His second arrest — at a rally on May 1, his twenty-second birthday — was unexpected. While the rally was on Alexander Walk, police issued a warning calling for protesters to leave. Since several police cars had surrounded the protest at that point, Birckhead-Morton approached a police officer to ask where it would be convenient for protesters to disperse. He was immediately arrested and then charged with two counts of first-degree criminal trespass and one count of disorderly conduct.

Birckhead-Morton is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is still connected to Yale and the ongoing protests, both in spirit and by necessity. He returned to New Haven on September 19 for a court hearing in which his charges from May 1 were dismissed and his first-degree trespassing charge from April was lowered to simple trespass. He has no criminal record.

Since last October, pro-Palestine student organizers at Yale have set up multiple encampments on university property, staged rallies, and organized teach-ins to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and protest the University’s investment in weapons manufacturing companies. Students who support Israel have hosted counterprotests and demonstrations. Many students have held memorials for the hostages killed and taken by Hamas, as well as spoken out in national media about antisemitism at Yale. 

Photograph by Yalies4Palestine

Though students are generally united in their hope for global peace and security, sympathies on Yale’s campus are split between two sides of the same war. 

But other forms of ideological bifurcation have emerged from the past year of student protests. Disagreements about activism at Yale often go beyond taking sides in the Israel-Gaza conflict; instead, they highlight fundamental disputes surrounding Yale’s role in society and its duty to students as an educational institution. As Yale gears up for another year of activism, student activists are confronting the tensions of campus activism head-on — to contradictory and at times hopeful results.

What is Yale’s role in society?

Yale’s endowment totaled $40.7 billion in June 2023. Within the 0.3 percent of the endowment which is publicly disclosed, the University has invested more than $110,000 in military weapons manufacturers through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as of February 2024. In their rallies and encampments, student groups like Yalies4Palestine and the Endowment Justice Collective have consistently demanded Yale to disclose the entirety of their investments and divest from weapons manufacturers. According to an Endowment Justice Collective Instagram statement, without a formal policy on investments in weapons manufacturers or transparency mechanisms, there is no way of knowing whether Yale and its shell companies are investing more in the weapons industry.

Their detractors, however, believe that divestment needlessly complicates Yale’s purpose in society. It “introduces so many restrictions into the academic focus that Yale should be having,” said Isha Brahmbhatt ’24, former chairman of the Tory Party at Yale. She believes that the University’s global impact comes from its education of globally-minded students; the ethics of Yale’s investments or its stance on social issues are less consequential. 

Within an institution that has educated much of the political elite of the U.S., including five U.S. presidents, a Yale education is still seen by many as a jumping pad for future global leaders. Elven Shum ’24, former vice-chairman of the Conservative Party at Yale, argues that Yale students are positioned uniquely to “amass their own power or influence” and eventually influence national policy. In the time before most students achieve “world leader” status, Shum advocates for volunteering at the local level: “Serving people at a soup kitchen is probably just as, or more impactful, compared to your individual add to whatever protest at Yale.” 

Photograph by Christina Lee 

Shum and Brahmbhatt’s concept of Yale as a politically neutral, academically intense cradle that fosters future changemakers is partially shared by the University. In early September, University President Maurie McInnis announced the establishment of a committee to recommend whether Yale should refrain from commenting on matters of public significance. This move comes as many universities nationwide, including Harvard and Columbia, have adopted versions of institutional neutrality amidst a rise in student protests this year. Institutional neutrality, a concept which was first introduced in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, aims to protect free speech on campus by preventing the censure of minority voices who do not agree with the public view. 

But Yale’s celebratory attitude towards its history of student activism suggests that being strictly politically neutral may erode some elements that the University prides in its education. A quote from anti-apartheid activist and first president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, is carved on the granite wall north of the Beinecke Library — “YOUR FREEDOM AND MINE CANNOT BE SEPARATED.” The sculpted monument is, per the epigraph, “dedicated to the people of South Africa who were supported in their struggle for freedom by members of the Yale and New Haven communities.” 

Photograph by Christina Lee

The memorial refers to the student protests of 1986, when student activists installed a shanty town on Beinecke Plaza calling for Yale’s divestment from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. After ten days, campus police dismantled the encampment and arrested over 70 students. According to the Yale Investment Office’s website, the University did eventually adopt divestment policies in the early 1990s — but only after Congress had passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986 and many multinational companies had already withdrawn from South Africa.

Despite Yale’s efforts to shut down the anti-apartheid student movement in the 1980s, it now celebrates these protests’ success in one of the most prominent campus spaces. The University continues to broadcast its students’ historical involvement in campus activism; last year, the Sterling Memorial Library hosted an exhibition commemorating campus protests in support of New Haven’s Black Panthers on trial.

These commemorations indicate that the University considers civic engagement part of its education. But Yale’s endorsement of activism has always been retroactive. 

An education in activism?

In student activist spaces, education goes beyond seminar readings: it consists of learning from others’ lived experiences. Over the past year, pro-Palestine activists at Yale have organized through means other than mere disruption of campus life. Through teach-ins, reading weeks and screenings, they seek to educate themselves and other students on the situation in the Middle East.

During the ten-day occupation of Beinecke Plaza in April, at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, protesters held a zine-making workshop and conversation with Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, professor of anthropology at Bard College. Omnia El Shakry, professor of history at Yale, hosted a teach-in about anti-colonial revolt and the Palestinian condition. James Forman Jr. LAW ’92, J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law, spoke to students about his experience organizing with the anti-apartheid student group Brown Divest/Free South Africa during his undergraduate years at Brown. 

“You should constantly be asking yourself, are we taking the time to learn from people who were doing it before?” Forman advised an attentive crowd of more than 70 student protesters on April 19. While students can be on the vanguard of activism because of the lack of established institutional structure, he said, this also means that it is hard for them to learn lessons from previous experiences and connect to the lineage of activism from decades ago. 

Photograph by Giri Viswanathan

Still, Yale institutions have shut down educational forms of student activism. Danya Dubrow-Compaine ’25 is an organizer with Yale Jews for Ceasefire and J Street U. To her, these organizations are spaces for those who feel alienated from mainstream Jewish institutions because of their views on the war; they also offer opportunities to educate the student body on Zionism and its history.

Dubrow-Compaine and others in J Street U planned to screen a documentary named Israelism at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life in December 2023. The documentary, which follows two young American Jews as they learn about how the version of Israel they were taught in Jewish institutions differed from Israeli policy and people in the Middle East’s lived reality, was controversially received in the States and on college campuses like Hunter College, where campaigns were held to stop the film’s screening. 

At Yale, the Slifka Center’s Board of Directors originally approved the screening before reversing the decision one week before the event. Students held the screening in the basement of Silliman College instead. In a conversation with Uriel Cohen, the executive director of the Slifka Center, Dubrow-Compaine learned that the approval was retracted because of concerns regarding external backlash from donors and Hillel International. (In an email to the Magazine, Cohen wrote that donor contributions do not change or impact Slifka Center’s mission, values or methodologies.)

Jewish students’ endeavors to screen Israelism at the Slifka Center illustrate how activists attempt to disrupt the ideological status quo at Yale through education, both among the student population and within Yale’s official institutions. “Israelism is a documentary making very well founded mainstream critiques of settlements in the West Bank, and yet it was deemed to be beyond the pale in a way that right-wing speech on Israel specifically is just often not,” said Elijah Bacal ’27, who is involved in J Street U and Yale Jews for Ceasefire.

Shutting down the protests: for student safety?

Photograph by Christina Lee

While student organizers maintain the value of campus activism within an educational institution like Yale, the University has often taken action to quell ongoing protests and prevent future rallies from evolving into larger occupations.

On April 22, 48 protesters (44 Yale students, a Yale employee, and three New Haveners) were arrested by Yale police and charged with criminal trespassing after police raided the encampment on Beinecke Plaza. On May 1, four people were arrested (two Yale students, two New Haveners) towards the end of a demonstration on campus; the arrest of a non-Yale affiliate involved the use of disproportionate force. The University claims that these arrests were made in order to protect students’ safety. 

Right after the arrests, former University President Salovey wrote in a statement to the Yale community that student protesters had chosen to end conversations with Yale deans, rejecting offers to end the protests and meet with trustees. At that point, the administration determined that “the situation was no longer safe,” as they “became aware of police reports identifying harmful acts and threatening language used against individuals at or near the protest sites.” 

Following the police reports, Chabad at Yale released a statement on April 21 condemning “brazen antisemitism” during the period of Beinecke protests: “The situation came to a head last night, when unauthorized protests blocking common areas led to a hostile and dangerous confrontation for Jewish students on campus. A dear and beloved student leader of Chabad at Yale was surrounded and struck by a sharp object and ended up in the hospital.” The student wrote about the incident in The Free Press and spoke on national media about it; her account has since been questioned by other journalists and outlets.

Rabbi Meir Chaim Posner, the Jewish Life Advisor of Chabad at Yale, noted that at Yale, protests have mostly not devolved into violence, nor has he been afraid for his physical safety despite his being “visibly Jewish.” But physical safety is not the most pressing issue at hand, he said. “The issue is, is it okay to delegitimize a people on campus at Yale and not suffer any repercussions?”

Eytan Israel ’26, a Jewish student, wrote to the Magazine about his uncomfortable experience as a “visibly Jewish” person who wished to witness and document happenings at the Beinecke encampment. At the encampment’s perimeter, he had a student marshal step in front of him to prevent him from passing, he said. He criticized how some faculty members moved their classes to the Beinecke encampment, which was “not a place many Jewish students felt safe going to” due to chants like “Resistance is justified when people are occupied,” and “Globalize the intifada,” which he and other Jews understood as being justification for Hamas’s attacks and a call for a global revival of the 2000–2005 Intifada in Israel. 

“Despite these slogans that were present at the encampments, almost every group chat in Yale was filled with messages that if you care about humanity and morality, you must come to support the encampments,” he said.

Given the accusations of antisemitism plaguing protest spaces, some Jewish student activists believe that it is even more important for them to speak up about the Gaza war. To Dubrow-Compaine, Jews for Ceasefire is “a way for Jewish students to shoulder some of the organizing labor for the Palestinian cause”: “People aren’t necessarily going to label us as antisemites in the way that they would label non-Jewish pro-Palestine activists.”

“The idea that arresting dozens of students peacefully protesting makes any of us safer is insane,” said Bacal, citing the necessity of freedom of expression and assembly on campus. “It’s true that individual Jewish students expressed feeling unsafe during the encampments, and I would never challenge the validity of their experience,” he said. “But the only thing the arrests made safer is Yale Corp’s bottom line.”

But when a second encampment was assembled on Cross Campus on April 28, more concerns started to arise 

Photograph by Yalies4Palestine

about whether antisemitism was ideologically embedded in spaces of pro-Palestine activism. Organizers erected a sign listing “community guidelines” of the encampment, which included committing to “Palestinian liberation and fighting for freedom for all oppressed people” and a no-tolerance policy for antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism. A protest marshal told the News in April that if pedestrians chose not to support the community guidelines, marshals offered to escort them to the other side of Cross Campus.

In response, Salovey wrote in an email to the Yale community that “to claim control of a shared physical space and to impose an intellectual and ideological litmus test are not in keeping with our bedrock principles and values.” Eytan Israel agrees: “It doesn’t matter that there are Jews that were part of the encampment,” he said.

Yalies4Palestine told the Magazine that when organizers received feedback that people were “not feeling included and represented,” the coalition “collectively” took the guidelines down. The group also stated their belief in the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism: Zionism is an “imperial, colonial political ideology that was created in the early 20th century to justify the genocide and displacement of Palestinian peoples from their ancestral land,” they said, while anti-Zionism opposes that ideology and is “completely separate” from antisemitism.

“We are constantly striving to make our spaces feel welcome for people of all different backgrounds,” the group said, highlighting their collaboration with Jewish activist groups. “A part of that is constantly examining our messaging, and Jews for Ceasefire has been very helpful in collaborating with us and helping us create safer spaces.”

To Rabbi Posner, trying to establish a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and then excluding Zionist Jews from accessing campus spaces, is equivalent to having a “plausible deniability that I’m only targeting ‘this kind of a Jew,’” he said, “which doesn’t fly.” Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to self determination in the land of Israel, he explained. “The moment someone believes that Israel is not a legitimate country, then that is antisemitic, period.”

Still, he believes that a version of “pro-Palestine” protests on campus can coexist with respect for Jewish people and non-antisemitism. “Even though it’s complex and I can’t say I agree, it would be a movement that sees Israel as legitimate, sees Israel as engaged in a legitimate struggle, and believes that the answer to that is through diplomatic negotiations.” These peaceful discussions happen in many Jewish communities, he said.

Photograph by Yalies4Palestine

Antisemitic actions at pro-Palestine protests are not the University’s only safety concern. Administrators have expressed unease about the “danger” of non-Yale affiliates participating in Yale protests. Salovey wrote in a University-wide email on April 22, after the arrests on Beinecke Plaza, that it was “concerning” that “some of those who joined students at Hewitt Quadrangle (Beinecke Plaza) in recent days were not members of the Yale community, and protesters were trespassing on campus overnight.” 

Following police arrests in the morning, hundreds of protesters moved to blockade the intersection of Grove and College Streets, causing traffic to divert and Schwarzman Center, including Commons dining hall and the Elm cafe, to close for two days. 

Afterwards, Pericles Lewis, Dean of Yale College wrote an email to Yale staff which was then leaked to student protest groups: “According to law enforcement, the core of the group holding the intersection outside Schwarzman are non-Yale protestors with a known history of violent confrontation with the police,” he wrote. “We have found that the presence of such outsiders has greatly increased danger at recent protests.” 

A few hours later, Lewis retracted his words in a statement to the News: “My email regarding the protest at Grove and Prospect was mistaken and I apologize for the suggestion that the protesters might turn violent,” he wrote. “I was repeating speculation I had overheard and I should not have done so.”

Activists from non-Yale organizations — like those from several Muslim Student Associations in CT, chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Connecticut chapter of American Muslims for Palestine — also participated in the Yale protests. 

Protesters were dissatisfied with the University’s response to their efforts in coalition building. Birckhead-Morton views the University’s statements as a strategy to “break up the movement by racializing and demonizing the communities which are acting in solidarity with student protestors.” This tension comes at a time period when the Yale administration is making consistent efforts to foster town-gown relations, including by increasing Yale’s voluntary payments to the city, establishing a commitment to offset the city’s loss in tax revenues, and helping fund public school tuition; Salovey’s Baccalaureate Address to graduating seniors in August 2023 also focused on the importance of community engagement in New Haven.

Yale won’t budge. What’s next for activism?

On April 17, at the peak of the first Beinecke Plaza occupation, Yale announced that the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) had concluded

Photograph by Christina Lee

that “military weapons manufacturing for authorized sales did not meet the threshold of grave social injury, a prerequisite for divestment,” meaning that Yale would not be divesting from military weapons. 

On September 28, three students advocating for Yale to disclose and divest from weapons manufacturers met with a member of the Yale Corporation for the first time. In the meeting, they presented a proposal for the University to disclose the percentage and dollar amount of Yale’s endowment that is invested in weapons manufacturers and suppliers; the trustee did not commit to the terms of the proposal.

In 2018, even with considerable student voices calling for divestment in Puerto Rican debt — including a movement occupying Cross Campus for three days — Yale concluded that divesting was unwarranted, suggesting that the University’s decisions are fairly independent of student pressure.

Beverly Gage ’94, John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, reasons that the failure of student activism to truly change the distribution of power of the institution is due to the fundamental disadvantages that students have compared to Yale itself. “The administration has been here for a long time, and The Yale Corporation not only operates in relative secrecy, but is a long-standing, permanent site of power… Most substantial change takes a really, really long time to make it happen.”

Yet even if campus activism seems futile in the moment, the hands-on education it provides may prove valuable to aspiring organizers. Sunrise Movement, a student-led organization in the climate movement, mainly consisted of campus activists who formerly advocated for divestment in fossil fuels as a theory of change. But as they grew more experienced in leftist advocacy, they saw the shortcomings of divestment, revamped their organizing strategy and eventually partnered with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to create a national campaign for the Green New Deal that stretched beyond divestment and economic incentives for industries to cut carbon emissions.

Photograph by Christina Lee

Still, to many student activists, the act of organizing at Yale is essential. Lumisa Bista ’25, an organizer in the Endowment Justice Collective (EJC) at Yale, organizes around awareness regarding Yale’s investments in exploitative industries and applies pressure on the University to divest. “It is a privilege to be able to separate ourselves from this war, but it is our responsibility to recognize that Yale is just as complicit in the atrocities,” she said. “Given that our education is tied to this corporation, it is our responsibility to challenge its wrongdoings.”

If campus protests are unable to force change at Yale, at the very least, they disrupt campus life, said Bista. During the Beinecke occupation, students were unable to pass through the Plaza without witnessing the swaths of protesters calling for a ceasefire, or the erected pop-up bookshelf, or the sign “ASK YOUR TOUR GUIDE ABOUT YALE’S INVESTMENT IN GENOCIDE.”

Student activism remains in the limelight this semester: as violence in the Middle East rages on, students have held a community gathering on Beinecke Plaza during Family Weekend, handed out “Yale Divest From War” pins to performance groups at Yale, and rallied with community members in solidarity with Lebanon. Both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine groups are hosting vigils and rallies around October 7th, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel.

“The status quo hums along inoffensively and self-sufficiently due to its nature. Activism comes in and is, by its nature, loud and disruptive,” said Bacal. “I think people just have to understand that these things don’t arise in a vacuum.”

Correction, Oct. 14: This story has been updated to clarify that a student wrote their account of antisemitism in The Free Press, not the Yale Free Press.

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Lewis first spoke about her experiences with memory, culture and African American relationships through the lens of her family. She then showed a moving-image film titled “Intimacy,” consisting of photographs from her grandmother’s photo archive, accompanied by a live voice-over of Lewis reading her new poem, “Intimacy (for Julie) Part 2.” 

“What Lewis offers us in her breathtaking works and prose is an opportunity to consider our likeness in our own time,” said Erica Edwards, a professor of African American studies. “A time of catastrophic declensions and tremendous heights and arcs to consider our own time as a small capsule in the time of the Earth — the thousands and thousands of billions of years that preceded us.” 

The event started with an introduction by Edwards, who placed Lewis’ work in the context of what she called the current “re-re-rebirth of African American letters, especially Black women’s literature and art.”

In her speech and her spoken poetry, Lewis traced the origin of the film and her exploration of memory to her late grandmother’s photo archive. She only discovered the archive after her grandmother had passed away from Alzheimer’s disease.

The photographs on the screen situated the audience within her grandmother’s specific community of the Black diaspora from Louisiana in Los Angeles. Lewis’ lecture expanded on the topic, covering history and migration. 

Lewis said that she feels her dead ancestors are “alive, present, palpable, standing nearby [and] listening.” Her poetry expresses how every “newborn face,” “eyebrow shape,” and “the color of the eye,”  was “an ancestor’s artifact” — either a return or a farewell, she said.

The lecture showcased a variety of ways in which memory can be preserved. By giving voice to the past through words, Lewis infused her grandmother’s photographs with her own meditations on the way that relationships last through generations.

Even though Lewis said her poetry is informed by her identity as an African American woman, she said that the emotions she writes about are universal. A significant portion of her poetry lacks a specific setting and the use of “I” and “you” pronouns.

Attendee Ruthie Block GRD ’29 highlighted their fascination with Lewis’ intentional decision to produce the moving-image film without subtitles.

“I found it very striking when she talked about her ‘refusal to caption’ her work,” Block said. “She turned the traditional relationship between the textual and visual on their heads and allowed for the photographs to illustrate the poetry, rather than having the relationship flow in the other direction.” 

The Department of African American Studies hosted a discussion on Lewis’s work a week before the lecture as part of the “Endeavors Seminar Series,” focusing on her National Book Award-winning collection “Voyage of the Sable Venus.”

Block said that the discussion helped them contextualize film, “Intimacy” in Lewis’s wider work. 

“Getting to be in conversation with those two books was really beautiful and reflecting on the way that her work has changed,” Block said. “That helped set us up to be present in a unique way for what she offered the other night.”

Tyler Campbell GRD ’29 said that the lecture was “a very special moment” to him, especially given his interest in the intersection between creative writing and personal documentation.

The way that Lewis incorporates the visual archive into her family genealogy has influenced Campbell’s personal projects, he said. He is currently working on a poetry collection which consists of interviews conducted with people from his neighborhood, focusing on ideas of kinship and survival.

“[My project] uses a lot of visual components as well, in a similar manner,” he said. “So hearing her talk about the project and the construction of the book was inspiring to my own process.”

“Intimacy” was also presented at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York over the summer.

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The two courses will guide workers on dealing with non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, and infectious diseases like tuberculosis. Both programs, which are available online through Yale Coursera, were developed in collaboration with the World Health Organization. The infectious diseases course was also created with help from the United Kingdom Health Security Agency.

“[This] recent project with WHO provided a really unique opportunity to enhance education for practitioners who practice internationally behind bars,” said Lisa Puglisi, an associate professor of medicine and director of Transitions Clinic-New Haven under SEICHE. 

According to Filipa Alves da Costa, a public health consultant at the WHO, the organization contacted Yale faculty members at the end of 2021, hoping to create educational initiatives for healthcare practitioners who work in prisons.

In 2022, the team first developed an online training course on non-communicable diseases, spearheaded by Emily Wang, the director of SEICHE and a professor of medicine and public health at Yale. 

The course was first launched as a system of virtual interaction between instructors and practitioners, including several modules, workshops and participant activities. It ran for a set period of time from May to June 2022.

According to da Costa, more than thirty ministries of health around the world nominated public health experts to participate in the program. Those experts took lessons from the course to prison health care providers in their respective countries.  

Even though the course was initially designed for European countries, the team has also reached out to the Pan American Health Organization and has received requests from Asian and African prison systems to join the program as well, Puglisi said. 

Building on the first course’s success, the team developed another program on infectious diseases, which was launched on Coursera in September. 

“Since incarcerated individuals face unique health challenges, we applaud the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice and the WHO-HIPP for helping to fill a needed gap in health education to prevent disease for New Haven residents and beyond,” Brooke Logan, Deputy Director of the New Haven Health Department, wrote to the News.

The non-communicable diseases course is also in the last stages of an adaptation to an asynchronous format on Coursera, da Costa said, which would allow participants to join the course at any time and progress through the course at their own pace.

Puglisi highlighted the importance of having a centralized and flexible platform through which health care providers could access course materials. 

“Practicing healthcare providers are busy, they are not given a lot of time for learning activities as often on their own time,” she said. “Yale Coursera provides a really unique, accessible platform that can be used internationally.”

Historically, Puglisi said, the international health community has focused on preventing infectious diseases in prison settings, such as tuberculosis outbreaks. Experts have only recently recognized the importance of the widespread health effects of non-communicable diseases, according to Puglisi. 

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, she added, experts have been trying to balance the amount of attention and resources devoted to both types of diseases. 

“For a time, we were dropping everything and only focusing on COVID, because that’s what the times called for,” Puglisi said. “But it’s not the only risk incarcerated people face, it’s not even necessarily the most deadly thing incarcerated people face. The leading cause of death of people in prisons is actually cancer and heart disease.”

SEICHE’s recent program is one of the first curricula for healthcare providers in prisons to center non-communicable diseases.

Puglisi also highlighted the urgency of improving healthcare within prisons, where incarcerated people endure a disproportionate burden of illness. 

“We incarcerate people who are minoritized and are often kept out of or have poor access to community health systems to begin with,” she said. “Prisons have relatively poor resources to address the health needs of a population with an abundant burden of illness, not to mention the way that [conditions during incarceration] affect physical and psychiatric states. Exposure to the place can worsen things or create new illness.”

The new courses are designed to adapt “community standards of care” to prison settings, Puglisi added, where legal, bureaucratic or physical constraints may make it difficult to use conventional healthcare practices.

Da Costa said that all the experts who helped develop the programs have had experience with incarcerated populations, which allowed them to include examples of real interventions that worked in prison environments. Still, she said that problems still persist. 

“There are things which healthcare practitioners cannot change immediately,” she said “[P]erhaps it’s more related to their legislation in their countries.”

The case of hypertension, Puglisi said, illustrates the challenges of providing health care in prisons. 

According to Puglisi, doctors usually recommend lifestyle modification as a first step to patients with hypertension, such as a better diet and more exercise. In prisons, though, she said, that is easier said than done.  

“If they’re in a high security, solitary confinement setting, [movement] is going to be challenging; even in a very overly crowded, low security setting, that remains challenging,” she said.

Puglisi said she believes that by including more previously incarcerated people in the development and distribution of health education programs, they could more effectively benefit incarcerated populations.

Shelby Henderson-Griffiths, a law student at City University of New York who was formerly incarcerated, was a fellow at Yale Prison Education Initiative at Dwight Hall for two years. During her fellowship, she worked with SEICHE on social justice and advocacy efforts. 

Because of factors like the understaffing of prison medical systems and the difficulties of managing power dynamics behind bars, Henderson-Griffiths said she views improving healthcare for incarcerated people as an uphill battle. 

“As an incarcerated person, sometimes you can put in a medical ticket and maybe people are not taking you seriously,” she said. “Maybe you don’t know what to say in the medical ticket.” 

She also emphasized the role of SEICHE’s programs in providing knowledge about prison healthcare to medical professionals.

She said that this is especially important since information about caring for incarcerated people is rarely taught in medical schools.

“Taking more time to educate their patients, changing their terminology, and any efforts to humanize the practice of medicine in a prison facility is ultimately going to be beneficial for the people who are incarcerated,” Henderson-Griffiths said.

SEICHE was founded in 2020 as a collaboration between the Yale School of Medicine and the Yale Law School.

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Originally invited by the Yale Glee Club to perform on campus in the fall of 2020, The Crossing’s plans were derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Jeffrey Douma, director of the Glee Club, expressed his excitement at finally being able to bring the chamber choir to Yale.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years, they’ve become one of the most important professional choirs in the United States, especially in terms of championing new work,” Douma said. 

Monday’s program put a range of contemporary compositional styles on show. The evening started off with an atonal piece, “At Which Point” by Wang Lu, set to the poems “Beckoned” and “The Sounding” by Pulitzer-winning poet Forrest Gander. Using a musical style called word-painting, in which the melody of a song reflects the meaning of the words, the performers situated the audience within a soundscape evocative of the poem’s vivid images — an experience heightened by The Crossing’s vocal quality and the lucidity of their overtones near the end. 

Regarding the composition, attendee Lukas Bacho ’25 felt that the music detracted from the poems instead of adding to them. 

“By word-painting every line, I felt like it gave into the tendency I’ve seen in a lot of contemporary choral music to show off impressive skill in a way that shies away from beauty,” Bacho said.

The chorus then moved into more conventional tonality in its second piece, “Singsong.” Set to words by Pulitzer-winning poet Rita Dove and composed by Tania León, the piece includes multiple virtuosic passages for the flute as well as a choral part. 

Claire Chase, a renowned flutist with hundreds of world premieres under her belt, surprised the audience with an exhibition that pushed the technical bounds of flute playing. Chase’s energy captivated the audience, especially during the more novel passages that involved “flute beatboxing,” while The Crossing seemed to play more of a supporting role.

“Infinite Body,” written by The Crossing’s inaugural resident composer and Yale Glee Club alumna Ayanna Woods ’15, ended the night with the most evident emotional through line. 

Focusing on tension between the body’s natural state and the demands of capitalism, Woods, through her writing, begs audience members to pause and reconnect with themselves in a productivity-driven society. 

In the second movement, “One Body,” a droning middle part and recurring patterns of notes evoke Kafkaesque images of chugging factory wheels and monotony. The Crossing ironically repeats, “maximize your down time! / maximize your energy! / maximize your productivity! / turn into a better you!” poking fun at burnout culture.

“Infinite Body” is rooted in Woods’ personal experience. A few months before her time with The Crossing, she experienced a serious concussion that continued into her residency. Since then, she has had to balance her healthcare needs and her excitement about her work. 

“It took a long time [for me] to fully believe the fact that my relationship with my body is going to be a priority to everything,” she said.

To Woods, the idea that people are humans before anything else has a fundamental connection to the natural world and to the natural state of our bodies. “Infinite Body” ends with a soaring fourth movement titled “Golden Hour,” where the harmonies are meant to evoke images of sunbeams. 

This is the final idea that she leaves with the audience: “My love, our time / on Earth is made / of sunlight — and you, / beaming at me / golden.”

Though Monday’s performance was primarily an auditory experience, it featured a key visual element. As The Crossing sang, two television screens beside the chorus displayed the lyrics, one or two lines at a time. 

Attendee Lila Schweinfurth ’25 noted that the visual presence of the text “relieved some of The Crossing’s need for express diction,” enabling them to move away from the deliberately overdone pronunciation of “choral speak.”

In the three commissioned pieces, fragments of the original text are jumbled in ways that could prompt new connections between phrases. 

When parts of the text repeated later in the music, the television screens stayed blank instead of showing the same lines once more. 

“On the screen, you get a blank in between the written lines, but what you really get is a musical echo,” Schweinfurth said. “I think it really adds another dimension to the piece.” 

Meanwhile, Bacho wished that each line was not displayed independently of the whole text, noting that the wider context could easily be lost with a visual hyperfocus on the current moment.

The Crossing’s precise cutoffs, tone matching and balance between different voice parts contributed to a cohesive artistic vision. Schweinfurth remarked on the members’ ability to both stand out as stylistically unique soloists and blend in with the ensemble. 

“After they finished their solos and went right back into the choir, you could never tell that they were there,” Schweinfurth said. 

Maya Khurana ’24, manager of the Glee Club, touched on the significance of The Crossing’s visit to members of musical groups on campus. With prior chamber choir experience herself, she found it insightful to witness in person what a professional chamber choir could be like.

While the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted The Crossing’s original plans for a 2020 visit, this delayed arrival to the University also revived Woods’ musical contributions at Yale. 

The moment was meaningful to both Woods and the Glee Club, which had included another of Woods’ pieces, “Archive Alive,” in their repertoire last season. 

“It was very, very special to have these two parts of my world collide,” Woods said about bringing her music for The Crossing back to Yale. “And to have the celebration of the culmination of this year, like to be brought home, was really beautiful for me.”

The Crossing is scheduled to perform at the University of Pennsylvania on Oct. 14.

The post Grammy-winning chamber choir entwines music with poetry at Yale appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“Once I found that kind of freeing space, I thought, okay, poetry is it,” she told a packed auditorium at the Yale University Art Gallery on Wednesday.

Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of six books of poetry, including “The Carrying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

At a public event co-sponsored by Ezra Stiles College and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration, Limón sat down with the Head of Ezra Stiles College, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, to discuss her writing. Afterward, Limón gave a poetry reading, answered audience questions and signed books.

The conversation started off with Limón’s assertion that a whole community is behind every artistic creation. She is skeptical of the myth that one person creates everything in a work of art and “rises on a pedestal” after its completion.

Limón recalled discovering that Muriel Rukeyser, whose poems she loved, was the teacher of Sharon Olds, whom she was studying with. This led her to realize the abundance of “cycles” of support in the literary world. 

“Even if what we’re working on aren’t exactly collaborations, what we’re actually doing is often reaching out to one another and saying, ‘Hey, will you read this one poem,’” Limón said. “You’re always reaching out, and you’re always getting that support from the people you need. Sometimes it can look like one person is doing a lot. In reality, a lot of people are doing a lot of things, and all of us are in community.”

To Camacho, reading Limón’s work has always felt like exploring a close relationship between herself and the poet — planning this event and circulating Limón’s poetry among her students felt like extending this relationship to her surrounding community.

Poetry is a communal experience, Camacho explained, because so much of it takes on meaning when one hears it read and performed out loud with an audience.

“I realized that [Limón] touches all of us, that she has the capacity to gather and bring us together,” Camacho said. 

Camacho also expressed her gratitude to RITM, whose sponsorship allowed the event to be held on a much larger scale, opening it up to the New Haven public as well.

To Sara Cao ’26, who read “The Carrying” during quarantine, hearing Limón read a few poems from the book felt like a full circle moment. 

“Whenever she ended a poem, there would be a pause before applause, from everyone internalizing the emotions from her poetry and thinking, ‘Wow. That really hit the spot’,” Cao said.

Limón said she believes the significance of poetry is that it makes one feel. This further reminds her that feeling is what being human is — not just survival, not just getting from point A to point B, but also witnessing and experiencing the world in its wholeness.

“I think that we’ve been living at a time where we’ve just had to numb so much of our lives,”  Limón said. “Poetry is a way of tapping into that, and being able to say, ‘Right, I am a thinking, feeling human being going through all of these things, I have these complex emotions working within me.’”

By reading and writing poetry, she explained, we are accepting the fluidness of life and the amorphous aspect of changing, growing and being more in tune with ourselves. 

This fascination with being present within one’s body underlies many of Limón’s poems, partially due to her time as a theater major at the University of Washington, which she said provided her with an intense awareness of the body as an instrument.

In Limón’s work, witnessing the world is intimately linked to the body and its senses, especially since her physical conditions, like scoliosis and vertigo, prevent her from being “completely free” in her body. To her, what the body is varies from day to day — sometimes, it is completely in tandem with nature; sometimes, it is an animal wearing clothes; sometimes, it is a machine holding thoughts, completely isolated from its surroundings. What does not change is that her poems consistently explore what it means to look at nature, and at each other, from different perspectives in different bodies.

“I think Limón’s encouragement towards ‘ongoingness’ — a sustained being with and in the world — is especially important at Yale, which can be an isolated and deadline-driven place,” said Megan Wright ’26. 

Just as Limón — stating her belief that her pain will eventually dissipate — refuses to use the term “chronic pain” to describe her condition, she also refuses to let her work be labeled and dictated by external expectations.

According to Limón, the publishing industry often explicitly or implicitly asks writers of color to center traumatic experiences in their works; as a result, they are often boxed into categories that have nothing to do with beauty, hope and freedom. While Limón does interrogate themes like conflict and identity as a Latinx poet, she strives to push against said expectations, mentioning that from very early on, she has wanted “everyone else’s freedom” to write unbounded by these constraints.

“When someone says, ‘Oh, you’re Mexican. So where’s your abuela poem?’— immediately, I’m like, no, no, no, no, I’m going to write about this tree,” said Limón. 

As established as Limón is, she still experiences self-doubt as a writer — her internal voice saying that she will “never write again” follows many of her accomplishments. Nevertheless, after completing six books as a poet, she has learned to trust the silence of the creative process: “If it isn’t coming, I just think it’s gonna come.” 

Limón’s latest poetry collection, “The Hurting Kind,” was published in May 2022 by Milkweed Editions.

The post U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón reads at Yale appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“Wait — Kinnia, don’t you speak English, Cantonese, and Mandarin?”

“Yeah, but it’s more like 2.5 languages… you know?” They wrote my name in the box anyway, and I was left wondering how I had arrived at the number 2.5. I was pretty sure that Cantonese was the 0.5 — I just wasn’t sure why.

Growing up in Hong Kong meant that most of my classes were taught in English besides six years of Chinese classes in Mandarin, but I spoke Cantonese — my native language — everywhere else. One Friday afternoon in seventh grade, I left my Chinese class unsettled. I sprinted back home, desperately Googling the prosodic rules of ancient Tang poems on my sluggish Samsung Note — all because my teacher had commented on how these poems were meant to be recited in Cantonese, not Mandarin. Bursting into the kitchen, in a twelve-year-old’s piercing soprano, I started a fervent reading of Wong Wai’s “Yearning” in Cantonese. My mom was unimpressed, even after my five-minute lecture on how, prosodically, Cantonese makes the poem that much more meaningful. Scoffing, she said: 「相思你識條鐵咩」 (loosely: “what the hell do you know about yearning?”). In that moment, though, I felt like I did know what it was like to yearn — for validity, if not anything else.

I tell this story a lot; I enjoy how idiosyncratic and defensive it makes me seem. In the years since, I’ve picked up the habit of writing in spoken Cantonese (which makes use of the universal set of Chinese characters and some more niche, Canto-specific ones). This habit is like microdosing the drug that is unsolicited Cantonese poetry in the kitchen; I feel real, and illicit, when I do it. I almost never see spoken Cantonese written out officially, as TV captions or in government papers; Mandarin is always employed as the standard written form (which, in itself, represents a kind of superiority: there’s no fear that it will ever be lost in the tides of time).

Nonetheless, this drug has taken its toll on me: I have never felt as incompetent as I did one night, sitting cross-legged on my wobbly dorm chair, nervously chewing the tip of my pencil while helping my friend with her L3 Chinese homework. Embarrassingly, I wasn’t sure about the “official” written syntax which I knew her instructor must have expected; Beijing Mandarin, after all, has nuances that differ drastically from the Cantonese structures I am used to. I never told anyone how I labored over the Mandarin speaking portion in Yale’s Chinese placement test (I emailed to ask about protocols for native Cantonese speakers, only to find that Yale didn’t have a system for recognizing spoken proficiency in Chinese dialects), and, after twenty discarded voice recordings, settled for a garbled fusion of Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations. Beyond feeling sorry for my Mandarin teachers in primary school, I also sensed that, in some way, I had failed to live up to my roots. If I couldn’t even help my friend with her Chinese homework in America, or express myself coherently on a test that was specifically designed to test Chinese abilities, what did I have apart from the impassive label, “Chinese,” on my passport?

Probably noticing how I struggled to correct her grammar, my friend turned to me and said, “It’s OK to not know Chinese perfectly — you’re an English major anyway!” It was clearly meant as a gesture of comfort, but it really hurt — in ways that I am only beginning to understand.

During family dinners, my grandma has told me, with an emphatic nod, 「讀英文好」 (“being an English major is good”). And I agree, especially the part of me that’s still thirteen and beaming onstage at school, clutching my certificate for “Best in Form for English.” But where does this pride come from, exactly? My parents like to recall how, thirty years ago, when Hong Kong was still a British colony, knowing how to English was the only skill you needed in the job market. English was the language of royalty; it was spoken in “rich people places”— areas where Western expats worked and drank — while Cantonese prevailed in the wooden slum villages my dad lived in. So I guess my family is proud that I am an English major, not because they necessarily value literature, but because it was and still is an achievement to speak the language of our colonizers — and to speak it well. So it goes: another authority, another “official” elite language, but the same illegitimate space that Cantonese is boxed into.

Sometimes, even I wonder whether the language I speak is legitimate. It’s a colonial debt we never repaid: my grandpa used to own a si6do1 (“store”), I take the dik1si2 (“taxi”) when I’m late for school, and my favorite drink is so1daa2 (“soda”). The words I speak are in-betweens, echoes of a language I do not own. Is it not tragically fitting that I, being in love with the real deal, am studying English in America?

In my senior year of high school, we studied Pai Hsien-yung’s Death of Chicago. After completing his PhD in Western Literature at the University of Chicago, the main character 漢魂 (literally “Chinese soul”) realizes that he does not know how to reconcile his abstract knowledge of Western literature with his Chinese identity — he spirals into depression, ultimately ending his life in Lake Michigan. By then, all my classmates knew I was planning on majoring in English in the US; this ensured that I was consistently the topic of discussion (and the butt of many insensitive jokes about suicide) in Chinese class. I would always respond with “the bodies of water in Connecticut are not picturesque enough” — but even then, I sensed cultural betrayal looming over me like the fog over Victoria Harbor in spring. My impending betrayal had been easy to ignore when I was confident enough in my own English abilities, yet lately I’ve been feeling like I have no right to speak in English classes at Yale, with my weirdly phrased sentences and jumbled thoughts.

Last Wednesday, my suitemates and I were jaywalking outside our college; we were so engrossed in a discussion that when a gray Toyota came speeding towards us, no one noticed but me. In a moment of frenzied panic, I screamed in the middle of the road, 「睇車啊!」 In my mind, this fleeting moment of unabashed Cantonese in the middle of New Haven is engraved as an eccentric diary entry I always return to; it is relieving to know that Cantonese is still my go-to during emergencies. The phrase was useless though — no one understood me. As the Toyota streaked behind us, my suitemate yelled in Mandarin 「你說啥?」 — I yelled back (in English) “Nothing!” and chuckled to myself all the way to Sterling.

When I speak, I settle — as my ancestors did — in the in-betweens, the illegitimacies. As I’m writing this, I’m thinking about how, in Cantonese, 寫, 瀉 and 捨 all have the same pronunciation; therefore, to say that I write is to say that I spill, which is also to say I experience diarrhea, which sounds exactly like I sacrifice. There is a brutal sense of tragedy: if I give up something on either side of me, does it mean that I will be saved from the chasm in between?

The post The In-Betweens appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The revocation was a result of the Pride Center failing to file IRS Form 990 for three consecutive years. In response, the Pride Center has made a change in leadership by removing former executive director Patrick Dunn and appointing Juancarlos Soto as the acting executive director via unanimous vote by the board of directors.

“The revocation of the status was just based on 990 tax returns not being filed in a timely manner,” said Board President Dolores Hopkins. “If you go over three consecutive years, you automatically are put on a hold status. And that’s what had occurred.”

On Oct. 31, the Pride Center released an official announcement on its Facebook page stating that the board had been conducting a thorough investigation of the situation. The Pride Center said they are working with an outside professional service to determine the exact nature of the situation and seek retroactive reinstatement of the Center’s 501(c)(3) status.

“Part of us releasing that statement is practicing our commitment of transparency to the community,” said Board Member Hope Chávez. “As soon as we became aware of the egregiousness of this situation, it was important to say, ‘Oh, my goodness, community, this is where we are.’”

The Pride Center has been working with BryteBridge Nonprofit Solutions to regain their 501(c)(3) status. According to Hopkins, the Pride Center has been able to move forward in the nonprofit reinstatement process quickly. She said BryteBridge is prioritizing completing the tax forms, which is a necessary step for the Pride Center to be reinstated as a tax-exempt nonprofit.

Filing the required tax returns is explicitly mentioned as part of the executive director’s responsibilities. According to Chávez, the Board had previously directed Dunn to hire an accountant to support him in his capacity management. The Pride Center’s relationship with BryteBridge had started earlier this year — before the Pride Center’s nonprofit status was revoked — to provide support with ongoing tax filings. 

“[BryteBridge] was retained and paid for — part of what led to the removal of the executive director was our awareness that they had not actually been engaged,” Chávez said. “And nor had an accountant really been engaged in the way that we understood they would be.”

Dunn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In light of this incident, programming at the Pride Center was suspended from Oct. 30 to Nov. 5, and the Pride Center’s staff took the week off. The only event held during this period was the “Chocolate and Cheesecake” fundraiser to support Connecticut’s LGBTQ+ Youth Conference.

Both Hopkins and Chávez believe that the Pride Center’s loss of nonprofit status will not cause donations to dwindle. They noted that they received support from the community for their youth programming fundraiser.

“There just wasn’t a concern [about a lack of donations],” Hopkins said. “The people donated from their heart for what we were doing and to support.”

Hopkins and Chávez also emphasized that when the Center’s 501(c)(3) status is reinstated, it will retroactively cover the period of time that the Pride Center has not been able to issue tax deduction letters. They said there is a high probability that donors will eventually be able to receive tax deductions on their current contributions to the Center.

Looking forward, the Pride Center’s goal is to keep functioning as planned. Upcoming events at the Pride Center include the TDOR — short for Transgender Day of Remembrance — Art Exhibition on Nov. 14 and a TDOR Panel on “Trans and Non-binary Joy” on Nov. 19.

“The New Haven Pride Center has served this community for over 25 years,” wrote Samuel Byrd, the director of Yale’s Office of LGBTQ Resources.  “We look forward to continuing our partnerships here in New Haven and nationally to advance access, equity and inclusion, both on and off campus.” 

The New Haven Pride Center is located at 84 Orange Street.

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More than four decades later, the pair were named winners of the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences. The two graduates shared the prize with former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke.

As students, Diamond and Dybvig quickly developed a friendship and a research collaboration that would lead to the publication of the Diamond-Dybvig model — which explains the role of banks in providing liquidity and how bank runs occur — in 1983. Since its publication, the model has been cited more than 11,000 times in papers related to banking, financial crises, liquidity and more.

“My first reaction [to winning] was stress … my life is going to be turned upside down,” Dybvig said. “I just didn’t know what it meant. I couldn’t process it.”

Diamond learned he had won the prize in a 3:45 a.m. phone call. His first thought was that he needed to wake up so he could speak coherently at the news conference in one hour.

Prior to Diamond and Dybvig, the last Yale affiliate to win the Nobel Prize in economic sciences was Paul Milgrom in 2020. Milgrom taught at Yale from 1982 to 1987. Before that, Yale Sterling professor of economics William Nordhaus won the award in 2018. 

The Diamond-Dybvig model is designed to show why banks should structure themselves so they remain subject to bank runs, according to Diamond. In the model, bank runs occur when most depositors fear a run, and a run is avoided when no run is feared. 

The main components of the model are long-term illiquid assets — such as loans — held by the bank, which relies on depositors for funding. In unexpected situations, depositors may urgently need to withdraw funds, creating stress on the bank’s liquidity. Similarly, in markets like online casinos Malaysia has seen a growing trend where players value platforms that provide easy access to funds, enabling quick withdrawals to meet unexpected needs. However, in banking, if large numbers of depositors demand withdrawals at once, it disrupts the system, ultimately risking collapse due to the strain on short-term funding sources.

Dybvig explained that the model ultimately aims to explain banking panics as a “rational phenomena” rather than a psychological one. 

According to William N. Goetzmann, a professor of finance and management studies at the School of Management, the model shows why protecting banks through deposit insurance not only helps banks and savers but has broader social value. 

Diamond explained the model can be applied to the 2008 crisis, when short-term debt financed parts of the financial system collapsed after Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail in 2008. 

“Once Ben Bernanke saw that it was a run, the Federal Reserve did absolutely everything to stop it,” Diamond said. “Similar things happened to money market mutual funds in this period and in March 2020.”

Goetzmann added that the names Dybvig and Diamond bring to mind “many great intellectual conversations” in the true Yale tradition. 

“Doug Diamond and Phil Dybvig are two brilliant, generous scholars whose creativity was nurtured by our common Yale mentor, the late Stephen A. Ross,” Goetzmann said.

According to Diamond, the Yale economics department was a “hotbed of ideas” in the late 1970s, with economists such as Ross, Martin Shubik, and James Tobin changing the understanding of financial economics. 

Reflecting on his time at Yale, Dybvig referred to Ross as “the most important influence” in his life.

“In my third year, Yale hired Steve Ross,” Diamond said. “Steve taught me how to do applied economic theory and to figure out what I was good at. I think I would still be in graduate school if I had not met Steve.”

After publishing the Diamond-Dybvig model, Diamond went on to teach at Yale and was a visiting professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as well as the University of Bonn, before taking his current position at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Dybvig would go on to teach at Yale and Princeton before becoming a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he continues to teach today. 

Dybvig said that he and Diamond were “good buddies,” adding that while their relationship was generously harmonious, their academic collaborations could become “a little intense.”  

“It wasn’t a fight,’ Dybvig said. “But one of us would say, ‘You know, we should make this assumption’, and the other one would say, ‘No, it’s gonna be too complicated, we won’t be able to solve it — how about this assumption?’ And I would say, ‘No, we can’t do that, that throws away all the economics,’ and so forth, back and forth, and back and forth. And it was great. It was just a really good collaboration.”

Diamond and Dybvig’s receipt of the Nobel Prize comes nearly four decades after the publication of their paper, an example of the Nobel time lag that has only become more prominent in recent years.

According to Nature, before 1940, Nobel Prizes were awarded more than 20 years after the original discovery for only about 11 percent of physics, 15 percent of chemistry and 24 percent of physiology or medicine prizes, respectively. Since 1985, however, such lengthy delays occurred in 60 percent, 52 percent and 45 percent of these awards, respectively. Because many scientists make their most significant discoveries early on in life, it can take many years to win the award.

When asked what advice they would give to students, both Diamond and Dybvig advised aspiring economists to work on the problems that are interesting and important to them.

“It could be that you’re really curious about it, it could be you think it’s so important for the economy, it could be that you’re angry because you think people say stupid things about this,” said Dybvig, “But anyway, if you don’t care about it, then working on it for three hours a week is going to be hard work. Research is hard work, but if you do care about it, then you won’t mind working 60 hours a week, it won’t be a chore.”

Diamond suggested that students think about new understandings of the problems that interest them. 

“There is so much that we do not understand and it is the young who bring in new approaches in economics,” said Diamond.

The first Nobel prizes were awarded in 1901.

The post Yale graduates win Nobel Prize in Economics appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The special divisional major does not belong to any department or have uniform prerequisites or core courses. Instead, with the approval of the Director of Undergraduate Studies, two or more faculty advisers and the Committee on Honors and Academic Standing, students design their own majors, allowing them to focus on academic interests that cannot be met by an existing departmental or special major. Students in the major have to complete at least 13 term courses, or 14 if they work on a two-term senior essay or project.

“I want first years in particular to know that they have options,” Tulsi Patel ’23, who is a part of the program, said. “They can make Yale fit them. They don’t have to fit to Yale.”

As one of Yale’s only two special divisional majors, Patel designed her major in Digital Age Studies, in which she studies technology from different perspectives, mainly focusing on its sociocultural impact. 

While she acknowledged that Yale offers many different fields of study, she said she found existing majors restrictive.

“[There are] very few fields that are focusing on the present and the way it’s shaping us,” Patel said. “A lot of stuff we learn is from when we look back at history and go, ‘Oh, this is what happened.’ But there’s stuff happening right now that we need to be aware of so we can protect the future.”

Patel found that there were individual courses from vastly different departments at Yale that viewed society from a current technological perspective. To her, the most fulfilling experience was incorporating these diverse classes and studying the Internet broadly in ways that would not be possible within the confines of an existing major. Courses included in her curriculum range from “Ethics of the Internet: Data, Algorithms, and Society” to “Interactive Design and the Internet: Software for People.”

Hannah Cevasco ’24 is pursuing a special divisional major in Computational Biology. Unlike Patel, versions of Cevasco’s major exist at other universities like Stanford and MIT. Pursuing the major was just specializing in an established field that Yale did not already have, she said, instead of carving out a path herself.

Cevasco hopes that Computational Biology becomes a department at Yale in the near future.

While she was on the Committee on Majors, Cevasco helped approve a new track for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics in the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry major. The Committee on Majors, which consists of University faculty, Yale College Dean’s Office administrators and undergraduate students, is in charge of considering proposals for establishing new majors.

However, Cevasco admitted that she would still have chosen the special divisional major over both this MB&B track and declaring an Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology major with the certificate in programming, even if these options were available to her a few years ago. She said that she values the flexible and personalized learning experience that the special divisional major offers.

“I’ve been able to take classes from a variety of departments including CS, MB&B, BENG and S&DS, whereas if I tried to double major in MCDB and CS, I would’ve had to take a lot more prerequisites and core courses that basically would have taken up my entire time at Yale,” Cevasco said.

The special divisional major requires the submission of an application, including letters of support from faculty advisers, to the Committee on Honors and Academic Standing. Students may apply to the major at any time from their fourth term of enrollment to one month after their seventh term of enrollment begins.

Dean Sarah Mahurin, the director of undergraduate studies for the major, wrote in an email to the News that prospective majors should set up a meeting with her to discuss how best to approach the application process, including strategies for proposing a curriculum with breadth and depth comparable to other majors within Yale College.

When crafting her major, Cevasco referred to the Computer Science and Molecular Biology major at MIT and the Biomedical Computation major at Stanford as guidance, then recreated a similar curriculum based on Yale’s classes. 

During her preparation process, she consulted multiple people, including Amit Kaushal, the executive director of the major at Stanford, people in the biotechnology industry and faculty members at Yale, in order to put forward a proposal that she was confident Yale would accept. 

Cevasco said that Yale’s faculty members, especially Dean Mahurin, have been a great resource in helping her achieve her academic goals in the major. However, she noted that a huge challenge has been finding more specialty classes that truly tackle computational biology at Yale, as most Yale artificial intelligence or machine learning courses, for example, are not specific to biological applications.  

Both Patel and Cevasco believe that the special divisional major and its benefits could be more publicized at Yale. 

Application forms for the major are available at the Timothy Dwight College Dean’s Office.

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