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Is it a plot by Big Tobacco? (Probably not. Cigarette companies are, famously, champions of public health). Is it the unmet oral needs of infantile bulldogs in a crucial stage of psychosexual development? (I took AP Psychology in high school, no big deal.) Is it a valiant last stand against the Francophile cultural Marxists that plague this culturally capitalist university? The answer will inevitably disappoint you.

Equipped with a pack of a cowboy killers, an “I <3 New York” lighter that I bought for my mom, and the brute force of journalistic method, I set out to crack the cigarette question once and for all. I undertook what might have been the most important assignment of my career as a journalist, risking life and lung as I reluctantly smoked countless cigarettes, all the while remaining stone cold sober. Because many interview subjects felt that their moms would be disappointed in them if they, for some absurd reason, read this article, anonymity of the highest degree has been granted. Thus, the names and personal information featured in this article have been altered to protect students from a firestorm of matriarchal passive aggression. 

One need not look too hard to find a cigarette on campus. Your best bet is to buy a pack for yourself by taking a hop, skip, and a jump down to the convenience store questionably called “Murder Mart,” (which is okay actually because it’s comical classism and New Haven fear-mongering as opposed the more serious varieties of classism and fear mongering that abound at Yale. Your second best bet is to go to a party. The vast majority of my super extensive and unbiased research was conducted at Edon and the Fence Club, primarily because I’m just not like other guys and vastly prefer the atmosphere of social clubs to that of frats.

A pattern developed across my conversations with Yale’s carbon clique. When the question of how one comes to smoke cigarettes was posed, one answer rose above the rest: “I definitely just have a nicotine addiction,” was what Yale College student Jimmy Shoeshine had to say. Like most of his peers, Shoeshine felt that a culture of nicotine consumption via electronic cigarettes was popularized in his teenage years due to the glacial pace of research and regulation regarding vaporized nicotine delivery systems. The early popularity of these devices was largely attributed to their blatant advertising towards minors, with flavors such as cotton candy, banana split, and gummy bear. Early access to nicotine that smelled like candy created a generation of teens and early twenty-somethings far more willing to smoke cigarettes, especially when drunk and disinhibited at a party. The powers that be, however, have dissuaded me from pursuing this line of investigative journalism any further because it is too, “sad,” and “serious,” and, “negatively impacts the interests of important donors.

And in all honesty, I couldn’t agree more with the powers that be. I am tired of news being so serious and fact-driven. We need more funny haha material, more feel-good journalism as a respite from the soul crushing tedium and disappointment of everyday life. In the interests of good vibes, dear reader, I have assembled some other, equally convincing explanations for the cigarette culture on Yale’s campus.

One student, who requested emphatically that her pseudonym be Cheech, told the News, “I smoke to spite the French.” Cheech went on to tell the news a compelling story about the time that she once sat at a café in France, utterly famished and in the mood for some French lunchtime cuisine. To her chagrin, the waiter could not help but notice her Americanness and in utter disdain asked if she wanted a Caesar salad. To spite the waiter and prove her knowledge of French lunchtime cuisine, Cheech ordered Pâté, which for those fortunate enough not to know, is a reviling conglomeration of meat and fat that the French force themselves to eat and pretend is delectable in the interest of cultural superiority. Cheech, who despises Pâté, ate every last morsel of it as an act of resistance against her snide French waiter. A cigarette, to her, is much like Pâté. “I choke it down to spite the French,” she said. Cheech added: “I also definitely have a nicotine addiction.

For those who do not smoke to stick it to baguette-wielders looking down their noses at Americans, there is, perhaps, another explanation–the psychosexual approach. Believe it or not, this approach can be used for more than explaining why every male author you have ever read wants to have sex with his mom. “I have an oral fixation,” Oedipus Rex, a drunk cigarette enthusiast, volunteered (almost too eagerly) in an interview. Before I could ask further questions, however, I felt the need to escape in fear that he might finish the cigarette and start sucking my thumb. (He had been eyeing throughout the interview).

Okay, smoking kills. So what? Who are we to step in, to disrupt the spread of patriotism, to prevent the liberation of one’s sexual libido, or to fight any other number of obscure reasons for smoking? So, next time you pass by a smoker, instead of thinking about how cool and aloof they look, or about the long-term health effects of cigarettes, consider the private war they are waging—the cause they are willing to die for by smoking. And the next time you light a cigarette, light it in honor of these individuals, who march through clouds of gray smoke not as addicts, but as heroes.

The post Smoking Is A Drag appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I spent countless hours this summer exploring the area around my home. My friends and I would wander, talk, listen to music and take pictures together. It was a simple and rewarding way to keep busy and entertained throughout the summer. It also provided a new way for me to observe my home, Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The little suburban world I grew up in, surrounded by the dead and discarded remnants of American industry, had always seemed so painfully mundane to me. Home felt like a place from which to escape — there had to be bigger cities and more intellectual vitality elsewhere. But, as summer crawled by and I continued to work and take pictures, I came to thoroughly appreciate the authenticity, the almost vulgar honesty, that life at home brought me.

About halfway through this past summer, I bought a 35mm manual SLR camera for $30 at a yardsale. In well over my head, with little prior knowledge of photography, I had to learn the process behind film photography in order to make use of my new camera. Equipped with a phone camera for the better half of my life, I was used to the spray-and-pray method of photography – take as many pictures as you need until you get it right and delete all the rest. Shooting film manually, however, forced me to slow down, take one or two well composed shots of a given subject, and move on.

A typical roll of 35mm film has either 24 or 36 exposures on it. With each exposure (i.e. photo that I want to take) I have to manually adjust the shutter speed and aperture settings on my camera based on readings from a light meter, as well as focus the image. Each shot requires its own series of considerations based on lighting, composition and the type of film I’m shooting on. Once I’ve used every exposure on a given roll of film, I have to get it developed and scanned, a process that can take up to two or three weeks. This delayed gratification to see how an image turns out has made me particularly concerned with the quality of my photos — every detail has to be correct to justify everything that goes into taking and seeing a single photo.

In an effort to elevate the quality of my photography, I began to intensify the attention I gave to my hometown and allowed myself to see beauty where I had before felt disdain. I became singularly concerned with capturing the essence of home through my photos — the pace of life, the charm of its people, its rich industrial history now replaced by economic stagnation and our proximity to nature. Rather than taking photos of everyone and everything in a documentary style, I narrowed down my subject matter, focusing primarily on architectural studies of abandoned industry and street photography.

My architectural studies gave me the opportunity to explore with my friends and to feel wonder at something I was once embarrassed of. No town proudly admits that it is a shell of what it once was, struggling to provide for its residents as job prospects grow farther and farther away from home. For the longest time it felt easier to look past these steel husks and the harsh realities they contained, shifting my gaze outward towards bigger cities and better opportunities. As I explored these spaces with friends, however, their history began to unfold and fascinate us — the fact that sprawling industrial complexes where countless people spent much of their lives working could become abandoned within a generation, and then drowned in overgrowth and graffiti soon after, gave us a resounding sense of temporality. With my camera in hand, I felt that I could draw art, but also anthropological insight, from these places, capturing their state following abandonment, focusing primarily on the ways in which nature attempts to reclaim itself from industry as well as the ways in which individuals leave their marks on these spaces. In the act of photography, I captured these spaces in a particular moment in time, where the nuances of these miniature histories formed the basis of what I found to be so beautiful about them.

I also took a particular interest in street photography over the summer. Walking the streets of Pottstown with a camera completely recontextualized my view of the town. It gave heart to a place that felt so lifeless; it personalized a place I thought I could just leave behind. The primacy of authenticity over aesthetic purpose necessitated by street photography vitalized my subjects, who were Pottstown residents going about their everyday lives. Through the lens of my camera, I was able to better grasp the appeal of not only my hometown but also its residents, whose lives embody a sense of sincerity which I feel Yale lacks. 

At Yale it feels like our language is shrouded in euphemism and mock concern for the events of the world as we ponder this or that from our neo-gothic castles, sleeping comfortably on the promise that we’ll be successful enough that none of these things will affect us. At home, however, I was grounded by my friends, coworkers and family into a real world, a world where detachments permitted by wealth and other forms of privilege that are all too common at Yale simply don’t exist.

I spent the summer working in construction alongside my father, doing manual labor which trivialized so much of my experience at Yale. This university produces a thinking class of individuals, who might only ever be theoretically concerned with what goes into making a building, but after digging the trenches myself, spending days in the beating sun, and looking down at my dirty calloused hands at the end of each day, the intellectual chatter of Yale felt so silly.

I know that part of me wanted to spend my summer at home working construction and taking photos for how distinctly non-Yale it was, with no prospects for academic or professional advancement and certainly no soul-searching abroad in Europe. Perhaps I chose to do so to be able to lord it over those Yale students who could stomach the opulence of the first year dinner, but I’d like to think I did it for a more idealistic reason: before the academic and professional pressures of Yale start to close in, I wanted a final chance to internalize the parts of myself that I won’t allow the university, or anything else, to touch.

With the memories of the place that I am leaving behind, Yale has become a strange new home for me. At the periphery of wealth and power and desperately holding on to the shreds of my idealism, these photos are keepsakes of a place which I hope to keep within me as I pass through life. Contained within them is an embrace of the vulgarity of truth, a dedication to find the beauty of everyday life and a refutation of the cynicism of the bottom dollar. While in themselves they are photos, they contain a world that I took into the palm of my hand and examined gently, finding a place which I am sad to leave behind.

The post PHOTO ESSAY: Coming Home appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“I always felt like I was moving through a portal as I went up and down the street, because the social and intellectual environment is so different at the two schools,” said Elizabeth Allison, an early student of the religion and ecology joint degree program.

Allison explained that students get the “perennial” through spiritual and ethical exploration at the Divinity School and the “urgent” through the study of environmental degradation and injustice at the School of the Environment. Somewhere during that walk between classes, the students are equidistant from both schools, and many feel that it represents the broader intersection of their disciplines. As these students walk up and down the street, they embrace the scientific and the spiritual, surrounded by a world dense with meaning in both directions. 

Yale, like many universities throughout the world, offers a wide range of joint degree programs for its graduate students. Joint degree programs are characterized by enrollment in two concurrent graduate programs offered between graduate schools in pursuit of one degree. The Yale School of the Environment offers 11 joint degree programs which its joint degree website explains “are ideal for students interested in applying environmental management frameworks to particular research or professional contexts beyond the scope of YSE’s traditional offerings.” The Yale Divinity School also has seven joint degree programs. 

Most joint degrees offered at Yale and elsewhere are considered practical with respect to professional applicability. But there is one School of the Environment and Divinity School joint degree program which does not at first glance appear to be as practical as its counterparts: the joint degree in religion and ecology. Professors John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, jointly appointed senior lecturers and research scholars at the School of the Environment have championed the necessity of the degree. Science and policy are necessary, they said, but not entirely sufficient, in addressing the environmental crises we face today. From their view, the incorporation of religious and ethical frameworks is crucial to understanding and appealing to the factors that motivate substantive change. Tucker and Grim have spent much of their careers expanding this field of interdisciplinary scholarship as the co-founders and directors of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, a forum that hosts conferences and publishes research from a range of religious and environmental scholarship which has been based at Yale since 2006.

Yale is one of the only universities in the country to offer a degree program of this kind and as such serves as the center for activism and scholarship rooted in the relationship between religion and ecology.

In addition to the joint degree program, which typically has an enrollment of five students per year, the cross listed courses offered between both the School of the Environment and the Divinity School are open to all students from any of Yale’s graduate schools as well as undergraduates from Yale College. 

A New Approach

The relationship between the Divinity School and the School of the Environment at Yale has been a formative experience for students because it exposes them to a new method of thinking about environmental issues that they carry with them throughout their education and professional career.

“The conjunction between the two schools has been really powerful in helping to galvanize interdisciplinary research and the ways in which environmental changes and harms are affecting communities and the religious responses of those communities,” said Sam King DIV ’22, a masters student in religion and ecology and a research associate at the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology.

Tucker and Grim have heavily emphasized interdisciplinarity in their role as jointly appointed professors and co-directors of the Forum on Religion and Ecology. This interdisciplinary network has created an environment where students feel more comfortable to explore new approaches to environmental issues.

“There was this sense of openness that, by virtue of me being in both programs at the same time, professors were more willing to let me explore the ideas that I wanted to,” said Anna Thurston DIV ENV ’19,  a former joint degree student and current research associate at the Forum on Religion and Ecology.

This freedom has also prompted students in the joint degree program to embrace nontraditional avenues of discussion and research to the environmental crises our planet faces today. In the scientific community, there is a widespread understanding of the managerial solutions for ecological problems — the technical decisions regarding things such as resource allocation, fossil fuel usage, forestry initiatives, etc. — but there is a lack of motivational components, such as religion or ethics, being incorporated into these same discussions, as Tucker has explained. The discipline of religion and ecology seeks to understand and utilize what motivates individuals towards implementing ecological solutions. The joint degree in religion and ecology combines a technical approach with a moral or faith-based approach so that students of the program have an understanding of both dimensions.  

This combined approach does not, however, represent a rejection of the necessary and scientifically supported solutions to environmental issues; rather, it represents a willingness to explore what can motivate people towards these solutions. 

“There has been a realization among these students that we need more than just kind of managerial or bureaucratic responses to the crisis,” said Willie Jennings, an associate professor of systematic theology and africana studies at the Divinity School. “We really need to be thinking very deeply about its underlying philosophical and theological problems.”

The students of this program are encouraged to make it their own through the coursework, research, and fieldwork that they partake in while enrolled, said Thurston. As Grim explained, “This is a new field and people have to invent themselves. They almost have to invent the positions that they are going to fulfill with this degree.” The joint degree program often attracts people who have a strong vision of how they might take up this interdisciplinary work in their own fields — whether as a priest, a forester or an academic, there are unmistakable benefits to the unique education that this joint degree program provides.

The History of Religion and Ecology at Yale

While Grim and Tucker acknowledge their role in progressing the interdisciplinary movement, they see Thomas Berry, a professor they studied under at Fordham University and a longtime mentor, as being foundational to the work they are doing today. Grim and Tucker, who are married, met as students of Berry and have continued his work in various directions. In addition to several other projects, they have co-authored a biography of his life and produced an Emmy award winning film called “Journey of the Universe” which is inspired by Berry’s essay, “The New Story.” 

However, the formal relationship between religion and ecology began at Harvard University. Grim and Tucker organized a series of 10 conferences on world religions and ecology hosted by the Center for the Study of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School between 1996 and 1998. The conferences, which had over 800 collaborators including leading scholars, theologians, religious leaders and environmental specialists from around the world, produced 10 volumes of articles written for the conferences. These articles would go on to serve as the foundation of a new field of study in religion.

“If we had done the conferences but not published the books, religion and ecology would not have been as well seeded,” said Tucker. “It really gave people the chance to get a feeling for what religion and ecology is all about.”

While Harvard was working to develop an environmental studies program, Tucker and Grim sought a university with a strong environmental foundation that could provide more comprehensive support to the ecological dimension of their work. At this time former Dean of the Yale School of the Environment — then called the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies — James Gustave Speth, had invited Grim and Tucker to Yale to establish a more formal relationship between religion and ecology at the University. With its century-long history of environmental study and a receptive faculty and administration, the School of the Environment was an ideal candidate.

Speth recognized the value in their work, saying “Their reception at YSE was a natural [one] it seemed to me, given the imperative of a new consciousness in addressing the environment,” and brought Grim and Tucker to the University in 2005. With the help of faculty members Margaret Farley of the Divinity School and Steve Kellert of the School of the Environment, who also went on to play mentorship roles for students of the program, the joint degree program in religion and ecology was established. As Attridge explained, Tucker and Grim’s joint appointments, along with cross-listing courses between the schools and offering the join-degree program, helped formalize the Divinity’s School’s long-held tradition of combining the theoretical and the practical.

“Given both their backgrounds — Mary Evelyn in Eastern religions and John in native American religions — it made an awful lot of sense,” Attridge said about Grim and Tucker’s joint appointments. “That proved to be a very fruitful relationship and has stimulated a lot of student interest at the Divinity School regarding issues of environmental ethics and the like.” 

The Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology was also established in 2006 with the arrival of Tucker and Grim. It has since played an active role in promoting the study of religion and ecology in academic and religious communities. The forum has hosted several conferences since it was founded at Yale, generating a wide range of scholarship in the growing field of religion and ecology. The forum has published as well as publicized numerous books and research articles, compiling a comprehensive body of work for the field of religion and ecology that can be found on their website. Students of the joint degree program also work closely with Tucker and Grim through the Forum on Religion and Ecology as research associates. The forum has always been at the academic center of the religion and ecology movement, but Tucker and Grim have undertaken an effort to make their work more accessible through a series of  massive open online courses titled, “Religion and Ecology: Restoring the Earth Community.” On the coursera platform, Tucker and Grim have 13 courses covering a wide range of world religions and their Journey of the Universe project, with over 30,000 students.

Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Pioneers of Interdisciplinary Thinking within the School of the Environment and the Divinity School

Both current and former students, faculty colleagues and deans of the School of the Environment and the Divinity School applaud Grim and Tucker for their dedication to engaging with the natural world, their students and their scholarship. The effect that this engagement has had is tangible in the enthusiasm of their students and admiration of their colleagues. Tucker and Grim have facilitated an environment for their students where they are welcome to experiment and encouraged to draw on personal experience, teaching the substantive material of religion and ecology to their students, but also showing them that there are different ways to think about and discuss the natural world and their place within it. 

“Mary Evelyn and John are really at the core of the intersection between the two schools. There is a lot of community around them as professors and mentors alike,” said Jordan Boudreau ’19, an architectural designer and environmental educator who took many of Tucker and Grim’s classes as an undergraduate. “[Tucker and Grim] were the two most important professors in my college career and I think they have also been really meaningful to a lot of other people.”

Jennings agreed with Boudreau on the positive impact of Grim and Tucker on students and faculty alike at Yale. “They are a real treasure here at Yale and a real force in the global conversation about this relationship between religion and ecology,” he said.

Samuel King, a research associate at the Forum on Religion and Ecology and a third-year master’s student in religion and ecology, is in accordance with Jennings: “Professors Grim and Tucker have been absolutely transformative in being bridge builders between the School of the Environment and the Divinity School, and more profoundly, between ways of knowing — between a more quantitative, reductionistic bottle of science and a more holistic view of religious communities and the values of religions and cultures throughout the world.”

“They are part of the bedrock of the broader field of religion and ecology beyond Yale. There is tremendous respect for the foundation that they have laid for these interdisciplinary dialogues on the whole, not just for religion and ecology,” said Rachel Holmes, the first student of the joint degree program and an urban forestry strategist for North America at the Nature Conservancy. “They were doing it before it was the cool thing to do, before everyone was clamoring for interdisciplinary scientists.” 

The Student Experience

The experience of students at the intersection of the School of the Environment and the Divinity School is intellectually diverse, providing them with a space especially conducive to powerful conversation amongst one another and the formulation of a new way of looking at the world. Students gain an exposure to the world religions and their ways of understanding the environment through the curriculum of the joint degree program and the Forum on Religion and Ecology.

“I think it helped me and the other students destabilize or question the relationship that our modern capitalist world has with the natural world,” Boudreau said about the joint degree program. “The Western capitalist world has a very exploitative and extractive relationship with nature that is made to feel natural. I learned through those courses that there has been such a plurality of ways that people have understood their relationship with the natural world and with local ecosystems.”  

In many ways, joint degree program students are encouraged to bring their relationship with their faith, their past experiences, as well as their personal interests to the table for discussion with their peers. While students enrolled in the dual degree program tend to lean towards one end of the religion and ecology spectrum, the program allows them to incorporate their interests and expand their views in both directions.

“In my cohort of those of us who were pursuing dual degrees, we all came at it from very different perspectives,” Thurston said. “Some came with a more religious perspective — I had a classmate who was getting ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church who wanted to be able to speak on environmental justice issues. I was going in with a more environmental humanities perspective. But you can really see how it could attract different people based on their end goals.”

Student organizations such as FERNS — Faith, Environment, Religion, Nature, Spirituality — or the Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology at Yale — GCRE — an annual interdisciplinary graduate conference organized by graduate students of the two schools, are further examples of how students might incorporate their various interests outside of the classroom.

With an understanding of both the technical and motivational solutions to the environmental issues we face today, the students of the joint degree program bring a unique perspective to the ways in which we interact with the environment and one another. While students of the program often have vastly different interests, they are equipped to serve the environment in a way that few other students in the world are.   

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On April 7, in the 97th annual Guggenheim Fellowship competition, Brooks, a professor of African American studies, women’s, gender and sexuality studies and music, and Svolik, a professor of political science, were among 180 individuals awarded the fellowship from a wide range of artistic fields and scholarly disciplines. Brooks was named as the sole recipient of the fellowship in the theater arts and performance studies category. Svolik was one of two recipients in the political science category. 

According to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation website, the fellowships are given to “mid-career individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts and exhibit great promise for their future endeavors.” Brooks and Svolik will continue to produce research in their respective fields through a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation.

“It’s wonderful to be included in a community populated by so many of my peers in academia and the arts whom I deeply admire,” Brooks wrote to the News, going on to discuss her intended work through the fellowship, the first full-length study of the 1935 “folk opera” Porgy and Bess. “I’m very pleased to have the support of the Guggenheim to not only dissect and illuminate the multiple dimensions of this classic and yet deeply troubling and problematic text but to also tell a different story in which generations of Black women creatives have subverted and reinvented composer George Gershwin and librettist/lyricist DuBose Heyward’s material.”

Both professors have received recognition for recent books — Brooks recieved the 2021 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award for “Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound,” and Svolik took home the best book award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association for “The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.” 

In addition to the experience that can be gained by the fellowships themselves, the professors’ departments and students also stand to benefit from their work through the fellowship. 

Brooks has already indicated interest in leading an undergraduate seminar on Porgy and Bess in the African American Studies Department upon her return from sabbatical, noting the timeliness of the decision as Black feminist filmmaker Dee Rees is working on a new version of the opera.

“Professor Brooks’ Guggenheim fellowship is exciting news and a much-deserved honor for her,” Jacqueline Goldsby, chair of the African American Studies Department, wrote to the News. “Professor Brooks’ writing on African American music and literature, sound studies and Black feminist theory is breaking open so many new questions and archives; she deserves the Guggenheim year to dig into her next project on George Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess. All of us in African American Studies — faculty and students — are thrilled that she’s won this prize fellowship.”

Svolik, whose work focuses on comparative politics, political economy and formal political theory, will use his fellowship in political science to undertake a number of paper-length projects as well as to synthesize years of research on democratic backsliding into a book manuscript, “Downsizing Democracy: Why Ordinary People Acquiesce to Authoritarianism.”

Svolik is seeking to address a lack of empirical evidence and rigorous theoretical framework in extant research to approach the question: “When can we realistically expect democratic publics to serve as a check on the authoritarian temptations of elected politicians?”

“My ambition for the book is to offer a rigorous explanation and the most comprehensive evidence to date for when and why democratically elected politicians succeed in subverting democracy,” Svolik wrote in his statement of plans for the Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Svolik said he sees this work as addressing one of the most important intellectual challenges facing social science today.

Chair of the Political Science Department Gregory Huber said that the department is “thrilled” about Svolik’s fellowship, and that his success continues Yale’s “excellent history” with the award.

“Professor Svolik’s early research on how autocrats retain power has now turned to the equally important question of how democracies can backslide to autocracy, in part, with popular support,” Huber wrote to the News. “Understanding the fragility of democracy is at the forefront of efforts to understand patterns observed worldwide in which the move to democratize is far from a one-way street.”

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925.

The post Two Yale professors selected as Guggenheim Fellows appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“I didn’t know who my advisor was,” Talenfeld ’25 said. “She never reached out to me, ever. Then we had a little ten minute Zoom where she was like ‘it seems like you know what you’re doing’, and then we never talked again.” 

In interviews with the News, dozens of Yale College students recounted similar experiences with the University’s advising system. Many students emphasized that their advisors were friendly and willing to provide support, but that they lacked the knowledge to make recommendations on selecting courses or other academic opportunities. Others simply never met their advisors at all.

Many four-year colleges, including Yale, tout low class sizes and close student-faculty relationships as integral components of the liberal arts education. But interviews with faculty, administration and students revealed a growing impression that the state of advising at Yale is falling short of students’ needs and that the system is due for an overhaul.

“I think advising has gone downhill,” said Jay Gitlin ’71 MUS ’74 GRD ’82 ’02, a professor of history who advises around a dozen students, ranging from first years to seniors. “Generally speaking, when I was a student, faculty met with students fairly often, and there was a sense of camaraderie. And I think that’s declined a little bit.”

His ideal advisor, Gitlin said, should act as a “uncle.” He recalled his own advisor, professor emeritus of history Howard Lomar, treating him as a member of his family.

Yale undergraduates are typically assigned a slate of advisors to guide them through course selection and help them access career and extracurricular resources. First-year advisors, typically fellows within a student’s residential college, are generally the first step. Residential college deans and heads are another source of early support, as are first-year counselors, who are typically closest in experience to issues that underclassmen face. Rising sophomores may then choose a new faculty member to become an academic advisor or remain with their previous first-year advisor.  Later on, as students begin choosing majors and concentrations, the directors of undergraduate studies in each program or department become primary advisors, as do the faculty members who ultimately serve as thesis advisors. All in all, students have access to at least half a dozen advisors during their four years at Yale.

But many students report underwhelming experiences with advising — especially with the first-year academic advisor system. Out of 35 undergraduate students asked by the News whether they found the advising system to be helpful, 30 said that they did not. Some reported that they had not expected much out of their advisors to begin with, while others said they felt let down and struggled with constructing schedules or exploring various fields on their own. Students noted that first-year academic advisors were often unable to answer questions about course selection or did not have knowledge of Yale College. 

“I feel like my advisor had good intentions, but I didn’t find our meeting particularly helpful,” Cindy Li ’25 said. “After the first meeting, I didn’t really feel like it was worth reaching out for a second one.”

First-year advisors are volunteers drawn from nearly every corner of the University and are not necessarily professors. They may bring a wide range of experience to their advising, but this sometimes comes at the expense of their ability to offer specific advice for undergraduate course selection and long-term planning, students said. 

“My advisor has been pretty helpful as far as navigating Yale goes, helping me explore the resources and options that Yale students have available to them such as study abroad programs,” Justin Dominic ’25 said. “But when it comes to academic advising, I feel like they haven’t been as helpful.”

Another issue with the advising system, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, is that students are not meeting with their advisors with the same frequency and depth.

Several students interviewed by the News have only met with their advisors once since the beginning of the year — for the mandatory initial meetings that occured in August and September. 

“The first and only time we met was at the beginning of last semester,” Samuel Getachew ’25 told the News.

University administrators, Dean of Undergraduate Education Pamela Schirmeister are exploring ways to make these advising relationships less transactional while encouraging follow-up meetings. She further emphasized the significance of understanding student needs with respect to advising, noting a possible disconnect in what students and faculty expect from the advising relationship. 

“I think the faculty and the administration feel that there should be holistic advising conversations, not ‘take these six courses,’ but ‘what do you want out of your education?’” Schirmeister said. “But my sense is that students do not want to have those conversations. And I feel in a way, what they want is something more transactional, like out of these four physics courses, how do I know which one to take?”

Questions about specific courses are often directed at first-year counselors, or FroCos. FroCo Luis León Medina ’22 explained that many of the academic needs of first-year students can be met with the help of peer-to-peer advising, with students who have had years of experience in Yale College providing first years with practical scheduling and course selection advice.

But while this system has proven helpful for many first-year students, it cannot fill all the gaps left by the current advising system, León Medina said. FroCos can provide advice based on their experience, but are limited as a group in the breadth of academic subjects on which they can offer insight.

“While the FroCo job is a team effort, there are limitations of the number of majors that a group of 8 -10 seniors has sufficient knowledge about to be able to support every first-year properly,” León Medina wrote to the News. “Yale students love being able to provide support. However, peer-to-peer shouldn’t be the only resource for students. It shouldn’t be solely in my hands as FroCo (as someone majoring in sociology) to sway a student one way or another.”

Administrators appear to be aware of the system’s shortcomings: about five years ago, a new committee called the Committee on Advising, Placement and Enrollment was formed. This committee, alongside various University deans and administrators, enacted a number of policy changes, such as the shift to an early registration system as well as the removal of the signature requirement for schedule approval. 

But professors such as Gitlin see the ensuing shift to online advising as harmful to the characteristically personal component of the advisor-advisee relationship. English professor Leslie Brisman specifically condemned the elimination of the signature requirement, and Schirmeister concurred, explaining that while it was intended to make advisor meetings more than just about getting a signature, instead it made the meetings stop occurring altogether.

“Now students do not need to consult us at all before more or less deciding on their programs, and even if they do, we are no longer asked to approve a program but to attest that we have spoken with the student about it,” Brisman wrote to the News in February. “Yale is still the Ivy League school with the most commitment to teaching, but the abolition of faculty advising is a blow to the values that commitment represents.”

The Committee on Advising, Placement and Enrollment is not convening in 2021-22, but the Committee on Teaching, Learning and Advising will meet. Advising was not a focus of that committee this year, Schirmeister said, but will likely be taken up by the committee in depth during the next academic year.

When considering why the advising system seems to have unraveled in recent years, Karin Gosselink, the director of the undergraduate Academic Strategies Program and a co-supervisor of the First-Generation, Low-Income Community Initiative, said that the University has not kept pace with the needs of a student body that is increasingly coming from more varied backgrounds. Yale has undergone radical change in the diversity of its students with respect to racial and ethnic diversity, socioeconomic diversity and a diversity in past educational experience, she noted. These differences in student experience, she said, mean that the advising system must adjust as well. 

“The need that’s emerging is this differential between the expectations that the old system had when we had a more homogenous student body with a more homogenous degree of experiences and the radical diversity of our student experiences,” Gosselink said.

Faculty may also be discussing the state of advising now because of the establishment of the Poorvu Center and the increased visibility of low-income students on campus.

Changing advising seems to be a process of trial-and-error and could take some years. The elimination of the signature requirement, for example, served as a reminder that a policy shift meant to strengthen the advising system — and which had seen approval in focus groups conducted by Schirmeister and another dean — can, in practice, end up having negative effects on advisor-advisee relationships. 

Risa Sodi, assistant dean of Yale College and director of advising and special programs at Yale, told the News that she is working with Dean of Academic Programs George Levesque and Schirmeister to develop a summer advising plan, which they hope to finalize in the next few weeks.

“A team within the YCDO has been working on designing enhancements to advising, to be implemented as early as this summer,” Sodi wrote to the News. “A range of options is under consideration, with a focus on providing summer advising to incoming first-year students, transfer students, and Eli Whitney students, and better aligning advising with our online registration system. We hope to be able to announce some new initiatives soon.”

Sodi also acknowledged the continued role of the dean of Yale College in addressing undergraduate advising through various responsibilities. The dean is in charge of convening the Teaching, Learning and Advising Committee as well as maintaining regular contact with heads of college, directors of undergraduate studies, department chairs and the Office of Undergraduate Education. The policy agenda of the next dean will likely influence the future of undergraduate advising, she said. 

Yale College Dean Marvin Chun concludes his term on June 30, 2022. His successor has not yet been announced.

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The Russian army has not had the swift victory in Ukraine that Putin anticipated, and many experts are saying the war is far from over. Ukrainian military efforts have been supported globally, supplemented by sanctions on Russia, talks of European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership for Ukraine and efforts to hold Russia accountable under the standards of international law. In an address given in Warsaw, Poland on Saturday, President Biden echoed global sentiments, providing a sweeping condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and said that Putin could not remain in power.

“At moments like this, it gives me great hope when I see Yalies unite around our shared humanity to support peace abroad, and to support one another on campus,” University President Peter Salovey said on a recent podcast about the war.

History Professor Timothy Snyder explained on the podcast that unintentionally published victory declarations by Russian news outlets indicate that the initial invasion aimed to achieve a complete military victory over Ukraine, and then subsequently upheave the political order in the country through the elimination of political and civil elites. 

This initial goal failed, and professor of political science David Cameron wrote to the News that Russia has since rolled back the scope of its offensive, focusing now on areas contested by Russian-backed separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. 

“The change in focus was announced by the Russian ministry of defense,” Cameron wrote. “Russia will now be focused on securing the portions of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts [regions] in eastern Ukraine that have been controlled by the pro-Russian separatists since 2014, and extending the territory controlled by the two statelets to most if not all of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. But it should also be said that the war, and the outrageous crimes against humanity, are still going on in the rest of Ukraine and no doubt will continue for some time to come.”

Associate professor of European cultural and intellectual history Marci Shore wrote to the News regarding Ukrainian morale amidst the war, noting that it “seems to be extraordinary.”

Shore also emphasized the necessity of victory felt among Ukrainians as their country’s status as a free and sovereign nation has been jeopardized. 

“The Ukrainian soldiers are much more determined to win than the Russian soldiers appear to be: this is Putin’s war, and many of those carrying out his sadistic orders feel no compelling reason to do so other than fear, conformity, and a failure to think,” Shore wrote to the News. “For the Ukrainians, on the contrary, the stakes are all or nothing. No one in Ukraine wants to live under Putin’s neo-totalitarianism. It’s not about ethnicity or language. It really is about freedom and human dignity.”

Snyder explained on Salovey’s recent Yale Talk podcast that despite propagandistic narratives being pushed through Russian media outlets about the intentions and status of the war in Ukraine, there have been instances of resistance to the conflict amongst Russians.

The extent of this resistance, however, is unknown. Shore wrote that dissenting voices remain difficult to find through the tight control of Putin’s regime.

“It’s very hard to gauge public opinion in Russia because the regime is so repressive, and the penalties for expressing any opposition are so high,” Shore wrote to the News.

Since the conflict began, there have been efforts to uphold Russia’s accountability to international law. Former Dean of Yale Law School and current law professor Harold Hongju Koh argued on behalf of Ukraine alongside a team of international lawyers at the International Court of Justice in the Hague over two weeks ago.

While little has developed legally in the past few weeks regarding the ability for international institutions to take substantive action in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, law professor Lea Brilmayer told the News that, as Russia continues to violate international law, evidence will continue to accumulate for use in future litigation. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violates article 2(4) of the UN charter.

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Blight appeared in a Feb. 25 broadcast of the podcast, which “features intimate conversations with today’s biggest luminaries,” according to its description on the NPR mobile app. His appearance drew from his 2018 interview on the same podcast, in which he discussed his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.” The book went on to inspire the HBO documentary “Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches,” on which he also served as a historical advisor and interview subject.

O’Rourke appeared on a Feb. 28 broadcast of Fresh Air to discuss her new book “The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness,” as well as the impact of long COVID-19. The Invisible Kingdom was released the next day, on March 1, to critical acclaim and positive reception from those with chronic illnesses. 

“I had two aims for the book,” O’Rourke told the News. “The first was to help the tens of millions of people with autoimmune diseases feel heard and seen in a way that they have not been, and the second was to galvanize a national conversation around these invisible illnesses.”

O’Rourke’s book began as an article for The New Yorker in 2013, but it became a book project that she sought to supplement with further research and accounts of her personal experience. She spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, speaking with medical historians, scientists and researchers, gathering the foundational research for her book.

The Invisible Kingdom proved to be a personal endeavor for O’Rourke, who has suffered from an autoimmune disease for much of her adult life. Her experience living with a chronic illness that was not fully recognized or validated mirrors that of many others, making her book personally resonant for those in similar positions, she told the News.

“She steers ably between the Scylla of cynicism and the Charybdis of romanticism, achieving an authentically original voice and, perhaps more startlingly, an authentically original perspective,” Andrew Solomon wrote in his New York Times review of O’Rourke’s book. “A poet by choice and an interpreter of medical doctrine by necessity, she brings an elegant discipline to her description of a horrific decade lost to overdetermined symptoms that were misdiagnosed or dismissed as hypochondria.”

O’Rourke’s book has received widespread national acclaim for its careful consideration of issues at the edge of medical certainty. By critically considering the way medicine has historically dealt with chronic illnesses such as her own, O’Rourke sought to bring about a “public reckoning” with previous practices, especially the misattribution of real physical symptoms to solely psychological causes, she told the News.

She further explained that one of her greatest challenges while writing her book was maintaining the balance between the technical and the abstract. Her experience as a writer, poet and editor informed her work thoroughly, especially when it came to conveying ideas which seemed previously “illegible” to her.

“As both a writer and an editor, I care a lot about how we translate knowledge in a compelling way that makes people want to learn and consider questions that they haven’t considered before — that is a really urgent problem for me,” O’Rourke said.

Blight appeared on the NPR broadcast days before O’Rourke to discuss the life of Frederick Douglass. His appearance was recorded in 2018 around the time that his book was published, but it was reused in the Feb. 25 episode of Fresh Air. The interview was aired in conjunction with the release of an HBO documentary on Frederick Douglass. Blight spoke about major events and figures in Douglass’ life as well as his reputation as a powerful orator. 

Blight’s 2018 book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” was credited by director Julia Marchesi as being the inspiration for her newly released documentary “Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches.”

The documentary is comprised of five major speeches delivered at critical moments in Douglass’ life. These speeches, powerfully delivered by various actors, were supplemented by commentary from scholars including Blight, who contextualized them within Douglass’ life and the broader history of the period.

“What you lose in converting to a documentary is an enormous amount of subtlety and detail, but you gain something too,” Blight told the News. “Film is a medium that can be very powerful at evoking feelings, ideas and a sense of place.”

Blight acknowledged the limitations of converting dense historical material into a documentary but also considered what the medium permits. He described the film as “aesthetically and historically powerful,” noting the value of hearing Douglass’ speeches performed by the documentary’s cast.

Blight also noted that the major benefit of this film is that it will reach a broader audience, exposing them to an essential figure in American history. He considers Douglass to be the most capable individual of the 19th century to capture the meaning of slavery and its relationship with the values of American democracy.

He also noted the timeliness of the documentary in relation to Douglass’ consideration of topics of democracy and race in America.

“No one spoke more poignantly, brilliantly, lastingly on the issue of race than Douglass,” Blight said.

“Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History.

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The recent study from Santos and three contributors from the University of Bristol — Catherine Hobbs, Sarah Jelbert and Bruce Hood — revealed that participation in credit-bearing online happiness courses can have a protective effect on student mental health. The study, published Feb. 16, examined the impacts of the virtual “Science of Happiness” course on students from the University of Bristol compared to a wait-list control group. The online course was modeled after Santos’ popular “Psychology and the Good Life” class, offered at Yale. Using various self-reporting measures — including well-being, perceptions of academic performance, positive expectations and interest, engagement, feedback and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic — the researchers examined the benefits and limitations of their online happiness course.  

“​​As a result of participating in the course, students maintained levels of mental well-being during the lockdown compared to a match control group who experienced significant decline in mental well-being as well as increased anxiety,” Bruce Hood, University of Bristol professor of developmental psychology in society, wrote to the News. “This suggests that the course may strengthen resilience during times of adversity.”

Due to the pandemic, interest in online courses has increased significantly. 

The study is considered by its authors to be among the first to test the efficacy of online courses in improving well-being in a university academic course setting.

“There is a real interest now in whether you see the same sorts of benefits from courses conducted online versus courses conducted face-to-face,” said Sarah Jelbert, a lecturer in the School of Psychological Science at the University of Bristol. 

The researchers sought to examine whether online courses were capable of delivering on the goals of existing in-person options.

The article explained that many universities use a “reactive, individualized approach” to treat mental health, which typically takes the form of mental health services and treatment. Courses such as the online “The Science of Happiness,” however, are intended to provide students with tools to better understand their own mental health and take measures to prevent it from declining.

“The goal of classes like these is to give students strategies for improving their well-being,” Santos wrote to the News. “Classes like these are not meant to be a substitute for therapy or mental health counseling but would be complementary in the sense that they teach students concrete evidence-based skills they can use to improve their resilience and flourishing, ones that can be used to help students navigate the stresses of college life.”

Santos also recently appeared in The New York Times Magazine to discuss her work, drawing especially from her students’ understandings of happiness and their experiences with “Psychology and the Good Life.” 

In addition to her class, which has become exceedingly popular at Yale, Santos also has a podcast called “The Happiness Lab” that currently has over 35 million downloads.

“It’s been humbling that so many people have resonated with the class I developed here at Yale and the podcast that followed from it,” Santos wrote. “It’s also been amazing to see that so many universities around the world are beginning to teach similar courses for their students, especially since we’re starting to see evidence that classes like these can indeed help student resilience.” 

With the positive reception of Santos’ work and that of her co-authors at the University of Bristol, the researchers have indicated interest in continuing to explore means of improving the courses as well as identifying the factors that make students especially likely to benefit from the course.

The collaborators have also indicated interest in expanding course offerings beyond Yale and the University of Bristol.

“What we really want to do is take these results and apply them to get more universities on board with this idea of embedding teaching about happiness into the curriculum,” Jelbert said.

A total of 477 Yale College students were enrolled in Santos’ “Psychology and the Good Life” as of Feb. 9.

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