In the first installation of the congregation’s author series, Stanley spoke on the global movement away from democracy and the role that education plays within it. Stanley began by evaluating the mission that U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has laid out for her department, stating that the Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion educational policies is evidence of a campaign to America’s youth.

“To battle the ‘toxic’ ideology that the United States was based on slavery,” as McMahon envisions, is to “erase factuality,” said Stanley.

More broadly, the lauding of American democracy and American exceptionalism through patriotic education is to “install the ideology that the United States could never fall to fascism at the very same time at which it is falling.”

According to Stanley, the federal government is targeting programs that address gender and critical race theory in order to obscure the roles that patriarchy and racism play in inhibiting democracy. By claiming that these programs divide society into the oppressor and the oppressed, such targeted policies ignore that the systems they study were instituted with the intention of brewing division.

Stanley recalled W.E.B. DuBois’ ideas on how racism was “used by the northern industrialists to split poor whites and poor blacks apart.” He added, “patriarchy, too, is a method to split us apart.”

To understand the current global movement away from democracy and the construction of a mutiracial far-right, Stanley said, the concept of a scapegoat must be understood. In both America and Western Europe, scapegoatism has led to the proliferation of bigotry and the growth of authoritarian structures as political coalitions build in opposition to minority groups.

Specifically in America, historical antisemitic stereotyping has underlined the attack on elite institutions such as Columbia University. The media is complicit in this mischaracterization, Stanley argued, pushing forth messaging that ultimately harms the groups it claims to defend.

“Henry Ford wrote a book called The International Jew about how Jews supposedly control the institutions. [Today,] the administration is saying, we’re going to destroy the universities and tell you it’s because of the Jews,” Stanley, who is Jewish, said. “But if you look at the anti-war protests on our campus and on other campuses, you’ll see that one of the largest identity groups were Jewish students and faculty. It took months for the media to recognize that.”

Public media, according to Stanley, is complicit not only in the mischaracterization of protests on campus, but also in the criticism of leftist influence within elite universities in general.

Recent assessments of Ivy League universities have touted a lack of intellectual diversity due to an overabundance of liberal voices on campuses. This rhetoric, according to Stanley, is markedly influential.

“The media has been the engine behind the attack on the universities. They’ve been the one pushing the narrative that Marxists run Yale University,” Stanley said. “[There is] no mention ever of the Buckley [Institute], talking about Yale Law School, the power of the Federalist Society … We’ve been in a panic about leftists by a media that doesn’t seem to be aware of the fact that they are targets, too.”

Stanley laid out his thought process for leaving Yale, a choice that has garnered extensive media attention.

Though he held an offer to teach at the University of Toronto, Stanley had not planned on making the move to Canada until Columbia agreed to changes Trump demanded to protest and security policies on March 21, along with the establishment of oversight over the University’s Middle Eastern Studies Department.

He said the decision came to him when he “saw Columbia capitulate in this humiliating way.”

Stanley continued by setting up a comparison between the Trump administration’s current policy decisions and the Nazi’s process of “gleichschaltung,” by which federal workers were vilified as Marxists and communists and replaced by party loyalists.

“What our democratic institutions are doing is not recognizing this,” Stanley said. He added that in the past he has been ridiculed and labeled an alarmist, recalling being told that the government has “legitimate objections, and all of this is normal … there’s no war against universities like this.’”

Stanley has previously criticized the threats to freedom of speech encountered by international faculty members at universities nationwide, and reiterated his disapproval on Wednesday. 

“Even the ones in political science departments … can never speak about politics again,” Stanley warned.

In the Q&A segment of the event, Stanley recounted the former confusion of colleagues to whom he had expressed a desire to leave Yale for the University of Toronto. Recent events, he said, have led to a shift in their view of his departure.

Stanley said he recognizes that faculty at universities like Yale are generally better paid and better resourced than those at other institutions and in other countries, and that leaving, if even a possibility, is a “strong statement.” Still, the magnitude of the Trump administration’s attack on universities is not something to overlook.

“You have to ask whether there will be a Yale University or a Columbia University,” Stanley said. “There might be some buildings and a name, but the university is a democratic institution, and if you yield that, it’s no longer a university, even though it might have that name.”

Those present at Wednesday’s event, which included both congregants of the Unitarian Society and local visitors, expressed concern about the administration’s impact on the institutions that make up civil society.

Bob Congdon ’72 said that it felt “heartbreaking” to see many “things that were anchors” in his life and values being shredded.

Congdon’s wife, Mary Beth Congdon, was employed at the University under Rick Levin and Peter Salovey. She wished “strength and courage” to the current president, Maurie McInnis.

During the talk, Stanley urged attendees to remain informed of the Trump administration’s actions and reject complacency. 

“When you’re in a war, appeasement is surrender. If you do not know you’re in a war, you’re going to lose.”

Stanley’s most recent book was published in September 2024.

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Next year marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The course offered in fall 2025 will span American history from 1776 to the present day, focusing on how the national character and identity have evolved over time. The three professors will each teach eight consecutive lectures, focusing on their respective areas of expertise. 

“It’s a major restock, recalculate, rethinking kind of moment,” Freeman said. “And what’s wonderful about this course is you’re going to be thinking about these things leading into next year.”

Between them, the three professors share nearly 70 years teaching at Yale, as well as two Pulitzer Prizes, for Gage’s “G-Man: J. Edgar Hover and the Making of the American Century” and Blight’s “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”

Freeman will lecture on the Revolutionary Period up to the 1840s, Blight will take over to teach up through Reconstruction and Gage will teach the 20th century up until the present day. 

The unusual length of time which the course will cover has led the three professors to take a unique approach to lecturing.

“We want each lecture to ask and answer a question,” Freeman said. “For example, the American Revolution course lecture might ask, was the revolution revolutionary? And if so, how much?”

The course has also been designated as a DeVane lecture series for the Fall 2025 Term, meaning that all members of the New Haven community are encouraged to attend lectures. Each class will also be recorded and uploaded to YouTube so that anyone can follow along with the material.

The public-facing nature of “America at 250: A History” does not stop there, however.

“After lecture, every Thursday, the three of us are going to go over to the broadcast studio, and record a conversation between the three of us about what we think about the week’s readings, debating each other’s lectures and kind of getting into history,” Gage said. “So we’ll have individual lectures, mostly, but everybody will be able to weigh in.”

History courses co-taught by three professors are rare. Peer advisor Ted Shepherd ’25, who has taken courses with Freeman and Blight, emphasized that course instructors are “some of the three top history professors, not just at Yale, but in all of America.”

Freeman, Shepherd said, puts a lot of thought into organizing the structure of the course, and Blight is “a master storyteller” able to teach history “in a really engaging way.”

Currently, the course is set to have eight discussion sections, which will accommodate 144 students, but more sections will be added as needed so that every student who wants to register for the course is able to.

Both Gage and Freeman emphasized that students from all majors and years are encouraged to take the course. 

“It is this generation of students who are going to have to invent some of these things anew about what the United States is and what its function in the world is,” Gage said.

The Yale Department of History was established in 1919.

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During his speech, President Trump displayed a chart listing the “tariffs charged to the U.S.A., including currency manipulation and trade barriers” by select countries, along with “discounted reciprocal tariffs” with which his administration is responding. 

Yale English professor and journalist James Surowiecki was immediately skeptical of the tariff rates supposedly faced by the United States.

“If you knew anything about, and, I mean, barely anything about foreign trade, you knew that the numbers just didn’t make any sense,” Surowiecki told the News. “I thought they had basically made the numbers up.”

Though the tariff rates imposed on the United States by foreign countries are easily accessible, the non-tariff trade barriers supposedly used to limit imports of U.S. goods, such as currency manipulation and value-added taxes, are more difficult to calculate.

At first, Surowiecki believed that the Trump administration had preemptively chosen a reciprocal tariff rate, which is 50 percent of the supposed tariff and non-tariff trade barrier calculation, and then “backfilled” by making up the non-tariff trade barrier number that would result in that tariff rate.

Economist Paul Krugman ’74, in an interview with The New York Times, shared Surowiecki’s skepticism about the validity of the non-tariff trade barrier figure. 

“Who would be doing that careful assessment of other countries’ trade policies, country by country? That’s a massive undertaking,” Krugman said. “And it seemed implausible, basically impossible, that they could have done that.”

After closer analysis and “screwing around on a little calculator function on my laptop,” however, Surowiecki stumbled upon the formula that the Trump administration had used to calculate the combined tariff and non-tariff trade barrier figure — and it didn’t have to do with trade barriers at all.

He found that the administration had simply divided the trade deficit — the goods the United States imports from a country minus the goods it exports to that country — by the total goods the United States imports from that country. Then, to arrive at the “reciprocal” rate with which the countries will be faced on April 9, this figure was halved.

“There is no connection between bilateral trade deficits and trade restrictions imposed by a foreign country on its imports from the United States,” Samuel Kortum, Yale economics professor, wrote to the News.

The official formula’s reliance on the trade deficit on goods reflects the Trump administration’s ultimate goal of establishing a trade balance with each of its trade partners, according to Surowiecki. 

The adoption of reciprocal tariffs claims to operate on the idea that if countries impose no tariffs or trade barriers upon the United States, the United States will respond in kind. Under the formula proposed by the Trump administration, the only way for a country’s supposed tariffs and trade barriers to be calculated to be zero is if the United States has a trade balance of zero with that country. 

“The basic premise of the formula is that any trade deficit has to be the result of trade barriers, manipulation and bad behavior on the part of our trading partners,” Surowiecki said. “The point of the tariffs is to get those tariff rates that are imposed on us down to zero. But the only way to do that is to get rid of trade deficits with every single country in the world.”

A trade deficit is often considered by mainstream economists to be a sign of a productive nation. Yale economics professor Amit Khandelwal emphasized that trade balances must be analyzed in the context of many other relationships in the global market. 

“If you’re a really productive nation, and you have high levels of productivity, you might be having a lot of investment, your savings might be a little bit slower and other countries might want to invest in your country,” Khandelwal said. “That will lead to a current capital account surplus and a current trade deficit.” 

Yet according to Surowiecki, Trump’s “zero-sum” view of the world leads him to see any trade deficit as a sign that the United States is being “ripped off” by a trading partner.

This view, which has been put forward by the president for forty years, Surowiecki said, reflects his psychology more than it does America’s place in the world.

“I think he just sees existence as basically a struggle,” Surowiecki said.

In the case of countries with which the United States does in fact maintain a trade surplus, exporting more goods than it imports, the numerator in Trump administration’s formula is negative, resulting in a non-viable, negative reciprocal rate. Surowiecki realized that the administration had remedied this defect by simply applying a duty rate of 10 percent to these countries.

Surowiecki took to X — formerly Twitter — where he posted his findings and wrote, “the tariff rates that foreign countries are supposedly charging us are just made-up numbers.” He expressed later in an X post, “What extraordinary nonsense this is.”

Surowiecki’s post on X quickly gained notoriety, and as of April 6 has garnered 19.1 million views and almost 30 thousand reposts. The shock generated by the calculation’s simplicity prompted a reposted response from the Trump administration’s deputy press secretary, Kush Desai, who told Surowiecki, “No we literally calculated tariff and non tariff barriers.”

The Office of the United States Trade Representative posted an official formula, which was included in Desai’s tweet, that appears much more complicated than the calculation proposed by Surowiecki. However, when one multiplies the values representing different price variables, the formula ultimately simplifies to Surowiecki’s formula: trade deficit divided by goods imported.  

The Budget Lab at Yale sprang into action as soon as Trump announced the tariffs on April 2, publishing a comprehensive report with an eye to the impact the new tariffs would have on the global economy.

“We had invested in setting up our tariff modeling ahead of time, which allows us to respond quickly in the moment,” said Budget Lab Representative Kelly Friendly.  

The study predicts the April 2 tariffs will cause a -0.4 percent reduction in the domestic GDP, reflecting a loss of over $100 billion from the United States economy. Additionally, the anticipated rise of consumer product prices will effectively reduce the average disposable income of American households by over $2,000. And because lower-income households spend a larger proportion of their income on disposable goods, these tariffs disproportionately harm the poor — in other words, they are regressive. 

The experts at the Budget Lab commented on the confusion around the relationship between the April 2 tariffs and the tariffs announced in March. Chinese products have already been hit with 20 percent tariffs, and the country faces 34 percent tariffs based on the April 2 announcement. 

“Overall this policy is highly unusual,” Friendly wrote to the News. “Would the rate on China be 34 percent or 54 percent? Would the rate for products dominate or the rate for the country? One of the reasons markets are reacting as they are is because of the chaos in the announcement – not just on the substance.”

Since Wednesday’s announcement, the stock market has been thrown into mayhem, with the S&P 500 experiencing its worst two-day plunge since the pandemic began in March 2020. Yet the impact of the April 2 tariffs, should they remain in effect, will not be limited to these short-term market effects.

According to Khandelwal, the effects of the newest tariffs are twofold. 

“One is kind of the direct effect of the tariffs, which is that prices are likely to rise,” Khandelwal said. “When you have a magnitude of tariffs or taxes that is so high, my guess is that they would get passed to consumers pretty quickly. But then there’s the secondary thing, which is what you’re seeing in the stock market. Even companies like Facebook, which is a service company not affected by tariffs, is also collapsing.”

Surowiecki emphasized that the Trump administration’s tariff calculations only concern the goods imported and exported from a country, leaving out the services that are considered in the calculation of a full trade deficit. Services provided to foreign consumers by domestic companies like Facebook, for example, are not considered in the deficits used to determine reciprocal rates.

This choice is a deliberate one, according to Surowiecki, reflecting Trump’s larger motivations for implementing such sweeping tariffs.

“We specialize in digital services. We specialize in entertainment,” Surowiecki said. “So Trump is basically reading the numbers to suit his particular view of the world, like only these dollars are real, or whatever it is. And obviously this is connected to the fetishization of manufacturing.”

Aside from the goal of attaining a trade balance with each of its foreign partners, the Trump administration has aimed its efforts at reshoring manufacturing. 

However, preliminary estimates do not foresee the April 2 tariffs as meaningfully increasing the share of the U.S. workforce employed in manufacturing jobs.

“I saw one estimate that suggested that even if the tariffs worked relatively well, that the share of the U.S. workforce that was in manufacturing and employment would rise from 8 percent to 9 percent,” Surowiecki said. “Is that really worth overturning the global economic order?”

The Yale Economics Department is located at 28 Hillhouse Ave.

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Students were given 10 days to decide to either admit to using AI on any problem set — and have 50 points deducted from the corresponding grade — or risk being faced with disciplinary action if AI use were to be detected in any of their problem set submissions.

“Students who do not come forward voluntarily but are identified through our investigation will receive a score of 0 for each affected problem set,” the announcement read. “Most importantly, your case will be referred to the Executive Committee, which is currently overwhelmed by similar cases. Due to the delays, it is likely that you will not receive a final grade for this course this semester.”

The News interviewed three students in the class, who requested anonymity out of fear of academic consequences. All three students said that they did not use AI to generate code for their problem sets.

One student in the course told the News that their professor told students to admit to AI usage before April 4 and explain the AI-generated code. The student recalled the professor saying that those who failed to self-report would be referred to the Executive Committee.

The Executive Committee, or ExComm, is the body responsible for enforcing the Yale College undergraduate regulations.

Group referrals to ExComm are rare. The last time that a large portion of one class was reported to the committee occurred when 81 students in a biological anthropology class allegedly collaborated during an online final exam in 2022.

ExComm releases summaries each term of the disciplinary cases it has decided. The most recent report summarizes cases from Spring 2024 and contains five instances in which students were “reprimanded via agreement of responsibility” for use of AI in problem sets, projects or papers. 

The Spring 2023 report was the first to cite ChatGPT being used as the violation, with four related cases. The Fall 2023 report records seven such instances.

According to CPSC 223 instructor James Glenn, the traditional practice of running student homework submissions through digital detection tools precedes the advent of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. For decades, Glenn said, professors have used digital tools to detect similarity between submissions.

“These collaboration detection tools are probably better at [detecting similarity] than detecting use of AI,” Glenn said.

Students interviewed by the News reiterated concerns regarding the reliability of AI detection, citing being falsely accused as a significant source of anxiety. One student in the course told the News that it is unclear how students could prove themselves innocent.

“The majority of people I’ve talked to are unsure because I think the biggest worry is that they are going to be told that they used AI, but they didn’t and they wouldn’t be able to explain themselves,” the student told the News.

Another student said that the way problem sets are submitted — along with a completed code, students also upload a log written by the student containing the steps involved in solving the problem — would make it difficult to definitively prove AI usage either way, saying that the log could be “easily faked.”

“There are definitely more than one-third of people in the course who are using AI,” the student said, “and [disciplinary action] would be unfair to the one-third [of students].”

Whether or not professors opt to use plagiarism detectors is up to each individual instructor, in line with the Computer Science Department’s discretionary approach to AI policy in classrooms. 

AI-related policies, however, should be made clear to students, according to Department Chair Holly Rushmeier.

“[Computer science] instructors are given wide pedagogical latitude to structure their courses in the ways they see fit,” Theodore Kim, the department’s director of undergraduate studies, wrote to the News. “This includes the level of AI usage allowed, and the detection methods employed. As in the past, we strive to educate students so that their skillsets are not tied to specific software products, AI or otherwise.”

For the Spring 2025 term, CPSC 223’s syllabus explicitly prohibits the use of AI-based code generators.

A student in the course told the News that the professors did note during the first lecture that AI was not allowed, but rather that most of the emphasis was on not collaborating with someone else. Additionally, learning concepts with AI was allowed, but generating code for problem sets was expressly not.

Glenn expressed that professors teaching lower-level computer science courses like CPSC 223 often impose stricter AI-use policies than those teaching more advanced courses.

“It’s easier to use AI to help in the intro course,” Glenn said. “Our goal is to teach students exactly the kinds of things that AIs are good at.”

Ozan Erat, who teaches CPSC 223 alongside Glenn and Alan Weide, cited student concerns around AI’s impact on job availability within the field of computer science. According to Erat, the fact that employers may begin adopting AI technologies to replace software developers increases the responsibility students have to avoid the use of these technologies.

“[The adoption of AI technologies in the workplace] makes it even more important for students to fully engage with their studies and master all concepts so that they are undispensable for their future jobs,” Erat wrote to the News. “I tell my students that if you let AI do the job for you, AI will take your job.”

Students in the course told the News that they generally understood the policy banning AI but felt that allowing AI in a limited form would reduce its abuse. 

One student said that they felt ChatGPT should be very limited for introductory courses, but due to its perpetual availability — compared to the limited office hours hosted by teaching assistants — students should not be punished for using it to learn or for error correction.

“In my opinion, it would be better if they would just make everyone explain their code in comments [to] their code, and just explain why it does and what it does. I guess you could use [AI] to generate those too, but it would be a way to [encourage] more integrity,” another student said.

In the announcement sent through Canvas, CPSC 223 students were also warned that further use of AI on problem sets may result in a restructuring of the course design, such as placing more weight on grades received on in-class exams.

OpenAI debuted ChatGPT in 2022.

The post Dozens of CS students flagged for AI use, urged to self-report or face ExComm appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“WGSS faculty members have been discussing for a number of years the possibility of a trans studies hire to match the directions of our field and the interests in our student body,” Roderick Ferguson, chair of the WGSS department, wrote to the News.

Currently, 12 faculty members teach full-time within the department, a number that has tripled in the last 15 years. Each term, WGSS enrolls over 500 undergraduate students across a broad range of major interests in its classes.

According to Igor de Souza, director of undergraduate studies for WGSS, students and faculty members alike have expressed a need for a specialist in trans studies.

“WGSS lacks somebody who is thinking about transness full-time, doing work on transness and pushing the boundaries of how we conceive of gender, of gender relations, of gender and sexuality,” de Souza said. “And transness is such an integral part of how we understand gender, how we live and practice gender, in the sense that it calls all of us to think about how we fall in transness.”

The department currently offers several courses focusing on trans studies, such as “Gender and Transgender,” an introductory course taught by Greta LaFleur, and “Gender Expression before Modernity,” taught by de Souza. 

Margaret Homans, professor of English and WGSS, teaches “Fiction and Sexual Politics,” a course which covers the trans experience as portrayed in literature.

“I’m thrilled that WGSS has hired a specialist in the field to start at Yale next year,” Homans wrote to the News. “It would be great to see more trans related courses all over the catalogue.”

The department, which listed the position last fall, is nearing the end of the process of choosing a final candidate for the new assistant professorship, and is currently vetting a short list of applicants.

According to de Souza, WGSS has opened up the role in order to offer more courses concerning transness not only historically, but also in the context of other related fields. These fields include  the performing arts and the sciences.

“I really imagine this position as sort of doing a transness of the present. So, dealing with topics in contemporary discourse, and performance in the arts,” de Souza said. “Transness and performance, transness in politics, transness and science would be another aspect of that.”

The growth of the WGSS department has also allowed it to become better equipped to welcome early career scholars into roles such as the Transgender Studies professorship, as opposed to more senior, tenured professors. 

Yet even as the department seeks to expand its curriculum and as the hiring process for the new professorship has progressed, the intellectual climate in which the department operates has become one of “fear,” according to de Souza.

“We have some troubling developments in other states at the level of public universities and WGSS departments being curtailed or closed. Courses being sort of stricken off the books,” de Souza said. “ I don’t anticipate that happening here. But the federal administration has levers that they can pull to pressure Yale to move to a certain direction.”

The federal threat to remove scientific funding, for example, impacts the resources available for departments such as WGSS. 

Still, de Souza expressed an unrelenting commitment not just to the department’s continuing operations, but to its flourishing and growth. The assistant professorship in Transgender Studies is only one of several positions that WGSS is looking to fill in the fall. These include openings for lecturers and postdoctoral researchers.

“I think that it’s really important, in line with what [Yale history professor] Tim Snyder has argued, that we don’t silence ourselves preemptively and we don’t obey preemptively. So we are proceeding as normal, as in we are offering the courses that we have always offered. We are still reading the same texts and discussing the same ideas that we always have,” said de Souza. “We are going to keep doing our work that is so vital for us, that has touched the lives of so many students.”

The Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies was established in 1979 as the Women’s Studies program.

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“The University Registrar’s Office was approached by separate undergraduate departments who had or were near exhausting all three-digit course number combinations,” Shonna Marshall, the Yale University registrar, wrote to the News. “On average, there are 350-400 new Yale College courses offered every year, in addition to recurring courses.”

In response to the struggle these departments faced in naming new courses, the University Registrar’s Office decided to make the switch to four-digit course numbers. The office planned for the change to take effect beginning the Fall 2025 term.

Before the University-wide rollout took place, however, the office worked with the English department to pilot the use of the new numbering system come the beginning of this calendar year. Students taking the course previously called English 120, for example, are now officially enrolled in English 1020. 

“I feel like the number of the class has become the name of the class, so it’s very rare that someone will say, ‘I really want to take Reading and Writing the Modern Essay.’ Most of the time students will say, ‘I want to take 120,’” Kim Shirkhani, English 1020’s course director, said. “It feels almost like an identity change to call it something else, but I think no one’s really that serious about the complaint. It’s more just, ‘Oh, aren’t we silly’ … We have a sentimental attachment to 120.”

Last July, the University Registrar’s Office informed the Yale College Dean’s Office, directors of graduate and undergraduate studies, residential college deans and other office administrators about the upcoming change. 

Each departmental registrar was instructed to update course numbers ahead of fall 2025 term registration in April 2025. The office also provided the registrars with a recommended schema of renaming courses. The schema includes assigning first-year seminars with course numbers beginning with the digit “0”, introductory courses with the digit “1” and intermediate courses with the digit “2,” assigning the beginning digits of “5-9” to graduate courses. 

“This transition provide[s] an opportunity across all departments to better align their schemas for courses considered ‘introductory’ or ‘advanced,’” Marshall wrote. 

The undergraduate and graduate departmental registrars were also recommended to decide on a numbering schema in collaboration with their director(s) of undergraduate or graduate studies, respectively. The Registrar’s Office also provided each department with a list of active course inventory and a guide to assist registrars with the renumbering process. 

In the past, departmental administrators have encountered problems involving the use of the same course number for different courses.

“When I was the director of undergraduate studies for comparative literature, we did sometimes wind up having to reuse the numbers,” Pericles Lewis, dean of Yale College, said. “It just makes record keeping difficult. So now we have, you know, 10 times as many numbers.”

The University Registrar’s Office has provided students and faculty with a Course Number Equivalency Report, which includes the old three-digit and new four-digit figures for active courses. According to the office, all student systems have been updated to honor both sets of numbers.

“In the long run, most places have four digits. It’s pretty standard,” Lewis said. 

Yale College offers roughly 2,000 courses every year.

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“I noticed there were some pretty obvious cases of using some LLM to generate parts of [their] homework. I just told everyone that there was a 48-hour window when they could go ahead and tell me that they did that,” McKay told the News. “I had quite a few students come forward over that.”

Students who responded to McKay’s offer were given a zero on the AI-generated submission but were able to resubmit the assignment for full credit a second time. According to McKay, class policy seeks to help students learn from their mistakes. A typical homework submission will receive both an initial grade and feedback, which students are expected to incorporate into their work before submitting a second version.

Class policies around artificial intelligence and homework submissions are created largely at the discretion of instructors within the Computer Science department. 

“There is a wide variation in what is appropriate in the variety of courses we offer,” wrote Holly Rushmeier, chair of the Computer Science department. “Our policy is to let instructors determine what resources can be used for assignments as appropriate for the material being covered in their course. The essential thing is that the allowed resources should be made clear to students.”

Professors within the department vary widely in terms of the strictness of their policies and how specifically they are enumerated in class syllabi. Many professors opt to cite the College’s Academic Integrity Regulations in place of writing their own policies. The regulations dictate that “inserting AI-generated text into an assignment without proper attribution is a violation of academic integrity,” stating that policies will vary widely from course to course as well as over time. 

McKay has long encouraged students to treat AI tools as they would a teaching assistant, asking for clarifications or for examples of code for reference. However, recent instances of AI use in homework submissions have motivated McKay to update the class syllabus.

“I have found that students will see the lax attitude and then either treat that as liberty to blatantly copy from AI or have it generate their homework entirely,” said McKay. “Maybe they actually think they’re allowed to do that.”

Now, McKay prohibits students from inputting any problem set text into a large language model, or LLM, or using the LLM to generate text that they will submit as part of their solution. 

According to McKay, detection of AI in homework submissions is mostly dependent on graders’ abilities, rather than on detection technologies that may not be reliable. In the case of the assignment that prompted the announcement to the class, McKay personally found evidence of LLM usage in certain submissions. 

“There’s a certain way that the AIs write things. There’ll be artifacts of the fact that the AI is not a student in the class,” said McKay. “They might cite something that the student shouldn’t be citing in the first place, or cited by a name that the students won’t be familiar with.”

Other instructors within the computer science department have adopted policies which differ from McKay’s. The syllabus for “Spectral Graph Theory,” a high-level computer science class, instructs students to “state both the platform and the prompt that provided useful results” when they opt to use AI as they complete their work. They are prohibited, however, from using AI tools for their first problem set, as it is “one is designed to help [students] learn to do the sort of math” that will be integral to the rest of the course.

Certain computer science courses employ practices that result in swift consequences for the use of AI. The syllabus for “Physics Simulation for Movies” states that the submission of “anything laundered through Chat GPT or Copilot will be considered theft” and will result in the offending student being automatically referred to the Executive Committee. The student will also receive a failing grade in the course.

“Full Stack Web Programming,” which is called a “collaborative course” in its syllabus, strongly discourages the use of generative AI. The course syllabus dictates that the use of AI will most likely result in a student’s failure to learn the material, or the chatbot’s inability to solve the problem correctly. 

“[AI] affects different disciplines in different ways, and also individual professors will have different approaches,” said Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis. “We’ve asked professors to be clear with students about what the policy is in their class. We’re not imposing any universal policy.” 

The Computer Science department joined the School of Engineering & Applied Science in 2015.

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Instructional faculty members are eligible to receive funding to support the integration of artificial intelligence into their curriculum. Grants are given in three separate tiers: up to $500 for Tier One, up to $2,000 for Tier Two and two-year grants of up to $20,000 for Tier Three. 

“Our goal is to support Yale instructors as they reflect on the central learning goals of their course and rethink their pedagogical approaches in the context of AI,” wrote Jennifer Frederick, the executive director of the Poorvu Center. “For some instructors, this means designing opportunities for students to experiment with AI tools and evaluate the outcomes. For other instructors, this means a refreshed articulation of the essential human skills that will be gained in their course.”

The program was motivated by the June 2024 Report of the Yale Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, which encouraged educators to prepare students for entrance into a world where the use of artificial intelligence is prevalent, fostering ethical approaches to the technology.

The Poorvu Center website offers examples of AI integration into curriculum that faculty members have utilized across disciplines, ranging from allowing students to submit a final paper that was originally AI-generated and then edited by the student to prompting students to identify errors in ChatGPT’s responses to research questions. According to Frederick, approved grants may be similarly showcased by the Center.

“Faculty appreciate opportunities to learn from one another, and programs like these can catalyze creativity in our classrooms,” Frederick wrote.

The grant website also encourages faculty to consider the Yale Library’s Generative AI Literacy Framework in their grant proposals. The framework offers suggestions for learning outcomes and assignments to utilize generative AI effectively in the classroom, and is meant to spur conversation and thinking, not be directive, said Lauren Di Monte, associate university librarian for research and learning.

The Yale Library has also developed resources to improve equity of access to AI, such as a platform named Clarity. The platform runs on ChatGPT 4.0 and is free for Yale students, faculty and staff. It offers broader privacy protections for sensitive data than traditional generative AI models.

“All faculty are invited to apply for the AI Course Revision Grant and no particular disciplines have been targeted,” wrote Elizabeth DeRosa, communications director at the Poorvu Center. “Given the nature of this new technology, we are excited about the opportunity for great creativity in the development of the proposed projects.”

Proposals will be evaluated and selected by a committee consisting of Poorvu Center staff and other Yale community members, according to DeRosa. The committee members will be chosen by the Faculty Advisory Board, which will also be in charge of approving the committee’s recommended awards.

Tier Two and Three grant recipients must attend Poorvu grant cohort group sessions, and Tier Three grant recipients must also consult with Poorvu center staff separately.

According to Frederick, the grant is launched as a pilot program, and its effectiveness will be evaluated to determine its status in future years.

“While AI is a tool that is rapidly evolving, the fundamentals of teaching have not changed. AI is not a replacement for learning,” wrote Julie McGurk, director for teaching development and initiatives at the Poorvu Center. “This grant will encourage faculty to identify the skills that are important for students to become informed users or non-users of AI and the ways AI may be used as a teaching and learning tool to complement their instruction.”

Applications for the grant revision program are due on March 7, and applicants will be notified by April 28. 

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Jhumpa Lahiri’s vivid prose was my first exposure to Yale. I marveled at the way she moved Gogol through the heartbreak and hardship that soured starkly against the Neo-Gothic beauty that drew him to campus in the first place. I suspect that “The Namesake” was a significant motivator for my early application. And while life on campus has certainly not been as novelistically adaptable as Gogol’s was, there is a sense of watching for one’s Ruth that undergirds much of the student body.

The Marriage Pact is a Yale tradition that uses an algorithm to match students with potential future spouses based on intimate survey responses. It is a public-facing symptom of a more nebulous affliction: the existential dread of graduating college with an identity we don’t really want for ourselves. The security of a life partner who is a “match” for us, or at least this iteration of us, is a tantalizing offer in the tumultuous midst of what are meant to be our formative years. Everything in our lives, from the people we eat our meals with, to the classes we take, to the train cars we sit in on the way home, balloons in importance when we consider that once we leave campus, we’re expected to be fully realized adults ready to carpe the diem out of the real world.

After my uneventful (slumbering) train (bus) ride back home from Boston for Thanksgiving, I stretched out on the couch and waited. And when my nine-year-old brother came barrelling through the door, the first thing my brain registered was how small he looked. He’s less than a foot shorter than me, but it took me a second to get used to craning my neck that far down. My mom shrugged at my wrinkled brows and said it was because I had been around people my own size for so long. 

Being hit with this latent burst of reality made me realize how little had actually changed in what had felt to me like a turbulent first three months of school. My brother’s voice had not yet dropped, congestion pricing had still not been implemented and my mother didn’t fail to supplement her greeting with another kale smoothie. In college, every moment seems monumental on its own scale of propitiousness because there is little constancy to life: an awkward moment with a professor might dictate your productivity for the rest of the day, just like an especially good a cappella rehearsal might set you on a high of tranquility. And the seeming tempestuousness of the lives of every other human being around us only compounds upon this feeling. More often than not, it can lead us to place unnecessary importance on trivial things.

This is not to say that people should stop caring; caring is what makes the world go round. But a little perspective never hurts. College functions in the opposite way as does a car’s side-view mirror: objects in mirror are further than they appear. Maybe the workplace is pretty proximate, after all, but the people we will carve ourselves out to be are still works in progress. We don’t have to pop every metaphorical pimple as we look at the reflections of our future selves; we can’t even see the blemishes yet. For an undisclosed length of time, we are all blank slates, easily written on but also easily erased, like the peeling whiteboards that witnessed every kindergarten subtraction slip-up and spelling mistake. The more mistakes we make, the better we become at reflecting upon and adjusting the parts of ourselves that might merit improvement. 

So maybe we don’t have to worry about becoming the best versions of ourselves before we don cap and gown. Maybe the best versions of ourselves are indeed the ones most pockmarked by regrets and missteps. In any case, most things aren’t worth dwelling too deeply upon. Except, of course, those curious eyes that glance up from time to time from that waterlogged paperback on the Amtrak Northeast Regional. 

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Sánchez and Lorivie Alcea, co-owners of Vía Láctea, operate two store locations in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The New Haven location opened on Nov. 15 and is their first in the mainland United States.

“We’re bringing in a lot of recipes that we developed in Puerto Rico, and they have been tried and true and tested, and they are amazing,” Sánchez said. “But also, we’re taking the opportunity, since Vía Láctea stands for local, to work with local agriculture and develop new flavors based on whatever grows here in New England.”

In New England, shorter shipment distances between farms and kitchens mean the shop can pick from a new array of flavors, Sánchez explained. Their pumpkin chai offering, for instance, is made with fresh pumpkins from Bishop’s Orchard in Guilford.

In addition to prioritizing sustainable agriculture, the store is dedicated to minimizing its operational carbon footprint in other ways. Samples are offered on metal spoons, not plastic ones, and all dessert offerings are completely plant-based. Vía Láctea uses a coconut-milk base for most of its ice creams, but also offers rice and oat milk options. 

Sánchez, who is lactose intolerant, said he is excited to bring non-dairy ice creams to Whitney Avenue. Some flavors are inspired by Puerto Rican desserts — guava panetela is an almond cake with guava paste, which the store envisions as an almond and vanilla base with almond cake and guava ripple, and coquito is a traditional nog of cinnamon and coconut milk.

Vía Láctea also boasts flavors like coffee chip, which is made with 100% Arabica coffee beans from Puerto Rico; Home Planet, an original flavor made blue with butterfly pea flour and combined with matcha cake to resemble the earth; and mint chocolate chip.

“We want to bring some of our heritage, our roots, our flavors, recipes and traditions, here and incorporate them here,” Sánchez said. “Because most people are not used to our brand of flavors, we want to have one or two comfort flavors, and then that’s the hook. So then they can try the newer flavors, the more avant garde ones.”

Mackenzie Cruikshanx, who specializes in ice cream production at the New Haven location, is responsible for preparing an array of different purées and colorings. All of Vía Láctea’s ice creams are free of artificial dyes, Cruikshanx said. Every add-in, ranging from cookies to cakes, is also baked in-house.

 Some of the ice creams are also caramel-based, which adds a laborious step to production that many ice cream makers avoid. Cruikshanx, however, has become comfortable with both the caramel-making process and the unique science behind plant-based production. 

“There’s a lot of chemistry that goes into vegan milk because it’s culinarily specific,” Cruikshanx explained.

The New Haven location plans to expand its offerings to include drinks like affogatos, milkshakes and floats, along with to-go pints of ice cream, brownies a la mode and ice cream cookie sandwiches. 

Vía Láctea’s commitment to high-quality, innovative flavors in its two San Juan storefronts has been recognized both by enthusiastic customers and expert foundations. This year, it was named a James Beard Foundation Award semifinalist in the Outstanding Bakery category.

Still, the innovative, sustainable approach that Vía Láctea takes to ice cream has had to jump its fair share of hurdles during the permitting process that accompanied its move to Connecticut.

“We’re not a cookie cutter company,” Sánchez said. “Right now, [our permit is] under frozen desserts, which is very encompassing, but procedural-wise, inspectors and people who were assigned to work our case couldn’t make heads or tails [of the permits], because this is a new market that we’re exploring right now.”

State regulations around vegetables in frozen desserts have also proved difficult to navigate when vetting ingredients for flavors like Pumpkin Chai.

Alexandra Daum, Yale associate vice president for New Haven affairs, expressed enthusiasm for the store’s November opening in a University property. 

“With its commitment to quality, innovation, and community Vía Láctea is going to fit right in in New Haven,” Daum said in a press release.

The Whitney Avenue space in which Vía Láctea recently opened had been unoccupied for five years and lacked basic plumbing. Sánchez called the space a “blank canvas” that he and his team filled with ice cream cone-themed wallpaper, bright potted plants and an array of delicious smells.

Having made the space Vía Láctea’s own, Sánchez hopes to utilize it to share the store’s Puerto Rican roots with locals.

“I believe diversity is the key to enrichment, be it food, be it culture, be it traditions,” Sánchez said. “All the history books say the US is a giant melting pot, and we should really take advantage of that and work with what we have.”

Vía Láctea’s new location is located at 2 Whitney Ave.

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