“It really has been like building a plane while we fly it,” Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun said of making policy during the public health crisis. “Right now, we are required to adapt to challenges as they emerge and make decisions based off of the best information available at a given point in time without having the luxury of being able to see the larger picture. It is both our privilege and our honor to serve our students by trying to meet the challenges brought on by the pandemic in the best way we can, but there is no guidebook for something like this.”

How student policy is made and who is involved

When it comes to policies that impact University-wide health and safety, student policy ultimately comes from the guidance of University President Peter Salovey,  University Provost Scott Strobel and University COVID-19 Coordinator Stephanie Spangler.

The three are guided by the Yale Public Health Committee, which is made up of Salovey’s chief of staff, the director of Yale Health, multiple public health experts and the deputy general counsel. Deans from the Yale School of Nursing, School of Medicine and School of Public Health also sit on the committee.

According to Strobel, pandemic-time decisions have been guided by science and the recommendations of public health experts, as well as directions from federal and state authorities. 

“President Salovey and I frequently meet with the deans of all the schools, heads of various administrative units, and various faculty groups, who, in turn, work closely with faculty, students, and staff across the university,” Strobel wrote to the News. “These ongoing conversations and deliberations help us ensure that university policies are crafted and implemented in ways that balance the public health considerations with our community’s education and research goals.”

For her part, Spangler told the News that, with the advice of the Public Health Committee, she is responsible for overseeing the development and implementation of public health practices that reduce the risks caused by the pandemic. In her role, Spangler makes recommendations for “related policy and operational changes to University leaders.”

Some examples of Spangler’s recommendations include those involving COVID-19 testing and campus reopening. 

While policy discussions that impact the whole University are made at the upper levels of the Yale administration, when policies concern Yale College alone, Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun takes the lead. However, Chun explained that his discretion and decision-making power is highly dependent on the policy in question. For example, while decisions about the College’s academic calendar this year were made more centrally, decisions about course selection for Yale College are more within Chun’s purview.

Although Chun is often the face of Yale College policy decisions, he explained how nearly all decisions he makes are collaborative, and include input from across the university. 

“There are some things I have more control over than not, but I do almost nothing alone,” Chun said. “Everything is in consultation with others. But I definitely understand how it is viewed from the student perspective — that I am the one behind the policy since I am mainly responsible for communicating the policies. In many ways, I do represent Yale. I am in a key position to receive and share student input and feedback. I very much take that role seriously.” 

Chun explained how when it comes to decisions about public health and safety, the Public Health Committee and other members of the Yale administration have provided “a guiding light.” But while the committee, other Yale administrators or experts may recommend guidance or certain courses of action, “ultimately those policies need to be decided upon, fleshed out, funded and implemented.” That’s where the cooperation of the community comes in.

Chun cited Yale’s testing infrastructure as a “classic example” of this phenomenon. Based on public health guidance, it was necessary that Yale offer a robust COVID-19 testing infrastructure that allowed for the semiweekly testing of students and the frequent testing of faculty and staff in order to reopen as safely as possible. While the provost’s and president’s offices were behind the larger plan, bringing the plan to life and managing day-to-day operations required the involvement of several University bodies and the commitment of the whole community to abide by the plan.

At the time of publication, Yale’s COVID-19 dashboard reflects 858 positive cases from students — undergraduate, graduate and professional — faculty and staff since Aug. 1, 2020. In comparison, Harvard reports 920 positive cases since June 1, Brown reports 554 cases since August 24 and Dartmouth reports 389 positive cases since July 1.

Spangler, too, cited the COVID-19 testing and tracing program as a piece of Yale’s public health infrastructure that she is proud of.

“We owe our deepest thanks not only to the leaders who supported it but also to the public health experts who designed it; the health care, administrative and hospitality staff who implemented it; and the many students, faculty and staff who participated in it,” Spangler wrote to the News.

Navigating new academic, student life concerns

While COVID-related policy decisions often rely more heavily on guidance from public health experts, plenty of student policy has been crafted over the past year that have not been directly related to the public health aspects of the pandemic but rather responded to the challenges sparked by it. These decisions — which include policies surrounding matters such as student housing, remote learning and break days — have been made and communicated to undergraduates predominately by Chun and Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd. 

While the choice to engage in mainly remote learning and the choice to have five break days rather than a spring break were based on public health guidance and did not include many student voices, a survey was sent out to students to express preferences for what housing in the next academic year would look like.

In terms of academic policies in a time of pandemic, Chun explained that much of that happens in collaboration with Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Tamar Gendler and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Lynn Cooley. He explained that the three meet nearly every day.

“We are in constant conversation about policy, about making sure that things are running smoothly,” Chun said. “A lot of the planning happens in those meetings to ensure that the University’s academic mission is at the forefront of discussion, and making sure that student learning is disrupted to the least extent possible.”

Aside from the day-to-day discussions, Chun explained that his decisions on academic policy have been guided by the academic planning committees and task forces — made up of FAS faculty members, deans and other relevant staff members — who “spent every waking moment planning for this academic year” over the past summer and have guided academic planning ever since.  According to a webpage from last May, while student representatives sat on five of the seven task forces, they did not sit on the two committees.

And in terms of student life, Boyd explained to the News how making student policy has changed during the pandemic. Whereas pre-pandemic policy making was what Boyd described as “incremental, with lots of discussions, experimental pilots and extended roll-out plans,” policies during the pandemic have had to be made quickly and within the guidelines of public health recommendations.

Boyd explained how policies such as making students eligible for room and board rebates if they left campus early and the decision to only utilize single bedrooms are examples of how they made quick decisions to meet public health standards while also easing the adverse pressures of the pandemic.

Now, her role making student policy includes addressing the unique difficulties created by the pandemic as well as responding to case-by-case student concerns, ranging from helping to support remote learners in Texas after the storms to finding a way to allow students in COVID-19 isolation housing to receive Grubhub meal deliveries. 

While much of student policy over the past year was made on the administrative level, students have also played a pivotal role in guiding decision making and advocating for policies. 

Chun explained how it is “always [his] priority” to collect student input, gauge student feelings toward a prospective policy and try to understand how decisions may impact students. Chun looks to do so by sending out surveys and meeting with student leaders.

A main way Chun and other administrators solicit feedback is through having students sit on standing committees. For the next academic year, there are dozens of committees that students can sit on, ranging from the Investor Responsibility Committee to the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Conduct. According to YCC President Aliesa Bahri ’22, while YCC was asked to nominate students to 22 of the committees, many have their own selection process.

Bahri did not know how many students in total serve on those committees, as it varies by committee. On the website that lists standing committees, half of the 42 committees had an updated roster of members for the 2020-21 academic year. Thirteen committees listed rosters from last year or the year prior and six did not list any roster at all.

Hannah Cevasco ’24 currently sits on the Committee on Majors and the Science and Quantitative Reasoning Committee. She told the News that the Committee on Majors typically meets monthly to review departmental proposals for changes to major requirements as well as proposals for new certificates and that the Science and Quantitative Reasoning Committee meets as needed to discuss the ways in which STEM education could be bettered at Yale.

Cevasco said that she “absolutely” feels that her voice as a student is valued and taken into account on the committees. She explained how, in her experience, students on the committees are able to offer suggestions, opinions and feedback on prospective policies.

“I want students to know that their input is really valuable,” Boyd said. “We can’t always say ‘yes,’ but that input is itself important, both in terms of the relationships we build and in terms of planning for future possibilities.”     

But more than just serving as sounding boards for policy at the higher levels, many student leaders have spent the last year advocating for and creating student policy themselves.

Bahri explained that, since she was elected as president at the height of the pandemic, she expected most of her tenure to be focused on “overcoming the unique challenges to undergraduate life engendered and exacerbated by COVID-19.”

She told the News how her administration’s top priority has been helping students access the resources they need to remain safe and healthy, as well as equipping them with the tools to overcome the obstacles posed by virtual learning. Equally important, Bahri talked about her commitment to facilitating community in such an isolating time.

From public health policies such as securing reimbursements for COVID-19 tests for students who are not able to get them on campus, to academic policies such as advocating for deans to be authorized to grant dean’s excuses for technical difficulties during final exams in this new remote environment, to administrative policies such as clarifying the amnesty policy to include violations of the community compact when sexual misconduct is reported, Bahri’s administration has been involved in crafting, shaping and passing student policy that respond to this unique moment in time.

This year, Bahri and YCC Vice President Reilly Johnson ’22 have met with Chun every other week.

“In many ways, being a YCC leader has been very different from previous years, but in so many ways it also has been the same,” Bahri said. “At the end of the day, regardless of our circumstances, YCC is about supporting one another through hardship and building community wherever we are. I hope that will never change no matter what the future holds.”

Logan Roberts ’23 is currently the president of the Yale First-Generation and/or Low-Income Advocacy Movement. The primary focuses of YFAM are community building and advocacy as it pertains to Yale’s FGLI population.

Roberts explained how although all students are impacted by the pandemic, the FGLI community has faced unique challenges that YFAM seeks to bring voice to and address. Over the past semester, YFAM has partnered with several student organizations to launch initiatives that will better serve the FGLI community at Yale. This includes partnering with QuestBridge to launch “Student-Faculty Mentor Circles” through which students were grouped with FGLI faculty mentors, as well as joining the Mental Health Justice Coalition at Yale, which has released a list of demands oriented towards improving and expanding Yale’s mental health resources.

“YFAM plays a critical role in crafting student policy,” Roberts wrote to the News. “There is a widely held misconception that FGLI advocacy work is primarily concerned with financial aid. It is true that sound financial aid makes up a large portion of our advocacy work, but in truth, it is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Similarly, Students Unite Now Organizer Naomi D’Arbell Bobadilla ’22 explained to the News how SUN has been fighting for the elimination of the student income contribution — the colloquial term for the student effort portion of financial aid — and better mental health care for students, topics that have become particularly salient due to the financial and health impacts of the pandemic.

While some student policy is made at only the student-level or administrative-level, D’Arbell Bobadilla explained how the administration waived the student income contribution for remote students this year as a result of student organizing and advocacy. However, she noted that Yale’s decision not to waive the student income contribution for students enrolled in-residence made “low-income students of color on campus do extra work to belong, even during a pandemic.”

Joaquín Lara Midkiff ’24, who serves as Disability Empowerment for Yale vice president and YCC accessibility chair and senator, has spent the past year engaging in advocacy work pertaining to accessibility. Through helping to get the most medically vulnerable students vaccinated to securing closed captioning on Zoom, Lara Midkiff has spent the last year trying to advocate for solutions to some of the unique challenges that the pandemic created for accessibility.

Lara Midkiff explained how the pandemic “elevated and centered conversations about accessibility” in ways that he had never seen before. Specifically, he mentioned how DEFY’s access and partnership with the administration has been unparalleled this year, allowing for many accessibility wins. 

Midkiff explained how he is “effectively in constant contact with the administration” via email, and he meets with at least one of either Chun, Student Accessibility Director Sarah Scott Chang or Associate Vice President for Institutional Equity, Access and Belonging Elizabeth Conklin two to three times a month.

“The pandemic saw a groundswell of student advocacy efforts,” Lara Midkiff wrote in an email to the News. “The pandemic, and the state of the world, allowed for intense and productive conversations. It’s imperative that we continue the momentum we have attained and I encourage anyone who’s interested in fighting for causes near to their hearts to do so — loudly and proudly.”

A year of hindsight

In retrospect, knowing what he knows now, Chun explained that there are a few things he wishes could have been done differently. The first example he cited is the universal pass/fail policy that was implemented in the spring 2020 semester and sprung out of the “universal pass” movement — a student demand that advocated for all classes to give students passing grades without the possibility of failure.

The demand stemmed from the disruption of the spring 2020 semester that forced students to abruptly move home and continue their studies remotely, and it was rooted in a desire to ensure equity for students experiencing hardships due to the unusual circumstances brought on by the pandemic.

However, instead of adopting a “universal pass” policy for the semester’s grades, Chun announced a universal pass/fail policy in which the College gave students grades of either “pass” or “fail” on their transcript with no option for students to earn letter grades.

Looking back, although Chun acknowledged that the majority of the community of faculty and students supported the policy, he wishes there was a way to have done it differently. 

After a YCC survey showed 69 percent of the 4,618 student respondents supported a universal pass/fail option and a faculty vote found that 55 percent of the 537 respondents from the Yale College faculty meeting membership supported the option as well, Chun implemented the special grading policy.

“We did it because the anxiety and stress levels of students was so high, that it was needed to relieve the pressure that everyone was feeling,” Chun told the News. “But a lot of students did not want to have their grades converted to pass/fail. I wish the original plan of having a very flexible credit/D/fail option could have gained traction as opposed to a universal pass/fail. But ultimately, we listened to the community of both faculty and students.”

Another regret that Chun has — albeit something he does not think could have been done differently given the public health circumstances — is not being able to have all four classes on campus for each semester.

But overall, Chun is proud of the policies enacted in the past year. While there are a few things that, in hindsight, could have been done differently, Chun stated that he is happy that the University “definitely did many more things right than the few things that we could have done differently.”

“It’s deeply impressive to think how many decisions were made that turned out to be the right ones, including sticking with our announced plans in the summer when a lot of schools were canceling and changing what they announced,” Chun said.

Similarly, Spangler expressed pride at seeing the sheer number of people and University bodies who have come together “with energy and creativity and skill” to adapt to the circumstances and run a university during a public health crisis.

While Boyd does not “yet feel like we are into the realm of hindsight” as the University is “still trying to keep up with each new twist and turn,” she expressed a deep appreciation for the hundreds of people who have been working nonstop to keep campus running.

But above all, all of the administrators who spoke to the News expressed gratitude for how the student body was able to remain resilient, adapt to the most uncertain of circumstances and come together to protect their community.

“As dean, I am just so grateful and impressed with the students,” Chun said. “You are dealing with something that no other college students have had to face, endure or adapt to. Although we certainly understand and feel sorry for the negative aspects of the pandemic, I really applaud the students for managing through this the way they have. It has been remarkable, and they have made us proud.”

Julia Bialek | julia.bialek@yale.edu

Correction, Apr. 16: An earlier version of this story said there were 24 committees for students to sit on. It it unclear exactly how many standing committees will operate next year at this time, but 42 are listed on Yale College’s website. The YCC is involved with the selection process for 22 of those committees. The story has been updated.

For the Deans’ Designees, Reese recommended that additional training and skills — such as basic counseling techniques and knowledge of specific University policies — be implemented. Reese wrote that the wide variety of positions held by Deans’ Designees means they have different levels of training and noted in his report that designees and their colleagues agreed that differences existed in how each approached the role.

Conklin, who joined Yale in September 2020, provided a statement to the News on behalf of herself, the OIEA and Stanley and nine Deans’ Designees — including Deputy Dean and Chief Diversity Officer Darin Latimore. Conklin wrote to the News that Deans’ Designees can take advantage of professional development workshops, “based in part on the Reese report and on requests from the Deans’ Designees themselves.” She added the workshops cover informal and formal options for resolving student complaints, communicating on community issues and a wide range of other areas.

“Deans’ Designees can provide individualized support to students in the context of their own schools,” Conklin wrote. “Many Deans’ Designees are deans of student affairs or in other highly visible roles involved in student support, and they work to be accessible and well-known within their schools so that students know where to turn and how to reach them.”

Two first-year students, Joaquin Soto ’24 and Jade Villegas ’24, expressed unfamiliarity with the existence of Deans’ Designees and their role.

That role, Conklin said, includes “[mediating] difficult conversations” between students and those whose behavior has affected them, having conversations on a student’s behalf and occasionally making academic and other arrangements, including switching class or discussion sections. Deans’ Designees also work with other administrators, including the dean of students’ respective schools, heads of residential colleges and cultural center directors, to address issues related to discrimination and harassment.

“Overall, we want students to turn to staff with whom they feel comfortable to initially sort through their concerns,” Burgwell Howard — associate vice president of student life and one of two Deans’ Designees for undergraduates — wrote in an email to the News.

Howard and Melanie Boyd — Yale College Dean of Student Affairs and the other Deans’ Designee for undergraduates — process about a dozen “more complex” cases each year, according to Howard. He added that the Deans’ Designees across schools meet monthly to “talk through scenarios,” such as how they might have addressed incidents at another institution.

Informal resolutions at Yale vary from case to case, Howard said. For “classroom-related concerns,” the Deans’ Designees may connect the undergraduate student with a departmental director of undergraduate studies or faculty chair, or “simply the classroom professor where the incident occurred,” Howard wrote.

For incidents involving someone outside the Yale community, like a visitor or Yale applicant, Howard said the Deans’ Designees will occasionally “follow up” with the home institution or the admissions office, so that they are aware that an incident has occurred. In a phone interview with the News, Howard added that Conklin was attempting to set up an online reporting process for people such as prospective and recently admitted students, who may not know who to turn to when an incident has occurred. According to Howard, similar systems had proven successful at universities such as Dartmouth, where he worked from 1988 to 1994.

On the cases he has seen, Howard wrote that he is sure “not everyone is always satisfied with outcomes” from contacting the Deans’ Designees, in part due to definitions of discrimination and harassment and University policies.

The University defines harassment as the subjection of a student to “objectively offensive, unwelcome conduct” based on any protected characteristic, when that conduct is “severe, persistent or pervasive.” Yale’s definition of “protected characteristics” includes those covered by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as sex, religion, age, disability, veteran status, gender identity and sexual orientation.

But the University’s definition of harassment does not include all forms of offensive speech. University policies state that all students are “generally free to express their views,” and so are visiting speakers, even if the view is “unpopular or controversial.”

“Some students would like to see the other student ‘punished’ for their offensive behavior, but our system is not set up to prevent people from being offended or even to manage people’s speech,” Howard wrote in the email. “However, if we are able to facilitate a conversation where these concerns could be heard by the offending party, that is a significant step towards being understood and seeing behavior stop and not repeated.”

Although both parties have the right to refuse conversation, Howard said in the phone interview that “most people, when they cause offense, want to repair those harms.” He added that simply informing the Deans’ Designees for students can be helpful, and encouraged students to bring forward any concerns they had.

Howard characterized students’ understanding of Deans’ Designees and the reporting process as still developing. He said that “students don’t fully understand” the resources available.

“You don’t read the safety manual until you actually need it,” he said.

Stanley did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and her automatic email reply noted that she has started “phased retirement” and stopped working on Mondays starting on Jan. 4, 2021. Conklin wrote to the News that Stanley will retire at the end of this calendar year after 45 years of service at Yale.

In February 2019, Tanis provided a written statement and a list of people to contact, all but one of whom Stanley had contacted by mid-March, according to emails provided by Tanis to the News. Come July, Stanley was still waiting on that final interview but would close out the investigation if she was unable to get it — an update Tanis only learned after reaching out.

The two spoke again in August, when according to Tanis, Stanley said that she would be meeting with Kurth to discuss the findings and recommendations of her report. Two months later, on Oct. 15, Stanley emailed that she had met with Kurth and Associate Dean for Global Affairs and Planetary Health LaRon Nelson, and she and Tanis scheduled to meet in person 10 days later.

“Sometime after Oct. 15, basically what she [Stanley] told me then was that it was my word against [the professor’s] … and because of that they can’t do any disciplinary action,” Tanis told the News. “I was disappointed because it’s like, it took you guys eight months to say this?”

According to Tanis, what Stanley told her about her recommendations more broadly focused on the “culture at the YSN” that would allow the incident to happen, which was something YSN leaders could address. Still, Tanis expressed frustration with not being in the meeting with Stanley, Nelson and Kurth, nor seeing or hearing what “exact recommendations” Stanley made to YSN leadership.

“[Stanley] wouldn’t give me that sort of transparency … if I’m the one who filed the complaint, I should have access to that information,” Tanis said. For its part, YSN cooperates with information gathering, Kurth said, noting that the process is confidential and directed by OIEA.

Karina Medved-Wu, a former Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence program manager who resigned in March 2019, also expressed similar sentiments to Tanis in her own interactions with Stanley and the OIEA.

Richner-Maldonado and Medved-Wu co-authored a letter to Stanley with three other former YCEI employees on July 16, 2020, in response to a Zoom bombing that occurred the same day. At the virtual event, curse words and racial slurs targeted former YCEI Assistant Director Dena Simmons.

In the letter, the former employees wrote that they were leaving the YCEI because they could “no longer face the racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, body shaming, bullying, conflicts of interest, and retaliatory patterns inflicted on us, on our coworkers with protected status, on the schools and families YCEI claimed to serve, and on Dr. Dena Simmons.” For Medved-Wu, such instances included revising YCEI RULER — a social and emotional learning program — curriculum to incorporate an alternative to “The Other Boy” by M.G. Hennessey, a novel about a transgender child’s journey to acceptance. She was told by YCEI leaders her inclusion of the novel in the original curriculum could be viewed as “controversial.”

According to Medved-Wu and emails obtained by the News, the former employees received an email response from Stanley in August 2020, a little under a month after they sent the letter, detailing that the OIEA would follow up on the information Latimore provided, but they may be unable to share actions taken once the review was complete and apologizing for the “delayed response.”

“While we cannot comment on specific cases or matters due to federal privacy laws, as a general matter, the outcomes of investigations are discussed with the individual who filed the complaint and, where appropriate, with the individual who was the subject of the complaint as well as faculty or other administrative leadership,” Conklin wrote to the News. “They are not available publicly given individuals’ right to privacy and the need to maintain the confidentiality of the process.”

Medved-Wu called the response “inadequate with no sense of urgency.” She and Richner-Maldonado also noted that Stanley and Latimore never followed up with them about a September 2019 climate assessment of the YCEI workplace, which was conducted by the School of Medicine’s Office of Academic and Professional Development in collaboration with OIEA in response to employee complaints and recent resignations.

Medved-Wu said that in her climate assessment interview with Latimore, Yale School of Medicine’s chief diversity officer, she was asked if there was anything she would change about YCEI or in general.

“I told him [Latimore] that I wished someone would design a new system at Yale specific to supporting employees from marginalized groups experiencing racial/gender-based discrimination and to be provided with a more efficient mediation process to hold perpetrators (of discrimination) accountable for their actions,” Medved-Wu wrote to the News in an email.

Both Richner-Maldonado — former YCEI director of technology and communications — and Medved-Wu said that they had limited knowledge of the OIEA and the complaint process during their time of employment. Richner-Maldonado said that he would have utilized the OIEA resources and the ability “to talk through these complex issues” — if he had known that those resources existed. Neither Richner-Maldonado nor Medved-Wu remained in touch with Stanley after her August 2020 response.

In a phone interview with the News, Howard said he was “not concerned” about overlap between his role as a Deans’ Designee and his other positions, which include senior associate dean of Yale College and associate vice president of student life. He said in the event that there was a conflict of interest, he would recuse himself from the discrimination or harassment case. He added that students can go to any of the Deans’ Designees listed on the website.

Petersburg said that the GSA had been advocating for a University-wide ombuds office since 2017, but just as they had spoken with members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate and heard that a meeting would be set up in spring 2020, the onset of the pandemic interrupted their progress.

“There’s a very clear way the pandemic affected this,” Petersburg said, adding that he hoped these meetings could be rescheduled for some time this year.

Still, some students called for additional improvements to how the University thinks about and addresses racial discrimination and harassment.

For Sei, while it is important to have structures in place to address what he called “the big cases” of racial discrimination and harassment, he felt the conversation should shift to microaggressions students experience on a day-to-day basis.

“No one’s going to call you the N-word, no one’s going to do anything especially egregious,” Sei told the News. “But instead it can feel sometimes like a ‘death by a thousand cuts,’ like this is the little things that we interact with on the day-to-day. So in that regard, I definitely personally prioritize the microaggressions, just because that’s the kind of racism we experience.”

Sei said that possible solutions could be working towards making an environment where students feel comfortable to talk about these microaggressions with faculty members and emphasizing the sources of peer support.

Rhee called on the University administration to do better in understanding the experiences of Black, Indigenous and people of color on a local level and national scale.

“I feel like sometimes there’s kind of a demonstrated lack of awareness or lack of acknowledgement of a lot of traumatic things that have happened,” Rhee said. “Sometimes there’s no mention of obvious violence going on in the world and on campus, so more transparency about that. … There’s a lot of people on the admin talking about anti-Asian hate, and that’s been recognized as an event that’s happened recently. But that type of violence and vitriol is always present for Black and brown communities … so I think there’s a lot of recognition that still needs to be done.”

Zaporah Price | zaporah.price@yale.edu

Correction, April 14: The story has been updated to include that the OIEA active recruitment is currently happening and that the new hires will begin in early summer, according to Conklin. 

UP CLOSE | Teachers in a pandemic: Adapting and innovating in an unorthodox school year

Nine NHPS teachers spoke to the News about how they have adapted their teaching strategies to help students through an unexpected and prolonged period of remote learning.

Story by Christian Robles

Cover photo by Cassidy Arrington

Published on

Last March, High School in the Community math and statistics teacher Dorothy Cohen was trying to think about pie: finding sponsors to donate pies and looking for fun facts about pi. She was planning for her school’s upcoming Pi Day festivities, during which the class would get together to eat pie and attempt to recite digits of pi.

But 2020’s Pi Day celebration ended up being more of a challenge to carry out than any teacher had expected. Cohen had to balance a fun celebration with “all that talk” of a possible district-wide school closure.

On March 12, 2020, Cohen’s school entered what she described as “crisis mode,” when New Haven Public Schools officials announced that beginning the following day, the district’s schools were to close indefinitely due to “COVID-19 concerns,” a phrase that is ubiquitous now, but was anything but for Cohen and other NHPS teachers at the time.

For Marta Musial, a fourth-grade teacher at Conte West Hills Magnet School, the sudden shift to remote learning was jarring. In the two weeks following March 12, 2020, she said that teachers were “completely in the dark as to what was going to happen.”

Musial is one of nine NHPS teachers interviewed by the News about how they have adapted their teaching strategies to help students through an unexpected and prolonged period of remote learning.

Immediately after schools closed down, Musial resorted to sharing educational videos from YouTube, Netflix and other streaming platforms to fill in the gap. Even after she received guidelines from NHPS to push forward with remote instruction, she found it difficult to transition to a virtual setting, as she had previously relied on a learning centers-based approach — a method of education in which students engage in independent and self-directed activities. Continuing with this approach involved breakout rooms, which her students found difficult to maneuver, often returning to the main room before completing their activities.

A year later, teachers across NHPS like Cohen and Musial are still struggling to adapt to the challenges of the pandemic.

“The teachers are just burnt out,” said Dave Cicarella, who is the president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers and has taught in NHPS for over 40 years. “It’s just so much work to teach remotely … [teachers] much prefer to teach in school, but it’s gotta be safe. Remote learning is not something anyone enjoys.”

The rate of chronic absenteeism among district students has risen to 33.7 percent, the highest percentage since data was first collected in the 2014-15 school year. The number of students who failed five or more classes in the fall 2020 semester quadrupled in comparison to fall 2019.

All the teachers interviewed by the News said the breakdown in teacher-student interaction has also raised significant alarm. Teachers are often staring at blank screens, with little clue as to what their students are doing on the other side.

Over the course of a year, NHPS has taken actions to alleviate some of the pandemic-era problems that teachers and their students face. Superintendent Iline Tracey has worked to ensure that every NHPS student has access to an internet-connected device and the internet. The school district has launched the A.C.E. campaign, a team of volunteers who identify ways to provide support for families of students who sporadically attend classes.

Amid discussion between students, parents and officials on balancing the COVID-19 risks of reopening and the drawbacks of remote learning, NHPS students have been trickling back into the classroom since early this year. In January, elementary school students were allowed back to school for the first time since March 2020. In March, middle school students were offered the same opportunity, and by early April, high school students were finally back in schools.

But not all students have shifted into the hybrid model.

As of April 2, 2,270 high school students out of 5,681 — or about 40 percent — have opted to stay in the remote system, according to Michele Sherban, director of research, assessment and evaluation for NHPS. For middle and elementary school students, 5,205 out of 13,995 — or about 37.2 percent — have chosen the remote system.

The shift to hybrid learning has not meant an end to remote learning. Thousands of NHPS students — regardless of whether they are at home or in the classroom — continue to sign into their virtual Google Classrooms each day.

One year on from March 2020, many teachers are still struggling to teach dynamic lessons and keep their students engaged in school. Yet they have developed innovative solutions to their newfound challenges.

A timeline of NHPS reopening in 2020-2021. (Stephanie Shao, Production and Design Staffer)

‘There’s no playbook’: Teaching remotely

Cicarella often hears from NHPS teachers about the challenges they are facing. Throughout the pandemic, he has heard teachers talk about the difficulty of teaching concepts in a virtual setting. Teachers are navigating a sudden drastic shift in pedagogy made tougher by the lack of preexisting teaching and learning models amid a pandemic.

Cicarella said that while teachers have not lost the ability to teach lessons, remote learning is much more challenging than traditional in-person instruction. As the union president put it, “there’s no playbook” for teachers, no prior pre-pandemic model that teachers have been taught to follow.

Due to the lack of robust learning models, teachers across NHPS have had to innovate — adapting the way they teach to various types of remote learning.

Musial has adapted her teaching style to the pandemic by splitting her class time between group sessions and self-guided independent work, which replaced her individualized, centers-based approach. She described the transition as “a happy medium” because students retained the ability to choose what activities they wanted to engage in under her new plan. Despite her best efforts, the fourth-grade teacher said she has still seen her students fall behind in their education.

Some of Musial’s fourth graders have struggled to learn multiplication, a concept that she said they should have grasped by the end of third grade. Other students have not developed their grammar or vocabulary skills to what she believes to be a fourth-grade level.

But Musial told the News that her biggest challenge has been conducting standardized testing. This school year, she had to virtually administer Connecticut’s triennial Interim Assessment Block, or IAB, tests for math and English skills. She stated that it was difficult for some of her students to stay engaged while taking the test.

“In theater there’s stage right, stage left, stage down, stage up. In Zoom, everything is in our camera frame. You’re using the box, in a way, to express yourself as you would in a stage. … It’s a fight, there’s a lot of hesitance about [performing virtually].”

—Matt Young, theater teacher at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School

A host of technological challenges contribute to the learning loss and testing woes that Musial described. Musial said that many of her students have been uncomfortable using computers to write their assignments because they are used to writing out their work by hand. She added that it is also difficult to know what exactly her students are doing during class unless she asks them to share their computer screen. Even then, some of Musial’s students are either too shy or too embarrassed to share their screens.

Matt Young, a theater teacher at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School, has found it difficult to bring theater into a virtual space.

“In theater there’s stage right, stage left, stage down, stage up,” Young said. “In Zoom, everything is in our camera frame. You’re using the box, in a way, to express yourself as you would in a stage. … It’s a fight, there’s a lot of hesitance about [performing virtually].”

Young told the News that during the first two weeks of the school shutdown, the arts sat dormant as in-person activities were suddenly canceled. After NHPS guidance was handed down at the end of March, he used Google Classroom to teach his classes.

However, NHPS does not require its students to have their videos on during class. For Young, this means that traditional theater exercises — such as mirroring, which is based on physical movement and response to it — are no longer feasible. He decided to focus primarily on lessons on the power of the actor’s voice. For example, Young assigned his class of mostly fifth graders monologues for them to develop so that they could discover themselves.

As time has passed, some of Young’s students have become more comfortable with turning on their cameras more frequently. But others are still struggling to meaningfully participate in class.

Young said that low student engagement in virtual learning makes it hard to create safe learning environments where students “surprise [themselves] every day” by going out of their comfort zone.

For Steven Baumann, an eighth-grade science teacher at Conte West, science education has its own host of problems, beginning with the loss of in-person instruction, as students can no longer participate in in-person labs.

Baumann typically has his class interact through Google Docs, watch short videos and read through an online textbook. Sometimes, he uses computer simulations to replace traditional experiments — some particularly useful resources have come from PHET, PBS and NASA.

“[I’m] still nowhere near where I wanna be,” Baumann said. “I’d much rather have kids spend more time trying to figure out science instead of just looking at the results.”

A false dawn? Switching to a hybrid model

Under NHPS’ hybrid reopening guidelines, pre-K to fifth grade students are currently allowed back to school for in-person learning for four days a week. Students in grades six through 12 are only allowed back to school twice a week and are divided into two cohorts. Due to cohorting and the availability of a remote learning choice, NHPS teachers are often teaching both an in-person and virtual pool of students at the same time, which presents additional instructional challenges. And Cicarella said there are only a few teachers who have an aide to help them teach both student pools.

Teachers like Baumann are not entirely sure what hybrid learning means for their instruction, because it does not change the fact that multiple students are logged in remotely each day. Baumann said that the instruction plans he used during the remote learning period have not changed as a result.

“How am I going to change my engagement with the 10 students in front of me in the classroom yet I still have another 62 students on remote? … I haven’t figured it out,” Baumann told the News.

He did note that he could monitor his students and engage with them a little more when they are there in person.

Baumann’s colleague at Conte West, Musial, did not report making any drastic changes to her instruction either. She said that she projects her whiteboard onto the Google Classroom screen just as she did in remote learning. The main difference, she said, is that she can now walk around the classroom and physically monitor her students.

Myles Ross, a music teacher at Worthington Hooker School, is another teacher who has returned to class for hybrid instruction. He agrees with both of the Conte West teachers that it is very difficult to balance both the hybrid and in-person cohorts. He added that he is happy to see his old students in person again and that he could tell that they were happy to see each other as well. The in-person hybrid instruction has made his students more engaged with their school work and made it easier for him to teach music content, Ross said.

“How am I going to change my engagement with the 10 students in front of me in the classroom yet I still have another 62 students on remote? … I haven’t figured it out.”

—Steven Baumann, eighth-grade science teacher at Conte West

Reconnecting: How to keep students engaged, foster social-emotional health

A year into the pandemic, Ross and other teachers continue battling to keep their students engaged in school work.

“You see a steep decrease in students wanting to have their cameras on [as you move up in grade levels], which I’ve found ultimately ties to the level of engagement,” Ross said. “A lot of times you’re just talking to an avatar on the screen.”

However, the Worthington Hooker teacher and four others have found some ways to increase student engagement: give students autonomy and choice, don’t treat remote learning like “business as usual” and get students moving.

Ross tries to maximize student interaction as much as possible, which often means allowing students to dictate what occurs in the classroom.

Each week, Ross accepts “song of the day” requests from students, which his students enjoy and he incorporates into his lessons. One school day, a student pitched a “song of the day” and performed it on the guitar for his peers to hear, which Ross believes encourages his students to engage more actively with music. The Worthington Hooker teacher also makes it a point to stop in the middle of class and ask his students how they feel about the topic at hand. Ross said that these types of changes require a little more effort on the teacher’s part but go a long way in keeping students engaged.

Ross added that it is also important to “not treat business as usual.” He added that this means giving students ample opportunity for breaks.

Musial, the Conte West fourth-grade teacher, similarly incorporates brain breaks and other fun activities into her lessons. She includes read-alouds of books, virtual field trips, streams of silly videos and rounds of the icebreaker game This or That. Musial said that her small departures from traditional lesson plans are necessary because her students would rather be playing games like Among Us and Roblox than paying attention in class.

Marianne Maloney, a math teacher at New Haven Academy and chief steward of the NHFT, uses a similar strategy, often starting classes with non-academic questions, like how students are feeling and what they plan to do during spring break.

“We’ve been told [at teacher training] to try to include our dogs on cameras so that it seems more personable to the kids,” Maloney said. “To possibly share our own situation with them a little bit. To just try to have personable conversations and not just head directly into the curriculum.”

Lindsey Witte, a physical education teacher at Elm City Montessori School, has worked diligently to keep her students moving in both remote and hybrid instruction.

At the beginning of the school year, Witte acknowledged that not all of her students owned the PE essentials — a soccer ball and a basketball — so she had to get creative, adapting ideas from preexisting online resources.

In one lesson, Witte had her students take a pair of socks to make a sock ball that they used to practice throwing and kicking. In another lesson, she had students use plastic grocery bags to practice juggling. She said that these ideas helped keep her students engaged in physical activity during ECMS’ remote learning period.

Musial agreed, explaining that she gives students time to do jumping jacks and lunges to get them moving and out of their seats.

And Betsy Ross theater teacher Young — one of few teachers in NHPS who has an aide in the classroom to assist with hybrid learning — said that he was able to play a game of “Sound Ball,” an icebreaker game in which students stand in a circle and throw an imaginary ball, on one of his first few days back to school for hybrid instruction. He said that the activity helped students “shake it out” and mentally prepare for the day’s lesson.

But Witte’s students returned to the classroom in November, two months before the first batch of public school students was allowed back to school: ECMS is the district’s charter school and did not have to follow NHPS’ reopening guidelines.

Under hybrid learning, the PE teacher has focused a lot on being outside, which her students have enjoyed.

“They do lessons outside, kids eat lunch outside, their recess is outside,” Witte said. “For 50 percent of the day, kids [at ECMS] are outside, which made it possible to come back at such a full capacity.”

NHFT advocacy

New Haven Federation of Teachers President Cicarella said that the union’s position on school reopening has always been that the buildings had to be ready with adequate COVID-19 safety measures and proper infrastructure before students and teachers returned to classrooms.

During the summer of 2020, union leadership did not feel that school buildings were prepared for in-person learning, so they worked with district officials to implement policy changes.

Due to the pandemic, NHPS leaders decided that all schools should have MERV 13 air filters, which are more efficient at catching potentially hazardous airborne particles than other air filters. However, as recently as February, not all schools had installed those filters. In response to the revelation, NHFT worked with the district to develop a new system to keep track of air filter maintenance, which includes having school custodians sign off on the date when filters are changed. With union support, the district also decided to permanently close the physical West Rock and Quinnipiac Schools, two NHPS schools with aging infrastructure and poor ventilation.

NHFT also successfully advocated for teachers to receive a three-hour work period on Wednesdays to catch up on lesson planning and grading.

The union has also provided surgical face masks and sanitizing wipes to all building stewards in the district. Cicarella said that the union’s work on this front is important because he never wants a situation in which a teacher needs a face mask for their student but does not have one. Cicarella added that the NHFT also sends building stewards N95 face masks upon request.

Similar challenges from Yale students in teaching roles

Yale students serving in mentorship roles with NHPS students also encountered similar challenges to those faced by regular public school teachers: issues with technology, recruitment difficulties and low student engagement.

Danielle Castro ’23 is a Dwight Hall public school intern who works with the Fair Haven School community to provide additional tutoring services for students in an after-school tutoring program for Spanish-speaking English Language Learning students, a student demographic that has particularly struggled during the pandemic. The program matches 22 Yale tutors with about 20 Fair Haven students and meets twice a week.

Despite the challenges her team faces due to the pandemic, Castro has continued to be enthusiastic about finding new ways to supplement the work of Fair Haven’s teachers. Castro is currently working with a Fair Haven teacher to implement Lexia, an online program that gives students learning English personalized practice and support, for the upcoming fall semester. Castro said that the program would allow tutors to identify language-learning areas with the most potential for improvement.

Another student organization, CodeHaven, has worked to bring weekly computer science classes to New Haven classrooms across the city. In a typical year, Yale mentors would teach NHPS students about Scratch, a block-based visual programming language, in the fall, and MIT App Inventor, a website that allows students to create an Android/IOS application, in the spring. This year, mentors have switched to Scratch for the whole academic year.

CodeHaven mentors James Wang ’23 and Justin Chang ’23 both described to the News the challenges that come with teaching Scratch remotely. Chang said that some of his students have struggled to understand how to drag Scratch blocks across the screen.

“If you observe [the students] try it in person, it’s really easy to find out what the problem is,” Chang said. “If [the students] describe it purely over audio, then it might be a lot more difficult.”

Wang agreed and added that other issues, such as tardiness and slow internet connection, have made the 2020-21 school year difficult for mentors. Chang and Wang pointed out that in addition to technological issues, student engagement has been a constant battle.

Wang shared some of the strategies he has employed to keep students engaged, such as playing clean versions of songs by Canadian singer The Weeknd and casually conversing with students before class.

But both mentors said that even with their strategies, they have had to shift their expectations for students, which means not expecting the mentees to finish every single assignment. Still, they said they continue to support CodeHaven’s goal of instilling excitement for computer science in NHPS students.

What a post-pandemic education system might look like

The yearlong experiment with remote learning in NHPS and across the country has raised questions about what a post-pandemic education system will look like.

High School in the Community math teacher Cohen told the News that while the pandemic has been hard for her students, it has helped them become more independent and mature, which will help them succeed in college.

She also plans to keep using some online applications during the rest of the hybrid learning period and beyond, including Pear Deck, a platform she uses to field anonymous student responses to questions, and Screencastify, a software used to record video tutorials.

Worthington Hooker music teacher Ross also plans to carry over some programs into a post-pandemic world. Ross said that while music education is more effective in person because of its cooperative nature, the pandemic has allowed him to teach his students music production through a program called Soundtrap for the first time. He told the News that although it may not be a major component of his teaching, he will likely continue using Soundtrap even when students return to fully in-person instruction.

Conte West teacher Musial said that she and her team of fourth-grade teachers are thinking about continuing to use Google Classroom in the future to supplement in-person instruction. She said that she likes to have all of the students’ information available to her on Google Classroom rather than in a traditional paper portfolio. The virtual database of student information makes it easier for her to tell parents how their child is performing in class, she said, adding that parents are also able to see how their child is doing by logging into Google Classroom.

New virtual supplements for in-person instruction may not be the only innovation that carries over for years to come.

David Weinreb, magnet resource teacher at ECMS, deals with the charter’s school technology and coordinates community engagement, among other roles. He has noticed that new extracurricular activities have flourished under remote instruction.

Weinreb told the News that ECMS, Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School and Beecher School have created gay-straight alliances, or GSAs, during the pandemic. He noted that virtual meetings provide a greater sense of anonymity and safety, which allows more students to participate in clubs like GSA than if the meetings were in person.

The magnet resource teacher said he is impressed by what his colleagues have been able to achieve despite the changes the pandemic has presented.

“I’ve been amazingly impressed by the adaptability and flexibility of teachers … in making learning as accessible as possible. We have a lot of growing and learning to do,” Weinreb said.

Christian Robles | christian.robles@yale.edu

UP CLOSE | Socially distant science: How the School of Medicine adapted to research during a pandemic

Researchers and administrators have had to prioritize remote research, limit in-person activity and shift their focus to COVID-19-related topics over the course of the last year.

Story by Beatriz Horta

Cover photo by Hedy Tung

Published on April 9, 2021

On March 18, 2020, as the pandemic rapidly worsened, University Provost Scott Strobel announced that all non-essential medical research would be suspended and should be conducted remotely. Principal investigators, Yale School of Medicine administrators and students had to adapt to the unprecedented challenge of conducting research from home, or being present in the lab studying an unknown virus as it spread across the planet and killed millions.

“It was a really difficult work environment,” Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Anna Marie Pyle told the News. “[But] we didn’t consider ourselves unlucky, we felt really fortunate to have the privilege of being in a position to make a difference.”

Over the course of the last year, investigators have had to limit the number of people present in their labs at any given time, move most of their activities online and, for some, shift their research projects to focus on COVID-19.

The News spoke to administrators, faculty and students at the School of Medicine about changes in research during the pandemic and how they affected their research experiences — as trainees, leaders and scientists during a time when scientific knowledge is especially prominent. Many researchers described a feeling of pride in being able to contribute to the scientific knowledge which was essential to save lives.

“We all wanted to help understand how people’s immune system is responding to this virus infection and what goes wrong in those who develop severe and life threatening COVID,” Professor of Immunology Akiko Iwasaki wrote in an email to the News. 

“It was a really difficult work environment. [But] we didn’t consider ourselves unlucky, we felt really fortunate to have the privilege of being in a position to make a difference.”

—Anna Marie Pyle, Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Prioritizing remote research

As all non-essential research was moved online, scientists had to adapt their current projects to an online format, an undertaking that proved far easier for some than for others.

According to University Spokesperson Karen Peart, faculty had to submit safety plans developed to follow guidance from the University’s Environmental Health and Safety and COVID-19 Public Health committees. These plans were then approved by their departments in addition to the Dean’s and Provost’s offices.

Professor of Psychology Nicholas Turk-Browne explained that his work on patients already at YNHH — those undergoing surgery for epilepsy, for example — was able to continue since he was able to focus on the parts of his research that did not require bringing subjects into Yale’s campus.

However, since much of his pre-pandemic lab work did involve healthy human subjects, he suspended those studies for over four months, focusing mostly on data analysis and writing papers in the meantime.

“[Research on healthy subjects] would have required bringing people to the lab who had no other reason to be on campus during the early part of the pandemic, and then interacting with them in small rooms or at close range,” Turk-Browne wrote in an email to the News.

The focus on remote work was characteristic of most labs. All four of the PIs interviewed by the News said that a main change they implemented was reducing the number of people in the lab at any given moment. Many researchers set schedules in order to rotate between lab members working in person.

For undergraduate students, these changes meant that they were, for the most part, not allowed into the lab they were working in, since many of them performed tasks — such as data analysis — which could be done remotely. With the limit on the number of people allowed in the lab, PIs often prioritized those doing graduate work or who had essential roles requiring their presence in person.

This was disappointing and frustrating for people like Tai Michaels ’23, a research assistant in Iwasaki’s Lab, who had just started working at the lab.

“I joined the lab maybe two or three weeks before spring break,” Michaels said. “So I had just gotten started before everything went remote.”

Since the Iwasaki Lab was considered essential due to its focus on COVID-19 research, one of Michaels’ tasks is remotely analyzing the data that is collected on site by members of the lab.

According to Michaels, before COVID-19 restrictions were relaxed, he had never actually met most of the lab members he was working with. Now, he is able to go to the lab for short periods of time, but is still working mostly on his remote research.

“It was kind of a disconnected experience,” Michaels said. “I never saw anyone in the lab, but I was glad to be able to participate.”

According to Michaels, one of the benefits of working as a remote research assistant was getting involved in different areas of research which were not originally his focus. Michaels explained that during the summer, his work for the Iwasaki Lab focused on data analysis and bioinformatics, which he had never tried before.

Michaels believes that despite the unexpected turn of events in his lab experience, he was able to learn a new skill and contribute to the Iwasaki Lab at an important time — as Iwasaki herself has gained prominence for her COVID-19 research.

However, some labs were able to perform a larger proportion of in-person research. The Pyle Lab, which performs essential SARS-CoV-2 research, was able to maintain in-person activities throughout the pandemic.

“I did miss out on physically being in the lab. However, I gained so much through deeply reviewing the literature and building my computational research skills.”

—Kerrie Greene MED '27, Chair of the Department of Music

While adhering to strict safety precautions — such as a requirement for masks, surface decontamination and a rotating schedule of in-person lab members — PIs and students were present in the lab while most of the world remained under lockdown at the onset of the pandemic.

“We were able to have some control over the situation in a way, and most people didn’t,” Pyle said.

Similar to the Turk-Browne and Iwasaki labs, some projects not involving COVID-19 research in the Pyle lab had to be halted or moved online. According to Pyle, lab members working remotely prioritized bioinformatics projects, as well as writing papers and grants, since most of the lab projects required the use of equipment and in-person analyses.

Kerrie Greene MED ’27 explained that she elected to do her summer rotation — a requirement for all medical students — in the Iwasaki Lab remotely. According to her, the beginning of her research time coincided with the start of the pandemic, so her research experience at Yale has always been remote.

“I did miss out on physically being in the lab,” Greene wrote in an email to the News. “However, I gained so much through deeply reviewing the literature and building my computational research skills.”

Funding research

As researchers either pivoted to focus on COVID-19 or shifted their work online, they found themselves worried about funding and grants. The long wait periods for grant approval — between eight to 20 months — were the main source of preoccupation, due to the urgent need for knowledge about the virus, according to three principal investigators and Liliana Lucca, a post-doctoral student in the Department of Neurology.

The National Institutes of Health, the main source of funding for most researchers in the United States, provided expedited pathways for grant approval, as well as flexibility in using already-existing grants for COVID-19 research. When receiving NIH grants, researchers are allowed to redirect those funds into other projects with similar goals, which fit within the broad research lines described in the grant application.

According to Peart, while the turnaround time for grant application approval and manuscript publication has decreased amid the pandemic, the process has largely remained the same.

She also stated that the School of Medicine and the University provides its own funding for researchers. This included both “gap funding” for faculty at the beginning of their careers when the pandemic started — who usually devote more time to research as opposed to teaching or seeing patients — and funding specifically directed for researchers studying the novel coronavirus.

“Additional funding for COVID-19 related research was made available through a university-wide effort led by [School of Medicine Dean Nancy Brown] at the school of medicine,” Peart wrote in an email to the News.

Brown added that the School of Medicine has provided seed money for investigators within the first three years of joining the faculty, regardless of their field of study. Peart said this was a “unique investment related to the impact of COVID” but emphasized that there are “many mechanisms for supporting early-career investigators.”

Still, Peart stated that Yale-funded research grants did not prioritize COVID-focused research over other research focuses, though outside funding agencies might prioritize certain proposals during the pandemic.

She wrote that there was a “temporary dip” in the number of grant applications in the first quarter of 2020, but that overall in 2020 the University saw an increase of 26 percent in the number of grants from the number in 2019. From 2017 to 2019, the number of applications increased by six percent each year.

According to Pyle, many researchers had to use their discretionary accounts — funds raised by investigators that are not assigned to a specific project, and are therefore available for unrestricted use — and outside funding in order to support their projects.

“It’s been a bit of a sacrifice because we’ve had to spend precious funds on that work and have not been compensated for it,” Pyle said. “Despite what’s being said in the media, there’s very little funding for research because it’s a brand new virus.”

Even though there are many reports of large funding opportunities for coronavirus research, especially the bill proposed by the United States government, scientists around the world still struggle to find funding and use it to cover the expenses of essential COVID-19 research.

Assistant Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Immunobiology Craig Wilen explained that since the demand for COVID-19 research was high and there was a great sense of urgency amongst scientists, some researchers started projects before being sure of funding availability. 

He said that the low chance of being funded also encouraged researchers to look for sources of funding other than grants — from the School of Medicine or outside donors.

“I think there’s so much information we needed to look into, that we were hoping that the money would come later,” Wilen said. “[My lab was] fortunate enough to get foundation support and support from generous donors, through Yale, private foundations and targeted donors, and that really enabled us to make progress without having to worry about resources.”

“The scientific accomplishment, both the speed and volume, over this pandemic has been truly remarkable. My hope is that more people realize the importance of basic research and the need to invest in future research, in order to be better prepared for future pandemics.”

—Akiko Iwasaki, Professor of Immunology

An expedited publishing process

Two researchers also demonstrated concern for the expedited peer review processes of reputable journals, which had to be sped up and restructured due to the high volume and fast-paced production of coronavirus research.

According to Lucca, there was a “long line” of papers waiting to be published, and a “crowding” of journals with coronavirus research. This caused the researchers who were working on other topics to struggle to publish their findings, according to Lucca.

“This comes from a place of good intentions,” Lucca said. “But there have been a lot of COVID studies that have been retracted later on or whose analyses have been critiqued.”

Lucca also said that sometimes, peer reviewers for papers were only given a few days to review papers. as opposed to the several weeks they typically have.

According to Retraction Watch, over 100 papers related to coronavirus research have been retracted, worrying scientists around the world, as some retracted papers made their way into mainstream media and were widely propagated. The Scientist even generated a “Top Retractions of 2020” list, in an effort to emphasize the severity of the issue.

“That side of it has gone badly, in my opinion,” Pyle said. “There’s been a lot of fast publication of report and research, but then there’s also been a lot of bad papers slipped through the cracks.”

Despite these challenges, Peart satiated that there has been an increase in publications by the University’s faculty members of 26 percent. By comparison, the net increase in the two previous years was only 6 percent per year.

Even though the fast-tracking of paper revisions poses issues to the quality of papers published, Iwasaki believes speed in the communication of new scientific knowledge is essential.

“We are able to communicate what we are learning in real time through Twitter and preprint servers, as well as more main stream media,” Iwasaki wrote to the News. 

According to Peart, many faculty members have used preprint servers like bioRxiv and medRxiv to publish their findings more quickly.

Wilen also mentioned that Yale’s hiring freeze implemented on April 7 represented a challenge to PIs who were unable to hire new students and lab members. This restriction, in conjunction with the personnel safety restrictions in place within labs, meant that in-person lab members were under increased stress.

Pivoting research focus

Many basic science laboratories — which do not perform clinical research — were working on viral genome and immunobiology research prior to the pandemic. Once COVID-19 hit, they pivoted their research projects to focus on coronavirus research. Researchers told the News they felt a responsibility to contribute to the knowledge surrounding the novel virus.

The Pyle Lab’s previous research focused on viral RNA and viral genomes, which permitted them to transition their established projects into studying the coronavirus genome and structure.

“Given that it was simple for us to make a few changes in our workflow and sort of address really fundamental problems to understand coronavirus biology,” Pyle explained. “We just decided that it’s the responsible thing to do.”

Researchers such as Wilen also started unique projects designed to address specific issues brought on by the pandemic. For example, the Yale IMPACT team, led by Iwasaki and Albert Ko — of which Wilen was also a member — created a biorepository for COVID-19 samples to be available for researchers. The project spanned a few months and collected samples in partnership with New Haven citizens, health care workers and patients.

According to Iwasaki, medical students in her lab also created a group called Spike Support, which focused on giving Zoom seminars to educate citizens across the United States about the vaccines.

“Transitioning to work on COVID has been truly transformative for me and my lab,” Iwasaki wrote in an email to the News. “The incredible hard work of people in my lab has produced so much important knowledge in such a short time.”

According to Peart, some faculty members expanded the scope of their research in order to accommodate COVID-19 related projects when the pandemic began. This research was supported by the additional funds provided by Brown or by previously-approved grants.

Long-term impacts

“I think that going forward there is going to be public support for directing more funds to basic biology so that we understand new types of viruses. We should know more about all these different classes of viruses, so that when one of them becomes really pathogenic like this we have some idea about what to do.”

—Anna Marie Pyle, Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Iwasaki believes that the level of scientific knowledge produced during the pandemic should bring more attention to the importance of basic, non-clinical scientific research.

According to her, the “decades” of basic research dedicated to immunology, virology and vaccines enabled the development of COVID-19 vaccines in such a short timeline and with such high effectiveness.

“The scientific accomplishment, both the speed and volume, over this pandemic has been truly remarkable,” Iwasaki wrote. “My hope is that more people realize the importance of basic research and the need to invest in future research, in order to be better prepared for future pandemics.

Iwasaki also emphasized the transition to online tools, such as Zoom, for meetings which have enabled communication between scientists all over the world and the sharing of their expertise. She believes this practice could be one of the legacies of the pandemic which will improve research in the future.

According to Pyle, one of the positive effects of the pandemic for biomedical research was the media attention and global interest in viral research, which according to her was previously focused on the human immunodeficiency virus.

“I think that going forward there is going to be public support for directing more funds to basic biology so that we understand new types of viruses,” Pyle said. “We should know more about all these different classes of viruses, so that when one of them becomes really pathogenic like this we have some idea about what to do.”

Brown agreed, saying that the pandemic has “brought home” the importance of scientific discovery in ways that will continue even when it ends. The pandemic has stimulated collaboration between labs across the world and highlighted the legacy of innovative research in biomedical science.

“We have RNA vaccines today because of research done years ago,” Brown wrote in an email to the News.

 

Beatriz Horta | beatriz.horta@yale.edu

UP CLOSE | How a reshaped music major is influencing accessibility, depth and perspective

Since changes to Yale College’s music major were unveiled in 2018, students and faculty evaluate how the changes have shaped music at Yale and whether they are here to stay.

Story by Marisol Carty

Cover photo by Zoe Berg

Published on April 7, 2021

Music is one of humans’ greatest tools of communication and methods of interaction. But the classical music taught and performed at established programs including the Yale Department of Music has long maintained a Western European focus — failing to capitalize on the cultural connections that can be mediated through studying music outside of this canon, according to professor of music Brian Kane.

But in recent years, nationwide movements like Black Lives Matter have led to increased calls on musical institutions to improve diversity and equity within their curriculums and performance repertoire by raising questions of why academia and, specifically the arts, lack representation and diversity.

Spurred by these questions, the Department of Music developed new requirements for the music major that were implemented in 2017 and 2018. These amended requirements — aimed to increase accessibility to the major and the field, as well as diversify the program beyond its focus on Western art music — would first apply to the class of 2020.

“I think the whole classical art community has gone through a reckoning,” music major Lisl Wangermann ’21 said. “[After the killing of] George Floyd, every art organization has looked at their repertoire and their seasons and their boards and the people in charge.”

The previous music major requirements included four mandatory music theory courses — MUSI 210, 211, 218 and 219 — as well as four specific music history courses, alongside other requirements. Now, instead of specific courses, the major requires students to take classes within four broader categories in the department: popular music, vernacular music or music of non-Western traditions; composition and performance; music theory; or the Western art music tradition.

The music department also now offers more specialized courses that allow students to fulfill their requirements, including MUSI 232, “Central Javanese Gamelan Ensemble,” and MUSI 207, “Commercial and Popular Music Theory.”

Ian Quinn, former director of undergraduate studies and current chair of the Department of Music, said that though these changes had been “a long time coming,” the sociopolitical climate on campus in 2017 marked a “decisive moment” for these amendments. At this time, the university was considering renaming Calhoun College, because the college’s namesake, former vice president John C. Calhoun, defended slavery. The college is now Grace Hopper College.

Since their introduction in 2018, department leadership hope these curricular changes have impacted the study of music for Yale college students in four main ways: accessibility, perspective, specialization and increasing diversity and representation.

Still, the room for the department to grow in terms of its non-Western offerings has not gone unnoticed by students. Alex Whittington ’22 said that the music major remains largely centered around the Western art music tradition — especially since all courses that do not belong to the Western canon are relegated to ‘Group IV’ of the major.

Whittington noted that though the course offerings are expanding and some core classes like the music history sequence ask students to evaluate the contents of the courses themselves, “the path to a degree is still very much paved by Western art music.”

Music Department Director of Undergraduate Studies Anna Zayaruznaya said that the department has been looking to bring in more faculty specializing in ethnomusicology and music of the world, but hiring freezes instated due to the pandemic have delayed these plans.

“I found myself wondering, why am I trying to force this specific sound world on them? Why do I need to go so far out of my way to get them to write a string quartet minuet that sounds like Mozart instead of Beethoven, when there are much broader, more compelling musical questions to be addressed?”

—Ian Quinn, Chair of the Department of Music

Improving accessibility

In their first year of college, bassoonist and music major Marty Tung ’21 enrolled in the music theory course MUSI 210, “Elementary Studies in Analysis & Composition I.” Yet with a limited background in musical theory, Tung found the course more challenging than expected.

“They started talking about a ‘cantus firmus,’ and I had no idea what that was,” Tung said, laughing. “I think most instrumentalists are expected to have a grasp on theoretical concerns — but that’s not always the case.”

Zayaruznaya did not think it necessary for the major to require difficult entry level requirements, specifically MUSI 210 and MUSI 211. As part of the new changes, these courses are available to students in certain semesters but no longer required for majors.

“Often you’ll get an advanced seminar that actually doesn’t really need the skills from 210 and  211,” Zayaruznaya said. “So what’s the point of requiring that? Advanced classes aren’t necessarily just advanced because they require prior knowledge.”

The department’s new major requirements aim to make music courses more accessible to students from all backgrounds, according to Quinn. With a diversification of Yale’s student population in the past decades, increasing numbers of students come to college interested in music but lacking prior training in Western music theory or history, he said. To adapt to students’ changing needs and differing levels of prior knowledge, the music department now offers more fundamental courses in music theory, some of which are grounded in non-Western musical traditions.

Quinn and Tung noted that in the past, some Yale music theory courses presupposed a familiarity with the Western musical canon, which created an imbalance in the classroom and drove away students with no prior experience in studying music.

“I found myself wondering, why am I trying to force this specific sound world on them?” Quinn asked. “Why do I need to go so far out of my way to get them to write a string quartet minuet that sounds like Mozart instead of Beethoven, when there are much broader, more compelling musical questions to be addressed?”

When she began her music theory courses, vocalist Maryanne Cosgrove ’21 initially felt she had to work harder than her classmates who came equipped with rigorous instrumental training.

“Even though I felt like I had a really good music exposure, I didn’t quite realize the population that I would be compared against at Yale and the kind of resources that they had,” Cosgrove said.

Now, students can choose from a variety of music theory courses besides Western music theory. The department also continues to introduce new courses — such as Quinn’s “MUSI 100, “Melody, Rhythm and Notation in Global Context”— in which students learn music by singing repetitively and study an alternative musical notation developed by Quinn.

“They started talking about a ‘cantus firmus,’ and I had no idea what that was. I think most instrumentalists are expected to have a grasp on theoretical concerns — but that’s not always the case.”

—Marty Tung '21

The material in new courses like MUSI 100 is generally unfamiliar to all students, which allows classmates to enter the course on the same base level of musical knowledge, Quinn previously told the News.

But according to composer and violist Jacob Miller ’22, these changes may have made music courses more appealing to students in other majors rather than increase accessibility for music majors. Miller noted that to an extent, classes within the major are inaccessible because they require a background in music theory, which is similar to higher level courses with prerequisites in other majors.

Zayaruznaya said that she has no concern over the major losing its rigor, since students will be more enthusiastic if they are able to choose a course they are passionate about from a wider set of options.

“For music majors, it’s nice to see the music we take seriously, independent of our music education, get represented more in the required curriculum,” Miller said, citing genres including EDM and early jazz.

Introducing different perspectives

The music major’s new course offerings and requirements also strive to expose music students to musical traditions from around the globe, although some say the department does not go far enough.

Quinn said that exposure to music from various places and periods offers a “rigorous challenge” for students studying music. Just as learning a new language can inform a person about another culture’s mentality, studying music from different regions can “expand the limits of musicians’ minds” and change the ways they think about music.

“The world is a big place and time is very long, and to reach out from the very small area that Western classical music covers is a challenge for anybody who does it — and a very rewarding one,” Quinn said.

For example, unlike Western music, Javanese Gamelan — a type of Indonesian traditional ensemble music made up primarily of percussive instruments — is not based on written musical notation. The department offers a class on this type of music: MUSI 232, “Central Javanese Gamelan Ensemble.”

“Music was mostly learned orally, and it’s only sort of recently that notation has become a widely accepted way of learning music,” Tung explained.

Wangermann, who studies opera, took a class called MUSI 491, “Musical Afrofuturisms” to fulfill one of her requirements. She said she had never heard the term “Afrofuturism” before taking class, which was first offered in fall 2020. After taking it, she explained that Afrofuturist artists “mix timelines in order to change or redefine stereotypical narratives surrounding the African continent and people of the African diaspora.”

“I don’t know if I will ever be a part of an Afrofuturist opera, but it definitely informs the way I look at art,” Wangermann said. “I think as musicians we tend to specify and focus on what we want to do early. If you want to compose, you focus on composing; if you want to sing opera, you focus on singing opera. A lot of times, the other opportunities in the world can pass you by because you’re so focused on what you’re trying to do. I think being forced to take the time to expose yourself to new things is really important, and it’s really great that it’s built into this major.”

Wangermann added that being required to study music of different origins is not only important for a musician’s study on the “micro level of classical music,” the focus of most traditional music programs, but also on a “macro level” of human experience.

“Having a broader perspective and learning more about things that [we] don’t immediately understand is incredibly important in this very polarized society that we live in,” Wangermann said. “The more I understand about different types of people or people who have a different experience than I do, the better I am at empathizing with others and talking to people with different perspectives.”

Depth and breadth: Impacts on specialization

Within the music major, students are now offered a wider variety of topics to study, from a broader array of introductory courses to highly specialized upper-level seminars.

According to music professor Brian Kane, this expansion of courses gives students more opportunities to direct their personal musical paths, in contrast with the music major’s earlier requirements that heavily emphasized training in Western classical music.

“Now, we’re much more interested in breadth, and then people can specialize in the way they want to,” Kane said. “It allows people to come through and figure out what they need to study music in a way that’s going to be robust and interesting for them and help carry them on into whatever pursuits they do. We don’t push people into particular channels as much as in the past.”

As an option for students to study a form of music outside of the Western classical tradition, Kane and professor Michael Veal introduced two new historical survey courses on jazz music that majors can use to fulfill a music history requirement. Kane teaches MUSI 380, “Jazz in America, 1900-1960,” and Veal teaches MUSI 381, “Jazz in Transition, 1960-2000.”

“We have room for anybody who’s really interested in studying music with intensity, thought and depth,” Kane said.

But expanding the range and breadth of courses also has a downside. According to music major and peer tutor for the introductory music theory sequence Dani Zanuttini-Frank ’22, encouraging students to take a diverse range of courses can actually diminish students’ ability to specialize. Because the major offers introductory courses on a wider range of topics, students are more disposed to gain a basic knowledge of diverse topics rather than specialize in a single area.

Zanuttini-Frank said that in expanding its array of courses, he feels that the department is providing fewer opportunities for students who share one of his areas of interest — traditional Western music theory — to specialize in the field or gain in-depth knowledge.

Zayaruznaya said that despite some courses not being offered in certain semesters, no course in the department has been removed from the curriculum. She added that with the new major, students can choose to either go for breadth or to specialize.

Quinn echoed Zanuttini-Frank’s statement, saying that demanding breadth in students’ courses of study was a way the department intended to make the curriculum more equitable. Yet he added that in coming years, the department will offer new courses that will be open to qualified undergraduates alongside graduate students — some of which will be upper level music theory courses.

“Music is in every culture. Every culture has got its musical practices. And even within any national or regional context, there is a whole diversity of musical practices. Music can do work that other forms of discourse can’t do.”

—Brian Kane, professor of music

Diversity and representation beyond departmental offerings

Amid recent racial justice protests, music curriculums and performance groups have also begun to make stronger efforts to diversify their musical repertoires. 

Changes in music curriculums have effects that go beyond improving students’ musical skill, Quinn said. According to him, part of the department’s intention behind changing the major’s requirements was to make the major more representative of the “student body as a whole.”

“All of us — performers and audiences — benefit when the music we explore is as diverse as the world we live in,” Glee Club Director Jeffrey Douma, who works with many students in the Department of Music, said. “We have a lot of work to do in the world of choral music, but I think we are seeing a true recognition in our field that we must study and perform a broader and more diverse range of voices.”

Wangermann, who was part of the Opera Theatre of Yale College before graduating last fall semester, said that to ensure the lasting impact of curricula and repertoire changes, the effort must extend beyond departmental offerings.

“Smaller arts organizations need to be on the forefront of making this change,” Wangermann said. “We have the resources, we have the dedication, we have the motivation to make a positive change in the way that classical music works. It’s really important that art represents or reflects the audience. And that starts with what you produce and what you create.”

In exposing musicians to diverse curricula and musical traditions, Kane sees the means to create both better musicians and better humans. Kane explained that since music is an essential characteristic of human nature, exposure to a diverse array of music theory, history and performance is necessary to inculcate better informed attitudes in people.

“Music is in every culture,” Kane said. “Every culture has got its musical practices. And even within any national or regional context, there is a whole diversity of musical practices. Music can do work that other forms of discourse can’t do.”

Marisol Carty | marisol.carty@yale.edu

 

Correction, April 7: Due to  a copy editing error, a previous version of the story incorrectly stated Marty Tung’s first name. The story has been updated.

Vaccine Hesitancy Isn't the Whole Story

When it comes to Black communities in New Haven and COVID-19 vaccination, the problem of vaccine inequity is larger than vaccine hesitancy.

Story by Marie Sanford

Illustration by Dora Guo

Photos by Regina Sung

Published on March 14, 2021

On Feb. 5, I listened in as members of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ bantered about the impending snowstorm. From the comfort of their homes, they asked about each other’s days, shared how their family members were doing and complained about laying salt and shoveling snow. I was a newcomer, but the group quickly embraced me, asking how I was doing and how I was related to the church. I was there, I said, to talk to them about their thoughts on the COVID-19 vaccine.

The 20 or so congregants had been gathering over Zoom as part of the church’s wellness series for months now. Senior Pastor Frederick Streets, a longtime New Haven resident, said the church leadership was inspired to organize the Zoom series once it became clear that traditional Sunday services could no longer fully engage the community. He sought a different way to increase social connectedness.

Beyond fellowship, the meetings became a place to share COVID-19 updates. The church invited public health experts, such as New Haven Health Department Director Maritza Bond and her staff, to the meetings, where they personally addressed questions about the virus — and more recently, the vaccine.

On the evening I attended the weekly Zoom, Connecticut’s vaccine rollout was already underway. Those who were vaccine-eligible described their ease in registering for vaccination. One member reported, “I called on a Friday afternoon, and I got an appointment for Monday.” Other congregants expressed doubt about the vaccine’s efficacy due to its swift development, a concern that prompted murmurs of agreement among the attendees.

(Frederick Streets)

According to a January 2021 report by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, 43 percent of Black Americans said they would “wait and see” if offered the COVID-19 vaccine — the highest percentage of any racial group. The same study found that only 3 percent of Black Americans had received at least one dose of the vaccine, the lowest percentage of any racial group. Current Connecticut statistics report that, as of March 8, only 6.1 percent of non-Hispanic Black residents 16 years and older have been fully vaccinated compared to 14.1 percent of white residents in the same age group.

Lower vaccination rates within Black communities are often attributed to vaccine hesitancy. However, health equity experts point out that vaccine hesitancy isn’t the whole story. In New Haven, and nationwide, structural racism contributes not only to medical distrust but also to a lack of vaccine access and information within Black communities.

SYSTEMIC MEDICAL RACISM

Vaccine hesitancy can partially be explained by deep-rooted mistrust borne from repeated instances of medical racism, according to Jessica Cerdeña, an M.D. and Ph.D. student in medical anthropology at the Yale School of Medicine and researcher on race and racism in medicine. 

“If you were to go and talk to a typical medical professor and say, ‘Do you think about patients differently because of their race?’ they would say, ‘No, that’s racist,’” Cerdeña said. “But if you go through their lecture slides, if you go through their case studies, you’ll see consistent patterns by which patients are thought about differently because of their race.”

Cerdeña raised the example of focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), a kidney disease for which being Black or Hispanic is commonly thought to be a risk factor. When a Black or Hispanic patient comes in with excessive protein or blood in their urine, Cerdeña said, a doctor has been conditioned to assume that they have FSGS. As a result, doctors are more likely to falsely diagnose them with FSGS and overlook their true medical problem. The deeper problem is that the assumption is substantiated by the falsehood that race is a biological category instead of a “socio-political category” that was “developed to justify political prerogatives,” Cerdeña said.

These “political prerogatives” started centuries ago, Cerdeña explained. Doctors on ships that transported captured Africans conducted invasive medical exams and procedures that were intended to increase their economic value. In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service began administering false syphilis treatment to 600 Black men, 399 of whom had the disease, in the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” For over 40 years, they studied the disease’s progression and even withheld penicillin after it became the known cure. This evidence of abuse at the hands of U.S. federal agencies is widely cited as an explanation for the African American community’s distrust of health care.

“We remember the past… but we don’t live [in the past]. It’s historical for us: It makes us vigilant, but it doesn’t make us stupid.”

—Rev. Leroy Perry

Cases of racist medical abuse persist in contemporary times. This past December, Indiana resident Dr. Susan Moore died after her case of COVID-19 was not taken seriously by white physicians within the Indiana hospital system. The story caught the attention of national media outlets only after Moore posted her personal testimony to social media. 

New Haven is no different. According to Doris Dumas, president of the Greater New Haven NAACP, New Haven was vulnerable far before the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost 10 years ago, the Greater New Haven NAACP published its “Urban Apartheid Report,” which outlined what Dumas called “the two New Havens.” 

Dumas said that New Haven COVID-19 death rates are currently 25 to 50 percent higher in Black and brown communities than in white communities. “We can pinpoint the red areas where there are the highest numbers,” said Dumas. “Certainly, we are advocating that our communities need to be a priority with as many people having access to getting the vaccine and having information about the vaccine.”

Tackling hard topics like the Tuskegee experiment is an integral part of discussions surrounding mistrust within the community, said Dumas. “We see a lot of [mistrust], and it’s justified,” Dumas said. However, Dumas was optimistic that mistrust can be curbed. “I think you combat it with having as many conversations, forums and discussions on the facts,” she said. “And also not just [dismissing] concerns, but [addressing] them and [letting] people know that there’s a long dark history with this and it’s real in our community.”

CONTEMPORARY HEALTH CARE PRACTICES

Dr. Keith Churchwell, president of Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH), said the key to fostering community trust is taking a more aggressive stance on sustained care after inpatient treatment. According to Churchwell, YNHH has prioritized equity by emphasizing the patient’s “overall symptomatology” over “the subjective evaluation of a clinician or nurse.” As a result, during the COVID-19 pandemic, YNHH rates of morbidity and mortality for African American and Latino inpatients have actually matched or been less than the rest of the population, Churchwell said.

However, extending care into the patient’s everyday life is not the hospital’s expertise, he said. “How do we address not only the issues of [a Black patient’s] acute medical illness, but all the [social determinants of health] that we know have an impact on their medical issues?” Churchwell asked. “We, in the past, did not address that to the degree that it needs to be addressed.” 

(Regina Sung)

Tackling this key question is also a concern for medical researchers at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI), a program for clinical research that aspires to improve patient care. The YCCI began their Cultural Ambassadors program in 2010 as an effort to increase the number of people of color participating in clinical trials. Tesheia Johnson, director and chief operating officer of YCCI, described the program as a “bi-directional partnership,” with the communities it supports being equal partners in the planning process.

Cultural ambassadors, who serve as “expert resources” for the program, hail from the AME Zion Church and Junta for Progressive Action, the oldest Latino community-based nonprofit in New Haven. “It’s been this great relationship that we’ve had over the years and they really have made a huge difference in the clinical research at Yale,” said Johnson. Before the pandemic, Johnson said, over 30 percent of total participation came from minority groups. When the Cultural Ambassadors were specifically engaged in a study’s design, that percentage ranged from 40 percent to 90 percent.

Onyema Ogbuagu, associate professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, is a principal investigator on several COVID-19 clinical trials through YCCI and a close cultural ambassador collaborator. When it comes to vaccine development, “The question most people ask is, ‘Did they include people like me?’” he said. “That could mean either people like me, meaning my race or ethnicity, or people like me, meaning my comorbidity or medical history profile.” The Cultural Ambassadors program, then, aims to be a bridge between under-represented minority communities in New Haven and research programs whose positive impact on those communities hinges on their participation in studies — including recent vaccine trials. 

AGE AS A FACTOR

Ogbuagu noted that when engaging people in clinical trials, a “huge currency” is “established trust and credibility.” Within minority communities, this trust appeared decidedly skewed towards older individuals. “In some way, I find that the older people tend to be a little more trusting of the system than younger individuals,” said Ogbuagu. “I’m not sure if it’s trust that’s derived from wisdom or past experience.” 

He noted that this observation among minorities was from his Yale-affiliated point of view. “It’s hard because I think that the key people we interacted with were some of the cultural ambassadors,” said Ogbuagu. “So these guys have had a much more long-term relationship with the research program.”

“We don’t have the privilege of saying we can just wait this out because it’s affecting us in such a radical way, more so than our counterparts.”

—Rev. Leroy Perry

His observation was seconded by the Rev. Leroy Perry, pastor of St. Stephens AME Zion Church and a longtime cultural ambassador. Perry has observed varying levels of trust within different age groups of his constituents. “I think that elderly people in the African American community have shown that they are willing to take this vaccine, and it has nothing to do with a medical apartheid,” he said.

“You have younger kids who are in elementary school and grade school who are saying, ‘Grandma and grandpa, mommy, I want to take the shots so we can go back to going to school every day and having life as normal.’” He continued, “Then you have another group of people who are somewhere in between that, the late 20s to mid-50s population, who are saying, ‘I want to wait and see, I don’t really know, I don’t really trust them.’”

This “wait and see” approach among the young adult cohort makes sense to Ogbuagu, who noted that the “hesitance” we are observing in young people “may not necessarily be reflective of frank reluctance to take the vaccine.” Rather, the priority groups in vaccine rollout may be a “systemic way of telling young people you’re not a priority.”

Ogbuagu said that the priority groups aren’t misguided, but they certainly don’t encourage a hesitant young person to go out of their way to get the vaccine. “Because of the disproportionate impact [COVID-19] is having on older individuals, you can imagine that an individual’s personal risk assessment — ‘What’s my risk of getting COVID-19 and dying?’ — is a very different calculation for a young individual than an older individual,” said Ogbuagu. “And in some sense you could argue, if you perceive yourself to be a young person at the lower risk, it’s not the worst idea to want to delay the vaccine to have more people take it, if you’re concerned about safety.” 

This personal risk assessment theory points to the ways Black communities are no different from white communities in terms of COVID-19 vigilance, regardless of historical instances of medical racism. “We remember the past, and if you went to a historically Black college or university, you might be more familiar with that, but we don’t live [in the past],” said Perry. “It’s historical for us: It makes us vigilant, but it doesn’t make us stupid.” 

Conversely, Perry said, Black communities are disproportionately riddled with poverty. Perry shared the anecdote of a young dad he knows who earnestly cautioned Perry to “wait and see how [the vaccine] is going to work out.” Perry had been engaging with the dad through the Fatherhood Initiative at New Opportunities, a community action agency in Waterbury that offers social services to eliminate poverty and help those in need. While Perry was touched by the young dad’s concern, Perry also recognized the danger of his mindset. “I said to him, ‘If I wait to see how it’s going to work out, I might not be around to hear the outcome,’” Perry said. “We don’t have the privilege of saying we can just wait this out because it’s affecting us in such a radical way, more so than our counterparts.” 

To reach younger people, the cultural ambassadors started the Young Ambassadors program, a cohort of 19- to 30-year-olds specifically affiliated with the AME Zion Church. Perry said that once the inaugural young ambassadors complete their 30 hours of YCCI training, their role will include spreading messaging on social media. “Hopefully, then we can reach another population that might be more readily interested in clinical research, including the areas of vaccines and how they may help prolong life,” he said. 

While Dixwell Avenue Congregational is not directly plugged into the YCCI support network, Streets noticed similar age-related trends in his congregation. Among his members that were vaccine-eligible at that time — health care professionals, long-term care facility affiliates, and individuals 75 years and older — Streets observed generally “open and positive” attitudes toward the vaccine. 

Consequently, rather than hesitancy towards the vaccine, Streets believed the larger issue facing the vaccine-eligible members of his congregation were barriers to vaccination, mainly due to barriers to technology. Thus, a paradox emerges: 20- to 50-year-olds who are more well-versed with technology tend to be more skeptical of the vaccine, while seniors who are more willing to take the vaccine tend to be obstructed by that same technology.

ENVIRONMENTAL BARRIERS TO VACCINATION

Streets identified the top three barriers to vaccination as the digital divide, the skills and informational divide and direct access — the lack of access to technology, technological literacy and secure transportation to vaccination clinics, respectively.

Streets shared the anecdote of one 90-year-old congregant who was lucky to have assistance through both her granddaughter and her home care facility, to which the vaccine was directly delivered. However, most do not have that luxury, said Streets. He estimated that at least half of the church’s elderly members do not have a close family member or friend to readily assist them, which is increasingly problematic during a time where nearly all of our daily tasks have shifted to online interfaces. Additionally, many of these members live off a fixed income, which would make upgrading to the latest technologies a superfluous expense. 

Perry shared these concerns. “What are we going to do with elderly people when hospitals are closed, and the COVID is so bad that even their relatives can’t even get in to see them? And they’re having difficulty reaching their doctors?” he recalled pondering in early October. With Johnson’s support, Perry piloted a five-week program at his church where 12 seniors were given relatively cheap tablets and taught the basics of Facebook, email, telemedicine appointments, Zoom and MyChart, an application used to schedule vaccine appointments online.

“Health care institutions and academic institutions [put] the onus on the community to trust them.”

—Jessica Cerdeña

However, technology is only half of the battle. For Streets, a big shortcoming on the part of the public health and medical sector is the reluctance to extend medical therapies to BIPOC patients in environments where they feel most comfortable — namely, places of worship. “The church has always been a social service charitable institution, but the focus is now public health,” Streets said.

For those wary of getting vaccinated, places of worship are safe, hospitable spaces with built-in networks for providing transportation options, Streets said. Some churches, clustered closer to Hartford, have already begun hosting pop-up vaccine clinics. However, Streets insisted that “more collaboration is necessary — public health needs to recognize the influential role churches can play.”

An optimal example of community engagement, described by Cerdeña, is an initiative first implemented in New York in 2004 called Project VIVA where researchers went directly into neighborhoods and knocked on doors to address concerns about the flu vaccine. “When they actually worked with community-based organizations, and actually went to where people were living, working, playing, socializing, etc. to try to bring vaccines to them there, and actually listened to people’s concerns regarding the vaccine,” Cerdeña said, “that was much more effective than any kind of flyering or messaging through other avenues.” 

(Regina Sung)

Cultural ambassadors have tried flyering in the past. During the fall of 2020, Perry, along with other Branford town leaders, disseminated flu vaccine information via flyers at the local food pantry. Though community-centered in some regards, flyering introduces the barrier of language. According to Cerdeña, pamphlets are rarely written at or below a seventh grade reading level, or with language reflective of the diversity of the environment. Speaking of enrollment paperwork for clinical trials, Ogbuagu echoed this frustration. “So many times the first wave of literature is always in English and then you have to scramble to get, at best, Spanish,” said Ogbuagu. “But then when you start to deal with other minority languages, it’s almost impossible.”  Cerdeña noted that New Haveners are fluent in Spanish, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Polish, Hindi, Gujarati, Farsi, Pashto and Arabic — to name a few. During a global pandemic that is affecting minority communities at disproportionate rates, efforts aimed at building trust must remain cognizant of these less conspicuous barriers. 

CULTIVATING EFFORTS AND SOLUTIONS

For the AME Zion cultural ambassadors, mitigating barriers means implementing initiatives in the spaces members of the Greater New Haven African American community already engage. They organized a bi-weekly Monday segment, “The Community Health Series” on the Tom Ficklin Radio Show, which airs on New Haven broadcast station WNHH 103.5 FM. Perry is featured on most episodes, and whether he is discussing prostate cancer, cardiovascular health or COVID-19, he aims to bring information about healthier living straight to a prominent Black radio show. Similarly, the cultural ambassadors published a YCCI Ambassadors Newspaper that featured Black professionals speaking on COVID-19.

Ogbuagu credited the strength of the Cultural Ambassadors program to the credibility and influence of its community leaders. “The cultural ambassadors are the key people who play a role at the tip of the pyramid, and the base of that [pyramid] could be unlimited,” said Ogbuagu. “It’s the people who come to their churches and the people they interact with in the barbershops.” 

He continued, “Because these programs are primarily within New Haven, obviously the number of people that are directly involved in the Cultural Ambassadors program is limited and finite, but the sphere of influence could be much greater.” 

Ogbuagu called these efforts a “great model,” and testified to how the Cultural Ambassadors program contributed to YCCI’s greater than average minority participation in clinical trials when compared to peer research institutions. 

However, the robust and creative strategies demanded to connect with the Black community may indicate that the failure of public health to sufficiently support BIPOC communities is due to a larger issue: structural racism. “When we think about why we’re seeing disproportionate rates of COVID among Black and brown populations,” Cerdeña said, “it’s because of inequities in the food system that contribute to higher rates of diabetes and hypertension, comorbidities that affect worse outcomes for people who contract COVID; it is due to inequities in housing conditions; it is due to the fact that Black and brown populations are more likely to be essential workers; it is due to the fact that for cost-saving reasons, people might be living in multi-generational households.” 

When the cultural ambassadors go to work, they tackle all of these issues and more. The work is endless, said Johnson. While commendable, the constant demands on individuals to re-imagine systemic problems betrays yet another systemic problem: what Cerdeña calls the phenomenon of “health care institutions and academic institutions putting the onus on the community to trust them.” Perry personally came up with and pushed for the radio show segment; he had the foresight to anticipate technological barriers for seniors at his church. These initiatives are born from the community. The unique aspect of Perry’s ingenuity is that he has institutional support. 

When health care institutions have hosted programs and events during the pandemic, they are usually aimed at fostering trust by providing information. On Jan. 26, in a virtual town hall co-hosted by the Greater New Haven NAACP and YNHH, Churchwell moderated a Zoom webinar alongside Greater New Haven NAACP President Doris Dumas. The event, titled “COVID-19 Vaccine: The Facts vs. Fiction,” was attended by about 200 YNHH patients and New Haven residents. With a panel of emergency doctors, YCCI representatives and the Rev. Perry on behalf of the cultural ambassadors, the goal was to address vaccine hesitancy from all sides. 

(Regina Sung)

This collaborative effort by an array of health care professionals to directly appeal to communities is one positive that has emerged from the pandemic. “Forget clinical research, there’s this larger problem: this mistrust of even the medical community in general — health care systems, hospital systems, medical research as a blanket issue,” Ogbuagu said. “I like that COVID-19 has unmasked this. Even in the routine course of the services that we provide to our communities, we need to engage our community. We need to involve them more in what we do.”

Still, holding an event over Zoom does not solve the problem of access, given the prerequisites of attendees having Wi-Fi, a technological device, technological literacy, English comprehension and being plugged into certain networks to hear about the event in the first place. Come-one come-all Zoom events also don’t relieve community leaders of the responsibility to provide truly accessible options — though this is not a concern for Perry. 

“The more I branch out, the more people will see. It’s not limited to AME Zion. It’s just that we’re starting here to branch out,” Perry said. “You can never start with the general because it has no foundation, and I think the foundation that we’re starting with is a foundation that has historical legitimacy.”

THE PROBLEM WITH ‘HESITANCY’

Nevertheless, when asked how they were receiving their information about the vaccine, the first response from the Dixwell congregants came via Zoom chat: “Facebook!” The sender was half-joking, but still, responses varied between “television” and “word of mouth.” The only Dixwell member who testified about a vaccine-learning experience facilitated by public health professionals was a young person who attended a Sickle Cell Disease Association of America of Southern Connecticut town hall. She attended because of her underlying condition — and the fact that she had reacted poorly to one-size-fits-all therapies in the past. 

Likewise, it seemed that the only congregants who would pass on the vaccine once offered were those with preexisting conditions. Generally speaking, these congregants had previously undergone bad medical experiences related to their preexisting conditions; they seemed the most well-informed about the potential adverse effects of the vaccine. For example, one woman said she opted for the Pfizer vaccine over the Moderna vaccine because Pfizer had lower rates of adverse side effects during clinical trials. After one man expressed concern about reputable sourcing of information, this same woman informed the group about the daily COVID-19 updates residents can receive via phone call from their local health departments. 

In contrast to others’ skepticism, one elderly member proclaimed, “The shot or death!” While members of the group laughed, the sentiment struck a salient chord. For many, said Churchwell, COVID-19 is extraordinary in that the adverse effects of not taking the shot are much greater than, say, not getting your annual flu shot. Any outsized focus on minority vaccine hesitancy undermines this intuitive fact.

Most Dixwell members said they called their primary care doctors straight away once they were vaccine-eligible and only turned to “word of mouth” when the primary care pathway wasn’t available to them. This demonstrates that the central problem surrounding vaccine hesitancy is not historical mistrust borne from repeated instances of medical racism, nor present-day health care malpractices. The central problem is racism, cemented in the Americas when white Europeans put captured Africans on ships. Vaccine “hesitancy” is a reflection of medical inequity, itself just one symptom of structural racism. So, in order to combat vaccine inequity, we must understand Cerdeña’s central dictum: “Racism is not the shark. It’s the water.”

‘Even when it's successful, the process takes its toll’: How tenure works — and doesn't — at Yale

In many ways, Yale’s tenure process — and its problems identified by faculty — resemble that of other universities. But faculty interviewed by the News still felt that Yale can and needs to do more to make the process less stressful, more equitable and more transparent.

Story by Madison Hahamy

Cover illustration by Dora Guo

Published on February 23, 2021

When Marci Shore, associate professor of history, told her son’s elementary school teacher that she had received tenure at Yale, the teacher was shocked — she had not known that Shore was even being evaluated for tenure. 

Initially confused as to why her son’s school would care about her tenure, Shore then learned that the school normally provided counseling to children whose parents were undergoing the process. Shore said it was “because it was so stressful for the parent(s), and that stress inevitably adversely affected the child.” The New Haven school, in part due to its proximity to Yale, had “a lot of experience with this situation and had developed strategies for helping the children cope,” Shore said.

Tenure is, at face value, an assurance of job security and academic freedom. But it is also an intricate and complicated system to understand. And Yale, which only recently transitioned into its current tenure system in 2016 and does not have explicit guidelines as to which professors may ultimately be promoted to tenure, makes navigating the system especially difficult.

The News spoke to 12 Faculty of Arts and Science administrators and professors to better understand the tenure process at the University. The professors shared their thoughts on the effectiveness of Yale’s tenure process and whether tenure is still a necessary aspect of professorship. They expressed a range of perspectives: from believing that tenure is a potent enabler of a thriving academic community to viewing it as a system that is structurally unequal and hurts young scholars, women and faculty of color.

38 professors declined to comment or did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“If there’s one thing I am proud of, it’s that I got through the whole process without either one of my children even knowing what the word ‘tenure’ meant,” Shore wrote in an email to the News.

“If there’s one thing I am proud of, it’s that I got through the whole process without either one of my children even knowing what the word ‘tenure’ meant.”

—Marci Shore, associate professor of history

Out with the old, in with the new-ish

In 2005, Yale was the only university in the country that did not have a “genuine tenure track,” according to a 2016 review of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Tenure Appointment Policy. Not having a “genuine tenure track” meant that tenure was dependent on departmental resources, rather than purely on the merit of the faculty member. It also meant non-tenured faculty members needed to apply separately for a tenured position in a new job search.

In 2007, a new policy went into effect to address the previous plan’s issues. It achieved two goals: First, the new process separated discussions about departmental resources from discussions of tenure. Second, it reduced the “tenure clock” — the probationary period between a tenure-track faculty member’s entrance into the University and their becoming eligible for tenure review — from 10 years to nine years, meaning that faculty would be eligible for tenure sooner. The long probationary period was a common concern for faculty, who worried that other promising faculty would take offers from other universities where they would not have to wait as long before being up for tenure consideration.

In 2016, the University released a new report, along with a new set of policy guidelines. This is the tenure system that Yale currently uses.

In the 2016 system, the tenure clock was again shortened, this time to eight years, with consideration no later than year seven. The old system had five ranks: assistant professor 1 and 2, associate professor on term, associate professor with tenure and tenured professor. But the new system has only four ranks. In keeping with practice at most other universities, the untenured rank of associate professor on term is no longer used at Yale, except for faculty who joined the University prior to 2016 under previous tenure policies. The new system also added an additional fourth-year review process designed to produce substantive, in-depth consideration of and feedback on the faculty member’s work, according to Tamar Gendler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Some Yale faculty progress through the four ranks through their time at the institution. Other professors come to Yale from an institution where they are already a tenured professor. In those cases, Yale typically hires them into a comparable position, Gendler said.

Since 2014, FAS has hired 263 tenure-track faculty. Of those faculty, 65 percent were hired as assistant professors, while the other 35 percent were hired in a tenured position that carried over from another institution. During this seven-year period, FAS hired an average of approximately 37 tenure-track faculty each year, of which 24 were hired as assistant professors and 13 joined with tenure, according to Gendler.

“On average, during each year of this seven year period, we brought 37 new ladder faculty: 24 new Assistant Professors, and 13 new faculty hired laterally at the tenured level. (Of course, the numbers differ slightly year over year – but this is the average.)”

All aboard the tenure train: How the process works 

Those who are not yet tenured at their previous institution and join Yale on the tenure track often come in with the rank of assistant professor and begin the promotion process during their sixth year of teaching. At any stage of the process, the faculty member can be denied tenure. If that decision is upheld, they will no longer be employed by the University when their contract runs out — which is “at least another full year” after the tenure review occurs, according to Gendler.

The first stage begins with faculty assembling all of their research, writing, evaluations, indications of service, written statements and other material into a “tenure dossier.” Then, the departmental review committee, composed of faculty from the candidate’s department, will solicit evaluations from at least 10 senior scholars in that faculty member’s field — although FAS Senate Chair Matthew Jacobson said the number is typically closer to 12-15.

“My experience with the tenure process for faculty in my [department] has been quite positive,” Tyrone Cannon, department chair of psychology, wrote in an email to the News. “Of course, we have very strong junior faculty and that is the key thing.”

Some faculty expressed that the multi-step tenure process can be difficult to navigate. (Eve Grobman, Production and Design Staffer)

After the scholars’ evaluation, the faculty member’s department will decide if the application can move forward by a simple majority vote. If it does, it moves into a divisional Tenure and Appointments Committee — these committees exist for the humanities, social sciences, biological science, and physical sciences and engineering. The most substantive review of a candidate happens during this stage.

John Mangan, dean of faculty affairs, told the News that these committees are an unusual aspect of Yale’s tenure review.

“At most universities, there is a single committee that oversees all of the academic areas, generally with one or two faculty from each of the broad areas (humanities, social science, etc.),” Mangan wrote in an email to the News. “Yale’s FAS tenure process involves a wider range of faculty than virtually any of our peers.”

Each committee is chaired by Gendler and overseen by the divisional dean or, depending on the field, an area director, as well as roughly a dozen scholars from that division. The tenure voting is done by secret ballot and requires a simple majority to move forward.

If cases are approved, they then move to the Joint Boards of Permanent Officers, made up of all the senior faculty across the FAS. They generally take up five to 15 cases per meeting, which occur “several times per academic year,” according to Mangan.

At the JBPO meeting, Gendler, the FAS dean, would present the votes from all previous stages, and the department chair would describe the candidate. After a discussion, the JBPO would vote on the candidate.

Candidates that receive a two-thirds majority vote then move up to the Yale Corporation for final approval.

Mangan wrote that “it is extremely rare (indeed, unprecedented) for a tenure case, once approved by a divisional committee, to be overturned by either the JBPO or the Corporation.”

At every level, the voting is done by secret ballot. According to Mangan, no faculty member has access to any of the materials used in the tenure process deliberations.

The entire process can take anywhere from six months to a full academic year. Candidates typically submit their dossier in the summer, and the majority of tenure decisions are granted in the spring, although they can technically happen whenever.

If successfully promoted, professors typically stay at the rank of associate professor with tenure for three to five years, after which they may be considered for promotion to the rank of full professor, according to Gendler.

If ladder faculty are denied tenure, they can appeal the decision through a formal complaint process in which they submit a letter to the provost within 45 days of the tenure decision or other action that gave rise to the complaint, according to the Faculty Handbook.

If the provost decides that the complaint merits review, it will be forwarded to the Faculty Review Committee, a standing committee of senior faculty with members appointed yearly by the provost. Then the panel will deliberate on the complaint in a closed session. If the majority of the panel votes to adopt their recommendations, the panel reports back to the provost for further review.

The provost ultimately makes the final decision, which is delivered to all relevant parties in writing.

Eighty percent of faculty who joined Yale as assistant professors between 1990 and 2010 and stayed at Yale for the entirety of the tenure track period were granted tenure. But only around a third of the faculty who joined as assistant professors became tenured faculty, according to statistics provided to the News by Gendler. The discrepancy is attributed to a number of faculty leaving the University before they were eligible for tenure consideration.

Tenure: The good, the bad and the ugly 

Tenure in North America was initially developed in the 20th century to protect academic freedom, with an added benefit of job security. A tenured professor, unlike instructional faculty, cannot be fired without cause. If a tenured professor commits a crime or fails to show up to class, that could be cause for termination. But a tenured professor cannot get fired for publishing a risky or controversial research project or pursuing a project that might take years to complete, which allows professors more freedom to research their interests without fear of it affecting their job stability. 

“A tenured professor can in theory say f— off to the president without fear of retribution,” Jacobson wrote in an email to the News. “Very few do that, but an untenured professor couldn’t even consider it.”

Eighty percent of faculty who joined Yale as assistant professors between 1990 and 2010 and stayed at Yale for the entirety of the tenure track period were granted tenure. (Yale Daily News)

A further benefit of tenure, according to Gendler, is “that it creates an enduring academic community.” When a professor is granted tenure, the University is often committing decades of investment into that person, and that faculty member has the potential to serve in leadership positions at the University, such as being a department chair or dean. Each year, “only a handful” of tenured faculty at Yale ultimately leave for a position at a different university, Gendler wrote to the News in an email.

But some faculty also took issue with some aspects of Yale’s tenure process, as well as tenure more generally.

The 2016 tenure report indicated that some faculty were concerned about the number of external letters that Yale’s tenure reviews necessitated, noting that they were often “difficult to obtain.” Yale’s 2007 system required seven external letters in the tenure dossier. The 2016 revised system increased the number, asking for at least 10.

“Yes, it is important to have outside evaluations,” professor of English Leslie Brisman wrote in an email to the News. “But so many letters are required for promotion and tenure, and the outside letters have such undue influence. We are so, so dependent on outside evaluations that our own judgments are marginalized. And our imposition on scholars elsewhere is absurd — especially since there is no honorarium for doing the weeks of work it takes to write a detailed evaluation.”

Feisal Mohamed, professor of English, called the outside letters “probably [the] greatest potential source of bias in the process.” Mohamed added that women and faculty of color, who “feel much more socially isolated,” may not develop the necessary personal relationships with senior scholars in the field — who are responsible for approving a ladder faculty member’s tenure process and tend to be less diverse.

In an email to the News, Gendler noted that in the 2016 report, there was “a broad range of opinion on the optimal number of letters.” Some faculty felt as though the number should be even larger, Gendler wrote, but the majority thought that 10 to 15 was a good range. She also added that standard university practice is to require 10 to 20 letters.

Some faculty in the report also expressed concerns regarding how the tenure process may be built against faculty who are underrepresented minorities or interdisciplinary scholars.

Jacobson elaborated on these concerns in an email to the News, noting that women and faculty of color often do “invisible labor,” such as mentoring, that he claimed is not taken into account during the tenure process. And, Jacobson added, interdisciplinary scholars, whose work might not match up to a specific department, could suffer if the “wrong people” are asked to write an evaluation or give their thoughts.

Mohamed told the News that because there are “so few minority faculty” on campus, minority assistant professors are often asked to take on additional tasks that are not part of the “standard” tenure process approach. These tasks can include mentoring students, helping with curriculum design and serving on various committees through the Dean’s Office or Office of the Provost so that those committees are more diverse. Typically, assistant professors spend their years in the tenure process working primarily on their research portfolio.

Furthermore, the tenure committee is made up of senior faculty who are often older than those who they are reviewing, which can disadvantage younger faculty working on new areas of research.

“If you write about Shakespeare, everybody understands your work as ‘important,’” Jacobson wrote. “If you write about Alice Walker or Junot Diaz, you’re ‘provincial.’”

In response, Gendler wrote to the News that Larry Gladney, dean of diversity and faculty development in the FAS, trains all of the tenure committees “on issues of implicit bias.” Gendler added that in the current tenure system, candidates are explicitly asked to submit statements with space to describe mentoring efforts or other types of service, “both formal and informal.”

Gladney told the News that those discussions are more focused on how “bias can affect promotion within the academy.”

“Achieving tenure is a structural barrier for all faculty,” Gladney wrote to the News in an email. “It’s meant to be.”

He added that the high bar is not in and of itself problematic, but that bias needs to be removed from the evaluations that determine tenure decisions. This includes biases that start well before the tenure point, which Gladney said are “just as efficient at eliminating people from permanence in the academy” as any bias that might be present in the tenure committees.

Mohamed also expressed the belief that tenure in and of itself can be biased and said that the bias leading up to the process can be similarly harmful before professors are even considered for tenure.

Professors aiming to publish a book, for example, have their manuscript vetted by editors and other readers who have their own biases. And, Mohamed added, student evaluations, which are part of the tenure dossier, are sometimes prejudiced against women and faculty of color.

“Put all of that together and you can see that even if the people making the tenure decision have the best of intentions and the committee has no bias whatsoever, all the materials they’re working with have bias packed in,” he told the News.

In 2019, 68 percent of FAS ladder, or tenure-track, faculty identified as male, while 32 percent identified as female. This is a six-point difference from 2007, when 26 percent of faculty identified as female and 74 percent identified as male.

In 2019, 22 of Yale’s FAS ladder faculty were Black, with three hired that year. In total, Black ladder faculty made up 3.3 percent of the FAS faculty population. That same year, Black faculty made up 14 percent of total FAS departures, with three faculty members departing.

28 of Yale’s FAS ladder faculty in 2019 were Hispanic or Latinx, constituting 4.1 percent of total faculty. Hispanic or Latinx faculty made up 11 percent of FAS faculty hires that year —  five new faculty members — and, similar to Black faculty, 14 percent of FAS departures that year.

Asian American FAS tenure-track faculty comprised 9.3 percent of the 2019 makeup, with 63 faculty members — six of whom were hired that same year, making up 14 percent of total FAS hires. Four Asian American faculty members left in 2019, making up 19 percent of total FAS departures.

White faculty comprised 64.2 percent of FAS ladder faculty in 2019.

“The system of tenure isn’t that old, it’s really a 20th century phenomenon. It doesn’t have deep roots in academic life, and it can be altered. It is within our power to do that”

—Feisal Mohamed, professor of English

A decade lost to the tenure process

As the counseling strategies at Professor Shore’s son’s elementary school demonstrate, the tenure process can also be intensely stressful for faculty members.

“You are being judged by senior colleagues both within and without the university, and your case can get shot down anywhere along the way,” Jacobson wrote in an email to the News. “And if it does, you get fired. And if you get fired, your reputation might be stained forever.”

Yale awards tenure to FAS scholars who “stand among the foremost leaders in the world in a broad field of knowledge. It is reserved for candidates whose published work significantly extends the horizons of their discipline(s),” according to the FAS tenure criteria.

According to Shore, who initially was a tenure-track faculty member while at Indiana University, these broad qualifications are in contrast with the more straightforward tenure qualifications at other schools, such as IU. Faculty there “has a pretty good idea” before entering the tenure promotion process whether or not they have the necessary qualifications.

“Elite universities consider themselves elite because they have the best faculty and recruit the best students,” Shore wrote. “That means that if they think there’s someone better out there, they want that better person.”

For Brian Scholl, a professor in the Department of Psychology, this high bar for tenure was “liberating” — because he said he did not expect to ultimately receive tenure at Yale, he spent more time focusing on his research than trying to establish relationships with colleagues or otherwise building his tenure dossier.

He called his tenure promotion an “unexpected surprise.”

But Shore considered the process to be a strenuous one in which junior faculty members struggle to form relationships with senior members of their department who will, at one point, decide if they should receive tenure — even though Yale’s probationary period is now more on par with peer institutions than it was before 2007.

For junior faculty, the tenure process takes the better half of a decade at best — a decade that, even if tenure is ultimately granted, can leave them “shells of the people they had been,” Shore said.

“You never feel secure (should you buy a house or an apartment?),” Shore wrote. “You constantly think about pleasing your senior colleagues and outside letter writers and stop taking intellectual risks. You might not read your students’ papers as carefully as you want to, because every moment you spend on them is a moment you’re not spending on your own writing. You might decide not to have children (how can you take the time to have a baby when the tenure clock is ticking? A year doesn’t nearly compensate for the fact that you go from having 24 hours at your disposal to having zero), or to radically outsource the care of your children (every moment you spend with them is a moment you’re not working on your research), and so on. I’ve seen divorced colleagues lose shared custody of a child when they don’t get tenure and have to look for a job in a different state.”

Gendler declined to comment on the stress associated with the tenure process and the comparison between Yale’s tenure qualifications and those of peer institutions.

David Sorkin, Lucy G. Moses professor of modern Jewish history, said that despite its issues, tenure is a valuable aspect of academia that “you couldn’t have the system of the American research university without.”

But for Mohamed, tenure as a whole “is so completely broken” that the only solution is “far-reaching reform.” He proposed a system in which there are two ranks — instructional and research — that both protect job security and academic freedom.

“The system of tenure isn’t that old, it’s really a 20th century phenomenon,” Mohamed said. “It doesn’t have deep roots in academic life, and it can be altered. It is within our power to do that.”

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, tenure-track faculty had the option to extend their “tenure clock” by one year. In a typical year, tenure-track parents to a newborn or newly adopted child can receive a one-year extension as well.

Madison Hahamy | madison.hahamy@yale.edu

 

Data visualization by Phoebe Liu.

The Church at the End of the World

In 2018, a group of Catholic anti-nuclear activists made national news when they broke into a naval base in Georgia. One of their members — a New Haven resident — now awaits his sentencing.

Story by Sharla Moody

Photos by Regina Sung

Illustration by Dora Guo

Published on November 25, 2020

M

ark Colville is relaxed for someone expecting to be sentenced to federal prison in a few weeks. He stands in front of a stove, white hair sticking out from under his hat, cracking eggs on the stove and piercing the yolks with the shells. As he cooks, he talks about his expectations for the hearing, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has forced him to choose between traveling out of state for an in-person hearing or being sentenced via a virtual meeting. He rolls up the sleeves of his sweatshirt, flips the eggs, then adds slices of cheese and hot dogs. He’s not worried, he says as he glances up from the food, even though it’s a less-than-ideal situation. He’s been arrested as an activist so many times he’s lost count, and he has spent enough time behind bars that he feels prepared for what awaits him. He places the eggs and hot dogs between two bagel halves and wraps them in aluminum foil before handing them off to another man, who will distribute them to hungry people standing outside in the rain. Then, he cracks more eggs.

On April 4, 2018, Colville, who lives in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, and six other Catholic activists who call themselves the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, broke into Kings Bay Naval Base in Camden County, Georgia. Among the activists were a Jesuit priest, a couple of grandparents and a journalist. Under the cover of darkness, they cut a padlock on a gate and replaced it with another to cover their tracks. They walked several miles by moonlight to a bunker that stores nuclear weapons and vandalized models of nuclear missiles. They were convicted as a group of three felonies and one misdemeanor — conspiracy, destruction of government property, depredation and trespassing. As of November 2020, six of them have already been sentenced. Colville expects to be sentenced in December.

“I’m worried about the end of the world,” Colville chuckled. “I’m not worried about going to prison.”

Colville outside his home in New Haven. (Regina Sung)

RESISTING AN IDOLATROUS ABOMINATION 

Plowshares began as a Christian pacifist and anti-nuclear weapons movement in 1980, when Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan and seven others protested nuclear weapons by breaking into the General Electric Re-entry Division in Pennsylvania, where vehicles for the Minuteman III missile were manufactured. There, they vandalized trucks and documents and prayed for peace. Since then, there have been over 70 Plowshares actions and protests around the world, according to research compiled by Arthur Laffin, an activist who has written two books about the movement.

Colville, who has been involved in peace and progressive activism his entire life, recounted that the Plowshares 7 began “whispering to each other about possibly doing an action” at Berrigan’s funeral in 2016. “I think part of my motivation was in fact Dan Berrigan’s death,” he said. “I felt like that was a good way to honor him, to take up the hammer again and do a Plowshares action.”

Colville believes that nuclear weapons and the United States’ nuclear policy are tantamount to religious idolatry.

“Nuclear weapons represent [a] perpetual posture of hostility … that amounts to a compulsory religion that us citizens are forced to abide by,” Colville said.

Anti-nuclear activism is not the type of action typically associated with Catholicism. In the United States, Catholic activism usually concerns pro-life or sexual ethics issues and has a politically conservative bend. But pacifist activism has a place in Catholicism, as evidenced by the Kings Bay Plowshares 7’s work, which represents just one group action in the Plowshares movement. In 1984, two members of the Plowshares movement were sentenced to 18 years in prison for breaking into missile silos and launch sites in Missouri.

“If you look at nuclear policy in this country, it does have all the elements of religion,” Colville said. “We’re talking about ultimate sovereignty that a nation claims over the whole planet, and to wield that power puts us into a situation of basically idolatry as a social practice in the United States.”

The Plowshares movement takes its name from a few verses in Isaiah, an Old Testament prophetic book in the Bible. Chapter 2, verse 4 of Isaiah states: “He [God] shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” A plowshare is a broad blade used to turn soil during tilling and plowing. The phrase “swords to plowshares” has been adopted by anti-war, anti-nuclearism and veteran advocates alike to represent the transformation of violence to nonviolence.

“Idols are to be smashed. That’s a basic call of faith in the Bible.”

—Mark Colville

Plowshares asserts that militarism and nuclear arms are equivalent to religious idolatry, arguing that the direct funding of weapons is a misappropriation of money that would better serve the poor. These ideas inspired actions such as the 2018 protest at a Georgia naval port where U.S. Navy submarines armed with Trident nuclear missiles are stored. The Trident missile is armed with thermonuclear bomb warheads, which are each a thousand times more destructive than atomic bombs. The U.S. Navy has a fleet of fourteen Ohio-class nuclear submarines that carry these missiles. In 2011, the Obama administration budgeted $70.5 million per Trident missile.

Plowshares believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s teaching from a 1967 speech that the triplet evils of racism, poverty and war must be addressed holistically.

“I look in my neighborhood and see this place that has been laid waste by the military and this idolatrous commitment to funding this idolatrous abomination. That’s a direct theft from the poor,” Colville said. “My daily life and lifestyles revolves around trying to bind up some of the wounds that are caused by this unbridled commitment to militarism.”

This militarism, Colville believes, has been so pervasive throughout American culture that it must be actively resisted. “We’ve been living under the shadow of nuclear weapons for 75 years. It can feel like this is a permanent reality,” Colville said. “You can really start to absorb the idea that these weapons are approved of by God.”

CONVERTING DEADLY FORCE

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 planned for their action in Georgia for about two years, Colville said. The planning involved discerning whether they should perform the action and training for how to diffuse situations.

“It was a long discernment process,” Plowshares 7 activist Martha Hennessy said. Hennessy is a retired occupational therapist, grandmother of eight and community worker who has been arrested and imprisoned several times for protesting nuclear power, drone use, the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and the use of starvation as a weapon of war in Yemen. “I’ve grown up with this nuclear threat. It’s imperative that we pay attention to this nuclear holocaust.”

 Building community beforehand was integral to the protest. “I was scared to death,” Colville said. “But again, we do it in community. We spent two years discerning this as a group.”

Community as the foundation of progressive Catholic thought goes back to Dorothy Day, an American anarchist and Catholic convert who was influential in Catholic pacifism. In 1933, she started the progressive Catholic Worker Movement, which was centered around building local communities. Those involved in the movement live together and dedicate their time to local social justice causes. Day also wrote prolifically in support of pacifism. Today, the Vatican is considering Day for possible canonization into sainthood — in Catholicism, saints are people recognized for their holiness and closeness to God, and they are the only people the Catholic Church confidently and officially claims are in Heaven. Hennessy is Day’s granddaughter.

(Regina Sung)

Hennessy said her participation in Plowshares was driven by the work of her grandmother. When Hennessy was a teenager, Day gifted her the book Hiroshima by journalist John Hersey, which documents the lives of Hiroshima survivors in the wake of the 1945 atomic bombing. This helped Hennessy prepare to take part in the Plowshares movement, she said.

As the day of their action rapidly approached, Colville felt strangely calm. It was Colville’s third time participating in a Plowshares action, and he felt somewhat ready.

“I kind of knew what to expect,” he said. “But I was, particularly because of the deadly force zone, trying to bargain with God. ‘Let this night end in a jail cell and not a morgue or a hospital.’”

 The Plowshares group entered the Kings Bay Naval Base near a dirt road at what looked like a disused gate. They broke the lock at that gate and replaced it with another one to avoid being detected. Then, they followed the road for several miles in the dark before splitting up.

“Every 10 or 15 minutes you got this recorded announcement saying you were in a deadly force zone,” Colville recalled. “It was just really chilling to hear that announcement. Our group, we pray a lot. On the walk we were praying the rosary, a litany of the saints, a lot of traditional Catholic prayers. That was a real calming sort of thing for all of us.”

Colville and Patrick O’Neill, a hospital chaplain in North Carolina, parted from the group to see what they perceived as a shrine to nuclearism — a collection of missile models on the base. It was still dark, but they soon found themselves on a busier road in the base. Cars passed periodically.

“I said to Patrick, ‘I need a rest.’ I needed a psychological break before going forward, I needed to really get my head and my heart into this before we went further,” Colville said. “We sat down, did a little talking and strategizing, a little prayer, had granola bars. Then when I was ready, we ran across the street and hid behind a tree and waited for the right moment. And then we went over there. Once we got there and pulled out our tools and started doing the action, that’s when I found my legs and it became a lot easier once we got there.”

After writing “Thou shalt not kill” and “blasphemy” on the missile replicas with markers, they prayed and waited to be arrested. Other members of the group entered a bunker where nuclear weapons were stored, as well as an administrative building, where they left a copy of The Doomsday Machine, a book by Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers.

The Plowshare members’ real fear — aside from being killed — was being arrested before they could complete their protest, Colville said. In this case, they were able to reach each location before they were arrested. According to Colville, their protest was so markedly peaceful that officers waited until they finished vandalizing the last model to make arrests.

“We go into these actions with the intent of doing conversion, converting swords into plowshares,” Colville said. “So, it’s not like we were trying to make trash out of these things. We were symbolically converting them into something useful for life.”

O’Neill, who is garrulous and good-natured even over the phone, struck up a conversation with one of the officers who arrested their group. Their conversation reached significant depths, with the officer sharing that he had experienced the death of his two-year-old son. O’Neill believes he was able to “convert” part of Kings Bay and transform it into something other than a base for nuclear weapons. 

“The site … was really not a deadly force zone,” Colville said. “We converted it into something other than a deadly force zone, at least for those moments.”

Hennessy, O’Neill and Colville all believe that in court, these details were brushed aside in favor of a narrative that depicted them as criminals rather than activists. They spent varying amounts of time — for Colville, over a year — in the Camden County Jail in Georgia.

“I do time well,” O’Neill said. “I look at it as an opportunity to do ministry. I make friends, I like to read, I like to write, I run every day. I don’t get bored in prison. I make the best of it.”

(Regina Sung)

In the Camden County Jail, O’Neill was popular, and he ministered to other inmates. Once, he taught them the Richie Havens song “Freedom” at a “party” he threw in his cell. Still, O’Neill thinks that the group’s sentencing was affected by their depiction as malicious criminals rather than activists. Judge Lisa Godbey Wood, who sentenced O’Neill, was “cold,” O’Neill said, but he added that she showed him mercy by giving him a shorter sentence than the probation department recommended.

 “She’s sentenced literally hundreds of people to thousands of years in prison,” O’Neill said. “To be in a job where you do that — I think it’s hard not to see the person on the other side of the bench as being someone you have to punish, and they need to be punished, and all of that is in the interest of justice. So she [sent] a hospital chaplain with eight children, whose youngest child has Down’s syndrome, who runs a Catholic Worker house and works with the poor, and basically devotes his life to peace and justice work … to prison for a year and two months. She still had to punish me pretty severely for what I did.” O’Neill’s daughter provided character testimony in her father’s defense.

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 activists faced up to 20 years in federal prison for their action. So far, the longest sentence given to any of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 activists has been 33 months in federal prison for Fr. Steve Kelly, a Jesuit priest. Of the 20 years O’Neill could have been sentenced to, he was only given 14 months. Colville expects to receive between 21 and 27 months in prison, plus restitution, which he says he will refuse to pay.

“Hopefully I’ll get to go along for the canonization [ceremony for Day] and not go to federal prison for too long,” Hennessy said. On Nov. 13, Hennessy was sentenced to 10 months in prison, the lightest sentence received by any of them so far.

WAR, DOGMA AND CATHOLIC LIFE

Plowshares actions are not explicitly condemned or condoned by the Catholic Church, though the Church views nuclearism unfavorably. In 2004, the Church published the “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church,” which stated that nuclear deterrence must be replaced with disarmament. According to Carlos Eire, the Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale, every pope since the invention of nuclear weapons has stated that they should not be used. While popes’ condemnations of nuclear weapons aren’t rigidly dogmatic, they should have great moral weight to the beliefs of Catholics. This moral weight resonates deeply with Colville.

 “I have to go to the site where sins are committed, where idolatry is practiced,” Colville said. “Idolatry isn’t to be avoided or argued against or simply ignored. It’s not about nonparticipation when it comes to idolatry. Idols are to be smashed. That’s a basic call of faith in the Bible.”

For issues not dogmatically defined by the church, individual Catholics are able to form their own opinions in good conscience with church teachings. The Catholic Church teaches that there is such a thing as “just war,” and Catholic theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas developed early versions of just war theory. But during the Vietnam War, opinion began to shift. Some Catholics, like Berrigan, were imprisoned for burning draft cards.

“There are plenty of Catholic clergy who have been arrested, and not just for the nuclear weapons issues, but other issues that fall in the area of ethics,” Eire said. “People are on a spectrum in the Catholic Church, and they don’t have to match up.”

But the idea of just modern warfare is waning among Catholics, even those at the head of the church. In his October encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis wrote, “We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war’. Never again war!” Whether opposition to nuclear weapons justifies breaking a nation’s laws, however, remains undetermined by the Church.

“To be a Catholic in this country naturally means that we must resist this government,” Colville said. “It’s imperialist, violent and incredibly racist. As a Catholic, I have to have a response to that.”

Pacifism, anti-militarism and advocating for the disadvantaged can exist alongside more traditional Catholic stances of being pro-life, anti-euthanasia and anti-death penalty, Eire explained, and holding these beliefs has been described by Catholics as a “seamless garment” of views of the sanctity of life, or “consistent life ethic.” Pope St. John Paul II stressed the importance of a consistent life ethic but upheld just war theory after witnessing the Nazi invasion of Poland as a young man, Eire added.

Conservative critics of Catholic pacifism have argued that war is necessary in cases of terror states and in cases of religious persecution. Others sympathetic to Plowshares’ goals worry that its confrontational methods alienate potential supporters. Still, Plowshares activists view their efforts as intertwined with their faith and as actions they are morally obligated to carry out.

“I like to study the works of mercy, the spiritual works of mercy, relating to resistance,” Hennessy said. “Admonish the sinner, instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, comfort the sorrowful, bear wrongs patiently, forgive all injuries, pray for the living and dead. And then of course the seven corporal works of mercy, which is what we do at the [Catholic Worker] house: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the imprisoned, visit the sick, bury the dead.”

(Regina Sung)

Hennessy, O’Neill and Colville are all involved in Catholic Worker communities and live according to these spiritual works of mercy. Colville lives in the Amistad House, a Catholic Worker house in the Hill neighborhood of New Haven, where he, his wife Luz Catarineau-Colville, and others cook and distribute meals for over 60 people a day.

“The experience of running a Catholic Worker is all about day-to-day living, trying to simplify your lifestyle and voluntary poverty, looking for peace and justice for all,” Catarineau-Colville said.

In many ways, Colville’s work and Amistad House seem to embody the most radical interpretation of Catholicism. But Colville, Hennessy and O’Neill view the Catholic Worker Movement, as well as the actions of Plowshares, as the correct mode of living according to Catholic principles in this age.

Colville opens another carton of eggs and cracks them onto the stove. The oil sizzles and sputters, and he cracks the yolks with the shells. Later today, he will repeat this for lunch for the people who gather outside of Amistad House. Whatever tomorrow may hold for him, he isn’t concerned. The two greatest commandments, after all, are to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself — Colville leads a life oriented around these missions. He wraps another sandwich in foil and hands it off.

‘It’s terrifying’: Students say racism runs rampant at School of Nursing

In interviews with the News, students criticized outdated curriculum, offensive remarks by guest lecturers and professors and a lack of diversity among students and staff.

Story by Julia Brown, Beatriz Horta, Zaporah Price

Cover photo by Nick Tabio

Published on October 29, 2020

Even though Tayisha Saint Vil NUR ’23 has been at Yale School of Nursing for less than a semester, she already feels unsafe as a Black student at the school. 

“It’s terrifying,” Saint Vil told the News. “This feels like a really hostile environment for Black and brown students to learn.”

Just two months before Saint Vil arrived on campus, the School of Nursing committed to improving that environment — and addressing the “racism that happened right here.” In a June 18 statement to the nursing school community, Dean Ann Kurth promised to be “intentional and accountable” in learning from the school’s failings and helping YSN “tap into the true ethos of our school.”

“We must recognize that without structural and institutional transformation, YSN will continue to perpetuate inequities and miss critical opportunities to fight against the health implications of racism and improve the health of all marginalized communities in the United States,” she wrote.

Kurth’s statement came one year after a professor asked a student, “Are you saying my exams are racist?” after the student expressed concerns over BIPOC retention at a town hall. The year before, a guest lecturer gave a presentation on how to spot dermatological conditions — without sharing how to identify those conditions on Black skin. 

According to 19 students — and a collection of emails, instructional materials and other documents obtained by the News — those are not isolated incidents, but rather emblematic of the culture at the West Campus school.

In interviews with the News, students criticized outdated curriculum, offensive remarks by guest lecturers and professors and a lack of diversity among students and staff. They said that the administration has failed to adequately address these issues, and that institutional channels — including an Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion established in 2015 — do not provide adequate recourse for student complaints. Raven Rodriguez, who was hired in 2019 as director of diversity, equity and inclusion, resigned abruptly last week, criticizing an “oppressive status quo” at the school.

Black students, said Sola Stamm NUR ’21, quickly become aware that the program is “academically and culturally” built for their white peers. They “fall through the cracks” academically and socially, she said, and the School of Nursing leaves them to fend for themselves.

More than 220 students attended a forum on Monday set up to address a student petition calling for a full-time faculty member dedicated to DEI issues. Students brought their complaints to Kurth at the forum.

“I do believe we have to do better; we can do better — despite all legitimate concerns I really am committed to seeing YSN becoming a better place,” Kurth told students at the forum.

But students told Kurth that she has not proven herself up to the task.

“It’s terrifying. This feels like a really hostile environment for Black and brown students to learn.”

—Tayisha Saint Vil NUR ’23

OUTDATED INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS 

Five nursing students told the News that they were initially attracted to the school because of its social justice-oriented advertising. For example, the application requires an essay regarding students’ interpretation of the School of Nursing’s mission, “better health for all people.”

But according to Emily Brown NUR ’22, Cameron McCaugherty NUR ’22 and Saint Vil, the school’s branding is misleading.

“[The tagline] does not apply to their students in the slightest,” Brown said. “And I would even argue it doesn’t apply to our future patients, because the education that we receive is marginalizing people of color, particularly Black people and transgender folks.”

Five students cited a 2018 dermatology presentation by guest lecturer Lindita Vinca — a certified nurse practitioner invited by School of Nursing professor Deborah Fahs — that included “hundreds of slides” without “a single example of a single dermatologic condition on skin that wasn’t white,” according to Billie Campion NUR ’21. Nursing lecturer Patrice O’Neill-Wilhelm invited Vinca to deliver another lecture in 2019 — an invitation that two students criticized in interviews with the News. Fahs, O’Neill-Wilhelm and Vinca did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“If you are only trained to recognize skin conditions on white skin, they can be really easy to miss on Black skin,” Campion said. “Besides the fact that this was a huge oversight, it was a thing that never occurred to the faculty for that class … and it never occurred to them that we might want to know what a skin condition looked like on Black skin.”

Students also raised concerns about curriculum developed and delivered by faculty members themselves. Professors have taught that race is a risk factor for certain diseases — a theory that has long been contested — and failed to acknowledge the root causes of racial disparities in health outcomes, students say.

For example, professor Lisa Meland taught in her “Introduction to Pharmacology” lecture last year that the populations at greatest risk for primary hypertension include “African Americans, [and] Mexican Americans,” according to lecture slides obtained by the News.

“We’ve heard lecture after lecture listing anti-Black rhetoric, for example that being Black is a risk factor for hypertension … without any elaboration on the reasons why someone might be at higher risk,” Genevieve Lipari NUR ’22 wrote in an email to the News. “When asked to elaborate, many faculty have replied, ‘I don’t know,’ or even worse, attributed it to differences in metabolism or some other biological difference which we know has no basis because race is a social construct.”

Brown said that these so-called risk factors are actually associated with inherent racism in the health care industry — which the School of Nursing curriculum fails to acknowledge, students say.

In a video obtained by the News, nursing lecturer Patrice O’Neill-Wilhelm said she “really cannot” think of any examples in which race was medically relevant during a lecture on trauma-informed care.

“[The tagline] does not apply to their students in the slightest. And I would even argue it doesn’t apply to our future patients, because the education that we receive is marginalizing people of color, particularly Black people and transgender folks.”

—Emily Brown NUR ’22

“Patrice was like ‘No, I don’t have any examples’ so I was like, ‘Well I’ve got a ton,’” Ashleigh Evans NUR ’23 told the News. “I start going and I’m like, ‘There is Tuskegee syphilis and John Hopkins and forced sterilization — there are so many examples to choose from,’ and [then] she cuts me off.”

As confirmed by the video, O’Neill-Wilhelm thanked Evans for her contributions during class but asked her to give other students time to speak. Evans was only allowed to continue giving her thoughts at the end of class after two white students spoke up on Evans’ behalf.

Neither Meland nor O’Neill-Wilhelm responded to multiple requests for comment.

For her part, Kurth pointed to the school’s mission — “better health for all people” — in her June email and outlined a curriculum review as one of eight initial actions.

“We reject the use of race as a proxy to make clinical predictions and support racial terminology in the biological sciences only as a political or socioeconomic category to study racism and the structural inequities that produce health disparities in marginalized, underrepresented, and underserved people,” Kurth wrote.

Still, according to Rodriguez, racism in the medicine and nursing curriculum was the core complaint she heard from students during her time as DEI director.

CONVERSATIONS IN THE CLASSROOM

Curriculum is just one part of the problem, students said, citing multiple instances of offensive remarks in the classroom.

Two students told the News that O’Neill-Wilhelm said in a lecture that in her hometown, “All Nepali people work at Dunkin’ Donuts.” O’Neill-Wilhelm did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Four students expressed discomfort about a guest lecturer invited by O’Neill-Wilhelm, Aron Rose, who is an associate clinical professor at the Yale School of Medicine. According to a recording obtained by the News, Rose said in a lecture that “the Argyll Robertson pupil is called the prostitute’s pupil. It’s kind of cute, I remember this as a resident, because it accommodates, but does not react. Get it? Like a prostitute? Good.”

In an email to the News, Rose explained that the Argyll Robertson pupil was “historically called the prostitute’s pupil,” serving as a “mnemonic for medical students.”

Students also said that Rose pointed to Asian nursing students in the room and talked about their eye shape during the same lecture. One student, who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution, expressed concerns to Rose at the time and later emailed LaRon Nelson, who at the time was leading the DEI office as associate dean of global health and equity.

“The Asian students in the class were in fact actually publicly shamed and targeted when he chose to point us out for our lack of double eyelids in front of the whole class,” the email read. “As I’m sure everyone must know, not all Asian people have the same eye shape, and many Asians, including a large population of South Asians, and including myself, do have double eyelids.”

Rose told the News that course instructors had asked him to demonstrate how to flip the upper lid and remove a foreign body from the eye. To do so painlessly and effectively, certain anatomic landmarks such as the upper lid fold — which he said is present in “some patients but not in others” — must be identified.

“While I cannot take responsibility for others’ feelings or how they might interpret the information I aim to impart, I regret any offence taken,” he wrote in an email to the News. “Working with and treating people of multiple ethnicities worldwide is a privilege and a responsibility I take very seriously. I try my best to be sensitive to (and respectful of) all kinds of differences, respectfully acknowledging the numerous variations in humans — be they anatomical or emotional.”

After this incident, students complained about Rose, who was scheduled to give a talk in another professor’s class within the month. Nelson told the News that he looked into student complaints concerning Rose’s comments and met with him about them.

Kurth told the News that when dealing with student complaints on faculty and guest lecturers, the administration attempts to find ways to “educate the offending party” before taking serious action.

“Does it look like [there is] any willingness to acknowledge the harm and to improve?” Kurth said. “If so, then we can facilitate a conversation — if that is desired and consented to. That’s one example of an intervention. If not, it might need to be a very forced conversation with the guest lecturer or faculty member if you will … and then [the] consequence being non-engagement in the school.”

In Rose’s case, it was “clear” that the lecturer was not going to “reflect [or] self-educate,” Kurth told the News. He was not invited back to give his scheduled lecture.

Kurth’s June 18 email outlined plans for “anti-racism education and capacity-skills building” among instructors and students, to be implemented within the next six months. The school also plans to include anti-racism and DEI criteria in course and instructor evaluations starting in the 2021 cycle.

DIVERSITY OF FACULTY AND STUDENTS

In addition to concerns about individual professors, students criticized the makeup of School of Nursing faculty at large and brought up those concerns at Monday’s forum with Dean Kurth.

According to the Office of Institutional Research, there were 25 tenured and tenure-track faculty members out of a total of 97 faculty members at the school during the 2019-20 academic year. On Monday, students asked Kurth how many of those faculty members are Black.

She gave one name: LaRon Nelson.

“Most Black people are in support staff positions,” Shantrice King NUR ’22 told the News. “We need an entire overhaul of our administration. … [We need] a new structure, a new way of thinking about this [and] a new way of working.”

The problem is not just with hired faculty, students said, but also the guest lecturers they invite to the classroom.

“Our guest speakers are predominantly friends or colleagues of our white faculty which perpetuates a culture of learning from only white practitioners, while we know this is not representative of the broader landscape of providers,” Lipari wrote in an email to the News. “It prioritizes the learning of white students who can more easily identify with the providers and perpetuates power dynamics that elevate white knowledge.”

“Most Black people are in support staff positions. We need an entire overhaul of our administration … [We need] a new structure, a new way of thinking about this [and] a new way of working.”

—Shantrice King NUR ’22

Kurth told the News that the nursing school has “made great strides” over the last three years, increasing the number of Black and Latinx faculty on the clinical side by seven.

That progress, according to Kurth, is not limited to faculty. She wrote in a Monday email to the School of Nursing community that the 2020 cohort of students was “the most diverse in YSN history.” The administration, she added, has a “Pursuit of Progress” fund for BIPOC students and programming. 

University Provost Scott Strobel echoed Kurth’s sentiments in his own Monday email to the nursing community, stating that BIPOC students compose 31 percent of the student body. In an interview with the News, Kurth described the increase in BIPOC students as “not as far as we want it to be,” but that it was “a step in the right direction.”

Still, students criticize a lack of representation at the school. For example, there were only two Indigenous students and one Indigenous faculty member at the School of Nursing in the 2019-20 academic year, the most recent year for which OIR data is available.

“Indigenous people are kind of just completely left out of the conversation,” Jill Langan NUR ’21 told the News. “The only real support or conversations I’ve had that are substantive around Indigenous health care or focusing on Indigeneity in health has come from peer-to-peer conversations.”

2019 TOWN HALL

In her June 18 statement regarding anti-racism at the School of Nursing, Kurth apologized for “all the times” that BIPOC members of the community were “hurt and let down” because of the school’s failure to effectively address racism.

“Recent examples,” Kurth wrote in the statement, “include incidents that occurred at a Jan. 2019 town hall with the [Graduate Entry Prespecialty in Nursing (GEPN) Program] faculty and students.”

According to McCaugherty and Campion, it was unclear to students in the GEPN Program — the first-year program at the school — what circumstances necessitated this town hall meeting in the first place.

Ana Svibruck NUR ’21 said the meeting started with vague comments and “random feedback” from students about the GEPN Program. After a returning GEPN student declared their support for a remediation policy — which would alter an existing policy that prevented students from continuing in the program if they fail an exam — the conversation started to get confrontational, according to Svibruck.

When Svibruck asked about retention rates for students of color in particular, she and Leonne Tanis NUR ’21 recounted in interviews, Honan asked “Are you saying my exams are racist?”

Kurth told the News that she has had “multiple conversations” with Honan related to the town hall.

“What was happening was that students were expressing their concerns and experiences and every time a person of color spoke, a person from the faculty would directly attack them personally back in response, and it was really bizarre,” McCaugherty said. 

Tanis, who is Black, told the News that she was publicly mocked by former School of Nursing professor Shannon Pranger during the town hall. According to Tanis, Pranger “put her hand above her head” and “started snapping” at her — in what Tanis called a “stereotypical impersonation of a Black woman.”

Campion and Tanis added that Pranger became defensive during the town hall.

“She screamed at [those present] that her husband could be Black, we don’t know her, and we don’t know what her family is like,” Campion said. “We were well acquainted with the fact that her husband was a white person.”

Kurth told the News in an interview that Shannon Pranger is “no longer here.” Kurth did not specify whether or not this was related to the town hall incident. Pranger did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

After the town hall, Tanis took her grievance to the Provost’s Office, where Director of the Office of Institutional Equity and Access Valarie Stanley conducted an informal investigation. Tanis also met with Kurth, who personally apologized to her, but Tanis felt that wasn’t enough.

Kurth’s public apology — in her anti-racist statement this summer — didn’t come until a year after the fact.

MONDAY’S FORUM

“We need to take action. We need policy changes, because we can talk about racism all day, all year [and] for centuries, but that’s not enough. ”

—Tayisha Saint Vil NUR ’23

Student frustrations came to a head on Monday during a forum with Kurth that aimed to address students’ petition protesting administrative changes in the DEI office. More than 220 nursing students attended — students pressed Kurth not just about their petition but about the School of Nursing’s culture as a whole and her lack of progress in improving it.

“They keep on missing the mark and actively not doing the job,” Sola Stamm NUR ’21 said in an interview. “It’s so unacceptable to see the administration refusing to confront its anti-Black racism instead of expanding and being better teachers, better health care providers and a better institution.”

In addition to raising specific concerns about administrative changes — including Kurth taking the DEI office under her purview — students asked Kurth what grade she believes the nursing community would give her for her response to racism.

“I think it’s clear that you all would say I do not deserve a good score, and I’m willing to hear that,” Kurth said. “It’s a work in progress.”

Saint Vil asked Kurth why she believes many Black students refuse to meet with her, and why those students who do express “trauma, frustration and pain.”

After a pause, Kurth responded that she feels there is a sense that there has been “harm,” and that the harm has not been addressed quickly enough. She added that her goal is to “do better with that.”

“As a community if we can’t have dialogue, we’re not going to be able to move forward,” Kurth said. “We have got to move together in making [this] a better place for our Black students.”

Later in the forum, Co-President of the Yale School of Nursing Student Government Organization Zoe Feinstein NUR ’22 interrupted Kurth to point out that she was using “a lot of passive voice” and “a lot of ‘we’” when students felt that she was the one who had authority.

When Kurth tried to hand the floor over to Nelson, students said they wanted Kurth to speak about these issues.

“I believe in ‘we’ and not just ‘I’,” Kurth responded. “There is a ‘we’ here. We have set up structures like the IDEAS council, like the curriculum committee that has student representation, like now having representatives in GEPN. … That’s the way that we make change.” 

Still, students do not think that dialogue is enough.

“We need to take action,” Saint Vil said at the forum. “We need policy changes, because we can talk about racism all day, all year [and] for centuries, but that’s not enough.”

Clarification, Oct. 29: A previous version of this article implied that all 220 students in attendance at the Monday forum brought complaints against Kurth. The article has been updated to clarify that not all 220 attendees brought complaints to the forum.

First years believe Yale can handle COVID-19, according to survey

Story by John Besche

Data Analysis and Visualizations by Ashley Qin

Cover Photo by Daniel Zhao

Published on September 17, 2020

In an anonymous survey sent out to the class of 2024, first-year students largely showed confidence in the University’s COVID-19 protocols despite the ongoing pandemic and no unified directives to combat it at the federal level.

The survey was sent to 1,207 students in the class of 2024 on Aug. 31. It closed on Sept. 2 with 471 responses, a 39 percent response rate.

Yale, like many college campuses, shut down in March to prepare for an ongoing pandemic that has since killed nearly 200,000 Americans. Yale ultimately decided on July 1 that it would partially reopen with stringent public safety protocols in place, raising the possibility of an outbreak in the fall.

Before the semester began, outbreaks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Syracuse University and the University of Notre Dame made national headlines, instilling concerns among some incoming first years — 46 percent said these outbreaks made them nervous about coming to campus. One first year commented that public health concerns kept him from traveling to New Haven altogether.

“The pandemic is the sole reason that I have decided to study remotely this semester,” Zach Auster ’24 said. “I was not going to endanger my health and the safety of others by traveling cross country. The recent outbreaks at other campuses only strengthened my confidence in that decision as they showed that no matter how rigorous the protocols in place, coronavirus outbreaks can and will spread on campuses.”

First years said by and large that Yale’s protocols are fair, with only 7.5 percent saying they were “too strict” and 9 percent answering “not strict enough.”

Jamarc Simon ’24 said that he does not think Yale’s protocols are too strict, but “just right” because —per the rules — students are tested twice weekly and can go out into New Haven.

For all students enrolled and living in New Haven, twice weekly COVID-19 testing is mandatory, and protocols limit the size of social gatherings. Even with these measures in place, 6.2 percent of respondents thought it was likely that they will get COVID-19.

“I work with the University of Utah’s COVID response, so I have seen firsthand that people who never expected to get COVID end up getting it, and that strict measures are necessary to keep the spread of the virus to a minimum,” said Gabe Ransom ’24. “I think that it is best to always assume that you are infectious and take the appropriate steps to protect those around you with that in mind.”

Auster added that Yale’s policy lacks a “true line in the sand” for violations of its community compact. In his opinion, students who forgo masks or choose to party should be sent home as these choices have wider implications for public health.

Still, 86 percent of first years said that they believed if they were to get sick, Yale would have the resources to adequately care for them.

15 percent of respondents think it is “highly unlikely” that they will become infected with the virus — more than twice the percentage of those who believe they will likely get COVID-19.

The majority of respondents were confident in Yale’s protocols and attitudes toward social distancing: 53 percent of respondents found it “unlikely” that they would contract the virus. Still, students will now have more freedom as they were released from arrival quarantine last week, creating more opportunities for exposure to the virus.

Kesi Wilson ’21, a Davenport FroCo, said there has been “recklessness as much as there has been adherence to policies,” and that first years will occasionally congregate in large groups on Cross Campus or in front of residential colleges without masks.

“In those cases, FroCos across colleges have been mobilizing to break them up,” Wilson said.
“Overall though … it really comes down to the level of individuals and how much they feel a communal responsibility to follow the rules in order to keep people safe.”

Monitoring adherence to COVID restrictions comes as an additional obligation to FroCos, whose job even in non-pandemic times is primarily to keep first years safe. These efforts are aided by the newly appointed Public Health Education for Peers, or PHEPs, in each residential college.

One FroCo commented on the social implications of the COVID protocols they are asked to enforce.

“It’s definitely hard to essentially tell a first year to put their social life on hold, but we have seen first years violate some parts of the community compact — thankfully usually at less serious levels,” said Berkeley FroCo Brian Lin ’21. “The current situation is a matter of public health, and we try to make that very clear. it’s a collective effort to keep everyone safe, and thus, we face collective consequences.”

Yale has reported 12 student cases of COVID-19 since Aug. 1.

Most first years believe it is unlikely that they will become infected with COVID-19. (David Zheng)