Points of Departure

Fork Lift

In the common room of a Stiles freshman, proudly displayed between a poster of girls kissing and an empty bottle of rum, overlooking the X-Box and a dusty old rug, sit the crested plates from several of Yale’s 12 residential colleges. The mythical beasts of Jonathan Edwards and Timothy Dwight, the quaint fleurs-de-lis of Ezra Stiles, the stoic battle axe of Morse— all speak silently to a long tradition of Yale pride and theft. Hidden beneath jackets, stuffed into backpacks, and most often paraded out in plain view past the dining hall staff, myriad plates and cups make their way back to private pantheons every year. They can be found in every college and almost every entryway, hung triumphantly above bunks and old futons. The tradition of plate stealing is not new: These makeshift shrines are as old as the residential colleges themselves.

Flatware thievery dates back to the birth of the residential college system. Originally, every dining hall had personalized silver flatware engraved with the college crest. However, even in the raccoon coat days of the 1930s, the temptation to own the silver of one’s own college proved too great for some Yale men. Servingware in the colleges dwindled to only a few dozen place-settings. Eventually, these survivors were retired to the Masters’ Houses for safe-keeping and replaced with more affordable cutlery, while the aristocratic plate settings were exchanged for cheaper ceramic ones.

Several years ago, a Calhoun Master awoke to find a full set of stolen silverware and eight to ten place settings at his door, along with an apology note from a penitent alum. According to Chuck Bennett, University Dining Service’s Director of Support Services, Yale annually spends between $75,000 and $90,000 to replace stolen items. “We have no way of knowing how that china is lost,” he says.

This semester, Silliman College alone will order over one hundred new plates and 480 tumblers to replace those that have been stolen or broken. “We know it happens,” says John Morris, Director of Silliman’s dining hall. “It’s always a problem. Kids take them to their rooms and never return them.”

But, Yale’s flatware fetish is not unique. According to Jami Snyder, Communications Director for Harvard University Dining Services, Annenberg, Harvard’s freshman dining hall, loses 250 to three hundred dozen pieces of silverware, 225 dozen tumblers, and around 150 dozen pieces of china annually, as well as entire pies, several potted plants, and decorative pumpkins. In addition, House rivalries have sparked more large scale theft: In recent years, the Harvard dining halls have lost, among other things, a golden gong and a large ceramic elephant.

Yale’s current plates are manufactured by Syracuse China Company, which, aside from a proud 150-year history of ceramic production, boasts substantial investments in such markets as oil and gas resources, heavy mining, iron and steel production, and commercial lumber. A patriotic company, during World War II Syracuse even put its pottery expertise to use producing ceramic anti-tank mines for the US Army. Ironic that, while discussing ANWR drilling and economic imperialism over Sustainable Food Project meals, Yalies are dining on (and collecting) decorative little pieces of the military- industrial complex.

Futile attempts by dining hall managers and college Masters to retrieve lost servingware include signs in the dining halls which read, “Please return stolen silverware” and an official policy of “blanket amnesty” for anyone returning missing goods. According to Morris, of the several hundred items lost or stolen from the Silliman dining hall each year, the custodial staff recovers only a few dozen.

Why the tradition of plate theft at Yale has been and continues to be so strong is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it derives from deep-seated college pride or the capricious greed of spoiled Ivy Leaguers; or maybe, as one Commons worker suggested, “The kids just need plates.”

Whatever the reason, the anonymous freshman and his suitemates are proud of their flatware collection. “The plates are cool. They’re cool because they have, like, the shields on them,” he says. “It’s like when you go into someone’s house and they have antique china on display. It looks cool. It makes the suite look nice. We have a competition with the suite below us to see who can steal plates from all the dining halls first. We take the big ones, they take the small ones, and the suite across the hall steals mugs.”

Secret Artists

Yale School of Art Grad Chris Engstrom swims around his New Haven apartment, preparing to screen his short animated film, “Sea Net,” for a dozen strangers. They mill around his home-studio with a combination of art-museum wonder and open-house voyeurism, glancing from paintings into an adjoining kitchen (where a real, live artist breaks his daily bread), and surreptitiously back again.

The film features line-drawings of a small boy struggling to gather all of the beach—its shells and starfish— into his “sea net,” to take back to his studio (where else?) for inspiration. “That’s a problem of mine,” a bubbly Engstrom admits to his audience. “Having to select the most important thing. I want to push it all in there.”

As the trespassers tramp out of his apartment at Art Lofts West, an affordable housing complex for working artists in Westville, Engstrom’s temptation becomes mine: There is too much to take away as we make for the next stop on the “Neighborhoods” studios tour. The tour is the second installment of the annual City-Wide Open Studios event. Over three weeks, local Artspace showrooms will introduce New Haven’s arts community and its public to each other.

On this tour, in this town, it becomes increasingly clear that there are too many artists to do them all justice—what is the most important thing? On the tour there is a small elderly woman dressed from head to toe in every shade of purple, with the exception of the giant sunflower pinned to the top of her floppy lavender hat. It becomes my bobbing yellow beacon as we wander among the numerous studios.

“Where are we, and what is this place?” she asks me. Her name is Matty Dagradi. Together with a young, ponytailed high-school art teacher named Noah, we are removing our shoes in the foyer of someone’s Sherman Avenue home; filing by a woman I recognize as a Yale professor, who refuses to go sockfooted (“It’s fine among friends, but in the house of a stranger!”); climbing stairs past dynastic African sculptures to the incense-scented studio of a former Hillhouse High School football player who recently quit his job to become a “full-time artist.” Noah corners him genially in the kitchen and proposes a meeting with his class—a group of recalcitrant students he’s “having a hard time getting to realize that people in their own neighborhoods” make art.

Matty pokes covetously around each new studio. “I have half a garage to paint in,” she laments—so she is an artist too! Oh, she takes a drawing class at Southern Connecticut State that’s free for seniors, but what really gets her going is talking about “the vitality of young artists” and how “it’s a different generation now.” After studying advertising design at Brooklyn’s renowned Pratt Institute, Matty stayed home to raise her kids—all five of whom are now what could be called “full-time artists:” a painter, a photographer, a jazz musician, an architect, a documentarian. Imbuing them all with that “most important thing,” Matty Dagradi has sculpted an entire family of artists. I wonder if she would adopt me. But am I an artist?

Noah—who takes welding classes at the local Creative Arts Workshop and will display one of his works at Open Studios’ closing exhibition, Alternative Space, the following weekend—is an artist. He moved here two months ago from Minneapolis, which he says has an impressive art scene “for being where it is in the Midwest.” It buzzes with just the right mix of large galleries and small community venues. Similarly, he says, New Haven “has more opportunities than you would expect to find for a city of its size.”

According to Artspace’s communications director Leslie Kuo, New Haven has the “concentration of artists” necessary to support an event like Open Studios. This year, some 500 creative minds participated in “one of the premier” events of its kind across the country. Kuo cites the public exposure that Open Studios has offered for the past eight years as the key to its success. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she says, fierce with pride. “Artists leave New York to come here.” By luring new artists, Open Studios feeds itself. And then there’s Matty, at once audience and artist. Kuo explains that Open Studios helps people like her—“secret artists”—to “step over that line.” “We’ve gotten artists [both] by importing them and by making them.”

One of the last stops our dank Yale-borrowed bus makes is the Loretta Staples studio. A former graphic design professor whom Kuo named as part of New York’s art exodus, Staples stands before a set of scrolls decorated with abstract ink designs and tells us, “Everybody has their own way. You just need to find the way that’s your way. You can give yourself permission to take yourself seriously and be an artist.”

Before we part, Matty and I promise to look for each other at Alternative Space the next weekend. She tells me I “have a nice, low-key way of doing things,” and also to wash my hands when I get home.

The following Saturday, I wander the massive old Olin Brass building on Shelton Avenue—filled for a weekend with five stories-worth of art, artists, and audience. I don’t find Matty. I do find three shadowy photographs by her daughter, Terry Dagradi, and Noah’s piece—a chunk of metal from an oil drum, carved into a jagged sunburst. The short caption reads: “I get pulled—moving constantly out, but return to the center for more and more and more and more and more and more.”

Dixwell’s Gospel

Today, the stretch of Dixwell Avenue that runs from Payne Whitney Gymnasium to the Hamden border is lined with bus stops, quickie food joints, sagging houses and dozens of churches: grand brick ones, storefronts, standalones. The Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ doesn’t look like any of them— with angular eaves jutting out in every direction and an empty moat circling its base, Dixwell Church looks more like a cement star. Founded in 1820, this strange castle is the oldest black church in New Haven, and the oldest black Congregationalist church in the country. For years, it was a stop on the Underground Railroad; in the Civil Rights era it supported demonstrators rallying on behalf of the Black Panthers.

Sunday mornings tell a different tale. Most congregants arrive by car, driving in from Hamden or other outlying neighborhoods. They are an illustrious group. Carlton Highsmith, the US Department of Commerce minority businessperson of 2005, is a Dixwell Church member. John Daniels, first black mayor of New Haven, is in the men’s choir. Natalie Hardy, who joined the church in 1928, was the first black girl in the country to be awarded the highest honor by the Girl Scouts. She lived on Dixwell, a few blocks down from the church, for over sixty years; now, she drives in from her Hamden home every Sunday morning.

Dixwell Church, home to New Haven’s black leaders for over a century, is now a congregation of commuters. The membership’s slow exodus from the Dixwell neighborhood, spanning half a century, mirrors middle-class migration out of inner cities across America. But at Dixwell Church, the pattern may soon be interrupted. Reverend John Henry Scott III is charting a new course for the church’s future.

Now in his tenth year as Dixwell’s pastor, Reverend Scott has drawn over a dozen newcomers to the church this year alone. For an aging congregation of about two hundred, that is a sizable increase. In large part, Reverend Scott attracts members through his bimonthly talks on financial management and occasional seminars on topics like how to start a small business. The reverend, also a professor of business at Gateway Community College, is adapting Dixwell Church to a new era—and a new Dixwell community. But the proud steward of his church’s long history claims his mission is really nothing new at all.

When Simeon Jocelyn, a white 21 year-old from a prominent local family, helped 24 former slaves found the Dixwell Church in 1820, their quest for autonomy and racial equality in New Haven was nothing short of revolutionary. A retrospective from the church’s centennial recalls that its first home, a small frame church on Temple Street, “was stoned regularly during services.” Founder Jocelyn was threatened so often he needed bodyguards—and eventually fled New Haven altogether.

At Jocelyn’s departure, the church was exclusively black. Throughout the 1800s, some of the most vocal abolitionists and suffragists in the black community were drawn from its ranks. Before local public schools were desegregated, the founders of New Haven’s first school for black children also came from Dixwell Church. By 1900, New Haven had several other black churches. But Dixwell Church—relocated to 100 Dixwell Avenue after a group of Russian Jews bought its Temple Street building in 1887—had already established a reputation as the religious home for the city’s black elite.

In 1924, the church donated land for the founding of the Dixwell Community House— known later as the Q House—a staple of the Dixwell community into the twenty first century. Natalie Hardy, a 77-year veteran of Sundays at the Dixwell Church, remembers those days as a different era along Dixwell. Many of the city’s black professionals lived near her house at 62 Dixwell: Her own father was a lawyer, and their neighbors were doctors and dentists. With only a handful of black churches in the city, Dixwell faced little competition for congregants. By the 1960s, it had 400 members.

The community’s transformation began in the early 1940s, when a low-income housing project was built in the area. The campaign was intended to be one of urban renewal, but Dixwell would never be the same. “People moved out, some of whom expected to move back, but in some cases that didn’t happen,” Hardy recalled. Her family stayed in Dixwell, but its church was increasingly comprised of commuters from Hamden, Bethany and other neighboring towns. In the 1960s, the church co-sponsored the construction of a low-income housing unit of its own, Florence Virtue Homes Inc., which drew the neighborhood’s first white residents. Of those who moved in, some remain church members. But low-income housing had a dual effect on the church. By 1967, only a quarter of its congregants lived within walking distance. In 1969, when the church moved to its present home at 214 Dixwell, its collaboration with the Q House tapered off, severing one of its strongest neighborhood ties.

But the reverend is eager for his church to shed its out-of-towner image. In the last year, he has mailed out hundreds of postcards inviting church neighbors to its services, and he has overseen the installment of a new roof; new speakers, bathrooms, and carpets; and a fresh coat of paint in the church sanctuary, all in the hopes of welcoming new parishioners. He doesn’t want the church to lose its homey feel—but he also doesn’t want it to cede its history of activism to the comforts of middle- class suburbia.

On a recent Sunday, the reverend, ebullient and fresh-faced, knew all his congregants by name. He knew who had surgery last week, and who recently lost a son. When the service began, his greetings rang out from the pulpit along with the sermon. To a lady in the back: “I know you’ve been under the weather. Good to see you!” To a family in the front: “You haven’t been here in a few weeks. Glad to have you back!”

But the bulk of the sermon was reserved for talk of the world outside the cement star. “Here at Dixwell Church, we have a special responsibility— the same responsibility that Simeon Jocelyn and 24 former slaves felt all those years ago,” he told the congregation. “Middle-class folks like us,” he added, have no less of an imperative to fight for social justice—for racial equality, improved housing, better education and better health care; for the haves as well as the have-nots. “That’s your mission as a Dixwellite!” he bellowed.

From the front row, Hardy nodded in approval. Her granddaughter recently joined the church, one in a spate of new members. Hardy now drives past over 16 churches on her way down Dixwell Avenue each Sunday. But she has never thought of leaving: “That’s my church. I’ve never considered any other church being my church than Dixwell,” she explained defensively. “The city changed a lot, but we kept going.”

Trashy Magazines

Monday through Friday, copies of The New York Times delivered to the Davenport College dining hall will disappear within three hours. The Yale Daily News might last from breakfast until dinner. Piles of The Yale Herald distributed on Friday at five vanish by Monday at two. Yet when issues of the popular campus tabloid Rumpus recently went missing from four colleges, the story made headlines.

This year, Yale undergraduates will write, edit and publish over 35 magazines. They range from The Yale Record, the University’s long-running humor magazine, to stYle, Yale’s first and only fashion mag. Interested in Human Rights? Fishing? Classical Studies of Ancient Mesopotamia? Check the laden tables outside of any dining hall: somewhere in the piles of printed matter, the perfect magazine awaits. Unlike the YDN or The Herald, most of these publications will linger for a few weeks, trying to entice readers, before ending up where the missing piles of Rumpus were found—in the trash.

Off-campus, “real” magazines need subscriptions and advertisers to justify their publication. Many student publications have neither and thus depend on sponsorship from Yale or outside interest groups. In an informal survey conducted by The New Journal, twenty campus publications reported their publishing costs, which range from $500 to $7,000 per term, not including the YDN or The Herald. Combined expenses of these publications, per term, total $63,700. In comparison, the Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee, which scrambles to fund a variety of student groups, has a budget of $90,000.

For some niche interests, Yale prints more than one magazine. The cadre of campus conservatives somehow need both Light and Truth and The Free Press; gunslinger.’s indie rock reviews work hard to be hipper than The Herald’s Arts & Entertainment section; and a series of college-specific lit mags give a voice to those writers who refuse the Yale Literary Magazine.

In this world of literary magazines, the “Lit,” Yale’s oldest magazine (over 160 years and running), easily dominates, often selecting as few as four poems from over one hundred submissions. Publisher Jonathan Sherman-Presser recognizes that the smaller alternatives serve as welcome venues in which more writers can publish their work. He adds, “The kind of publications that irk me are those that needlessly overlap on others’ territory.” As part of the founding team of P.H.: The Yale Journal of Public Health, he remembers a magazine with a similar health policy focus appearing just when P.H. was starting out. “In a field with as limited a draw for writers and editors as public health, there’s neither a need nor the population to support two magazines,” he says. Working together, the two sets of magazine founders could have better served the public health community.

Such needless competition may contribute to the short lifespan of many publications. For every magazine that lasts for decades, like the Lit or The Record, there are countless magazines such as Wake, Jake, or Electric Fence which last only a few issues before disappearing.

From his base at Manuscripts and Archives, Bill Massa, Head of Collection Development, fights to catch hold of each student publication no matter how fleeting its existence. Here, in the research room, squeaky glass cases surround scholars with memories of Yale: Yale books, Yale newsletters, Yale photo albums, and Yale student publications. The YDN is on microfiche here, all the way back to 1878. In this piecemeal history of Life at Yale, The Journal of Ethics, a wellheeled pomposity, ages alphabetically with The Eavesdropper, a sheaf of student gossip. All official Yale publications must donate two copies of each issue; but most of the publications actually find their way here from the Woolsey rotunda, the gym, or the Trumbull dining hall, where Massa, a fellow of the college, makes an effort to collect them. “It’s a losing battle,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like a publications bag lady.”

Manuscripts and Archives, the last line of defense against disappearing copy, aspires to be a bastion of young Yale genius, a safekeeping for the fledgling scribbles of great men and women. Although the library has the most complete run of any magazine, issues or even whole volumes are often missing from the record. Each year, a few Yalies come in search of literary glories past, often to find their words permanently lost. They, like today’s Yalies, lacked foresight. Massa does his best to head off current students’ future nostalgia for their undergraduate prose before their words, like Rumpus, are thrown away.

The culprit in the mystery of Rumpus’ trashing remains at large, as does the perpetrator of a similar affront last year to The Free Press. But Stan Alcorn, a magazine editor himself (of the liberal Hippolytic), believes he saw the thief at work.

The crime occurred in Jonathan Edwards college, in the course of a normal delivery of his magazine. After leaving one pile of magazines in the mail room, Alcorn moved onto the common room. When he returned a minute later, he saw a deliveryman from Turley, the Boston company that prints many of Yale’s publications, leaving. His stack of Hippolytics was gone; in its place was The Herald. He hunted about for his magazines. There they were, in the trash, along with The Yale College Review of Books and P.H.— before anyone, including Massa, had a chance to pick one up.

Siren Song

You’ve been there. Waiting at the interminable light on Broadway and York, chatting on your cell phone with a friend who’s sitting somewhere secluded and quiet—and then it begins. Distant, buzzing strains at first, then a mounting screech leading to a series of wails and a shrieking vehicle hurtling through your long-awaited walk light. Once the throbbing in your ears seems to have ended, you shatter the newly settled quiet with a shout: “WHAT WERE YOU SAYING?” Embarrassed by your lack of volume control, you glance around and proffer a quick explanation: “Sorry... it’s New Haven!”

As a Los Angeles native, rumors alleging New Haven was a hotbed of crime never fazed me. What I was not prepared for, however, was the neverending symphony of sirens. When I first arrived, walking to class was an overwhelming experience. Already frazzled by the crush of bodies, I seemed to be the only one who noticed the flashing and screeching ambulances and fire engines barreling through crosswalks. I was shocked to discover that when a siren sounds, not only do drivers feel no pressure to pull over (or even to delay a left-hand turn), but pedestrians are also impervious to the signs of a vital emergency. No need to let a blaring fire truck impede your dash across Elm Street to grab lunch as a Berkeley transfer.

“Yeah, nobody here even notices the sirens anymore,” says Sergeant Burgh, a sturdy man casually perusing The National Enquirer behind the main desk at the police station. “It’d be good to ticket them, but when you’re in your squad car with the siren going”—his eyes drift from the tabloid as he describes the experience—“getting closer and closer to the crime scene, you just get so... so jacked-up, you know? And it’s not like you’re really gonna stop for a minute to ticket some jerk who didn’t pull over. It’s like a, you know, a...”

“Catch 22?” I suggest.

“Yeah, one of those,” he says, returning to his magazine. “People say there are a lot more sirens here than in other places,” he remarks, flipping to a story about Britney Spears. “I would say only two per cent of those are us, though. The rest are the medical people or the fire department, mostly. The fire guys are required to set the sirens going for every barbecue-fire call they get.”

“It’s the way Yale is set up, why there are so many sirens around there,” Sergeant Burgh continues. Fumbling around for a piece of scratch paper, he explains that Yale’s campus is the most siren-ridden place in New Haven. He sketches a quick diagram of the streets around campus, pointing out the fire station and hospitals that make it a siren epicenter. The main fire headquarters sits at the end of Elm Street, only four blocks east of campus. Yale-New Haven Hospital hems the school in just south on York Street, and The Hospital of Saint Raphael is located seven blocks west of campus on Chapel Street. Nestled between these three facilities, Yale’s campus is an emergency vehicle crossroads, with fire trucks racing through to the city’s west and ambulances pummeling northward on York Street. Sergeant Burgh also has an imaginative theory as to the way the sirens echo off the Gothic architecture—creating, as he explains, a “tunnel of sound.” The theory’s scientific basis seems shaky, but I can attest to walking through that tunnel several times each day.

A chat with the Fire Marshall shed statistical light on my observations. An average of 92 911 calls are received in the call center in the basement of the New Haven Courthouse each day. Usually, only about ten of these calls involve actual flames; these are passed along to the fire department, while the other 82 are answered by ambulances. That’s 92 sirens each day indiscriminately passing through the “tunnel of sound.”

Sitting outside Au Bon Pain recently, I was talking to my dad on the phone, when suddenly he asked me to repeat myself—he hadn’t heard “because of the damn siren.” Siren? I thought. I hadn’t noticed; I’d just shouted over it. After all, it was merely one of 92 that would greet my ever-adjusting ears that day.

A Striking Difference

Ward One Alderman Nick Shalek’s anti-union stance would probably have made him totally unelectable thirty years ago. Picture the political climate of the time at its peak on May 1, 1970: Over 15,000 people converged on the New Haven Green, the “largest assortment of long-haired youths, film crews, and National Guardsmen that New Haven has ever seen” reported the Yale Daily News the following day. Protesting the murder trial of three Black Panthers, they listened to speakers, snake-danced to chants of “Free Bobby Seale,” the name of one of the Panthers on trial, and eventually clashed with police in a violent eruption of rocks and tear gas.

Looking back, between the culturally defiant youths, the radical speakers, and the seeming intractability of police-protester relations, this scene seems like a caricature of the era. It epitomizes a polarized America, a clichéd conflict of aggressive authority using old tactics to respond to rebellious liberalism.

And yet, Yale University handled the May Day protests of 1970, and the student strikes leading up to it, with a surprisingly liberal approach. President Kingman Brewster decided to end the school year prematurely in response to the strike, and managed the throngs of protesters by opening residential college gates, housing them in courtyards, and feeding them in dining halls. It was a “policy of shutting down to open up,” remembers Sarah Shapiro ‘72. Recognizing that the protests could not be contained, Brewster postponed academic deadlines and expanded the option to take classes pass/fail. William Farley ‘72 LAW ‘77, then-chairman of the Strike Steering Committee explained, “As long as people went along with their daily lives, things would not be confronted and faced. The only way to get things confronted and faced was to stop normal activity and to concentrate on what was going on around us.”

Today, the political atmosphere has changed radically. On August 27, 2003, Yale employees’ Local Unions 34 and 35 went on strike for better pensions. The surrounding turmoil was undeniably smaller in magnitude than that of the Bobby Seale trial. The strike was a disagreement over the terms of a contract, and there was certainly less consensus on the issues. Yet, if the conflict between Yale and its labor unions was comparatively small, and the issues less significant, the Yale community’s effort to stifle the conflict stands out. Personal preference replaced political ideology: Every part of the Yale community endeavored to take politics out of the equation.

This political apathy extended to even the highest levels of the administration. Amidst the May Day protests of the 1970s, President Brewster had famously articulated the political nature of the trial, declaring, “I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States. In large part, the atmosphere has been created by police actions and prosecutions against the Panthers.” In 2003, President Levin did the opposite: When protesters were arrested for allegedly refusing police orders and blocking traffic on separate occasions during union demonstrations, President Levin said it was a matter for the court and prosecutors to work out.

During the 2003 demonstrations, Yale refused to let political protests disrupt normal school functions—even if that meant marching riot police into its investment offices or harassing students wearing signs of political protest.

The Yale administration was not alone in its desire to contain the politically volatile nature of the strikes. Student reactions could hardly be characterized as radically political, or even political. Pundits-in-training rushed to the opinion pages of the Yale Daily News to express their “respect” for the unions while avoiding discussion of the issues. Others insisted that the strikes distracted students from their “purpose” on campus. When two politically-opposed professors coauthored an opinion piece, they withheld their differing views on the issues and instead offered a purportedly objective solution to the political conflict: simply let a “neutral” third party evaluate the case and rule—not on who is right on the issues, but who is more “reasonable.”

By the end of the conflict, good community sentiments were the new political fad. The Yale College Council held events for Yale workers and students to mingle in “social settings.” YCC representative Daniel Weeks ‘06 told reporters in 2003 that the council’s aim was not to endorse the strikes or the union, but simply to “build a stronger community in non-political ways.” The YCC also offered to distribute one hundred JEOPARDY! tickets to union employees. As President Levin put it, “I think it’s a very nice gesture to help rebuild a good feeling in our community.”

Politics were quickly forgotten in the mad rush to kiss and make up. Perhaps it was because Yale’s labor troubles were more complex, less polarized, and aroused less student interest than Bobby Seale’s murder trial. Perhaps enough progress has been accomplished to render radical change to Yale’s political atmosphere unappealing. Yet, as the recent Ward 1 election shows, conflicts about unionism still lurk beneath the surface of student politics.

In previous elections, challengers to the Democratic nominee were repeatedly defeated because those who cared enough to vote resoundingly favored the more liberal candidate. Perhaps Nick Shalek defeated Rebecca Livengood because the people who voted were more ambivalent about unions. In 1970, ambivalence would not have carried the day.

Something Blue

“Everyone dreams of being married in a place like Battell,” says Bill Grenawitzke, sipping from a bottle of seltzer after offering it to his fiancée, Ashley Green. “Especially Ashley,” he adds, prompting a sharp look from her. “What?” he says sheepishly. “You’ve been really gung-ho about it.” Given the importance of Battell—both to this couple and to Yale as a whole—no one could blame her. Battell is a house of God amidst freshman housing: It sits on the corner of Old Campus, between Durfee’s Convenience Store, home of the $6 bag of Fritos, and Farnam Hall, home of the only washing machines ever available on Old Campus. The chapel dates back to 1874 and, even on a campus overrun with historic architecture, it stands out as especially gorgeous. “To be a part of that history is quite an honor,” says Bill.

As Gale Iannone, Facilities Director for the Office of the Chaplain, says, “Battell has a very intimate feel about it. The events unfold right around you.” Though its high ceiling, booming organ, and imposing history channel that which is most intimidating and spectacular about Yale, Battell remains a personal site. Its pews have seated myriad patrons—from some of America’s greatest thinkers to guests at bar mitzvahs. It is a site of worship adjacent to sites of late-night cramming and a capella rehearsals. It is a place where personal histories somehow live peaceably alongside history.

Last year, Battell hosted 1,391 events, about thirty of which were weddings. The Chaplain’s Office first officially recorded marriages in Battell in 1960, but there were most likely many marriages before then, according to Iannone. Today, to walk down Battell’s aisle, couples must register a year in advance. However, the process is nothing like the rigid standards enforced by the Stanford University chapel, which requires couples to fill out compatibility tests. Despite Battell’s Yale heritage, only one in three of the couples who marry there have any previous connection with the University.

David Williams and Priya Raman, an undergraduate couple engaged to be married, can explain why, for them, Battell is out of the question. First, it’s a matter of practicality—David hails from California, and Priya is from Arizona, putting Connecticut far off the map of convenient locations. But equally important is the fact that Battell is a little too Yale. “I associate Yale with college,” Priya says, “which is a distinct period. I love Yale, but when I graduate, that’ll be it.”

David and Priya began dating in September 2004, the fall of their freshman year. Before long, they started talking about life after Yale and the possibility of sharing it together. In January 2005 they decided to get married. “Either people are really happy for you,” says Priya, “or they don’t know how to deal with it.” Some of David’s friends, he says, still don’t know he is engaged to be married. Their plans for the future are far from definite; at the age of 19, there’s no rush. David is still choosing a major. They don’t know where they will be living and working after graduation, or where and when they’ll get married. Yet they have already considered what a Battell wedding could mean and, even at this point, they know it is not for them.

For Bill, a PhD student in geology, and Ashley, who received her Master’s degree from Yale in Computer Science, the case for Battell is compelling. They met as grad students in September 2003 on the walk over to Convocation at Battell Chapel. They became friends and started dating a few months later. Next July, they will walk out of the place in which they met as husband and wife. Bill appreciates what Battell means to his relationship: “We met here— that means a lot to us. It’s the one thing that brought us together.” For Bill, a Texas native, and Ashley, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, New Haven is a neutral site for their families to travel to. But Battell is more than that, says Ashley: “It’s our common ground.” Their wedding, the ultimate gesture of togetherness, will be held at the place that brought them together to begin with.

Bill and Ashley hope their wedding day will recreate that experience for others— but with an end-of-ceremony surprise. “You can enter from the outside of Yale,” Ashley says, “but empty out into the courtyard. That’s our plan, to have people dump out into the courtyard after the ceremony, to have champagne and get tanked.”

Diversity of Life

Stephen Kellert has a very complicated sounding job. He is a Professor of Social Ecology at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a member of the Executive Committee of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. He works in what is called “environmental ethics” and recently he has spent much of his time thinking about “biophilia,” an idea he helped develop, which hypothesizes that the love of nature is an evolutionary development. This love might even be selfish: A cure for cancer, Kellert points out, is more likely to be found in a world with many plant and animal species. “There are values to be derived,” he says, “from a healthy and diverse natural environment.”

This last statement could be the motto of the Center that helps support his work. Housed in a small building, tucked away on Prospect Street behind the Institution for Social and Policies Studies, of which it forms a wing, the Center is a healthy environment for the diverse array of scholars who pass through.

As the name proclaims, it is very much an interdisciplinary center. “It’s hard to think of a field that’s more interdisciplinary,” says Professor Margaret Farley, one of the Center’s two directors. The Bioethics Course List, a diverse file of all Yale courses relating to bioethics, is fifty pages long, drawing from most undergraduate departments and many professional schools. Paging through Bioethics at Yale, the Center’s annual publication (some 270 pages this year), it is easy to forget which discipline you are reading about. Professor Willard Miranker of the Computer Science department worries about the “grave ethical challenges” humans will face when machines “become sentient.” Professor Robert A. Burt of the Law School is concerned with “the experience and culture of dying in America.” Rajesh Rao, a medical student, has cofounded the Yale Stem Cell Interest Group “to discuss the biological, therapeutic, ethical, social, and religious implications of stem cells.”

In no other book could one turn the page from a profile of Ian Shapiro, Professor of Political Science (“In the area of bioethics, I have written about abortion policy, euthanasia, and the distribution of health care...”), to a profile of John Ohno, High School Junior (“I’m interested in computers, programming, robotics, and anime…I am also a member of the ‘Technology and Ethics’ working group”).

All these people—and hundreds more—are united by a word that didn’t even exist a few decades ago. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the birth of the term “bioethics” occurred in 1971. That year was a time of “large scale questioning about the nature of moral authority in our society,” says Susan Lederer, a science historian affiliated with the Center. “There was distrust that physicians could be left to make responsible decisions on everything from test-tube babies to the definiton of death.”

It wasn’t until the mid-80s that anyone at Yale even attempted to organize and bring together people working in bioethics. It was then that Dr. Edmund Pellegrino first convened the “Humanities in Medicine” group. Professors from all departments and professional schools came to speak about their work. “We spent a year and a half just educating each other on what we had been doing,” says Dr. Robert Levine, now a director of the Center. “And just when we were finished, Ed Pellegrino went to become the president of Catholic University.” The group dissolved, and for the next decade, professors at Yale pursued bioethics individually, without any coordination of their efforts. When Donald Green, director of ISPS, suggested creating a Bioethics Project at Yale, Dr. Levine told him not to bother— it wouldn’t work. “Fortunately he didn’t listen to me—and it worked.”

The “Project” was only this past year promoted to a “Center”—and “The University does not convey ‘Center’ status lightly,” reads the foreword to Bioethics at Yale. The Center has shown results: Its 14 research groups produce papers and sometimes books, and its conferences can draw audiences of two hundred. Dr. Levine estimates that about a fifth of all Divinity Students and Medical Students pass through its doors. The undergraduate bioethics course taught two years ago attracted a record-breaking 500 students. “It worked” indeed— the small house on Prospect is now a hub linking activities at the remotest corners of Yale’s campus.

And in another corner, at the Forestry School atop Science Hill, Professor Stephen Kellert is planning a major symposium on biophilia— specifically, on the principle of “biophilic design.” The idea, he explains, is that “human physical and mental wellbeing can be enhanced by a built environment that lets you experience nature.” Some of our most honored feats of human construction, he feels, operate on just such a principle—consider cathedrals, constructed to let in as much natural light as possible. The keynote speakers at the symposium will be Vincent Scully, the architectural historian, and E. O. Wilson, the entomologist. This should not surprise you. Naturally, the Center for Bioethics would bring together a devotee of Saint Denis Abbey and a man obsessed with ants.

For the Birds

I was ill-prepared for my first birdwalk. After staying up till three the night before, I arrived at East Rock Park five hours later armed only with coffee and a warm coat. The Birdwalk was one choice in a series of nature tours organized by the New Haven Park Rangers Program, almost all of which—Mill River Nature Walk, Giant Steps Hike, Hawkwatch at Lighthouse Point Park and Introduction to Hawks & Hawk Watching—involved either birding, walking, or, in some cases, both.

I expected, given the early hour, that I would find myself mostly in the company of children. The Birdwalk seemed the perfect fieldtrip for Madeleine’s girls school class or a nanny with young ones in tow. But as I approached the Trowbridge Environmental Center, the only other walkers in sight were a young guy around my age—with dreadlocks and skater pants, who seemed no more comfortable in the forest than I—and an older, seemingly more bird-conscious man, who was equipped with binoculars, a huntsman cap and sturdy hiking boots you could wear to kill a bear.

The three of us converged in front of the Trowbridge Center’s front door and ventured inside together. There, we toured the Center’s main room, which houses small exhibitions about wildlife with names ranging from the banal “Migratory Raptors” to the exclamatory “Trees are Terrific.”

Tom Parlapiano, an employee of the Trowbridge Environmental Center, provided an un-outfitted companion and me with binoculars and led our gang of three outdoors. Parlapiano, a veteran birdwatcher, said the only trick of the trade is observation. Silhouette, flight patterns, habitat: each of these elements must be examined to determine a species. As we began our walk in the woods he appeared to dispense this wisdom to distract us from the fact that there were no actual birds in sight. It seemed that the two hour trip would be spent mulling over pictures and making small talk rather than actually spotting a spectacular bird in flight.

Early on in the journey, we heard a “peep” from some nearby plants. Would this be the first bird of the day? As the older walker, Gil, wisely remarked, “It’s one thing to hear ‘em, it’s another thing to see them.” The group stopped and waited in hope of a sighting. In the meantime, Parlapiano provided a drawing of the loud-mouthed creature: a White-Breasted Sparrow. After a few minutes, when it became clear that the bird would not make an appearance, we trudged on.

Parlapiano explained that the cold morning temperature and clouded light prevented many birds from leaving their resting habitat—unlike me, the wise birds had chosen to stay in bed. Nonetheless, he said “you shouldn’t let the non-ideal day prevent you from birding.” A bit farther along, we stopped again to examine movement in a bush. Looking through my binoculars for the first time, I realized how difficult it is to capture a still bird. “One thing you know about birds,” said Parlapiano, “they know exactly when you pick your binoculars up.” He laughed.

Birding requires precision and patience. You can spend hours searching for a specific bird and then, once you’ve spotted it, maintain that sighting for only a few seconds. Parlapiano emphasized how, through practice, birds become recognizable not only by their physical appearance, but also by their song. Since birdwatchers’ eyes often fail them, they rely more on other senses, such as hearing, to distinguish one species from another. Later that morning, acute hearing led our group to uncover a female Downy Woodpecker circling the top of a tree trunk—the coolest bird I have ever seen.

About halfway through the walk, we left the more dense vegetation and hit a wall of open space. This narrow clearing was devoid of the massive trees and cluttered foliage we had seen along other parts of the trail; it seemed an ideal place to rest. Desperate to see another bird, I focused my eyes and scoured the skies for sudden movement. Nothing. But then, a sound: “vi-de-o, vi-de-o, vi-de-o, vi-de-o, vi-de-o...” The Carolina Wren. Seconds later, we heard more noise—the Common Yellowthroat—then we watched it in flight. The tides had turned. “I tell you, it’s a great birding morning,” said Parlapiano excitedly, “Everybody’s moving.” And by that point, at last, so were we.