Just over a decade before his vice presidential candidacy, Vance graduated from Yale Law School. There, he was well-liked among students across the political spectrum and wanted to be a “moderating influence,” his classmates recalled. As a student, Vance facilitated a reading group, sent spirited emails to his classmates, adventured on road trips and hikes, and met his future wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance ’07 LAW ’13.

Though the roommates did not become close friends, McLaurin said he respected Vance’s intellectual rigor and open-minded curiosity.

“I really believed that he had the potential to reshape conservative politics,” McLaurin told the News. “He was not just parroting Republican Party talking points. He was really his own thinker, and he had modesty about his own thoughts.”

Since graduating, the Vances have separated themselves from the institution and skipped reunions, according to a classmate who took a seminar with JD Vance, who will be referred to as H. for clarity. In a speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy” at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, Vance mentioned his stint at Yale to a chorus of boos from his audience. He bemoaned the institution’s “liberal bias” and decried it as “totalitarian.” 

Former classmates say Vance’s views have changed since he left Yale. They disagree on whether this change of opinion was genuine and productive or a recalibration to the “winning team.” 

The News talked with YLS professors and Vance’s former classmates about his time at Yale. Three classmates to whom the News spoke requested anonymity to speak freely due to employment concerns.

Vance’s press team did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

An outsider in an insider institution

Vance grew up in a poor household in Appalachia, an origin story that serves as the thesis of his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” In the book, Vance outlines his turbulent childhood, his time serving in the Marines and his G.I. bill-sponsored education at Ohio State University.

Eventually, he made his way to New Haven where he studied for three years at Yale Law School. 

“Yale Law is a very conservative institution in the sense that it’s very protective of its place as a kind of breeding ground for the world’s leaders,” said Robert Cobbs LAW ’13. “It values that reputation more than it cares whether those leaders are any good.”

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” he writes of the institution with awe, describing it as a “nerd Hollywood” of towering neo-Gothic architecture. Vance recalls feeling like a perpetual outsider at Yale, largely because of his rural working-class background.

“Maybe, with my Southern drawl and lack of a family pedigree, I felt like I needed proof that I belonged at Yale,” he writes in his book.

Alumni who studied alongside Vance also noted the institution’s emphasis on status and prestige. Ryan Thoreson LAW ’14 said that at that time, Yale Law School felt “more insular.”

Classes at the Law School were not particularly competitive due to forgiving grading systems and an emphasis on small-group collaboration, several alumni said. These priorities, however, underlined the pressure to distinguish oneself outside the classroom through networking.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance writes that his background made him feel particularly ostracized in these non-classroom spaces at Yale. For example, Vance describes in one scene a “nine utensil” recruiting dinner.

The 2013-14 Yale Law School Bulletin wrote that approximately three-quarters of the student body received some sort of financial assistance.

“My experience was that almost everybody’s got something to make them feel less than confident,” said Lea Brilmayer, a professor emeritus of law who taught a first-year contract class at the law school. “There’s one in a million that just aces everything, but nobody really feels like they ace everything. Everybody’s insecure.”

However, according to Charles Tyler LAW ’13, many students at Yale Law School hailed from wealthy families, often with distinguished parents, which explains what Tyler calls the cultural “dislocation” Vance described in the book. The law school experience “heavily [depended] on insider information and networks,” and students who went to elite undergraduate institutions “had a distinction very early on,” Tyler added. 

McLaurin believes that Yale Law School, whether accidentally or intentionally, might exacerbate the perceived outsiderness of people who already feel excluded.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance recalls a story in which a professor said that students not from schools such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton require “remedial education” and should not be accepted to the law school.

According to McLaurin, it was Paul Kahn, a professor of law and the humanities at Yale Law School, whom Vance referenced in the anecdote. Kahn wrote to the News that “JD Vance, at one point in his first term, did believe these were my views, and he was quite upset about it.” 

However, Kahn wrote that he actually does not believe this, which he explained to Vance, and the two eventually had a good relationship. Vance became Kahn’s teaching assistant and house sitter. 

“I don’t think he would have done this had he continued to think these were my views,” Kahn wrote.

Vance also writes of the Yale Law Journal, the school’s prestigious student-run law review, with the same sense of mythology that he attributes to the institution itself. Like in other non-curricular spaces at Yale, Vance felt he lacked the insider knowledge of many of his classmates. 

“The entire process was a black box,” Vance wrote. “And no one I knew had the key.”

Alumni explained that admission into the journal entailed a rigorous bluebook exam as well as a short essay component, necessitating the study of a universal legal citation system. Students could also be admitted by writing for the journal.

But Robert Cobbs LAW ’13 mentioned that, while the journal was a “presumptive criterion for a chunk of prestigious clerkships,” not everyone was interested in participating. 

“It’s as mythic as you let it be. Nobody has to go on the Yale Law Journal to get a job,” Professor Brilmayer echoed.

In the October 2012 edition of the journal, Vance was one of around 60 editors, a non-leadership role that required checking citations. His future wife, on the other hand, was the executive developmental editor of the same volume. H. described her as “Ms. YLJ.”

“A kind, unassuming friend” and Usha’s “smitten” boyfriend

Vance was a law student who “wanted to be a kind of moderating influence, or a translator, between the angry, crazy side of the Republican party and everyone else,” according to a second former law school classmate.

He befriended classmates with a broad range of political outlooks. James Eimers LAW ’14, who met him at an admitted students program prior to law school, wrote to the News that Vance “genuinely cares about the people around him.” 

Eimers wrote that he knew JD Vance as “a kind, unassuming friend who had no trouble bridging seemingly disparate social groups.”

“During his own search for summer work, he came across a clerkship opportunity on the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Eimers wrote. “Despite the very limited number of positions available, he didn’t hesitate to send it my way and give me his thoughts on the application process, lowering his own chances of acceptance to the program as a result.”

Ultimately, Eimers said that the two both received offers and worked together that summer.

Vance frequently used the Wall, an email list server that blasted messages to the Yale Law School community. He would offer to sell Usha Vance’s Megabus tickets, ask if anyone would lend a law book for an exam, complain about the IRS or request a puppy sitter.

At Yale, Vance was “quite smitten” with his then-girlfriend, Usha Chilukuri, Tyler said. The Vances married a year after graduating from law school.

Usha Vance studied history at Yale as an undergraduate, was a Yale-China fellow and earned a Gates-Cambridge fellowship before returning to Yale for her law degree. 

In 2006, Yale’s tabloid magazine Rumpus featured Usha Vance in their annual “Most Beautiful People” edition, writing that “most of her liaisons have been tall, handsome, and conservative (though she herself is of the left-ish political persuasion).”

H., who mentioned the Vances’ distancing from the institution, said that though Usha Vance identified as a liberal, she was willing to clerk for a conservative judge for reasons of career advancement — something not many of her peers were willing to do, and something that set her apart for success, he said. She clerked for several judges after law school, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90.

H. wrote that JD and Usha were “joined at the hip.” Tyler said the two spent much of their time together and mentioned that during long weekends, he would join them to visit local farms or go hiking. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” JD Vance calls Usha Vance his “Yale spirit guide.”

Recalibrating political views

While classmates’ opinions on Vance’s character differed, many agreed that he has politically changed since his time at Yale. 

Vance’s political orientation was no secret, Tyler said.

Vance facilitated a reading group on social decline in white America. According to an email obtained by the News, the syllabus included books and articles like Allen Batteau’s “The Invention of Appalachia” and “About Men: Whites Without Money” — a theme that arises in much of Vance’s writing and political platform.

Since graduating, Vance has worked in corporate law and venture capital. Throughout his early public appearances, he was a vocal Trump critic, and even called himself a “Never Trump guy” in a 2016 interview with Charlie Rose. 

McLaurin and Vance fell out of touch after their time as roommates. But, looking for an opinion from a conservative whom he respected, McLaurin contacted Vance in 2016 to ask about his perspective on Trump, then a presidential candidate.

McLaurin said that he reached out because Vance was “a genuinely curious person, and other than cynical, sarcastic humor about the school that featured in a lot of group hangouts, he was a good roommate.”

H., who took Kavanaugh’s National Security and Foreign Relations seminar with JD Vance, said that running for office has been something that the Vances have “had in the works” since their time at the law school.

During his campaign for Ohio Senator in 2022, Vance courted and won Trump’s endorsement. 

Ahead of Vance’s run for Senate, in which Trump’s endorsement helped him secure the Republican nomination, McLaurin revealed messages from that exchange, in which Vance wrote that he goes “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

One of Vance’s close friends from Yale described his shift towards Trump as a productive change of opinion, saying that he was “proven wrong” about Trump. “If you don’t change views as you learn things, you’re a pretty shitty candidate,” he said, maintaining that Vance has always been “for the little guy.”

McLaurin, however, said that “maybe you could understand his criticisms of Trump as an audition to be one of the foremost voices condemning Trump.” Once Trump won, McLaurin said, “Obviously he had been on the wrong horse, and he needed to completely recalibrate so he could be on whatever the winning team was.”

McLaurin called Vance cynical. Vance has condemned the smugness of “elites,” McLaurin said, yet he has profited enormously from connections forged at Yale, including with billionaire Peter Thiel, whom he met at the event at the law school. Vance later wrote that Thiel’s talk was “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale. 

Tyler, on the other hand, views Vance’s shift as part of a broader contextual shift. “One thing that’s hard to disentangle is that the Republican Party itself is so radically different today than it was back then,” Tyler said.

“He was always a conservative,” Tyler told the News. “That was always quite clear. But what conservatism meant for him then, and what it means for him now, I think has changed.”

If elected, Vance would be the fourth U.S. vice president who graduated from Yale. 

Correction, Oct. 29: This article was updated to clarify that “dislocation” was used describe Vance’s book, but not in the book itself. 

The post Before he was Trump’s running mate, JD Vance was a free thinker and “moderating influence” at Yale Law School appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The Guggenheim website boasts fellows in 52 fields in the natural and social sciences, humanities and creative arts. The awardees come from 84 academic institutions and range from 28 to 89 years old. Fellows were selected through an intensive application and peer review process, according to their website.

The Yale faculty fellows include Ned Blackhawk, Marta Figlerowicz, Ben Hagari, Elizabeth Hinton, Tavia Nyong’o, Douglas Rogers and Travis Zadeh. Their areas of study include Native American history, literature, sculpture, law, performance, anthropology and religious studies respectively.

“I learned last week after returning from a trip to Maine to watch the eclipse,” Zadeh wrote. “The timing was cosmic.”

Zadeh, Hinton and Filgerowicz all wrote to the News that they plan to use the fellowship to work on books in progress.

Zadeh is a PROSE award-winning author, a professor in religious studies and Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies. His current project explores law, ritual and memory in the formation of early Islamic history.

Hinton, a professor of history, African American studies and law, is working on a book tentatively titled “Criminal Injustice: Crack Cocaine Laws and Their Legacies.” It is under contract with W.W. Norton and is expected to be published in 2026.

Comparative literature and English associate professor Figlerowicz said the fellowship will support her ongoing research for her third book, which necessitates visiting archives at the University of Lagos in Nigeria and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. She told the News that the book is an intellectual and literary history about anthropology and comparative literature at the beginning of the twentieth century told through marginalized modernist voices.

“I got the news this past Thursday morning,” Figlerowicz wrote to the News. “I felt elated and all the more honored when I saw the full list of this year’s fellows: so many people whose work I deeply admire, including our own Yale faculty.”

Rogers, another awardee, is the chair of Yale’s Department of Anthropology.

His past works, including books “The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals” and “The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism,” have drawn on ethnographic fieldwork and rigorous archival and manuscript research.

“There’s a ton of great work in the field of anthropology these days,” he wrote to the News. “And I’m deeply honored and grateful that folks out there think highly of mine.”

Six of the seven Yale recipients are faculty in Arts and Sciences. The seventh is Ben Hagari, who teaches at the Yale School of Art.

Hagari teaches “Principles of Animation” and “Puppet Animation” at the School of Art. He told the News that these two courses share some of the themes he explores in his current project. His current project is a multimedia installation that explores “the world of shadows” through a fable about a man “pursued by shadows of the living, the dying, and the dead.”

“The project departs from the tradition of wayang kulit, the shadow puppet theater of Western Indonesia and the modern use of this tradition and crosses geographical and chronological timelines,” Hagari wrote.

He added that the installation will include videos, puppets, sound and a dual screen.

Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife Olga established the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1925 in memory of their son, who died at the age of 17.

The post Seven Yale faculty members named 2024 Guggenheim fellows appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Undergraduates in the global affairs major are not able to pre-register for fall 2024 courses, according to an April 9 email from Director of Undergraduate Studies Bonnie Weir. Many students sorely feel the loss of preregistration — a process that global affairs major Rohan Krishnan ’24 called “extremely helpful.” 

“The course selection process is going to be a free-for-all all when it opens, which is really frustrating for me,” said global affairs major Ross Armon ’25. “Seniors in the major should get the highest priority for classes, but that isn’t possible this year.”

Other majors, such as history, allow students to pre-register for certain departmental seminars in order to give priority to students in the major. The global affairs major has previously worked under the same system. 

Some students in the major told the News that the reason for the change is because the department does not have a registrar for this semester. The department’s previous registrar, Jana Baslikova, left Yale in January to take a position at Denison University, while the previous assistant registrar, Taylor Spadacenta, now works as a senior administrative assistant in degree audit. The department still lists Baslikova and Spadacenta as registrars on their website.

Eleanor Schoenbrun ’25 wrote that she became aware of the vacated position’s impact when the department was slow to resolve scheduling concerns at the start of the spring semester, forcing professors to work through concerns themselves.

Schoenbrun also noted the unusually low number of courses offered within the global affairs major next semester, which has dropped from 94 in fall 2023 to 52 in fall 2024. The drop is part of a college-wide trend, as the number of courses overall is down from 4,268 in fall 2023 to 3,114 in fall 2024.

Armon, who chose the global affairs major due to its selection of seminars and opportunities to engage with faculty, says the lack of communication overall regarding the department’s class offerings next fall has been upsetting.

“I don’t really know what the available options are or if they’re going to add more,” he said.

In an email to the News on Sunday, Weir wrote that an interim registrar had been assisting the global affairs department.

She added that the department has found a new registrar who would begin work on Monday.

“Jackson’s new full-time registrar and director of academic affairs begins work tomorrow,” Weir wrote, withholding a name. “And we thank our global affairs students for their patience and understanding during this transition time.”

The Jackson School, known before 2022 as the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, was built after a 2009 gift from John W. Jackson ’67 and Susan G. Jackson.

The post Global affairs majors bemoan changes to course registration, limited course offerings appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The winners of the Windham-Campbell Prize, a prestigious award presented annually to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, were formally announced last Tuesday. The prize, which includes monetary compensation of $175,000, intends to support writers in their creative craft.

This year’s awards, led by director Michael Kelleher and administered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, recognized Christina Sharpe, Christopher Chen, Deirdre Madden, Hanif Abdurraqib, Jen Hadfield, Kathryn Scanlan, NourbeSe Philip and Sonya Kelly.

“I just think this […] is a really daring group of writers,” Kelleher said. “Some of them write about really difficult subjects. Some of them write in really inventive new forms, and they find new ways to use language to examine ideas and feelings and situations.”

According to Kelleher, the year-long prize selection process is fully anonymous and confidential. The Windham-Campbell prizes receive 30 nominations from Anglophone writers around the world. A panel of three judges per category read the writers’ works and narrow the field before submitting them to a final, nine-member selection committee.

Prize winners received the news with surprise.

“It’s really one of those very astonishing, delightful things,” NourbeSe Philip, one of the year’s two poetry winners, said.

Having been writing for over 40 years, the prize came from out of the blue, she told the News. She received an email from Michael Kelleher that requested she call him the following day. When she found out she was a recipient, she “just couldn’t believe it.”

She added that her anticipation of the prize money has reduced her anxiety in the face of a global, but especially Canadian, “affordability crisis” and granted her the freedom to turn down more projects.

Philip’s ideas, she said, come “in response to the external world.” She cited the pandemic, George Floyd and the ongoing war in Gaza as places where her poems may begin. 

“I was working with the idea of history, juxtaposing the large-scale canvas of what I call uppercase history with lowercase histories of family and origin and stories,” Philips said.

Currently, she is working on a collection of essays that she plans to finish this August. She also hopes to revisit and rework poems from decades past.

“I’m contending with language,” Philip said. “Using language almost like the way a painter uses paint.”

The award was first issued in 2013 following a gift from Donald Windham in memory of his partner, Sandy Campbell. As members of a rich American literary scene, Windham and Campbell boasted close ties to Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Campbell, who had sizable family stocks, left the family fortune to Windham when he died. Windham subsequently donated the funds to the Beinecke in 2011.

“The idea behind the prize was always to provide writers with time to write,” Kelleher said. “It’s given to them out of love, and it’s given to them out of a desire to see them fulfill their ambitions.”

In an email to the News, nonfiction winner Christina Sharpe expressed relief that the award would free her “from a great deal of worry.”

She said that her work focuses on the aftermath of slavery and added that the prize would allow her to continue producing work that continues experimenting with form and imagines “other, not brutal, ways of living into possibility.”

For fiction winner Deirdre Madden, the prize “was a wonderful surprise” — one that gives her the chance to “[balance] the writing with the other demands of life.” Her work, which deals with the subjects of memory and time, has explored themes of painting and artwork, families and the Northern Irish Troubles.

Kelleher also emphasized the importance of writing prizes in a world of diminishing literary profitability. He explained that, unlike other competitive writing awards, the Windham-Campbell prizes seek to foster a sense of community and collaboration.

Prize winners will visit the University come fall during the annual Windham-Campbell Festival for the ceremony and a keynote address delivered by a notable writer. During the weeklong event, they will deliver readings and participate in conversations throughout the New Haven community.

According to Kelleher, next year’s nominations have already started coming in.

Previous prize recipients include Ling Ma, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yiyun Li.

The post Windham-Campbell Prize recognizes eight distinctive writers appeared first on Yale Daily News.

As of April 2, 2,439 courses are listed for the fall 2024 semester on Yale Course Search, compared to 4,268 courses that were offered for the fall 2023 semester. This semester’s course rollout process has been noticeably slower than last year’s, according to CourseTable data by co-lead Sida Chen ’26. By March 31, 2023, 3,144 offerings for the fall 2023 semester appeared, meaning that this year’s rollout process has lagged behind by 22.5 percent. 

The Registrar’s Office is “not aware of a reason that course offerings would have decreased,” according to a statement provided to the News.

“It is a challenging time for departments to complete this work with competing priorities, so perhaps the numbers will go up by the time registration opens,” the statement wrote.

The discrepancies in total courses listed vary by major. Last fall, 71 unique courses were listed under global affairs, including 28 specifically for undergraduate students. When Yale Course Search opened on March 5, just two undergraduate courses in the department were listed on CourseTable — which scrapes its data daily from Yale Course Search. As of April 2, nine undergraduate courses are now listed under global affairs. 

Isabella Panico ’26, a global affairs major, wrote to the News that she had been looking forward to browsing electives for her major, but the delay has hindered her ability to develop enthusiasm about her fall 2024 calendar.

“With courses coming out later it can be frustrating for students in the major to get excited about the next semester and also just to plan our schedules,” she wrote. “With the Jackson School’s recent growth I’m always rooting for their exposure, but this is a bad foot to get off on for the fall semester.”

The Registrar’s Office for the Jackson School of Global Affairs said in a statement that they are still in the process of entering fall courses and that students should check back at the end of the week.

In the philosophy department, 19 undergraduate courses are currently listed, compared to 34 last year. Professor Daniel Greco, the department’s director for undergraduate studies, said that while he was not sure of the cause for the discrepancy, it could be due to an unusually large number of faculty taking leave during the fall 2024 semester.

Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences Tamar Gendler did not provide the number of FAS faculty on leave for the fall 2024 semester but confirmed that “the number of faculty on leave next fall is well within the range of normal variations.”

“As always, there are a few FAS departments that have more leaves than they can accommodate in their curriculum,” she wrote. “In those departments, we have approved the hiring of visiting faculty with relevant expertise who can teach the needed course.”

The course discrepancy is also visible in other disciplines, including in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Computer science, a popular undergraduate major under SEAS, shows 67 fall 2024 courses as of April 2, compared to 87 courses ultimately offered for the fall 2023 semester.

Kristin Flower, associate dean for faculty affairs at SEAS, wrote that she cannot share which faculty are slated to take leave next semester.

However, she wrote, “The number of SEAS faculty on leave for Fall 2024 is consistent with past fall leave numbers.”

Course registration for the class of 2025 begins on April 15.

The post Fall 2024 courses rollout process slower than last year appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Last month, in a page of the News’ Black History Month special issue, nine Yale students contributed to a section called “Being a Black engineer at Yale,” highlighting their experiences as Black students in departments such as Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. Students expressed feelings of isolation and discouragement at the lack of representation in the University’s STEM majors.

“It’s discouraging to walk into an auditorium where I can count on one hand the amount of other Black people in my lectures,” Deja Dunlap ’26, a Black applied mathematics major, told the News. “In discussion, I feel pressured to be exceptional and to be more than just the ‘Black person in the room.’”

Dunlap also highlighted the lack of Black professors in Yale’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Just two out of 153 faculty members in SEAS identify as Black or African American, a meager 1.3 percent compared to five percent across all Yale faculty and six percent among the faculty of Arts and Sciences.

This issue is not unique to Yale; Ivies across the country hire disproportionately low Black faculty members to teach engineering and other STEM fields. Zero percent and four percent of Harvard’s tenure-track and tenured engineering faculty are Black or African-American, respectively. The Dartmouth Thayer School of Engineering has one Black associate professor out of 70 faculty members.

Vincent Wilczynski, deputy dean of the engineering school, declined to comment about the lack of Black faculty representation. He pointed instead to the school’s “fairly robust DEIB program,” which houses several affinity groups and professional organizations for students from historically marginalized backgrounds.

Wilczynski also told the News that Charles Brown, a physics professor and National Society of Black Engineers faculty advisor, will be bringing a team of over 10 Yale members of the National Society of Black Engineers – of which Dunlap is the Yale chapter vice president – to the organization’s annual meeting in Atlanta, which will take place later this month.

Brown did not respond to the News’ request for comment on the trip.

Wilczynski said that the convention is an exciting opportunity for students to meet and network with colleagues from all over the nation.

“From the school side we go ahead and make sure that the support is there and work hard to make sure that there’s a faculty advisor to integrate students into this professional society network,” he added.

Solomon Gonzalez ’23, who graduated from Yale last spring with a degree in mechanical engineering, said that NSBE had less of a presence on campus when he arrived at Yale. 

He described his experience in the major as “individual.”

“It felt like I was just doing it on my own,” Gonzalez said. “Being part of a major and seeing nobody else who looks like you, it makes you wonder, ‘Does it even make sense that I’m here?’”

Both Dunlap and Gonzalez said that the number of Black peers in their majors decreased as they moved to more advanced courses.

Dunlap, who attended a public high school in Las Vegas, recalled her experience taking Math 115 –– an intermediate course –– while others in the major began in Math 120, which is more advanced. She speculated that “working from behind” could discourage students from public high schools — who are disproportionately students of color. 

She suggested that Yale permit students to take introductory math courses such as Math 115 for free the summer prior to their first year in exchange for course credit. Yale does provide preparatory Online Experiences for Yale Scholars, a free program that helps students adapt to the rigor of quantitative study at Yale — though the program does not count for credit.

“I didn’t realize it would be like this when I arrived,” said Dunlap, referring to the introductory math sequence. “Yale could do more to acclimate students from lower-income backgrounds.”

Yale’s School of Engineering and Applied Science was founded in 1852. 

The post Black engineering students call for increased diversity in SEAS appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Yale’s ambitions for a Ukrainian program are not new, but Tytarenko and Edyta Bojanowska, Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures, told the News that in the face of the war in Ukraine, this objective has grown more urgent. Tytarenko, who comes from a background in education and academia, brings to Yale her fluency in Ukrainian, Russian and English, as well as skills in language pedagogy and research in Russian mysticism and mythology.

“I consider it a noble task to start a Ukrainian program,” Tytarenko told the News. “Especially now, during this moment when there is a heightened interest in Ukrainian studies and a need for an understanding of Ukraine, its cultures, history, politics and the relation between Ukraine and Russia.”

Tytarenko received a B.A. and M.A. in English Language and Literature from Ukraine’s Lviv Ivan Franko National University. Initially, she planned to teach English as a foreign language — but when she moved to the United States to earn a Master’s degree in Russian and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, she opted to stay and pursue an academic career. In 2016, she earned a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto.

Almost immediately after defending her dissertation, Tytarenko began working at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she said she taught for seven years and completely “rebuilt” the Russian curriculum. She was presented simultaneously with an offer for a tenure-track research-oriented position at UNL and the opportunity to teach at Yale.

Tytarenko said that ultimately, she decided to join the Yale faculty so she could build a Ukrainian program.

“I thought it would be a very meaningful way to contribute to the Ukrainian cause,” she said. “Because it was challenging to be here and not to be in Ukraine while everyone was in Ukraine.”

Tytarenko told the News she found it “surprising” that a robust Ukrainian program does not already exist at Yale.

Since Tytarenko was on maternity leave in the fall and began teaching courses this Spring, she plans to introduce course offerings in Ukrainian in the fall, as the department requires both semesters of instruction.

“[Teaching Ukrainian] is something the department has been talking about for a while,” Bojanowska told the News. “But the war in Ukraine made this all the more imperative.”

Bojanowska said the department ran a search for a language lector, seeking a lector who was fluent in both Russian and Ukrainian. She said that Tytarenko, trilingual and a “dynamo in the classroom,” was the perfect fit.

She added that she hopes that, by having the same lector teaching both languages, students can understand that speaking the Russian language does not equate with a Russian nationalist identity.

Tytarenko said she hopes the Ukrainian language department will work closely with the Ukraine House student group, offer extra-curricular community events and become a “hub” for cultural events and exchange.

In the future, she also wants to create an interdisciplinary course on Ukrainian identity, culture and mentality explored through the lenses of art, music, folklore, mythology and literature. She also aspires to teach Ukrainian literature in translation — a skill that she has honed as a translator for several literary works.

Tytarenko added that these courses in Ukrainian studies will diversify the Slavic department’s offerings and help students understand the complexities of Ukraine-Russia geopolitical and cultural relations.

After the war, Tytarenko said she hopes to forge connections with schools in Ukraine and facilitate exchange programs — though she said this planning feels “premature” now.

Alongside being a senior lector and associate research scholar and teaching first- and second-year Ukrainian, Tytarenko endeavors to expand and develop her dissertation — a study of Russian folk mysticism narratives and the mythology behind rebellion — into a full-length book manuscript.

She added that this research has resounding relevance nowadays.

“We can see the political mythology in supporting propaganda narratives and the place of mythology in nation-building and in the current regime in Russia,” Tytarenko said.

In addition to her research in Russian mysticism and mythology, Tytarenko also has experience researching pedagogical practices and curriculum-building.

She uses virtual reality and immersive technology to help her students improve speaking and communication skills. She cited an example of a course she taught at UNL about Russia through art, in which students would use glasses to experience galleries, stores, streets and rooms immersively with visual and audio input.

“I have seen how effective this is as an innovative tool in boosting motivation for students,” Tytarenko told the News. “Students are more engaged with the learning material they have. They have better focus on the task. They demonstrate better retention of the material.”

Tytarenko told the News that the program will have to gauge student interest to determine how expansive offerings in Ukrainian will be.

Bojanowska echoed this perspective, urging students to be receptive to classes in Ukrainian.

“The ball is in your court because students now need to come and take these courses,” she said.

Although Yale currently lacks its own Ukrainian language program, some opportunities for Yale students to pursue Ukrainian already exist.

Jordan Shevchenko ’27 is a half-Ukrainian student taking Elementary Ukrainian II, a Columbia University language course offered to Yale students through a Shared Course Initiative program.

“A lot of my Ukrainian family are unable to speak English, so by learning Ukrainian I can communicate much more with them,” Shevchenko wrote to the News.

He shared that Yale students, who are in a classroom together, use high-definition video conferencing technology to connect to the Columbia language class, which is taught by a Ph.D. candidate there.

So far, Shevchenko wrote that his course focuses on grammar, vocabulary, reading and writing — but students also talk about Ukrainian culture, history and politics through discussions.

“Russia’s full-scale invasion is trying to compromise and eliminate Ukrainian culture, and alongside this the Ukrainian language,” Shevchenko wrote. “By learning Ukrainian, one can help combat these measures, and also express their solidarity with the people of Ukraine more easily.”

Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Tamar Gendler expressed excitement at Tytarenko’s plans for the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

She wrote to the News that Tytarenko, who has published extensively on the subject of language teaching, will create new offerings that will dynamically accommodate student interests.

“Ms. Tytarenko is an expert in language pedagogy,” Gendler wrote.

Bojanowska echoed Gendler’s enthusiasm, saying that Tytarenko has the expertise and the passion to build a strong Ukrainian language and culture curriculum.

Yale’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures was established in 1946.

The post New lector Olha Tytarenko to spearhead Ukrainian language program at Yale appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Data released by Yale’s Office of Institutional Research from the 2022-23 academic year has revealed a notable gender disparity in certain academic areas — particularly in arts and humanities and in physical sciences and engineering.

According to data released by Yale’s Office of Institutional Research — which presents figures through a gender binary — there are 664 junior and senior male majors within the Physical Sciences & Engineering realm, compared to 351 women. Meanwhile, the number of female Arts & Humanities majors far outnumbers male ones, with 701.5 women and 420 men. The decimal point accounts for interdisciplinary majors that fall in more than one of the four dominant divisions — for example, the Archeological Studies major being classified under both Arts & Humanities and  Social Sciences. 

Although the percentage of women in Physical Sciences & Engineering has increased between the 2000-01 academic year and now — from 26.3 percent to 34.5 percent — for the last 10 years, this percentage has fluctuated between 33.6 percent and 38.8 percent without a clear upward trajectory.

On the national level, numbers are worse. The American Society for Engineering Education, for example, reported that women were awarded only 24.1 percent of the total number of bachelor’s degrees in engineering in 2022.

Though Yale has seen more success in gender diversity than the national average, the University is falling short compared to peer institutions. At Princeton, 40.6 percent of the bachelor of science in engineering degrees that the school distributed in 2023 were to women. At MIT, 48 percent of undergraduates studying engineering were women. The same year at Yale, only 34.5 percent of junior and senior physical sciences and engineering majors were women.

Vincent Wilczynski, deputy dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, told the News that engineering faculty maintain a close relationship with admissions officers while admissions decisions are being made.

“Admissions clearly, clearly, clearly has its eye on this topic,” he said regarding gender diversity.

Internally, too, Wilczynski said diversity and inclusion remain central priorities at the engineering school. He cited several professional organizations — including the Society of Women Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the National Society of Black Engineers — which he said help create safe environments for engineering students who are part of underrepresented minorities.

Wilczynski said that the engineering school has many support systems in place, aimed at combating the “national and international problem” of gender inequity in STEM.

Though some engineering departments — such as biomedical and chemical engineering have more female students — most departments in the engineering school are male-dominated.

For the electrical engineering and computer science combined major, for example, the class of 2025 has 10 men but only one woman in the major.

Rajit Manohar, the director of undergraduate studies for the electrical engineering component of the electrical engineering and computer science major, told the News that he thinks his area of study has an “image problem.” He said he thinks this dissuades students of all genders from studying the discipline as he thinks that many students do not have an accurate understanding of what engineering is.

“I had a really interesting conversation with some folks at the art school and I said, you know, we are much more similar to you than you think,” Manohar told the News. “Because engineering is about creativity. You’re designing something new.”

Along with engineering, physics is also a disproportionately male major at Yale, with 46 declared junior and senior men and 13 women in the 2022-23 academic year.

Sarah Demers, the director of undergraduate studies in physics, said that within the already male-dominated physics major, there are four introductory sequences, and the department has noticed many fewer women in the most advanced sequence.

“Physics is a subject that’s traditionally seen as very challenging. It has that stereotype and that in some ways works against us in terms of people feeling like they don’t belong if things start to get really hard,” Demers told the News. “If people aren’t open and communicating and they don’t realize, ‘oh, wait a second, this actually is pretty tough for everybody,’ they might assume that they’re the only one who’s confused.”

Demers penned an op-ed about gender bias in science in 2013. She wrote about a 2012 study that revealed that when science faculty members were shown identical applications for a lab manager position from men and women, they were more likely to see men as more competent and deserving of a higher salary.

The gender inequality in physics majors is echoed in an uneven faculty gender distribution, Demers said. Still, Demers added that she is hopeful about improvements that have been made in recent years.

“I believe the numbers are seven women out of 37 tenure track faculty members,” Demers said. “Which is actually very good in the national context. If you go back 20 years ago, there was a period when there were one or two.”

Demers told the News that her department is focusing not only on gender but also on other types of diversity, specifically citing race and ethnicity.

She said that diversity is important for reasons deeper than optics — that different perspectives and backgrounds can improve a work environment as well as the ideas and findings that come out of that space.

“It also is a benefit to the science,” she said. “I mean, we’re just not going to be doing as much physics or as good physics if we’re restricting unnaturally who participates, right?”

These issues are central to “Being Human in STEM,” a science course led by professors Rona Ramos GRD ’10 and Benjamin Machta.

The course addresses topics of diversity and representation in STEM disciplines, seeking to study solutions to these stagnancies.

The bulk of the class focuses on discussions of readings, including peer-reviewed papers on subjects such as stereotype threat — a phenomenon that finds that people tend to fall back on vocalized stereotypes of themselves in performing intellectual tasks.

“It’s great that I get to hear the youth’s perspective on this,” Machta said. “It’s quite a fun course.”

As a final assignment, students aim to create and implement a project that will improve STEM culture at Yale.

Machta noted that the gender inequity problem is complex, and one without obvious reasoning.

“It’s a problem of culture, really,” Machta told the News. “And culture is slow to change.”

Yale College first welcomed women in 1969.

Pam Ogbebor contributed reporting.

The post Gender disparities persist in several areas of study at Yale, data show appeared first on Yale Daily News.

In the foreword of the book, University President Peter Salovey wrote that he asked Blight to lead a team research initiative exploring Yale’s history of slavery. He wrote that Blight readily accepted the task, choosing to expand the initial proposal of a scholarly report into a more accessible narrative for a broader readership.

Michael Morand ’87 ’93 MDiv, director of community engagement at the Beinecke Rare Book Library and a researcher and chapter author for “Yale and Slavery,” wrote to the News that he worked in close collaboration with Blight on the book.

“As an alum, a Yale leader, and a New Haven resident, I know our university and community only grow stronger if we are honest about our history,” Morand wrote. “I am proud to be part of a university willing to rigorously shine light on truth.”

The Yale and Slavery Research Project began in late 2020 as a commitment to better understand Yale’s formative ties to slavery and racism — as well as the ongoing repercussions of that history. Last Friday, Yale issued a formal apology statement addressing the project’s research findings and listing next steps the institution plans to take. The book is one component of this larger initiative, which also includes a lecture series in fall 2024 and updates to campus tours.

“Yale and Slavery,” which is divided into 12 chapters with five interludes and an epilogue, stretches across centuries of history. The book draws on a wide range of archives and other texts in an effort to remain specific and resonant to Yale while also relevant and applicable nationwide.

“I was determined to not write a conventional report but to write a real history that ordinary people could and would read,” Blight wrote to the News.

Blight wrote that after the project was launched, webinars and a major conference followed. The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, which Blight directs, was central to the project’s management.

Morand wrote that the Beinecke Library Community Engagement program also managed much of the Yale and Slavery Research project, with more than 20 online programs over the past three years. These programs included a 2022 documentary film on the 1831 Black College proposal and the “Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery” exhibit at the New Haven Museum.

Hope McGrath, the Beinecke research coordinator for Yale, New Haven and Connecticut history, has served as the project’s lead researcher since she joined in Jan. 2022. Along with organizing a team of researchers and conducting primary and secondary research, she authored two chapters and three interludes in the book.

She wrote to the News that one of the project’s major challenges was finding a way to tell the many stories of Yale’s historical involvement with slavery, the slave trade and abolition in a coherent narrative.

“We were always asking ourselves, what are the through-lines of this story? What are the key themes and tensions that run through over 300 years of Yale history?” McGrath wrote.

She wrote that though the book is over 400 pages, she thinks it is told in a way that will leave readers with a clear perspective about how Yale’s history with slavery has unfolded.

Blight echoed the difficulties of condensing centuries of stories into one readable history.

“The many challenges in writing this book came from the mountains of material and evidence and the tasks of converting it into a narrative history that moved over nearly 250 years,” Blight wrote.

In his acknowledgements, Blight named many student researchers, Beinecke archivists, Yale professors and other community members who played important roles in the making of “Yale and Slavery.” Ultimately, he and Morand both credited Salovey for providing the initial impetus for the book and the broader Yale and Slavery Research Project.

Salovey told the News about his experiences with the University’s archives and primary sources he encountered that told a troubling story.

“I saw for the first time the invoices reflecting payments or requesting payments from the University to those who had enslaved people that they owned whose labor built Connecticut Hall,” Salovey said. “You were looking at wages not paid to the people who worked on that building but paid to somebody else for the people who worked on that building — who received nothing for working on that building.”

Although the idea for the project came from Salovey, Blight told the News he was given free rein to decide how he would conduct his research and write the book.

Blight said Salovey and his office did not attempt to censor his project, and although the timeline was somewhat controlled, the book’s content was not.

“The only rules were the rules of scholarship,” he told the News.

McGrath wrote to the News that she hopes the scholarship in “Yale and Slavery” will inform and enact change in the Yale community.

“By providing historical context, we can better understand why early Yale was funded by profits from human trafficking, or how Yale ended up naming a residential college for John C. Calhoun in the 20th century, to give just two examples,” she wrote.

Looking forward, Blight wrote that there will be follow-up measures and responses to “Yale and Slavery” around the Yale campus and in the surrounding New Haven community.

He noted that one of the most important of these efforts is to use their findings to help New Haven’s public schools.

“Our book and the exhibition are important steps in ongoing reckoning with history,” Morand wrote to the News. “I hope students and community residents will engage this history and seek to learn more.”

The book, which is currently a number one Amazon New Release in Higher & Continuing Education, is currently for sale as a hardcover for $35 and also available online.

The post Yale confronts ties to slavery in Professor David Blight’s ‘Yale and Slavery’ appeared first on Yale Daily News.

CourseTable, originally created in 2012 and rebuilt by the Yale Computer Society in 2020, is an open-source website that presents data from Yale’s course catalog and evaluations database through an interactive user-friendly interface. A small team headed by YCS member Alex Schapiro ’26 introduced and updated several features last semester including mobile calendar view, friends, Google Calendar integration, worksheet summary, links to courses and more search options, as they wrote in an email to the Yale undergraduate community on Jan. 23. The email also included that the site has processed 5.26 million requests in the past month.

“It’s awesome to walk in the library and see everybody using a website that you’ve worked on,” Schapiro told the News. “It’s a great feeling.”

CourseTable has a complex history with the Yale administration. After Peter Xu ’14 and Harry Yu ’14 created Yale Blue Book +, which would eventually become CourseTable, in 2012, Yale’s administration became concerned about the site and shut it down in 2014.

While the CourseTable team no longer faces active resistance from administrators, Sida Chen ’26 — a developer on the team — said that administrators don’t seem to be in support of the platform, either. 

“Even though we face no push back, we also have no collaboration with the administration and this creates a lot of obstacles,” Chen told the News.

He explained how sometimes their work is blocked or limited because it is only possible to submit a certain number of information requests simultaneously in the Yale system.

A small group of unpaid volunteers in the Yale Computer Society runs CourseTable. The group uses data from Yale, with scripts that run through Yale’s course website at 3 a.m. each morning and a scraper that goes through Yale’s “archaic” course evaluations database semesterly.

Though the team does not plan to charge students for their work, Schapiro and Chen said that they hope to communicate with Yale administration and establish a mutually beneficial relationship. Students can also support the CourseTable team with donations.

“We would love if we could have a more official relationship where maybe we could be more fairly compensated for the work and utility and value that we’re creating on campus,” Schapiro told the News.

Part of the reason CourseTable initially received pushback from Yale is the same reason it is so popular with students: the site displays past students’ ratings and written responses about courses and professors in an accessible way. It can also function as a replacement for Yale’s in-house course website, Yale Course Search.

“That’s kind of the bread and butter of why our product is used,” Schapiro said.

Diana Contreras Niño ’27 said CourseTable is an invaluable resource when it comes to choosing classes for the next semester.

She said that she especially likes adding friends and being able to see past students’ evaluations for courses she is considering.

“CourseTable is so helpful because I can look at different layouts of potential schedules and see them visually on the ‘worksheet,’” Contreras told the News.

Schapiro noted that a computer science professor from Harvard reached out to him about using CourseTable at the school. Because CourseTable is open-source, the code can be adapted for use at peer universities.

Schapiro and Chen suspect that other institutions may use similar models to display course data, as well as ratemyprofessors.com.

The reason CourseTable is so successful at Yale specifically, Schapiro conjectured, is because Yale forces every student to evaluate their courses before viewing their grades, which creates a pool of information about every course — though last semester, Yale Hub’s grade suppression mechanism temporarily failed, allowing some students to bypass this requirement.

Chen told the News that CourseTable has room for improvement.

He said the team hopes to make the site more “uniform” and create more filters, as well as a slider for professor ratings.

“We want to work out a way where users can more intuitively interact with these gigantic numbers of features,” Chen said.

The small CourseTable team meets weekly. They have a roadmap, listing features they hope to add, and they divide tasks between members. The work is individually focused, but the team works in collaboration to maintain a uniform style and ask each other for help.

Team members explained that they constantly have new ambitions and goals for what they want to achieve next on their site.

“We want CourseTable to be the hub for everything about the courses at Yale,” Schapiro said.

Evaluations from last semester became available to Yale College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences faculty on Jan. 9.

Correction, Jan. 31: One quote in this article was misattributed; it has since been resolved.

The post CourseTable grows in popularity, adds new features appeared first on Yale Daily News.