“NOT A TOP-DOWN KIND OF PLACE”

While other universities like Harvard have ignited lively debates over how to best manage social clubs through broad sanctions and administrative initiatives, Yale, by its own admission, prefers to deliberate longer before approaching hot-button student-life issues.

“Yale is not a top-down kind of place,” Associate Vice President of Student Life Burgwell Howard said. “We are always trying to find where’s that sweet spot to listen to the concerns that come from various parts of the community.”

In 2010, student outrage over an incident in which DKE pledges chanted “No means yes! Yes means anal!” in front of the Women’s Center led then-Dean of Yale College Mary Miller to open a six-month-long investigation before ultimately sanctioning DKE by prohibiting it from engaging in on-campus activities. The incident also led the U.S. Department of Education to investigate Yale for not properly adhering to Title IX guidelines.

Many expected that the events of that fall would bring an end to Yale’s laissez-faire attitude toward fraternities. Less than a year later, Executive Director of DKE Doug Lanpher lamented in an email to a DKE alumnus that “the days of Yale allowing the fraternities to operate independently seem to be over.” Miller and Yale took new measures to regulate fraternities, such as a prohibiting rush activities for students in their first semester at Yale.

But even then — echoing Holloway’s words that punishment did not interfere with “business as usual” for DKE — Lanpher wrote in an email to DKE Yale alumnus that “our 5-year suspension had minimal effect on our ability to operate successfully.”

In addition, despite Miller’s requirement that DKE would only return to campus under the condition that it “pursue registration as an undergraduate organization,” DKE is still an unrecognized, off-campus organization. In May 2016, DKE’s ban from campus activities was lifted.

When SAE, now known as LEO, was banned from on-campus activities for violating the University’s policy on sexual misconduct in 2015, regular fraternity activities were similarly unaffected. Former President of LEO Jesse Mander ’18 told the News that “because we’re off campus already, and a lot of fraternities are off campus, [the ban] didn’t affect us that much.”

In that same year, the Yale College Council claimed that Yale’s punishments of fraternities were “more or less toothless.”

Yale has traditionally, according to some administrators in the Yale College Dean’s Office, preferred dealing with individuals in matters of disciplinary action rather than targeting an entire group. For example, after news broke that the former president of DKE had been suspended for sexual misconduct and another senior in the fraternity allegedly raped a female Yale student, University President Peter Salovey said that “when an individual violates Yale’s standards in a way that cannot be tied fairly to the student’s organization, the sanction falls on the individual, not the organization.”

That thinking may soon change. Yale College Dean Marvin Chun recently announced the creation of the Yale College Committee on Social Life and Community Values. The committee is tasked with determining the state of Yale’s social scene and making recommendations to Chun on how to handle social groups while other schools in the Ivy League grapple with similar issues.

“We have students who say we should be like Harvard, and we have many students who say we should not be like Harvard,” Chun told the News. “I have not formed an opinion strongly. I’m in listening mode.”

PENN’S CRACKDOWN

For other schools, just two incidents of alleged sexual assault in a fraternity like those at DKE would have been enough to justify an investigation.

“If we were to have three to four allegations — probably just two — come from the same fraternity in six-month span, that would be viewed as an institutional problem with that fraternity,” said Reggie Murphy II, the president of University of Pennsylvania’s Interfraternity Council. “Individually of course the accused would be punished specially but the fraternity as well — 10,000 percent.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, the student-run Interfraternity Council manages all fraternities that are part of the National Interfraternity Conference — such as Sigma Phi Epsilon and DKE — whereas the multicultural Greek council manages multicultural Greek organizations. Murphy said that Interfraternity Councils exist at many schools because they allow students to hold their peers accountable through student-run judicial boards and easier access to administrative support.

He added that Yale leaving fraternities free to run their own affairs as off-campus organizations is “pretty dangerous.” But even so, bringing fraternities to task for their actions at Yale presents challenges that do not exist at Penn. Unlike Yale, Penn owns nearly every fraternity house on campus and, as a result, can use the property as leverage. Murphy explained that when Penn threatens to take away a fraternity’s house, students usually listen.

“I never really realized how important it is that Penn has a stake in the ownership of our houses,” said Murphy, “A fraternity is just a club if you don’t have a house, and I don’t think anyone would join then.”

Miller tried to gain influence over DKE by requiring that the fraternity become an official student group. In his 2012 email to an alumnus, Lanpher complained that Yale wants to “pull us into their sphere of influence” with new regulations. Eight years later, DKE remains off campus and unregistered.

Although Penn has more control over its on-campus fraternities, some that are located off campus still give the administration trouble. Murphy gave the example of when, in September 2016, OZ, an off-campus fraternity that had disaffiliated from its national organization, emailed undergraduates with a lewd poem addressed to “ladies.” In multiple verses, the poem invited “the fun ones” to “your first showing” at an OZ house party with the added request to “please wear something tight.”

Several days later, a group of students posted printouts of the poem across Penn’s campus with “THIS IS WHAT RAPE CULTURE LOOKS LIKE” written across the email’s text. The event spurred Penn’s administration to create the Task Force on a Safe and Responsible Campus Community in February 2017 — a group that soon after came up with strict standards for how Penn students should go about properly registering parties.

Despite questions of how the guidelines would be enforced against unrecognized student groups, Penn began working closely with local police to shut down any parties not registered with the university, both on campus and off. Soon, the university began shutting down everything from OZ parties to ice cream socials and, in one particular case, a “Mac ’n’ Phis” charity event hosted by the sorority Alpha Phi, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Students objected, but administrators had achieved their goal: Student groups began registering parties to avoid being shut down by police. Several off-campus fraternities were among the newly registered groups and, as a result, the university now has more information on and control over their activities.

“Last semester was really big for us, we had a task force, and even the on-campus fraternities that where doing right said that it was a little bit too much,” Murphy recalled. “Fifteen brothers couldn’t play pong in their basement without cops coming to shut it down.”

Brendan Quinn, a member of the Phi Delta Theta on-campus fraternity, remarked that with the task force, police considered many lower key social events — just several people in a room drinking while watching TV, for instance — to be fair game for busting up as unregistered parties.

“Can you imagine a squad of police officers in bulletproof vests bursting into a sorority house because a few girls are drinking with friends over?” Quinn asked, jokingly.

As it turns out, Murphy claimed, the task force ended up hurting on-campus fraternities more than off-campus fraternities. He explained that off-campus fraternities used to be more vulnerable to police and university intervention. Now that they are recognized off-campus student groups, they can officially register parties with the university but do not have to follow the stricter university guidelines that govern Interfraternity Council members, such as specific living and risk-management requirements.

One former president of an on-campus Penn fraternity, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that he would personally prefer Yale’s laissez-faire system of off-campus Greek life to Penn’s as it would relieve his fraternity of a number of strict regulations maintained by Penn.

Still, Murphy said, it was clear that the task force got the job done when it came to bringing to heel the last off-campus fraternities holding out against Penn — something made easier by off-campus fraternities’ reliance on party culture.

“Since the OZ email, we’ve cut into their social scene,” he explained. “We know where their houses are — they live together, and there are police parked outside on all the days they could have parties, which they thrive on. They have no tradition, no rituals, just parties.”

“TWENTY YEARS? MAYBE.”

While Greek life at Penn is not under threat of extermination from the administration, its situation at Cornell is more precarious. The death of a Cornell student during an SAE hazing ritual in 2011 has cast a shadow over the school’s fraternity system. The school’s Interfraternity Council has to be sensitive and watch Cornell’s new president Martha Pollack carefully. According to students, Pollack was not a fan of Greek life at her previous job as provost of the University of Michigan, which recently suspended all fraternity social activity  on campus.

“Cornell’s president hates Greek life,” remarked one Pi Kappa Phi brother who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The fraternity’s president, Vincenzo Guido, chimed in: “People here know what President Pollack did at University of Michigan with Greek life, so they’re wary,” he said. “If one more person at Cornell dies here because of Greek life, we’re done.”

But Cornell also offers a glimpse into what Yale’s Greek social scene could begin to resemble if, faced with pressure to improve their behavior, fraternities at Yale create a formalized Interfraternity Council to manage Greek life.

Guido estimated that Greek life would last 10 more years at Cornell before it comes to a crashing halt. Cristian Gonzalez, another member of the Pi Kapp fraternity and a member of Cornell Interfraternity Council’s executive board, disagreed. “I don’t think it’s going to go in 10 years. Twenty years? Maybe,” Gonzalez said. “The climate now is the most tense since SAE,” referring to the student death in 2011.

However, Gonzalez added that one-third of the members of Cornell’s board of trustees were active in Greek life as undergraduates, which would make it very difficult for Pollack to take major action against fraternities or sororities.

For Paul Russell, the president of Cornell’s Interfraternity Council, this means making the current system work as well as possible. He explained that the basic benefit of Cornell’s Greek life system is that, coupled with Cornell’s Office of Sorority and Fraternity Life, the council can use sanctions to discipline fraternities for bad behavior. There are benefits, Russell explained, to being part of the Interfraternity Council, and when fraternities lose those benefits they also lose their place of prominence in the social scene.

Cornell’s Interfraternity Council coordinates a list of all Greek life parties with Cornell University Police. Any party not on the list can be shut down by police immediately. Fraternity rush, which Cornell handles through a centralized recruitment process mandated by the council, also becomes a nightmare for fraternities if they lose their Interfraternity Council privileges, according to Russell.

“If you’re looking to join a fraternity, the way you do that is through fraternity recruitment, the broader recruitment week we have,” he explained. “If you’re trying to recruit outside of that, it’s really difficult. … You have to secretly do it all underground.”

At that point, Russell said, a fraternity pushed off campus at Cornell is also bound to lose its relationships with sororities as it struggles to throw parties and maintain a new underground pledge class.

The Interfraternity Council has a judiciary board run by students that punishes fraternities for bad behavior. Potential penalties include a prohibition on hosting parties. Russell also said that when the case is too big for students too handle, they turn to the administration for help.

“If we find out someone is not doing X, Y and Z, we can then tell someone in the administration, that’ll trigger a hearing, and there’ll able to get in trouble for that,” Russell continued. “We try not to be the snitches of the [council] community but, at the same time, [if] it’s something that is causing legitimate harm, we’re absolutely going to tell.”

James Ritchie, president of Phi Gamma Delta at Columbia University and a member of his Inter Greek Council’s judicial board, said that students in the Ivy League might be more willing to cede control to administrators than observers would expect.

“The big divide that I’ve seen at Columbia in Greek life — and I’m pretty sure at every other university — is that there is this deep desire to, at points, be like an ‘Animal House’ frat boy but, at points, acknowledge that you are an Ivy League student who went to whatever school and got whatever on your SATs,” Ritchie said. “The nice thing about having systems of power in place, especially in the Ivy League, is that we’re people who, to be honest, probably crave a certain element of control because that’s what we’re used to.”

Still, it takes a lot for the council to decide to ban one of its own from on-campus activities, in part because people like Russell and Guido view rogue off-campus fraternities as dangerously liberated. Earlier this year, Cornell’s Zeta Beta Tau fraternity came under fire for holding a contest among pledges to see who could sleep with the most women. Tie-breaking points were awarded based on whose sexual partners weighed the most.

Cornell investigated the competition after complaints about the so-called “pig roast” were filed through a confidential process for disclosing hazing on the Cornell website. Cornell’s administration disciplined ZBT relatively mildly, placing the fraternity on probationary recognition for two years.

These are ultimately the scenarios that Yale’s new Committee on Social Life and Community Values is considering as it decides how to handle fraternities in all their forms.

“THE HEAVY ARTILLERY”

At Harvard, all eyes are on the school’s administration, which has decided to punish individuals who join unrecognized single-gender social organizations.

“It is challenging,” Yale student life administrator Howard said. “Frankly, I applaud the intent behind Harvard’s efforts. I don’t think that they are on solid legal ground.”

Dean Chun assured the News that his office is not in the “mode of blindly following what’s happening” at Harvard but added that the office “may certainly attend to what they’re doing” and “calibrate” that to what happens on Yale campus. He, like Howard, recognized that Yale likes to take things slower.

“We try to spend more time listening to our community,” Chun said. “The decisions we make here are more community-driven, so it does take a bit more time, but you have more buy-in.”

At Harvard — where some students have taken poorly to top-down efforts from President Drew Faust — Yale’s approach might be appreciated. Noah Redlich, a Harvard student, said that he liked being in the newly all-gender Aleph — formerly the all-male Alpha Epsilon Pi — and that he thinks university administrations should intervene in off-campus group matters at a certain point. But only, he added, when the time is right.

“It should start with the students,” said Redlich. “When an administration acts in the way that Harvard has, it creates a divide among the students between those who want to go along with the new rules because they don’t want to be sanctioned and those who want to continue their policies. … If the class reached a consensus first, it would just make a lot more sense.”

And one student involved in a final club at Harvard, who asked to remain anonymous because of his club’s rules, noted that relations between single-gender off-campus organizations and the university have deteriorated to a point where students are unsure that ceding any ground will be met with a reward.

Harvard also sets an example for how Yale might handle pushing fraternities to include all genders.

Lulu Chua-Rubenfeld, a Harvard student who oversaw Sab Club’s transition from all female to all gender, said that the change has decreased the group’s reliance on male clubs for social events and was, overall, an empowering experience for its female leadership.

“It was far more seamless than you would assume,” she added. “But we made very careful selections for the first two classes so that our first male members would be highly respectful of women and value what we were trying to do.”

Turning the fraternities at Yale into all-gender organizations is an idea that has been floated by the group Engender for nearly one and a half years now. But this solution is not always what it is cracked up to be. Chua-Rubenfeld mentioned that after one club, the Spee, opened to all genders, students on campus began noticing a disturbing sexual power dynamic between the younger, newly admitted female students and the established male members.

Jacqueline Deitch-Stackhouse, the director of Princeton’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources & Education office, told the News that the cohesive and healthy gender atmospheres in the eating clubs today — for the first time, nine of 11 groups now have female presidents — came after years of growing pains.

She added that just becoming an all-gender space doesn’t make a club the “right space.” A conscious effort from the students matters as well.

“In the six years that I’ve been here, my observation has been that the students are more intentional now about creating an environment that is inclusive and respectful, and I think that that is three-quarters of the way home,” she added. “There is an appreciation for the information we can share and how we can help them accomplish their goals, that relationship has grown and evolved, we’re now viewed as more of a partner in this process, but that doesn’t come from nowhere.”

But beyond the social implications of pushing social clubs toward all-gender status, there are legal concerns as well.

As the News reported in early April, final clubs and Greek life organizations are gearing up to sue Harvard, likely by arguing that the university’s policies violate the clubs’ First Amendment right to a single-gender status and a Massachusetts state law that prohibits the use of “threats, intimidation, or coercion” to interfere with this right, according to documents obtained by the News.

“There is little in precedent that constrains the situation,” said Richard Epstein, a professor of law at New York University. “I don’t even want to predict anything without some close study, and even then, the choice of judge and the presentation of case could really matter.”

Chun and Howard have both told the News that they are not confident Harvard is standing on solid legal ground.

At the same time, Yale needs to contend with vocal critics interfering with the University’s reputation if a new policy for social groups is introduced. Epstein has been a vocal critic of the Harvard sanctions, and he told the News that Harvard administrators used “heavy artillery” to handle a squabble with final clubs that could have been resolved with “sensible quiet conversations.”

It is not hard to imagine Yale in similar crosshairs if — after years of “quiet conversations” — the Dean’s Office enacts Greek life policies that introduce controversial changes to the social groups.

One Yale administrator has already taken flak for suggesting a change in direction for Yale’s fraternities. After the News quoted an email that Howard sent to fraternities in the fall in which he wrote that it does “no harm to have your rush events open to all eligible members of the Yale community — regardless of gender,” he received a suspicious package in the mail. He told the News that it did not contain any physical threats, just “a lot of hateful language” referencing the News article that included his quote.

As for Harvard’s enthusiastic sanctions, the opportunity to cultivate a healthy and civil conversation about final clubs may have long since passed — at least for the staunchest critics.

Epstein said Harvard is a case of wrong choices.

“Bad leadership leads to bad places,” Epstein said.

Britton O’Daly | britton.odaly@yale.edu

BORN & RAISED

Yale professor Leonard Bell founded Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc., a company that now concentrates on serving patients with rare diseases, as a tech startup in Science Park in 1992, but it has since transformed into a publicly traded giant.

Alexion grew up alongside a burgeoning biotechnology industry in New Haven, which was virtually nonexistent in the 1970s. At that time, only 21 percent of city jobs were in the fields of education and health care, a number that has since doubled. Science Park, too, is far ahead of where it was in the 1990s, when it was built on the site of the former Winchester Repeating Arms Company. At the time, parking lots weren’t paved, and a gate prohibited residents from entering the complex without permission.

No one expected the company to be so large, according to New Haven Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson SOM ’81.

Jon Soderstrom, the managing director of the Office of Cooperative Research at Yale, is on a mission to help support startups. The office provides licensing to existing companies, encourages corporate sponsorships for research with faculty members and helps others launch new ventures based on the intellectual property available.

Eighty percent of Yale’s research budget is in the life sciences, Soderstrom said, so a lot of effort goes into the biotech industry. According to Soderstrom, Yale’s efforts to stimulate new ventures have paid off. Last year, Yale supported 11 venture-backed companies that raised $80 million, and over the last decade, 60 ventures have raised $700 million, Soderstrom said.

But even among the many other Yale-affiliated biotech projects, Alexion stood head and shoulders above the rest. As of 2016, it had 3,000 employees and served patients in 50 countries.  In 2011, Alexion was added to the Nasdaq-100, a stock market index of the 100 largest nonfinancial stocks traded on the Nasdaq composite. A year later, the company joined the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

Connecticut, for its part, has done a lot more than just praise Alexion. The state offered financial help in the form of tax breaks and incentives. In 2012, the company received $50 million from Connecticut taxpayers as part of a new economic development program. Throughout Gov. Dannel Malloy’s administration, Alexion continued to profit from tax breaks codified under state law.

Malloy, like many of the state’s residents, regarded Alexion’s transformation from a small startup to a global company as one of Connecticut’s success stories.

The First Five job creation initiative, which Connecticut rolled out in 2011, provides direct state aid and tax breaks to businesses that create a minimum of 200 full-time jobs in the state within two or five years, depending on the size of a given company’s investment, from the time their applications to the program are approved. Alexion, Cigna, ESPN and NBC Sports all signed up for the program.

According to the governor’s website, the program — which Malloy signed into law on July 8, 2011 — was designed to attract new companies from other states, retain companies already in Connecticut and encourage businesses to expand.

Connecticut did not stop there. Large investments in other projects have proved successful. Another biotechnology hub is growing in Storrs, just 60 miles away from New Haven.

In 2014, Jackson Laboratory opened a 4-story, 183,500-square-foot space on the campus of the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. The lab focuses on discovering genomic causes for diseases. In 2011, a Democrat-controlled state legislature made a $291 million investment in Jackson Lab. The facility is projected create 300 jobs in research and technology by 2024.

Like Alexion, the Jackson Laboratory started small. The nonprofit was founded as a cancer research center in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1929.

The emergence of industry centers in New Haven and Storrs is not a coincidence. The main driver of the biotech industry is the quantity and quality of academic, basic and life sciences research, according to Pescattlo. Storrs has the nearby University of Connecticut, and New Haven has Yale.

THE CONNECTICUT LAG

Connecticut has struggled more than other states to keep major employers and taxpayers, perhaps because it lacks a major city to attract companies amid the recent trend of urbanization. Recent high-profile departures from suburban areas and small cities fall in line with a national pattern of large companies moving to larger urban centers. It seems that the pendulum of investment and growth has swung away from the countryside to city centers. Companies no longer want to isolate themselves from the rest of the world on quiet campuses but instead seek the energy of urban networks.

Nemerson, New Haven’s economic development administrator, said that no one who was watching Alexion closely was surprised by the move. Once founder Leonard Bell left the position of CEO in 2015, the company’s personal ties to New Haven seemed less significant.

“I think a lot of people thought it was only a matter of time,” Nemerson said. “[The move] was disappointing, not surprising.”

In Rhode Island, Hasbro Inc., the third largest toy maker in the world, moved 350 jobs to Providence from smaller towns in the state. In Illinois, dozens of companies, including The Kraft Heinz Company, an American food company, moved from the suburbs closer to Chicago. Although the suburbs still hold the majority of the metropolitan workforce, downtown areas are closing in on that difference. Between 1996 and 2013, the proportion of metro area jobs within three miles of a city center grew 7 percentage points, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But Connecticut has no major city. Hartford and Bridgeport are not as large as Chicago or even Providence and have yet to solve major urban problems such as public transportation, poverty and crime within city limits. If a business cannot find what it needs from New Haven’s midsize population, its next step is generally to leave the state.

Alexion’s move is only one of several significant departures from the state in recent years. General Electric Co., a multinational conglomerate corporation, announced on Jan. 13, 2016, that it would leave Fairfield, where it had been headquartered since 1974. In 2017, GE ranked as the 13th-largest firm in the nation by gross revenue, according to Fortune magazine. In 2018, GE moved its global headquarters to Boston.

After the company announced it was considering a relocation, several states offered GE incentives to leave suburban Connecticut. With tax incentives from Massachusetts, the move would be cost-neutral. The company received over $150 billion in incentives and grants from Boston and the state of Massachusetts, which is one of the top investors in research and development. In addition, Boston will position the company in closer proximity to a variety of technology startups and global conglomerates in the seaside area.

Following GE’s departure, Malloy continued to praise the bioscience industry. In response to the news, Malloy still noted Connecticut’s draw to large companies on Channel 8 News.

“You can’t objectively look at Connecticut and not appreciate that we are making progress, whether that takes us to the level one company wants or sees in its future, I can’t tell you,” Malloy told the local news outlet.

But last summer Connecticut residents could not help but notice that, when Aetna Inc., a health care company and one of Hartford’s top employers and taxpayers, announced a $100 million relocation to New York City in June 2017, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio approved a $9.6 million incentive plan for Aetna.

GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt has said that the company’s relocation to the Seaport District of Boston would provide a more attractive, technologically savvy workforce, in line with the company’s push to develop a larger software scale. And if a technologically savvy workforce is what Immelt is looking for, Connecticut may not have been the right place to find it. Boston is home to over 50 colleges and universities, while Fairfield only hosts a few.

Millennials, for their own part, may play a significant role in the anti-suburban trend. New Haven demonstrates this phenomenon. Only 138 of the 1,399 Yale students in the class of 2016 stayed in New Haven after graduation, according to the Yale Office of Career Strategy. Nemerson noted that New Haven’s location, in between Boston and New York, is a challenge. He said that companies tend to move within a 100-mile radius. Boston is 130 miles from the Elm City, and New York is less than 70. Because these cities are so close, New Haven often loses out, but it also means that New Haven has the potential to gain.

“People often say how horrible it is that young people are leaving Connecticut. But they’re just actually moving to New York and Boston. And they can still be home, they can see their parents, they can see their friends, they’re an hour away. If you were in Los Angeles and you moved an hour away, you might still be in Los Angeles,” Nemerson said.

Yet some are still skeptical of the reasons behind large corporate moves. In March 2017, Ludwig Hantson, a resident of Boston, was named the CEO of Alexion, three months before the move was announced. Soderstrom described Alexion’s stated desire to gain access to a larger pool of highly skilled workers as “puffery.” Pescattlo noted that most members of Alexion’s new management team had no connection to Connecticut and New Haven but had built their careers in Boston.

And still, recent news has not all been sour. Last December, news broke that CVS Corporation would purchase Aetna for $69 billion, making the company’s planned move uncertain. And in early January, de Blasio withdrew the incentive proposal.

On Jan. 12, Hartford Eyewitness News Channel 3 reported that Carolyn Castel, the vice president for corporate communications for CVS Health, said in an email that CVS views Hartford as “the future location of our center of excellence for the insurance business.”

Soderstrom says that Connecticut is quick to highlight what it is doing wrong or what it could have done better but often doesn’t make note of its improvements.

But, though it may not be useful to harp on the past departures, they do point to larger questions facing Connecticut. The reality is that Connecticut has experienced a decadelong decline in the number of bioscience jobs. The reality is that Connecticut needs to take a critical look at its future in bioscience.

SO WHAT NOW?

Connecticut is lagging behind other states. Conglomeration of worldwide companies and the changing demographics of the workforce have fostered an environment of competition among states. It may be dangerous to chalk departures up to corporate management and the shifting desire to be near flashy cities. Changes can make Connecticut more of a competitor.

If Alexion’s move says anything, it is that providing large companies with major tax breaks will likely not be enough to incentivize them to stay in state. And even if Connecticut legislators wanted to do more, the state’s finances may be an insurmountable barrier. Last year, after the state added more than a billion to its debt, the Connecticut General Assembly passed a new, far more restrictive state budget. Pescattlo, the head of the Connecticut Bioscience Growth Council, says that the most signficant “macro” issue in the state is its budget.

“[Companies] do their research. And they find that Connecticut has really, really deep fiscal issues and deep budget problems. And they make a calculation [of] what’s going to happen in 15 years given this fiscal mess we’re in. And … unless things change in a fundamental way, it looks like higher taxes and fewer services, and that’s not a good profile to attract companies.”

But even if the state solves its budget crisis — something unlikely to happen without major changes — several issues make Connecticut particularly unfavorable relative to other states.

First, despite the small area of the state and constant praise for its ideal location between Boston and New York, transportation remains a problem throughout the state. Executive Director of DataHaven Mark Abraham said that, while New Haven and smaller cities and suburbs serve smaller companies and startups well, larger companies gravitate toward sites with commodities such as long, heavy railroads and subway systems. Connecticut is still fighting to fund infrastructure.

On Jan. 30, a debate arose between Malloy and the state’s top Republican lawmakers over transportation, a center point of the governor’s proposed budget. While Democrats expressed urgency to make strides on the issue, many Republicans want to wait on any major infrastructure spending. State Sen. Len Fasano, R-North Haven, thinks that Democrats are trying to do too much too soon.

“One of the biggest challenges facing our state is the decadeslong refusal to invest in our roads, bridges, tunnels and rail,” Malloy spokeswoman Kelly Donnelly said on Jan. 30, according to the Hartford Business Journal. “Yet, perplexingly, the Republican leaders’ solution is to further slash our transportation investment.”

2018 may not be the year for a major economic stimulus package, as elections across the state will likely be contested.

Connecticut may also not be able to offer the potential employee pool that other states can. In a statement issued after GE announced its departure, which was due in part to the availability of skilled workers, the governor’s office responded to the move: “Businesses care about talent, and we will continue our investments in our higher education system in order to connect them to the needs of high-tech employers.”

Even though Malloy has made a point of defending the public education system, Connecticut has recently had difficulty funding state colleges. In the state budget passed last year, the University of Connecticut’s state funding was cut by $139 million, enough for students to mount a #SaveUConn campaign to air their grievances.

Though New Haven has actively pursued large companies, major proposals have not proved fruitful, in part due to faults in state operation.

In October 2016, New Haven, in conjunction with Bridgeport, submitted a proposal to host the new Amazon.com Inc. headquarters. The New Haven–Bridgeport proposal would have provided the company with roughly 16 million square feet of office space. In addition, major statewide officials praised a Hartford–Stamford joint offer. But, on Jan. 18, Amazon released a list of 20 finalist cities out of the 238 that had submitted proposals. The list included New York and Boston but no Connecticut entree.

MORE THAN AN OUTPOST

In 2014, an article in FierceBiotech, an online publication, ranked New Haven as the 13th best biotech city that year, ahead of Los Angeles and Chicago.

“Connecticut may not be the first place that biotech entrepreneurs have in mind when they start a company, but when the circumstances are right it can make a lot of sense,” the article read.

Soderstrom, the managing director of the Office of Cooperative Research at Yale, said that Alexion represents the success of Yale’s Science Park, and the company’s departure will not put the brakes on any projects or Sciences Park’s future successes. He disagrees with any assessment that Alexion’s leave will cause long-term trouble for the city, instead arguing that Alexion was a symbol of a burgeoning critical mass of bioscience innovation in New Haven.

While Alexion’s move has shocked residents across the state, other biotech companies in New Haven are improving. The 2014 FierceBiotech article did not mention Alexion, but it did note that, in 2013, Canaan Partners’  Tim Shannon launched another Yale startup. Arvinas Inc. is a New Haven–based private biopharmaceutical company that aims to produce protein degradation therapeutics for cancers and other rare diseases.

Arvinas announced major partnerships at the end of last year and the start of this year, one with Genentech Inc. and one with Pfizer Inc. The company is poised to perform better this year, as they move forward with clinical development and filing new drug applications.

BioHaven Pharmaceutical, a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company that targets neurological disorders, was one of the strongest biotech initial public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange according to Soderstrom.

There is a new fashion in the life sciences industry. Companies want to be close to the academic research that spawned their company, as well as potential scientists and employees, Pescatllo said. In a sense, companies want to be near their competitors.

Soderstrom seemed tired of having to re-explain why it’s time to move past Alexion’s departure.

“The Alexion thing was a time to celebrate. It was a brand new building in the center of the city,” Soderstrom said. “But it is just one of those things that happens.”

Alexion’s presence in the city will not come to a complete halt. Research will continue in New Haven — Alexion CEO Ludwig Hantson said that 450 workers will stay Downtown, and the city will now be home to the company’s “Center of Excellence.”

Abraham stressed that, while moving headquarters can be symbolic, it does not always mean a large base of workers will move with it. For example, insurance company The Travelers Companies Inc. moved headquarters to New York, but its Hartford office is still its largest branch. Abraham said that the fact that Alexion has retained research and parts of its financial and administrative branch in New Haven indicates an ongoing relationship with the city.

The fashion in the life sciences industry may now be urban settings with a fluid workforce cross-pollination, Pescattlo said, but the trend may not be permanent. He pointed to high housing costs and congestion as incentives push employees and companies in the other direction.

“Fashions come and go. There is probably an overemphasis on that density, and I think we may have reached a peak,” Pescattlo said. “I could see a shift back to what Connecticut has.”

Now Connecticut has to adjust to the times or wait for another swing of the pendulum.

No Beef:
A New Haven teen dreamed of dancing and died without reason

Gabriella Borter

photos by Surbhi Bharadwaj

Published on February 4, 2018

At around 8:30 p.m. on the evening of July 16, 2017, 14-year-old Tyrick Keyes walked up the porch steps of his house on Read Street, opened the front door and went inside. He had been out playing basketball for most of the day, but now that it was getting late, he was hungry. His mom, Demethra Telford, liked him to check in. He found her in the kitchen.

“Mommy, what’d you cook?” he asked. The night before, dinner had been a rare treat — baked macaroni and cheese, not the store-bought kind.

That night was hamburger and rice.

“Aww, you know I don’t eat that!” Tyrick said.

“Okay, Tyrick. If you don’t want it, then you aren’t hungry,” said his mom. She waited for a response, but he wasn’t looking at her. She saw the expression on his face and thought, “Something’s wrong.”

Tyrick ran upstairs. Demethra assumed that he was looking for his brother. Whenever something was bothering Tyrick, something he did not want his mom to worry about, he would talk to his brother Silas, who was three years older. She might have followed him, but her left knee was clamping up more and more these days, and moving wasn’t so easy.

Then he was back downstairs. He walked over to stand by the front door, looking out.

“Ty,” Demethra said. He didn’t turn around.

“Ty,” she said again. He never ignored her like this.

“Ty.”

At around 8:50 p.m., he walked straight out the door without looking back.

***

Tyrick was born at Yale New Haven Hospital on Feb. 6, 2003, and he lived his whole life within the city’s 20 square miles. Still, he never lived in the same place for more than two years, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood as his mom tried to find less-dilapidated subsidized housing. Wherever he lived, the routine was more or less the same. He skateboarded, played pickup football and basketball with kids who lived nearby, and played video games when his mom would let him. He made friends easily and did well in school. He also knew he had to watch his back.

“I always tell my kids, ‘When you see someone driving slow with tinted windows, you run, because you don’t know what they’re going to do,’” Demethra told me. We were sitting in the front parlor of her new home in Beaver Hills, an 8-minute drive from her previous home in Newhallville.

Demethra didn’t spare any caution because she knew what could happen in New Haven. In 2017, the city had 61 shootings and 7 homicides. With crime rates lower than bigger cities like Baltimore and Chicago, its high incidence of gun violence is often overshadowed in the national media. Still, as a relatively small and less populated urban center, the Elm City has been counted among the 25 most dangerous cities in America several times in the last few decades, based on data released in the annual FBI Uniform Crime Report.

Not all city inhabitants face the same level of risk. A Yale study published in January found that black residents of New Haven are nearly 6 times more likely to be the victims of gun violence than white residents, and the vast majority of black victims are between the ages of 10 and 25. Gun violence kills an average of 3 children in America every day — over 1,000 per year — nearly 50 percent of whom are black. Every year, children from New Haven are represented in that statistic.

In 2014, 17-year-old Taijhon Washington was shot and killed by an 18-year-old just a quarter mile from Demethra’s home on Read Street. The day after attending Taijohn’s funeral, 16-year-old Torrence Gamble was shot in the head by another teenager who was a member of a local gang. Jacob Craggett, a 15-year-old star football player at Hillhouse High School — which Tyrick eagerly anticipated attending — was murdered in a shooting in August of the same year. In 2015, 16-year-old Jericho Scott was shot in the Fair Haven neighborhood, and more than two years later, the police still have not arrested anyone for his murder.

Tyrick dreamed of getting away from the neighborhoods where he grew up, where friends of friends had been shot and killed. He had given it thought, and he planned to make it out by becoming a professional dancer.

“His thing from when he was a very little boy was ‘Mommy, when I grow up I’m going to be successful. I’m going to help people. I’m going to make it out the ’hood, and I’m getting you out the ’hood with a white picket fence, and I’m going to have all these children,’” Demethra said, smiling at the memory.

***

Tyrick walked into the New Haven anti-violence arts program Ice the Beef at age 12, determined to learn the moves that would catapult him to dance stardom. He had already been practicing, but, according to his friend Tyshade, his moves weren’t “fluid.”

“It wasn’t, like, that bad,” Tyshade said. But Tyshade knew that Tyrick could work on his hip-hop skills at Ice the Beef, so he convinced his friend to come with him to a vacant building in Goffe Street Park one day after school.

Goffe Street Park is in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood, less than a mile from Yale University’s campus. Empty liquor bottles and banana peels are strewn on the grass. Black graffiti is sprayed across the building’s brick exterior. It reads, “I ♥ ♫”and “Kiss butt.”

From 3 to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, a synthesizer beat blasts from the building where Tyshade and 30 other kids from New Haven meet for Ice the Beef rehearsal. Ice the Beef kids range in age from fifth grade to sophomores in college, and they differ in specialty too — some are rappers, some are actors and some come because they want to dance, as Tyrick did. The program aims to get kids excited about the performing arts and, at the same time, to keep them off the streets and out of trouble.

I visited the building on a Wednesday afternoon in October. I waited until the president of Ice the Beef, Chaz Carmon, had finished giving an arriving group of teenage boys fist bumps before I introduced myself. Chaz, 40, is a New Haven native and was, he said, “a big drug trafficker back in the day.” That was before he found God, turned his life around and realized his purpose working with at-risk youth.

Chaz took over Ice the Beef from its founder, Darryl Allick, a New Haven native who was also involved in drug trafficking before his brother was killed in a street shooting in 2011. Darryl started the organization that same year. In its early days, Ice the Beef provided services to help grieving families and offered assistance in paying for burials. But when Darryl asked Chaz to come on board, Chaz had a different idea for what the mission should be.

“He said, ‘Do you want to be president?’” Chaz recalled. “And I said, ‘OK, I’ll be president if we go out of bereavement and go into youth services. Why are we catching them after they die? Let’s do something before they die.’”

On this fall afternoon, a soft-spoken boy named Monty stood outside the building and practiced his emcee introduction for one of the group’s upcoming shows. Inside, there was one main room — a wide-open space with yellowish walls and a linoleum floor. Three girls danced in the middle, thrusting and locking in synchronized moves to a blaring hip-hop track. Two boys stood in the corner, engrossed in a freestyle rap battle. Other kids sat on the floor, taking a break from the action and watching the performances in front of them.

“It’s a walk-in program,” Chaz told me. “So you can also just come in off the street and hang out. You don’t have to have great grades. If you say cuss words, we’re not going to be mad at you, whereas at other programs” — he jerks his thumb over his shoulder — “kicked out. We really try hard not to kick you out of this program.”

Almost all of the kids who go to Ice the Beef are in New Haven’s Youth Stat program, a city initiative that provides academic support, counseling and basic needs to New Haven public school students who are at risk of dropping out. Students recruited for the Youth Stat program are often homeless, have family conflict or are under threat from a local gang. Several Ice the Beef kids were expelled from school, some more than once, before they started coming to the group. At Ice the Beef, they learn not only how to rap but also “the 5 Rs”: rules, responsibility, respect, resolve and results. Lastly, participants work on the anger management skills that give the program its name.

“If you have beef with somebody, it’s like you have a problem with somebody,” Chaz said. “It’s not like we get in a fight and then it’s over. Beef is [when you’ve] got a problem for a while. Icing the beef is stopping the beef. So we try to teach them how to calm down. That’s the key. If you shoot somebody, you’re angry. If you get in a fight, you’re angry. If we teach you how to calm down, that’ll solve half the problems.”

Tyrick hardly needed the anger management lessons, though. He was, Chaz said, the “nicest kid,” always smiling and never needing to be told the same thing twice. He came to the program to learn how to dance, and he did that quickly.

“He started coming to me with new moves, and I’m like, ‘Ay, bro, that’s weavy!’” Tyshade said, laughing. “And then he told me a few moves too.”

Tyshade and Tyrick both watched the famous Les Twins on YouTube — “the best dancers in the world,” if you ask Tyshade — and eventually choreographed and performed a few shows to their music at YMCAs around New Haven. When they weren’t dancing together, the boys would play basketball and football in Goffe Street Park. They had never gone to the same school before, but they were both about to enroll at Hillhouse High School.

“He was so excited,” Tyshade remembered. “He was like, ‘Bro, we’re going to be going to Hillhouse! We’re going to be walking to class together!’”

When he learned that Tyrick had been shot, Chaz canceled the arts program. He couldn’t hold himself together. Still, every kid showed up the next afternoon.

“We cried into each other’s shoulders. The therapist was in here,” Chaz said, shaking his head. “You hear this from leaders in the community, you hear this from the school, you hear this from everybody, but it doesn’t really hit home till it hits home. And then it’s like, ‘Crap, that really f—ing happened.’”

***

Newhallville, the New Haven neighborhood where Tyrick’s family was living in the summer of 2017, has over twice the citywide average of violent crime. Demethra never wanted to live there, but her dependence on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Voucher Program, known as Section 8, left her with few options besides the Newhallville house on Read Street. Her previous house needed repairs, and the landlord wouldn’t take care of them. Forced to choose between a house that was falling apart and a neighborhood she disliked, Demethra saw no alternative.

“They told me I would lose my Section 8 if I didn’t take it. I didn’t want to move to Read Street at all, but they left me no choice,” she said. “I went to them and I begged them, ‘Please Section 8, let me out.’ I said to them, ‘What is it going to take, me or my children to get killed?’”

Despite several phone calls, messages and a weekday visit to the New Haven Housing Authority, the occupancy specialist who handled Demethra’s case could not be reached for comment.

The house on Read Street where Demethra moved in 2016 is narrow and white. It sits on a row of similar three-story, tired-looking Victorian homes. Many homes in Newhallville, like this one, are set off from the street with barbed wire fences. Some have small porches where residents may sit and look out at the street at all hours of a summer day. Most have bars on their windows. Teenagers race their bikes down the middle of the road, and women pushing strollers squabble outside the corner store. As of 2016, the neighborhood was 86 percent black and 21 percent unemployed.

Just a week before Tyrick was shot, Demethra heard gunshots fired so nearby that she had to duck inside. She called the landlord and told him she needed to move and that she didn’t care that her lease was not up. “He told me to wear a bulletproof vest,” she recalled.

***

When Tyrick left his house on his bike around 8:50 p.m. the night of July 16, Demethra knew she couldn’t catch him. Instead, she turned to her 4-year-old granddaughter Skyler.

“Go catch Uncle Ty!” she said.

“He’s gone!” Skyler said.

From Read Street, it’s only a minute by bike to the corner of Bassett and Newhall streets. Demethra had barely gotten upstairs to look for her knee medication before Jasmine, a friend in the neighborhood, came running to the house to tell her that her son had been shot on that corner. Then she did what any mother would do, knee injury or not — she ran.

When she got to the scene, there were close to 15 people around. One of them, a woman named Missy, had called 911 when she heard gunshots and saw a boy fall. Tyrick was struggling to get up, but Missy tried to urge him to stay down. When Demethra arrived, she saw nobody else. Her attention was only on her child lying next to a barbed wire fence, his blood staining the sidewalk. The police showed up next, and they blocked off the area around Tyrick with tape.

“I was yelling to the police officer because they wouldn’t let me by my son, and I said, ‘Where is the f—ing ambulance? My son’s laying here!’” Demethra said.

At 9:36 p.m., an ambulance arrived on the scene and loaded Tyrick into the back on a stretcher. Demethra was not allowed to ride in the ambulance. Her husband, Tyrick’s stepfather, drove her to the hospital, beating the ambulance there.

***

On a Tuesday morning in October, Demethra and I sat on folding chairs in her front parlor, talking. We were surrounded by framed pictures of Tyrick on shelves, on the coffee table, on every wall. In the corner hung a long pop-art tapestry with his face painted in the center. Next to it, a pair of brand new Air Jordan sneakers sat on display in a glass case.

Demethra’s 17-year-old son Silas stood by the front door, backpack over his shoulders, watching the street intently as he waited for the bus. He made no movement when his mother paused our conversation to weep and collect herself. When the bus pulled up to the front of the house, Demethra stopped talking and went to the door to watch her son walk through their small yard and climb in. Then she picked up her phone to call the school and tell the office that Silas had left, to make sure they were expecting him to arrive.

“I worry a lot. Tyrick knew I worry a lot,” she said. “He’d always walk children home, and I’d be like, … ‘Who’s gonna walk you home, Ty?’ He’d be like, ‘Mommy, I’m okay. Nothing’s going to happen to me.’ I said ‘Baby, you got to be careful.’ But he’d still do it.”

It didn’t matter who it was or what help they needed — Tyrick lived to make himself useful. He raked his neighbors’ yards without pay. He carried moving boxes for Chaz, the president of Ice the Beef. When he walked by the Little Red Hen community garden near his home in the West River neighborhood, 7-year-old Tyrick insisted on helping with the planting even though there was no free garden bed for him to till. Instead, Stacy Spell, a former police detective who had established the garden as a community-building initiative, gave Tyrick a five-gallon bucket. Over the course of several weeks, thanks to Tyrick’s diligent watering, a tomato plant and a pepper plant sprouted from that bucket. Even when Tyrick’s family moved out of the West River neighborhood, he still came back to the garden on Saturdays to eat strawberries and help with weeding.

“He was just one of those kids that was not only for the outside people but for his family,” Demethra said. Then she laughed and admitted that, when he wasn’t helping or doing chores, his silly side got the best of him.

“He was a goofball,” she said. “He gets it from me.”

On days when he was feeling like a rascal, Tyrick walked into his mom’s room without knocking. “I told you to knock on my door little boy!” she’d call out, trying to be stern. But she couldn’t help laughing at him as he shimmied and made funny faces in the reflection of her TV. When Silas joined, the boys would chase their mom through the house. “You know my leg’s messed up!” she protested. When they quickly caught her, she couldn’t get away from the tickle attack. “No, you’re just getting old!” they teased.

Dinner was also a time for jokes. Extended family would come over for special occasions, and, when Tyrick knew there would be more people at the table, he asked his mom to hide the hot sauce on a high shelf. That way, if only he and she knew where it was, he could make sure he got it first.

But at most meals, hot sauce was the furthest thing from his mind.  Tyrick would occasionally bring his friends home and ask his mom if they could get something to eat because they were hungry, even when the family barely had enough for themselves.

One time he came home with another question. He asked his mom and stepfather how much jail time he would get for stealing a moped — something a few kids had tried to convince him to do.

“They tell me that I won’t get much time. I’ll just go to juvenile,” he said to his mom. When she pressed him to tell her who was putting him up to stealing, all he said was, “I’m not a snitch.”

“Are you planning on doing it?” Demethra asked.

“No, Mommy, I’m never gonna do that because you’re not going to get me out!” he said.

It was true that Demethra had assured her sons she would not bail them out if they were sent to prison, because they had to learn. She is proud to say that, although she has two older sons who have spent time behind bars, she raised her children the way she was raised: “the good way.”

 “I was really hard on my kids,” she said. “I had a soft point too, but I was really hard. I was like this: ‘If you sell drugs, if you put your hands on a weapon, if you do anything bad, you’re out of my house. I will call the police, and you won’t come back here at all. And if you take anything, I’m still going to call the police.’ And my kids knew I was very serious.”

No matter how many times Demethra asked Tyrick who was trying to make him steal the moped, he refused to tell her because he thought she would call the police. She sat him down at the kitchen table and looked at him.

“Baby, you’ll get time,” she said. “Don’t believe what other people are telling you. You’ll get time.”

***

Unlike many of his peers, Tyrick never got in trouble with the law. The only time he came close was late last spring, a couple of months before he was shot.

Tyrick and Silas were leaving Goffe Street Park after Ice the Beef, around 5 p.m. Demethra was expecting the boys home shortly after, but they never arrived. Instead, she got a call from the police department saying that her sons had been arrested.

Demethra hung up the phone and walked with her nephew Elijah to the police car on Goodyear Street to pick up Silas and Tyrick, furious. She demanded to know why her sons had been stopped, and she said the police told her they had put the boys in the car because there had been a shooting in the area and Tyrick and Silas fit the description of the suspects.

“That don’t give you the right to stop them and chase them down and put out a dog on them,” Demethra said to me, fuming. “No it don’t.”

The New Haven Police Department does not release arrest records for minors and declined to comment.

When Demethra came to pick up her sons, she recalled, the officers apologized and told her they were good kids.

But after that day, Tyrick was scared. He didn’t trust the police — a lack of faith that had been ingrained in him as a young black boy growing up in New Haven. He heard it from his friends, from the older kids, even from adults in the community: “No snitching.” Sometimes, as in the cases of Taijohn Washington and Jericho Scott, whom the police said were targeted after reporting information on crimes, it costs you your life.

Stacy Spell, the retired detective who knew Tyrick through the Little Red Hen garden, sees distrust in community policing as a growing problem. Stacy — or “Big Stace,” as he prefers — is a neighborhood man, through and through. He ambles down the streets of New Haven’s West River neighborhood, his dreadlock ponytail swinging with every step, bellowing out a greeting to everyone he passes.

This, to Stacy, is the essence of community policing — officers engaging with citizens on- and off-duty.

“If you stand on a corner long enough, somebody’s going to come over and talk to you,” he said. “It don’t have to be about anything crucial. It’s in talking to them that you create those relationships.”

As a veteran of the system, it pains Stacy to see young officers miss opportunities to get to know their assigned neighborhood and make themselves easily approachable. If no one feels comfortable talking to the police, people who commit crimes get a free pass. It’s the absence of those officer–citizen relationships that creates distrust, and distrust, Stacy believes, is to blame for the fact that no person has been arrested for Tyrick’s murder.

“Make no mistake, someone saw something,” Stacy said, shaking a finger. “It hurts me that no one has come forward. It bothers me that you’re a father, you’re a mother, you’re an aunt, you’re somebody’s sister, and you saw this happen, and you’re not saying anything.”

***

After Tyrick arrived at Yale New Haven hospital on the night of July 16, Demethra spent the next four days by her son’s bedside, watching him suffer. She said the doctors told her that his heart had stopped twice at the scene of the crime, but he was still fighting.

On the fourth day, the fight was over. Demethra realized she had to pull the plug. But before she did, she made him a promise: She would not rest until she got justice for him.

Nearly seven months later, the New Haven Police Department’s detective unit is still pursuing an active investigation into Tyrick’s murder. The police say it appears that Tyrick was targeted. Witness reports say that the shooter was in a white vehicle, and some say the person was wearing a black face mask. No one has called in any suspects.

***

Demethra still gets in her car every day and drives across New Haven County to hang up flyers for the $50,000 reward that the governor has offered for information on her son’s murderer. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, she made him a plate of food and propped up his picture on the chair where he should have been sitting. She calls the police department every few days, and sometimes they pick up, but they don’t tell her much. Every night she sits among the belongings and photos of her son in the front parlor, wishes him goodnight and prays to God that the detectives get a written statement or a phone call from someone who knows what happened that night.

“Someone was there. Someone saw it,” she said. “They got to look at it as, what if it were their child?”

On her bookshelf, next to a framed picture of Tyrick at his eighth-grade graduation, is a photo of a patch of sidewalk next to a barbed wire fence.

“There’s his blood,” she said, pointing to a few brown splotches on the cement. “If they ever catch his killer, I want to bring these things up and show them what they did to my son.”

She gazed up at the photo of Tyrick in his graduation cap, smiling with his diploma in hand.

“I’m not going to let my son be another cold case, one they just put up on the shelf.”

Under the Wing

Story by Will Reid

Lead photo by Robbie Short

Published on December 11, 2017

On the evening of Oct. 18, 2017, University President Peter Salovey rose to address a gathering of Yale alumni at an event in Seattle. About a hundred people were settled into the small auditorium’s staggered seating. Behind the stage, the city skyline — with its famed Space Needle — filled the projector screen. Just as Salovey began his speech, a woman leapt onto the stage and faced the audience at large: “Excuse me everyone, can I have your attention please?”

A prominent public figure, an interjecting protester, an imposing security guard hovering in the wings — perhaps more important than the actors on the stage was the protester’s accomplice in the audience, who was recording a video destined for YouTube.

In the video, activist Marlene Blanco brandishes a sign that droops and folds as she paces the stage. “President Salovey: Stop cruel sparrow experiments,” it reads. Below the message, the name of the group that had dispatched her to Seattle is written in cursive: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Since last May, the Norfolk-based nonprofit has mounted a sustained campaign online and in person against a Yale postdoctoral researcher named Christine Lattin. In her work, Lattin examines how wild house sparrows respond to stress. She induces this stress by placing birds in cloth bags, rattling their cages and adding small amounts of crude oil to their millet.

PETA considers the research torture and the researcher, who has euthanized 250 birds since 2008, a killer.  While PETA’s campaign targets her methods not Lattin herself,  the group’s tactics have a very personal edge. PETA’s online posts identify her by name, which has enabled internet users to flood Lattin’s email, Facebook and Twitter inboxes with hate mail. PETA has also revealed her home address: of their six protests, one was staged outside her New Haven condo, where she lives with her husband and 20-month-old son.

Meanwhile, the University has defended Lattin. Her methods meet all the guidelines on bird research set by Yale’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and by the Ornithological Council.

Back on stage, Salovey spoke dryly into the microphone, asking Blanco to leave. But she persisted, yelling, “Shame on Yale! Stop killing birds! Shame on Yale!”

The crowd, at first quiet, grew agitated. “Begone!” one alumnus shouted, with a touch of melodrama fitting for the occasion.

“You’re going to have to carry me out!” Blanco yelled back.

A few minutes of pacing later, Blanco left of her own accord; security had called the police, and Blanco decided not to risk arrest. It was clear as she exited the stage that her act was over.

Lattin watches for birds in East Rock Park on Saturday, Nov. 20. (Robbie Short)

***

On a crisp day in November, Lattin, dressed in jeans and a dark cardigan, stepped off a shuttle onto the curb outside the Yale School of Medicine. As we walked toward her lab along the sun-dappled sidewalk, her demeanor scarcely showed the six months of harassment she had endured.

Lattin came to Yale in 2014 after receiving her doctorate from Tufts University. She came to Yale for access to world-class equipment:  PET scanners, doughnut-shaped instruments that use particles of antimatter to peer inside the organs of a still-living body. Yale has one of the best PET labs in the world, according to Richard Carson, director of the University’s PET Center and Lattin’s boss. The scanners enable researchers to quantify everything from organ function to brain density by examining how organic molecules, such as sugars or hormones, are concentrated in the various parts of the body. The scanning process is complex and expensive, not least because it requires researchers to have a stock of radioactive molecules on hand to inject into their subjects.

The School of Medicine is a fitting home for such a complex operation. Clinicians use PET scanners to find cancerous tumors; medical researchers use them to make sure new drugs hit their target. Lattin wanted to use them to study how different hormone levels in the brain influence bird behavior.

“It’s kind of amazing to me that they let me put feral sparrows in their million-dollar scanner,” she said. “Not everyone would be as open to doing this work.”

Carson said they had never scanned a bird before. About 25 percent of PET Center scans involve animals, but most of these examine more typical research subjects, such as mice or chimpanzees. Lattin had to develop new techniques to use the scanners on sparrows. She worked with engineers at Yale’s Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design to build a specialized plastic gurney for the birds that holds their bodies steady while they lay anesthetized in the scanner. And she’s had to develop a new method for injecting the radioactive tracer into the sparrows’ tiny bodies.

“Now the birds are being scanned the same way people are being scanned,” said Carson.

The research harks back to Lattin’s time before academia, when she was on staff at animal shelters and other conservation centers. Her work has already contributed to scientific discourse, racking up a total 384 citations, according to Google Scholar. Her crude oil study has been cited by researchers working with dolphins, sea turtles and other species exposed to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Lattin’s study found that even tiny amounts of crude oil induced the birds’ stress response. Even if they appeared normal, the birds’ hormones revealed internal distress. In other words, stress can be hard to detect — in birds being researched or in a researcher herself.

Computer tomography (CT) scans provide a powerful tool, Lattin says, for her research. (Robbie Short)

***

In 1980, PETA began with five members and a philosophy. Since then, its numbers have grown to over 6.5 million — a million and a half more than the National Rifle Association. Inspired by Peter Singer’s manifesto of the modern animal rights movement, its founders sparked a revolution. They believe that the mistreatment of animals is morally equivalent to the mistreatment of any human group. “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment or abuse in any other way,” the PETA slogan goes.

Among the general public, PETA is perhaps best known for its provocative advertisements, which advocate for  adoption of a vegan lifestyle. Provocative puts it lightly: In a recent Thanksgiving-themed ad, a family happily slices into a roasted human child, dressed like a turkey. But PETA’s efforts at persuasion don’t stop with consumer choice. Among other watchdog agencies, PETA has a department devoted to investigating and lobbying against the use of animals in academic and commercial research.

PETA’s lab investigators first looked into Lattin’s work last year, after an article published in the Yale Engineering magazine detailed her collaboration with the CEID.

A few things stood out immediately, said  PETA’s chief of laboratory case management Alka Chandna. Lattin’s abstracts made no mention of the potential human benefit of her research. Chandna and her colleagues doubted that Lattin’s discoveries in wild sparrows could be applied to other bird species — let alone humans.

“Right away, we can say, ‘She’s harming animals and there’s no human benefit,’” Chandna said.

Ingrid Taylor, a veterinarian on staff at PETA, pored over Lattin’s articles, searching for evidence of cruelty in the experiments she conducted at Yale and Tufts. For Taylor, the worst part was that these were not accidents that occurred during the course of research — they were part of the research itself. Lattin’s crimes were premeditated.

In May 2017, PETA, evidence in hand, sprang into action. It filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the district attorney of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, where Tufts is located. (Most states, including Connecticut, exempt research animals from their cruelty laws, but Massachusetts does not.) Then, the campaign for popular opinion began.

“Right from our inception we’ve known that media is critical to our work,” said Chandna. Social media has only made it easier to amplify their message. It’s a change for Chandna, who’s been involved with animal rights work since the 1980s. It used to be that, as an undergraduate, she would spend $15 to order VHS tapes from PETA through the mail. Now, videos surface right in your news feed.

One such video begins with a photo of Lattin holding the blue plastic device that keeps the sparrows in place while they are in the scanner. She’s grinning directly into camera. “This woman is torturing songbirds,” reads the superimposed text. The video has over 2 million views on Facebook and about 9,000 “angry” reactions.

“You better believe that we’re sponsoring advertisements on Facebook,” Chandna said. “You better believe that whenever there’s an opportunity to get this video footage in front of people, we’re doing that.”

PETA has used other channels as well, sending letters to the Yale President’s Office and appealing to alumni for support. A recent alumna, Hanh Nguyen ’17, first heard about Lattin’s research when she started working for PETA the summer after graduation. She wasn’t personally involved with the campaign until October, when she joined a group of demonstrators outside a Yale Corporation meeting at Woodbridge Hall. That month, she sent a letter to alumni organizations, urging them to express their disapproval of the experiments.

Lattin stands next to her PET scanner. (Robbie Short)

After the first online posts against her in May, Lattin’s inbox started filling up with messages from unfamiliar addresses. Some described her research in a way she didn’t recognize. “Unsuspecting birds who have been lured to feeders and trapped or netted are being systematically tormented to induce stress and fear,” read one. Others addressed Lattin directly: “SHAME ON YOU” and “STOP TORTURING BIRDS YOU SICK FUCK!” Notably, a majority of messages criticized the alleged purposelessness of Lattin’s work.

At first, Lattin thought it would blow over. Things weren’t too bad for Lattin — the controversy didn’t even show up on the first page of Google results for her name. Some colleagues advised her to keep her head down. This type of incident hadn’t happened at Yale in about a decade. The last target — Marina Picciotto, a neuroscientist studying addiction — remained at Yale.

A turning point came when PETA protesters demonstrated outside a conference in Long Beach, California, where Lattin was presenting. Lattin described the experience of having protesters shout her name while she spoke to her colleagues as “incredibly traumatic.”

The situation worsened. Lattin could tell by spikes in harassment whenever PETA uploaded a new post. Some of the messages she received were so threatening she shared them with the New Haven Police Department. She also keeps a file on her computer in case something happens to her, so she can have evidence to provide the FBI.

Chandna thinks it’s regrettable that Lattin has felt threatened, but she emphasized how PETA’s communications have been polite. “Clearly, our intention is never to have people be harassed,” she said. “It is never our intention to stir up the masses.”

As for the protests PETA has organized, Chandna doesn’t see them as harassment. Rather, she sees the tactics against Lattin as similar to those deployed by any other campaign for social justice.

“I don’t even think of home demonstrations as being harassing,” she said. “And I like to remind people that the body count here, the harassment here, has been done by Christine Lattin. There are more than 250 birds that have been captured from birdfeeders.”

Taking a step back, for Chandna, Lattin’s work represents one battle in a larger “war on animals” being waged by researchers across the country — against which PETA’s prepared to fight back.

“If you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna.’” Chandna said. “That’s PETA’s modus operandus [sic]. We’re in it to win it.”

Lattin looks at her scans from the other side of a glass panel in her lab. (Robbie Short)

***

When Lattin needs more sparrows, she gathers a mix of potter traps and mist nets and goes herself to catch them. The sparrows she finds are an invasive species, introduced to North American cities in the 1850s as a solution for urban pests and a salve for homesick European immigrants. They’ve since spread across the whole continent, which is one reason Lattin felt comfortable using them in research — she knew they weren’t going extinct anytime soon.

Lattin acquired her bird-handling skills as a young science educator at the Glen Helen Raptor Center, near Springfield, Ohio. The center is part nature preserve, part animal shelter for the area’s birds of prey. Primarily, Lattin led grade-school children on hikes and taught them about local bird populations. Toward the end of her time, she became an assistant to the veterinarian on staff. Sometimes, she said, birds would be brought in who could not be saved. While the vet euthanized them with a syringe, Lattin held their bodies still.

“That was really hard for me,” she recalled, taking a long pause. “It was pretty sad. But you know, definitely better than … starving to death is definitely a worse way to go.”

In her current research, Lattin prides herself on her ability to handle birds deftly, injecting them with radiotracer and taking blood samples. By doing things smoothly, she minimizes the stress birds otherwise would have felt from having someone reach into their cage or pull them out of a net.

Enjoying the work at raptor shelter and subsequent nature preserves, Lattin moved to Eastern Kentucky to study birds full time. To obtain her degree, she chose a topic not far from her undergraduate work in linguistics: analyzing the songs of the blue grosbeak, a seedeater common to the southern United States. Male grosbeaks sing to impress potential mates and, like human speech, their songs are made up of a complex line of syllables strung together by the singer. And like some humans, when male grosbeaks get worked up, they blow a gasket, launching into a tirade of syllables several times longer than a typical song.

Lattin wanted to capture these tunes in the wild, so she packed up her recording equipment and drove to where most humans stayed clear — a local chemical weapons depot. The 14,000 acres of uninhabited land had become a haven for wildlife, favored among local hunters, and the perfect spot to record birdsongs on a spring morning. Lattin got out of her car and started unpacking her equipment. Immediately, she noticed something was off. It was April, peak breeding season. The hills should have been alive with the sound of birdsong. Why was it so quiet?    

The answer, it turned out, was weather: A harsh late May frost had shocked the local ecosystem, halting flowers at the bud, hardening the ground and scattering the insects. Without grasshoppers to eat or seeds to chew on, there was no sense trying to attract a mate. “Of course, I was like, ‘Oh my god, what am I going to do?’” recalled Lattin. “I’m trying to do this research project on song and the birds aren’t singing. But for them, it made sense.”

The frost was a stressor, a threat in the birds’ environment that influenced their behavior — like a lion on the savannah or the loss of control from captivity. While eventually grosbeaks returned to the area, the spring silence alerted Lattin to stress as a phenomenon worth studying further. And so her research began.

The container in which the birds rest while in the scanner. A bird's head sits in the white cylinder, which delivers anesthesia. (Robbie Short)

***

“It is amazing that they chose Christine,” Carson said. Given that a lot of animal research is done at Yale, Carson and his colleagues struggle to rationalize PETA’s unilateral focus on Lattin. “Whether that’s because they think more people will care about birds than care about mice and rats,” Carson said, “I don’t know.”

Lattin has her own theories, but mostly she feels vilified unfairly. She’d deliberately switched to PET scanning because the procedure was less invasive. In the future, she hopes to be able to release caught sparrows back into the wild with tiny transmitters so as to track and, later, recapture them. Not only would that be better for the birds, it would be better for the research.

It would feel better for Lattin too. She’s never liked killing the birds, but legally, that’s the requirement: her scientific
collector’s permit, issued by the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection, doesn’t permit her to release captured birds back into the wild. The department has an interest in reducing sparrow populations. They’re invasive, and they compete for nest space with local species like bluebirds, whose numbers have declined in recent decades. The permit isn’t something Lattin likes to talk about publicly because she fears it will sound like she isn’t taking responsibility for her work.

PETA has repeatedly argued that Lattin should stop using animals altogether and switch to modern methods, like computational modeling. This perspective misapprehends the state of alternate methods, Lattin said. It’s hard for her to think of something more modern than PET scans. And without animal research, she said, “all scientific discovery would come to a screeching halt.”

Where Lattin prepares the birds to be scanned. (Robbie Short)

Throughout the controversy, the Yale STEM community has come to Lattin’s defense. Graduate students in biology and immunology have written op-eds in her defense, and in October, an undergraduate chemistry and molecular, cellular and developmental biology major circulated a letter of support. One hundred and twenty people have signed.

Lattin’s case has garnered attention from outside Yale as well. Science magazine and the New Haven Register both covered the story. Other concerned researchers, like Kevin Folta at the University of Florida, have sought to protect her reputation. Folta, who has faced protests himself for research on genetically modified organisms, wrote a paean to Lattin on his blog and hosted her on his podcast. Folta believes she is being targeted because, as a young female scientist without tenure, she is vulnerable.

But perhaps the most vigorous defender of the research has been Lattin herself. She has replied to PETA’s claims on Twitter, rewritten her personal website to make it more accessible and made an effort to speak to journalists interested in her case. So far, that seems to have helped — after she started to speak out, the harassment declined.

“A few people early on said, ‘Oh well, keep your head down and it’ll blow over,’” Lattin said. “I kind of think those people are wrong. If you don’t speak up for yourself, you don’t make it easy for people to rally around you.”

***

Though many have flocked to Lattin’s defense, PETA remains undeterred. It will continue its campaign; Lattin will continue her research, though her current focus is elsewhere. This semester, she is teaching the undergraduate class “Comparative Physiology” for the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department. And she’s searching for a professorship — somewhere she can run her own lab.

Although PETA’s aim has been to stop Lattin’s research, the experience has only hardened her resolve. PETA’s accusations have not undercut her belief that the work she does is important, that the questions she’s asking need answers and that, without plausible alternatives, work that kills sparrows is justified.

PETA emphasizes that Lattin’s research has no direct application; she’s not working on a new drug or developing a new conservation method. Lattin and her supporters argue scientific inquiry doesn’t work that way. Sometimes research directly solves a problem or answers a question, sometimes opening up space for more.

PETA argues the animals aren’t ours, for research or otherwise. Chandna said the group only approves of animal research that meets the same standards as human trials. Latin says she’s as humane as possible.

“I’m good at this work. And I try to do it in a really thoughtful and respectful way, and be ethical in everything that I do,” she said. “Who do I want to do this research? I want it to be people like me.”

For PETA, Lattin’s research on birds is yet another piece of evidence in their larger case against animal research. For Lattin, that research is her life’s work.

There’s one point both sides can agree on: justified ends and justified means.

Lattin peers down the tunnel in her scanner. (Robbie Short)

God & the Left at Yale

Story by Chris Hays

Lead photograph by Robbie Short

Published on November 12, 2017

The Rev. Robert Beloin sits against the marble wall of the Abraham A. Ribicoff Federal Courthouse in Hartford. Next to him, a line of men and women in suits, tie-dye shirts and clerical attire wraps across the front of the building, blocking the doors. The St. Thomas More priest’s own white collar peeks out from under a Yale-emblazoned vest.

It’s 8 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 25. The flagstones are still damp from the previous evening’s rain. Beloin, his fellow priest the Rev. Karl Davis, Yale history professor Jennifer Klein and 33 other protesters have gathered to support Franklin and Giaconda Ramos, both scheduled for deportation on the 29th. The Ramoses are at their jobs — it is the start of a workday for them, in some ways just like any other workday of the 24 years they have lived, paid taxes and raised a family in the United States.

The Ramoses’ two college-aged sons are there. At moments, the protesters lock arms, resting a 20-foot orange banner that reads “ICE Stop Your Ethnic Cleansing” against their knees. In front of them, a crowd of 200 supporters chants, “No borders, no nations. Stop the deportation,” and “If you don’t let us dream, we won’t let you sleep.”

“We had very clear instructions,” Beloin remembered about his arrest. “Do not resist, do not be dead weight, don’t be carried to the van.”

St. Thomas More graduate affiliate Catherine Rodriguez DRA ’18 alerted Beloin to the protest. “Pope Francis is saying, ‘Go to the periphery and accompany people,’” Beloin said. “Immigration is a way to go to the edges.”

In the days after the demonstration, a New York immigration judge reopened the Ramoses’ case, giving them a temporary stay of deportation. Though a federal judge issued an order of removal for the couple in 2005, immigration officials did not act on the ruling until Trump-era enforcement protocol took effect. “The tone of anger and hatred and ‘us against them’ is really taking a toll on the moral fiber of the country,” Beloin said.

(Robbie Short)

The St. Thomas More priests’ intervention places them among an emerging community of Yale activists called by their religious convictions to take progressive action. Organizations like the Yale Black Seminarians, the Muslim Students Association and the Chaplain’s Office are working to promote social justice in the Trump era. Though religion is often overshadowed by politics at a largely secular institution like Yale, a recent surge in faith-based political activism revealed the complex — and storied — relationship between theology and liberal activism on campus.

For Beloin, these ideas find expression through prayer: at the pulpit, in front of the courthouse and in his holding cell during his daylong stay in jail.

When the protesters arrived at the correctional facility at around 11 a.m., they were each fingerprinted and asked to turn in their possessions. Beloin handed over his wallet, phone, keys and, finally, the clerical collar from around his neck.

On the national stage, conservative religious activism has long eclipsed its liberal counterpart in American politics and media. White evangelical Christian voters have been the Republican Party’s base since President Richard Nixon’s term in office. Although there are significant political disagreements among different right-leaning Christian communities, Christians overwhelmingly vote Republican. In the 2016 presidential election, Christians voted for Trump by a margin of 15 percent, and evangelicals favored Trump by a margin of 64 percent, according to a Pew poll. Yet, as Latino Catholic and Arab Muslim communities come under threat of immigration restrictions and political vilification, the religious left is garnering grassroots support.

The Hartford rally was one of a series of progressive political actions taken by religious leaders across the country in past months. Just three weeks after Trump’s election, the Rev. William J. Barber II led an 80,000-person “Moral March” in Raleigh, North Carolina, mobilizing a national network of interfaith leaders and earning the title of the “strongest contender for [Martin Luther King Jr.]’s mantel” from many supporters, according to The New York Times. In protest of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, faith leaders linked arms and marched silently through the city.

Just a few weeks later, on the Aug. 28 anniversary of the March on Washington, the Rev. Al Sharpton led the multifaith One Thousand Ministers March for Justice rally along the path of the 1963 march. Wearing clerical collars, yarmulkes and vestments, the demonstrators protested Trump’s racial politics in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville.

Yale has seen a parallel increase in liberal religious activism in recent times, but this movement is not without precedent. Progressive icon and Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’49 DIV ’56 leveraged his religious authority on campus to promote anti–Vietnam War and civil rights causes. Though the student body may no longer recognize his name, Coffin’s influence persists.

(Robbie Short)

Coffin’s Pulpit

On Oct. 2, 1967, Coffin stepped up to the lectern at an anti-war press conference in New York City. Yale’s Battell Chapel, he announced, would be “a sanctuary from police action for any Yale student conscientiously resisting the draft.” Following the speech, nearly 300 draft resisters burned or turned in their draft cards to Coffin in an act of collective civil disobedience. A New York Times article about the announcement ran under the headline, “War Foes Are Promised Churches as Sanctuary.” A Yale Alumni Magazine article later observed that Coffin’s Oct. 2 address cemented Yale as the center of the draft resistance movement in New England.

Yale faced an onslaught of incensed calls from alumni even as Yale President Kingman Brewster ’41 denounced Coffin’s speech. Brewster reminded Coffin that Battell was under the authority of the administration, not the chaplaincy; the chapel was not his to give away.

By age 40, Coffin had been arrested three times, including one instance in which he was arrested while leading a Freedom Ride to protest segregation in Alabama. When the New Haven trial of Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale brought thousands to the city, Coffin led a student–faculty committee tasked with keeping the protests nonviolent. Though he twice graced the cover of Time magazine and never faded from the national public consciousness, Coffin was most visible on campus arguing with students, as he tirelessly sought to change minds one at a time.

Coffin’s friend and former University Secretary Henry “Sam” Chauncey Jr. ’57 laughed as he said, “I don’t know anybody to this day who thinks they are entitled to march into the president’s office and just go right in without permission or anything else, right in the middle of a meeting or whatever, but he would just go right in. He would come in and say, ‘Damn it, Kingman, you can’t let this happen!’”

Confrontation was Coffin’s style. Chauncey remembered that Coffin once walked into a fraternity house unannounced during the group’s officer elections to interrogate the students about why they weren’t electing black leaders. He leveraged his oratory to rail against the old-boy-network attitude that still pervaded campus.

“In a world in which traditions need to be reshaped and purged as much as protected to support what we already hold, O God, bless us all with uncertainty,” Coffin said at a luncheon in celebration of Brewster’s inauguration as University president. As Yale shifted from an elite white Protestant school to a more progressive, diverse and pluralistic place, Coffin was an unapologetic advocate for reform.

The cultural context of Coffin’s time at Yale makes his faith-based activism even more striking. The 1970s were a time of decreasing religious engagement on college campuses. Amid an anti-authority cultural revolution, religion had fallen by the wayside. The deep and seemingly inalterable connection between tradition and religion would create a tension that generations of progressives before and after Coffin struggled to reconcile.

Yet Coffin was an uncompromising revolutionary. Drawing on the Protestant Reformation as a parallel to the civil rights movement, he liked to quote Martin Luther: “My conscience is captive to the word of God. … To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other,” Coffin repeated. “God help me.”

(Courtesy of Arnold Gold/Heart Connecticut Media)

Revolutionizing, again

Professor Jennifer Klein was standing near Jason Ramos, the Ramoses’ eldest son, the morning of her arrest. As a historian of social movements, she noticed what others might have missed: The rally did not focus solely on Christian prayer, even though, 15 years ago, a similar protest would have. “The language has become more ecumenical,” she said.

For Klein, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric on immigration echoed anti-Semitic chants by neo-Nazis at her alma mater, the University of Virginia. A threat to Latino Americans is a threat to every historically marginalized group, she said. Collective action — the concept that links her most closely to the other religious leaders involved in the protest — is a moral imperative of Judaism for Klein. “Tikkun olam,” the religious duty to work collectively to “repair the world,” underpins her beliefs.

Nine months earlier, repair work on campus was focused on those in the Yale community affected by Trump’s travel ban. The ban targeted seven predominantly Muslim countries. Abrar Omeish ’17, former president of the Muslim Students Association, helped coordinate the January rally in support of affected Yalies.

“The purpose was showing unity,” Omeish said of the Jan. 29 rally, which was led by a group of organizers that included members of the Women’s Center, the Slifka Center for Jewish Life and the Yale Democrats. “It needed all of the student groups involved to fulfill that purpose.”

The student organizers projected the word “solidarity” onto the stone facade of Sterling Memorial Library. About 1,000 people attended, holding candles and standing in silence until a series of speeches spurred the crowd into chants. For Omeish, the power of the rally rested in a “faith-based model of activism.”

Selflessness and humility before God guided the organization of the rally. “It was successful because of the blessing of God,” she said. Only by approaching the rally with a focus on the issues, rather than grandstanding or self-promotion, could the event fulfill its purpose: “bridge-building across these communities who feel marginalized and alienated.”

The night of the rally, Associate Chaplain Maytal Saltiel was busy “schlepping,” as she affectionately called it. Saltiel is practiced in the logistics of event organizing; she held the official title of “repair the world coordinator” while working at the University of Pennsylvania Hillel. Last January, she was one of the few people who could find power outlets and a sound system for the rally. “We are the behind-the-scenes people,” Saltiel joked.

(Robbie Short)

The Chaplain’s Office has weathered its own turbulent political moments over recent years. In October 2015, University Chaplain Sharon Kugler found herself at the center of a national controversy. Kugler, acting as a member of the Intercultural Affairs Council, co-signed an email to the Yale student body about cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes, asking students to “avoid those circumstances that threaten our sense of community or disrespects, alienates or ridicules segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression.”

The directors of the Afro-American Cultural Center, Native American Cultural Center, La Casa Cultural, Asian American Cultural Center and Slifka Center co-signed the letter. Within a week, Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis sent out a response challenging the basis for labeling costumes appropriative and affirming “freedom of speech.” As protests escalated, reporters from national news outlets descended on campus.

“That semester set us on a course of trying to figure out how to listen to each other better,” Kugler reflected. She said she did not regret sending out the email. But she emphasized the importance of dialogue amid political controversy, perhaps directing her comment at the alienation and pain many on campus felt during the semester-long period of protests. “It’s an office that attempts very delicately to keep people talking and to feel accessible to everyone. The prophetic voice that  is found in accompaniment and radical hospitality and a kind of endurance.”

(Robbie Short)

Kugler and Saltiel, in some ways, are the new, pluralistic continuation of Coffin’s legacy. The chaplaincy, when it was first created in 1927, was intended for one person, the campus pastor. When Coffin was appointed in 1958, the Chaplain’s Office had hardly changed — his voice was the prophetic one. Over time, the staff expanded, adding a Jewish associate chaplain in the ’80s as well as Muslim and Hindu staff members in the mid-2000s.

Today’s chaplaincy comprises Catholic, Protestant and Jewish chaplains as well as Muslim and Hindu directors of student life. With this new pluralism, its voice is diffused among many chaplains.

As outspoken as Coffin was, the chaplaincy today takes a much more subtle tone on social justice. “It’s no longer the case that the chaplain assumes the role of standing at the pulpit and having the prophetic voice be that one voice,” Kugler said. “I think if Coffin were alive today, he would probably be among us.”

Liberal Divinity

Coffin spent three years on the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, where his legacy persists in the Divinity School’s activist student body. Much like the College, the Divinity School has a slew of liberal-minded student organizations: the LGBTQ group DivOut; FERNS, an environmentally focused group; and Peace, Action and Justice, a race-focused social action group. The organizations tackle social issues both in preparation for ministry and advocacy work at large.

Attending the Divinity School is often just as much about social history as it is about theology. Qadry Harris DIV ’18, a member of the Yale Black Seminary, grew up going to a black Baptist church in the Bronx. His studies center on radical scholarship in religious academia.

“Black religion in the Americas begins with antebellum chattel slavery,” Harris explained. “It’s not a secret that white slave masters were using Christianity to justify slavery.”

(Robbie Short)

Harris sees a racial divide in American religion. On one side stands the slave master’s religion of oppression and, on the other, the religion of liberation and resistance developed by slaves to subvert slave-master Christianity. Harris explains today’s Christianity in terms of its past: Enslaved people “started appropriating Christian symbols to say, ‘God wants me to be free.’” Social justice, for Harris, is the inevitable consequence of faith in something larger.

“The Black Lives Matter movement — these protestors and activists are responding to the Trayvon Martins of the world,” Harris said. “There are those that would assert that Black Lives Matter has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian gospel and the church. I’m of the opposite opinion. It is a manifestation of the church because it is people of the church fighting to protect our personhood.”

When asked how he reconciles his Christianity with the religion of oppression from which he believes it is descended, he said, “I don’t know if reconciliation is the right way to put it.” Harris acknowledged that his faith is not unimpeachable and that even the black Baptist tradition has internalized elements of dominance and suppression, though those influences are difficult to identify. His black liberation politics bears the marks of a religion that was once an instrument of oppression, and that does not sit easily with him.

The culture of the Divinity School lends itself to radical action. In fall 2017, Divinity School Dean Greg Sterling introduced “Religion and Ecology” and “Latinx and Latin American Christianity” as new concentrations of study. Earlier this year, the school also announced plans to construct the “regenerative village,” a highly energy-efficient residential complex designed to dramatically reduce waste.

(Courtesy of Sam Chauncey, Jr.)

Julia Johnson DIV ’18 and Emily Bruce DIV ’19 run Faith, Environmentalism, Religion, Nature and Spirituality, or FERNS, the religious ecology student group at the Divinity School. Johnson, a nondenominational Protestant, and Bruce, a Unitarian Universalist, both regularly attend programming at the Yale School of Forestry. One event last spring, a film festival, convinced Johnson to discard her trash bin and practice a zero-waste lifestyle.

“A lot of my energy goes to thinking about how the church doesn’t talk about climate change,” Bruce said. Johnson also expressed frustration that, even at Yale, faith leaders do not recognize the religious importance of environmental stewardship. Climate change is something “that’s very Christian and very political.”

Despite Johnson’s frustration with religious leadership on environmentalism at her school, divinity schools at elite secular universities like Yale and Harvard are much more liberal than their counterparts at other institutions. According to several Yale Divinity School students, Yale’s liberalism derives from the University’s broader secular liberal tradition; the College and the graduate and professional schools have attracted a liberal student body since the ’60s. Saltiel, the associate chaplain, attended Harvard Divinity School and said that Yale and Harvard are two of the most pluralistic of their kind.

Not every religious school focuses on social history the way that Yale Divinity School does. At most Southern and Midwestern theological schools, the political outlook is different. In a 1995 Atlantic article exploring Regent University in Virginia, Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox characterized the mission of the school: to produce an “elite of religiously trained professionals to exert a spiritual influence on the secular realm.” He described a series of op-eds in the campus newspaper debating the extent to which Christians have a right to dominion over society. Cox argued that the school was a microcosm of debate within conservative Christian communities at large.

Mike Lally DIV ’18 attended St. Louis University, a Jesuit Catholic school whose curriculum is centered on theology. Lally seemed bemused by the Yale Divinity School’s liberalism. The Divinity School, he said, is “basically a liberal secular institution with some Christian language tossed on top.”

A Place in the Tradition

On a rainy Sunday in October, Lally stood near the steps of the altar at St. Thomas More, offering communion with two other parishioners and Beloin. Two lines of congregants proceeded toward them. Earlier during the service, Beloin preached about change in the Church over time. It was the Sunday before the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, and Beloin joked that, if Martin Luther were alive today, he would find a place in today’s more grounded Catholic faith.

He delivered a homily about neighborly love and the importance of putting aside differences to find consensus. He cited the case of the Ramos family. It is hard to take action from a place of comfort and privilege, he said, but love of God is parallel to love of neighbor, so we must act. Quoting from the daily liturgy, he added, “You shall not wrong any alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.’”

The quotation harkens back to the prophet Moses, who claimed the divine authority to free the Israelites, restructure society and make political demands to the pharaoh. Similarly, Jesus was crucified in part for being a political threat, and Muhammad was nearly assassinated by the Meccans for upending the existing social order. Revolutionary change is a fundamental element of every prophet’s story.

The theologies founded around these figures have taken on a life of their own. Religions created millennia ago have continued to shape the many societies within which they thrive, impacting the daily experience of each individual.

Struggling with the inertia of their religious traditions was one of the things that prompted Saltiel and Kugler to take positions working at a university, where they would interact and collaborate with campus activist culture. Saltiel reflected that her understanding of patriarchy in religion once prompted her to question the role of feminism within faith. Women struggle against religious institutions that are just as patriarchal as the broader societies that they inhabit, she said. There has always been a kind of friction between religious tradition and the social change these activists fight for.

But this kind of wrestling is a motivating factor as often as it is an alienating one. The stakes of social change are higher when considered in an explicitly religious context. Though it is often impossible to tell where religious doctrine ends and cultural custom begins, religious activism is just as much about grappling with religious issues as it is social ones. Especially as Yale’s liberal religious activists navigate a campus that is increasingly secular — more than half of Yale’s students are religiously unaffiliated — contemplating the role of their faith gives language and power to their activism.

Coffin was notable for his backstory. He was the third generation of his family to attend Yale and the heir to a family fortune. “His wealth always hung over him,” Chauncey said. He spent his life at elite institutions: Phillips Academy Andover, Yale College, the CIA, Williams College, Yale Divinity School and the Yale chaplaincy. Yet he worked tirelessly to change the institutions that produced him.

Over the past six decades, aspects of Coffin’s vision have come to pass: Yale has become more pluralistic, and Christianity at large has adapted to socially progressive trends. Over the course of his life, Beloin has seen a version of this change in the Catholic faith: “I look for times when the Church gets it right, I am inspired by that,” he said. “And when I think the Church gets it wrong, I try to learn from that.”

For Beloin, morality is too connected to social issues for him to stay aloof. His views demand that, while he stands above the congregation at his pulpit on Sunday, he also sits down in front of the doors of the Hartford courthouse and stoops to pick up trash during his court-ordered 24 hours of community service.

He remembered, “When I was walking down to the corner to be fingerprinted, one of the cops walking with me turned to me and said, ‘Hey Father, it wasn’t worth it, was it?’ I looked at him and I said, ‘Well as a matter of fact, it was.’”

At the Hartford jail, police put the protesters into two-person cells. Each cell had a bunk bed and an exposed toilet. Its walls were brick. Everything in the cell was nailed down, and Davis remembered empathizing with those threatened by deportation. In his loss of freedom, he experienced “just a fraction of what they experience.” His only lifeline was the lawyer’s phone number written in permanent marker on his forearm.

Beloin was placed with Pentecostal Elder Ron Hurt, who preaches at Deliverance Temple Church in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood. The church sometimes takes in people with addictions, helping them on the path to recovery. It owns a house next door where people looking for shelter can stay. Hurt has preached and done advocacy work in the neighborhood for 12 years.

“We talked for quite a while about our different experiences of faith and church and why we were there,” Beloin remembered. They discussed poverty, the voiceless and their congregations. They stretched out on their beds, Hurt in the top bunk and Beloin in the bottom. Privately, Beloin contemplated the Exodus narrative of the widow, the orphan and the alien. They prayed.

Draw the line

By Amy Cheng

Published on September 19, 2017

Isabella Ciambotti, a junior at the University of Virginia, walked up Market Street around noon on Saturday, Aug. 12. She brushed shoulders with wet-eyed protesters retreating from Emancipation Park, where they were attacked by tear gas moments earlier.

In front of the Robert E. Lee statue that stands erect at the heart of Emancipation Park, a cluster of white supremacists — many of them wearing Confederate flag-like capes and holding riot gear plastered with the Othala rune and swastikas — busied themselves with hurling stones and racial slurs across the barricade. The counter-protesters returned by pelting them with water bottles and obscenities. Ciambotti, struck on the head by an airborne coke can, found herself having flashbacks to the schoolyard brawls she saw in her high school.

Amid the chaos, she could only make out a few people chanting “shame” over the uproar of hateful swearing and racial insults. In a vignette that she later published in The New York Times, Ciambotti wrote that a woman from the alt-right marching line stared squarely into her eyes and said, “I hope you get raped by a nigger.”

What the newspaper did not print, Ciambotti chuckled, was that the same woman continued to heckle her and called “pimply.” Why are you alone? Where’s your man? That’s right because you don’t have one! You’ll never get a man.

Peering beyond the frontlines of the alt-right ralliers, Ciambotti could make out the faces of the white supremacists. Some, grandfatherly men. Others, “well-groomed and educated white males in their early 20s” — men who could have passed as college students on her campus.

On Aug. 12, the college town of Charlottesville, Va., transformed into a swirling vortex for neo-Nazi and white supremacy demonstrations. The escalation culminated fatefully in the death of 32-year-old counter-protester Heather Heyer, who was run over by a Dodge Challenger barreling through the crowd. The driver, a 20-year-old from Ohio, had been described in a Reuters article as “a kid at an amusement park” when visiting Dachau in Germany.

Promoted as “Unite the Right,” the white nationalist rally was long anticipated after the Charlottesville City Council passed the motion 3 to 2 on Feb. 6 in favor of removing the Lee statue from downtown Charlottesville. The very same panel ruled unanimously that day to remove Lee as the namesake of the public space and rename it Emancipation Park. While groups like the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Inc. and The Monument Fund Inc. pushed back on this decision by filing a lawsuit the following day, far-right organizations set their heart on a different form of resistance: a physical one that became mired in blood and hatred.

As the dust settles in this southern college town and the shock of fascism’s public revival wears off, the country finds itself amidst a tide of pro-nationalist rallies and counter-protests, many of which often end in arrests and violence. And Charlottesville is hardly the first. Four months before, an April rally in Berkeley, Calif., deteriorated into fist fights between supporters and opponents of President Donald Trump. The event initially began as a “Patriots Day” organized by pro-Trump groups to support First Amendment rights. But hundreds of Trump opponents, many dressed in black clothing and wearing masks, faced off with the far-right supporters. The two sides threw soda cans, rocks, sticks and other projectiles at each other.

One organization in particular has come under fire for its staunch defense of First Amendment rights to speak and assemble in today’s volatile environment: the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been dedicated to defending civil rights such as freedom of speech since its conception in the early 1920s.

The group’s national legal director David Cole ’80 LAW ’84 represented Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler when the Charlottesville city manager withheld the rally permit in an attempt to relocate the rally. The city argued that the new venue — McIntire Park, about a mile away from Emancipation Park — would be safer to manage an expected crowd size in thousands, but the ACLU claimed that revoking Kessler’s permit to rally at Emancipation Park was “based on his viewpoint and was not necessary to achieve any compelling governmental interest.”

A federal judge eventually ruled in favor of Kessler, and the rally proceeded to its deadly end.

Two days after the Unite the Right rally, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe said in a National Public Radio interview that he felt angry that the demonstration was not moved elsewhere, indirectly jabbing at the ACLU’s involvement in Kessler’s legal defense.

The First Amendment rights are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and have been deemed as a defining feature of American democracy. But as the nation faces polarizing political discourse, is hate speech protected by the First Amendment? And after the bloodshed in Charlottesville and other urban centers, is violence a necessary consequence of upholding free speech?

Protestors gather outside of the College formerly known as Calhoun, advocating that John C. Calhoun's namesake be removed from the building.

Waldo Jaquith, who served on the ACLU of Virginia board for two and a half years, publicly announced his resignation on Twitter in the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally.

“We need the ACLU. We need it so much,” he wrote. “But we also need it to change, just a tiny bit: don’t defend Nazis to allow them to kill people.”

Though Jaquith declined my request to comment further on his resignation, claiming that it would be unfair to the colleagues he had left behind, the backlash on the ACLU’s decision to defend Kessler drew considerable traction on social media and news platforms.

K-Sue Park, who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law and who had previously volunteered at the ACLU, left little room for interpretation in her criticism of the organization’s stance. Calling on the civil liberty group to rethink its philosophy, Park argued that defending hate speech merely fuels the radical, spiteful agenda of the far right. “Sometimes standing on the wrong side of history in defense of a cause you think is right is still just standing on the wrong side of history,” she wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

The ACLU has attracted scathing criticism because of its clients before. The last time when the civil liberty group faced staggering reprisal, around 40,000 members handed in their resignations, a number large enough to threaten a budget deficit of the ACLU’s national branch.

That moment of crisis was triggered when the ACLU represented the National Socialist Party of America to fight for the NSPA’s constitutional right to assemble before a predominantly Jewish village hall with Nazi regalia on full display.

In 1977, the NSPA requested to hold a public demonstration — marching through the streets while wearing Nazi uniforms and holding swastikas signs — in Skokie, Ill., where one out of six residents was a Holocaust survivor. The village of Skokie tried to prevent the rally by asking for a $350,000 insurance bond and prohibited any Nazi imagery, citing possible damages to city property and violent confrontations. The local authorities also obtained an injunction against the rally, forcing the NSPA’s plan to a grinding halt.

David Goldberger, the ACLU lawyer who represented the NSPA, said he received party leader Frank Collins’ request for legal counsel the day before the neo-Nazi group was due in court. Still affiliated with the ACLU today, Goldberger told me that Collins’ case struck him as a classic First Amendment rights violation and compared it to Kessler’s case in Charlottesville. At the time, he thought the ramification of losing the case would deal a heavy blow to all the lawsuits that the ACLU was fighting under the First Amendment as well as any future defense for controversial demonstrations.

Hate speech, no matter how unpopular or offensive, is securely shielded under the First Amendment, Goldberger assured me. He added that throughout the years, the Supreme Court has articulated a set of constitutional standards through landmark cases to doggedly guard the extent to which hate speech is protected.

One of the most popular analogies to describe the boundary of free speech is that one cannot falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater, deriving its origin in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s widely cited 1919 opinion in Schenck v. United States. Such speech was prohibited because it presented a “clear and present danger” to the public, according to the opinion. Since this case, whether speech violates the “clear and present danger” test has become a key doctrine in determining if it should be protected.

This standard was put to test throughout pages when speech was used to advance racist agendas in cases such as Brandenburg v. Ohio. Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader in the 1960s, was convicted under the state’s criminal syndicalism statute when he rallied KKK members for possible “revengeance,” if “our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race.”

The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which overturned Brandenburg’s conviction in 1969 by drawing a firm line between merely advocating for a political cause and inciting “imminent lawless action.” This morphed into the modern constitutional standard, Goldberger said, for the specific purpose that no group’s rights would be stripped simply because there is potential for their provocative speech to instigate violence.

In addition to the articulation of the “clear and present danger” clause in 1919 and the “imminent lawless action” test in 1969, free speech is also conditioned on the time, place and manner of expression. For instance, Goldberger explained, if a demonstration chooses to picket the busiest intersection during rush hour, it is reasonable for law enforcement officials to demand that the demonstration be moved onto the sidewalk.

Still, even with these court standards in mind, what seems to clearly demonstrate the letter of the law does not reflect people’s emotional responses.

“I was a little naive about the pushback that was coming [on the Skokie case]. It seemed to me on the law, the case was very straightforward,” Goldberger said. “[But] the pushback was huge and much bigger than anyone has anticipated.”

Regardless of the resistance and of how ACLU’s defenses are perceived by the public, Goldberger stands firmly by the organization’s dedication to upholding First Amendment rights. In his eyes, the ACLU is a principled institution that does not act out of partisanship, and the bloodshed in Charlottesville should not dissuade the organization from carrying out its mission.

“I am sorry to see people take the position like Jaquith, but that’s clearly a person who doesn’t belong in the ACLU because we are an organization that stands for neutral principles,” Goldberger told me. “I think [Jaquith] prefers clients who you invite home for lunch, and that’s just not the ACLU.”

The organization’s national branch lent strength to Goldberger’s legal analysis. Its statement, in the wake of bloodshed at the Unite the Right rally, affirmed the First Amendment’s protection of “vile, hateful and ignorant speech.” Thus it was the ACLU’s obligation to defend Jason Kessler.

Hate speech may be protected by the First Amendment, but when blood is shed, the clear-cut line between what can and cannot be said — and how various individuals draw the line — begins to blur.

New Haven, a city with a nationwide reputation for its liberal traditions and social activism, is left reeling after its experience this summer with a counter-protest gone awry. The local chapter of a national right-wing fraternal organization, the Proud Boys, had planned a rally to protest against socialism on the New Haven Green this July. Augustus Invictus, an alt-right politician who also headlined the Unite the Right rally, was invited to attend.

The Proud Boys, from founder Gavin McInnes to local members across the country, have a litany of ideological beliefs: pro-Western chauvinism, pro-Trump, anti-feminist, anti-Islam, for example, but also anti-Nazi, pro-gay and anti-willful ignorance. After Charlottesville, the group became defensive about being labeled as alt-right or white nationalistic.

When I contacted John Rutledge, an administrator on the “Proud Boys — Connecticut Chapter Vetting Page” on Facebook, he did not accept my interview request and only sent over an article by McInnes, who argued that the Proud Boys is not a white nationalist group because there are minority members in their ranks.

Tommy Arizona, another administrator on the Proud Boys Facebook page, reiterated to me that his group would never inflict any kind of violence, unless it is used in the name of self-defense. In addition, he offered his own theory as to why political rallies nowaday often deteriorate: “mass mob mentality.”

“You have a bunch of people who hate our president and hate our political system and have no idea why,” Arizona wrote. “So they come to these rallies and cause violence and accuse anyone who isn’t on their side of being a Nazi or being a racist.”

Nevertheless, news that a white supremacy group gathering on the Green made its way to the New Haven activist communities, many of which sprung into action and began to organize a counter-protest. The local chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice, an organization with the goal of undermining white support for white supremacy, became one of the leading groups against the impending Proud Boys rally. Natalie Alexander, one of the co-organizers of the counter-protest, later recounted a “strong communications failure” and has since left the organization.

Back in July, SURJ conducted a close call, which means contacting counter-protest attendees individually without making public announcements so that the Proud Boys would not mobilize more of its members in response. But the lack of a public, unified front led to internal confusion among the counter-protest organizers, who did not agree on how violence, or even its implication, could play out on the Green.

Alexander later shared with me a document that SURJ had prepared beforehand to instruct the counter-protesters how to proceed without physical confrontation. It included tips like “stay 15 feet back for the fascist rally,” “use noisemakers altogether to INTERRUPT speakers,” and “stay on the Green for the dance party after the rally.”

But the celebratory dance party never happened.

Alexander told me that counter-protest organizers originally planned to stake out the center of the Green and remain stationary, using only noise to drown out the Proud Boys’ event. But to her surprise, there were individuals, their faces masked by bandanas and sunglasses, who came from out of town and had little affiliation with the local activism community. They came, Alexander added, with the intention of risking police arrest and provoking a violent outburst.

Immediately after the Proud Boys stepped foot on the Green, she recalled seeing several mask-bearing counter-protesters leap from the ground and charge toward them. Though only a handful of Proud Boys came, almost all were chased by one or two menacing counter-protesters who did not hold back on their kicks and punches. One paint-filled balloon landed on a Proud Boy’s neck, coloring the back of his head entirely pink.

“As soon as it turned into the clusterfuck that it was, it was very difficult to distinguish between counter-protesters and people who were just really angry that this was happening on their Green,” Alexander said.

Violence, it seems, could come from both sides.

Almost half a century before the Proud Boys descended upon the New Haven Green, this city grabbed national headlines during the height of the Black Panther trials. All eyes were on the city government and Yale administrators when Yippies like Abbie Hoffman announced that thousands would march onto the streets of New Haven on May 1 of 1970, threatening to burn Yale to the ground during what became known as the “May Day” rally.

Alex Rackley, a Black Panther member, was mistakenly suspected of being an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was tortured and murdered in 1969 by three fellow Panthers, who were eventually arrested and tried for their criminal actions. But the May Day protest was triggered by the arrest of Bobby Seale, the Black Panther national leader, who the Connecticut state attorney believed to have ordered Rackley’s murder.

Outraged by what they considered to be injustice committed upon the African-American community, people of all persuasion, radical or not, were moved to join the May Day protest, trying to forcibly release Seale from prison.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Henry “Sam” Chauncey ’57 was special assistant to former University President Kingman Brewster. He told me that the May Day protest took place in an era when massive political gatherings were not only common on college campuses but also highly likely to turn violent. And the default strategy for school administrators was to lock out the demonstrators completely.

Nevertheless, with an estimate of 50,000 people showing up in the Elm City on May Day, Chauncey was convinced that the traditional solution of relying on law enforcement to bar the entry of the protesters would only end in a bloodbath. Instead, he opted to welcome the protesters with open arms and decided to keep police presence strictly controlled.

“The principle behind the plan was that most radicals are people who have a belief which is not consistent with the norms in the current society,” Chauncey said. “[But] they are not harmful or out to cause physical damage.”

Chauncey began to coordinate with the former NHPD Police Chief James Ahern to keep those with the sole purpose of wreaking havoc at bay. Militant left-wing groups like the Weathermen, who Chauncey considered as having no central philosophical standing and only promoted destructive violence, were prohibited from entering the city while all other radical factions were accommodated with three meals a day and a place to sleep.

Yale students — only around 25 of whom decided to leave town before the two-day rally — were recruited to guide or volunteer. Residential colleges were assigned specific roles: for example, Pierson College was the medical infirmary and Davenport College served as a child care center.

Yet, the most daring but clairvoyant plan was asking Ahern to command all law enforcement authorities, Chauncey said, which included the Department of Justice, the Marines, the FBI and 5,000 National Guards. This marked the only time in American history when a local police chief is given command of the federal troop. Unfazed, Ahern ordered that all bullets be removed from firearms and stationed the police far from the boundaries of the Green. Photos from May Day show few uniformed officers — Chauncey told me that only around a dozen or so plainclothes were scattered through a crowd of around 35,000.

“When Ahern took control of all the police forces and the military, he made everyone take out bullets in their guns. It had always been our philosophy that talk is better than guns,” he said.

I asked Chauncey whether Yale exported this model of preparation. But he let out a sigh and explained that after four students were fatally shot by the National Guard during the Kent State University rally in 1970, no peaceful campus demonstration comparable in size to May Day ever occurred in the country. Perhaps this is a history lesson that police departments in the country today have forgotten, or have never learned, he added.

Comparing the level of preparedness between the May Day protest and the Unite the Right rally, Chauncey was cautious to point fingers to the UVA and Charlottesville police force. But Goldberger did not mince his words when I asked what could have been done differently to change the deadly outcome.

“There is no public assembly that can’t be managed if there are sufficient police and law enforcement authorities and they are properly planned,” Goldberger insisted.

As he was watching TV news report on the rally earlier in the day, Goldberger said he was taken back by the lack of police skirmish line between the white supremacists and the counter-protesters. He tried to rationalize this hands-off decision by positing that police officers might have considered their presence to be provocative to civilians. But he quickly discredited this line of reasoning and exclaimed that it is not “rocket science” to implement a neutral area separating confrontational individuals on both sides.

“Frankly, if you really think about what happened, it’s miraculous that the death occurred not by an action of the demonstrators as part of the demonstration,” he said. “It was a one-off by a crazy man.”

Yale, embracing the full force of the May Day rally with detailed preparation, escaped a potentially catastrophic conflict unscathed, while the Charlottesville demonstrations lacked proper law enforcement coordination. But this argument does not answer whether violence is inherent to the nature of heavily partisan, highly emotional ideological conflicts.

The Unite the Right rally upended Heather Heyer’s family, and sent ripples to communities from all sides of the political spectrum. As UVA students begin their new academic year, the rally became the colloquial “elephant” in the room.

Brendan Novak, the opinion editor at UVA’s campus newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, told me that campus conversations around race relations almost always begin with a tribute to Heyer. A second-year student, Novak made national news because of his two opinion columns, which documented his change of heart before and after Aug. 12.

Two weeks before the Charlottesville rally, Novak wrote a column arguing in favor of letting Kessler hold his white nationalist demonstration. He had hoped that these “petulant racists” would openly display “the rotting moral of their ideology,” so that onlookers would come to realize that groups like the KKK are dying organizations.

But what he saw on Aug. 12 completely defied his expectations. Realizing that Kessler and his cohorts had little intention of participating in public discourse, Novak wrote in his second column two days later that violent intimidation and harassment should be grounds to disqualify their alt-right assembly.

I probed him further on his second column, asking if it is possible to have right-wing extremist demonstrations without physical harm. Clearly hard-pressed for an answer, Novak admitted that though these rallies could proceed peacefully in theory, they have shown a record of devolving in reality.

“It’s a blurry line and I can’t pretend to be smart enough to know where to draw the line. But, I know that it takes a nuance,” he said. “It’s not free speech matters so much so that anything goes.”

The Other Calhoun

By David Yaffe-Bellany

Published on April 22, 2017

The largest community college in Alabama overlooks a barren stretch of highway just north of the old industrial city of Decatur. Constructed in the early 1960s, the red brick complex abuts a small airport where U.S. Army pilots trained during World War II. A gas station and a Subway franchise are the only other landmarks in sight. This campus in suburban Alabama is separated from Yale University by nearly 1,000 miles of land and a seemingly infinite amount of wealth and academic prestige. But the college does have one timely connection to Yale: It is named after John C. Calhoun.

Calhoun Community College is a two-year institution serving roughly 10,000 students, almost a fifth of whom are black. It offers classes in welding and pipe fitting as well as math and history. The college’s mascot is the Warhawk — a reference to Calhoun’s support for the War of 1812 — and the main hangout area on campus is called the Hawk’s Nest. A portrait of Calhoun hangs in the library.

But over the past year and a half, as Yale has weathered a heated debate over the name of its own Calhoun College — culminating this February in the University’s decision to rename the building in honor of computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper GRD ’34 — the community college located just off Highway 31 North in Decatur has been untouched by controversy.

As virtually every student at Yale now knows, Calhoun, a graduate of the class of 1804, was a prominent South Carolina politician who unapologetically promoted chattel slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War. A pioneering political theorist and the only American to serve as vice-president in two different administrations, Calhoun was also, even by the standards of the antebellum South, an extraordinarily virulent white supremacist, a champion of states’ rights who famously argued that slavery was “a positive good.” But at Calhoun Community College, the background of the school’s namesake remains unfamiliar to the vast majority of students, many of whom have never even heard his full name.

“I don’t think they know there’s a ‘John C’ in front of the Calhoun,” one Calhoun Community College student explained to me over lunch last month.

In March, I flew to Decatur, Alabama to ask students at Calhoun Community College what they thought about their college’s name. The campus I encountered could not have been less like Yale. At the other Calhoun, naming — an issue that has engaged students across the Ivy League for the past 18 months — simply does not register as a legitimate concern.

One of the first students I met at Calhoun was Antoinette Brown, a black woman who serves as president of the college’s student council. After graduating high school in 2015, Brown moved to Alabama from her home in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, carrying with her sad memories of her father, who had recently died of liver cancer. I asked Brown about John C. Calhoun. She said most students she knows have better things to worry about than the name of their college.

“Some people have jobs, some people have kids to take care of, some people have to worry about when they’re going to get their next paycheck to pay off the bills, or they might be in debt, or they might have to worry about how to figure out college tuition, or about their family and their parents,” she said. “It’s just the name of the school. They have other things that are more important.”

Calhoun Community College is far from the only place in the United States that still carries John C. Calhoun’s name. The church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine black parishioners were shot to death in the summer of 2015 is located on Calhoun Street, just half a block away from an 80-foot monument topped by a statue of the state’s former senator. A lake in Minnesota is also named for Calhoun. So are a small town in Mississippi and a larger one in Georgia.

The college is arguably not even the most significant tribute to Calhoun in the state of Alabama. About 150 miles south of Decatur lies the city of Anniston, the government seat of Calhoun County, a 612-square-mile region named in honor of the antebellum statesman. But in light of Yale’s headline-grabbing naming debate, the story of Calhoun Community College is especially compelling — a vivid illustration of two opposing poles in higher education and a powerful example of the regional divisions that still define American politics and culture.

—

Calhoun Community College opened in 1941 as the Decatur Trade School, an industrial facility where students learned to make military supplies during World War II. Students at the trade school took welding classes and learned to read blueprints and operate radios. After the war, the school moved to a plot of land next to Pryor Field Regional Airport and was renamed the Tennessee Valley Vocational Technical School. In the early 1960s, as part of a statewide education initiative engineered by then-Gov. George Wallace, it expanded to include a junior college as well as a vocational facility.

(Photo by David Yaffe-Bellany)

In the North, Wallace is best known for his intransigent opposition to the civil rights movement. At his inauguration in 1963, he famously promised, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But during his first term as governor, Wallace also established some dozen junior colleges across Alabama to revitalize the state economy by preparing high school graduates for the workforce. Nationwide, the 1960s represented a period of significant growth for the community college system, as nearly 500 new facilities opened across the country to keep up with demand from the baby-boom generation.

Robert Norrell, a history professor at the University of Tennessee who is an expert on race relations in the South, said Wallace used the colleges partly as a patronage network to reward political supporters with jobs and construction projects in their hometowns. And according to Yale graduate student Justin Randolph GRD ’20, who attended community college in Alabama and is writing his history dissertation on the 20th-century South, the initiative may also have been designed to improve Alabama’s reputation at a time when the state was under intense national scrutiny because of its resistance to the civil rights movement. “Part of it is this impetus: All eyes are on us, we have to show some kind of modernizing, civilizing or moderating of our political attitudes,” he said.

That impulse apparently did not sway the state Board of Education when it chose names for the new junior colleges in the mid-1960s. Although honorees included early American heroes like Thomas Jefferson, the board also named colleges after such Confederate icons as Joseph Wheeler and Jefferson Davis. And for the junior college opening next door to the Tennessee Valley Vocational Technical School, the board picked John C. Calhoun — “a strong advocate for states’ rights,” as Wallace put it at the college’s dedication ceremony in 1966.

“The Confederate past was romanticized and celebrated as a challenge to the civil rights movement. In the political culture of that time, there was a lot of impulse to celebrate the Confederacy,” Norrell said. “Calhoun didn’t have anything to do with the Confederacy, but he was a symbol of pro-slavery, anti-national government states’ rights — the view that slavery was a good thing in Southern life.”

In the following decades, Calhoun grew to become the largest community college in Alabama, opening a second campus in Huntsville in the mid-1990s and a new arts facility in downtown Decatur last year. But despite the black-and-white portrait of Calhoun that still hangs in the campus library, the history of the college’s namesake has been largely forgotten. Janet Kincherlow-Martin, the college’s public affairs liaison, estimated that 85 percent of current students would not recognize the name John C. Calhoun.

When I arrived in Alabama, I soon found that the cities of Decatur and Huntsville are full of former Calhoun students, whether graduates of the college now working at local businesses or blue-collar employees who took just enough credits to earn a raise. But almost none of the alumni I approached knew anything about the college’s namesake. On the cab ride from Huntsville Airport to my hotel in Decatur, I learned that my driver Hazm Saleem, a 48-year-old Iraqi who worked as an interpreter for the Army after immigrating to the United States in the early 1990s, had taken a handful of online classes through Calhoun in 2013. Saleem described the school as “awesome” — cheap, easy to get into and not much work.

But when I asked whether he had heard of Calhoun the man, Saleem paused and then slowly shook his head. “I’ve never known nothing about him,” he said. “I’ve always thought this is a guy who decided to establish a community college, and had the money to do it. It’s like a business and you put your name on it, that’s what I thought.”

I told Saleem that Calhoun was an outspoken slavery supporter in the 19th century. Saleem started to laugh. At the next traffic light, he scrolled through his iPhone contacts, pointing excitedly to all his black friends, some of them fellow cab drivers who currently study at Calhoun. “They’re all black. They should’ve known,” he said. “I don’t think one of them does.”

As we sped through downtown Decatur, Saleem clicked on a contact ambiguously labeled “Chris or Jamal.”

“Do you know who’s Calhoun?” Saleem shouted into the phone.

“Huh?”

He rolled his eyes. “Who’s the guy who it’s named after, the college?”

“Calhoun? President or something, I don’t know. What is this shit?”

Saleem roared with laughter. “You stupid, man. That guy supported slavery!”

—

Tariona Adams never planned to attend Calhoun Community College. As the star power forward for the women’s basketball team at her high school in Athens, Alabama, a city a few miles north of Decatur, Adams seemed destined for bigger things, maybe even the W.N.B.A. She earned a full ride to Columbia State Community College in southern Tennessee and was set to start for the basketball team. But after a few months, Adams grew to resent the daily grind of college sports — a morning run, followed by classes, a gym workout and then more classes. At the same time, her grandmother was battling cancer, and her nine-year-old sister was in and out of the hospital with a variety of ailments.

“It’s hard to keep faith when you have school, you have a sport, you have family issues and all that,” said Adams, who is black. “You have got to keep the faith, and that time I had lack of faith, and I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

Adams quit the basketball team at Columbia State and transferred to Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. But she had to travel home most weekends to take care of her grandmother, and the two-hour drive from Tuscaloosa to Athens was a tiring routine. So last January, Adams enrolled at Calhoun with dreams of breaking into the music industry like her favorite artist Lil Wayne.

Adams called Calhoun “a great school” and praised the network of advisors who help guide students to their degrees. Still, she regrets throwing away her basketball prospects after a few tough practices at Columbia State. “I have a best friend that plays for Northwest Florida, and she always calls me and tells me what goes on. That just brings back memories,” Adams said. “And then I could run into my high school coach, and it just brings back memories as well. I do miss it. I do.”

Adams is hardly the only student to arrive at Calhoun after missed opportunities, bad luck or a family crisis. One aspiring artist told me she was forced to turn down a slot at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Oregon because her family couldn’t afford to send her out of state. Another student spent two years at home in nearby Hartsville after he finished high school, doing little but playing video games. He enrolled at Calhoun last year because he had “nothing better to do.”

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 40 percent of American undergraduates attend two-year public or private colleges. A community college experience is far more typical in American higher education than four years at an elite institution like Yale. The students I met at Calhoun lead very different lives than Yale undergraduates. Most live in Huntsville or Decatur, not San Francisco or New York. Some are adults, like Saleem, my cab driver, earning credits toward a long-sought degree or a quick promotion at work. Others finished high school in the mid-2000s, worked for a few years and only recently found time to pursue further education. Although Calhoun has a successful baseball program, best known for producing the former New York Yankees catcher Jorge Posada, most students do not participate in sports or extracurricular clubs.

“With us being a commuter college, our students are here for one reason: They come here, go to class and then they leave,” Kincherlow-Martin told me. “It’s a much different environment than a residential institution. The only hanging out they do would be between classes.”

—

On my first day visiting the Decatur campus, I stopped by the Hawk’s Nest, a lounge area connected to the library where students sometimes go to eat lunch or play table tennis. I started chatting with David Orme, a 17-year-old business major who was collecting signatures for a new fraternity, Iota Theta Kappa, that he hopes to start at Calhoun. In high school, Orme played varsity baseball and was good enough to be recruited by Wallace State, a local community college named after the former governor. But at the end of his sophomore year, Orme was caught with 16 marijuana joints in his backpack and promptly expelled from school. “I don’t smoke anymore,” he said. “That really kind of ruined the fun for me.”

After his expulsion, Orme was home-schooled by his father and managed to graduate a year early. Now he plans to pursue a career in management, possibly as the chief financial officer at a major company. But he knew little about John C. Calhoun — he thought I might be referring to the actor John C. Reilly — and when I explained the situation at Yale, he reacted with disdain.

“That’s just stupid,” Orme said. “I’m going to be no one’s hero when I say this, but it’s stupid. It’s a building name.”

Orme was joined at the table by Jay Foster, a biochemistry student finishing his last semester at Calhoun. Foster enrolled at Calhoun in 2015 because of his family’s straitened finances: Suffering from bone spurs and three types of arthritis, his father had recently been forced to leave his welding job. “He’s had to work hard his entire life, and that put kind of a financial strain on us,” Foster said. A self-described “history buff,” Foster was the only student I met who knew anything about John C. Calhoun. But like Orme, he was unimpressed by my account of the renaming protests at Yale.

“It’s a reason for people to whine, because they have nothing else to whine about,” Foster said. “There are much worse things going on than [having] to live in a building named for some guy that’s been dead for a hundred-and-something years.”

Foster and Orme are fervent supporters of President Donald Trump, and both expressed profound distrust for the brand of liberal campus politics that drove Yale’s renaming movement. At one point during the presidential election campaign, Orme said he was reprimanded by a “super left” teacher for wearing his bright-red “Make America Great Again” hat to school. Foster spoke sarcastically about “the great privilege” of sitting between a “staunch female Hillary supporter and a staunch female Bernie Sanders supporter” in a class last semester.

As he scrolled through basketball scores on his laptop, Orme said he could imagine a naming debate taking place at Calhoun — but not about the school’s notorious namesake.

“If there was a building here named after Malcolm X — like the Malcolm X Hall of Science — there’d be some uproar about that,” he said.

—

It took Yale decades of debate and more than a year and a half of protests, committee meetings and administrative backpedaling to rename Calhoun College. But the official process was always in the University’s hands. At its meeting last February, the Yale Corporation voted to rename Calhoun based on the recommendation of a faculty task force, reversing its decision a year earlier to keep the college name. The change will officially go into effect July 1.

As a public institution, Calhoun Community College does not have that same freedom, according to Kincherlow-Martin. A name change request would have to work its way through the college administration and eventually receive approval from the state legislature. “If everybody in north Alabama decided today we don’t like that name, it doesn’t matter what we like, because there is a process we have to follow to get our name,” she said.

But any attempt to rename Calhoun Community College would face a further obstacle: The college’s administrators are not interested in having this debate. In August 2015, Yale President Peter Salovey used his annual Freshman Address to open a campuswide discussion about naming and historical symbolism. “Members of the class of 2019, here is your first hard problem,” he said. “Welcome to Yale!” By contrast, the president of Calhoun Community College, a former South Carolina legislator named Jim Klauber who arrived on campus two years ago, refused to meet with me to discuss the college name. The acting chancellor of the Alabama Community College System, Jimmy Baker, did not return my phone call.

“The chancellor has made it clear that he would prefer for President Klauber not to speak on it at all,” Kincherlow-Martin told me about a week before I showed up on campus. “That needs to be the end of any conversation.”

As I started asking more questions and contacting college faculty, it became increasingly clear that the Calhoun administration was desperate to avoid the monthslong naming debate that took place at Yale.

One day in February, Kincherlow-Martin called to tell me that Calhoun’s faculty and staff are not allowed to speak to the press without her permission. A few instructors had complained to her about the emails I had sent them, she said. I pointed out that three faculty members had said they would be happy to talk to me. Kincherlow-Martin replied that some instructors “have an agenda” and accused me of “trying to stir up controversy.” During one particularly tense phone call a week before I was scheduled to fly to Alabama, Kincherlow-Martin threatened to kick me off campus if I continued asking questions about John C. Calhoun. That afternoon, she sent a mass email to faculty and staff reminding them to check with her before speaking to the press.

After I arrived on campus in early March, I visited the office of Gene Barnett, a history instructor who had replied enthusiastically to my initial email about the story. As soon as I uttered the words “Yale Daily News,” the previously affable Barnett retreated into a defensive crouch. “You have to talk to Ms. Janet Martin on the third floor of the math and science building,” he said. “I was told to tell you to go see Ms. Janet Martin on the third floor of the math and science building.”

(Photo by David Yaffe-Bellany)

I thanked Barnett for his time and turned to leave. But before I reached the door, he started to speak again. “I have this real bad habit,” he said. “I like having a roof over my head, I like having food to eat and I like riding my horses. And for that, I need a job.”

It was easy to see why Klauber and Kincherlow-Martin might be unhappy that I was coming to campus. After taking over as president in 2015, Klauber ousted three high-ranking college administrators at a cost of around $300,000. A public records request by the Decatur Daily unearthed abuse complaints against the administrators, as well as allegations of financial impropriety. I figured the last thing Klauber needed was another problematic story about Calhoun.

But the college’s resistance to my questions about John C. Calhoun may have deeper historical roots than the administrative upheaval of 2015. In his 2007 book about opposition to the civil rights movement in Mississippi, titled “In Search of Another Country,” the historian Joseph Crespino used the term “racial troubleshooting” to describe a public relations strategy designed to head off racial controversies. When I told Randolph, the Yale graduate student, about my experiences at Calhoun, he said the opposition I had faced from the administration was an example of that phenomenon.

“All these communications and public relations jobs in these small institutions actually came directly out of the civil rights movement,” Randolph said. “Everyone had to have a racial troubleshooter — that’s straight out of 1955.”

On my second day at Calhoun, I went to the third floor of the math and science building to meet with Kincherlow-Martin in person. As I waited in the lobby, her secretary presented me with a “swag bag” of college merchandise: a pen, a key ring, a pack of Post-its — all emblazoned with the word “Calhoun.”

A few minutes later, I followed Kincherlow-Martin into her office, where she sat behind a desk cluttered with papers and promised no more than 15 minutes of her time. At first, she was suspicious and combative, interrupting to ask why I had really come to Alabama. But as I explained the purpose of my trip — to learn about life at the “other Calhoun,” not to stir up controversy — she gradually seemed to warm to me, opening up about her own experiences as a woman of color in Alabama. Kincherlow-Martin has worked at Calhoun for nearly 30 years, but she didn’t learn who John C. Calhoun was until the late 1990s.

Yale decided to rename Calhoun College because his legacy conflicted with the University’s mission. Kincherlow-Martin said she understands why Yale came to that conclusion, but she rejected the notion that the history of the antebellum South has any bearing on the mission of her college. “Our mission is our mission,” she said. “Our mission has nothing to do with what our name is.”

As the interview drew to a close, I told Kincherlow-Martin that students in Calhoun College used to refer to themselves as “Hounies” or members of the “Houn.” She said the “Houn” abbreviation has also caught on in Decatur — much to her distress. “Our name is Calhoun,” she said. “I’m an official kind of person.”

“Don’t you think if somebody should be upset about it, it should be someone who looks like me?” she added. “I’m not getting caught up in what happened 75 years ago, when someone named us. A lot of what you all are talking about, we’ve lived forever. So we’ve tried to move to the positive, because we have lived it as opposed to talking about it.”

—

The renaming protests at Yale were part of a broader campus movement. The students who took to the streets over the name of Calhoun College also demanded that Yale hire more black faculty members and provide greater support to the four cultural centers. “There are many Yale students, and faculty and staff, who have also encountered the legacy of racism, who live it as well as talk about it,” said Julia Adams, head of the newly renamed Hopper College. “Students at Yale hail from a wide range of economic circumstances, too. The image of Yale may make this harder to see, but it is more and more the case each year.”

In the fall of 2015, as racially charged protests rippled across universities nationwide, from Yale to Missou to Pomona, the main campus of Calhoun Community College remained quiet. This February, when the Yale trustees voted to rename Calhoun College after a female pioneer, barely anyone in Decatur heard the news. At the Calhoun in Alabama, the only thing students complain about is the shortage of parking spaces in front of campus buildings, Kincherlow-Martin said.

When I met Tariona Adams, the former basketball player, she was listening to music in the Chasteen Student Center, next to the campus’ main administrative building. It was around noon, and Adams was already done with class for the day. I asked if there was anything about Calhoun she would like to change. She said it would be great if the college had a basketball team.

(Photo by David Yaffe-Bellany)

Adams had never heard of John C. Calhoun, even though her history class recently finished a unit on the Civil War. “I just came here, so I don’t know too much about the background,” she said. “But I will. I will truly.”

I told her that Yale students believed the name of Calhoun College was a distraction from their education, an assault on their senses that prevented them from concentrating on schoolwork or enjoying themselves outside of class. Adams said the Yale students were being ridiculous.

“Just because they’re in a building it gets in the way of their education? Really? I have to disagree,” she said. “Just because they’re in the building they can’t focus or they can’t get their education? That has nothing to do with it. I could be in a room full of whites, and that’s not going to stop me from getting my education. I could be in an abandoned building, and if a teacher’s in there, she knows what she’s talking about, there’s nothing to stop me from getting my education — nothing. I love my education. That’s why I’ve been to so many schools, because I wouldn’t stop.”

Adams shook her head in disbelief when I told her Yale’s Calhoun College had been renamed in early February. “That’s just outrageous,” she said. “This just happened?” I nodded.

Orme and Foster viewed Yale’s renaming protests as the pathetic antics of politically correct liberals. But for Adams, the naming controversy was a powerful symbol of something altogether different — the cultural and economic gulf between her community college in the deep South and the wealth and privilege of the Ivy League.

“It’s different up there than down here. We just don’t act like that,” Adams said, her voice quavering with emotion. “Education is a gift. I’m not going to let a building stop me from getting my education.”

The Man Alone and I

By Stephen Williams-Ortega

Published on April 6, 2017

I was sitting at my desk, still stranded in the Oregon Country, when someone came to knock at my door frame. It was late. I was burning lamplight to stare brick-stupid at my notebook, to pretend I was writing something of use. But a blank page wasn’t of any use to a reader, and disregard the frauds who’ll tell you that it’s somehow of any use to a writer. It’s of no use to a writer who can’t think of something to write.

They knocked again on my door frame, and in a voice full of sullen hostility I answered, “What?” I can’t imagine they thought me awake at that hour of the night, unless someone saw the lamp burning through my window.

“Are you decent?” It was Lizzie, Tull’s second wife. I recognized her voice, her heft and insolent pride and confidence of carriage through the rice paper.

“You going to come in and check?” The blank page and late hour had gone and put me in a bad mood, but then, Elizabeth Tull could put me in a bad mood with a doctoral dissertation under my arm and a bright clear picnic lunch.

“Clem wants to see you,” she said, pretty flatly and not interested in me giving her a hard time.

I leaned back in my chair and dug around for something smug to say, but she wouldn’t let me. “Boy, get out of that bed before I light a fire under it.”

I picked up my eyeglasses and slung them over my ears. “Gee, Lizzie,” I said. “Don’t I deserve my day of rest?” I closed the notebook heavily and my pencils rattled on the creaking wood. “Isn’t it Sunday?” Begone ye damned gremlins, begone you detestable bondage of the mind.

“Boy,” she began, but didn’t continue. I sat in apprehension, half at my desk, half-cocked to get up and put on a coat. Outside, at my screen, I heard muttering. “Then you talk to him,” she said, annoyed, but not loud enough for it to fully traverse the thick pitchy darkness of my attic room.

Someone — I presumed Lizzie — thumped down the stairs in percussive annoyance, and a few seconds later there was a much lighter rapping on my door frame. I heard Lizzie’s footsteps receding in the hall below me. “Yeah?” I called.

“Are you awake?” The voice was younger and lighter, and not half as bold as Lizzie’s, with its outcropping of terse attitude. But I was hired help, and she was the successor matriarch, so things were pretty clear there. “Parker?” she asked very quickly. It was Ruth, Tull’s eldest, half-Japanese from his first wife, who I’d only seen in a photograph in the dining room. Ruth and I rolled in the hay when nobody was looking, and I’d hug her like a puppy just come in from the rain. I expect she figured me for a husband, excepting I wasn’t intending to stick around in Oregon to get myself a wife, and I didn’t figure her one to want to go back down to Santa Clara and leave her family behind.

“You’ve caught me in the middle of a dream,” I said. She didn’t say anything back. “You’ve caught me sleepwalking.”

“Daddy wants to see you,” she said through the rice paper, and her voice was tremulous, and I wondered for a moment if he hadn’t somehow figured I was in with his daughter, though if he had, I figured, he’d probably just kill me quick and be done with it; decapitate me with that katana of his hanging in the parlor under his Winchester.

“Why?” I asked her.

Her voice quavered. Aw, she was a delicate girl, real Classical and virginal in her mode and mannerisms. Plus, she took after some hidden genes in her daddy, and she had all the fairness of a debutante with the fine-boned grace of her mother. “You’d better go see him.”

“Well,” I said, annoyed, and trying not to be flippant with the girl. “I’d better go see him.” I stood up to put some decent clothes on and heard the wood groan as she leaned against it. “You coming in?”

She slid open the screen. She was wearing red gingham that it sort of looked like she’d thrown on over her nightshirt. She was barefoot and her hair was wild, and she was really lovely, though the dark framed her like a chiaroscuro painting — or maybe because of it, her skin which was really pretty pale beneath her field tan so bright against the shadowed attic. She stood in the doorway clutching onto the placket of her shirt like it she couldn’t trust its buttons.

I gathered her up into my arms and felt good with her against me, since it’s not like I got to hold her altogether that often, busy and crowded as this place was. She let her hands go from her breast and wrapped them around my hips, holding on to me through my undershirt. She had a chill on her face and body.

“What’s the matter, amor?” I asked. Spanish would get her every time, seeing as all they spoke in Oregon was Japanese and plain American English.

“You better go see daddy,” she said, shivering, and when I let her go she went and sat on my bed, back against the wall, one leg crossed under the other. She played with the ends of her hair in her lap. I threw on brogans and a three-button shirt and then pulled on a flannel against the pine tree night and its hand-in-hand chill.

“Did I wake you?” she asked as I was lacing up my shoes. It was characteristic: Something goes bump in the dark and Clemson Tull is waiting for me past midnight, and she was worried about my rest and health.

“Naw,” I said. “Naw. I was working.” I crossed to my empty notebook and took the lantern from its surface. The light pitched in the room, and it threw full and bright against her, and she was lit in its roundish glow on my bedroll like a figure in a cameo.

“Were you getting a lot done?” she asked, and looked at my desk, with its messy stacks of notebooks and reference books and mismatched papers. My suitcase sat under it all, deflated by my stay in Oregon, only transient in name. That was like her, too. Her sweetheart was an important postgraduate from California, in case you were asking, an intellectual anthropologist, and it tickled her ever so much that I should come up to this nowhere corner of the abandoned Oregon Country to write about her and her family and her folks and land.

“Course,” I lied, and gave her a big moon-pie smile. She wasn’t the sort for me to explain these writerly distinctions to, these widgets and grommets. If it gave her pleasure to call me sweetheart and call me Washington Irving, that I’d stay on here in Kirikabu, send off to Santa Clara for my things, and we’d be these cultured czars of the piney land — God bless her. God bless her. “Close your eyes, amor,” I told her, and though my Spanish was bad she had no way of knowing, and it was like maple to her.

森林

Tull hollered to me when I came out onto the porch. He was standing in the grass and darkness away from the house, a little humanish shape lit by a lantern held at waist height. I closed the shoji screen behind me and went to go join him.

He didn’t talk to me, just grunted when I got to him and we walked out into the night, coursing through his property, through the cleared parts, and then into the pines, out until I gathered we were somewhere along the edge. He had his Colt tucked into the big hip pocket of his lumber jacket, and a lantern in one hand. He flexed his jaw like a ruminant, and I saw him kind of look around like he was searching in the black spaces between the trees. And then, when he saw it, I figured, he kind of cocked his head like he’d just been slapped, and he led me a few feet away until we were standing the two of us over a dead body.

It was thrown flat to the ground, one arm up and one arm down, sort of like a cactus you might see if you went far east of Santa Clara like we did once or twice to study Indians in undergraduate. It had been a white fellow, with hair that was light but dirty, and some freckles or grime splattered on the pale skin. It was wearing a sheepskin jacket and dungarees, and a pair of brogans more or less like mine, and except for the face whose dead eye was obvious and glassy, and the two big blooming daubs of blood across its back, you could hardly tell it was a corpse. It was an it — that part was very important, was that, having not seen altogether that many corpses in my time (though more than a few like I said when I studied the Indians in Nevada, what with burial customs and all), I, without thinking, decided that a corpse wasn’t a person any more than beef was a cow.

Deciding that was easy enough, unconscious and all, but I wasn’t any less shocked. I looked for a while with Tull, staring at the body, sort of caught off guard by the sudden appearance of this personlike thing, laying out in the pinewoods at two or three in the morning with the sky black as tar. After a while I turned to look at Tull and asked him, “Did you do this?”

“Yup,” said Tull, and moved his tongue around in his mouth like it was cud, it being characteristic of him.

“OK,” I said, and rattled things around in my head. The bridge of my eyeglasses felt very tight and I wanted to take them off and pinch my nose. But I didn’t, not in front of my landlord and employer and prospective father-in-law, whose easy attitude toward death, heretofore only understood secondhand, was now so neatly on display like men’s suits in the display window of a Mitsukoshi. “How?”

“’Chiro doesn’t do watch on Saturday nights,” he said curtly, which I understood well enough. Junichiro, the other logger and farmhand, did night watches Monday and Wednesday. I did them Tuesday and Thursday, and Tull did them Friday and Saturday. Sundays we sort of made a party of it and would walk around with growlers and tobacco. So Junichiro was at home in town where he would be on Saturdays, and that was fine, but it still didn’t really come to explain how there was this dead body out on the edges of the pines. I said as much.

Tull grunted not unsympathetic to my concerns. “I caught him coming on through the trees.”

“And you killed him?” I asked.

“Yup,” he said, sure of it.

“What if he was just some drunk jerk?” I asked.

Tull grunted at that too, ’cause he’d sort of thought of everything. He adjusted his grip on the lantern and leaned forward to turn the corpse over with his toe. The body flopped in the brush, and I saw first the bullet wounds in his chest, then the double-cocked sawn-off under him, half-sticky with blood and coated with dead leaves and little clods of dirt.

“Aw,” I said. “OK.” He grunted in response.

森林

Come Monday we were on the road just after dawn. Junichiro met us about two miles in. He had his own horse, and Tull and I rode in the wagon. I took the reins and he sort of propped his feet up on the board and watched the light coming up through the trees. We all said our ohayous and then Junichiro fell into place with the wagon. Day before, Junichiro came up to the house with his wife and kid, and after Sunday dinner we told him about the body — or I told him, and Tull sort of corroborated everything I said with a nod here or there and the utterance, “Yup.” After that we burned it and did our rounds, and didn’t catch anything but maybe cold.

Still, on the road into town, I couldn’t exactly help but wonder if maybe I wouldn’t stick around too long in the Oregon Country any more, seeing as I’d been away from California for a long time — at least, that’s how I figured then, because apocalypses are easy to imagine, but things falling apart, little things, well, can’t a man on earth do that with cool comfort. Not for nothing, but we’d strapped up that morning. We’d loaded the wagon with timber and fur, and then Tull had his Colt and I had me a LeMat tucked into the inside flap of my lumber coat, uncocked but yeah, fully loaded with even a shotshell in the chin gun.

Junichiro was a quiet fellow but I figured him for good company, in spite of all that. He had a little dusting of beard on his face the way a lot of these Oregon-born colonists tended to have, when most of the older folks come into the territory from Japan were baldfaced. Then there weren’t a whole lot of old folks around, especially not out here in the backcountry, but there were a handful come in originally on the Omikami and her sister ships. He had a little house in the sticks, with a few dozen acres of wood that were his own, but he’d been working for Tull for as long as I had, and longer obviously. He had a wife named Keiko, and a daughter named Chie, who were nice enough, but generally quieter than Tull’s clan, it being the Japanese way and all.

Furthermore, he had the not unpleasant habit of asking me intellectual questions, and though he was a colony-born fellow, I gathered that his parents kept him literate, God bless them, and he knew the sorts of things about Japan and Japanese that you might expect a fellow to know. So in this particular case, on the road to New Otaru, we were talking about the Indians in Nevada, and how I’d studied them for a few months in my undergraduate years. There were not so many Indians in the Oregon Country any more, seeing as the ones with any sense had moved to Canada, so they were sort of alien to a Japanman. I got the feeling he had a hard time wrapping his head around how there could be so many of one sort of person in a place at one time, that’s the Indians, and then — there be gone. Because even when the Japanese come over from the Home Islands on the Omikami, even when they planted the Rising Sun Flag on Cape Lookout, staked out a piece of our bright continent for themselves, the Indians were pretty much gone from the Oregon Country. I suppose white folks had chased them all off, in years from when you called the Rump State the United States of America and were proud of it instead of puckish.

“Do you have interest in the Indians of Oregon?” he asked me. His body, lean and casual on horseback, nodded back and forth with his mare’s steady pacing.

“Interest,” I said. “Interest, sure. But I’d have to go on up to Canada for that. I don’t know when I’m gonna get up there.”

Junichiro shrugged. He was wearing a shearling jacket and had this old beat-up Boss of the Plains hat I never saw him do work without, the color of clabber on his head. The jacket was heavy on his body, and made him look thickset as one of the sumo wrestlers he’d told me about, queer custom as it was. “When you finish your book about us,” he said, and I thought that was characteristic, a bit off-putting, because, hell, my research was pointedly not about the Tulls, or Junichiro, or any of the people I’d met in Oregon. It simply wasn’t how capital-A Anthropology worked. But these folks couldn’t or I think didn’t want to wrap their heads around that, because in their heads a little bit after they got done being raw with me, I think I excited them— college-educated California man, university man. And I was fit to cut lumber and kill beavers with the rest of them, maybe not the best of them, but at this point, how much was Oregon a frontier, really, and how much was it just sort of half-abandoned by any effort other than a million or so trappers and lumberjacks all aiming to get by, and the leftovers of a colony the last bank Panic went and left behind?

I was gonna respond, but someone down the road called out, “Howdy,” to us. I turned from Junichiro to look through the thick Pacific air. There was an urbane-looking fellow in a gray-blue suit with kempt whiskers a little ways away from us. I glanced at Tull. He was looking ahead at the fellow, rolling his jaw around. He gave a little tilt of the head that I interpreted as a nod.

“Ho, fella,” I called out to him, and slowed the mules. I took a second, better, look, and made out some other figures thumping in the morning mist. I wasn’t necessarily ready to call them goons, but was, I thought, sharp enough to assume in good faith that they were with the dandy in one capacity or another.

The fellow approached us at a trot, and I saw he did indeed have two Oregonian-looking dudes with him, wearing dungarees and knit caps. One was sort of heavy with a strawberry beard, and had mean dumb eyes like a pig, and the other one had short-cropped dark hair on his face, and one heavy eyebrow. They were riding mules and yeah, pretty clearly they were carrying guns. OK.

“You wanna ask your sweethearts to put away their pistols, there?” I asked the dandy, and stopped our mules.

The fellow reined in his horse, this lovely gray dappled mare with a low bashful-looking mane. He was wearing a nice felt bowler that made him look a sight more lantern-jawed than I think he actually was. “I ain’t a slave-driver,” said the fellow, and offered me a smile made sharper by his shaped whiskers. “They can do what they want.”

“OK,” I said, trying to be a lad. “Then maybe you could get out of our way, what with us having errands to run and all.”

“What have you got in that bed?” he asked me, ignoring me.

I sighed and sort of tried to look unamused. “We got timber and we got pelts.”

“Timber and pelts,” he repeated. “Y’all ain’t got any turpentine in there, huh?”

Next to me, Tull sucked his teeth loudly. I felt any remaining speck of humor in me go out with a flat thunderclap. I’d sort of figured that these fellows would be from the Conference, sort of how I figured that the body Tull had shown me Saturday night was as well. The Conference had been after Tull’s land for three or four months now, lowballing him, putting the pressure on here and there. They’d let a little cattle, what little there was, into his woods to muck about and make things generally unpleasant. They’d trap in his pinewoods, on his land, and force us to chase them off and sometimes they’d get away cleanly, with pelts that were rightly his. But most of all they’d buffalo us over the God-damned turpentine.

“Listen, fella,” I began.

“Mr. Tull, good morning,” said the fellow, and touched his derby with two fingers. His eyes were smiling. “Have you given our offer any more thought?”

Tull looked him over evenly. “Your bosses figure me for a flake, I reckon,” he said, pretty uninterested. “I don’t know how many times I’m gonna’ have to say no to you people before I start getting mean-spirited about it.”

“You’re sitting on a hundred-odd acres of good, turpentine-producing pinewoods there, Mr. Tull,” said the fellow, as though he didn’t know it.

“Shoot,” murmured Tull, surprised as a chef who burned himself on a chuffing stove.

“And we’ve been pretty clear,” he continued, and made a face as though it gave him great pains to break things down so politely, “how interested we are in your woods.”

“We’ve been pretty clear too,” I boiled up, but Tull sort of patted me on my ribs with the back of his hand, and I felt him rapping at the cylinder of my LeMat. I figured that for a deliberate action.

“You could even keep the house,” said the fellow, and smiled coldly.

“I intend to keep the house,” Tull said. “Kusanagi Akira sold that house and a ‘hundred-odd acres’ of that pinewood to my father so he could go back to Honshu, and my father gave it to me, and if you think you’re the first Rump State carpetbagger to try to buy it off a Tull, you ain’t, and I’m gonna’ tell you something real flat, Mister —”

“Tweed,” offered the fellow.

“I don’t care what your name is, mister,” said Tull with a bit of sand in his voice. “Mister Graveler Conference is what I was gonna call you before you so rudely interrupted me — Mister Graveler Conference. I’m gonna be real clear and even with you: If you come on my land, I’m gonna kill you, and if you send someone on my land, I’m gonna kill them like I killed your boy Saturday night.”

“Evar,” said Tweed with an easy smile. “Did you give him a Christian burial?”

“Parker and I burned him with some garbage we were fixin’ to get rid of anyways.”

Tweed just smiled like he’d heard a good joke, and with one hand he tugged at his whiskers while the other held his reins. He patted the pommel of his saddle. “I’ve got 5,000 hansatsu in my saddlebag here,” he began.

“If you say another word to me,” Tull said very evenly, “I will spit on you.”

“And I —”

Tull patted my toe with the sole of his right brogan, and I saw him peel back his lips and shoot a jet of brown spit through his teeth at Tweed. It looked like a pound or so, a thick heavy gout of chaw-dark saliva splattering on the lapel of his coat and waistcoat. At the same time, I put my hand in my jacket and took out my LeMat and cocked the hammer with my thumb.

Tweed’s mouth dropped open and I saw him unbuckle his saddlebag to reach for something, and probably not a handkerchief. “I wouldn’t,” said Tull, and though I hadn’t seen him do it, he had his Colt in his hand with his thumb on the hammer, braced against his knee.

Beside me, Junichiro had two greasy black Peacemakers in his hands, wrist crossed over wrist, one barrel trained on each of Tweed’s goons. His thumbs, flat and thin, were poised over the hammers, and his face was even and inscrutable beneath the curling brim of his hat. I watched him very gently run his tongue over his bottom lip, moistening it.

“OK,” I said, and I couldn’t help but smile a bit at this slick but definitely not college-educated geek with his dumb derby and ruined lapels. He was probably fixing to pull a Derringer out of his saddlebag, and I was hot under the collar for thumbing the lever and putting a shotshell through the leather and money, and his leg if convenient. Just enough to scare him and spook his horse.

“OK,” he murmured, less to me and more to himself, and his whiskers barely hid the sneer of his upper lip. “We’ll get out of your way,” he said, and I could watch his heart swelling and bursting inside his chest, and yeah, I knew it was killing him to be so polite without condescension.

“You’d better,” I said, and felt really confident with a gun in my hand, even if it wasn’t entirely mine.

We went on toward town, and after a little while we put our guns away, gently nosing the hammers forward. It’s not like I was upset I didn’t get to shoot it off, not really, but I wonder if maybe it wouldn’t have been better to get the drop on them there, if maybe we ought to have just made like back-stabbing bushwhackers and killed them all without any real indication, and if we’d done so, how things might have gone better and I’d be writing this at my desk in Tull’s attic, stranded, but not altogether upset about it, in the Oregon Country.

森林

When we got back from New Otaru, the sun was settling comfortably behind the pinewoods. Rebecca was standing on the porch in bare feet, tall and thin as a beanpole for a girlish 9 years of age. She had Lizzie’s hair and skin, heavy dark with healthy clay, with but a pinch of Tull’s youthful pallor mixed in. Now that was all buried under his farmer’s tan, skin rubbed raw by the thumb of the sun. When she saw us coming up the road she sort of scratched her ankle with the sole of one foot, then turned and hollered into the house that we were back.

In the little barn, Junichiro hitched his horse and I jumped down and flipped the tailgate, but Tull stopped me. “Naw, leave the wagon packed with that stuff,” he told me, and sort of patted his vest where he kept his money.

“OK,” I said, and we went back into the house. Dinner went by quick. It wasn’t a Sunday anymore and I think we were telling ourselves we felt raw about not getting to get more done because of having to go into town, in place of what I think had us churning our guts. There was a salt smell in the dining room, that’s how I read it. I could smell sodium tang and I felt on edge, my teeth as scurvy as gunsights. My pistol hung in my coat on the back of my chair. I hadn’t given it back to Tull yet because he hadn’t asked, and furthermore, I liked having it by my side like some yokel in a black Stetson might come walking through and I’d have to ventilate him, or more accurately a wispy little dandy in a bowler hat…

We drank coffee after dinner, and Tull sort of steepled his fingers on his belly and said, “Yup,” and then a moment later elaborated his confirmation, saying, “I think I’m gonna’ have me a chew. Lizzie?”

She sat at the other end of the table, closest to the open shoji screens leading into the kitchen. She raised her eyebrows at him. “If you don’t mind me having my pipe,” she said, which was sort of characteristic of her, that kind of challenge. He grunted, and they got up and left after she directed Rebecca and Leona to clear the table.

Junichiro picked at his teeth with his fingernail, not looking at anything in particular. He was now the boss sort of, but I felt authoritative given I was a man, college-educated in fact, and he was checked out or so it seemed. So I cleared my throat and set my fists on the table. “I’m going to have a look out at the pinewoods,” I decided, and I looked around. The younger girls were clearing the table and didn’t pay me much mind. Ruth was nursing her coffee. I looked at her. “Ruth will you give me a hand with that?”

“Alright,” she said, but didn’t make a motion to get up. She kept on staring into her coffee like she was a medicine woman divining grounds.

I rubbed my jaw and then got up and put on my jacket and the gun banged against my ribs.

She and I walked out from the back porch to look at the trees ostensibly. In Japan, houses didn’t really have porches I don’t think, but it was something the colonists had sort of picked up from the locals. It certainly threw off the nice lines of the curving pagoda roof. I didn’t lay a hand on her and we stood out there under the darkening sky watching nothing in particular, my hands on my hips, her hands crossed in front of her skirt.

After a while she asked me, “What’s going on?”

I thought about how to answer that, felt sensibilities punching at each other like the big Mexicans that would box for 5-peso bets in Yerba Buena. Then I said, “Some fellows from the Graveler Conference tried to get your daddy to sell this land today.”

“OK,” she said. “But before that?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, feeling irritable.

“Saturday night,” she said. “When I had to go wake you up.”

“You didn’t wake me up,” I corrected her. “I was already awake.” She inhaled beside me. “Your daddy killed a man that the Graveler Conference sent onto the property.”

“Sent to do what?” she asked. I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what to say, honestly. “Parker?”

“I don’t know,” I snapped, and wanted to tell her to quit bothering me. All I did was work on the God-damned property. You could read that in the way that he took Lizzie out on to the porch to strategize and not me or Junichiro. “He had a gun, girl,” I said mean-spiritedly. “You’re smart.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much, I expect —”

“Parker Buran!”

“Seeing as he’s dead and all.”

“Damn it, Parker,” and the words sounded rough coming off her tongue, but I think it was just because I’d never heard her cuss before. “Are we going to have to leave?” she asked, but I don’t think she was asking me. She’d figured out that she wasn’t going to get answers out of me, not about these sorts of things she figured mattered. Was she asking God? Did she believe in Him? Not likely, seeing as she was her father’s daughter and I don’t think Tull had a religious bone in his body. The little girls took after Lizzie’s Gullah faith, hard and proud and fiercely independent, but Ruth was too much a woman now to borrow from—  let’s be straight — a usurper.

After a few minutes I tried to offer some clarity. “You know, in New Edo —”

“Parker, god damn it,” but it was god with a little “g.”

Instead I heard footsteps behind me in the grass. I looked over my shoulder, whiskers on my chin prickling against the collar of my jacket. Lizzie was approaching with her pipe clamped between her teeth, puffing against the smoke or the exertion, I don’t know. She stopped a few footsteps away and plucked the stem from her mouth, teeth white against her dusky skin. “Tull wants to see you, boy,” she said to me, and cocked her head at the sweeping gables of the house.

He was on the other side of the house, the front porch, leaning against a stair post. He had chaw heavy in his cheek, working it over, and his jacket was pulled back so the handle of his Colt was showing like a curve of docked horn.

“Tull?” I asked him, and was very conscious of my LeMat.

“Everything you own you can fit back in your suitcase?” he asked me.

“Yessir,” I said, hesitatingly. “Sir?”

“OK, Parker,” he said to me. “You ever killed a man?”

“Naw,” I said, and had to lean against the other post.

“How much you think I can get for the katana hanging in the parlor?”

I pressed the heels of my hands hard against my eyes. I felt maybe like I was going insane.

“4,000 hansatsu,” said Junichiro, and I looked back to see him standing with his thumbs hooked in his suspenders. He was wearing his Boss of the Plains hat. “If you wait to find the right buyer.”

“How long?” asked Tull.

“It could take months.”

Tull spit through his teeth into the grass. “I think some folks might come and try to take this place from us.”

“I think so, too,” I said, trying to be helpful.

He side-eyed me. “Tonight.” He chewed his tobacco. “And I’m wondering if we shouldn’t just burn these woods to the ground so they don’t get a cinder.” We didn’t say anything, and instead just looked at him. “But I’m not looking to get y’all killed, and I figure that’s what would happen if I spat too hard in their face.” He turned to Junichiro. “Go home,” he said to him.

Junichiro stared at him for a long while, impassive, thumbs in his suspenders. At the end of the day he wasn’t a warrior, and wasn’t bound to any code of bushido, and what made him a man, I think, was his duty to his family and how he kept to it, and that’s why he lowered his hat over his eyes and walked off the porch. He paused next to Tull and said something to him in Japanese that I didn’t understand, and Tull didn’t look at him or say anything back, and I watched the dirty crown of his hat bobbing until the air got too dark and I couldn’t see him anymore.

Then he turned to me. “You’re gonna help me pack the wagon,” he told me.

“Okay,” I said. “We’re leaving?”

“You’re leavin’,” he corrected me. “I’m gonna’ wait for them to show up and I’m gonna keep my promise to ’em.”

I blinked at him. “You’re gonna leave the girls behind?”

“Dammit, boy,” he said, and he pushed me hard on the shoulder so I stumbled. “I ain’t intending to die in this pinewoods. Did I say I was gonna die? I said I was intendin’ to kill. Have a lick of faith in me, will ya?” He shook his head, and turned and spit again. Then turned back. “I want you to drive the wagon again, and I want you to drive ’em into New Otaru, and then if the money’ll stretch, I want you to drive ’em to New Edo. And then you can take a thousand hansatsu and go back to California, if you like.”

“You’re giving me the money?”

“No, Parker,” he said very, very flatly. “I’m giving Lizzie the money, but I ain’t gonna make my wife drive the wagon, and we been fair to ya and I’m asking you to do a few more days of work for me whether I’m there or not, OK?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, “I don’t know if I’m ready to take care of ’em.”

“I know you’re not,” he said, and I couldn’t make out his face, it was getting so dark. “And I know you ain’t planning to make a wife of Ruth either, which is why I’m saying you can go where you like afterwards, but I ain’t got anyone else to ask, and you got to do this for me first.”

I was quiet for a while. I didn’t like what he said about me because it felt like he didn’t deserve to be so incisive after saying as few words to me as he had these past few months. I didn’t like him telling me right now he knew about Ruth and me, like it didn’t bother him or he didn’t care that I was with her or he didn’t care I didn’t have the notion to marry her. I hated it. I hated that he had this notion that I was going to cut and run so he was going to hold the thousand from me until I got the girls to New Edo.

Then I balled up my fists. I was very, very conscious of the gun by my ribs. “OK, old man,” I said. “But when you meet us halfway up the road I expect you to drive your own God-damned wagon.”

森林

When I came out of the barn I thought there was maybe ball lightning or some kind of yokai glowing on the edge of the property. In a line, like lanterns on a fence, I saw maybe 15 or 20 bobbing blots of hot light out by the main road. I called Tull to come see and when he did he shouldered past me and went into the house without saying a word. I hitched up the mule team and brought the wagon out to the front of the house. I could make out, now the figures of men on mule and horseback, with pinewood torches and lanterns and in all, about 15 or 20 of those flaming orange bright lights across the lip of the front pinewoods.

I took out my gun and laid it in my lap, and I watched as the girls came out of the house. Lizzie was sort of in front, because she was bundling along her two youngest, Leona and Rebecca, who looked sleepy and confused against the night. Lizzie herself just seemed flat and preoccupied, face as inexpressive as the moon itself, maybe even less so, because the brightness had sort of gone out of her skin and she was dull as hard-baked adobe. Behind her, Ruth and Hana looked a little more cowed, a little more resigned. It was like they’d gotten through the shock and were now slouching under its weight. One by one, Lizzie loaded her little girls into the back of the wagon, then Hana helped her in. She hung a lantern on the peg by my seat.

“Ruth,” Lizzie said softly. “Go sit in front.” She did. She walked around and I reached across the bench and pulled her up. She held something long and thin in one hand, and when she settled her skirt across the bench she laid it in her lap, clutching it tightly with both hands. I realized after a minute that it was the katana from the parlor, and a moment after that I realized that I didn’t know where exactly it’d come from. It seemed like the kind of thing Kusanagi Akira might have wanted to take back to the Home Islands, but then, maybe it wasn’t his. Or maybe it was, and it was a parting gift to one Holden Tull, who was graciously taking the desolate pinewoods off his hands for more than it was worth.

“Ruth,” I said to her, but instead she looked across me at the slouching front porch of the house. It was deep and shadowed like a gouged-out wound in your thigh flesh, an odd mix of boondocks pragmatism and Japanese idealism.

“Daddy,” she murmured.

I turned. Tull was standing on the porch, chewing slowly. He had the handle of his Colt turned out and I saw that he’d taken down the Winchester too and was holding it in one hand, its muzzle pointed at the ceiling. He looked at me, then looked us all over like we were property and he was supervising us. Then he turned his head and his face went into the darkness and I heard but didn’t see him spit into the grass. When I realized he wasn’t going to say anything to us I looked away from him and whipped the reins and set the mules to turn and go up the track toward the chain of fire at the edge of the pinewoods.

Next to me, Ruth clutched the katana in its scabbard, lacquered wood the color of deep-black plums, burning in long strokes with the light from the torches. We drove up the path, quiet, just the sound of the wheels and the reins and the mules’ hooves against tamped-down dirt.

I saw that fellow on horseback in his gray suit, though he had a piece of yellowish sackcloth over his head with black blots where the eyes were, and so no derby on his head. I wanted to see if the tobacco stain was on his lapels, like it would make me feel sort of better about this running instead of standing with Tull on that porch with two pistols and a Stetson like a cowpuncher, but the light was sour and I couldn’t see anything but the gun in his hand, held tangled up with the reins.

As we drove by I propped up the LeMat on my knee and pointed it at his stomach. “God damn you,” I told him, and I felt so impotent in that moment, like there was nothing but wax in my chambers, and no trigger for me to pull. I thought I heard him laugh and then he gave a tilt of his bagged head, bloated with sackcloth, and some of the horsemen parted off the road to let us pass through. But they didn’t say anything to us, and he didn’t say anything back, and after a bit I lowered the gun flush with my thigh and kept driving.

And drove into the dark, I drove out into the dark. The six of us drove down the road and the sky was black and starless, and I couldn’t make out the pinewoods as much more than black stripes soft through the night, and I kept driving until my fists couldn’t clench any tighter on the reins and then I shook my head and pulled and drove us off to the shoulder, to the grass at the edge of the road where the pinewoods had been interrupted.

“What are you doing?” Ruth asked me, and I turned around and didn’t answer her. I held the pistol in one hand and the reins in the other and I looked past Lizzie and her daughters and the night to the hard black head of the road, back to the flat unkind wall that the house was behind, and I waited for Tull. I waited for him to come walking up the road, or on a mule, or maybe on horseback, because in that moment I couldn’t remember if there were more animals in the barn or just the two-mule train, I felt so wrapped up and hot like a little kid. I waited to hear his footsteps or the clip-clop of a horse, I waited there on the road in the night with his family and mine for him to come and take the reins out of my hand and together we could go on to wherever the future would take us.

The School of Exile

By Daniel Judt

Published on

I: Run, Keep Running

Place du Palais-Bourbon is a beautiful, cobblestoned little square in Paris’ Seventh Arrondissement. It is about as quintessentially French as a square can be. On its northern side sits the French National Assembly. To its east and west stretch vast wings of government offices. A marble statue in the square’s center named La Loi depicts Marianne — the symbol of the French Republic — seated with a scepter of justice in her right hand, a tablet of law in her left.

Every Saturday morning, 30 refugees jog through the square. They come from a host of countries — Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Tibet, Eritrea, Georgia and many more — but more immediately they come from a Parisian banlieue (suburb), or a night in a metro station, or a friend’s house where they’ve crashed for the month. A medley of languages echoes off the marble walls of the National Assembly. Dari, Pashtun, Arabic; French. The refugees cut through the center of the square and pass directly beneath Marianne’s gaze. They head one block south along Rue de Bourgogne, until they reach number 28bis — two noble blue doors. Next to them, a gold-plated sign reads: “Pierre Claver: Aide aux Demandeurs d’Asile.”

The noble blue doors open onto a small, grassy courtyard. A foosball game with four built-in, well-worn ashtrays sits on the left. In the courtyard’s center, two slender benches flank a thin metal table, where breakfast awaits. The runners gather round and eat: slices of baguette from the patisserie down the street, spreads of fine jams in little bowls with little spoons, dollops of thick cold cream. A glass of tea. It makes for a rare and almost utopic scene: refugees passing by the seat of French government, eating bread and jam in an old hôtel particulier, at perfect ease in their new home.

The runners are students at Pierre Claver, a small private school for adult refugees in the quiet, soft-with-wealth Seventh Arrondissement. Every day, 150 refugees cycle in and out of Claver’s grassy courtyard, up and down two floors of tiny but homey classrooms. They take classes on French language, but also French history, art, poetry — and sport. Not two blocks away from the seat of French government, this school is trying to form the next generation of French citizens — and they are refugees.

—

The question of how to welcome refugees into a nation wary of their presence may well be the defining issue of our time. This is especially true of Europe. In 2015, over a million migrants entered the Schengen zone, and over half a million requested asylum — petitioned a European government for refugee status. The International Organization for Migration expects that over 3 million migrants will try to enter Europe this year. The last time such movement happened on such scale was some 70 years ago, when the continent — the world — had just torn itself to pieces.

In France, refugees are too often the implicit scapegoat of a uniquely French crisis. The country has suffered three major terrorist attacks in two years; Marine Le Pen’s far-right party remains atop election polls; mayors are banning burkinis. The best-seller shelf in French bookstores is flooded with the likes of Éric Zemmour’s polemic “The French Suicide” and Michel Houellebecq’s not-quite-satirical “Submission.” Laïcité, the French term for separation of church and state, is today the center of fraught debate, with critics claiming it discriminates against Muslims – no veil in schools, for example – and defenders insisting that it keeps France secular and equal.

It is a familiar theme. Across Europe and America, the left’s answer to a decade of mass migration and displacement has been multiculturalism. Let refugees import and preserve their culture; let us adapt to and tolerate difference. The right has responded with demands for nationalism and assimilation. Make refugees learn and adopt our culture; let us remain unchanged.

But on both left and right, especially in France, the premise is the same: Refugees rarely integrate. They learn shoddy French and remain either hostile to or ignorant of French culture.

As a result, we often read a narrative of France’s and The West’s crisis as one of cultural disintegration — a clash of civilizations. In the press, we see refugees flooding shorelines and wandering the squalid “Jungle” at Calais. But at Claver, we see a more common truth: Refugees who want to adopt their new nationality, and French people eager to help them do it.

Eight years ago, before Europe’s migrant crisis and before the populist shock that today surges through Western politics, a French philosopher named Ayyam Sureau began to envision a different way to welcome a refugee. She wondered if it would be possible to create a model for integration based neither on uncompromising French Republicanism nor on strident multiculturalism, a model which might, in today’s polarized politics, seem impossible: Accept refugees as they are, but make them French, too.

—

I came to Association Pierre Claver as a volunteer. I had taken a semester off from university and had heard about the school from a friend. I ended up spending six months there, volunteering and teaching. My first day, I walked through the large royal blue doors and nearly toppled over a group of 30 refugees who were circled up, stretching. It was Saturday morning — running time.

Claver’s running coach, a growling Frenchman named Alban, stood outside the circle in a sharp brown jacket, a tee shirt and tight black sports leggings. He smoked, sipped a Nespresso and barked, “Ok, runners, listen up! Regular route. And stick together. Push each other.” He pointed to the team captain, an Afghan in a sleeveless black running shirt, mid-thirties, built stocky like a baseball catcher, with a goofy child’s cackle and a twinkle in his eye. “Rahman, lead us out.”

I got to know Rahman well during my time at Claver. He lives with his wife, also from Afghanistan, and two children — both born in France. He speaks fluent French. Rahman is Pierre Claver’s success story, a refugee poster boy.

He insists I would not recognize the Rahman who arrived in Paris eight years ago. “J’étais sauvage,” he says. He clarifies: as he uses it, sauvage means shy, uncivilized, where civilized means “to be civil,” to interact in the public realm of his new nation.

He grew up a shepherd in a village in the mountains of northern Afghanistan. He tended to 80 sheep and one donkey, and he carried a rifle. He never went to school — not one day — and never thought much of that fact. In a short essay he wrote for himself about his life, he says:

I see myself there: I’m sitting under a tree, playing the flute for my sheep. The wind blows gently and my hair, as though it heard my music, sneaks out from under my Taqa (shepherd’s hat) to dance in the air.

When he was 22, he got into some trouble with the local Taliban and had to flee Afghanistan.

I arrive in France in August 2008, after traversing Iran, Turkey, Greece and Italy, after a voyage full of dangers, adventures and hardships! On foot, running, by train, in the trunks of cars, in trucks, crammed in with hundreds of other people packed tight like sardines or hidden under those hundreds to get across the Greco-Italian border. This dream or nightmare lasts six months.

I met many students at Claver who have taken similar paths. They were pinballed around, nudged and shuttled and chased through Europe. They tended to see movement as linear: You start someplace and end someplace else. And more often than not — like Rahman — you move fast. You run. Massoud, a suave Iranian with a dry sense of humor, bitterly remembers one Greek policeman chasing him full-throttle through a camp. He croons the policeman’s words in French, lengthening his o’s into a blood-curdling howl: coooours, coooours encore. Run, keep running.

But when Rahman arrived in Paris, he decided to stay. He spoke neither French nor English; only Dari with a thick village accent. But he wanted “a place where equality prevails,” and here seemed good enough. He was also tired, and wanted to stop moving. Some Afghans hanging around the train station told him to go request asylum. He got on the metro. Somehow — he’s not quite sure — he found Ayyam Sureau.

II: Fellow-Men

Ayyam Surreau, the founder and director of Pierre Claver, keeps a quotation pinned above her bathroom mirror. She reads it each morning as she puts her makeup on.

“If a human being loses his political status … [he] has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”

The line is from Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In a chapter on refugees, Arendt — who was herself in exile — warns us of the “abstract nakedness of being human.” She cites Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” Burke argued that the Revolution’s emphasis on natural rights — what we today call “human rights” — was dangerous. What counts is not natural right, but “a right to belong to some kind of organized community”: a state. Arendt says that refugees, who retain their natural but not their national rights, are “deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion.” Deprived, in other words, of a civic space. Burke called these national rights “entailed inheritance.”

Ayyam wants to solve Arendt’s problem in 21st century Paris: To offer refugees the tools — the entailed inheritance — to be treated as fellow-man.

Ayyam herself is not a French citizen. Born in New York to an Egyptian family, she came to France 33 years ago. When French newspapers profile Claver, they make a big deal of Ayyam’s decision not to take French nationality. To which Ayyam simply responds: “More French than I, and you’d die.”

And indeed, Ayyam appears right at home her Haussmannian apartment where she and her husband François — both in their 50s — live with two of their three children, one block from Pierre Claver. When I interview her in October, we sit on a deep-red velvet armchairs that surround old, dark wood tables in her living room. Ayyam holds herself in perfect posture, tall and slender. Her long eyebrows arch like waxing crescent moons toward the bridge of her nose, which lends her face a constant sternness. Her dress is impeccable. She wears a long black skirt, a flowing grey chemise with a single black stripe running down the middle, a dark brown leather belt and black leather boots: just a touch severe. Her voice, slightly different for each of the three languages she speaks – English, French, Arabic – is always rich and throaty with cigarette.

French as she is, though, Ayyam still insists on her foreignness. “I am very foreign. I enjoy my place. … A very French way is to be foreign.” In university, she studied the ethics of encounter — a particularly French area of philosophy. “The whole grace of an encounter,” she explains, occurs when you interact with someone “without either imposing yourself on [him] or being crushed by who he is. By creating something dynamic between you both.” Ayyam’s life mirrors her studies: one long, graceful cultural encounter. She is both French and foreign; neither element is crushed. It’s her kind of Frenchness — a Frenchness beyond nationality, independent of documents — that Pierre Claver tries to give its students.

—

In a sense, Ayyam founded Claver by accident. In 2008, then-President Nicolas Sarkozy pushed through a law making it more difficult to petition for refugee status in France. Asylum-seekers rejected by the French refugee agency, the OFPRA, had only 30 days to appeal the decision in court. “For a foreigner!” exclaims Ayyam. “Someone who does not speak a word of French, without resources, legally lost — it is as though you were saying, ‘There is no appeal.’” She decided to create an organization to provide aid to asylum-seekers.

Claver’s name and symbol were also accidents. When Ayyam decided to found the school, her husband François was reading the journals of Pierre Claver, a 17th century monk who aided slaves in Spanish colonies, and who is today the patron saint of slaves. Ayyam used Claver’s name because of a passage he wrote about a donkey:

“Every time I do not behave like a donkey, it is the worse for me. How does a donkey behave? If it is slandered, it keeps silent; if it is not fed, it keeps silent; if it is forgotten, it keeps silent; it never complains … That is how the servant of God must be.”

Ayyam says that when she explains this choice, everyone misinterprets the symbolism. They think the donkey is the refugee. The donkey is the school.

At first, Ayyam thought Claver “was an accident with absolutely no political reason, or even preparation in my life.” But one night made her realize that the school had its roots in her philosophical studies — Arendt in particular. It was Christmas Eve, 2008, a few months after she founded Claver. At the time, the school’s home was the basement of a church behind Gare de Lyon (a generous Jesuit priest lent it to Ayyam). That night, she had opened up the basement to cold asylum-seekers. Suddenly, she and François found themselves facing four hundred desperate faces — “all wanting something, all needing something. A cacophony of needs.”

A young, gaunt Afghan approached her. He shook with fever. A pile of multicolored legal documents trembled in his hands. “I have been rejected by OFPRA because, I sleep outside. This is not possible, I really need help,” he stammered. Ayyam, overwhelmed and exhausted, replied, “Oh, how terrible. Please come and see us after the holidays.”

That night, she lay awake in bed. “I said to François, ‘Did we really say to a guy who had a fever — we didn’t even see about his fever — come back after the holidays? Did we actually say that?’ And we went into a real frenzy, and we sent out all the students to search for him, without a name. He hadn’t a name.”

They searched until the crack of dawn. They went to Gare de Lyon and Gare de L’Est. They peered under countless bundles of blankets. At last, they found him. His name was Habib. (add footnote 1 here)

The ordeal unsettled Ayyam. The encounters she had visualized in her studies were always at a remove. “Two actors on the scene of the world, and the ethics is between you and me. It’s completely different, as I discovered, in Gare de Lyon, when you have an ocean of faces.” This is why she keeps Arendt close by: a reminder never to let an ocean of faces blur into meaningless abstraction.

—

Back in 2008, Pierre Claver had just four students. Rahman was one of them. He remembers noticing Claver’s symbol — the donkey. It reminded him of the one he guarded in Afghanistan. He came to class every day, but didn’t like to talk and didn’t know how to act.

At the prefecture, I speak sign language. I make signs with my hands. The only thing I can say is, “Hello.”

… I start to learn French. I, who don’t even know how to hold a pen, how will I learn, how will I write?

He went to OFPRA, the Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, with François. It helps to have François on your side. He used to serve as a judge on the French court for asylum seekers. “I lucked out,” Rahman says with a sheepish grin.

And yet OFPRA still denied his request for asylum. The interviewer didn’t believe his story. He thought Rahman might not even be Afghan. It had taken eleven months for OFPRA to issue the rejection; it would be another six before he could appeal his case to the court. In the interim, he was not allowed to work.

This didn’t bother him. He had a language to learn, and could get by on 300 euros in welfare aid per month. Every day, he went to class at Claver. Then he went to the Pompidou library and watched French movies on its public computers. He preferred action films — Bruce Lee, he says. He binge-watched “24.” Every time a character said something, he paused the film, copied down the subtitles and looked up each word.

His dream, he says, was to be “just a normal person.” He clarifies: “French.” In a radio interview with France Inter this year, he says that, “When I became a refugee in France, I didn’t know where my nation was. We don’t know. I couldn’t go back to Afghanistan, I wasn’t French. And so: Who am I?”

—

By 2009, Claver had nearly 100 students and dozens of teacher-volunteers — far too big for the church basement they occupied. Ayyam began searching for a proper home for her school.

She scoured the fringes of Paris, where space would be cheap and where, she supposed, folks would be less snooty. She tried neighborhood after neighborhood. Each time, she found an ideal space. Each time, she nearly signed a contract. And each time, the owner backed out when he discovered Ayyam ran a school for refugees. These “fringes” were gentrifying -— no one wanted trouble. Ayyam was shocked. “France keeps boasting about all [its] diversity,” she says, “[but] it’s a very easy thing to accept diversity, and welcome it, and be left wing and so on, as long as it’s on paper. Another thing is to sit on the same bench.”

Despairing, Ayyam happened to walk down Rue de Bourgogne one afternoon on her way home. She noticed a small hôtel particulier that she passed all the time. “I knew it by heart. And — shit! — it was for sale.” She bought it.

Almost immediately, she knew she’d made a good choice. “When you’re making a dough, you make a hole in the center and then you break the eggs,” Ayyam says. “You never try to integrate the eggs from the outside. Doesn’t work.” The seventh, with its haute bourgois allure, (and not some drab suburb) is what refugees imagine Paris to be. “What we believe is that, when you have guests, foreign people who have just arrived from travel, you bring your best things out.”

III: Not a Language School

The unfortunate side-effect of offering only the best is that Claver must remain small. Ayyam takes no more than 150 refugees each semester — which means only 40 new students each fall and spring. To win a spot, refugees line up twice a year — Sept. 15 and Feb. 15 — outside the great blue doors. When Ayyam arrived at Claver on inscription day this past September, her mouth dropped. A line of 750 refugees stretched back to the Place du Palais-Bourbon, all the way to the National Assembly. Claver, her husband François joked, “has become the hottest school in Paris.”

Ayyam interviews each aspiring student. (Former Claver students act as translators.) There are two prerequisites: Students must be refugees or asylum-seekers, and they must be adults — minors go to public school. Beyond that, Ayyam searches for intangibles. She wants “ambassadors”: people who, 10 years down the line, will open their own associations and run their own businesses. “Active citizens,” she says, recalling Arendt. “That would be very important in France. Because there are very few people to embody [refugees’] presence, politically.”

The refugees who queue up for admission think of Pierre Claver as a place to learn French. To Ayyam, this is a mistake. She frequently notes an “urgency” in her classes: As soon as students obtain refugee status, they want to learn just enough French to get by, and then find work. She understands the urge. But she also knows that in order to regain Arendt’s “political status,” one cannot rush through language. She wants her students to slow down a bit. “Pierre Claver is not a language school,” she tells each class at the beginning of the semester.

Ayyam’s philosophy manifests in her teaching style. Every Friday, she leads a class of beginners through a review of the grammar they’ve learned that week. There are four classrooms at Pierre Claver. Fridays, Ayyam teaches in Room C. The room is small and dark, draped in warm, heavy colors: deep red curtains; red-patterned oriental poufs for chairs; two thin, pitch-black wood tables for desks. As with Ayyam herself, there is a sense of passionate warmth and security — but with it, a rigorous austerity. I always find myself sitting up straight. The first time I observe her class, there are five students. Friday is the only optional class of the week. Normally, attendance is mandatory. There are no grades at Pierre Claver, but there is a single strict rule: If you miss three classes unexcused, don’t bother coming back. (“You either belong in this classroom, or you don’t,” Ayyam tells her class one day. “Is that clear? This isn’t the United Nations conference where no one gives a shit. This is my classroom.”) No matter, says Ayyam. Five is enough. She writes the endings of the past imperfect tense on a whiteboard: ais, ais, ait, iez, ions, aient.

She turns to face the class and her eyes narrow. She speaks slowly and carefully, carving her words as a sculptor his marble.

I want you to recognize that sound, she says.  Ais. When you hear it, you should feel sad. Someone is telling you about something that once was, but no longer is. She pauses, searches for a good example, one that will sting a little. “J’habitais en Afghanistan,” she says. “I used to live in Afghanistan.” Three students nod, but two still don’t get it. Ayyam tries another, and this time everyone understands: “The Twin Towers were beautiful.”

—

A week after the terrorist attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, someone defaced and destroyed Claver’s blue doors. The attackers left the rest of the school untouched. Ayyam suspects a French person attacked the doors “as a sign of disagreement” with Claver’s model (and its members). “It wasn’t a threat,” she remembers. “But it caused a lot of pain, because it was done to cause pain. A single message.”

After the attack, Ayyam installed a security camera outside the school. She quickly noticed a trend. She would leave the blue door propped open to avoid constant bell-ringing as students arrived. The students, though, would always close the door from the interior. “To form a community,” Ayyam explains. But perhaps also to avoid what lurked outside. “Pierre Claver,” one refugee told me, “is the good side of France.”

As late as 2014, says Ayyam, the anti-Muslim sentiment that today chars so much of French politics simply “was not there.” But the Hebdo attacks, and the Nov. 13 massacre 11 months later, changed everything. To heed Arendt’s words, Claver couldn’t teach French culture at a remove. They had to tackle French politics head-on.

One time this fall, a moody Syrian asked Ayyam whether one of his French culture classes was “obligatory.” She didn’t sleep that night from anger. The next day, she pulled the student over. She took a blank piece of paper and drew a circle: Claver. Inside, she wrote little labels for all the activities at the school: French classes, drawing class, coffee and tea, history class, poetry class, running, evening concerts.

As she wrote, she told him, “Right now, France is in a crisis towards the foreigners. A very huge crisis. They think that you guys are coming to France only to come and get social services, social aid, take whatever you want to take from it, and not participate in anything. You’re not going to respect the laws, or the manners, or take part in the creation of the common project called France. So nothing is obligatory — but that’s exactly what people are hating you for. They are hating you because you are asking, “Is this obligatory?”

“And this school” — Ayyam pounds her hand on the table with every word — “is about not being hated here.”

IV: The French Way

One Friday in March, François Sureau marches through Claver’s blue doors with a canvas army backpack, belting French military tunes. François is, by his own definition, “of a time gone by.” He wears only suits, unless he’s going hiking, in which case khaki army pants, a blue button-down shirt, a light beige vest and a cravat. The tips of his fingers are always charred black with the pipe tobacco he carries in a brown leather pouch in his breast pocket. And he has an astounding memory: songs, poetry, long passages of prose, the furthest depths of French history. The students at Claver see François as the Franc. “When he speaks,” one student told me, “you feel France.”

Every year, François leads 30 students and teachers at Pierre Claver on a weekend to walk to the Cathedral of Chartres, some 80 kilometers outside of Paris. The pilgrimage to Chartres is a Catholic tradition that dates back to before the town’s Cathedral was built in 1193. The weekend before Easter — the weekend Claver makes the trek — is one of the most popular times to go.

François is well aware that the scene he and Ayyam have created here is a strange one. Thirty Muslim refugees taken on a Catholic march by their French school — by François, the Franc, himself a practicing Catholic — to mark the Holy Week.

I ask François if there’s anything to be made of this. He shakes his head. For our group, this trip has nothing to do with religion, he says. This is Claver camping for a night on our way to a beautiful cathedral that everyone ought to see. Plus, he adds, letting the main point seem like an aside, walking long distances builds solidarity. François served in the Foreign Legion.

It’s certainly true that none of the refugees seems concerned with any religious subtext. As we plod through vast stretches of pancake-flat fields (“What a shitty landscape,” François remarks), spirits are high. François bellows round after round of patriotic French songs, and some students join in. That afternoon, we stop in a town square and splay our aching legs out on the grass. The wind blows gently. Rahman sits under a tree and plays his flute.

Sunday, we reach Chartres. Ayyam, Alban the running coach, and a host of other teachers arrive by bus minutes later. Everyone gazes up at the cathedral’s imposing facade. The other groups begin to stream into the cathedral for afternoon mass. We go in, too. François, in his element, circles us up and gives a history lesson. He points out the cathedral’s famous blue stained glass. He talks about Chartres’ principal relic, the tunic Mary wore when she birthed Jesus. He also points out some common features — the cross-like structure, the alter. Ayyam reminds me that if many of the students have never been inside a cathedral.

Listening to François, it becomes clear that this is not just some hike through the French countryside. It is very much a pilgrimage; a way to show refugees a crucial piece of their new country’s history. Bernd, a kind-faced man with a delicate smile who teaches poetry at Claver and whose mind seems to always be somewhere yours hasn’t quite reached, put it to me bluntly: “We’re creating a school of French civiliz …” — he cuts off, searching for the more appropriate formulation — “A school of the French way.”

—

During the semester I spend at Claver, there is one class that every single student and teacher must attend. The class is taught by Didier Casas, a friend of François and a former member of the Conseil d’Etat (equivalent to the US Supreme Court). Over the course of four evenings during the spring, he delivers a sweeping history of laïcité, the French separation of church and state.

Everyone attends the lectures (“I need this just as much as they do,” one professor murmurs). Since Claver’s classrooms are too small, Ayyam relocates the fourth and last session to the side-room of a church down the block. As with the Chartres pilgrimage, the uneasy comedy of a Frenchman teaching a crowd of Muslim refugees about laïcité in a church classroom is lost on no one.

Claver itself is strictly laïque, but not for the reason public schools are. Ayyam explains, “I wouldn’t want anyone to believe that we are forced by the French government. We are not, we carry those rules within us. We don’t give a shit what the French government wants or doesn’t want, it’s going to be that way, because we believe in that — that life is much better if you protect public space from religions. That’s all. It’s the French way.”

Students at Claver tend not to mind this policy at all. “In laïcité everyone respects everyone without knowing their religion. And it’s marvelous,” one remarks to me. But when Casas opens the floor to questions about laïcité in French society, some begin to push him. One asks: Religion can’t be present at schools; why, then, can parents ask for a chaplain who offers an optional class on school premises? Casas wavers; laïcité isn’t as steadfast as it sounds on paper. He responds: “There’s also something that I call the ‘principle of reality.’ It means: depends on the neighborhood. Very simply. I mean, it’s not very systematic, but that’s nevertheless the truth.”

Students latch onto this ‘principle of reality.’ Can one be excused from school for religious holidays? “Depends on the neighborhood!” a student yells. And what about serving halal food in school lunches? More calls of “It depends! Principle of reality!” ring out.

François closes the course. Perhaps he realizes the atmosphere is slightly awry, for what he says perfectly encapsulates the way Claver teaches the elusive “French way”:

“This is the most difficult course to teach. Didier had to explain to you that France is a country where we can believe whatever we want, but where we have to preserve our way of living together despite our different religions. That’s what it is to be French. The law is difficult … And I’m glad it’s difficult, because that’s being French. And now: we drink and eat together!”

—

Sitting on a bench in the courtyard at Claver, I ask Rahman if he thinks he’s changed since arriving in France. He picks up his iPhone and puts it face-down on the metal table. “Before,” he says, “I was like that.” “Now” — he flips the phone over, face-up — “I’m like this. I’m open, I give advice. Often, when one comes from a country that has been at war ever since one was born, one thinks in a negative fashion. In France, that way of thinking has to change. I try as hard as I can to be French.”

He’s spent eight years in France. Things are going well. He was finally granted refugee status in 2011. With Claver’s help, he got a degree in mechanics and a driver’s license. He brought his wife over from Afghanistan. He writes:

Today I no longer learn irregular verb conjugations or complicated tenses. … I learn French songs, I take classes on politics and theater. I go on field trips the school organizes.

He also teaches. For the first time, Claver is offering a class for “Alphas.” These are students like Rahman; Afghans who don’t yet know the Roman alphabet. Ayyam hopes that “les Alphas” will become a new generation of Claveriens. And indeed: Early in the semester, Rahman makes an announcement in Dari. He’s recruiting runners. Saturday morning, he says. Meet in the courtyard.

A few weeks later, he recruits me, too. I join the team for the “regular route,” a 10 kilometer loop through central Paris. I try to imagine the scene from high above: 30 refugees racing through the city, tearing past the Louvre and Notre-Dame and along Boulevard Saint-Germain and through windy side-streets with little cafes, pounding through Place du Palais-Bourbon.

The run ends where it began, in Claver’s courtyard. Alban, the coach, stands next to one of the benches, talking to Ayyam. She asks me how the run was. Good, I say. Hard. She laughs; most of these refugees aren’t used to running for leisure, she says.

I remember Rahman and Massoud: Run, keep running. On their journeys, refugees run from – or are run out of – place after place. Running means being unsettled. But in Paris — at Claver — refugees run loops. They start someplace and end in that very same spot. Rahman does not run through Paris so much as he runs in it (or, as Parisians say, sur Paris: on Paris). This is the Claver model: Take the refugee journey and transpose it, graft it onto a new life. Here, to run is no longer to traverse alone. It is to declare a desire — an ability — to stay in one place together.

A week or so after the last laicité lecture, Rahman walks into the courtyard with a larger grin than usual. Without saying a word, he walks over to Ayyam and hands her an opened envelope. “What is it?” She asks. “Read it!” he says. She opens and reads. Then she too grins wide, and pulls him into a tight hug. I peak at the letter and see the official watermark of the Republique. Rahman has become a French citizen.

V: A School of Exile

In October, I return to Pierre Claver for a final interview with Ayyam and François. The three of us scrunch around a table in a small Vietnamese restaurant. I ask what impact they hope Claver will have on its students. Ayyam and François respond in dialogue. Slowly, they turn away from me completely, and speak directly to one another, still inventing the school together.

Ayyam: I think if we were to say it truthfully, we’re working for their children. There is absolutely nothing we can do — I know that — for a foreigner who has come as an adult from a foreign country to make him happy. There is no way in the world this is going to happen. You can make him less sad, less sorry, less bitter, but you can positively help him make his children happy. Of that I am sure. I’ll take this as a principle in marble.

François: It’s really true, that’s really it.

Ayyam: I have never lost sight of that, whatever we were doing —

François: That’s what’s at the core of Claver, and that’s why Claver is very particular. It’s particular because that assumes something disappeared in modern society, a kind of friendship between generations.

Ayyam: You know, that whole hullabaloo about French values, the Eiffel tower, the beauty of France … that hurts. No country is ever more beautiful than your own. That is a fact. And I think that this is important, and maybe this is very specific to Claver, is that we completely acknowledge and know the pain of exile.

François: This is a school of exile.

Ayyam: Voilà. And I think that this makes it a very human place.

Listening silently, I realize that, philosophy aside, Claver is simply pragmatic. It is a place where refugees can meet and model their new nation – and where the nation can meet and model its refugees. It is not about becoming French; it is about learning to live in France.

The day he became a French citizen, Rahman wrote the end of the piece he’d written for himself, and from which I’ve been quoting, in clear and beautiful French:

Today, I became a French citizen. I have two children, Youssef and, this past June, Rukhshana. They were both born in France. Youssef will start school next year. I hope that they will speak French just as well as they do Dari; that they will study in university; that they will treasure the value of liberty; and that they will have a heart big enough to love two countries.

Living in Limbo

By Kate Cray

Published on December 15, 2016

Living in Limbo: Aymir Holland’s Year in Pre-trial Detention

At 6:34 p.m. on Nov. 27, 2015, the New Haven Police Department received an urgent phone call — Charles Hill, a lecturer in International Studies at Yale, was lying on the ground, badly injured, at the intersection of Bradley Street and Whitney Avenue. According to a press release from NHPD spokesman David Hartman, Hill had been viciously attacked from behind by a group of five men. Gathering his strength, Hill later made it home, where his wife called the police again. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital for treatment of his multiple facial injuries, broken knee and two broken ribs. He was 79 at the time.

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

Hill has since recovered, and over a year later, three of his five alleged assailants sit in prison. Aymir Holland and Kelton Gilbert, who were 16 and 18 at the time of the assault, are detained at Manson Youth Institution for offenders up to age 21; Lawrence Minor, who was 20 during the incident, is detained at an adult institution. The last two of their group remain at large. Each of the three suspects are being charged with five felonies: first degree assault, assault of an elderly victim, first degree robbery, first degree conspiracy to commit assault and first degree conspiracy to commit robbery. The identical felony charges reflect no distinction of the relative levels of culpability among the three defendants, or any special treatment for Holland’s juvenile status.

Having just turned 17, Aymir Holland is the youngest of the accused group. He had never been suspended from school or arrested by the police before. A young black man, Holland’s mother described him as a “gentle giant,” and friends and family mentioned his diverse interests in computer game design, music and football. Now, he faces up to 61 years in prison, as well as the possibility of being tried in court as an adult. But his family remains hopeful that he might be tried as a youthful offender so that even if convicted, Holland would have a second chance: He would not be legally considered a criminal, and the maximum sentence he could accrue would only be four years. Not only would his case stay private, but at 21 the crime would also be stricken from his record, protecting him from the job discrimination that many felons face.

Hill declined to comment due to the sensitivity of the case and the approaching trial. I was also unable to access Holland’s arrest records at the courthouse because of his juvenile status. LaToya Willis, Holland’s mother, said she does not believe he assaulted Hill.

“I’m not going to accept that my son is guilty, because I know that he’s not,” Willis said. “I know my child, and I know that in this situation he didn’t do what he’s being accused of. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Holland and the others have yet to be convicted, but with bail set at a quarter million, none of them can afford to go home. So they wait — more than a year and counting — behind bars in pretrial detention.

—

The morning of Hill’s assault, Holland attended a funeral in his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut. His best friend had battled leukemia but recently passed away, Holland’s mother explained. The two had played together in their church band, Holland on percussion and his friend on piano.

While the public spotlight is focused on Holland’s upcoming hearing, Willis lingered on the funeral of her son’s best friend. Up till this day, in the midst of his own criminal proceedings, she believes that he has yet to find a time to grieve for his best friend.

At Holland’s best friend’s funeral, Willis couldn’t help but think back to another funeral she attended with her son over six years ago, when the grandmother of Holland’s friend had passed away. At that funeral, Willis recalled, a ten year old Holland walked over to his friend and held her so that she could cry on his shoulders.

“It touched my heart to see him do that on his own at that age,” Willis said. “He didn’t even ask for permission. He saw her hurt, and went to try to console her. That’s how he’s always been. That’s how he is now.”

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

Diana Gonzalez-Valeta, a West Haven resident, was struck by this story. On a change.org petition for Holland to be tried as a youthful offender, she blamed the stringency of Holland’s potential punishment on his race.

Almost all activists, family members, and friends I interviewed felt the need to describe Holland as a large black man, an appearance they believed to be the first strike against him. “He can, by his mere size, look threatening, “ said Dave Colton, who mentors Holland in prison as a volunteer through Family Reentry, a Bridgeport organization aiming to stop the cycle of mass incarceration through community-centered interventions.

Those who are familiar with Holland, however, were quick to defend him. “He’s not the kind of big that’s imposing. He’s very friendly. You can see it. He’s got a nice smile,” said Mark Fitzgerald, Holland’s former ninth-grade English teacher.

The accusation against Holland shocked his friends and family. Colton said he found it difficult to imagine that Holland would do anything malicious, and Fitzgerald pointed to the teen’s school record. Holland had never been suspended and was known around school as an anti-bullying advocate. When somebody was being bullied, Holland would always tell the bully to “knock it off,” Fitzgerald recalled.

His mom agreed. “He’s always for the underdog. He doesn’t like to see anyone get bullied or he uses his size to intimidate bullies from bullying people who are smaller,” she said. “He doesn’t like to see anyone hurt.”

And Holland’s kindness has not gone unrecognized. Willis told me that since his arrest, his peers have written letters to the judge commending Holland’s kind actions. By doing so, they hope the trial will be ruled in Holland’s favor.

—

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

Holland’s story — a year behind bars in the absence of any conviction — is a sad but familiar one.

“That story sounds unfathomable — that a kid who was 16 years old, now 17 years old, could be in jail for more than a year having never stood trial. It’s sort of mind-boggling,” said Patrick Sullivan ’18, who co-founded the Connecticut Bail Fund with two other Yalies. “Across the United States, there’s about 450,000, maybe more, people in pretrial detention right now.”

A New York Times article written in August 2015 first cited 450,000 as an approximate number of individuals in pretrial detention, including those denied bail and those who are unable to afford it.

Sullivan, Brett Davidson ’16, Simone Seiver ’17 and Scott Greenberg, a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine, formed the Connecticut Bail Fund last year with a grant from the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute. The Bail Fund aims to solve the injustice of money bail by posting bail for clients who can’t afford it.

A 2011 report from the Bureau of Justice revealed that at any time, 60 percent of the prison population is awaiting trial, just like Holland. In Connecticut, about 3,000 people await their trial behind bars at any one time for no reason other than being unable to afford bail. For John Mele, Mentoring Coordinator at Family Reentry, the injustice of pretrial detention cases is a frequent part of his work.

“I just had a young man who was in Manson [Youth Institution] for two and a half years, and who ended up not being found guilty,” Mele said, shaking his head. “Innocent until proven guilty, but for two and a half years he sat in a cell. What kind of system works like that?”

Daee McKnight, who is involved with Family Reentry, said the entire bail system is rife with classicism. “It’s almost like the person is guilty to stay in pretrial detention because they’re in poverty,” McKnight said. “It’s almost like you’re guilty because you’re in poverty.”

Sullivan agreed, adding that in theory, pretrial detention and bail are supposed to incentivize individuals to show up in court. But the current practice has only produced a “two-tiered system of justice,” where the wealthy can pay their bail and go free no matter how severe their crime is, while those without the money are forced to wait for weeks or months in pretrial detention.

And pretrial detention also produces negative long-term consequences. A study commissioned by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation revealed that, on average, those who had been detained before their trial were three times as likely to be sentenced to prison and two times as likely to receive longer prison sentences. In other words, pretrial detention hurts the outcomes of a trial. Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” hypothesized in a column for the New York Times that this may be caused by the pressure to take plea bargains, a special deal in which the defendant agrees to plead guilty in exchange for dropped charges or a lower recommended sentence. She pointed out that over 90 percent of criminal trials are resolved in these bargains, which are often coercive in nature.

McKnight, who served 17.5 years of a 25 year sentence, is no stranger to the effects of incarceration on all aspects of life, even after release. Among many factors, he cited job discrimination and his inability to receive money from his mother’s will, because the state extracted a significant percentage of his inheritance to cover his incarceration costs. In fact, in a system where the costs of a criminal record are so high, the effects of accepting any kind of conviction can be crippling.

“We’re supposed to be a second chance society,” McKnight said. “For that statement to become a reality, there are a lot of things we have to do right here in Connecticut…Taking juveniles and trying them as adults is a step backwards to the progress that we’re trying to make.”

—

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

Turning down a plea bargain, Holland has stayed in Manson since last November, waiting for his turn to stand a just trial. Meanwhile, his case — and the surprisingly high bail for someone who has never committed a crime in the past — has mobilized the larger New Haven community. Touched by Holland’s situation, Fitzgerald looked for legal support and other ways to financially support Holland’s trial efforts. He tried to contact Yale Law School’s public defender program, but it was no longer in place; he then turned to Quinnipiac, but the public defender program there was tied up; he found Modest Means, a program affiliated with the New Haven Bar Association, but Willis still couldn’t afford one of their lawyers, Fitzgerald explained.

But things started to change when Fitzgerald met Addys Castillo, executive director of the Citywide Youth Coalition. Even though the coalition did not normally pursue criminal justice advocacy, Castillo was swayed by Holland’s story. And when she shared his story with young people in the coalition, she saw an immediate response.

“They were so upset,” Castillo said. “They wanted [Holland’s] story to be told and to see if we could get some type of movement around it. So we held a rally, dinner and dialogue called ‘Justice or Just Us.’”

The movement has only grown from there. Once other young New Haven residents heard about Holland’s case, many decided to get involved. Together, they wrote and published a change.org petition that has gained 626 signatures and started a fundraiser on GoFundMe that has raised over a thousand dollars. Every time Holland went to court for his preliminary hearings, members of the coalition demonstrated in front of the courthouse, calling for the justice system to try Holland as a youthful offender.

The Youth Coalition’s efforts convinced New Haven Mayor Toni Harp to write a letter on Holland’s behalf. And Holland now has a new lawyer — Jason Goddard, who agreed to work on the case on a pro bono basis. Goddard’s presence and the support from the New Haven community have been “such a relief,” Willis said, expressing her gratitude for the extra help.

But the Citywide Youth Coalition did not just change Holland’s case — in fact, the case has transformed and mobilized the coalition into a group of criminal justice advocates. Members have now spoken at the Bail Project about bail reform; they used Holland’s story and his bail of a quarter million to illustrate the ways that the money bail system unfairly targets poor victims. Advisory Board member Cowiya Arona assured me that no matter how the case proceeds, the coalition will continue to fight and protest.

“When I was approached by [Fitzpatrick] and [Willis], it was going to be a passion project on my end to get involved, but then I told the youth about it in the hope that they would want to get involved and I just told them the story and they took it and ran,” Castillo said. “This is really new for us, but we’re really proud of the work that they’ve been able to accomplish.”

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

Yet despite the passionate local activism, representation from the Yale community has been largely absent. Yale Police Chief and Director of Public Safety at Yale Ronnell Higgins sent out an email on the day of the attack last November, but in the absence of any University-wide emails, only a few members of the Yale community have followed Holland’s case and even fewer have taken any action.

Sullivan of the Connecticut Bail Fund suspects that the quiet around Holland’s case might be because so much of the Citywide Youth Coalition’s planning occurred over the summer when students were off campus. But he was quick to emphasize that this is not an excuse. “I think it’s troubling that there’s not [more activism],” Sullivan said. “I think this is a perfect example of that Yale-New Haven separation.”

As a leader of the Connecticut Bail Fund, Sullivan has attended several of the Citywide Youth Coalitions events centered around Holland’s case. He shared the names of several other Yale students he had seen at these gatherings. When I reached out, one student declined to be interviewed because she did not feel like she was representing Yale, but was rather engaging as an individual in the New Haven community. Others echoed her sentiments.

Since my interview with Sullivan, the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, a student ] organization aimed at reducing recidivism and promoting dialogue around mass incarceration, has sent out an email with more information on how to get involved, promising a different future for Yale activism around Holland’s case.

—

On Nov. 30, I sat among the crowd in the New Haven Judicial District Courthouse — Gilbert and Minor were set to appear in court for a pretrial hearing. That morning, family members and friends scattered around the courtroom, waiting anxiously as they sat in the benches. A lawyer approached Gilbert’s family. “He’s okay, he’s okay,” she said. When she left, the courtroom grew quiet again. No judge appeared. Finally, a man approached the security guard in the room.

“Is Lawrence Minor here?” he asked.

The security guard consulted a sheet. “He’s been here and left already. He’ll be back for another hearing on January 5,” the guard finally said.

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

And Kelton Gilbert? He, too, will return to the courtroom on January 5. Their lawyers had consulted independently with the judge to put off the hearing, seemingly without the families’ knowledge. The result? Another five weeks in prison. Their constitutionally mandated “speedy trial” did not seem to be approaching anytime soon.

When the families stood up to leave, Gilbert’s mother noticed another family in the room, here for the next hearing that involved another young man who was waiting justice. She waved to a woman, perhaps a friend. The two women hugged — it seemed like they knew each other well.

—

At Manson Youth Institution, the correctional facility in Cheshire, Connecticut where Holland is currently being held, the young men are separated into units called “cottages” based on age, sentence-length and other factors. There is no separation between boys who are already convicted and those still awaiting their trial, Mele told me.

Colton, who mentors at Manson Youth Institution regularly, said he tries to do his best to help the inmates transition.

“I come with my eyes and my ears and then just be receptive to who they are,” Colton said of his usual method. But Holland was a slightly atypical case — he believes the young man has had “a more sheltered life” than the other inmates.

Willis agreed. “Aymir’s in a foreign land right now,” she said. “My son’s not even street smart. He wasn’t raised that way.”

For a long time, Holland was not able to go to church services, the bedrock of his Sunday mornings. Willis said she had to send study materials to her son to “keep up with his spiritual belief.”

Perhaps most difficult was the blow to his education. Attending school is mandatory in Connecticut up to age 17, and that mandate pertains to those who are incarcerated as well. Manson Youth Institution operates its own fully accredited school within the prison walls with over 60 teachers, a library and a computer lab that contains resources for graphic design but with no Internet service, which inmates are forbidden to use. Despite these efforts, students still lag behind.

(Courtesy of LaToya Willis)

“The education in there is nothing compared to the education he was receiving outside. My son has been in charter schools all of his life,” Willis said. “Then he goes to prison and they’re teaching him fifth grade things, and he’s in high school.”

When Jillian Valeta, a member of the Citywide Youth Coalition, heard that Holland was studying Mandarin, she wrote him a letter asking him if he’d like to practice Mandarin with her. He agreed, so she concluded her next letter with some of the new characters that she had learned in her language class.

“And it’s funny but not funny, but [the prison guards] actually wouldn’t give him the letter, thinking that it was gang-related mail,” Willis said, explaining that the security staff at the prison was under the impression that the Mandarin characters in Valeta’s letter were gang symbols. “They actually came to the cell and told him, ‘You can’t have your friends writing you in gang symbols,’ and he’s like ‘I’m not in a gang, what are you talking about?’”

Prison has been isolating, but Holland holds onto the ties that he has from home. In addition to members of the Citywide Youth Coalition, Holland’s classmates take time to write to him regularly. And mother and son talk on the phone on a daily basis.

“I speak to Aymir everyday,” Willis said, holding back tears. “It’s really expensive, but he calls home everyday. It’s about four bucks a phone call, and he calls everyday.”

—

Looking forward, Holland’s mother expressed a mixture of hope and anxiety. Many friends and family described him as an ambitious young man full of potential, but Willis said his future prospects have changed because of the interruption in his education.

“Aymir knows that this situation isn’t his destination,” she said. “He’s ready to come home and pick up the pieces and make something of his life, because this is the time that he would be planning for his life. This situation has stagnated his growth in every area. He’s anxious, I’m anxious and we’re anxious for him to come home and put his life back together.”

Mele recalls a conversation that he had with Holland at their last visit, when he asked Holland what he’d learned in his time in prison. Holland paused and thought for a while. “‘The thing is, we’re all there, we’re all trying to do better in our situation,’” Mele recalled Holland saying.

Holland is scheduled for a court hearing on Dec. 22. At that hearing, the judge will determine whether he will be tried as a youthful offender or as an adult. But it is unclear if the question will be answered then. This is what pretrial detention in Connecticut looks like for Holland and thousands like him — if they do not accept plea bargains, they will have to wait in jail for what feels like an eternity before getting a fair trial.

Still, Holland’s legal team has pledged lasting support for his case.

“We truly care about this young man and we believe in his potential to be a wonderful member of his community,” Meredith Olan said on behalf of Holland’s attorneys. “We are doing everything in our power to give Aymir the best possible representation in his case.”