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After life: Muslim deathcare in New Haven

Story by Ko Lyn Cheang

Photos by Erum Hassan

Published on November 22, 2019

Secular regulations hinder Muslim burial practices in Connecticut

When a Muslim woman dies in New Haven or a nearby town, Sana Fatima Farooqi is informed by the local imam. She finds someone to take care of her sons for the hours that she will be gone. Then she messages one of her WhatsApp groups — “Gosl Sisters Group” or “Washing and Shrouding CT” — to find two to five women who will join her to wash the body of the deceased woman in the Muslim ritual of ghusl before the woman is shrouded and laid to rest.

When she arrives at the funeral home, Farooqi prepares warm water scented with camphor oil to wash the body. Sometimes the home will have running water available in the preparation room. If not, she and the women helping her carry buckets of water for the washing. Out of respect for the modesty of the deceased woman, Farooqi covers her from neck to foot in a white cloth. Just as Muslim women cover themselves in life, they give the same respect to a Muslim sister in death.

The hardest part for Farooqi is washing the breasts and genitals without ever looking at them. The women always wash the right side of the body first, then the left. They repeat this process twice, more if necessary. They must not clip her nails. They must not cut her hair. The body is sacred, as is her resting soul.

Sometimes they must clean blood that trickles from the nose or from exposed wounds on the body. Farooqi takes care not to let any blood get on the white sheet that will shroud the woman in the grave. The cloth, called the kafan, must remain pristine.

Once the washing is completed, Farooqi will dry the body and perfume it with camphor, sidr (jujube) leaves or scented oil so the woman smells as if she had just taken a bath. They dab the scented oil on the parts of the body that touch the ground when Muslims prostrate themselves before God. The forehead, the tip of the nose, the hands, the knees, the feet — these are the places where you are closest to God.

Finally, the women take three seamless white cotton sheets and wrap the body, folding the right side of the cloth over the left. When Muslims bury the body the traditional way, in a shroud without a burial container, the fabric decomposes and the shroud, along with the body, returns to the earth.

~~~

I met Farooqi at the mosque on George Street. She invited me to sit with her on the carpet. The material was scarlet and gold-patterned, vibrant against the black velvet skirt beneath her knees.

From the outside, a passerby would never guess that the unassuming two-story New England-style house with the white cladding, pitched roof and dormer windows is a mosque. But for the Muslim community in New Haven, finding a way to practice their faith within a secular context is not something new but a fact that they have long accepted. The daily call to prayer sounded quietly within the walls of the mosque; in this country, public broadcasts of the adhan are inconceivable. I would soon learn that in death practices, too, Muslims in America have had to learn to adapt.

Erum Hassan

Small-boned and bespectacled, Farooqi’s soft-spoken voice belies the hefty responsibility she bears in the local Muslim community. Farooqi manages a loose coalition of about 10 women who volunteer their time and, in some cases, money, to carry out ghusl for any Muslim women who pass away in New Haven.

“A lot of people are scared to do it because they think, ‘It’s a dead body,’” said Farooqi. “But I think, what if it were me? Who is going to do it for me? Everyone passes away, so you feel honored that you can help somebody in that state.”

For Muslims, washing the body prior to shrouding and burial is obligatory, according to hadith, which are the recorded words and actions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It is written in hadith that when the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad died, he gave instructions to women to wash her three times or more, with water and sidr and camphor. Muslims today continue to follow these instructions on how to wash the bodies of the deceased.

Farooqi rarely knows the families of the women whose bodies she washes. She has met families from Bosnia and Bangladesh, families who don’t speak English and families who have lived in Connecticut all their lives. Since 2012, she has washed the bodies of over 20 women.

The women who assist Farooqi are usually younger, since the washing involves lifting the body, requiring physical strength. Most are devout and pray five times a day. For many, their motivation is deeply religious. Farooqi and the women who volunteer their time to do ghusl never charge for what they do. Sometimes, appreciative family members will give them some money to replenish ghusl supplies. Every few months, Farooqi purchases towels, soap, camphor, cotton buds, Q-tips and other materials for ghusl, usually with her own money. Recently, Farooqi has begun using burial kits provided free of charge by a nonprofit organization called Akhiri Tohfa based in Connecticut.

“She is not alone in what she does. In Windsor and Bridgeport, Orange and Weston, other Muslim sisters like Farooqi take the lead and organize similar teams to wash the bodies of women in their communities who pass away.”

The women on these ghusl teams have a spiritual connection to these rituals and feel an obligation to perform ghusl. Based on Islamic teachings, if someone in the community fails to carry out this responsibility, there is a sin on the whole community.

The ghusl ritual is a cornerstone of Muslim deathcare practices. “The washing of the body is integral,” said Omer Bajwa, director of Muslim life for the Chaplain’s Office at Yale, “Islam doesn’t have many requirements [for death rites] but the washing of the body is one really prominent requirement.”

According to Bajwa, Islam sees death as a departure from our mortal life where the body is fundamentally vulnerable to degeneration. “Islam is very realistic about the human body and human limitations,” he said.

In line with this thinking, the ideal Islamic burial is simple. Muslims prefer not to use a casket for burial and certainly not a burial vault, a concrete container that encases the casket and prevents the grave from sinking. In strict Islamic tradition, Muslims are laid to rest in a simple burial shroud in the soil.

Bajwa quotes a verse from the Quran to me: “From the earth We created you, and into it We will return you, and from it We will extract you another time.”

For this reason, embalming is also frowned upon in the religion. By wrapping the body in nothing but three plain cotton sheets, the body can naturally decompose and return to the earth.

Erum Hassan

But in practice, very few Muslims are able to fulfill their vision of a simple Islamic burial. Many modern cemeteries have regulations that require burial vaults. One such cemetery is Beaverdale Memorial Park, a modern nonsectarian cemetery in New Haven founded in 1929.

The manager, Dan Krueger, has a neat, white beard that trims his slim face. He has been working at the cemetery since he was 35 years old. He is soft-spoken and kind, almost as if he is anticipating what you are about to say. He says “yes” a lot.

At Beaverdale, it is a requirement that all caskets are encased in a burial vault. The reason is practical: Without the concrete vault to prevent the grave from sinking, the ground covering the burial site can drop several inches. It would be harder to maneuver trucks and equipment and excavators over the grounds. Visitors could trip.

When Muslim or Orthodox Jewish families approach Krueger to help with the burial of their loved ones, Krueger has to explain that regulations require the burial vault for safety reasons. State regulations on burial tend to be permissive, according to Krueger — the body doesn’t have to be embalmed by state law and burial vaults are not required.

However, cemeteries tend to set stricter policies. “We put in regulations so we can maintain the cemetery in the manner we think is fitting,” said Krueger. Being the final resting place of loved ones, a cemetery has to project an atmosphere of serenity and order befitting of the dead. Sunken graves, overgrown grass, and faded plastic flowers littering the grave sites are high on the list of things that Krueger tries to avoid.

Since he was the imam for Masjid Al-Islam from 1996 to 2001, Saifudeen Hasan has been responsible for managing funerals for the mosque and its members. He has noticed that in the past 10 years, cemeteries have started imposing more restrictions on burial procedures.

There is a cemetery in Enfield, Connecticut, where Muslims in New Haven have been buried for over 25 years. After years of burying Muslims the traditional way, without a casket or vault, the cemetery began imposing requirements on using a burial container. Hasan explained that the cemetery was concerned because of its proximity to residential housing and the risk that human remains could contaminate the water.

There’s nothing in the Quran that says the use of a burial container is strictly forbidden, but Muslim burials without a vault or casket are a matter of tradition.

“Sometimes, you have to conform to the state laws as long as it’s not completely against Islam,” said Hasan. “If it was, we would try to go to the state to make exceptions for religious reasons.”

However, given the high cost of funerals, the requirement on burial vaults only increases the financial hardship of a loved one dying.

Death is expensive in America. In 2017, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the price of funerals in the United States had risen almost twice as fast as consumer prices for all items since 1986. There are transportation fees to pay the funeral home, burial plots which can cost upward of $1,000 and burial caskets priced at $2,000 or more, among other costs.

Muslims funerals are considered to be on the cheaper end of deathcare rites: Hasan estimates the average Muslim funeral would set a family back by about $5,000. In comparison, the average cost of a funeral with a burial and vault in 2017 was $8,755, according to National Funeral Directors Association statistics. Still, for many members of the mosque, he says, cost is an issue.

“Our community is more blue-collar taxi drivers and social workers, whereas a lot of other communities have doctors and lawyers and engineers,” Hasan said. According to 2017 data by the Pew Research Center, Muslim Americans report lower household incomes and are less likely to be middle class than the general population.

“Muslim families, especially Muslim American families, don’t always have the money to pay for it because they don’t have the insurance,” said Hasan. “So a lot of the time the cemetery will waive the fees or the masjid pays for the funeral.”

But the mosque does not always have the funds on hand to cover the funeral and burial costs of their members. When accounts are running low, the mosque leaders will appeal to the congregation for donations to contribute to the funeral expenses of deceased members. If members don’t have the money, the mosque makes an appeal to other mosques in the area.

Between the Muslim communities in Orange, Hamden and New Haven, they have always managed to pull together the funds in the end, Hasan said. He cited the Muslim concept of “Sadaqah,” or voluntary charity, as the reason for the mosque to shoulder the financial burden for families that cannot afford it.

“Honestly, economically, people are struggling right now so the donations are not as great as they used to be in the past,” said Hasan.

Technically, the Connecticut Department of Social Services offers burial assistance of up to $1,400 for individuals with very limited means. But in practice, Hasan says the assistance has not been immediately useful as it takes days to process.

Since Muslims do not embalm the body, they prefer to bury the dead as quickly as possible, within 24 hours. If they delay until after state assistance is approved, the body will deteriorate.

Hasan recently buried a Muslim man whose family could not afford the funeral. Although they applied for state assistance, it took too long and by that time, the mosque had already covered funeral expenses.

“We don’t get any support from the government,” said Hasan. “Everything is done individually by the mosque.”

~~~

When Farooqi’s father passed away seven years ago, she inadvertently found herself becoming acquainted with the rituals and regulations of death — both Islamic and state-imposed.

Connecticut law generally prohibits people from bringing dead bodies into their homes, unless they have special permission. But for Farooqi, part of Muslim tradition is that a body should never be left unattended.

Farooqi gained permission from the state to bring her father back home where she stood vigil over him through the night, saying prayers over his body. Outside, a state official was parked all night to ensure that the body was buried the following morning in line with state health and safety regulations.

At that time, the only Muslim cemetery in Connecticut was located in Enfield, almost 60 miles and an hour’s drive from New Haven. So to Enfield Farooqi went.

For a Muslim, it is ideal to be buried in a Muslim cemetery. Bajwa explained that the idea of community is deeply rooted in Islam. Even after death Muslims see themselves — irrespective of race, nationality and ethnicity — as part of a global ummah, or global Muslim community.

“These are people who you will be resurrected with on the day of judgement,” Bajwa explained, “Muslims believe at the end of time, it was prophesied by the prophet that all souls will be resurrected from the graves. These are brothers and sisters of faith, co-religionists, that you will be resurrected with before you go to meet god.”

For many years, Enfield was the only option in Connecticut for Muslims who wanted to stay together as a community after death. That changed three years ago, when the Tariq Farid Foundation, a philanthropic organization that has funded U.S. soup kitchens and the rebuilding of schools in northern Syria, opened a second Muslim cemetery in Cheshire, just a half-hour drive from New Haven.

There is still no Muslim cemetery in New Haven, however. For the Elm City’s growing Muslim community, it may be quite some time before that becomes a reality.

~~~

After her father passed away in 2012, Farooqi felt an urge to give back to her community and attended a workshop by Sister Matiniah Yahya to train women in washing and preparing bodies.

Farooqi didn’t know it then, but Yahya would become instrumental in mentoring Farooqi in the ghusl process. Eventually, Yahya passed the role of leading the women who do ghusl in New Haven to Farooqi.

Yahya has been involved in the ritual washing of bodies for most of her adult life. She was 21 when she first participated in a ghusl for a dead person. The imam at a mosque in Quincy, Massachusetts, had called to ask if she could help wash bodies — they were short one person. Her heart pounded as she entered the preparation room where she was to assist the ghusl team in the washing. She told herself, “Don’t faint, just stay there.” She said a prayer to calm herself.

The room was very hot. The air was thick with the piquant aroma of camphor and sweet aroma of oils for ghusl. But despite the heat and her nerves, she felt a sense of calm. The women were all quiet as they methodically worked. All attention was on the body.

“Everything became real to me at that point, all the questions about who is going to wash me? Am I going to be too fat for them to roll over? What is it going to be like? My family, are they going to be here? And the angels are going to come and question me?” said Yahya.

When she arrived in Connecticut after getting married, women were doing ghusl without formalized classes on the ritual. Motivated by her knowledge of Islamic theology, Yahya developed a detailed three-day workshop that explained the scriptural basis for ghusl, examined the ritual’s origins in the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and taught participants how to wash and shroud dead bodies.

Back then, a large group of stay-at-home wives and mothers volunteered their time to do ghusl. But it has since become harder to find women to help. In the past 15 years, Yahya has noticed more women going back to school or work, with less and less time to volunteer.

Yahya and Farooqi have begun to reach out to towns around New Haven to find other women willing to shoulder the responsibility of ghusl. They have a list of women they know they can call when a Muslim sister dies. But Yahya admits it takes a special kind of person to do this task.

~~~

On the day I met Farooqi in the mosque on George Street, a crying toddler being consoled by his older sister — barely adolescent age herself — and an elderly woman in a hijab sat in the corner of the room. When Farooqi, the girl and the elderly woman lined up for the sunset prayer, they stood from youngest to oldest, a physical reminder of the inevitability of aging and mortality.

“I have seen so many people who have been dead that I [often] think about my own death and what am I going to leave behind,” said Farooqi later. “It’s something I think all Muslims are supposed to think about.”

I thought of my visit to Beaverdale Memorial Park, the secular cemetery, less than two weeks before. I had stood with Dan Krueger before the yawning grave — 36 inches wide, 8 feet long and 5 and a half feet deep, standard-issue size. The sides and bottom of the grave were perfectly flat, like the bottom of a big chest. Below my feet were 32,000 graves, people buried between 1929 and 2019, men, women, large and small, all stacked side by side in this resting place for the dead.

Looking at the grave, I had found it easy to think of death and burial as a strictly mechanical process. The excavator that digs the grave with its metal claws would belong just as much on a construction site or a scrapyard as in a cemetery.

But then I remembered what Bajwa told me.

“Death is a powerful, profound reminder on how you should live your life: You can live your life, be obsessed with your job, your career, accumulate power and prestige, but when you go to the grave … no wealth, power will go with you,” he said. “You were born into this world naked and you will go to the grave naked. And, at that moment, you will hear the fading footsteps of your loved ones. That is a moment of feeling profoundly alone.”

SMOKE RISES

Story By Matt Kristoffersen

Photos By Marisa Peryer, Lukas Flippo

Published on October 1, 2019

The KBT fire wiped out years of research. Scientists in the building say it could have been avoided.

It started in the basement.

Unnatural flames spread through the building’s electrical transformer, cutting off power to priceless biological specimens. Kline Biology Tower would soon go dark for days.

Floors above, the skyscraper’s dim, cramped hallways were unusually calm. On that Sunday afternoon in February, Michael Bond GRD ’22 had just finished grading papers for Biology 103 on the fourth floor when he decided to check on his experiment.

He opened a freezing liquid nitrogen tank and, through his safety goggles, saw a worried colleague approach. “There’s a fire,” Bond remembered him saying. “We have to leave.” But Bond didn’t hear any alarms, and since drills were common in the aging skyscraper, it was hard to believe this wasn’t another false alarm. As he grabbed his coat and backpack, Bond figured he’d be back soon.

He and other researchers gathered in front of a nearby building. When he looked back at the tower, he could see a plume of black smoke emerging from a grate next to it. The acrid stench of charred electrical equipment was overpowering, he wrote in an email to the News. He hoped the fire wasn’t serious. He’d left the tank open.

Firefighters arrived. They evacuated researchers and professors who were still in the building. Bond was startled to learn that until firefighters entered their labs, many scientists weren’t aware of the embers spreading in the basement at all. He would not be able to turn off his nitrogen tank; the fire department had closed the building.

The next time he’d be in his lab, it would be dark, and his lab’s freezers — which stored valuable animal cells and reagents at temperatures far below freezing — would be warming.

Other specimens across the skyscraper were in jeopardy that night, too. A weeklong power outage — caused by the blaze — would eventually cause millions of dollars in damage.

But it all could have been prevented. Several scientists who worked in the building said they had concerns about the tower’s safety measures and lack of emergency power, but that the University failed to address them.

Marisa Peryer

“Yale never will”

From her ninth-floor lab in KBT, Nadya Dimitrova could see the entire city of New Haven; to the south, the Atlantic Ocean; the seemingly endless mass of green trees stretching in nearly every other direction.

The professor has since moved into the new Yale Science Building. But she misses her old view.

“KBT was a fantastic building,” she said. “But for biomedical research — where you need proper temperature control, airflow and other support — it was absolutely inappropriate.”

Designed in the mid-1960s by renowned modernist architect and Nazi sympathizer Philip Johnson, the tower was intended to command New Haven’s skyline and contrast with Yale’s prevailing Gothic Revival aesthetic. It was a monument to Yale’s scientific achievement and, briefly, the city’s tallest building.

According to professor Joel Rosenbaum, who has been working in KBT since it was built, the tower has its problems.

“[It is] a tall, thin building where communication between floors is next to impossible,” Rosenbaum told the News. “The building was not built for science, but as an edifice to Philip Johnson himself.”

What lay inside KBT at the time of the fire was near-priceless: entire careers’ worth of carefully cultivated cells and custom-made reagents that would prove expensive to replace. Countless experiments were permanently preserved in freezers and incubators across the building — or so scientists hoped. Ph.D projects and endangered animals hung in the balance. Emergency power, they assumed, would kick in if a power outage were to happen.

But Dimitrova had been through too many emergencies to assume. Before coming to Yale, Dimitrova weathered Hurricane Katrina. Her lab lost power for three days but wasn’t impacted, she said. Later, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her lab went dark for 24 hours. In both cases, none of her team’s research was affected, thanks to backup power.

At her previous jobs, she said emergency power was “a given.” But when she accepted an offer to work at Yale and explored her lab, she was surprised that KBT’s procedures didn’t measure up.

“I was shocked that nothing of what I had would be in any way protected in the event of either a natural disaster occurring or a malfunctioning of the electrical system,” she said.

As a junior faculty member, Dimitrova felt it wasn’t her place to question authority. But the thought of losing all her work to a preventable disaster pushed her to speak up, she said. At weekly meetings with a supervisor, Dimitrova remembers discussing the issue to no avail. “There’s no money,” she remembers being told.

In fact, Dimitrova once tracked down an assistant provost at a cocktail party to ask him for improvements to the emergency power system. She remembers him laughing the request off, saying, “Yale never will.”

Marisa Peryer

The administrator referred the News’ request for comment to University spokesperson Karen Peart. Peart did not respond to questions regarding the discussion. Dimitrova said she did not keep records of her requests for additional power system improvements. But other scientists shared similar stories — and agreed that Yale wasn’t as prepared for a power outage as it could have been.

Scott Holley, who led a lab in the tower, blamed the lack of administrative action on the new Yale Science Building.

“Once the University realized we were moving out of KBT, they did not want to do more modifications for it,” he said.

The plumbing was also “terrible,” Holley said. Other scientists confirmed this, and spoke of frequent water leaks and weak, inconsistent air conditioning. Holley remembers his office reaching 85 degrees in the summer. But just one floor up, he said, the rooms would remain very cold.

Lucas Sanor GRD ’19 recalled noticing a hole in the window next to his desk in professor Craig Crews’ lab on the fourth floor. And in summer months, the heat was so extreme that he worried that his sweat would drop onto the specimens he was examining.

Outside KBT

The evening of the fire, as the sun set over KBT, researchers like Giuseppe Militello weren’t focused on their dissatisfaction with the building’s maintenance. They just wanted to go back in.

Hours past sundown, they still waited outside in the cold. With the firefighters came a hazardous materials crew, and the dark building — filled with expensive specimens and equipment — was closed to non-emergency personnel. What started in the basement of an aging tower had become a much larger crisis.

Militello, who works in Dimitrova’s lab, recalled that researchers began to worry out loud that night. “Okay,” he remembers someone saying, “I’m losing years and years of work.”

Militello could tell Dimitrova was nervous from her emails. She was on a bus headed to British Columbia and reception was poor. Their lab manager was in Boston.

Then, at around 9 p.m., there was a rush.

Millitello, escorted by safety personnel armed with flashlights, finally climbed to his lab on the ninth floor and tried to stuff as many specimens as he could into each freezer. There wasn’t enough space, he said, and the dark floors could have been filled with nitrogen fumes from tanks like Bond’s — which, if inhaled, could make you faint.

He could only save so much. The elevators worked, he said, which meant that movers could easily wheel freezers to other buildings. But time worked against him: Plenty of other scientists wanted to get in the building, too, and the movers were hard to locate on a Sunday night.

The building’s poor ventilation also posed problems. Without proper airflow, the blackout had raised the temperature in some of the rooms, killing animals and research materials that would prove hard to replace.

And when Sanor walked into his lab, he saw one of his axolotls — a critically endangered salamander species native to Mexico — laying dead in its enclosure.

Sanor’s damaged axolotl embryos, central to his dissertation research, were arguably worse losses. They develop slowly and the regrowth process took weeks. “It’s not catastrophic,” he said, but “when you work for weeks and it just disappears, that sucks.”

Dimitrova’s worst fears were, in essence, confirmed: Emergency power didn’t save the day. Still, she remembers dozens of Yale researchers and movers working to save as much as they could from the building. By early Monday morning, rows of freezers stood in the basement of Sloane Physics Laboratory, full of critical research materials and finally connected to much-needed electricity.

Yale Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology chair Vivian Irish, who served as the liaison between researchers in the building and the University administration, told the News that night that she was “cautiously optimistic” her team could move back by Wednesday. But it was too early to tell how much was lost, she wrote.

“Why the hell is that possible?”

Bond wasn’t the only one who didn’t hear fire alarms that day. According to him, and others across the tower, alarms on the fourth and ninth floors weren’t functional.

But even if they had worked, he said, the alarms may not have gone off: KBT’s fire system was designed to only alert floors immediately surrounding the blaze in the event of a minor fire.

Yale Environmental Health & Safety advisor for the tower Josh Armstrong did not respond to several requests for comment on the fire system. Peart, the University spokesperson, denied accusations that fire alarms at Kline were nonfunctional. She wrote in her statement that KBT’s fire alarm system has since been reconfigured to evacuate all floors in the event of a fire due to faculty members’ concerns. The Office of the Fire Marshal had tested the alarms after the fire, she wrote, and found that the system “functioned properly, as it was designed, and is in good working order.”

Scientists like Militello would later find that the emergency power they had assumed was present — and that Dimitrova knew was not — was hardly sufficient to handle the demands of an electrical fire. The elevators from the ground floor were working during the blackout, but the floors and their labs had gone dark.

“Something I really did not understand was that we had no current in the building but the elevators were working,” Militello said. “Why the hell is that possible?”

Marisa Peryer

Dimitrova’s concern that there wasn’t enough emergency power turned out to be only part of the problem. The backup power in the building, said professor Thomas Pollard, came through the same transformer in the basement as the regular power. When that transformer burned, it knocked out both, he wrote in an email to the News.

“It boggles my mind that a university like Yale that invests so much in biological and biomedical research would not have [sufficient emergency power],” Bond said. “People could lose half to all their Ph.D. in a day. It’s a little scary to think about.”

The Recovery

The fire was just the beginning of the scientists’ woes.

Then came the recovery process.

Once evacuated, scientists were forced to deal with freezer failure and unconventional recovery methods for days until they were able to fully return to their labs. Pollard said power in his cold room failed twice after returning to the tower.

Even though Pollard’s lab “did not lose irreplaceable materials at any point,” other scientists were not as lucky. Bond said emergency freezers in the tower’s 11th floor, which could be used in the event of a minor fridge breakdown, were stuffed with samples from several different labs — making inventory disorganized and difficult to sort through. Freezer units in Dimitrova’s lab were also scattered across buildings on Science Hill, delaying her work for “very, very long periods of time.”

Researchers spent hours documenting and testing what they had — and what they didn’t — to determine what was salvageable. According to Bond, coordinating with the insurance company was difficult, tiring and time consuming.

Experiments that were months in the making had to be revived, replaced or redone, delaying research to the detriment of young scientists’ Ph.D. projects. For one graduate student in Dimitrova’s lab, this meant significantly limiting the scope of their project.

“Scientifically, of course, that also affected all of us,” Dimitrova said. Custom-made genetic sequences had to be relabeled and replaced before work in Dimitrova’s lab could resume. Work returned to normal about five or six weeks after the fire, she said.

In sum, the total damage to KBT’s labs reached the millions — the Crews Lab alone may have lost as much as $400,000 in precious antibodies, Bond estimated.

“There is the element of loss that’s not easy to recover,” said Dimitrova. “You’ve lost a little bit of the excitement when you do it the second time.”

“What if?”

For Militello, who came to Dimitrova’s lab in January, the move to the Yale Science Building was a welcome change. Instead of a “dirty, old, ugly” tower, he said, the new location is sleek and clean.

Thanks to the insurance payout and $200,000 from the University, Dimitrova’s lab has bounced back from the disaster with enough money to hire new staff and replace what her team had lost, Dimitrova said. And in the Yale Science Building, the lab has an outlet connected directly to an emergency power system. Dimitrova made sure of it. But there’s only one, Militello said. “There should be more.”

Lukas Flippo

Peart wrote in her email to the News that improvements are to come. “We are confident that the YSB building has state of the art systems, and we are working with the faculty to place additional alternate power outlets in their YSB labs in an abundance of caution,” she wrote. “The fire impacted a number of investigators from our MCDB department. We regret that this happened and have worked hard to get the groups back to full operations.”

But original plans for the Yale Science Building mirrored KBT’s problems, including insufficient emergency outlets. According to Pollard’s recent email, the new cold rooms have none.

The move itself put a great disadvantage relative to her competitors in research, she added. And even though the Yale Science Building’s plans have been updated in response to scientists’ concerns, her worries remain.

“What if something else comes up, and I try to warn people and explain why that would be important for science and it’s not taken into account?” she said. Dimitrova thinks that the new building may not have sufficient emergency power if the fire didn’t happen.

“I definitely do not have the trust that our view as biologists is taken into account when making decisions,” she said.

From the windows of the new Yale Science Building, one can follow the dirt-brown columns of KBT floor by floor. First, there’s the ground-level cafe. Then, rows of laboratories, layered one on top of the other, much emptier than before. Finally, its summit, windowless and plain.

For Yale’s Astronomy Department, which will soon move into the skyscraper, the empty space presents a new opportunity to conduct research.

But for many of its former occupants, the building is a reminder of what was lost, of a loss that could have been prevented. It looms over Science Hill as a makeshift mausoleum: Here lie cell cultures, DNA molecules and years of work. Here lies Ph.D. projects and views of the Atlantic.

Seven months after Bond stopped grading Biology 103 papers to evacuate from a building he didn’t know was burning, students taking this semester’s Biology 103 in the new Yale Science Building Marsh Lecture Hall followed suit. They gathered outside on Science Hill, cautiously optimistic. This time was different. There was a fire alarm, but there were no flames. Within the week, class picked up where it had left off. Business as usual.

When the alarm rings again, will Yale heed it?

Lukas Flippo

Miye Oni '20 Pursues the Pros

Story By William McCormack

Photos By Marisa Peryer

Published on May 15, 2019

The once-overlooked Ivy League Player of the Year went from no looks to New Haven. Now, he might soon find himself in the NBA.

Miye Oni ’20 did not make the Viewpoint School’s varsity basketball team until his junior year of high school. A 5-foot-8-inch point guard on the junior varsity team his freshman year, Oni had sprouted into a 6-foot-4 center by the time his junior season began in November.

In March, Oni — now 6-foot-6 — hired an agent and declared for the 2019 NBA draft. After three seasons as Yale’s starting guard, he ranks tenth among the Elis’ all-time scoring leaders, with 1,308 points. Amid speculation that he might become the first Ivy League athlete selected to an NBA team since 1995, Oni’s 17.1 points, 6.3 rebounds and 3.6 assists a game helped guide Yale to March Madness, earned him this season’s Ivy League Player of the Year award and lured NBA scouts to Ivy League gyms throughout the Bulldogs’ 22-win campaign.

Most draft pundits project that Oni will be selected as a mid-to-late second-round pick. He now finds himself in a unique position for an Ivy League athlete: withdraw from the draft and return to Yale for his senior season or kickstart a professional career by remaining in it. The upswing has been dramatic, but his NBA dream — no matter his size, scoring average or how few considered it realistic — has always been the same.

Varsity Orchestra, JV Basketball

Oni’s father Oludotun (Dot), who immigrated to the United States from Nigeria, took an interest in basketball watching Nigerian American center Hakeem Olajuwon play for the Houston Rockets in the 1990s. When his son was 2 years old, Dot bought Miye and his older sister Oluwatoniloba (Toni) a toy hoop, and the Yale guard has been shooting ever since. But for much of Oni’s high school career — and especially before his post-sophomore year growth spurt — his community viewed him as more of a violist than a competitive basketball player. Oni began playing viola in fifth grade at Viewpoint, a Los Angeles–area independent school that runs from kindergarten to 12th grade.

Initially, Oni’s sister was the basketball star of the family. Coaches at nearby basketball powerhouse Sierra Canyon School recruited Toni, who stood at 6 feet in eighth grade, for her precocious performance on the court. Sixth-grade Miye followed his phenom sibling there. Oni’s family had moved to the Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles when Miye, whose full name is Olumiye, was born in 1997, and Oni had earlier enrolled at Viewpoint as a first grader. But, discouraged by the size and skill of his classmates at Sierra Canyon, he returned to Viewpoint in ninth grade for its academics and what he and his parents considered his only chance to play high school hoops.

Oni’s viola teacher, Kristin Herkstroeter, who is also Viewpoint’s music department chair, was happy to see him back. She considered him “someone who was focused on academics who also played the viola and then did some basketball” for years. “I knew he played basketball, but usually [if] kids do well, you hear about them, and his name really didn’t float to the top until senior year,” Herkstroeter said.

Even once he towered over the 5-foot-2 Herkstroeter and played a viola so big that she struggled to help him tune it, Oni enjoyed playing in Viewpoint’s orchestra — where he earned “varsity” affiliation long before he made the basketball team as a junior. Orchestra met during the school day as much as a math or science class, and Oni played at most concerts, including one at Disneyland, always combing his “already perfect” hair just before the curtain opened, Herkstroeter recalled.

In the offseason, he worked to gain lower-body strength with air resistance squats and box jumps at Dune Citi, a basketball facility near his house. Oni began his Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) season with the Basketball Training Institute (BTI) program soon after, but as practically its last man off the bench, he played inconsistently and lacked confidence. Starting the recruiting process with only a few games of varsity film and scattered play from his summer AAU was difficult. His strength program hadn’t come into full effect and he was still growing. But he did have one definite asset: academics.

“Basically once my sister got into Cornell, I knew that I wanted to go to an Ivy League school,” Oni said. “There was no question. … My mom wouldn’t even take me to the gym until I finished all of my assignments for the upcoming week.”

Oni sought a spot at a top academic program, expressing interest to Division III schools like UChicago, NYU and Washington University in St. Louis. Emphasizing strong test scores, burgeoning athleticism and versatility on the floor, he hoped, would catch some coaches’ attention. But his emails, which he also sent to all the Ivies and Patriot League schools, barely received responses. Yale’s associate head coach Matt Kingsley sent him one, Oni said, that basically wished him luck with the process. It wouldn’t be their final correspondence.

From no looks to New Haven

Underestimated for so long, Oni initially committed to Division III Williams College after Ephs coach Kevin App invited him on an unofficial visit to Massachusetts. Williams, which offered a historically strong basketball program alongside the small school’s academics, suited Oni well at the time.

Then everything changed.

“His five month upward trend [afterwards] was essentially one that I really haven’t seen before or since,” Viewpoint head coach JJ Prince said. “He went from a very good player to a great player very quickly.”

Oni exploded during senior year, finally able to realize the potential that had accumulated with his growth and strength training. Division I coaches were often at Viewpoint contests to recruit Oni’s fellow starter, best friend and current Harvard guard Christian Juzang, and they started to take note of Oni too.

Although Yale had already completed its recruitment of seniors — the Yale class of 2019 — Kingsley attended a game in December to watch Juzang and remembers being intrigued by Oni during warmups. Those in the know could glance at a box score — his average stat line that season, said Prince, was 20 points, 10 rebounds, four or five assists, a couple steals and a block a game — and sense Division I potential interest in the Viewpoint senior.

A few months after Kingsley’s visit to LA, once Oni had started dominating competition en route to a Gold Coast League MVP honor, Robert Icart — the founder and director of Oni’s BTI — clued the Yale coach in on Oni. Icart attached an updated highlight tape that Oni’s father, Dot, had prepared, and Prince sent Viewpoint game film. Yale’s Kingsley and head coach James Jones became the first of many impressed Division I coaches. Oni soon secured an offer from Jones a couple weeks before his graduation, becoming the first player whom Jones has offered without watching in person.

“I was just amazed at how well he passed the ball, at his court vision, at his size, and then his athleticism was really quite outstanding in the tape,” Jones said. “He ended up having a transition dunk in somebody’s face … and he’s an excellent student, really smart young man, and it was just kind of a no-brainer.”

Pursuing the Pros

Oni’s senior spring became some of the busiest months of his life, as he fielded phone calls from Division I coaches around the nation on his way out of class. His late commitment to Yale meant Oni would need to reclassify and spend a year at prep school, but he thought sacrificing one year while all his friends started college as opposed to playing at a local UC program — or playing DIII — was worth it if he could compete at an Ivy.

Even after he committed to Yale in late June, the offers flooded in. Yale coaches helped him land a postgraduate spot with coach Jeff Depelteau at Suffield Academy, a prep school in Connecticut, for the 2015–16 school year, and with his arrangements in order, the swingman could finally focus on basketball. Over the summer, Oni played so well with the BTI on AAU circuits — and especially at the Fab 48 tournament in Las Vegas — that the Bulldogs feared other coaches would lure him away from New Haven.

“It was unbelievable,” Yale coach Kingsley said. “Your heart’s like, ‘Oh my god, who’s at this game?’ You’re looking around.” Oni led underdog BTI to wins over sponsored programs like Canada Elite, who featured future Milwaukee Bucks pick Thon Maker and Phoenix Suns selection Josh Jackson. A coach on Kansas’ staff told Yale assistant Justin Simon he was going to have Jayhawks head coach Bill Self give Oni a call.

It became clear that Oni, just nine months removed from sending emails to DIII schools in vain, could play on nearly any college team in the country. And to anyone who watched sponsorless BTI take down AAU powerhouses backed by Nike, Adidas and Under Armour, it also became clear that Oni could compete with — and beat — soon-to-be lottery picks in the NBA draft. His confidence grew while his desire to attend Yale endured.

He arrived in Suffield as the team’s top option. “Supposedly I was the first person to coach him that ever told him that he could play in the NBA, and that stuck with him,” Depelteau said. “I said listen, ‘You have the athleticism that these guys have, and that’s usually what most people are missing. You can shoot the ball. You can finish at the rim … It’s everything in between that you’ve got to work on.”

Oni responded well, developing his play and dropping 52 points in one game against Kentucky commit Wenyen Gabriel and his Wilbraham Monson teammates. He acclimated to life on the East Coast, trained before dawn with former Suffield strength coach Harry Melendez and incorporated feedback from both Depelteau and the nearby Yale basketball staff on how to improve his game.

Oni discussed the Yale offense with Kingsley on the phone for about two hours one time and asked his future coaches to send along game film to pair with clips he found on YouTube.

“I didn’t want anything to hold me back basically from playing right away,” Oni said. “I didn’t want to be that freshman that didn’t know the plays, so I made sure I was on top of that stuff.”

Once he got to Yale, consistent improvement helped him impact virtually every facet of the team’s game. Oni averaged 12.9 points a game as a first year and scored 24 in his first game as an Eli, a season-opening win at Washington. There, NBA scouts watching future No. 1 overall pick Markelle Fultz likely first took note of Oni. He started 28 of 29 games as a first year, earning five Ivy League Rookie of the Week awards and an invitation to the Nike Skills Academy the summer before his sophomore season. Former professionals Rasheed Wallace and Robert Pack helped coach the camp, and Oni learned how several pros approached their basketball at the Nike Academy.

“This is what I want to do for hopefully the next 20 years, so I know I have to put the time in,” Oni said.

After the Nike camp and another successful season that saw Oni receive Yale’s MVP award and a unanimous selection to the All-Ivy First Team, his summer workout routine reached a new intensity. From 6:00 a.m. skill workouts in the San Fernando Valley to daily physical therapy at Live Athletics in Thousand Oaks, Oni was regimented, making sure to grab breakfast at Chick-fil-A most mornings in between. He focused on addressing specific weaknesses with each workout, making them shorter and more efficient. He’s seen NBA players like Jimmy Butler, whom Oni said starts his workouts with lifts at 4 a.m. and shooting at 5 a.m., and Victor Oladipo completing their own early summer workouts. “Seeing them finishing up a workout, that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

Oni transported his early-morning habit to Yale this past fall, occasionally driving from Benjamin Franklin College to John. J Lee Amphitheater for sunrise workouts in the offseason.

“He’s gentle. He’s kind. He’s a little shy. He’s a little reticent,” Franklin Dean Jessie Hill said of Oni’s off-court presence. “I think he really looks to the residential college as a place to be off-duty. He’s just like a big kid there, you know, with his bowls of cereal and kind of low profile. He’s never the center of attention when he’s in the college environment.”

Hill explained that Oni, who has played under bright stadium lights at arenas from Shanghai and Memphis to Jacksonville and Miami this season, may not have time to appear at most college events or teas, but he dutifully appears at any Chick-fil-A study break she sponsors.

The Draft

Kingsley estimated at least two-thirds of the NBA’s 30 franchises sent personnel to watch Oni live at either practice or a game this season.

The Golden State Warriors dispatched scout Mike Dunleavy Jr. to sit courtside during Yale’s win over Columbia. Boston Celtics general manager Danny Ainge did the same when the Bulldogs visited Harvard, simultaneously watching his Celtics play the Knicks at Madison Square Garden with AirPods and a smartphone. More than 10 scouts took in that contest against the Crimson, and a little less than two dozen received credentials to attend the conference tournament Ivy Madness in mid-March.

Kevin Stacom, a Mavericks scout based in Rhode Island, said the NBA attention Oni has garnered is rare but not completely unprecedented for an Ivy League hooper. Despite going undrafted, Harvard’s Jeremy Lin, who remains the only active Ancient Eight alumnus in the NBA, generated some buzz during his senior year in 2010. Cornell guard Matt Morgan and Brown guard Desmond Cambridge drew scouts to some of their games this season. Recent Yale alumni, such as two-time Ivy League Player of the Year Justin Sears ’16, attracted similar interest, along with current forward Jordan Bruner ’20, but coaches said the attention on Oni has been more intense.

Guard Alex Copeland ’19 was proud to hear his teammate declare for the draft on a Friday morning in late March. “Obviously as basketball players, we all were five-year-old kids that would write in class … ‘I want to be an NBA basketball player, I want to be a pro.’”

If drafted, Oni would become the first Ivy League player chosen since the Minnesota Timberwolves selected former Penn shooting guard and current Boston Celtics assistant Jerome Allen with the 49th pick in 1995. NBA franchises have only ever drafted seven Yale alumni — most recently Chris Dudley ’87 and Butch Graves ’84 — and none since the league adapted its current two-round format in 1989.

In declaring, Oni emphasized that he had made arrangements to complete his degree if he did indeed decide to leave Yale and commit to the draft. Especially towards the end of the season, Jones — who said he, Miye and Oni’s father Dot discussed the draft throughout the year despite keeping the talk at a minimum — continually complimented Oni’s concentration on college basketball and Yale’s successful season.

By the time No. 3-seeded LSU had eliminated No. 14-seeded Yale from the NCAA tournament, Oni’s Ivy League Player of the Year season had practically made the decision for him. The star guard broke out for a career-high 29 points in a comeback December win over Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) squad Miami and scored 31 (and grabbed nine rebounds) in a big win at Dartmouth in February. And in Yale’s next game against Princeton, he did it again, scoring 35 points (plus 12 rebounds) to increase his own career best for the third time this season. After guiding Yale onto college basketball’s biggest stage, Oni declaring for the draft early in order to test his professional chances made sense.

In 2011, Jones said he suggested Greg Mangano ’12 declare early after the forward’s junior season before he removed his name before the deadline. Guard Makai Mason ’18 did the same after his sophomore year. Cornell’s Morgan declared as an early entrant the past two years before returning to the Big Red both times. Declaring early, coaches agreed, allows prospects to field professional interest, collect feedback from the NBA Undergraduate Advisory Committee on their projected draft position and increase their own name recognition.

Even though Oni has signed with sports agent Harrison Gaines of SLASH Sports, he could still return to Yale. New NCAA policies updated late last summer allow basketball players who sign agents to maintain their collegiate eligibility by requesting an evaluation from the Undergraduate Advisory Committee. If Oni is not satisfied with the prediction he receives, he can withdraw from the draft and return to Yale for his senior season up until May 29. The 2019 NBA draft occurs on Thursday, June 20 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

Immediately after Oni declared, Jones told the News he would drive the wing to New York himself if NBA teams project taking him between one and 40. But “if he’s someone that they’re thinking is going to be from 45 to 60,” Jones said, “most of those young men end up in the G League, and it would probably be better for him to come back to Yale and graduate in his normal time.”

On the eve of the NCAA tournament, ESPN’s Mike Schmitz and Givony predicted Oni as 51st (of 60 total draft picks), and The Athletic ranked him as high as 39th. Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski, meanwhile, declared him a first-round pick — before complimenting Oni on his grades as the teams shook hands postgame — when Yale played at Cameron Indoor Stadium in December. In any case, scouts have already begun their research.

“These teams invest so much in their draft picks that they ask a million questions,” Simon said. “And what’s nice is that Miye is such a great kid that you can give them the straight truth. He’s phenomenal. He’s a worker. He’s a good practice guy, pushes his teammates.”

While some might assume playing in the Ivy League as opposed to facing lottery picks in the ACC detracts significantly from a prospect’s stock, many teams might actually see the maturity and off-court development Oni has amassed in the Ivy League as a positive. Oni, an August baby, was always young for his grade until he reclassified at Suffield, but he would enter the NBA draft as one of its oldest prospects among several “one-and-done” players that spend one season in college before playing professionally.

But no matter what he decides this spring, Jones, and many others at Yale, will be excited.

Benefitting from another season of production that ranked top 10 in nearly every Ivy League statistical category this past year? Fantastic.

And hearing Oni’s name called in June?

“It’s a wonderful thing for all of us,” Jones said. “Miye told me years ago that he wanted to try to get to the NBA as soon as he could, and my job is to try to help him get there as soon as he can. If you had a science student who had a cure for cancer, are you gonna hold them back? If you had a violinist or a dancer or an artist? No, you don’t hold true greatness back. You allow true greatness to flourish and move on and do whatever it is that they intend to do.”

I SAW WHAT I SAW: On this island, a Yale professor sexually harassed a Yale student. Did the University do enough?

Story By Jever Mariwala, Alice Park, & Marisa Peryer

Photos By Marisa Peryer

Published on March 5, 2019

A Yale student endured serial sexual harassment during a summer internship. The perpetrator — a School of Medicine professor — retired quietly. Five months later, the University announced an investigation — but did Yale do enough?

Editor’s Note: This article contains sexually graphic descriptions of misconduct. The student who experienced the misconduct requested the pseudonym Blair to protect their privacy.

On a chilly January evening, Blair received an unexpected call from their dean.

The dean told Blair, a gender nonbinary Yale senior who uses they/them/their pronouns, that Yale had launched an independent investigation into sexual misconduct complaints against retired School of Medicine professor Eugene Redmond. Blair was shocked. Seven months earlier, the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct had found Redmond responsible for sexually harassing them. But Redmond had retired before the University imposed disciplinary sanctions. It had seemed like the University’s hands were tied. Blair wondered: What had changed?

Later that night, in a Jan. 28, 2019 statement announcing the investigation, Yale said it was responding to a new complaint against Redmond. The University made a striking admission: Yale had investigated Redmond before. In 1994, former interns alleged that Redmond had sexually harassed them at a research facility on the Caribbean island St. Kitts where he ran an internship program — the same facility where he harassed Blair in 2017. At that time, Redmond promised to end the program, which he did for a few years. But since at least 2011, he had reopened it to Yale undergraduates, seemingly without Yale’s knowledge.

Eugene Redmond (YaleNews)

For a university that rarely — if ever — acknowledges cases of misconduct committed by faculty members, Yale’s announcement was unprecedented. It also seemed impressive: Yale hired a former U.S. district attorney as an outside investigator and named Redmond publicly. It looked like the University was doing the right thing.

“I am committed to the investigation that will shine more light on it: a university dedicated to the pursuit of truth can ask no less of itself,” University President Peter Salovey said in Yale’s statement.

But a five-month investigation by the News exposes Yale’s inability to effectively discipline faculty members found to have violated the University’s sexual misconduct policy. When the UWC found Redmond responsible for sexual harassment, it sent a report to the administrator with authority to sanction faculty — Provost Ben Polak. After receiving the UWC’s findings and all follow-up reports and responses — a normal part of the UWC’s adjudication process — the provost usually makes a disciplinary decision “within seven days,” according to the UWC’s website.

Polak had all of the follow-up reports and responses he had requested by July 9, but he did not issue a decision within seven days. Thirty-eight days passed before Blair received an update from the UWC: Redmond had retired without Polak having issued a decision. Another five months passed before the University announced its independent investigation in January.

In a signed letter to the News, Redmond categorically denied sexually harassing Blair. After Yale announced its investigation, he denied the allegations that motivated it in an email to the News, calling them “slanderous and defamatory.”

Fearing the disciplinary and legal action outlined in the UWC’s confidentiality policy, Blair decided not to publish any documentation from their UWC hearing. The News corroborated their story with email exchanges between Blair and University officials, as well as with the accounts of another St. Kitts intern, professors and Redmond himself.

The case against Redmond reveals an inability by the UWC — a highly bureaucratic system, considered a model among Yale’s peer institutions — to accommodate nuance in the cases it adjudicates. At nearly every stage, the University’s response to Blair’s experiences did not uphold its commitment to preventing and addressing cases of sexual misconduct. From the burden imposed on student complainants, particularly those who are nonbinary, to its stringent yet vague confidentiality policy, the UWC’s process can leave survivors feeling powerless and silenced. And even when the UWC rules in a complainant’s favor, the University is not always able or willing to hold its faculty members accountable.

Polak’s delay in disciplining Redmond and the University’s decision to launch an investigation months after Redmond’s retirement raise the question: Can Yale protect its students?

“I saw what I saw”

During the spring of their sophomore year, Blair, a biology major, began searching for internship opportunities for the upcoming summer. They found Redmond’s internship program listed on Yale Career Link — an online job portal run by Yale’s Office of Career Strategy — and decided to apply.

In March, Redmond interviewed Blair in Morse College, where he served as an adviser for at least 20 years. Eager to build a relationship with their new mentor, Blair invited Redmond to a performance by their spoken word group, which he attended.

Two days after the performance, Redmond told Blair over dinner that they would have to share a room with two beds over the summer. Blair found the idea of sharing a room with a professor “a little weird,” but ultimately agreed. There didn’t seem to be other options.

Despite the sleeping arrangements, Blair was thrilled by the opportunity to conduct research with Redmond, an esteemed scientist and pioneer of stem cell treatments for Parkinson’s disease. In the weeks after their dinner, Blair and Redmond emailed back and forth planning a joint research paper, which Blair knew would stand out on future medical school applications.

The night of June 11, 2017, Blair and two female interns — also Yale undergraduates — flew into St. Kitts and drove to Redmond’s research facility, roughly a mile from the coastline. The humid Caribbean air hit them as they walked to the main house with their suitcases, ready to sleep after a long day traveling.

Railroad tracks on St. Kitts. (Courtesy of Blair)

After saying goodnight to the other interns, Redmond and Blair retired to their shared room. Without warning, Redmond undressed, Blair said, and stood completely naked in front of them. Blair told the News that Redmond then put on loose boxers and got into his bed, which was situated just a few feet from Blair’s own.

According to both Redmond and Blair, the professor also offered to apply lotion or aloe onto their back regularly that summer.

“I offered to put sunscreen or lotion on the student’s back before going out into sun or at night. In the tropics, unprotected sun exposure can be dangerous,” Redmond wrote in his letter to the News.

Every morning, Blair woke with the other interns and walked across the facility grounds — past Dobermans that roamed the campus and cages of monkeys — to conduct their research. When their workday ended, the students often biked around the island or explored the nearby beach. Night after night, Blair and Redmond retired to their shared room.

On one of those nights, Blair encountered the professor “holding his penis with his hand and moving his hand up and down,” they told the News. A few days later, Blair saw Redmond masturbating in the bedroom for a second time.

“You can’t do this again,” Blair told him that night before leaving the room.

Blair recalled confronting the professor the next day.

In response, Redmond denied masturbating.

“I saw what I saw,” Blair told Redmond.

“It’s one of life’s little pleasures,” he responded.

In his letter to the News, Redmond denied “any occurrence of masturbation (or any explicit sexual behavior) in the presence of this student on any occasion in any place.” When asked about this alleged conversation with Blair, Redmond’s attorney did not address it directly but denied any misconduct.

One of the female interns living with Blair and Redmond — who requested anonymity because she did not want to be associated with the case — told the News that Blair confided in her about the second alleged masturbation incident that same night.

A day after the confrontation, Redmond asked to speak with Blair alone after work, according to Blair, and inquired about their sexual fantasies. When Blair responded that they felt uncomfortable discussing such topics, Redmond asked whether they masturbate. Blair said “not often,” hoping to end the conversation.

But the conversation did not stop there. According to Blair, Redmond responded, “As someone who cares about you, I am going to prescribe an orgasm a day.” From that day until the end of the summer he continued to ask Blair whether they were following his “prescription.”

In his letter to the News, Redmond defended all of his interactions with Blair during the internship, insisting that conversations about “gender and life experience […] were intended to be supportive and always guided by what the student brought up and seemed comfortable discussing.”

During the UWC hearing, Redmond confirmed that he said that Blair “should have more sex,” according to Blair. In addition, Redmond acknowledged that he had engaged in multiple conversations about Blair’s sexual fantasies, sexuality and sexual history, according to Blair. Blair added that during the UWC hearing, Redmond also admitted to talking about masturbation and sexual fantasies with previous interns.

Halfway into the internship, Blair missed a day of work after experiencing “terrifying” stomach pain and constipation for several days.

When Redmond entered the shared bedroom to check on Blair, he asked them to describe their medical condition, Blair recalled.

“Why don’t I do a rectal exam on you?” Blair remembered Redmond asking.

“I’d rather not,” Blair responded.

While Blair was reluctant to allow the rectal exam, they felt coerced to agree after Redmond insisted that it would be medically prudent to do so. Until that moment, Blair had never had a penetrative rectal examination.

“He feigned giving me a medical exam I didn’t need, and sexually assaulted me,” Blair told the News.

Redmond told the News that he conducted the rectal exam to test for appendicitis. Redmond added that the student “cooperated fully” after he explained the need for a rectal exam. The medical decision was “made for ‘watchful waiting,’” Redmond wrote in his letter.

At the UWC hearing, according to Blair, Redmond told the panel that before he administered the exam, Blair did not show symptoms of appendicitis, and that he had not been involved in diagnosing appendicitis in over 30 years. According to Blair, the UWC panel ultimately confirmed what they already knew: The rectal exam was coercive.

In his letter to the News, Redmond said that the rectal exam “did not reveal any signs of appendicitis.” After the exam, Redmond gave Blair a laxative, and the student recovered fully.

“I do want to emphasize that even the behaviors that Dr. Redmond does admit to in his account — giving me a rectal exam, telling me to have more sex, offering me massages — are not behaviors that should exist in a student/professor relationship,” Blair wrote in their opening statement for the UWC hearing. “As faculty members at this university who interact with students, I respectfully ask that you consider whether you would behave with a student you were mentoring and supervising in this way.”

Even as Redmond engaged in repeated sexual behaviors, Blair increasingly felt beholden to him, particularly as a low-income student. When two other interns attended a concert on the island that Blair could not afford, Redmond offered to pay for it and future excursions, provided Blair kept it a secret.

“That created this coercive environment where I felt very thankful to him and wanted to be extra nice to him because he was paying for things for me, and I felt very uncomfortable about it,” Blair said. “I felt like I owed him something.”

Redmond did not see these subsidies as problems. In his letter to the News, he wrote that, “It is odd that this generosity was interpreted by the Yale Committee as ‘harassment.’”

Blair wasn’t the only intern uncomfortable with the power dynamics on St. Kitts. “He took us everywhere,” one of the female interns told the News. “We were pretty much subject to his entire will throughout the summer.” Redmond controlled all of the internship funding — including money for stipends, groceries and travel. Interns also depended on the professor to drive them around the island.

Adding to Blair’s discomfort, they said Redmond disregarded their gender identity on several occasions. Blair told Redmond their preferred pronouns when the two first reached St. Kitts in June. At the time, Redmond told Blair that they should not use they/them/their pronouns on the island since, “not everyone will understand.” Blair added that Redmond said he did not believe in transgender identities.

In his letter to the News, Redmond claimed that Blair had never indicated that “non-traditional pronouns (THEY, THEM, THEIR) were preferred.” But in an earlier paragraph in the same letter, Redmond said that over the course of the internship, he had several conversations with Blair about gender.

“I guess he perceived me as a gay male, which is another way that a lot of people perceive me,” Blair told the News. “But simultaneously, in this process of feeling violated, I felt like I was being [romantically] pursued … for someone I wasn’t, someone he thought of me as that wasn’t even the real version of me.”

“He could literally ruin my life”

After 64 days on the island, on Aug. 14, 2017, Blair returned to the U.S.

“The moment I stepped foot in Florida for the layover, I just cried my eyes out,” Blair said.

Blair returned to Yale that fall to start their junior year. Though Blair had left St. Kitts behind, nightmares from the island persisted. They would lie awake, unable to sleep, as disturbing moments from the summer “kept playing over and over again” in their head.

About two weeks after leaving the island, Blair decided to abandon their nearly finished research paper with Redmond — they wanted to cut ties with him completely. Soon after, Blair sought help processing the summer’s trauma at Yale’s Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education Center and confided in School of Medicine professor Joanna Radin, Blair’s former professor and a trusted adviser.

In Radin’s office, Blair broke down as their story “just sort of spilled out.”

As a mandatory reporter, Radin notified the University Title IX coordinator of Blair’s experience without naming them. Radin’s response made Blair feel reaffirmed. Blair considered taking the next step — filing a formal UWC complaint, which would launch an investigation into their allegation against Redmond.

The decision kept them up at night. If Redmond — a powerful researcher — decided to retaliate, “he could literally ruin my life,” Blair explained. They worried that if the UWC were to rule against them, Redmond would undermine their chances of getting into medical school. Blair also feared they would repeatedly have to explain their gender identity, as they had done on the island with Redmond. They did not want to relive that discomfort.

Yale School of Medicine (Marisa Peryer)

“I always felt like I was wrong,” Blair said. “I always felt I hadn’t experienced what I had. … It took me so long to realize that even though I felt so violated, it was valid. Because [Redmond] did a really great job the whole time of gaslighting me. Every time I confronted him, he pretended it hadn’t happened or it was coincidental.”

After months of indecision, Blair filed a formal UWC complaint on March 9, 2018. Later in March, the UWC appointed an impartial fact-finder who began investigating their complaint.

While Blair was determined to hold Redmond accountable, their daily routine was overwhelmed by the UWC process of submitting statements, retelling their story to the fact-finder and waiting for hearings. Their UWC hearing was postponed to take place after Blair had finished their final exams, but the proceedings loomed over them that semester.

On May 15, 2018, the five-person UWC panel held its hearing on Blair’s complaint.

“This is not something I would have put myself through if I did not feel morally compelled to do so,” Blair said in their opening statement. “I do not want this man to hurt anyone else the way he hurt me.”

Blair told the News that University officials seemed to not understand their gender identity. Blair recalled that, at the start of the seven-hour hearing, a panel member advised them to “do [their] best to not be offended” if anyone misgendered them during the hearing.

According to Blair, UWC panelists used their pronouns properly at the beginning of the hearing. But after Redmond’s testimony — in which he described Blair using he/him/his pronouns — panelists started using incorrect, male pronouns as well, Blair said.

Mark Solomon, the current UWC chair and the panel chair for Redmond’s case, declined to comment on specific UWC cases and the alleged misuse of pronouns. Then-UWC chair and panelist David Post referred questions to Yale’s Office of Public Affairs & Communication. The other three panel members at Redmond’s hearing did not respond to requests for comment.

Conroy, the University spokesman, first told the News on Dec. 1 that Yale does not “confirm or discuss complaints.” After the University announced the independent investigation in January, Conroy said the investigator will “examine all issues regarding the complaints” against Redmond.

Despite the exhausting UWC process, Blair left the hearing feeling encouraged.

“The panel was clearly in my favor, and they were shocked by the stuff I was saying and Redmond was saying,” Blair recalled. “That felt great because they believed me. And it was reaffirming. And I felt good about it.”

About three weeks later, on June 4, 2018, the UWC affirmed Blair’s account. Redmond had violated Yale’s sexual misconduct policy in the form of sexual harassment.

Banned from Yale

Polak, the University official who was to make the final decision about the case, received the UWC panel’s report on June 4. UWC panel reports typically include a recommendation for an appropriate disciplinary sanction, according to the UWC’s website. However, the report sent to Polak did not mention any recommendation for what Redmond’s punishment should be, according to Blair, who also received a copy.

After receiving the UWC’s report, Polak requested a follow-up with more information about the rectal exam Redmond had performed on Blair. Both Blair and Redmond were given an opportunity to submit a response to the supplemental report. In an interview with the News, Conroy reiterated that the decision-maker may request further information before issuing a decision, as “new facts may emerge.”

On July 1, UWC Secretary Anita Sharif-Hyder notified Blair that Redmond had requested an extension to submit his response “due to his travel schedule.” Both parties’ deadlines to submit responses were extended. By July 9, Polak had received all of the additional information he had requested. According to the UWC’s website, a decision-maker “will render his or her decision in writing within seven days” after receiving all reports and responses from the parties. But the UWC did not notify Blair of the case’s outcome until Aug. 16 — 38 days later.

That day, Blair finally received the email they had been anticipating all summer.

The email informed them that Polak had accepted the UWC panel’s conclusions, according to Blair. But Blair read on: Before the Provost issued a decision, Redmond had retired. No disciplinary action had been taken.

Polak referred requests for comment on the extensions and retirement to Conroy, who reiterated that faculty members may retire from Yale at any time. Once a faculty member retires from Yale, the University can no longer impose disciplinary sanctions, such as counseling or suspension.

“It seems that the UWC reporting process was structured in such a way where the Provost allowed him to retire and that should not be the case,” Blair told the News. “No one person should have that sort of power.”

Following his retirement, the University banned Redmond from campus and prohibited him from contacting Yale undergraduate and graduate students, residents, postdoctoral fellows and research associates, according to Blair’s recount of the Aug. 16 email. Yale also banned the St. Kitts facility from recruiting Yale students as long as Redmond is affiliated with the program. Redmond was denied the privileges of most retired faculty members, such as emeritus status and University sponsorship for grant proposals, according to Conroy.

But while Blair was left in the dark on Redmond’s fate, five of his undergraduate advisees in Morse College were notified on July 27 that he intended to retire — 20 days before Blair heard the news — according to an email sent to Abhishek Srinivas ’21, one of the former advisees.

“Professor Redmond chose to retire after he was informed of the planned punishment that would be implemented by University leadership,” Conroy told the News on Jan. 29. “In addition, Yale cannot prevent faculty members from retiring if they are contractually entitled to do so.”

Conroy declined to comment on what Redmond’s punishment would have been had he not retired.

Redmond's former lab (Marisa Peryer)

In his letter to the News, Redmond confirmed that he retired last summer, but claimed that he was denied “basic due process rights in this matter.” He did not respond to multiple requests for elaboration. On March 2, Ethan Levin-Epstein, a partner at a law firm advocating for workplace fairness, emailed the News on behalf of Redmond.

“Dr. Redmond continues to deny that he engaged in misconduct and continues to strongly disagree with the UWC Panel’s decision and the unfair process by which it was reached,” Levin-Epstein wrote in his email to the News.

“Yale has made me a victim”

In an interview with the News on Jan. 29, Conroy insisted that the University imposed “severe restrictions” on Redmond after his retirement. Redmond is barred from engaging in Yale-related activities, according to a Dec. 3, 2018 email Conroy sent to the News. When asked if Redmond still receives retirement benefits, Conroy directed the News to a University website and read the policy aloud: “All faculty who retire are eligible to receive a subsidy for part of their health insurance.”

Despite the “severe restrictions,” the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a paper for which Redmond is the senior author in September 2018 — roughly one month after his retirement and subsequent ban from engaging in Yale-related activities. Just last month, Redmond submitted a paper to the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications with his former colleagues in the School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry.

This is not the first sexual misconduct case that the School of Medicine has grappled with in recent years. The medical school drew scrutiny last summer for honoring cardiologist Michael Simons MED ’84 — whom the UWC found responsible for sexual harassment in 2013 — with an endowed professorship. In November, the News reported on two additional cases of sexual misconduct that the medical school mishandled.

In a Jan. 30 statement to the News, School of Medicine Dean Robert Alpern said that the school is “committed to creating a culture of respect and inclusion, where sexual misconduct has no place.”

Redmond emphasized in his letter to the News that he sees himself as a “victim” of Yale’s adjudicatory processes.

“Yale and/or its official process has made me a victim and brought great personal damage to me,” Redmond wrote in his letter.

According to Blair, St. Kitts staff decided to put the Yale internship program on hold after speaking with Blair in December 2017. Staff members did not respond to requests for comment.

Still, Redmond said he hopes to continue searching for a treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

The last paragraph of Eugene Redmond's signed letter to the News.

“A re-examination of Yale’s approach”

Although the University claims that the UWC’s confidentiality policy protects participants, Blair found that it did the opposite. When they wanted to speak, they couldn’t, fearing University retaliation. And when they were resigned to remain silent, the University’s investigation placed an unwanted spotlight on their case.

UWC documents are confidential, and the University may take disciplinary action against any person who shares those documents. The confidentiality policy is designed to “encourage parties and witnesses to participate in UWC proceedings and share all the pertinent information they have to offer,” according to the UWC’s website.

All Yale community members are “expected” to maintain the confidentiality of UWC proceedings, according to UWC policy. Blair does not remember signing an agreement committing to confidentiality, but since their UWC case ended last August, they have felt silenced by the same confidentiality policy meant to preserve the integrity of the UWC process. Blair feared they would be disciplined by Yale’s Executive Committee if they made public UWC documents from their case via the News, even though those documents would corroborate their account of events.

Instead, Yale’s independent investigation has inadvertently brought Blair’s experience at St. Kitts into the public eye. Since the announcement, several acquaintances — including those with no knowledge of the complaint — have asked Blair about their experience on St. Kitts and connection to Redmond. A friend currently working on St. Kitts told Blair that the research facility is buzzing with speculation and gossip about Redmond.

“I feel that my privacy has been invaded after the investigation of Dr. Redmond went public,” Blair told the News. “If things are going to be confidential, they have to be either fully or not.”

Initially, in November, administrators in Yale’s Title IX Office, Office of the Provost and the School of Medicine all declined or did not respond to requests for comment on Redmond’s retirement and on Polak’s delay to issue disciplinary action. These administrators only issued public statements after Yale announced the independent investigation two months later. Conroy declined to comment on whether the University can take action if the independent investigation finds additional survivors, as Redmond is already retired and banned from Yale.

According to Yale’s statement, Salovey ordered the independent investigation — which is being conducted by former U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly — after receiving another formal complaint against Redmond in 2019.

“We must learn whether there are additional survivors who wish to come forward, and we need to understand the facts relating to the internship program,” Salovey wrote in the Jan. 28 statement.

But this is not the first time Yale has launched an investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Redmond. According to the University’s statement, former St. Kitts interns brought sexual misconduct complaints against Redmond to Yale’s attention in 1994. Yale’s investigation that year was “unable to verify those earlier allegations,” according to the statement, but Redmond told Yale that he would end the internship program.

Yale did not hold him to that commitment.

Since the 1994 investigation, Redmond has recruited numerous Yale students, including Blair and at least six other undergraduates, to conduct research with him on St. Kitts. Amid the new investigation, Conroy said that he could not share who investigated the complaints against Redmond in 1994, at which time the UWC had not yet been formed. He also declined to comment on whether the University followed up with Redmond on his promise to stop taking interns from Yale, or whether Yale ever reported Redmond to the Connecticut Medical Examining Board after he was found responsible for sexual harassment.

Yale has reported the information it has to the Yale Police Department and the New Haven Police Department, “which will be in contact with law enforcement in St. Kitts,” according to the Jan. 28 statement. The University will cooperate fully if those departments conduct their own investigations, according to Conroy.

Radin — the professor whom Blair confided in — wrote in an email to the News that she was “deeply dismayed to learn from the YDN” that Yale had knowledge about Redmond’s alleged misconduct dating back to 1994.

“That Redmond was able [to] retire after a long career [at] Yale even as his behavior may have derailed the careers of young scholars is cause for serious concern,” Radin wrote. “The courage and leadership of students like [Blair] should be recognized as such and prompt a re-examination of Yale’s approach to dealing with sexual misconduct.”

Now, a year after they filed their UWC complaint against Redmond, Blair feels resigned to the situation. When they first reported their case to the UWC, Blair did not know that other interns had reported similar experiences with Redmond in the past. While Blair is hopeful that the independent investigation will have a positive outcome, they feel overwhelmed and frustrated that the University did not launch an investigation into Redmond’s conduct earlier.

“I continually feel like the University did not take my case necessarily as seriously as I had wished,” Blair said. “I think it is now taking it seriously, but I really wish that this had all happened before [Redmond] had been allowed to retire.”

AFTER THE BAN

Story By Ko Lyn Cheang

Photos By Xander de Vries, Madelyn Kumar

Published on

Two years in, Trump’s immigration policies continue to disrupt the lives of internationals at Yale.

In January 2017, Mohamed Eltoum ’19 said goodbye to his family, placed his bags in the back of his uncle’s car and headed to the airport to return to Yale for his sophomore spring semester. As he rode, Eltoum thought about the break. It had been uneventful. He’d played soccer with friends, hung out with neighbors in the garden in his front yard and walked the dusty alleys of his hometown, Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. But troubling news from the U.S. had hit the front pages of all the Arab newspapers in the region: The newly elected U.S. president was considering an executive order to ban citizens of majority-Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S. The news had upset Eltoum and his friends studying at American universities, but at the time, no order had been issued. In the car, he thought about his parents. It had been easy to say goodbye; his last trip home had been in September. They’d barely had time to miss him.

Eltoum arrived in New Haven on Jan. 15, two days before classes began. Had he waited 10 more days, he may never have arrived. Ten days into the semester, President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning all citizens from seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Sudan — from entering the United States for at least 90 days. The order stated that “immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from [these] countries would be detrimental to [U.S.] interests.”

Almost immediately, Trump’s travel ban faced challenges, in court and on campus. University president Peter Salovey released an email strongly condemning the ban, and Yale joined the Association of American Universities to urge the Trump administration to end the ban. More than a thousand Yalies gathered on Cross Campus to hold a vigil for those affected. “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here,” students chanted in unison. Court cases quickly enjoined the ban, but in June, the Supreme Court allowed a second iteration to take partial effect. A later, fuller version of the ban was upheld — this time in full — in June of 2018.

Over the last two years, a small group of Yale students and scholars from banned countries have suffered the consequences and uncertainty of Trump’s travel ban. If students from these countries leave the U.S., they may be unable to return.

The day Trump ordered the ban, Eltoum’s parents called in a panic. How would Trump’s order affect him? Could he keep his student visa? Eltoum did not know. He made an appointment with Yale’s Office of International Students & Scholars and kept going to class. He wouldn’t see his parents again for almost two years.

—

As of fall 2018, 17 international students from countries that are currently on the travel ban attend Yale University. A comparable number of affected students — 19 — were enrolled in fall 2017.

After the ban was announced, OISS launched into action. Ann Kuhlman, its executive director, and her colleagues reached out to the students affected by the ban, advising them not to leave the U.S. without first consulting OISS or an immigration attorney. They opened their offices for two consecutive afternoons to members of the Yale community for consultations. Ozan Say, an OISS advisor originally from Turkey, met multiple times with Eltoum to explain what was going on.

Kuhlman explained that the role of OISS at the time involved “staying on top of what [was] going on,” providing immigration counsel and connecting international students to legal services.

There is a strong consensus among immigration advisors and attorneys nationwide that students from the affected countries should not leave the U.S. while the travel ban is in effect, according to Kuhlman.

“It was, and still is, very hard — as anyone can imagine — to be unsure of one’s future, suddenly,” said Elizabeth Bradley, who served as head of Branford College until early 2017. “Students came to office hours, and friends of the affected students also came to talk and think through how they could support their peers.”

But there are limits to what the University can do in the face of an order issued from the highest office in the U.S. government. When asked what more the University could have done at the time, Bradley, who now serves as president of Vassar College, expressed that the University administration did everything within its capacity at the time.

Attempts by the University to lobby the government or judiciary to overturn the travel ban have been unsuccessful. Along with 30 other universities and colleges, Yale filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court challenging the third version of the travel ban, which “threatens their ability to attract scholars from around the world.” The decision was not what Yale had hoped. The Court upheld the ban.

—

In the weeks following Trump’s order, it became clear to Eltoum and others in his situation that they would not be returning home for a while.

“That whole semester I was thinking, if I had just stayed an extra day or two at home, then it could have been much, much worse, and I would have had to take the semester off,” Eltoum said.

Some international students were not so lucky. According to Eltoum, one of his friends from Sudan, who studies in Michigan and declined to be interviewed, was on a plane to the States when the travel ban was announced. At U.S. customs, he was told he could not enter and had to return home immediately. It did not matter that he had a valid student visa.

As Eltoum realized he would be unable to return home until the travel ban ended, the difficult reality of the year ahead dawned on him.

“The second semester of my sophomore year, I felt the worst,” Eltoum said. “It was just very hard to get through. I felt frustration at the entire system that made the whole semester unbearable.”

Eltoum realized he wanted to become a doctor in high school when he worked at local orphanages and hospitals. While working as an assistant at a local hospital, he shadowed a senior doctor in heart and lung surgery and witnessed the profound impact he had on his patients’ lives. At the time, he didn’t think of attending an American university. It wasn’t until he was one of two students to earn the top score on Sudan’s national exams, giving him a spot in the country’s only International Baccalaureate program, that he was encouraged to apply to American universities.

Even prior to the Trump administration, immigration processes for students from countries without favorable immigration agreements with the U.S. have been cumbersome and inconvenient.

U.S. student visas for Sudanese students expire every six months. If they leave the country on expired visas and wish to reenter, they first need to renew them at a U.S. embassy, usually in their home country. This has meant that every time Eltoum leaves the U.S, he also has to travel home to renew his student visa. But the visa renewal process takes at least four weeks, sometimes longer, and the three-week winter break is not always adequate time to complete the renewal process.

In Eltoum’s sophomore year, he was stopped at the Istanbul airport in transit to the U.S. because the immigration officers demanded he renew his student visa to be allowed to travel, despite being cleared for travel in Sudan. The visa was due to expire the next day. He had to return home and ended up arriving at Yale three weeks after classes began.

“That was the first semester of my sophomore year, and that was definitely a very hard semester because I was just playing catch-up the whole time,” Eltoum said. “That flew into the second semester. Then with Trump being elected, it just ended up making things even worse.”

In the weeks after the ban, Eltoum thought about trying to complete his degree in three years instead of four to minimize the time he spent in the U.S. while the immigration situation was uncertain. To complete his degree early, he overloaded his class schedule that semester, taking five and a half credits. His grades suffered.

Kuhlman, Say and their colleagues at OISS helped Eltoum secure a research job at Yale, so he could stay on campus for the summer of 2017 while he was unable to return home.

Eltoum tried to stay hopeful. Every Friday, he called his parents. They would update him about the tumultuous situation in Sudan, where the government had just slashed subsidies for fuel and food. They would tell him how his three younger brothers were doing. One had enrolled in an IB program back home, intent on following Eltoum’s footsteps to study in the U.S. His parents would not let Trump’s ban deter their sons from a quality American education.

Then in September 2017, Trump issued a third version of the travel ban that removed Sudan from the list of banned countries. But Eltoum wasn’t certain that this would be the end of his immigration challenges. He was advised by OISS not to leave the country for winter break.

“The general feeling of people in Sudan [was] that it [was] a very volatile situation,” Eltoum said. “We had seen between one day and the next, we could be on the ban list, and we could not be on the ban list. One day we were terrorists, and the next day we were not.”

—

AJ, a Yale affiliate who requested a pseudonym given the sensitivity of the topic, is a citizen of one of the banned countries. His passport was set to expire in late 2016. But civil conflict prevented him from returning home to renew his passport, and in America, the embassy of his home country had been shuttered.

“I would have been effectively stateless if my documents had expired,” AJ said. After consulting with an immigration law clinic, he realized his best option was to seek asylum in the U.S. Individuals seeking asylum have to demonstrate they are unable to return to their home country due to a “well-founded fear of persecution” for an aspect of their identity — such as their religion, race or sexual orientation. AJ is gay.

As such, he found the asylum process difficult and intrusive. The most important step of the process is an interview, during which an asylum officer determines if the applicant’s fear of prosecution is legitimate. So AJ had to find people to testify to and provide evidence for his sexuality.

“When you are talking about your religion — yes, you’re talking about something very personal. But you’re not talking about your emotional labor, who you’re attracted to and how you’re attracted to these people. Who you had sex with. Who is the first person you ever had sex with,” AJ explained. “Those types of details are very embedded in and necessary in the asylum process.”

The process of seeking asylum has only become more complicated under the Trump administration. In the same month that he issued the travel ban, Trump temporarily suspended the U.S. asylum program, capped the number of refugees and indefinitely blocked all refugees from Syria.

Though AJ finally gained asylum in July 2017, his immigration woes are far from over. He still cannot travel outside the U.S. without fear of being denied entry. Under normal circumstances, refugees who lack valid passports can apply for “Refugee Travel Documents” to travel transnationally. But while the travel ban is in effect, asylees from banned countries find it increasingly risky to travel even with a valid Refugee Travel Document.

In theory, the travel ban is meant to provide exemptions for asylees, granted on case-by-case bases. But in practice, few asylees are granted a waiver to bypass the travel ban. In his dissent to the most recent Supreme Court decision, which upheld the travel ban, Justice Stephen Breyer provided evidence that the exemption was effectively nonexistent.

“The State Department reported that during the Proclamation’s first month, two waivers were approved out of 6,555 eligible applicants,” Breyer wrote.

As such, AJ has not been able to leave American borders to see his family since he arrived in the country close to three years ago. In June, it will be three years since he has last seen his parents and his brother. He remains hopeful that the wave of national support for refugees will help his situation.

“People are waking up,” he said. “There is a national consciousness about who they are and to whom they are committed and who they should be protecting.”

—

While the travel ban and refugee cap dominate headlines, the Trump administration has been quietly working to implement policies that limit opportunities for all international students, not just those affected by the ban. Some executive orders have called into question what students are permitted to do under their statuses.

Kuhlman said that two years after the first order, her office is still “waiting to understand the full implication” of Trump’s policy. Because the Trump administration is still reviewing these orders, the legal limbo “creates more uncertainty for international students.”

The administration signaled its shift in attitude on Aug. 9, 2018, with what it called the Unlawful Presence Policy Memo. “Unlawful presence” is the policy that governs how long students may stay in the country — their buffer period — before they face deportation. Since 1996, students who had violated their student visa status would only start to eat into their buffer period on the day an immigration officer or judge ruled that the student had violated their status. The student would have 180 days to regain proper status or leave the country.

Trump’s memo announced a new way to interpret the unlawful presence policy. Now, when an immigration officer or judge rules that a student has violated their status, immigration officers will subtract the number of days that had passed since the student committed the violation from the 180 day buffer period, effectively shortening it. In this way, the memo introduced harsher penalties for students who violate their visa status.

Students can violate their status in numerous ways, such as working more than 20 hours per week, failing to extend an expiring I-20 document — which serves as evidence for the student’s legal status in the U.S. — or neglecting to report a new residential address within 10 days of moving. If discovered violating their visa, students could be barred from returning to the U.S. for three years, 10 years or permanently.

An international student interviewed, who requested anonymity for fear of legal repercussions, told me they once failed to sign their I-20 before it expired. Another student did not report his new off-campus address within 10 days of moving, because he was unaware of the requirement. In both cases, they rectified the status violation and regained proper status before immigration officials found out.

Mark Gazepis ’21, an international student from Greece, said he thinks that punishing students for flouting the rules on a “first-strike” basis is overly harsh. Gazepis wants to revive the grace period that existed pre-ban, during which students were given the chance to rectify their mistake.

A slew of memos, policy proposals and executive orders point to a general trend in the Trump presidency of making it harder for foreign nationals to work in the U.S. For instance, Trump called for a review of the H-1B program, the primary vehicle for gaining a work visa. An “extreme vetting” procedure pushed by the administration would introduce new hurdles for students seeking to work in the U.S.

Kuhlman expects other such reviews to affect programs like the STEM Optional Practical Training system, which permits recent graduates to work in the U.S for up to three years. But she does not know when they will take effect or what they will entail. She has advised students to start looking for a Plan B in case they are unable to secure a visa to work in the U.S. after graduation. One possible alternative that Kuhlman explained is attending graduate school in the U.S.

Kuhlman said these changes have discouraged international enrollment in U.S. universities. According to the 2018 Open Doors report, published by the U.S. Department of State, the number of newly enrolled international students in the U.S. dropped by 6.3 percent between the 2016–17 and 2017–18 academic years. Graduate school enrollment dropped by 5.5 percent in the same period.

Despite enrollment drops and policy changes, undergraduate applications to Yale from international students have actually increased over the past several years, according to Mark Dunn, director of outreach and communications at Yale’s admissions office. Dunn declined to comment about the admissions statistics for students from travel ban countries.

Still, some international students have reconsidered their post-graduate plans to stay in the U.S. following Trump’s election, citing concerns about racism and xenophobia. Scarlet Luk, GRD ’19, had been keen to work in the U.S. when she first arrived for graduate school in 2013. But as a person of color, her impulse to leave the country has grown stronger, partially due to the political climate here since the Trump presidency began. She now plans to return to Australia after she completes her doctorate.

“There is a feeling you are not necessarily welcome beyond a certain point,” Luk said.

Since graduating last spring, Gregory Ng ’18 has been working as an intern at two New York City museums while completing his graduate school applications. He hopes to get his master’s from New York University in performance studies before enrolling in a doctorate program in the field. But Ng, who hails from Singapore, has little want or need to stay in the U.S. permanently.

Ng noted that the experiences of international students at Yale are so fractured along lines of nationality and ethnicity that the notion of “‘international-ness” at Yale holds little meaning. Eltoum pointed out that the student visa for a Sudanese citizen is six months, while a student visa for his other international peers is four or five years.

For Eltoum, the pull of a U.S. education remains strong. A degree from Yale is a stepping -stone to achieve his goal of working as a doctor in Sudan, where he sees a strong need. Even during the most difficult time in the Trump presidency, when he was unable to return home, he recognized the value of remaining in the U.S. He still hopes to pursue a medical degree here after he graduates.

“You very much have to dissociate the person who is doing this from the whole country,” Eltoum said. “It did not make me see the quality of education in the U.S. as any less. It’s just at this point now, the U.S. is not a very good place to be a Sudanese citizen.”

For asylees and asylum-seekers like AJ, the desire to live and gain legal status in the U.S. is a question of stability and safety. AJ had been transient for several years before arriving in the U.S after he was forced to leave his home country. He moved between countries where he experienced vicious racism.

“When I arrived in the United States, I was just like, I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t want to move anywhere else, and I want to be stable, and I want to be on the way to citizenship. And I want to be resettled somewhere. And I want to have a permanent status,” AJ said.

For now, Eltoum and AJ are determined to achieve what they first came to the United States to do. AJ is in the process of gaining a green card and believes that it is only a matter of time before he is able to leave the country to see his family again.

—

Eltoum finally returned home the summer of 2018. It had been close to two years since he had last seen his family. He was shocked by how much his three younger brothers had grown in the last year and a half. His second brother, 18, who was preparing to enroll in a U.S. university that fall, had matured, stepping up to fill Eltoum’s role as the eldest son in the household.

“My third brother, after me and my second brother, is most aware of the implications of what it means to be a student from Sudan in an American university,” Eltoum said, “[I] went through a lot of issues and struggles, and [my brothers] will learn from that.”

Today, Eltoum mentors first years as an Ezra Stiles first-year counselor and is a molecular, cellular and developmental biology major. He is preparing to apply to medical school. He fully expects that navigating the application process as a citizen of a country where even tourist visas to the U.S. are often denied will be challenging. He intends to stay in the States to work while waiting to interview with medical schools instead of returning home to minimize the chance of being denied entry on the way back, which would jeopardize his applications.

“[Working as a doctor in Sudan] was my original goal in life, and still remains to be my original goal in life,” he said, “I see the U.S. and the U.S. educational system as a way for me to gain the necessary training, the necessary experience, just to reach me to my goal.”

The summer after returning home, Eltoum spent hours walking around Khartoum, taking in what had changed. Everywhere, new billboards and newly built mosques reminded him of the lost time. He followed the route he used to take to school, before attending university in America, before he learned what it meant to be Sudanese there. He thought about how his younger brother was now a few centimeters taller than him. It saddened him to realize that he had missed out on two years of his brothers’ lives. At least in his mother’s garden, the flowers, spice plants and mango tree were still growing.

Stained, Lacquered, Checkered: Elihu and I in Chennai

Story & Photos By Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

Published on February 25, 2019

Yale traded slaves in my father’s hometown. Where does that leave me?

St. Mary’s Church is stained a clean white that balances out the blues and greens of the landscape. Nothing in the building’s architecture suggests how close it is to the Hindu temples 15 minutes away, let alone to the dark-skinned people that frequent such establishments. It seems to try to exist independent of its circumstances. The pews are wicker-laced benches, a typical product of South India. In the living room of my grandfather’s house 15 minutes away, we sit on similar wood benches. They were my grandmother’s. If I were to trace my lineage back in time, past the limits of our family records, I might find myself standing alongside a woman whose nose resembles my father’s, in the year 1680. It was then that the church held its first marriage ceremony — for Elihu Yale.

The church is one of the oldest British building in India. During the height of the East India Company’s empire, British subjects commonly referred to it as the “Westminster Abbey of the East.” Yale was one in a string of governors to be married in this church. But the brown congregation members I speak to don’t remember any of these weddings. In fact, they tell me they see the namesake of Yale University as just another unremarkable figure in what can only be named a fraught history. People do not like to revel in their history because no narrative can make sense of what happened here. The people I speak to here like to say that it is colonization, and then move on. We do not discuss the centuries of domination. Often I am told it is more helpful to look to the future, if not the present. Wallowing does not help anyone, says the church pastor here. They believe there the future holds hope, I think. They have to.

When we first stumble into the church, I hear my father curse under his breath. Like most of Chennai — the capital of Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state — it is swathed in sultry air. Crowds of dark-skinned people move back and forth on dated motorcycles and Vespas on a neighboring street. In the throng of skin, my father and I stick out as light, drawing stares. My father is with me partially as my escort: He grew up here and speaks Tamil fluently. But he’s also here because of what I’ve been telling him about Yale, about what was done to our people. He is no fan of religion, and certainly no fan of a religion meant as a proxy for imperial governance.

The air here has the same moisture and thickness as the air in St. James Parish Church in Montego Bay, Jamaica. The rafters are just as grand as those in Tan Dinh Church in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. These are both places my father and I have travelled to together, trying to understand the messy world we live in. Wandering past this church’s threshold, his eyes widen. But I don’t see what is immediately evident to him, to anyone who grew up in the open wounds of colonization, who knows “British” as a bad word like the back of their hand.

The pastor is an older woman with a sari under her white gown. She asks my father and me if we are Christian. No, says my father, I am from here. Her dark hair is tied up in a bun that is decorated with jasmine flowers. I can smell the fragrance following the wind as I chat with her after service. When she talks to me, I can’t help but wonder if this is how my grandmother, Vijaya, might look if she were alive. I wonder if this is how she would treat me, with soft oiled palms. And then I wonder about her mother.

When I press the pastor about Yale, she does not seem to know whom I am talking about. I say, he was the governor of Fort St. George, which draws a short pause. She takes my hand and directs me to a marble plaque with Yale’s name on it. In her office, set in a water-stained frame, is a small engraving of him. I think it’s all we have.

Thank you, I say. I come back here many times during my stay in Chennai. The walls: some white, some now stained a sulfuric yellow.

—

The Tamil Nadu Archives are painted a brilliant sienna. When I see the outlines of the red and white arches beyond the gate, I stop to take some photographs. Later, I learn, this design was made in the Indo-Saracenic architectural style, meant to reference the Islamic architecture for which India is traditionally known. But no Saracenic buildings were commissioned by brown voices or brown hands; instead, the revival style was used by the British during the period of the British Raj.

The library itself is practically open air, shelves saturated with dark pages, some of which are laminated, others imposed on cotton. The librarian who helps me mentions how the archive was severely understaffed because there wasn’t enough government money. Looking through 300-year-old pages, I see the toll that lack of money takes on preserving history. The archive is stacked with books on the Indian Ocean slave trade, books that Yale’s Orbis Library Catalogue has never heard of. The librarians who worked there didn’t seem to know why I was there. I kept telling myself that I did, that I knew what I was walking into. I didn’t. I still don’t really understand what happened there. I am still trying to clarify the facts.

Yale served as the governor of Fort St. George, now known as Chennai, from 1687 to 1692.

As I understand it, Fort St. George was a part of a larger network of stations in the Global South that was central to the British commercial venture. We had natural resources, and so they used us. We had people who could work, and so they took them. The truth is that I have written and rewritten this piece praying it will expose itself, crystallize or evaporate, like a bedside glass of water. It won’t.

—

During shopping period, I looked for a class on the Indian Ocean slave trade. If I couldn’t teach myself, maybe someone else could. There wasn’t one. The world does not offer the Indian Ocean slave trade the attention it requires, despite the fact that it enslaved many people. This disregard towards the region is often called the “tyranny of the Atlantic.” Despite growing up in the wake of the Indian Ocean slave trade, my father didn’t know anything about it.

When reading, I learned that many of those kidnapped and sold were African, and, according to scholar Richard B. Allen, “tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of slaves were exported from India and Southeast Asia …”

In lieu of the class I wanted, I am taking a class I need, called “Mobile South Asians and the Global Legal Order” with professor Rohit De. The class is mostly about South Asians and indentured servitude, another overlooked topic. One day, I approached him after class. I knew the Indian Ocean trade was different from the Atlantic, but the Atlantic was all that I knew, all that I grew up learning about. Could he explain?

He started by explaining major differences between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades. First, the slave trade in the Indian Ocean was associated with a pre-existing trade in the region in which enslaved individuals primarily performed household and domestic labor. Further, slavery in the Company was usually a result of “debt bondage” in which families sold their children to the Company to address debt.

De left the room in a flurry, and I thought of all those spare moments when he had reoriented the little knowledge I had. As one of the few South Asians teaching in the humanities at Yale, he is very valued by the brown community. Very valued, and thus, very busy. He told me to reach out to Tiraana Bains, YGS ’21, a past student of his.

I posed the same questions to her. “There were several forms of slavery … the kind that involved the purchase and sale of local people from South Asia itself, especially during times of famine …, the transport of enslaved Africans brought from West Africa to St. Helena and then to Madras or from East Africa and Madagascar via Bombay … many of these slaves found their way to English, later British settlements in Southeast Asia, which was in itself also a source of traffic in slaves.” What she said was starting to match what I was learning in De’s class. Though marginal, I had found the corner pieces of my people’s history. I knew a lot of histories. But I didn’t know the history my father would have called his own, had he been taught it. If I wanted to build a picture from the corners, I would need edges.

Edges, like the flush grass in Chennai, daffodils decorating the bottom of the picture: Those who were sold “had no way of escaping the situation they [were] in,” said De. But then I am lacking the colors of the sky, the architecture; I am missing the faces in the puzzle where I know people are supposed to be.

Professor Jay Gitlin, the associate director for the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, wrote in an email that “scholars have not fully investigated the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades. They should.” So I have been told that I must build my own canon, start my own section in the library. But how much are we expected to build before we grow weary?

I learn many things in Chennai. At the Fort St. George Museum, amid pearlescent, peacock blue walls, I learn that the slave trade was moderated by the East India Company. A stained-brown map shows that the EIC divided Chennai into “White-town” and “Black-town.” “Black-town” compromised the entire city outside of the fort’s walls and was populated by the native peoples, who were commonly referred to as “black” in the EIC’s records. I can’t help but think of every story my mother had told me about how happy my father’s extended family was when they met her; you’re so white, they said. Yale was responsible for the fortification of said dividing walls even though the Company objected, was responsible for driving the separation of these communities into the physical soil, according to East India Company records in Manuscript and Archives.

The archive teaches me that the EIC relied on local slaves from the beginning of their time in the subcontinent. As in, looking down on people who are smaller and browner than you isn’t new. When I first get off the flight from the U.S., my dad and I meet a couple from Belgium. Excitedly, the woman mentions that they have seen a slum already. I know the real India, she says to me. As in, she wants to teach me. As in, I want to retch. Mostly, from the jetlag, or because of the flash of images that jolt through my head.

Local scholarship tells us that teenagers were often sold as slaves in the market. At one point, it was common practice for slave traders to kidnap children away from their parents. Those taken and shipped to other colonies — including Sumatra, Indonesia, the “East Indies” and Southeast Asia — were joined by individuals condemned by the EIC to hard labor in lieu of capital punishment. While many Company records in the Tamil Nadu Archive press the point that Madrasis often “sold themselves” into slavery, records show that this argument was usually a “defensive trick played by the slave traders to justify their greedy activities.” The community’s desperation was made worse by famines, which became more common as the British transitioned the community into commercial farming.

In 1683, the slave trade of Madras was supposedly abolished by Governor William Gyfford because of outcry from the local community. However, the fine associated with breaking the law was so small that the trade continued, unaffected. In fact, the Madras slave trade peaked in the 1680s. By the end of 17th century, the Madras slave trade, which was regulated by the Company, had increased in volume tremendously.

I am standing by the beach in Chennai. We are looking east, towards the Andaman Islands, Indonesia and Thailand. The sky is kissed a kind of blue for which purple is an afterthought, a blue that makes me think of the sky at 4 o’clock in New Haven. Women stand in the water wearing white. No one wears a swimsuit, all saris. It is one of my last Sundays here. I have been at the archive today. I have been to the ocean. I have been to my aunt’s university. I have been through great confusion and great sadness. Now, I am thinking of a painting I looked up on my phone on the way here. It is a portrait of Elihu Yale with a few other White men. In the far right corner is a boy, presented as a conceit, I later learn. But in this oil painting he is as plain as day, and he is Black.

Professor Joseph Yannielli — previously a postdoc at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition — has extensively studied Elihu Yale’s involvement with the Indian Ocean slave trade. I read a lot of his work while I was in India. While some sources seek to portray Yale as an abolitionist, this is counterfactual, Yannielli writes. Yannielli notes that in addition to supporting the Company’s policy of exporting black South Indian slaves to colonies like that on St. Helena, Elihu Yale attended a meeting wherein it was agreed that “a minimum of ten slaves [must be] sent on every outbound European ship … ” At least ten. This is the figure that bothers my father the most. Ten. A number large enough to be a whole family, and small enough to comprehend. Ten. The number of people who left on boats, looking back, looking like him. The number of people who probably never came back.

Yannielli noted that in 1689, Yale sent a ship to the island of Madagascar requesting that slaves be purchased and taken to the colony on Sumatra. While Yale himself didn’t own any slaves, “he profited both directly and indirectly from their sale,” Yannielli said. To me, there isn’t much of a difference. If you traffic in the suffering of others, you are far from exonerated. This wealth is what allowed his money to come to our University, and certainly, Yannielli said, it was what incentivized the University to chase after men like Yale.

I emailed Gitlin on the advice of someone in Yale’s Manuscripts & Archives. I don’t know what I was expecting. Certainly not the response I received. Gitlin believes that “it would also be misleading to characterize [Yale] as a slave trader … Yale’s personal wealth came primarily from a private trade, on the side, in diamonds and other precious gems.” While this may be true, diamonds are far from pure. Diamonds, like the big one on my father’s gold ring. The diamond is from his grandmother’s, my great grandmother’s, nose ring. Even diamonds tell stories. Even diamonds come from somewhere.

“It’s impossible to disentangle the diamond trade from the slave trade,” Yannielli told me over the phone. “The East India Company used the slave trade to consolidate political and economic power, and that power enabled Yale’s mercantile activities.” It is worth recalling that the Company’s initial interest in the subcontinent was to extract natural resources; Yale himself signed “… profitable treaties to the Company’s benefit [that were] … undoubtedly exploitative,” according to an article in the Duke Undergraduate Journal of South Asian Studies by Nikila Sri-Kumar ’11.

The reality is that the slave trade was central to the Yale’s life. Bains notes that “… Yale was part of a broader milieu in both India and England, in which people thought of slave trading and the deployment of slave labor as a political economic strategy …” The Yale Center for British Art possesses a painting in which a black slave can be seen alongside Yale and his compatriots. He is young. He is a child. Defenders of Elihu Yale continually reiterate that Yale himself did not own slaves. Yannielli explained to me that, regardless of whether this is true, Yale is present in two portraits that feature slaves, unusual even for other imperialists.

Yale’s involvement in the slave trade is such a central point in his personal narrative that former Dean of Yale College Jonathan Holloway felt it necessary to preempt a conversation on the issue in his Opening Assembly Address to the class of 2019. “…There’s no doubting the fact that he participated in the slave trade, profiting from the sale of humans just as he profited from the sale of so many actual objects that were part of the East India trade empire,” he said in the speech.

Titus Kaphar ART ’06 had two paintings on display in the Yale University Art Gallery in September of 2016, before I came to Yale. I was drawn to one in particular, titled “Enough About You,” a reconfiguration of the original portrait of Yale and the little boy. The White men in the painting are contorted, their faces and features now missing from the image. All is obscured, save for the boy’s face, framed in gold.

—

This trip to India was my first trip to the subcontinent in a long time. It was my first to Chidambaram, the town south of Chennai where my grandfather is from. The town was built around the temple, which is about 1,100 years old. It is a UNESCO heritage site. Still, people here are casual about the beauty of every archway, the gold statues, the kumkum. I’ve been raised in the United States, where we put things behind glass, explains my father. Here, he says, the history does not get stuck in the past. It’s part of current reality. So they walk casually through temples older than the United States. They inside the memories and outside the reality so that they are intertwined, imbuing one with the other.

When I visit St. Mary’s Church, I see a plaque with Elihu Yale’s name on it. It makes me angry. I want to know why history allowed the name of this man to be immortalized in stone while some, like my great-grandmother’s, go missing. Samuel Delany says that “the language you speak in is the world you see.” I have, as a person of South Asian origin, written this article in English. I attend my classes in English. I live my life in English. I see Elihu Yale’s name carved in that white stone in my first language, in English. Wandering through that church, and here, in these hallways of dark wood and stone in New Haven, I realize: We cannot seek to exist independent of our circumstances. That painting is part of our history at Yale, just like Fort St. George is part of mine. So, too, is whatever was taken out of the ports in my father’s home city and never returned.

The East India Company isn’t here today, but it left a mark on the land. While I am in India, I keep thinking about how lucky I am, finally appreciating everything there. There is so much beauty to be seen, by the beach at sunset and at my grandfather’s temple. The thick smell of honey and sugar, carted in big trucks just in time for Pongal. I have never seen sugar cane stacked so high. There is so much about the universe to love in these small square miles of lush land, especially understanding the violence that was here before, that truthfully, is still here. But sometimes it feels like this gift of sight is coming two generations too late.

In our last visit to the church, I think I understand what my father is saying. In my grandfather’s house, we make sambar with my grandmother Vijaya’s karai. I carry her name in mine. Her stories live with me and color my present. So, too, it is with Elihu Yale. His memory, what he did, who he was, lives in the present for every person in Chennai, but also for us, here, in New Haven.

Cold Cases, Open Wounds

Story By Kyung Mi Lee

Illustrations By Michelle Li

Photos Courtesy of Sherell Nesmith

Published on January 21, 2019

Closure feels out of reach for families of New Haven’s unsolved crimes.

In the break room at work, Sherell Nesmith watched televised news coverage of a mysterious discovery — along the Metro-North Railroad tracks at the State Street train station, someone had scattered dismembered human limbs. On July 15, 2015, the stench of rotting flesh had led a passerby to the location of two severed legs. A bag containing handless human arms was discovered below the Chapel Street bridge.

“I’m watching this and I’m saying — wow, people cutting people up now? Like where do they do that?” Nesmith said. “Not knowing that two weeks later, it was going to end up in my backyard, literally.”

The limbs belonged to her brother, Ray Roberson.

In the intervening three years, his murder has not been solved.

A few weeks after the initial discovery of his legs, police uncovered Roberson’s torso in the abandoned Salvation Army on 274 Crown Street. He was a 54-year-old New Haven resident, a house painter and artist, the eldest of six siblings, affectionately known to family and friends as “Booboo.”

“I think we were all numb,” Nesmith said. “Of course, you cry instantly. But it makes you numb because you’re like, this can’t be. Everybody thinks that these things don’t hit their families.”

Ray Roberson’s murder is an ongoing investigation at the New Haven police. A prevailing sense of anger and mistrust plagues the families of unsolved homicides; grief extends beyond the criminal justice system. Nesmith continues to pray that his case will be solved.

“It’s hard,” she said. “You try to push it back so you don’t think about it, but there are times when you can’t do that. It’s a process where you’re numb. We’re still here. We’ve still got to live. But you don’t ever forget about it.”

Some families seek closure through arrests and convictions, a difficult process in open cases. Ongoing investigations serve as daily reminders of painful events they wish to leave behind.

“Some people are fortunate in the atrocity that they may know who [the killer] is,” she said. “But there are some of us whose crimes may be elongated.”

—

In 1998, Yale senior Suzanne Jovin was found fatally stabbed in the back near the corner of Edgehill and East Rock roads. Dec. 4, 2018 marks the 20th anniversary of her murder.

“From our perspective, this year is no different than any before,” the victim’s parents, Donna Arndt-Jovin GRD ’68 and Thomas Jovin, shared in an email with the News. “Suzanne was a good citizen (and a good student) of Yale, was happy there and derived great benefits from an outstanding institution of higher learning.”

On the night of her murder, she was walking back to campus from a pizza party for the New Haven chapter of Best Buddies, an international organization dedicated to serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. A celebrated member of the Yale community, she posthumously received the Special Elm and Ivy Award from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven in 1999. There are numerous dedications honoring her contributions to the Yale community, including a memorial plaque in the Davenport College courtyard. The Suzanne N. Jovin Memorial Fund continues to support promising undergraduate students who “reflect Suzanne’s aspirations and commitments.”

Over the intervening 20 years, the Jovins have maintained close contact with public investigators in New Haven. They are still searching for conclusions to be made about the circumstances of her death. In an email to the News, her parents credited the University as an “outstanding institution of higher learning.” But they urged the University to finally share the information gained by its private investigators with the New Haven and Connecticut authorities.

“For whatever reason, the University has opted, at least up to now, not to release the material,” the Jovins wrote. “We by no means condemn the University, merely urge it to join us in facing the challenges generated by the violence that is so prevalent in our society.”

University spokesperson Karen Peart stated that Yale “has cooperated fully with the investigation and has provided all available information that the law enforcement authorities have requested.”

—

According to the Division of Criminal Justice, Jovin’s case is one of 38 open cold cases in the state of Connecticut. Many are serious crimes or homicides of decades past, ranging from the 1968 abduction of 13-year-old Debra Spickler to the 2012 Waterford shooting of Kyle Seidel.

In an effort to dedicate special resources to the investigation of unsolved crimes, the Connecticut Office of the Chief State’s Attorney established its Cold Case Unit in 1998. Central to the core of its mission is the idea that every case, no matter how old, deserves to be solved. As the Senior Assistant State’s Attorney for the New Haven Judicial District, Seth Garbarsky works with a team of 25 law enforcement individuals to prosecute felonies for the state of Connecticut. Although a majority of homicides in the New Haven County occur in the City of New Haven, his role extends to cover any and all cases in the County’s jurisdiction, including the murders of Ray Roberson and Suzanne Jovin.

“The primary function of a cold case unit is to look into cases that for whatever reason have (been) deemed to have gone unsolved. It’s just to put a new, fresh pair of eyes,” Garbarsky said. “It could be a case that’s two weeks old; it could be a case that’s 20 years old. … It’s not a very exact science.”

The Governor’s Office authorizes thousands of dollars for information leading to arrests and convictions in open cold cases. Sizes of rewards vary by case; the maximum state commitment is $50,000. Additional funds come from the families and communities of murder victims. In the case of Suzanne Jovin, Yale University has offered $100,000 in addition to the state’s $50,000, making the total cash reward the largest in Connecticut.

Authorities work with a wide range of sources for potential leads. “That could be family members; it could be eyewitnesses; it could be witnesses that are cooperating from prison — jailhouse informants,” Garbarsky said. Fluctuating budget cuts and limited access to resources requires creative methods to find tips on unsolved crimes.

In 2010, the Cold Case Unit released the first edition of cold case playing cards, each card featuring a picture and brief details about an unsolved case. Since then, the unit has received 675 tips on open cases, leading to 20 arrests and convictions. A total of four editions have been distributed through the Connecticut correctional system. The fourth and current edition was released just last month.

Rapid advancements in forensic science also help to uncover previously unknown details, allowing new methods of application towards criminal investigation. It was postmortem DNA testing that led to the identification of Roberson’s dismembered body. DNA identification allows authorities to gather DNA from articles of clothing, surfaces and other pieces of evidence.

“Every day, there is constant advancement in this field, which obviously goes to help us, Garbarsky said. “It also goes to exonerate individuals who were found not to have committed a crime.”

Garbarsky’s work is inextricably linked to legitimizing the grief of the living.

“I don’t even think it has anything to do with a punishment or jail or incarceration,” he said. “I think [families] just want to know who did this horrific thing and why they did this horrific thing. I think that’s why we continue to investigate — to give the families some sense of justice and closure.”

—

Life goes on despite the tragedies of injustice. For Winter Alston, the news of her brother Iroquois Alston’s death coincided with her son’s first birthday on Aug. 6, 2011. She was shopping for the birthday party with her mother when she received the call. They rushed to the scene of the shooting only to be stopped by police — “I told them I was his mother,” April Barron said. He had been shot in the back of a Honda sedan, along with his friend Rickita Smalls. That night, Alston identified her brother’s belongings in an evidence bag at the Norwalk police station.

Alston, 27 at the time of his murder, was a loving father and dedicated son.

“He was always smiling. There was never a dull moment around him,” his daughter Dynasty Alston said.

A family member’s passing is a difficult process to endure, his murder an unexplainable reality to communicate to his child. She remembers being pulled from dance practice and rushed to her grandmother’s house.

“Nobody wanted to tell me what was going on. I had to beg to find out,” she said. “I think about it a lot. I’m more angry if anything. … It’s hard. It’s a lot to take on.”

Seven years after Iroquois Alston’s death, his family has cycled through four police detectives, made countless weekly calls and prayed daily. Barron, Alston’s mother, calls the Norwalk police “three to four times a week” to inquire about new progress. It is a tireless task of never-ending grief, the presence of unceasing sorrow in the absence of her son.

“May 26, 1984 was the best day of my life, and Aug. 6, 2011 was the worst,” she said.

The Alstons have remained in contact with the family of Smalls, the woman also found dead in the sedan. Since the murder, they have relied on each other in times of need.

“We just need justice,” Alston’s daughter said. “It’s been going on too long now. Seven years and nothing. He’s still not here. They still took a life. Whoever did this is still somewhere walking around.”

—

Sherell Nesmith frequently communicates with the New Haven police, serving as the point person to represent her family in the case. Overcoming her grief to maintain an active role is an essential part of honoring her brother’s passing.

“In the beginning, [the detective] was present quite often. As time goes on, you hear from them a little less. If they get something, they’ll reach out to you. But he’s always made it very clear, ‘If you have any questions, I’m a phone call away. You call me. You text me. We can get together.’”

Over time, it is perhaps inevitable that cold case investigators become an important part of grieving families’ lives, acknowledging that victims of unsolved homicides include the living.

“When I’m walking around throughout the city, I’m looking like — could it be that person? — your mind is all over the place,” said Nesmith. “It’s just a matter of trying to stay sane because it never goes away.”

An arrest or conviction comes at the cost of personal hardship; families of the deceased endure years of grief in search of closure.

“My response then and my response now is: There’s a special place in hell with [the killer’s] name on it,” she said, echoing a sentiment repeated by the Alstons. “One day [they] are going to meet those fiery pits of hell.”

They share their stories in honor of their loved ones, as Nesmith said, to “keep his name out there until justice has come.”

In Between Homes

Story By Isabella Zou

Published on

Michaelle Gonzalez used to be part of the twenty-three percent of youth experiencing homelessness in Connecticut who are LGBTQ+. Now she’s advocating for them.

When she was 15 years old, Michaelle Gonzalez came out to her parents as queer. To her surprise, her mother, a member of a Pentecostal cult with extremely conservative views, acted normally.

“She pretended like everything was fine,” Gonzalez said. “I thought everything was fine.”

When her parents announced they were going on vacation to their native Puerto Rico, she thought nothing of it. They dropped her off at a friend’s house and told her they would be back in two weeks.

She never heard from them again.

At first, Gonzalez continued living with her friend’s family. But after enduring six months of frequent beatings from the family’s son, she made the decision to leave, she said.

“I felt like, if I’m going to sit here and get hit or I’m going to go live on the street, then I’ll go live on the street,” Gonzalez said.

Her sister, who remained in the house her parents had left, barred her from entering because of her sexuality. When she couldn’t break in, she slept outside in the extreme cold and in extreme heat. At times, she slept behind The Sound School, sneaking in during after hours for warmth. Other times, she slept on the New Haven Green. For a few months, she slept at a man’s house in exchange for sex. Meanwhile, she started working two jobs at different locations of Dunkin’ Donuts. She ate her meals there sometimes, ate at her school or stole from convenience stores.

“I was so frightened about being very small, and by myself, and nobody knows where I’m at,” she said. “I was always frightened of getting caught [stealing] and also frightened that nobody would ever find out.”

She said that the Department of Children and Families knew of her case and was searching for a living situation for her, but her caseworker told her that few foster families would want to adopt someone as old as her. The department did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Gonzalez moved from place to place, unmoored.

—

On Nov. 16, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced that Connecticut would receive $6.5 million to end youth homelessness in the state by 2020. The grant was the largest sum conferred this year as part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program, which aims to award states with concrete and innovative plans for combating youth homelessness.

According to a study conducted by the True Colors Fund and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, compared to other states, Connecticut is doing well. The study graded each state on dozens of metrics spanning legal, systemic and environmental barriers faced by youth experiencing homelessness. Their resulting State Index on Youth Homelessness gives Connecticut a score of 61 out of 100 for homeless youth — the third best in the country.

Connecticut is one of only four states to have a strategic plan to end youth homelessness that specifically includes strategies to address LGBTQ+ needs, per the study. And it’s one of only six states that maintains a youth action board, which represents youths’ needs in the making of youth homelessness policy. Overall, Connecticut and the District of Columbia had the highest “environment” scores, indicating a supportive environment for youth experiencing homelessness.

But Connecticut lacks crucial support for homeless youths’ education rights, as well as a state law to provide funding support in the style of the federal Runaway and Homeless Youth Act. And despite efforts to remedy these deficiencies, both across the state and nationwide, the number of youth experiencing homelessness is on the rise.

Last January, Connecticut’s third annual Youth Count administered surveys to youth in schools, colleges, local drop-in sites and other gathering places. Overall, 5,054 homeless or unstably housed youth were counted, up from about 4,300 the previous year.

In the Greater New Haven region, 816 were counted, and in the city of New Haven itself, 87 were counted to be homeless or unstably housed.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act mandates that schools in the U.S. provide a homeless liaison for their students, ensuring that youth experiencing homelessness are identified and connected to services including health care, mental health, substance abuse, transportation and housing. In reality, however, according to Gemma Joseph Lumpkin, the Chief of Youth, Family, & Community Engagement for New Haven Public Schools, the people who serve as McKinney-Vento liaisons are teachers, social workers, guidance counselors and even principals, who prioritize their primary duties over their McKinney-Vento responsibilities. Furthermore, their services tend to be poorly publicized, leaving students experiencing homelessness to feel a lack of support from the school.

Gonzalez said that during her time experiencing homelessness while attending the Sound School, she wasn’t aware that a McKinney-Vento liaison was in the building.

Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing one-tenth of the school year, hovers around 19 percent of the general student population in New Haven. Among students facing homelessness, the figure is more than double: 44 percent. Increasing embarrassment resulting from teachers’ attitudes and her own sense of dignity and presentation contributed to Gonzalez’s worsening attendance — and her eventual dropping out.

“When I did show up to class, teachers would point me out, like oh, you’re late, you need to see me after class,” she said. “And that felt like you’re putting all this attention on me right now, and all the students are noticing I’m wearing the same things I was wearing three days ago, and they all notice now that I haven’t been here for a few days. It made me wonder, what’s the point of being here?”

At a Board of Alders meeting the night of Wednesday, Oct. 17, Gonzalez and other high school students who had experienced homelessness advocated for schools to provide more basic services for students, such as washers and dryers.

Gonzalez also advocated for the need to train teachers and youth peers to work with homeless youth and connect them with important resources.

“If I had been able to see that there was some sort of support available, I would have reached out for it. I wanted to be housed. I wanted off the streets. But I was really afraid of asking for help when I didn’t see any resources available. I just felt like, what are they going to do for me anyway?”

Gonzalez’s friends knew what she was going through, to some extent. But she warned them not to tell anyone. Gonzalez said they were afraid of what they didn’t know — what the school would do, what legal action might ensue.

After talking to other youth who have experienced homelessness, she said that this is a common phenomenon.

“Our friends always know — and they don’t say anything,” she said. “And it’s not their fault, but I feel like the school system is failing us by not pushing us, not educating us, not being open and inclusive and saying that this is a safe place, and nothing bad is going to happen to you and your friend; we will provide some sort of support.”

—

On a bleak day in 2017 on the Green last year, Gonzalez met another teenager experiencing homelessness, who told her about Youth Continuum.

The organization is the largest resource for unaccompanied homeless youth in New Haven and runs the only shelter for homeless youth in Connecticut. It provides a range of services, from street outreach to a variety of housing opportunities.

Gonzalez came to their drop-in center for homeless youth, where together with a caseworker, she called 211 — the statewide point of entry for homeless services — and began the intake process. Soon, she was accepted into the transitional living program and began sharing an apartment with a roommate. For the first time in more than two years, she had a place to come home to.

(Photo by Isabella Zou)

—

According to Paul Kosowsky, Youth Continuum’s CEO, the youth homeless population is primarily composed of runaways, youth who are choosing to live outside and “throwaways,” whose families have forced them out of their homes — sometimes after they come out, like Gonzalez, and other times after learning they are pregnant. Across crisis housing beds, the transitional living program, rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing and scattered site programs, the organization serves approximately 100 youth.

“What we do is so unique because there are so many different pieces, and they’re all connected to each other, so we’re able to move people through the system in a timely way,” Kosowsky said.

Fighting youth homelessness poses unique challenges in a system designed for adults. HUD defines homelessness literally, meaning that to qualify for many longer-term housing resources, someone has to be living either in an emergency shelter or in a place not meant for human habitation.

However, Kosowsky said, many youth avoid adult shelters because they feel out of place or unsafe, and many don’t sleep outside as Gonzalez did. Instead, adolescents will couch-surf to survive. But this creates a sort of limbo, destabilizing their housing situation while disqualifying them from most of the adult-oriented housing services in the area.

“Now they find themselves being sexually trafficked or engaging in survival sex for a place to stay or for food to eat,” Kosowsky said. “Now they’re in danger, and now they qualify for housing, but until they get into that bad situation, they don’t qualify. It’s a system that was built on the adult model, and it doesn’t easily take into account that unique equation that youth [who] are homeless bring. We try to be the agency that understands the issues and provide a range of services and can help figure out how to get into the system.”

One of these services is LGBTQ+ counseling. Twenty-three percent of youth in the 2018 Connecticut Youth Count identified as LGBTQ+, and nationwide, the estimates range from 20–40 percent.

Gonzalez’s homelessness directly resulted from perceptions of her identity. Her situation seemed only to reinforce her parents’ beliefs, leading to an ongoing mental health struggle with self-identity and worth.

“All I’d ever heard at seminars and things was like, gay people do drugs, and they end up homeless, and everybody gets HIV and AIDS, and they die, they go to hell, and they’re evil,” Gonzalez said. “I got a very negative education about it. And then, it was negative reinforcement when I was housing unstable and living on the street.”

The Voices of Youth Count, an ongoing project by the University of Chicago, interviewed 26,161 people about their experiences with youth homelessness for one recent study. It found that not only are LGBTQ+ youth at more than double the risk of homelessness compared to non-LGBTQ+ peers, but homeless LGBTQ+ youth had over twice the rate of early death among youth experiencing homelessness.

The research also showed that most LGBTQ+ youth became homeless not in the immediate aftermath of “coming out,” as in Gonzalez’s case, but as the result of increasing family instability and frayed relationships over time.

This was the case for Violet Thomas, 20, who came out to her family as a trans woman during her senior year of high school and, as her situation at home worsened, eventually decided to leave. According to an article from Connecticut Public Radio, she couch-surfed for a while before living in her car.

Research advocates for increased resources for LGBTQ+ youth to provide the kind of counseling and targeted support that has helped Gonzalez. The staff and counseling at Youth Continuum, some of whom are openly LGBTQ+, helped Gonzalez accept her sexuality, something she was previously unable to separate from her homelessness.

“I have to forgive myself,” Gonzalez said. “I need to stop hating myself for something I shouldn’t hate myself for.”

(Photo courtesy of Michaelle Gonzalez)

—

Kellyann Day — the CEO of New Reach, an organization that runs shelters primarily serving women and children — believes that ending youth homelessness could help address the issue of adult homelessness.

“If you give kids a stable environment to grow up in, a stable home, you help prevent them from becoming homeless later as adults,” Day said.

Studies as recent as 2010 have found that adverse childhood events, including the neglect and abuse that accompany homelessness, are powerful risk factors for adult homelessness. According to the American Psychological Association, homeless children are twice as likely as other children to have a learning disability, repeat a grade or be suspended from school and are twice as likely to experience hunger and its adverse effects on cognitive development. Also, about half of school-age children grapple with depression or anxiety, and unaccompanied youth are often more likely to struggle with mental health and substance abuse issues.

But working to rectify this is difficult. New Reach must fight to balance long-term prevention with the immediate needs of people in crisis, which vary greatly case to case. Even families with older children have different needs than those with younger ones, Day said. Parents of young children need childcare to work, while teenagers might require career and academic support.

“We want to help people today, but also make sure that they’re thriving and staying housed,” Day said. “For the chronically homeless individual who’s on the Green and who’s struggling with mental health and substance abuse, that thriving definition is different than the [one for a] 21-year-old mom who’s got two kids under the age of four, in a shelter. Neither is right or wrong: it’s just different. So the interventions need to be different, and the services need to be different.”

New Reach is receiving some of Connecticut’s grant money to help provide these services. And out of the $6.5 million, Youth Continuum CEO Paul Kosowsky said his organization will be receiving $450,000, all to be used in New Haven. He said the money will help his agency to double the number of short-term beds in its crisis housing program from six to 12, hire two youth navigators and enable 28 people — up from four — to receive rapid rehousing services, emergency housing stabilization and short-term rent assistance to get into their own apartments as soon as possible.

“The most important thing is to provide more of what’s needed so we don’t have to have a waiting list,” he said. “The goal of all the programs to make sure that homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring.”

Youth Continuum is hiring several “youth navigators” to work with youth on the brink of homelessness to help stabilize their families or connect them to other community resources to keep them out of the homeless system. For those who do become homeless, they provide crisis housing to keep their period of homelessness as brief as possible. Finally, their longer-term housing and support programs aim to lift them into self-sufficiency and ensure they don’t have to enter the system again.

—

Gonzalez is now part of a Youth Advisory Board at Youth Continuum, a group of about 12 former or current clients of the organization that advocate for the needs of the youth it serves. She said it gives them “a sense of power in [their] own decision-making.”

The board represents the needs of the homeless youth population in city government settings, participating in New Haven Board of Education meetings once a month.

“We wanted to become human to these people, so we’ve created our own platform to speak and to share our experiences,” she said.

The board also engages in statewide initiatives to end youth homelessness, attending monthly meetings at Youth Action Hub, a youth-led research and advocacy organization, and participating in Youth Engagement Team Initiatives, which bring together youth advisory boards from across Connecticut.

At Youth Action Hub, they meet with the likes of Jay Perry, 25, who was abandoned by his parents as a 2-month-old because he was constantly sick and hard to care for. He grew up in the foster care system and became homeless after he aged out of the system at age 18.

“My experience being homeless has proven useful for some of the projects we work on at the Hub, and I think it has made the people we interview feel more comfortable and understood,” he wrote in a recent blog post. “Working at the Youth Action Hub has allowed me to gain more contact with support systems, as I have continued to struggle with unstable housing, and the knowledge I have gained has made a big difference in my life.”

The members help organize the annual Youth Count, conduct sensitivity trainings for Yale student volunteers at Youth Continuum, and train to use and teach others to use naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal drug.

Gonzalez said that after Youth Continuum helped house her for the first time, she felt inspired to give back through advocacy work. She hopes to stay in the program as long as possible — probably until December of 2019 — and, meanwhile, start earning enough money to afford her own apartment when the time comes. In January, she will begin a six-year term with the National Guard, serving for one weekend a month and two full weeks a year.

Gonzalez hopes to continue her work with youth homelessness as a career, working full-time with Youth Continuum or a similar organization — or even starting her own nonprofit to enhance the network of services.

“When I was homeless, it made me feel like I was less than a person sometimes,” she said. “And I don’t think anybody deserves that.”

Figure of Speech:
Jamie Kirchick’s Run for the Yale Corporation

Written by Hailey Fuchs

Photos by Surbhi Bharadwaj, Robbie Short, Schirin Rangnick

Photos courtesy of Jamie Kirchick

Published on September 16, 2018

“I assumed college kids didn’t want to be policed and coddled and now we have a situation where students are basically begging for the administration to micromanage their lives,” said James Kirchick ’06, leaning back in the desk chair in his D.C. office at the Brookings Institution.

Two months ago, Kirchick — a journalist and former notorious campus conservative — announced his candidacy for alumni trustee of the Yale Corporation, also known as the board of trustees. He chose to run in part because he feels that “there doesn’t seem to be anyone on the board of trustees who is representing [his] viewpoint.” Kirchick is the first candidate in 16 years to campaign for a seat on the Corporation without University support. In order for his name to officially appear on the ballot, he needs 4,266 signatures — 3 percent of the total number of ballots distributed in last year’s election — by 11:59 p.m. on Oct. 1. As of early September, his campaign estimates that it has garnered 1,500.

In a June op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Kirchick announced his candidacy and vowed to protect free speech, even amidst attacks by “fashionable opinion.” His goal is “to restore Yale values.” To spread his message, Kirchick has appeared in Yale clubs across the nation, sent mail to alumni and mounted a full-fledged media tour. With the support of the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program — whose mission is to increase ideological diversity on Yale’s campus — Kirchick hopes to restore the right to free expression, a right he believes came under attack on Yale’s campus during a series of protests during the fall of 2015.

In the fall of 2015, then-Associate Master of Silliman Erika Christakis sent an email to the college, expressing frustration with an earlier University statement that urged students to refrain from dressing in racially or culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. Students, upset by the suggestion that the right to free speech should supercede other concerns, later approached then-Master of Silliman Nicholas Christakis in the college courtyard. They criticized the email as racially insensitive and demanded an apology.

The confrontation alone, which was filmed and went viral on social media, was not the sole impetus for Kirchick’s campaign. Rather, according to Kirchick, it was the University’s decision in 2017 to award two of the students involved — whose contentious standoff with Nicholas Christakis in the Silliman courtyard was widely shared on the internet — the Nakanishi Prize, dedicated to graduating seniors who have enhanced “race and/or ethnic relations at Yale College.”

Kirchick was appalled that Yale had honored “the ringleaders of that mob.” Nothing like that would ever have happened while he was an undergraduate in the early aughts, he said. The rhetoric used in the Silliman confrontation was not a way to speak to a fellow student, let alone an elder, he added.

Kirchick resents this growing intolerance and dogmatism in the student body. He noted that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a campus free speech advocacy group, labelled Yale with a “yellow light.” The yellow light is one of four designations — green, yellow, red and warning — designed to compare the protection of the right to free speech at colleges nationwide through a uniform standard. As the intermediate designation, a yellow indicates that the university in question has ambiguous regulations that allow administrative exploitation and subjective application. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, such policies include Yale’s definitions of sexual misconduct, consent and harassment, as well as complaint procedures for racial or ethnic harassment, among others. In comparison, both Harvard and Princeton received a red light, a graver assessment of policies that unambiguously restrict free speech on campus.

“A lot of the alums looked at [the Christakis controversy] and [said], ‘What the hell is going on?’” Kirchick said.

As member of the Yale Corporation, Kirchick promises to uphold the pillars of the Woodward Report, the 1974 booklet on the University’s free speech policy. He also intends to bring those principles into the Corporation, the governing and policymaking body of the University. The group’s 17 regular members, including University President Peter Salovey, ten appointed members and six elected alumni, convene five times annually, filing into the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall. Decisions that shape the future of the University, such as the coeducation of Yale College, the renaming of Calhoun and the expansion of the undergraduate population, rest in the hands of the Corporation.

The six alumni trustees are elected by Yale graduates across the University’s schools, and in most election cycles, all candidates are appointed by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee. Yale’s alumni population chooses between these cherry-picked candidates, whose resumes often boast finance and consulting gigs such as McKinsey, or who have the name-brand power of Maya Lin ’81 ARC ’86 and Janet Yellen GRD ’71. But, with the selectivity of the cohort, two candidates, prior to Kirchick, have successfully petitioned to be included on the ballot and won the general election.

These candidates — one, the first Jew and another, a local New Haven pastor — have sought to usher in major change to a notoriously secretive body, once a group of Protestant ministers. But in the past, when candidates like Kirchick have upended the usually quiet election process for alumni trustee, Yale powers-that-be have not hesitated to initiate a counter effort to maintain the status quo.

To Kirchick, a seasoned political commentator, upsetting the status quo is his trade. Since his days as an undergraduate in Pierson College, Kirchick himself has long challenged “fashionable opinion.”

GAINING NOTORIETY

During Kirchick’s freshman year, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization — the precursor to Local 33 — held a protest demanding recognition from the University. Glancing down from his fifth floor Lanman-Wright dorm room, a freshman named Jamie Kirchick shouted, “Go teach a section!”

Over the course of his undergraduate career, Kirchick continued to argue against graduate student unionization both in person and in print. As a columnist for the Yale Daily News, he adopted controversial stances — so controversial that he recalled the “dirty glances” he used to receive from passersby across the street. Once, he received a threat from a graduate student over his pieces about graduate student organization in the News, in which the graduate student warned she would jeopardize his grade if she were ever to teach a class in which he was a student. Kirchick said he reported the threat to the Yale College Dean’s Office.

Though the Yale Daily News was not Kirchick’s only extracurricular — he was the vice president of the Independent Party in the Yale Political Union and a member of the the Dramat, the comedy group Fifth Humour and the Jewish society Shabtai — it was by far his most prominent platform.

When asked what he thought about being a controversial figure, Kirchick replied, “I guess it’s just a certain type of masochism.”

Kirchick describes himself as a “classical liberal” and “aggressively centrist.” To his fellow classmates, however, Kirchick was “the pre-eminent conservative at Yale” at the time, one who threw himself into battles with the campus liberals, said former classmate Aryeh Cohen-Wade ’05, who did not know Kirchick personally.

“Jamie, as we all called him, then was was just one of these few people that did enough unusual things that pretty much on campus knew who he was,” Cohen-Wade said. “At a place like Yale, if you’re known by the whole campus, there’s probably something very strange about you.

When the Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing Kirchick’s candidacy was published, Cohen-Wade’s small group of friends from Yale was shocked. He added that, to run for the Yale Corporation at Kirchick’s age, one must have a high opinion of oneself.

In February of his freshman year, Kirchick sat in the back of a room in the Afro-American Cultural Center for a lecture by Amiri Baraka, former poet laureate of New Jersey. Months earlier, the writer had drawn criticism for claiming Israeli workers had knowledge of the September 11 attacks and was later stripped of his honorific for those remarks. At Yale, Kirchick recalled, Baraka read that poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” and received a standing ovation.

During the event, Kirchick, who is Jewish, asked Baraka to defend his remarks with facts and sources. Baraka asserted that he had read it in Arabic newspapers, Kirchick said, scoffing at Baraka’s claim 15 years after the fact

But noting the freshman’s skepticism, the writer — in front of a crowd of Kirchick’s peers — announced that the teenager appeared to have “constipation of the face” and required a “brain enema.”

In wake of the invectives, the former News columnist penned an editorial condemning the affair as one of “the most disturbing events of [his] entire life.” Kirchick criticized the event not for the personal insults Baraka spewed but for the Afro-American Cultural Center’s and Black Student Alliance’s decision to invite the controversial poet to campus and for the praise he received. Kirchick claimed the organizations demonstrated a disregard for “civil discourse on campus.”

“I wish the Yale students today would behave in a similar fashion,” Kirchick said of his method of response: writing an op-ed as a retort and conversing with fellow students. He compared his response to that of the students who confronted Nicholas Christakis in the Silliman courtyard. Still, Kirchick contends he would not even know how to converse with someone who found the Christakis email racist. If any rational person found it offensive, “We have a real serious problem,” he said.

As an undergraduate, Kirchick had a fondness for those who brought controversy to campus. The News columnist was a member of the Yale College Students for Democracy, which supported U.S. involvement in the Iraq War, and a chapter of a conservative think tank known as the Middle East Forum. The latter invited Daniel Pipes, the founder of the Middle East Forum, to speak on campus. Pipes had drawn controversy for his remarks on Islam, stating that “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene. … All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

During Pipes’ 2003 lecture, the room in Linsly-Chittenden Hall was packed. Cohen-Wade, who attended the event, recalled that Betty Trachtenberg, then-dean of student affairs, served as a bouncer at the door, in anticipation of protest. At least a third of attendees donned black clothing and black gags across their mouths, in opposition to Pipes’ derogatory comments about brown-skinned peoples and Muslims. Cohen-Wade speculated that Middle East Forum President Eliana Johnson ’06 may have cherry-picked questions for the Q&A session after Pipes’ remarks to alternate between critical comments and queries from the contingent of neo-conservatives on campus.

But Kirchick recalled the event as a model for controversial campus speakers. Attendees protested and asked questions, without forcing the event to be shut down.

Matthew Louchheim ’04, the former President of Yale Students for Democracy, said he remembered a kind of “knee-jerk pacifism” of many students at the time. But Louchheim, who met Kirchick through the Independent Party, said that the aspiring Corporation candidate was never one to shy away from challenging conventions.

“To be honest, he didn’t identify as a conservative back when we were at Yale,” Louchheim said. “He was willing to stick his neck out. … He cares more about pursuing the truth than he does about offending people.”

In his freshman year, Kirchick also published an editorial with Johnson, a good friend, in FrontPage Magazine. The piece, published not long after the fall of Baghdad, directly criticized the remarks of professors who spoke at an anti-war teach-in, calling them “nihilists” and their remarks “a spectacle of self-aggrandizement.”

“If Jamie believes in free speech on campus, why did he write an article for a national conservative magazine, impugning the patriotism of professors who are protesting the Iraq War?” Cohen-Wade questioned. “I don’t really trust Jamie Kirchick’s definition of [free speech].”

The piece resulted in a public back-and-forth between Kirchick and Johnson and professor James Sleeper. After its publication, Sleeper wrote an op-ed in the News of his own, in which he noted that two freshmen — whom he did not refer to by name — had “arrive[d] here primed to attack professors in public.”

Kirchick and Johnson then appeared on Joe Scarborough’s show on MSNBC, condemning the professor for his remarks. Scarborough criticized Sleeper for calling the young students “Fedayeen Uncle Sams” and signs of a “neo-Stalinism.” Kirchick and Johnson demanded an apology, to which Sleeper responded with another op-ed in the News claiming that the alleged “ad hominem epithets” were exaggerations.

Today, tension remains between Kirchick and Sleeper. Sleeper declined to be interviewed for this story but sent a link to a video along with a statement. The video shows Kirchick, donning rainbow suspenders, appearing on Russia Today, a network paid for by the Russian government. At the time, the live panel intended to discuss the awaited sentencing of the leaker Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley.

In an act of protest, Kirchick refused to discuss Manning’s sentencing, citing a hostile and violent climate for gay people in Russia and the “gay propaganda law,” which prohibited exposure of minors to content that normalized homosexuality.

“Being here on a Kremlin-funded propaganda network, I’m going to wear my gay pride suspenders and speak out against the horrific, anti-gay legislation that Vladimir Putin has signed into law,” Kirchick said in the video.

“It’s part of a desperation for public attention and vindication that began in 2003 when, at 18, he went on Joe Scarborough’s MSNBC show to denounce professors opposed to Iraq War drum-beating,” Sleeper wrote in a statement to the News. “He veils a seemingly unquenchable, neo-connish craving for revenge by touting his gayness and devotion to free speech. It ill-suits him for any role in governing Yale, let alone in defending liberal education against the real threats to it.”

Questioning why his sexuality was relevant, Kirchick called the comment, on the part of Sleeper, a “low blow but characteristic.”

Indeed, as his old friend Louchheim noted, Kirchick does not shy from controversial comments or quips, whether directed at a professor or then-Dean of Yale College Peter Salovey.

As a senior, Kirchick co-authored the script for the senior class skit, performed on Class Day. In that year’s production, the graduate student union kidnapped Salovey threatening to shave off his mustache unless the University recognized their group.

But Trachtenberg, the dean of student affairs at the time, cut the jest, which she believed was disrespectful.

Afterward, Kirchick bumped into Salovey, who lauded the script. Kirchick told the Yale College dean the story of the axed mustache joke, which delighted Salovey, who called the plot-line “brilliant,” Kirchick said. Salovey questioned why the storyline had been censored in the first place, he added.

In this instance, he and Salovey saw eye to eye, Kirchick said: Both opposed oversensitivity. In moments like these, the University president has offered appropriate recognition of the right to free speech, but, in some cases, the administration has fallen short of those principles, he said.

“A HAPPY WARRIOR”

The night of the Yale Daily News 125th celebration in 2003, Kirchick bumped into William F. Buckley Jr. ’50 and his son Christopher Buckley ’75 while the two toured the paper’s headquarters. The elder Buckley had once served as the chairman of the Yale Daily New and his son as the founding co-editor of the Magazine. William F. Buckley, like Kirchick, published columns in the News. He too often disparaged Yale liberals and weighed in on the controversies of his times, most notably defending then-U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy in his anti-communist efforts. Buckley was once called “the most dangerous undergraduate in the history of Yale” for his controversial editorials attacking the liberalism and atheism that he claimed overwhelmed the campus. Buckley later hosted the popular television program “Firing Line” and founded the National Review, a magazine with a conservative editorial stance.

Face-to-face with Kirchick, Buckley told the student that his wife would be unable to attend the banquet for the News’ celebration later that evening and asked Kirchick to fill her empty seat at the table. Though Kirchick could not attend due to an evening showing of a student-written production, the two began corresponding. As an undergraduate, Kirchick even helped then-New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus research archival documents for a biography of Buckley.

For his present campaign, Kirchick said he drew some inspiration from his conservative predecessor’s 1965 run for mayor of New York City. Then, Buckley ran an unlikely campaign as an ideological conservative.

During the campaign for New York City mayor, Buckley was once asked what he would do if he won.

“Demand a recount,” he retorted.

“I think I’m more inspired by that,” Kirchick said, chuckling. “I’m trying to come at this with sort of being a happy warrior. … Levity, that’s what I take from Buckley.”

Like Kirchick, Buckley also ran for the Yale Corporation. Buoyed by the popular reception of his treatise “God and Man at Yale,” Buckley looked to effect some real change at his alma mater. In the book, he criticized Yale for its seeming secularity and hostility toward religious beliefs, as well as its emphasis on collectivism. Similarly, Buckley’s campaign for alumni fellow of the Corporation stood in direct opposition to actions by the Yale administration.

“[Buckley] thought there should be more ideological diversity on campus,” said Al Felzenberg, who authored a book on Buckley and taught a seminar on his life at Yale. “He thought … that religion and capitalism were downplayed if not ridiculed.”

Kirchick’s and Buckley’s campaigns took a decidedly reminiscent tone. Each candidate recalled the better days at Yale. Both lamented an emerging ethos on campus that seemed to suppress ideological minorities. Where Buckley advocated for the rights of the religious, Kirchick said the same for the campus conservatives.

Still, Kirchick rejected the comparisons between his own candidacy for the Yale Corporation and that of Buckley. He noted that maintaining the rights of legacies in Yale’s admission process was the core tenet of the Buckley campaign. Indeed, Buckley lodged an attack against Yale’s admissions process for the advantages it gave to students from underrepresented backgrounds — a practice which Buckley called “egalitarian hocus-pocus.” Kirchick commented that his predecessor’s platform was “reactionary” in that respect.

Lauren Noble ’11 — Kirchick’s campaign advisor and William F. Buckley, Jr. program executive director — contended that his platform was “far superior.”

In his 1968 Corporation campaign, Buckley succeeded in securing enough signatures to make the ballot but ultimately lost to Cyrus R. Vance ’39 LAW ’42, who would later serve as secretary of state under Jimmy Carter, in the general election. Vance, the favorite of then-University President Kingman Brewster, was not the last cherry-picked candidate to defeat an outsider in the race.

In 2002, the Rev. W. David Lee DIV ’93, a minister at the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church, successfully found his way onto the ballot, garnering 4,000 signatures along with $30,000 in union funding for his campaign. The minister boasted a long list of high-profile endorsements — including then-Mayor of New Haven John DeStefano and U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67. But the University alumni and administration had coordinated efforts to thwart Lee, who early on had signaled his allegiance to Yale’s unions. A group of alumni led by former University Secretary Henry Chauncey ’57 and Frances Beinecke ’71 spent over $80,000 on mailings to convince alumni to vote against Lee. Chauncey, who led the group dubbed “Alumni for Responsible Trusteeship, argued at the time that Lee would be beholden to special interests. Meanwhile, the Association of Yale Alumni spent over $60,000 on controversial mailings to educate alumni about Lee’s candidacy, the Association of Yale Alumni board of governors said at the time.

In the end, Lee lost; the minister received only 16.7 percent of the vote and was defeated by Maya Lin, the architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Women’s Table on Cross Campus.

Kirchick is similarly critical of the University, though on a largely different set of issues. If he were to gather the necessary signatures, the University could very well put another candidate like Vance or Lin — one who would secure a surefire victory for the Association of Yale Alumni — to ensure his defeat. Nevertheless, Kirchick is not worried. He has not faced any institutional resistance yet.

“I’m joking that, if I get on the ballot, they’re going to choose, you know, Meryl Streep [DRA ’75] to run against me.”

CONTESTING THE ELECTION

Working alongside Noble, Kirchick has organized a national listening tour across America. His campaign has four pillars: reforming the Alumni Fellow Election to promote transparency, protecting free speech, promoting viewpoint diversity and reducing administrative bloat.

He noted that former Corporation candidate David Lee had the unions behind him in his 2002 race. But with a full-time job and little campaign experience, Kirchick is relying on word-of-mouth to publicize his campaign. He’s been asking class secretaries to mention his candidacy in the class notes at the back of the Alumni Magazine.

“[Campaigning] is a much bigger task than we set out for ourselves,” he lamented.

With about 1,500 signatures, Kirchick has a long way to go before he even secures a spot on the ballot. And the figure is only a guess. Yale uses a third party for the election services, obfuscating the process for assessing campaign progress, he added.

Indeed, for years, elections for alumni trustees have been anything but transparent.

In 2017, the News invited two alumni fellow candidates — Roger Lee ’94 and Kate Walsh ’77, both of whom were chosen by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee — for endorsement interviews, which the two accepted. Additionally, more than 450 alumni signed a petition calling for Lee and Walsh to participate in a Buckley Program free speech forum. But University Secretary and Vice President for Student Life Kimberly Goff-Crews instructed the candidates to cancel the meetings, citing a policy against campaigning in the alumni fellow election — a policy not recorded in the University Charter, the Corporation Bylaws or the Miscellaneous Regulations. After pushback from activists, the policy was formally recorded the following year. Yale Corporation Senior Trustee Catharine Bond Hill GRD ’85 questioned whether asking candidates to run would attract the best trustees for the Corporation.

“What is the point of voting in such an election?” Noble, Kirchick’s campaign advisor said. “Agree or disagree with Jamie on any issue, at least he will tell you his views and wants to reform the process.”

As part of his campaign platform, Kirchick has proposed greater transparency in the alumni fellow election to allow voters to learn more about the candidates’ stances on key issues. Further, he lamented the obstacles, including an arduous process to even secure a spot on the ballot, for petition candidates.

“I think the way in which members of the Yale Corporation are chosen is frankly undemocratic,” he said. “They’re chosen by a combination of the administration and the Yale Alumni Association and presented to the alums.”

In his campaign platform, the candidate vows to “reform the rigged system,” in which he believes administrators “muzzle their hand-picked candidates chosen in an opaque process.” Kirchick believes that voters should be aware of contenders’ stances on key issues in higher education, including free speech on campus and graduate student unionization.

THE POLICY

The primary issue for Kirchick, though, is ultimately the administration’s attitude toward campus controversies. According to Kirchick, the way the University treated the Christakises was part of a broader trend, one in which the administration has placed a virtual “kick-me sign” on its back and exposed itself to ridicule.

He criticized Salovey’s response to the incident in May, in which a graduate student called the police on a black graduate student napping in a common space. In an email, the University president had announced a set of diversity and inclusion initiatives, including increased implicit-bias training for Yale Police officers and renewed efforts to build police-community relations. Kirchick said the University president was “falling on his sword” — just as he did three years ago, in the wake of the Christakis controversy.

“All of this new bureaucracy over an isolated incident of one student who apparently has a problem with this sort of thing,” Kirchick complained. “Why are we extrapolating from one isolated incident this claim that the YPD is racist? Yale University is racist? This is ridiculous. The University should be standing up to these slanderers.” In contrast, one-third of incoming first-year students reported that they think there is institutional racism at Yale — only 20 percent said there is not.

Kirchick suggested that the graduate student who called the police take up the issue with her therapist, rather than Yale instituting a set of new bureaucratic procedures and initiatives that would increase costs. He believes tuition has become far too high.

He opposes using a preponderance of the evidence as the standard in campus adjudications of sexual misconduct and believes cases should be arbitrated in a court of law — he alleged that University campuses have a tendency to “railroad” the accused and statistics of campus sexual misconduct are often overestimated. In his campaign platform, he noted the size of Yale’s Title IX staff, as well as other offices at the University related to gender and diversity, questioning whether Yale needed all its hires in these bloated administrative bodies.

“The accused do have rights in this country, whether they are black criminal defendants or white athletes at Yale, they have rights, and I feel like all too often those rights have been trampled upon,” Kirchick said.

According to a News survey distributed in fall 2016, nearly 75 percent of respondents said that Yale does not provide a welcoming environment for conservative students to share their opinions on political issues. He would relish the opportunity to bring the voices of alumni who fear this kind of climate to the Yale Corporation. Hill, the Corporation senior trustee, rejected the notion that the Corporation was uninterested in free speech. Further, she argued that the media selectively covers college campuses, focusing on situation where freedom of expression is jeopardized.

“My sense is that free speech is alive and well on college campuses across America,” said Hill, who is the former president of Vassar College and current managing director of the higher education arm of a research and consulting firm. “On most campuses, thousands and thousands of speakers of all different points of view come into campuses, and students are getting to hear from them and participating in discussion and debates and hearing those different points of view, and none of that gets reported.”

Kirchick is not worried that his critical stance on the University’s politics will be an issue in the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall. He noted that in boards of trustees where consensus is the goal, some principles are often sacrificed or overlooked. Most trustees on the Corporation are chosen by the administration, meaning that there’s no real skepticism challenging the consensus, Kirchick said, adding that disagreements are sometimes necessary, even healthy.

“I’ve never admired any writers who don’t have any enemies,” he said.

When asked his thoughts on likability, Kirchick responded:

“Overrated.”

THE REVOLUTION OF OUR TIME

Credits

After life: Muslim deathcare in New Haven

SMOKE RISES

Lukas Flippo

Miye Oni '20 Pursues the Pros

I SAW WHAT I SAW: On this island, a Yale professor sexually harassed a Yale student. Did the University do enough?

AFTER THE BAN

Stained, Lacquered, Checkered: Elihu and I in Chennai

Cold Cases, Open Wounds

In Between Homes

Figure of Speech:
Jamie Kirchick’s Run for the Yale Corporation

THE REVOLUTION OF OUR TIME

Credits

After life: Muslim deathcare in New Haven

SMOKE RISES

Lukas Flippo

Miye Oni '20 Pursues the Pros

I SAW WHAT I SAW: On this island, a Yale professor sexually harassed a Yale student. Did the University do enough?

AFTER THE BAN

Stained, Lacquered, Checkered: Elihu and I in Chennai

Cold Cases, Open Wounds

In Between Homes

Figure of Speech:Jamie Kirchick’s Run for the Yale Corporation

Figure of Speech:
Jamie Kirchick’s Run for the Yale Corporation