T H E O L D E S T C O L L E G E D A I L Y · F O U N D E D 1 8 7 8

BY NATASHA THONDAVADISTAFF REPORTER

Half a mile northwest of their future site, the designs of Yale’s 13th and 14th residential colleges are tak-ing their final shape.

Last month, a two-story mock-up created to test potential design fea-tures for Yale’s new residential col-leges was constructed in a field next to Science Park’s building 25, said School of Architecture Dean Rob-ert A. M. Stern, the head architect on the project. Stern’s firm designed the structure to contain multiple ver-sions of elements like windows and stonework, so that administrators and architects could analyze the ben-efits and costs of various alternatives, Stern said.

“I think people understand that when we build something, it’s not for the next five or ten years, it’s for many generations,” University spokesman Michael Morand said. “To make the best decisions, you have give it the time, have lots of eyes and sweat the details.”

After New Haven’s City Plan Commission approved the loca-tion for the new residential col-leges at Prospect and Sachem streets in November, University officials, trustees and the project’s archi-tects are working to finalize its spe-cific, technical details, Morand said. Since its construction, the mock-up has given administrators, architects and members of the O!ce of Facil-ities the chance to weigh in on the particulars of the colleges’ technical design. On Thursday, the Buildings and Grounds Committee of the Yale Corporation — the University’s high-est governing body — went to exam-

CROSSCAMPUS

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That’s why she wants Yale. After Yale deferred her last fall, high school senior Jackie Milestone uploaded a song about her deferral to Youtube on Tuesday titled “A Deferred Student’s Appeal to Yale: White and Blue for You.” “Yale is more than just my first choice school, it is a school I know well and have dreamed of attending ever since I discovered that colleges existed,” reads the video’s description. As of early Friday morning, the video had racked up over 2,700 views on YouTube.

Believe in Justice. Early Thursday morning, New Haven gra!ti artist Believe in People tweeted some recent work — a photo featuring two spray-painted signs reading “Fox News Lies!” and “Occupy Wall Street,” which someone named Neils dropped o" at Occupy New Haven. The signs are meant to replace signs that, two weeks ago, were stolen when students came to the encampment one Saturday night.

A whole new Whi!s. Auditions for next year’s Whi"enpoofs began on Thursday.

Some new tour guides, too. As the Whi"s start their process, tryouts for new tour guides with the O!ce of Undergraduate Admissions wrap up today.

Visiting. Anita Hill, a professor of law, social policy and women’s studies at Brandeis University who gained fame for testifying against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas LAW ’74, came to campus Thursday to discuss her latest book, “Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race and Finding Home.”

Again. Kudeta and S’wings both received low scores on health inspections conducted in early February, while Five Guys Burgers & Fries notched a near-perfect score.

No homecoming yet. Members of Human Rights Watch are working to secure the body of Marie Colvin ’78, who was killed Wednesday in a mortar blast. Meanwhile, journalists in Tripoli held wakes in honor of Colvin, who covered the uprising in Libya last fall.

Yale Police Department o!cers arrested five men near the intersection of Stoeckel Hall on College and Wall Streets around 1:30 a.m. Friday. At least five YPD vehicles were on the scene, but none of the o!cers would comment on the arrests. A sergeant on the scene deferred comment to YPD Assistant Chief Steven Woznyk, who could not be immediately reached for comment.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY1944 A total of 12, 138 Yale men are currently serving in World War II; 205 have died.

Submit tips to Cross Campus crosscampus@yaledailynews.com

INSIDE THE NEWS

GREEK LIFESPACE FOR TWO NEW FRATS?PAGE B3 WEEKEND

IMMIGRATIONLaw School clinic fights new deportation program in lawsuitPAGE 5 CITY

TRANSPORTATIONDOWNTOWN MAY SEE ARRIVAL OF NEW TAXI STANDPAGE 7 CITY

M. BASKETBALLLocked in battle for second, Elis pursue NIT bid in two home gamesPAGE 16 SPORTSMORNING RAINY 40

EVENING CLOUDY 46

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 99 · yaledailynews.com

Future uncertain for a!rmative action

Yalies live in New Haven nine months of the year, claiming the city as their home away from home. But only about 30 of those students, according to data published by the O!ce of Institutional Research in 2010, actually trace their roots to the Elm City.

Eleven Yale students interviewed from greater New Haven — which includes neighboring towns such as Woodbridge and Hamden — said they take pride in being locals. Yet from the moment they stepped through Phelps Gate as Yale students, they said, all found themselves needing to defend their hometown from stereotypes of the city as both unsafe and dependent on Yale’s presence for its value.

Still, their experiences present varying definitions of what it means to be from the Elm City: Yale students who see themselves as local residents attended both private and public schools within the greater New Haven area, including neighborhoods such as Woodbridge, North Haven and Hamden.

“We see a relatively large and diverse contingent of students from this wide range of schools,” Dean of Undergradu-ate Admissions Je"rey Brenzel said. “As to backgrounds and what attending Yale for a student from the area has been like, I would be very reluctant to generalize. I think you would find quite a diversity of stories.”

Class gift beats record

BY JULIA ZORTHIANSTAFF REPORTER

A rigorous three-week cam-paign to collect donations from the class of 2012 for the Senior Class Gift ended Wednesday with a record-breaking 97.5 per-cent participation rate.

The participation rate of this year’s seniors edged out that of the class of 2012 by half a per-centage point, though its senior gift of $31,545.47 fell roughly $10,000 short of last year’s total. At least 12 representatives of the campaign in each residential col-lege collected donations by hold-

ing events and contacting peers individually. While most seniors interviewed expressed enthusi-asm for supporting the Univer-sity, several said they felt exces-sive pressure to donate from some members of the campaign.

“The senior gift isn’t going to move mountains for Yale’s oper-ating budget, but we’re trying to establish an early foundation

King, faculty, conflict

BY GAVAN GIDEONSTAFF REPORTER

After a Univer-sity push to cen-tralize adminis-trative services came under fire at the Yale Col-l e g e Fa c u l t y meeting on Feb. 2, Vice President for Finance and Business Oper-a t i o n s S h a u n a K ing defended h e r o f f i c e ’s efforts to stream-line departmental operations.

E a rl i e r t h i s month, profes-sors criticized shared services, a business model intended to shift common admin-istrative tasks in Yale’s various depart-ments to centralized service units, as an across-the-board system that does not meet the needs of individual depart-ments and has harmed staff. Though King acknowledged in a Feb. 16 email to all finance and business operations staff that some faculty are uneasy about shared services, King wrote that she believes her department is “on the right track” and that the initiative is in Yale’s “best long-

BY BEN PRAWDZIKSTAFF REPORTER

In its 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, the United States Supreme Court ruled that col-leges and universities could consider race and ethnicity in their admissions decisions for at least 25 years. But a move by the court on Tuesday could ultimately reverse that deci-sion — ending race-based a!r-mative action policies at Yale and other higher education institutions across the country.

The nation’s highest court announced Tuesday it would hear Fisher v. University of Texas — a case filed by a white student, Abigail Fisher, who said she was denied admis-sion to the University of Tex-as’s Austin campus because of her race. Since the 2003 Grut-ter v. Bollinger ruling, educa-tion experts said the argument over a!rmative action policies

at colleges and universities has calmed, but news of the court’s decision to hear another a!r-mative action case has reig-nited debate between sup-porters and opponents of the policy. Since 2003, the court’s ideological center has shifted to the right, placing the future of race-based affirmative action into question, education and law experts said.

As Yale takes race into con-sideration in its admissions process, it is possible that the court’s decision could affect the University’s admission pol-icies.

“There is value in having a class that is widely diverse and represents di"erent racial, ethnic and religious groups,” University President Richard Levin said. “We’re bound by the law as it stands — Yale has practiced affirmative action

VICTOR KANG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Mock-ups of Yale’s two new residential colleges have helped Yale o!cials and architects decide the final designs for the $500 million construction project.

T O W N A N D G O W N

New Haveners face stereotypes as Elis

Yalies who hail from New Haven — currently totaling 30 — come from diverse backgrounds, but on campus, most find themselves defending their homeown against slights by

their classmates. ANDREW GIAMBRONE reports.

SEE SHARED SERVICES PAGE 8

SEE NEW HAVENERS PAGE 8SEE AFFIRM. ACTION PAGE 6

SEE CLASS GIFT PAGE 6

RECORD 97.5 PERCENT OF SENIORS DONATE; SOME STUDENTS COMPLAIN OF PRESSURE

Colleges’ designs take shape

SEE NEW COLLEGES PAGE 6

Shared services … will be helpful as we all adjust to reduced sta! levels.

SHAUNA KING VP FOR FINANCE AND BUSINESS

OPERATIONS

GRAPH SENIOR GIFT TOTALS, PARTICIPATION

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$10,000

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$50,000

60

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31.5K40.8K29.7K27.5K26.2K27.6K

201220112010200920082007

OPINION .COMMENTyaledailynews.com/opinion

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T Z A R A K E S S L E R

A vegetarian at Louis’ LunchI’m by far the least vegetarian of

any vegetarian I know.For starters, I occasionally

eat fish. This means that the cor-rect term for my dietary preference is actually “pescetarian.” This is a term that I refuse to use because it sounds obnoxiously pretentious. You would judge me if I walked into Book Trader and asked which of the day’s soups were pescetar-ian. I would judge myself.

If I can’t see the meat, it’s not there. If I can see it and remove it, it was never there. Last Friday night at Chabad, I found a delight-ful bowl of matzoh ball soup in front of me. Then I saw pieces of something other than matzoh ball floating in it. I scooped them up. Chicken. Thankfully, a car-nivorous friend o!ered my poul-try chunks refuge in her bowl. I happily ingested the remainder of my soup, assuring myself that the stock was made of things that grow in the ground. Self-decep-tion is such a wonderful tool.

Worst of all, I make excep-tions. Since declaring myself a vegetarian at the beginning of last summer — admittedly because I thought I would eat healthier, though the moral arguments I’ve heard since have been a nice pat on

the back — I’ve consciously bro-ken my vow four times. The first was during Camp Yale, when I was still a newbie and succumbed to the powers of a late-night Wen-zel. (I’ve since successfully transi-tioned to the eggplant variety.)

My second act of disobedi-ence was a bit more predictable: Thanksgiving. Though the meat became less desirable after my parents named our turkey “iTur-key” — some homage to Steve Jobs whose implications I still can’t wrap my head around — it just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving with-out a bird. I limited myself to a small piece. No seconds. No left-overs.

My third transgression came over winter break when I was trav-elling with my family in Thailand and was made aware of the fact that a certain beef dish at the hotel restaurant was something along the lines of “the best in the world.” The gullible tourist in me ate this endorsement right up, along with one bite of a pretty good, but cer-tainly not life-changing, beef. No one in America would ever know.

I blame America for my fourth, and most recent, instance of mis-behavior. More specifically, I blame New Haven. Allegedly

(according to Wikipedia), the hamburger was invented in New Haven in 1900 at a little brick building called Louis’ Lunch. I could not leave New Haven with-out indulging in the historically significant ritual of lunch at Louis’. And though I joked on my way over that I would limit myself to the potato salad, there was no doubt in my mind as I entered the little red door on Crown Street that there would be meat with my potatoes.

If I were going to start a Bucket List therapy group, I would hold it in Louis’ Lunch. When I tell friends that I am going to make a trip to Louis’, most respond with something along the lines of “Oh, I’ve been meaning to go!” I end up there with two friends — a senior and a junior (precocious!) — who are also first-timers. After navi-gating through the French tour-ists, I see another senior friend sitting in a window booth. He too is on a senior spring-provoked excursion. He has no shame; he took a picture outside.

The potato salad does little more than help me pass the time as I wait for my burger, which I get with tomatoes and onions. I’m a little wary of the sign above the counter that says, “All Burg-

ers are Cooked Medium Rare. If You Would Like Yours Well Done. Please Tell Us Prior to Cooking …” In my carnivorous days I was always a medium-well kind of girl. But when a lapsed vegetarian at Louis’ …

The medium-rare is worth it. The meat is perfectly pink and juicy, melting onto the bun toast. The tomato adds a hint of fresh-ness; the warm onions, just enough sweetness. Together, they truly do cancel out the need for ketchup (writes someone who can’t even eat eggs without gobs of Heinz). I savor every bite, in part because it is really that good and in part because I know that, if all goes according to plan, I won’t be eating cows for the foreseeable future.

So, seniors, if you haven’t already, go get yourself a burger. If you’re a real vegetarian, I can send you a picture. I was too embar-rassed to snap one outside, but I did sneak one of my fourth — and hopefully final — piece of excep-tional meat.

ZARA KESSLER is a senior in Ezra Stiles College. Contact her at

zara.kessler@yale.edu .

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“I’m sure Counter-Reformation Catholics just sat around on December 25 looking at their hands.” ‘REXMOTTRAM08’ ON “LENT FOR ATHIESTS”

PAGE 2 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

Moments like last Monday night make me proud to be a Yalie. It’s rare for

a university president to speak out so forcefully against the gov-ernment, but that’s exactly what President Rick Levin did in a Monday email to the Yale com-munity. He was clear and unam-biguous; even when Mayor Mike Bloomberg attacked him the next day, Levin stuck to his con-viction that Yale remain free and tolerant.

Most Yalies agreed with Levin. We shook our heads at Bloomberg’s comments and told him to take his prejudices elsewhere. The Yale commu-nity stood by our president, our Muslim friends and our culture of openness. We were going to lead — especially against a mayor who somehow believes that our Muslim friends are more likely to be terrorists than us.

The NYPD used religious association to distinguish between innocents and potential suspects, and that led them to monitor the wrong group of peo-ple. They wasted their resources on Muslim student associations at colleges across the Northeast. These Muslims are our age: our classmates, neighbors and peers. They are college students, many of whom are very much living out the famed American dream. For what reason would they have a higher likelihood to resent this country than the rest of us?

I’m proud that Yale was the first college to respond force-fully against police abuse. The great task for us now is to ensure that we respond equally in force to all breaches in civil liberties — particularly to even more blatant ones we will face at Yale-NUS.

Singapore is a nation that still uses caning as a common pun-ishment, that cracks down on peaceful protests, that detains citizens without trial, and that even bans the import of chewing gum. I cannot conceive of any way that basic academic free-doms — to inquire, critique and assemble — can flourish under such an autocratic government. Levin has repeated his idealis-tic vision that Yale-NUS may help liberalize Singapore, but in a match-o! between Yale and the Singaporean government, I would definitely place my bet on the government. The practi-cality of creating an atmosphere of freedom under an iron fist is harder than it may seem.

Without freedom, a liberal arts education is an intellec-tual exercise of no use. But the Yale Corporation has already voted on this new campus, and it appears that there is no way to stop this initiative from moving forward.

At this point, all we can do

— and must do — is press the importance of academic free-dom at Yale-NUS. The faculty must speak up at the next meet-ing about their concerns about Singapore’s academic climate. The administration must know that Yale has an obligation to stand for civil rights and liber-ties everywhere; just because the campus is in an oppressive country halfway around the world does not mean that Yale’s standards should be lowered. Yale must fight rights abuses in Singapore with the same fervor as we would in the United States.

Yale will need to fight many battles against Singaporean authorities. It will need to fight against detention without trial. It will need to fight against cen-sorship. It will need to fight against unfair discrimination based on sex, religion and polit-ical leanings. These battles will not be easy, and they will most likely be lonely ones. But if we are to have a campus in Singa-pore, Yale must be willing to fight these battles with all the conviction it can muster.

The crucial issue is this: How would Yale act if police surveil-lance were conducted at the Yale-NUS campus instead of New Haven? If a situation arises in which a group of students is being unfairly profiled by Sin-gaporean authorities, will Levin act as forcefully and unequivo-cally as he did on Monday?

These questions are not intel-lectual exercises — they are very real situations that Yale will face in the coming years. Now, we must ask ourselves whether Yale is ready to issue a public response, to condemn the Sin-gaporean government sternly and always to stand sharply and uncompromisingly on the side of its students every single time a civil rights abuse occurs.

In his email on Monday, Levin wrote that baseless surveillance is “antithetical to the values of Yale, the academic commu-nity, and the United States.” But such draconian behavior is also antithetical to the values of jus-tice and fairness all around the world.

Yale cannot a!ord to defend civil liberties at New Haven and ignore such abuses in Singapore. Not only would that tarnish the Yale brand, but a double stan-dard would also make this insti-tution culpable of the very kind of discrimination Levin decried — of selectively choosing which group of students deserve pro-tection of their rights and liber-ties and which group does not.

GENG NGARMBOONANANT is a freshman in Silliman College.

Contact him at wishcha.ngarboon-anant@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T G E N G N G A R M B O O N A N A N T

Bring MSA outrage to NUS

This semester, I am taking “Human Evolution,” a fas-cinating course taught by

Andrew Hill. As I learn about the complex web of human ancestors and relatives (with multiple hom-inid species coexisting and even preying upon each other!), I find myself wondering where exactly one can draw the line between humans and animals. We think we know humans are unique, but attempts to define our uniqueness have fallen, one by one, like domi-noes flicked contemptuously aside by Mother Nature.

Thus, bear with me as I step back from our discussions about Sex Week and nuclear disarma-ment to bring us all back to what is really important: birds.

Two summers ago, I worked as an intern at the National Avi-ary, home to over 200 species of birds. During my time there, I could not help but be impressed by the many complex bird personali-ties and behaviors that challenged traditional distinctions between humans and animals. Perhaps the most notable of these was the tale of Sahara and the Ice.

One hot and humid Wednes-day, I was cleaning an owl enclo-sure across from Sahara, a juve-nile Southern Ground Hornbill. To picture Sahara, imagine a large, ground-bound Zazu. Like Zazu, Sahara loves to talk; she squawks loudly and constantly for a human

audience. I, however, apparently did not qualify as human, perhaps because my features were com-pletely obscured by sweat, dirt and other unmentionables as I chipped away at accumulated owl droppings — in any event, Sahara kept mostly quiet, although she did alert me to the approach of other trainers by a Doppler e!ect of squawks as they passed by.

At one point, Sahara’s squawks remained high-pitched and excited for longer than usual, so I straightened up to see a trainer named Mike dumping a huge bucket of ice in one corner of her enclosure. Mike turned to me, winking as he tucked the empty bucket under one arm, and cheer-ily remarked, “Enrichment!” before strolling away. The trainers regularly introduce toys and other novelties to the birds to keep them happy and interested in the world around them.

While I was, of course, com-pletely captivated by the enticing task at hand, I found myself dis-tracted by Sahara’s antics with the ice. She first explored this unusual addition to her home by cautiously stepping on it, then leapt back-ward in comical confusion. Next, she tried delicately picking up pieces of ice in her ponderous beak only to quickly drop them.

But finally, Sahara did some-thing strange. She picked up a strip of lukewarm meat from her dish,

strode purposefully to the pile of ice and carefully placed the strip in the center of the ice. I watched, fascinated, as she repeated this procedure for four more pieces of meat, fussing with the arrange-ment to keep the pieces evenly spaced. After about 10 minutes of puttering around her enclosure, Sahara returned to the ice pile, cocked her head with a squawk and eagerly gobbled up all four nicely chilled meat strips.

Sahara, a bird with no experi-ence with ice (and most likely with no ice-related genetic background from her South African forebears), seemed clearly to use ice as an impromptu refrigerator.

Is it a logical fallacy — anthro-pomorphism — to assume that human-like behavior implies the existence of human-like men-tal processes? Well, what do you call it when someone assumes that complex human-like behav-ior is NOT evidence of complex human-like mental processes? I call it the biological equivalent of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system.

My experiences strongly sug-gest that animals have distinct personalities and emotions; many species use tools, plan for the future, solve puzzles, have com-plex cultures, communicate with something approaching language, appreciate aesthetic beauty, farm plants and fellow animals and

exhibit other traits once thought to be distinctly human.

For example, an early marine center in Florida housed a killer whale couple which finally became pregnant after many unsuccess-ful tries. About 11 months into the pregnancy, the father — as was customary for him — ran his nose along the mother’s belly, emit-ting high-frequency clicks. Sud-denly he froze in the water, then swam pell-mell against the side of the pool, repeatedly smashing his head against the wall, and later became apathetic and melan-choly. After a few days, their baby emerged stillborn.

The best explanation is sort of amazing: The killer whale father performed regular sonograms to check on his baby, realized it was no longer alive and sank into self-destructive depression.

Sure, we can think abstractly and communicate with a com-plex, nuanced language, two rel-atively clear di!erences between us and our nonhuman neigh-bors. But consider Sahara; con-sider the bereaved killer whale father. Humans are not separated from animals by a clear, bold line. Rather, we are just a relatively advanced point on a long and complex continuum.

DAKOTA MCCOY is a junior in Branford College. Contact her at

dakota.mccoy@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T D A K O T A M C C O Y

Bird brains ain’t so simple

Last weekend, Yale had more visitors than usual. Slightly confused-looking kids wan-

dered around in herds, mostly staying close to Science Hill but occasionally straying into the heart of campus. They were here for Yale Engineering and Science Weekend (YES-W).

YES-W epitomizes Yale’s e!orts to recruit top science and engineering students. Prefrosh sat in on science classes, saw science facilities and attended a science-themed extracurricular bazaar.

According to Deputy Dean of Admissions Jeremiah Quinlan, the admissions o"ce will consider changes to the relatively new pro-gram in May. I don’t know how Yale should change YES-W, but I have a suggestion: Add another prefrosh weekend. Only this time, make it for students who would otherwise attend small liberal arts schools.

It seems that YES-W is Yale’s e!ort to out-MIT MIT. This sci-ence-heavy recruiting e!ort has become too myopic. Instead, Yale should recruit students who would otherwise go to a school like Wil-liams or Swarthmore.

Yale is never going to out-MIT MIT. But we might out-Williams Wil-liams. Our sci-ence resources may be top-notch, and our engineer-ing classes may have low student-fac-ulty ratios, but students who want to

study nothing but the sciences are going to go to MIT or Caltech. Those schools are engineered for that type of student. Yale simply focuses too much on ensuring that each student has a well-rounded liberal arts education and enjoys his undergraduate experience.

Yes, you may say, we may never get the intensely focused science kids, but aren’t we already getting liberal arts kids? Yes, but that isn’t the point. Yale may get many lib-eral arts kids, but it is losing out on a whole type of student: those who want the small school feeling.

I have several friends who only applied to these small schools. They didn’t want the big-school ambiance but a small-school envi-ronment, where the emphasis is on small classes and the overall undergraduate experience.

Yale has that! At least, much more than it has science facilities to rival those of MIT or Caltech. (That is not to diminish Yale’s science facilities, but MIT and Caltech just have the best in the world — because that’s all they have.) Yale may not be a small school in size, but it is in atmosphere.

We have the residential col-lege system, which is an excellent substitute for a small-school feel. Students truly get to know other members of their college as well as their master and dean. Only at Yale can students have the small-school experience within the con-text of a larger research university.

Yale also has the small-school benefits of small classes, numer-ous caring advisors and a well-rounded liberal arts curriculum. But many colleges can claim to have these. Yale’s inimitable qual-ification is its atmosphere. That

is why we must have a weekend specifically geared to win over small-school kids, just as YES-W attempts to win over science kids. This weekend will show small-school kids that Yale’s atmosphere — that ine!able aura — is exactly what they think they would get only at a small school. The sense of happiness, friendliness and the focus on the undergraduate expe-rience is as present at Yale as it is at any other school across the nation.

This is what we should be telling prefrosh. We can let them feel for themselves Yale’s undergraduate-centric atmosphere. At the very least, we should target these kids far more than we do now.

I was almost wooed by the allures of the small-school expe-rience. I very strongly considered St. John’s, a tiny liberal arts school in Maryland that emphasizes the Western canon. It was through visiting Yale that I fell in love with the place. We should make sure that happens more often.

SCOTT STERN is a freshman in Branford College. Contact him at

scott.stern@yale.edu .

For another prefrosh weekend

SCOTT STERNA Stern

Perspective

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 3

FRIDAY FORUM WOODY ALLEN, “SLEEPER”“I’m here to supervise the initial phase of your as-similation into society, the society that will take care of your needs and desires …”

About this time last year, I wasn’t sure what to think. Society tap had begun. I was attempting to

make sense of something that didn’t spam panlists or sponsor a booth at the extracurricular bazaar. I wasn’t quite sure what I was trying to make sense of.

I was hardly alone. Freshmen, sopho-mores and juniors are all more or less in the dark. Even privately, the subject of society can isolate close junior friends as they tiptoe over eggshells of ego and self-worth. Seniors in society have little extrinsic incentive to speak out. Seniors not tapped for society are muzzled for fear of looking bitter. Considered alto-gether, it’s a coincidence of near com-plete silence.

I was supposed to be in society this year but no longer am. I’m in the pecu-liar position of having looked from the outside in (or tried to, through windows that don’t exist) and, briefly, from the inside out.

During junior spring, while soci-ety remained mysterious, tap was real. Some of us were getting envelopes, dis-creetly slipping away for interviews and dinners. Some of us were not. For nearly all of us, if to di!ering degrees, tap awakened feelings that best belong deep inside Yucca Mountain: jealousy, inse-curity, spite.

Tap is ugly. Ugly. Some societies pro-fess to adjudicate achievement and suc-cess (often, only as well as Google mea-sures it) and solicit and vet names of the select from society alumni, peers (I’ve received such inquiries) and, for a few, our professors. Far more important — and this very much applies to pro-fessedly meritocratic societies — is the deliberation that picks favorites among friends and peers. Ultimately, taps are determined by who happens to know whom, who likes whom, who does not like whom.

Tap leaves a foul aftertaste that requires more than mouthwash to cleanse. Nearly no one likes it, seniors in society included. Yet perhaps, as with college admissions (or FOOT leader or Tour Guide selection), it’s a necessary evil? The product might merit the pro-

cess?Yale would not be Yale without admis-

sions. Yet Yale’s value requires selectiv-ity: At Yale, for example, I find seminar discussion far more compelling than I would its equivalent at the University of Alaska. That’s why I chose Yale.

The value of society is relationships. I wonder: Is the process of tap and soci-ety required for the product of compel-ling relationships?

For some, the answer is yes. I have several friends who would describe themselves as quiet, and their takes on their society experiences average “pretty good” (and range from “ugh” to “transformative”). Society facilitates relationships they probably wouldn’t have otherwise sought out. Sadly, ironi-cally, the institution also systematically selects against those for whom it might most benefit.

For others not phobic of Solo cups (unlike me), society can be great, too. It’s a dedicated time and place to chal-lenge oneself and introspect, which has universal value. I know two Yalies who came out to their societies before they did to friends or family. Yale is a safe, supportive place. They had both already spent three years here. Clearly, they found in society camaraderie beyond what they found elsewhere at Yale.

If you strip away your attraction to exclusivity and selectivity and prestige, your curiosity, your need for self-a"r-mation, your appreciation of being told you’re incredible and wonderful, dis-tinguished and accomplished — if you strip all this away (which is impossible),

society is for relationships. Society is to meet new people, to make friends.

But in this aim — admirable from every perspective — there’s an almost tragic quality. To find relationships, to make friends, we submit ourselves to an institution of exquisite grandi-osity: interview invitations embossed on Tyco’s finest cardstock, a conceit of secrecy, a protocol of selection and rejection, budgets and dues and endow-ments, the very real, superfluous phys-ical exclusion of windowless buildings that loom large throughout our campus.

When I was in elementary school, I would make friends by asking if some-one wanted to play. To make friends at Yale, I accepted a tap to an institu-tion with a divisive and hurtful enabling process that, once enabled, requires of its members a sometimes extraordinary number of hours each week.

In elementary school and at Yale, I was looking for the same thing — for relationships, for friends. What in the world happened to me between elemen-tary school and now? How is it that in looking to find the most free and organic aspect of life — relationships, friendship — I outsourced myself to an institution? I wonder what nine-year-old me would say to all this. Why can’t we just play?

I imagine George Pierson lived life with a nine-year-old’s spirit and think that his description of Yale as “a com-pany of scholars, a society of friends” rings true because, for the most part, Yalies share that spirit. Subdividing the society of Yale and the natural society of our friends into exclusive subsocieties is strange to everyone — including our parents, including our nine-year-old siblings, including us before we came to Yale — because it’s so di!erent from how we find friends and relationships in life. Di!erent isn’t necessarily bad and exclusion can be useful, but I wonder whether we need this system. While I’ve found my answer, I wish you more than luck in finding yours.

JONATHAN KREISS-TOMKINS is a senior in Branford College. Contact him at jon-

athan.kreiss-tomkins@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T J O N A T H A N K R E I S S - T O M K I N S

Exclusive friendships

YALE SENIORS TALK SOCIETY

I am not in a secret society. When I wasn’t tapped, I

was pretty bummed. I wish I could say I was mature enough not to care, but I did. I was wor-ried that I would be missing out on some fundamental Yale experience, that everyone would have new friends and, worst of all, that I was somehow subpar — that all my friends in societies (all my friends) were somehow more “accomplished” or “worth knowing.” It felt lame.

I guess I’m writing this op-ed for future people like me — peo-ple who for whatever reason slip through the cracks of the sys-tem. I’m writing to say: Don’t feel lame! I can’t speak for the society experience because I didn’t have it, but I can speak to the non-society experience, and the verdict is: It’s totally fine. It’s totally not a big deal. Seri-ously.

There are a lot of advantages to society, but it takes up a ton of time. Twelve hours a week for roughly 34 weeks amounts to over 400 hours. That’s a lot of hours! Society is one way to spend them, but there are cer-tainly others.

Last semester I spent every Sunday and Thursday night writing the book for a musi-cal that went up in December, and this semester, I travel to New York every Thursday for an internship. If I were in a soci-ety, I wouldn’t be able to have this job — as I usually get back around 10 p.m. And who knows if I would have had time to write the play last semester if I didn’t devote two nights a week to the project?

I’ve heard friends talk about how amazing society is — the bios, the parties, the dinners. But I’ve also heard friends com-plain about it — when society must take precedent over study-ing for a test or applying for jobs or spending time with other friends or roommates.

Junior spring, society is such a thing. Everyone everywhere seems to be talking about it and thinking about it and worrying about it. But when senior year rolls around, it fades into the background. No one really talks about it anymore. It doesn’t continue to take over everyone’s lives. (I promise.)

The real secret about secret societies is that they’re not a big deal. They’re a fun way to get to know people. To get free food. To socialize. To think. But they’re not the only — or even best — place to do that. I’ve had plenty of deep conversations, debates and drinks with (new!) friends this year, and I didn’t have a tomb inside which I could do so.

Every year, there are inevita-bly people who don’t end up in a society. And my only message to you is this: I’ve had a fantas-tic senior year without one. I did things I was proud of, made new relationships I will always trea-sure and had a little bit of extra time to do so. I’m not in a soci-ety, and I don’t think I’m a lame person — all of you juniors who don’t get tapped, please, please, please join the club.

MARINA KEEGAN is a senior in Saybrook College. Contact her at

marina.keegan@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T M A R I N A K E E G A N

Senior year without society

Some of my closest friends at Yale are juniors. I have grown through knowing

these people, and I care about their well-being. It seems silly to me that while many of my junior friends are experiencing anxiety about how they want to spend part of their senior year, we seniors are supposed to clam up. I would rather not have wonderful people doubting their self-worth or worrying about which seniors they need to be impressing at any given moment.

The society tap process is not secret; it’s sort of two-thirds secret in a way that fuels a rumor mill about who got in where and how. I’m writing to divorce two elements of senior societies that are often conflated. The first is the aura of exclusivity and intim-idation that surrounds the tap process. The second is the expe-rience of participating in a soci-ety’s weekly activities. The first can be very negative, and the sec-ond can be very positive.

It’s worth remembering that admission to a senior society is far from a holistic evaluation of your merit relative to your class-mates. It can’t be boiled down to simple arithmetic. I am in my society because a former senior in it knew me well and saw qual-ities in me that are shared by many, many peers whom she did not know as well. The vast major-ity of senior societies select their next class based on people whom they already know. You are not better or worse than the next person. Let the measure of your worth come from you — or, even better, from that kid you tutor,

or the way you make your family laugh. Let it be from somewhere other than a group of seniors and alums who don’t know you.

Frank dialogue between

seniors and juniors about the purpose and expectations of society is important, especially before juniors sign away hun-dreds of hours on the dotted line. During your senior year, you will have strong opinions about how you want to spend your time. It is the time when you can express what you value most and best channel Yale’s resources. The people whom I admire most in the senior class have started clean energy companies, devoted full courseloads’ worth of time to public service in New Haven and are preparing for master’s degrees in history at Cambridge. Some are in societies; others are not.

Furthermore, be aware of the salesmanship that surrounds the tap process. Seniors want to make their society sound extra special to you. Many societies o!er won-derful experiences. The experi-ence depends quite a bit on the composition of the group of ris-ing seniors. Last year, a senior friend who had never spoken

critically of her society experi-ence told me she respected me more for turning down an o!er to join her group than she would have if I had taken it.

As I suspect many others did, I came to Yale for the people I was going to meet here. I hope that when we indulge in self-reflec-tion, we value other students for the qualities they have — dedica-tion to a cause, sense of humor, humility — and not for the groups to which they belong. The real value many societies o!er is the opportunity for self-reflection, meeting new people and having meaningful conversations. You do not need to have a society set this up for you!

This week, my conversa-tions with my suitemate, who I first met on FOOT, ranged from discussing the ways we might change due to living abroad next year to how to cure an overdose on gummy calcium chews. We’re like Britain and the U.S., she is fond of saying — we have a spe-cial relationship. Another high-light of this week was hearing a freshman suitemate’s thesis pre-sentation on the history of HIV discrimination law and thinking back on how she became inter-ested in public health. The stu! that makes senior year special for me is what makes Yale special: relationships that make you grow both personally and intellec-tually. How you cultivate those relationships is up to you.

CATHERINE OSBORN is a senior in Pierson College. Contact her at

catherine.osborn@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T C A T H E R I N E O S B O R N

Seek values over groupsYalies are notoriously concerned about

getting into stuff. Whether it’s the extracurricular climbers you spot

freshman year or the shopping period rush to get into that seminar you absolutely have to take, Yalies crave acceptance.

Of course, for many upperclassmen, the one thing on their mind is society. I’m in a society. I went through the same process that many juniors are going through, and I came up with some delicious little pointers for those being considered or shunned by a senior society.

First, you’re going to tie society to your own self-worth, even if you don’t think you will. A small part of you will feel awe-some if you get into Skull and Bones, and as much as you might try to deny it, you’ll feel like crap if you don’t get any invites. So, when you inevitably start thinking in these terms, go soak your head, let go of your ego and remember that society is mainly about chilling with a group of people every week. That’s all you actually do.

Second, people outside of Yale barely know what a senior society is — at best, they’ll know about it as a joke, or some-thing that George Bush was involved with. Don’t do society for personal validation, because it will disappear once you leave Yale. Instead, I’d recommend meditating. And trying to forget about the fact that all society members get a free puppy on gradu-ation day.

Third, society isn’t how you culti-vate deep relationships with people. Yes, you meet a group of people and hopefully become close friends. But to get really close to somebody, you need a one-on-one inter-action, which happens in society only if you decide to hang out with somebody outside of the normal group meetings. You don’t need to get into society to make friends. If close, varied and lifelong friends are what you want, you should spend less time wor-rying about society and the lifetime sup-ply of Cap ’n’ Crunch that comes with it.

Whether you’re in a society or not, think about pursuing deep relationships.

Fourth, lose the idea that you need be deeply involved with a certain group of people. Yale can be cliquish; everyone here is in a group, and it can feel daunting if you are not. But we’ve gotten to the point where people here make groups so that they can be in groups. Stop worrying about it; other-wise there will be more groups than people to fill them. I’m worried about the day when our groups start forming their own groups and we get into a whole mess of meta.

Finally, the secrecy of society is above all for keeping sensitive personal information safe within a trusted group. However, dur-ing tap period, that same secrecy ends up creating a bunch of unintended hype that hurts to a lot of people. It makes juniors speculate and distracts from the real rea-sons why society can be a wonderful expe-rience.

Remember shopping period, when you fought for the classes that you just had to get into? You’re probably putting off read-ing for those same classes right now. Once the thrill of getting in dies down, you can actually see something for what it really is. It’s the same for society. However, taking a shower in champagne every Thursday really is all that I thought it would be.

WILL MORITZ is a senior in Trumbull College. Contact him at will.moritz@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T W I L L M O R I T Z

Seeing society clearly

SENIOR SOCIETIES ARE ALL WELL AND GOOD

FOR MANY PEOPLE, BUT DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE

FRIENDSHIPS AT YALE ARE

IMPORTANT, IN OR OUT OF SOCIETY

JUNIORS SHOULD WEIGH THE STRESSES OF THE TAP PROCESS

AGAINST THE BENEFITS OF SOCIETY

NEWSPAGE 4 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

TODAY’S EVENTSFRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2412:00 PM “Ancient Insects in Technicolor: The Preservation and Evolution of Insect Structural Colors.” Maria McNamara, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geology & Geophysics, will give this Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies/Environmental Sciences Center seminar. Class of 1954 Environmental Sciences Center (21 Sachem St.), Room 110.

5:00 PM “200 Years of Gynecology and Obstetrics at Yale Medial School: From Nathan Smith to Charles Lockwood.” Ernest Kohorn will speak at 449th meeting of the Beaumont Medical Club. Sterling Hall of medicine (333 Cedar St.), Historical Library.

6:00 PM Settlers of Catan Tournament and Fundraiser. Love Settlers of Catan? Want to prove to everyone that you’re the best Settlers of Catan player at Yale? Want $50 if you win? All proceeds will support the YIRA 2012 Philippines Spring Trip. Admission is $8. Refreshments will be served. Register by emailing binh.hoang@yale.edu. Asian-American Cultural Center (295 Crown St.).

PAGE FIVEYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 5

BY EMILY KLOPFER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Over 1,000 students packed into Commons Thursday night to watch teams from their residential colleges chop, dice, fry and saute in pursuit of this year’s Iron Chef Final Cut title.

The competition, organized by Yale Dining and `the Yale Col-lege Council, gave each team of three students one hour to display their culinary prowess as audience members looked on and sampled offerings from 21 vendors scat-tered throughout the hall. Var-ied approaches to using this year’s secret ingredients — mushrooms and cod — yielded dishes rang-ing from rice-paper wrapped cod to honey-glazed mushroom brus-chetta. But Silliman College’s team ultimately took home the $1,000 cash prize with its wild mushroom appetizer and steamed cod with a homemade shrimp and mushroom stock. “We wanted to feature ingredients and do little to change them,” Jared Shenson ’13, a member of Silliman’s team. “We started the hour with butterflies but then settled and knew what we were doing thanks to practice.”

Shenson said his teammates, Aliy Zhang ’15 and Hallie Meyer ’15, spent many hours planning their menu and practicing how they would cook their dishes, adding that they collaborated with last year’s Silliman team, which also claimed first place.

Judges for the competition — who included Provost Peter Salovey, Director of Undergradu-ate Career Services Allyson Moore and Yale Dining Executive Direc-tor Rafi Taherian — watched the tactics of each team closely, bas-ing their evaluations on fla-vor, cleanliness and innovation, among other considerations. Each team earned a place in the event after winning preliminary com-petitions in their residential col-leges.

The staggered starts of each team began with the Jonathan Edwards College representatives. Ioannis Legmpelos ’13, who com-peted for Jonathan Edwards, said his team was confused about the time limit and had to rush their preparation of their mushroom bruschetta. Though the team managed to avoid creating “soggy and stale” bruschetta, he said, but time constraints prevented them

from perfecting its presentation. One competitor from Cal-

houn College, Elliot Morse ’13, faced challenges beyond just determining the right combina-tion of ingredients: She could use only one arm, since she had bro-ken her collar bone. Alison Pease ’13, another Calhoun representa-tive, said the team had the mod-est goal of not “setting things on fire,” and while Morse said her sling did not hinder the team and just required more organization to make sure her teammates “got the two-armed tasks done,” her efforts earned admiration from some Calhoun supporters.

“It’s truly inspirational to see someone with so much pas-sion for fine dining in the face of a debilitating injury,” said Nata-lie Papillion ’13, who attended the event.

The Davenport College team won second place with a cash prize of $500, and Pierson brought home third with a prize of $250. Other awards for the competition included “cleanest jacket,” “best organized” and “most interesting dish,” won by Pierson, Silliman and Davenport, respectively. One of the loudest cheers of the night

came when Morse College earned a “chicken tenders night” by field-ing the “best cheering squad.”

Jeanette Norton, deputy direc-tor of Yale Dining, said the orga-nizers hoped to emphasize the importance of sustainability by rewarding contestants for reduc-ing their waste, using sustain-able ingredients and keeping their cooking areas sanitary, as well as inviting vendors that value sus-tainability.

Audience members said the Iron Chef competition proved exciting, but many said they actu-ally spent most of their time pre-occupied by the enormous array of food. Rodrigo Cuestas ’15 said he attended the event because he heard he could try many types of food, and Joshua Jacobs ’15 said he also appreciated the chance to try exotic foods.

“Although normal day dining food is good, I enjoyed a change from the daily menu,” Jacobs said.

Vendors at the event included the Alaskan Seafood Market-ing Institute, General Mills and Michele’s Family Bakery.

Contact EMILY KLOPFER at emily.klopfer@yale.edu .

BY JAMES LUSTAFF REPORTER

The Yale Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic is challenging the legal-ity of a federal deportation pro-gram launched in Connecticut Wednesday.

The WIRAC filed a class action lawsuit in a U.S. district court Feb. 13 questioning the consti-tutionality of the immigration detainers used by U.S. Immi-gration and Customs Enforce-ment in the program, known as Secure Communities, and asked Wednesday that the suit be expe-dited in the wake of its imple-mentation. The lawsuit argues that confinement based solely on an ICE detainer notice violates the Fourth, 10th and 14th amend-ments of the Constitution.

“Detainers are the linchpin of the Secure Communities pro-gram. Without them, the pro-gram cannot function,” Mat-thew Vogel LAW ’13, an intern at the WIRAC, said in a Wednesday press release. “But confinement pursuant to these ICE notices is unconstitutional and unauthor-ized by Congress. The Depart-ment of Correction cannot hold people without lawful authority to do so.”

Local police departments rou-tinely run suspects’ fingerprints through the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s database for the purpose of criminal background checks. Under Secure Commu-nities, those fingerprints are also checked against an ICE database in an e!ort to deport criminals living in the country illegally.

If ICE has reason to believe a suspect is an illegal immigrant, the agency can issue a detainment request to the state’s Department of Correction to hold the suspect for up to 48 hours while immigra-tion o"cials arrive to determine whether to initiate deportation proceedings.

But immigration detainers are not warrants — they are nei-ther based on evidence nor issued after a constitutionally required

probable cause hearing, the WIRAC argues.

“[An immigration detainer] is merely an administrative notice requesting that the local agency continue to detain an individual, even after that person would oth-erwise be released from state cus-tody, until ICE comes to take cus-tody,” the WIRAC’s press release said. “An immigration detainer carries no legal authority to order such continued detention, nor does it authorize continued detention.”

Bill Hing, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, said the main debate that will play out in the courts is whether the way Secure Communities operates is inter-preted to be coercing local and state officials to act or spend money against their will.

The central question, Hing said, is whether Secure Commu-nities violates the 10th Amend-ment, which forbids the fed-

eral government from making local o"cials do work that is not their responsibility. This con-stitutional question, he added, is likely to take more than a year to be resolved by courts, a view echoed by five other law profes-sors interviewed Thursday.

While Travis Silva LAW ’13, an intern at the WIRAC, said that the clinic does not does not comment to the News “as a policy,” he told the New Haven Register that the clinic wants the court to expe-dite the suit because they fear an increase in unlawful deten-tions with Secure Communities’ implementation on Wednes-day. The motion asks the district court to order the Department of Correction to respond to the law-suit “within days.”

Meanwhile, Mike Lawlor, the state’s undersecretary for crim-inal justice policy and plan-ning, said Connecticut’s Depart-ment of Correction will decide whether to honor ICE’s detain-

ment requests on a case-by-case basis.

“We don’t understand why the governor would detain peo-ple in jails pursuant to this pro-gram when he is not obligated to do so by law,” said law profes-sor Michael Wishnie ’83 LAW ’93, who directs the WIRAC, at a Monday press conference at City Hall with Mayor John DeStefano and other city and state o"cials.

Wishnie said participation in Secure Communities is entirely within Governor Dannel Malloy’s discretion, as most criminal sus-pects are held in state facilities that report to the governor.

City Hall spokeswoman Eliz-abeth Benton ’04 said Thurs-day afternoon the city has not received word of any detainment requests from ICE since Secure Communities was implemented Wednesday.

Contact JAMES LU at james.q.lu@yale.edu .

CHRISTOPHER PEAK/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Jessica Vosburgh LAW ’13, a member of the Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy clinic, joined city and state o!cials at City Hall Monday at a press conference resisting a new federal deportation program.

ZOE GORMAN/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

The Silliman team won this year’s Iron Chef Final Cut competition in Commons Thursday night in a repeat of last year’s victory.

396,906The number of immigrants deported by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2011. 2011 saw a record number of deportations. Of the nearly 400,000 persons deported, ICE reports that 55 percent had criminal records.

YLS clinic fights deportation program

BY AKBAR AHMEDSTAFF REPORTER

Attics, off-campus houses and Old Campus yurts have been past haunts of Control Group, Yale’s only undergraduate exper-imental theater company. But come Saturday, they will break with their penchant for obscure venues, putting up a new pro-duction in one of the most public settings on campus.

In a turn for the traditional, the group will present “The Tempest,” their only show this semester and a Shakespeare at Yale production, this Satur-day and Sunday on the street in front of Payne Whitney Gym-nasium. The group has adapted the text, shortening the show to only 45 minutes and incorpo-rating extensive sound effects and musical elements, said Alex Kramer ’13, one of the group’s co-directors for the semester.

Putting up a Shakespeare pro-duction has been a challenge for the group, said co-director Charlotte McCurdy ’13. In using a set text and tackling a larger production than usual, she said, Control Group leaves its comfort zone.

But choosing to stage a classic text does not mean that Control Group is moving away from its experimental dynamic, member Charlie Polinger ’13 said.

“‘Tempest’ is honestly like any other [Control Group produc-tion],” he said. “It’s a very famous text we’re using … but we’re still making it our own, taking the pieces we want to explore and devising our own product.”

McCurdy said that the group, which makes decisions based on consensus and the interests of its current membership, wanted to do a show in a big space such as Payne Whitney because mem-bers felt that they needed to get out of their “habit” of only performing in small, intimate spaces.

“We know we can [create] beautiful visions and write text in a certain way,” Kramer said. “But when we suddenly have to work from a text, that’s when things get interesting.”

The Shakespeare at Yale fes-tival this semester led Con-trol Group members to consider adapting a Shakespeare text as a

challenge they could grow from, added member Josh Evans ’12. Beginning with Shakespeare’s original text, the group began to add in experimental elements such as original music created by Nathan Prillaman ’13, sounds McCurdy described as “wrench-ing and unsettling.” With the University gymnasium as their backdrop, McCurdy said the group hopes to convey a sense of the synthetic refuge Pros-pero creates for himself and his daughter on an island.

McCurdy said the group’s approach to productions makes it very di!erent from most Yale theatrical productions.

“It’s very process-based,” she explained, adding that members train twice a week throughout the semester. “We build a shared vocabulary and style because we work together continuously.”

Zach Bell ’14, the group’s producer, added that Control Group’s long-term view enables the development of strong work-ing relationships. Although most shows are planned in a one to two-month time period, he said, the thematic foundations of Control Group shows are built over a period of years as group members practice with and bounce ideas o! each other. The group began developing “The Tempest” early this semester, but McCurdy said it incorporates ideas from rehearsals as far back as a year ago.

Kramer said he is particularly excited that a larger-scale show allows for a larger audience than most Control Group productions do. Increased exposure may draw a greater range of audience mem-bers, McCurdy said. While the group is often viewed as “exper-imental theater with a capital ‘E,’ ” McCurdy said that the cur-rent membership is not inter-ested in cliches such as audience confrontation or excessive bru-tality and grotesqueness.

“It’s absurd to think of exper-imental theater as ‘crazy,’ ” said Kramer. “In the theater commu-nity, experimental is the norm.”

The show will run Saturday and Sunday afternoon at 2 and 3:30 p.m.

Contact AKBAR AHMED at akbar.ahmed@yale.edu .

CHRISTOPHER PEAK/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Control Group, the experimental theater group shown above perform-ing on Old Campus, tackled Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ in a new show.

Silliman repeats at Iron Chef

Experimental group tackles ‘Tempest’

FROM THE FRONTPAGE 6 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

“There’s a lot of Americans … who think that we’ve arrived where we need to be … and a!r-mative action needs to be dismantled.” SPIKE LEE AMERICAN FILMMAKER

for continued giving,” said Joey Mensah ’12, one of two co-chairs of the campaign.

The high participation rate led to additional gifts from anonymous donors, including a $100,000 gift given for beat-ing last year’s participation. In addition, three $10,000 schol-arships for incoming freshmen were awarded to the three col-leges with 100 percent partici-pation: Branford, Davenport and Ezra Stiles. Jonathan Edwards College also a $10,000 scholar-ship for an incoming freshman by donating more in total money than any other college.

Courtney Fukuda ’12, the other campaign co-chair, attributed the high participa-tion rate in part to the enthusi-asm of agents and college co-chairs who collected donations in the residential colleges. The campaign gained momentum early in the process after holding a kick-off event and receiving donations from about a quar-ter of the class on the first night of the campaign, Mensah said. Kevin Ryan ’85 also sponsored a 24-hour donation challenge, and ended up donating $7,000 after seniors raised participation from 78.5 percent to 85.4 percent in one day.

Jocelyn Polce, assistant direc-tor of the Yale Alumni Fund, called the senior gift “a vote of confidence for Yale” that encourages alumni to donate to the University.

“It shows that our seniors who are about to go into the world had a positive experience here,” she said. “We publicize that to par-ents and alumni who may also donate to alumni fund.”

Every college had donation rates of over 92 percent, and Berkeley, Saybrook and Silliman had only one senior choose not to donate.

Many students interviewed said the drive to maximize par-ticipation made them feel pres-sured to donate, and three said campaign representatives were inappropriately persistent with them.

Daniel Thompson ’12 said he chose not to donate mainly because he felt that “harassment and coercion” had replaced dis-cussion about the senior gift. He said after he decided not to give to the class gift, he received calls and texts from peers in Pierson and had multiple discussions with campaign agents about his choice. He added that the Pier-son co-chairs visited his room on the last night of the campaign and o!ered to donate a dollar in Thompson’s name.

Nick Makarov ’12, one of the Pierson co-chairs, said he pro-posed donating in Thompson’s name because he was not sure why Thompson did not want to donate, and he wanted to ensure financial constraints were not keeping Thompson from partic-ipating.

“If it’s a financial reason, obviously that’s understand-able,” Makarov said. “[My Pier-son co-head] and I were so

invested in the campaign that we were willing to make the dona-tion on [Thompson’s] behalf.”

Makarov added that he is happy with Pierson’s 97.5 per-cent participation rate.

Jennifer Flynn ’12 said she ini-tially did not want to participate because she thought the cam-paign was centered too strongly on residential college spirit, but she ultimately decided to con-tribute and direct her gift to financial aid, in part because she has benefited from financial aid herself and would not want to prevent Saybrook from receiv-ing a $10,000 scholarship for a freshman.

Shir Levkowitz ’12, a member of JE who chose not to donate, said he thought the campaign was mostly managed respect-fully in Jonathan Edwards but that the campaign overall had “some really troubling aspects to it.”

“The ultimate reason why I chose not to donate was because I was really appalled by some of the practices surrounding the senior class gift campaign, and I think a lot of people were sort of robbed of the right to make a meaningful contribution,” Levkowitz said.

Mensah said some seniors cited “personal reasons” for not donating, and while he respected their decisions, he added that it is “frustrating to not know what the problem is.” Fukuda said the campaign is intended to reach out to as many students as pos-sible and encourage them to donate, but the essence of the campaign as a group activity inherently places pressure on students.

“That’s sort of the nature of it: The closer you get to the goal of 100 percent, the more pressure is placed on those who don’t want to participate,” she said. “I think some people might think there’s too much of an emphasis on this campaign, too much pressure, and they are turned o! by that.”

Still, many students inter-viewed praised the act of donat-ing to the Alumni Fund and expressed excitement that the class had broken the participa-tion record. Alyssa Mitson-Sala-zar ’12, who was not involved with the campaign, said she often casually encouraged her friends to donate because “Yale has granted [students] so many opportunities.”

Lisa Wang ’12, co-chair of Jonathan Edwards, said she believed the campaign unites the senior class and provides an easy way to show gratitude to the University.

“The heart is the senior class gift is showing appreciation of the four years we have had here,” she said. “It wasn’t about the dollar amount; it’s a way to show gratitude if Yale has given you anything at all.”

Fundraising events during the campaign included an event at Mory’s and a tailgate at the Har-vard-Yale hockey game.

Contact JULIA ZORTHIAN at julia.zorthian@yale.edu .

Participation beats record

CLASS GIFT FROM PAGE 1

ine the mock-up, the final group heavily involved with the construction of the new colleges to do so.

By late March, the colleges’ archi-tects will determine the final details of the building’s technical design.

The mock-up structure consists of two walls at a 90-degree angle adorned with various types of windows, stones and mor-tars to present a sample of the colleges’ potential features, Stern said. Its cost is included in the project’s construction con-tract, Levin said, since creating mock-ups is standard procedure for projects of this scale.

“It’s like a life-size tableau of what many of the architectural features of the college will look like in real life,” University Pres-ident Richard Levin said, adding that the mock-up looks much more “busy” than the actual colleges will, as it compresses many design elements onto such a small building.

Yet not every component on the mock-up will make its way onto the actual col-leges. For example, in examining the struc-ture in this phase, visitors consider the way in which the mortar should be handled: The architects have tinkered with options for the width and thickness of the mor-tar between rows of bricks and the depth of the grooves along the mortar’s surface, Stern said.

Morand added that attention at this level of detail contributes to the unique-ness of Yale’s architectural landscape, cre-ating an “environment of delight.”

Windows are subject to similar exami-

nation, with the mock-up presenting three di!erent options for the final design, Stern said. Each choice comes from a di!erent supplier that can work within the new col-leges’ price and contracting constraints to provide a product close to what the archi-tects are seeking.

“We want to see which one comes the closest to what we want,” Stern said.

In figuring out which of several options to select, Stern said that physical appear-ance is only one factor. Price and perfor-mance play a key role in which options will be selected for the new colleges. He added that the mock-up enables his team to test the features in New Haven’s environment and to see how the colors appear under New Haven’s light. With its proximity to Yale’s central campus, the Science Park location e!ectively approximates the envi-ronmental conditions of the actual site.

The mock-up was assembled by Turner Construction, Yale’s contractor for the residential colleges, Stern said.

Contact NATASHA THONDAVADI at natasha.thondavadi@yale.edu .

in admissions since the 1960s and will continue to do so as long as it is consis-tent with the law of the United States.”

Other education leaders, including Columbia University President Lee Bol-linger, have taken a strong stance in sup-port of affirmative action admissions policies. Bollinger called the court’s Tuesday decision “ominous” and said “it threatens to undo several decades of e!ort within higher education,” accord-ing to a Feb. 22 article in The New York Times.

Fisher’s argument against affirma-tive action is not the only one of its kind currently under scrutiny. Last August, an Asian-American student filed com-plaints against Harvard and Princeton alleging that, despite performing at the top of his class, he was denied admission to the universities on account of his race. The student’s claim is currently being investigated by the Department of Edu-cation’s O"ce for Civil Rights. Fisher’s case and complaints like it claim that affirmative action policies qualify as “reverse discrimination” against stu-dents of certain racial or ethnic back-grounds.

David Petersam, president of Vir-ginia-based higher education consult-ing group Admissions Consultants, said data from quantifiable college admis-sions metrics — such as high school transcripts and standardized testing scores — indicate that it is more di"cult on average for students of some racial backgrounds to gain admittance to com-petitive colleges compared to students of other backgrounds. According to a 2009 study by Bloomberg News, Asian-American applicants needed a score of 1550 out of 1600 on the SAT exam to compete with white applicants scoring 1410 and black applicants scoring 1100.

“Reverse discrimination is absolutely an issue in college admissions,” said Irena Smith, a former Stanford Univer-sity admissions officer who now runs

her own admissions consulting group. “Especially at the nation’s top schools, first generation Indian-Americans or Asian-Americans are overrepresented in the applicant pools and they feel that they are being edged out because of their racial background. This is a completely justified complaint.”

But Petersam and Smith said it would be “impossible” for the Supreme Court ruling to change the admissions pro-cess drastically. Because most universi-ties use a “holistic decision” approach, in which admissions o"cers consider a host of factors including socioeconomic background, access to opportunities and race when evaluating college applica-tions, the decision process is very murky and di"cult to disentangle. Smith added that these criteria are not easily separa-ble, and race cannot be singled out as the ultimate reason why someone is or is not accepted to a college.

Petersam said that aside from GPA and test scores, none of the other college admissions decision factors are easily quantifiable, making it even harder for individual students to prove that they have been victimized by raced-based a"rmative action.

“It would be ridiculous if there weren’t charges of reverse discrimina-tion, and I think [eliminating a"rmative action] would help pacify some of the kids and their parents,” Smith said. “But the process is so big and has so many parts that is impossible to legislate.”

Richard Sander, a professor at the UCLA School of Law whose areas of spe-cialization include affirmative action, said he was not surprised to learn Tues-day that the court will revisit the issue. Sander said the Grutter v. Bollinger rul-ing in favor of affirmative action has not panned out in practice the way jus-tices originally hoped it would, as it has become a mechanical calculation rather than a more fluid part of a holistic approach. He said colleges often manip-ulate statistics on the racial breakdown of their student bodies to appear to have

a more diverse community than they actually do. But socioeconomic stratifi-cation at the college level has not notice-ably improved since the 2003 ruling, Sander said. Students within the top 10 percent of the nation’s income distribu-tion generally receive 60 percent of the spots at elite schools, he added.

Sander said the court’s decision to hear the case was also unsurprising given the relatively conservative bench: Since the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger rul-ing, five conservative justices have been added to the court. He added that Justice Anthony Kennedy will likely be “a criti-cal vote” in the final decision.

“Kennedy has been skeptical of a"r-mative action in the past, but he has also demonstrated a hesitance to make sweeping changes and precedents,” Sander said. “The outcome is not pre-dictable at all.”

Sander said the court ruling will most likely be one of three outcomes. One, the court could find that the University of Texas was not acting in accordance with the Grutter v. Bollinger decision, thereby upholding the 2003 ruling. A second course of action that the court could take would be rewriting the Grut-ter v. Bollinger principles in a way that translates into clear guidelines so uni-versities can tell when they are in com-pliance with the law, he said. Alter-natively, Sander said, the court could decide to strike down a"rmative action in college admissions altogether.

Je!ery Brenzel, dean of undergrad-uate admissions, did not respond to a request to comment on the role race plays in Yale’s admissions decisions.

Justice Elena Kagan disqualified her-self from the court’s hearing of Fisher v. University of Texas because she had previously worked on the case as solici-tor general.

Contact BEN PRAWDZIK at benjamin.prawdzik@yale.edu .

Mock-ups provide ‘tableau’ of options

Supreme court to issue ruling

NEW COLLEGES FROM PAGE 1

AFFIRM. ACTION FROM PAGE 1

VICTOR KANG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Yale’s two new residential colleges will be constructed in the “Prospect Triangle” area adjacent to Science Hill.

TIMELINE REMAINING PHASES BEFORECONSTRUCTIONFINAL TECHNICAL DESIGNArchitects will complete their tech-nical documents by late March.

ORNAMENTAL DETAILS Plans for gates, sculptures and other aesthetic details.

CLEANING OUT MUDDThe library overflow facility needs to be knocked down to make room for the new colleges, but sorting the books could take more than a year. Depending on when the other phases are completed, this process could take place out of the site.

PREPARATION OF THE SITE The site will be prepared for con-struction and preliminary utility work on areas like electrical wiring, plumbing and sewage will com-mence.

FUNDRAISING Before the University can begin construction on the new colleges, it must meet fundraising goals. As of last week, Yale had raised $187 mil-lion of the $500 million needed.

When we build something, it’s not for the next five or ten years, it’s for many generations.

MICHAEL MORANDSpokesman, Yale University

NEWSYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 7

TaxiThe word taxi comes from the taximeter, the instrument that measures the distance travelled, or time taken, to determine a fare. The taximeter was invented in 1891 by German Wilhelm Bruhn.

BY ROBERT PECKSTAFF REPORTER

A new e!ort by the Arts Coun-cil of Greater New Haven seeks to help local artists further their careers.

Beginning March 15, Debbie Hesse, the Arts Council’s director of artistic programs and services, and Shola Cole, the Council’s community programs coordina-tor, will be traveling to three ven-ues around New Haven offer-ing “pop-up” career counseling,

including workshops and one-on-one consultation sessions. Hesse said that by o!ering con-sulting outside the o"ce, she and Cole hope to reach artists who wouldn’t otherwise hear about upcoming exhibition and per-formance opportunities. While the three visits are the only ones planned so far, Cole said that if they go well, the program may be extended to include more dates and locations.

“The arts have the ability to bring people together,” Cole said.

“Maybe just going out and being in areas where people are more likely to approach us will help more artists find the council.”

While the new pop-up pro-gram will provide similar ser-vices to the in-house counseling the Arts Council already o!ers, Cole said local artists often have di"culty locating career assis-tance when they need it. She said the council hopes to make career services more visible to art-ists by creating outposts in areas already frequented by local art-ists, such as theWilson Branch of the New Haven Public Library on Washington Avenue, where she and Hesse will hold a ses-sion on March 29. Artists seek-ing local art events often turn to the Wilson Library for informa-tion about arts events, Cole said, making it an ideal location for the outreach program. On March 15, Cole and Hesse will travel to 756 Chapel St., the headquarters of the City of New Haven’s Proj-ect Storefronts initiative, which fills empty storefronts with work by creative businesses, followed by The Grove, a collaborative meeting space on Orange Street, on March 22.

Hesse said that in addition to spreading information about exhibition opportunities in New Haven, the Council’s counsel-ing program aims to help artists develop confidence and profes-sional skills, which she said she hopes will help imbue the cre-ative community with “new vitality.”

Cole said the pop-up pro-gram’s first three sessions are part of an off-site counseling pilot program that, if success-

ful, will continue in the future and extend into the greater New Haven area. The initial three ses-sions will allow Hesse and Cole to better understand the steps they can take to improve marketing, networking and financial oppor-tunities for local artists, Hesse said.

Arts Council Executive Direc-tor Cynthia Clair said that at this point it is difficult to estimate how many or what kinds of art-ists will utilize the program, since artists are able to walk in without signing up for sessions before-hand. Though no artists have yet registered, Hesse said she and

Cole selected the sessions’ loca-tions because artists are more likely to “stumble upon” them in the course of their daily lives.

“I believe people will come to us in di!erent ways, and that is fine,” Hesse said. “We are trying this as a pilot, and will fine tune in terms of locations and hours after these initial sessions.”

In addition to the in-person career services, the Arts Council also partners with local business in order to help artists find dis-play and performance spaces.

Contact ROBERT PECK at robert.peck@yale.edu .

Arts Council institutes ‘pop-up’ counseling

recyclerecyclerecyclerecycleYOUR YDN DAILY

DESIGNWe’re thebest-looking desk at the YDN.

We see you.

design@yaledailynews.com

BY HOON PYO JEONCONTRIBUTING REPORTER

City officials are looking to establish a reliable transporta-tion option for patrons of the city’s nightclubs.

Winfield Davis, the deputy director of public space for New Haven’s Town Green Special Ser-vices District — the independent special taxing district authorized by the city and the state — announced Tuesday that the city is planning to set up a taxi stand on Crown Street between College and Temple streets from 10 p.m. until 2:30 a.m. or 3 a.m. from Thursday to Saturday. Davis said he hopes to announce the exact location and operating times in the next several days, after he receives the approval he needs from city o"-cials. Though some hailed the ini-tiative as a savvy economic move for taxis and downtown businesses and a solution to nightlife security issues, others expressed doubt that the stand will have a signifi-cant e!ect on downtown taxi pat-terns.

“We think it’s a great idea from our perspective,” New Haven Police Department spokesman David Hartman said. “Any way to get people who might be intoxi-cated out of their own cars and safely to their destination is a great benefit to all.”

Davis o!ered two main ratio-nales for the taxi stand. It will

ease the chronic traffic conges-tion downtown at night, he said, as most cabs circle around the dis-trict, often blocking entire lanes or double-parking on Crown Street. Knowing they have access to a taxi stand would encourage peo-ple to make smart decisions about whether or not they should drive to bars or clubs, he said. Accord-ing to the Town Green District’s Nightlife Committee — composed of police, bar and club owners and city sta! members — finding a cab past 10 p.m. is difficult even on Thursday nights because on aver-age 5,000 to 6,000 people come into the downtown area on week-end nights.

Hartman said there have been taxi stands downtown in the past. Though most were eventually dis-continued, at one point there were taxi stands in front of the Omni Hotel, Phelps Gate and at the intersection of Temple and Col-lege streets. One stand remains at the intersection of Chapel and College streets. The city discon-tinued these taxi stands because few cabs came to the allotted space, he said, and many bar and club owners were frustrated by the fact that the large stretches of the street reserved for the stands were not being used for parking. But, he said, the fact that the proposed taxi stand will have time parameters will prevent this outcome.

Many downtown bars, clubs and restaurants support the pro-posed new taxi stand.

Keith Davis, a bartender at Wicked Wolf Tavern on Temple Street, said the area around Tem-ple and Crown streets attracts the greatest number of clubgoers, including tourists from Manhattan or college students from nearby Quinnipiac University. College students are the most prone to intoxication, and transportation is often the crucial variable in their decision to travel to New Haven, he said, adding that the taxi stand

will help create a sense of collec-tive security because large crowds will congregate around the stand late at night.

“When I get out of work at 1:15 in the morning, there are peo-ple who literally put knives at [my] neck for my money,” he said. “You’re much safer in bigger num-bers, and you know that’s the spot you can go to.”

Representatives of several New Haven taxi companies also expressed optimism about the plan’s success.

Jerry Walthall, the owner of New Haven-based Heritage Taxi, said he was in favor of the taxi stand because it will make it eas-ier for drivers to locate custom-ers in an increasingly competi-tive taxi industry. Walthall said there are currently 16 New Haven taxi firms of varying sizes, up from four in 1986, and the recession has decreased demand for taxis.

“From the taxi industry’s stand-point, the taxi stand will definitely help because demand has fallen drastically,” said Andrew Osumah, a driver for Metro Taxi. “Nine p.m. to 2 a.m. on Friday and Satur-day nights is definitely the busi-est [time], and it’s good that we’ll know where to go.”

Still, the stand will not be e!ec-tive if taxi drivers do not frequent it, Hartman said. For the stand to become “the norm” for drivers, he said, its organizers need to spread the word.

Davis said he plans to publiciz-ing the hours of operation and the location of the taxi stand after its approval by encouraging bar own-ers and club owners to advertise it in their establishments.

The proposal for a new taxi stand downtown has been on the Nightlife Committee’s agenda for nearly a year, Davis said.

Contact HOON PYO JEON at hoonpyo.jeon@yale.edu .

YDN

A new taxi stand may be coming to downtown, where bar owners have complained of nightly tra!c congestion.

JOY SHAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven is seeking to promote career coun-seling for local artists.

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CITY OF NEW HAVEN

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven will hold arts-centric counseling for kids at the Wilson Branch of the New Haven Public Library March 29.

term interest.”King told the News in a

Wednesday email that faculty have protested shared services “most strongly” because of the reductions in and restructuring of departmental staff over the past few years. But King said these changes were required because of the nationwide eco-nomic recession that struck in 2008, and were not the result of shared services.

“I understand faculty con-cerns, but these reductions were made in response to the financial crisis and the loss of $6.5 billion in the Yale endow-ment,” King said. “We remain convinced — and I believe experience will prove — that shared services and certain staff-sharing arrangements will be helpful as we all adjust to reduced staff levels.”

King said more than 600 staff positions — mainly from administrative units instead of departments in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences — have been eliminated since the reces-sion hit in 2008. As adminis-trators have looked to reduce departmental staff levels, they have tried to leave those vacancies unfilled rather than lay off additional employees, King told faculty at their Feb-ruary meeting. She added that tight finances have also caused some departments to share staff members and change pre-viously full-year positions to 10-month posts, both changes that were not caused by shared services.

Throughout the budget cri-sis, shared services has helped Yale cope with staffing reduc-tions by assuming tasks that are common to all depart-ments, King said.

“What shared services has done is allow some of these [positions] not to be replaced, or to have some work moved to shared services, allow-ing department positions to be reshaped for the work that remained,” she said.

But some professors con-tend that shifting adminis-trative work to shared service units has not, in fact, lightened departmental loads, and has at times led to cuts in staffing not necessitated by budget con-straints.

William Kelly, a professor of anthropology, said Yale’s aca-demic departments rely on staff with “thick knowledge of multiple skills” — not shared services employees, who are assigned to perform special-ized tasks away from main campus.

Kelly also said he believes positions have been left unfilled to help implement the shared services initiative, even though administrators have pointed to budget constraints to justify those actions.

“They’re very coy because sometimes cuts are made with a budget rationale. Sometimes cuts are made with a shared services rationale,” Kelly said. “Frankly, they aren’t very hon-est about what they’re doing.”

Professor of English Jill Campbell GRD ’88 said in a

Thursday email that efforts to centralize administrative tasks through shared services and to reduce staff have burdened other faculty, administra-tors and staff in those depart-ments. The support provided by shared services has not compensated for departmen-tal staff reductions, she added.

In an email to the News ear-lier this month, Campbell crit-icized King’s office for not demonstrating how the shared services initiative would cut costs for the University.

When King and University President Richard Levin intro-duced shared services — prior to the recession — the goal was to “minimize the administra-tive burden on faculty by mak-ing it easier to get things done,” King told faculty at their Feb-ruary meeting. Although administrators were not seek-ing a way to reduce costs at the time, she said the budget crisis forced them to reevaluate their priorities.

King said shared services has not resulted in any “incre-mental costs” to the Univer-sity, and rather has begun to save Yale money. The work-ers handling shared services have come mainly from the Office of Finance & Business Operations, she said, adding that the few “key hires” made for the initiative were funded through cuts to other parts of her department’s budget. She said that she expects sav-ings from shared services to become more apparent “as the effort scales up” — a projec-tion Campbell said will need to be tested.

“If Shared Services is to achieve long-term savings for the University, the costs of its administration, its facilities and its staff must be measured against the savings achieved by genuinely reduced need for staff in other locations,” Campbell said.

Just as the cost-effective-ness of shared services is not yet clear, the initiative has also not reached all depart-ments because administrators are rolling out the initiative in stages.

Economics Department chair Benjamin Polak said he has worked with King’s office to plan for introducing shared services in his depart-ment, and said administra-tors have been “responsive” to the department’s needs. Polak said that, because of its large size, the Economics Depart-ment requires an indepen-dent undergraduate and grad-uate registrar who can deal with its numerous faculty and students. At the same time, he said other tasks currently handled by departmental staff members, such as processing expenses, could be completed more efficiently under shared services.

“There’s a bit of a difference between shared services with the respect to the back-office operations and sharing the services in the front offices,” he said.

Dan Harrison GRD ’86, chair of the Department of Music, said outsourcing departmen-

tal work to shared services employees has worked well in his department. Harrison said the help the department reg-istrar has received from a Uni-versity-wide shared services unit has been “exemplary,” and that services important to the “local culture” of his depart-ment have been maintained.

Harrison added that no changes were made to the department’s business oper-ations without his approval. King said administrators in her office met with department chairs “several times” to dis-cuss shared services and pos-sible changes in staffing.

The Department of Music also began sharing its busi-ness manager with the Eng-lish Department last summer, Harrison said. While the busi-ness manager’s workload has increased under the shared services system, her compen-sation has increased as well, Harrison added.

Though Harrison said shared services has seemed effective as a business model, he called its implementation “problem-atic.” After King’s office held a meeting about the initiative last summer for clerical and technical workers, Harrison said one staff member in his department returned feeling as though there “wasn’t any good news for existing staff.”

King said last summer’s meetings with staff in some departments were held to involve staff in conversations of how and by whom depart-mental work is performed. She denied that employees had their jobs questioned in those meetings.

“We did not indicate any specific actions that would be taken with any positions and no one’s job was threat-ened at these meetings, but I can understand how, in budget reduction times like the ones we have experienced these last few years, this sort of dis-cussion could cause concern,” King said.

Yale has begun to form three shared services centers — Yale Shared Services for business transactions, Faculty Research Management Services for grant administration and Fac-ulty Administrative Services — through the consolidation of existing units. The Yale Shared Service Center was formed in January 2010 and helps oper-ations managers and depart-mental administrators com-plete tasks such as data entry for credit card processing and reimbursements, King said during the February faculty meeting. The Faculty Research Management Services unit was created in August 2011, King said, and is intended to improve grant administration.

The University has had a shared services unit in the sci-ences for at least a decade — a Shared Service Science Branch that predated King’s arrival in 2006.

Contact GAVAN GIDEON at gavan.gideon@yale.edu .

While the majority of Yale students from the greater New Haven area interviewed attended private high schools, all 11 inter-viewed o!ered reasons for why they identify as true New Haven natives and feel an obligation to stand up for the city as a whole — regardless of their varied upbringings.

COMBATING STEREOTYPESThe issue of safety in New

Haven is often discussed seri-ously among Yale students and administrators: New Haven saw 34 murders last year alone, the highest count in the past 20 years. But this year, no homi-cides have been recorded. Though Yalies from New Haven said they recognize that some neighborhoods may be unsafe at certain hours, they said their classmates often exaggerate the extent to which living in New Haven is dangerous.

The New Haven students interviewed said they find them-selves countering the city’s neg-ative reputation to their peers, citing restaurants, cultural events and a sense of community as reasons to enjoy living here.

Kayla Williams ’13, a wom-en’s, gender and sexuality stud-ies major who has lived in New Haven since the age of five, said she often confronts stereotypes about New Haven while at Yale. A graduate of the Cooperative Arts and Humanities Magnet High School on College Street, Williams said she struggles in particular with people who con-sider Yale the only worthwhile component of New Haven.

“Something that has bothered me about a lot of students at Yale is that they think of New Haven as just a rung on the ladder to help them get where they’re going rather than a city they’re part of and live in for four years,” Williams said. “They see it as a means to an end.”

Williams recalled an incident during her freshman year when a suitemate told her she did not believe New Haven could exist without Yale. Williams said she found the comment to be “hurt-ful on a personal level,” add-ing that she frequently hears students voice what she called “hyped-up” concerns about New Haven’s crime problems.

Lynette Perez ’15, who attended Hill Regional Career High School on Legion Avenue, agreed that the city’s “bad repu-tation” is undeserved. While she said her neighborhood, the Hill, may not be the safest in the city, Perez added that she has lived on the same street her entire life without encountering any dan-gerous situations.

“Some of the people living around me know the police very

well for the wrong reasons,” she said. “But despite that, I don’t feel unsafe in my community.”

James Doss-Gollin ’15, who attended Wilbur Cross High School near East Rock Park, said he understands students’ con-cerns about safety but occasion-ally feels the need to correct their assumptions. He also said he had experienced stereotypes about the people with whom he had grown up. But when he invited a few of his friends from the local area to hang out in his suite, Doss-Gollin said his Yale friends were surprised by how well they got along with the “townies.”

While Doss-Gollin said he laughs o! many snide remarks about New Haven said o!hand, Marian Homans-Turnbull ’12, a graduate of Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, said she always “yells at her friends” for making disparaging comments about the city. She added that she often invites her friends to explore the city’s neighborhoods with her “to break out of the Yale bubble.”

THE ‘REAL’ NEW HAVEN?Within the group of New

Haven students who study at Yale, over half of the students interviewed said they have noticed a significant di!erence between those who come from private school backgrounds and those who were educated in New Haven’s public school system.

“I want people to understand that there are di!erent types of New Haven students,” Williams, educated in New Haven pub-lic schools her entire life, said. “Just because [Yale students] say they’re from New Haven doesn’t mean they’ve had the same experience.”

Williams said she faced more challenges in being competitive for a spot at Yale than local pri-vate school students may have.

She said her family raised her with the notion that she would one day be a Yale student, and that her grandmother used to refer to her as “her little Yalie.” But even after being admitted, Williams said people applied stereotypes related to the city’s public education system to her

own upbringing and intelligence. Sofia Gearty ’13 attended Cho-

ate Rosemary Hall — an institu-tion whose alumni include John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson and Paul Giamatti ’89 DRA ’94 — and said that while she under-stands how public school stu-dents might not think those from private schools understand “the real New Haven,” she identifies strongly as a New Haven citizen. Gearty grew up in downtown New Haven, and her family now lives in East Rock, she said.

Still Doss-Gollin said he thinks there is a “very big gap between the public school kids and the private schools kids within New Haven.” He added that he feels it is very easy for private school students to live in New Haven without ever inter-acting with the parts of the city outside the Yale bubble.

As a student who went to public school, Doss-Gollin said he felt alienated by how much Yale’s campus seemed to domi-nate the downtown area when he was younger.

“It was really weird coming here at first because the bound-aries between the city and the University are so strong,” he said. “I used to walk by the gates of Old Campus and think that wasn’t my world — it was a world designed to keep people from my background out. Now I feel wel-come. And I think it’s been good for my friends to know someone who lives here.”

All but one of seven students interviewed who attended pri-vate schools in the greater New Haven area said they have a par-ent who has taught at Yale.

William Koh ’12, a gradu-ate of the Hopkins School, said Yale was an integral part of his childhood. He recalled attend-ing Harvard-Yale football games with his family, including his father, Harold Koh, who served as dean of Yale Law School until 2009.

William said he feels a con-nection to both the city and the University, and that he would be lying if he were to say he only identified with one or the other. Koh said his time at Yale has solidified his connection to New Haven. He is currently writing his senior thesis about the sim-ilarities between urban renewal in New Haven and South Africa, he added.

“I am very surprised and happy when I hear about Yale students who have found jobs here and end up staying here,” Koh said. “I used to really want to leave in a way that was very final and never thought I would come back here… New Haven will always be a place that I enjoy being.”

Contact ANDREW GIAMBRONE

at andrew.giambrone@yale.edu .

FROM THE FRONTPAGE 8 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

30 Yale students from New Haven According to the O"ce of Institutional Research, only 30 students at Yale reside in the Elm City.

Faculty question motives New Haven Elis adjust SHARED SERVICES FROM PAGE 1

NEW HAVENERS FROM PAGE 1

0

3

6

9

12

15

2001-’02

2002-’03

2003-’04

2004-’05

2005-’06

2006-’07

2007-’08

2008-’09

2009-’10

2010-’11

GRAPH NUMBER OF YALE FRESHMEN FROM NEW HAVEN

Something that has bothered me about a lot of students at Yale is that they think of New Haven as just a rung on the ladder to help them get where they’re going.

KAYLA WILLIAMS ’13

Our sta!ers don’t look like this anymore.

JOIN@YALEDAILYNEWS.COM

SOURCE: OFFICE OF INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH

NEWSYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 9

“Modern music is people who can’t think sign-ing artists who can’t write songs to make records for people who can’t hear.” FRANK ZAPPA AMERICAN COMPOSER

BY YEN TRUONGCONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Former CEO of Palm Inc. Donna Dubinsky ’77 drew on her own fail-ures and successes to encourage students to take risks in their pro-fessional careers.

Dubinsky, who spoke at a Bran-ford College Master’s Tea and to the residential college seminar “Philanthropy in Action,” dis-cussed her work in leading Palm’s development of the Palm Pilot and her struggles to retain the sup-port of investors while still main-taining ethical business practices. Although Palm is no longer operat-ing, Dubinsky said the company’s failure helped her to understand the importance of having a flexible business strategy as she embarked on new ventures.

“It’s all been an incredible series of ups and downs and ups and downs, and it’s taken just huge per-sistency and tenacity to actually take those learnings and turn them into something,” she said.

Dubinsky described Palm’s first product, called the Zoomer, which was one of the first elec-tronic handheld devices, as a “complete failure” in part because it was clunky and expensive. From the failure of the Zoomer, Dubinsky said she and her team learned what customers valued in the product and how much they were willing to pay.

“I failed so often I don’t know where to start,” she said. “Our early years at Palm were very, very di!-cult.”

This initial experiment led to the idea to create the Palm Pilot in 1997. Personal Digital Assis-tants (PDAs) ultimately became a multi-billion dollar industry and set the stage for later devices like

the Blackberry and the iPhone. In launching the Palm Pilot,

Dubinsky sold Palm Co. to U.S. Robotics because she could not gain a su!cient number of inves-tors, though she retained a signifi-cant role its release. She defended her decision to sell the company by arguing that she and her team were “finishing what they started.”

“It was a means to the end and not the end,” she said.

Dubinsky said the Palm Pilot eventually failed due to “bad busi-ness decisions” rather than poor product quality. Ownership of the Palm Pilot product changed hands several times, and Dubinsky said this inconsistency was the primary reason for the product’s eventual failure in the market. Consumers value stable brands, such as Apple, she said.

Dubinsky went on to co-found Numenta, which will soon release a new software product that pro-cesses data and streams out infor-mation “much like the human brain.” She said this product may have “huge” implications for applications related to healthcare, the environment and sports sta-tistics.

Carl Chen ’13, who attended the talk, said he found Dubinsky’s work “innovative and inspiring.”

“One thing we can all take from her talk is that in order to be suc-cessful, we cannot dwell on our failures but must learn from them,” he said.

Dubinsky and her business partner Je" Hawkins were nomi-nated by Fortune Magazine to the “Innovators Hall of Fame.” The pair also made it onto TIME Magazine’s “Digital 50” in 1999 for their work.

Contact YEN TRUONG at yen.truong@yale.edu .

BY DEVIKA MITTALSTAFF REPORTER

World-renowned DJ and producer Markus Schulz shed light on developments in the house music scene in the United States and Europe at a Master’s Tea Thurs-day.

Schulz spoke to roughly 50 students about how he cultivated his interest in DJing and entered the world of profes-sional music production. As he explored recent changes in the world of house music — a subset of electronic dance music that is often performed in nightclubs — Schulz touched on issues ranging from the techni-calities of music production to piracy and illegal downloading.

Schulz said his interest in electronic music began at an early age. Growing up as an adopted child in Germany, Schulz said he listened to radio DJs, traded mixtapes of their music with his friends, and would often “listen to the di"erent sounds and try to analyze them.” Though he did not know where his initial interest in DJing came from, Schulz said he was surprised when he met his biological father five years ago and learned that he had also been a radio DJ.

“We had been living parallel lives in the world of electronic music,” Schulz said.

With a strong interest in DJing but few technical skills for the job, Schulz said he joined a music academy for two weeks before deciding to explore music in the real world instead. Schulz said he started try-ing to DJ with two turntables he acquired at a pawn shop, adding that he had a knack for knowing “where the song must go and where it needs to release itself.”

Schulz said he is unimpressed by the latest technologies crowding the market of sound mixing. He said he prefers more retro, traditional styles of DJing with CDs and rarely uses his computer at concerts and performances.

“I don’t want technology to consume me and my music,” Schulz said. “The song has to be allowed to breathe.”

As he discussed the technicalities of sound mixing and music production, Schulz expressed concern about percep-tions of rave culture and drug usage that often accompany electronic music con-

certs, particularly in the United States. Though electronic music is changing because of this image, Schulz emphasized that the genre should not be associated with drugs and partying.

Schulz said he prefers playing at clubs where his set can continue for hours, allowing the music to build over the course of the night.

“I like to be about the party, not to just go for my music and get o" the stage,” he said.

At festivals, on the other hand, Schulz said DJs are typically given one hour to per-form and must play at a “high frequency” to keep large crowds excited.

Whether at festivals or in concerts, Schulz said the performance element of DJing is essential for house music.

“The performance has to be a Broad-way production,” he said. “While I produce a song, I am also conscious of how it will translate to a performance on a live stage with lightning and theatrics.”

Schulz said there has recently been increased interest in house and dance music in the United States, attributing this change to the music festivals that have introduced people to the genre. At the same

time, he said the popularity of mainstream house music has declined in Europe.

Toward the end of his talk, Schulz dis-cussed music piracy. Rather than express-ing dismay about music theft, Schulz said he believes illegal downloads have contrib-uted to the rise of house music in America. He added that music and Internet-based companies are adapting their business models to ensure that musicians and pro-ducers get their dues, citing how YouTube pays royalty to musicians.

Five attendees interviewed said they found Schulz’s talk engaging, as he took questions throughout the conversation.

Amelie Peisl ’12 said that Schulz had always been her favorite DJ and she was glad to have an opportunity to hear him speak.

“I am only a newcomer into the indus-try of music, and learned a lot from his talk about technicalities and inspiration today,” she said.

Schulz was ranked the world’s eighth-best DJ in a 2011 edition of DJ Magazine.

Contact DEVIKA MITTAL at devika.mittal@yale.edu .

DESIGNWe’re thebest-looking desk at the YDN.

We see you. design@yaledailynews.

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Flexibility is key, entrepreneur says

DJ discusses changed music industry

CREATIVE COMMONS

Internationally renowned DJ Markus Schulz shared the story of his journey into the elec-tronic music world with students at a Thursday Master’s Tea.

AROUND THE IVIESPAGE 10 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

“Same-sex room assignments are not ideal or appropriate for all students.” JENNY KURTZ DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION AND

LGBT COMMUNITIES AT RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

BY JESSICA STALLONESENIOR STAFF WRITER

Emotions ran high at a town hall meeting hosted by the Mus-lim Student Association on Wednesday, where students dis-cussed reports revealing that the New York Police Department had monitored the MSA’s web-site as recently as 2007.

A panel that included MSA Vice President Maliha Tariq expressed disappointment and shock, saying that surveillance of this nature was an infringe-ment of their intellectual free-dom and basic civil rights.

But those in attendance took aim mostly at university Pres-ident Lee Bollinger, criticiz-ing his lack of a university-wide response to the allegations.

In a statement, Bollinger said that Columbia “did not know or condone the surveillance of publicly accessible websites by the NYPD.”

“We are deeply concerned about any government activity that would chill the freedom of thought or intrude upon student privacy, both of which are so essential to our academic com-munity,” Bollinger said.

University spokesperson Rob-ert Hornsby said that the state-ment was “being provided to student leaders.”

The consensus at the town hall was that Bollinger’s state-ment was inadequate and should have been issued to all univer-sity a!liates. Many members of the group felt that the statement trivialized the scale of the alle-gations.

“My official reaction is that

I ’ m g l a d there was a re s p o n se ,” K a h l i l A b d u r -R a s h i d , C o l u m -bia’s Mus-l i m re l i -

gious life advisor, said. But at the same time, he said, “We’re being bullied by the NYPD. We need someone to step up and say, ‘Stop bullying our kids.’”

The Associated Press pub-lished a report on Saturday stat-ing that o!cers from the NYPD’s Cyber Intelligence unit patrolled the websites of various Mus-lim student groups, including Columbia’s, as part of a “daily routine.”

Abdur-Rashid called on Bol-linger to demand an explanation of city o!cials and investigate how deeply embedded police o!cers were in Columbia stu-dent life.

“President Bollinger, I need you to pick up the phone and call Commissioner Kelly and call Mayor Bloomberg,” he said.

The panelists praised Barnard College Debora Spar and Yale University President Richard Levin for making public state-ments.

“The College is firmly com-mitted to protecting the civil lib-erties of our students and stands by the Muslim Students Asso-ciation in its concerns about the actions of the NYPD and its calls for further explanation,” Spar wrote an email to all Barnard students on Tuesday.

Many of the speakers empha-sized the traumatic e"ect that

this news has had on Mus-lim students on campus. Some expressed fear of going to and speaking in class, in case they were recorded on a laptop or cell phone. Others stated that they were being more cautious about whom they spoke to, what they talked about in regular conver-sation, and what they searched for on the Internet.

Abdur-Rashid was disturbed by the fact that students with whom he previously had close relationships were now too intimidated to enter his office and have an honest conversa-tion. The fear of being watched, he said, has prevented certain Muslim students on this campus from confiding in someone they used to trust.

Numerous student groups and organizations were represented at the meeting, with attend-ees showing their support for MSA and all Muslim students on campus. Representatives from student organizations including Occupy Columbia University, Students for Justice in Pales-tine, and the Student Governing Board made statements express-ing their support for MSA.

Barry Weinberg, SGB chair, said that the message of the meeting was that the univer-sity administration needed to do more to publicly support Muslim students and advocate on their behalf when dealing with exter-nal forces.

“There were no upper-level administrators from the uni-versity. One of their duties is to handle external issues with the university. They needed to be there because this is their

role in the community,” he said. “They haven’t been public in how they’re going about carry-ing out that duty, which is just as bad because of the lack of trans-parency.”

Administrators at the meet-ing included Barnard College Dean Avis Hinkson, Colum-bia College and School of Engi-neering and Applied Science Dean of Student Affairs Kevin Shollenberger, Barnard College Vice President for Community Development Vivian Taylor, and Graduate School of Arts and Sci-ences Dean Carlos Alonso. Rabbi Yonah Hain of Hillel was also present.

After the meeting, Hinkson told Spectator, “Certainly we will continue to engage students, continue to have open doors for students to come in and talk.”

“The emotional feelings of the students are critical to us and we want them to continue to feel that they can come and express their concerns,” she said.

Shollenberger said he did not want to comment on behalf of the university.

“I was just really here to lis-ten and be supportive of the stu-dents, and I’m certainly going to follow up with some of the stu-dent leaders about what they had to say, but beyond that I’m not prepared to say much more,” he said.

For Abdur-Rashid, nothing is more frustrating than inac-tion from administrators. “This is not conducive to an academic environment. Saying ‘They’ll be OK, that’s fine, we’re handling this’ … what a condescending thing to say.”

T H E C O L U M B I A D A I L Y S P E C T A T O R

MSA presses Bollinger on NYPDT H E D A I L Y P R I N C E T O N I A N

Gender-neutral

expands

BY ALAKA HALDERSENIOR WRITER

Gender-neutral housing for upperclassmen has been expanded for the upcoming academic year, with a total of 278 beds in the Spelman, Scully, 1901-Laughlin and Foulke dormitories included in the revised program.

Given the growing number of students interested in gender-neu-tral housing, Associate Director for Student Housing Lisa DePaul said in an email that the expansion was “timely.” The decision was based on student input in the form of written submissions, meetings with stu-dent government representatives and findings from last December’s Undergraduate Housing Demand Survey.

“For the past few years we have worked closely with the Undergraduate Life Committee, the O!ce of the Vice President for Campus Life and the O!ce of the Dean of Undergraduate Students on the possibility of o"ering gender-neutral housing,” DePaul said.

Nine gender-neutral units were first introduced in the Spelman dormitories for upperclassmen two years ago as part of a pilot program.

“Now they’re going to make it permanent,” USG Undergraduate Life Committee chair Adi Rajagopa-lan said. Rajagopalan worked closely with the univer-sity administration to oversee the expansion. “Hous-ing wanted a few years to evaluate the program,” he explained, adding that the Princeton Equality Project’s petitioning last fall helped add a lot of student support.

“It’s amazing how quickly it came together,” he said. “During my time with the ULC, it’s one of the top things a lot of people wanted and worked on. It’s very cool to see, a win for a lot of people.”

Emily VanderLinden, the project manager of PEP’s petition, said in an email that the group was “very happy” with the university’s decision. PEP’s peti-tion received over 1,000 signatures last November and December through tabling at Frist and online distribu-tion.

“We worked hard for expansion beyond Spelman because it is pretty specific housing,” VanderLinden said. “The majority of the roommates need to be inde-pendent; it is all on one side of campus; there is only one type of room with four roommates.”

In 2011-12, 14 groups with a total of 56 students applied for gender-neutral housing. Of these, two groups were not placed into gender-neutral Housing because of unfavorable housing lottery times, according to DePaul. Any group of students seeking gender-neu-tral housing will now be able to select from the rooms available during their draw time, she said.

PEP President Lelabari Giwa-Ojuri said that these developments were very recent and that the Univer-sity has not made any public announcements. She said that extensive floor plans for gender-neutral housing are expected to be available on the housing website when room draw launches this spring.

Giwa-Ojuri and VanderLinden said that they did not have an estimate for how many students are likely to be interested in pursuing gender-neutral housing under the new program. Rajagopalan said that it was “tricky” to estimate how many gender-neutral groups would sign up for housing.

“The rooms are also part of regular room draw, so there’s a possibility that a group that isn’t gender neutral could still fill up a GNH housing room,” he said. “Part of the intended expansion is to add a lot of rooms. You want some extra capacity since it’s part of regular room draw.”

“Even if a minority of students take advantage of GNH, the important aspect of the policy is having all students be able to choose whatever room with whatever roommate they want,” VanderLinden said. “Putting that responsibility in the hands of intelligent adults shows the university’s respect for our community.”

DePaul declined to comment on how the university’s new policy compares to those of its peers, saying that she was not in a position to “speak to the gender-neutral housing policies of other institutions.”

PEP will continue to work to expand housing options so that all students can have “equal access to safe and comfortable gender-neutral living arrangements,” VanderLinden said.

“It’s a big step to happen at Princeton,” Rajagopalan said. “We’ll keep looking at the program and evaluating if it’s enough, or if people want more.”

T H E H A R VA R D C R I M S O N

Univ. may support a!rmative action at S.C.BY JUSTIN WORLAND

STAFF WRITER

When the United States Supreme Court heard the first case challenging affirmative action in higher education in 1978, Harvard defended the use of race in admissions decisions.

Now, as the Court takes up the issue again more than 30 years later, Harvard is likely to lobby the court in favor of a!rmative action once again, according to university General Counsel Rob-ert W. Iuliano.

“Harvard has long believed that a diverse class enhances the educational experience for all of our students,” Iuliano wrote in a statement. “I antic-ipate that the university will seek to express its views to the United States Supreme Court in the Texas case, just as we did in the prior two occasions when the Supreme Court took up this

issue of vital importance to higher education.”

In 1978 and again i n 2 0 0 3 , the univer-sity fi led

briefs with the court explaining its holistic approach to college admissions, in which race is one of many factors used to evaluate an applicant.

On both occasions, the court upheld the consideration of race and touted Harvard’s method as an appropriate “individual” approach.

The court announced Tuesday that it would hear Fisher v. Uni-versity of Texas in its next term.

Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas, filed a law-suit against the school alleging racial discrimination.

The case will mark the first time the court has examined the issue of a!rmative action in higher education since Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger in 2003. In those cases, the court again upheld the right to con-sider race as part of a holistic approach to college admissions.

But since then, the compo-sition of the court has changed dramatically. Most significantly, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — the court’s swing vote and author of the Grut-ter decision—departed in 2006, leaving Justice Anthony M. Ken-nedy as the swing vote in close decisions.

“Anthony Kennedy is unpre-dictable on this. He can a formal legal expression of support — in favor of a!rmative action.

As an institution that receives federal funding, Harvard must comply with federal laws regard-ing discrimination under Title

VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Levinson, who also served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School this past fall, said he anticipates that other insti-tutions of higher education will file briefs in support of the Uni-versity of Texas as well.

Levinson said he will be inter-ested to see if any individual professors file briefs in favor of the plainti".

“Quite frankly, I would be surprised,” Levinson said. “It’s an extreme position.”

Tushnet said he believes that Harvard’s decision on whether to file a brief might be influenced by the university’s view of itself as a trendsetter in higher educa-tion.

“Harvard sees itself as a leader in higher education policy for the nation,” said Tushnet. “The university regards what it has to say as important to know.”

ZARA KASTANY/THE COLUMBIA SPECTATOR

Members of Columbia’s Muslim Student Association say that University President Lee Bollinger needs to do more to support the school’s Muslims.

KATYA ALEXEEVA/THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

Leo Mena ’12, Elizabeth Stein ’12, Rodrigo Munoz Rogers ’12 and Karen Krieb ’12 currently live in gender-neutral housing.

HARVARD

COLUMBIA

PRINCETON

BULLETIN BOARDYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 11

Rain. High near 43, low of 34. Chance of precipitation is

100%.

High of 44, low of 24.

High of 40, low of 24.

TODAY’S FORECAST TOMORROW SUNDAY

CROSSWORDACROSS

1 Woolly grazers5 It follows John9 Defunct Olympic

sport13 Dieter’s snack?16 On __ with17 Crop production

toast?18 5’7” Spud who

won an NBASlamDunk contest

19 Words beforecoming or out

20 Telegraph sound21 Lover of Psyche22 Artist’s pad25 Ability to detect a

certainorientation

27 Not like at all30 PLO part32 Boxing statistic33 Actress Thurman34 Saint in red36 Raised entrance

area38 Ave. paralleling

Park39 Useless footwear41 Switz. neighbor42 Soul44 Waist-length

jackets45 Gray gp.46 Stray chasers48 Not own outright,

with “on”49 Pique50 Debate choices52 Piano sonatas,

usually54 It covers all the

bases55 Tuna of the

Pacific57 Golden __61 Rice from New

Orleans62 Buckaroo at sea?65 It has banks in

Germany andPoland

66 Dance andtheater in Texas?

67 Red areas, once:Abbr.

68 Case workers,briefly

69 The greater partDOWN

1 Do some glasscutting, perhaps

2 “Take it easy!”3 Goes astray4 Declining from

old age5 Bavarian carp?6 Friend of Fidel7 Knotted8 Mistletoe piece9 Played with, in a

way10 One giving pep

talks betweenacts of“Carmen”?

11 Maternity ward?12 Balls14 __-1:

“Ghostbusters”auto

15 Relatively coolred giant

23 Fail in business24 With 35-Down,

fairs, and a hintto making senseof this puzzle’spairs of adjacent10-letteranswers

26 Acknowledgments27 Pacific dance28 Pews, at times?29 Intersection

where cabs hangout?

31 Joie de vivre34 Tropical ring-

tailed critter35 See 24-Down37 H.S. sophs may

take it40 Basie’s “__’Clock

Jump”43 Auto club

employees47 Hot tea hazard49 Ojibwa home51 Young pig

53 Thailandneighbor

54 New Mexico skiresort

56 Buried treasure site,often

58 Iberian river59 Disintegrates60 Part of MS-DOS:

Abbr.63 Dr. Mom’s forte64 __ in Charlie

Thursday’s Puzzle SolvedBy Ian Livengood 2/24/12

(c)2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc. 2/24/12

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DOONESBURY BY GARRY TRUDEAU

BEAR IN ANTARCTICA BY ILANA STRAUSS

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9 2 8 3 4

SUDOKU EXPERT

ON CAMPUSSATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2512:55 PM The Met at Yale Presents: “Ernani.” Angela Meade takes center stage in Verdi’s thrilling early gem. Marcello Giordani is her mismatched lover, and all-star Verdians Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Ferruccio Furlanetto round out the cast. Free admission to Yale students, faculty and sta!. Sprague Hall (470 College St.), Morse Recital Hall.

7:30 PM “Out of Africa, Into Europe.” Composed for string quartet and prerecorded tape, “Di!erent Trains” relies on recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors as a melodic base for the composition, which was described by Richard Taruskin as “the only adequate musical response — one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium — to the Holocaust.” Join the Haven String Quartet for a rare performance of this masterpiece along with original string quartets by African composers Kevin Volans and Justinian Tamuzuza. Admission is $10 with Yale ID. The Unitarian Society of New Haven (700 Hartford Turnpike, Hamden).

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26

2:00 PM Harkness Tower Sunday Tour. Experience the beauty of the bells from inside the tower. Branford College (74 High St.).

4:00 PM “Arab and Iranian Perceptions of the Holocaust.” Meir Litvak of Tel Aviv University will speak. Sponsored by the Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism. Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.), Room 208.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 274:00 PM “Abraham and Hus.” Symposium by Institute of Sacred Music fellows in sacred music, worship and the arts. Aaron Rosen will discuss “Picturing Abraham in the Abrahamic Faiths” and Hana Vlhová-Woerner will discuss “Jan Hus and His Contribution to the Tradition of Spiritual Song.” Sterling Memorial Library (120 High St.), auditorium.

SUBMIT YOUR EVENTS ONLINEyaledailynews.com/events/submit

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CLASSICAL MUSIC 24 Hours a Day. 98.3 FM, and on the web at WMNR.org.“Pledges accepted: 1-800-345-1812” Saturday is Big Band night!

NATIONPAGE 12 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

Dow Jones 12,984.69, +0.36% S&P 500 1,363.46, +0.43%

10-yr. Bond 1.98%, -0.02NASDAQ 2,956.98, +0.81%

Euro $1.34, -0.04Oil $108.60, +0.71%

BY TOM RAUMASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — Soaring gasoline prices are threaten-ing to undercut President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects and o!ering Republicans an easy target. With prices pushing $4 a gallon and threatening to go even higher, Obama sought Thursday to confront rising public anxiety and strike back at his GOP critics.

“Only in politics do people root for bad news, do they greet bad news so enthusiastically,” Obama said of Republicans. “You pay more; they’re licking their chops.”

Obama said dismissively that all the Republicans can talk about is more drilling — “a bumper sticker … a strategy to get poli-ticians through an election” — when the nation’s energy chal-lenges demand much more. In a speech in Miami, he promoted the expansion of domestic oil and gas exploration but also the development of new forms of energy.

For all the political claims, economists say there’s not much a president of either party can do about gasoline prices. Certainly not in the short term. But it’s clear that people are concerned — a new Associated Press-GfK poll says seven in 10 find the issue deeply important — so it’s sure to be a political issue through the summer.

“Right now, we’re experienc-ing yet another painful reminder of why developing new energy is so critical to our future,” the president said. At an average of $3.58 a gallon, prices are already up 25 cents since Jan. 1, and experts say they could reach a record $4.25 a gallon by Memo-rial Day.

Those higher prices could hurt consumer spending and unravel some of the recent improvements in the economy. And they could also be a daily reminder to vot-ers to question Obama’s conten-

tion that he’s making the nation — and them — more secure.

While motorists are already starting to complain, many economists see the $4-a-gallon mark as a breaking point above which the economy starts to suf-fer real pain. Analysts estimate that every one-cent increase is roughly a $1.4 billon drain on the economy.

Obama’s Republican chal-

lengers aren’t letting it all slide by. They have stepped up their attacks on his energy poli-cies, including his rejection last month of a pipeline to carry oil from Canada to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. And they’re full of promises.

“I’ve developed a program for American energy so no future president will ever bow to a Saudi king again, and so every

American can look forward to $2.50-a-gallon gasoline,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in the Wednesday night GOP debate in Mesa, Ariz. He calls his strategy “Drill Here, Drill Now.”

At the same event, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania — who has warned of $5-a-gallon gas — asserted that “we have a lot of troubles around the world, as you see the Middle East in flames

and what’s going on in this coun-try with gas prices and the econ-omy.” And former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney suggested that even more troubling than rising gasoline prices was Iranian Pres-ident Mahmoud “Ahmadinejad with nuclear weapons.”

In his speech at the University of Miami, Obama sought to draw a contrast with his GOP challeng-ers and made a pointed reference

to what he suggested was Repub-lican glee at rising gas prices.

“And you can bet that since it’s an election year, they’re already dusting o! their three-point plans for $2 gas,” Obama said. “I’ll save you the suspense. Step one is drill, step two is drill, and step three is keep drilling … We’ve heard the same thing for 30 years. Well, the American people aren’t stupid.”

BY ALAN FRAMASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — Most peo-ple like President Barack Obama’s proposal to make millionaires pay a significant share of their incomes in taxes. Yet they’d still rather cut spending than boost taxes to bal-ance the federal budget, an Asso-ciated Press-GfK poll shows, giv-ing Republicans an edge over Democrats in their core ideologi-cal dispute over the nation’s fis-cal ills.

The survey suggests that while Obama’s election-year tax plan targeting people making at least $1 million a year has won broad sup-port, it has done little to shift peo-ple’s basic views in the long-run-ning partisan war over how best to tame budget deficits that lately have exceeded $1 trillion annually.

“Everybody should be called to sacrifice. They should be in the pot with the rest of us,” Mike Whittles, 62, a Republican and retired police o"cer from Point Pleasant, N.J., said of his support for Obama’s tax proposal for the wealthy. But Whittles said he still prefers cut-ting government spending over raising taxes because of federal waste and what he calls “too many rules, too many regulations.”

Sixty-five percent of the people in the AP-GfK poll favor Obama’s plan to require people making $1 million or more pay taxes equal to at least 30 percent of their income. Just 26 percent opposed Obama’s idea.

Yet by 56 percent to 31 percent, more embraced cuts in govern-ment services than higher taxes as the best medicine for the bud-get, according to the survey, which was conducted Feb. 16 to 20. That response has changed only mod-estly since it was first asked in the AP-GfK poll last March. The question on Obama’s tax on the rich was not asked previously.

The poll showed that overall, more people have a positive view of Democrats than Republicans, a ray of hope for Obama and his fel-low Democrats with the approach of November’s presidential and

congressional elections. Fifty-four percent in the poll gave Dem-ocrats favorable ratings compared to 46 percent for Republicans, similar to results in January 2011, at the start of the newly elected Congress in which Republicans have run the House and Democrats wield a slender Senate majority.

Though embraced by congres-sional Democrats, Obama’s pro-posal on taxing millionaires more has virtually no chance of pas-sage by Congress in the political heat of this year’s campaigns. But it stands as a rallying cry for Dem-ocrats — about 9 in 10 of whom supported the plan in the poll — and it contrasts with proposals by the remaining major GOP presi-dential candidates, who would lower the current 35 percent top income tax rate.

Obama has spent months tout-ing his plan, nicknamed the Buf-fett rule after Warren Bu!ett, the billionaire who has complained that the rich don’t pay enough taxes and that his own tax rate has been lower than his secretary’s. The wealthy Mitt Romney, a lead-ing GOP presidential contender, has released tax returns showing he paid a rate of around 15 percent the past two years.

Illustrating the wide accep-tance for Obama’s tax proposal for the rich, the poll showed it was supported by nearly two-thirds of independents and 4 in 10 Repub-licans. It also won backing from 6 in 10 whites and half of conserva-tives, two groups that traditionally are more likely to support the GOP, as well as by 6 in 10 people earning at least $100,000 a year.

Everybody should be called to sacrifice. They should be in the pot with the rest of us.

MIKE WHITTLESRetired police o!cer

Gingrich slams Quran burning apology

BY BRIAN BAKSTASSOCIATED PRESS

SPOKANE, Wash. — GOP presiden-tial candidate Newt Gingrich said Thurs-day a U.S. apology to Afghan authorities for burned Qurans on a military base was “astonishing” and undeserved.

Gingrich lashed out at President Barack Obama for the formal apology after cop-ies of the Muslim holy book were found burned in a garbage pit on a U.S. air field earlier in the week

Obama’s apology was announced Thursday morning. A few hours later, news organizations reported that an Afghan soldier had killed two U.S. troops and wounded others in retaliation for the Quran burning.

Campaigning in Washington state,

Gingrich said Afghan President Hamid Karzi owes the U.S. an apology for the shootings.

“There seems to be nothing that radi-cal Islamists can do to get Barack Obama’s attention in a negative way and he is con-sistently apologizing to people who do not deserve the apology of the president of the United States period,” Gingrich said.

“And, candidly, if Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, doesn’t feel like apologizing then we should say good bye and good luck, we don’t need to be here risking our lives and wasting our money on somebody who doesn’t care.”

Even before Gingrich’s comments, White House spokesman Jay Carney sought to counter any criticism of the president’s apology.

“It is wholly appropriate, given the sensitivities to this issue, the understand-able sensitivities,” Carney told reporters traveling to Miami with the president on Air Force One. “His primary concern as commander in chief is the safety of the American men and women in Afghani-stan, of our military and civilian person-nel there. And it was absolutely the right thing to do.”

Later Thursday, Gingrich planned to head to a rally across the border in Idaho, one of the 10 states that votes on March 6. He is also spending Friday in Washington state, which holds caucuses a week from Saturday.

“You are the last big event before Super Tuesday,” he told a gathering of 600 Republicans in Kennewick, Wash. “You have a huge chance to change things.”

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks during a campaign stop at the Bing Crosby Theatre Thurs-day, Feb. 23, 2012 in Spokane, Wash.

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Barack Obama speaks during a fundraiser at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 23, 2012Coral Gables, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 23, 2012.

Gas prices cloud Obama’s re-election prospects

Poll shows taxes on wealthy popular

WORLDYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 13

“I am a President held prisoner, that I haven’t resigned and I will not resign.” HUGO CHAVEZ VENEZUELAN PRESIDENT

BY BRIAN MURPHY AND ZEINA KARAMASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIRUT — Medics stitch wounds with thread used for clothing. Hungry residents risk Syrian government sniper fire or shelling to hunt for dwindling supplies of bread and canned food on the streets of the besieged city of Homs.

The opposition stronghold was being destroyed “inch by inch,” by government forces, with col-lapsed walls and scorched build-ings, according to accounts Thursday, while Western and Arab leaders hoped to silence the guns long enough to rush in relief aid.

The pressure for “humani-tarian corridors” into the cen-tral Syrian city of Homs and other places caught in President Bashar Assad’s crushing attacks appeared to be part of shifts toward more aggressive steps against his regime after nearly a year of bloodshed and thousands of deaths in an anti-government uprising.

In back-to-back announce-ments, U.N.-appointed inves-tigators in Geneva said a list for possible crimes against human-ity prosecution reaches as high as Assad, and international envoys in London — including U.S. Sec-retary of State Hillary Rodham

Clinton — made final touches to an expected demand for Assad to call a cease-fire within days to permit emergency shipments of food and medicine.

Washington and European allies remain publicly opposed to direct military intervention. But there have been growing signs that Western leaders could back e!orts to open channels for sup-plies and weapons to the Syr-ian opposition, which includes breakaway soldiers from Assad’s military.

In a sign of the international divide, however, key Assad ally Russia said Moscow and Bei-jing remain opposed to any for-eign interference in Syria. Rus-sian President Dmitry Medvedev spoke by telephone with the pres-ident of the United Arab Emirates and emphasized that “foreign interference, attempts to assess the legitimacy of the leadership of a state from the outside, run counter to the norms of interna-tional law and are fraught with the threat of regional and global destabilization,” the Kremlin said.

“It is a deeply frustrating situ-ation,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague told BBC radio ahead of the London talks. He said that the Assad regime “has continued to act seemingly with impunity.”

In battered Syrian city, cries of humanitarian disaster

BY ALEXA OLESENASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIJING — The United States and North Korea headed into a second day of talks Friday on restarting nuclear disarmament in return for aid, negotiations that were delayed by the death of North Korea’s longtime leader Kim Jong Il two months ago.

The discussions that ran all day Thursday could sig-nal whether North Korea under new leader Kim Jong Un is ready to agree to steps demanded by Washington and Pyongyang’s neighbors to return to broader multinational disarmament talks. More than three years have passed since the last six-nation discussions, which are meant to provide aid and diplomatic con-cessions in return for the North taking verifiable steps to moth-ball its nuclear weapons pro-grams.

Kim’s Dec. 17 death upended a tentative deal between the United States and North Korea where Pyongyang would have suspended its uranium enrich-ment in return for food.

“The talks today were sub-stantive and serious and we cov-ered quite a number of issues,” U.S. envoy Glyn Davies told reporters Thursday after meet-ing his counterpart Kim Kye Gwan for almost six hours over two sessions, first at the North Korean Embassy and then at the U.S. Embassy.

Davies would not provide other details, saying only that nutritional aid was discussed.

Kim said he found it “posi-tive” that the two sides talked with “serious attitudes,” South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported. Kim wouldn’t elabo-rate when asked if progress was made.

The U.S.-North Korea talks in Beijing are the third round since July aimed at restarting the broader negotiations that

began in 2003 and also involve China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. The talks were last held in December 2008. Pyongyang walked away from those talks in 2009 and later exploded its sec-ond nuclear device.

Additional steps may be needed before a resumption of the six-nation talks. The North may first request food ship-ments, while the U.S. and its allies want assurances Pyong-yang is committed to making progress on past nuclear com-mitments.

Questioned on what agree-ments were needed to restart the six-nation talks, State Depart-ment spokesman Mark Toner said the North Koreans “need to still come back and answer some of the questions and issues that we’ve raised previously.”

“But we are also steadfast in what we’re asking for North Korea to do, which is live up its prior commitments, and we’re going to continue to talk with them,” Toner told reporters at a Thursday briefing in Washing-ton.

The United States has also said that better ties between North Korea and U.S. ally South Korea are crucial. North Korea has rejected South Korean o!ers to talk in recent weeks, and ani-mosity between the rivals still lingers from violence in 2010: a North Korean artillery attack in November killed four South Koreans on a front-line island, and Seoul blames North Korea for the sinking of a warship that killed 46 sailors earlier that year. Pyongyang denies sinking the ship and says a South Korean live-fire drill provoked the artil-lery attack.

The six-nation talks, once restarted, would be aimed at dismantling North Korea’s remaining nuclear programs in exchange for what would likely involve even greater donations of aid.

N.K. in first talks since Kim’s death

BY FABIOLA SANCHEZ AND VIVIAN SEQUERAASSOCIATED PRESS

CARACAS, Venezuela — For someone who’s ill, President Hugo Chavez didn’t show it Thursday as he launched into full-blown campaign mode on his last day in Venezuela before flying to Cuba for cancer surgery.

Chavez, who is running for re-election this year, spoke for more than four hours on a folksy, upbeat broadcast, pausing only so supporters could send greetings, messages of encouragement and reports on home construction and new soy plan-tations from around the country.

At one point, an apple-cheeked boy clad in the red of Chavez’s socialist political movement appeared via a video feed from the western city of Maracaibo and recited a poem about the president’s illness and how he will overcome it.

Chavez, 57, invoked the revolution-ary language of both Cuba and his own country, and vowed to see the campaign through even after revelations of his can-cer’s comeback cast his health and stam-ina in doubt.

“I will live! I will live!” cried a bespecta-cled Chavez, pounding the table in a hall in the Miraflores government palace during the live broadcast from a hall in the Mira-flores government palace.

The president took over the national airwaves hours after lawmakers granted him permission to absent himself from the country while he has a potentially cancer-

ous tumor surgically removed, a formality required by the constitution.

He said he would leave Friday and undergo surgery early next week to remove the growth, described as about an inch (2 centimeters) in diameter located in the same area where Chavez had a baseball-size malignant tumor taken out last year.

The constitution says the vice president may take the president’s place during tem-porary absences of up to 90 days, and the National Assembly may extend that for 90 days more.

Opposition politicians called for Chavez to put his No. 2 in charge while he’s recov-ering in Cuba, which could take weeks if he stays for radiation therapy like he did last summer.

“We can’t have what happened last year, the president purporting to govern from Cuba,” said Alfonso Marquina, a lawmaker and spokesman for the opposition bloc in the National Assembly. “Because in the absence of the president, the government is the vice president.”

But Chavez is not naming a substi-tute and plans to continue making deci-sions and signing decrees from abroad. Instead he went on the attack Thursday with an animated, near-uninterrupted speech in which he warned that the oppo-sition will resort to dirty tricks by starting rumors about divisions within the mili-tary to destabilize his government while he undergoes surgery.

He also railed against the “unpatriotic bourgeoisie” and said social initiatives

such as housing for the poor will disap-pear if his opponent, Henry Capriles, wins Oct. 7.

“A capitalist state is never going to sub-sidize anything,” Chavez said, his hands carving the air in front of him as he spoke.

Comfortably seated at the head of a wooden conference table and flanked by Cabinet ministers, a beaming Chavez told jokes, broke into song, bantered and urged glum-faced supporters to cheer up.

“We are going to win by a knockout,” he said.

Chavez spoke again at a political rally held later in the evening in a Caracas the-ater. Images broadcast on local televi-sion showed Chavez wading through the packed auditorium, shaking hands and stopping to kiss a baby swaddled in the red, blue and yellow of Venezuela’s flag.

Chavez said earlier this week the same doctors who removed a cancerous tumor from his pelvic region in June would be operating on him. The firebrand president had already undergone chemotherapy last year, and in October declared himself “free of illness.”

In a letter sent to the National Assembly requesting permission to travel, Chavez described the need for surgery as “urgent.”

“I know the news of this new surgery has caused concern among the vast majority of my countrymen. I say it from the heart: I’m certain that we will win this battle,” Chavez wrote in the letter. “I will return as I always return: With more energy, more enthusiasm, more happiness.”

Chavez assures supporters of recovery

LOCAL COORDINATION COMMITTEES IN SYRIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Flames rise from a house from Syrian government shelling, at Baba Amr neighborhood in Homs province, Syria.

FERNANDO LLANO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Chavez is headed to Cuba for surgery to remove a potentially cancerous tumor while the nation’s congress on Thursday unanimously approved permission for Chavez to leave, a formality required by the nation’s constitution.

SPORTS Nick Watney eliminates Tiger WoodsWatney defeated Woods in the Match Play Championship in Marana, Arizona yesterday. For the third consecutive year, Woods failed to advance past the second round of play. Putting got the worst of Woods on Thursday, as he missed three putts that were ten feet or fewer from the hole in the last six holes of play.

PAGE 14 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

to win. They have a very good penalty kill, but if we keep it sim-ple and stick to what’s been work-ing for us, I’m confident that we will be successful.”

The Bulldogs went a combined 6-for-18 on power plays last weekend against the Big Green and the Crimson, which raised their season average to 23.8 per-cent.

On Saturday night, the Blue and White will likely face a hos-tile horde against Quinnipiac at TD Bank Sports Center, where a sold-out crowd last season tried in vain to faze the Elis. Young said the team is excited to take on the unfriendly atmosphere.

“It should be fun,” Young said. “We’re pretty pumped. They’ll have a lot of students, and it’s going to be fun to play in front of them.”

The puck drops at 7 p.m. on Friday at Princeton and 7 p.m. again the next night at Quinnip-iac.

Contact JIMIN HE at jimin.he@yale.edu and KEVIN KUCHARSKI

at kevin.kucharski@yale.edu .

overcoming a 21-point deficit the next night and beating the Lions 59–58 in New York City.

One reason that Cornell was able to topple Yale in Ithaca was the hot shooting of Jonathan Gray, who hit six of his eight three-point attempts on his way to a career-high 29 points. Although Yale head coach James Jones said that the Bulldogs will have to improve on defending ball screens, he said that he would not game-plan specifically for Gray.

“We want to limit shots for anyone,” Jones said. “If [Gray] shot his average, we [would] win the game. [But] we’ll certainly be conscious of him.”

Gray is averaging a career-high 8.4 points per game this season and shooting 29.7 percent from beyond the arc.

This weekend will not only be the final home stand of the sea-son: it will also be the final home stand in the careers of four Bull-

dogs. Forward Rhett Anderson ’12, guard Brian Katz ’12, forward Greg Mangano ’12 and forward Reggie Willhite ’12 will all suit up for their final regular season game at the Lee Amphitheater Satur-day.

Although Mangano and Will-hite might look to pursue pro-fessional basketball after gradu-ation, Anderson said that he is looking at his final home game as a di!erent transition.

“I’m transitioning from some-thing I’ve been doing my whole life — playing basketball com-petitively — to something else,” Anderson said. “[This weekend] is going to be business as usual, which is probably going to be one thing I like the most. I’m just enjoying it while it lasts.”

Yale has won nine of its 10 home games so far this year.

Contact CHARLES CONDRO at charles.condro@yale.edu .

week’s loss to Harvard will motivate the team to avenge itself against Princeton and finish o! the rest of its remaining opponents a sec-ond time.

“Coach told us to focus on the emotions after [the Harvard game] and remember how bad that felt,” West said. “I think those mem-ories are definitely going to give us an edge in the games we have left.”

Columbia (2–21, 0–9 Ivy) is sitting in last place in the Ivy League and has not won a game since Dec. 30, but the Lions showed the Elis they still had some roar left in them when the teams first met. Columbia jumped out to a 12-point lead in the first half before guard Megan Vasquez ’13 set a career-high mark with 28 points and led the Bulldogs back for a 73–59 win. The Lions are last or second-to-last in the Ivy League in nearly every statisti-

cal category, and the Elis should take advan-tage of Columbia’s poor shooting and anemic defense.

In Yale’s last meeting with Cornell, two milestones were reached as Vasquez scored the 1,000th point of her collegiate career, and Gobrecht won the 500th game of her head coaching career. Vasquez scored 25 points that night, and Yale made an incredible 16 of 30 shots from beyond the arc in a 86–73 victory over the Big Red. The Bulldogs’ most danger-ous opponent against Cornell may be fatigue, as several players acknowledged the chal-lenges that the grueling, five-hour bus ride from New York City to Ithaca poses.

Tipo! tonight is scheduled for 7 p.m. at Columbia’s Levien Arena.

Contact JOHN SULLIVAN at john.j.sullivan@yale.edu .

Yale battles for playo! positioning

GRAHAM HARBOE/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Forward Jesse Root ’14 has scored four goals this season and added 12 assists for Yale’s o!ense, which is ranked seventh nationally and has averaged 5.5. goals in its last four wins.

Elis face New York road trip

M. HOCKEY FROM PAGE 16

M. BASKETBALL FROM PAGE 16

W. BASKETBALL FROM PAGE 16

BAOBAO ZHANG/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Guard Sarah Halejian ’15 has earned Ivy League Rookie of the Week five times this season.

ZOE GORMAN/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Guard Michael Grace ’13 has started in 16 games this season.

FRIDAY, FEB. 24OPPONENT TIMEWomen’s Swimming and Diving - Ivy League Championships

1:30

Women’s Squash vs. Cornell

1:30

Men’s Basketball vs. Columbia

7:00

Men’s Ice Hockey at Princeton

7:00

Women’s Basketball at Columbia

7:00

SATURDAY, FEB. 25OPPONENT TIMEMen’s Track and Field - Ivy League Championships

9:00

Coed Sailing - 11th Bob Bavier Team Race 9:00

Women’s Swimming & Diving - Ivy League Championships

TBA

Women’s Track and Field - Ivy League Championships

TBA

Women’s Squash - TBD

TBA

Women’s Tennis vs. William & Mary

11:00

Women’s Lacrosse vs. Holy Cross

11:00

Men’s Lacrosse vs. St. John’s

1:30

Men’s Basketball vs. Cornell

7:00

Men’s ice Hockey at Quinnipiac

7:00

Women’s Basketball at Cornell

7:00

SUNDAY, FEB. 25OPPONENT TIMEMen’s Track and Field - Ivy League Championships

9:00

Women’s Fencing - U.S. Collegiate Squad Championships

9:00

Men’s Fencing - U.S. Collegiate Squad Championships

9:00

Women’s Tennis at Syracuse

9:00

Coed Sailing - 11th Bob Bavier Team Race 9:00

Gymnastics - Ivy Classic

1:00

Women’s Track and Field - Ivy League Championships

TBA

Women’s Squash - TBD

TBA

Bulldogs take on home stand

SPORTS NFL Scouting CombineProspective NFL draft picks began their week-long job interviews Wednesday. The Combine will include a hospital examination, body measurements, psychological testing, workouts and team interviews. The 40-yard dash, the most anticipated event of the week for both its highs (see Lamichael James) and lows (think o!ensive linemen), will take place this Saturday through Tuesday at 9am.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 15

BY RONALD BLUMASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — National League MVP Ryan Braun’s 50-game suspension was over-turned Thursday by baseball arbitrator Shyam Das, the first time a baseball player success-fully challenged a drug-related penalty in a grievance.

The decision was announced Thursday by the Major League Baseball Players Association, one day before the 28-year-old outfielder was due to report to spring training with the Mil-waukee Brewers. The com-missioner’s o"ce and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency each were disappointed and angry about the ruling.

Braun’s urine tested positive in October for elevated testos-terone, and ESPN revealed the positive test in December.

Braun has insisted that he did not violate baseball’s drug agreement.

“I am very pleased and relieved by today’s decision,” he said in a statement. “It is the first step in restoring my good name and reputation. We were able to get through this because I am innocent and the truth is on our side.”

MLB executive vice president Rob Manfred said management “vehemently disagrees” with Das’ decision.

Das, who has been baseball’s independent arbitrator since 2000, informed the sides of his decision, but did not give them a written opinion. He has 30 days to do so.

“Today the arbitration panel announced its decision, by a 2-1 vote, to sustain Ryan Braun’s grievance challenging his 50-game suspension by the commissioner’s o"ce,” a state-ment from the players’ associa-tion said.

Manfred and union head Michael Weiner are part of the arbitration panel, and man-agement and the union almost always split their votes, leav-ing Das, the independent panel member, to make the decision.

“MLB and cable sports tried to sully the reputation of an inno-cent man,” Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said on Twitter. “Picked the wrong guy to mess with. Truth will set

u free”Brewers closer John Axford

added on Twitter: “All I can say is that Braun has exemplary character is continuing to handle this in an unbelievable manner.”

An evidentiary hearing on Braun’s appeal was held Jan. 19-20 in New York, ending the day before the player accepted the NL MVP award at a black-tie dinner.

“We provided complete coop-eration throughout, despite the highly unusual circumstances. I have been an open book, will-ing to share details from every aspect of my life as part of this investigation, because I have nothing to hide,” Braun said in his statement. “I have passed over 25 drug tests in my career, including at least three in the past year.”

A person familiar with the sit-uation told The Associated Press that, after being informed of the positive result, Braun asked to have another urine test taken, and that the second test was within normal range.

During the hearing, Braun’s side challenged the chain of cus-tody from the time the urine sample was collected by Com-prehensive Drug Testing Inc. to when it was sent nearly 48 hours later to a World Anti-Doping Agency-certified laboratory in Montreal, two people familiar with the case said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because what took place in the hearing is supposed to be confidential.

The sample was collected on Oct. 1, a Saturday and the day the Brewers opened the NL play-o!s. The collector did not send the sample to the laboratory until Monday, thinking it would be more secure at home that at a Federal Express o"ce during the weekend.

Baseball’s drug agreement states that “absent unusual cir-cumstances, the specimens should be sent by FedEx to the laboratory on the same day they are collected.”

Travis Tygart, chief executive o"cer of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, called the decision “a real gut-kick to clean athletes.”

“To have this sort of techni-cality of all technicalities let a player o! … it’s just a sad day for all the clean players and those that abide by the rules within

professional baseball,” he said.Positive tests for perfor-

mance-enhancing drugs have been relatively rare under the major league testing program, with just two others in 2011: Tampa Bay outfielder Manny Ramirez and Colorado Rock-ies catcher Eliezer Alfonzo. Ramirez at first retired rather than face a 100-game suspen-sion for a second positive test.

Wanting to return this year, he is serving a 50-game penalty - the length was shortened because he missed most of last year.

“It has always been Major League Baseball’s position that no matter who tests positive, we will exhaust all avenues in pursuit of the appropriate dis-cipline. We have been true to that position in every instance, because baseball fans deserve

nothing less,” Manfred said. “As a part of our drug testing pro-gram, the commissioner’s o"ce and the players’ association agreed to a neutral third-party review for instances that are under dispute. While we have always respected that process, Major League Baseball vehe-mently disagrees with the deci-sion rendered today by arbitrator Shyam Das.”

Braun hit .312 with 33 hom-ers and 111 RBIs last year and led Milwaukee to the NL champion-ship series, where the Brewers lost to the eventual World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals. The Brewers are counting on his o!ense following the departure of Prince Fielder, who became a free agent and signed with the Detroit Tigers.

BY BRIAN MAHONEYASSOCIATED PRESS

ORLANDO, Fla. — Not Magic and Bird, not Kobe or LeBron. Not even Michael Jordan.

Nobody can match the buzz that Jeremy Lin has created in such a short amount of time, NBA Commissioner David Stern said Thursday.

“I haven’t done a computation, but it’s fair to say that no player has created the interest and the frenzy in this short period of time, in any sport, that I’m aware of like Jeremy Lin has,” Stern said Thurs-day.

Lin, an undrafted guard from Harvard, has become the NBA’s biggest story since coming o! the Knicks’ bench earlier this month to lead them to nine wins in 11 games heading into their matchup with Miami on Thursday night.

With Lin’s popularity in Asia as the league’s first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwan-ese descent, and with the religious community because of his strong Christian faith, Stern says he’s “never quite seen anything like” the attention on Lin.

“It’s fascinating,” Stern said after the All-Star Jam Session opening ceremonies.

The top five videos on NBA.com since Feb. 4, when Lin joined the rotation, are all Lin or Knicks related. Lin went from 190,000 followers on Sina, China’s version of Twitter, on Feb. 2 to more than 1 million as of Feb. 16.

Lin was a late addition to Fri-day’s Rising Stars Challenge between first and second-year players. Lin’s emergence came after the 18-player roster for the game had been announced, and though there were calls for his inclusion, Stern told USA Today

that Lin would not be given a spe-cial addition.

However, Lin was added along with Heat rookie Norris Cole last week. Stern said he was “over-ruled” by Kenny Smith, who is serving as commissioner of the game while fellow TNT analysts Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal acted as general managers and drafted the teams.

“So I guess the people have been satisfied,” Stern said, add-ing that he thought Lin’s addition was great.

Lin’s story has caught the attention of athletes beyond the NBA, such as boxer Manny Pac-quiao and tennis great Roger Federer.

Federer, speaking on a confer-ence call Thursday to promote an exhibition match against Andy Roddick at Madison Square Gar-den, said he hopes Lin comes to the March 5 event.

“I think this is why we all fol-low sports because of great sto-ries like this, that all of a sudden someone breaks through that you didn’t know or didn’t expect and you didn’t know the result was going to happen,” Federer said, “and that he was able to help the Knicks to come through in the way he did now is a great thing.”

Stern also said he plans to meet with Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and the Maloof family, who own the Kings, on Sunday. They are facing a March 1 deadline to reach an agreement to finance a new arena. Without that, the team could be on the move.

“By March 1 we hope to either have a deal or not have a deal by March 1. We don’t hope not to have a deal, but if we don’t have a deal by March 1, my guess is we won’t have a deal,” he said.

BY JEFF LATZKEASSOCIATED PRESS

OKLAHOMA CITY — Kevin Durant scored 33 points, Russell Westbrook added 19 and the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Los Ange-les Lakers 100-85 Thursday night to head into the All-Star break tied for the league’s best record.

The Thunder won their 12th straight home game and denied Los Angeles the chance to head into the midseason break with back-to-back statement wins on the road. The Lakers had won at defending NBA champion Dallas a night earlier and were trying to follow it by knocking o! the other half of last year’s West finals.

Kobe Bryant scored 24 points but went 7 for 24 from the field for Los Angeles. Pau Gasol had 22 points and nine rebounds.

Oklahoma City and Miami both have NBA-leading 27-7 records at the break.

The Thunder pulled away in the second half to win their second in a row against the Lak-ers, who won eight of the teams’ previous nine regular-season meetings and knocked Okla-homa City out of the 2010 playo!s in the first round.

The Lakers, once able to use their size advantage against Oklahoma City, struggled to get those same inside baskets against the remade Thunder interior of NBA blocks leader Serge Ibaka and Kendrick Perkins.

Center Andrew Bynum started out 2 for 12 before finally hitting three in a row midway through the fourth quarter. His two-handed slam got the Lakers within 81-74 with seven minutes remaining, only for Oklahoma City to come right back by scoring the next seven points.

Westbrook converted a three-point play, followed by James Harden’s two-handed slam and a two-handed putback dunk by Perkins with 4:29 left.

JEFF HANISCH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ryan Braun’s 50-game suspension was overturned Thursday by baseball arbitrator Shyam Das.

ALAN DIAZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

New York Knicks Jeremy Lin reacts to a call during the first half of an NBA basketball game

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Thunder tie Miami as

NBA’s best

Nothing like frenzy created by Lin

Braun’s 50-game suspension overturned

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THE NUMBER OF GOALS MEN’S HOCKEY TEAM HAS AVERAGED PER GAME IN ITS LAST FOUR VICTORIES. The Elis have a season average of 3.48 goals per game, good for seventh in the country. Captain Brian O’Neill ’12 leads the team in scoring with 18 goals.

STAT OF THE DAY 5.5

QUICK HITS

“I’m transitioning from something I’ve been doing my whole life – playing basketball com-petitively – to some-thing else.”

RHETT ANDERSON ’12FORWARD, MEN’S BASKETBALL

WOMEN’S SQUASHSEEKING ANOTHER CHAMPIONSHIPThe No. 2 women’s squash team will be in Cambridge this weekend for the Howe Cup, seeking its second straight national championship. The Elis have dropped only one matchthis season, a 5–4 heartbreaker to No. 1 Harvard two weeks ago.

PATRICK WITT ’12QUARTERBACK ENTERS COMBINEPatrick Witt, one of 19 quarterback to receive an invitation to this weekend’s NFL scouting combine, was given a grade of 53.5 by NFL.com, placing him 14th of the 19. Witt was criticized for throwing errant balls, and praised for his improvement in avoiding pressure.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

M. BBALLDuke 74Florida St. 66

M. BBALLAlabama 79Arkansas 68

NBAMiami 102New York 88

NBAAtlanta 83Orlando 78

NHLSan Jose 2Toronto 1

BY JIMIN HE AND KEVIN KUCHARSKISTAFF REPORTERS

Plenty is at stake for the men’s hockey team as it heads into the last two games of the regular sea-son this weekend.

Coming o! their first winning streak since November, the Bull-dogs (12–13–2, 9–10–1 ECAC) will try to keep their momentum rolling on the road against Princ-eton (8–13–6, 6–11–3) and Quin-nipiac (16–11–5, 8–8–4) before the ECAC playoffs kick off on March 2. A pair of victories this weekend will at least give the Elis a shot at earning a first-round bye and home ice advantage in the playo!s.

In order to secure a chance to open up the postseason at home,

the Elis, currently tied for sev-enth place out of 12 teams in the ECAC with 19 points, must fin-ish in the top four of the confer-ence standings. But two victories alone, which would give the team 23 points, will not be enough to guarantee a top-four finish. The Bulldogs will also need their competitors — Colgate, Clarkson, Harvard and St. Lawrence — to lose their matches this weekend.

Yale’s last trip to Princeton ended in a wild shootout in which the Elis barely emerged victori-ous. The Tigers jumped out to a three-goal lead in the first half of the opening frame, only to see the Bulldogs tie the score by the end of the period. The Blue and White prevailed 5–4.

“[Princeton is] usually more of a run-and-gun team, but this year they’re more structured and play a more defensive style,” defense-

man Gus Young ’14 said. “But our philosophy doesn’t change either way, we want to bring the game to them.”

The key to this weekend’s action for the Bulldogs is their o!ense, which ranks seventh in the nation with 3.48 goals per game. In their last four victories, the Elis have averaged a stunning 5.5 goals per game.

Last weekend, the Bulldogs outscored Ivy rivals Dartmouth and Harvard by a combined score of 12–4 and showed a deadly transition o!ense that has been missing from their game all sea-son long.

Defenseman Kevin Peel ’12 said an aggressive o!ensive game plan will be especially important against Quinnipiac on Saturday. The Bobcats bested the Bulldogs 2–1 at Ingalls Rink in January.

“[Quinnipiac is] solid defen-

sively, so we need to think shoot-first all the time,” Peel said. “The more pucks we put on net, the better chance we’re going to have at scoring enough goals to win. We didn’t do that last time we played them, and that’s how they were able to beat us.”

The Bobcats’ defense is ranked 13th in Division I hockey, surren-dering just 2.47 goals per game. But even more impressively, the Quinnipiac penalty-killing unit ranks third in the country, one spot ahead of Yale.

In their last seven losses, the Elis converted just three of their 28 power play opportunities.

“It’s going to be very important to get a strong showing from our power play this weekend,” Peel said. “You’ve got to take advan-tage of that situation if you want

Bulldogs seek second straight sweep

BY CHARLES CONDROSTAFF REPORTER

Yalies hoping to wach the men’s basketball team in action at home this season will get their last chance this weekend.

The Bulldogs will play host to Columbia (14–12, 3–7 Ivy) tonight and then face Cor-nell (10–14, 5–5 Ivy) at the Lee Amphitheater Saturday. The Bulldogs played on the road the past two weekends, most recently in a 66-51 loss at Harvard last Saturday. Although the Elis were defeated by their archrival Crim-son, Harvard head coach Tommy Amaker said that he saw Yale as a team that is never out of a ball-game.

“[Yale has] been down, and they’ve marched their way back and won games,” Amaker said last Saturday. “That’s the mark of a good team — a tough team.”

The Bulldogs will need to be tough this weekend, as they are in third place in the Ivy League: a half-game behind Penn and two below the Cantabs.

If the Elis want to gain a post-season berth — either the NCAA tournament bid given to the Ivy League champion or an National Invitational Tournament bid as the second place team — then sweeping the final home stand of the year is essential. The Bulldogs played both Cornell and Colum-bia away two weeks ago, losing to the Big Red 85–84 in OT before

Elis prep for final home stand

MEN’S HOCKEY

BY JOHN SULLIVANCONTRIBUTING REPORTER

As the weather finally heats up in New Haven this week, so does the Ivy League race for the women’s basketball team.

The Bulldogs go into this weekend’s games at Columbia and Cornell in virtu-ally a dead heat with Harvard for second place in the league, with only four games remaining on their schedule. While Princeton seems to have run away with the conference title for the third straight year, the second-place finisher will get a bid to the Women’s National Invitational Tournament and the chance for post-sea-son glory.

The Elis (15–9, 7–3 Ivy) are currently a

half-game ahead of Harvard (13–10, 6–3 Ivy) in the conference standings, though the Crimson has an extra game remain-ing. Last weekend at home the Bulldogs had a chance to beat Harvard for the sec-ond time this season, but were unable to capitalize on the opportunity. A win would have pushed Harvard back to two and a half games out of second place and put the Elis in the driver’s seat going for-ward, but the Crimson played as if it knew its season was on the line, and won deci-sively 71–51. Head coach Chris Gobrecht said she was upset with her team’s perfor-mance, but acknowledged the excitement that the next two weeks will hold.

“We do like to make it interesting,” Gobrecht said.

The Bulldogs hope to replicate last year’s finish when they stole the No. 2 spot in the conference from the Can-tabs in the final two weeks of the season

and earned their first-ever bid to the NIT. Both teams finished with 10–4 records in the conference, but Yale’s 78–64 win over Harvard on the penultimate Saturday of the season proved decisive. The victory gave Yale a 2–0 advantage in the season series and the tiebreaker that awarded the Elis a National Invitational bid.

But the Bulldogs and Crimson still have four and five games left to play, respec-tively, and it is too early to talk about tie-breakers. Yale plays Columbia and Cornell tonight and tomorrow, and Princeton and Penn next weekend. Harvard plays all four of these teams with the addition of Dart-mouth. Both the Bulldogs and the Crim-son lost to Princeton in the teams’ first meetings, but neither has lost to any of the other teams they have left to play.

Guard Aarica West ’13 said that last

Yale in tight race for second place in Ivies

SEE W. BASKETBALL PAGE 14

M. HOCKEY

W. BASKETBALL

M. BASKETBALL

SEE M. BASKETBALL PAGE 14

GRAHAM HARBOE/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Forward Kenny Agostino ’14, who scored three goals last weekend and the Yale o!ense will

BLAIR SEIDEMAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Yale’s only home loss this season was against Harvard on Jan. 27.

BAOBAO ZHANG/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Guard Aarica West ’13 averages five points per game for the Bulldogs.

SEE M. HOCKEY PAGE 14