The truck, sponsored by the conservative advocacy group Accuracy in Media as part of its multi-stop “Campus Accountability Campaign,” appeared on campus as early as 11:55 a.m. on Nov. 16, outside Atticus Bookstore Cafe on Chapel Street, and was still present as of roughly 3:05 p.m., when it was spotted near the Watson Center on Yale’s campus. The truck appeared near Pauli Murray College on Prospect Street around 3:30 p.m., and it was seen around 3:50 p.m. on Broadway.

At least six students’ names and faces rotated through the truck’s screen, making them victims of a public shaming tactic known as “doxxing,” in which an individual’s personal information is spread publicly by an unauthorized individual. Five of those six individuals are graduate students of color. 

This is not the first doxxing truck to visit the Ivy League.

The truck was first seen outside Harvard University’s campus on Oct. 11. Two weeks later, a similar truck visited Columbia University in New York City and returned on Nov. 1. These public doxxing campaigns exposed mostly Black and brown people, some of whom are undocumented, Teen Vogue reported on Oct. 27 based on interviews with two Harvard students.

Also on Nov. 16, AIM’s X account proudly announced the doxxing truck’s presence, writing, “our Campus Accountability Campaign is at @Yale today to highlight the rampant antisemitism from radical ‘scholars’ on campus.” 

The Tweet links to a website that encourages students to petition the University to “take a stand against the antisemites on campus who issued a statement blaming Israel for the actions of terrorists.” It is unclear to what statement the group refers.

A typo on the website claimed as of 3 p.m. on Nov. 16 that the petition will go to “Columbia’s Board of Trustees,” a sign of the organization’s hasty effort to reach multiple Ivy League campuses in a brief period of time.

This is a developing story that the News will continue to follow.

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Scholl allegedly forced him to hold meetings in the early hours of the morning, and Yousif — a graduate student in the department of psychology — feared retaliation if he declined. Yousif also said that Scholl would make demeaning comments about other faculty and students.

After Yousif left the lab, the relationship between himself and Scholl soured, and the two consistently levied criticism against the other. Yousif lambasted the culture in Scholl’s lab while Scholl took issue with Yousif’s character and quality of work. 

Yousif claimed it took almost three years to get the University to conduct an official investigation into Scholl’s behavior — and he found the verdict and consequences inadequate. Scholl was found guilty of only two of eight allegations Yousif made about him by the panel, though they admitted Scholl’s behavior was “intentional,” “threatening and coercive” and “occasioned serious psychological harm.”

Yet Scholl received only two behavioral training “recommendations” from the panel, as well as the requirement that he write an apology letter.

 “When you run into a real serious conflict … like Sami did, then there has to be a mechanism in place to adjudicate that,” professor Richard Aslin, Yousif’s adviser in the case, said, “and the advocacy for the student is essentially completely absent.” 

As Yousif’s adviser, Scholl had been his primary academic and professional connection to the world of psychology. But what happens when advisory relationships go awry? What resources do parties have to ameliorate the situation, and whom does the University take care to protect?

Yousif and his advocates have been sure of one thing for half a decade: not the students.

The graduate adviser

After getting settled into their department, Yale’s graduate students connect with a faculty adviser. The adviser is usually a faculty member in the student’s department and often one who works in the student’s specific area of interest.

Per the GSAS Guide to Advising Processes for Faculty and Students, a graduate adviser’s job is to assist their students in producing a successful research project and train them to succeed in their desired career path.

Yousif noted that he had chosen to study at Yale in part because of Scholl’s field-leading research in visual perception and the work that went on in his lab.

“I have always emphasized Brian’s many strengths as a mentor. In his best moments, he is, truly, a great adviser,” Yousif wrote in a statement obtained by the News. “I do not wish for any of these criticisms to take away from that; I do not wish to demonize him.”

On the day that Yousif left, Scholl wrote in an email to Yousif that while his decision was “a 1 percent relief, it is mostly a 99 percent crushing disappointment.” 

“I am truly sorry that I have failed you so dismally,” Scholl added in the email, which has been obtained by the News. He asked Yousif to come up with precisely how he had felt frustrated in the lab, and to meet with him to discuss those issues later on.

Yousif moved into the lab of Frank Keil, the Charles C & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology and Linguistics. 

Though Yousif and Scholl had initially parted on good terms, tensions escalated after Yousif claimed a remaining member of Scholl’s lab had framed an abstract similarly to a prior paper of his own.

Scholl eventually accused Yousif of creating a toxic and abusive environment for a number of female lab members. He requested that Yousif sever any lingering involvement with his lab — including ending his inclusion in both completed and upcoming projects.

Yousif, in turn, complained that Scholl attempted to exclude him from department-wide flights, dinners and meetings he deserved to attend as an involved member of the department. Scholl, in response, claimed that he was protecting other students who were uncomfortable with Yousif’s presence. 

The reporting process

Yousif said he felt obligated to ask Yale to investigate Scholl’s conduct. This began a process in which Yousif felt volleyed between numerous administrative avenues. Each administrator would at some point tell him that he was in the wrong place to get the help he was searching for, and bounce him along.

“I was told again and again that I should not ruin my ‘promising career’  by pursuing this further,” he told the News. 

Multiple members of Scholl’s lab, Yale’s Psychology department and Yousif’s past collaborators and mentors would also become enmeshed in the dispute as it wore on. 

The first party Yousif sought help with was then-Director of Graduate Studies Greg McCarthy. When Yousif expressed concerns regarding potential retaliation from Scholl, he says, he was told he was “probably overreacting.”

Deans Michelle Nearon, Tamar Gendler and Debra Fischer would eventually look into Yousif’s case. They chose to interview current members of Scholl’s lab rather than Yousif and other former lab affiliates labmates. 

Yousif found this investigation insufficient and felt as though his interactions with upper-level faculty were becoming adversarial.

The Faculty Standard Review Committee conducted the only formal, committee-wide investigation into Yousif’s case, which began in October 2021 and spanned 11 months. 

On Feb. 15, 2022, in the middle of the committee’s investigation, Emory Professor Stella Lourenco, Yousif’s undergraduate thesis adviser, received an email from an account with the name deb.fischer.yale@gmail.com. The account, which used Debra Fischer’s email signature, asked Laurenco if she had any “grievances” she would share with Fischer for a “review” Yale was conducting on Yousif.

This address was not actually Debra Fischer’s, and when Laurenco notified Yousif of the email he asked Yale about it, former FSRC chair James Baron told him that Fischer had not had any connection with the email and, to Yousif’s knowledge, did not further investigate.

Yousif stated that he was upset at what he viewed to be a lack of action on the committee’s part to find the perpetrator of the false email, who he suspected was attempting to interfere in the investigation, and said that he was “terrified” at the prospect of a force working to endanger his career prospects. However, he hoped the committee would resolve the situation.

The committee completed its review in September of 2022, three years after Yousif first began petitioning the University to look into Scholl’s behavior and the complaints of abuse that Scholl claimed various women had made against him.

The panel decided that Scholl “had behaved in a manner that was substantially inconsistent with faculty standards, that was reckless or intentional, and that had done serious harm to Mr. Yousif.”

However, no required action was taken to rectify the situation on a personal or administrative level: the panel merely recommended that Professor Scholl receive training and coaching on communication and mentorship and that he write an apology letter to Yousif.

Scholl would not send the apology letter — a paragraph in length — to Yousif until December.

“Although we haven’t had any direct contact with each other of any sort for almost three years, I wanted to write to you directly now to apologize for the language in several of my emails to you from those many years ago that the investigatory panel found to have had ‘threatening, intimidating and unduly harsh language,’ and to have been conveyed ‘in a manner that we find at times to be troubling,’” Scholl’s letter reads.

The report itself said that a primary reason for the dispute was “that there were no clear policies or procedures for Professor Scholl to rely on in seeking to rectify the situation.”

There is no formal training for faculty or administration for mediating non-Title IX conflicts, so both Scholl and Yousif had to go about their mediation efforts without help.

The panel decided, however, that this lack of resources meant they could not force Scholl to face severe consequences because there were no available avenues for him to solve the dispute. They did not mention the potential effect this hole in their disciplinary policy had on Yousif, the complainant.

The panel quoted Keil’s assessment that “Sami was being forcibly excluded in a very painful way,” and that he “would have dropped out of graduate school if that happened to [him.]”

Scholl, for his part, told the News that his conduct toward Yousif was informed by the fact that Yousif had been a “source of considerable trauma” within the lab. He added that the panel had found a rightful issue with the tone, but not the content, of his communication with Yousif in 2019.

“I think the panel’s ultimate decision was eminently fair, and I do regret the strong tone I used in several cases,” Scholl told the News. “At the same time, I continue to believe these women, and my support for them is unwavering.”

Professional consequences

Yousif feared he would face professional consequences because of his tense relationship with Scholl and because of his exclusion from Scholl’s lab — something that attracted him to Yale’s graduate school in the first place.

Keil studies higher level cognition and child development, so his work did not directly align with Yousif’s interests. This deviation in study left Yousif discouraged. He said he was worried that he would have to work much harder to achieve the same career milestones he might have reached had Scholl’s lab been a tenable work space for him.

In a conversation with the News, he admitted that those fears had come to fruition.

“I’ve been ostracized,” Yousif said. “If you want a job at a decent place where you’re going to actually have the resources to support students and do the work that you want to do [after graduate school], you know, that [likelihood] is maybe one in 20 … So when someone is … pulling levers in the background and affecting those odds, the worst case scenario is that they have in a very significant way altered the course of your career and your life.”

Yousif, Aslin and Keil all noted that as a graduate student, one’s early career depends almost entirely on connections made with current professors and researchers in one’s field of interest. 

The pressure to “do right” is enormous, as are the consequences of a relationship gone sour.

“That’s where conflicts between students and faculty need extra attention because of the critical nature of conflict at that level,” Aslin explained.

A lack of further options

When Provost Strobel told Yousif of the committee’s decision, he was dismayed and concerns about professional retaliation remained. He sent Strobel a series of questions about the case, but they went unanswered.

Further discouraged, Yousif went next to President Salovey himself to request an appeal on the committee’s ruling. Salovey refused to consider the appeal, stating to Yousif that it had been submitted too late — the deadline for submitting an appeal was seven days, and Yousif took 23.

But Yousif claimed the appeal process, buried deep in the faculty handbook, was hidden from where he might reasonably find it.

Moreover, Yousif noted, “they don’t follow the rules in the faculty handbook.” Indeed, the handbook itself states that investigations are meant to be completed and reported ”within a reasonable period of time, normally within 90 days of its receipt of a complaint.” Yousif’s took 11 months from the time of its formation, and 13 from his complaint email to Strobel.

“It seemed like various parties at different levels wanted to follow policy, but also wanted to devote more energy to other issues and just assumed that Yousif’s case would go away with time, or when he left Yale,” Keil told the News. “I would have hoped that the university would have seen this entire event as an opportunity to directly address a problem that goes far beyond this one incident.”

Keil noted that he remains “deeply worried about other graduate students at Yale who might feel trapped in similar situations.”

In the end, the University made no official changes to policy in student-faculty conflict mediation, and Yousif claimed that no one ever told him whether or not Scholl completed the training he was recommended.

Scholl, for his part, stated to the News that he had completed the training, and that it was “extensive, fascinating and tremendously valuable.”

Yale University spokesperson Karen Peart wrote in a statement to the News that the University “has developed a shared set of principles regarding the responsibilities of faculty as educators, scholars, and members of the Yale community. The University provides extensive resources to address any concerns that these faculty standards of conduct have not been met, and welcomes input and comment about these complaint processes.”

Peart responded for Salovey, Fischer, Gendler and Nearon.

Aslin views these issues as a small part of an endemic issue in graduate study.

“The fact that this did not go to a committee formed out of the Provost’s office until almost four years after the initial incident is just mind boggling to me,” Aslin noted. “[Students don’t] know where to go … and there’s no advocate for the student.”

Aslin also noted the “run-around” Yousif and other students had to struggle through to find the appropriate channels to lodge and follow through with their complaints. Faculty turnover in Deans’ offices frequently, and lines of communication — especially those pertaining to student complaints — get dropped.

Before arriving at Yale, Aslin served as the vice provost, dean of the college of arts and sciences and chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Rochester. He resigned in 2016 after filing a joint lawsuit against the university for its mishandling of a sexual harassment complaint in his department.

He was drawn to Yousif’s case because he had seen first-hand the trauma inflicted upon graduate students when relationships with their mentors went awry — and the purposeful hurdles universities seemed to put in place to prevent equitable rectification of the situation, he said.

“Almost all institutions try and make uncomfortable things go away. And one way to do that is to set up a system that provides as little information as possible to students, or hides where a student could make a complaint,” Aslin told the News. 

He explained further that the transience of students, compared to the relative permanence of tenured faculty, adds to a “heavy thumb on the scale of protecting faculty” at the administrative level.

 He described this dynamic as “endemic.”

Rethinking graduate student advocacy

Aslin explained that across the field, every faculty member he has spoken to about intra-university issues has tales of their institution’s dropping of the ball.

“It goes back to this issue: the students don’t have the information they need and they don’t have the advocacy,” he said.

Aslin noted, however, that some institutions of higher education have set standards of transparency and justice in dealings with student-faculty conflicts which Yale might look to.

Looking forward, Aslin pointed to the complainant system at Cornell, where the Office of the Complainants’ Codes Counselor provides confidential assistance to students considering filing a complaint.

CCC’s, Aslin noted, are a prime example of the kind of neutral third party Yale lacks in these matters.

Keil, however, believes the best course of action is training faculty in case studies and “vigorous independent reporting” of institutional trends.

“Cases of misbehavior are not subtle and are often obvious in terms of basic principles of conduct between individuals in situations of power asymmetries,” Keil wrote. “All too often, setting up more committees and procedures simply serves as a way of claiming concern about the problem without really addressing it.”

Yousif completed his undergraduate study at Emory University in 2016.

Correction, April 28: This article has been updated with the correct title for University spokesperson Karen Peart. 

Correction, May 14: A previous version of this article stated that Scholl took public issue with Yousif’s character and caliber. Scholl maintains that he expressed his issues with Dr. Yousif privately; the article has been updated to reflect that.

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The program allows Fellows and Associate Fellows — who can be faculty, staff and other Yale affiliates — to form connections with each other and with students over a four-year renewable timespan. Head of College Thomas Near described Saybrook’s Fellowship as a sort of college “social network,” wherein students are able to reach out to specific Fellows based on individual interests and expertise.

Though Fellows are often associated with the University, colleges can nominate and appoint non-Yale employees per year as Associate Fellows. This year, Head Near nominated Fiasco, and Fiasco accepted.

“He’s a big fan of Yale because he’s essentially participated in every one of the Open Yale Courses online on YouTube,” Near explained.

Fiasco’s journey to becoming a Fellow started at an entirely different academic institution: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fiasco has been at MIT for a year as part of its MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars Program, where he taught a course at MIT called Rap Theory and Practice, a technical exploration into the creation of rap music. 

Fiasco also worked with MIT faculty to understand the neurophysiology of spoken word art and rap. While there, he met computational biologist and Yale Assistant Professor Brandon Ogbunu GRD ’10, a member of the same program.

“Lupe represents the kind of thinker that Yale champions,” Ogbunu told the News. “He had a very big impact on MIT.”

He and Ogbunu collaborated on projects and talked, and eventually Ogbunu invited him to take part in a College Tea at Saybrook. 

Nathan Mai ’25 attended the February College Tea, and described the experience as “surreal.” He said that Fiasco had been one of his favorite artists since he first heard the rapper’s feature on “Touch The Sky.”

“He really struck me as a cerebral guy when he was talking,” Mai said. “There were moments where he was quoting Aristotle next to A$AP Rocky… He had all sorts of little influences from everywhere. He seems like a very curious guy.” 

From the tea, Fiasco and Near bonded quickly — near, like Fiasco, is from Chicago, and connected with Fiasco’s music.

“We grew up in different geographic parts of the city, but we both faced very similar pressures, and I’m a white dude, and because of white privilege I was able to escape trouble,” Near noted.  “Lupe escaped trouble…by being an artist.”

His favorite song? “Kick, Push.” the lead single off Fiasco’s first album: “Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor.”

Near nominated Fiasco as an Associate Fellow, and Fiasco was chosen this past March.

“Proud to announce I’ve been chosen to be a Saybrook Fellow at my OTHER favorite school in the whole wide world outside of MIT…@Yale,” Fiasco wrote on his Twitter on March 30. “Shout to Tom Near for nominating me to a place where against all odds two Chicagoans found a home in the Ivy League. #SayBrookCollege #SAYWHAT”

Mai had been following Fiasco’s MIT class from afar, and praised Fiasco’s desire to bring rap music into the university as an art form worth being studied as poetry.

Fiasco will likely continue living in Cambridge in the fall, but Near and Ogbunu are hopeful that he will establish a physical homespace at Yale in some capacity over the next year.

Sartaj Rajpal ’25, who produces hip-hop and house music, praised Fiasco’s lyricism, and said he was particularly excited about the opportunity to learn from such an accomplished hip-hop artist.

“ I will be spending some time in Saybrook that’s for sure,” Rajpal told the News. “I’d love to work with him at some point”

Near and Ogbunu both noted that Fiasco would be a resource for students interested in the arts.

The college will work with the rapper to set up lectures and talks — and perhaps even to establish a course for Fiasco to teach. 

“I love the fact that we have communities where we can bring people all together, regardless of who they are …. We all come together and we find community,” Near explained in closing. “I don’t think there’s a lot of institutions where that happens.”

Lupe Fiasco headlined Yale Spring Fling in 2011. 

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Film students expressed concern that the money they get from CPAs – often lower than the limit – remains insufficient for the costs of their projects. These students said the guidelines for what CPAs cover are often restrictive for film projects, as CPAs cannot cover purchase of equipment, actors, travel or transportation costs, food — unless it serves as a prop — or wages.

“It’s a really hard space to navigate and almost feels like we’re pulling at strings, pulling at each other and pulling from the little resources that we can to make anything work,” said Fernando Cuello Garcia ’24, a film and media studies major. “As a whole and for the CPA as well, it really shows that Yale doesn’t care about film.”

CPAs are administered by the Council of Heads of College with the goal of supporting on-campus dramatic, musical, dance, video or film projects. They are financed by the Sudler Fund, Welch Fund and the Bates Fund. Projects must take place on campus, and applying students must consult with their Head of College prior to submission of their application.

While there is a centralized website for applications, Cuello Garcia said that changes to recent rules — including that students must speak to their Head of College — goes against “institutional knowledge” passed down from upperclassmen, creating confusion around how to apply for CPAs.

Given these challenges, Marc-Alain Bertoni ’24, a film and media studies major, said film at Yale is an “afterthought,” with the lack of funding through CPAs as clear evidence of this.“Time and time again, film at Yale has been undermined by unclear regulation and broad rules applied to the artistic community that simply don’t consider how film and filmmaking would factor into the equation,” Bertoni wrote.

Students may apply for CPAs twice a year and can only serve as the primary proposer for one project produced per term.

The maximum grant for plays and musicals, as well as thesis films, is $1,200. For all other projects, price maximums range from $500 to $1,000, with additional funding granted for obtention of legal rights.Cuello Garcia said the decreased limit compounds with other discrepancies including a lack of resources for film students at Yale, which are mostly provided through the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media.

“Film, on its own, I think tends to be a lot more expensive to produce than some of the other arts but that’s compounded with the fact that a lot of resources at Yale are kind of lacking for production,” Cuello Garcia said.

Cuello Garcia, the student coordinator at the CCAM, said that the CCAM lacks resources from Yale to support the space, especially if compared to the resources for graduate students at the School of Art.

Bertoni wrote that he applied for a CPA for a film project last fall and received the maximum amount of $500, but said he thinks that there are a lot of hidden costs which make the maximum insufficient, along with the high costs of what the CPA does cover.

“Essentially, if you’re at Yale, and you want to make a film, you have to be prepared to pay out of pocket to do so, and considering the amount of money this institution has, I think it’s a shame that is the case,” Bertoni wrote to the News.Head of Timothy Dwight College Mary Lui, the chair of the CPA committee on the Council of the Heads of College, wrote that there are categories of funding within the CPA system that each have preset limits, and the aim is to fund projects “as best as possible according to our best understanding of average costs per category.”

“There are many reasons why a project won’t get full funding, and it is case by case rather than a specific category getting less,” Lui told the News.

According to Lui, CPAs come out of gifts to Yale College and are broadly defined — early conversations back in the 1980s emphasized performing arts but the fund “quickly broadened” to a greater variety of arts today.

But Lui said this year has faced an increase in applications across many categories. Residential colleges have stretched their arts budgets “to the limit,” with some exceeding their own budgets.

Lui added that there are varying costs between theater and film projects, and theater projects may be especially costly due to the buying of rights for productions.

“The difficulties of funding such a high volume of CPA applications across the board, including film, has led to discussions with film faculty on how best to support filmmakers whether through the CCAM or additional streams of funding devoted to curricular film making,” Lui told the News. “So I am hopeful that we’ll be able to do more for filmmakers in the future.”

Kate Krier, Dean of Yale College Arts, explained that total CPA funding per college has remained flat since 2014. In the 2014-15 year, 72 students applied. In the 2022-3 year, 421 have.

As such, colleges have had to be more selective regarding funding decisions, and a lower percentage of applicants.

Krier noted that the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media will, in the coming fall, offer $28,000 worth of film equipment to students, informed by “wish list” feedback from student filmmakers.

This year’s applicants, however, have weathered numerous monetary difficulties in carrying out graded film projects and, in some cases, their senior theses.

Jonas Kilga ‘23, whose senior thesis film required external funding, felt hindered in his ability to complete his graduation requirement by financial restraints.

“If you, like me, needed this grant to graduate from Yale, then it is a case of the school actively prohibiting you from completing a graduation requirement,” Kilga explained to the News. “The need to crowdfund…creates significant equity issues, because those students with wealthier friends and family will have more funding for their films than students from low-income backgrounds.”

Kilga explained that difficulties surrounding CPA funding only cropped up starting this year, when a drastic increase in applications had severely reduced the percentage of applicants who received grants.

The explanation students received, Kilga noted, was that the money “just wasn’t there.”

Non-senior film students have also run into difficulties funding class-mandated film projects, having to crowdfund or spend thousands of dollars on projects. Cuello Garcia said many students fund projects using their own money — spending up to $10,000 for film theses.

“It doesn’t have the sufficient equipment that we need,” Cuello Garcia said. “So it’s a matter of pulling money out of your own pocket or, or asking friends to give you equipment. There’s mostly no other mainstream ways of funding”

Funds given from the CPA awarded in February must be submitted for reimbursement by May 5.

Correction 4/20: This article has been updated to reflect that the $500 cap for non-thesis CPA grants only applies to most, not all, arts disciplines. 

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Instructional faculty — or faculty members who have been hired to teach without the option for tenure — have long faced challenges in gaining the benefits and treatment which tenure-track faculty enjoy on university campuses. At Yale, adjunct instructors compose around 40 percent of the faculty.

“Most adjunct faculty in the United States suffer from deleterious working conditions,” wrote FAS Dean Kathryn Lofton in an announcement regarding the report’s release.

Indeed, per the report, around 60 percent of contingent faculty in higher education earn less than $50,000 a year. Moreover, most states do not grant adjunct faculty the right to unemployment insurance.

The name “instructional faculty” is itself new — in 2017, an FAS senate report urged the renaming of professors were then known as “non-ladder” faculty, claiming that the term was “inimical to inclusion and sends the wrong signals,” describing faculty in negative terms or ones that implied “provisional status.”

Lofton continued that she hoped the report would encourage faculty members to consider the ways Yale might improve the working environment of its instructional faculty.

“The policy changes that the Instructional Faculty Working Group instigated recognize [instructional] faculty for their indispensable contributions to Yale,” Lofton told the News. “I am proud of what the Working Group has achieved, and I am thrilled that Yale is taking a leadership role on the issue of equity for instructional faculty.”

The working group was formed in 2020 for faculty in the Humanities division, but has since expanded to demand FAS- and University-wide policy changes. It aims to ensure respect, security and important benefits for instructional faculty at Yale through a number of avenues. 

The report noted that the IFWG had already made strides in implementing phased retirement, emeritus status eligibility, access to short-term medical disability benefits and a number of other improvements. 

“It is meaningful that the FAS leadership understands and recognizes the distinct challenges faced by instructional faculty and is committed to improving their conditions,” Shiri Goren, working group member and director of the Modern Hebrew Program, told the News. “With worrying processes of adjunctification in higher education around the nation, this is an opportunity for Yale to be a national leader, and model, as the report suggests, ‘respect and inclusion for all ranks.’”

The report identified a number of “future issues” which ought to be addressed in years to come: foremost among them was tenure eligibility, on which front Yale lags behind its peer institutions and as such places itself “at a competitive disadvantage in its recruiting of distinguished practitioners.”

Also of concern were questions regarding instructional faculty obtention of research grants and inclusion of instructional faculty members in faculty committees and decision-making bodies.

The report commended Yale for its willingness to engage in instructional faculty reforms but urged continued attention and action. Indeed, the report ended by noting the massive import of the instructional community to institutional advancement and the university’s “moral mandate.” 

“Advancing knowledge requires intellectual freedom, financial security, informational access, and institutional commitment,” the report concluded. “Yale should remain an institution that supports its entire faculty, whose teaching forms its academic mission.”

The Faculty of Arts and Science Dean’s Office is located within Warner House at 1 Hillhouse Ave.

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The Yale Disability Studies Network, a multidisciplinary student-led coalition that unites students, faculty and alumni through disability scholarship, has petitioned for the formalization of an interdepartmental center for the study and research of disability at Yale.

Throughout the months of April and May, four disability advocates — including an author and autism activist, a political anthropologist, a CNN journalist and a professor of architecture — will visit Yale’s campus to speak on issues relating to disability. The Yale Disability Studies Network hopes that this speaker series will call attention to the interdisciplinary character of disability scholarship, and also serve as a platform through which those interested in disability studies can engage more deeply with the field.

“I found it to be an unacceptable oversight, particularly for an institution like Yale, not to have a dedicated space that caters to the intellectual needs of scholars and practitioners working to benefit disabled individuals,” Yushi Zhang SPH ’23, co-leader of the Yale Disability Studies Network, told the News.

Zhang said that support for the proposed disability studies center became clear in conversations she had with community members involved with the Poorvu Center, DiversAbility at Yale, Student Accessibility Services and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office, as well as the Office of the Provost and its faculty and student affiliates. 

However, she noted, the program will need the support of leading University faculty and administrators in order to move past planning stages. 

Presently, the Yale Disability Studies Network’s leadership team consists of students from all across the University. According to Zhang, the graduate and undergraduate working groups will be led by history Ph.D. candidate Rebecca Boorstein GRD ’26 and disability peer liaison Alexis Sye ’25, respectively. 

To gain further legitimacy, Zhang explained that the program will require official registration and internal funding. The next step in their advocacy efforts will be to collect signatures on a petition letter from supporters of an interdepartmental Center for Disability Studies. 

Martine Cruz ’23 defined disability studies as the academic exploration of the experience of disabled persons. Historically, she said, scholarship has often medicalized certain aspects of the disabled experience instead of taking a holistic approach. Cruz affirmed the importance of the creation of a disability studies department as a way to begin facilitating a more tangible connection between the University and its disabled community. 

Cruz previously served as a member of Disability Empowerment for Yale — an undergraduate advocacy group for disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent students — for one year, before becoming the group’s communications director. 

According to Cruz, she and Zhang connected through their shared interest in public health, and have worked together to coordinate action around Zhang’s Yale Disability Studies Network initiative. 

As a student-led initiative, the Yale Disability Studies Network has introduced a number of efforts to gain attention and support from University administrators. 

“Presently, Yale really does what is demanded by the Americans with Disabilities Act and that’s about it,” Cruz said. “It’s never been the initiative of the university to provide any support to students that would otherwise not be required by the law.”

Zhang’s first concept of the Yale Disability Studies Network was as an intra-university “cross-school student group,” she told the News. This vision was complicated when Zhang discovered that multi-school organizations were not eligible to receive activities funding from any single school.

Relying on individual faculty members, too, proved onerous.

Zhang explained that though a number of faculty members are individually invested in disability studies, “many of them did not have the bandwidth to establish a university-wide collaboration” without institutional support.

“I can’t do this alone,” she continued. “If we want this thing to exist, I will need a lot more people joining me and joining the many [disabilities studies] scholars and students at Yale.”

Anthropology professor Elizabeth Berk has thrown her support behind expanding disability studies at Yale, and Katie Wang, assistant professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Public Health, expressed hope that the current movement would increase visibility and resources for disability studies scholarship.

Wang said that she thought the program could “encourage the conceptualization of the disabled lived experience as a form of human diversity, and raise awareness of disability inclusion as a social justice issue, both within the Yale community and beyond.”

Through her own experience as an educator, Berk said she has observed students’ experiences with disability, chronic illness and mental health challenges. To Berk, a dedicated disability studies center would not only expand academic and extracurricular opportunities relevant to the field, but also provide a space through which students can explore their own experiences. 

Some students and faculty believe that University support for a disabilities studies program is, at best, overdue.

Cruz said that institutional recognition would be “the first step of Yale formally acknowledging that disabled students exist and that disabled people exist.”

Both Zhang and Berk affirmed that disability studies have recently gained an increasing amount of academic attention. Wesleyan’s “cluster” program cropped up in 2010 thanks to student advocacy, and Georgetown has offered minors and Masters and Ph.D programs. Certificates in the study for three decades.

However, Berk also highlighted the intrinsic value of disability studies beyond its “trendy” status as a field of study.

“One thing I think is incredibly important about disability studies overall is not just treating it as another axis, [like,] ‘okay, we’ve talked about gender, we’ve talked about race; now let’s add disability,’” stated Berk. “I think disability studies come out of the ways in which all of those are constructed together, and the different ways that disability has been constructed over time.”

However, Ivy League schools have lagged behind in offering organized disability studies programming: Princeton and Yale only have working groups, the University of Pennsylvania allows womens, gender and sexuality studies majors to “concentrate” in Health and Disability and Columbia University’s disability studies program is tucked away in its Department of English and Comparative Literature. 

Members of Yale Disability Studies Network said they see the gap as an opportunity to be trailblazers of disability studies and to encourage wider recognition of the practice in academia.

The Yale Disability Studies Network’s next speaker event will take place on Tuesday, April 18, where Eric Reinhart — a Harvard-trained medical anthropologist and physician — will discuss abolitionist care. 

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The series was established in 2018 in order to expose current and prospective Yale English students to the poetic voices of recent generations. Last year, Nobel winner Louise Glück delivered the lecture. The series caters especially to students in ENGL 125, 126, 127 and 128, the department’s core courses for completion of the major.

”When I read a poem, I know there’s a piece of the poet I’m getting, and then there’s a piece that’s bigger and different from the poet that’s in there,” Smith said at the lecture. “I don’t think I’m what you get if you read that poem — I hope you get you.”

Smith — Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner and 2017-2019 U.S. Poet Laureate — was introduced by Marc Robinson — acting director of undergraduate studies for the department — and Richard Deming — the director of creative writing.

In his introduction, Deming said that there is a “collective urgent need” for Smith’s work and noted the inherent collectivity to poetry, the “need to be urgently human” that it instills in readers.

Smith took the podium to rousing applause.

 “I always feel so much more heartened and hopeful about the world when I’m in spaces where people like you are telling me about what they’re caring about, what they’re working on,” Smith said. “We desperately need that.”

Smith read a number of poems both original and translated, spanning a two-decade career in poetry. She began with a selection of translations from Chinese poet Yi Lei’s “My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems.” Li died in 2018, in the midst of her translative collaboration with Smith.

Smith moved next to a series of pieces from her 2021 collection, “Such Color: New and Selected Poems,” which has been distributed to students currently enrolled in foundational courses. 

According to Deming, the collection speaks to the power of poetry — its ability to “[pinpoint] our attention in a moment and to the moment where we are.” Smith’s words articulate difficult reflections about the past while creating a hopeful vision for the future. 

“We, all of us, together,  have a need to look unblinkingly at the past — its griefs, its wreckage —  acknowledge all that it encompasses and then find a way forward,” Deming told the News. “Throughout her book… she builds out of the act of bearing witness — in details and specifics — the possibilities for hope, for joy.  Her poems show that the work is still out there in front of us.”

She spoke to a number of difficulties in her craft — the constraints and necessities of form, the use and confusion of negative space and the finicky necessity of loosening the iron grip she is sometimes inclined to hold over her work at its inception.

Smith’s reading was followed by a question and answer session and a reception outside the lecture hall.

English major Madeline Poole ’25 left the reading with a new appreciation for Smith’s work.

“It was a privilege to hear her own interpretations of her creations, and the process she undertakes to produce them: how she considers form, and how she pushes her poems from repeating what she already knows,” Poole told the News before rushing off to hunt for her own copy of “Such Color.”

This year’s Foundational Courses Lecture was held in the Humanities Quadrangle.

The post Tracy K. Smith delivers 2023 Foundational Course Lecture appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Patrick DelPercio, a Cherokee language instructor at the University of Oklahoma, will join the University’s faculty to teach a lecture course focusing on Cherokee language and culture.

“Other home speakers can take heritage language classes at Yale, but not Indigenous students,” Director of Undergraduate Studies of Linguistics Claire Bowern told the News. “Particularly for Indigenous students, it seemed very out of place that one can do one’s language requirement by studying languages from all around the world… except the Indigenous languages of the Americas.”

Indeed, students and community members have advocated for course and language credit for Native American languages for years. As far back as 2018, students have petitioned for those classes to be offered officially for course credits, noting the disjunction between Yale’s historical exploitation of Indigenous resources and the lack of attention paid to those peoples on course syllabi.

Professor Ned Blackhawk, of the Western Shoshone, noted that up until now the onus has fallen largely on Native students to create their own classes — which they often take for no credit. Native language learning “evolved and eventually moved into the ‘community class’ model,” Blackhawk explained.

 “The NACC has held the vast majority of the language courses and has often been overseen by the NACC directors,” Blackhawk said. 

Sandra Sánchez GRD ’24, a PhD candidate who attended Professor DelPercio’s first lecture, wrote that they hoped that Yale might in the future form stronger relationships with Native people and communities. 

“With the wealth of resources and collections here, I can imagine a future where language revitalization, preservation and education can happen if the right care and respect is taken to support tribal-University relations,” Sánchez added.

Though the course may not be offered in this month’s course selection process, it will be available in the fall through add-drop period and will employ a number of University materials. Interaction with — and reclamation of — the University’s own historical resources has long been a major focus of Indigenous curricula on campus.

Bowern noted that the limited documentation and archival material which exists on Native peoples is often held within the walls of the very institutions which have historically excluded those communities. She pointed to the Belonging at Yale Initiative’s emphasis on curricular reform.

“We don’t want to lock things up in archives and make it difficult for the communities whose cultural heritage they are to have access to those materials,” she explained.

Community access is important for local Indigenous peoples like the Quinnipiac, Mohegan and Wâpanâak in Southern New England, she said, who have sought access to materials preserving their linguistic and cultural roots.

Sánchez expressed hope that the University would facilitate the expansion of Native Studies at Yale, and that new course offerings would help bring University-owned materials into the hands of Native communities and students.

Yale’s Native American Cultural Center is located at 26 High St.

The post Yale to offer first Indigenous language course in fall 2023 appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Koman is a comedian, writer and producer who has written on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” “Nathan for You” and “Saturday Night Live,” among many other projects. He has been nominated for 11 Emmys — securing one in 2007 for Outstanding Writing For A Variety, Music Or Comedy Program on Conan — and has won six Writers Guild Awards.

“If you feel enthusiasm for something, it’s a sign that either you’re meant to do it or that you’d be good at it,” Koman stated, looking around the room. “Don’t talk yourself out of it; you’re probably cut out for it.”

Koman was introduced by Branford Head of College Enrique de la Cruz, who then ceded the floor to Alexia Buchholz ’24. Choosing a student interviewer for Branford teas is a tradition of de la Cruz, a method by which he hopes to encourage current students to engage directly with the leaders they are inspired by.

Buchholz wrote that after the talk, Koman told her that “if he could get anything across to the students who attended, he wants us to believe in ourselves,” adding that “it was an absolute honor to meet him.”

Koman started his career at MADtv.

“It was just a job I got,” Koman admitted of stint as a writer at the sketch comedy show — the catalyst to his career. “I got [it] out of college, honestly by accident.”

Koman described moving on to “Conan” as a rude awakening — and as a phenomenal opportunity for growth.

At MADtv, Koman felt like a lone step in a long process of writing and editing. At “Conan”, he remembered, “your idea was completely your responsibility, from pitching to writing to the final edit.”

“I fell apart,” he admitted.”I felt like a fraud … It’s easy when you’re young, when you’re doing something you care about, to vacillate between self-loathing and vanity.”

Koman was plagued by fear, but after some time in the position he came to appreciate the creative freedom he was given, stating that it is the best way to operate a writers’ room.

Perhaps more importantly, he found kinship with the other writers: they found the same things funny, he said. It felt profound at the time, and, Koman added, that sort of chemistry is not always guaranteed.

Koman met Nathan Fielder soon after ending his stint at Conan, when the two began writing together for Demetri Martin. They formed a quick friendship.

“Nathan For You” is part mockumentary, part improv and part “cringe comedy.” No matter how the show is characterized, it is fundamentally silly. Koman spoke of Fielder as a “natural character,” the kind of person whose very presence brings hilarity to any situation. Audience members nudged each other, as if to tell their neighbors, “That’s you!”

Nathan For You ran for four seasons, garnering a cult following and critical acclaim. When it ended in 2017, Koman moved on to SNL, and then to How to with John Wilson.

“I was too old [to write] for SNL,” he said, noting that the best writers on the show were at the beginnings of their careers, “but I made myself do it so I could know what it was like.”

Buchholz asked Koman for his best advice for aspiring creatives; he emphasized community and the unwillingness to succumb to fear. He also noted all the times he almost quit — and how glad he was that he had not.

Koman stayed well past his allotted hour to answer student questions, ranging from inquiries on the streaming age to affectionate interrogations on the creation of favorite “Nathan for You” scenes. 

“I am delighted that we were able to bring Michael Koman to Branford and the Yale community,” de la Cruz told the News. “Koman was generous with his time and offered great anecdotes about his experiences, which were inspirational to students for their creative pursuits in comedy.”

Branford College is located at 74 High St.

Correction 4/11: A previous version of this article misspelled Buchholz’ name. 

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Radev led the U.S. team to victory in multiple International Linguistics Olympiads, taught an open course in NLP to over 10,000 students and loved foreign language movies. Radev was also a family man, devoted to his wife Axinia and their two daughters, Laura and Victoria.  

“I knew Drago as a leader in his community,” Jeffrey Brock, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, told the News. “He had a love for people and colleagues, and he was much loved in return.”

Brock noted that Radev’s interests were varied, ranging from automated book summarization to attempts to program humor into natural language processing systems. In addition to background information on his academic work and course offerings, his website includes a list titled “My favorite movies,” organized by director, country of release, awards, release year and the year Radev first watched them.   

Indeed, Sterling Professor of Political Science Alan Gerber ’86 agreed that Radev refused to confine himself to a single area of interest or academic field.

“He led efforts to connect people working on natural language processing across the university,” Gerber wrote in an email to the News. “His openness to collaborations across fields was legendary and I believe that he is probably the only computer scientist to win the Gosnell Prize for the best empirical paper of the year in political science.”

Radev’s website, full of colorful links and featuring a small picture of the smiling professor watching over the page, expressed that same focus on facilitating connection.

“My long term goal is to build an infrastructure for computers and humans to interact in a fluent and natural way,” Radev wrote in a simple .txt page on the site.

Radev earned his doctorate at Columbia University in 1999, moving on to teach at Michigan before then coming to Yale in 2017. He was awarded fellowships at multiple computer science associations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of Artificial Intelligence. In 2007, he co-founded the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition, a contest for high school students interested in the field.

Brock wrote that Radev “believed deeply in the promise of Yale and in its future,” and was passionate about leading his community at the University and beyond. 

“He was tireless and spent long days working with students and carrying out his research,” Brock wrote.

Brock added fondly that Radev was “a fixture on Hillhouse Avenue,” often found tapping excitedly on his phone in communication with students and colleagues. Those same students and colleagues have since gathered online to share memories of Radev on a memorial website.

Collaborators and friends flooded a GoFundMe for Victoria’s medical expenses with support this past week, writing comments about Radev’s kindness, intellect and dedication.

“I was chair of Yale CS when we recruited him,” wrote professor Joan Feigenbaum on the fundraising site. “I often think that my contribution to that recruiting effort might have been the best thing I ever did for Yale CS.”

Radev was deeply involved in the department, serving as the director of the Language, Information, and Learning at Yale Lab, the Yale Institute for Network Science and the Wu Tsai Institute for Neuroscience.

Dan Spielman ’92, a Sterling Professor of Computer Science at the University, emphasized the hole that Radev’s passing would leave in the department and in the field.

“From the moment he arrived at Yale he worked hard to improve our course offerings, to teach inspiring courses, and to recruit new faculty,” Spielman wrote in an email to the News. “He tried to improve every community that he touched… we won’t be the same without him.”

A communal celebration of Radev’s life will be held soon, according to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

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