No surprises

“I can’t think of a time in which the trustees took over in a sense, and told the President this is the way it’s going to be and then they announced it,” said Henry “Sam” Chauncey ’57, a longtime administrator at Yale who served as University Secretary from 1963 to 1977 under former Yale president Kingman Brewster Jr. “It’s just unique.”

The basic philosophy, Chauncey said, was that the person who runs an institution knows that institution best. He added that if a board initiated a proposal for a course of action that the president did not like, the president would quit.

Chauncey described a historical relationship between the president and the trustees that is very different from the one that exists today. Once in the 1960s, Brewster asked the board of trustees to review his performance for the previous several years of his presidency. Brewster wanted to confirm that the board had confidence in him, Chauncey said, even though the president already had popular support from the students and the faculty. 

“The board said, ‘No, we don’t do that’,” Chauncey told the News. “When you’re appointed the president of Yale, you have the job.”

But Brewster threatened to resign if the board did not follow his instruction — so the trustees folded, and set up a “really elaborate six month process of reviewing the president.” The results came back with a “stunningly positive review” from everyone except alumni, given his relatively progressive University policy at the time.

That good faith dynamic appeared to be University policy for several decades until the late 20th century.

Former University President Richard Levin, Salovey’s predecessor, told the News that the Corporation had a “lot of anxiety” when he took office in 1993. 

Faculty unhappiness over budget cuts, dated infrastructure and a precarious relationship between Yale and New Haven had intensified over the 1980s and 1990s before Levin took office. A murder on campus and high crime rates in the surrounding city, Levin added, all contributed to the sense that Yale’s leadership needed to make changes and needed to make them fast.

While Levin said the corporation had “taken a risk on a young president” when they selected him, they didn’t stop there. The trustees also made several large-scale reforms to their own role in University governance, many of which survive to this day. The Corporation began to develop policies that would make them more involved, Levin said. They wanted to make sure there were “no surprises” when it came to developments on campus, good or bad.  

“The motivation for this was that the Corporation had failed after my predecessor left,” Levin said. “That they had really not been aware of the magnitude of the problems on campus and that they wanted to be better informed.”

Levin would organize an executive session during every Corporation meeting, when he would speak to the trustees and update them on campus developments. He looped them in during early stages of development, rather than presenting policies or initiatives that were already “fully worked out.” But as Levin grew into the role, Corporation members expressed their faith in his judgment and took a more hands-off approach to his decision-making.

“Rick had been there for many, many years when I came onto the Corporation,” Francisco Cigarroa, a former trustee who served in the last three years of Levin’s presidency and the first three years of Salovey’s tenure, said. “He certainly had formed a lot of experience underneath him and had established a lot of trust with the board and so, you know, the board gave him a lot of leeway.”

When University leadership discussed timing for the construction of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray Colleges, Levin said that many members of the corporation were “very eager to expand” and thus preferred for those schools to be built sooner than later.

Levin disagreed, and after a “push and pull” between him and the board, the project was delayed for several years. The University did not yet have the financial resources to “do it right,” Levin said, so he resisted moving forward.

Under Levin, the general consensus was that the trustees were not decision makers. To most, their job appeared to be counseling, shaping, advising and supporting the president, including on issues of governance. When Levin stepped down in 2013, the trustees expressed a desire to be more involved in difficult decisions when they considered Salovey as the university’s next president.

It’s difficult to succeed a highly successful president such as Levin, Cigarroa told the News. The presidential search committee, which included Cigarroa, saw two notable attributes in Salovey. First, he had heavy experience in administrative positions, including as Yale’s provost, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and dean of Yale College. 

Second, Cigarroa said, Salovey “brought in a different personality.” As a social psychologist in the classroom and a clinical psychologist in the field, Salovey’s “human leadership” caught the attention of the Board.

“Compared to the candidates that we were interviewing, certainly he was able to connect with the trustees and with people he met better than most,” Cigarroa said.

And indeed he did. After a unanimous Corporation vote, Salovey was inaugurated as the 23rd president of Yale in October 2013.

“I’m a first year, just like you!” newly appointed University President Peter Salovey proclaimed to a crowd of incoming Yale first-year students that same year, a grin on his face.

Salovey enters the scene

“Those first couple of years were difficult,” Nancy Better ’84, a longtime fundraising chair for the University and capital campaign co-chair, said.

She was referring to a string of campus controversies, many of which related to racial tensions, that began in 2015.

Two years into his presidency, Salovey became a polarizing figure. In 2015, former Head of Silliman College Nicholas Christakis and Associate Head Erika Christakis faced student backlaxsh after the latter sent out an email dismissing concern over cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes. Salovey received criticism first, for his handling of the incident, and then for siding with the Christakis. 

Roughly 200 undergraduate students marched to Salovey’s home on Hillhouse Avenue to protest institutional racism at Yale. They pointed out two things: one, that Salovey’s first campus wide email since the Christakis controversy outlined an initiative to tackle tobacco use on campus, and two, that Salovey’s later email addressing the scandal spoke about affirming students’ freedom of speech instead of racial tensions at Yale.

But this was not the only criticism Yale faced at the time. That year, students demanded that Calhoun College be renamed — it is now known as Grace Hopper College — and that the title “master” be abolished — it has now been replaced as “head of college.”

In that same 2015 interview with the News, Salovey said that decisions about renaming and naming residential colleges fall under the domain of the Yale Corporation.

When it came to the Calhoun renaming, the News reported in 2015 that Salovey and the other 16 members of the Yale Corporation spent seven months deliberating over whether to rename Calhoun College and eliminate the title of master. In April 2016, Salovey announced that the college would not be renamed — only to reverse that decision 10 months later.

University stakeholders were unhappy with the extended process that was required to make a final decision. A  2019 News investigation found that major donors were doubtful of Salovey’s ability to effectively lead the University through a fundraising campaign because of his handling of the Calhoun renaming. 

Trustees who were in the room during the Calhoun deliberations described Salovey’s decision-making process as very collaborative. Hill told the News that when she became a trustee, Salovey was determined to engage the trustees in Corporation meetings when it came to large issues.

“He seemed very open and honest and engaged with the board,” Hill said.

Paul Joskow GRD ’72, who served as a trustee from 2008 to 2020, said that Salovey can recognize mistakes, and is willing to engage in consultation and collaboration to correct those mistakes.

“He recognizes that an autocratic leadership style is an unsuccessful approach,” Joskow said.

Salovey has prioritized collaboration in his dealings with the Corporation. The three trustees who spoke to the News for this story all independently attested to Salovey’s ability to listen empathetically. 

Chauncey said that during the Griswold and Brewster administrations, presidents typically tried to personally bond with the trustees to foster a good working dynamic.

“That makes for a really good relationship, because if you disagree with a friend, that can be usually done much more effectively than if you disagree with someone you don’t like,” Chauncey said.

In this respect, Salovey has conducted himself similarly to his predecessors. When Cigarroa was a trustee in the early years of his presidency, he would enjoy dinners with Salovey and his wife, Marta Moret. Cigarroa added that Salovey was easy to connect with on a human level, a sentiment shared by many of those who were interviewed by the News. 

“He has a way of making people very comfortable,” said Randy Nelson ’85, a co-chair of the Yale Development Council. “I think it’s just generally, people like to be understood and heard. They like to feel that they’re important and Peter has a way of making everybody feel important.”

In describing his dynamic with the Corporation, Salovey says that when it comes to managing the University’s day-to-day operations, he often reports a decision to the trustees “that has already been made.” But when it comes to governance, or processes by which issues will be decided or voted upon, he will tend to “lay out options” and “be receptive to their feedback.” 

“My experience as a psychologist … helps me try to understand the vantage point and perspective by which a trustee or a group of trustees might be coming [from], particularly if they disagree with me,” Salovey said.

One of the 17

By the time that Ashe vied for a Corporation seat in 2021, many former University leaders had already made note that, following Salovey’s inauguration, the dynamic between the president and the Corporation had appeared to have drastically changed.

The perception that Salovey was merely a voice at the table instead of the Corporation’s final decision-maker only became more prevalent among students and alumni in light of the trustees’ decision following Ashe’s failed election.

“I write on behalf of the Yale Board of Trustees to inform you of a change to the process for electing Alumni Fellows to the board,” Hill, the senior trustee at the time, wrote in a letter addressed to alumni in May 2021. 

She said that the petition process had recently been embraced by candidates who had particular issues or reforms in mind, which current trustees found incompatible with their goal. 

“It is because Yale’s fiduciaries must represent the interests of the university above their own or those of any backers that we find the prospect of cause-based elections so troubling,” Hill said.

Ashe was largely backed by the William F. Buckley program, a political group which claims to advocate for free speech on campus and receives financial support from high profile conservative donors. 

Hill added that there was concern that elections would “discourage many qualified and desirable candidates” from accepting a nomination, citing politicization and a costly campaigning process as barriers to entry. She acknowledged that there would be some who would “object to this decision” but felt confident the board was correct.

Michael Poliakoff ’75, a Yale alumnus who also serves as president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, told the News that he was “absolutely appalled” by the petition vote for two reasons. He said that it reflects what he calls the Board’s fear of diverse voices that have not been “vetted carefully” who could challenge the status quo.

“It’s as if the existing board is saying that we’re … just people who wave a handkerchief at reunions and sing ‘God, country and Yale’, and then start waving the checkbooks,” Poliakoff said of himself and other alumni.

Chauncey could not recall any announcement in which a senior trustee announced a decision to the Yale community ever being made in any presidency that he has been involved in at Yale since the 1950s.

Salovey defended the board’s decision, explaining that there was an important group within the board of trustees that “grapples with issues of governance” — the trusteeship committee. The president is not a voting member of that committee, but Salovey said that he attends those meetings as a “source of information,” noting that he votes in the final Corporation decision.

When it came to the decision to terminate the alumni petition process, Salovey said that he agreed with Hill’s concerns that she vocalized to the Yale community but that he had no special vote when it came to the final decision. He was only “one of the 17 [members]” when it came to that decision, Salovey said.

Salovey did not confirm how he himself voted.

Students call for change

It was Kyle Hovannesian ’25, a Berkeley College undergraduate senator, who first sparked the idea to advocate for change in the structure of the Yale Corporation through the undergraduate representative body. 

Hovannesian, with a group of other student senators, wrote a letter to the trustees raising concern over alleged lack of transparency and community input in its decision making process. It was unlikely the Corporation would support democratization of trustee elections, Hovannesian said, but he also included in the letter what he thought were some other less significant and “pretty reasonable requests” for reform which he believed would give the trustees greater access to student input.

The Yale College Council held their referendum in January. They asked two questions: “Should the board of trustees for Yale Corporation consist of democratically elected trustees?” and “Should students, professors, and staff be eligible to vote for candidates for the board of trustees for Yale Corporation?” 

The vote was overwhelmingly yes on both, with over 2,000 students voting in the affirmative — 90 percent of those who voted. As a result of the referendum results, the letter Hovannesian wrote was approved by the Senate on Feb. 5, and submitted to Salovey on Feb. 6.

Hovannesian told the News that he was disappointed with Salovey’s response to the letter. The president did not respond to any of the six recommendations, he said. 

Salovey also did not publicly address the concerns raised by the results of the referendum. 

“I feel like people didn’t really know what happened with the referendum,” Hovannesian said. “Like what was the point of it?”

But while the administration provided little response to students’ concerns, the referendum itself received wide media attention. A week after the referendum, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece entitled “Make Yale Democratic Again.”

“It seems the wealthier American universities get — Yale’s endowment is $41.4 billion — the less open they are to different voices,” the op-ed read. “At a time when it’s become fashionable to cast any political disagreement as a ‘threat to democracy,’ some of the institutions that trumpet democracy the loudest don’t mind undermining it in their own governance.”

Still, Hovannesian cautiously avoids putting the blame on Salovey for his response to the letter. 

“I don’t want to criticize his leadership because I don’t really know what else he could have done,” Hovannesian said. “Because his boss at the end of the day is the board of trustees. So he’s not going to anger them and lose his position, essentially.”

Salovey, now

Salovey told the News that the culture among the Yale Corporation is to “try to support the decision that the leadership of the University wants to make,” backing him and the rest of his cabinet. But he also noted in interviews with the News that it can be difficult to make everyone at the University happy with every decision.

He added that the trustees are currently in discussion on how they can be more responsive to student input, which he believes will lead to “novel opportunities” for Yale students to interact with the Corporation. 

“I think over time, as a leader, I’ve become better at making sure that everyone at the table, whatever that table is… has an opportunity to weigh in, is listened to, and their ideas are taken seriously,” Salovey said.

However, only 16 people at that table have the ability to fire him.

2023 marks Salovey’s 10th year as president of Yale University.

The refund

Mandated reporting of scholarships to colleges is a result of individual college policies, not federal law or regulations. The only legal requirement on the national level is reporting the taxable portion of an external scholarship, anything in excess of tuition and mandatory fees, to the Internal Revenue Service. 

At Yale, students may be required to complete a Family Information Supplement form after matriculation, which includes a section on outside awards, following matriculation — and for students receiving Yale financial aid, expected outside awards are either indicated in the Yale financial aid application or through a separate Outside Scholarship/Resource Information form. 

Full-aid students like Reiswig who receive outside grants equivalent to or above $3,700 may allocate excess scholarship funds for their $3,700 student share. Along with travel costs, the student share is one of the aspects of a student’s package that is not a direct payment to the University — and it is also the section that outside scholarships contribute to if a student is already on a Yale full ride. Comparatively, a higher-income student who is not receiving aid from the University but has outside awards will have that funding first go toward covering the total cost of attendance and the parent share — and only toward the student share if there is any amount from the award leftover.

For Reiswig, this allocation of scholarships to the student share produces an annual $3,700 refund that appears in the student’s personal accounts, if the option to refund “everything” is selected. Theoretically, the refund is supposed to be applied for those aforementioned indirect costs, but many put it toward travel or other means.

Some full aid students argue that the application of external scholarships, especially those that specifically accept applications from low-income students, should delve beyond the student share to yield a more considerable refund, therefore expanding coverage to accommodate expenses that are not as easily anticipated in a student’s internal aid package.

Lusangelis Ramos ’25, a QuestBridge student receiving multiple outside awards, has to plan out her finances so she can afford necessary medical care for her mental health and chronic conditions, something that she said her “full ride” from Yale does not take into consideration. 

“Disabled people like me are more likely to be low income than non-disabled people,” she said. “As someone that seems to have endless health problems, I am in contact with Yale Health a lot and I have to pay for my Yale Health copays out of pocket.”

In the United States, adults with disabilities live in poverty at over twice the rate of adults without disabilities — 27 percent versus 12 percent. A 2018 article in “Inquiry: the Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing” also found that the average annual health cost for a person with a disability is almost five times that of a person without a disability, and that out-of-pocket costs are more than double, at $1,053 versus $486. 

As a student receiving several outside scholarships, Ramos emphasized that there is the added layer of challenge that comes with communicating between all her organizations to ensure that only the necessary amount is sent to Yale to avoid displacement.

For example, if a low-income student on a full ride from Yale also receives two outside scholarships of $5,000 each per year — for a total of $10,000 — the student will receive an expected refund of $3,700, and the remaining difference of $6,300 goes into reducing or “displacing” a student’s existing financial aid package, which is paid for through internal grants, institutional endowment and alumni donations. The same student would receive the same amount of money if they had asked only one of their scholarship organizations to send Yale $3,700. In the second scenario, however, the scholarship organizations themselves would not lose any money and may then allocate those excess funds to another student. 

Many scholarship distributors, such as the Asian Pacific Islander American Scholarship, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, send out surveys that request their students’ academic and financial standing for every year that the scholarship could be viably renewed. The questions on these surveys intend to assess what recipients need covered. For Yale students, this may amount to the student share and any additional costs that students have to pay out of pocket. 

The colleges’ perspective

As scholarship organizers defend students who they believe are being undermined in their educational efforts and intensive scholarship searches, colleges argue that displacement permits reallocation of resources to students with greater need and who did not receive external aid. At Yale, the average aid package for students on aid exceeds $67,000, and the number of admitted students receiving Pell Grants has climbed steadily over the years. 

“Our policy is that outside scholarships may replace the standard student share, which is $3,700 for all undergraduate students,” Alexander Muro, the interim director of the Yale Office of Undergraduate Financial Aid, wrote in a statement to the News.

At Yale, students on full aid who receive large external scholarships may apply up to $2,500 toward a one-time technology grant after their scholarships cover the $3,700 student share, he added. 

Referencing the previous example of the college student receiving two outside scholarships, each for $5,000 annually, they may at one point apply $2,500 in outside aid toward a new computer, pair of headphones or tablet, using $6,200 of the total $10,000. The remaining difference of $3,800 would still go toward reducing the student’s aid package from Yale if the student reported the scholarships to Yale.

It is important to note that the technology grant and student share coverage from external scholarships is liable to taxation. According to Muro, all grants and scholarships “in excess of tuition and mandatory fees are considered taxable income.” While students do not have to pay taxes on scholarships that cover tuition, costs such as the student share and room and board do not fall under the “mandatory fees” category, so external scholarships used to pay for those expenses are taxable. 

The University offers limited support for students navigating taxation. Muro said that he is not a tax professional and is thus unable to provide in-depth tax advice. 

When Reiswig asked representatives from the Financial Aid Office about what parts of her financial aid were taxable, she was told to speak to a professional in the area. The Yale Student Employment website affirms that while there is no personal assistance at Yale for students filing taxes, the local IRS office located at 150 Court Street can assist students in preparing returns. 

“I don’t understand exactly what we’re supposed to pay taxes on and what we’re not, so I will be submitting my documents and hoping for the best,” Reiswig wrote in an email to the News. “I understand if they’re not legally allowed to give tax advice, as was the implication of their comments, but it would be really helpful if they gave students a [more comprehensive] list of resources … to help us navigate.”

Safety Net

University policy requires students submit a receipt to receive the $2,500 technology award. Other financial aid supports such as the winter clothing grant offered at the Yale College Dean’s Office and Safety Net, an emergency funding option through the Yale College Dean’s Office, follow a similar model. Students must first pay for an item out of pocket and then submit an official receipt for reimbursement. For students who cannot immediately afford the overhead cost, this is a burden. 

Reiswig explained that this delayed reimbursement usually isn’t an issue, but that more time-sensitive expenditures can exceed what a student can afford, especially for individuals who lack the capacity to pay for large costs. The process has created difficulty, for example, for low-income students moving off-campus — since refunds can arrive much later than deadlines for security deposits.

“I’m lucky to be in a position where I don’t have to worry about navigating many different scholarship sources and how they come together, but I would say that my greatest challenge has been with the timing of the refund,” Reiswig added. “Yale’s estimated travel cost doesn’t include getting to college in the fall, and I don’t usually receive my [$3,700] refund until a few weeks into the school year. It can be difficult getting what I need at the beginning of the year before it comes in.”

Reiswig is not alone. For students like Harvey Lloyd Picar ’25, a roundtrip airline ticket to his home in Hawaii runs up to hundreds of dollars and can cost close to a thousand when booked at the last minute. When his sister, Harlene, suddenly passed away in October 2022, Picar had to travel back and forth from Hawaii several times while fall semester was still in session. 

Picar, who receives both full aid and a Gates Scholarship, turned to a representative from the Yale Financial Aid Office to see whether his scholarship could fund his travel home. The official told Picar that while he could request coverage, he would not receive the funding until the following year. 

But Picar needed the money right away. 

Ultimately asking a cousin to cover his first round trip between New Haven and Hawaii. Then he learned about the University’s Safety Net program, which covered the full cost of his second trip home — this time, to attend Harlene’s funeral. For “emergency” requests, Safety Net reimburses funds within 24 hours. Between 2018 and 2019, around half of all requests were resolved with funding or a loan of equipment. 

The funding arrived at a critical moment for Picar, who suggested that outside scholarships should consider a similar model for supporting first-generation, low-income students through unexpected expenses, especially if scholarship displacement prevents students from otherwise taking full advantage of their resources. 

Some students have not had nearly as successful of an experience with Safety Net, but agree that its support is a fast solution to immediate problems confronting low-income students whose financial backgrounds lack the stability of higher-income households. As an individual with chronic health conditions, Ramos wished that either her “full ride” from the University or the Safety Net could cover her medical visits. 

“Essentially a situation that I have encountered is being denied Safety Net funding and being explicitly told that it’s because I had already received significant funding via Gates or outside scholarships,” Gates scholar and first-generation, low-income student Kimberly Wenceslao ’23 wrote to the News, recalling a time when she requested funding after her laptop had broken down. “Definitely understand their stance … [but] my expected family contribution was zero and I’m from California, so a big part of my refund was already used for flights.”

Safety Net’s email to Wenceslao revealed that its assessment of her situation was completed in conjunction with Undergraduate Financial Aid — and that her financial standing, though “indeed challenging,” was stronger than her peers who were being considered for this limited fund. The document then stated that the “limited fund” would be subsequently used for students who have “lesser access to university funds or personal resources.” 

Senior Associate Dean of Yale College Burgwell Howard reiterated this position in a February interview with the News. 

“In general, there are no hard criteria for which requests receive Safety Net support, as the details of each request and each student’s situation are different,” Howard said. “The driving factor in these requests is generally demonstrated financial need, and even among FGLI and non-low income students there is great variance in people’s financial situation. So, we seek to address the most critical and unanticipatable issues and expenses as quickly as we can, with input from Undergraduate Financial Aid and other key stakeholders who may have information or input.”

Muro affirmed that the Financial Aid considers outside scholarships — and the refunds derived from them — when determining Safety Net requests. However, he explained that the “mere presence” of outside scholarships is not an immediate disqualifier for Safety Net funding, due to the “holistic” nature of the evaluation. 

He added that the team makes a distinction between outside scholarship monies already received by the University versus those in a pending status, “since the former is immediately available and [the FA office] only mentions refunds if one is available.” This difference can cause students to not be aware of a credit balance on their account or the means to access a refund, but it is something that the office can guide students through, Muro said. 

While grateful for the refunds that Gates provides, Wenceslao agreed with Ramos that the perception of outside scholarships conferring “significant funding” for low-income students with a full Yale scholarship can be a distorted one. She suggested that heightened communication between students and donor organizations may open other avenues of use for excess outside aid — and looked back on a point when her family’s expected family contribution had exceeded $0, resulting in an unexpected and significantly reduced refund from Yale. 

For Wenceslao, the first-generation, low-income experience is continuous and fluctuating — and these moments have only attested to that. As a second-term senior reflecting on her time here at the University, she has found a way to see value in everything from the frequently difficult communications with administration to the hours spent pouring over family finances thousands of miles away from her California home. 

The struggle against displacement, and the consideration of privilege 

The road to maximizing the utility of external awards is far from over, but efforts have been promising. As a result of displacement, some scholarship organizations allow students who will already have their education subsidized by their universities to withhold accepting their scholarship funds until that money is useful. 

Oscar Sweeten-Lopez, the leader of the Dell Scholars Program, announced in 2017 that its scholarships will give students experiencing scholarship displacement the choice to defer their funds until they graduate, when they can collect all their funds at once and pay off loans or attend graduate school. 

“One piece of advice that I give students who will likely experience displacement is to ask their outside scholarship provider if they could defer their scholarship to a later year in undergrad — as freshmen tend to have more generous packages — or [to] graduate school,” agreed Senior Financial Programs and Scholarship Director Nadja Jepsen of College Track, an education nonprofit that supports underserved students through college scholarships and mentorship.

According to Jepsen, who credited her own ability to obtain a graduate degree to an outside grant, the decision of whether to permit fund deferral is largely based on a scholarship’s mission statement. For example, she said that if a scholarship supports first-generation students earning a bachelor’s degree, they would likely be less receptive to deferring funds to graduate school education. Nonetheless, she urges students to research scholarship providers and the specific colleges that they plan on attending.

During her time working with students as a scholarship provider, Jepsen observed that private colleges tend to be more flexible with their institutional aid than public universities. 

The full tuition coverage that low-income students receive at many of the nation’s top colleges is rare; schools like Yale and Dartmouth College have eliminated loans from their financial aid award packages, guaranteeing students whose families fall under a certain income threshold a debt-free college education. 

The same does not hold true for financially disadvantaged students at public, state or even private colleges with smaller endowments. In fact, over the past decade, many schools have raised tuition prices for families on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum at a higher rate than those on the higher end, even though low-income students generally receive larger financial aid. 

For low-income students who find themselves in these situations, private outside scholarships can reduce loans and push them toward a more debt-free future. At least, that is what students might expect. It turns out that Yale’s own scholarship displacement policies, which only apply when a student has excess outside aid, is in itself a privilege. 

For some colleges today, scholarship displacement is more extensive and occurs for students whose awards do not exceed their need. Instead of using outside aid to reduce a student’s loans or issue a refund, a college might reduce the amount of financial aid its internal system had awarded the student. This practice incited a two-year long anti-scholarship displacement campaign from Central Scholarship, a scholarship and mentorship organization for Maryland students, whose staffers were frustrated that any scholarship money a student received would cause their college to simply reduce their financial aid by the same amount.

“It totally undermines our very existence,” Jan Wagner, president of Central Scholarship, said in a 2017 interview with Baltimore Sun. “For someone who went out and beat the bushes and pounded the pavement and submitted applications to try and get additional grants and make college affordable, the net result of their efforts is zero. That’s unfair. Especially when we’re talking about low-income and middle-income students.”

Until summer 2017, nowhere in the United States had officially banned this kind of displacement. Today, colleges in five states — California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington and New Jersey — have passed some requirements forcing schools to reduce a student’s loan packages, if they have any, before decreasing internal scholarship allocations. For instance, California’s AB-288, an anti-displacement bill passed in September 2022, prohibits both public and private institutions from cutting down Pell-eligible “students’ institution-based gift aid offers below their financial need.” 

Connecticut is among the 45 states without active legislation banning scholarship displacement. Title IV of the Higher Education Amendments of 1965 outlines policies underlying the management of financial aid programs. It dictates that a student’s awards — whether they consist of university grants or outside scholarships — may not exceed one’s financial need. The law defines need as the difference between a college’s standard cost of attendance and the amount that the financial aid office believes a student’s family can pay. Essentially, Title IV prohibits students from pocketing scholarships or grant money that exceeds their need for a college education — which some argue is an issue that is nuanced and requires more consideration of the real-world challenges confronting FGLI students. 

“The real cost of attendance is different from the formula provided in the FAFSA or college financial aid award letters,” Viveros-Walton, one of the writers and thinkers behind AB-288, said. “And in California, that gap can be anywhere from $9,000 to $30,000.”

Viveros-Walton called attention to off-campus housing for California students, which in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco can drain most of a student’s refunds and financial awards. Similar to Yale, many colleges in her state do not guarantee housing for all four years of their undergraduate education — except in California, many are thrown into a more voracious open market with external adult renters. 

However, some scholarships have restrictions dictating what their funds may be used for. Some scholarships may not cover off-campus housing, presenting a challenge for students who are not guaranteed on-campus lodging. Viveros-Walton hopes that by urging scholarships to expand their latitude of coverage or disperse funds directly to recipients, students would be able to put their hard-earned awards to better use. 

Nonetheless, these are only recommendations — and private scholarship organizations ultimately decide what they wish to dedicate scholarship dollars. The struggle to make financial aid and scholarship processes equitable, transparent and accessible is one of many moving parts and perspectives, requiring as much empathy as education from all sides of the equation, she continued. It remains, now more relevant than ever. 

Starting the 2023-2024 academic year, Yale University’s overall cost of attendance, otherwise known as its term bill, will increase by nearly 4 percent from $80,700 to $83,880. 

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UP CLOSE | The Investments Office’s diversity “smoke screen”

How Yale and its peer institutions keep their assets under primarily white management

By Staff Reporter Evan Gorelick

Published on April 4, 2023

In its public statements, Yale’s Office of the President often celebrates diversity. A quick look through recent statements turns up titles like, “Yale’s Steadfast Commitment to Diversity,” “Yale Will Continue to Foster a Diverse and Vibrant Educational Environment” and “An Excellent Faculty is a Diverse Faculty.” 

“By bringing people of different backgrounds, talents, and perspectives together, we best prepare our students for a complex and dynamic world,” one statement reads.

Yale was quick to take up rallying cries in support of race-conscious admissions when a nonprofit challenged the practice in lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014.

Since then, Yale has joined 14 peer universities — including all six remaining members of the Ivy League — in a joint amicus curiae brief defending the use of affirmative action in college admissions. The brief, filed with the Supreme Court in August 2022, justifies ethnicity- and race-conscious admissions practices on the grounds that they are “crucial to achieving a richly diverse academic environment that enhances students’ educational experiences and maximizes their future success.”

But for all of Yale’s fervent advocacy in the public sphere, the University has been notably less enthusiastic about diversity in the private management of its $41.4 billion endowment. Despite ongoing calls for transparency, Yale and other elite universities continue to withhold data on the diversity of the managers who oversee their endowments. Although these universities often claim that they are working to improve asset manager diversity, experts in the field argue that data secrecy hinders institutional accountability.

The Yale Investment Office building at 55 Whitney Ave. (Tim Tai, Photography Editor)

These policies of nondisclosure come even as research finds that white- and male-owned firms continue to dominate the asset management industry.

Endowments and asset manager diversity

Most elite universities follow the so-called “Yale Model” when investing to grow their endowments. The Yale Model is a framework for institutional investing developed by long-time Yale Chief Investment Officer David Swensen, who managed the University’s endowment for 35 years until his death in 2021.

The Yale Model instructs broad asset diversification, allocating fewer assets to traditional U.S. equities and bonds and more to alternative investments like private equity, venture capital, hedge funds and real estate.

Because endowment offices are limited in staff capacity — and because alternative assets require specialized expertise — universities outsource much of their investing to third-party asset managers.

These external management firms oversee designated pieces of their clients’ portfolios. They are contracted by university endowment offices as fiduciaries, financial agents legally compelled to act in their clients’ best interests.

Minority- and women-owned asset management firms manage just 1.4 percent of U.S.-based assets, according to a 2021 study by the Knight Foundation, which funds journalism, arts and research in the areas of media and democracy. The Knight Foundation defines minority- and women-owned firms, also known as “diverse-owned firms,” as those whose ownership is held by at least 50 percent women or “racial/ethnic minorities.”

Nevertheless, these firms represent approximately 12.2 percent of U.S.-based asset managers. Evidently, such firms are grossly underrepresented in allocators’ portfolios; if they were perfectly represented, we would expect them to control the equivalent 12.2 percent, rather than a mere 1.4 percent, of assets under management. 

The Knight Foundation’s ongoing research series on asset manager diversity follows its decade-long effort to employ more diverse-owned firms in the management of its own multi-billion dollar endowment. Today, over a third of the Knight Foundation’s endowment, or approximately $1.07 billion, is overseen by diverse-owned managers, a list of which the Foundation publishes on its website.

There are two common, albeit debunked, arguments that asset allocators use to justify their disproportionate reliance on white- and male-owned firms: the performance justification and the pipeline justification.

Perceived performance tradeoff

The first line of reasoning boils down to performance. While asset allocators generally agree that diversity is important, most investment professionals — especially white ones — perceive a negative financial trade-off that comes with prioritizing diversity.

In a 2021 Morgan Stanley survey, 56 percent of asset owners agreed that “they must choose between financial gains and incorporating diversity into their investment decisions.” And there is a sizable opinion gap by race — 70 percent of white asset owners agreed, compared to just 35 percent of non-white owners.

“The survey … does not take long to point out that this is a perception issue,” Daniel Villao, CEO of Intelligent Partnerships, Inc. and former chair of the National Board of Directors for the Association of Latino Professionals for America, told the News. “The fact that the existing cadre of leading minds is uncomfortable with change really drives the status quo and means that the lack of opportunity to demonstrate otherwise continues to ensure the 1.4 percent does not change.”

The preponderance of research — including by the Knight Foundation — continues to find, however, that diverse-owned firms perform at a level comparable to or exceeding that of their predominantly white- and male-owned peer companies.

A recent meta-analysis of 56 performance studies using 50 years of data arrived at a “clear consensus” that there is no trade-off between diversity and investment performance.

Jason Lamin, the founder and CEO of Lenox Park Solutions, a financial technology company specializing in DEI — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — data aggregation, thinks we have begun “to overstudy the problem.”

“The research that comes out of any major academic institution or think tank is pretty empirical at this point: diverse teams outperform,” Lamin said. “They mitigate risk, they are more innovative and creative. … There’s a part of me that is candidly tired of talking about it.”

Pipeline issues 

Robert Raben, executive director of the Diverse Asset Managers Initiative and president of the Raben Group.

The second rationale is a pipeline argument; some allocators say there just aren’t enough diverse-owned firms out there to muster a diverse portfolio. Considering that only 12.2 percent of management firms are diverse-owned, this justification may initially seem compelling.

But some industry leaders, including Robert Raben, consider the pipeline argument unpersuasive. Raben serves as executive director of the Diverse Asset Managers Initiative and president of the Raben Group, a progressive public policy firm. He also served as Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice under former President Bill Clinton.

Raben thinks that asset allocators claim there are too few diverse-owned management firms to conceal their deep-seated hesitations about allocating assets away from white- and male-owned firms.

While Raben says that he would like to see more women and people of color enter the asset management industry, there are already “plenty” of diverse-owned firms for any single institution — like Yale — to improve its managerial diversity.

“[Many asset allocators say] that there aren’t enough minority asset managers,” Raben said. “We believe that’s a smoke screen. We don’t have a supply problem. We have a demand problem.”

“[Many asset allocators say] that there aren’t enough minority asset managers. We believe that’s a smoke screen. We don’t have a supply problem. We have a demand problem.”

—Robert Raben

Raben said that for every financial institution to significantly improve its manager diversity, “we’d need a lot more managers of color, yes.” But Raben emphasized that the industry is not yet close to a point where individual firms aiming to improve their diversity will run into a capacity problem.

Raben used Yale as an example. 

“I don’t know how many managers Yale has on contract — let’s say 70 firms at a time,” Raben said. “There are hundreds and hundreds of Black- and Latino-owned asset management firms.” 

The National Association of Investment Companies, or NAIC, is the country’s largest network of diverse-owned alternative asset managers, consisting of over 180 firms representing over $325 billion in assets under management.

Raben argues that the “best proof” for the strength of the existing pipeline is actually the other allocators, including the Knight Foundation and academic institutions like Duke University and the University of California system, which Raben says have “easily achieved extremely significant women/minority representation in their management numbers with the current supply.” 

In 2022 alone, UC Investments’ allocation to diverse-owned partners increased by roughly 10 percent, from 36 to 40 percent of its managers. In 2022, Duke’s share of diverse-owned managers reached a record-high 44 percent.

University transparency

How does Yale compare? 

Frankly, nobody knows. Duke and the University of California are in the small minority of universities that make their manager diversity numbers public.

Yale, by contrast, is in the majority that chooses not to release these statistics.   

“By being transparent, we hold ourselves accountable,” UC Investments CIO Jagdeep Bachher told the News. “Compiling reliable data gives us a way to easily track our own progress and that of our partners.”

“By being transparent, we hold ourselves accountable.Compiling reliable data gives us a way to easily track our own progress and that of our partners.”

—Jagdeep Bachher

When the Knight Foundation asked the nation’s 50 wealthiest colleges and universities to participate in its research in 2022, 34 institutions, including Yale, declined to share data.

However, some of Yale’s peers with large endowments — including Duke, Harvard University, Stanford University and Princeton University — did choose to share data for the study.

“We’ve done this research, for one, to ensure that this is a part of the conversation,” said Ashley Zohn, vice president of the Knight Foundation’s Learning and Impact program. “We hope that more foundations and universities will be transparent. And ultimately, we hope that this will lead to more use of diverse-owned firms.”

The Knight Foundation is performing its higher education research in partnership with the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

The researchers have only published an interim release so far and are waiting on more schools to share data before publishing a final report.

“Universities are promoting DEI in how they present their institutional values, in the admissions process and in various other aspects of campus life,” Center for Business and Human Rights Senior Associate Director Kerin McCauley told the News. “We saw these initiatives around DEI, but we weren’t seeing the same kind of urgency related to where they were investing.”

The News contacted the Yale Investments Office in November for comment on its non-participation in the study. When the News initially reached out for comment, the Investment Office’s team page displayed the names and photographs of 22 upper-level financial staff, a group that appeared to skew white and male.

Within two hours of the request, the page was updated to display the names and photographs of 39 staff members, including administrative assistants and legal staff whose names or photographs did not appear before. On the new page, white men no longer appeared to make up a majority of depicted staffers.

Although these were internal office staff members and not external asset managers, the website change prompted some, including Raben, to wonder what the incident revealed about the Office’s general approach to matters of diversity.

“In other areas of university life — student enrollment, faculty composition — the universities are clear and sometimes assertive with granular detail about the presence or absence of women and people of color,” Raben said. “But what must be going on in the management of $40 billion for very, very talented and bright people to go through Herculean gymnastics to avoid answering the basic questions: Do you work with women or not? Do you work with Black people or not?”

Raben thinks Yale probably does care about the issue, but he said this episode is “Exhibit A” of the University’s lack of “internal skills, tools and experiences” to address it appropriately. 

In response to the News’s November article regarding Yale’s decision not to participate in the Knight Foundation study, Raben and the Diverse Asset Manager Initiative — or DAMI — sent a public letter to University President Peter Salovey and CIO Matthew Mendelsohn urging Yale “to avail itself of the transparency that has so benefited the rest of the institution.” 

Raben told the News that Yale’s leadership should seek help from expert groups like DAMI that have the proper toolset and experience to address these issues. He has met several times with University leaders to discuss manager diversity and said that the Yale Investments Office initially delegated the diversity issue to one white woman, Lisa Howie, who served as a YIO director.

When Howie left Yale to become CIO of Smith College in April 2021, Yale redelegated diversity, equity and inclusion work to Sohail Ramirez. Ramirez’s profile on the YIO website says that he “is a member of YIO’s legal team and focuses on the venture capital portfolio, regulatory matters, and YIO’s DEI efforts.”

Across all 41 current YIO staff profiles, only Ramirez’s mentions DEI responsibilities.

“A classic example of doing this poorly is to put the burden of diversity on the shoulders of the few diverse people in your office, who have day jobs,” Raben said. “They’re there to manage money.”

Samantha Katz, a board member of IDiF — the Center of Innovation for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Finance — told the News that institutional transparency is a critical first step for driving change. 

IDiF aims to bring together trustees, donors, CIOs, public pensions, allocators, asset owners and entrepreneurs from across the industry to source solutions for the underrepresentation of diverse-owned firms in asset management.

“Silence and opacity around this data allows for the perpetuation of the status quo,” Katz told the News. “Transparency will help investors identify what leadership in this market looks like and enable accountability.”

The Endowment Transparency Act

In the wake of lackluster university participation in the Knight Foundation’s study of America’s largest university endowments, Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II introduced the Endowment Transparency Act of 2022. 

The Endowment Transparency Act would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to mandate annual reporting on the ownership of asset management firms contracted by university endowments. The act would also require the data to be disaggregated by race and gender.

“In the year 2022, it is simply unacceptable that nearly 99 percent of assets controlled by the $82 trillion asset management industry … are overseen by White men, when we know that there are qualified women- and minority-owned firms that can fulfill these duties to the same, or even better, degree,” Representative Cleaver wrote in a press release.

University endowments currently have no legal obligation to report data on their use of diverse-owned management firms, and, as Cleaver writes, “anecdotal reporting has been less than favorable.”

The act, which has not yet made it onto the congressional docket, builds on Cleaver’s prior work requesting diversity disclosures from elite universities, including Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford. 

On July 10, 2020, Cleaver and then-Massachusetts Rep. Joseph Kennedy III sent a letter to 25 colleges and universities requesting information about the diversity of the asset management firms overseeing their endowments. The letter cited the most recent Knight Foundation report at the time, which found that firms owned by women and minorities managed just 1.3 percent of U.S.-based assets under management.

“Some colleges and universities have resisted repeated calls to be more transparent with such information,” Cleaver and Kennedy wrote in the letter. “The response of colleges and universities has only heightened suspicions.” 

They also pointed out that most university endowments “have never spent a dollar with a minority [asset management] firm in the history of their institution,” a fact first described in a June 2019 hearing of the House Financial Services Committee. 

Of the 25 audited institutions, 24 submitted responses. Very few, however, broke down the data by race or gender ownership; instead, each institution provided an aggregate share of “diverse” or “diverse-owned” managers. Raben said that only Duke, the University of California and Georgetown University provided “meaningful data.”

In a reply letter to Cleaver and Kennedy, Yale wrote that “a preliminary assessment indicates that 50 percent of Yale’s assets that are managed by U.S.-based managers are managed by diverse-led firms.” 

In a footnote at the bottom of the page, Yale defines diverse-led firms as “those [firms] where women or people of color make a material contribution to a firm’s investment leadership and decision-making.” 

The letter does not explain what constitutes a “material contribution.” 

“‘Diverse’ is not a term of art,” Raben said. “It can mean veterans, it can mean LGBTQ, it can mean managers in Hong Kong. You have no idea what is behind that number. … They gave a number to Congress that is absurdly large. They imply that 50 percent of their domestically managed money is diverse. That’s not happening.”

To complement its asset manager diversity work, the Investments Office, according to the letter, “has stepped up efforts to focus on diversity and inclusion among its own staff.” At the time of the letter’s writing, women and people of color made up 38 percent of YIO staff and 30 percent of senior staff.

Nevertheless, YIO’s demographic diversity falls short of the diversity of Yale’s student body. According to Yale’s 2022-23 Common Data Set, which provides student demographics by race and gender, approximately 50 percent of Yale College students are female and 60 percent are people of color. If one assumes that approximately 50 percent of people of color in Yale College are women, women and people of color together represent about 80 percent of Yale’s undergraduate student body — more than double both of the YIO figures.

A stubborn status quo

There are some legitimate obstacles that universities face in hiring diverse-owned managers and reporting manager diversity statistics.

For one, these changes take time. 

On its website, the Yale Investments Office writes, “Our team actively searches for partners who are focused on establishing long-term partnerships and building sustainable organizations. We have partnered with many of our managers for more than ten years, and several partnerships span more than 20 years.” 

Tim Tai, Photography Editor

(Tim Tai, Photography Editor)

Yale has spent decades building strong, long-term partnerships with its managers, and, according to Raben, University leaders probably don’t want to sever those partnerships overnight.

And because Yale’s investment returns over the past several years have been best-in-class, switching managers might not improve performance. Amid this year’s turbulent markets, Yale was the only school in the Ivy League to report a positive return on its endowment holdings.

Although diverse-owned firms generally perform as well as or better than white- and male-owned firms, some individual white- or male-owned firms are inevitably still capable of outperforming their peers.

Even UC Investments, which leads the endowment space in manager diversity and transparency, maintains unequivocally that performance is its number one criterion in choosing managers. 

“We hire very few external managers, but when we do we look for the best people, potential long-term partners whose values are aligned with our own and who have a record of high performance,” UC Investments CIO Jagdeep Bachher told the News. “We are in the business of making money for the University of California, so we will not sacrifice returns for anybody. We are not a charity.”

Just as asset managers act as fiduciaries for endowments, endowment offices act as fiduciaries for their respective institutions. 

Lenox Park Solutions CEO Jason Lamin, whose firm supports DEI benchmarking and reporting for 1,800 organizations managing over $4 trillion in assets, says that diversity for its own sake can be a tough sell.

“Are my fiduciary responsibilities to make money or to employ a social agenda?” Lamin said. “I want to be clear. My view personally, at my firm, is that it’s the right thing to do. But as you know, there will be those that say, ‘It’s not my responsibility. I’m here to make returns.’” 

Nevertheless, every endowment — including a top-tier performer like Yale — must have managers performing in its bottom quartile.

According to Katz, it is much easier to renew a contract with an underperforming manager “than risk your job bringing new talent into the portfolio.” 

Raben argues, though, that “an important client can say to the manager, ‘I need to see women and people of color in senior positions on my team within two years.’” Yale is a large and important enough allocator, Raben says, that it can use its leverage to improve diversity without ditching its existing managers.

Reporting challenges

Even if an asset allocator has every intention of making its diversity data public, transparency can be difficult in practice.

For an asset allocator to report on the diversity of its asset managers, it must first ask each of its asset managers to report its own diversity numbers. 

“For those that are surveying managers, some of the asset managers choose to report and others simply don’t, even when the allocator requests the information,” Katz told the News. “Without fund managers reporting, the allocator has no way of knowing what demographics are represented in their portfolio.”

Katz says that enacting laws or policies — like the Endowment Transparency Act — could help. But real change, she says, might require a commitment from allocators to pull capital from managers that do not report or to allocate additional capital to those that do.

“If every allocator sends out a different DEI survey with different definitions of what it means to be diverse, then what can they really do with it?The managers are tired; they’re getting 50 or 60 surveys a year.”

—Jason Lamin

Because asset allocators generally conduct their own diversity surveys, managers can easily become overwhelmed when allocators want to report. At any given time, some asset managers are managing funds from dozens of allocators.

“If every allocator sends out a different DEI survey with different definitions of what it means to be diverse, then what can they really do with it?” Lamin said. “The managers are tired; they’re getting 50 or 60 surveys a year.”

This is the very issue that Lamin’s company, Lenox Park Solutions, aims to solve.

Lamin describes his platform as the “Common App” of manager diversity reporting. When allocators — which include pension funds, endowments, foundations and more — join the platform, they can use it to send standardized surveys to all their managers.

Jason Lamin, founder and CEO of Lenox Park Solutions, a financial technology company specializing in DEI data aggregation. (Courtesy of Lenox Park Solutions)

The platform then receives, aggregates and benchmarks data for the allocator.

“What we’ve done with our technology is continue to build and refine tools that just make it easier for people to report … [and] to measure and monitor over time how their asset managers are doing,” Lamin said.

Because the platform is so large — its thousands of users collectively manage over $4 trillion — the benchmarks it generates “actually mean something.”

Though reporting is far from perfect, Lamin says that there is “no question” that transparency and disclosure is improving across the industry. In 2019, just 59.9 percent of the managers that received surveys from Lamin’s platform responded with full, complete information. By 2022, that number had jumped to 81.1 percent. 

“There’s a feeling from the asset owners that, you know, ‘I don’t want to be troublesome for managers, and maybe I’m asking for information that’s too invasive in some way,’” Lamin said “And we remind them … just on our platform, there’s another $4 trillion of asset owners that are asking the same thing.” 

Diversity initiatives

Despite these constraints, the universities that have made concerted efforts to report on diversity  — like UC and Duke — have generally been able to do so. 

UC began reporting diversity numbers in 2019, and, in that first year, achieved a 92 percent manager response rate, representing 98 percent of assets surveyed. By 2022, the response rate had risen to 94 percent.

If Yale has also been regularly surveying its managers for diversity information, it has not said so openly.

In October 2020, however, Yale’s then-CIO David Swensen publicly instructed the firms that manage the University’s endowment to diversify their ranks.

Swensen asked managers to complete a diversity survey, writing that Yale is “interested in the numbers of diverse professionals on the investment team and in … support functions, at various levels of seniority.” Swensen asked Howie — who had not yet left for Smith — to coordinate the survey.

Yale has stayed almost completely silent on its progress since. Although Swensen told managers in the initial letter that he intended to ask for annual updates, it is unclear whether the efforts have been ongoing.

Rather than simply asking managers to improve their diversity, UC Investments has been intentional about “search[ing] widely” for diverse-owned firms with which to build new partnerships.

“To find the best people, we intentionally search widely, often looking for firms we may have overlooked or who, for some reason, haven’t been on our radar,” Bachher told the News. “That was the impetus behind our recent initiative during which we met more than 100 firms who were new to us … But to be clear, that initiative was merely an accelerant. We routinely meet with many diverse firms throughout the year.”

UC Investments has partnered with trade organizations like NAIC to help source diverse-owned firms. 

In 2022, UC Investments met with approximately 333 diverse-owned managers, including 101 managers sourced through the NAIC partnership; these meetings increased in number by 43 percent compared to 2021.

Bachher said that the meetings allow UC Investments to “expand [its] networks, explore new opportunities, and in some cases, form new investment partnerships.” In 2022, six of UC Investments’ seven first-time investment partners were owned by women and people of color.

UC has effectively created its own pipeline for diverse-owned firms. 

And others have been doing the same thing. Crewcial Partners is a consulting firm that works with allocators to build effective portfolios and, for almost a decade, has been intentional about finding diverse talent for its clients.

“We’ve been investing with diverse managers since back in 2013 … and it’s really allowed us to build smarter portfolios,” said Angela Outlaw-Matheny, director of investment staff and diverse manager equity at Crewcial Partners. “You need to think about diversification in various ways; not just asset classes. What about geography, different life journeys, and backgrounds — ethnicity, gender, age? All of these things are risk-controlling factors when you’re building smart portfolios.” 

Outlaw-Matheny said that when she started in her role, she thought she could be a kind of “civil rights leader” in the field of asset management. 

Her mentor — Crewcial’s CIO Michael Miller — advised her that she needed to lead with performance, and social impact would follow.

“So it started with our need to exercise our fiduciary duty to build smart portfolios,” Outlaw-Matheny said. “That was, I think, the impetus for our work, and then it trickled over [to social impact].” 

Since starting to build its diverse manager pipeline in 2013, Outlaw-Matheny said that Crewcial has been able to avoid resorting to manager diversity quotas.

The pipeline of diverse-led firms has allowed Crewcial to improve returns and focus on “what’s the best fit in terms of portfolio construction.”

Looking forward

Yale’s endowment is overseen by the Investment Committee of the Yale Corporation, the University’s 16-member board of trustees.

The committee, which oversees the endowment in the review of asset allocation policies, endowment performance and strategies proposed by YIO staff, is almost entirely white and male. 

Raben argues that the root of higher education’s manager diversity issue is culture — especially at the level of institutional leadership.

“There’s a basic resentment of outsiders asking questions,” Raben said. “It is likely that Mr. Mendelsohn makes three to five times more than Mr. Salovey. So that tells you a lot. It’s like Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama: ‘Yeah, I’ve got this. And I really don’t want lots and lots of people questioning my strategy. My success allows you to have need-blind admissions.’”

“There’s a basic resentment of outsiders asking questions.”

—Robert Raben

Yale’s then-CIO Swensen received a salary of $4.7 million in 2017, making him the University’s highest paid employee. That same year, Salovey made $1.7 million.

Katz told the News that the attitude of an allocator’s leadership team, “which includes trustees, board members and chief investment officers,” greatly influences whether and to what extent that allocator invests with diverse-owned managers. 

Efforts to improve diversity benefit substantially when leadership “has a process internally that incentivizes change, such as emerging manager programs, the broadening of networks for sourcing, and setting concrete goals in portfolio construction.”

Raben believes that University leadership is probably trying to figure out how to improve manager diversity “as we speak.” However, he told the News that he “can’t think of another area of life where, when you want to try to solve a problem, you refuse to speak to the experts.”

The University has not responded to DAMI’s public letter and has denied Raben’s recent requests to meet with Yale officials.

When the News reached out to the Yale Investments Office for comment, they provided the statement below. 

“The Yale Investments Office is firmly committed to building a diverse team and increasing the diversity of our roster of investment partners by adding diverse new partners and supporting efforts by our existing partners to increase diversity within their organizations,” the Investments Office told the News. “Efforts are underway to advance toward these goals, and we plan to provide periodic updates via our website.”

In 2008, Yale alumni mounted an unsuccessful campaign to name one of the University’s new residential colleges “Swensen College” in honor of David Swensen.

UP CLOSE | Is the Yale-China relationship in jeopardy?

The University's future actions could situate it as either a bridge — or another divide — between the United States and China.

Story and Cover Illustration by Staff Reporter Isaac Yu

Published on April 25, 2022

When the United States Department of Justice ended its controversial 2018 China Initiative in late February, many on campus sighed with relief.

Yale, which has the oldest relationship with China of any American university, had managed to escape the high-profile cases plaguing peers at Harvard and M.I.T., where professors were suspended and arrested on accusations of spying for the Chinese government or failing to disclose ties to Chinese institutions. At the height of the DOJ’s campaign, new China-related counterintelligence cases were being launched every ten to twelve hours, often targeting researchers of Chinese descent, according to current FBI director Chris Wray. Faculty and administrators alike condemned the China Initiative, with University President Peter Salovey himself speaking to government officials about the importance of open scientific exchange. When the initiative ended, it seemed to some that scientists on campus could turn over a new leaf, thawing what many had described as a chilling, hostile environment for scientific research.

But just a few weeks later news broke that a Yale School of Medicine professor had been suspended by the University amid a DOJ investigation. Faculty quickly wrote a letter to administrators protesting the decision. Though that professor has since been cleared by the government and returned to his lab, the ordeal has thrown into question the University’s position amid rising tensions between the U.S. and China — how will the University react to geopolitical pressures, and will its relationship to China emerge intact?

“The history and connection between Yale and China is incredibly positive. So I was absolutely shocked,”  Weimin Zhong, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, said regarding the recent professor suspension. “This is the history of Yale. What happened?”

Anasthasia Shilov

(Anasthasia Shilov)

The News spoke to 11 administrators, program directors and faculty members about Yale’s historical precedent of deep collaborations with China. All pointed to the continued strength of the University’s connections in China and expressed optimism about the relationship moving forward. But many warned that how Yale acts over the coming years could situate the University as either a bridge — or another divide — between the world’s largest superpowers. 

THE BEGINNINGS

When Yung Wing graduated from Yale College in 1854, he was the first Chinese person to graduate from any American university — and he remained the lone Asian graduate from an Ivy League institution for at least two decades more.

When he returned to China, Wing founded the Chinese Educational Mission, which sent more than a hundred young Chinese men to high schools across New England in the 1870s, jointly funded by the Qing dynasty government and the United States. 

Yale would eventually receive more than 30 of those young men, by far the most of any college. Many of them returned to Chinese society after graduation; one became the ‘Father of China’s Railroad’, while another founded what became the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing. A substantial number became cabinet members, forming China’s first nationalist government in 1911. 

“I was determined that the rising generation of China should enjoy the same educational advantages that I had enjoyed; that through western education China might be regenerated, become enlightened and powerful,” Wing later wrote in his memoir.

That same mindset spurred a group of alumni, many of them born in China as the children of missionaries, to in 1901 form Yale-in-China, now known as the Yale-China Association, which propagated clinics and schools in various parts of China over the first half of the 20th century. Many of those institutions are still operating today: Yali High School in Changsha, named as a transliteration of “Yale”, as well as a medical school, nursing school and hospital at Central Southern University named Xiang-Ya (the “Ya” also standing for Yale). The Yale-China Association would also later come under fire from those who viewed its activities as imperialist.

For decades after World War II, Yale and other Western institutions were barred from mainland China, and many organizations began refocusing on work in Hong Kong or Taiwan. After the opening of China in 1979, however, connections once again began to strengthen. 

A steady stream of Yale graduates became diplomats and ambassadors to China, and, taking advantage of the newly opened relationship between the two countries, individual faculty members began collaborations with Chinese researchers, reaching several dozen over the course of the next two decades. In 1990, Yale University Press began a joint publishing venture with Beijing-based China International Publishing Group. 

By this point, Yale had built up the reputation of its Chinese Studies programs with professors like Jonathan Spence, who mentored several Chinese scholars. Chinese students became the largest international contingent on campus, concentrated particularly in the graduate and professional schools. 

THE LEVIN YEARS

In the summer of 2008, former University President Richard Levin went to the Beijing Olympics.

His appearance was not his first visit to the country; it came after years of building connections to China. Levin, who made the University’s internationalization a core piece of his vision, kicked off the tri-centennial in 2001 by leading a delegation to several highly-ranked Chinese universities: Tsinghua, Peking, and Fudan. The interest in China as the center of this effort came from both a desire to raise the University’s profile with potential Chinese students and from economic predictions that China would eventually rise to be the United States’ counterpart, Levin told the News.

Scores of undergraduates were traveling to China for language study under the Light Fellowship, which was established in 1996. Soon, the University embarked on a flurry of formal partnerships, including a new China-focused center at Yale Law School, a biotech program at Peking, and a genetic center at Fudan.

In 2006, the University opened Yale-in-Peking, a physical hub for research to launch further China-based collaborations. Many ties, Levin noted, were sparked by Chinese-educated faculty who had maintained contact with former classmates and faculty. Meanwhile, the University expanded its international student population, which grew after the University made financial aid available for international students in 1999.

As students came from China to study in New Haven, Levin’s administration launched several academic diplomacy programs that brought Chinese leaders to campus as well. For one week every other summer, Yale hosted the Yale-China University Leadership program, in which Chinese government and university officials gathered to hear from Yale leaders about the running of a western university. Throughout the week Chinese attendees would participate in seminars on how Yale manages finances, faculty or holistic admissions, for example. Some years, Levin took a delegation from Yale to universities in China to meet with their leaders. 

“After a few years, [Chinese universities] embarked on a whole set of reforms,” Levin said. “It naturally became more of a form of exchange and commentary on what they were up to, what innovations they were trying out and what was working.”

This model was later replicated for Yale’s relationships with other countries in Asia and Africa. But Levin noted that alumni of the Yale-China University Leadership program became particularly influential, returning to China and becoming presidents and provosts of prestigious programs across the country. Alumni of the program include the current president of Jiaotong University. Chinese officials, Levin said, were opening up the country’s education system and sought to emulate the research universities in the States. 

By 2010, when United States and China relations were at their strongest in recent years, nearly a quarter of the Yale College population was traveling to China at some point during their academic careers for research or language study, Levin said.

The era of positive relations also yielded major economic benefits for the University.  Hillhouse Capital, a private equity giant named for a street on the north side of campus that manages upwards of $50 billion through East and Southeast Asia, was started by Zhang Lei GRD ’02 SOM ’02, who was mentored by former chief investment officer David Swensen himself. Swensen seeded the fund with $20 million from the Yale endowment. Lei later donated $8,888,888 million — a lucky number in Chinese culture —  to the School of Management with the goal of strengthening Yale-China relations.

During this time, the Bush administration encouraged such collaborations, Levin said. For the three decades after the opening up, American and Chinese officials maintained amicable relations, and so too did their academic counterparts. Then-President of China Hu Jintao himself even concluded his first visit to the U.S. in 2006 with a speech at Yale; his alma mater, Tsinghua University, received a similar visit from President George W. Bush ’68.

The connections formed during this golden era — specifically, through the Yale-China University Leadership program — were how Levin received his invitation to the Beijing Olympics.

The highlight of the Olympics trip, Levin recalled, was the U.S.-China basketball game (the United States won, 101-70). He also observed the Games’ opening ceremony from just two rows behind President Hu. Levin was attending the Olympics as part of a small delegation of university presidents, and was the only Ivy League president included in the group.

This visit, and many others like it, cemented Yale’s position in the international arena, and was heralded as a testament to the University’s increasingly global outlook. Every year, the University was establishing and strengthening formal partnerships with Chinese universities and playing host to delegations of students and administrators traveling back and forth between the two countries. 

But Levin’s trip also came during a very different period of U.S.-China relations, when both governments not only permitted but encouraged cultural and scientific exchange. In the decade since, relations between the world’s two biggest superpowers have soured, and college campuses are often viewed not as bridges but as hosts to espionage and threats to national security. 

At Yale, the cracks have started to show.

This year, a prominent research program — the Chinese Scholarship Council-Yale World Scholars program— was forced to suspend its recruitment from China. Meanwhile, faculty have been conducting research in the face of fear and government scrutiny. 

“I had felt that mutual understanding and peaceful relationships, encouraged through academic connections, were perhaps going to be able to keep the two nations from becoming hostile,” Levin told the News. “How I wish that were true.”

Dan Murphy

(Dan Murphy)

A PERILOUS TIME

Maintaining partnerships with China was made more difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of China, including urban metropoles like Shanghai, remains under harsh lockdowns. Short-term travel between the two countries has been virtually impossible.

“Before COVID I used to go to China every year, a couple of times some years,” said Pericles Lewis, Yale’s vice president for global strategy. “Zoom allows for certain kinds of exchange and collaboration, but the relationship is never as deep.”

But the University’s relations with China had weakened even before the pandemic. Distrust has steadily risen on both sides of the Pacific over the last decade, said applied physics professor Yu He, who was born in China.

Stephen Roach, a senior fellow of the Jackson Institute, emphasized “off the charts” anti-China sentiment among the American public, which is also fueling vitriol against Asian Americans.

“I don’t think the decline of friendliness among the public is spontaneous,” professor He said. “It has a lot to do with how officials are making choices and doing public education, how the media are choosing their narrative.”

Lightning rod issues such as the status of Hong Kong and the oppression of Uyghur Muslims have pushed both countries to trade cultural, political and economic jabs. The last decade, Lewis said, has seen greater strain over issues surrounding Hong Kong, Taiwan and Xinjiang. Faculty engagement with China has become riskier, Lewis said, in part due to those political concerns.

“We’re not accelerating, but maybe we’re not exactly slowing down,” Lewis said. “We’re just trying to maintain, recognizing that some relationships will come and go.”

Not all relationships have been severed, and many remain vibrant. Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, who has worked extensively in China over the last two decades, noted that both the Yale School of Medicine and YSPH have continued vibrant collaborations with departments and programs at Changsha University and South Central University, for example. Several new partnerships with Chinese schools have been initiated in the last five years.

But those who do engage with China may face higher hurdles. Comparative literature professor Jing Tsu, who spent the last half-decade researching for a recent book, noted that conducting research in China has become more difficult for scholars from the West.

“China is becoming less and less accessible to the outside,” Tsu said. “In the last year, [we’ve been] talking about, ‘What are we going to do? How will we continue to study China when the archives and libraries and even our contacts are closing down?’”

The academic strain between the two countries has also been driven by the policies of the countries’ governments. 

The Trump administration’s DOJ China Initiative created immense hurdles for Chinese professors and those wishing to collaborate with Chinese sources for research. New Chinese policies regarding foreign entities, including non-governmental organizations, have also made it more difficult for Yalies to access China. Yale-China Association Vice President and Director of Education Programs Leslie Stone told the News that her office has been inundated with paperwork. She called the present moment the “most challenging time I’ve had in this work.”  

“The U.S. government, especially the funding agencies and the FBI, became a little skeptical of some of our engagements with China,” Lewis said. “And it’s not all one way; some Chinese universities started to get cold feet about the U.S.”

Lewis noted, however, that the previous relationships the University had forged with Chinese academic institutions has allowed Yale to more easily weather the “ups and downs.”

Though pressures have been building for some time, discussions about how U.S.-China relations are affecting academia have burst into the open this year. In December, nearly 200 professors signed onto an open letter condemning the China Initiative.

In late February, it was revealed that Haifan Lin, a prominent School of Medicine professor from China, had been suspended by the University amid a federal investigation into alleged issues with disclosure. Whether the investigation was directly linked to the China Initiative remains unclear, but the news sent shockwaves through Yale’s research community, particularly affecting those of Asian descent. To many, the suspension confirmed that Yale too was vulnerable to government pressures.

Entire programs have been upended. The China Scholarship Council-Yale World Scholars Program, which places top Chinese researchers in the YSM’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences program, has been forced to suspend admissions until further notice, program director Craig Roy told the News. Proclamation 10043, first issued by Trump, targeted initiatives like the CSC Program that drew funds partially from military-minded schools. The Biological and Biomedical Sciences program, however, does not conduct military-related research. 

The proclamation barred those involved with CSC from obtaining visas, making it impossible for the program to admit new students and jeopardizing the status of the program’s current participants. The current students were eventually granted visas after the program funded them directly with money from the University, but that funding source is not enough to sponsor new participants. 

The proclamation has continued to be enforced by the Biden administration, Roy added, noting that contacts in the State Department indicated no appetite to reverse the policy.

“We would love for this program to continue, but it’s so far out of our hands,” Roy told the News.

(Council on East Asian Studies)

Part of the confusion, Roy said, is that the government has never explicitly banned the CSC, but simply denied visas to its program participants with no explanation. 

Professor He also expressed dismay at the sustained anti-China sentiment, labeling it as “cheap and easy bipartisanship.”

Results of the China Initiative only came to light when professors were either suspended or sued, meaning that the scale at which academics were investigated might be larger than what is publicly known. Junior faculty in particular, several professors say, may be more vulnerable to such suspensions and less likely to receive institutional support.

He also pointed to the case of Franklin Tao, a chemistry professor at the University of Kansas who was found guilty of fraud. The Asian scholarly community at Yale has watched his case and many others with great alarm, He and Qin Yan, a professor of pathology, said. Such recent events simply draw out latent feelings of xenophobia, He noted. 

This environment of suspicion and suspension has left researchers scared of new collaborations with China, chilling scientific research, seven professors said. Professor He noted that he had even avoided giving a Zoom talk co-sponsored by a Chinese university. 

“As an Asian American, this is a delicate situation where I generally feel that the University is supportive, but [there is] this fear and stress that we have experienced in recent years,” Yan told the News in March. 

Others have been more skeptical, criticizing the University’s general silence regarding these issues, especially regarding the recent suspension of Haifan Lin.

“I feel that suspending a Yale faculty member without due process, and without the conclusion of that investigation, seems unfair,” Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Akiko Iwasaki said. “Should any future cases like this arise, we need to know where the University stands in protecting us.”

TODAY

Though the geopolitical strains to science have touched many corners of academia, the impact at Yale has been especially significant. The University has a large percentage of faculty trained internationally, including many from China. Its ability to attract top-tier international scholars may be in jeopardy, Professor He said.

In China, the practice of leaving the country to join academic institutions in the U.S. used to be widespread. In his graduating class of 80 from his undergraduate alma mater in China, He noted, nearly half went on to the United States for graduate schooling, with many opting to stay in the U.S. and continue their careers. That fraction has dropped significantly, he said, in part because Chinese universities have developed dramatically in the intervening decade. But another factor, He noted, is that the modern perceptions of studying abroad have changed.

“Back then, the understanding was that if you want to do good science, if you really want to push to the frontier, you should go to the United States,” He said. “We were never concerned about national security or the nationalism and patriotism you might see in today’s generation of college students.”

Yale Daily News

(Yale Daily News)

More and more Chinese students studying in the U.S. now choose to return home at the conclusion of their studies. Even many of those who have opted to stay in the United States, He said, are now having second thoughts. 

“This textbook notion of the American Dream has a lot of footnotes,” He said. “I meet a lot of visiting scholars or postdocs who are extremely competent, and [who] we would love to retain here. But staying here has evolved from a natural choice to a not-so-obvious choice and then to a non-starter discussion.”

Also at great danger, He said, is the status of the University’s push to invest in the sciences and engineering fields, since much of the University’s graduate research in the sciences is conducted by international students. Around 7 percent of students across all Yale schools are from China, particularly concentrated in the graduate and professional schools such as YSM and YSPH.

“With a declining interest to pursue these basic sciences in this country among immigrant populations, I really worry for how long this country will remain competitive,” He said. “… I will cross my fingers and hope to see more discussions and attention paid to this community.”

He and others noted that, if it acts correctly, Yale has the opportunity to remain a scholarly bridge to China. Despite tensions, University leaders said that they hope their collaboration with China remains strong. 

“I’m a firm believer in what is sometimes called soft power, namely the use of sciences, medicine, public health, the arts, academic exchanges to better understand people in other cultures, and to foster favorable institutional ties, because governments can sometimes go awry and sometimes institutions can be very helpful,” Dean Vermund told the News.

“Even when there’s a difficult political climate, there’s a lot to be gained from collaboration like public health, climate, law, those kinds of issues,” Lewis added. 

During the first decade of the 21st century, Levin, spurred by an era of geopolitical tranquility, saw a vision of what Yale’s relationship with its Chinese counterparts could create. Although the last decade has partially fractured that vision, the roots Levin’s administration created have allowed Yale to keep sparks of it alive — perhaps enough to last until the geopolitical tensions ease.

“We’re keeping the flame alive,” Vermund said.

Correction, April 26: This article has been updated with Stone’s correct title and the current name of the Yale-China Association.

 

UP CLOSE | “Cold, institutional, transactional”

A look back on four decades of mental healthcare at Yale

By Staff Reporter Lucy Hodgman

Published on April 21, 2022

Nicolette Mantica saw a therapist for the first time in 2017, during her junior year at Yale. 

Mantica, who was slated to graduate in 2019, was depressed. She struggled with self-harm and abused over-the-counter medication. When she opened up to her close friends, they insisted she see a therapist — a step that Mantica by that point knew she needed to take. On her friends’ advice, she signed up for therapy through Yale Mental Health and Counseling.

“I was like, ‘I’m going to sign up. It’ll get better. I won’t have to worry about this anymore,’” Mantica recalled. “I started seeing a therapist who I really didn’t like that much, but because I’d never done it before and this was my first time ever seeing a therapist, I thought, ‘Well, this is just me. This is what therapy is like, and this is just me.’” 

The treatment Mantica received from Yale Mental Health and Counseling, or MHC, continued to disappoint her. She pointed specifically to one incident, when she described the anxiety she felt about never being in a relationship and her therapist told her to “try harder.” That therapist referred her to a psychiatrist, who prescribed a medication that Mantica could not afford. 

“I definitely felt like neither of them were ever listening to me,” Mantica said. “And because I didn’t think they were helping, I didn’t always tell the truth. I would lie about self-harming. Like, ‘They’re not doing anything for me, why would I tell them when I feel this way?’” 

The emotions Mantica associated with MHC — feelings of betrayal, anger and shame — resonated with six other alumni who spoke to the News, who graduated between 1988 and 2019. The past year has seen renewed conversations surrounding the structural failings of Yale’s mental health resources, but Yale students have long felt underserved by the services and policies ingrained within YMHC. Concerns about the ability of MHC services to meet student needs are particularly pressing given a recent demand for counseling services  — this year, MHC director Paul Hoffman said, saw the largest single-year utilization increase in the department’s near-century of operation. 

The collective memories of alumni reflect that the critical student perception of MHC has remained virtually unchanged over the past 30 years. Paul Mange Johansen ’88 is an organizer for Elis for Rachael, a mental health advocacy group composed of alumni, current students and many of those who knew Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum ’24, who died by suicide last year. One of the group’s first initiatives was conducting a survey of alumni encounters with MHC, which Johansen, a statistician, analyzed. 

“The results are incredibly consistent over time,” Johansen said. “The complaints that people had when I was a student in the 80s … are almost identical to the problems that people are having today.” 

The treatment Mantica received from Yale in 2017 continued to prove unsatisfying. Her mental health worsened to the point where her dean intervened, and she was involuntarily hospitalized. She spent ten days at various wings of Yale New Haven Hospital, taking three finals as she completed the semester. During that time, she received no communication from her therapist or psychiatrist, but she did receive a visit from a MHC representative, who stood in her doorway and told her she would need to take a medical withdrawal from Yale. 

Withdrawals can occur for academic, medical, personal, disciplinary or financial reasons, and withdrawn students are barred from campus without permission from either their residential college dean or the dean of student affairs. Withdrawals are unique from leaves of absences in that those who withdraw are not automatically granted a place at the University upon their return and must instead meet certain requirements for reinstatement.  

This month, Yale relaxed numerous reinstatement requirements. However, in Mantica’s time, requirements for reinstatement included an application form, two letters of support, a personal statement, interviews with members of the reinstatement committee, the equivalent of two term courses at an accredited four-year university or Yale-sanctioned community college and, in the case of students on medical withdrawal, documented treatment from a clinician. 

“I felt so betrayed, because this message was, ‘We’re a family,’” Mantica said. “This constant message of, ‘We’re here to take care of you, if there’s anything that you need, come to us.’ And yet, every step of the way, every person that I tried to rely on for help just told me, ‘Well, we can’t have you here. We don’t want you here. We’re not going to help you.’” 

“Every step of the way, every person that I tried to rely on for help just told me, ‘Well, we can’t have you here. We don’t want you here. We’re not going to help you.’”

—Nicolette Mantica

Mantica never returned to Yale. She began the reinstatement application but felt so alienated by the process that she decided to transfer to Northwestern University, in part because she felt the mental health care offered there was more comprehensive than at Yale. 

Currently, MHC offers individual, group and couples therapy with licensed clinicians. After attending an initial intake session, the department provides students with clinicians to determine the length and regularity of their treatment. 

The department was founded in 1925, and in its near-century of operation, has been headed by six people — Arthur Ruggles, Clements Fry, Bryant Wedge, Robert Arnstein, Lorraine Siggins and Hoffman. When Hoffman took over in 2020, Siggins had been in the position for 30 years. Siggins did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

(Yale School of Medicine)

“I think that I have the same goals as my predecessors as far as providing exceptional mental health treatment, but I think that the pandemic along with the large surge in mental health utilization have created an urgency to solve some of the challenges that have existed in the department for a number of years,” Hoffman wrote in an email to the News. “This has led to a period of significant change in the department.”  

Last year has seen reforms such as the relaxing of reinstatement requirements, the creation of the Yale College Community Care program and additions to MHC clinical staff. But as student demand for mental healthcare grows, a culture of student mistrust lingers around MHC. In interviews with the News, experts, alumni and administrators recalled the fraught history of mental health care at Yale and looked ahead to avenues for change. 

Shared experiences 

Similar experiences and emotions recur throughout alumni recollections of MHC, regardless of the year they graduated. 

Johansen never used MHC services during his time at Yale  — other students, he said, warned him away. 

“I heard rumors about, ‘Oh, don’t go to Yale psychiatric service, they’re terrible,’” Johansen said. “I was there ’84 to ’88, and that was sort of the word on the street.” 

Lisa Marie Bronson ’88, who was on campus during the same window as Johansen, was one of the students who made use of MHC counseling. The experience left her unsatisfied. 

Mental health was rarely discussed on campus, Bronson explained, but it was something that she talked about often with her parents. When she felt her mental health deteriorating during her time at Yale, she sought out therapy on her own, without guidance or intervention from anyone else at the University.

“I didn’t have any type of internalized stigma about it coming in that I brought with me, but I think if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have received any messaging or information to make me think differently,” Bronson said. “I also didn’t have anyone who would have been aware of or in touch with my mental state. I went to find counseling because I was concerned about how depressed and nonfunctional I was.” 

When Bronson began the process of finding a therapist through University services, she asked to be assigned to someone with whom she shared experiences, specifically requesting a therapist who was young, a woman and, if possible, a person of color. 

At the time, Bronson said, she had never heard of a non-white therapist, but she wanted to be able to talk to somebody about her experiences in the predominantly white environment of the University, where she often felt particularly targeted as a Black woman and an activist. 

But the therapist Bronson was assigned to, she said, was a “very, very old, very, very white man,” with whom she did not feel comfortable talking about many of her experiences. When she was reassigned to another counselor, this time a middle-aged woman, the experience was not much better. 

The new therapist referred her to a psychiatrist, who prescribed her medication. When the medication did not initially have an effect, the psychiatrist accused her of lying about taking it. 

“Outraged,” Bronson returned to tell her therapist about what had happened in the hopes that she could help find a resolution to the situation and get her the medication she needed. But apart from asking her how she felt about being accused of lying, Bronson said that her therapist had almost “no reaction” when she described the interaction with the psychiatrist. 

“When she did not advocate for me in that instance, I just said, ‘Okay, this isn’t going to work,’” Bronson said. “So, I stopped seeing her, but I was very depressed, and I definitely needed to be under care. It absolutely impacted my academic performance.”

Bronson was ultimately forced to take a withdrawal — not for mental health reasons but for academic ones. 

She fulfilled the necessary requirements for reinstatement and eventually returned to Yale. But throughout the process, she recalled, no one from the University expressed concern for how she was, or if she had the necessary support to facilitate her return.

“I wanted to finish and graduate from Yale, but my support was not coming from there,” Bronson said.

Alicia Floyd ’03 graduated almost two decades later, but her experience applying for reinstatement to Yale left her with a similar sense of detachment from the mental health resources in place to support her. 

Floyd struggled with depression throughout her time at Yale but did not initially pursue therapy. She said her first meaningful interaction with MHC came after an attempted overdose — “calm, but kind of bewildered,” she was taken from Yale Health to the emergency room and finally to a psychiatric institute. Like Mantica, she was asked by the University to take a medical withdrawal a week into her stay there.

As she went through the motions of withdrawing and completing reinstatement requirements, Floyd said the University’s handling of the process felt “harsh and liability-driven.” Although Floyd said that while the immediate aftermath of her overdose was traumatic in its own right, it was the reinstatement process that has stayed with her — it gave her nightmares, she said, for eight years after that. She felt “very betrayed” by a University she thought would support her regardless of her mental health.

“I think if I had perceived Yale as being a cold, institutional, transactional sort of place to begin with, my expectations and the reality would have matched up a lot better,” Floyd said. 

Although Mantica’s interaction with MHC came another decade after Floyd’s, she described a similar feeling of betrayal. 

“I did feel such a betrayal, and it made me feel like a criminal, too,” Mantica said. “When I got that reinstatement letter, for a long time, I wanted to go back because I loved my communities. I was involved with Glee Club; I was involved with some other clubs; I loved my friends; I loved Silliman. I wanted to be there. But the more I thought about it, I was like, ‘These people did not care about me when I was at my most vulnerable state. They didn’t want to take care of me because it was easier for me to just leave.’”

More than 30 years after graduating from Yale, Bronson has come to find fault with how her mental health crisis was handled by the University. She now provides professional wellness coaching to medical students. If she saw a student in the state that she was in at Yale, she explained, it would raise immediate alarms — “just kind of letting it ride” would not be an option. 

But when she was a student, Bronson said that it did not occur to her to blame the University for the inadequate care she received. 

“I internalized it, and I felt ashamed,” Bronson said. “I felt like it was my fault. I didn’t put that at the feet of the institution at the time at all. I felt like I had this wonderful opportunity and experience and I messed it up.” 

“I internalized it, and I felt ashamed. I felt like it was my fault. I didn’t put that at the feet of the institution at the time at all. I felt like I had this wonderful opportunity and experience and I messed it up.”

—Lisa Marie Bronson ’88

“Incremental changes”

Recent changes to the University’s mental health care resources have come slowly, often in gradual policy amendments rather than sweeping reforms. 

A buzz of dissatisfaction with Yale’s policies on mental health — and with its reinstatement and readmission practices in particular — has pervaded campus throughout the past two decades. 

The News reported on the limitations of the University’s therapy offerings in 2002, quoting students who raised the same issues, like long wait times and underwhelming treatment, that are often brought up in discussions of MHC today. In 2007, students spoke against withdrawal and reinstatement policies, specifically criticizing Yale’s practice of sending students on involuntary withdrawals.  

In January 2015, campus dissatisfaction with the University’s policies on mental health rose to a fever pitch after Luchang Wang ’17 died by suicide, citing Yale’s policies on readmission in a Facebook status posted hours before her death.  

The next month, members of the Yale College Withdrawal and Readmission Review Committee, which had been commissioned by then-Dean Jonathan Holloway in fall 2014, attended a town hall meeting with students and administrators, where students aired their grievances with the policies as they stood. 

In April 2014, the committee published a report including a series of recommendations to Holloway on how to improve the withdrawal process, all of which he accepted. The reforms, which Holloway committed to enacting for all students applying for reinstatement in 2016 and beyond, included the change of the term “readmission” to “reinstatement,” as well as changes to reinstatement application deadlines, an elimination of the application fee for reinstatement and changes to financial aid for students who take medical withdrawals. 

Since then, the requirements for reinstatement remained the same — despite renewed criticism of the policies in the wake of Shaw-Rosenbaum’s passing — until a host of reforms were announced this April. 

Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun, who will conclude his term at the end of June, told the News that student mental health had been a “priority area” during his time as dean and that he thought Yale had made important progress on this issue. 

“The Yale College Community Care program is something I’m very proud of, and I really love my colleagues who are serving with it, and I’m very proud that they’re affiliated with the Yale College Dean’s Office,” Chun told the News. “That’s a program that did not exist, and it now exists. I think it’s going to continue to have a great impact on campus.”

Chun announced the establishment of Yale College Community Care, or YC3, in April last year. The program provides short-term clinical care and wellness advising, intended to help students work through short-term issues and ease the strain on the central branch of MHC. 

Through YC3 in particular, Hoffman said, he has seen increased student engagement with mental health services over the past year.

“The major priority has been to add staff and find space, to modernize our department, to increase the diversity of staff and to increase the outreach to students,” Hoffman said. “All these efforts are aimed at decreasing the wait time for treatment, providing students with high quality treatment and decreasing barriers for students.” 

Among the other developments that Hoffman recalled from his term as chief of MHC were new partnerships with the Yale Law School, the Yale School of the Environment and the Medical School, and the addition of a second location at 205 Whitney Avenue to accommodate the addition of “a significant number of clinicians.” 

MHC, Hoffman added, has also adapted to a hybrid treatment model developed during the pandemic, the flexibility of which he said has received positive student feedback. 

“We have changed our policy so that students can utilize both individual therapy and group therapy simultaneously to allow students access to more intensive treatment,” Hoffman explained. “In the next few months, we will be allowing students to use MyChart to communicate with their clinicians at MHC. We expect that the staff additions will begin to decrease wait times next year.”

But some advocates — including groups like Elis for Rachael — have argued that a meaningful overhaul of Yale’s mental health structures can only be achieved with the counsel of an outside perspective. In particular, Elis for Rachael has suggested that the University employ the services of the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on suicide prevention and mental health care. 

The Jed Foundation offers a four-year program that assesses mental health policies in place on college campuses and guides administrators through the process of policy development with the help of a dedicated campus advisor.  

Nance Roy, the Jed Foundation’s chief clinical officer, told the News that she often proactively makes contact with university administrators. In 2020, she said, she met with Yale administrators to discuss a potential involvement with the four-year program. 

“We met to talk about Jed campus and them joining and, you know, they never did,” Roy said. “I don’t know what factored into their decision. They are positive about Jed — they always applaud our work and think we do great work, but for whatever reason have chosen not to join the Jed campus program. I will say that Yale and Brown are the only two Ivies so far that are not part of our program. So of course, we’d love to have them, but I can’t tell you what the obstacle is.”

Hoffman told the News that the meeting with the Jed Foundation took place in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was not “the right time to take on a project of that nature.” At the time, he explained, MHC was focused on the pivot to online counseling as the broader University responded to the pandemic. 

“Everyone’s effort was being diverted to the pandemic response,” Hoffman said. “I would not say that partnering with either Jed or a different third-party consultant is a closed question.”

Even as change comes to Yale’s mental health policies, Floyd said, it can feel insignificant when compared to student calls for more major reform. 

“Over and over and over again, you see these little incremental changes being made in response to pretty large outcries,” Floyd said. “You see what came out of that and it’s like, ‘Well, we created an FAQ page,’ or ‘We changed the name from readmission to reinstatement’ … It doesn’t add up.”

Lily Colby

(Lily Colby)

Hoffman, for his part, noted that the University has made more significant changes in the last year, but recognized that these may take some time to have a tangible and widespread effect. 

“We have made an enormous number of changes in a short period of time, but it may take some time for students to feel the full effects of the changes,” Hoffman said. “We are always looking for different ways to meet the needs of students and to evolve as we see generational shifts in mental health trends.” 

Demand for treatment

Amid the push for reforms to the department, an increased demand for counseling services has placed a unique strain on MHC.

.

“I think that many students who receive treatment in our clinic have a very positive relationship with MHC, but I do think that the public perception of our clinic is often shaped by our wait times and limits on our clinicians’ availability due to the extraordinary demand,” Hoffman explained.

Hoffman noted the positive “significant decrease in stigma around mental health” that is in part driving up demand for mental health care. But at Yale and across the country, he added, students are also facing more significant mental health challenges than they have in the past.  

On Dec. 3, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy MED ’02 SOM ’02 released a public health advisory which warned of the “devastating” effect that modern challenges have on the mental health of youth in the United States. In particular, Murthy warned of issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, income inequality, racial injustice and the adverse effects of social media.

“These past few years, we’ve seen a lot of really major stressors at the community level,” Sarah Lowe, a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, told the News. 

Lowe made specific reference to “the COVID-19 pandemic and all that comes with that in terms of bereavement, disruptions to routines, social isolation and so on.” Like Murthy, she also pointed to political tensions, the severity of climate change and an increased awareness of race-based violence as contributors to an “undercurrent of stress.”

But at Yale in particular, alumni have described a pervasive unhealthy student culture as yet another cause of mental health challenges — one that not only exerts pressure on students to succeed but casts shame on them for admitting to vulnerability. 

Anasthasia Shilov

(Anasthasia Shilov)

During their time at Yale, Sean Moundas ’03 said, the culture among the student body was one that rewarded engagement, encouraging students to be as involved with as many activities as possible.

“The downsides were that there was this pressure to be quite busy,” Moundas said. “I think there was a culture with the academic rigor and the work volume of, like, ‘I stayed up x-number of hours just to get this done,’ and pushing through and pushing through.” 

The effect of this culture on student mental health, Moundas said, was not broadly acknowledged by students or the University’s faculty and staff. 

“It seemed like mental health was something to be managed more privately, and that there wasn’t a ton of space to talk about experiences with mental health and seeking support,” Moundas said. 

Mantica recalled a similar culture among the student body during her time at Yale, over a decade after Moundas. The attitude towards mental health on campus, Mantica said, could be exemplified by a Facebook meme page that took off while she was on campus, where much of the humor relied on playing student unhappiness and exhaustion for laughs. 

Party culture on campus is similarly demonstrative of a cultural unwillingness among the student body to confront their mental health challenges head-on, Mantica added.

“The culture at Yale was very much work hard, play hard,” Mantica said. “Like, ‘You can’t show any weakness. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re sad or struggling because everyone’s struggling.’” 

The force of this culture, Mantica explained, delayed her decision to seek mental health care from the University. Students talked so casually about the pressures they were under, she explained, that she wrote off her own concerns about her mental health when she began to lose a sense of stability. 

“The thought process during my time was, ‘I’m not bad enough,’” Mantica said. “Like, ‘I’m not actually having suicidal thoughts, so I’m not bad enough.’ But at the same time, I’m saying that and really, really  needing help and not recognizing that, because I just thought, ‘Oh, everybody does that.’”

“Cautiously optimistic”: Moving forward

Looking ahead, Bronson hopes the University will continue to treat the gap between student demand for mental health care and the services currently available with the urgency it deserves. 

The current approach to mental health reform at Yale, she said, seems to prioritize institutional preservation above the immediate needs of students. But when the University has existed for over 300 years, she said, concern for the institution itself should pale in comparison to concern for the students within it. 

“I think the institution is going to be alright,” Bronson said. “Are the kids alright? That’s what I want to know.” 

Hoffman emphasized that MHC is always open to student feedback as the department continues to develop, lauding the “extremely dedicated and diverse” teams of clinicians within the department, which he said was one of the most talented groups in any university mental health department. 

As he prepares to depart his deanship, Chun said that he has been pleased to see the stigma surrounding mental health on campus decrease during his time at Yale.

“I think there’s a better understanding that we need to manage our expectations,” Chun said. “It’s not healthy for oneself, and it’s not healthy for others, if someone drives themselves so hard for superficial reasons. What’s most important is that students learn and enjoy learning here. To work against that defeats the purpose of their time here.”

Floyd recognized some of the recent progress made but said that the historical pervasiveness of Yale’s inadequate mental health resources means that even if administrators seem to be moving in the right direction, there is far more that can be done.

“Regardless of whether they’re moving in the right direction or not, I think this is a long enough-standing problem that has been so chronically under-addressed,” Floyd said. “I think extra pressure is a good idea to keep them on the right track … I hope that they’re sincere. I do see some good movements.”

“Regardless of whether they’re moving in the right direction or not, I think this is a long enough-standing problem that has been so chronically under-addressed. I think extra pressure is a good idea to keep them on the right track… I hope that they’re sincere. I do see some good movements.”

—Alicia Floyd ’03

Floyd added that she was “cautiously optimistic” that the attitude of the current administration could be conducive to making substantive changes to some of the University’s current policies surrounding mental health — particularly regarding access to affordable mental health care.

In November 2021, Elis for Rachael circulated a petition demanding specific changes to the University’s current mental health care resources. In particular, they called on administrators to enact additional reforms to the reinstatement process — some of which were reflected in the changes announced in April — to add an affordable Preferred Provider Organization, or PPO, option to University health insurance that would allow students to see providers outside Yale and to allow withdrawn students access to campus.

“It boggles my mind [that] these changes haven’t been made, because some of them are free,” Johansen said. “There’s some things that they could do immediately. These reinstatement policies — just change your policy. That’s free. You can design what you need.” 

Until these changes occur, Johansen, like Floyd, emphasized the importance of keeping up pressure on the University. Alumni advocacy, he suggested, could be uniquely powerful in its ability to sustain a movement, even if the turnover of current students every four years limits the broader memory of the student body.  

Since Johansen and Bronson graduated in 1988, the University has increased the size of its student body, with the class of 2025 setting new records for the largest class size in history. That expansion could be a positive development, Bronson said, but only if the University has structures in place to make sure none of those students fall through the cracks. 

“It shouldn’t be possible for a student to be in a state of extreme distress or having a mental health crisis, and have that be a complete surprise to the people around them,” Bronson said. “There needs to be a structure within which people are known.”

MHC was founded in 1925.

UP CLOSE | Buried in an “avalanche of goodness”

How emergency housing relief during the pandemic left out New Haven’s most vulnerable

By Staff Reporter Sylvan Lebrun

Published on April 14, 2022

Suzan Malcolm, a 43-year-old New Haven resident and single mother of four, worked at Goodwill for 17 years before losing her job in a wave of layoffs.

In her “strenuous” former role at the nonprofit, Malcolm provided home care to those recovering from brain injuries — struggling patients would sometimes throw chairs at her, grab her and hit her. Goodwill paid Malcolm $34 an hour, allowing her to care for the two children who lived with her in public housing and afford child support for the two others.

When she was laid off, she hoped to find a role in a different field, one that would pose less of a threat to her personal safety. But it was 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic began to ravage the country. Malcolm has not been able to find consistent employment since.

Amid the economic downturn and isolation of the pandemic, she found herself struggling to cover the bills she needed in order to keep her unit at Elm City Communities, New Haven’s public housing program for low-income families. “I couldn’t pay my rent,” Malcolm recalls. “But I did, because I had to.”

At the suggestion of staff at Elm City Communities, Malcolm turned to UniteCT, the state’s emergency rental assistance program that had emerged amid the pandemic to provide relief to an increasing amount of struggling residents.

When the pandemic struck the United States in March 2020, forcing droves of people out of their jobs, both local and federal legislators feared a wave of evictions. A host of emergency rental assistance programs like Coronavirus Assistance and Security Tenant Landlord Emergency, or CASTLE, and UniteCT emerged to help blunt the damage, as government money poured into the historically underfunded area of housing insecurity.

To activists and nonprofit leaders, this represented a once-in-a-lifetime chance to show the public the importance of investing in housing. However, a challenge remained: how the city and state would distribute this sudden influx of federal funding.

“All of this [COVID relief] money is like an avalanche of goodness,” said Karen Dubois-Walton, president of Elm City Communities. “But are we going to get buried by it? … The risk of not executing it really effectively, is certainly that risk for the families that could be served, but it’s also a risk in the political world of sending a message out that’s like, ‘See, these systems are ineffective, they’re inefficient.’”

Instead of investing federal money directly into local housing nonprofits, the city and state created new rental assistance programs to last through the pandemic — CASTLE and UniteCT. However, accessibility issues and bureaucratic complexities plagued these rollouts, putting additional burdens on the shoulders of both the housing insecure and their community allies.

Meanwhile, although New Haven’s housing nonprofits received their own influx of funds to be used on subsidies to help residents out of homelessness, systemic barriers within the city’s housing market have left these crucial funds sitting untouched.

Connecticut’s eviction moratorium ended on February 15. The same day, UniteCT abruptly closed to all new applications, having spent all of their initial funding.

In the end, Malcolm received enough from UniteCT to cover three months’ rent, which equated to a total of $2439. Yet a year later, and after multiple new variants of the virus, her financial situation — like many others in the city — has not left a state of crisis, even as programs of support have petered out.

“Give us a little break?” Malcolm said when asked what the city and state could have done better for the housing insecure during the pandemic. “I’m not saying they didn’t help me, because obviously they helped me out, but my point is, when you’re in a situation like that, you don’t know what to do. You’re stressed … and they help you a little bit and then they stop. And I still don’t have a job. So, you know, I just do the best I can.”

A “temporary” problem? 

On July 13, 2020, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed an executive order allocating $10 million in federal CARES Act funding to create a “temporary program of rental housing assistance.” This initiative was then named Temporary Rental Housing Assistance Program, or TRHAP.

“This will address both the arrearage caused by income loss and/or greater expenses due to COVID-19 that have negatively impacted a household’s ability to pay their full monthly rent over the next number of months,” read a statement from the Connecticut Department of Housing, Lamont and DOH commissioner Seila Mosquera Bruno.

At this point in the first summer of the pandemic, the state moratorium on evictions was in effect. However, about 230,000 households across Connecticut were estimated to be at risk of losing their homes because of an inability to make rent, according to Kiley Gosselin, executive director of the Partnership for Strong Communities, an organization focused on addressing homelesness and neighborhood development.

TRHAP was the first of a number of state and city emergency rental assistance programs, all of which followed a similar formula. Eligible low-income tenants who could prove that the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted their ability to pay rent could — after a document-heavy application process — receive up to $4,000 in rental assistance paid directly to their landlord.

Ryan Chiao, Senior Photographer

(Ryan Chiao, Senior Photographer)

Details of this program rang alarm bells for activists. THRAP applicants could not already be receiving any state or federal rental assistance, while priority was given to those who had been denied unemployment benefits, favoring English-language speakers with access to technology.

“They’ve created another bureaucratic application process that’s not going to be fulfilling the needs of all renters,” labor attorney and housing advocate Keren Salim told the New Haven Independent in July 2020.

TRHAP, with “temporary” in its name, was meant to be a short-term solution to a short-term problem. It was designed to keep Connecticut families housed through the pandemic, which Lamont and Mosquera-Bruno believed meant “over the next number of months.”

The program began in full on July 15, 2020. By Aug. 28, THRAP had temporarily closed to all applications, citing an “overwhelming number of submissions” — over 7,000.

Although TRHAP briefly reopened at the end of October 2020, before closing again just over a month later, the state was in the process of structuring a longer-term rental assistance program to tackle the scale of the housing crisis, said Bridgette Russell, Neighborhood Housing Services, or NHS, of New Haven managing director.

UniteCT launched on March 15, 2021, coming at the end of a destructive winter of case spikes in New Haven in which unemployment rates once again rose. With a $235 million initial budget, almost 25 times that of TRHAP’s initial funding, UniteCT represented a landmark investment into eviction prevention.

This was the commitment that housing activists had been waiting for — but the question of execution loomed.

UniteCT, the state’s “mammoth program”

With promises to cover up to $10,000 in rents and $1,500 in utilities for each qualifying tenant — more than double the highest contribution offered under TRHAP — UniteCT was expected to attract an immediate wave of applications from the struggling families it was designed to help.

However, by the end of April, almost two months into the program, only 10 households in the entire city of New Haven had been approved to receive UniteCT rental assistance.

Just 49 applications had even been submitted “successfully,” according to Urban League of Southern Connecticut Director Virginia Spell. Spell told the News that a significant number of applicants had been disqualified because some applicants were unable to locate physical copies of required documents, while others struggled to navigate the online platform.

The surprisingly slow rollout in New Haven inspired an all-hands-on-deck effort among city leaders to both spread the word about the program and ease the burden on applicants. In late spring and summer 2021, a working group that included the Livable City Initiative, the mayor’s office, faith leaders and local nonprofits organized a series of outreach efforts — knocking on doors, distributing flyers and holding promotional press conferences.

“It’s a complex system that really needs some work rolling out … getting the message into the communities so that they can take advantage of it,” said Rev. Kelcy Steele, pastor of the local Varick Memorial AME Zion Church, in April 2021. “Because I know that more than 10 people in New Haven need rental assistance, and all of this money is on the table.”

After several months of these efforts, the pace of applications suddenly picked up. As of April 6, 5276 New Haven residents have been approved to receive UniteCT funding, with 2,255 cases still pending. This amounts to a total of $24,108,235 in rental and utilities assistance, about 10 percent of the total funds UniteCT has distributed to date.

However, certain nonprofit leaders felt that the state had not invested in proper marketing programs to accompany the launch, placing the burden on local groups. Margaret Middleton, CEO of local homelessness nonprofit Columbus House, recalls being “involved with some early calls just making sure that people knew that these programs existed.”

(Jose Estrada, Production and Design Editor)

In an email to the News, Department of Housing spokesperson Aaron Turner described the state’s “extensive promotional efforts,” including “printed media; radio and tv shows; billboards” and “a comprehensive and interactive website.”

UniteCT is funded through the U.S. Treasury’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which was launched in January 2021 to support such state-administered initiatives amid the pandemic. According to Turner, the program’s budget arrived in a series of allocations totalling up to $400 million, excluding administrative costs.

Applicants to UniteCT must be making less than 80 percent of the Area Median Income, which equates to $78,500 for a household of four in New Haven. Both tenants and landlords are required to fill out separate online applications, uploading photographs of a range of documents — including past bills, proof of income, proof of COVID-19 financial hardship and the lease and deed to the property.

All who the News spoke to for this article said they appreciated the state taking on the effort to create such a program, which did provide crucial assistance for thousands of struggling New Haven families, like Malcolm’s. Others added that UniteCT helped mom-and-pop landlords stay afloat amid the pandemic — a period in which their livelihoods were threatened while larger, outside developers thrived.

“In theory, [UniteCT] sounded really good,” said Bridgette Russell, managing director of the Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven. “But in terms of application … practitioners on the ground level, they could have foreseen some of the issues, some of the obstacles that were going to be out there.”

Two critical obstacles to the rollout — once the initial question of promotion was somewhat resolved — were the high documental requirements put on the shoulders of applicants and the program’s reliance on technology, both of which became barriers to residents who might have needed UniteCT the most.

Dubois-Walton described UniteCT’s application as “very punitive and bureaucratic,” especially amid a pandemic that made it harder for tenants to access printed copies of the necessary documents.

Latoya McCrea, who holds a directorial role with Elm City Communities, found it “surprising” that UniteCT required tenants to present the lease and actual deed to the property instead of a simple letter of confirmation from the landlord. This made the process all the more difficult for struggling tenants and landlords who often could not easily locate paper copies of the documents.

The responsiveness of the call center for UniteCT was also quite poor, she said, recalling being left on hold “for a very, very long time” as she attempted to seek out updates for clients who had been waiting for months with no response after submitting their applications.

Furthermore, it took copious negotiation for those living in public housing developments like Elm City Communities to be eligible to apply for relief at all, as Dubois-Walton explained.

However, one major advantage for those applying to UniteCT from public housing was that the “landlords,” as staff of a housing assistance organization itself, were “here to help [their] residents stay housed and ease the burden, especially through the COVID crisis,” said Marilyn Dawson, Elm City Communities regional property manager.

Others reported that they had interacted with landlords who were reluctant to participate in any governmental assistance program. Housing activist Dione Dwyer shared that one woman she had tried to assist with UniteCT was evicted by a landlord who refused to fill out their side of the application.

The UniteCT website provides a “training” flowchart for tenants titled “How to work with your landlord.” For tenants with non-participating landlords, it details that UniteCT will contact the landlord to “encourage” them — but “if, after three attempts, it is confirmed the landlord can not be engaged, then your Case will be denied.”

Tenants are then instructed to search for a new landlord for 30 days. If, after this period, they are still unsuccessful, they “may be eligible for a $3,000 direct payment to stabilize [their] housing and prevent homelessness.”

John Lugo, co-founder and lead organizer of advocacy group Unidad Latina en Acción, told the News that UniteCT requirements made it impossible for many of New Haven’s immigrant families to even apply for the much-needed funds.

“All these details like forms of paid taxes, producing pay stubs,” Lugo said. “Again, we have a lot of people that work under the table and have really small companies. So they don’t have all the paperwork and they weren’t able to access the money.”

Yale Daily News

(Yale Daily News)

Unlike TRHAP and the city’s CASTLE program, UniteCT accepts applications through a centralized website, with no paper or hybrid option available. This choice to make it online-only stunned many local organizations, inspiring what Middleton called a “healthy amount of concern” given the disparity of technological access.

Malcolm told the News that she did not have a computer of her own to access the online-only UniteCT application. Luckily, an Elm City Communities staff member offered to walk Malcolm through the process over the telephone. To assemble the required documents, Malcolm recalls also having to take a number of separate trips to print documents out from an Elm City Communities office — “I had to jump through a lot of hoops,” she said.

“They thought the online [application] was going to be accessible and it was going to allow for the maximum number of people to be able to get into the program quickly,” said Robin Ladouceur, homeownership coordinator for Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven. “But we had people who were deaf, we had people who were blind. We had individuals with disabilities. We had older individuals who had very limited tech skills.”

In response to these technology concerns, Turner mentioned the mobile UniteCT bus funded by the Department of Housing to bring computers to applicants and a “technology resource map” that could paradoxically be found on their website.

According to Ladouceur, the economic disparities in terms of access to computers were one of the factors that led to such a heavy reliance on local nonprofits and Housing Counseling Agencies  — certified partner organizations of the Department of Housing — to do individual case management and walkthroughs of the application.

Local nonprofits step in to help

UniteCT was a “mammoth program,” Russell said, but its major initial administrative budget was predominantly dedicated to setting up the technological component of the program. To walk struggling individuals through the lengthy application process was another project in and of itself, and this burden fell on community organizations.

“And they always underfund the nonprofit agencies that they want to help them,” Russell added.

The Department of Housing even began cutting the number of internal staff working on UniteCT as early as winter 2021, reducing staff from 250 individuals to 162. Wait times for application processing, which had been 15 days on average at the peak of the program, ballooned to over two months.

Dubois-Walton described “huge backlogs” due to a mismatch between staffing resources and “the scale of what needed to be addressed.”

16 local housing nonprofits across the state were then subsidized by the state as official UniteCT “resource centers,” according to Parker. Yet these were not enough to meet the demand for assistance, as independent organizations throughout the state dispatched their teams to both promote the program and do the grueling work of taking individuals step-by-step through the complex application process.

In New Haven, these included not only housing-focused groups like Neighborhood Housing Services, Urban League of Southern Connecticut, New Reach and Columbus House but also Unidad Latina en Acción, the New Haven Free Public Library and even maternity care nonprofit New Haven Healthy Start.

Steele has assisted with UniteCT efforts for over a year as the director of neighborhood and faith-based partnerships for the nonprofit Supportive Housing Works. He told the News that local organizers “had to do way more” than rely on centralized Department of Housing efforts like the often-cited mobile van.

“We had one bus for the entire state,” Steele said. “The challenge was not being able to provide case management for those who are applying … and so we started to get individuals in our agency trained on how to fill out forms and be that liaison between United CT and the community if they had questions. And so that really caused our engagement to go up tremendously.”

Once the state had agreed to recognize the UniteCT eligibility of those like Malcolm who lived in public housing, Elm City Communities staff began to work one-on-one with residents in the summer of 2021. But they were only able to book the UniteCT van for one of many promotional events.

McCrea estimated that the application itself took about 45 minutes to an hour per resident, “if the residents have all of their paperwork,” and said that the process was “tedious” for on-the-ground workers like herself. Only 30 percent of the over 100 residents that she assisted received the UniteCT funds they had requested.

Lugo told the News that ULA had struggled to keep up with the scale of the community’s need for UniteCT assistance, which had strained the nonprofit’s limited capacity as they simultaneously kept up their own advocacy work. His staff had become “very frustrated,” he said.

There is an existing precedent for governments to ease certain bureaucratic application processes through collaboration with nonprofits, Middleton said. She pointed to the example of programs like SOAR, a nationally funded initiative that certifies nonprofit workers to help the unhoused apply for Social Security benefits, and questioned why with UniteCT “they weren’t paying for community service providers, or at least many of them, to do the work.”

Yale Daily News

(Yale Daily News)

Evidently, this unfunded grassroots assistance occurred regardless, and was instrumental to the program’s rollout among the people who it was designed to help. Even individuals who struggled with housing assistance themselves committed their time to helping others access the program.

Dione Dwyer, a 44-year-old Bridgeport resident who organizes for the housing advocacy group PT Partners, has been living in low-income housing for almost 20 years.

Dwyer first heard of UniteCT in meetings with Christie Stewart, chief initiative officer of The Housing Collective, in which the original ineligibility of tenants living in public housing was raised. Concerned for herself and her neighbors, she began to learn more about the program.

Once eligibility requirements changed, Dwyer applied for UniteCT around June 2021, covering her utilities bill and two months of overdue rental payments. With the goal of later assisting others with UniteCT, she decided to “train for it by applying for it,” because there was “no one there to train me.”

After scheduling the UniteCT van to visit her community, Dwyer began to volunteer aboard the bus to assist applicants — the state would only send one or two certified staff on each trip, which she said was nowhere near enough to handle the demand, causing them to seek out volunteers. Dwyer also started to help a few of her friends and neighbors fill out the forms, and word soon spread.

In the end, Dwyer said, she ended up single handedly assisting over 50 people in the community with their applications. Only about half were successful in getting funds.

At meetings with UniteCT officials, Dwyer recalls hearing complaints about “fraudulent acts,” meaning duplicated applications that meant applicants would not receive funds. But Dwyer believes that these problems traced back to cases begun on the UniteCT van that had been entirely lost through technological difficulties, an issue she had witnessed first-hand.

Aboard the van, she said, tenants were suddenly informed that they needed an email in order to apply to UniteCT, something that many low-income families did not have access to. Dwyer recalls talking to a woman who had applied to UniteCT a year prior who did not know how to log into the email to check her application status.

“She was like, ‘I don’t remember anything, I didn’t write it down,’” Dwyer said. “She just figured they knew what they were doing. So she just let them create her email, she didn’t know the password. … I tried like five different ways to help her remember … tried to call them up and tried to get a UniteCT representative to say give us an alternative … but none of it was working. So we started it over.”

Unlike these independent groups and individuals, Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven, a local Housing Counseling Agency, had a contract with the state to assist first with TRHAP and then with UniteCT case management. However, they officially cut ties with UniteCT as of the end of 2021 in order to turn their attention to mortgage assistance.

According to Ladouceur, Neighborhood Housing Services initially was in an auditing role, going through already-submitted applications “and making sure everything was in place, which was rare.” This process was “incredibly labor-heavy,” interrupting staff schedules and the organization’s usual homeownership assistance initiatives and soon they pivoted to outreach and intake work.

In addition to one-on-one assistance, Neighborhood Housing Services staff helped operate press events and promotional fairs at local schools and nonprofits and worked on the mobile van. During the peaks of the Delta and Omicron waves, they shifted to a system where applicants would drop off documents and then be walked through the application on the phone, similar to Malcolm’s process.

Russell questioned why, given the Department of Housing’s reliance on Housing Credit Agencies to execute the UniteCT program, they had “never been consulted” during the program’s creation and launch. Further, she said, the state’s subsidy had not been proportional to the hours that the organization ended up having to commit, as the different steps of obligations continued to expand.

Some applications took up to three hours with certain individuals, according to Ladouceur.

“We were pandemic frontline [workers],” Ladouceur said. “You have people who are incredibly stressed, people who were affected by the pandemic, who were sick … single mothers, and I have to tell you like the lion’s share of my UniteCT clients were single mothers who were riding on the border of poverty. … We were there with all of the tragedies.”

The rocky rollout of CASTLE

With largely the same fundamental structure as UniteCT, New Haven has been running CASTLE, an emergency housing assistance program of its own, since September of 2020. But a year and a half later, there is still unclaimed money in the pot.

CASTLE was established with an $800,000 budget from the city’s portion of the federal CARES Act funding. Tasked with implementing and facilitating the program was New Haven’s Livable City Initiative, a department that is primarily dedicated to the enforcement of the city’s housing code.

The program is available to residents who have already received state housing assistance, the application states, as to “enable tenant’s [sic] and homeowners to maximize their assistance.”

For New Haven residents with an income of less than 80 percent of the AMI who can prove verifiable income disruption due to the pandemic — whether it be through job loss, closures of businesses or reduction in hours — CASTLE offers to provide both renter and homeownership assistance. CASTLE can cover up to $12,000 of back rent or mortgage payments owed after March 2020.

However, by the end of October 2020, two months into the program, not a single dollar of CASTLE funding had been distributed.

(Stephanie Shao, Production and Design Editor)

Arlevia Samuel, director of the LCI, reported that at the time only 23 of almost 400 mailed applications had been submitted in full. While the rest were still under review, seven had already been disqualified — some, again, because of a landlord’s unwillingness to participate.

The application process for CASTLE, unlike UniteCT, relies on residents first reaching out by phone or email to inquire about the program. The city will then mail a paper application to be filled out and returned. However, the document requirements are of a similar scale to the state program — tax returns, paystubs, the written lease to the property and copies of rent or utility bills.

Struggles with CASTLE’s initial rollout appeared to again stem both from promotional difficulties and the burden of the application itself. Those living in subsidized housing developments were also initially ineligible, Dubois-Walton said, until advocacy work led to a change in policy. However, in the fall of 2020, Samuel told the Independent that “there are no changes that need to be made to the program.”

Soon, though, the city intensified their promotional efforts for CASTLE. These included flyers, TV advertisement spots, email blasts through the Board of Education and collaboration with local nonprofits, Samuel said.

According to statistics that Samuel provided to the News on April 5, the city has now distributed about $387,000 of their $800,000 budget. Out of the remaining pool, $200,000 is allocated for administration costs and $213,000 toward relief for residents.

However, only 130 CASTLE applications have been received by the LCI to date, 65 of which were accepted. While 17 remain in the queue to be reviewed, the rest were declared ineligible, withdrawn or returned due to reasons such as landlord reluctance.

When asked if difficulties with the rollout of the program had been anticipated, Samuel responded in the negative, stating, “It’s our process, why would I have expected it to be difficult?”

Samuel also said that, unlike with UniteCT, applicants to CASTLE have not struggled with the documentation requirements.

“You can’t really predict how people are going to apply,” Samuel said. “When all the programs initially came out, everybody thought there’s going to be this huge wave of foreclosures. … I don’t really know what happened, compared to what was predicted. The demand never became as great as we expected, or as fast and as furious as they were telling us it was going to come.”

Of the seven nonprofits the News spoke to, none reported having had as significant involvement assisting with CASTLE applications as compared to UniteCT.

Malcolm, despite being a New Haven resident with friends and family who are also housing insecure, said that she had never once heard about CASTLE as an option available to her. “I can’t apply for something I don’t know about,” she said.

“Rather than relying on community providers … [CASTLE] tasked an already very stretched Livable City Initiative, which does very important, noble work in other areas, but this wasn’t their bread-and-butter,” said Dubois-Walton. “The system did learn, it did evolve and get better over time, but folks really suffered in the meantime and lived with a lot of anxiety.”

Housing subsidies in a city without affordable housing?

In addition to funding the creation of state and city programs like UniteCT and CASTLE, a portion of federal COVID-19 relief money from the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan also trickled down to housing nonprofits.

The Greater New Haven Coordinated Access Network, or CAN, is a coalition of local nonprofits that work together to streamline the process of providing resources for unhoused families. Amid the pandemic, the CAN received a sudden influx of funding to provide their clients with federal Section 8 housing vouchers and state Rental Assistance Program certificates, according to senior manager Margaret LeFever.

Housing subsidies like Section 8 and RAP can help cover up to even a year’s rent for a new affordable unit of the recipient’s choice. These programs therefore would allow unhoused families and individuals in shelters across New Haven to move into a private and more permanent housing option.

When New Haven’s homelessness service providers first received a major new wave of funding for these vouchers amid the pandemic, the mood was beyond optimistic.

“Having this amount of subsidy come into our system would be a huge, huge improvement over what happened pre-pandemic,” Middleton said. Her organization Columbus House is a member of the CAN. “Leading to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people being able to be housed. … It was a tremendous upside of the pandemic that we finally had enough housing supports.”

Nonprofits immediately began to act on this influx of funding, matching unhoused clients to vouchers and helping them fill out all of the necessary paperwork to “figure out what level of subsidy will help this person achieve stable permanent housing,” Middleton said. However, once these clients were matched, it became evident that the subsidies alone were not enough to help people out of homelessness.

Out of the 671 unhoused individuals currently served by the CAN, 196 are both matched to a housing subsidy and unable to find any affordable rental unit to use the subsidy on.

“The bottle-neck we’re seeing on the other end (getting people out of homelessness) is a direct result of a lack of affordable housing and landlords unwilling to rent to people exiting homelessness, even with a voucher,” Steve Werlin, executive director of homelessness service nonprofit Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, wrote in an email to the News.

Feteria Sheats, Landlord Engagement Specialist for United Way of Greater New Haven, shared that her organization had struggled to locate units for families matched to housing resources like Section 8 — even when they provided additional incentives, including an extra month’s rent and $1000 in guaranteed mitigation funds, to landlords.

Sheats said that the greatest barrier was the unavailability of affordable units in New Haven that fit within the subsidies’ price range. For the rare units that would emerge, “you can set up a viewing, but you go to the viewing and there are nine other people there for the same apartment.”

When asked about United Way’s landlord incentive program in September, LeFever told the News that the organization was struggling to find any landlords “willing to accept a new tenant at this point,” a sentiment that was echoed by Sheats over half a year later.

“Especially anyone that has past evictions on their records,” LeFever said. “Especially families where they don’t have any income, or if they have any criminal history … [landlords] feel that it is better to keep a unit vacant than fill it with someone who potentially might be at risk of being evicted.”

To utilize the subsidies of already-matched CAN clients, Middleton said, she and her colleagues have at times even had to look outside of New Haven due to the extent of the affordable housing crisis. Certain families have found apartments in Hartford.

As Columbus House transitions back to congregate shelter housing for the first time since the start of the pandemic, Middleton said, the strain on the organization’s capacity will only grow. It is a real possibility that they will be forced to discharge individuals who are already matched with subsidies and “are totally ready to go and rent an apartment, but we aren’t going to be able to support them with a shelter bed long enough to get them into it.”

“No amount of rental assistance is going to address the fundamental problem that we don’t have enough affordable housing for everybody,” Middleton said.

As the flood of funding runs dry, activists look to the future 

Two years into the pandemic, the long-touted “return to normalcy” has included the end of programs designed to assist the housing insecure. State and federal eviction moratoriums have expired, and UniteCT has run out of funds entirely, with no plans for replenishment.

The last holdovers from this temporary wave of government investment will almost certainly help a final group of New Haveners avoid eviction or find housing. Over $200,000 in CASTLE funding remains, while over 200 unhoused families in the CAN are matched to housing subsidies, although again the strain on the affordable housing market may leave many of these vouchers unused.

Fundamentally, low-income individuals and families in New Haven are still in need.

“I’m going through a lot right now,” said Malcolm. “Everything is hard right now. Everything went up — gas prices went up, food, everything.”

Lugo shared that already ten families he works with at ULA were facing eviction from their homes, while many others are homeless, “living under the bridges and in the parks of New Haven.” He warned that the city is “still in the middle of a crisis … and right now the crisis is getting worse.”

With UniteCT shut off with almost no prior notice — many interviewed told the News that they had simply logged on to the website on Feb. 15 to see an announcement that they had closed to applications — Lugo questioned why the city and state had not invested more of their federal COVID-19 relief money into housing. Dubois-Walton added that the state should have been able to use data projections to guess when their funds would max out.

The issue of housing investment has risen to the forefront of the discussion on a local level, with regards to Mayor Justin Elicker’s plans for distribution of another $53 million of New Haven’s allocation of American Rescue Plan funds. His proposal, which would invest $10 million into a new “I’m Home” housing initiative, is coming under fire from local activists.

Yale Daily News

(Yale Daily News)

The Sisters in Diaspora Collective, a group of immigrant and refugee women, has led a coalition to push for the city to invest $62.5 million, or 54 percent of its ARP funding pool, into housing. In their proposal, a portion of these funds would create monthly rental subsidies for those on waitlists for Section 8 and public housing, while the majority would be used to purchase properties from corporate landlords and transform them into affordable housing.

All housing activists and nonprofit workers interviewed echoed the Sisters in Diaspora Collective’s call for a greater dedication of ARP funding, with Middleton calling the current $10 million an “inadequate investment.”

On March 1, about two weeks after UniteCT closed to new applications, evictions spiked in New Haven. Since the start of the year, almost 300 evictions have been filed, the majority of them in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods.

The need for more support is clear. But what, then, can be learned from the past two years about how to utilize new funding in a way that truly works to address the housing crisis?

While advocating for the continuation of well-funded eviction prevention and rapid rehousing work out of the context of a global pandemic, Dubois-Walton also argued for a policy of “presumptive eligibility” in contrast to the bureaucracy of UniteCT and CASTLE.

Individuals who have already successfully proven their financial insecurity for programs like food stamps, childcare benefits or subsidized housing should not have to do so all over again, said Dubois-Walton.

“We as a country invest so much more resources in trying to punitively dig into the finances of the very lowest income folks in our records … than we do on everyday citizens’ IRS filings,” Dubois-Walton said. “We’ve made a determination that if you’re middle or upper class and you cheat the system, we don’t really care so much about that. But if you are poor, we are going to have our foot on your neck to ensure that not a single extra dollar gets spent on you.”

Overall, nonprofit leaders also questioned why the city and state decided to create their own rental assistance programs instead of investing in service providers who have experience and connections.

In addition to the initial logistical difficulties with UniteCT and CASTLE’s launch, which may have been abated if they had chosen instead to expand an existing community program, Lugo argued that the unusually high requirements inherent to government programs had made the application process more burdensome.

Amid the current influx of evictions, many also shared that they were unsure whether these rental assistance programs had been enough to have any lasting effect on housing stability.

The state had not included any counseling or case management element in UniteCT, Russell said. With this in mind, she questioned whether any recipients of the funding had been put in a more sustainable situation. “Or are you just throwing money at a problem and not looking at long-term sustainability?”

Steele said that even those who had taken advantage of UniteCT had only been able to receive a few months of assistance, consequently leaving them “still in the same predicament” — like Suzan Malcolm, they are struggling to find employment, pay rent and keep their housing.

“The rest of the country is moving on,” Middleton said. “Their masks are off, and the money faucet has turned off … but people are still experiencing homelessness. Is it a success if we ‘return to normal’ and people are still housing insecure and homeless?”

UniteCT’s average rental assistance payment for each household statewide was $8,456 as of April 10, 2022.

UP CLOSE | "The narratives of Yale-NUS were not shaped by us"

With Yale-NUS’ closure, what happens to the students left?

By Staff Reporter Miranda Jeyaretnam

Published on April 13, 2022

In the days following the August announcement that Yale-NUS College would merge with the National University of Singapore’s University Scholars’ Programme, Yale-NUS students received an email from their student government telling them to express their frustration in “a way that does not jeopardize your safety and the community’s safety,” according to Sam Kouteili Yale-NUS ’23.

Although the student government and administration were trying to prioritize student safety, Kouteili felt that the email was also a warning not to protest, kick up a fuss or do something the school could not protect them from. But why did they rely on their school for protection and who, or what, was it protecting them from?

The National University of Singapore, or NUS, is Singapore’s flagship university. NUS consists of 17 faculties and schools including the arts and social sciences, business, dentistry, law and engineering — all of which are offered as undergraduate majors — that sprawl across three campus locations. The University Scholars’ Program, or USP, is a multidisciplinary undergraduate honors program that has its own residential college, Cinnamon College. Yale-NUS, the partnership between Yale University and NUS, existed as a small autonomous liberal arts college within NUS, the first of its kind in Singapore, with a class size of 250 students and three residential colleges.

Yale-NUS was almost a decade old when the 2025 merger was announced — a decision that signaled the dissolution of Yale’s partnership with NUS, and Yale-NUS’ closure as an autonomous university. NUS College, the institution that will replace Yale-NUS and USP, is set to open later this year.

Through extensive student involvement, Yale-NUS has flourished as a place of student advocacy, academic excellence and progressivism in Singapore. Its closure came as a shock to students, faculty and administrative staff. There had been no hints, no consultation and no discussion by NUS, even with the Yale-NUS governing board, Pericles Lewis, the vice president of global strategy at Yale and founding president of Yale-NUS, told the News. All steps in the decision to close the College had been taken internally, by NUS itself.

Since that announcement, students told the News that it felt as though Yale-NUS’ autonomy was waning and that it was now impossible to ignore NUS’ presence on the College’s campus. Kimberly Wee Yale-NUS ’23 explained that, while NUS always had a presence at Yale-NUS, prior to the merger’s announcement NUS was significantly less visible on campus and in student affairs.

“The day this decision was made, Yale-NUS was no longer an autonomous university,” Kouteili said. “Channels of communication have become a lot more rigid, there’s a lot of chaos on campus as well because everyone’s leaving, there’s a lot of uncertainty, so maybe that’s why it feels like we have less of a voice, but NUS is much more of a presence now, and we as students feel less protected.”

But what enabled NUS to make decisions unilaterally remains an unanswered question. The News spoke to eight Yale-NUS students and alumni about whether there was a pattern of top-down decision-making prior to this and what avenues of resistance students still have.

Structural relationship between Yale-NUS and NUS

The boundaries that existed between Yale-NUS and the broader NUS were often unclear to students — four of the students who spoke with the News could define the relationship between the two institutions only by their experiences with administrators, as there is no transparent structure. The consensus amongst students was that Yale-NUS was a freer environment.

(Alcan Sng Yale-NUS '22)

Jacob Jarabejo Yale-NUS ’22 believed that the boundary was drawn along financial lines: at Yale-NUS, NUS controlled the budget, while Yale-NUS controlled how it was distributed. He drew his conclusion in part from the fact that students who worked on campus received their pay from NUS, not Yale-NUS.

Angela Hoten Yale-NUS ’23 noted that student organizations at Yale-NUS received funding more easily than their counterparts at NUS.

Jarabejo, too, said that in his first two years at Yale-NUS, students only needed to gain approval from a rector at one of the residential colleges to receive funding for a project — including for activities like beer brewing, which would not have been allowed at NUS, where alcohol consumption is not permitted on campus, except at designated outlets or university events.

NUS is described as an autonomous university and is ostensibly not under the influence of the Singaporean government’s Ministry of Education. But a 2021 survey by an informal group of Singaporean academics reported that 77.5 percent of 198 Singaporean academics surveyed felt that there is indirect, often invisible, political pressure. Although there is a line drawn between NUS and the Ministry of Education, it is not always clear to students how the political environment factors into NUS’ decisions.

“My experience at Yale-NUS has always been like an ‘ask for forgiveness, not permission’ kind of policy,” Daryl Yang Yale-NUS ’19 said. “That was a very different experience from when I tried to organize things at NUS.”

Yang, who served as co-president on the second executive committee of The G Spot, Yale-NUS’ Gender and Sexuality Alliance, from 2014 to 2016, said the process of organizing events and booking venues was more procedural and bureaucratic at NUS than at Yale-NUS.

(Daryl Yang Yale-NUS '19)

In 2015, Yang recalled, he helped the NUS Political Association organize a panel on LGBTQ+ issues for its annual social policy forum. The panel consisted of a speaker from Singapore’s Association of Women for Action and Research, or AWARE, a speaker from the LGBT+ advocacy group Oogachaga and Baey Yam King, a member of parliament who has been outspoken on LGBTQ+ rights in Singapore. In part, this was because conservative speakers had all refused invitations to be part of the panel. Yang says the Office of Student Affairs was very involved with the process of who would be invited and at one point discussed canceling the event due to online backlash towards the panel’s composition.

Yang also founded the Community for Advocacy and Political Education, or CAPE. Yang, who was in the Yale-NUS and NUS Law’s double-degree program, said he had wanted to form the group with his friends at NUS Law, but realized that the Yale-NUS administration would be more supportive of the initiative than NUS.

“In general, the terms of operation for Yale-NUS were laid out by an agreement between Yale and NUS, so the broad parameters (like the existence of the College and the broad budget) were determined by agreement,” Lewis told the News. “Within those parameters, the leadership of Yale-NUS has a fair amount of autonomy, for example in how to allocate the budget, which courses to offer, whom to hire.”

Six students who spoke with the News shared a broad understanding of the parameters that Lewis referenced, but expressed confusion about the exact bounds of that autonomy — specifically on when and where NUS could step in.

“Several batches of Octant editors and reporters, including me, have been trying to seek clarity on [the Yale-NUS] Governing Board’s authority, but to no avail,” Yihui Xie Yale-NUS ’23 said, referencing The Octant, Yale-NUS’ flagship student newspaper. “I can’t speak for all the decision-making on campus, but at least for the governing board, few people know what power they have.”

The Yale-NUS Governing Board is composed of the Yale-NUS president, Yale President Peter Salovey, Lewis and others. The Board is responsible for the strategic direction of the College, as well as establishing policies for Yale-NUS.

(JX Soo Yale-NUS '25)

Several students delineated the roles within the Governing Board based on who they had interacted with. Kouteili told the News that Yale-NUS Dean of Students Dave Stanfield was typically the most involved in day-to-day student life and the main point of administrative contact for students. The provost, he suggested, was more involved with structural decisions, like the direction of the College.

Certain NUS policies have been adopted by the Yale-NUS Governing Board, Lewis said, but these tend to be on the more administrative side, such as governing personnel policies or IT policy. He stressed that any decision to adopt a shared policy with NUS came from the Yale-NUS administration, not NUS.

Wee told the News that students had enjoyed significant involvement in most of Yale-NUS’ administrative decisions that pertain directly to students, such as the curriculum and residential life. But how Yale-NUS fit into the larger context of education in Singapore was not in the hands of students and, Wee thought, was likely to have been shaped by NUS. She said this made those smaller decisions, which did have student involvement, feel “meaningless.”

“Yale-NUS as an institution was not really decided by us,” Wee said. “The narratives of Yale-NUS were not shaped by us.”

Yale-NUS was framed by both Yale and NUS as an “experiment” within Singapore. For some students there, however, it felt like they had no control over the experiment’s direction, even if they could contribute to how it ran internally.

And now, that experiment has come to an end. The “fair amount of autonomy” that Lewis said Yale-NUS had was overwritten by NUS in the decision to end its partnership with Yale in 2025.

(Jose Estrada, Production and Design Editor)

Valerie Yeo, a Yale-NUS spokesperson, told the News that, since the merger, members of the Yale-NUS community have worked closely with NUS to share policies and practices and reaffirmed that Yale-NUS has the autonomy to “innovate and adopt” policies, curricula, systems and practices.

Student consultation and input

Yale-NUS as a community and as an academic institution was largely shaped by its students, who were often consulted on decisions — or at the very least listened to — when they voiced concerns.

“In Yale-NUS, I think just because of how small the community is, we actually have quite a few […] channels that provide feedback, which has actually resulted in a lot of very formative changes,” Wee said.

(Sophie Henry, Illustrations Editor)

For example, during a regular review of the Yale-NUS Common Curriculum — a sequence of 10 foundational and interdisciplinary courses that all students are required to take — students advocated specifically to decolonize the curriculum. In response, the College added “The Malay Annals,” an Islamic text and seminal work of Malay history and literature, to its literature common core curriculum, which had previously been dominated by Western classics like The Odyssey.

Although the process to attain these goals could be long and bureaucratic, Wee emphasized that the Yale-NUS administration has been transparent and attentive to students.

“Where the Yale-NUS administration is in full control, I think they do listen to the students,” Wee said. “It’s painful, but there is progress.”

Students also had a say in Yale-NUS’ policymaking, which was generally autonomous and separate from NUS. Students had significant control over their residential experience: because of student canvassing, Yale-NUS implemented all-gender suites on the campus. NUS College, however, plans on abolishing these suites following the merger.

Yale-NUS also recently implemented two gender-neutral bathrooms in its library as a result of student advocacy. Administrative staff at Yale-NUS urged their colleagues at NUS to follow suit, Hoten said, and NUS now has one gender-neutral bathroom. NUS did not confirm this number when asked for comment.

Students pointed out that the Yale-NUS StuGov has much more potential for impact than its NUS counterpart, the NUS Student Union, or NUSSU.

“There’s this common joke in NUS that […] NUSSU is only good for packing goodie bags during exam week,” Wee said.

Yale-NUS’ mental health policies are another example of the difference in attention towards student concerns between NUS and Yale-NUS. Yale-NUS has five full-time counselors available for students, whereas NUS only has one part-time counselor for its residential colleges “in the same area that exists with USP,” Hoten said. NUS did not confirm the number of mental health counselors available to students when contacted by the News.

“The process with which they make these decisions often doesn’t involve student feedback,” Hoten said. “I think that’s a big element of Yale-NUS that is missing at NUS in terms of the decision making process.”

Professors at Yale-NUS are aware of the need for learning and accessibility accommodations, Hoten added, and the school also provides paid positions for students to take notes for their peers who are hard of hearing or have other accessibility needs. But at NUS, she added, professors do not have the same training, and they often do not provide the same accommodations for students. NUS did not respond when asked about whether they train professors to provide accommodations.

Hoten said that she has not seen a move towards increasing the number of counselors at NUS or educating professors and training staff to help students struggling with mental health issues.

(Sam Kouteili Yale-NUS ’17)

“Students are very vocal on what Yale-NUS looks like, or at least we have a lot of day to day input […] and that was one of the best parts of the whole program — the fact that we were able to shape our learning experience,” Kouteili said.

Yale-NUS also adjusted its sexual misconduct policies independently of NUS via a rigorous consultative process. Since the inception of Yale-NUS, Hoten said, but especially in the last few years, Yale-NUS has conducted multiple reviews of its sexual misconduct policy, with its most recent review conducted in the 2017-18 academic year by a group of students, staff and faculty. In 2018 and 2019, Yale-NUS conducted two sexual climate surveys with the student body and in 2020, the school rolled out a new model of support for survivors.

Following a sweep of voyeurism and sexual misconduct cases among students at NUS in 2018 and 2019, there was significant public pressure on the school to review its sexual misconduct policies.

In 2019, Monica Baey NUS ’19 took to social media to call for more severe punishments against a student who had filmed her showering in her residential hall. The incident received widespread media coverage and student organizations including NUSSU, The G Spot and Kingfishers for Consent called on the university to reform its sexual misconduct policy.

JX Soo Yale-NUS '25

(JX Soo Yale-NUS '25)

NUS’ disciplinary policy previously followed “Second Strike and You’re Out” guidelines, whereby first-time offenders received a punishment ranging from a warning to a suspension, but were not immediately expelled. Only repeat offenders could be expelled, however ex-NUSSU Vice President Soon Hao Jing NUS ’19 reportedly noted that this policy was “not representative of any formal policy I knew of, since no one was ultimately expelled from NUS for sexual offences.”

Hoten said that NUS then amended its policy using Yale-NUS’ refined policy as a template.

“NUS basically took what we had at the time and almost duplicated it — and has refined it on their own since — but Yale-NUS was able to autonomously create these policies,” Hoten said.

At the time, media and student backlash against NUS focused not only on the university’s perceived leniency towards perpetrators, but also on NUS’ alleged disregard for students’ voices.

Students raised concerns over NUS’ lack of transparency with regard to incidents of sexual misconduct and its inadequate support systems for victims at an April 25, 2019 town hall held by the university. But students said NUS representatives responded to their concerns by saying “we have to wait for the review committee to come to a decision.” No members of the review committee on sexual misconduct were present at the town hall.

“Public pressure and bad publicity are the only things that NUS responds to, unfortunately,” Hoten said.

As part of Yale-NUS’ orientation program, Hoten said, students are required to attend a mandatory consent education workshop.

At NUS, this is conducted through an online interactive module, an NUS student told the News.

“We also have struggled with creating safe spaces for survivors on [Yale-NUS’] campus as well, so I will not negate the limitations of our own policies and our own institutional support,” Hoten said. “But I would say in comparison to NUS, the fact that [NUS doesn’t] have people hired to think about these things, makes it really difficult for them to think about these things.”

No More Top Down

Following the announcement of the merger, students at NUS, USP and Yale-NUS organized to form No More Top Down, a group that called for the reversal of the Yale-NUS and USP merger. The group is also calling for the planned merger between the NUS faculty of engineering and the School of Design and Environment — which are set to merge into the College of Design and Engineering — to be reversed.

According to a statement by the group, these merger decisions were made unilaterally by NUS without the consultation of the Yale-NUS governing board, the president of Yale-NUS, NUS’ academic and nonacademic staff and both schools’ student associations.

Conflicting ideas about the hierarchy of decision-making at Yale NUS. (Jose Estrada, Production and Design Editor)

Yale-NUS President Tan Tai Yong previously told The Octant that he was “gobsmacked and flabbergasted” by the news of the merger. While the Yale-NUS governing board had endorsed the decision on Aug. 23, 2021, he said they had “procedural obligations” to do so.

Hoten, a member of No More Top Down, told the News that NUS leaders had claimed they consulted with students prior to the announcement of the College of Design and Engineering merger. When No More Top Down spoke to NUS students, however, it turned out that this consultation was done through closed-door discussions with particular individuals in the student body.

“This is not a consultative process,” Hoten said. “This is basically just the administration getting you behind closed doors, and convincing you [that] the decision that they made was right, and because you don’t have the collective ability to demand from your administration, they’re just going to claim that they consulted you.”

According to Hoten, NUS had also reached out to Yale-NUS students for closed-door discussions more than two weeks after the merger was announced, but students unanimously refused to participate, insisting that the student body be consulted collectively and transparently through town hall discussions.

For two weeks, she said, members of No More Top Down wrote emails and letters to the NUS administration but were met with no response. NUS also did not respond to No More Top Down’s petition, which had almost 15,000 signatures from students and members of the public at the time. NUS President Tan Eng Chye’s op-ed about higher education in Singapore, which painted the merger as a financial decision, was his first response to both the public and the students, Hoten said.

“It’s not feasible for you to just adopt something statically as you see it without understanding the process behind it,” Hoten said. “It’s still top down, it still doesn’t consider what students need, because what students will need will change over time, you know, as the culture changes, as the types of students change, you need to be able to adapt to that.”

Academic freedom on campus

In fall 2019, the issue of academic freedom came to a head when a workshop, “Dialogue and Dissent,” run by Singaporean playwright Alfian Sa’at, was canceled around two weeks before it was scheduled to take place. The workshop formed a part of the school’s Learning Across Boundaries Week Seven program, a week-long learning program for Yale-NUS students held either in Singapore or overseas.

(JX Soo Yale-NUS '25)

Alfian is known for tackling taboo topics like race, sexuality and politics through his works. The class — and its cancellation — drew media attention because of its allusions to protesting, which is illegal in Singapore. Jarabejo told the News that Alfian seemed conscious of the implications of what he wanted to teach and took steps to tone down his content. The course proposal originally included two workshops, one on sign-making and one on theater techniques, as well as a walking tour of Hong Lim Park — a designated place for approved public speech and rallies, and the only place in Singapore where it is legal to do so. The Yale-NUS administration raised concerns about the sign-making activity and the tour of Hong Lim Park, because they “posed possible legal risks,” especially for international students.

Alfian consulted students, Jarabejo said, including those in CAPE, to provide a more scholarly and balanced understanding of the subject and how he could adjust the course.

Although the administration claimed that the course was canceled due to a lack of academic rigor, students pointed out that it was impossible to ignore the larger political context in Singapore. Jarabejo stressed that it did seem to be an internal decision, but he doubted that it came from the Yale-NUS administration alone.

Yale University’s investigation into the incident, headed by Lewis, found that there was no evidence of government coercion.

“As a university administrator, one of my key roles is defending the academic freedom of faculty and the broad freedom of expression of students,” Lewis said. “Since academic freedom always involves controversy and is never automatic, it is a key job of the college or university leader to ensure it every day in every interaction with faculty and students.”

JX Soo Yale-NUS '25

(JX Soo Yale-NUS '25)

Before its cancellation, the program had been modified to remove the sign-making activity, which had the potential of being controversial given Singapore’s laws banning unapproved protesting. Yale-NUS told students it would not have been able to protect them from potential legal repercussions of participating in such an activity. Several students cited this modification as evidence that the Yale-NUS administration still wanted to go ahead with the program and that they suspected there were internal discussions with NUS that resulted in the cancellation.

Regardless of who pulled the strings, the news of the program’s cancellation was given suddenly to both students and to Alfian. Alfian responded to Yale’s report saying that he had agreed to all revisions to the program and that Yale-NUS had failed to communicate its concerns regarding academic rigor. Hoten, who was originally meant to participate in the program, was transferred to a different Week 7 group just two weeks before it was set to run.

“That was a really prominent example in the last few years of the way that NUS and even the government more broadly encroached upon the decision making processes of Yale-NUS and the kinds of activities we could do,” Hoten said.

But Yale-NUS maintains there was no coercion. The decision to cancel the workshop was made independently by Yale-NUS based on “pedagogical grounds,” Yale-NUS spokesperson Yeo, told the News.

Nevertheless, all eight students interviewed said they felt their academic freedom was never a question within the Yale-NUS campus.

Michael Sagna Yale-NUS ’23 told the News that during his time as a managing editor at The Octant, no students had reported their academic freedom being constrained. Xie concurred and added that there has never been a topic she has been barred from exploring.

In his time at Yale-NUS, Kouteili said, they had screenings of banned films on campus, the libraries offered banned books and several professors were openly critical of the Singapore government and fervently championed academic freedom. He emphasized that the school tried to protect its students as much as it could.

Students’ freedom of expression, Kouteili said, was bound by the borders of the Yale-NUS campus. Students were conscious of the fact that what they posted on social media or did outside of campus could no longer be protected by the school beyond its grounds.

Still, there was a conflict between how some students felt they were promised freedom of expression because of the school’s collaboration with Yale University and the limitations of Singapore’s laws, Yang said.

“We need to draw a line between what is academic freedom and what is freedom of expression and the two are not synonymous with each other,” Yang said. “In trying to demand that we define it by equating the academic freedom that we were promised in Yale-NUS with some kind of complete freedom of expression, you’re just forcing the [Singaporean] government to push back.”

(Sophie Henry, Illustrations editor)

“Yale will not save us”

When Yale announced the establishment of Yale-NUS, skeptics amongst Yale faculty criticized the University’s decision to get involved with what Christopher Miller, a professor at Yale, described as an “illiberal, authoritarian regime.” When NUS announced the dissolution of their partnership with Yale, the same criticisms reemerged.

These faculty members placed an impetus upon Yale as an institution to champion liberal values in its overseas ventures. Miller cited the Singapore government’s reaffirmation of anti-LGBTQ+ laws, including its retention of penal code 377A which criminalizes sex between men, as an example of Yale’s failure to influence the country.

In an op-ed soon after the merger was announced, Miller criticized the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate for refusing to open an inquiry into Yale-NUS — “its history, its unfolding and its closing.”

“Faced with the administration’s assurances that this was all Singapore’s doing, and that Yale can do nothing about it, the Senate goes limp,” Miller wrote in his op-ed.

Sagna told the News that Yale’s 2019 investigation into Yale-NUS’ academic freedom shocked him, because it demonstrated the lack of trust that Yale had in the Yale-NUS administration. Additionally, the suggestions by Yale faculty that Yale’s own investigation was biased also angered him and made it clear to him that “Yale will not save us from anything.”

“Your first thing is to investigate and challenge and question, rather than actually listening to what the professors or the president had to say,” Sagna said. “I think that eroded a lot of the trust between [Yale and Yale-NUS …] That was a huge shift in the way that I thought about [Yale and Yale-NUS’] relationship.”

Those most affected and least talked about

The dissolution of the Yale-NUS partnership affected students in very different ways.

International students that receive a financial aid scholarship to Yale-NUS receive up to $55,000 from Yale-NUS and the rest from the Singaporean government, which requires them to work in Singapore for two to three years after graduating. While some Yale-NUS students’ initial response to the partnership dissolution was to consider transferring to another university, many international students did not have that option. If they wanted to break the bond and transfer, they would have to repay the money, including interest.

(Sophie Henry, Illustrations editor)

A second response that students had, Sagna said, was to pursue a master’s degree after graduating in order to leverage the reputation that Yale-NUS has now.

“Even if no one knows what [Yale-NUS] means on their resume in 10 years, they will know the one above,” Sagna said. “But then for us students who are on a tuition grant, we can’t do that because we don’t have that privilege — we can’t do anything to mitigate the effect that will have on our employment.”

Sagna said that if he were to leave Singapore to try to work back home in the United Kingdom, it would be difficult to explain his education to employers. While Yale-NUS is reputedly academically competitive, that reputation may wane in the next decade and a Google search by an employer would reveal that it is now a defunct college.

(Michael Sagna Yale-NUS '23)

The school claims that the closure is due to the college’s success, Sagna said, because they want to replicate the model on a bigger scale — and one that is more accessible to Singaporeans — but that is something that he cannot communicate to employers.

“It’s just so frustrating because I had to work so hard to get here, Yale-NUS was my dream school,” Sagna said. “I had to do all these things and I ended up making it and now it just doesn’t exist.”

Foreigners are also restricted in their ability to get involved in politics in Singapore.

Sagna recalled attending a talk by CAPE, where they explained to international students their rights.

“You know how people say, not caring about politics is a privilege,” Sagna said. “As a foreigner, you feel disenfranchised, but simultaneously […] a lot of the decisions that are being made about Singapore, a lot of which really directly affects you, you have no direct political say over, you don’t have a way of expressing your opinion.”

Sagna said there were smaller top-down decisions he experienced that were overlooked by a majority of students.

Previously, the school offered financial aid for students who requested to live on campus over the summer — a number that increased when the pandemic hit. In 2020, Sagna’s first summer in Singapore, he managed to obtain financial aid since he was unable to return home. But over that winter break, Yale-NUS reduced its financial aid available to students for accommodations so that a smaller number of students could qualify.

Financial aid was not offered at all over summer 2021. Instead, students who had to stay over the summer paid $800 a month, a figure that Sagna felt is too high, especially as students already pay for air conditioning through “top up credits.” No financial aid is being offered for the upcoming summer.

Yale-NUS spokesperson Yeo told the News that the financial aid offered in the summer and winter of 2020 was COVID-specific funding intended to help international students who could not travel home at the time. As international travel restrictions have lifted, Yale-NUS adjusted its financial aid policy accordingly.

“It affects a certain type of student disproportionately,” Sagna said. “It’s only affecting poor international students — they structure their decisions, such that it only affects a very specific part of the school population and that means that the majority of people don’t care.”

About 45 percent of Yale-NUS is made up of international students. In May 2020, Joanne Roberts, the executive vice president of academic affairs at Yale-NUS, said that the percentage of financial aid offers for international students stood at 80 percent, although they estimated it would drop to 50 percent in future years as Yale-NUS became need-aware in its international admissions. However, Sagna explained that that percentage represents students on any type of financial aid, so the number of students that are most affected by these decisions tends to be much smaller, and therefore they have much less of a voice.

A lost space in Singapore

In spite of its limitations, many felt that Yale-NUS represented a beacon of progressivism and student activism in Singapore. Students mourned what they said felt like the death of a space that prioritized their voices and made them feel heard.

To many, the consultative and transparent approach that Yale-NUS previously took was already being eroded by the merger.

Sagna said he felt like the Yale-NUS administration had “no backbone” and had not fought for students in any tangible way.

(JX Soo Yale-NUS '25)

Students told the News that the promises that Yale-NUS and NUS had made about a transparent and consultative process had not been fulfilled. Less than five percent of students at Yale-NUS and USP expressed satisfaction with the NUS College planning process in a survey conducted by The Octant.

Students’ frustrations also come from NUS’ disregard for the recommendations given by the working committees. In particular, there are plans for gender-neutral housing to be abolished and the entire batch of NUS College first years to be housed separately from Yale-NUS students, contrary to the working committees’ recommendations.

“When I look at the process with which NUS gathers student feedback or alters their policies, it’s still the same,” Hoten said. “I would say administratively at NUS nothing has changed.”

Some were concerned about what place different identities and communities would have at NUS College.

“I think that’s a big chunk of the worry here as well — when we think about minority voices and diverse voices, I would say NUS demographically is a lot more homogenous, but Yale-NUS has really quite an incredible diversity of identities that are well celebrated on campus,” Hoten said.

Within a country that so often suppresses activism, Yale-NUS was an achievement, students said. As the partnership dissolves, with the last Yale-NUS students set to graduate in 2025, students expressed hope that that outspokenness and inclusive community would continue at NUS College, and even at NUS.

“I think that spirit and that energy of believing in your agency as a student, I think some of that really did kind of rub off on NUS students, or the students who were privy to what was happening,” Hoten said. “And I think that that makes me cautiously hopeful about the future of NUS, the future of New College and what NUS will be.”

Yale-NUS was the first liberal arts institution in Singapore and the first institution outside New Haven that Yale University developed.

Correction, April 17: A previous version of this article said there are four residential colleges — there are actually three. It also included an incorrect class year for Xie and described Yang as the founder of The G Spot, instead of as its co-president. The article has been updated.

UP CLOSE | Yale communities feel the pandemic’s effect on music making

Musicians at Yale shared how the pandemic impacted their psychological well-being and altered the nature of their music.

By Staff Reporter Gamze Kazakoglu

Cover by Staff Photographer Tenzin Jorden

Published on April 12, 2022

If there were to be a medium of communication across boundaries, it would be the universal language of music. There is something magical about listening to live music while swaying your body, synchronized with those around you — an experience that all but disappeared during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Over the past two years, students, staff and faculty across the University were forced to adapt to ever-changing public health restrictions while seeking out avenues for Yalies to continue creating and enjoying music. 

“While the pandemic presented its unique challenges for the arts on campus, it did not let that stop students from creating art and sharing their music,” University President Peter Salovey wrote in an email to the News. 

Music groups were largely unable to meet in person for rehearsals and performances for the entire 2020-21 academic year following the start of the pandemic. Last fall, performance activities resumed on campus in phases — first with rehearsals, then performances with Yale audiences. Eventually, community members outside of the University were gradually invited to attend on-campus performances once again.

When these relaxed restrictions tightened briefly at the beginning of the spring 2022 semester in response to an uptick in on-campus cases, students raised concerns to the Yale administration about a perceived discrepancy between policies regulating the performing arts and other activities, including athletics. 

In conversations with the News, 12 musicians at Yale expressed how the pandemic led to burnout, isolation and disconnection from their craft.

“I just remember feeling so drained and fatigued,” music major Alex Whittington ’22 said. “I had enough Zoom and I didn’t want to log onto another Zoom call, even if it was for music making. I often found myself so constantly defeated, very often just feeling anxious about it, often not wanting to do it. It’s a strange conflict, because I’m glad to have produced music, but it was so hard to find the motivation sometimes.”

Musicians also shared how long quarantine periods and social distancing restrictions took a toll on their mental health, isolating them from the communities that were previously crucial to their craft. 

Still, while the gradual lifting of restrictions may remedy their feelings of separation and rebuild communities, the landscape of music has likely been forever changed by the pandemic.

Isolation, a lack of communication and emotional burnout

Although University-wide limits on audience capacity, vaccination and mask requirements still remain, musical performances on campus are gradually returning to their pre-pandemic norms. However, the return of sound reverberating through Sprague Hall does not negate the psychological impact caused by the three-year period of silence.

“Music is the common universal language,” Kimie Han ’23 said. “Not being able to really directly communicate with other people, directly seeing your music being shared with other people certainly changes how you feel as a musician.”

(Tim Tai, Staff Photographer)

At the height of the pandemic, Yale’s strict social distancing restrictions deprived performers of live audiences. For Music Department chair Ian Quinn, a live audience raises the stakes of a performance, giving musicians an adrenaline rush and making the act of performing more exciting. In addition, musicians express their emotions through music, requiring people they can express their emotions to. 

“Music is a communicative activity and it’s hard to have a conversation with somebody over screens,” Quinn said. “Online performances are like having a conversation where you record yourself, email it to somebody and then they email their response back. That’s not the same as a live, real time connection.”

As in-person performances shifted to online platforms, musicians grappled with a phenomenon known as “Zoom fatigue.”  

According to Mark Rego, assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, individuals were cut off from each other as society moved to online meeting platforms. This sense of separation made people’s mental health more vulnerable. For Rego, micro-facial expressions — little cues that people subconsciously observe about others during in-person interactions — enable the exchange of information. 

Rego explained that the brain’s prefrontal cortex is where human beings process sensory inputs — such as textures and colors — which relate to images they perceive in three dimensional spaces. The brain “puts a person together” through the senses, he explained. In online interactions, the brain requires more energy to form a mental representation of a person — which can become exhausting after long periods of time. 

“There is just something about being in the presence of another person; you have that degree of connection,” Rego said. “If you put children in front of the TV all day, they will never learn how to speak. There are certainly some people who are very productive in their creative processes when they are alone. But [during the pandemic] there was something large missing that is present when you are together — maybe it’s things you hear, you feel or the spirit of things for more creative endeavors. When I think of people who are creative or collaborative [who can no longer be] together, I think of them like that kid watching Sesame Street all day instead of being together with the adults.”

According to professor of psychology Laurie Santos, humans are happier when they are more socially connected. She pointed to a study by psychologists Ed Diener and Marty Seligman, which found that humans are happiest when physically in the presence of other people, and that overall well-being improves with human contact. Research from a Yale study also supported this thesis, finding that sharing a positive experience with another person without communicating intensifies the pleasantness of that experience.

“My read of the science is that we can get a well-being boost [based on social connection] if we use platforms like Zoom, but the key is that those platforms need to connect people in real time,” Santos wrote in an email to the News. “Connecting via other technologies that aren’t in real time — for example liking someone’s Instagram post or reading through a social media feed — doesn’t seem to give the same well-being boost. One of the worst forms of torture is solitary confinement— as social primates we need to be around other people to be psychologically healthy.”

For musicians, social isolation arose from two sources: the lack of an audience and the lack of other musicians sharing the same performance space. 

Matiss Cudars MUS ’23, said that, like most musicians, he mainly thrives in the presence of others when creating music. Although music can be a solitary activity — according to Cudars, one could hypothetically take one’s instrument, go to the woods and play only for oneself and nature — music is primarily a social process. 

“Musicians are, like most human beings, sensitive to [other] human beings, and they feel when someone really loves or hates what they are doing — and anything in between that spectrum,” Cudars said. “When you’re just with yourself, it’s a different experience [from] the transcendental and magical experience of making collective music. It’s transformative and a very abstract feeling — I lose myself at one point and feel every heartbeat of the audience. My energy connects with others and I react to it. I guess why people like going to concerts is partly because of this.” 

For Cudars, while solo music can be a “wonderful” thing, it is a solitary activity which may lead to feelings of isolation. In-person performances and live music, on the other hand, embody the beauty of human love — which he defines as synchronization as one body. 

The pandemic not only brought an interruption to live performances, but also prevented musicians from rehearsing with one another. Virtual rehearsals eroded the boundaries between the distinct notions of practice, a solitary activity, and rehearsal, a collective activity.

According to musician Louis Sokolow ’22, what separates practice from rehearsal is that practice is one’s own time working through things. On the other hand, rehearsals create collective musicality with others. 

For Maggie Schnyer ’24, the experience of practicing felt more like submitting an assignment on a deadline rather than truly making music.

Some student groups, including the Glee Club, Opera Theatre of Yale College and the Yale Baroque Opera Project, organized virtual projects with each musician recording a section entirely on their own. According to Whittington, singing their part alone was difficult and made them feel isolated. 

Like people around the world who had to adapt to long periods of isolation during the pandemic, many musicians experienced symptoms of psychological burnout.

According to Santos, burnout can be split into three parts, with the first being emotional exhaustion, where one continually feels drained and worn out. People experiencing burnout also feel a reduced sense of personal accomplishment, caring less about the work they do. The third part, what is known as depersonalization or cynicism, leads to feelings of annoyance and a shorter temper than usual. 

But some musicians combatted feelings of burnout by adjusting their routines to help them adapt to the circumstances.

(Yale Daily News)

Herdís Guðmundsdóttir MUS ’23 found it helpful to imagine the camera as a person and set self-motivating personal goals. She acknowledged the difference between playing by herself and with others online. When she was alone with the camera, Guðmundsdóttir was increasingly conscious of small details of her performance. 

According to Anna Zayaruznaya, director of undergraduate studies for the music department, creating music in a collaborative format can lower stress levels, since people’s “hearts are [more] together.” 

Sebastian Ruth, a lecturer in music at Yale, found his relationship with his instruments redefined during the first few months of the pandemic, when he was practicing without working towards a set performance. When he produces music in-person with others, he thinks that musicians breathe together and feel the body language of others around them, reading social and musical cues to play as a synchronous whole. 

While playing in isolation, “is the music yours?” Ruth questioned. “My mind goes to playing correctly, because this is going to be recorded. [Playing alone requires] a really different mindset from playing communicatively, because [in a performance] someone in the room will be moved by this.”

The musical community 

Decreased human contact also threatened the musical communities that are crucial to providing support and creativity for the musicians within them. 

What Han loves most about music is playing alongside others, whether as a member of an orchestra or a chamber group. 

For Schnyer, the musical community has been a good way to connect with people. 

“What I’ve loved the most about [music] is the connections and relationships I’ve made with other people — both in and outside of rehearsal times,” Schnyer said.

As performances shifted online during the pandemic, many groups compiled individual recorded performances into videos that could be shared.

“With these virtual recordings that we did in the Glee Club, we were able to get a sound with all the notes and rhythms,” Sokolow said. “But I think what makes it music and what brings people to Glee Club and maybe other choirs, even with everything else that we have in our lives, is being able to — as our conductor Jeff [Douma] likes to say — lean into each other’s sounds, really hear each other, listen and find an emotional resonance in that.”

With sophomores stuck at home for the fall 2020 semester and first-years restricted from campus in spring 2021, new members of Yale’s musical groups were deprived of bonding activities that would have been held in-person if not for the pandemic.

For Gabby Montuori ’24, who joined the acapella group Doox in his sophomore year at Yale, bonding with fellow members was difficult as social distancing restrictions prevented many socials and group activities from taking place in-person. 

Yet musicians nevertheless attempted to compensate for this lost aspect of music. 

Zanuttini-Frank put on small-scale concerts for his suitemates and people in his social circle. Still, he felt that he lost his “group identity” within the larger community that he was used to. 

A redefined artform

Music, like all art forms, is constantly in flux. While some changes brought on by the pandemic are likely to only be temporary, the effects of others — like the rapid advances in technology — may shape how music is made and appreciated for years to come.

Over the course of the pandemic, Jamulus, a music performance software that allows musicians to rehearse, perform and play in real-time, was reinvented. According to Quinn, although this did not exactly replicate synchronous performance, the minimal lag time allowed people in different locations to feel like they were playing together. 

“[The feeling of togetherness] is the most important thing, right? It’s to feel that you are in real live time communication with somebody else,” Quinn said. “So musicians have really pushed for and succeeded in getting a lot of those technologies to emerge.”

The School of Music also updated its infrastructure with the installation of a new system allowing for real-time live digital audio communication between rooms. This allowed ensembles of musicians to come into the building and, with each instrumentalist in a separate room, play live and improvise together. 

(Yale Daily News)

Social media platforms such as TikTok also saw the rise of a new kind of collaborative musicianship — with people harmonizing and improvising with each other, layering performance on performance. For Quinn, this is a new kind of art form. 

The pandemic also led some musicians to reconsider their relationship with the art form.

Amidst the Black Lives Matter movement that took place in May and June of 2020, Ruth found himself contemplating the meaning of creating music, as it did not feel right for him to play traditional music like a Bach concerto given the societal conditions. Combined with the dilemma of making music together while being alone, Ruth composed a new piece titled “Praying,” which was based on a poem by Mary Oliver carrying the same name.

“What place does music have in all of this uncertainty, upheaval, questions and striving?” Ruth first asked himself. “Then [I thought] if maybe it’s like a prayer, it could come back to something really central and offer something to the world.”  

In addition to the changes in societal dynamics, Ruth also found solace in the stillness associated with the pandemic. All of a sudden, he wasn’t running around from one meeting to another and conducted meetings over Zoom instead. 

As the pace of life slowed down, so did his angle towards music. When he came across a piece of violin music by Reena Esmail called “Darshan” in a New York Times article, he thought it to be very “meditative” and fitting for the times. 

Although many musicians have felt disconnected from their art due to a lack of interaction during the pandemic, Ruth found himself closer to his music than ever before. He found more time to learn new music — time which would have otherwise been allocated towards preparing for concerts.

Ruth pointed to various evolving music forms throughout the world that resonated with his own experience. One of them was a performance by Andrea Bocelli singing in an Easter concert in April 2020 in Milan. The imagery in the video was an empty city where Bocelli was walking in and out of a church — against the backdrop of desolation. 

“It was so much pain and suffering to just hear music in that moment, which made it so beautiful and was something that we needed — the role of music in that moment felt very special,” Ruth said. “There was something about the psychologically significant role that music could play in that time.”

As the world slowly recovers from the pandemic, new ways of creating music and a return to in-person performances may fill the void left by months of isolation and social distancing. 

“One of the things humans are best at is making beauty under extraordinarily challenging conditions. If new art forms can be born out of this pandemic, I’m all for it. But is there any substitute for personal connection? I don’t think there is,” Quinn said. 

UP CLOSE | Yale’s FGLI community: fact or fantasy?

Though there is a robust group of students who use the first-generation, low-income label, there is not a clear consensus on if a community exists for FGLI students.

By Staff Reporter Jordan Fitzgerald

Cover by Illustrations Editor Cecilia Lee

Published on April 11, 2022

When Lucas Shepard ’24 and his twin sister arrived at Yale in 2019, their parents gave them each $100, which was to be all the spending money they would have during their first year on campus.

But despite being deemed low-income based on U.S. tax brackets, Shepard rejects the label. Shepard, who hails from Brazil, stressed that both of his parents have Ph.Ds and that he considers himself financially privileged back home. It is the conversion from Brazilian real to U.S. dollars that renders him low-income.

“If I just took on the FGLI label, I would feel really weird about it,” Shepard said. “I don’t think it’s a label I deserve and that I would be downplaying my privilege.”

Yale’s FGLI community is tied together by socioeconomic status and familial privilege, but students in the community said that those shared experiences are not always enough to hold together a group with such diverse backgrounds.

More and more of these students are enrolling at Yale, but they do not all agree on what it means to be a FGLI undergraduate on this campus. There are programs in place, friendships to be made and widespread calls for more institutional and cultural support, but is there a FGLI community?

The News spoke to 10 FGLI students as well as several University administrators about their perceptions of an FGLI community, or a lack thereof, at Yale.

A growing population

Jeremiah Quinlan, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid, said that expanding Yale’s socioeconomic diversity has been a “top priority” of his tenure since it started in 2013.

Under Quinlan, the percentage of undergraduate students receiving Pell grants — financial awards given to students with high levels of need — has increased from less than 13 percent in 2013 to over 19 percent in 2021. The number of students who are the first in their families to attend college has risen from below 13 percent to almost 18 percent over the same period. This translates to 500 more Pell-eligible students and 400 more first-generation students on campus than there were eight years ago, according to Quinlan.

The increase can be partially attributed to an overall increase in the size of the Yale College student body since the 2015 opening of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray Colleges.

Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun said he and University President Peter Salovey — whose term, like Quinlan’s, both began in 2013 — share the admissions office’s commitment to bolstering Yale’s socioeconomic diversity.

“Our mission is to give people educational opportunities,” Chun told the News. “And because we have the resources to provide an exceptional education and college experience for our students, we think it is very important to try to share that as promptly as we can for those who have really earned it.”

Chun, Quinlan and Mark Dunn, director of outreach and communications at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, said that Yale can serve as an engine of socioeconomic mobility for FGLI students. Quinlan and Dunn both stressed that increasing socioeconomic diversity, as well as diversity in general, benefits everyone on campus.

(Yale Daily News)

Jorge Anaya ’19, a FGLI alum, said that he could feel the number of FGLI students grow throughout his four years as an undergraduate.

“The term itself — FGLI — was not heard, or at least I didn’t hear it until I was a junior,” Anaya — who currently serves as assistant director of student engagement at the Yale College Dean’s Office, where he works to support FGLI students at Yale — said.

Anaya added that the spike in FGLI enrollment, as well as the introduction of more resources, has shifted the campus culture to one that is more open about FGLI identities and issues. Now that the population has grown, he said, Yalies can focus not only on broadening the FGLI community but also on exploring what the identity means for an individual student.

A complicated label

FGLI is a fairly new term to describe an identity, and it is not one the admissions office itself recognizes.

Dunn and Karin Gosselink, associate director of writing and tutoring at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, said they first heard the acronym “FGLI” used in the mid-2010s. They both speculated that the students may have brought the phrase to campus from an 1vyG conference. 1vyG was an annual gathering dedicated to empowering first-generation undergraduates at Ivy League universities.

According to Quinlan, the admissions office considers first-generation and low-income to be distinct groups that they examine separately when building a class of Yalies. He added that any grouping of the two identities comes later, once students have setted on campus.

On its website, The First-Generation Low-Income Community Initiative at Yale defines FGLI students as those who both hail from a low-income background and are the first in their family to attend college.

Colloquial student understanding of the acronym allows students who are just first-generation or just low-income to claim membership in the FGLI category. Anaya, for example, stressed the importance of saying “first-generation and/or low-income” when discussing the FGLI community.

“Generally, it is safe to say that a first-generation and low-income student is both, but we are conscious of the fact that is not the reality for every student,” Anaya said. “I still think being first-gen and being low-income does come with a series of challenges that can be shared among those students.”

Gosselink explained that both groups may lack familial and cultural resources that will help them maneuver through college, and that both must encounter “the hidden curriculum.” According to Gosselink, the hidden curriculum is the unsaid “set of expectations, norms, practices and institutional structures that define how the university functions.” Students from more privileged backgrounds often have an easier time navigating these structures.

Zoe Hsu ’24 — who identifies as both first-generation and low-income — concurred, writing in an email to the News that she thinks first-generation and low-income identities often overlap with and rely on one another.

But not all students agree that those who are first-generation, low-income or both should all be grouped together under the FGLI moniker. Nathalia Reis ’24 said that while they understand that first-generation students, low-income students and students who are both first-generation and low-income share experiences, consolidating so many backgrounds under one label can engender difficulties in building community. Sheikh Nahiyan ’24 said he thinks the label was created “largely out of convenience because they’re definitely not one and the same.”

Although Faiad Alam ’23 said that while he does not mind first-generation and low-income students being grouped together, he thinks that Yale should focus more on low-income students because he believes the most significant challenges facing FGLI students is a lack of financial capital.

“There are so many levels, particularly to being low income,” Tammy Chung ’24 said. “There are people who make 20k and people who make 50k and those are very different experiences.”

Chung and Alam, both of whom are students of color, said they had initially assumed the FGLI community at Yale would be composed of other students of color.

“When I came [to Yale], I was very surprised that there is a very big group of white FGLI students,” Alam said. “I’m very happy I met them because it made me reframe my definition of FGLI. There are white people here who are not from a privileged background.”

Dunn called the varied socioeconomic and racial makeup of the FGLI community “diversity within diversity” and emphasized that the admissions office does not assume first-generation or low-income students will have one specific background.

A threshold to meet

Alam only came to identify himself as FGLI once he got to Yale, because at home in Texas, he and his friends all came from similar backgrounds. Nevertheless, imposter syndrome regarding his FGLI classification rendered him slow to embrace the label.

“You feel like you need to reach a certain threshold to be FGLI,” he said.

Diego Lopez ’24 first encountered the FGLI label during a pre-college program in high school. He confronted this identity again once when he arrived at Yale and encountered a culture he called “elitist and individualistic and superficial.” But he said that he ultimately became comfortable with being FGLI, which he called his “source of strength.” He now serves as director of outreach for the Yale FGLI Advocacy Movement, also known as YFAM, and the deputy financial accessibility policy director for the Yale College Council.

“FGLI is not something I’m ashamed about. Sometimes, in a way, when I say I’m FGLI, [I know it means] I didn’t pull any strings to get to Yale. I worked my ass off.”

—Tammy Chung ’24

Chung echoed Lopez’s sentiment.

“FGLI is not something I’m ashamed about,” she told the News, “Sometimes, in a way, when I say I’m FGLI, [I know it means] I didn’t pull any strings to get to Yale. I worked my ass off.”

Still, Chung said she had never thought of herself as poor before she came to Yale because her family always had enough money to live off of.

Reis said that they know they are first-generation but that being low-income is not as “clear cut.” Although they identify as being low-income, they are conscious that because they grew up in Long Island, New York, where the cost of living is higher, their family’s income may be higher than other low-income students at Yale.

Shepard — who also grapples with the tension between his home finances and the low-income label — said he prefers to eschew calling himself low-income. He added that he is not the type of person who wants to discuss “their upbringing and their status and their identity. For me specifically, my hobbies and my passions are things that feel much more important.”

(Amay Tewari, Senior Photographer)

Shepard is not alone in this line of thought. Nahiyan is both first-generation and low-income, but he personally does not consider himself “super duper FGLI” and instead chooses to let other interests guide his time at Yale.

Reis said that although they may be FGLI, their identity is also more complex.

“I think being FGLI is an important aspect of my identity, but it’s not the only aspect,” they said. “It’s one of the factors that shapes how I view the world, just like any other factor like gender or race. It can be useful bringing out those different points of view, but it can also be isolating here at Yale.”

Lopez said he shared Reis’s sentiment, saying that being FGLI and being Mexican-American can both feel isolating on Yale’s campus.

“I think being FGLI is an important aspect of my identity, but it’s not the only aspect. It’s one of the factors that shapes how I view the world, just like any other factor like gender or race. It can be useful bringing out those different points of view, but it can also be isolating here at Yale.”

—Nathalia Reis ’24

Many FGLI Yalies seem to question the income side of their identity. But Taylor Chapman ’22, on the other hand, said that while she is low-income, the first-generation side of her FGLI identity is “more of a grey area.” Her parents took an untraditional path to post-secondary education, earning their bachelor’s degrees when Chapman was older. Although they now have college degrees, their different path to a degree has left Chapman on her own in navigating how to obtain a conventional degree.

But do these thoughts disappear after college?

While Anaya said he thinks differently about being FGLI now that he is a working professional, Gosselink said she is still grappling with her own FGLI identity. While both of her parents attended college, neither made much money and her mother suffered from mental illness which prevented her from working. Now as a parent with a P.h.D., she will be able to offer her son the institutional guidance she lacked as a college student, Gosselink said.

A bonding experience

Many FGLI students’ first encounter with Yale academics is a summer program called First Year Scholars at Yale (FSY). A virtual program, Online Experiences for Yale Scholars (ONEXYS), also offers quantitative education, but is not limited to first-generation and/or low-income students.

FSY scholars come to campus in the summer before they matriculate at Yale, and may take English 114 and a half-credit statistics course over the summer. They then enter Yale knowing each other, their residential college staff, the city of New Haven and how to succeed in a Yale course.

When FSY first ran a decade ago, only 36 people participated in the program. When it runs in the summer of 2022, Quinlan said he hopes over 100 pre-frosh will be able to take part.

Still, this is only a fraction of the low-income students on campus. According to Quinlan, FSY invites students to participate based on income, though high school type and a “human element” also play a part in deciding who qualifies.

Neither Reis nor Alam took part in FSY, and both said they feel like they missed out socially, by losing the chance to meet other FGLI students, and academically, by losing the chance to slowly adjust to Yale’s intellectual rigor. Beginning at Yale without the FSY transition period was difficult for both.

“I was literally placed in the wilderness trying to grapple with academics and navigate the social scene,” Alam said.

Gosselink said she hopes to hold more in-person events for FGLI students as public health restrictions loosen, which she hopes can help bridge the divide between those who did and did not do FSY.

Chung, Hsu, Lopez and Nahiyan all completed FSY virtually in 2020. Though Hsu said she met friends and mentors during the online program, Lopez and Nahiyan found that the bonds they made trickled away into the chaos of Yale life.

Through participating in FSY and the Science, Technology and Research Scholars Program (STARS), Chung has found that “90%” of her friends are FGLI. Although spots in these programs are limited, she said these initiatives are the best ways to meet other FGLI students. Nahiyan, who also partook in both FSY and STARS, noted that these opportunities disappear once you pass your first and second year at Yale.

Gosselink acknowledged this drop-off. FSY serves a limited group of incoming first years, and STARS is open to first years and sophomores — and only those interested in STEM. The Academic Strategies Program offers peer mentorship groups for first years and sophomores, but upperclassmen are expected to become mentors themselves and often lose out on formal support.

The FGLI students who spoke with the News had differing opinions on the bearing their FGLI identity has on the friendships they form, both through Yale initiatives and independent of them. Though Nahiyan said his FGLI identity has not impeded his ability to make friends in his residential college, Alam said it can often be a barrier.

“My ‘normal’ friends here talk about their backgrounds and their childhoods and then I talk about my background or my childhood, and they are astonished,” he said. “Then it feels like we didn’t have as much in common as we thought we did.”

He said that the experiences FGLI students share can make it easier for him to connect with them than non-FGLI students.

Reis said that they have a “different layer of relationship” with non-FGLI friends because they do not talk about things like money with people who do not share similar financial constraints. Lopez said he also refrains from discussing socioeconomic issues with more privileged friends because he believes they will either not understand or attempt to “overrelate” to his experiences without really listening. His closest friends are also FGLI, also Mexican and also from Los Angeles.

“My ‘normal’ friends here talk about their backgrounds and their childhoods and then I talk about my background or my childhood, and they are astonished,” he said. “Then it feels like we didn’t have as much in common as we thought we did.”

—Faiad Alam ’23

Hsu called her FGLI friends her “solace.”

“I don’t know a single FGLI Yalie who has not been absolutely kind, warm, compassionate, and empathetic,” Hsu wrote in an email to the News.

Reis said they do not want to force friendships that are solely based on shared identity, but added that they wished there were more events or spaces where they could meet FGLI students.

A room of one’s own

According to Alam, YFAM has advocated for the establishment of a physical space on campus — akin to the cultural houses or the Office of LGBTQ Resources — with the express purpose of supporting FGLI students.

Alam, Chapman and others said that a physical space could help centralize the community, which “essentially exists as a spider web across campus, stretching between all of the different student groups, cultural houses, and administrative offices,” according to Chapman.

Students proposed multiple functions for this space.

“They could host speakers, they could host mixers, they could host financial aid panels,” Lopez suggested. “You could kill three birds with one stone by giving them a space.”

Nahiyan concurred and said that the only place he can think to go when he has questions pertaining to FGLI issues or wants to meet students with similar backgrounds is a GroupMe group chat — “and who goes on GroupMe?”

Despite the universal support from the ten students who spoke to the News, Alam said that the process has been difficult because of administrative pushback.

Chun said he thinks FGLI students should consider all of Yale as their own.

“They should view this entire campus as their space, and in particular, they should view their residential colleges as their home and as a space that is really devoted to our students,” Chun told the News. “This entire campus should be viewed as one space.”

Chun pointed to the Schwarzman Center, university libraries and empty classrooms as spaces that could be used for student congregations and that FGLI students in particular can take advantage of programs like the Community Initiative, the Poorvu Center and FSY.

(Courtesy of Francis Dzikowski)

Though Gosselink said she understands why some administrators are concerned that an identity-based space would segregate FGLI students from the rest of the student body, she held that the effect would be the opposite. She explained that a space for FGLI students to ask questions, build community and be understood would bolster their ability to engage with the rest of the Yale community.

“The priority of the college has been for the students to feel like the residential college is their home,” Gosselink said, “But does it have to be the only home?”

Lopez, however, rejects this integration model altogether. He explained that he does not believe FGLI students should have to change themselves to fit in with Yale’s broader culture.

Both Lopez and Hsu said the principle of creating a space would be just as important as the eventual space’s function. Hsu said creating a space would “symbolize the FGLI community’s presence and importance” on behalf of the administration.

However, even proponents of creating the space disagree on how it should be modeled. Some use the cultural centers as a potential touchstone, while others reject the conflation of socioeconomic and ethnic identities.

Alam, for example, said he strongly believes FGLI students are a cultural group on campus because of “similar struggles, similar achievements, similar ambitions.”

But although Anaya also supports the creation of a FGLI-based space, he disagreed with Alam’s premise. Though he said he understands why people would think of the cultural centers as the model of a home for marginalized identity groups, he suggested that advocates for a FGLI space look to the Office of LGBTQ resources or the Women’s Center as examples instead.

“It would be wrong to solely base [a hypothetical FGLI space] on a mere copy cat of what a cultural center does,” he explained. “The work they do is so different, and there’s historical precedent for why those centers were created.”

Rather than portray FGLI as a cultural group, Anaya said Yalies should examine how the FGLI community intersects with other communities on campus.

Nahiyan said he felt more ambivalent on the question of culture. Though he personally would not feel offended if Yale created a “FGLI Cultural Center,” he said he could understand why others would not appreciate the appellation. Nevertheless, he claimed that the benefit of having a space, regardless of what it is called, would outweigh any backlash over naming conventions.

Anaya is optimistic that a space “could be a great avenue to pursue” once the administration moves past “crisis responding” amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Alam said he hopes this is the case.

“The day that happens I’ll be so happy,” Alam told the News. “Even if I’ve graduated it will make my day.”

A community?

When asked if there is a FGLI community on campus, Lopez said no.

“I honestly don’t think there’s a FGLI community here at Yale beyond the groups that are formed through student effort and relationships,” he told the News. He continued that it is “tokenizing” for Yale to focus on enrolling more FGLI kids without installing more structures to support them.

Chung said yes. She said she sought out programs that would serve her and those from similar backgrounds, which led her to other FGLI students. According to Chung, “If you put in the effort, the community is there.”

Hsu said both yes and no. She emphasized the value of her FGLI friends, though she said she feels “a sense of loneliness” when she remembers how much of a minority FGLI students are on campus.

If the FGLI community does exist, it is one of little consensus.

Dunn said he was not surprised that there is disagreement among FGLI students about cohesion of the community.

“This community is much larger than it was just in recent history and it’s also I think more diverse in terms of the kind of student, the kind of background,” he explained.

Nevertheless, the students agreed that Yale — and Yale students — can better serve FGLI students.

As Yale College Council Vice President, Hsu is advocating for a stipend that would cover the cost of laundry, technology replacement, course supplies, printing and more. Despite her belief in these policies, Hsu said it can be “exhausting” for FGLI student leaders like herself to continually stand up for their community, especially when “there are no other voices to support the initiatives we are consistently fighting for.”

Reis raised a similar point, telling the News that being FGLI is “more than just a financial struggle or a lack of information or experience. A lot of time it manifests as mental strain.”

They added that everyone at Yale — student or administrator, FGLI or not — must contribute to making Yale a more accessible place for members of the FGLI community.

However, they acknowledged that the FGLI community is not one that is “unified.” This state of segmentation, which characterizes the whole community, is also evident in the emergence of various FGLI-based extracurriculars at Yale instead of one, overarching group.

Though Alam is part of YFAM, he criticized the fragmented nature of FGLI groups on campus.

“I wish all the groups were bigger and had more power to do more stuff and were more interconnected,” he said. “We can all do something huge together instead of The Community Initiative doing one thing and YFAM doing another and Questbridge doing another.”

Anaya said he thinks there is power in the various pockets of FGLI communities on campus because there is space for every FGLI student to feel comfortable, but he added that there is power in them joining together as well.

When asked whether there is a FGLI community, Anaya responded with certainty.

“The simple answer is yes,” he said. “I think the better question is … what would you want it to look like?”

Is Yale seeing the decline of the residential college?

Since its inception almost 90 years ago, Yale’s hallmark residential college system has transformed with the growth of the student body and changes in student life.

By Sarah Cook, Staff Reporter

Published on April 8, 2022

When Yale’s residential college system was founded in the 1930s, longtime administrator Sam Chauncey ’57 said the colleges were intended to be locales for faculty and student interaction. Senior history lecturer Jay Gitlin ’71 added that the residential colleges were originally founded to have an “egalitarian impact” and bring students of all income levels onto campus.

Modeled after Oxford and Cambridge, the colleges helped lessen housing shortages and provide space for first-years to live on campus. Still, their primary aim was to serve as intellectual hubs for students.

Now, Chauncey thinks the University is falling short of this ideal.

The pandemic has upended residential college life over the past two years, canceling in-person events and creating larger class sizes that the colleges cannot accommodate. Data from the Dean of Student Affairs office shows that 12.9 percent of enrolled students lived off campus in the 2007-2008 school year, while that number has risen to 20.7 percent this school year. An even greater proportion of students lived off campus last school year, with 28.3 percent of enrolled students living off campus during the 2020-2021 school year.

But many alumni have also observed broader, more long-term changes in the role of the colleges at Yale — especially as the relationship between students and fellows has shifted. Fellows include — but are not limited to — Yale faculty and administrators. In recent years, according to some students and alumni, fellows and students have stopped meeting, and fellows have become less present in students’ lives.

“What has happened to the colleges is that having started out as hopefully a place of intellectual exchange as well as a place to live and eat meals, they have become luxurious dormitories,” Chauncey said. “They are not intellectual centers [anymore]. The fellows no longer have a role in the college.”

Alumni reflect on changes in residential college communities

Gitlin emphasized the importance of promoting a social life in the colleges and said he thinks that the University has made “conscious attempts” to decrease interactions between students and fellows at the colleges. This was a “huge mistake,” he said.

“I cannot reinforce the idea that Yale needs more social life desperately, and not less,” Gitlin said.

Gitlin recalled meeting interesting and famous fellows and associate fellows such as Norman Mailer and Eleanor Roosevelt, and he emphasized the importance of these relationships with fellows to fill a need for sociability in learning environments. He said students and faculty alike seem to want to build more connections with each other.

Head of Berkeley College David Evans ’92 told the News that he has observed a divide between students and professors that has limited the interactions between students and fellows in his time as head.

“As head of college, I’ve been frustrated by an intangible divide between the students and fellows,” Evans said. “In part it mimics the same type of divide that naturally exists between students and professors. Students tend to be intimidated by professors, right, and that’s no one’s fault. It’s just a natural outgrowth of the difference in age. I think it comes from a good place. It’s born of respect that students have for professors, but it’s also one that actually many professors would prefer to break down.”

Chauncey served as a fellow almost 70 years ago. He remembers the heads of colleges consulting frequently with fellows about potential changes in college life, and that the fellows would often meet with students at lunchtime. Chauncey also remembers debates in the colleges, such as one that took place between an English professor and a physics professor over the role of science at Yale.

(Zoe Berg, Photo Editor)

In 1979, an essay written by visiting fellow Vivian Gornick sparked a discussion over the function of fellows at Yale, leading some to question if students should be blamed for a lack of outgoingness and if the program itself should change to promote student and faculty interactions. In the article, Gornick described fellows meetings as “gatherings of leering chauvinists engaged in meaningless, cocktail party chatter.” At this time, the News reported that fellows’ main interaction with students was meals at the dining halls. Every faculty member was assigned as a fellow in one of the colleges, but their involvement in the colleges varied greatly on an individual basis, as it does today.

Even before that, in 1967, assistant professor of English and Morse fellow Michael Cowan wrote in the News that the fellowships “emerged out of the same rather vague and romantic notion” that produced the residential college system. However, Cowan wrote that the initial plan to make Yale like Cambridge and Oxford was not achieved.

Still, despite the perceived disconnect between fellows and students, both Gitlin and Evans noted an increased involvement of deans and heads of colleges in student life in recent years.

“In general, we can strive to be as involved as possible in student life, and generally speaking I think we do so more now than was done regularly in the past,” Evans said. “I feel a calling in my job now to be highly involved in student life. And I think that’s true for all of my peers.”

Visiting Yale Law School lecturer William Garfinkel ’77 told the News that he remembers colleges having unique reputations and many had their own theater productions. He said the main changes he sees in the residential colleges are the writing tutors and updated facilities, but he is not sure if they are “fundamentally different.”

Some recent alumni, however, recall not having as much engagement with the fellows in their colleges during their time at Yale. Both Garfinkel and Evans told the News that they do not remember interacting with the fellows. Still, three current students told the News they engage with the fellows in their colleges and see them as active members of the college community.

However, Gitlin said he hopes the University will begin to try and encourage more fellow and student interactions by promoting having students live in the residential colleges.

“It’s a message that should be set in subtle ways — meet people, meet other fellows, meet the students,” Gitlin said. “That’s part of why this place should be special.”

Fellows and affiliates continue to build community as pandemic provides challenges  

Today, fellows and college seminars are still present, but some interactions with fellows have been limited due to the pandemic. Still, even pre-pandemic, the Jonathan Edwards fellows were the only group that met weekly in person.

According to Head of Jonathan Edwards College Mark Saltzman, fellows used to be individually selected by heads of colleges, but nowadays, the Council of the Heads of College works cooperatively to ensure a balance of academic disciplines within the colleges and help the new colleges recruit fellows.

Although he has noticed the divide between fellows and students, Evans said he has invited students to attend fellows meetings which include lectures and artistic performances. But these events have not been well attended by students so far, Evans said.

According to Head of Grace Hopper College Julia Adams, JE is known for having an especially strong fellows program. Saltzman told the News that the JE fellowship started in the 1930s, and he attributes the strong program to the especially tight connections among the original group of fellows that established long-lasting traditions.

Adams said that Hopper fellows act as advisors for students, and they also often attend the Mellon Forums, especially when their advisees are presenting. Additionally, in Hopper, Adams said there is an “interesting history of consulting our fellowship at key moments,” including a fellowship dinner in 2013 where Hopper officials kicked off the discussions of the name change of the college.

Adams said that housing space is the main reason for varying numbers of residential fellows in each college, and their involvement in the college differs based on their interests.

“There are often cross-college differences in and differences across fellows and what the fellows elect to do,” Adams said. “It’s always expected that they would have a particularly close relationship with the students. But they do that in different ways.”

Hopper residential fellow Sheraz Iqbal wrote to the News that he has interacted with students regularly in a variety of ways. He said that he has advised many first years and sophomores in course selection, time management and extracurriculars, and he participates in intramural sports. Most recently, he was appointed as a judge for the University’s Final Cut cooking competition.

Since the founding of the residential colleges, the undergraduate population size has soared, which has continuously caused housing shortages and affected the number of fellows in each college.

In 1981, the News reported that residential fellows — who live in their respective colleges — were being cut down to two fellows per college due to overcrowding concerns and an effort to draw students living off-campus back to campus. Prior to that cut, there were 48 residential fellows in the 12 colleges, but the cut split that number in half.

(Yale Daily News)

Today, most residential colleges have one to three residential fellows, and there are 30 residential fellows in total.

In addition to residential fellows, each college has fellowships for faculty, and many of them act as academic advisors to first years. Adams told the News that in the past, the initial meeting between the Hopper advisors and the first years was usually a lively event in the college.

“This was also a really fun occasion and a very collective occasion because the advisors would come out en masse with the students and then disperse to sit in your booth or small groups to actually to talk about what courses are you thinking about taking and talk about what is the liberal arts education and all these really important, basic academic kind of conversations,” Adams said.

Adams added that monthly dinners with fellows, along with college teas, were “severely hampered” during the pandemic, and the fellows have not been able to eat in the dining halls, making it difficult to maintain the traditional social life of the college. However, she hopes intellectual life with the college fellowships will be “regalvanized” and said there has been excitement among the heads of colleges about getting back to normalcy.

Saltzman emphasized the negative effect of the pandemic on interactions between undergraduates and fellows, particularly in the colleges’ inability to have weekly fellows meetings where students can meet potential advisors and mentors.

However, numerous undergraduate students told the News they have engaged with the residential graduate affiliates and fellows and see them taking on active roles in the colleges.

Fiona Benson ’22 said that Saybrook residential graduate affiliate Adam Halliburton ’10 runs events for the whole college and for seniors specifically, including senior happy hours, and encourages Saybrook students to engage with the arts through opportunities such as seeing the Metropolitan Opera perform. However, she said that the fellows and graduate affiliates could improve at engaging with underclassmen.

Students reflect on the impact of the pandemic on residential life and rise in off-campus living 

Many alumni see the rise of off-campus housing as the major difference from their time at Yale, and say that it prevents students from participating fully in their residential college communities.

Since the founding of the residential colleges, Yale’s undergraduate population has grown significantly, and in recent years, not only has off campus housing become more popular, in part due to pandemic regulations, but there have been housing shortages reported in many residential colleges, causing some students to be forced off campus.

Stella Vujic ’22 told the News that the pandemic was the main reason she moved off campus her junior year, and she never planned to live off campus prior to the pandemic.

“I was worried about feeling cramped, always spending time in my dorm room,” Vujic told the News. “I figured living off campus would be better for me, better for my mental health and give me more flexibility.”

(Yale Daily News)

Vujic said many seniors were originally motivated to live off campus to feel less crowded while taking online classes, and she said she chose to remain off campus this year because it was cheaper, allowed her more control over daily activities and the place she was living was in close proximity to campus.

Although she said her engagement with her residential college, Saybrook, is not as strong now that she lives off campus, Vujic said she thinks it is hard to distinguish between the effects of her living off campus and her not being in her college at all throughout last school year. She also said someone’s engagement with their college depends on their meal plan and how much they choose to use the college’s facilities.

“I think there’s just sort of a natural amount of disconnection that happened during the pandemic with a lot of the common spaces being closed off for COVID reasons,” Vujic told the News.

Maya Sanghvi ’23 told the News she also moved off campus because of the pandemic restrictions on campus in the fall of 2020, and she found that living off campus provided more autonomy and was cheaper than living on campus and being on the full meal plan.

Despite living off campus, Sanghvi said she has remained involved in her residential college, Pauli Murray. She told the News she attends senior happy hours and college teas, works with her college as a Communication and Consent Educator and maintains close relationships with the Pauli Murray dean and head of college.

Sanghvi said she sees the recent increase in off campus living as a unique effect of the pandemic and on the class of 2022, but she would be surprised if this increase continues as the pandemic restrictions on campus ease.

“I think that Yale has always been [a school] that markets their on campus housing in the residential college system as being a really big part of the college experience, so I don’t think that that’s necessarily going to change,” Sanghvi said.

Benson also moved off campus in the 2020-2021 school year due to the pandemic restrictions and the increased autonomy off campus living afforded, but she moved back on campus her senior year to get “the typical college experience,” especially since she had not lived a full year in her college, Saybrook, yet. She said living on campus has allowed her to have more connections to her college than other seniors living off campus, especially because she is able to build relationships with underclassmen, which is difficult while living off campus.

While Sanghvi said she thinks much of the increase of people moving off campus in recent years is due to the pandemic, the recent housing shortages will also force students to live off campus. Sanghvi said that, because of the housing shortage, she was recently asked to speak to sophomores in Murray about how to stay connected to their residential college while living off campus.

This spring’s housing shortages have displaced many members of the class of 2024, who have had their first two years at Yale altered by the pandemic. These housing shortages come at a time when Yale recently admitted 2,234 students into the class of 2026 from its largest applicant pool in history.

Beatrice Maron Schaeffer ’24 wrote in an email to the News that after the suite she planned to live with in Berkeley College disbanded, they were given two days to decide to either live in a single in annexed housing in McClellan Hall or to find off campus housing. However, if they chose to live off campus later after accepting annexed housing, they would be fined. Additionally, Schaeffer wrote that not all colleges offered annexed housing to students who were unable to secure housing in their college.

Schaeffer said she worries about how the University plans to accommodate increasing class sizes over the coming years.

“Why boast about the Class of ’26 being your largest class [of applicants] yet when you barely have enough housing for your current students?” Schaeffer wrote to the News. “And especially since the ones affected continue to be the ’24s, students who stuck it out during the beginning of the pandemic and who have barely had the dorm experience we all hoped to have by coming here. I can only begin to imagine how badly housing will go for next year’s rising juniors.”

University Archivist Michael Lotstein said that housing shortages have been prevalent throughout Yale’s history. There were significant over capacity problems after Yale’s coeducation in 1969, and in the 1970s, the University wanted to build a new residential college on Whitney Avenue, but it was shut down by the Board of Alders. The building aimed to fix housing shortages, but no new residential colleges were built until 2017 when Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray colleges were built.

“I think that overall the student population probably was not able to be increased as much as they wanted to because of [the failed proposal to build a residential college on Whitney Avenue],” Lotstein told the News. “But I think for the most part what ultimately kind of kept things at an even keel in terms of changes to student populations in the residential colleges was the opportunity for upperclassmen to live off campus.”

Reporting from the News in 1991 also describes these housing shortages, along with sleep-out protests carried out by students in Trumbull due to a lack of guaranteed housing in many of the colleges, which forced students to live off campus. In 1990, the organization Student Committee for Rooming Environments without Excessive Density, better known as SCREWED, organized a sleep-out protesting the housing shortages.

However, Lotstein said today, with the growth of the undergraduate population, the construction of new residential colleges is a “necessity.”

(Amay Tewari, Senior Photographer)

Expansion of graduate affiliate program provides opportunity for closer age gap with students 

As space in residential colleges runs out for undergraduates, graduate affiliates have also been squeezed out, making it harder to form connections between the two age groups.

Head of Benjamin Franklin College Charles Bailyn told the News that Franklin and Pauli Murray colleges had several resident graduate affiliates in the first two years of their founding. He said this was done to “try and have some older presence in the colleges” in their early years and because the newer colleges had space for resident graduate affiliate housing that would otherwise be unused.

Franklin currently has 13 graduate affiliates who all live off campus. Most colleges do not have residential graduate affiliates, and the number of graduate affiliates varies widely among the colleges, ranging from seven in Saybrook College to 24 in Davenport College and Hopper.

Emily Gerdin, one of Franklin’s graduate affiliates, said that the graduate affiliate program provides a good way for graduate students to form a sense of community even though they all live off campus, and she said she sees two main roles of the graduate affiliates: facilitating events for undergraduate students and developing a community of graduate students in Franklin.

John Lazarsfeld ’17, another graduate affiliate in Franklin, said that the Franklin graduate affiliates recently hosted a workshop to provide academic advice to sophomores. He added that the demand to be a graduate affiliate is very high, and many graduate students who applied in recent years were not accepted.

However, Bailyn emphasized that he thinks aspects of Harvard’s residential system are stronger than Yale’s. Although he wrote that the Yale system is better overall, Harvard has a system of “junior tutors” who act as residential graduate affiliates in the houses at Harvard. It would be beneficial for Yale to expand the residential graduate affiliates program to emulate this type of system, Bailyn said.

“I think it provides great support for activities, but also a group of slightly older students so that the seniors — and especially super seniors — don’t start to feel like they’ve ‘aged out’ of the residential system,” Bailyn wrote to the News.

Saltzman agreed that the smaller age gap between graduate affiliates and undergraduates makes them more approachable than professors and allows undergraduates to get advice on post-graduate plans. Currently, he said, there is one resident graduate affiliate who has been “a critical part” in organizing events in JE.

Bailyn also added that it would be hard to implement a junior tutor system campus-wide because most colleges do not have graduate affiliate rooms like Franklin and Murray, which each have two graduate affiliate rooms available.

Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun told the News that it is up to the heads of college to determine how many graduate affiliates they want, and there were not “more slots” given to the new colleges. Additionally, each college has a fixed budget that is adjusted for size, and heads may choose to allocate more or less of this to the graduate affiliate program.

By contrast, Saltzman said that the main limiting factor for increasing graduate affiliates is the budget.

“I don’t see where that additional funding would come from, but maybe if that was a priority of the next dean of your college, then it could happen,” Saltzman told the News.

The first seven residential colleges were opened on Sep. 25, 1933.