on trying to get to some kind of at least preliminary recommenda- tions or outlines that we can share with the faculty by the end of the term.” Berry said the committee is still gathering information, and has asked the faculty advisory committees of the four academic divisions — phys- ical sciences and engineering, bio- logical sciences, social sciences and humanities — to talk to their depart- ment chairs and report back to the committee shortly after spring break. The committee has not Academic review to shape faculty size Department of Health and Human Services Other Other sources of operating revenue, including endowment income 80% 6% 14% If federal institutions reduce budgets by 5.3% as required by the sequester, Yale’s over- all operating revenue would decline about 1%. The sequester would reduce Yale’s financial aid budget by $125,000, a 5.3% reduction of federal contributions through grants and work study. Non-federal revenue Federal revenue from grants and contractsv SELF-HELP (loans and work study) SCHOLARSHIPS AND GRANTS Potential revenue reduction Federal scholarships and grants 3.8% Federal work study 23% Other 96.2% Other 77% Our aim is to fill every slot with the best person in the world. BENJAMIN POLAK Provost, Yale University [Snyder] was willing to … go around the country and the world to meet with and speak with alumni. … Fundraising is, to a great extent, a contact sport. JOEL GETZ Senior associate dean, School of Management GRAPH YALE’S $2.8 BILLION OPERATING REVENUE GRAPH YALE’S FINANCIAL AID FUNDING SEE SEQUESTER PAGE 4 SEE ALUMNI GIVING PAGE 6 SEE ACADEMIC REVIEW PAGE 4 SEE FIN. LITERACY PAGE 4 Yale tackles financial illiteracy YALE 2011-’12 FINANCIAL REPORT
Transcript
T H E O L D E S T C O L L E G E D A I L Y · F O U N D E D 1 8 7 8
CROSSCAMPUS
MORE ONLINEcc.yaledailynews.com
y
INSIDE THE NEWS
Richard PrumThe Koutroumanis
Joan Cavanagh The Panzarellas
Camille ChambersDorian Grinspan
Jin Ai YapNicole Sore
Jon Kreiss-Tomkins
The Interview Issue
MORNING RAINY 39 EVENING RAINY 31
MEN’S LACROSSETaking on No. 17 Fairfield, Bulldogs hope to continue winning streakPAGE 12 SPORTS
TRAFFICCOMMITTEE LOOKS INTO IMPROVING CAMPUS SAFETYPAGE 7 CITY
EDUCATIONCity report documents city graduation, matriculation ratesPAGE 5 CITY
INTERVIEWS!WKND CHATS WITH CAMPUS’S BESTPAGE B1 WEEKEND
Spring break: It’s finally here. As midterm season wraps up and the snow finishes melting, take advantage of this time to wind down and relax before the cycle begins again.
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis & company. This Spring Fling, it looks like Yalies will get a chance to thrift shop and rock out. Indie band Grouplove, best known for its hit song “Tongue Tied,” will perform at Yale on April 29 — the same day as Spring Fling — according to a concert listing on Grouplove’s website Thursday afternoon. As of last night, the listing had been taken down.
Those three words. Yalies across campus were greeted Thursday morning with a standard email from the Student Employment O!ce informing that they had received their payment for a student job. Normal enough, but the subject line of the email? “You been paid.” That’s right, and don’t you forget it.
Check your academics. Midterm season is rough, guys. That’s why this is a friendly reminder that today is the last day to drop a class without receiving a “W” on your transcript. It’s also the deadline to apply for double credit in a single-credit course.
Hail to the chief. In a Thursday email to the Yale community, Secretary and Vice President for Student Life Kimberly Go"-Crews ’83 LAW ’86 and music professor Daniel Harrison announced a series of inaugural festivities that will take place in October to celebrate Peter Salovey’s ascendancy to the presidency. The inauguration ceremony will be held from Oct. 10-13, though inaugural festivities will happen throughout the week.
Science superstars. Eight Yale science professors have been named to the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. Election to the academy is based on significant contributions in theory or applications to scientific and engineering fields. The fabulous eight will be celebrated at the Academy’s 38th annual meeting and dinner on May 22 at Quinnipiac University.
Globe changer. Yale senior Sejal Hathi ’13 has been awarded a 2013 Je"erson “Globechanger” Award for her work in establishing the international nonprofit organization “Girls Helping Girls,” which works to bridge international cultures and focuses on issues concerning poverty, education, public health and peace.
THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY1887 The newly formed New Haven Camera Club meets for the third time to discuss the use of the “swinging back” in the camera and the principles of proper photography.
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2013 · VOL. CXXXV, NO. 105 · yaledailynews.com
BY AMY WANGSTAFF REPORTER
On an ordinary day, the lobby of the Student Financial Services Center is clean, brightly lit — and almost com-pletely empty.
The center, which contains the financial aid offices for Yale Col-lege and other Yale schools, occu-pies the first floor of 246 Church St., an administrative building that sits at the eastern edge of campus and also houses the ID Center and Stu-dent Employment Office. Student Financial Services employs a team of 14 full-time sta" members, roughly two-thirds of whom are qualified to provide students with information on financial aid, financial policies and personal finance, upon request.
The only things missing from the equation are the students themselves.
A Feb. 27 report by educational-technology company EverFi titled “Money Matters on Campus” found that the majority of college students are highly inexperienced in matters of personal finance. After surveying 40,000 first-year college students from around the country and finding that nearly 80 percent of the students “frequently” worry about debt, the report concluded with a strong rec-
ommendation that all colleges imple-ment a mandatory financial literacy curriculum for students.
University Director of Financial Aid Caesar Storlazzi said he and his sta" are eager to help students get started managing their finances, but he added that his o!ce must first raise aware-ness about the services it o"ers.
When the o!ce partnered with the Yale College Council last month to hold a “financial literacy forum” for students interested in learning more about personal finance, a group of 40 students attended and fired o" ques-tions for a full hour and a half. Even-tually, Storlazzi had to conclude the forum and agree to plan another date for later in the semester to continue addressing students’ questions.
“I was amazed by the level of interest,” Storlazzi said. “The bulk of the questions were about credit scores, income tax, IRS rules. … I just [thought] students know this already, but I realized they didn’t. There’s a real hunger to learn about it.”
Storlazzi said the Yale College Dean’s O!ce introduced the idea of increasing financial literacy on cam-pus roughly three years ago, but the initiative did not begin until this
BY ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKASTAFF REPORTER
Though the School of Management reported a slight decrease in the overall par-ticipation rate in its alumni fund for fiscal year 2012, the school has maintained high levels of alumni participation over the past 10 years in comparison to peer institutions.
The SOM’s alumni fund raised roughly $1.5 million during fiscal year 2012, and over 44 percent of alumni made donations — down from roughly 49 percent in the 2011 fiscal year. With over 40 percent of SOM alumni participating in the alumni fund each year over the past 10 fiscal years, the school has the second-highest alumni participation rate among U.S. business schools after Dart-mouth’s Tuck School of Business, where par-ticipation exceeded 70 percent last year. SOM administrators and alumni interviewed said alumni keep donating to the school because the small class sizes enable students to forge lasting relationships with one another, pro-fessors and administrators.
“Alumni giving at SOM is strong first and foremost because the school is a mission-driven organization, so even though the school has gone through changes over the years and will continue to do so, people expe-rience the school in a deep way,” SOM Dean Edward Snyder said.
Joel Getz, SOM senior associate dean for development and alumni relations, said the
SOM alumni
donation rates high
BY DAN WEINER AND JULIA ZORTHIANSTAFF REPORTERS
Three days after the seques-ter began to slash federal budgets, roughly 10 University o!cers met to consider the grim reality of the cuts and their potential effects on the
University.The series of blunt reductions to
the federal budget is likely to reduce Yale’s allocation of federal financial aid by around $125,000 and shrink the number and size of University research grants, said Associate Vice President for Federal and State Rela-
tions Richard Jacob and Deputy Pro-vost Steve Girvin in a presentation at a Tuesday meeting of adminis-trators. Because the exact reper-cussions of the budget reductions are not yet clear, Jacob and Girvin
Grants, aid hit by sequester
BY SOPHIE GOULDSTAFF REPORTER
A committee responsible for con-ducting an extensive academic review of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is homing in on possible ways for the University to allocate teaching posi-tions across departments.
For the past four years, the Univer-sity has been unable to fund as many new teaching positions and initia-tives as it could before the onset of the recession in 2008, Provost Ben-jamin Polak said, adding that new strategies are necessary to ensure that departments can plan for the future. Last fall, then-Provost Peter Salovey, who will become Univer-sity president on June 30, formed a 14-person Academic Review Com-mittee, a group charged with deter-mining the optimum size of the fac-ulty and with recommending a new system for allocating teaching posi-tions, known as “slots,” between departments.
Economics professor Steven Berry, who serves as the chair of the com-mittee, said he expects to release a “broad set of ideas” to the FAS by the end of this term.
“We’re too far away from decid-
ing, so I think it’s misleading to say, ‘Well, we’ve had this one idea, but we also had this other idea,’” Berry said, declining to comment more specifi-cally on possible solutions the com-mittee might recommend. “We’re focused on trying to get to some kind of at least preliminary recommenda-tions or outlines that we can share with the faculty by the end of the term.”
Berry said the committee is still gathering information, and has asked the faculty advisory committees of the four academic divisions — phys-ical sciences and engineering, bio-logical sciences, social sciences and humanities — to talk to their depart-ment chairs and report back to the committee shortly after spring break.
T h e c o m m i t te e h a s n o t
Academic review to shape faculty size
Department of Health and Human Services
OtherOther sources of operating revenue, including endowment income
80%
6%
14%
If federal institutions reduce budgets by 5.3% as required by the sequester, Yale’s over-all operating revenue would decline about 1%.
The sequester would reduce Yale’s financial aid budget by $125,000, a 5.3% reduction of federal contributions through grants and work study.
Non-federal revenue
Federal revenue from grants and contractsv
SELF-HELP (loans and work study)SCHOLARSHIPS AND GRANTS
Potential revenue reduction
Federal scholarships and grants
3.8%
Federal work study
23%
Other
96.2%
Other
77%
Our aim is to fill every slot with the best person in the world.
BENJAMIN POLAKProvost, Yale University
[Snyder] was willing to … go around the country and the world to meet with and speak with alumni. … Fundraising is, to a great extent, a contact sport.
JOEL GETZSenior associate dean, School of Management
GRAPH YALE’S $2.8 BILLION OPERATING REVENUE
GRAPH YALE’S FINANCIAL AID FUNDING
SEE SEQUESTER PAGE 4 SEE ALUMNI GIVING PAGE 6
SEE ACADEMIC REVIEW PAGE 4 SEE FIN. LITERACY PAGE 4
Yale tackles financial illiteracy
YALE 2011-’12 FINANCIAL REPORT
OPINION .COMMENTyaledailynews.com/opinion
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I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I agree with the News: when President-elect Peter
Salovey finally gets to take up the less awkward-sounding mantle of “President,” he needs to commit to a firm recruitment policy. Thankfully, he’s got me to advise him. So, if I may:
President-elect Salovey, ath-letics at Yale are fine. I know this because once I went to a hockey game, and it was totally rad. To be honest, I don’t remember if we won, and I guess there was some friction because everyone there seemed angry at me for being drunk at a hockey game, but whatever: Those folks were losers. Anyway, even though the Whale appeared to be crowded with old people who hate noise and fun, and even though, at this rate, we will probably never win another Yale-Harvard game in my lifetime, I maintain that Yale athletics are absolutely a-okay. Besides, I don’t actu-ally remember watching any of the last Yale-Harvard game, so what if we had won? Then I’d have felt bad for having missed it.
But, President-elect Salovey, what we do need at Yale is more tall people. I mean, really tall people.
So here’s my proposal: Let’s take those 50 spots that Presi-dent Richard Levin freed from athletic recruitment, and use them to establish a healthy col-ony of giants at Yale.
I don’t mean real giants, of course. They are a rare and dying breed and would probably prefer to go to Hogwarts. I’m talking about people over 6 feet tall. Or maybe, for women, over 5-feet-10-inches. Honestly, anything would be an improvement. We’re like a bunch of munch-kins here.
Except for that one time when I saw the men’s heavyweight crew team — or rather, from my vantage, their pectorals — in line for dinner at Commons (R.I.P.), I’ve had disappointingly few encounters with the vertically advantaged. By which I mean, I can’t remember dating any of them. It’s one of the great-est regrets of my college career, along with actually sampling General Tso’s Tofu. President-elect Salovey, you now bear the great burden of my roman-tic sorrow. You are the only one who can heal my wounds.
My love life isn’t the only thing that stands to profit from such a progressive admissions policy, however. Yale itself ben-efits from having tall people around. For example, tall people can reach tall things. The library would save so much money if, instead of replacing all those stools I keep falling o! of, they could just hire taller students to come to the aid of their pip-squeaky peers.
Research shows that tall people are also more success-ful — it’s no coincidence that our president and our first lady
would prob-ably be u n c o m -fortable in our twin XL beds. In today’s terri-ble economy, height is an a dva n ta ge , and Yale would come out on top — literally — if
more of our graduating seniors were able to find real jobs after college. Tall people are prob-ably also more likely to do well academically, since they can see everyone’s answers over their shoulders with no problem.
Of course, naysayers will neigh that tall people require taller beds, taller shower heads, and more food and water for eating and bathing. It’s true, and our resources will only be more strained by our e!orts to woo the tall people in the first place — spending will increase on tall-people perks, like free XL shirts, and maybe suspender-extend-ers.
But who else is going to fill those 50 free spots at Yale? Nobel Prize winners? Award-winning poets? Those people are all, like, 5-feet-7-inches, tops. President-elect Salovey, I urge you — and Yale in gen-eral — to imagine what it would be like to comfortably replace (or have someone replace for you) a lightbulb on our luxuri-ously high ceilings, or to receive a hug from someone whose hal-itosis you absolutely cannot smell because it is so far away from your head. That’s what our campus would be like if we had those 50 students dedicated to being tall.
For those of you with preju-dices against the tall — for those of you who say, “Oh, they’re not more impressive, we’re just made nervous around them because they can see down our shirts,” and “I hate tall peo-ple because it hurts my neck to look at them” — I beg you not to think of my attitude as “height-ism,” but to realize that tallness is just one of many equal advan-tages. Being very tall is just like being very articulate, being very good at football or being Bran-don Levin '14.
And since Brandon is going to graduate soon, President-elect Salovey, I suggest you act fast.
MICHELLE TAYLOR is a senior in Davenport College. Contact her at
I too mourn for Latin America — a region with immense economic potential, cultural diversity and a
rich history that was home to my parents and grandparents. But for Chavismo and democradura, I do not mourn.
The Venezuela left by Hugo Chavez is not a democracy. I admit that I was one of those people clamoring, "¡Viva Vene-zuela Libre!" after reading that the dem-agogue was dead. But my reaction was not rooted in myopia — it was rooted in the realities created by terrible state planning and a quasi-democratic dic-tatorial regime. ¡Viva Venezuela Libre! does not “dance on the dictator’s grave.” The phrase serves as a message of hope to my Venezuelan brethren, whose fam-ilies left the country when Chavez per-manently altered their world to create his vision of what the country should look like.
My sentiment was also partly selfish. The Chavez regime was a crucial ally to the Castro brother — whose disas-trous utopia my family left in the 1960s. Chavez kept a great number of other “democratically” elected leaders in his midst.
Chavez’s closest ally throughout his term was the Cuban regime — a regime his oil kept afloat — that was known to repress dissent on the island. Chavez supposedly lauded the Assad regime in Syria, which has murdered thousands of civilian protestors in the last year alone. Chavez talked extensively with Ahma-dinejad to increase trade with Iran, whose government violently repressed dissent two years ago. And Chavez also counted among his closest allies Robert Mugabe, whose brutal regime in Zimba-bwe has scored lowest on human rights
indicators since the late 1980s. The Venezuela Chavez leaves today
has made great strides toward amelio-rating poverty, but the economy lies in absolute shambles. Venezuela today recalls Cuba, which benefitted from a boon in the 1960s as it attempted its experiment with socialism. Like Cuba’s, Venezuela’s paradisiacal bubble has burst.
Since Chavez came to power in 1998, Venezuelans have been leaving their county by the tens of thousands. They leave behind a country where mass nationalization stymies innova-tion in industries that had been previ-ously performing at market levels. They leave a Caracas that now considered the most dangerous city in the world, its crime rates higher than Kabul and Baghdad. They leave behind a country whose leader abolished term limits to be “elected” to a fourth term.
Chavez gutted Venezuela’s demo-cratic system. In 2004, he added 12 seats to a Supreme Court tribunal, which pre-viously had just 20, and filled them with his cronies. The justices advocated his political agenda, and thus that branch of government no longer checked Chavez’s power. The lower courts have since been discouraged from hand-
ing out rulings that would displease the government, which has prevented investigating human rights abuses per-petrated by Chavez supporters and the military.
Let’s also look at Chavez’s treat-ment of the press. His government passed laws that penalized speech that “o!ended” government o"cials and prohibited messages that “fomented anxiety in the public” from being broad-casted. The regime also sought to censor stations by suspending them arbitrarily; anything critical of the regime meant suspended broadcasting licenses. The Chavez regime even prevented RCTV — the nation’s oldest private television channel — from renewing its license after the station covered the Bolivian government in a negative light. By 2010, the only major channel left still criti-cal of the president was Globovisión, but the government continues to pres-sure it with threats of suspension or clo-sure. Conversely, Chavez’s attempts to “democratize” the airwaves increased the number of government-run TV channels from one to six — all clearly puppets.
A dictator is a dictator, and with a 14-year track record, it’s safe to say that Chavez was a terrible one. Venezuela faces a turbulent future, but at least now it has the promise of leaving behind the deadlock caused by Chavismo over the course of the last 14 years.
CHRISTIAN VAZQUEZ is a senior in Bran-ford College and a former production and
WRITE TO USAll letters submitted for publication must include the author’s name, phone number and description of Yale University a!liation. Please limit letters to 250 words.
The Yale Daily News reserves the right to edit letters before publication. E-mail is the preferred method of submission.
Providing context I have been moved to write by recent
pieces in the News by Alejandro Gutierrez (“Easing the transition to Yale,” Feb. 19) and Michael Magdzik (“Who belongs at Yale,” March 5) about the academic preparation of Yale students who may have attended poorly resourced high schools. Both pieces were well-written and well-argued, in my view. Among the large number of comments they have provoked, however, I have seen some that criticize Yale for admitting such stu-dents. These comments rely on a seriously mistaken assumption about our selection process. We know, of course, that students who have attended underresourced schools may face a challenging transition at Yale. However, we evaluate all candidates by the same criteria. That is, we only admit stu-dents who have truly excelled at an extraor-dinary level within their own contexts, whatever those contexts may have been. In terms of distance traveled, leadership ini-tiative demonstrated, personal determina-tion, use of opportunities, and yes, sheer academic potential, students from schools with fewer resources often stand head and shoulders above students who have had the
Hidden costs in Singa-pore
The "Yale-NUS Fact Sheet" released on Wednesday pro-claims many policies that will have considerable impact on Yale College, yet the Yale Col-lege Faculty as a body — as the
collegium of Yale — has had no role to play in the development of these policies. The YCF has had no opportunity to vote on any of these policies, nor even to be involved (again, as a body) in their formulation. Only indi-vidual faculty members, those who have chosen to collabo-rate with Yale-NUS, have had a say. This is in keeping with the conduct of the administra-tion throughout the process of developing Yale-NUS.
Moving forward, the YCF — which alone is qualified to assess the impact of this ven-ture on Yale College — will have no role to play other than lis-tening passively to occasional "updates." The body doing the evaluating will be the Advisory Committee, created to oversee Yale-NUS and not to protect Yale College. So there will be no independent assessment of the impact of Yale-NUS on Yale-New Haven.
There is another cost of Yale-
good fortune of better instruc-tion. In short, a preparation deficit by itself is not a disquali-fier for these remarkable candi-dates. We know that once they fully engage the limitless oppor-tunities here at Yale, they are as likely as anyone else to continue doing the incredible things that earned them admission in the first place.
JEFFREY BRENZELMarch 5The author, the master of
Timothy Dwight College, is the current dean of undergraduate admissions.
SOME PEOPLE ARE TALL, AND THEY SHOULD
BE AT YALE
CHAVEZ LEFT AN ECONOMY IN SHAMBLES; THE BUBBLE HAS BURST
The Whi!enpoofs were the cap-stone of my Yale experience. The friendships I formed and the
experiences I had were indelible: We entertained embassy guests in Lon-don, Madrid and Caracas; we sang on the steps of the Temple of Dendur at the Met; we marched out of an alpine forest in Austria to serenade newlyweds with Yeats’ “Down by the Salley Gardens.” I can understand why female Yalies (at least, those who enjoy a cappella, admit-tedly a plurality at best) might look jeal-ously at the Whi!s as a final bastion of old white male privilege, unfairly denied them on the basis of their sex alone.
But those who argue against an all-male Whi!enpoofs typically discount its legitimate musical justification. Male voices, as a whole, do sound di!erent than female voices. Male groups, with a tenor-tenor-baritone-bass (TTBB) range, achieve a blend that is simply not possible in a typical soprano-alto-tenor-bass (SATB) mixed vocal group. Perhaps more significantly, the entire Whi! repertoire was written for a TTBB ensemble. In a very real sense, the rep-ertoire is the group. Were the Whi!s to be reimagined as an SATB group, they would have to throw out a century of repertoire — a tradition that comprises much of the group’s very reason for being.
This aesthetic standard, however, does not provide a justification for refus-ing women altogether. Some women are indeed capable of meeting the perfor-mance requirements of the Whi! reper-toire. A woman who can sing in the tenor
range and blend well with men is rare, to be sure, but not unheard of.
A useful analogy may be found else-where on campus. Is the men’s football team obligated to try out a female defen-sive lineman? No; the basic job require-ments of mass and strength are met by few, if any, females. But a female place kicker? Absolutely. If she is capable of playing the position, the team must allow her a tryout — not just under Title IX law, but more importantly under the basic principles of fairness and equality.
By this logic, the Whi!s have no right to discriminate on the basis of gender. But the group retains the right to define artistic goals, and to select only candi-dates who meet them.
Critics of the Whi!enpoofs, even when they acknowledge this right, counter with a more nuanced argument. The Whi!s, they say, use this reasoning as a fig leaf to cover willful gender dis-crimination. This is a di"cult charge to either prove or disprove. However, it’s fair to suggest that decades of coedu-cation without a single female mem-
ber places the burden of proof squarely on the Whi!enpoofs. And if the Whi!s wish to justify their admittedly exclu-sionary artistic definition, they have an obligation to show that musical capa-bility is indeed the criterion on which membership turns.
How might the Whi!enpoofs meet such a standard? There is a simple solu-tion. For decades now, symphonies and university music departments have implemented “blind” auditions. In this process, candidates are referred to only by number, are hidden behind a screen and do not speak during the audition, so as to avoid disclosing any character-istics that might induce bias. A noted study by economists Cecilia Rouse and Claudia Goldin found that blind audi-tions had a dramatic impact in increas-ing female representation in major U.S. orchestras. Selecting the new Whi!s using this method would pre-empt any reasonable claim of gender discrimina-tion.
Critics of the all-male Whiffs should not call for the destruction of a beloved musical tradition in the name of fair-ness. Still, there is every reason they should insist on a demonstrably gen-der-neutral standard for admission. If the Whiffs wish to maintain fidelity both to their traditional musical iden-tity and to the ideals of equality taught at Yale, they should employ a blind audition process.
DEVON COPLEY, a former member of the Whi!enpoofs,
is a 1995 graduate of Branford College.
WITHOUT SEEING SINGERS, DISCRIMINATION
IS IMPOSSIBLE
G U E S T C O L U M N I S T D E V O N C O P L E Y
Try a blind audition
FRIDAY FORUM MACKLEMORE
“If I'm not grateful now, I'm not sure I ever will be.”
One year ago the week before spring break (cue: trumpet fanfare), the Yale administra-
tion gave gender-neutral housing for juniors the go-ahead. One year later, I could not be more grateful.
In my suite, you return every night to a choice of four platonic boyfriends or four equally platonic girlfriends. If you ask (or demand) politely (or grumpily), any one of them will give you a personal massage, braid your hair or listen to you vent as they clip their fingernails or tweeze their eye-brows. We pigpile on the common room couches to watch the weekly episode of "How I Met Your Mother" and try to decide who would be Bar-ney and who would be Robin. When we hold suite parties, each of us has the unusual luxury of multiple wing-men and wingwomen who can be summoned within seconds. Later on the same evenings, we nod o! in one another’s beds, often unaware of whether or not its owner is even there.
Chatter about gender-neutral
suites often rests on a seesaw of ste-reotypes. One common concern: cleanliness. Throw away your gen-der-normative prejudices; the men in our suite are actually the maids, you’d be surprised to know. They sweep after parties, they scrub the shower, they recycle the Solo cups. Their rooms are probably the most neat.
Another misconception: Girls are crazy and cry a lot. Guess what — we can all be a little crazy, and everyone is entitled to a little crying. Both men and women have shed tears on our floor, and the only thing that matters is that we’re all there to wipe them up.
One more: suitecest. Like alliga-tors in the sewer, this could happen, but it probably won't. After enough conversations where one person is on the toilet and the other teasing out earwax, suitecest becomes a nonis-sue.
Some of my male friends are com-pletely closed o! to the idea of liv-ing with girls. There’s a lot of “I just couldn’t do that,” even from guys
with sisters. Most girls seem OK with the idea, but also prefer to keep their living realms undisrupted by inces-sant surges of testosterone and over-night visits by unknown girls.
I understand our proclivity for comfort. I understand the idea of per-sonal space. But there is also much to learn from what might make you uncomfortable. If you aren’t open to sharing a bathroom, a box of tissues or a year of yourself with an unex-pected, heterogeneous crew, you’re not living to the fullest.
More than anything else, the two sexes in our suite have taught each other to be more mindful of both how we treat others and how we
allow ourselves to be treated, par-ticularly when it comes to messing around with emotions. My room-mate described it as having four older brothers, and I imagine we ladies, depending on the day, are the annoy-ing little sisters or the sympathetic, maternal ones.The suite-brother and -sister support systems are unique from one another, however; unlike during the past two years spent in all-female estrogen chambers, my dat-ing complaints are no longer con-soled almost exclusively by the words “Boys are idiots.” Instead, comfort from my platonic boyfriend-brothers now comes more often in the form of “Do you want some of my Wenzel?”
Free personal training sessions. Fresh-baked brownies. Interior dec-oration expertise. Bathroom humor. Menstrual advice, bench press advice, life advice. What more could you want?
TAO TAO HOLMES is a junior in Bran-ford College. Contact her at taotao.
G U E S T C O L U M N I S T T A O T A O H O L M E S
Platonic lovers
NUS here in New Haven, as yet undisclosed: course relief (a rare commodity at Yale) for "con-sulting faculty" who remain in New Haven but work part time for Singapore. Faculty serv-ing as consultants for Yale-NUS are reportedly teaching fewer courses in New Haven, thus increasing the losses to this col-lege.
Consulting faculty with course release and visiting fac-ulty gone to Singapore (in addi-tion to their regular leaves): this means that in New Haven, courses will disappear, advi-sors will be unavailable, senior essays will not be possible. Undergraduates should ask questions now.
The real and complete costs of Yale-NUS to Yale-New Haven remain hidden.
CHRISTOPHER MILLERMarch 8The writer is the Frederick
Cli!ord professor of African
American Studies and French.
The Whi!enpoofs’ warrants
Brandishing the sword of equality, that weapon that Yalies heed without question, Ms. Hendel attacked the all-male Whi!enpoofs as ruthlessly and needlessly discriminatory by virtue of their not admit-ting females (“Let’s hear it for the girls,” March 4). She is com-pletely right that the Whi!en-poofs, if they bar women cate-gorically, are unequal; however, her cries of injustice do not fol-low her claim of inequality.
Though the Whi!enpoofs argue that they did consider women who auditioned, such an argument is not neces-sary to justify their barring of women from being accepted. The Whi!enpoofs are an all-male a cappella group. Ostensi-bly they have two requirements
to join: 1) sing a cappella well, 2) be a male. Ms. Hendel says that she did not choose to be a woman and thus is only barred from the Whi!enpoofs because she does not “have the correct plumbing.” What of the person who is rejected because he can-not sing? Similar to Ms. Hen-del, they had no control over a natural quality of theirs (their vocal ability) that happens to be a requirement to join the Whi!enpoofs. They treat sing-ers unequally, yet I doubt any would make the case that such unequal treatment is unjust.
Now, is there something qualitatively di!erent distin-guishing between men and women as opposed to distin-guishing between levels of tal-ent? I see no reason to think so. Both qualities, of sex and tal-ent, are unchosen, and both are arbitrary qualifications. Could the Whi!enpoofs admit bad singers? Sure, if they wanted to sing badly. Could they admit
women? Sure, if they decided to be a mixed group. The point is rather that they have legiti-mate reasons to remain an all-male group. They could rightly acknowledge that all-male groups sound di!erent from mixed groups, they could wish for the Whi!s to remain a fra-ternal institution, or they could mark the fact that the all-male singing of the Whi!enpoofs is traditional. Seeing as these reasons are not arbitrary, their decision to bar women is far from unjust.
ALEC TORRES March 4The author is a senior in
Trumbull College.
Don’t ignore stress
In my opinion, the views expressed by President-elect Peter Salovey and his collabora-tors in the study to be published
in the April edition of the Jour-nal of Social and Psychological Sciences, reported on by Emma Goldberg in Tuesday’s edition that “stress can be good,” are one-dimensional and ignore the well-documented fact that stress causes physical damage to the health of those who expe-rience it (“Stress may cause workplace benefits,” Feb. 26).
Stress can be beneficial to productivity, but that is a short-term view. The long-term negative impact on health has been documented in numerous studies. The link-age of stress as a causative fac-tor in heart disease, alcoholism and mental health is unques-tionable.
Concluding that stress is good and can be dealt with sim-ply by working to change stu-dent and employee attitudes toward stress is shortsighted. I submit that the long-term impact of stress on the health of students and employees, and
the resulting loss of study and work days due to absences, has a negative impact on both perfor-mance and productivity when viewed at the macro level by institutions and employers.
The scope of studies, such as this one, needs to be enlarged to look at all outcomes, both long- and short-term. The authors might benefit from looking at studies performed by health insurance companies, the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Depart-ment of Labor, before grandly concluding that stress is good.
As the spouse of a Yale employee, I am concerned that these conclusions by President-elect Salovey will be used to empower the Yale administra-tion to ignore the stress.
MICHAEL KAUFMANFeb. 27The author is the spouse of a
Yale employee.
GENDER NEUTRAL HOUSING HAS ITS
STRENGTHS
Hunger pangs with hours to go before bed? Check. Sudden hankering for cof-fee — but Blue State feels miles away?
I feel ya. Ready for your usual late-night ice cream run, but the buttery’s out of food? All too familiar. Such was the scene for much of the five-day Nemo tempest, which saw stu-dents more interested in finding food than that overprotected Pixar clownfish. Yes, din-ing hall workers showed incredible dedication to the Yale community by braving the weather to come feed us. But the merciless tyrant that is the stomach continued its reign of terror. With spring break approaching, a lot of us will be facing a similar challenge of how to feed our-selves sans dining hall.
Many will resort to junk food like those shiny, crinkly packages of Chips Ahoy, the always-better-in-theory cookies whose sandy texture gives me the mild impression of eating sugary clay. This is unfortunate, not only for health reasons (I suppose), but also because you can get tastier, more filling food with just a smidge of preparation. After all, these kind of breaks, weather-imposed or otherwise, can also be a perfect time to slow down a bit and eat something delicious with friends, instead of grabbing a prepackaged sandwich on the run. Below, some tips. You don’t even have to cook.
First of all, stock your pantry — by pantry, I mean the shelf above your fireplace. Or your bookcase. Or that spot on your windowsill next to last semester’s books. This process becomes more fun if you develop a proper faux siege mentality, with remnants of high school Euro-pean history running through your head. (The siege of Paris in 1870, part of the Franco-Prus-sian War, is a good place to start.) Anywhere is a good spot to stash some staples: a loaf of good bread, some nuts, a couple of those weird-but-wonderful chocolate bars from GHeav. Cereal, whether surreptitiously stashed in a Tupper-ware from the dining hall or bought at Durfee’s exorbitant prices, is also a good bet. Oatmeal, if you have one of those Heating Apparatuses Not Quite Ordained by the Fire Marshal (some know it as a “microwave”), is also a nice thing. If you want to pretend the guys in the suite across the hall are invading Prussians, I cer-tainly won’t object.
The minifridge, however, is a girl’s (and guy’s) best friend. Sure, right now it may hold nothing except a few sad bottles of seltzer and the remains of last night’s Chinese food run, but like your freshman self, it has immense potential. Let it skip the beer, however, and buy it some cheese. You don’t have to trek to Caseus and get something schmancy, although it’s certainly not a bad idea. If you failed to nab something from the latest corporate presenta-tion at the Omni, you can start with something simple from the grocery store: goat cheese, cheddar, Brie and Swiss are all good bets. Next, consider a little meat: salami or prosciutto for the more gourmet-minded; sliced turkey for the timid. If you want to make your mother happy (and you should), add some fruit. Honey, peanut butter and banana make an incredi-ble late-night snack. Toss some blueberries in your oatmeal and remember that they really do taste better when they’re not frozen into pel-lets at Commons. And it should go without saying that this is the time to indulge in a des-sert richer than the Sultan of Brunei would. Clear out the shelf of Ben & Jerry’s. Buy up the whipped cream like a Wall Street commodities trader. Breaks only come five or six times a year, people.
Last step: sips. If your life will end without your morning latte, this might be a good time to invest in a French press. It’s simpler than filling out your schedule form and will give you major foodie cred when you can name your favorite single-origin roast. For those of age, a good bottle of wine or liquor can make things more pleasant. When else are you going to nail down the perfect ratio of ingredients in a hot toddy?
Spring break is a great excuse for serious eating, and more than a dash of self-indul-gence. Don’t let the opportunity pass.
ELIZABETH CHRYSTAL is a senior in Davenport College. Contact her at [email protected] .
G U E S T C O L U M N I S T E L I Z A B E T H C H R Y S T A L
Stocking up for the siege
G U E S T I L L U S T R A T O R M I N H N G U Y E N
Spring Break, DS style
FROM THE FRONTPAGE 4 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2013 · yaledailynews.com
“Touch a scientist and you touch a child.” RAY BRADBURY AMERICAN WRITER BEST KNOWN FOR HIS DYSTOPIAN NOVEL
“FAHRENHEIT 451”
semester. Storlazzi added that at “just about every conference” he has attended, there has been “a lot of talk about the need for financial literacy programs at schools.”
Mark Kantrowitz, finan-cial aid expert and publisher of college financial aid web-sites FinAid.org and Fastweb.com, said he thinks students can become more successful throughout their adult lives if they learn how to borrow, invest and manage expenses before they graduate. For colleges, Kantrowitz suggested inserting minicourses into student orien-tation and adding financial lit-eracy to the course curriculum.
“Colleges can also try to make it fun through contests and cel-ebrations,” he said. “Person-to-person is more effective than web, email or printed material, partly because it is more inter-active.”
Students interviewed said they were unaware that the Financial Aid Office pro-vides financial assistance that includes advising on personal finances.
Ray Crouch ’14 said he “def-initely would consider” visit-ing the Financial Aid O!ce if he were having problems with per-sonal finance, because he would benefit from advice by profes-sionals who thoroughly under-stood finance and know “the semantics.”
“Unfortunately, I’m not pre-pared [for personal finance],” McKenna Keyes ’14 said. “I’m a junior, but … it’s definitely
something I could learn more about.”
Storlazzi said the Financial Aid Office is working to pro-mote its presence more actively through efforts such as rede-signing its website. He added that he plans to hold regu-lar financial literacy sessions in the future in order to pro-vide students with comprehen-sive information on tasks such as filing taxes or paying back loans. The next financial liter-acy forum will be held in April, and more events will be sched-uled for the next academic year.
“We know students don’t have the time to read pages and pages of IRS documentation. And tax returns are very scary,” he said. “We live in this world all the time. But students don’t, and they shouldn’t have to.”
Yale’s financial aid budget for the 2012–’13 academic year is $120 million, up roughly $5 mil-lion from the 2011–’12 budget.
said only that Yale will need to monitor the e"ects of sequestration before taking action in response. For now, the Univer-sity’s plan of action is to continue urging Congress to enact federal budget policies that protect high-value investments in education and research.
School of Medicine Dean Robert Alp-ern said meeting attendees, such as President-elect Peter Salovey and Pro-vost Benjamin Polak, were worried about the same issues that concern many peer research universities: the future of the faculty and student STEM research that is likely to lose crucial federal funding.
“We worry when these cuts occur,” Alpern said. “But it’s thoughtful worry.”
Following the Tuesday o!cer’s meet-ing, Jacob sent a memo to the fac-ulty Thursday afternoon explaining the expected e"ects of the sequester on cam-pus student aid, research and scholar-ship, and government services such as processing applications for residence. While the e"ect of the sequester will be felt throughout the University, faculty and administrators noted that the impact will be especially acute in STEM fields because research labs rely so heavily on federal funding, according to the memo.
Congress established the across-the-board cuts as a part of the debt ceiling compromise in 2011. The March 1 dead-line was intended to incentivize legis-lators to agree upon more specific bud-get cuts before the sequester would take e"ect, but Congress could not overcome its partisan gridlock to decide how to decrease spending in time.
Last Saturday at midnight, President Barack Obama signed the sequester and informed federal agencies that they must cut $85 billion dollars from their budgets
by Sept. 30. Domestic programs, includ-ing the Department of Education and major University research backers like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, are facing a 5.3 percent reduction to their funding.
The widespread reductions affect numerous institutions that support the University. The NIH, which provided roughly $457 million in federal grant funding to Yale during the fiscal year end-ing June 30, 2012, plans to award fewer grants and reduce the value of current grants, according to the Yale memo. The NSF, which awarded 7,850 new grants in fiscal year 2012, is expected to reduce that number by 1,000 in the next fiscal year. The Department of Defense, NASA and the Department of Energy are also plan-ning to reduce future research grants. These institutions have 120 days from March 1 to finalize their cuts.
“The problem is sequestration is just an across-the-board formula,” Alpern said. “If [Congress] had set the budget themselves, they would have protected [research institutions]. But since the cut was across-the-board, we got slammed with everyone else.”
Professor of molecular, cellular and development biology Paul Forscher called the challenging funding climate made worse by the sequestration a “catastro-phe” for science programs in the United States. At his lab, which investigates neu-
ron development, a grant that has been continuously funded by the federal gov-ernment for 23 years is now up for re-review for the first time.
“If this grant doesn’t come through, my lab is in jeopardy,” he said.
Since the cost of supporting educa-tion for graduate students falls largely on federal teaching and research grants, the sequestration has the potential to reduce the number of graduate students admit-ted to Yale in future years, said Dean of the Graduate School Thomas Pollard. He added that graduate students in STEM departments will be hit harder because financing their education depends more heavily on federal funding than that of students in the humanities and social sci-ences.
Salovey told the News on Monday that he does not expect students to feel the reductions to financial aid. While admin-istrators expect the work-study program and Supplemental Educational Opportu-nity Grant funding to decrease by about $125,000 for the 2013–’14 academic year, Jacob said, the University is committed to providing additional aid to any student a"ected.
Until the University receives specific figures for decreases in funding, admin-istrators will continue to assess the sit-uation and formulate a plan for how to respond, Alpern said.
“We’re going to have to really watch,” Alpern said, “and be ready to address whatever happens.”
The sequester also requires a 7.9 per-cent reduction to the defense budget.
addressed the overall size of the FAS yet, Berry said, adding that a larger faculty size “will always bring more research excellence, opportunities for students to interact with faculty and a greater vari-ety of classes” but also comes with bud-getary trade-o"s. Berry added that dis-cussions about the size of the faculty will likely begin in the fall once Polak and Salovey have had time to familiarize themselves with the costs and benefits of di"erent faculty sizes.
Berry said decision-making about faculty hiring became highly central-ized during the recession when the Uni-versity decided to cap the FAS at around 700 positions. The committee will likely recommend an allocation system simi-lar to the one in place before the reces-sion, which focused on departments, he said, but with an additional mechanism for allocating slots toward a general pool to fund new initiatives, such as faculty diversity.
Recent committee discussions have stressed the importance of hiring more women in the sciences, Polak said.
“Right now we’re at a critical juncture historically where more women scien-
tists are coming out of postdoc,” he said. “Half the great scientists in the world will be women, and we’re going to lead that.”
The committee has had to consider “tricky details” such as how to allocate faculty positions while working around endowed chairs, which are permanent professorships founded by gifts to the University, Polak said.
“That’s a little bit of a problem because you wouldn’t want to leave the engineering school only with positions that can be used for railway engineer-ing,” he said. “It’s a question of how to prevent specifically endowed positions from jamming up the process too much.”
Salovey also tasked the committee last fall with addressing the discrep-
ancy between the slots the University has authorized and the slots it has bud-geted, known as the “slot overhang.” Polak said the University promised more slots before the recession than it can now fill, which has led departments to feel uncertain about whether or not they will be able to hire in the future. With the slot overhang, instead of waiting to hire the best candidates, departments have incentives to hire immediately when given the opportunity, he said.
“Our aim is to fill every slot with the best person in the world,” Polak said. “That takes time and e"ort, so if you get into a ‘use it or lose it’ mentality, you’re not going to end up with the best people.”
Berry said there needs to be a perma-nent system under which departments can feel confident they will have access to the slots they were promised and can plan for the future.
Five other committee members did not respond to requests for comment.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences had 682 tenured and tenure-track professors at the start of this fall.
THURSDAY, MARCH 7The article “Eidelson pushes youth agenda at committee meeting” mistakenly stated that contractors will report back to the New Haven Youth Committee about the state of the “Q” house in approximately a month. In fact, a plan for assessing the “Q” house will be completed in about a month.
THURSDAY, MARCH 7The article “Organ recital highlights Yale’s strength” mistakenly included a photograph of the Battell Chapel organ. In fact, Michael Salazar MUS ’13 will perform his degree recital on the Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall, as the caption stated.
THURSDAY, MARCH 7The article “DeStefano plans budget” included multiple references to a state congress, when in fact the references should have been to Connecticut’s state Legislature.
“If I could edit Google Images, then I wouldn’t be as scared of the Internet.” CHLOE SEVIGNY AMERICAN
FILM ACTRESS, FASHION DESIGNER AND FORMER MODEL
BY JANE DARBY MENTONSTAFF REPORTER
Roughly 45 professors gathered in Con-necticut Hall on Thursday to continue an ongoing conversation about Yale’s Infor-mation Technology services.
At the monthly Yale College Faculty meeting, University Chief Information Officer Len Peters and political science professor and ITS advisory committee chair Gregory Huber spoke about Yale’s current information technology presence and future goals. Yale College Dean Mary Miller said the presenters stressed the importance of clear lines of communica-tion between professors and ITS, and dis-cussed innovations that will enhance Yale’s technological services in the future.
“The chief information o!cer and pro-fessor Huber presented two very interest-ing reports on ITS and the management of information in general at Yale,” Miller said. “The meeting before spring break is one which in some years gets cancelled, but we had these important matters to discuss.”
At the meeting, Peters, who is also the director of Information Technology Ser-
vices, presented a report to the faculty regarding the Information Technology Strategic Plan, a University-wide initia-tive designed to bolster Yale’s technologi-cal resources. Though Peters and ITS are leading the initiative, the project of draft-ing a three-year plan for Yale’s IT services incorporates departments involved in IT work throughout the University, including the libraries and professional schools.
In February, Peters released a draft of the IT strategic plan — which addresses topics including technology in the class-room, email strategy and digital storage in an online forum — that allows faculty, stu-dents and sta" to contribute comments and feedback. Peters said ITS plans to pub-lish a finalized proposal in May.
Faculty and staff involved in Yale IT said they were pleased to see Yale make an e"ort to solicit feedback from across Yale, as there is generally little communication on IT practices between di"erent areas of the University.
Huber said his presentation addressed how professors can use the ITS fac-ulty advisory committee as a tool of fac-ulty governance. Huber said his com-
mittee, which is composed of professors from across the disciplines, seeks to inte-grate faculty feedback in ITS decisions and advise ITS on areas of interest or concern.
“I think the big questions about IT as far as faculty are concerned are how can it support faculty as teachers, research-ers and academic administrators,” Huber said. “In all of those roles you interact with computers all the time and the question really is, ‘What can we do with IT to make it so that we can be a better university?’”
Huber added that the ITS faculty advi-sory committee will review the IT strategic plan before it is published in May.
Miller said the faculty also approved minor changes to the linguistics major at the meeting, eliminating the major-spe-cific language requirements since Yale Col-lege graduation requirements now include foreign language.
At the next Yale College faculty meeting on April 4, professors will discuss Yale Col-lege’s grading policies, including proposed changes to the A-scale grading system.
Just over one month after Mayor John DeStefano Jr., in his State of the City address, cited increasing college atten-dance and graduation rates as one of the main goals of his last year in o!ce, a November report released Tuesday shows that New Haven public schools continue to face di!culties in working toward these objectives.
Compiled by the non-profit National Student Clearinghouse, which New Haven Public Schools hired to collect the data, the report shows that many grad-uates of the city’s schools either never matriculate to college or drop out before graduation. Although the city received the report in November, the informa-tion was only made public Tuesday after the New Haven Independent filed a records request with the city. The new data comes in the third year of DeStefa-no’s School Change Initiative and amidst significant progress toward lowering the city’s college dropout rate.
The report examined data from the high school graduating classes of 2005 through 2012, although data on college graduation rates were only available for the classes of 2005 and 2006. Over the past seven years, the percentage of New Haven Public School graduates attend-ing college in the year after leaving high school has remained relatively flat, mov-ing from 59 percent in 2005 to 64 percent in 2012.
Perhaps more challenging for the city, however, is the so-called “persis-tence rate,” or the percentage of students
who not only enroll in college but actu-ally continue to graduation. Although 59 percent of the class of 2006 began college in the year after their high school gradua-tion, only 22.8 of NHPS high school grad-uates completed college within six years.
NHPS spokeswoman Abbe Smith, noting that School Change is a long-term project, said that the district is focused on emphasizing college preparedness for all of the system’s students.
“We’re trying to build up, from kinder-garten, college culture and college persis-tence,” Smith said.
The report has had significant con-sequences for high schools across the city. It served as the basis for this year’s “tiering” of all city schools in January, in which the city graded each school and classified it as a top-ranked Tier I, mid-dle-ranked Tier II or bottom-ranked Tier III school.
Hill Regional Career High School — where an average of 76 percent of grad-uates from the classes of 2005 through 2012 went to college immediately after graduating — was one of the top per-formers in the city and was upgraded from from a Tier II to a Tier I school. On the other hand, Sound School, the inter-district magnet school where 58 percent of students went on to college immedi-ately after graduating, was downgraded from Tier I to Tier II.
The use of the report has drawn crit-icism from some New Haven principals, who have emphasized that tertiary edu-cation is not the best choice for all stu-dents and that different schools face different challenges in preparing their students for college.
Sound School principal Rebecca Gratz told the New Haven Independent that her school focuses on vocational skills and many students “are not kids who want to go on to higher education in a traditional way.”
Hillhouse High School principal Ker-mit Carolina echoed a similar sentiment, emphasizing to the New Haven Indepen-dent that Hillhouse has a relatively large number of students unprepared for high school and unable to a"ord college. At Hillhouse, 55 percent of students enroll in college immediately after graduating and 18 percent of the class of 2005 graduated from college within six years.
New Haven Public Schools Assistant Superintendent Garth Harries ’95 said that regardless of the di"erences between high schools, the district should have the same college goals for all of its students.
“We should have the same hope and expectation for post high school educa-tion for all of our students, regardless of which high school they go to,” Harries said. He added that the district compares a variety of metrics — such as the gradu-ation rate, on track rate and college per-sistence rate — to the academic levels of students when they arrived in high school to account for di"erences across schools.
According to the report, the most common college destination for New Haven Public School students is Gateway Community College, followed distantly by Southern Connecticut State Univer-sity and the University of Connecticut.
New Haven’s charter may give a higher preference to city resi-dents for civil service positions if the Board of Aldermen votes in favor of such a proposed revision this May.
One of three committees within the charter revision com-mission — responsible for draft-ing revisions to the city charter, which is updated once a decade — decided on the change at a meeting Thursday evening fol-lowing testimony from local fire-fighter and community leader Darryl Brooks. In his testimony, Brooks argued that extending civil service hiring preference to New Haven residents who apply for emergency services and law enforcement positions is critical to New Haven’s stability.
Currently, residents of New Haven receive five additional points on a 100-point index designed to help quantify hir-ing decisions. The committee decided that they should instead receive 10 additional points for being residents, a point boost equal to that of veterans.
“People in minority commu-nities often have a mistrust of police o!cers, but a police o!-cer who grew up in city is [better equipped because he or she is] familiar with the challenges of the neighborhood, and … knows the community networks,” he said
The charter commission is divided into three committees, each of which is composed of five people and assigned by the board five proposed revisions to consider. The committee that met on Thursday also includes Helen Martin Dawson, Kevin Arnold, Ward 20 Alderwoman Delphine Clyburn and Ward 8 Alderman Michael Smart, who was excused absent from the meeting.
Fishman said the committee’s goal is to begin actively finding ways to recruit unemployed res-idents who want to contribute to the community. Brooks added the measure involving civil ser-vice positions would strengthen New Haven’s tax base.
“When people are gainfully employed, they are more likely to spend money where they live on businesses and in the form of property taxes,” he said.
City Hall legal counselor Vic-tor Bolden o"ered the commit-tee advice on how to define res-idency and how charter revision could improve city hiring prac-tices. He proposed that the com-mittee avoid the word “resident” in the charter because, legally, people can be residents of sev-eral cities at once. Instead, the committee opted to determine preference based on whether or not applicants are New Haven “electors,” meaning they vote in local elections.
The board also tasked the committee with discussing potential charter reform related to the Democracy Fund, a rela-tively new program currently not included in the charter that pro-vides public campaign financing for mayoral candidates. Fishman said that the fund, which is sim-ilar to programs that have been successful in several other states including Maine and Arizona, is still in its experimental phase and going through changes. While the members agreed that it is effective in encour-aging more people to run for o!ce, they thought it was not ingrained enough to be incorpo-rated into the charter just yet.
“It’s important, but putting things in the charter as a specific detail forces the city and Board to do it,” Arnold said. “Putting it in in a broader sense reflects what we’d like to do. … That’s more of a statement.”
The committee that met Thursday will also discuss how to include the Civilian Review Board in the charter, an inde-pendent board that addresses citizens’ complaints of the New Haven Police Department, at next week’s meeting.
After the commission finishes its draft in May, the Board of Aldermen will vote on whether to approve it and send it to voters in November.
5 percent decrease in the last fiscal year may be because more alumni chose to give to the dean’s priori-ties fund instead of the alumni fund following the arrival of Sny-der in June 2011, or because alumni wanted to donate directly toward SOM’s new campus, which is slated to open in January 2014. The school’s participation goal is 50 percent, Getz said, adding that SOM is on track to top 50 percent in fiscal year 2013, after raising roughly $1 million through Janu-ary 2013.
In an effort to reach out to alumni, Snyder traveled to di!er-ent states and countries during his first year as dean, and Getz said Snyder’s in-person meetings with alumni increased their interest in donating to the school.
“[Snyder] was willing to get on a plane and go around the coun-try and the world to meet with and speak to alumni,” Getz said. “One of the things he has been very focused on is getting across some of our concrete aspirations to alumni and clarifying the mis-sion of the school. I do ultimately think that fundraising is, to a great degree, a contact sport.”
Getz said alumni are consis-
tently drawn to donate to SOM because they get to know the fac-ulty and administrators well due to the school’s small student body, which currently stands at roughly 450 students. Harvard Business School’s class of 2012 included 880 students.
Getz and Director of the SOM Alumni Fund Cynthia Sacramone said this year, the school is pilot-ing a new alumni fundraising ini-tiative, which will focus on solicit-ing donations from alumni during class reunions.
“Reunion years are special,
exciting years, and we want to use that as an opportunity to enlist more volunteers and get more people to think more about the school and hopefully lift their total participation,” Getz said.
SOM Assistant Director for Reunion Giving Basie Gitlin ’10, who will lead the reunion giving
program, said the initiative aims to spread a “come back, give back” mentality among alumni, add-ing that SOM’s reunion program needs a stronger emphasis on fun-draising.
Mark Tuckerman SOM ’78 said SOM students benefit from the low student-faculty ratio, adding
that there is a lot of attention paid to individual SOM students, which results in a shared “class mental-ity.”
“At a smaller school, you get a lot of interaction with a much larger percentage of the students and professors, so it becomes more important to support it,” Tucker-
NEWS “Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners’ persecu-tion.” THOMAS FRANK AMERICAN AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST
BY JOSH MANDELLCONTRIBUTING REPORTER
This November, the election for city clerk may be closely contested for the first time in a decade.
City clerk Ron Smith has held the posi-tion for 10 years, but Ward 26 Alderman Sergio Rodriguez said last week that he is considering running for the o!ce this fall. As the o!cial record keeper for city government, the city clerk largely deals with property records, said Sally Brown, a former city clerk who currently serves as deputy clerk. She added that the city clerk also processes lawsuits against the city, issues dog licenses and liquor per-mits, and approves the names of local businesses.
Rodriguez announced last week that he is forming an exploratory committee to look for sources of funding and gauge his chances of success. He said that he has been encouraged by what he has learned so far.
“Things are looking up,” Rodriguez said. “I’m looking forward to building this [exploratory] committee, and we’ll have an o!cial announcement in a few weeks.”
Rodriguez has been an alderman for nearly 10 years and currently serves as the vice-chair of the advisory council for the National League of Cities. He cited his experience on the local and national level and the steady progression of his career as justification for a possible run for the o!ce of city clerk.
If elected, Rodriguez said, he would modernize the o!ce and make it more accessible. Improved technology could make the voting process smoother and make records easier to access, he said.
“I’ve always been a believer … in good customer service,” Rodriguez said. “I want to make sure that’s done in the right way.”
Smith, who previously served as Ward 20 alderman, said that he first ran for city clerk because he wanted to help people vote and manage their homes, adding that the constant activity at the o!ce also intrigued him.
“There’s a lot to be done with land licenses, fishing licenses, hunting licenses … I was interested in it. And it made me grow up a little,” Smith said. “I had to deal with people every day.”
Candidates for city clerk often run with a mayoral counterpart, which Brown said can help balance the ticket and attract voters, though the clerk’s o!ce is an autonomous and nonparti-san entity. For the past decade, Smith has run with Mayor John DeStefano Jr., but with DeStefano not participating in this year’s election, city clerk candidates may choose to run independently.
Smith and DeStefano have worked together in the past. Since the clerk per-forms legislative functions like certifying elected aldermen and legislation, Smith said that he worked closely with DeSte-fano to organize voting for the 2012 presi-dential elections.
The uncertainty surrounding the end of DeStefano’s tenure has led to the most competitive city clerk election in many years, as the position has not been con-tested by any candidate with signifi-cant name recognition since Smith was elected.
Regardless of the election’s results, Brown said that the clerk’s o!ce would not see any decline in its output.
“Government is supposed to function no matter who’s in or who’s out — that’s what people pay taxes for,” she said.
The New Haven Independent, a nonprofit community news website, is used to exemplify the innovation required for journalists to stay afloat in an industry fraught with lay-o"s and bankruptcies in a new book about journalism in the Internet age.
Dan Kennedy, assistant professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, tells the story of the Independent in “The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age,” a book that he will publish this May. Kennedy presents the New Haven Independent as a product of the “market failures” of the for-profit model of the New Haven Register, as well as the answer to an unfilled niche in New Haven community reporting.
“We’re in a period of continual reinvention,” Kennedy said. “This is an inspirational story of what can spring up when you have the market failure represented by the Journal Register Company’s bankruptcy.”
The Independent has performed relatively well within the burgeon-ing field of nonprofit journalism, boasting 20 percent growth every year since its inception in 2005 and now garnering over 30,000 unique visitors per month. Scott Lead-ingham, education director for the Society of Professional Journalists, said that while nonprofit news out-lets have existed for decades under models like National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, the business model has witnessed a resurgence in the last decade as the future of the for-profit journalism model has come under fire.
Independent creator and Editor-in-Chief Paul Bass ’82, who worked
at for-profit media outlets for 34 years prior to forming the Inde-pendent, said he finds the medium of nonprofit journalism “freer” in that his sta" can pursue stories sug-gested by online commentators to serve the public interest and act as the “watercooler for the city.”
“We need to cut down on the information apartheid,” Bass said. “If we are going to construct a pay-wall, we may as well not publish. We believe in community empower-ment through journalism.”
But Leadingham said nonprofit outlets find difficulty competing with established commercial media enterprises. Instead, nonprofit and for-profit media outlets have engaged in a collaborative relation-ship, occupying di"erent niches of the market for media consumption. While Matt DeRienzo, editor of the New Haven Register, said that Bass was previously unmentionable in the Register newsroom as a tough competitor, he added that Bass now engages in frequent conversations with Register sta" about city news.
“We direct our readers towards him, and he does the same towards the Register,” DeRienzo said. “He makes our coverage better and I would love to see him succeed for years to come.”
Kennedy said his school intro-duces journalism students to digital skills such as social media and video reporting, although he empha-sized that the school’s major focus is on developing journalistic skills divorced from technology.
“We don’t want them to get too hung up on any particular tech-nology,” Kennedy added. “Any one technology we use today could eas-ily pass from use. We want to make them lifelong learners when it comes to technology.”
Kennedy emphasized the impor-tance of maintaining the traditional values and ethics of journalism while cultivating an “entrepreneur-ial spirit.” He added that it is still too early in the “post-newspaper and Internet age” to know what a suc-cessful journalism model will look like, but he hopes that his book — rather than prompting news organi-zations to follow the Independent’s model — encourages readers to take a more optimistic view of the future of journalism.
“What I hope comes from the book is some excitement instead of the gloom and doom that we’ve been hearing about the newspaper busi-ness,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy is a longtime media commentator, writing for The Hu"-ington Post and serving as a regu-lar panelist on “Beat the Press,” on WGBH-TV in Boston.
Following a series of car crashes and traffic incidents over recent years, the Univer-sity is reaching out to students to improve pedestrian safety on campus.
In an ongoing e"ort to examine tra!c conditions on New Haven roads, the Yale Traffic Safety Committee has developed a cam-pus-wide web-based survey to collect information on areas that are di!cult to navigate or in need of repair. As the committee is collaborating with the University administration, the Yale Police Department and the Yale Col-lege Council to improve pedes-trian safety on and around cam-pus, the survey will help identify unsafe intersections, poor road safety infrastructure and other dangerous high-traffic areas, said Kirsten Bechtel, associate professor of pediatrics and chair of the Tra!c Safety Committee.
“Our concern is safety all over campus, and this survey will cer-tainly inform our prevention e"orts to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety,” Bechtel said.
A subdivision of the Yale Safety Committee, the Traffic Safety Committee was created in May 2011 after the death of Mila Rainof MED ’08, who was struck and killed by a car when cross-ing the College and South Front-age intersection. This was only one of a series of traffic acci-dents around campus in the last 10 years, including the May 2006 death of Alexander Capelluto ’08 after he was struck by a truck two-thirds of a mile from the Yale Bowl and the August 2009 van crash that killed a Hamden resident.
In May 2012, the Graduate Student Assembly compiled a report that identified a series of troubling intersections on or near campus, including those between Elm and York Streets and between S. Frontage and York Streets. Building on the momen-tum of the 2012 intersection report, Bechtel said, the Traf-fic Safety Committee decided to create and disseminate a sur-vey to gather input about tra!c safety from students, faculty and other members of the Yale com-munity.
“We wanted to expand our reach and really understand where students felt the most concerned about traffic safety issues,” said Ben Ackerman ’16, the student representative to the
Tra!c Safety Committee and the author of the tra!c safety survey.
The web-based survey allows participants to voice their tra!c safety concerns and, through an interactive map, select areas on and around campus where they would like to see improvements. The user-friendly design, Acker-man said, was one of the goals as he was creating the survey.
“Unlike many surveys, this one certainly does not cause too much inconvenience to stu-
dents,” he said.According to Bechtel, the Traf-
fic Safety Committee has been working with masters of the 12 residential colleges and with the O!ce of Environmental Studies to distribute the survey around campus. As of Wednesday eve-ning, approximately 150 students — primarily undergraduates — had submitted their responses to the online survey, Bechtel said, adding that the committee is now concentrating its e"orts to reach-ing out to medical and graduate students as well as students from the professional schools.
While the survey is still open, preliminary results have cor-roborated the findings of the 2012 intersection report, Bechtel said. Some of the areas that stu-dents identified as dangerous to navigate include the intersec-tion between College & Pros-pect Streets, the Temple and Wall intersection and the crosswalk
between Old Campus and Cross Campus on Elm Street.
“All of these areas are extremely important, as they a"ect students’ day-to-day life,” Ackerman said.
Meanwhile, the results of the traffic survey will also be part of the report that the YCC will present to President-elect Peter Salovey to give recommendations about a variety of topics, includ-ing mental health resources, alcohol disciplinary policies and introductory science courses. In a January meeting with Bechtel and Ackerman, YCC President John Gonzalez ’14 discussed gen-eral tra!c safety issues and trou-bling areas that can be addressed in the short-term.
“We hope to take the results of the survey and the work of the University Traffic Safety Committee to prioritize a list of solutions to traffic safety that we would like the University to
explore,” Gonzalez said, adding that the YCC will highlight the survey in its future weekly news-letters. “Maintaining a YCC-University Traffic Safety Com-mittee relationship is crucial to this.”
He also said that he will meet again with members of the Tra!c Safety Committee in early April.
University spokesman Tom Conroy said that the results of the survey will be reviewed by members of the Traffic Safety Committee, Yale planners and the city’s Department of Trans-portation, who will work jointly to consider future improvements to intersections, crosswalks and other related measures.
In addition to the tra!c safety survey, Bechtel said, the com-mittee is currently working on collecting objective data, such as crash statistics from Yale Police and the New Haven Police Department and injury statistics
from local hospitals.While City Hall maintains
purview over any infrastructure remedies, the findings of the sur-vey and of these other projects will help the Tra!c Safety Com-mittee to cooperate with city authorities in allocating financial resources, Bechtel said.
Meanwhile, she added, chang-ing the mindsets of pedestrians, bikers and drivers in New Haven will remain one the committee’s priorities.
“Modifying an infrastructure takes time and money, but the behavior of pedestrians and driv-ers is easier to change,” Bechtel said.
The Traffic Safety Commit-tee is funded by the University’s O!ce of Environmental Health and Safety.
The Yale Tra!c Safety Committee will work closely with the Yale College Council and the Yale Police Department to promote safer tra!c conditions for pedestrians around campus.
All of these areas are extremely important, as they a!ect students’ day-to-day life.
BEN ACKERMAN ’16
What I hope comes from the book is some excitement instead of the gloom and doom that we’ve been hearing about the newspaper business.
DAN KENNEDYAuthor, ‘The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-
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BY ALAN FRAM ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — In Congress’ first gun votes since the Newtown, Conn., nightmare, the Senate Judiciary Com-mittee voted Thursday to toughen fed-eral penalties against illegal firearms purchases, even as senators signaled that a deep partisan divide remained over gun curbs.
The Democratic-led panel voted 11–7 to impose penalties of up to 25 years for people who legally buy firearms but give them to someone else for use in a crime or to people legally barred from acquir-ing weapons. The panel’s top Republi-can, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, cast the only GOP vote for the measure.
President Barack Obama urged law-makers to vote on gun curbs, including the bill approved Thursday, which law-makers named for Hadiya Pendleton, the Chicago teenager who was fatally shot days after performing at Obama’s inau-guration.
Congress should consider those bills “because we need to stop the flow of ille-gal guns to criminals, and because Had-iya’s family and too many other families really do deserve a vote,” he said at an Interior Department ceremony.
The parties’ di!erences were under-scored when senators debated a proposal by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to ban assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines. Democrats have noted that such firearms have been used in many recent mass shootings.
“The time has come, America, to step up and ban these weapons,” said Fein-stein, a lead sponsor of a 1994 assault weapons ban that expired a decade later. She added, “How could I stand by and see this carnage go on?”
The response from Republicans was that banning such weapons was uncon-stitutional, would take firearms from law-abiding citizens, and would have little impact because only a small per-centage of crimes involve assault weap-ons or magazines carrying many rounds of ammunition.
“Are we really going to pass another law that will have zero e!ect, then pat ourselves on the back for doing some-thing wonderful?” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican.
The two other bills would require background checks for nearly all gun purchases and provide around $40 mil-lion a year for schools to buy security equipment. The committee was expected to vote on those measures and the assault weapons ban on Tuesday.
Thursday’s debate made it clear that despite recent mass slayings, new gun restrictions face a di"cult path in a Con-gress in which the National Rifle Associ-ation and conservative voters have a loud voice. Obama proposed a broad package of gun curbs in January, including a call for background checks for nearly all gun purchases and an assault weapons ban.
Solid opposition from Republicans, and likely resistance from moderate Democrats from GOP-leaning states, seems all but certain to doom the assault weapons ban when gun bills reach the full Senate, probably in April. The fate of the other bills is uncertain.
The Senate measures were all crafted since the December slayings of 20 chil-dren and six educators at Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. That massacre plus others in Aurora, Colo., Tucson, Ariz., and elsewhere, have made guns a top national topic but have not erased many lawmakers’ concerns about protecting gun rights.
Feinstein’s assault weapons prohi-bition “represents the biggest gun ban proposal in our history,” Grassley said. He argued that firearms bans don’t work and said, “Had this bill been law at the time, Sandy Hook still would have hap-pened” because shooter Adam Lanza used a legally owned gun he took from his mother.
Democrats disagreed, arguing that assault weapons firing large numbers of bullets make killers like Lanza even dead-lier.
“The plain, simple, blunt fact is that some if not all of the beautiful children who perished that day in Newtown, along with the great educators who gave their lives trying to save those children, might well be alive today if this ban had been in e!ect,” said Sen. Richard Blu-menthal, D-Conn.
The bill boosting federal penalties for illegal gun purchases, whose chief spon-sor is the committee’s chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was one of the least controversial measures that senators are debating. Studies have shown that large numbers of firearms used in crimes are purchased illegally.
Both parties agree that stiffer pen-alties are needed to stifle gun tra"ck-ing and straw purchases, when someone legally buys a gun to give to a criminal or someone else not allowed to have one. Currently, law enforcement officials prosecute the practice with laws that forbid lying on forms for gun purchases, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The bill was approved after Grassley inserted language requiring the Justice Department to take steps aimed at pre-venting a repeat of the agency’s botched Fast and Furious gun smuggling investi-gation. Republicans, who also expressed worries that people might be prosecuted for unwittingly giving firearms to some-one who ends up using them in a crime, indicated GOP support could grow if some changes are made.
Expanding background checks is the cornerstone of Democrats’ gun pro-posals. That effort suffered a setback this week when Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., dropped e!orts to write a com-promise with Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.
Coburn’s blessing could have won crucial support from Republicans and moderate Democrats because he is a solid conservative with an A-rating from the National Rifle Association. Schumer and two allies — moderate Sens. Joe Man-chin, D-W.Va., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill. — said they would continue seeking com-promise with other Republicans.
Senate votes on gun curbs
BY DONNA CASSATA AND RICHARD LARDNER ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed John Brennan to be CIA director Thursday after the Obama administration bowed to demands from Republicans blocking the nom-ination and stated explicitly there are limits on the president’s power to use drones against U.S. terror sus-pects on American soil.
The vote was 63–34 and came just hours after Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a possible 2016 presidential candidate, held the floor past midnight in an old-style filibus-ter of the nomination to extract an answer from the administration.
Still, Brennan won some GOP support. Thirteen Republicans voted with 49 Democrats and one independent to give Brennan, who has been President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, the top job at the nation’s spy agency. He will replace Michael Morell, the CIA’s deputy director who has been acting director since David Petraeus resigned in November after acknowledging an affair with his biographer.
The confirmation vote came moments after Democrats prevailed in a vote ending the filibuster, 81–16.
In a series of fast-moving events, by Senate standards, Attorney Gen-eral Eric Holder sent a one-para-graph letter to Paul, who had com-manded the floor for nearly 13 hours on Wednesday and into Thursday.
“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an addi-tional question: ‘Does the president have the authority to use a weapon-ized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’” Holder wrote Paul.
“The answer to that question is no.”
That cleared the way.
“We worked very hard on a con-stitutional question to get an answer from the president,” Paul said after voting against Brennan. “It may have been a little harder than we wish it had been, but in the end I think it was a good healthy debate for the country to finally get an answer that the Fifth Amendment applies to all Americans.”
However, Paul’s stand on the Brennan nomination and insis-tence that the Obama administra-tion explain its controversial drone program exposed a deep split among Senate Republicans, pitting leader Mitch McConnell, libertarians and tea partyers against military hawks such as John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
The government’s drone pro-gram and its use in the ongoing fight against terrorists were at the heart of the dispute.
Though Paul held the Senate floor for the late-night filibuster, about a dozen of his colleagues who share his views came, too, to take turns speak-ing for him and trading questions. McConnell, a fellow Kentuckian who faces re-election next year, congrat-ulated him for his “tenacity and for his conviction.”
McConnell said in Senate remarks on Thursday, “The United States military no more has the right to kill a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil who is not a combatant with an armed, unmanned aerial vehicle than it does with an M-16.”
Paul’s filibuster echoed recent congressional debates about the government’s authority in the anti-terror war and whether the United States can hold American ter-ror suspects indefinitely and with-out charge. The disputes have created unusual coalitions as lib-ertarians and liberals have sided against defense hawks.
The latest GOP split also under-scored the current rift within the rank and file over budget cuts, with some tea partyers willing to reduce defense dollars to preserve tax cuts but longtime guardians of military spending fighting back.
During his talkathon, Paul had suggested the possibility that the government would have used hell-fire missiles against anti-war activist Jane Fonda or an American sitting at a cafe. During the height of the Viet-nam War, Fonda traveled to North Vietnam and was widely criticized by some in the U.S. for her appear-ances there.
McCain derided that notion of an attack against the actress and argued that Paul was unnecessarily making Americans fear that their govern-ment poses a danger.
“To somehow allege or infer that the president of the United States is going to kill somebody like Jane Fonda or somebody who disagrees with the policies is a stretch of imag-ination which is, frankly, ridiculous,” McCain said.
McCain found himself in the odd position of defending Fonda’s con-stitutional rights over her July 1972 trip to Hanoi that earned her the derogatory nickname “Hanoi Jane.”
Obama bows to Paul filibuster
JAMES CRISP/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., led the filibuster against John Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA.
The United States military no more has the right to kill a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil who is not a combatant with an armed, unmanned aerial vehicle than it does with an M-16.
MITCH MCCONNELLMinority leader, U.S. Senate
The time has come, America, to step up and ban these weapons. How could I stand by and see this carnage go on?
DIANNE FEINSTEINU.S. senator, California
US court charges al-Qaida spokesman on 9/11 crimes BY LARA JAKES
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — A senior al-Qaida leader and member of Osama bin Laden’s inner cir-cle was charged Thursday with conspiring to kill Americans in his role as the terror network’s top propagandist who lauded the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — and warned there would be more.
Officials said Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, who was born in Kuwait and was bin Laden’s son-in-law, was captured in Jordan over the last week. He will appear Friday in U.S. federal court in New York, according to a Jus-tice Department statement and indictment outlining the accu-sations against Abu Ghaith.
“No amount of distance or time will weaken our resolve to bring America’s enemies to justice,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in the statement. “To violent extremists who threaten the American people and seek to undermine our way of life, this arrest sends an unmistakable message: There is no corner of the world where you can escape
from justice because we will do everything in our power to hold you accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”
The case marks a legal victory for the Obama administration, which has long sought to charge senior al-Qaida suspects in American federal courts instead of holding them at the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But it immediately sparked an outcry from Repub-licans in Congress who do not want high-threat terror suspects brought into the United States.
“If this man, the spokesman of 9/11, isn’t an enemy com-batant, who is?” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters. Abu Ghaith “should be going to Gitmo. He should be kept there and questioned.”
The Justice Department said Abu Ghaith was the spokesman for al-Qaida, working alongside bin Laden and current leader Ayman al-Zawahri, since at least May 2001. Abu Ghaith is a former mosque preacher and teacher and urged followers that month to swear allegiance to bin Laden, prosecutors said.
The day after the 9/11 attacks, prosecutors say he appeared with bin Laden and al-Zawahri and called on the “nation of Islam” to battle against Jews, Christians and Americans.
A “great army is gathering against you,” Abu Ghaith said on Sept. 12, 2001, according to prosecutors.
Shortly afterward, Abu Ghaith warned in a speech that “the storms shall not stop — especially the airplanes storm” and advised Muslims, children and al-Qaida allies to stay out of planes and high-rise buildings. In one video, he was sitting with bin Laden in front of a rock face
in Afghanistan. Kuwait stripped him of his citizenship after 9/11.
In 2002, under pressure as the U.S. military and CIA searched for bin Laden, prosecutors said Abu Ghaith was smuggled into Iran from Afghanistan.
Tom Lynch, a research fellow at the National Defense Univer-sity in Washington, described Abu Ghaith as one of a small handful of senior al-Qaida lead-ers “capable of getting the old band back together and postured for a round of real serious inter-national terror.”
“His capture and extradition not only allows the U.S. to hold — and perhaps try — a reputed al-Qaida core survivor, further tarnishing the AQ core brand, but it also points to the dan-gers for those few remaining al-Qaida core refugees,” Lynch said.
Abu Ghaith’s trial will mark one of the first prosecutions of senior al-Qaida leaders on U.S. soil. Charging foreign terror sus-pects in American federal courts was a top pledge by President Barack Obama shortly after he took o"ce in 2009 — aimed, in part, to close Guantanamo Bay.
Republicans have fought the White House to keep Guanta-namo open. Several GOP law-makers on Thursday said Abu Ghaith should be considered an enemy combatant and sent to Guantanamo, where he could be questioned more thoroughly than his lawyers likely will allow as a federal defendant on U.S. soil.
G e n e ra l ly, G u a n ta n a m o detainees have fewer legal rights and due process than they would have in a court in America but could potentially yield more information to prevent future threats.
Graham, the South Caro-lina senator, accused the White House of sneaking Abu Ghaith into the U.S. to avoid any back-lash from Congress.
Since 9/11, 67 foreign terror suspects have been convicted in U.S. federal courts, according to watchdog group Human Rights First, which obtained the data from the Justice Department through a Freedom of Informa-tion Act request.
By comparison, of the thou-sands of detainees who were
swept up shortly after the terror attacks and held at Guantanamo Bay, only seven were convicted by military tribunals held at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba, the watchdog group said. The vast majority have been sent back overseas, either for rehabilita-tion or continued detention and prosecution.
Exactly how the U.S. captured Abu Ghaith is still unclear.
Rep. Peter King of New York, the former GOP chairman of the House Homeland Security Com-mittee, credited the CIA and FBI with catching al-Qaida propa-gandist Abu Ghaith in Jordan within the last week. A Jordanian security o"cial confirmed that Abu Ghaith was handed over last week to U.S. law enforcement officials under both nations’ extradition treaty. He declined to disclose other details and spoke on condition of anonym-ity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The Turkish newspaper Hur-riyet reported that Abu Ghaith was caught on his way to Kuwait, shortly after leaving Turkey.
No amount of distance or time will weaken our resolve to bring America’s enemies to justice.
Questions or comments about the fairness or accuracy of stories should be directed to Editor in Chief Tapley Stephenson at (203) 432-2418.
Bulletin Board is a free service provided to groups of the Yale community for events. Listings should be submitted online at yaledailynews.com/events/ submit. The Yale Daily News reserves the right to edit listings.
DOONESBURY BY GARRY TRUDEAU
ON VIEW BY ALEXANDRA MORRISON
SCIENCE HILL BY SPENCER KATZ
THAT MONKEY TUNE BY MICHAEL KANDALAFT
2 8 6 32 5
3 9 77 5 3
18 7 5 6
6 81 2
9 5 3 4 1
SUDOKU DASTARDLY
ON CAMPUSFRIDAY, MARCH 88:30 AM “The Art of Medicine” The Society of General Internal Medicine New England Regional Meeting will feature peer-reviewed oral and poster presentations as well as workshops and symposia addressing a variety of topics relevant to the practice and teaching of general internal medicine. Sterling Hall of Medicine (333 Cedar St.), Harkness Auditorium.
11:30 AM “Broadcasting Your Work: Publication Trajectories in the Google Scholar Age” Political science professor Nikolay Marinov will cover some simple things scholars can do to augment the impact of their work. Lunch starts at 11:30 a.m., and the talk begins at noon. Free and open to the general public. Kline Biology Tower (219 Prospect St.), CSSSI Stat Lab.
SATURDAY, MARCH 92:00 PM “Electric Edwardians: The Lost Films of Mitchell & Kenyon” Directed by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon. Part of the film series “Edwardian Opulence on Film,” which accompanies the exhibition “Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the 20th Century.” Free and open to the general public. Yale Center for British Art (1080 Chapel St.), Lecture Hall.
SUNDAY, MARCH 101:30 PM Greater New Haven Annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade The sixth-oldest St. Patrick’s Day Parade in the nation will be held in downtown New Haven and is Connecticut’s largest single-day spectator event. It will be led by Yale employee, 2013 Grand Marshal Joseph Lynch, who will be accompanied by his wife, Alieta Lynch, also a Yale employee, and their daughter, Tanya. Downtown New Haven.
SUBMIT YOUR EVENTS ONLINEyaledailynews.com/events/submit
y
CLASSICAL MUSIC 24 Hours a Day. 98.3 FM, and on the web at WMNR.org
THE TAFT APARTMENTSStudio/1BR/2BR styles for future & immediate occu-pancy at The Taft on the corner of College & Cha-pel Street. Lease terms available until 5/31/13. It’s never too early to join our preferred waiting list for Summer/Fall 2013 occu-pancy. Public mini-stor-age available. By appoint-ment only. Phone 203-495-TAFT. www.taftapart-ments.com.
WORLD “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethi-cal infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.” OMAR BRADLEY U.S. ARMY GENERAL
BY EDITH WWM. LEDERER AND HYUNG-JIN KIM ASSOCIATED PRESS
U N I T E D NAT I O NS — The U.N. Security Coun-cil responded swiftly to North Korea’s latest nuclear test by punishing the reclusive regime Thursday with tough new sanc-tions targeting its economy and leadership, despite Pyongyang’s threat of a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the United States.
The penalties came in a unanimous resolution drafted by the U.S. along with China, which is North Korea’s main benefactor. Beijing said the focus now should be to “defuse the tensions” by restarting negotiations.
The resolution sent a pow-erful message to North Korea’s new young leader, Kim Jong-un, that the international com-munity condemns his defiance of Security Council bans on nuclear and ballistic tests and is prepared to take even tougher action if he continues flouting international obligations.
“Taken together, these sanc-tions will bite, and bite hard,” U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said. “They increase North Korea’s isolation and raise the cost to North Korea’s leaders of defying the international com-munity.”
The new sanctions came in response to North Korea’s underground nuclear test on Feb. 12 and were the fourth set imposed by the U.N. since the country’s first test in 2006. They are aimed at reining in Pyongyang’s nuclear and mis-
sile development by requiring all countries to freeze financial transactions or services that could contribute to the pro-grams.
The resolution also tar-gets North Korea’s ruling elite by banning all nations from exporting expensive jewelry, yachts, luxury automobiles and race cars to the North. It also imposes new travel sanctions that would require countries to expel agents working for sanc-tioned North Korean compa-nies.
The success of the sanc-tions could depend on how well they are enforced by China, where most of the companies and banks that North Korea is believed to work with are based.
Tensions with North Korea have escalated since Pyongyang launched a rocket in Decem-ber and conducted last month’s nuclear test — the first since Kim took charge. Many coun-tries, especially in the region, had hoped he would steer the country toward engagement and resolution of the dispute over its nuclear and missile pro-grams. Instead, the North has escalated its threats.
Immediately before the
Security Council vote, a spokesman for Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry said the North will exercise its right for “a pre-emptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors” because Washing-ton is “set to light a fuse for a nuclear war.”
The statement was carried by the North’s o!cial Korean Cen-tral News Agency, which issued no comment after the vote.
In the capital of Pyongyang, Army Gen. Kang Pyo Yong told a crowd of tens of thousands that North Korea is ready to fire long-range nuclear-armed missiles at Washington, which “will be engulfed in a sea of fire.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the U.S. is “fully capable” of defending itself against a North Korea ballistic missile attack.
Experts doubt that the North has mastered how to mount a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States.
The North Korean statement appeared to be the most specific open threat of a nuclear strike by any country against another. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the threat “absurd” and suicidal.
North Korea also has threat-ened to scrap the cease-fire that ended the 1950–53 Korean War. It has a formidable array of artillery near enough to the Demilitarized Zone to strike South Korean and American forces with little warning.
N. Korea targeted by UN
BY PAUL HAVENASSOCIATED PRESS
CARACAS, Venezuela — Hugo Chavez’s body will be preserved and forever displayed inside a glass tomb at a military museum not far from the presidential palace from which he ruled for 14 years, his successor announced Thursday in a Caribbean version of the treat-ment given Communist revolutionary leaders like Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh.
Vice President Nicolas Maduro, Venezu-ela’s acting head of state, said Chavez would first lie in state for “at least” seven more days at the museum, which will eventually become his permanent home. It was not clear when exactly he would be moved from the mili-tary academy where his body has been since Wednesday.
A state funeral will be held Friday attended by 33 heads of government, including Cuban President Raul Castro and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. U.S. Rep. Greg-ory Meeks, a New York Democrat, and for-mer Rep. William Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, will represent the United States, which Chavez often portrayed as a great global evil even as he sent the country billions of dollars in oil each year.
Maduro said the ceremony would begin at 11 a.m., but did not say where.
“We have decided to prepare the body of our ‘Comandante President,’ to embalm it so that it remains open for all time for the peo-ple. Just like Ho Chi Minh. Just like Lenin. Just like Mao Zedong,” Maduro said.
He said the body would be held in a “crys-tal urn” at the Museum of the Revolution, a stone’s throw from Miraflores presidential palace.
The announcement followed two emo-tional days in which Chavez’s supporters compared him to Jesus Christ, and accused his national and international critics of sub-version.
A sea of sobbing, heartbroken humanity jammed Venezuela’s main military academy Thursday to see Chavez’s body, some wait-ing 10 hours under the twinkling stars and the searing Caribbean sun to file past his co!n.
But even wwas his supporters attempted to immortalize the dead president, a country exhausted from round-the-clock mourning began to look toward the future. Some wor-ried openly whether the nation’s anointed leaders are up to the task of filling his shoes, and others said they were anxious for news on when elections will be held. The constitution mandates they be called within 30 days, but the government has yet to address the matter.
“People are beginning to get back to their lives. One must keep working,” said 40-year-old Caracas resident Laura Guerra, a Chavez supporter who said she was not yet sold on Maduro, the acting head of state and desig-nated ruling party candidate. “I don’t think he will be the same. I don’t think he has the same strength that the ‘comandante’ had.”
At the military academy, Chavez lay in a glass-covered co!n wearing the olive-green military uniform and red beret of his para-trooper days and looking gaunt and pale, his lips pressed together. In a nod to the insecu-rity that plagues this country, mourners had to submit to a pat down, pass through a metal detector and remove the batteries from their mobile phones before they entered.
As they reached the co!n, many placed a hand on their heart or sti"y saluted. Some
held up children so they could see Chavez’s face.
“I waited 10 hours to see him, but I am very happy, proud to have seen my comandante,” said 46-year-old Yudeth Hurtado, sobbing. “He is planted in our heart.”
Government leaders had been largely incommunicado Wednesday as they marched in a seven-hour procession that brought Chavez’s body from a military hospital to the academy. They finally emerged before the cameras Thursday but o#ered no answers.
Asked when an election would be held, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said only that the constitution would be followed. He continued to refer to Maduro as “vice president,” though he also said the rest of the government was united in helping him lead the country.
The foreign minister also struck the defi-ant, us-against-the-world tone the gov-ernment has projected, which some critics fear could incite passions in a country that remains on edge.
“They couldn’t defeat him electorally, they couldn’t assassinate him, they couldn’t beat him militarily,” Jaua declared. “Chavez died as president ... Chavez died the leader of his people.”
Just hours before the 58-year-old presi-dent’s death on Tuesday, Maduro expelled two U.S. diplomats and lashed out at oppo-nents at home and abroad. He implied that the cancer that ultimately killed Chavez was somehow injected into him by his enemies, a charge echoed by Ahmadinejad.
Chavez body to be put on permanent display
BY KARIN LAUB ASSOCIATED PRESS
BEIRUT — New video Thursday of U.N. peacekeepers held captive by Syrian reb-els illustrates the sudden vulnerability of a U.N. force that had patrolled a cease-fire line between Israel and Syria without incident for nearly four decades.
The abduction of the Filipino troops — soft targets in Syria’s civil war — also sent a worri-some signal to Israel about the lawlessness it fears along the shared frontier if Syrian Presi-dent Bashar Assad is ousted.
The 21 peacekeepers were seized Wednes-day near the Syrian village of Jamlah, just a mile from the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, a plateau Israel captured from Syria in 1967.
Negotiations were under way Thursday for the release of the men, who said in videos posted online that they were being treated well.
“To our family, we hope to see you soon and we are OK here,” said a peacekeeper shown in one video. He was one of three troops dressed in camouflage and blue bulletproof vests embla-zoned with the words U.N. and Philippines.
However, a rebel spokesman seemed to sug-gest the hostages were also serving as human shields. If the U.N. troops are released and leave the area, the regime could kill “as many as 1,000 people,” said the spokesman, who spoke via Skype and did not give his name for fear of reprisals.
The peacekeepers’ abduction highlights the growing risks to U.N. sta# in Syria’s escalating conflict.
Fighting has spread across the country, claiming more than 70,000 lives and displac-ing nearly 4 million of Syria’s 22 million people. There is no sign of a breakthrough for either side, though rebels have scored some recent gains on the battlefield and in the diplomatic arena.
U.N. diplomats and officials said Thurs-day that the capture of the peacekeepers will almost certainly lead to a re-examination of security for the U.N. force and its patrols in the field.
The U.N. monitoring mission, known as UNDOF, was set up in 1974, seven years after Israel captured the Golan and a year after it managed to push back Syrian troops trying to recapture the territory in another regional war.
For nearly four decades, the U.N. monitors helped enforce a stable truce between Israel and Syria, making it one of the most success-ful U.N. missions in the world, said Timor Gok-sel, a Beirut-based former senior U.N. o!cial in the region.
The force has an office in Damascus and sta#s observation posts along the armistice line.
Goksel, who works for the Al-Monitor news website, said the observers are “soft targets” in Syria’s increasingly brutal civil war. Up to now they were “never challenged by anybody in Syria,” he added.
The monitors’ success may have been linked to a decision by Assad and his father and prede-cessor, Hafez Assad, to comply with the armi-stice deal, including limits on military hard-ware allowed near the cease-fire line.
Abduction illustrates UN vulnerability in Syria
BEBETO MATTEWS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The U.N. Security Council voted for tough new sanctions to punish North Korea for its latest nuclear test.
Taken together, these sanctions will bite, and bite hard.
SUSAN RICEU.S. ambassador to the United Nations
They couldn’t defeat him electorally, they couldn’t assassinate him, they couldn’t beat him militarily. … Chavez died the leader of his people.
ELIAS JAUAForeign minister, Venezuela
RODRIGO ABD/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro speaks outside the military academy where the body of President Hugo Chavez lies in state.
SPORTS
Heart, the Bulldogs have had less time to focus on preparing for Sat-urday’s game against Fairfield.
But mid-week games give the team an opportunity to balance the lessons learned from practices and games, according to the Bulldogs.
“Midweek games can be tough because they limit the amount of preparation we have for a di!er-ent opponent, but they are good in the sense that they allow us to have more game experience head-ing into the weekend,” McCor-mack said.
Despite the shorter practice week, the Bulldogs try to make the best of the limited time they do have by homing in on the errors revealed during the previous game.
Face-o! specialist Dylan Lev-
ings ’14 battled against the Sacred Heart’s Stephen Kontos, the No.6 ranked face-o! man in the coun-try, on Tuesday and took 11 of 24 face-o!s.
The Bulldogs are approach-ing perfection on the attack. With goals coming from five play-ers against St. John’s, six players against Albany and eight players against Sacred Heart, the Elis have increased the number of players that are contributing to the o!ense every game. In addition, a total of nine of the 14 goals against the Pioneers were assisted, indicating a strong team e!ort to put the ball away.
“As always, we’re just working hard to get a little bit better every-day, in every aspect we can. That’s our main goal,” attackman Kirby Zdrill ’13 said.
McCormack added that key to the Bulldogs’ success over the entire season will be effective practices and the team’s reliance on its experienced coaches.
“The coaching sta! does a great job breaking down game film and incorporating certain drills into practice that will put us in the best position to win,” McCormack said. “Fairfield is a very solid team on both sides of the ball, so I’m sure that the coaches will be busy all week formulating a proper game plan.”
The Bulldogs will face off against the Stags at 1 p.m. at Reese Stadium this Saturday, March 9.
In their last meeting, the Tigers trumped the Elis in a 99–53 win, which was an all-time scoring record for the Tigers program. However, with recent wins at their backs, the Bulldogs are confident in both their o!ensive consistency and defensive aggression.
“[Princeton] has a lot of strengths,” guard Sarah Hale-jian ’15 said. “They hustle, but we just need to match their intensity.”
Halejian currently leads the Elis in scoring and has put up double figures in 24 of 26 games this season. She aver-ages 14 points per game and is shooting 71 percent from the free throw line. Janna Graf ’14 and Megan Vasquez ’13, who both average over 10 points per game, are also big scorers for the Bulldogs.
The Quakers will have a dif-ficult time holding on to their second-place spot as they face o! against Yale and Princeton this weekend. Penn averages 36 percent from the field, trailing Yale’s 37.8 percent and Princ-
eton’s 43.5 p e r c e n t average.
“ P e n n has a lot really good p l a y e r s and is well rounded,” said Mes-s i m e r . “ T h e y have a lot of people coming o! the bench to pick up the slack and that
makes them harder to guard.”Junior guard Alyssa Baron
averages 14 points per game, tied for fourth in the Ivy League alongside Halejian. Baron leads the Quakers in rebounding with 6.2 per game and will test the Bulldog defense with her 37.3 percent shooting average.
The Bulldogs will be vying for a top-three finish in the league this weekend as seniors Megan Vasquez ’13 and Allie Messimer ’13 suit up for the Elis for the final time.
“We just want to play our best games of the season and finish out the best we can, said Janna Graf ’14. “We want to be proud of what we’ve spent the last five months working on.”
Yale will take on Princeton on Friday and Penn on Satur-day. Both games will begin at 7 p.m.
“America 12” is front-runner for name of new conferenceAn ESPN report on Thursday indicated that the schools that will remain in the old Big East conference after the split of the so-called “Catholic 7” will be called the “America 12 Conference.” Domain names registered by the “old” Big East include America12Conference.com, AmericaTwelve.com and America12Sports.com. Cincinnati, UConn, Memphis and South Florida will be among the member schools.
Men’s Swimming and Diving @ Brown Fri/Sat. Ivy Champs.
Softball vs. Bradley 6 p.m. @ Univ. of Washington
Men’s Basketball vs. Princeton 7 p.m. Yale All-Access
Men’s Lacrosse vs. Fairfield 1 p.m. Yale All-Access
Women’s Basketball @ Penn 7 p.m.
Men’s Basketball vs. Penn 7 p.m. WYBC, Yale All-Access
Gymnastics @ Maryland 5 p.m. also vs. C. Michigan
Women’s Tennis vs. DePaul 11 a.m.
Baseball vs. Army 1 p.m. @ Yankees Spring Training Complex (Tampa, Fla.)
Softball vs. New Mexico 1 p.m. @ Univ. of Washington
FRIDAY MAR. 8
SATURDAY MAR. 9
SUNDAY MAR. 10
BULLDOGS ON TAP
Women’s BasketballFriday, 7 p.m.
at
Princeton
Saturday, 7 p.m.at
Penn
Yale returns to Reese
Ivy) will be offensive produc-tion. The team has scored over 10 goals in every game thus far, with its largest output coming in its 19–12 win against Quin-nipiac on Feb. 27. Team captain Devon Rhodes ’13 leads the team in scoring with 14 goals and 18 points. Attackers Jen DeVito ’14 and Kerri Fleishhacker ’15 have also been key o!ensive contrib-utors this season, with 15 and 11 points, respectively. But Hofs-tra is another o!ensively sound team, averaging over 11 goals in five games this season.
However, improvement is needed on the defensive end if the Bulldogs hope to come out with a win on Saturday. Fouls, turnovers, groundballs and yel-low cards have been issues for the team, and the Elis will need to do better in each of these cat-egories if they hope to go far this season.
“I think our focus on the defensive end is picking up 50-50 balls,” goalie Erin McMul-lan ’14 said. “Our opponents have been able to take advan-tage of these ground balls and maintain possession. Picking up ground balls will be huge for us on Saturday.”
Attackers Brittain Altomare (11–11–22) and Julia Reimer (9–2–11) lead the Pride in points going into their matchup with Yale. The Pride have been a high-scoring and high-shoot-ing team, through their first five
games. The team has reg-istered 147 shots; how-ever, a rel-atively low 72.8 percent of these have been on net. A d d i t i o n -ally, Hofs-
tra has been more e"cient than its opponents in clears, and the Pride committed fewer fouls and turnovers than their opponents in the season thus far.
“We will look to carry over the intensity and scrappiness we displayed in our Bryant game today, especially towards the end of the second half” McMul-lan said. “Hofstra is a very tal-ented team. We will look to cor-rect some of our mistakes we made today and head into Sat-urday with a lot of energy.”
For Morgan and fellow senior guards Mike Grace ’13 and Sam Martin ’13, the weekend will be bittersweet, as it will mark the final two games the trio will take the court for Yale.
“It’s definitely sad,” Martin said. “But it’s also gonna be a lot of fun at the same time. I’ve had a great time with these guys — they’re great teammates. I’m sad that it’s gonna come to an end and, as a captain, it’s tough that we didn’t accomplish our goals, so I take some of the responsibility for that.”
Although the Elis will fail to end their 52-year NCAA tournament drought, they were still able to outperform expectations this sea-son. Picked sixth in the preseason Ivy League media poll, the Bulldogs enter the final week-end of conference play with a chance to finish third in the league. Townsend stated the team has been playing with a chip on its shoulder.
“Coming into the season, the whole team knew we had the talent to finish better than what [the media poll] predicted,” Townsend said.
The Elis will tip o! their final home stand of the season at 7 p.m. tonight.
Matt Townsend ’15 had a career-high 19 points last weekend against Cornell.
W. BASKETBALL FROM PAGE 12
BRIANNA LOO/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Megan Vasquez ’13 enters the final weekend of her career just 18 points behind Lisa Brummel ’81 for sixth on the career scoring list.
SARA MILLER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
The Bulldogs’ two-game winning streak will be tested against No. 17 Fairfield on Saturday at Reese Stadium.
I think our focus on the defensive end is picking up 50-50 balls.
ERIN MCMULLAN ’14Goalie, women’s lacrosse
W. LACROSSE FROM PAGE 12
MEN’S BASKETBALL FROM PAGE 12
M. LACROSSE FROM PAGE 12
We want to be proud of what we’ve spent the last five months... on.
JANNA GRAF ’14Forward, women’s hockey
ANDREW MILLER : PLAYER OF THE YEAR
107 3 14 141ALL-IVIES GOALS CAREER POINTSASSISTS
Second-mostin team history
Seventh-mostin team history
Two were first team All-Ivy selections
Tied for team lead this season
Women’s Lacrosse
Saturday, 1 p.m.at
Hofstra
Bulldogs finish seasonWomen’s
Basketball
SPORTSIF YOU MISSED IT SCORES
FOR MORE SPORTS CONTENT, VISIT OUR WEB SITEyaledailynews.com/sports
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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2013 · yaledailynews.com
NUMBER OF MEN’S HOCKEY PLAYERS EARNING ALL-IVY HONORS THIS SEASON. Andrew Miller ’13 was named Ivy Player of the Year, while Kenny Agostino ’14, Antoine Laganiere ’13 and goaltender Je! Malcolm ’13 were named to the second team. Tommy Fallen ’15 earned an honorable mention.
STAT OF THE DAY 5
QUICK HITS
“The o!ense has done a great job keeping pos-session…[and] scoring on their opportunities.”
ERIN MCMULLAN ’14GOALIE, WOMEN’S LACROSSE
WOMEN’S SAILINGELIS CLAIM NATION’S TOP SPOTAfter snaring second place at last week’s Charleston Women’s Regatta, the team was rewarded with the top ranking in the nation. It will compete this weekend at the U.S. Naval Acad-emy in Annapolis, Md., before flying to St, Petersberg, Fla., for a training trip.
WOMEN’S SWIMMING AND DIVINGSEVEN BULLDOGS NAMED ALL-IVYAlexandra Forrester ’13 and Eva Fabian ’16 were named to the first team for their excellence in individual swimming events, while Paige Meneses ’13 was named the Ron Keenhold Career High Point Diver. Three others received first-team honors for relay performances.
NCAABFlorida St. 53Virginia 51
NCAABGeorgia 72Kentucky 62
NCAABPenn St. 66Northwestern 59
NHLN.Y. Rangers 2N.Y. Islanders 1
NHLBoston 4Toronto 2
Bulldogs return home to take on FairfieldBY ASHTON WACKYM
STAFF REPORTER
Coming off a two-game hot streak on the road, the men’s lacrosse team is preparing for suc-cess in its first home contest of the season this weekend.
After defeating in-state rival Sacred Heart 14–6 on Tuesday night, the Bulldogs (2–1, 0–0 Ivy) headed back to New Haven to pre-pare for their matchup against the No. 17 Fairfield Stags on Satur-day at 1 p.m. While this will be the Elis’ first regular season contest at Reese Stadium, the Bulldogs have already played two scrimmages at home. Fairfield has been ranked inside the top 20 since the begin-ning of the season and plays a sim-ilar style to the Bulldogs, so Sat-urday’s game should be a close matchup.
“ T h e r e ’s a lways a n added ele-m e n t o f e x c i t e m e n t playing on our own turf, e s p e c i a l l y when it’s the home season opener,” team captain Mike
McCormack ’13 said. “The team is definitely excited to open up at home against a great opponent in Fairfield and, like every game, we expect it to be a grind for all four quarters.”
After losing 9–2 to Hofstra on Feb. 26, the Stags (3–2, 0–0 ECAC) boosted their o!ensive output in their next contest against UMBC to down the Retrievers, 14–9.
One challenge the Elis face this week is limited practice time. With a Tuesday game against Sacred
Elis still have say in Ivy raceBY CHARLES CONDRO
STAFF REPORTER
Though Yale has been eliminated from Ivy League title contention, the Bulldogs can still play the spoiler this weekend as they take on Penn and Princeton.
Tied with Brown for third in the Ancient Eight, Yale (12–17, 6–6 Ivy) will host the first-place Tigers (16–9, 9–2 Ivy) on Friday. The following night, the Quakers (8–20, 5–6) will come to the John J. Lee Amphitheater to wrap up the Elis’ regular season. Forward Matt Townsend ’15 said that the Bulldogs still have a lot to play for.
“At this point it’s very much a pride thing,” Townsend said. “And also for
our seniors … giv-ing them a good send o!.”
B e fo re t h e seniors suit up for their final home game on Saturday, the Elis will have a chance to stir up the standings when they play the Tigers. Princ-eton currently sits a half-game over Harvard for first place in the Ivy League. A victory
by the Elis would open the door for the Crimson to force a one-game playo! or even win the league championship, and the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament that comes with it, out-
right. “We’re very cognizant of the fact
that we could play spoiler,” guard Aus-tin Morgan ’13 said. “But at the same time we have to try not to focus on where the other team is in the stand-ings and instead focus on where we are and playing our game.”
Four weeks ago, the Elis upset both Penn and Princeton on the road, sweeping the “killer P’s” road trip for the first time since head coach James Jones came to Yale over 13 years ago.
Morgan said that containing for-ward Ian Hummer would be criti-cal to the Bulldogs’ attempt to sweep the season series against the Tigers. Hummer is averaging 16.3 points, 6.6 rebounds and four assists per game on the season.
SEE M. LACROSSE PAGE 11SARA MILLER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
The Bulldogs are over .500 after Tuesday’s 14–6 win over Sacred Heart, but they’ll play No. 17 Fairfield on Saturday.
MEN’S LACROSSE
Yale prepares for tough opponent
BY FREDERICK FRANKCONTRIBUTING REPORTER
This weekend, the women’s lacrosse team will travel to Hempstead, N.Y., to take on Hofstra University, looking to push its record over .500 for the first time this season.
After narrowly edging out Bry-
ant, 14–13, on Wednesday, the Bull-dogs will face a tough challenge in the Pride (4–1, 0–0 Colonial) on Saturday. Hofstra’s only loss this season came in its last game against No. 1 Mary-land, which featured a strong second half comeback by the Pride that barely fell short against the top team in the nation.
Key for the Bulldogs (2–2, 0–1
Closing the season on the roadBY DINÉE DORAME
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
The women’s basketball team heads into the toughest weekend of its sea-son as it travels to both Princeton (19-6, 10-1 Ivy) and Penn (15-10, 8-3 Ivy) for the last two games of its Ivy League slate.
The Bulldogs (12–14, 7–5 Ivy) will
enter their final pair of games three-and-a-half games behind first-place Princeton and one-and-a-half behind Harvard and Penn, which are tied for second. Though the Elis are elimi-nated from contention for both the Ivy League title and the Women’s National Invitation Tournament bid that comes
with a second-place finish, they have won five of their past six games and are looking to finish the season playing their best basketball.
“I want these games to prove that we can play at the level that we know we can play at,” captain Allie Messimer ’13 said. “Both teams are really good,
Men’s BasketballFriday, 7 p.m.
at
Princeton
Saturday, 7 p.m.at
Penn
Men’s LacrosseSaturday, 1 p.m.
at
Fairfield
WOMEN’S LACROSSE
MEN’S BASKETBALL
WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
SEE W. LACROSSE PAGE 11
SEE M. BASKETBALL PAGE 11
SEE W. BASKETBALL PAGE 11
YDN
Erin Magnuson ’15 recorded a goal and an assist in Yale’s win over Bryant on Tuesday.
